#When people do awful things for reasons that are comprehensible emotionally so that it makes my gut twist in helpless sorrow for what messes

[mswyrr]

[hitracks]

i'm going to throw up please explain your though process behind that latest pumpkinduo piece /pos /pleading

Of course … any reason to rant and rave about my minecrafters in my brain. LONG POST WARNING OMFG. I feel like I should like preface my view on Them lwk before I say anything first UMMM Pumpkinduo to me was a very obvious marriage of convenience and political advantage at first. Two parties joining together to gain voter power is way unethical but what are you gonna do if the Runner and his Vice are making eyes at eachother the whole time and then get engaged? Nothing. Especially if one of them is Jschlatt ( Scary in a real sense, can and would make you unable to live in peace physically. ) and the other is Quackity ( Doesn’t shut his mouth and trips people up real easy just by talking. Reputation ruiner over here! ) I think they just slotted together easily in a dominating act. But Schlatt is an emotionally repressed alcoholic and Quackity is an attention seeking nobody with avoidance/dismissive issues. So when they stick together it’s more like how Velcro is rather than anything softer than that. 

I believe they do fall in love in a real way after a while, but given how they see themselves / others it’s not feasible for either of them to properly pursue it. I think Schlatt falls particularly bad into self sabotage, because he denies himself positive things that are ‘handed’ to him. He loves Quackity but he didn’t work for him, he didn’t shape him into being quick witted and kind along with being a good & ruthless politician. Schlatt is not the cause of the aspects he enjoys from Q. He hasn’t seen Quackity be anything but hedonistic, and he resents it badly. Either for the fact he is envious to be that way himself or upset that he knows he doesn’t HAVE to be the way he is. But he is anyway. He likes these qualities from Q as well — but the two conflict in his mind so badly that he is unable to take the feeling in stride. 

So whenever they get comfortable, outside of the public eye, it kind of just makes him angry? Not explosively but snide and quick to close off. He wants to deny Quackity himself ( Which he knows Quackity sees as good in some fashion. ) Because he doesn’t allow himself the same luxury of having Quackity. And it makes Quackity feel awful no matter how many times they have something good. I think part of the reason Schlatt treated him that way was because he didn’t know what the fuck to do with that. Even in SMPLive almost all of the people there were more like business endeavors rather than anyone close to him ( save for Connor and like two others. ) so he doesn’t have a basis for anything else other than treating everything like an investment or a transaction. 

He wants to make Q feel less than because he doesn’t know how to be anything but devastating to anybody. He could be better but he has resigned himself into thinking that’s just what he is. He loves that Quackity holds himself well and is productive but HE wants to control that, to be the cause. Schlatt doesn’t think anything other than being broken down and chiseled into a smaller version of himself can make him healthier, so when Quackity comes to him with a gentle approach it feels demeaning. If he can’t help himself, why should he let others? You can’t buffer stone with a wet cloth. ( Which is ironic, you can buffer stone with wet grit cloth … usually the tactic keeps the original shape more clear rather than sanding it flatter. Ha! ) 

Sorry for so much text I hope this is comprehensive. I think about these two really hard all the time they’re evil and special to me at the same time. Glad that last post punched you in the face anon, twas the intent!

[finalgirlbrainrot]

sam and victim blaming

inspired by this post, because sam getting victim blamed for one reason or another has been a consistent pattern since s1 and I wanted to make a comprehensive list of all the examples I can think of. if you can think of other examples, please let me know

dean blaming him for john's abuse "maybe he had to raise his voice a few times, but you were out of line" (1x08)

john making excuses for the way he treats him and blaming it on him "walking away" (1x20)

john trying to split the blame for their failed relationship between both of them (2x01)

dean putting the blame for sam and john's failed relationship on sam (2x02)

dean telling sam that he has something evil inside him because he was force-fed demon blood as a six months old infant (4x04)

s5 is literally the Victim Blame Extravaganza with everyone and their mom blaming him for being taken advantage of and tricked into breaking the last seal and for ruby's manipulation

war being like "addiction makes you evil" and sam agreeing with him and saying that the problem isn't the demon blood or ruby, it's him (5x02)

one of the hunters who tried to force-feed him demon blood saying "come on, you know you want to it" and "there, was that really so bad?" (this scene is already plain awful and has extremely rapey vibes, so those lines just makes it even more disturbing) (5x03)

the wraith-nurse telling him that he's far too angry to be out there in the real world (5x11)

sam saying that he doesn't understand why he's angry at john, lilith and lucifer, even tho he has more than enough reasons to be angry at all three of them (5x11)

dean victim blaming and shaming him for wanting to escape an abusive environment and because his heaven didn't include memories of his horrible home life (5x16)

brady blaming him for being manipulated by azazel's minions and ruby (5x20)

dean getting mad at him because of his hallucinations (7x02)

dean blaming sam's mental illness for him lying about amy's murder and for almost getting them killed (7x07)

sam apologizing for being mad about amy's murder (7x07)

hallucifer saying that he can't get rid of him because he let him in / wanted him (7x15)

dean saying that he wouldn't have manipulated him with the amelia text if sam just trusted him (8x10)

dean's list of sam's sins "ruby, killing lilith, letting lucifer out, losing your soul" (8x23)

sam getting blamed for the apocalypse for the 816482th time (9x02)

the aftermath of the gadreel possession aka the Victim Blame Extravaganza 2.0. I'm not even gonna list all the examples because there are literally too many to count, but mainly every single character telling him to get over it, dean demanding that he get over it without even offering an apology or acknowledging that what he did was wrong, dean getting mad at him for saying he wouldn't do the same thing to him, etc...

demon!dean's grossly victim blamey speech about how everything wrong in his life is sam's fault (10x03)

dean's whole speech while trying to convince him that he deserved to die to fix dean's own mess (10x23)

toni asking him if it was good for him after mind raping him via spell (12x02)

dean blaming sam for him lying about jack's death and saying that it's because he knew sam couldn't handle it (15x16)

I wanted to keep this list pertinent to instances that happened in the show without including fandom stuff, because otherwise the list would've been endless, but I have to include this one: people getting mad at sam for his speech in 8x23 and turning it into him emotionally manipulating dean and not wanting dean to have any friends, when he's literally suicidal as a result of dean spending a season guilt tripping him, putting him down and verbally and emotionally abusing him

[karliahs]

It’s been months since he was this close to anyone. It might have even been Jon the last time, too; helping him walk down in the tunnels. How did they get from there to here? How-

“Tim?” Jon asks softly, pulling back to look him in the face, and it’s the loss of that warmth and pressure that makes Tim realise he’s started breathing in great, shuddering gasps. He screws his eyes shut and Jon reverses their positions, pulling Tim into his chest with unpracticed but fervent hands. His T-shirt is soft against Tim’s face; he hadn’t thought Jon would own anything so soft.

Tim’s throat is burning, but as long as he keeps his eyes screwed shut then he isn’t crying. He isn’t crying on Jonathan Sims the night before they both-

“It’s alright, Tim,” Jon says, searching for words of comfort he only half believes himself. “It’s - whatever happens tomorrow, it can’t - we’re safe here.”

Tim laughs bitterly. “Nothing’s fucking safe.”

Jon seems unable to decide between rubbing soothingly at his back and just holding on as tight as he can. Tim shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be giving into this. But there's a reason he lost so much time when he should have been searching for the thing that killed his brother. The Institute was full of potential answers, but it was also full of bright, lovely distractions. He's buried in the arms of one of them.

Tim didn't used to think of that as weakness - but he didn't used to think there were worms that burrowed through your flesh, or creatures that took every true memory of your friend without you ever noticing, or monsters that played with skin, played with the fabric of who you were, because it was fun.

Tim doesn't know fucking anything, and maybe he never did, and now all that's left is to-

"What can I do, Tim?" Jon asks, and he sounds so honestly lost.

"Turn back time," Tim murmurs into his shirt. "Don't let go," he adds a moment later.

“I won’t, I won’t.” Jon clutches him impossibly closer. Tim’s world narrows down into warmth and pressure. “Tim, we don’t - we don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this.”

The gentle vibration of his words is almost enough to distract Tim from the words themselves. He turns his head so he can speak un-muffled, and immediately misses the comfort of being closed in. “I do, Jon. I can’t…” Tim fumbles for the right words, wondering faintly if this is how Jon feels all the time, struggling to give voice to the unspeakable. “The worst thing in all of this, the worst thing would be if they hurt someone again while I’m just standing there."

Still not crying, not as long as his eyes are tight shut. He feels Jon hesitate, then push forward anyway. "Even if...Tim, even if you had moved, what could you have done?"

Tim squeezes hard at Jon's side and isn't sure if he means it as a warning or a plea.

"I'd never have met you," Jon says, so soft Tim isn't sure if he was meant to hear it.

"Was just thinking before,” Tim replies, because he’s fucked up enough that he might as well keep going, “I wish I'd met you somewhere normal."

Jon’s hands still, and for a moment the rise and fall of his chest does too. It’s the closest thing to absolution Tim’s ever offered. He’s glad he can’t see Jon’s face, can’t see whatever shock or gratitude is playing out there. At some point, he made himself into someone who no one expects to be kind. He wonders, vaguely, whether it counts as forgiveness, to want someone to spend what might be their last night on earth forgiven.

from: enemy of my enemy, aka jon and tim sit in various rooms and talk: the fic

thank you for asking!!! here we go:

It’s been months since he was this close to anyone. It might have even been Jon the last time, too; helping him walk down in the tunnels. How did they get from there to here? How-

do you ever just think about how fast things went wrong for the s1 crew...they were friends just a few months ago!! a few weeks in between no current supernatural experiences -> trying to survive supernatural experiences together by physically holding each other up -> complete alienation. some experiences just defy comprehension, emotionally speaking, even when you can see every step that led from there to here

i also like to make myself sad by thinking about the practical day to day aspects of everyone in the archives being alienated from everyone else. like...when were either of them last touched (non-violently)

so much has changed but they've circled back around to each other

“Tim?” Jon asks softly, pulling back to look him in the face, and it’s the loss of that warmth and pressure that makes Tim realise he’s started breathing in great, shuddering gasps. He screws his eyes shut and Jon reverses their positions, pulling Tim into his chest with unpracticed but fervent hands. His T-shirt is soft against Tim’s face; he hadn’t thought Jon would own anything so soft.

'person starts crying without noticing until someone points it out' is a trope i generally try to stay away from partly because i just can't imagine that ever happening to me and therefore it doesn't ping my realism senses, but i get one (1) because it is undeniably juicy

this fic is very zeroed in on tim's perspective in terms of small sensory experiences, for a few reasons - drive home emotions, portray dissociation, and because i like writing about how it actually feels to be in a romantic gesture, to make it more real than just like...an image of people holding each other

small detail that jives with bigger points - jon's shirt unexpectedly soft, jon's surprising ability to still provide him with gentleness and comfort

i think jon here has no idea what to do but has been given permission to touch so is living his best tactile life with this inexpert hugging and is hoping that does something

Tim’s throat is burning, but as long as he keeps his eyes screwed shut then he isn’t crying. He isn’t crying on Jonathan Sims the night before they both-

“It’s alright, Tim,” Jon says, searching for words of comfort he only half believes himself. “It’s - whatever happens tomorrow, it can’t - we’re safe here.”

Tim laughs bitterly. “Nothing’s fucking safe.”

tim spends a lot of this fic having his inner-monologue cut off to try and show as well as tell that he's struggling to stay present

that 'both-' hurts me, honestly. hurts more than it actually being spelled out, i think. write to upset yourself, maybe you will upset others in the process

half is a word i absolutely overuse in writing but cannot stop. no one ever does something all the way, they are half- believing, wondering, worrying, etc.

i'm never 100% sure if i'm accurately capturing the way that jon speaks in canon but i did always like and want to emulate the fact that he speaks kind of hesitantly, trips over his own words, etc

Jon seems unable to decide between rubbing soothingly at his back and just holding on as tight as he can. Tim shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be giving into this. But there's a reason he lost so much time when he should have been searching for the thing that killed his brother. The Institute was full of potential answers, but it was also full of bright, lovely distractions. He's buried in the arms of one of them.

Tim didn't used to think of that as weakness - but he didn't used to think there were worms that burrowed through your flesh, or creatures that took every true memory of your friend without you ever noticing, or monsters that played with skin, played with the fabric of who you were, because it was fun.

again, jon does not know what to do so he is just trying. just trying to do any kind of soothing hand thing

i thought quite a lot about reconciling the seemingly happy-go-lucky tim that gets presented to us early on vs learning why he came to the institute in the first place. tim here is framing that as a failing because he's miserable and traumatised and guilt-ridden, but i think at least part of it was actual healing. he was taking time and enjoying the people around him and trying to make the best of things, until it all went wrong

related, the self-recrimination of tim hating himself for not having seen any of this coming, even though they were not predictable events...very human nature after you have been through something terrible. how dare i have not anticipated every trouble that ever befell me

'played with skin, played with the fabric of who you were' - a lot of this story was me just enjoying the themes of stranger-horror. i love the terror of knowing there are creatures who can change aspects of you that should be unchangeable, physically in skin and otherwise in terms of identity and memory. love applying that to jon and tim, who have been fundamentally changed against their will by trauma and their roles in a story neither of them wanted. skin as metaphor for identity, and learning that people can take away your skin is then utterly terrifying to someone who already feels like his identity is being forcibly eroded. and then that shared terror brings them back together, just a little

Tim doesn't know fucking anything, and maybe he never did, and now all that's left is to-

"What can I do, Tim?" Jon asks, and he sounds so honestly lost.

"Turn back time," Tim murmurs into his shirt. "Don't let go," he adds a moment later.

this fic...is so sad. why did i write this. why am i being attacked by my past self and their awful words on this day

explicit admission that tim wants/needs jon here...even a chapter ago he was like yeah i'm going to america with jon bc i am regrettably relying on him as my reality-anchor, nothing emotional here

“I won’t, I won’t.” Jon clutches him impossibly closer. Tim’s world narrows down into warmth and pressure. “Tim, we don’t - we don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this.”

The gentle vibration of his words is almost enough to distract Tim from the words themselves. He turns his head so he can speak un-muffled, and immediately misses the comfort of being closed in. “I do, Jon. I can’t…” Tim fumbles for the right words, wondering faintly if this is how Jon feels all the time, struggling to give voice to the unspeakable. “The worst thing in all of this, the worst thing would be if they hurt someone again while I’m just standing there."  

Still not crying, not as long as his eyes are tight shut. He feels Jon hesitate, then push forward anyway. "Even if...Tim, even if you had moved, what could you have done?"

Tim squeezes hard at Jon's side and isn't sure if he means it as a warning or a plea.

warmth, pressure, vibration...continuing to be fascinated by the little tactile details of what it feels like to be close to someone

emotional logic is so powerful. tim moving most likely would have either made no difference to the outcome or worsened it (because both him and danny would have died) but of course for tim standing still while someone he loves was destroyed counts for everything about who he is. sometimes blame feels better than helplessness, which mirrors what happens with his friendship with jon - is it scarier if they are all helpless, or if this one guy is The Enemy

‘give voice to the unspeakable’ sometimes i like poetic descriptions of jon’s role as archivist

"I'd never have met you," Jon says, so soft Tim isn't sure if he was meant to hear it.

"Was just thinking before,” Tim replies, because he’s fucked up enough that he might as well keep going, “I wish I'd met you somewhere normal."

Jon’s hands still, and for a moment the rise and fall of his chest does too. It’s the closest thing to absolution Tim’s ever offered. He’s glad he can’t see Jon’s face, can’t see whatever shock or gratitude is playing out there. At some point, he made himself into someone who no one expects to be kind. He wonders, vaguely, whether it counts as forgiveness, to want someone to spend what might be their last night on earth forgiven.

:(

tim views talking with and connecting to people as fucking up. how much of that is even slightly shrouded in logic and how much is just - tim is depressed and deep in self-loathing, somewhere still at the core of him tim loves people and making connections, so of course doing the thing he wants to do is wrong

‘At some point, he made himself into someone who no one expects to be kind.’ tim has this thought once and then worries at it like a sore tooth because his default state is hopeless fury with himself, with everyone. i also think this demonstrates how new information/realisations often can’t help you out of a bad mental state on its own, because it’s all too easy to slot it into your existing thought patterns. pushing everyone away was making tim worse - he starts to feel like that was a mistake, but it just becomes more self-recrimination

forgiveness is one of those words that seems to encompass so many different concepts that i find it hard to know exactly what it’s meant by saying you forgive someone. specifying what’s meant by this little shard of maybe-forgiveness makes it mean more, at least to me

may i reiterate: :(

[ghostmartyr]

Are you still watching RWBY? What did you think of Volume 8 overall

VOLUME 9 NEVERLAND SAGA WHERE NO ONE CAN HIDE FROM THEIR TRAUMA OR THEIR FRIENDS BY TRYING TO STOP IRONWOOD FROM BLOWING UP HALF THE KINGDOM HE’S SUPPOSEDLY PROTECTING WHILE ALL THEIR OTHER FRIENDS AND ALLIES THINK THEY’RE DEAD.

POGCHAMP.

I enjoyed Volume 8, but I think it stumbles at the end enough to look back at its time management and feel not totally great about it.

Cinder’s development is solid. I’m still not very attached to her, but she has attained my interest at long last. Good for you, Cinder. Solve your emotional problems with murder. Kill Watts. Give Neo a reason to go back to trying to kill you. Make yet another mortal enemy. I support these actions.

Emerald’s flip means she won’t have sad eyes over all the atrocities she’s playing witness to while the timer goes down on her defection anymore, and that’s cool.

Ironwood’s everything is... well. Yeah. Great. Nothing like watch someone destroy themself. Oh, and everything else around them in the process. Once he got started, it was pretty clear where he was going, and that’s just sad. He goes from hugging Qrow and finding relief in his allies to shooting all of them. Shooting Jacques along the way does not even that out.

The Ace-Ops felt too cluttered for the final parts. They’re the cautionary tales, obviously, but I don’t think we get enough time detailing them for them to be on the same stage as Winter coming into her own and RWBY falling into oblivion. Qrow and Robyn get the slow burn and then the panicked call to immediate action, but for the Ace-Ops, Marrow and Harriet are the only ones who the narrative actively does something with. Marrow’s problems are obvious from the start, and Harriet’s emotional heat hints, and then reveals, a depth of trauma that this system has been crap at handling. But Vine and Elm, the critical pieces in talking her down, and centerpieces of keeping Mantle from blowing up, aren’t prominent enough in the narrative for their place in its resolution to feel quite earned. I think if we’d gotten an extra episode it would have worked a little better. As it was, I was left wanting more focus on the central cast.

Which is kind of why I’m so thrilled that RWBY+J are maybe stuck spending some quality time together. The macro plot matters, obviously, but they’ve been moving so fast. Atlas feels like a speedrun of a kingdom falling, and a little more interplay between my faves would be very welcome.

Then there’s the obvious.

Oh, Penny.

I can’t feel good about Penny’s handling in the end.

The Winter Maiden, as soon as we’re introduced, is waiting to die and offer her power to the next one in line. Winter was intended for that, but Penny interrupts.

Two days later, Winter has the power, and Penny’s dead.

This is necessary so that Winter has time to center what she actually believes before she’s upgraded to demigodhood. Winter as the Winter Maiden leading into Volume 8 would have kept her on Ironwood’s script. The disruption of expectations that leaves her vulnerable forces her to respond to what is going on, not what her side believes should be going on.

It makes sense to delay Winter’s ascension, because it gives Winter perspective that she can’t access as long as she’s in her chain of established command.

Making Penny’s value tie entirely back to supporting someone else’s story. She’s allowed to be a real girl, she’s allowed to fight for what she believes in, she’s allowed to have friends, but becoming the Winter Maiden serves Winter’s storyline more than it serves Penny’s.

Which isn’t to say they do nothing with her. Obviously, the virus making the vault look good creates a variety of opportunities. Sure, they could have filled in another domino without Penny specifically, but she’s an instrumental part of getting them inside that vault in how the story goes.

Creating a new body for her is a complicated thing. Penny’s a real girl no matter what her form is, but if you say that while cutting out the nuts and bolts -- it’s a little mixed. In the most benign way I can put my preferences, I like Penny being a robot. I’m thrilled she knows how warm a hug can feel (Pietro, patch notes, get on it), but...

Before Watts causes problems on purpose, Penny shows a little hesitance about not being your standard model of girl, but unless I’ve been worse about my watching comprehension than I thought, she doesn’t have any burning need for flesh. Changing her body is the best solution they can up with in response to her agency being violated.

It’s not my favorite thing in the world. I don’t think it’s entirely good faith to pin all of the possible unfortunate implications on it, but they exist, and they are there. And on the flip side, being granted a body that is created through nothing but who you are is a sentiment that I’m sure resonates with a lot of people. I think there’s a lot to observe in what Penny’s going through, and it’s worth discussion more than angry words.

Except before there’s a chance to collect opinion polls on that, we once again have her asking for death before she hurts her friends.

I believe there’s a post on LotR somewhere that explains why people are okay with it being a mood shift from The Hobbit. People aren’t huge fans of media they consume invalidating media they previously invested in.

Penny dies, then she comes back. Then she dies.

Penny interrupts the inevitability of Winter becoming the Winter Maiden. Then Winter becomes the Winter Maiden.

It feels like a zero sum game, but a zero sum game where our emotions were torqued around for the sake of it, and the object of said torquing is being utilized as a plot object prior to being a character.

Penny obviously has a lot of personality, and a lot of established emotional ties. She’s not just a lamp standing in a corner.

But to use the apt metaphor, you can see the strings. Penny’s trajectory seems to be moving under its own velocity -- but then that ending hits. Despite going through all of the steps to make sure that Penny doesn’t have to sacrifice herself to keep the people she loves safe, despite actually being really creative and clever about doing everything possible to keep her alive --

The plot demands her death.

It isn’t good enough to fix the pressing issue that made sacrifice look good. Sacrifice is still the ultimate answer.

Thematically, that doesn’t jive with the story we’ve been getting.

Emotionally, what the fuck, could we not.

(What’s better than the cute robot girl begging for death? Doing it twice!)

People who are in a more optimistic state about fiction at the moment have noted that Pinocchio does do a lot of dying, and I do like the read of Penny as Jiminy Cricket. Considering the full context of the world, there’s more to justify a return than a lot of characters get. It wouldn’t be the most shocking thing ever.

It’s still kind of fucked up. Penny doesn’t kill herself, but she asks others to kill her, and that’s her being a good girl.

The National Suicide Hotline gets its number placed in the summary of the episode.

Obviously there’s more to it than that, but the implications are there, and a very painful thorn when looking over the rest of her. Creating an environment where it makes sense for this character to kill themself, it’s noble, even --

I don’t think that’s a route of story that the available material handles gracefully.

It’s the “twice” that really hammers the point down into the coffin. It creates a pattern of behavior in Penny. Once, and okay. Heroic sacrifice plays are always a major source of drama, exemplifying how Good the person making the sacrifice is, and how Tragic it is that we’re losing such a good person, all because they have principles and just love these other people so much.

Only if you have a character asking someone to kill them twice in relatively quick succession, the callback isn’t to feats of heroics. It’s suicidal tendencies.

If you’re not prepared to deal with implications of that magnitude, you’ve got to make the link a lot less suggestive. Otherwise you’re telling a new story whether you like it or not, and it’s not one you’re ready for, drastically upping the odds that it’s not going to be the most polished thing ever.

What the issue becomes then, in my personal opinion, is pacing (’hey self why is the answer always pacing’ ‘because shut up’). Penny’s joy of life is a blip in between her asking for death. The heroic nature of her desire for death mixed with the awful despair of her actual death makes this endpoint of her story saturated with a darkness that sours the entire experience.

Complicating it further is the issue of trust.

The writers killed her and brought her back just to kill her again. If they do bring her back again, the faith is kind of broken. Once you show that you’re willing to move a character around like a piece on a chessboard, your audience isn’t going to trust the story enough to invest. They’re going to be looking for the strings. For a complicated special effect that takes a lot of strings, that’s a pain, because the agreement with stories is supposed to be that yes, there are strings, that’s our medium.

If you don’t trust the writers, you are not going to believe in the story.

For my personal taste, if the writers are doing something more with Penny, their presentation has made it difficult for me to see value in the journey, even if the destination happens to be something I ultimately approve of.

Anyway Robyn needs to officially adopt Qrow. He has been a bad guy bandit, now he can be a good guy bandit.

He can be the Happy Huntresses’ cute animal mascot.

That is all that matters.

That is my one, solitary thought on the entire volume.

Thanks for the ask!

[millennialdemon]

Coming off of true trainwrecks the likes of Mars of Destruction and Skelter Heaven, I actually came out of Dark Cat with a sense of respect and gratitude for its competence. 

For the uninitiated, Dark Cat is a notoriously bad OVA from 1991 that you will see listed in many Worst Anime Ever countdowns. It follows 2 brothers, “dark cats” Hyoi and Rui, who investigate supernatural happenings and purify evil with their somewhat undefined powers of shapeshifting and increased strength/agility. The majority of the story in the OVA is about a school girl named Aimi, who is pining after her childhood friend Koizumi, who since the rejection and sudden death of his crush, has been suffering a depressive episode and ignoring her. Hyoi and Rui sense dark forces are manifesting at the school, and they keep an eye on Aimi while fighting off the increasingly brazen appearances of demonic enemies.

A monstrous ex-dark cat named Jukokubo is revealed to be manipulating Aimi with his dark powers, and Hyoi and Rui fight him, but not before Aimi succumbs to the evil magic -- as well as her own violent jealousy and overprotectiveness of Koizumi -- and transforms into a horrific tentacle monster that kills seemingly everyone in the school.

In the end, Koizumi realizes that Aimi was in love with him the entire time, and doesn’t fight her when she engulfs him completely. Apparently this act of selfless love was enough to purify them both, and although they do indeed die, their souls are “light” and able to ascend. This throws a wrench in Jukokubo’s plan to prove that humans are The Worst, so he turns tail and leaves his boss fight against Hyoi, threatening to return again. In the epilogue, Hyoi and Rui reflect on the mission and wax poetic about the nature of humanity while crossing a busy street.

… Ehm… happy ending, yes?

Now then: there are actually quite a few things I enjoyed about Dark Cat, and they are all very simple things that I had come to miss after days of watching other entries from the Bottom of the Barrel.

It had a narrative, and was -- mostly -- comprehensible in its storytelling, as rushed as it may have been. There was an undeniable presence of an art director, something I’m not convinced was present in a few of the other similarly rated titles I have seen. Some of the shots were noticeably well composed and even clever, and required an artistic vision and some decent effort to create. The animation wasn’t awful, the designs ranged from serviceable to genuinely charming (I like the subtlety of Hyoi and Rui’s cat-like features!), and I liked that the characters actually emoted. It wasn’t as generic as I expected and took some risks, even if they didn’t pay off and left it with a reputation of being “too grotesque to be enjoyable”.

I can understand the common criticisms of the gore and body horror being poorly animated, but I won’t decry it for existing and “being ugly”... of course it’s ugly, it’s body horror reminiscent of The Thing from The Thing. (Now would be a good time to warn people not to look this OVA up, unless they are sure they are okay with body horror and gore of this calibre. Tentacles with teeth and spines rip out of people’s skin from the inside and deform their hosts, it is quite awful! I would also include a warning for trypophobia -- there are shots where the mutations form clusters of holes on the skin.) The body horror in Dark Cat being disgusting and making my skin crawl isn’t a fault -- I think it’s the intended purpose. Though I will concede that:

The phallic imagery of the horrific flesh mutations, particularly that of the teacher who attacked Rui, was… bizarre, considering that otherwise the OVA isn’t particularly dark in tone or otherwise sexually graphic.

Perhaps having grotesque body horror is completely unexpected in a story about two bishounen teens (?) who can turn into cats and fight ghosts. 

Yes, Dark Cat, the OVA put on Worst Anime Ever lists for being a grotesque spectacle, is just as commonly placed on those lists for being a dumb anime about guys that can transform into house cats and who fight supernatural entities with not so amazing powers. This is a gripe I’ve seen in a few popular reviews, but there was no point during my watching experience that I thought, “Man, these teens are pansies, they don’t even turn into big scary lions or anything! What’s the point, it’s practically a power-down! cinemasins ding” because I don’t go into anime expecting every single male character I see to be Big & Strong & Cool, because I uh… don’t have brain worms I guess? I don’t know what to say about this criticism really, other than people who watch a lot of shounen have very strange hang ups about super powers. 

Otherwise, it seems the biggest reason Dark Cat is lauded as One of the Worst -- perhaps even ahead of the silly concept and nauseating gore -- is actually because of the abysmal english dub. It’s my honour to say that I didn’t watch the dub, so it doesn’t factor in at all into my impressions! 

So in the end, perhaps my only true gripes with Dark Cat are:

Despite having no particular issue with body horror and gore existing, the extent of destruction and graphic death gave the OVA a bit of a snuff film vibe.

The conclusion to the story was quite bad. 

It could be surmised by the brief plot outline I wrote earlier that Dark Cat isn’t a very complicated story. Demons and ghosts exist and wreak havoc on emotionally vulnerable humans, and supernatural soldiers try to mediate between the realms by purifying tortured ghosts and saving those dragged into darkness by evil entities. These beats are common in the supernatural genre of anime, but Dark Cat’s handling of its tragic morality tale left me more confused than anything.

Koizumi didn’t do anything wrong -- he shouldn’t have had to die for the sin of not reciprocating Aimi’s feelings, nor for developing depression after the rejection and death of his classmate and crush. Aimi… did things wrong, but was nevertheless the most compelling character in the OVA. Throughout Aimi was kind, patient, and forgiving when it came to being treated badly by Koizumi. In the finale however, it is revealed that Aimi was the one responsible for Koizumi’s crush’s death, assumedly having murdered her out of jealousy or out of revenge on Koizumi’s behalf for hurting his feelings. Prior to this, the first students to be killed by the tentacle monsters just happened to be the ones that had bullied Koizumi in class earlier that day -- implying that Aimi was getting revenge on them, as well.

It was with these revelations that I started to wonder: Why not just let the flesh monster manifest as a direct result of Aimi’s negative feelings? Aimi confessed to murdering Koizumi’s crush before the events of the OVA -- would she have done so if she wasn’t being influenced by the malignant force set on her by Jukokubo? I feel that her arc would have been much more interesting without the introduction of a non-compelling and badly designed villain like Jukokubo, because then we would know it was all her. Even if she was influenced by forces exacerbating her pre-existing jealousy and rage, that is a more satisfying option than having a big dumb green cat of a villain to trace everything back to so neatly. 

And really, what did Jukokubo do in the story beyond take the spotlight, and the blame, from Aimi? He had some previous relation to Hyoi and Rui, but it’s not developed at all, and his ideological rivalry with Hyoi was trivial. Hyoi could have come to the same conclusions about holding out hope for humanity without Jukokubo there to insist he be a guest to debate on his political podcast.  

The lack of accountability regarding Aimi is a part of why the resolution to her conflict with Koizumi feels so wrong -- he succumbs to her feelings because he realizes the evil was born from her suffering, and he feels that he has to sacrifice himself to make up for unknowingly hurting her so much that she turned into a monster from hell. In the end she is absolved via being purified and getting to die with her spirit entwined with Koizumi’s, and he apologizes for having not recognized how he was hurting her. 

Aimi kills his crush, kills his bullies, and ends up -- inadvertently, at least -- killing almost all of their classmates, because she was tilted about her childhood friend not realizing she had romantic feelings for him. And when Koizumi learns all of this, he apologizes and dies with her, and this is proof of humanity’s goodness? The dark clouds part and the rain stops and Aimi and Koizumi ascend in a heavenly ray of light, because he decided, while she was devouring him, that he was wrong to ignore his murderous best friend’s love for him?

I guess it’s fine -- it was probably mostly Jukokubo’s fault anyway, and everyone was just an unfortunate victim of his meddling… 😒

Other than the bad writing, the string of deaths that happen in the finale when the monster lets loose in the school are quite uncomfortable to behold. Deformed student bodies are splayed and strewn around classrooms, and the bullies are rendered into unrecognizable mounds of pulsating flesh in their homes. The violence of a fight against a monster like this, I can handle, but the graphic images of helpless death were difficult to stomach. And in this OVA, there is no miraculous reversal of the demon’s damage once it is purified -- there is no implication whatsoever that everyone who died isn’t still just as dead as Aimi and Koizumi in the end. 

The main thing I was actually worried about when I watched Dark Cat was that there would be sexual assault, thanks to reviewers griping it for “generic hentai tentacles”. I am relieved to say that there is none, at least not insofar as deserving a comparison to actual porn. There is sexual content scattered throughout the horror scenes: The occasionally phallic appearance of the tentacles, shots of the tentacles coming down from under skirts, and there is one shot of nudity when Aimi’s shirt is ripped open as she transforms, though I would say it’s too horrific and ugly to be sexualized or otherwise considered “fanservice”.

What is the point of the hits of sex imagery in Dark Cat? I have no idea. This isn’t Alien, it isn’t about the horror of sexual assault or the violence of creation -- though the main horror of the scene where Rui is ambushed by the teacher seems to be that she uses magic to seduce him, only to reveal a very phallic tentacle from her mouth that she means to kill (or infect…?) him with, which can have multiple, potentially offensive readings… it is a one off, however -- and there doesn’t seem to be any moral posturing about it as is often seen in slashers. I couldn’t parse any sort of consistent STI allegory regarding the plague of tentacles upon the student body, despite how many summaries I have read that describe the tentacles as that, a “plague”. 

… I realize I am probably the only person on earth to give any aspect of Dark Cat’s production this much thought. To sum up: It seems to just exist for the shock value. Considering the extent of disgusting imagery already present a la The Gore and Deformation of Human Bodies, I don’t think this OVA benefitted from featuring some explicit looking tendrils, beyond cementing its abhorrent reputation.

Is this all to say that I think Dark Cat is a good OVA? No, of course not. It’s tone deaf, and tasteless, and has awkward pacing and bad writing. But compared to the utterly soulless and artistically devoid works the likes of Skelter Heaven and Mars of Destruction, I would say the fact I was able to write this much about Dark Cat is testament to that fact that it at the very least, contains content -- and some of that content was like, decent! Skelter+Heaven was such a mess it was all I could do to understand the sequence of events, and Mars of Destruction was so bland I literally have no posts about it on the blog despite watching it more than once. Psychic Wars was a snoozefest I barely finished that similarly has no mention on the blog, and Hanoka’s production gimmick couldn’t save it from being a totally forgettable romance story. 

Therefore, Dark Cat is the best worst title I have seen thus far, by virtue of being executed with an average amount of competency for an OVA from the early 90s, and for having a balance of good and bad elements that gave me something to hold onto and mull over after viewing. 

3/10.

Oh, and I loved the bad 80s insert songs.  

[brainrotmeta]

You are so so annoying. I don’t care if you ship wincest or if you think it’s validated by the text or if you think it’s a fun way to view the show! good for you! I don’t expect you to stop shipping wincest but you coming onto active deancas fans posts that you WERE NOT TAGGED IN is so weird and honestly a violation of boundaries! You aren’t even sending asks so it’s just you and their audience you’re showing these people who didn’t even mention you and putting them in front of your audience of wincest fans?????

Actually while I’m being a hashtag hater let me just say the way you Own The Hellers by being like Cas and Dean are not gay. Cas isn’t even gay. If anyone is gay it’s Dean and Sam. Ummmm but Dean is straight it’s just allegorical wincest to showcase a messed up relationship in a horror show. But I will still use this as combative evidence to trash anyone who likes Dean and Cas’ relationship ☺️

Like. I don’t care if you ship wincest. But you are interacting with people who didn’t even ask with your frankly dumbfuck meta. If you think Sam and Dean are in an emotionally incestuous relationship, that’s fine. I even agree with you! Very much, actually, and I agree that is good for horror aspects because it’s uncomfortable and requires a restructuring of the relationship as the show goes on that I find very interesting and compelling!

What I don’t get is why you use this in your responses to Destiel fans when you’re owning them with your Reading Comprehension 101. Because it’s one thing for you to like, be vagueing or whatever. Or doing this fucking debunking on your own with other wincesties who agree with your analysis, like clowning on the hellers. You are trying to start a dialogue with people not working from your same incest shipping framework and it makes me like. Lmao. you look dumb!

I was actually in a semi emotionally incestuous relationship with my sibling who I had to somewhat parent. Go to family counseling with them and everything about it. (we are normal now and I care about them very much). It’s not incest like sexual attraction or even being committed to each other platonically in a way that sublimates attraction or desire! Sam and Dean in early seasons are for sure for sure emotionally incestuous in many aspects (not all I don’t think though) In later seasons they slip back into it when shit is hitting the fan and the regression is great for horror, because it’s uncomfortable, like you said. You aren’t wrong about that in any way.

But it’s so fucking STUPID to think this works counter to Destiel. To be clear I am a big fan of Deancas. I think it’s validated by the text. I don’t care to go into it right now with you, because I’m just astounded that graduate from supernatural studies and the decider of what is Correct and Textual over here has such shitty shallow takes and delivery about the textual incest, which you’d think a wincest shipper would be good at! But no you’re awful. it’s not even interesting. Watching the brothers get better a little and then just nosedive back into insane emotional incest when things go wrong and it never getting better until the relationship is just super bad is… I can see why that would be compelling for some. it’s horror. it’s a valid way to recontextualize the show and I am not even mad about it! But it’s not what happens in canon

Their emotional incest as the show goes on gets better, not worse. Deancas in this context compels me a lot, and it’s part of the reason I like it so much but I won’t go into that unless you’re curious or want to yell at me about how stupid it is and ask. But it compels me because I want Dean and Sam to get better in the incest aspect, and I want their relationship to improve. Dean is abusive largely in other ways by the end of the show and I enjoy it because it’s fucked up and interesting. I’ll even throw you the bone that the finale takes a super sharp twist back into emotional incest and it’s insane and compels me! It has a very unreality feel to it and I enjoy it.

I went on so long here but TLDR I think you sound really REALLY stupid talking about Dean and Sams emotional incest as some kind of own to the hellers. they can coexist and in my opinion make each other even more interesting to engage with (textually!! even just friendship. it’d still fascinate me if they were platonic). If you want to be mr Shapiro of supernatural tumblr I’m begging you to at least make even an ounce of sense because your ‘meta’ isn’t interesting in the least. it’s fucking boring and frankly insulting! As someone who has dealt with emotional incest (this isn’t important like I’m also uncomfortable with your literal incest shipping but it isn’t about me and I don’t expect you to like. Stop posting about it just because I say I’m uncomfortable)

You are so so annoying.

fair

you coming onto active deancas fans posts that you WERE NOT TAGGED IN is so weird and honestly a violation of boundaries!

If you post something in public, especially something tagged meta, you're inviting people to respond to it. It's not a violation of boundaries, it's just shitty web design. People can and have blocked me. Which is good. Less destiel nonsense to run into when I'm trying to enjoy spiderman gifs or something.

You aren’t even sending asks so it’s just you and their audience you’re showing these people who didn’t even mention you and putting them in front of your audience of wincest fans?????

I actually think most of my followers are DeanCas shippers rubbernecking.

Anyway I'm cutting this for length

Cas isn’t even gay. I've actually stated that I think that while Castiel's confession was plausibly deniable, I think a romantic reading was the one with the most merit. Can you at least drag me for stuff I said? Unless you're going mad as hell that I pointed out angelic gender doesn't map onto human gender?

If anyone is gay it’s Dean and Sam. I haven't stated my opinion on Sam's sexuality.

But I will still use this as combative evidence to trash anyone who likes Dean and Cas’ relationship. I don't care if you like Dean and Cas' relationship. I'm annoyed by massive misreading, in particular trying to fit Cas into Sam's narrative role.

But you are interacting with people who didn’t even ask with your frankly dumbfuck meta. No one has the right to universal praise when they post meta.

What I don’t get is why you use this in your responses to Destiel fans when you’re owning them with your Reading Comprehension 101. I don't, as a general rule. I often have to bring in Sam because of Destiel meta's annoying habit of trying to replace Sam and Cas' roles.

Because it’s one thing for you to like, be vagueing or whatever. Or doing this fucking debunking on your own with other wincesties who agree with your analysis, like clowning on the hellers. I'm disagreeing with people's meta posts.

You are trying to start a dialogue with people not working from your same incest shipping framework and it makes me like. Lmao. you look dumb! I usually don't even bring up the wincest lens. It's only important to episodes like Sex and Violence. But most of my asks are people angry I'm acknowledging the intended subtext written/directed/acted in the show.

Their emotional incest as the show goes on gets better, not worse. ...no it doesn't. Season ten ends with Dean mock executing Sam and Sam releasing the darkness to save Dean. What happens it that Sam becomes more passive and less likely to resist Dean's controlling nature. Jack becomes the big sticking point because Sam might not be willing or able fight for himself (as much) anymore, but he tries to fight for Jack.

I mean, yeah, there are highs and lows in season 12-15, and it never gets as bad as season 9. But I think Sam and Dean in season 1-2 are waaaaay healthier than Sam and Dean in season 14, where Dean pressures Sam to tick Jack into a box to live out eternity.

Deancas in this context compels me a lot, and it’s part of the reason I like it so much but I won’t go into that unless you’re curious or want to yell at me about how stupid it is and ask. Go ahead.

I think you sound really REALLY stupid talking about Dean and Sams emotional incest as some kind of own to the hellers. No. It's funny to point out all the Incest Content in the canon to people who pearl clutch and threaten to kill people who enjoy said content.

I’m begging you to at least make even an ounce of sense because your ‘meta’ isn’t interesting in the least. it’s fucking boring and frankly insulting I'm not convinced you actually read it seeing as you are pointing to things I never said.

I’m also uncomfortable with your literal incest shipping I'm uncomfortable with Destiel Hot Takes. I made a side blog to complain and you write to me anonymously. I feel like we're both living our best lives here.

[bewires]

sometimes, I read things on the internet that make me angry. my knee-jerk reaction is usually to reblog with a response, but I almost never actually follow through. this is why.

1. Reading comprehension: if I am responding to something and I’m emotionally invested in the point, it can be easy to read undertones and subtext into someone else’s words and actions. If I catch myself doing that (and I definitely don’t always catch myself, interpreting what I read is a reflex and sometimes not one I notice), I usually just don’t reblog or respond, because there’s a very real chance I’m not reading what they’re saying, I’m reading what I’m feeling.

2. Emotion: I have a temper. I’ve worked really hard to learn from awful fights I’ve had in the past. Thankfully, when I’m writing, even about things that make me angry, I have the option of retreading my steps and deleting things that sound too angry. I wish I could do this when I’m talking. I do this because I know when I read posts that are written in an emotional/angry tone (or at least that I perceive that way), I get upset, defensive and combative, and those aren’t emotions I want to evoke in anyone else. I can’t count how many times I’ve gone back over what I’ve written and just deleted it because it sounded too angry.

3. Framing: When I’m writing about something I know is controversial and difficult, it can be really hard to design my use of language in such a way that it’s not immediately combative or aggressive. My go-to is to use I-statements: I feel that, to me it sounded like, what I understood from this is, and so on. This isn’t a rhetorical trick I’m using to be persuasive or anything, this is a tool I’m using to clarify that I’m aware I am treading on controversial ground and to make obvious to anyone reading that my opinions are subjective.

4. Dogpiling: chances are, if I’ve seen the thing and gotten annoyed about it, so have other people. I’m a person who is very comforted by the thought of my own insignificance, so I like to remind myself that my opinion is pretty extraneous in most cases and if I really care I can silently reblog stuff I agree with and not engage with stuff I don’t. (I don’t always succeed at this. There’s a german phrase - to add one’s own mustard - which means sticking your opinion where no one wanted it or needed it, and I add my own mustard way more than I ought). Also, chances are excellent other people know more than me and I don’t want to wade into a discussion without all the facts. So far I haven’t found an internet debate where it was possible to have all the facts, and the last thing I want to do is beat up on someone who’s already getting anon hate.

I’d like to note at this point that I am a very privileged white person, and my anger is not necessary or helpful to anyone; there’s a difference between me demanding civility, restraint and neutrality from myself and demanding it from people who have every reason to be angry.

If you’re interested in debate tactics that crush dissent and how that can lead down a rabbit hole, I really recommend Ian Danskin’s youtube series “the alt-right playbook”, it’s a fascinating look at rhetorical strategies used to startling degree by the alt-right, but also found on a lot of online platforms.

[lifeonashelf]

COLDPLAY

Let’s get this straight right off the bat: Coldplay is fucking terrible.

We all know this. Designating Coldplay as terrible isn’t a statement of personal opinion, it is an easily demonstrable fact. Just listen to them; Coldplay’s music proves the existence of Coldplay’s terribleness the same way that breathing proves the existence of oxygen. Surely, even the band’s staunchest supporters understand that their songs are pretentious, monotonous, and unimaginative—they’d kind of have to; I assume these people have listened to Coldplay, too. If you like music as superfluous as Coldplay’s, that’s totally fine. I’m not here to tell you that you shouldn’t, nor to convince you to stop listening to Coldplay (you can’t stop listening to them, anyway; no matter how hard you try to escape, wherever you go, Coldplay will find you). But they are unequivocally fucking awful, and I need to make that clear before we continue in case I end up saying anything courteous about them later. And, who knows? I may indeed find something positive to say about Coldplay—I mean, nothing comes to mind right now, but it’s going to take me a few hours to write this piece so it’s possible something will at some point.  

Okay, so we’re all clear on Coldplay being fucking terrible, right? Great. But that isn’t the main reason I hate them. I appreciate plenty of terrible bands just as I appreciate plenty of terrible movies. Listening to a really shitty group is sort of like watching a cast of really shitty actors—though they clearly suck at what they do, there’s something oddly appealing about the charming naiveté they demonstrate by giving it the best go they can anyway.

For instance, since I was still filing most of my Warped Tour emo discs in my punk section when I began this venture, I never got around to writing about a band called Adair. If you’re not familiar with them, don’t worry about it; they only existed for a few years in the mid-aughts and their diminutive discography merely consists of a self-released EP and one full-length album, The Destruction Of Everything Is The Beginning Of Something New. Sonically, Adair were so amusingly prototypical of every baby t-shirt screamo band that was thriving at the time, they essentially sounded like they were parodying the style of music they played (although, to be fair, a lot of those squads did). But, Adair were absolutely serious, regardless of what stridently nasal heights the vocals reached, regardless of how faithfully their compositions adhered to their genre’s textbook page by page, and regardless of the sublimely ridiculous realms some of their allegorical angst lamentations ventured into (the line “lock me up in Guantanamo Bay and throw away the key” from the song “I Buried My Heart In Cosmo Park” may very well be the lyrical apex of their entire genus).

Adair’s music is so inane that it makes me laugh out loud when I sing along to it—but here’s the thing: I do sing along to it. I have probably played The Destruction Of Everything Is The Beginning Of Something New a hundred times from start to finish since my copy was sent to me to review for some website back in 2006, and I have cued up individual high(low?)points like “The Diamond Ring” and “Folding and Unfolding” even more times than that. As silly as they sound—and trust me, they sound very fucking silly—I still sincerely enjoy their tunes and have spent enough hours listening to TDOEITBOSN for it to possibly qualify as one of my favorite records ever. Shit, even writing about it right now makes me feel like hearing the disc, so I’ll probably end up blasting it in my truck tomorrow (ed. note: I actually did). If they ever decided to do a reunion tour, I would absolutely go see them, and if vocalist Rob Tweedie did that whole “hold the microphone out toward the crowd so they can finish the lyric” thing which every frontman in every band that sounds like Adair does at least a dozen times per show, I would totally be able to fill in each of those blanks and enthusiastically do so.

Sorry, we were talking about Coldplay. To recap, they’re fucking terrible.

Unlike a frivolous whimper-core ensemble like Adair, the most off-putting thing about Coldplay isn’t their music. They’ve actually managed to excrete a few tracks that I grudgingly enjoy over the years. However, sporadically releasing songs which don’t sound like they were specifically written for Gap commercials actually works against Coldplay in this instance. Sure, most of their output is noxious twaddle, but since they occasionally come across as a marginally decent band, their work isn’t awful enough to at least ironically appreciate it for being awful.

In fact, there’s absolutely nothing ironic about Coldplay—other than U2 and Radiohead (more on them in a minute), I can’t think of another band that seems to take itself as dreadfully seriously as Coldplay does. There isn’t a single lighthearted number in their entire catalog, and the demeanor of their music is so staid and cheerless that it’s hard to imagine the dudes ever cracking a smile while they’re making it. Their approach to songwriting is rigidly Pavlovian—when the music gets louder, ring ring ring, that signals the listener the *really* poignant part of the tune has arrived and cues them to emotionally salivate in kind—yet despite their calculated use of sonic dynamics to manufacture sentiment, the vapid and unspontaneous nature of the delivery saps their tunes of anything resembling genuine soul or passion. Even when thrusting through the more energetic tracks in their litany, the musicians in Coldplay always sound like they’re actively striving to not play their instruments too hard. The result is that they consistently deliver some of the safest and least edgy rock ever created, shaping their ethos around a formula so willfully tepid and cuddly that they barely qualify as a rock band at all. Coldplay aren’t quite the musical equivalent of plain yogurt (that would be Jack Johnson, an artist so comprehensively flavorless that even his name is fucking boring) but the granola in their mixture is always judiciously distributed so as not to agitate anyone’s tastebuds.

And at the center of this slow-motion kaleidoscope, you have Chris fucking Martin (I find it difficult to cite his name without including the “fucking” in there; he’s just one of those guys—like Jason fucking Mraz, Blake fucking Shelton, or fucking Bono). Coldplay’s music may be stagnant, but you’d never know it from beholding the practiced arsenal of slinky paroxysms their vocalist bursts into while that music is playing. In performance and in their videos, Martin’s appendages are incessantly in motion, his hands ever-swaying gently through the air like he’s waving a pair of invisible cigarette lighters or finger painting on the goddamn sky, ostensibly so deeply lost in his band’s reverie of sound that he simply can’t help himself from moving his body in a cadenced pantomime of the way their music is meant to superficially move your spirit.

For the three non-ballads the group has written in their career, Chris usually switches things up by crouching in an incongruous bobbing panther-stance like a battle rapper delivering a diss track about fucking his opponent’s mama in the mouth, until it’s time to freeze in the tried and true messiah-statue pose as the number’s final notes chime into the ether. But it is in the quiet moments when Martin truly shines—which makes perfect sense given that he’s the leader of a group so systematically anodyne they probably should have actually named themselves Quiet Moments. These are the obligatory interims where the frontman takes the stage on his own to sit down at the piano, resplendent in the spotlight, and perform an intimate solo rendition of one of his most tender hits to show everyone in the audience that Chris fucking Martin is a bonafide fucking musician who, if he really felt like it, could totally do the whole Coldplay thing without the other three dudes whose names no one knows. His soaring falsetto croon is custom-feigned for the arenas the band was destined to coldplay from the moment they dropped their breakthrough single “Yellow” and caused a nation of book-sensitive sociology majors eagerly anticipating the arrival of their generation’s U2 to cream their Dockers in unison. When Martin opens his pipes to summon those indelibly contrived choruses about birds and stars and other monosyllabic nouns, it hardly even matters what words he’s singing—the leitmotifs in most of the tunes are basically interchangeable anyway. What matters is that Chris sounds like he really, really, really means it when he says he will try to fix you.

That analysis probably makes it seem like I hate Chris fucking Martin as much as I hate his band. I actually don’t—he’s too benign a character to elicit such a fervid response; hating Chris Martin is like hating turtleneck sweaters, or actual turtles. In fact, I suspect he’s probably a really nice dude.  At least, I’ve never heard any creepy stories about him showing his penis to under-aged fans on Skype or anything like that.

Regardless, while I don’t specifically despise either Martin, Dude Who Plays Guitar, or the other two anonymous members of Coldplay, I do gauge their collective as the fourth or fifth worst band of all time. And the reason I loathe them more than any of their neighbors on that list is because they aren’t the kind of prodigiously abysmal group you can just ignore until their moment in the spotlight inevitably passes—which is how I dealt with Five For Fighting from September 2001 through February 2002 and how I’ve been dealing with Twenty-One Pilots for the last four years (seriously, are you fuckers done yet?). Coldplay is a far cagier nuisance because they are massively popular and have been for a ludicrously long time. I’ve been patiently waiting for them to go away for two decades now, yet they continue to pop up every third summer or so to drop a new album and remind us that, yes, they’re still here assiduously mining the middle of the road for new ways to write more tunes about clouds being pretty.

Even worse, I can’t disregard their music because it’s everywhere. I hear “The Scientist” while I’m shopping for cereal at the grocery store, I hear “Talk” when I sit down to eat at any chain restaurant, and I imagine I’ll be viewing that idiotic video for “Adventure of a Lifetime” with the posse of animated dancing monkeys on an infinite Clockwork-Orange-eyes-gaping loop for the rest of eternity when my mortal essence exits this world and I am cast into the fiery pits of Hell. I can’t even watch football without encountering Coldplay, as I discovered with horror in 2016 when they took part in the most fatuous jumbled fucking mess of a Super Bowl halftime show the NFL had ever presented (a zenith of suckery which seemed impossible to eclipse until this past February, when Adam Levine showed up covered with prison tattoos and said, “hold my beer”).

The pervasive level of esteem Coldplay has reached dumbfounds me. This is a group that has sold millions and millions of albums worldwide, even though I have never once heard a single person utter the phrase, “man, that new Coldplay song kicks ass.” I’m sure their most dedicated fans have favorite hits, tracks that are significant to them in some way, etc. But their remarkable success is patently disproportionate to how patently unremarkable the work which garnered that success really is. Nobody ever describes the band’s music as “awesome”, just as nobody ever describes a glass of pinot gris as awesome—the term simply does not apply to their province; actually, in this case, describing the mouthfeel of Coldplay tunes and recommending cheeses they best pair with is probably more relevant than discussing how they sound. Coldplay is as universally popular as they are precisely because they aren’t awesome. They’re not beloved because they’re extraordinary; most people love them because they’re innocuous, functional, and suitable for almost any occasion—Coldplay is akin to a pair of cargo shorts, and no one thinks cargo shorts kick ass. Coldplay isn’t an alternative band (on the contrary, almost every good band is an alternative to Coldplay); they are a lowest common denominator band, undemanding and ubiquitous and safe to like because everyone else likes them. Their work is specifically geared toward people who think appreciating music demonstrates sophistication, but don’t ultimately give enough of a shit about the artform to put any effort into finding music that is actually sophisticated or appreciable. You may assume Coldplay is erudite because they’re British and they cite books you’ve never read when discussing the lyrical themes in their work, but they’re merely recycling the same emotional territory as every other pop act that writes tunes about finding love, losing love, missing love, and the 18th Century French peasantry.

The best thing about being a Coldplay fan is that it’s easy. You don’t have to buy their records, go see them live, or make any concerted effort at all to receive their music. If you listen to the radio for any extended period of time (or eat at an Applebee’s), you will eventually hear one of their songs; all you have to do is not hate it and, voila, you’re officially a Coldplay fan. There, don’t you just love the security of venerating a critically and commercially acclaimed band that will never challenge you or be unpopular?

Okay, I do strive to be fair—even in this arena where I can say whatever I want and no one can argue with me. I gave this a lot of thought, so here are four things about Coldplay that are not terrible:

 1)      “Clocks”: I resisted it for many years, but I finally had to concede that it’s kind of a pretty song. Notes of red currant and blackberries, and it goes superbly with a nice aged brie.

2)      “God Put A Smile On Your Face”: It doesn’t put a smile on mine, but that’s why I enjoy it. Most Coldplay songs sound like they’re aiming to evoke what being hugged by a koala bear feels like, so I appreciate Chris fucking Martin delivering a darker number that seems intent on making me feel depressed instead. Well played, sir.

3)      Viva La Vida, Or Death And All His Friends: I sincerely respect their effort to broaden their palate a bit by working with Brian Eno and making Dude Who Plays Guitar buy a distortion pedal to use on one song. This is still an archetypal shitty Coldplay record, but at least it sounds a little different than all of the other archetypal shitty Coldplay records.

4)      Nah. They’re still fucking terrible; they were lucky to get three things.

 There is one additional facet of the group’s career which has fascinated me over these past several years, even though it relates more to bands that are not Coldplay rather than the band that is Coldplay. Earlier I dubbed them the U2 of their generation, and recent events in particular have coalesced to underscore that comparison. See, when Coldplay came out, the tributes to their Irish brethren in choreographed affectation were far from subtle. Chris fucking Martin’s warbling was plainly modeled after fucking Bono’s, Dude Who Plays Guitar served up an endless cycle of repetitive but hooky high-register licks that were striking similar to the distinctive methodology of The Edge, and both bands’ workmanlike rhythm sections held things down with competent yet discreet backing tracks which militantly fulfilled each song’s basic requirements rather than showcasing the musicians’ dexterity. I don’t think anyone ever disputed the collective homage in Coldplay’s dogma, and no one was terribly bothered by it either; at the time there were a lot of people craving a band that sounded just like U2, because U2 didn’t sound like U2 anymore.

When Coldplay’s debut album Parachutes was released in July 2000, fucking Bono and company’s career was on a downward arc after they largely vacated their signature approach to instead craft a couple poorly-received discs dominated by insipid rave-lite tunes that not even the members of U2 listen to anymore. Though they would temporarily rebound later that year with “Beautiful Day”, the last honestly excellent song they would ever record, U2 had left a gap that needed filling. And the most obvious inheritors of their kingdom, Radiohead, had grown tired of anthemic guitar rock; they were hunkered down creating their demanding but exceptional opus Kid A, which sounded nothing like U2, nothing like Radiohead, and indeed nothing like any other music being made on planet Earth. Kid A still had some anthems, still had some guitar, and still had a little rock, but its oblique delivery clearly demonstrated that Radiohead was chasing a far different muse and had little interest in claiming the crown (of course, this would be abundantly clarified in hindsight when they subsequently slid further down their rabbit-hole, gradually abandoning the anthems and guitars and rock altogether, until finally settling upon their current songwriting formula, which seems to mostly involve Thom Yorke masturbating on his laptop, naming ten of his climaxes, and calling it an album).

So while U2 were busy trying to figure out why they weren’t relevant anymore and Radiohead were busy doing whatever the fuck they were doing, the lads in Coldplay stepped up and said, hey, why not us? They seized the ersatz-earnest arena rock mantle with A Rush Of Blood To The Head and never looked back. Now, 17 years and seven multi-platinum albums later, they can ruin the Super Bowl, collaborate with the Chainsmokers, and even make the same kind of lameass dance music that essentially buried U2’s career with impunity. Even more significant, they have come full circle. A group that started out playing second-rate U2 facsimiles under the moniker Pectoralz (this is absolutely true, by the way) is now one of the hugest pop institutions in the universe, beloved by millions of music and wine connoisseurs across the globe. And the student has eclipsed the teacher; U2’s desperate efforts to play catchup have made their modern work sound unmistakably like second-rate Coldplay facsimiles. Chris fucking Martin and those other three guys are no longer pretenders to the throne—they are Coldplay, and this is their empire now, bitches.

These days, U2 has to reprise their old records in their entirety on nostalgia tours to get anyone to come to their concerts, and Radiohead continues to release unlistenable albums which their fans claim to love while sheepishly casting them aside to listen to OK Computer for the thousandth time instead. But Coldplay has strategically situated themselves for an eternity as the undisputed emperors of rock mediocrity. I think they’ve got another two decades in them, too; I have no doubt that long after Twenty-One Pilots is (finally) relegated to the county fair circuit where they belong, Chris fucking Martin will still be promising sold-out crowds that lights will lead them home and having a series of polite, gently-articulated seizures while he sings “Speed Of Sound”.

It seems I respect Coldplay a little more than I suspected. You know what? I’m going to amend my original valuation right here and now. As of this moment, I am formally designating Coldplay the sixth worst band of all time.

Your move, Godsmack.

 May 15, 2019

[arcticdementor]

Kayfabe is a treasured part of pro wrestling culture. Kayfabe refers to the commitment of everyone involved (the wrestlers, the refs, the announcers, and to a certain degree the fans) to maintaining the shared fiction that pro wrestling matches are unscripted. (Wrestling is real, in the sense that the athletes are taking real punishment and risk really getting hurt, and there is a degree of improvisation, but the outcomes are predetermined.) Kayfabe has had a kind of mythical importance to many in the pro wrestling community: you keep kayfabe no matter what, even in the event of serious injury, out of a sense of sacred commitment. Crucial to understanding kayfabe is that it is not an attempt to deceive the audience. Modern wrestling is in some ways perfectly open about the scripted nature of the matches. Fooling people is not the point. If every fan signed an affidavit saying they knew the outcomes were predetermined the wrestlers would still keep kayfabe, out of commitment to the culture. Kayfabe is a mutually-approved illusion. It is artifice, but it is mutually agreed upon artifice, a consensual fantasy.

Our current political culture is kayfabe.

The illusion that we pretend to believe is that we are in some sort of uniquely politically fertile moment for progressivism and social justice, that we are experiencing a social revolution or “Great Awokening.” Further, we keep kayfabe by acting as if we believe that certain policies like police abolition or abolishing border enforcement (or if you prefer utterly meaningless sloganeering, “abolishing ICE”) are tangibly viable in anything like the near future. I say that these are kayfabe to emphasize my belief that most people who endorse these beliefs are well aware that they are not true, and to underline the sense in which the commitment to unreality is mutual, an expression of a strange kind of social contract. Most thinking adults comprehend the current moment and understand that the hand of establishment power and the influence of social inertia are as strong as ever. (Why would you feel otherwise?) But because people have understandably been moved by recent righteous calls for justice, they feel they must accept the fiction of a new awakening to show solidarity with the victims of injustice. This is emotionally understandable, but strategically counterproductive. And indeed one thing that has defined these new social movements is their relentless commitment to the emotional over the strategic.

…

Living in a culture of political kayfabe is a strange experience. It feels the way that, I imagine, it feels to live under a truly authoritarian government, where you’re constantly having exchanges where everyone involved knows that what they’re saying is bogus but you push right through the cognitive dissonance with a smile on your face. Only you’re not compelled by the fear of torture or imprisonment but of vague-but-intense social dictates, of the crucial priority of appearing to be the right kind of person. So often political conversations today have this dual quality where you feel forced to constantly evaluate what your interlocutor actually believes even as propriety compels you to take seriously what’s coming out of their mouth.

A major negative consequence of our commitment to kayfabe lies in our acceptance of behaviors we would ordinarily never accept, under the theory that this is such a special time, we need to shut up and go along with it. Take our broken discourse, as frequently discussed in “cancel culture” debates. My experience and my intuition tell me that almost everyone in the progressive/left/socialist world knows that our discourse norms and culture are totally fucked up. Trust me: most people in liberal spaces, Black and white, male and female, trans and cis, most certainly including people in academia and media, are well aware that we’ve entered into a bizarre never-ending production of The Crucible we can’t get out of. They’re probably just as sick of Woko Haram as I am.

But they’re either empowered and enriched by this state of affairs, and don’t want the party to end, or they’re holding on for dear life trying not to get their lives ruined for speaking out of turn. Look past self-interest and self-preservation and you’ll find that everybody knows that the way left spaces work now is horribly broken and dysfunctional. The problem is that thinking people who would ordinarily object don’t because they’ve been convinced that this is some sort of special moment pregnant with progressive potential, and that is more important than rights, compassion, or fairness. So we maintain a shared pretense that things are cool the way you go through the motions on an awful date where you’re both aware you’ll never see each other again.

If I say “cancel culture,” normies indeed don’t know what I’m talking about, because they are healthy, adjusted people with a decent set of priorities who value their own time and lives too much to get caught up in all of this horseshit. But if I say “cancel culture” in front of a bunch of politics-obsessed professional-class shitlibs they will pretend to not know what I’m talking about. They’ll put on a rich fucking show. They do an impression of Cletus from The Simpsons and go “cancel culture?!? Hyuck hyuck what’re that? I’m not knowing cancel culture, I’m just a simple country lad!” These are people who have read more about cancel culture in thinkpieces than I read about any topic in a year. But pretending you don’t know what cancel culture is happens to be a key part of the performance, a naked in-group signifier, so they pretend. The “I don’t know what cancel culture is” bullshit performance is kayfabe at its most infuriating. I know you know what cancel culture is because you’re currently using it to demonstrate your culture positioning by pretending you don’t know what it is. You fucking simpleton.

People say and do weird shit and it’s all wrong but you just pretend like it isn’t. Who wants to be the one caught making waves? When you’re in a group of people and someone engages in something patently ridiculous - when, for example, someone says “AAVE” in an ordinary social situation with no academic or political reason to use jargon, even though everyone there knows the phrase “the way Black people talk” is more elegant, useful, and true - and the moment passes and there’s this inability to look each other in the eye, when everybody starts studying their drink and clearing their throat, that’s life under kayfabe.

Getting to this is not normal. It’s not a healthy state of affairs. It can only happen when people come to believe that self-preservation requires pretending things are OK.

…

It is at this point that people say that “defund” does not mean “abolish,” which is true, and Defund the Police indeed does not mean “abolish the police.” Defund the police means nothing, now, though I’m sure that the people who started using it had noble intentions. At this point it’s a floating signifier, an empty slogan that people rallied around with zero understanding of what semantic content it could possibly contain. If it’s meant to be a radical demand, why use the vocabulary of an actuary? If it’s meant to mean a meaningful but strategic drawdown of resources, why use it interchangeably with “abolish”? I cannot imagine a more comprehensive failure of basic political messaging than Defund the Police. Amateur hour from beginning to end.

I take the political concept of alternatives to policing seriously, in the same way I take many political ideas seriously that are not likely achievable in my lifetime. I know there are deeply serious people who are profoundly committed to these principles and who have thought them through responsibly. I appreciate their work and become better informed from what they say. But their ideas did not reign last year. A faddish embrace of a thoughtless caricature of police abolition reigned, pushed with maximum aggression and minimal introspection by the shock troops of contemporary progressive ideas, overeducated white people with more sarcasm than sense.

Policing will not end tomorrow or next month or next year. And whoever you are, reading this, you are well aware of that fact. The odds of police abolition in any substantial portion of this country are nil. Indeed, I would say that the likelihood of meaningful reduction in policing in any large region of this country, whether measured by patrolling or funding or manpower, is small. Individual cities may reduce their police forces by a substantial fraction, and I suspect that they will not suddenly devolve into Mega-City One as a result. (Though I can’t say initial data in this regard is encouraging.) I hope we learn important lessons about intelligent and effective police reform and more sensible resource allocation from those places. But the vast majority of cities will not meaningfully change their policing budgets, due to both the legitimate lack of political will for such a thing - including in communities of color - and broken municipal politics with bad incentives.

…

Living under kayfabe makes you yearn for plainspoken communication, for letting the mask fall. The professed inability of progressives to understand why woke-skeptical publications like this one keep succeeding financially is itself a slice of kayfabe. They know people are paying for Substacks and podcasts and subscribing to YouTubes and Patreons because it’s exhausting to constantly spend all of your time pretending things that don’t make sense make sense, pretending that you believe things you don’t to avoid the social consequences of telling the truth.

When you’re someone who spent the past several decades arguing that the American university system is not hostile to conservative students, that it doesn’t try to force extremely contentious leftist views onto students, and then you watch this video, how do you react? I think many people, most people, even most people committed to the BLM cause, see that video and wince. That is not how we get there. Browbeating 20 year olds for not parroting your politics back at you is not how racial justice gets advanced. But if you’re caught in this moment, how do you object? Acknowledge that, yes, in fact, it is now plainly the case that many professors see it as their job to forcefully insist on the truth of deeply controversial claims to their students, berating them until they acquiesce? Well that would be an unpleasant conversation with the other parents when you pick up your kid from Montessori school. So you just choose not to see, or keep you mouth shut, or speak in a way that maintains the illusion.

I mean there is the absurdity of what she’s saying to contend with - the now fairly common view that policing was literally invented in the antebellum South purely to enforce slavery, because in ancient Rome if someone came in your house and stole your stuff you’d just be like “oh damn, that sucks.” Is there a relationship between modern policing and slavery? Of course. Does the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow infect modern policing at every point? Sure. Should we make political and policy decisions that recognize that historical influence on policing, especially given the racist reality of policing right now? Yes. But what good does it do anyone to pretend that the concept of “the police” is 250 years old? Why on earth would we get the correct shit we do believe tangled up with this bizarre shit we don’t believe? (The professor in that video does not herself honestly believe the police were invented to support African slavery in 18th and 19th century America.) Because this utterly ahistorical idea is being promulgated by people who claim to speak from a position of justice, we are forced to assign seriousness to it that it hasn’t earned, seriousness that it could never deserve. Because we live in a world of mutual delusion. Because of kayfabe.

…

And the fact that some will wrinkle their noses about this piece and its arguments, go about their days of progressive performance art, and pretend they don’t believe every word they just read? That’s kayfabe, my friend. That’s kayfabe. And we’re trapped in it, all of us, you and I. You know it’s all bullshit. Will you keep the code anyway? I’m willing to bet that the answer is yes.

[ladyherenya]

Books read in July

After I read How to Find Love in a Bookshop, I searched the library’s catalogue for other titles containing “bookshop” or “bookstore”. I was curled up in bed with a bad cold at the time, which meant I ended up choosing a bunch of books whose covers or synopses would have, on a different day, put me off. And that worked out rather well!

But afterwards I felt like I didn’t get the right balance between contemporary fiction and fantasy this month.

Favourite cover: Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher.

Still reading: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert.

Next up: Mort by Terry Pratchett. Maybe The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton.

(Longer reviews and ratings are on LibraryThing. And also Dreamwidth.)

– (they’ve taken away page breaks) –

Things a Map Won’t Show You: stories from Australia & Beyond, edited by Susan La Marca and Pam Macintyre: I borrowed this because I recognised some of the names involved. I liked bits and pieces of it but nothing really stood out. Maybe Peta Freestone’s “Milford Sound”, for the setting. According to the introduction, the stories and poems were chosen “with the curriculum in mind and for their appeal to Year Seven and Eight readers”. That’s a valid reason but I suspect that approach is unlikely to result in a collection that would really appeal to me, not me now and not even when I was a young teenager.

A Thousand Sisters: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II by Elizabeth Wein: This is AMAZING. It is aimed at young people, and I wondered if I’d find the writing style too simplistic, but it was just remarkably accessible. I knew bits about Russia’s history but this gave me a much more comprehensive understanding of the culture and politics these women grew up with, and how Russia came to have three regiments of airwomen at a point in time when other countries wouldn’t let women fly into war. The rest of the book is just as fascinating and surprising. Wein knows how to tell a story.

How to Find Love in a Bookshop by Veronica Henry: This is about Emilia, who inherits her father’s bookshop in a picturesque Cotswold village, and the bookshop’s customers. It doesn’t shy away from Emilia’s grief but otherwise is very much a cosy, optimistic story in which friends are made, relationships are mended, mistakes are overcome and everything turns out all right. Which definitely has its appeal. I wanted just a few more sharp edges -- or else slightly more uncertainty -- so that everyone’s happy endings felt more realistic. (I keep brainstorming ways that could have been managed.) Although I didn’t love this book, there was a lot I liked about it. 

The Masquaraders by Georgette Heyer (narrated by Ruth Sillers): This is ridiculous but still quite entertaining. Either I missed something or Heyer doesn’t really do a great job of explaining why Prudence and her brother Robin need to be in disguise, nor why they’ve decided the best way to do this is by crossdressing. The key to enjoying this book was to just roll with it. Also Prue’s romantic interest is a type Heyer writes so well: perceptive, unflappable, competent, with a sense of humour and an appreciation for level-headedness in others. Sensible people pushed into madcap adventures is something Heyer has a flair for.

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle: It’s much more dreamlike than I was expecting, in a similar vein to Patricia A. McKillip’s fantasy. I was emotionally invested only in flickers and bursts, but I appreciated the way it plays with, and comments on, fairytales. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.

The Bookstore by Deborah Meyler: Esme, a British scholarship student studying art history at Columbia, discovers she’s pregnant and gets a job at a quirky secondhand bookshop. I would have found some of her choices -- and the book itself -- terribly frustrating, except I really liked the bookshop and Esme’s narration. I liked her quotes and references and her enthusiasm and her observations, especially those about living in New York and about the shop -- this is a story with a vivid sense of place. Esme’s naivety and optimism is both understandable and believable, and I wanted to see her finally, properly, free of her awful boyfriend. 

The “Happy Ever After Bookshop” books by Annie Darling:

The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts: If I hadn’t already read the second book about the Happy Ever After bookshop and liked it a lot, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading this. The romantic interest annoyed me -- he’s not a bad match for Posy, but I’d find him infuriating in person and I didn’t want to read about him. Fortunately the book is just from Posy’s POV. I enjoyed the Britishness, and the bits about running a bookshop. I particularly liked Posy’s relationship with her younger teenaged brother, whom she has responsibility for. And I was pleased the romance bookshop stocks appropriate YA and mystery titles.

True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop: I was expecting it to turn into the sort of romance which annoys me. To my delight, it did not! Verity loves her noisy family, her nosy friends, her job in a bookshop and reading romances but she believes she isn’t suited to being in a romantic relationship. She reluctantly agrees to a fake-dating situation to avoid friends trying to set her up. I loved the way this story shows Verity being an introvert, and her obvious love for Pride and Prejudice. And this has all the things I like about fake-dating without too much cringe-worthy deception.

Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop: I have less in common with Nina than I do with her colleagues: she’s into make-up, tattoos and Wuthering Heights. But it was interesting seeing why she’s embraced both Wuthering Heights and her own particular style so fiercely -- she’s finding her own path, one that differs from what her conservative working class family expected. Some of the resolutions came about a bit too easily. However, I liked getting a different perspective on the bookshop, I enjoyed bits of her romance with Noah, and I share some of Nina’s fascination with the Bronte sisters.

A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews:  Mattie runs the tearooms attached to the Happy Ever After bookshop. She is delighted about living above the bookshop, but not so impressed about her new flatmate. I’m not a fan of the crazy commercialism of Christmas, but really enjoyed reading about it here -- probably because the story recognises that not everybody loves it. And, given the weather, I was in the mood for something wintry. Other things I liked: the vivid portrayal of the challenges of working “in a customer-facing environment over Christmas”; the details about Mattie’s baking; and the intelligent commentary about romance novels and romantic relationships.

Allegra in Three Parts by Suzanne Daniel: Eleven year old Allegra lives with one grandmother, next door to the other, while her father lives in above the garage. Allegra knows her grandmothers love her, but they are very different. “Sometimes I wish they could just love me less and take what's left over and put it into liking each other a little bit more.” The initial mystery and conflict were slightly stronger than the answers and aftermath. But it’s an interesting portrayal of growing up in Sydney in the 70s, the women’s liberation movement, and of a family dealing with grief. I read it in practically one sitting.

We Rule the Night by Claire Eliza Bartlett (narrated by Chloe  Cannon): Revna’s father is a traitor. Linné’s father is a general. Revna is discovered protecting herself with illegal magic during an air-raid. Linné is discovered after three years fighting at the front disguised as a boy. They’re both sent to a new women’s Night Raiders regiment, where, if they are to survive this war, they have to learn to fly together. This is tense and captivating -- and nuanced. Magic is wondrous but also confronting, the Union is unjust but contains things worth defending, loyalties are not always predictable, difficult people can become valued friends, and not everything is neatly resolved.

The Way Past Winter by Kiran Millwood Hargrave: In the fifth year of winter, Mila and her sisters wake to find their brother has left. Sanna believes Oskar left them willingly, like their father once did, but Mila is convinced that Oskar was taken by last night’s unsettling visitors -- and is determined to rescue him. I didn’t find this as emotional and compelling as Hargrave’s previous books. I don’t know if that’s because this is a simpler narrative or because I didn’t listen to the audio book -- a good narrator adds liveliness and emotion. But Hargrave’s prose is lovely and I liked the fairytale quality this story has.

Grace After Henry by Eithne Shortall: I really enjoyed Love in Row 27, so I borrowed Shortall’s other novel. After her boyfriend dies, Grace keeps seeing him everywhere. Then she meets a man who looks unnervingly like Henry -- a long-lost relative of Henry’s she did not know about. This story is funny and touching. I didn’t expect it to be so compelling, nor make me so invested in Grace’s relationship with Henry. There’s a strong sense of history and of place -- it was interesting to read about contemporary Dublin. There are unexpected and hopeful developments in Grace’s life. But mostly, it’s just very sad.

Famous in a Small Town by Emma Mills: Sophie loves her friends, her high school’s marching band and her small town. She has an idea for how the band could raise money -- enlisting the help of a famous country singer. I liked Sophie’s deep sense of belonging and how much she cares about things. She’s very kind in a way that is realistic and realistically complicated. Her friends are very supportive, but believably so. They all have flaws and make mistakes and have their secrets. I really enjoyed this story about friendship and summer (and it was a good choice after reading something sad).

Can’t Escape Love by Alyssa Cole: I’ve tried a couple of Cole’s novels and they didn’t appeal to me -- I wouldn’t have considered this novella if I hadn't seen a positive review. It’s fun and fandom-y and diverse. Reggie contacts an old internet acquaintance after she discovers his puzzle livestreams are no longer online. I liked how it’s very clear that Reggie’s disability has a significant impact on her daily life, but has nothing to do with her current problems. And, for Gus, being autistic isn’t ever an obstacle to a relationship with Reggie. I would have liked to read more but this still satisfying.

The Orphans of Raspay, a novella in the World of the Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold: Penric’s ship is captured by pirates and he is thrown in a hold with a couple of young girls from Raspay. As always, I enjoyed Pen’s interactions with Desdemona. I would have enjoyed the story even more had there been more significant character interactions -- the girls aren’t quite old enough to play a very active role in escape plans but are old enough that, in terms of emotional support, they’re not very demanding. I’d like to see Pen challenged more. But this is still a solid adventure. I’m very glad that Bujold hasn’t finished telling stories about Pen and Des.

Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon): Oliver, a twelve year old minor mage with an armadillo familiar, is sent by his village on a perilous journey to the mountains to bring back rain. There’s some dispute over whether this is a children’s book -- Vernon thought it was, her editor was adamant it wasn’t. It feelslike a children’s book to me, even when Oliver has to deal with ghuls, bandits and murderers. (There have always been children’s books which have been too dark and scary for some kids.) The tone is dryly humorous, the armadillo is a delight and I never doubted that Oliver would succeed.

[hookaroo]

Vocivore, Ltd. (25 of 40?)

Also on FFN and AO3 (ListerofTardis)

Tagging @ouatwinterwhump, @killian-whump, @sancocnutclub, @killianjonesownsmyheart1, and @courtorderedcake <3

***THE MOST WONDERFUL COVER ART BY @cocohook38 HERE!!!!!******

***Chapter 12 animation and art that will absolutely astound you!!!**********

***LETHAL Chapter 19 art in all of its BLOODSTAINED GLORY!!!!************

**POOR STABBED KILLIAN falling into the sheriff station! Ch. 7 & 23 art!!**

****KILLIAN AND HIS MASTER IN THE GORGEOUS CATHEDRAL!!!!!!!!!!!!    CHAPTER 1 ART THAT KILLS ME EVERY TIME I SEE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*********

***AAAAHHHH!!! THANK YOU MY WONDERFUL COCONUT FRIEND!!!!!!***

4 weeks ago...

Deception never got any easier; in fact, as the week dragged on, the lies grew more complicated, with additional details to try and remember. Who knew what. What each of them had told someone else. Killian and Emma were forced to have comprehensive debriefings with each other several times a day. When they could find a moment alone, that is.

The tension, the arguing… that had been Emma’s idea, the day he came home from the hospital. And she hadn’t warned him beforehand, either; maybe as payback for the shock of seeing him stumble into her office with an unexpected stab wound, even though that part wasn’t his fault. Regardless, her emotional outburst with Jones as witness--and partial victim--sounded impressively real. Killian wondered if a small part of her was actually angry at him for suggesting the plan in the first place. That night, while helping him tend to the painful rows of sutures in his flank, she had offered words of quiet apology, which Killian assured her weren’t necessary.

From then on, their charade had required the inclusion of biting remarks and frosty silences, adding to the discomfiture of all onlookers. Increasingly, Killian found himself unable to meet the eyes of anyone he interacted with; his days as a villain had not prepared him to sustain such a devastating deception in front of people he actually cared about. They were trying to comfort him, going out of their way to be sure he was taken care of, trying to bolster his spirits and show him their love, and all he was doing in return was prolonging the suffering they kept stoically private. If he looked them in the face, he would see the tears behind Snow’s brave smile. The desperation masked by David’s gruff words of optimism. The helplessness on Henry’s face every time he softly asked his mother what she needed.

More and more, Killian was becoming convinced that he had the easy job, going to face the monster. Emma would be left to continue the falsehoods alone. Physical torture may yet prove easier to bear.

*****

One week after the surprise stabbing, Killian limped along a garden path in an unfamiliar realm, straining to hear--yet dreading--the sound of a playful three-year-old in the vicinity. The cottage lay just up ahead, at the outer limits of his ability to walk even with six days of recovery time behind him.

Storybrooke slept, gifted with hours left until the dawn of Day 7. It had been early even by Killian’s standards when he’d awakened in a spiraling terror, the charade weaving seamlessly into his nightmares, and he knew he would never get back to any semblance of a peaceful rest.

To a greater extent each day, the wound was becoming a convenient excuse. A plausible reason for him to avoid taking that awful next step, the plunge into torment that was their whole motive for emotionally torturing their loved ones. If he'd been sound, who knew how long it would have taken him to work up the nerve to go. Maybe the extra time was making it harder; maybe he could have already been through it all and come out the other side by now. But it was a moot point when he was limited to hobbling mere yards before needing a break. And so, in order to banish the temptation to carry on in indefinite, dread-tinged delay, he had to eliminate the obstacle.

He’d been a coward, in the end, unable to face a proper goodbye. The last glimpse of his slumbering wife he would take with him into Hell. The note he’d left her--I love you, my Swan, for all eternity--could only bring her anguish on the morrow. But it was time to go, and their shared pain would help to shield him from a frighteningly perceptive monster.

First things first, though. Killian knocked on a carved wooden door, tucking his hookless wrist behind his back as he awaited a response.

Bless Smee and his side business. With the uniting of the Realms, there wasn’t much call for magic beans anymore, but the former first mate still tended the beanstalk in his backyard with all the devotion integral to his character. Killian and Emma may have been his first customers in three years; they made sure to tip him well. Later, they’d even tossed around the idea of somehow smuggling a bean into the Vocivore’s presence and then simply opening a portal right underneath the monster, but eventually decided that its telepathic powers would give it full control of the portal’s destination. The idea was shelved for a last-ditch effort, if all else failed.

Belle opened the door with a pleasant smile. “Killian! Welcome back! Hope’s gone for a nap, but I can go get her if--”

“No!” Killian exclaimed, then added sheepishly, “Thank you, love. She can be a right little terror if she misses out, and I’m not here to collect her just yet.”

Belle nodded her understanding, and his heart wept. He wanted more than anything to see his daughter and ensure her safety after so many days of pretending otherwise. To tell her once again how much he loved her… in case he never got another chance. But he held firm in his decision. For one thing, he didn’t have the time. Every minute spent in this realm translated into an hour back in Storybrooke. In the short amount of time he’d taken to walk from the portal to the cottage, Swan would have likely already risen and discovered his absence. He needed to get this business taken care of and get out of there as quickly as possible.

Additionally, if he had just seen Hope, the monster may somehow pick up on that. It was better to have the real feelings of missing her and of prolonged separation when he surrendered himself.

Later today.

Killian shuddered slightly, then plastered on a fake, cordial grin. “Is your husband around, by any chance? I have a favor to ask of him.”

“Uh, yeah, he was just…”

As if drawn by magnetism, Rumple chose that moment to materialize near the shed in the corner of the yard, and Belle gestured in his direction. “Just there, in fact.”

Killian thanked his friend before hobbling back the way he’d come. The Dark One was waiting near a morning glory vine, wearing an overly polite smile for his wife’s sake, which promptly dissolved into an expression of strained acknowledgement as soon as the cottage door clicked shut.

“Back so soon, Captain?”

“I haven’t the time for games, Crocodile,” growled Killian. He lifted his shirt to reveal the unbandaged stab wound in his side. “The blasted magical barrier has expanded to include all of Storybrooke. For once, have the decency to do the right thing without a calculation of how it can benefit you.”

Rumple broke into a wicked smirk. “Heal you for your appointment with the Vocivore? That seems rather futile, seeing as you’ll soon be sporting countless other injuries just like it…”

“That’s exactly the point and you know it.” Killian stepped closer, seething with enough frustration to partially mask the dread threatening to overwhelm him. “I have to start out as strong as possible to have any chance at surviving long enough to--”

“Spare me the sniveling,” sighed Rumple. “If it rids me of your unwanted company for the afternoon…”

He made a casual gesture with his fingers, and Killian was knocked back a step with the unexpected force of the dark magic crashing into him. If Emma’s healing was like an effervescent champagne spilling over the rim of a bottle, Rumple’s was the cork unstoppered, all explosive velocity with nothing gentle about it. Invisible iron fingers gripped half-knitted flesh, mashing separated fibers together until they had no choice but to bond, yanking and practically melting individual layers of dermis into a functional protective coat.

Effective… but excruciating.

If jet lag were possible between realms with different time rates, Killian would have self-diagnosed as suffering the effects of it. The thirty seconds spent enduring the healing magic of his foe felt like the half hour that had elapsed in Storybrooke during that time. And when the invasive power fled with just as much force as it had plowed into him, Killian only barely managed to avoid toppling sideways. He dripped with sweat, unable to get enough air.

“No charge,” sneered Rumple as he pushed past the doubled-over pirate. “It will be worth it to hear tales of your… experiences... with the monster.”

He was gone before Killian could summon the breath for a bitter reply.

[powerdadbatman]

I am so sad about Ben Affleck not being Batman anymore, but at the same time I gotta remember that this kind of thing, recasting, happens all the time. I guess I was very emotionally invested in him being that character like Henry Cavill is Superman, but we should remember that these characters, like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman transcend the actors that play them. There were always be versions we will love or hate. I love this version of Batman, maybe I will like the next version too.

I get where you’re coming from, anon. You’re right. I was into DC comics before Ben was casted as Batman. Hell, I didn’t even liked that he was cast at first. I enjoyed Nolan’s trilogy despite its flaws and I love Batman The Animated Series and Tim Burton’s take because it’s my childhood.

There are two reasons for why I’m feeling different than I felt with Nolan’s trilogy ending for example (and I was waiting for every movie with bathed breath, that’s how hardcore of a fan I am). One, there’s no closure. I was hoping for so long that we’d see more of Ben’s Batman. The production was set. The script was written down. Ben wanted to do this. And now we just… won’t see it. Someone else is gonna be casted and that’s that. I’d feel differently if I could go to cinema and kinda say goodbye, you know? If I knew there’s one more movie waiting for me and that’s it, I’d accept it. I wouldn’t be happy, but I’d have something.

Second, more personal reason: 

This is the iteration of Batman that got me into fic writing. I know it’s not a big deal for someone outside of fandom zone but you know what? It is a big deal for me. Even though I write barely comprehensive erotica and not some epic novels, the fact I wrote something and posted on the internet for others to see is huge to me. I don’t talk much about my personal life so you may not know this about me but I’m very insecure. I got better at it as I got older, I can fake self-confidence when necessary, but in reality I’m vulnerable. I wish I could explain how the simple act of creating an account on AO3 and publishing a silly fic was a big step for me. I’m a fucking adult for fuck’s sake. I should take pride in getting a promotion and having kids and buying a house and that kind of stuff. But I was at a point in my life when I wanted to do something creative just for myself, just for the hell of it, just to say oh yeah I have a fic on AO3, it’s still there I think lmao, I wanted to write it so I did. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating that I thought Glass and Patron would be my first and last fic. Just a fun little thing I did because I’ve been reading fan ficition for years and always wanted to do the same and there, I did it. 

But then… other people read it… and… were nice to me about? No one commented on my poor English skills? No one made fun of the sex scene? Not one person pointed out the weird sentence structures I was dying over but didn’t know how to fix? People read it and liked it and actually wanted to read more of the stuff written by… me? 

I know I’m very lucky and that some fic authors would sell a kidney for the recognition I got. I know because once I was a teenager getting into fandom, dying to create something but too scared to do so. My other writing (because I do write stuff beside fan fiction) didn’t get a n y type of praise. Well ok, my teachers were always impressed but that’s it. I didn’t win any contests, I wasn’t published anywhere, I didn’t get into my dream college. Now that I think about it, I did write a short fic years ago for another fandom, posted it anonymously on kink meme… and received one (1) comment about a typo I made and how I should pay attention to these things to show respect to my readers. 

And now, after posting my stupid as shit BvS smut? I get the nicest comments ever. I have readers I recognize and talk to. I made friends. People make fan art of my fics. People want to read more of my stuff. So, if there’s so many fic authors who get a fraction of the recognition I received… does it mean I’m… not the worst… person ever? That my writing isn’t garbage and that I’m… maybe… in some way…. talented? 

Don’t get me wrong, with that realization came a whole different set of issues, like how I’m failing everyone and how I shouldn’t even start if I only disappoint people who showed me nothing but kindness, and my process of writing is incredibly stressful because 274* people are subscribed to me on AO3 and that’s more than the amount of people employed at my firm and they all have expectations and shit one reader compared me to fucking Murakami how the fuck am I supposed to live up to that, oh shit being fandom famous is a gift that comes with a price, JFC am I fucked up or what. I live to fail expectations it seems because I fear success and failure at the same time. And oh yeah, I live with chronic depression, that could explain a thing or two.

I don’t know him personally, but I think Ben deals with similar doubts. We’re both Leos after all. Except that he got really, really bad reception. Not gonna lie, if I was him I’d resign right after the BvS shitstorm because I’m a huge crybaby. He’s a fucking champ for handling the pressure for so long even though it’s clear it took a toll on him but people chose to turn it into a fucking meme and I’ll never stop being bitter about it. 

So, to sum up, this is why I’m sad about Ben leaving the role. I treat it very personally, perhaps too personally. However, I believe the primary role of art is to make a connection. I made the connection with BvS. I made the connection with Ben’s Batman. And in some crazy turn of events, I made the connection with you guys. I had people saying my writing was the best part of their day or that I’m the reason why they smile after something really awful happened to them. One reader told me on AO3 about her operation she was scared of but my fics made her feel a little better and holy shit, I did that? I did that by sitting alone in my room and putting words together on my laptop? I’m even able to do that? Wow. Just wow. 

Don’t get me wrong, I will get over this but not now. Now I wanna mourn and cry becuase something that was important to me came to an abrupt end. 

*I just checked and the number jumped to 275 oh goooooooooood oh my goooooooood oh sweet jeeeeeeeeesuuuuuuuuuuus fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucking heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell

[cwl190]

Week 4

Benjamin Percy’s “Designing Suspense”

“Start with reality. Come up with a moment when you really, really wanted something. Could be you wanted to land a job or could be you wanted to quit a job... Recall tha tmoment. Then inject it with a healthy dose of imagination. What is the worst-case scenario for this character?” (80-81)

“Some of my characters are on a quest, moving from point A to point B. But by flashing back and forth between the Sancturary and the journey west, I’m able to enhance suspense (by leaving the reader hanging with every chapter break) and to contrast the terrors and hopes of two very different worlds. The more tiem we spend in the Sancturary, the more we understand why the perilous escape from it is so necessary” (87).

TC Boyle’s “How Stories Say Goodbye”

“When the narrator says “It’s really something.” it tells us that he’s feeling deeply, but it doesn’t tell us what he’s feeling. That’s the beauty of the story: It’s up to us to know what he’s feeling” (298).

Talks a lot about your work flowing organically, not everything being structured

Ethan Canin’s “Rehearsals for Death”

“Endings are about emotion, and logic is emotion’s enemy. It’s the writer’s job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel” (305).

“The biggest problem for young literary writers, besides plot, is how to characterize: how to make a character seem like a real human being. One of the more subtle ways... is to have a character describe other people” (307).

“Writers tend to think that their own prose is the most compelling thing. You have to strangle that off, I think. Talk about killing your darlings. It’s not just about killing your good scenes, it’s about killing your instinct to try to impress with witticism and handsome phrasing- becoming, instead, a vessel for telepathy in a way. The less present you can be, the more you can be the character you’re trying to write about” (308).

“With characterization, you have to let go. You’ve got to release yourself from your grandiose intentions, your ambitions, your ideas about humanity, literature and philosophy by focusing on the being-another-person aspect of it- which, by the way, is freeing, delightful, and one of the few real joys of writing. Stop worrying about writing a great novel- just become another human being” (308).

“Whether or not a novel actually contains death, it’s often about the highlights of a life. Literature allows us to experience thousands of lives, to understand how we might want to live our own” (309).

DESIGNING SUSPENSE; Or, FLAMING CHAINSAWS: 

The authors were able to keep those flaming chainsaws “dancing” through the momentum they managed to keep up throughout both of their novels. In “The Minature Wife”, things continue to escalate right after the climax of the story. We had just gotten over the fact that the wife had cheated on the narrator and the narrator had literally fed his co-worker to the birds. We aren’t given a pause or hope things will get better because the tension between the narrator and the wife overflows and she attacks him, kills the cat as well as gouges out one of his eyes. 

The same thing occurs in “The Infamous Bengal Ming”, where the author hits us with a murder after a murder. The entire thing is veiled in confusion and unreliable narration until the tiger caves into his natural instincts and we are given a sense of violent euphoria from him as he tears into his final victim for the last time. We feel overwhelmed by sensory and emotional overload the same way the narrator is. It’s due to the fact that the narrator is a tiger that we are able to buy into his corruption.

HOW STORIES SAY GOODBYE: 

When I read “The Infamous Bengal Ming”, I think the story was finished for me. At the start of the story the tiger seems to have a very idealistic sense of love, but by the end it’s devolved into something warped beyond our comprehension, something more sensory and without reason or limits. We know that the tiger will eventually get caught and things will most likely not end well for him, but his emotional arc is already finished. I didn’t feel the need to see anything more.

For the “Minature Wife”, I think I am still compelled to see what happens next. Does the wife end up killing the narrator? Is the narrator able to capture his wife? I also want to learn more about the shrinking machine, and the consequences that extend beyond the narrator’s own personal circumstances. However, I don’t think that’s the direction the author set out to do and I thought the blowout confrontation between them was satisfactionary enough.

REHEARSALS FOR DEATH: 

I don’t believe that quote because there are several classics that have been praised to no end with super ambiguous endings. One of them that comes to mind is “The Giver”. We have no idea whether or not Jonas finds his way into the real world, heaven, or if the entire thing was a hallucination he created in order to help him cope with the deadly circumstances in which he escaped from. I think it depends on the story you want to tell. I agree with the idea that you should definitely feel something, but just because an abstract conclusion pushes you to think logically doesn’t mean you aren’t feeling something at all. If done right, you might leave confused, but with a drive to pick at the story. It might make you want to talk about it with other people who read the same book, or even revisit sections of the book to design your own interpretation of what happened. 

This is partially applicable to “The Minature Wife” because we don’t know what happens to the narrator or his wife at the end and we have an even fainter idea of the lab the narrator works at, which means that even after they are done ripping each other to pieces we still have questions for the world the narrator lives in. becoming, instead, a vessel for telepathy in a way.

CONNECT THE DOTS: 

“It’s not just about killing your good scenes, it’s about killing your instinct to try to impress with witticism and handsome phrasing- becoming, instead, a vessel for telepathy in a way” (Rehersals for Death, 308).

I think Orringer applies this piece of advice really well into her novel because in the section of the story where Ella goes to fetch her parents after burying Claire’s body, we are not given any insight into what Ella’s thinking at all. Orringer utilizes show not tell to the maximum here. We don’t get a window into Ella’s emotions because she is focusing on her present goals and senses. She needs to fetch her parents and leave that place immediately, and she’s probably in shock over what had just happened. We’re being fed that Ella is paranoid through what she sees, which is a portrait of someone who resembles who Ella had just saw die.

THE END: 

Orringer’s story simultaneously invites me back in as well as makes me hope the story is finished because I want to know what happens while the family makes their escape, but also not because if they’re stopped from their escape I’ll be upset, and also because they’ll be held accountable for the death of Claire.

EMOTION v. LOGIC:

I was feeling a sense of unease and sadness throughout the novel because of how helpless it was. Ella and Benjamin have no control over what happens to them all throughout the novel and it just made me feel upset from them. The circumstances before they entered the house was very depressing because of their ill mother. I just felt uncomfortable when they moved into the new house because of how unnerving the adults were, the violence of the kids and the weird foods they were forced to eat. The story seemed to be setting itself up for Ella to evolve emotionally and appreciate this more “humbled” enviornment due to how she kept wanting to return to the past, but I didn’t even want that to happen to her because of how awful it seemed there. When Claire died it completely subverted my expectations, and honestly made me relieved because her family was able to bag it and run. It was still completely horrifying, I don’t understand the point of why they came there. If it was for treatment, the mom was better off going to a regular hospital.

HOW’S IT GOING?: 

It’s okay. I really like the texts we were given. If it was something boring like American history, my entries would probably be halved. I wasn’t expecting Benjamin Perry’s “Thrill Me” to be so good, and honestly I’m glad I’ve been forced to read it because I don’t know if I would’ve been able to finish it if I couldn’t. There’s some super helpful advice there and some examples of suspense/horror/escalating that seem to be done well that I’m interested in checking out. I don’t know if I have that much faith in his recommendations though because he describes the horror of what happened to the professor in Paul Bowles’s “A Distant Episode”. It really intrigued me when I read it in the context of Perry’s book, but recently I was assigned to it in another class and I didn’t even recognize that gorey scene until it happened. While it seemed horrible in description, I didn’t feel much of the fear and disgust I think I should’ve. It just felt like it was being described to me but there was nothing to be scared of or dread.

[lifeonashelf]

...INTERLUDE...

Come to Vegas! We can make out, gamble, and forget all our troubles.

This is quite possibly the greatest text message I have ever received. Four days later, I hit the road.

I have never driven to Las Vegas by myself. Once I complete the journey I can’t fathom why this is, because despite the extended sprawl of nothing between us, Vegas isn’t nearly as far away as I picture it in my mind. I arrive in 3 hours and 17 minutes (which, oddly, is the exact figure Google Maps gave me when I checked the route before leaving my apartment—this is even more astonishing when you factor in that Google not only calculated my precise rate of speed for the entire trek, but evidently also predicted that I would be pulling off the road for seven minutes to have a cigarette at a rest stop just outside Baker). On the way, I listen to two volumes of a 10-disc playlist I made a few months earlier. When I burn mix CDs for myself, they are ridiculously schizophrenic—crossing the state line, I hear Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, my favorite track by the death metal band Gorefest, and then “Cool For The Summer” by Demi Lovato in immediate succession, and I sing every word to each of them. Needless to say, it is an awesome drive.

Everything proceeds smoothly when I arrive. The Gold Coast has my lodgings ready for me two hours prior to the posted check-in time and they are able to accommodate my request for a smoking flat. I take my bag up to the 9th floor, set up my laptop at the table by the window, and then smoke a cigarette in my room just because I fucking can. I purposefully skipped dinner the night before so my stomach would be prepared to maximize the possibilities offered by the hotel’s Ports O’ Call Buffet. I tear that shit up, then head to the lounge to play a bit of video poker and get a cup of coffee—the machines at the bartop are not kind to me; that cup of coffee ends up costing me sixty dollars. Such is Vegas.

The day is uneventful, by Las Vegas standards. I drink more coffee, I gamble some more and win back my sixty bucks, I write a bit, I watch some basketball. But I am really just killing time. Because the passing hours are merely a preamble; the woman who sent me the text message which acted as the siren song for this trip is in the same town as me, and come “around 7ish” we will be in the same building.

She’s here on business. ___ is a reality television producer, and has been dispatched to Sin City to film the upcoming season of the show Hell’s Kitchen. I have not seen her in over two years, even though she only lives 30 miles from my apartment in real life and driving to Nevada is in fact way more effort than I would normally have to exert to visit her. But our real lives are rarely able to intersect. Besides, I love Las Vegas. And there’s something undeniably enchanting about the prospect of walking beside a beautiful girl amidst a panorama of brilliant dramatic neon and exotic stereoscopic night-sounds. Being in Vegas is like being in a movie, and the character you get to play has way more fun than you do when you’re not on-screen. Compared to my daily existence, and the daily existence of anyone who does not live here, the milieu of Vegas feels like an ethereal dream. That’s why it’s the perfect place to rendezvous with ___; being around her is so intoxicating that it feels much the same.

Our history spans nearly two decades. It is as complicated and messy and wonderful as any history I have ever shared with anyone. I cannot possibly recount all of it here, though I will tell you some. I lost a girlfriend when ___ and I became close because that girlfriend clearly identified that we were mutually attracted to each other. I would have never cheated, but my relationship imploded because I aggressively refuted her well-founded apprehensions and pretended like she was acting crazy for even insinuating I was drawn this person who I would 17 years later drive 230 miles to visit at the whim of a late night text. As a result I broke the heart of an incredible woman who deserved far better, and she broke mine by dumping me. Twenty-four hours subsequent, I was on a park bench making out with a girl who I swore up and down was merely a platonic acquaintance, and I was officially a liar.

I was 23 years old. I was also far more charming and attractive than I am now, and in the mindset to actively explore the positive corollaries which arose from that confluence. I spent a few years kissing a lot of girls because I was single and I was in my early twenties and it’s a good idea to kiss as many girls as you can when you’re single and in your early twenties because you won’t get to kiss too many more after that. Despite the sagacity I demonstrated by accurately predicting this, I was an unadulterated fucking idiot when it came to ___. I am horrified by my conduct throughout everything that ensued between us, and I will forever be haunted by the what-ifs brought about by the consequent brazen stupidity I exhibited.

From the moment we began groping each other at Cahuilla Park in Claremont, ___ became sort of a surrogate for the girlfriend I had sacrificed, a proxy upon whom I could bestow both the passion that had been extinguished and the anguish that had been stoked after the break-up. ___ did not kill my relationship, I killed it by being a callous asshole. But I think subconsciously I blamed her anyway (for having the audacity to enter my life and be the extraordinary girl she is, I suppose); that was far easier than owning up to the fact that I had acted like an irredeemable piece of shit toward the girl she supplanted. My pride and my heart were wounded and I couldn’t take it out on the person whose inescapable-in-hindsight decision had caused those injuries since she was no longer taking my calls. So I took it out on her replacement instead. And over the course of the several tumultuous months that followed, I proceeded to meticulously break the heart of another incredible woman who deserved far better.

I have never handled anyone as poorly as I handled ___. She was a dazzling and unequivocal gem, yet I treated her like she meant nothing to me at all. The mere thought of her being with anyone else drove me mad, yet instead of telling her this I told her time and time again that she could never have me all to herself and continued dating other people to underscore my assertion. More than once, I brought her to tears by stating in no uncertain terms that I never wanted to see her again, only to call her the very next night and ask her to come over as if that conversation never happened. I wasn’t simply emotionally abusive to ___, I was utterly fiendish to her. For every year of my life leading up to that one and every year since, I have been proud to conduct myself as a true gentleman, so I will never understand how I was even capable of hurting anyone as persistently and comprehensively as I hurt her. Rest assured, I didn’t understand it at the time, either. Nor did I understand why no matter how awful I was to her, she still saw the best in me and held out hope that I would come to my senses and acknowledge the singularly special thing that was standing right in front of me.

Unfortunately, I realized far too late that the reason ___ did so was because she was deeply in love with me. And I also realized far too late that I was deeply in love with her.

By then I had done about as much damage to her psyche as one person could do to another. Though she wouldn’t know it, my comeuppance was delivered by the next woman I entered into a failed relationship with, who put me through a lot of the same things I put ___ through and came up with several novel doozies of her own for good measure. ___ and I remained in sporadic telephone contact, though we rarely saw each other in person. Bizarrely, this had the upshot of emphasizing the indissoluble strength of our bond, since none of the interactions we had were stilted by our silence and distance—every time we came together, I felt as close to her as ever and she clearly felt the same.

Over the years, we’ve had numerous conversations about what happened between us. I wish to keep those private, but the essence of what has been expressed is that despite everything she considers me one of the people closest to her in the world. She also told me that “Perfect” by The Smashing Pumpkins is her song to me; I listen to it often, even though those beautiful and devastating lyrics always bring tears to my eyes.

Of course, along the way I finally did what she desperately wished I would have done 17 years ago. I came to my senses and acknowledged the singularly special thing that was once standing right in front of me. I made overtures to that effect on a couple of occasions when we once again found ourselves simultaneously single, but they were way overdue. She said she did still love me and always would, but the wall I forced her to build to shield herself from me had grown too tall and sturdy to tear down. A tacit understanding developed between us: we would be friends for the rest of our lives, but I had confused and harmed her enough for one lifetime and she was not willing to give me any chance to add to that abominable legacy. It’s a verdict I had no choice but to accept because it was a much better one than I deserved; she would have been undeniably justified in never wanting to speak to me again.

I know ___ has never wholly resolved the chaos of emotions I stirred within her, neither the amorous nor the angry. Some cuts are too deep to be sutured, and those tend to leave scars. Truthfully, I think she despises me as much as she adores me; she just adores me too much to let the other side win out most of the time. But this paradox is entirely fitting because our entire relationship is a paradox, a saga of two satellites which have shared each other’s orbit since they were launched and create a blinding explosion when they collide. Last night, she kissed me in the lobby of the Golden Nugget casino and we melted into each other just like we did that first time in Cahuilla Park, seventeen years erased by the touching of lips. When we came up for air, she wrapped her arms around me and buried her face against my chest and said, “god, I hate you,” with so much love in her voice that it made my stomach swim. It was the perfect thing for her to say in that moment, both because it is absolutely true and because it is the absolute opposite of the truth.

We had a delightful night on Fremont Street, both of us properly investigating that very cool region of the city for the first time. We had some drinks and we listened to some music and we played some poker and we held hands as we walked the promenade. For a few hours, we got to be the couple both of us wanted to be at one time or another, just never at the same time; we even fought like a couple for part of that span, since the resentment and pain she’s had to bury deep within herself to continue accepting me into her life despite my previous sins still gets triggered from time to time when we speak of the past. Regardless, I wouldn’t have changed a second of it. The night was absolutely magical, because ___ is absolutely magical.

But the spell of Las Vegas gets broken once you realize that nothing there is real. There’s an axiom people use to justify all manner of debauchery they engage in while visiting Sin City: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”  Tonight ___ is out with a large group of people who esteem her, and I am alone in a smoky room sitting at my laptop, which is a lot closer to what our individual non-Las Vegas lives look like. This artificial vacation existence in which we were united as one happened in Vegas and will stay in Vegas, because it has to. Because, truthfully, the life she built for herself without me is much richer than the life I built for myself without her. Tomorrow morning I will get in my truck and exit this city of lights to travel back across a stretch of barren desert the length of two mix-CDs, and after I arrive home I will spend the next interminable number of days and nights sitting at my laptop in a room that is less smoky than this one but no less lonely. Meanwhile, tomorrow morning ___ will continue to work her fascinating job and then she will leave the country on some adventure, and no matter where she is and what she’s doing, she will be surrounded by people whose company is far more gratifying to her than mine ever could be.  

The hours we spent holding hands on Fremont Street were unreal. But they were also so real that I am still reeling from the aftershock of our latest satellite collision. Our relationship, both the real and the unreal, befits that manner of contradiction. I don’t think ___ and I are still in love with each other, but I do still love her in a way that I have never loved anyone else. I have committed unconditionally to other women in her absence and redistributed the connection we share into a more manageable framework, but whenever there is no one in my life I can’t help but recognize that there very well could be if I hadn’t once been a soulless beast to someone who was merely pleading for me to appreciate them the way they sincerely deserved to be appreciated. ___ is without a doubt one of the most phenomenal and inside-out beautiful human beings I have ever known and I cannot conceive of my life without her in it, yet I still to this day find it difficult to face her. Every moment I spend with ___ feels like a gift, but those moments also sting in equal measure, because she is a walking reminder of me at my absolute worst.

I don’t think she has ever truly forgiven me. I’m not sure she really ever could, or should. Nothing I do today can undo what I did yesterday. I know that no matter how exhilarating it feels to look into her gorgeous and soulful eyes after we kiss in a glittering alternate universe, there are times when she looks at me and only sees a man who likely hurt her worse than anyone else she has ever known. I know there is a part of her that will always love me, but I also know there’s a part of her that wishes she had never even met me.

While I can only suppose what the world might look like if I had treasured her instead of trashing her all those years ago, I am positive that it would look far better and brighter than it does now. I’m aware that even if I had done the right things then, it’s improbable we would still be together today. Very few relationships go that distance, and despite our exceptional chemistry, ___ and I are not effortlessly compatible. I wouldn’t change a single thing about her, but there are unchangeable things about me I know she could not abide and no one should have to. She detests smoking; I enjoy smoking more than I enjoy most other things. She dreams of spending her days traveling and exploring; I dream of sitting in my easy chair and watching blu-rays.

She thinks I was worth falling in love with; I think strongly otherwise.

I don’t specifically wish ___ and I were together now. Yet therein lies another paradox. Because I got a little glimpse of what that might look like last night on Fremont Street, and it looked amazing. But that wasn’t real, that was Las Vegas; what happens there stays there. It was a magnificent movie, but that’s not what our actual lives look like. We could make out, we could gamble, but we could never forget all our troubles—no matter how much she loved me then and loves me now, I will always be one of hers.

So maybe what I do wish is that I could really be the person she was holding hands with in that unreal fantasy, the person who kissed her with abandon in the lobby of the Golden Nugget, the person she gazed at with unbridled tenderness during that joyful interlude when both of us were able to shelve our past and exist solely and safely in our present. The person she hoped I would become before I shattered her hopes by becoming a monster. Regrettably, untethered from our mutual orbit, I grew to be someone else entirely, someone with numerous regrets he can never completely atone for, someone she will always measure with a watchful and skeptical eye to protect herself. Someone who can never be anyone else except who he is. And that person simply would not be capable of making ___ as happy as she deserves to be, because he already had his chance to do that and made her miserable instead.

Besides, he can barely make himself happy most of the time.

 ###

 The trip home is an inexorably depressing conclusion to every great vacation—you’re doing the exact same thing you did when you set off, except there isn’t anything to look forward to when you arrive. Fittingly, an unseasonable rain is coming down when I hit the 15 Freeway. The water-dappled windshield and the desolate unfolding highway ahead evoke another cinematic scene, perhaps a montage in which the central character takes a long drive to think heavy thoughts. At the risk of becoming a cliché, that is exactly what I do.

My mix-CDs play on, the music blurring past with the miles. I hear “Wonderwall” and I hear “Stairway to Heaven”, which are two songs that everyone should listen to extremely loudly on the open road at least once in their life. Seaweed… Tiamat… Purity Ring… My Chemical Romance… P!nk… The Dillinger Escape Plan... Fleetwood Mac… Each one of them imparts a decisively fantastic tune, but this time I’m not singing along. I am instead blinking away tears as it dawns on me exactly how much I am leaving behind in Las Vegas. Not the money I lost at the video poker machines, but the luminous girl I wagered at the age of 23 when I made a much more foolish gamble than I could have ever imagined and ended up losing the most precious thing I never had. The fortune that I lose over and over again every time ___ and I part from each other and return to the real world.

I discover that her hold on me, this cosmic magnetism we share, has not diminished with time. And I discover that the axiom is not absolute—not everything that happens in Vegas stays there; some things follow you all the way home.

That night on Fremont Street, she told me that she will never be completely over me. At least that makes us even in one respect.  

Though the imprint I left on her heart was shaped like a bruise, there will always be a piece of mine that is the precise shape and size of ___. That piece belongs to her, and though it is a woeful consolation prize, it is the only one I will ever have the opportunity to give her.

But it does come with a vow: forever and always, whenever and wherever we meet, in Las Vegas and in real life, I promise we’ll be perfect.

 May 9, 2019        

[thuskindlyshescatters]

Question: Why do people like Raven, the mass murdering, child-abandoning woman who is hated by everyone in her family for a specific reason, and yet want Whitley, the kid who said a few mean things to his older sister but ultimately did nothing at all, to die?

Context.

Let’s take this out of RWBY context. Actually, let’s take this out of TUMBLR context, because Tumblr usually turns into a hell hole of people saying you can’t like villains and whatnot.

Let’s talk about… hmm, let’s see… Darth Vader. Now that’s a character I’ve yet to see labeled as “problematic” on this site.

LOOOONG post under the cut.

So. Darth Vader.

Darth Vader is the leader of the Sith and ultimately the evil Empire, whose mission is to blow up PLANETS FULL OF BILLIONS OF PEOPLE, MURDER AS MANY MEMBERS OF THE REBEL ALLIANCE AS POSSIBLE, and KILL ALL JEDI. You know I’m not exaggerating, because assuming we’ve all seen Star Wars, this is common knowledge. Onscreen, he also abandons his wife, intends to kill his children, kills Obi Wan Kenobi, and slashes his son’s hand off when he doesn’t get what he wants. Oh, yeah, and he slaughters about 100 children at the Jedi Academy.

So, we can all agree that Darth Vader is a bad guy.

So why do we like him?

Why do we, as an audience, feel this desire to forgive him? We all know, and saw, how awful he is, and yet, when he finally reunites with his son, he comes together to, at first, fight him and cling to his ways, but then unites with him after seeing a better part of himself in his son to defeat the ultimately greater evil, Emperor Palpatine.

And by the time he dies, we are SUPER, SUPER conflicted about this guy. We might even cry along with Luke when we see him dying. We see how vulnerable and scarred he is under his dark exterior (literally), and see his regret and sorrow over doing what he did. Some of the audience ignores this and still thinks he should die. But most of us see his fear, see his regret, and see his conflict over his actions that we are feeling as well. He connects to the audience’s pain, and that’s what ultimately gets us to feel bad for him, because he feels bad in almost the same way we do.

Now, let’s compare that to Raven.(I know, hush, I’ll get to Whitley in a second.)

Raven leads a tribe whose mission is to survive by whatever means possible, including theft, burning, slaughtering people, and murdering Huntsmen, not caring about the Grimm and despair they leave in their wake. Additionally, Raven herself had been shown to abandon her family, neglect her child, and threaten Yang’s life when she doesn’t get what she wants. Oh, yeah, and she trained SPECIFICALLY to murder people.

Go reread the Darth Vader paragraph, and compare.

We see Raven’s regret over leaving. We see her desperation in making Yang try to stay, and her private sadness that Yang has parts of her in her, because she knows that will keep her from her goal. We see a guilt complex, that blames others for her hardships like Ozpin, but yet leaves her hanging her head when Yang admits to her she was not being the kind mother that she wished she had been. Furthermore, we see how gratefully she treats Vernal, and how fiercely loyal she is to her people.

I think us, as an audience, can relate to some of this. Feeling guilty? Regretful? Ashamed? Feeling like they should have done more? That they’re a bad person? We, as the audience, regret Raven having left Yang, and connect with her regret in a way that makes us favor her reasoning. Raven feels bad, and we’re like “GODDAMN RIGHT, YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD,” but… now we’re connecting with one of Raven’s emotions. Now, we’re starting to see her as a person, with experiences we can relate to. It inspires a feeling of forgiveness for her that we want to give to ourselves. And, sure, STILL, has Raven probably killed children before? Yes. But don’t forget – so has Darth Vader, and we still love him fine. While RWBY’s writing is not NEARLY as perfect as Star Wars’, it’s the same archetype.

Maybe, like Vader, she WILL reunite with her daughter, and at first, want to fight her and stick to her old ways, but then see a better part of herself in her daughter and unite to fight against the ultimately greater evil, Salem.

(Again, if that felt familiar, reread the Vader paragraph above.)

I mean, hell, Qrow blames Raven for Yang losing her arm! GUESS HOW LUKE LOST HIS ARM, TAKE A WILD FUCKIN’ GUESS–

…Anyways. What about Whitley?

Well, for one, a lot of the “I WANT SHITLEY TO DIE” thing is coming from exaggeration. A better translation would be “I want Weiss to attain the catharsis she needs, because I can relate to that character relationship and would feel satisfied with her doing something that would somehow harm his ego or pride.”

How often, when you were (let’s say) 11, did you get mad at your mom or something, and wish she would die? Well, you didn’t actually want her to die, you just… wanted her to feel how bad YOU felt, and the animal brain usually translates that to the worst possible thing EVER, which in this case is death.

Did your mom ever get that kind of cathartic redemption? I doubt it. But then you calmed down, forgave her, and moved on with your life. Alternatively, you could be mad at her to this very day, but… that’s an issue you should resolve on your own.

Anyways, the same principal can be used with an annoying little brother. Maybe you have one, maybe you don’t (I don’t), but ultimately, people less mature than you who know you personally genuinely do shitty things. Why? Because they know their immaturity will excuse it, and they know that you’ll eventually forgive them, but be really irritated for the time being.

Whitley is not an annoying little brother.

I mean, sure, he taunts Weiss for a bit when she’s locked in her room, but that’s not because he doesn’t know any better. That’s deliberate dehumanization, passed down by his snake of a father, and is something that one only does when they feel they’re in a position of authority (which he now does).

Have you ever been taunted by someone who feels their better than you? Say, a school bully? Have you ever wanted to punch them in the nose? Cause if you haven’t, you’re lacking human experiences that make people overcome wanting to punch people in the nose, and you’re probably not complex enough to know what’s happening to you. 

So, in this scenario, Weiss is an outlet for members of the audience who recognize a taunting dipshit who thinks he’s better than Weiss [us, since we project onto characters we like], and have the natural human urge to want him to suffer. Not like, in hell, but get a taste of his own medicine.

Another instance of where our disdain for Whitley worsens is when at first, we see him as this figure who’s… cocky, sure, but actually seems like he cares for Weiss’s wellbeing. However, later, it turns out that he sides with his father, because he gave him power, and abandons Weiss emotionally, betraying her trust in a time of need.

Has someone you trusted ever left you when you needed them? Sure, you might have felt SAD, but then you felt angry, and… I don’t know, wanted to punch a pillow or something and pretend it was them. Kind of like when your mom doesn’t let you do what you wanted – you think “I WISH YOU WOULD DIE!”, but what you mean is “I’m upset, and want you to feel how upset I am.”

So, yeah. TL;DR:

Raven has a villain complex as old as time, where she does terrible things, but ultimately shares enough human qualities with the audience that we can empathize with until some of us (clearly not all of us, since apparently you’ve never regretted something or don’t have the character comprehension to recognize her regret) forgiver her enough to start seeing her as a character we like. Not ignoring her terrible deeds, but sympathizing enough to think she is interesting.

Whitley is a combination of an unfair mom, a school bully with a superiority complex, and a friend who’s betrayed you, all at the same time. Since the general human reaction to such injustices is “wow, I hate you and want you to die” (once again, “die” meaning “suffer in a way that I have that feels absolutely terrible, and death is the most terrible thing I can imagine”), and since the audience is meant to see through Weiss’s eyes, we basically decide we want our outlet in the story, Weiss, to beat the living daylights out of Whitley.

When it boils down to it: a person’s implied actions don’t matter to us. But when we’ve seen how they interact with characters we identify with (Yang, Weiss), we feel like they’re interacting with us. And while we’re starting to see Raven at eye level and she’s becoming a character we identify with, we see Whitley from Weiss’s view and go “holy shit, you’re a bag of dicks.”

Raven is taking a turn for the better. We want to like her, when in the past we haven’t.

Whitley is taking a turn for the worse. We want to hate him, when in the past we haven’t.

…

You wanted an answer!