#actually in terms of becoming jewish... i guess in a way you almost do become like a lawyer in terms of jewish law

[shalom-iamcominghome]

Becoming jewish because being a lawyer is too much work

[disappointingyet]

Between The Lines

Director Joan Micklin Silver Stars Lindsay Crouse, John Heard, Jeff Goldblum, Jill Eikenberry, Bruno Kirby, Gwen Welles, Stephen Collins USA 1977 Language English 1hr 41mins Colour 

Classic indie ensemble piece – before that was a thing

If you’d seen this at the time, which of the male actors do you think you would have picked out as the future movie star? The obvious thing to say is one of the rectangular-headed blonde guys, especially because John Heard is sort-of the male romantic lead here. But then again, this is the 1970s, the era of Al and Bobby, so maybe you go for Bruno Kirby – the short Italian guy who had actually shared scenes with De Niro in The Godfather Part II.

Watching in 2023, we know it's the tall, weirdly magnetic Jewish dude who seems all limbs who would become much more famous than the rest. The film ends with the camera locked on Jeff Goldblum and he’s fully formed here – the day after I saw Between The Lines, I watched an episode of Search Party from last year that he’s in, and if the mannerisms are a little more extreme now, they were certainly already there. 

It’s a formidable cast of then up-and-comers. It’s not quite a 1970s equivalent of Short Term 12, but almost all of these people went on to have good careers: Kirby and Heard as beloved character actors and Jill Eikenberry and Stephen Collins as leads on hit TV shows (as was Marilu Henner, who has a memorable few scenes in this film). Maybe I think of Crouse as bigger than she is because House Of Games was a very-much-talked-about film back in the day and she was a Columbo villain, which puts her in the company of Donald Pleasance, Janet Leigh, Rip Torn and Johnny Cash. (She’s also in the worst Buffy The Vampire Slayer storyline, but that’s not her fault.)

Never imagined John Heard and Lindsay Crouse as a cute couple

And it’s Crouse who gets the most screen time in this packed ensemble. She plays Abbie, a photographer working the Back Bay Mainline, an alternative weekly newspaper in Boston. Heard is Harry, one of the paper’s star writers and her sometime boyfriend. Goldblum is Max, the rock critic. Collins and Gwen Welles are Michael and Laura, both writers, but he’s the one working on a pompous-sounding book and she’s struggling with being in his shadow. Kirby (27 but looking much younger) is the newly joined boy reporter and Eikenberry is the long-suffering office manager. 

In a lot of ways, this a classic American indie movie about a bunch of bright young folk (eg, the already mentioned Short Term 12). Only that wasn’t really a thing yet in 1977. There were plenty of  films at the time, though, shot in scruffy, believable locations with sprawling casts (indeed, a few of the stars of this had been in Robert Altman pics). It was in the 1980s, I guess, that things started to separate out again. It was shot in only two weeks so I’m assuming the budget was pretty low – there are a couple of aerial shots that feel designed to make you sense this is proper movie.

And it’s a good example of the ensemble movie, a movie that makes us feel immersed in this little world, a very likeable film, funny in places, sharply written. And I don’t think it wrong to say Joan Micklin Silver is clearly bringing a woman’s perspective here – it’s easy to imagine a film that would have indulged and glorified Harry and Michael, rather than exposing their fragile egos. (There’s also a couple of good exchanges between Laura and Abbie that pre-figure the Sally/Marie ‘I don’t think he’s ever going to leave her’ riff in When Harry Met Sally.)

Between The Lines treads fairly lightly in boomer regret and nostalgia – there’s a bit of stuff about the passing of the counterculture, references to the early days of the paper as part of the underground press and the idealism of that moment, contrasted with the mid-1970s when it’s professional enough to be the target of a takeover by a guy who in that earlier moment would have been described as a breadhead.  But that never becomes the main theme — this isn’t the Return Of The Secaucus Seven or The Big Chill. Maybe it was a bit too early for that, and that's probably a good thing.

What feels like it was maybe intended as the movie’s marketing trump card is the presence of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, who were famous as Bruce Springsteen’s mates. They are on the soundtrack, mentioned in the plot and then play at a party. Never really been a fan – they represent the brassy bar band side of Springsteendom that I like less – but it’s kind of fun to have them here. 

At the time I write this, MUBI have a bunch of Joan Micklin Silver films up, aiming to get a serious consideration of her career. This is the first one I have seen, and I’m fully sold. 

[khorneschosen]

For the first one you can and should say that you hate groomers and pedophiles that's just kind of non-negotiable.

If every time however you hear something must be done about the groomers and pedophiles in our education system your brain immediately jumps to people like me who are gay I'm going to have a couple of questions for you. Like why do you see us as a bunch of groomers and pedophiles when the biggest demographic that is actually abusing children in these schools are people of your ideological kind not the people who share my LGBT background. Which is why you do it under our name. Makes a nice little human shield for your bullshit.

But you don't get to talk after all this shit you talked about Zionist or Jewish people who live in Israel and how thin that line you made it is we don't use the New world order we talk about Soros and he's a singular fucking person we talk about him in the same way that you would talk about the Koch brothers. So not only is this you admitting you could not find evidence of a wide scale anti-Semitism on the right, But we now have proof that you guys are actually anti-Semitic because it took nothing for you guys to turn on them and become incredibly anti-Semitic and support people who support anti-semitic terrorist organizations.

Say what you will but your average Republican is not just chomping at the bit to start working with the aryan nation.

However when it came to Hamas all it took was one of the worst war crimes and loss of civilian human life this century in a few days for you guys do suddenly go "Well I guess I hate Jews now. "

I remember a bunch of white people who are engaged in rioting and looting. This too you do in black people's name despite the fact that a lot of the black community is telling you to stop doing this because you're making their community worse so that you can use them as a social battering ram against and your own terms capitalism You aren't actually interested in helping the black community otherwise you'd actually have a degree of humbleness when you listen to different black voices describe what they need in their own community I have. But you ignore them because they're not part of your community that being the left-wing community.

I've heard liberals I've heard conservatives I've heard libertarians who are all black gave it their take on what the black community needs and they typically fall pretty close aligned with each other and those are the things not practiced today.

So real talk do you actually care what black people have to say or do you just want to hear your own self being reflective back at you from a black face.

Yeah because they have broken the law in the first case and then the second case that's actually a very interesting case of context dropping almost on par with slander because you're quoting Trump when he was describing MS-13 a Latin gang who has done quite horrendous things as a method for the cartel.

If hemorrhoids you mean radical feminist yeah they deserve hatred your own community fucking hates them for being transphobic don't pretend like we are doing something wrong for being a bit displeased with them because they're also misandronistic. And ask for sluts I don't even see that as a major concern within the right party. Cuz if you're going to go with oh they don't like promiscuous sexuality it's usually the Christians and they say hate the sin not the sinner and they mean it. And not only that but they typically are the most benevolent towards women especially women on the right.

What you're describing are the kind of men who have just a vague idea of being right weighing because to be left-wing means to be demasculated.

Cancel culture is not Democratic I don't know where the fuck you get off on that oh an entire group of people decide to be outraged and they decided to destroy your rights wow I'm glad that's your view of democracy where necessarily the majority has the right to crush the minority.

See if a bunch of white people get together and decide to cancel all the black people in the country That's their right according to this That's sort of what you're saying This is you're saying not only is this this status good but it should be achieved fully. Which is something I would not say.

Hahaha and you hate the radical right only you think everything to the right of you is the radical right.

Again it would be nice if you would not accuse your us of your own sins that you are practicing even worse.

Darling I have listened to you for damn near a decade there has not been one period in that decade where you did not use dehumanizing language against your opposition or even fucking neutrals. And when you did come for us when you came for us and we had no power but to point to the law and are shared morality and say this is wrong You said nothing at all You didn't have to The culture did it for you. We would try to speak to you and we weren't talking to you we were talking to your ideology every fucking time because there wasn't a person left in you just someone hollowed out to make room for a dog shit ideology that has never brought anything but suffering to people. Go and fuck yourself.

Republicans deliberately use coded language to trick people to vote for them and radicalize their group. Many don't even realize they're radicalized or what they're saying is even racist. This is why they think the Left is "over reacting" because the either know they're using coded language and don't care, or they don't know anything at all.

[morganaspendragonss]

holly's august extravaganza day 26: slowly becoming lovers

for sonia (@pragmaticoptimist34)! i have to confess something - i got so caught up in writing this that i actually forgot to include either of the other two prompts you sent me 🙈 i hope you like it anyway!

second confession - it was supposed to be longer and then it kind of got away from me so i had to draw a line somewhere oops

thanks to @ravens-words, @cosmiicmalex, @halsteadmarchs and liz (sorry, i don't know your tumblr!) for enabling me and to @noxsoulmate for beta'ing!

ao3 | 2.9k | falling in love, fluff, tiny, tiny hint of hurt/comfort, soft tarlos, set between s1 and s2

Things don’t get fixed overnight. They agree to give them a shot, but that doesn’t change the fact that TK is still reeling from his break-up and overdose, nor that Carlos is still hesitant and afraid of pushing too hard at once.

But, slowly, they get to know each other. And, slowly, they start to fall in love.

i. food preferences

“You have to be joking.”

“It tastes like soap, Carlos!”

Carlos groans and drops his head into his hands, shaking his head at this latest revelation from his boyfriend. His boyfriend, who has just made his life—or at least his cooking—a hell of a lot more complicated. “My mamá would have a fit if she could hear you now.”

He almost regrets the words as TK’s eyes alight with interest; he’s been dancing around the topic of his parents for a while now, but it’s not like he can deny what he said. His mom would be having a fit, or possibly attempting to kill TK with a wooden spoon, if she found out that Carlos’s boyfriend was not only a gringo, but one who hates coriander.

“I swear, you won’t even taste it when it’s mixed into the food,” he tries, because coriander is a staple of his cooking, and he can’t even fathom not using it.

But TK just levels him with a firm look. “Yes, I will, Carlos. I’ll always taste it.”

Carlos rolls his eyes at his boyfriend’s theatrics, but sighs, relenting. “Fine. I suppose I can—” He doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence, as TK throws his arms around him and plants a noisy kiss on his cheek.

“Thanks, babe,” he says, grinning cheekily.

“Yeah, yeah,” Carlos grumbles, but he can’t help but smile.

There’s very little, he’s finding, that he wouldn’t do for TK.

ii. nicknames

It slips out by accident one day.

“TK,” Carlos groans, followed by a gasp as TK moves just right, sending sparks of pleasure down his spine. “TK, Ty—”

TK instantly freezes on top of him and Carlos’s eyes open, concern rising in him as he takes in the pensive look on his boyfriend’s face.

“What’s wrong?”

“I…” TK shakes his head and forces a smile. “It’s nothing. I’m good, I promise.” He ducks down to kiss Carlos again, but the mood is all wrong, and Carlos gently pushes him back, raising an eyebrow. TK holds out a moment longer, then sighs and rolls away, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s stupid.”

Carlos tuts, reaching over to brush a hand through TK’s hair. “Bet you $20 it’s not.”

“Hope you have $20 then, Reyes,” TK says wryly. He looks over at Carlos and sighs again, biting his lip. “It’s just… You called me Ty.”

“Oh.” Carlos’s eyes widen and he props himself up on an elbow. “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking; it won’t happen again—”

TK presses a finger against his lips, cutting him off abruptly. He smiles softly, then removes his finger and caresses Carlos’s cheek. “It’s okay,” he says. “More than okay, actually. I… I’ve always hated my name, but, I don’t know, I guess it sounded right? Like, when you said it? I think I’d kill anyone else who tried, but I really liked it coming from you.”

“Are you sure? You’re not just saying that because—”

Carlos is again cut off, this time by TK’s lips on his. TK moves so that he’s straddling Carlos again, hands pressed against his chest. “I’m sure,” he whispers, a grin playing at his mouth. “Now, weren’t we in the middle of something?”

iii. religion

Christmas sneaks up on him that year. Between helping the city recovering from the solar storm, work in general, the pandemic, and building his relationship with TK, Carlos has completely lost track of the months, until it’s a week before the date and he has nothing planned.

Really, it’s never been a big deal for him; he and his family used to attend mass and make an event out of it when he was a kid, but now he’s an adult, he’s often working, and he hasn’t been to church regularly since he was a teenager. But this year is different. This year, he’ll be spending it with TK, their first Christmas together, and he wants to make it special.

But he’s left it too late—nothing he orders online will arrive in time, the shops are becoming a nightmare, and he honestly has no clue where to even start. So Carlos resigns himself to another quiet Christmas, frustration and disappointment welling in him at the thought of telling his boyfriend.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out one night over dinner, the thought having been gnawing at him for days.

TK raises a brow. “For?”

“Christmas,” Carlos sighs, looking down into his stew. “It’s our first one together and I had all these plans, and then I just sort of… I didn’t forget! But things have been so crazy, and—”

He’s cut off when TK lays a hand on his. When Carlos looks up at him, TK seems to be fighting back laughter, which is confusing at best and potentially mildly insulting at worst.

“Babe,” TK says, grinning, “it’s okay. You might not believe me, but I forgot too. Christmas wasn’t really a thing growing up—my mom’s Jewish, so I used to celebrate Hanukkah on the years I stayed with her, and Dad was working more often than not. I don’t care, I promise.”

Carlos blinks. “You’re Jewish?” Surely he would know if… But they’ve never discussed religion before, and Carlos had kind of assumed TK had the same ideals as him about the church. In hindsight that was stupid and presumptuous, and Carlos can’t quite believe he’d do something like that. An apology is on the tip of his tongue, but TK just shrugs, going back to his stew.

“Half,” he says. “I don’t really practice anymore but I still keep the beliefs with me, if that makes sense?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it does.”

TK smiles at him, and Carlos suddenly realises that this holiday season will be special after all, even if they don’t celebrate anything. Because he’s with TK, which is the most special thing in the world.

iv. how they sleep

Carlos has been sleeping alone for a long time. He’s had a couple of short-term boyfriends and the odd hook-up here and there, but he’s never had someone else in his bed regularly—certainly not regularly enough to get used to it.

TK was hesitant at first to stay over, but once he started to be more comfortable, it was almost a given that they’d be sleeping together whenever their shifts allowed.

And it had been an adjustment.

TK had warned him he tended to move around and be clingy in his sleep, but Carlos hadn’t quite understood what that meant, until now. He is, essentially, trapped under TK, his arms pinned to his sides and one leg thrown over his hip. TK’s head is pillowed on Carlos’s shoulder and his breath is fanning in soft puffs over his skin.

The only way he can move is if he wakes TK up, and there’s no way Carlos is going to do that. His boyfriend looks so peaceful, and Carlos is more than happy to be clung onto like a koala to a branch if it keeps that expression on his face.

In fact, he thinks he can get used to this very easily.

v. pda

In private, their days are filled with gentle touches and stolen kisses. Carlos will be cooking breakfast and TK will slip his arms around him, kissing the back of his neck. TK will be doing one chore or another and Carlos will brush a hand over his back or gently nudge him as he walks past.

But in public, it’s a whole other story.

It’s almost reflexive, the way TK reaches for Carlos’s hand as they’re walking down the street. It’s something they do all the time at home, and even with their friends, but this time, Carlos immediately tenses, seemingly automatically pulling his hand away.

“You okay?” he asks, frowning.

Carlos takes a deep breath, then obviously plasters on a smile, retaking TK’s hand—and TK can feel the tension in the gesture. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not.” TK gently lets go of Carlos and smiles reassuringly up at him. “It’s okay if you’re not comfortable with touching in public.”

“I’m sorry, I just—”

“You have nothing to be sorry for. This is all on me; I should have asked.”

“But—”

“But, nothing.” He carefully bumps their soldiers together. “You’re entitled to your boundaries, I’m just sorry for overstepping. Tell me next time, please?”

Carlos hesitates, but nods, a gentle press of their arms a silent acknowledgment of agreement and understanding.

vi. scars

Carlos, TK has noticed, likes to pay extra attention to his bullet scar. Whether it’s pressing a gentle kiss over it when they’re in bed, or brushing it with his fingers when wrapping an arm around him, it happens too often for TK to believe it’s anything but intentional.

He doesn’t understand it at first.

Then he discovers Carlos’s own scars.

“What’s this?” he asks, tracing over the thick raised scarring on Carlos’s side. It stretches along the curve of his waist and round his back, and TK has no idea how he hasn’t noticed it before.

Carlos cranes his neck, letting out a hum when he sees what TK’s looking at. His head flops back down on the pillow and he closes his eyes, absently stroking up and down TK’s sides.

“It was...three years ago, maybe?” he says. “I got stabbed on a call. They told me it was pretty touch-and-go for a while, but they fixed me up and I was back at work in a month.”

His eyes are still closed, body completely relaxed, but TK can’t take his eyes off the scar. He reaches up to his own scar, and he gets it.

Carlos’s eyes crack open. “TK?”

“I’m good,” TK murmurs. He breaks his gaze from Carlos’s abdomen and smiles at him. “We both are.”

And if, after that day, Carlos notices him paying more attention to that scar, he doesn’t say anything.

vii. penguin or panda

“You’re out of your mind!”

In Carlos’s defence, a zoo date had seemed like a good idea. He knows TK loves animals, and he himself grew up around them, so in theory, a trip to Austin Zoo should have been the perfect time to get to know each other better while enjoying the day.

Turns out, TK has some very strong opinions on animals, and is willing to budge for absolutely no-one.

“I can’t believe you think penguins are cuter than pandas! I mean, look at them, Carlos!” He gestures emphatically to the panda enclosure, where one is napping on a log. It’s pretty cute, Carlos has to admit, but…

He shrugs. “But remember when the penguins were all huddling together?”

TK makes a noise of outrage, and Carlos has to laugh, then some more at the wounded pout he gets for it. “Is this really a thing for you?” he asks. “Like, is this going to be the dealbreaker for us?”

TK folds his arms and levels him with a stern look. “That depends,” he says. “Meerkats or koalas?”

And, just because he knows it will rile TK up more, Carlos grins and answers, “Meerkats.”

(They don’t break-up over it, but Carlos isn’t so sure that TK will be forgiving him any time soon.)

viii. special interests

“Say you could go back to a moment in history, but only once,” TK says, out of the blue, breaking the comfortable silence of the front room. Carlos stops carding his fingers through TK’s hair and looks down at him, curious. “Where would you go?”

Carlos opens his mouth, but TK doesn’t give him a second to answer. “Is it cliché if I said I’d go to Stonewall? I mean, I’d really like to see dinosaurs in the flesh, or—oh! I was, like, obsessed with pirates as a kid; I thought they were the coolest things ever, and I pretty much idolised Anne Bonny. But I’m pretty sure I’d die immediately if I went to either of those places, so…”

He trails off, a blush rising on his cheeks. “Sorry, I’m boring you.”

“No!” Carlos rushes to say. “No, you’re not. I love history, I just… What makes you ask?”

“It’s something we got into at the station earlier. Mateo brought it up first, I think?”

Carlos hums, pursing his lips in thought. “I guess…” He sighs and shakes his head. “It’s too hard. There’s so many places I’d want to go and people I’d want to meet.”

“But if you had to pick?” TK pushes, sitting upright and looking at Carlos with interest.

“I really want to meet Eleanor of Aquitaine, but if I could only go to one place…” He hesitates and thinks it over some more, but then his eyes catch on the masks hanging along the stairway, and he’s sure. “Tenochtitlan, but before Cortés arrived. It was a whole society, and I just think it would be so cool to see it up close and to know what it was like first-hand. I mean, I’ve read a lot of books, but we don’t have much from the Mexica people, a lot is from the conquerors, and—”

Carlos stops and huffs a laugh. “Now I’m the one boring you,” he says, but TK shakes his head, eyes bright.

“Tell me more.”

ix. coffee order

TK accepts the coffee without even thinking about it, even taking a sip before he realises he never told Carlos what his order was. He curses himself but resolves to drink it anyway; TK isn’t too much of a coffee snob, and he’s certainly not going to reject anything his boyfriend brings him.

He takes a second sip, and he’s so caught up in making a mental note to tell Carlos next time that it takes a minute for the taste to register. And…

It’s his order.

He looks sharply up at Carlos, who is smiling into his own coffee—therefore dispelling any notion of this being an insanely good guess. “How did you know?” he asks, bewildered.

The tips of Carlos’s ears turn pink, but the smile doesn’t leave his face as he looks up at TK. “Our first real date,” he says. “You mentioned that this was your go-to order.”

And TK can’t do anything but stare, because their first date was weeks ago, and Carlos still remembered, and it’s just…

He thinks—no, he knows—he’s falling in love.

x. fears

“Weirdest fears, go.”

TK has to laugh at the perplexed look Carlos sends him at the question, the straw of his boba hanging out of his mouth. Now that they’ve figured a sort of rhythm out between them, they decided to try the boba place again—there have been no emergencies or disasters so far, so TK is counting it as a win.

“Come on,” he continues. “Last time we were here, you said we barely knew each other—which was true—so now we’re going to fix it.”

Carlos’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. “By telling each other our weirdest fears?”

“Exactly!” TK grins. “I’ll go first if you’re too chicken. Mine is slicing my hands open or cutting some fingers off with ice skates.”

“What?” Carlos breathes, disbelief all over his face. “I’ve never been ice skating but I’m pretty sure your hands aren’t supposed to go anywhere near the blades.”

“I didn’t say it was rational.” TK sips his boba, raising an eyebrow at Carlos. “Your turn.”

Carlos swallows, suddenly very interested in the table. “I, uh. When I was a kid, my Tía Lucy had a snake get into her pipes. She only discovered it when she went to the toilet one morning and it was just...sitting there in the bowl. I was terrified for years that the same would happen to us, and it’s kind of become a reflex to check.”

“Oh my god.” TK can’t help but burst out laughing, even though he feels bad for it as Carlos covers his face with his hands. “I’m sorry, I know it’s a real thing for you, I just…”

But Carlos’s shoulders are shaking too and, bizarrely, TK really does feel closer to him now.

It’s a good feeling.

xi. long-term commitments

Carlos is surprised when TK is the one to bring it up first.

“Do you ever think about the future?” he asks one day, head in Carlos’s lap, staring up at the ceiling.

Carlos pauses the show he’s technically supposed to be watching and quirks an eyebrow at his boyfriend. “Sure,” he says. “What about the future exactly?”

TK hesitates, and his voice comes out a lot quieter when he next speaks. “Like…” He sighs, a small flush rising on his cheeks. “The future. Our future. Us. Maybe...marriage, or…”

He trails off, practically whispering by the end of it. His gaze has shifted from the ceiling to the frozen TV screen and he’s chewing on his bottom lip, body stiff with tension. “Sorry,” he mutters. “Forget about it.”

But Carlos is learning to read TK, and he knows he was looking for reassurance. “I mean, yeah,” he says. “I think about it. Do you?”

TK stares up at him, wonder in his eyes. “After New York, I thought… But yeah. Yeah, I do.”

They share a smile as they lock eyes, and Carlos knows that they’re on the same page here. That, distant though they may be, both of them can hear wedding bells in their future.

[aotopmha]

Attack on Titan in 2020

I've sort of dropped doing detailed chapter posts on the series because that type of writing wasn't very fun for me anymore and I have taken a liking to a bullet point kind of approach where I list the elements that stood out for me in the chapter or make a separate post for some specific topic I'd like to talk about in it.

I've started like 10 different posts to attempt to talk about AoT this year and I always end up with incoherent rambling because of all of the elements I'd love to to talk about.

This year's chapters were 125-135 and this year's episodes episodes 1-4 of season 4.

The anime episodes in particular have given me a lot of food for thought, so I'm just saying fuck it.

I think the biggest misstep of the story for me will forever be the fact that it decided to use fairly specific historical imagery.

The Eldians are clearly supposed to have allegorical equivalency with Jewish people, but the Jewish people were never the oppressors. There weren't any Jewish empires. That's conspiracy theory bullshit.

But on the other hand, the series clearly takes great effort to not stereotype any of the groups it's portraying and gives complex reasons for what both sides do. It's one of the few Japanese series that I've seen not stereotype Middle Eastern-coded people (Ramzi and Halil) or black people (Onyakapon). Everyone are people, it says. It even champions diversity:

(Chapter 118)

It is also very much true that a bunch of fascist states use long-term history as an excuse for their actions:

(Chapter 127)

Nation did X 2000 years ago therefore our conquest of them is justified.

This makes discussion about the series' themes like a minefield.

The people who are very critical about its imagery are right, but the people defending the series aren't wrong, either because it condemns all of those nasty ideas of conquest and hurting innocent people.

You can't have a more clear-cut condemnation of genocide:

(Chapter 127)

If you combine all of these details instead of zoning in on them one by one, to me what the story is saying is that *even if* all of that conspiracy bullshit is true, innocent people don't deserve to be slaughtered no matter the reason because they are still people who have their own feelings, thoughts and wishes.

The story clearly gets the baseline, but fumbles the details. I decided to look up some more discussion surrounding this these past few days and I just wish there was more good faith discussion about it. A lot of it feels like a moral superiority contest.

I think it's these kind of flawed stories that actually deserve detailed scruitiny over stories that are rotten to the core because they are *almost there*. Talking about them is a good topic starter in what to do and not to do in a story like this.

Speaking of rotten to the core, I think the absolute highlight of the chapters this year is Eren and some of the chapters this year finally gave me a pretty clear picture of what is going on with him.

Context from 123 certainly helps, though:

(Chapter 131)

This is about Eren's perspective. He can't accept the destruction of Paradis.

It's not that this solution was inevitable looking in from the outside (which is one of the interpretations I see around for Eren's actions), it's that *Eren* can't see any other way out of this except the most extreme because of all of the horrible things he has seen from the outside world. It is very similar to the way suicidal people can only focus on the negative.

You can tell them everything is going to be okay, but those words won't reach them because their mind won't let them and loops them back to those negative thoughts.

Eren can't see the ice cream or silly clowns. But he can see how the other Eldians in the league of Eldians are willing to push Paradis under the bus. He can see how Grisha's sister was killed. He can see how racist and cruel Marley is towards the Eldians in Liberio (and how the people have racist leanings towards other nations, too).

He can only see those bad things. But he also understands how everyone outside of the walls are human just as the people inside of the walls are.

So he is torn to pieces by guilt.

He doesn't want to do this, but he can't see any other solution.

This is why I also think he can't rob his friends of their agency. He is fighting for them to have a good future:

(Chapter 133)

(Chapter 131)

What really stood out to me on a revisit is that Eren considers himself much worse than Reiner.

I've seen criticism on how the story pushes the narrative of both sides being the same and this detail is really important to me because this is the story acknowledging that what Eren is doing is worse and gives all of the following exchanges about this the context of it being a similarity in principle.

Both sides have killed for what they think is right and have to deal with how they have killed people. This is such an important detail in the Uprising arc, too, where Erwin firmly acknowledged that overthrowing the government might not actually be the right choice by him. It was simply what he saw as right. On a narrative level this avoids absolute truths and preference of one character perspective over the other and once again makes it about individual perspectives.

The theme of individual perspectives is so ingrained in this story at this point in my eyes that it's another cornerstone in understanding what is going on with Eren to me.

I think it's great.

I also really appreciate Annie and what was done with her in this chunk of chapters.

(Chapter 127)

There has been this narrative going around that proposes that the story is in Eren's corner too much. But these chapters are nothing but questioning Eren and Annie is one of the main voices in this. It's the Marleyan girls, really and I think this is a very necessary part of making the narrative work. Once again, it separates the narrative and character perspective.

It says that the Paradis side caring is about character perspective, not what the narrative sides with and Annie is even sympathetic to Mikasa in that instance.

She gets it. Unexpectedly, I think Annie might play a bigger role in taking down Eren than expected. Her character arc about deciding to no longer go with the flow because she doesn't want any more tragedy to happen is basically calling for it.

(Chapter 128)

Another element I've seen brought up is the fact that nobody seems to address the Bert-sized elephant in the room, but some of our characters are certainly thinking about him.

This is such a thematically strong element and really interesting because Connie joined the military to make his mom proud and be a good soldier. This is the motivation behind his claim when he says they are going to save the world. But what does becoming a good soldier mean, exactly?

Well, apparently possibly gunning down people you care about.

This moment is so good because it's another moment where the idea of glory in war is taken down a peg.

The moment with Connie declaring they're going to save the world is so often criticised, but it is actually turned on its head in 128. There is no heroics in this. This is actually Connie's big "killing a person" moment because it strips away the final bit of comfort in killing in war, the excuse of killing for good moral reasons.

It is also a wonderful complex evolution of the series' themes. Trost was about fighting monsters. In the Female Titan and Clash of Titan arcs some of those monsters turned out to be human. In the Uprising, Return to Shiganshina and Marley arcs all of those monsters turned out to be human and here in the War of Paradis arc, everyone is human and the only separating system is what everyone views as right.

I really hope the anime will let this chapter breathe a little bit more.

Moving on, I guess it is time to address the rumbling.

I love it as a horror spectacle.

(Chapter 130)

And I really I think it needs to be non-CG when animated. CG is fine in spectacle battles, but not in horror settings because it is too clean.

The rumbling needs to be disgusting and dirty.

Chapter 132 gave me one of the few moments in which I truly cared about Levi. I think him telling Hange to dedicate her heart was a very good moment to cap off their relationship. He sent another SL commander to fulfill their duty.

The speech about hatred in chapter 134 also stood out to me. I think it definitely should be fitted in there somewhere in this, but I also see a bunch of criticism for it.

I want to point out that this is the side of present Marley talking here. It's the military dictatorship.

It's the Nazis. I think the Nazis should feel regret for exploiting innocent people and admit they're wrong.

I also like how the horrors here are undoing the brainwashing and showing the truth to the citizens.

I guess you could read it as heavy-handed, but it is also something that needs to be addressed and in principle, it's not wrong.

I'm also going to put a mention of Historia here. I've talked about how this is my biggest and most glaring problem with the series because of how thematically unfitting it feels, but I've also talked about it in many posts. I wanted to focus more on other stuff in this post.

So now, we make it back to chapter 135.

I think having stewed on it for a month now, I like the element of mindscrewing our cast with the Titans of the people they love is the strongest element of it. It's making them face their personal traumas and we also get some great character moments and payoffs from it.

Mikasa ended off the year in a very good note in my eyes.

Even this deep in the story, this chapter left me in a situation where I have no idea how things might turn out.

I might have rough ideas, but not anything specific and that's fun.

Well, this is it on my retrospective.

2021 is confirmed to be AoT's final year of publication as volume 34 is set to be the story's final volume.

Those who hate the story can finally be free of it and those who care for it, can look back on it with fondness and sadness and many other emotions and evaluate.

It's been 7 years for me. What a wild ride.

So, I'm asking everyone, what are some of your observations on AoT in 2020?

Is there anything you'd like to add or do you have any observations or counterarguments for anything I've said?

I'd be curious to see what everyone else thought of AoT in 2020!

[livlepretre]

This is prob a weird question, but do you wonder what a ‘typical vampire’s’ relationship to religion would be like in the tvd universe if it had been explored (&I get why it wasn’t), at least upon being turned, considering that most vampires would have been brought up in eras where religion (generally) played a comparatively more serious role in everybody’s lives? I mean, how would one BEGIN to grapple or fit in this critical aspect of one’s (prior??) worldview, with rising from the dead as what’s essentially a demon, w supernatural powers & preying on humans — what would be t implications of your existence? Were the Salvatores never believers? Plus, do u have any hc on the Originals’ faiths as humans?? Were they Pagans? Christians? Or… I guess not the latter/they would have believed in the spirits as their mother was a witch..? Thoughts? (Srry if I’m bothering you with this question btw, I appreciate that you’re probably busy)

No, not bothering me, I'm very interested in the intersection between religion and vampirism.

We have to assume that religion played a huge role in the lives of MOST vampires-- secularism is relatively recent, and even then all that's happened is that older gods have been replaced with newer gods. And I can't think of any religion where rising as a vampire would be anything other than, as you say, rising as essentially a demon, a night hag, an abomination. And also, to make a blanket statement here, many religions focus a lot on the progression from life into death-- on making sense and peace of the natural order of birth, life, death (and rebirth). Vampirism breaks a person from this cycle, forever divorcing them from the natural world, the natural order. The combination of becoming that demon, of fearing themselves, and of becoming trapped in the netherspace between life and death is a horror unto itself-- one of the main reasons I find tvd vampires in particular so fascinating is because it is not just that they are truly monstrous and frightening, but that the show delves into the way the vampires horrify themselves with their own monstrosity (at least, it used to). They can only be horrified by that monstrosity if they retain some sense of what it is to be human-- and therein is the key. TVD vampires don't lose their human souls, as the vampires in BTVS do-- they simply... transmute. They're cursed with that never ending bloodlust that turns them inevitably into monsters, and they go further and further down that road until they just give in. It's a very dark curse. I'm sure there are plenty of vampires who lose faith... but there are probably even more who don't lose their faith, but instead come to accept their role as the dark mirror in opposition to life. There are a lot of really profound psychological implications to all of this.

As for the specifics of the religions of the vampires-- Damon and Stefan would have almost certainly been raised Catholics-- and I've never thought they weren't still Catholic, although, being Catholic doesn't necessarily make one devout, as with any other sect of any religion. Damon obviously crossed a lot of lines as a human. Also, the show would never have gotten into the thick of us, but how much of Stefan's guilt and shame is tied up in an understanding of the world and morality based on his religious upbringing? We can talk about Humanist ideals all we want, but I think it would be stretching credulity that someone turned as a 17 year old in the 1800s would be feeling so much shame from pure philosophical ethics and not from a sense of morality built into the religion he was brought up in. (And how do we know that Damon isn't so furious with Stefan for forcing him to turn because Stefan has essentially damned him?)

The other vampires are interesting because they're medieval people, so their worldviews would have been even more strongly intwined with religion than the Salvatores.

Katerina I've always assumed would have been Bulgarian Orthodox (you could make an argument for other religious takes based on the Travelers-- but that came later and I tend to just blot that all out of my memory because frankly I think making Katherine exceptional at all other than as the doppelganger is stupid and actually robs her story of tragedy-- it's tragic for her to just be living her normal life and losing her baby the way she did and then to discover that no, she has this dark fate she had no idea about-- it's somehow less tragic if she also is from a family with superpowers and her daughter just gets vamped to track her down) -- nothing much to this other than that is a likely choice. Although I have ALWAYS wondered about Katerina's life in Bulgaria, since it was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time and of course, the show has no interest in history so there's nothing that even touches on this potentially fascinating detail.

Okay the Originals. I have a special place of loathing in my heart for the Viking!backstory and have basically decided to whole heartedly reject it. I think Elijah's "my father was a landowner in Eastern Europe" story was much more convincing and likely. I prefer the idea of Russian!Originals, for various reasons I've documented here on this blog, so I think they would also be Orthodox Christians. (But: potentially before the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches? so perhaps they wouldn't really think of themselves as "orthodox," or perhaps they later started to think of themselves this way.) The Orthodox Christian thing also ties into Tatia Petrova, whose descendants I headcanon as Orthodox. (I'm also fond of the idea that the Originals were Jewish, or the idea that Esther was Jewish.) There are a lot of mystic arts buried in religious arcana, so I don't see there being a conflict between Esther's witchcraft and simultaneously practicing a religion. I think in a medieval context, framing the world in terms of religion would have been just so inevitable, so tied in to every other element of life. It's actually fascinating to consider what hold overs of this thinking medieval vampires would have. (And I think of the Originals as deeply medieval in outlook, in ways in which they are largely unaware)

At any rate, the Originals are by far the most monstrous of the vampires, and the ones that have slipped the furthest from their humanity. I wonder in what ways they developed such horrific tastes as a means of spitting in the eye of their faith? If some of their differences could pertain to who held on to faith (Finn) vs. who felt most abandoned by it (Klaus)? Food for thought!

[whitehotharlots]

Previewing the 2024 Democrat Primary

Within a couple weeks of his being sworn in, just about every person on earth will wish Joe Biden was no longer president. Sure, the few surviving John B. Anderson voters will be thrilled to see 4 years of crushing austerity and half-assed attempts at Keynesian stimulus. But most people will begin dreaming about a brighter future.

Good news! The 2024 Democratic primary field is going to contain dozens of options. Bad news! They are all going to be disgusting piles of shit. 

The “top tier”

While it’s too early to do any handicapping, these are the candidates the media will treat as having the most realistic chances of securing the nomination. 

Kamala Harris

Kamala did not win a single primary delegate in 2020. This is because she dropped out before the first primary, and that was because no one likes her. She has no base beyond a few thousand of twitter’s most violent psychos. Her disingenuousness approaches John Edwards levels: any halfway incredulous person can see immediately beyond her bullshit. She has no principles whatsoever, and while that may be par for the course for Democrats, she lacks even the basic politician’s ability to intuit anything that might, hypothetically, constitute a principle. 

Even better: she is an awful public speaker. She sounds like how a talking dog would speak if he were just caught stealing people food off the kitchen table. She communicates in weird grunts and faux sassy squeaks, which is how she imagines real black women sound like, but something about her is unable to sell the bit. She begins her sentences in halfhearted AAVE, stops and panics halfway through as she realizes that maybe this sounds fake and offensive, and then reminds herself oh wait, no, this is okay since I’m black. This doesn’t happen once or twice per speech. This is how every single sentence sounds. 

Kamala is like Nancy Pelosi in that no sketch show will ever impersonate her correctly, because anything that came close to authenticity would be considered far too cruel. This might benefit her in the primaries, as she exists in the minds of Democrats as someone and something she absolutely is not in reality. Nominating her would be like allowing your child’s imaginary friend to attempt to drive you to the store. 

Andrew Cuomo

Easily one of the 50 worst people alive, Cuomo has a solid chance because Democrats, same as Republicans, are unable to differentiate between electability and self-serving ruthlessness. Cuomo used the deadliest public health crisis in American history as a pretext for cutting Medicaid and firing 5,000 MTA workers, and his approval rating increased. New York Dems are little piggies who love eating shit. If we assume that the political media will continue their habit of refusing to discuss the legislative history of right wing Democrats, Cuomo might well cruise to the nomination and then lose to literally any human being the GOP nominates by an historic margin. 

Joe Biden

The party loves him because he is a right wing racist. “Progressives” tolerate him because black primary voters over 40 supported him, and their opinion is supposedly a magic window into god’s truth. Everyone else can tell he is manifestly senile. I don’t put it above the DNC to pick a candidate who is in horrible health, dying, or even dead--whatever the financial sector wants, they’ll get. But I would be shocked if his approval rating is above 39% by mid-2023, and by that point deep fake technology will be advanced enough they’ll put out a very lifelike video in which the Max Headroom version of Joe explains he’s proud of his accomplishments--that budget’s almost balanced already--but, man, I gotta abd--I gotta abdica--, uhh, I gotta, I, uhh, I gotta move down, man. 

Wild Cards

These candidates would have all have a chance if they ran, but they could all much more easily retire to Little Saint James off of kickbacks they’ve gotten from Citibank and I.G. Farben. 

Rahm Emanuel

Rahm is going to receive some hugely influential post in the Biden administration. Let’s say he becomes Secretary of Education. His signature achievement will be replacing all elementary school teachers with Amazon’s Alexa, which saved the taxpayers so much money we were able to quadruple the number of armed police officers we put into high schools. This will give him several thousand positive profiles on network news programs and the near-universal support of the Silicon Valley vampires who will own 99% of the country by the time Biden’s term ends. They will use their fancy mind control devices to convince geriatic primary voters that Rahm’s the one who will bring Decency back to the white house. His candidacy will be the paragon of wokeness, as expressing concern toward the fact that he covered up the police murder of a black guy will get you called a racist. 

Rahm has a bonus in that Jewish men are now Schrodeniger’s PoC. When they are decent human beings, they are basic, cis white men who are stealing attention from disabled trans candidates of color. When they love austerity and apartheid, they become the most vulnerable people of color on earth and criticizing them in any way is genocide. No one will be able to mention a single thing Rahm has ever done or said without opening themselves to accusations of antisemitism, and that gives him a strong edge against the rest of the field. The good news is that an Emmanuel candidacy would result in over 50% of black voters choosing the GOP candidate--which, I guess that’s not really good but it would certainly be funny. 

Gavin Newsom

Newsom is every bit as feckless as Cuomo, but he doesn’t put off the same “bad guy in an early Steven Segal movie” vibes. He will mention climate change 50 times per speech and no one will bother to mention how he keeps signing fracking contracts even though his state is now on fire 11 months of the year. If anything, this will be spun into an argument about how he’s actually the candidate best suited to handle all the water refugees gathering on the southern border. Look for his plan to curb emissions by 10% by the year 2150 to get high marks from Sierra Club nerds. He’s also a celebate librarian’s idea of what constitutes a handsome man, so he’ll have some support from the type of women who claim to hate all men. 

Larry Summers

I mean, why not? Larry, like most members of the Obama administration, has politics that are eerily similar to those of Jordan Peterson. In normal circumstances, this makes a person a dangerous fascist who should not be platformed. But if that person has a D next to their name this makes them a realistic pragmatist who has what it takes to bring suburban bankers into our tent. If current trends in Woke Phrenology continue apace, Larry’s belief that women are inherently bad at STEM will be liberal orthodoxy by 2023, and his dedication to the Laffer Curve could see him rake in massive donations. Seriously, I’m not kidding: cultural liberalism is now fully dedicated to identity essentialism and balanced budgets. Larry is their ideal candidate. If he were black and/or a woman, I’d put him in the very top tier. 

Jay Inslee

Unlike Newsom, Inslee’s attempt to crown himself the King of Global Warming won’t be immediately derailed, since his state is only on fire because of protestors. This, however, poses a different problem. He’s going to be a good test case for the Democrat’s uneasy peace with the ever increasing share of the electorate who become catatonic upon hearing a pronoun. On the one hand, you need to take their votes for granted. On the other hand, they’re not like black people or regular gays: most voters actively, consciously despise wokies, and associating yourself with them will ruin a campaign even in deep blue areas. There’s still gonna be riots in a year. Biden’s gonna announce the sale of all our nation’s potable water to the good folks at Nestle and some trans freak named Sasha-Malia DeBalzac is going to use that as an opportunity to sell their new pamphlet about how it’s fascist to not burn down small businesses. No matter what Inslee does in response, it’ll end his career. 

AOC

I’m not one of those “AOC is a secret conservative” weirdos, but I am aware enough of basic reality to know she has zero chance of coming close to the nomination. The right and the center both regard her as a literal demon. The party is already blaming her for the fact that a handful of faceless Reagan acolytes failed to flip their suburban districts even though they ran on sensible pragmatic proposals like euthanizing the homeless. The recriminations will only get more unhinged when the Dems eat shit in the 2022 midterms. She will be a Russian, she will be white male, she will be a communist, she will be a homophobe: any insult or conspiracy theory you can name, MSNBC will spend hours discussing. Her house seat challenger will receive a record amount of support from the DNC in 2024 and it’ll be all she can do to remain in congress.

Larry Hogan

Don’t be dissuaded by the fact that he’s a Republican. Larry is the DNC’s ideal candidate: a physically repulsive conservative who owes his entire career to appealing to the most spiteful desires of suburban white people. He’s an open racist in a material sense--if you’re old-school enough to think racism is a matter of beliefs and actions, rather than the presence of cultural signifiers--but his is the beloved “never Trump” style of racism that Dems covet. He’s also a Proven Leader who thinks the role of government should be to finance the construction of investment property and give police the resources they need to run successful drug trafficking operations. Few people embody the Democrat worldview more than Larry. 

The Losers Bracket

These people will have at least a small chance due solely to the fact that the Democrats love losing. They have lost in the past, and in the Democrat Mind that makes them especially qualified.

Joe Kennedy

The man looks like a mushroom-human hybrid from a JRPG. Trump proved that physical hideousness need not doom a presidential bid, but a candidate still needs some kind of charm or oratorical abilities or, god forbid, a decent platform. Joe aggressively lacks all of these things. A vanity campaign would be a good way to raise money and perhaps secure an MSNBC gig, so Joe might still run. 

Mayor Pete 

I am 100% convinced that Pete’s 2020 run was a CIA plot meant to prevent working class Americans from ever having a chance of living decent lives. I am also 100% aware that Democrats are dumb enough to enthusiastically support a CIA plot meant to prevent working class Americans from ever having a chance of living decent lives. If we have some sort of military or terror disaster between now and 2023 the Dems are sure to want a TROOP, and wait wait wait you’re telling me this one is a gay troop? Holy hell there’s no way that could lose!

Stacy Abrams

Never underestimate the power of white guilt. She lost the gubernatorial race to Gomer Pyle’s grandson, and her spiritual guidance of the Dems saw the party lose black voters in Georgia in 2020. Nonetheless, she is regarded as a magic font of fierceness within the DNC. She might stand a chance if she can establish herself as the most conservative non-white candidate in the field, but there’s going to be stiff competition for that honor.

Elizabeth Warren

Liz is probably angry that the party so shamelessly sold her out even after she was a good little girl and sabatoged Bernie’s campaign for them--yet another example of high ranking US government officials reneging on their promises to the Native American community. Smdh. The fact that this woman hasn’t been bankrupted a dozen times over by various Wallet Inspectors genuinely astounds me. So Liz is probably going to run again, and her campaign will be even sadder the second time around. 

It might surprise you to hear this if you don’t work at a college or NGO, but Liz diehards actually do exist. She’ll get even less support this time because there will be no viable leftist in the field for her to spoil, but she’ll still hang in long enough to make sure the very worst possible candidate beats out the second worst possible candidate. Maybe she’ll fabricate a rape accusation against Sherrod Brown. Maybe she’ll spend her entire allotted debate time doing a land acknowledgment. With Liz, anything is possible--so long as it ends in failure. 

Amy Klobuchar 

Amy was the most bloodthirsty of the 2020 also rans. She will double down on the unpopular failures of the Biden administration, explaining that if you weren’t such a selfish idiot you’d love the higher social security retirement age and oh my god are so such a moron you think you shouldn’t go bankrupt to get a COVID vaccine? There’s a non-unsubstantial segment of the Democratic base that’s self-hating enough to find this appealing, but it won’t be enough to make her viable. 

Martha Coakley

She lost Ted Kennedy’s senate seat to a retarded man who was pretending to be even more retarded than he actually was. Then she lost a gubernatorial race to a guy who openly promised Massachusetts voters that he would punish them for electing him. Her record of failure is unparalleled, making her perhaps the ideal Democrat standard bearer for the twenty twenties. 

[sleepycoffins-and-benhargreeves]

Standrew Serial KillerxAddams Family AU with Andrew as Fester and Steven as Debbie

Steven as the fancy golden truffle boy who dates people, acts all innocent, marries them then kills his husbands or wives (we stan pansexual Steven)

Andrew is the “Addams-Ilnyckyj” cousin who has been missing for 10 years now and has only recently returned because he got lost in the Bermuda triangle.

Shane and Ryan are prob the Gomez and Morticia Addams couple here, Shane and Andrew are distant cousins, so Shyan tries to help Andrew woo Steven

We’re gonna make a Shyan lovechild (Brett or OC?), Ryan saying he just wants to have it all, loving husband, family, and time to hunt ghouls and demons for his hellish crusade

Steven is that Nanny that barges into the Addams household saying that they’ll finally “found” someone to take care of their child

Andrew, the most stoic and reserved Addams in their family has finally found someone he actually feels attracted to.

Shyan organizes a welcome back home party for Andrew, all relatives invited.

Shyan lovechild grows suspicious of Steven and knows he’s up to no good with their Uncle Andrew

The party happens and Andrew and Shane dance the Mamushka, since both consider each other almost like brothers (they both killed their brothers or smth cuz the tradition of killing your siblings still runs in this era lmao) or they’re just only childs in general tbh idk

After the Mamushka dance, we’ll have Andrew and Steven dance the Hopak. Apparently, the Cossack cousins of the Addams are from Ukraine, Cossack is a Ukranian dance so, Andrew is that Ukranian Cossack cousin and I love this because I just researched this and it’s too fucking perfect for this AU.

Hopak, originally a male dance that eventually evolved into a couples dance, so we have Andrew and Steven dancing together with fucking knives and it will be beautiful, and sexy, and fucking perfect.

I need to research and watch many dances about Hopak and apparently Hora as well, because the Addams family is apparently Jewish in nature so I need a nice way to imagine them dancing with knives while learning all the terms for this fanfic lmao

Andrew and Steven take a lovely romantic stroll in the Addams graveyard, Steven goes in for a the kill, telling Andrew that he’s a virgin and he’s been waiting for someone to make the ultimate sacrifice with him.

Andrew when Steven said he’s been waiting for someone to make the ultimate sacrifice with: “A goat?”

Steven ignoring Andrew’s brain of equating sacrifice to goat and confessing instead that he loves him to which Andrew replies. “I never would’ve thought you’d feel the same way, I love you so much, I’d kill for you, I’d die for you... I’d pay.”

Steven practically moans seductively when Andrew tells him he’d pay lmao imagining all the gold and truffles he’ll have

A nice beautiful scene of Steven and Andrew digging up the grave of Andrew’s mother so that he could propose to Steven with a beautiful golden ring with blood red rubies on it.

Standrew announces to Shyan that they’re engaged and we have that iconic scene of Debbie-Steven showing the ring and holding a shovel with a psychotic look on his face.

Standrew wedding where Andrew has poured out all his feelings and emotions for the first time, shocking the entire Addams clan, it’s long and prob takes at least thirty minutes to an hour and he has misty eyes while his voice continues to almost break from too much love.

Steven, looking impressed and nodding his head, looks to the priest/uncle It and says: “Ditto.”

Shyan lovechild arguing and saying that Steven is prob gonna kill their Uncle Andrew and continues to wail.

Shane telling Standrew as they leave for their honeymoon “Have a nice life together!” and Steven replies. “I will!”

Cue in Standrew honeymoon and Steven tries to kill Andrew numerous times and gets frustratedly angry when Andrew keeps surviving.

They.Have.Sex.

Steven after amazing sex with Andrew and losing his virginity (Let’s admit it, even though Steven has married and murdered so many people, he didn’t think they were worthy enough for him. But Andrew is “rich-enough” for Steven to lose his virginity for, he thinks. Like the richest catch he’s ever had. And no, Steven thinks it’s not because he’s starting to fall for Andrew.)

He made Andrew promise to never-ever talk or contact his family ever again, Andrew indulges him and agrees.

Steven’s butler driving a hearse to the airport and waiting for Steven to get off his flight from Hawaii. “Hello Mr. Ilnyckyj, where is your husband?” He asks, expecting the husband to be dead.

“Oh he’s right there, getting off the flight.” Steven points to Andrew who’s currently looking at him with heart eyes. Butler: “But he’s alive sir!” he says in shock. Steven in a very angry and frustrated voice. “TELL ME ABOUT IT!”

Andrew: I love you mon cher

Steven: WHO?!

Andrew: mi amor???

Steven:  SPEAK IN ENGLISH. or chinese, but he is secretly slowly starting to love the pet names Andrew gives him, don’t worry, we only have tsundere Steven for a short time.

Steven forces Andrew to live with him in a pastel palace that’s very fancy and very un-Addams like, Andrew is intrigued because it’s Steven.

Shyan visits their home to demand to see Andrew, saying it’s not true that Andrew doesn’t want to see them anymore.

Andrew confirms to them that He wants to be alone with Steven now.

Shyan comes home to find that their lovechild has become a pastel monster, very un-Addams like and they cry but accept their child.

Steven tries numerous times to kill Andrew but to no avail.

And this one time that Steven blows up half of their house and finds Andrew “Dead”

He laughs maniacally and says finally but then he’s crying

His tears fall down on Andrew and he opens his eyes and Steven screams.

Andrew: You do care my love

Steven: No! Why are you still alive?! What does it take to kill you monster?!

Andrew laughs and Steven blurts out that he’s been able to kill all of his husbands and wives before but why doesn’t Andrew die?!?!?!

Andrew: because you love me and our love won’t allow us to kill each other

Andrew then explains that he’s known about Steven all this time, that he’s a serial killer, that he loves being this golden fancy boy, and that he even knows that Steven himself is from a notorious serial killer family as well

Steven still in denial but he’s all like “So you’ll let me use your money?”

Andrew: “My love, I love you so much, I’d pay for you and everything else.”

Steven, tsundere but slowly warming up to Andrew, mumbles “Fine, i forgive you.” He grumbles. “And I’ll let you be with your family again.”

Andrew meets the Lims full of serial killer family, only they’re more pastel and shit and he is absolutely in love and their families move to live close to each other and Shyan is also there and they meet the pastel Lim serial killer fam and it’s very very happy and nice and cute and amazing

the end

Wow, this got to be so long and I actually wanna write this but I have so many other Standrew fics in mind so yeah, have this one for now and I’ll think about it if I still wanna write this lmao

It looks and sounds like a lot of fun tbh and I only have to do little research about it I guess to write it perfectly sdjfksandkj

[mautadite]

may book round up

24 books this month, a pretty good stack. even though i’m working from home i keep expecting work to swamp me and leave me with no reading time but... that hasn’t happened yet? so, good.

silver moon - catherine lundoff ⭐️⭐️⭐️ a paranormal novel about a small town in which certain women who reach the age of menopause find another change happening to their bodies. i.e. they become werewolves. i fucking adored this concept and there was f/f romance, but the execution and the writing was sadly pretty boring.

no-no boy - john okada ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ post-wwii, following a young japanese american man who was just released from prison. called a no-no boy because like all other japanese men at the time, he was asked two questions: will you serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the us? he answered no to both questions and was detained. the novel follows him grappling with that decision after the war, looks into his friends, family life, race relations, and what it’s like living in a country that despises you. enjoyed it a lot.

the husband gambit - l.a. witt ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ the kind of tropey romance nonsense that i live for. contemporary m/m slow burn fake marriage between a struggling actor, and the son of a famous hollywood producer. there were some meh parts (like, the plotting and the reasoning behind why they had to get fake married was like... are you SURE marriage is the best way to fix this) but i really liked it for the romance and the tropes.

drive your plow over the bones of the dead - olga tocarczuk ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ contemporary polish mystery fiction, following an old woman living in a secluded community in the woods, when poachers and prominent hunters begin turning up dead. really interesting writing and format, and a really excellent protagonist. not sure how much i liked the actual mystery.

the babysitter - jack harbon ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ quick and dirty m/m romance, a literature-loving babysitter falls for the divorced father of the kid he babysits. pretty fun.

zipper mouth - laurie weeks ⭐️⭐️⭐️ contemporary fiction that follows a queer, mentally ill woman as she hurdles through life, unrequited love, jobs, and lots of drugs. i enjoyed the themes when there was a coherent one, but i really didn’t gel with the style. i guess it was trying to be stream of consciousness, which i have read and enjoyed in the past. but this didn’t do it for me. interesting tho, and honestly, i just might not have been the audience for it.

spirits abroad - zen cho ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ a PHENOMENAL collection of stories drawing inspiration from malaysian spirits, culture and folklore. absolutely loved it, fave read of the month for sure. loved the use of language and dialect, and the writing was simple and precise and wonderful. and there were some great f/f stories in here. 

a cat, a man and two women - junichiro tanizaki ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ the setting: 1920s japan. the characters: lily, a fat tortoiseshell. shozo, her lazy, well-meaning, but ineffectual cat-dad. fukuko, his hot young former mistress, current wife. shinako, his strong-willed, slightly bitter ex-wife. the plot: shinako decides, HEY ACTUALLY FUCK YOU KEEP YOUR HOT WIFE BUT I WANT THE CAT. a great novella about loneliness and comeuppance and marriage. the best part was the cat lol.

the terracotta bride - zen cho ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ really interesting novella about a young dead woman living in chinese hell. she’s married, and her husband has three wives. the first: estranged, conniving, distant. the second: herself, unwilling but resigned. the third: newly arrived, and made out of terracotta. very interesting novella, beautifully written, grim but hopeful, f/f romance on the side.

king and the dragonflies - kacen callender ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ wonderful queer children/YA book about family, grief, racism, coming to know yourself and also accepting yourself. contemporary, but it almost FEELS like a fantasy/magical realism book. 

orphan number eight - kim alkemade ⭐️⭐️⭐️ a novel about an orphaned woman coming to terms with experiments done on her as a child, when she encounters the doctor who performed said experiments, dying in a nursing home. the writing in this was pretty so-so, did a lot of head-hopping which is my biggest pet peeve. i liked the concept, but the plot and the follow through were meh. loved that the main character was a lesbian though, and some of the writing was great.

firm hand - nora phoenix ⭐️⭐️ meh... not for me. m/m contemporary romance following a guy recovering from the car crash that killed his best friend, and his best friend’s son. it went some places that i’m just not up for, lol.

meet cute club - jack harbon ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ REALLY adorable m/m romance, following a dorky, earnest romance novel lover, and the new cashier at his favourite book store. they end up trying to revive the main characters struggling book club, and falling in love along the way. very fun and sweet.

mrs. mix up - candice harper ⭐️⭐️ the concept sounded so so cute: an f/f romance about two librarians with similar last names that go to a library convention and the staff mistakenly thinks they’re married and book them into one room. but the writing and chemistry were lacklustre and it was extremely poorly edited. it’s a shame, i could have liked this.

mine - kim hartfield ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ a sexy f/f romance that i liked a LOT, about a young woman who after a traumatic event in her life decides to quit her job and go volunteer on a farm in the middle of nowhere. she ends up falling for her sexy lesbian farmer boss. it got deep in some areas i wasn’t really expecting it to, though it was a tad... idk, preachy? and the conflict at the end was annoying. enjoyed it a bunch tho.

the hobbit - j.r.r. tolkien ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ nth reread! i’ve been listening to this on audiobook around bedtime since like... march, i think, it’s just such a comfort read for me.

the knight and the necromancer 1-3 - a.h. lee ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ a very solidly good fantasy m/m romance series, about a young prince and a necromancer in a war against an invading sorcerer. sorta enemies to lovers? the three books span their relationship and the war, and though it was only a few weeks in time, it didn’t feel insta-lovey at all. liked it a lot.

the fake game - kim hartfield ⭐️⭐️⭐️ contemporary f/f fake dating office romance! pretty cute; didn’t blow me away but i solidly liked most of it.

what the wind knows - amy harbon ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ historical time travel romance centred around the aftermath of the ireland easter rising. i spend so much time reading solidly gay stuff that it’s so weird reading things where the existence of queer ppl isn’t even acknowledged lol. anyway this was pretty good, i liked it mostly for the historical facts and aspects, but the romance was pretty touching too.

the golem of mala lubovnya - kim fielding ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ LOVELY m/m romance in a small jewish community between a newly created golem and a stonemason. lovely writing and atmosphere and characters. i had my nitpicks with the resolution but holy heck i’m so happy with this.

the electric heir - victoria lee ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ the second part of a queer YA duo-logy that i started earlier this year, set in a future dystopian magic-riddled US, dealing with abuse and trauma and survivors. extremely difficult to read, almost unenjoyable at times (because god these kids go through so much) but very very good.

first everything - kim hartfield ⭐️⭐️ aha, possibly my last try with this author, though i liked the first book i read by her so much i might read one more! f/f romance between a journalist and a fictional first daughter (who’s also like, a domme, lol). the plot was fine but a lot of the character stuff and the shitty parent stuff really bothered me.

and that was may! for june i’ll... read lots of queer stuff, but i mean i do that every month. i also want to try to read less romance, more thriller and historical and just general contemporary? i feel like i say that all the time, but i’ll try. (though i did just get my first ever advanced reader copy from netgalley and it’s f/f romance, so... exciting!) currently reading the 7 deaths and evelyn hardcastle, a thriller. pretty okay so far.

[unculturedmamoswine]

AoS McKirk Recs

At the request of @fireinmywoods​ I’m finally getting around to making a McKirk rec post, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while. All these fics are McKirk endgame. This isn’t organized in any way whatsoever, and is also not a comprehensive list. I mostly just scrolled through my bookmarks and picked the things that weren’t outright porn. I always wish reccers would include their own notes along with the author’s summaries so... I did that. Hope y’all don’t mind. I’ll try not to be too spoilery, but I think it’s valuable to see what other fans like about a fic. Also, always heed the author’s notes, warnings, and tags. Definitely check out other fics by these authors, because I’m mostly not reccing a bunch by each person in order to keep this post slightly less long. And please consider leaving comments on the fics!

The palimpsest verse by fireinmywoods (series is 100k words)

Author’s summary (of the first fic in the series): “Skip to the point, Jim. The sooner you spit it out, the sooner I can refuse and get back to work.” “It’s really no big deal,” Jim says as the door slides closed behind them. “I just need you to come down to Hearth with us…as my husband.” The Enterprise has been sent to negotiate reaccession to the Federation with an isolationist religious group known as the Kindred. While there, Jim notices that some of the children seem to be gravely ill. The problem is, the Kindred practice faith healing and refuse to allow a doctor to be brought in. So Jim does what he does best: he improvises.

Gotta start with the gal whose fault this list is! When I read the first fic in this verse I was really at a low point in my McKirk obsession. This fic really brought me back into the fold in a big way. The whole series is just very very full of love. I ALMOST read one of the sequels first but thank god I heeded Em’s warnings to read palimpsest before reading the other fics. Seriously. You need to go into the thing unspoiled. Anyhow, if you want Jim and Bones way way super in love, for sure read this fic.(And listen, if you don’t want to read it because you hate fake marriage please read it anyway. I dislike fake marriage and I read it and loved it. Give it a shot, I beg you.)

Manhattan (Weeks Gone By) by blcwriter (8k words)

Author’s Summary: For the jim_and_bones St. Patrick’s Day challenge, because only I can turn a flash fic prompt into 8000 words. I haven't been able to stop listening to Frightened Rabbit’s “In Living Colour”  from their Winter of Mixed Drinks album as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to say for my next story, and then this challenge came along, and literal writer! is literal, so, there you go.The prompt was "Manhattan," and the boys wanted to be married in modern times and run a bar in the Village with the whole gang involved.  Non-happy-fun-times ensue before things sort of resolve.

I love a lot of blcwriter’s stuff, but this one is my favorite. It’s a modern day au, and Jim and Bones’s marriage is in trouble. It’s a really wonderful look at people in a long-term relationship struggling to keep it alive and wondering whether to just let it die.

Something so right by blcwriter (series is 13k words)

Author’s Summary (of the first fic in the series): "Don't say we aren't right for each other, the way I see it is.. we aren't right for anyone else."

Okay, I said I wouldn’t rec lots of things by one author and this is my one exception. I HAD to rec this one as well as Manhattan. An utterly fantastic modern day chef au. Jim and Bones knew each other at culinary school but now find each other again as real grown-ups. And the sequel is a Christmas fic! Also contains Jewish Jim, which I’m always a slut for.

That Monogamy Thing by silverlining99 (11k words)

Author’s Summary: Jim thought he was doing it RIGHT.

I also need to mention the fic The Thing About Realizing You Are In Love With Your Best Friend by JenTheSweetie because these two fics are so identical in premise I can only assume they were written for the same prompt. They’re both great, but I slightly prefer That Monogamy Thing, so it got top billing. Both fics are set during the five year mission, or at least they’re set on the Enterprise. Basically, Jim and Bones start sleeping together and Jim assumes they must be now in a Monogamous Relationship(TM) and gets with the monogamy program. Of course, at no point did anyone say they were in a monogamous relationship, so Bones is not on the same page, shall we say. It’s a classic “miscommunication causes delicious but short-lived angst” kinda vibe. You get it.

The Repairs verse by shinychimera and Yeomanrand (series is 69k words)

Authors’ Summary (of the first fic in the series):  Young Jim Kirk is unstable and self-destructive, Leonard McCoy is withdrawn and wary, and the obstacles to surviving their first term at Starfleet Academy are not easy to overcome. A dark and brutal tale of the tangled borders between healing and hurting, where hard choices between emotions and ethics have far-reaching consequences; dealing with abuse and alcoholism, affection and neglect, piercings and bar fights, hot and cold sex, complicated questions of consent, and loyalty and love between people who aren't comfortable with either. A whole new spin on "I want my pain, I need my pain."

This one is kinda...whump porn. Like, read the tags. JIm is suuuper messed up and traumatized but sometimes that’s what you need in a fic, yanno? It’s an Academy fic that deals heavily with Jim having been violently abused as a child, and him growing to trust Bones while also kind of learning how to be an adult, rather than living life as the abused child he’s spent so long being. The abuse in this fic was not sexual in nature, jsyk.

En Promenade by newsbypostcard (series is 86k words)

Author’s Summary: After three months of weekend bar-hopping and a slow process of elimination -- with finding the right bar, that was, and tragically not discovering who Bones was into -- Jim was starting to narrow it down.

A very cute Academy fic that nevertheless deals with a bit of heavy shit for both Jim and Bones. Starts out with Jim bound and determined to befriend Bones by... discovering the perfect bar for them to hang out in. Has a lot of really great exploration of Bones’s character, and he’s written in a really entertaining way.

Future Imperfect by Savoytruffle (50k words)

Author’s Summary: Leonard wins the kid in a hand of poker. A hand of poker he plays in the dirty back room of a dive bar in East Bumfuck, Iowa, two weeks after his humiliating divorce is finalized, and on the sixth day of a bourbon-fueled bender that’s somehow taken him from his high-rise loft in Atlanta to a fleabag motel in the middle of nowhere.

This fic is an Academy fic, but in a pretty dark universe. Maybe not Mirror Universe dark, but it’s one where slavery is practiced on Earth. Jim is, in this fic, Bones’s slave. Not in a sexy way. He’s part of an underclass of people who weren’t designer babies. Bones goes to the Academy and tries to become a Starfleet officer, accompanied by Jim, his newly acquired slave. They grow closer as they deal with their pasts, and I guess I should stop there for fear of spoiling too much. This one talks a lot about childhood sexual abuse, so be warned. The story overall though has a hopeful ending.

Let Me Come Home by yawnralphio (7k words)

Author’s Summary:  “Someone asked me what home was and all I could think of were the stars on the tip of your tongue, the flowers sprouting from your mouth, the roots entwined in the gaps between your fingers, the ocean echoing inside of your ribcage.”

For someone who theoretically dislikes modern day AU’s, there are actually a fair few that I really really love, and this is one. Jim and Bones run a travel blog together and journey around the US in a van. It’s a really lovely mix of angst and romance.

The Switch series by Ceres_Libera (series is 269k words)

Author’s Summary (of the first fic in the series):  The life and times of Leonard H. McCoy MD/PhD … If Leonard McCoy's life could get any fucking weirder, it would be … Jesus, he didn't even want to think what that could possibly mean, because it's already been too fucking weird to make any kind of rational sense. A Starfleet Academy story, set in the ST:XI universe.

I don’t need any sass, people. I KNOW you’ve all read Switch, and I know you’re all tired of seeing it on rec lists and I don’t care. It’s famous for a reason! It’s not just long, it’s WONDERFUL. The big, epic Academy fic that kinda sets the Academy fic bar. Goes from Jim and Bones meeting all the way through the end of the 09 film. And that’s just the main fic. I really love that both Jim and Bones are depicted as realistically flawed people, especially earlier on in their acquaintance. Neither of them are angst sponges, they’re both just... kinda messed up dudes. But they’re good people who learn to love each other. Also I guess it’s technically slow burn?

The Greater Good by emiliglia (29k words)

Author’s Summary: Doctor Leonard McCoy thinks he's getting by, working as both a surgeon and a researcher at UCSF Medical Center. A chance encounter with Lieutenant Jim Kirk - who's changed since they first met five years before, and not for the better - forces Leonard to face reality about his own situation while trying to keep Jim from heading down the same path.

This is the only fic on here not on Ao3, as far as I can tell. Anyhow it’s modern day AU. Jim and Bones help themselves by helping each other and falling in looooove.

The aftershocks series by canistakahari (series is 30k words)

Author’s Summary: Jim Kirk turns down Pike’s challenge, and doesn’t get on the Starfleet recruiting shuttle. But neither does Leonard McCoy, who’s actually been in Iowa for six months already, doing fuck-all. Becoming drinking buddies seems like a natural progression.Sometimes the path to the stars is just a piece-of-shit dirt road. You know, the kind that’s filled with potholes and surrounded by brambles and conveniently happens to be located in the bottom of a ravine. But every once in a while, when confronted with such a twisted mess of circumstance and cracked foundation, the universe still does its very best to fill in the holes.

I haven’t read this in a long time, but I remember it being really good and kinda mindfucky. Not in a dark or stressful way, though. Jim and Bones don’t join Starfleet at all. I feel I shouldn’t say more because I don’t want to spoil things, but the tags should give you more information if you want some.

i think i’ll keep you (like a secret) by hoosierbitch (3k words)

Author’s Summary: Bones came to Starfleet with a hell of a lot of baggage. Jim came empty handed.

Some good ole Jim angst. Prominently featuring: Tarsus things! Allergic-to-everything Jim! Jim allowing himself to be vulnerable around Bones! All that good stuff. I just love me some vulnerability.

How Whales (Sorta) Brought Jim and Bones Together by highschool-facelesshellion (4k words)

Author’s Summary: For Leonard, first dates are flowers and small, homey restaurants where you talk quietly like you're sharing secrets with your potential girlfriend.They are not supposed to be at a table covered with aquarium maps and aquarium souvenirs. And they are certainly not supposed to be spent with a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy rambling about whales.(Or: Where Leonard is the only person that doesn't think Jim's too crazy for his whale obsession and Jim notices.)

Fairly goofy, slightly cracky remix of The Voyage Home (the one with the whales). It’s just silly and charming and I don’t know why I love the idea of Jim being a whale aficionado, but I really do. 

Any Road Will Take You There by shoreleave (63k words)

Author’s Summary: Slow-developing K/M, beginning right after the shuttle ride and showing what happens the first year at the Academy. Told from McCoy's POV.

This fic is verrrrry good. I know I have a lot of Academy fic on here, but please treat yourself and read this one. Shoreleave is really good at both plot and characterization. I really like this fic in part because it explores the root of Jim’s complete lack of trust in authority figures, while also showing just how dangerous that lack of trust can be for him.

Seeing Stars by lindmere (1k words)

Author’s Summary: Inspired by Chris Pine's wig in Bottle Shock. Jim sneaks into Riverside for an old-fashioned Fourth of July.

A very sweet, sort of domestic established relationship fic.

His Eyes are Opened by tresa_cho (21k words)

Author’s Summary: Lt Colonel Leonard McCoy thought his service days were over. After the Great War, he was ready to disappear into the sanctuary of anonymity, but the government had other plans. Strange men whisk him away from his comfortable existence to investigate an airship crash unlike anything the United States had ever seen before. The year is 1947. The location, Roswell, New Mexico.

Despite the summary saying ‘Great War’, this fic is clearly post WWII, so I think that must be a typo. There is a dearth of McKirk fic set in the forties, and hot damn does this fic ever hit the spot if that’s what you’re looking for. Usually fics that are set in modern times or earlier take out all the sci-fi elements of Star Trek, but not this one! Just a very well done fic with a unique premise.

Investigations by AceOfSpades (series is 93k words)

Author’s Summary: The first thing Jim noticed about McCoy, and what started him on this whole messy path, was that McCoy was just a little…off.

GOD DAMN I love this fic. It’s a Doom (2005) fusion, but you don’t need to know anything about Doom to get this fic. It might even help to not know anything about Doom. God knows I don’t and I adore this fic. Academy era, with Jim simultaneously befriending Bones and trying to solve the mystery of this weird Leonard McCoy guy. Theoretically we’re getting a sequel sometime, and it can’t come soon enough in my opinion. Never fear, though, the fic is complete as-is and has lovely closure. Really really really recommended!

The Galactic Adventures of Major Zeph by winterover (14k words)

Author’s Summary: Jim is a comic book nerd who’s finally found his one true sidekick. Leonard is a convention virgin who really needs a drink. There is only one bed left in San Diego.

Academy fic! For some reason I always love fics where Jim is into some kind of craft or art, or is just generally a nerd about something. This fic provides that twice: Jim is a comic book nerd as the summary says, but also really into cosplay. And Bones just happens to look like the sidekick of Jim’s favorite comic book character. Romantic hijinks ensue.

The Man Who Held Up Atlas by thalialunacy (7k words)

Author’s Summary: Five times Leonard McCoy fixed Jim Kirk’s back, and the one time he didn’t have to.

Really really lovely 5 plus 1 fic with reverse chronology. Starts with Jim and Bones as old old men and moves back in time from there, showing little snapshots of their relationship.

and i can lend you broken parts that might fit (like this) by jeyhawk (17k words)

Author’s Summary: Academy Era. First they fall into bed. Then they fall in love.

Funny and sweet. Nothing too heavy, just loads of Jim and Bones being wildly in love with each other. And sexytimes.

[citizenaycock]

Cold War (2018) | Directed and Written by Pawel Pawlikowski

Before getting into Cold War, as a prelude, I’d like to mention a funny documentary the filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski released back in 1991 called Dostoevsky’s Travels. It follows the great-grandson of the famous Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky who died in 1881.  Fyodor is generally known as one of the greatest writers of all-time and possibly one of the first modern psychologists, deeply probing the human soul in his work.  Great-grandson Dmitri drives a tram in Leningrad, Russia and agrees to go on a speaking tour about his “prophet” Grandfather.  He doesn’t do this to pay his respects, but only because he dreams of scraping together enough money to buy a used Mercedes to impress his friends.  And he is OBSESSED with buying a Mercedes and knows nothing about his Great-Grandfather. He talks to crowds of intellectuals and hardly has anything to say about his kin Fyodor and just wants to get paid. He buys one Mercedes and it breaks down immediately. He then buys another at the end of the documentary and it gets stolen by bandits. As the doc progresses you see Dmitri is a bit of a numb-skull and a scoundrel. I liked it due to the irony of Dmitiri’s complete uncaring attitude towards Fyodor’s highly regarded esteem, and obviously this absurd infatuation with acquiring a used car as a status symbol compared to his novelist grandfather, who is held up so highly for his spiritual profundity and depth.     It’s a great piece of work no one has heard of...part-cautionary Capitalist tale at the end of the Soviet Union, while Cold War is part-cautionary Communist tale post World War II.  

Official Trailer for Cold War

Intro and Technical Specs

To start, my main fear of writing about films I love is that it will suck the joy out of the film itself by looking at it so closely.  I have only written in depth about two films, and thus far, am finding it to be the opposite.  When going under the microscope, I am just becoming more aware how great a truly well-made film is when breaking it down.  

Cold War may be the most beautiful black-and-white film I’ve seen.  The category Amazon has placed it in is “Arthouse Drama”.  Amazon Studios also is the distributor of the film.  My guess is because it did very well at the Cannes Film Festival and Pawlikowski won the Oscar for his previous film Ida in 2013. Sometimes they get it right.   To give some more context, I am very familiar with Ida and studied it for research for making my latest short film.  I found it interesting Pawlikowski implemented a particular style similar to filmmaker Paul Schraeder’s book, “Transcendental Style in Film”.  One aspect of this style pertaining to Ida is the cinematic framing for the action and not moving the camera until the end.  He framed his subjects in a squared 4:3 aspect ratio while leaving lots of headroom, sometimes leaving them in the bottom corner of the frame, which carried over to Cold War.  I don’t exactly know why he does this, but I have some theories that I will flesh out within the post in depth.  While watching, I immediately noticed the grain in the 4K version.  I looked it up and the film was shot with an Alexa digital camera and also a 35mm film camera, so apparently they were able to mimic film grain with the Alexa in post to match.  A 32mm lenses was used for almost all the shots. According to Pawlikowski it was because this focal length closely mimics the viewing width of the human eye and allows a wide space of action that can fit around the subject(s) in the frame. Similar to Ida, there is no non-diegetic music in the film (music added outside of the film’s music itself) until the closing credits, reminiscent of the French director Bresson.  

Opening in Rural Poland

The film opens on the hands of a man playing an instrument that resembles bagpipes, looks handmade and I assume is indigenous to Poland. The camera tilts up to reveal a bright-eyed rural man, and eventually pans over to another interesting looking character playing a violin as they sing together.  We soon learn that Wiktor (one of the protagonists) is traveling with two others (Irena and Kaczmarek) and they are recording various forms of folk music unique to the Polish people.  Kaczmarek immediately degrades this type of music as “possibly crude” or “too primitive” immediately marking a divide in perspective compared to Irena and Wiktor, who visibly enjoy interacting and recording the villagers’ authentic music.  

They soon come to a house where a unique-looking dirty village girl sings a song not accompanied by any instruments.  She has deep-set eyes and looks slightly haunted, and the lyrics of the song are about unrequited love. Not a happy song. Wiktor and Irena are enraptured by the raw singing and are recording this. In contrast, Kaczmarek disinterestedly eats soup in the next room, spoon klanking against the bowl, probably interfering with the recording.  Kaczmarek is representative of the Communist State for this film, high on bureaucracy and lacking in soul. The song being sung by the little girl is a huge part of the film as a whole.  Little do we know (and probably not evident to most who have seen the film) the lyrics tell the story of what happens between the protagonists we are about to follow in the film. The song is called Dwa Serduszka (Two Hearts) and is an authentic Polish folk song like much of the music in the movie.  After watching for the first time (I commonly do this) I went online to look up background information and found a very well-made youtube video essay describing the song as being the “Leitmotif” for the film. Leitmotif is a term defined as “a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation”.  In this case, the song operates as a direct pointing of what is to happen.  The song pops up several times throughout the course of the film, forecasting the fates of the two protagonist lovers, Wiktor and Zula, who are brought together by music.

This “forecasting” I believe goes deeper.  It’s as if it is pre-determined. Pre-determined due to the current political environment in Poland and the two characters’ difference in personality and upbringing.  Also, most importantly, is because they love each other in a way that seems beyond their control and not a choice, eventually becoming impossible for them to live life without one another. The leitmotif reminds us throughout the film of Wiktor and Zula’s inability to escape their fate, which is already etched in stone by powers beyond their will:    Two hearts four eyes Crying all day and night long Dark eyes, you cry because you can't be together You can't be together My mother told me You mustn't fall in love with this boy    But I went for him anyway and love him until the end I will love him until the end  

Folk Ensemble

Now we are at a large building which looks to still be in the rural area.  Auditions are going to be held here for singers and dancers for a folk ensemble performance.  A couple of trucks haul the commoners in and Kaczmarek gives a stately speech to the bunch before cutting inside to everyone waiting to audition for Wiktor and Irena.

We then meet Zula waiting.  She elects to audition with another girl, naively, rather than shine in the audition solo. They enter the room to sing for Wiktor and Irena.  Wiktor is immediately transfixed and asks Zula to hold on and asks her to sing another song alone.  She sings with an authentic, untrained beauty.  We also see her feistiness here.  It’s obvious Wiktor is smitten and she is marked down to be selected as one of the singers after they exchange a parting look.  By now, the framing style of the cinematography is noticeably unique compared to other films.  As mentioned in the intro, characters are often framed with lots of headroom and sometimes placed in the bottom of the frame, leaving it mostly open space.  My theory on this is that the environment the characters inhabit are shaping their destiny more than the characters’ own free will, therefore their heads are often seen at the bottom with action on top and around them. For example, Communism looms larger than the individual, tamping he or she down (literally) to the bottom of the frame.  Not only Communism, but their uncontrollable love for one another, the characters’ upbringing and the people around them with their general wants and needs. These factors shape their present and future more than their own willful, self-determination and I think the filmmaker is aware of this fatalism, yet doesn’t just come and say it because that wouldn’t be interesting.  We just see that Wiktor and Zula are never able to comfortably settle anywhere with their love nor escape the love they feel for one another, making their situation impossible due to the circumstances.        In Ida, duty to God looms large and so does the characters’ Jewish unknown family past (to only name two) and the shots are framed accordingly as well.   On a broad level stepping outside of the film, what’s interesting to me is how much free will do humans actually have and how much is self-determinant?  After studying the film closely, this is the deep question (not answer) that I came to that transcends the surface story.  

Wiktor watches Zula from a distance outside that evening.  Irena then tells him Zula killed her father and did some prison time for it.  After rewatching, I suspect that Irena loves Wiktor, and there are a few subtle cues later on that I noticed as well.  During private lessons, Wiktor curiously asks Zula what happened between her and her father while Wiktor plays scales on the piano and she matches the notes with her voice.  Zula says her father tried to be sexual with her so she stabbed him.  It is a very matter-of-fact and short answer.  Wiktor doesn’t say anything and continues playing the piano.   I’ve thought about this scene more so than any other scene after rewatching.  I think it is because of the dialectical nature of Zula saying she stabbed here Dad because he tried to have sex with her, one of the darkest things you could imagine, then the slight humor of Wiktor’s reaction while seamlessly transitioning back to the softness of the piano and her soft voice syncing.   Wiktor is very watchful, internal, reserved, most likely from a more refined family and musical background.  Zula is tough, spirited, tenacious and has lit a fire in Wiktor.  Wiktor is tall and dark-haired.  Zula is short and blonde. Opposites!

It is now time to perform for a large audience in a theatre.  Wiktor conducts. Zula and about 20 other girls in Polish folk attire sing the leitmotif song that was sung by the young girl earlier.  The group sings beautifully.  Zula shines in front.  Even Kaczmarek on the side of the stage behind the curtain seems to be in awe and carefully walks about as if not to disturb the magic.

Afterwards there is a reception.  Wiktor and Irena lean against a large mirrored wall and everyone else in the room is seen in the reflection. When you first watch it, it takes awhile to figure out the orientation of the room due to the mirrored wall.  I think this is the most interesting shot of the film.  Kaczmarek then gleefully enters frame and says that the performance was so beautiful, calls Wiktor a genius and says it’s the most beautiful day of his life.  He really means it and is the most authentic emotion we see from him in the whole film.  Previously, Kaczmarek thought all this “folksy stuff” was foolish.  There is a funny moment between the three.  Wiktor and Irena are obviously moved by this but not sure how to express it as the stately Kaczmarek leans against the mirror with the two.   On a second viewing, one sees Zula in the reflection staring at Wiktor the entire time.  The two make love soon after in a bathroom at the party.

The Ensemble + The State

The performance is so good, now the State wants to get involved and meets with Wiktor, Irena and Kaczmarek.  The government wants to turn the repertoire into a “calling card for our Fatherland” and incorporate “Land Reform”, “World Peace” and a strong number about the “Leader of the World Proletariat”.  In return the group will be held in high favor, able to travel to other countries to perform, etc.  Irena and Wiktor are visibly uncomfortable with this.  Irena speaks first and says thank you but the ensemble is about authentic folk art and the rural population doesn’t sing nor understand these difficult issues.  Kaczmarek quickly intervenes and calls the man from the state “comrade” and says the ensemble, on the contrary, will do this after given proper direction. Irena stares him down.  Wiktor says nothing.  The next performance is stained by a huge tapestry of Stalin behind the singing ensemble.  The tone now is more dutiful rather than soulful, as if singing a church hymn they are forced to sing.  Zula’s face while singing now lacks the life it possessed in the performance before.  The State must extinguish all individuality and uniqueness with the goal to homogenize.  Irena’s heart looks broken in the audience.  Everyone dutifully rises for applause afterwards and Irena walks out.  We do not see her again in the film.  Everything has changed.

The stuffiness of the singing troops is saved afterwards by a beautiful shot of Wiktor and Zula laying in a golden wheat field together at dusk. Golden?? The film is in black and white but my mind says “golden”.  Birds and crickets sing. Tranquility away from the group.

But it doesn’t last long, as they are unable to run from the larger outside factors.  Zula soon confesses that she reports on Wiktor to Kaczmarek about their relationship and the things he tells her. She says it’s because she’s on probation for something and assures Wiktor that it’s nothing that will hurt him, but Wiktor gets up and walks off angrily at a loss for words.      As mentioned, the scene starts with their eyes closed as if in a dream, beyond the State, but it's inevitable that the state has to enter their relationship at some point, infecting the dream, and will remain a problem for the rest of their lives.   Zula calls him a “bourgeois wanker” as he walks away and she reacts oddly by jumping in a nearby river.  As soon as she hits the water, Wiktor stops and turns around.  She floats in the river and begins singing the leitmotif song.  

The next shot is of the two silently sitting together again in the wheat field at nightfall with a campfire going.  Zula’s hair is wet. The two just stare at each other and never say a word. What are they thinking?   I think Wiktor is thinking that he can not escape her because of his love and that they are stuck!  Zula knows this too.  This is a type of love that transcends choice.  Just like the State, their love controls them. The silent shot in nature cuts to black, then diverges to a busy train station with a brass band as the ensemble leaves to go to Berlin for a show.  Kaczmarek gives a stately speech to the group about their trip.  Wiktor meets Zula privately in a train car and lays out a plan for their escape once in Germany to go to France.  Zula is nervous she will not be able to make it somewhere other than her homeland Poland due to her inability to speak French and lack of experience.  I doubt she has any family to rely on, and at the moment has the ensemble in Poland as a decent occupation.  Wiktor assures her she has talent to learn and the most important thing is they’ll be together. They kiss.   The performance in Berlin is shot very uniform and proper, perhaps further pointing to its newfound soulless rigidity.  Afterwards, Wiktor goes to the meeting place to cross the border.  Zula remains at the reception with the comrades and Kaczmarek (as if in a trance) and never shows.  Wiktor waits until nightfall and eventually stiffly walks across without her.  

Defection

Wiktor is now playing piano in a cool jazz night club in Paris with a band.  It is 1954.  His beard is now grown out a bit and his hair messier than before.  He is now in an empty cafe at closing time and speaks French with the waitress. He seems to have assimilated well here.  It is revealed he is waiting for someone. That someone is Zula.  She eventually walks in and they stare at one another for a few moments.   One look at Wiktor while sitting across from her shows how much he still loves her and has missed her. The actor playing Wiktor, Tomasz Kot, really shows this wonderfully. He is very good at being still yet showing so much.  Regarding the performances, this is one of the most authentic love films I’ve seen in a long time.  And an expert director and writer doesn’t hurt.  The film never feels sappy, in my opinion, while simultaneously remaining very romantic.   Zula doesn’t show much and stays cold during this scene, but can’t help but ask, “Are you with someone?”  Wiktor is.  So is she.  He asks if she’s happy.  She isn’t, but doesn’t say it.  Wiktor knows and walks her to the hotel.  She says she wasn’t good enough, not as good as him, to make the escape from Poland to Paris.  Wiktor says he believes love is enough.   Zula coldly kisses his cheek and then stolidly walks away.  Wiktor watches her go.  But eventually Zula breaks! She turns back around, walks quickly back and they kiss passionately for a few moments before she leaves again.      If one just read this and didn’t watch the film, you might think it seems like any other love story you’ve seen a million times. But to me, because of the authenticity of the performances and lack of constant soundtrack music, it really felt great to see these two embrace again. And I think it proves that moments in movies that may look cliche on paper can be pulled off with a skilled filmmaker and actors.  Also, there’s only a few angles that the camera covers in this scene and ALL the scenes really!  There’s a graceful economy and no superfluous closeups with unnecessary dialogue.  And as mentioned, no outside music booms in like most films commanding you to feel something! You feel it because you feel it, not because you’re told to feel it with an over-bearing soundtrack trying to compensate for lack of performance or direction. Wiktor now walks into his apartment, smokes a cigarette alone deep in thought, then gets in bed with his girlfriend.  He tells her he’s just been with the woman of his dreams.  She doesn’t seem to care and turns around to go to sleep, highlighting the lax and blase nature of their relationship and possibly Paris artist life as a whole.  Wiktor then turns off the lamp and looks up at the ceiling in lovestruck thought.

We are now in Yugoslavia in 1955, which looks much more lush than I would’ve imagined Yugoslavia.  Wiktor gets off the train to attend a performance of the ensemble.  Kaczmarek quickly greets him at the front of the theatre and is oddly cordial and confident in a sharp suit.   Once inside, Zula sees Wiktor in the audience and looks startled.   Wiktor looks side to side and men are watching him from the aisles.  He is escorted away by authorities yet remains adamant to see Zula rather than be afraid of being thrown in jail or hurt.  The first time I watched I thought he was definitely going to be thrown in prison. Kaczmarek obviously ordered the men to take him away and send him home in a train before he could see Zula, because of Kaczmarek’s interest in Zula.

Zula and the ensemble are shown singing the leitmotif song now.  Zula notices Wiktor is no longer in his seat.  Perhaps he was escorted out at the intermission.  She sings with a melancholic intensity.  The black-and-white contrast is especially beautiful here, maybe more so than anywhere else in the film.  There is a black back drop and all of the singers’ alabaster skin glows, as well as their folk costumes.  

Wiktor is back in Paris now and has gotten work as a Film Composer.  Two years has passed since the Yugoslavia concert.  While in the middle of working on the soundtrack, the side door of the sound stage opens. Wiktor is spellbound as a smiling Zula is revealed.  

Zula has married an Italian so she could legally move to France.  She says the marriage doesn’t count though because it wasn’t in a church. Neither seem worried about it.  This time Zula does not hold back her feelings and, obviously, neither does Wiktor. They make love.   They ride on a boat down the Seine at night past the buildings and cathedrals. They messily and drunkenly dance alone at a night club in rapture. Heaven for a moment.   

Which begins Zula’s vast transition from the performing rural ensemble in Communist Poland to a solo singer at the Paris jazz club with Wiktor’s band.    She sings the emblematic Dwa Serduszka most wonderfully here. Order.  Everything in it’s right place. She is luminous as the camera slowly dollies around her, eventually revealing a packed club.  Everyone is captivated and still.  Then at the end is a lovely moment, maybe my favorite moment of the film, where Wiktor is staring at her intensely and she turns to check in with him and he gives her a nod of approval.  It’s almost corny, riding the edge, but is powerful, conveying a silent understanding between the two seeing one another perfectly clearly.

Poles to Parisians

We now are at where Wiktor and Zula live, which looks like a cool version of a converted attic with a Paris view.  Juliette, Wiktor’s ex, has translated Dwa Serduszka from Polish to French and Zula is unhappy with the translation, which most likely includes some self-consciousness about her pronunciation.  The manner is which the leitmotif song appears here runs parallel to the first step in the descent of the relationship in Paris.  Zula is defensive and anxious about the Parisian artistic circle Wiktor has introduced her to and she drinks to ease the anxiety of feeling inferior.  Wiktor tells her not to because she is “charme slave” as they say, alluding to how everyone has a narrative role and label in these circles.  Zula is becoming difficult and insecure.  Wiktor is becoming caught up in the scene and ignorant of Zula’s dramatic change of environment.

The film director at the party looks Zula up and down when they arrive.  Wiktor allows this without rebuke, most likely due to the nature of the sexually-lax Parisian art culture. Everyone is beautiful and chic at the party.  Zula immediately goes for the drinks.  She then sees Juliette and approaches her abruptly (yet with restraint for Zula), subtly challenging her French translation of Dwa Serduzska.  Juliette calmly explains her reasoning according to the lyrics’ metaphors. It’s obvious Juliette sees through what’s happening in the situation here..  Juliette’s part is small but the actress is excellent and conveys a lot.  She eventually mentions how the transition to Paris must’ve been a shock...the cafes, cinemas, shops, restaurants. Apparently Juliette sees this shock more than Wiktor does.  Zula tries to play it cool here but you can see she’s flustered.  This is a game she’s not used to playing. She then retorts that her life in Poland was better.  

Wiktor is talking to someone and looks over and sees Zula and the Film Director sitting closely, flirting.  Zula glances back over at him to see if he cares, but Wiktor stays put.  Then later she aggressively confronts him about giving her story “more color”.  It is apparent now that he has enhanced her Polish story to seem more dramatic in order to captivate his French friends and colleagues.  Wiktor shrugs this off.  Zula’s vibe is not carefree and cool like the rest of the party with her straightforward, intense rawness which creates an isolation for herself.   She sits in the bathroom now alone, drinking from a bottle, talking to herself in the mirror.  She calls Wiktor a jerk, but then says she loves him. She calls herself an idiot at one point. She continues to talk in the mirror as if to console herself.  And I can’t help to mention how much she looks like a young Gena Rowlands here.  It reminds me of the 1968 film Faces, which is also black and white.  They look so much alike, and both fantastic actresses that are blonde, voluptuous and troubled.

Gena Rowlands in Faces (1968)

Joanna Kulig in Cold War (2018) Wiktor, unknowingly and excitedly, opens the bathroom door and says that they’re all going to the Jazz Club now.  Zula says she’s a bit sad and wants Wiktor to come in the bathroom with her, but he ignores this and says let’s go.  She takes a moment to herself and then it cuts to the club.  She looks miserable and wasted sitting at the bar.  As we go, I am still noticing the framing I mentioned at the beginning with the subject at the bottom, but for this shot she really seems low!

Her melancholy is interrupted by an upbeat, American song (”Rock Around the Clock Tonight”) and she gets up reinvigorated and starts dancing enthusiastically with a few different guys.  The camera goes handheld and is the messiest camerawork of the film (a good messy).  She eventually gets sloppy and gets on the bar and almost falls and people drunkenly cheer as Wiktor exasperatedly watches.

We then see Wiktor carrying her into their room.  Zula says he is no longer a man in Paris like he was in Poland, and says she and the director get along well in attempt to get under his skin further.  He then sits alone in the dark and smokes a cigarette.

It now cuts to Zula in a sound studio singing into a mic in French.  I don’t speak any French, but her accent and pronunciation feels correct, but her spirit is muted...and we soon see one reason why.  Wiktor’s voice ominously interrupts her over a speaker behind glass in the recording booth.  Now the shot is on him and he looks disheveled and dark and tells Zula they only have 40 minutes left and not to blow it.  There is a deep hate in his eyes we haven’t seen yet, perhaps retribution for calling out his manhood and their recent relationship woes. An engineer and the film director are also in the booth.  There is just a bad energy in the room and anyone that’s ever tried to perform anything would be able to detect how difficult it would be to bring a great performance here.  The music starts back up and Wiktor looks down as if disappointed right before she starts singing.  

We are at a listening party now for Zula’s record at the French Director’s apartment.  Zula is standing in the middle of the room alone, listening intently as several others sit around in the background drinking champagne.  Dwa Serduszka plays, but now in French.  It’s okay but not great. It doesn’t have the soul that it had before in Polish.  I’m trying to put my finger on it, but the French seems a little stiff and the vocal track seems extra-produced.  Too loud and too clear when mixed with the band’s instruments and it’s just not what it was before like the first time at the jazz club, for example.  Again, this leitmotif song is also a metaphorical indicator for the stage in the relationship. She looks over at Wiktor who is cooly leaning on the wall off to the side (maybe too cool) and gives Zula a nod similar to his nod after the jazz club performance.  But this nod doesn’t have the effect it did then and seems oddly forced.  The record playing here in this posh Paris apartment compared to the Polish rural girl singing at the beginning of the film is night and day. It’s obvious why, if you think about it.  They’ve taken a folk Polish song, translated it to French for a rural Polish singer, then recorded and produced it in a slick Paris sound studio under difficult conditions.  How could the quality not suffer a bit?! Another example of the larger outside obstacles making it impossible for them, even in a free society like Paris, France.    

It cuts to them now walking home afterwards.  Immediately it’s apparent Zula is unhappy.  Wiktor recognizes this but apparently didn’t know while at the party.  As they pass a fountain next to the street, Zula throws the record in <splash> yet continues to mostly hold her sadness in, which has become more of a depression at this point.  Assimilating is one thing, but they have gotten into this habit of holding back and not being up front, maybe due to the social circles they run in now.  Zula cooly mentions that the French Director has fucked her well 6 times and "not like a Polish artist in exile,” which causes an eruption in Wiktor (what she wanted) and he slaps her.  

This is strange to mention but, technically, the slap doesn’t sync with the sound. Lol. I watched this part 3 or 4 times to make sure and it just doesn’t (unless there was a lag in the internet connection).  Maybe nobody else notices this, but I’ve had to edit-sync slaps, kicks and punches before many times on this very computer and immediately saw something didn’t look/sound right. After the hard slap, Zula raises up and says, “Now we’re talking”, which is sarcastic but also the truth.  Often one needs a crisis moment to break out of a behavioral habit and apparently the French translation broke the camel’s back. The next day Wiktor frantically goes to the Director’s apartment looking for Zula.  He stomps through the rooms looking for her.  The Director then says she went back to Poland.  Wiktor slowly walks out of the apartment with a terrified look on his face.   Wiktor has become unhinged and plays maniacally on the piano at the Jazz Club.  The other band members just stop playing and look at him as he bangs on the keys in isolation.  There is some slight comical levity here for a couple of seconds due to the look on the clarinet player’s face.    You assume Wiktor has lost his job.  He is now miserably pumping coins in a phone booth for talk time to find out where Zula is in Poland.  Afterwards, Wiktor goes to what I assume is an embassy.  A Polish man at a desk tries to dissuade him from leaving Paris and going back to Poland.  You can see the Eiffel Tower outside the window as the man asks Wiktor why he would ever want to leave this place.  He says Wiktor doesn’t exist anymore to Poland because he left and let down all the young people he worked with. The man takes a drink from his cup and reacts as if he’s spiked it with something strong, perhaps how he’s able to get through his job.  He then mentions there is a way Wiktor can go back if he truly regrets what he has done.  

The Exiles Return

It is 1959 and we see Zula back in Poland on a dreary, crowded train with peasants.  Soldiers whistle at her as she walks on a snowy road.  She has come to visit a very broken, gaunt Wiktor who is being held prisoner by the military for being an exile.  He says he has to be here for 15 years and got off lucky.  Zula gives the guard what I assume are cigarettes which buys them 10 minutes alone.  

His right hand has been beat severely.  They kiss and Zula says she will wait for him.  Wiktor tells her to find someone else, but Zula says she will get him out.

Cuts to 1964, 5 years later.  A performing Zula is on stage singing a ridiculous Latin-infused song with a black wig on, resembling a late Judy Garland.  She looks overweight and drunk with her comical, sombrero-wearing band. We now see an older Wiktor backstage with Kaczmarek who is holding an unhappy, despondent child.  Kaczmarek doesn’t look like he’s aged a bit and still has a detached soullessness about him.  With Kaczmarek, you wait for him to be rude or mean but he is not.  He always stays at a steady, robotic hum of cordiality.   It is revealed Wiktor can no longer play music because he can no longer use his right hand.  It is also now apparent that Zula married Kaczmarek in order for Wiktor to be released.  Zula now comes off stage and walks quickly toward them but drunkenly falls down. She manages to rapidly get up and falls directly into Wiktor’s arms, completely disregarding Kaczmarek and her son.  They go off to the restroom together and sit on the floor staring at one another.  Zula pulls off her wig, perhaps finally able to shed this horrible identity she's had to create to survive. 

She asks him to get her out of here...for good.  

The two take a crowded bus and get dropped off on a country road next to a lovely field.  They look slightly rejuvenated but stolid.  

Early in the film, Irena and Wiktor sat in the van while Kaczmarek took a walk to take a pee.  Kaczmarek then aimlessly walked into the ruins of this old church. He looked around, then left...point being we’ve seen this place before.  And earlier, even Kaczmarek’s face showed a certain amount of reverence for this old church and felt the power it gave off.  Wiktor and Zula now enter this same church.  There is a circular hole in the ceiling, perhaps so God can see them.    

They now kneel with a candle lit in front of them on an alter with a row of white pills. They have a brief, simple marriage ceremony. They both have a glow to them.  They cross themselves and mention God.  They ingest the pills.

They kiss.  

They then sit on a bench at dusk and look out into the field, holding hands, quiet.

You can hear the insects and an occasional bird chirp.  Both have dark circles under their eyes.  It’s so beautiful yet so sad.   Zula then says, “Let’s go to the other side.  The view will be better there”.  They stand and go, leaving an open frame.  A gentle gust blows the wheat from behind where they were sitting.  Perhaps God’s sigh...

This last time I watched, the ending really got me...and is powerful now as I write about it.  As mentioned in the intro, Pawlikowski’s last film Ida incorporated a particular style.  Pawlikowski never moved the camera until the end of that film, so when he did the viewer would be raised up in a transcendental way as the first external music came in, lifting us from the real world for a few moments.  I think he did the same thing here with Cold War in a different way. The moment of transcendence for this film comes at the end also but not with the movement of the camera but with the movement of the wheat behind the bench before cutting to black.  This film is high on realism, but this gust is something otherworldly, therefore a powerful contrast from the stark, real world tribulations previously in the entirety of the film up to this point.  This is what makes it so heartbreaking and beautiful and poetic all at the same time.  And also, for a moment, the viewer might weigh whether the fate of Wiktor and Zula is so horrible after all.   “for my parents” appears before the credits, pointing to the fact that the story is based on the filmmaker’s parents’ true experience during that time period.  Bach’s Goldberg Variations comes in and you know it’s Glen Gould when you hear the humming, which I don’t necessarily like but it doesn’t ruin the mood.  Bach was also used for the ending of Ida and is also the only non-diegetic music used for Cold War.  

In conclusion, I think every great film has to have a surface story that one can follow and then a large idea hidden within that story (or as a result) to meditate on which includes something deep about the human condition.  With some films, one has to work to find out what that larger idea is. For future posts, I may try to specifically focus on this “larger idea” rather that breaking down the entire film.  This often appears as a question, not an answer, and Cold War does this masterfully.

[fuzziekins]

I would like to ask you all of the pride questions from that one post.

Dammit Steve XD

Gender and pronouns?  Female and she/her are fine, as far as i know i’m cis. i don’t care if you call me dude, though. Dude can be anyone.

Romantic orientation? i use demi-whatromantic, with demiromantic as the microlabel. Most people know whatromantic as quoiromantic or quoi. i think what/quoi is typically known as a microlabel, but i relate to that more and feel it describes me more compared to demi which is why i focus more on that aspect.

Sexual orientation? In lamest terms? Asexual. In my terms? Stereotypical ace. In specific terms? S-x repulsed asexual.

Past labels you’ve used? i didn’t use anything before discovering asexuality because naive and oblivious, as far as i know. Before demi-whatromantic i briefly used demiromantic as a placeholder even though that didn’t totally feel right on its own.

How long have you been using your current labels? Asexual since late October 2017 and officially, or i guess out, since February 2018. Demi-whatromantic i think has been for maybe 6ish months now?

What made you pick your name? i had no say in my name lol. I haven’t changed it at all

What names have you gone by previously? Unless nicknames count for anything, just my regular boring name.

What names have you considered using? i’ve only ever considered using other names for me as a Pokemon trainer in the games which is obviously not the same. But, for the record, every time i start a game using the male trainer i’d use the name Larry.

Do you like your flag(s)? i don’t focus on the demiromantic flag as much, only because i feel less of the connection to compared to ace and what. The asexual flag has definitely given me a new appreciation for purple, but as a former art student i’ve been taught that black is typically the absence or color and white encompasses all the colors. so i do wish the ace flag had more colors just so i can stop referring to purple as the “only” color. i definitely appreciate and like the look of the whatromantic flag, but i don’t think as many people are aware of what it looks like or that it even exists. i especially love the shade of blue used in it.

Favorite flag(s) visually? Gonna be unoriginal and say the gay pride flag just because i love rainbows. 

Favorite colors? Blue has always been a favorite of mine, and i used to gravitate mostly towards lighter shades of purple but now i just include purple in general.

Favorite animals? Puppies, kitties, bunnies, hamsters, monkeys, ponies.... Actually, probably best just to say adorable fluffy animals.

Favorite things about being LGBT+? i like having an explanation for being me. i don’t look my age to begin with and i definitely don’t act like it. So people assuming there’s something wrong with me mentally because of it, or wanting to avoid me in general.... i know people have their feelings about stereotypes and a lot of times it is negative, but for me knowing that a stereotypical ace basically describes who i am, it feels reassuring. And i like knowing that i don’t have to act or think or do completely of what’s expected of me because in a heteronormative world, being LGBT+ completely flips that around. Even if to me, it doesn’t always feel like i have a place because i don’t know many queer people and i don’t get involved in things in general, somewhere in my mind i know that there’s a place for me.

Are you dysphoric? Not that i know of.

Are you religious? Nope. i don’t fast, i don’t keep kosher, i don’t go to temple, i never went to Hebrew school.... But it doesn’t make me any less connected to my religion and, as selfish as it sounds, i still wanna make a point of it and remind people, hey us Jews exist, too!

Are you questioning your identity? Some parts of it i do question sometimes, mostly in terms of aesthetic attraction. But i fluctuate with including that attraction in my identity. And i do question how much, if at all it does or could play a part in my romantic attraction. 

Are you in a relationship? Haha, funny. Nope.

Are you out of the closet IRL? For the most part, yes. It’s primarily in terms of saying i’m asexual or just queer, but part of that depends who i’m talking to, if or when it comes up in conversation, and how comfortable i feel talking to people about it.

Is your family supportive? i honestly don’t know if my extended family knows, even though i do post pride related things on my Instagram which some of them do follow and i have posted about it there. But, as annoyed as my mom can get with my ace jokes or comments sometimes, she accepts me for who i am and supports me, and has, probably before even knowing the term asexual existed, had an assumption a typical relationship happening for me was slim. And i know without a doubt that if my dad was still around he would definitely be supportive of me and not cared what i identified as, what i looked like, who i liked or didn’t like, or anything like that. 

Favorite LGBT+ celebrity or historical figure? Neil Patrick Harris is definitely one of them, and i think another favorite is probably Demi Lovato.

Favorite LGBT+ couple IRL? Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka. i love NPH and the family that he and David have are just the most precious things ever! Plus the way they go all out for Halloween every year? HELL. YES.

Favorite LGBT+ canon character? First one that comes to mind is Asami from Legend of Korra. Because Asami. Another one is Cyrus Goodman from Andi Mack. i loved watching his journey on the show and also knowing that there are kids who were watching Disney Channel that could not only relate to and look up to him as a queer character but also as a queer Jewish character. Plus he was just the most precious character and i just wanted to hug him!

Favorite LGBT+ canon fictional couple? Korra and Asami from Legend of Korra; Stef and Lena from The Fosters; Kat and Adena from The Bold Type.

Some characters you headcanon as LGBT+? Elsa and Honeymaren from Frozen 2. Don’t get me started, i will NEVER shut up. I’m going down with that ship.

Some LGBT+ pairings you ship? i know i already said Kat and Adena from the Bold Type. As of the current season they are - spoiler - not together and have not been done the justice to them as characters or their relationship. I continue to ship them, i love the chemistry the actors always have between them and how believable it is for their characters, and i’m just anxiously waiting for the day when they can hopefully FINALLY get back together.

Any celebrity crushes? If by crushes you mean celebrities i admire, look up to, think are cute, and would probably watch almost any show or movie if they were in it? Zendaya. The same has also applied to Corbin Bleu.

Any fictional crushes? As long as the same rule applies to the previous question and also includes being obsessed yet completely in control of that obsession and that character is also a muse for creativity? Elsa.

A trope you dislike about your identity? Probably that it’s a phase or i just haven’t met the right person yet. It took me probably too long to know let alone even understand why i didn’t think so much of romance or relationships and why i was never looking for or really wanting an actual relationship. For the most part, that’s been my whole life so to say my whole life is just some kind of phase or imply that i’m living it wrong? Just. No.

A trope about your identity that applies to you? Maybe this falls more under the stereotypical asexual label, but that aces can be very childlike. i’ve always been a kid at heart, i never really acted like my age, and yeah i can be really naive or clueless about a lot of things. 

Something you wish people understood about your identity? Probably just that people understood it’s an actual identity. It’s not a choice, it’s not a phase. It’s not a label someone created just to be able to fit in somewhere or for sh-ts and giggles. It’s an actual, legitimate, real identity. 

Something you dislike about being LGBT+? I feel like i can’t fully comment on it because sometimes i don’t fully feel LGBT+. Not having more than a couple of friends who identify as queer, not actively getting involved in the community or really wanting to be around people in general...i can only say what i dislike based on what i’ve seen online. And what i don’t like is that the LGBT+ community is supposed to be that - a community. It’s supposed to be a place where we can all relate to each other somehow, support each other and rely on each other. It’s supposed to be a place where, regardless of what label or how many labels we use, if we’re not straight it’s our place. We belong. But people still find a way to want to kick people out or treat people badly just because they don’t understand or agree on the label. Or maybe they don’t like or understand why someone chose a certain label or doesn’t have one at all or just uses queer. People still find a way to exclude and ignore and that’s not fair at all.

If you’re not cis, do you want HRT and/or surgery?

If you’re not straight, who was your first same-gender crush? Are we still going by either of my crush definitions from earlier....?

Do you align with any gay subcategories? (Butch/femme, bear/twink, etc.) Not that i know of. I don’t think i even know a lot, or maybe any of the subcategories at all besides those mentioned.

Do you have any LGBT+ idols? Elton John is the one that comes to mind. Knowing the life he had, the addictions he struggled with and ultimately overcame, becoming an activist and philanthropist especially for HIV/AIDS, growing up on his music... He dealt with a lot and has gone through so much but he’s come out so much stronger and has not only had a successful career but has also tried to do his part to help others for a cause that he believes in. 

Do you own pride merch? Would you like to? A pride hat, 2 pride scarves, a few pride pins, an asexual lanyard.... i would definitely like to have a t-shirt with an ace pun at it at some point, though.

Do you have a type in partners? Probably water. Or were you talking about actual human partners and not Pokemon partners in the games?

Do you have a type in friends? i actually don’t think i chose any of my friends. As far as i can think of, all of the friends i do have came into my life kind of by accident or by chance and they’re the ones who have stuck around. i do think most of my friends though have senses of humors and are loyal, although the closest ones are definitely WAY more levelheaded than i am! XD

[jewish-privilege]

...My weary tone doesn’t mean I’m not upset by [John] Cusack’s actions. The meme he shared is indeed unambiguously antisemitic: An image of a Jewish hand, marked by the star of David, crushing the people, accompanied by the quote, “To learn who rules over you simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize” — erroneously attributed to Voltaire, but actually from a neo-Nazi called Kevin Alfred Strom. Cusack added his own gloss, a glibly hateful “Follow the money.”

This was all bad enough. But in some respects, it was his confused attempts to atone that frustrate me most. He first defended the tweet, citing Israel’s “atrocities against the Palestinians,” then conceded that “even if you don’t have an anti-Semitic bone in your body, it is still an antisemitic cartoon”. He then explained that he initially thought the start of David signified Israel. Now he understands that yadda, yadda, yadda. He never did address the “Follow the money” quip.

My frustration is partly because, given the incessant controversy over anti-Semitism, it’s extraordinary that anyone can claim ignorance anymore. Was Cusack asleep during the firestorm surrounding Ilhan Omar’s “All about the Benjamin’s” comment? I’m also frustrated because the implication of his apology was that, had there been a symbol that could signify Israel without implying Jews, it would have been fine. I say this not as a defender of Israel, but as someone who believes that the Palestinians are being oppressed not by a world-conquering venal conspiracy, but by regular human beings.

...It’s the easiness of social media that is our downfall. Did John Cusack ponder his post for hours until he got it just right? Almost certainly not: I would guess that he was in the queue for the dry cleaners, sitting on the toilet, or half-watching TV when he lazily pushed the button.

None of that means that there wasn’t something real behind his desire to post. Anger on behalf the Palestinian people is of course not, in and of itself, illegitimate or anti-Semitic. Cusack may have been moved by very real suffering.

But what is truly poisonous about social media is that it provides a constant temptation to respond to genuine concerns in a facile way. Too often, we are drawn into a simplistic logic: I am angry about something, I want to address the cause of that anger, I will express my anger in the strongest possible terms, I will hate, I will draw on the most convenient way of expressing that hate.

And in the case of Israel-Palestine, anti-Semitism offers the most convenient form of hatred.

I don’t think we really know how to respond to convenience anti-Semitism of the Cusack-variety. Too often, Jews are working with an implicitly essentialist model of anti-Semitism in which a particular anti-Semitic incident is evidence of a wider world view that is implicitly or explicitly anti-Semitic. But what if there is no world view at all? What if all that exists are the lazy pleasures of hating, generated by equally lazy forms of empathy?

...John Cusack’s tweet didn’t help the Palestinian cause and it didn’t stop him from ruining his reputation.

What we desperately need right now is a collective effort to try and nurture a more reflective, less convenient, online discourse. This is probably a generational project and it’s difficult to know where to start. Still, it’s worth considering how, when we call anti-Semitism out online, we can refrain from the lazy hatred that Cusack expressed.

Might a patient, clear and calm explanation of where Cusack went from work better than mass derision and anger? One challenge here is that even those tweets that are carefully expressed can, if joined by many others, create a cumulative effect that ends up looking like a hate campaign — so-called “dogpiling.” I spent a portion of yesterday being accused by one tweeter of doing just that, despite trying (sometimes successfully) for years to be as civil as I am able. It may be that online restraint, posting only when one has something new and different to say, is the model to follow.

Restraint is not a fashionable virtue these days. Perhaps though a counter-cultural emphasis on not saying immediately what is on your mind could popularize the practice. Even then though, for a film star with declining name-recognition, the desire to be heard and state that “I am still here” may be too strong to resist.

[vi-olia]

Yuletide 2019 Letter

Dear Writer,

Hi! I am violia over on AO3 and viiolia here on tumblr.

I am so excited that you have been matched with me for this year’s Yuletide. This letter is intended to expand upon the small details that I gave you on the AO3 signup. If you’d prefer to not have any more details from me, then I understand! Good luck, thank you for writing in these small fandoms, and I can’t wait for the 25th!

On the other hand, if you’d like some more info from me, then please read on. What you’ll find here is a list of my likes and dislikes, and then a rundown of each of my requested fandoms, in which I explain why I love the characters and fandoms that I’ve chosen, so that you may get an idea of what I’d like to see in potential fics, without me just straight up telling you what to do.

ABOUT ME

Likes:

If there’s only one thing that you want to remember about me, please let it be this: at the end of the day, I will love any fic if it is driven by strong, well-thought-out characters and relationships.

Happy endings! I enjoy angst and hurt/comfort, but please let there be a happy ending for all.

Snappy dialogue.

I love canon! All these canons. I also like canon divergence and post-canon fics.  

Humour, romance, mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, drama, adventure, magical realism.

I generally enjoy fandom tropes, as long as they’re adapted to suit the specific characters and relationship dynamics. Friends-to-lovers, or 5+1 things, are two tropes that immediately come to mind. The same goes for AUs: I love an AU if there’s been good thought and worldbuilding put into how the specific characters and relationships would fit into a different canonical universe.

I love slash. All my requests contain characters that I love to ship together. I love smut and romance and getting-together fics and established relationship fics. But if slash really isn’t your thing - I won’t mind a gen or pre-slash story either. Again, at the end of the day, if the fic is driven by strong, interesting, emotional characters and arcs, whether in relationships or not, I will be loving it!

In terms of smut, I really enjoy (again, I’m a broken record) when it’s informed by the characters’ emotions/dynamics/relationship at that certain point in the story. I enjoy reading more vanilla smut and more kinky smut; specific likes include praise kink, consent play/dubcon (where it’s still clear that both parties have consented to this kink), body worship, semi-public sex (preferably close calls, or without being caught), tender sex, and rough sex (not too much actual pain though). My bookmarked works on AO3 can be pretty, uh, enlightening in terms of what smut I like to read. Also, this is pedantic but I prefer the word “come” rather than “cum”.

Dislikes/DNWs:

Animal and child abuse/death.

Character death, or characters with cancer/terminal illnesses.

Unhappy endings.

Horror, zombies, cannibalism, and extreme/non-canon-typical violence.

PWP. Don’t get me wrong - I love porn. But please have some plot in there!

De-aging.

Student/teacher relationships, and any circumstances/relationships/power dynamics where a main character is taking unfair or malicious advantage of another.

Rape.

Infidelity.

First person POV.

In terms of smut, I’m really not a fan of BDSM, scat, watersports, vomit, extreme humiliation, body horror, or bestiality.

BLACKKKLANSMAN Ron Stallworth, Flip Zimmerman

This film really got me good. Everything about it struck me - the message, the characters, the plot, the cinematography, the music. I quickly fell in love with Ron and Flip and the idea of those two becoming friends (or something more).

I love Ron Stallworth for his courage and wit. I love how he approaches life and people. He’s so open, low-key and easy to get along with. He’s not quick to judge anyone. Perhaps this stems partly from the time he spent at college. But I truly feel that if someone were to come out to Ron Stallworth, he would never discriminate against them. Maybe he’d need some time to fully understand. Maybe he’s needed some time to fully come to terms with his own sexuality. But he’s not one to judge. And he’s so smart and such a quick-thinker. And probably a little kinky, which I love. Okay I’ll stop rambling about Ron now.

Time to ramble about Flip instead. Flip Zimmerman: the Gruff, Quiet Romantic. I love how Flip can seem so immovable, always unfazed. He and Ron are similar, in this way. But Ron is way more in touch with his emotions, whereas Flip is not so much. Or maybe he is in touch with his emotions, but he just doesn’t often express them. I love that Flip needs to really trust someone before he lets them get close. He’s not quick to judge others, either, but I think he can certainly hold some judgements about himself, and out of the both of them, I’d say Flip would have more trouble coming to terms with his sexuality, or admitting his feelings for Ron. But oh boy - I think Flip would be fantastic in bed. Yes ma’am. Mmm… anyway.

One thing I’m very aware of is that being gay or exploring your sexuality was not totally fun or freeing in 1970s America. It came with a lot of serious dangers. Being outed could cost you your job, your safety, your family, and more. Writer, I would appreciate it very much if you could take this historical context into account. It directly informs whatever friendship/relationship Ron and Flip have. I would find it very difficult to feel immersed in a story about two men, one Jewish and one African-American, who are coming to terms with their feelings for one another, or entering into a romantic and/or sexual relationship with one another, or forging a close friendship with one another, if the story did not take into account the serious issues of racism and homophobia which pervade the era and setting of this film. (AKA, please don’t have them sitting in a public cafe holding hands, or something else that’s unrealistic for this time period.)

My preference for these two characters is clearly skewed towards slash. I would love to read about them forging a relationship, romantic or sexual or both. Maybe they go from friends to lovers, or they do the only fun thing there is to do in Colorado Springs and hike into the wilderness for a private moment. Or maybe they’re in an established relationship, and navigating their lives as a closeted gay couple who both work for the police department. Or maybe you think of something else entirely; I can’t wait. Alternatively, maybe you’d prefer to write gen or pre-slash instead, and in that case, please feel free. I would love reading about the growth of Ron and Flip’s friendship, or more of their time working together as police officers. Ultimately, I am just so excited to potentially receive a fic from you, for me, which I think is so special.

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE RPF Colin Jost, Michael Che

Although the first year or two they spent as hosts of Weekend Update was fairly rocky at times, Colin Jost and Michael Che have really come into their own with this segment on SNL, and the hate comments I used to see on their videos a couple of years ago have almost all changed to comments of support and appreciations of their comedy. What makes them so good at this is their dynamic. They bounce off of either other constantly on the show, and they work so well together - they have to, in this job!

Michael Che is the one true trash fire that I know and love. What is he doing? I don’t know. I don’t think he knows either. And I love him for it. One thing that really stands out to me about Che is how good he is at comedy, and particularly stand-up. I can tell that he seriously puts a lot of thought and effort into his delivery. He makes it sound so effortless and off the top of his head, but in reality he is practiced and professional and knows his craft. His humour often comments on big issues like racism and gender, and I personally really enjoy this commentary-style comedy, where you can poke fun at everyone but also have a serious message to convey as well. Personality-wise, I love how Che is a selective over-thinker. He can be so overly conscious of some things, and so oblivious and apathetic about others. I think he might struggle, or has previously struggled with his sexuality; but I also think Colin makes him weak at the knees, and Che finds himself simultaneously wanting to take Colin on a date, and fuck him into the mattress, and run away and hide in another country, and fall asleep for three years, all at once.

Colin’s humour is more silly and less ‘controversial’ than Che’s. I don’t enjoy it less, just differently. Colin definitely has his life more together than Che does - or at least, is great at acting like he’s got his life together. I love that Colin is easygoing and quietly calm and confident, but beneath that, I think he struggles with some overthinking tendencies too. And sometimes he really doesn’t feel confident at all. I think he’s pretty in touch with his emotions, but when it comes to expressing them, sometimes he might just need a moment to get the right words. Especially if he’s nervous. But I love that Colin really likes Che. He finds Che so hilarious (and vice versa, of course). I love how Che can always make Colin laugh out loud, or do his cute little smile that’s a twist of his lips. I love that they can bounce off each other in progressing a joke to the point where it seems like they’re the only two people in the room.

Truly, I think they’re both trash fires in their own ways. I think it’s a minor miracle if they get together, because they’re both second-guessing themselves at some point, and they both treasure their friendship so incredibly much. But that’s why I love them so much - because of how closely tied together they are. They truly value each other in their lives. They are best friends and close confidants and they’ve gone through a lot together.

I love reading about Colin and Che and their lives working at SNL. The work week is incredibly hectic at that show - even more so now that Colin and Che are head writers, as well as managing and appearing in their own segment. I find the whole cast of SNL fascinating and hilarious, and I think a lot of people romanticise what it might be like to work in such a demanding job with such a close-knit community of people. I think who they are at this point in time is tied very closely with their jobs, especially because they work together. If you’re writing a story or some scenes that take place at SNL, I don’t mind if you include other SNL cast members in passing interactions, for the sake of verisimilitude.

Writer, I would love it if you could just pretend that Colin Jost is not engaged to Scarlett Johansson. Or if there’s another way you want to deal with that, then go for it. Please just heed my DNWs: no infidelity, and no unhappy endings. Other than that, I’m so excited about any story you have about these two guys. I clearly ship them together; I’d love to see some aspect of their relationship, maybe getting together or in an established relationship, maybe during the SNL season or something they get up to during their summer holidays. If you’re more of a gen or pre-slash writer, I totally understand - just their dynamic as it is now, as friends who bounce off one another and get on each others’ nerves but ultimately understand each other on a deeper level than anyone else around them, is so interesting and entertaining for me to watch and I’d love to read more of it.

Side note: Colin and Che did an advertisement for Red Nose Day on the Weekend Update desk in which Kate McKinnon, in an old-lady character that I think embodies all of fandom, lobbies for them to kiss. Colin kisses Che on the cheek, but Che was totally ready for a peck on the lips. THIS VIDEO IS MAYBE POSSIBLY REQUIRED VIEWING FOR THESE CHARACTERS. Search their names + Red Nose Day on Youtube to find it; requires a VPN if you’re not based in the USA.

LEGALLY BLONDE Elle Woods, Vivian Kensington

I have two words for you. LAWYER WIVES. Or law student wives. That’s more than two words, but you get the idea.

A couple of months ago, I rewatched Legally Blonde for the first time in many years. My biggest takeaway from this viewing? ELLE AND VIVIAN NEED TO DITCH THOSE GROSS GUYS AND JUST GET TOGETHER INSTEAD. Seriously! Warner is a sexist and self-absorbed asshole. Both Elle and Vivian deserve so much better… aka, each other.

The biggest thing I love about Elle Woods is her positive and caring attitude. She rarely lets things get her down, nor does she fall into self-pity. And Vivian Kensington just screams smol baby gay to me and I adore her for it. Please can someone (Elle) walk into Vivian’s life and pull her out of the humdrum of repetitive, lame, often orgasm-less intercourses with self-absorbed men and into the beautiful world of women pleasuring other women one, two, three times over. But also I do love how Vivian puts on a strong, confident face and is so dedicated to her studies and career but you can tell, beneath all that, she’s still figuring all this stuff out.

I think Vivian can learn a lot from Elle about how to let go, have fun, and most of all, how to be more considerate of others; I think Elle can learn a lot from Vivian about discipline, duty, responsibility, and the more realistic/gritty aspects of being a lawyer. I think that together, these two women could balance each other out incredibly well. They could learn and grow together and support each other.

I think Elle’s naïveté could sometimes get annoying, especially to someone like Vivian, who is incredibly knowledgeable, realistic and down-to-earth. But that’s not to say that Elle is not those things as well. And in fact, I think Vivian can be quite naive herself when it comes to emotions and relationships; this is an area she’s not totally confident in. It’s pretty clear that Vivian’s internalised some sexist and misogynistic attitudes (see: slut-shaming Elle when she was sexually harassed by Callahan). I think Vivian’s jump to conclusions here can also be attributed to her tendency to act first, and ask questions later; she’s quicker to judge others than Elle is.

I hope this whole bunch of random thoughts I have about these characters gives you some idea of why I love them so much. What I’ve written here leans more towards femslash; but please know that, if you prefer to write gen, I would of course gladly accept any gen fic that you gift me. Because it’ll be from you, to me! And that is something so special and exciting. At the end of the day, I just want to read about these two characters growing closer together, whether that be in a friendship or relationship.

Note: if you want to include Emmett and/or Warner in some capacity, I don’t mind, just as long as the main focus of the story is on Elle and Vivian. Tbh I think Elle and Emmett would be awesome best friends.

[mazikeentheshedimqueen]

Jewish Magical Creatures/Beings (with recs)

So @biperchik​ was looking for some resources on Jewish magical creatures and I was going to make a short list and message them but then...this happened. Anyway, I’ve been planning on making some info posts since I just finished my Jewish Magic class. So I guess we’re starting here! I’ll be posting detail posts for different categories soon.

From what I have read I would say there are three major categories of “creature,” all anthropomorphic: golems, dybbuks, and demons. There are others that don’t fit into these, which I’ll list further down, but as far as I can tell these three categories are the main ones.

Golems:

·         Schwartz has a section in Tree of Souls from pages 278 to 286 which covers pretty much all the main golem narratives. There are also a few passages in other sections which deal with golems, including in his creation of man section (some narratives say that Adam was a golem, which is a really interesting intersection of the two creation narratives in Genesis and I will blab about that later on my magic blog 😝)

·         Goldsmith, Arnold L. The Golem Remembered: 1909-1980: Variations of a Jewish Legend

·         Schäfer, Peter. “The Magic of the Golem: The Early Development of the Golem Legend.” Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 46, no. 1-2, 1995, pp. 249–261., doi:10.18647/1802/jjs-1995 (This one is a journal article, I don’t know how accessible it is or what level of info you’re looking for)

·         Golem! Danger, Deliverance, and Art by Emily D. Bilski. Haven’t looked at this one much but it has some cool art as well as the text which I have not read at all and it looks like it talks a lot about different portrayals (probably mostly modern/contemporary)

·         Scholem, Gershom Gerhard. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. This is a book about Kabbalah generally; I know it talks somewhat about golems specifically and I think a number of other books on Kabbalah do as well since its tied in tightly with Jewish mysticism (because golems use name and letter magic and are almost always made by rabbis…I have words to say about “acceptable” acts of magic and elitism and patriarchy, but that’s a whole other rant)

·         Golem by Moche Idol (haven’t looked at this but my prof recced it)

 Dybbuks:

 Other than Schwartz, I only have one rec for this: Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism by J.H. Chajes. It gets pretty technical in some places (apparently, our professor had us skip them) but it’s pretty good and has a lot of information and narratives surrounding the exorcism of dybbuks in Early Modern Europe.

 Oh, also Trachtenburg’s Jewish Magic and Superstition has a number of chapters on spirits.        

 Demons:

Okay so this category is really wide. I’m gonna give you some recs but mostly just subcategories to look into. Also infodumping because demons are my jam right now.

Jewish demonology goes back to at least the adoption of the Zoroastrian mythology into Jewish belief, since that is where a lot of this comes from. A lot of Jewish (and non-Jewish) demonology also comes from the gods of other surrounding societies.

Later Jewish demonology kind of faded into the background and Medieval/early modern European Jewish demonology is a lot less intricate and varied probably, but is also probably what most resources are going to be pulling from.

Joshua Trachtenburg’s Jewish Magic and Superstition is great and has a couple chapters dealing specifically with demons. It’s pretty old so it might be available for cheap/free, idk. My prof just posted literally the whole book in our resources for the class. It’ll also give you a lot of terms which might make finding stuff easier.

Schwartz has a big section on demons (and also Gehenna). It has a lot of older and more specific stuff too.

Different things to look for:

Lilith and the lilim are a big deal; Lilith is one of the very few specific demons that has survived into the medieval and early modern era.

Ashmadai is the king of demons (originally Zoroastrian). There are some stories about him and King Solomon from pretty early in the integration of his mythology into Judaism.

Another word describing demons in general is mazikeen/mazikeem

There’s a story called The Tale of the Jerusalemite which includes Ashmadai. A guy winds up in a town/kingdom of demons, some of whom study Torah. Ashmadai is really into Torah in the Solomon myths too. Trachtenburg talks about this also; its related to an idea that demons are constantly searching to become a more complete and perfect creation.

The main creation myth for demons is that they are unfinished because God started making them before Shabbos and had to stop, then left them that way in order to show the importance of keeping the Sabbath.

Magical creatures from other cultures were integrated into medieval/early modern European Judaism with a creation myth saying that they were the children of Adam copulating with a demon (possibly Lilith?) during his (100 year?) separation from Eve after leaving the Garden of Eden. Trachtenburg talks about this too.

 More animal-like creatures (from the “mythological creatures” section of Tree of Souls, p. 144-151)

·         Adne Sadeh,  who doesn’t fit in this category because it’s a kind of primitive man but it is so freaking cool so I don’t care. They’re attached to the earth by an umbilical cord.

·         Leviathan

o   Sea monster

o   Want dragons? Here is a dragon

o   The Great Sea/Okeanos is on top of Leviathin’s fins.

o   God takes this guy for walks

o   We get to eat it in the World to Come

·         The Ziz

o   Big bird. Very big bird. The ocean only comes up to its ankles and one time its egg broke and flooded sixty cities

o   Messenger of God

o   We get to eat it in the World to Come

·         The Re’em

o   A horned creature kind of like a unicorn or rhino but like…big. Really big. “A re’em that is one day old is the size of Mount Tabor” big.

·         The Phoenix

o   “the only creature that didn’t eat the  fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

o   Guards earth from the sun

o   “Over a thousand years, each Phoenix becomes smaller and smaller until it is like a fledgling, and even its feathers fall off. Then G-d sends two angels, who restore it to the egg from which it first emerged, and soon these hatch again, and the Phoenix grows once again, and remains fully grown for the next thousand years.”

·         The Lion of the Forest Ilai

o   It’s like a lion but it roars super loud. I don’t know how big a parasang is but it made Rome shake from four hundred parasangs away.

o   Basically there’s a line in Amos 3:8 that uses lions as a metaphor for G-d and the story says Caesar was like “hey lions aren’t that bad people kill lions” and Rabbi Joshua ben Haninah was like “um no not this lion.”

 I really can’t recommend Tree of Souls enough. I’ve been writing fantasy for a long time and I was doing primarily Celtic paganism for a long time and that book really opened my eyes and showed me that I could find the things I was looking for in my own culture. That’s also where I learned about the Shekinah and started to feel like there might actually be a place for me in the religious part of this culture and I didn’t have to imagine G-d the way They’re portrayed in mainstream (and particularly Christian) culture. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, and everything has sources and annotation which make it a great jumping off point, as well. It’s HUGE so it might look intimidating if you’re not into that but all the individual myths are very short. Also I think Schwartz has some other books that might be less academic and tome-like.

[ruminativerabbi]

The End of Privacy

I have been revised! The news came just the other day in an email from ancestry.com informing me that my DNA profile has been revised in light of serious amounts of new data that they have recently processed and which now allow them to refine my ancestral portrait based on the DNA sample I sent them last spring. And now for the results: instead of being of 96% European Ashkenazic heritage, 2% Sephardic, 1% South-East Asian (a true mystery) and 1% of indistinct origin (whatever that meant exactly), my DNA profile has now been revised to yield the completely un-startling result that, genetically speaking (as well as by disposition, worldview, and appearance), I am of 100% Ashkenazic/European origin. Was I surprised? Not very! And yet…I had come to like the idea of having some weirdly inexplicable Sri Lankan blood in me somewhere, something that, at the very least, could have turned into a good short story. I suppose I’ll get over it. I might as well! 

Joan took the test too and received similarly expected results. I suppose most people do. But, of course, not all do. I wrote to you last year about the remarkable way that a woman from Chicago discovered that her (apparently) 100% Irish Catholic father turned out to have started out in life as a 100% Jewish baby boy who was sent home with the wrong set of parents and whose real parents (i.e., the woman who gave birth to him and his biological father) took whom the (actually) Irish Catholic baby who grew up to be a Jewish man from the Bronx and the patriarch of a large, complicated Jewish family. (If you find that confusing, you can revisit that letter by clicking here.) There, I mused aloud about the malleable boundaries of identity, about what it means to be who we are—and what that means with respect to the ultimate definition of Jewishness or, for that matter, any kind of identity deemed to inhere in an individual at birth. To my great surprise, I actually received an email from the woman with the Jewish Irish Catholic father in response to what I wrote about her case and I was very gratified indeed by her very generous appraisal of what I had to say about her situation and her father’s.

You have to be a serious genealogist to take advantage of most of what these online DNA sites offer. When I visit the ancestry.com website, for example, I can see the names of more than a dozen people whom the site says are “almost definitely” my fourth or fifth cousins. (Fifth cousins are people, one of whose thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents was a sibling of one of the other person’s thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents.) I’ll have to upgrade my membership if I want actually to contact any of them, but I haven’t taken that step. Nor do I think I will in the future. (In all fairness, they’ve also dangled the names of two second cousins to see if I’ll take the bait. So far, I’ve resisted.) But it turns out that there is a lot more to all of this than learning the names of theoretical cousins possibly descended from theoretical siblings who lived in the eighteenth century.

One of the side developments of all this DNA testing is the discovery some men have made, not of distant cousins, but of children inadvertently fathered somewhere along the way and in any number of different ways. (This phenomenon, which will only become more common in the coming years, has touched one family in our congregation and it has touched my own family as well. Those two stories were different in detail, but identical in terms of result…and, although both appear to be having happy endings, it feels unlikely that there are not out there people whose entire lives have been or will be turned upside down by this kind of unanticipated revelation.) Another has to do with the forensic use of these data banks to solve crimes long consigned to the “cold case” bin and only now becoming solvable in the wake of the proliferation of these online DNA banks.  You may recall reading about the arrest of the man police accuse of being the so-called “Golden State Killer,” a violent criminal considered likely to be responsible for fifty rapes and a dozen murders committed between 1976 and 1986 whose identity was only revealed to the authorities after they uploaded DNA taken from the crime scenes to a site called GETmatch.com. (To read more about that specific case, click here. Making that specific case more interesting is the fact that although the suspect did not personally offer his DNA to any of the online testing sites, a few of his relatives did…and matching the crime-scene DNA to their profiles led to the arrest of the sole individual to whom they were all related.)

But the specific issue I want to write about this week has to do neither with the discovery of unknown offspring nor the solution of cold-case crimes. Instead, I’d like to write about an issue that feels as though it has the potential to dwarf both those issues in terms of the impact it could conceivably have on society.

To date, about fifteen million people have consciously and intentionally sent in samples of their DNA for analysis to sites like 23andme.com or ancestry.com. Another couple of million have signed up at a few less well-known sites. We are, therefore, talking about far less than 10% of American citizens, but the implications of this phenomenon are far greater than the numbers suggest. Just this week, a study co-written by Yaniv Erlich, Tal Shor, Itsik Pe’er, and Shai Carmi was published in the journal Science that suggested just how important this whole phenomenon is…and how it will soon affect the lives of millions of people who themselves have not sent in their DNA for analysis.

To date, about sixty percent of Americans of North European descent—Brits, Germans, Poles, Danes, Swedes, etc.—can be identified through these databases regardless of whether they have personally sent in their DNA for analysis. And that number is only the beginning: within two or three years, the authors of the Science essay imagine that a full ninety percent of Americans whose families originate in northern Europe will be identifiable through their DNA even if they themselves have not personally contributed any DNA sample.

To me, that sounded unbelievable. It’s one thing, after all, for my ancestry.com page to say that mitchKK (whoever he is) and I are “highly likely” to be second cousins. (I think we probably are cousins, by the way—the 2nd K matches the odd way my great-grandparents spelled their last name so I’m guessing one of his grandfathers must have been one of my grandmother’s brothers.) But that only sounds plausible because we both contributed samples of our DNA and so opened ourselves up to being identified as each other’s relative. But how could this possibly work with people who specifically have not contributed their DNA? That’s what I set myself to trying to figure out.

I’m not sure I understand the Science article entirely correctly. (To try for yourself, click here.) But as far as I can understand, the whole thing has to do with third cousins because, it turns out, the way the tests work is precisely to identify people whose DNA samples match closely enough for them to be third cousins, i.e., the great-grandchildren of siblings. Most of us apparently have about 800 people in the world whose DNA matches ours to that extent. And if just one of those people is in the data base, then someone who truly knows what he or she is doing can extrapolate information based on other public records to find a trail to a sought-after individual even if that person has not personally contributed DNA of his or her own.  This does not bode well for people who value their privacy.

The authors of the Science article chose thirty DNA test results at random from the GEDmatch database and then, by analyzing that data and using public information available to all, they were able to identify third cousins of about 60% the people whose DNA they had selected for study. (GEDmatch, with only a million customers, is significantly smaller than its competitors but was amenable to allowing the experiment to proceed.). In an article describing the experiment published in the New York Times this week (click here), Heather Murphy quoted Yaniv Erlich, one of the authors of the Science article, as saying that, “to identify an individual of any ancestry background, all that is needed is a database containing two percent of the target population.” That stopped me in my tracks.  

Is that really possible? Graham Coop, a genetics professor at the University of California Davis who is cited in the Times article, thinks so and is quoted as saying that “society is not far from being able to identify 90 percent of people through the DNA of their cousins in genealogical databases.” In my opinion, anyone who doesn’t find that both startling and seriously unsettling probably hasn’t thought the matter through carefully enough!

I’ve been sensitive for a long time to the slow erosion of personal privacy in our American culture. For most of us, that thought conjures up almost funny images of some drone at the NSA poring over trillions of emails that could not possibly be of interest to anyone other than the person to whom they were sent. But the thought that society seems to be blundering almost unawares into a future in which personal privacy is a thing of the past and the fullness of an individual’s genetic heritage is suddenly a matter of public record regardless of whether that individual has or hasn’t chosen to become part the digital quarry from which amateurs like myself presumed such data could only be mined—that seems to me to be far beyond something reasonably referenced as a quirky innovation of the digital age. The right to personal privacy in life—to live free without the oversight of others and without their interference—is one of the fundamental privileges of citizens in a democracy. That we appear to be on the verge of losing control over that foundational right is just another sign of just how out of control things are as we barrel into the future only vaguely aware of what we ourselves have wrought.