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pynkhues · 5 years ago

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I’m sure you’ve already gotten a bunch of asks since Manny’s Crime King interview! I’m just like confused about him saying he’s enamored by her world but honestly like how is his different (besides his obvious commitment to the game) he lives in a nice loft, takes his kid to baseball, drives a fancy car, and plays tennis at the club. It’s not like he’s living the life of a thug. I guess I’m not getting the exact contrast of their worlds.

(Rest of my ask) I’m probably missing some obvious point here which is why I’m asking you lol helllppp

I do think Rio’s enamoured with Beth’s world, yes! I think that really boils down to the fact that while on paper Beth and Rio aren’t living dissimilar lives in terms of their roles as parents, and while they obviously now share parts of the criminal world, I do think the show is actually pretty specific in how it represents those worlds, particularly in terms of the masculine / feminine, and how a part of the curiosity around each other is in viewing one another as a key that both compliments their own world, while also unlocking the other’s one for them.

The gendering of spaces in storytelling – but particularly films and TV is, hilariously, a topic that I’m incredibly passionate about and have both written it a lot in my original work, and written about it a lot for magazines, journals and media sites (I’m actually writing an essay at the moment for a literary journal about LGBTQI cinema and how lesbian romances are highly domesticised [i.e. Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Handmaiden, The Favourite, The Kids are Alright] while gay romances are usually very pointedly about keeping away from domestic spaces, moving and traveling [i.e. Brokeback Mountain, The Talented Mr Ripley, Moonlight, Midnight Cowboy, even Call Me By Your Name is heavily focused on being Americans abroad aka away from home] but that all feels like a different story, haha).

Luckily for me, Good Girls is actually about as obsessed with the gendering of spaces as I am. It’s a major, major throughline throughout the show for many of the characters, but particularly Beth and Rio, and their intrigue with the other’s spaces – her interest in his powerful, highly masculine one, and his with her deceptively innocent, strongly feminine one – is really central to their intrigue with each other more broadly.

So to talk about this, we probably need a little bit of context.

(Under a cut because this is literally 4,000 words)

Gendering Spaces in Cinema

It’s probably not a surprise to anyone here, but places and spaces in stories are about as gendered – if not more gendered – as they are in daily life. In particular, cinema’s visual and textual language has historically been very clear:

The inside is female. The outside is male.

This concept has really been around since the beginning of cinema but became very popularised through Westerns in the late 1920s onwards, and really underlined by war films particularly during propaganda cinema in WWII. Men are outside, battling the elements and other men, claiming land, building outwards, while women are at home – either literally or figuratively (if they’re actually out at war, like in the utterly fabulous So Proudly We Hail!, they’re at the ‘home base’ as nurses) – building inwards. Men protect the home while women create it.

Westerns feature these images very potently and very literally. Almost every single western dating back to the 1910s will have some combination of these two shots:

a) Woman at home, looking out into the wild:

b) Man leaving home, stepping out into the wild:

(These two stills are from John Ford’s The Searchers which is generally regarded as one of the greatest Westerns of all time. It’s………very racist and misogynistic, as many were and still are, but in terms of technicality and visual language, it’s a very well-made film, albeit not one I enjoyed).

The purpose at the time, of course, was steeped in historic sexism and invested in maintaining that culture, particularly westerns and war films which are heavily devoted to ‘macho’ narratives. Women were passive, men were active, but these images really set the stage for how the ideas of ‘space’ continues to exist in cinema. A fact that’s bolstered by broader social discourses that still exist today – schools, grocery stores, laundromats are inherently ‘female’ spaces because they are seen as an extension of the home, while police stations, car dealerships, warehouses, are inherently ‘male’ spaces because they’re about work, protecting and providing for a home, and being pointedly outside of that domestic space aka ‘the wild’. It’s not an accident that the girls are robbing grocery stores and day spas, but I’ll get back to that, haha.

These ideas of gendered spaces underpin everything we watch, no matter the genre.

Sure, these ideas can be subverted to varying degrees of effectiveness (often it’s steeped in my least favourite trope – the ‘not like other girls’ heroine), but you can’t subvert a trope without actually acknowledging it exists. Sometimes these subversions are done brilliantly too – like in Legally Blonde which was not just about Elle existing in a space that was quintessentially coded as male, but embracing her femininity and womanhood within that space; and often brutally too in films like Winter’s Bone, Room and The Nightingale which all brutalise women in ‘male spaces’ while simultaneously weaponizing female spaces against them – usually the home. The lead character of Winter’s Bone is going to lose her house unless her absent father shows up in court, the lead character of Room creates a home that is simultaneously a sanctuary and a mockery of a sanctuary to try and protect her son from reality and survive, the lead character of The Nightingale has her home invaded, her husband and baby murdered, and is horrifically raped within that home.

Hometown Horror: a divergence

This is a slight aside to where I’m going with this overall, but please indulge me, haha. I’m a big fan of horrors and thrillers, which explore this in a really stark way. In that, the invasion of a home or a domestic space – whether by ghost, demon or serial killer, is, generally speaking, synonymous with the invasion of a woman’s body and the violation of her as a person.

Films that focus on a female survivor or a ‘final girl’ are very generally focused on the invasion of her home as much as it’s focused on the invasion of her body. Think The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Scream, The Babadook, Hereditary, The Conjuring, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Panic Room. The violation of a woman’s home is the invasion of her, because cinema relies on over 100 years of movies telling us that a house and the woman who lives in it are symbolically the same thing.

Horror films that focus on men are very rarely centred in the home. It’s men travelling, or men visiting a woman’s home, or men who’ve been taken. Think of the first Saw movie which takes place in a mysterious basement, Hostel which is at a hostel, Dawn of the Dead at a shopping mall, An American Werewolf in London while two men are on holiday, The Evil Dead is in a cabin, Get Out is at his girlfriend’s family home.

There are exceptions, of course! Family home invasion films like The Purge, Funny Games and The Strangers are rooted in the violation of that home, but still. You’ll generally find that it manifests differently narratively speaking for men and women. Rear Window too takes place entirely in a man’s apartment – but it’s interesting to note that most of the ‘horror’ comes from him spying on somebody else’s home – notably a woman’s, The Descent too is very much about women and is set during cave diving. Still! These are all exceptions, not the rule.

Good Girls and Gendered Spaces

Every single space in Good Girls is gendered. It’s actually one of the things I seriously love about the show because it’s thoughtfully done, and it is deliberate. We know it is, because they tell us explicitly in the writing multiple times. I mean – hell, think of Ruby telling us (well, telling Rio, haha) way back at the end of 1.04 when they’re selling him on the idea of washing cash through Cloud 9 – “Nobody thinks twice about a woman buying her husband a TV or new tires for the minivan.” A store like that is gendered, and Ruby’s reinforcing it by saying it’s a place women go to build a home. It hasn’t been weaponized yet - - but our girls know how to weaponize it. They’re playing on the fact that people think women’s spaces are effectively impotent, and they’re telling Rio – and us as an audience – that they’re going to exploit it.

This is an idea the show revisits frequently. Women’s spaces are – both in life and in storytelling – spaces that are viewed as passive because they are representative of women, and what the show is – I believe – very invested in, is showing how those spaces are fundamentally active. If you want a house to represent a woman – well, okay. Then you get to see what’s under the rug, y’know?

I’m going to come back to the home thread – because I really do think it’s very important, and I think the way the show depicts people in those spaces (and invading those spaces) is significant – but it’s not just homes that are looked at in this way. The show is very specific about having feminine spaces and masculine spaces, with only a few in between (and usually those in-between spaces are very specifically for Stan and Ruby, showing just how in-sync they are with each other and how much they operate within a shared space). Beyond the women’s homes, there are the kids’ schools, Fine & Frugal (very important here to note that Annie emasculates Boomer in what is an associated female space and that he retaliates by attempting to rape her in her own home aka not only another female space, but a space that is symbolically Annie, something he repeats later with Mary Pat – a violation on essentially every character, narrative and symbolic level, again), the waxing salon, Nancy’s day spa, Jane’s dance recital (and actually the physical object of the dubby – being a highly feminine object lost in a very masculine space), and already what we know of s3, with Ruby being at a nail salon and Beth being at a paper / card store.

The show also has very masculinized places – I’d argue Boland Motors is one of the biggest ones – very much about ‘boys and their toys’, which is why Beth pointedly feminising it when she takes over is so significant and symbolically indicative of Beth’s claiming of that space; but also spaces like the police station, the drug dealer’s house in 2.07, the hotel suite Boomer briefly occupies, even to an extent the church. When the girls are in these spaces, there’s a distinct feeling of encroaching on territory that isn’t theirs, or being in spaces that they don’t belong in. This is often done as a two-hander too – the police station and the church Ruby doesn’t belong in anymore, not necessarily as a woman, but as a criminal.

Nothing though, from a technical standpoint, is more masculine than the spaces that are shown to be Rio’s. From the warehouse spaces to the bar to his loft to his car, Rio’s ‘places’ are distinctly masculine and generally placed in direct contrast with Beth’s femininity. But I’ll come back to that point too.

Home, Identity and Invasion

Almost every female character on this show has a very defined domestic space, from Beth, Ruby and Annie, to Mary Pat, Marion and Nancy. These spaces are representative of not just who they are, but who they are as women, and really comes to routinely represent the interior lives of these characters. This is probably the clearest in 2.09 when Beth is uncharacteristically messy following Dean taking their kids, and in 2.06, when Beth and Dean switch roles, and Dean is incapable of maintaining that domestic space because it’s not his. But let’s not start there.

Let’s start with Annie.

Annie’s apartment is fun, feminine (but not overly so), youthful, sweet, and generally a bit of organized chaos. It’s often underequipped – there are several mentions of the pantry being understocked – but it’ll always do in a pinch. More than anything though, Annie’s apartment comes to life when her son is in it. She’s happiest when he’s there, and when he’s not, her loneliness drives her to pulling people into the space with her, whether that’s the electronics guy, Greg, or Noah.

This is particularly significant when Annie’s forming bonds with people. The show has symbolically relied very heavily on Annie’s moments of vulnerability and connection being grounded in her apartment or an extension of it – usually her car. There was her reconnecting with Greg over YouTube videos in s1, there was Nancy and her talking about pregnancy in 2.02, and there was Noah settling in across season 2. These are all substantial moments in terms of Annie’s interior life that are represented through her home – she lets them all in. Which is why it’s significant what people do when they are in. Particularly the show marrying Noah getting to know Annie while simultaneously rifling through her belongings, trying to know specific things about her.

This is only reiterated by Noah’s scenes with Sadie later in the season – always at home, reiterating just how much Noah’s invaded Annie’s life, how much he’s inside her, how much he’s using everything and everyone who’s important to her, and how much he’s a threat to all of that too.

Ruby and Stan are a little different. Ruby’s house is the only one that’s genuinely shared with somebody, and the show represents this across the board – Ruby and Stan wear similar colours, the house feels like theirs, and the parts of their worlds that are separate are still frequently pretty defined by each other (even when Ruby’s acting away form Stan, the show makes it clear that Stan’s at the forefront of her mind, and vice versa). This indicates their partnership, but the house really still is symbolically tied to Ruby. This is particularly represented by the effect of having Turner in the house, but, more than that, it’s underlined symbolically by Turner arresting Stan at home. If the home symbolically carries the meaning of the woman, Turner arresting Stan there is starkly about Turner taking Stan away from Ruby. That image would not hold the same weight if he was arrested at, say, the park or the police station, because the locations don’t hold the same meaning.

It’s also why there’s significance in Stan and Turner’s showdown narratively speaking happening at the police station. It needs to, because symbolically it should occupy a masculine-coded space, because that showdown isn’t just about who they are as people, but who they are as men.

Beth and Beth’s house is very, very different to Annie and Ruby’s, and holds a more substantial narrative and symbolic function. From the very first episode, the potential of losing her house is key to her arc, and key to her identity as a character.

Beth is a lot of things, but a recurring image with her as a character is that she is invested in projecting a dated idea of ‘perfect womanhood’, and, within that, actually pretty perfectly creates parts of it for herself. For Beth – as somebody who was a housewife for roughly twenty years – her house really is her in every sense of the word. Every threat to that house, every disruption, every wrinkle, every intrusion, every theft, every invitation is personal. Dean might have at least two rooms in the Boland House, but that space is Beth’s on almost every symbolic level. When people pop into it, it’s a direct invasion of her.

This is something that the show has revisited time and time again, particularly when it comes to Beth’s bedroom. When people want to be close to Beth, that’s where they go. Annie slept there across season one when she was vulnerable and lonely, despite Beth telling her to go home, Jane broke into Beth’s closet there when she felt she was being neglected, Dean’s constantly trying to sidle into it (and – pointedly – only really in it when they’re fighting and Beth is revealing something / letting him in on something – that they’re out of money, that she has Rio’s money, that she knows about his affairs). When Beth has been at her most vulnerable, she lets Ruby and Annie into it. That said, the only character who’s been explicitly invited into it has been Rio – significantly both in fantasy, and in the show’s reality.

It’s not just about inviting people in though – when she kicks somebody out of it, the act is loaded.

She’s not just pushing somebody out of a space, she’s pushing them out of her.

It’s not just her bedroom of course (although I do think that’s the most significant space on perhaps the whole show). Rio and Turner between them have regularly invaded Beth’s living room, dining room, her kitchen, her yard. These are often distinctly tied with her doing something domestic and / or distinctly feminine. She’s bringing groceries home, she’s baking, she’s trying on jewellery, she’s mothering her children. Symbolically, this is often when Rio and Turner both are at their most masculine and their most threatening, which just serves to underline the invasion of Beth’s space.

It’s not just the girls though, as I said above. Female domestic spaces on this show are significantly coded as belonging to women, even if they share those spaces. Think about Nancy and Greg’s house – which is Nancy’s space, not Greg’s, and throughout season 1, Annie was pitted as the outsider to that. She’s a smear of hair oil on Nancy’s perfect couch. It’s made all the starker when Nancy kicks Greg out, and when Annie helps Nancy give birth in that house – a distinctly female, intimate act, that not only operates as a significant feminization of that space, but also about Annie fighting for Nancy to let her in again.

These spaces all keep secrets for the women they belong to too – Mary Pat’s husband’s dead body, Boomer’s very much alive one – because, again, symbolically, they are these women.

Rio’s loft is a really interesting one to look at in this context, because not only is it hyper masculine, but the show underlines that it does not hold the same significance that the girls’ places have for them. Beth does not learn Rio by being inside him – something made stark through their game of twenty questions. In fact, being in Rio’s loft, in his space, only serves to point out how much Beth doesn’t know him. Not only that, but Beth’s inability to lose her house (which is really central to her arc) is paralleled exactly with how easily Rio can separate from his.

The domestic space is not male.

Rio exists outside of it.

Beth x Rio and the Feminine x Masculine

Rio and Beth are basically at polar opposites of the masculine / feminine spectrum, and it’s something that this show often casts in a really stark light through dialogue, visual language, character coding and symbolism.

Beth epitomizes the old archetype of femininity and the female world in a way that I don’t think Annie and Ruby do (although I do think Ruby does in some respects). This is coded into almost every part of her character – from her long history of domestic servitude and marital submission (letting Dean control their finances, not working, keeping the house, etc.) to her fertility (four children!) to the way she dresses in floral, bakes, to certain traits, namely her nurturing tendencies, overt empathy and guilt (not being able to kill Boomer). Even in terms of the casting – Christina is somebody who has a very distinctly feminine body.

On the other hand, Rio, in many ways, epitomizes the old idea of masculinity and the masculine world. He’s coded that way almost as much as Beth is coded as feminine – he’s physically strong (beating up Dean, holding Beth up while they were having sex), assertive, dominant, capable and collected. That’s not even touching on the fact that the golden gun is incredibly phallic, haha.

The show loves to place Beth’s femininity in direct contrast with Rio’s masculinity in a way that it doesn’t do with the other girls or – in fact perhaps more notably – with Beth and Dean (if anything, Dean’s frequently emasculated around Beth, but that feels like a whole other thing, haha), and it does this frequently, and often even in the same shot.

Most notably, think of her pearls on the warehouse door handle:

Their cars parked side-by-side:

Her necklace, his gun:

Her light, his darkness:

Her floral, his solid colours:

Interestingly though, these things are very rarely in competition or combative (although occasionally they are – Rio trying to use her femaleness and his maleness / their sexuality to literally bend her over a table in 2.06 being the clearest example of that). Generally speaking, the show’s visual language though shows us how these things compliment each other. They occupy different gendered spaces, so they can ‘crime’ in different ways – Beth using the big box stores, the secret shoppers, robbing the day spa, are all things that are highly feminised, and give Rio by proxy access to a world he ordinarily wouldn’t (albeit it’s not always a world he’s interested in – like it wasn’t with the botox), and the reverse of that is that Rio gives Beth access to spaces that are highly masculinised and that she ordinarily wouldn’t have access to (again, not always a world she’s interested in either). It’s why when they’re working together, and acknowledging they have different departments, they actually become something really whole, comprehensive and effective.

It’s the exploration of this that I find really intriguing generally, and particularly a thread that I think is reiterated where Beth’s usually at her worst and her most ineffective when she’s trying to emulate Rio’s masculinity. We saw that at the end of 1.10 and the start of 2.01, and I think we saw it at the tail end of season 2 too. When Beth’s succeeding, she’s typically doing something that revels in the strength and power and the underestimation of femininity and female spaces, and turns places that are typically viewed as passive into active ones.

The Secret Shoppers (which worked briefly! And fell apart because she couldn’t handle Mary Pat. Notably almost every scene with them was inside Beth’s house):

The day spa heist:

The Boland Motors takeover / reclamation that focused on feminising the place:

Pretending to be somebody’s mum to get into the kids’ space (which would’ve worked if Beth and Ruby hadn’t started fighting):

Breaking into Rio’s loft:

Again, this is something that seems to be being teased out already in s3 with the paper store and the nail salon, and I’m sure we’ll see it coming up again and again beyond that.

But yes! Your question, haha. I think Rio is enamoured with the strong, feminine space and the untapped female world that Beth exists in, and the ways that she is actively capable of utilising her femininity and her womanness in a way that is completely impossible for him. She can manipulate these spaces – either those already female, or those she makes female aka Boland Motors – in ways that he can’t, and in a way that, at the end of the day, lines his pocket, in the same way that giving her access to his powerful, masculine world lines hers. It’s market development, y’know? But it’s also something that could be a true and successful partnership if they could stop, y’know, playing games and trying to kill each other, haha.

I think it’s worth noting here too that the show has shown us explicitly that Beth absolutely gets off on Rio being highly masculine, and while I think Rio absolutely gets off on Beth being a boss bitch too, it’s also important to note how he responds to her when she’s displaying vulnerability in a way often defined as very feminine – namely crying – and how that display of femininity not only affects him, but often makes him want to touch her (and more and more, follow through on touching her).

Basically I think they’re as obsessed with the contrast between the two of them as we are, haha.

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maiji · 5 years ago

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I Heard A Cicada Cry (part 4 of 4) A YYH North Bound story

The end... for now.

A lot (a looootttt) of historical and actual Yu Yu Hakusho series commentary below the cut.

The opening page is based on the “Tsuki no yotsu no o” (The Moon’s Four Strings”) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, the piece I referenced for Semimaru’s appearance. I already shared a link to the image in Part 1, but you can see it again at this site alongside all the other beautiful works in the 100 Aspects of the Moon series, which uses the image of the moon to highlight 100 Japanese folktales and famous figures. (Tsuki no yotsu no o is #98.)

Otake’s comment about the bamboo is a reference to his own name (“Great Bamboo”) - more on Otake at the end of this post. Catching dragonflies was done by putting sticky stuff on the end of a bamboo pole so that when the insect lands, it gets stuck. Great fun for kids, probably not much fun for the dragonfly.

The poem is another Anonymous waka sometimes associated with Semimaru. Again, the version here is my attempted rendering for this comic, referencing many other much more skilled translators’ works. This one was really challenging to me. Compared to the two previous waka, there’s so little kanji to reference plus the really old kana, and the translators diverged quite a bit on the rendering of the last two segments.

Kokinshu 989

風のうへにありかさためぬちりの身はゆくゑもしらすなりぬへら也 kaze no ue ni / ari ka sadamenu / chiri no mi wa / yukue mo shirazu / narinu beranari

A speck of dust / Tossed aimlessly / on the winds, / It seems I've become / One with no known future. (Susan Matisoff)

Blown upon the wind, / With no settled place to dwell, / This dust, my body, / Is doomed to an endless journey, / Destination yet unknown. (Edwin Cranston)

I have become a / speck of the dust carried in / helpless flurries by / the dancing winds I who know / no destination no home (Laurel Rasplica Rodd and Mary Catherine Henkenius)

Fate seems to decree / that my wandering must soon / lose all direction -- / I who have no more roots now / than dust floating in the wind. (Helen Craig McCullough)

At last, the introduction of another existing Yu Yu Hakusho character. This is my attempt at Captain Otake from when he was a lot younger and before he grew a mustache!! Otake will (eventually) play a very important part in the creation of Raizen’s territory. I wanted to bring in an existing Yu Yu Hakusho character for this role, and after scouring the cast decided he fit the bill perfectly. He’s interesting - and by interesting I mean scary - because he straddles the line between loyal military man (in some aspects not dissimilar from Hokushin’s loyal retainer archetype) and reasonable-sounding extremist. The latter being IMO one of the most dangerous things in the world, and one of those challenging personalities Togashi seems to love writing. Not that we get to see much character development for Otake in the actual series. His depiction in the manga VS the anime diverge a bit - he’s a little more sympathetic in the latter. But we know he ends up leading that terrorist group in volume 19 of the manga after Enma Daioh is overthrown, and the OVA Noruka Soruka didn’t bother doing anything different. Otake’s age isn’t given in the series, but he comes across as being older than Koenma (it could still go either way, but nothing in the series makes it impossible). He clearly knows more than any of the other SDF members about the situation with the Demon World barrier and what’s really behind it. Sure, maybe he was just briefed about it because he’s the captain, but it’s more fun to imagine he was actually there when it all went down. If it came down to a fight: it’s clear actual series Yu Yu Hakusho Hokushin (S-class) would crush Otake (A-class) easily. But North Bound takes place around 700 years before the modern era, possibly centuries before the Spirit World has even developed its energy classification system! (At the very least, Kuroko didn’t know about it, so it was never used to brief her. Then again, Yusuke wasn’t aware of it ‘till the Sensui arc either so who knows when it came to be... aside from the fact that it uses the roman alphabet lol.) In other words, I have a lot of flexibility for my purposes.

If you recall previous bios I made for Hokushin, you'll notice I’ve lumped Heian-Kamakura era Otake and Hokushin into the same (wide) power class range. I imagine Hokushin being on the lower end. As explained in this post, rokurokubi in the North Bound universe are very weak demons. Hokushin’s unique experiences - thanks to the interventions of his first lord and Raizen in Mirror Most Dark and A House That Holds Long Limbs, respectively - are what enable him to gradually break the common limitations of his type. Until then… we know Hokushin can be formidable even when he’s locked down to D-class. But that might be thanks to several centuries worth of accumulated battle and psychological experience, which he doesn’t have yet.

The final version of Cicada Cry is pretty close to the original script I had years ago, tweaking as I went along and revisited details with a critical/more experienced eye and a better sense of where the rest of North Bound had already gone. Still lots of things to improve on, but I can also see/feel improvement from where I've come from since beginning North Bound and having all those building blocks behind me. This might be the fastest I've ever gotten through a (more) sustained serious story, and I was able to try some new things in terms of art workflow, as well as narrative development and paneling. I really enjoyed getting to blend in many of my favourite things (ukiyo-e, ancient poetry, etc.). I hope it gave off that elegant classical vibe, despite the conclusion.

#yu yu hakusho #hokushin #semimaru #otake #fanart #japanese history #japanese literature #comics #fancomic #art by maiji/mary huang #yyh north bound

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womenofcolor15 · 4 years ago

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#CHADWICKFOREVER: Ryan Coogler, The 'Black Panther' Cast, Former Co-Stars, Politicians, Athletes & More Make Beautifully Heartbreaking Statements About Our Fallen King

We're still heartbroken, and the only fact giving us some sort of solace is knowing that seemingly everyone, everywhere, feels the same way. Let's remember Chadwick Boseman through the most beautiful words we've ever read from his co-stars, friends and stars that give us the most intimate look at the king we all loved.

It's been two days since we learned a king had fallen, and it hasn't gotten any easier. 43-year-old Chadwick Boseman had given us so much of himself and his legacy, both before and during the toughest years of his life.

If that doesn't show us exactly who this man is, those close to him and those who admired him can drive that notion home even deeper.

The stars of Black Panther and the Marvel Universe, politicians, athletes, fellow actors, directors and more have been pouring out their hearts about the amazing man that is Chadwick Boseman.

Danai Gurira, who played Chadwick's on-screen right hand woman and leader of the Dora Milaje, shared a special off screen bond with Chadwick that the world easily saw. She wrote a touching post about his leadership in Black Panther and him changing the game of black representation and being a profundly generous:

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How do you honor a king? Reeling from the loss of my colleague, my friend, my brother. Struggling for words. Nothing feels adequate. I always marveled at how special Chadwick was. Such a pure hearted, profoundly generous, regal, fun guy. My entire job as Okoye was to respect and protect a king. Honor his leadership. Chadwick made that job profoundly easy. He was the epitome of kindness, elegance, diligence and grace. On many an occasion I would think how thankful I was that he was the leading man I was working closely with. A true class act. And so perfectly equipped to take on the responsibility of leading the franchise that changed everything for Black representation. He made everyone feel loved, heard and seen. He played great, iconic roles because he possessed inside of himself that connection to greatness to be able to so richly bring them to life. He had a heroic spirit, and marched to the beat of his own drum; hence his excellence as an artist and the incredible courage and determination as he faced life’s challenges; while still guiding us all. He was zen and sweet and funny (with the very best laugh), attentive, and truly, truly, good. I can’t even wrap my mind around this loss. A loss resonating in my own heart as well as around the globe. The children he inspired, my heart aches for them, to lose their hero just as they finally found him. I am so thankful to have taken the Black Panther journey with him. To have known him, spent time in his light and leadership and to call him forever a friend. Lala Ngoxolo Kumkani.

A post shared by Danai Gurira (@danaigurira) on Aug 30, 2020 at 4:26pm PDT

Her last words, Lala Ngoxolo Kumkani, translates to Sleep in peace, O King.

BP director Ryan Coogler had us in tears as he recalled how their friendship began and blossomed both on screen and off, saying that we have all gained an "ancestor" now:

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#BlackPanther Director #RyanCoogler honored #ChadwickBoseman in an incredibly deep statement about their friendship and Chadwick’s work ethic. We’ve posted it here in full.

A post shared by TheYBF (@theybf_daily) on Aug 30, 2020 at 11:26am PDT

Chadwick's on screen little sis Letitia Wright, who clearly was almost like a little sister to him in real life, could barely formulate words:

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#LetitiaWright #ChadwickBoseman #BlackPanther

A post shared by TheYBF (@theybf_daily) on Aug 30, 2020 at 10:20am PDT

Chadwick's good friend who he was actually often closest to off screen since they shared a love for complete privacy, Chris Evans, posted about his Avengers & Captain America co-star:

I’m absolutely devastated. This is beyond heartbreaking.

Chadwick was special. A true original. He was a deeply committed and constantly curious artist. He had so much amazing work still left to create. I’m endlessly grateful for our friendship. Rest in power, King pic.twitter.com/oBERXlw66Z

— Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) August 29, 2020

The rest of the Marvel Universe co-stars - Don Cheadle, Angela Bassett, Sterling K. Brown, Forest Whitaker, Chris Pratt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Josh Brolin and Zoe Saldana:

i will miss you, birthday brother. you were always light and love to me. my god ... forever and ever ... https://t.co/9pORaKZuQN pic.twitter.com/awX3DiTVwn

— Don Cheadle (@DonCheadle) August 29, 2020

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“It was meant to be for Chadwick and me to be connected, for us to be family. But what many don’t know is our story began long before his historic turn as Black Panther. During the premiere party for Black Panther, Chadwick reminded me of something. He whispered that when I received my honorary degree from Howard University, his alma mater, he was the student assigned to escort me that day. And here we were, years later as friends and colleagues, enjoying the most glorious night ever! We’d spent weeks prepping, working, sitting next to each other every morning in makeup chairs, preparing for the day together as mother and son. I am honored that we enjoyed that full circle experience. This young man’s dedication was awe-inspiring, his smile contagious, his talent unreal. So I pay tribute to a beautiful spirit, a consummate artist, a soulful brother...”thou aren’t not dead but flown afar...”. All you possessed, Chadwick, you freely gave. Rest now, sweet prince.” #WakandaForever

A post shared by Angela Bassett (@im.angelabassett) on Aug 28, 2020 at 8:43pm PDT

I don’t have words. Rest In Peace, Bruh. Thank you for all you did while you were here. Thank you for being a friend. You are loved. You will be missed. https://t.co/8rK4dWmorq

— Sterling K Brown (@SterlingKBrown) August 29, 2020

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Your light brightened our days. It will continue to brighten our hearts and minds. Let the heavens be blessed as you illuminate the sky. Sending my love and prayers to the family. May god continue to hold you in his everlasting embrace. RIP Chadwick

A post shared by Forest Whitaker (@forestwhitaker) on Aug 29, 2020 at 12:22am PDT

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My prayers go out to Chadwick’s family and loved ones. The world will miss his tremendous talent. God rest his soul. #wakandaforever

A post shared by chris pratt (@prattprattpratt) on Aug 28, 2020 at 8:25pm PDT

Our hearts are broken and our thoughts are with Chadwick Boseman’s family. Your legacy will live on forever. Rest In Peace. pic.twitter.com/DyibBLoBxz

— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) August 29, 2020

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I was lucky enough to spend some time with @chadwickboseman on the set of The Avengers. I was so struck by his presence. He was the embodiment of the modern man; strong, intelligent, graceful, self-possessed. I am deeply sad to hear of his passing this morning. What a beautiful legacy he created in such a short life.

A post shared by Gwyneth Paltrow (@gwynethpaltrow) on Aug 29, 2020 at 9:08am PDT

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Mr. Boseman leveled the playing field while fighting for his life... That’s heroism... I’ll remember the good times, the laughter, and the way he changed the game... #chadwickforever

A post shared by Robert Downey Jr. Official (@robertdowneyjr) on Aug 29, 2020 at 11:14am PDT

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Gonna miss you mate. Absolutely heartbreaking. One of the kindest most genuine people I’ve met. Sending love and support to all the family xo RIP @chadwickboseman

A post shared by Chris Hemsworth (@chrishemsworth) on Aug 28, 2020 at 8:40pm PDT

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Shattered to see you go. Our paths have felt linked since the day we met many moons ago. Always, your ascension felt like mine too. I suppose its because your dreams were rooted in those around you. Thank you for showing all of us the way. Rest well, friend.

A post shared by Tessa Thompson (@tessamaethompson) on Aug 30, 2020 at 1:19am PDT

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I am absolutely floored. Such an amazing, beautiful person. RIP Brother. @chadwickboseman

A post shared by Josh Brolin (@joshbrolin) on Aug 28, 2020 at 8:39pm PDT

I’m gonna have to tell Cy, Bowie and Zen that T’Challa has passed. What other king can I tell them about now? pic.twitter.com/AFEFxJOFd5

— Zoe Saldana (@zoesaldana) August 29, 2020

Beyond painful. Rest in Power, King. https://t.co/jonGfW15i7

— Black Lives Matter (@Blklivesmatter) August 29, 2020

Chadwick's former Get On Up co-star and upcomig co-star in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Viola Davis, had touching words as well:

A photo a friend sent from backstage at the 2016 NAACP Awards. Touched my broken heart to see this today. That smile...that lifeforce... pic.twitter.com/6JaVA7HxAm

— Viola Davis (@violadavis) August 30, 2020

Chadwick.....no words to express my devastation of losing you. Your talent, your spirit, your heart, your authenticity........It was an honor working beside you, getting to know you....Rest well prince...May flights of angels sing thee to thy heavenly rest. I love you! pic.twitter.com/6abglPBOsh

— Viola Davis (@violadavis) August 29, 2020

His Get On Up movie screen love Jill Scott posted:

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Ever so thoughtful. Ever so profoundly kind, motivated and clear. You touched my heart and the hearts of millions. THANK YOU. THANK YOU. Rest well friend. Rest well Nelsan. You two ARE MISSED!!!!! #sincerelygood #sincerelydopehumanbeings #sincerelyKINGS

A post shared by Jill Scott (@missjillscott) on Aug 29, 2020 at 12:18am PDT

The black directors and creators we love, who have been in a tight knit circle with Chadwick for years, expressed how broknhearted they are - Issa Rae, Lena Waithe, Ava Duvernay & Spike Lee:

What the fuck is happening? My God.

— Issa Rae (@IssaRae) August 29, 2020

This broke me.

— Issa Rae (@IssaRae) August 29, 2020

Black Hollywood is small. Like a small village. When you think about it, there’s really a handful of us working actors, writers, HODs, crew, directors in a massive industry. One absence devastates. Chad loomed large among us. We will miss him, never forget him, love him - always. pic.twitter.com/yB3S9q8L40

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) August 29, 2020

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You loved us. And we will always love you.

A post shared by Ava DuVernay (@ava) on Aug 29, 2020 at 8:32am PDT

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Gutted at the loss of you. We needed you now more than ever. I loved you, man. We all did. You will be missed. Our little black boys lost a superhero today. Black Panther has wings now. It’s as if we all gained an angel. This man made sure our heroes would live on forever. Heroes like: Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, and James Brown. You loved us. May your life remind us to always love on each other.

A post shared by Lena Waithe (@lenawaithe) on Aug 28, 2020 at 7:24pm PDT

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No matter how hard I tried I could never stand as tall as you. Thanks for reminding all of us to reach for the skies. Love y’all. Let’s be kind to each other.

A post shared by Lena Waithe (@lenawaithe) on Aug 28, 2020 at 8:52pm PDT

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#SpikeLee speaks on directing #ChadwickBoseman in #Da5Bloods.

A post shared by TheYBF (@theybf_daily) on Aug 30, 2020 at 9:11am PDT

Actors Lance Gross, The Rock, Mahershala Ali, Cynthia Erivo, Janelle Monae & Cory Hardrict paid their respects:

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This wasn’t the news any of us wanted to hear today. You’ve moved the world with your gift and presence. Gave a lot of us hope and something more to be proud of. Tonight I pray for your family and loved ones. You will be missed man

A post shared by lancegross (@lancegross) on Aug 28, 2020 at 8:24pm PDT

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“Press on with pride. Press on with purpose” - Chadwick Boseman This was hard to hear about. Hard to imagine the quiet pain and struggle you went thru all these years, yet still shined your powerful light and talents to inspire the world. Especially, our kids who finally saw themselves as a superhero — because of you. Rest in power, brother. My love and strength to your family. You will always press on with pride and purpose. @aspictures

A post shared by therock (@therock) on Aug 28, 2020 at 11:39pm PDT

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A gentleman that was the kindest superhero I have ever met. Took my hand and walked me down the steps, had a hug every time we met. There was only ever love. A real one. We lost a real one. I’m truly crushed. We lost the Black Panther, the hero that gave our babies a hero to aspire to. Just fucking heartbroken. Dearest Chadwick You will never be forgotten. Rest In Power!! God Rest your soul kind man. Can we please just love on each other now, we are losing each other!!!

A post shared by Cynthia Erivo (@cynthiaerivo) on Aug 28, 2020 at 7:27pm PDT

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Peace King... Thank you for your extraordinary work, your exemplary character and leadership. Love you Brother.

A post shared by Mahershala Ali (@mahershalaali) on Aug 28, 2020 at 8:25pm PDT

CANCEL EVERYTHING. MY GODDDDDDDDD.

— Janelle Monáe, Cindi Mayweather (@JanelleMonae) August 29, 2020

LeBron James hit the Wakanda salute during this weekend's playoff games in the bubble:

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FOREVER

A post shared by LeBron James (@kingjames) on Aug 29, 2020 at 10:18pm PDT

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Rest In Paradise King ! #TheHellWith2020 #FCancer

A post shared by LeBron James (@kingjames) on Aug 28, 2020 at 8:27pm PDT

The Obamas, Joe Biden and fellow Howard University alum and VP nominee Kamala Harris all poured out their hearts in shock:

Chadwick came to the White House to work with kids when he was playing Jackie Robinson. You could tell right away that he was blessed. To be young, gifted, and Black; to use that power to give them heroes to look up to; to do it all while in pain – what a use of his years. https://t.co/KazXV1e7l7

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 29, 2020

Only Chadwick could embody Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, and T’Challa. He, too, knew what it meant to persevere. To summon real strength. And he belongs right there with them as a hero—for Black kids and for all our kids. There’s no better gift to give our world. pic.twitter.com/t2tjZDMxNT

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) August 29, 2020

Heartbroken. My friend and fellow Bison Chadwick Boseman was brilliant, kind, learned, and humble. He left too early but his life made a difference. Sending my sincere condolences to his family. pic.twitter.com/C5xGkUi9oZ

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 29, 2020

The true power of @ChadwickBoseman was bigger than anything we saw on screen. From the Black Panther to Jackie Robinson, he inspired generations and showed them they can be anything they want — even super heroes. Jill and I are praying for his loved ones at this difficult time.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 29, 2020

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We’ve lost a great one. My heart is truly broken. #ChadwickBoseman

A post shared by Octavia Spencer (@octaviaspencer) on Aug 28, 2020 at 7:13pm PDT

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I have to say this because it’s on my heart. We all must do and be better about how we discuss people aesthetically. I remember reading things people were saying about Chadwick’s dramatic weight loss without ever considering his circumstances. Now, my heart is breaking because a young and vital talent has ascended, and I pray he never felt the withering assault of public scrutiny. I pray that his family knows just how beloved he is. That he was always a perfect gentleman with strong convictions. Always gracious. Graceful. Many of us are inconsolable right now; but I’ve put my mother on the case. I’ve prayed and asked her to show him around heaven and to look in on us every once in a while!!

A post shared by Octavia Spencer (@octaviaspencer) on Aug 28, 2020 at 10:22pm PDT

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Your Legacy will live on forever, Rest in Paradise King ...

A post shared by Cory Hardrict (@coryhardrict) on Aug 28, 2020 at 11:43pm PDT

Pics we love from the rest of cast:

Chadwick Boseman presenting Daniel Kaluuya for Get Out winning best feature film at the independent spirit award pic.twitter.com/eOuzmFMc6J

— the famous rick grimes Dianne Wyntet (@ldiannew) March 4, 2018

This picture of Chadwick Boseman and Michael B Jordan pic.twitter.com/si5PJTuRa9

— Marta (@xdiordepp) August 29, 2020

Even Soccer players paid their respoects during their weekend games:

and he hit them with the Wakanda

RIP @chadwickboseman. pic.twitter.com/vmnJ3X7mDc

— Sporting KC (@SportingKC) August 30, 2020

For you #ChadwickBoseman.

Wakanda Forever. pic.twitter.com/C92bf51QRh

— Major League Soccer (@MLS) August 30, 2020

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang scores, and hits us with Wakanda Forever #RIPChadwickBoseman

(via @FA)pic.twitter.com/oXR1h2N2uV

— Yahoo Soccer (@FCYahoo) August 29, 2020

We love to see it.

Photo: Featureflash Photo Agency/Shutterstock

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/08/30/chadwickforever-ryan-coogler-the-black-panther-cast-former-co-stars-politicians-more-give

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missjosie27 · 5 years ago

Text

The Other World Part 2

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to Part 2 of this short story epic that I’ve written. I must warn you it’s considerably longer than Part 1, but it had to be, given the subject matter. It also gets very heavy. I almost shed tears writing this multiple times. And I hope that passion is reflected in my work here today.

What else can I say except this is for you @hogwartsmysterystory. Consider this my thanks and appreciation to both you and Ethren.

If anyone needs a bit of back history for my MC please go here

Enjoy, guys!

Entering the classic wizard shop had been simple enough. Tom the barman was still there and the same tapping sequence still existed to actually get in. At least that hadn’t changed.

As it was with the previous two institutions he had visited, any damage caused by the war to Diagon Alley was already repaired and the streets were alive and full of busy shoppers, running children, and nervous parents once more. There were still a few wanted posters up, but David didn’t pay much attention to them, as they were only reward information for the capture of a few unseemly looking men and one haggard, scowling looking young witch.

His primary destination was Flourish and Blotts, a bookstore that had almost every kind of publication imaginable. Other than the Hogwarts Library itself, it contained one of the largest assortments of knowledge in all of England, including history. If there was a place he could find some answers in peace, it was there.

As he walked along the cobblestone streets, David gave more thought to his situation and tried to consider the facts of what he knew instead of going completely bonkers. He was clearly in the magical world of the UK. Hogwarts, the Ministry, and Diagon Alley existed, and the war had taken place much in the same fashion as he remembered. The time was a year into the future…except this wasn’t the future. If that were the case, why was Talbott alive, he reminded himself. Why were some of the names on the monument unfamiliar? Why was there no record of his existence in the halls of his own government? And what did this American with the last name ‘Whitecross’ have to do with this?

Surprisingly enough, the last question was the one David felt most intrigued by. He couldn’t explain why, but he was sure that whatever happened in this particular instance had a lot to do with the name he saw on the monument. The fact that Talbott wore a miniature American flag only added to his suspicions.

This is really fucked up. I still want to believe Talbott was pulling the other one, but there was no lie in his eyes. The bloke I knew…there’s no way he’d turn me away like that.

Walking into the pristine bookstore didn’t arouse the same sense of excitement and wonder he felt as a teenager when buying new schoolbooks or investigating the disappearance and motivation of his brother, but he appreciated the vast collection of books and editions all the same.

I wonder what Jacob would say if he could see me right now? Probably tease me relentless and give some cryptic advice on how to get out of it

Though he did miss the usual familiar, cheerful greeting from Madam Villanelle, who politely nodded in his direction and treated him as a brand-new customer, it only emboldened him more to find out why no one in this crazy world knew who he was. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for him to come up with a plan. One of the perks of being a pure blood, even from a minor family, was that it was much easier to trace your family lineage through the centuries than it was for half bloods or those who were muggle born. Thanks to Merula and her own resources, he had managed to trace his lineage all the way back to the time of William the Conqueror and the Norman French invasion. With any luck, he’d be able to find out the fate of his family and that of his mother, father, and brother as well.

David quickly found the book he was looking for, the one his wife bragged about all those years ago when they were children: Quibus Sunt Pura- A List of the Oldest Families of Great Britain by Linesrta Quint. Unlike the Sacred Twenty-Eight, who’s criteria was much stricter courtesy of the pure blood supremacist Cantankerous Nott, this book covered a much wider berth of material. The author in question also wrote the book as a purely academic, historical exercise not a means to propagate an exclusive group of people above all others. It revealed that many more wizards than just twenty eight specific families carried a great deal of history, including his.

Remembering almost fondly how Merula single handedly showed him more about his family history than he knew before, he reminded himself that finding his wife was a top priority as much as his own peace of mind. He needed to know where she was and if she existed as well. It was all information that could be gleaned by this one book.

Summoning water in his hip flask and taking a swig, he set to work in reading the introduction and scouring the index for the last name ‘Grant’. Strangely, however, he could not find it. It was usually right after the summaries of the ‘Gaunt’ and ‘Gamp’ families. But as he flipped back and forth, there was no mention of anyone of his last name having existed in magical England nor anywhere else for that matter.

Not a good sign.

Flipping about a dozen pages more, he came across the ‘MacMillan’ family expose and saw that his mother’s side of the family was intact, including all of his cousins. But there was no sign of Heather MacMillan having ever known or married John Grant.

David’s heart and pulse began to race. He thought back to what he and Merula discovered all those years ago: that his common ancestor Robert Graund had settled in England after the successful invasion of William the Conqueror, who unknowingly employed many Norman French wizards in his service, including Robert. Over time, the name became Anglicized to ‘Grant’ and each male whether by a pure, half blood, or muggle born woman also produced at least one magical son through the centuries. Certainly not as ‘pure’ as the bigots would have it, but then again that was the least of his worries.

Going back over to the front of the introduction, David finally found what he was looking for: the name Robert Graund. Apparently, alongside other pure blood families of French Norman descent: Malfoy, Lestrange, Rosier, etc. Robert had also taken part as it was before. But unlike before, there was also a miniature cross next to his name with a brief note that he had died during the famous Battle of Hastings, a decisive conflict that eventually led to William being crowned King of England.

David ran his hands through his hair once more and leaned back in his chair at the realization.

So that’s what happened. My first ancestor was struck down during that fateful battle. Therefore, no one in my family beyond him even exists. Including me.

But there were some parts he still didn’t understand, namely how he could go from existing one day to fast forwarding a year later where he didn’t at all? There was no logic in it. He knew the veil within the Department of Mysteries carried many secrets that even the Unspeakables didn’t fully understand. But did it transcend more than just life and death itself? What if perhaps the archway didn’t merely lead to a path beyond death, but other possibilities relating to time and space?

Peering around him, David took a deep breath and rationalized everything once more. Almost everything about this world was exactly the same as it was yesterday. Except today Talbott Winger was alive and there was no trace of him or anyone in his family having ever walked the earth.

“I must be insane,” he muttered to himself. “This whole place is insane.”

But the reality kept biting him until he could no longer deny it. Unless the world was playing an extremely sick joke, the only other possible explanation was that somehow, he had ended up in an alternate timeline or scenario where his very family had died almost a millennia before it could actually take root. Thereby the events he experienced at Hogwarts, as an Auror, a bounty hunter, and at the Battle of Hogwarts never took place. Which lead him back to two more avenues.

“Merula.”

Turning the pages to the ‘S’ section, it didn’t take long for him to find what was looking for: the Snyde Family crest and information. And it was just as accurate as he remembered. Merula’s own common ancestor was actually of Danish-Norse origin, a wizard Viking to be exact, who settled along the area of modern East Anglia only fifty years before William the Conqueror’s invasion. He traced his finger right down to the modern names, specifically her father, mother and aunt: Matthias, Lyra, and Lucretia respectively. Sure enough, Merula’s name and birthdate was there but that’s not all that was written. In tiny black letters below was the name ‘Alaire Whitecross b. 1997’.

David was absolutely convinced now that whoever this ‘Ethren Whitecross’ was, had to be related to Alaire in some way but the implication was becoming abundantly clear. If he, David Grant, had not existed in whatever realm this was, logic pointed to Merula being involved with another person. And in all likelihood this American was it.

There were several other factors to consider, however. If his hypothesis was correct, how had this person died? How had he gotten involved in the first place? And what was Merula’s role in all of this? And if Alaire was her son, where was he at the moment?

David quickly closed the book and stuck it back on the shelf. Even among the circumstances, he still loved Merula no matter which universe she was in. At the very least, he wanted to make sure he was safe, sound, and happy no matter if she was married or taken by someone else. It was too important.

Then, a sense of déjà vu hit him for more than the first time that day. His own Merula was effectively shanghaied into the ranks of the Death Eaters. Could the same have happened here too? Suddenly, his stomach again dropped multiple notches below his belt as he recalled the poster of the haggard witch he had passed by earlier.

“No..” he whispered in horror.

Rushing outside, not even bothering to say goodbye to Madam Villanelle, David ran about fifteen paces outside on the cobblestone street, narrowly avoiding two small children running in front of him before finally coming upon the wanted poster he sought.

What he saw nearly crushed him.

Wanted for crimes against the Ministry and Humanity:

Merula Snyde

Age 26

167 cm

Offense: Ex-Death Eater under You Know Who

Status: Missing/On the Run

Any information about her whereabouts should be sent to the Auror Office of the Ministry straight away, and any assistance will be rewarded with a sum of 1000 galleons

He didn’t want to believe it. No part of him wanted to believe this was the girl he had fallen for all those years ago. Technically speaking it wasn’t and the unkempt appearance only contributed to his feeble denial. Though far from being a girly, girl, Merula always kept herself moderately groomed to a certain degree. This person couldn’t have been further from that image: her porcelain skin and soft features were gaunt and much thinner, permanent bags seemed to be fixed underneath her eyes, the normally chin length bob a tangled mess of brown that went far past her shoulders.

But there was no mistaking that tuft of orange on top of that mop, nor the vivid violet eyes. He’d know them anywhere. It was her alright and no amount of disbelief could change that fact.

“Merula,” he whispered. “What happened to you?”

Resolve surged through the Auror once more as the search for information took on a whole new dimension. This wasn’t merely about himself anymore, no this was much bigger. He needed to find this version of Merula and talk to her. He was sure she could reveal the true story of what occurred in this world and why. She was the key to everything, including the American on the monument that was becoming increasingly relevant.

Snatching down the poster, David pocketed it and began heading east. If Merula was a wanted witch with a dark past, she was sure to be in hiding somewhere. And if that place was England, he knew the exact spot where dark and outcast magic folk loved to congregate.

It was time to leave the serenity of Diagon Alley for the dirt and grime of Knockturn Alley.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In all honesty, going to one of the foulest areas in the British wizarding world was far more of a hunch than anything else, but he did have his reasons.

The first was Merula’s own history with the place. In his own world, she had discussed in detail her encounters in Knockturn Alley and all the times she visited with her parents as well as unsupervised instances. The amount of run ins they experienced together while at Hogwarts only added to that notorious history.

Second was his own experience as an Auror. Make no mistake, if someone wanted any information or news about the underworld, this was the proper location to do so. The trick was getting people to talk. Some would loosen their lips for a few extra galleons, but the dark, blackened alley ways held their own code of honor, one that was extremely hostile to outsiders and law enforcement. A man in blue had to be very careful with how they approached things.

Unfortunately for David, time was not on his side and he desired answers. The sad fact of the matter was, there was a distinct possibility Merula may not have remained in England after the war. Anyone on the run from Aurors wasn’t likely to stick around for long. He remembered Kingsley falsifying all those reports about Sirius Black being on some tropical island and Fudge buying it hook, line, and sinker.

However, assuming this version of his wife was still kicking around somewhere, this was the best place to ascertain that information, if anyone had it. Pulling the black hood over his head, he tried to give himself the appearance of someone who was collecting a bounty not an Auror making rounds. It helped that he did not have the blue robes on, but even so, it paid to have eyes on the back of their head.

That brought back memories of Mad-Eye, another painful loss he wasn’t prepared to deal with at the moment. After all, he was the personal mentor of a certain pink haired witch that became one of his best friends…

“Watchoo lookin at?” growled a short, squat, white bearded patron with a fish eye.

Snapping out of his daydreaming, David responded quickly and decisively.

“Nothing,” he responded. “Not unless you’ve seen this woman. Then we have business to discuss.”

He held up the poster of Merula and the dwarf like man gave it a good glance over.

“Ain’t seen head or tail of ‘er. Personally, me thought the Ministry already rounded up the last o them Death Eaters.”

“Apparently not. If you do see her, let me know. I pay rather handsomely for information of this kind.”

That definitely intrigued the man.

“Ye got yerself a deal.”

As he shuffled along his way, David grabbed another random person, this time a hooded witch and showed her the picture.

“Have you seen this woman?”

The hood fell back to reveal the face of a rather grotesque looking banshee, who began to screech as though she were being tortured.

“AREEEEEEEECCHHHHHHH!”

“Bloody hell! SHUT UP!”

He shoved the banshee away in an effort to reduce the attention he had unwittingly drawn on himself. This wasn’t going well thus far. Even the most transient, unsavory looking characters didn’t appear interested or knowledgeable about his wife. The longer he stayed here, the more likely he was to become a target and the last thing he wanted was to get caught up in a scrum in this Godforsaken place.

You taught me well, Rakepick you miserable bitch. Thankfully, Kingsley and Mad-Eye taught me better.

He was just about to take his questioning to another part of Knockturn when he noticed a middle aged woman in a black cloak staring at him and the poster he was currently holding. It dawned on him that she recognized the picture but before he could say so much as a word, she dropped everything she was holding and sped off into the street.

“Hey! Come back!” he shouted, immediately taking off after her.

The crowd was thick and various people shouted at him for shoving them, but he didn’t care. Just as long as he was able to keep the woman in his sights, he’d catch up to her eventually. He was only about five steps behind her, when she suddenly ducked into a side street in an attempt to shake him loose.

“Trying to do this the hard way, eh?” he muttered to himself. “We’ll see about that.”

The woman thought she could lose him by utilizing the maze of narrow streets and alleys that Knockturn was well known for. Unfortunately for her, David knew just as well as any of the sleazeballs who sold black market poisons on the corner and prepared a plan to cut her off. Using his superior speed and agility, he booked right knowing that the woman was trying to reach a secret passageway that led onto Piccadilly St., where she would blend in more easily.

Muttering incantations, he pointed his wand at the sky and a puff of golden smoke filled the air.

“That oughta keep you here.”

Sure enough, his guess was right. He took a left and then another left peering around the corner where the woman was attempting to use the passageway but she was too late. She had nowhere to run and there was no way out.

“You don’t strike me as the completely unscrupulous type but it would be better if you simply gave up now,” he told her.

The woman’s response was to send a cutting hex his way, which he easily dodged.

“Or not. Either way, you’re not going anywhere.”

David the saw woman try to apparate, but it was to no avail.

“Yeah that’s not going to work,” he said in the casual tone of someone scrapping butter over a biscuit. “Temporary anti-apparation ward. Really comes in handy in these kinds of situations.”

Realizing now that she was completely trapped the woman raised her wand, her arm shaking like a leaf in the wind.

“Stay back,” she said in a thick cockney accent. “I’m warning you.”

A silent disarming spell was all it took to send her last line of defense spinning into the air, which David caught before grabbing the woman by the wrists and pinning her against the wall.

“I’m only going to say this once,” he growled, his voice full of steel, hazel blue eyes boring into the woman’s light green. “You tell me the information I need to know about this person, and I won’t have to break your wrists and arm today. Start talking.”

“I swear I don’t know anything,” the woman pleaded.

“That’s why you ran away once you saw the picture, right? Listen, I’ve had a very rough day and I’m on my last leg of patience with other people’s shit. So I’m only going to say this once more. What do you know about this woman?!”

David, sensing that she was no longer a threat to him, eased his grip slightly, allowing some of the iron in his eyes to subside. She wasn’t the type you had to scare to death in order for her to talk. Just enough to know that you mean business.

“I seen her bout few weeks back. She comes around every so often looking for supplies and other things like that. She gives me no grief, so I don’t tell no authorities.”

“And you know that she’s Merula Snyde?”

“Aye,” the woman nodded, still nervous at the much bigger man maintaining a firm hold on her. “She was one of them Death Eaters. One of the few to escape gettin thrown into a bloody cell in Azkaban. No one knows how she did it.”

That was code for: I don’t personally know but I’ve heard rumors. David knew all the tricks the backalley types liked to pull.

“Enlighten me.”

The woman lowered her voice to a quiet, hushed tone as though admitting it out loud could get her into trouble.

“They say the night she was captured, some Yank was watching over ‘er in a cell way up in a tower or some such. Then, when his back was turned, she slipped by ‘im and into the black of night. Been on the run ever since. No one’s been able to find ‘er or touch ‘er. Cept when she comes around buying food and what not.”

David tried to process this in his head. The American in question was supposedly dead, marked by a gravestone and subtlety confirmed by this world’s Talbott. But if an American had been watching her and she escaped, how then did this Ethren Whitecross die?

“She didn’t kill him?” he asked.

“Didn’t ‘ave a wand. Or so I heard. It’s all just gossip round this place.”

Gossip it may be, but it often held an element of truth to it. However, there was only one way to truly find out.

“Do you know where she is now? Any location she was last seen or frequents?”

“Last I knew, she was ‘iding out in a little hovel up in Liverpool. There’s a muggle pub up there called ‘Thomas Rigby’s’. Apparently, she’s pretty fond of the drink nowadays.”

That was all he needed to hear. Having no more use for the woman, he let go of her wrists and tossed her wand back toward her.

“Oi! Don’t I get a little something for my trouble? I have needs too ya know and make no mistake.”

“Not for chasing you down,” he called back over his shoulder. “Besides, what you need is a bloody bath.”

Ignoring her cursing and insults uttered to his back, David now walked with more of a purposeful stride than ever before. He was getting to the bottom of this, in fact he was so close he could taste it. The only premonition? Not liking what he found. In the center of his gut, he had a nasty feeling that this version of Merula did not share much in common with the one he left behind.

I just hope she didn’t join them because of….no, I’m not even going to go there

There was no time to waste. It was on to Liverpool.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

David didn’t try to waste time in finding other Merula’s residency. The city itself was far too large and industrious to pinpoint an exact location. But he did find Thomas Rigby’s rather easily. It was a cozy little pub- well lit, quaint, a standing and sitting barroom with numerous tables for patrons to sit, drink, chat, or mind their own business. If one was a witch or wizard seeking to blend in, there weren’t many spaces better to do so. There wasn’t a single patron in here looking for anything out of the ordinary. And why would they? It was a lazy, Sunday evening on a cloudy British day.

The twenty five year old knew that there was a chance of sitting here all night without so much of a trace of Merula. But he also acknowledged that very few other alternatives existed short of breaking into the Ministry and looking at her last known whereabouts and that was something he could not afford at the moment. He didn’t even know how was going to leave this crazy world much less solve the mystery of what happened. The universe seemed content to just take him along for the ride.

So in the meantime, he decided to take off his hood, sit back for a bit and sip on a few pints of Guinness while he waited.

When the waitress came over to give him his drink, he handed her two hundred pounds worth of notes and told her, “Just keep them coming until I say otherwise. You can keep the change.”

The blonde waitress, a woman who looked to be in her mid thirties, merely shrugged.

“Suit yourself.”

David began drinking and began lamenting that wizarding beer lagged far behind in its quality compared to that of muggles. It had been a damn good thing he learned how to use dollars, euros, and pounds during his time abroad. They were two among many things he had discovered.

In the old days, meaning the time before the war, David was at his most content sitting in a bar such as this one, drinking the night away with some friends. As he had many times that day, his mind wandered back to memories that were now too painful to consider anymore. It was tradition on every Friday he Tonks and Talbott would go to a London pub and see who could hold the most liquor. Strangely enough, Talbott was usually the one with the highest tolerance. Badeea didn’t drink, so their excursions were usually just the three of them. Sometimes, they’d get Penny, Tulip, Barnaby, Andre, Charlie, Bill, Ben, or even Merula to join in the festivities.

Those memories only served to bring back even older ones. Nights in Hogsmeade where he and the lads almost destroyed the Hogs Head Inn, Penny’s cocktails, the lampshade Tonks wore while dancing on top of a table, parties hosted by random popular kids in the Three Broomsticks, including one where Ismelda and Diego first got together.

Draining Guinness after Guinness, David couldn’t help but think back on those days and how fleeting they were. Almost the relic of another time, a universe that no longer existed, similar to his own predicament. They were rare moments where everything wasn’t so complicated…they were just teenagers being teenagers, growing up in the best way they knew how. No war, killing, mourning, or death. No one had to choose a side under the point of a wand.

But eventually, they all did. Things fell apart. Their island home and their entire world went to hell: Barnaby fled the country taking Ismelda with him in an to avoid the fate that would befall so many of their housemates. Diego too found England increasingly dangerous and went back to Spain. Rowan, always sensitive by nature, never forgave him for putting Merula before their own friendship and soon embarked on his own journey across the world and soon found a husband along the way (to no one’s surprise he had a bit of a resemblance to Bill). Charlie went off to Romania to tame dragons, Bill to Egypt to advance his curse breaking career. Chiara became a healer at St. Mungo’s, Penny a potions lecturer, Andre the starting Keeper for the Tornadoes, Tulip a freelance journalist for international publications….

With the exception of a few (Rowan being among those who stayed away), all had come back to fight in the end, which made Merula’s situation all the more painful. Her forced subservience to her parents, long after she had renounced them and their blood purist ways, was an act of cruelty that made David want to break the glass in his hand. Whatever her flaws and faults, joining the ranks of the Death Eaters was not truly his wife’s own choice, but an abusive sin enacted by Matthias and Lyra Snyde.

I hate them. I hate them both. I don’t even regret accidentally killing Matthias. He deserved far worse for what he did to her.

They were manipulative, sociopathic people. But even from a young age Merula was able to see through that.

The ringing of the bell signaled the arrival of new customers as the pub slowly started to fill up. There was no sign of her yet.

He continued his internal monologue. No, his wife was no more a Death Eater than he was. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever happened in the world he was in was much different than the outcome in his own. He was almost afraid to continue searching, but some other entity pushed him on, as though a cosmic force was actually trying to show him something.

He was already on his 5th Guinness when the door opened again. Just as he began to believe that the exercise was all for naught, there she was, standing in the doorway, completely cloaked but there was no mistaking those violet eyes nor the trodden black combat boots she still wore even into her twenties. And underneath the robes, she looked every bit as tired and worn down as the wanted poster.

By Merlin, is that really her? She looks as though she’s ten years older than she is

David supposed alcohol had a lot to do with that, after all the stuff was highly addictive. But there was more to it than that and it was plain enough on her face. There was a lot of turmoil hidden underneath the brown haired mess- anger, regret, denial, depression, and pain…so much pain.

“I’ll have my usual,” she said in a bored monotone, tossing out a couple of coins.

“Coming right up,” the barkeep announced.

He could have guessed what she ordered: a vodka tonic with a lime to top it off. Her favorite. Though there was no doubt this Merula had no idea who the heck he was, it also stood to reason she was just as clever as his own version. She would know if a wizard was either observing or following her. So he kept his head down and bid his time, resisting the temptation to look in her direction.

A couple of hours passed and the Slytherin kept downing more and more vodka tonics. By this time, David had ceased drinking, the mind needed to be clear for what came next and it would not be easy. But if she was intoxicated enough, he just might be able to get her to talk long enough before she inevitably tried to hex or kick him. Either way, he tried not to focus on the awful appearance and keep himself focused on the ‘why’ and not the ‘what.’ It did no good to do the latter.

Finally, at the stroke of ten, Merula paid for her last drink, hopped off the stool and made her way outside. David, having paid in advance, stood up, and also opened the door to the warm pre-summer air. He pulled his cloak over his head and faked as if he were going left but secretly veered right, careful to mask his presence with a concealing spell. The onset of darkness also assisted in avoiding being seen.

“Come on, just a little more,” he muttered to himself.

When Merula was about fifty yards away from Thomas Rigby’s and headed towards the River Mersey, either to hang on the railing, puke, or a combination thereof, it was time to make his move

With a small *pop he apparated from the corner of the street and almost directly behind her. Immediately, he was met with a wand to the face.

“I suggest you back off right now, wanker,” she spat viciously, though her words were slightly slurred. “Not unless you want to lose a nose and your cock in the same night.”

“You know it’s really quite impressive how many of those things you downed in a couple hours,” he responded dryly. But that had been the wrong thing to say as she sent a curse of unknown origin his way.

Yeah, that’s her alright. Probably thinks I’m trying to get in her pants.

“Do you think just anyone can sneak up on me?” she snarled. “Do you know who I am?”

“Believe me, I’m very familiar with ‘The Greatest Witch at Hogwarts.’”

There was a minor look of surprise on her face indicating that was a term she had not used in quite some time. Nevertheless, she remained hostile.

“I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you,” she said wand remaining directly pointed at his chest. “So whoever you are, mind your own business and hit the road.”

David internally struggled with the situation. On the one hand, Merula was still his wife, no matter which universe he found himself in….no, that was wrong. Scanning this woman up and down she bore almost no resemblance to the woman he’d left behind, either in appearance or temperament. She was an ex-Death Eater on the run and also a drunk. This was not someone to be saved or redeemed.

This is about closure. Something is going on here that’s bigger than yourself.

As much as it pained him, he could not give the impression he was a pushover or else she’d walk right over him.

Suddenly, quicker than Merula could anticipate, he disarmed her physically and grabbed her left arm.

“Hey! Let go!”

True to his prediction, she gave him a mighty kick in the leg with her combat boot but he stood firm, rolling back her sleeve to reveal the ugly, faded remains of the Dark Mark. The skull and snake were still there, but with Voldemort’s death it was already becoming gnarled and reduced, and soon it would be nothing more than a permanent scar- a black stain on all those who wore it.

“So it’s true,” he whispered harshly, pushing her away. “You did join them.”

Merula didn’t try to escape. She didn’t have her wand for one thing but the look on her face was nothing short of grim.

“A real genius you turned out to be. Didn’t you read the wanted poster before deciding to collect this bounty?”

“I don’t give a damn about the wretched bounty,” he replied, hurt creeping into his tone. “What I want to know is why.”

She held her grim, harsh gaze, unwilling to say more. But David hadn’t come this far to be denied now. If this was some lesson being brought upon him by the universe by Merlin he was going to learn everything.

“Please…” he said, his voice dry and cracked from all of the beer. “Please tell me that joining the Death Eaters was not something you did voluntarily. If you were forced, it’s not the same thing but I need to know that you did not do this by your own actions.”

It was yet another in a long line of cosmic twists and also another painful reminder of just how different this woman was from his own Merula. She didn’t need to say anything, her silence said it all.

“Why?” he repeated painfully.

“Because I couldn’t disobey my parents!” came the ragged shout. “Because people don’t change! It was war and I had to choose a side…”

“…and ended up choosing the side you despised since you were a little girl. You said so yourself, that mark was something you feared.”

“They manipulated me! I-I….DON’T YOU GET IT?!” she screamed in rabid fury. “I said the same thing to him all those years ago! There is no such thing as happy endings!”

It was all the confirmation he needed to know that this woman, whoever she was, couldn’t be further from the Merula Snyde he had come to love and lay his life for. The person standing before him sounded no different than the version he’d known in third or fourth year: petulant, narcissistic, angry, and blaming everyone for her problems except herself.

“You still had a choice,” he responded firmly, willing himself not to quiver as he spoke. “No one forced you to join Voldemort. And look what it got you.”

“What’s it to you, whoever you are?” Merula snapped, leaning against the railing as though unable to properly stand upright. “You sound just like him. Preaching about morality and choice as though any of us have it.”

They were coming to the crux of the issue now.

“Whitecross,” he said and there was immediate recognition of that name upon its proclamation. “What was your relationship with him? Where is your son?”

“So, you know about that too,” she huffed. “Are you some two bit author looking to make a buck on our life story?”

“Look, it doesn’t matter who I am,” David responded in frustration, knowing that there was no point in telling her the truth. “I just need to know what happened to Ethren Whitecross. Humor me and I’ll leave you alone.”

This seemed to do the trick as other Merula sighed and stood up a little straighter.

“We were….an item so to speak. Hogwarts sweethearts, dating pals, whatever you want to call it. He loved me.”

“But you chose opposite sides,” David confirmed. “He must have been an Auror or with the Order.”

“The latter of the two. He was always a magnet for adventure, especially during the curse breaking years. Then again what else do you expect from a Gryffindor?”

Though this universe had been the opposite of his in so many ways, David was starting to see some parallels as well. A Gryffindor boy falls in love with a Slytherin girl, dating while at Hogwarts, going on curse breaking adventures…it was all quite similar. And yet, so vastly different. The dynamic of their relationship had not played out as it did in his own world.

“How did he die?” David continued. “I was told he was guarding you in one of the Hogwarts towers when he turned a blind eye and allowed you to escape. But the memorial says he was killed on that night.”

“That wasn’t him.”

He raised an eyebrow, features turning into a confused frown.

“He’s the only Whitecross listed on that memorial. So either you’re lying or-”

“It was his brother guarding me you prat!” she cut across him. “Jaxson Whitecross. He wasn’t the only American there that night. He was the one who let me go.”

“Jaxson,” David breathed out. It was a name remarkably similar to Jacob, his own brother. “So if he was the one who let you go, what happened to Ethren?”

There was no mistaking it this time, tears were forming in the defeated violet eyes. A look of hatred formed on her sullen, hollow features but it was not a hate directed at him. No this hatred was internal.

“He was killed….protecting me.”

For the second time in as many days, David felt his body go numb. He knew that the person he sought was already deceased, but hearing how he was taken from this world made it that much more…potent.

“Protecting you?”

“Yes,” she answered, salty discharge streaming down her cheeks, managing to tell the story through emotional breaths. “I-I had killed two Death Eaters that were trying to do him in. But then reinforcements from the Order arrived including a herd of centaurs. One of them saw me and shot an arrow directly at my heart….h-he took it instead.”

And so the answer had been revealed at last. This was the connection that the universe had been trying to show him all along. The man who loved Merula Snyde in this world, died doing so without hesitation for a person that did not deserve it.

Sacrifice. The ultimate sacrifice.

“And your son,” he managed to choke out. “What of your son?”

“He lives with his uncle in America…I’m sor….I couldn’t take care of him. Not after everything that happened. I’m not a mother. I’m not anything except a lush anymore.”

It was the closest thing to an apology David heard thus far and he suspected that was as close it was going to get. At long last he finally understood. Stories had more than one way of playing themselves out. A choice made by one was not a choice made by someone else. This was the legacy of the world he currently stood in laid bare: Merula had refused to better herself and as a result the story of Ethren Whitecross ended in tragedy, not redemption.

How then, would his own conclude?

Looking down at the crying woman in front of him, a mixture of pity and supreme sadness weighed in his heart. He wanted to say that he was sorry and to help in any way he could. But this was a person beyond any sort of help he could give. And if he and Ethren had truly been similar, nothing he said would change that.

“Take this,” he said, tossing back her wand. “Though I doubt you’ll need it much. If my hunch is correct, no one will be able to harm you until the day you pass from this world.”

He began to turn to leave but before doing so, there was one more thing he needed to know.

“Merula,” he spoke softly. “Where is he buried?”

“O-on the shores of Lake Michigan in the United States. There’s a large house by the shore overlooking a grassy hill. He…he’s there.”

Then that’s where I’ll go

“Take care of yourself,” he said to other Merula, though in his heart he knew she wouldn’t. Whatever her future held, it didn’t involve proper self-care. It was out of his hands now.

Even now, I understand…that could have just as easily been me lying in a grave. He gave his life for her even when she was beyond all hope…he still loved her just as I would have.

He walked off from the docks and apparated away. There was one thing left to do.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Somewhere on the shore of Lake Michigan an unknown man arrived at a beautiful, melancholic scene.

David had never been to this part of the United States, his interactions being limited strictly on the east coast in cities like New York, Boston, Washington, and what not. But he resolved to visit again someday to the Midwest, because what he saw was truly mesmerizing. True to Merula’s word, there was indeed a large mansion overlooking a green hill which contained nothing save for a white marble headstone. Beyond the shore, were the waters of Lake Michigan in all its spring time splendor. In the distance, tall oaks and pines mixed together creating a deciduous-boreal forest, the scent of which could be inhaled even from the edge of the water. The oaks were at last in full bloom, creating a vivid green that contrasted wonderfully with the afternoon sun and the dark, turquoise sky. The air was clean…so clean. He truly envied anyone who grew up in an environment like this. America was always a much sunnier place than England, both figuratively and literally.

But that was not the purpose of this visit. David couldn’t explain but he sensed his time in this world was coming to an end.

Which brought him to this final task.

It hadn’t been hard to sense the magic surrounding this place and after probing with his wand, David detected only a minor muggle repelling charm by the gravesite, which thankfully wasn’t rigged with a caterwauling charm or any other such alarm. After temporary disabling it, David walked the length of the hill before arriving at the foot of the headstone. He silently read the writing of the deceased for the second time that day.

Ethren Whitecross

1973-1998

A proud American

A wonderful son & brother

You will be missed

“The father that never was,” David breathed out.

He took one more glance back at the mansion, ensuring no one noticed his presence. To ensure absolute privacy, he tapped his head with the disillusionment charm, rendering him completely invisible. After one more look towards the beautiful forest beyond, he began to speak.

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” he finally uttered, struggling to hold back the lump in his throat. “I don’t know what to say really. This whole thing is bloody crazy. You never knew me, and I only just learned about you. We’re literally from different worlds. And not just because I’m from across the pond,” he added with a choked chuckle.

“But at the same time, I feel a connection to you. I can’t explain it, but after the events of today and all the shit that’s happened, part of me feels like I’ve known you almost my entire life. And…I couldn’t leave without honoring you.”

He knelt down, taking another deep breath.

“Thank you. Thank you for the kindness and consideration you gave my wife. I know she’s not my wife but she’s still Merula and my love for her transcends worlds. No matter how difficult she was or how lost she became, you never stopped loving her. Even when she found herself in the dark pit of the Death Eaters, you never gave up. I only wish she had done the same for you before it was too late.

“Thank you, for making me realize…just how lucky I am. Before I arrived here, I genuinely thought there was nothing left to live for. But I was wrong, I have everything to live for. My wife is alive, so are scores of others. We have the opportunity to build a better world than the one before and we will. Through it all, I’m still here and so is Merula. That’s more than enough.

“Lastly, thank you for your sacrifice…the ultimate sacrifice. You gave your life so others could live, and the evil of Voldemort permanently ended. You did so out of love, and because of that your Merula will carry that protection for the rest of her life. People owe you so much more than just a memorial and a gravestone.”

Taking out of his locket, the one that contained the picture of his beloved wife, he clutched it tightly as he uttered his last sentence.

“I promise you for as long as I draw breath, your story will not be forgotten. I swear it on your grave, Ethren Whitecross.”

He reached out and touched the white marble and that’s when he felt it. The same overpowering, white hot sensation that threatened to rip him apart molecule by molecule and every action and thought seemed to run for an eternity. By the time he thought his mind would be lost to the pure chaos, darkness took him once more and there was nothing.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

A thunderous force pushed David so hard, he fell straight back onto a hard stone floor with an incredible thud.

“AGH!”

Ignoring the pain he felt in his back and shoulder, he slowly lifted himself off the ground and tried to make some sense of his surroundings.

“Grant?” a voice called out. This one, however, was not mysterious or a whisper.

“Hello?” he called out.

The figure of Williamson made its presence known as he stepped into the lighted part of the room.

“Blimey, Grant what are you doing in here? This area’s off limits, you know that.”

Dusting off his robes and pocketing his wand, David saw that he was still clutching the photo of Merula that he had taken out only seconds earlier at the gravesite. But if he was back in the room of death that could only mean…

I’m back. Son of a bitch, I don’t know how but I’m back in my own world. And not a second from where I left it.

“Uh, Grant? David? Can you hear me? What’s gotten into you?”

Shaking his head, he pulled his focus back to the matter at hand, trying to give off the impression that nothing was out of the ordinary…which was a shame because he had never been very good at lying.

“Oi, yeah. Sorry, Williamson. I zoned out for a second.”

The smaller, dirty blonde Auror eyed him carefully.

“Just what exactly were you doing down here anyway?”

“Nothing,” David murmured. “Just…needed some time to think. I’ll be on my way.”

But Williamson held up a hand to stop him.

“Breaking into a highly restricted area of the Ministry aside, that’s actually not the reason I came to see you.”

That gave him pause, as he stuck the picture back into his jeans pocket.

“What do you mean?”

“I come bearing news. The Minister has decided to release your wife, Merula Alice Snyde, effective immediately with no charges being brought to bear as of now. She’s free to go pending further evidence.”

David could hardly believe his ears nor dare to feed the excitement of his heart.

“She is?” he asked lamely.

“Yes. We’ve received new intelligence in the last hour or so, one that just came to my attention. It confirms directly that your wife was under the control of the Imperius Curse and that her actions were indeed not her own.”

As overjoyed as he was, David didn’t quite understand how this was possible. One moment Merula was looking at a life sentence in Azkaban and now she was free?

“How? I mean…how-”

“Two people, including one who was very high in You Know Who’s inner circle, have agreed to give testimony against any and all of his captured servants. One confirmed that Miss Snyde was indeed being controlled by Death Eaters Matthias and Lyra Snyde and is prepared to confirm that in court to the Wizengamot.”

“And just who is this informant?”

“That is confi-”

“Out with it, Williamson, who am I going to tell?”

With a sigh, his colleague relented.

“Lucius Malfoy. And his wife, Narcissa.”

Yup that confirms it

Williamson gave an irritated look and gestured towards the door.

“Look you’re really not supposed to be in here and I imagine you’ll want to see your wife now. She’s waiting for you in the lobby. Shall we?”

He didn’t have to be told twice. Jumping down from the giant rock that supported the veil, he followed Williamson out of the door and back towards the Atrium.

“By the way, I do hope that you didn’t touch that thing in there.”

David gave a cheeky grin and response.

“Perish the thought Williamson, old boy,” he in a fake posh tone.

Yes, teasing him would never get old.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

It didn’t take long for David and Merula to reunite. The moment the spotted one another they ran into each other’s arms and embraced, hugging so tightly that neither one was prepared to let go.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered in her ear, tears running down his cheeks once more. “I’m so sorry.”

“What are you sorry about you prat?” Merula responded, wiping away tears of her own. “You saved me from being a slave. From my parents.”

“No, you saved yourself,” he affirmed to her, his forehead pressed against hers. “You made the choice. The right one.”

He kissed her, long and passionately, one that she returned.

“I’m okay,” she whispered. “We’re all okay. We’re going to get through this.”

“Yes, we will.”

An awkward clearing of the through interrupted their tender moment and David realized Williamson was still there.

“Very sorry to cut in, but there is one other thing I needed to inform you of,” he stated.

“It can’t wait until after post-prison sex with my wife?”

Merula kicked him in the shins, which caused him to wince and hop on one foot.

“Just joking, dear.”

“I shan’t keep you,” Williamson said, completely unperturbed. “I only wanted to confirm your appointment with Minister Shacklebolt regarding your reinstatement to the Auror Office. He seeks to discuss the matter with you personally this Wednesday at ten o’clock. It seems he desires your return.”

Relief awashed the twenty-five-year-old as he looked towards the heavens.

Yes, everything was going to be alright.

“Tell him I’ll be there on the dot.”

“Wonderful, I shall inform him of your decision,” he turned to go but not before adding the smallest of smiles. “Congratulations to you both.”

“Many thanks, Williamson.”

With the last of the formalities concluded, he and Merula were set to exit.

“Shall we go home?” she asked him.

“Wherever the hell that is. I pretty much abandoned my London pad two years ago. I do hope no one’s trashed it.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she reassured him. “We always do. Now let’s get out of here. I never was a fan of the Ministry.”

“Wait.”

He stopped her. Before they did anything else, David had to get a good look at her…just to be sure. What he saw, warmed his heart. Yes, she was still covered in cuts and bruises from the battle, and dark circles permeated underneath her violet eyes. But instead of alcoholic self-loathing he saw they still radiated life. Her hair was still the cute little bob he adored as opposed to a tangled heap. Her posture gave no indication of defeat. She was not the broken Merula Snyde daughter of Death Eaters who gave up on herself, but a woman who had passed through multiple trials and won them all.

It’s still her, he thought joyfully. This is still the woman I fell in love with and will continue to love for all time.

“Uh, David?”

“Yes?”

“I appreciate that you want to bask in all of my beauty, but the staring is kinda off putting. Can I at least shower beforehand?”

David smiled.

“Of course. It’s just…I love you is all. And I’m the luckiest man in the world to have the ‘Greatest Witch at Hogwarts’ by my side.”

Merula laughed and interlocked her chipped, black polished fingers with his.

“Wow, it’s a been a long time since either one of us used that title.”

“I don’t see you complaining.”

Merula leaned in, a soft, but eager look on her beautiful features.

“I’m not,” and she gave him a gentle kiss. “I love you too.”

Together they began to walk towards the exit of the Atrium but not before Merula had one last question.

“Dave…you mentioned something earlier about me making the right choice. What did you mean by that? There was a funny look on your face when you said it.”

Clever as ever, she is

“It’s a bit hard to explain,” he said rubbing the back of his head as they approached the exit.

“Did something happen to you in the short time I was in a Ministry cell?” she joked to him.

The image of a marble white headstone appeared once more in his mind, the shores of Lake Michigan calming his heart as he squeezed Merula’s hand a little tighter.

“It’s a long story. A story that will never be forgotten.”

The End

#ethren whitecross #david grant #gyrffindor #hogwarts mystery #hphm #hphm fanfiction #harry potter #mc #merula snyde #mc x merula #fanfiction #au #worlds collide

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antoine-roquentin · 6 years ago

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Mortgage lending is central to the financial system: Housing accounts for over 70 percent of household debt, and housing finance plays a central role in financial instability. Conversely, residential construction is the economic sector most sensitive to financial conditions, and to monetary policy in particular. So the shrinking weight of housing in the economy may be a factor in the Federal Reserve’s inability to restore growth and full employment after the crisis. Looking forward, if conventional monetary policy works primarily through residential construction, and residential construction is a permanently smaller part of the economy, that is another argument for broadening the Fed’s toolkit.

Housing construction may be down for the count, at least compared with historical levels. But — and this is the second trend – it is not down across the board. The recent decline is limited to single family housing. Multifamily construction has been quite strong, at least by the standards of the post-1990 period. Compared with the two decades before 2007, single-unit housing starts in the past year are down by a third. Multifamily starts are up by a third. Per capita multifamily housing starts are actually higher than they were at the height of the housing boom.

These divergent trends imply a major shift in the composition of new housing. Through much of the 1990s, less than 10 percent of new housing was in multifamily projects. Today, the share is more like 30 percent. This is a dramatic change in the mix of housing being added, a shift change visible across much of the country in the form of suddenly-ubiquitous six-story woodframe apartment buildings [note: this is an excellent article that you should absolutely click through and read]. The most recent housing data released suggests that, if anything, this trend is still gathering steam: A full third of new housing in June was in multifamily buildings, an even higher proportion than we’ve seen in recent years. In the areas that the Census designates as metropolitan cores, the shift is even more dramatic, with the majority of new housing units now found in multifamily buildings....

This shift is important for politics as well as the economy. Tenant organizations were once an important vehicle for mass politics in American cities. In the progressive imagination of a century ago, workers were squeezed from one side by landlords and high rents just as they were squeezed from the other by bosses and low wages.

After World War II, the focus of housing politics shifted away from tenants’ rights, and toward broadening access to home ownership. This shift reflected a genuine expansion of homeownership to middle class and working class families, thanks to a range of public supports — supports, it should be noted, from from which African-Americans were largely excluded. But it also reflected a larger vision of democratic politics in terms of a world of small property owners. Homeowners were expected — not without reason — to be more conservative, more ready to imagine themselves on the side of property owners in general. As William Levitt, developer of the iconic Long Island suburb, is supposed to have said: “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist.”

The idea of a property-owning democracy has deep roots in the American political imagination, and can be part of a progressive vision as well as a conservative one. Baby bonds – an endowment or grant given to everyone at the start of their life — are supposed to be a way to broaden property ownership in a way that opens up rather than shuts down possibilities for radical change. Here for example is Derrick Hamilton in his 2018 TED Talk. “Wealth,” he says,

is the paramount indicator of economic security and well-being. It provides financial agency, economic security… We use words like choice, freedom to describe the benefits of the market, but it is literally wealth that gives us choice, freedom and optionality. Wealthier families are better positioned to finance an elite, independent school and college education, access capital to start a business, finance expensive medical procedures, reside in neighborhoods with higher amenities… Basically, when it comes to economic security, wealth is both the beginning and the end.

Descriptively, its’s hard to disagree. And with homes by far the most important form of middle-class wealth, policies to promote homeownership have been supported on exactly these grounds. Homeowners enjoy more security, stability, a cushion against financial setbacks, and the ability to pass their social position on to their children. The policy problem, from this point of view, is simply to ensure that everyone gets to enjoy these benefits.

One way to keep people secure in their homes is to allow more people to own them. This has been the focus of US housing policy for most of the past century. But another way is to give tenants more of the protections that only homeowners currently enjoy. Outside a few major cities, renting has been assumed to be a transitory stage in the lifecycle, so there was little reason to worry about security of tenure for renters. A few years ago I was a guest on a radio show on rent control, and I suggested that apart from affordability, an important goal of rent regulation was to protect people’s right to remain in their homes. The host was genuinely startled: “I’ve never heard someone say that a person has the right to remain in their home whether they own it or not.”

There are still plenty of people who see the decline in homeownership as a problem to be solved. But the shift in the housing stock toward multifamily units suggests that the trend toward increased renting is unlikely to be reversed any time soon. (And even many single-family homes are now owned by investors.) The experience of the past 15 years suggests that, in any case, home ownership offers less security than we used to think.

If more and more Americans remain renters through their adult lives, the relationship with the landlords may again approach the relationship with the employer in political salience. Strengthening protections for tenants may again be the basis of political mobilization. And people may become more open to the idea that living in a place, whether or not you own it, gives you a moral claim on it — as beautifully dramatized, for example, in the 2019 movie The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

We may already be seeing this shift in the political sphere. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of support for rent regulation. A ballot measure for statewide rent control failed in California, but various bills to extend or strengthen local rent regulation have gotten significant support. Oregon recently passed the nation’s first statewide rent control measure. And in New York, Governor Cuomo signed into law a sweeping bill strengthening rent regulation where it already exists — mainly New York City – and opening the way for municipalities around the state to pass their own rent regulations.

The revival of rent regulation reflects, in the first instance, political conditions – in New York, years of dogged organizing work by grassroots coalitions, as well as the primary defeats of most of the so-called Independent Democratic Conference, nominal Democrats who caucused with Republicans and gave them control of the State Senate. But it is not diminishing the hard work by rent-regulation supporters to suggest that the housing-market shift toward rentals made the terrain more favorable for them. When nearly half the population are renters, as in New York State, there is likely to be more support for rent regulation. The same dynamic no doubt played a role in the opposition to Amazon’s new headquarters in Queens: For most residents, higher property values meant higher rents, not windfall gains.

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scratchybeardsweetmouth · 6 years ago

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Iain Glen Knows Why You're So Thirsty For Jorah Mormont on Game of Thrones

By Madison Vain April 29, 2019 Photography [and Videography] by Tyler Joe

Excerpt:

Ser Jorah Mormont crossing the wide terrains of Westeros on horseback is a familiar sight for fans of HBO's Game of Thrones. But for actor Iain Glen, who’s played the role now for seven-plus seasons, it’s hardly his favorite mode of transportation. “I always find a bicycle,” he says, sitting in a Midtown Manhattan green room, speaking about how he prefers to get around since the show catapulted its cast into the stardom stratosphere. It’s simply the most practical—not to mention safest—way to travel, these days. In some locations, especially Spain, he notes, fans don’t hold back when they spot the lovelorn lord. “They’ll attack you,” he says. “They’ll just grab you and start snogging you without invitation.” It's not exactly a violent response, but it does make getting around difficult. “They just want to hold you,” he continues. Cue: a set of wheels. “I don’t know what it is,” he admits, “They stop looking. They don’t associate actors with bicycles. So [I] just always sneak out the back, get a bicycle, and find a hickey restaurant on the outskirts of town. That’s my modus operandi.” New York is a bit easier, and he insisted on arriving at our April interview on foot even though a few blocks away fans have been camping outside of the hotel where the Thrones cast is staying for the premiere of Season Eight. Fans in the city recognize him, but let him get on his way. “It's lovely, actually,” he admits, laughing. “It reminds me of London.” Historically, the attention has been confusing for Glen's younger children. (He has one son and two daughters.) His youngest is six and, as the actor says, frequently taken back by the approach of strangers. He chuckles, recalling her questions: Do you know that person? Why do people keep speaking to you? Why are they calling you Jorah? But for Glen, it's welcome. He says his wife actually put it best: “Who would not want someone to pat you on the back and tell you you're fantastic a few times every day?” For many of Glen’s young costars, Game of Thrones marked the very beginning of their careers. (Bella Ramsey, who plays Jorah’s cousin, the spunky Lyanna Mormont, hasn’t even seen most of the series on the account of only being 15 years old.) But the 57-year-old Scot has been working consistently across film, television, and theater for decades. One of his fondest memories of New York, he says, almost wistful, was when he and Nicole Kidman starred in Blue Room on Broadway in 1998. He lived near Central Park and spent his down time perusing the Met, freely. “It’s a great deal to take on when you’re that young,” he says of co-stars like Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner who began filming as young teens. “But they all seem to be managing incredibly well.” And, as only an actor seasoned by years of rejection can, he quips, with a laugh: “And, if I’d been Kit’s age or Maisie’s age when I started, I certainly wouldn’t be complaining!” A wizened perspective actually made him more measured in his acceptance of the role, initially, he recalls. “When you accepted the job, you had to commit for, I think it was four years,” he says. “And they wouldn’t tell you if you were gonna die.” Glen said his team pressed HBO for details: “I asked for a breakdown, going forward, season by season.” His quest turned up few details, but something about the little he learned inspired him. “Listen, you go out for stuff, and there’s some things you really want and some things you don’t,” he says. “I really wanted this. I remember saying to my wife that I had a funny feeling about it. I felt like it was going somewhere.” As we all know now, he was right. The show is watched obsessively, by millions. (The Season Eight premiere drew a record 17.4 million viewers, making it HBO’s biggest night ever for streaming.) And in the age of Netflix binges where watching on your own time is the norm, it remains a can’t-miss, Sunday night event. That reality is a treat for the cast, as much as the viewers, assures Glen. A long career means the actor is exponentially more aware of how special it is to have been involved. “It’s very unusual to come back to something again and again and again,” he muses. “The life of an actor is very ephemeral. That’s what we’re used to; getting thrown with a bunch of strangers and getting to know each other really quickly and then saying, ‘Right, I’m gonna completely forget about that and now I’m going to jump into something else.’ Certainly, in my experience as an actor, I’ve never done anything like this. And to come back to something that everyone is saying is just going fantastic, that’s a very binding thing in itself. That was very winning.” much has been made over the years about some of the brutal shoots the cast has had to endure each season. (See: the Battle of Winterfell, which required 11 weeks of freezing, night shoots.) But for the most part, Glen was lucky. “In the early seasons, I was part of the Dothraki/Daenerys storyline,” he explains. “We were always on the move, always traveling. But we were always coming into rather fantastic, gorgeous, sunny warm spaces. We were filming the bit that the crew always looked forward to each season, before they went back to shitty, wet, cold weather.” And then came the greyscale. When the disease had gotten to its worst, Glen spent eight hours with the costume department, getting a full prosthetic outfitted on him before each shoot. “It was like coming in at midnight and being ready to shoot at eight, to then do the ten-hour day,” he recalls. “It reminded me of some of the drugs I’ve taken. At university, I was pretty spaced out—but in a nice, helpful, acting way.” It was also during this time that Glen thought his run on the notoriously deadly show was coming to an end. “I thought my number was up,” he admits. “[Creators] Dan [Weiss] and Dave [Benioff] really enjoy fucking with the actors—not giving them any sort of clues. So I asked them both individually, because I couldn’t get the answer.” He still came up short. “One of them said ‘I’m not saying.’ The other, when I said, ‘Do I survive the greyscale?’ said, ‘You do this season.’” (Turns out, the actors know just how you feel, wondering about their characters’ fates.) Ser Jorah is not Jon Snow. He doesn’t have a hero storyline and he's not a contender for the Throne, so it wasn’t a give-in that he’d earn such a passionate fanbase. And yet the Jorah fan accounts on social and thirsty fan fiction on the internet has run wild over the years. Glen attributes it to his devotion to Dany, the Mother of Dragons. (Even, yes, when he betrays her.) “In a chaotic, mad, dangerous, and violent world in which people are generally out for themselves,” he begins, “the purity of his desire to support her—to be there for her—is a nice contrast to the rest of the show. For the first two, three seasons, it was about this desire to express that from his point of view, but never doing it.” He follows up, “Do you know what I mean?” Um yeah. Jorah as the head of House Friendzone is the material that’s spawned, to be exact, a gajillion memes since the show’s 2011 debut. The way he looks at her, even now, oozes with a desperation that viewers can’t help but melt over. “I think they modulated their journey really beautifully throughout the seasons,” he says of the writer’s attention to Dany and Jorah. “I think they found a really compelling root through it, where for you, as an audience, it's hard to stand from the outside. And I'm not the best person to ask, but people tell me, that you have such a mixture of emotions watching. At first you think, ‘Oh please, go on and say it!’ But then very quickly it's, ‘Oh god! You shouldn’t have!’” On a show that has to divide time between so many characters each week, there’s an inevitable risk that some storylines will feel one-note or under-developed. Glen’s refuses this in his portrayal of the former slave owner mightily, instead bringing a weightiness as well as a readiness to recognize internal conflicts to his turns on screen. “It’s like real life,” he says of his careful approach. “Isn’t it? With people that we fall madly in love with, there’s always a moment of, ‘Fuck, I never realized you were such a shit when I fell in love with you.’” It’s been a delight, truly, for audiences. But Sunday night, the pensive stead’s run finally came to an end. After leading legions of troops into the Battle of Winterfell, near the end of the one-hour, twenty-two minute episode, he fulfilled his final mission: protect Dany with his life. He lasted as long as the battle and Dany held him as he drew his final breath. For the fans who've loved him, they know it's exactly how he'd have hoped to go. [...] “I feel very happy with his story arc,” Glen tells me. “When we read all six episodes before we started at the beginning, in a big room in Northern Ireland—Belfast—I thought the writers had managed it incredibly well and thoroughly, in terms of looking after everyone. It’s one of the hard things when you write big, sweeping, epic dramas like this. How do you look after everyone’s storyline, individually?” We’ll continue to see as Season Eight continues its March towards a May 19 series finale. Glen is adamant that the sheer scale of the production will stick in his memory bank forever. “I felt like a kid, coming into set and seeing some huge, monumental fucking castle—and arriving at bases with so many vehicles, so many extras, so many horses. There’s a side to that which is just really thrilling.” But the moment he’s actually most fond of a shoot from Season Five when Ser Jorah, following a brutal journey with Tyrion Lannister, offers his life to Dany in the Fighting Pits in Mereen. It took several days—and five or six other fighters—to film, something Glen loves, but it was what was going on behind the camera that he enjoyed most. “My family was there,” he recalls. The crew dressed his then seven-year-old up as a mini Ser Jorah and let her call the shots alongside director David Nutter. “They put her in the gear and put scars on her face. It was so, just great.” Looking ahead, Glen joins the DC Universe. Earlier this month, it was announced that the actor would take on the role of Gotham City’s most notorious billionaire, Bruce Wayne, on Titans. It’s unlikely that that show—or any role—could eclipse Jorah’s rabid fandom but that hardly bothers Glen. “I’m proud of the product and I’m proud of any association with that,” he explains. “You can walk around thinking, ‘Didn’t you see my Hamlet?’ or ‘Where were you when I did Henry VI at the Royal Theater Company?’ but you’re wasting your time. [Thrones] is kind of the Holy Grail, to be critically approved but have a massive following? That’s the ticket.”

#iain glen #esquire #iain glen interview #interview

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adorkablephil · 6 years ago

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Fic: The Roles We Play (4)

Title: The Roles We Play Summary: Dan Howell and Phil Lester work together as voice actors for BBC radio dramas in the late 1930s, but slowly begin to develop “inappropriate” feelings for each other Rating: G Word Count: 3,046 (this chapter) Tags: Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Historical AU, 1930s, BBC, Radio, Actors AU, Slow Burn, Love Letters, Past Character Death, Grief, Angst Author’s Note: This fic was inspired by the @phanfichallenge 20k History Challenge. A bazillion thanks, as always, to my amazing beta, India! See my note on the first chapter regarding historical inaccuracies.

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[ All Chapters Masterlist ]

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18 March 2001

Kathleen should have gone home about an hour ago, but she’d found herself unable to put down the letters emerging from the shoebox. She needed to know more! She wanted to know how it all turned out … and yet she wasn’t willing to cheat by skipping to the letters in the bottom of the box. She wanted to read each in its turn, following the story as it had unfolded in these men’s real lives.

She had also fallen hopelessly in love with Great-Uncle Dan and wished desperately that she’d gotten a chance to know him. If Phil Lester’s letters to him were any indication, Daniel Howell had been an incredibly wonderful person well worth loving.

Picking up her phone, she called her husband to tell him what was happening. He, too, expressed curiosity and urged her to stay as late as she liked. He would give the kids their dinner and even put them to bed if necessary. “No,” Kathleen objected. “I’ll be home before bedtime, I promise. I just want to read a few more letters.”

“Order in some food,” her husband, Stuart, insisted. “Look on their fridge. Even crusty old men probably have takeaway menus on their refrigerator. Have some dinner, read some more letters, and come home when you’re ready. You can always go back tomorrow to read more. Or bring the box with you.”

Kathleen shook her head, even though she knew Stuart couldn’t see her. “It would feel wrong to take the shoebox out of the house,” she explained. “I can’t explain it, but I don’t even want to move it off the table. My great-uncle had it open here—left it here perhaps the night before he died in his bed—and it seems disrespectful to move something so precious to him away from where he left it.”

“Well,” Stuart replied slowly, “you will eventually have to sell the house. And probably the table, as well.”

Kathleen laughed. “I know. I don’t need to leave it here forever … just … maybe until I’ve finished reading all the letters. Then I can pack them up and take them home. Save them somewhere special.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Stuart agreed gently. He was a good man. “Just make sure to eat something and don’t stay too late. Remember, you can go back tomorrow.”

“Yes, sweetheart. I’ll see you in perhaps two hours.” They said their goodbyes, and Kathleen wandered into the house’s tidy kitchen. All of the cabinet doors were slightly ajar for some reason, so she shut them. Such things disturbed her sense of order, and she wondered why her Great-Uncle Dan would have left the doors open like that. Did he honestly not notice or care? Or had it been some odd personal choice she could not understand? Did he have some reason for preferring them that way?

As Stuart had predicted, there were indeed a number of takeaway menus on the refrigerator. The one on top was for Domino’s Pizza, so Kathleen decided to order from them in honor of this house’s former occupants and their apparent culinary preferences. She phoned and was asked if she would like the usual order for that address, with all the dips. “Er … no,” she replied, and then ordered herself a simple, small pepperoni pizza. She also helped herself to some Ribena from the kitchen, where she found an entire drawer full of bottles of the stuff. It helped her feel more connected to them, as if she were somehow drinking their favorite drink with them. She raised her glass in a toast to Daniel Howell and Philip Lester, still uncertain whether Philip had been her great-uncle’s “housemate” or if Dan had found some other love later in life. She very much hoped that this had been Dan and Philip’s home together.

Waiting for the food to be delivered, sipping her glass of Ribena, she returned to the kitchen table and eagerly picked up the next letter.

4 August 1939

My most beloved Daniel,

In my lonely house at night, I think only of you. I re-read your letters and hold them to my heart. I think of the sweet words you have written and wish that I could hear them spoken by your lips.

I fear I am utterly besotted. Will you laugh at me? I think not, for I believe you share the intensity of my feelings, but I sometimes feel so alone, isolated in my inability to speak to you on these topics directly. Every time your eyes meet mine, I feel as if I have missed a step on a flight of stairs, as if I am suddenly falling. And, as when falling, I am not entirely without fear, but I like to imagine my fall ending with me landing in your arms.

Fancifully yours, Philip

There were many such papers: some proper love letters and others simple short notes. Kathleen’s pizza arrived, and she began eating absentmindedly, her attention still primarily on the letters from the shoebox. She held them far away from the pizza, however, lest pizza grease stain anything. She would rather risk pizza sauce falling on her own clothing than besmirch her great-uncle’s love letters.

18 September 1939

My Beloved Daniel,

Today during the radio broadcast, you touched my hand by chance, and I found myself momentarily unable to speak. You may perhaps be a negative influence upon my career, and yet I want only to feel the touch of your hand again and again. I want to hold your hand in mine and press a gentle kiss to your palm.

With these thoughts in mind, I will seek sleep tonight in my lonely bed and mail this upon the morrow so that I may hope to inspire dreams of you as long as the letter remains in my possession. In truth, I dream of you most nights, and expect tonight will be no different. I hope you also dream of me.

Yours always and forever, Philip

The doorbell rang again, surprising Kathleen. She looked at her watch to see that it was now early evening, and she should really leave this work behind and return to her family soon. She wondered who might be at the door, and so went to answer it. An older lady with bright red hair showing gray at the roots smiled in a very friendly fashion from the doorstep. “You must belong to one of my boys,” the woman said unexpectedly.

“One of your boys?” Kathleen repeated in confusion.

“Oh, my, yes. My Danny and Philly. Much older than me, of course, but still my boys. I’m Bernice, their neighbor these past … oh … more than twenty years. Nearly thirty, now, in fact.” The woman shook her head sadly, then reached out to take Kathleen’s hand and pat it gently between her own. “You must feel their loss even more keenly than I do.” And then somehow the woman was coming into the house, though Kathleen could not remember having invited her by word or by gesture. Bernice boldly went into the kitchen and made herself a glass of Ribena, then commented softly, “Oh. Someone closed the cabinets. Was that you?”

Kathleen nodded. “I don’t know why they were all open; perhaps a flaw in the construction? But seeing them all open like that bothered me, so I closed them. Why do you ask?”

Bernice smiled sadly. “It always bothered Dan, too. Phil was always leaving the cabinets open, and Dan always chided him about it. They bickered like the old married couple they were, you know.” Kathleen was happy to hear her hopes realized: It was Phil Lester with whom her great-uncle had gotten to spend his elder years. But the odd woman had continued speaking, her voice quiet and reverential. “After his dear Philip died, though, I came every day to visit poor Daniel to make sure that he was eating properly. He grieved so deeply, you know. I noticed the open cabinets and asked him about it, and do you know what that sweet boy said? He told me, ‘If the cabinet doors are open, then I feel like Phil might still be in the house, so I daren’t close them or face the fact that he is truly gone.’ Of course, he himself was gone not long after. Couldn’t live without his love, I think. They were the closest two people I’ve ever known, those two.”

Feeling a sudden upwelling of affection for this woman who had apparently cared deeply for the two men Kathleen had only begun to know through the letters, she smiled and said, “I’m Kathleen Banks, Daniel Howell’s great-niece. I didn’t know him well, and I didn’t know Philip Lester at all, so I would love to hear stories about them. I do wish I’d had the chance to know them before they died.”

Bernice looked Kathleen up and down and replied tartly, “Looks to me like you had at least forty years of opportunity, missy. It’s a mite late to be regretting now.”

Kathleen blushed, feeling as if she needed to explain herself to a woman she’d never even met before 10 minutes ago. “Great-Uncle Dan was estranged from the family my entire life, and I didn’t even know that Philip Lester existed until I began reading his letters today. My family told me that Great-Uncle Dan lived with another Army pensioner to help pay the rent, but that was obviously a lie. Given the way my family seems to have treated him, I don’t know if he would even have been open to knowing me.”

Bernice put her hands on her sizeable hips and shook her head in disbelief. “Well, of course he would have, child! It was only his own family that wouldn’t have him! Or, at least, that’s what dear Philly told me over tea one time when Dan was away. His mother’s funeral, I think it was, and Phil said it was one of the few times the family would even let him near. But of course Phil could not go with him. Danny never talked about his family, but I know Phil hurt for him.”

Kathleen frowned deeply. “I didn’t know,” she told Bernice. “No one ever talked about him, and I guess I was just busy with my own life, and I never thought…”

“Yes, yes,” Bernice interrupted her brusquely. “None of you ever thought of him. But that boy still had a family that loved him.”

Kathleen wanted to ask what family Bernice was referring to, but Bernice had walked up to a photo on the wall and smiled broadly at it. “Oh, those dogs. They loved those dogs. They’ve been gone 10 years or so now, but sweet Danny and Philly kept their photo on the wall.” Kathleen went to look and saw a photograph of two very happy-looking corgis with tongues lolling in doggy smiles at the camera. “The boys walked those dogs twice a day, every day, and it was often the only time they left the house. They liked their own company, you know—didn’t go out much. If I hadn’t stopped by so often to bring them proper food, they would have had pizza delivered every night.”

Kathleen glanced guiltily at the kitchen table, where her pizza still sat a safe distance from Dan’s pile of keepsakes.

“Oh,” Bernice breathed, having followed Kathleen’s glance toward the table. “Dan’s box of memories. He went through that every day near the end. I can only imagine the things he loved deeply enough to save all those years and bring out constantly during those final days.” She sighed, sniffed, and quickly wiped a hand across one of her eyes. She cleared her throat and added, “Well, I suppose it’s only fair that someone from his family be permitted to read the things he held most dear, though the whole lot should most likely be given to those what loved him when you’re finished.” Bernice gave her a steely-eyed glance.

“I think I’ve been coming to love him by seeing him through Phil’s eyes,” Kathleen admitted. “I wish so very much that I hadn’t lost a chance I never even knew I had. He seems like a really lovely person.”

Bernice laughed. “Oh, he was a crotchety old goat much of the time, unlike his sweet Philly, but that Dan had a heart of gold under all that bluster. I do wish you had gotten to know him, as you seem like you might be one of his few relations that might have brought him joy.” Bernice paused. “As long as you loved Phil equally, of course. There was no Dan without Phil, no Phil without Dan. They were a matched pair, and you wouldn’t have gotten a second glance from your great-uncle if you didn’t accept that Phil meant the world to him.”

Kathleen felt tears sting her eyes. “I think that may be why he became so estranged from the family. I think there may have been family members who couldn’t accept their relationship. That’s my guess, anyway. But I can promise you this: If I had ever gotten to meet the Phil Lester who wrote those letters, I would have hugged him even more tightly than my own Great-Uncle Dan. I feel as if prejudice within my own family stole them both from my life, never giving me the opportunity to know them.”

“Oh, pooh!” said Bernice with a dismissive hand gesture. “They wouldn’t have wanted much company anyway! They liked to be on their own, in their own little world, just the two of them.” She seemed to see something in Kathleen’s face and added, “But if you ever want to hear stories about them, get to know them a bit after the fact, you come visit me any time you like. I live just next door at number 18.” Bernice went to wash out her Ribena glass and left it upside down in the dish drainer. “I should be getting home now. I just wanted to see who was over here, since I saw the light on and got curious.” She stepped close and shocked Kathleen by kissing her lightly on the cheek. “You seem a sweet girl. Come see me anytime you’d like to hear about your uncles, because I loved those boys dearly and will never tire telling stories about them.” She smiled sadly again, gave Kathleen another quick kiss on the cheek, and then opened the door and left without another word.

Stunned, Kathleen sat down again at the table. The congealed pizza no longer looked remotely appetizing, and she hated seeing it so close to those delicate and precious documents her great-uncle had saved so carefully. She put the remaining pizza in the refrigerator, knowing that she would be returning tomorrow and might be willing to snack on it then.

Just a couple more letters, she told herself. Maybe two more, then she would head home. There was still plenty of time before the kids needed to go to bed, and Kathleen didn’t want to leave quite yet, not after that emotional conversation with the neighbor.

31 December 1939

My love,

I was, of course, distraught to see you leave so soon after that most precious moment, but I know that you must spend part of the festive season with your own family. I cannot have your attention every moment of every day, no matter how much I may desire it. Please know that you are in my heart and in my thoughts always.

As I write this, I know that I shall see you this evening for our New Year’s Eve broadcast. I will see your lovely brown eyes turn to me and I will know the emotions and the memories behind that glance. We may shake hands or I may rest a hand upon your shoulder, but those small touches contain a multitude of emotions.

We start the new year by turning a beautiful new page. We may find ourselves not in a position to express our feelings as openly as we might like, but we two know the truth and share its inestimable beauty.

Yours most devotedly, Phil

Kathleen couldn’t help wondering about “that most precious moment,” and quickly picked up the next envelope, only to find that it did not contain a letter. Or, rather, it contained a form letter with relevant details stamped in ink.

NATIONAL SERVICE (ARMED FORCES) ACT, 1939 ENLISTMENT NOTICE Date: 15 JANUARY 1940 Mr. DANIEL JAMES HOWELL

DEAR SIR,

In accordance with the National Service (Armed Forces) Act, 1939, you are called upon for service in the ARMY and are required to present yourself on MONDAY 29 JAN 1940, at 10 a.m., or as early as possible thereafter on that day to:

RINGSTEAD BARRACKS MILL HILL RINGSTEAD DORSET NW7

A Travelling Warrant for your journey is enclosed. Before starting your journey you must exchange the warrant for a ticket at the booking office named on the warrant. If possible, this should be done a day or two before you are due to travel.

A Postal Order for 4s, in respect of advance of service pay, is also enclosed. Uniform and personal kit will be issued to you after joining H.M. Forces. Any kit that you take with you should not exceed an overcoat, change of clothes, stout pair of boots, and personal kit, such as razor, hair brush, tooth brush, soap and towel.

Immediately on receipt of this notice, you should inform your employer of the date upon which you are required to report for service.

Yours faithfully, James Alistair Davies Manager.

Kathleen found herself almost physically ill at the phrasing of the closing of the letter. “Yours faithfully”? Among all these letters from the truly faithful Phil Lester, a bureaucratic form from the British Army sending Daniel Howell off to World War II with a “Yours faithfully” made Kathleen nearly lose the pizza she’d eaten earlier.

She decided this was an excellent time to go home to the warm arms of her loving husband, who wouldn’t mind if she cried a little bit over events of decades past.

******

[ Continue to Chapter 5 ]

#phanfiction #phanfic #historical phanfiction #historical phanfic #phanfiction historical #phanfic historical #phanfiction au #au phanfiction #phanfic au #au phanfic #historical au #1930s phan #the roles we play #myphanfic

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limafm · 4 years ago

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JACOB ARTIST, CISMALE, HE/HIM, BISEXUAL; Is that JAKE PUCKERMAN I see getting a cup of joe at the Lima Bean? Sounds like them. Apparently, they’re TWENTY-SEVEN years old and I know from Instagram they seem to be RESILIANT but also COCKY and are a DANCE INSTRUCTOR. Not to mention their feed reminds me of JEANS AND T-SHIRTS, PERSISTANCE BEYOND BELIEF, & DANCING UNTIL YOU DROP. Here’s to hoping they get out of Lima soon!

TW: major injury/drunk driving/depression

CHARACTER INFO:

Birthday: March 16th, 1994

Family: Puckerman

Relation: Half-Sibling

Birth Order: Open

Secret: Part of him thinks he failed.

THREE THINGS ABOUT JAKE:

Jake Puckerman was a dancer before he could walk. Everyone around him, though at the time it was only his mother and grandmother, knew he had untapped potential and they did what they could to make sure it was nurtured for as long as he’d be interested. He first started training in ballet and eventually ventured out into other areas.

Growing up, they moved around a lot. His mother would always have a couple jobs, making sure there was enough food on the table and money for dance. When he was thirteen they eventually found something, back in Lima where he’d been born, a little more permanent. It was small but it worked for the three of them.

Jake knew he had probably close to fifty other siblings out there if anything his mother told him about his father was true, but to be totally honest, he wasn’t super interested, at least not for a while. It wasn’t for another couple years that Jake would feel any need to try to build any relationships with any of his half siblings.

The older Jake got, the more competitive he got with his dancing, and the more focussed he was about keeping it as a part of his future. He applied to a few different Art’s/Dance programs all over the country, including some in NYC and LA. In the end, Jake settled on Juilliard.

It was hard at first, being so far from his family, but Jake was thriving. He loved the city and he loved being surrounded by like minded people. While in New York, and once he started going out for auditions, Jake dropped his last name. His father didn’t deserve any of the credit, so he wasn’t Jake Puckerman anymore, he was Jacob Samuel.

After a few years, and far too many small roles, Jake got what he wanted. He landed John Laurens/Phillip Hamilton. When he called home, he was just a little kid again, a kid who’d gotten everything he’d ever dreamed about. This was his breakout role and this is where he’d start to get noticed. Getting Hamilton completely kickstarted Jake’s career.

Jake really enjoyed playing John, especially being allowed to play into the historic romance between him and Alexander, it was a dream. There was honestly nothing more exhilarating than being on stage every night. He did that for nearly a year before he got another call asking if he’d take up the mantle as Evan Hansen. There was no question in Jake’s mind, of course he’d go for it. It was so much more … everything than John. He was able to show off that not only could he sing and dance, but he could act too, and well.

Everything in Jake’s life was going really well. He dated every now and then, but nothing all too serious, he was a live in the moment kind of guy. Jake knew he wasn’t famous per se, but he was getting pretty used to people knowing him on the streets or the subway. He loved the attention and he wasn’t going to lie about that, but he also knew he was lucky.

One night, on his way home from a show, everything changed. One person decided that getting behind the wheel drunk was a great idea and with that Jake’s future was drastically changed. He’d been tired so he opted for a cab instead of the subway, a choice Jake would later regret. The scene was … something else. When EMS first arrived on scene, they were prepared to call everyone DOA, but luckily Jake was spotted and his life was in their hands. The paramedics and firefighters worked quickly and efficiently and got him to a hospital but despite all their best efforts, Jake ended up losing his right leg, just below the knee.

The Jake who woke up with one leg was not the same Jake that performed. Depression hit hard and fast, something Jake had never really dealt with before. It took a team of doctors just to get him to eat and actively participate in PT. Once he was medically cleared, Jake was admitted into an inpatient rehabilitation centre to learn how to navigate the world in a whole new way. It took a while before he could move with anything close to grace, but once he put his mind in it, things got so much easier.

It was a couple months before Jake felt strong enough to move back home, slightly ashamed to be back in Lima. Jake felt like a failure, like he’d failed his dreams. It wasn’t until he visited his old dance studio, something he felt he owed, and was flocked once again with kids who looked up to him so much, that the idea of dancing again even occurred to him.

It was hard, Jake would never lie about that, but there was something about getting back to his roots that sparked an old fire in him. The first time he got through a whole routine, albeit short, he cried like a baby. For the first time in forever, things were just a little more normal, a little more right.

A few months later, after a lot of practice and deliberation, Jake applied for an open teaching position at the studio. He’d teach anyone, but he wanted to focus on helping kids, especially kids who had it a bit harder financially. Dance had always been important to him, and he was just so grateful to have it back.

#jake puckerman

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tchalametdaily · 7 years ago

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Timothée Chalamet: "I always root for the underdog".

Translation below the cut.

A star is born. He has a French name (like his dad), but his home is New York. However, fame came with an Italian movie, "Call Me By Your Name" by Luca Guadagnino, a heart-wrenching tale of first love. And there's already Oscar talk around it.

"College? I tried, but I just can't. I'm already in too deep with the movie business to take a step back and say, okay, now I'll go back to school. I can do what a director tells me to do, but I can't do homework".

Warning: acting is robbing a bilingual 21-year-old, who's always been a good student, of a prestigious degree at Columbia University. It's undeniable that the career of New Yorker Timothée Chalamet is rising (right now he's on the set of Woody Allen's next project), and if you didn't notice how talented he is in movies like Love The Coopers and Interstellar, you now have a new chance of finding out with his first leading role in Luca Guadagnino's Oscar frontrunner Call Me By Your Name (written alongside James Ivory and Walter Fasano), out in US theaters on November 24th and coming to our cinemas next year.

Based on André Aciman's 2007 novel of the same title, it tells of an unexpected love story between a French-Italian 17-year-old named Elio and one of his father's students, Oliver, a 24-year-old American who comes to Italy to work on his post-doctorate dissertation. It takes place in the early 80s, when Craxi was prime minister and Beppe Grillo was on TV*, in an unspecified location near Cremona. The discovery of passion turns Elio's summer into a coming-of-age momentum that will probably change his whole life.

"I admit I was a bit intimidated by the character at first. But once I got to Italy, after I took piano lessons, and guitar and diction, and while rehearsing scenes, I let myself go without having to label roles or actions. It truly was a beautiful experience, partly because Guadagnino has a very natural way of guiding you and making you see things through his eyes".

Call Me By Your Name is a movie about the power of first love. Do you remember your first crush?

I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I went to a party and I found myself with a group of girls. I realized that, while I was talking, my head was pounding, it felt like a war was raging inside of me, I sensed that it wasn't like when I was with my friends... I was afraid, and yet I was enjoying it.

Do you have any confidants?

My sister, who's a little older than me. I usually talk to her about some stuff, and I talk to my parents about other stuff, there's a good dialogue between us. I have no secrets from them (he smiles)... well, maybe some. And then there’s my friends, although sometimes my job makes it hard to see them regularly.

Has fame changed your life?

I started at 14 with small roles, I had time to get used to it. I'm not a star, I'm sure I'll never be one. No one is stopping me on the street. There are a lot of celebrities in Manhattan, where I grew up, no one looks at me like I'm special. And I don't mind being interviewed either, some of my older colleagues told me that it can get boring after a while. But, for the time being, this gives me the opportunity to ask myself where I'm going and how. It's like seeing a therapist.

What did you learn on the set of Call Me By Your Name?

That one doesn't just decide to change, that there are stages in everyone's lives that take you places you didn't expect. Sometimes, trying to impose our will onto the future is a wasted effort.

What did Italy leave you with?

Beauty. Beauty in places, food, people's warmth. But I'm half French so it felt a little bit like home.

How did your parents meet?

My father, who's French, was on a business trip in New York for Le Parisien. He's a journalist, who now works for the United Nations. My mom was a dancer, now she's in the real estate business. I can't tell if my sister and I feel more French or American. I stayed in New York while she's been living in Paris for quite some time. I spent every summer in France until I was 15 years old, but New York is my home.

Who would you root for in a sporting match between France and the US?

France if it's basket, America if it's football**. I find that it's easier for me to root for the underdog.

Do you find a different welcoming while you're overseas now that Trump is president?

It's not easy, not so much because of what people think, but because of how I feel in the first place, as an individual.

Are you politically active?

I don't take to the streets to protest, but I often talk about politics with my friends. Obama's first election campaign was a sort of a way in that pushed my generation to get into politics. Up to that point, the only memories I had of the White House had Bush as the main resident, and there was very little to get excited about. Trump can try to build walls and make our current lives horrible, but we now live in a world where most of us come from mixed-race families, Americans, and Mexicans, Canadians, and Germans, French, and Italians, Argentinians, and Russians. It's a process that cannot be stopped, we're already heading towards a united world, free of nationalism.

What do you read in your spare time, do you prefer essays or literature?

Literature. I'm currently obsessed with Russian authors. Tolstoj, but also Dostoevskij. Crime and Punishment is a gut punch.

Music?

David Bowie, Nancy Sinatra, Talking Heads. I know, I have old-fashioned tastes.

Social network?

I'm not a fan. I have an Instagram account I rarely use, no official Facebook page. There's so much to do, I really don't have time to commit to something that is not real***.

Favorite actor?

Louis de Funès, the greatest.

Do you have a long-cherished dream?

In my case, to be content with your everyday life is already like living a dream.

(translator's notes: *a bit of historical context: Craxi was the leader of the Italian Socialist Party and a controversial political figure; at the time, Beppe Grillo was a stand up comedian and actor who's now, ironically enough, a controversial political figure. **For you Americans out there, he's obviously talking about soccer, but everywhere else it's called football, the one you actually play with your feet! ***I realize him saying that social networking is "not real" can sound a bit harsh, but please don't fixate on such a small detail; the real meaning behind his words might have gotten lost in translation –mine was literal– and he clearly has a different approach to it than us)

#timothée chalamet #timothee chalamet #call me by your name #cmbyn #laterpeaches #interview #article #thanks to cam again for translating this!!!

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sciencespies · 4 years ago

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New Research Suggests Alexander Hamilton Was a Slave Owner

https://sciencespies.com/history/new-research-suggests-alexander-hamilton-was-a-slave-owner/

New Research Suggests Alexander Hamilton Was a Slave Owner

For Jessie Serfilippi, it was an eye-opening moment. As she worked at her computer, she had to keep checking to make sure what she was seeing was real: irrefutable evidence that Alexander Hamilton—the founding father depicted by many historians and even on Broadway as an abolitionist—enslaved other humans.

“I went over that thing so many times, I just had to be sure,” recalls Serfilippi, adding, “I went in to this with the intention of learning about Hamilton’s connection to slavery. Would I find instances of him enslaving people? I did.”

In a recently published paper, “‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing’: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver,” the young researcher details her findings gleaned from primary source materials. One of those documents includes Hamilton’s own cashbook, which is available online at the Library of Congress.

In it, several line items indicate that Hamilton purchased enslaved labor for his own household. While antithetical to the popular image of the founding father, that reference has reinforced the view held by a growing cadre of historians that Hamilton did actively engage in enslaving people.

“I didn’t expect to find what I did at all,” Serfilippi says. “Part of me wondered if I was even wasting my time because I thought other historians would have found this already. Some had said he owned slaves but there was never any real proof.”

One who is not surprised by the revelation is author William Hogeland, who has written about Hamilton and is working on a book about his impact on American capitalism.

“Serfilippi’s research is super exciting,” he says. “Her research confirms what we have suspected, and it takes the whole discussion to a new place. She’s found some actual evidence of enslavement on the part of Hamilton that is just more thoroughgoing and more clearly documented than anything we’ve had before.”

A 1784 entry from Hamilton’s cash books documenting the sale of a woman named Peggy

(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Hamilton’s connection to slavery is as complex as his personality. Brilliant but argumentative, he was a member of the New York Manumission Society, which advocated for the emancipation of the enslaved. However, he often acted as legal arbiter for others in the transactions of people in bondage.

Serfilippi points out that by conducting these deals for others, Hamilton was in effect a slave trader—a fact overlooked by some historians.

“We can’t get into his head and know what he was thinking,” she says. “Hamilton may have seen enslavement of others as a step up for a white man. That’s the way many white people saw it in that time period.”

Serfilippi works as an interpreter at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New Yori, the home of Hamilton’s father-in-law Philip Schuyler, a Revolutionary War general and U.S. senator. Her paper came about as part of her research on the many African Americans enslaved by Schuyler. According to the mansion, Schuyler enslaved as many as 30 laborers between his two properties in Albany and Saratoga, New York. Sefilippi initially looked at Schuyler’s children, including Eliza, who married Hamilton in 1780, and as she examined the founding father’s cashbook, the evidence jumped out at her in several places.

One line item, dated June 28, 1798, shows that Hamilton received a $100 payment for the “term” of a “negro boy.” He had leased the boy to someone else and accepted cash for his use.

“He sent the child to work for another enslaver and then collected the money that child made,” Serfilippi says. “He could only do that if he enslaved that child.”

The smoking gun was at the end of the cashbook, where an anonymous hand is settling Hamilton’s estate following his death. That person wrote down the value of various items, including servants. It was a confirming moment for Serfilippi.

“You can only ascribe monetary value to a person you are enslaving,” she says. “There were free white servants who he hired but they were not included there.”

She adds, “Once you see it in his own handwriting, to me there’s really no question.”

An 1893 photograph of Hamilton’s estate, the Grange

(Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

In late-18th century New York, according to historian Leslie Howard, the words “servant” and “slave” were often used interchangeably—especially in New York, where enslaved workers were likely to be members of the household staff. Howard, a professor of African American studies at Northwestern University, points out it is an important distinction in understanding the many guises of slavery in 18th-century America.

“In casual usage, enslavers used the term ‘servant’ to refer to people they enslaved, especially if they were referring to those who worked in the household—the idea of a ‘domestic servant’ could be inclusive of enslaved, indentured or free laborers,” she says. “So in reading documents that refer to people as servants, we have to be careful to find other evidence of their actual legal status.”

Harris is impressed by the research in Serfilippi’s paper and how it is reshaping the way we view the founding father. “It’s clear that Hamilton was deeply embedded in slavery,” she adds. “We have to think more carefully about this [idea of Hamilton as] anti-slavery.”

Hamilton played an important role in the establishment of the American government and creation of many of its economic institutions, including Wall Street and a central bank. The illegitimate son of a Scot, he was born and raised in the Caribbean, attended college in New York and then joined the Continental Army at the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775. He eventually became aide-de-camp to General George Washington and saw action at the Battle of Yorktown.

Largely self-taught and self-made, Hamilton found success as a lawyer and served in Congress. He wrote many of the Federalist Papers that helped shape the Constitution. He served as the first Secretary of the Treasury when Washington became president in 1789 and was famously killed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804.

Despite being on the $10 bill, Hamilton remained generally ignored by the public until the publication of Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton. The bestseller was read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who turned it into a watershed Broadway hit in 2015, winning 11 Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize.

For the most part, Chernow and Miranda hewed to the accepted dogma that Hamilton was an abolitionist and only reluctantly participated in the sale of humans as a legal go-between for relatives and friends. Though Chernow states Hamilton may have owned slaves, the notion that he was ardently against the institution pervades his book—and not without some support. The belief is rooted in a biography written 150 years ago by Hamilton’s son, John Church Hamilton, who stated his father never owned slaves.

That idea was later refuted by Hamilton’s grandson, Allan McLane Hamilton, who said his grandfather did indeed own them and his own papers proved it. “It has been stated that Hamilton never owned a negro slave, but this is untrue,” he wrote. “We find that in his books there are entries showing that he purchased them for himself and for others.” However, that admission was generally ignored by many historians since it didn’t fit the established narrative.

“I think it’s fair to say Hamilton opposed the institution of slavery,” Hogeland says. “But, as with many others who did in his time, that opposition was in conflict with widespread practice on involvement in the institution.”

A portrait of Elizabeth Schuyler, Hamilton’s wife

(Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

In an e-mail, Chernow applauds Serfilippi’s “real contribution to the scholarly literature” but expresses dismay over what he sees as her one-sided approach to Hamilton’s biography. “Whether Hamilton’s involvement with slavery was exemplary or atrocious, it was only one aspect of his identity, however important,” he writes. “There is, inevitably, some distortion of vising by viewing Hamilton’s large and varied life through this single lens.”

In her paper, Serfilippi cites the work of other historians who have similarly investigated Hamilton’s past as enslaver, including John C. Miller, Nathan Schachner and Sylvan Joseph Muldoon. Hogeland also cites a 2010 article by Michelle DuRoss, then a postgraduate student at the University at Albany, State University of New York, who claims Hamilton was likely a slave owner.

“Scholars are aware of this paper,” Hogeland says. “It’s gotten around. It predates Serfilippi’s work and doesn’t have the same documentation, but she makes the argument that Hamilton’s abolitionism is a bit of a fantasy.”

Chernow, however, holds steadfast on his reading of Hamilton. “While Hamilton was Treasury Secretary, his anti-slavery activities did lapse, but he resumed them after he returned to New York and went back into private law practice, working again with the New York Manumission Society,” he writes. “Elected one of its four legal advisers, he helped to defend free blacks when slave masters from out of state brandished bills of sale and tried to snatch them off the New York streets. Does this sound like a man invested in the perpetuation of slavery?”

For her part, Serfilippi is taking the attention she is receiving from historians in stride. At 27, she is part of a new breed of researchers who are reviewing now-digitized collections of historical documents to take a fresh look at what happened in the past. She is pleased her discovery is shedding new light on a familiar figure and adding insight into his character.

More importantly, she hopes it will help deepen our understanding of the difficult issue of slavery in the nation’s history and its impact on individuals—the slavers and the enslaved. The driving force for Serfilippi was to get to know and remember the people held in bondage by the founding father. She recounts one correspondence between Philip Schuler and his daughter and the potent impact of learning the name of one of Hamilton’s slaves.

“Schuyler, just in letters to other people, will casually mention enslavement,” she says. “In one letter he writes to Eliza in 1798, ‘the death of one of your servants by yellow fever has deeply affected my feelings.’ He goes on to identify the servant, a boy by the name of Dick.

“That was a shocking moment for me. This is the first and only name of somebody Hamilton enslaved that I’ve come across. It’s something I’ve never stopped thinking about.”

#History

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spicybisous · 4 years ago

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A Pragmatic Approach to Religion

I have a bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies, but not for the reasons you might think.

You see, a majority of people often confuse religious studies for theology, which is the study of God. Which god? Well, that depends on which faith’s theology you’re studying. Rather than studying the word of a specific religion’s God, I opted to look into religious studies, which combines political science, objective world views, and international policy all wrapped up. I actually learned very little about individual faiths, but more about their existence world-wide, and the many different roles religion plays depending on what continent, village, and culture you’re referencing. It provided me with experiences beyond belief, and since I have graduated, I have successfully communicated with people from all walks of life, with a lot more understanding for the importance religion (r spirituality) plays in their lives. I’ve been able to connect with people and think completely objectively in ways I never thought imaginable.

During my junior year of university, we were asked to look at religion through a new set of glasses; separating faith and believe from religion, and re-applying it to something people would not automatically assume is religious. We were also asked to explain whether or not we felt that religion was a noun, or something else.

I figured I would share a snippet of my presentation, mostly because for once in my life, I really have nothing else to write.

Scholars have been studying religion for centuries, and while there is a multitude of evidence supporting the existence and presence of religion, they have failed to produce reason to believe that religion stands as an independent object of study. Sociologists and theorists alike, have made a seemingly successful differentiation between religious and secular institutions, and many will agree that religion and the rest of the secular world are two different entities, but how much truth to that statement can there be? Theorists have also made multiple attempts at defining what religion is, arguably, with little to no avail. One clear theory surrounding the futile attempts to define religion came from 1960’s theorist Wilfred Smith, who believed that the attempts to define religion as a “thing,” were misguided on the basis that religion itself does not define any one particular phenomena that can be picked out among cultures or societies. He stated that, contrary to many other theorists’ studies of religion, it did not have a common feature which could be recognized across planes. Many other scholars believed religion could be easily spotted across cultures due to its indicative nature, but here, Smith, along with Durkheim, argues that religion is a Western social construction, superimposed upon many different phenomena to give the illusion that religion is a unified institution. In fact Durkheim pushed this theory to the fullest extent, suggesting that religion itself was a unified system of both practices and beliefs (Nine Theories of Religion, 104).

The idea of religion can be traced back about 5,000 years, near the dawn of written language. Since it has made its appearance in society, religion has served a great purpose; defining gender, marital, and miscellaneous social roles, setting moral boundaries for the creation and upholding of laws, and providing people with an optimistic outlook to the woes of life. That is just it, though. Religion plays a crucial role in almost all aspects of historic and modern society, and is always accompanied by some greater, all knowing entity. It may be studied alongside economics, politics, law, and home-life, but to what extent can one study religion without observing another core facet of society? In order to be a true object of study, it would seem that one should be able to quarantine religion, and study it without interference of other aspects of human life. In a multicultural world, it seems irresponsible to assume that religion, as a singular body, exists in every society. It seems that theorists often make the mistake of dubbing a cultural as “religious,” based on a template that has been constructed to throw various beliefs and actions towards religion, rather than human nature. Now, to say that religion may not necessarily exist as a solitary object of study is not to say that it does not serve an immensely important function. Religion has managed to infiltrate every aspect of human existence, driving the mind, law, politics, and social and personal spheres, to define good and evil.

Notably, religion is responsible for telling humans what is right versus what is wrong, how one should think, behave, and execute day-to-day actions. All of these religious dictations are designed to not only create a highly-functional society, but to keep people safe. For example, Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17 both state “You shall not murder” (Holy Bible, New International Version). Matthew 19:18 further defines this as well:

“Then he said to Him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness.”

In fact, there are more than fifteen separate mentions of the above throughout the Bible, and many of them present repercussions for committing these transgressions, which would require one to face a court (Matthew 5:21). From this, we can infer that the justice system was born. However, rather than to credit the creation of all things to religion, one could just as easily say that religion was the excuse for such happenings. One modern-day example is the relationship between a parent and child. The child will blindly follow the word of the parent, both out of respect, but also out of deeply-rooted fear of both disapproval and punishment. The same can be observed about religious people throughout history; they followed the word of God out of fear of the unknown, or of a cruel, grueling punishment. God holds the idea of Heaven and Hell over the religious people as either a prize or damnation. This seems to be more of a basic human thought process, cloaked with the excuse of religion, because if there stands nothing to be afraid of, what would encourage people to follow such laws or precepts in the first place?

In terms of economics, Karl Marx decides that the purpose of religion is to create an illusory fantasy to appease the poor. He strongly believed that religion served as comfort for those who were being exploited and taken advantage of (Nine Theories of Religion, 113). Predating Marx’s concept of the sociology of religion and publishing of The Communist Manifesto (1848) was the sale of indulgences around 1517. Marx’s theory fits this example perfectly, as the Church used its religious platform and power to exploit the population and used scare tactics in order to revamp their economy. The demand for indulgences skyrocketed, and people were selling property rights and homes to both the Church, and non-religious entities such as princes, in order to afford these symbolic tokens to ensure theirs and their families’ safety in the afterlife. This was one of the first moves into a more progressive economy, which did not rely solely on the barter system to acquire goods. In the 1560’s though, the people questioned the validity of Indulgences once the church began selling them for those who had already passed away. Suddenly, the people were awakened, as Marx claimed they would be, and began questioning the time constraints and limitations of their indulgences. Many people began to feel the heat of the proposed scam the church had pulled on them.

Based on the ordinary traits attributed to religion, one could say that Americans are religious based on the traditions, rites, and rituals observed throughout the greater society. However, upon further examination, these phenomena could easily be accredited to patriotism and early Biblical dictations for safety and wellness. For example, American rituals may include more obvious representations of nationalism such as the Pledge of Allegiance. Another vivid example is Americans and their relationship with sports, namely, baseball and football. Along with extensive preparation and somewhat of a uniformed appearance in support of a specific team, there are many superstitions which arise as well. This of course, brings forth the need to differentiate between sports and religion. By the standards of what is and isn’t a religion, sports seems to be a strong contender, but lacks the ability to settle on one divine or Supreme Being. Religion then becomes contradictory to itself, in attempts to be defined by the parameters previously set because Hinduism, a very widely accepted religion, grants divinity to hundreds of different images. One might ask how theorists have gotten around this contradiction, by stating that Hinduism is still ultimately ruled by one supreme power, but that each god and goddess is simply a more personalized and relatable conduit to convey the same one-being’s word. Now, with this angle in mind, who is to say that each sport in itself is not its own religion, and each individual team is just a smaller, more personalized representation of a more influential power, such as the NFL of MBL. The lines by which religion was previously defined are clearly blurred, and seem to be ever-changing in order to outsmart modern challenges to the integrity of religion as its own brand.

#writing #spicybisouswriting #religion #religious #religions #college #paper #thesis #written word #opinion piece #thinkpiece

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medschoolash · 8 years ago

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Let’s talk about TO’s increasingly Racist Narrative with the Mikaelsons and Marcel Gerard.

Disclaimer: This is VERY long. I’m putting most of it under the cut because of length. I thought about cutting it short but this is a topic that’s very important to me so I decided to not cut words.

So after Friday’s episode many viewers, especially black viewers were left with a very real feeling of discomfort following Elijah’s speech to Marcel. Because of that discomfort many of us have expressed how the narrative, and Elijah, has skewed into racism, an accusation that makes some viewers feel uncomfortable.

Here’s the truth though, in a way it should make some people uncomfortable. If you didn’t feel uneasy about the idea of racism in a narrative that you like then I would have to question some things about you. With that said, I’ve seen a lot more efforts to shut down discourse about the accusation or explain away the behavior many people find problematic than I’ve seen to actually understand it and why we might feel that way. That’s a problem, it’s a big problem when this discussion is something that’s actually very necessary for this show, and many TV shows. When writers take on the task of crafting a narrative that includes minority characters, there is a certain level of awareness and delicacy that many are going to expect then to have when it comes to these characters. When they offend their audience and mishandle the characters they have been entrusted with then they deserve to be taken to task for that. It doesn’t matter if the offense was intentional or unintentional. This is especially the case when you have a writing staff who pats themselves on the back for trying to be aware of social and racial issues that are currently at play in our society.

I personally don’t think that writers are obligated to treat every black character or every character from a marginalized group like a delicate flower that can’t be harmed in any way shape or form. That’s not what I’m talking about here. What I’m talking about is when you take characters from marginalized groups and carelessly handle them in a way that ends up pushing a racist narrative.To give an example, killing a black character doesn’t automatically make a narrative racist but pushing an idea where a black character is consistently targeted by white characters, denied humanity and is treated as disposable flesh then that is indeed a racist narrative. That kind of dynamic has historically been an issue in this world and it is still an issue. We can discuss whether the racism that seeps into our fiction a little too often is intentional, and I don’t personally believe it always is, but we have to acknowledge that it’s actually there first.

That’s why we need to talk about The Originals and Marcel.

What they did to Marcel in Friday’s episode, what they had Elijah say to him, and the narrative that built up to that moment was racist.

From the very beginning of this show there was a very troublesome aspect of the narrative around Marcel and the Mikaelsons. Marcel was a former slave who was rescued from slavery by Klaus and adopted as his son. They used a white savior idea to explain how this black man became the son of this powerful white man and got integrated into this all white original family. Instead of tackling this dynamic on screen the completely glossed over it. They never tackled how Marcel felt about that, if it had any effect on his mentally, how the mikaelsons adjusted to his presence in their life given his different racial background. It’s convenient to just pretend that the Mikaelsons and Marcel never even blinked at the racial difference because the Mikaelsons have been around for so long that race doesn’t register to them at all. Just like it’s convenient to pretend that Marcel never cared that the people that he now lived with were just sharing a table with and share the same skin color with the very people who have abused him and people who look like him. They basically painted a narrative where Klaus was an empathetic white savior for marcel...even went as far as to have marcel actually call him his savior more than once in canon, and Marcel was just incredibly grateful to have been saved. That’s as far as the discussion went.

They never addressed this aspect of the dynamic on the show and I suspect that it’s because they never sat down and thought about the racial implications of having a black former slave be adopted into an all white family that saved him from slavery. The choice was careless and problematic from it conception.

The only reason this aspect hasn’t been super unsettling for 4 seasons now is because that little bit of history has been pretty much background noise in the narrative and they’ve avoided addressing anything about race explicitly. We all know that the way it was set up is troublesome but we don’t actively think about it during every interaction because we believe in Klaus’s genuine love for Marcel and their father and son dynamic. They basically took the easy way and lazy way out and said “let’s pretend that a racial difference doesn’t exist here” and they’ve gotten away with doing this for 4 seasons now.

This actually reminds me of Julie Plec’s comment about her practice of “colorblind” casting for her TV shows. Colorblind casting in theory is good for diversity since it would theoretically increase the likelihood of a minority being selected for a role. Colorblind casting is how Kat Graham was selected to play Bonnie Bennett despite the fact that in the books that inspired TVD Bonnie was white. Like I said,in theory this is great...however that doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for how you handle these characters that you have made a minority in your narrative. Making Marcel a black man instead of a white man and having him considered a part of this family could be seen as a plus for diversity, but that doesn’t absolve them of their responsibility to handle the racial difference that are at play in a manner that doesn’t offend or push racist ideas. They don’t get to skate responsibility here by having the characters not openly acknowledge the racial difference, the racial difference is still there at the end of the day even if the writers are too lazy to tackle it.

It’s actually their reluctance to address the racial aspect from the very beginning that makes what happened in the episode last night so impossible to divorce race from the narrative that they have set up concerning marcel. (I have to give credit to my friend Amy being the one who originally raised this point during a discussion)

Let’s take a look at the build up to last night:

Marcel started the series as the King of New Orleans. Klaus comes to town and is envious of what Marcel has built and wants to take it back for himself. We learn that Marcel was actually Klaus’s son, he adopted him when he was a boy and raised him up until adulthood. Klaus was the one who even gave Marcel his name since he didn't’ have one previously due to being a slave. Klaus and Marcel have their share of clashes but in season 1 in particular we learn that Marcel has scars that Klaus couldn’t heal, but that there is still genuine love and a father son bond between the two of them.

This carries over into the rest of the seasons where Klaus and Elijah have an up and down relationship but from Klaus’s eyes that’s still his son. Along the way they introduce a past close relationship between Elijah and Marcel. Marcel was very close to Marcel until Klaus became jealous. Elijah, in an effort to appease Klaus and because he saw Marcel as Klaus’s path to redemption, very harshly distances himself from Marcel without explanation to Marcel. In their present day dynamic Elijah shows an open annoyance and hostility towards marcel. The audience gets no real explanation to the root of Elijah's present day behavior towards marcel and we see the two of them co-exist but it never goes beyond that.

One other wrinkle to the Mikaelsons and Marcel dynamic that was introduced was that when Marcel was a boy, Kol was jealous of how accepted in the family Marcel was while he still felt like an outsider. Kol was the first to truly express the opinion that Marcel was almost unworthy of his position in the family and to show resentment. There is an uneasy idea being perpetrated by Kol’s resentment, a white man resents a black boy for taking his place in the family. A white man can’t comprehend how this black child can be embraced by his brothers but he feels like an outsider looking in and resents the child and his family for it.

Once again the racial dynamics are never factored into this narrative, we are just to assume that Kol doesn’t see Marcel as a black child but just a child. We are to assume that he doesn’t see a former slave as unworthy of a position in his family over him, he just sees this colorless person who’s soaking up attention that he wants for himself. Once again the racial difference and how an idea like that might affect a black child who was born into oppression at the hands of people who look and at times act like Kol is never addressed.

Like with Elijah, Marcel is aware of the hostility Kol feels towards him, but the narrative never addresses how he felt about that beyond a simple “it hurt his feelings”. The narrative wants us to ignore the racial factors and go along with the idea that Marcel doesn’t question if these two white men show hostility towards him because of his blackness even though any child in that predicament would in fact wonder if his blackness is a factor in the behavior of the people he now sees as family. We are to never question if the racial difference is a factor in the dynamic. We are supposed to pretend that it would be exactly the same way if Marcel was white, even though there is no way of knowing that (and it’s highly unlikely) and even though Marcel would have never been a slave if he was a white character. His blackness is just supposed to be ignored for the sake of their narrative that lacks the sophistication required to address it properly.

They were already dangerously close to being blatantly racist at this point, it was mostly subtextual and they didn’t cross any big lines with the problematic things they did have in play so as a viewer it was easy to let it slide. It wasn’t perfect, but I, and I suspect many other viewers, give their narrative the benefit of the doubt.

That changed in season 3. In season 3 we saw Elijah take his disdain for marcel up several notches. His previous annoyance and condescension turned into disdain and open hostility. He constantly talked to marcel like a child, used him as a flunky, and constantly went out of his way to make marcel feel less than. In season 2 they provided some basic explanation for his behavior, even if it wasn’t at all satisfactory, there was something there to explain why there was tension on both ends. However, in season 3 there was no exploration into why Elijah behaved the way he did with Marcel. His behavior got progressively more hostile with Marcel at a time when Marcel wasn’t an enemy. Marcel had aligned himself with their family. He protected Hayley, he protected Klaus even when he was no longer linked to him. He went along with all of Elijah’s plans and yet as the season went on Elijah started to treat Marcel worse and worse.

The way he spoke to Marcel all of last season and at times before has always made me particularly uncomfortable and the longer it went on without explanation the more it became harder and harder to divorce Marcel’s race from the equation. There have been times where Elijah has spoke to Marcel with such disdain and condescension he seemed one step away from calling him “boy”.

If you look at it at its most basic level you have a white man, an elitist white man, who speaks to a black man who was supposed to be a part of his family with open disdain that’s unexplained. None of this is addressed in depth. Marcel is allowed to talk back at times and argue with Elijah but Elijah’s behavior never shifts in a positive way, instead it gets increasingly hostile. Watching a white character speak to a black one with such open hostility consistently was unsettling a lot of times. This behavior was also never checked by any of the other characters. Everyone let it fly, including Klaus. The narrative never treated Elijah as if how he was behaving towards Marcel was wrong, it was just brushed off as just Elijah being Elijah. When you’re dealing with a black character who’s been thrust into a racial dynamic like the one Marcel was placed in with the Mikaelsons, Elijah being Elijah has different implications, especially when you add that to the already troublesome behaviors towards Marcel I mentioned before.

Elijah’s disdain towards Marcel often felt very targeted and unnecessarily harsh compared to his behavior with other characters and at some point it becomes hard to see Marcel as a colorless person who just so happens to be on the receiving end of elijah’s elitist condescension at that moment. When the abuse becomes that targeted and consistent it’s almost impossible to unsee Marcel’s blackness and how that blackness is at the receiving end of behavior that’s often perpetrated against black people in this inherently racist society. It’s also almost impossible to do when the narrative, in an effort to draw the least amount of attention to the racial dynamics on the show as possible, has never actually ruled out his race as a motivator for the behavior against him.

They’ve never had the characters explicitly or implicitly say “marcel what I’m doing right now has nothing to do with your race, your race doesn’t matter to me, your race is not relevant to my current feelings or how I view you”. They’ve never had the mikaelsons express any views on race at all, not even in a context outside of Marcel. Just like they’ve never had marcel himself actually question if his race plays a part in his treatment, not even as a way to rule it out within the narrative. There is only so far you can take a narrative like this, the audience won’t be able to keep pretending that my some miracle all of these characters are the super special exceptions who have nothing race related register to them in a society where race is a huge factor. We can’t just pretend that they are all the most open minded color blind people to ever exist forever. The audience definitely won’t be able to keep pretending that race isn’t a factor when the narrative starts to blatantly push racist tropes and ideas and when Marcel is consistently ostracized by the mikaelsons. That’s where I am with with originals at the moment.

Elijah’s disregard for Marcel in season 3 goes as far as having him take his life. When he killed Marcel I didn’t automatically think “wow this is racist”, but the way he handled killing marcel and the aftermath did leave me feeling uneasy. Marcel was a grieving man who had just lost his surrogate daughter because of a decision by elijah and freya. After initially trying to smooth things over with marcel Elijah reverts back to his usual uncaring and condescending attitude towards him. Marcel is placed in a scenario where Klaus, his father, is trying to convince him of his love for him to prevent him from making a rash decision that could harm them all. Klaus had spent almost an entire day with Marcel, trying to make him see that he’s still his family, that he’s still his son and that he doesn’t have to take this path that he is close to taking. Klaus proclaims that Marcel will always be his family. From Klaus’s POV there is still something redeemable in Marcel, still something valuable even if he’s currently a threat to his well being. That was important to establish in the narrative and Marcel is this close to accepting that and possibly reigning in his rage when Elijah shows up. Elijah comes and immediately contradicts everything Klaus had worked so hard to establish.

Elijah has no such empathy or care for Marcel. He immediately starts to hurl his vitriol towards him. Marcel even goes as far as commenting that Elijah is eying him like he’s a rabid dog. They actually made a black man compare himself to a rabid animal in the eyes of his white family member and they do nothing to suggest that Elijah doesn’t in fact see him as a rabid animal. It’s very hard to hear that and not be reminded of how black people, particularly black men have historically been viewed through a lens of suspicion and seen as uncontrollable animals that need to be brought to heel. The racism is bleeding through the seams of the narrative at this point.

Marcel is also in a position where a white man who has actually wronged him now gets to use the privilege of his inherent superiority to cast suspicion on to him as if he’s the bad guy, and he has to prove himself to this white man despite the fact that, as I said before, he’s the wronged party in this dynamic. This pushed the racist idea that no matter what, blackness is always the offending party. White people can abuse, kill, hurt people of color as much as they want, but the suspicion of malice will still fall on the shoulders of the person of color and the person of color will always be in a position of having to prove themselves. Whiteness is always given the benefit of the doubt. Elijah is absolved of his wrong doing towards Davina and Marcel because “it had to be done”, but blackness is always seen as inherently malicious, wrong, and intending to do harm no matter what. Marcel’s pain doesn’t matter, his hurt doesn’t matter, him being the victim doesn’t matter, the nuance to his behavior is irrelevant and never considered. He must prove that he’s not the monster in this dynamic despite being the party who has just been wronged and the true monster now gets to use his inherent privilege and serve as his judge,jury, and executioner.

Elijah ends up killing Marcel on the bridge. The funniest thing about this action is that it was allegedly done in the name of protecting the family, the family that Marcel no longer feels he is a part of, but it ends up being the very thing that leads to their downfall. When fandom talks about Elijah killing Marcel it’s always said that “he had to kill him he threatened Klaus” but there was a choice on that bridge. Marcel’s death was avoidable. Marcel could have changed his mind, he could have changed his path, he could have been given the benefit of the doubt. He took the Serum but he could have decided to never make the transition and even if he made the transition his relationship with Klaus could have been repaired. If any of that was considered the outcome of season 3 could have been completely different. Elijah didn’t care to consider any of those things though. He saw inherent evil in marcel, irredeemable evil and therefore he was disposed of as if he never mattered to begin with. It’s very difficult to take the fact that Marcel is a black male out of the equation here, but I tried to, I know many other people tried to, and were successful for a while but I can no longer view these events from a colorless lens.

I personally do not think that if that had been Hope on that bridge Elijah would have done the same thing. I think that the narrative would have shifted towards their being possible redemption for Hope, that some part of Elijah would have wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt even if it was proven to be a mistake later down the line. I do not think that Hope would have been regarded as having pure malice in her heart and as disposable in the way that Marcel was. Whiteness, especially white femininity, is seen as having innate purity and innocence. Even in the worse of situations white women are hardly ever viewed as pure evil completely devoid of any innocence. Black women and black males don’t have the luxury of getting that sort of treatment, not even when we are pure and innocent. If Hope was put in the same position as Marcel I don’t think the writers would have been able to stop that idea from bleeding into how they crafted the narrative. There would have been some sort of innocence still there for her, none of them would have seen her as truly being disposable the way marcel was viewed, they also would have more than likely allowed Hope the room in the narrative to actually be the victim and would have used her victimhood to excuse her threats and justify why she inevitably doesn’t meet a deadly end.

This whole thing is made worse by how they proceed to handle the aftermath of Marcel’s death. Klaus is gutted, and he questions if Elijah’s actions were truly necessary. Later Hayley is sent to Klaus to try to compel him to forgive him for his actions. Klaus makes a very good parallel by asking Hayley is she would be saying this if it had been Hope and Hayley immediately shuts down the comparison. She wasn’t the first character to shut down a comparison between Marcel and Hope, but the question was an extremely valid question. Everyone else was treating Marcel as if he wasn’t truly Klaus son, therefore it should be recoverable.

Their callous attitude towards the authenticity of Klaus and Marcel’s father son relationship is never addressed. It’s never explained why they might feel that way, they just do. By doing that they pushed a very problematic narrative about Marcel vs Hope because in Klaus’s eyes they are indeed the same. Marcel is his son, he looked him in his eyes and told him that he was just as if he was his blood. Hope is also Klaus’s child, so would everyone be telling him to let it go if it had been Hope? This question is never answered explicitly in the narrative but it’s clear that the implied answer is no.I also personally believe that the answer is no because If they truly believed that Marcel was his son they would have been more empathetic towards his grief. Hayley, who grieved the temporary loss of her own child in season 2, would have been able to understand klaus’s grief and would have probably never asked him to forgive elijah mere hours after Marcel had died.Hayley would not be okay with it if it had been Hope, no one would have been okay with Elijah doing that to Hope. So what’s the difference between the two of them?

Any answer you come up with is troublesome because the most basic answer is that Marcel is not Klaus’s biological son, which pushes a very harmful narrative concerning biological vs adoptive children. If the difference isn’t biological vs adoptive then we have to look at race next which makes it even more troublesome. Can we really definitively say that if Marcel was a white girl like Hope, or even a white male he would have been rejected so fervently as an equal to Hope? Honestly we can’t and I personally don’t believe he would have been. So we have this narrative crafted where the black male adoptive son of a white man is not regarded as an equal to his white female biological daughter. It’s a very ugly and racist narrative to have in place, and it’s never addressed or corrected, instead this idea is actually allowed to proliferate further into the narrative later on in the series and it becomes even more offensive.

When the current season picks up Marcel comes face to face with Elijah again, he expresses his rage and hurt to both Elijah and Hayley about how Elijah, who was supposed to be his family killed him while klaus stood back and did nothing. Later Marcel expresses bitterness about how his family, the mikaelsons didn’t stick together with him and Kol completely dismisses Marcel’s feelings and tells him that he was never a Mikaelson so he needs to just get over it. Not one of the Mikaelson siblings correct Kol or show any open feelings of unease towards this statement, not even Klaus.

You have this black man who is very clearly hurt that the family he loved turned their backs on him and the response to that pain and bitterness is that he was never one of them. As usual there is never an explanation for why they may feel he was never one of them. The imagery alone is uncomfortable because you have this herd of white people who have pledged allegiance to each other collectively rejecting the sole black member of their family. It’s all of these white people against a black man. To add even more insult you have Hayley included as a part of the Mikaelson fold, a woman whose sole claim to family relation is through a child she birthed. Hayley, a white woman is eagerly accepted as a part of the family, yet the black adoptive son who they have all played some part in rearing since he was a child is the sole person on the outside looking in for no real explainable reason. It was established that it was only his recent actions making him an outsider it would be different, but that’s not the narrative, the narrative is that he’s always been an outside. It’s hard to look at the scene and not see the racial divide. It sticks out like a sore thumb and yet were are expected to ignore it. It’s hard to look at their rejection of Marcel and not see a rejection of blackness in a dynamic that is exclusive to white people. It’s hard to look at that scene and not see a message that says to a black person that regardless of your proximity to whiteness, ultimately you are not good enough to actually be seen as an equal among them. They might even pretend that you are for a while, but eventually you will get your rude awakening that you aren’t. Black people deal with that harsh reality all too often in white spaces in real life.

I think in the writers minds this entire exchange is okay because Marcel is seemingly the one with the power here. He’s the one who can chose whether they live or die, can stay or leave but that power they give him is superficial at best. Where it truly counts in the narrative he is powerless. They hold all of the power in the family dynamic with is the true core of the dynamic. They hold the power to accept or reject him as an equal and given the racial differences, placing that power solely in the hands of whiteness perpetuates the racist idea that for a person of color equality is not inherent to your identity, it is completely at the mercy of whiteness. Regardless of how powerful you are, their privilege and power always reigns supreme.

They think that they allow Marcel to regain his power here by proclaiming that he’s proud he’s not a mikaelson, but when you look at the character you can’t erase the hurt and pain the he just expressed and the nuance to his behavior. He proclaims that he’s proud he’s not a Mikaelson but it is a shallow show of power, we are all still very aware of who holds the true power in the dynamic because narratively he is indeed still very hurt and bitter about his rejection. His entire speech was given out of a need to cope with his rejection in the first place. So this facade they make Marcel put on is just that, a facade, which does nothing to erase the racism embedded in the narrative. The fact that he even has to feel the need to prove himself better or that he’s perfectly okay without their validation is bothersome because it’s something many black people have to do to cope with a lack of validation we often experience in white spaces.

They could have used that opportunity to assert that Marcel was family, they could have at the very least made Klaus correct Kol, but they did nothing. Instead they just let the idea that Marcel is not an equal just continue sit unchecked in the narrative like they had been doing before.

While we have this ugly family narrative going on the writing also manages to find itself in more hot water by unnecessarily vilifying Marcel. Granted this offense is smaller than some of the others but it’s still an offense.

Hope Mikaelson is affected by a deadly curse. Marcel allows the mikaelson family to return to Nola to help her. It’s finally explicitly said in the narrative that Hope is Marcel’s little sister and he’s empathetic towards her plight and the plight of children so he temporarily ends their exile.

All of the characters are aware that they are only back because Marcel has shown some come compassion. He’s doesn’t even interact with them again once they return….and yet when Hayley decides to go to try to talk to him Elijah feels the need to stop her and warn her to be fearful of him. Marcel has never ever tried to harm Hayley in any way. He’s actually protected her several times. The entire time the original family was put down Marcel never tried to harm Hayley and he actually tried to protect her and Hope from the henchmen of Klaus’s enemies. Elijah has even seen Marcel’s unwillingness to harm Hayley with his own eyes. So you have to ask the question why did Elijah feel the need to instill a sense of fear or weariness towards Marcel in Hayley? Why was he vilified when he was the one currently allowing them back and had done nothing towards Hayley to deserve it? Why did Hayley have to be careful? It was unnecessary and unwarranted, and yet this vilification was still there.

I can’t help but think of the historical context of what was demonstrated. There is a history of portraying black men as evil waiting in the wings to harm fragile white women. White men have seen it as their duty to protect their women from these savage men, you can’t trust them, it doesn’t matter how they behave, they are inherently unhinged and unpredictable. They were seen as rabid dogs just waiting to take a bite out of fragile and pure white woman. White women must always stay on alert when they’re around these black men, they can never be too careful.

If felt like that same idea was being pushed here with Elijah and Hayley. There was no reason to have that scene with elijah and hayley in the narrative it did absolutely nothing for the plot or the characters so I can’t help but wonder if it’s there because once again their racism is seeping through the seams of their writing. It felt completely unwarranted and inappropriate given the racial differences and yet no one in the writers room stopped and said “you know what this isn’t even needed and it has some uncomfortable racial undertones so maybe we should cut it”. If they would have had that conversation they maybe they would have seen some of the ugly undertones, but that never happened.

I honestly wish it had because maybe if they talked about these things we would have never gotten the blatantly racist scene between Elijah and Marcel in the most recent episode. The scene at the end of 305 is was the last straw for many of us minority viewers. There is no way around how uncomfortable it made many of us feel and there is just no way it can be glossed over like many of their past offenses have been.

They made Elijah come to Marcel as he’s imprisoned in a dungeon and taunt him with the idea that he is pretty much worthless because he can no longer serve as a conduit for Klaus’s redemption. He mocks him with the idea that he maybe saw him as a son in the past, further pushing the idea that marcel really wasn’t family at all to him. He throws the fact that Klaus’s daughter, not marcel, had changed Klaus in his face and then harshly tells him that he is not needed, welcomed or wanted. Then he tells him that he’s only still breathing because his brother is weak but then pledges to do to Marcel what Klaus was too weak to do. He’s

appalled that Klaus, when faced with the same decision he had in season 3, would choose to risk it all for Marcel instead of kill him like he did and pledges to show no such mercy to him.

It honestly made my skin crawl watching it. Elijah’s behavior was unnecessarily cruel and the level of disdain he displayed towards Marcel, combined with his words made it all feel blatantly racist.

Here you have a white man admit that the only reason he saw any worth in this black man was because he thought he could be used as a conduit for redemption for his white brother. You have to remember that Marcel was a slave, so the only reason he ever saw any value in his household for this little black boy his brother rescued from oppression was because he made his brother a good man and could be used to further his development into the person he wanted him to be. Now that he sees that he is no longer useful for this goal, and might work against his progress he sees him as nothing more than a pile of flesh just sucking up air and getting in the way. He rejects Marcel in every way possible, completely taking away all of his value. Now that Klaus has his pure white biological daughter Marcel is as useful as a stranger off the street to him. He’s nobody, he’s nothing. All of Marcel’s worth was tied to how he could serve a white character. Having a white man cruelly degrade a black man in that manner to prop up a white character is so blatantly racist I’m honestly flabbergasted that no one stopped it from happening.

How could they see that and not see how horrid it was? Or maybe they did see it but they felt like the blatant racism was just an unfortunate consequence of their writing and the payoff from the scene was worth putting it out there despite the racism. Either way it was such a terrible thing to do. As I mentioned when I first started this meta analysis, they had a responsibility to handle Marcel’s character with care and they grossly failed at doing that. You don’t have to treat Marcel like a special snowflake because he’s black, but because he’s black you absolutely can not push a narrative where his entire value as a living being is tied to a white character and where once that value has been maxed out treat him as disposable flesh. It’s careless and offensive.

It is almost impossible to divorce Marcel’s blackness from that scene and from the dynamic they set up. Elijah sounded like a slave master taunting his property with the idea that they are running out of value so they are probably gonna be dead soon. He lorded over Marcel, cruelly taking blow after blow to his worth as a person before threatening to basically kill him. This is why I had such a problem with the scene where Marcel tells the Mikaelsons that he is glad he wasn’t one of them and called it shallow, because in 3x05 it’s confirmed that the person with the real power is Elijah. Marcel is physically stronger than the Mikaelsons, in every way possible he is their better, and yet at the end of the day this black man is still completely and utterly powerless and this white man is the one with the true power. Marcel lives and breaths according to his will only and apparently it’s been that ways from Elijah’s eyes since the day Klaus took Marcel in.

It was honestly so ugly that I almost couldn’t even watch it all the way through. There is no way you can expect a black viewer to just ignore the historical context of Elijah’s words and actions and Marcel’s blackness to make it all just okay and not be offensive.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if we had some indication that Elijah isn’t a racist and none of his behavior towards Marcel are racist microaggressions, but we don’t know that and honestly often times that’s exactly how his behavior comes off towards Marcel. Maybe this wasn’t intentional on their part, but at some point a certain level of awareness has to come if you are going to have any real integrity as a writer. There should have been more awareness here but there wasn’t and as a result many of us were left offended and frustrated.

I don’t believe for a second that Elijah would have treated Hope the same way or told her the same cruel words that he told Marcel. I’m sure many people will try to argue that he totally would, but I honestly just do not see it if not for the basic reason that I don’t think his disdain towards hope would ever be allowed to be as strong as it is towards Marcel.Just like I don’t think they would have ever insinuated that Hope’s only value to the world is as a conduit for Klaus’s redemption. Elijah wouldn’t tell Hope that she’s unwanted, unwelcome, and unneeded and then pledging to kill her. What Elijah told Marcel was basically the equivalent of telling him he could have stayed a slave, I don’t think they would ever tell Hope she would have been aborted by Hayley that day she considered it in season 1. They have built her up as this super special child who comes before them all, while Marcel has been the habitual afterthought and torn in their side so to my it would have been different.

Since the episode aired I’ve seen several justifications for Elijah’s behavior. The main one being that Elijah wasn’t being racist, he was just being elitist which is typical for his character. I feel like this is probably how the writers saw it in their heads, but honestly the elitist justification doesn’t fly with me because in most white dominated spaces where Elitism persists racism also co exists. You would be hard pressed to find a real life hyper-elitist like Elijah who is not also racist. White dominated spaces like Academia have always been accused of being incredibly elitist, and one big problem with this elitism is the rejection of blackness in these spaces that often goes hand in hand with this elitism. Many of the people who inhabit these elitist spaces are guilty of stereotyping and having a racial bias that leads to discrimination and racism. Now I know this isn’t a perfect parallel for Elijah, but I think the principle still basically applies. Among white people where an elitist mindset persists usually so does a racist mindset as well. An Elitist enacting their beliefs against a person of color is usually enacting racist behavior.

It’s for these reasons that I don’t think that Elijah can be absolved of his racism in this racist narrative, he’s the tool they used to push all of the ideas they set forth. If this was indeed not out of character for him then Elijah Mikaelson just might have some race issues that the writers need to check or think about when they decide to write for him in his dynamic with Marcel. If they don’t then we will continue to see the racist narrative they’ve set up in the future.

Maybe if they had actually spent time thinking about Elijah as a character and finding ways to flesh him out they could have avoided the blatant racism they showed in that last episode and some of the racist undertones that have been present in the past. They failed to do this, which did a major disservice to their story and If they don't’ check themselves and the messages they are sending they will continue to do a disservice to their show and in the process alienate viewers who at one point genuinely enjoyed the writing.

I used to love this show, I used to see such great depth to the writing, but I’m at a frustrating crossroads now. There is only so many times you can watch a TV show and have the narrative offend you or blatantly insult your intelligence before you completely give up. Based on the responses of several fellow black viewers after the episode I’m not the only one who is at this crossroads. The Originals needs to do better. They have to do better if they are going to keep this show going and keep expecting us to trust them with minority character that are important for representation. How they handle characters like Marcel matters, the messages they send with these characters matters. That’s why despite my initial reluctance I decided to write this long winded take down of their racism. These things might seem small or overblown to some of you, but as a black viewer these things are important, they register to us even when they might not register to a non-black person. As a black woman I don’t have the privilege of being able to escape my race and how my blackness is handled and perceived on the day to day basis, not even when it comes to fiction. This is why more thought needs to be put into narratives that involve people from marginalized groups.

Ultimately as a character, Marcel Gerard deserved better and as every black viewer who has dedicated their time to this show deserved better and considering how several of the writers like to sit on twitter and give social commentary I expected better. They won’t be getting anymore passes for the racism that bleeds into their writing and their hypocrisy.

#the originals #Marcel Gerard #To commentary #anti the originals

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seasonsofreckoningrp-blog · 8 years ago

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Congratulations, Bru! You’ve been accepted for the role of Leon Valiente-Gardner. Please make sure to check our checklist, and you have twenty-four hours to send us your character’s blog. We’re really happy to have you in our family!

You had us with the family feels, seeing as both of us will be playing Leon’s siblings. You’ve brought him to life as the selfless and whole-hearted warlock that he is. Family obviously is a big and important factor to him and you’ve touched on his relationship with all three of them, especially with your headcanons about Spencer. It's beautiful how much you understood Leon and found every blank space in his past and filled it up with headcanons.

Introduction

Bru. 27, she/her.

Activity level:

Honestly, I can log on every day for at least one hour or so. My hours are flexible… sometimes my schedule gets crazy, but for the most part, I can log on every day.

Further contact:

[Removed]

How did you find the roleplay?

Magic ~~~. I’m jk. You guys told me about it <3

Roleplay experience:

I’ve been roleplaying for a few years now. I’ve done city roleplays, bio roleplays, oc roleplays, crossovers… I’ve met you both on SoR 1.0 and it’s been a crazy ride ever since. Most of the RPs I’ve been in, have been with Ev so she knows I’m a decent player.

Triggers:

[Removed]

Anything else?

[Removed]

IC INFORMATION

Desired character:

Leon Valiente-Gardner.

Faceclaim:

Why did you choose this character?

From day one, I’ve been in love with the idea of Leon and when I finally read his bio, it only made me want to play him even more. First and foremost let me talk about the family connections, which to me, is a huge part of Leon and one of the main reasons why I’m choosing to apply for him. Family is everything to him. It’s the people who’ve made him who he is, it’s the ones the love him the most, unapologetically and unconditionally. There’s nothing that he wouldn’t do if that meant protecting his family. And then we get to Eirene, which is basically like a second family to him. He’s more than happy to help the little ones understand their power and he’s always so eager to learn from the older members of the coven.

To me, he sort of breaks that trope where every popular guy has to be a jerk or a bully. I can see him as the class’ president, fighting for everyone’s place in the school, always trying to do better and to be better. He’s so filled with life and knowledge that it’s impossible not to feel drawn to him. I feel like people are drawn to both twins, but since Leon is the one who’s more in sync with people while Lena is in sync with herself and the nature around them, they tend to flock to him more often. The fact that he’s an empath also, is something that I’d love to explore because someone who can feel other people’s emotions and be able to ease the hard ones or to increase the good ones, but doesn’t really know how to handle their own emotions is definitely something interesting.

Leon is very diplomatic. He loves being around people and he loves hearing what they have to say, even if sometimes he might end up not agreeing with them. Besides, I think that being around people helps him escape his own mind and how much of a dangerous place it can be. The way he’s always putting others in front of himself is also another way of escaping his own thoughts, because the more he cares and worries about others, the less time he gets to spend alone with his own insecurities and the duality living in him. He always has a smile on his face to match his upbeat attitude, because if people don’t see the cracks beneath the surface, they won’t give up on their cause, which is peace no matter what. If he manages to stay strong for everyone’s sake, then he’ll have done his job.

There are two sides of Leon: one that he lets people see… the popular, friendly guy. The man who’s always there, offering you either a shoulder to cry on or some advice. The boy with the childish grin who’s grown into a leader of his own people without overstepping Cassidy’s boundaries, the one who doesn’t want this war to get any worse. For the most part, he’s this light-hearted young man, who lights up the room with his attitude and his kindness; but every up has its down and then there’s the part no one ever sees… the ambitious, reserved and quiet man who’s struggling to put his pieces back together and who would love more than anything than to see his brother’s killers not getting away with what they’ve done. His soul, he feels has broken ever since Spencer’s death, and while he’s been trying to mend himself up, sometimes tempting thoughts end up creeping their way up to the back of his mind, leaving Leon to fight his demons by himself. I personally love those shades of grey in him. The struggle to keep himself together, because others need him, even though he’s falling apart.

Para sample:

Run.

It was like he couldn’t breathe. His mind was playing tricks again, giving him images of happy times with Spencer, only to have them taken away from him in a blink of an eye. His nightmares were usually bad whenever he felt like his energy had been drained, but this time it had happened after spending some time with Pari and even in his dream, Leon was confused. The darkness was closing in, making his heart race and making it harder for him to breathe. With a jolt, he was awake. His chest was heaving, the air coming in cold into his lungs as he pulled it with some strength. Leon blinked a couple of times, removing the pillow from its position behind him and pressing it to his face, screaming into it, as if it would help him get rid of the dark energy that still clung to his body just like his sweaty t-shirt that he had slept in, did.

As he lowered the pillow, he could’ve sworn he had seen a figure by the window, which prompted him to turn his bedside lamp on, but there was nothing there. Was he going crazy? No… not yet. With a quick jerk of his head, Leon climbed out of bed and hopped into the shower, hoping the jets would relax his muscles and empty out his mind so he could go back to sleep. After changing his sheets, watching as some droplets of water had marked his bed with wet dots, Leon still wasn’t tired enough, so he paid a quick visit to the kitchen, where, surprisingly, he found Cassidy munching on some fruit while reading on a book. As unexplainable as it was, Leon was immediately invaded with this sense of comfort just by the mere sight of his sister.

“Can’t sleep?” He offered them a smile as he pressed a kiss on their rosy cheek. His gaze was still on them, waiting for a reply as he moved through the kitchen, pouring himself a glass of juice, then joining them at the table. “Anything I can do?” His questions had two meanings: one, it meant to help Cassidy as a member of their coven, as a brother; and the other, it meant helping them as an empath. When Cassidy shook their head, thanking for the offer but denying it, claiming they had gotten distracted reading a book, Leon knew better than to push it. People didn’t like being forced to speak when they didn’t feel like doing so, besides, their expressions and manners didn’t read as a lie.

He offered them a smile, warm and comforting, before motioning his head towards the living room. “Since we’re both here and we both can’t sleep, how about we watch some TV? It’s not like I have an early class tomorrow.” And he also didn’t feel like meditating either. Deep down, deeply rooted inside him, resided some kind of fear of poking this darkness that sometimes haunted his dreams. This eagerness for power, the craving for more than it had been gifted him… he feared that by trying to understand it, Leon would open the door to something so crude and ugly, that would make him see himself as a completely different person, and you know—he liked who he was. He actually did.

An offer had been made and an offer had been accepted, which made him move to the living room, getting comfortable as Cassidy joined him on the couch. The house felt so silent this evening. If Spencer was still alive and awake, he would’ve wanted for them to watch some old cartoon, like Johnny Quest or Thundercats. Something colorful and lively. Something that would make everyone’s auras just a shade warmer. Remembering Spencer had always felt bittersweet to him. Out of everyone, Leon had always had this notion that he had felt Spencer’s loss the most, although it wasn’t like him to undermine or to think less of other people’s pain. Everyone in the family felt the blow. Everyone was still trying to make through the days.

Steps coming from behind the couch brought him back to the present as he felt his twin’s presence in the room. Was it possible that everyone had had trouble sleeping that night? “We’re about to watch that Nicole Kidman movie where she’s witch.” His childish grin was plastered on his face as Leon followed Lena with his gaze. “Do you want to join us? It always makes us laugh.”

Maybe this was exactly what he wanted to recharge his energies, some quality time with his family, watching some silly movie about witches, picking apart all the differences between what they were watching and what was actually real. He had hope that the next day would be better… for him, for his soul, for everyone in that island. That was all he could do, right? Hope.

EXTRA

Personality traits:

+ SELFLESS

+ DIPLOMATIC

+ CHARISMATIC

- COMPLEX

- PASSIVE

- SELF-SACRIFICING

Headcanons:

I. SPENCER: He visits Spencer’s grave every week. When his younger sibling was still alive, they were often found together, sharing stories and laughing about most things. Leon enjoyed teaching Spencer little fun facts about historical figures and watch as his brother would always come back, eager to learn more, so ever since his death, every week Leon picks a day out of random, usually when he’s feeling drained out and goes to the cemetery and has a quick chat with his brother’s grave, often sharing something new that he’s learned about this or that person. It’s a way to keep him grounded and sane, to make him feel like he’s still there.

II. LANGUAGES: Ever since he was young, Leon’s been walking around with his head stuffed in books. He’s taught himself Latin as a young teenager, which made it a lot easier for him to understand the ancient spells written in those old grimoires. During high school, fascinated by the myths, he’s learned Greek, just for the sake of learning something new. His eternal seek for knowledge also led him to learn how to speak French and Spanish during his time at Yale, and recently, he’s picked up on learning German, too.

III. NIGHTMARES: As an empath, you’re bound to let people’s emotions influence your aura somehow and it isn’t different with Leon. Sometimes, when he’s overwhelmed, he can feel his body physically tired, but unable to have a peaceful sleep. Emotions are tricky things and in Moon Island, they tend to be fickle and all over the place. The mix of his gift with his inner struggles often result in him suffering with vivid nightmares that wake him up in the middle of the night struggling for air. They don’t happen often and they definitely don’t pose a problem in his life… yet.

IV. RELATIONSHIPS AND SEXUALITY: Leon considers himself demisexual. While he has no preference towards genders, he cares little about sex itself. He’d rather connect with people first, to get to know them before they even begins feeling sexually attracted to them. He loves the nightlife in Moon Island as much as the next person and connecting with people is one of the best feelings for him, so whenever he finds someone who connects with him in that level, he wants to commit to them. So Leon’s had a few relationships in the past, some more meaningful than others, but all have taught him something. I’m not sure if people feel intimidated by the fact that he’s a Valiente-Gardner and that could be some kind of obstacle when it comes to being in a relationship with him. Lots of people don’t want the kind of responsibility that entails dating someone like him, so that could be a problem. I know that Leon’s last names weight a lot on his shoulders, he’s got huge shoes to fill, but I also think he tries his best to make people see him as more than just someone with important parents.

V. EXERCISING: Since his powers are abstract, Leon’s type of training consist mostly on keeping his body healthy and ready to defend him in case he needs to. Besides going to the gym, he does boxing classes and swims in his spare time, but also, doesn’t mind joining Helena in a yoga or meditation session whenever he feels like his mind’s getting too heavy.

I had a tag for him but I just realized that the hyphen isn’t letting the other posts show and now I’m sad. But I made a mockblog even though is not as pretty as I’d like it to be. HERE.

#accepted

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philaprint · 8 years ago

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers: "Get Out" and the Everyday Horror Story for Blacks

MARCH 12, 2017

By Tre Johnson

Hollywood has been producing black horror films for awhile now. The 80s and 90s were replete with films with a horror bent. 1985 gave us “The Color Purple” monster “Mister”, a monster the movie positions as an almost tireless, ageless evil who terrorizes the women around him. Spike Lee pulled off horror twice; 1989’s “Do the Right Thing” felt like an urban “Twilight Zone” tale, where Bed-Stuy had everyone cooking underneath a magnifying glass, the setting gradually slimming down from a neighborhood to a pizza store murder. Two years later, he did 1991’s “Jungle Fever” where everyone was predator and prey, falling for the incurable desire for two white substances: women and crack.

There’s been lighter fare too, but even they have preyed upon psychological fears. Movies like 2014’s “No Good Deed” or 2015’s “The Perfect Guy” might be called thrillers, or 2009’s “Obsessed” another horror masked as thriller all playing different notes on the real-world fears of heterosexual black women finding “a good black man”, and being wary about who you do and don’t let into your home. In real life this has been a horror story for the black community; 1.5 million black men have been swallowed by everyday monsters like imprisonment or murder (Chicago recorded its 700th murder in December) or unemployment; nearly 50% of black men aged 20-24 in Chicago are unemployed. All of these films have origin points that can be traced back to the original horror story of slavery, and its likely why a lot of black people, even as Hollywood has continually held up films like “Birth of a Nation”, “12 Years A Slave” and “Amistad” as works of art, have often talked about avoiding or being weary of these same films. They are too real, too scary, and too relevant.

Now we have “Get Out”, a film by Jordan Peele that’s a welcome reversal on many of these narratives. While on the outside “Get Out” is about many of these same issues—the film touching on everything from the criminal justice, black bodies and the ever-simmering tensions of black-white relations—it’s actually squarely preying on white liberalism, a group that often views itself as harmless when it comes to racism and bigotry. This point comes across in many parts of this movie, which on the surface is about what happens when a young interracial couple, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams), travel to her parents’ home for the weekend.

“Get Out” has several set pieces worth discussing, but the film’s garden party scene might be the most essential, the gathering of Rose’s parents’ friends and acquaintances for an annual get-together in loving memory of her departed grandparents. Earlier Rose’s father offers a popular assurance and validation when he proclaims that not only was Obama the greatest president he’s known, but he would’ve voted for him a third time. As Chris wanders from couple to couple, we want a gauntlet with him that’s likely familiar to plenty of black folks traversing white spaces. There are the soft come-ons about your appearance (“aren’t you a handsome one” one partygoer remarks as she delicately squeezes his arm); the desire to validate blackness as a commodity (“black is in again”, intones another attendee as he curries favor); or as a means of intellectually engaging him, Chris is asked in front of a throng of the white guests to speak on the progress of African-Americans; have things gotten better or worse? As he makes his way through the crowd, you experience a lot with Chris: the exhaustion of literally navigating white spaces; the delicateness and calculations of how you choose to respond to commentary intended to be innocent and well-intentioned but ultimately still steeped in ignorance and, at times, fetishization.

The scene features Lakeith Stanfield, “Darius” from Atlanta and his inclusion in this particular section of the movie serves a couple of purposes. His presence actually evokes a call-back to Atlanta’s “Juneteenth” episode, which in many ways saw the realization of this movie’s social scene. As a collection of Jack-and-Jill styled fanciful black people mingle about the sprawling mansion of a high-minded black woman and her awkwardly liberal white husband who aggressively displays how “down” he is to everyone around him, especially Earn, who the husband likely senses is skeptical about his authenticity. The two parties present inverses of one another; as Earn and Chris both get sized-up, evaluated, chastised and patronized as much for what their blackness is and for what it isn’t, there’s the illusion of a gateway being opened to another world. Atlanta’s “Juneteenth” represents the illusion of a black bourgeois that feels like they’ve “made it” and the implicit message that they, if not have become “white”, have certainly escaped being “black”. On the other side “Get Out” has a phalanx of white people yearning for the cool side of the pillow of blackness; wanting to retain the power of their whiteness while acquiring aspects of blackness a la carte.

This sort of racial power bartering is the underlying horror at the heart of both pieces, as both make the case that one of the greatest fears of wading too far into a white world is the loss of identity, something made clear with Chris’ relationship, to blacks living in the suburbs, to a change in dress and language, to maintaining a sense of village or community whenever you come across another person of color—that silently telegraphed, telepathic two-word message we transmit in those moments: “you good?”. “Get Out” unearths this uneasiness, neurotically aware of a white culture that’s quick to consume aspects of the black culture, and the movie gets a lot of mileage out of the issue of appropriation as it looks at the most obvious ways that white mainstream culture steals things: entertainers, artists, athletes, and bodies. The black victims in “Get Out” are analogues for all these situations and it’s worthwhile to consider the real world examples and implications when it comes to this sort of continued white theft. There are the obvious ones: Three years ago on an MTV stage, Miley Cyrus, twerked on stage surrounded by black women props; months later, Macklemore wins over Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys.

The movie also adds to the ongoing paranoia about black mobility and identity. Several times in the film, the issue of staying black is a literal and metaphorical dilemma. Chris’ decision to be with Rose, their decision to go to her parents’ house in the bucolic suburbs, and the roles of the landscaper, housekeeper and Andre (Stanfield) are all familiar echoes about the recurring nightmare of losing your black self in white settings and culture. It’s a familiar question of trespassing and authenticity that shares roots both historical in the “paper bag” tests and passing, and pop cultural, too.

“Get Out” was obviously made decades later, but “Chris” would have been the perfect role for a 90’s-era Will Smith to have played. As an actor whose work during that period often negotiated outing race and class identities in unpredictable spaces, this film would have been a natural inclusion to his resume then. In 1993’s “Six Degrees of Separation”, Smith plays the lead role in the true-story film of a black gay con artist who worms his way into a New York area white high society, by pretending to be the son of “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” actor Sidney Poitier, likely in-joke for the con artist and certainly for an audience that gets the messages and paranoia in “Get Out”.

What makes him especially relevant to this film though is his six-year run on “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” from 1990-1996. The entire series was about Will’s struggle to maintain his particular blackness in a community where he felt everyone around him had already been snatched, from rigid, authoritarian Uncle Phil, to Valley Girl Hillary, Smith navigated a fun house of black misshapen mirrors. The pinnacle was his sometimes foil; Ribero’s “Carlton”, the Tom Jones swaggering, uptight cousin was an everyday mirror that terrified and tortured Will with its galling feeling of whiteface at times. Much of the series positioned Will not only as a fish-out-of-water but an exorcist of sorts, too; constantly using his values, his culture, and his body to wake up the Banks family. To Will, his family wasn't just strange; they appeared to be brainwashed and inadvertently, the show took on this racial dilemma too, body-swapping the darker-skinned Janet Hubert-Whitten’s “Vivian Banks” for the fairer-skinned Daphne Maxwell Reid midway through the series to play the same character. That sort of swapping set-off age-old concerns and injustices around the penalties of being black in issues that “Get Out” also provokes discussion about: colorism, opportunity, mobility, and acceptance. Smith’s first movie after the “Fresh Prince” was 1997’s “Men in Black”; a sci-fi action series where he and Tommy Lee Jones took on cases to reveal the true identity of people living amongst us by using a device armed with a flash.

Yet our most complex example of this negotiation and the vampire-like nature might be the ongoing vexing saga of Rachel Dolezal, whose presence and journey serves as an embodiment of the angst, anger, and anxiety that “Get Out” is about. In Rachel, there’s everything ranging from appropriation to passing, privilege to theft, politics to intimacy. Her decision to identify as a black woman is steeped in a racially political American context that has a sordid history around whites finding ways to comfortably and conveniently adapt blackness as it suits them. Her own story is one of continued consumption; from altering her appearance, to her academic and career decisions, to most recently, her official name change: she is now “Nkechi Amare Diallo”. It’s Nigerian in origin. Her story is an example of both how true life is stranger than fiction and also how art imitates life.

Both Diallo and “Get Out” tread into the uneasy way we mine our racial traumas into devices and identities, becoming keys to get to the other side. Catherine Keener puts Chris under by first empathizing with and then manipulating his emotional trauma around a very personal loss, and the tumble to the sunken place becomes something Atlanta, “Jungle Fever”, Rachel/Nkechi, Kanye, “Do the Right Thing” and even the currently running Kalief Browder documentary “Time” all share in common: when you tumble into that dark space, no one can hear you scream.

https://www.philadelphiaprintworks.com/blogs/news/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-get-out-and-the-everyday-horror-story-for-blacks

#get out #movie #review #racism #liberalism #philaprint

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