#and by extension respects the Eleven above all other ''gods''

[vabam-fr]

"Necessity is the Mother of invention..."

New Lore Notes For Riot:

• In the beginning of her journey, Riot travels across Sornieth with Varg, chasing Lesser Falls to keep her leg and tail charged. When they come across a place of latent magic, Riot spends a considerable time dwelling there to stock up on vials. (More often than not, it is an ugly and boring process of hacking up local fauna and plants with her Cleaver... until more befitting tools are crafted..)

• As a result of constantly needing to upkeep her prosthetics, Riot becomes familiar with Artificing. Riot's desire to learn the inner mechanisms of imbuing items with magic was a natural conclusion. She invents a design for her leg that is far more cost efficient when utilizing the magic she's harvested -- and much like Pig and his Cleaver, Riot's augmentations go through many iterations.

• That isn't to say Riot doesn't tinker with her own Cleaver's design. Through idle studying, and various enlightening trips through the Ashfall Waste and the Shifting Expanse, Riot creates other Harvesting weapons, too -- which are expertly used in the hands of her Needlers and Breakers within the Hunting Corpse. When the designs are perfected (or an otherwise acceptable level of craftsmanship,) Riot willingly shares these inventions with her family.

• Riot's travels across Sornieth give her many opportunities to run into her family -- if she's privy to the knowledge on where to find them. Arguably the most sentimental of the nest, Riot doesn't let her Search or her Hunting get in the way of visiting her siblings when the opportunity presents itself.

○○•○○

• Riot is aware of who her charge is just as early as her recognizing that she has the calling -- it was a matter of figuring out where the Plaguemother wanted her to be.

• The intuitive pull carried her around Sornieth, pushing her into more and more challenging circumstances and fights. And her travels enlighten her to the worldly insights of other clans and their customs. The opportunities to adapt and overcome were not lost on Riot -- she recognized the lessons that the Plaguebringer eased her into, or abruptly dropped her in.

• Deeper spiritual wisdom leads Riot ever closer to the understanding of balance between the Eleven. It becomes most apparent when conversing with Water dragons -- their concern and waning magic regarding their absent Father was enough to sympathize with. There was no feeling of conquest or opportunity in the Tidelord's absence. Indeed, The Sea of A Thousand Currents was a territory bordered by the most flights, yet the Tidelord's domain remained. The worry that rang in his worshipers' words felt like a resonant bell that answered back His Sister's sentiments. "Where did he go? Why is he gone? What is he searching for? What did he See?"

• In a longer eventuality, The Hunting Corpse settles in the Rotting Woods. Their base of operations. While Riot still participates in Collapses, her older years grant her the privilege of finding where the Plaguemother wished for her to settle... and to aide in the struggles happening beneath the Wasteland.

obligatory piglet lore ping @ringleaderising

let me know if anyone else would appreciate being pinged in Riot lore posts!

[me-and-your-husband]

Need Someone

Summary: Reader gets into some trouble, and doesn’t know who else to call besides her best friend’s dad, District Attorney Andy Barber.

Warnings: age gap, mentions of kidnapping and sexual assault.

Pairing: Andy Barber x Reader

Word Count: 1.7k

Note: Lets say reader is 18 and in senior year. 

There’s nothing in this chapter, but the next part will definitely have some of that in it ;)

     Slinging my backpack over my shoulder, I stepped out of my door, swinging it shut behind me. The chilly fall mornings where you could see your breath in front of you and just one layer wasn’t enough to keep you warm came quick. 

    Checking the time on my watch, I realized that I was already running ten minutes late to pick Jacob up. Being best friends with somebody who doesn’t have their own car has it’s downs and...well, it has it’s downs. I don’t mind picking Jake up on my way to school or dropping him off; we’ve been best friends for almost eleven years. I spent more time at his house than I did mine. The Barbers were like an extension of my family, I could always count on them.

    I turned the radio down slightly as I pulled up in front of the Barber’s house. It shocked me a little when I didn’t find Jacob on the stoop shaking his fist at me for being late. I ignored it and just scrolled through Instagram while I was waiting. 

   First it was two minutes, then five, ten, and then nearing fifteen when I finally got my ass out of my car to knock on his door. Ready to give him a good old lecture on how he is not only wasting his time, but my time too, The door swings open and I’m met with the familiar face of his father.

    Andy was a very respectable man. He was great at his job, well accomplished, polite, had a great family, and essentially had the American dream, built up from a life of nothing. Despite this, the man was also fucking beautiful, to say the least. His neatly-trimmed beard had always been adorned on his face as long as I’d known him, his deep blue eyes paired with that boyish grin felt like getting whiplash whenever it made an appearance. It annoyed me to the ends of the earth that this man was not only happily married, but also my best friend’s father. Therefore, I try my hardest to push those aches aside and focus on maintaining a healthy relationship with Mr. Barber.

     But that’s hard to do when he brings me in for a hug, like right now, and my face naturally buries into his broad shoulder, where I can smell his woodsy cologne that makes me feel things. Or when he pulls away, and fixes the tie that he wears to work everyday, and my eyes can’t help but travel to his hands around his neck, and wonder what they’d be like around mine-

    No. That’s weird, stop thinking about that. He asks me about school and the usual, comfortable small talk, until Jacob comes barreling down the stairs waving an Advanced Trigonometry text book in the air.

“Found it!” he yells, frantically attempting to get his shoes on while eating a piece of toast. What a mess. I chuckle.

“Jake, you’ve got to be more organized. Your room looks like a sweat-shop,” Andy said in an accusing tone, walking away, forcing me to look at how good his ass looked in those slacks.

“It would concern me that you know what a sweat-shop looks like, Dad, but I don’t doubt it at this point,” Jacob states, simultaneously stuffing his mouth with peanut butter toast. “By the way, my room does not look like a sweat-shop. Y/N can vouch for that,” Jacob says, finishing off his toast, and both the Barber Boys look at me. Andy crosses his arms, his biceps tightens around his shirt, and his eyebrow raises in a playful “oh really?” sort of way. 

An awkward laugh escapes my lips, and I change the subject as fast as I can. “Okay, Jake, let’s get out of here. Bye, Mr. Barber! See you after school, if we come back here to study. Tell Mrs. Barber I said hi,” I said, stumbling out the front door, not waiting for a reply. I walk to my car, and with Jacob far enough behind me to be able to hear me, I mutter to myself two words. “Fuck me.”

     Sitting at the Barbers’ kitchen table, I stuffed my textbook into my backpack. It had been a long night of studying with Jacob, and it was getting late. It didn’t even hit me until halfway through the study session that I’d have to walk home, remembering I dropped my car off at my house after school. It was only a twenty-minute walk, but in the dark was worse. I shrugged it off and tried to hide my diminished will to leave behind a yawn. 

     Normally, Mr. Barber would be here to offer me a ride home, and insist, because, “I’ve seen how dangerous the world is, Y/N. Especially for women,”. Jacob walked me to the door, as I slid my shoes on my feet. I stepped onto the porch, and his figure leaned against the door frame. He shoved his hands in his pockets, 

“See you in the morning, Jake,” I said, giving him a cursory wave and turning on my heel. I reached into my jacket pocket and felt around for my earbuds, shoving them in and pressing play on my Spotify playlist. Through the music, I could hear a faint “See ya,”, and a door being closed. 

     Walking through the streets of Newton in the dark wasn’t particularly something one looks forward to. This is when all the druggies come out to buy their next fix, and the psychopaths and stalkers victimize the innocent. I roll my eyes at myself, thinking. “Oh my God, you’ll be fine. Stop worrying about nothing,”. 

   With one earbud in my ear, I’m walking down a main road, taking cursory glances to the huge SALE signs outside of shop windows. The calm eleven o’clock traffic passes me, probably without a second thought to my character. Reaching the end of the busy street, I take a right to one of the residential avenues leading to my neighbourhood. The streetlights cast an orange glow on the sidewalk, crickets chirp in this area and keep the night alive. On the fence of one of the houses, a black cat is seen during it’s night’s rest. I exhale sharply through my nose out of amusement; a black cat, probably the oldest Old Wives Tale. Those things are overrated, anyways. 

    I’m just about at the end of the street and entering my neighbourhood when I hear a door slam to my right. Taking out my earbud with a manner as to not make a noise, I frantically spin around, looking for the sound. Only a few house lights are left on, but most are porch lights. Heavy footsteps stalk towards me; and I take off in the direction I was headed in. But the only problem, a man already stands in my path. My stomach drops. A big man, about 6′4 and beefy, mostly bald with tattoos adorning his arms and neck. My flight, fright or freeze instincts kick in, and I bolt in the other direction.

   At least if I can get back to Jacob’s house, I’ll be alright. I run, but I’m no track star. I drop my bag, in hopes to speed up, and reach into my jacket pocket and yank my phone out, while simultaneously taking short glances behind me every few seconds to see if the man has stopped running after me yet. He hasn’t. I’m starting to sweat and my heart’s racing, my breath hitching in my throat. For a short second, I wonder who to call. What a great time for my parent’s to be on a business trip. I dial Jacob, straight to voicemail. I try again, voicemail. I let out a shriek when I feel the man’s hand swipe across my back, almost grabbing me. I’m met with a crossing, and don’t even think before running across the street.

    I hear an innuendo screeching noise, and freeze as I’m caught in the headlights of the car that came to a dead stop. I continue my sprint, the man basically on my heels. Just my luck, I didn’t tie my shoelaces up when I slipped my shoe’s on at Jacob’s. I trip over my own feet, sending me flying forward into the pavement. I hear an amused grunt, and am yanked up by the hair. I let out a yelp, which was hard to get out. My eyes traveled down, to see that the man’s other hand was on my throat. I reached up to claw it off, but the lack of airflow was making everything fuzzy. Things got blurrier and darker, until it just stopped. 

     My head throbs as my eyes flutter open. I immediately groan as I move my hands to rub my temples. When my hands don’t move, I feel the thick ropes bounding them to the headboard. I’m on a bed, in a strange room, with my hands tied. The screams for help die in my throat, as I can’t speak. I try to loll my head to the side to take in more of my surroundings, but all I can see is the scary-looking syringe laid on the bedside table. I try to kick my legs, but they won’t budge. 

    Hot tears stream down my face as I realize I can’t do anything about my current predicament. I don’t know how long has passed when I start getting a little movement in my feet and face. Even longer passes and I can move my whole body, just not adequately. This strength is spent trying to get out of the ties, which just rubs against my wrists and makes it hurt more. 

     After a while of struggling against the ropes, I hear the hinges of a squeaky door swing open. A low rumble of a laugh bounces off of the walls and makes my stomach drop lower. I halt all movement, and don’t dare to make a noise.

 The man appears at the foot of the bed, and slowly hovers above me. 

“We’re gonna have some fun, little one. Will you be good? If you’re good, I’ll take the ropes off,” he says in a menacing tone, to which I frantically nod my head.

“Okay, good little one,” Playing it cooperative is the best way to play it until I can find some way to get out of this. I hope I can before he does anything. 

[welcometoels]

Session Eleven - Slathiel

And so, our adventurers completed their quest for the four items of power, and returned them to the entity known as Slathiel, as promised.

Or did they?

Something about this being rubbed certain party members up the wrong way.  This, combined with the close personal connection each of them felt to one of the items, gave them pause.

Thus, a plan was hatched - each party member would speak to some of the friends they had made in town, and gather a little posse to speak to this so-called Slathiel - that way, if everything suddenly went wrong, they would have strong support in the ensuing battle.

Kadis makes the first move.  Stepping into Jackie & Clutchstraw’s, he has a friendly chat with Drow artificer Aberron - who, understandably, still has a lot of questions.  Kadis fills him in as best he can, and Aberron - after a quick consultation with his brass owl, Dominique - agrees.

Oddsock takes a more direct approach.  Storming into the Dogwood Trading Post (Presented By Himself), he invites Jackie Face to come out and play.  Jackie, though, has business in mind - specifically beer business.  The market research has gone swimmingly, with the new hoppy brew going down especially well with the hard-grafting carpenters in town - in particular with the man who took the lead on building the Potions & Artifices shop: a man they refer to fondly as Jackies’ Hammer.

After agreeing that this would make a fabulous name for the beer, Oddsock gives Jackie Face a few more details about the upcoming fight.  Face becomes uncharacteristically quiet, muttering under his breath about company values, teamwork and synergy, in a way the Dog finds strangely familiar.  Suddenly, Jackie Face disappears into a large box of miscellaneous armour parts in the corner, and promises to see the team outside shortly.

Talion heads over to the Jaunty Skinner to speak to his new buddy and nighttime companion Freginald Biceppe.  Being very well disposed towards both fighting and Talion - his two favourite things to do - Freginald needs very little encouragement to join the fray, and pledges his two meaty fists to the party’s cause.

On the other side of the pub, Julius finds Gyder at the bar with the latest in a line of foaming ales, and X at a nearby table, idly doodling couches with a distracted look on her face.  Gyder has a new haircut - trimmed almost to the skin at the sides and back, with a asymmetrical fringe.  It is the kind of cut that would look spiffy on an Elf, but serves mostly to accentuate the severity of her face.  This may have been the point.

Julius approaches both with a panicked entreaty for help.  X yelps and quickly hides her drawings, before asking what is wrong.  After a brief, stuttering rundown of the situation from the Otter, X immediately agrees to assist, and turns to Gyder.  The Half-Orc drains her ale in one swallow - game on.

Out in the town square, as everyone gathers, new companion Batch 38 Unit 12 is standing in conversation with Aberron Clutchstraw.  The Helpforged cleric is going into extensive detail regarding their inner workings, while the Drow stands agog, in rapt attention.

Suddenly, from the Trading Post door, there appears a strange contraption: Half of a suit of armour, with raccoon faces peeking out from the neck and wrist holes, mounted on a unicycle.  Jackies Left and Right clutch a katar and tea tray respectively, while Jackie Face shouts commands at Jackie Bottom’s madly pedalling feet.  Jackie Middle is in there somewhere, doubtless horribly warm at the heart of the hastily-assembled Mecha-Jackie.

Standing in the deepening dusk and watching with a sense of bemusement as this all take place, Slathiel now commands attention.  An agreement was made, a quest given and accepted, yet no items of power have yet been presented.  Folding their six golden arms and flapping their wings, Slathiel requests them once again.

It is now that the party begins to ask questions that had been festering since their first encounter - specifically about who Slathiel is, and what they need the gems and lanterns for - but Slathiel is not in an answering mood.

Talion laments his lack of a Detect Good & Evil spell, and 38/12 - helpful by design - twists the spell focus on their chest to the left, lighting up several magical runes imprinted on their body.  With a wave of their hand, the verdict is announced:

“This entity before us is... Evil.”

With that, Slathiel’s demeanour changes.  Unfolding their mighty ruby wings and taking flight up to the roof of the Jaunty Skinner, their form too begins to alter: The six golden arms merge into two thick, grey, scaly limbs, their height increases and their head widens, with a mouthful of sharp teeth and two cruel eyes glaring down at the gathered people below.

The creature hunches forward on the roof, turning its hands about in arcane gestures. “I gave you the chance to do what I asked,” it says, “but you have chosen death.”

From its scaly hands it shoots a Fireball, straight at 38/12.  The Helpforged dodges the worst of the blast, but Kadis and Aberron are less fortunate, finding themselves close to death.

Worse still, Dominique is hit full force by the flames, and is shattered to pieces - a pile of broken brass and a single bright gem lying where the owl once was.

38/12 does their best to apply healing, while X dashes over to assist and Aberron, recovering from the loss of Dominique, conjures up an Eldritch Cannon to imbue those nearby with bonus health.  The Jackies make a decent fist of pedalling in roughly the right direction, whilst buffing themselves with the Power of Commerce.

Deeper into the fight, those that can fire projectiles do so, to varying levels of success.  Kadis dashes round to the side of the inn with the intent to scale it, and Julius cast Faerie Fire on Slathiel, lighting it up like a festive tree.  Having achieved this, he transforms into a giant Wolf Spider, and begins to climb the front of the pub.

Slathiel, infuriated by this affront, descends, in order to bring the fight to the party.  Freginald takes this as his cue, and makes with the fancy footwork and fists to the face.  Talion lends his rapier to the fray, Gyder strides forth with her greataxe, and X conjurs up a spiritual weapon to assist.

Julius, abandoning the wall plan, drops his spider form and brings up a Moonbeam of radiant energy upon Slathiel, while Aberron moves in to support, Oddsock makes ready with Blasts both Eldritch and Searing, and the Jackies roll out in entirely the wrong direction.

Kadis, hearing the decent of Slathiel around the corner, attempt to jimmy open one of the Jaunty Skinner’s windows, with little success.  He does, however, attract landlady/mayor Tiatha Rowe’s attention, and asks her to fetch a lantern from the wall and bring it to him.

As all of this goes on, a terrible shout is heard from the south.  The figure that appears is familiar, but somewhat worse for where - green-scaled Dragonborn in dirt-covered robes, with a ragged sword wound at his throat.

As he charges in, he shouts after the monk who took his lantern.  The body may be Graindude, but the voice is pure Aberraton Mortesque.

He is a distant concern for now, out on the edge of town.  There are more pressing matters, such as the giant lizard who is now bearing down on Freginald, to terrible effect.

Fortunately, 38/12 is on hand to provide healing, while X lets rip with a Guiding Bolt.  Talion and Gyder cut away as Julius’ Moonbean shines down, and the Jackies nearly make it to the battle.

Back inside the Skinner, Tiatha has reached the window and hands a torch out to Kadis, along with a request that he try and keep the fight out of her pub.  This request becomes harder to fulfil, as Barty appears from the back.

Seeing the carnage on his doorstep, something changes inside the affable Gnome.  He pulls out his meat cleaver and carving knife, bellows several nautical oaths into the air, and charges forth with the rage of a sea storm.

Slathiel rears away from this new attack, and launches its fury at Freginald once again.  Undeterred, the brawny fighter hammers a fist straight into its jaw, smashing its head with furious vengeance and showering the inn’s chef with gore - which he loves.

And Lo!  What sight do we see here?  Losing control of the unicycle once again, the Jackies charge, by accident more than design, straight into the advancing corpse of the reanimated Graindude.  They set about his rotten head and shoulders with bites, jabs and tea tray slaps.

As this furious (and inadvertent) melee ensues, Kadis puts into action his torch plan.  Sharpening the unlit end, he channels his apple-lobbing skills and smashes the torch in the direction of the corpse... and misses completely.

Another fine plan foiled by the Dice Gods.

Fortunately, his friends are on hand with less convoluted fighting styles, and before long the revenant falls under fist, axe, rapier, raccoon, cutlery, magic blasts, and a final scourging strike from the Moonbeam, showering everyone with rotten Warlock.

Finally, quiet falls over Dogwood square.  Barty goes to draw a bath, and Aberron picks up the gem that used to be Dominique, promising to remake her better than ever.

The others simply stagger about, congratulating each other on a fight well fought, before becoming silent.

The whole world becomes silent.  Then, it begins to fade from view, and nothing can be seen, heard or felt around our party of four.

The round red gem and silver lantern rise from their keepers, and float in the air, joined in this negative space by the blue gem and green lantern.  As they float, they begin to dance in a slow circle above the party’s heads.

And then a voice.  A slow, calm, pleasant voice.

“Well done.  You were very good, very entertaining, wonderful to watch.  You were not fooled by that creature, and you have forged a beautiful bond as a party.

“We will meet again, I’m sure, elsewhere in this world.  But for now, I will leave you with a gift.”

The gems and lanterns begin to change form in the space above their heads.  The blue gem shrinks into a perfect blue pebble, and attached itself to Julius’ necklack, next to Pa McGinley’s charm; the green lantern becomes a small black and green egg, and sets itself next to Kadis’ cursed idol; The silver lantern flattens itself into something that could be a plectrum or a silver dragon scale, and hangs beside Talion’s jagged onyx charm; and the red gem becomes a gleaming red bottle cap, which hangs on to Oddsock’s leather tunic, at his neck.

Finally, the remains of Slathiel swim into view, and a perfect golden gem emerges from its skull.  This too undergoes a transformation, into a tiny golden gear, which lands in Kadis’ hand.

“There is one more,” says the disembodied voice.  “Make sure this gets to them.”

The world then rushes back into view, but not quite as it was.  The dusk sky is subtly different in colour - more vibrant than before - and way off to the south stands a tall spire.

It is completely unfamiliar to Oddsock, though Julius may once or twice have seen it on the far horizon, and Kadis and Talion will have heard tales of it - the tallest tower in Els.

It is Barty, though, who speaks.

“Monthend Spire,” he says, his voice filled with awe.  “Now I know where we are.”

[haphapner]

The Madonna of Allentown

It happened again at Big Len's place in Allentown, Pennsylvania.  A steady flow of true humanity came through there every day.  Big Len's specialized in cold beer to go and weekly room rentals, an odd mix but it had been around for years.

I had just returned from buying a carton of cheap cigarettes.

It was my daughter’s sixteenth birthday.  I hadn’t been pregnant for fifteen years, eleven months and nineteen days.  On that morning, I experienced a miraculous conception.  What would come from my womb some months later would not, indeed could not, be, from a man.

Long ago, I recognized that one should take these things as they come.  The years and more than five-hundred-fifty pregnancies have tempered my weariness and bone crushing sadness with wisdom.  Inexplicably I felt driven to invest in this child so that it would be more successful than all the others combined.

One minute, I was walking up the backstairs to my bug-infested room, a communal toilet and shower down the hall.  The next, a fresh new soul spontaneously generated in my ancient womb.  The cigarettes slipped from my grasp and bounced down the dingy stairs, bounding higher as they picked up speed.  The carton cracked against the door and burst open spewing cellophane wrapped pleasure across the sun-lit landing.

“Shit!”

I can’t explain it; I just knew it had happened again.  It’s like Zen, if you’ve experienced sartori, you get it; otherwise, you’re shit-out-of-luck.

I sat down three quarters of the way up the steep stairs.  “Shit, shit, shit … I’m too tired for this.”  I slammed my elbow against the wall; dingy, faded wallpaper fluttered. “How does this always catch me off-guard?”  I took a long drag on a generic cigarette, my last.  “So many myths about gods becoming men and walking among us, the gods of mythology were too chicken-shit to become women.”  I ripped at a piece of wallpaper exposing years of corrupted paint.  “Woman’s work my ass,” a sarcastic laugh slipped out. “Men should try motherhood.”

My story starts in the mists of time, before I conceived the collective unconscious of humankind. Known by a thousand names – Eve, Ishtar, Isis, Mother Earth – I am the Oracle of Delphi who doled out visions, generation upon generation, ad infinitum.  The Greeks referred to me as Gaia, the one who sprang from Chaos and became the mother of all things.

Myth cloaks the truth trapping humanity in ancient prisons of ignorance.  A son once said, “The Truth shall set you free.”[1]  I have born more grief than the mind can conceive.  In vain, I have staggered through humanity searching, always searching for true companionship, a true equal.

Jung wrote, “Whenever the earth mother appears it means that things are going to happen in reality; this is an absolute law.”[2]  His words were confused.  I do not appear.  I never disappear.  I keep moving, looking into eyes that cannot see, listening for words that convey meaning. Carl understood one thing.  For those who come to know me, reality takes hold.  Through the mind-numbing millennia, I have witnessed pockets of hope, people whose peaceful coexistence drew me toward the mainstream.  Such communities were but flickering flames blown out by human progress.

Every sixteen years I become pregnant and carry the baby to term – which is usually some time during the twenty-fourth lunar month.  I neither consult nor require a patriarch to participate in these sacred events. These children of fiat are my offering, my sacrifice to humanity, gifts meant to foster evolution so that humanity might come to a full realization of their divine nature.

Through the centuries, I have mothered some famous and infamous people.  Ishmael and Isaac, those naughty boys who denied the goddess, were mine.  Siddhartha and Jesus were my sons as were Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Mohamed. You see, I am doomed to have sons, boys and men who must throw off the fear and oppression of women or die.  Warriors, orators, gurus, and shaman alike I have birthed, but very few wise men.

Sid was a rebellious boy in the beginning.  Jesus died too soon.  I fled the Christian lands after seeing so much harm done in his name.  Humans constantly teeter on the brink of madness.  After the first jihad, Mohamed tried to honor me in his book, “Christ, the son of Mary, was no more than a messenger; many were the messengers that passed away before him.  His mother was a woman of truth.  But they had both to eat their food.”[3]  Can you imagine?  My own son did not understand the divine reality of the one who bore him into this world.  With a broken heart, I slowly made my way north and west.

Sadly, most of my sons turned out to be self-centered egomaniacs.  Tragedy seemed my only companion.  Witnessing their utter lack of respect for women and the goddess, I began to desert my boys by their sixteenth birthday.  Hitler broke my heart long before he broke the world.  I fled to the west.

I arrived in the new world just after the turn of the century.  My next child, Sunnyland Slim, soulfully interpreted my heart through his fingers and songs.  But the moral decay and utter inhumanity of the last several centuries had brought me low. I took a long vacation, which brought me to Big Len’s with my only daughter.

Human potential for greatness is exceeded only by its arrogant individualism.

Around each child’s thirty-third birthday, when the calendars of the sun and the moon align, is a powerful opportunity in their lives.  At those times, the collective unconsciousness draws toward the surface of conscious thought throughout the earth’s inhabitants.  At that time, every generation faces the great question – will they accept their maker as she is.  Only during that powerful alignment of the lunar and solar phases, is vision able to break the bonds of human limitation and broach the domain of collective reality.  That unified vision is the key to human evolution.

I loved the renaissance when men nearly grasped the divine nature of humanity.  Rubens honored me, and all women, with his exquisite art. Things had always been dicey with the boys, but they really went downhill fast during the industrial revolution. My son Karl wrote about a community of equals, but he was no Jesus.  He thought economics could alter the human condition.  He could not see that lasting social change will only come through an evolved race.

For thousands of years, since the men of this species overthrew the goddess, violence toward women and children has run rampant.  The prehistoric patriarchal revolt disfigured the male capacity for love, trust, and connection.  In the process, my heart fractured and so began my perpetual search for wholeness.

The myth of the ages is that human men become mature. Their adult lives are lived as an extension of their boyhood.  They do not mature they merely age.  Their deeply buried true self rarely surfaces.  Panic ensues in the hearts of men when they glimpse their feminine side. The fear of homosexuality is but a disguise.  Their terror lies in something sinister and primal that they cannot face.

They fear me in them.  In the gap between Eden’s fall and recorded history, they knew me as the goddess of all things dark and uncanny.  Men’s hearts filled with fear, knowing I could strike them down with arrows of conscience even from afar.  In rebellion against the true nature of all things, they have subjugated women since the dawn of human history.  Once they seized control, they denied their essence and proclaimed their superiority.

To survive I had to go on the lam.  Of course, modern humans have no recollection or understanding of these things.  Primeval instinct leads men to oppress and deny their nature and needs.  They do not comprehend that their claims of physical superiority and manifest destiny are born of fear.

Men need not fear.  I am the self-existent One.  Ex nihilo I made all things.  I am woman and man, the beginning and the end, the lover of all things.  I draw many into oneness creating a race of divine equals, who knowing their origins choose to embrace their divine nature.  I alone procreate – the divine begetting the divine.

A sign flashed above my head, Sacred Heart Hospital.  I floated along into an elevator.  Everything smelled clean and white.  Doors parted, closed, and opened again.  People rushed past my horizontal floating frame.

“She’s in trouble.  Get her into surgery.”

Who could they be talking about?  How long had I been here?

I hear my daughter’s voice, “What is it?  What is wrong?”

“She’s hemorrhaging.  We need to take the baby now.”

“Looks like a lot of scar tissue, possibly an acute ectopic. Get the on-call surgeon.

“Blood pressure’s dropping, pulse is dropping.”

“She’s going into shock; we’re losing her.  Come on people!”

~

The doctor explained that they had done a “clean house” hysterectomy.  I would never have another child.

My firstborn daughter, now eighteen stepped forward and looked into my eyes.  She held her new little sister with pride and hope.  “Mama, she’s the one; the last one.”

[1] Holy Bible, New International Version, John 8:38

[2] Douglas, Claire, Editor.  Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930 – 1934 C.G. Jung. Princeton University Press.  1997. Page 790.

[3] Koran 5:75

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Essay by Michael Almereyda, Filmmaker

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out. —Martin Scorsese

We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

In Cameraperson (2016), Kirsten Johnson has made a buoyant film about the weight of the world.

She lays out her process in a paragraph presented up front. What we’re about to see, she explains, has been patched together from material she has shot as a cinematographer for films directed by other people, in the course of a career spanning twenty-five years. “I ask you to see it as my memoir,” Johnson insists.

A memoir, yes, but one that is scant on autobiographical facts. You have to turn elsewhere to learn that Johnson studied painting and literature in the late 1980s at Brown University, where she had a political awakening, stirred by the anti-apartheid movement roiling the campus. Upon graduation, making an uncommon move, she transplanted herself to Senegal and interned there on a film written by the great Ousmane Sembène. In 1991, she was the first American to enroll at La Fémis, the French national film school, where she entered the camera department and discovered a vocation. She landed early cinematography jobs in France and Brazil.

Evolving from this global trajectory, Cameraperson is a nonchronological collage of raw and repurposed footage: forty-four distinct episodes (by my count) made up of sounds and images gathered for (but generally not appearing in) twenty-four separate projects. Most of the episodes are bridged by breaks of black frames, during which anticipatory sounds prepare for oncoming images. Locations are identified by title cards, and eleven people are given names and job descriptions, ranging from “Jacques Derrida / French philosopher”—a quick cameo, as the famous man impishly holds forth on a Manhattan street—to “Aisha Bukar / nurse, midwife,” a more substantial, recurring presence, granting us access to a natal unit in a Nigerian hospital, where the film arrives at one of its most harrowing sequences. We get scraps from high-profile documentaries—Laura Poitras’s The Oath and Citizenfour, on which Johnson served as a principal shooter, and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, for which she received an “additional camera operator” credit—but most of the movies cannibalized here are not especially well-known, and Johnson accomplishes her most probing portraiture by focusing on people encountered as strangers. Her inclusion, at regular intervals, of her own home-video footage confirms an impression of inspired and intimate rummaging. (This is a memoir that blurs the line between professional and private experience.) Ultimately, like a lavish quilt, or a bird’s nest, the film subsumes its source material on the way to becoming a complete and organic new thing.

More often than not, Johnson’s work takes her to places stamped by violence, death, and destruction, sites of collective grief and dread. Even if the worst of the mayhem has occurred in the past, she’s there to absorb and collect the residue, talking to survivors, bearing witness. Johnson supplies a few grace notes, musical interludes, flashes of scenic splendor, but for a film made by a cinematographer, there are bracingly few images that are merely pretty or picturesque. People are plainly what Johnson cares about most, and in this film she candidly prizes and examines her ability to use her camera to get close to whoever is in the frame. “Gettin’ close to everybody,” she murmurs, disarmingly, to an initially wary man in a Brooklyn boxing gym. The man smiles and relaxes, as if Johnson has cast a spell. She coaxes equivalent looks of complicity and acceptance from a boy in Kabul whose left eye has been blinded in a bomb blast; from an elegantly wizened Muslim woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina who, with a tight, tart smile, denies that the Serbs’ campaign of mass rape ever affected her family; and from her own mother, diminished by Alzheimer’s, regarding Johnson—and Johnson’s camera—with a mix of tenderness and fright.

The film has been crafted with self-reflexive knowingness. Shots that feature fumbling and reframing are integrated the way a confident painter builds a picture around bare canvas, loose brushwork, spattered drips. And there’s a steady pressing of a central nerve, a nagging question implicit in the most searching documentaries as well as the most trivial: At what point does the camera’s scrutiny become exploitative, invasive, voyeuristic, damaging? The question hovers throughout the film, despite Johnson’s evident gift for putting people at ease, respecting the pressure and pain of true confession. In sequence after sequence, she invites and captures intimacy, even or especially when her subjects don’t want their faces shown. (In these cases, Johnson’s camera follows their uneasy hands, and we see Scorsese’s axiom at work; what’s not in the frame adds eloquence to what is.)

As a self-portrait, Cameraperson is intriguingly elliptical, oblique. Early on, we see Johnson’s striding shadow, her camera rising from her shoulder like a jagged branch, an extension of her body, but in the course of the film she appears full-on only briefly, near the end. She doesn’t spell out a credo, or spill any outright confessions of her own. (In an overconfiding age, this may account for a good deal of the film’s power.) But Johnson’s overheard voice—a quick, open, guileless voice, quintessentially American—is there from the start, behind the lens, giggling and almost giddy. When her camera catches lightning slicing down from a wash of blue-gray Missouri clouds, she gasps, then stays steady and silent enough to take in the emptiness—a crash of thunder, its echo, a defiantly serene bird—then Johnson sneezes, twice, jostling the frame, undercutting any self-important claim to authority as the film’s title comes up.

Soon after, in Sarajevo, speaking offhandedly to an unseen collaborator, the cameraperson sketches her MO, talking like a teenager: “I always try to have some kind of relationship with people, like I’ll look them in the eye like ‘You see me shooting you, don’t you?’”

She shows us her twin toddlers in her Manhattan home (without giving a glimpse of a significant other) and spends time with her parents, inevitable augurs of mortality. Johnson’s father, on a casual walk, cheerfully displays a dead bird to the grandkids, while images of Johnson’s mother give way to shots of a container holding her ashes. (For the latter, Johnson keeps rearranging objects in the frame, adjusting the composition, as if trying to come to terms with the unadjustable limit of her mother’s life.)

In interviews, Johnson has expressed guilt and self-reproach about photographing her afflicted mother against her wishes. Yet, as she must know, some of her film’s most poignant moments emerge from this betrayal. How could Johnson resist recording her mother’s stunned face, trying to hold on to an identity slipping away before her eyes? Circling back to Scorsese, we can recognize that Johnson is confronting a larger fact: human presences are always fragile, fleeting, on their way to being out of the frame.

*****

You can entangle across time. You can entangle into the future, into the past. You can entangle through space. That’s what quantum entanglement means. It means that there’s another underlying layer of nature that we haven’t discovered yet. —Dr. Eric W. Davis, in Cameraperson

At some point in the editing process, Johnson seems to have taken her cue from the astrophysicist quoted above, riffing on the notion that we’re all entangled; time and space can’t always be taken literally; recorded reality can be reorganized to comply with memory and imagination. By this logic, less scientific than intuitive, people and places in Johnson’s memoir become entangled in occasional shared chapters, tethered by free-associational edits. The harsh wind in Wyoming, flashing through tall grass on the Johnson family ranch, makes Johnson’s mother stagger, wince, and seem to dwindle into a Giacometti figurine. With the grace of a cut, the same wind sweeps through a yellow hillside in Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the rural village where a Muslim family has returned to their farm while contending with memories of genocide and war.

Similar associative links and leaps flicker throughout the film, but, halfway in, there’s a sequence that’s starkly explicit in its insistence on interconnectedness. Johnson serves up a series of landscapes where historic atrocities have occurred, now mute and tranquil crime scenes, mundane places conjoined by invisible carnage and, for the most part, a shared look of dreary ordinariness. The sequence includes sites of mass execution, torture, and rape, plus forensic shots of the drab interior of a pickup truck identified as the vehicle that dragged James Byrd Jr. to his death in the otherwise unremarkable town of Jasper, Texas. In this stretch, Johnson expresses a sustained note of anguish, like a war correspondent admitting to a case of secondhand PTSD, but she’s stoic about it, and, as her film offers a range of locations and perspectives, she’s irrepressibly alert to the bigger picture—a picture that includes antic dancing in Uganda, a woman embracing a fierce and humiliated young boxer after a lost match in Brooklyn, the flow of life around a roadside market in Liberia. It’s fair to say the “wonderful” God hailed by nine-year-old Kirsten in a preserved handwritten poem—“Your love never ends! / And my love to you will never end!”—has been displaced, in the grown cameraperson’s mind and eye, by a pantheistic understanding of the world, a sense of immanence and mystery that competes with evidence of unrelenting bad news. And so Johnson counterbalances bitter and abject scenes with proofs of compassion, consolation, even joy. And it’s no fluke that many of the film’s brighter moments involve children.

*****

Down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios . . . Long live life as it is! —Dziga Vertov

Cameraperson has been showered with sympathetic and insightful reviews, and hailed as a film without precedent. It doesn’t diminish Johnson’s work—its integrity, freshness, and force—to recognize that antecedents do exist. Dziga Vertov, the pioneering Soviet director of newsreels and kaleidoscopic documentary features, would not be spinning in his grave to consider his legacy extended and fulfilled in Johnson’s audacious and self-aware doc/essay/travelogue/memoir. Indeed, Cameraperson would make a provocative double bill with Vertov’s equally unclassifiable Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a dazzling chronicle of urban life channeled dusk to dawn through the lens of an itinerant cameraman, a tale told without intertitles or narration. (Vertov’s spectacular “day” was in fact filmed in four cities over a period of three years.) Man with a Movie Camera’s propulsive editing and hyper-aestheticized photography don’t jibe with Johnson’s levelheaded approach, but her anchoring ambition is aligned with Vertov’s: to record and elevate common experience, to uphold film as a reflection of reality rather than an escape from it, and, further, to create movies that open idealistically outward, providing a means for people to see their lives valued, honored, and in effect returned to them, even as they become part of a larger collective story.

In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), we can find another singular, self-defining, soaring hybrid “documentary” experiment, a collage of fragmentary episodes candidly jigsawed together from a cinematographer’s accumulated outtakes. Marker uses magisterial narration to explicate his images, to question them, to expand their reach, constructing a philosophical inquiry into the nature of seeing, memory, time, consciousness; but strip away the voice-over and you can still take in Marker’s generous regard for the people he encounters, respect for their vulnerability, their otherness, their unique place within a vast human family.

All the same, Vertov and Marker, assigning their authentic, unstaged images to fictional cameramen, avoid the level of personal risk embraced by Johnson, who unabashedly (if incompletely) reveals her history, her unmistakable self, as the source of every frame. By the time we catch sight of her in Cameraperson, we can be forgiven for presuming to know her. She aims the camera at herself, standing beside her unsteady mother, sharing the older woman’s worried smile, and her eyes look haunted. The image emerges within a flashback, an editorial surprise, and it suggests that Johnson would agree with a primary Marker aphorism: “Being a photographer means not only to look but to sustain the gaze of others.” The gaze of others, we can see, carries a corresponding weight.

*****

I said to the wanting-creature inside me: What is this river you want to cross? —Kabir

Voyeurism is related to cinema as lust is related to love. You can separate them—you can try to separate them—but to what end? The urge to look, to see and share private experience—whether displays of intimacy, acts of violence, the urgent facts of another person’s pain—is seldom pure and simple. How do we, filmmakers and film viewers, transcend voyeurism? How can a filmmaker’s craft and conscience elevate images from voyeurism to revelation?

Cameraperson reaches a kind of climax back in Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the place Johnson visits most within the braided strands of the film’s structure. She documents her return five years after her initial journey, with music from the resulting 2011 film, an episode of the PBS series Women, War & Peace, brimming over into Cameraperson, the movie we’re watching while the gathered family watches themselves on a laptop screen. Johnson, of course, records this rapt audience, their charged attention, then the rich homemade meal that follows, coffee, a cigarette. The Möbius-strip circuit of giving and taking and giving back—the process of seeing, sharing, and accepting—brings Cameraperson to an ideal summit of reconciliation, peace, hope for the future. “We hope someday she can come back with her son and daughter,” a woman tells Johnson’s translator, “to see how peasants live.” Exactly the response Vertov was hectically hungering for.

One of the film’s most arresting and resonant images, for this viewer, occurs earlier in Foča, when an unnamed Muslim woman lifts a bowl high above her head, confidently spilling berries into another bowl held below her waist. The free-falling fruit makes an ecstatic blur, and the next cut shows the berries as they’ve landed and settled, as if artfully prearranged: a ready-made bouquet of whorled color—red, black, white, yellow—an instant metaphor for plenitude and renewal, raw experience transformed into poetry.

“Wow,” says the woman behind the camera. “It’s like magic.”

Yes—wow—it is.

Michael Almereyda’s documentary films include This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World, Paradise, and the forthcoming Escapes.

I have copied this essay from the site linked above.

[aion-rsa]

How Marvel is Redefining the Future of the X-Men

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Jonathan Hickman and crew are blazing a bright trail for Marvel's X-Men with House of X and Powers of X.

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Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, RB Silva, Marte Gracia, and the rest of the team are now two issues into House of X and Powers of X, the intertwining X-Men event comics meant to reset the marvelous mutants, and in four issues over one month, they've managed to change everything we know about the X-Men. This isn't hyperbole: the changes that were made in House of X #2 altered everything we knew about the past of the X-Men, and the additional information we got in Powers of X #2 changed at least two potential futures and may have further tweaked the past. We are one third of the way done with the event, and already these are the most ambitious, most entertaining X-Men comics in a decade. 

WARNING: This article contains EXTENSIVE spoilers about the first issues of House of X and Powers of X. STOP READING NOW if you haven’t read both comics.

I. The Theme

They're not kidding about this 10 thing. First, Powers of X literally goes through exponentially greater powers of ten on a timescale (starting at year 1, jumping to year 10, year 100 and year 1000). So of course Moira X would be the tenth Moira Kinross.

House of X #2 made one of the most head-spinning retcons in X-Men history. This is a flatly absurd statement to make about a comic family where the title character faked his own death for shits and giggles more than once, but Jonathan Hickman will see your "actually Jean Grey's real body was in a cocoon at the bottom of Jamaica Bay," and raise you "in Moira MacTaggert's ninth life she chose to help Apocalypse ascend to godhood."

A brief summary of this massive, massive retcon: Moira Kinross lived a happy, long life full of family and died at the age of 74. When she died, she immediately woke up in the womb with all the knowledge she had gained in her previous life. She tried living through her life again with that additional knowledge, but it didn't work, and when Charles Xavier outed himself as a mutant on television, she felt that was the answer she had been looking for, and promptly died in a plane crash on her way to meet him. She woke up again in the womb, with an additional lifetime of memories, and proceeded to devise a cure to her mutant ability of reincarnation. Unfortunately, Mystique and Destiny didn't care for the potential outcomes of having a mutant cure out and available in the world, so they burned her and her cure in her lab, but not before warning Moira to help mutants, to never attempt to make a cure again lest they find her and kill her again, and telling her that she only has ten or eleven lives in total.

read more: Marvel's X-Men Relaunch Explained

From there, Moira begins an iterative process of figuring out the best way forward for mutants. First she marries Charles and helps him establish the X-Men, but they're eventually all killed by Sentinels. Then she finds Charles 10 years early and helps him establish a separatist mutant colony, but they're all killed by Sentinels. Then she goes badass commando and kills every Trask she can find, but Sentinels are created anyway and she's killed by a stray Mastermold.  So she convinces Magneto to attack early, but he's killed by the heroes of that world and she dies trying to break out of jail. The ninth time through, she wakes Apocalypse early and helps him ascend to his maximum power, and they go to war with the Sentinels. And the tenth time through brings us, presumably, to House of X.

This is a massive, massive change to existing continuity that asks as many questions - what happened in the unaccounted for life 6? why would she enter an abusive relationship with Joe MacTaggart in life 10? - as it answers (Moira is no longer the only human to contract the Legacy Virus).

II. The Art

Pepe Larraz on House of X and RB Silva on Powers of X  continue to astonish with their linework, but my god, Marte Gracia's colors are staggering. It's unfair to single anyone out, because these are arguably the best looking superhero books on stands right now, but Gracia is doing tremendous work (and we fawned over Larraz and Silva last time, but holy shit look at Destiny's mask and tell me Larraz isn't due some awards).

These two books are basically telling four stories; one in each of the four time periods. Each is a vastly different setting with a different tone and different coloring needs. Gracia maintains the distinctions between the four with different palates, and uses different effects for each. He also does a great job of getting out of the line art's way when it's needed - Larraz is a little chunkier and muddier with his blacks, which really adds to the tone of some of the scenes in HoX, while Silva is a little bit bubblier and cartoony, which is perfect for adding incongruous menace to Nimrod. Gracia combines with the other artists to make an X-Book that sings better than any X-Men comic since Jerome Opena and Dean White on Uncanny X-Force.

We are in a golden age of comics coloring. The perfection of digital coloring technology has both opened the doors to a lot more potential colorists, and given those at the top of their game more tools to use when telling the story than they had when coloring was more analog, and that means there are a lot of people doing incredible work. Gracia's work on House of X and Powers of X show that he belongs in the same conversation with the Dave Stewarts and Jordie Bellaires of the world.

III. The Marvel Universe Matters Again

For a very long time, the X-Men books have been siloed off from the rest of the broader Marvel Universe. This has been to the detriment of both the X-Men and the rest of Marvel. That shared universe feeling is part of the reason most of us got into superhero comics in the first place. If we wanted to read a story about a group of kids with powers, there are any number of places we could go for that. It's the fact that the X-Men resonate within a larger shared superhero universe that helped lend these stories some meaning.

That feeling is back, and the beauty is that the creative team is doing it entirely through offhand references. The fact that Powers of X's textual explanation borrows heavily from Annihilation: Conquest isn't material to the progress of the story, but for longtime fans it's a sign that these stories matter, and for new fans it's a thread to tug at to find more stories to love. Cyclops showing genuine affection for Ben Grimm is an awesome metacommentary on how the Fox properties were treated at Marvel, but it's also a link between all of these stories happening. X-Men comics haven't felt like they mattered like this in a long time.

IV. Everything X is New Again

X-Men comics haven't been this effectively rooted in their own continuity for some time either. These two comics are absolutely jammed with classic X-Men nods and love from all over the time period. The promotional material flagged four distinct eras it would call back to - Giant Sized X-Men #1, the '90s launch of volume 2, Age of Apocalypse, and the Grant Morrison run - and while we're getting plenty of those, we're also getting everything else. There's a surprising amount of '90s X-Men, too, from well beyond the launch of volume 2. That is perhaps required when you're doing this much work with classic '90s villains like Apocalypse and Sinister, who weren't entirely fleshed out until The Twelve and the Gambit ongoing series respectively, but it's still fun and surprising to see that era rehabilitated here. And the X^3 era's focus on the Phalanx hearkens back to a lot of X-Men continuity that is firmly mid-90s.

Magneto is also a pathway for a lot of Silver/Bronze Age cusp continuity. We spend a lot of time in Octopusheim, his island base from the dawn of Uncanny X-Men that he then used as a vacation getaway for the New Mutants when he ran the school, and the gorgeous flashback above from Powers of X #2 is chockablock with classic callbacks. 

And every aspect of X-Men life is touched. Obviously their genetic inheiritance is the crux, but the preponderance of crazy X-adjacent space name drops like the Shi'ar and Phalanx and Technarchy shows that everything counts and nothing is off limits.

V. Hickman's Mastery of Villains

There were very few outright villains in Jonathan Hickman's older Marvel work. Really only two that I can think of: Thanos in Infinity and The Maker, Ultimate Reed Richards. There were plenty of villanous characters, but while Namor and Dr. Doom are assholes, they at least had an argument to make. But whether they were bad guys or bad guys making compelling points, Hickman wrote them beautifully. This is happening again here.

read more: The X-Men Movies You Never Saw

Nimrod is a delight. He plays as brilliant, weirdly funny, and just slightly unhinged, which goes against type for a blocky murder robot. But his power and design and openness to flat murder make him a little bit terrifying as well. Meanwhile, Magneto is tremendous. "I do. I decide." is right next to "I. Doom." in the face of the Beyonder's destruction of the multiverse as PERFECT lines from ambiguous bad people. Destiny's entire interaction with Moira in HoX #2 is on the same level. Menace, authority, understanding, and purpose all in the briefest of dialogue.

VI. The Greatest Cyclops of All Time

This is going to sound weird, but I don't want to be friends with this Cyclops. I want to be his coworker.

I want to be set to a task with him. I want us to decide who's going to take care of what. And then I want to be completely and utterly certain that the stuff I'm not working on is going to be taken care of correctly and quickly, and then we can go grab a beer when it's done.

This is perfect writing of a character who's been done dirty for the better part of the last 15 years. Good Cyclops should be competence porn. He's the guy who can bank an optic blast off of two walls and knock out the bad guy, the one Captain America takes tactical advice from. I look at him and I see a viable politician with appeal outside the mutant community, but for a decade and a half events have conspired to push him into reactionary terrorism before he was killed off panel. His return in the last wave of X-books is promising from what I've read so far (I'm on Unlimited time, so I'm six months behind), but he was off the board or playing a different game for a long time. He's back now and he's better than any Cyclops I've ever read.

VII. Elegant Infodumps

The infodump graphics that abound in Hickman comics have turned some people off to his work in the past. Designer Tom Muller and the subject matter are, I think, combining to change that. Also, the droplets of information hidden on these pages make them really worthwhile to pour over.

read more - The Essential Episodes of X-Men: The Animated Series

There has been an enormous amount of information conveyed in these first four issues. Resetting of timelines, additional potential futures, massive character retcons, a core mystery, new factions introduced. All of them used Muller's infographics to help further the story, but they're presented in a clear, logical way that both furthers the story and deepens the mystery. Here's a perfect example: the timelines at the end of HoX #2 require two page turns. Being the broken completist that I am, I wanted to see all of the timelines lined up, and when I found a copy of the images attached online, I clicked away immediately because it didn't work in my brain. It was laid out the right way for the page turns, but not necessarily from end to end. Someone also very generously put the timeline data laid side to side in a google spreadsheet that was, to me, fundamentally unreadable, and I have spent enormous parts of my life staring at and creating unreadable spreadsheets. It is a testament to Muller's skill as a communicator that he found the best way to convey this information on the page.

It also helped that he dropped a huge hint about Moira 9's timeline as an OS build caption at the bottom of the mutant race summary graphic in PoX #1.

VIII. Mastery of the Form

As consumer products, these books are just about perfect.

To be completely honest, $5 is pretty expensive for a comic. Even with an added page count, a LOT of books now are breezy, decompressed reads that are done in ten minutes. Not these. Setting aside that they're designed for rereading, these are incredibly dense stories that are perfectly balanced between using the art and the words to tell them, that reward deep readings and rereadings in a way a lot of other comics don't. I'm not saying I want my entire stack of books to be like this, but these are good purchases.

They also manage the information flow perfectly for a weekly story. Consider: week 1, House of X #1 lays out the new status quo for humans, Magneto, the X-Men and the robot adversaries. A week later, Powers of X #1 builds two potential futures and sets up a retcon while furthering week 1's story and layering in mystery that rolls back onto the first issue. A week after that, we get hit with a massive retcon that changes all of X-Men history and totally recontextualizes the first two issues along with building out ten potential alternate timelines. And then this week, more gaps in that story get filled in and more mystery gets layered on. A month delay between any of these would be interminable. A week is just right, and considering the quality we're getting, it's also ridiculous from a production perspective. This is high quality work.

IX. #XSpoilers

I've been reading comics for a while, and I think the last time any comics hit like this was probably Flashpoint. EVERYBODY is talking about this book. It's selling like gangbusters, but it's also the first time since I started using the internet that people were universally and uncritically happy with a comic. 

read more: Best X-Men Movies Watch Order

Honestly, these books are just so much fun to experience. Rushing to read them right when they come out, then spending hours arguing about the possible interpretations and new plot lines, it's a reminder of what it was like to first get into comics. I'm loath to be the old white dude shouting at the kids that this is how comics should be, but it is nice to have everyone on generally the same page and having fun reading them again. Even if the guy who owns Marvel has spent the last three years trying to rob the VA.

X. I Don't Own Enough Corkboard and Yarn

An enormous part of that fun is the baseless, incorrect and often ridiculous speculation. Last time, I argued that X^1 Xavier is actually Sinister in disguise. While the trashy glam geneticist remains conspicuous by his absence, I'm drifting away from that idea a little bit, only because it feels like he's being accounted for. My big speculation this week is around the various lives of Moira and how they relate to the PoX timeline.

-X^3 is Moira 6.

-X^2 is Moira 9.

-X^1 is Moira 10 and the 616.

-X^0 is Moira 11.

I'm very confident about the X^2 timeline belonging to Moira 9 after PoX #2 showed that Apocalypse is leading the future mutants. There's still one unaccounted for mutant on Asteroid K, so that could easily be her.

Moira 6's timeline is noticably missing from the timeline at the back of HoX #2, but each new life flows from its predecessor - Moira 5 gets Charles to wall off the X-Men after watching them die in a Sentinel attack, while Moira 9 goes to Apocalypse after Magneto can't fix things. So what happens to Moira 6 to make her spend her next life hunting down Trasks? 

She makes herself a Sentinel and lives through the Ascension. 

If Moira 6 doesn't involve a Nimrod, then the first time she'd experience on would be in her ninth life, so it would make no sense for her to have the X-Men hunting down information about Nimrod's emergence there for use in a future timeline. It makes a kind of sense for her to experience these Sentinel ends to her previous two lives, then to go all the way to the end of what the robots want to find out what she's up against.

read more: Complete Schedule of Upcoming Marvel Movies

I have no evidence to support X^0 and X^1 being different trips through besides a gut feeling. X-Men continuity would be SO much more complicated if Moira, Charles, and Eric all knew what was coming and the intervening thousand issues of X- and X-adjacent comics happened. And we've seen a timeline where minor changes lead to mostly the same outcomes - Moira 4 lived through the original 5, the Giant-Sized globetrotting team, and A vs. X while married to Charles, so Moira 11 can have Charles and Magneto working together from the jump and the rest of Marvel continuity unfold the same way.

Either way, it's extremely complicated and a blast to argue about.

Read and download the Den of Geek SDCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Feature Jim Dandy

Aug 14, 2019

Marvel

X-Men

Jonathan Hickman

from Books https://ift.tt/2Z4FqVR

[if-only-we-could-read-it]

I’m thinking about my first ever full blown story idea when I was a child (called ‘Opposites’ because I also couldn’t name things back then) and like. It was generally such a good idea/concept? Like it needs a lot of... tweaking but in terms of a basic idea/characters etc it was actually really interesting and now I can’t stop thinking about it. I used to use it to write summaries/make covers/write random scenes etc for whenever we had to do that stuff in school. 

In place of gods, things existed as ‘Embodiments’ (occasionally referred to as concepts I think). So instead of a god of plants, for example, you’d have the embodiment of plants. But like. The concept of plants. Sometimes these would be channeled through people, either because they were born as the personification of it, or because they were chosen immediately after birth, I wasn’t very consistent with it. All ‘embodiments’ had at least one human personification at a time, some had multiple, depending on the reach of the thing. (Plants, for example, have many, because they’re are many types of plants. Water would probably also have multiple to represent different bodies of water. Something like the moon/night would probably only have one, because there is only one moon). The embodiments also still exist as themselves, and can take on forms to appear to humans, though not for very long. Which is how religion is mostly explained - the gods to exist, they’re just either an expression of pure power, or a human personification of it. 

The more personifications a thing has, the weaker they are. Also, there are some ‘major’ personifications and some (many) ‘minor’ ones, which... are still very important, but aren’t as strong (they’re considered less... necessary? I guess? and their areas are smaller). The personifications of weaker embodiments are, by extension, weaker. Also, they’re aging slows down a lot (more depending on how powerful the person is), they have increased resistance to illness and injury, and they can only die by being killed.

The two main characters are like eleven/twelve, a girl and a boy, and think they’re totally normal kids. One of them joins the school the other one goes to, they start talking, and then they discover that they are, respectively, the personifications of good and bad luck. There are only ever two of them at a time, and now that they’re together, it makes some sort of signal that lets anyone looking know they are. The main villain of the first book are (three? iirc) witches who spend their lives killing the personifications and absorbing the energy from them. They killed the last good/bad luck personifications however many years ago, which gave them a lot of power, so now they want to kill these two. 

The protagonists end up at this safe haven thing for young people like them, where they can get training and stuff, and find out about their bigger destiny. (I was am a big fan of PJO, can you tell?)

But like. the protagonists (who I’ll refer to as A, the girl, and B, the boy, because their names changed constantly) had such an interesting dynamic. 

A was the personification of bad luck, and that affected her most of the time, as well as (to a lesser extent) everyone around her. Meaning that bad things were pretty much constantly happening to/around her completely by chance, and she had very little in the way of friends. The school they attend is both a boarding school and a day school - she boards there overnight and lives in an orphanage/group home during the summer. Either both her mother and father died in a car crash due to a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time (it was just bad luck, you could say) or just her father died, but her mother was in no state emotionally to look after her, hence the home, though she still visits her. 

B was the personification of good luck, which, as above, effected him most of the time and to a lesser extent everyone around him. He was pretty much good at everything he tried (even when he messed up, he got lucky), never had to worry about much, and was super popular. He lived with his mother, who was rich and famous (for... something) and also v. nice and caring. He basically has the perfect life on paper (though his father was abusive, and that’s why they don’t live with him anymore, but he doesn’t really remember that). 

And like. It’s such an interesting dynamic - you’ve got this perfect sunshine boy and this desperately struggling gloom girl who end up being friends despite their differences. 

Also I think I might make this and official wip, at least offline.