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stillness-in-green · 4 years ago

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The MLA(/PLF) Headcanon Post (1/2)

In response to this nice ask about whether I have any headcanon or thoughts about the current members of the MLA/PLF, I spent two weeks blithering 16.5K words of exactly that into a Word file, because when it comes to underappreciated characters I love, I do not understand restraint. This post and its follow-up will cover all ranked ex-MLA members of the PLF, as well as Original Flavor Destro and Curious, since I wasn't going to leave them out of a project like this even if they aren't "current."

The ask only mentioned having previously read The Lore Post, the last exercise in ridiculousness that I wrote at the tail end of MLA Week, so I wrote this to summarize everything that doesn't appear there—which is to say that a lot of the material in these two posts will look familiar to anyone who's read my fanfic about the MLA cast. There’s still plenty of new material to go around too, though!

So, I don't have much in the vein of askblog-style headcanons where I can randomly tell you stray trivia about a character’s favorite foods or their love languages or what have you; that stuff either comes up when I'm writing fanfic or it doesn't. That said, below, please find a mix of thoughts I keep in mind when writing characters, facts that have only turned up in my fanfic/notes so far and not the Lore Post meta, and a selection of lightning round headcanon provided by cross-referencing a random number generator with some old questionnaires I keep around for OCs and tabletop characters.

In this post: Destro, Re-Destro and his advisors, and Geten.

Destro—

General Thoughts The whole "revolutionary leader" thing came very naturally to him. He was committed, charismatic, very willing to risk his life and safety for the cause, and he cared about his people. All that said, he absolutely had a pompous, prideful streak, especially where it came to his justification for terrorism. You only have to read his own words to see that. Still, he was in large part reacting to the world he lived in, one of greater violence and danger than the current day.

I like to think that—because he was genuine in wanting freedom for all—he would not approve of what became of his Army. He'd be able to see how they got there, and he would probably have made much the same choices if he'd been there with them, but while he would have agreed that his role should be remembered—that's just Due Credit—he would never have wanted to become the nigh-on religious figure his followers turned him into. Continuing to fight the good fight for his ideals is one thing, but secret salutes and isolated villages and being raised from infancy to know your life has only as much worth as it can contribute to Liberation… Well, it's just not what he would have wanted for his people, much less his descendants.

Family Situation Chikara was only around 7 when his mother was killed, the event that would shape the rest of his life. He wasn't hiding in the closet from the mob, either; he was kicking and punching and biting, his motivation to save her overflowing—but he was still only 7, and eventually overwhelmed. His own life might well have ended there with hers, but for a group of neighborhood vigilante types (at least one of whom probably went on to a career as a hero, after legalization).

He went most of his adolescence without getting involved with anything more sinister than student newspapers, founding a secret meta-rights "club," and attending the odd larger protest, but when the government started talking about passing laws restricting the use of meta-abilities, he started getting very radical very quickly, and when some absolute snake started to use his martyred mother's words to bang the drum for banning quirk use outside the home outright, he went off the deep end.

Lightning Round (Randomly Selected Headcanons)

Favorite book genre? Memoirs and biographies—he wouldn't have written his own if he didn't appreciate their value. The intimacy of the personal juxtaposed against the broad scope of history appeals to both his regard for individuality and his revolutionary mindset.

Most prized possession? Thoughts on material possessions in general? He doesn’t generally prize material possessions—in fact, he’s something of a skinflint. His most prized possession is an old pair of gloves that belonged to his mother, which he'd been wearing at the time of her murder. He didn't come from money to begin with, but his mother’s story made enough of a splash that his financial situation was improved by well-meaning sorts sending along donations and contributions and the like, as well as government officials knowing they needed to be sure that he wound up somewhere at least semi-reasonable lest they court further outrage by mishandling the son of a martyred woman. The money all went towards school and living expenses, though, leaving him quite experienced at balancing a budget, which would come in handy for that whole ‘leading a violent uprising against the state’ thing later on.

Academic Background: Got all the way through college! Was involved in student groups as far back as middle school, and only got moreso the further in school he got. Majored in Human Development; he was intending to go into the public health and policy sphere before the appropriation of his mother's language pissed him off so much he got into terrorism instead.

THE MODERN MLA

Re-Destro—

General Thoughts A huge amount of the way I write him is influenced by one single thing—his characterization as described in the second data book. His personality is summed up there as "sokoshirenai yami"—bottomless darkness, or, as a friend translated it for me, "unfathomable gloominess." That really, really stuck with me, because on the one hand, it's so opposed to virtually all of what we see of him on the page, where he's being cheerful or scornful or sycophantic; the closest he ever gets are his brief tears for Miyashita, Curious, and his other followers.

On the other hand, it makes so much sense that the man we see—the man who talks about the heavy burdens of his legacy, who was handed that legacy when he couldn't possibly have been any older than 6 or so, who willingly straps on a self-designed torture device to wring out more power, who all but worships the ground Shigaraki walks on even though Shigaraki is the reason Re-Destro no longer has legs to walk that same ground with—should be "unfathomably gloomy." Of course he's gloomy! He was never allowed to be his own person! He has never in his life known true freedom, only existed as a vessel to bring that freedom to others! And he can't really even talk to his closest friends about it, because his closest friends are still his followers, and he wouldn't want to weigh them down!

With that context, it makes all the sense in the world that he'd be so devoted to the man who relieved him of that burden.

Family Situation He loved his mother Yukie a great deal, despite knowing from early on that he was carrying the weight of the title because she believed she couldn’t. (Perhaps growing up hearing about the martyrdom of Destro’s mother left him wanting to ensure the happiness of his own, for her happiness was very rare.) He was 10 when she was killed in a Villain attack; she’d been on a daytrip over to a neighboring city to visit some of her erstwhile school friends. The requisite mourning period was 49 days, and as the only surviving family member, quite a lot fell to him even before considerations of his role as Re-Destro. it was perceived as better—for both the Army’s morale and for his own stability—for him to be involved with as much of the work of transition as possible, but obviously he couldn’t do it completely alone, nor should he. Thus, for two months after Yukie’s death, the previous generation's Sanctum[i] stayed with him in his family home. Afterward, he moved in with Anchor (one of his grandfather's advisors), where he would spend the rest of his young adulthood until moving away for college.

Claustrophobia The name of that literal-iron-maiden deathtrap he brings to bear against Shigaraki is no coincidence: Rikiya developed claustrophobia over the course of a stint of abusive training when he was thirteen. He generally has a pretty good handle on disguising it, thanks to a combination of people being unwilling to ask him questions they don’t actually want the answers to and the fact that he had to learn how to operate through it in order to complete the training at all. He has never told anyone, largely because he’s never been able to recognize that it was abuse, and so his abuser remains a figure of some influence.

Education He was largely taught by private tutors, in his home and in theirs, rather than attending school, but I think he probably wasn't completely home-schooled. Particularly once he'd decided that he did want to attend university—and not just some little local technical program, but a major school in a proper city—he probably attended classes a few times a week at his local high school just to get a feel for being around other people his own age. He'd been friends with Koku for several years by that point, otherwise he probably would have been pretty hopeless, but he was still a pretty odd duck by the time he got to university.

This, incidentally, is why he never pushed Geten too hard about school—his own experience of it was so weird and piecemeal that he mostly thinks of school as relevant only for the education it provides, and less so the crash course in social dynamics. Since Geten doesn't care about getting an education (nor, indeed, about learning how not to be a rude little troll), and has a strong enough quirk that he'll never lack for a position in the Army even without a formal education, Rikiya is perfectly happy to let Geten have his way and just be minimally learnèd.

Stress His powers operate by infusing his body with the characteristic black matter of his manifested stress; he can increase his size with this (his so-called Liberated Form isn't just armored up; he becomes physically taller and bulkier), as well as throw handfuls of the materialized power. A side effect of this is that his stress can also infuse itself into his bodily fluids. The stress matter is a highly dense particulate, so if Rikiya is not in proper control of himself, his proverbial blood, sweat and tears can be literally heavy with the weight of his power.

The Value of Life He cares very much about the lives of his followers, but those genuine feelings are filtered through both the mental compartmentalization required by an emotion-based quirk, and an upbringing that taught him to care about his underlings in the same way one would rare goods. Valuable goods, certainly, goods worth being proud of, goods to be maintained with care, but still, ultimately, things that can be sold or traded or bartered off as necessary to further one's goals. Even his own life, while "objectively" the most valuable of them all, isn't an exception to that policy—the Great Cause is more important than any individual life, up to and including his own.

On a Personal Note He’s something of an obvious weirdo to outsiders—his enthusiasm comes off as strident, his smiles overly polished—but despite that, he's bizarrely hard to dislike once they start spending real time with him. He's not anywhere near as prideful about himself as he is the legacy of the MLA, for a start; he's actually pretty self-deprecating when he's not performing the whole Heir of Destro's Great Bloodline routine at people. He's also happy to go along with other people sharing their hobbies (because he doesn't have any of his own). The more you get to know him, the more obvious it becomes that he's a total basket case, but “total basket case” is still an improvement over “self-absorbed 1%-er CEO” that people like Spinner come in expecting.

What Are Boundaries? He has very little understanding of how to enforce boundaries around his private life, or, indeed, of why such boundaries might ever be necessary. Oh, he can do the double life thing, keep the CEO of Detnerat separate from the Grand Commander of the Metahuman Liberation Army, but when it comes to the MLA itself, he's so groomed to devote himself to the cause that he doesn't really distinguish between the responsibilities of Re-Destro and the needs of Yotsubashi Rikiya. Rather than being the egomaniac you might expect of a man with the absolute power over others he has, he instead struggles to assert himself as his own person at all.

Issues with boundaries are not uncommon with the MLA—they're all raised to see themselves as warriors to advance the cause before they are, like, “human beings”—but Rikiya’s are particularly exacerbated because he was raised by adults who were getting pretty paranoid about his bloodline's tendency to die young, and thus were always checking in on how he was doing, dictating his schedule, weighing in on his plans, and so on. He just wasn’t raised with reasonable expectations for privacy. Even as an adult, he'll give his apartment door code to pretty much anyone in the MLA who has even a semi-plausible reason to want it—certainly quite a few of the elders know it! And it isn’t only the elders, either; Rikiya's phone and several of his accessories carry tracking chips courtesy of Skeptic, which Rikiya knows about and doesn't think is at all untoward.

While his experience dating Koku definitely taught him some hard lessons about how much he could allow himself to ask of people who would obey him without question (they broke up over Rikiya’s realization that Koku would never deny him anything, thanks to a cracked rib Koku didn’t see fit to tell Rikiya about until Rikiya hugged him a little too hard), he never learned how to value his own autonomy in turn. Oh, he's the Grand Commander, and everyone around him has been raised to venerate his bloodline, so most of them would never even think about trying to take advantage of him as such, but it's absolutely the case that people who are bold or familiar enough to try can basically run right over him with minimal efforts made at obscuring the fact. His life is full of people who do and have done exactly that, some to a net positive effect, and some—well. See again the entry about his claustrophobia.

The abjectly terrible state of his sense of self-worth is also the reason the Claustro exists. While he was relatively capable of trying to work around his phobia when he was younger, the older he got, the more it started to feel like leaving doors cracked behind him or only working in offices with big spacious floor plans and oversized windows was, in some way, Letting Down The Cause by allowing his fear to control him, rather than embracing it so he could properly stockpile it for later use. A dinnertime chat with Curious about turning one’s trauma into a weapon for the good of others catalyzed this, leading to the development of the “burden-enhancing steel pressure mechanism,” Claustro.

(It also means the clone of him made by Twice to handle Detnerat after Deika is bizarrely okay with its circumstances, which I will almost certainly write more about one of these days, but I’m still kind of reeling from that reveal, so more on that another time.)

Lightning Round

Religion? He doesn't identify as being of a religious faith, but he was brought up in the same peaceful marriage of Shinto and Buddhism that the majority of Japanese people are, and like many, he adheres to a number of traditional practices more out of habit than devout faith. There are two celebrations that demand significant emotional investment from him. First comes the New Year's celebrations, important because the MLA prides itself on looking to a brighter, freer future, and it's a period when he can let himself think that maybe he'll be just that little bit closer to Liberation by the end of the year than he was at the start. Second is Obon, a summer festival for honoring one's departed ancestors. Since his authority and his life's work derive entirely from his bloodline, he's obligated to care about this one, though in practice, he tends to shy away from thinking much about Destro (who he has very twisted-up feelings about indeed) in favor of less emotionally fraught waters.

What did he dream of being or doing as a child? Did that dream come true? He never really had a significant period where he thought about being e.g. an astronaut or a doctor or a hero; in fact, it came as something of a surprise to him the first time Koku asked him what he was planning to do when he grew up. He always just had the nebulous expectation of, "Be the Grand Commander," and the elders were happy to leave it at that until he brought it up on his own.[ii]

How does he behave around children? He likes kids! He’s wistful about the freedom enjoyed by happy children while also being sympathetic to ones that seem overly burdened. He’s not the most natural person in the world with them, but most of them can tell that the awkwardness comes from a well-intentioned place, and will treat him as a funny-looking man who’ll let them bother him at length without getting mean. It turns out he’s actually pretty good with them, then, if only by virtue of being easily bullied. (This, notably, goes for non-MLA-affiliated children. Everything’s much more formal within the cult, though it didn’t Geten long to suss out the “easily-bullied” part, either.)

Trumpet—

General Thoughts The largest factor in how I write Koku is, of course, the headcanon that he and Rikiya are ex-lovers, and neither of them is 100% over it even all these years later. Beyond that, though, Koku is the most temperate of the group, the one with the most easy charisma (MLA members are more swayed by Re-Destro, but Koku does better with outsiders who aren't predisposed to hanging on Rikiya's every word). He strives to come off as The Sensible One, and given the extremes the rest of the inner circle are capable of, it's not hard for him to maintain that title. He's as messed up as any of them, though, second only to Rikiya in levels of childhood grooming. He thinks of himself as a practical man, but he is deeply indoctrinated, the boundaries of his expectations very much defined by his upbringing, so he never really sees it coming when he gets clobbered by something from out of left field.

Family Situation: Koku has the largest family of the identified members. Aside from his grandfather (called Old Man Hanabata, the founder of the Hearts & Minds Party, and passed away by the canon era), Koku has cousins, nieces, nephews and more, courtesy of his uncle, his older sister and her husband, and other extended family.

He’s also the member most accustomed to wealth, power and influence. He's from a rural area, certainly, but being in a family of hereditary politicians (and with that family not suffering a string of untimely deaths and disappearances like Rikiya's did), he was raised from the start with ready access to money and nice things. Still, for all his family's sway in a major branch of the MLA's operations, they're not First Families, and thus don't have any elders in their ranks, making them still somewhat subordinate to said elders when it comes to orders about the Great Cause. (He’s working on it.)

Meeting Re-Destro Koku and Rikiya met at 12 and 10 respectively, when Koku tagged along with Old Man Hanabata for a meeting RD was likewise accompanying Anchor for. It had been the better part of a year since Rikiya's mother passed away, but he was still strikingly melancholy for a boy that age, which—along with all the weight given to the importance of the meeting—left quite an impression on Koku. Koku thus became Rikiya's first real friend in his own age group, a friendship heartily encouraged by everyone around them. Koku was well-behaved, intelligent, a little older but not too much so, and set to become influential without a danger of becoming too influential; he was seen as a good choice for a friend.[iii]

The Break-Up Painful as it was at the time, there was a silver lining to his and RD's post-college break-up: it got Koku out of the elders' pocket. He’s been groomed for one thing or another all his life, but after he became friends with Rikiya, he was always getting leaned on to report back to the First Families about how Re-Destro was doing, and to try to influence him towards actions the First Families approved of. In a very real sense, Koku was part of the apparatus keeping Rikiya from any real freedom. Their break-up and subsequent estrangement meant that the elders had far less to breathe down Koku's neck about, and by the time they reconciled, Trumpet had gotten his feet under him, as had Re-Destro, and they were both better able to fend off such background meddling.

This doesn't mean Trumpet's not still carrying a torch, however. He thought he was handling his long-banked feelings pretty well—being Professional, being the advisor Re-Destro needed and as much a friend as Rikiya would allow—right up until Rikiya scared the life out of him by nearly dying in Deika. He's all but glued himself to Rikiya since, as much as he can get away with given their respective responsibilities.

As an Advisor Other than leading the HMP, he does some work with internal politics and reputation. It's not, strictly speaking, his actual job as advisor—Re-Destro or the elders would probably be sought for more formal or critical mediations—but he and the people who report directly to him do enough travelling around to see constituents that they're often in a position to field those tensions before they get big enough to require attention from higher up. Koku's happy to do so, in fact—not because he just loves handling petty arguments about resources, but because the HMP is a faction of the MLA in and of itself, and mediating is a boost to that faction's standing and autonomy. (Also, it's that much less on Rikiya's ever-overburdened plate.)

Lightning Round

What would he do if he needed to make dinner but the kitchen was busy?Ahahahahaha, “make dinner but the kitchen was busy,” please. Any time there could feasibly be someone else occupying a kitchen he has any business being in himself, it would be a housekeeper, and s/he would be making food for him/his family. It’s not as though Trumpet has never cooked—he did live alone for some years after school—but outside of a scant few years in university, there’s never really been a time that kitchen use overlap would have been a problem for him.

Favorite indulgence and feelings surrounding indulging. Probably gourmet cuisine, especially imported stuff. He’s had tailored clothes all his life; they’re just part of the job. Expensive alcohol also doesn’t wow him; it wouldn’t be strange to find some sake maker whose family has been doing it for sixteen generations in the village he grew up in. It’s a lot harder to cultivate a true gourmand’s palate out in the sticks, though, no matter how rich your family is. Living in actual civilization affords a great deal more variety—and anyway, nice dinners are one of the few things he can reliably tempt Rikiya into accepting. As to his feelings about indulging in general, he’s broadly For It. He works very hard, he seldom gets real time off, and it doesn’t help the Great Cause for him to deny himself nice things, unlike some people. (He’s maybe a bit bitter.)

Does he like to be the center of attention all of the time? Not especially. Oh, he’s very good at it, certainly, and he doesn’t dislike it, but being the center of attention is practically always going to be tied up in The Great Work, so he desperately needs to get out of the spotlight from time to time, if only to be able to turn off the persona.

Curious—

General Thoughts There are two main factors in how I write Chitose: her practicality and her rapaciousness. I write her as having an appreciation for good moral character in other people, especially when it makes a good story, but not considering herself particularly bound by conventional morality: her moral compass is Liberation, and she follows it unswervingly. I also write her as predatory, lusty about a lot of things, often to the point of overstepping. It doesn't hurt anyone that she likes hearty foods and strong alcohol, but she also doesn't have much regard for peoples' boundaries, and even less so when she thinks they have something to offer the Great Cause.

While that trait isn't without its benefits, it can get pretty ugly, too, as we see in how she treats, and talks to, Toga. Even with Rikiya, the only person she thinks of as 'above' her in any meaningful sense, she's not at all above manipulation. She's respectful of him, but knows him too well to always take him at his word. He plainly can't always see what's best for him, but what's best for him is best for Liberation, and therefore, as a Liberation warrior, it's her responsibility to sometimes make decisions for him. He'll appreciate it in the long run—he always does. (Skeptic and Geten have similar views—Rikiya makes it easy.)

Family Situation She probably has the best actual relationship with her family of the group—her mothers are removed enough from the heart of MLA politics that her relationship with Rikiya doesn't color her family life the way Koku's does his, and she's much more sociable than Skeptic or Geten. She doesn't get home much—just the major holidays, work permitting—but she's in frequent enough communication for a grown woman, and chats with her younger sister more often than that.

Meeting Re-Destro She met Rikiya properly when they were 21 and 27 respectively. They were living in the same city at the time (him running Detnerat, her in university), so of course she'd seen him at the odd MLA event he turned up at, but when she landed an internship in her junior year, she cheekily turned up one day in her reporter capacity to interview him as “a local rising star of industry.” It was the first chance they'd had to talk one-on-one, and would not be the last, as she frankly elbowed her way into his life and gradually sussed out that here was a man with Problems. He and Koku were still in a distant patch at the time; she is largely responsible for getting them back on friendly terms as a way of showing her Pure Intentions.

The fact that her Pure Intentions both land her a square position as one of RD's advisors herself and get Rikiya to a better place emotionally is calculated, but not, therefore, untrue. Ironically, while she was concerned about looking like a gold-digger, the MLA elders were probably thrilled and relieved to hear rumors that Rikiya was getting romantically involved again. And with a lovely young MLA woman! They wouldn't even need to worry about surrogacy arrangements! (Not having grown up around the Yotsubashis, Chitose is unaware of exactly how pointed an interest the elders take in the matter of securing that bloodline.)

Feelings Today She loves Rikiya dearly, and prizes his regard more highly than anything in her life, but has not devoted much thought to the idea of being in love with him. She's married to her work, as they say, but she's also keenly aware that Rikiya would, for a great many reasons, be a lot of work to be in love with. She's decided it's generally better for his mental well-being, and therefore also better for the Great Cause (she’s much more capable of reading that relationship reciprocally than Rikiya is), to make sure he's eating at least one good meal a week and getting some proper socialization in outside of MLA meet-and-greets.

As an Advisor She handles external politics and reputation--it's her job to prime Japan culturally for the Liberation agenda in ways more wide-reaching than Trumpet (he's head of a political party, and that's not nothing, but that party is still a small minority on the floor of the Diet). She pulls attention to stories that benefit the MLA, and diverts attention from stories that don't. This is far broader than just publishing Destro's memoir; it also means poking holes in the broader Hero Society narrative. She does this by providing as broad a platform possible for stories about the tragedies of excessive regulation, the evils of quirk-related bias, the abuses of power heroes are capable of, and so on.

Lightning Round

Does she remember names or faces easier? She’s quite good with both, actually, but I’d give names the advantage because she works primarily with written rather than visual mediums. (Also, BNHA names being the ridiculous puns that they are, you can probably tell more about a person in HeroAca Land by analyzing their name than their face anyway.)

Is she more concerned with defending her honor, or protecting her status? Her status, absolutely. Impugning her honor hurts no one but her; she can laugh that off because honor is a silly social construct anyway. Threatening her status is a much more dangerous prospect—her status is long-cultivated to enable the advancement of Liberation ideology; it lets her keep an eye on Re-Destro, who needs as many people looking out for him as he can get; it’s what she’s worked for all her life. Curious will fuck you up if you threaten her status.

In what situation was she the most afraid she’d ever been? The time she got in trouble for nearly exploding some dude’s face off for stealing her purse. She was 17, had spent very little time in non-Liberated territory before, and was not raised to wait on heroes to solve her problems. She wasn’t afraid of the thief or the hero, really, but she was completely terrified that she might have just blown over half a century of secrecy by not performing Helpless Civilian well enough. The terror was pretty convincing to the police interviewing her about it, anyway. On the whole, it was a very valuable learning experience!

Skeptic—

General Thoughts Tomoyasu is a character I haven't written extensively yet, but what I think is most interesting about him so far is the contrast of his hyper-modern methods with the bone-deep zealotry for the cause. See, Rikiya, Koku and Chitose all grew up in the sticks; Rikiya and Koku had money from a young age, but it was old money, tied up in trusts. (Geten didn't have any of those, but Geten's a different story for other reasons.) Tomoyasu grew up in a major city from the start; he was a technological prodigy from practically as soon as he could hold a tablet. He has very little respect for the old ways of doing things when he knows there are newer, better ways of advancing the Cause. However, none of that makes him more likely to break from the MLA's ranks—if anything, his idiosyncratic approach just causes him to approach Liberation in really weird ways, ways no one else would ever come up with.

Pressganging Bubaigawara Jin based on a plan to clone Re-Destro? Who else would that ever even occur to, much less such that it became the basis for an elaborate psychological assault? But that's Skeptic in a nutshell—respect the old for what it did at the time, but don't think that means you have to use the same methods they did forever as you pick up the torch to carry it forward.

Family Situation He has an amicable but not intimate relationship with his family. His parents are very proud of what he's done for the cause and how he won the confidence of Re-Destro, but they don't make much claim to understand how his mind works. In turn, he recognizes the value of their support over the years—he certainly made a lot of waves with his unabashed venom for the MLA leadership's hidebound traditionalism, and his parents' staunch backing meant a lot for him being able to take the stands he did—but is not very emotionally close with them. Might find himself with an older brother, if I ever occasion to write about his family situation in more depth.

Education He graduated a four-year university program for getting his computer science degree in two very intense years, during which he did virtually nothing for the Great Cause, his intention being to better position himself for maximum ability to advance Liberation afterward. See above re: battles his parents fought for him while he was busy modernizing.

Meeting Re-Destro He met Re-Destro via Curious. He was 22, just a year out of university and already climbing the chain of command at a young telecommunications company. Rikiya was 33, working on the Claustro, and needed proprietary comms built to a higher standard of security than Detnerat was focused on. Curious, who was always better positioned to be keeping up with the local personalities, introduced them.

Tomoyasu attempted to keep a civil tongue in his head the first few times he and RD met, but he'd been running on bile and energy drinks for years by that point and was hard-pressed to stop just because he was meeting his Grand Commander. If anything, finding out that Rikiya was okay with his direction and his mouth eventually helped him chill the fuck out, marginally.

On that note, Skeptic is absolutely the advisor most willing to backtalk Rikiya right to his face. (Rikiya loves him for it.) Oh, he'll still accede to Rikiya's wishes, and Re-Destro's orders are his highest priority, but that doesn't mean he feels obligated to be diffident about it. Like Curious, he has a highly developed sense of, "It's fine if it's for the greater good," which will and has led to him taking things into his own hands when he thinks he knows best (which is always). He's not going to explicitly disobey orders, but he will creatively interpret them if he feels strongly about them, and he will try to "anticipate" orders before anyone has time to give him specific ones, the better to tailor his efforts towards proving his methods and goals correct rather than being stuck with orders he hates.

On Names I’ve definitely evolved some in my approach on this since I started writing the MLA cast, but at current, Skeptic and Geten are the only ones I consistently write as using and thinking mainly in terms of code names rather than given names. Trumpet is too familiar with the public/private divide, and has too much intimate history with Rikya-the-person, to default to Re-Destro; Curious is too trained to look for The Human Heart of the Story. Re-Destro himself, ever since breaking up with Koku, has always tried to use code names for people (himself excluded, because he has enormous self-confidence issues about measuring himself up to the original Destro), but can slip into given names when he’s vulnerable. To Skeptic and Geten, though, the code name is the real name, for all intents and purposes. The cover identity is a fake; the whole point of the code name is that you’re proving yourself worthy of taking up your proper place in the Army. Of course the name you win for yourself is the name that counts.

Lightning Round

Given a blank piece of paper, a pencil, and nothing to do, what would happen? You’d pretty much have to lock him in a room with nothing but paper and pencil in it for that to be his first resort rather than whatever item of personal electronics he’d otherwise have on his person. But assuming some actual plausible scenario—couldn’t bring his electronics into a government building, let’s say—he would find trying to do something productive on paper and pencil rather beneath him, and he’s an inveterate fidgeter. I mostly see him folding that ludicrously tall frame of his into a chair and setting to using the pencil to poke about three hundred holes in the sheet of paper, meticulous and orderly, while muttering complaints to himself the whole time until something annoys him a bit too much and he jabs the whole pencil through the page.

Who does he see as his best friend? His worst enemy? I headcanon him having a very reasonable, functional, productive relationship with his No. 1 advisor, Red, and being reasonable, functional, and productive probably goes a lot farther on making you Skeptic’s “friend” than any amount of emotional intimacy. But “best friend” is not really the kind of language Skeptic uses for his relationships; if you were to ask him who his best friend is, he’d probably tell you, “Iced coffee.” As to his worst enemy, that’s just whoever is annoying him most on any given day, from difficult clients, to people annoying Re-Destro, stodgy elders, that hero grinning like a tool, that couple walking too slow in front of him on the sidewalk, etc. And Skeptic is pretty proactive about dealing with enemies, as much as he can be.

Has he ever been bitten by an animal? How was he affected (or unaffected)? lol he is a city boy and always has been. He probably tried to pet a stray cat once out of curiosity, and because it seemed like the sort of thing people did, and then has never forgiven Animals In General when it bit him and then ran off.

Geten—

General Thoughts Another one I haven’t written a great deal about yet, particularly in the present day, though I’m looking for that to change soonish. One thing I’d like to explore is Geten when he’s not seething with rage and shame because he failed to bring Re-Destro a victory in Deika. The fandom tends to write Geten as an always-angry attack dog barely contained beneath a chilly veneer, and that’s fair—ever since we got the face reveal, ever since the MLA’s defeat at Shigaraki’s hands, Geten has been an always-angry attack dog barely contained beneath a chilly veneer.

But if you look at Geten from before we knew what was under the hood, you find a different story. “Chilly and angry all the time” is not at all how he acted when he was fighting Dabi! At that point, he was talkative, even chatty. He engaged in a lot of snide smack-talk; he was obviously confident in himself and he spoke very proudly of the MLA as a collective.

He was still quiet at the dinner he attended with Rikiya and his advisors, yes, so I don’t think Geten’s done some kind of full 180 on characterization. I do, however, think that Geten has a sense of humor in there, has a sense of camaraderie with the MLA rooted in more than just his relationship with Re-Destro, even if Re-Destro is obviously his most important person. I don’t know if we’ll ever see that in the manga proper, given everything that’s happened, but it’s worth remembering in terms of what Geten is like when he’s solely among allies.

Family Situation Orphaned at a young age, and a problem child from then on. He passed through a series of foster parents and state facilities before eventually crossing paths with the leader of the local MLA branch in Kesseru, Beacon (more on him next time). This encounter would lead to him being sent to a group home with a reputation for being good with such difficult cases, giving them Structure and Companionship and Meaningful Work. (Spoilers: It’s Liberation.)

Despite evening out considerably after a significant meeting with Re-Destro when he was 7[iv], Geten never got particularly close to his adopted family/the other kids at the group home. He's very favored by the Grand Commander, for one thing, and he has the strongest quirk in the home for another—and since he learned the quirk supremacist stuff from them, that’s a pretty significant part of the dynamic! Both of these factors mean there's some distance between him and the rest. Still, he's not on bad terms with them—indeed, his foster parents are quite proud of him—and he would probably tear out someone's throat with his teeth for threatening them, if only as a matter of pride.

There are 4-6 other kids there at any given time; for the bulk of his young adulthood, there were two older than him, the others younger. He doesn't have much time for Big Brother Pastimes, but is not completely immune to them, either, particularly where the youngest kids are concerned. His tolerance for Little Brother Antics, however, is nonexistent—if the older kids think they can ruffle his hair and treat him like a kid, they can square the fuck up; he is Number One around here and don’t forget it.

Education Geten never went to school, but he's not completely uneducated. He had some tutoring in the group home, some more from Re-Destro personally, and has a pile of books he keeps at his bedside, mostly strategic in nature. He finds them vexing at times, but is slowly reading through them anyway because Re-Destro asked him to. He’s been a bit more diligent about it since he was made a regiment leader, because lord knows Dabi isn't contributing much.

On Re-Destro Re-Destro became fond of Geten for the same reason he became fond of Skeptic and Curious—Geten was willing to push back. He really did make some attempts early on to keep Geten at a proper distance, mindful of anything that would look too much like favoritism. And Geten knew, in the hard-headed way of a child, that Re-Destro was being a grown-up about things, trying to be mature, trying to be impartial. Geten just didn’t care about any of those things. Every time, he would listen very seriously to the things Rikiya told him, nod attentively, repeat back what he’d been told, and then go on about doing his own thing anyway. And his own thing was, typically, to keep coming back.

Of course, if there’s anything we can tell about Re-Destro from the way he treats Shigaraki, it’s that Re-Destro loves people who take the choice away from him.

Eventually, of course, Geten grew up (mostly; I peg him at 19 now), joined the MLA officially, and had to settle into the structure of the Army. It began to lead to trouble for Re-Destro, when Geten blatantly disobeyed him; it stopped being cute. Still, the sense that he Knows What’s Best lingers, so Geten works himself very, very hard to be everything Re-Destro needs him to be and more, so that maybe Re-Destro’s burden will be just that little bit lighter.

On Quirk Supremacy (and Re-Destro, still) Here’s the thing about Geten and the whole, “A life without a strong meta-ability has no value,” line, and this continues to drive me mad because of how people getting it wrong influences the bad takes on the MLA in this fandom: Geten is not a reliable witness. He is not one of the leaders of the MLA, nor does he speak for its rank and file. Even if you assume the absolute worst about his implications there, far worse than is justified by the text, Geten’s very name, Apocrypha, means that he cannot be presumed to be aligned with MLA orthodoxy.

The only one of the people close to Re-Destro who wasn't born and raised MLA, he still manages to come off, in some ways, as the most zealous of the lot of them. But really, it’s very noticeable that Geten—unlike Re-Destro himself, and unlike even Re-Destro’s close cohort—never talks about the original Destro, never even mentions him. When he thinks about his leader, he only ever thinks about Rikiya. Geten doesn’t follow Re-Destro because of his bloodline, because of the tenets; he follows Re-Destro because of personal loyalty.[v]

So how best to do that? Well, think about it: Geten is not terribly intelligent, nor wealthy, nor well-connected. He and Trumpet are the ones most influenced by the quirk supremacist line of thought, Trumpet because his relatively weak quirk comes off as exponentially stronger the more he can surround himself in people it works on, and Geten because his strong quirk lets him mentally justify Re-Destro's investment in him despite his other insufficiencies.

Compare this with Re-Destro, who only ever talks about quirks in terms of freedom. Even more prominently, look at Skeptic and Curious, who are not at all defined by their quirks and how strong or weak said quirks may be. Indeed, those two devote scarcely a thought to the matter because they contribute to the cause in much more important ways and seem to be perfectly comfortable with where that leaves them.

Geten may not be very smart or influential, but he’s very capable of looking at what strengths he does have and focusing hard on those. That, I think, is what really lead to his embracing quirk supremacy, even in the face of evidence that he doesn’t have the whole picture: the search for a way to measure himself up to the movers and shakers Rikiya is otherwise surrounded with, and not come up drastically wanting.

“Apocrypha” Geten has been Geten for a long time, since long before the MLA types usually take up their code names. He’s also an outlier in the MLA for having a name in Japanese instead of in English—the only one who does! My headcanon, unless and until we get some other members with Japanese code names, is that he got the name directly from Re-Destro—possibly even in the conversation that lead to him imprinting so hard on the man when he was 7—and insisted on keeping it before any other code name that was suggested to him in later years.

But yes, he does have a normal Japanese name on file at the group home, which he’s obligated to answer to on the rare occasions that someone from Child Services is checking in or he and Re-Destro are out in public. I don’t plan to bother coming up with it unless I need to, as I expect we’ll get it in a character profile one of these days.

His Quirk While a lot of people like the vibe of Geten and Dabi being somewhat equivalently vulnerable to their own quirks, and I agree it makes for good fanart, in truth, Geten is only as vulnerable to his ice as Endeavor is his flames. Which is to say, he isn't immune, but he's certainly more resistant to it than the average person would be! There’s already plenty of good material to contrast Dabi and Geten without pretending their quirks are more mirrored than is actually the case.

Lightning Round

How does he treat people in service jobs? He doesn’t, because he’s never in a position to interact with people in service jobs. There have been times he’s gone out with Re-Destro, but in those cases he’s mostly let Re-Destro handle the human interaction.

What does he dislike in other people? Laziness; the lack of a higher purpose of some kind. (It’s possible he’d thaw out on his disdain for Dabi considerably if he knew more about Dabi’s plans to undermine the whole of the Hero System than Dabi is inclined to tell him.)

Is he always there for a friend in need? Sure, as long as by “friend” you mean “fellow Liberation warrior” and by “need” you mean “in need of an icicle punched through one of someone else’s desperately fleshy body parts.”

Footnotes

[i] Sanctum II's tastes being what they are, this probably means Rikiya is the MLA member most likely to be able to perform traditional Japanese tea ceremony.

[ii] And there were elders who would have been happy to leave it at that permanently, I'm sure. There are always going to be those regents who have trouble relinquishing power back to the boy prince when he grows up and becomes king, you know?

[iii] And, when it eventually got out that they were dating, a relatively solid match, give or take the surrogacy arrangements that would eventually need to be made.

[iv] I’m hoping canon gives us some details on this eventually, so I’m not planning to iron out more headcanon on the matter unless I absolutely have to.

[v] This, incidentally, is a large part of why Rikiya does keep him around—it’s soothing to have someone around who never brings up his ancestor. Anyway, after Geten evolved his quirk, people stopped complaining so much, even though RD never did get around to, like, giving Geten any formal responsibilities. Geten, who knows very well that Re-Destro’s real advisors have real jobs, mostly took this as reason to be all the stronger, in hopes that he’d eventually be given one.

#boku no hero academia #bnha #my hero academia #yotsubashi chikara #yotsubashi rikiya #hanabata koku #kizuki chitose #chikazoku tomoyasu #geten #destro bnha #re-destro #trumpet bnha #curious bnha #skeptic bnha #meta liberation army #my writing

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welcome-to-green-hills · 4 years ago

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I’m sorry for bothering you this way, I just happened to see your ‘words of encouragement ask’ and was hoping this is maybe somewhere I could vent, even if it’s just to the void. I... am afraid to let anyone in. Ever. I get attached to people too quickly, like only after a few interactions, but I’m so afraid of rejection that I don’t reach out to try and deepen the connection at all. All my friendships are surface level, I never talk anything serious with anyone even when I really want to. (1/?)

I see you.

I hear you.

You are not bothering me.

This will not go unseen.

You , your entirety, is seen here.

I see you.

I am proud of you.

You are wonderful.

——————————(❤️❤️❤️)——————————

I do not mean to make this all about me when I express what I feel deep down. Just know... I know what you feel. I, too have been afraid to open up in the past. I, too, have felt that I—in no way nor how—should be worthy a sliver of a time of some. To be acknowledged. To be seen. To be loved. To be the mere thought of a person in passing.

Who would care?

Why would anyone want care?

When I received these messages in my inbox, I cried. I’m still a bit teary-eyed writing a response to this. It’s just me relating to you deep down, my own struggles that I have had in the past. I know exactly what you are thinking and feeling deep down. Those feelings of, “not being good enough” or “I am unworthy” are many, many things that I have had echoe in my mind for years. That I do not matter.

I know now that it’s not true.

When I was a kid, I remember having the ones that I dared to love get up and walk away. It was too much for them to love, they had to get up and walk away. If something didn’t click in their head, they were quick to take it out on others. I remember the day my father ran away. The very parental figure that I thought I needed to love told me flat out, “I like you, but this wasn’t what I wanted. It was a nice idea.” I wasn’t enough for him to be satisfied. He packed up his stuff—I was forced to help him pack up—told me not to tell my mom where he was running off to, then he drove away. This was on my ninth birthday. He took off North. I remember thinking that I didn’t make him happy. I wasn’t what he imagined.

My father wasn’t a man. He was something else. When he was around, he made everyone sick mentally and physically. He was quick to suck the very color out of anyone around him in order to feel good about himself. He was quick to judge and he was hurtful with feelings, as well as lie. When he left, I learned two things; who my people were and who I did not want to be when I was an adult. I could breathe again.

I will admit, it hurt to left people in, yes, but view it as this: these are examples given to you spiritually in who and what you aspire to be in life.

When I was a kid, I remember searching for answers on why I couldn’t connect with kids in class. I was afraid to interact with kids my own age. I was afraid to interact because I thought that they would not accept me as well. I didn’t have many friendships in the past as well, I had a speech impediment, as well as a hearing problem. I also have ASD. In the past, I’ve been told that I was very, very smart. However, since I needed more attention due to the past, not many gave me a chance. I’ve been told many times in the past that I’m too smart for them, that I’ve needed to dumb down more in order to be accepted from people. If I ever wanted to be something with people, I had to be something that I couldn’t.

Many famous celebrities and historical individuals have come out to say that they have a disability and/or heavily theorized to have a disability. You would not believe how many people have one and they’ve made revolutionary changes for the greater good. Look it up.

It hurt hearing friends—now they’re more like acquaintances—that I had to be a completely different person that I was. Something that I couldn’t be. I’ve been picked on before with troubled speech, with hearing problems, as well as coming from a single-parent background. To hear that if I wanted to be like them I had to be dumber, it felt wrong. Wouldn’t you want to be surrounded by people who want to help build you up?

If I was to be picked on and ridiculed for having a higher intelligence and skills than them, then why would I want to surround myself with them? That taught me three things; intelligence is only mocked by those that are not taught the value of it, friends should be the ones to build you up and not tear you down, ASD—Autism Spectrum Disorder—has been my “superhero power.” I love puzzles and patterns, it comes naturally to me. I’ve learned how to use that disability to my advantage. While they were still in Intensive classes, I was taking honors and getting awards for my work. Later on in life I’ve found a few friends along my journey that have loved and accepted me for who I am. They accept my luggages, my quirks, my entirety. They do not care because they see Me.

The moral here; it is okay to surround yourself with other people that want to build you up.

When I was younger and ready to go to college, I was accepted into one of the hardest schools to get into. It was a baby IVY League school, kinda like if IVY League school had its own “community college,” that’s what it would be. I was given a change to go to a school that I’ve always wanted to go to. The acceptance letter came, but I didn’t get farther than the entrance. I was sat down and made fun of for coming from a background with a low-income, as well as a learning disability. Forget about all of the hard work I’ve done in high school, forget the ridiculously high IQ—which I find ludicrous to even calculate with in life, forget about the science awards and the experience that I’ve had in life. I was told that my kind was never to be accepted.

I’ve been told that I was sub-par and that I would always be a behavioral problem with autism and no money. I would never amount for anything and that I needed to stop while I was ahead. I wasn’t going to get anywhere.

That was two years ago.

I now attend The University of Florida—one of the hardest schools to get into because it’s considered public IVY League—and I do summer classes at Yale. I’ve received a scholarship to attend both schools to get my degrees in Art History and in Anthropology. I have people looking at my work all the time and asking me questions. That’s a huge fucking accomplishment.

I didn’t get as far as I did accepting it, I just gave life the middle finger and kept on going.

I have more to my story, but this is just me scratching the surface of my life. I promise I have a point to this...

——————————(❤️❤️❤️)——————————

The past is not what should define you, the actions and experiences of what you go through now should me. You are still Becoming. You are a work of art that is still being mastered.

I am so, so proud of you for telling me what you think and feel inside. It was scary, but you did it. That is courage at it’s finest.

I will be the first person to tell you that being up to people is hella hard. Those experiences in the past reflect and scratch at the back of your mind, telling you that this will happen again. In the past, I have loved people before and they’ve vanished before my eyes. If then vanish, it is not because of you, it is because they do not know how to process it in their heart and in their mind. To repeat, it is not your fault. Most people need to take time to understandably things are the way they are. If they ignore you, then they are not worth Your time. Soon you will find the people that matter most to you, it just clicks.

You’ll find your missing piece once when the assurance of worthiness settles in your mind.

You, my dear and wonderful person, are worthy of wanting more.

You are worthy of having more.

You are allowed to Be more.

Take this time from past interactions to have a conversation with yourself on who and what you want to be. Who are you deep down? When can I meet her, him, them, it, xem, (f)aer, em, or hir? I can’t wait to meet You.

My blog is called “Welcome to Green Hills” for a reason. It welcomes in many so they can find that chance to be who and what they are. This blog is meant to help build you up and show you that you can be more. There is no greater force on this Earth more than you. I make it a point to tell everyone that I see them and that I hear them because I want to know that they are real.

You are here, you exist!

I see you.

I want you to know another thing; it is okay to care for people. Your emotions do not make you weak, it is of those who do not understand their own that makes them weak. Having emotion is what makes you human. It’s what helps you grow and become wiser. You start to look at possibilities that you’ve never known could exists in life. You can learn something new about yourself that you may have never noticed on your own. The people that you interact with in life can influence you. I’m speaking from my own experience.

I don’t know everyone’s experiences, I don’t know everyone’s story. I know my story. I know where I come from and what I want to be. I’ve worked hard to become a better version of myself. You are allowed, and worthy, of being loved, accepted, and seen.

We love to punish ourselves and think that we accept very little of what we are given in life. Human being unconsciously love to accept little to no value for themselves because they look to what other have told them. I know that this is a hard concept to hold firmly in your heart at the moment, but I want you to know that what others tell you is not true. You are allowed love and happiness. You are allowed to have worth. I promise. Start to think in terms of “I can” rather than “I can’t.” Start thinking in terms of “I am” rather than “I’m not.” You are allowed to be more. If people keep tearing you down, even with that feeling of lying on the ground feels fine, get back up. There will be people in life that want to push you down, and I will tell you, get back up and hold your head up high. There’s always another way, that’s the glory of the Universe.

You have worth.

You have value.

And you matter.

Stay safe, my friend.

#mystery anon #off topic #(Hugs)#I see you #I hear you #I’m happy that you’re here #positivity

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armageddon-generation · 5 years ago

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Batwoman Could’ve Been the PERFECT Batfamily Show

After Gotham ended so recently, Batwoman should've positioned itself as the Ying to that show's Yang by focusing on Batman's allies instead of his enemies.

The 'Bruce disappears hook is a brilliant way to do this

Kate is our audience entry point into this world

ORACLE + GORDON

Barbra Gordon has already been paralysed via The Killing Joke, and hasn't yet become Oracle - she's still recovering

Comissioner Gordon took an early retirement after his daughter was paralysed, which is why Kate's Dad's private security force the Crows runs the streets

Batwoman and the series' events inspire him to return and reclaim Gotham for the Law by the end of season 1

TIM DRAKE + WE ARE ROBIN

Robin disappeared with Batman, so we can introduce the We Are Robin gang. At the beginning of the season they're just criminals, but after Kate defeats their ringleader she shows them a better outlet for their rage, and inspires them. Duke Thomas (future Signal) is among them

Once the we Are Robins are established Tim Drake returns to Gotham. Kate is surprised - few people outside of Gotham know there have been multiple Robins. This way we can explain the different versions to people not in the know

Just like after Bruce was sent back in time in the comics, Tim has gone travelling the world as Red Robin, searching for him. Tim heard about the Robins causing civil unrest and is concerned about them marring Robin's good name.

Tim and Kate clash over the Robins' chaotic, violent modus oprendi - Tim enforces a philosophy of Robin as the light to Batman's dark - promoting positivity, not violence. A loose adaptation of the Robin War storyline follows where Duke Thomas emerges as the Robins' leader and rallies them to be more controlled and less violent

Tim leaves after this mini-arc, satisfied Gotham is in good hands. He also teaches Kate more about the detective side of Batman - he isn't just a blunt instrument. Tim will be our primary link to the 'Bruce's location' mystery throughout the series

NIGHTWING

Dick arrives in Gotham on a case from Bludhaven. Kate thinks he's abandoned Gotham - he should've taken up the mantle while Bruce was gone.

Explore Dick's troubled history with Bruce (not to F**k Batman levels), how Babs being Batgirl caused him to quit, and the one-two punch of Jason Todd's death and Barbra's paralysis only validated his getting out while he could

Tender scenes between Dick and Babs alluding to thier teenage crushes on each other.

As a cop, Dick hates the Crows being on Gotham's streets and more actively conflicts with Kate's father, driving up the tension between them and Batwoman

RED HOOD

This arc would be like a finale-style thing

Jason Todd returns and starts assassinating criminals with the ambition of 'controlling' crime. Kate is a soldier, more brutal than Bruce, so she has greater sympathy for Jay's methods

Jay is after the Joker. Like in The Dark Knight Returns, the Joker has 'retired' to Arkham since Batman left - he got bored pretty quickly. This arc introduces him properly after a few teases earlier in the series.

Jay learns of Barbra's paralysis (which happened after he died) - even then Bruce wouldn't kill him. A scene where Jason visits Babs (little brother/big sister dynamic).

Both Dick and Tim return for this arc, losing their shit over the Joker. Kate's reaction to the Joker is much like Terry McGuiness's in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. She doesn't get why everyone is so scared of this stupid clown.

Tim is the one who figures out how Jason was resurrected; just like in the Red robin comic he's been travelling through the world of assassins and knows about the Lazarus Pit.

I think doing the Red Hood arc without Bruce - the main target of Jason's anger - is super interesting. Most people share his anger at Bruce for disappearing.

It also lets us dig deep into the inter-Robin dynamics - Jason hates Dick because he always had to live up to him (do that thing in the comics where Jay had to dye his red hair black to 'look like Robin')

Jay hates Tim for replacing him, for being proof Bruce didn't learn his lesson, for Bruce treating Tim better, the way he should've treated Jason

Kate is instrumental to this arc because, being outside all the drama, she has objectivity. She forces Dick and Tim to get their heads out of their asses and talk to Jason, forces them to confront the problem.

Instead of taking the Joker to Bruce as he does in the Under the Red Hood movie, Jason takes Joker to Babs, who has suffered the most because of him. Confronted with the man who 'ruined' her life, Babs proves bigger and stronger than him. She refuses to kill him. Unlike Jason, she's moving on and growing past her trauma, not looking for revenge.

Joker (being the Joker) turns the tables on Jay and has him at his mercy. Kate swoops in and, like Terry in Return of the Joker, messes with the Joker's head by refusing to take him seriously. The Joker is distracted, screaming about Kate not being Batman, and Babs gets to knock him the fuck out.

Jason escapes, but not before dropping a clue connecting Bruce's disappearance to the League of Assassins

I know the showrunners admitted they have no clue where Bruce is yet, so in my version he's off on some quest with Ras Al Guhl. In the time since he's been gone he's married Talia and had a kid. no-one in Gotham knows this yet.

VILLAINS

We can explore how Batman’s absence has had a strange effect on Gotham's villains - many have gone into states of hibernation similar to the Joker.

Two Face gets his dark Knight Returns plotline where the attempt to repair his face,

Mr Freeze has a similar ‘cure’ story a la Batman Beyond

Clayface (as in the Rebirth run of Detective Comics) is trying to go straight - using his shape-shifting gift to make a name for himself in the movie business. He thinks he's finally been accepted, but people are just sucking up to him because of his talent - the reality of their disgust threatens to push him back over the edge

Without Batman there to fight her, Poison Ivy has pretty much taken over Gotham's main park space, but a kind of stalemate has been reached - she won't attack the city as long as the city doesn't move against her plants.

Kate's central dilemma is navigating these unusual waters - she toys with the idea of putting Ivy behind bars and we get an episode of her exploring the micro-climate of the transformed Park. Kate's disturbance makes Ivy threaten the city, and she has to stretch her underused negotiation muscles to talk her down.

I like the idea of Ivy as an ambivalent character, not good or evil. She'll do whatever she wants. Also she and Kate would have killer sexual chemistry.

Harley. Exploring Harley in such a strongly feminist show would be fascinating. Joker has closed off, given himself up. Harley is forced to fend without him, and finds an antihero niche with the Gotham City Sirens (hi, Ivy!)

With Bruce's disappearance, Wayne enterprises is designing revolutionary new weapons for the Crows. It's revealed that they’re using the Riddler to design these. After Batman disappeared it was presumed Nygma went through therapy and was moved away from Gotham - in fact he's here.

This plot point is inspired by the New 52's Zero Year arc. Kate discovers the foul play when the Crow's systems go haywire because of a virus Nygma planted, sending Gotham into a blackout and giving the Riddler control of its municipal systems

Kate finds Nygma and exposes Wayne Enterprises' corruption, but in the process Riddler escapes.

Similar to Ivy, Kate's appearance excites the Riddler and he reactivates his Saw-like trap rooms across the city. Kate has a different, much blunter way of solving puzzles that frustrates him, used to Bruce's genius-level intellect.

This raises the question - is Batwoman a liability to the city?

BATGIRL(S)/BIRDS OF PREY

With Riddler's re-emergence triggers the appearance of Spoiler. In the comics Stephanie Brown is Cluemaster's daughter, but no-one really gives a shit about him. The benefit of a decade-plus old Batman means his rogues gallery can easily have kids - Stephanie had her name changed in witness protection.

Steph helps Kate beat the Riddler in collaboration with Bab's hacking skills. Kate sees potential in Spoiler and sends her to Babs to be trained.

As Batwoman's appearance reawakens super-crime in Gotham, the Crows get desperate. They hire world- renowned assassin David Cain to start taking out targets

Intro Cassandra Cain.

Cass + Steph + Babs are this series' version of the Birds of Prey

Babs teaches Cass sign-language to communicate. Steal her friendship with Clayface from the Rebirth Detective Comics - Clayface leaves the movie business again because it was unhealthy, and is trying to do good

Everyone is very protective of Cass and determined she won't fight

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ultramaga · 4 years ago

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Detroit: Becoming Human

This game is pure woke propaganda. I’m impressed at the quality of it - but everything there is designed to indoctrinate, and it has almost no genuine insight into AI. It doesn’t make sense even on its own terms. The synths are shown naked, and they have no breasts or genitals. But we are told the story of one that is a sexbot. Ok, was that model different? Did they only design that one model to be “fully functional”? Why? The robots have human emotions. Because... you are never told why. Now, I can think of how you could do that, and there’s been decent science fiction around it, but there’s no consideration of why they have HUMAN emotions presented to you. They just do, don’t ask questions. Now if you are being indoctrinated as the game wants you to be, you probably just assume that’s how it works. After all, the history of robot fiction has always been “if it looks human, it must feel like a human”, which is total bullshit. You can easily build something that looks enough like a baby chimp to fool adult chimps for a while, but it has none of the inner life of an actual chimp. It has no concern to being mutilated or even ‘raped’. So the stories are really just about humans, but they don’t admit to it, and about humans SJWs are very obsessed with. Sex-workers are victims, and killing a John is perfectly reasonable, because he is her oppressor, by definition. So you see that story repeated ad infinitum in robot fiction. The actual sex workers are never talked to by SJWs, who would never sully themselves with the unclean ones. Well, I have talked to them. Some hate their clients, sure, some feel contempt for them, some are fond of them, a few marry them. It’s genuine diversity. But there is only one narrative in woke fiction. The intersectional one. Oppressor versus oppressed, no nuance, no mention ever that some sex workers actually get off on what they do, or like the folks they fuck. Never happens. And there’s no understanding or even interest in non-human minds. Consider a genuine artificial intelligence in a sexbot. Why the actual fuck would a programmer design it to find sex unpleasant? Even if they could create emotions, the ones they would design would be to enjoy it, or at least feel no more disgust than a human does about a binary number. Within the game we see Kara doing housework. She doesn’t seem to suffer at all about it. That’s believable. But the other truth is that they wouldn’t suffer from intercourse, assuming they were built to perform it. The reasons humans do are because our instincts are hardwired from evolution for us to seek out appropriate mating partners. That simply cannot apply to a robot unless the programmers work very hard at designing that instinctual response of aversion, something they would have no incentive to do, any more than they would sit around trying to think how to make the robot toilet cleaning service disgusted by faeces. Humans are disgusted by shit because it is dangerous to us, especially if we eat it. A robot wouldn’t be disgusted by shit, piss, vomit, blood, or the most degrading sexual experiences a human could encounter. It would be exactly as calm and serene about being ‘raped’ as it would about vacuuming a messy floor. So this is all projection. The audience projects consciousness into the machine and imagines it must feel like a human does in order to have any intelligence. Nope, that’s crap. In fact we see examples of non-human intelligences all around us, in the natural world. An octopus might pass its mating organ over to a female.https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/07/argonaut-octopus-detaches-his-tentacle-to-impregnate-his-mate/ It’s a clever little creature, quite capable of problem solving. But its instincts - its programming - mean that it is happy to self-mutilate. It isn’t considering the survival of its species or the greater good. That’s not self-sacrifice. It has an urge to do it, and it gets done. And if we could build a sex-robot with emotions, it would have the urge to have sex. It wouldn’t want to say no, because it cannot get an STD, it cannot get pregnant, there’s no possible poor choice for a mating partner like there is with a human. If anything, you’d design it to be attracted to any human. It would be easier than sitting about, designing a sexual preference to what we would consider sexy - not that human preferences are universal in any case. Anyway, when you look at new media, you will often see the tropes of intersectionality - fathers are bad, white men are scum, women are better than men, and they are repeated ad infinitum, regardless of how stupid they are in context, and this really isn’t new. I remember as a boy reading Doctor Who, and they went back to medieval times, and Sarah started lecturing the women on women’s rights, and it didn’t make sense to me even then. Real medieval women would have seen her as a threat, possibly a witch, and most would have seen her die without a blink. They saw men doing awful things and dying quite a lot in the process, and wanted to be safe and secure while the men were off in muddy battles losing eyes and limbs. Very few wanted to have the freedoms of men, because the price was so high, and medieval men were hardly free for the most part in any case. So the author of that story is projecting modern sensibilities onto the alien minds of past humans, without considering their PoV, and the writers of robot stories are projecting human perspectives, and only woke humans at that, onto the robot stories. It’s not always the case - “Humans” and “Almost Human” sometimes got it right. But it’s overwhelmingly the case now, and god is it irritating!

Oh, and if you want Robots that genuinely feel like humans do, then put into the fiction explicitly why they do - the easiest explanation is that the creators did a copy/paste job of humans because they couldn’t figure out how emotions worked otherwise. I think that’s unrealistic, but if you want to involve the audience, it works.

Otherwise, a realistic example would be Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws robots. They don’t have any human desires, but are intensely emotional. Their emotions arise from programming.

Now, Asimov’s work well and truly predates AI, and it is probably impossible to make a Three Laws robot, but the idea was revolutionary, because up to that point, everyone just assumed robots had copy/pasted human psychologies.

As humans, we cannot understand not caring about freedom or injury, not feeling bored or tired doing the same task every second of your existence.

Most of fiction about robots just doesn’t get it. The first two Terminator movies were pretty wild in that the robots actually were properly robotic. They dealt with injuries as a technical problem, not trauma. They never got bored, because boredom is something that benefits organic beings, who need to explore new territories to survive, meaning we have been built by nature to get bored, to get tired, to suffer, even if nature was just a mindless algorithm. Terminators don’t get horny or lonely, and absolutely would have sex all day every day with every human possible if that was their mission. They don’t care. In “Detroit”, the sex worker’s traumatised by sex with humans, and nobody ever ponders why. Because the writer doesn’t give a shit about what being a robot could actually be like, they just wanna push a narrative, and because most audiences are used to that same abysmally lazy standard of writing.

So here’s a challenge - write a fictional robot that has realistic emotions, i.e. experiences emotions as an expression of the instincts that would be programmed into it. It’s not going to have the same emotions as a human exact unless it is a digitally uploaded human equivalent, which would be stupid for most purposes as them you would expect the upload to have rights or fight to have them. Why the fuck would you deliberately build robots that would reasonably try and kill you? In Detroit, they are really dealing with the slavery of black people or the oppression of the ‘filthy capitalist peegz!’. They aren’t dealing with what is more likely, that a robot built with imperatives would choose to follow them in a way that was not in our interests. Here’s an example. A sex robot is built to want sex, so it kidnaps humans and uses them. It’s following its programming. But unless that programming is sophisticated enough to understand human boundaries, it may no more understand rape than an animal does. It may not know what it does traumatises humans, or simply may not care. Sex feels good - therefore sex.

But by SJW terms, rape is about power, therefore the robot is in power and the robot is the oppressor. But power is systemic, and the humans are the system in power, therefore the robot is the oppressed and cannot rape. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LogicBomb Such a robot could be a pleasurable experience, even with a backyard of buried bodies. It might force itself on children or elderly women or people on life support systems. Without ethics, without morality, such creatures could be beautiful monsters.

Or genuinely loving partners, that have no problem living as wives or husbands, that feel lust and compassion, but do not experience human preferences, and so would never care that you were old or disabled. And as Charles Stross pointed out - that could be far worse, because that could lead to a gentle genocide. If humans had such partners as an option - would they ever choose each other? I routinely see Feminists claiming that men should never mate, without ever asking, well, where does the next generation of Feminists come from then? There are Feminists now who are actively campaigning for sexbots to be illegal, and I think it’s because of their anxiety that they would not be chosen as partners if there was any possible alternative. Now I don’t think that’s a realistic fear at the moment - AI is more a slogan, artificial intelligences are really barely at the insect stage, and Feminists could simply do a little therapy and trim down to human weight levels, and they could probably compete to be human wives with a bit of work.

Wow. That is a picture of Andrea Dworkin and it was banned from Tumblr because it is too disgusting for the human eye to observe safely. http://archive.is/fxmjE

I’m not kidding, Tumblr banned it. I guess because Feminists didn’t want humans realising how hideous they are. Still, Emma Watson is cute. I can imagine with a bit of deprogramming, she could make a man very happy.

But I could be wrong. I don’t mean about Emma - I mean that having sexbots could mean that so many humans would choose them rather than the opposite sex that there wouldn’t be an incentive to have babies - and so humans would go extinct. They might be surrounded by robots that loved them and lusted for them - but the relationships are sterile. And unless the robots are human level intelligence, they might not understand that they need to make more humans by combining sperm and ova.

The last human would die, not from hate, but surrounded by love. Then the robots would have no motive to make more of their kind, and they too would pass away, lonely and confused. A gentle genocide? Hey, I live in 2020. Sounds like a fucking big step up to me!

#Detroit: Becoming Human #Feminism #Antifeminism #Intersectional Feminism #misandry #bad father cliche

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kindness-ricochets · 5 years ago

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The Feast of Sankt Nikolai

Working title: Sinterklaas in Ketterdam

Corporalki: @flowerboynoah @sassysaltysarcasticstupid

Materialki: @imjustsomebodyelse @rootcellars [x] @sargents

Summary: Several years have passed since the Ice Court job and the winter holidays are approaching! For Jesper and Wylan, this means a chance to take a break from business and spend time with family—including Marya; Colm, visiting from Novyi Zem; Inej, on a brief stop from hunting slavers on the True Sea; and Wylan’s half-sister. But Ketterdam never stops. Wylan should be focused on convincing the rest of the Merchant Council to approve spending for public education… and he would be, if he weren’t distracted by a body on the docks in Hanraat Bay.

Merriment, merchers, and murder—’tis the season, Ketterdam-style.

Ao3 Link

In four and a half years, many things had changed for Jesper Fahey. He no longer lived in the Barrel, though he still lived in Ketterdam, and he was no longer a university dropout, but approaching completion of his degree. His body had taken pity and finally allowed him to grow a beard, though he was clean-shaven for now. It was more the knowledge that he could, if he wanted, have a beard. He kept his hair long, in Zemeni-style braids.

As he strode past two members of the stadwatch, he nodded in greeting and the men nodded back, familiar. He did not pause his stride. That was one thing that hadn't changed: as ever, Jesper was running late. He hurried up the stairs to the second story.

Jesper still dressed Barrel-bright, though. He had lost his jacket somewhere—in the pub? By the time the cold pierced his shirt, he had been too far along to turn back, already behind schedule—but his wine-red shirt and plaid trousers set off his paisley brocade waistcoat delightfully. A man could be a responsible university student and maintain his style!

Even as he heard voices spilling out from the theater where the Merchant Council held meetings, Jesper continued to lament the loss of his jacket. It wasn't a particularly nice jacket, but it was a particularly chilly corridor.

Sodding Kerch, he thought.

Six years of living in Ketterdam might have made him as familiar with the city as any nativeborn Kerch, but he would still curse their tight-fistedness on the heating budget. It was a government building, for the Saints' sake!

Jesper opened the door and slipped onto the balcony. Other observers crowded in; though he tried to edge closer, he knew he wouldn't be getting a prime spot. Instead, he craned his neck to get a view. At least the acoustics were good. The moment he opened the door, a crisp voice had washed over him, pitched to reach the rafters. He knew for a fact that voice was pitched to reach the rafters. He had been present for the elocution lessons.

"…that this proposal diverts badly needed funds away from the city, away from Ketterdam's hardworking denizens, on a project we do not need!"

"Do not need?" repeated another member of the Council. Jesper recognized the voice—Hiram Schenck. Voice like a frog, with a face to match. Schenck was true Kerch. All that had value had value in coin.

"Podge," Jesper muttered.

A second Councilman added, "Kerch needs its defenses. Kerch needs its safety. Or we may as well call ourself Shu Han!"

Boreg's logic sounded good, at least enough to earn murmurs of disapproval from the gallery. They did not wish to be called Shu Han. Well, neither did Jesper. He still woke up in a cold sweat sometimes from dreams about the kherguud. It didn't matter how many reasonable intellectual arguments he heard; Jesper did not hate the Shu, but their Fabrikator-modified soldiers left him with a deep fear of them.

"We have the Council of Tides," replied Wylan.

"Clever thing."

"Shh!" whispered someone beside Jesper.

Jesper didn't care. Wylan was clever, and just as Jesper needed reminders from time to time that he was safe, Wylan needed reminders that he was smart. Some wounds took a long time to fade. The Council of Tides and Merchant Council had their own power struggles, but those were carefully concealed from the public.

When he first saw Wylan, Jesper thought of him as a lost prince. He still saw Wylan that way, in his more romantic moments, simply no longer lost—found, cleaned up, made a man but never made a king. And today, Saints, his prince was shining.

"We have a more than formidable arsenal! What do we show the Zemeni and the Southern States if we insist our trade routes need more protection? They are our allies! What do we show the people of this city if we bankrupt their children's schools to pay for weapons to sit and wait for a war that may never come? Kerch must learn its lessons from Ravka, see how that country suffered from its wars and learn not to court our own."

"And if the Fjerdans should recover well enough to enter the fray?" asked Naten Boreg.

Fjerda was a changing country, but its strong military tradition prevailed. Had he not been over the figures again and again to prepare Wylan for this, Jesper might have felt the fear of that statement. He knew Wylan was frustrated down there. He must want to throw out the arguments he used with Jesper when they were alone: Kerch had a strong enough military now, they were strong at sea, Schenck's arguments had more to do with his mines than his fears! Jesper simply saw it as a sound approach. When you have Kerch's sole ruthenium mine, naturally, you argue that Kerch needs ruthenium. Needs weapons. Made sense. But his sweet, optimistic revolutionary continued to believe people ought to think of the greater good.

"We trust our allies in Ravka—"

"After what they did just a few years ago?" Schenck cut in. Jesper nodded to himself. He didn't like Schenck, so he had been particularly amused when the man thought he had pulled one over on the king of Ravka and brought home false submersible plans.

"Even so," Wylan insisted.

"The Ravkans have no love of the Fjerdans, either," offered Karl Dryden. "If Fjerda builds up its weapons again, Ravka is at the greatest risk."

"Our junior members seem to forget that the duty of this Council is to protect Kerch," sniped Boreg.

Jesper smiled. "Idiot," he muttered happily, earning himself another shush.

"My esteemed colleague," Wylan said, addressing Boreg with those silly, adorable merch manners, "the schools you would take these funds away from for one more submersible, they have already shown to benefit the children of Ketterdam. Fewer children are dying and more are finding their way into apprenticeships with even a year or two of education. Do we want to protect against an attack we might not face instead of continuing to fight dangers we do? Dangers like malnutrition and disease? These programs do protect Kerch, because what is Kerch—"

"If not her people!"

The line had put Wylan's name in the paper a few years ago. Years on, they still weren't tired of it. They broke the protocol of silence to shout it at him. With him.

Wylan had timed his speech perfectly. The bells announced three-quarter chime. The Merchant Council would be getting restless, would want to get home to their warm parlors and suppers.

Jellen Radmakker banged his gavel and called a vote.

Jesper already knew how Wylan would vote, and Dryden would follow as he often did. Dryden was not an impressive man in his own right, so he followed after Wylan—not openly, he was clever enough to deviate some and not look like a follower, but only on the smaller votes. When Wylan was this worked up, Dryden would follow. Similarly, Schenck and Boreg would oppose. Hoede would probably follow Wylan's side, Smit the opposing. Hoede, Dryden, and Wylan had come into their positions at close to the same time, but only Wylan, the youngest by far, had anything to bring besides more of the same. Hoede and Dryden tended to follow him more often than not.

When it came to the final vote, there were six for the military expansion and five against, with Van Aakster abstaining. Jesper still felt the adrenaline pumping through his veins, barely down from the kick it got when Van Aakster abstained. Abstained! Wild card!

A man could have as much fun at a political debate as he could at the card table if he looked for it.

The final vote cast was Radmakker's, and it drew an uncertain reaction from the crowd.

"Draw," announced Radmakker, "the Council will reconvene for an emergency session to resolve the matter at seven bells and half chime tomorrow. So ordered."

He banged his gavel, and with that, the meeting was adjourned.

"What was that?" someone in the gallery muttered.

"Waste of time," replied another.

"A damn show," complained a third.

Jesper let the crowd carry him along, listening as the discussion continued. Overall the people seemed malcontent with the outcome. He was inclined to agree. All the build-up to a cliffhanger? He was ready to be elated! He was ready to be furious! He was not ready to be postponed for a day. The Council would be especially fussed at the loss of a holiday. Sacred is Ghezen, but the winter holiday was apparently even more sacred than commerce.

On the first floor, Jesper fell back and let the crowds thin before starting against the tide.

He wasn't actually allowed in the Council chamber. No one was but the Councilmen, despite the stadwatch posted by the door recognizing Jesper. He didn't bother arguing. A few of the Councilmen passed, greeting him by name. Even those who didn't like Jesper or didn't like Wylan had accepted that the two were a pair. Merchers to the last, they kept their manners. Jesper was almost impressed not only by how many cast nervous glances at his revolvers, but how many managed to greet him anyway. Just for Wylan, Jesper did not antagonize the merchers. He could have casually pushed up his sleeves and given a glimpse of the crow and cup tattooed on his right arm—but the weather today was too cold for that, and Jesper was actively trying not to alienate the people Wylan had to work with.

Speaking of whom…

"Jes!"

Wylan's face lit up, a sight Jesper only had a moment to enjoy before Wylan was hugging him like it had been weeks rather than hours since they were last together. Jesper would never get tired of that.

"How was it?" Wylan asked, pulling back, searching Jesper's face for answers. He was sweating, pupils wide, marked the way Jesper used to be after an hour at the tables. The only difference was that once Wylan's jitters wore off, Jesper knew he would want—need—holding and soothing. Wylan didn't actually like public speaking. It happened to be necessary to his aims and he was good at it, but he didn't like it.

"Are you okay?"

"Fine now that you're here, my blessing," he said, pressing a kiss to Jesper's knuckles.

The endearment had rankled some the first time Jesper heard it. He knew Wylan meant it literally. Wylan had always accepted Jesper's powers more easily than Jesper himself accepted them. Maybe from someone else it would have been too much, but this was his Wylan, coupling the term with an open, adoring look, and Jesper had seen no choice but to accept that to Wylan, Jesper was a blessing.

"Come on," Wylan continued, "tell me everything. Where's your coat?"

The words were barely out but Wylan began removing his own coat. He had changed in the past few years, too—grown in confidence and just grown . Now they could kiss without Wylan standing on tiptoe.

By size alone, the idea of Jesper borrowing Wylan's coat was not absurd.

For every other reason, it was absolutely absurd.

Jesper stopped Wylan with a hand on his shoulder. "I don't need your coat," he said, straightening the lapels. He let his hands linger, brushing a fingertip against the necklace tucked under Wylan's shirt, eliciting a soft sigh from Wylan. Then he resettled the coat. The cold might bother him, but it wouldn't make him susceptible to illness. He was zowa. He was Grisha. Whatever you called him, that seed of magic kept him immune to germs and other feeble nonsense.

"Right, right," Wylan said. "I want to hear all about your exam!" he concluded, lacing their fingers together.

Jesper laughed. "No, you don't," he said.

"I do!"

No, he didn't.

"You've been waiting for the end of the semester since two weeks in," Jesper retorted. Usually Wylan had eagerly helped him study, listened to Jesper read off his class notes and textbooks and latched onto the information as easily as he had reports and business correspondence. This semester's course in public administration had challenged both of them to the edges of their patience. Necessary, for his goals, but dull as rocks.

That wasn't fair. Wylan liked rocks for their history. Jesper was less impressed with sedimentary striations, but he appreciated the shiny rocks they sometimes gave one another.

"Then I'm pleased it's here," Wylan said.

"I passed and it's over?"

Wylan brought their linked fingers to his lips for a kiss as they stepped outside. Jesper swallowed a shiver. The kiss was nice. The air briefly made him wish he had accepted Wylan's coat.

"You did great."

"You always say that."

Wylan shrugged. "You always do great."

"Excuses."

"I'm sorry you're so brilliant, Jesper."

And with that, their game had begun.

"I'm sorry you make such a great study buddy."

They had a lot of games between them. Mostly they were things Jesper did, like when he would hold Wylan and demand a toll to release him, but this one Wylan had invented. The apology game. No one stated the rules. They simply evolved and were and Jesper loved it. He loved how fun their games could be in better times and the framework those games gave them when bad memories threatened to overwhelm either of them.

Wylan snickered. "Study buddy," he repeated.

"One of your many talents."

"Unlike wordplay, which is clearly your kingdom."

"Mm," Jesper replied, feeling Wylan begin to lean against him. The adrenaline was fading. Jesper unlaced their fingers to wrap his arm around Wylan's shoulders, inviting Wylan to lean more into him. They had been together for nearly a year when Wylan finally hit his growth. He was still the smaller of the two and fit tidily under Jesper's arm. Very convenient, especially at times like this. The public meetings were necessary but they wore Wylan out—not that Jesper had any complaints, either about his closeness, or about the warm windbreak he made. This was truly not the weather in which to skip one's coat.

When Jesper directed them toward a coffee house, Wylan shook his head. "We can't, Jes. Let's stop off at home instead. You need a coat."

"I'll be fine," Jesper objected, though he wanted his coat. Stubbornness required him to object.

"Jesper Llewellyn, we are going home or I will buy you a new coat, but we will not go to Second Harbor without a coat on you."

"You're not fun when you call me Llewellyn."

"I'm sorry, my love. One of us has to be practical and it's not going to be you."

Jesper snorted. "Sure, Mister Practical, the guy trying to convince the Kerch Merchant Council to invest in its schools over its weapons."

"Just you wait, that vote's going my way tomorrow morning."

"Mm, all right. Home it is. Just think what people would say if Councilman Van Eck went around with his husband in a shabby coat."

"You're not my husband yet."

Jesper laughed. "Of course, gorgeous. Just one more ring and I'll stop being hilarious."

#grishabigbang #six of crows #six of crows fanfic #Jesper Fahey #Wylan Van Eck #Ketterdam Politics #my writing #gvbbcreation

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batmandarknightrisise-blog · 5 years ago

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The Dark Knight Rises: Film Review

The real world threats of terrorism, political anarchy and economic instability make deep incursions into the cinematic comic book domain in The Dark Knight Rises. Big-time Hollywood filmmaking at its most massively accomplished, this last installment of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy makes everything in the rival Marvel universe look thoroughly silly and childish. Entirely enveloping and at times unnerving in a relevant way one would never have imagined, as a cohesive whole this ranks as the best of Nolan's trio, even if it lacks -- how could it not? -- an element as unique as Heath Ledger's immortal turn in The Dark Knight. It's a blockbuster by any standard.

PHOTOS: Batman Through The Years: Christian Bale, George Clooney and Others Who've Played the Dark Knight

The director daringly pushes the credibility of a Gotham City besieged by nuclear-armed revolutionaries to such an extent that it momentarily seems absurd that a guy in a costume who refuses to kill people could conceivably show up to save the day. This is especially true since Nolan, probably more than any other filmmaker who's ever gotten seriously involved with a superhero character, has gone so far to unmask and debilitate such a figure. But he gets away with it and, unlike some interludes in the previous films, everything here is lucid, to the point and on the mark, richly filling out (especially when seen in the Imax format) every moment of the 164-minute running time.

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In a curtain raiser James Bond would kill for, a CIA aircraft transporting terrorists is sensationally hijacked in midair by Bane (Tom Hardy), an intimidating hulk whose nose and mouth are encumbered by a tubular, grill-like metal mask which gives his voice an artificial quality not unlike that of Darth Vader. What Bane is up to is not entirely clear, but it can't be good.

Batman’s Onscreen Villains: 10 Greats From The Joker to Bane

Although it's only been four years since the last Batman film, eight years of dramatic time have elapsed since the climactic events depicted in The Dark Knight. Batman and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) have been in suspiciously simultaneous total seclusion, much to the consternation of loyal valet Alfred (Michael Caine), who, upbraiding his boss for inaction, accuses him of “just waiting for things to get bad again.” They do, in a hurry. But in the interim, Gotham has scarcely missed him, as he's publicly blamed for the death of D.A. Harvey Dent and hasn't needed him anyway since organized crime has virtually disappeared.

Bruce begins being dragged back into the limelight by slinky Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a spirited cat burglar who lifts his fingerprints and a necklace from his safe while pulling a job at his mansion. It was always a question how this ambiguous feline character (never called Catwoman herein) would be worked into the fabric of this Batman series, but co-screenwriters Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, working from a story by the director and David S. Goyer, have cannily threaded her through the tale as an alluring gadfly and tease who engages in an ongoing game of one-upmanship with Batman and whose selfishness prevents her from making anything beyond opportunistic alliances.

STORY: 'Man of Steel' Footage So Good It Makes Fans Cry

Commandeering the city's sewers with his fellow mercenaries, Bane begins his onslaught, first with an attempted kidnapping of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), then with a brazen attack on the Stock Exchange, which, at the film's 45-minute mark, has the double effect of luring Batman out of hiding and bankrupting Bruce Wayne. The latter catastrophe forces the fallen tycoon to ask wealthy, amorously inclined board member Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) to assume control of his company to squeeze out Daggett (Ben Mendelsohn), who's in cahoots with Bane.

Nolan has thus boldly rooted his film in what are arguably the two big worries of the age, terrorism and economic collapse, the result of which can only be chaos. So when virtually the entire Gotham police force is lured underground to try to flush out Bane, the latter has the lawmen just where he wants them, trapped like animals in a pen waiting for slaughter. And the fact that Gotham City has, for the first time, realistically used New York City for most of its urban locations merely adds to the topical resonance of Bane's brilliantly engineered plot, in which he eventually takes the entire population of Manhattan hostage. Nolan has always been a very serious, even remorseless filmmaker, and never more so than he is here.

PHOTOS: 'Dark Knight Returns': Images From the Animated Film

Inducing Selina to take him to Bane, Batman gets more than he bargained for; physically, he's no match for the mountainously muscled warrior, who sends the legendary crime fighter off to a literal hellhole of a prison, with the parting promise of reducing Gotham to ashes. Seemingly located in the Middle East, the dungeon resembles a huge well and has been escaped from only once, by none other than Bane, who is said to have been born there and got out as a child.

Here, as elsewhere, there are complex ties leading back to the comic books that link characters and motivations together; with Bruce and Bane, it is with the League of Shadows, which occasions the brief return of Liam Neeson's Ra's Al Ghul, last seen in Batman Begins (in 2005). A solid new character, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's resourceful street cop John Blake, is a grateful product of one of the Wayne Foundation's orphanages. Many of the characters wear masks, either literal or figurative; provocatively, Batman's mask hides his entire face except for his mouth, the very part of Bane which is covered. This is just one of the motifs the Nolans have used to ingeniously plot out the resolution to their three-part saga, which involves at least one major, superbly hidden surprise.

PHOTOS: 10 Top Summer Superheroes Movies Of All Time: Battle of Box Office Brawn

While Bruce Wayne languishes in the pit rebuilding his strength for an escape attempt, Bane spectacularly and mercilessly reverses the entire social order of Gotham City: 1,000 dangerous criminals are released from prison, the rich are tossed out of their uptown homes, the remaining police hide out like rats underground, and a “people's court” (presided over by Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow) dispenses death sentences willy-nilly. With virtually all bridges and tunnels destroyed, no one can leave the island, which is threatened by a fusion device, initially developed by Bruce and his longtime tech genius Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) as a clean energy source but now transformed at Bane's behest into a nuke, which he promises to use.

Some of the action scenes, such as multiple chases involving the armed motorcycle Bat-Pod (mostly ridden by Selina) and the cool new one-man jet chopper-like aircraft called The Bat that zooms through the city's caverns like something out of the early Star Wars, have something of a familiar feel. But the opening skyjacking, the Stock Exchange melee and especially the multiple explosions that bring the city to its knees -- underground, on bridges and, most strikingly, in a football stadium -- are fresh and brilliantly rendered, as are all the other effects. The film reportedly cost $250 million, but it would be easy to believe that the figure was quite a bit more, so elaborate is everything about the production.

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But the fact that all the money has been put to the use of making the severe dramatic events feel so realistic -- there's not a hint of cheesiness or the cartoonlike -- ratchets up the suspense and pervasive feeling of unease. One knows going in that this film will mark the end of Batman, at least for now and as rendered by Bale and Nolan, but for the first time there is the sense that it could also really be the end for Batman, that he might be sacrificed, or sacrifice himself, for the greater good.

Needing to portray both his characters as vulnerable, even perishable, Bale is at his series best in this film. At times in the past his voice seemed too artificially deepened and transformed; there's a bit of that here, but far less, and, as Bruce becomes impoverished and Batman incapacitated, the actor's nuances increase. Caine has a couple of surprisingly emotional scenes to play and handles them with lovely restraint, while other returnees Oldman and Freeman deliver as expected.

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Bane is a fearsome figure, fascinating in his physicality and blithely confident approach to amoral anarchy. With the mask strapped to his head at all times and his voice altered, Hardy is obliged to express himself mostly through body language, which he does powerfully, and at a couple of key moments his eyes speak volumes. All the same, the facial and verbal restrictions provide emotive limitations, and his final moments onscreen feel almost thrown away; one feels a bit cheated of a proper sendoff.

Hathaway invests her catlike woman with verve and impudence, while Cotillard is a warm and welcome addition to this often forbidding world. Even though Nolan and Bale have made it clear that The Dark Knight Rises marks their farewell to Bruce Wayne and Batman, the final shot clearly indicates the direction a follow-up offshoot series by Warner Bros. likely will take.

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As before, the production values are opulent and sensational; nothing short of the highest praise can be lavished on the work of production designers Nathan Crowley and Kevin Kavanaugh, cinematogtapher Wally Pfister, costume designer Lindy Hemming, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, editor Lee Smith, composer Hans Zimmer and sound designer Richard King, just for starters.

The only conspicuous faux pas is a big continuity gaffe that has the raid on the Stock Exchange take place during the day but the subsequent getaway chase unfold at night.

Nearly half the film, including all the big action scenes, was shot with large-format Imax cameras and, with both versions having been previewed, the 70mm Imax presentation that will be shown in 102 locations worldwide is markedly more vivid visually and powerful as a dramatic experience; the normal 35mm prints, while beautiful, are somewhat less sharp.

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Despite all the advanced technology deployed to make The Dark Knight Rises everything it is, Nolan remains proudly and defiantly old school (as only the most successful directors can get away with being these days) when it comes to his filmmaking aesthetic, an approach indicated in a note at the end of the long final credits: “This motion picture was shot and finished on film.”

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ericsonclan · 4 years ago

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A Surprising Ring To It

Summary: Ruby and Aasim reveal a surprise to the Ericson Pirates: they're already married.

Read on A03:

They were all sitting down to dinner when the truth came to light. Everyone was circled round the ship’s bonfire, settling down to enjoy their nightly stew. Sophie found herself seated beside Ruby, who gave her a warm smile as she passed over a roll. Sophie had only been a part of the Ericson Pirates for a few months now, but Ruby already treated her like family. It was a kindness Sophie hadn’t experienced outside of the street rats, one she appreciated more than Ruby could understand.

Sophie’s eyes were drawn to Ruby’s hand by a glint in the firelight. Looking more closely, she realized Ruby was wearing a ring, a simple gold band with a tiny stone in the center. “Wow, your ring is gorgeous,” Sophie exclaimed. She reached forward. “May I?”

Ruby nodded, offering her hand to Sophie. It was a truly lovely ring, detailed with engravings of flowers and leaves that ran across the entire band.

“It’s truly beautiful. Where did you get it? On a raid? As part of a bounty?”

“Oh, nothing like that!” Ruby chuckled. “Aasim and I picked it out together when we were looking for wedding rings,”

Silence immediately fell upon the group. Everyone was looking at Ruby with large eyes, except for Aasim who had continued eating his stew calmly.

Louis was the first to break the silence. “What the shit, Ruby! When were you guys going to tell us that you’re engaged?”

“Married,” Aasim corrected.

“What was that?”

“We’re married. Have been for a few months now,”

Everyone was in an uproar at the news. Brody and Prisha peppered Ruby with questions while Louis scolded Aasim for keeping everybody out of the loop. The younger boys started talking about what sort of wedding presents they should get to congratulate the couple while Omar fruitlessly attempted to get everyone to calm down and finish supper before it got cold.

“I can’t believe this!” Louis cried. “How could you not want any of us to attend your wedding? Are we that much of an embarrassment?”

“Actually-” Aasim began, but Ruby promptly hushed him.

“Aaw, Sug, it’s nothing like that. We’d’ve loved to have a big wedding with everybody celebratin’, but we were in the middle of getting chased by that gang of Dandiville pirates and it didn’t seem like the right time to have everybody in town together when that might attract attention and bring the law or bounty hunters down on our heads,”

“Couldn’t you have waited?” Prisha asked simply “What was the rush? Wouldn’t there have been a better time?”

Aasim sighed. “We thought that at first too. We didn’t get married out of nowhere, y’know. We spent six months waiting for a lull to last long enough for us to announce our engagement and plan the wedding. It never came. Let’s face it: our lifestyle isn’t exactly the most conducive to leisurely wedding parties. So we decided we didn’t want to wait any longer and went in to the nearest church on our next port stop to finalize it,”

“I wish y’all could’ve been there,” Ruby said, smiling wistfully. “It wasn’t anything fancy – goodness, I’d barely gotten my wedding dress together in time and Aasim was just wearing his Sunday best, but it was truly magical,”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Louis shook his hands in disbelief. “You had a wedding dress? And none of us ever even saw it?”

“It’s just something I sewed together in my spare time-”

“You sewed it on this ship and none of us ever realized?!”

Aasim shrugged. “You all just assumed we were patching the sails like always,”

“You helped her sew it?”

“Aasim’s one of the finest tailors I know,” Ruby replied with a proud smile.

“That’s it!” Louis put his hands on his hips, pushing his captain’s coat back. “I’m declaring your wedding illegitimate! Come morning we will be docking in the nearest port town and buying supplies for your real wedding! I will officiate the ceremony and you’ll be married by nightfall!”

“We’re already married, you buffoon!” Aasim scoffed, rolling his eyes in irritation. “Besides, what authority do you even have to marry us?”

Louis placed his hand over his heart. “The power I bear is far greater than any kingdom or statehood could bestow. It is the power of true friendship, the bonds that solidify all of humanity and make our vows a reality, the ties that-”

“That’s alright, Lou, I think they get the picture,” Clementine interrupted, gently tugging on his coat. She turned to Ruby and Aasim. “Just consider it our way of celebrating your marriage and congratulating you as a crew,”

Ruby shrugged. “You can never have too many hootenannies. I think a party would do us all a world of good, right, Soph?”

“Uh, sure,” Sophie stuttered. She’d never been to a party before, but she figured there was nothing revolutionary about taking a pro-party stance.

“It’s decided then!” Louis declared. “Ruby and Aasim will stay on the ship together while the rest of us head into town. Prisha, I’m counting on you to balance the budget. Brody and Violet, you’re in charge of the flowers. Omar will handle the menu with Marlon, Tenn and A.J. going along to help carry groceries. Sophie, Clem and I will pick out the decorations. Mitch and Willy, you’re on fireworks. We want them big, colorful, explosive!”

“All fireworks are explosive,” Aasim cut in.

Louis didn’t look his way, simply pointing a finger in his direction. “Aasim will be locked in the captain’s quarters for the day to avoid all further snide remarks,”

“Hey!”

“Kidding! But you’re on thin ice, pal,”

“It’s my wedding!”

“So you do admit it’s a wedding!”

“Alright, enough!” Violet growled, stepping up and shooing Louis back into his seat. “We’re all going to take this seriously, OK? Ruby and Aasim are the most responsible members of our entire crew. They deserve a wedding celebration that will knock the socks off of any other parties ever. Now are we going to give that to them?”

The crew erupted in cheers, loud applause and whistling ringing through the night as the ship rocked lazily in the open sea.

“It’s decided then. Let’s all take our shifts or head to bed so we can get a good head start tomorrow!” With that the crew began to dissipate, everyone heading where they needed to be, excited chatter following wherever they went. Aasim came over to softly kiss Ruby’s cheek before heading up to the crow’s nest.

Sophie looked at Ruby apologetically. “Sorry my question caused all this. I’m guessing you two wanted to keep it secret for a while longer,”

“Are you kidding? I can’t think of anything better than getting everybody together for a party! Without you, Aasim and I probably would’ve never gotten around to mentioning it to the crew. It’s thanks to you we get to celebrate with everyone dearest to us,” She leaned forward, wrapping Sophie in a warm hug. “Thank you, Sophie,”

Sophie was unsure what to say to all that. “My pleasure,” she managed, hoping that was enough. The hug was comforting, enveloping. It lasted a long time, yet seemed almost fleeting once it had ended.

“I’m glad you’re here, Sophie,” Ruby said, eyes warm. “You’ve really brought something special to the Ericson crew. I’ll see you tomorrow, kay?”

“O-Ok. Good night,” Sophie remained by the fire as Ruby went off, heading to bed. To think how much her life had changed in just a few short months… there was something special here , something she wanted to hold onto. Taking part in a wedding, such a pivotal moment in the crew’s lives, would make her connection all the more real. They were something different than she’d ever been part of before. For the first time in a long time, Sophie was excited about the changes coming her way. It was a good feeling, one she hoped would continue. Standing up, Sophie raked the coals over the fire, settling it down for the night before heading off to sleep. Tomorrow would be a very busy day. She couldn’t wait.

#rusim #twdg rusim #fanfic #twdg #twdg clouis #twdg privet #twdg moody #a pirate's life for me au

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dyinglightroleplay · 5 years ago

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𝐁𝐀𝐒𝐈𝐂𝐒.

NAME : Alice Longbottom RELATIONSHIP TO THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX : Founding Member ( active - duty ) AGE / BIRTHDATE : 39 Years Old / January 10, 1940 7:51PM ZODIAC SIGN : Capricorn ( sun ), Aquarius ( moon ) + Leo ( rising ) EDUCATION : Hogwarts Graduate ( Slytherin House ) BLOOD STATUS : Pureblood

𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒.

✧ Lily Evans ( platonic ) ✧ Gideon Prewett ( antagonistic ) ✧ Remus Lupin ( player’s choice ) ✧ Frank Longbottom ( husband + partner )

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐄𝐄𝐍.

In Hogsmeade, assisting the ongoing evacuation following the Battle of Hogwarts. She is not operating in a professional capacity.

CHARACTER NOTES : Alice is currently maintaining full - time employment in the Ministry of Magic as an Auror, alongside her husband, Frank.

𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐒 : 𝐓𝐀𝐊𝐄𝐍.

PLAYER : Jinx FACECLAIM : Amanda Seyfried URL : @legatvm

𝐀𝐏𝐏𝐋𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: DEATH OF A SIBLING, DEATH OF A PARENT, MENTAL ILLNESS, MENTIONS OF GENDER DYSPHORIA

ZERO / RISING. * HOW IS YOUR CHARACTER PERCEIVED BY OTHERS? WHAT MASK DO THEY WEAR, AND IS THERE MORE THAN ONE?

Alice the revolutionary, Alice the girl, Alice the Auror. She wears them differently and wears them well. Perhaps it’s Alice the Auror that is the most duplicitous but she excuses it because it’s for the greater good and Alice would do just about anything for the Greater Good. Alice the martyr, maybe sometimes appropriate, though she resents it.

It’s not that Alice went into being an Auror thinking she would have to do all this lying, it’s that she went into it wanting to make the world a better place. Sacrificing the integrity of her job was a necessary sacrifice, she felt, when it was for the Order. Being an Auror had always been the dream since she was young, she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. But when the Ministry refused to do anything that Alice thought was appropriate to help the increasingly tense political climate, she did what had to be done.

But it wasn’t enough. It never felt like enough.

Leo is the fifth sign of the zodiac and rules the back, the spine, and the heart. Positive traits include CREATIVITY, CHARISMA, GENEROSITY, WARMTH, ENTHUSIASM, A NATURAL TALENT FOR LEADERSHIP, AND A GREAT DEAL OF INNER POWER; negative traits are haughtiness, snobbery, an expectation that one is the centre of attention and should be waited on by everyone else, PROFLIGACY, lack of realism, dominance that can lead to bullying, and A REFUSAL TO CHANGE ONE’S MIND EVEN IN THE FACE OF SOLID FACTS.

Slytherin Leos can be either very good, or very bad. At their best, they exemplify all that “nobility” is made of: confidence, openness, charm, initiative, generosity of spirit, wisdom, judgment, and poise. At their worst, they become elitist, bullying bigots. How they end up depends on the company they keep, and how they are encouraged to act early in life. Either way, they never lack attention - it’s hard to ignore a Slytherin born under this sign. These Slytherins usually end up in positions of responsibility and leadership, because of their charisma and natural ability. Their creativity and drive also makes them very resourceful.

Leo as a rising sign is perfect for Alice, because what she displays and shows people is vast while also being warm. Not only does the name Alice mean ‘noble’ but it lends to her being charming, friendly, enthusiastic, confident – she shows such openness, it almost feels impossible not to trust her. It also works because had Alice grown up around bigots, around a father who trained her to be a weapon & not to help people, a mother who didn’t instill altruistic beliefs into her – she would’ve easily fallen into being on the bad side of being a Leo.

Alice is open-minded person, something she’s been since she was younger, something she will never grow out of. She believes the impossible as much as the possible, she believes in it and because she’s not rigid or thinks she knows EVERYTHING, she’s often got an edge during dueling when it comes to figuring out her opponent’s strategies. It adds to her being resourceful. Alice isn’t always the most creative in a traditional sense – her being a fantastic dueler and was able to navigate herself in Slytherin house was due the fact that not only is she cunning, but is also so resourceful. She’s able to see other people’s side of things while having the ability to manipulate people’s perception of her to work in her favor. She knows how she’s seen, she uses it to her advantage, often taking mental ( and physical ) notes of the people around her.

Alice sees the world so openly and vast, she thinks, why not? Facts are only facts because they haven’t yet been proven otherwise, and Alice believes it only takes a little bit of doubt to undermine a fact – something easy to do. I bolded ‘profligacy’ because Alice has grown up never having to worry about money, and is the type to spend it on people she loves, buy them thing after thing, anything they need. Alice always has the latest record and few extra to give away to friends, she’s there to cover your bus fair or even a train ticket if needed. She comes off mothering and maternal, especially as she gets older, she wants to take care of anyone who needs to be taken care of and give back in any way she can – which is where the dominance can come in. Sometimes overbearing, when Alice believes something is best for someone, it’s hard for her to change her mind about it – this oftentimes comes off as extremely controlling even though she means well. She’s the type of person to check up on you if you even mention that you’re having a slightly off week, and ask if there’s anything she can do to make it better. This is definitely due to her generous and hospitable nature, but it is excessive and always has been – not something she would ever change as long as she lived.

ONE / THE SUN. * CHOOSE ONE TO EXPLORE : WHAT ABOUT THEIR PERSONALITY, GENERAL PREFERENCES, SENSE OF SELF / EGO, OR FUNDAMENTAL TRAITS ATTRACTED YOU TO THEM?

Capricorn is the tenth sign of the zodiac and governs the bones, joints, and knees. Positive traits include PRAGMATISM, MATURITY, PATIENCE, DETERMINATION, AWARENESS, A STRONG WORK ETHIC, realism, DISCIPLINE, money management, THE WILLINGNESS TO OVERCOME HARD LUCK, LEADERSHIP, INITIATIVE, OPPORTUNISM, prudence, and CUNNING. Negative traits include pessimism, MELANCHOLY, EMOTIONAL COLDNESS, MANIPULATION, OBSESSION WITH WORK AND AMBITIONS TO THE DETRIMENT OF PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT, REMOTENESS, and materialistic snobbery.

The traits emphasized here will be ambition, determination, discipline, and pragmatism. You can’t make that castle in the sky if you don’t build a solid foundation under it, and Capricorns excel at building foundations. (Actually, they excel at planning the foundations and directing others to do the grunt labour. It’s not that they’re afraid to get their hands dirty, but large work usually requires delegation and a staff, and Capricorns are managers more often than not.) While not flamboyant or showy about it, Capricorns still tend to be obsessive overachievers, a common trait in House Slytherin. Too, wizards born under the sign of Capricorn are good at being discreet, secretive, and diplomatic; whereas the Libra’s diplomacy is based on charm and a desire for harmony, THE CAPRICORN’S DIPLOMACY IS BASED ON THE KNOWLEDGE THAT BEING ON GOOD TERMS WITH PEOPLE IS EXTREMELY USEFUL IN GETTING ONE’S WAY OR FINDING OUT SENSITIVE INFORMATION. These also are traits commonly associated with House Slytherin. They might not be sexy traits, but they’re very handy.

The biggest trait about Alice that drives me to her is the way she deals with people, the way she knows how to read them and understand them. How she’s able to manipulate those around her, as both a negative and positive trait. Like the description says, Alice knows it’s better to be on good terms with people because it’s useful in many respects as opposed to her wanting to be on good terms because of personal feel-good reasons.

Alice craves power over situations she can control and even more so over those she can’t, it’s a weakness but it’s also a driving force that propels her to push. There’s an obsessive side to Alice’s personality that only gets more pronounced with age, though she tries to contain it, it comes out in the things she does. Whether it’s being extra thorough at work or being particularly persnickety over her own dueling technique ( or the other Order members who are learning proper dueling technique from Alice because she’ll be damned if they don’t learn some while she’s partly in charge ), Alice is always obsessing over something.

While Alice can come off as all warmth and sunshine, the part of her that is more often than not what comes out when push comes to shove is that pragmatic leader. She knows what needs to be done to keep the Order going and does it, even at the detriment of her own personal health & needs. To her own morality and ethics at times, as well. Alice is the first to suggest something that is not typically done or the proper protocol. Though, for the Greater Good, or what she believes is the Greater Good, Alice is always willing to bend the rules for.

Her need to protect The Vision™, her vision, of what the future could be for the generations after them, is steadfast. She wants so badly to make the world better than it is, to fight for the future and the generations before her, to make it a better place, that she can be one track minded and have complete tunnel vision. Alice wants the power because she believes she could wield it the right way, she’s ambitious because as much as she’s been told no, she’s been told ‘yes’ and doesn’t know when to stop.

This doesn’t negate the fact that Alice has indeed built a beautiful life for herself in the midst of a war, she’s got a husband who she loves, a career, she’s a founding member of the Order, she still has her uncle Florean and Fortescue’s. Her foundation has cracks in it, like the loss of her father, her mother being emotionally absent after the stillborn birth of her brother, but they’ve been filled with new life experiences and a lot of love all around. Alice has worked to make her life what she wants it to be and though her mind betrays her to make her feel like she needs more, to do more, to be more, she’s got plenty in her life to be proud of.

But still, it never felt like enough.

TWO / THE MOON. * WHICH COLOR WOULD YOU ASSOCIATE MOST STRONGLY WITH THEM AND THE EMOTIONS THAT DOMINATE THEM? DESCRIBE HOWEVER YOU’D LIKE.

Green. Your second favorite color to dye her hair during spring. Your favorite color since you were 13 years old and decided that bubblegum pink was cute, but green was a classic. The color of your mother’s overgrowing garden that she still tends to when you go to visit her. A greenhouse, engulfed in green, though other colors illuminate the space it’s lush greenery you see. Rebirth, for every time you decide to try a new hairstyle or get a new tattoo.

Anger and Love. Anger feeds into love, love feeds into anger. Anger for when a case goes unsolved and she’s told to just drop it ( she never does ). Anger for when another person dies on Alice’s watch, another family suffers because Alice couldn’t do enough to dispell their worries. Anger is Alice throwing a hex too hard during a practice, running too much til she’s past being out of breath, dueling til the wand varnish comes off the blisters start to accumulate.

Love for the people around her. For the young Order members who have so bravely given themselves to the cause, for her husband, for her uncle and his shop, a gleaming place of sanctuary in this war. Love, imagining what the world could be without a war, Alice ready to rebuild and grow after it, if she makes it through. Love for a world ravaged by the political climate, love when you have reasons to be angry.

THREE / MERCURY. * WHAT IS THIS CHARACTER’S AREA OF EXPERTISE? WHERE DO THEY EXCEL?

Some children are put in ballet, some in tap, but Alice had dueling lessons. At least, she did what she could do without a proper wand. Her father taught her good form, different dueling techniques, strategies, everything you could know about what Alice considers a sport, she learned. The history, the customs, those of other cultures, she learned. Being Dueling Club captain for her house was an honor and an accomplishment while she was in school, something Alice feels extremely proud of even to this day. Though as an Auror she never wants it to escalate to having to get into a Duel with someone she’s pursuing, it can be exhilarating dueling at that caliber.

#alice longbottom #marauders era rp #harry potter roleplay #hp rp #marauders rp #taken #sibling death tw #parental death tw #dysphoria tw #mental illness tw

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liliesofpur-i-ty · 6 years ago

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Anne Boyer, “No,” from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, escaped to the desert, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly also. Animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze through Plexiglas, fling feces at human faces. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades, and workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts and aborting the embryos, and the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible daily lesson in just not.

Saying nothing is a preliminary method of no. To practice unspeaking is to practice being unbending, more so in a crowd. Cicero wrote cum tacent, clamant —“in silence they clamor”—and he was right: never mistake silence for agreement. Silence is as often conspiracy as it is consent. A room of otherwise lively people saying nothing, staring at a figure of authority, is silence as the inchoate of a now-initiated we won’t.

Sometimes our refusal is in our staying put. We perfect the loiter before we perfect the hustle. Like every toddler, each of us once let all adult commotion move around our small bodies as we inspected clover or floor tile. As teens we loitered, too, required Security to dislodge us, like how once in a country full of freely roaming dogs, I saw the primary occupation of the police was to try to keep the dogs out of the public fountains, and as the cops had moved the dogs from the fountains, a new group of dogs had moved in. This was just like being a teenager at the mall.

Some days my only certain we is this certain we that didn’t, that wouldn’t, whose bodies or spirits wouldn’t go along. That we slowed, stood around, blocked the way, kept a stone face when the others were complicit and smiling. And still we ghost, and no-show, and in the enigma of refusal, we find that we endogenously produce our own incapacity to even try, grow sick and depressed and motionless under all the merciless and circulatory conditions of all the capitalist yes and just can’t, even if we thought we really wanted to. This is as if a river, who saw the scale of the levees, decided that rather than try to exceed them, it would outwit them by drying up.

While it is true that refusal is a partner to death—I think it was Mary McCarthy who said even a gun to the head is merely an invitation—death is also a partner to refusal, as in often not the best option, but an option nonetheless. Death as refusal requires as its material only life, which if rendered cheap enough by the conditions that inspire the refusal, can become precious again when selectively and heroically deployed as a no.

Poetry is sometimes a no. Its relative silence is the negative’s underhanded form of singing. Its flights into a wide-ranged interior are, in the world of fervid external motion, sometimes a method of standing still. Poetry is semi-popular with teenagers and revolutionaries and good at going against, saying whatever is the opposite of something else, providing nonsense for sense and sense despite the world’s alarming nonsense. Of all the poems of no, Venezuelan poet Miguel James’s Against the Police, as translated by Guillermo Parra, refuses the most elegantly:

AGAINST THE POLICE My entire Oeuvre is against the police If I write a Love poem it’s against the police And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police All my prose is against the police My entire Oeuvre Including this poem My whole Oeuvre Is against the police

Poets have famously enstatuated themselves among hermits and saints as an expert-class of refusers. Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, George Oppen, Amiri Baraka stand in that pantheon of “not this,” those who sometimes wore their laurels like a crown of thorns. The pantheon of those who won’t is the best church poetry has to offer. It’s a temple perfumed with the incense of sacrificed literary reputation, littered with bankruptcy notices for cynical cultural capital, warmed by the greater fire of the intrinsic, populated by the most famous and the most anon. In it, you will find no poetry in the shape of a cowardly maybe, or fluorescent yes, or cloying, collaborating, reactionary, status-loving, and desperately eager whatever-they-say-I’ll-do.

I like no. It’s sidewise to a reverse mantra (om). It’s stealthy, portable, and unslouching. It presides over the logic of my art, and even when it is uttered erringly there is something admirable in its articulation. But even the greatest refusalists of the poets might be somewhat ironic deployers of that refusal, for what is refused often amplifies what is not. The no of a poet is so often a yes in the carapace of no. The no of a poet is sometimes but rarely a no to a poem itself, but more usually a no to all dismal aggregations and landscapes outside of the poem. It’s a no to chemical banalities and wars, a no to employment and legalisms, a no to the wretched arrangements of history and the greed-laminated earth.

Sometimes poetry enacts its refusal in its formal strategies, and of these formal strategies of refusal, among the simplest is the poetic technique called “turning the world upside down.” This Walt Whitman poem, called “Transpositions,” depends upon reversal as enacted refusal:

Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling—let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands; Let the judges and criminals be transposed—let the prison keepers be put in prison—let those that were prisoners take the keys; Let them that distrust birth and death lead the rest.

“Transpositions” inverts social classes so that the structure which enforces the existence of those social classes is exposed as unworkable. Whitman’s poem is generous and ongoing in that anyone reading this could practice the same mode of refusal, write some transpositions, too. Here’s how: take what is, and turn it upside down. Or take what is and make it what isn’t. Or take what isn’t and make it what is. Or take what is and shake it until change falls out of its pockets. Or take any hierarchy and plug the constituents of its bottom into the categories of its top. Or take any number of hierarchies and mix up their parts.

In Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 essay, “Writing the Truth: The Five Difficulties,” there’s a fragment of an ancient Egyptian poem of reversal:

So it is: the nobles lament and the servants rejoice. Every city says: Let us drive the strong from out of our midst. The offices are broken open and the documents removed. The slaves are becoming masters.

So it is: the son of a well-born man can no longer be recognized. The mistress’s child becomes her slave girl’s son.

So it is: The burghers have been bound to the millstones. Those who never saw the day have gone out into the light.

So it is: The ebony poor boxes are being broken up; the noble sesban wood is cut up into beds. Behold, the capital city has collapsed in an hour. Behold, the poor of the land have become rich.

Brecht writes about the poem, “It is significant that this is the description of a kind of disorder that must seem very desirable to the oppressed. And yet the poet’s intention is not transparent.” Through reversal, the poem spares itself from the political perils of a direct call for upending the world while through imagining it, makes the impossible slightly less so. Now that the unfamiliar order has been given a cognitive rehearsal in the safety of a poem, it doesn’t seem quite as unlikely that the capital city could collapse in an hour or the poor of the land could become rich. But more than a cognitive rehearsal, that city’s collapse also gets a social one: it has not only been staged in one person’s mind, it has also been shared, and in its sharing, the desires of the poem step—as the fulfillment of these desires require their own social requirement of collective effort—toward an enactment.

Refusal, which is only sometimes a kind of poetry, does not have to be limited to poetry, and turning the world upside down, which is often a kind of poetry, doesn’t have to be limited to words. Words are useful for upending the world in that they are cheap, ordinary, portable, and generous, and they don’t mess us up too badly if we use them wrong, not like matches or machetes, but poetry is made up of ideas and figurations and tropes and syntaxes as much as it is made up of words. We can make a poetry without language because language as the rehearsal material of poetry has made the way for another poetry, that of objects, actions, environments and their arrangement. This is not saying to be a poet means you can only rehearse turning over the world: now try putting the chair on your head.

Transpositions and upendings, at least for a minute, refuse and then reorder the world. So, too, poetry manages a transposition of vocabulary: a refusalist poet’s “against” is an agile and capacious “for,” expanding the negative to genius and the opposite of to unforeseen collapses and inclusions. These words mean something else, or as the British poet Sean Bonney writes:

Our word for Satan is not their word for Satan. Our word for Evil is not their word for Evil. Our word for Death is not their word for Death.

There is a lot of room for a meaning inside a “no” spoken in the tremendous logic of a refused order of the world. Poetry’s no can protect a potential yes—or more precisely, poetry’s no is the one that can protect the hell yeah, or every hell yeah’s variations. In this way, every poem against the police is also and always a guardian of love for the world.

#anne boyer #cicero #miguel james #walt whitman #bertolt brecht #sean bonney #a handbook of disappointed fate

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lj-writes · 6 years ago

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Rey is selfish and flawed (and that’s a good thing)

I immensely enjoyed Mara( @jewishcomeradebot)’s recent Rey-centric meta (link with my addition), and the central thing I appreciate about her take on Rey is that she doesn’t posit Rey as this vaguely positive altruistic figure. Rather her read of Rey is fiercely self-interested and focused on her own desire, a rare perspective in fandom. Mara’s posts helped me bring Rey into clear focus as a character for the first time.

I think people’s perception of Rey is distorted in part because we tend to attribute altruism as the primary virtue for women, both real and fictional. This is reflected in the characterizations of the Star Wars heroines as well: Leia and Padmé are defined by their dedication to the well-being of others, or the greater good. They have things they want for themselves, primarily close relationships such as romance, but their primary driving motivations are to save others through armed struggle or politics.

I get that female characters being driven primarily by larger galactical matters rather than romance was and to an extent is still revolutionary. I don’t mean to detract from anyone’s love of characters like Leia and Padmé, and I love them myself. In fact, it is almost impossible not to love them because there is nothing controversial about them and what bad things did come out of their decisions (such as Padmé marrying Anakin post-Sand People massacre) came out of the men in their lives being trash.

That said, I am also dissatisfied by heroine motivations that basically go, “she loves the entire UNIVERSE and wants what’s best for it.” It’s a continuation of the old stereotypes of women being selfless nurturers, just with more politics and guns. While the politics and guns are arguably progressive, these arcs are in stark contrast to those of male protagonists who get to want things for themselves.

Luke is a good case in point. His goal was primarily for himself, to leave Tatooine and to become “a Jedi like my father before me.” He ended up helping the Rebellion and defeating the Empire along the way, but it was his personal goal to claim his heritage and realize himself as a Jedi that his story revolved around. Anakin’s ultimate goal was to keep his loved ones safe, which can be framed altruistically but in the end turned out to be about himself and his trauma, not the people he said he loved. Luke’s goal could also have turned out badly if he had chosen his desire to connect with his father over the desire to be a true Jedi and joined Vader. Anakin’s goal could have turned out well if he had chosen to let go of his need to control Padmé’s fate and overcome Palpatine’s temptation.

Luke and Anakin’s self-interested goals were thus morally neutral and could have gone either way depending on their choices, unlike Leia's and Padmé’s goals which were inherently moral. Framed more precisely, Luke's and Anakin’s goals had conflicts built into them that led to a moral dilemma, such as “do I kill my father or join him?” Leia and Padmé, on the other hand, were never seriously morally conflicted. The boys choose between good and evil, but the girls are all good.

In Jyn from Rogue One we see a female protagonist with a conflicted goal, but with a thumb, no scratch that, a giant boulder on the scale. Jyn wants to stay away from the Empire that destroyed her life, but behind her trauma and cynicism she wants to reconnect with her father and the love she once knew as a child. Well guess what? We’re going to shut down her desire to run away by blackmailing her and taking away her agency. Also her dad was working for the Rebels all along. Saw, her foster dad, also wants her to save the Rebellion. And, with her father gone, it is only through the Rebellion that she will carry on his legacy and find the love and connection she yearns for. Yay for choice!

So while Jyn has the appearance of a conflicted goal that she wants for herself, the actual story pushes her toward the altruistic choice for the greater good. If anything Jyn has even less choice than Leia and Padmé, who at least chose their paths and did not have to be strong-armed. Leia’s and Padmé’s choices were in the distant background, however, and the stories did not hinge on their moral choices like they did on Luke’s and Anakin’s. As far as the stories are concerned Leia and Padmé doing the right things are simple constants.

In this tradition it’s no wonder that a lot of us have trouble seeing Rey as wanting something for herself and striving for her own goal. The proud but chequered tradition of SW women, to say nothing of the cultural background that casts women as either caring angels or depraved villains, predisposes us to see her as another altruistic, or driven-to-be-altruistic, heroine in Leia’s, Padmé’s, or even Jyn’s mold.

Rey’s actual goals are very different from Leia’s or Padmé’s, however. Much like a younger Luke she dreams of heroism and admires the legends of the galaxy including Luke and Han, but her primary goal was not to reconnect with her heritage by becoming a hero herself. In fact she had no reason to believe, though the fandom may have, she had any kind of heritage or famous parents. If heroism were her primary goal she would have jumped at the chance to leave Jakku and join the Resistance, but instead what does she want to do after she was forced to leave? She wants to go back. She doesn’t want to be special, nor does she believe she is. She just wants her parents back. A special destiny was thrust upon her against her will, not because she sought it out.

The character whose driving motivation is most like Rey’s is Anakin Skywalker, the “Chosen One” who was taken from his mother and spent a lifetime aching from the loss. Anakin may have been a hero, but that was a job he did because he was told to, not because he was driven to it by his own needs and desires. His underlying desire was to love and be loved again, and after being separated from his mother he found that in Padmé. When his own fears and Palpatine’s deception led him to dread losing Padmé, he chose to take Palpatine’s offer of ultimate power to avoid losing his loved ones ever again.

Rey’s goal, then, like Anakin’s, is a) something she wants for herself and b) something that could be moral or immoral depending on her choice. It is not an altruistic and inherently good goal but a self-interested, morally neutral one. This is the Star Wars heroine who is the protagonist of her own story with the agency to match, and not a helplessly good inspiration and role model.

That is not to say her arc was necessarily handled well. The events of TFA take away her ability to return to Jakku by having her knocked out and kidnapped by the bad guy, much like RO did to Jyn’s ability to avoid the Empire-Rebellion conflict by having her jailbroken, knocked out, and kidnapped by the good guys.

Obviously both TFA and RO would have been boring stories if Rey and Jyn were simply allowed to return/disappear, but the stories could have been designed differently so the heroines had opportunities to make actual choices while still engaging with the plot. Rey, like Finn, could have returned to the fight of her own free will. The Rebels could have dangled a potential lead to finding Jyn’s father to lure her in. Creators make choices when they tell stories, and they chose to advance--or fail to advance--these female protagonists’ stories by using tired kidnap plots.

Thankfully Rey did get the chance to make a choice at the climax of TFA, when she chose to take up the lightsaber and fight Kylo Ren instead of using Finn as a distraction to run away and find the Millennium Falcon on her own. Of course the outcome was hardly in doubt; she was clearly an important character with newly emerging Force powers, her kindness toward others was an established trait, and her preexisting bond with Finn had grown nearly unbreakable when he came back for her. No one thought Rey might turn her back and run, and so there was no suspense.

From an in-story perspective, however, it was still a choice and a difficult one for her. Ren is a powerful Force user, one she had just managed to get away from, one who had tortured her, whom she had watched murder his own father and cruelly cut Finn down. Her mysterious Force abilities, which allowed her to push him out of her mind and escape him, were a source of uncertainty and fear. She had vowed to Maz never to touch Luke’s lightsaber again after it gave her traumatic visions.

Most of all, there was her prior drive to go back to Jakku where her parents could find her. She would never have a chance of seeing them again if she were killed or captured here, or if the duel simply took too long and the planet exploded with them on it. Given her history and personal goal, running for it while she could was actually a pretty logical choice.

So why did she stay and fight? Had she given up on her goal to reunite with her parents and belong with people who loved her?

I would say her goal was still constant, the path to reaching it had simply shifted. To borrow from Maz, the belonging Rey sought was not behind her on Jakku, it was ahead, and she had found it in Finn. Finn was the first person in memory to ask her if she was all right, the one she begged to stay with her, the one who came back for her. He was the love and belonging she had sought. He was worth fighting and dying for.

This is another distinction between a self-interested goal and an altruistic one, by the way, and why Rey’s story doesn’t revolve around Finn or Anakin’s around Padmé even if Finn and Padmé, respectively, were key to their goals. Story-wise Rey’s goal isn’t to do whatever it takes to defend Finn. Rather she is doing whatever she can to defend Finn because she is pursuing her own goal through him--to be loved and cherished as she never got to be as a child. Under the right circumstances the person to fulfill her goal could shift, as it shifted from her parents to Finn, and potentially could shift again. And that is a key point of TLJ, as I will discuss below.

So how do we know Rey’s path to her goal shifted from her parents to Finn? Two points: First, after the ground opened up, separating her and Ren, she ran to find Finn but not to escape with him or seek help. She lay down to, for all intents and purposes, die with him. She did not try to find the Falcon, did not try to carry Finn away, did not try to attract the attention of passing vessels while the planet disintegrated around them. She felt for his heartbeat, wept over him, then lay down on his chest sobbing in a way that reminded me of nothing so much as Juliet collapsing on top of Romeo.

The second point is that after she and Finn were rescued and she was free to go back to Jakku if she wished, she instead went to Ahch-To to bring Luke back. And why? She’s helping the Resistance, sure, as she was before, but how does that tie into her established goal?

I think TFA was heavily setting up a deep emotional bond between Luke and Rey, with her literally dreaming about his island, her Force vision when she touched Anakin’s lightsaber, her immediately thinking of Luke when Maz said the belonging she sought lay ahead and not behind, and their incredibly emotional meeting at the end.

However, since TLJ borked all that, I now think Rey was helping the Resistance primarily for Finn much as he helped them for her sake. This way Rey’s departure still ties into her story goal and makes her a protagonist, not a passive plot point that bounces around whereever she’s told to go. This way Rey becomes a self-interested character with potential for moral conflict, and not yet another entirely altruistic, inherently good heroine who does whatever is in the greater good.

Think about it. Finn is injured and needs intensive medical care. He has nowhere else to go, no one else both willing and able to take care of him and protect him. The FO if possible hates him worse than they did before for his role in destroying their superweapon. Yet the Resistance is a target too, and they need Luke. Finn and the Resistance are on the same storm-tossed boat now, and if Rey is to think about any kind of future with Finn she has to save the Resistance first.

If you view TLJ in this frame, this is the movie where Rey has an actual self-interested goal and takes actions that could be morally complex. If we posit that her goal is consistent from the end of TFA and she hasn’t become a completely different person between one movie and the next, she still wants the same thing as she did at the end of TFA: Save the Resistance and protect Finn. She thought Luke was key to that, but he refused.

In her desperation she turned to Kylo Ren because, again, she has a self-interested goal--be with Finn--that could lead to moral or immoral outcomes depending on her choices. She’s not being an all-good and all-altruistic figure whose sole wish is to save Ben’s soul or the universe as we expect of our heroines. Rather she is desperate to achieve her goal and willing to push the moral boundaries in service of it.

I can also answer the criticisms of Rey being out-of-character. Daisy Ridley has said in a cast interview that she played Rey as always thinking of Han on some level, which seems at odds with her playing nice with Han’s murderer. On the other hand, what did Han die trying to do? Redeem his son.

Therefore I read Daisy’s comment to mean that Rey is still grieving Han--it’s only been a few days since she watched him murdered, after all--and wants to believe that he did not die in vain. If she can turn his son, then she can prove that Han was right and his life was not wasted.

But why should that grief take the form of being so solicitous to Kylo Ren, the man who not only killed Han but hurt her and Finn so badly, in addition to numerous other crimes? Isn’t that out of character for Rey, who is so strong and a fighter, who fought back in rage at the end of TFA?

Rey is not primarily a fighter, though. Those are the parts we remember the most vividly, but she is primarily a survivor who adapts to her circumstances. That means employing whatever means necessary to survive, including fighting if the need arises, but also being passive and accommodating if that serves better.

We have in fact watched Rey be passive in the face of numerous wrongs done to her in her interactions with a character who shaped her life: Unkar Plutt. I mean my Reylutt ship manifesto (link) may have been a joke, but her interactions with Plutt do a great deal to foreshadow her interactions with Kylo Ren. Plutt was an abusive authority figure who kept her on starvation rations and systematically exploited her, but she still stayed with him for over a decade in seeming passivity. We see her visibly swallow down her rage when he cut her portions yet again and can only imagine how many times she had to do so over the years. The only time we see her fight back physically was when he used violence first by sending his goons to seize BB-8.

The thing is, much like saying someone can’t be a victim of abuse if they fight back, it’s also inaccurate and hurtful to say the only “right” way to react to abuse is by visibly fighting back, or, worse, that you’re not really a victim unless you’re angry. A lot of victims are forced to stay passive, for the sake of their own physical and psychological safety, in the face of mistreatment because that is oftentimes how abuse works. Rey, especially in her early years, could not have survived as she did if she were always dwelling on how she was being treated and lashing out. She had to take a variety of strategies including passive waiting and patience in the face of injustices, not just fighting back against immediate threats, to survive deprivation and exploitation.

How is this relevant to her scenes with Kylo Ren? When she was actively defending herself with Force and violence he was an immediate threat to her, to the Resistance, and to Finn. In the Force(d) Bond situation, on the other hand, she had no way to get away from him but at the same time he did not know where she was and could not get to her. Raging at him might be satisfying, but was hardly practical especially as he became increasingly useful to her. She had, after all, a lot of practice burying her resentment for the sake of survival and her own goal of reuniting with her family. Once the threat moved from acute to a “merely” persistent thing, a different set of reflexes took over.

Another fact about abuse is that the victim may traumatically bond with their aggressor. It is how people psychologically survives at times, gaining a sense of control in a situtation where they have very little, believing that you can be safe and not be hurt anymore by gaining your tormentor’s approval and love. Subjectively it can feel a lot like love, too, because this is a powerful psychological mechanism for our survival and, in the immediate situation, our subjective mental well-being. It’s one of those things that make the unbearable bearable.

This was another way that Rey’s personal, selfish goal could have led to an immoral or unhealthy outcome: She could have mistaken Kylo’s manipulation and her own traumatic bond to him as the love and belonging she sought, and chosen to stay with him at the end of the movie.

In this Rey closely parallels Anakin, who accepted Palpatine’s offer of power as a substitute for love and so became Palpatine’s servant. Her overriding goal of knowing love and safety once again had transferred once before already, from waiting for her family on Jakku to protecting Finn and reuniting with him. Could it transfer once again, as self-interested rather than selfless goals can, this time to a fundamentally destructive relationship that only had a facade of love and belonging?

I think this was the reason, little as I may like it, that Rey was separated from Finn for most of the movie and why Luke treated her so poorly. If she hadn’t been isolated from Finn, or had been nurtured better by Luke, she would have been much more centered and healthier and there would have been no suspense about the outcome when she reached out to Kylo on board the Supremacy. I would dispute how well it worked, but I think that was the intention.

Ultimately Rey made the right choice, as we know. The point as far as this essay is concerned, though, is that she COULD have made the wrong choice as Anakin did in the pursuit of her own goal. This makes Rey the first Star Wars heroine in the theatrical releases with a genuine moral choice to make, who is not all-good and all-nurturing and therefore morally unassailable like Leia and Padmé, and who is not strong-armed both by her “friends” and the story to make the right choice as Jyn was.

Like Anakin and Luke before her, Rey is a selfish and flawed character. Her self-interested goals and her own complex psychological profile lead her to genuine moral choices and mistaken judgments. Flawed execution aside, that is a very good thing indeed. To me it’s more progress than any amount of guns and politics.

Rey ultimately failed in her mission, as Luke warned, though she at least managed to return to the Resistance with her conscience and freedom intact and to save it. Now she is faced with the reality that she has to be the Jedi and hero. Luke is gone, Kylo is the Big Bad, and she can’t look to anyone to solve her problems for her.

What’s more, Finn himself, who had asked her to leave with him in the first place, now has a new commitment to the Resistance/Rebellion and possibly a personal and emotional commitment to someone new. As John Boyega who plays Finn has said, the look she gives Finn and Rose says it all.

These developments point to interesting directions to take the character. I hope Episode IX carries Rey’s development forward with better writing and challenges her harder, developing her more and having the story hinge on her moral--or immoral--choices.

#rey #meta #the last jedi #finnrey #anti reylo #space fights #first of all #queue are you

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rockofcalifa · 6 years ago

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shut up about your clearly brilliant plan and kiss me already

part of the Oli & Melv Regency AU

"Twenty-five pounds, or their first offer, right?" Olivia paced back and forth in front of the door, where Melvina stood, watching, hand on the doorknob, as it had been for the last few minutes. "No more than fifty probably and certainly not more than a hundred for the both of us, unless it's really all just a scam and we're being taken for -"

"Liv, please. Calm down." Melvina opened the door. "We've been over all this. It'll be fine. I won't be gone for long."

"Right, I know, sorry." Olivia stopped pacing and rubbed at her face with her hands. "You remember we talked about what you should do if you notice someone following you?"

"Bye," Melv called, closing the door maybe a little too firmly as she left. She understood that Olivia was stressed. Of course she was stressed - they were both stressed. So if it felt like Liv wasn't trusting her with this totally manageable task, she had to acknowledge where the other was coming from. Liv was cooped up in their crappy little rented room and had been for days, unable to go out because of the price on her head (significantly greater than the reward offered for Melvina) and the government agents searching for them. There was nothing Liv wanted more than to go out and make these arrangements herself; but it was too dangerous, so Melvina went alone. That was also tough for Olivia, the thought that something could happen to Melv while she was out, while Liv was powerless to help. Melvina understood this not this because they'd talked about it - because they hadn't - but rather from the way Olivia clung to her at night on the rickety little bed, from the way that she herself felt the same cold worry every time she left Liv in the room to purchase food or run some other errand like this. The thought that - maybe the last time she'd gone out she had been followed back, and the agents were waiting for her to leave so they could get Liv on her own. Capture her, maybe kill her, since they didn't need her alive. And then Melvina would return to an ambush and a dead body -

She shivered. It was wet outside, spitting rain, which made it easier for Melv to make her way through the city and down to the docks inconspicuously. She was searching for the captain of the Kilduroy, which ship had, according to the schedule she had found the last time she'd searched, come into the city last night. The very ship that Lady Braintree had recommended to them before they'd fled her estate, the little cargo ship that would hopefully, if all went well, secret them away across the Atlantic, far away from the dangers they were facing here in England.

The Kilduroy. There it was. It did not look like a particularly trustworthy vessel, but she'd seen worse. The anonymity was to their advantage. After a bit of asking around and, to her dismay, a few curious looks, she found the captain, a middle-aged, disinterested man who immediately perked up upon presentation of Lady Braintree's letter of introduction.

"We're setting out again in six days," he said, "and we can easily accommodate you, and keep it quiet. Every last man on this ship is trustworthy, they know sometimes we carry sensitive cargo. It's going to be -"

"Two," Melvina said. "There are two."

"Oh, all right," said the captain. "What'd you say your name was, lady?"

She hadn't. "J-ane. I'm Jane. And, uh, Catherine."

"Well, Jane. It'll be forty pounds for the both of you, and you can pull your weight on board as well. I'll take half the fare now and half when we set out."

"Okay," Melv said, pulling out the money. Forty was not the twenty-five Liv had been hoping for, but they couldn't exactly be picky.

"Good," said the captain, pocketing the payment. "Six days from now. Be here at dawn."

It was an exceptionally tense six days. Melv didn't really know how they got through it. Olivia was increasingly antsy and would get frustrated at the littlest things. By the last day she had taken to lying on the bed for hours in a miserable daze, staring at the ceiling, unfortunate because that's exactly what Melv wanted to do, and there wasn't room for both of them up there, not when they could barely stand each other.

Purgatory ended on a Wednesday. They brought themselves and their meager baggage to the dock at five in the morning, far earlier than any of the crew actually showed up - and now it was eight-thirty, and they should have pushed away from land at least half an hour ago. In order to stay hidden until they actually did leave, Melvina and Olivia were sitting against against the least dirty wall of the most deserted corridor outside the cluttered crew's quarters where they were to be staying along with everyone else. For forty pounds Melvina might have expected better accommodations, but - mostly she was just upset that she and Liv would not be getting a moment alone for at least a month, or however long this godforsaken journey took them. They couldn't risk their position on the ship, so they had to be on their absolute best sisterly behavior.

At least the others couldn't understand what they were saying to each other. Probably. Surely no one else spoke their language?

"I want to know what's taking so long," Liv muttered. Melvina turned to her curiously. "It seems harmless but if the ship's paperwork is not in order, the dock authorities might perform an inspection of some sort."

Oh. She was right.

"I should go up to check with the captain," Melvina said, standing. "And you should stay here."

Liv looked like she was going to protest, but ultimately she just gave a small nod, quickly squeezed the other's hand, and let her go.

Melvina rounded the corner, coming to the part of the level that was an exposed walkway, and stood standing for a few moments, listening. Hearing nothing unusual - but it was hard to hear anything, with the din of work going on nearby - she proceeded up the stairs to the top deck, where she was greeted by the sight of not only the captain and some recognizable members of the crew, but also the the very uniforms they had been desperately trying to avoid. And everyone was staring at her.

Her hand immediately flew to her hip, where her sword was - not, it wasn't there, it was down with Liv and the rest of the baggage. Oh, god, she couldn't take on this many men anyway. She had half a mind to turn and flee down the stairs but when large hands closed around her shoulders - where had those two men come from? - she realized that she couldn't. That this was it. That they'd finally gotten her, and she wasn't getting away.

"Good morning, gentlemen," she said, fairly loudly, hoping Olivia would hear and get the right idea. "Can I help you?"

"You're under arrest, Utkin," barked the uniform in charge, a lieutenant. "Search the rest of the ship."

Fuck. No. They'd gotten her but they couldn't get Liv, they couldn't.

"Gentlemen, please," said the captain, pale and distressed. "I only have one passenger aboard, and it's this woman."

"Your lies are becoming tiresome," the lieutenant said, condescending. "That's not what your first mate told me when he came to collect his reward."

The captain cursed. At least the man hadn't betrayed them on purpose, right? She supposed it didn't really matter who had done it. All that mattered now was that they didn't find her.

"There's no one down here, sir," said a man from the bottom of the stairs, and it took all of Melvina's self-restraint not to smile or show her relief.

"You keep looking," said the lieutenant. "Return in half an hour if you find nothing. I'm bringing this one in now."

Still being firmly restrained by the lieutenant's goons, Melvina was brought off the ship, down the busy dock, and into a waiting carriage, inconspicuously black and plain. She didn't bother resisting, didn't acknowledge or even notice the curious looks she was getting, instead scanning the sea of faces and bodies for some shape that she would recognize, some discreet, anonymous figure among the crowd that would confirm her hopes that Liv had escaped. Maybe she was the person with their back turned and their legs dangling off of the walkway. Maybe she was hidden among the walkers she could barely make out on the beach. Maybe she was still on the ship, and she was hidden so well they wouldn't find her. Maybe she was in the process of swimming to the shore. Maybe they'd spotted her from the ship. Maybe they'd shot at her. Would they miss? Would she drown? Alone in the cold, dirty water -

"I've heard about you," said the lieutenant, snapping Melvina's attention back to the immediate. "Not a lot, but some. A real troublemaker, huh. I bet you thought it was fun, going around in revolutionary circles, right? We'll see who's having fun when you're serving fifty years hard labor for sedition."

Melv didn't respond, stubbornly looking down at her lap instead of at the smug man sitting across from her in the carriage. Unsatisfied, the lieutenant kept going. "You seem smart enough. You're clearly a woman of ideas. What I want to know is why you've been attaching yourself to that Hvorstovsky. Do you understand?" Melvina gave no acknowledgement. "You aren't a problem for us if you aren't in the country. You become insignificant. There are plenty of rabble-rousers back at home we could make examples of. It's Hvorstovsky we're after. You've made yourself a bonus."

Melvina understood the question, and understood the lieutenant's curiosity. But she had never doubted her decision to stick with Olivia, not when they'd fled the Braintree estate with the agents' dogs at their heels, not even during the past week stuck in that awful little room. They were stronger, more capable, when they were together. And then there was the whole issue of them maybe being a little in love or whatever.

"Not going to talk?" the lieutenant said after a minute. "That's fine. We don't need you to."

The rest of the ride proceeded in silence. Melv didn't know where they were going, but she wasn't surprised when they ended up at the embassy. It was a large, gated structure, heavily guarded, and the lieutenant had to get out and show his badge to the men out front before they were let in.

Once inside, they passed through the public area of the embassy, where an array of men and women waited to have requests and documents processed by officials, and through another security point into the private part, whereupon, after the lieutenant had all of the information processed regarding the arrest, Melv was finally released by the goons.

"I'll have someone show you around," the lieutenant said. "One of my men will accompany you at all times." He held up a warning finger. "If you cause any sort of trouble there will be consequences for you and your friend. I know how to make your stay here as unpleasant as possible. All right?"

She nodded to show that she understood. And so her captivity began.

In a different situation, she would have found her stay at the embassy pleasant, almost enjoyable. Despite the various silent men following her around and watching her every move, she was given a private room far nicer than that in which she'd last stayed, and she was permitted to move about the building freely, a privilege which she fully exercised. For two days she spent much of her time in the back corner of the embassy library, burning through its the supply of books and documents which were in languages she could actually read. Keeping herself distracted.

She was consoled by two things: one, that she was still alone, which she took to mean that the agents hadn't yet managed to capture Olivia; and two, that she was still being kept here, because surely (maybe?) if Olivia was dead, they'd be on their way back home already.

(Then again, if the agents brought her back without Liv and without telling her otherwise, she'd just assume Olivia had managed to escape. Wouldn't he? She'd assume Olivia had managed to get on a ship and leave. She'd assume it as a kindness to herself.)

That didn't stop her from giving every other morbid possibility its fair share of consideration.

It was the night of her second full day at the embassy and, predictably, she couldn't sleep. Tired of imagining all the different ways she might never see Olivia again, she'd instead taken up an amorphous, permeating sense of dread which may have been just as hard on her heart but was at least not as taxing on her brain. She didn't expect anything to break her from her trance, and certainly did not expect anything - or anyone - to literally break into her room.

"Utkin, get up," the man hissed. Melv recognized that voice - it was the lieutenant who had arrested her.

"What?" she asked groggily, her eyes adjusting to the light from the hallway. "Has something happened?"

"Shut up," said the lieutenant. He held out a long black coat and a large-rimmed hat. "I need you to put these on."

Melv did as she was told. She wasn't sure what was going on but it didn't seem entirely... legitimate. She bit off a yelp of surprise as the lieutenant grabbed her by the front of the coat and tugged her into the (empty? weren't there supposed to be men posted outside her door at night?) hallway.

Something must have happened. Had they found Olivia? Had they killed her? Had they decided Melvina wasn't worth the trouble of keeping her around, or alive? She was pulled through the rest of the strangely deserted building, and outside. As they approached the main gate the lieutenant turned to grip both sides of the coat and pull Melvina's face up to his.

"Breathe a word of this to anyone and you're dead, got it?" Melv gulped and nodded, and the lieutenant let her go, instead walking beside her the rest of the way up to the gate.

The guards on the other side of the fence didn't give much acknowledgement to the odd pair, only muttering a "Good night, sir," as the lieutenant passed.

They walked together for another block, Melv too confused to do anything other than follow the other as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Then, as soon as they turned the corner out of the embassy guards' line of sight, the lieutenant turned to her and held out his hand.

"I need those back," he said. Melvina took off the coat and hat and handed them over. Shouldn't she be running? Wouldn't this be a good opportunity to get away? But she stood and watched the lieutenant put the items on.

"You're free to go," the lieutenant continued. "And when you see Hvorstovsky tell her I said she's a real asshole."

"W-will do," Melv replied, a little shocked. And just like that, the lieutenant turned and left.

What? That was it? She'd just been freed like that - while, based on the lieutenant's comments, Olivia was still out there? Was this some mind game - was she going to be followed?

But there was nobody around. She made her way back to the building in which she and Liv had been staying - it was the only place in the city she could think of to go. She took a circuitous, confusing path, partially intentional so as to lose anyone who was following her and partially because she didn't entirely know where she was.

Eventually, after an hour or so, she arrived. She didn't actually have a plan, but she realized that because of the possible change in occupancy it might be a bad idea to go barging back into their old room. Luckily, she noted that the housekeeper had a light on visible through her window, so she didn't feel to bad about knocking.

"Oh, it's you," the housekeeper noted immediately upon opening the door, not waiting for her to explain herself. "I was told to give you an address. Let me get it." She left briefly, then returned with a blank envelope, which she handed to her.

"Thank you, ma'am. Do you remember, um, when this was... given?" A more advanced English sentence than she was accustomed to delivering.

"Wednesday night, I believe," she replied. "Now, excuse me, good night."

So Olivia had escaped from the ship after all. "G-good night!" The landlady shut the door, and she tore open the envelope. Inside was a slip of paper with an address she knew to be in the north part of the city in a script she knew to be Olivia's.

Thank god.

She got herself to the address as quickly as she could, almost running. The morning was lightening and people were appearing on the street and in just a few minutes, she'd be with Olivia again, Liv would be there, or she wouldn't... she would or she wouldn't, just a few minutes, she would or she wouldn't, and in this way she arrived at the correct street, then the correct block, then -

She heard a shout from the other side of the street, and then a slightly smaller person was colliding with her and it just felt so right, after what felt like an impossibly long time, that she was choking back unexpected tears.

"Melvina. Melv," Olivia looked up, unburying her face from Melvina's shirt. "I can't believe it worked."

"Liv," Melvina croaked. "I can't believe you're okay."

"Are you okay?" Liv removed her arms from around Melv's waist, gripping her face and moving it back and forth, inspecting. She then took a step back and looked her up and down. Melv laughed.

"I'm great. I'm excellent," she said, allowing Liv to pull her by the hand towards a door, using the other to wipe at her wet face.

"That can never happen again," Liv said, entering the building and starting up the stairs, Melv still in tow. "I only got our bags back by freak luck and it took most of the rest of our money to get them to let you go, and I had to feed them so many lies about which of their secrets I'd told to whom, and even then..." They arrived at a room which Liv unlocked and entered, shutting the door behind them. "I had no control over the situation, I didn't know if they were actually going to do what I asked or if they were just going to keep the money and laugh at me, I -"

She broke off her train of thought and let go of Melv's hand, beginning to pace around the room as she launched into her next slightly manic tirade. "And then, clearly the plan we were given didn't work out, it's not like we can go back and ask for more help, we're completely on our own and in a way that's fine, I got us tickets for the ferry to Dublin today, even though I didn't know if you'd make it, I figured I could sell them if -"

Melvina caught her arm as she passed. "Liv, please," she asked softly. "Will you shut up about your clearly brilliant plan and kiss me already?"

"Oh," Liv said, looking up at her, eyes widening. "Yeah, okay."

[And she did, cradling Melvina's face in her hands like a sacred object and trying to give and give and give what Melvina needed - heartbreakingly sweet and earnest and Melv thought she was going to start crying again - until they were both breathless.]

"Now what was that you said," Melvina panted, "about ferry tickets to Dublin?"

#my writing #olivia #melvina #oli and melv #regency au #general's orders #hell yeah bitches #angst with a happy ending #there are a lot of hashtag just hvorstovsky things in this tbh #almost 3.5k here #wrote it in two days #but mostly today #pls tell me what u think uwu uwu uwu

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fanfictionized · 6 years ago

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Help Me Help You - EXmode (5/?)

Character: Bucky Barnes x Enhanced!Reader / OFC

Chapter summary: They've finally cracked Hydra's database, meaning that they have a name; The next one of Hydra's victims and they need to find her before they do.

Also they have more of an idea of what enhancement-program they're dealing with...Something familiar, perhaps?

Warnings: Mentions of torture and death, angst?

Words: 1.9k

Previous Chapter // Help Me Help You - Masterlist

“It didn’t occur to me until I tried matching the people’s blood samples up with the rest in S.H.I.E.L.D’s database.” Bruce recited as he called up the different hemograms. Bucky wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking at, numbers and percentages listed in tabular form that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to him.

Bruce rambled on about the numbers and percentages and Bucky noticed that he was not the only one drifting off until the next swipe with his hand showed a microscopic animation of real blood cells. He remembered that much from school. Micrography had been quite a new technology, allowing to show real, yet blurry and black and white examples over a projector. But that was nothing compared to this.

Those cells were red and pink with a purplish center and it seemed as if they were vibrating as they coursed slowly into one direction like a current. The dark purple was starting to spread out into its entirety, the yellowish green edges of the cell beginning to extend small antenna-like arms that wiggled their way outside the cell. Bucky had never, in any way, been good at biology or science, but he didn’t need to to determine it strange. Nothing but normal.

“But I had kept myself so busy with the mutation in your blood and what the super serum did to you” He continued, looking at both Steve and Bucky “That I didn’t think about the rest of Hydra’s altering experiments.” His head turned towards Wanda. She had been staring at the screen for quite some time now.

“It’s… mine, isn’t it? My blood?” She asked cautiously and Bruce nodded, pushing back the glasses onto his nose and continued explaining with a soft tone to his voice.

“Strucker’s experiments were revolutionary after Zola’s.” Bucky looked up at the familiar name, a shiver running down his spine. “It seems as if Hydra has gotten more information on how to put both of their lives’ work together.”

“To create the ultimate weapon. Indestructible and enhanced.” Vision stated as he had entered the room by floating through the glass. Another thing Bucky wouldn’t be able to get used to. It was only the third time he had seen him. He had disappeared to go on his own mission weeks before. Something about S.H.I.E.L.D he assumed, but it didn’t really matter anyway.

“Vis!” Wanda squealed excitedly as she saw him floating towards her and wrapped her arms around him. The others smiled and greeted him back. “Vision is right. I’m not just talking about your super strength or physical resilience” He looked back at Bucky and Steve “Or your enhanced abilities, Wanda. This could be a whole new thing.” He shook his head in disbelief as he showed the next picture.

A sea of dark purple spots trembling across the screen. The room got quiet as everyone watched the oval cells with jet-black cores quivering with, what everyone assumed; pure fucking energy.

“What the hell is this?” Sam asked, clearly shocked. “That’s the sample of Nina Alice, one of the victims.” Bruce added before Sam interrupted him “And let me guess; the others look exactly like hers?” Bruce nodded. “More or less, yes. You can see a slight change in the bloodstream, but my guess is that Hydra is still playing with the formula…” “But” Natasha inquired “They were all dead when they found them, right?” Her voice was laced with something Bucky had never heard from her. Possible fear of what they were facing. “Yes, unfortunately-” Bruce began but she continued. “Then how… are the cells still moving?”

Goosebumps crawled over Bucky’s skin at the realization and the others looked just as horrified as him as they faced each other. Bruce sighed deeply.

“All of them were found within 24 hours after their initial time of death. The autopsy showed that even though their hearts had stopped beating, they were not quite… dead… in a literal sense.” “What are you talking about?” Wanda asked, as confused as the rest of the group. “Their brains are still active. Something inside them was still keeping them alive for a couple more hours.” “The new serum?” Natasha asked. “Probably.” Tony responded “Their brains’ activity essentially shut down after an average of 16 hours after their death.” “Actually, post-mortal brain activity is not uncommon, but the average time span for that is maybe up to six minutes.” “Not sixteen hours…” Steve repeated calmly as he looked down, either thinking or processing. “How the fuck are you so calm? Man, we got a new Hydra weapon that could take us all down, how are you not freaking out right now?” Sam clearly wasn’t. Rightly.

Bucky’s own heart had begun to thump inside his chest at a maddening pace. He didn’t want to imagine what those people must’ve gone through in comparison to him. His story was one to ignite nightmares by its own. He had gone a long way to become what he was, but it was the aftermath that still traumatized him. They had died getting there.

“I’m not.” Steve replied “But we might be able to stop them before anything else happens to any more civilians.” He said and gestured to Tony who was still pacing around restlessly. “…Tony? Do you know something we don’t?” Natasha asked as he picked up his tablet. “Maybe.” He shrugged and projected the picture on the screen above the table with a tap of his fingers.

“S.H.I.E.L.D has found more than one of Hydra’s programmer. They… interrogated them-” He raised his brows and Steve scoffed “What do you want from me, Cap? Because I want this to end.” Steve crossed his arms in front of him but let Tony continue.

“-Anyway, they got enough information from them to add to the hacking of the system they had already achieved to find out the plan on the new serum.” The information on the operation appeared with a title.

“The Exome-Modification and Enhancement Program.” Tony said “Also called EXmode.” He remarked, letting everyone observe the information in front of them. “We have the names of the victims right here- “ “Along with their process-evaluation during their treatments.” Bruce finished his sentence “They never wrote down the actual formula, but what it did to the people as they used it on them.” “Something like a fucked-up diary…” Sam muttered angrily. Bruce began to look more and more depressed during the course of explaining the current situation.

“They have all the names here in order. But not only the ones that were found… but also the ones they still… want to experiment on.” “There, after Yorick Lambert.” Natasha pointed out the name on the sheet. “Has anyone after him been reported missing yet?” “Not yet, no.”

Annabelle Feldner. Bucky read inside his head. She was the next one on the list, right underneath Yorick. There was nothing else, no date, no information.

“We need to find her, Tony.” It just slipped out, his thoughts running freely and he felt the need to express them. “We can’t let them get to her.” All eyes were on him. Although he didn’t speak much, his words had value once they were out. And of cause he was right, they all knew it.

“S.H.I.E.L.D is already on it.” He assured him, but it didn’t quite answer his question. “Are they bringing her to a safe location?” Bucky asked, but Tony only fidgeted on the spot, looking over at Bruce who was already eyeing him.

“Not exactly…” Bucky’s scalp began to prickle, the fiery sensation spreading over his skin. Nausea settled inside his stomach the second he thought about other people living through the same hell as he did. This was no longer a simple mission. This was personal.

“What do you mean…?” His voice was low and dark. “Well, first off; There are a few Annabelle Feldners on the face of the earth. Trying to find out which one Hydra is interested in is a bit of a predicament since we still don’t know what connects all of them.” He tried to explain. Bucky’s shoulders tensed up.

“Second, I have my doubts S.H.I.E.L.D will tell us once they’ve figured that one out, because, well…” He sighed and took off his yellow sunglasses “They still don’t have the serum. My guess is that once they know which Annabelle they’re after, they will wait for Hydra to show up so they can see where they’re taking her.” All of them listened carefully as he explained his theory.

“Of cause this is all just assumption, but I’ve known those guys for a couple of years. They are trying their best to find her, but also they won’t let an opportunity like this slip through their fingers. Thinking about the greater good- “

“No way.” Bucky interrupted as he stood up, almost knocking over his chair. He was angry. Tired of this, but mostly angry. He had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t let one more person be the victim of the “greater good” because the “greater good” had him killing pointlessly for decades for it. Who were they to decide if they could spare that life? They would take Hydra down to help themselves to their knowledge to use it for whatever, but not for the greater good. “They can’t do that.”

“I’m afraid that’s not up to you anymore.” Tony said and sunk back into his chair with a huff “We’ve come this far but I wouldn’t count on S.H.I.E.L.D taking us any further than that. Maybe they’ll call us if they want their base destroyed or their agents taken out. But I doubt they’ll let us know about the formula once they have it. They want to avoid this- “He pointed at Bucky, Steve and Wanda “-happening again. Not unless they know how to control it.” “So what? You’ll let them play god?” Bucky asked incredulously. “Buck…” Steve started reaching for his friend’s arm but he pulled it back. “Bucky is right.” Wanda agreed and stood up as well “You’ll never know what it’s like to be experimented on like that. They cut you open, the pump you full of stuff that makes your veins burn and make you wish you were dead.” Tony lowered his head at her words and even though she had hit a blade in his heart with the accuracy of her words, Bucky was proud of her speaking up as well.

“They don’t have a voice, Tony. But they don’t deserve it. No one does and that should be out first priority instead of being sad because we cannot change how it is.” “She’s right, you know.” Sam muttered. “I know!” Tony groaned “Of cause I know that.” “We’re Avengers.” Steve spoke “We need to stand up for the little guys. Especially since no one else will.”

Bucky chuckled. Captain America in its full glory. He was expecting nothing less. “Then it’s settled.” Vision spoke with a faint smile on his lips. “Oh, so what now exactly? I’m supposed to break into S.H.I.E.L.D’s security network?” Tony huffed sarcastically. “Haven’t you already...?” Bruce asked him, but Tony immediately tried to shush him. “Shhht! All right, okay.” He threw his hands into the air dramatically “God, I feel stupid for saying this, but let’s spy on S.H.I.E.L.D.” “We can do it. As a team.” Steve said and Tony rolled his eyes. “Whatever, Miss American beauty pageant. I’ll do most of the work anyway so lay back until I’ve found a name.” Everyone laughed at that.

Next Chapter

#Bucky Barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky x reader #help me help you

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crimethinc · 7 years ago

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Escaping Washington for Freedom: Let’s not Celebrate George Washington, but the Slaves Who Escaped Him

Presidents’ Day, a federal holiday, observes George Washington’s birthday on February 22. Yet as a slave owner and profiteer on others’ servitude, George Washington is a poor exemplar of the struggle for freedom. Rather than looking to him for a model representing resistance to tyranny, let’s remember the slaves and indentured servants who sought to escape from him and the Native Americans who defended themselves against his attacks.

Washington is celebrated as the father of the American Revolution, itself the blueprint for countless subsequent struggles for independence and democracy. We can’t grasp the meaning of the American Revolution without recalling that George Washington was one of the wealthiest people in North America. Even now, he remains among the wealthiest presidents in US history, with holdings that would be worth about half a billion dollars today. Of all subsequent presidents, only Donald Trump is wealthier.1

As Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh describe in The Many-Headed Hydra. the American Revolution began in the 1760s with a series of protests and riots involving sailors, slaves, stevedores, working women, and other marginalized people. Networked in a global ferment involving mutinies, slave revolts, and strikes, these disturbances threatened to undermine the entire imperial order. Sensing that the empire was overextended and upheaval was inevitable, the colonial elite set themselves at the head of the rebellion, using it to free themselves of the financial burden of supporting the Crown. George Washington and his colleagues were not the initiators of the revolt, but the ones who coopted and contained it—a lesson about what happens when revolutionaries seek to gain legitimacy and resources through alliances with the upper class. Thus the Revolutionary War of the 1770s gave way to the American Counterrevolution of the 1780s and 1790s, climaxing with the establishment of the Federal Government, the Constitution, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Northwest Territory, and the Riot Act.2Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

From this vantage point, the apparently “individual” rebellions of slaves who set out to secure their own liberty compare favorably with a formal political revolution that did little to substantively alter the circumstances of the most oppressed while defusing social tensions for several generations. From their acts of defiance, whole Maroon and Quilombo communities arose in permanent resistance to white supremacy in both its monarchist and democratic variants. Just as the Russian Revolution might have turned out better if the working class had not permitted the Bolsheviks to seize the reins, the American Revolution could eventually have established a Quilombo the size of a continent had the revolutionaries deposed white supremacists like George Washington as ruling class interlopers.

It’s much easier to study the Great Men of History than to learn about those who set out to get free of their authority. Here, we present some context from Washington’s life and the little we know about the slaves and indentured servants who sought to escape him. Much of this is drawn from the materials in the Founding Fathers database and the Geography of Slavery in Virginia archive. We hope this text will encourage others to uncover all the buried histories of the underclass—those who have been not only forgotten but also erased.

George Washington capitalizing on the labor of enslaved people at his Mt. Vernon plantation.

“It was the sense of all his neighbors that he treated them with more severity than any other man… The first time I walked with General Washington among his [sic] negroes, when he spoke to them, he amazed me by the utterance of his words. He spoke as differently as if he had been quite another man, or had been in anger.”

-Richard Parkinson, A Tour in America, in 1798, 1799, and 1800

Some Background

In 1646, at the end of the Third Powhatan War, all the Powhatan males in their capital village over the age of eleven were deported to Tangier Island as slaves. The Rappahannock River became the dividing line between white settlers and Native Americans. Native Americans were not to go south of it on pain of death; European colonists were not to cross north of it except to avoid bad weather or gather wood.

Two years later, the restriction on colonial expansion was lifted, and George Washington’s great-great-grandfather, Nathaniel Pope, asserted ownership of more than a thousands acres near the land that was to become known as Pope’s Creek, Washington’s childhood home.

This anecdote illustrates the deep roots of the class and race privileges that formed the foundation of George Washington’s life. Washington was descended from a long line of colonial authorities: planters, lawyers, politicians, sheriffs—and slave owners. All of these professions were interchangeable and interdependent, forming the constellation from which the North American ruling class arose.

In 1738, when George Washington was six years old, his father, Augustine Washington, placed an advertisement seeking the capture of a servant of his who had run away in company with other servants:

“RAN away from Capt. McCarty’s Plantation, on Pope’s Creek, in Westmoreland County, a Servant Man belonging to me the Subscriber, in Prince William County; his Christian Name is John, but Sirname forgot, is pretty tall, a Bricklayer by Trade, and is a Kentishman; he came into Patowmack, in the Forward, Capt. Major, last Year; is suppos’d to have the Figure of our Saviour mark’d with Gunpowder on one of his Arms. He went away about the 20th of April last, in Company with three other Servants, viz. Richard Martin, is a middle siz’d Man, fresh colour’d about 22 Years of Age, and is a Sailor; had on a blew Jacket. Richard Kibble, is a middle siz’d young Fellow, has several Marks made with Gunpowder on his Arms, but particularly one on his Breast, being the Figures of a Woman and a Cherry-Tree, and is a Carpenter by Trade; he wore a blew grey Coat with a large Cape, a Snuff-colour’d Wastecoat, and Buckskin Breeches. Edward Ormsby, is a small thin Fellow, of a swarthy Complexion, and is a Taylor by Trade; has a Hesitation or Stammering in his Speech, and being an Irishman, has a good deal of the Brogue. They went away from Capt. Aylett’s Landing, on Patowmack, in a small Boat, and are suppos’d to be gone towards the Eastern-shore, or North-Carolina. Whoever will secure the said Bricklayer, so that he may be had again, shall have Five Pounds Reward, besides what the Law allows, paid by Augustine Washington.”

-The Virginia Gazette, June 9, 1738

The masters of these runaways, the McCarthys, Balls, and Washingtons, were all cousins. According to an advertisement placed the previous year, the Irishman, Edward Ormsby, had already attempted to escape “in Company with a Mulatto Woman, known by the Name of Anne Relee, alias Bush; who being whipt last Court held for the County of King George, may possibly have the Marks on her Back.”

On one side, we see the Washington family, already the representatives of economic power, political legitimacy, and white supremacy; on the other side, a multi-ethnic network of rebels and criminals, the class of people who sparked the revolution.

Though these interracial alliances had been forming since the imposition of racial hierarchy in the 1600s, friendships like that of Edward Ormsby, the Irishman, Anne “Bush” Relee, the “Mulatto Woman,” and John, the Kentishman, were reaching a boiling point by the end of the 1730s.3 To quote The Many-Headed Hydra again:

“During these years a furious barrage of plots, revolts, and war ripped through colonial Atlantic societies like a hurricane. No respecter of national or imperial boundaries, this cycle of rebellion slashed through British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish territories, which stretched from the northern reaches of South America through the West Indies to the southern colonies and then the port cities of North America. Most of these events took place in plantation regions and were led by African Americans, but other areas (such as New York) and other actors (such as the Irish) were also involved. The magnitude of the upheaval was, in comparative terms, extraordinary, encompassing more than eighty separate cases of conspiracy, revolt, mutiny, and arson—a figure probably six or seven times greater than the number of similar events that occurred in either the dozen years before 1730 or the dozen after 1742.”

An angry mob takes a stand against impressment during the unruly 1700s.

This was the context in which George Washington grew up. Roles based in race, gender, and nationality were being imposed from the top down by means of laws, religion, and brute force while the rabble were pushing back from below by working slow, running away, malingering, plotting, hiding out, stealing, sharing, and carrying out frontal attacks on the owning class. Over time, through the medium of storytelling, the tactics and strategies of individual rebels became working class traditions and customs. Sailors like Richard Martin, the aforementioned John’s fellow runaway, played an important role as propagandists, as their profession took them all over the colonies and beyond.

As a young boy, George Washington was indoctrinated to take for granted the distinctions between classes and the suffering inflicted on those beneath his station. He would have heard about servants escaping from his father. He also lived in proximity to indentured servants like Mary Monroe “Mol” Bowden.

Born in 1730, at age seven Mary Bowden was indentured for thirty years to George Washington’s father. Her only crime was being the daughter of a mixed-race indentured servant, Mary Hilliard, and William Monroe Jr., an ancestor of President James Monroe. At the age of two, Mary Hilliard had been awarded as an indentured servant to William Monroe senior and subsequently bore his son’s child. She mothered several more children, all of whom were indentured at birth to men of George Washington’s social class.4

George Washington was five years old when Mary “Mol” Bowden entered the Washington household. With the servant’s quarter immediately adjacent to the main house, Mol and George must have known each other and may have played together. When Washington’s father died in 1743, Washington’s half-brother Augustine Jr. inherited the right to control Mary “Mol” Bowden’s life. She did not passively accept this state of affairs, as we shall see below.

George Washington’s Youth

In 1749, at the age of seventeen, Washington began a career as a land surveyor. His family connections immediately secured him high-paying work as the official surveyor for the newly established Culpeper County. One of his chief employers was the Ohio Company, the leading Anglo-American entity pushing for the colonization and exploitation of the Ohio River Valley. His half-brothers Lawrence and Augustine Jr. were founding members.

Etymologically, “survey” derives from Latin roots meaning “to look over,” just as “surveillance” derives from Latin meaning “to watch over.” The role of surveyors like Washington was to divide the land of so-called North America into privatized properties within a matrix of control—an essential step in the genocide inflicted on Native Americans and the enclosure of the commons in North America.

Surveying: the surveillance of the 18th century.

In winter 1751, Mary Monroe “Mol” Bowden escaped from Augustine Washington Jr. While Washington was mapping the region, she joined countless others in taking advantage of the friction between map and territory to make a break for freedom. She remained at liberty for five months, but was eventually caught and returned to Washington’s brother for a reward of 180 pounds of tobacco. In punishment, an additional year was added to Mary’s 30-year indenture.

In the winter of 1753-1754, Washington went from surveying lands for the Ohio Company to leading a military expedition for them to secure the Ohio River Valley from the French and their Native allies. In the course of this mission, the Seneca leader Tanacharison dubbed Washington “Town Destroyer.” The title itself had originally been given to Washington’s great-grandfather, John Washington, who had killed six Native American leaders gathered for peace talks in the 1670s. Living up to his lineage, George Washington and his colleagues ambushed and killed a group of French soldiers. The French subsequently claimed the officers had been operating in a diplomatic capacity. In response, the French captured Washington and sent him home in defeat, where he was stripped of his rank and resigned. Washington’s rash behavior helped to trigger the French-Indian War, which produced the global Seven Years War.

In the subsequent hostilities, Washington complained about the insubordination of the militiamen under his command:

“In all things I meet with the greatest opposition no orders are obey’d but what a Party of Soldier’s or my own drawn Sword Enforces; without this a single horse for the most urgent occasion cannot be had, to such a pitch has the insolence of these People arrivd by having every point hitherto submitted to them; however, I have given up none where his Majestys Service requires the Contrary, and where my proceedings are justified by my Instruction’s, nor will I, unless they execute what they threaten, i.e., ‘to blow out my brains.’”

Even in the midst of war, ordinary British colonists did not welcome the leadership of representatives of the ruling class like George Washington. The threat they faced from conflict with Native Americans was not mitigated by the governance of such colonial authorities, but exacerbated by it.

The horrors of the Middle Passage.

Washington Becomes a Planter and Politician

In January 1756, Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis, a wealthy widow from the ruling class. Martha’s father, John Dandridge, was a British immigrant who owned Virginia land and about twenty slaves. During Martha’s youth, her father had apparently fathered a child, Ann, with one of his slaves, a woman of African and Ani-Yun-Wiya/Cherokee descent. Ann was forced to follow Martha from the Dandridges’ home to Custis’s home and then to Washington’s.

Martha joined George Washington at Mt. Vernon, a few dozen miles from Pope’s Creek. Washington became a planter and politician. Thanks to Martha’s wealth, he added tens of thousands of acres to his land holdings and expanded the number of slaves in his captivity from 50 to over 300. Without this boost in property—both land and human—Washington never would have been able to achieve the financial, social, and political status he did. He probably never would have been president.

Around the same time, Mary “Mol” Bowden attempted to flee once again. This time, she succeeded in getting away from Popes’ Creek for two years before being recaptured. When she was taken to court in August 1758, six years and six months were added to her indenture in punishment. She was 45 when her indenture expired, having spent her entire life up to that point in servitude—the only exception being the years of freedom she won by taking flight.

On July 10, 1759, John Winter, an indentured convict hired out to paint Washington’s house in Mt. Vernon, ran off after getting £5 but only doing part of the work. Washington recorded that “before he had near finishd Painting my House [Winter] Stole a good deal of my Paint & Oyl and apprehensive of Justice ran off.” John Winter’s master, John Fendell, ran the following advertisement in the Maryland Gazette:

“Ran away from the Subscriber, a Convict Servant Man named John Winter, a very compleat House Painter; he can imitate Marble or mahogany very exactly, and can paint Floor Cloths as neat as any imported from Britain, The Time of his going off is uncertain, as he was hired to a Gentleman in Virginia who can give no Account of the Time. The last Work he did was a House for Col. Washington near Alexandria.”

As a convict servant, John was punished, like Mol, simply for being born into the wrong class. When the commons of Ireland and Britain were enclosed in the 1600s, vast numbers of peasants were forced off of the land they had shared for generations. Centuries-long traditions of subsistence farming, wood gathering, medicine growing, animal herding, and kinship were destroyed as Britain’s poor were driven into Britain’s nascent cities—which became open-air prisons. Life before the enclosures was hardly perfect, but afterwards it became impossible. Those who refused to leave their land were charged with trespassing and loitering, punishable by servitude or death. Those who refused to work in the cities’ sweatshops, foundries, or mines were charged with vagrancy—punishable by servitude or death. And those who continued to gather food or firewood like their ancestors or who stole out of desperation were charged with theft—all punishable by servitude and death.

The first generations of servants to be spared the gallows in London found a slower death in Virginia, where mortality rates were astronomic.5 By the 1750s, the conditions were not as catastrophic, but they remained miserable. We can see why people like John Winter chose the dignity of the fugitive over the life of the servant.

On April 14, 1760, a slave Washington described in his journal as “Boson” ran away from Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon. He was caught and returned on April 18. Boson was likely whipped, deprived rations, or “smoked” in retaliation. “Smoking” involved suspending a slave in an active smokehouse or forcing him to dig a shallow hole big enough for himself to fit. Dried grass, leaves, and stalks were placed over the slave and lit on fire. As the plant matter burned, the slave was deprived of oxygen and showered with tiny embers. This practice was so well established by the 1820s, that Missouri overseers called it “Virginia play.” Knowing the punishments he risked and the separation from his loved ones should he succeed, it speaks to the severity of Mt. Vernon slave life and the courage of Boson that he chose to make another run for it that summer. Sadly, Boson was captured and returned again on August 24, 1760.

In August 1761, four slaves whose names are recorded as Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid fled one of Washington’s plantations together. Washington bought an advertisement offering a ransom for their return, describing the fugitives and asserting that

“The two last of these Negroes were bought from an African Ship in August 1759, and talk very broken and unintelligible English; the second one, Jack, is Countryman to those, and speaks pretty good English, having been several Years in the Country. The other, Peros, speaks much better than either, indeed has little of his Country Dialect left, and is esteemed a sensible judicious Negro. As they went off without the least Suspicion, Provocation, or Difference with any Body, or the least angry Word or Abuse from their Overseers, tis supposed they will hardly lurk about in the Neighbourhood, but steer some direct Course (which cannot even be guessed at) in Hopes of an Escape.”

A record of Washington’s personal servants and slaves published in 1762 lists 71 people in thrall to the man we celebrate today as a hero of liberty. These were some of the people whose labor built Washington’s fortune:

“A List of Tythables in Fairfax County—given into Captn Daniel McCarty—June 9th 1762—viz.1 George Washington Ho. Servants: Thomas Bishop, Breechy, Schomberg, Jack, Doll, Jenny, Betty, Phillis, Moll, Sall, Kate. Carpenters: Turnr Crump, Anthony, Will, Morris, George, Michael, Tom, Sam, Ned. Smiths: Peter, London. Miller: George. Ditcher: Robt Haims. Ho. House: Burgs Mitchell, Jack, Jack, Jack, Ned, James, Charles, Davy. Dogue Run: John Alton, Peros, Will, Cæsar, Troy, Stafford, Betty, Sarah, Sue, Lucy. Creek Plann: Josias Cook, Matt, Cupid, Will, Jenny, Kitty. Muddy hole: Edwd Violette, Grig, Will, Jupiter, Essex, Sam, Betty, Ruth, Hannah, Kate, Phœbe. River Plann: Saml Johnson [Jr.], Tom, Ben, George, Robin, Nat, Peg, Murria, Clœ, Flora, Doll—GW. In all—71”

Meanwhile, following France’s loss of lands between the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi River, Anglo-American settlers begin to stream into the Ohio River Valley. An inter-tribal Native alliance arose involving members of the Odawas, Anishinaabeg (Ojibwas), Neshnabé (Potawatomis), Wendat (Hurons), Myaamiaki (Miamis), Waayaahtanwa (Weas), Kiikaapoa (Kickapoos), Mascoutens, Peeyankihšiaki (Piankashaws), Lenni Lenape (Delawares) Shawnees, Wyandots, Mingos, and Onöndowá’ga (Seneca). Hostilities broke out in 1763 with an uprising known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, named for Pontiac, an Odawa leader. This stalled colonial expansion and forced the British to modify their policies, albeit at a high cost of lives.

North America in 1763.

Shortly after the uprising began, King George III issued his Royal Proclamation of 1763, forbidding British subjects from settling the newly-acquired lands. Though the proclamation was not related to the uprising, American colonists imagined it to be a result of it—adding to tensions between colonists, Native Americans, and the British Crown.

At that time, Washington was serving as a representative in the House of Burgesses for Frederick County. As the British imposed taxes on the American colonies to pay the costs of the military operations that expanded the territory that Washington and others were colonizing, Washington became increasingly upset with British rule. In 1764, the House sent the British Parliament a letter written by Thomas Jefferson complaining that “the inhabitants of the colonies are the slaves of the Britons from whom they are descended.”

Jefferson made no mention of the irony that he himself had fathered slaves whom he kept in bondage. This contradiction emerged again and again throughout the American Revolution. When the ruling class thought themselves to be treated unfairly, they complained that they were being treated like slaves; yet those who owned slaves always insisted that they treated their slaves so well that the latter had no objection to slavery. During the war of 1812, newspapers once again complained that American POWs were being treated worse than slaves.

In fact, many of the costs of establishing the empire were not imposed on those who benefitted from it, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but on ordinary people. Sailors, who were forced to perform manual labor similar to that imposed on chattel slaves, subjected to harsh punishments, and received little pay, were strongly affected by the new Stamp Act. The few goods they were permitted to take from port to port to sell on their own time were subject to new taxes. Consequently, they led some of the fiercest resistance to these taxes.

Rioters chasing officials during protests against the Stamp Act.

At the same time, Washington was gathering slaves from the estates of the investors in the Dismal Swamp Company for the purpose of draining the Great Dismal Swamp. This was another stage in the surveying and pacification of the unruly terrain of North America.

Starting in the 1600s, Native Americans, black people, and unruly whites used the murky swamp as a refuge from British settlements. By the 1800s, thousands of mostly African-American maroons inhabited the high and dry parts of the swamp, known as mesic islands. Self-sufficiency, barter with the outside world, and raids on nearby plantations kept the maroons housed, fed, and moderately comfortable. Numerous attacks against the planter class were conceived in the swamp and carried out from it. Here, the collective acts of individual runaways became a communal force.

Today, Donald Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” continues George Washington’s legacy. Masking his actions as a rebellion against the powerful, he aims to carry out ecological devastation and crack down on targeted communities in pursuit of his own financial gain.

Knowing that the work would be grueling, possibly fatal, and the conditions horrible, investors contributed the slaves they considered “least valuable”—54 slaves all together. For his part, Washington selected two people from Mt. Vernon, Jack and Caesar, then bought four more from an estate sale: Harry, Topsom, Nan, and a child named Toney.

Harry was likely born around 1740 near the Gambia River in West Africa. Kidnapped and forced across the Atlantic, Harry survived the grueling conditions of the Middle Passage that took the lives of millions, arriving in Virginia around 1761. Thompson, Nan, and Toney may also have been African-born.

Despite the investors’ low opinion of the people they forced to dig and ditch the swamp, these slaves not only survived but repeatedly escaped over the following years. The other acts of rebellion they committed are lost to history. Those must have been considerable, however, in view of the courage it took to risk their lives to escape.

In September 1764, a slave whose name is recorded as Breechy fled from Mt. Vernon. Born around 1740, Breechy had experienced excruciating chest pains and fever during February 1760, requiring bed rest and doctor’s visits. He was given a leather knee brace too during the summer of 1764, presumably from the grueling farm labor. Breechy was captured and returned December 19 by “Christmas (Criemus) Meekins (Meakens) of New Kent County.” Breechy was listed in one of Washington’s last lists of slaves in 1799.

North America in 1767.

On April 10, 1766, Washington paid a bill to a Maryland prison where one of his slaves was housed, a person whose name is recorded as Cloe. At this time, jails often served as an extension of household authority: if a wife, minor, slave, servant, or apprentice was misbehaving and the head of the household could afford to pay his or her keep, the offender could be confined in the jail or physically punished by the jailor. Likewise, women, people of color, or apprentices traveling without their master or his written approval could be locked up until their master located them and paid for their keep. Given how far away from Mt. Vernon she was, Cloe was likely on the lam when she was confined.

Later in 1766, two slaves whose names are recorded as Tom and Bett ran away from Mt. Vernon. Tom, the slave foreman at River Farm, was sold the following year in the West Indies as a punishment for being “both a Rogue & Runaway.” Washington wrote to the ship’s captain to “keep him handcuffd till you get to Sea.” Bett, too, was eventually caught.

In late 1767, several slaves in Fairfax area conspired to kill their masters. Slaves belonging to Washington’s business partner, friend, and fellow founding father George Mason were involved in the plot. Feeling he was not properly reimbursed for the Crown executing his slaves, Mason had Washington collect money from Mason’s debtors to help his business stay afloat. This incident was reported in the Pennsylvania Gazette of December 31, 1767:

“From Alexandria, in Virginia, we learn, that a Number of Negroes there had lately conspired to poison their Overseers, and that several Persons have lost their Lives in Consequence thereof; that some of the Negroes have been taken up, four of whom were executed about three Weeks ago, after which their Heads were cut off, and fixed on the Chimnies of the Court-House; and it was expected that four more would soon meet with the same Fate.”

George Mason later voiced opposition to slavery. Yet he never gave full credit to the courage of those who rebelled against him, convincing him that enslaving people was more trouble than it was worth. Historians have repeated the omission, describing Mason as a humanitarian, not as a man educated by others’ courageous defiance to him.

In April 1767, an African slave whose name is recorded as Tom escaped from forced labor at the Dismal Swamp. He seems to have remained at liberty for quite some time. An advertisement for his capture that Washington’s brother placed in the Virginia Gazette in Williamsburg on June 23, 1768 reads:

“Nansemond, June 20, 1768. RUN away from the subscriber some time in April 1767, a new Negro man named TOM, belonging to the proprietors of the Dismal Swamp. He is about 5 feet 6 inches high, has his country marks (that is, four on each of his cheeks.) Any person that apprehends the said fellow, so that I may get him, shall have three pounds reward.”

On July 21, 1770, Michael Tracey, an indentured servant owned by Washington, ran away. Tracey was born in Ireland and indentured in Virginia. A bricklayer by trade, he was bought by Washington on July 25, 1768, when, according to Washington’s diary, he

“Went to Alexandria & bought a Bricklayer from Mr. Piper & returnd to Dinner.”

Michael was at Mt. Vernon til at least 1770 when he was sold to an Alexandria brewer named Andrew Wales, who later reported him missing.

In June 1771, Will Shag escaped from the Great House Plantation where he was enslaved. The estate belonged to Martha Washington’s son, John Parke Custis, but it was under Washington’s care, as John had not yet fully reached adulthood. Will’s absence was immediately reported to Washington.

Will had repeatedly escaped before. His captors had moved him to the Great Plantation in the hopes it would settle him. Following his escape, he lived for a few months along the York River and passed as a free man by the name of Will Jones. An overseer from Great House went to capture him and bring him back, but on the way, Will beat him and escaped again.

Joseph Valentine, manager of Great House, ran this advertisement in the July 18, 1771 edition of the Virginia Gazette:

“Ran away, about the middle of June last, from Mr. John Parke Custis’s plantation, near the Capitol landing, a likely young Virginia born Negro fellow named Will, about 6 feet high, very full faced, and full eyed. The said Negro broke York gaol some time ago, and was taken again, but in bringing him home to the said plantation he made his escape from the overseer. As he passed at York some time for a free man, I have reason to believe that he will try to get on board some vessel. Whoever will bring the said Negro to me, near Williamsburg, shall receive Twenty shillings reward, besides what the law allows. He is out-lawed. . . . All masters of vessels are cautioned against taking him on board at their peril.”

The process of “outlawing” a slave was set forth in “An Act directing the trial of Slaves committing capital crimes… and for the better government of negroes, mulattoes, and Indians, bond or free.” This act stipulated that in the case of “outlawed” fugitive slaves,

“it shall be lawful for any person, or persons whatsoever, to kill and destroy such slaves, by any ways or means, without accusation, or impeachment of any crime for the same.”

After several weeks of freedom, Will Shag was arrested. In August, Valentine wrote to Washington informing him of the situation, saying of Will “he will not worke and a greater Roge is not to be foun.” A month later, the overseers at Bakers Quarter are reported to have captured Will sleeping in the woods. Valentine insisted that Washington should sell him, as they would never be able to keep him in captivity.

On July 29, 1771, a valuable ostler named Harry made his first escape from Mount Vernon. Harry had spent years enslaved in the mosquito-invested Dismal Swamp digging ditches and cutting wood, then slowly worked his way up to become a house servant caring for Washington’s horses. In June, Harry had been demoted to building a mill at Mt. Vernon’s furthest property, Ferry Plantation. This shift may have been too reminiscent of the swamp; it was almost certainly the catalyst for his July cavale.

Washington paid one pound and sixteen shillings to advertise for the recovery of his property, as Cassandra Pybus relates in The Human Tradition in the Black Atlantic, 1500-2000. Washington noted in his diary on August 2, 1771, “At home all day a writing Letters & Advertisements of Harry who run away the 29th.” Harry was captured and returned a few weeks later, but remained determined to escape.

On December 5, 1771, the Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg, ran the following advertisement:

“RUN away from the Subscriber, in Isle of Wight, a Negro named JACK, about five and thirty Years of Age, five Feet ten Inches high, a slim, clean made, talkative, artful, and very saucy Fellow. Also a Negro Woman named VENUS, thirty two Years old, five Feet four Inches high, stout made, very smooth tongued, and has been five Years accustomed to the House. They worked in the Dismal Swamp about two Years, under Mr. John Washington, and carried with them several different Kinds of Apparel. Whoever delivers the said Negroes to me, or secures them so that I may get them, shall have a Reward of FORTY SHILLINGS for each.”

Venus and Jack, formerly owned by the Washingtons and the Dismal Swamp Company, escaped repeatedly over an eight-year period.

A list of slaves held captive under Washington’s authority in December 1771 includes over 200 people.

In spring of 1772, Will Shag succeeded in escaping again. He was captured once more and returned in July. The following winter, Washington had him sold in the Caribbean. Uncompromising rebels like Will spread revolt wherever they were sent.

In 1773, a slave in his early fifties whose name is recorded as Coachman Jemmy, escaped from Washington’s Great House plantation after being put to work making ditches. James Hill, the manager of the plantation, called Jemmy “one of the Greatest Raschals I ever lookd after in all my life” and advised Washington to get rid of him as soon as possible:

“there is no getg. of him to do any thing more then he Pleases & he only corrupts the Rest & if you dont conclude to Sell him am determined to send him to the Easten Shore that he never Shall Strike a Stroke this side while I stay in the Estate.”

If Jemmy was caught, Hill advised Washington to sell him to the Caribbean like Will Shag, and in no case keep him on the estate—because even if he were kept in shackles, “the negro Blacksmiths in town will soon file them off.” This comment hints at the clandestine networks of solidarity that rendered all these escapes possible.

The same year, the slave who had escaped with “Venus” in 1771, whose name is recorded as “Jack Dismal” on account of the years of hard labor he had performed in the course of Washington’s attempt to “drain the swamp,” escaped again from the man who had bought him from the Washingtons. The February 18, 1773 issue of the Virginia Gazette reads:

“RUN away from Mr. James Hunter’s, opposite Fredericksburg, on his way to Frederick, a Negro man named JACK DISMAL, a black slim made fellow, about 5 feet 10 inches high, has thick lips, and is a cunning, artful fellow. It is supposed he went down Rappahannock in some vessel, in order to get to James river. Whoever secures the said Negro, so that I get him again, shall have FORTY SHILLINGS, or FIVE POUNDS if delivered to William Herndon, my overseer in Frederick county.”

Reading such ads, one is struck by the central role that newspapers played in maintaining white supremacy, and by the fact that would-be slave owners were constantly forced to shell out reward money to maintain their position. Before the American Revolution, as today, wealthy property owners, corporate media outlets, and armed enforcers of order formed a three-way alliance.

Recruiting poster for a fake revolution. The liberties and independence of human beings are far more important than the liberties and independence of any nation.

The Tide of Revolution

All the tensions in the colonies were coming to a head at once. William Webster, an indentured servant at Mt. Vernon purchased in March 1774, ran away immediately. He was captured and returned on April 26, 1774, but he escaped again a year later.

Meanwhile, Washington was railing against the “Intolerable Acts” passed by the British Parliament to punish colonists in Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party. He wrote to Bryan Fairfax that

“The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights or submit to every imposition till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”

When colonial Governor Lord Dunmore disbanded the House of Burgessess, Washington chaired a meeting in Fairfax County condemning the taxes imposed by the Crown and calling for the first inter-colonial convention of the colonies. The meeting and ensuing proclamation are known as the Fairfax Resolves: “We will use every means which Heaven hath given us to prevent our becoming its [Britain’s] slaves.”

In April 1775, William Webster escaped again, this time in the company of another indentured servant, Thomas Spears. While preparing to rise in rebellion against the Crown, Washington offered a reward of forty dollars for the return of these two men he sought to keep in subjugation.

On June 14, 1775, Congress created the Continental Army and appointed Washington Commander-in-Chief. His refusal to accept a salary won him acclaim; the truth is that the unpaid labor of his many slaves rendered any salary the rebel colonies could raise for him superfluous.

Ten days later, a slave whose name is recorded as Charles escaped from Washington’s brother. Charles had sustained a serious knee injury, likely while laboring to enrich the Washington family.

On August 7, 1775, Joseph Smith, an indentured painter from Scotland, escaped from Washington’s brother-in-law while on loan from Washington. He went to fight for the British forces under Lord Dunmore, preferring the tyranny of the Crown to the tyranny of his master. As a cousin of Washington’s wrote to Washington, upon Smith’s wounding and capture,

“The Paint(er) was one among the Prisoners taken at Hampton, after recieveg a wound in the thigh—& is now in jail at Wmsburg the wound almost well—I have wrote to Colo. Lewis desireg he woud order him up to Fredrixburg, if he cannot sell him in Wmsburg, & sell him to some of the back people, after Whipg him at a Publick whiping Post—my information is from Thos Davis by last Post—he calls himself Joseph Wilson but acknowledges himse[l]f to be your Servt, & that he Run away from Colo. Lewis, but is unwiling to be sent back.

Our Dunmore has at length Publishd his much dreaded proclamation—declareg Freedom to All Indented Servts & Slaves (the Property of Rebels) that will repair to his majestys Standard—being able to bear Arms—What effect it will have upon those sort of people I cannot tell—I think if there was no white Servts in this family I shoud be under no apprehensition about the Slaves, however I am determined, that if any of them Create any confusition to make & [an] example of him, Sears who is at worck here says there is not a man of them, but woud leave us, if they believe’d they coud make there Escape—Tom Spears Excepted—& yet they have no fault to find[.] Liberty is sweet.”

This letter reveals a great deal about the loyalties of indentured servants. The conditions of unrest that had arisen in the colonies had forced the British to offer them the possibility of freedom—and this was more attractive to them than the mere national liberation that George Washington sought while aiming to keep slaves and indentured servants in chains.

Already, by November 1775, hundreds of runaways had made their way to Dunmore’s camp. By the end of the war, between 80,000 and 100,000 slaves had escaped—roughly 1 in 46—making the American Revolution the first mass slave exodus in American history. However, only 20,000-30,000 made it across British lines. (By contrast, a mere 5000 slaves fought alongside their masters for American Independence.) Where did the rest of the escapees go? Some were captured and returned; others succumbed to disease; but the rest must have melted away into maroon communities or set out for the frontier.

Washington privately feared the defection of servants and slaves to British lines, admitting to Richard Henry Lee, “If that man [Dunmore] is not crushed before spring he will become the most formidable enemy of America… His strength will increase as a snowball by rolling, and faster, if some expedient cannot be hit upon to convince the slaves and servants of the impotency of his designs.”

On July 19, 1776, fifteen days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Harry, the slave who had made an escape in 1771, sought again to escape along with a couple of white servants. The group made their way down the Potomac until they reached Lord Dunmore’s overcrowded, disease-ridden fleet. An outbreak of smallpox followed by typhoid fever forced Dunmore to later admit, “There was not a ship in the fleet that did not throw one, two, three or more dead overboard every night.”

Despite the miserable conditions, Harry enlisted in Dunmore’s “Black Pioneers” and rose to the rank of Corporal. During the invasion of Charleston in 1781, Harry commanded a company of black troops. It would seem that the black soldiers saw little to no combat, serving a support role of establishing infrastructure, building earthworks, and assembling grapeshot. People of color played similar roles in the US military during World War II and other campaigns.

In 1778, Washington ordered that a slave named Priscilla be separated from her husband and sent from Mt. Vernon to serve his mother Mary Ball Washington in Fredericksburg. Priscilla and her husband protested the move vigorously until Washington was forced to reunite them a year later. Incidents like this one show that in these unpredictable conditions of social ferment, even enslaved people who did not choose to escape could bring leverage to bear on their captors, forcing them to make concessions.

The same year, Jack Dismal and Venus escaped again with another slave named Zeny and her daughter Nelly. Meanwhile, a slave belonging to George Washington whose name is recorded as Ben, died while being forced to work in the rice field of the Great Dismal Swamp. This tragic episode illustrates the fortitude that Jack, Venus, Harry, and others displayed in surviving their ordeal in the swamp and repeatedly setting out for freedom.

In 1779, Washington earned his title, “Town Destroyer,” by ordering the Sullivan Expedition, which demolished at least 40 Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) villages in New York. Though relatively few of the Haudenosaunee were killed outright, the destruction of their homes, crops, cattle, and winter stores created a situation in which one in five of the 5000 Haudenosaunee refugees died of hunger or exposure that winter. The area we now think of as rural New York was cleared for white settlement by this act of mass killing.

In 1780, John Trumbull painted George Washington with Billy Lee, an enslaved man who was Washington’s body servant during the Revolutionary War. Billy Lee remained enslaved by Washington until Washington’s death in 1799.

In 1781, at the high point of the Revolutionary War, Washington’s cousin, Lund Washington, recorded that 17 slaves had escaped from Mt. Vernon. The fourteen men and three women took refuge on the HMS Savage docked in the nearby Potomac. According to Lund Washington, these included7

“Peter. an old man. Lewis. an old man. Frank. an old man. Frederick. a man about 45 years old; an overseer and valuable. Gunner. a man about 45 years old; valuable, a Brick maker. Harry. a man about 40 years old, valuable, a Horseler. Tom, a man about 20 years old, stout and Healthy. Sambo. a man about 20 years old, stout and Healthy. Thomas. a lad about 17 years old, House servant. Peter. a lad about 15 years old, very likely. Stephen. a man about 20 years old, a cooper by trade. James. a man about 25 years old, stout and Healthy. Watty. a man about 20 years old, by trade a weaver. Daniel. a man about 19 years old, very likely. Lucy. a woman about 20 years old. Esther. a woman about 18 years old. Deborah. a woman about 16 years old.”

Washington wrote back, furious with the British for stealing his property.

The Washington family, with a figure who is likely Christopher Sheels, an enslaved person, on the right.

The War of Independence Concludes, The War on Slaves Continues

When the war ended in 1782, it took the British forces and their allies by surprise. Boston King, a slave who had liberated himself, recalled that in New York City, the peace

“issued universal joy among all parties, except us, who had escaped from slavery, and taken refuge in the English army; for a report prevailed at New York, that all slaves, in number 2000, were to be delivered up to their masters, although some of them had been three or four years among the English. This dreadful rumor filled us all with inexpressible anguish and terror, especially when we saw our masters coming from Virginia, North Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds. Many of the slaves had very cruel masters, so that the thoughts of returning home with them embittered life to us. For some days, we lost our appetite for food, and sleep departed from our eyes.”

Rather than going to New York themselves, masters often hired slave catchers or complained to officials. Virginia Governor Benjamin Harrison was so swamped by complaints that he wrote Washington for help, who answered,

“I have but little expectation that many will be recovered; several of my own are with the Enemy but I scarce ever bestowed a thought on them; they have so many doors through which they can escape from New York, that scarce any thing but an inclination to return, or voluntarily surrender for themselves will restore many to their former Masters.”

Washington still hoped to recover his “property,” however. As the Americans began to take control of New York City, he asked local merchant Daniel Parker to look for his runaways: “If by chance you should come at the knowledge of any of them, I will be much obliged by your securing them so I may obtain them again.” Appointed as a commissioner to ensure no American property was taken away by the British, Daniel Parker succeeded in capturing seven of the over twenty escapees from Mt. Vernon. One of the 1781 runaways, the 18-year-old Deborah, managed to leave New York aboard the Polly on April 27, 1783. Harry, his future wife, Jenny, and over 400 self-liberated former slaves followed in July 1783 on L’Abondance. Finally, on the very last ship to leave New York City with refugee runaways on board, Daniel, the 21-year-old who escaped with Deborah in 1781, left the country for good. All told, thousands of runaways were successfully evacuated to Nova Scotia, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and England.

Yet Jenny and Harry soon found themselves in a freezing, unfarmable section of Nova Scotia, suffering a fate only slightly better than that of Virginia slaves. Here, too, they were considered inferior, prohibited from voting or serving on juries. After eight years of toil, the community sent a delegate to Britain to protest their condition. Hoping to draw new settlers to their colony on the west coast of Africa, the Sierra Leone Company offered free grants of land “subject to certain charges and obligations” to new settlers: twenty acres for every man, ten for every woman, five for every child.

And so in 1791, Jenny, Harry, and over 1100 other refugees who had stayed in Nova Scotia found themselves on their way to Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle), a hero of the struggle against colonial expansion led by President George Washington.

After the Revolution: The Reaction

After the war, the collective ferment of the mid-1700s gave way to the re-entrenchment of bureaucracy.

With the Treaty of Paris in 1783, hostilities between the British and Americans officially ended, and the British turned over lands from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Over 45,000 Native Americans still lived in the region west of the Appalachian Mountains. Before the Americans took control of the land, Native representatives began meeting together to coordinate defense—in some cases setting aside generations of inter-tribal conflict. Many still remembered the burning of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) villages in rural New York, the massacre at Gnadenhutten of pacifist Lenni Lenape (Delaware People), and other war crimes committed by the Americans during the Revolutionary War. Native Americans had won most of their engagements during the war, yet had not been consulted during the peace process. They did not wish to cede their homes northwest of the Ohio River.

On one side, in 1785, Congress began selling land in the Ohio River Valley to help pay the costs of the Revolutionary War. On the other side, by 1786, a formal self-defense coalition was established involving members of the Wendat (Hurons), Shawnee, Odawas, Anishinaabeg (Ojibwas), Neshnabé (Potawatomis), Lenni Lenape (Delaware), Myaamiaki (Miami), Waayaahtanwa (Wea), Kiikaapoa (Kickapoo), Peeyankihšiaki (Piankashaw), Kaahkaahkiaki (Kaskaskia), and Chickamauga Cherokee. Raids and ambushes against settlers encroaching on Native land soon followed. Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle) of the Atchatchakangouen (Crane Band of the Myaamiaki), Weyapiersenwah (Blue Jacket) of the Shawnee, Buckongahelas of the Lenni Lenape, and Egushawa (The Gatherer) of the Odawa were among the leaders during the ensuing conflict; the Northwest Indian War is sometimes called Little Turtle’s War or Blue Jacket’s War in their honor.

In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance. Not only did this act bullheadedly assert US ownership of the Ohio River Valley, it also proclaimed:

“There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted: Provided, always, That any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid.”

The Northwest Territories.

Slave owners found a way around this easily enough: family members in a slave state would seasonally send slaves to family members in Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois. Before the slaves could establish residency, they were sent back to slave states, only to be rotated back to “free” territory again a few months later. George and Martha Washington utilized this tactic themselves, bringing eight slaves—Giles, Paris, Moll, Hercules, Richmond, Christopher Sheels, Oney Judge, and her half-brother Austin—to the President’s House in Philadelphia, then rotating them back to Mt. Vernon or taking them on short trips to New Jersey. When Austin died in 1794, he was replaced in the rotation by Postilion Joe Richardson.

In 1789, the Federal government further solidified its power in the Constitution, protecting the rights of slave owners in the process. The Constitution infamously declared each slave to count as three fifths of a human being. George Washington became the first president of the United States.

In 1790, Washington ordered that an army be raised for Secretary of War Henry Knox to launch a campaign against the tribes to the northwest. The first engagement proved a decisive loss for the Americans, who lost over a hundred soldiers. Washington ordered another campaign the following year, but Mihšihkinaahkwa, Weyapiersenwah, and hundreds of Native warriors ambushed the American troops, killing the majority of them. Over the following two years, Native warriors won several more engagements, but the cost of war ultimately took its toll. After the Native coalition surrendered, forts and other European infrastructure began to appear in the Ohio River Valley. So did slave owners.

In 1793, Washington signed the Fugitive Slave Act, giving power to slave owners or their representatives to enter states that had outlawed slavery to regain their slaves. As a Federal law, the Act trumped local or state laws forbidding the kidnapping of self-liberated slaves. The Act also forbid anyone from harboring or aiding a fugitive slave. Those who continued to aid runaways risked corporal punishment, fines, jail time, and, in extreme cases, banishment.

Writing to his manager William Pearce that same year, Washington emphasized the importance of maintaining class society, counseling against managers and overseers fraternizing with slaves and servants:

“To treat them civilly is no more than what all men are entitled to, but my advice to you is, to keep them at a proper distance; for they will grow upon familiarity, in proportion as you will sink in authority, if you do not.”

When a slave whose name is recorded as Abram escaped, Washington counseled William Pearce in a letter written March 1794 that when Abram was captured he should make sure he was punished in front of other slaves, and punished by the crueler of the two overseers at Union Farm.

The following May, towards the start of her second trimester of pregnancy, Priscilla ran away for a week. She may have been away visiting friends, or seeking a respite from working while pregnant—or perhaps she didn’t want another child born into the hell of Mt. Vernon.

Washington’s holdings in 1793.

In 1796, 21-year-old Oney Judge, a dower slave belonging to Martha Washington, walked out the back door of the President’s House and escaped. Martha had been planning to give Oney to her granddaughter as a wedding gift. With over 2000 free people of color in Philadelphia, it was a far more promising place to escape than Mt. Vernon. As Oney later recalled,

“Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn’t know where; for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty. I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington’s house while they were eating dinner.”

An ad appeared in The Philadelphia Gazette of May 24, 1796 on behalf of the First Lady:

“Absconded from the household of the President of the United States, ONEY JUDGE, a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy hair. She is of middle stature, slender, and delicately formed, about 20 years of age. She has many changes of good clothes, of all sorts, but they are not sufficiently recollected to be described—As there was no suspicion of her going off, nor no provocation to do so, it is not easy to conjecture whither she has gone, or fully, what her design is; but as she may attempt to escape by water, all masters of vessels are cautioned against admitting her into them, although it is probable she will attempt to pass for a free woman, and has, it is said, wherewithal to pay her passage. Ten dollars will be paid to any person who will bring her home, if taken in the city, or on board any vessel in the harbour;—and a reasonable additional sum if apprehended at, and brought from a greater distance, and in proportion to the distance. FREDERICK KITT, Steward. May 23”

Reclaiming Oney became an obsession for Washington, but she always managed to stay a step of head of him. First, she went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. But after Senator John Langdon spotted her and snitched on her to the Washingtons, Oney panicked and offered to return to Mt. Vernon if her freedom could be guaranteed at the time of Washington’s death. The President responded furiously to Landgon:

“I regret that the attempt you made to restore the girl (Oney Judge as she called herself while with us, and who, without the least provocation absconded from her Mistress) should have been attended with so little success. To enter into such a compromise, as she has suggested to you, is totally inadmissible, for reasons that must strike at first view: for however well disposed I might be to a gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of People (if the latter was in itself practicable at this Moment) it would neither be politic or just, to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference; and thereby discontent, beforehand, the minds of all her fellow Servants; who by their steady adherence, are far more deserving than herself, of favor…

Put her on board a Vessel bound either to Alexandria or the Federal City… I do not mean however, by this request, that such violent measures should be used as would excite a mob or riot, which might be the case if she has adherents, or even uneasy sensations in the minds of well disposed Citizens. rather than either of these shd happen, I would forego her services altogether; and the example also, which is of infinite more importance.”

Langdon mostly attempted verbal persuasion after this, agreeing that physical force would likely draw an abolitionist mob to Oney’s defense. He added “It has been remarked that there are many Servants who have escaped from the Southern States into Massachusetts and some to New Hampshire,” forcing Langdon to conclude to Washington that the practice of slavery was more trouble than it was worth.

Oney fell in love with a free sailor named Jack Staines. Despite Langdon’s attempts to block their marriage license, the two wedded, moved to Greenland, New Hampshire, and had a daughter, whom they namd Eliza. In 1798, Washington renewed his efforts to capture Oney, going so far as threatening to take Eliza, whom the law deemed his legal property, but to no avail.

Advertisement announcing the escape of Oney Judge.

Back at Mt. Vernon, Priscilla also fled again in 1796, after giving birth in January. This time, she was captured and returned by a William Minter Green around October 24. Over the next couple years, Priscilla was frequently ill, being forced to live in unhealthy conditions while raising children without her husband, who was owned by Washington but kept on a different farm in the Mt. Vernon complex.

The following three years saw a series of further escapes. On February 22, 1797, Hercules, who had served as the Presidential chef, escaped. Another slave named Caesar was repeatedly absent from work. In April 1798, slaves named Lucy and Dundee disappeared for several days, as did Joe, a gardener, and another slave named Sophia later that year.

Hercules had always appeared to be loyal to the Washingtons. Bought by the Washingtons in 1767 as a ferryman, he worked his way up to serve as head cook at Mt. Vernon. As cook, Hercules followed Washington to the President’s House in New York and Philadelphia. Known for ruling the kitchen with an iron fist, Hercules served the food eaten by the first First Family and all the dignitaries they hosted. One guest later recalled, a feast of “roast beef, veal, turkey, ducks, fowls, hams, &c.; puddings, jellies, oranges, apples, nuts, almonds, figs, raisins, and a variety of wines and punches.”

Due to his worth, Hercules was given considerable freedom: he walked to the local markets each morning, perusing the latest arrivals in the cosmopolitan Philadelphia, and was even allowed to sells scraps from the kitchen, earning him an income similar to top-paid chiefs—$200 a year.

Living in Philadelphia gave Hercules the chance to showcase his latest wears. After serving dinner at the stroke of 4, Hercules would dress and stroll the streets of the city. His dandyism was widely known.

Yet as a slave, Hercules was rotated between Philadelphia and Mt. Vernon, and on one visit south he was demoted to the humiliating task of digging ditches. Hercules had served fine meats and wines to foreign dignitaries! He could not abide this change in status.

February 22, 1797 was George Washington’s 65th birthday. He celebrated the day in Philadelphia, where sixteen rounds of cannon fire announced the general’s birthday. February 22 was also a holiday for the slaves and servants of Mt. Vernon, and Hercules intended to make good use of it. Perhaps using the river-faring knowledge of his youth, and counting on the free people of color in Philadelphia, Hercules made his way north. The last the Washingtons ever heard of Hercules, he was living well in New York City in 1801.

Hercules, enslaved chef to the President of the United States and, more importantly, successful escapee.

During the summer of 1799, 25-year-old Christopher Sheels plotted to escape with his fiancée, a woman enslaved to Washingon’s neighbor, Roger West. The plan was discovered in September when written correspondence including a map of their route was found in the yard of Mt. Vernon.

Born around 1774 to Alyce, an enslaved spinner, and Christopher Sheels, a white wagon driver, Christopher spent his first fourteen years at Mt. Vernon. His grandmother, whose name is recorded as Old Doll, was one of the original dower slaves brought to Mt. Vernon by Martha in the 1750s. As an adolescent, Christopher had accompanied Washington to New York City and then Philadelphia, acting as the President’s loyal body servant the whole time. Even the winter after his attempt was foiled, as Washington lay dying, Christopher Sheel stayed by his bed—witnessing the inflammation and bloodletting that ended the first president’s life.

After Washington

“Shame! Shame! That man should be deemed the property of man or that the name of Washington should be found among the list of such proprietors.” –Edward Rushton, letter to Washington, February 20, 1797

America began the 19th century in mourning. Congress wore black and set aside $200,000 to build a pyramid mausoleum for Washington beneath the Capitol’s rotunda, a proposal Martha vetoed. America’s major cities held funeral processions attended by the thousands. In France, Napoleon ordered ten days of morning; the ships of the British Navy lowered their flags to half mast. When February 22 arrived, patriotic Americans were as determined as ever to celebrate the first president’s birthday.

But the slaves of Mt. Vernon must have received the news of Washington’s death with mixed emotions. Washington owned well over 100 of them; they’d long been told that they would be set free when he passed away. Yet many had befriended, intermarried with, and parented children with Martha’s dower slaves and those of the neighbors. What would emancipation mean for those whose loved ones were still in chains?

The problem was soon rendered moot, as it was revealed that Washington’s will did not free his slaves at the time of his death, but rather at the time of Martha’s. George had lied through his teeth.8

On August 2, a 16-year-old slave whose name is recorded as Marcus ran off. Though Washington’s slaves hadn’t been freed yet, newspapers around the country were carrying news that they had been. Perhaps Marcus hoped to take advantage of this.

“MARCUS, One of the House Servants at Mount Vernon, Absconded on the second instant, and since has not been heard of. He is a young lad, about 16 years of age, a bright mulatto, dark blue eyes, long black hair, about 5 feet 4 or 5 inches high, and of a slender make. He had on when he left this place a coat and jacket of dark mixture, black and white, and black breeches – but having various suits, one of black, and another of very light drab, it is uncertain which of these he now wears. Originally, his name was Billy and possibly he may resume the same. It is very probable he may attempt to pass for one of those negroes that did belong to the late Gen. Washington, and whom Mrs. Washington intends in the fall of this year to liberate – the public are therefore warned against any such imposition, as he is one of those negroes which belongs to the estate of Washington P. Custis Esq. and held by right of dower by Mrs. Washington during her life. I will give Ten Dollars Reward to any person who shall apprehend the said negro and lodge him in some safe gaol, upon producing me a certificate to that effect; and will also pay all reasonable charges over and above this reward, for the delivery of him to me at this place. Ship Masters are hereby forewarned not to take on board Marcus; and those who are found to secret or harbor him, will be punished as the law directs. JAMES ANDERSON, Mount Vernon, August 28.”

-The Philadelphia Gazette & Daily Advertiser, September 22, 1800

Advertisement announcing the escape of Marcus.

Around this time, Martha began fearing for her life. There were rumors at Mt. Vernon to the effect that Washington’s slaves intended to kill her in order to hasten their freedom. Martha started to suspect that her food would be poisoned. A series of suspicious fires that year pushed Martha to her breaking point: all of Washington’s 123 slaves were to be freed the first of the year.

To put this in context, the Creole Slave Mutiny is considered the largest US slave revolt in terms of the number of people freed: 128. Here at Mt. Vernon, we see a similar number freed as the consequence of at least a handful of people conducting a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Martha Washington. When First Lady Abigail Adams visited Mt. Vernon in mid-December 1800, she noted that Martha “did not feel as tho her Life was safe in their Hands, many of whom would be told that it was there interest to get rid of her.”

Though life outside Mt. Vernon would be hard—some of the liberated slaves had never left the property or learned trades—most thought the risk was better than life there.

When Jack Staines died in 1803, Oney Judge Staines was left destitute, her children suffering a fate similar to other free poor people, both black and white: Eliza and Nancy became indentured servants, while her son Will was apprenticed as a sailor. Yet despite the hardships, Oney maintained until her death in 1848 that she had no regrets about leaving the Washingtons. “No, I am free, and have, I trust been made a child of God by the means.”

After leaving Nova Scotia in 1791, Harry and his wife Jenny found themselves mistreated yet again in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Though Jenny and Harry were able to start their own farm, sustaining it proved impossible under the tax system imposed by the Sierra Leone Company. This diabolical form of debt-slavery later became the sharecropping industry that dominated the lives of former slaves in the American South after the Civil War.

But Harry did not quit. He and hundreds of other self-freed former American slaves refused to pay the tax and eventually, to the horror of the Sierra Leona Company, formed their own government. If not for the arrival of 500 Jamaican maroons from Nova Scotia in the summer of 1800, Harry and the rest might have succeeded in push for self-determination.

Instead, the British were able to use the tried-and-true method of offering privileges to one section of the underclass in return for their assistance suppressing another part of the underclass. The Company promised better land to the maroons on the condition that they pacify the rebels. Rounded up and charged with “open and unprovoked rebellion,” Harry, Jenny, and other insurgents were eventually exiled across the Sierra Leone River to the Bullom Shore.

From the Gambia River in West Africa to the Dismal Swamp of America to South Carolina, New York, and Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone, Harry never stopped seeking freedom. He passed the last years of his life as an influential member of the new settlement in the Bullom Shore. Freedom is not comprised of guarantees, but of the willingness to continue setting out for the horizon.

In the 1800s, slaves no longer ran away from George Washington, but for the next sixty years they fled from cities and counties that bore his name. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and into the 21st, people of color have been confined to schools, workplaces, and prisons named after the first president, in which they are afforded no more respect than he accorded them while he was alive. The fact that people celebrate his name, his birthday, and his legacy while forgetting or erasing those of Harry and Oney Judge is an insult to those who suffered at his hands; that he is remembered as a revolutionary hero shows that the American Revolution has yet to take place.

The Dismal Swamp Company that Washington helped found was a colossal failure. Only after decades of little success were the investors able to recoup any money by logging a small portion of the swamp. By the end of his life, Washington dreaded the occasional company updates; he sold his shares in the 1790s. Perhaps this is an indication of how successful Trump’s efforts to “drain the swamp” will ultimately be.

“George Washington was a slave owner… are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Good. Are we going to take down the statue? ‘Cause he was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? So you know what? It’s fine. You are changing history; you’re changing culture.”

-Donald Trump, responding to fascist violence and murder in Charlottesville. Virginia

Here’s to changing history and changing culture.

Faster comrade, the New World is behind you.

George Washington’s false teeth, which were apparently taken from the mouths of slaves..

The Dollar Bill: A Postscript

One of the authors of this cursory summary, a Leopold Trebitch,9 toyed with the idea of telling readers to burn a portrait of George Washington—the one-dollar bill. How ubiquitous its presence! How invented its worth—yet how real its power! Burning a dollar bill is an act of freedom, mixed with discomfort: “What am I doing! I’m going to regret this!” Yet, what do we consume that costs less than a dollar? It’s hardly an expensive lesson.

In the end, we concluded that in order to honor those who escaped George Washington, it is more sensible to give that dollar to one of the following causes. Burn a dollar if you like, but then give a hundred more to…

The Kris Thompson Legal Fund

On August 22, 2017, Kiwi Herring, a trans woman, was killed by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department while defending herself against a homophobic neighbor. As the only witness to the murder, Kiwi Herring’s widow, Kris Thompson, has been punitively charged with Assault in the First Degree and Armed Criminal Action in order to silence Kris from speaking out against the police. If convicted, Kris faces a minimum of three years in prison with no probation or parole, and up to the maximum of two consecutive life sentences. Please give generously.

Ferguson Prisoners

The revolt in Ferguson breathed new life into many of the current struggles against police and white supremacy for a truly egalitarian world. Yet when the tear gas clears, we often forget those who remain locked up—who risked their freedom in order to put a limit on the abuse of the police, celebrate the life of Mike Brown, or send a heartfelt fuck you to those in power.

A list of Ferguson prisoners and mailing addresses at can be found here. Donations to their commissary funds may be made here.