#and given we exist in a culture way too comfortable with wishing violence on people... yeah.

[dragonlights]

Like I don't Post about drama but vis a vis predestro's Tumblr ban, like. I don't necessarily think it's a good thing that we on the Internet have become so desensitized to threats of violence that we use them as jokes, but like.... That's been Tumblr culture for, what, a decade now? At least four years. Almost definitely longer.

And like. I've seen so much worse. Folks admitting to sending asks telling others to kill themselves!! Folks outright wishing x/y person killed themselves!!! Folks harassing trans folks (esp. trans women!)

But what gets this one lady banned was her man door hammer hand car boom-ass post???

Like, talk about enforcing the TOS from the wrong angle.

I totally get that part of it is "this person had their rule breaking reported en masse so something happened" but shouldn't the severity of the response have more to do with the severity of the offense, rather than how many people reported that user?

Like. The fact that we have to do mass reports to get anything to happen to anyone is ridiculous.

And, the fact that INCORRECT mass reports aren't punished more is also ridiculous.

There's also no report function for discriminatory content, or for seeing users harass each other. So... If you're not the one being harassed, your report does... Nothing??

Unless you, what scroll through someone's blog looking for things you could report as threatening violence??

On the "I hope every politician dies" webbed site???

There's obviously something fucky with their reporting system- either the way that reports are handled, or the way the severity of the reports are being judged.

Cause right now, it looks like they got a flood of reports from TERFs, photomatt saw a post about him, and went "well, fuck it, get her out of here" without looking at the context of HER BEING HARASSED FOR AGES. And that the post in question- the only one I saw shared!- was almost certainly a vent post for Said Situation that was...

Comically mishandled?

Like this one?

Like. Look. Do I think maybe at some point, on the "way too comfortable with violence on people I see as Wrong in some way" webbed site, a popular user said something that could actually be construed as a threat, and due to rampant transmisogyny got, got her shit reported?

Yeah, I can see that.

I don't follow her blog too closely, I know she does a lot of hyperbolic stuff. (as is Done on this Web site, again... I've almost certainly rb'd things just as bad)

But the example photomatt uses is hilariously bad and so obviously not a threat, and one would think, IN LIGHT OF THERE BEING ALLEGATIONS OF TRANSPHOBIA ON THEIR TEAM FOR YEARS, THEY WOULD BRING OUT A MORE CREDIBLE PIECE OF EVIDENCE THAN A LOONY-TOONS ASS DEATH WISH.

Just. The bar was on the ground and they still fumbled It! Fucking! Amazing!

[learningnewways]

Leaving The Gambia

Wow, where did the time go? Actually, that’s kind of a joke as it felt veeeeery slow at times. This has definitely been the longest four months of my life! 

This week I caught up with friends, packed my bags and said goodbye... On Monday I visited my American friends the Reed’s for some board games and chats, Tuesday I went to the government shelter with Antonia then out for ice-cream with the Kursawe’s, Wednesday I packed my bags and had a farewell dinner cooked my M, then Thursday I went to the Reed’s one last time for Thanksgiving dinner, before heading to the airport. And that was my week! The quickest rundown of all!

It’s hard to believe I actually made it to the end of my time in The Gambia... The first weekend I arrived was so awful, I cried so much... Yet by my final week I was feeling so comfortable that I was even sad to leave... I know right?! A lot can change in a few months! I’m glad to be leaving on a positive note though, as my past few months have certainly been an emotional roller-coaster! I thought seriously about leaving early multiple times, as my parents can attest to! But I’m proud of myself for sticking it out, even when it was really hard. If I had left in one of the times I was feeling more down, I think it would’ve tainted my overall experience. Whereas leaving now in a good place, it means I’m leaving with fonder memories and feeling at peace.

It’s hard to imagine being back home in New Zealand so soon... Seeing my friends and family... Seeing the beautiful Nelson scenery... It all feels like a world away right now, a whole different life. I know I’m going to have to deal with reverse culture shock and lots of processing, most of which I’ll have to do alone, given I’m the only one who lived my experience. How will I live in NZ after what I’ve seen and experienced overseas? Maybe it’s not possible to go back to how things were, maybe the way I live will need to change... I’ve seen so much, not just in The Gambia, but also in The Middle East, that it will be hard to live with the privilege and easy life that is NZ. Of course we have our own struggles and some people are living it super rough, but overall things are pretty great and we have social welfare which helps too.

On Thursday we were watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade on TV and I honestly couldn’t believe what I was watching... It’s hard to explain since there’s nothing like it in NZ... But to me, the parade represents consumerism and over the top stuff to the maximum! And when you watch it from a place like The Gambia, it seems so ridiculous and weird... So much money is spent on these floats, surely that money could be used for something else? Then after the parade, everyone stuffs their face with dinner, then a few hours later it’s Black Friday, so everyone goes out and spends loads of money on things they don’t need... The idea is unfathomable from somewhere like The Gambia where people struggle to survive day by day...

I wish The Gambia wasn’t so far away from NZ so I could visit again easier... I wish there was more I could do from NZ to help... I wish that all the issues that exist in The Gambia, across Africa and the world didn’t exist... That there was no poverty and starvation, no sex abuse and trafficking, no drug and alcohol addiction, no malaria or aids, no violence and murder, no greed and corruption, no death in childbirth, no child brides, no female genital mutilation, no child soldiers... On and on the list goes... It’s paralyzing, the more I learn about the world, the harder it is to know what to stand for and fight for. No one can do it all, but we can all do something. So what am I going to do? 

Most of all, I want people to know and love Jesus. I hope that in my time overseas I have helped at least one person grow closer to Him, whether they are overseas or back home. God works in mysterious ways, so I might never know the impact He’s had on people through me, but I am grateful and humbled that He continues to use me to bring glory to Himself.

[honestgrins]

Can you write a Klaroline drabble where Caroline shows up in NOLA and shocks everyone but maybe Kol or Katherine when she says she's Klaus's wife? Cannon Caroline not original.

I Heard a Rumor

The club was filled with people and the chaos of a Friday night. Klaus preferred to avoid the rush of tourists, but Marcel kept the VIP lounge to a more tolerable set even during peak hours - usually.

“Don’t you just love this place?” Janet was hanging over the balcony to watch the crowds below, none too subtly pushing her ass back toward him. As one of the humans on staff to provide a live blood source, she was perfectly amiable to Klaus. He’d even become something of a regular customer for her given his penchant for the tinge of bourbon in her taste. However, it seemed she took the friendly flirtation of their transactions to heart, and she was testing his patience for more. 

Unfortunately for her, his patience was wearing thin. With a barely polite grimace, he downed the rest of his drink and made to stand. “It’s a bit rowdier than I like, love, so—”

She gave a rapturous giggle, only to fall into his lap and sprawl across him. “I like that you call me ‘love,’” she murmured, her mouth clumsy against his ear. “Let’s get out of here, and I’ll show you how much I like it.”

Rolling his eyes, Klaus was ready to speed out of there without bothering to set her back on her feet. The only thing that kept him in his crowded seat was the biting and all too familiar voice coming from behind him.

“Sorry, love, he won’t be available to accept whatever appreciation you have in mind.”

Both surprised — though for very different reasons — they turned to see Caroline Forbes facing them with a pageant-ready smile and murder in her eyes. She was stunning. Klaus couldn’t help a grin despite his earlier annoyance, and his brow arched in challenge. “Hello, sweetheart. Fancy meeting you here.”

Her jaw shifted almost imperceptibly to the left, but his companion didn’t seem to sense the rising tension as a threat. “Who the hell are you?”

Just like that, Caroline’s smile turned sharp with her fangs on full display. “I’m his wife, and you’re in my seat.”

The club was home to any number of vampires who heard her perfectly over the music, and more than a few froze at the sudden silence coming from him. The Klaus Mikaelson they knew would have reacted instantly, either with murder or some other violence, and they all seemed to wait for the ensuing mayhem. Even Janet finally grasped the discomfort of the moment, and she extricated herself from his lap with all the delicacy a human could manage. “I’ll just— Yeah, bye.”

Whatever show the club was waiting for, Klaus had more pressing concerns. “Shall we continue this interesting discussion at home?” he asked, though they both knew it wasn’t a question. Gently gripping Caroline’s arm, he flashed them back to the manor. He heard Kol and Rebekah meandering somewhere, and Elijah was likely on the premises as well. With that in mind, he brought her to the privacy of his studio and its soundproofing spell. Wisely, she waited until the door was shut to yank her arm free with a disgruntled huff. He merely smiled as he went to pour them some blooded wine. “That was quite the display you gave, sweetheart,” he said lightly, handing her a glass. “I have to admit: I didn’t see it coming.”

“Bullshit,” she snapped, setting aside the drink without indulging. His lips pursed; it was an excellent vintage, yet he was more perturbed at her outright refusal of his hospitality. Perhaps this wasn’t their usual spat to be easily resolved. Proving just that, she seemed truly distraught. “You promised to leave Mystic Falls, that my life was my own.”

“It is. I haven’t stepped foot in Virginia since that day.” Brow furrowed, Klaus felt an urgent need to reassure her. “I understand you need time to accept what I’m offering, and I am prepared to wait however long it takes. What on earth made you believe I’m encroaching on that promise?”

Last he heard, she wasn’t even in the States. They did chat by phone every so often, and when she’d mentioned a tour abroad, he had offered a list of his various estates that would be available to her should she wish. It was the caretaker of his dacha outside of Moscow who alerted him to her softening boundaries. He certainly had no intention of making her regret the change, let alone whatever caused this latest upset.

Watching him with suspicion, Caroline apparently wasn’t sure of his intentions at all. “Seriously? It wasn’t bad enough I ran into the stalkers you have ‘looking out for me’ in every city, but the one time I take you up on borrowing a place, you have the staff literally bowing to me. I wrote it off as a cultural thing at first, then I heard the whispers.”

“Though I refute your accusations of stalking, I will admit to warning some friends and enemies you are not to be trifled with in your travels. As for Dmitri, I merely asked him to welcome you as an honored guest, which you are.” 

She scoffed and crossed her arms in defiance. “Yeah, well, he wasn’t welcoming me as an honored guest. I overheard him chatting with his wife about meeting ‘the new mistress of the house.’”

Klaus shrugged, unconcerned. Satisfied the situation wasn’t more dire, he allowed himself to relax on his sofa, daring to pat the spot next to him. Caroline remained unmoved, and he rolled his eyes. “Perhaps the nature of your significance was lost in translation. You’re the one who came to my town and introduced yourself as my wife.”

“Because half of Russia thinks I am your wife!” With an indignant stamp of her foot, she seemed ready to tear her hair out — but she frowned more sedately at the blankness on his face. “You didn’t know?” 

Shaking his head, he honestly had no idea. “What happened, Caroline?”

Finally taking her drink, she dropped to the couch beside him with an embarrassed groan. “I stepped into exactly one vampire club, and people practically threw themselves out of my path. I assumed it was more of the same from you, until the guy I was flirting with was suddenly yanked away by a friend. He went white when he was told my husband would tear out his intestines and shove them down his throat.”

“A bit uncreative, that.”

“Klaus!”

“I don’t know,” he insisted, his frustration growing to match hers. Rubbing a hand across his mouth, he genuinely had no idea why anyone would think him married. Though he had many hopes and plans involving Caroline in his future, matrimony was a human tradition he’d never once considered. “Truly, this didn’t come from me.”

Sighing, she leaned back into the couch and nursed her wine, defeated. “Oh. Then, sorry for cockblocking, I guess.”

Klaus smirked at that, and he turned to face her more fully. “Are you really?” The lightest blush stained her cheeks, and he knew she was biting her tongue at the faint scent of her blood. Unable to resist, he reached his hand to rest on the back of her neck, his thumb rubbing into her hair. “New Orleans is a small town at heart, love, and you effectively announced yourself as my wife in the middle of town square.”

“To be fair, I thought you had told the whole world, and I wasn’t going to be the only one not getting laid because of it.”

“Ah.” He was torn between a wince and a laugh, so he settled for another sip of his drink instead. His other hand continued to massage her scalp, and he felt the tension slowly loosening within her. “I never meant to restrict your choices,” he promised. “Tempt you into choosing me, absolutely, but not like this.”

Finally, she relaxed into him, slouching until he could tuck her against his side. Some doubt lingered, though, he could tell. Perhaps it was a sign of growth on both their parts that he didn’t take offense and that she trusted him enough be honest. “But who else would want to spread a rumor like that about us? It’s not like anyone benefits if we really did do the Vegas wedding thing.”

His mouth twitched, and he flashed to the door, barely sparing a brief kiss to the top of her head. He tore it open, only for her to slam it shut again. Pressing her back to the wood, she kept a heavy glare on him. “Put those away, we both know you’re not going to bite me.”

With a reluctant growl, he forced his fangs to recede. “It’s not your blood I want at the moment, and it’s certainly not pleasure I seek.”

“Yeah, ‘cause revenge isn’t a pleasure for you,” she answered snidely. “Tell me what’s going on before you kill the blabbermouth.”

“This is something I have to do myself, sweetheart.”

“Hi, I might want to help! They screwed with both of us here, not just you.”

A half-smile formed without permission, the fondness he felt for her softer than he was comfortable acknowledging at the moment — especially when someone had proven all too willing to use their connection against him. “Few in New Orleans know about you, let alone your...effect on me. Only two would maliciously speak out of turn about that. And just one of those would dare to bind you to me forever, lest I be challenged to follow through.”

Her face was an open book to him, and he hoped she never lost that human nature to share every feeling she had as it happened. Confusion, calculation, consternation, they all boiled down to an annoyed scrunch of her nose. “Your family knows I exist, at least, I think so. I never actually met Elijah, but you two seem to have gotten over whatever grudge match was going on at home.” He gave a brief nod, fascinated at the determined way she thought it through. “I also doubt you told him about your fling with a baby vampire. Kol and Rebekah, on the other hand, probably didn’t need to be told.”

“Bekah still likes to complain that we defiled the entire wood within earshot,” he muttered, not that he could be particularly aggrieved at the memory of a sunny afternoon. “And you are no mere fling, Caroline.”

That lovely blush rose again, and she looked anywhere but at him as he crowded her against the door. Gently brushing the curtain of her hair back from her face, Klaus waited for her to gather herself. After a deep breath, she finally met him with a half-hearted glare. “Which Rebekah loathes, so she’s definitely not daring you to marry me by telling everyone else you already have.”

Silently agreeing, he hadn’t lowered his hand from where it settled on her cheek, and a thrill came when she leaned into it. “Kol, however, enjoys sowing chaos wherever he goes.”

“Yeah,” she groaned. “That sounds on brand, and I played right into it with this stupid payback stunt.”

“We always did share a flair for the dramatic.”

The laugh built in her throat before it burst out, filling the air between them until they were both smiling like fools. Her hands had curled into his shirt, one at his hip and the other over his heart. The slight tug of fabric was tempting, but he still kept his tentative distance. “I promised you time, and I meant it.”

Biting her lip, Caroline nodded. She didn’t let go of his shirt, either. “Does it have be all or nothing right now?” It was half a whisper, the barest hint of whine in her voice endearing. “Because you smell really good and it’s been a long time thanks to your stupid brother, and I might have missed you more than I realized, so can you just kiss me alrea—”

There would be consequences from the rumors of their marriage, and more than just those Kol would face. Caroline would be a target, either for those seeking Klaus’s favor or those out to destroy him. Her presence or absence from his daily life would be a noted occurrence, and more rumors would arise should they be seen with others instead. New pressures would exert force on the evolution of their relationship, something he had measured in decades and centuries without such attention. But they could deal with those consequences in time, together.

Later.

[matchstickdolly]

Lucifer 5B: Cutting off Touch to Spite Your Fans

Spoiler warning: This post assumes you've watched all of Lucifer, season 5, part B.

CW: There's plenty I like about season 5, but this is a negative post. I know not everyone is up for negativity about the things they love. I also generally avoid it and (try to) keep my mouth shut about things I don’t like in most spaces. It’s good etiquette. But this is my space, and I have thoughts specifically about purity culture and the treatment of sexuality and trauma in fiction. You’ve been warned!

---

I'm a professional writer (not in TV). I've worked with enough bad clients, editors, and other writers to recognize some hallmark behaviors in how both Fox and Netflix gave Lucifer's writers incredibly difficult, unfair, and frankly weird situations to create through.

Fox did them dirty, interfering and ordering too many eps in S3. Netflix did them dirty, ordering 10 eps for S4 when it clearly needed ~13. Then Netflix ordered 10 "final" eps for S5—then, just kidding(!), 6 more after they'd done their writing for the 10. (What the fuck?) And then Netflix ordered 10 more for a "final-final" S6 after the writers had done their best to tell their whole story in S5. (MORE what the fuck.)

Talk about whiplash for creators, and half of those who consume content don't even care to understand such creative pain.

So, there are problems on multiple fronts. There's much I'll forgive writers, accordingly. I go into most shows expecting plotting/pacing issues. I look, instead, for characters and relationships that will triumph over those issues.

Heart is what the show Lucifer has always had in spades, both in its characters and in the immensely committed, wonderful ways the actors have tried to realize the characters' humor, love, trauma, and—most importantly—struggle to find healing. Yet, when given the opportunity to show health alongside another in a relationship, the writers/directors of 5B chose to remove most sexual humor and physical intimacy from their female lead and bi/pan characters to, I feel, sanitize them and troll fans. What happened?

Well, for one, say hi to showrunner Joe Henderson bragging about how the writers decided to be colossal dicks to the fans who helped secure their jobs:

From CBR's 'Lucifer Showrunner Joe Henderson Dissects Season 5B's Chaos'

Have we not suffered sidelined/repressed female characters, "bury your gays," and, oh, Chloe fucking a serial killer enough? Must we also say hello to neutered relationships once characters find stable love (whether same or opposite sex)? The result of withdrawing more sexual humor and physical intimacy from paired characters is an uncomfortable suggestion that they're reformed by "pure" love—more chaste and aloof, more acceptable in polite society. This is only done to end-game committed relationships.*

The writers seem to think they're edging the viewers, but the reality is they're taking traumatized minority characters who rejoiced in sexual freedom, but lacked and craved an emotional connection, and showing they can't have both, or, if they find both, it will never last. They've taken hypersexual characters and said, here, even they can have the love and commitment they desire, but some physical intimacy, especially sexual intimacy, is what they must trade for it.

There's always one more case, phone call, or coincidence interrupting intimacy. Traumas or deaths deserving emotional and physical comfort go on to receive none or only one aspect. Done sometimes, it's fine. Done always, it's sick. Dan dies, and there's no hugging? Really?†

Don't craft characters who crave a full range of emotional and physical intimacy, only to rob them of related scenes every chance you get. That's not complexity. That's bad writing. To even achieve this in 5B, they must squash banter and sideline their female lead yet again.

What a gift to purity culture, which tells us to be more palatable by bottling and buttoning up. That sex should be taboo, but violence glorified. That there is no heated desire among "Good Women," that sexual minorities of all genders shouldn't experience it much at all.

5A is so good. At the very least, it's on the right path (clearly, since the plot payoff from 5x01 to 5x16 is great). It shows a couple working through difficulties and trauma, toward each other emotionally and physically. It even pokes fun at people who think an established relationship means the death of romantic and sexual appeal (a tired and hugely sexist trope). And then... And then 5B reverses that, pretending established relationships are barely physical during emotional struggle and that the honeymoon phase doesn't exist. It robs characters of joy and comfort through physical intimacy when they need it to move through or push beyond trauma.

It's telling that so many fan wishes for Deckerstar are about healing touch and existing in each other's spaces: amending Chloe's spicy PDA history with Cain, Chloe caring for Lucifer's wings, soft family scenes a la Monopoly night and shared meals, morning-afters, etc. Reasonable fans aren't asking for porn; they're asking for connection and humanity. They're asking for writers not to forget characters (and, yes, including hypersexual characters) on their way from Point A to Point B.

That 5B lacks these things isn't a "tee-hee frustrating" slow burn or a cockblock. It is, in so many scenes, excising from characters a core part of what nearly every human and fictional monster craves. And it's a slap in the face to the "found family" trope. When you remove or tamp down a casual physical intimacy that was previously there, characters and their relationships fall flat, even if only partially. They become blunt weapons creators wield against watchers or readers begging for scraps of warmth.

Minorities shouldn't be killed off with ease, and they shouldn't be stifled with ease, either.‡ And maybe there shouldn't be deep trauma driving a wedge in a romantic relationship if you're not going to explore it through that relationship, too—physical intimacy included.

I'm still reserving some judgment. I loved the family drama and the end. (Although, again, where was the physical intimacy? No intimacy when Chloe or Lucifer return from the dead? Really?) I see where they could do awesome things, and could have done more if not for network BS.

But I no longer trust Lucifer's writers and directors. They thought S5 was the end. And what they gave us of Deckerstar, of the relationship that symbolizes health and healing in their fictional world, is this: cold distance. And they got a kick out of doing it, apparently.

If this is a "love letter" to me as a fan, I'm burning it. I can only hope S6 course corrects. If not, the writers who made these choices shouldn't write sexual minority and/or traumatized characters again. If you don't understand most of us, you should stop fucking using us.

---

* If you don't believe me about the differences between casual/short-term relationships and end-game relationships in Lucifer, go back and look at how Lucifer and Maze are with strangers in all the other seasons. Look at Chloe's sex dream, her propositioning of Lucifer in a library, her sex with Pierce in the evidence closet. Look at how much physical intimacy there is between Lucifer and Eve, and then between Eve and Maze (if only as a ploy). Across seasons, there are sex/kink jokes and scenes galore.

Compare this to how these same characters are portrayed when with their end-game loves. Notice the gentle pecks on the lips and the huge general drop in sexual humor between 5A and 5B. How boring. Where's the spice these characters had? Also, give me a damn break. Buttoning up in a relationship is contrary to four and a half seasons of emotional character work that's been communicating security in our relationships is personally freeing.

† I'm not just talking about sexual intimacy in this post, though that is a big part of it because of the characters. 5B lacked crucial found family scenes, too.

Chloe should have been at God's family dinner, but being so would have prevented more ham-fisted angst. Chloe never even has a one-on-one with God, probably because that would demand a straight answer about her miracle status, which I would guess will be used to drive yet another wedge between her and Lucifer next season, but we'll see.

In multiple before- and after-work scenes, there was no reason for Lucifer and Chloe to be apart more, even, than they were in S1 and S2. Monopoly night was in S3, for crying out loud. Most horrifying of all? No one touches Chloe after Dan's death, but Trixie. Meanwhile, Linda, Amenadiel, Ella, Maze, and Lucifer all receive physical comfort. No wonder Chloe's tired of being strong.

‡ If you don't think it's offensive that they stuffed all their wlw content for two hypersexual characters into a few clunky, irrational, and chaste scenes that rushed I love yous, a marriage-like proposal, and the mention of soulmates, I don't know what to tell you other than get off my lawn.

[sunflowerheartsandstarryskies]

The Devil and the Mermaid - Chapter Four (Lucifer x Mermaid!Reader)

Author’s Note: The inspiration here came from a dream of mine, also one of my favorite shows “The Legend of the Blue Sea” has some heavy inspiration in here as well. Thank you so much for the support of the series! I will also create a tag list for this story since I saw people interested in that. Again I love reading your guys’ comments and if you want to be part of a tag list for this series please let me know :)

Warnings: None, maybe mild violence? (You shove a guy out of the way)

Taglist: @th3gl1tt3rgam3roff1c1al, @magnet-girl, @roxytheimmortal​

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You were covered in darkness, but you were adjusted to the darkness, you lived in the dark with your clan who usually swims in the parts of the ocean where the light just barely touched your skin. 

However instead of the comforting warmth and assurance, you had when you were a woman swimming with your clan, your family, it was a lingering warmth and a reassurance that had made you realize you were dreaming and not of your memories. 

“(Y/N) you have met an interesting fate having fallen for Lucifer,” a voice echoed around you. You looked around in the dark space to search for the voice but found no answer to that.

“I would not have known of your existence if you hadn’t gone out of that water, it’s strange what this world has created once I left it.”

“Are you the moon? What do you mean by that? All I know is what I have been taught and seen when I was in the ocean”

“You could say I am the moon, but I am more than that and also less than that at the same time. I affect the world around me indirectly but you have caused quite a stir where I am at with your involvement with Lucifer, I wish you the best of luck and the best of health.”

With that, you were startled from your sleep by pressure on your shoulder, and you opened your eyes to see Lucifer smiling at you. Once he saw you were awake he went to say, “Good morning my dear, have a good dream?”

“Funny you should mention that, I heard a voice say that they were the moon, I think anyway. I don’t quite remember what they said but I remember your name,” you say as you start sitting up from the bed.

Lucifer sat down next to you as he took in what you said, humming in thought, he turned to you and patted your shoulder.

“Well the only one I know that could do that, would be my Dad, but I don’t know why he would want to talk to you.”

After a couple of days, you have gotten well versed with different aspects of human life and culture, mainly you are not allowed to eat spaghetti with your hands. You also have gotten interested in the tv that had got you basically hooked on the subtleties of different subsets of human culture, one being that if bad men are about to hurt you you can beat them up.

“Anyway, darling remember when I was talking to you about my consulting job for the police?”

You nodded remembering the different stories of his workplace along with his partner, Chloe. She seemed weird but nice from what you heard from him. 

“Well, I have to go in today there is a case that the police department says they need my help with,” Lucifer continued, “and I want you to come with me.”

“I would like to, is it going to be like what I saw on tv with how they deal with violence?” you asked.

“Kind of, it depends, now love let’s get you ready for the day and we can get going.”

--------------------------------------------------

You and Lucifer walked into a one-story house it looks plain and forgettable with its beige outside paint and white shingled roof. There were also some beautiful hydrangea bushes in the front, and you noticed them because they were the only splash of color in the whole property. There were police officers around the property and you saw one documenting the bushes. You tilt your head as you were stalling to enter the house and saw footprints underneath the bushes. 

“(Y/N) are you okay? Come on,” Lucifer urged on. He leads you into the home, and you immediately see the crime scene.

 It was an execution. Plain and simple. The victim was a young woman from what you saw, and she was shot point-blank in the back of the head as she was sitting on her couch, she probably knew the killer, since the tv was still on. 

The aquarium was direct across from the living room, and you saw the fish in there was trying to get your attention. You can hear the voices of the fish repeatedly crying out, “He hurt her! Help her! He was her friend” You looked at the aquarium and the fishes seem to surround you as they try to talk to you through the glass. ‘Can you show me what he looked like,’ you broadcasted to the fish. 

Lucifer was looking at you confused at what you were doing and was about to talk to you when he got interrupted.

“Oh no, you did not bring a civilian to a crime scene” you hear a voice coming towards you. 

“Ah detective, how good to see you again, and this is (Y/N) she is my assistant and friend,” Lucifer says. 

You turn your head away from the aquarium and saw a stressed blonde woman coming towards you, and you realized that this must be Chloe Decker. She tilted her head with furrowed brows and a hand to her hip as she eyes you. 

“Why would you need an assistant?” Decker questioned.

“You know there are always things that I could miss out on while we’re out here and plus don’t you want someone who can put me in line and in order for once?” Lucifer replied.

“That’ll be the day,” Decker snorted.

You tugged on the jacket sleeve on Lucifer to get his attention to you, and he leaned for you to whisper to tell him the thoughts and profile the fish given to you about the person who committed the murder.

“Oh that’s brilliant, darling, see Detective my assistant just gave us a solid lead to go off of. We have a suspect!” Lucifer exclaimed as he grabs your hand and leads you out of the crime scene.

“Wait a minute can you tell me what means?” Decker ran off to you two.

---------------------------------------------

So the three of you ended up at an apartment building on the opposite side of Los Angeles waiting to interview the suspect that the fish had identified to you at the victim’s home. 

Lucifer ended up filling into Decker that you had deduced based on the footprints outside the house and the way she was killed, it was someone she knew intimately enough to let the person in without a second glance. You just confirmed that for him with the description of the man the fish saw kill their owner, Blaire Wright. He also found that there was a single picture of him and the victim together faced down so he connected the dots to realize that the relationship must’ve turned to an obsession for the man and had gone possessive over the woman. The old “if I can’t have her nobody can” cliche, which made Lucifer quite bored about that trope but you can’t always choose what happens in your cases. 

You all made your way to the apartment building, Decker went to find out from the landlord about the suspect and you and Lucifer were ordered to stay out in the parking lot. You spotted the man that matched the description the fish gave you and the picture Lucifer showed to verify it. His name was Oscar Grant, and he’s suspected to have developed an obsessive behavior over Ns. Wright … and he was heading your way.

Lucifer seemed to be aware of it as he straightened himself and walked over to where the man was walking into the parking lot. 

You felt a strange sensation of being submerged in the water again, you felt heavy and light all at the same time. You couldn’t hear what the two were saying, but you felt the danger and sensation of a cornered animal, and that’s when you felt that you had to move. So you did. Grant pulled a gun but as soon as he did you grabbed his forearm and threw him towards the dumpsters that were ten feet away from him. You may have used a bit too much of your strength. There was now a new dent behind Grant that there wasn’t there before and a shocked looking Lucifer next to you and staring at the gun in between you and the culprit.

You heard Decker walking behind you and you heard her go with a bewildered voice, “How in the-?”

When he came to a few seconds later, he was given his rights by Decker and placed in the back of her car off the police department. While you were walking up to you and Lucifer’s ride you felt a lingering gaze on your back throughout that entire encounter. You just shook your head in an attempt to get rid of that feeling. 

Later on, Oscar Grant ended up confessing to both the attempted murder of you and Lucifer and the murder of Blaire Wright. Decker relented upon the idea of Lucifer bringing you to cases because you ended up being a pretty good asset. 

------------------------------------

Now you were back at Lucifer’s penthouse and you were in pajamas lounging around the bar area in his place. Lucifer was down at the LUX club area taking care of some business that he needed to get done as he told you. 

There was a small pool that he had in his apartment which you found, and you can hear the call of the water no matter its state. So you took off your clothes and went in the pool, your tail and scales came as soon as you were submerged and your whole body was singing with happiness as it felt alive again. 

The more you spend on land without the return of the love that you came out of the water for, your heart will stop beating unless you step back in the ocean. You forgot to tell Lucifer about that specific part of the deal of you coming on land because you didn’t want him to feel the pressure of returning a love that might not be real, to begin with. 

You begin to worry about what might happen if he found out you didn’t tell him the whole truth of your situation to him. You didn’t want him to concerned for your fate, because you never know what might happen there might be a happy ending for you both.

As you were swimming in the small pool brooding in your thoughts you heard the elevator ping, so you peaked your head over the corner of the pool. When you just saw it was Lucifer and no one else you let yourself be seen by him.

“Well hello there, I see you have found my pool then?” Lucifer greeted you. You beamed at him and nodded fervently at that.

“Y’know I never actually saw you as your original mermaid self? Is it alright if I watch you swim?”

“Um sure if you want to, I’m not the most beautiful, there are others in just my clan that have amazing scales and tail fin,” you state.

“Let me be the judge of that, love-” he cut himself off with a mouth agape look as he marveled at your full beauty.

Your tail was massive and the scales decorating and protecting your body were glittering with a rainbow of colors complementing your skin tone. It made you look heavenly and the flowing tail at the end made you look that way even more so.

You became self-conscious at the way Lucifer was just staring at you, so became to fidget under his heavy gaze in the water.

Then he spoke gently, “You are beautiful, absolutely gorgeous. Thank you for letting me see your true self like this.”

“Thank you Lucifer, that means a lot to me.”

The brooding can wait, you have time to be hopeful and to think about that happy ending.

[wickedpact]

A ranking of all the TTT stories in order of how much I liked them.

(Oh god this is so long)

1 My Mother's Axe

BABY ANDYYYYYYYYYYYY. Honestly this one had the trifecta of developing a character's motivations, developing a character's backstory, & developing their personality. The story starting out with Andy teaching Nile to use the axe was so charming and fun, and you could feel that chemistry they had in Opening Fire, the way they teased and bickered with each other so naturally. I loved the wedge between them on the subject of the axe, how Nile was perhaps a little too young to understand Andy's feelings about whether or not its the 'same' axe. I also love how the axe is obviously the symbol of the franchise and hugely important, but you never get a sense of exactly how important it is to Andy until you read the story.

I love the entire Ship of Theseus theme, and how it feels so natural that for Andy she has to get attached to the idea of things rather than the things themselves because she'll always outlive the things themselves-- the axe is symbolically her mom's axe, even if physically it isn't. And I love how she clearly clings to that concept so tightly. "This is the labrys she held in her hands...." IT GETS ME.

And the fact that this sense of BELONGING, of FAMILY, of CULTURE is so important to Andy that she clings to it (figuratively and literally) with both hands. And of course it's important to her, she spent so long alone that the woman doesn't even remember her birth name. That axe (or the idea of that axe) is all she has left of her mother and that family/culture she was born into.

PLUS on that note I love how Andy doesn't remember if her mom was her actual biological mother, but it doesn't matter to her. This woman was her mother in all the ways that counted. And how her mom BETRAYED AND KILLED Andy but Andy loved her so much that she avenged her and carried her axe for thousands of years. THOUSANDS OF YEARS!!!!!!

I also loved how the story transcends the timeline of the whole franchise and seeing Andy through the years. Loved seeing her with the varying squads and with varying axes. Also baby Andy was so cute. It was cool seeing her so young. like holy fuck. Andromache The Scythian, Immortal Warrior (but smol). Love that.

Also I think this one is one of the few ttt stories that doesn't suffer from length problems.

tldr: goddammit greg you've done it again.

2 Zanzibar and Other Harbors

Zanzibar my beloved. I've said before, but it's downright comedic how little regard there was for Joe and Nicky's character designs in this story. The same person who does the colors for the regular comic did the colors for this one too, and you can tell, every panel of this story was Beautiful.

Ik there was A Lot of criticism of this one (lmao @ how the fandom had no idea what was to come) but I thought a lot of The Discourse was a bit dramatic. I did think Nicky came off as a little oblivious to Joe's feelings in this story, but I've said before, I honestly think that was a 'tone not translating' thing. It felt like Nicky was nagging Joe for [checks notes] saving innocent people, but Joe was so amused by Nicky's complaints I really do think it was supposed to come off as teasing.

Plus I know the 'Joe running off into danger and Nicky reluctantly following' dynamic wasn't popular (I'm a pretty meh on it meself) but I did love how Joe's impulsiveness (if you want to call it that) was interpreted as heroism and not hot-hotheadedness. All of the examples Nicky and Joe talked about included Joe explicitly saving people. (and it also took A Lot for the nazi to actually provoke Joe).

I also feel like their characterization here was closest to the movie canon-- the bit where they hear the woman scream and Joe goes running in to save her while Nicky swoops in on Joe's heels to comfort her while Joe and the nazi were fighting reminds me of the train car scene. Joe had suggested First that they go find Nile because she needed to be protected, and Nicky later added that Nile probably also needed emotional support. Similar reactions.

But it was So Good, the themes of queer community and the enduring nature of queer culture are Not themes you see in media that often and it was such a delight how it was done. Also it's one of the few more modern TTT stories that has a completely valid excuse for taking place when it did. Chef's kiss.

3 Passchendaele

I love the Duality between seeing baby Andy and then seeing Mama Andy in the very next issue. This story doesn't have a ton of meat to it, but the entire concept of Andy adopting a war orphan straight off the battlefield PLUCKS MY TENDER LITTLE HEARTSTRINGS, and I think it's especially poignant for comic!Andy. I think most people wouldn't think twice about movie!Andy doing something like that but comic Andy is so hardened and almost cruel sometimes, and seeing that even for her the world hasn't beaten all of the compassion from her yet is SO!!!!!!! this woman contains MULTITUDES okay, she's violent and angry and tired and Done but she's also so kind and compassionate and THE STRENGTH OF HER!!!!! Also the idea of her and Yitzhak co-raising a kid together is so damn cute. It was #mysterious pre-Yitzhak-story but now it's cute. holy fuck. It's cute.

& the headbonk panel of her and Zeus lives in my heart. anyways.

4 Many Happy Returns

I Know people weren't thrilled about Booker being in this one, but I've developed a pet-peeve about that: this story was *not* booker-centric. Booker only exists in this story to the extent required to explain the importance of the gesture Nile makes towards him. If there was a story about Booker making some grand gesture of kindness to Nile no one would be saying it was Nile-centric. bc it wouldn't be! Booker exists in this story to explore Nile's kindness, its not about him. I saw that a couple times and it bothered me. anyways.

AAAAAAAAAA I loved this one, the art was beautiful, I loved how Andy Nile and Booker were drawn (like their comic selves but.. more looking like actual people). I loved Andy and Nile's Bants, how Andy wanted to jump right in and Do Violence but Nile was basically telling her to hold her horses.

I feel like I'm just repeating the post I made on this story a few days ago, but I LOVED how Nile's plan revolves not around violence or Cool Mercenary Skills but on Nile's own life skills (as she canonly did a lot of minimum wage job-hopping before the marines in comics canon). Her plan used her skills, not the skills of an immortal warrior, and HER SKILLS were in fact more useful for the situation! lov to see Nile's resourcefulness and planning skills.

AND HOW NILE WAS PROBABLY WATCHING BOOKER??? it's so Much bc 1.) nile knew booker A SINGLE DAY and yet he made such an impression on her emotionally that she had to keep an eye on him and 2.) she said in the movie she wanted Booker to get off free with an apology. Yes she's a member of the team but that doesn't mean she's necessarily going to follow orders like a good little soldier. I also love how she convinced Andy to go along with it. her HEART, her KINDNESS, her THOUGHTFULNESS, UGH.

5 The Bear

Honestly I have like no negative things to say about this one other than a.) character design issues which is less about the story itself and is more of a 'tog comic in general' criticism and b.) too short, but it was supposed to be a tease, so.

But I loved Yitzhak, I wasn't expecting to really like him at all but like I said in my other post, he tickled me. I love characters who are Kind™, especially if they have little reason to be so given their backgrounds. Chef's kiss. Lov him.

6 Bonsai Shokunin

I know this one was a little controversial bc of the outsider POV but whenever I see people upset about that they never point out that the Outsider Guy (the samurai) existed as a reflection on Noriko. His ideas are explained in the text to develop hers. The whole story follows how she gave mercy to a scared young man and in response he murdered Noriko, repeatedly! Who gave him the right to inflict such pain and suffering on the world? In his opinion, the lack of response from the gods was his permission. And for Noriko-- over and over again she dies and suffers because she gave mercy, which lines up with her ideas in FM about how it's their fate to rule mortals and if they don't align with that plan/fate/whatever then they suffer. It shows some background to those ideas and how they developed in her mind outside of Ocean Madness™. Additionally, his idea of 'the Gods have done nothing to strike me down so it's fine if I do these things' kind of explains how Noriko may justify her own morally corrupt actions-- she's died so many times and it's never stuck. Maybe if she did die any of those times, or while she was in the water, maybe that would've been a sign she was doing something right, or at least doing something normal. But she hasn't died. Fate isn't done with Noriko yet. And maybe there's a reason for that. In her mind, it's just not a very pleasant reason, is all.

There were things I was kind of meh about tho. I did kind of wish we saw something of Noriko and the team, or smth explaining the way she was before her dip in the pool-- personality, likes dislikes, etc. but it wasn't bad or anything. It was super vague tho, I had to read it a few times before I got what it was going for. Liked the art. Liked the bonsai metaphor. And of course I Respect the decision to use the 1300s (1200s? I don't remember off the top of my head) rather than using the last 200 years.

7 Strong Medicine

Honestly looking back, this one made me kind of sad because both this one and Bonsai Shokunin explored character's ideas on Fate and The Divine and how that intersects with immortality and I totally thought that theme would be continued, especially with Love Letters. But Then It Wasn't™.

Admittedly.... I had to re-read this one to remember most of it. I liked Booker's ideas on God, 'The conductor of the symphony just may not be very good at his trade' but the plot itself was kind of forgettable. Some fuckin cowboys try to kill a doctor (their second) because he couldn't save their sickly brother. Book tries to stop them, gets killed, and then comes back and kills them all before they get the doctor. Alright. I liked the artstyle because the characters were ugly in a similar way that leandro's are, but way more bearable.

I love the Irony of Booker concluding that there is no such thing as fate or destiny and nothing has meaning, AS HE UNKNOWINGLY SAVES MERRICK'S GRANDFATHER FROM BEING KILLED. Booker getting fucked over by life/god/destiny yet again. It also kind of explains about where the fuck hell Merrick's interest in immortal mercenaries even came from.

I originally had this one a lot higher and then I thought about it and moved it down like two spots.

8 Never Gets Old

I liked seeing Booker interact with his kid. And we got a name for the kid! Philippe was a little bitch though, he was a little obnoxious. I liked how Booker was so thrilled to experience a restaurant with his kid (and since we know he was there before, it can be assumed he went with all of his kids and yet he was so charmed each time). It fits with his line to Nicky in the moon landing story about how you don't appreciate beautiful things 'unless you have someone to share them with'. It was charming to see Booker interact with his kid, and to see him so happy. Also lmao @ Booker's big fat Ye Olde Crush on Andy.

However at the same time it was like.. of all the things to write about,,, I guess? Booker's Night Out...... alright. Especially since Book had so many stories.

I don't know, it was alright. The old man killing him really came out of nowhere, (but the 'Salut, asshole!' panel was funny tho).

9 How To Make a Ghost Town

I've hit a point where talking about these stories has gotten less fun. I liked this one but I felt like Achilles getting lynched was not really necessary for a story that was already tragic (a story that already involved Achilles doing a lot of suffering at the hand of bigots). When we first got the blurb for this story I thought it would be about Andy returning to the squad and making friends with Booker after losing Achilles and them butting heads on the idea of family and when to cut off ties. So a little bit of my underwhelmedness about this one might be just my expectations being different.

Honestly I was pretty interested in Andy and Achilles' relationship and I would've liked to see more of them-- like, what was their dynamic like? What did they love about each other?

But anyways Andy leaving and Achilles getting killed anyways feels so pointlessly tragic (which I suppose is the point..... I don't like tragedies) she left to save him and yet people killed him anyway. Meh.

I did love the bits about Andy wanting to have a domestic life (Andy and her multitudes again) and the little detail about how she buried her axe near the road but he buried his guns under his bed-- he was an escaped slave, he never had the luxury of assuredness like Andy did. It was a sad story.

10 Lacus Solitudinis

'You put this one above love letters crim??? how could you???' easy, lmao.

There was stuff in this one I liked. But to talk about stuff I didn't like: (I'll keep it brief, I know ragging on this story has been done time and time again)

UH, setting aside the 6 year cold shoulder between Joe and Nicky, I thought their chosen method of conflict resolution was... bad at best. Nicky's inability to talk about his feelings was also annoying, especially since the entire point of this story is a fight Joe and Nicky had, and yet we don't get both sides to the story, which is...... important? That fact is especially annoying bc in the absence of Nicky explaining his side of the story, it's absolutely a possible (and admittedly probably unintentional) interpretation of the text that we do get that Joe routinely resolves conflict between him and Nicky by simply cutting Nicky out of his life entirely until Nicky just. caves? Even if it takes years?

WHICH i could get into that interpretation and how fucked up i find it. but im not going to. out of restraint.

I don't know, I think there are a lot of interesting ways to go about this conflict but 'Nicky wants to kill a guy and Joe refuses to acknowledge his existence until he stops because he thinks Nicky is too much of a Good Boy to get his hands dirty like that' ('I wont watch as the world turns his (...) compassion into something ugly'. ) wasn't.. how I would've done it. (I mean you know Joe doesn't give a shit about what Nicky is doing in a moral way, because Joe doesn't even care or mention that Booker is killing those cops too. Joe only cares because he doesn't like the idea of Nicky changing in a way he finds undesirable.)

admittedly I've said before, I do like the emphasis Joe's reaction puts on Nicky's kindness. Joe has a complete inability to cope with Nicky simply Not Being Kind. It speaks to the steadiness of Nicky's compassion all those years. but still that fact doesn't make it the conflict feel worth it

hm. I said I would be brief and I wasn't.

oh well. basically I thought there was interesting conflict potential there but it wasn't done the way I would've liked, and the way it was done leaves a lot of disturbing (and again probably unintended) interpretations to lie.

What I did like? Andy and Joe having that pessimist/optimist dynamic. Joe nerding out about science. Andy not being impressed by The Achievements Of Man. I loved Booker needling at Nicky about his outdated slang and also trying to give him Older Brother advice practically in the same breath. I loved Booker giving The Worst relationship advice ever and Nicky being like 'I Will Not Do That, Ever, Thanks.' the family vibes were so good. The Joenicky vibes left a lot to be desired tho.

11 Love Letters

I talked about my problems with Nicky in this story (and Lacus Solitudinis). I don't know, the story isn't bad but I do hold a little bit of a grudge towards it because its very existence begs the existence of a solo Joe story and we didn't get one. If we never got this story, then we could happily count Lacus Solitudinis and Zanzibar as The Joenicky Stories™ and move on with our lives. sigh.

I remember when we first got the blurb for this story I was really curious about why Nicky specifically + the setting, and the answer kind of feels like 'the author had an idea for a story like this and saw ttt as a good enough place to utilize that idea'. Plus I was really underwhelmed by the Romantic Sentiment in the letter. If you look at it line-by-line, the majority of the letter is actually Nicky talking about how lonely and disturbed he is, rather than actual,, yknow,,, Romantic Sentiment. I mean, compare the van speech and this letter and this letter is just kind of meh in comparison. I liked nicky calling joe wise! and I liked the brief sun/moon metaphor! and otherwise it was eh. It didn't even have cute squad banter, which is why Lacus Solitudinis is above this one.

12 An Old Soul

Nun orgy. Nun orgy?????? Nun orgy.......

The whole story felt like a setup to have a nun orgy. Why did Booker have abs? Why did they do that to Andy's nose? ?????? the art was good at least.

nun orgy.

[godkilller]

@shirenui144

A more sombre question, but had me wondering... Has Gin ever cried / what would it take to make him cry? I imagine it would be verse dependent, but could a man this guarded ever visibly show such emotional hurt?

          out of character.  Why must you hurt me.

          But it’s an excellent question, and as you say too -- Gin has become such a guarded, numbed, and twisted man. He has, for lack of better wording, killed off that part of himself long ago. He is also one of the topmost guarded characters in Bleach, even Ichigo’s little trick of ‘reading his opponent’s heart’ during battle did not work on Gin. Gin was empty. Gin wasn’t even ‘looking at Ichigo’ with his heart when fighting. They did not reach each other. Gin is so utterly closed off from others and himself that there’s an eerie absence of self present in him, a swallowing abyss, intimidating and oppressive. Gin has also spent his entire existence isolated, he joined Aizen extremely young and thus his centuries-long otherness began. He cannot show emotions akin to Toshiro, who is often used in ways alongside Gin to show what happens if one shows emotions and weakness to Aizen Sousuke via childhood friends. Renji and Rukia, too, are used in ways that contrast Gin and Rangiku subtly in the background. Gin’s interactions with Rukia about Renji, and his interactions with Toshiro about Momo are to make Gin more of an other. He is removed, unlike them.

          So Gin does not despair openly like they do. He doesn’t shout or cry for the audience to see. He’s a villainous cold-hearted bastard.

          This is on top of the potent sense of cultural toxic masculinity and military way of avoiding / “dealing with” emotionally charged moments, not speaking of trauma, and the whole nine yards of suppression which channels into self-worth issues and a tendency for violence. Most characters in Bleach, and especially male characters, aren’t allowed to really stop and think about what they’re feeling, doing -- Ichigo being able to do a decent amount of that, yes, with his protagonist badge, but even then ?  It’s pathetically insufficient, barely a taste of what Ichigo actually should be experiencing, and no other characters are allowed to mourn losses or suffer long-lasting consequences for their actions, for injuries, for mistakes, for harmful words or acts. It’s an action / fighting series, the audience is here for big flashy swordfights and cool abilities, not emotions. Certainly not darker topics of PTSD and the like.

          You can slice it any which way, but Gin grew up as a child soldier. It can be contrasted by the fact that the majority of the Gotei 13 / Shinigami characters are shown, in flashbacks, as entering the Academy whilst in adulthood, becoming Shinigami once adults, with the exception of people like Toshiro, Momo, Hiyori, who all look / are perpetually young.

          Gin is a little older than Toshiro, for context, by the way -- and he is younger than Byakuya. Because Tite doesn’t know how the ages of his own characters work, it can be argued that Gin and Hiyori are possibly within the same ballpark in terms of ages. But like. Look at her. What the fuck. ANYWAYS, the point is ?  Gin’s young, and his trauma is fairly fresh. From the Winter War -- and then 110 years into the past to the Turn Back the Pendulum arc -- Gin spends the majority of his childhood either playing caretaker for Rangiku, who is actually a little older than him, and then killing; first, the three Shinigami that attacked Rangiku, then the Third Seat of the Fifth Division, and then many more likely during his career of observing failed projects at Aizen’s side, witnessing horrific Hollowification experimentations, and many more things. The crucial period of development for things like higher level empathy  ( Gin showcases it by sharing his food with Rangiku, a stranger, and then we see the absolute absence of it from then on )  and Gin swiftly enters into the midst of Erikson’s industry vs. inferiority stage of development; what does he have to offer the world ?  What can he become ?  Will he be good enough ?  This is the stage in which Gin makes the connection as well as makes peace with becoming a monster; this is what I’m offering, this is what I’m becoming, this will be good enough.

          He flipped a switch. It’s questionable whether or not Gin has the ability to cry once he’s an established Third Seat. It’s gone, it’s been swallowed down a hole so deep and dark Gin doesn’t want to go searching for it. He doesn’t want to cry. Gin already has a negative connotation connected to crying given his quote “I’m gonna become a Shinigami, change things for ya, so that you don’t have to cry anymore, Rangiku.” Not crying = good. Not crying means better. Rangiku crying over what was done to her was what embedded into Gin that he needed to be stronger. No crying allowed. None. In his mind, obviously, Gin doesn’t actually make that connection that ‘because Rangiku did this, I’ll do this’ no, he’s not so meticulously aware yet, but there’s certainly an imprint left on him from those earlier years in the Rukongai, dreading her tears, hating them, hating those men, and so crying = murderous intent. Crying = anger.

          If Gin cried as a child, he didn’t realize he was doing so. I can see him crying in his sleep from a dream, a nightmare, a jam-packed series of emotions hitting him whilst vulnerable, whilst unable to smile and swallow it all down. I can see him waking from it and wiping at his face, feeling utter detachment like an ache in his chest, an otherness, like that wasn’t even him crying, that wasn’t him. Gin wouldn’t think more of it, he wouldn’t dare linger on the thoughts. Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know.mp4 and all that jazz.

          Gin is more likely to lash out in anger than let himself cry. I have a headcanon / drabble somewhere of Gin screaming into his inner world, clutching at his hair, feeling so terribly close to crying but he can’t, it literally will not happen. He’s too bottled up and frustrated from that that when he actually has an opportunity to cry and it doesn’t naturally happen because he’s become so suppressed, it just outright angers him. Because he has latched everything up, lock and key, by the time Gin’s an adult -- if he were to cry as an adult, it’d be during a flurry of explosive emotions. He cannot just casually let loose, no, that door’s jammed shut, it’s been coiled tight in him. A pit of despair by the time the Winter War rolls by. Gin admits to feeling anxiety, dread, during that conflict -- a sign of slowly coming undone, no longer able to keep himself from hesitance, doubt, insecurity, and anticipation hovering around him like a dark cloud. Gin cannot cry, though, not now. Not when he’s so close to making all the pain worth something...

          So it’s no surprise that Gin really only starts getting the actual opening to properly cry in my canon divergent verses. But the catch !!!!  Gin has failed so thoroughly and so brutally that he feels he doesn’t deserve to weep about it. That this is merely a fraction of the karma he deserves. He experiences suicidal ideation, daydreaming of how it’d simply be easier if he hadn’t survived at all. He feels too hollow to cry, then, at the start. He feels too heavy, too much, it’s too much to cry about. He ruined himself and Rangiku for nothing. He did all of this for nothing. And now Rangiku wants answers, still waiting, watching him, and he can’t cry in front of her. IT’S STILL INGRAINED IN HIM FROM CHILDHOOD: she’s the one who cries and he’s the one who comforts. The audacity of him to cry in front of her after everything he put her through, as though he were the victim and her the one needing to comfort him. Gin may be morally gray, but at times he truly sees the world in black and white. No moderation, no give and take.

          It’d hit him later, when he’s learning to become more vulnerable. When he’s trying to open up to Rangiku about something he has to rip from himself, his heart holding onto this sorrow for so long Gin has to surgically remove the truth from himself. AS A CHILD, WITNESSING WHAT HAPPENED TO RANGIKU COUNTS AS A TRAUMATIC EVENT. Not talking about it for 110+ years does a number or two on you when you at last, FINALLY, tell her the fucking scoop. Gin repressed what happened to Rangiku because he recognized that Rangiku did not fully and properly remember, recollect, what happened to her. He knew. Gin saw.

          Compartmentalizing her trauma on top of his own, as though a keeper of it, a sin-eater, Gin would feel absolute despairing relief at finally telling her. Despairing because he’ll be inflicting upon her something he’s been holding back, holding that door shut, for the entirety of their knowing of one another, and to finally let go of the door and let that beast of trauma go charging at her undeterred ?  There’s immense guilt attached to this entire affair. Gin feels childlike guilt; why her, and not me ?  I wish it could’ve been me, we could’ve traded places and I’d be fine, I’d live, we could live happy together.  Akin to survivor’s guilt, Gin wishes those men had found him and taken a piece of his soul rather than Rangiku’s. The ‘why’ of it haunts him. Why her. Why didn’t I stop them. Why didn’t I show up sooner. I could’ve bitten at them, kicked and hit, we could have escaped together -- or at least you could have. Gin also feels guilt at a base adult level: why am I keeping this from her ? No, it’s too late to tell her, she’s happier now, there will never be a good time to tell her.

          There are so many things, feelings, thoughts, that Gin has never shared with Rangiku due to it all being tied to the unspoken secret he’s let fester inside of him.

          SO WHEN GIN FINALLY TELLS RANGIKU WHY HE JOINED AIZEN, WHY HE TRIED TO KILL AIZEN, WHY HE SAID THOSE WORDS TO HER DURING THAT BLIZZARD AND BECAME A SHINIGAMI ... GIN’S GOING TO BREAK DOWN.

          The truth is tied to vulnerability in Gin’s mind. Telling it means ripping himself apart at the seams. Everything he crafted himself out to be was made around this secret. It’s going to be bloody, it’s going to hit him like a fucking train. Gin’s going to feel it coming, rumbling on the tracks, he’ll hear it even, that approaching storm, he’ll know by the prickle at his eyes and the closing of his throat, but still nothing’s ever prepared him for the absolute choked finality of the truth, and he’s going to do his best to hold it back -- it’s instinctive, it’s in his blood by now to mask it, stop it, divert and drawl his way out of it. But this time he can’t just stop halfway and distract her, talk about something else. No, Gin’s cornered himself and it’s high time Rangiku got the truth from him, he can’t run away any more. He’ll have to grit his teeth and talk through it, swallow it back just enough to speak, to tell her what he’s done to them both and for what, for why, it’s the worst possible conversation they could ever have, but one they need. And Gin’s going to find himself incapable of holding back a sob the more he discloses, the more that slips out and escapes him the more the emotions tied to that sunken anchor come up too. He will feel simultaneously lighter and heavier for it.

          There are numerous ways Gin’s thought about wording it. He’s thought about the numbed approach, MISSION REPORT style: Aizen Sousuke harvested souls from the 64th Rukongai District, they took a piece from you. Perhaps not, no, not like that. Maybe... back when y’were a kid, there were three Shinigami assigned to the 64th District to collect souls to fuel Aizen Sousuke’s Hogyoku. They took somethin’ from you. I saw it. I saw them hoverin’ over you, I saw it in their hands. I saw’em offer it up to Aizen in the forest, collectin’ firewood. I saw him.

          WHY DIDN’T I STOP HIM, WHY DIDN’T I ATTACK THOSE THREE MEN THEN AND THERE IN BROAD DAYLIGHT WITH YOUR COLLAPSED FORM A FEW FEET AWAY, MAYBE I COULD HAVE TAKEN THEM ON AFTER ALL. I COULD HAVE CRUSHED A SKULL IN WITH STONE, I COULD’VE STOLEN HIS SWORD BEFORE THE LIFE FULLY FADED FROM HIM AND MADE IT VANISH, I COULD’VE CARVED THROUGH THE SECOND, SLICE THE TENDON AT THE THIRD’S ANKLE AS HE ATTEMPTED TO FLEE, WARN OTHERS. SLIT HIS THROAT AS HE CRAWLED AWAY. YOU��D HEAR IT, OFF TO THE SIDE. YOU’D SEE ME COME UP TO YOU WITH BLOOD SPLATTERS. YOU’D SEE ME LEAN OVER YOU WITH NOT A PERSIMMON OFFERED, NO, YOUR OWN FUCKING SOUL THEY PLUCKED FROM YOU. SHAKY HAND. BLOODIED HAND. TAKE IT, TAKE IT BACK. I FIXED IT --

          Just tell her. JUST TELL HER.

          DO YOU REMEMBER THE DAY WE MET, RANGIKU ... ?

[arcticdementor]

I was a pre-teen in the seventies, which means that long before I hit the jaded age of fourteen when older men tried to use it to get me to peel off clothes, I was used to hearing “we’re all naked under clothes.” (Later on I greatly regretted most of these idiots hadn’t read Heinlein so I couldn’t say “nul program.” So instead I had to say things like “We’re also all clean under our dirt, so I see you don’t intend to shower ever again.”)

There were other just as crazy aphorisms that passed for “deep thought.” I’m honestly not sure what caused this, whether it was more people than ever being pushed to higher ed they weren’t really qualified for, but that made them want to sound “intellectual” or that the Soviets were diligently working with their wrenches to take apart the ability to think of the new generation. Or perhaps for whatever reason mass media and TV just encouraged a ridiculous wave of aphorisms that not only didn’t mean much but that aimed to destroy rather than build habits, patterns and ways of life that led to success.

You know, crazy stuff like “What difference does a piece of paper make to whether we’re married?” (Other than meeting potential obligations to potential children, and getting the buy in of both sets of inlaws and recognition of society that protects well…. mostly the woman who puts more biological investment in the relationship, none, really.) And “If it feels good do it!” and– Well, a lot of you are old enough to have heard all this cr*p growing up. And the younger ones, trust me, the current spate of crazy is well anchored in a barrage of crazy — to my certain knowledge — from the sixties and seventies.

I fell for some of them too. The unflappable Miss Almeida was not unflappable when this stuff came at her from someone she respected. So for a long time I bought my brother’s “romance is the opium of womanhood” long before I realized where the origin of that nugget came from, or that my brother — never having been a woman — was in fact assuming that without having romantic notions to encourage her to care about attachment and feelings, young women would be as “free” and sexually available as men wish they’d be. Of course now we know that’s the rankest and most absolute bull excreta, and that in fact women have — surprise! It’s not like we evolved to be the caretakers of children or anything — a different set of sex related hormones that encourage attachment to sexual partners and incidentally children.

But the excreta of “pseudo-profound-social statements is now everywhere, and yesterday I was hit in close proximity by two bits of crazy. And suddenly it hit me “And what is the alternative, precisely?”

…

Look, all of human civilization has been an attempt to suppress inter-personal violence, or at least keep it within bounds that don’t prevent us from assembling in numbers larger than clan or tribe. Almost any reading of the records of older cities will quickly come to the conclusion that people used to be a lot more interpersonally violent. They just were. Even in early modern England, well…. Let’s say men died young because they fought over the most stupid things.

And that was already a state-nation, where people identified with the nation was though it were a race, and had not only forgotten their early tribal affiliations but their micro-kingdoms (the regional association, which given travel in that time probably had a lot of genetic backing) before it was unified into “England.” So the fights were rarely tribal or regional (though there were family feuds.)

…

But we are built on a template of great apes, and the remains we find of hominins and other man-tribes show that their lifestyle was in fact close to that of great apes everywhere. And do you know what you call a baby chimp found by a genetically unrelated band? Snack.

So, sure, let’s assume that education — public or not — is a way for a culturally dominant “elite” to suppress generalized violence.

What is the alternative?

The left is assuming violence is justified and on their side, because of course their idea of social dominance, and the model they implement is to take control and rob everyone. But throughout history they are an exception, in fact. Even the “bad old kings” were trying to do the best they could for their tribe or micro nation. They often screwed up and followed their own desires, because human, but the idea of noblesse oblige is very very old in humanity. And most people at least try (Unless they’re all ‘et up with Marxism and self-righteousness, because bullsh*t means never having to say you’re sorry.)

Instead let’s look at it as meaning what it says “education” (by which we can mean everything we do to tame the toddler-beast and up through specific knowledge of how to get ahead in life) is a way to suppress inter-personal violence.

Well, yes. And we’re all naked under our clothes. And wearing clothes isn’t natural, maaaaan.

But what is the alternative? The civilizational process of mankind, from band to clan, from clan to city, from city to nation, accomplishing things that could only be accomplished by many people cooperating without violence is a process of suppressing unnecessary violence and waste of human life.

…

In the same way, later, while doing my instapundit link rounds, I saw an article about how 2 + 2 is colonial thinking imposed on non-white populations, and are alien and evil, compared to their native ways of knowing.

After I got my eyes from under the sofa, I took a deep breath and asked “What’s the alternative?”

Because, you know, I’ve heard this before, but I never thought about precisely what their nonsense would entail.

Sure, we’re giving up the internal combustion engine, bridges, anything better built than a hut made of rough stones, and probably — let’s be honest — crops. The horrendous thing is that this might be completely acceptable to them, since they don’t realize what supports their ability to live in relative comfort.

Let’s instead explore what this means at the interpersonal level and how much eschewing simple math would make living with other human beings impossible.

…

Humans have partly got this far, and now enjoy untold prosperity which had practically eliminated famine (until of course the covidiocy starved the third world) because “colonial thinking” defeated that of isolated tribes.

Or perhaps more cogently: those who won a clash between two populations generally (there are exceptions, like Greece and Rome and to an extent India and Great Britain, and perhaps to an extent America and Japan) imposed their mode of life on the defeated. Though they might culturally appropriate that which was worthy in the culture of the defeated.

…

Is 2 +2 a colonial way of thinking? Oh, probably. But that was probably way back when the colonization of the homo sap by the Neanderthal (culturally, that is. Well, that seems to have been the direction) occurred, because we have trade going that far back, and trade can’t survive without counting.

In fact, even though the concept of zero is also fairly sophisticated, we’ve come across very few tribes that don’t have a concept of counting, or a concept of numbers over 5, and those are usually highly isolated and tiny tribes. Because arithmetic is a darn useful skill, as is everything we’ve built on it from accounting to architecture.

And what’s the alternative? People walking around “Sensing” the numbers? Be real. That’s not native to anyone but the crazier tribes of Homos New Agicus, a tribe who uses cannabis in such vast quantities they’re sure to become extinct.

The alternative is never “death or cake.”

When idiots run around with blunt aphorisms, demanding you dismantle civilization, ask them what their alternative is. And stop them when they start talking of rainbows and unicorn farts, and ask them the exchange rate of the unicorn fart to the rainbow. Because if it’s a civilization, we have to know.

You want to eschew controls over violence? Basic arithmetic? Clothes?

Well, sure. I believe you’re ultimately free to do what you want, as long as you pay the price.

You’re free to take all your clothes off, and take off to the forest with your buddies, where you can live as though 2 plus 2 equals 20, or potato, or chicken.

We don’t care. Heck, you probably won’t live long, but if you do, you’ll be a fascinating ethnology-experiment.

What you won’t be and can’t be is able to shame us out of living our lives as civilized human beings, who have enough to eat and can trade a known quantity for a known quantity. Because you know, there really is no alternative. Not an alternative that allows humanity to survive.

And if you hate humanity enough you don’t want us to survive, I have an easy solution: You go first. After which the existence or non-existence of humanity stops being your problem.

[morelike-bi-light]

As much as I love our meme culture where we romanticize or slam our favs, I do genuinely think there's really interesting flaws to explore with all of the Twilight vampires. It's not developed super well in the series, not front and center since whether we see main characters make mistakes with consequences largely depends on how Meyers personally feels about them and what they represent to her, but the complexity exists and there's a whole heap of potential to explore.

Like Carlisle's need to 'save' and how it conflicts with itself. There's that post that points out exactly how selfish his decision was, seeing as how he views vampirism as damnation, and yes! That makes it so much more interesting. What would he be without this conflict? A pretty one dimensional saint figure with a million PhDs. I love that Carlisle spent hundreds of years denying himself company and then crumbled beneath a single Chicago mother's plea to save her son, in my mind as an excuse to soothe his own crippling loneliness. And then when he had someone to exist beside, he just... he did it again, ostensibly because Esme deserved better. And again, this time for Edward. Then he did it for Rose. And then they picked up Alice and Jasper, and I wonder if he felt that much more guilty knowing that if he'd just waited a decade or so more, he might've found family anyways without having to 'damn' the others. Exploring how that interacts with his religious beliefs? Sign me up.

Then there's Rosalie's resentment. It's been covered in much better depth by other users, and I think I've reblogged those posts, but the validity of her anger and fear of losing the only things that give her comfort in a life she never chose bears repeating. Not to mention how this possibly affects her relationship with her coven - it's like when your child or spouse or sibling or best friend who has depression. How do you interact with a loved one who wishes they were dead? Who thinks life, even with you, whom they claim to love, is a prison? How do you interact with the man you believe to be your soulmate when you genuinely believe that you would be better off having died before meeting him? What does it say about her sense of self prior to death versus as an immortal?

Which leads perfectly into Edward's self-flagellation. He murders and feeds, because he's a monster who deserves to feel like one - but he's not the only one who suffers from that (though we give him some points for understanding that from the get-go and targeting people he thinks deserve it). But then he feels bad for acting like a monster and he has another reason to punish himself. He deprives himself of joy and distances himself from his family because how dare a monster like he ever find comfort in others like him, and how dare he enjoy a life that's so unnatural - but his family suffers alongside him. But then he feels guilty for being a dick to them, which gives him another reason to punish himself. He sends Bella mixed signals by alternating between caring, coldness, and cruelty, because he wants her to be happy but he also doesn't want himself to be happy - but Bella suffers because of this. Then he feels guilty about putting her safety at risk, which gives him another reason to punish himself. It goes on and on, and this line of thinking hinders his growth as a character through the entire series without being properly addressed.

Bella's bull-headedness. Jasper's survivalism. There is so, so much to be said here. Even with the three least developed of the coven, Alice has her impulsivity, Esme has her passivity, Emmett has his impatience.

On the flip side, we have the native characters, who are all either poorly developed or most characterized through off hand, arm's-length negativity, so as to make the vamps look better, and all I want for them is more content exploring all the good they have to offer.

Like, Jake's defining quality is his loyalty - Smeyer may have butchered his character, but I'm not talking about the bullshit she had him do in the last two books. I want to see more exploring how warm and good and patient and generous he is with his friends, no matter what it is he's up against, be it social conflict or an emotional crisis. I mean, in the books, we only ever get to see him really care about Bella. What about Embry and Quil? There's an entire foundation to their friendship that's hardly brushed by canon. I want to see his loyalty to his father and sisters and the memory of his mother. IT is interesting when loyalties conflict, preferably with greater nuance and weight than the Uley vs Cullen dilemma, but what's more satisfying is getting to see Jacob act in his element. I wanna see his other good traits explored too, the ones that exist outside of the necessity that he be a good friend/alternate LI for Bella - like the passion he has and his down to earth attitude.

And don't get me started on the Uley pack. Sam himself had so much potential to be a nuanced foil to Carlisle - I'm going to need to make an entire other post on it, it gets me so worked up, so keep an eye out for that! But also there's Paul, who is literally just an angry caricature version of Emmett, Emily whose entire characterization is built on a mess of racist and sexist tropes, and how many of the others even get characterized at all?

And Leah. Was she done the dirtiest of not only all the native characters, but also all the females? Arguably, yeah. I'd say so. Again, there was so, so much potential to explore her even in subtle ways through the later narrative and literally next to none of it was fulfilled. By the end of Breaking Dawn I was genuinely irritated, even as a kid, because it felt like Leah had been pointed out time and time again as being so special - only important native woman, only pack member to have been ostracized through the entire series, and the only female werewolf, hello - only for none of it to be relevant literally at all to the major plot. There wasn't even any follow up. Why is she the first female wolf? What does that mean for the future of the shapeshifters? (I'm absolutely thinking about this for my - probably shorter than planned - fic, jsyk.)

Thank God for Seth, I guess. We all love Seth, but still I think even he is basically just a puppy's personality given human form. It's as if Smeyer thinks that complexity is counter blank to goodness, friendliness, and openness. (And I think this is an issue with Emmett, Alice, Esme, and Angela, too, to be fair. It's just that where those four are just Defined by a trait - boisterous, fun, gentle, and nice in turn - Seth's behavior specifically plays into a... cutesy... paternalism? That makes me narrow my eyes a bit.) Anyways, I wouldve liked to see his feelings about Charlie and Sue, or about his sister's transformation and his father's death, or uh, any of the violence against the newborns many of whom were literally his age from Eclipse? And not just in an, oh, sad boy is sad kind of way. He's not a care bear - there's gotta be some conflict about what he's been through seeing as it's a LOT.

To be real, though? In some ways, I'm actually okay with it that Smeyer dropped the ball on so many of her characters, while still giving us what we have to work with - largely because it's actually so cool to think about all the potential buried in the content we have, waiting to be unearthed. It's why, regardless of when or why it started and how long it should've lasted, I don't see myself exiting the Twilight fandom for a long time. There's so much work to be done, you know, stuff to be said, and I think it's been and is and will be a beautiful conversation. This was just meant to be a long meta, but really, I have to take a moment and celebrate everyone in the fandom who has kept it alive and funny and interesting, whether you're a staple like @howlonghaveyoubeenseventeen and @shittytwilightaus or you're just here to reblog and enjoy. We all sort of rediscovered this thing we liked in our childhood and just collectively decided to fix it and make it something worth loving as the people we are, and it makes me proud to be here!

[firelord-frowny]

I’ve talked a little bit about how at least one ~negative aspect~ of white supremacy/racism that impacts white people is that it can be SO DIFFICULT to avoid being Accidentally Racist over something that really shouldn’t have been that deep, and WOULDN’T have been that deep if not for the pervasiveness of white supremacy in america, and this bit about the lil country band Lady Antebellum and the controversy surrounding their name illustrates that pretty well, I think:

The band members have always said that the band's name was chosen arbitrarily, complaining about the difficulty of choosing a name. Inspired by the "country" style nostalgia of a photo shoot at a mansion from the Antebellum South, they said, "one of us said the word and we all kind of stopped and said, man, that could be a name"[40] and "Man that's a beautiful Antebellum house, and that's cool, maybe there's a haunted ghost or something in there like Lady Antebellum."[41] Haywood concluded, "[We] had a lady in the group, obviously, and threw Lady in the front of it for no reason. I wish we had a great resounding story to remember for the name, but it stuck ever since."[40] The name was always controversial, with a critic in Ms. Magazine writing in 2011 that the band's name "seems to me an example of the way we still — nearly 150 years after the end of the Civil War, nearly 50 years after the Civil Rights Act; and in a supposedly post-racial country led by a biracial president — glorify a culture that was based on the violent oppression of people of color".[41][42]

On June 11, 2020, joining widespread commercial response to the George Floyd protests,[41] the band announced it would abbreviate its name to its existing nickname "Lady A"[43] in an attempt to blunt the name's racist connotations.[1] The band members stated on social media that, never having previously sought the dictionary definition of the word "antebellum", they now consulted their "closest black friends and colleagues" so that their "eyes opened wide to the injustices, inequality and biases black women and men have always faced and continue to face every day. Now, blind spots we didn't even know existed have been revealed."[44] Fan response was mixed, with many decrying virtue signaling or even disparaging the protests.[41]American Songwriter said, "Given that the world knows what that A stands for, to many this change does little more than add extra insult to this ongoing injury."[45]

The next day, it was widely reported that the name "Lady A" had already been in use for more than 20 years by Seattle-based African American activist and blues, soul, funk, and gospel singer Anita White. The band again admitted ignorance of any prior use, which White called "pure privilege". Interviewed by Rolling Stone, White described the band's token acknowledgement of racism while blithely appropriating an African American artist's name: "They're using the name because of a Black Lives Matter incident that, for them, is just a moment in time. If it mattered, it would have mattered to them before. It shouldn't have taken George Floyd to die for them to realize that their name had a slave reference to it. It's an opportunity for them to pretend they're not racist". A veteran music industry lawyer observed that such name clashes are uncommon due to the existence of the Internet.[46][47] The band members contacted White the next week to apologize for having inadvertently co-opted and dominated her name,[48] saying that the Black Lives Matter movement had inspired them to a collaborative attitude. They nonetheless required retaining the same name, though she believed dual-naming is inherently impossible.[49]She said "We talked about attempting to co-exist but didn't discuss what that would look like"[48] because the band members would not directly respond to that explicit question three times during the conversation or in two contract drafts. She soon submitted a counteroffer that either the band would be renamed, or that her act would be renamed for a $5 million fee plus a $5 million donation to be split between Seattle charities, a nationwide legal defense fund for independent artists, and Black Lives Matter.[49]

On July 8, 2020, the band filed a lawsuit against White, asking a Nashville court to affirm its longstanding trademark of the name. The press release read: "Today we are sad to share that our sincere hope to join together with Anita White in unity and common purpose has ended. She and her team have demanded a $10 million payment, so reluctantly we have come to the conclusion that we need to ask a court to affirm our right to continue to use the name Lady A, a trademark we have held for many years."[50]

On September 15, 2020, White filed a counter-suit asserting her claim to the Lady A trademark and rejecting the notion that both artists could operate in the same industry under the same brand identity. She is seeking damages for lost sales and a weakened brand, along with royalties from any income the band receives under the Lady A moniker.[51][52]

Like????????? this REALLY didn’t need to be a thing. 

And one thing I think black folks and other poc need to chill out with is dismissing any white person’s attempt at Being Better in how they move through a white supremacist world in a way that seeks to undo or at least not exacerbate white supremacy. I can TOTALLY believe that, in their white ignorant bliss, this band really did choose their name without realizing for a moment that it might leave a fucked up taste in some people’s mouths. Honestly like... antebellum IS a cool sounding word lmfao and if it wasn’t so heavily associated with slavery-era america, i’d wanna name something antebellum, too! 

And like, yes, it’s true that it ~shouldn’t have taken george floyd’s death~ for anyone at all to suddenly decide that they want to go a little bit out of their way to denounce or at least not seem to promote racism in some small way. But it did. And it does. And every fucking time there’s a gross act of violence and injustice acted out on a person of color in front of the world, there’s always going to be a brand new white person out there who Sees The Light for the very first time. That doesn’t mean their new perspective isn’t genuine, and it doesn’t mean it happened All Of A Sudden. If anything, it was something they’d been thinking about for a long time, but didn’t know how to address it, or what to say, or who to say it to, or how to talk about it in their own community. OBVIOUSLY that problem is WAY LESS BAD than, ya know, actually experiencing racism, but it’s still a real thing that some white folks go through, and being mad about it isn’t going to make it NOT a real thing. it shouldn’t have taken george floyd’s death. it shouldn’t have taken trayvon martin’s death. it shouldn’t have taken the instatement of one of the most vile human beings to ever assault the face of the earth for This Person or That Person to finally want to make a positive and public change, BUT IT DID. It always does. That, unfortunately, is How It Works. 

And so, this band adjusts it’s name in an effort to not seem hostile. OBVIOUSLY it’s not a grand show of solidarity. OBVIOUSLY it’s not meant to convince anyone that they’re Super Amazing White People Who Will Stop At Nothing For Racial Equality. It was literally just a small, simple gesture. They’re just modifying their image, because they were no longer comfortable with knowing how that word makes a lot of people feel. Bc like... let’s be real: probably a solid ZERO of their fanbase would have given a shit if they’d just left the name as it was. Nobody who’s going to a Lady Antebellum concert was pouting about the name. And if anything, they prolly stood a better chance of LOSING fans for ~being politically correct~ than gaining fans for changing their name to something less annoying. 

And it JUST SO HAPPENS that the slight lil adjustment they made to their name steps on the toes of an existing artist, and it JUST SO HAPPENS that this artist is black, and is also an ACTIVIST in social and racial justice. 

Oops. 

And so, obviously people don’t interpret it as an honest mistake. Instead, it’s a result of white privilege. And I mean like??? ok, maybe it is. But I ALSO had never heard of Anita White until I read this fucking wiki page lmfao. So like... my ignorance isn’t due to no white privilege on my part. Maybe it’s a consequence of a white supremacist culture that wouldn’t glorify her and celebrate her and put her name everywhere... but that’s a different thing from privilege. 

So now not only are the bands efforts to adjust to a world that’s becoming more aware of racial injustice being dismissed as disingenuous or too-little-too-late, but now they’re ALSO being accused of Using Their White Privilege to trample all over an artist they’d never heard of. 

i DO think that after finding out the name was already taken, and after talking with her about it and determining that she wasn’t interested in sharing - as is her right - they should have just said “ok, sorry, thanks for talking with us about it” and picked something different. i think it’s kinda ridiculous that they think they should sue her and i think she’s HELLA right for suing their asses right back, and I hope she gets her damn money. 

But I’m also cognizant of how emotionally/psychologically upsetting it can feel to have to just Change Your Name after so many years of living with it. It makes sense that despite their desire to adapt and choose a new name that doesn’t make people cringe, they still want to try to hold on to the feeling that THEY associated with their own name. “Lady A” seemed like a happy medium: They can remain Who They Are while also showing that Who They Are is someone who’s not trying to glorify a disgusting era of history. But if “Lady A” isn’t an option... what’s left? What else could they call themselves that wouldn’t feel like a totally new, alien identity?? 

So, I understand how, on an emotional level, they want to fight to keep it. 

But uh. They really need to just Be Sad about it and let it go. Just consider it one of the small, upsetting sacrifices that white folks may sometimes have to make as we ALL struggle and stumble through this fuckin long-ass road of Making The World Less Terrible For People Of Color, and move on. 

But yeah, like. 

It’s fucking ridiculous that this was even an issue, and it was only an issue because of racism!!!!! If white supremacists didn’t manufacture a culture that oppresses people of color and glorifies the pre-civil-war era SPECIFICALLY for the good ol slavery, then perhaps people could wax poetic about the artistic and environmental aesthetic of that era without it being assumed that they Must Be Racist. Bc like??? idk if yall know this lmfao but i LOVE????? colonial american music. like, the kind of stuff with that Ashokan Farewell vibe. I think it sounds beautiful. And i really fuckin love the black spiritual music that was developed in that time. and i think so much of the architecture and fashion was so???? Nice. Just pleasant! But I can’t even get myself to fully enjoy it because of all the fuckin connotations that have been stuck to it. 

A band should be able to name theirself a name without it being such a goddamn fucking cultural crisis. 

But they can’t! And it is! 

Thanks, White Supremacy! 

[whitehotharlots]

It’s impossible to square the circle of #BelieveWomen

Let’s think back a month ago, to what turned out to be a pivotal moment in the 2020 campaign: Elizabeth Warren’s bizarre claim that Bernie told her a woman could not win the presidency.

The dishonesty of the attack on Sanders was so manifest that the takes barely need to be re-enunciated: her campaign was stalling so she lied about Sanders, hoping to re-focus media attention on herself while riding the most cynical aspects of MeToo into a poll bounce. Bernie faced an accusation, and since the only properly woke response to an accusation is immediate and uncritical acceptance, he was going to be dinged no matter what happened afterward. (Only, hilariously, he was not dinged. It was actually Liz whose campaign was ruined by the stunt. And this signals, I hope to god, an end to this bullshit). 

This is all very basic. Good writers have already covered it. You don’t need me to rehash it any further.

I would like to talk, however, about how this highlights larger and more fundamental problems within the #BelieveWomen/#MeToo cinematic universe--problems that must be confronted if the people who seriously believe in the goals of these movements wish to accomplish anything other than securing book deals for a handful of shitty writers. My framing device here will be a concept introduced by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, in their 20-year-old critique of identity politics. This has to do with the split between hard “identity,” a fixed and firm conceptualization of identity that carries immense rhetorical weight but does not hold up to theoretical scrutiny, and soft “identity,” which views identities as protean and constructed--a more theoretically sound concept that has very little purchase in everyday discourse.

To start with an aside: it’s important to note that the malignant strains of identity politics presently infesting liberalism have been around for decades. It’s just that they didn’t have much utility until the Obama years--when it became clear that the promises of Hope and Change really just meant more means testing, more austerity, mass deportation, the wanton destruction of the planet, and an acceleration of our Forever Wars. The Democratic Party had to shift gears. In response to a crushing defeat in the 2010 midterms, their media apparatus decided to aggressively pursue identitarianism. This came with two benefits: 1) It allowed them to differentiate themselves from Republicans and motivate supporters while still sharing 98% of the GOP’s policy positions (this is where we get the logic about it being, like, so important for kids to see Black Panther); and 2) it provided an easy means of discrediting any material politics (“if we broke up the banks tomorrow, would that create more trans CEOs?”). Very little has changed within cultural studies-based understandings of identity over the last 20 years, as will be demonstrated from our review of Brubaker and Cooper’s piece. 

Brubaker and Cooper posit that

 “Identity,” is both a category of practice and a category of analysis. As a category of practice, it is used by ‘lay’ actors in some (not all!) everyday settings to make sense of themselves, of their activities, of what they share with, and how they differ from, others. It is also used by political entrepreneurs to persuade people to understand themselves, their interests, and their predicaments in a certain way, to persuade certain people that they are (for certain purposes) ‘identical’ with one another and at the same time different from others, and to organize and justify collective action along certain lines. (4-5)

As a category of practice, identity is morally neutral--its goodness or badness depends upon what ends its evocation is utilized toward. The trouble is when this category of practice is spun into a foundation of analysis, at which point the conception of identity becomes reified, made to appear as sort of an inatlertable given.  “We should,” the authors note “avoid unintentionally reproducing or reinforcing such reification by uncritically adopting categories of practice as categories of analysis” (5). 

Now, you may be fine with the notion that identity markers are un-transcendable, that they serve as the primary or perhaps even exclusive determining factor of a person’s being, worth, or moral stature. That’s what’s called an essentialist point of view. There’s trouble, though, because essentialism is (at least nominally) rejected within most bodies of academic thought. The more prevailing frame is called constructivism, which posits (correctly, I feel) that there’s nothing magical or inevitable about identity groupings, that they are instead social constructs and can therefore eventually be transcended even if their present-day effects are very real. This, the authors note, points to the fundamental contradiction of how identity is actually understood:

We often find an uneasy amalgam of constructivist language and essentialist argumentation. This is not a matter of intellectual sloppiness. Rather, it reflects the dual orientation of many academic identitarians as both analysts and protagonists of identity politics. It reflects the tension between the constructivist language that is required by academic correctness and the foundationalist or essentialist message that is required if appeals to ‘identity’ are to be effective in practice. (6)

Basically, “identity” has been formulated in such a way that it can be utilized in a essentialist sense even while its purveyors issue rote denials of its essentialism--like how someone can shamelessly use the #VoteLikeBlackWomen tag while claiming to not regard black women as ideologically monolithic. Or, more generally, by asserting that social problems can only be addressed by listening to Oppressed Group X or Y, (which is done most commonly as a response to left-materialist suggestions for change), as if all members of those groups would understand each issue identically and would suggest the same response. This is a dishonest and incoherent approach to politics, but it prevails because of its utility--that is, because it poses no real threat to existing power structures.

Here we find a rhetorical move that is foundational to contemporary identity politics: leaning on popular but theoretically indefensible understandings of terms and slogans while claiming that we actually understand these terms and slogans in obscure ways that are unpopular and rhetorically weak. Simply put: this is a lie. 

Brubaker and Cooper go on to explain that “weak or soft conceptions of identity are routinely packaged with standard qualifiers indicating that identity is multiple, unstable, in flux, contingent, fragmented, constructed, negotiated, and so on. These qualifiers have become so familiar--indeed obligatory--in recent years that one reads (and writes) them virtually automatically. They risk becoming mere place-holders, gestures signaling a stance rather than words conveying a meaning” (11). And the parallels here to Intersectionality are manifest--like how class is perfunctorily nodded toward but never substantially engaged with, or how what is purported as a means of understanding a multitude of identity positions is, in practice, a victimhood hierarchy that’s used to determine the (in)validity of people’s actions and observations. As long as we keep allowing people to hide within this double-conceptualization, we will continue promulgating an understanding of social problems that contradicts itself so fully that it cannot lead to any actionable analysis. 

This is fairly obvious now, in 2020, with identitarians having taken control over our liberal institutions and failing miserably at enacting any but the most superficial of changes. But in 2000, Brubaker and Cooper pointed out the simple fact that “weak conceptions of identity may be too weak to do useful theoretical work. In their concern to cleanse the term of its theoretically disreputable ‘hard’ connotations, in their insistence that identities are multiple, malleable, fluid, and so on, soft identitarians leave us with a term so infinitely elastic as to be incapable of performing serious analytical work” (11). And so they wondered, naturally, ““What is gained, analytically, by labeling any experience and public representation of any tie, role, network, etc. as an identity” (12)?

I find the answer pretty simple: leaning on an intellectually dishonest understanding of identity allows writers to cosplay as radicals without giving up any comfort, status, or power. Liberal leadership (by which I mean, those with power in academic and media spaces, as well as the center-right mainstream of the contemporary Democratic party) embraces this charade, as they realize it poses no threat of disruption or upheaval. Conservatives (Republicans, and more generally those in power in business and finance sectors, as well as the military), however, despise this, and are ideologically unaware enough that they regard it as an actual threat, and react to it with physical and fiscal violence (mass shootings are domestic terrorism are conspicuous examples, but selective austerity is much more commonplace and causes more harm on the whole). But now, most terrifyingly, a whole generation of young humanists have found themselves inculcated into this belief system but utterly unable to interrogate its foundational contradiction. They don’t realize it’s a grift. 

This is why the left-leaning criticisms of Warren’s’ campaign stunt fell so flat, even when they were being issued by writers with whom I usually agree. Warren was accused of cynically misappropriating the #BelieveWomen mantra. Writers explained that, actually, everyone knows that we shouldn’t seriously believe every claim by every woman, that the hashtag is instead meant to encourage people to simply be more empathetic and less dismissive to women who claim to have suffered abuse. This is the same fundamentally dishonest contradiction we find in the split between hard and soft identities. The hashtag isn’t #BeSomewhatLessIncredulous. It’s #BelieveWomen. It a blunt mantra, a demand so intense and absolute that no one could possibly take it literally--that it sometimes comes packaged with some post-facto qualifiers does not change this; it just makes its purveyors seem dishonest.

Warren’s stunt failed because most people could see through it. We recognize self-contradiction as easily as we recognize cynicism and hypocrisy, and unless someone has an awful lot of charm we tend to react negatively to all of those traits. A movement founded on such a flimsy edifice is never going to attract outsiders and is never going to achieve anything of value. It’ll elevate a small number of people and make everyone else even less likely to engage with social justice going forward. 

[hamliet]

On Banana Fish’s Ending

Welcome to the hell that is Banana Fish’s ending. If you like it it’s hell. If you hate it it’s definitely hell. If you’re like me somewhere in the middle but closer to “I don’t like this” it’s hell. We’re all suffering. 

Like any useless writer, I cope by writing out my feelings so here, have this.

I can see why some feel the ending narratively works in some respects, and in some ways I can even agree it can be read in certain ways that make it work. But I also think a happy ending could have been just as narratively excellent, depending on the execution, and my personal opinion is that this would have been a more responsible ending. But no one has to agree, and I understand why people hate the ending and why people defend the ending. 

I’m going to talk about this in a few segments: authorial statements, social messages, and genre. (I’m writing another meta on the narrative themes of the ending because that section got massively long.) For what it’s worth, a story does not exist in a vacuum, and while it’s absolutely valid to interpret and critique a story according to simply the written story, it’s also valid to weigh authorial intent (or to dismiss it), and to evaluate how the story plays into both larger cultural messages and larger literary trends. Any author 100% knows that their story will be interpreted according to all of these. But what follows is mostly my opinion/explaining why I feel as I do. It is not me saying anyone has to feel or interpret it the same way. 

Authorial Statements

I know Yoshida has made... contradictory and, frankly, offensive statements on the ending, in which she’s said things such as that Ash narratively had to die because he was a murderer and people who kill need to pay with their own lives. In general, Yoshida seems to struggle in interviews--like saying she hates Yut-Lung when the story’s moral center character (Sing) literally tells him in his last scene “I can’t hate you” and promises to help him redeem himself. This is hardly unique to her. It’s hard to explain a complex element of story in a few sentences of an answer. Ishida’s first interview after the end of TG had some cringeworthy moments, Rowling seems to make constant missteps (and retcons), etc. Hence, I generally employ “death of the author”--I think the author’s intent matters to the extent their work conveys their intent, but not if their work contradicts what they then say. 

The entirety of Banana Fish contradicts this idea of murderous karma. In fact, the story is at its core about finding a way out of a violent cycle, of finding freedom. Ash dying with a smile on his face literally says that he did not die trapped in a system of karmic violence with no hope of freedom. 

Not to mention Sing is a murderer. Yut-Lung* is a murderer. Blanca is a murderer. They all live, and get hopeful (even happy-ish) endings and implied redemption for Yut-Lung and for Blanca. 

*I know Yut-Lung is name-dropped as having been assassinated in a later manga called Yasha but like, he never actually appears in Yasha and it has nothing to do with his character’s arc in Banana Fish, so I don’t think it’s relevant to anything relating to Yut-Lung’s character as we know him. It’s really just an Easter egg, and since Yut-Lung dying in Yasha is a retcon of the fact that his arc ending with him living in the main story (Banana Fish) I feel completely free to disregard it as not actually canon.*

Additionally, Banana Fish takes empathetic looks at children who are suffering in a world where they are forced into the roles of prostitutes and killers, and what’s the point of empathy if it can’t change anything? Eiji is noted to basically be walking empathy, having a gift for comforting those around him, and the mutual, spiritual, and yes, romantic, love he and Ash share changes things for Ash (and for Eiji). To say that death had to happen narratively is to say that Eiji was, in the words of his critics, useless, which is rather at odds with the central emotional draw of the story: Ash and Eiji’s relationship. It contradicts Eiji’s beautiful letter, the one that Ash smiled as he died because of, because in this letter Eiji assures Ash: “you can change your destiny.”

So anyways, regardless of what Yoshida says, Ash being a murderer is not a narrative justification for the ending because that simply isn’t what the story conveys.

That being said, that perspective--that Ash’s death is karma for killing--is exactly Ash’s perspective. Just when he was about to overcome his flaw of not seeing his value by realizing how much he meant to Eiji, Lao reminds him of Shorter’s death, the one thing he cannot forgive himself for. And so Ash allows himself to die. But the thing is this perspective is wrong and narratively condemned. Eiji’s letter offers a counter to this, but Ash doesn’t take it (which is slightly inexplicable). Plus, as we see in “Garden of Light,” it leaves Eiji unable to completely overcome his flaw (an inability to act/truly live) for seven years, so the story condemns it too. 

And, of course, Ash also did not kill Shorter out of malice--he was forced into it, like he was forced into the life he had to live with Dino. It’s not the deaths of one of the people begging to be spared whom Ash killed for playing a role in killing Shorter, but Shorter’s death itself that brings about fear and mistrust in Lao. To have Ash’s death be a consequence for killing willingly (which he did plenty of), it should have been for one of those nameless people we got a brief shot of, instead of as a consequence for a murder Ash had no choice in and was a victim of almost as much as Shorter was. But that also wouldn’t work because a nameless death doesn’t quite suffice for offing your main character, so. Yeah. Ash’s death is not a narrative consequence for killing others; it’s expressly framed as a tragic and cruel result of his inability to forgive himself for specific acts that were not his fault. 

Social Messages Part 1: LGBT relationships

While Banana Fish was written in the 1980s-90s (kind of a dire time for LGBT+ people in the United States with the AIDS crisis), the trope of “bury your gays” has received rightful criticism since, and the ending can definitely be seen as “bury your gays.” (A criticism that is not helped by what happens to the gay/bi character in Yasha.) In other words, while I think the themes, characters, and frankly issues of Banana Fish are generally timeless, the ending is the only part of the story that I don’t think ages well. As time goes by, it will probably get even more criticism because of current society finally moving towards being better in the portrayal of LGBT+ characters. 

*Because I want to complain and explain why I really don’t consider anything post-GoL canon: the follow-up picture book “New York Sense” doesn’t help the “bury your gays” impression either: Sing and Akira are certainly intended to be parallels to Ash and Eiji as Akira is brought to the US by Ibe and interacts with gangster Sing in “Garden of Light,” and while such framing is very ambiguous/bordering on not being there in GoL the follow-ups absolutely paint a romantic framing to their interactions in GoL. They marry and raise a son, popping up in cameos in Yoshida’s other works. Hence it runs dangerously close to reading as the heterosexual couple introduced in the epilogue got the happy ending while the gay couple we spent 19 volumes with did not. Since Sing is also still heavily involved with the mafia in all of the follow-ups, this again contradicts narrative justifications for Ash’s death as karma. 

While I very much like Akira’s character, her romance with Sing isn’t just uncomfortable because of the above issue--it’s also uncomfortable because she is 13 and he is 23 in GoL (though their relationship doesn’t have to be read as mutually romantic there, and I don’t read it that way) and according to “New York Sense,” they marry when she is 18 which... implies things that seems very, very out of character for Sing, the series’ moral compass, and dramatically contradicts the skeevy adults preying on kids theme. It can also raise some cringe-worthy questions about why it’s framed as okay for the heterosexual couple but negatively (as it should be) for the people--who are primarily men--who assault Ash (and there is noted to have been a woman who assaulted him in “Private Opinion”). Like with Yut-Lung’s death, I just... don’t accept this retconning as canon. It contradicts the themes of Banana Fish as a story so I don’t have to.*

Social Messages Part 2: Abuse Survivors

For people who have been through abuse similar to Ash’s, in which choices over basic things like life, death, and your own body are taken from you, it’s honestly cruel to show someone who has spent their entire life suffering just about to grasp happiness, and then they die. It is fully valid to find this completely distasteful, and I do too.

But for me at least, one aspect that circumvents... some of the distasteful implication that Ash really was broken by things he had no choice in is the fact that Ash triumphed over his abusers first. Yet of course, having him die afterwards still hurts people who read the story and see themselves in a character like Ash, as it can reinforce the idea that abuse defines your life. 

I do wish (though I don’t think there’s a moral necessity) that more authors/creators would acknowledge that, in creating characters whom you in theory want people to relate to, see themselves in, root for, care about, you’re asking people to suffer with them as they suffer and if they die, grieve for them. Given the heaviness of Ash’s arc and the specific nature of his suffering (especially since it was horrifically emphasized in the story’s last arc with Foxx), the fact that Ash didn’t in the end overcome the message that he did not have value is going to be very painful for readers/viewers. (Lao missed his vital organs, so Ash really chose to die instead of getting help, because he chose to believe Blanca over Eiji, which... I’m not sure it quite works.) If you could have narratively had it end happily (and it absolutely could have, and apparently Yoshida’s editor told her not to end it with Ash’s death), there’s room to say that going with the tragic ending is hurtful and bordering on irresponsible. 

Genre

That defeat of Ash’s abusers is the reason I don’t think Banana Fish is quite as tragic as other stories like, say, the first Tokyo Ghoul or Hamlet or Macbeth, though it’s certainly tragic. In those stories, every single characters’ flaws lead to them dying, and it offers a cautionary tale. Banana Fish is more in the vein of say, Romeo and Juliet, or even the movie Titanic (I’m not making a romance comparison, for the record), in that the main characters might die, but their choices and the people they loved and how they loved manage to save a city, in the case of Romeo & Juliet, or to save Rose in the case of Titanic. In Banana Fish, Ash did help Eiji live, even if Eiji would need time to process it after the set-back of Ash’s death. 

In other words, even if I’m unhappy with it and I am, I don’t consider Banana Fish’s ending nihilistic. It wasn’t “life sucks and then you die,” at least not to me. Life sucked, but it also meant something, even beyond Ash’s relationship with Eiji. Ash’s life had value. Through saving Sing in the story’s climactic battle, and then helping Max with that article that would save other child prostitutes, Ash saved younger versions of himself. That’s powerful. Not only that, but Ash found love and hope in his personal life as well with Eiji, Max, Shorter, etc., and through that genuine happiness. Even if he couldn’t fully grasp it, he knew it was there, and he died knowing there was genuine, true love, and therefore beauty, in the world too. And that, for me, comes across as far more hopeful than surface-level, cheaper happier endings. But still, the fact that Ash couldn’t fully experience this beauty and happiness because of the cycle of violence he had no choice about being involved in, plus a questionable character decision, does leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. (That questionable character decision, with the letter not having a full effect, makes tragedy seem a bit forced on Yoshida’s part.)

I want to quote Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man,” and I’ve highlighted parts I think explain how I feel about Banana Fish and Ash’s character (in particular, why I don’t think a tragic ending necessarily sends a nihilistic message, at least not to me):

The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws. And Job could face God in anger, demanding his right and end in submission. But for a moment everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in this sketching and tearing apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains "size," the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal or the high born in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in the world.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal.

For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

This applies to basically all tragedy, of course, but I think some tragedies are more hopeful than others. And I see that struggle in Ash’s, and a hope in Banana Fish that I don’t see in other more nihilistic stories. Ash fought to reclaim the humanity that people tried to deny him, and through Eiji realized his humanity was there all along. 

Anyways, these are my complicated, all-over-the-place feelings on the ending. It’s fine for people to feel strongly either way, but also understand that when discussing such a heavy, fundamentally triggering work, it’s good to be sensitive to where people are coming from and interact with differing opinions with empathy. Many of us relate to characters like Ash, Eiji, and Yut-Lung, and since you don’t know where someone is coming from, let them express their feelings, and be kind. 

I’ll post another meta on thematic impressions on Banana Fish later. But to each their own. Also please note, again, this is really just my opinion. 

[ruminativerabbi]

Christchurch

There was something creepy and unsettling about settling into Purim this week as we were all still reeling from the news about the mass shooting last Friday at the mosques in New Zealand. Yes, it’s true that at the heart of Purim is the encouraging story of how a plot to murder innocents was thwarted by a combination of cleverness, bravery, and extreme chutzpah on the part of Mordechai and Queen Esther. But how could that happy outcome provide comfort for the Muslims of New Zealand (or, for that matter, for New Zealand’s Jews, who could surely just as easily have been the shooter’s victims) given that Haman’s plot failed utterly, while last week’s attack took the lives of fifty innocents at worship? There is something to learn from that comparison, though, but it has to do more with the villain’s motivation in both stories than with how either turned out in the end…because what motivated Haman to plan a nation-wide pogrom openly intended to annihilate the Jewish community in his time and place is more or less precisely what motivated the alleged shooter in New Zealand—at least judging by the so-called “manifesto” he emailed to more than thirty recipients, including the Prime Minister’s office in far-off Wellington, just minutes before the attack on the first mosque.

Assuming the authorities have the right man, which they seem certain they do, the shooter seems to have been motivated by a set of grim fantasies that society needs seriously to address. Admittedly, the seventy-four-page manifesto is a long read, although nowhere near as long as the 1,500-page screed penned by Anders Brevik, the man convicted of murdering seventy-seven people, mostly high school students, in a shooting rampage on the Norwegian island of Utoya in 2011 and whose writing covered many of the same topics covered in the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto. (Brevik’s unabashed motivation in undertaking his act of mass murder was to get his book read by the public, an incentive so real in his mind that he actually referred in public to the shooting as his personal “book launch.”)

At the heart of both documents is the deep-seated fear of replacement, a theme most Americans first heard about when the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville shocked the world back in 2017 by chanting “Jews will not replace us,” a slogan so foreign to most that even I, who consider myself more than knowledgeable about anti-Semitic tropes, did not understand it properly at first. (To revisit what I wrote last fall about eventually coming to understand what the slogan means to those who chant it, click here.)  Nor, I finally seized, was this just a creepy mantra intended solely to unnerve or to upset, but actually a slogan fully expressive of the idea that serves as the beating heart of white supremacist paranoia. The concept itself is simple enough: that the policies promoted by liberal Western democracies that permit immigration from third-world countries, encourage racial integration, promote (or at least permit) interracial marriage, justify ever-descending fertility rates as the result of personal decisions with which the state may never interfere, endorse access to abortion as a basic human right, and enact gun control laws intended to declaw the basic human right to bear arms—that these policies are all part of some mysterious global effort to replace “regular” white people (i.e., working-class whites who belong to Christian churches they either do or don’t attend) with people of color in general, but particularly with Muslims from third-world countries.

The white supremacists of different nations promote different versions of this theory—but they all derive at least to some extent from the 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, Le Camp des Saints, in which an ill-prepared host of Western nations, primarily France but others as well including the U.S., are at first slowly and then decisively overwhelmed by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, Western Africa, and Southeast Asia. Eventually South Africa is overrun too, as is Russia, with the result that the world as we know it comes to a decisive end even before the book does. (The book is available in English in Norman Shapiro’s translation as The Camp of the Saints, published by Scribner’s in 1975 and still in print.)

And that specific fear—that faceless hordes of dark-skinned people of various ethnic and national origins are just biding their time on their own turf until the misguided members of the liberal establishment in eventually every First World country blindly and stupidly open the gates without caring who comes through them or what those people stand for—that is the underlying emotion that appears to have provoked the mosque bombings in New Zealand, the mass murder of high school students in Norway, and any number of violent incidents in our own country. When white supremacists talk about the fear of being “replaced,” that is what they mean.

It’s not entirely untrue, of course, that immigrants—and particularly in large numbers—alter the face of the host country that takes them in. That surely did happen in our own country after successive waves of immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamentally altered the face of American culture. But in the case of our own country, the overall effect was essentially salutary because those groups who came here en masse were composed of individuals, three of my four grandparents among them, who were for the most part eager to embrace American culture and who had no interest at all in attempting to impose the culture of their countries of origin on the citizens of the nation that granted them refuge and took them in.

The accused shooter is an Australian, which adds a strong dollop of irony to his fear of replacement given that both Australia and New Zealand are dominated by cultures brought to those places by imperialist immigrants from Europe who rode roughshod over the actual culture of the actual people they found living in those places when they arrived en masse in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But I’m thinking that the real issue isn’t whether cultures do or don’t, or should or shouldn’t, evolve as time moves forward and the ethnic or racial make-up of the populace alters. On a more fundamental level, the issue has to do with the ability to see strangers as individuals rather than as a faceless horde.

The fear of being overwhelmed is probably a natural response when newcomers are seen not as individual men and women—people with children, who need jobs, who want to play a useful and meaningful role in society, who like to swim or to paint or to make music or to cook, who have their own set of fears and anxieties—but solely as part of the groups to which they belong.  And there is irony in this anxiety-driven world view as well because, by refusing to see others as individuals, such people eventually start thinking of themselves in that way as well and end up retreating deeper and deeper into their own communities. This in turn leads to the phenomenon that Canadian author Hugh McLennan once famously called “two solitudes,” a baleful situation in which contiguously situated groups have almost so little contact with each other that they quickly forget that the people on the other side of the line are individuals with whom they could easily engage if they wished. And so the path is laid for once-great countries to become balkanized shadows of their former selves as the sense of national identity that once held the citizenry together slowly erodes and becomes ever more fragile. Eventually, the nation collapses in on itself and something else emerges from the ruins…but the chances of that new entity somehow not facing the same issues of mutually antagonistic solitudes within its borders is nil. And so begins the spiral down towards dissolution and disunity born of fear. It does not—perhaps even cannot—end well!

In the history of the West, the Jews have played the role of the perennial other, of the tolerated alien. The outpouring of sympathy in the Jewish community over the last week for the Muslims of New Zealand—a community that I seriously doubt more than half a dozen Jewish Americans even knew existed before last week—derives directly from that sense that, in the end, what drives the kind of violent animus against Muslims gathering for prayer that exploded last Friday in Christchurch is different only in cosmetic terms from the kind of explosive violence so often directed at Jews. So we add Christchurch to the list of gun-violent massacres in religious settings that already includes (to reference only attacks within the last decade) Charleston, Pittsburgh, Sutherland Springs, and Oak Creek. And we brace for the next attack, which will surely come unless we can find a way to force the haters to look directly at the objects of their antipathy and see, not a faceless horde, but men and women made in the image of God. That sounds so simple when put that way, and so obvious. But you cannot make blind people see merely by forcing them to open their eyes and face in the right direction….

[bellamygateoldblog]

Blog Summary Tag Game

Find your fandom kru and help them find you. Answer the following and include the tag #the100blog in your answer, then tag some of the blogs you follow.

created by @johnmurphysreddit tagged by @blodreina-noumou !

1. What are your primary topics?

My blog is pretty much divided 70/30 between t100 & skam italia (i do tend to follow more t100 blogs!) Sometimes there’s the odd post of other shows I watch/have watched.

Most of my posts are spacekru, but i reblog lots of pretty gifs/edits of anything from the show because they are beautiful and creators put lots of work into them! I’ll probably also be posting about Octavia, too, throughout s6 because i’m particularly interested in her arc.

I’m not the most eloquent writer, but i do write & reblog a fair amount of meta, some of which are very lengthy, and i understand it could be frustrating if this doesn’t interest you, so I always try to tag them as “#meta<3″ so you can filter them if you wish. (note: my blog is disorganised atm, i’m still pretty new & only just getting the hang of it lol but my newer posts are tagged properly).

2. What tags should a visitor check?

#meta<3 is where i store meta about the show, it isn’t necessarily all my own, but i do comment on quite a bit!

#anti clarke griffin is where all of my Clarke posts go, even ones that I don’t necessarily class as negative, because i think my general feelings about her character give off a negative impression regardless.

I tag with full names (e.g, #bellamy blake) and i do this with any other show besides t100 that i spontaneously reblog, too (such as #deadly class).

3. What do you love about The 100?

I love the dynamics between a lot of the characters, and i tend to focus on them a lot! There are plenty of instances where there are personality clashes, and where they’re forced to challenge one another. The dynamics also give pretty good indications of who are best suited as units or teams, and who can be percieved as being outliers to the rest.

I like that pretty much every character is presented as grey, it makes it more enjoyable to analyse them, their motivations, and their strengths and weaknesses. It’s possible to view a scene from multiple different perspectives and understand where each of the characters stand during that point in time, even when we don’t necessarily agree with them. I love the redemption arcs of both Bellamy and Murphy, I was always taken with their journey’s of seeking atonement, reflecting on their morals and place in the world, and growing as people as a direct result of their actions and the consiquences of them.

I like to be surprised; I can be a fan of major character death if it’s executed properly (no pun intended), and if this end point is consistent with the rest of their arc. I like when the trajectory of a character’s story changes suddenly, such as when Murphy went along with Jaha to the city of light, and then later regrouped with the rest of the mains, but as a member, rather than an outsider. Another example of this, just to be clearer, was Luna’s refusal to take the flame despite all the suspence and mystery surrounding her character, and i like that they didn’t result to compromising who she was in order to drive the plot!

I’m drawn to post-apocalypse/dystopian future style shows and movies for the new and exciting challenges they pose compared to the here-and-now. These types of shows are a great way of exploring ideas that wouldn’t otherwise be appropriate, such as corrupted morals, the difficulty of survival, and taking extreme measures in the face of danger. LOVE fight scenes, especially involving combat weapons, and the thrill the comes with them; they’re much more entertaining than guns.

I love some superficial drama in the midst of all the chaos, usually relationship and friendship conflicts. I feel it just brings so many more layers to the narrative, and makes the world it exists in seem bigger and deeper, while also serving to make the show more engaging by giving us something we can relate to better, no matter how silly it seems within the context of the show. This way, it doesn’t feel too plot-orientated and gives the viewer a breather from the darker aspects of the show. I think t100 did this better in the earlier seasons, especially with Octavia and Bellamy, as the dynamic conflicts that came later on all seem to be plot-related in one way or another.

I love the whole idea of finding your place in a world that works hard to suppress you.

My favourite characters are spacekru + Octavia & Diyoza (both bad bitches which i truely cannot resist). Deceased favourites: Luna, Jasper + Finn (I like the peaceful damaged ones okay)

I don’t focus too much on ships, but i have a strong preference for Becho!

4. What do you hate/what frustrates you about The 100?

Hypocrisy and double standards that exist within the narrative, and especially within the fandom. A lot of the time this is concerning Clarke.

The fandom climate in general! explicit and implicit hostility directed towards people who disagree with popular opinion, people unable to distinguish between actor and character, people opting to attack rather than discuss, people viewing the entire show through ‘shipper goggles’ and ignoring key elements of the narrative in favour of creating their own canon (people who ignore and twist past the point of it just being individual interpretation).

The wasted potential of Jasper & Finn as insights into the harmful affects and futility of war, and the puncture it makes on a person’s psyche. As much as these deaths had me shaken to my core, I could never quite get past the blatant killing-off of two of the more explictly mentally ill characters. Rather than a recovery storyline, the only solution to their struggles was death, and i’ve always felt like the writers had so much potential to address PTSD and depression more directly, through them. I think it could’ve made for an interesting storyline, and it would’ve given the writers more personalities, dynamics, and challenges to play with.

The belittlement/mocking of peaceful characters, which in a way expressed that hating violence and war made you weak and not to be taken seriously (Lincoln & Luna specifically, but also s5 Monty and s1 Finn).

Additionally, the lack of world-building. We were only given minor glimpses into the past of some characters, we didn’t get to see details on how the ark evolved, or how the present culture was formed from it’s history. We see the same approach with the grounders; we learn that every clan is different, but then we barely see how they are different. The small appearance of mutated animals and then no future mentions is another confusing point. I know most of this is simply due to time restraints, but there came a point where we didn’t learn any more than was necessary to advance the plot, and it just made the world and conflicts in it seem smaller.

Characters I dislike include Clarke, Kane & Abby (both equally as frustrating and eye-roll inducing).

5. Is this exclusively a The 100 blog?

No, but i usually only use one other main tag (skam italia) which can be filtered!

6. What else should people know?

I love engagement with my posts! You don’t need to be reluctant to add your own thoughts. Conversation is welcome as long as it is kind and respectful!

I usually don’t speak too openly about this, but I have depression, which means I sometimes go M.I.A and sometimes i’m here most of my time to keep myself busy. It varies! so if I fail to reply to anything, it may be because i don’t have the energy to just yet, but it isn’t personal!

I talk a lot in my tags, sometimes commenting on the post when i’m trying to avoid hijacking, and sometimes talking bs and tagging Bellamy “big sexy”

I have a lot of unpopular opinions in this fandom, i’m well aware of it lol but i don’t appreciate hateful anons (which i have had in the past, and they aren’t pleasant!) I prefer to keep anon turned on because some people are just more comfortable interacting that way, and that’s fine! but don’t take it being turned on as an invitation to attack me.

I don’t follow many people, but here are some people who’s blogs I love, who i tag to do this if they want to (though i know this kind of thing isn’t for everyone!)

@bound-by-stardust @fleimkepakosskairipa @awkwardnarwhall93 @fleimkepajohnmurphy @ringabellamy @spacekru-defense @skaiengineers @alrightsnaps @bunker-boyfriends

Sorry if you were already tagged!!

[andysnorwayaffairs]

Final Project

Pt 1; a perfect ending. feeling a rush of shared excitement - finally! just like me!

warmth, embraced, a queer kind of friendship. we sat in the grass and talked about how our lives were growing up, how our queerness was realized and how it affected the way we walk in the world. our stories are so similar yet so, so different. miles and miles of time away, you announce to your friends that you’re probably maybe gay. you start a spark in their minds, and soon after you’re deemed the trail blazer of coming out. you are brave, do you know it? you were the person who i wished for. so desperate for approval from others, and not meeting anyone like you, i took it upon myself to starve my queerness, the differentness, the part of me that i knew i could definitely be hated for. and i can’t stand the thought of being hated. and a part of me hated myself for who i was. i was taught that i couldn’t love like that, that it wasn’t *real*, that anything other than normal is impossible, wrong, destructive. so i listened, and i believed them. not completely, that is also true. that’s why i never stopped immersing myself in online queer culture, why i desperately searched for any sign of queerness in the online personas i followed and in the fiction that i read. we talked about this too, how we’d entrench ourselves in media and later realize that we were part of the group we were so obsessed with. finally... just like me

you opened your heart so quickly - your friends, they tell me that they’re so happy that you’ve met me. you open a window into your life and lend a hand to help me hop in. i see how you love others, and how they love you. we run through the lawn of a backyard riddled with ripe fruit and laugh like children at how sweet the juice is. we share a meal and spend hours talking about nothing and everything. i sometimes stop and listen to the chatter, and i feel complete warmth even when i cannot understand what is being said. we read the cards i brought and i learn how each of you sees love. i see the way you interact with your loved ones, the way you so deeply care to spend time with them. letting go, giggling in giddy joy, acting like absolute fools. finally, just like me

cried a farewell last night

thank you for offering me a bizarre, unfair amount of kindness

thank you for showing me a glimpse of your life, your entire world

thank you for extending a hand in friendship, in solidarity

thank you for being my friend

I feel like my time here, my glimpse into another person’s life, feels like a glimpse into an alternate timeline. A timeline in which I accepted myself from the beginning. A timeline in which I told a friend about my crush on Jen from Buzzfeed. A timeline when I refused to normalize myself, refused to uphold the boundaries that were unfairly placed on me. A timeline when I was brave. A timeline when I stopped being so damn scared. A timeline when I realized that my friends would still stay friends with me, and those who didn’t want to, I should let go of anyways. There will always be people who don’t match up with your values, your energies, your being. I won’t lie to myself and say that it wouldn’t hurt like a bitch, but it’s a hard fact of life that homophobes, transphobes, racists, xenophobes, ie bigots exist and there will be always be bullies and people who don’t care about you, who WANT to put you down, who want to hurt you. In a world of power, there will be those with some and those without. I was given a small window into my friend’s life and saw a life pathway built around friendships who learn and grow right alongside you. I’ve always thought about that – what if? What if I let go earlier? In my timeline, the forces around me were not as kind to me. I was told queerness was ugly, so utterly upside down. I didn’t have anyone to tell me otherwise. Perhaps if I had a positive role model to tell me that it WAS okay, that it was beautiful and wonderful. Perhaps if I had a friend like them in my life who was the first to come out and encouraged others by simply living their life the way THEY want to, perhaps I would have had the courage to do so earlier. I can’t change the past.

But I can think about how the events of my past shaped my present, and how my present shapes my future. Thank God - I DID let go! There’s no race to live your truth, but oh god it feels so good to do it NOW. I’m so thankful that I found the bravery these people I know now have embraced so many years ago. I feel like my own person, like an entire human soul. I don’t feel the need to please anyone. This queer experience, of finding yourself and maybe even fearing yourself, but, ultimately, coming to love yourself despite dominant society failing you, that is a queer experience. Regardless of any experience, something we all share is having to live in a world that ultimately does not accept us, does not want us.

An ode to knowing that although things are different here, and that there’s no possible way that I could have had a similar timeline just simply because of how different our spheres and worlds are... despite this, despite the fear and self hate and internal violence I was forced into because of the life I was born into, despite all of this, I was still able to find myself and love myself and find others who love me for my whole humanness.

There’s a lot of work to be done in the world, for our lives and our safety and our happiness. I think the friends I’ve met here are doing that work. Through their love for each other and thus their refusal to conform, to stay quiet, to accept the norms in place.

Meeting this special friend may have been completely chance, but I believe fate had a little bit to do with it too. To give me this window, to let me see what beauty it is to allow a person to be themselves. The sooner, the better.

____ DISCUSSION

Pt 3:

It’s funny to see how these ppl’s reflections of their lives fit in line with exactly what we discussed through our readings and class discussions. Norway may be progressive in law, but not necessarily in practice. Each of the queer people I asked this about, or asked them to speak about their queer experience, expressed frustration at there not being much of a strong queer community here, and how they still experienced everyday oppression (you may call these micro aggressions).

Nordic model of inclusion + welfare, making this a space where it is looked down upon to discriminate for someone’s sexuality

A different relationship to Christianity

In the U.S., I grew up in a heavily queerphobic, heavily strict and monitored environment where I was even monitoring myself, reprimanding myself for all of the gay content I was consuming but allowing myself to keep doing it because I was “outside” of the community and thus could not be associated with it or have to think of the consequences.

In middle school I was fully aware that I had strong crushes on gay female celebrities but was petrified of sharing that information with anyone.

I shut myself down immediately, but continued to consume gay, lgbt, and trans media for years and years after, allowing myself to do this because I could convince myself that I was just “a straight girl” who was a big fan of the community.

After coming to college and experiencing true freedom from the expectations and values placed on me, it took me less than three days to come to the realization that I was in fact, extremely not straight. It took me 6 more months to fully feel comfortable admitting to myself and claiming the label that I was gay. It took me another year to “come out” to all of my friends and folx I really cared about.

-talk about how this is a divide between my experience and the experiences of the friends I made here. L & their friends came out when they were extremely young, in middle school actually. Our timelines diverge here.

Only recently, I began to make friends on the shared experience of our queerness. Meeting my close friends now, sharing intimate + tender moments. Loving each other and supporting one another the way family might do. A queer kind of love shared in these emotional bonds. A kind of love I had not experienced before my full acceptance and life as a queer person. Tender, radical love.

Meeting L, sharing on our experience of being queer and trans. And not to say that their life in Norway is so much better. The Nordic model may allow for some general acceptance, but queerphobia still has its roots in other malicious ways. Many of L’s friends still don’t use their pronouns. A is called the slur version of the word lesbian, and she recognizes that being a lesbian is not favorable to society. She wants to be a prof of gender studies at her uni but told me that since there is already one queer person on staff, she’ll never be hired on.

M telling me about how even tho queer ppl are accepted on the outside, and in the law, in practice, not so much.

-A telling me that people hate lesbians

-in Norwegian, the word for lesbian is also really similar to the slur, “fucking lesbian”

CONNECTION TO THE FIRST ARTICLE WE READ

Norway’s state feminism and inclusion of queerness is heteronormative, only assimilating those that fit into the family, hetero model (thinking to naked sculpture park, extremely family oriented)

Same sex has to still be straight – family, private, culturally straight.

[elfinchick]

Only Lovers Left Alive

This is one of my favourite movies of all time and has inspired three pieces of work. One is still in my head, one is in the processes of being written and more importantly researched and one is below.  Thank you Jim Jarmusch, Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton for the inspiration.  Please find below Adam’s suicide note, which Eve never discovered.

My dearest darling Eve,

My lady,

Please forgive me for I can no longer stand the stench of fear that comes from the zombies. Their panic is instilled in their very souls, chasing their tails, digging a hole so big it drowns them in sludge of their own making.

Even the good stuff from the haematologist at the hospital is tainted these days. It has lost the sweetness of vegetables, replaced by the chemical sweetness from sweeteners and preservatives in their drinks and cakes.  At least it is free of the drugs they consume for fun; we really knew what fun was in the old days, running through Venice, Paris and Rome, late nights routs through the streets, sharing our works with Byron and Schubert, revelling in their successes because they were ours.  Remember that night in Paris when we got the old priest out of bed in the early hours of the morning of our third wedding day, 23rd June 1868, I think he thought he was dreaming. That memory always makes me smile, how I wish we could go back and stay there.  

Did you know they have been poisoning the bees and butterflies?  The zombies spray their crops with insecticides to kill aphids and other crop eating insects but forget there are beautiful creatures that eat them. They think they know better than nature, what idiots they are.  I remember the days before you turned me when I used to bring you beautiful butterflies and drawings of the birds I saw. There was a lady bird in the house the other day, it had seven shiny black spots on its crimson back, it kept climbing up the window, so I couldn’t do anything about it until dusk. It now lives on the red roses you planted when you were here last, the aphids are no longer safe. I keep meaning to get Ian to buy a few bee hives, it might help some of the plants.  In some parts they rent swarms of bees to pollinate their crops because they have wiped out the insect population.  

They really need to turn back to nature, surely their zombie alarms are ringing by now, no insects and farmers in bio-hazard suits.  The population is rising and instead of looking at modifying their methods, encouraging nature and nurturing the ground. It is overworked and dead, like dust. Sometimes it is best to look backwards not forwards, but as much as I would love to I cannot turn the clock back.

Ian bought me some new guitars yesterday, one was a so well made so perfect I named it after Will, the one big regret of my entire existence. I tried so hard to get to him that night, to save him, to turn him but I was too late. The thing a vampire has on his side is eternity, but what use is that when the innocents you need to save, and preserve, are taken by something as futile as war. Back then it was guns, swords and arrows but today they have invented weapons that can devastate whole areas for decades if not centuries. Chemicals that pollute the environment, biological weapons and Oppenheimer’s pet project who’s deadly fall out is still happening.  These zombies really know how to heighten their fears turning their fearful childhood fantasies that had been fed to them by the politicians into a terrible reality.

Amongst the guitars Ian bought me was a plastic and wood affair, at least they recycled the plastic in a unique way, it usually ends up floating the oceans choking birds, fish and killing like the weapons of mass destruction they love inflicting on each other. These silent weapons have ended up in their own food chain and yet they continue to produce and discard their little invention.  There are vast areas of floating garbage arriving onto beaches where there is normally no plastic.  The seas we used to travel are long gone now my love, all those nights watching the stars and wondering which ones had life circulating around them, wondering what the sound of the cosmos was like.  All the sounds of nature, the lapping waves, the call of the gulls, the wind when it whipped up the seas into a frenzy, the lashing waves in a storm tilting the ship to perilous angles, the laughter tinged with fear as we fought not to be swept away! Oh God I miss those days when we had the world ahead of us unencumbered by mankind’s follies and I miss you even more my darling Eve.  

I cannot stand the suffocating stale air of the city, yet I cannot leave it.  I long for the soil beneath my feet, the leaves brushing my skin, the moonlight peeping through the canopy of forests.  The night insects, the earthy scent of the ground, moths float by and the owls call out while hunting for the rustling mice scurrying around trying to avoid them.  I long for the mysterious sounds of the rain forests we visited in South America, how full of energy it was as the trees introduced new oxygen into the world. Can you believe they are chopping down the lungs of this planet and their potential medicine cabinet.  Not to mention the species they are bringing to extinction before they have even discovered them.

I cannot live in a world governed by them any longer!  Their cruelty towards each other gets worse each day, they step on those they consider below them to get higher up the ladder.  When the water starts to run out they will ration and build technology that destroys the planet even more quickly.  Even now when the charities come and find fresh water for the poorest, the greed of others steals the technology and rations it.  Promises of better housing, of schools and medical facilities are broken and the villagers forced to pay for the rations they are given. They kill and maim those of different ideologies, pollute the air with their chemical bombs and superior fire power, forcing their innocents into leaving their homes just to escape the violence.  Not only do they terrorise their poorest and most innocent, they destroy cultures, history and art along with society, the things that bring out the best in them. Instead of building and growing they deny their souls for no other reason than because they can!

They attack new ideas, new thinkers, especially the scientists.  They are still teaching creationism rather than the science put forward by Darwin in some American schools!  They have abandoned the beautiful ideas of Tesla and destroy their most brilliant simply because they do not conform to their idea of what is normal, just like they did to Turing and Galileo. At least they still remember the talent of Lawes and Marlowe, even if he did have to give Shakespeare to pay him back when you helped him fake his own death and Shakespeare hid him for a while. That was quite a game of cat and mouse the three of you played, I am amazed you got away with it.  Then again you were and always will be brilliant.

I so wish you were here, how I crave your phone calls, you can always lift my soul, take the bad feelings away.  I say I have no heroes, but we both that is not true!  Out of all the people I admire the most in this life, you are the biggest of all, for the love you have for dancing, the love you give me and most of all for the way you just know what to do.  You have the calmest of souls, gentlest of touch when giving me comfort and you always have the right words.  I love you my darling and long to dance with you one last time, feel your touch, your caress…

Please forgive me my eternal love

Adam