#and hes forced to assess their relationship from a grand scale of life and death

[tinesleftnipple]

Episode 9 is Wei zhiyuan's love letter to Wei qian.

"I can't control my heart from loving you"

"I won't shy away from confessing to you"

"I wish the last thing I saw in life was you"

"I will die so you can live. I love you"

"You define my entire being"

[mittensmorgul]

Sam and Rowena? I’m still bitter about Sam and Eileen. Hope it’s ok to say that. I want Sam to have a significant other but I don’t get Rowena.

Hi hi! And absolutely, it’s fine to say you’re bitter about Eileen, because damn… 

*takes five minute break to feel all the rage about 12.21*

Okay, now that that’s set aside for a moment, I’m going to attempt to speak rationally about this. Let’s see how well I do. Y’all can grade me at the end. :P

Yeah, for the entire two episodes that we came to know Eileen, it really did feel like they were setting her up to be a potential love interest for Sam. They used many of the same tropes they’ve used for other potentially romantically linked characters (*coughdestielcough*), and gave Eileen a family history and personal goals that narratively paralleled Sam’s. Her parents died when she was 6 months old, and she was forever changed by a supernatural being who killed them. She was raised in hunting, but always had a desire to pursue the study of Law. She and Sam spoke a common narrative language, as it were.

And then in 12.17, we learned that she and Sam had carried on a close communication for more than a year. It was clear from that little skype chat that even though she communicated with both Sam and Dean, and that they did all discuss matters related to hunting and general life stuff, that it was Sam she had a much closer relationship with the second she effectively said goodbye to Dean and continued her personal conversation with Sam.

That whole conversation– two episodes before the Mixtape reveal– was yet another reminder that “things happen offscreen,” and “Sam and Dean have personal emotional connections with people that develop even when we’re not actively being told about all the details on a weekly basis.”

Dean: All right, well, what are we lookin’ at here?Eileen: Working on it.Dean: Well, go get ‘em, Eileen.Eileen: That’s the plan.[Dean gives Eileen the 'thumbs up’ and Sam shifts the monitor back towards him.]Eileen: Bye, Sam.Sam [smiling]: Bye.[Sam disconnects the call]Dean [smirking]: That’s cute.Sam: Come on.

And then 12.21 happened. And dashed that potential. If 12.21 didn’t inspire more coda fic than any other episode, it’s gotta be near the top of the list. *I* wrote coda fic of 12.21…

Eileen is actually alive and what we saw was some sort of trick. Eileen was never there and Ketch actually killed a shapeshifter made to look like Eileen to rattle Sam and Dean, but she’s actually still in hiding. She’s too good for that, and wouldn’t have allowed herself to be caught out like that…

I mean, all of that could still be true, and her apparent death at the jaws of a Hellhound controlled by Ketch was just the most pointless … it didn’t even bear the narrative trigger that Charlie’s death did (i.e. the other pointlessly gross murder of a woman in the most horrific way possible just to further the manpain). The worst of Eileen’s death, to me, is the fact the same writers are attempting to ~do something~ with the character who murdered her. It’s not even remotely clear what that something is, but they’ve given him a half-assed redemption arc that none of the other writers seem to want to touch (and good for them, honestly).

So yeah, I definitely understand the bitterness.

But like with Charlie, the other characters have to keep living, and they’re put into new situations in which they grow and change and as a result of continuing to live… they do move on.

Take Rowena, for example. She’s been in near 30 episodes to Eileen’s two (It’s not really fair to include 12.21 in Eileen’s count, even). And she has had a pretty incredible personal character arc as we’ve learned more about her. Rather than spend half an hour recounting her entire plot history, I’m just gonna point everyone to her page on the superwiki for a quick, bare bones assessment of the technical plot details of her evolution from enemy to adversary to reluctant ally to possibly… friend…

http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/Rowena

So now that we’re all refreshed on how Rowena has managed to grow closer and closer to the Winchesters, let’s consider why. Because again, her redemption has always been closely tied to Sam. And since 13.19, quite literally on a cosmic scale through the revelation that all of Billie’s books on her fate end with her death because of Sam.

The show has paralleled Sam’s struggles since s10 directly to Rowena. Think back to their uneasy alliance during s10 during a time when Sam was going off the rails in an attempt to save Dean from the Mark. He hallucinated Rowena in 10.19, in an episode where the hallucinations were specifically crafted to drive the person experiencing them to their own death. And now Sam will apparently be the cause of Rowena’s eventual demise… although the mechanism of that isn’t textually clear yet, there is a definite potential romantic reading to it.

That information came to light in 13.19, in an episode where Rowena had to confront the ghosts of her past via her grief and all her regrets about her life and her lost son. It was also an episode where she was forced to confront reality, and to lay that baggage aside so she could move forward with her life. Where she had to acknowledge that her choices now could change her fate, that she was no longer the victim of fate that she’d been battling against since her lover abandoned her in poverty with a baby more than 300 years ago.

Sam was critical in her even getting to that point at all. He helped her (against Dean’s advice) restore her powers so that she could protect herself and finally achieve the security she’d been fighting for against the Grand Coven, against the old Men of Letters, against Lucifer, against the world in general that drove her to seek shelter from people who would only abuse her along the way. Sam did that. He was framed as the key to her being able to save herself, as well as the potential eventual cause of her demise.

But what if it isn’t literal death that Sam will bring her, but a choice? She’s kept herself alive for hundreds of years, resurrected herself at least three times in canon alone, and is effectively immortal because of it. But… what if she chose something else? What if, like Lily Sunder, she made the choice to stop pursuing immortality? What if she laid it aside because she was able to find true happiness in a human lifetime? They effectively opened the narrative doorway to that possibility, while putting Sam in the position to be the one waiting to unlock the door for her.

Eileen was an excellent narrative mirror for where Sam was back in s11 and s12, but through it all, Rowena has been given what has the potential to be a much deeper, more meaningful personal connection to where I’ve been hoping they would take Sam for years now.

Sam has struggled against his own nature, over what he perceived was “done to him” when he was a baby, and whether he’s even human or not, since season one. Rowena being a natural witch, born with these powers and choosing to do good with them now because she’s finally in a place of security where she can even consider that option, could potentially mirror Sam finally feeling at peace with his own entire life, you know?

Because Rowena has never run from her own powers, or from the reality of the Supernatural. She’s had essentially the entire opposite issue to Sam’s lifelong conflict of resisting that life. And from what we’ve seen so far of Rowena’s journey in relation to Sam, they very well could be setting up a “meet in the middle” sort of balance between them.

Rowena is perfectly positioned to confirm to Sam that he’s not a freak, that he’s wonderful exactly how he is. And Sam’s perfectly positioned to confirm to Rowena that she deserves safety, security, and happiness and can choose to fight for something bigger than her own personal survival.

I mean… what’s not to get here?

eta: Also please just let someone be there for Sam. Let someone care about him and take care of him and give him a kiss and a hug and be there for him in the morning. Let him have nice things.

Same with Rowena.

[jamiedodgerart]

the fade is a liar sometimes

aka, a really long post about how mal hawke survived dragon age inquisition. warning for big but kinda vague spoilers for dai and mentions of alcoholism

ok full disclosure i dont know how he survived the fade. but im thinking the nightmare like. didnt wake back up in time to block the way through the portal, and so never caused the Do I Kill The Warden Or Hawke dilemma. cos. that was kiiiiiiiinda bullshit. 

i had to pick between alistair and mal. and i really didnt want mal to be actually really dead bc at the time of here lies the abyss he’d be in a really shitty place, mentally, and i didnt want him to just! die! without resolving that! so i gave canon the finger and concocted a convoluted plan to give mal a better ending

background, after the events of da2, he ended up leaving kirkwall and fuckin’ around in the woods for a bit. i imagine he was helping refugees get out for a little while, until anders showed up and convinced him to help groups of renegade mages/circles on the verge of winning their independence. at this point he was pretty sick of the world at large, didn’t know what he wanted or where he was going to go next, and let himself be (guided? directed? pushed around?) by anders, drinking himself into oblivion and generally feeling like garbage. he fell out of contact with most of his remaining friends and began convincing himself that he was guilty for the explosion, by trusting anders (he’d suspected something was wrong with the ingredients anders was asking for and confronted him about it, but trusted him and helped him by distracting the grand cleric)

i rambled about this on my private twitter but mal and anders... ended up not being a great fit for one another and past me said it better than present me can

eventually, the inquisition came into being and grew in power. anders, still being a wanted man and mal too by association, avoided the inquisition’s patrols pretty easily. but stories started to spread about the inquisitor and his... particularly creative justice. see, pica really likes choices that have some poetic irony to them that also focus on rebuilding (he had alexius work for the mages, stuff like that), generally avoids executions, and is pretty chill with mages. the inquisition is also independent of any government, really, and is about as impartial as you can get in thedas. so when mal gets word from varric that corypheus is back, a problem, and something they need mal’s help with (that is also, in his professional opinion, his fault), he gets an idea.

he heads to skyhold, meets pica (who read the tale of the champion, asks varric questions about it constantly, was expecting a hero, and was not expecting the hero to be a depressed alcoholic) and iunno here lies the abyss happens with the aforementioned edit of no one important dying (i guess i could kill alistair and preserve a kind of important turning point in pica’s character with an added bonus of giving mal another thing to have survivor’s guilt about but i dont think i could go through with it. imagine the emotional toll. pica could get that change some other way anyway) mal by this point has gotten to know pica fairly well and has found what he’s heard to be true, and gives him a proposition

(i would like to add now that while ive read asunder, until i looked it up just now i didn’t remember where it sits in the timeline relative to da2, and it wasnt super clear to me just how much each of the two events affected the mage/templar war. so some text in sketches might be inaccurate, historically)

so you can imagine that anders is Pissed Off by this development, but justice is kinda like 

cos like. pica Is a real actual authority figure. who is down to dispense some quality justice esp re mages. and is coming at it from a “yo i know you meant well and you did kinda have a point but you also killed a lot of people so there does have to be Some kind of consequence of that”

(but neither of them are at all happy with mal turning them in)

anyway the trial ends up including a full investigation of the events in kirkwall, as well as the events at the spire (cole, rhys, and evangeline all give their testimony) and it’s more a straightening out of what was up with the whole start of this shitshow anyway, cos the confusion and misinformation about it is probably the worst part. 

pica finds anders guilty and sentences him to community service, which a lot of people disagreed with. pica thinks it was a GREAT IDEA though because that community service comes in the form of anders teaching the inquisition mages about healing magic!! something that anders is good at, loves doing, and can actually help people with!! why are we still fuckin about with herbs when there’s magic!!!!! this also has the added bonus of making mages less scary to the general populace- chuckin’ fireballs is a lot more alien and intimidating than healing up a broken arm, yknow? it can help mages seem more human and good for society than they were, separated from the public in towers.

anders is still a prisoner, though, which hes super not happy about, and part of his sentence is also that dagna gets to study him. he and samson are in grudging solidarity in the face of tolerating her extreme cheerfulness. and maybe he gets a cat too. i wonder if he and samson could talk about how shitty the chantry is re: lyrium addiction in templars? its obvs not on the scale of mage shittiness but it could be an interesting discussion

see in the grand scheme of things mal really didnt do all that much. he was duped by a lover into doing something he 100% would not have done if hed known what was actually going on. i feel like the most anyone could bust him on was aiding and abetting. and maybe helping hide an apostate. mal was found, as pica informally put it while distracted by looking at a transcript of a kirkwall templar’s testimony, “kinda guilty? just like. if ur asked to help blow up a chantry dont do it again” but cassandra elbowed him really hard and he said “look ok your sentence is, fuck, i dunno, work for the inquisition. what do you wanna do”

that was not what mal was expecting and he didnt have an answer. and pica looked at him and said “ill give you some time to figure it out, ok. just. take care of yourself, man. u look like shit” which got him another elbow, which he returned to cass with equal force

anyway. mal is now officially Not Guilty in the court of the law. which fuckin sucks bc that assessment does absolutely NOTHING to stop his shit brain from keeping being guilty about everything. so he tries to quit drinking, fails, and just has a rough time in general, while also sometimes visiting anders in prison. which probably really doesn’t help.

ENTER WARDEN-COMMANDER OF FERELDAN, MADRANA “MAD” TABRIS, AND HER PARTNER/GF/ADULT SUPERVISION EMMARIE “EMMY” COUSLAND

(you may also know mads as hester, as i called her in previous playthroughs. hester’s not a really elfy name and shes grown far enough away from her namesake that i felt a change was warranted. also emmy was created by @1500birds. i love her)

thats them (mads then emmy) so mad tabris, legendary fighter, unkillable blight-ender, bather in darkspawn blood, and general bottle covey is looking for a challenge. its been like ten years since shes had an actually hard battle to win and she’s near skyhold, and she’s heard that mal hawke, another legendary fighter, is also in the area. oh and some cadash guy. hes apparently good too. also, she’s looking for some way out of the whole grey warden death sentence thing. shes not keen on dying unless she’s killed, ydig, and apparently skyhold’s doing a lot of groundbreaking research these days

she and emmy swing on in to skyhold and finds that hawke is, well, a mess

important background. mads is not good at dealing with other peoples’ emotions. so shes not really equipped to deal with this. emmy, however, is kind, has nerves of steel, loves to help people, and is Very equipped to deal with this. and so the two of them adopt mal. (even though hes older than both of them.) 

theyve got really, really different ways of trying to help mal. emmy is a great listener, and understands survivor’s guilt and the lost-all-my-family brand of trauma pretty well. she helps him sort through all the shit that’s happened to him and offers a lot of support. and hugs. by god shes a hugger. also theyve got a symbiotic cuddling relationship bc emmy is always cold and mal is always warm, so they platonically nap together sometimes. mads is unfortunately too wriggly and pointy to be a good cuddler :’( she squeezes in the mix sometimes anyway though and it’s uncomfortable but nice

mads’s method of helping mal is in her area of expertise: getting out pent-up negative emotion by fighting. for a long time, mal has internalized a lot of shit, and mads is really good at annoying him into either yelling or punching out that shit. shes doing it out of concern for his well-being, she swears, and not because she takes joy in pissing people off. she does but thats not the point. it’s not a perfect strategy but it does help a lot

unfortunately for her, sometimes mal can be downright vindictive when drunk and angry, and can hit on the few things she’s insecure about

(i would really love to make a post about mads sometime, cos she ended up being a lot deeper of a character than i originally intended. i really just wanted a really sharp angry lady who fought with the subtlety of a brick to the face, and ended up getting that plus bravado covering up a whole host of insecurities. i feel like i should finish dao before writing it up though ahah)

(what mal said is also not totally accurate- mads cares very much for emmy. but yknow how when things get heated it doesn’t really matter if they’re really accurate anymore- they just have to be close enough to get a reaction, ydig)

anyway! the two of them together help mal get his life back in order- he cuts down and eventually quits drinking, starts taking better care of himself, and gets more of a handle on life. i guess you’re probably wondering where varric is, right around now. so am i mal pushed away a lot of people close to him after da2, including varric. but varric kept looking out for him (lying to cassandra to protect him, using his network of contacts to keep an eye on where he and anders were operating). when mal comes to skyhold i think he’d try to avoid varric out of guilt- yknow how when it’s been a really long time since you’ve talked to someone, and you know you should have called them back, but you never did, and they kept asking how you were, and you want to be in an actually good place before you call them back, but shit keeps happening, and it’s been like two years since youve said anything to them, and then you see them and do some serious acrobatics trying to stay out of their sight so you don’t have to confront their honest interest in your well-being that they have no right to still have after so long with no word from you, and you have to make it seem like you havent been avoiding them because that would be rude, and really it’s just easier to be constantly vigilant of where they are and make sure youve got plausible reason to be leaving casually yet quickly

well mal did that. emmy had to physically bar his way from escaping a room once when varric came in, and dragged him by the scruff of the neck to talk to him. varric was painfully understanding and ended up hitting it off nicely with emmy

so! someday mal gets a job. specifically, pica gives him one. because he still owes the world some community service. with his experience as a hunter and highwayman, he becomes a scout!

whoaaa color

more specifically, mal becomes a... specialized type of scout. some idiot who shall not be named but whose name sounds a whole lot like pica cadash gave him command of a small squad of scouts, heavier armored and armed than average inquisition scouts but not heavy enough to count as infantry soldiers. their job is to dismantle highwayman and rogue mercenary bands, in whatever way necessary. so! originally this was supposed to mean sneak attacks on their strongholds or whatever, but mal talked with him about his own experiences with crime (mostly that most people in his crew back then were in it out of necessity, and needed money to support family) and the squad kind of became. really heavy recruiters. it became kind of a joke that the inquisition would take anyone- and they would! practically any skillset could be used in an organization as big as the inquisition, and at this point it was still growing

like. barely any exaggeration here

so that’s where he is pre-trespasser! thank u for reading and if youve got questions or want to learn more PLEASE ask i lov my ocs and love talking about them

i want to add that in @1500birds‘s latest playthrough (miranda trevelyan, a pro-chantry mage cullenmancer) mal rags on cullen endlessly

that was supposed to be the playthrough where he survives the fade, but then bran realized that miranda would kinda hate mal and would 100% leave him behind

[footballghana]

FEATURE: 'The man of Marseille' - why late Pape Diouf meant so much to one city

Ever since the tragic death of Pape Diouf due to Covid 19, on 31 March 2020 in Senegal's capital Dakar, a tide of tributes has flooded from all over Africa, France - and especially Marseille. BBC Africa Sport's Victoire Eyoum gives her personal assessment of the life and career of the journalist-turned-agent-turned chairman.

Ask someone who they are, and they would probably answer to you with their profession after they have told you their name.

Ask who loves that person who that person is, and you would get a completely different answer.

Pape Diouf was a journalist who wrote for La Marseillaise; the first African football agent to succeed internationally; and the first African President of a top league European football club, Marseille.

He was also a businessman and politician who was a candidate to become Marseille's mayor.

But those who knew him closely - and even those who did not know him that well - describe him as "a father, a grand-father, a god-father, a brother, an uncle, a legal guardian" as well as "a friend, a model, a mentor, a pioneer, an entrepreneur, and a maverick."

A widely-respected man, he was fiercely intelligent, and to those in his care, a good advisor: humble, wise, competent, experienced. Some saw him as a legend for what he achieved - the pride of Africa.

Some of the tributes have mentioned his love of people. Others described him as an African football lover, or the Man of Marseille (he moved their in his teens).

Abedi Ayew Pele, one of Diouf's many clients as an agent, said "there is no amount of words to describe Pape."

Former Marseille and Cameroon goalkeeper Joseph-Antoine Bell, who was the man who first persuaded Diouf to make the switch from journalist to agent, called Diouf "The One and Only."

The journalist

Born from Senegalese parents on 18 December 1951 in Abéché, Chad, where his father was working for the French military under the colonial system, Papa Mababa Diouf - named after his grandfather - was sent to France aged 18 to follow a military career.

The young man thought he would only be joining a military school for three years before going back to Senegal. But he soon realised his father had actually signed him to join the forces based in Avignon after a stop in Marseille.

He had experienced enough already to know a military life was not for him. So he began to try to find a way to escape his father's design for his life, which is when the love story with Marseille started.

For a few years he went through several odd jobs and casual work.

But one of them, at the Post, led him to an encounter with a freelance journalist at La Marseillaise who would often discuss sports results with him.

Soon, Pape was introduced to the newspaper to start as a freelancer, and he worked there for more than a decade.

As a sport fan, and especially of basketball - his first article - handball and football, it was not long before Diouf became the newspaper's full-time reporter, dedicated to covering Olympique Marseille.

That was how he developed a special relationship with the players, the club fans, and the whole city.

"Pape arrived in Marseille young - he was a youth from the suburban neighbourhoods - and was as fully from Marseille as he was fully African and Senegalese," Bell recalled.

"So here you have this youth from Marseille's suburban neighbourhoods who goes from the young man who followed the club from afar, through being a student who became a journalist covering the daily football team training, and then becomes a close friend of the club's captain.

"So he was very much into the intimate circle of the club, more than any other journalist."

Abedi Ayew Pelé also remembers his first encounter with Diouf.

"In the nineties, when I got to Marseille, Pape was a journalist, writing for one of the biggest newspapers in Marseille. So, he was somebody who was respected across the board. And he was always very close to the Marseille team."

This closeness would later be the key for a new career pathway, as Diouf was convinced by Bell and Basile Boli to become their agent.

The common values Bell had found in Diouf were "first honesty and integrity but also - I wouldn't say the rejection of money, but the refusal of letting himself be influenced by money.

"As we know, many people change because of money. So the fact that he would consider that money had some worth but was not a value itself was something that united us.

"That encouraged me to recommend him to other players, because I knew he would not disappoint them."

The agent

At the end of the 1980s, African players were paid less than their European counterparts - often substantially less.

There were only few agents in France, and the profession had some bad reputation. That's when Pape embraced his new career and founded in 1989 his firm Mondial Promotion.

"At that time, it would have never occurred to anyone to have a black agent, because there were not many agents and no-one would have thought it could happen," Bell recalled.

"So that tells you how much of an achievement it was."

Former Ghanaian defender Anthony Baffoe - also a client - added: "He was a pioneer in terms of player management. I'm talking about real player management, especially coming out of Africa.

"For him, the interest of the players was always on position one, before he might even consider negotiating his own interest."

Word of mouth spread.

Over the years that followed, after Bell and Boli, Diouf's client list read like a who's who of the cream of African and African-origin players: Abedi Ayew Pelé, François Omam-Biyik, Rigobert Song, Marc-Vivien Foé, Marcel Desailly, Titi Camara, Habib Bèye, Frédéric Kanouté, Peguy Luyindula, Didier Drogba, William Gallas, Samir Nasri, Andre and Jordan Ayew.

But he was not exclusively about players from that background - he also took on Robert Pirès, Laurent Blanc and Grégory Coupet, for example.

"He came out to be someone who foresee my career and managed me to success," Abedi Pele said.

"He managed my children, he took them to Marseille at the age of 14… Everybody is saying that I've got wonderful children. They are well respected and disciplined in the society, but it was not me - it was Pape."

Former Guinean Liverpool striker Titi Camara remembered: "The first time I met him I was playing with Saint-Étienne in the early '90s. Pape helped us to understand there is a life after football.

"He advised us to invest our money in order to have revenues after our football careers."

Players are not the only ones to remember the impact Pape Diouf made on them and on that profession.

For agent Bernard Collignon, Diouf was "the one who opened the door to Africans in terms of entrepreneurship. He showed the way", while fellow agent Yves Sawadogo said his own desire to follow that career "came from the respect and esteem I had for this man."

"Still today, I am deeply influenced by the advices I've received from Pape. Pape knew how to read situations and more than anything he had a really deep knowledge of human beings," Sawadogo added.

In 2012, Pape Diouf was invited to the launch of La Nuit du Football Africain, a Pan-African event that rewards African football performances, as well as African initiatives and achievements. The trophy, which rewards strong action with a large-scale impact, will now be renamed the Pape Diouf Award.

The President

After 15 years as an agent, and having twice rebuffed approaches from the club, in 2004 Pape Diouf took a post at Marseille - first as general manager and then a year later becoming president.

"When you are at Olympique Marseille you are at the centre of Marseille - and this was a youth from Marseille's suburban neighbourhoods who had reached the very top in the city," Bell said.

"So it's not a surprise that today the city of Marseille pays him such a tribute. From the suburban neighbourhoods, he became the Man of Marseille. Everybody knew him."

Once in such a high-profile post - Diouf was the first black president of any top division club in elite European football - his aura began to transcend his sport.

Amadou Gallo Fall, vice-president of the NBA and Basketball Africa League president, described him as a "huge source of inspiration."

"To dare to dream, lead and execute big projects on the global stage, using the transformative power of sport to impact positive social change in our Africa, is a testament to his trailblazing efforts," he added.

Diouf himself saw his status as "a painful assessment if you look at the European society and especially the French society that excludes ethnic minorities."

He did not seek to make things about him, no matter what he achieved.

Once coronavirus is over, there will be a commemoration celebrating Diouf life and legacy.

Abedi Pele said it will be an important event for him, and for Marseille.

"I think people will see all of us there and people will see how Pape is loved all over the world. He crosses and above race, colour, religion, whatever you can name. Pape is respected across board. Pape is a big, a big, big, big personality".

Source: bbc.com

source: https://footballghana.com/