#and neither of them advanced in their heroism the way they should have either

[deadwriter16]

post endgame bucky and 431 bakugo parallels oh god …

[i-prefer-the-term-antihero]

Your favourite Pandora Hearts character and why? Mine is Jack, because he’s interesting.

(AHHHHH I took forever to respond to you, I’m so so very sorry!! ...Actually it was partially because I really loved your question or took me so long to answer…Also I uh, wanted to take the time to edit my message and explain this concisely…and I failed) 

Thank you so very much for you question anon!! I don’t get a lot of asks so it made me overjoyed to get one.

My favorite ph character is Break!! Actually he’s become my all-time-favorite character!! 

As for why, well…I don’t think you were looking for a long response, but I’m a very longwinded person so I couldn’t help it…sorry in advance for all the detail XD

There are far too many reasons I could go into for why I like him, but I think probably the main one is that he is a very specific type of redemptive villain that is difficult to find in most stories. 

If you’ve read my blog description you know I like villainous characters with redemptive qualities. I find them much more relatable and interesting than main characters who find being selfless and good easy. Plus I’m here for the angst. I especially like when I myself find these characters creepy or unlikable at first and learn to love them later—(which, because I’m prone to look for the good in villains, is tough to do)—because it means my enjoyment and love for the character in the end feels more real (ie it wasn’t just because I found them attractive, or read into something what wasn’t really there). 

One of the many reasons I love Pandora Hearts is that it is littered with these types of characters. These types of characters are difficult to write, so most authors only have one or two in their stories, and often even those who do try to write these characters are unable to do so well. But Mochizuki has written more than I’ve ever seen one author write. Not only that, they are all unique and not just carbon copies of each other, and they are all well written, interesting, unique, and relatable. (I mean, even the main characters in her stories struggle with good and evil, and it makes them interesting and likable too). 

Break is a specific brand of this character category that I’ve never seen before or since. He’s almost like the reverse: a redeemed person with villainous qualities. He’s...the next step.

See Kevin is your usual character in this category: he’s killed a bunch of people (villain) but he did it to save his family (redemptive quality). He was very easy for me to like.

But Break is different. I haaated Break when I first started watching the anime (before I read the manga). He was creepy, he was manipulative, he was condescending, and he didn’t seem to care about anyone but himself. Learning about Kevin began to change my heart, but it was what he says in the carriage ride home from the opera house that made me fall in love with him. How all the jokes, the teasing, the condescension was stripped away in that moment, and he was completely honest and vulnerable with them, revealing his true character. 

He basically explained then...what’s the next step? What happens if and when a redemptive villain like Kevin gets what they want? Will it be the redemption they hope for? 

Seeing a villain get what they want, what they think will redeem them...but finding that it isn’t what they want at all, nor a redemption for them…seeing how that completely dismantles everything they knew…everything they are, seeing them change, seeing them learn to live with the villainous things they did, to try to make up for those things, and find redemption in other ways, thereafter...that’s powerful. And that’s real. 

The ways in which Break is villainous are realistic. I haven’t met any murderers (to my knowledge...), nor have I killed anyone, but I have met people who are condescending and manipulative, and I have been condescending and manipulative myself. Kevin is easier to like because his brand of villainy is removed from what feels real to me. And Break is easier to hate when you don’t know him because his villainy is the kind we all face on a daily basis. 

But that also means that his redemptive qualities are the ones we face on a daily basis too. I haven’t killed anyone to save my family, nor have I met anyone that’s done so, but I have done things I regret, and that I want some sort of penance for. I have thought certain things would “save” me, in a way, and found it wasn’t what I thought it would be for me at all. I have had suicidal thoughts (“so...you want to die?”) and I have tried to do things myself without asking for help when I really should have relied on my friends…and the list goes on. 

Everyone is both a hero and a villain inside, but our villainy and heroism is much subtler. It’s hard to get this right within a story. It’s easy to just paint a fictional world in black and white, and have good win, and not really work at the characters and story until you can see why the villains think they’re right, and how the heroes can be wrong. But I am so happy Mochizuki painted her world in grey; that no one is fully a villain or fully a hero, there’re all very human.

As a fantasy lover and writer I’m always trying to thread the line of how far fantasy should go, and where reality should seep in. There are fantasy stories in which you lose touch with reality so much it feels almost soulless. But I still want to travel to fantastical worlds and fight demons and dragons with heroes. To me Mochizuki hits the nail on the head. She definitely takes me to worlds that are delightfully fantastical, and builds her world so well, with its own quirks, and rules, demons and gods, but her characters, and the messages they provide us with are so real.

Break is a prime example of this. He can be the worst of villains and the best of heroes. And the messages that surround him (”You’re much much stronger than you think you are” ”no, you simply want to save yourself” “we can never know what would have happened” etc.) are so real I often think about in everyday life.

Despite being young I am often more drawn to adult characters than kids/teens. Which means I am often very fond of mentor characters. But one of the ways in which these characters fall short is that most of the time their character arc is kind of over; they don’t really grow, learn, or need advice throughout the story. They simply give it. They probably did some bad things in their past but they’ve learned from it and they’re done now. And that’s great!! But is isn’t as interesting or relatable as someone who is still struggling themselves. 

Break is a very rare type of mentor character. So much so that I don’t think a lot of people would even call him a mentor character. But he does mentor Oz. And he does give advice. But unlike most of these types of characters he isn’t just done, just a good person now. He’s a hero in his own way, but he’s still very much messed up, and he needs to take others advice as much as he can give it—just like us in real life. In fact, one of the most wonderful pieces of advice he gets is from the very person he mentors, which is absolutely amazing, and rare within this type of relationship. 

Like I said, there’s a lot more I could say, expanding on these ideas, I could go on about other things like how fun and funny he is…but I’ve said too much as it is XD In the end he’s just this very unique type of character you don’t get to see very often. 

And, I won’t go as in-depth on this, but since you mentioned him, my second favorite character is Jack!! I also find him very interesting. 

He’s another unique villain-with-redemptive qualities. There aren’t many characters who almost every word out of their mouth for half the series is a lie, or twisted truth, who aren’t completely hateable. 

The moment you learn he lied you also get to learn his backstory, and why he lied, and why he thought what he was doing was right, how broken he is too. 

I just love that twist. I’m usually good at predicting things, and earlier in the series I even thought “wouldn’t it be crazy if Jack was the villain?” and then I was like “Nahh he’s too sweet.” But then he was!! It was so unexpected and cool that he was the antagonist after all.

Again, that goes back into what I was saying earlier. In a lot of series the way Jack and Glen are painted in the first half would be all there was to it; there’s a wonderful hero and a terrible villain, nothing more. Or, if there was the twist, it would then be the opposite, that who you thought was the terrible villain is the wonderful hero and vice versa, and again, that’s all. But then when the truth comes out you find that they are neither, that they are both people. And they’ve done heroic things and they’ve done villainous things, and they will continue to do both as the series goes on, but that does make either of them completely good or completely bad. 

In a weird way I think Jack is the best of all these different worlds. At the beginning of the series I was like “he’s like a sweet little puppy I love him so much” and at the middle I was like “ahh he’s so evil I love him so much” and by the end I was like “aww he’s so broken I love him so much” XD He has all those qualities within him, that sweetness is still a part of himself and his personality, he did do some genuinely villainous things, and he is very broken. 

Again, I’ll stop there for now XD

Thanks again!! And again, feel free to direct message me!! 

Can I also turn this into a tag game? @song-of-amethyst, @maddyisenough, @sanhatipal, @nozominohana, @emily-cheshire, @the-twisted-otaku, @tabinotochuu...and @ anyone else who sees this post and would like to engage, Who are your favorite ph characters and can I get your longwinded explanations for why you love them?

[braincoins]

I saw ficlet prompts and ran with it! Lol! older sha//ura (like 30?), not together at the moment, talking about past relationships, and realizing they always like each other but never gave it a shot because when one person was single the other was decidedly not, until now

((That’s right, LIVE YOUR DREAM!))

“Shiro! It’s been ages!” She pulled away from their greeting hug to look up at him.

“Yeah,” he replied, giving her an easy-going smile, “we’re both keeping pretty busy. Shall we?” He reached over and held the cafe door for her.

They asked for and received a small table out back in the garden, where vines of extraterrestrial flowers wound around the trellises and trailed down amongst the rows of fairy lights (currently off; it was still mid-afternoon). The server took their orders (coffee, black, two sugars & a verarrian berry tart; yarlupian tea with honey and a slice of apple pie), and left them to their small talk.

The weather’s been so nice this year, and did you hear about the local theater troop doing a version of Henry V set in outer space? You know Balmerans are allowed to play rugby now, and bii-bohs are surprisingly good golfers!

When their orders arrived, they ate and drank (and swapped bites of baked goods). And, at some unspoken signal, the talk got decidedly less “small.”

“So how are things with you and... oh, I’m sorry, I’ve completely forgotten his name.”

“Hm? Oh, you must mean Jacques. We broke up about a year and a half ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He says he can’t relate to me. Y’know, after everything I’ve been through. What about you? Last I heard, all the tabloids had you dating some supermodel?”

“She might be better off with Jacques.” They both laughed a little. “And, you know, it wasn’t even that I’m not human that was the problem.”

“It’s Voltron.”

They both nodded. 

“There’s nothing else like it. Even other soldiers don’t have quite the same experience.”

“You know, Rylie thought I was cheating on her with Keith at one point.”

Shiro spat his coffee and started choking. Allura started to rise but he waved her back into her seat. “No, I’m fine,” he wheezed. “I’m just trying to picture that.”

She laughed. “It’s not that impossible! Though I’ll admit, you’re more likely to...”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” he accused her. “I practically raised him.”

She just laughed again. “And what else have you been up to?”

He talked about recruitment efforts. She responded with the advancements in ship-building that had come from bringing in other worlds’ scientists, not just Earthlings and Olkari (and Coran). 

“Coran!” Shiro exclaimed. “How is he?”

“Better. The chicken pox weakened him severely.”

Shiro frowned. “I didn’t know he’d caught them. Was it chicken pox or shingles?”

“Well, the doctor said chicken pox. I have to say, Coran was quite pleased to hear that it’s a disease of young people on Earth.”

Shiro snickered. “It doesn’t balance out the slipperies.”

“Oh, let him be happy,” she mock-griped. “Especially now that he’s over them. But he’s not as young as he used to be.” She sighed.

“None of us are,” he replied. “And time just keeps slipping away.”

That statement hung in the air until Allura asked about how Keith was doing. “I mean, if I was cheating on my girlfriend with him, you’d think I’d know these things.”

Shiro guffawed again before catching her up. This, in turn, inspired him to ask about Lance, and then, of course, they were off and running. If there was one thing they could always talk about, it was the Paladins.

Afternoon turned into evening. They waved their server down for a menu as the lights came on outside, and ordered something more like a proper meal. And still, they talked. 

Old battle stories, tales of personal heroism, accusations of bad memories or outright lying, laughing, reminders of inside jokes and silly things that had happened. The hours slipped by as they ate and drank and reminisced.

“It’s getting late,” Shiro said finally. 

“I know,” she sighed. “But I don’t want to stop yet.”

“Let me pay and we can go for a walk.”

“Excuse me, let me pay and then we can go for a walk.”

“Meeting for coffee was my idea.”

“I chose the place.”

“Dutch, then?”

“What about the Dutch? I still haven’t been to The Netherlands...”

He laughed. “You pay for your meal, I’ll pay for mine?”

“Oh, that sounds fair.”

Shiro waved the server over, but when he approached, Shiro just handed him his card.

“TAKASHI SHIROGANE!” she all but shrieked in outrage.

“Not so loud! Someone’ll want an autograph!”

They laughed, but she still pouted at him when the server handed his card back to him. “Come on; you can berate me while we walk.”

They left the cafe and walked out onto the street. It was a wide boulevard, far from the crowded shopping districts, the hovering lights along it a faint cyan. The night was clear and warm, with a cooling breeze. “Nice night for it, at least,” she observed.

“So, I have a confession, but... I’m not sure I should say it.”

She glanced over at him. “Of course you should. As if there’s anything we can’t say to each other after all this time!”

He cleared his throat, hands shoved in his pockets. “I’ve dated lots of people. Men, women, more than a few aliens at this point.”

“Yes?” She knew that already.

“But I still remember the first time I saw you, when that pod shimmered open and you fell out. You went from confused to having Lance in that armlock - and by the ear! - in no time flat. And I remember thinking then that I’d never seen anyone like you before.”

“Well, of course not. You’d never seen an Altean at that point.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He cleared his throat. “Instant attraction to someone is one thing. Looking at someone and finding them hot or whatever. But it wasn’t that way with you. You were - are! - hot...”

“Nice save.”

“...but what I first thought when I saw you was that you were so utterly and entirely unique. I... I wanted to know everything about you in that single moment.” He cleared his throat again. “I’ve seen and dated lots of people that I wanted to get to know better, but there’s never been anyone else like that except you.”

She smiled, hoping the exertion of the (slow, gentle) walk would be blamed for any color coming into her cheeks. “Truly? Why am I only hearing about this now?”

“Well, we had a war we were kind of busy fighting. And then you were still healing up from Lotor’s betrayal...”

“...and you were still mourning your boyfriend.” For a long time, just hearing the name ‘Adam’ made Shiro withdraw. She didn’t think he was still like that, but it had just become habit to speak around his name.

“And then you started dating and... there was just never a good time. It would have been even more awkward to bring it up when you were with someone, y’know? Or when I was.”

“You’ve dated far more than I have,” she told him.

“You have higher standards than I do,” he replied, meaning it as a joke.

“I do,” she agreed. He started to laugh, but she just continued, “It’s hard to find someone to compare to you.”

That shut him up.

She kept going. “Even after you were no longer a Paladin, you were the standard by which I judged us. The other Paladins and myself, that is. We all judged ourselves by you. You were a remarkable Paladin and a remarkable man.

“Brave, strong, unafraid to do what was right even when it wasn’t easy. Compassionate and so thoughtful. The only other man I could think of who’d even come close was... well, my father.”

“I’m... honored.” 

“You should be,” she said, poking his side. He squirmed away with a faint grin. “You’re right when you said that no one else knows what it’s like. And I would be lying if I said I hadn’t thought of what it might be like to date you.”

She glanced over at him and was gratified to see him blushing. “Really? I mean... hell, that’s basically the same reaction you had to my confession.” His laugh was a little forced, a little off. “I guess we just never had decent timing before.”

“Our timing works now. Neither of us are seeing anyone.”

He stopped walking and she stopped to turn and face him. “Allura, I... I don’t know what to say.”

“The truth, Shiro.”

He exhaled. “You’ve been some crazy dream for a long time. We’ve been friends and comrades all this time; I didn’t think it’d ever be anything else. And now... I don’t know. It almost seems too easy. Too... normal, to just say, ‘hey, let’s try dating.’”

She nodded. “It’s too weird and it’s too normal; too hard and too easy. Nothing is ever simple with us, is it?”

“Of course not.” He looked around, but the street was mostly empty. It was a weeknight, and getting later all the time. “You know, we... could start with something simpler?”

“What’s that?”

His cheeks reddened further. He was almost impossibly adorable right now. “I’ve wondered for a long time what it’s like to kiss an Altean.”

She frowned at him and put her hands on her hips. “An Altean? Or me specifically?”

“Either. Both.” He was grinning through his blush. “Especially you, though.”

“Better.” She dropped her indignant posture; it didn’t go with the blush coming into her own cheeks. “And it’s not a bad suggestion.” She stepped closer to him.

He stepped closer to her. “You know, I’ve never kissed a princess before.” He wrapped his arms loosely around her waist.

“I’m not a princess any longer,” she reminded him. “So stop thinking of me as one. I’m just Allura.”

“Not ‘just.’ Never ‘just.’” His eyes were dropping closed as he leaned in.

She kept her eyes open when she kissed him - or, she intended to. They fell closed almost as soon as their lips touched, because she wanted to focus on this kiss, this moment, this long-awaited satisfaction of an old curiosity.

But it was so much more than that, and when they parted, she could tell he thought so, too. His gaze was warm, his smile soft. “So, about dating then...?”

“Friday, at Bailiwick’s?” she asked.

He nodded. “I’ll pick you up at 1900.”

[turtlebolt718-blog]

My Hero America ch6 (A parody of My Hero Academia)

By: Team Sugar Russia (Aka: Zeus, Fox, SeaStar905, Festus, Darci, Pennywise, Loading…, and Wild-Tiger)

Chapter 6: The One Man Band

Curt and I were both villains for the match. We discussed our plan during the ten minute set up.

“So… You know Krieg from last year, what’s his quirk?” I asked Curt.

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t say much about him from last year. He didn’t really talk a whole lot, but I do know that his quirk has something to do with radiation, and I know that if he touches us, there’s a good chance that we might die. Luckily, there’s a small chance that he or the teacher will actually let him take his gloves off, but it’s still something to keep in mind.”

“Oh, well that’s nice.” I quivered.

“Like I said, he’s not going to make much physical contact. I’m pretty sure he is ground based, so we should probably pick one of the top floors and then you can cut off the power, so he can’t see that well.”

“Are you saying my quirk can actually be useful?” I perked up.

“Yes, that is exactly what I’m saying, your quirk wasn’t working out for you because you were on the hero team, but now that you are on the villain team, it works out perfectly!”

“Oh, so my quirks really only good for being a villain?” I sighed.

“Exactly!” he gave me a thumbs up, I walked over to the corner of the room and sat down facing the wall.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“Contemplating existence.”

“Was it something I said?”

“No.” but it was something he said, I just didn’t want to say it. However, my moment of pure depression ended up short circuiting the whole building, so the plan was already working out perfectly.

“Alright, Sophia! That’s exactly what we needed.” He said in the darkness. Then the  intercom blared, “Okay students, may the test of Heroism and villainy begin!”

“Don’t worry Sophia,” Curt sayed in a light-hearted tone, “We got this one in the bag!”

Just as he said that, the whole building rumbled.

“What the hell was that?!” I shouted. The whole building began to get hotter and hotter. Even the edges of the cutouts began to singe.

“We need to get out of here!” I grabbed the cutouts and began to book it to the roof, having the windows light my way.

“Sophia, wait!” Curt called after me. Since I knew this floor plan in advance I managed to reach the roof rather quickly. Curt followed soon after.

“Well now we’re stuck on the roof. Why did you do that?” he asked me.

“You said he was ground based and if we need to we could jump to another building. And the cutouts were in danger.” I explained.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Okay, well we should be safe here for now.” He let out a sigh.

“You sure about that?” We both turned around and saw that Krieg was right there, midair, hovering by the explosions coming from his hands. “Hello there.” he said. We both jumped back and white stuff began to envelope Curt.

“Sophia, get back. I’ll protect yo-” and just like that, Curt was blasted off the side of the building. Krieg Laughed.

“I’m sorry, it’s just that that idiot thought he could beat me in combat with his lack of skill and weak quirk. Anyway, I’ll be taking those cutouts now.” He held his hand out like he was expecting me to just hand them over. And I probably should’ve done it. After all, there’s no way I can beat him with his quirk. How can I be expected to incapacitate him. I began to walk over to him. What am I doing? I know I need to do something but I’m not sure what I can do. And then I realized. I’m a villain, villains play dirty. I’ve been thinking of playing the hero. I continued to walk forward, this time a little more quickly. I then tossed one of the cutouts to him and while he was distracted trying to catch it I took my chance, I rushed towards him and before he had time to react, I pushed him off of the building.

Meanwhile, outside the observation room sat Iris and Barry.

“So….should we be doing something?” Iris asked.

“My name is Barry Allen, and I am the fastest man alive.”

“Yeah, I’m too lazy too.”

I ran into the building with the rest of the cutouts while Krieg was falling. I tried thinking of my next step. I was down one hostage but I still have 4 left. If I can make it out of the building then I can probably run and try to stall like Barry. And then the building rumbled again.

Iris just stared. “....What was that about?” Barry just shrugged.

The building began to heat up again, faster this time. The whole building began to glow from the heat and I knew I had to get out somehow. I can’t run back to the roof, he would expect that. I couldn’t run out of the entrance, I was on the 3rd floor. So I did the only option left. I jumped out of the window. Luckily it was much softer due to the heat so I could actually break it. But then I realized something, I was 20 plus feet in the air with no landing strategy or any idea what a landing strategy was. I closed my eyes. So this is it, this is how I die. By jumping out of a window in a simulation. I mean, it’s probably better than having to deal with everyone else in my class but I had so much to do. Also, how long does it take for me to fall 20 feet? I opened my eyes to see that I had landed on Curt.

“Oh, sorry.” I got up quickly. Curt groaned and slowly got up.

“It’s fine, I softened some of my bones so neither of us would be harmed too much.”

“You can do that?” I asked.

“Yeah, my quirk allows me to manipulate the bones in my body however I want.”

“That’s cool.”

“Yep,” Curt flexed, “My quirk is pretty usef-” and he was blasted away. Krieg had shown up with a slightly burnt cardboard cutout in glove.

“Enough chit chat, we’re in the middle of a fight.”

I turned around and ran.

“Hey, get back here!” he shouted. I heard another explosion and saw him blast past me, he stopped and turned around, he made another explosion that propelled him towards me, I ducked but he managed to grab one of the cutouts. This continued until I only had 2 cutouts left. What the heck am I supposed to do, If I try to do anything he can just make another explosion and either propel himself or send me blasting off like Curt, who was currently nowhere to be found.

“Give it up, your quirk isn’t going to help you out here and I can tell by the way you move that you have no struggle experience.” Krieg trudged towards me. “Among other things, I’m likely smarter than you, I don't want to brag but this entire time you’ve been doing exactly what I expected you to do. So you have 2 options: submit now, or I blow you up just like that idiot in the leotard.”

While he was monologuing, I began to look around for anything I could use to help me get away from this guy, and then in the distance I saw Curt, charging in at full speed. I tried to move myself so Krieg’s back was turned to him. I turned my attention back to what Krieg was saying.

“ ...and thus, Mardoza, Guardian of the Pebble, fell to his knees, and passed from this world, leaving behind the mighty weapon, for he knew that, one day, its power would be acquired once mo-”

“SNEAK ATTACK!!!” Curt lunged at Krieg but was quickly blasted away.

“You see? You see what I mean when I call this guy an idiot? News flash,” He turned towards Curt. “Sneak attacks don't work if you yell ‘sneak attack’.”

While his back was turned I then proceeded to sneak up on him. Krieg turned around and I punched him square in what I was assuming was his jaw. Krieg stumbled back and I began to book it once more.

“How was that for a sneak attack?” I shouted behind me. Then the sirens outside blared.

“Okay, students. Time’s up. Because the hero was unable to capture all hostages in time, that means the villain team wins.” Mr. Koro announced.  

We all went back to the observation room, Curt looking mostly fine but his costume was a little worse for wear. We gave Mr. Koro the now toasted hostages.

“Okay, time for grades.” Mr. Koro snapped his tentacles. How is that possible? “Krieg, I expected more from you, your strategy was great for getting your opponents to fall into your trap, but you allowed too much harm to come to the hostages. The purpose of this exercise was to see your classmates’ strengths and weaknesses as well as putting others before yourself. So minus points for hurting the hostages, although you did save the majority.”

Krieg crossed his arms and sat down, like he was about to have a fit.

“Curtis, you did good to stay in the fight a lot longer than last time. Using your quirk to make sure your body took minimal damage from the explosions was very smart, but do try to use more strategy in the future. Charging in without thinking will only get you and others in danger.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” Curt saluted Mr. Koro.

“And, Sophia. I must say, you improved a lot in the short time between your first match and this one. You took advantage of your opponent’s restrictions and even managed to hold your own for a little bit in combat, Good job.” He held up one of his tentacles in a thumbs up motion, only without any thumbs.

“Thank you, sir.” I nodded. Compared to my last fight I was certainly feeling less useless, so that was good.

“Okay, class. That’s it for today, let’s all get changed and head back to class, you may head home once the bell rings.”

“Hey Barry! Wanna come over to my place to play video games?” Iris asked, a grin on her face. “I got Walumario Party!”

Barry just nodded.

We all got changed and headed back to class.

“Good job, newbie.” Taura patted my shoulder. “You showed that stuck-up brat.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Krieg, mr. hazmat suit guy.” She pointed at him near the front of the group.

“Oh, him? Sure he’s cocky but I don't think he’s stuck up.” I told her.

“That’s just because it’s the first day, just wait and you’ll see what I mean.”

“Yeah, he’s no good.” Iris added, stretching. “Also, Jesus Taura, where’d you learn to tie knots?”

“A ninja never reveals their secrets. Also, Where’d Killena go?” She wondered, putting her hands behind her head.

“Knowing her, probably wrestling with Dy or something.” Iris yawned.

“tttttttttaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAA!!!” Kil charged down the hall straight towards Taura.

“Uh oh… Welp, time to run!” Taura turned on her heel and darted down the hall. Kil raced by Sophia and Iris, cursing loudly. “YOU GOT ME IN TROUBLE AGAIN YOU DAMNED NINJA! DON’T THINK I FORGOT!”

They both disappeared around the corner. A moment later a large blast of lighting shot across the hall, hitting the wall. Killena walked proudly back around the corner, dragging Taura behind her by the ninja’s scarf. Taura looked perfectly ok with this.

“Mr. Koro also said you were getting the detention too. I’m not letting you walk out of here.” Kil growled, and Taura sighed, throwing her hands up.

“You’re the one who keeps trying to stab everyone.” “IT WAS A JOKE! I TRY TO KILL EVERYONE!” Killena threw her hands up, dropping Taura’s scarf.

“Ow.” Taura said monotoned, as she sat up. “Fine you win, I’ll go to detention.”

We all made it back to class and went home except for Taura and Killena. First day of school was….interesting…. to say the least.

Character: Krieg Blitz

Quirk: Nuclear: His body is made of radiation and can create simultaneous nuclear explosions, everything living he touches dies. Expect Dy, he feeds off that.

Age: 16

Hair: Unknown

Eyes: Unknown

Height: 5’9”

Personality: Sarcastic, Entitled

Ideals: Become CEO of his father’s business

[ruminativerabbi]

An American Hero

John McCain’s death was hardly a surprise. (The announcement at the end of last week that the decision had been made to discontinue medical treatment was certainly a clear enough indicator that he was coming to the end of his days.) I admit that the national wellspring of emotion the senator’s death brought forth from political fellow travelers and opponents alike, even leaving the President’s belated and begrudging response out of the mix, caught more than a bit off-guard. But it was Senator McCain’s posthumously-revealed wish that he be eulogized in a bipartisan manner both by Presidents George Bush and Obama that made the strongest impression on me. That these were the two men who the most consequentially thwarted his own White House aspirations—the former by defeating him for the Republican nomination in 2000 and the later by defeating him in the presidential election of 2008—also impressed me as a sign both of humility and magnanimity. The funeral is this Saturday, so I’m writing this before knowing what either man will say. But my guess is that both will rise to the occasion and pay homage to the man, not for holding this or that political view, but for having the moral stamina to move past his own defeats at both their hands to return to the Senate to continue his life of service to the American people.

Senator McCain was a complicated figure and hardly a paragon of invariable virtue. He himself characterized the decisions that led to his involvement in the “Keating Five” scandal the “worst mistake of my life.” (The fact that he made that comment after the Senate Ethics Committee determined that he had violated neither any U.S. law nor any specific rule of the Senate itself speaks volumes: here was a man who could have gone on to crow about his innocence—or at least about his non-guilt—yet who chose instead publicly to rue the appearance of impropriety that he feared would permanently attach itself to his name.) He owned up publicly to the fact that, at least in the context of his first marriage, he was not a model of marital fidelity. He was in many instances a party-line guy, going along with the plan to invade Iraq without stopping to notice that there was no actual evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed the weapons of mass destruction President Bush was so certain had to exist and in fact going so far as to refer on the floor of the Senate to Iraq as a “clear and present danger” to our country without pausing to ask himself how he could possibly know that in the absence of evidence that Iraq possessed actual weapons capable of reaching these shores.

On the other hand, his more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese—the beatings and the torture he endured, his refusal to accept the early release offered to him because the military Code of Conduct instructs prisoners to accept “neither parole nor special favors” from the enemy, his two years of solitary confinement—speaks for itself. (And the phony “confession” he signed at a particularly low point when his injuries had brought him to the point of considering suicide does nothing to change my mind about his heroism. In the end, he defied his captors in every meaningful way and was momentarily defeated by them only once.) As does his lifetime of service to the American people, one given real meaning specifically by the fact, as noted above, that he specifically did not abandon his commitment to serve merely because he was twice thwarted in his bid for the presidency and instead simply returned to the Senate, following the admirable example of Henry Clay, who lost the election of 1824 to John Quincy Adams and then, after serving as the latter’s Secretary of State for four years, returned to the Senate where he served as Senator from Kentucky for two non-consecutive terms and died, like McCain, in office.

But it was McCain’s posthumous letter to America that I want the most to write about today. Lots of literary masterworks have been published posthumously—all three of Kafka’s novels, for example, came out after he died in 1924—but most have been works that their authors for some reasons chose not to publish or were unable to get published in their lifetimes, not letters that their authors specifically wished to be publicized after they were gone from the world. That concept, however, is not unknown…and the concept of creating what is called an ethical will in which a legator bequeaths, not physical possessions or money, but values and moral principles to his or her heirs is actually a Jewish practice that has its roots in medieval Jewish times.

There are early examples of something like that even from biblical times—the Torah contains the pre-posthumous blessings that both Jacob and Moses left behind for their heirs to contemplate and to allow to guide them forward after Jacob and Moses were going to be gone from the world. (When the New Testament author of the Gospel of Matthew portrays Jesus as doing the same thing, in fact, it is probably part of an ancient author’s effort accurately to depict Jesus as a Jewish man doing what Jewish men in his day did.) But the custom reached its fullest flower in the Middle Ages—the oldest extant ethical will from that period was written by one Eleazar ben Isaac of Worms in Germany and dates back to c. 1050. After that, there are lots of examples, many of which were collected and published in two volumes back in 1926 by Israel Abrahams under the title Hebrew Ethical Wills and still available for a very reasonable price. There is even a modern guide to preparing such a will to leave to your own descendants in Jack Riemer’s Ethical Will and How To Prepare Them: A Guide for Sharing Your Values from Generation to Generation, published in a revised second edition just a few years ago by Jewish Lights in Woodstock, Vermont.

And it is in that specific vein that I found myself reading Senator McCain’s letter to the American people: not as last-minute effort to make a few final points, much less to get a few last jabs in at specific, if unnamed, opponents. (The Bible has a good example of that too in David’s last message to the world, which includes a hit-list of people David hopes Solomon will find a way to punish—or rather, to execute—after David is gone from the world and Solomon becomes king after him.) The McCain letter, neither vengeful nor angry, is not at all in that vein. Nor is it particularly soothing: it is, in every sense, the literary embodiment of its authors hopes for the nation he served and his last word on the course he hopes our nation will take in the years following his death. To read the full text, click here.

Senator McCain identifies the core values he feels should lie at the generative core of all American policy: a deep dedication to the concept of personal liberty, an equally serious dedication to the pursuit of justice for all, and, to quote directly, a level of “respect for the dignity of all people [that will bring the nation and its citizens] happiness more sublime than life’s fleeting pleasures.” Furthermore, he writes unambiguously that, in his opinion, “our identities and sense of worth [are never] circumscribed, but enlarged, by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.”

He characterizes our country as “a nation of ideals, not blood and soil.” And then he writes this: “We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world.” But his tone is not at all self-congratulatory. Indeed, the very next passage is the one that seems both the most filled with honor and trepidation: “We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down; when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.” It is hard to read those words without reference to the current administration, and I’m sure that McCain meant them to be understood in that specific way. But the overall tone of the letter is not preachy or political, but deeply encouraging and uplifting. His final words to his fellow Americans are also worth citing verbatim: “Do not despair of our present difficulties,” the senator writes from the very edge of his life. “We believe always in the promise and greatness of America because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit, we never surrender, we never hide from history. We make history. Farewell fellow Americans, God bless you, and God bless America.”

I disagreed with John McCain about a lot. We were not on the same side of any number of the most important issues facing our nation, but those divisions fall away easily as I read those final words. Here, I find myself thinking easily, was a true patriot—a flawed man in the way all of us must grapple with our own weaknesses and failings, but, at the end of the day, a principled man and a patriot. His death was a loss to the nation and particularly to the Senate, but the words he left behind will, I hope, guide us forward in a principled way that finds in debate and respectful disagreement the context in which the American people can find harmony in discord (which is, after all, a peculiarly and particularly American concept) and a focused national will to live up our own Founders’ ideals.

In the physical universe, energy derives from tension, friction, and stress. In the world of ideas, the same is true: Socrates knew that and developed a way of seeking the truth rooted not in placid agreement but in vigorous debate. That concept, almost more than anything else, is what shines through Senator McCain’s literary testament to the nation. He notes wryly, and surely correctly, that we are a nation composed of 325 million “opinionated, vociferous individuals.” But he also notes that when debate, even raucous public debate, is rooted in a shared love of country, the result is a stronger, more self-assured nation, not a weaker one enfeebled by conflicting opinions. I think that too…and my sadness at the senator’s passing is rooted, more than anything else, in that specific notion.

John McCain’s life was a gift to our country and his death, a tragedy. May he rest in peace, and may his memory be a source of ongoing blessing for his family and for his friends, and also for us all.

[elisaenglish]

All the Difference in the World

It seems almost contradictory to think of shining a light on dystopias. And there’s a certain element of “Why should we?” when history offers a damning surplus of cautionary tales and the future beckons with innovation yet too murky to fully judge. Here we are at the pivot. The pendulum swings without a concrete place to land and opinion drowns consideration. Meanwhile, the clock ticks on; we vacillate like a metronome as spectacle draws attention.

Thus, herein lies our quandary. We can speculate, but we can’t know. We can weigh, but far from settle. Literature presents some longed-for clues, except less discerning eyes are prone to over-simplify the essentials.

After all, non-literary figures frequently cite Orwell as science fiction’s most incisive voice and I agree that there’s grain of truth there. But I can’t help but feel somewhat sorry for poor old George, languishing in his premature grave, largely misread and far too easily utilised to justify all manner of dubious agendas. Quote-mining? Never a good idea. It’s like taking the moral high ground; there really is only one way to go. As for the ghost of the writer? There are two words you need to embrace: context and oeuvre. And in this case, I suspect he’d also like his name back. Because anyone of sober mind really would.

So if not Orwell, then who? If not a partial analogy, then where resides completion? And I hesitate at this juncture because parallelism is never an exact measure and variables come and go. Still, it feels safe – and by ‘safe’ I mean ‘absolutely fucking terrifying’ – to place our bets on Brave New World.

Not entirely original, I know. You could argue that it’s a bit mainstream, a bit staid, possibly a bit done to death. I could trawl obscurity to find something – well, obscure. But no, because what would be the point? Huxley, to use a technical term, knows his prophetic shit.

And ninety years later, here on the brink of some digital abyss, it looks a lot like we’re living it. Or at least we will be, before the next half-century’s done.

Of course, the world was negotiating its own horrifying pre-show in 1931. Lest we forget, communism and fascism were entrenched on the eastern and southern flanks of Europe. Meanwhile, Nazism was on the rise in the crumbling Weimar Republic and the Great Depression took its social and economic toll on the entire globe. In the midst, however, Huxley drew together a vision of a political model that had evolved civilisation beyond war, or famine, or plague, or suffering. A place of continuous peace, prosperity, where the government artificially, by means of advances in biotechnology and social manipulation, keeps everyone in a permanent state of contentment so that no one ever has any reason to rebel.

Control through love and pleasure, we see, is far more potent than that acquired through fear and violence. A whole population anaesthetised, and on and on they beg for another, and another hit. Familiar, isn’t it? And somehow under your skin because unlike 1984, it isn’t as easy to pinpoint what makes this scenario the worst of the worst, or even just one of them.

We turn, then, to the novel’s climactic moment. John the Savage, having lived all his life on a remote reservation in New Mexico and symbolic of the authentic and passionate mindset eliminated in the name of ‘benign’ tyranny, is brought before Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Western Europe and the only other man in London to know anything of Shakespeare or God, or it must be said, freedom:

““My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilisation has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organised society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended—there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.”

“But the tears are necessary. Don’t you remember what Othello said? ‘If after every tempest come such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.’ There’s a story one of the old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of Mátsaki. The young men who wanted to marry her had to do a morning’s hoeing in her garden. It seemed easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones. Most of the young men simply couldn’t stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could—he got the girl.”

“Charming! But in civilised countries,” said the Controller, “you can have girls without hoeing for them; and there aren’t any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them all centuries ago.”

The Savage nodded, frowning. “You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them... But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy... What you need is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here. Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare, even for an egg-shell. Isn’t there something in that?”

[…]

“There's a great deal in it,” the Controller replied. “Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.”

“What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.

“It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.”

“V.P.S.?”

“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”

“But I like the inconveniences.”

“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right, then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”

There was a long silence.

“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.”

So it is that he rejects the ‘blessings’ of modernity and retires to the wilderness to live out the rest of his days as a hermit. Having tried – and failed – to incite rebellion in those shackled by the system, he has learned from their apathy that they cannot be saved unless they possess inside them the will to liberate themselves. Such instincts are instilled in us through the multiplicity – not least of all, our stories, our art. Without them, we are husks of our generational selves, perhaps never to be salvaged.

True to form, as we see in these our days now, John is eventually hounded to death; his novelty of antiquated longings yet more fuel for a public driven rabid by consumerist lust. But so, his soul remains:

“He was digging in his garden��digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death—and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last... He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true—truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams?...”

What death? What purity? What dreams? And of course, what strength?

Choose your dystopias wisely, you could say. But nonetheless, choose. As Huxley writes in his essay Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds, “Generalised intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship.” We are the intuitive solution; we are the nuanced light. And for all of Miranda's mistaken claims, we might live to “see how beauteous mankind is.” Just be wary of the distractions.

[nacchi-nacchi-nacchi]

Advanced Darkness

When Bikini Bottom is destroyed by Godzilla, the carefree lives of SpongeBob, Squidward and friends change in an instant.

Pain, loss; fear of death is etched into our bodies and minds. And so we are dragged forward, whalefalls into stiller and stiller seas. Will there still be a feast, when we arrive at last?

By Nacchi.

Squidward took a long draw from his cigarette and flicked the still-lit butt onto the prostrate Sandy. The cherry-red flame burrowed carelessly through her plastic suit and sunk with a hiss into the sea of soft fur below, a dying star in the starless dusk of Neo Bikini Bottom. A wisp of greasy smoke curled up from the wound, the stench of burning hair joining the odors of piss and rancid oil in the alleyway.

"Everyone is in pain all the time, Sandra. Either you master that pain, or you learn to crave it."

Sandy's hands were leaden, her arms like sponge. Her once-muscular body had collapsed around the willpower which had built it up, a dead weight all the greater for the life she had spent in it. She could not even brush the cigarette from her back. Finally, with an impossible, defiant effort, she brought herself to her knees.

"No," she said through gritted teeth. Her mouth moved uselessly around the next words, opening to release not sound but foamy, pink blood. Squidward snickered.

"No? Is that all y—"

"No."

Sandy lifted her head to look Squidward in the eyes. For one moment, though he would never have believed it himself, the octopus felt true fear.

"That's just… what you tell yourself. That's just… how you justify hurting people." Sandy spoke more forcefully now, spattering the front of her helmet with blood.

"Because… it feels good. Because… because… you're weak! Weaker than a… Y-you-"

Two of Squidward's heels crashed down with an explosion of glass, and night came to Neo Bikini Bottom.

Neo Bikini Bottom resembled its predecessor in name only. It was a dark stretch of filthy concrete that sprawled out across the sand like a great scorch mark, punctuated with ugly steel buildings jutting from the earth with neither rhyme nor reason. Never before had the capacity of modern industry to create entire towns without a moment of thought or a single happy coincidence been so clear. The entire city was a bare-minimum, disposable stage on which the survivors could act out bare-minimum, disposable lives, forever stumbling after the dream of a day when they might lose themselves completely in the performance and forget the cheapness and flatness of the set. No one who had witnessed the original town's fate would believe in any other sort of place, or in any other sort of life.

Tragedy, as always, had been sudden and ridiculous. One summer day the blue horizon had darkened, and moments later the sunwashed Bikini Bottom was gone, transfigured instantaneously into a giant handful of rubble strewn across the vast seafloor. Only later would survivors piece together a fragmented tale—some godlike, titanic being, dragging itself across the floor of the Pacific, had plowed straight through their small pocket of civilization. It had probably been a totally arbitrary and thoughtless action—that Bikini Bottom was in its path was simply another coincidence of physics, as random and cruel as the reactions in the primordial brine from which life was first born.

Mr. Krabs had been killed instantly, dashed against the splintered remains of his favorite money-counting desk. SpongeBob, too, had been flattened, but fate was not so kind to the sponge; without any organs to crush, he would live on past the world into which he had been born, would live on to see the carcass of the town putrefy beneath its concrete shell. For the rest of his life he would be searching for bloodstains washed too quickly away in the name of reconstruction, desperate to convince himself of the reality of a past the others would sooner forget. Only SpongeBob had resisted Plankton's so-called rebuilding of Bikini Bottom, dragging out a series of grim protests that even he knew were doomed from the start; Embarrassed on his behalf, most of the town averted their eyes from what amounted to little more than public self-flagellation. When the sponge accepted Plankton's offer to work at the hollow shell of the Krusty Krab, the townspeople of Bikini Bottom were merely relieved to see the painful memory pass through its death throes and at last grow silent. And so SpongeBob was granted the small mercy of being allowed to vanish quietly into history, and nurse his festering wounds alone in the darkness. Plankton never even bothered to ask him the secret formula for the once-legendary Krabby Patty; there was no point anymore, nothing to compete with.

Ironically, Mr. Krabs himself would be remembered as a hero. He was cast in bronze and placed at the site of his old restaurant, gazing proudly off into the horizon on which death had first appeared. This was a particularly cruel trick on Plankton's part: the money-grubbing owner of the restaurant would be remembered as a beloved son of Bikini Bottom, forever honored with a view of his rival's absolute success. No trace of the crab himself remained beneath the gilded veneer of heroism; Eugene Krabs had at last been destroyed completely, wiped even from history.

Squidward, upon returning from a vacation to find his home destroyed and his workplace somehow even worse than before, had stood before the wreckage for hours, wordlessly holding the broken halves of his clarinet. There was nothing to say, and nothing to do. Reality stood before him, a smoking ruin, a bloodslick strip of sand. Bikini Bottom had always been nothing, he realized. Anything that had been anything wouldn't have vanished like this. Wouldn't have been so dwarfed by the monster that had trampled over his entire life. A life lived amongst nothing, worth nothing. Death would have been preferable, but suicide suddenly seemed an absurd proposition—how does one throw away nothing? It was meaningless, a logical impossibility. For as long as he lived he would suffer, and that alone was something onto which he could grasp. The pain deep within him compacted into a hard, heavy core, colder and denser than steel. An anchor to life. He dropped the shards of his clarinet and walked onward, onward into the endless and directionless open sea, not to be seen again for years.

When the Americans first contacted him in a panic, somehow reaching his shellphone with their sob stories of the same beast incinerating their great cities and slaughtering their masses, it was only with great effort that he had refrained from laughing at their arrogance. He had always heard of the amazing industry and frightful power of the human race—all come to nothing, in the end. But there was one thing that had chafed against him: as long as this godlike beast, this Godzilla, lived, the humans could spin their fairytales, could see themselves as a race of defiant underdogs. Only by destroying Godzilla and leaving in its place the haunting memory of their absolute powerlessness would their humiliation, and by extent the complete affirmation of the emptiness of the world from the top down, be complete. Or was that just his own personal fairytale, one final attempt to deceive himself into believing that the choice between murder and certain death meant anything? Either way, when the Americans' pleas for compassion inevitably turned to threats of violence, Squidward was ready.

The Americans planned to use a device called the Oxygen Destroyer, which had apparently been deployed in the past to obliterate a similar creature. A single unit would render a good portion of the Pacific Ocean an anaerobic graveyard and strip the flesh from the bones of every organic lifeform unfortunate enough to be trapped within its waters. It seemed the scientist who had developed it had given his life to ensure that it would never be used again—Squidward envied him. He must have died believing firmly that he could stand in the way of the proliferation of destruction, a pursuit to which humanity had always been willing slaves. In the end, he had only slowed the Japanese government's efforts to recreate the horrific device, which in turn would be stolen by the Americans and, at great expense, strengthened well beyond any reasonable point. Squidward couldn't help but admire their drive; if lives were worthless, and ending them profitable, America had—perhaps predictably—thrown itself wholeheartedly into an exceptionally lucrative industry.

Sandra was unlucky. She had cornered Squidward in an alley as he hauled the device home through the murky evening of the reconstructed city. It seemed the Americans had reached out to her first, and revealed too much in their haste. Once, long ago, he would have feared her. But she had been at her home when disaster struck, and had spent hours pinned beneath her great tree, blanketed in broken glass. Her muscles were scarred and atrophied, her once gratingly loud voice a painful rasp. With a fatal, stupid defiance, she had attempted nevertheless to stop him. And so he stepped forward into the lightless future, expecting to plummet into a chasm too deep and dark to ever return from. Only, there was no chasm—or rather, he had already been at the bottom all along. Killing, dying, saving, living. It was all the same within the terrible shadow of the past.

Wasting no time, Squidward immediately began preparing to bring about the end of days. It seemed only appropriate, however, that he should deploy the Oxygen Destroyer somewhere with a nostalgic backdrop. Some trace of the old Squidward still remained in him, it seemed—he would kill that lingering piece there, in the awful restaurant which had made him so miserable back when he still had the capacity to feel misery. It was hardly surprising to him that SpongeBob was still in the back of the restaurant even in the dead of night, and even less surprising that he was easily able to overcome the sponge, shoving him into the meat freezer with neither hesitation nor explanation. Even so, SpongeBob knew enough. He could see a terrible resolve in the octopus's eyes, and the shadow of death was reflected in the dull metal of the device.

His pores beginning to fill with ice, the sponge could only stare helplessly from the freezer as Squidward set about turning Neo Bikini Bottom into a cemetery. For a moment Squidward stared blankly into the blue water, toward the ruins of his old house. SpongeBob wondered if he might be remembering better days. Things had been so carefree then. It was still beyond comprehension that all throughout those grease-scented years something incomprehensible and unstoppable had been slumbering deep within those frigid, dark, ancient places beyond even Rock Bottom. That all of their petty struggles over the Krabby Patty formula, all of their trials and triumphs, had been inevitably bounded by that deferred horror, minuscule, invisibly small in proportion to it. Perhaps, SpongeBob thought, all happinesses were small happinesses—moments, trapped in fragile bubbles of ignorance, where you might find some effervescent bliss, or at least a pocket of numbness, just enough to seduce you into enduring another day within the freezing sea of time. And then, as Plankton placed his arms on either side of the Oxygen Destroyer, the coldness became absolute, and SpongeBob thought nothing at all.

Squidward's face was blank as he turned away from the activated Oxygen Destroyer. He himself could not decide what it was he had done. Had he made the only choice available to him, or had he at last exacted revenge for all those worthless days, those long, corrosive years of pointless work and restless evenings that had eaten away at his soul? What did he feel? Why did he still feel nothing?

Sandy, SpongeBob, all the inhabitants of Neo Bikini Bottom… were they merely a casualty of his quest to destroy himself?

Lost in thought, Squidward turned just in time to see a restaurant table seemingly suspended in the water inches from his face. For a moment it was as if it were moving in slow motion, and then reality snapped back into motion along its horrible trajectory. His world spun, reorienting itself painfully against the floor with a burst of stars and a fountain of blue blood. Over him stood Patrick Star, dumb, uncomprehending, unstoppable, half of a dripping Krabby Patty in hand. Death incarnate.

Still reeling, Squidward grabbed the spatula SpongeBob had left on the grill. It was red hot, and the half-melted plastic handle seared his tentacle as it closed around it, but he hardly noticed. Patrick, of course, was oblivious, shouting some nonsense about his friend. It seemed he was working himself into a rage intense enough to boil over his brainless lethargy.

"And," he shouted, standing over the mangled Squidward, "Here comes the giant fist!"

So, this is it, thought Squidward. This was not a punishment for the others, though Patrick probably meant it as such. It was just the order of things. The will of Patrick which set his fist into motion, the machinations of Squidward which would bring the ocean to ruin, all were merely expressions of the unchallengeable gravity which dragged each of them along from moment to moment. Always downward, downward, toward the unknowing, lightless void at the bottom. Entropy, inanimate and inviolate; an emptiness more perfect and infinitely more cruel than any god.

If random violence was the order of the world, then reproducing that power was neither radical nor admirable—to forever pantomime the currents of nature, throwing one's own body again and again upon pyres erected to no purpose, that was the hell of beasts. But, then, what else was there but the tyranny of that understanding? Was an octopus not a beast? Was it not right and proper, or at least blameless and inevitable, that he should injure, kill, be injured and be killed? It had nothing to do with pleasure. Yes, that was it! That was why he had felt nothing! There was no room for joy, and no cause for guilt, as they all inscribed their memories, their wounds, upon each other's rotting minds and bodies. This world was endlessly blasted by lightning-bolts of agony—Squidward was made of conductive flesh, and so he conducted. There was nothing else, no sins to absolve and no ablutions to perform.

When the beast first passed, some thought to sate its thirst for blood, and so win its cooperation. The rich smoke gave them away. For days the scent of alder and salmon fat hung over the remains of the Kelp Forest. Arrogant fools, to think that our flesh was worth anything at all…

The fist came, and at the same time Squidward drove his burning spatula deep into the core of the starfish, propelled by instinct as much as any desire for vengeance. There was a shout, a cloud of steam, and the impact of Patrick's blow—a torrent of confused sensations that overflowed the octopus' brain as it was pulverized into a viscous fluid. Carried over its liquifying circuits at the last moment, the taste of Squidward's own blood in his mouth was just like that of a Krabby Patty.

Patrick stumbled over to the refrigerator door and put his immense brute strength to work peeling the steel from its hinges. He knew something was wrong with him, but he didn't know what—he had to ask SpongeBob, whose frozen form he could just barely make out through the glass. As he flung the door behind him, Patrick's momentum sent him careening across the bloodied floor with a crash. He felt… funny. As though something that had been hanging on by a thread for years had finally snapped, and the tension which had been tugging at the edges of his conscious for all that time had instantaneously vanished. His arms fell to his side, limp and immovable, as he drifted weightlessly through daydreams, abstract impressions that spun outward from whatever had passed for thought, unravelling as they went. Patrick, always separated from reality by a lacy veil of ignorance, hardly noticed as the last embers of his primitive mind smoldered out and the soft dreams gave way to a velvety, opaque sleep.

Shivering, melted frost evaporating off of him in great puffs of steam, SpongeBob cooked. He slid the spatula ever so carefully beneath the patty, savoring the slight give of the browned meat coming off of the grill and the subtle flex of the burger as it flipped through the liquid aether. Beyond the glass walls of the Krusty Krab, shimmering in the chemical haze, the dawn sun was rising incarnadine.

The patty landed with a soft pat and pronounced sizzle. It was perfect.

Yes, thought SpongeBob, as the first bubbles began to lap at the windows, This is good.

He stepped over the twin wrecks of Squidward and Patrick, leather shoes slippery against the gory floor, and gathered together two golden-brown buns, the crisp lettuce, the just-so pickles. There, in the sizzling silence, warmed by the grill, SpongeBob constructed the perfect Krabby Patty.

It's okay now, he thought. Things will be right again, soon enough.

The dull sounds of a faraway hysteria reached the kitchen, dying out just as a fizz signaled that the front door of the Krusty Krab had been breached. Shutting the kitchen door, SpongeBob went into the cupboard and found the small jar of secret ingredient that he had stowed away all those years ago, scraping it from the ruined floorboards and picking out the splinters. There, in the twilit confines, he savored an authentic Krabby Patty. At last, it was exactly as he had remembered. A dusky illumination bled in through the cracks of the door, dyeing the shadows a dark red. He closed his eyes and let the old memories envelop him in a warm ignorance. He had been away so long in a strange world, separated from his home by a growing and impassable sea of time. But now he knew.

The dead ocean would not become a cemetery. A cemetery was something the living bore inside of them, their hearts growing heavier and heavier with the ghosts of the past until at last the weight of their loss dragged them down into the darkness. Something they projected onto stones and mounds and urns quite content to sit silent until the end of time. No, this time it would be a real, proper end. A complete death sweeping in and leaving only bleached bones and chitin and sponge, white and smooth as fresh-fallen snow. With no scars to read, and no one to read them.

SpongeBob felt joy blossom in his breast for the first time in all those years. He did not fear disappearing back into the blinding, glimmering whiteness. No, far from it.

He was ready.

Originally posted June 2018. Description updated when I decided the old one was really bad.

[fricklefracklexpress]

Advanced Darkness

When Bikini Bottom is destroyed by Godzilla, the carefree lives of SpongeBob, Squidward and friends change in an instant. The horror of tragedy is not in tragedy but the aftermath, a life frozen in a single unending snapshot of dull agony as the years drag on. Loss is the mind's awareness of its own mortality, pain the body's. How much meaningless suffering can we endure? By Nacchi.

Squidward took a long draw from his cigarette and flicked the still-lit butt onto the prostrate Sandy. The cherry-red flame burrowed carelessly through her plastic suit and into the soft fur of her back, a dying star in the starless dusk of Neo Bikini Bottom. A trail of greasy smoke curled up from the wound, filling the alleyway with the scent of burning hair.

"Everyone is in pain all the time, Sandra. Either you master that pain, or you learn to crave it."

Sandy's hands were leaden, her arms as sponge. Unable even to brush the cigarette from her back, she struggled to lift the dead weight of her broken body. With an impossible, defiant effort, she brought herself to her knees.

"No," she said through gritted teeth. Her mouth moved uselessly around the next words, opening to release not sound but foamy, pink blood. Squidward snickered.

"No? Is that all y—"

"No."

Sandy lifted her head to look Squidward in the eyes. For one moment, though he would never have believed it himself, the octopus felt true fear.

"That's just… what you tell yourself. That's just… how you justify hurting people." Sandy spoke more forcefully now, spraying a fine mist of blood onto the front of her helmet.

"Because… it feels good. Because… because… you're weak! Weaker than a… Y-you-"

Two of Squidward's heels crashed down with an explosion of glass, and night came to Neo Bikini Bottom.

Neo Bikini Bottom resembled its predecessor in name only. It was a dark stretch of greasy concrete that sprawled across the sand like a great scorch mark, punctuated with ugly steel buildings that jutted from the earth with neither rhyme nor reason. Never before had the capacity of modern industry to create entire towns without a moment of thought or a single happy coincidence been so clear. The entire city was a bare-minimum, disposable stage on which the survivors could act out bare-minimum, disposable lives, forever stumbling after the dream of a day where they might lose themselves completely in the performance and forget the cheapness and flatness of the set. No one who had witnessed the original town's fate would believe in any other sort of place, or in any other sort of life.

Tragedy, as always, had been sudden and ridiculous. One summer day the blue horizon had darkened, and moments later the sunwashed Bikini Bottom was gone, transfigured instantaneously to a giant handful of rubble strewn across the vast seafloor. Only later would survivors piece together a fragmented tale—some godlike, titanic being, dragging itself through the floor of the Pacific, had plowed straight through their small pocket of civilization. It had probably been an entirely arbitrary, thoughtless action—that Bikini Bottom was in its path was simply another coincidence of matter, as random and cruel as the reactions in the primordial brine from which life was first born.

Mr. Krabs had been killed instantly, dashed against the splintered remains of his favorite money-counting desk. SpongeBob, too, had been flattened, but fate was not so kind to the sponge; without any organs to crush, he would live on past the world into which he had been born, would live on to see the carcass of the town putrefy beneath its concrete shell. For the rest of his life he would be searching for bloodstains washed too quickly away in the name of reconstruction, desperate to convince himself of the reality of a past the others would sooner forget. Only SpongeBob had resisted Plankton's so-called rebuilding of Bikini Bottom, dragging out a series of grim protests that even he knew were doomed from the start. Embarrassed on his behalf, most of the town averted their eyes from what amounted to little more than public self-flagellation. When the sponge accepted Plankton's offer to work at the hollow shell of the Krusty Krab, rebuilt in name only, the townspeople of Bikini Bottom were merely relieved to see the painful memory end its death throes and at last grow silent. And so SpongeBob was granted the small mercy of being allowed to vanish quietly into history, and nurse his festering wounds alone in the darkness. Plankton never even bothered to ask him the secret formula for the once-legendary Krabby Patty; there was no point anymore, nothing to compete with.

Ironically, Mr. Krabs himself would be remembered as a hero. He was cast in bronze and placed at the site of his old restaurant, gazing proudly off into the horizon from which death had first appeared. This was a particularly cruel trick on Plankton's part: the money-grubbing owner of the restaurant would be remembered as a favorite son of Bikini Bottom, forever honored with a view of his rival's absolute success. No trace of the crab himself remained beneath the gilded veneer of heroism; Eugene Krabs had at last been destroyed completely, wiped from history.

Squidward, upon returning from a vacation to find his home destroyed and his workplace somehow even worse than before, had stood before the wreckage for hours, wordlessly holding the broken halves of his clarinet. There was nothing to say, and nothing to do. Reality stood before him, a smoking ruin, a bloodslick strip of sand. Bikini Bottom had always been nothing, he realized. Anything that had been anything wouldn't have vanished like this. Wouldn't have been so dwarfed by the monster that trampled over his entire life. A life lived amongst nothing, worth nothing. Death would have been preferable, but suicide suddenly seemed an absurd proposition—how does one throw away nothing? It was meaningless, a logical impossibility. For as long as he lived he would suffer, and that alone was something onto which he could grasp. The pain deep within him compacted into a hard, heavy core colder and denser than steel. An anchor to life. He dropped the shards of his clarinet and walked onward, onward into the endless and directionless open sea, not to be seen again for years.

When the Americans first contacted him in a panic, somehow reaching his shellphone with their sob stories of the same beast incinerating their great cities and slaughtering their masses, it was only with a great effort that he refrained from laughing at their arrogance. He had always heard of the amazing industry and power of the human race—all come to nothing, in the end. But there was one thing that had chafed against him: as long as this godlike beast, this Godzilla, lived, the humans could spin their fairytales, could see themselves as a race of defiant underdogs. Only by destroying Godzilla, and leaving only the memory of their absolute powerlessness, would their humiliation, and by extent the complete affirmation of the emptiness of the world, be complete. Or was that just his own personal fairytale, one final attempt to deceive himself into believing that the choice between murder and certain death meant anything? Either way, when the Americans' pleas for compassion inevitably turned to threats of violence, Squidward was ready.

The Americans planned to use a device called the Oxygen Destroyer, which had apparently deployed in the past to obliterate a similar creature. A single unit would render a good portion of the Pacific Ocean an anaerobic graveyard and strip the flesh from the bones of every organic lifeform unfortunately enough to be trapped within its waters. It seemed the scientist who had developed it had given his life to ensure that it would never be used again—Squidward envied him. He must have died believing firmly that he could stand in the way of the proliferation of destruction, a pursuit to which humanity had always been slaves. In the end, he had only slowed the Japanese government's efforts to recreate the horrific device, which in turn would be stolen by the Americans and, at great expense, strengthened well beyond any reasonable point. Squidward couldn't help but admire their drive; if lives were worthless, and ending them profitable, America had—perhaps predictably—thrown itself wholeheartedly into an exceptionally lucrative industry.

Sandra was unlucky. She had cornered Squidward in an alley as he hauled the device home through the murky evening of the reconstructed city. It seemed the Americans had reached out to her first, and revealed too much in their haste. Once, long ago, he would have feared her. But she had been at her home when disaster struck, and had spent hours pinned beneath her great tree, blanketed in broken glass. Her muscles were scarred and atrophied, her once gratingly loud voice a painful rasp. With a fatal, stupid defiance, she had attempted to stop him. And so he stepped forward into the lightless future, expecting to plummet into a chasm too deep and dark to ever return from. Only, there was no chasm—or rather, he had already been at the bottom all along. Killing, dying, saving, living. It was all the same within the terrible shadow of the past.

Wasting no time, Squidward immediately began preparing to bring about the end of days. It seemed only appropriate, however, that he should deploy the Oxygen Destroyer somewhere with a nostalgic backdrop. Some trace of the old Squidward still remained in him, it seemed—he would kill that lingering piece here. It was hardly surprising to him that SpongeBob was still in the back of the restaurant even in the dead of night, and even less surprising that he was easily able to overcome the sponge, shoving him into the meat freezer with neither hesitation nor explanation. But SpongeBob knew enough. He could see it in the octopus's eyes, could see the shadow of death reflected in the dull metal of the device.

His pores beginning to fill with ice, the sponge could only stare helplessly from the freezer as Squidward set about turning Neo Bikini Bottom into a cemetery. For a moment Squidward stared blankly into the blue water, towards the ruins of his old house. SpongeBob wondered if he might be remembering better days. Things had been so carefree then. It was still beyond comprehension that, throughout those grease-scented years, something incomprehensible and unstoppable had been slumbering deep within those frigid, dark, ancient places beyond even Rock Bottom. That all of their petty struggles over the Krabby Patty formula, all of their trials and triumphs, had been inevitably bounded by that deferred horror, minuscule, invisibly small in proportion to it. Perhaps, SpongeBob thought, all happinesses were small happinesses—moments, trapped in fragile bubbles of ignorance, where one might find some effervescent bliss, or at least a pocket of numbness, just enough to seduce you into enduring another day within the freezing sea of time. And then, as Plankton placed his fins on either side of the Oxygen Destroyer, the coldness became absolute, and SpongeBob thought nothing at all.

Squidward's face was blank as he turned away from the activated Oxygen Destroyer. He himself could not decide what it was he had done. Had he made the only choice available to him, or had he at last exacted revenge for all those worthless days, those long, corrosive years of pointless work and restless evenings that had eaten away at his soul? What did he feel? Why did he feel nothing at all?

Sandy, SpongeBob, all the inhabitants of Neo Bikini Bottom… were they merely a casualty of his quest to destroy himself?

Lost in thought, Squidward turned just in time to see a restaurant table seemingly suspended in the water inches from his face. For a moment it was as if it were moving in slow motion, and then reality snapped back to its horrible trajectory. His world spun, reorienting itself painfully against the floor with a burst of stars and fountain of blue blood. Over him stood Patrick Star, dumb, uncomprehending, unstoppable, half of a dripping Krabby Patty in hand. Death incarnate.

Still reeling, Squidward grabbed the spatula SpongeBob had left on the grill. It was red hot, and the melting plastic handle seared his tentacle as it closed around it, but he hardly noticed. Patrick, of course, was oblivious, shouting some nonsense about his friend. It seemed he was working himself into a rage intense enough to boil over his brainless lethargy.

"And," he shouted, standing over the mangled Squidward, "Here comes the giant fist!"

So, this is it, thought Squidward. This was not a punishment for the others, though Patrick probably meant it as such. It was just the order of things. The will of Patrick which set his fist into motion, the machinations of Squidward which would bring the ocean to ruin, all were merely expressions of the unchallengeable gravity which dragged all of them into place from moment to moment. Always downward, downward, toward the unknowing, lightless void at the end. Entropy, inanimate and inviolate; an emptiness more perfect and infinitely more cruel than any god.

If random violence was the order of the world, then reproducing that power was neither radical nor admirable—to forever pantomime the currents of nature, throwing one's own body again and again upon pyres erected to no purpose, that was the hell of beasts. But, then, what else was there, but the tyranny of that understanding? Was an octopus not a beast? Was it not right and proper, or at least blameless and inevitable, that he should injure, kill, be injured and be killed? It had nothing to do with pleasure. Yes, that was it! That was why he had felt nothing! There was no room for joy, and no cause for guilt, as they all inscribed their wounds and their memories upon each other's rotting bodies and minds. This world was endlessly blasted by lightning bolts of agony—Squidward was made of conductive flesh, and so he conducted. There was nothing else, no sins to absolve and no ablutions to perform.

When the beast first passed, some thought to sate its thirst for blood, and so win its cooperation. The rich smoke gave them away. For days the scent of alder and salmon fat hung over the remains of the convention hall. Arrogant fools, to think that our flesh was worth anything at all…

The fist came, and at the same time Squidward buried his burning spatula deep into the core of the starfish, propelled by instinct as much as any desire of vengeance. There was a hiss, a cloud of steam, and the impact of Patrick's blow—a torrent of confused sensations that overflowed the octopus' brain as it was pulverized into a viscous fluid. Carried over its liquifying circuits at the last moment, the taste of Squidward's own blood in his mouth was just like that of a Krabby Patty.

Patrick stumbled over to the refrigerator door, and put his immense brute strength to work peeling the steel from its hinges. He knew something was wrong with him, but he didn't know what—he had to ask SpongeBob, whose frozen form he could just barely make out through the glass. As he flung the door behind him, Patrick's momentum sent him careening across the bloodied floor with a crash. He felt… funny. As though something that had been hanging on by a thread for years had finally snapped, and the tension that had tugged at the edges of his conscious for all that time had instantaneously vanished. His arms fell to his side, limp and immovable, as he drifted weightlessly through daydreams, abstract impressions that spun outward from whatever had passed for thought, unravelling as they went. Patrick, always separated from reality by a lacy veil of ignorance, hardly noticed as the last embers of his primitive mind smoldered out and the soft dreams gave way to a velvety, opaque sleep.

Shivering, melted frost evaporating off of him in great puffs of steam, SpongeBob cooked. He slid the spatula ever so carefully beneath the patty, felt the slight give of the browned meat coming off of the grill, the gentle weight of the burger as it flipped through the liquid aether. Beyond the glass walls of the Krusty Krab, shimmering in the chemical haze, the dawn sun was rising incarnadine, bathing the restaurant in red light.

The patty landed with a soft pat and pronounced sizzle. It was perfect.

Yes, thought SpongeBob, as the first bubbles began to lap at the windows, This is good.

He stepped over the twin wrecks of Squidward and Patrick, leather shoes slippery against the gory floor, and gathered together two golden-brown buns, the crisp lettuce, the just-so pickles. There, in the sizzling silence, warmed by the grill, SpongeBob constructed the perfect Krabby Patty.

It's okay now, he thought. Things will be right again, soon enough. The first waves of mass hysteria, far away and dull, reached the kitchen, and then the fizz of the entrance being breached. Shutting the kitchen door, SpongeBob went into the cupboard and found the small jar of secret ingredient that he had stowed away all those years ago, scraping it from the ruined floorboards and picking out the splinters and rubble. There, in the confined near-darkness, he savored an authentic Krabby Patty. At last, it was exactly as he had remembered. A dusky illumination bled in through the cracks of the door, dyeing the shadows a blood red. He closed his eyes and let the old memories fill him, envelop him in a warm ignorance. He had spent so long away in a strange world, separated from his home by a growing and impassable sea of time. But now he knew.

The dead ocean would not become a cemetery. A cemetery was something the living bore inside of them, their hearts becoming heavier and heavier with the ghosts of the past until at last the weight of their losses dragged them down into the darkness. Something they projected onto stones and mounds and urns quite content to sit silent until the end of time. No, this time it would be a real, proper end. A complete death sweeping in and leaving only bleached bones and chitin and sponge, white and smooth as fresh-fallen snow. With no scars to read and no one to read them.

SpongeBob felt joy blossom in his breast for the first time in all those years. He did not fear disappearing back into the blinding, glimmering whiteness. No, far from it.

He was ready.

[ruminativerabbi]

My Writing Self

As Descartes almost said, existence is a slippery thing.

A trip to the theater will bring that idea sharply into focus. What you think you see on the stage when you see Othello entering Desdemona’s bedroom in the fifth act of Othello are two people, a man and a woman—real people with real Social Security numbers and real home addresses—dressed up to look like two other people, neither one of whom actually exists at all. But what is really happening has nothing to do with any of the above: what is actually afoot is that a playwright dead and gone from the world for a cool four centuries is somehow managing to overcome the natural limits of the possible to speak from the grave directly to the fully-alive people sitting in the audience. That’s a lot of people involved, only some of whom exist. Even that doesn’t sound that complicated, not really! But saying exactly how many people in that complicated equation are real is more daunting a task than it feels like it should be. Here’s a tip: don’t answer too quickly!

The actors exist, but their real identities are completely submerged under the personae of the characters they’ve been hired to play on stage. So they exist in some theoretical, yet fully invisible way. The characters in the play that the audience sees on stage are wholly fictitious: no matter how talented Glenda Jackson may be, she’s still not really King Lear, who, like Othello and Desdemona, is a wholly fictitious character. (Even Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a fictitious character, at least in the sense that the real man of Roman antiquity never said any of the lines the Bard put in his mouth. He didn’t even speak English! Ditto Antony and double-ditto Cleopatra.) That leaves the people in the audience and the playwright to consider. Shakespeare is dead. (He died in the spring of 1616, so it’s been a while.) But even if the play in question were to be by a playwright still among the living, that living person is not actually talking to anyone in the audience other than through the magic of his or her art, and is certainly not really present in the room in the way that two people engaged in direct, dialogic conversation have to be. So that leaves the audience. They, obviously, do exist! But it’s only they in this complicated pas-de-six that do so unambiguously and in a way that does not require elaborate explanation. No wonder I always feel so existentially exhausted after an evening at the theater!

What’s true about the theater is also true about the movies and about TV, which is why I find it upsetting when a character on the screen leaves the dramatic context in which he or she was conceived and in which that character solely exists to turn to the audience in the theater and speak directly to them. (Joan says this is a sign of being a crazy person, but I really do feel this way.) When the Kevin Spacey character in House of Cards, for example, turns to face the camera and address the audience watching at home, it’s at best confusing: the guy on the screen speaking to me isn’t the actor divested of his role in the show (since he’s still in costume and on the set, and he’s reciting lines someone else wrote), but he also isn’t the character he’s portraying (because he seems suddenly to exist in the real world that I myself exist in, which makes no sense since only one of us is real). No wonder I feel ontologically aggressed against when that happens—and, yes, I felt that way even when Matthew Broderick does the same thing at the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and, stepping out of the film but somehow not really into the real world, tells the audience that the movie is over and that they should all go home. (Or do I mean when Ferris Bueller does that?) You see why this is upsetting! At the very least, it’s confusing. But since I am someone who finds it upsetting to be confused, it all comes down to the same thing.

Why I don’t find third-person novels irritating is a good question. They too, after all, feature narrators who aren’t the author (since they live in the fictitious narrative and seem to be on the same existential plane as the people they’re describing, none of whom exists in the real world) but who also aren’t characters in the story (since they are rarely named or identified, and almost never play any sort of actual role in the plot as it unfolds). Maybe it’s precisely because they are such wan personalities, these all-knowing unidentified narrators, that I don’t find them that upsetting. But it’s also true that I generally like first-person novels much better: when Ishmael opens the book by turning to me, the reader, and telling me what to call him, I like him already. He’s not Melville. But he’s also not a voice-of-God narrator who magically seems to know everything about the story the author-who-is-not-him is about to tell. What Ishmael is, is a character in the book, and that is the case even if he seems able to transcend his own context and speak to me personally and directly. For some reason, I can live with that in a great book. And I feel the same way about Huck when he starts right in by telling me that Mark Twain only mostly told the truth about him in Tom Sawyer. And about Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. And, of course, about Scout as well. (Doesn’t everybody forgive Scout her non-existence and welcome her willingness to tell us her story directly as though we somehow actually could encounter each other on the same plane of existence?) So I’m a little inconsistent. What can you do? My favorites among my own stories are also all first-person narratives. But you probably guessed that already!

And now it turns out that the great stage of human folly and promise that is the Internet also features real/unreal players…and to an extent I hadn’t realized until just recently. There was a startling story just the other day in the Times, in fact, about the degree to which “virtual influencers” have become such a staple of digital advertising that it feels unnecessary to waste time wondering if they are people or digitized sales-avatars. (To see the article, written by Tiffany Hsu, click here.) I do realize that neither Betty Crocker nor Aunt Jemima actually existed either…and that they didn’t do so long before anyone could have imagined the Internet. But they were basically drawings on boxes who occasionally appeared in magazines to encourage the purchase of their products, not faux people with whom consumers could conceive actually of having a relationship with, of listening to, or of caring about.

And that brings me to my own avatar-issue. Because, for me personally at least, my writing self—for all it is obviously allied strongly to the real me—has also come, at least to a certain extent, to exist independently. And as June draws to a close and I conclude now my thirteenth year of writing weekly letters to you all, this seems a point worth pondering. (There has been a lot of room for growth too: this week’s is my 465th letter since the first went out in the fall of 2006, a number that seems unreal even to me.)

To prepare the series of “best hits” among my letters that will appear during the weeks I’ll be in Israel, I’ve been looking through the files and noticing how my writing has evolved over the years…and how I myself also have in the course of all these weekly efforts to speak directly to my readers about issues that seem relevant and interesting. Without planning to do so in advance, I note how I return over and over to certain themes in my writing, trying always to flesh them out slightly more provocatively and to refine more accurately the precise way I feel in their regard. These themes—the nature of heroism, the symbiotic relationship of history and destiny, the relationship of Jewishness to Judaism, the flawed reasonableness of the democratic ideal, the relationship of church and state in America and in Israel, the sanctity of Jerusalem and the great adventure of owning property there, the ultimate compatibility of science and religion, the relentless vulgarity of so much of Western culture, and the specific way I have responded to specific books I’ve read and wished either to recommend or not to recommend to my readers—will be familiar to all. I’d like to think my prose style has evolved over all these years in a positive way. But more interesting, at least to me personally, is noticing how I have somehow evolved a writing voice that feels to me distinct from my preaching voice or my teaching voice, how the weekly commitment to writing these letters has allowed me to evolve an identifiable addition to my collection of other selves, how I have been able intellectually, emotionally, even spiritually, to evolve and to grow through the medium of these weekly letters.

I remember reading somewhere that you should never been pleased when someone you haven’t seen in ages attempts to compliment you by saying that you haven’t changed a bit in all that time. Life is growth! But growth requires a medium, a context, a setting. And you, my faithful readers for all these many years, have provided me with that setting, with that context. And for that I am truly grateful.

I wrap up, then, this bar-mitzvah year of writing to you all with a simple wish: may God grant that we all have many years to write and to read, to agree and to argue, to allow the written word to function as the specific arena in which the ideas I put forward in these letters are allowed to incubate so that we can all together see where they go, and where we go as well. Whether there really is no noise when a tree falls to earth if there’s no one present to hear it is one of those high-school truths that feels hard to square with the way the physical world appears actually to work. But what I do know to be true, and unequivocally so, is that no written word truly exists without readers to read it, to test it, to respond to it, to react to the invitation to dialogue or to debate embedded in it. And that makes me very grateful to you all for the opportunity you’ve afforded me over all these many years to write and, because of you, to be read as well.