#and that her defiance of her own identity throughout her life up until its end

[catherdrashepard]

Red Rising/Persona

I’m a huge fan of the Persona series and pretty much anything Atlus has done. I am ALSO a huge fan of Red Rising (blame that on @hyena-frog) So, the natural conclusion is that I should determine which Persona the main RR POV characters would have. As well as a couple extras. Pictures will be included with credit to the artist when applicable. Please let me know if I forget to credit someone. (https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Persona_5_Royal_Personas) Here is the website I’m using. Spoilers for the first three books and probably a little of Iron Gold. Also a spoiler for the Faith Confidante in Persona 5: Royal. Avoid the Lysander paragraph if you want none of that. Disclaimer: I have not finished Dark Age yet so some of my thoughts might be lacking complete information.

Darrow: The main characters of the Persona series always start with a Persona from the Fool arcana. It doesn’t necessarily stay that way depending on the players personal preference. That being said, Darrow does fit the Fool arcana very well. It’s considered to be the beginning arcana or one without a number. It represents innocence, divine inspiration, madness, freedom, spontaneity, inexperience, chaos and creativity. These traits I think describe Darrow pretty accurately, especially in the first two books. Considering the story revolves around his journey, it makes sense to label him as a character of beginnings. Persona-wise, I think the one that fits Red Rising and Golden Son Darrow would be Satanael. This Persona is basically the equivalent to Lucifer, the angel who led a rebellion against God. But also that isn’t all that Darrow is. I also think the Death arcana is fitting for him, from Morning Star and beyond. Death is an arcana roughly in the middle of the tarot deck and it’s one that represents metamorphosis and change. Literal interpretation aside, Darrow experiences a change in himself after his capture at the end of Golden Son and his rescue in Morning Star. Not to mention, his entire purpose for becoming a Gold in the first place was to provoke a change in the current system of government. For his Death Persona, I would give him Thanatos. Because he’s my favourite, but also he’s considered the harbinger of death. Perfect for the Reaper. I don’t think Darrow completely loses Satanael in favour of Thanatos; I could definitely see him using both depending on the circumstance.

Virginia/Mustang: By Persona standards, because Mustang is Darrow’s main love interest, she would be the Lovers arcana. However, and this was incredibly difficult because she could really fit more acana, I think she could be both the Judgement and the Empress arcana. The Judgement arcana, I feel, fits her Sovereign persona (ha). It’s associated with a deep understanding of life, a balance of light and darkness, and characters who are well-aware, and intelligent. Not that this doesn’t fit her in her private life as well, but it seems more prevalent in her dealings as the Sovereign. The second arcana is the Empress. This one is more associated with mothers and women of authority. As we saw in the first trilogy, she went to great lengths to protect her family, i.e., working for Octavia, being with Cassius, the whole incident in Lykos. Choosing her Persona is tricky, mostly because Personas can shift arcana depending which game they are pulled from. I think the one to go with is Astarte. This is more of a feeling rather than definitive “proof”. She is identified as the goddess of war, hunting, love, sex, horses and possibly the morning star; her symbols are thought to be the lion, panther, and an eight pointed star. This is also the ultimate Persona of Haru in Persona 5, who awakens her initial Persona in defiance of her father and his corruption, which also feels apt. That being said, Astarte is from the Empress arcana and I could not find a Judgement arcana Persona that I felt fit her well enough.

Credit for the picture of Astarte to: Machia McMadlass on Amino

Sevro: Sevro was very easy to choose a Persona for. One in particular stood out to me. I think Sevro could fit both the Fool arcana and the Devil arcana. I think the aspects of the Fool that Sevro embodies are the madness, freedom, spontaneity, and creativity. The Devil arcana represents the urge to do selfish, impulsive, violent things. However, it also can represent a healthy bond and commitment.  Sevro is a wild card from the beginning, killing Priam in the first book being a prime example. Both he and Darrow were very unexpected successes in the Institute. This is something that also describes the protagonists in the Persona games as well. They all just kind of show up out of nowhere and completely shift the paradigm, especially in Personas 3&5. As for the Devil arcana, Sevro reminds me of the Devil confidante in Persona 5. Their goals are not the same, but both characters are very focused on what they want and make every effort to push through despite any obstacles in the way. As for the Persona, the one I chose was sort of picked for superficial reasons; Bugbear. Its name comes from the Celtic word bugs which means evil spirit or goblin. It’s also considered to be something of a boogeyman, a creature that lurked in the woods to scare children. Also, it’s essentially a stuffed bear filled with skulls, which seems to fit Sevro’s weird tastes.

Victra: With Victra, one arcana stuck out in my mind immediately, the Chariot. This arcana represents victory, conquest, self-assertion, self-confidence, control, war, and command. When first introduced to Victra, she does seem very sure of herself and what she wants. She strikes me as a shoot first and ask questions later type, which is something she has in common with the video game characters who share this arcana. Like Sevro, she could also fit the Devil arcana, especially during certain events in Dark Age that she pursues very single-mindedly. Although, I would say Victra is more Devil leaning than Sevro. As for the Persona, I think Pazuzu would fit her style pretty well. What really struck me as fitting Victra was the description of Pazuzu as an evil spirit that drives away other evil spirits, and protects humans from plagues and misfortunes. Also, despite trying to stick with the arcana placements of Persona 5 Royal, I think it’s worth noting that Pazuzu was summoned by a character in Devil Survivor who seeks revenge for death of a loved one.

Cassius: While perusing the arcana descriptions, the one for the Lovers immediately reminded me of Cassius. The Lovers is usually reserved for the “canon” love interest in the games, barring player preferences. However, Dassius jokes aside, what really made me think Cassius is that this arcana symbolises two paths a life could lead to and, standing at a crossroad and needing to make a decision. I think this describes Cassius’ personal journey throughout the books to a T, especially in the climax of Morning Star where he makes the decision to join Darrow in taking out Aja and Octavia. The other arcana that Cassius would be is the Star. This arcana is said to represent hope, self-confidence, faith, altruism, luck, generosity, peace and joy. I feel like self-confidence, faith, and altruism fit pre-end of Morning Star Cassius very well. He was considered the pinnacle of Golds and I think, at least until he learned what was actually going on, that’s all he wanted to be. The game characters with this arcana are teachers or mentors to the protagonist. Characters that are very good at what they do and offer some form of training. A sort of outlier to this is Teddie, from Persona 4. While he does have more experience than the main character dealing with the enemy (both Cassius and Teddie are part of the group the protagonist fights against), Teddie doesn’t take a combative role until later in the game. This is only possible because Rise, who replaces him as support, makes him question his identity or the “real” him. This is very similar to what happens to Cassius in the first three books. Darrow becomes what Cassius thought himself to be and it causes Cassius to question who he really is. Although, unlike Teddie, I think Cassius chose to heavily lean into being the perfect Gold specimen until the end of Morning Star, where he makes a choice to be the “real” Cassius. As for the Persona, I could easily see him with Sraosha, who represents the highest virtue of humanity, obedience to and submission to Divine Law. I think his motivations for using this Persona would change, however. I imagine at first, he would use it to keep the Society functioning how it always does. But, after Morning Star, I bet it would shift to be more about protecting his own ideals and the submission aspect would relate to Cassius’ personal morals and sense of justice.

Lysander: I really wanted to avoid using the arcana that are not present in a standard deck, and added for a specific game. However, one of the arcana that stood out to me for Lysander is the Faith arcana. This arcana symbolises, in the positive, belief in others and in oneself. Negatively, it represents blind faith misplaced in something that does not deserve trust. From what I understand of Lysander’s story, his personal journey seems to mirror that of the game character who shares his arcana. It is revealed later that she is a fake, and her memories were overwritten by another character. I have not finished Dark Age as of writing this but, I am under the strong impression that Lysander has been brainwashed and that some of his memories have been replaced or erased entirely. And while he does have some misgivings about the Society, I believe he is blind to how fucked up it really is. But it also holds potential for Lysander to overcome this indoctrination. I had a bit of trouble with what the second arcana would be but, I think the Moon fits Lysander pretty well. You could say he’s a….Moonie. But in all seriousness, the description that struck me as Lysander-esque was "They often tend to have trouble accepting themselves for who they are and, because of that fear, try to correspond to an ideal person. And like the arcana, there is a hidden depth as to why they act in their behaviours." Lysander was definitely sheltered and isolated, by both Octavia and Cassius (he tried his best). And perhaps by Atalantia to some degree. He is a fed a narrative and doesn’t really get a chance to analyse his own perceptions and why they may be incorrect. The characters of the Moon arcana in the game often struggle internally with themselves which, to be honest, is a trait most of the POV characters have. But what I think Lysander lacks in that case, is self-awareness. As for the Persona, I ended up going with Cendrillon. This Persona is based on Cinderella, which is a little different from some of the other ones. As much as I like to make fun of Lysander for his poor choices, it’s hard not to see him as a victim. I don’t necessarily think he’s a hero or that he’s entitled to the kind of happy ending Cinderella gets. However, I do feel that, like the fairy tale princess, some of his circumstances were as a result of situations that were out of his control. Also, a line really stuck with me from the initial awakening for the Persona that really made me think Lysander; “Well, if those really are the shoes you've chosen... Then we'll dance to the end.”

Ephraim: Ephraim suffers a lot throughout the books, and I feel like that reflects heavily on what arcana he is. I think the first one that fits him well is the Tower arcana, which is associated with a fall from grace. His story reminds me a lot of the Tower social link character in Persona 3. Both Ephraim and the game character lose their family and turn to substance abuse to numb the pain. People of the Tower arcana seems to suffer a lot of internal pain which they fail to cope with healthily and thus turn to less savoury means until and outside force steps in to help steer them in a better direction. The other arcana I believe fits him well is the Hanged Man. What makes me think Ehpraim is that the appearance of the Hanged Man can be seen as advice to take the time to reflect over one's upcoming actions, which is something I think he needs to learn how to do. They can also be self-sacrificial and are often notable for being stuck between two different stages of life. Also, much like the Tower arcana characters, their journey seems to revolve around some kind of loss that they are failing to cope with. As for the Persona….this was a bit tricky. I have a few I like but one comes with a bit reluctance because of how it plays into the plot of Persona 4 and how it would reflect on Ephraim’s character. But, my gut is telling me that Magatsu-Izanagi is the way to go. What is making me think of Ephraim when I see it is the symbolism behind this Persona. It represents emptiness, impulsiveness, poor judgement, obsession and frivolity. There are also some similarities between Ephraim and the character who wields this Persona in Persona 4. They both exhibit little tact and seem to be playing some sort of game with the other characters. However, Adachi (Persona 4 character) seems to do this because he’s a psychopath whereas I think Ephraim is this way as a terrible coping mechanism. In Persona 4, the arcana where this Persona fits in is meant to be the reversed Fool. And while I’m trying to stick with the Persona 5 Royal placements (which for Magatsu-Izanagi is the Tower arcana), I think the implication here is that Ephraim has a lot of potential to be something so great if he can just reverse the path he is going down.

Lyria: I love Lyria. I think she’s a wonderful and interesting character. I love that she highlights the ramifications of undoing a toxic form of government. She gets so much development that it was easy to see what arcana she fit into. The first one I thought of was the Hermit. It represents wisdom, introspection, solitude, retreat and philosophical searches. In the beginning, she has very strong opinions about Darrow and the rest of the Rising. Which is entirely understandable considering her entire way of life was stripped from her without a way to cope with the changes. But, unlike Lysander, she’s willing to re-examine herself and her perceptions as she is presented with new information. She also tends to try and keep under the radar if she can, which is another trait of the Hermit. What’s interesting to me is that other characters of the Hermit arcana are victims of circumstances out of their control, but they see their own victimization as a result of a flaw in their character. The other arcana is very tricky for me, as there are parts of Lyria’s character that I don’t know yet. After much discussion and deliberation with my resident expert, the second arcana for Lyria is the Priestess. This arcana is a symbol of hidden knowledge or other untapped power, wisdom, female mystery and patience. The characters of this arcana also take more time to open up to the protagonist than others. Which also fits Lyria as she needed time and introspection to really understand Darrow and Mustang. As for the Persona, I’m actually going to cheat a little with my choice. I try to keep the arcana placements from Persona 5 Royal but for Lyria, I’m choosing Hariti whose arcana is Priestess in Persona 4 and Persona Q. Hariti is a protector of children and childbirth after going through a significant change in perspective which, from what I understand and have been told, is also something that Lyria does.

[meta-squash]

Brick Club 1.8.3 “Javert Satisfied”

I know this is technically a “good thing” since otherwise Valjean’s testimony would be for nought, but everyone except the prosecuting attorney agrees that Valjean is the real Valjean. I guess some part of me would expect for everyone to still think that Madeleine had gone crazy, or to somehow still be affected by the respect and veneration for Madeleine as mayor. But that’s not the case, and pretty much everyone believes that Madeleine really is Valjean.

Quick note that the lawyers also try to pull in all sorts of nitpicky bullshit to try and get Champmathieu indicted anyway, which courts still do today.

“This sentence, containing a great many ‘of’s, is the prosecuting attorney’s, written by his own hand, on the minutes of his report to the attorney general.” Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like the comment on all the “of’s” goes hand in hand with the earlier critique of the provincial language of the courts.

“...although the judge was a kind man and quite intelligent, he was at the same time a strong, almost zealous royalist, and had been shocked when the mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer, in speaking of the landing at Cannes, had said “the Emperor” instead of “Buonaparte.” A supposedly impartial person whose impartiality is a requirement for him to do his job well, actually be affected by his personal opinions and biases. I mean, that hasn’t changed in 150 years, that’s for sure. *cough Amy Coney Barrett cough* But it’s such a tiny little thing. Would the order of arrest be granted so quickly if the judge hadn’t caught that little honorific slip-up? It’s also just an example of the kind of knife-edge that things like someone’s life sits upon when in the hands of the courts. This is probably not the first case where a tiny, unrelated detail like that weighted the balance between life and death or freedom and prison for someone in this court.

Okay I don’t know anything about couriers and letter-sending and doing things quickly. If this is an official letter sent by courier, would that be one person riding horseback, without a carriage? Surely that would be faster than a horse pulling a vehicle? Especially since the deliberation went on for a little while after Valjean left the courthouse, and then the judge went in with the prosecutor, and then the letter was written and sent, but it got to Javert in M-sur-M soon enough that Valjean only had time to send his letter to Lafitte and briefly see Fantine. I’m just trying to figure out the timing of all of this.

“The buckle of his leather collar, instead of being at the back of his neck, was under his left ear. This denoted extraordinary agitation...For his collar buckle to be awry, he must have just had one of those shocks that could be called inner earthquakes.” I know the descriptions of Javert a few paragraphs later as being overjoyed means that this “agitation” is most likely shocked excitement, but I don’t know, something about this description is so weird to me. It’s the “inner earthquake” line, I think. That feels a lot more “negative” than excitement. Javert’s entire world has been shaken by this information. Perhaps it’s because this is so big. Really, it gets treated with such flippancy within the narrative, but a respected, well-known, charitable member of society in a mayoral position ends up being a wanted convict, and Javert was not only right about it, but right about it twice. That’s big for Javert himself, but it’s also big in general because it’s probably the first time Javert has ever uncovered something like this and been right about it and then told he was wrong and then proven right again. Plus the fact that he was hiding his convict identity the whole time while being a high-ranking, well-loved, leader of the community. Like, a “criminal” government official isn’t just corrupt in the usual way, he was fully a convict the whole time with a hidden identity and everything. It must be mind-blowing for him. And it’s interesting, Valjean is the only one who’s able to deliver multiple earthquake-status blows to Javert’s world throughout the book. (Valvert shippers, I’m starting to understand your perspective a lot more in this read-through than my last two.)

“...Javert turned the knob, pushed the door open as gently as a nurse or a police spy...” What an odd comparison to make. Nurse or police spy? Those are two incredibly disparate professions with totally disparate morals. Nurse implies a calm gentleness, a gentleness that is maybe nurturing or healing or at least positive in some sense. Police spy implies a much more cautious gentleness, one whose purpose is sneaky and definitely not positive towards those behind the door. How is Javert both a nurse and a spy? Unless he’s Harold Shipman, I’m not sure what to make of the connection to the nursing profession.

“Properly speaking, he did not enter. He remained standing in the half-open doorway, his hat on his head, his left hand in his overcoat, which was buttoned to his chin. In the bend of his elbow could be seen the leaden head of his enormous cane, which disappeared behind him.” Okay So this paragraph in context with the chapters before and after it are really interesting. He doesn’t enter the room at first, just stands in the doorway. He only enters the room after both Fantine and Valjean have noticed him. I’m sure there’s a good horror movie example out there, but it’s like he’s not allowed to enter until he’s noticed. Like he’s not allowed to exist for others until they see him. Does that even make sense?

“There is no human feeling that can ever be so appalling as joy. It was the face of the devil who has just regained his victim.” Man, I like the Hapgood translation of that second sentence so much better: “It was the visage of a demon who has just found his damned soul.” Like, it’s not Javert who has singularly persecuted Valjean (I mean it is, but not really), Valjean isn’t Javert’s victim. Valjean is persecuted by society, Javert is just there to collect someone already marked. He’s not the only one doing the marking. So I like the symbolism of a demon collecting a damned soul.

“Javert’s satisfaction radiated from his commanding attitude. The deformity of triumph spread across his narrow forehead. It was the full quotient of horror that only a gratified face can display.” I love this chapter for its bizarre contrast of ugliness and grandeur. Everything Javert does in this chapter is this gross, twisted version of divine justice. His joy, which should be a beautiful and pure emotion, is perverted by its circumstance. And the description of how scary a satisfied face can be is so good because it’s so viscerally descriptive. You see that exact face on every video of a cop being a racist, condescending, sanctimonious, power-hungry cunt to people on the street. That face of “I’m better than you and I have power over you and there’s nothing you can do about it so ha ha I win.” It’s more evil than antagonists who know they’re evil because Javert fully thinks that his actions and thoughts are right. And Hugo points it out here. Triumph and glee for the wrong reasons doesn’t make a person beautiful, it deforms them.

I actually love the description of how joyful Javert is because it’s clear that this is personal for him. When he arrested Fantine and sat down at his desk to write out her sentence as a one man judge-jury-executioner, he wasn’t gleeful like this. He wasn’t sad about it, he just was. He was doing a duty and Hugo even says that he was very thoughtful about it and spent time cataloguing what he saw in order to decide what to do. This isn’t the same type of detached judgement and condemnation. This is fully personal glee at being able to be vindicated.

“At that moment Javert was in heaven. Without a clear notion of his own feelings, yet with a confused intuition of his need and his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and truth, in their celestial function as destroyers of evil. He was surrounded and supported by infinite depths of authority, reason, precedent, legal conscience, the vengeance of the law, all the stars in the firmament; he protected order, he hurled forth the thunder of the law, he avenged society, he lent aid to the absolute; he stood erect in a halo of glory; there was in his victory a trace of defiance and combat; standing haughty and resplendent, he displayed in full glory the superhuman beastiality of a ferocious archangel; the fearful shadow of the deed he was accomplishing, making visible in his clenched fist the uncertain flashes of the social sword; happy and indignant, he had gnashed his heel on crime, vice, rebellion, perdition, and hell, he was radiant, exterminating, smiling; there was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous St. Michael.”

I have multiple things to say about this passage so I think I’m going to break it all down into different paragraphs because there’s A Lot of different things in my brain.

First of all this is an echo--this time righteous and vindicated--of Javert’s feelings from 1.5.13. Madeleine lets Fantine go and Javert has this thought: “Or, in view of the enormities he had witnessed over the last two hours, was he saying to himself that he had to resort to extreme measures, that the lesser had to make itself greater, for the detective to turn into a magistrates, the policeman become a judge, and that in this shocking turnabout, order, law, morality, government, society itself, were personified in him, Javert?” In 1.5.13, Madeleine’s authority overruled him, protected Fantine and humiliated Javert. In 1.5.13, he is forced to accept defeat. Now, he has all of the authority, all of law and reason and justice behind him because Madeleine no longer has that same power. Javert is again the personification of justice, law, society itself, but there is not Divine Authority to stand up for Valjean as there was for Fantine. Javert is vindicated here for his earlier humiliation, with all levels authority backing him up this time.

“Without a clear notion of his own feelings, yet with a confused intuition of his need and his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and truth, in their celestial function as destroyers of evil.” Okay hold on wait. In 1.5.13, Javert has a moment of nearly breaking the fourth wall, nearly deciding that he needs to become a Symbol in order to restore the balance of authority and justice that he feels Madeleine has knocked askew. He is very much aware of his potential to personify Law and Justice etc. But here Hugo says that he does all of this with “confused intuition” and without a clear idea of how he feels. Interesting that when he is conscious of being able to become a symbol, he is prevented from doing so, but when he actually becomes a symbol, he’s unaware of it. Also, here’s another moment of Javert clearly Feeling Something but not fully understanding it, again a thing that only Valjean seems to provoke in him. (Oop more Valvert fodder.)

I don’t really know what to make of the superiority complex that Hugo describes here. Obviously Javert thinks that he is righteous and that he is doing a Great And Grand thing and that he is avenging society by ridding it of the scourge of the evil deceiver convict Jean Valjean. But the way Javert’s righteousness is describes feels like almost more of a “nanny-nanny-boo-boo” feeling. Is your righteousness truly righteous if you’re feeling personal satisfaction and personal superiority about it?

Javert is literally the Angel Of Death here! I know in my last post I talked about Javert as the grim reaper entering the room. His comparison to St Michael confirms this. Michael is a seraph, which are winged celestial beings with a fiery passion for doing God's good work (which is interesting to me considering how much Valjean’s symbolism is associated with fire). In Roman Catholicism Michael is the Angel Of Death who descends and gives the person the chance to redeem themselves before dying. He is also the one who will weigh people’s merits on Judgement Day. Except! Javert is Michael without mercy or patience! He judges without allowing a chance for redemption. We saw this in 1.5.13 when he sat down and wrote out Fantine’s sentence while she simultaneously explained her situation and begged for mercy. We see it now. Javert as St Michael is “monstrous,” he is the St Michael that defeated Satan, not the healing protector Michael. We even have the sword imagery. Michael used the sword to best Satan in battle; except this time the sword is “social” and to Javert at this moment, Valjean is the personification of Crime-As-Satan.

(Side note: something I love about Javert is that he as a human being isn’t really portrayed as an avidly religious person, at least not in the ways that Valjean or the bishop are portrayed as religious people. But his symbolism sure is religious. I think that’s one of the drastic differences between book Javert and stage Javert. Stage Javert is portrayed as a religious person but his symbolism is more human.)

“Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the idea of duty, are things that, when in error, can turn hideous, but--even though hideous--remain great: their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, persists in horror. They are virtues with a single vice--error.” Hugo’s thought about duty done in error is so interesting. He says something similar when talking about Problem of the monastery: “To mistake a grave error for a duty has a grandeur of its own.” For Hugo, the fact of having such strong conviction alone is a grand thing. Having conviction, having a sense of duty is always a good thing--the error is not in the sense of duty itself but in what that allegiance might be to. The virtues of duty or honesty or conviction are by themselves inherently good, but they can be misused and misinterpreted and made wrong.

(Side note: This is actually a really interesting thought re: Grantaire! Hugo holds not just having beliefs but having faith in and conviction about your beliefs in such high regard. Which makes Grantaire, who is conviction-less and faithless, in the midst of all these people who are so loyal and committed to their beliefs and ideals, not a mild contrast but a massive one.)

“Without suspecting it, Javert, in his dreadful happiness, was pitiful, like every ignorant man in triumph. Nothing could be more poignant and terrible than this face, which revealed what might be called the evil of good.” God I love this line. “The evil of good” is a concept that really, really, really needs to be common usage. I feel like this line specifically really needs some in depth analysis but also I don’t really know what to say about it except that it’s just so true. Regarding Javert being “pitiful” in his happiness, this kind of reminds me of Mme Victurnien? Both think they’re doing a “good thing” and their deeds ruin lives; their triumph and feelings of righteousness are pitiful for this reason. Again, it’s the equivalent of a “ha ha I win” bully moment, but with much worse consequences. Man, I feel like this chunk needs more analysis than this but I don’t know what to give it.

[comic-brew]

On Smoldering Ashes

Chapter Two: If any more blood is to be spilt

@whumptober2020 days 3. Held At Gunpoint, 6. "Stop, Please", 9. "Take Me Instead", 14. Branding and 21. Stitches (Altprompt)

Series summary: Bruce Wayne has gotten vulnerable. Bruce Wayne has found love. His love and his kids are all he needs to find happiness. Some sick concept of fate doesn't like him being happy.

Notes: Forgive me for I have sinned. Oh god, oh lord, what in the blazing hells is this. Shitty shitty but I'm tired and late *drops mic* (37 mins/4.6k words I've exhausted tumblr's paragraph limit)

Warnings: RATED MATURE. Graphic depictions of child abuse and torture, graphic depictions of violence, blood, swearing, heavy I guess angst

AO3 | Prev Chapter | Next Chapter

***

"Why" Dick hears Bruce's voice implore. "Why are you doing this? I thought-"

Bruce's merely balancing on his toes inches from the end of the cliff, Dick can figure just by the way his voice wavers like it has only ever done no more than a couple times in the past.

Cecile knows this. She knows Bruce, and she knows this. And quite possibly she's enjoying it way too much.

"Because, dear, who can say they're getting paid to practise their hobbies?"

Dick can only gawk at her, an frankly that's the only thing all the others seem able to do as well.

Hobbies?

They're nothing but a plaything to her.

It doesn't seem right. This shouldn't be happening. Dick should be helping B plan the wedding that made him beam just at the thought of taking place.

Not being held in an unknown location by his could-be step mother.

They really dodged a bullet, but in doing so they fell right into a different trap.

His family's unable to speak, stunned by the sudden revelations. He can't blame them, nor can he blame Jason for cursing under his breath.

Barbara's the first to snap out of their trance.

"What could you possibly want that Bruce's money couldn't get you?" she asks. Her true goal though, expertly weaved inside is search of Cecile's motive.

There's none.

Cecile giggles. "Oh dear. It's never about money. It's not personal either, if that's what's bugging all of you. And although my client does pay a fair amount, in reality.. pain and suffering are simply way too enjoyable."

Client, Dick notes. Somebody's paying for this. Somebody that most likely knows who they are when night falls. Somebody dangerous.

Cecile then turns to look directly at Bruce, as she expertly hides her poison inside cheerfully spoken words.

"And you, love, with as many kids as you have here,-" she says, and Bruce's face crumples, "-are going to be a very, very interesting subject"

Duke shakes his head in disbelief at the woman.

"You're sick"

Cecile sits back and ponders on this statement for a bit. Just for a split second, so it's enough to pass across that message, but not quite long to let them be freed from that entrapping mist of concurrent desire for knowledge, and repulse keeping them bound to every word that falls from her lips.

"Perhaps I am" she ventures.

"Perhaps we're all sick, just in different ways. Have you ever thought of that?"

Dick has in fact thought of that, but his answer would never share meaning with Cecile's. How different really are they from the people they fight? They lock all those costumed freaks up in Arkham, but they themselves could very well be described in the exact same way. Sometimes he wonders if they're insane for choosing this life, and the answer that his mind spits out is always yes.

Every life they save is worth it. That's the truth that makes him continue to put on the suit every night, even though the wounds inflicted on him the previous night are still healing.

But are they really making a difference? Aren't they just lunatics running around in kevlar and spandex. Isn't all the grime and mold of the city simply feeding off of them like leeches?

Dick can't focus on that now. Questioning his life choices might have to wait until he's not that tied up.

Heh. Tied up.

Meanwhile Cecile has exploited the moment of nonplussed silence she's created to tighten her sleek ponytail.

Keeping the attention to herself. Every move is calculated to milliseconds.

"Okay, so here's how this is going to go" she begins, clasping her hands together, then motioning towards their hanging limbs. "Do you see those cool little bracelets on your hands?"

On cue, nine heads tilt upwards to test Cecile's statement. And there, right on his forearm Dick can spot a faint blue light shining dully on what seems to be the middle of a silver-like device.

"Those give us, the immense pleasure of electrocuting you whenever you folks might try to escape, or cause any unwanted trouble" she informs, with her mouth taut into a completely mechanical smile.

"Or.. you know. If we're just bored and feel like it"

"And this little screen right in front of you, it's pretty bland now, if you ask me"

She then starts pacing around in the segregated room, seeming to find great amusement in hearing how her heels click against the concrete.

"Well what if I told you the sight will get more entertaining?"

Dick doesn't like this.

"Before you ask, I will not spoil the experience for you. But I will give you this: you will be the stars of a grand performance. You in particular, circus boy should be thrilled by this fact"

He flinches when he mentions him in that way. It's then that his mind fully comprehend just how much she knows them.

It's not just some kidnapping, of those they've had many before. But it's never been like this. Never has a stranger gotten so close only to betray them for laughs.

Some could argue that it was a similar case when Jason had come back, but Jason had always had a motivation. A goal.

Cecile's doing this for nothing else than pleasure.

Before he can compose himself and reply her voice strikes again, this time in the form of a snarl. "So? Any volunteers?"

No, Dick doesn't like this at all.

"Leave them alone" Bruce demands, only it's not precisely Bruce anymore. Not only has his voice assumed the dark edge of the Knight, but his speech is completely neutral, apathetic. Somehow, his emotional state is even more prominent that way.

"It's me you want to get back to"

"Oh, no" Cecile frowns. "No, no Brucie. This is not about you. Hell, it's not even about them. It's about me. And I say it will be nicer to leave you for last."

She rests a finger on her chin contemplatively, but it's fake. It's all fake, and provocatively so. Cecile's head twists around so that her malicious glare lands on Damian.

"How about our little asshole over here?"

No. Not Damian. Never in a million years. Never in a billion years.

"If you value your life you'll stay away you imbecilic Jezebel" Damian hisses, but Cecile makes no motion to enter their space. Instead, the man in black leaves his post to disappear behind the door Cecile had previously entered from, most likely leading even further away.

"I do value my life"

He comes back with three more identically dressed men, one slightly leaner than the other, and one slightly taller.

"Plenty, for that" she says loftily, and while one of the men returns to his post by her side, the other two barge in through a barely visible door next to the right end of the glass.

There's an outrage as the men quickly advance towards the boy. Everything's blurry and spinning and his ears are ringing so that Dick can't quite figure out if he's shouting along with his brothers and sisters or if he's simply been trapped in a lucid dream all this time.

Voices and bangs and thuds and yells, it all gets lost in the end. So much thunderous noice, yet still it can he broken down to its core. Raw and frantic cries of dissent, repeated over and over in a canon, until the words and senses are but a blurred collage of ire and desolation.

Cecile whips a rectangular device from her suit's pocket and before her finger has enough time to hover above one of the polished buttons, the last is pressed and Damian's body is released from the pipeline.

The boy wastes no time, immediately lunging for the men, and despite any rust slowing down his joints because of their inactivity, he manages to hold off the two men looming over him with size thrice his own.

Dick wants to hold hope inside his heart, but he knows it's futile. He also knows Damian is aware that this fight was lost before it even began, but his baby brother isn't a quitter, nor a coward by his own standards.

If Cecile is startled by Damian's fierce resistance, she doesn't let it show. Her finger finds the device held loosely in her grasp, and a different button is pushed. Sparks that are birthed from the device on Damian's forearm begin to climb throughout his every inch of flesh, until he soon collapses to the ground -like lifeless weight.

The men drag him out of their view, and Dick swears he witnessed a smirk manifesting on their faces while they yelled with all their might, yet completely powerless.

***

It starts with low and hollow grunts. It starts with insults, it starts with defiance, it starts with barely discernible hisses.

Most importantly, it starts with no image.

Only screams. Separated by breathless gasps.

"Please, stop"

Dick's heart shrinks into his chest, sinking deep, deep down, until his lungs are under too much pressure to expand.

The screen flickers to life only after the first hollow screams have subsided.

It's.. not a good sight. Nobody expected it to be.

The room is small and dark, the camera feed is black and white and grainy, but that doesn't help in reducing the horror.

The image focuses enough for Dick to make out Cecile finishing stitching deep gashes on Damian's torso back together in the worst way possible.

Cecile retracts her hand hastily, like she's forgotten something. She lolls her head to the side, waving primly towards the camera.

"Stay tuned for a surprise" she whispers almost conspiratorially before turning to Damian, severing the thread with her own fingers, picking at flesh and stretching it out until he's bleeding again all over the gurney he's tied onto.

Damian struggles not to let her hear the sound she would find oh so hedonic. He grits his teeth and grinds his jaw, but groans emanate from him without his consent.

Cecile sets the sutures and her other tools on a filthy table standing miserably beside her.

"Your brother's such an ass" she declares almost smugly, while shifting in her place to face the camera

Without a warning she pokes a finger inside Damian's open wound, evoking a strangled yelp of agony. Soon enough Cecile's retracted her finger. She brings her hand up to her face. She makes a show of admiring the fresh blood coating it, before she tastes it.

She giggles nonchalantly, but there's that certain grace to everything she does.

"Don't worry. We're not done yet"

No. No, this can't happen. He can't let this go on any longer than it already has.

He has to take his place. He'll take his brother's place. Just, god. Just please listen..

"Take me instead!" Dick screams at the top of his lungs, and the dread climbing up his ribcage seeps into his voice. Bent in ways abnormal, tuning in with his despair.

"Do you hear me?!"

He's flailing around wildly and almost hysterically, his voice is getting hoarser by the second. Kicking and bumping the air, but the chains are relentless, so that he's supposed to sit idly by and watch while his little brother is being tortured.

All alone in a dark room.

The man standing tall and unmoving on the other side of the glass only smirks slightly.

"Leave Damian alone!" Dick roars at the screen, and roars at the man, but he knows it's pointless.

Cecile smiles once again to the direction of the camera as she elegantly walks away from Damian, leaving him alone strapped to the gurney -panting, sweat dripping down his forehead.

Damian's head follows the woman even as she disappears out of Dick's sight. The boy's face crumples. Breathless pleas escape his trembling lips, in swift exhales of air that hold no power.

"Please no"

She reemerges cradling an incandescent piece of metal. The sickening calmness on her face is doused in its fiery glow, and all Dick can utter as he goes deathly pale and still is a breathless "No"

Dick finally has enough contact with reality to register his brothers and sisters' own twisting and shouting. The sounds are earpiercing but all hollow to his ears, and Dick only does acknowledge their existence by sight of tears on enraged faces, jaws snapping open with enough force to dislocate, muscles toned and clenched uncomfortably, bodies bent and struggling, in futile attempts to raise enough force and reach the glass to perhaps create a distraction.

Dick can't figure out the faces from his peripheral vision, nor does he care enough to try.

"No."

His eyes are stubbornly fixed on Damian's own, shining wide with terror as the metal illuminates his skin more and more clearly on the screen. On Damian, desperately tugging against the straps keeping him bound to the gurney to no avail, struggling to be freed before the red-hot iron burns the exposed skin of his chest.

"No.. please no" Damian mumbles, and he looks so small. Smaller than a child his age should look. More frightened than a child his age should be.

Dick had promised -to him and to himself- that he'd always be there for his little brother.

He watches helplessly as the metal sizzles the first layer of flesh. He watches as his little brother writhes and squirmes helplessly under the red-hot iron melting into his skin, and he realizes he can't keep his promise.

No, no, no, no, no

Damian is screaming with all his soul and all Cecile does is laugh. Cecile is laughing, and Damian is being tortured because Dick couldn't keep his promise.

He failed him.

"Take me!"

Please no. Not Dami.

Every inch and acre of Dick's skin feels set aflame, but the pain is nothing but the child of wildfire blazing and burning in his chest. Its smoke has filled his eyes with tears burning like acid.

Failed him.

In his ears buzz cracking woods and falling towers. Not his brother's screams and pleas for mercy, not the echoes of laughter, not the thundering cries of their family.

Failed.

And because of his failure his little robin is expected to endure agonizing pain, as also the wounds inflicted on him are what make Dick's failure not only discernible but grievous.

Failure equals repercussions.

Failure equals punishment.

Perhaps it's irrational, and perhaps he's lost his mind long, long ago. Perhaps this is all a nightmare that he can't wake up from, but Dick's senses don't deceive him.

His every cell is howling in despair but yelling and praying are not enough to relieve them of their pain. Flowers buried deep in ice, frantically searching for sunlight- too frantically to know that they're dead.

Dick failed him. Dick should have been the one punished for this failure.

Only moments have passed but the agony grabs them and twists them, draws them out until seconds can't be told apart by eons.

Dick's eyes are fixed on the form spasming on the screen, but those eyes are empty and hollow.

Their azure blue has evaporated, their glossy white has been burnt to the ground. Obsidian vortexes shining with the life they've stolen from his soul in the half light, is all that is left of them.

Damian's voice is rough from the perpetual screaming, but Dick can hear no more.

So he prays to whatever deity listens that Cecile is reached by his own cries tearing through his throat with fading intensity. Perhaps so loudly the air is grazing his vocal cords more harshly than it should.

Perhaps so loudly he is already silent.

But Dick won't mind it even if they fail to produce a sound ever after these, as long as his flesh is torn and burnt instead of Dami's.

The flesh being torn and burnt is his, in a way, but not in any way that matters.

The iron is removed and Damian's face slowly appears behind the sparse smoke of his own smoldering skin.

***

Cecile reappears behind the glass, walking ever so elegantly towards the barrier separating her from them. She peers at each and every one of them in amusement, deaf to te insults so full of hatred being hurled at her from every corner.

She smiles at the teary paths staining Cass and Barbara's cheeks,

"You fucking-"

"-embodiment of evil and-"

"go-"

She laughs at the veins popping on Duke, Jason and Stephanie's necks as they shout their lungs out, feebly attempting to stop the world from sinking,

"I'm gonna fucking kill you"

"Jay calm down-"

"You repulsive.. abomination-"

"-to hell-"

She gracefully snickers at Tim and Bruce's state of dishevelled resignation, a progression of the rage and agony to the point where they're no more prominent than their breathing,

"You hear me? You're going to burn-"

"Don't you dare tell me to calm the fuck down, replacement"

"-in hell"

"He's right Jason, this doesn't help Dam-"

"you'll wish you were dead before I get my hands on you"

But she stops in her track when her piercing hazel eyes land on Dick. So visibly worn out, yet determinedly burning holes through her with his glare.

She stops, and can only regard him in newfound interest.

Dick doesn't shift in his place. Doesn't bat an eye as he speaks with the power of a thousand thunderstorms enhancing the calmness in his voice.

He's made up his mind.

It's his failure.

His decision.

"You'll stop" he says, almost nonchalantly.

Cecile cocks an eyebrow, scoffing.

"Excuse me?"

"You'll bring Damian back here with us. And you'll stop."

Cecile smirks ever so slightly. "I'm afraid I'm not quite done with your brother yet. Besides, why would I do that?"

"Because you will" Dick growls, but soon enough he masks his outburst beneath a carefully tailored poker face.

Something unreadable passes across the woman's face. Dick assumes she's caught up to his thinking. Of course she has.

"Well, you wound me!" Cecile exaggerates, clasping a hand to her chest. Overacting the entire thing, on purpose no less. She's proven to be too much of a hypocrite for Dick to know she's only acting terribly on purpose.

His stomach is urging him once more to let its contents out, only this time he's not sure it's just a lingering side effect of the drug.

"Although, while wounded, you can consider me intrigued."

Dick swallows thickly. He hopes Cecile doesn't hear him gulp as loudly as he sounds to his own ears.

"You'll stop. Leave Damian alone" he says and although his heart is beating a hundred times faster than it should, his stare is unyielding.

"And you'll take me instead"

Cecile eyes him half incredulously, half entertained, for moments that feels like an eternity. Dick is convinced his soul has already left his body, and the woman is simply left staring blankly at his hanging corpse.

She's still staring vacantly at his direction, with no indication of the fact changing.

But then she chuckles.

She chuckles, and soon snickers are finding their way up her throat one after the other, until her shoulders are shaking with laughter.

Yet the laughs escaping her are perfectly normal. Perfectly contained, just the average sound that could be prompted by an oddly funny joke. A joke so ridiculous it fulfills its purpose.

Perhaps that's the most terrifying part. How human it is.

And Dick is showered in cold sweat when he repeats himself, voice sounding just a little more tight and frantic than need be, but Cecile pays him no mind, laughing silently on her own.

Cecile -most likely pointedly- ignores his protests, which are growing more and more despondent as he's fumbling for words, caught somewhere in the crevasse dividing dread and ire.

"Do whatever you want to do to me! Just-"

He's just a child. Just an innocent child.

"-just leave Damian alone. And take me." Dick says.

An innocent boy caught in the crossfire of a war he never swore to fight, but was instead compelled to win.

His brother caught in the crossfire. His Dami.

His fault.

Dick's stuck in a loop. It doesn't end, it never does. Once it's starts there's no end to look forward to, there's merely one he can imagine, and they won't let him follow it.

All air leaves his lungs. Everything seems so peaceful when the flames tingling his heart have no more smoke to give.

"Take me."

His fault. His responsibility.

"Dick, no," Bruce pleads from behind him. Only then is it that he realizes the rest of them have grown silent, all eyes on him, reflecting the light nearly pensively.

Only then is it that he realizes he's been toeing the line of hysteria. That he doesn't know how to stop.

"B, I have to. I can't let Damia-"

"And I can't let any of you!" Bruce snaps. Dick is taken aback, only not due to the sonorous anger redirected towards him. Rather by the tears he can see glistening all over his father's irises.

Tears.

Shining all across his father's eyes.

Under the enemy's scrutinus gaze, and still he let the sorrow swim all the way up to the surface.

Cecile has stopped laughing. Openly at least, as her palm is covering her mouth in a futile attempt to stifle the giggles, perhaps not wanting to disturb the show. The bright smile lighting her eyes betrays her nonetheless.

"You're my son, Dick. I can't let you do this. I can't let another of my children do this" Bruce concludes, never ending eye contact.

Never trying to deny the tears.

All Dick wants is to give in to the pain of his own, and let Bruce wipe at his eyes and tell him it's all going to be alright, just when he was little.

But he isn't little anymore, is he?

Is he?

Is he strong enough?

No. Not a question. He has to. He has to be-

"I was dead, I should go in next. There's nothing she can do to me that I haven't already gone through" his brother's voice cuts in, disrupting the debate that's been won in his mind, long before it even started.

"Half of us have died, Jason" Stephanie counters. "I don't mind going myself"

"You're not going Steph"

"I'll go then"

"The hell you are, replacement. You didn't make the cut for our club the first time, you'll not make it now.

"Are we seriously having this conversation right now?"

Cass clears her throat to get their attention.

"Me" she offers, and immediately after she's met with loud protests.

Dick watches as the others continue to fight between them, arguing on who should trade places with Damian. They can't understand that he has to do it. He doesn't expect them to. So when Cecile laughs and asks who's it going to be?, his decision is adamant.

"Like I said. It will be me" Dick insists.

He's not little anymore.

"No." Bruce says sternly. "No, you won't go. Do you hear me?"

He is strong enough. He has to be, so he's going to be.

Dick hears him, although elects to ignore him, staring proudly ahead, at the two men walking inside to retrieve him.

Bruce then is yelling, and the others protest, some are still fighting over which one of them should take Damian's place but it's already too late. The cuffs clink open and the two men go to stand by either of Dick's side as soon as his feet touch the ground.

Dick doesn't fight them. He doesn't mind being pushed around with his arms pressed behind his back so tightly his already sore muscles hurt as his arms are straining to bend backwards despite his flexibility. He doesn't mind, because he's doing it for his brother.

As long as his brother's safely reunited with the others, it doesn't matter whatever they might do to him.

Dick sends one last look to his family, and another full of a different kind of love directed right at Babs. He hopes his eyes delivers the thousand messages he doesn't have the time to relay with phrases.

The room is left in hush when the door slides closed behind him.

As far as looks go, Dick's were farewells.

As soon as Dick's dragged into the small room whose horrid purpose he's seen on camera, he spots Damian sitting upright against a corner, with a gun pressed to his temple.

Dick's shoulders stiffen and a breath catches on his throat. Still, it's all going to be alright. It's all going to be okay. Damian's going to be okay.

"I'd advise you not to try anything smart, or-"

"I won't" Dick interrupts sharply.

Cecile stands to the side and gestures towards a skeletal armchair with untied restraining straps. Dick shudders at the thought of how many people have suffered on this same chair, and his stomach fills with dread as the knowledge that he's next settles in.

"Grayson wh-"

"It's okay Dames" Dick says softly, scrambling to regain his composure as he's forced onto the blood stained metal by the men.

He winces when they securely latch the straps around his wrists and ankles, so tightly the leather is pressing into his skin, disrupting blood circulation.

Damian looks hurt and afraid, so Dick does his best swallow his own accelerating fear and suppress the shivers running down his spine, triggered by the icy feeling of metal on his skin.

"Everything is going to be okay"

Dick locks eyes with him and plasters something that feels like the poor excuse of a smile on his face, but he knows it must appear somewhat comforting to his little brother.

Masking his unraveling self beneath a charming smile and a lighthearted joke has always been his gift and curse.

Cecile clasps her hands together impatiently and nods towards the man holding the gun. He hastily shoves Damian into the arms of the leanest of the men, while his extended arm is turned around to point at Dick's head instead.

Damian yelps and as his arms are restrained behind his back, the hideous burn on his exposed chest comes into Dick's full view.

Dick's breath hitches despite himself and.. and..

It's...

The ghastly tendrils of burnt skin spreading across his little Robin's chest that spell out the word brat…

Dick could never describe the utter despair and pain and sorrow and ire and helplessness he feels, yet he doesn't have the time to stare right through the monstrosity etched onto his little brother's flesh as suddenly his chin is being pushed uncomfortably upwards by the barrel of the gun being pressed firmly against the soft skin right above his neck.

As Dick gulps, his Adam's apple bobs almost visibly on his inconveniently prolonged neck. The underlying dizziness finds the perfect opportunity to strike him again as his head slightly lolls backwards.

He no longer sees Damian, but amidst the sounds of his heartbeat echoing from inside the veins and taut muscles in his neck, a small and strangled Richard finds its way to his ears.

"I'm fine" Dick assures, even though he's nothing but. "I'll be fine. Love you, lil bro"

The absence of an answer doesn't concern him as much as that of shuffling or any indication that Damian is guided out of the room.

That is, until a delicate stray sniffle rips his heart apart.

If he could glance at his little Dami, he'd be able to see his reflection fall from his watering eyes in teardrops that he can no longer contain.

Dick can imagine the silently crying face, and so he shuts his eyes closed harshly, trapping inside all the pain and anguish lest it makes way to the surface

With a wavering voice he demands:

"Now let Damian go"

When he reopens his eyes with a breathy gasp he's all alone, bound to the metal skeleton of the chair.

Relief floods his heart.

If any more blood is to be spilt, it shall be his.

[five-miles-over]

Why I Think ‘Gladiator’’s Commodus is a Better Character than Maximus

(Disclaimer: this schpiel is not intended to offend anyone, or any group of people. This is just a personal opinion I have based on the characters of the film, Gladiator. This has nothing to do with the historical Commodus. If you happen to disagree with some of the ideas here or might like to add on, I’m always happy to hear it. I welcome constructive criticism! Also SPOILER ALERT!!!)

So, without further ado...here are some of the reasons why I think Commodus is a better character than Maximus. 

Tag list: @beautifulyoungprospect @captain-el-writes @jokerflecker @cruellytearful @dreamingmaria @cherrymoon75​

(Note: When I talk about being a “strong character”, I don’t necessarily mean physical strength (I think I’ll leave that to your imaginations.) I think of strength as in emotional endurance and resilience combined with inherent good qualities present in both men. In addition, I factored in the ability to ‘win over’ the audience.)

1) Commodus is Self-Motivated

For this, I’d look no further than the scene in the first few moments of Gladiator, where Maximus checks on his camp and finds Commodus practicing with his sword. Aside from a little fanservice, I think this scene gives insight onto one of the ways Commodus acts upon his ambition. We (the audience) don’t see his father standing nearby or telling him to practice, thereby we can assume Commodus creates his own practice sessions. 

And by the looks of his fighting (I’ve only tried fencing for a few weeks so pardon my ignorance), Commodus looks like he is actually interested in perfecting his performance. He genuinely wants to be a good fighter, knowing how important it would be in the future.

Compared to Commodus, Maximus constantly needs other people to stir him into action - be it his wife and son, Proximo, or Lucilla and the senators. Even when he’s put in the gladiatorial area, Maximus initially refuses to fight and has to be goaded. This is possibly the consequence of being surrounded by people all his life - he constantly needs somebody else to be the catalyst for his actions. 

Commodus on the other hand knew he had to rely on none other but himself in order to get his things done. 

2) He knows himself....and he stands up for himself

“You wrote to me once, listing the four chief virtues. Wisdom, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. As I read the list I knew I had none of them. But I have other virtues, father. Ambition, that can be a virtue when it drives us to excel. Resourcefulness. Courage. Perhaps not on the battlefield but there are many forms of courage. Devotion, to my family, to you. But none of my virtues were on your list.” 

For the record, ambition is a virtue when it drives us to excel. And in my opinion, it is a quality that Maximus lacks. I would rather trust a ruler like Commodus who had a clear vision of everything he wanted from his time on the throne, as opposed to someone simply thrusted the power of the empire with no intent (or possible idea) on how to rule. 

The ability of Commodus to advocate for his own virtues makes him look better than someone like Maximus, who constantly needs someone to remind him of his abilities. While someone could call Maximus ‘humble’ for refusing to brag about himself, it is Commodus’s ability to fight for his rights that enables him to fulfill his lifelong ambition.

And it is only when Maximus decides to stand up instead of letting someone else control his life that he is finally able to get his revenge. By deciding to win the crowd using his ‘mercy’ and ‘defiance of killing’, Maximus is able to get closer to winning over Commodus.

Moreover, Commodus’s ability to fight relentlessly to get what (he believes) he deserves is something desirable in today’s day and age. People like someone who knows what they have to offer, and isn’t afraid to use their talents to get what they want.

3) He appears to have learnt from his father on how not to raise a child

When it comes to being a father-figure, he appears to have learnt some of the things what not to do based on his experience with Marcus Aurelius. For proof of this, watch how he interacts with his nephew, Lucius. He plays with Lucius, reads to him, and encourages him. (”A gladiator? A gladiator fights only for the games. Wouldn’t you rather be a great Roman warrior like Julius Caesar?”) 

He never actively neglects him or berates him, like his father did. Most of all, once he finds out that Lucilla was conspiring against him, he made sure never to speak ill about her in front of Lucius. (Proof: the “busy little bee” monologue) Commodus wanted Lucius to have a mother he could respect, and he also knew when to separate politics from his family life. 

(Also, side note to Lucilla and the conspiring Senators: don’t you all know better than to get an innocent child involved in political schemes that could endanger him? All he had to do was shout, “Maximus, the savior of Rome!” in front of Commodus.)

4) He wasn’t afraid to call out the Senate on their bullsh*t

“I doubt many of the people eat so well as you, Gracchus. Or have so such splendid mistresses as you, Gaius.” 

Let me start with this: I admire sassiness in all its glory. And with Commodus particularly, I like the fact that he used witty retorts as a way to establish his authority in a room. It was the perfect, non-verbal method of saying ‘don’t mess with me’.

The Senate was elected to represent the Roman public, the majority of whom certainly did not fall into the aristocratic class of the Senators. 

Commodus actually had a point when he stated this flaw- throughout the film, the Senate never really did anything to help Rome. All they cared about was gossiping about Commodus’s spending habits and plotting his assassination. Honestly, I would’ve ordered the Senate to be temporarily dismissed until those guys got their act together. The Senators needed to realize that they were elected to represent the people, not their own individual interests. 

5) He shows instances of having excellent knowledge on being an emperor

For this point, I’m going to use the (deleted?) scene in which Commodus has two of his soldiers executed for lying about Maximus’s escape. 

Many viewers use this scene as a way to emphasize how cruel of an emperor Commodus seemed to be. On the contrary, Commodus shows what an emperor is supposed to do. 

To a ruler, lying is one of highest sins ever. Commodus himself explained it quite clearly in the film. “If they lie to me, they don’t respect me. If they don’t respect me, how can they ever love me?” The other point Commodus didn’t mention is, what’s the likelihood they won’t do it again? If a liar is allowed to go free, that makes the Emperor more vulnerable to further betrayal. So, to take no further chances, execution would be the correct punishment. 

On another note, public execution is by far one of the greatest ways of establishing authority by intimidation. It was the one way Commodus could tell the entire kingdom what happens to people who lie to the emperor. 

Most emperors, fictional and historical, would’ve seen this logic and followed suit during their own instances of betrayal.

Another instance is his organization of the gladiatorial games. His willingness to empathize with this particular aspect of the Roman people made him well liked among citizens - the very same citizens he is supposed to rule over as an Emperor.

6) Commodus had no allies throughout his reign...and still lived with his head held high

Being Marcus Aurelius’s only son may have gotten him the throne, but staying on the throne was all Commodus’s effort. 

This guy had no allies throughout the entire film, no ‘personal cheerleader’ to encourage him. In fact he had the total opposite. He’s been criticized and belittled all his life, while Maximus was praised all the time - even as an emperor, Commodus was belittled by every one of the Senators. They never took him seriously or even considered Commodus’s ideas to be good in any way. 

In fact, it would be plausible to say that Commodus was also his own enemy at times - fighting his conflicting urges, trying to create an identity for History to remember him by. (Should he be Commodus the Invincible or Commodus the Merciful?)

Nevertheless, he still keeps his head held high at the end of the day - never once do we see him attempt to give up the throne or drown himself in vices (like women, gambling, etc.) to try to escape from his duty as Emperor. He never lost his determination to be the best Emperor he could be. 

7) Your Hero is Only as Good as Your Villain Is

This is by far one of the most interesting parts about stories involving a Hero’s Journey archetype. Based on the types of things the villain metaphorically “throws” in the hero’s way, audience members get to see the hero’s adaptability and even the depth, or the extent, to which the hero is truly heroic (or not). 

(Side note: this gif is freaking adorable. He looks like a (big) little boy enjoying himself. I once watched this on loop for a solid five minutes.)

In Gladiator, Commodus is someone that many love to hate, but also many love to sympathize. Commodus’s desires to be a successful (and popular!) Emperor and a devoted son are things people see within themselves as well. This complex mixture results in a character that needed something as unforgivable as patricide or incestuous-looking actions in order for the filmmakers to tell the audience, “You are not supposed to be cheering for him. You’re supposed to cheer for the vanilla, goody-two-shoes guy.” 

However, with the amount of things Commodus does to seem relatable or even likable by the audience, Maximus is expected to do more or show more heroism and charisma to be really considered the ‘good guy’ of this story. It’s something that each and every viewer decides for themselves.

8) Commodus is more attractive than Maximus

Now, this is not a comparison between Joaquin Phoenix’s and Russel Crowe’s looks- I think “People” magazine can do a better job of this than me. 

(My ex-friends fawn over Maximus, I’ve found friends that think Commodus is more gorgeous...the feud never ends, folks.)

Commodus is definitely more charismatic, offering plenty more for the attentive audience member to dissect in his personality. His actions and emotions attract viewers into asking questions and even creating their own theories to understand what makes him tick. 

Maximus, on the other hand, offers nothing of that sort. His profile ends at just, “loves his family, wants to do the right thing.” This is the main reason I call his character ‘boring’ - he brings no element of mystery. With him, what you see is pretty much what you get.

So there you have it, everyone. This is why I personally appreciate Commodus as a character more than Maximus.  Sorry I made this super long; I really like analyzing movie characters. I hope you liked reading this and I would love to hear your opinions. Feel free to comment or message me directly.

[ritamordio19]

A Court of Steel and Fire (3/?)

Summary: Post-ACOFAS. My take on Nesta’s banishment to the Illyrian camps with Cassian and her corresponding recovery process.

Alternatively, a reminder that hardened steel doesn’t melt easily. ~~ All the characters/locations are owned by Sarah J. Maas :).

Chapter 1 Here

Chapter 2 Here

AO3 Link Here

~~

Cassian hesitated at the entrance of her room, still questioning last night’s decision to have her accompany him on his rounds throughout the campsite.  Her reactions were still unstable, and the fact she hadn’t been ready to go right at 5, despite his note, should have made him decide to abandon his plan altogether and make his rounds himself, if only to avoid the inevitable conflict between her and the Illyrian warriors.  The operative phrase was, of course, “should have,” as he knew what that decision would mean on a deeper level, that abandonment of hope that she might find herself again, that willingness to give up on her that he couldn’t allow himself to accept.  So he raised his fist to the door all the same, ready to knock.

He needn’t have bothered; the door swung open hard enough that he had to dodge to his left to avoid being crashed into.  His resulting, exhausted glare was met with those familiar steel eyes staring him down, before Nesta Archeron dismissed him outright on her warpath through the living room, calling behind her and waving her arm.  “If you have all this time to waste in front of my door, I don’t see why I had to be ready promptly at 5.”

“My days are long here, and it’s the only way to guarantee sunlight for most of them.  Not that you’ll last more than a few hours in that state.”  For she was still in her clothes from the previous day, eyes dark and hair unkempt.  He doubted she’d slept a minute the night before.

“And what state would that be exactly?”  She turned on her heels at the entrance, staring him down.  “I wasn’t aware I had to meet your grooming standards.”

He growled in annoyance, closing the distance between the two of them, her gaze locked firmly on his the entire time.  “That state would mean being able to stand up for more than an hour without passing out from exhaustion; I feel that’s a fair bare minimum to ask for.  Go out naked for all I care about your grooming standards.”

“Maybe I will.”  Her retort came as he passed her on the way out of their cottage, and her eyes met his again in challenge, stopping him in his tracks with her endeavor to bring this to an accustomed fight, one where she could argue from their past, where she could use his jealousy to misrepresent his motives, to get out of the day’s tasks.  So he didn’t bite, despite the roar of familiar feeling that flared in his core, instead exhaling his retort into air as he tossed her a spare coat from the foyer closet and reached for the front door handle.

“Then I fear for the Illyrian who would be the first to leer; his torture would be an example to many.”

The biting cold that struck him as he passed through the wards blanketing the cottage spared him the process of wondering which of the two of them would be responsible for that consequence.

“I’m surprised you deigned an appearance today, with the hatred you seem to harbor for this place.”

Nesta flashed a poisonous simper in Cassian’s direction at his opening barb.  Three hours. It had taken Nesta only three hours to get under the skin of Prythian’s most cunning and powerful warrior, she noted internally to no small amount of debased satisfaction.  Sure, she had interjected the cold comment here or there, but it was her silence, the power in following him but ignoring him, that was ultimately her greatest weapon.  She had watched as it ate and ate away at his resolve, until her desired scene had reared its head at the edge of camp, far away from prying ears after his morning inspections of the training rings, where she could make her finishing blow and end this day early.

“I wasn’t aware there was much of a choice.”  She kept her body angled away from his, but glanced ever so slightly toward him, barely locking eyes before continuing.  “Besides, why shouldn’t everyone hate this place?  Your men are despicable, your women near-desolate.” She swept her arm across the campsite.  “If you ask me, I don’t see much difference between Hybern and here.”  

The words hung in the air, a blow to his gut as powerful as any her powers could summon.  It would be a lie to say the predictable blanching of his face didn’t revolt her to her core, that the pursing of his lips didn’t cause an instinctual, subtle aversion of her gaze, but he couldn’t be a part of her life anymore.  Telling him that to his face hadn’t worked; avoiding him hadn’t worked. So if the only way for him to learn that was for her to strike low, to assault the very core of his identity, then she would do so; she would make the point clear that it was not his job to push her forward.  After letting a few moments of stunned silence pass between them, she waved him off and turned on her heels, striking again before he could recover.  “I’m heading back to the cottage.”

“Where do you want me to take you?”

She hadn’t expected the reply, having known the emotional effects her words would exact, but she masked her surprise with her continued stride.  “I,” she spoke curtly, “don’t need you to take me anywhere.  My legs work perfectly fine.”

His pace sounded quickly behind hers, and she spun on him before he could cut in front of her.  She opened her mouth to speak again, but he was faster.  “No.  Not here.  Not this camp.”  He matched her respondent daggered glare and pressed further.  “Where do you want me to take you?”

She let the words settle in, her chin risen in defiance at his persistence, before dismissing him abruptly and turning to walk away again.  This time, he succeeded at blocking her path, and she turned wildly to him in incredulous anger.  “And where,” she seethed, “could I possibly choose?  This is your world, and mine doesn’t want me anymore.”  She pushed him aside, grateful for his final lack of resistance as he drifted to the side. “Just leave me alone.”  His hand grasped at hers desperately, but softly; she pulled sharply away and continued to storm off.

“I know how you really feel.”

That was her final straw.  Her insults aside, their dysfunction aside, that was not to be discussed, and he knew it.  For him to break their code, after all this time...even with their fights, it was inexcusable.  Cheeks reddening, Nesta halted in her tracks. “I. don’t. care.”  She laughed grimly as she wheeled on him, hands and eyes darkening in black and crimson flares she carefully wove around her body.  “Do you think I’m scared of this?”  She took a step toward him, amplifying the effect further and darkening her laugh.  “Do you think I can’t handle this?  Do you think I need you to help with any of this?”

He studied her slowly, his stance unchanged.  “No.”  He took a step toward her, but paused as she increased her flames even more.  He crossed his arms nonchalantly in response.  “But you can’t make me hate you.”

She met his unimpressed stare for a few seconds, black fire licking at the air around her, before cooling off her flames in quiet irritation at the lack of impact.  “Find someone else to torment, Cassian.” She turned away from him again, and shot back a line of black fire at the briefest sound of his movement.  “NO.”  This time, as she disappeared within the canopy of the surrounding forest, his presence did not follow her.

Nesta knew she’d made a massive mistake the moment she'd summoned that abhorrent power.  That eye had appeared – that eye that opened from deep within her, that called to her from far away.  She’d immediately changed her cabin plans, bolting for the woods in case it decided to pay another visit to her location, but she began to wonder if that had been an error as well, with the sensation of its eye opening wider the deeper within the forest she dove and the sense of foreboding filling her further and further, regardless of what change of direction she cut.

She’d lost her cool with him; she’d worked so hard for months to stay disconnected enough, drugged and sexed enough, unfeeling enough to prevent this very reoccurrence, only to have it dashed with a single, vexing sentence from him.  And now this feeling, her magic boiling over, filling her past the brims of her body...she collapsed to her knees as she broke into an open pasture and screamed, slamming layer after layer of her power into any and every inanimate object she found and turning several large boulders into elemental mist that swirled around her.  Tears swirled down her face as she collected her power as strongly as she could, dissipating it around her in a spherical structure to drain the overflowing energy from her body. Her hands bristled as the leaves and grass beneath her turned to ash, a perfect circle of blackened death surrounding her.  A metaphor for her life, she noted solemnly to herself.

“Fascinating, isn’t it?”

She shot to her feet, uneasy, at the clipped voice to her left.  The elemental mist floating around her from the boulders began to spiral in a tight oval a few meters away, before settling slowly into an undeniably male shape.  The figure, a mass of sparkling dots, jokingly marveled at his limbs before settling into a mock bow. Nesta threw black fire at him the moment his head dipped, only for the flames to pass right through him, hitting a tree on the other side of their clearing and slowly spreading those black veins through its healthy bark.  The figure chuckled at the sound of the tree collapsing under the disintegration of its trunk, before he straightened once more.

“Did you hope to use my own power against me?  Surely you understand you cannot kill me like that–” He raised his arm, and ashes from the ground shaped into black daggers and flew directly at her body. Nesta rolled to the side in anticipation, only for the ashes to divert course immediately.  She covered her head, then raised it when the expected pain did not arrive.  “–just as I cannot kill you with mine.”  And indeed, the ashes swirled through and around Nesta’s body as if she were air, piercing no skin and causing no pain.

“Leave me alone.”  She crawled back slowly onto her feet, giving the man a death stare.  “You can have the power back for all I care.”

“Oh?” The elements swirling around the man quickly flew into the air, before reappearing right before her, the figure’s head leaning toward hers; it was an effort for her to maintain her ground, stance, and glare.  “But you see, I’ve had time to think since your last...adventure with my powers.  It would be quite troublesome to find a way to kill you, what with us sharing the same carbon-based source of power.”  He shifted rapidly to her left, her eyes moving to match.  “And believe me that I would have to kill you, for certainly Beron would’ve taken his power back from your sister already as well otherwise, would he have not?”

Her lips pursed in anger.  “Don’t talk about her.”

“Why not?”  The man dissipated again, and the elements swirled around, kicking the ashen leaves up in an orchestra that sounded chillingly like laughter.  “She’s not the sister you truly care about, after all.  Besides--”  His body reassembled a few feet further away.  “--neither of us can do much about the other’s existence, so perhaps you should hear me out, after all.  I need a favor from--”

“No.” Her deadpan reply caused the elemental man to swirl three times as large, towering over her as he shone brightly.

“You don’t have much of a choice, Nesta.  You think today was bad?  I may not be able to physically harm you, but I can make every ounce of your power feel like blades cutting into your skin from inside; I can make your blood burn as if molten lava itself courses through your veins.  Hm? How long do you think you’ll be able to escape from me through drugs this time, Nesta, before I can latch on again, before you’re forced to endure me again?”  The form shrunk down to its previous size and moved as if brushing off its collar, sending bright sparks in the air.  “Oh dear, you’ve made me lose my temper.  Again.”  Its eyes narrowed.  “So perhaps we can come to an arrangement, being that you possess my stolen power and yet, ironically, pose to be quite valuable to me alive after all.  I’ve had quite a lot of time to think about this, after all, in the year that you’ve laid waste to the body I so graciously gifted you.  So, what do you say?  Do one simple task for me, and I can ensure you will never be bothered by my power again, forever living dormant in your body.”  He tilted his head expectantly.

“I don’t even know...what you’re asking for.”  She grunted out the words, as the previous, rapid usage of her powers finally began catching up to her.

“But you will, when it matters.”  The figure appeared inches in front of her again.  “Trust me.”  The flickering lights in the man’s face tilted upwards in what Nesta chillingly realized was supposed to be a smile, then the figure shrugged.  “And I assure you that I will be dropping by again to check in on you.”

“I’d rather die than hel--”  Nesta screamed as electric current flowed through her body, collapsing to the ground and clutching at her skin. Just as suddenly as it came on, it ended, and sure enough, she found her body completely unharmed, although she lay panting in her field of blackened leaves.  She gave a vulgar gesture to the figure, earning another scream from a second blast of current.

“We are connected, Nesta.  Neither you nor I can break that, whether we want to or not.  I am as much a part of you as you are of me. Though...perhaps it is beneficial that I can’t harm you.” The figure cupped her chin with his glowing hand, before passing it harmlessly through her skull.  “After all, my deal wouldn’t be nearly as incentivizing for either of us if I could.”  He paused in a mocking posture of contemplation, then stood up and began walking away.  “Either way, I’ll wait here with you for awhile while you think about what I’ve said; what you stand to gain...or lose...from your choice.  There’s not much--”

The figure paused and glanced up as a swift gust of wind flurried through the clearing and kicked up the ashen floor, and Nesta seized on its distraction, pulling out the Illyrian blade she’d hidden from her ankle and thrusting it upward.  It barely grazed skin before a force barreled into her from the side, and she quickly found her head pinned to the forest floor as she heard the quiet clanks of the knife bouncing away from her.  Her instincts, against good wisdom, tried summoning her power in protest, but it was as if she were mortal again, her core empty of force.

“Binding amulet.”  The gruff, unmistakable, condescending voice of Devlon sent adrenaline coursing through her veins, and she struggled and bit at him until he lifted off her.  “As much as I’d love to kill you for what you did to me--” She gasped as he turned toward her, his face intermittent with large spots of rotten flesh, twin amulets at each of their necks growing brightly.  “--I don’t feel like dealing with Cassian.  And speaking of which, the next time you try that--” He gestured at the knife laying a few feet away. “--try not to scream, would you?  Prevents me from looking away.”  

She glared at him, but her retort died in another powerful gust of wind as Cassian abruptly landed a few feet away, scattering a wide arc of ash.  Devlon held up his hand at Cassian, the latter Illyrian’s face red from more than just exertion.

“Relax, General.  Her scream wasn’t from me.”  He pointed at the knife on the ground.  “Your little witch here tried to take her own life.  I was merely intervening on your behalf.”  He shrugged as he flexed his wings in preparation for departure.  “I assume you can manage her from here.”  A quick smirk followed from Devlon before he continued.  “We can discuss my payment later.”

Nesta glared at Devlon, though she wouldn’t deny her true motive in avoiding Cassian’s eyes.  Not that she needed to look to know what she’d see.  She heard his voice distantly.  “And her shoulder?” She blinked as she checked both shoulders, finding her right one sticking out at a sickly angle.  She gently touched it, feeling no pain.

“Couldn’t help it; had to make a hard tackle.”  He gestured vaguely toward her. “She’ll be a mess to deal with when her amulet’s power wears off shortly. Unfortunately, hers barely has any magic left; I had to save our stronger ones for our soldiers, after the war you put them through.”  He stared down Cassian for a long span before taking off, blasting the ashen floor in her face in a move she knew was intentional.

She didn’t have much time to dwell on his patronizing departure, however.  True to Devlon’s words, the amulet’s glow almost immediately died, and she stifled a yell as she collapsed, her shoulder beginning to burn with hot fire.  She felt Cassian’s hands around her arms, and she tried to shove him off with her left palm, earning a muted, but exasperated, grunt.

“For Gods’ sake, Nesta, let me do one thing. Please.” His eyes tore into hers, and only the agony she saw piercing back at her caused her to relent, reluctantly allowing him access to her arms as she scanned the pasture, noticing the elemental man had disappeared as she had assumed.  And as she bit her tongue down to keep the yelps and curses down when Cassian shoved her shoulder back into place, tasting the coppery tang of blood as her eyes watered from the blistering pain, she realized how restricted her life might become in the coming weeks.

And how unbelievably screwed they both were as a result.

~~

Author's Note

I apologize for the [very long] delay!! I know 18 months is a long time to restart updating a fanfiction, so I hope it reads continuous for everyone. As always, comments and critiques are appreciated. I hope everyone enjoys, and thank you for reading!

[mistressoffishnets]

All We Are We Are

Characters: Zatanna Zatara, Dick Grayson, Artemis Crock (mentioned) Rating: T for minor sexual content Length: ~2,100 Prompt: “She doesn't know how she ended up here. One minute she's cleaning out her apartment, packing every broken memory and reminder of simpler times into boxes because it just hurts too much to look at them and she just doesn't know what else to do with herself right now, and the next she's seeing red and Zeta-ing to the one place she knows she shouldn't be.” Notes: Set between Artemis’s identity reveal and Wally’s death. 

She doesn't know how she ended up here. One minute she's cleaning out her apartment, packing every broken memory and reminder of simpler times into boxes because it just hurts too much to look at them and she just doesn't know what else to do with herself right now, and the next she's seeing red and Zeta-ing to the one place she knows she shouldn't be.

And she's angry. She's so angry. The remarkable thing is that it didn't even hit her just how angry she is until now - days after Artemis showed up alive.

She's steaming just thinking about it, and before she knows what's happening her knuckles are rapping on the apartment door. She wouldn't be surprised to find the apartment empty and her knocks left unanswered. She knows how busy he's been making himself lately. But she is taken aback at how he doesn't look even the slightest surprised to see her when the door finally opens and she's met with those baby blue eyes she's seen much too frequently in the last few weeks.

"Zatanna," he greets, stepping aside and pulling the door open to let her into the apartment. His voice is stoic but not unkind and the use of her full name does not go unnoticed.

"Dick," she deadpans back, moving out of the rain and into the too cool entryway. Goosebumps raise on her arms but she pays them no attention. Without giving him a minute to breathe, she turns back to him and asks a little too heatedly, "Why didn't you tell me?"

He hasn't even had the chance to close the door behind her before she's questioning him. He must have known this was coming though, as he doesn't even flinch at her tone. Too calmly, he closes the door and turns to face her. She must look crazy right now in a pair of sweatpants with her hair in a messy bun and her tank top all disheveled because her realization mixed with her temper afforded her no time to make herself presentable. It also doesn't help that she ran here in the rain from the nearest Zeta tube which is a little over a mile from Dick's apartment. Her arms are crossed over her chest and she's waiting for an answer that she's not sure she wants to hear, her expression steely.

"The mission was on a need-to-know basis," he says simply. He doesn't look her in the eyes when he speaks which heats her up even more.

Zatanna scoffs a bit before shaking her head at no one in particular. Maybe it's at herself for expecting more. "And you thought I didn't need to know that my best friend wasn't actually six feet in the ground?"

Artemis's information about the mission remained vague when she and Zatanna last spoke, and the magician still had so many questions. Once she found out Nightwing had been one of the people in on it (Artemis had knowingly left out that he was the ringmaster of the whole ordeal) she knew he was the one she needed to hear the answers from.

He doesn't say anything in return, just stares at the floorboards. She can't tell if his resolve is one of defeat or defiance, but she's too riled up to stop now. "Do you realize how much danger she was in?" She knows he does. "She could have been found out at any moment, I don't even know how-"

"No, she couldn't have," he interrupts her. "Your glamour charm made sure of that."

For the first time all night she's speechless. When he came to her with the request for a glamour charm all those weeks ago, she'd thought to ask but knew she probably wouldn't get anything out of him. Besides, they had a history - one that ended with her trusting him with her life. If she needed to know anything, Dick would tell her. She didn't need to know about Artemis though; he'd decided that for her.

What really gets her about this whole thing isn't that he didn't tell her explicitly about the plan and her part in it, though. It's the fact that he didn't trust her enough to. He knew how much pain she was in and he still had the nerve to exploit her ignorance the way he did.

Her mind flashes back to the last night she'd shown up at his doorstep, grief becoming her like a glove that fit too well. They spent that night together, laughing over memories and worshiping each other like the world was about to end. She needed to feel alive, even just for a second. She needed reprieve from the bitter hatred she was starting to feel towards Kaldur and the crippling heartache she reserved for Wally. She needed to forget about the gaping hole in her heart where Artemis resided. And she did that night just like the ones that followed with Dick's arms around her, skin against skin and hearts beating as one. He helped her forget, helped her feel alive. He helped her start to heal the wound that he'd secretly created. And while he filled the gap her best friend had left in her life, he branded himself on her heart all over again. In those moments of relief, she realized it had never stopped beating for him.

But now, knowing that Artemis's death wasn't real, she wonders if the spark rekindled between them wasn't either. She wonders if he indulged her out of guilt, or worse, pity. After those nights together, she trusted that he felt the same way she did. Standing before him, she wonders if she'll ever be able to trust him again.

Tears prick at the corners of her eyes and she can feel the inside of her nose burn just slightly the way it does when she's about to cry. And she doesn't know if the waterworks are starting out of the hurt of feeling so used or the fact that she let herself foolishly believe he still loved her too. (She has an inkling it's the latter.)

She takes a deep breath, regrets how shaky and vulnerable she sounds, and steps towards him. It's almost as if her arm acts of its own accord as she watches it raise and swing towards him in slow motion, her hand connecting with his cheek and the sudden clap of her skin against his echoing throughout the barren space. He doesn't flinch, though, just takes it as if he knew it was coming.

Betraying the sting behind her eyes and the urge to scream, she shoves him towards the door until his back is pressed against it. She wants him to explain himself, to tell her his involvement was just a joke - that those nights they spent together when he comforted her as she cried herself to sleep were real. But she doesn't ask him to. She doesn't say a word as she beats against his chest, willing him to stop her or do something more than the nothing she's receiving as he gives in.

She doesn't know when the tears started to roll down her cheeks but she can feel them slide down her jaw and drip off her chin onto her hands. She knows that she should stop - that his plan worked and it basically saved the world from the Light for now - but adrenaline is pumping through her veins and even if she wanted to she can't.

Then as suddenly as she began, her wrists are in each of his hands, holding her still and he finally looks at her. His eyes stare into hers and she can feel his thumb rubbing against the inside of her wrist the way it did when they were more than just friends. There in his gaze, his eyes give nothing away.

Without thinking about it, she pulls back and kisses him. But when he freezes against her lips, she knows she read him wrong and pulls away embarrassed. She takes a step back from him and wraps her arms around herself, feeling as though she'll fall apart if there's nothing to hold her in one piece. Only now does she realize that it's actually freezing in this place and she's not soaked from the rain but definitely damp enough to feel it, and she starts to shiver just a little. This is it. This is where she faces the music and tries to not to lose herself in it as she does.

"Just tell me," she whispers. She gets up the courage to look him in the eyes and her heart falls as they reveal nothing to her. Biting her lip to steady to her voice before she speaks, she blinks a few tears away before asking, "Was it all a lie?"

His silence is all she needs. Feeling her bottom lip start to quiver, she wipes under her eyes in resigned acceptance. She's been through this with him before, and she knows she can do it again. But she also realizes a mutual breakup is much less painful than a rejection. As she moves to turn the doorknob and let herself out, she's knocked off balance as Dick's hands grasp her hips and position her so her back's now against the door and her chest is pressed to his. Her gasp of confusion and surprise is cut off as Dick's lips slide over hers, one hand remaining on her hip and the other coming up to cradle her cheek.

"It wasn't," he breathes against her lips before pulling back and looking her in the eyes. She feels like the wind has been knocked out of her and when she looks at him she can finally see everything he sought to hide from her in those baby blues. She nods before catching his lips in hers and threading her fingers through his hair.

She shivers again but this time from his hands roaming her body and his fingers grazing against her abs as he pulls the hem of her wet tank top up and over her head, leaving her in her sweatpants and lacy black bra. Zatanna moves to kiss him again but gets stopped short by his lips on the underside of her jaw. He trails kisses down her neck and licks the hollow of her throat, relishing in the small moans that come from her, before sliding his lips over hers again.

They're all hands with heavy breathing and unspoken apologies between them. They throw caution and worries and past mistakes to the wind, articles of clothing following close behind.

Later when she's resting her head on his chest and listening to his heartbeat, she thinks about the times before life got in the way. She thinks about how her teen years feel like forever ago and how much easier life was when her friends weren't pretending to die on missions. She thinks about how natural and effortless it was to fall for Dick Grayson, and how it still is. The syncing of their beating hearts doesn't go unnoticed and she smiles against his skin.

Leaning up on her elbow, she watches as he sleeps peacefully, his lips parted and his hair a bit disheveled (her doing). He looks like a child, the years of stress and living a double life forgotten in his features. Throughout the night he had answered all of her questions. And as much as she wants to stay mad at him (she's learned that anger is a good distraction from pain), she can't. She understands the life too much. It has its risks and its dangers, but that's the price to pay when the world depends on them - when they also depend on each other.

She thinks about trust and how theirs had been broken.

When Dick wakes up to an empty bed, he can't say he's not disappointed, but he understands. (He wishes he didn't.) He glances at the clock before pulling on his boxers and a pair of sweats and heading out into the kitchen. What he doesn't expect to see, however, is Zatanna completely bare except for a larger t-shirt of his coming down to cover just enough of her backside standing at the stove with her back to him, flipping pancakes.

Zatanna jumps when she feels him wrap an arm around her stomach and bury his nose in her hair. One thing he had never outgrown was his silent ninja skills. She hums at his presence before setting the hot pan on an unused burner and twisting around so that their foreheads are resting against each others'. Their noses rub together a little and Zee smiles.

Dick finally breaks the silence when he says, "I know it's going to take a while for you to trust me again, but..."

"Then I guess we better start now." She leans up on her toes and kisses him, and thinks better late than never.

[sacredrite-archived-blog]

I feel like this is one of those topics that is completely and utterly overshadowed. I want to delve deep into Luna’s mental health and states of it she goes through while growing up.

It’s not completely unheard of Luna being traumatized and suffering from C-PTSD. Real quickly, I will go into the difference between PTSD and C-PTSD for those who don’t know.

C-PTSD ( or complex post-traumatic stress disorder ) is a disorder categorizes by long periods of repeated trauma. PTSD is for one or few instances of trauma while C-PTSD is something that developed ( or worsens ) due to years worth of trauma.  

And throughout the game and movie, we never really see Lunafreya struggling much with her own mental health. While Luna isn’t all too emotionally driven like Noctis, she undoubtedly suffered as much or near as much as he did.

Her time in captivity and under constant moderation has formed her hyper-vigilance. There would be a creeping sense of paranoia build up over time as well as the fear of being touched or having a voice raised at her. The Nifs certainly hadn’t been treating her with much care as shown in the dawn trailor. Why would they? She is their prisoner and they are free to do as they please. They are free to break her down and build her back up as if she is their own property. Her life is in their hands and they would have no qualms in holding such a fact over her head.

In the twelve years she had been under imperial rule, her resolve to aid the chosen king to his destiny did not waver. As said in my tarot card post, their physical, mental and emotional torment fueled her burning desire to gain control over herself once more and seek out freedom. This destiny wasn’t just her duty. It was a sense of freedom. To defy them and continue to do as she vowed, she was denying Nifs control over herself as well as a promise of new beginnings for their world. If she ever wanted to reach the end she had to push through and so she did. There was motivation to be found in a promise to save the people. 

Her reluctance to manipulate Luche into putting on the ring stems from her fear of being similar to her captors. While a necessary evil, she is sensitive to the idea of being anywhere near their level. Again, though, she pushes forward. To be scared of the consequences of her actions is to lose the one hope she had for finally spreading her wings and flying away from the Nifs; even if it meant she die in the process. 

This desperation to get away conflicts with the part of her that feels awful that she has to be the one to lead her childhood friend to his death. It’s a heartbreaking sacrifice and if she lets herself feel she will crumble. Lunafreya has kept up a front for something. She built it from the cuts and bruises. From the hands that touched her in despicable ways and the fear of being restrained. To feel is to give in and to recognize tragedy. Thus, logic becomes her main suit. If logic overpowers emotion then the worry of falling apart is far. 

Her conflicting personality traits only tear down what little sense of self she even managed to keep. Underneath the mask, Lunafreya has no idea who she is. Her duty as Oracle is the only piece of her that makes sense and so she takes it seriously just as her mother did. 

Emotions have to be strong and stable. Held must be held high and posture must convey a sense of confidence. It is not an option to be weak. There is defiance laced in her veins and it burrows in the marrow of her bones leaving poison in its wake. She wants to be cyanide. She wants to be sulfuric acid. To burn flesh and leave traces of conviction; a message that she will bite off fingertips of those who point in her face. 

Yet, there are certain phrases that revert her into a frightened child. 

Upon misbehaving, a Nif would always hiss the same words,”This is for your own good.” But what good was that? If she continued would they kill her? Would they beat her bloody and bruised? Luna was just a child, but they couldn’t care less. They’ll grab her arm until it purples and throw her to the ground. For awhile, she kept doing it in hopes they’d tire and ignore her. It became evident quickly that they spared no empathy for her situation, though.

To even hear this phrase quickly sends her into a flashback. Her eyes will widen a fraction and her blood runs cold. She’s not too visibly distressed, but the way her pupils dilate and how disoriented she seems to become is hard to miss. Her automatic response is so dissociate. Rarely does a breakdown happen in full. Luna shuts down completely and grows quiet and distant. A defense that her mind activates in order to protect her from further harm. Detaching ones self from reality invokes security. There seems to be no other way that she copes.

Lunafreya is a mess. A huge conflicting mess, but she struggles to find her sense of identity.

Her nightmares are too frequent. Dark circles under her eyes tell stories of long nights where she was too scared to sleep. Where she stared at the ceiling and drifted off into her own little world that she built in her head. Just for mere moments she is okay. There is no Gods, no prophecy, no death. She and Noctis spend hours together. She meets his friends. The Starscourge never existed. It’s all perfect and it’s right at the edge of her mind. Seeking solace in daydreams and dissociative states is all she has known. 

Clinging onto her childhood and the time she and Noctis spend laughing and reading together. Playing in the fields and inhaling life as so desired. 

Admitting to dependence on these memories and her calling makes her feel selfish. Guilt is riddled in her ribs and she avoids any self-evaluation. 

[onestowatch]

Listen To Dear Boy’s Bittersweet ‘The Strawberry EP’ a Day Ahead of Release [PREMIERE + Q&A]

Photo Credit : Casey Curry

California’s Dear Boy had an immense 2018; they were hailed as one of the best bands in Los Angeles by critics and music publications, sold out multiple hometown shows, embarked on a full US tour w/ Rogue Wave while also playing dates w/ Day Wave and Sunflower Bean—and there’s no signs of slowing down in 2019. On March 1, the nostalgic band will release The Strawberry EP (the third extended play of their career) into the world via the band's own label, Easy Hell and Burnside/The Orchard. Produced by Dear Boy, and mixed by Tony Hoffer (AIR, Phoenix, Beck, M83), the EP showcases the band's ability to craft bittersweet songs pulling from late 70's and early 80's post-punk and early 90's Britpop, large enough for arenas, but intimate enough to be with you during your most private moments.

The band’s wildly creative nature that has attracted not only a wildly devoted fan base, but the respect of fellow artists who have gone on to be collaborators. The Strawberry EP features appearances by their friends Day Wave, Hazel English, and Patrick Spurgeon of Rogue Wave. The four real life friends that make up Dear Boy (vocalist Ben Grey, guitarist Austin Hayman, drummer Keith Cooper, and bassist Lucy Lawrence) have made something that is deeply personal, while celebrating their city and challenging the direction of modern guitar music.

Ahead of The Strawberry EP’s worldwide release on March 1, we spoke to vocalist Ben Grey to break down the five-track collection, which you can listen to a day early exclusively here on Ones To Watch. Pre-order the album here.

OTW: Considering your previous releases, how would you consider The Strawberry EP to be a progression of your sound?

BG: I think The Strawberry EP is the closest we’ve come to sounding the way we’ve wanted to in our heads. The band’s sound has been described as “bittersweet” since day one, and while I think we really perfected the bitter in our early work, I don’t think we were able to get sweet until this EP. Melancholia is in our DNA… It’s just musically and thematically what we’re drawn to, but the dream was always to leave the listener and ourselves with feeling of hopefulness. I don’t think we fully figured out how to do that until now.

OTW: When were the songs for the EP written/recorded between, and how did you choose what 5 tracks would make it?

BG: Putting out an EP was definitely not the plan! We’ve been writing for a full length record, but we seem to keep stumbling into recording opportunities. With the exception of “Love Interest,” the EP was all recorded at our friend Clay Blair’s studio Boulevard Recording in Hollywood, in between legs of our tour with Rogue Wave. We would work these new songs out on the road for a few weeks and then come home to track them. That’s why I think they sound so immediate… They’re straight from stage to stereo. And to answer your other question, it wasn’t until Tony Hoffer sent us the final mix of Limelight, that we realized we had finished a collection. The songs had all coalesced so naturally and they truly did capture a moment in the band’s career.

I should also note that the current count of new Dear Boy songs is 35,  so I don’t think it’ll be very long until we follow this up with something else.

OTW: Starting off the EP we have the single “Semester”— a song that you’ve previously described as being about “following the moment”. How has the response to the track been so far?

BG: I feel funny telling you that it’s been great, but it truly has been pretty great. If I’m being honest, I am RELIEVED. Whenever you’re in the process of working on something, it’s so small and private. It only belongs to you and you can’t even really imagine it existing in the real world. Any artist will tell you that this whole process is a cocktail of arrogance and earth shattering doubt, so I'm shook constantly. But the fact that Rodney Bingenheimer is playing "Semester" on the radio, our fans like it and my friends who I respect are still taking my calls, I’m finally going to concede that it’s going okay.

OTW: The track is quite dreamy, though bittersweet lyrically. What came first: the music or the lyrics?

BG: The way it normally works with us is that the music & melody come first., but I’m always scribbling down stuff that gets a reaction out of me… The hope being that one day we’ll be able to marry the nonsense to a piece of music and have it no longer be nonsense.

I’ve used this expression before, but I feel like songwriting is pick-pocketing in the dark. That’s part of why it’s so exciting. "Semester," for example was just a word I had written down in the middle of the night 3 years ago… I had no idea what to do with it, zero context… I just knew that it made me feel something and it was my job to figure out why. It wasn’t until we started writing this particular music that it became clear, oh this song is “Semester,” and I think I know why.

OTW: I know that track was produced by the band w/ contributions from Jackson Phillips (Day Wave)—is this the only track on the record essentially self-produced? And what was it like working with Phillips?

BG: Jackson is incredible. We met last year when our bands did a West Coast tour together and became fast friends. Working with him on "Semester" and "Something Good" was inspiring. A lot of spontaneity goes into his work. The opening swelling noises in "Semester" are a mistake with the tape machine… It was a synth arpeggio sped up all crazy, and he quickly suggested we record it and have it flow throughout the entire song, which I think is partly why "Semester" has its dreamy atmosphere. Feels like exaggerating a memory… And on “Something Good,” Eleisha from Hazel English was hanging out with us in his studio and started humming something to herself during the bridge… Jackson asked her to record what she was doing and she graciously agreed… and now it’s my favorite moment of the song. He’s really good at disrupting your work in the way it needs to be disrupted. Ian Hultquist also produced “Love Interest” with us, but the rest of the record is DB.

OTW: Then we move on to “Limelight,” which seems to further romanticize the valued fleeting time with a lover through stylings that seem suited for youthful romance. What can you tell us about the track?

BG: “Limelight” actually started out this slow, moody ballad, so you’re definitely not wrong about those themes…  But as soon as I played an early version for the band, it became clear that’s not what the song was meant to be… And that's what great bands do; they show you what you really mean. Keith, Austin and Lucy heard the song and instinctively knew what to do with it. I’m so thankful to be a part of a project that has such a confident sound and assured chemistry… My version of “Limelight” was small and limited, while Dear Boy’s interpretation was big and thrilling and cathartic. I didn’t realize that the lyrics belonged in a song like that, until I started singing them against this final arrangement.

OTW: Though it’s only the third song, by the time we get to “Something Good,” the EP has effectively avoided “sticking” to one definitive sound. Was it intentional for this EP to showcase your versatility as a band?

BG: I think we’re always chasing things that are exciting and expansive for us, but it wasn’t intentional. This song is the second in a trilogy of waltz’s for the band, (the third is a song called “Die”),  but everything about the creation of “Something Good” was surprising to us.

OTW: And did you always know you wanted an acoustic track included? How did “Something Good” come to be?

BG: We didn’t! We actually had studio time booked to work on “Anything At All,” but Keith had the flu and couldn’t track drums... It was Austin’s idea to work it.  I wrote “Something Good” with my friend April Bender and it was meant to live on an acoustic guitar, but didn’t really have a sonic identity beyond that. And maybe it’s my own personal bias, but I’m super over bands recording token acoustic songs for their albums, so it was important for us to take it somewhere unexpected. We threw everything we could at it; There are mountains of analog synths, distorted ebows, lap steel, a mille feuille of harmonies, down-tuned conversational elements… it’s very lush and I’m sure totally annoying for our mixer, Tony Hoffer. But it was important for it to not sound like anything else and after days of concentrated studio experimentation,  we got this Americana Mazzy Star dark waltz thing. But most important, it sounds like our band and it opens up a lot of portals for us in the future.

OTW: “Anything At All” quickly picks the energy back up with an energizing guitar riff and an incredibly catchy hook. Talk to us about the track and is there a story behind the spoken outro?

BG: “Anything At All” is pure “band.” A song built around a guitar riff, leaning into all the things you want to hear as an audience member…  But the lyrics, in Dear Boy fashion, stand in defiance of the major chords. It’s about despair and making the most out of your despair.

While tracking guitars, Austin and I would end our takes with excessive and unnecessary feedback, as one does… I can assure you that it was never meant to stay… but I dunno…one day while I was recording vocals,  I just heard a little epilogue in my head… I wrote it down in 2 minutes, recorded it in one take and that was it. I didn’t expect it to stay in, let alone be audible… but the band liked it, Tony Hoffer liked it and I didn’t hate it. Admittedly, I don’t know how I could live without it now.

OTW: “Love Interest,” though the closing track, is probably the most pop-centric – evoking the pop-hook laced energy of 90’s college rock. What influenced the track?

BG: I remember that we were at Keith’s studio and somehow the guitar theme, which sounded like early R.E.M. meets Suede, willed itself into existence. The rest is fuzzy. But I do remember that I left that night with a crudely put together basic track of the music and then spent the following two months writing the lyrics. The song is, in part, about the clumsiness and optimism of love... the joy of being out of your depth. It’s a sentiment I really wanted to get right, so I obsessed over it. I still kinda want to change one or two things.

OTW: Was it a conscious decision to end the EP with the eldest single from the set, seeing as it was initially released nearly a year ago?  

BG: Not so much that it was the eldest, but more that it was the first song written in what we consider to be “The Strawberry Era.” And, really... the message. Like we discussed earlier, leaving the listener with hopefulness for the first time was something appealing to us.

OTW: And finally—why “Strawberry”?

BG: This sounds made up, but I had been dreaming about strawberries for the two weeks before recording “Love Interest.” Every night. The image of a skeleton performing the Hamlet soliloquy to a giant strawberry, dressing in clothes with strawberries sewn into them, running through strawberry rain drops... And because I NEVER remember my dreams, it seemed impossible for it to be coincidence. I don’t think I’m tuned into the will of the universe or anything like that, but I’m also not foolish enough to argue with it.

[gleymy17-blog]

Aliens Paper

Gleymy Garcia

ENG 3690 

Aliens Film Post 

20th February 2017

                                  Can Women Live in Outer Space?                               

“Women have been taught that, for us, the Earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge” (Andrea Dworkin). However, women have ventured and while they did not fall off the edge, they are perceived negatively.

Science fiction as a work of literature “constantly interrogates the limits of identity and the nature of difference”(Seed, pg. 27).  It perceives this notion of women venturing off Earth throughout history, specifically their roles in stories to outer space. The difference in gender roles in outer space has undermined women as individuals within society, as shown in Ridley’s Scott films Aliens and Alien3 through the main character Ripley.

The term alien “are by definition always imagined through reference to familiar humans groups, animal species, or machines” (Seed, pg.28). In the sequel action/adventure movie Aliens, the epic fight against extraterrestrial life that destroyed a colony takes place between Aliens and the combat squad sent out to fight them. Throughout the movie Ripley is portrayed as more of a motherly figure and not the head protagonist, as she does not have any power to make decisions until the middle or end of the film. Lieutenant Gorman makes all the decisions and even when he dies the person in charge than becomes Captain Dwayne Hicks, illustrating Ripley may make tough and good decisions on her own but get no credit for it. The lack of acclamation the film portrays through Ripley as women character illustrates the denial of society to accept women as important figures within society.

 “Even though issues surrounding fatherhood and masculine subject were central concerns in many 1980s blockbusters, anxieties surrounding motherhood and feminine subject can also be witnessed in the genre at this time” (Cornea, 147). It seems as if writers, authors, screen players and even society as whole was scared to accept the fact that feminism existed. Ridley Scott the writer of the film, even he had “originally planned to have Ripley Killed, but the studio insisted that she should survive and the alien be killed” (Seed, pg.39).

Well I guess it’s a relieve to know some crewmembers had the decency to still care about women’s rights!

Although Scott soon came to understand that Ripley was an important figure in the film as he kept her alive throughout the whole Alien Trilogy, in Alien3 the audience once again was given the standard of women being unfit to be superior. 

“The film charts Ripley’s emotional course from despair to beyond despair to a brief moment of rebirth (in community) to a death that’s no less bitter for all if principled defiance” (Taubin, pg.96). Stuck in a prison where she is the only woman and surrounded by men completely, the film illustrates masculinity as a main element needed within society. While the “dialogue implies that the aliens are as indiscriminate as ever in their choice of hosts, on the screen it is a female human who suffers the involuntary caesarian birth”(Taubin, pg.95). Ripley is seen as the suffering character and with her tomboyish look in the film is seen as what is the “acceptable form and shape of a woman” (Cornae, pg.150). Not only that but the overall meaning behind the film is to send a message against women’s reproductive system and the advancement of AIDS.

So basically one portrays the woman as a hero in a time of history where woman are not accepted as a figure role, but at the same time one chooses to let this character be misrepresented, suffer and die? Many would believe that it makes no sense, which your right it doesn’t!

However, critiques feel it makes perfect sense given the fact that at the end of both films Ripley is seen as having a bit of power as a female figure. Not only that but Ripley “operates in a futuristically post-feminist environment “ and her depiction in the film is seen as a “set against time when not only had 1970s feminism challenge patriarchal structures, but feminist science fiction writing had dared to make inroads into the masculiniist preserve of the writing genre”(Cornae, pg.150).

Now if feminist writers are challenging and daring to write about the representation of woman against masculinity, there must be reasons for it don’t you think?

The relationship between both films and the trilogy by Ridley Scott is that it allows for “a notion of the feminine which does not depend for its definition on a concept of masculine” (Cornae, pg.150). The films want to articulate a masculine fear of gender dissolution, a dissolution

that is initially presented under the guise of a progressive futurism and then quickly undercut with the introduction of the alien (Cornae, pg.150).

Ripley is only seen as a mother figure and nothing more. Her character portrays the struggle of power women go through not only in the film, but also in reality historically and today. How can women strive in a society they are constantly being put down in? How can one even strive to make their presence known here on Earth if individuals do not give them a chance?

Without acknowledging the presence of women here on Earth, we will never make it outside of it. Science fiction about outer space may be fictional now but a reality later; Something women still may never be able to achieve.

 Word Count:1182

 _____________________________________________________________________

                                                  Works Cited

Cornea, Christine. "Gender Blending and The Feminine Subject in Science Fiction Film. “Science Fiction Cinema : Between Fantasy and Reality. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Edinburgh UP, 2007. 145+. Academic Search Complete [EBSCO]. Web. 20 Feb. 2017.

Seed, David. "Chapter 2: Alien Encounters." Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. N.p.: Oxford UP, 2011. 27+. Print.

Taubin, Amy. "Women and Film. A Sight and Sound Reader." Ed. Pam Cook and Philip Dodd.Women Against the Grain 2.3 (1992): 93-100. Print

[nedsecondline]

Women’s March

Women and girls march through the village of Derbesi to celebrate International Women’s Day 2016.

A few years ago, I began hearing remarkable stories about a social movement in northern Syria. Not far from the wreckage of Aleppo, a society founded on principles of direct democracy and women’s rights has taken root in the predominantly Kurdish region known as Rojava. There, in defiance of the Islamic State’s brutal patriarchy, women are leading the way in political decision-making and fighting on the frontlines in their own battalions.

Last year, I was invited to come to Rojava with a delegation of women from around the world—journalists, activists, academics and lawyers— in a visit set to coincide with International Women’s Day. I wanted to see for myself what was going on in Rojava, and I set about finding people to join me. Ali, a freelance journalist from Spain, and Kimmie, a university student I had interviewed for my book about hitchhiking, agreed to go. (Their last names have been left out for security reasons.) None of us had actually met in person before the trip.

The first thing we learned was that getting into Rojava was tough. Turkey had closed its borders with Syria, and the only way into Rojava was via the KRG—the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north of Iraq. We decided to enter the KRG from Turkey, little realizing that renewed fighting between Turkish state forces and Kurdish guerrillas had escalated so much that some of the roads were closed. In Turkey, we passed through numerous checkpoints, where security forces would interrogate and search us. When we reached the Syrian border, it took us four hours and numerous phone calls to talk our way past the final checkpoint.

Once we crossed into Rojava, we met the women from the Foundation of the Free Women of Rojava (WJAR), the organization that had invited us. It quickly became clear that, in light of the worsening security situation, even they had not expected us to make it in.

The next day—International Women’s Day—we headed to Derbesi, a village straddling the Turkey–Syria border, where a solidarity march was taking place. Thousands of Kurdish women wearing colorful traditional dresses chanted and whooped as they paraded down the street. There was a feeling of sisterhood beyond anything I’d ever felt before. Smiling women stopped to hug us, take photos, and thank us—the foreign guests—for coming. Soon we were shouting along with them: “Jin, jiyan, azadî! Jin, jiyan, azadî! Jin, jiyan, azadî!” Women, life, freedom!

We didn’t see any men at all until the end of the march, when we noticed civilian men lining the sides of the street. The women were the ones doing the marching that day—and the guarding, too. Down the street we met a female member of Rojava’s civilian self-defense force. She wore a spotless white headscarf and carried an ageing Kalashnikov rifle. Flipping a V sign, she posed for a photo.

A soldier stands guard during the solidarity march in Derbesi.

What has been happening in northern Syria has been decades in the making. Rojava, which means “west” in Kurdish, is one of four areas unofficially known as Kurdistan. In a series of treaties and agreements following World War I, the victorious European powers divvied up the lands where the Kurds lived, apportioning them across the newly created states of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. (The northwestern part of Iran, which also has a substantial Kurdish population, is considered part of Kurdistan as well.) The Kurds encountered persecution throughout the region. In Turkey, for example, the Kurdish language was banned, with on-the-spot fines for speaking it on the street. Their names for towns, villages, mountains, and rivers were Turkified. The Turkish government even refused to acknowledge that there was such a thing as “Kurdish” people, calling them “mountain Turks” who spoke a broken form of Persian.

A half-century of repression led to the emergence of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, in the late 1970s. Demanding an independent Kurdish homeland, the PKK led a series of armed uprisings against the Turkish state. Tens of thousands died in the fighting over the next two decades. Under pressure from the Turkish government, the United States and other nations began listing the group as a terrorist organization.

In 1999, Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, was captured—reportedly, with the help of the US government. He was imprisoned in the Turkish island prison of Imrali, where he has remained ever since. During the first years of his incarceration, Ocalan’s politics underwent a dramatic shift. Originally a proponent of Marxist-Leninist communism, he turned to a form of communalism he called “democratic confederalism.” Inspired by the writings of social ecologist Murray Bookchin, democratic confederalism sees the nation-state itself as a fundamental cause of social problems.

If the Kurds went down the conventional path of nationhood, Ocalan argued, they would eventually fall into the same trap of authoritarianism that had snared their oppressors. Influenced by his ideas, the PKK in Turkey eventually abandoned its struggle for an independent nation. It instead began working to develop a “bottom-up” democracy built upon neighborhood councils and rotating elected representatives, with quotas for women and ethnic and religious minorities. This model of self-governance quickly spread across the borders of Turkey to other parts of Kurdistan, including Rojava.

When the Syrian civil war broke out, the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, was forced to loosen his grip on the north and send his army to fight rebel forces elsewhere. Rojava’s geography was not ideal for staging a revolution, with a hostile Turkey to the north, land controlled by the Islamic State to the south, and a river border with war-torn Iraq to the east. Nevertheless, the Kurds in Rojava seized the opportunity to revolt against Assad’s regime. In 2012, the region declared its autonomy.

Rohani, a Dutch-born doctor, in front of the health clinic she runs in Serekaniye.

On the third day of our trip, we traveled to Serekaniye, one of the region’s largest cities, where we visited a health clinic run by WJAR, a key player in the women’s movement in Rojava. A group of women wearing black chadors arrived shortly afterward, accompanied by several young children. I recognized the center’s coordinator from the march. Originally from Holland, she went by the Kurdish name Ronahi (for security reasons, Westerners who come to Rojava to help the movement are given Kurdish names). We watched her at work, switching easily between Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish, and English as she talked to us, our interpreter, her staff, and the veiled women. She told us that people would walk for hours from the outlying villages to reach the women’s clinic.

Later, Ronahi took us through a local park and over some conspicuous mounds of earth to a simple building. It was a barracks for the YPJ—a women’s fighting force that is part of Rojava’s army. The women there had been fighting on the frontlines against the Islamic State. The mounds in front of the barracks, I learned, had been put outside to stop car bombs from driving in.

Inside, we were greeted by several young women who smiled shyly and invited us to sit. A woman with hair hanging down past her waist brought over a tray of teacups and sugar; another followed with a teapot. Ronahi, translating for us, asked them for permission to record our conversation. Two of the women declined—they said they had family in Turkey who could be at risk if their identity were uncovered—so we agreed to record only Ronahi’s English translation.

During the course of the next two hours, it became clear that the women, who called one another sisters, had developed the tightest of bonds. “We are one soul,” one soldier told us. I was also interested to learn that one of the women in their unit was Arab, not Kurdish. The YPJ soldiers told us war stories about the Islamic State. I was particularly struck by their claim that they would routinely find amphetamines on the bodies of the fighters they killed. “One time a man was so high on drugs, he wandered right into the frontline. He didn’t seem to know even where he was,” one woman told us, shaking her head slowly.

In their barracks in Serekaniye, YPJ soldiers in Rojava’s army tell war stories about their encounters with the Islamic State.

The leaders of the women’s movement in Rojava don’t call what they are doing “feminism.” They say they are simply reclaiming a lost “heritage”—a tradition of women’s empowerment that was lost centuries ago. Later, when I began reading Ocalan’s writings on gender, I recognized that these were his ideas. The advent of monotheistic religions had made goddess worship sacrilegious and turned women into slaves within the household, Ocalan argued. Capitalism had brought this oppression and objectification to another level. What was necessary for society to be free, he concluded, was an end to patriarchal power and violence—a movement to “kill the dominant male” (figuratively speaking)—and the establishment of independent political institutions of, for, and by women.

After Rojava broke away from Syrian rule, the movement mandated that at least 40 percent of representatives on its councils and committees be women. It set similar quotas for Arabs and Christians and established a number of women-only spaces and organizations, such as mala jin, or “women’s houses,” where women could go for help with issues relating to domestic abuse, forced and underage marriages, and polygamy—all practices that had been outlawed after the start of the revolution in 2012.

A representative at a women’s house we visited in Qamishlo, Rojava’s de facto capital, told us that the day before a woman had come in after being beaten by her father over a trivial matter: the unexplained presence of a dog in their family’s garden. “The father got angry and asked why was this dog there. And then he got more angry and hit her.” The women at the center decided to put the father in jail. “Of course we don’t want everyone put in jail,” the representative told us. “But sometimes you have seen the body—everything is blue. So he should sit there for some days to come back to his mind and realize that it’s not right to hit her.”

Although the Assad regime’s prisons are still in use in Rojava, they now house captured Islamic State fighters for the most part. The way the courts operate has changed, too. In Qamishlo, for instance, those arrested for crimes no longer go before a government judge, but instead face a panel of people from the community, who as a group decide on a fitting punishment—one that, in line with Rojava’s new principles, often does not involve jail time.

In Qamishlo, women sit and chat at a mala jin, or women’s house, where locals dealing with issues like domestic abuse, forced and underage marriages, and polygamy can seek help.

From my conversations with representatives of the Rojava movement, it seems that they see education as a particularly important strategy for women’s empowerment. In recent years, WJAR has opened a number of preschools in the region, with the aim of having a preschool and a health clinic in every neighborhood in every city. We visited Akademya Star, a women’s academy open to all regardless of age or ethnic background. Classes there are based on discussions and debates rather than lectures, and the topics covered include women’s history. “When you understand the system,” a representative from the academy told us, “you have the power to change it.”

Later, we met a Kurdish woman from Turkey named Nahide Zengin, who was working to set up the Greenhouse Project, an agricultural cooperative run by women from eighteen communes. Zengin said that the collective planned to grow fruit and vegetables without the use of chemicals. For several decades, the Assad regime used the whole of Jazira—Rojava’s largest canton—and most of the Kobani canton for pesticide-heavy wheat production. Other than for a few large private landholdings, the fields were state-owned. Most of the farmworkers were paid meager wages. Over the years, the trees in those areas were cut down, and their soil depleted.

Now cooperatives like the Greenhouse Project are trying to recover some of the local knowledge about small-scale, sustainable farming that has been lost over the years. Zengin said that their focus was on something more than just producing as much food as they possibly could. There was a social and political element to their work, too. Rojava aims to develop what the movement calls a “social economy,” with 80 percent of its economy based on the goods and services of cooperatives. “If we don’t give this to the society, then we’re going to be just like a company,” said Zengin, who lived in England for eleven years before coming to Rojava. “Then we’re not working for Rojava—we’re working for ourselves.”

Zengin told us that in England she had had her own company, a house, and a car. Unhappy with that life, she had given it all up to come to Rojava, she said. “I get up early, and … everything is very clear. Dirt, war—no problem,” she said. “Sometimes people think about where they are going to die. Well, I chose my place.”

In the greenhouses we saw little green shoots peeping out from rows of pots. Months after I left Rojava, I would see photos of the cooperative’s women showing off huge piles of the melons and courgettes they had grown.

Nahide Zengin left a comfortable life in England to help set up the Greenhouse Project, a women’s agricultural cooperative in Rojava.

Near the end of our trip, we visited a Yezidi refugee camp run by the movement. The Yezidi are ethnic Kurds who practise an ancient pre-Islamic religion related to Zoroastrianism. The Islamic State considers them the worst kind of infidels. The people in the camp, I learned, were the survivors of the 2014 massacre on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq.

The United Nations has been providing the refugee camp with some supplies, but it cannot have an official presence there, the camp’s coordinator told us, given that nominally the Syrian regime controls the territory under international law. WJAR is running a health clinic there and organizing clothes-making workshops for the camp’s women. It has also established a school for children—many of whom, the coordinator noted, were dealing with trauma from the Sinjar massacre.

As we were driving away from the refugee camp, our guide told us that a friend of hers—a veteran fighter in the women’s army—had been among the first Kurdish forces to arrive in Sinjar and engage the Islamic State in combat. By the time they were able to rescue the Yezidi, however, thousands of them had already been beheaded, disemboweled, crucified, raped, and sold into sex slavery. Her friend, our guide said, is still traumatized by what she saw there.

Shortly before we left Rojava, Kimmie told us she was staying behind. Before our trip, she had planned to spend the next few years finishing her university degree and then starting her own NGO. But the experiences of the last two weeks had convinced her that Rojava was where she was really needed.

The day before Newroz, the Kurdish New Year, we exchanged an emotional goodbye at the border. Then Ali and I took a small boat back across the river to Iraq—the day before the border closed. Since then it has opened at times for a small amount of trade—five trucks per day being the last news I heard—but is often completely sealed.

In the year since I was in Syria, the Islamic State has suffered major losses on the battlefield. The ongoing sieges of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria by coalition forces—often led by Kurdish fighters—offer hope that the extremist group is on the verge of defeat. In Rojava, however, the situation is uncertain. Determined to stamp out a possible Kurdish state, Turkey invaded Syrian territory last August and began shelling Kurdish positions, while at the same time continuing to wage war against its own Kurdish population. In their mission to wipe out the PKK, Turkish troops have razed parts of many cities (such as the predominantly Kurdish city of Cizre), displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians, and allegedly committed war crimes.

I am still in regular contact with people in Rojava, and they tell me that the women’s movement, despite the danger, continues to thrive. Meanwhile, the idea of democratic confederalism is spreading beyond Kurdistan. As Kurdish-led forces retake more territory in Syria, some of the newly liberated cities and villages are setting up their own councils and communes. When the Islamic State and Turkey’s authoritarian regime fall—as all such oppressive states eventually do—women will rebuild their communities.

The post Women’s March appeared first on In The Fray.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Carol Rama’s Resistant Desire

Carol Rama, “Appassionata” (Passionate, 1940), watercolor and pencil on paper, 9 x 13 3/4 in (23 x 35 cm) (© Archivio Carol Rama, Turin; Collection Fondazione CRT per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and GAM Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; courtesy Fondazione Torino Musei; photo by Studio Gonella)

I went to see Antibodies, the Carol Rama exhibit at the New Museum, at 11 o’clock on the morning after the show opened. I had anticipated crowds but was surprised to be one among a very small group of visitors, seemingly made up entirely of Italian tourists.

When I went to the counter to purchase my ticket, I was informed that, because the majority of the museum was closed, in the process of being setting up for new exhibits, and only the Carol Rama show was open, the entrance fee was reduced. “Do you still want to buy a ticket?” the seller asked.

After I said yes and purchased my half-price ticket, I made my way up to the exhibit along with the Italians, in what felt like a private tour of the museum’s inner staircases.

Carol Rama, “Maternità” (Maternity, 1966), mixed mediums on canvas, 35 1/2 x 27 1/2 in (90 X 70 cm) (© Archivio Carol Rama, Turin; photo by Gabriele Gaidano)

In other words, my introduction to the Carol Rama show was a series of interventions that felt like outside forces (or, rather, inside forces) warning me not to enter, or to enter with caution. Were I less pragmatic, I might read these interventions as intentional, a kind of performance informing my entire experience of the exhibit, rather than a series of strange and surprising short circuits. Either way, the interruptions felt organic to the show, due to the interventions in the reception of Rama’s work and the subsequent violence done to her legacy — her being made invisible as an artist. As Paul Preciado writes in the catalogue for The Passion According to Carol Rama, a 2014–15 exhibition at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art:

Invisibilise, discover and reduce to an identity: these are three epistemological operations that the hegemonic discourse of art history has deployed to construct the norm. In the case of Carol Rama, these three critical operations explain the non-place that her work has occupied in museum discourse, anthologies and spaces of exhibition until today, and also make intelligible why it has been so difficult to create a space in which the artist can, in the words of Boris Groys, be considered “a comrade of our time.”

One of the ways artists are made invisible is when the mainstream art world ignores them, because they don’t adhere to current trends, don’t fit into certain identity categories such as “feminist,” or, conversely, are not affiliated with a recognized group of artists such as the surrealists, minimalists, and so on, which tend to be comprised of mostly men. When one of these artists is then “discovered,” they’re labeled as an “outsider” or otherwise marginalized further, while the art historian or critic who discovers her becomes, akin to an anthropologist, a kind of savior, labeling the artist with specific identities or beliefs and silencing her and her original intentions in the process.

Carol Rama, “Epifania” (Epiphany, 2003), graphite, pastel, watercolor, and enamel on canvas-backed paper, 17 3/4 x 12 3/4 in (45 x 32.5 cm) (photo by Andrea Rossetti)

In Rama’s case, she first received high-profile attention from Italian curator Lea Vergine, who included her in L’altra metà dell’avanguardia, 1910-1940 (The Other Side of the Avant-Garde), a 1980 exhibition bringing together the work of more than 100 women artists. According to Preciado:

In the catalogue … Vergine names the artists as ‘genius experimenters’, stating that ‘many of them were Jews, homosexuals, others were not alien to the experience of madness of having passed through the madness of the world.’ … The exhibition was therefore not about the ‘other side of the avant-garde’ but rather about its constitutive outside.

In this way, Rama was ushered into the canon under the direction of Vergine, relegated to a specific identity — woman, outsider, insane — and her own voice was muffled.

Instead of attempting to fit artists into preconceived categories, we might push away our desire to “understand,” which is just another way of saying: make the artist’s work align with our own beliefs and aesthetic values. So that rather than view Rama’s work through the lens of insanity or psychoanalysis, the outsider artist, female victim, feminist, or sado-masochist, we simply see the work. And, when doing so, we ought to assume the highest intelligence of the artist — that Rama knew exactly what she was relaying and what she was leaving out. When we do this, we can see the work as it was meant to be seen — without interventions or negations, simply as it is.

Installation view, Carol Rama: Antibodies at the New Museum, New York, 2017 (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)

The exhibition takes up one whole floor of the New Museum, featuring over 100 of her works from 1940 through 1999, including textiles, paintings, drawings, and assemblages. Throughout the installation, the curators have posted swaths of contextual background on Rama’s life. This choice, though generous, forces biographical readings of the work. In addition, quotes from Rama appear throughout the show — another thoughtful move on the part of the curators, and yet, because the artist’s words have been cut from context, they further encourage one or another biographically centered interpretation of her work. Such incisions into the lives of artists who don’t fit neatly into the normative narrative change how we read their art. When this cutting occurs — removing prices from the picture, pasting in other pieces of the artist’s biography, bits that help present a more cohesive, though not an altogether organic, whole — another, additional violence is done to the artist. How, I wonder, might Rama’s work appear without any biographical background. Or, conversely, with all of it?

Fortunately, it is not possible to reduce Rama’s work to one discrete topic, nor is it possible to single out her style. Making my way through the exhibit, I was surprised by the constant movement: from figurative to abstract, from what appeared to be one idea to another. This piling up of various images and styles, of different themes and forms, is in itself a kind of defiance, a resistance to reduction.

Carol Rama, “La Mucca Pazza” (The Mad Cow, 1998), inner tube, acrylic, and pencil on mail sacking, 22 7/8 x23 1/4 in (58 x 59 cm) (© Archivio Carol Rama, Turin; photo by Pino Dell’Aquila)

Carol Rama, “Nonna Carolina” (Granny Carolina, 1936), watercolor on paper, 9 1/2 x 13 3/4 in (24 x 35 cm) (© Archivio Carol Rama, Turin; Collection Fondazione CRT per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and GAM Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; courtesy Fondazione Torino Musei; photo by Studio Gonella)

Such versatility manifests even within individual works. For example, on first glance, the watercolor “Nonna Carolina” (Granny Carolina, 1936) appears, due its soft hues and the light touch of the medium, pleasing to the eye, almost like a scene from a children’s book or fairy tale. But upon closer inspection, the canvas is strewn with what appear to be amputated body parts or prosthetics. In the center, so pale it’s difficult to make out entirely, is a ghostly apparition of a woman’s torso, her face frozen in a grimace. Are the many limbs hers? Is the female figure a carcass? Is the scene culled from memory, a dream, or neither? The work’s pale hues and subject matter cancel one another out, and in doing so, they resist simple interpretations. In a broader sense, Rama’s watercolors counter her paintings of nude bodies, of amputated penises and vaginas, as well as her assemblages. In the last group, her piece “Le tagliole” (The Traps, 1966) is a stunning construction of the hide of a fox coated in gold enamel. The shining orb suggests a sun, or an amorphous cell, with the face and arm of the dead animal centered in a sea of browns, golds, and reds.

Carol Rama, “Le tagliole” (The Traps, 1966), hide and enamel on canvas, 23 5/8 x 19 3/4 in (60 x 50 cm) (photo by Tommaso Mattina)

These moves back and forth — from delicate watercolors of amputations to the cruelty, or what might be seen simply as the reality, of a carcass — this almost manic motion between styles and genres is consistent in the work of Carol Rama. In interviews, when asked questions that clearly reveal an intent to fix her in the available art historical roles of “feminist,” “madwoman,” or “outsider artist,” Rama always refused.

Yet the artist did have a lingering focus: the depictions of bodies as vulnerable and often at risk, in hospital beds, in wheelchairs, ill or amputated. Jennifer Griffiths explains the historical context for this in the essay “Erotically Engaged: Carol Rama’s Politically Defiant Bodies”:

With its motto, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State,” the Fascist government in Italy legitimized its intrusion into the private lives of citizens. Fascism labeled nonstandard bodies as enemies of society and the practice of defining and disciplining individual bodies and sexualities came to be viewed as fundamental in building social consensus and national identity.

These non-normative bodies — seen by the state as abhorrent and, therefore, vulnerable to discipline — appear throughout the exhibition. They are our bodies, the bodies of many of us. As Precadio writes:

In this inventory of the unacceptable body we find the mentally ill and the sexually deviant as well as the physically or psychologically deficient. These are precisely the sick and institutionised bodies that the work of Carol Rama visibilises and celebrates through a vitalist and sexualised representation, which serves to reclaim them as political subjects who act and experience pleasure.

In the end, because Rama did or could not make artwork that conformed to cultural norms — because she depicted bodies and lives that mirror many of ours, not those of the people in power — her work and she herself were not recognized. This is the price of making art not meant for kings and collectors, but rather aligned with one’s own desire.

Carol Rama, “Appassionata” (Passionate, 1939), watercolor on paper, 11 1/8 x 9 in (28.3 x 22.7 cm) (© Archivio Carol Rama, Turin; photo by Gabriele Gaidano)

Carol Rama: Antibodies continues at the New Museum (235 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through September 10.

The post Carol Rama’s Resistant Desire appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[raceandspeculation]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Breana Pietrosanti

Dr. S. Smalls

Eng 3690

7 April 2017

                       Defying Heteronormativity in “Once More With Feeling”

           The Heterosexual Script is a handbook for sexual content on primetime television shows in the 2001-2002 season most popular among adolescents of the period. The Script dictates how the men and women on these shows, and their teen viewers, ought to think, feel and act in romantic or sexual encounters with the opposite sex (Kim et. al, 146)

           When the characters on these shows stray off the beaten path, they feel ashamed and remorseful. The teens who view these shows and use them as a guide when exploring their own sexuality then mimic these behaviors. This leads to poor sexual ideals: girls precariously teetering between “slut” and “prude,” and boys being rewarded for sexually harassing girls, to name just two examples (Kim et. al, 154).

           “One More With Feeling is the seventh episode of the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the episode, the town of Sunnydale turns into a giant musical due to the summoning of a lord of the dance-esque demon(2001). The Scooby Gang, and the romantic relationships within it, are put to the test as they defy The Heterosexual Script laid out by its competing shows Broadway style.

           Compared to other television shows of the 2001-2002 season, the show was on the low end of the heteronormative scale. Futurama is in the lead with thirty-seven and a half heterosexual references per hour of broadcast, Buffy pales in comparison with seven and a half heterosexual references per hour. The low rank of the season, which is the one during which our episode of Buffy aired, is the perfect foundation to stack the rest of the episode’s defiances onto (Kim et. al, 150).

           According to the script, masculinity means sex. Men are hypnotized by women’s bodies, spend every waking moment thinking about sex, and may be overt in discussing sex with male friends and initiating it with women (Kim et. al, 150-151) Throughout the episode, the male protagonists have more important things to worry about, like finding the source of all of the theatrics and defeating it. Xander is also very sheepish and shy when discussing his sexual behavior. In the song “I’ll Never Tell” he replaces what the audience expects to be references to Anya’s body with the words “tight embrace,” trying to change the subject (“Once More with Feeling,” 2001).

           When trying to court women, men are expected to be powerful, active, and overt. These men also find their value in their wealth and strength (Kim et al, 152-153) In our opening scene, we already see a power play between the sexes, as Buffy saves what could be called a “dude in distress.” She also has authority over Spike when he admits that he is her willing slave. His status as a vampire to her vampire slayer gives her the upper hand again. He’s literally and figuratively six-feet-under her as a dead, supernatural man (“Once More with Feeling,” 2001).

           Women in these shows take a one-eighty spin. They are judged by their sexual behavior. Self-objectification is another one of their duties, as their value is found in their bodies. In fact, they are expected to be more reserved than men, flirting in the most teasingly and subtle way possible (Kim at al, 151-152). Our titular Buffy is powerful, casually slaying monsters as she sings. She’s valued for the title as The Slayer, and has no scarlet letter on her chest for others to gawk at and judge. She never stoops to objectifying herself, until she offers herself as the demon's bride to save her little sister (“Once More with Feeling,” 2001).

           Tara and Willow are an interesting duo to put up against the Heterosexual Script, as they defy the title alone as a lesbian couple. Tara’s love song for Willow, “Under Your Spell,” makes some not-so-subtle sexual references. Tara sings that she can “feel [Willow] inside.” She even plays with her girlfriend’s name when she uses the phrase “spread beneath [her] willow tree” to allude to her genitalia (“Once More With Feeling,” 2001).

           When it comes to romantic relationships, the Script dictates that men are supposed to be independent and value sexual bonds to emotional ones (Kim et al, 153). Xander’s fiancée, Anya, exudes sexual implications in her red-hot lingerie. Her choice of dress paired with the couple’s issues revealed in “I’ll Never Tell” hint at a sexual, and not emotional, bond keeping the two together. But it is later revealed that Xander is the one who summoned the musical demon to ensure that he and Anya get their happily ever after, showing his deep feelings for her (“Once More with Feeling,” 2001).

           Homosexuality merely has its surface skimmed in The Heterosexual Script. Men are expected to be scared of gay men and tendencies, yet fetishize homosexual women (Kim et al, 153-153). Xander’s summoning of the demon means he’s expected to become the demon’s “queen.” The homophobia here is from the demon, who is defeated by the idea of marrying another man. He breaks a supernatural, magical contract to avoid the nuptials. The relationship between Tara and Willow is also never fetishized, but Xander does crack jokes about them leaving The Magic Box to “research” (“Once More with Feeling, 2001).

           Times have changed in the fifteen years since “Once More with Feeling” first aired, and even more so in the two decades since The Slayer first graces television screens. Gay marriage is now legal in all fifty states, and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community is the on the rise. Shows that defy The Heterosexual Script such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer have helped pave the way for this acceptance.

           Jayson Flores, of the site Pride, wrote a warm tribute to Buffy and her impact on his life and the lives of other queer individuals. Though Buffy herself is not a member of this community, her status as the Slayer is an allegory for queer youth. Being the Slayer isolates her from her friends, giving queer youth a way to identify with her. Her mother even asks her if she’s ever tried to not be the Slayer as if it’s a switch she can just turn off, emanating misconceptions about queer youth held even by their own families (Flores, 2016). Buffy teaches teen who struggle with identity and isolation to persevere by giving them representation in pop culture.

           Willow and Tara are another representation of the LGBTQ+ community in popular culture. In a ranking of all the couples on Buffy, Tara and Willow take the highest spot of the three couples mentioned in this paper, coming out at number three; their high rank and fan following show how acceptance of queer youth is rising (Jinks, 2014). The couple has also helped carve the path for other LGBTQ+ characters and even shows, such as Orange is the New Black (Rylah, 2017).

           Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a show ahead of its time, with its strong female lead, sheepish men, and couples from various places in the spectrum of sexuality. With such innovative characters and plot lines that defied The Heterosexual Script, the show teaches viewers that there is no shame in being different and straying from social norms and conventions.

 WC: 1193

Works Cited

 Whedon, Josh. “Once More With Feeling.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, United Paramount Network, 6 Nov. 2001, www.netflix.com. Accessed 29 Mar. 2017.

Flores, Jayson. “Why Queer Youth Needs 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'.” Gay Pride - LGBT & Queer Voices, Pride, 6 Apr. 2016, www.pride.com/gay-tv/2016/4/06/why-queer-youth-needs-buffy-vampire-slayer. Accessed 6 Apr. 2017.

Jinks, Caitlin. “Ranking The Greatests Couples Fron ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer.’” BuzzFeed Community, Buzzfeed, Inc., 15 Apr. 2014, www.buzzfeed.com/caitlinjinks/ranking-the-greatest-couples-from-buffy-the-vampir-mfzs?utm_term=.xbajYZAvYq#.cvqjA496AY. Accessed 7 Apr. 2017.

Kim, Janna L., et al. “From Sex to Sexuality: Exposing the Heterosexual Script on Primetime Network Television.” Vol. 44, no. 2, 2007, pp. 145–157., www.jstor.org/stable/25701753. Accessed 7 Apr. 2017.

Rylah, Juliet B. “How Buffy The Vampire Slayer Depicted One of TV’s First Lesbian Relationships.” Nerdist, Nerdist, 15 Mar. 2017, nerdist.com/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-lesbian-relationship-willow-tara/. Accessed 6 Apr. 2017.