#and yes i will absolutely be framing this entire event through the context and experiences of being a bbc sherlock fan

[whoscruffylooking]

to me it's the thought that mark gatiss himself got invited back for good omens 2, found out what neil was up to and to the press and everyone was like.........you know what we gotta do a sherlock movie it's the only logical thing 😂

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

What Cristabel Did

EXTENSIVE SPOILERS for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth below. If you haven’t read both books, skip the rest of this post. In fact just get off tumblr and go read them instead. I guarantee they’re better than anything else you’ll find here. 

I think I know why John Gaius didn’t tell his disciples about the perfect Lyctorhood, and I don’t think it had to do with sharing power or with AL. I think it’s the same reason why Augustine and Mercymorn hate each other, why Anastasia was the only one to figure out the Eightfold Word, and why Mercy doesn’t want to hear her cavalier’s name.

tl;dr I think Cristabel and Alfred tried to kill some number of the original disciples, forcing them to try for lyctorhood before the ritual was fully understood, and John kept quiet because he didn’t want to tell them they’d killed their cavaliers for nothing.

The handwritten note at the end of the sermon on cavaliers and necromancers says, “valancy says one flesh one end sounds like instructions for a sex toy. can’t stop thinking about that so can someone stop cris and alfred before the sex toy phrase catches on, thanks.” This early in the Nine Houses’ history the entire concept of necromancer and cavalier is still being figured out. It sounds like Cristabel and Alfred were the main drivers behind the idea of the cavalier-necromancer relationship as a formal, sacred oath, coming up with the phrase “one flesh, one end” in the process. Much much later Silas Octakiseron brands the ritual of lyctorhood a mortal sin and heresy as soon as he hears what it entails, because he treats the cavalier-necromancer bond as a sacrament akin to a holy marriage. To trespass against that bond, he declares, was to sin against the Emperor himself. The sermon before the handwritten note backs up that idea, talking about the combination as having all sorts of profound religious symbolism.

Therefore: what if the disciples were working on the ritual of lyctorhood and hadn’t yet figured the cavalier didn’t have to die, when Cristabel and Alfred decided they had to take action to keep any of them from trying? What if, like Silas in Canaan House, Cristabel decided the idea of the adept killing their cavalier was rank heresy and had to be prevented by any means necessary, and convinced Alfred of it as well? Cristabel was from the Eighth House, though early enough that it may not have taken on its hardline personality - then again, perhaps Cristabel’s actions are why it did take on that hardline personality. Augustine calls her an idiot, but also “a fanatic,” and his own brother someone who “regretted that he wasn’t.”

Augustine says that he became a lyctor “under scrambling pressure,” and when Harrow tells the Emperor that she became a lyctor under duress, he replies, “You aren’t the first.” Then when Augustine is talking to John about Alfred, he says, “I have built an entire myriad on the idea that I could’ve made him come around, given five minutes.” That’s in response to John saying, “No one could make him do anything he didn’t want to.” That could mean either Augustine thinks he could have talked Alfred into willingly dying to perform the ritual, or that he could have talked Alfred out of doing something else dire. The way John phrases it makes me think it’s the latter, because in the context of the conversation they’re discussing Cristabel’s influence, and John knows that the lyctoral ritual can be performed even if the cavalier is unwilling. 

So: Cristabel and Alfred decide that they need to do whatever it takes to keep the other disciples from performing the ritual. Either by accident or design, they put Augustine in a situation where he’s facing imminent death - maybe not intentionally on Alfred’s part, but it happens. Augustine chooses to kill his brother and take in his soul to survive as a lyctor, becoming the first to ascend. This fits with Augustine’s loathing of Mercymorn, who in his mind forced him to murder his brother; of his own immortality, since it was gained at the cost of murdering family; and of necromancy in general. He has to convince himself that he could have talked Alfred into making the sacrifice if there were time to ask because otherwise the guilt will destroy him.

After ascension, Augustine’s probably fighting Alfred’s soul, but he’s a powerful spirit magician. Like Ianthe he may be scattered but he’s still present. So now he rounds on Cristabel and probably mortally wounds her. He means to finish the job but Mercymorn intervenes, alerted to what’s happening by all the chaos. She finds her cavalier dying. Cristabel asks her to avenge her and kill Augustine and, since she’s already dying, to use her soul to do it. Mercy finishes Cristabel off and swallows her soul, becoming the second lyctor. So from the very beginning Mercymorn is absolutely set on Augustine’s death and blames him for Cristabel’s death and, in an indirect way, forcing her to become a lyctor as well.

After that it gets a little fuzzy. Events could go several different ways and we just don’t have enough info. I favor the idea that maybe the rampage continues - or maybe Cristabel and Alfred had set all of them up to be in mortal peril (possibly in space, where an adept’s powers won’t work but a lyctor’s would) - because of Mercy’s quote at Cytherea’s funeral: “I never saw her cry except once. The day after. When we put together the research. When she became a Lyctor. I said, There was no alternative. She said, We had the choice to stop.” Mercy saying “there was no alternative” and Cytherea answering with “we had the choice to stop” makes me think everyone was in duress. Mercy saying, “the day after. When we put together the research,” makes me think that they hadn’t fully pieced together the ritual even though six people had already ascended; Augustine improvised. “The day after” also makes me think that most of the lyctors ascended in a single night. If Augustine through Cassiopeia ascended in a group, only Cytherea and Anastasia would be left. Loveday volunteered for the rite in hopes of curing Cytherea, so that’s a non-distress motive for them to ascend as well. That leaves only Anastasia, who now has plenty of time to figure it out on her own.

Where’s John in all this? Remember what Ianthe said when she was trying to regrow her arm? She thought John would tell her to try it on her own first to build her own skill. Maybe John was letting his disciples work out lyctorhood on their own, expecting that they’d figure out the full ritual in time. If they’d planned to try the imperfect ritual, he probably would have stepped in and said, “No, no one has to die, yes now you’re mad at me because I knew the answer all along but it was a learning experience okay.” But because Augustine had to make a scrambling improvisation, John didn’t get the chance to intervene. So before he can do anything, Augustine and Mercy, plus some number of the middle four, have already killed their cavaliers and swallowed their souls (meaning no resurrection). He’s faced with the choice of telling them that those murders weren’t necessary, or keeping the secret and letting Loveday and Cytherea go through with the imperfect ritual. John tells himself that it’ll hurt them all too much if he tells them they killed their cavaliers for nothing, and Loveday’s willing to die already. He stays quiet.

That leaves only Anastasia. With the benefit of time and the others’ experience, Anastasia realizes the ritual can be done without killing the cavalier. She plays this close to the vest, uncertain of her results and unwilling to traumatize the others unless she’s sure. Just in case she’s right, she bans everyone except John from watching her attempt. If she succeeds and Samael lives, they can figure out how to break it to the others. But something goes wrong - or John sabotages her - and Samael dies, leaving Anastasia thinking she didn’t have it right after all.

A myriad later, John and the other lyctors have yet to allow or invite any other adepts to attain lyctorhood, believing the cost is too high. But now they’re down to four lyctors and three Resurrection Beasts, and those four lyctors are showing the strain. So John invites the heirs and their cavaliers to Canaan House. He knows his first disciples left the necessary information behind to put together the rite - only the imperfect rite, but that’s okay because this time there won’t be anyone making the choice under duress. As he tells Harrow, “I intended for the new Lyctors to become Lyctors after thinking and contemplating and genuinely understanding their sacrifice—an act of bravery, not an act of fear and desperation. Nobody was meant to lose their lives unwillingly at Canaan House.” If the cavaliers are okay with it, he’s not on the hook, he reasons. He’ll keep his secret and get new lyctors without any fresh guilt on his conscience.

Except of course it doesn’t work out that way. As usual, John’s future plans are sabotaged by his past plans coming back to haunt him. He ends up gaining one and a half lyctors at the unexpected cost of one old lyctor, so that’s a net gain of half a lyctor with several heirs dead in the process. And then an even newer plan gets sabotaged by an even older plan, leaving him with one and a half, possibly two functioning lyctors. Meanwhile Camilla and Palamedes are out there probably as a functional lyctor-cavalier pair that he doesn’t know about, because Palamedes has been stuck in freeze-frame hell for long enough to come to the same conclusions as Anastasia. It’s not gonna go well for John, ey?

[laconiclurker]

A little bit of negativity, as a treat, I guess, lol. If you loved the Lucifer finale, I’m genuinely happy for you, no hard feelings. If you didn’t, I don’t know if anyone can relate to this, but these are just my current complicated feelings of disappointment with some aspects of the finale that live alongside my relief that Deckerstar did reunite for their happy ending.

But Lucifer was the one show that I trusted to give me an “unqualified” happy ending, and any disappointment I have with S6 is really attributable to the fact that reality fell short of my expectations. This was naive of me to presume a completely happy ending, because I don’t think modern TV works that way in any context. Every victory has a cost; every conclusion has some touch of poignant tragedy. If it doesn’t, then labels of “unrealistic” and “unearned” get thrown around. I read at least one (positive) professional review of season 6 that still called the season “fan service” because Deckerstar reunited in Hell.

I also know that some would probably say, hey, why are you bummed, it actually was an unqualified happy ending (after all, Deckerstar, the engine driving the show, is together for all eternity, and they got a kid that they will also be able to see for all eternity). Some others would say, at the very least, the emphasis was definitely more on the “sweet” in “bittersweet” given that outcome.

But I keep coming back to that scene where Chloe comes home from the hospital with Rory. Chloe was surrounded by a village of people supporting her, escorted home by God himself, so I know she wasn’t alone. However, when she was sitting on the sofa all by herself, with her baby in her arms, looking around at the people there to support her but still looking a bit wistful, I’ll admit that I cried. Because the one person who should have been there over all others … wasn’t. Just like Chloe’s own father couldn’t be there for her for the rest of her life. Just like the father of her other daughter couldn’t be there for his kid. For a reason that I found unpersuasive in the storytelling. In my opinion, Lucifer’s decision to go away was extracted under extreme duress of the highest order and while given in sincerity and conviction, was not one he would have made absent the duress, nor one would he have had to make if the paradox of Rory’s time travel were resolved in any number of other ways.

So yes, the absence of loved ones at important events happens in real life all the time (loved ones die and you don’t see them again in this life, or depending on your beliefs, ever). Of course people deal with it (I’ve dealt with it). But this is a fiction and fantasy where they didn’t have to make Chloe go through that. Or Lucifer. The agonizing drawn out goodbyes and worry over this event cast a sad pall over the last couple of episodes, when certainly by ep 9, it was clear from Lucifer’s goodbyes to his friends that this was going to happen. And the 10 second reunion at the end wasn’t enough time to wash away the hurt of the prior 20 minutes or last couple of episodes.

Rory called the sacrifice of her childhood a blip in their grand existence, but we viewers are ordinary people with only a human lifetime as a frame of reference. Missing his child’s entire childhood (against his will) is, as another good post I read said, an absolute tragedy for Lucifer, in my frame of reference. Again, this happens in real life, and people deal. But I just didn’t expect that to be the parting emotion of the show. So although I found the acting beautiful and the goodbyes and the sacrifice plucked my heartstrings, it wasn’t the experience that I had hoped for in light of the fun, romance and happiness that this show had brought me previously.

[bxllafanficc]

Lady of mischief- Part four

Pairing: Loki x Greek!goddess f!reader

Summary: Asgard is having a change of power so there are several events Loki has to get right before he can announce victory against his brother as the next king. But one lady’s approval will change the whole outcome if the stakes are right. That lady is you, intended heir to the throne of Olympus but tied down to a marriage of convenience with one of the princes of Asgard. The prince you choose to marry will be the next king but you refuse to let yourself be a pawn in this game for power. Loki, with his intentions to take you as his queen has far greater reason to marry you than just for the reason of being king. You however, would rather cut off your left arm than exposing yourself for the fact that there’s another purpose besides Loki getting a throne to sit on.

The palace halls were crowded with workers and even aristocrats from far away staying in the palace’s guest areas. People from high ranking families and servants alike came our from their rooms. The chatting wasn’t quiet enough for you not to hear but the context was obvious. Everyone wondered why Asgard was suddenly shaking, why the ground beneath their feat suddenly became an object of death instead of the concrete safety it’s always been. The poor Asgardians had probably never experienced an earthquake before. Or a god loosing their cool and taking it out on the nature either.

Despite people making the halls hard to get past, everyone stepped aside for the prowling embodiment of fury: you, on your way to confront the man who started the nightmare.

You truly tried to make the waking earthquake to stop. It wasn’t at full force yet since you were still somewhat grounded. But every time you would try to strap the source of its boiling anger, a maid you walked past would mention prince Loki’s wellbeing and the emotions would burst off the lid again.

And you knew that you’d never make this decision in a calm collected state. After all, this was what he wanted. You’d play into his hands if you didn’t act careful.

You pounded on the wooden door and secretly hoped it would break a hole from the impact. The door stood unaffected.

“What’s the matter?” The mumble was faint and came after a brief paus.

You gave the door one last punch and regretted it immediately. How would confronting him affect the earthquake? We’re you being selfish for potentially putting the Asgardians in danger?

You were just about to turn around and leave but the door swung open with a stale-eyed Loki at the other end.

“(Y/n)? What are you doing to my poor door?”

Couldn’t he at least act like he was surprised to see you? At least give you that much satisfaction?

You crossed your arms tightly above your chest and forced yourself to stare him right in the eyes. The thought of making him stand accountable for his actions was the only thing not making the shaking worse.

“Are you the reason behind me falling every 3 seconds? The waves are especially strong here, did you know that?” You actually didn’t know about that, which only showed just how little control you had over yourself.

“Would you care to elaborate exactly what was your plan tonight? Making me look like your pretty little pawn all dolled up in that dress or locking me up here, tied to your leash for all eternity?” You tried your best to hide the emotion in your words but ended up just spitting them through your teeth instead.

He looked genuinely clueless with his furrowed eyebrows. At least he gave you that. Wrong timing though. His hand traveled up the frame of the door as a way of stealing himself for the shaking. If you lost just a little more control, he’d either fall on his rear or right over you, taking you down with him.

You stood unaffected by the shaking, however.

“What are you talking about? Why would I want to lock you up?” He raised a pointed finger at you.

You had to scoff. How could he pretend not to know when it was so obvious?

“You going off earlier to whine to my uncle wasn’t you manipulating him into getting what you wanted?”

The finger fell slightly and he formed a faint ‘oh’ with his lips. But his expression was still curious. Was he offended?

“Yes but, what does that have to do with you being ‘locked up’?”

“You don’t know?” The shaking seemed to intensify and it caught you off guard.

“If you’ll enlighten me, I’ll answer that for you when I know what we are talking about”, he said as he almost fell forwards with a soft yelp. Your noses touched just as he got a hold of the doorframe, your cheeks brushing against each other as he slumped forwards in relief. It was only a second of him being so close but you felt frozen in the moment.

“And would you stop doing that?!” He motion at the ground and the shaking actually faltered. Not because he told you to stop, but because you weren’t furious anymore. The anger seemed to have vanquished and you were too caught up in his closeness to ask yourself why.

Finally Loki seemed to realize how close you actually were and pulled away. His hair tickled your neck just like they’d done earlier.

“I’m sorry for…” He tapped his nose and cheek with a soft hand. “I know you… that you, yeah.”

Find it disgusting? ‘Despise’ his touch? But you never really meant it, though. Back then he laughed it off but now it seemed like he took your words with him ever since. It kind of made your stomach twist in guilt. Or hunger. You couldn’t tell. When was the last time you’d eaten? Wine didn’t count, that much you knew.

“(Y/n)?”

Why were you here, again? Right.

“Right… Zeus banished me from entering Olympus.” You just said it bluntly because there was actually something else you’d rather said. You lacked the guts though.

“What? Why? Does my father know about this?” His eyes turned round as if it was really bad news for him. The reaction you’d expected was nothing like what you actually got.

“I don’t know about that. But I’m forced to stay with you and Thor until… Until I’ve made up my mind.” Your arms fell flat to your sides since you were no longer angry. Back was the collected you. But you couldn’t quite remember the events leading up to you calming down.

“Haven’t you made up your mind since long ago though? And that’s not for all eternity- wait nevermind, I get it.” His expression faltered to match yours and you started looking around. At the furniture, at the walls… Without the anger giving you strength, you could no longer look him in the eyes for too long.

Lastly you peeked beside his broad frame and into his room only to find it absolutely destroyed. Chairs and what you assumed must’ve been his working desk were broken into tiny pieces across the floor along with shattered porcelain figures of different sorts. The drapes were halfway ripped off the window and stuffing from the bedsheets were still visibly dusting the air.

Loki must have seen you noticing the mess because he let out a muffled sound and moved in front of your vision.

Now forced to look at him, you saw that his hair was tangled, clothes messily arranged and his chest rising and falling rather quickly. Was that redness in his eyes as well?

“Loki, are you okay? Have you been cr-“ He immediately cut you off with a dismissive arm and avoided looking at you. The tables had turned so quickly you still had trouble figuring out how to handle the situation.

“Of course not! Now it’s time for you to go. It’s bad for your highness’ skin to be awake for this long.”

‘Your highness’?

He was already midway at closing the door when your hand snaked between and caught it. You could see him getting ready to put distance between himself and the door through the small gap you had left.

“Is there something that- is everything alright?” You didn’t really know why you were now chasing his attention like that. Didn’t you want him to stay away from you? To avoid and feel nothing but hostility from you?

Loki only wasted one second to look at you before he sighed and untangled your fingers from his door. The skin-to-skin contact was warm. Not at all despicable as you’d told him. Damn your mouth sometimes.

“Yes. Everything’s just fine. Good night, my lady.” And so you were facing a closed door. You were thinking about knocking again but somehow knew that door wouldn’t open anytime soon. You’d heard of past experiences where the prince would lock himself up in his room for days just so nobody would see just a tad of vulnerability from him.

Had you just made the maid’s work harder? You thought about how you would have to apologize later if that was the case. Maybe apologize to the entire population of Asgard for causing the ground to shake while you were at it. If you were to stay here for all eternity, you might as well make some friends. Because it would most likely be forever. Either you were trapped refusing to marry one or the brothers or trapped by the crown that would be on your head if you did end up choosing one.

The walk back to your room was quick since it wasn’t too far from the prince’s. Henna greeted you at the door and brought you inside to discuss the matter that caused your outbreak.

“So prince Loki’s room was like a scene out of a war? I heard from the maids here that outbursts like that has only occurred a few times before but the prince would always cover it up with illusion magic immediately. He’d ignore it for as long as he could until sooner or later when the servants tripped over the mess and couldn’t see the reason for them bruising an arm or knee.”

He’d cover up the destruction? Why hadn’t he done it earlier? Maybe you caught him off guard mid-rampage. And so he was to distracted to conjure the spell.

Henna had been talking nonstop ever since you came back. She insisted on babying you tonight and currently brushing your hair before bed, she had all the time in the world to talk.

“Henna?” You stared into your own reflection in the mirror and found only tired eyes met you at the other end.

“Yes, my lady?”

“Do you know if it’s usual for the prince to cry?” Henna put down the brush and went to grab your nightgown with an almost skipping walk. Why were she in such a light mood tonight? Right. Everyone had a great time at the banquet, except for you and, you assumed, Loki as well. You should be asking Henna if she danced with some handsome youngster tonight instead of hearing about gossip about the second born prince. You should mind your business. Loki was fine, as he said.

But Loki is a known liar.

“No, I don’t think so? There would definitely have been servants talking about that if it ever happened since prince Loki isn’t very popular with the maids. Why do you ask?”

If that was the case, then you were probably just imagining it. His eyes could be red out of straining the veins in his face from destroying all that furniture too. And after all, prince Loki’s wellbeing wasn’t your concern.

But you couldn’t help but wonder why he suddenly started addressing you so formally just as he wanted to get away from you, since he never usually kept up the formalities in private.

(A/N: Hi! Don’t hesitate to comment on each chapter what you thought about it/if you liked it since that keeps me motivated to keep writing. Also reblog so my story reaches a wider audience, if you really liked it! Your support is much appreciated. Also let me know if you want to be added to the tag list for this series. Have a good day, lovelies!)

Find the other parts in my MASTERLIST

Tag list: @liffydaze @queen-of-mischief @sidepartskinnyjeans @girl-obsessed-with-things @obsessivelysearching @reverse-iak

[anonniemousefics]

WIP Wednesday

I’m not going to be sharing my fanfic WIPs at the moment, for fear of scaring off my newfound and terribly skittish motivation. But if you’d like a totally out of context bit of my original WIP featuring two of my favorite little brain babies, enjoy :)

Sneak peak at the prologue

Get to know my brain children: OC moodboards

Dominic

Why hadn’t I eaten anything first?

The ground beneath my shoes bent and warped as I caught myself against the bar again, desperate to wave down what’s-his-name before Rayna Greenbarrow had a stroke. This evening was only supposed to end in some light rebuking and maybe a scandalous rumor for the newspapers, not with a dead Saint’s daughter and actual jail time. A cold sweat started to break out across my forehead. 

“Alan,” I heard a man’s voice say next to me, where Rayna stood. 

But when I looked back, there was no man. Only Rayna, standing from her seat, straight as an arrow, her little gloved hands on the bar. The sea spray had tousled her red hair out of its bindings, so that thick, soft locks of it trailed down the back of slender neck. Wisps framed her freckled cheeks, which had been blushed and rosy all evening but now looked pale and drained.

And her enormous eyes, bright and fiery just moments before, were now completely milk white.

“Alan,” her lips moved, but it wasn’t her voice at all. 

What had been in my drink?!

My knees were buckling, my feet stumbling, my hands grasping at air as I tripped backwards, the world completely on end now. The bar stools toppled to the floor with a crash around me, but even in the chaos, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Rayna. 

What I was seeing made absolutely no sense. 

At the sound of the crash, Alan came running from the opposite end of the bar, and, when he locked eyes with Rayna’s dead-eyed stare, he looked startled, though nowhere near as horrified and mystified as I felt, cowering from the floor. They stared at each other a moment, Alan cocking his head, beneath the flickering glow of the lamps, twinkling against the rows of liquor bottles shelved across the back wall.

“Pop, is that you?” he asked, leaning out across the bar as he took in Rayna’s milky gaze. His dark eyes were gleaming.

A sweet smile spread across Rayna’s lips, full of an unexpected tenderness, and she reached up across the bar with one of her gloved hands to gently cup Alan’s rough, bearded face. 

“My boy,” said the gruff voice that moved her mouth. 

At the sound of the voice, Alan’s expression seemed to melt, his eyes closing while old memories washed over him.

“I knew you were hanging around,” he sighed. “You never let me change anything around here.” 

“No, son,” said the voice behind Rayna’s tender smile, “you’re just afraid to change anything. I’m proud of what you’ve built. You should never let my memory hold you back.” 

“We just miss you—” Alan could barely whisper.

“We will all be together again in the end,” the voice assured him. “I am going now. I love you, then and always.” 

Rayna’s hands moved back to the bar as her head tipped down, her eyes closing shut. For a brief moment, there was an icy cold rush of air that rippled around her, catching the lace of her gown and ruffling the tousled, loose waves of red hair around her soft cheeks. I felt a shiver of gooseflesh break out across my arms, like every hair was standing on end.

When she opened her eyes again, they were normal and soft brown, her eyelashes fluttering as she raised her gaze with a gasp. 

“Thank you,” Alan murmured to her, his eyes still glassy. “I didn’t know you were a vessel. Now I’m certain you deserve a more decent man.” 

If I was supposed to take offense to that, it wasn’t registering. I could feel my hands starting to shake against wood floor, a tremble that reverberated up through my elbows, and my stomach pitched while my mouth went dry. 

Too much to drink too fast. Not enough food. Here it comes.

I scrambled to my feet, pushing my way through the pressed in crowd as I lurched for the door. 

“Dominic, wait!” I heard Rayna cry after me, but the air of the room pressed in around my head and my ears and I could think of nothing else but getting outside before all of my insides exploded out of me.

I rode a fierce wave of nausea right out the door into the cool night air in the alleyway, but as soon as the fresh air hit my lungs, it began to subside. I couldn’t seem to get air in fast enough; my head was spinning as I tried to gulp in quick gasps. I hadn’t been too drunk after all, but I was in a complete panic.

“Dominic—” I heard her voice behind me as the silver bell jingled over the door. 

“Broken glass!” I reminded her, and when I turned back from the brick wall opposite the green door, she hadn’t budged from The Black Rose’s threshold. That was good. We needed some distance between us for the moment.

I began pacing back and forth in the alley while Rayna wrapped her arms around the bodice of her lacy gown, her exposed shoulders shivering even though the summer night air was comfortable. 

Goddamn that gown of hers. If it wasn’t for that gown, she would probably still be at Westlea and my world wouldn’t have been fracturing.

“Say something,” she pleaded. I glanced at her face, and she looked as terrified as I was. 

“What the hell was that?” I shouted, pointing at the tavern door. 

“I don’t know,” she shouted back. “I’ve never done that before.” 

“That was — that was — ” I had to stop pacing, doubling over as I sucked in air. Stars were exploding in my vision. “I can’t breathe.” 

“Let’s just take a moment,” said Rayna. 

Running my hands through my hair, I stalked across the alleyway and turned to lean against the brick wall. Each breath felt like my chest was being crushed. I leaned my head back against the ridged bricks behind me and focused on the stars above us, breathing through my nose while my mind played the images in a loop. The milky eyes. The man’s voice. The cold rush of icy wind. The weight of memory.

The magic.

“You think I’m evil.” I heard Rayna’s voice, small and frightened, across the expanse of cobblestones between us. I looked down at her, and her quivering face looked crushed while she held herself, trembling on the doorstep in her stocking feet. It pulled at something in me, and I felt the panic begin to unwind itself.

“No.” I shook my head, still breathing heavily. 

“Yes, you do,” Rayna insisted, looking miserable. She was shaking so hard that her hair trembled against her skin. “You’re thinking you should report this.” 

I sighed, still shaking my head, and looked at my black shoes against the cobblestones until I could get a handle on breathing properly. When I’d gathered myself, I took a tentative, gentle step toward her.

“I have very little conviction on much of anything,” I told her, and then the alcohol finally pulled the lever on the dam that held back all the words that had been building since the entire experience at the bar. “In fact, I can think of really only two convictions that I’ve held onto in my life, both from my father. He would always say that a man is only as good as his word, and while I may be a disappointment to his memory in every other possible way, that much stuck with me, and I swear to you, I will not lie to you — at least, not well. I do not think you’re evil or cursed, and I would never discourage or report anyone for doing what you just did for that man. That was—”

And then the words failed, and I could do nothing else but clutch at my chest, somewhere over the gaping unseen hole I would always carry. To be given the chance to hear my mother’s voice, one last time. To finally say the good-bye I never got to say to my father. Who could put that feeling into words? 

“Then why are you panicking?” Rayna interrupted, still shivering.

“Because this was all supposed to be bullshit!” I exclaimed, and I started to laugh in spite of myself. What was happening? What world was I in? “The Blessed Mission, the dinishee who brought the old magic from the fey realm, the nine fires of hell — these are fairy stories. But you — this shatters the only other conviction in my life! What am I supposed to do with you? And that?” I pointed to the green door behind her. “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. What was it like? What happened?” 

“Can we go back inside and sit?” Rayna asked, swaying a little. “I don’t feel well.” 

“Of course.” I crossed the distance between us in two quick steps, grabbing the door for her as the silver bell jingled. We slipped back into the warm, raucous room, where no one seemed to have noticed or cared for the magical events that had transpired just steps away from their revelry. Like it had been happening all around them always, and I’d never been the wiser.

This changed everything. 

But first, I would usher Rayna back through the crowd, back to the bar and into the corner where she could sit on a stool and lean her head against the wall. I ordered us both coffees, since we both had gotten a little carried away. I let my mug sit on the bar while I leaned against an elbow facing Rayna, who nursed her coffee up in her black gloved hands. Her eyes were like slits as she rested her head back against the wall, the tousled wisps of her hair brushing against her neck and shoulders. I’d force myself to focus on her eyes and not the curve of her chest that swelled when she sighed. 

Fine, just the quickest of glances. I’m no Saint. 

“What happened was there was a ghost in this corner when we first got here—” she began as she exhaled.

“I’m sorry, what?” I interrupted, waving a hand at her. “Is this a normal occurrence for you?” 

She just nodded her head once, as if it was too heavy.

“You see ghosts,” I clarified.

“All the time,” she replied, looking weary. “Every day.” 

I couldn’t believe I had no choice but to believe her. That’s the kind of day this had turned into.

“So, there was a ghost here,” I said, slowly. 

“There was a ghost right here.” Rayna pointed at her lap, indicating her seat. “And he was being a little mouthy.” 

“Mouthy,” I echoed.

“He had opinions,” said Rayna. “He recognized you. Didn’t seem to like you very much. Can’t say that I blame him.” 

“You’re kind of a mean drunk,” I commented, frowning.

“So, anyway,” Rayna rolled her head back, ignoring my remark, “then I get all shouty and he noticed that I’m Blessed and he says — you don’t know what you can do, let me show you a thing.” 

“This ghost sounds like a dirty old man,” I pointed out. 

“I swear on all of the Saints this is what happened,” said Rayna, bringing her head up, eyes wide. “And then he did the thing.” 

“The thing.” I was on the edge of my seat, pushing for more. 

“The thing, the thing, the hedgewitchy thing.” Rayna leaned her head back again, closing her eyes.

“Drink some coffee,” I urged. 

“You drink some coffee,” she frowned at me, stubbornly. 

“But you’re not even a hedgewitch.” I was actually saying these words seriously. “How are you doing vessel magic?” 

“You all keep using that word.” Rayna squinted at me. “Vessel this, vessel that. I don’t even know what that is.” 

“It’s what you did, I’m assuming,” I said, “which you would know if the Blessed let anybody talk about the old traditions. Vessel magic was said to be how hedgewitches communicated for and with the spirits of the dead. I thought it was bullshit—”

“I know; you said that already,” Rayna interrupted, irritated. “Very loudly.” 

“Sorry about that,” I nodded. She’d reached at the stage of drunk where it was in everyone’s best interest to keep humoring her. “You’re killing me here, Rayna. What was it like?” 

“You’ve had more to drink than me,” Rayna pointed, wobbling. “Why are you so upright?” 

“Practice,” I told her. “Vessel magic, Rayna —”

“It’s like riding in a carriage,” said Rayna, as she straightened her spine against the wall, looking me dead in the eye. “It’s like one minute you’re driving the carriage and in control, and then someone else takes the reins, so you ride in it for awhile. You can see out the windows, and you know where you are and that you’re safe, but someone else is doing the work. And then when they’re done, it’s just—” She raised her fingers and tried to snap, but it made no sound against her gloves. She looked down at her fingers, confused and disappointed. “It doesn’t work with gloves on,” she slurred. “That really ruined the effect.” 

“It didn’t; I’m enraptured,” I insisted, but she’d set down her coffee cup and was wiggling off the glove. 

“I just— I just—” she was saying, and then when it was off, she looked back up at me, raising her hand victoriously. “And then when they’re done, it’s just—” She snapped her fingers, soundly. “And then you’re back at the reins.” 

“Brilliant,” I applauded. She grinned, visibly proud of herself. 

[skybird13]

My Thoughts on Clover’s Introductory Scenes in RWBY vol. 7

Ask and ye shall receive.  

@fairgame-is-endgame​ actually requested that I go off on another long-ass ramble about Clover Ebi. (Okay, full honesty, I don’t know if he was actually expecting another massive post but... it’s happening anyway. Such is life 😉 ). Rambling about Clover and Qrow has been my favorite thing to do since they came on screen together so how could I possibly say no? As the title states, I’ll be focusing primarily on Clover’s introductory scenes back in volume 7 chapter 1, the narrative decisions made by CRWBY in framing and animating those scenes, and whatever other little tidbits I can coax out in the process. 

But first, a quick shoutout to @lady-branwen​ who made an awesome post about these same scenes a few weeks ago I think? You can check it out here and you should definitely check it out. It’s fantastic and we touch on a lot of the same things.

[vol. 7 spoilers ahead]

Also, this thing is freakishly long so I’m going to put it under a cut. Happy reading y’all!

The Lead-In

I was going to start this post off with the first glimpses we get of Clover Ebi’s character, but I think the moments leading up to his arrival are pretty damn important to this analysis, so let’s take a look at how this whole thing is set up. 

The events just before teams RWBY, JNOR, and Qrow are captured by the Ace Ops is one completely focused on the “kids” (Ruby in particular) and their reunion with Penny. Qrow is there but he’s mostly uninvolved in the whole thing, hanging in the background.

The scene shifts focus on to Qrow a little when we get to see his actual reaction to Penny’s return, but he’s still being portrayed in the context of something that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with him personally:

That’s not the best still shot of his somewhat goofy smile but he’s clearly very happy for Ruby and pleased overall with how things are going in Mantle so far. He says something to the effect of Penny’s arrival is a surprise “but not unwelcome. I was honestly expecting things to go a lot rougher.” That line right there is a pretty classic narrative device to signal to the audience that some type of shit is about to go down. The fact that it is said by Qrow himself is pretty significant. This interaction could have been played out by Weiss, Blake, and Yang, and it would have accomplished that same tip-off, foreshadowing effect. Instead, through his delivery of the line, the narrative focus is very subtly shifted to Qrow. This accomplishes a few things: 

1) It reminds us of Qrow’s Semblance and his base-level expectations for just about anything in his life (as if any of us could forget, but this is relevant to a point I’m going to make later). 

2) It transitions Qrow from background to foreground in a narrative sense. Again, Penny’s arrival had very little to do with him personally. He didn’t know her, never interacted with her, and probably would have only heard about her from Ruby (or potentially James, though considering the nature of their relationship in vol 3, I find that highly unlikely). Thus, this shift offers the audience another clue: whatever is about to happen, it will have a lot to do with Qrow specifically. 

3) It establishes the grounds for the subversion of expectations. Point #1 ties into this. Because we are reminded of Qrow’s Semblance and his own personal expectations, we are fully set up to believe that whatever is going to happen next is going to be bad. We expect this because he expects this, and because we have been conditioned to expect the worst when it comes to Qrow. CRWBY absolutely leans against, plays with, and then subverts those expectations entirely, which I will get into when Clover actually shows up. 

4) Closely related to #3 is the fact that it brings out a line of tension surrounding Qrow specifically. What that tension is going to be as of this moment, we have no idea, but we know that it’s going to be closely tied to (if not revolve entirely around) Qrow himself.

5) Because of the shift in focus, it smooths the way for what happens next.

Narrative Focus Shifts Fully to Qrow

This scene right here is where the narrative shift to Qrow reaches completion. The line delivery right before this, which is the last thing said before they are captured, functions as a sort of transitional phase. It does bring Qrow back into the forefront but doesn’t put him center stage. This scene, however, does do that.

Now, from a character’s perspective (i.e. the incoming Ace Ops), if you’re going to make an arrest on a large group of people, subduing the most dangerous member of the group first is probably the best way to go. We can see in this shot where Qrow is standing in relation to the others:

Qrow is by far the most physically imposing and the oldest of the group, which sort of makes him the de facto leader, at least from outward appearances. He’s not out of reach or significantly distanced from any of the kids. The sensible thing would have been to take him out first and then deal with teams RWBY and JNOR. Instead, we get these progressive shots of team JNOR being targeted followed closely by team RWBY.

Then there is a pause in the action. Qrow is left standing alone, as depicted in the header image above, weapon drawn, ready to fight. This pause, like everything else in these scenes, operates on a couple of different levels: 

1) It gives the audience a chance to absorb what’s happening and sets up the Ace Ops to enter the scene. We know from the relatively “gentle” nature of the take-down that whatever is happening, while not ideal, probably isn’t going to be as bad as we (and Qrow) would normally expect. Salem’s agents sure as hell aren’t going to try to capture them all with some fancy bolas; they would just kill them all on sight, with the exception of Ruby. It’s also not Grimm. So the subversion of our expectations starts here.

2) It also functions to completely divert any errant scraps of our attention onto Qrow. Again, the narrative shift is completed in this shot.

3) It reinforces the fact that the following events are going to have a lot to do with Qrow personally. He’s alone in the frame here, the sole center of narrative focus and attention. 

4) Again, this focus paves the way for what happens next.

The Arrival of the Ace Ops and Clover Ebi

With our focus fully resting on Qrow now, he is able to function as the lens through which the audience is meant to experience the next sequence of events. We’re with him when he gets snared. We’re with him when he hits the ground. And we’re with him when the camera pans out to show the kids around him and the arrival of the Ace Ops behind him.

Here is where things get fun.

The first glimpse of the Ace Ops is another massive step in the subversion of expectations. They’re about the furthest thing from threatening that we can probably get while still maintaining some level of weight in the scene. They’re uninformed, which is typically not a bad thing (it lets the audience know that they’re likely some sort of official Atlas patrol force) and their postures are not aggressive in the slightest. It’s made pretty clear that we’re not meant to be overly concerned with them, which means that the tension of our main cast being in any sort of danger disintegrates almost instantaneously.

So where does the tension go, you may ask?

To the dramatic entrance of Clover Ebi, of course! More specifically, it goes to the fact that while all of the other Ace Ops are introduced as a group, Clover is deliberately and carefully singled out, just as Qrow was singled out in the scenes directly preceding this. 

Remember that Qrow is supposed to be the lens for the audience in this whole sequence. Now take a look at the way that Clover’s damn boot is framed. Remind you of anything? 

(This man and his whole portrayal by CRWBY is so deliciously extra, I swear.)

From the very beginning, the scenes between Qrow and Clover are framed in such a way that, even when not spatially close to one another, they are still depicted as being together. Connected. And it all starts with the hilariously deliberate placement of that damn boot.

Now, I’m not saying this is where the romantic tension begins (that comes in chapter 3). It’s a little hard to introduce it when Qrow is tied up on the ground and all we have is some footwear from Clover (unless you’re that kind of person, in which case... god’s speed to you). But it does set it up to come into play later in the volume. 

The fact that we don’t get to see Clover directly is also pretty significant and, once again, this decision does more than one thing for the story. 

1) As I stated, Clover is singled out. This is accomplished not only by his delayed entrance into the scene and the fact that he enters from the complete opposite direction of his team, but also because we don’t get to see him right away. You know who sees him first? Qrow. And because we’re meant to experience the scene through Qrow, our attention and curiosity are immediately piqued because we’re being denied something that he already has: a view of Clover.

2) It kicks up dramatic tension, which at this point I’m pretty sure is almost a necessity to Clover the way oxygen is for the rest of us, but on a narrative level it really works out. Despite the fact that everyone has just been apprehended, in these moments of Clover’s appearance and Qrow’s reaction, the Teams and the Ace Ops are 100% in the background. The narrative focus at this point has not only shifted but has completely inverted from the norm, putting full focus on these two characters as opposed to Ruby or any of the others or even the group as a whole. This is, by the way, the nature of nearly all of Qrow’s and Clover’s scenes together, no matter how brief. CRWBY bookends them out (usually through key visual cues, such as the not-quite-over-the-shoulder thing), lingers exclusively on them for a time, and then shifts right back into the main narrative structure. This is not something that can be achieved accidentally.

3) It really does this amazing thing where the focus is bounced around between Clover and Qrow until we realize that we’re supposed to be focusing on them together. We get Qrow in this shot and Clover’s entrance as a sort of disruption. Literally, the man walks into Qrow’s shot the way he walks into his life, and we the audience are meant to feel the impact of this.

4) It answers the question put into our minds during the post-Penny build-up to these scenes: if the next events after Penny’s departure are going to revolve around Qrow in some way, how? What exactly is the big impact going to be? Clover’s entrance, and particularly the way it was handled by CRWBY, gives us that answer. It’s not the things that are happening or anyone in the scene behind Qrow. The significant missing part of the equation is Clover himself. 

5) Continues to subvert expectations. Remember waaaay up there where I said that the subtle reminder of Qrow’s Semblance and his typical mindset was important? Well, here would be why. I’m not sure what I was expecting on my first viewing of this episode, honestly. But that nudge at Qrow’s Semblance amped up my nerves a little and I’m pretty sure that was entirely on purpose. At first we the audience see the arrest as a potential side-effect of Qrow’s Semblance (again, we’ve been conditioned to accept this correlation). But the fact that it’s Clover we’re meant to focus on, and not the arrest itself, takes that off the table. This scene isn’t about Qrow’s Semblance screwing him over again. It’s about this particular man being introduced into his life.

Clover’s Full Introduction

That right there is the second glimpse we get of Clover. Again... THE FRAMING!!!!! But I’ve said enough about that in this and other posts, so I’ll go into some other details that get laid out in the following interaction. 

First of all, Clover walks right up to Qrow (completely bypassing Ruby, which I’ll get to in a second), further cementing the fact that we are meant to be focused on him through Qrow as a lens. If you have doubts, look at where Qrow’s focus is. We get a little more of Clover in this shot and, honestly, I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but I find the fact that we get a glimpse of Clover’s long coat (something that directly echoes Qrow’s own coattails/cape) at least worthy of note. Especially in light of the next shot that shows us just a little more:

*cough* Framing *cough* (Seriously. This might be a drinking game next volume where I fully expect them to get some more screentime together.) 

The lucky rabbit’s foot offers a pretty significant clue to who exactly is standing in front of Qrow. It’s this slow piecemealing out of Clover’s appearance that leads me to believe that the shot where we can see his coat wasn’t 100% by chance.

This shot also totally removes all others from the scene, thereby keeping them in the background and Clover and Qrow in the narrative foreground. 

And then, finally:

In the previous shot, Qrow tries to offer some explanation that he hopes will get him out of the bolas and off the ground: “Hey, pal, I’m a licensed Huntsman. Just helped save everyone?”

And this right here is the shot we are given in direct response: Clover Ebi in all his glory. Lucky rabbit’s foot, four-leaf clover on his chest, horseshoe... everything that we would pretty much identify as the antithesis of Qrow’s character. 

Now. I will fully and completely admit that there are a large number of ways CRWBY could have taken this whole scene and everything that comes after. He and Qrow were clearly framed together in the shots leading up to this, but as of this moment, it could have just as easily leaned towards a rivalry rather than a romance. Clover could have done any number of things that would have established him as an ass-hole that we all would have hated right along with Qrow. But he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t gloat or give off any malicious vibes. The guy is cocky and at ease, but that’s part of what we all love about him.

Also worth noting is the fact that this is the first look he gives Qrow. This is the established baseline right before he bends down to pick up Harbinger. He’s not hostile or off-putting or smug (at least not overly so). He’s professional with a healthy dash of confidence and a hell of a lot of presence. 

We’re still with Qrow here, obviously, and the steep angle of this shot makes it clear: we are meant to see Clover Ebi the way Qrow does at this moment. Inherent in this perspective is the line of tension that we are meant to be following. (A quick clarification: the word ‘tension’ here carries no negative connotations. I’m talking about narrative tension, the forward movement of a story, the thing that makes the audience perk up and go “Oh? What’s this?” And I would say these scenes accomplish that extraordinarily well.)

The Harbinger Moment

*cough cough* FraMInG!!!!!!! *cough cough*

Funny story. This particular shot where Clover picks up Harbinger is the one I was actually asked to comment on. But as no scene exists in a vacuum, I think the analysis for this relies heavily on everything I’ve already said. It’s all about the build-up, the already established framing, the line of tension that we are meant to be following (namely, who is this guy going to be to Qrow?), and the way that Clover again enters the scene as a sort of disruption into Qrow’s space.

Now, if Clover had done any of those things I mentioned above (gloated, smirked in a hostile way, sneered, etc.) that’s all it would have taken for this disruption to be coded as negative. Setting them up as rivals would have literally been that simple. But because he didn’t we’re left in an area of... comfortable curiosity, is the phrase I’m gonna go with. The first disruptive entrance into Qrow’s scene (with the boot) introduces Clover as a character, and the second (this one) makes sure to let us know that, while CRWBY isn’t making it entirely clear what exactly these two are going to be to each other just yet, their relationship is going to be far more nuanced than the obvious antagonistic crap they could have gone with.

As far as the event itself (Clover picking up Harbinger), this is absolutely meant to resonate on an emotional level with the audience. We watch this unfold, again with Qrow as our lens, and knowing what he has been through with that weapon, we know what it probably means to have another person handle it. Clover does so respectfully and carefully and without comment. Also notice that while Clover seems to be ambidextrous for the most part, he wields his own weapon almost exclusively with his left hand, which is the same hand he picks up Harbinger with. If anyone wants to get into deep psychoanalysis of the implications behind that, I will love you forever, but if you don’t I’ll probably circle back to it at some point XD

Worthy of note here too, though I’m not entirely certain what to make of it just yet, is the fact that Clover’s armband is fully visible in this shot. And we all know how CRWBY loves their armbands. 

Choices

And that pretty much wraps up the extent of the interactions between Clover and Qrow in this scene. This shot above just illustrates something @lady-branwen​ pointed out, which I find incredibly funny. 

Upon entering the scene, Clover has two obvious options as to who he approaches first. Even if he comes down from a roof, he is either approaching from the front (top of the image), in which case he had to bypass Ruby (and the relic!) entirely to reach Qrow. Or he comes from that side street off to the left side of the image, in which case he is probably equidistant from Qrow and Ruby (and the relic! which he knows about!) and still chooses to approach Qrow first.

Intent, people. None of it is accidental.

Bonus:

The remainder of the scene does a pretty fantastic job of shifting the focus to Clover and establishing who he is. He’s charming, professional, a people person, and definitely lawful good. All of this further draws out that line of narrative tension between him and Qrow, leaves us wondering where exactly this is going to go, and perfectly sets us up for all of their scenes after this.

[maddhatterreviews]

Sasha’s path in season 2

Y'know, I didn't mean for this kinda thing to be the focus of this blog. I wanted to primarily talk about video games and maybe bring up comics and movies every once in a while. I had no intention of turning this into a cartoon discussion blog, but this is where we are, so let's talk about Amphibia.

Amphibia is a new Disney Channel cartoon about three young girls being transported to a world of talking frogs. The series follows only one of the girls, Anne, who was taken in by a family of Frogs named the Plantars, as she tries to find a way back home. It's basically one of the few Western Isaki shows. 

For reasons known only to the mad and the divine, Disney decided to air the entire season all at once; with a new episode every day for five weeks. So the finale's already come and gone. And it was quite a ride. After spending months in the small village of Wartwood, Anne is finally reunited with her best friend from Earth, Sasha...Only to find out Sasha came to Wartwood with an army of toads. 

The toads actually trick all of Wartwood in come to their homebase just to kill Hop Pop for inadvertently starting a rebellion by standing up to the toads that have come to Wartwood over the course of the season. 

As the series goes on, Sasha is revealed to be a pretty terrible person. Manipulating and coercing Anne to do things she didn’t want to on Earth, and teaching Grime to do the same to his soldiers so they’ll fight harder for him. The plan to trick Wartwood was actually her’s. 

But at the end, Anne finally stands up to Sasha, frees Hop Pop and Wartwood, and destroys the Toad Tower. (Although she didn’t actually want that to happen and one of the less stable frogs planted explosives against her orders not to do so) 

The Tower going down causes Sasha to almost fall from the roof and Anne and the Planters try to save her. Even though, like I said, Sasha came up with the plan to kill Hop Pop in the first place. Sasha seeing the Plantars doing so much to save Anne makes her realize she’s been a shitty friend, and her actions have directly put her friend in mortal danger. 

It’s interesting that, despite seemingly taking advantage of Anne for most, if not the entirety of their relationship, it’s made very clear that Sasha does genuinely care about Anne’s wellbeing and happiness. She just thinks she knows better than Anne on what that actually is and forces her to do things she wouldn’t want to do ordinarily. But as they are dangling from the top of the tower, Sasha has a moment of clarity; realizing being a real friend means putting your own feelings aside for the sake of your friend. Saying to Anne, “Maybe you’re better off without me.”

And to atone for everything she’s done to Anne, especially in the last few hours, Sasha let’s herself fall so the Plantars can pull Anne to safety. 

Really think about that. A thirteen year old girl was willing to let herself die after realizing what a shitty person she is. But the thing that makes this particular plot point interesting, is that Sasha doesn’t die. 

I mean she’s a child and this is Disney, there was no way Sasha was going to die, especially in the first season. So Grime comes out of fucking nowhere and saves her. And before walking away with the rest of his Toad army, he gives Anne a dirty look, unquestioningly think that Anne THREW her off the tower. See, just like Sasha actually cares about Anne despite how she treats her, Grime cares about Sasha despite being a tyrannical warlord. 

So, like I said, the season finale was a bit of a ride. It ends with Anne emotionally drained after seeing her oldest friend almost dying for her, and fairly certain that nothing will ever be the same between them. But fully prepared to venture outside of Wartwood with the Plantars to find a way home. 

Anne’s path forward is pretty firmly established, but the big question is where Sasha will go from here. The most hopeful course of action would be for Sasha to take the revelations she’s experienced to heart and strive to be a better person. Leaving Grime and the toads to reunite with Anne and the Plantars on more humble and peaceful terms. And had this series come out when I was a kid, I’d expect this to be the how everything would play out. But this is a Post-Avatar world we’re living in. It’s not out of the ordinary any more for cartoons aimed at kids to take darker turns in it’s storytelling. 

Speaking of Avatar, I feel like Sasha may go through a similar situation as Zuko at the end of Book two when he freed Appa to help Aang, doing something that went against the very core of who he was as a person. Sasha doing something so uncharacteristically selfless as letting herself die for Anne when their relationship up until that point was so monumentally one sided, it will undoubtedly result in the same existential crisis that Zuko went through. Though...maybe not with the day long coma and the fever dreams. 

But while Zuko at his core was a good person, doing morally questionable thing because of a misguided sense of honor and a desire to get back in his abusive father’s good graces. Sasha, at least at present, doesn’t seem like a good person. Being manipulative and amoral, with her only real redeeming quality being her genuine friendship with Anne. And well...Anne and Sasha aren’t exactly friends anymore. 

The main reason Sasha sided with Grime was because of a promise for the toads to help her find Anne and their other friend Marcie, who by the end of the season is still missing. But not only does Sasha not seem to take any issue with the fucked up things Grime wants to do, she’s the one who came up with the plan to murder Hop Pop for a purpose she has absolutely no stake in. She has no reason to help the Toads keep their iron grip on the Valley, but she does it anyway, and even takes advantage of the trust Anne has garnered from the frogs of Wartwood to set her trap in the first place. 

So while Sasha face-heeling would make sense in the context of realizing she’s been a cunt to her best friend, it would make just as much sense for Sasha to double down on her actions and gradually becomes a worse and worse person as the story goes on. 

It’s also a factor that now Grime knows how to better manipulate people thanks to Sasha. It would make sense for Grime to twist the events of the finale to frame Sasha in the right, and lead her to continue on her already set path, and preface all the terrible things she continues to do as the ends justifying the means. Yes, she’s hurting innocent people, but if it means getting Anne and Marcie back to Earth in one piece, she’s willing to do it. She may not like who she’s becoming, but if it’s for her friends it’s worth it. 

In this sense, Sasha learns from her near death experience that a friend should give of themselves, and do things you may not want to for the sake of your friend. The problem comes in how she goes about that. To her, Grime and the Toads are the best chance she has to find a way back home, so it’d be easy for her to rationalize continuing to work for them. She may not like what she’s doing anymore, but she’s doing it for Anne and Marcie. 

There’s also the thematic element of setting Anne and Sasha up as character foils to take into account. Anne started off as selfish and a bit of a brat, but through the various adventures she’s had with Sprig and the various other frogs of Wartwood, she’s grown as a person and become more thoughtful and compassionate. She’s actually saved the town more than once during the three months she’s been in Amphibia, and it all culminates in the penultimate episode of the season, Anne of the Year. Where all of Wartwood celebrates how far Anne has come since she arrived. 

Sasha, on the other hand, was held captive by the Toads for months until she helped Grime protect their tower from giant Herons and taught him how to get the best out of his subordinates with empty flattery. When Grime give Sasha the offer to become his second in command she relishes the idea of gaining enough power to basically do whatever she wanted. 

The longer they stayed in Amphibia Anne became more of a hero, while Sasha became more of a villain. Anne will most likely continue to grow as a person, and the more she and the Plantars explore the Valley, especially with the whole “Hop Pop is the face the rebellion” plotline, there is almost certainly going to more instances where Anne will have to defend more towns from Grime’s army. Spreading stories of the strange, tall, gangly creature with a sword standing up against the Toads. While also putting her in direct conflict with Grime and Sasha. 

Is Sasha still going to fight Anne to save Anne? Will she come to the decision that the best what to keep Anne safe until she can find a way home is to keep her prisoner? After all the only reason Anne was in danger at Toad Tower was because she left her sight. 

And what if Sasha decides Grime isn’t doing enough to figure out how to get her home, and takes control of the Toad army away from him. I mean the toads already like her more than Grime, it wouldn’t be that hard for Sasha to convince them to make her their leader despite her age. And as he’s being led away to be either exiled or executed, Sasha says to him, “I bet you wish you hadn’t save now.”

Am I seriously suggesting Disney make a cartoon where a teenage girl both becomes the main villain and develops a death wish?

When Sasha let go of Anne’s hand at the top of the tower, she wasn’t just willing to die, she was expecting to die. Grime saving her means she’ll have to deal with that...and for a thirteen year old girl, that’s not going to be easy. It’s going to fuck her up emotionally and mentally, and it’ll only get worse if she does go full darkside. 

A huge wild card in the story is Marcie. So far we don’t know where she is, what she’s doing, how she’s going to be introduced. There is basically no information on this character or what her relationship with Anne and Sasha is. We know she was the one who brought the Music Box to Sasha and Anne’s attention, and she was probably just as manipulative as Sasha is. But since we don’t know what Marcie’s been going through, we don’t know how she’ll react to the changes in both Anne and Sasha or if she’ll side with one, the other, or stay as an independent entity. 

Amphibia is a surprisingly good show so far. Which isn’t too surprising considering the guy who made it also worked on Gravity Falls. It will be a matter of time before we can say with any kind of confidence that it will be remembered as one of the highlights of modern cartoons...but it seems like a safe bet. Especially with how the first season ended and what it sets up. It’s entirely possible I’m talking out of my ass on this one. Nothing that I proposed will come to be, and Sasha will just become one of the good guys. But the fact that Amphibia built it’s characters so well I could have this kind of discussion and not have it seem like absolute bullshit, that’s saying something. This show has a lot of potential. And I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

[thelawyerthatwaspromised]

We Really Need to Talk About the Forehead Kiss Scene

Consider this another iteration of the Sansa and Jon “Would that be so terrible?” scene that I covered a little while back.

For a lot of people that believe that Jonsa will happen, the scene on the battlements in “The Winds of Winter”, the finale episode of the sixth season of Game of Thrones, is the starting point of that belief.

It’s unusually sweet, as Jon and Sansa scenes tend to be. It’s almost semi-unnecessary to the plot. It’s the last we see of Jon before it’s revealed that he is the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, making this decidedly un-sibling like interaction with Sansa a bit less suspicious except upon rewatch. (Sidenote, imagine if this scene took place after we learned about R+L=J...)

But a lot of Jonsa skeptics (I’ll call them that though there are obviously varying degrees of this such as “venomous”) seem unable to understand why this particular scene feels so different from just about every single other scene on the show. To me, there are multiple factors that make this particular scene unique from any other on the show.

It’s an almost perfect example of a “romance setup” from multiple angles.

1.) It didn’t really advance the “plot”

For some reason, this scene was included among the 10 most crucial scenes of the series by HBO pre-season 7 buuuuut not a lot happened at face value.

Jon had just banished Melissandre for burning someone alive (inquisitive emoji) and was watching her leave on the battlements. He’s approached by Sansa. She says she’s sorry. He credits her for winning the battle. They say they need to trust each other. They leave. So why is a “recap of events” considered a crucial scene? Why was it on the show at all? Viewers wanted to know what Jon was going to do about Sansa arriving with the KotV and if they were going to have a conflict about it. Except that part took about 5 seconds. And the opposite happened. 

Similar to the Littlefinger choke scene in season 7, this didn’t really directly affect the actions of the characters in any way. Even if a scene doesn’t advance “plot”, it’s meant to advance the “story”. What happens here between Jon and Sansa? It revealed something between the two of them that wasn’t revealed simply through the dialogue. It’s inclusion in the show at all should leave you wondering about its purpose, but the added layers of the length, framing, and use of reaction shots should make it fairly obvious that it’s a romantic scene.

2.) Both characters are pleasantly surprised by each other’s tenderness towards the other

I think to really grasp this scene, you have to get inside the heads of each character.

Normally, any surprise in Game of Thrones is a bad thing. The strange quality of the battlements scene is that it’s an inversion of the normal routine. We need to take a step back and evaluate the psychology of Jon and Sansa as they’re entering.

Jon has just banished the person who resurrected him. He’s just won a battle that he knows he should have lost. He’s clearly been quite introspective about Sansa and what she meant and her importance in winning the battle since he’s already preparing her chambers. Somehow, the tent scene is magnified in its intensity because this scene is its exact opposite and it’s where we last left off with Jon and Sansa.

Sansa pleaded with Jon to listen to her.

To be fair to Jon, it’s hard to understand what Sansa is saying but instead of trying to understand her more, he allows them to be dead locked and unable to finish their thoughts.

and it ends with Jon’s sad resignation that he desperately wants to win but he’s not sure if he can.

So this was the last time they spoke privately before the battle. Jon feels guilt for failing to listen. Sansa feels guilt for calling in Littlefinger, an option neither she nor Jon would have wanted.

Then - their relationship suddenly became stronger because of the weakness they revealed to each other. Instead of punishing each other, they forgive each other. Instead of gloating, Sansa reaches out and expresses to Jon that she never wanted it that way. Instead of holding it against Sansa, Jon reaches back and validates her importance in multiple ways.

The most rewarding part is how they each give wonderful gestures to each other in turn without being prompted.

He’s publicly affirmed her place as the Lady of Wintefell...

She objects but only because she thinks he should be seen as the head of the family...

Sansa tells him he should take it. Jon responds with a sad smile and says he’s not a Stark. And then Sansa gives Jon the most gentle but meaningful affirmation that he’s ever gotten on the show...

“You are to me.”

(I decided halfway through this to leave the text off the gifs because I want the focus on the micro expressions of the actors because...damn...)

What else could anyone say to Jon that would mean more to him at this point? His entire life has been marked by his non-Starkness. Sansa is working to undo the biggest source of his sadness without his ever asking for it.

Jon’s gift to Sansa is recognition and it comes in two parts;

1) “You’re the Lady of Winterfell.” He was right there as Lyanna Mormont referred to her as a Lannister and a Bolton. He was right there as Lord Glover looked right into her eyes and told her that House Stark is dead. No. Jon is determined that those statements are to be corrected.

2) “We’re standing here because of you.” He’s not just “gifting” her the position and the lord’s chamber. She’s earned it in his eyes. Her place is meant to be elevated above his at this point. This is before he was crowned as king. He was content for her to be in charge until he was thrust into the position of command.

So what does Sansa do? He’s just basically said “you were right” and she has a chance to respond. Does she gloat? Does she say “well yes I suppose I am the last remaining Stark (that we know of) and so I should rule our house...I also command the loyalty of the Vale”? None of that, she apologizes to him. She’s still expecting his anger and disappointment and feels she deserves it.

And it makes sense. Leave aside that it was absolutely necessary for Sansa to bring in the KotV and ask yourself “when was the last time Sansa was ever actually rewarded or treated gently by someone she thought she wronged?” She’s existed in a constant state of punishment since Littlefinger betrayed Ned in the throne room in season 1. Misery is her expectation. Her expression as Jon approaches confirms this exactly.

Part is her actual guilt, and I’m sure part of it is an expectation based on her experiences...and to her pretty obvious surprise, Jon does the exact opposite.

HA. You’ll have to wait for the kiss gifs because I want to change gears now.

The entire last section was explaining why this scene was so unexpected given the context of the setup. Both characters had reasons to treat the other harshly. Jon for his stubbornness. Sansa for not telling Jon about the Vale. All the components were there to reinforce an ongoing feud between the two. These were the factors commonly cited by those oh-so-brilliant Starkbowl predictions leading up to season 7. 

Yet despite that tension, we didn’t get a shouting match and glares and future plotting. We got a moment of clarity for once...and a whole new set of questions about these two. The beauty of their quiet moment together was in its simplicity - but also in the way that the writers indicated that there was so much more going on than we could have ever known.

Yet all of this information is packed into a scene that’s so quiet and slow. It’s in the romantic pacing.

3.) The Pacing

Jon and Sansa have had always had a distinct strangeness to their scenes in that they’re almost all completely different from any other. Their reunion was a moment of triumph for any Stark fans as they were the first two reunited since the pilot episode. Their fireside chat started incredibly sweet and ended with the heightened stakes of Sansa attempting to convince Jon to re-take Winterfell. The Pink Letter scene is the realization that their little oasis was about to meet the realities of a harsh world that still viewed both of them as threats. 

The cloak scene where Sansa gifts Jon a Stark cloak after Jon takes keen interest in Sansa’s new dress is another moment where each took the initiative to validate the other without any prompting. 

They argued twice, while at the encampment and in the tent before the battle, but each scene was unique as Sansa indirectly criticized Jon’s decisions to follow Davos considering Stannis’ ultimate failure, and Jon mostly tried to tune Sansa’s arguments out - while the tent scene is where those complaints came into a direct collision. 

Then they met on the battlements and it was equally emotional but in a total reverse of tone. 

Simply put, this scene was about “Jon & Sansa” as an entity and not about “Jon” having a talk with “Sansa”. It’s all in the pacing and it’s all in the framing.

We already know the setup. Now comes the payoff. Jon has already told Sansa they need to trust each other. That would be the “plot” purpose of the scene. As far as things happening that affect the story directly, it could have ended right there. “It’s ok Sansa. We’re a team now.” Or, alternatively, Jon could have kissed Sansa’s forehead and THEN said they need to trust each other and the tone could be viewed entirely differently. Instead, the show disposed of the “textual” purpose of the scene and continued right through with the “subtext” (which also continued into season 7) which is: what exactly is the nature of Jon and Sansa’s relationship?

It’s not just the forehead kiss. It’s not just the romantic back drop. It’s not just the setup. It’s not just the micro expression of the actors. It’s not just that the whole scene is relatively unnecessary. It’s all of that mixed together.

This is where the pacing comes into play. Let’s recap the scene to this point...

Sansa gets about 13 seconds of an entrance before Jon tells her he’s having the lord’s chamber prepared for her.

Sansa waits 3 seconds before answering “mother and father’s room?”

Jon waits about 3 seconds before he says he’s not a Stark.

Sansa answers “you are to me” almost immediately.

Jon has roughly a 5 second reaction shot. 

There’s about a 5 second pause after Jon gives Sansa credit for winning the battle before Sansa starts apologizing.

Sansa says sorry and Jon waits about 6 seconds before he even starts walking over to her.

There’s about 3 seconds between Jon saying they have enemies and him reaching up to kiss her.

Jon gets roughly 3 seconds to kiss Sansa and about 4 seconds of gazing at her (and her gazing at him). They make this moment last.

Then they transition into a micro expression that juuuuust says everything.

The second Jon closes his lips, he looks down and abruptly starts to walk away. But his mood has immediately turned almost melancholy or sort of a confusion. It’s not normal to kiss someone tenderly and then just turn around and leave. Even if it were entirely platonic. There’s something left unsaid...especially since the camera focuses on the post-kiss for almost 6 seconds altogether before Jon starts to leave. Viewers aren’t the only ones left a bit bewildered. 

Sansa’s reaction tells the same story.

She stands in the same position, almost frozen. She’s internally probably as confused as Jon. She came to Jon to apologize (remember, she approached him) - which I’m assuming she would have been dreading. She got her apology, and he delivered his form of “there’s nothing to forgive” which would normally signal that her part here is over. Yet he initiates physical affection for her when positive physical affection is something that’s a very complicated subject for her.

And it stuns her. As he begins to leave, we see her expressing that she doesn’t want the moment to end.

It’s ridiculously beautiful. Sansa finding a reason for Jon to get one last look, right after he had turned away in sort of Byronic melancholy, only to have her call him back again is extremely romantic given what we know about both of these characters.

The immediacy of Jon’s response in turning back towards her and the utter-seriousness of his look again makes the end of this scene a twist of its own. 

“Winter is here.” That phrase is of course a play off of “Winter is coming” the words of House Stark and the ominous warning of fear and looming destruction echoed throughout the entirety of the series. Those words should mean “fear”; real “fear”. (also take note of her deliberately deep breath as her eyes scan Jon again..)

And how do they react to this potentially terrifying threat? By being adorable again!?!?

Well of course they do. Because winter is here and they are home. Think about this. Being together (moments after entering a scene which they both began reluctantly) is enough to make them smile sweetly as they acknowledge the coming storm.

And the end really cements Jon’s view of Sansa as a noble lady.

And the pure joy Sansa feels as the scene concludes.

To wrap up...the scene didn’t have to happen in the first place. The setup made you wonder if there was going to be fracture. It was tender. It was warm. It’s pacing made you sit and take notice. It didn’t waste any time - it took its time.

We were meant to see not just the displays of forgiveness and validation by Jon and Sansa towards each other. We were meant to see them expecting the worst and getting something beautiful instead. We were meant to see them wrestling with the confusion of where the scene was heading. We were meant to see them completely comfortable in each other’s presence in this very moment - and we were meant to see a very subtle but also very unsubtle indication that the direction of their relationship is causing (and must cause) them inner conflict before it can truly provide them fulfillment. 

They weren’t a royal couple in this scene but I’m fully confident that after the finale season has concluded, this scene will be the one everyone can point to and say “this is where Jon and Sansa ending as king and queen truly became possible.”

[black-duo-maxwell-0085]

Thoughts on Steve Stirling’s _The Stone Dogs_

This take is as hot as a sno-cone, insofar as the novel it is in reference to was written in 1990 (which is way longer ago than I’m prepared to acknowledge). But the Spirit moved me since I hate this book so got-damn much. So here we are.

Let me start by saying that I am certainly not averse to a work of art dealing with challenging subject-matter in and of itself. Some of my faves—The Bluest Eye and Invisible Man—are especially uncomfortable as narratives of life and family are concerned. I also read works that force me to take the point-of-view of the coloniser as well, and whilst I didn’t care for Kipling’s Kim and certainly didn’t like Konrad’s Heart of Darkness, they were simply bad books looking to ask questions about the human experience without trying to get out from under the then conventional wisdom and parochial epistemologies of the authors’ milieu.

The Stone Dogs is a novel that is—flatly—cynical, ugly, and repugnant on every conceivable dimension. In short: this is trash.

And let me be clear. It’s not just The Stone Dogs, here. It’s the entirety of the thought experiment that generated the alternate history of the Draka. I don’t have a problem with exploring histories where things turn out painfully or nightmarish in the way that systems of power operate; I quite enjoyed Harry Turtledove’s Timeline-191 books, up to and including the exceptionally bleak _The Victorious Opposition_. But that novel, whilst it proffered truly execrable characters, even in POV capacities, never shied away from painting their actions—and crucially, *them*—as wrong and people. Capable of being seduced by manifest evil. Even though we ride around in the mind of a Jake Featherston, the author is careful and deliberate enough to delineate that this is a truly godawful place to be. And the narrative never contorts itself to make him look in any way sympathetic.

The Stone Dogs is not nearly so sophisticated.

And I say this while, from a purely objective standpoint, Stirling’s prose is richer than Turtledove’s. There is a sense of aesthetic in his craft that is absent in The Master of Alternate History’s methodical, plot-focused genre stylings. It’s just that it lavishes this on the very very worst kind of people and circumstances.

It really does beg the question if Stirling has ever met a Black person in real life before. For several reasons, not least amongst them that a good Black friend would have told him that he was dead-wrong for exploring the idea of racist, super-Afrikaners taking over the world in his novel. But what do I know.

And it’s bad enough that the novel and the series it is a part of, so utterly bungle the experience by focusing nearly entirely on the perspectives and experiences of the enslavers. But what makes the matter even worse is that the series as a whole seems to only care about addressing the Draka’s expansion when it has them encountering and subjugating EuroAmerican people. The first book in the series, Marching through Georgia is—for all its signifying on the exploits of Sherman in the American CivilWar, primarily concerned with events long after the whole of the African continent has already been subjugated. So the ‘interesting part’ is when Stirling smashes his Draka action figures against Germans in a sick rendering of WWII in the case of what happens when Bad meets Evil (and the most disturbing thing is that it is really, really, REALLY hard to tell which is which).

The text is as graphic as it is cynical too. Depictions of pain and various sorts of violations are a regular occurrence in the text, and all of it feels immensely gratuitous. That the books have a 90s era sense of puerile ‘edge’ about them is fairly self-evident. And again, the cynicism is always there, too. Such that the text feels like something written by a talented but *deeply* disturbed Southern high school boy.

The books are racist in their exclusions of people of colour throughout, and racist in the scant few depictions that do occur as well (which may be worse). I nearly had to put the text down when Jolene, one of the only recurring Black characters in all of the Stone Dogs (and of course, a “serf”/slave), enthusiastically asks to be a “brooder” for the woman who presumes to “own” her, Yolanda Ingolffson. The sequence is disgusting enough in its abject dehumanisation of Jolene as a character, but all the more so in the context of the novel emerging from a real-world sociohistorical context that perpetuates a flawed historiography of Black experiences in bondage in the US at a very broad scale.

Finally, fatally, the book is audacious enough to be *boring* in the parts not actively intent on being offensive. There is no attempt at establishing a frame of reference for why we should care about the pulse-drive on a starship, and even if there were (and the novel goes on, and on, and on about that shit), I still would be hard-pressed to care because the whole book is about actual-ass racist super-Afrikaners who take over the whole world.

And I haven’t even addressed the fact that the racist super-Afrikaners *DO* take over the world. Because of course they do. The whole novel—and the larger series as well—pays lip service to how the Draka are bad, or whatever, but all that rings absolutely hollow in the face of the overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of time that the novel expends bending over backwards to position them as sympathetic in spite of that fact. There are no real repercussions for their evilness, and the novel, again, ultimately rewards them for doing so. Yes, Yolanda loses the love of her life, but that loss is only tenuously narratively linked to anything about who she was or what she was doing: going for a walk after selecting a serf to ravish as part of their spoils of war. But going for a walk in a war zone is not linked to the basic act of owning another human being in and of itself, and the story actually goes a step further to suggest that that claim was really only made as a rationalisation by Yolanda herself in the throes of her grief. So ultimately, there is never any punishment for any Draka character for the repugnant behaviour that they perpetrate, and I read that as the novel’s tacit acquiescence of the fact that, ‘welp, there really must not be anything that they *deserve* to be punished for, I guess’.

The only people who are punished are everybody who isn’t Draka for not taking the Draka threat seriously enough. Which seems to suggest that, if there are any moral failings to be found in this novel at all, that’s the only one there is: to not be just as depraved as the Draka, which would allow you to be able to anticipate the nature of just how awful they will be.

I’m so tired.

This book is bad, and I hate that I’m reading it, and subjecting myself to it. Like, it’s legitimately affecting my mental health, reading this hateful-ass, unconscionably long-ass book. It is a mean, ugly, bitter epic that presents no heroes and no sympathetic characters. Just a mass of abyss as cold as a serpent’s heart.

[piesforjack]

there's a lot of back and forth with this where Kent was both Jack's first and closest best friend and also Bitty was the first person he was romantically in love with and yet even with Bitty jack wasn't really aware of how he felt till last minute. Considering it is already hard enough to differ romantic/platonic love when one is highly emotionally intelligent and Jack isn't by a long shot and Jack has been an unreliable narrator before its still hard to know just what the relationship was.

"You know when it’s the last summer of your childhood and you’re just hanging with your bro and you’re smoothing out his cowlick and you fondly call him Kenny while trying not to think about how mercilessly cruel fate is lol you know bros being bros" the same as "I didn't even know we were dating" Camilia

––reflect how the artist views Parse, which is sympathetically. Not to mention in her notes, she frames their summer fling as being emotionally significant to not just Parse, but also Jack. The scene that you point out of Jack telling Bitty about his exes shows a skewed narrative bias in that either Bitty, because he dislikes K, minimizes his importance to Jack (thru the meta narrative of the comic) OR (sorry these are long, i don't mean to be contrary) (2)

(srsly sorry for spamming ur inbox) OR Jack has compartmentalized and reduced the emotional remembrance of his relationship with K to cope with both his NDE and his abusive relationship with K. I say all that to say I completely agree that a relationship between Jack and K*nt is VERY unhealthy, but that Jack's own feelings towards K have been downplayed because K will still have a significant narrative impact. (3)

Again sorry for spamming ur inbox with these. I do agree with most of your post!! And this #confirmed isn't the last we've seen of K*nt. (4)

idk when you sent all the messages (not even sure if the first on IS your original message anyway????) but i’m JUST seeing these now. ANYWAY.

so like. i see what you’re trying to say here, but i still gotta like. push back against this a bit. 

“in her notes, she frames their summer fling as being emotionally significant to not just Parse, but also Jack” 

The scene that you point out of Jack telling Bitty about his exes shows a skewed narrative bias in that either Bitty, because he dislikes K, minimizes his importance to Jack (thru the meta narrative of the comic)

obviously we know bitty is an unreliable narrator, and ngozi has made it clear that what jack and p*rse had was significant in some ways (first sexual partner, i can assume, first boy he ever kissed we assume, lots of firsts and lots of fumbling weird teenager-y beginnings etc), but it’s definitely not as significant as the scale people pretend it to be. the thing that i think is the biggest difference is that, for jack? what he had with k*nt and camilla was equal (but different.) hear me out:

we know jack and p*rse were best friends and that jack cared for him deeply at the time, but this direct parallel of “didn’t even know we were dating” camilla and “it really wasn’t more than anything physical” k*nt narratively illustrates that jack views these situations as separate but equal. jack was never in love with p*rse. we can assume (i mean we know but for arguments sake lets say it’s meta) he didn’t love camilla either. both relationships were purely physical and/or loosely resembled dating from the other persons perspective (ie. not from jack’s POV). from that we can gather that jack never considered these to be romantic relationships, even if he felt fondly of k*nt or enjoyed spending time with camilla. jack’s disconnect between romance and friendship vs how he views things with bitty is everything you need to know. 

(this isn’t me comparing the relationships, bc one was obviously unhealthy and not even a defined romantic relationship, whereas the other is a committed exclusive partnership--rather this is an exemplar of jack’s interpretation of both relationships as separate and unequal in terms of quality and definition) 

Considering it is already hard enough to differ romantic/platonic love when one is highly emotionally intelligent and Jack isn't by a long shot and Jack has been an unreliable narrator before its still hard to know just what the relationship was.

ok i would argue heavily with the sentiment that jack isn’t highly emotionally intelligent because he’s proven time and time again that while he isn’t perfect he’s more aware than people like to believe he is. the ability to control emotions is a huge component of this particular intelligence, even more so than the expression of emotions. for example, we all know people who are emotionally sporadic, they go from happy to sad to angry to guilty all in the span of a 10 minute window. these people, though emotionally expressive and (usually) empathetic to a fault, they don’t exhibit high emotional intelligence. jack has shown over and over again that, while he can be unthinkingly insensitive and a bit cold, he’s very in tune with other peoples emotions, which is why his rudeness to bitty was so shocking and hurtful--he knows how to cut to the quick, he knows what buttons to press, how to hurt people in specific and painful ways (“it was a lucky shot”) but on the other side of that coin he also knows how to be supportive and attentive to peoples needs (pep talks and hanging around with the haus boys, all of whom are emotional and expressive, and shitty, my lord, his best friend shitty, if that doesn’t prove how not robotic and emotionally devoid jack is then idk what could.) that combined with the fact that jack is so firmly in control of his emotional expressiveness (especially including the fact that he has a history of mental illness) shows incredible resilience and deep understanding of his mental and emotional processes (ie. jack knows jack best) 

((also i can already hear the “um but he didn’t realize he liked bitty until like tHe LaSt SeCoNd!!!” argument and i know i know!!!!! but i believe his ~realization~ moment was more him understanding that letting go of bitty was something he didn’t want to/have to do. i think he already knew he was sweet on bitty and that he liked him more than he allowed himself to believe. but i think his dad/gretzsky pep talk gave him the nudge, the final push to see it clearly, more of a realization of “you don’t have to leave and wonder what could’ve been, you can have all this and heaven too. you’ll never know if you never try.))

so to say that jack is essentially too blind to emotional intelligence to know the difference between his relationship with k*nt and a romantic relationship...a touch absurd and wholly inaccurate.

OR Jack has compartmentalized and reduced the emotional remembrance of his relationship with K to cope with both his NDE and his abusive relationship with K.

this, for me, is a bit of a reach. ofc this is valid and very real, it could happen, trauma does awful things to people. however, i feel like pulling this as the reason he brushes off his not-relationship with k*nt greatly undermines the fact that jack has gone through so much. he’s had years to think about and discuss these things through therapy and rehab. i think to say that p*rse is so inexplicably linked to jack’s NDE that jack compartmentalized or repressed the actuality of that relationship is...inaccurate, given the context we have.

yes, jack cut k*nt out of his life before or after the OD, and so we can assume there was some connection there between the two events (OD and cutting k*nt out) HOWEVER, i think it greatly over-simplifies this trauma. to think that jack would come away from a NDE and thusly cope by cutting k*nt out seems to imply that k*nt wasn’t actualized as abusive until post-NDE, which makes very little sense when we look at the canonical timeline and the emotional and mental vulnerability jack would be in after trauma like that. alternatively, if jack cut k*nt out of his life pre NDE, it’s even LESS likely to be associated as one unifying repression (i speak only from my own experiences with trauma, i feel like that’s important to say) simply because that implies jack’s OD was in relation or as a result of that action.

i’m guess what i’m saying for this point is: yes it’s possible but i don’t think that’s what happened, if only because both scenarios are too p*rse centric and would revolve around p*rse to the point that it minimizes jack’s illness and trauma, which are both huge focal points surrounding jack’s OD.

I say all that to say I completely agree that a relationship between Jack and K*nt is VERY unhealthy, but that Jack's own feelings towards K have been downplayed because K will still have a significant narrative impact.

i have to disagree again. do i think k*nt is an antagonist? absolutely! but so is southern homophobia, bitty’s procrastination, and the entire nhl organization. so. yes, i’m sure k*nt will play a role in the playing out of yr 4, but i have to stress this again: this is bitty’s story. p*rse, no matter how much we link him to jack and jack’s history and jack’s narrative, will ALWAYS BE a background or side plot storyline to whatever is prevalent in BITTY’S world. that’s as a result of an unreliable narrator and also the fact that, unless p*rse begins to overlap into bitty’s life more than he has in the past, we’ll only see the peripheral view of him (which can’t be told through unreliable narration as it’s told through that of the author (ngozi) rather than bitty bc obviously bits isn’t omnipotent lol)

i’m sorry this is soooo fuckin long, it’s also super late/early? so i’m sorry if it doesn’t make 100% coherent sense, i had no intentions of writing this much but alas! it got away from me.

thanks for your thoughts, i hope i’m making any sense in here xx

[laurent-ofvere]

BIRTHDAY FIC FOR BIRTHDAY MOD

@safetytank: “to help make up for the lack of party hardying ;n; here’s a bit from yon unfinished wedding fic set along the journey back to vere”

~

            “I’ve spoken to the remaining Councilors,” said Laurent after seating himself comfortably beside Damen, “who were more than willing to accept that what transpired in Ios should remain undisclosed in exchange for refraining from having them all executed for treason.”

            “Aside from Guion?”

            “Loyse and I have yet to come to an agreement.”

            It was a small concession, one that would buy Laurent no social or political advantages, but the small gesture of mercy towards the Councilor’s wife warmed Damen’s heart. “So all of Akielos will know what happened, but Vere won’t.”

            “There will be rumors, but merchant gossip has always been of a rather outlandish sort.” Laurent seemed content despite this, as he often did when able to control the situation to his liking. “Our transcript of events will only reveal as much as we wish it to.”

            Withholding information still struck Damen as a very Veretian manner of going about things. Even without his authorization, there were already scribes and bards throughout the south detailing the trial and all accompanying details in poetry and song. To suppress a vital part of history from the public for the sake of leveraging evidence seemed almost a selfish thing to do. “We’ll still be riding into Arles with half an army.”

            “Half an army and your honor guard. I don’t anticipate immediate retaliations in my uncle’s name, but it is a risk to leave you undefended in what many would still consider enemy territory.”

            Damen nodded, thinking of the soldiers he’d handpicked for the excursion.

            “I’ll send out invitations for the coronation as soon as we reach the palace. Until the summons are heeded, we’ll have time to prepare for first impressions.”

            “What did you have in mind?” Despite himself, Damen was excited. It felt as if it had been eons since they’d last put their heads together to drum up a plan against insurmountable odds, though this time they weren’t quite as insurmountable as they’d been before.

            “The necessary people will arrive within two weeks, three if they’re waylaid by inclement weather. They won’t recognize you right away, which we can use to our advantage.”

            Damen stared at him incredulously. “You can’t be serious, of course they’ll—”

            “They won’t,” Laurent interrupted, tucking a loose curl of yellow hair behind his ear. “They could barely tell that shipment of slaves apart, especially the ones of similar coloring. And you weren’t in view often enough to become a familiar sight.”

            An awkward silence settled between them, the unspoken because I imprisoned you for days at a time hanging over their held gazes.

            “You’re sure of this,” said Damen.

            “Absolutely.”

            “Because if-”

            “Damen.” Resolute blue eyes bored into his own. “I guarantee that four months after the fact, having glimpsed you at most thrice a week, every member of the court has already put your face entirely out of their memory. They have their own petty concerns to hold their attention, their prince’s foreign plaything will be nothing but a faintly-remembered talking point.”

            “Touars recognized me,” he pointed out.

            “Touars first met you at Marlas. Encountering him again on a battlefield gave his memory the context needed to identify you.”

            He didn’t want to beleaguer the subject further, despite all the rebuttals marshalling at the tip of his tongue. Laurent was steadfast in his convictions, and Damen had yet to experience a plan of his going too dangerously awry.

            “All right,” he conceded reluctantly, “they won’t recognize me.”

            “If it will calm your nerves, I also suggest you don one of your Akielon accents—”

            “What.”

            “—Since the slave they glanced at in passing spoke perfect Veretian,” Laurent finished. “Without a silk sheet and speaking with a disguised voice, there will be no connections made between Damen and Damianos but their shared country of origin.”

            He exhaled for a long few seconds, resisting the urge to rub his temples. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

            “It’s better to draw foes into traps of your own making than to risk them taking the initiative,” said Laurent. “Your pride will have to recover, but we still breathe at this moment because our enemies underestimated us.”

            Damen understood perfectly, even if the underhanded nature of their tactics didn’t sit well with the part of him that demanded honor and truth in all things. “How versed should I be in your language, then?” he asked, laying a thick coat of Akielon over Vere’s smoothened consonants and flowing sentences. If his language tutor were there to hear him butcher the pronunciation so, she’d have swatted him on the back of the head.

            Laurent stared at him with a delicate wrinkling of his nose. “That was appalling.”

            “You aren’t giving me much direction,” Damen continued, this time with substantially less accent flavoring his speech. “Have I been practicing these long years, or will you have to translate for me?”

            “Your skills have fallen into disuse, but you’ve been studying diligently ever since our introduction.”

            “Our introduction,” he repeated with a smile and only a dusting of Akielon to harden his syllables. “And how exactly did we tumble into each other’s good graces?”

            “With decidedly less tumbling than the truthful version.” Laurent did not comment on Damen’s snort of laughter. “Accounts of the trial are guaranteed to circulate, but perhaps Prince Damianos was not so much rescuing a lover as he was coming to the aid of a foreign dignitary unjustly sentenced to the execution block.”

            “All tales should have a dramatic rescue, certainly,” agreed Damen, “but this one shouldn’t gloss over the part where the rescued in turn becomes the rescuer.”

            “Nobody else was there in the baths,” Laurent said with a minute shrug of one shoulder. “It’s not so important whether the bastard king died by another’s hand or by his own.”

            “Of course it’s…” Damen trailed off, holding Laurent’s cool blue gaze. “You…don’t want it known you bested Kastor.”

            “The crown prince of Vere avoided patrolling the border for years and hasn’t much experience with combat in the field. Just as well, since his hypothetical murder of an acting ruler, however illegitimate the man’s claim to the throne, would spark much more of a political incident than if Akielos kept its regicide between members of the royal family.”

            He didn’t like it. He was already going to be greeted by fleeting whispers of Prince-killer the moment they set foot in Arles; he didn’t want to add King-slayer to his repertoire.

            “We will confirm nothing, of course,” Laurent added. “Such topics are not fit for polite conversation.”

            “And how polite is our conversation going to be?” Damen asked, despite the question settling into his gut like a lead weight. He’d grown accustomed to acting warmly towards Laurent during their time in Akielos. The thought of giving it up…

            “Damianos is, of course, idealistic and headstrong enough to mount a rescue fueled by a perceived injustice. However, he and the prince are still strangers, knowing each other for less than two months. Rumors will inevitably circulate of their being lovers, but the rest of the court will see no evidence in how they behave toward each other.”

            Damen’s heart splashed sadly into his stomach.

           It must have shown on his face, as Laurent paused a moment before placing one fine-boned hand over Damen’s closest knee. “Because of this,” he explained in the manner he did when revealing some complex piece of intellectual acrobatics, “the king has no particular attachment to the prince. If a noble who felt the prince unfit to rule wished to undermine his reign and ultimately depose him, that noble might follow in the Regent’s footsteps and seek outside assistance.”

            Damen’s eyes widened, the wheels in his brain spinning. “I’m…to act as bait for the traitors in your court?”

            “Should they approach you with propositions, express skeptical interest but agree to nothing until they’ve laid their plans before you,” Laurent instructed. “Any reasonable co-conspirator would familiarize himself with every step of their strategy.”

            “I can’t imagine the prince’s rescuer betraying him so easily,” Damen said softly, covering Laurent’s hand on his knee with his own. “It doesn’t fit his character at all.”

            “The treachery won’t be framed as such.” Laurent let his fingers slide into the spaces between Damen’s. “There will be efforts to convince the king that the prince would make a terrible ruler, that the country would be better off if a puppet candidate held the throne instead. Perhaps the prince need not be executed at all, but entrusted to the king as a prisoner while a more qualified leader takes his place.”

            Damen squeezed Laurent’s hand gently. “If the king is agreeing to all of this, I feel he’d specify that the prince not be harmed during any phase of the operation.”

            “The prince will not appreciate his benevolence,” said Laurent.

            “No,” Damen agreed, “he wouldn’t.”

            A long, quiet minute passed. Damen’s thumb rubbed idly at one of Laurent’s knuckles while he tried to think when they’d last had time to sit and hammer out a battle plan together. Outside, the sounds of general camp activity had quieted as their entourage bedded down for the night, leaving only crickets and the rustle of wind on silk to fill the air.

            Laurent did eventually break the silence. “Were you harmed, when they took you?”

            “Yes.” His capture in Ios was not something they had previously discussed. The memories still carried an unpleasant aftertaste. “They had to, otherwise I’d have fought through them to reach Kastor and demand he explain himself. After that, they settled for sleeping draughts.”

            Laurent stilled, clearly weighing options in the privacy of his own mind. Damen waited patiently, and was rewarded with Laurent shifting to lean his head lightly against one bared shoulder, his hair tickling Damen’s skin. To distract from the newness of the action, Laurent asked, “Were you afraid?”

            Damen kept himself very still, half-worried the slightest movement would dislodge Laurent and this tentative intimacy would be lost. “Afraid, confused. Disbelief…then just anger.”

            Laurent made a small acknowledging hum.

            “…You know,” Damen said after a time, “Anyone I take up on their offer of dethroning you is going to be offended when it turns out we’re to be married.”

            “That will be the card we reveal last,” said Laurent. He paused again, as if each successive degree of physical contact came at great personal risk. Damen wanted to reassure him that nothing between them would ever be a danger, but Laurent would only take such talk as coddling. The best he could do was to let Laurent come into such understanding on his own, which he achieved by turning to cautiously press the warmth of his body into Damen’s side. “I know you won’t enjoy playing at being strangers again.”

            “I’ll endure it,” he replied, looping an arm comfortably around Laurent’s waist. “There’s little I wouldn’t do to secure a future with you.”

            Though the lights from their various candles was too dim to see well, Laurent still turned to bury his face in whatever part of Damen he could reach. “We can visit at night,” he murmured, as if sharing a great secret. “I won’t go months without you for the sake of infallible discretion.”

            “I can be discreet,” Damen promised, reveling in their closeness. “Arles has plenty of window shutters.”

[renaramblesaboutcomics]

Wednesday Roundup 6.9.2017

Here we are with a fairly straightforward week! I know, I’m surprised by my restraint, too! Who could have imagined I’d ever manage a week with less than five comics. My wallet definitely would appreciate if I did so more often. 

Regardless, let’s get right into the bones I have to pick. With one of these entries. Because it’s a bone and a half. And I use a lot of UPPERCASE so uhhh Guess which one gets that treatment!!!

Marvel’s Generations: Iron Man & Ironheart, Dark Horse’s Usagi Yojimbo, DC’s Wonder Girl: Adventures of a Teen Titan

Marvel’s Generations: Iron Man & Ironheart (2017) #1 Brian Michael Bendis, Marco Rudy,Szymon Kudranski, Nico Leon

Whooooooooo boy. It’s been a long time since I picked up a new comic at release date and just.... did not have a pleasant experience reading it. Like at all. So this was kind of a disappointing conclusion to what has for the last year been a pretty solid record of maintaining great comic book readership. I don’t know why I’m even a little surprised it’s a Bendis comic.

Here’s the thing, I don’t... aggressively hate BMB as others do. I’m just critical of him on what I feel are pretty logical issues to be critical of someone on and in turn that leads to this dagger’s edge of when his comics are good, they’re really damn good. But when they’re bad? It’s like this collision of all the things in comics possible that work as my personal pet peeves. Which is why, though I genuinely adore Riri Williams as a character, and had been enjoying her book, I moved it to a trade wait status right along with Miles Morales: Spider-Man -- it’s easier to take the good with the bad when it’s not an issue by issue basis. 

And... well. Let’s just say that for being THE guy at Marvel who usually gets all the very best talent to lift up even most of his comics I didn’t personally enjoy? There was not that saving grace this time around. Believe you me. I wish there were. But let’s just jump into the details.

Story: TONY STARK AS THE SORCERER SUPREME. TONY. STARK. SORCERER. SUPREME. Who asked for this. Who wanted this. Who thinks this future makes absolutely any sense whatsoever other than calling what everyone has thought since Tony “died” in Civil War II which is that Marvel doesn’t have the actual guts it takes to permanently kill off a franchise character that isn’t the original Jean Grey? Who thought this was a good idea? Bendis. Basically because Bendis likes to pretend he’s doing Morrison-style shake ups of continuity and bringing things together but rarely delivers it in a way that is either consistent or satisfying. 

The one reason I’ve been giving a good number of these Generations books a chance isn’t because I’m particularly interested in the event itself. Truth be told I have absolutely no idea why it’s happening or why Laura was sent back through time to meet up with Logan in Japan or just... anything. I didn’t catch a single clue of what was going on. And I didn’t really care because I’ve read comics long enough that I just want the issues themselves that center around the characters I care about to make sense and be enjoyable on their own. That, for me, is the most valuable part of an experience comics can grant me. And when it doesn’t, I would hope that at the very least it would be because they were providing me some insight on the event as a whole because it was substituting characterization and plot for the Event. Which happens. 

This comic managed to not only provide neither of those things for me, I would argue that it made me unerstand less about the event and less about Bendis’ own characterizations for Riri and Tony than I had a handle on before. Which is... frankly impressive. Also... what a fucking bland future. Like I appreciate it not being a nightmare dystopia like every other comic book future, ESPECIALLY at Marvel, but..... damn, man. There was exactly no life in the city of mushrooms and LSD of tomorrow. Apparently the only inhabitants of a positive future are.... oh my god I can’t believe I have to type it again, Sorcerer Supreme Tony Stark, and the blandest version of the future Avengers I think I’ve ever seen. Like at that point why even bother. 

Oh and adult Franklin Richards is special. Shocking. YES. FRANKLIN IS AN OMEGA LEVEL MUTANT BUT WHY WOULD STARK GO TO HIM TO FIX TIME TRAVEL SHENANIGANS WHEN IT’S VALERIA WHO IS THE SUPER GENIUS AND WAS THE ONE IN THE PAST RUNS OF FF THAT INVOLVED FUTURE FRANKLIN TIME TRAVELING WHO CREATED THE TECHNOLOGY FOR HIM TO DO SO. BENDIS HAVE YOU NOT BEEN KEEPING UP WITH THE FF FOR THE PAST TWO DECADES OR SOMETHING WHAT THE HELL. Moving on... 

Art: One thing I can usually always count on with Marvel is that they love to match their best artists with the leading talents they have writing, and there’s no one shaping the entirety of the Marvel Universe right now more than Bendis, so usually the art for his comics is easily some of the best to come out in any given week.

....

That’s not.... really the case here??? Is it terrible, no not at all. And there’s definitely nice sequences. The problem arises from the page layouts which, ngl, utterly awful. There were multiple pages in a row where I had to reread the whole page again just so I could follow the dialogue. It was not easy to follow from one panel to the next, and the psychodellic affects just made me wish for 70s comics. Back when they had rulers. 

Characters & Dialogue: Sorcerer. Supreme. Tony. Freaking. Stark. No I’m not over it. Especially since this entire issue was more dedicated to beefing up how awesome and amazing Tony is. Riri’s fine, but her biggest part in this issue is to be Tony’s fan and to learn that she’ll be awesome!!!... in the future. She’s only 15 now! She’ll have to grow up into a more prominent hero in the next 45 real world years. But mostly it was... just really lazy. What’s interested me about Generations is that it’s given an excuse for Legacy characters to team up across timelines with versions of their predecessors that in all honesty would have not made sense in other context. What was great about the Wolverine issue I covered before wasn’t just that we got to see Logan and Laura the way we had back when Logan was alive. We got to see Laura with a version of her father that she had never met before. And to make it even more unique, it was viewing this older, more matured Laura almost entirely through the eyes of the father who didn’t yet know her. It was creative and it added depth for both characters even if it’s not going to be the source of some great shift in the main comics for them, it provides a refreshing look into who they are and even how far they’ve come. This issue? Honestly I can’t even tell you what Bendis’ goal was here. And that cover -- the name of the issue? -- the idea we’d get to see Iron Man and Ironheart team up together and kick ass is apparently just too predictable and lame for an event that is literally advertised as being that exact premise. 

I’m so annoyed with this comic. But I’m really more annoyed with myself for expecting something more interesting and paying Marvel’s outrageous and nearly unethical price gouging of their comics. $4.99 for this comic. I’m never getting that $4.99 back. That’s... That’s like five bags of chips from the vending machine at work. That’s a Hot & Ready pizza at Little Ceaser’s. I spent it on this comic. What’s wrong with me. What did I expect???

Dark Horse’s Usagi Yojimbo (1984-present) #161 Stan Sakai, Tom Luth

Why are the best comics always the most difficult to explain in quality? This thing has been going on for thirty years, has never changed writer or artist, has impressed by the hundreds of thousands, and drastically impacted the atmosphere and tone of comics publishing since the 80s right alongside Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all without truly getting due credit. I would tell anyone who asked to just immediately drop what they’re reading and go catch up on Usagi, but it feels like that should go without saying. 

Instead I’ll say, this issue is the first of a new arc and since you can jump into Usagi Yojimbo comics at any point in continuity and be assured to have a good time and pick up what you need to know along the way, pick up today’s issue and get started.

Story: We see the collision of a few of Usagi’s favorite supporting casts and as always it leads to a lot of ruckus and a lot of fun. Though not specifically fun for Kitsune this time around as she’s been seemingly framed for murder. Fortunately Usagi comes in to vouch for her and due to Ishida’s immense respect for Usagi earned over the years Kitsune gets off relatively lighter than usual. But there’s still a murderer about. 

Now one of my compliments to Usagi Yojimbo and really the genius of Stan Sakai in general is that he’s maintained a high quality solo comic for over thirty years and somehow still makes new stories always keeping hot takes and ideas for characters refreshingly new and refreshingly fun. That remains true of this story, too, since this match up of supporting characters hasn’t exactly been seen yet, but at the same time I’m suspicious of the retread of the idea of Kitsune being framed for a crime other than the one she really did and Usagi having to figure out the mystery. I don’t expect that plot to be repeated beat for beat, especially since Inspector Ishida is here and that almost always develops into a more thickly plotted mystery story. So part of me talking up all that flowery wording on my adoration of these comics is to explain why, despite my usual instincts to be distrusting of a repetitive plot beat in comics, I know to expect more from the upcoming issue continuation and don’t have that fear of disappointment that has been instilled in me for the past two decades. 

Also new to the comic is the addition of a one page sub-story at the end of Chibi Usagi which might be the most adorable idea ever and Stan Sakai truly is the hero we don’t deserve. 

Art: I once read a comic reviewer’s explanation of Usagi Yojimbo’s art as being “deceptively simple” -- the bold lines, the character designs, the adherence to a completely black and white comic -- what is seemingly such a simple comic in theory dazzles with its true complexity and tight control of action sequences and blocking. Stan Sakai uses Japanese patterns and crosshatching as well as detailed background art to turn almost every sequence into an unmistakable landmark that makes every town and prefecture that Usagi travels to feel unique. 

It’s just one of those amazing things you have to see for yourself to truly believe. 

Characters & Dialogue: This section is pretty much purposeless on an Usagi Yojimbo comic because Sakai has been writing these characters so long and giving them all such identifiable traits and voices that they’re just always good. If you enjoy these characters then Sakai meets every heightened expectation along the way.

DC’s Wonder Girl: Adventures of a Teen Titan  John Byrne, Bob Kanigher, Bruno Premiani, Neal Adams, Ross Andru, Bob Haney

One thing I have liked recently that DC’s been doing is these recollections of their properties that for a long time they haven’t capitalized on the most, and there’s probably no better example of that exact thing than the severely underrated Wonder Girl Legacy, which has finally earned a short and cute collection going over all the (three) Wonder Girls over the years and even includes the introduction of SOLSTICE! One of my favorite underutilized characters. 

It’s a super neat collection, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the history of Wonder Girl (which is a bumpy ride to be sure) but it also spans so many generations and so many writers and story arcs that I can’t really summarize it the way I do my usual reviews. I can just say that if you’re curious about the Wonder Girls, it’s a great collection to check out. 

Also as a side note, as someone who was deeply disappointed by the lackluster to downright confused and insulting use of Cassie Sandsmark in the New52, DC is apparently doctoring the character to resemble more of what she was in the preboot because the New52 is utterly ignored in this collection, hilariously enough.

Oh, those tides. How they turn. 

The unsurprising pick of the week is, obviously, Usagi Yojimbo. It’s one of the best comics ever made, it continues to be one of the best comics ever made, and also the competition was thin if only I’m being lenient. But regardless, this comic was a fantastic start to the new storyline and I’m so excited to see what twists and turns shall be weaved. 

Now that’s all for this week, but I’m curious about your opinions! Did you agree with me? Disagree? Think I missed out on some great comic I didn’t pick up? Please let me know!

And finally, another necessary plug:

I am in a bit of a financial crunch for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being the medical bills I’m paying for my dog, Eve, who experienced a catastrophic dog fight and underwent surgery recently.

As such, I really would appreciate if you enjoy my content or are interested in helping me out, please check out either my Patreon or PayPal. Every bit helps and I couldn’t thank you enough for enjoying and supporting my content.

You could also support me by going to my main blog, @renaroo, where I’ll soon be listing prices and more for art and writing commissions.

RenaRoo Patreon

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[frankkjonestx]

Stephen Wolfram’s hypergraph project aims for a fundamental theory of physics

Thanks to Kevin Bacon, everybody nowadays knows about networks.

There are not only Bacon-like networks of actors, linked by appearing in the same film, but also social networks, neural networks and networks of viral transmission. There are power grid networks, ecological networks and the grandest network of all, the internet. Sometimes it seems like the entire universe must be just one big network.

And maybe it is.

Physicist–computer scientist–entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram believes the universe is a vast, growing network of relationships that constitutes space itself, and everything within it. In this picture, Wolfram sees the basis for the ultimate theory underlying all of physical law.

Wolfram expressed something like this view 18 years ago in a 1,197-page tome entitled A New Kind of Science. But back then his picture was still a little fuzzy. Now he thinks he has found a more sharply focused vision for how to explain reality.

“I’m thrilled to say,” he writes in a summary document released April 14, “that I think we’ve found a path to the fundamental theory of physics.”

At the core of Wolfram’s approach is the notion of a hypergraph. “Graph” in this context is like the diagrammatic representation of a network: lines connecting points. But reality can��t be captured by lines linking points on a flat sheet of paper. Wolfram generates computer visualizations to depict relationships in more complicated “hypergraphs.” (In a hypergraph, the “lines” can connect any number of points, not just one to another.)

Wolfram’s investigations indicate that complex hypergraphs can mimic many features of the universe, including matter and energy, along with reproducing the physical structures and processes described by the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

“In our model, everything in the universe — space, matter, whatever — is supposed to be represented by features of our evolving hypergraph,” Wolfram writes.

His key point is that such extremely complex hypergraphs can be produced by applying simple rules to a simple starting point. Suppose you have two “abstract elements” labeled A and B. You have a rule that says every A should be changed to BBB, and every BB should be replaced with A.

Start with A. By the rule, you “update” A to BBB. BBB possesses two BBs. So you update BBB twice: Once, making the first two Bs into an A (making AB), and then making the second two Bs to an A, making BA. So:

A

is connected to

BBB

which is connected to both

AB and BA.

Updates of AB and BA both yield BBBB. But BBBB then makes ABB, BBA and BAB. As you keep on applying the rule, the graph gets more complicated.

These update steps, Wolfram says, correspond to our common notion of time, a sort of ticktock of the cosmic clock. As a rule is repeatedly applied to a set of abstract entities, the resulting connections — the graph of the relationships linking them — correspond to the structure of space. So space (in this picture) is not a mere uniform set of indistinguishable points; rather it is a network of points linked in unfathomably complex patterns that reproduce matter and energy and the relationships collectively known as the laws of physics.

“This is basically how I think space in the universe works,” Wolfram writes. “Underneath, it’s a bunch of discrete, abstract relations between abstract points. But at the scale we’re experiencing it, the pattern of relations it has makes it seem like continuous space of the kind we’re used to.”

It’s sort of like how fish perceive the ocean as a smooth featureless fluid, even though the water is made of discrete tiny molecules.

In a sense, Wolfram believes, everything that exists is basically made from space. “Put another way,” he writes, “it’s the exact same hypergraph that’s giving us the structure of space, and everything that exists in space.”

It almost sounds like theoretical physicists should close up shop and just run some computer simulations using Wolfram’s rules. But as he acknowledges, the job isn’t done yet. So far Wolfram’s project has identified almost 1,000 rules that produce complicated structures that look like a universe. It remains to be seen what rule produces precisely the universe we all actually inhabit.

“Sometime — I hope soon — there might just be a rule … that has all the right properties, and that we’ll slowly discover that, yes, this is it — our universe finally decoded,” Wolfram writes.

In his summary, Wolfram declares that hypergraphs illustrate a principle he calls “causal invariance.” That means that various distinct paths through the hypergraph can sometimes converge. Such convergences allow the cause-and-effect chain of events through time to be preserved.

In a hypergraph “there is not just one path of time; there are many paths, and many ‘histories,’” Wolfram writes. But one supposedly independent path of history can merge with another. “Even when the paths of history that are followed are different, these causal relationships can end up being the same — and that in effect, to an observer embedded in the system, there is still just a single thread of time.”

Thanks to causal invariance, Wolfram’s hypergraphs reproduce many of the consequences of various physical theories, such as Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Traveling rapidly slows down time (as special relativity says) because hypergraph structures corresponding to moving objects make an angle through the hypergraph that extends the distance between updates (or time steps). The speed of light is a maximum velocity, as relativity states, because it represents the maximum rate that information can spread through the hypergraph as it updates. And gravity — described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity — emerges in the relationship between features in the hypergraph that can be interpreted as matter particles. (Particles would be small sets of linked points that persist as the hypergraph updates, something like “little lumps of space” with special properties.)

In an even more complicated extension of these ideas, Wolfram explores how hypergraph properties even correspond to the weird features of quantum mechanics. “In our models, quantum mechanics is not just possible; it’s absolutely inevitable,” Wolfram asserts.

Space as constructed in such hypergraphs can have a very fine structure, like a digital camera sensor with gazillions of megapixels. Wolfram estimates that a hypergraph corresponding to today’s universe might have applied 10500 time steps (incomprehensibly more than the universe’s age in seconds, roughly 1015). So space could be fine-grained enough to contain matter-particle structures much, much smaller than the known particles of physics. In fact, Wolfram suggests, supersmall unknown particles, which he calls oligons, might have been created in abundance shortly after the beginning of the universe. Such oligons, subject only to gravity, could now be hanging out in and around galaxies utterly unnoticed — except for their gravitational impact. Oligons might therefore explain why astronomers infer the existence of vast amounts of invisible “dark matter” in space. (And that could also explain why attempts so far to identify the nature of dark matter have been unsuccessful.)

Similarly, the mysterious “dark energy” that drives the universe to expand at an accelerating rate might just be a natural feature of Wolfram’s hypergraphs. Perhaps dark energy might in essence just be what space itself is made of.

Beyond that, Wolfram believes that his hypergraphs could resolve current disputes about which of many speculative theories are the best bets for explaining fundamental physics. Superstring theory, loop quantum gravity, causal sets and other ideas have all been proposed, and debated, for decades. Wolfram thinks hypergraphs can contain all of them.

“It almost seems like everyone has been right all along,” he writes, “and it just takes adding a new substrate to see how it all fits together.”

Wolfram’s technical paper (and accompanying papers — here and here — by colleague Jonathan Gorard) have been posted on a website promoting his project, and Wolfram is inviting the physics community to participate in pursuing his vision.

“In the end our goal must be to build a bridge that connects our models to existing knowledge about physics,” he writes. “I am extremely optimistic that we are finally on the right track” toward finding the “right” rule for our universe.

That “right rule” would generate a hypergraph with our universe’s precise properties: three (apparent) dimensions of space, the right cosmic expansion rate, the right repertoire of elementary particles with the correct charges and masses, and other features.

But perhaps, Wolfram has realized, seeking one single rule misses a bigger point. Maybe the universe uses all the possible rules. Then all the possible universes are just parts of one really big universe, in which “absolutely everything … can happen — including all events for all possible rules.”

We discern a certain set of physical laws based on the “language” we use to describe and comprehend the world. The elements of this language are tuned to “the kinds of things our senses detect, our measuring devices measure, and our existing physics describes.” The right rule is the one that corresponds to the portion of the hypergraph that we explore from our own particular frame of reference. Life elsewhere might see things differently. “There’s actually an almost infinite diversity of different ways to describe and experience our universe,” Wolfram suggests.

In other words, explaining the physics that applies to our existence might require insight into the mechanisms of a vastly more complex reality, beyond the realm of what we can experience. As Wolfram puts it, “In many ways, we are inevitably skating at the edge of what humans can understand.”

As he acknowledges, much more work will be needed to merge his approach with the successful theories of established physics. And standard physics does have an impressive resume of accomplishments, explaining details about everything from the innards of atoms to the architecture of the universe and the nature of space and time.

Yet mainstream physicists have long suspected that space and time cannot be fundamental concepts. Rather it seems likely that space and time are conventions that must emerge from something deeper. It might be a long shot, but just maybe Wolfram has perceived a path that leads to the depths where reality originates.

Only time — or many more hypergraph updating steps — will tell.

from Tips By Frank https://www.sciencenews.org/article/stephen-wolfram-hypergraph-project-fundamental-theory-physics

[pelikinesis]

warning:  this was a casual review of the movie Outcast, until it wasn’t (and then it kept going)

i just watched Outcast, because it was free on Tubitv and because it had Nicolas Cage and Hayden Christensen on top billing. the fact that it was supposed to be set in 12th century China was even more baffling, and probably racist. it has a 5% on Rotten Tomatoes. but...

but i had to know. i had to see this for myself. so i did.

and now that i have, i’m puzzled as to what exactly they were going for.

amongst other things, they literally forget about one character. there’s a random peasant girl, and i say that because that’s how she was first introduced, and given that she has virtually no other scenes and does literally nothing of significance, she’s still just a random peasant girl by the end of the movie.

the only thing she contributes is that, by rescuing her, Hayden Christensen’s PTSD Crusade veteran can be reminded he’s redeemable. she interacts maybe once with each main character afterwards in short, terse scenes. tomorrow i’ll wake up, remember watching Outcast, and struggle with my own memory on if there was a fourth character in that movie and call bullshit on myself. that might even be the main point of writing this, to prove it wasn’t a completely mundane embellishment on my part.

and i start off mentioning that, because it’s the only way to explain how Nicolas Cage is in a movie where he’s missing an eye, sports the most improbable and jarring hairstyle yet, and at one point wears live snakes on his arms while yelling in incomprehensible angrish at Hayden Christensen who is in a fever dream, and yet i have to remind myself of those details because his character is somehow forgettable. 

and i may be biased, but i imagine it has to do with how little he is in the movie. I’d be surprised if he were in more than 30 minutes of the entire movie. he’s there in the prologue, appears in a handful of flashbacks, then shows up at the end to have a dramatic Boromir-esque final stand shortly after telling his whole “here’s what i was up to between the beginning of the movie and now, it’s very tragic, let me tell you, in words, in expository dialogue, in this incredibly visual medium, what happened to me and why you should care”

another thing i’m going to remember tomorrow is Nic Cage’s shockingly mediocre rousing speech to his troops ala King Theoden at Helm’s Deep (the LotR references are apt in the worst way, trust me), because no such thing happened, and yet it needed to, for the climactic battle of traitorous Blackguard vs. Nic Cage’s wacky mountain bandits. because otherwise, the mountain bandits have no incentive to risk their lives for the falsely-framed prince--it’s been established multiple times that no other group, not the palace guards, nor town inhabitants, nor merchant caravans from the Middle East, were willing to fight on behalf of the true heir to the throne against the patricidal tyrant prince. 

but no such speech happened. there’s an incredibly bitter reunion between the two white Crusade veterans where they clear up a minor misunderstanding, become friends, and then suddenly not only Nic Cage but his entire mountain bandit gang are down to fight against impossible odds against the best soldiers of the empire. at the very least they needed a scene where they somehow agreed they were going to do this thing, but they didn’t even go through the motions. 

i was actually confused when i saw them starting to collectively mess with jars and powder and stuff. i thought they might be deciding to flee or something, and then i was wondering if i must have misheard or misinterpreted the past several minutes of dialogue. What was their plan, exactly? I understand why it had to be a last, desperate stand with no possible escape routes (hence the Helm’s Deep reference)--because the prologue of the movie had to have a call-back at the end, with the turntables bieng turned. very poetic, yes.

but there’s no indication that this battle has to happen. They’re deep in the mountains. They’re being harried by a force of fully armed and heavily armored infantry. They had to cross a large river and were only seen getting across in a series of thin, canoe-like boats. there’s every indication that the main characters, aside from Anakin, had time to come up with a plan beside “last stand against hopeless odds” because while i can buy some of the Blackguard catching up to their general area, it couldn’t be the entire overwhelming force presented in the climactic battle.

on the other hand, if in fact several days or even weeks had passed and Anakin was unconscious for the whole time, as opposed to at most a day as all clues indicate, then Nic Cage would have asked the royal siblings and maybe even Random Peasant Girl what the hell was going on, and could have made preparations for escape well before the Blackguard could have arrived in force.

come to think of it, they basically started off a set of character arcs and only like one or two got resolved, namely between Anakin and Chinese Padme. i mean, the character is literally a princess so this analogy actually works. also, the actress clearly was doing the best she could with the script, much like Natalie Portman. it was the most okay thing about the movie. she even gets a feminist speech in on Anakin, though unfortunately his reaction scene is very rushed.

so i’ll always be in favor of gratuitous feminist speeches, as opposed to gratuitous sexist speeches, when it comes to both fiction and real life, and even though it seems rather bold for a 12th century Chinese princess to tell off a white Christian crusader about how the horrors of war also affect women, interrupting his guilt-ridden man-pain pity party at a perfect moment. and he pauses and then says ‘u rite’ which would be fine if the camera didn’t end  the scene with a very short shot of his face turned away from the camera. should have been right on him shoving his foot knee-deep into his own mouth. for symbolism.

and when i say it’s gratuitous, i do believe that’s mostly a function of that scene ending so quickly. if that scene continued, it could have gone somewhere interesting, even flowed into their obvious romantic arc.

finally, the whole concept of a movie about white European crusaders finding themselves caught up in a royal coup in Song Dynasty-era China (unless i’m doing history wrong, which is very possible) after being disillusioned and traumatized by their war experiences in Jerusalem--that’s not a bad concept. 

the prospect of following a character who started off galvanized by genuine religious fervor, to struggling with the reality that the Crusades, like the majority of other wars, is about greed and power, then ended up complicit in war crimes and massacres just by doing their job as soldiers and holy duty as Christians--as they go from that to becoming embroiled in the bloodshed of royal succession, that’s a jarring-ass thing. they’re completely difference worlds in every meaningful sense.

but the fact is, the writing isn’t very good, at least not in the state it was clearly cut into, and furthermore, the above concept would only be sufficiently meaningful if the film was done with a Chinese language, where Hayden Christensen and Nicolas Cage do their dialogue in the language of the setting the film is set in. there’s absolutely no way that subtext could be earned when it’s the presence of the two top-billed white males as part of the rationale for a film that was filmed in, set in, and made most of its money in China to have English be the spoken language.

and that’s super annoying because i hate the fact that I have to read the synopsis of a movie like Outcast and be correct in assuming there’s something racist about--because there didn’t have to be. this could have been--no, there COULD BE films featuring multicultural casts of characters set in the distant past that aren’t racist, or pandering, or whatever. i wish i didn’t need the skepticism that i have to that idea.

the whole prospect of different people from different places in the world suddenly cross paths, at a time when the world was so comparatively disconnected it was effectively much larger, and living in different empires were essentially living in different worlds, is always interesting to me, precisely because i’m so bad at history. Just looking at the wikipedia page for my birth year to see what events occurred at the same time i debuted my life, it’s overwhelming.

in 1989 the Showa era gave way to the Heisei era in Japan, a distinction i really only understand in the context of Kamen Rider; Ted Bundy was executed in Florida; the nation of Iran placed a $3 million bounty on Salman Rushdie for authoring The Satanic Verses;  Exxon spilled 240,000 barrels of oil into the waters around Alaska; there were the Tiananmen Square protests; the Game Boy was released; The Berlin Wall is torn down; The Velvet Revolution begins in Prague; Salvadore Dali and Lucille Ball both died that year.

one thing that struck me is how simultaneously few and many names there are in the births and deaths lists. the pattern that emerges from these lists is on the one hand, unsurprising, but on the other, infuriating in a way. performers and politicians populate these lists. everyone else becomes relegated to memory. just like Random Peasant Girl. i could imagine a writer gave her a couple more scenes that would have made her a meaningful character in the movie. and those scenes got deleted, and her story doesn’t make it into the film that people saw.

i just realized how far this has gone from what was originally a review or rant of Outcast. I’ve been watching a lot of video essays recently, most of which are about video game franchises. they’re really well done, at least the one’s I’ve seen. Off of the top of my head I remember the name Noah Caldwell-Gervais, or something like that. Cadwell, maybe. I’d check, but then I’d probably keep writing, at least until the weed wears off completely.

it’s weird how listening and watching essays makes me miss writing/composing essays, giving speeches, and all that. or maybe it’s just weird how i like doing that sort of thing. or how i’m really impressionable. or maybe Outcast was weird. 

Outcast *is* weird. I also hope that we’re reaching the tail end of the ongoing film industry convention of giving movies really bland, generic names. Outcast. Jumper. Shooter. mmm, no, i should take back that last point. i’d have to look at more lists of movies to see whether this is just confirmation bias or actually a thing. Jumper and SHooter are way older movies too i think. anyways, i hope that we’re reaching the tail end of a lot of things that are currently ongoing. like white supremacy and continuing to permit systems of governance that permit and entrench white supremacy and other bullshit.

[task-modelcam-blog]

Paradox Of Self-Promotion And How To Escape It

Self Promotion, Audience, Traditional Marketing, Media, Content, Social Media, Social Selling, Amit Jadhav Social, Digital Marketing, facebook, Newspaper, TV and Radio

Social media generally frowns on self-promotion, but self-promotion is a necessity for anyone starting out and hoping to gain any sort of foothold on social media. 

Did you know that you can toot your own horn without automatically causing your audience to roll their eyes and scroll by your post? Yes, self-promotion and value can live in the same post in peace and perfect harmony.

To make this seemingly impossible feat a reality, you need to understand that, out of the two elements, value must be your first priority while ‘self-promotion’ — in its literal sense —takes a backseat.

Self Promotion: The Black Sheep Of Social Media Marketing

The paradox is that self-promotion on social media is both, a necessity and a no-no.

You see, the reason the term ‘self-promotion’ has such a bad rep is that it was a direct aftermath of traditional marketers trying to adopt social media into their marketing plans. They would use the techniques they used while making advertisements for conventional marketing media like newspapers, TV, and radio. And it made sense back when people wanted to know about your products in a straightforward manner.

The problem cropped up when the definition of the term didn’t evolve with the audience it catered to; while people slowly started to prefer personal connections and humanized versions of their favourite brands, companies unintentionally (or stubbornly) stuck to using self-promotion as a device for sales pitches.

The Paradox Of Self-Promotion On Social Media

In his blog on Social Media Today, Matthew Peters perfectly explains “The Paradox of Self-promotion on Social Media”:

Social media generally frowns on self-promotion, in many cases admonishing outright those who practice it. But with the sheer numbers of new videos, posts, sites, pictures, and stories appearing each and every day, self-promotion is a necessity for anyone starting out and hoping to gain any sort of foothold.

In short, the paradox is that self-promotion on social media is both, a necessity and a no-no.

Even if you don’t talk about yourself constantly, self-promotion has been so overused that even the few times you do directly promote your brand; you will see an immediate backlash.

So, even if you don’t talk about yourself constantly, self-promotion has been so overused that even the few times you do directly promote your brand; you will see an immediate backlash. This means that if you want to stick to having your social media promotion heavy, you will have to learn how to add value to your self-promotional posts.

How To Escape The Paradox

1. Spam and You’re Out

The Number 1 rule of social media is: “Give Spam, Get Banned.”No one — and I mean no one — likes to see the same thing over and over and over again, especially if it is a clear sales pitch on social media. If you want to spread awareness about something, say an event you’re hosting, instead of putting up multiple posts about it, you could write a few articles or blogs related to the event and add some information about it in there.

While we’re on the topic about spam, let’s talk about private messages. Now, it is a great way to connect with your audience on a personal level but it can become an equally great way to annoy your audience… on a personal level. So here is a simple advice: Use private messages sparingly. It may sound counterproductive but it will actually help you. Overusing or abusing the private messages feature only results in your messages losing their charm.

If you use the private message feature to send your followers or potential followers lists of blogs or links, your audience will use their private message feature to mute, block, or worse, report you. Leave newsletter-type updates for newsletters and use private messages only for special instances like upcoming events; that way your messages will hold some meaning and increase the chances of your followers clicking on it rather than scroll by it.

2. Sell, But Subtly

If you’re a brand, you are going to sell, but don’t make it obvious.

Okay, listen, your social media audience isn’t stupid; they know that, if you’re a brand, you are going to sell to them. They don’t mind that as long as you do it their way, which means — don’t make it obvious. Disguise your promotion with your opinions on relevant links you share, blend it into your blogs, alter the content in your posts to sound and look interesting or entertaining.

3. Give and You Shall Receive

The reason why self-promotion is frowned upon is that it makes you look self-absorbed. Well, that’s not entirely true. The fact is, constantly and exclusively promoting yourself makes you look self-absorbed. To get around this hitch, you will have to become a ‘real user’. What does that mean?

It means that you will have to do everything a real user of the platform does.

This includes, but is not limited to, sharing content created by your peers, lifting up other voices, and engaging with the community through replies and discussions. This will help break the illusion of vainness that is usually a byproduct of self-promotion.

4. Don’t Aim for Instant Virality

focus on giving your audience interesting, entertaining, and informative content that is relevant to them

Rarely does it happen that a post goes viral as soon as it is published, and even if does, you need more than 15 minutes of fame to build a brand. So don’t hope for your notifications to blow up in the first go; in fact, don’t even aim for that. Instead, focus on giving your audience interesting, entertaining, and informative content that is relevant to them, regardless of whether it is your original content or content you share from others.

5. With a Little Help From Your Friends

Social media is nothing like print media or any other traditional marketing medium; you cannot get away with blatant and constant promotion, you cannot post something and leave your audience hanging in the comments sections, and you absolutely cannot survive without friends. In this context, ‘friends’ refers to the people you connect with without the intention of marketing to them.

The people you interact with during discussions, reach out to when sharing their original content, and meet in your comments sections when replying to them have higher chances of following you than the ones you market to directly. These are the followers who will make you a strong brand because they are here because your brand voice appealed to them, not because they like your sales pitch; these are the followers you are looking for.

6. Know Your Platforms

There are literally thousands of social media platforms in the world and not all of them will help you grow your brand. So you need to learn to pick your battles. Research on the best platforms for your brand, figure out the ones that can potentially fit in with your social media plan, go through their terms and conditions (no, really, go through them) and filter out unsuitable ones (that don’t allow original content or place too many restrictions on posting it).

You will also need to understand the unspoken rules of the platform and the community sentiment towards self-promotion and find out whether the platform and its community’s tone matched your brand voice. All this may sound like too much work — and it probably is — but in the long run, this research will save you from a lot of stress.

7. Find Your Golden Ratio

In the previous article, we looked at the various content ratios for social media, one of which was “the Golden Ratio”. In this ratio, you allot 30% for original content, 60% for curated content, and 10% for promotional content. But, if you want to focus on self-promotion, you need your own Golden Ratio. You will probably have to experiment a little before you find it, but make sure to find it; not only will it help you plan your content schedule, you will also not feel as overwhelmed about the notion of self-promotion.

8. Add Value to Your Self-promotion

If you give your audience value along with your self-promotion, most of them will be much more tolerant of self-promotion.

The reason why self-promotion is so frowned upon on social media is because it is mostly pitch after pitch after pitch that push brands on absolutely uninterested audiences in the same old bland ways. But if you give your audience value along with your self-promotion, most of them will be much more tolerant (even receptive) of it.

It might start off as a real task to frame your content to give your audience value and promote your brand, but once you get a hang of it, this skill will be a great boon for your brand.

In the end, it is important to remember that you are on social media to build your brand. So you need to be your number #1 fan and evangelist; you need self-promotion. But you also need to keep in mind that people don’t like to listen to brands broadcast about themselves all the time.

The only way out of this paradox is to find the right balance between value and promotion (mostly the balance is tipped towards value). This “value-added self-promotion” is a long, not-so-easy path, but it is a path towards success; you only have to learn how to tread it (which is a long process in itself).

[dorothydelgadillo]

14 Essential Books To Make You a More Progressive, Future-proof Marketer

The future of marketing is changing.

For one thing, marketing is no longer a siloed department.

In many companies, it is now part of customer service. It’s part of sales. It’s part of product development. Marketing is becoming more and more involved in other departments, as people realize the buyer’s journey never truly “ends.”

And as marketing itself changes, marketers will have to evolve their skill sets to keep up.

I believe that the days when you could be a highly successful marketing specialist are numbered. In the future, the most effective and sought-after marketers will be “full-stack marketers.”

In other words, marketers who understand the entire marketing process from beginning to end. Marketers who can do it all.

In order to become one of those “full-stack marketers” and really thrive in 2018 and beyond, you’ll need to attain a solid grasp of many different marketing topics.

These 14 books will give you the breadth of understanding you need to become a successful modern marketer.

Analytics & Data Books

There’s no getting around it: the marketer of the future absolutely must be comfortable with analytics and data.

You don’t necessarily have to be a statistician or a data scientist, but as a modern marketer, you DO have to make the best-informed decisions you can. That requires a solid understanding of how to analyze and understand data and these two books will help give you a solid foundation in how to do that.

1. Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll

Written for startups, this book will help you grow your business with data-informed decisions—without being overwhelmed with so much data you don’t know what to do with it.

That’s really the struggle for a lot of businesses, isn’t it? You want data to inform your decisions, but you don’t want to drown in it.

So, what you need is a system that can help you distill the mountain of data that’s available into just a few important metrics.

Enter Lean Analytics.

This book teaches that all startups go through five distinct phases:

Empathy - Connecting with others to discover a problem you can help solve.

Stickiness - Discovering a way to solve that problem in a way that’s “sticky.”

Virality - Building a marketable product that people enjoy using.

Revenue - Growing your company, while maintaining profitability.

Scale - Expanding into new markets and growing your team.

The genius of the Lean Analytics method is that it helps you distill each stage down into the one metric that matters most.

This way you’re able to focus on the single most important task in your business at any one point in time.

2. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb

This book teaches that as important as data is—it can’t predict everything.

There’s always a certain amount of luck and randomness in life and business, and most people have a tendency to underestimate how powerful those forces can be.

So, what does that mean for us as marketers? Does it mean we should stop trying to measure our efforts because it all comes down to luck in the end?

NO! Of course not!

Of course, we should always try our hardest to succeed, and that often means making the most of the data and analytics available to us.

But we also shouldn’t let that lure us into overconfidence.

No matter how much we analyze the data, we can never predict the future with certainty.

No matter how confident we are that a new marketing campaign will be successful, for example, there’s no way to know for sure what will happen until we let it out into the world.

For better or worse, “randomness” will always have an effect on your business. The point isn’t to get disheartened or to think of your business like a roulette table (which it definitely is NOT). The point is to be aware of the prevalence of randomness in business so you can be prepared for any possible outcome.

This book will help you do that.

Behavioral Psychology Books

You may have heard me say this before, but I’ll say it again:

B2B...B2C...all marketing is really just H2H.

(Human-to-human.)

No matter how complex the digital marketing landscape becomes, remember that it’s always a human being on the other side of that computer screen; Someone a lot like you, with similar worries, fears, hopes, and dreams.

So, yeah. It’s pretty much impossible to be a top marketer without understanding the psychology of why we do the things we do.

Luckily, there are some amazing books out there on this topic. Here are my top 5:

3. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

This is the classic book on persuasion, and it deserves to be on every marketer’s bookshelf.

In it, Robert Cialdini describes the psychology of what makes people say “yes.” (Clearly, a useful skill for any marketer.)

He boils all of the persuasion down into six primary factors:

Reciprocation - When someone does something for us, we feel obligated to reciprocate.

Commitment and consistency - People like to be consistent with their own behavior, so once they have committed to something, they are more likely to stick with it.

Social proof - If something appears to be popular and well-regarded by a lot of other people, it instantly becomes more attractive to us.

Liking - People are much more likely to be persuaded by someone they like.

Authority - We tend to trust and obey authority figures—people like doctors, judges, experts, celebrities, and so on.

Scarcity - We put a high value on things that are scarce, which makes them appear more valuable.

By applying these principles to your own marketing, you’ll find that your ads and landing pages will instantly become more persuasive and effective.

4. Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini

Cialdini followed up Influence with Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, a fascinating study on how you can make your marketing more persuasive by strategically taking advantage of “the essential window of time before you deliver an important message.”

In other words, framing your message in the right context and asking a “pre-suasive” question can dramatically increase the odds of people being receptive to what you have to say.

Cialdini cites a 1993 study among students who were asked a simple pre-suasive question: “Are you unhappy?” Asking this causes people to start fishing for unhappiness in their life.

Whereas, “Are you happy?” makes you look for the positives.

In the 1993 study, students asked the first question were 375% times more likely to report actually being unhappy.

Bottom line: What kind of answer you get highly depends on how you ask the question.

That’s just one example of what Cialdini refers to as “pre-suasion.” As you can see from it, it’s a fascinating topic and definitely worth a read.

(Keep in mind, this book builds on some of the concepts in his first book, Influence, so I would recommend reading that one before.)

5. Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition by Dr. Dan Ariely

In this NYT bestselling book, Dr. Ariely examines the cause and effect of some of our most irrational behaviors.

For example, have you ever noticed that name brand aspirin seems to work better than the generic  (even though they both contain the exact same ingredients)?

Or that people will clip coupons to save 50¢ at the grocery store and then splurge many times that amount at a restaurant?

These are the kinds of irrational behaviors that don’t make sense on the surface.

When you start to understand our irrational psychological triggers behind them, however, you’ll start to recognize them all over the place. Self-defeating behaviors, the placebo effect, the power of suggestion, the psychological effect of price anchoring; these are just some of the phenomena we see.

As a marketer, it’s critically important that you understand how and why we make such irrational behaviors. They really are “the hidden forces that shape our decisions.”

6. Meet Your Happy Chemicals by Loretta Graziano Breuning

This book gives you a detailed explanation of your “feel-good” chemicals: dopamine, serotonin, endorphin, and oxytocin.

As human beings, we’re wired to seek out things that feel good; In other words, things that stimulate those four happy chemicals in our brains, and a big part of that means we seek out things that felt good in the past.

If you, as a marketer, can deliver customer experiences that stimulate those happy chemicals, then guess what? Yep, you guessed it. Your customers will be literally hard-wired to come back to you again and again!

(Note: the book has been republished with the title, Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Endorphin Levels, which you can get here.)

7. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Nir’s illuminating product design book explains why some products (and startups) succeed and others fail.

In it, Nir concludes that the key to launching a successful product is influencing consumer behavior in a way that reinforces a habit of using your product.

Makes sense, right? But how do you actually do that?

Nir lays it out in his 4-part “Hook Method,” which he describes as a cycle of events engineered to keep consumers coming back again and again:

Trigger - First, you need something to happen that will prompt the consumer to take action. This could be an external trigger (like an email) or an internal trigger (like feeling hungry).

Action - Next, you need the consumer to take some sort of easy action in order to receive the reward promised by your product. (i.e. click this link, sign in to the app, etc.)

Variable Reward - In order for a product to be truly habit-forming, it can’t offer the same exact reward every time. Instead, the reward has to be variable. This way, the user will never be able to fully anticipate the reward they will receive. (i.e. new updates/content every time you visit)

Investment - The last step is getting the user to make a small investment in your product, helping to keep them committed to using it even more in the future. (i.e. uploading their photos into the platform, connecting with all of their friends.)

By baking these 4 steps into your own products and marketing funnels, you can start to create a customer experience that keeps your users coming.

Classic Advertising Books

All I’ve ever really done, as a digital marketer, is take the time-tested principles laid out in these advertising books and apply them to the new mediums of the internet, email, and so on.

In my opinion, these 5 books are essential for anyone who calls themselves a serious marketer.

8. Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz

You’ll probably be surprised when you find out how expensive Breakthrough Advertising is.

I’ve bought it several times (people have a tendency to borrow it, and then when they find out how good it is...somehow I never seem to get it back), probably to the tune of several thousand dollars --and I’m sure I’ll buy it again.

It’s just that good.

In this classic marketing book, Eugene Schwartz teaches that the way to sell your product isn’t to “sell” but instead to channel demand.

Think about why your product or service exists in the first place. What massive desire triggered the creation of this market?

THAT is what you need to focus on in your marketing. Not your product’s features or price-point or any of those details, but the deeper-seated value/benefit of it.

This book also teaches how to understand the state of awareness in a market.

This is vital information if you want to create advertisements that differentiate you from your competitors while also speaking to the correct level of sophistication in your prospects.

These are just a few examples of the gems hidden in this book. It’s full of high-level strategic gold. Buy it. Read it. Then, read it again.

(And be careful when you lend it out.)

9. Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples

Caples is one of the most successful copywriters and direct marketers of all time, and in this, another must-read marketing classic, he shares his secrets in detail.

This book is especially helpful for anyone who needs to learn how to write compelling copy, as Caples spends a lot of time teaching you how to write advertising copy that appeals to the right emotional hot buttons to make people take notice and buy.

He starts by teaching you how to write winning headlines by...

Appealing to the reader’s self-interest

Sharing news or information

Arousing a sense of curiosity

Focusing on a quick & easy solution to the reader’s problem

You’ll learn how to appeal to a mass market audience, how to choose a layout & illustration that attract the most attention, how to increase the selling power of your copy, and much, much more.

10. Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins

Now, compared to Breakthrough Advertising, Scientific Advertising is a steal.

Plus, at just 88 pages long, it’s also an incredibly fast read-- but don’t let that fool you.

Scientific Advertising is one of the most influential and frequently cited marketing books in history.

David Ogilvy famously claimed that nobody should be allowed to be a marketer until he or she reads this book seven times!

It was the first one to lay out the principles of advertising using a scientific method that measures results and uses data and real-world results to improve sales over time.

(Sound familiar?)

Hopkins taught the importance of leveraging customer psychology, being specific in your ad copy, and of using your headlines to speak to your target audience.

Along the way, he also shares dozens of highly successful examples.

11. Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy is another one of marketing’s founding fathers, and On Advertising is his marketing bible.

It’s a treasure trove of insights for anyone who wants to write better direct-response-style ads, covering topics like

The importance of research, and why it’s essential to back up your claims with facts

Why it’s so critical to find out what your competitors are doing

How to position your product to appeal to your ideal customer

What a brand image is, and how every part of your advertisement contributes to it

One thing I love about this book is how visual it is.

Ogilvy includes a lot of eye-catching examples from print ads, including his famous “At 60 miles an hour…” ad for Rolls-Royce.

Ogilvy covers a lot of important concepts and these examples help to really drive home the message and help you understand everything in concrete terms.

12. The Wizard of Ads by Roy Williams

I’ve written about The Wizard of Ads before.

Roy Williams was a mentor of mine and an absolute master of marketing for radio, and it turns out that radio marketing is a lot like digital marketing!

Think about it: in both mediums, you’re trying to grab the attention of a passive, highly distractible person, and unless you can do that, FAST, that person is going to move on to the next thing and forget all about you.

The technology changes, but the underlying emotions and motivations that drive us don’t.

That’s what Roy Williams was an expert on, and that’s why reading this book will pay dividends in your marketing career.

Agile Marketing

Successful marketers have to move fast. They have to be willing to test minimum viable products, offers, and funnels, and be willing to fail...learn...and try again.

With that in mind, the Agile framework is an important concept for marketers to grasp. Here are two books on the topic that I highly recommend for your bookshelf.

13. The Agile Marketer by Scott Brinker

This book by Scott Brinker operates on the principle that the most important aspect of your company’s marketing is the experience your customers have while using your product or service.

It’s based on the Agile methodology that started in the world of software development and focuses on making incremental improvements based on feedback and collaboration while remaining highly flexible and capable of making rapid changes.

The goal of all these changes is to help drive a superior customer experience that can help your company to stand apart from the competition.

(Thus the book’s sub-headline, “Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage.”)

In its pages,  you’ll learn why it’s becoming more and more important for marketing and product management to work hand-in-hand to create products customers love.

It’s essentially a system you can use to infuse marketing directly into your product or service, helping you to turn it into an offer that sells itself.

14. Hacking Marketing by Roland Smart

Like The Agile Marketer, Hacking Marketing draws insightful parallels between modern marketing and software development.

In today’s digital world, marketing is more complex than ever. It has to move fast, adapt to feedback on the fly, and deal with more touch points and marketing channels than ever before.

That might sound daunting, but in Hacking Marketing, you’ll gain a management framework you can use to help achieve those goals while staying organized and preventing chaos in your marketing department.

When you learn how to apply lean and agile management strategies to marketing, you’ll be able to leverage the five “digital dynamics”—instead of struggling against them:

Speed

Adaptability

Adjacency

Scale

Precision

Leveraging these dynamics is critical to successful digital marketing today and in the future.

Never Stop Learning

I don’t want you to think that these books will teach you everything you need to know about marketing forever.

They won’t.

The field of marketing is changing so rapidly that you have to be constantly learning to keep up with the developments.

There’s always something new and exciting to discover, but these 14 books will help give you a solid foundation in some of the most important marketing topics and help you develop a future-focused mindset.

Remember, the marketer of the future is a “full-stack marketer”—someone with a solid grasp of ALL the different pillars of marketing.

So, check out these books to help make yourself a more well-rounded marketer. One positioned for success in 2018 and beyond.

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/essential-books-every-modern-marketer-should-read