#at least a year and a half ago so i might be misremembering and that might also not be true

[mermaidsirennikita]

I remember struggling to enjoy The Dukes Perfect Wife because of Hart’s relationship with his mistress (Mrs. Palmer?) I couldn’t get over the fact that he went back to her after she ruined his relationship with Eleanor. This was years ago so maybe I’m misremembering… Was my reading wrong?

Nope, Hart does go back to Angelina Palmer; I think that for me, it's just not really an issue and honestly something I find to both make sense and act as a supporting factor for his journey.

I don't believe he went straight back to her—there's the gap in time during which he briefly is married to Anne, who it sounds like he was pretty incompatible but Determined to Make It Work with, and then Anne AND their baby son die. So he's lost Eleanor, he's lost his wife and his son (and feels immense guilt over those things), there's the whole "and I killed my dad for Ian" thing...

I'd be kind of surprised if he DIDN'T go back to Angelina. Because the thing is that SHE didn't ruin his relationship with Eleanor at all lol. Hart did. Hart ruined it by not being open with her, and by being domineering and trying to aggro his way into making Eleanor forgive him. AND, as I think is often dismissed when people critique this book, he didn't just have a big fight with Eleanor and have that be final. He went to her DAD and told him he'd slept with Eleanor (which would be humiliating today, but way more so back then) so that her father would force her hand. He told her she'd been seen as his "leavings".

Eleanor doesn't blame Mrs. Palmer; she calls her on being manipulative, sure, but she also understands that the woman is basically operating in a no-win game and is doing her best to win by whatever means she can. And then she learns that Mrs. Palmer would go even further to try to keep Hart's interests at points... and Hart would be disgusted.... and he wouldn't leave her...

And based off what we can see in both that book and Ian's book (when Mrs. Palmer is alive) they pretty much had an incredibly toxic relationship in which she framed herself as the person who could take his darkness~ at a point when he had a pretty low sense of self worth despite telling everyone he was THE SHIT, and he both felt like he didn't deserve any better than their shitty relationship, AND felt like nobody else (i.e. Eleanor) would accept him. (Plus, there was the whole thing where he fully knew that he'd encouraged Angelina's dependency on him and didn't realize the consequences until it was too late.)

Like... should Eleanor have accepted him as he was when they broke up? Nope.

By the time Hart and Eleanor get back together, Mrs. Palmer has been dead for two and a half years. And even before she died, the relationship had collapsed to the point where she was doing some WILD SHIT to try to keep him, and he was on his way out, but he also was clearly aware that it had gone a bit far and she might kill herself if he left. Just a MESS. And he did care about her—it would be kind of worse if he didn't after this long-term deal. The point being that the Hart who got back together with Angelina is not the Hart who was with Angelina when it ended, AND. Even after that point, he's still not in the place he needs to be with to be with Eleanor.

I think it's a better creative choice to have Hart go back to Mrs. Palmer, ESPECIALLY in the midst of a fuckton of grief and trauma. Because if he doesn't, he's either with some other lady who functions similarly to her (take aside her relevance to Ian's book) OR he's... what? Celibate? That doesn't track at all.

But if he is, say he doesn't go back into that toxic place... Why are he and Eleanor apart for so many years after Anne dies? Why doesn't he reach out to her? Why doesn't she reach back out to him? What's keeping them apart—because it sounds like Hart learned his lesson, at least on that level.

The point is that he didn't learn his lesson. He lost the thing he loved most, AND he then lost the other thing he loved most (his baby son), and he still kept fuckin' going. Because rather than rising to the challenge Eleanor basically laid out for him, he sank internally while projecting success and power externally. Some ground work is laid in Ian's book (and tbh the other books before Hart's) for him to have his real turning point, and I do think it's so deliberate that he basically gets stepped on by all his little brothers before he gets his HEA... He's basically getting a reality check that his mythical suffering to protect them is bullshit that he uses to ignore the work he needs to do on himself....

But Hart has to decide to be worthy of Eleanor, and before that I think he has to get a lot of narrative punishment.

(In turn, I think that Eleanor has to learn that she can call him on his bullshit and expect him to LISTEN... while also placing more trust in his feelings. Because he didn't cheat on her lol, and she did kinda just take another person's perspective on him wholesale versus hearing him out.)

And then I mean if we put all that aside I'm still very... Well why the fuck wouldn't he go back to a woman he had a long-term relationship with, with whom he was very sexually compatible, if he legitimately thought there was zero way that he'd ever be happily with the person he wanted to be with again? Lol, it's very human to me.

I get why a lot of people don't like it, but I sort of prefer romance novels where people fuck up in a way that rings at least somewhat true to life. One of the reasons why Hart and Eleanor are two of my favorite leads is that the relationship feels very real to me. They read like two people in their thirties who had this wild passion for each other and still do but have sense Been Thru It. He is finally ready to be with her, but it's in part because he fucked up like 7x between their breakup and now (and I also frankly just appreciate that he actually reads as someone who's been through the degree of trauma he went through as a kid, because there are a ton of books where Hart and Eleanor's initial courtship IS the love story, and he immediately throws his pride aside and grovels after their fight and she forgives him, HEA, and that is NOT satisfying to me... People who have been THROUGH IT tend to fuck up more than once) and she's finally ready to hear him out because she had time to take the stars out of her eyes and become a grown woman who has an existence separate from him.

EDIT:

Lol I opened my copy of Ian's book to confirm something before I type this out, and then I opened it back up and forgot than Hart was twenty and Angelina/Mrs. Palmer was thirty-three when they started up. (Which also means she'd been his mistress for about seven years when he met Eleanor.) Which isn't illegal! But does explain a lot about that relationship.

[yesthatsatumbler]

With the additions, I've technically already counted 11 calendars in use on current coinage:

Christian/Anno Domini/Common Era (most of the world)

Lunar Hijra (many Islamic countries)

Solar Hijra (Iran, Afghanistan)

Hebrew/Anno Mundi (Israel)

Buddhist era (Thailand)

Vikram Samvat (Nepal)

Ge'ez calendar (Ethiopia)

Republic of China calendar (Taiwan)

Juche era (North Korea)

imperial regnal years (Japan)

papal regnal years (Vatican City)

Admittedly I'm cheating a little in this list because the North Korean calendar is only used concurrently with the AD years [so that a coin would say something like "97 (2008)"], and the Vatican regnal years are not only that but also limited to non-circulating commemoratives (though AFAICT consistently used on those). All the others, however, are the only calendar on (most) coins of at least one modern country. (And I might well still have missed a few, but I'm failing to think of specific cases.) There are a bunch of other calendars still actively used (mostly in religious contexts) that didn't make it to coinage.

But yes, they're spreading a lot and taking over one another. (Indeed some of this spreading had occurred after WW2.) Historically there used to be a lot more variety within the individual calendars, too (especially in the Byzantine branch of the Anno Mundi calendar, where about half a dozen different variant eras were in active use in the Middle Ages). Even more historically (particularly in antiquity) there's a lot of city-specific calendars, where coins of a particular city would be dated in an era local to that city! (And probably not just coins, but there aren't exactly a lot of dated non-coin objects surviving from that time...) I think a few of those still hadn't been definitively attributed to specific AD dates yet.

(Fun fact: the Ge'ez calendar is counting from the same mythological event as the Anno Domini calendar! But they used a different calculation for the date, so they're eight years off. AFAIK modern estimates suggest that actually Anno Domini is six years off from the most probable actual date of the event in question, and that correspondingly the Ge'ez calendar is fourteen years off. Mythological dating can be like that sometimes.)

...I had also apparently misremembered the history of the Saka era; its use on coinage had apparently ceased just over two hundred years ago, but it continued in non-coinage use and was actually briefly adopted as the national calendar of India after independence.

It only happens rarely but I'm always slightly annoyed at sci-fi stories that are like "oh we don't know what year it is anymore"

Bullshit. Humans love calendars, and there's nothing special about the gregorian xalendar's epoch. Just make a new one.

At least in The Matrix I think we can interpret the canon as there being a new calendar, Morpheus just never bothers telling it to Neo because "years since the founding of Zion" would be meaningless to him. He just says we don't know the gregorian date.

But Transmetropolitan has no excuse. There's no year and no one has come up with a replacement epoch.

[urmomsstuntdouble]

post abt mcyt guys on tumblr in the tags bc am scared

[scribeofred]

Thanks to @onereyofstarlight for the tag!

 1. What fandoms have you written for?

This is embarrassing but I actually had to look at both FFnet and AO3 because I couldn’t remember all of them. TRON: Legacy, Assassin’s Creed, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, Sherlock, Final Fantasy VII and XV and Kingsglaive, Voltron: Legendary Defender, Merlin, Skyrim, and, of course, Thunderbirds. I have a couple other fandoms that crop up in various wips, including a Tom Swift/Thunderbirds crossover that I really should finish.

2. How many works do you have on AO3 &/or FFNet?

FFnet has 45, and AO3 has 41. There’s also a couple stories lurking on tumblr, notably a final chapter for Reflection.

3. What are your top 3 fics by kudos on A03 &/or Favs on FFNet?

AO3 dominates in this area, if I can use a word like “dominates” for stories that have less than 125 kudos each haha. Oh well, the numbers don’t matter!

1.     118 kudos on tell the shades apart (my world is black and white)

2.     94 kudos on Reflection

3.     91 kudos on The 43rd Hour

4. Which 3 fics have the least kudos & Favs?

Again on AO3:

1 kudos on I Am You (And You Are Me)

5 kudos on The Dragonborn Chronicles

6 kudos on cynosure

5. Which Fic has the most comments and which has the least?

Reflection has the most at 29 threads, and I Am You (And You Are Me) has the least at zero.

6. Which complete fic do you wish had gotten more attention?

Lodestar, definitely. Sure, it’s for something of a rarepair, but they aren’t that rare, and I just really really like the way the story came together. On the other hand, of course my unfinished Merlin fic has gotten probably the most attention, because that’s just the way it goes, eh?

7. Have you written any crossovers?

None that I’ve published! I have various crossovers lurking in mostly unfinished states, including the aforementioned Tom Swift/Thunderbirds crossover, and an Assassin’s Creed/Thundeerbirds crossover that is very good and I should also finish. There’s an Expanse/Thunderbirds fic lurking in my brain that I may or may not ever commit to paper, who knows. I’ve also very vaguely toyed with a Batman/Thunderbirds crossover, in the sense that “nebulous” is too strong a word for the kind of toying I’ve been doing.

8. What is the craziest fic you’ve written?

I don’t really write crazy or crack or humor in general, so probably the closest thing to “crazy” is On the Lam, which was the result of wanting to throw Scott and Penelope toward an Egyptian stud farm. It ended up being the host for a bad joke about that, courtesy of one @thebaconsandwichofregret, who consistently gives some of the best dialogue advice I’ve ever encountered.

Actually, the true answer is probably a chapter in Glimpses into a Supernova, maybe the one about blood? It seems bonkers when I think back on it now, but I admittedly haven’t read it in many years. Possibly I am misremembering. Glimpses has some weird ones, though.

9. What’s the fic you’ve written with the saddest ending?

It’s a tossup between The Painting and a place where the water touches the sky. The former deals with a prior off-screen death; the latter is (maybe??) an on-screen death. People seemed upset by it, at any rate. I said it was ambiguous!

10. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

“Happy” is probably a matter of perspective? Depends on the overall reading experience and the ending within that context. Either septet or Three Towels and a Tracy, they’re both pretty fluffy overall.

11. What is your smuttiest fic?

protoinstincts, which I completely forgot I wrote and then rediscovered like a year later and realized “hey, this is actually pretty good” and you know what, despite it not being overly spicy, it is pretty good.

12. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not hate, per se, but someone left a review on Less Than Nothing saying they “didn’t like” that I “wrote the story as a series of drabbles.” Cool, I didn’t write the story for you, random guest reader, and the back button exists, friend 😂 It didn’t bother me on a personal level because I wrote the fic for an audience of one (incidentally, not myself and rather the recipient of a secret santa event), but I was mad because the reviewer had no way of knowing where I was at as a writer, and I know from longtime observation how that kind of comment can crush less experienced or confident writers.

Don’t leave flames, kids, you don’t understand the power your words have. Don’t like, don’t read.

13. What is the nicest comment you’ve received?

The nicest? Goodness. Hmm. I’d have to go hunting to find the nicest, but in recent memory, @ayzrules sent me a couple passages from Spanish texts she’s been studying that reminded her of my writing, and I was honestly so touched by the fact that she even thought to make such comparisons, much less mention them to me. Taking the time to familiarize yourself with someone’s style until you can make comparisons between it and someone else’s work is so much more meaningful to me personally than a basic “Nice story!” or “Loved this!” type of comment ever could be. <3 Ayz <3

14. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I’m aware of, but I’ve never gone looking on any sort of copycat site or whatever either.

15. How many fics do you have marked as incomplete?

Two. First is The Dragonborn Chronicles, which is a retelling of Skyrim from Lydia’s perspective via her journal, to complement the in-game journal. It’s a slog of a style to write, though, even for someone who loves writing first person and doesn’t really want to write a lot of dialogue, and the outline is huge, and the story will be many times more huge, and just. Some day. Some day.

Second is tell the shades apart (my world is black and white), which has always been unfinished because the outline itself is over seven thousand words and the fully written story would undoubtedly land between 100,000 and 200,000 words, and there’s no way I’m writing that. I’ve always meant to upload the outline, but I got kind of self-conscious about the way I formatted it, and ugh I just haven’t bothered. One day, one day, right?

Moral of the story is I’m intensely a short story writer, and I’ve really found myself settling into that role over the last couple years. Better a clipped, punchy short story than a bloated slog of an epic.

16. Which of the WIPS will most likely be finished first?

Literally no one knows that. I wrote 95% of the observable entropy of a closed system over five years ago, and then I proceeded to pull it out roughly once a year and write and rewrite various endings until last month, which was when I finally figured out how I wanted to end the story. septet, too, languished for about five years before I finally remembered it existed and managed to wrangle an ending. Endings are hard, man. So are those third plot points. Terrible creatures, those, bog me down every time.

17. Which WIP are you looking forward to finishing?

Uh... mm. See. If I were looking forward to finishing any of them, I’d be actively working on them. At this moment, writing fic isn’t exactly high on my list of priorities, but I am also coming off a four-day idle game bender, so I still feel like I haven’t quite reengaged with myself as a living person. Give me another few days and I might have an answer.

(I am always most looking forward to finishing this ridiculous Ignis-drives-the-Audi-R8 fic that’s been languishing in my wips for literal years. As mentioned above, third plot points. Killer, man.)

(oh and also the working-titled the art of murder. Scott and Penny attend a private art auction. Things don’t go to plan. It, too, is stuck at the third plot point. I know, I know I have a problem, shush.)

18. Is there a WIP that you’re considering abandoning?

Any wip has the potential to be revived—this year and the old wips I’ve unearthed, dusted off, finished, and posted have been proof of that. I don’t intentionally permanently abandon anything for that reason, some stories just probably will remain dusty old wips forever because I didn’t actually need or want to write the full story for one reason or another.

19. Which complete fic would you consider rewriting?

Now that’s an interesting question. Hmm! Honestly? None of them. Once I finish a story, I’m not inclined toward rereading it again any time soon, to the point of years in some cases, and I feel like I’ve moved on from the stories I wrote one, two, five, eight years ago in the actual writing sense. They’re finished stories, and on top of that are relics of their time, which doesn’t mean the stories don’t have any ongoing significance on a reading level—I just don’t have any interest in rewriting those particular stories. I’ve gotten them out of my head, to the point of not remembering at least a third of them on demand anymore, and I don’t have any desire to “retell” those exact stories. I do tend to tighten the wording and fix perceived errors/weaknesses whenever I do end up rereading an old story, and I usually silently update the AO3 version if I make any significant changes because AO3 makes it a breeze to update a posted fic. I might do FFnet too if I’m feeling up to it or have the time.

20. Which complete fic is your favourite?

Once upon a time I would’ve said Holding On, but I honestly find it kind of unbearably melodramatic now. the observable entropy of a closed system is equally melodramatic, as it was written in the same era, but at least it has the excuse of being told in second person and via a style that is a half step away from being poetry. Possibly I will reread it in a few years and find it equally obnoxious and overly dramatic, but it received some shockingly positive comments, which I wasn’t expecting at ALL, and I’ve been honestly blown away by the amount of praise it’s received. <3 to everyone who’s said anything about it!

21. What’s your total published word count?

141,000 on AO3, 160,000 on FFnet, but technically the light of my life SS wrote fifty thousand words of each. It’s too late for math.

 I tag @velkynkarma, @lurkinglurkerwholurks, @writtenbyrain, @thebaconsandwichofregret, and anyone else who wants to play!

[ziploc849]

Family Drama

For context, this is based on this post I made a few days ago! I might make this into a series if people end up enjoying it, so let me know!!!

Also, this is based on one of my paracosms!! I made a whole post about what that is and how that works here if you're curious! Because this is in my paracosm there are characters in this from the Dream SMP, please be aware that these are CHARACTERS and are not portrayals of the actual Creators or even really their DreamSMP characters, this is essentially fanfic with my own OC's involved.

Contains: Captive Whump, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Underage Whump (Whumpee is 17), PLEASE let me know if there's anything else I need to add, I'm not very good at gauging this sort of thing.

~.~.~

Arianna's fine. She is absolutely, completely, entirely fine.

Sure, she's curled up in the corner of an all too familiar cell, praying that she's wrong, that she's misremembering, that there's some other villain who lives here. That it's not him, because it can't be him.

But she's fine!

Totally, completely fine.

At least she's not alone. Phil is sitting on the opposite side of the cell up against the wall, signature green and white hat over his eyes, probably half asleep. Wilbur and Techno are sitting next to each other against the back wall of the cell. They had been talking quietly, trying to figure out some kind of plan to escape, but after a few hours, they had decided to wait it out. Tommy's the closest to the front of the cell, sitting against the iron bars next to the door and staring at the ceiling.

It's hard to know how long it's been, they don't exactly have any clocks to keep the time, and there aren't any windows in the place. At first, the boys had been pacing and scheming, planning a way to get out as soon as the cell door opened, but after what felt like hours and no other people coming down the stairs at the other end of the basement, they all stopped scheming and pacing, and sat down, opting to play it by ear for the time being.

Ari, however, had not spent a single second anywhere except the corner. The others had tried to console her, assuming she was scared for the obvious reasons. After all, she had only joined the team a few months ago, as far as they were aware, this was her first time experiencing anything to this magnitude.

At some point, Tommy had pointed out the strange stain in the center of the cell. Ari had stayed quiet, hoping it was a total coincidence that she could remember the very same stain from months ago.

It had to be a coincidence, it had to be because otherwise, that meant-

A door opens and shuts, and footsteps start making their way down the stairs. Immediately, the others are on their feet, crowding towards the front of the cell, all on edge and ready for a fight.

Ari tries to hide in the stone walls, wishing the grey brick and cement would swallow her whole. Instead, she curls around her knees in tighter and buries her face into her arms.

Footsteps click against the cement, from the bottom of the stairs over to the cell, slow and calculated.

"Who the hell are you, bitch? What do you want with us?" Of course, Tommy is the first to talk, yelling at whoever is on the outside of the cell.

You know who it is. It was stupid to try and escape.

Shut up.

"He brings up a good point." That's Techno, his monotone voice more threatening than usual. "Who are you?"

There isn't a response for a moment, or maybe it's an hour.

"I'm sorry I kept you all waiting-"

Ari's heart drops to her stomach.

It's actually him. Oh shit oh fuck.

"-Life can get so busy, you know. It really was my intention to be here a few hours ago."

Arianna can't breathe. It's too much. She thought she escaped, she had escaped, for three months she was safe and happy and-

"Especially when you have such a precious person to me with you, it really is a crime I didn't come sooner."

No no no no no stop I can't, please be lying please just be another horrible dream I can't do this again no.

She doesn't need to see him to know his eyes are on her. She barely suppresses whimper and tries to press herself further into the walls.

"Really, Ari, running off like that? You had mom so worried!" He laughs, and shivers run down her spine.

"I mean, I had to convince her not to put up Missing posters! Especially when you didn't show up to my birthday, and honestly that just hurt."

She gasps as her head is pulled up by some invisible force. The word telekinesis rings in the back of her mind, but panic overtakes it just as quickly.

Her team is staring at her, wide-eyed and confused, but that doesn't matter because Dream is there with a hand raised and a dangerous glint in his eyes, and she can't move and she can't be here, she can't.

"I'm sure she'll be happy to know her youngest is safe in her older brother's hands, though." He smiles, and Ari can barely suppress a sob. That smile had been in her nightmares for three goddamn months.

Suddenly, the weight keeping her head up leaves, and Ari barely has time to feel relieved because suddenly her team is thrown up against the walls, and the door is opened, and Dream is there and the others are screaming and it's too much.

Dream places a hand on her cheek, far too gentle, and wipes away the tears-when had I started crying?- streaking down her face.

"You had us so, so very worried Arianna." He almost sounds genuine, but she knows, she knows it's just a front. His smile is too forced, the glint in his eyes too recognizable, the hand on her cheek too tense. "I'm just glad I found you again before you could hurt yourself."

"P-please, Dream, don't- don't do this, please." She doesn't care about how pitiful she must sound. She doesn't care that begging won't work, because it never does. She only cares about stopping this because she can't be here again.

Dream hisses through his teeth, grimacing slightly. "Now now, don't worry, I'm going to take good care of you and your friends here." He gestures to her team behind him, who have all gone silent, staring at the pair. If Ari was in a state to be able to tell, she'd say they were concerned, and probably a bit confused.

"But you know the rules."

Ari sobs, feet scuttling against the floor to try and get away from her brother, pleas and apologies falling from her mouth because she does, she does know the rules and she's hated them for years and she knows that it's going to hurt and she can't stop crying.

Dream shushes her, moving his hand up to her hair, carding through it, and Ari hates how every instinct in her body wants to melt into the touch.

"I know you don't like it, but you're young, Ari." False sympathy drips from his words, "You're too young to go out on your own, you need to stay here, where it's safe. The rules are in place to keep you safe." She barely manages to bite back her response of it's not safe here it's hell before the hand in her hair tightens into a fist, and suddenly she's being dragged out of the cell, kicking and screaming and begging, and she can hear her team yelling profanities, but they're still being held to the walls of the cell, and then the metal bar door closes like a death sentence.

Over the shouts, Arianna can still hear Dream's voice. She can always hear his fucking voice.

"Now, we've never had much of an audience before, I know, but personally-" He throws her roughly onto the cement floor, in the center of the room-

"I think it'll make it all the more fun."

[rainbowamory]

Mansfield Park (1999) Review

The film I am reviewing is the one that came out in 1999. There is actually another film made in 2007.

I want to start by saying that I was a fool. I take back everything I said in my first post about this film. I had been reluctant to watch it for the reasons I explained in the previous post, but I finally pushed myself to give it a chance and… by the end of the film, it went from being my least favourite cousin love story in a novel to one of my Top Favourite films exploring this kind of relationship. I want to explain why I loved it this time round and what my impressions were of the book vs. the film.

The truth is I read the novel by Jane Austen years ago, so I don’t really remember the exact details or what the film might have changed. The main love story is still there. They might’ve just changed some details of the scenes here and there. But I remember that my first impression of the novel was that Edmund was indecisive and took forever to realize Fanny’s worth. Or that’s how it seemed to me, and that was the main reason for the bad impression I got of the book. It’s possible I misremembered or simply misinterpreted the book’s version of Edmund.

As for Fanny, I thought they changed her personality completely, but that too was a misunderstanding. The first time I tried to watch this film, I had only watched the opening scenes and I was irritated because I didn’t like the creepy stories that Fanny was reading out loud… I recall the book version of her being more sensitive, so I was put off by those opening lines because it seemed on the surface that the film version of her was harsh and unfeeling.

But the fact it, sometimes Fanny is cold on the outside, but she’s a sweetheart on the inside, and always faithful. (Wait a minute. Isn’t that my type?? So how could I possibly dislike her?) I think if they changed anything about her it was just that they made her personality more vivid and passionate in the film. They didn’t change her core character traits or values from the book.

The 2nd reason I had a negative impression of Fanny was that before I watched this film, I had seen some screenshots of the 2007 film, and I noticed two males in the picture, which sometimes indicates a love triangle. My personal preference in ships has always been monogamous pairings. The only scenarios in which I am ok with non-monogamous ships is if all characters involved are truly poly. I don’t care for stories where one person leads on two people and acts like the center of attention. In the 1999 version of the film, it’s clear that Fanny’s heart is always with the one guy: Edmund. There is no ambiguity there. If Henry Crawford feels like a third wheel, it’s his own dumb fault because no one is leading him on....

As I watched more of the film, it became clear that the dilemma Fanny and Edmund were really going through was the dilemma of a second-born son being in love with a woman from a lower class. Their marriage would not have been “advantageous” in a material sense in their time period. That was a huge part of what was holding them back from getting together.

So Edmund actually had a good reason for his hesitations. He was struggling inside because he felt he didn’t have enough to offer Fanny if she were to be his wife. And the only reason Fanny went along with the courtship with the other guy was because she too was trying to make the best of her circumstances and the fact that being with Edmund was not initially an option.

➤

[Typo in the captions below. It should read “I hope you know how much I shall...”]

Edmund and Fanny were always each other’s first choice. And they were always honest with each other every step of the way, even when they were going in separate directions. There was no sleezy deception. It’s this fact that ultimately won my heart: this consistent mutual respect. It’s what made them worthy of each other in the end.

There were a number of other things I also loved about this film. Often times, when consanguineous pairings are handled in fiction, especially more modern fiction, they tend to set the pair in a “broken family backdrop”. That’s something I really hate—this implication that incestuous relations only happen in unstable or “dysfunctional” families. Mansfield Park appears on the surface to follow this stereotype, but there’s more going on. Fanny’s uncle is a very sick individual who gets away with horrific crimes, but there was unfortunately nothing Fanny could directly do as she didn’t have the power to expose him. To add to that, Edmund’s mother is emotionally absent, Fanny’s parents are always struggling with poverty, and Edmund’s siblings are troubled in their own ways.

So one can say that Edmund and Fanny really only had each other. But it’s clear that the “broken family backdrop” is not the reason they got together.

I look at the common Cousin Dynamics to see where Fanny and Edmund would fit, and they actually don’t fit into the 3 main categories that are most typical. They grew up separately up to a certain point, and they didn’t seem to see each other as siblings, so it’s not Dynamic 1. But they did grow up together under the same roof for a big part of their lives, so it’s not Dynamic 2 which involves more distance. It’s not Genetic Sexual Attraction, because they did not fall in love upon first meeting. They had developed a bond and shared history before they fell in love.

They were playful and mutually supportive and they just seemed very in synch with each other’s personalities and values. It was a bond that came with the build-up of trust over time, familial and romantic at the same time. The “broken family backdrop” in this scenario did not force any of that. If anything, it only brought two already close people even closer. Dysfunction in their families was a circumstance, not the catalyst for their love.

Would I recommend this film? YES. However, you should know it’s not a plot-heavy story. It’s more a “slice of life” kind of story. When I watched it with my partner, half-way through she asked me, “Is this one of those stories where nothing really happens?”

My answer was that actually a lot is happening, but it’s in subtext. The themes that we see in subtext include women’s social expectations, inequalities between genders, classism, and the darker undertones of what was happening with slavery in those times.

But the main story is focused on the inner conflicts and coming-of-age of two characters.

It’s a refreshing exploration of a relationship that is allowed to form without the added stigma of the “incest taboo”. This is also due to the time period in which the story is set, in which cousin marriage was not automatically seen in a negative light.

As the 2nd born son, Edmund will not inherit the main wealth of the family. So their future is that of a clergyman and a clergyman’s wife, a humble middle class couple. This is an interesting alternative to the usual stories about royal couples or rural stereotypes. And something tells me they will not be the blind, bigoted type of religious people. Edmund’s comments about the music at church and about Fanny’s character traits, and Fanny’s own ability to see through falseness in others shows they are people who can see the very essence of things.

Watching this movie was like watching a dream. It was beautiful and very charming and satisfying. The symbolism, the subtle humor, the way it was filmed, the acting… every decision fit the story and the themes. I was getting worried near the end whether it would end the way I was hoping it would, and when he started confessing to her, this was my reaction: 

YES. SAY IT YOU SON OF A B*TCH. SAY IT. APOLOGIZE TO HER. THAT’S RIGHT. YES. NOW KISS HER. 

And after that moment, all was forgiven in my head…

It was really a treat for a romantic with an open mind. And I regret dismissing it before, but now that I’ve seen it in full, I love it so much I would actually like to make a fanvideo for it eventually.

[commentaryvorg]

Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 6.6

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time as trial 6 began (and no, this trial is not getting any exclamation marks), we retried Rantaro’s murder, Rantaro’s Survivor Perk note was not a video, Kaede still did meaningfully bear responsibility for his death but her execution was not justified even by the game’s rules, Kaede’s twin was a ridiculous and very telling red herring, Himiko continued to be a little bit Kaito (though only on a surface level) in her desperation to keep believing in Tsumugi, Shuichi still hated accusing his friends of murder but managed it anyway, and Junko Enoshima waaaas…

Tsumugi:  “Junko… Enoshima is…”

“Junko”:  “Right the fuck here!”

…Not actually even remotely here at all, of course.

“Junko”:  “Even if nobody was waiting, even if it makes you go, ‘What, again?’… The diva of despair takes the stage once more! Junko Enoshima the 53rd!”

So… are we seriously to believe that in every single in-universe Danganronpa series up until this point, they’ve always found some excuse for it to be Junko each time? That this really is literally the 53rd time she’s appeared? Damn, no wonder she’s lampshading the repetitiveness and how bored everyone must be of that.

That’s difficult enough to believe that I’d rather assume she’s only saying 53rd to give them a hint, and really Junko has appeared more than enough times for people to be tired of it but still not nearly every time.

(This also reads like a dig by the out-universe writers at themselves for this, even though she only returned once and that was pretty believable because of the situation they were in. Unless she also somehow returned from the dead in the anime or UDG. Geez, I hope not.)

Monokuma:  “Bwah-hahahaha! There you have it! Once again, the mastermind is Junko Enoshima!”

Monokuma has apparently just become like a sports commentator, now that the mastermind herself can play the role he usually has. This is after all the first time Monokuma’s still been around once the mastermind takes the stage, because he’s not a literal puppet this time.

Himiko:  “Tsumugi… wh-what’s the matter? Aren’t you… Tsumugi Shirogane? Our friend who survived with us?”

“Junko”:  “Hahaha, sorry about that. You can go ahead and forget about Tsumugi Shirogane.”

Tsumugi:  “Cuz I’m just a character! Y’know, a lie!”

This is, in a certain sense, not wrong. The Tsumugi they thought they knew and were friends with never existed – it was just an act being put on by the real Tsumugi who was cruelly making this fiction for entertainment and enjoying every second of it. It may have been somewhat based in reality in that Tsumugi based that lie off herself and just did what would come naturally to her if she wasn’t a fucking terrible person, but it was still ultimately not a person who really exists. “Tsumugi�� was the only one of the students here who really truly was just fictional.

“Junko”:  “Sorry to all her fans out there. If any of you even exist, that is.”

And now joining Monokuma in the Not Remotely Subtle club: Tsumugi! Not that she probably cares because she’s intending for Shuichi to figure out the real truth soon enough.

“Junko”:  “Tsumugi Shirogane was nothing more than a cover for me, the mastermind.”

However, here she’s trying to imply that there never even was anyone called Tsumugi Shirogane in the first place and she was just Junko in disguise the whole time. And for some reason, the students seem to kind of buy this (as did several of the blind LPers I’ve watched), when nobody should? Tsumugi is a cosplayer. It is still perfectly possible that this is just Tsumugi cosplaying Junko rather than the other way around, and especially since Junko is supposed to be super super dead, that should be what everyone immediately jumps to rather than believing this.

“Junko”:  “As you can see, I am a perfect reproduction of Junko Enoshima.”

Maki:  “So… you’re just a freak pretending to be Junko Enoshima, huh!?”

“Junko”:  “No, a perfect reproduction!”

Tsumugi:  “Perfect reproductions are exactly the same as the original.”

She’s clearly talking about cosplay here, guys! At least Maki seems to get it, but nobody quite zeroes in on the fact that beneath the mask she still is Tsumugi the Ultimate Cosplayer and it’s just that the Tsumugi we thought we knew was mostly an act.

Maki:  “So if we kill you, then that’ll be the end, correct?”

Maki Roll, no! Didn’t you decide back in the investigation that you weren’t actually going to kill the mastermind?

Shuichi:  “You killed Kaede, and Monokuma covered it up with a false narrative!”

Hah, I like how he calls it a narrative. Way more appropriate than he realises.

“Junko”:  “I knew of Hope’s Peak Academy’s Gofer Project, and my inner Junko told me…”

…

Tsumugi:  “And then I took the name ‘Tsumugi Shirogane’ and sneaked in among them.”

She can’t even keep her own narrative straight! “Junko” is implying she’s not really Junko and just wanted to be, and Tsumugi is saying she’s not really Tsumugi! Which one is she even trying to go with here!? Apparently she’s just trying to confuse everyone as much as possible.

Maki:  “Did… Kokichi know about this? Wasn’t he a Remnant of Despair?”

Maki, you were with Shuichi when he saw Kokichi’s motive video, you should know now that he wasn’t! It seems she was so fixated on her belief that he’s a Remnant (for reasons we will get into soon) that she told herself the motive video must have been some kind of hoax.

Himiko:  “Who’s this killing game being shown to!? Where are the survivors of humanity!?”

Tsumugi:  “There’s nobody watching.”

You literally just talked about your “fans” like five minutes ago, Tsumugi, I don’t know why you expect this to work on anyone.

Shuichi finally brings up with the notion that their memories might not be true. He let Tsumugi ramble on for far longer than he needed to about things he had every reason to think were most likely lies before coming out with this, but.

Shuichi:  “This book contains years of research about Hope’s Peak Academy. Nothing would indicate this book is a prop. I believe this information here is accurate.”

Oh, no, Shuichi, this book is very much a prop and everything written in here is also a lie. I guess he’s saying this because, for the out-universe audience, they already know that everything written in that book is the real truth about the Hope’s Peak story. But it’s still pretty flimsy the way Shuichi just takes this book as the truth at this point in the trial in order to argue that their memories are the part that’s wrong. Especially when he now has plenty of other ways to prove that anyway.

Monokuma:  “Alright! Time to play some Danganronpa trivia!”

…Apparently this is why the narrative is doing this and is about to make us go through three Nonstop Debates just about this: because they really did just want to make us play Danganronpa trivia. Anyone playing this game who hadn’t played or seen the other games can just use the book to be able to do this, but man, surely they’d feel so bored and left out and questioning why they should care about all this.

(Also, the students are probably wondering why the hell Monokuma just started talking about Bullet Rebuttals like that’s supposed to mean anything. …Or maybe they’re not, because Monokuma was always full of non-sequiturs anyway and this is probably just another one, right.)

Maki:  “Wasn’t Junko the Ultimate Despair?”

Keebo:  “…That’s what I recall as well. That label should only apply to her.”

Apparently they don’t think that the Remnants of Despair count as being called the Ultimate Despair in any capacity. In DR2, a certain group of people who were referred to as “Ultimate Despair” were definitely also called “Remnants of Despair” in at least one or two lines. However, that’s the part of the story that everyone’s fake memories seem to be missing out, so I suppose that explains why they see the Remnants of Despair as a totally separate thing.

“Junko”:  “Ugh, does it even matter? I’m bored already.”

Really? Because you don’t seem that bored. This “Junko” we’re seeing here is only really showing one personality, the “base” Junko so to speak, rather than switching between multiple different ones like the real Junko would do because she kept getting bored. Of course Tsumugi isn’t going to get bored like that – how could she ever be bored of being one of her favourite characters?

Keebo:  “…because Junko had prepared countless ways of spreading despair.”

“She did no such thing!”

“Oh, maybe she did…”

Is Tsumugi switching characters mid-debate in order to disagree with herself? Boo, only Kaito was allowed to do that. (Or maybe she’s just arguing with Monokuma.)

“Junko”:  “It just means those documents were written all half-assed. There’s no need to worry about it. Your memories are all correct.”

Shuichi:  “What you’ve been saying isn’t consistent! First you said it was just ‘coincidence’.”

I appreciate Shuichi picking up on how inconsistent her narrative is and calling her out on that. The previous time he’s talking about was her claiming that everyone coincidentally misremembered the same thing, which is the complete opposite of her claim here that the book is wrong and not their memories.

Keebo:  “And with that… recruitment of talented students resumed.”

This is supposed to be Keebo remembering that they all applied to Hope’s Peak when the “truth” is that the school didn’t accept applications and scouted all its students. But the phrasing “recruitment of students” definitely sounds like Keebo is saying that they were scouted. Probably a localisation error, but way to mess that one up, localisers.

Shuichi:  “Me too. I *chose* to come to Hope’s Peak.”

And if you think about it, that really isn’t in character for you, is it, Shuichi? Until you met Kaede and Kaito, you hated your talent and didn’t think you deserved to be called the Ultimate Detective. You were scared of revealing the truth and certainly wouldn’t have decided on your own to apply to make that something you had to do even more of.

On that same note, why in the world would Maki have applied to be recognised as the Ultimate Assassin and have that become well-known?

Shuichi then goes on to mention the other evidence of this all being bullshit, specifically that they have no memory of the killing game Rantaro participated in, and that Kokichi wasn’t a Remnant of Despair. It’s almost like we didn’t need to do all of this business with Shuichi inexplicably insisting the book must definitely be the truth in order to prove this.

Maki:  “He wasn’t… a Remnant of Despair?”

Maki in particular looks very shocked to hear this. If he wasn’t, then it means she had no good justification for trying to kill Kokichi – not only was he not actually the mastermind, but she had no genuine, non-fabricated reason to even assume he was. It means she was just being manipulated into doing what others wanted of her and killing who others wanted her to kill on an even greater level than she was already aware of. She’d thought at the time that it was her own decision and her own desire, but all of it was just manipulation, just someone else using her as a puppet to kill, like always.

Shuichi:  “An organization centered around petty crimes, one that forbids murder.”

Whoops, there’s a remnant (no pun intended) of the original Japanese line in Kokichi’s motive video that mentioned their explicit motto about not killing people. Apparently Shuichi’s localiser is not the same one who localised the video and did not get the memo.

Maki:  “You mean… he wasn’t a Remnant of Despair? That’s… not possible…”

Because if it is possible, if it is true, then why did she try to kill him? Was she really just killing for someone else’s whims yet again? Is she not allowed to have any of her own agency at all?

Shuichi:  “Kokichi didn’t tell us because he wasn’t exposed to that Flashback Light. And… neither was Kaito.”

…

Exisal Kaito:  “… Junko?”

I like that it calls back to this and allows the players to very explicitly realise how utterly fucking confused Kaito must have been during those bits. (Even though it’s technically wrong for the text box be calling him “Exisal Kaito”; sure, we know now it was Kaito, but he was pretending to be Kokichi at the time and that makes him “Exisal Kokichi”. The name “Exisal Kokichi” never referred to the real Kokichi at all.)

Shuichi finally gets to the point and starts talking about how the Flashback Lights were fake. Since he has pretty concrete proof of this, I really don’t know why he couldn’t have brought this up sooner. (Because clearly we all really needed to play some Danganronpa Trivia, I guess.)

Keebo:  “So the memories we recovered with the Flashback Lights were…”

Shuichi:  “Not real. They were all false memories. They were all lies!”

One thing to note is that nobody remembers the very first Flashback Light at the beginning where they “remembered” their talents – understandably, since it created their entire characters and overwrote everything that came before. So, even though Shuichi now knows that the entire backstory about the Gofer Project was all a lie, he’s not yet able to think this through to its conclusion of just how bad this is.

Monokuma:  “Then everything was a lie! All the suspense and foreshadowing was for nothing! Can you believe it? It’s like everything that happened didn’t matter at all.”

You’re giving yourself and your in-universe writer friends way too much credit, Monokuma. It’s not like the backstory ever actually really mattered. The things that mattered most in this story were the deaths that happened in this killing game and the efforts everyone went to to avoid letting more happen, all of which was very, very real. All this changes is that a few of the murders – Kirumi’s and Gonta’s, and Maki’s attempted one – were done for a reason that was based on a lie. But that doesn’t make it not matter, that just makes it more tragic in hindsight to know that they were manipulated.

Tsumugi:  “Lies are just like snowballs. The more you roll them, the bigger they get. The bigger they are, the more fun and shocking it is when they’re revealed.”

“Junko”:  “That’s why everything up till now has been lies! That’s the truth!”

Not even remotely “everything”. Tsumugi is right to say that a bigger lie being revealed makes for a better plot twist, but doing so to too great an extent does run the risk of making the entire story seem pointless. I think the out-universe writers struck a good balance here, though, because not everything has been lies. Everyone still formed bonds and fought and struggled and died, and all of that has been real. Everything which really mattered still matters. And most of the actual meaningful foreshadowing and suspense we’ve had has been very much on an out-universe level, because the in-universe writers couldn’t have predicted what would happen in future, especially not for cases 4 and 5 which were all “written” for them by Kokichi.

Himiko:  “We’re not students from Hope’s Peak?”

Himiko is the only one who even seems to be particularly upset about this part of the relevation, probably because she’s the only one of them who’s truly proud of her talent and would have been happy to think she’d been part of a huge legacy of talented people.

“Junko”:  “Looking back, it was a mistake to have you remember Hope’s Peak.”

Tsumugi:  “I didn’t originally plan on giving you those memories, but… I was in a rush and overlooked all those inconsistencies, so you figured it all out…”

It wasn’t only a mistake because it let them figure everything out, Tsumugi. It was also just bad writing.

There’s no reason to doubt this claim that she didn’t plan this from the start. Everything about the Hope’s Peak part of the backstory was clearly shoehorned in and not truly connected to everything that had come before it; nothing about it was foreshadowed in the previous memories. That book in Kokichi’s lab was thrown in there in a hurry and had nothing to do with the rest of the room.

(It would have been perfectly possible to foreshadow Hope’s Peak in their memories. They could have all vaguely remembered growing up in a world that was slowly recovering from some apocalyptic event, even if they were unclear on what that event was. Instead of remembering being at ordinary schools and just having their talents recognised by a separate Ultimate Initiative, they could have remembered being at some fairly prestigious kind of school and just forgotten the name of the school and that it was the same one for all of them. And they maybe could have had it so they didn’t remember why they knew of their Ultimate titles, only for it to turn out that that’s because Hope’s Peak bestowed those titles and they forgot the specifics about Hope’s Peak. But nope – none of that was in their memories, because none of this was planned.)

Shuichi:  “So that’s why Kokichi had to die?”

I mean, really, Kokichi was planning on getting himself killed for his grand plan anyway whether the mastermind had any say in it or not.

Shuichi:  “He usurped the mastermind’s role, but in doing so, became a thorn in their side. So to get rid of that hindrance, the mastermind played along with the lie.”

However, the mastermind was probably hoping to get Kokichi killed before he could pull off whatever grand plan was going to be the endpoint of all his scheming and possibly make things even worse for them. Too bad that didn’t work out – all thanks to Kaito jumping in the way of Maki’s arrow, which is emphatically not something that was part of the writers’ script.

Tsumugi:  “At the same time, having everyone remember Hope’s Peak Academy… made you guys target him because you thought he was a Remnant of Despair.”

Yep, she’s straight-up admitting it. It wasn’t just believing he was a Remnant, but also the fact that they believed they themselves were these symbols of hope whose duty was to “defeat” anything associated with “despair”. Hope’s Peak was very much a part of the manipulation.

Maki:  “Then the reason I tried to kill Kokichi was…”

Monokuma:  “You were being controlled by false memories, like putty in the mastermind’s hands.”

I’m afraid so, Maki.

Monokuma also goes on to confirm that the Hope’s Peak memory was also to artificially make them recover from the despair they were in. Really they should have been able to figure this out themselves at the time, but hey.

“Junko”:  “New mysteries and truths turn to motivation. Motivation drives a story. Everything from the Flashback Lights was just motivation to move you forward. But… I guess it was fake motivation.”

Monokuma:  “You idiots kept getting jerked around by meaningless lies!”

I mean, yes, she’s right, they needed motivation to make the story interesting and that was a lot of the point of the Flashback Lights. But it really wasn’t to the extent that she’s claiming. Most of their motivation was just wanting to get the hell out of here and not die, which was entirely the truth and nothing to do with the Flashback Lights. The only fake motivation that actually drove the story was some of the motives for murder – but then everyone’s reactions and further motivations in the wake of those murders were very real.

“Junko”:  “This class trial was like that too, wasn’t it? Why was it you were so motivated to do it? Because you got a memory from one of the Flashback Lights, right?”

Haha, no, stop giving yourself credit you don’t deserve. She goes on to talk about all of the flashbacks they had during the investigation and how that supposedly filled them with the hope to fight back, but no, that had nothing to do with why Shuichi and his friends were determined to do this. This trial would still be happening exactly like it is now if they’d never had those flashbacks. Shuichi is doing this because of his determination to end the killing game, thanks to the promises he made to Kaede and Kaito and everyone else, because he doesn’t want their deaths to be in vain. All of that is completely real and had nothing to do with the pointless flashbacks that were entirely irrelevant to anything that’s actually been happening here.

“Junko”:  “Remembering the weight of that hope should’ve made you feel stronger.”

Eh, that depends. That could also have just put too much pressure on them and made them hesitant to act for fear of messing up and letting down everyone who’d supposedly been relying on them – especially for someone like Shuichi.

Tsumugi:  “Even though Kaito and Kokichi were gone, and Keebo started to go berserk… You guys didn’t give up hope.”

Oh, you can fuck right off with your implication that now that Kaito’s gone he has absolutely nothing to do with them holding onto hope. Kaito’s death is precisely why Shuichi is so determined now! And if you didn’t think that was going to happen when Kaito died, why in the everliving hell did you even *kill him*!? Am I seriously going to have to accept here that Tsumugi didn’t have any kind of meaningful narrative in mind for Kaito’s death? That she killed him not even for the sake of at least Shuichi’s arc in her story, but purely for the hell of it?

I can try and tell myself that she doesn’t quite mean this and is only saying it in a pathetic attempt to sell the importance of her pointless backstory and even more pointless flashbacks, but geez.

It also sounds awkwardly like she could be saying that Kokichi ever inspired anyone with hope, but I presume what she means there is that he was providing an obvious enemy whom they could be inspired to fight against.

Maki:  “You were controlling our emotions? Even our resolve to defeat the mastermind?”

Maki’s voice sounds very distressed here. She is not at all happy to realise that she’s still just being controlled and used by a higher power that doesn’t care about her, even now after she’d begun to feel like she’d started to make her own decisions and break free of that. Her desires matter? No, actually, her desires were never really hers in the first place.

I really enjoy how, even though it’s never explained why Maki’s so distressed over this and over learning that Kokichi wasn’t a Remnant of Despair earlier, it’s still very much there in her voice. This is hitting her right in the issues in a way that’s going to continue to be very relevant as this trial continues.

Himiko:  “A-All the memories… were fake? Then… what was everything till now?”

Still real, Himiko! Angie and Tenko still really died, you know! This doesn’t change that much!

Himiko:  “If they were all fake memories, then… Where… are we? Why are we in this killing game?”

She’s acting like the memories of the Gofer Project and everything somehow justified that they were being put through this killing game, but… they really didn’t. The killing game part of that was unrelated to the actual backstory and was supposedly because one single evil asshole suddenly decided “hey wouldn’t it be fun if the survivors of humanity all killed each other”. Which is the only reason a game like this would ever happen: because some asshole thought it would be fun. The wider context of it really isn’t that relevant – it only served to make it more tragic that they were killing each other despite how important their lives were to humanity – so it really doesn’t matter now that it’s all been revealed as fake.

Shuichi:  “But we have nothing to do with Hope’s Peak, so you can’t be Junko. So who the hell are you!?”

I… don’t know why this is only just occurring to you now, Shuichi. It should have been obvious from the start that she’s not really Junko. Why is it so hard for you to think that she could just be Tsumugi, albeit a different “Tsumugi” to the one you thought you were friends with?

“Hajime”:  “I’m me. No one else.”

Shuichi:  (…What?)

Keebo:  “What… is this?”

Tsumugi:  “Huh? You know him, don’t you? He was in the Jabberwock Island killing game.”

The general public in the Hope’s Peak universe didn’t watch that killing game, though. Shuichi and friends shouldn’t have fake memories of Hajime or anyone else from DR2. At most, they should vaguely remember a list of names and faces of the people who were involved in that conflict that the general public maybe learned about afterwards, but they shouldn’t be familiar with them.

Tsumugi:  “What am I doing? I’m just cosplaying.”

Shuichi:  “Cosplaying?”

I would say “come on, Shuichi, this isn’t hard to grasp”, but, to be fair… at this point, it becomes less cosplay and more shapeshifting. I can just about stretch my disbelief to buy that she can change clothes ridiculously fast – sure, whatever, this is an anime-style universe, let’s go with that. But now, she’s not only cosplaying Junko, she’s cosplaying several characters who have completely different body types to her. To some extent cosplayers can copy body types by using binding or padding, but not to this degree! Some of these characters are significantly shorter than her, and there’s no way you can do that!

So, everyone else’s talents are faked, but Tsumugi is so talented at cosplay that she can just do what has to be literal shapeshifting. Sure, sure, I guess we’ve just got to go with that. Tsumugi is a shapeshifter, okay then.

“Kazuichi”:  “Check it out! Even my voice sounds exactly the same!”

(Haha, hi, Kaito’s voice actor. The English dub had all of the V3 characters voiced by someone who did one of the DR1 or 2 cast in order to spend less money on this. Apparently the Japanese dub didn’t and yet still managed to get all the old VAs back anyway.)

We’re also supposed to believe that Tsumugi can just perfectly mimic all the voices, even the deepest male ones. I guess the Ultimate Imposter could do that kind of thing (even though they couldn’t change their body type), so sure, whatever, even though this is not supposed to be a universe where some people are born with talents that are practically superpowers, I guess Tsumugi can do that too.

I suppose her being able to do this does make it slightly more justifiable why the Exisals randomly have a voice changer that can perfectly mimic anyone’s voice, right? That’s a plus to this, isn’t it??

This is the moment at which Tsumugi’s magical cosplay aura is meant to appear… but there’s a well-known glitch where if you save and quit and then resume at any point before this while “Junko” is here, the aura will show up before it should and somewhat spoil the reveal. I write this commentary in sessions that don’t necessarily correlate with the post breaks, so this happened to me too this time. Whoooops, game devs.

Shuichi:  “How can she cosplay as students of Hope’s Peak Academy!? Because Tsumugi told us…”

Shuichi, that stupid cospox claim should not be taken as any kind of evidence for anything! You have no proof she was even telling the truth about that!

Tsumugi:  “Ah, you remembered! Yes, that’s exactly right.”

“Makoto”:  “So then… what does this mean?”

The cospox nonsense is supposedly used to “prove” that the characters she’s cosplaying are all actually fictional. But that really is not necessary, because Tsumugi is clearly ready to have Shuichi figure that out and would have therefore been quite happy to just tell him if he couldn’t figure it out himself. This entire stupid cospox plot point was just 1000% Not Needed. Even if they wanted Shuichi to be the one to figure this out to give the players a game to play, they could have just used the fact that Tsumugi always very strongly argued that it was wrong to cosplay real people and seems to still be agreeing with that philosophy even as Shuichi brings it up now.

(I mean, I suppose since Tsumugi is a literal shapeshifter maybe I shouldn’t be considering it such a ridiculous leap compared to that that her superpowers come with the caveat of only being able to do it with fictional people. But still. (And when she “demonstrated” it to Kaede, she did not attempt to shapeshift into her, just put on her clothes, so.))

Shuichi:  (Hope’s Peak Academy is…) “It’s fictional… It’s all fictional!?”

Shuichi looks incredibly shellshocked at this realisation… but I’m not sure why it’s getting to him so much now. As soon as he realised that their memories from the Hope’s Peak Flashback Light were all fake, it follows that not only were they not Hope’s Peak students, but also that the school and all the backstory surrounding it may well have never existed in the first place.

Shuichi:  “Dangan… ronpa…?”

I love how bewildered Shuichi sounds at hearing this name for the world he thought he was a part of. Okay, sure, maybe rebuttals are kind of relevant to these class trials, but what do bullets have to do with anything???

Himiko:  “S-So… this was all fake? Everything was made up? And the whole time… we thought it was real?”

What do you even mean, the whole time? You guys started thinking Hope’s Peak was real literally only two days ago! Again, this should not be the point at which everyone’s being the most shocked about this – that should have happened simply when they realised their memories from the Flashback Lights were all fake. I think the out-universe writers are slipping a bit too much into having them react like the audience would to such a revelation, because obviously Hope’s Peak is totally the most important thing, right? Not to these characters, it shouldn’t be. The last time they reacted more like a fan than they should have done regarding Hope’s Peak revelations, that was probably in-universely deliberate brainwashing from that Flashback Light, making them super excited for the sake of artificial “hope”. But this time there’s not that excuse.

I’ve also seen one or two blind LPers get kind of upset at this revelation that DR1 and 2 were “all fictional”, as if it callously retconned things so that nothing in those games ever mattered – but this is completely misunderstanding how fiction works. Of course Danganronpa 1 and 2 were fictional. We ourselves consumed them as works of fiction. But within that fictional universe, it all really happened and really mattered. All this is saying here is that Danganronpa V3 does not take place within that universe after all – instead, it takes place in a universe similar to our own where DR1 and 2 were works of fiction. That does not make the events of the Hope’s Peak storyline any less meaningful to itself – it just means that those events aren’t a part of this story like we’d been led to believe.

(And like I mentioned back in chapter 5, this is a good thing, because it means that those surviving characters we cared about in the Hope’s Peak universe weren’t randomly, meaninglessly killed off by meteorites! They did still live somewhat-happily ever after!)

While Himiko’s saying this, we also get a bunch of flashback images from both DR1 and 2… and again, she shouldn’t be remembering any of the specifics of Danganronpa 2, because the general public didn’t watch that killing game.

Tsumugi:  “Did you think the Ultimate Cosplayer’s talent was only limited to characters?”

“Junko”:  “It’d be kinda lame if that was all the big bad mastermind could do…”

I guess that’s our reason for why she’s a straight-up shapeshifter. Because she’s the big bad mastermind, so she’s got to be able to do something over-the-top like that. Sure.

Tsumugi:  “I can do far more than that… I can cosplay the world itself!”

…No, not really? Shoving memories of that world into people’s heads and making them think it’s the truth isn’t “cosplaying” it and has nothing to do with your superpower and everything to do with Flashback Lights.

Shuichi:  “B-But… why? Why would you do this? Why make us think it’s real—”

“Hina”:  “Well, duh! It’s so you’d all play the killing game!”

That’s really not why. They were all playing the killing game just fine long before they thought any of the previous Danganronpas were real. You don’t need to know about the previous ones to be forced to do what the bear tells you to. The only reason she made them think it was real was to pander to the in-universe audience when they were mad at her after Kokichi had made things temporarily boring.

“Nekomaru”:  “In other words, it’s Ultimate Real Fiction!!!”

In other words, you’re still killing real people for this killing game, regardless of how fictional the backstory is.

Maki:  “But… if it’s fiction… If everything… isn’t real… Then… the world being in ruins is also fiction, right? The world outside… is fine, right?”

It would be a little surprising that it took so long for someone to mention this part, the thing that would be good news about all this… but I suppose they didn’t only get the “truth” about the outside world from the Flashback Light. It’d be harder to find a reason to doubt what they also saw with their own eyes until reaching this point.

Unless, of course, you’re Kokichi and are already certain there’s an audience and using that as your base premise, resulting in a thought process of, “there’s definitely an audience, so what do you mean the world’s been destroyed?”. But since everyone else only learned there was probably an audience after seeing the outside world, they had the destroyed outside world as their base premise instead, and so they were faced with a mystery of, “the world’s been destroyed, so I’m not sure how there can be an audience even though the evidence suggests there is one”.

---

[Next post]

[koreanstudentiseul]

Fear of failure, leads to failure

So it’s been a little while, I’d taken a break from Korean to clear my head and get away from the negative space it had fallen into. As I started easing back into it I noticed some things that I’d not noticed I was doing before.

So I have always had a huge fear of speaking Korean, have done since like 2013 when I was just about able to read. I was so scared to speak that I basically never have, even in my tutor lessons I get constantly prompted ‘answer in Korean’ and it was out of the fear of failure and insulting/upsetting someone. So this is one way that shows that being held back by the fear of failure essentially created the failure I feared, I held myself back so much that when I wanted to talk to people I couldn’t. Not to say I insulted them, but I couldn’t understand them, and even on the rare occasions when I could I didn’t know how to reply I couldn’t give an answer.

At first I brushed this off, it was all in my head. I told myself the struggle was from lack of people to talk to, I had no natives to chat with and textbooks weren’t natural enough so the way they spoke confused me. Which technically isn’t entirely false as textbooks often are more formal or stiff than how people naturally talk so it was easy to tell myself.

How did I come to believe how much I was hindering myself? Well, the TTMIK website update. That sounds a bit random, but it kind of is so bear with me here. As many people know up until a day or two ago the end of level test dialogs were removed from the basic members (and premium members to be fair they were completely removed no paywall) level 1-5 courses. Now I was very sad to see them go, I’d wished that I knew they’d go before the original site went down to download them and their pdfs to use them even though I was only just into level 3 and wouldn’t be near some of them for a good while yet.

So there was a good weekish where I was kicking myself over this, and then they added them back. I was so excited that I went back and re-listened to the level 1 and 2 dialog as soon as they appeared back in the lists. Which is also how I found out there were certificates for the essential courses cause it showed as 100% complete but they only showed up after I marked the dialogs complete, so for anyone else i that boat, or with an old completed course that’s marked complete and doesn’t have a certificate on it if you undo and re-complete a lesson in the course it’ll show up. I had that happen with how Korean sentences work, slight tangent there.

Going back to the dialog tests, when I first moved up from level 1 I listened to the dialog and it was like white noise, I didn’t understand a word listening and even reading the script I didn’t understand most of it. Actually the same happened with level 2 not that long ago though I understood more while reading this time round. This time, even with the traffic noises in the background I understood 90% of the level 1 dialog. I was so surprised that I understood any of it I went and read it to make sure I was right, I didn’t trust myself. I don’t know if it was because the less I thought about it the more comfortably I could follow it or if I just remember trying last summer and being like the first time, or if it was because it was 3 people and I’ve never really had luck with 1 person speaking nevermind 3 and that made me question it.

Now with level 2 it wasn’t as smooth but it was still better. The first half was absolutely fine, I could just about follow it but the end I really fell over. At first I scolded myself, it’s only level 2 how can you not follow it, you’re meant to be an intermediate student, you’re a failure.

There it was, that word again. Failure. I will always be my own worst critic, but I don’t want to be a roadblock to myself. Instead of being excited that for the first time I’d understood any of it, I was tearing myself down for not understanding part of it. I’ve been trying so hard to improve my listening with dictation and watching drama’s and variety shows (I’ve been binging 언니들의 슬램덩크 recently, Sook is hilarious) so it makes sense that I can now understand something or at least be able to distinguish words better.

I always thought failing in a language meant giving up on it, but now I think I might have misjudged that. I’ve been doing flashcards daily and again I don’t give credit for the 100+ I get right but the 20 odd I forget or slightly misremembered I beat myself up over those. I have over 6000 cards, I can’t expect to remember them all perfectly that’s why I have flashcards in the first place. Really was it any wonder I felt I wasn’t making progress when that’s where my focus was.

My biggest failure has been not giving myself the credit for how far I’ve come, I was so focused on the small details I forgot about the big picture. I’ve come so far with Korean, I can read, write, and on a good day speak and on a fantastic day I can understand when people when they speak. And yet, I never stop and acknowledge that. I’ve had days ruined by doing flashcards which is ridiculous to say but I was so upset over how badly I’d done. So I’ve decided to scrap my new years goals for Korean and instead I want to sort out my headspace.

This year I want to be more positive about the learning process. I want (and need) to learn to have a better work/rest balance because working to burnout and then having to take huge breaks and restart isn’t healthy and also isn’t helping the feeling of not progressing. It would also be nice to get past the current procrastinating by doing other studying things. Like I have homework to do but I’ll do an essential course grammar lesson, or a video course lesson (or 5) etc you get the idea it’s avoiding the work I don’t wanna do by making it still feel productive unlike spending a day playing video games. Basically I want to stop feeling like I’ve failed at Korean ♡

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball 102

Last time on Dragon Ball... OH FUCK KRILLIN’S DEAD

He had gone back to the arena to fetch Goku’s Nyoibo and Four Star Dragon Ball, and then Goku found him and the World Tournament Announcer laid out on the floor.   The Announcer, at least, is okay.   He explains that some monster barged in and took the Four Star Ball and a copy of the Tenkaichi Budokai roster.   Krillin tried to fight the creature, but it was just too strong.  

Goku is livid.   A lot of people have asked why Goku didn’t just turn Super Saiyan right here.   Personally, I think there’s more to turning Super Saiyan than the emotional shock of your best friend getting killed.   For one thing, Goku wasn’t there when it happened.    I think there’s a difference between finding Krillin’s dead body and watching him get slaughtered while you’re powerless to stop it.  Also, Goku isn’t nearly as strong now as he will be on Namek, and I think that has a lot to do with it.

Nevertheless, this scene has a lot to do with Goku being a Super Saiyan.    It’s all well and good to talk about Goku “transforming” into a Super Saiyan, but you can argue that he always was a Super Saiyan, since he eventually figured out how to tap into that form.   And this righteous fury we see from him is what sets him apart from most of his species.   Nappa and Raditz never felt this way in their lives, or they never allowed themselves to feel this way.   Goku has this capacity throughout his whole life, and so when he’s finally strong enough to cross the threshold, he has the emotional intelligence to carry him to the other side. 

He grabs his Nyoibo, asks Bulma for her Dragon Radar, and rushes off to hunt down Krillin’s killer.   Roshi tells him to wait, even orders him to stop, but to no avail.   After all, Goku’s hungry and tired, and any monster who could beat Krillin so easily would probably be too much for Goku while he’s less than 100%.

Oolong finds a piece of paper on the floor with a mark on it.  

And once Roshi sees it, he realizes that he knows who’s behind all this.

King Piccolo.  

Okay, so here’s my perspective on this.   I watched DBZ first, and it was pretty clear from casualy watching the early episodes around 1998 or so that Piccolo was the bad guy before Z got started.  All we really knew about him was what little the edited dub revealed in flashbacks or exposition.   Goku said that he wanted to take over the world, though he never understood why, and it was pretty clear that Goku had been the only thing standing in the way of that goal.    While the early sagas of DBZ involved the good guys having an uneasy alliance with Piccolo, it was clear that no one really trusted him, and they were terrified of what he might do if left unchecked.

All of this led me to wonder just what Piccolo had done as a villain.   I think he struck me as a sort of Dr. Doom or Skeletor archetype at the time.    He wanted to conquer the planet, which suggested that he probably pulled some schemes that might have almost worked if Goku hadn’t come along and punched him in the face.   Yeah, he was super strong, but he must have been fairly restrained if the world was still in one piece.

Then I finally get to the first episode of the King Piccolo Saga, and it turns out to be way, way worse than I ever imagined.   Krillin’s dead, and that’s just for openers.   Piccolo had once terrorized the world a long time ago, and he had a horde of demonic creatures helping him kill innocent people right and left.  

This is one of the best filler scenes I’ve seen so far.   While Roshi tells the story of King Piccolo’s first reign of terror, we’re treated to this horriffic sequence of scaly green monsters flying around, blasting energy beams out of their mouths, stalking frightened humans, and crushing any and all resistance.  

This monster was about to descend on an innocent woman, until some guy tried to beat him up with a pipe.   But the pipe just bent around his body like it was nothing, and then the monster mauls him instead.    Now imagine that the entire world is like this, and you start to understand the horror of King Piccolo.

And through it all, King Piccolo’s just enjoying the whole thing.    Why did he do all of this?   Why turn the whold world into a charnel house?   We never really get an answer to that.

Piccolo’s monsters eventually came after the dojo that Master Roshi and the Crane Hemit used to belong to.   He doesn’t really mention why this conflict happened, but my guess is that that Piccolo’s creatures were just going after everyone.    There was probably no strategy to it at all.

I’m pretty sure these are Roshi and the Crane Hermit, although I have trouble telling which one is supposed to be which.  The one on the left looks a little more like Roshi, though.   

I’m not sure when this was supposed to have happened.   I’m pretty sure the Funimation dub established it was fifty years ago, but that doesn’t make much sense.   For one thing, of all the characters Roshi is telling this story to, only Tien has even heard of King Piccolo, and he hasn’t heard much.  If King Piccolo had been around only fifty years ago, then Bulma’s parents would probably know about him, since her grandparents would have surely lived during that time.

Also, Roshi is well over 300 years old, so if he looked this young fifty years ago, he must have aged really badly since then.   So I’m pretty sure Funi goofed, or I’m misremembering something.   It makes a lot more sense if the King Piccolo crisis happened a lot longer ago.   Two hundred years, minimum.

Whatever the chronology, Roshi and the Crane Hermit were only able to beat back Piccolo’s minions, and never King Piccolo himself.   Not even their master, Mutaito, could stop Piccolo, although he swore to oppose him with all his power.   

Piccolo wounded the guy, but he managed to survive, thanks to his superhuman vitality.   Only, he left Roshi and his other students before he was healed, and he promised to return one day.

Roshi thinks that the magnitude of the Piccolo crisis was what turned the Crane Hermit into the villain he is today.   That’s pretty heavy stuff.  Piccolo is so evil that he inspired other evildoers to turn to evil. 

Getting back to the story, one day, years later, Mutaito returned, having finally mastered a technique that would save the world from King Piccolo.

So he went right up to King Piccolo and zapped him with the Mafuba, also known as the Evil Containment Wave.    It didn’t kill Piccolo, or even hurt him...

Instead, it directed him into a vessel, which could be sealed with a sacred talisman.   I don’t know why he picked a rice cooker, but his options may have been limited in those days.

The only downside to the Mafuba is that it kills the user.   So it was up to Roshi to deal with the imprisoned King Piccolo.

So he dropped it into the bottom of the sea.    The only way King Piccolo could possibly have returned would be if someone found the jar and opened it.   Tien and Chiaotzu wonder if the Crane Hermit might have done it, but Roshi says that he never would have dared to unleash such horror again.   So the question is: Who would be dumb enough to find King Piccolo and set him free?     What sort of colossal idiot would... oh, who are we kidding?   It’s Emperor Pilaf.

Worse, Pilaf told Piccolo about the Dragon Balls.    He thinks King Piccolo would want to wish to rule the world...

But no.    Conquering the world is easy for him.   What he wants is eternal youth, so he can have the vitality and longevity to rule the wold forever!

Pilaf tries to suggest that Piccolo should share half the world with him in exchange for all of his help.    It was Pilaf who found Piccolo’s jar, released him, set him up in this cool airship, and he told him about the Dragon Balls and the Tenkacihi Budokai.   Piccolo replies that he’ll think it over.

As for the Dragon Balls, Piccolo has one of his goons named Tambourine looking for them, and he’s on his way back with one right now.    What the Pilaf gang doesn’t understand is why he had Tambourine steal the tournament roster while he was at it.    Piccolo explains that it was a martial artist who sealed him away for so long, and so he considers martial artists to be the only possible threat to his plans.   Any one of them might possibly know or reinvent the technique that sealed him away, so he plans to kill them all, and the Tenkaichi Budokai roster makes a nice list of strong fighters to kick off his purge.

Back at the arena, Roshi has reached the same conclusion.  

Meanwhile, Goku, who knows none of this, has finally caught up to Tambourine. 

[crystalnet]

3 Writing Samples

Here are 3 writing samples that might be useful to have at the top of the pile. 

1. Pacific Digital (Fiction, sample intro to long-form narrative)

Ryuki balanced on top of a fifty-foot skyscraper, poised as though ready to dive, he steadied himself, stiffened his stance and let himself fall backwards slowly into the urban abyss below him, free-fall style, arms crossed over his shoulders, suddenly picking up massive amounts of momentum as he hurdled to the ground, and then fluidly rolling in mid-air into a somersault, amassing exponential amounts of centrifugal force as he smashed a double drop-kick of a landing, he plowed himself against the helipad of a massive cement structure, collapsing it against itself, and then emerged from the haze of debris in an instant, leaping again, shooting through the air like a meteorite.

“The shock-absorption is fantastic. Lots of feedback but it isn’t obtrusive.” Ryuki said curtly as he butterfly jumped on the rebound of a kick-off from yet another cement sky-scraper, transitioning into a triple-axel, volleying his own mass up towards the gleaming artificial sun that hung high in a bright fully-rendered VR sky-box.

“That’s great Ryuki. Let’s run one more drill for today to test out your mobility,” a disembodied voice chimed in in the VR-helmet in-ear monitor as two drones suddenly appeared, circling Ryuki and moving in.

“Sounds good Professor Agassa, I’m ready for anything” Ryuki replied. A dazzling array of stats, internal analyses, and diagnostics flickered on the heads-up display projected on the screen of Ryuki’s VR module, as he brought his dynamic manouevering to a pause, perching menacingly on another structure in his bright orange test-model AR auto-suit, that resembled the giant robots of Saturday morning cartoon lore, readying his energy pole after detaching it from his rear-module.

Just minutes later, Ryuki blasted across the Palo Alto free-way in his blue Bugatti, a rental, the gleaming pacific ocean to his left, nearly seething with the reddish reflection of a blazing orange sun that hung low in the summer sky. He was headed back to the posh estate he was renting while he was here working with Agassa for the summer. He remembered the email from a few months that started all of this, coming out of the blue in the month of May. “Me and my collegues, among which are your esteemed sister, are working on something that I think you may be interested in. There is also a certain Miss Ayumi Ito who will be joinging us… ”

Agassa was putting them up in the luxurious Half-Moon Manse, named for it’s location near a prime beach in Palo Alto, it was a rare Californian plantation, practically on the shore; sporting a strange mixture of Roccocco and Spanish architechture, the house was said to have been built for a Spanish catholic-missionary turned gold-mining prospector to the stars. His family only lasted though until a string of grizzly murders near the end of 19th century and the palatial estate had since been rented out by wealthy investors and jet-setters year after year before being handed off to yet another recipient in the form of a certain Professor Agassa, who had a fetish for eccentric real-estate. The strangely vibrant Spanish roofing, the decadant banisters and parapets, the Art Decco flourishes that had been added by a wealthy oil tycoon nearly a century ago, and the gothic looking East Tower had a certain forboding and yet luxurious presence on the wind-blown strip of the white-sand beaches of Palo Alto.

Agassa wasn’t just being so generous as to rent the place just for Ryuki and Ayumi though, he also needed the estate to host a gala event for the Perseus Society, which he himself was an active board-member of. Agassa was greatly in need of their lucrative patronage but beyond just that Agassa actually felt very strongly about the society’s mission. In the years following the great environmental fall-out and the rise of AR technology, many mega-corporations had begun to amass power, all seeking to take control of a unstable global situation in various ways, some for capitalist ends and some for seemingly virtuous ones. Agassa seemed to believe strongly that Perseus actually had altruistic goals that were worth fighting for.

In the mean time until the big party, Ryuki and Ayumi were free to enjoy the impressively sized Manse to themselves after long 12 hour days working with Agassa in the lab on his new VR developments. When Ryuki arrived home though, tossing the keys and his Ray Ban shades on the marble counter-top, he wasn’t surprised at all to see Ayumi through the awning windows that let out to the tennis courts, hard at work practicing her base-line volleys against an automated ball-lobber in a teal velour Fila track jacket, white Lacoste tennis shorts, and a fluorescent green Commes des Garçons-brand visor over her brow that just happened to match the color of Ayumi’s test-model AR auto-suit from earlier that day at the lab.

The two of them, Ryuki’s esteemed older sister Aida, and Professor Agassa (as well as a formidable squad of lab-assistants) had been cooped up in Agassa’s private lab for about a month now working on various things that Agassa felt were going to be important moving forward.

The full-immersion function of his new VR-Tank allowed them to enter artificially-rendered VR settings at immersion rates exceeding 120% so that they could actually feel the very things they interacted with while in the tank’s VR module, and moved around by exerting and flexing their actual muscles. This demanded hours of strenuous training, both in the tank and out of it, working on various martial arts styles to master the use of their own bodies. They were running simulations that Agassa modeled after the giant-robot cartoons that Ayumi and Ryuki had grown up watching in order to help the pilots visualize their VR selves as armored shells which they themselves were piloting from a safe distance, even if it seemed to Ayumi and Ryuki at first that they really were in fact hurdling through the air or fending off drone-bombers in reality. Much of the work was separating the reality of their VR surroundings from their actual reality, mentally– easier said than done.

Ryuki, being just as fiercely motivated and unsatisfied in the same was Ayumi was, headed to the large sun-dappled drawing room on the basement landing to practice his Judo, instead of enjoying the myriad leisure options that the Manse offered, including an on-site tennis courts, regulation-sized pool, a lacrosse field and a pristine and thriving green-house, perfect for yoga and transcendental meditation sessions. The ornate Victorian book shelves that towered to the ceiling, and the marble flooring and Classical paintings, facilitated a meditative atmosphere, though several grim and gleaming suits of knight’s armor stood erect near the corners of the room and Ryuki couldn’t deny the slightly foreboding feeling he got when he caught sight of one in his peripheral as he transitioned out of a Harai Goshi wheel kick, feeling as though he was being watched by some predatory phantom.

Later that night Ryuki and Ayumi were relaxing pool-side looking out over the sloping dunes of white sand reflecting moonlight that illuminated the dark beach of Half-Moon bay. Ayumi sat on a pool-chair dangling a foot in the water, in her dark grey Z Cavaricci pants and a smart-looking vintage Vivienne Westwood jacket, while Ryuki, sat alongside her in a tweed sweater looking out at the now completely submerged sun, only showing slightly on the horizon below a newly revealed moon, glimmering behind dark clouds that were swelled with Pacific surf. [the later years of the 2010’s, US fashion saw a great return to the trends of the 1980’s, but unlike other trends which centered on the re-appropriating of misremembered nostalgia, this fad was actually mostly sincere. Somehow, in North America at least, people had come back around to the styles of the very decade which had seen the rise of so many brave new technological advancements, which in turn inspired fashions that would be just as eye-catching as the possibilities of the day were exciting and dreadful. Indeed, the pages of Vogue were filled with images and styles that evoked everything from Dallas and Dynasty to Espirit brand sweaters and Keith Harring graphic tees.]

“So…” Ayumi started to speak just to trail off again. “Have you gotten anywhere trying to figure out what exactly Agassa is preparing for?” She seemed distracted as she stared off in the distance toward the sickly moonlit glow as she held a flute of vintage sherry to her lips.

“Whatever it is, it definitely has a lot to do with Crystal Corp and the imminent funding grants he’ll be receiving from Perseus Society”. Ryuki offered. They had both been wondering what exactly Agassa wasn’t telling them. He had been reasonably fourthright, but it still wasn’t entirely apparent to the two of them why they had been gathered the way they were a month prior– he was hiding something.

The next day, the gala for the Perseus Society was to go off without a hitch, after a month of planning on Agassa’s part. The ballroom of the Manse was soon filled wall-to-wall with elegant and upwardly mobile entrepreneurs, scientists, philanthropists, and self-appointed philosophers of wealth and champions of the market. Veritable Robin Hoods who used their positions of power on Wall Street or Corporate boards of Silicon Valley tech companies to bring back their wealth to people of staggering intellectual ability like Agassa who sought to wrest the fate of the planet away from those who would watch it burn uncaring.

Ryuki and Ayumi were not sure they had ever seen that much Dior in their lives, as they sauntered around somewhat sheepishly in perfectly tailored outfits, making nice, small talk with the various benefactors, CEOs and wealthy eccentrics who would be directly funding their research with Agassa. After a keynote address on networks of airborne Geodesic-dome shaped super-structures as the new “city of tomorrow,” Agassa delivered his speech which included topics such as the rising need for global accountability by super corporations, some thinly-veiled attacks on Crystal Corp’s recent policies and controversies, and a loosely sketched plan for his research and Perseus’s unified research efforts moving forward, to a standing ovation that Ryuki could tell was a massive relief to the stressed but happy-to-be-there Agassa.

Late that night, after the party, after making small talk with strangers for hours, and after a heart-to-heart between Ayumi and Ryuki by the pool again (they had been having these more frequently lately), Ryuki had collapsed into a deep slumber in the master on the third-floor when he was suddenly awoken by some unseen force in the middle of the night.

“Ryuki”~

“Who’s that?” Ryuki shot out, rubbing his eyes groggily.

“It’s me Ryuki, your friend”. Ryuki was shocked to see a glowing blue teddy-bear, standing upright and kind of peeking around the door to his room from the hallway.

“Adomu-chan? What are you doing here”. Ryuki was partly relieved to see he was just dreaming as he looked out on at the ethereal blue teddy-bear thing that was now climbing onto the foot of his bed.

“I need you to come with me Ryuki. Let’s play a game”. Suddenly the living teddy-bear from Ryuki’s childhood turned on a dime and ran out the room into the cavernous hallways of the third-floor.

“Hey wait up!” Ryuki said, scrambling out of his sheets in satin red pajamas, then running through the East hall towards the tower, past gothic ornamentation, medieval suits of armor, and a collection of paintings that included everything from Gaugin and Pizzaro, to Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst originals, as he scurried after the glowing teddy-bear that was sprinting through the house.

The bear ran up the tower stairs into the hallway that connected to Ayumi’s room, dashing into Ayumi’s door which hung ajar when Ryuki lost sight of him.

“What’s going on in here?!” Ryuki said, burting through the door into the luxurious master bedroom. The living toy was suddenly no where to be found, but on the bed, perched over Ayumi’s resting body, was a dark figure who appeared to be readying a strike from an armed right-hand, poised to slash the throat of his victim. Just as Ryuki burst in the room, the assailant turned and saw him, and in an instant, jolted off of the bed, slinking rapidly towards the large windows which opened onto a veranda, and dashed through the already-open door out into the crisp moonlit night. Ayumi suddenly woke up at a start, and beginning to realize what happened, ran towards the window. Ryuki and Ayumi both walked out onto the veranda and stared down at the crashing waves far below them where the foundation of the house met the near shore. It was high-tide so it almost appeared as though the beach had completely flooded, and the shore was engulfing the foundation of the Manse itself and they looked out through the dark windblown night, searching for an assailant who wasn’t there.

All that remained of the most strange incident was a single pastel blue rose that lay on the deep maroon carpet in front of the veranda door, laying in shards of moonlight that spilled into the room, appearing as though it had been frozen in some treating solution so that it was stiff and glassy, as though it had been crystallized.~

2. My Favorite Anime Films (Editorial)

It might be worth mentioning that there is a precise moment when a millennial realizes that anime is more than just Pokemon. Weather it be through Pokemon’s rivalry with Digimon or the appearance of other also-rans like Monster Rancher and later Yu-Gi-Oh, or the monolithic DBZ airing on Toonami, or y'know, Toonami in general, it is guaranteed to be a profound experience when anime first becomes an option and life-style for a youngster. The pastures of eclecticism to your child-like near-autistic mind expand outward in all directions, electrified seizure-enducing color palettes and all, containing within their emerald acres untold secrets and state-of-the-art studio-driven capital-A Art presented for your liking, to devour a la carte as it were. For a select many, here in the west, that first exposure may be a Miyazaki film. Behold, Baby Otaku’s first anime movie.

Hayao’s after all is one of the most pervasive oeuvres within the genre here in the West if not globally, and here in the US thanks to Fox and then later good ‘ol Disney, we too, and I do mean a great many of us, pray at the church of Totoro-chan and Cat Bus-kun and live and die for this man’s work, and that isn’t by accident. I don’t profess to necessarily have good taste in anime films necessarily, mostly due to my somewhat limited exposure, but I have seen enough to know how severely good anime can make even good Hollywood seem like a sad, palsied and pathetic joke. Or like also just western animation also sucks comparatively which may be a more reasonable comparison. So without further ado, let’s get into my top 5 Anime films. Granted I haven’t seen enough… most of the essential mainstream films all entry-levels see and many films connected to long-running shows or shonen but not that much beyond the works of a handful of auteur-level directors are the extent. I am eager for more recommendations and experience, but I must admit these 5 films leave me petty damn satisfied on their own.

1. Totoro-

I led right into this one for a reason. It for me is probably the precise moment I realized that Pokemon and Digimon weren’t the only things that had that specific, distinct style that seemed so haughtily removed from and superior to the gaudy animations of failed, broken western animators. And what better showcase for the style than a movie that focuses on and worships the Rustic. This film is a love-letter to all things bucolic, idyllic, sun-dappled and sylvan. The country, as it were, with all of its woodenness and unexplored reaches, is just asking to be documented by a genre such as this. If anime is the instinctual expression of child-like wonderment and verve, than the boundless outdoors are the ultimate locus with which to explore that unbridled joy which good anime is want to capture. If I sound artificially elevated it is only because it is a lofty task indeed to explain this films special place in so many people’s hearts without using words like “magic”. It is inescapable, because there is something harshly familiar about things as strange as a bus that is a cat, and a family of wood-dwelling genies. An infestation of soot spirits that don’t seem that badly put-out by having to abandon their old haunt because of a families’ emotionally buoyant spirit being just too unrelentingly positive for their dark constitutions to bare. Something about a satchel of magic seeds that grow into a towering forest during a single surreal night, only to re-appear as saplings the next day (was it all a dream?).

These things inspire one and are otherworldly, and yet they feel instantly familiar to the young viewer. Satsuke and May become the viewer, and the film becomes a time-capsule. It is escapist while also rooting itself in the common experience of actually growing up (a sick mother, a lost little sister, a spooky old house). This film captures something so fiercely singular and yet feels at the same time like the most universal, archetypal of children’s films of all time. To simply list a few of the indescribably pleasant aspects of this film: Wind blowing through tree branches and tall grass, fields. The sheen and polish of certain acorns. Sunlight flaring and playing on a gurgling brooke. An old plastic watering can with a hole in the side (a viewing device). Gleaming, fresh vegetable life. The soundtrack, which buzzes and brims with delight, and threatens to take center-stage more than any other Hishaishi OST in the way it is unstoppabley effervescent throughout its run-time, is prodigious. Hisaishi-sempai is wildly brilliant here, and the plinking xylophones and playful 80’s synthesizing fit so wonderfully within the universe of this film. And then there are the numerous central arrangements which are some of the most anthemic and touching of all his compositions to this day. There is an enormous amount that could be said about this film. Nothing would be too much. I could talk about the way it seems to yearn for an agrarian lifestyle that was rapidly disappearing from Japan and the rest of the modernized world by the 1980s, and how there might easily be pre-war longing in its portrayal. A mother sick with something undisclosed and surrealistic dream-trees that are lovely even as they seem to evoke blooming mushroom clouds may point to a very subtle undercurrent that one does not think to look for until they are older. Life becomes more complicated than tadpoles and imaginary creatures after all. And in this way we can tack the resonance of this film to something as intellectually rich as it  is emotional, if one were to want to. But unlike its contemporary Grave of the Fire Flies, this movie doesn’t dwell on the harder things. It just honors them respectfully, not turning away from them even as it relishes in showing the simple joys that are also abound, especially in a rustic wonderland like the Japanese countryside. All I can really say, at the end of a day, about the staggering achievement for the whole planet that is My Neighbor Totoro is thank you Mr. Hayao, from the bottom of my heart~

2. Pom Poko-

Whew okay that was hard to sustain. Good movie but like damn. I’m glad this is my second one because it gives me close to as many feels as Totoro without even all that much childhood nostalgia involved, directly that is, and yet also features raccoon balls out the wazoo, so it makes my job easier in a way. I didn’t see this until I was older, and there’s probably a reason. It’s a bit shame that many of the testicles of the sometimes-anthropomorphic Raccoons in this film are visible so often as a reference to an odd detail of long-standing traditional Japanese folklore  because otherwise it’d be a fabulous children’s film in the west. As it stand, I’m not sure what kind of disclaimer one would have to devise if they happened to be an otaku parent, finding themselves wanting to show this masterpiece to a tyke just as one might the rest of the Ghibli movies. But alas every rose has its thorns, and if you err on the side being a certain type of furry or like being open to that then hey maybe you’ll like this a lot, but beyond all the raccoon nuts in this one, its still an amazing film. Like it presents you with the nuts as a way of taunting you that it can still transcend the nuttiness of that quirk, and goes on for all of its run-time not failing to wow and delight at every turn.

Seriously, this movie is just a gem and its a bit hard to describe because it is part mockumentary on a new suburban development outside of Japan (actual), part allegory for suburban sprawl, environmental politics, and modernization, and part racoon nation-founding epic a la Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of Nihm meets ancient Greek city-founding narratives, all with a light but acutely satirical surrealist approach. And yet so much humanity in these racoons! Or tanuki, I should say– raccoon dogs that is. These are the beast that Mario disguised himself as at times for the power of flight, and yet they themselves are shape-shifters. Tricksters. Threatened by a rival group of Racoons and then much more seriously the new developments of Tama-Town, these Racoons turn to phantasmagorical displays of hallucinatory manifestation of their collective angst, in the form of tengu, ghosts and kaiju alike roaming the streets of a sleepy little new neighborhood on the outskirts of Tokyo. The effect of seeing the tanuki rendered in a realistic and naturalistic way, roaming their woods silently one minute and then the next minute watching a scene in which they are rendered in a more cartoonish, anthropomorphize way is quite a unique gesture, and along with the narration that happens a lot early on, cuing-in the viewer to the film’s own strange and satirical nature, make this film unique even beyond balls. And then despite all this technical, thematic and conceptual wizardry it somehow still manages to make you feel something– and for odd little raccoon people at that. It’s all a very interesting and moving experience, bolstered most by a beautiful color palette, and animations that are intensely well-rendered. Raccoons and humans alike all have a great amount of expressiveness in their movement, and the sheer quality of the animation, along with a playful but moving script is what makes every second of this film work so well, expanding nut-sack parachutes and all. 3. Paprika-

If the scenes where the raccoons are haunting Tama-town are some of the most fun and imaginative moments in that film, then this movie– one which is about dreams much more than Pom Poko is about ghosts– outpaces even the brilliance of those scenes by a long-shot by featuring some of the most inhumanly colorful and creative visuals I’ve ever scene. Satoshi Kon’s style, and overall art direction is absolutely stunning, with everything from characters’ expressions to their movements to the warm intensity of the colors to the dream sequences themselves all displaying superb craft. While Pom Poko is fun and light while still making me feel something, this movie is largely all about the visuals, the concepts and the soundtrack. Hirasawa’s OST is punchy, energetic, and slightly batty in just the right way. Its one of the most unique I’ve ever heard, featuring lush electronic arrangements alongside strange, almost traditional-sounding vocal performances that help accent the poppy, bright and kind of bonkers feeling of this movie. And yet the script itself is somewhat reserved and restrained right up until the dream-detective enters into the boundless dream-worlds of various characters. The movie remains grounded on a basic level, while at its wildest it seems as unhinged as the strangest of dreams. This movie works very well as a gestalt– from the moments the OP-sequence plays I am strapped in and ready for the audio-visual splendour that then unfolds. All of Satoshi Kon’s work is inspiring and singularly excellent, but this one just might be my favorite.

3. Another Green World (fiction, short-story)

“And how was Professor McLuhan’s lecture today, Ovidius?” Beatrice asked, as she walked with the young child down the township’s sparkling side-walk, across the intersection from the Academy and on along the lane to Delfino Café in the breezy mid-afternoon weather. Beatrice was practically the archetypical image of a care-giver, for she exuded a nurturing aura, always smiling calmly as she addressed her young charge; today she wore a wide-brimmed sun-hat that flapped just slightly as a cool breeze wavered through the cobbled courtyard outside of Ovidius’ day-school. The leaves would be changing soon, but for now everything outside was the bright greens of palm tree fronds and cool blue vistas of the horizon.

“The lecture was fascinating! Media theory is more complex than I ever would have guessed,” Ovidius beams. He is wearing a hat with a little helicopter propeller on it; he has dark hair and sea-foam green skin (his choice).

“I’m so glad you liked it! I think you’ll like Dr. Einstein’s lesson just as well. You know, him and Agassa get along just famously with Dr. McLuhan.” Beatrice said warmly.

“Oh I just can’t wait; our lesson with Dr. Einstein last week was simply superb!” the precocious artificial youth replied, “I’m sure we’ll have another great time!”

And they did. Ovidius had long been friends with Albert Einstein, but today hisgenerous mentor was bringing along his new friend Ada Lovelace for a picnic on the beach, and of course she was absolutely delighted by the inquisitive young scholar, for Ovidius was living proof against her initial conception of the Analytical Machine, or at least, they had all hoped he would be one day, and she was pleased to oblige them, tossing a beach ball around with Albert and the child as Beatrice relaxed on a beach-towel nearby, resting her eyes behind a pair of  Foster-Grants as the mid-day sun became slightly obscured by big puffy cumuli, which reminded Ovidius of the gelato they had been enjoying moments before. They would play for now, but Ovidius knew that somehow the surprisingly-athletic-for-his-age scientist would tie this game with the beach-ball in with his lesson on Relativity somehow. For now Ovidius was enjoying the refreshing surf of the shore on his bare feet, still reflecting on Dr. McLuhan’s excellent lecture on Global Villages and thoroughly enjoying the company of the lively and brilliant scientists, as Madame Lovelace prepared a kite that they were to fly on the gentle sea breeze– it was shaping up to be another fantastic day inside of a sparkling Artificial World.

When Ovidius and Beatrice finally return to their bungalow for the day, after parting ways with the brilliant mathematicians (who surely had their own private plans for the rest of the evening), Pablo and Salvador will come over for Arts-and-Crafts while Beatrice cooks fish mousselines. The rambunctious painters always have an infectious energy when they come over, and usually in the middle of collaging with Ovidius or discussing German Expressionism in easily-graspable terms over Scrabble, they would be known to break into a game of surrealist cops-and-robbers with the child, who could still appreciate that sort of thing (though the young prodigy would surely be growing out of it soon). Next week, they were sure to tell Ovidius that their friend Frida would be joining them to teach Ovid the art of self-portraiture.

Soon the surrealists are on their way though and Ovidius will have his late-night Language lesson with Beatrice before she tucks you in for the night (Latin this week, Greek next week, JavaScript the next, etc.). Beatrice reminds Ovidius that Mr. Tesla will be visiting tomorrow after a guest-lecture from a certain Mr. Foucault at the Academy, and then she tucks him in for the night. Ovidius dozes off to strains of Mahler still playing on the gramophone in the den, and somewhere far, far away, beyond the digital look-glass, Dr. Agassa and his research assistants were examining a bevvy of diagnostic read-outs and progress reports, and an overall system-review, as Ovidius turned off his mind, so to speak, for the night, under the loving watch of Dr. Agassa’s crack-team, who had mapped-out, guided and molded every moment of Ovidius’ life heretofore, ever since they created it a couple months ago. Of course, they conformed some of their choices with expectations and preferences that Ovidius himself had so quickly developed in the short time he had existed, but at the end of the day, his life and experience was ultimately their vision, or more specifically, Dr. Agassa’s.

Beatrice had explained to Ovidius already that he was indeed the creation of a group of scientists, and that, yes, he was “artificial” in a sense, compared to the other intelligence that populated this world, but that he shouldn’t see this as any real difference between him and other people, and she herself, just like him, was in fact artificial. The young lad was kept very busy day-to-day with the artificial approximation of our planet’s recent visionaries’, of any given medium or field, and the ever-present aid of his care-taker Beatrice. He had friends, but he learned quickly that, they too were artificial, like him. Unlike him though, they would never grow and develop like he did. And unlike him, they would never receive their own Body.

That night, an artificial sun would set on a similarly immaculate, and artificial, township, between a large slopping green hill and a yellow-sanded sea shore that was modeled on those of the Grecian isles which they discovered were featured prominently in Ovidius’ dreams after he first began absorbing images of the World. And tomorrow, after toast and jam, Beatrice would ferry the young scholar to class at the Academy, where he and his friends enjoyed the lectures of some of the world’s leading scholars and scientists, hand-picked by Agassa and his staff to impart the highest quality education possible on the lad. Many of their choices were intentionally as obvious as possible for they figured that by allowing the child to interact with the intellect of the most well-known thinkers of the 20th century, he would be better grounded in the reality that existed just outside of his virtual snow-globe. To wit, Freud and Jung were in charge of the Psychology department, Joseph Campbell led an elective class on Fiction and Mythology, Euler was put in charge of the Mathematics department with the help of none other than Einstein and Newton themselves, who were guest-lecturers (outside of Albert’s private sessions with the child on Wednesdays) while Turing led Computing Sciences and Sacks handled the Neurology dept.

Ovidius couldn’t have quite known then, but could have probably figured, that the research that culminated in his existence and development would in turn lead to major technological advancements in various fields, including everything from the Geo-forming of extraterrestrial bodies by AI-controlled vessels, the creating of safer self-driving cars and even the creation of fully prosthetic bodies. He did understand though the sheer gravity of his existence, and after his lessons everyday, at some point before bed, he’d look out into the yard behind his house, made to resemble an average suburban yard, with its own charm and it’s sacred promise of limitation and impermeable boundaries, and his mind would wander out above the green, wooden shed and the iron lattices agains the fence, and the Oak tree whos branches hung low over the 20-acre plot, towards the invisible reaches of his world, and he’d look out beyond his own world, towards the World which he spent everyday studying and learning from, which had created him, and which had promised to allow him physical access to, one day, when the prosthetic was finished.

4 Years Later

Ovidius grips the steering wheel, and eases down on the pedal, rounding the impressively sized canyon as he shot along interstate-40, preferring for the moment to drive himself, despite the self-driving feature that came standard, he sped along in the black Arizona night, hurdling towards his destination as though he were being spirited there against his will. He keeps replaying the voice-mail from Ayumi over and over. Dead? How could he be? The coroner’s report deemed the death accidental suicide but Ovidius knew not to believe that for a second. When they found Dr. Agassa collapsed in his room the day after the gala, Ovidius was able to surmise a lot of things, but the fact that he had been partly prepared for this for so long didn’t help to soften the blow much. One red-eye flight later, a teary open-wake, and a reunion with the only human friend he’s ever had and the 4 year old artificially-intelligent humanoid is now hurdling towards something that even he himself didn’t entirely understand. He's heading to a seedy motel-8 in the middle of no where somewhere outside of Havasu Canyon and mentally prepare himself for what he is about to do. When the bright, blaring morning light streams through the motel blinds, he will understand that his journey beckons.

Go back

He kept hearing those words over and over. And as he looked out on the vacuous mesa of canyon and dessert, he knew that he mustn’t hesitate. He has to go to the place where Earth’s magnetic-field had been disrupted, and joined, on a sub-atomic level with the very infrastructure of the digital world– like a seam in the universe, where the exterior met the interior; behold the earth’s existential navel.  For Ovidius has come here to return to the very Net which had given birth to him.~

[dnotive]

I have a hard time accepting trans people. Because, I don't understand what being a "man" or a "woman" really means. If it's disagreeing with the role assigned to you by the society based on the chromosomes you have, then haven't the 100 years of feminism been a struggle to avoid exactly that? So that your physical traits don't limit who you can be? And if it's just your body that makes you unhappy, then that's objectification. I would just like us as a society to do away with gender entirely.

Hmmm... I’m probably not the best person to explain it to you, so I’m hoping that some of my trans followers might want to comment or reblog to clarify.

All the same, I’ll do my best to explain it as I understand it, and people are free to correct me or chime in if I’m wrong or if there’s a point that needs some clarification.

First, we need to define a few things.

The first one is sex. This is a physical, biological quality that just refers to the reproductive organs you have. 

The second is gender. This is a personal, psychological identification based on one’s internal awareness of how they feel about themselves. 

The third is gender-roles. Which, for the sake of brevity we’re just going to describe as “the traditionally assigned tasks and behaviors a specific gender is expected to conform to.” 

Finally, dysphoria is the word used to describe the feeling a trans individual has when the gender they feel internally doesn’t match up with the sex of their body.

While you are ostensibly correct that the last century of feminist thought has sought to expand, change, or even outright destroy gender-roles, this has very little to do with being trans. It’s true that men have been given tacit “permission” to take on more traditionally feminine gender-roles over the last few decades (things like child-rearing, homemaking... the stuff that dudes considered untouchable and taboo 50 or 60 years ago) and women have taken a lot of license to take up more traditionally masculine roles, but this is completely separate from trans issues. 

So, “disagreeing with the role assigned to you by the society based on the chromosomes you have” doesn’t really describe the trans condition at all, anon. On a more fundamental level (and this is probably a really clumsy way to put it) it’s “disagreeing” with the body assigned to you at birth... and no, being “unhappy” with your body is not “objectification.”

Objectification is when you link someone’s entire value as a human being to their body. You wouldn’t tell an amputee who is distraught over the loss of a leg that they’re just “objectifying” themselves, would you?

I think the reason a lot of trans rhetoric falls on deaf ears is because it can be really difficult to understand and articulate (mind you this is coming from someone who isn’t trans and has at least tried to spend more time listening to their experiences over the last 3 or 4 years) ... One thought exercise I’ve seen before goes something like this:

Imagine yourself your as you are right now Anon, and for the sake of this example let’s say your name is Devon, but every single person you meet, even your parents, your coworkers, your closest family... they all call you Ashley. This feels strange to you, because you know “on the inside” that your name is not Ashley, your name is Devon. The more you insist that everyone has your name wrong - that they’re misremembering, or they’re deliberately using a different name just to bother you, the more angry they seem to get. You even try to meet them half way and acknowledge that perhaps they once knew you as “Ashley” but you’d really like them to call you “Devon” going forward because that’s who you actually are. It seems simple enough to you -- the way you self-actualize and perceive yourself (as a person named Devon) is not the same way everyone else sees you (a person named Ashley.)

Devon and Ashley, by virtue of the “100 years of feminism” you describe, anon, are indeed perfectly capable of performing the same tasks, and choosing to ignore the roles assigned to them -- Ashley could certainly do all of the things that Devon could, but that isn’t really the point. The pain of the trans condition isn’t about what gender roles you’re allowed to and not allowed to perform; the pain of the trans condition is about existing as yourself in a world that sees you as someone else. 

I know this might seem a little esoteric and unapproachable, but I hope that at least starts helping you understand a bit more. Most importantly though, “acceptance” is murky here, because, frankly (and this could sound a bit harsh) your understanding the existence of trans people is kind of immaterial to “accepting” that they exist in the world around you. While I will do what I can to try to help you understand (or help put you in touch with people who are probably much better at explaining this than me), you don’t really need to completely “understand” trans people to not go out of your way to be a dick to them. 

Doing “away with gender entirely” isn’t really the goal, and I think that’s a pretty esoteric idea in and of itself, and frankly I’m not sure any one person could easily and readily define what it means “to be a man” or “to be a woman” but that’s not going to stop any of us from trying. 

Forgive me if I’m going out on a limb with this too, but if you’re personally in a position where you find both manhood and womanhood equally unappealing or equally unapproachable, you might be dipping your toe into the non-binary or genderfluid part of this realm, which I feel sadly under-qualified to delve into. 

Anyone who has anything to add to this please feel free. 

[sermacsteph]

I know anything 360 related on the xbox one hates me cos it still refuses to let me log into live XD yeah, cos the game was definitely not this glitchy when I played it last year on the xbox and some loading screens take forever to load (though I only noticed this when I started streaming and I’d be stuck in a loading screen for two minutes and being all to aware that I was live)

I don’t remember Alistair giving any approval/disapproval for recruiting Sten though i could be misremembering. He sure picks a time to be picky :P

Oooh, I remember looking a snake related jewellry for a larp character a few years ago, there’s some really cool pieces that would suit Dorian really well :3 (I had a cheap amulet that was of two interlocking snakes which was quite cool though I’ve seemed to have misplaced where i put it). I work in customer service so I’ve grown accustomed to it and its definitely easier for me to email in (though this time I wish I could have called instead might have had more success). Yeah apple products don’t seem to last long, my current ipad is just over a year old and the battery doesn’t last long at all and the one I’ve had before that stopped taking charge after awhile (though i do think that one lasted me a couple of years at least)

Saaaame :3 hmm dunno who is my strongest party, probably mage!Estelle, Dorian, Bull and Cole - but thats cos I enjoy the banter and with me being the mage I have control where half the barriers are going XD (Im not looking forward to Hakkon and Descent as a rogue hehe) Same, she deserves better

Tbh I only use stealth on occassion and now that I have the lightening flask I probably won’t be using stealth unless I really need to XD the bears aren’t too much trouble usually (though they’ve been ravaging my party this playthrough) but giants are a pain and the wildlife near them are a nightmare if stray magic hits them. I usually autostat (though might look into better stat lines for bull cos he falls over a lot) and the auto statline for Blackwall seems pretty decent but I rarely take him out anywhere

I tend to use google drive for that XD majority of emails I receive these days are junk or stuff that doesn’t require a reply (unless I get a rare commission but those tend get discussed via fb messenger)

How have I played this game multiple times and only just noticed that when you enter into a romance, random skyhold npcs start commenting on it

I got the "did you imagine such a pairing?" "Oh, yes! The allure of command, a powerful magister... sigh" and was just like wait what?

[spaghettiappletater]

The Seventh Soul

He'd hesitated long enough, having spent almost an entire day stalling just outside the barrier after shortcutting his way past Undyne and her guards. The doubt in his soul started small but by the time he finally stepped through it had almost consumed him, causing his head to ache from spine to shatter. The bits of humanity inside him had made him stronger for sure, but they'd also made him weaker, in a way. Maybe he should have expected them to be waiting just there on the other side but he hadn't. The two nearly collided, Sans' head ducked and covered by his hood, several layers of clothing concealing his broken form from full view. He thought he'd have to go a bit further into human territory after all, and they wouldn't have reacted well to a bloodstained skeleton waltzing around.

They had stood there, at the barrier, for a while.  It wasn't exactly the right place to enter in from, but it wasn't the wrong place either.  Besides, it was kind of an interesting place to stare and think and ... be indecisive. Frisk hadn't changed too much.  Taller, maybe a little more gaunt and scrawny.  Lots of sleepless nights, it looked like.  The kid wasn't really a kid anymore, but they didn't look ready to be an adult either.  Some overlarge striped sweater ( though not in blues or purples ) with its own hood that knocked itself back from their head upon collision with ... 'Sans'. "O-oh excuse me, I'm -- ..."  They paused in the midst of their apology, taking in the bundled appearance of who they'd run into.

"hhhhh eh heh heh..." Normally the surprise contact would have sent him right over the edge without second thought but needless to say he was more than a little bit absorbed in his own thoughts. The inner struggle only raged harder when he realized who he was looking at, that he wouldn't have time to watch them and steel his nerves before making his move. What took them so long? His eye socket twitched and his fingers clenched inside the pockets of his jacket. "well look who it is. took ya long enough, kid. you're eleven years and several months behind schedule. sup with that?"

Frisk blinked and -- tipped their head to one side, taking a step or two back to give the skeleton some space.  They didn't look scared, maybe nervous.  They figured there shouldn't be anything too different or wrong, but that ... there was definitely something different and wrong. "I don't really have an excuse, I guess.  Did you ... did you get my messages?  I left a few.  This phone is about eleven years old though, so it might not have -- ..."  They fished in their pocket for their phone for a moment.  It's the same old thing Toriel had given them forever ago, with the upgrades Alphys had put on it as well.  Even so, its casing was old and cracked in places, dented, worn, dusty and faded where color would have been.  Its screen was cracked and a lot of the buttons were worn down. "I was ... in the hospital, the entire time, just about."

"got a few. enough. or maybe not enough at all." The sound of the skeleton's voice was a little bit different too. His throat sounded wet and raw. Could skeletons get colds? Then there was that metallic creak every time he moved a shoulder. After so much time, though, maybe they'd simply misremembered him. Had he grown a little too? "sounds like... we've got some catchin' up to do, huh? c'mere. sit down. there are some things i need you to understand."

With a little gesture to a nearby rock they'd been sitting and stalling at before, Frisk moved, taking a seat and pocketing the old phone.   Shoving their hands into their jean pockets, the human waited and listened, eyebrows furrowed.  A lot of their face was still the same, maybe a bit less of the childish baby-fat and slightly more pronounced facial structure.

"I'd -- like to know what happened.  Something feels very different, but ... for a long time I had people telling me that none of what I remembered was real to begin with?  So I don't quite feel like I'm remembering everything the right way anyway."

The monster took a seat on a rock as well, taking a moment to look up at the sky before returning his attention to Frisk. He'd never seen the sky in his own timeline, at least not that he could recall. There was something, a distant memory, perhaps, or just feedback. It felt familiar somehow but too far away to really pin down. "kid, i dunno where to start. so i guess i'll say it's a damn good thing i ran into you on your way in. undyne claimed the throne, ya see, and she's not at all pleased about whatcha did to asgore. he was the closest thing she had to a dad guy, ya know. really went downhill without him. you think she was scary before? hoo. she's big on the idea of human genocide these days." Sans had no idea that it was actually Flowey who was to blame for the late King's death, nor did anyone else.

"I didn't-- ... I - ..."  There was really no use in it, was there?  Frisk cut themself off, glancing down at the ground.

"That old fellow in Waterfall told me Asgore knew her when she was really little, and taught her how to fight, and -- ..."  Frisk sighed.  Guilt ( even if it was more or less inapplicable in this case ) pooled in their stomach, and they pulled one hand out of their pockets to tug the striped hood over their head, huddling against the rock face behind them.

"K-keep going?"

"mmm. toriel was supposed to be the new queen, but undyne wasn't having that. said she was too soft. scared her back off to the ruins and didn't take kindly to it when i stood up to her either. she pooled all of our resources for the royal guard and made our military the top priority. left the rest of us without much to scrape by on. even my brother wants out of the guard at this point, but undick ain't having it. we're not on the best terms. i kinda want her dead." He put an elbow on his knee and rested his chin on his hand, fingers longer, sharper and dirtier than before for sure, but it was dark, concealing the extent of those cracks and claws. "now you tell me somethin'. i don't wanna sit here and monologue all night by myself."

"I remember a big rumble almost as soon as I left through the barrier.  It made the whole mountain shake, and -- honestly, I fell not too far from here, where we're sitting, I think.  At least, that's ... what I was told?  When I woke up.  I spent a lot of time in physical therapy, trying to get some strength and mobility back.  I had a lot of people tell me none of this was real, when I tried to explain why I was on the mountain in the first place.  Nobody came back to claim me, or help me." Frisk kicked a pebble off the ground and it scattered, like a mockery of a soccer ball, over toward Sans.   "I don't know why they didn't just pull the plug.  Sometimes I kind of wish they had?"

"you know, somebody told me it was probably something like that. they must really care about you, for some reason. i guess nobody's completely alone in the world." He scuffed his shoe, more concealing than his usual slippers, along the ground and knocked the rock back. "what you heard was the core melting down. i was gonna get to that in a minute but i might as well tell ya now. there was nothing anybody could do. it wiped out more than half the population. made the rest of us really sick. nothing grows in the underground anymore that doesn't do more harm than good."

For a moment, Frisk looked sick.  Their expression twisted and both hands yanked out of their pockets to hide their face and rub at it.  A shuddering little groan and a shiver was more than enough reaction to the news.

They hadn't gone through the Underground wantonly murdering, not like in a lot of the dreams they'd had.   A few, here and there.  One or two, maybe three, but only when it looked like it was absolutely hopeless -- and they'd felt sick about it every time.

After a moment, they croaked a few words. "S-sorry.  I-- I meant to go back.   I d-did, I could have-- ..."

"yeah. i know you could have. i don't remember how i know. see, i've got this real bad..." Twitch. "...memory loss problem these days. i get confused easy. thinking clearly? it just... doesn't happen. but i know it wasn't supposed to be like this. we just missed our happy ending, didn't we? i think you know that somehow too." There was a wheeze, more pathetic than threatening, as he pushed the hood down off his skull with a quick, almost dismissive bat of his hand. "i don't think i actually lived through all a that, kiddo. but being made of magic? kinda blurs that line. i guess what i wanna know is... what do you think you can do about it now? cause i think it's too late."

Sitting there, and possibly getting any kind of look at the human's soul, was difficult.  It certainly wasn't the blazing, determined red that it once was.   Something lighter, a little more on the orange side, but not orange either.  It lacked deep color, and looked faded, weak.  Mostly, it burned with remorse, and maybe a touch of perseverance. "I can't go back anymore.  I tried so many times, in therapy."  They muttered, kicking the pebble back at Sans.  They lifted their head to look at the skeleton in the dark, staring, sighing. "I can try again, right now, if you want.  I don't know.  I thought maybe if I got close, or if I came back and could see for myself that all of this is very real, maybe I'd -- ..."

"you're not as scared as i thought you'd be." The skeleton squinted at them, smile spreading wider. He felt the sting of pride in his own soul, chipped, veiny and rotting, more grey than cyan with tiny streaks of sickly yellow stretching from the core outward. Their soul, however, was no longer what he hoped it would be. "would you believe in me if the roles were reversed? i don't know if you can improve things around here anymore, but i know that, with one more human soul, i could. things aren't gonna go back to the way they were before but i could at least stop the corruption from spreading. a couple hundred years down the line maybe the underground would be habitable again." He gave them a moment to think before continuing. "what did you think? this probably isn't what you expected, is it?"

"I don't know what I was expecting."  Frisk said, still staring.  The nervousness that gripped them at the first initial bump into the skeleton had simmered down to what ... felt like acceptance.  Like a kind of ... inevitability.  Did they trust Sans?  They had before, as far as they could recall.  Bits of ... silly memory, weird things, -- "I can't do anything.  I dropped down into the Underground for a reason, and wasn't expecting to live through it.  I don't have a reason to go back to where I came from, either.  I guess -- ..."  Frisk held up a hand, cutting themself off, dark circles under their eyes. "Before you do, you deserve to know some truths, if -- ... if you want to hear them."

"yeah.  i think we owe each other the full truth. i'll hear ya out. i did care aboutcha, ya know. maybe a parta me still does. unfortunately, i don't think i'm ever gonna be able to let this one go. i'm not a very good person anymore. saying that i'm bitter? that'd be the understatement of the decade." It was almost alarmingly easy for him to trust them, at least to trust them not to run or to attack him unprompted. Did he think they could handle what the underground had become? No. But did he believe that they had good intentions now that he saw what the passing years had done to them? Yes.

"I -- ... cared about all of you, too."  They muttered, head lowered, eyes on the ground. "There was -- ... a flower.  It killed Asgore.  I don't know if it's still in the underground after what happened, but it might be.  It had the power to reset before I came along.  I'm sure you -- you know what resetting is, I think.  If you don't, you should.  Determination gives the power to reset, and whoever's determination is strongest has that power.  He had it before I came along, I think." Frisk looked up from the ground to stare at Sans.  "I don't think it'll make a difference to Undyne, but -- ... it matters to me.  I had to tell someone."  The human stared for a moment. "You've -- you should be careful with all those souls, too.  I think it's ... kind of a corruptive power, but you're already plenty ... maybe not corrupted, but ... I guess you did say you're not a good person."

"so you noticed. yeah. i didn't wanna get this desperate, but i figured, we were already desperate enough to start eating the people who fell into the underground after you. why not give it a shot? how much worse could it get, really?" He stared back, unblinking with his hollowed socket and bright, angry red eye. "a flower. yeah. i remember something about that. something... hey, believe it or not? i think the souls helped. i feel more than i did before. my own soul wasn't doing so hot." There was a brief pause as he wiped a stream of sweat from the unbusted side of his skull. "downside to feeling so much is that i'm torn now. i only need one more, and now i'm stalling? what are you waiting for you dumb stupid fuck?"

Staring at that bright red eye, Frisk tilted their head.  "You might be able to do something with whatever's left of my determination.  You -- ... seem pretty determined, yourself.  Even if it's just a determination to survive.  That counts for something."  They stood, and their hands pulled from their pockets to hang their arms at their sides. "Do ... you shouldn't wait.  It only gets harder the longer you wait.  If you want, I could -- ... I get violent, sometimes, when things get really foggy.  If you want, I could ... I don't know.  Could do something, make you defend yourself.  It'll feel less terrible."

"ya know, you sound almost like you wanna die. that makes it harder to wanna kill you, somehow, so... sure. if that's how we're gonna do it, i guess you could attack me. thing is, i was expecting a lot more determination. i'm not even sure if it's worth it anymore." The monster finally blinked, eye sockets falling and mouth curling into that smug grin he always wore when he felt he was shining light on a situation. "if you've got it in you to try and kill an old friend... well i guess i'd owe you one, kid."

"You know, it's -- ... odd.  I only ever feel determined like this anymore.  And even then, it's never enough."  Taking a glance about, Frisk reached for a large stone, boney fingers only just grasping over it. "What do you mean, you'd owe me one?"  They asked, looking over the rock before staring back at Horror.

"i mean one of us has to take that dive, right? somebody has to get violent first. if it was you? i could stop stalling." He glanced between the rock and it's wielder. It hardly seemed like an adequate weapon, but then again, they'd made effective use of all sorts of silly things when they were smaller. "you can't reset anymore huh? figured as much. i guess we're both in the same kinda pickle."

"I could just start crying.  Crying gets on my nerves.  I want to make it stop, when I hear it.  You ever feel that way?"  They asked, turning the rock over in their hands.

"Alternatively, I could bash my own head in with this.  You wouldn't have to lift a finger.  I don't particularly like the idea of you killing things.  Or anyone killing things."

"actually, i'd rather not witness another suicide. i'd rather kill you myself than watch you try to do it with a rock. i'm not sure what makes the difference there but it's something. as for crying, i'm not sure. i teeter between really enjoying it and getting pissy about it. it's kinda messed up." Stalling. Stalling. Stalling. "...it's usually easy, but i've lost a lotta friends. i kinda blamed you for it. papyrus told me that was silly, and that you'd come back. he'd... really like to see you, i think. he got long."

They had been trying not to think about Papyrus, or what all of this might have done to him. "... I'll be honest.  I was kind of hoping he was someone who didn't make it.  I don't want to think about -- ..."  There was a little sniffle there, and Frisk's vision finally blurred.  At least it brought a measure of relief to the lump in their throat.

"M'sorry.  This is stupid.  Just do it -- just do it and don't tell him about me.  If you can just -- ... maybe you can do something good.  Or at least ... marginally good compared to what's been done to the both of you."

"ugh. i wish you'd just screamed or something. made it easy. it's too late now, i know it wouldn't be sincere. if it makes you feel any better? papyrus hasn't changed all that much. he's just bigger. still a goofball, still a good person... or maybe i'm delusional. i don't think i could see my brother as a bad person no matter what he did. so, here's an idea." He stood from the rock he was sitting on and got to his knees, stretching his arms out toward the human with his eye turned down toward the rocky ground, avoiding looking at their tears at all costs. "c'mere, kiddo. death doesn't have to be the end, right? this way, you can stay with us. i uhh... i just wanna take you home. we'll look at it that way?"

They'd had dreams about this.  A hug, and then it all ended into some nice, quiet, comforting nonexistence.  Can nonexistence be comforting?

Regardless, physical affection sounded nice.  Too nice.  So nice.  They couldn't have resisted the call even if Sans had been made of sharp knives.  Scooting forward, Frisk dropped down and got close, pulling their arms around the skeleton's shoulders.  Hiding their face on his shoulder, Frisk said utterly nothing, but seemed ... relaxed.  At ease.

The end was quick, sharp and relatively painless. Sans figured it was nothing next to the pain he now understood both of them to have endured, at least. Spikes of bone rose and fell, rose and fell, targeting their brain and heart first. That wasn't at all how it had played out in his head, but he had been delusional. A fool, he figured, desperate for a scapegoat. Their soul was soon pulled from the remaining gore. His head hurt worse than ever, stomach churning despite the fact that he had nothing that even resembled one anymore. He tucked it under his coat and sweater, through his ribs and next to his own, away from the others. The others were of no real importance to him, tools and nothing more. “i hope you can still hear me. the others won't talk to me. no surprise there. ...we're basically god now, right? that's how it's supposed to work.”

The human slumped, body instantly shutting off with the hit to the brain and heart.  They didn't have much in the way of defenses, or healthy blood pressure, or anything like that -- a few weak spurts here and there, but mostly a great deal of lazy rolling and thick red welling in places and dripping.  Not much muscle or fat to tear through to get their soul, either.  Bones snapped like brittle candy. Confusion registered from the soul at the question.  Then warmth.  It felt oddly warm, content.  “Good. Be careful what you do.  I've seen them act against their user.  It's what they did to the flower.  The only reason I survived him.”

“i'm not keeping them long. just you. the others are gone as soon as i fix the core.” The warmth felt nice. Hearing their voice inside his skull made him feel much better about rifling through their belongings than he would have otherwise. Shame he put holes in their sweater. Oh well. He took it anyway. He'd wear it too. It seemed baggy and he wasn't as round as he used to be. “if you wanna stay with me, i mean. guess i couldn't blame you if you wanted to try moving on instead once this is done.”

“I feel alright here.  At least for now.  Not feeling tired is nice.  Maybe it'll help you.  Thank you for making it quick.  I don't know why I was scared.”

[skeren]

On the point of Assumptions

Today, when I came onto the internet, I did my normal kind of catch up for being away all day. Check my messages, my mail, log into my instant messaging programs so my friends could reach me. You know, the usual. For some reason, today seemed to be a strong day for advocating people without voices. Men who were raped by women, femmes that aren't seen as 'real' lesbians in the lesbian community. All I needed to see was something about transphobia, but wait, I saw that earlier this week. It's a good trend, I think, that I'm seeing a lot more of this kind of thing. I dislike anyone being told they're invalid in any way, and find it offensive. Then again, I'm also a person who believes that if you want to talk shit, fine, but don't be shocked if someone punches you in the head for being a dick. Because if you're talking shit, you're probably being a dick, let's be real. I'm used to seeing people I know rail about injustices. I'm used to people wanting to spread messages and watching them run up against the eternal buffer of 'oh yeah? Well THIS happened'. I'm sorry, but seriously people, I don't care what THIS happens to have been. People experience things their own way. Just because it might not be terrible to you doesn't mean it might not be terrible to them. An example, if you will. A child skins their knee. They start crying, need a band aid, and for all you know have just suffered the biggest damage in their young life. They get sympathy, they get hugs and kisses. An adult falls, scrapes up their hands, and they get a perfunctory 'you alright?' and someone scolds them for tearing up because they're 'not a child'. How fair is that? Maybe for them, just as for the child, it's the worst hurt they've had in their life. But people judge on what they don't know. Another example of this, to clarify the point: Someone loses their job due to being fired. People understand and have sympathy without reservation. Someone else loses their job due to quitting. Anyone who doesn't know why probably won't ask, and will instead come at them wondering why the person would throw away a perfectly good job. It's not fair, and for all you know the person quit because their boss was verbally abusive. Or maybe they were fired for being a complete jackass and deserved it. You don't know. Assumptions are terrible things. They are, I think, the worst part of people and how they interact with one another. People assume that how something is to go is the only way it should go. People assume that if someone has it 'worse' that it's not worth talking about their own experiences. That is stupid, untrue, and something I myself have fallen victim to. Just because it's not as bad as someone else's experience doesn't mean it wasn't a bad experience. I will use myself as an example. I, many years ago, had a boyfriend who I loved very much at the time. I was a teenager, and at the time, got very attached to people very quickly. I to honest, I miss being able to do that when I'm face to face with people. He is part of why I find it hard to do now. You see, I moved around the country a lot in my mid-teens, and he came with me through three state changes and two parental custody changes. I thought he was a keeper. To be honest, he wasn't healthy enough to be a keeper, and I made excuses for him because I knew how terrible of a place his mind was due to his history. It wasn't the right way to handle it. I was in no way mature enough to handle someone as damaged as he was, and I see that now. That doesn't mean I should have just let him do what he did. He was a sweet person, unfortunately like a puppy much of the time, and was insecure and clingy. These were all things I could handle, to an extent. And I was fine until we hit the final state of moving around the country. Then he just... went a little far. For a long time, I think I convinced myself that I'd just lost interest in sex. I went from highly sexually active to not having sexual intercourse for eight years, then barely scraping the bottom of frequency in the three years since then. That's more than ten years of my life, and only in the last year and a half have I started to accept that just because I wasn't hurt didn't mean it wasn't bad, and that it didn't damage me. It did. I never rebuked him for waking me in the dead of the night to have sex with me. I never said anything when he got touchy feely and I just wanted to be left alone, instead just closing myself off and ignoring him while letting him do as he pleased. I never said anything. I tried to own it, to play it off in my own mind as something fine. It even started a bit before him, if I'm honest. His friend, someone a lot older, took an innocent anime watching session turned makeout session and just abruptly slipped me a penis. No. Seriously, barely a how do you do, straight from flirting and a little kissing to a dick up the crotch. I was shocked, but not physically hurt, so I just let him do what he wanted. I convinced myself rather quickly it was fine because really, what else was I going to do? My family desperately needed a place to stay, so why not, it's not like I was dating anyone at the time. And all of this, all of it, somehow translated in my mind as 'it wasn't as bad as those people jumped in the street, and I had fun in the end, didn't I?' so I convinced myself to not talk about it, that it was something I didn't need to bring up to anyone. That was stupid. It was unhealthy. Just because my situation 'wasn't as bad as it could be' doesn't mean it wasn't BAD. I had sex with someone I didn't even have the slightest inkling of feelings for, but thoroughly convinced my dad I did, so he wouldn't worry, would think that all was well, for months just so that we'd have a place to stay after the people we'd been staying with kicked us out. From there I picked up a severely damaged boyfriend who liked to wake me from a dead sleep by having sex with me. I never told my dad. I probably never will tell my dad, and it's not even because I blame him, for not seeing what I was doing, but because he would blame himself for not seeing it and he wouldn't recover from that kind of failing I think. He's a gentle man, and he only ever wanted the best for me, so can't do that to him. Sound familiar to anyone else out there? That doesn't mean I shouldn't have talked to someone sooner. Hell, the first time I talked to someone it started as an offhand comment. The other person didn't catch it, and I played it off almost like a joke. I didn't try again for years, not seriously, dropping comments here and there about surprise sex or the uncomfortable sensation of someone abruptly putting their hands on you when you're trying to sleep. And I didn't even mean the sleep sex on those occasions, but another instance, and person, entirely. Let's just say she had an opportunity and ran with it, shall we? In any case... looking back, it makes sense that I just took a sharp right away from sex and never looked back. I think I was, on some level, terrified of having to tell someone about it. My spouses... I can't remember ever telling either of them about this stuff, not really. The wife maybe more than the husband. I think I told her once about the time someone tried to sell me when I was 16. I might be misremembering and she's totally in the dark. I know it's hard for me to share a bed with anyone, and sometimes the idea of someone pressing down on me in my sleep, even for a cuddle, freaks me out. In some ways, it makes that the waterbed that the spouses share makes my back hurt a blessing. No hurt feelings or elbows and knees when people try to cuddle me, because I've moved mostly to the other room since we got the guest bed. But this was supposed to be an example. It's mostly turned into me wanting to shake my younger self and go 'don't delude yourself' because as I get older, I remember more things and see them as something different than what they were to me at the time, because I just wanted them to be nice, so I pretended they were. Because I assumed, then, that because it wasn't as bad as someone else, that it wasn't as important, that it wasn't worth mentioning because if it wasn't as bad, that meant it wasn't a violation. That's not true. Anything that makes you feel invalidated, devalued, dirty, invisible, anything like that, anything even remotely like that, is worth someone listening to you talk about it. I was so relieved when I could make a friend feel better by telling her she wasn't alone in thoughts like I had, but it broke my heart that she was in a position to feel that way. Why do people feel the need to make other people feel wretched? If doesn't even have to be physical. People attack each other for beliefs, I know I've been. I once got stoned briefly as a child for being a witch. I shit you not. I was cornered on a playground at about fifth grade or so by a band of kids and they started throwing decent sized rocks at me. The only reason I escaped without injury is because the ringleader's mother worked as a playground aide and literally dragged him away by the ear. Who is going to continue on in the wake of THAT? People isolate when they don't understand. I grew up in a bubble of solitude as a child the other children were terrified to break. They'd be nice to me alone, almost to the man, but if two or more were together they'd publicly scorn me. Kids only sat with me, before puberty hit the boys in seventh grade at least, if teachers made them. Otherwise, if I sat at a lunch table? Every child would get up and go elsewhere, leaving me alone. Things like that hurt, and not everyone is strong enough to weather them. Just because I am doesn't mean I expect anyone else to be, and would willingly lend them my hands. It can be over sexuality. I've had people get in my face about how there's no way I could be open to any gender. And by any I mean any. I have been with male, female, pre-op Male to Female, and have gotten a very good look at a pre-op Female to Male. I see nothing wrong in being with any of these people. I do not care if someone is of the decision their gender is smurf. If I love them, or find them beautiful, I will still love them and find them beautiful and nothing will change my mind, even the people who don't believe that it's a thing that people REALLY feel. It can be over relationships. I've always been poly. In high school I briefly had two boyfriends and a girlfriend once. People presumed I was a slut. At the time, I hadn't had sex with any of them, and only one of them ever ended up getting any at all. Go figure. It can be over something as simple as what people wear. I, for instance, don't like to wear pants. I wear dresses, skirts, heels, all manner of girly things. I am forever bewildered when I run up against people who laugh at me for it, who mock me for deviating from the norm and wanting to look pretty. It hurts, when my effort to look nice is ridiculed, especially when I know I DO look good. Of course, gender. My uncle, now deceased, lived with me and my dad a while when I was 17, not too long after the first mentioned boyfriend up there moved away. He had this friend, and the man was obnoxious. He was convinced that because I was a pretty girl that I didn't have two thoughts to rub together. My dad, aware of my growing impatience with the man, nudged me to talk to him so that he'd get out and stop spending so much time at our house. I may not have been a nice person that day, and picked apart his beliefs, but it scared him off, and while I'm glad about that, on reflection, I kind of wish I'd used something less cruel to do it. Yes he was a chauvinist pig, but using his religion against him might have been a bit low. And lastly... remember how I mentioned up there about needing a place to stay? Me and my family moved around a lot because we were pretty much homeless for years. My mom sold the house without really giving dad a chance to protest so we were adrift. During that time, I had an English teacher, and all I remember about her is the day she made me furious. She asked the class, for the daily topic, to write a page about why homeless people should be kept out of public schools. I could have screamed. It's probably good I didn't, but I wanted to. So much. In any case, as the above shows... people will find things to assume about. They think they know you, so they treat you a certain way. And on the flipside, sometimes you'll assume things about yourself without trying to see if they're really true too. Being self-aware is hard. It hurts. It takes time and patience and care. Being able to offer that awareness to others and not shy away from their pain? It's even harder. But sometimes, many times even, it's worth it. I promise. I just hope people learn to stop assuming, and start accepting, be the people on the other side men, women, or something else. Victims are victims, and a bad day will stay a bad day to that person, even if it sounds like a wonderful dream to you. Don't devalue the pain of another just because yours doesn't match up. The world doesn't need more of that. It never did.

I originally wrote this post on January 30th of 2015 on another website. In that time, I’ve learned more about myself, but I can safely say that my views on these matters haven’t changed. Due to that, I invite you all to reblog this post if you feel it’s a message you want to spread. Thank you for reading.

[islandofkiwi-blog]

Time’s Mirror Episode 1 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Prologue

 Someone once told me that remembering your past betrays your present. He didn’t tell me what he meant, but instead advised me to go home and think about it, which I think is a bit like saying “go talk with yourself about whether or not I actually said something profound, while I wait here and take no responsibility for my words.” I did as I was told, though, and I ended up coming to a conclusion that he was talking about how our memory is often an incomplete representation of any given situation.

           Like when the future you remembers the present you he will inevitably forget some of the little intricacies that went into creating that memory preserved in your shared brain. Maybe he’ll forget how cool your hair looked that day, or how you had a bad habit of chewing your nails when you listen to people talk, or (heaven help him) how much that one, trashy, rock chorus influenced you, and in doing so he will unintentionally marginalize the thought of you almost as if he was a stranger observing a story less important than his own.

           When I was done thinking about that, however, I started to wonder if the true meaning behind my irresponsible philosopher’s words was that remembering your past betrays you because during that time you stop living in the present and you become a shadow of the person you were in the past; never changing, never growing.

           But in the end, I resolved that the saying was just fancy wordplay, as most sayings are, and I thought that whatever profundity this particular cadence of words represented was probably not worth the internal distress I was having, so I chose to forget about the matter entirely.

           I never had the chance to ask my mentor what he meant by those words, and he’s gone now so I suppose I will never know, but now I am thinking about my past and his words have resurfaced in my mind like long lost counsel waiting for the appropriate moment to reveal its true nature.

           I think the place that I am in right now is something that I will take with me until I die and I desperately want to not misremember even the smallest detail. Yet I feel so close to my experience right now, too close to write about it, because I would rather continue living it. So I’m reflecting and typing and shivering because it’s really cold, and I’ve finally decided that trying to remember the past is not a sin or any other cautionary stigma I created for myself while pondering that old advice, and I should at least try to record the unbelievable journey I’ve taken.

           I guess I should start with an introduction.

           My name is Bailey Prince. It’s a girl’s name. I was teased for it because I’m a boy and in all the sixteen years of my life I can’t say I’ve ever been comfortable with using my name as a first impression because of an intense reflex of fear of being mocked.

           For the few sadistic people, and sometimes for the innocently curious ones who ask me where my name came from, I tell them it came from my father. My mother only wanted one child and my father had always wanted a daughter whose name he dreamt was Bailey. God let one and a half of their two wishes come true, but everyone knows that having half a wish come true is like finding a magic lamp but figuring out that the genie you summon only speaks Arabic and has to use a dictionary to translate what you’re wishing for.

           I suppose I can remove any wary doubt by saying that this is not a story about bad names; it just happens to be a circumstance of my existence. But if I were to provide any commentary about the topic to any expectant parents who want to name their kid Seafoam Green it’d have to simply be: don’t.

           My name doesn’t really bother me anymore, but I think that’s also a result of this journey, because before all this started I was concerned that maybe my name would be my only gimmick. I thought that maybe I wouldn’t get to be any more interesting than a cross-gendered name, because there’s a limit to how interesting people can be. Like when you introduce yourself to someone, you should be able to summarize all the interesting points of your life in the first fifteen minutes, and when I introduce myself to people we spend the first five minutes discussing my weird name. I thought that maybe if I was born a David or an Andrew I could put my interesting minutes to work by slaying dragons or saving princesses.

           When I was a kid I loved adventure stories: the mighty swords and steeds; the fair maiden turned damsel in distress; the unexpected hero and his crucial battle for justice against evildoers. That’s all I really wanted for myself – well, that and a dog, but I didn’t get the dog either – but I didn’t think that it was something that my tiny town in Colorado, wedged in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, could provide me.

           And then it was. Not the dog part, I never got that. But one auspicious day, a winter wind swept through town and it brought with it the most mystifying girl and her insanely smart father and together they changed my entire life. This is my story, my memoir, and it will help me remember every pounding heartbeat; every sinking feeling that I was “going to die;” every tear I’ve shed and all the blood I’ve seen; every wonderful, mind-blowing kiss; and, yes, even the boring parts which I’m trying to make not so boring by writing this.

           These are my fifteen interesting minutes, and I feel them ticking towards eternity the longer I spend with her.

           But we’ll get to my mystery girl in a moment, for now I want to go back to the beginning.

           I guess it all starts with…

  Chapter 1

 It was ten minutes until the New Year at Eva Daniels’ house. A couple dozen of my high school classmates were packed haphazardly into the living room while the television played live coverage from Times Square of a scantily clad popstar’s dance routine of radio’s favorite pop song. The singer looked angelic as a flurry of real snow began to fall on the stage, and she played it off as if the weather was planned into the routine. I was sitting towards the back of the room with my friend Mark Daly, but I could still see the screen over the heads in the crowded room since it was fixed at the top of the wall – sometimes forcing my eyes to see the screen to distract myself when something made me feel uncomfortable.

           The night had started okay. It was the third time I’d been invited to Eva’s annual party, but this time had been a little different. While before I had been invited because we were friends going back to elementary school, this year Eva was without a boyfriend, and she made it clear that she wanted me to be her backup kiss at midnight. I had no problem with that, of course, but I also knew that probably nothing could come out of it since we had grown too different over the years so I was basically still there as her old friend.

           Mark had found me early in the night and he clung to me like plastic wrap for the entire party, unmovable even when I’d gotten tired of being smothered and tried any subtle way I could to get him to let me breathe.

           “Yo, Mark,” I said at ten thirty, seeing his girlfriend glancing in our direction for no more than a second. “Jen is staring at you, man. You better get your black ass over there.”

           “Nah, B,” he replied in his lullaby chocolate voice, completely unfazed. “You gotta make ‘em wait for you.”

           “Hey, Mark,” I said at eleven, thinking I finally had the key to my human-shaped handcuffs. “Eva said she might want to kiss me at midnight. You mind if I go see what’s up?

           “Man, B,” he responded, rejecting my metaphorical key. “There’s no way Eva wants to kiss a fool like you. Get outta with that noise.”

           It’s not like I hated Mark; he was one of my best friends since we were kids. But I could sense something was weird about him that night and I would rather talk with him somewhere more private.

           “Mark, I’m gonna go to the bathroom,” I said at eleven thirty, even though I didn’t have to go to the bathroom.

           “All right, B.”

           For a second, I thought I was free, but I made it about three feet away before the sound of his voice stopped me again.

“Hey, can I tell you something?”

           I looked at him.

           “You’re a good friend,” he said, grinning with his teeth.

           I sighed and stepped back towards him. “Okay, what is up with you tonight?”

           “What?” he asked innocently. “I can’t tell a brother he’s a good friend?”

           I considered myself intuitive or observant at least, and I knew Mark well enough to see that something was bothering him. I actually saw it on his face as soon as he came up to me for the first time that night, but I didn’t want to say anything.

           “No, you don’t get to call me a good friend. Not if you’re not going to let me be one. What’s up with you tonight? You haven’t talked to anyone else here.”

           I sat back down on the barstool at the back of the room, and I listened to Sara Baker and Tess Newman talk about prom while I waited for Mark.

           “Same old Bailey,” he said, taking a seat on the stool next to me. “Never could let anything go.”

           I said nothing and let my attention shift towards the live feed from Times Square. They were announcing the popstar’s performance, “right after these words from our sponsors,” meaning “in fifteen minutes.”

           “My brother died two days ago.” Mark finally said flatly. There was no anger or sadness in his voice despite the bad news.

“What the hell,” I whispered, too shocked to say anything meaningful.

Mark told his story like he wasn’t part of it. Like he was trying to be as disconnected as possible from the experience, but I could tell he was hurting.

“He was driving home from work on the interstate and it was kind of icy. The car in front of him went into a skid. Bobby hit the brakes but it wasn’t enough. Bobby runs into the other guy’s bumper and the car behind him was tailgating so his headlights are in Bobby’s trunk a second later. Police were there in ten minutes but he was DOA. Bobby    was the only one dead. They said he would probably have survived the first impact.”

“What the hell,” I repeated.

“I didn’t want to bring you down. Sorry.”

Everything started to fade away. The sounds of the party dimmed and all that was left was the tragic news and the welling pain in my stomach. Bobby was my friend, even though he was seven years older than me he was my friend. Now he was gone. Mark was my friend, and I hurt for him and his family.

“What the hell are you doing here? You should be with your family.”

He shrugged. “Man, you’re my family, too. My dad said that we all needed to spend some time being alive before we can know what it’s like to be dead. Being here is good. Being with you, B…” He stuck out his fist and I bumped mine into his. “It’s good.”

I looked at him. He seemed to be handling it.

“What do you need me to do?”

“You, Bailey?” He shook his head. “Man, you don’t need to do anything. Just listen to this. You remember that time…”

He recounted the story. I looked at the TV a couple times. I watched the faces in New York. I saw people from every corner of the world gathering to see the spectacle. I began to cry. I cried passive tears without trembling, fighting a public breakdown so I wouldn’t ruin the cheerful mood of the party but still letting myself feel pain. He patted me on the shoulder and it was like he became the outsider attending to my tragedy.

“Damn, B. This a’int nothing to cry over.”

“What the hell do you want me to do?” I said with tears stuffing my nose.

“I already told you. You don’t need to do anything. I’m letting you know this is a new me. The only thing I can wrap my mind around these past few days is that the life you have is so tiny. It changes like that.” He snapped his fingers as he said the word. “In a hot second it’s gone for reasons you can’t even control. Man, you don’t need to cry for me or for Bobby. All I need is for you to laugh with me, because I already decided that I’m not gonna waste any more time on stupid shit. I wanna say what I mean, and do what I wanna do.”

On the television, the singer had finished her routine and out of the corner of my eye I saw Eva Daniels approaching us. I rubbed away the tears under my eyes. It looked like Mark was going to make a finishing statement to his grand speech, but Eva interrupted him.

“Hey, boys.” She spoke in a cheerful, girlish tone. “Glad to see you made it.” Technically, it was the first time she had spoken to me at the party, not counting the subtle wink she had given me at the door.    

“Thanks for having us, Eva,” Mark said calmly. “I almost canceled, but I knew all the cool kids would be here and I didn’t want to lose my membership.”

She giggled. “Well I’m glad you’re here. Can I see Bailey for a second?”

Mark raised his eyebrows in a way that I knew meant he was up to something. “Can I just say you are looking damn fine in that dress, Eva. Is it true that you want to kiss my man Bailey here?”

She looked at me again and I looked back at the TV. The one-minute countdown to midnight had appeared in the bottom of the screen and most of the people in the room were gathering to watch.

Eva shrugged and said “I don’t think that’s any of your business, but I would like to speak with him. Privately.”

“Ah.” Mark made a show of nodding as the clock ticked down. “Okay. I understand, but we’re having a discussion right now and it would be terrible if you filled his mind with girly things while I’m trying to impart some of my wisdom.”

           “Excuse me?” Eva said, looking almost panicked. The ten-second countdown had started and everyone in the room began chanting in unison. Ten. Nine.

           “You heard me, woman.” Mark said casually. Eight.

           “Bailey,” Eva addressed me. Seven.

           I started to stand, but Mark put his hand on my shoulder. Six. Five.

           Eva took my hand in hers, it was soft and small and a little sweaty. Four.

           Mark kept his hand on my shoulder as he got out of his chair and walked around to stand in front of me. It went silent for half a heartbeat as I looked from Mark to Eva and then back again. I wasn’t exactly sure what was about to happen. Three. Two.

“I LOVE BAILEY PRINCE!” Mark announced at the top of his lungs. One.

Midnight, the new year, Mark kissed me right on the lips. He grabbed me forcefully on either side of my face and squeezed my cheeks together so that my lips puckered naturally and he pressed his face into mine. His lips were chapped and rough and smaller than I expected and the stubble on his upper lip rubbed against me and felt strange. My eyes were open and I snuck a glance at Eva during the second Mark was kissing me. Her hand was still on mine but her grip loosened and her eyes got real wide so I could see a bit of shock in her sky blue irises. Mark held his face against mine for longer than I expected and I pushed him away when I thought he was about to stick his tongue in my mouth.

Eva didn’t kiss me after that. She sarcastically wished me “good luck,” and walked away quietly. Some of the other people at the party, attracted by Mark’s loud declaration watched the whole thing and the rumor spread over the rest of winter break that Mark and I were about to be the next hot couple in town. Of course that wasn’t true, but it made for a better story.

Meanwhile, I found myself thinking constantly about how Mark had boldly claimed that he was going to be a new person. Even so close to his brother’s death, he was able to laugh and be spontaneous and not care at all what people thought. The kiss represented something more to him. It showed his determination to experience new things and live freely. He shared that motivation with me and transferred something to me that night, some virus that infected my mind and made every part of me aware of how boring my life was. His actions made me want something more: adventure or purpose or love, something I couldn’t place my finger on but that I felt was missing like a giant, gaping hole in my chest.

As winter trudged along and Bobby’s funeral came and went, I felt more and more frustrated that I couldn’t figure out a way to break out of my sense of inadequacy. I was bored, and half a month later I was still struggling with my boredom.

 I opened my locker door on the first day of school of the new year and stared at the worn out bindings of the textbooks I hadn’t seen since last semester. Outside the clouds were grey and there was supposed to be a snowstorm coming, but school continued to be in session despite the predicted bad weather. Returning to my day job made me somehow more frustrated than I had been during the break. Everything was exactly as I left it, though I didn’t know what I expected to find changed.

           I started picking at the paint on the inside of my locker, letting my mind wander absently. I held the door with my other arm and swung my body back and forth with the creaking hinge, the repetitive motion slowly rocking my thoughts away.

           I was beginning to fall asleep on my feet, when I heard a loud slam on the wall behind me that startled me.

           "Well? You gonna give it?” A rough voice echoed off the wall, disturbing peaceful morning. “Or do I have to get The Jock here to shake it out of your backpack for you?"

           I turned to see Dylan Clifford, a five foot ten punk that fancied himself a bad boy, standing over a tiny, Indian kid. The bully acted like the over exaggerated representation of an Italian mob boss from a 70’s mafia film. He had the entourage, the saucy accent, and the perfectly rounded vowels to boot. Lacked the charisma, though. Actually, he might’ve been a choir boy if he hadn’t found his place as the power saw in the assemblage of tools at our school.

           The Indian boy was a new face, but he’d found himself as prey for the biggest delinquents in the school. I was too annoyed with my thoughts to want to get involved at first, but I figured I needed a distraction and decided to intervene on behalf of the kid’s milk money.

           “Hey, Clifford,” I shouted across the hallway and approached the group. Two of his goons tried to stop me in a synchronized move that must have taken months of practice to perfect, but I pushed through them to confront Dylan. He still had his arm against the wall, cornering the boy with the help of his evil sidekick, Rodney “The Jock” Hemsworth.

           “What’s the deal here?” I asked, “This little guy giving you trouble?”

           “Oh, hey Baby.” One time when we were kids I misspoke my name as ‘Baby Prince,’ and it stuck as one of my many, disparaging nicknames.

“I heard you had a fun time on New Year’s Eve. Deal here is this little twerp won’t give me the answers to the math homework we were supposed to do over break. And I know he has it, because he never forgets to turn it in during class.” He made a threatening motion with his fist towards the kid.

           “Wait, hold on.” I moved in between them, “You need answers to freshman math homework? You didn’t fail a grade, did you?”

           “No, Princess, I didn’t. I’m a junior, just like you. I’m just taking sophomore math ‘cause they wouldn’t give me credit for my pretty sixty percent last year. And this kid’s one of those… uh, whadd’ya call ‘em…” He started snapping his fingers like he was trying to summon the word.

           “Accelerated learners,” offered The Jock.

           “Yeah, Rod. That’s it. Accelerated learners.” He took a second to spit a wad of saliva onto the floor. “Some kids are too smart for their own good. They’re bound to get hit by the pecking order at some point or another. I’m doing him a favor.”

           I nodded my head sarcastically. “You have a point there,” I said, agreeably, “but this one is my friend and I’m not going to let you torture answers out of him. So here we go.” I tried to pull the kid from the crowd.

           Dylan swatted my arm away from his victim. “Hold up, Babe. You can’t honestly expect me to believe that. I’ll give you ten bucks right now if you can tell me this kid’s name.”

           He had me. I looked down at the kid then back at Dylan. I knew any hesitation would kill my story, so I responded quickly. “His name is Raj. Can we go now?”

           “Whoa, dude. No way.” He looked over at his goons and whispered at them. “That’s not the kid’s name, is it?”

           “Oh, yeah? So you actually bothered to learn his name? You’ve really changed, Dylan.” I fake applauded and then grabbed the kid’s arm and pulled him away before any of them could protest. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

           I shouted at Dylan over my shoulder as we left. “Your problem, Clifford, is that you have no respect for others. You’d be surprised to know that some people have more to offer you than test answers.”

           And by the time I’d finished babbling we’d made it past a corner and disappeared into the crowd while Dylan stared blankly.

           I hadn’t exactly thought about what I was going to do after I saved the kid so we just stood there awkwardly for a second or two without saying anything.

           The boy looked down at the floor, unwilling to make eye contact with me. I wasn’t able to get a good read on him, so I decided to just walk away. “Okay… well, see you,” I said awkwardly.

           I was just starting to turn as I heard his timid voice call out behind me. “My name’s Henry.”

           “Oh.” I turned around, but kept shuffling backwards. “Yeah, sorry about that, I was just trying to get you out of there.” I scratched my head but continued moving down the hallway.

           I knew it.” I heard Dylan’s shout come from across my shoulder and I whirled around. “Give me those answers, Henry, and we won’t have a problem.” He laughed. “You almost made me forget that I really needed to pass this class, Bailey.”

           “Hey, you didn’t call me ‘Princess’ this time.”

           “This is too serious for great nicknames. I need to copy those answers before second period.” Dylan made a lunge at the kid, whose favorite form of self-defense seemed to be The Possum because he went limp.

           I was a step faster than Dylan, and I grabbed the kid’s arm just in time to turn and run. “All right, man. Just run as fast as you can,” I whispered to him.

           I half-dragged Henry behind me, because it seemed like he only knew how to move with the robotic motions of a silicone doll. Luckily, he was only about as heavy as one, too, so I pulled him through the crowded hall and hoped that someone would eventually stop the stampeding group of low-lives. I snuck a glance back over my shoulder and saw Dylan and his posse pushing over anyone and everyone, even the people trying to get out of his way.

           My goal was the library. I figured if I couldn’t lose him in a sea of people it would probably be best to take shelter in an open space with adult supervision. We were still in high school, and judging by how hard he was trying to cheat his way through Sophomore level math he still had to worry about the authority.

           We dashed down the hallway, rounding a corner before arriving at the library. I checked behind us to see if Dylan was still following us and, seeing a sea of people part the middle of the hallway for him to pass, I assumed he was. I pushed Henry through the library doors and ducked in after him. Hopefully, Dylan would just give up, because my heart was already pounding from the unusual amount of exercise so early in the morning.

           The library was an open area with tables in the center of the floor and bookcases lining the walls. At the front of the room were small, study alcoves and a very simple check-out counter leading out to the only door. Some teachers were helping kids with early morning questions in the study alcoves and the school librarian was busy reading a book behind the counter so I decided it was a safe place to stay. I led Henry to one of the center tables and I sat across from him so I could watch the door.

           There was silence for a couple moments, during which Henry just stared at the floor and started wheezing to find his breath and I looked at the door behind him waiting for a crazed Dylan to bust into the room and order my execution. Nothing happened and finally, I couldn’t take the silence and had to break the tension.

           “So how was your Christmas break?” I asked.

           The kid was in worse shape than I was which only made me feel worse. “My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas,” he managed to say through shallow breaths.

           “I meant more along the lines of you doing anything special.” I kept one eye on the door while I actually looked at him for the first time since I’d seen him. He had features like a mouse with a nose that seemed to draw any attention directed towards it.

           “Why are you asking me this?” He sounded upset.

           I shrugged. “I don’t know, really. We’re going to have to wait here awhile though, so I thought I’d try to make conversation.”

           “Why do we have to wait here?” His voice started to sound almost hostile.

           “I mean, isn’t there someone who wants to kill you out there?”

           He looked down, avoiding eye contact. There was more silence before he finally squeaked “Why did you save me?”

           I thought for a moment, and felt like I didn’t know the answer myself. I spoke uncertainly.

           “I don’t know if ‘saved’ is the right word for it, but it looked like you needed help and I really don’t like Dylan.”

           “Oh.” He sat quietly for a second before looking up at me with fairy tale doe eyes. “I thought you might have wanted to be my friend.”

           Just so we’re clear, the sparkling eyes is an effect that only animated characters can accomplish. I took one look at him and decided his was a ridiculous theory, but I knew I couldn’t say that to his face.

           “It wasn’t really part of my plan,” I stated, but I saw his face get very sad which was almost an effect worse than the doe eyes, so I added quickly, “But, you know, I’m never above making new friends,” which elicited a toothy grin.

           Normally, I probably would have melted on the inside when such a childishly innocent creature made that kind of face at me, but somehow all I saw was a mistake of nature smiling at me with unusually large gums and braces restraining a massive overbite.

           I shoved the ugly feeling to the back of my brain and forced a smile back at him.

           “So how’s school, then?” I decided to give him a chance to let his shining personality break through his rough exterior.

           “It’s good. I have straight A’s.”

           “That’s… well that’s good.” I couldn’t think of anything more to say and I was suddenly aware that my chair was really uncomfortable.

           We sat like that for a good minute and I started to think that the mind-numbing silence was worse than getting beaten up by Dylan.

           “So, class is probably starting soon and I don’t want to be late,” I lied. “Why don’t we pick this up some other time?”

           “Okay,” he said, innocently.

           I stood up and started to walk away.

           “Actually,” he stopped me, and I was only two steps out of my seat, too close to pretend I hadn’t heard him. “Can I ask you something?” His voice was shaking.

           “Um.” I gazed longingly at the door, but forced myself to sit down because I knew I would feel bad if I just left. “Sure, what’s on your mind?”

           “Well, it’s about high school.” He kept stopping after every phrase, like he couldn’t get a complete thought to come out.

           “Okay. What about?” I tried to guide him, “Girls? Bad teachers? Did you meet Rocko? Don’t buy whatever he’s selling.”

           “It’s just that…” He paused again and I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Well I moved here during the fall and I’ve been here for a semester already, but I haven’t really been able to make any friends. Everybody just seems to stare right through me and the only time people talk to me is when they have questions about homework.”

           When he finished, I felt bad about my previous thoughts. First impression, oppression, as my mother would say.

           I tried to come up with an answer for him, but it was hard because I knew I would definitely be one of those shameless people asking a freshman for help and I was obviously one of those people who wouldn’t bother to talk to him afterwards.

           “I can relate a little bit,” I lied, trying to give him what he needed to hear. “People like to pick on me because of my name; I have a really girly one. Bailey Prince.” I reached over the table to shake his hand and he giggled a little bit which made me smile.

           My awful concentration on his physical appearance seemed to melt away as I began to see just a lonely kid looking for a friend. I wanted to inspire him somehow, to help him escape from the natural, defensive shell that always seems to hinder the real, human experience.

           “You just have to stop worrying about what people will think about you if you just put yourself out there,” I said. “High school is this time when you’re supposed to figure out who you are. And all your classmates will pretend like they’re so complicated or they have everything under control, but they’re not and they don’t. We’re all the same, us high school students, we’re just looking for love, and direction, and test answers. So don’t be afraid to say what’s on your mind. Because it’s okay to make mistakes. Just, really, don’t buy anything from Rocko; those aren’t the right mistakes you want to make.”

           It was cheese straight out of an afterschool special, but I figured everyone could stand to watch a little more, trashy television. I did feel a little pretentious trying to make generalizations about teenagers when I was clearly not any more mature than my peers, but my ego took a back seat as I tried to advise this kid who just wanted to be noticed by someone.

           I was about to tell him something about talking to girls when I saw the library door open. I nearly fell out of my seat expecting Dylan to show his face when I had just talked myself into a vulnerable position, but I let out a sigh of relief when the second librarian walked in, whistling cheerfully over the top of his coffee mug.

           Henry looked behind him and when he turned back around I gave a lopsided smile to acknowledge how stupid I looked. He giggled again and a warm wave of something I could only call serenity filled my insides. When the moment passed he told me he should probably get to class and I told him I’d see him around. But as I watched him walk away with his uneven gait, I started to realize something.

           I was finally ready to accept what my high school years had to offer. I wanted to take my own advice and learn something about what I wanted to do with myself. Mark had planted the seed in my heart, and the conversation with Henry had watered it, but I was letting it take root.

           I sighed as I realized that I was ready to leave.

TO BE CONTINUED!