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nctyhoney · 4 years ago

Text

a helping hand (m)

Pairing: mark lee x fem!reader

Genre: smut, fluff, office worker!mark, friends to lovers, office!au

Word Count: 7.6k

Warnings: oral sex (male receiving), car sex, dry humping, praise kink

Playlist: pickled ginger - mac ayres, fill my holes - YESEO, wait for it - H.E.R.

Summary: You were used to workplace flirting. Everyone at some point would have a 'work bae'. Mark was different though, he was your intern. There were things you wanted to teach him, things he wanted to teach you and none of it had anything to do with work.

A/N: Mark in a suit is just too damn cute. This is my first fic on here so thank you for reading! There will be another part to this at some point.

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It’s just gone 8 am and you're on your morning commute to work. You have a car but the traffic in Seoul made it almost impossible to drive during rush hour. Your eyes still feel puffy from sleep, and you hope your mascara has masked their appearance somewhat. As you and a mass of other office workers spill out of the subway station, you're greeted by an autumnal wind. Although it felt mild for the time of year, you couldn't get used to the early morning darkness that the promise of winter brought.

In just 2 years, you'd progressed to head of the marketing team at Hyphen, Korea's biggest publishing house. You were proud to have landed a job at such a reputable company straight out of university, but with each pay rise came more responsibilities.

The elevator reached your floor, 39. Going through to the kitchen area, you put two iced Americano cans in the refrigerator. You weren't a fan of coffee but it got you through the day. As you were organising the refrigerator, you felt someone behind you and turned around quickly - it was your manager. He had a weird way of creeping up on his workers and you found him somewhat seedy. You always made sure to be polite to him, though.

"Morning manager Kim," you stand up, adjusting your pencil skirt slightly.

"Morning y/n! Here bright and early I see. Did you get my email last night?" He asks, his eyes flicking between your body and your face.

"Sorry, what email?" You ask, feeling slightly panicked.

"This year's interns start today. I sent it last night so you probably didn't get a chance to read it."

Crap. Interns. You didn't know if it was your imposter syndrome talking but something about being observed by interns made you feel underqualified. Perhaps you just got a bad batch of interns the first time around. You remembered Kyungsoo and Minhee from last year. Kyungsoo's uncle was CEO of Hyphen and he wouldn't let you forget it. He refused to work and you'd find him and Minhee coming back from their lunch breaks an hour late, often out of the unused stock cupboard.

"No sorry I didn't read it," you apologise, "when are they coming?"

"The receptionist said there are four downstairs waiting. They'll be up in a minute," manager Kim says checking his watch.

You nod, "How many will I be working with this year?"

"You'll each have one intern this year. You'll be working with Mark Lee, he's Canadian. A good kid. I think you'll like him."

Just then, the sound of the elevator reaching the 39th floor alerted you. Four of the interns shuffled out of the elevator.

"Welcome to Hyphen, I'm manager Kim, you might remember me from your interview," he said looking between his sheet with their faces and names and up at them.

"So we have Mark, Haechan, Jeno and Sooji. I hope you enjoy this year working in marketing. This is y/n, she's head of this department."

You exchange handshakes and bobs of the head, feeling relieved that these interns at least look shy rather than cocky rich kids.

"Mark you'll be giving y/n a helping hand this year. Y/n, I know you'll make him feel welcome. The rest of you, let's find the workers you'll be shadowing," manager Kim says before they're off out of the kitchen to one of the conference rooms.

Mark is staring at you from a distance, awkward and tense. His black hair falls into his eyes despite styling it neatly for work; he brushes it out of his eye nervously.

"Tea?" you ask him, grabbing your two favourite mugs out of the cupboard.

"Oh, yeah, please - if that's not too much trouble," Mark says hesitantly.

"Of course it's not. You can sit down, we don't start work for another 20 minutes."

He does as he's told, opting for one of the chairs closest to the kitchen worktop.

"Do you take sugar?" You call over to him.

"Two," he replies, fiddling slightly with his wristwatch. This boy is endearing you think, definitely an upgrade from arrogant Kyungsoo.

"How are you feeling about interning here?" You ask, stirring his tea, before coming to sit at the chair next to his.

He takes the mug, "Oh, thank you. I'm kinda nervous I'm not gonna lie, but thankful to be here."

You laugh, his casual tone is refreshing but he catches on and apologizes quickly.

"There's no need to apologize, you can be informal with me. I don't want you to feel uncomfortable," you say, catching his eye over the rim of your mug. He's blushing slightly, and you wonder why you are too.

♡

It's been 3 months since the interns came. December comes and with it is an endless rain.

In those 3 months, it didn't take long for you and Mark to grow close. Sure, he still had his occasional shy tendencies but you spent all your working hours together. Rather than a forced relationship between a senior and their junior, this was something you both saw as natural.

You're just not sure if the feelings you've developed are natural, too. His eyes hold onto yours for longer at company dinners, his hands linger at your waist when he reaches to get a file from the shelf in front of you. And it sets something off in you. You crave the contact. Mark Lee is driving you crazy.

You certainly weren't imagining these moments. You were used to workplace flirting. Everyone at some point would have a 'work bae'. Mark was different though, he was your intern. There were things you wanted to teach him, things he wanted to teach you and none of it had anything to do with work.

When you first started at Hyphen, Johnny used to be heavy on the flirting with you, and being from America, he was confident with it. He’d make you cups of hot, sweet tea each morning. He gave you those flirtatious touches on your arms while complimenting you, and he’d always make sure you got home safe after a company dinner. But he also had a long-term girlfriend and you knew nothing could come of it. Johnny still flirts with you, but that’s just him. And when you first began working at the company, you fell for it...almost. It happened a second time, with Jaehyun but then you learnt that these were just the ways of the office.

Today was a Friday, which meant your division would have drinks with the manager. You weren't keen on drinking, especially not with your manager but your coworkers made it bearable. And since the CEO was attending this week, the manager wouldn't be bothering you, Yerin and Mina for the entire night.

You lean over Mark, reading through the document on his laptop. He's edited the press release you wrote for a new book launch.

He shifts around in his seat. You can't tell if he's nervous about you reading his work or nervous about being sat underneath you. You hope it’s the latter option, though.

"As expected from our Markie. You're really helping me by editing these documents, it's great - thanks," you smile, moving away slightly.

He's blushing a violent shade of pink and touching the back of his neck. He couldn't get any cuter.

"It's not fair that y/n gets such a helpful intern. Sooji left early when she promised to help with my reports, that's the second time this week," Mina huffs, folding her arms.

"It's compensation for the hell I went through with the interns last year," you laugh.

Johnny walks up to you and nudges you playfully.

"Nah it's not compensation. Y/n is just so hard-working, that's why they gave you the most hard-working intern," he says winking.

Mark looks between you and Johnny, an eyebrow raised.

"Yeah, thanks for that Johnny but that's definitely not true. Not the part about Mark not being hard-working...or me, I mean, I am hard-working, just not the most," you stutter, suddenly feeling foolish.

Luckily it hits 5 pm before anyone can dwell on your tongue-tied speech. You're all tidying away, turning off your monitors and getting ready for a night of drinking.

You catch eyes with Yerin and go to the bathroom to touch up your makeup.

You're reapplying a dab of lipstick and Yerin brushes her face lightly with powder. She stops for a moment, glancing at you.

"You don't still like Johnny do you?" Yerin asks.

"Johnny?! No way, I'm not going back there," you laugh.

"You seem nervous around him," Yerin points out.

"Come on Yerin, that was awkward. It's weird when someone hypes you up like that. It's bad enough being marketing lead now, it's like I'm expected to be some bigshot when I still feel like a uni student," you admit.

"Yeah, I understand, but you're totally capable. Could it be that you’re feeling shy around a handsome, new worker, I wonder?" Yerin winks.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I've noticed that you've been spending a lot of time with Mark recently. I'm left to take lunch with Doyoung. I mean I'm not complaining but you know, Mark does look kinda smitten."

You look over at your friend and catch her looking back at you, expectantly.

"We have to look after our interns, Yerin. And it's not every day that you get such a hard-working one like Mark. Remember the hell I went through with Kyungsoo? Let's just say I'm relieved I've got a good worker."

"Right...so you don't think he's even a little bit cute?"

Hell yes, you did. But you couldn't admit that, could you?

"He's cute but like, in a little bro way. He's too goofy for me to see him romantically," you bluff but you know Yerin can see right through you.

"He's an intern, what's the harm? As long as Kim doesn't find out," Yerin says.

"Yerin! You're talking nonsense."

"I've seen the way you look at him. And the way he looks at you," she laughs.

"The way he looks at me?" You blurt out, "The way I look at him? We're just good coworkers."

"Girl, you're such a bad liar."

♡

Yerin's words stay in your head for the entire night. Suddenly you're thinking about what Mark's lips would feel like against yours. Wondering what it would feel like for him to touch you, more than the light touches in the office. You've thought about it before, of course. But mostly while touching yourself in bed.

Mark is sat at the low table opposite you, Yerin and Mina at either side of you. Mark is laughing, taking a shot of soju as Johnny pats him on the back. He clearly can't handle his alcohol because he's giggling like a school kid and his face is already flushed. He looks stupidly cute and you realize how much you want to hold him, feel his flushed cheeks underneath your palms. But you peel your eyes away, tuning in to a conversation Yuta and Mina are having about Christmas holidays in Japan.

Manager Kim announces that him and the CEO will be moving to drink somewhere else, stumbling from the long table and telling you to enjoy your night. You all know where that 'somewhere else' is, but you don't bother questioning it. Corporate culture can be parasitic.

Even so, you're relieved that they've left, the atmosphere less stuffy now. Things feel playful and flirtatious. Jaemin is whispering in Jeno's ear and Jeno is laughing. Yerin's hand is dangerously placed on Doyoung's thigh.

You can't snatch glances at Mark anymore because he's looking right at you, his eyes filled with something you haven't seen before..lust? Maybe your tipsiness is altering the situation but you like it.

“Shall we play truth or dare?” Lucas grins, clapping his hands.

“Let’s just do truths, we’re in public,” Jaehyun points out.

“I second that! But this stays between us, company oath,” Mina says, taking an empty soju bottle and spinning it on the table.

The bottle lands on Jungwoo first and Jaehyun and Mark nudge him on either side, laughing.

“Jungwoo! Who would you date out of everyone here?” Mina asks.

Jungwoo’s eyes are playful and he throws his head back laughing.

“You want me to be completely honest? I’d probably say Lucas,” he says without hesitating.

Everyone is laughing and teasing the pair, except for Mina who nudges Lucas in the ribs to stop him from smirking.

“Moving on, where is the riskiest place you’ve ever had sex?” Jaehyun asks, spinning the bottle as it lands on Mark.

Mark rubs at his nose, looking at you momentarily. You pretend to focus on your soju shot but you’re listening carefully.

“I mean…a car I guess?” Mark chuckles, he’s bright red now and you feel jealousy rising inside of you.

Why were you jealous? He wasn’t even your boyfriend.

Johnny is ruffling his hair but Mark looks up at you, looking slightly shifty. Maybe you understand how Mina feels now. You can’t look at him.

“Okay, moving on,” Mark says taking the bottle, “Do you like anyone here?”

It lands on Jaemin and he reclines back in his seat. He raises an eyebrow, “Sure, they like me too.”

Everyone laughs at that and Jeno just shakes his head cutely, everyone knowing they’re practically an item at this point.

“Who would you make out with right now if we were doing dares?” Jaemin asks.

The bottle lands on Johnny. It’s Mark’s turn to pat Johnny on the back now and Johnny just smiles to himself.

“Aren’t you gonna answer, Johnny?” Yuta laughs.

“I’d make out with y/n” Johnny shrugs.

There are collective gasps, and you can feel everyone’s eyes on you. That wasn’t what he was supposed to answer, surely? He had a girlfriend; he could’ve passed on the answer. You look up at Johnny and as if reading your thoughts, he shrugs.

“I had to answer,” he says, putting his hands up defensively.

You laugh then, typical Johnny.

There’s a playful glint in Mark’s eye. Was he that unaffected? You suddenly felt annoyed, foolish for feeling jealous about Mark’s confession.

“If you could have a threesome with two people here, who would they be?” Johnny asks.

It lands on Yerin then, who is already flushed with embarrassment at the question.

“Doyoung, and hmm..” she pauses looking around, “Probably y/n, because we’ve seen each other naked.”

“What?!” Mark, Lucas and Jaehyun say simultaneously. Mark just about chokes on his soju.

“Calm down Mark, looks like someone’s getting a bit turned on,” Yuta winks but Mark’s eyes are still wide, shocked by Yerin’s statement.

Yerin was your best friend, all best friends had seen each other naked. It was perfectly normal. At least it was for you two.

“It’s a girl thing,” Yerin says simply, taking another shot.

“Oh! I have a good one,” Yuta says grabbing the bottle, “Have you masturbated thinking about anyone around this table?”

Of course it lands on you. To be honest, you had touched yourself thinking about 3 separate people at the table but no one needed to know that. Everyone’s silent and you don’t know where to look. You could lie, it would save your reputation but where would the fun be in that? You were all as tipsy as each other. So you reply with a small “yes” instead.

“Who was it?” Jaehyun asks.

“I’m not gonna answer that,” you laugh.

You try not to blush but you can’t help it and cover your face with your hands momentarily.

“She’s thinking about them again!” Yerin nudges your shoulder.

You didn’t want to look, you didn’t want to see if Mark was staring at you so you take the bottle to ask the next question quickly.

“How many people have you slept with in total?” you ask, spinning again.

It lands on Doyoung, his eyes are wide and he looks confused, you can’t help but laugh at his cute expression.

Yerin is smirking, expectant.

“Hmm...maybe fifteen?” Doyoung says, tilting his head.

“Fifteen! No way,” Johnny laughs but Doyoung just nods.

“You said you wanted the truth.”

Yerin looks slightly pissed as she pours another shot of soju. It’s only when Doyoung whispers in her ear that her frown softens into a slight smile. She’s got it bad, you thought.

“Let’s stop the game now, I don’t want to hear all these details,” Mina says, side-eyeing Lucas.

“Yeah I didn’t even get picked,” Haechan huffs, “Let’s just drink a bit more!”

"Hey," Yerin murmurs in your ear over the noise a few moments later, "I'm going home with Doyoung, I'll see you on Monday."

"You naughty girl! Have fun," you laugh. She blows you a flirtatious kiss as she leaves, her arm in Doyoung's.

It's gone midnight when you and your remaining coworkers spill out onto the street.

"To the next bar, let's go!" Haechan shouts, stumbling as Johnny props him up.

"Dude, you've had way too much to drink. I'm getting you in a taxi," Johnny says.

Sooji and Jaehyun also opt for getting taxis, following Johnny down the street.

"Are you coming y/n? Mark?" Jaehyun calls.

"I think I'm going to get some food first, I'll see you guys on Monday," you say before you realize. You're not even hungry.

"Yeah me too, see you later!" Mark waves.

You say your goodbyes, leaving you and Mark to walk the opposite way. Mark follows your step, but he's taking his tie off, undoing his top button because he's hot from drinking even though it's the middle of December. The sight of him makes your stomach flip.

"You don't think they'll suspect anything, about you coming home with me?" you ask suddenly.

Mark raises an eyebrow and looks at you, "Who said I'm coming home with you? I thought you wanted food."

"Yeah...yeah, just they might think something else."

Mark shrugs, "Do you care what they think?"

"No, and I guess everyone's fucking each other anyway," you say emphatically.

"Exactly. Everyone in the office knows we're friends, let them think what they want," Mark says.

"I guess you're right."

"So where are we going?"

"McDonald's?" you ask.

"I don't really feel like food, to be honest," Mark chuckles.

You turn to Mark, "You're seriously just gonna watch me eat?"

He shrugs, "Why not?"

His eyes are glazed over and shiny from the alcohol, his lips formed into a little pout. It takes everything in you not to kiss him right there and then on the street.

"You're so weird when you're drunk," you say instead, "Seriously, where do you want to go? If you're not going to eat, we might as well go home. I mean...you go to yours and I go to mine."

Mark pulls at his ear, thinking for a moment. But it doesn't really look like he's thinking, more like pretending to think. You can see the trace of a smirk hiding on his lips. This whole conversation feels weirdly contrived. You want him and you're pretty sure he feels the same way.

"I could come with you? Just, you know, to make sure you get home safe," Mark blurts out.

You can't take it anymore. You want Mark Lee so bad it hurts. "Right, okay...well, shall we go now?"

Mark nods and you haul a taxi, just as it starts raining.

♡

Mark is stood in your bedroom doorway, looking as awkward as when you first met him. Now you're not so sure if it was a good idea to invite him in.

"I'll sleep on the sofa if you want," he insists but both of you know it means nothing.

You laugh, "Mark, you can sleep in my bed, it's alright. You can sleep on the left side, I'll sleep on the right if you want."

He smiles in response but doesn't move.

"Seriously Mark, I'm not going to bite," you say patting at the bed.

He sits down gingerly then.

"Your apartment is decorated so nicely," he says looking around your room.

You can see the moon outside of your window, already on its descent for another night.

When you turn back to look at Mark, his eyes are on you. You don't know what to say, but you know what you want to do.

"Can I kiss you ?" he asks, confirming your thoughts. He looks down at your lips and back up to your eyes again.

You nod your head, you can't talk but it doesn't matter because Mark is already leaning in and then his lips are moving against yours. His lips taste faintly of soju, but you don't care. You want to taste him and you slide your tongue against his, suddenly feeling desperate. He takes the hint because you're both taking off each other's clothes then until you're both just in your underwear.

"Wait," Mark says, his hands faltering, "Do you think we should be doing this?"

It's dark, only a street lamp and the moon partially illuminating the room. The raindrops are highlighted and cling to the windowpane. You feel melancholic and you realize now more than ever that you want to be held by Mark. You can make out Mark's expression, a mix of flustered and horny rolled into one. You know he wants this too, this dorky, shy intern who was barely able to make eye contact with you is now in your bed.

"Why not? There's nothing wrong with what we're doing."

That's all the confirmation he needs because he starts to plant kisses on your neck. You stroke his hair as he makes his way down to your boobs.

"You're so hot" he murmurs, taking off your bra.

He nuzzles his face into your chest, breathing heavily before taking one of your boobs in his mouth. He swirls his tongue around your nipple first and then sucks again. His tongue feels warm and wet against your skin. He looks up at you, his eyes wide and needy.

"God that feels so good - keep doing that," you breathe.

He hums in response against your boob and you shiver. You want to keep hearing him, that voice that you've dreamt about for nights on end.

Mark lifts you to sit on his lap and you can feel his hardness pressing against you.You guide Mark's head back up to meet yours and you're both kissing again. You grind down on him, both knowing you need this. You want to feel him against you and you can't control it. Your movements are instinctual. Mark understands because he's bucking his hips up to meet yours, despite still having his boxers on. You can hear him grunt into the kiss.

"Do you have a condom?" you sigh.

"Shit, no."

You break apart briefly, Mark's eyes are hooded and his lips are swollen. You're almost certain that you look the same.

"It's okay," you say, getting off his lap to sit next to him.

"Wait - what are you doing then?" he asks, a trace of disappointment in his voice.

"What does it look like I'm doing," you say, pushing him lightly so he's lying down on the bed.

You pull off his trousers and he helps by kicking them at the ankles. He's eager now, his eyes hungry.

You pull down his boxers next until he's lying there, his beautiful, fully naked body exposed. You can see the shadowed contours of his lean body, the smoothness of his skin.

You kiss on his thighs, his skin is so soft and you hear his breath hitch as you do it. He's completely turned on now, you're satisfied knowing you've done this to him. So satisfied that you begin rubbing your clit in slow motions as your face hovers over Mark's crotch.

You take his dick with your free hand and pump it in your hand a couple of times. The tip is wet already and you kiss it, the precum on your lips. He whimpers then and you circle your clit quicker, feeling yourself growing wetter. As you lick Mark's tip, his hips raise to meet your mouth.

"I can't show my face when I'm like this," he murmurs, putting your bed pillow over his face.

"No, I want to see you," you say, climbing up to take the pillow.

Mark just turns his face to the side in response, too horny to argue.

You take him fully in your mouth, bobbing up and down slowly before finding a steady rhythm. He groans in time to your sucking motion.

"Fuck y/n, I'm gonna cum soon," he moans.

You hum against his dick, "You taste so good, Markie. Please cum for me."

He holds your head, pushing it down to reach his raised hips and you can feel yourself choking as his tip touches the back of your throat.

"I'm so...close, fuck" he moans, thrusting into your mouth.

He whimpers and wriggles beneath you, before jerking violently in large strokes as he cums in your mouth.

You swallow it up, but continue sucking, feeling yourself reach your own climax.

"Shit," Mark hisses.

"Oh my god, Mark -" you cry as you orgasm, your center pulsating.

You come to lie next to Mark, kissing him, open-mouthed and hungry. He can taste himself on you and he likes it.

"You were so damn good at that, y/n," Mark whispers.

"You were so good," you mirror, taking his now sweaty cheek in your hand.

"But I didn't get to do anything," Mark mumbles, placing soft, small kisses on your face.

"I came too. It was so hot seeing you like that."

"No seriously - I wanna make you cum, like for real though," he murmurs into your hair.

"Mm?"

"I know you're sleepy now but would you let me some other time?" he says in the darkness.

Mark's dark hair is plastered to his forehead now. He's hot and flushed, it makes your heart want to burst.

"Do you want to see me again? Like...outside of work I mean," you ask, brushing the hair from his eyes to look at him.

He nods, "What are you doing tomorrow?"

"Nothing, are you asking me out?" you giggle, pinching his cheek a little then.

He smiles and you know he's blushing.

"I guess you could say that, yeah," he laughs.

"I'm free then," you say, giving him a small peck on his lips.

Mark pulls you in for a hug. It seems like he wants to say something, whisper to you but you find yourself drifting in and out of sleep quickly. The sound of rain mixes with Mark's rhythmic breathing and lulls you to sleep.

♡

Mark had told you to wait on a nearby street by Apgujeong station. So you're surprised when he pulls up in front of you in his car. It's an old model, just about affordable for a student but it suits him well.

"I never knew you had a car," you point out, climbing into the passenger seat.

"What can I say, I'm a man full of surprises," he winks, laughing because he knew that was as cheesy as it sounded.

"Is where we're going a surprise too?" you ask.

"It might be," he says tapping at the steering wheel with his thumb to the beat of the music. It's a Lucky Daye song.

"You look so pretty by the way," he says, rubbing his nose slightly. You can tell he does that when he's shy.

"You don't look bad yourself," you reply. That would be an understatement, Mark looks like a full course meal right now. Skimming your eyes over his casual clothes, you remember that this was the first time you were meeting Mark outside of work.

You feel good. Despite how cold the late morning feels, the low winter sun is shining, the sky a soft blue.

"Where are you taking me?" you ask when you eventually realize that you're leaving Seoul.

Mark just taps his nose and tells you it won't be a long journey.

And he's right, in the next half an hour, you're driving on Incheon bridge, next to a stretch of blue sea.

♡

It turns out that Mark brought you to Incheon to eat.

You're sat on the floor at a low table of a seafood restaurant. Both of you know how good Incheon seafood is. There's what seems like a hundred different side dishes on the table, and despite both being big eaters, you're not sure if you'll be able to clear even half of it.

"Have the spicy seafood stew, it's delicious," Mark says, pouring you a bowl and putting it in front of you.

You take a mouthful and he's right, it is delicious. It’s warm and spicy, exactly what you need on a cold day. Mark is looking at you intently, his eyes shining like an eager puppy. He seems happy to see you enjoying your food and that warms your heart. You want to kiss him again.

“The stew is really good for a hangover too, it’s probably what you need,” he says, smiling.

“Hangover? I’m not hungover, do I look it?” You say self-consciously.

“No, no, I just meant we both drunk quite a lot last night,” he says, laughing nervously.

You blush remembering last night and then your thoughts flick back to truth or dare, and how jealous you were.

Mark must be thinking about it too. "Have you dated any of the guys at Hyphen?" he asks.

You just about choke on your stew, "No, why do you ask that?"

Mark shrugs, "I just wondered. They all speak really well of you, especially Johnny. And you're pretty, why wouldn't they want to date you?"

You laugh then, "Do they?"

Mark frowns a little, "You don't like Johnny, do you?"

"God no, we barely interact these days. No, I haven't dated any of them."

"Did you interact a lot before?" Mark asks.

"Me and Johnny? No, has Johnny said something?"

"Nah, apart from saying he’d date you last night. He just looks like he likes you," Mark says, rubbing his cheek.

You laugh a little then, "No, Johnny has a girlfriend and I wouldn't date him now even if he didn't have one."

Mark relaxes a little then.

"Is there a rule about dating coworkers then or do you just decide not to do it?"

"There's no rule, people just like to keep their personal and work lives private and often separate," you point out.

Mark thinks for a moment, toying with the noodles on his plate.

"What do you like to do, keep things private?" he asks.

"Private or public, I don't care, they can choose," you say quietly.

"Okay...that's good then," Mark says, smirking slightly.

He always has a roundabout way of saying things.

♡

It's 5 pm when the wintry sun sets in Incheon. You and Mark are walking along the beach. It's not perfect weather for it, since it's cold and you shiver in your coat but you're happy to be here with him.

"You need to dress warmer, y/n!" Mark says as he turns to you to retie your scarf properly.

He rubs his hands over your arms to warm you up.

"I'm okay - feel," you say, reaching your hand up to his cheek.

Mark searches your eyes and so it doesn't come as a surprise when he leans in and kisses you. His lips are warm and soft against yours and you feel as though you're melting. The kiss is a light, sweet one and you have to break apart because you feel giddy.

"Sorry, I couldn't help myself," he says.

"No, I like it."

You look into the fading light and see figures at the busy part of the beach in the distance. It wouldn't matter if you were publicly affectionate, no one would care. But you know if you start kissing him again, you won't want to stop.

You hear the sea breeze and then the first rainfall before you see it. It's soft and gentle but you know if you stand here for much longer that you'll catch a cold.

"Shall I take you home?" Mark asks.

You nod, feeling dazed and slightly lightheaded.

As you get into the car, Mark puts his Spotify on. 'Wait for it' by H.E.R. is first to play.

You peer over at his phone screen, it reads 'sex playlist'.

"There's no way you have a sex playlist," you laugh, pushing his arm playfully.

"Nah, it's just random," Mark bluffs, rubbing his nose in the cute way that he did.

"Well, whoever created this playlist has good taste."

"Yeah, alright, it is mine. But it doesn't mean anything," he says.

You raise an eyebrow then.

"Why doesn't it mean anything?" you ask. You don't know why you're probing but you enjoy teasing Mark, hearing him search for words to form an acceptable answer.

Mark just shrugs though, "I just like this mood...being here with you, I like it. This playlist just represents the mood."

"You're so good at bullshitting, Mark," you laugh but Mark is looking at you seriously now.

I know you on the way, but now I want it I can't take it I'm merely tryna chill, but I'm impatient Stay on my mind Can't sleep at night

“I’m being for real though. Like yesterday, I didn’t tell you but it was the first time someone’s given me head before,” he says, playing with his hoodie drawstrings.

“What? You’ve never had a blowjob before?” you ask, eyes wide.

“I’ve only dated one girl and she straight up didn’t want anything in her mouth so nah, it was the first time and it was amazing” Mark says.

“Well there’s a first time for everything,” you smile, feeling happy that you got to share that moment with Mark.

You look at each other in silence again. It’s a comfortable silence but it’s heavy with intent. You both know what’s coming.

"Y/n, you know I'm not good with words," Mark says and then he pulls you to him so that you're kissing again.

The kiss is different this time, it's slow and intense as if you're something he craves. It's the type of kiss that expresses he needs you now. His lips on yours feel so good and you kiss him back, mirroring his eagerness. Your hands are in his hair and then he bites at your bottom lip. He's gentle but it drives you crazy. His hands are travelling into your bra now.

"Mark," you whisper against his lips, "Mark we're in public."

"It's crazy, I keep wanting to kiss you," he murmurs, pressing his forehead to yours.

"I want to kiss you too, all the time," you admit.

"No one's here to see and it's dark now anyway."

You look around and Mark is right, it is dark. The rain is lashing hard against the window now, the H.E.R. track barely audible. Your breath and body heat is already steaming up the windows of the car.

"Can I touch you? I want to touch you," Mark whispers, kissing your neck.

There's no use in trying to stop, you feel your willpower disintegrating by the second. There's a desperation in Mark's voice. He's wanted this for so long, and so have you.

Before long you're a tangle of arms and legs in the backseat. Someone might find you but that prospect turns you on more than you initially thought. Your stockings and panties are pulled off and your skirt is hitched up now.

Mark hovers over you.

"Can I touch you?" he murmurs, his half-lidded eyes flick over your body.

You try to close your legs, embarrassed about being observed like this. But Mark just parts your legs with a hand, "You're so beautiful. Can I?"

You nod, you're so wet and you want to feel Mark inside you, you've needed it for so long.

Mark finds your clit easily, rubbing at it slowly but it's enough to make you wriggle underneath him.

Mark leans down to kiss you hungrily. He slips his tongue into your mouth as he continues circling your clit, faster now. You moan into the kiss and Mark bites your lip gently again. That habit he had which drove you crazy.

He breaks the kiss, still touching you and looking at you intently.

"You're so wet, do you want me that bad?" Mark teases.

You bite your lip, bucking your hips up to meet his fingers.

Mark massages you in quick circular motions. You can only focus on the sensation now, coming closer to your orgasm. Nothing matters anymore, not Mark observing your body, not the possibility of being caught by someone, nothing at all.

"Mark, Mark - please," you moan.

"Mmm?" he asks, smirking slightly.

"I want you to fuck me," you murmur, suddenly losing all inhibitions.

"But we're in public," Mark's eyes widen and you realize he's teasing you.

"Please, please fuck me, Mark."

You've never seen Mark like this before, so in control of the situation and you feel disorientated because of it.

Mark takes a condom out of his pocket then and tears it open with his mouth.

He pulls his jeans and boxers down, rolling the condom over his length. As he touches himself to adjust the condom, he suddenly looks more like his nervous, boyish self. He concentrates when he's horny and you realize how cute it is.

"I need you now, please," you whisper, feeling increasingly needy.

Mark is so soft for you, you can tell by the sudden redness of his cheeks, the begging turns him on.

"Please, Mark," you mewl, scratching lightly at his left arm propping him up over you.

Mark positions the tip against your center and you whimper at the sudden contact.

"What would the others say if they saw us like this?" Mark says.

"I don't care," you whisper, feeling even more turned on by the thought. You're not doing anything inherently bad but Mark is still your intern. Why did bad things always feel so good?

Mark’s pupils are dilated as he leans over to kiss you again, and then he slips into you without warning. You feel yourself tighten around his dick and he feels it too because he's groaning.

"Oh my god, y/n, you feel so fucking good," he moans into your mouth.

“Better than the last person you fucked in here?” you murmur.

Mark is taken aback but he clearly likes the jealous tone. He bites his lip and nods “Much better, you’re so hot, y/n.”

Mark fucks you gently, moving inside you with slow movements. His breathing hitches and he closes his eyes momentarily.

"Mark faster," you plead, your voice filled with innocence.

Mark puts a hand on your thigh and the other grabs at your boob as he starts thrusting into you harder.

"Mm fuck," you moan, feeling him hit your sweet spot.

"D-Do you like that?" Mark whispers and you can't even nod in response. You just know he feels so good.

“Who do you think of when you touch yourself?” Mark pants between groans. So he’s thinking two can play at that game.

“Ah - it’s you, I think of you Mark,” you moan.

He licks his fingers before placing them on your clit and rubbing once more. The combination makes you a moaning mess and you can't think of anything but your approaching orgasm.

“That feels good, doesn’t it?” he asks.

“My god, Mark” is all you can manage.

Mark's strokes get sloppy and he has to grip at your waist with one of his hands to keep steady. Your bodies are both damp with sweat, the leather seats of Mark's car underneath you are wet. You want to melt into Mark, you want to feel like this forever.

It doesn't take you long to orgasm. With a few more slow strokes and a rub of your clit, you pulsate around Mark's dick.

"Mark, I'm - fuck" you moan, shuddering violently with every pulse.

"You feel so fucking good," Mark grunts and his praise is enough for you to tighten around him once more. He thrusts again, groaning in your ear before he empties himself into the condom. You feel his dick twitch inside of you and pull his neck down for another kiss.

It's sloppy and needy, your tongues against each others in desperation. When Mark breaks the kiss, he collapses on top of you breathing heavily. You both lie there, trying to catch your breath. Mark's dick is still inside of you though and you can feel the warmth of it and the now filled condom.

"Shouldn't we throw the condom out?" you whisper, stroking the back of his neck.

"I like this feeling, though. Can't we just stay like this for a while?" he says and you feel shy knowing he's still inside of you, that he likes the feeling of you.

"I don't think I can keep away from you," Mark whispers into your hair.

"Me neither," you say as he props his head up to look in your eyes.

"You know yesterday I asked if you cared if people at work knew about us - did you really mean that? That you don't care?" he asks, his eyes are wide like a puppy’s and you know you're too far gone, you want Mark to be yours.

"I don't care at all, Mark", you say, stroking his hair and then his cheek.

"I'm gonna pull out now," Mark chuckles, pulling himself out of you and taking the condom off.

He pulls his boxers and jeans up and you do the same, adjusting yourself into a sitting position.

Mark opens the car to dispose of the condom. Luckily it isn't as busy as you thought outside thanks to the uninviting winter cold and darkness.

As you both get back into the front seats, you look in the mirror, fixing your hair but not bothering with your makeup, which has sweated off completely.

Mark turns to look at you, "You look beautiful, y/n. Seriously."

"Anyway why did you ask me if I care or not?" you ask, trying to change the subject because you're blushing too hard now.

Mark drives away from the parking lot and back towards Incheon bridge.

His eyes are focused on the road but you know he's thinking of what to say next.

"I was just wondering, well, if I can see you again tomorrow. For a proper date?" Mark asks.

"We did go on a proper date, Mark, we ate seafood and walked on the beach. I loved it," you say.

Mark bites at his lip. He looks nervous as if everything he's done with you so far has lead up to this moment.

"I can't lie, I really like you. Like to the point where I want to be around you all the time," Mark murmurs and his face is going bright red again.

Your stomach is fluttering from the sudden confession and you're can't look at his face anymore. You press for him to go on, though.

"Mmm?"

"Being able to talk about normal shit, do normal things, it's made me realize how much I enjoy spending time with you. I don't even want to drop you off tonight."

He clears his throat, "I think I've fallen for you, y/n. I know I sound stupid but you wanted to hear it. I like you and you don't have to accept it, we can go back to work and forget this ever happened, go back to norm-"

"Mark," you cut him off, "I like you too. I've liked you for ages, I just didn't want to be the first to admit it."

"Why?" Mark chuckles, his eyes wide. He looks genuinely taken aback.

"You're my intern! Why would I confess first? That wouldn't be professional," you laugh.

"Well we're past professional now," Mark admits, "But if anyone asks, I can just say I've been giving you a helping hand." He winks then and you can’t believe how easily you’ve fallen for this dork.

As you drive across Incheon bridge back to Seoul, you look out of the window and see the same stretch of sea that you saw on the way there. Except this time, the sea is not a glittering blue, it's black, barely noticeable against the wintry evening sky. The passage of time in Mark's company comforted you, it reaffirmed how much you wanted to see each subtle change of the world with him.

"And to be honest, I don't care if anyone at work knows. It's better if they do know we like each other," Mark says quietly, reaching out a hand to stroke yours instinctually.

"Yeah, they've probably guessed already. I don't mind though, half of them are fucking anyway."

Mark laughs at your candidness. "For real though, the number of times I've seen Jaemin and Jeno come out of the unused toilet together is crazy."

"Don't forget Lucas and Mina in the stock cupboard," you point out, giggling.

"We're going to have to find our own spot before they're all taken up," Mark says, his tongue poking at his cheek. He was such a tease.

You could see the first few stars sprinkled across the sky through the car windscreen. The rain had cleared and it was one of those beautiful, chilly winter nights. Still, the stars made you feel solitary.

"I don't want to be alone tonight," you admit to Mark quietly.

Mark nods "I'll stay. So the cinema and aquarium tomorrow, how does it sound?"

"It sounds lovely," you smile.

You see the city skyline in the distance, nothing more than a cluster of twinkling dots. You're excited, the night is young and filled heavy with promise.

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lupusxdei-a · 4 years ago

Text

@obciidian

Oh and one more thing. I suggest you drop that stinky attitude when you go find her.

Pff. He did not have an attitude — though come to think of it, when was the last time he’d been invited by any one of his obnoxious coworkers out for a drink or a dinner? One, two...five...Eight weeks ago? Eight seemed about right, if he had not skipped over any number of days. Then again, that was the desirable outcome, was it not? Fend them off with huffs and puffs and a long face that told of nothing other than boredom that they made him feel. The subjects of their conversations, the sound of their laughter, the unintelligent jabs at one another, the condescending tone used against juniors and sleazy comments towards random women were all tortuous - scraping at the back of the warlock’s head, begging for release. And so it came to a point where it was either his attitude to scare them away or scrape their heads in a very literal fashion.

Fine. So he did have an attitude - but Ayre the Elf was wrong. It was not stinky, it was calculated, and he was not dumb to want to scare away or anger the one person that seemed to be eligible for his final goal. As he waited shrouded in darkness, perched on his motorcycle, helmet over the head to hide his face, Soohyun could feel his entire body break into pins and needles of excitement and anticipation; his heart skipped a beat the moment he even considered the possibility of the witch named Xiuying agreeing to help him slay Belphegor.

No matter how positively pumped he’d been for the moment of...truth, Soohyun began to hesitate as soon as he discovered the witch’s flower shop. It had been at least half an hour since he’d parked his bike nearby; it had been thirty minutes of staring and analyzing, of seeing who would come and who would go, of counting how long someone who might have gone in stayed. Eventually, when the ache in his body to move became unbearably, just before he became all unsettled and jittery, he removed his helmet, ruffled the raven-black locks of hair and then got off. One breath, two breaths. The helmet was stored away and he walked towards the flower shop, an almost military-like march, shoulders straight, his head held high, his breathing under control. The fists, however, curled and opened every dozen of seconds or so, the only indication of the nervousness that had started to creep in. If she refused, he wouldn’t exactly be at a disadvantage, but if she accepted...It would all be over sooner than he expected when he’d welcomed this year.

Two breaths. He pushed the door of the shop open and looked around. “Hello,” he uttered in a half questioning and half-declarative tone, waiting for a response.

#obciidian #( — filed under: xiuying. )#( — filed under: soohyun. )

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taww · 6 years ago

Text

Review: Silverline SR17 Supreme loudspeaker

Silverline SR17 Supreme loudspeaker

The Audiophile Weekend Warrior (TAWW)

TAWW Rating: 5 / 5

Combining the body and scale of a larger speaker with traditional mini-monitor virtues, the SR17 Supreme is an exceptional conveyor of musical color and expression.

PROS: Organic midrange tone; top-to-bottom coherence; ample scale and dynamics; superb imaging; unfussy setup.

CONS: Smidge of lower midrange coloration; favors acoustic over electronic music; awkward recessed terminals.

This review has been a long time coming. Back in 2010, @mgd-taww gave the Silverline SR17 Supreme (USD $7,500) a rave review in Bound for Sound magazine, and heartily recommended them to me as an upgrade to my Merlin TSM speakers. It took me 8 years and a move to the West Coast to finally reach out to Silverline for a review pair; then another 15 months of listening to get around to this review. In the meantime, lots of speakers have come and gone in the market, particularly in the 2-way monitor category saturated with offerings at every conceivable price point. And yet, to my ears, the SR17 Supreme endures as one of the most satisfying speakers of its kind. Read on for my take on how it’s withstood the test of time.

History & Design

Silverline is a small speaker manufacturer based out of Walnut Creek, California, a short drive northeast of San Francisco. The SR17 is one of their first models dating back to a couple years after their incorporation in 1996:

1998: The SR17 debuted at the 1998 Stereophile Show in LA, sporting a Dynaudio D28/2 tweeter and Esotec 17WLQ midwoofer.

1999: Updated with an Esotec D260 tweeter and revised crossover.

2004: The SR17.5 was introduced, with increased internal volume via a deeper cabinet for better bass response.

2009: The SR17 Supreme is introduced with an Esotar T330D tweeter and further refinements.

Proprietor/designer/craftsman Alan Yun has continued tweaking the Supreme over the last decade, and though the Dynaudio drivers he prefers are out of production he’s stockpiled enough units for years of production and repairs. The enclosure, recognizable by its trapezoidal shape and depth, is manufactured in China by a shop that does cabinet work for a number of high-end marques, with final assembly performed by Alan’s own hand. He shared a bit more about their production:

California has strict environmental regulations. The paints on cabinets are governed by strict rules, and is why there are fewer and fewer cabinet makers in California. Many manufacturers now find their production overseas.

Actually our cabinets were rawly made in China, painted, and the final detailing is done by me, also putting sonic materials inside the cabinets. This job is pretty tricky for tweaking the sound. The crossovers were handmade by me, matching components, soldering, etc. The drivers were fitted carefully and precisely by my hands with European-made T-15A screws. Final testing and listening are all done by me in my workshop. 😅 Therefore, the SR 17 is rather unique. I am also the original designer of this shape/type of speaker cabinet since 1996. I did research and to the best of my knowledge there were no similar designs then.

Large, but not ungainly, atop Dynaudio Stand 6′s

The depth of the cabinet - 15 inches, to be exact - gives it a rather top-heavy look on a typical stand, but it’s mitigated by the elegant tapered profile. My pair was impeccably finished on all sides in rosewood veneer. Rapping down the sides revealed it to be very solid, but not as fanatically braced and damped as my old Merlin TSM monitors or the Audiovector SR 1. Each speaker weighs around 26 lbs. The bi-wire terminals are recessed, which made them a bit of a pain, particularly as they have larger rectangular posts that will take 1/4" spades only in certain directions - I recommend banana terminations.

The crossover sports just 4 components, with 1st order high-pass (tweeter) and 2nd order low-pass (woofer) filters. Parts quality - Solen metallized polypropylene capacitors, a generic-looking wirewound resistor and an air-core inductor - is solid but hardly fancy, a deliberate decision by Alan who isn’t much of a believer in expensive boutique parts. Based on the results he’s achieved here, it’s hard to argue.

Cardas jumpers sounded better than the stock bridges to my ears. Stick with bananas for the cable termination - spades are awkward.

Setup

The SR17 is fairly efficient (nominally 90.5 dB/watt @ 8 ohms), but more importantly it's easy to drive - my Ayre AX7e, known for being rather limited in the power delivery department, sounded open and effortless. Alan Yun said the Dynaudio drivers love current and will benefit from powerful amplifiers, yet will sing with low-powered tube amps. I can confirm it loved the grunt of the 300wpc Bryston 4B Cubed, yet I never felt lower-power amps like the Ayre or Bryston B60 integrateds were lacking for dynamics. And my favorite pairing by far was with the 55-watt Valvet A4 Mk.II class A monoblocks sporting a single pair of bipolar output devices. (Incidentally, Alan’s favorite amp paring with the SR17 is the 30-watt Pass Labs XA30.5, which @mgd-taww can attest to being a magical combo.)

Similarly, I found the SR17 easy-going when it came to cables. My preferred cable had more to do with the amp used, but I got good results from a single run of Audience Au24 SX [review], Cardas Clear Light and DH Labs Q10 Signature cables. With the Audience, I felt the speaker was the sweetest and most dimensional; the DH Labs brought out more bass power and treble brilliance; while the Cardas brought out more upper midrange presence. With the Bryston 4B3 amp, I settled on the Cardas; with the Ayre and Valvet, the Audience was the clear winner. Unlike with the Audiovector SR 1 Avantgarde Arreté (review forthcoming), I didn't find bi-wiring to lend a noticeable improvement, but I did prefer replacing the stock metal jumpers with nicer Cardas ones from my Merlin TSM's for a little more refinement.

As with any high-quality monitor, stands are important. Something around 24-25” height seems right, though I wouldn’t be afraid to sit them an inch or two lower as the speakers are capable of projecting good image height. A trend these days is to decouple speakers from the stands/floor, but the SR17’s are “old school” in that they prefer tight coupling, meaning heavy suckers with spikes and a judicious amount of BluTack on the top plate. My old Osiris stands, heavy dual-column steel beauties loaded with sand, were a perfect match, but sadly I sold them with my Merlin TSM’s; they were replaced by higher-WAF but inferior-sounding Dynaudio Stand 6’s, which in stock form are quite light and choked the sound of the Silverlines. Fortunately I was able to get them to a better place with some tweaks; not as good as the Osiris, but close. A better choice sonically might be something like the Target Audio MR stand with the four pillars mass-loaded.

Pulling them out further improves imaging, but they still work well relatively close to the back wall.

Placement was pretty standard for a monitor speaker - keep it at least a couple feet from the back wall, with a 2:3 width-to-listener distance ratio and toed in about halfway. In my room, which has a number of living constraints, I had the back of the speaker about 21” from the wall, tweeters 76” apart and the plane of the speaker 8 ft. from my ears. While many small-box monitors rely (often excessively) on rear ports for low-end boost, the bass tuning on the SR17 is far more subtle and sophisticated - putting my ear to the port, I heard a fairly modest amount of output. I remarked this to Alan, and he described the port as more a method of pressure equalization than bass volume. This means in a pinch I could push the speakers as close as 12" from the wall without fear of low notes booming out of control. All in all, for being such a high-performing design, the SR17 is remarkably easy to live with.

The Sound

The first thing my wife, a professional oboist, noticed about music through the SR17 is how dynamically alive it was. I had just wrapped up my review of the Silverline Minuet Grand, a superb $2k speaker that is no dynamic slouch itself. And even though the SR17 was fresh out of the box and Alan warned me it would take some time to run in, the very first notes from the SR17 sung with expressiveness and vibrance. I think it took all of 15 minutes of listening to Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra streaming radio for her to remark, “I like this speaker.” She’s normally nonchalant about hi-fi, and yet has ears that can pick apart sonic deficiencies in about 90 seconds, so that amounts to a rave! And what made it so immediately engaging wasn't some artificial emphasis or hype; it was a feeling of unimpeded dynamic flow that makes most other speakers sound a bit drab. The SR17 lets music breath freely, carrying you with the ebb and flow of a tune and conveying every turn of a phrase with a sense of ease and conviction.

The next thing we noticed is how natural and palpable everything sounds through the SR17. Tonally, the SR17 is on the very slightly warm side of neutral; it combines reassuring solidity and density from the mid-bass through the midrange with an open, extended top end and fine harmonic resolution. Its ability to paint with a wide palette of tonal colors brings out the distinctive character of instruments and voices, making orchestral music a delight - just put on a Living Stereo recording such as Debussy’s Iberia [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify] and the front of your room will explode with the virtuosity of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s playing. Scale it down to smaller stuff like a Beethoven string quartet, and you’ll savor the finer gradations of timbre between the cello, viola and violin.

What you won’t notice is any discontinuity between the woofer and tweeter. These Dynaudio drivers were made to work together, and the minimal crossover mating them is superbly executed. The upper midrange around the crossover point is seamless, and I can’t remember a single moment over the course of hundreds of hours of listening when I noticed the tweeter sticking out on the face of the speaker, something that ails even the finest, most expensive dynamic speakers from time to time. In this respect the SR17 is up there with the very best and is utterly free of listening fatiguing.

As a violinist, I feel obliged to point out the Silverline’s superb reproduction of the violin G string. If you ever want to test out a speaker’s tonal truthfulness in the lower midrange (right around middle C, 262Hz), put on the 2nd movement of the Glazunov violin concerto performed by Jascha Heifetz [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify], or the 2nd movement of the Sibelius concerto performed by Lisa Batiashvili [Tidal, Spotify]. This is oh-so-tricky to get right; as the lowest string on the instrument, it’s the richest and deepest; and yet the violin is not a viola or cello - it’s a more subtle and delicate richness. Speakers that lack body will sound thin and washed out and minimize the difference in timbre vs. the D string above; woolly or bloated speakers will thicken it or blow the instrument out of proportion. The SR17 performs this balancing act better than anything I’ve heard in my living room, or in most any system for that matter. It rides the line between warmth and clarity in that register, lending tangible realism to piano, male vocals and low brass instruments as well.

Going down the frequency range, the SR17’s extra cabinet volume vs. a typical mini monitor gives it power and scale more akin to a floorstander. My room is a 17 x 19 x 8.5 ft. open layout living/kitchen area with floor-to-ceiling windows and an offset listening point along the long wall, so while not huge, it presents a bit of an acoustic challenge that smaller speakers have struggled to fill. The SR17 had no trouble projecting a big, bold sonic image, and can cleanly play as loud as you’d reasonably want in such a space. It has sufficient body and power down to 60Hz or so to give music real foundation, with meaningful output down to 40Hz. I think Silverline’s quoted 32Hz bottom limit is a bit optimistic (or perhaps you just need the right room), and I preferred the speaker with my REL T-9 subwoofer providing a little extra oomph. But for a great many listeners in moderately-sized spaces, this will be all the speaker you ever need. Listening to “The Elephant” from Saint-Saëns Carnival of the Animals [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify], a track I’ve heard on some very full-range speakers (e.g. Focal Grande Utopia EM Evo), the double bass is big and present, lacking a bit of rumble that was easily provided by flipping on the REL sub. Piano left hand similarly has nice weight, never sounding diminished in scale as typically happens on small monitors. Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées song cycle from the album Paysages by soprano Susanna Phillips and pianist Myra Huang [Tidal, Spotify] is a lovely test of colors, with ethereal vocals floating above dark undertones from the piano’s lower register. The Silverline possesses suficient extension and body to bring out these contrasts with depth and balance.

At the opposite end, the old-school Esotar tweeter is still one of the most musical high frequency transducers around. It balances detail with smoothness, extends low enough to mate perfectly with the woofer, and never sounds strained - a substantial upgrade in resolution and realism over the typical metal or silk domes in lesser speakers. In top-end extension and speed it might be bettered by some of the newfangled devices like Focal’s beryllium or B&W’s diamond domes, Scanspeak’s latest Revelator or the fantastic AMT in the Audiovector SR 1, but it’s a relatively small sin of omission and a worthwhile trade off to avoid any hint of unnatural edge or ringing. And it still has plenty of sharpness and sparkle, lending nice bite to trumpets and sheen to triangles and cymbals.

Last but not least, there’s that soundstage - present and tactile, but never in-your-face. Particularly when coupled with gear with sufficient resolution to relay subtle ambient information, e.g. the Pass XP10 preamp, there’s a real sense of the layout and layers of a symphony orchestra. The hi-res LSO Live recording of Mendelssohn’s "Reformation" Symphony with the London Symphony/Gardiner [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify] paints a vivid picture of the stage of the Barbican, with brass fanfares anchored closer to the back wall of the fan-shaped stage, and the smaller string section sounding up front and intimate. An interesting twist in this performance is Sir Gardiner had the violinists standing to emphasize the virtuosity of Mendelssohn’s writing, and while I can’t say I would have been able to tell this from listening alone, the Silverline does convey a subtle sense of freedom and space to the violin section that I’ve missed when listening to the recording on other systems. And it has no trouble imaging well outside the bounds of the speaker, with percussion and harp on the extreme left of the stage floating eerily behind and beyond the left speaker.

I think my wife put it best when I asked her one day how the system sounded with the Silverlines: “this is what I imagine it sounded like in the concert hall.” While I’ve broken down a bunch of its strengths in audiophile terms above, it’s the way it puts everything together into a musically vivid whole that makes it special. There’s an evenness of tone, a naturalness of perspective, an ease of dynamic expression, a consistency of refinement from top to bottom that gives music a sense of rightness that allows one to forget the hi-fi aspects and focus on the musical performance. In this respect, Alan Yun has crafted something truly masterful in the SR17 Supreme.

Caveats & Comparisons

I’ll nitpick a few things that were relatively minor deficiencies to my ears, but may weigh more heavily for people with different tastes. These were highlighted in my own home by direct comparison with another very fine monitor speaker, the Audiovector SR 1 Avantgarde Arreté ($6,200 in premium finish). I also have my long-term reference, the Merlin TSM-MXe (around $6k several years ago) as a baseline.

First off, I suspect the Silverline’s hint of lower midrange warmth, while sounding natural and consonant with much of my favored acoustic music, may come from a bit of otherwise well-controlled cabinet resonance. It gently highlights the woody quality of acoustic instruments, but with electronic music it comes across as a slight coloration - a bit like wearing orange-tinted sunglasses that make everything look a little less cool. It’s very subtle, and not enough to sound overtly “boxy” or throw voices off, but it’s not transcendentally-clean like the Audiovector or, say, a Magico. My sense is Alan wisely tuned the SR17 cabinet for this response, as additional bracing would just make the resonance peakier and higher in frequency where the ear is more sensitive; as it is, it’s a gentle and diffuse coloration. Part of this may also be the sonic signature of the Esotec woofer’s magnesium silicate polymer cone, which I’ve heard in a number of speakers and to my ears trades better damping for a hair less crispness vs. some of the fancier treated paper or composite cones out there. On the plus side, it never sounds dry as some of those drivers can, but with Erlend Øye’s Unrest [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify] or Carley Rae Jepsen’s Emotion [Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify] I found the Audiovector conveyed more of hard-wired immediacy and edge suitable for those albums.

Taking turns with the Audiovector SR 1 Avantgarde Arreté

Another area where the Audiovector came out slightly ahead of the Silverlines was in resolution during loud dynamic peaks. The Audiovector is truly special in this regard, being designed for minimal signal compression and sounding incredibly collected the louder you play them. The Silverline also plays loudly with ease, but vs. the über-clean Audiovector it’s very slightly thicker and more congested. Case in point are the fortissimo climaxes and interruptions in Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri overture [Tidal, Spotify] - when the orchestra comes crashing in after the pianissimo pizzicato opening, both speakers are clean and explosive, but the Audiovector sorts out the different instruments playing in unison for that brief moment a hair better, while the Silverline has more low-end oomph.

As mentioned prior, the Silverline’s superb Esotar tweeter isn’t the state-of-the-art in extension. It has plenty of resolution, but if you favor extremely extended and airy highs, e.g. the 52kHz-rated AMT tweeter in the Audiovector will give you more of that. I don’t think that ultimately matters so much for musical enjoyment (and many people can’t hear very well above 10kHz anyway), but it does make a subtle difference in realism. It also makes the Silverline’s treble a bit more forgiving of poor recordings and upstream components (silver cables could work) - it’ll never, ever burn your ears off.

The $7,500 price tag of the Silverline puts it squarely above the very crowded $5k-and-under monitor crowd, but short of the $10k+ “super monitor” category. Comparisons with other speakers are more conjecture on my part as I haven’t heard them in my own room... but I’ll mention a few things I’ve gotten a good listen to at shows, dealers, and other people’s systems.

Paradigm’s Persona series seems to be mentioned quite frequently in audio forums these days, and I heard the Persona B monitor ($7,000) briefly at RMAF. I’ve also listened to the floorstanding Persona 3F a bit, and there’s definitely a common house sound - fast, crisp, detailed and dynamic. I’ve never warmed up to either of them - they’ve struck me as rather strident, with instrumental interplays like oboes and clarinets playing in harmony tending to sound compressed. The Silverline by comparison may sound a bit thicker, but it has far more natural instrumental timbre to my ears, is less bright and thus easier to match to more systems, throws a more dimensional and properly-placed soundstage, and is very nearly as “fast” without sounding edgy. I’m honestly at a loss as to why the Personas are garnering so much praise, so maybe it’s just me? A similar argument could be made for the B&W 805 S3 ($6,000) - while I haven’t auditioned them specifically, I’m pretty familiar with the 800-series sound and again, it’s not my cup of tea. The Silverline’s balance and openness just strike me as much more natural than anything I’ve heard from B&W. So if the likes of B&W and Paradigm leave you a bit cold, the SR17 Supreme might be a step in the right direction.

An obvious comparison is to Dynaudio’s own bookshelves, specifically the Contour 20 ($5,000) and Special Forty ($2,995). You can read about them in my quick review from a dealer audition, and while I haven’t heard them head-to-head, I posit that the Silverline a worthwhile step up in coherence and musicality. If you can’t stretch the budget for the Silverline I think the Special Forty would be a good alternative, but it does not have the near-reference level neutrality of the Silverline. In the past Dynaudio had a bit of a reputation for not being as good at implementing their own drivers in complete loudspeakers as other companies were, and while I think their latest efforts are much improved, Alan Yun still seems to be squeezing more out of the old Esotar/Esotec drivers in the SR17... methinks this is a reflection of Alan’s sharp ear and painstaking hand-tuning.

A few more offhandish observations based on extremely limited auditions, so take with a block of salt: I heard the Wilson Audio TuneTot ($9,800) at a dealer shortly after its release. With the caveats that it’s designed for a totally different use case, it was in an unfamiliar setup and this pair wasn’t fully run in, I didn’t find it nearly as compelling or expressive. I got a good listen to the TAD Micro Evolution One ($12,495) with a couple different amps and found its midrange rather dry, upper midrange a bit peaky and its bass lacking fullness and extension vs. the Silverline. The Artist Cloner Rebel Reference ($16k w/stands) wowed me at RMAF - it seemed to have more speed and resolution than the Silverline, though the upper midrange was a hair pronounced. It would be an interesting comparison, even at twice the price. Another interesting monitor at RMAF was the Stenheim Alumine Two ($13k) which was super clean and detailed, but perhaps not as liquid. A more logical competitor/upgrade could be the Sonus faber Electa Amator III ($10k) that I also heard at RMAF. That speaker absolutely blew me away with its expressiveness, natural richness, insane dynamics and huge presentation in the show setup. It’s the speaker that I’m most dying to compare to the Silverline.

And to wrap up the comparison to my Merlins and the Audiovectors - I sold my beloved Merlins shortly after receiving the Silverlines, and wound up purchasing both the Silverlines and the Audiovectors as I just couldn’t decide between the two. That should give you an idea of just how much I like them both; I’ll have more to say about the Audiovector in a forthcoming review.

Verdict

It's been said speakers mirror the personality of their designers, and if you've met the talented and affable Alan Yun no doubt you’ll feel his influence. Much like the man behind it, the SR17 Supreme is sharp, earnest and engaging, yet easy-going, with an unforced warmth and great attention to detail. There’s something grounded and unfussy about the way it allows music to flow forth, feeling like it's taken an expressive limiter off of a recording without hyping it in any way. It checks off many of the audiophile boxes too - imaging, tonal balance, bass power and extension, etc. etc. - but focusing on those mechanical aspects, as excellent as they are, would be selling Alan’s accomplishment short. The SR17 Supreme is first and foremost a faithful and thoroughly enjoyable reproducer of music, one capable of strongly evoking the beauty of the original musical event. There are countless 2-way monitors superficially like this one, but few that I know that are so meticulously and lovingly tuned to such great effect.

I've spent a lot of words espousing this speaker, but I think it's deserving of it, not just because of the obvious quality of the product, but because Silverline is a small manufacturer flying under the radar without a big dealer network or advertising budget. While Alan continues to develop his entry-level Minuet and Prelude lines at a more rapid pace to keep up with market demands, he doesn’t pen up new versions of his reference models every couple years to generate hype. He’s instead chosen his design fundamentals wisely and focused on perfecting their execution through years of painstaking refinement, much as the late Bobby Palkovic @ Merlin Music did. Like Bobby, he has a great ear for music, does a lot of the production work himself, and gains most of his sales through word of mouth. This does make it trickier to find than the big brands at a typical shop, but I strongly encourage seeking out an opportunity to hear it. The SR17 Supreme is a special speaker, and it won't be leaving my living room any time soon.

Silverline Audio P.O. Box 30574 Walnut Creek, CA 94598 USA

#audiophile #audio #hifi #loudspeaker #speaker #review

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squeemcsquee · 6 years ago

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Anime Zap 2019, Friday

Previous Posts: Cosplay/Dressing Fun at Anime Zap 2019

Two weeks post-con and I’m finally getting my review done. I need to work on that...

As I think I’ve mentioned before, Anime Zap is my hometown con. It’s small (2,000 attendees, give or take a few hundred, probably) and relatively relaxed. My friends ( @shbumi @lechevaliermalfet @el-draco-bizarro and @someoldmemory for those on tumblr) and I find it a great way to hang out, have fun, and see Greg Ayres again.

This year, I had the brilliant plan of working 4 hours in the morning, then going home, changing into cosplay, eating, and making it on time to the start of the con at 12:00. In actuality, I think @lechevaliermalfet and I got there at about 12:15 or so.

This year, our friend group had a couple of first-time attendees on hand. Now, my rule for Zap is that if I’m the one extending the invite, I pay for the person’s badge for the weekend. Especially, as with my friend Ryn, they can only experience one day. Zap doesn’t have single-day pricing and demands cash at the door. To me, $40 cash at the door is a little steep for one day.

That is, honestly, an aspect of the con I’d like to see change. I think they had one-day passes back when I first began attending, but those were eliminated. Then again, the con is locked in with the Embassy Suites for ten years, and maybe they’re concerned about growing too quickly.

Anyway, we met with Ryn, and got ourselves all checked in. I was sad to see the return of the simple red cord lanyards after last year’s lanyards. But no big - the main thing is that the badge holds up, right? Badges this year looked nice, but were also minimalistic in artwork compared to previous years’ efforts. But at least we got to see artwork on the programs, as usual.

Once checked in, we grabbed programs and picked our first panel: Conspiracy Theories.

It was sparsely populated for the size of the room, but that was to be expected. This was the start of the con and most of Zap’s attendees are younger - they were probably at school still. As for how I enjoyed it, I can’t honestly say. Some of it was interesting and entertaining, and some of it was just too out there.

We left a few minutes early to get into the line for Opening Ceremonies. And I observed another change for Zap - Opening Ceremonies was now further down the hall, closer to the viewing room. The video gaming room acted as a buffer between it and the Dealer’s Room.

Of course, if I’d looked at the map in my program, I’d have noticed it sooner, but at least this was a pleasant surprise!

I loved it. From what I could tell, moving down to the next ballroom hadn’t sacrificed any space for events. You couldn’t notice the noise bleeding over, since Video Gaming has its own ruckus. And it meant the walls of the Dealer’s Room weren’t shaking through the weekend, either. I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing the artists positioned at that end of the con also got a bit more foot traffic over the weekend.

Speaking of artists/vendors, we had time to browse a few before Opening Ceremonies began. One vendor had some awesome jackets, though sadly not in my price range for the weekend - here’s Ryn modeling one:

As far as Opening Ceremonies go, I need to give props to the Live Events team, as they are always upbeat and enthusiastic. Also, Greg Ayres was the only guest who was on-hand at the time, as the others were delayed arriving. We were also informed that Steak n Shake was closed on Friday for a water main break. Thankfully, though that’s the most popular place to eat during Zap, there are plenty of other options.

As is somewhat usual for Zap, Opening Ceremonies ended early and we were released into the con proper.

None of us had anything on the schedule we were absolutely itching to attend until Greg Ayres at 3, so we went to the dealer and gaming spaces to kill time.

Not a bad crowd for early in the day!

As has become a bit of habit for me with Zap, I made mental notes for what I was maybe going to get later in the weekend. But I also made sure to get a print and sticker that I wasn’t sure were going to last.

Another change that I noticed - and that wasn’t in the map - was that Zap was again utilizing the rooms across the hall from Panels 1 & 2. Those two rooms held an artist/dealer area and a tabletop gaming space, respectively. It was nice to see the con taking advantage of so much space.

Video gaming at Zap always has at least one thing I want to try out. This year, there were a couple different dancing games, Rock Band (Guitar Hero only for me, prior to this), a rhythm game that was very trippy but very fun, and then an arcade cabinet that actually had a bubble pop game. I think I killed more time in Zap’s gaming room this year than in previous years.

Note to self: Cosplaying the Impala is not helpful for full-body dance games. And I need help with these, trust me. But despite my poor skills, it was fun!

The Many Voices, Hobbies, and Hair Colors of Greg Ayres was entertaining, as always. Greg is pretty much a staple of Zap, and always a highlight of the weekend.

After that, I debated attending Samurai Dan and Lady Jillian’s self defense panel, but as I’ve gone to it before, I opted out. Instead, I roamed the tabletop gaming areas a bit with @shbumi and Ryn, and played some Pokemon Go.

Last year, I had an exterior shot of the hotel itself. But this year, I want to include a shot of the views they have to offer.

We did finish with Pokemon Go and exploring in time to go into the final two demonstrations of No Sword? No Problem! Anime Fan Self-Defense.

Afterwards, it was time to sort out dinner. But first, we had a tasting adventure.

Now, normally Japanese junk food prices are super high in a dealer’s room. However, there was a vendor at Zap this year who priced everything pretty fairly. So, @shbumi got some durian-flavored mochi. $5 for 6 pieces. @shbumi was the only one who managed to eat a whole piece. Mochi in itself is pretty good - it was the flavor that was the sticking point. Durian is very...divisive, to say the least.

I think our taste test will become one of my favorite con memories, honestly.

With Steak n Shake out of the equation, we opted for Jimmy John’s for dinner. And after dinner, was @lechevaliermalfet‘s first panel of the weekend: A Brief History of Ys.

Since he’s done it a few times now, we decided to try something new and filmed the panel, in hopes of either posting the footage on YouTube or at least figuring out where he can add/take away things. (We haven’t reviewed the video yet to see what kind of quality we got). Since I wasn’t sure I could record it in full on my phone without resorting to live streaming, we did stream it (and his other 2 panels) over Facebook Live.

Con Horror Stories was up next. Both @shbumi and I came very close to offering up our story of the time I ruined her Lapis cosplay, but in the end, we opted just to listen to everyone else’s stories.

We went to the Greg Ayres - Raw and Uncensored event next. Anime Zap brought back the 18+ wristbands, which are really a lifesaver.

And then, to cap off the evening, was Sh*t New Cosplayers Say. Moral of this panel? “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” I was too busy giggling to snap a photo during this panel.

And that was my Friday at Zap! It left me with a great feeling for the course of the weekend!

I’ll put up Saturday and Sunday in separate posts. They won’t be as photo heavy, because wow apparently most of my photos were on Friday this year.

Up next:

Anime Zap 2019, Saturday

Anime Zap 2019, Sunday

#anime zap #anime zap 2019 #convention review #prose and cons #convention report

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sinrau · 4 years ago

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Clint Lorance had been in charge of his platoon for only three days when he ordered his men to kill three Afghans stopped on a dirt road.

A second-degree murder conviction and pardon followed.

Today, Lorance is hailed as a hero by President Trump.

His troops have suffered a very different fate.

Depression

Fatal car crash

Shooting death

Cancer

Hospitalizations

Drug abuse

PTSD

Arrests

Alcoholism

Suicide

‘The Cursed Platoon’

By Greg Jaffe

James O. Twist poses with local children during his deployment in Afghanistan in 2012. (Courtesy of the Twist family)

They thought of the calls and texts from him that they didn’t answer because they were too busy with their own lives — and Twist, who had a caring wife, a good job and a nice house — seemed like he was doing far better than most. They didn’t know that behind closed doors he was at times verbally abusive, ashamed of his inner torment and, like so many of them, unable to articulate his pain.By November 2019, Twist, a man the soldiers of 1st Platoon loved, was gone and Lorance was free from prison and headed for New York City, a new life and a star turn on Fox News.This story is based on a transcript of Lorance’s 2013 court-martial at Fort Bragg, N.C., and on-the-record interviews with 15 members of 1st Platoon, as well as family members of the soldiers, including Twist’s father and wife. The soldiers also shared texts and emails they exchanged over the past several years. Twist’s family provided his journal entries from his time in the Army. Lorance declined to be interviewed.In New York, Sean Hannity, Lorance’s biggest champion and the man most responsible for persuading Trump to pardon him, asked Lorance about the shooting and soldiers under his command.Lorance had traded in his Army uniform for a blazer and red tie. He leaned in to the microphone. “I don’t know any of these guys. None of them know me,” Lorance said of his former troops. “To be honest with you, I can’t even remember most of their names.”

The soldiers of 1st Platoon tell their story

An ‘entire month of despair’

Soldiers from the 1st Platoon fire a mortar during a firefight with Taliban in April 2012 in Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)

The 1st Platoon soldiers came to the Army and the war from all over the country: Maryland, California, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Indiana and Texas to name just a few. They joined for all the usual reasons: “To keep my parents off my a–,” said one soldier.

“I just needed a change,” said another.

A few had tried college but quit because they were bored or failing their classes. “I didn’t know how to handle it,” Gray said of college. “I was really immature.”

Others joined right out of high school propelled by romantic notions, inherited from veteran fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers, of service and duty. Twist’s father served in Vietnam as a clerk in an air-conditioned office before coming back to Michigan and opening a garage. In his spare time Twist Sr. was a military history buff, a passion that rubbed off on his son, who visited World War II battle sites in Europe with his dad. Twist was just 16 when he started badgering his parents to sign his enlistment papers and barely 18 when he left for basic training. His mother had died of cancer only a few months earlier.

“I got pictures of him the day we dropped him off, and he didn’t even wave goodbye,” his father recalled. “He was in pig heaven.”

Members of the 1st Platoon James O. Twist, Reyler Leon, Joe Morrissey, Andy Lehrer, Mike McGuinness, Dallas Haggard (kneeling) and Brandon Krebs pose with a flag in Afghanistan in 2012. (Courtesy of the Twist family)

Several of the 1st Platoon soldiers enlisted in search of a steady paycheck and the promise of health insurance and a middle-class life. “I needed to get out of northeast Ohio,” McGuinness said. “There wasn’t anything there.”

In 1999, he was set to pay his first union dues and go to work alongside his steelworker grandfather when the plant closed. So he became a paratrooper instead, eventually deploying three times to Afghanistan.

McGuinness didn’t look much like a paratrooper with his thick, squat body. But he liked being a soldier, jumping out of planes, firing weapons and drinking with his Army buddies. After a while the war didn’t make much sense, but he took pride in knowing that his soldiers trusted him and that he was good at his job.

Nine months before 1st Platoon landed in rural southern Afghanistan, a team of Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden.

Jarred Ruhl, Dallas Haggard and Mike McGuinness in Afghanistan in June 2012. (Courtesy of the Carson family)

Samuel Walley, the badly wounded soldier Twist pulled from the blast crater, wondered if they might be spared combat. “Wasn’t that the goal to kill bin Laden?” he recalled thinking. “Isn’t that checkmate?”

Around the same time, Twist was trying to make sense of what was to come. “I feel like the Army was a good decision, but also in my mind is a lot of dark thoughts,” he wrote in a spiral notebook. “I could die. I could come back with PTSD. I could be massively injured.”

“Maybe,” he hoped, “it will start winding down soon.”

But the decade-long war continued, driven by new, largely unattainable goals. When McGuinness saw where the platoon was headed — just 15 or so miles from the spot in southern Afghanistan where he had spent his second tour — he warned the new soldiers they were going to be “fighting against dudes who just really f—ing hate you.”

[ Are you a veteran? We want to hear your response to this story.4 ]

They were told by commanders they were waging a counterinsurgency war in which their top priority was winning the support of the people and protecting them from the Taliban. But no one seemed entirely sure how to accomplish that goal. They helped build a school that never opened because of a lack of teachers and willing students. They met with village elders who insisted they knew nothing about the Taliban’s operations or plans.

An Afghan girl watches as soldiers from the 1st Platoon walk by during a mission in April 2012, in the Zhary district of Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)

In May 2012, they moved to a new compound near Payenzai, a remote Afghan village west of Kandahar, which consisted of little more than mud-walled houses, hardscrabble farmers and the Taliban.

So began what Twist described, in a blog post written years later, as an “entire month of despair.”

Four soldiers were severely wounded in quick succession. On June 6, Walley lost his leg and arm to a Taliban bomb. Eight days later, yet another enemy mine wounded Mark Kerner and 1st Lt. Dominic Latino, the platoon leader. Then, on June 23, a sniper’s bullet tore through Matthew Hanes’s neck, leaving him paralyzed.

The platoon was briefly sent back to a larger base a few miles away to shower, meet with mental-health counselors and pick up their new platoon leader. Lorance had served a tour as an enlisted prison guard in Iraq before attending college and becoming an infantry officer. He had spent the first five months of his Afghanistan tour as a staff officer on a fortified base.

This was his first time in combat.

1st Lt. Clint Lorance during training at Fort Bragg before the deployment to Afghanistan in 2012. (Photo by Alan Gladney)

“We’re not going to lose any more men to injuries in this platoon,” he told then-Sgt. 1st Class Keith Ayres, his platoon sergeant, shortly after taking over on June 29, according to Ayres’s testimony.

His strategy, he said, was a “shock and awe” campaign designed to cow the enemy and intimidate villagers into coughing up valuable intelligence. When an Afghan farmer and his young son approached the outpost’s front gate and asked permission to move a section of razor wire a few feet so that the farmer could get into his field, Lorance threatened to have Twist and the other soldiers on guard duty kill him and his boy.

“He pointed at the child . . . at the little, tiny kid,” Twist testified. He estimated the child was 3 or 4 years old.

On Lorance’s second day, he ordered two of his sharpshooters to fire within 10 to 12 inches of unarmed villagers. His goal was to make the Afghans wonder why the Americans were shooting at them and motivate them to attend a village meeting that Lorance had scheduled for later in the week, his soldiers testified.

His real motive, though, seems to have been cruelty. “It’s funny watching those f—ers dance,” Lorance said, according to the testimony of one of his soldiers. Lorance didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he stood by his men in the guard towers, picked the targets and issued orders. His troops finally balked when he told them to shoot near children. They refused again a few hours later when he ordered them to file a false report saying that they had taken fire from the village.

“If I don’t have the support of my NCOs then I’ll f—ing do it myself,” Lorance exclaimed, according to testimony, referring to noncommissioned officers.

Sgt. 1st Class Keith Ayres looks over maps with other soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division in April 2012, before a joint mission with the Afghan army in Kandahar province. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)

On the day of the killings for which he would be convicted, Lorance posted a sign in the platoon headquarters stating that no motorcycles would be permitted in his unit’s sector. The platoon’s soldiers were falsely told before the day’s patrol that motorcycles should be considered “hostile and engaged on sight.” Several soldiers testified that Lorance told them that senior U.S. officials had ordered the change. At least two sergeants recalled the guidance had come from the Afghans and did not apply to U.S. forces. Due to the conflicting testimony, the jury of Army officers acquitted Lorance of changing the rules of engagement. Still, Lorance’s actions left soldiers confused on the critical, life-or-death question of when they were authorized to open fire.

The mission that day was a foot patrol into a nearby village to meet the elders.

Less than 30 minutes after they rolled out of the gate, three men on a motorcycle approached a cluster of Afghan National Army troops at the front of their formation. Lorance and his troops were standing about 150 to 200 yards away in an orchard, tucked behind a series of five-foot-high mud walls on which the Afghans grew grapes.

At the trial, Lorance’s soldiers recalled how he had ordered them to fire.

“Why aren’t you shooting?” he demanded.

A U.S. soldier fired and missed. The motorcycle carrying the three men, none of whom appeared to be armed, came to a stop. Upon hearing the shots, McGuinness began running toward Lorance, who was closer to the front of the U.S. patrol, to see why they were shooting.

The puzzled Afghans were now standing next to the stopped motorcycle, “trying to figure out what had happened,” according to one soldier’s testimony. Gray, who was watching from a nearby armored vehicle, recognized the eldest of the three men as someone the Americans regularly met with in the village. He recalled the Afghans waving at them.

Todd Fitzgerald testifies during Clint Lorance’s 2013 court-martial at Fort Bragg, N.C.

“Smoke ’em,” Lorance ordered over the radio.

At first Gray and the other soldiers in the armored vehicle weren’t sure whom Lorance wanted them to shoot. “There was a back and forth with the three of us in the vehicle,” Gray recalled in an interview.

Then Pvt. David Shilo, who was in the turret of the armored vehicle just inches from Gray, fired, striking one of the men, who fell into a drainage ditch. Because the platoon had been told that morning that motorcycles weren’t allowed in their sector, Shilo testified that he thought he was acting on a lawful order. Shilo declined to be interviewed.

The two surviving Afghan men bent to retrieve their dead colleague when Shilo cleared his weapon and shot again, killing a second Afghan. The third man ran away. Two U.S. soldiers testified that it was possible that an Afghan soldier also fired.

A few minutes later, a boy approached the dead men and the motorcycle, which was standing on the side of the road with its kickstand still down. Lorance ordered Shilo to fire a third time and disable the bike. This time he refused.

“I wasn’t going to shoot a 12-year-old boy,” Shilo testified.

David Shilo testifies during Clint Lorance’s 2013 trial at Fort Bragg, N.C.

Relatives of the dead were now on the scene screaming and crying. Lorance’s immediate superior officer, Capt. Patrick Swanson, who was two miles away and couldn’t see what was happening, ordered him over the radio to search the bodies.

Lorance was convicted of lying to Swanson, telling him that villagers had carried off the corpses before his men could examine them. In fact, Lorance’s troops searched the bodies of the dead Afghans and found ID cards, scissors, some pens and three cucumbers, but no weapons, according to testimony.

The troops continued their patrol into the village while McGuinness and a small team of soldiers provided cover from a nearby roof. About 30 minutes after the first shooting, McGuinness spotted two Afghan men talking on radios.

“We have to do something to the Americans,” one of the men was saying, according to U.S. intercepts. McGuinness and his troops received permission from the company headquarters to fire and killed the two men. The platoon cut short the patrol and returned to the base.

At the outpost the soldiers were shaken. “This doesn’t feel right,” Gray said.

“It’s not f—ing right at all,” McGuinness replied.

Lucas Gray, Joe Fjeldheim and Mike McGuinness in Afghanistan 2012. (Courtesy of the Carson family)

A few minutes later Lorance burst into the platoon’s headquarters ebullient. “That was f—ing awesome,” he exclaimed, according to court testimony.

“Ayres looked sick,” one of the platoon’s soldiers testified. McGuinness was furious.

The lieutenant tried to reassure his sergeants. “I know how to report it up [so] nobody gets in trouble,” he said, according to testimony.

Lorance’s soldiers turned him in that evening, and at the July 2013 trial, 14 of his men testified under oath against him. Four of those soldiers received immunity in exchange for their testimony. Lorance did not appear on the stand, and not one of his former 1st Platoon soldiers spoke in his defense. The trial lasted three days. It took the jury of Army officers three hours to find him guilty of second-degree murder, making false statements and ordering his men to fire at Afghan civilians. The jury handed down a 20-year sentence.

In response to a Lorance clemency request, an Army general reviewed the conviction and reduced the sentence by one year.

‘Why do you care so much?’

Dave Zettel reveals a tattoo of a lighter to represent the 82nd deployment outside his home in Blythewood, S.C. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

The war crimes and their aftermath followed Lorance’s soldiers home to Fort Bragg and, in some cases, into their nightmares. On many nights Gray woke up to the image of a group of Afghan soldiers surrounding his cot and emptying their rifles into his sleeping body in retaliation for the murders.

“I dreamed it,” he said, “because I thought that’s what would happen.”

Dave Zettel wasn’t on the patrol when the killings were committed but was in the guard tower when Lorance ordered him and another soldier to fire harassing shots into the neighboring village. On his first full day back in the States, Zettel went out to a dinner with a large group from the platoon and their families.

By the end of the night, the soldiers, rattled from the tour, the stress of Lorance’s upcoming trial and the return home, were intoxicated and emotionally falling apart. Zettel held it together until he was alone in a taxi with his wife and brother. In the quiet of the cab, he felt a crushing guilt that he had made it home unscathed.

“I just lost my s—. I felt like a failure,” he said. “I felt abandoned and so f—ing angry.”

In Afghanistan, Army investigators, who were primarily pursuing Lorance, threatened Zettel with aggravated assault charges for the shootings in the tower. And they showed McGuinness a charge sheet accusing him of murder for killing the Afghans who were talking on the radios about targeting Americans.

The threats of prosecution hung over them for months. Eventually, the Army concluded that McGuinness’s actions were justified. Prosecutors never pursued charges against Zettel.

Instead the Army issued administrative letters of reprimand to Zettel and Matthew Rush, the soldier who fired the rounds at the civilians from the tower. Zettel had watched from the tower but did not shoot.

The 1st Platoon leadership team in Afghanistan in May 2012. From left: Dan Williams, Mike McGuinness, Chris Murray (sitting), Keith Ayres, Dominic Latino and Jace Myers (sitting, right). (Courtesy of the Carson family)

Ayres and McGuinness — the senior sergeants in the platoon — received disciplinary letters, which can hinder or delay promotions, for their failure to turn Lorance in sooner or stop the killings on the third day.

McGuinness legally changed his surname, which had been Herrmann, in an effort to shed the stigma of the crimes. “I wanted to get away from the entire situation and I thought I’ll change units and no one will know,” he said. But, because of the investigation and trial, McGuinness’s orders to report to an airborne unit in Italy were canceled. “I ended up staying. People didn’t forget,” he said. “It was awful.”

Shilo, who fired the fatal shots at the men on the motorcycle, was granted immunity and left the Army not long after the trial.

Lucas Gray and James O. Twist in Afghanistan in 2012. (Courtesy of the Twist family)

Even those who weren’t punished or even on the patrol that day felt tainted. To some of their fellow troops they were the “murder platoon,” a bunch of out-of-control soldiers who had wantonly killed Afghans. To others they were turncoats who had flipped on their commander. Gray was waiting for a parachute jump at Fort Bragg when he overheard a lieutenant colonel deride the platoon as nothing but a bunch of “traitors and cowards.” Gray was just a low-ranking specialist, so he kept his mouth shut.

The unit had seen some of the heaviest fighting of the long Afghanistan war, but received no awards for valor. There was no recognition for Twist, who had pulled Walley from a blast crater and applied a tourniquet to the remains of his arm and leg. No one acknowledged Joe Fjeldheim, the platoon medic, who had cut a hole in Hanes’s neck and inserted a breathing tube after a sniper’s bullet left him paralyzed and choking for air.

“Not a single write up. The only thing we received were Purple Hearts for the guys that got messed up,” Zettel said. “We were treated like we had an infectious disease. The Lorance issue evaporated any support from the Army when we got back, and it was absolutely crushing to those who needed help.”

“I think when you see stuff like that sometimes it just flips a switch in some people and you’re just not the same. … I almost drank myself to death for two years,” said Lucas Gray at home in Pulaski, Va. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

A group from the unit gathered regularly at Zettel’s apartment off post to drink. Some Saturdays Fjeldheim would show up at 9:30 a.m. with booze and a plan to stay numb through the weekend. When the troops were too hung over to make it to mandatory morning formation and training, he would administer intravenous drips in the barracks.

“I was working at Macy’s, and I’d dread coming home because someone was doing something stupid or crying in the bathroom,” said Zettel’s wife, Kim. Often, it fell to her to offer a bit of empathy.

The soldiers blamed the killings when they were passed over for promotions or stripped of rank for drinking too much or missing formations. In early 2014, Gray was hospitalized for alcohol withdrawal and put on suicide watch. He had been drinking a half-gallon of whiskey each night to fall asleep. “It was my off switch,” he said. A few days into his hospital stay, when he was still dosed up on Valium, an officer visited him.

“Why are you like this?” the officer pressed. “They are just dead Afghans. Why do you care so much?”

The question infuriated Gray. Before the war crimes, he had believed he was helping Afghans and defending his country. “It’s like you’re this hardcore Christian and some entity drops from the ceiling and says it’s a sham,” he said. “That’s how it was for me. I thought of the Army as this altruistic thing. I thought it was perfect and honorable. It pains me to tell you how stupid and naive I was. The Lorance stuff just broke my faith. . . . And once you lose your values and your faith, the Army is just another job you hate.”

‘You need to stop running your mouth’

Mike McGuinness at home in Raeford, N.C. McGuinness legally changed his surname, which had been Herrmann, in an effort to shed the stigma of the crimes. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

McGuinness tried to intervene on behalf of his soldiers. He talked to Gray’s new commanders, who McGuinness said wanted to run him out of the Army for being drunk.

“Did you ask him why he’s drinking too much?” McGuinness pressed them.

Zettel asked McGuinness to meet with his new platoon sergeant when the Army, without explanation, blocked him from attending Ranger School.

McGuinness also spoke up for Jarred Ruhl, who had been one of his best soldiers in combat. Ruhl came home from Afghanistan with orders for Hawaii and a promotion to sergeant. But he soon began skipping morning formation, was demoted twice to private first class and forced from the Army.

“I just don’t know how to deal with everything that happened,” Ruhl told him. He had been standing next to Lorance when the lieutenant gave the orders to kill the Afghan men.

Jarred Ruhl holds an M203 grenade launcher mounted on his rifle as Dallas Haggard works the M240B machine gun while on duty in Afghanistan in June 2012. (Courtesy of the Carson family)

McGuinness, who said he felt like a failure for not stopping the killings or shielding his men from the fallout, was also self-destructing. “I was mouthy and insubordinate,” he said. He felt distant from his two young children and said he was drunk “six days a week.”

When conservatives rushed to turn Lorance into a hero, McGuinness felt as though the last shreds of his integrity were under assault. Former Lt. Col. Allen West, who had been relieved of command in 2003 for staging a mock execution of an Iraqi prisoner and was later elected to Congress in the tea party wave, blasted Lorance’s conviction in a Washington Times op-ed as a product of the Army’s “appalling” rules of engagement.

The rules were drafted by generals who worried that high civilian casualty rates were driving Afghans to support the Taliban. But West insisted that the rules put U.S. troops at undue risk and reflected President Barack Obama’s “outrageous contempt for the military.” West didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Fox News’s Sean Hannity took up Lorance’s case, calling the conviction a “national disgrace.”

In 2014, McGuinness was out drinking with an Army friend, and when the friend went home, stayed at the bar until he had downed enough booze to “sedate a rhino.” A military police officer found him later that night, sitting in his truck on All American Parkway, the main drag through Fort Bragg, with a gun in his mouth.

A nurse in the psychiatric ward at Womack Army Medical Center asked him if he really wanted help. “If you tell me that to get better, I’ve got to eat a 100-pound bag of gummy bears, then I’m going to eat 100 pounds of gummy bears,” he recalled telling her. “I just can’t do this s— any more.”

It was the end of a 16-year Army career.

Matthew Hanes during his deployment in Afghanistan in May 2012. (Photo by Dave Zettel)

Soon the platoon began to suffer losses at home. First Kerner, who was wounded in a bomb blast with the unit’s first platoon leader, died in March 2015 of cancer at age 23. Doctors discovered the malignancy when they were treating his combat wounds. Five months later Hanes, who was paralyzed by the bullet he took to his neck, died of a blood clot at age 24.

“Saying I love you doesn’t even scratch the surface of how much you truly mean to me,” he wrote in a note to the platoon three months before he fell into a coma. His closest friends from the unit — Zettel, Dallas Haggard and Fjeldheim, the medic who saved his life — were at his bedside in York, Pa., during his final unconscious hours.

At the funeral there was heavy drinking, just like at Bragg, but now that many in the platoon were out of the Army and no longer had to worry about drug tests, there was also cocaine to numb the pain.

Wives traded tips about how to persuade their husbands to go to therapy and talked about hiding their guns when they grew too depressed.

Ruhl complained to McGuinness that life at home felt empty. “Are you in therapy?” asked McGuinness, who was seeing a therapist and getting ready to start college at age 33.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” Ruhl said.

“It doesn’t f—ing matter what you think you can do,” he pressed. “It can’t make things worse.”

Dallas Haggard and Jarred Ruhl while on a long patrol in Afghanistan in June 2012. (Courtesy of the Carson family)

A few months later Zettel, who had finished college and was commissioned as an officer, stopped in to see Ruhl at his home in Fort Wayne, Ind. Zettel was on his way to a leadership course for new Army officers in Missouri.

Ruhl’s stepbrother told him that Ruhl had pulled a gun on a woman in a traffic dispute just days earlier. “Take his gun,” Zettel advised Ruhl’s stepbrother. “Take it apart and hide the pieces so that he can’t get it.” It was impossible, the stepbrother said. Ruhl took his gun everywhere.

Ruhl confided to Zettel that there were days when he couldn’t stop thinking about killing himself.

“How are we going to fix this?” asked Zettel, who helped Ruhl sign up for counseling at a VA hospital.

Before he could start, Ruhl pulled his gun on an acquaintance at a party. His stepbrother tried to wrestle it away and the firearm discharged, severing Ruhl’s femoral artery. He died before paramedics arrived.

“We kind of got betrayed,” said Dave Zettel outside his home in Blythewood, S.C. “We were pegged as if we were like a rogue unit. Which we clearly weren’t. It was kind of disheartening.” (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Zettel came back for the funeral, then returned to Missouri to finish his five-month leadership course. Four years had passed since the war crimes, but the murders and their aftermath still seemed inescapable. A captain teaching Zettel’s class on rules of engagement used Lorance as a case study, telling the new officers that Lorance had been trying to impose discipline on a platoon that had lost control after one of its soldiers was shot in the neck. The captain was referring to Hanes, who had given Zettel his first salute when he was commissioned as an officer.

Lorance’s soldiers, the captain continued, had violated the rules of engagement and now Lorance, who hadn’t fired a shot, was serving a 19-year prison sentence.

Zettel blew up. “I was there and you need to stop running your mouth,” he recalled shouting at the instructor.

The instructor suggested they step out of the classroom. Zettel grew angrier.

“If I ever see Lorance on the street,” he said. “I am going to rip his f—ing throat out.”

‘Y’all are being led the wrong way’

Sean Hannity of Fox News arrives in National Harbor, Md., on March 4, 2016. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

Six days after Trump was inaugurated as president, Hannity asked him in a White House interview about pardoning Lorance. “He got 30 years,” Hannity said incorrectly. “He was doing his job, protecting his team in Afghanistan.”

“We’re looking at a few of them,” said Trump of the case.

In the months after his conviction, Lorance had begun to receive support from United American Patriots ( UAP ), a nonprofit group that represents soldiers accused of war crimes. UAP helped Lorance find new lawyers who claimed in an appeals court filing that they had uncovered evidence showing that the younger victim was “biometrically linked” to a roadside bomb blast that occurred before his death. The sole survivor, the lawyers said, took part in attacks on U.S. forces after the Americans tried to kill him.

“The Afghan men were not civilian casualties . . . but were actually combatant bombmakers who intended to harm or kill American soldiers,” the lawyers wrote in their appeal.

In 2017, a military appeals court dismissed the biometric data as irrelevant because Lorance had “no indications that the victims posed any threat at the time of the shootings.” The judges found that the surviving victim’s decision to join the Taliban after the platoon tried to kill him probably would have helped prosecutors by demonstrating “the direct impact on U.S. forces when the local population believe they are being indiscriminately killed.”

But the biometric evidence and support from UAP helped Lorance’s mother and his legal team get on Trump’s favorite television shows — “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity” — where they offered a new account of the killings that differed dramatically from the sworn testimony. In their telling, the motorcycle wasn’t stopped on the side of the road with its kickstand down, as testimony and photos from the trial demonstrated, but was speeding toward Lorance and his men when he ordered them to fire.

“He’s got to make a split-second decision in a war zone,” Hannity said on his television show. “How did it get to the point where he got prosecuted for this?”

“I feel if he had not made that call,” Lorance’s mother replied, “my son today would be called a hero, killed in action.”

Hannity turned to Lorance’s lawyer, John Maher. “Was there anybody in the platoon that was with Clint that said that was the wrong decision?” he asked.

“That I don’t rightly know,” replied Maher, who had reviewed the platoon’s testimony.

“Then who made the determination that this was the wrong thing to do?” Hannity pressed.

“The chain of command,” Maher said.

“People that weren’t there,” Hannity concluded. Hannity and a Fox News spokeswoman did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In a recent interview, Maher said his response to Hannity’s question had been “potentially inartful.” Lorance was in prison because the 1st Platoon soldiers turned him in and testified against him.

But Maher maintained that Lorance had made a split-second decision to protect his men from an enemy ambush. Some of the 1st Platoon soldiers said that the Afghan men had been standing on the side of the road for as long as two minutes before the U.S. gun truck opened fire on Lorance’s orders. Others, including Lorance, estimated they had been stopped for only a few seconds.

“That’s probably an eternity sitting here in the safety of this environment,” Maher said. “But I assure you that it’s not like that under volatile, uncertain, unforgiving conditions where life and death are right around the corner and a tardy decision results in death or dismemberment.”

The Afghan men were about 150 to 200 yards from the U.S. position when they were killed. To reach Lorance and his troops, they would have had to scale multiple shoulder-high mud walls.

Aaron Deamron, right, and Zach Thomas run for cover as they are fired upon by Taliban fighters during a mission in Zhary district of Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan in April 2012. Thomas would receive a concussion in the incident. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)

Zach Thomas, who had been standing just yards from Lorance when he gave the order to fire, was driving to community college in 2017 when he heard Hannity talking about the Lorance case on the radio.

“My blood just started boiling,” he recalled.

Thomas had spent his last day in the Army testifying against his former platoon leader. He was just 18 when he left for Afghanistan, and like many in the unit, his return home had been difficult. He drank to blunt his PTSD and depression. Two of his sergeants were so worried about him that they let him move out of the barracks and spend his last two months living at their house. His plan after the Army was to forget about Afghanistan and start a new life in his hometown of Crosby, Tex.

Zach Thomas and Jake Jensen before their deployment at Fort Bragg. (Courtesy of Zach Thomas)

Thomas pulled over on the side of the road and looked up the number for Hannity’s radio show in New York City on his cellphone.

“I’m a big fan, but y’all are being led the wrong way,” he told a producer for the show. “This isn’t some innocent guy.” The producer asked him if he knew about the biometric data Lorance’s lawyers had uncovered.

“I don’t know about any of that information, but I was there and these people were not enemy combatants,” he said. He could tell he wasn’t convincing the producer so he gave her McGuinness’s cellphone number and urged her to call him. She talked with McGuinness as well but never invited him on the show.

A handful of other soldiers from the platoon did their best to counter Lorance’s story. Todd Fitzgerald, who was also standing near Lorance when he ordered the killings, took to Reddit to defend the unit. He and several other soldiers spoke to the New York Times for a story that detailed the inaccuracies in Lorance’s defense. Fitzgerald, McGuinness and Gray were interviewed for a documentary about the case, “Leavenworth,” that aired on the Starz Network.

In April 2018, the platoon suffered its fourth death since returning home when Nick Carson, 26, crashed his car late at night.

Carson had been with McGuinness in Afghanistan on the day of the killings, and like his squad leader had been threatened with war crimes charges.

“I don’t know what’s fixing to happen, but our platoon leader is making us all out to be murderers,” he told his parents in a 2012 phone call from Afghanistan. “Just know, I am not a murderer.”

Nick Carson eats a meal during his deployment in Afghanistan in May 2012. (Photo by Dave Zettel)

Carson’s mother and stepfather were at Fort Bragg a few months later when he returned from the war. “He got off that big plane, hugged us and cried and then he said, ‘I love y’all but I need to be by myself. I just need to go,’ ” recalled his stepfather.

Carson stayed in the Army after the combat tour, but he struggled with PTSD, depression and anger. He and Ruhl had been best friends and were supposed to go to Hawaii together when they returned from Afghanistan. After Ruhl’s death, Carson tried to explain on the platoon’s private Facebook page why he was skipping his friend’s funeral. “It’s not that I can’t physically be there,” he wrote. “I won’t let my last memory of Jarred be at his funeral. I am sorry for that. Most of you know how close Jarred and I were, so this has been extremely difficult to accept.”

On the night of the car accident that killed him, Carson had been drinking and wasn’t wearing a seat belt. His parents said he may have fallen asleep while driving. The platoon blamed the war crimes and the deployment.

In Afghanistan, the platoon had dubbed themselves the “Honey Badgers” after the fearless carnivore.

Back home, they began to refer to themselves as “the cursed platoon.”

‘Who is it this time?’

A loaded pistol on a side table in the home of Lucas Gray in Pulaski, Va. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

On October 23rd at 2:44 a.m., Twist’s wife, Emalyn, messaged Sgt. 1st Class Joe Morrissey, who had been Twist’s team leader with the platoon in Afghanistan.

“James committed suicide tonight,” she wrote from the hospital where the doctors were preparing to harvest his organs. “Could you let his other Army friends know. . . . This is a fucking living nightmare.” It was the platoon’s fifth death since returning home four years earlier.

Morrissey woke to the message at Fort Bragg and began sobbing. His soon-to-be ex-wife knew immediately that another member of the platoon was gone. His first call was to McGuinness, who was returning home from a late-night shift as a bouncer at a Fayetteville bar. The two immediately began calling the rest of the platoon, which was scattered across the country.

The deaths had imbued them with a grim fatalism. “Who is it this time?” a few answered when they saw the 5 a.m. calls from Morrissey’s phone.

“It’s James,” Morrissey said again and again.

At Fort Jackson, Zettel was administering a predawn fitness test to recruits when he got the call. He punched a fence and rushed back to his office so the new soldiers wouldn’t see him fall apart. Alone at his desk, Zettel thought about the steady stream of calls and texts Twist had sent him over the past five years, and he wondered if the messages were an indirect way of asking for help.

McGuinness caught Gray as he headed off to his job at a weapons arsenal in southwest Virginia. His wallpaper on his work computer was a photo of Twist and him in Afghanistan, their rifles slung across their chests. “Back when we were cool,” Twist had written when he texted it to Gray.

The hardest call was to Walley, the soldier Twist had dragged from the blast crater. “What’s wrong?” his fiancee asked him when he got the call. “It’s Twist,” Walley told her. She tried to hug him, but he pushed her away. “I need to take this in alone,” he said.

Samuel Walley with his fiancee Hannah Smallwood in their garage in Buford, Ga. Walley lost his right leg and part of his left arm in Afghanistan. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

At the funeral, Walley spoke first for the platoon, rocking back and forth on his prosthetic leg. Walley was wounded a month before the murders, but they had affected him too. At times, he felt abandoned by those who had tried to distance themselves from the unit, the murders and the war. “I have to wake up every single day and look in the mirror. Every single day I am hopping in a wheelchair,” he often thought. “I don’t get to forget.”

In January 2016, he was drunk and despondent in his apartment outside Atlanta and accidentally fired his pistol through the ceiling and into the apartment above him. After the shooting, Walley cut back on his drinking and returned to college. He was just one semester from graduating.

He stared out at the packed and silent church.

“Twist would probably give me a little bit of crap right now for having not wrote a speech,” he began. “But I figured I’d just tell a story. It’s a little bit of a harsh story, but I think it needs to be told.”

Members of the 1st Platoon at James O. Twist’s funeral in Grand Rapids, Mich., in November 2019. From left: Joe Fjeldheim, Jake Jensen, John Twist, Zach Thomas, Dan Williams (holding left side of flag), Alan Gladney (wearing glasses), Lucas Gray (partially visible), Reyler Leon, Samuel Walley, and slightly behind him is Dave Zettel, Brandon Krebs, and Mike McGuinness (in sunglasses), Brandon Kargol, Joe Morrissey, Dom Latino, Dallas Haggard, Brett Frace and Zach Nelson at the far right. (Courtesy of the Twist family)

Walley had spent dozens of hours reconstructing every second of the day he was injured. Eight years after the blast, he and his fellow soldiers would still argue over the smallest details: What kind of bomb had caused his wounds? Was it a pressure plate or remote-detonated? What exactly did Morrissey say as he and Carson lifted Walley into the helicopter? For Walley, the details were sacred. Remembering brought him comfort.

He took a breath and described the explosion and its aftermath. “My right leg was about 20 feet away. It was completely removed. My left leg, the tibia ripped through the [skin]; my foot was facing toward my butt,” he said. His right arm was mangled.

“Twist ended up coming through this cloudy haze,” Walley continued. “He was the most selfless man that I ever knew on this planet. He did not care if he died. He did not care if his limbs were to get ripped off. He didn’t care. He just cared that his guys were okay.”

A few minutes in a combat zone can define a life for good or for ill. “I believe that 10 minutes defined Twist,” Walley said.

Morrissey spoke next of Twist’s successes as a soldier, state trooper and father. “Those of us who knew Twist were extremely proud,” he said. “Unfortunately . . . underneath it all, the demons are still there, still tearing away at us day in and day out.”

‘The men and women in the mud and dirt’

President Trump welcomes Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, left, at the Republican Party of Florida’s Statesman Dinner in December 2019, in Aventura, Fla. Both soldiers were granted full pardons by Trump. (Joyce N. Boghosian/The White House)

The 1st Platoon soldiers were still filtering home from Twist’s funeral when Pete Hegseth, a “Fox & Friends” co-anchor who had advocated on Lorance’s behalf, tweeted that Lorance’s pardon was “imminent.”

The actual release came two weeks later on Nov. 15.

“It’s done. It’s a political move,” one of the 1st Platoon soldiers wrote on the group’s private Facebook page. “Time to move on.”

Ayres, who had skipped all five of the platoon’s funerals, agreed. “Not worth any of our time,” he wrote. “What matters is that everyone that matters knows he is a piece of s—. Let’s move on and enjoy life.”

For McGuinness it wasn’t an option. He couldn’t bear the thought that Lorance was being hailed as a hero by Trump and others, while soldiers like Twist were being forgotten. “I’ve buried people that struggled with what happened, and whether through their own hands or their actions, they’re gone,” he said. “I’m not going to sit quietly while he gets paraded around and they’re not recognized.”

He texted with Gray, who wasn’t on Facebook.

Lucas Gray

Fuck it all. The one reprieve we had is gone.

Mike McGuinness

I feel so shitty right now.

Lucas Gray

I’m going to drink until I can sleep.

Mike McGuinness

I might do the same.

Others in the platoon argued on social media with pro-Trump friends, who insisted Lorance was innocent. “You realize I was f—ing THERE, right?” one soldier wrote to a fellow veteran. “Like you realize I was one of the godd— WITNESSES who testified, right?!”

Later that evening, Twist’s father, John, called McGuinness, hoping to talk about his son and the pardon. McGuinness shared his memories of Twist, who came to the platoon when he was just 19. “We put so much work into him,” McGuinness said. He talked about Twist’s quirks — his irritating tendency to correct McGuinness when he got a minor fact wrong about a weapons system.

Twist’s father asked whether the murders and the trial might have contributed to his son’s torment. Twist wasn’t on patrol the day of the killings, but McGuinness believed that what had happened with Lorance had wounded him too. “Twist had a big heart. He was like Gray. He wanted to do good,” McGuinness said. “When Lorance took that away, he took a little part of Jimmy, too.”

“You don’t go into the military thinking you are going to be part of a war crimes case,” said Mike McGuinness at his home in Raeford, N.C. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

“This is absolutely amazing,” Lorance said as his car, escorted by the county constable, rolled to a stop in the high school parking lot.

“It’s a hometown hero’s welcome,” said his cousin from the back seat.

Lorance climbed atop a flatbed trailer. Someone from the crowd gave him an American flag. The vice commander of the local VFW handed him a microphone.

“God Bless Texas!” Lorance yelled. “God Bless America!”

At his side was the head of UAP, the group that had worked to free him. Lorance’s case and the publicity generated helped the group boost annual donations by about 150 percent, from $1.8 million in 2015 to more than $4.5 million in 2018.

Lorance, who was wearing his crisp, blue Army uniform — his pants tucked into his boots, paratrooper style — knew exactly what his backers wanted to hear. “We finally have a president who understands that when we send our troops to fight impossible wars, we must stand behind them,” he told the crowd.

“Amen!” cried a voice from the high school parking lot.

“Amen is right!” Lorance answered.

Former 1st Lt. Clint Lorance addresses a crowd as he returns home to Merit, Tex., on Nov. 16, 2019, after he was pardoned by President Trump. (Courtesy of Farmersville Fire Department)

For those in the parking lot that night, Lorance’s freedom was proof that Trump would stand up for them and their town, population 215, at a moment when large swaths of the country seemed to hold them and their way of life in contempt. “You know how many people just want to see that someone cares,” said Tiffany West, 37, who was standing feet from the stage.

Lorance thanked his family and the lawmakers who pressed for his release. He talked about Trump and Vice President Pence, who had called him at the penitentiary to tell him that they were setting him free. “We had a nine-minute conversation,” Lorance said. “Yeah, I was timing it. . . . They took time out of their busy day to ask me what I was going to do with the rest of my life.”

He blasted the craven “deep state” military officers he blamed for his conviction. “That’s not really the military. That’s the politicians who run the thing,” he said. “The men and women in the mud and dirt. That’s the real U.S. military.”

He was still talking nearly an hour later when the television news crews from Dallas, about 60 miles away, began packing up their equipment.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I know it’s cold.”

“Go ahead!” a voice shouted.

“You’re home!” added another.

Soon the crowd began drifting away for the night, past Merit’s post office, its volunteer fire department, its recently shuttered convenience store, and the decaying wood clapboard building that once held its cotton gin. Lorance handed the microphone back to the local VFW’s vice commander, a Gulf War veteran who had organized the gathering and would now get the final word.

“There’s going to be people out there that are going to try to use this against Trump,” he warned. “Well, we’re going to throw it right back in their faces!”

Lorance visits the set of “Fox & Friends” in New York on Nov. 18, 2019, after receiving a presidential pardon. (Mark Lennihan/AP)

The next morning Lorance boarded a plane for New York City, where he appeared on “Fox & Friends” and Hannity’s radio show. In December, he joined Trump onstage at a GOP fundraiser.

In interviews after his release, Lorance insisted that the soldiers who testified against him were pressured by the Army or had turned on him because he was an exacting commander and they lacked discipline. “When I walked into the guard tower and the soldiers didn’t have their helmet or body armor on, I told them to put it on,” he told Blue Magazine, which advocates on behalf of police officers. “And they didn’t like that, they didn’t like taking orders like that, but I was brought in there to enforce the standard.”

‘There’s almost always more to every story than we know’

John Twist created a wall in his living room memorializing James and other family members who served in the military at his home in Grand Rapids, Mich. The flag was signed by members of James’s platoon after his funeral. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

In Grand Rapids, Twist’s father spent much of the winter trying to unravel the mystery of his son’s death. His dining room table was covered with foot-high piles of papers from James’s life.

There were old report cards, passports and programs from high school wrestling matches. A second pile from the Army included a spiral notebook that his son had used as a diary when he was going through basic training. A third pile contained a printout of the essay — “The Invisible War Inside My Head” — that his son wrote the day before he died.

In it, Twist wrote briefly about the killings that had “rocked and split up” his platoon. The longest section of the essay recounted the day Walley lost his arm and leg. “I found Sam in a small crater,” he wrote. “He was missing his right foot and all the muscle and skin around his right tibia/fibula.” That image, he said, played again and again in his head when he returned from the war.

“I really don’t understand what PTSD is,” his father said. “You can read about it, but I don’t get it. So far the only thing I can get is that it’s like having . . . poor Sam Walley getting blown up” playing in your head over and over. “And how do you get rid of that?”

James O. Twist with his son Ben, celebrating his first birthday in August 2019. (Courtesy of the Twist family)

Twist’s wife, Emalyn, 27, also had been thinking about the meaning of her husband’s life and sudden, violent death. In early March she was sitting alone in the parking lot of a nearby Target. Her three children — ages 1, 3 and 5 — were with a friend. She balanced a Starbucks coffee in one hand and hit record on her cellphone camera.

“It has been kind of a bad week, filled with a lot of ‘it shouldn’t have to be that way’ kind of moments,” she said. Earlier that morning, she had turned over their house keys to the new owners. Her 5-year-old son spotted the family’s moving trucks in the driveway and panicked, yelling for her to “stop them.”

Twist’s children remembered their father as a dad who liked to wrestle and sing them to sleep. Emalyn couldn’t forget her husband’s insecurity, bouts of self-loathing and verbal abuse. On the night her husband took his life he was upset with her for going to see a therapist and terrified that she was going to divorce him. In a blog post, Emalyn described him slamming his head into the kitchen counter until blood was running down his face. Then he stormed to their bedroom and shot himself.

Emalyn pressed a pair of leggings to her husband’s head in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding. With her other hand, she dialed 911. As she listened for the sound of approaching sirens, she stifled the urge to vomit and prayed that their children would not wake.

Emalyn Twist writes about her experience following Twist’s death in Emalyn’s Blog: Words of a Young Widow. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

“I couldn’t stand to live in that house or sleep in that bedroom when I had seen so much in there, and that just makes me mad, because I loved that house and I loved that neighborhood,” she said to her cellphone camera. “And I shouldn’t have had to leave. I shouldn’t have had to pull my kids out of their little social circle and all those people who loved them. It shouldn’t have to be that way.”

For years she had helped her husband hide his pain from family, friends and even his fellow soldiers. Now she was determined to be honest. “I just don’t have to keep up this facade of the grieving widow all the time, even though that’s also what I am,” she said. “There’s almost always more to every story than we know. It’s important to pay attention to that.”

She stopped recording, turned on the ignition and picked up with her day.

‘I love you’

Dave Zettel at home with his wife, Kim, in Blythewood, S.C. The couple are expecting their first child. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

In April with the country locked down by the coronavirus, McGuinness arranged for a dozen of the guys from the platoon to get together on a video call for beers. He and Walley were finishing up their last few college courses before they graduated. A couple of the soldiers and wives were expecting their first children. Two were in the early days of divorces.

An hour into the call almost everyone was drunk or stoned — except for the pregnant wives. One soldier kept streaming as he sat on the toilet. When he was done everyone screamed at him to wash his hands. Another soldier vomited and curled up on the floor.

“This is better than getting together at funerals,” McGuinness said cheerily.

The troops talked about their plans for the future. Morrissey was just back from another tour in Afghanistan, where he mostly sat on base while the Afghans fought each other. “There’s no war left there anymore,” he said.

“What are you going to do when you retire?” McGuinness asked him.

“Let me finish, before you laugh,” Morrissey replied. “I’m going to go to school to be a barber and open one of those high end barber shops where you can get a drink, a real gentleman’s haircut and shave with a straight razor.”

Walley tried to talk, but everyone was talking over him. “No one listens to me,” he joked. “Everyone just stares at the guy with two limbs.” He and his fiancee were planning their wedding for the spring of 2021. They had already reserved a “mansion where we can fit the whole platoon,” he said.

“Just tell me the day and I’ll be there,” McGuinness promised.

Zettel and his wife were expecting their first child on Aug. 10. He was planning on leaving the Army for good in October. “It’s not going to join the Army,” Zettel said of his unborn child. “I’m going to burn everything so it doesn’t even know I was in the f—ing Army.”

The soldiers talked about the guys they had lost to suicide and self-destructive behavior. And they spoke briefly about Lorance, who has a memoir titled “Stolen Valor” that is going to be published by Hachette Book Group in the fall, when Lorance has said he is planning to start law school. A blurb for the book, posted by the publisher, calls Lorance “a scapegoat for a corrupt military” and asserts that “his unit turned on him because of his homosexuality.” Lorance’s lawyer said there was no evidence that homophobia played a role in conviction.

“We looked,” Maher said, “and we came up with nothing.”

In interviews, troops said that in Afghanistan they didn’t know Lorance was gay and wouldn’t have cared.

“We took s— from so many people for so long,” McGuinness said. “I’m not letting that happen anymore. I’m going to fight back.”

The soldiers shared tips about how to find a good therapist and promised to look out for one another so that there would be no more funerals.

“You guys mean everything to me,” McGuinness said. “We have to do this more often. We have to look after each other. If you guys are hurting, hit me up. We can do this instead of just letting things fester.”

He rose from his desk chair — a little wobbly from all the beer. It was 2:30 a.m., and they had been talking for more than four hours. “I love you a–holes,” he said, and signed off the call.

An American flag decorates a roof along a country road in North Carolina. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

[ Are you a veteran? We want to hear your response to this story. ]

Under the current administration, the Office of the Pardon Attorney has become a bureaucratic way station, data and interviews show.

#IFTTT #WordPress

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unstablemonstrosities · 5 years ago

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Juliette Solo VI

Trigger Warnings: Death, mentions of suicide and self-harm.

Juliette had failed, she was sure of that now.

She’d done her best, she was sure when she’d closed the eyes in the bathtub it would be for the last time. She was so confident that she’d be ready, to become an angel and fulfill her destiny, that was what Nathan wanted after all. He’d told her so. Where was Nathan? Since she’d become aware once again she hadn’t seen him. He should have been here. Unless he was disappointed in her.

She didn’t blame him, she was disappointed in herself too. The one thing she was supposed to do and become, she’d failed at. She was supposed to be an angel now. She was supposed to wake up, and be an angel and be with Nathan again. That was how it was supposed to be. She was so sure. Something had gone wrong. Maybe someone had found her and brought her back.

The redhead was sure she’d been in her room one minute, but then, in what felt like a flurry, she was somewhere else. It was like a whirl wind pulling her forward, bringing her towards something. And then it just stopped. She was free to move on her own once again. When she looked around, she realized she was outside her house, on her street, next to the hedges her neighbors kept around their yard.

She blinked a couple times, trying to figure out how she’d gotten here. When she tried to grasp at that thought it’d slipped away, like she couldn’t quite get a hold of it. She decided to push her absent mindedness away, deciding to take in her surroundings. She realized that there was the evident flashing of red and blue lights, her gaze shifted over and she quickly realized it was an ambulance.

“I hope Mrs. Thompson is okay,” she mumbled. Mrs. Thompson was the elderly woman across the street. She was sickly, and Juliette used to help her by cleaning her house for her while having bible passages read. She’d liked that so much, before the depression set in. Then she stopped going as much, her interest in spirituality growing more and more confusing as she met Nathan.

Part of her wanted to check on the woman, but another part of her seemed entirely against it. Like she couldn’t quite get herself to move from that place. At least not in that direction. She willed her limbs to bend to her will, to bring her a step forward so she could make sure they elderly lady wasn’t hurt. But she just couldn’t. It was as if something held her back.

Finally, she gave up when she got that odd absentminded fuzziness about her once again. There was quite a spectacle, and the more curious she got, the more guarded off from her own mind she felt. Maybe this was it. Maybe she was truly going crazy. Perhaps she’d imagined it’d all, hurting herself. Maybe she was fine, or not fine, crazy.

The redhead looked down at her wrists, checking for evidence of the wounds she’d left. There was nothing. Just the normal scars from the harm she so often did to herself. She shook her head, trying to grasp her thoughts. Like slippery pasta, they evaded her still, leaving her clueless to what was going on. She felt so lost. The redhead clapped her hands on either side of her head, bobbing it slightly as she tried to get a hold of herself.

“Come on Juliette, come on, get a hold of yourself,” she muttered, shaking her head slightly.

That was when she heard it. Heavy footfalls coming down the sidewalk, quickly too. She immediately looked up, flushing with embarrassment over her little outburst. The face she saw was strikingly familiar. The tall, athletic build, the handsome but gentle features. She’d know that face anywhere she was certain of that. Roland.

Immediately she started to move towards him, too excited to know that each footfall she made did not make a sound like his. She was just desperate to seek comfort from a familiar person. She opened her mouth to get a word out but she was quickly silenced. Not by the nagging feeling in the back of her head. No the silencing came from Roland. He lurched over and emptied the contents of his stomach in to the bush. She had to turn away for a second. That was always something she’d never had the stomach for. But after the heaving and gagging stopped she turned around, ready to provide comfort and if need be medical care for her friend.

“How the-,” her voice was cut off midsentence, this time by a different person.

“Ayres, are you alright boy?” It was an older man, maybe mid-fifties. She recognized him, he was one of the higher ranking members on the police force. Not that there was many ranks to rise in with a taskforce made of twelve men. He had an air of authority about him that instantly made her quiet down. The last thing she was going to do was keeping mouthing on and end up earning his ire and perhaps a bad discussion with her father. With how she’d been lately, no doubt she was already on thin ice.

There was no response, just another hiccupping heave that had her thinking she’d have to turn her back before he ended up vomiting into the hedges again. He didn’t though, but she noticed he looked absolutely broken. She wasn’t sure what had happened, but he’d looked like he’d been hit by a bus, or lost everything that had ever mattered to him. She supposed the first would be mercy compared to the ladder. As soon as the man was gone, she’d do her best to help. He was always there for her after all. She noticed that when they’d first met he’d told her she didn’t have to be okay for everyone yet she couldn’t help but feel like that’s exactly how he was about himself.

In the months she’d spent as his friend, she’d rarely seen him truly let loose, even though he had that laid back feel to him. She sometimes wondered if he ever had fun or if he was just trying to make sure she learned how to. Though remembering the bright smiles, she hoped it was true. She didn’t want everything to be a total waste, at least not on his part. She knew it wasn’t on hers.

“You knew her, didn’t you?” The man’s voice was solemn for a second, as if he too was saddened. Juliette’s face fell immediately. Past tense, somber expressions. She immediately wanted to go to Mrs. Thompson, to see if there was anything she could do. But once again, she was held back. She was unsure if it was because she needed to be there for Roland or because of that odd block in her head.

“Yeah,” his voice was gruff, thick with turmoil. She’d thought the other officer’s voice was sad, well he had nothing on Roland. The sound of his voice matched that same expression as if everything he held dear had been snatched away. “Yeah I did.” It broke her heart a little to see him so sad. She felt helpless for a second that she couldn’t do anything.

She wanted to reach out, to do anything to get that expression off his face. She’d never seen him so down before. It was so unlike him. She felt a little bit guilty. All the time she’d known him he’d been the strong and stoic type for her. He was playful sometimes, yes but she’d never seen him so completely crushed. Maybe he’d known Mrs. Thompson well. She wouldn’t be surprised. He seemed like the type everyone got along with, even religious old ladies.

“Listen, Ayres why don’t you take today off? I’ll handle the report, and the Sheriff, you go home and…take care of yourself.” That was almost stranger than Roland’s emotional nature. The man seemed awkward, not quite used to feelings. She’d never seen him look so out of place before, so ruffled, like there was something he just couldn’t grasp.

“I should probably stay,” he started to protest. Juliette immediately wanted to scold him. That was just like him. How many times had they had coffee late at night at the station while he worked on something overtime? Too many to remember.

“Roland, you look like hell, go home, that’s an order,” the man’s authoritative attitude was quick to show before giving Roland and awkward pat on the shoulder before taking off back to the scene of flashing nights and neighbors in their PJ’s.

She watched Roland release a heavy sigh, and run his fingers roughly through his short hair. It was usually relatively tamed but now it was uncharacteristically messy for him, and not in the way all the boys liked to style their hair to try and look cool. He did look like Hell. She frowned slightly and looked over at him for a few minutes.

“Hey, Roland, it’s okay. You can’t be everyone’s White Knight, some people just aren’t meant to make it,” she said softly, hoping the words would comfort him. He didn’t even look her way. Instead he just sat down on the curb, continuing to thread his hands through his hair. She was sure that he was trying to find a way not to cry.

“Come on, don’t ignore me. I know you’re all hero guy, and you breeze in a rescue damsels but sometimes it’s okay to not be okay for everyone else. You were the one who taught me that if I remember correctly,” she smiled meekly as she sat down on the curb next to him. It felt odd, like she was weightless almost. Usually the solid cement of the curb would press into her legs as she sat, but this time there was nothing, absolutely nothing.

Nothing from him either. Just a sad blank stare.

“Roland,” she mumbled, frowning slightly. Deciding words weren’t working, she reached out her hand. Sometimes a comforting gesture could always help. But when she went to place a hand on his back, it passed right through, as if she was made of nothing but mist and fog. She stared at her hand in horror.

Once again, she tried to reach out to comfort him.

Once again her hand passed through.

She stared at her hand in horror, as if it was detached from her body. It might as well have been. Her gaze shifted away completely from Roland for a second, scanning her arms she saw no evidence of what had happened to her. No evidence of the scars. Yet she still wore the outfit she’d worn when she’d gotten in that bathtub. She was still fully clad in those clothes.

“Roland,” she whispered shakily, unsure of what was happening in the moment. She desperately needed someone to tell her it was all a joke.

He didn’t turn.

“Roland please this isn’t funny!” She exclaimed, desperate for him to tell her that what she was thinking wasn’t true. She felt like her world was closing into her. She also noticed there were no more rubbery thoughts anymore. She understood more. Only this time she didn’t want to get a hold of what she was thinking. She didn’t want to think at all in fact.

No response.

“Roland,” his voice was a desperate whisper on her lips this time.

No response.

She immediately threw herself in the direction she was sure she’d find a sickly Mrs. Thompson in. There wasn’t much holding her back now. In fact she was certain that what had been holding her back was herself, and her denial of what had happened. She’d failed indeed. Something had gone wrong. She was dead.

“No,” she told herself firmly, denying it once more even as her footsteps carried her in the direction of the sounding ambulance siren. She made her way closer and closer, and people seemed to freeze around her. Nobody could see her, she was nothing to them. Yet still, her world was frozen. She couldn’t think of anything else.

She tore past the others, not that it felt like they were moving anyway. That’s when she saw it. There was a stretcher. Only on it there wasn’t a body just a body bag. There was a suited man starting to zip it up, but not before she caught the flare of red hair and the skin that had once had the pink tinge of life that was now devoid of any sign of life.

The face wasn’t peaceful at all, like the bodies looked in movies. The girl, she looked at rest. It took her a moment to realize why that was. She wasn’t at rest. And this wasn’t just a girl. It was her. The unrested face was hers.

Nobody could hear her, but it didn’t stop her from letting out a horrified, ear splitting shriek.

Nothing.

Literally nothing.

She wasn’t sure how much time had passed. It was like when she was suddenly on her street the night of her….the night of her death. She supposed she had to get used to saying it. The only mark that time had passed was that now, when she opened her eyes she was in what she recognized as Roland’s apartment. She wondered why she kept drawing herself her.

Maybe it was because she felt too ashamed to see anyone else. Her parents they had to be crushed in that time. And well, Nathan had to be disappointed in her too. After all she’d failed him. All the talk and promises of becoming a Queen, or becoming his Queen and now it was nothing. She was nothing but a ghost of those promises. No pun intended.

Juliette hadn’t quite gotten the ghost thing down. Not that she had the time to. She had been…wherever she’d been for the past few days. She was hardly read to start walking through walks yet. So like an ordinary person, she started to turn the corner into the hallway. And then nothing, she just stopped. She realized why.

Down the hall came Roland. He was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans. It was fairly casual compared to his police uniform he usually wore. She only saw him dressed like this every now and then. That was the only thing normal about him though. The look on his face was completely abnormal. When she’d thought however long ago that he looked like Hell, now he looked worse.

His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was a mess, no doubt from him running his fingers through it. His dawning stubble was the sign that she hadn’t been out for very long. Maybe a day. She could tell he hadn’t slept. Those bloodshot eyes bore dark circles on top of that. He looked deflated, no longer filled with life as he usually was.

“Roland,” she whispered solemnly, feeling immediate guilt for what she done. She’d done this to him. She’d hurt him like this. It was her fault. How stupid had she been? Too stupid to think about.

He didn’t respond to her, something that was strange. He was always such a good listener. He listened to everything she said. Every story she told, every rant and complaint, every dreamy review of whatever she obsessed over, he’d listened to it all. And now, seeing him so despondent, well it wasn’t easy.

After standing there for a few moments, as if he was debating whatever he was about to do, he went into action again. He grabbed his leather jacket off a hook behind the door. She recognized that one well. It always smell like his cologne in the rare times she’d hugged him. Not too strong like most his age liked to pack it on in hopes of impressing women, just faint enough so she knew she’d remember it.

She sighed, knowing she had nowhere better to go and decided to follow him. Out of the apartment building and down to his car. It wasn’t like he was going to hold his door open for his invisible ghost friend so she was forced to go through it. It wasn’t like she could feel it, but she felt awkward that was for sure. She passed through the door. Apparently her powers were weird enough that even though she passed through the door, she wasn’t about to fall through the floor of the car.

The driving began, and she wasn’t pulled back anywhere. She guessed with him was where she was supposed to be. Maybe it was like in the movies, and there was a lesson she had to learn. Perhaps this was all just a dream and she’d wake up. She hoped it was at least. She desperately hoped it was. Even though she was certain after seeing her body that was not the case at all.

She looked out the window silently as they drove, waiting until they pulled up to their destination which wasn’t a place to eat, like she had hoped it’d be. She’d had a strong sense Roland hadn’t eaten, and the last thing she wanted was for him to starve himself. Once again, that was part guilt and part general concern for her friend.

It was the hospital. She almost sighed. He was going to see her.

She didn’t want to follow him, but she felt like she had to. And so her footsteps drew her after him as he walked through one of the less populated entrances and towards the morgue. There wasn’t a huge amount of security, all he had to do was flash his ID and he was quickly given a pass. She even managed to slip through the door behind him easily enough, without going through anything.

For a split second as she walked into the room she had to turn away. There she was, on display to the world. Sure it was just her face, but that thin sheet covering her naked body did no favors, she knew she was there, exposed. She hadn’t caught sight of any stitches in her. She was grateful for that. She was sure she’d lose it at that point. She wondered if ghosts could throw up, which distracted her from the disgust for a minute.

“Can I have a minute alone with her?” She heard a rather depressed voice of Roland. She hadn’t heard his voice since they’d been outside her house.

“Of course,” the woman, the doctor she guessed told him before stepping out.

For a few moments, she stood there, facing the wall of lockers that held the bodies of the dead. She was one of them. She shuddered a little, enjoying the moment of silence she was able to have as she tried to get a hold of herself. She was sure she would lose it at some point though. She swore to her right now would not be that time though.

His voice was what caught her attention.

“I don’t really know what to say to you, or how to say what I need to say…how to tell you what I’m thinking,” he sounded so lost and unsure. It drew Juliette to turn around, and in a second she was at his side, trying to focus on him and not the body.

“Listen, Jules…Juliette…” he trailed off again, and there was an almost bitter laughter escaping him after a pause. “Can you believe it? Being around you, talking to you, even if I didn’t talk a lot, it as easy as breathing, as easy as just being. And now that you’re gone and you’re not listening I can’t even formulate what I need to say.”

She closed her eyes for a second, holding her breath, or the ghost version of that. “I’m here,” she murmured, as if it’d somehow encourage him. She didn’t want to hear what he had to say, in truth. In fact the idea terrified her. The guilt she already felt so deep in her soul would only be amplified so much more. Yet he had to. She was the dead one, he had to go on living, and she had to make sure he did, even if it was hearing the hard truths.

“I can’t believe they missed this,” she immediately opened her eyes, hoping for some sign of life in the body she even knew was long dead. But of course that wasn’t it. She knew it wasn’t it. But she wanted so desperately to have hope for something, anything.

What she saw was him looking at her hand. Specifically a ring. Her ring. It was one her parents had given her for her birthday when she turned thirteen. They’d resized it to fit her hand one or twice as she’d grown. “You remember that picture Sheriff Lax got of us, after that night up working on that one case, the one I just couldn’t let go,” he trailed off.

“Because you were too stubborn,” even if he couldn’t hear her, she had to complete it.

“We were running only by the caffeine in our veins. I don’t think…I don’t think that’s enough to remember you by. Not that I could ever forget you if I wanted to. The truth is I don’t want to remember or forget you. I don’t want you to be gone. So I hope you, and I hope your parents don’t mind if I kept this for you. I’ll keep it safe, I promise,” she could see guilt shining in his eyes. He even paused as if regretting his actions already. It was so like him.

“It’s okay,” she promised, knowing he couldn’t hear. It reflected too. He took another long pause before he took her dead, lifeless hand as gently as he had the few times when she’d been alive, carefully sliding the ring off, holding it between his middle finger and thumb. He slipped it into his pocket and she could see tears shining in his eyes. She felt the urges to cry herself. But no tears came. Must have been something that came with being dead.

“You’re cold. When you were alive, and our hands would brush you were so warm, so full of life. You had some much left to live, so much life left to give to everyone. You touched everyone around you whether you knew it or not, and some were lucky enough to feel that warmth and compassion you carried inside you. Now you’re this…you’re a corpse. I see your face, sunken and pale. And all I can think of is who you used to be.”

She hiccupped a sob, apparently tears or no tears, crying was still an option.

“And I can’t help but think that this is all my fault. I don’t know if I can ever say it enough, and I know it’s too late. But I’m so sorry. You will never see another day, because of me. All your life is gone, and all those people you touched, you’ll never see any of that, because you’re gone. Because I let you down.”

A split second of horror, and a sickening, gut wrenching twist of guilt. Not only had she done this to herself, she’d done this to everyone else, and one of the best people in her life, her saving grace thought he was to blame. Apparently death didn’t mean she couldn’t feel pain. Because very clearly she could. She felt it so acutely.

“That first night, I should have brought you to the hospital even if it meant strapping you down. I should have made sure that you had the proper doctors, all the things you needed. If you’d gotten help, real help, you wouldn’t be here right now, you’d still be smiling and making everyone’s lives around your better. You’d still be here. Even if you hated me, it’d be better than this because a day were you hate me is better than a day I have to live where you’re not in this world. Juliette, I’m sorry. I put too much on your shoulders, I made you carry this, I convinced you that you could do it alone. I should have drawn a line and made sure you’d gotten the help you needed, and that’s my fault. And now you’re alone, and you died alone, and I can’t help but think that maybe if you weren’t so alone, that maybe you wouldn’t be here right now. That’s something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life,” his voice was breaking near the end, she could hear it and once again her gut twisted, as if punishing her. She deserved it. She’d take a whipping right now if it’d take away his pain. She’d do anything.

For the first time in her life, she saw something she’d never seen before, Roland crying. Tears ran down over his fan, and he broke out in a sob that killed her just as much as the blade she’d taken to her skin had. She let out a sob of her own, and she cried with him. All the guilt and shame getting to her.

“I hope…I hope wherever you are you can forgive me for what I’ve done to you, for leaving you alone. I hope the world will forgive me for taking you from it,” he whispered in a heavy breath between his sobs.

“But I was never alone,” she whispered between her own sobs, reaching out with a hand, not pressing it to his back as she knew it’d pass through, but resting it there, hovering, as if the gesture would do anything.

#solos

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sophiescarlet · 6 years ago

Text

my anime boston recap

i told a few people i’d write this, so here. warning, it’s long as fuck.

rebecca black - friday

while waiting for artists’ alley to open, i sat in a corner and watched people go by and saw a group cosplaying the main characters from the extremely underrecognized game the arcana, which was awesome and i totally would have asked for a picture but i’m way too shy. even though i’ve asked cosplayers for pictures before but i seem to have regressed in that sense...

i also saw (and this happened throughout the con) a bunch of hot, fit, really thin girls, which made me feel gay (as expected) but also really envious and sad and insecure about my body. cause i wish i looked more like them.

i also saw two girls cosplaying snow halation!honoka and kotori from love live, and the honoka had a giant honk nesoberi that i totally envy, and then right afterward a hate na heartbeat!eli and nozomi came around the corner and they were the coolest. i wish i’d had the guts to ask them for a picture too.

finally i went to artists’ alley and i got to buy a print from one of my favorite persona 5 fan artists but unfortunately she didn’t have the postcard set i wanted to buy. BUT right across was another fan artist whose stuff i really like so i bought a BUNCH of her prints - one of each of the p5 girls for me, and an extra makoto for my friend - and she came over to thank me and we chatted a little and it was nice. i am fucking determined to befriend some of these people and now at least one of them knows who i am.

i went to a panel on “fandom as coping” presented by a social worker which was really cool. she talked about how even though she’s a social worker, she still went through a severely suicidal period this past year and survived because of yuri on ice. i left partway through because then she turned it over to the audience to share our stories and i didn’t need to hear from a bunch of people talking about bad things that had happened to them.

the next thing i went to, after hanging around the vendors for a while, was tara platt’s (mitsuru and elizabeth from persona 3) q&a. she was really cool, and i actually managed to ask her a question, which was which one she preferred. (she said she can’t choose a favorite, but had more fun with elizabeth.)

i went to a presentation by sunrise, the studio that made love live among other things, but it was boring and i left early again because they were talking about gundam and other action stuff i don’t care about.

i’d planned on going to johnny yong bosch’s (makoto from free, kitamura from toradora, yu and adachi from p4) q&a, but it had a hella long line and it was obvious i wasn’t going to get in since the room wasn’t going to accommodate that many people. so i went over to a panel greg ayres (kaoru from ouran, nagisa from free, monokuma from the danganronpa anime) was doing on “it gets better.” come to find out he is openly bi! and is good friends with his ex who’s a trans woman and confronted her family about misgendering her! he is my new fav ngl and a far cry from hikaru’s va whom i met at tora-con a few years ago and was kind of an ego. it was a conversation sort of panel and we talked about a lot of stuff around queerness and bullying. i had to leave that one early too, but wished i could have stayed for the whole thing. also, there was a girl across the aisle from me who mentioned she was trans, and at one point i happened to catch her looking at me, and i think she was checking me out! sadly, i did not run into her again.

the reason i had to leave early was to get johnny’s autograph. he was really cool and i totes wish i could’ve gone to his q&a. since i don’t actually have any free! or toradora! or p4 merch, i had him sign my p3/p5 dancing game since it did at least come with p4 dancing as a free download. he took his daughter with him to the con which i find adorable though i have to wonder how bored she was sitting there for an hour and a half while he signed autographs.

katy perry - last friday night

at this point, i had a couple hours to kill, so i walked out to newbury comics in the hopes they’d have the bananarama vinyl reissues from the british record store day. they didn’t (though weirdly they did have the shakespears sister one), but they had kacey musgraves’ golden hour on sale, and i’ve been waffling on buying that for ages, so i finally snapped it up. then i went back to the mall where the con (sort of) was and got some godiva ice cream, which was even more overpriced than you’d expect but still very good.

so my last agenda item for the day was yuri lowenthal’s (makoto/minato from p3, yosuke from p4) q&a, which tara crashed because they’re married, which i love because it means that mitsuru is irl the canon waifu. once again i managed to ask a question, which was which p3 girl he’d like to have minato end up with, which made everyone laugh, and of course he said “i want to preserve my marriage, so either mitsuru or elizabeth.”

then i went home and felt like death.

i don’t know any songs that have “saturday morning” in the title

i took an uber to the con for saturday because the T was being replaced with a shuttle bus and i decided i’d rather pay $17 each way for a 15-minute trip than $2.50 each way for a 90-minute trip.

i went to a panel on “idols in anime” that was kind of interesting but i didn’t take much away from it, other than that i should maybe watch revue starlight. but then i went to a panel on “diversity in the magical girl genre” that was really cool. it was hosted by a queer latina woman and she talked about racial, gender, sexual, and ability diversity. it was interesting because she has a very negative view of yuuki yuuna, which i can certainly understand but don’t really share. but it was a great panel and i feel like i learned a lot. one neat idea she had was that what comes across as queerbaiting (or whatever-baiting) to western audiences can be really progressive representation in japan, and vice versa.

after that i went to another panel on “magical girl fashion” and literally got up and left because i couldn’t stand how wrong the presenter was.

i’d missed out both days on the free autograph passes for yuri and tara, so i went to their paid session, which to make a long story short was an absolute fucking disaster, and i ended up making a complaint, during which i cried in front of the con’s assistant director. so there’s something i can check off my bucket list. i also met the director, who came over to reassure me they were fixing things and said, “i keep saying i need a machete to take off people’s heads this year.” so obviously i immediately liked her! in the end, i did get their autographs (on the same p3d/p5d game) for fifty fucking dollars... i’d been expecting more like thirty. and they didn’t even personalize them. sad trombone noise. they were nice though.

then i rushed over to the free autographs and saw kara edwards (chihiro in the danganronpa anime) and had her autograph a wall scroll i’d bought from a vendor. i wish i could’ve gone to her q&a because she seemed sweet.

and right after THAT, i got in line for tara sands (a bunch of pokemon) and had her sign a manga volume i bought for my friend. she was also awesome and i really wish i could have gone to her q&a because we had this exchange:

me: this is for my friend who’s a huge bulbasaur fan

sands: oh, you’re such a good friend!

me: i know. and i won’t let them forget it.

sands: [laughs] that’s good! keep it up, i like your style!

i then went to greg’s q&a, which was fun. he mentioned that while recording the audio commentary for ouran, caitlin glass (haruhi) and todd haberkorn (hikaru) got really uncomfortable during one of the twincest scenes and started talking about anything else they could so they wouldn’t have to talk about the twincest, and in the commentary you can just hear greg laugh a little because he’d made himself laugh by thinking of saying “i just think it’s hot” but kept himself from saying it out loud. the hero we deserve tbh.

whigfield - saturday night (i actually don’t like that song btw)

at this point, it was time for the 18+ panels to start, so i went to one where yuri, tara platt, lisa ortiz (idk her), and billy kametz (same) did in-character readings of various scripts. they did a couple of star wars ones which obviously did nothing for me, except that tara did bb-8 in a christopher walken voice, which was fucking hysterical. the other one i remember was lisa doing a southern belle voice narrating the notebook, with yuri as sasuke (i think) as noah, and billy as lelouch (?) as ally. but the best one, of course, was the last one, which was the iocane powder scene from the princess bride, performed by yuri as spider-cop (iirc) as the sicilian and tara as elizabeth as westley. it was AMAZING.

then i went to greg’s 18+ panel where he recounted risqué stories like when his mom wanted to watch an anime where his character has anal sex. i remember it being hilarious but unfortunately don’t remember any specifics other than him affectionately calling his lawyer the C-word and a story about beating up an asshat in the o’hare airport after asshat broke a jigglypuff ornament his friend made him.

blondie - sunday girl

so having stayed out past 11:30 for greg’s panel the night before, and forgetting to take melatonin before bed... i actually couldn’t wake up sunday morning so didn’t end up going back to the con at all. which was really sad and disappointing as it meant i missed getting greg’s autograph, a panel on autism in anime fandom, and the voice actor roundtable panel, all of which i really wanted. so after finally getting up at 2:30pm i spent the rest of the day super depressed and mad at myself and just sad and disappointed.

the end.

#dreams of an impossible princess

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joyofcrime-elinorhigh · 6 years ago

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Dragon Ball Super Resurrection ‘F’ Arc REVIEW:

Previously on Dragon Ball Super. Goku pounded a pussy, for FIVE EPISODES STRAIGHT!

Hello everybody, my name is JoyofCrimeArt and welcome back to my multi part review/retrospective on every single arc of the anime series Dragon Ball Super. Last time we talked about Dragon Ball Super we talked about the of the "Battle of Gods" story arc. If you haven't read that review yet you might want to before preceding, that way you can know my thoughts on that arc before we talk about this arc. So the link is here if you are interested. Dragon Ball Super: Battle of Gods Arc REVIEW: Now let's talk about this arc and the history behind it. Like Battle of Gods, this arc (titled the "Resurrection 'F'" if the title of this review didn't make that clear) is an adaptation of the film "Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F'" which came out in 2015. Now if you remember last time, I mentioned that I loved the Battle of Gods movie, and thus, the arc had a lot to prove if it wanted to surpass the movie in quality. Which in the end it was not able to do, despite having some good moments here and there. However with Resurrection 'F' it's a bit of a different story. I thought that the movie was good, but nothing especially great. It had an interesting premise, some really good action scenes, and kept a lot of the fun and comedic tone that was so prevalent in "Battle of Gods." However, it also suffered from a lot of weird pacing issues, a lot of things not being very well explained, and a bit of a weak ending. I remember when I first watched the film I thought that "Yeah, this would probably be better as an arc rather than a film" (Dragon Ball Super was already out in Japan by the time I got around to see the film for the record.) There could be room for an adaptation to expand upon things that where kinda brushed aside in the film version, so I was interested to see how the arc would deliver. Did it do just that? And is this arc and upgrade or a downgrade from the movie of which it is based? Well, let's dive in and find out. Also, for the record I will be discussing mainly the dubbed version, not the subbed, just as I did with the Battle of Gods arc, and will be doing for all future Dragon Ball Super arcs. Just wanted to make sure that that was clear from the get go. So the story begins not that long after the end of the Battle of Gods arc with Vegeta being mad that's he's been overshadowed by Goku for the like nine thousandth and first time. Determined to become stronger, he goes out to train when he finds out that Bulma has actually been having lunch dates with Beerus's assistant, Whis. Whis has been wanting to see more of Earth's food after the Battle of Gods arc, and since Beerus is asleep at the moment he has nothing better to do. Bulma's been showing him all of the food that Earth has to offer, that way if Beerus ever comes back to destroy the world again, Whis will have incentive to stop him. Vegeta questions what Whis's actual role is in the god hierarchy and Whis tells him that he is the one who actually taught Beerus how to fight, and thus is actually much more powerful than him. Impressed, Vegeta begs Whis to train him, so he can become stronger than Goku is. Whis agrees, but only if Vegeta can find him a tasty food that Bulma hasn't shown him before. This leads to a hilarious scene of Vegeta trying and failing to feed Whis a meal that will please him. And I do mean hilarious. Like, I know that a lot of Dragon Ball fans skipped to the post movie arcs, but please, if you are one of those people I highly recommend that you do yourself a favor an go watch episode 16 of Dragon Ball Super. It's one of the funniest episodes I've seen so far. Christopher Sabet has been voicing Vegeta for so long that he is absolutely perfect at pulling off the comedy in these comedic Vegeta scenes, and he has some great ab libs. Also just as the "Vegeta in a choo-choo train bit" justified the Battle of God's arc's existence for me Vegeta calling Bulma "babe" does the same for this arc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYjMn_FsIHY

Eventually Vegeta is able to win Whis over by showing him the greatest food that humanity has ever created. Instant microwave ramen...apparently. Vegeta goes off with Whis to Beerus's planet to train and we get a six month time skip. Goku, who's been to busy with his new found farming job and his new role as a grandfather to Gohan's newly born daughter Pan, finds out that Vegeta's been out training without him and asks Bulma to get Whis to train him too, much to Chi-Chi's dismay. Goku, never one to miss out on an opportunity to abandon his loved ones, is able to convince Whis to train him too by just kinda bugging him a lot. Whis begins training Goku and Vegeta by having them do simple house chores Mr. Miyagi style. Though after Beerus wakes up from his slumber Whis tells Beerus that the reason he's training Goku and Vegeta isn't just because of the free food or to get out of housework, but because he's genuinely interested in seeing there true unlocked potential. Oh, and also new outfits! Neat. All the stuff that I've just mentioned are additions that the anime added. In the movie we just start with Goku and Vegeta on Whis planet training and get told how they ended up there. I greatly prefer this version of events more. In the movie, while Beerus and Whis where interested in seeing Goku become stronger, it still felt kinda weird how they where trying to kill Goku in one movie, and in the next movie they're just hanging out on there planet. I know Goku befriends his enemies a lot but it felt a little bit to...quick I guess? Here though it flows a lot better and provides some great comedy. Also it's great seeing Bulma being proactive and trying to stop another disaster before it begins by befriending Whis. To many characters in this show are reactive instead of proactive, and it's nice seeing Bulma being smart enough to plan for this kind of thing. Overall I would call all of this stuff a good expansion of the film. Meanwhile out in deep space, we see a group of people that we haven't seen in a long time. The Frieza Force. That's right, turns out that they're still around. Which makes sense I guess, considering the fact that after our heroes defeated there leader they kinda just sort of forgot about the rest of them. We learn that the Frieza Force has been falling into disarray ever since Frieza died. Sorbert, the new leader of the Frieza force, along with his second in command Tagoma decide that they have no chose but to go to Earth and find the dragon balls in order to bring Frieza back to life and restore there empire back to it's former glory. The Frieza Force arrive on Earth to discover that the now children Pilaf Gang have already been collecting the dragon balls so they can wish for world domination. Geez, you'd think the Z fighters would frickin' collect these balls the moment they become activated, even if they don't intend to use them. Two separate groups of villains nearly collected all of them without the good guys even noticing. Sorbert makes them hand over the balls and they wish for Frieza to come back to life. But not before we the audience see what Frieza's been doing in hell for all of this time.

Oh my God, this is all of my yes. Unfortunately for them, Shenron can not rebuild Frieza's body. But only bring back the still alive pieces. So are you frickin' telling me that even after Future Trunks cut Frieza into a billion pieces it was still the energy blast that killed him? I'm going to have to call bull on that good sir! However, luckily for the villains they can still reform Frieza's body using an upgrades version of there healing chambers. They leave as quickly as they came and not long after Frieza is back!...Again.

Man, Frieza is kinda like the Ganondorf of DBZ, isn't he? Speaking of which, let's talk about Frieza for a minute. Frieza is cool. I know many people say he's over played, (which he totally is.) but that doesn't take away from the fact that, on a fundamental level, Frieza is just really frickin' cool. From his sadistic but also flowery mannerism, his threatening but also quite unassuming design, to his role in the story that from a narrative perspective makes him the ultimate antithesis to both Goku and Vegeta, Frieza is just cool. And that's not even to mention the voice performance that's masterfully crafted by Chris Ayres. Frieza, in my opinion at least, is the best Dragon Ball Z villain. He was able to come off as extremely powerful, and unlike Cell or Buu he was able to enter the series RIGHT before power of all of the characters became so unbelievably powerful that the concept of power started to be to high to hold any substantial weight. Or at least, that's my opinion. So while many people where annoyed to see a villain rehashed I wasn't super against it. I know that technically, from a story perspective, yes it's kinda dumb to bring Frieza back. They're no points, we've done all of this before. But when you see Frieza come out of that healing chamber, as the ominous music builds, it's hard for me to not feel hyped to see one of the greatest cartoon bad guys come back to settle the score. So I am kinda torn on this. My brain is saying no, but my heart is saying yes. You know what I mean?

Oh my God, it's so cool! So once Frieza is brought back, he immediately decides that he wants revenge. Though after hearing that Goku's become strong enough to take on Majin Buu, Frieza decides that it would be best to train for four months first. Frieza, being a naturally gifted fighter from birth, has never trained before. He believes that if he we're to actually apply himself he would be able become so stronger and break through his limit's just like Goku did. We also get into another film vs anime difference here. In both versions Tagoma suggests to Frieza to not focus on petty revenge and focus on rebuilding his empire. In the movie Frieza kills Tagoma for suggesting that, but in the series he just mutilates him. Frieza then says that Tagoma will be his training partner as punishment. In the movie we never really learn what Frieza's training is. Here we get to see it very briefly. (Too briefly if you ask me.) Basically Frieza spent four months beating Tagoma to near death everyday, then put him in the healing chamber so he could do it again the next day. This not only made Frieza stronger but Tagoma too. And Tagoma under this torture kinda goes a bit nuts. Learning from Frieza that the only way to true power is by embarrassing pure sadism and ruthlessness. It's interesting to see, especially since in the film Tagoma is pretty much just there to be killed by Frieza. It's an interesting change. Though I do question how beating up someone that much weaker than him helped Frieza get so strong so fast. Or how being beaten helped Tagoma. But hey, this is Dragon Ball we're talking about. Peoples power depends completely on what's convenient in the moment, especially in Super! We also see some of Goku and Vegeta's training with Whis. We get a glimpse of some energy that they seem to be locking into.

Hey look, foreshadowing! That's something that wasn't in the film version! Whis tells the two of them that if they want to become strong enough to defeat Berrus they need to overcome there flaws. Goku needs to stop being so overly confidence and Vegeta need to stop overthinking things. Wait, isn't Vegeta's whole thing that he doesn't think things through? Like when he let Cell reach his perfect form or when he let Babidi brain wash him? Both things that nearly lead to the destruction of the Earth? Yeah, I'm not the only one thinking this, right? But whatever, regardless Whis tells that they the biggest thing they need to do is learn to work together. Whis decides to throw them both in a pocket dimension so they can learn how to internalize there ki, because Whis is kinda a dick. Oh, a Whis also foreshadows the fact that he can rewind time. I'm sure that won't be at all relevant later on... Four months past and Frieza is ready to invade the Earth. However, luckily for our heroes Bulma get's a warning about this upcoming invasion by none other than...Jaco! What's that? You don't know who Jaco is? It's Jaco! Y'know, the main character of Akira Toriyama's 2013 short run manga series "Jaco the Galactic Patrolman." that, in the final chapter, was revealed to actually be set in the Dragon Ball universe. This manga was not very well know before Jaco was introduced in Super and the Resurrection 'F' movie, and hasn't seen any form of english translation as of the time of me writing this review, but don't worry, they don't bother explaining who he is or how he knows Bulma for any newcomers. And if they don't have to explain it than why should I, right? Moving on! With Jaco's warning Bulma tries to contact Whis by using a strawberry sundae, by alas it doesn't work. So Bulma has no choice but to get all the other fighters that she can. Piccolo! Gohan! Krillin...Tien...Master Roshi for some reason.... Yay? They tried to get Buu as well, but he was asleep. I'm sure that this won't become a trend or anything! Frieza lands on Earth with his army of a thousand men. And in typical Dragon Ball fashion it's up for all of the lamer heroes to stall the minions while we wait for Goku and Vegeta to show up. The battle begins and honestly, it's a lot less cool than it is in the movie. Not just because of the animation downgrade, which is inevitable, but also just because a lot less time is devoted to it in general. Also in the movie we see Jaco fighting along side the other Z fighters, and it's really cool. However, in this we just see him sneak attack like one or two guys. I don't like this, why take away some of the awesome Jaco moments? Still though, it still is pretty cool to see a six on one thousand battle with the six managing to pull in a win. That's still pretty frickin' epic. However, a plus the series does have is, as mentioned before, Tagoma, who proves to be quite the formidable and sadistic foe, being able to give even Piccolo the run around. This is actually really cool and Tagoma's English voice actor Micah Solusod. He does a good job adding a lot to an overall not super well developed character. However, Tagoma's reign of terror is cut short when Gotanks shows up (Also an addition the series makes.) and pretty much one shots him. While I do like how Gotanks is added, as Goten and Trunks really don't get to be in much of the action in Super in general, it is a bit lame that Tagoma only get's one episode to really do anything of note. Feel's like there was more that could be done with him. However in another interesting twist, a certain alien frog shows up, and if you're a long time DBZ fan you'll know what I mean. Captain Ginyu, trapped in a frog's body for all of this time, shows up and uses his body switching powers on Tagoma and steals his body. Ginyu is back in all of his flamboyant glory! And yes, while I do wish we got a bit more time with Tagoma as Tagoma, this isn't that bad of a trade off.

In a scene that was in the film briefly, but very much expanded upon in the series we see Gohan showing mercy to the Frieza soilders by not killing any of them. This mercy enrages Frieza, as it reminds him of the mercy that Goku gave him back in the Namek saga. We get this really creepy scene of Frieza just decimating Gohan, as Gohan has become a lot less powerful since Z due to him focusing less on training and more on his job and family. Frieza beats him easily and starts torturing him to the full extent that a show that is aimed at Japanese children can allow. Frieza is about to finish the job, but right as he fires the blast Piccolo get's in the way and sacrifices himself in order to save Gohan, just like he did in the Saiyan saga. Gohan is forced to lie on the ground, seeing that despite all the time that has pasted nothing has really changed. He's still forced to rely on Piccolo and Goku to protect him, and he is helpless to stop Frieza from destroying his planet, and by extension his friends and family. It's a really powerful scene in my personal opinion, as it gives Gohan a lot of character development and shows Frieza at his most ruthless. Whis finally get's Bulma's message and picks up and Goku and Vegeta find out about what's going down on Earth. However, it'll take them at least thirty minutes to get to Earth if they travel with Beerus and Whis, and Goku can't teleport to Earth because he can't lock on to anyone's power over such a long distance. That is until Gohan uses all the energy he has left to power up as much as he can, making an energy signal powerful enough for Goku to detect it and Goku and Vegeta teleport to Earth, with Beerus and Whis following shortly behind. And then Vegeta kills Ginyu. Geez, first Tagoma now Ginyu. Why does this arc keep introducing all these cool ideas only to get's rid of them after only half an episode! This isn't Adventure Time!

Well...I guess you could that that Ginyu...Croaked? (...I'll go home.) With Tagoma a frog and Ginyu dead it's time for Frieza to get out of his chair and take matters into his own hands. He powers up and in the process kills all of his men except for Sorbet by accident. Though Frieza is not bothered by this, as he believes that men that weak have no right to serve as his army. ...Y'know Frieza, maybe killing all of your men just to show how evil you are is a bad idea. Like, what if you lose and they're nobody left to revive you? Y'know, like what totally ends up happening... Goku and Vegeta argue over who get's to fight first and decide with a game of rock-paper-scissors, which Goku wins. Goku and Frieza begin to fight for a bit, and sadly like the Battle of God arc this is where the animation starts to go down in quality. Though luckily it's nothing that's to noticeable. The two go back and forth for a while until Vegeta get's board and demands to fight instead. This leads to Goku and Vegeta actually fighting each other for a bit and honestly this leads to a big flaw this fight has in both versions. There is a sever lack of tension. Goku and Vegeta are taking turns fighting, and honestly treating this more like a game than an actual threat. There's never a feeling of tension because whenever Goku is on the ropes where reminded that Vegeta is just off to the corner standing there, ready to jump in if anything goes really wrong. Coupled with Whis time reversing technique that was foreshadowed so obviously that we know that it's coming, it really results in the biggest problem that I think I have with the entire fight. Goku pulls a fast one on Frieza by revealing that he too has a final form, in the form of Super Saiyan Blue! It's like a normal Super Saiyan, but blue! Ooooooh! In all seriousness though it is a bit different. Remember that training that Goku and Vegeta did in the other dimension to focus on internalizing there energy. Well that's what Super Saiyan Blue is. It keeps all the energy inside them, making sure not to waste in unnecessarily. So no power ups that destroy mountains and no hours of screaming, it much more zen. And interesting change of paste from what we are use to. The design is cool, and I do like how it is different from some of the other forms, but in a lot of ways this form feels very unnecessarily. We JUST got Super Saiyan God in the last arc, and they made a big deal about getting it. And now it's just replaced by a new form that got only the tiniest bit of foreshadowing before hand. It honestly feels like something they threw into the movie just to make sure that people would see it, and they had to add it into Super as a result of that. But Frieza has a trump card, a new form! It's his final final form! Called Golden Frieza, a form he modeled after the Super Saiyan form, as a form of ironic mockery. Also, I guess Frieza can chose what his forms look like? Then how come Frost's forms look pretty much the same in the next arc? The forms design is...okay. I don't know normally gold and purple look really good together, but I dunno, it looks a bit gaudy to me personally. Though it's nothing awful or anything.

Oh, and Beerus and Whis show up. They eat ice cream. Yay. Frieza and Goku punch for a bit. While not awful or anything it does pale in comparison to the film version and especially the Goku vs Frieza fight in Z. I know that comparison might come off as a bit unfair but it's hard not to compare them when it's literally the same match. The original Goku vs Frieza fight is considered one of the greatest fight scenes in anime history by many, and this arc trying to recreate it in a nostalgic way was always distended to be a losing battle. Also while the Battle of Gods arc had the problem of making the Goku/Berrus fight to long, this arc has the opposite problem with the fight being to short. The fight is divided into three parts: Base Goku vs Base Frieza, Blue Goku vs Golden Frieza, and Blue Vegeta vs Golden Frieza. Each of these phases last only one episode. Three episodes is awfully short, especially considering that the original Goku Frieza fight was nineteen episodes, and that's not counting the Frieza fight with the other Z fighters before that. I'm not saying it has to be that long, that would be just plain awful, but something a bit more might of been nice. I should of at least been about as long as the Goku/Berrus fight at least. It's frickin Frieza for God's sake. Goku has Frieza on the ropes, and in typical Goku fashion offers Frieza a chance to leave and be sparred. He powers down from Blue (Which is a change from the movie.) and then get's shot through the chest by Sorbet from behind. Goku got over confident, just like Whis warns. Frieza begins to torture the barely alive Goku and Vegeta steps in, kills Sorbet, and get's Goku away so he can be healed. It's now Vegeta's turn to fight. Vegeta turns Super Saiyan Blue as well and we learn of Frieza's great weakness. The moment he unlocked his form he went to Earth, and didn't bother spending any time mastering his form. So the form suffers from Stamina issues and will not last that long. However it seems a bit weird, because they way that it implies that Vegeta and Goku have master Super Saiyan Blue for a while now, but they just learned about holding in there energy earlier that day. But they keep things so vague and explain Super Saiyan Blue so badly that it's left open enough I guess...? Vegeta and Frieza continue to fight until Frieza is left completely drained. Vegeta is about to finish Frieza off for good. But Frieza, in the Dragon Ball equivalent of throwing a board game off a table when you're about to lose, punches the ground and blows up the planet, in a pretty actually emotional sequence all things considered.

Oh, right. I forgot he could do that. However, before the planet explodes Beerus and Whis make a bubble that protects pretty much everyone there except for Vegeta from the blast. Oh boy, if only there was some kind of Chekhov's gun we could use in this situation. So yeah, Whis uses the time rewind ability, however we learn that his ability t rewind time only goes back three minutes. He tell's Goku to take the situation seriously this time and not be cocky. And so Goku does, using a Kamehameha to finish Frieza of for good. ... ... ... For good. Piccolo is brought back to life OFF SCREEN! (Yeah, that's seriously how little death matters at this point.) Gohan decides to go back to training with Piccolo that way next time something like this happens he can be prepared to protect his love ones. This is another Super addition and I honestly like what it does for Gohan's character. (To bad it'll be another sixty one episodes before we see any of this come to fruition- The arc ends with Goku explaining what happened to Vegeta, and they ponder what they could accomplish if they actually followed Whis's instructions and work together. However, neither of them seem interested in doing that and Goku laughs it off. Yay! Nothing was learned! Overall the ending in the arc is the same as the movie, except a bit more gravity was given to the planet destruction scene. Overall the ending still leaves a lot to be desired in my personal opinion. What I would have done differently to fix the ending? i would of had the Earth stay exploded, and THAT'S what leads into the next arc. That could be the reason why our heroes are trying to find the super dragon balls, and that could be why they enter the Champa's tournament. Obviously you would have to change some stuff around since two of the all of the fighters in the Champa tournament minus Goku and Monaka would be dead, but you could do it. I dunno, maybe it wouldn't work, but I think it would of made both arcs carry a lot more weight emotionally. But wait, that wasn't even my final thoughts! So is this arc better than the movie? Well, like the Battle of Gods arc it depends on what you're looking for. The movies a lot shorter and has a lot better animation and action scenes. However, I'm going to disagree with ninety nine percent of the Dragon Ball fandom here when I say that I think I like the Super arc more, which is weird cause I was not expecting to. I feel that while a lot of the flaws of the movies are still present, this arc adds enough new concepts that makes it better than the film over all. I like seeing how Goku and Vegeta got to train with Whis. I like seeing Tagoma and Ginyu. I like seeing Gohan get some character growth. And I like seeing Frieza just do his thing. It's great to watch, no matter how much of a marketing stunt it is! Is the arc perfect? No, like I said the animation is a lot worse, Jaco is given a much less badass role, and it's a good bit longer. But I think that, overall, I liked this version better. Though it'll be up to your own personal preference to decide which version is better for you to watch. I think part of the reason most Dragon Ball fans hate this arc so much is because it came out right after the movies release. We were burnt out on the story, still upset over the major flaws, and wanted to get to the new stuff. I think those factors may have influenced some peoples opinion on the arc itself. However me, seeing the arc over a year after watching the movie for the first time, I can say that I like it more. But that's just my opinion. I would love to know yours. What did you think of the Dragon Ball Super: Resurrection 'F' arc? Do you prefer the series or the movie's interpretation? Leave your thoughts down bellow, I would love to know you're opinion, even if it doesn't necessarily match mine. I would love to start a discussion! Also sorry about getting this review out so many weeks after the arc ended on TV. I try to get these Super reviews out as the arc air on Toonami, but sometimes life get's in the way. Anyway, please fav, follow, and comment down bellow if you liked the review or if you have any suggestions for something else for me to review. If it sounds interesting I might just do it. Have a great day.

(I do not own any of the images or videos in this review. All credit goes to there original owners.)

https://www.deviantart.com/joyofcrimeart/journal/Dragon-Ball-Super-Resurrection-F-Arc-REVIEW-705109337 DA Link

#Frieza #Dragon Ball Super #Review #anime #Dragon Ball

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