#at this person who by all accounts has experienced exactly what she and other grim fucked up legionnaires have gone through

[lavellane]

can confirm sigrun is so so so much funnier and more perfect when ur playing a warden who acts like this unironically. felt genuinely read to filth when she said this

[principiumindividuationis777]

Curtains Fall Lightly (Historical Noir)

Chapter I

At a leading manufacturer of aircraft, especially military aircraft, in the Summer and Autumn of 1963, events unfolded as described.

Philip Morris was a dying man, having received a dire prognosis from his physician. A leading contact between the firm and United States government agencies, he attempted to teach the much younger George Blythe to replace him, briefing Blythe on a situation as grim as Morris's own.

"Young man, you must understand that this company is under attack from within. It's not the Soviets primarily, but a woman named Rosalind Kerr, ostensibly a consulting advisor. Even I don't know who she works for, but she uses blackmail of our board and our employees to advance her own position, and what she wants, as far as I can tell, is an escalation of warfare, in any and all parts of the world, to increase sales of our aircraft, receiving a generous percentage in her own accounts of the resulting profits and cash flow."

"The compromising data is seldom obtained by Mrs. Kerr personally, you understand," continued Morris, "But by her mousy little male secretary, Joseph Wheedle, aptly named if ever anyone was. I have never seen anyone so good at a show of false humility, and he gains trust, and thereby ruins lives."

"Why does he share this information with Mrs. Kerr?" asked Blythe.

"Ah, that's the key. I have rumor and conjecture. I believe that Wheedle, some fifty years old and unmarried, may have homosexual tendencies, taboo to many, even illegal, and that most likely Mrs. Kerr knows this and compels him to share in her goals, and to share his ill-gotten gains with her."

Morris added a hint that perhaps Blythe should uncover proof of Wheedle's secret life, to leverage against him, and continued to explain the company's sinister cabal.

"Now, as you can see, Kerr is a woman, and not a young one, and Wheedle is a small man of little physical prowess. When blackmail is not an option, they have a man, Michael Pocius, though I am one of the few who knows Michael's real name. Nearly everyone calls him 'Clawboy'. He was born elsewhere, but by age fourteen, was a student in America, and at that age, did something so gruesome to the Principal of his school that the papers would not describe it, but the nickname Clawboy has been with him since. Do you remember the Cleveland murders of the 1930's? The ones even Eliot Ness couldn't solve? No? Well, such is your youth. I have every reason to believe Pocius was the culprit, though he deflected blame on to some mental hospital patient. Six foot three and never gave man or woman a quick death, he is as dangerous as they come, and he works for Kerr, who pays him well, though he will still hurt most anyone for sport."

"Why isn't he arrested?"

"Because Wheedle has compromising information on policemen and judges too."

"Surely, not all of this company is part of Mrs. Kerr's plot?"

"No, just those three, as far as I know. In this wing you will find Ramon Germanos, as he is legally known. It may be a poor translation of his Spanish name- he's from Mexico- but that is beside the point. He is a bitter bureaucrat who obstructs everyone in his path. His father died in a riot, I hear, and he hates the system for failing him."

"If he hates the system, isn't this company the essence of, well, the system?"

"Exactly, and from this very vantage point he can make life miserable for the people he quietly and, technically, law-abidingly hates, which is all of us."

"A job much like mine is done by the less experienced Leonard Collins. He is loyal, but much too impulsive for such secretive work, I believe. The one other person you'll need to know of is someone I know only as Three Eyes- never knew his real name. He's from India, I think, and every now and then you'll have to meet him at a planned location so he can give you the latest on Soviet aircraft, giving us, and the USA, a great advantage. Three Eyes is a spy, though I don't know who he works for- some say Britain, but I'm unsure, and now, if you'll excuse me, I am rather tired, so I'm going to rest in my office."

Chapter II

Morris had not considered Ramon Germanos's wife, Jayne (maiden name unknown), important enough to mention, and this is understandable. As far as the world knew, she was a bleach blonde imitation of Marilyn Monroe, but without the talent. Relying on Ramon's money, she had a résumé of only a few unprofitable films of the lowest quality, such as "Snake Women of Acapulco"… or so she wished the world to believe.

Morris also failed to mention Trenchcoat, often just called Trench. His existence was considered something of a legend. From the aeronautics firm up to governments around the world, many had heard the legend of Trenchcoat, but most disbelieved in it. The stories went that he was supposed to live in an abandoned building somewhere near this airplane manufacturer, and though some CIA agents initially took the stories seriously enough to search abandoned buildings around the city, no trace of this semi-mythical being was found.

No one had ever seen Trench's face, though some claimed to have heard his voice, either by telephone, or in person, in his pitch black lair, they said, though these supposed witnesses were often less than credible. No one knew Trench's agenda or loyalties, or if he even existed, at least not until Mrs. Kerr's schemes brought matters to a head.

Finally, in my attempts to keep the stranger than fiction nature of this report comprehensive, there is Linda Aeons (real name unknown), the only person in America who could openly assert being a Soviet agent and remain at liberty, because no one believed her. Supposedly a Romanian immigrant, she would hang around important government and corporate buildings, point her fingers like a hypnotist, believing that she was hexing passersby, mainly the employees, go into strange dances, have conversations with spirits (or so she claimed)… aside from several stays in mental hospitals, which generally found her to be harmless, as she never became violent, no institution took Linda seriously.

Having apprised the reader of those involved, the reader can now understand what transpired that fateful year. (Excuse the poetic touch, dear reader.)

Chapter III

George Blythe quickly became acquainted with the ways of Ramon Germanos. Blythe filed a report comparing American and Soviet aircraft, only to have Germanos interfere and claim it was "written unprofessionally". When Blythe asked how he should change it, Germanos replied, "You are supposed to be a professional. You should know." Thus, a report he could have finished in two days took four rewrites and three weeks to meet with Germanos's grudging approval.

Blythe once sneaked into Germanos's office, and found a treatise on anarchism. Confronting Germanos with it, Ramon explained it away as "understanding subversives- to defeat them, we must understand them." With what Morris had told him, however, Blythe doubted this explanation.

This soon became moot, however, as Germanos overplayed his hand attempting such obstructive tactics against Rosalind Kerr. Soon after this, photographs of a most graphic nature, proving what many already knew, became widely available within the firm, and to law enforcement, and to anyone else who wanted the information that they contained.

Ramon Germanos had married Jayne to keep up appearances, but much preferred men. His face was very recognizable in the photographs, but the other man's face could not be seen. Philip Morris, however, though by now like a walking cadaver, and straining to speak, insisted that the other man was Joseph Wheedle, and told Blythe that, to undermine Mrs. Kerr's schemes, Blythe needed to prove this.

"How could I prove it? We can't see his face."

"W-we [here a coughing fit interrupted Morris's speech]… we can see a scar on his ribs, near his left elbow… here. Prove Wheedle has this."

Blythe could think of only two ways of proving this: One would be to find some reason to have Wheedle throughly searched, but no such reason could be found. The other was far more distasteful to the very heterosexual, as some might later say, George Blythe, but he went through with it.

Not an unattractive young man from Wheedle's point of view, Blythe saw enough of Wheedle one night to be certain that yes, Joseph was the other man in the photo.

In the meanwhile, however, Ramon Germanos had done in himself, and Blythe, himself more than a little shaken over how he had to obtain the information on Wheedle, went off drinking at various bars during work hours, rather against regulations, and at one such bar, met with, it seemed, a grieving Jayne, but it was there and then that we would find that the sad-eyed blonde was a myth, and a cold heart and head lived beneath that façade.

Chapter IV

A less than sober Blythe had mentioned to Leonard Collins his encounter with Wheedle, and Collins thought that he might try the same, but with the more drastic aim of ending Wheedle's life, hoping this would put an end to Mrs. Kerr's hold over the corporation. Ransacking Wheedle's place to make it look like a robbery, Collins reported to an abandoned building, an old warehouse, devoid of any lighting, proudly boasting of what he had done.

"I did it Trench. Got that little scoundrel once and for all, and even if Mrs. Kerr has his info, she'll be too scared now to act."

An eerie, quavering voice replied out of the darkness, none too pleased.

"You foolish whelp. Kerr has ten times the physical courage of Wheedle. You should have killed her to frighten him. Employing you was my biggest mistake. This is an easier death than Clawboy would give you."

A dim shadow in the room's darkness flung a knife at Collins, hitting his target, and Collins was never found.

Chapter V

At the bar, Jayne, red eyes and running makeup, seemed to be the most pitiable sight Blythe had ever seen, until his vision began to blur, and over he fell, dead. Jayne looked confused and frightened. The bartender assumed that George had just been drinking too much, and would soon recover.

Jayne kept up her dumb blonde act for about three blocks, then her face set to stone, and she got in a car with an up-to-date telephone, calling the man Collins would refer to as Trench.

"Blythe was drinking on the job. I made the drink his last."

"You always were one for drastic action, but I suppose weak wills have no place in our line," replied the same strange, quavering voice, though distorted a bit by the phone.

"Say, Trench, aren't you concerned someone might bug our phones?"

"No, because the man they send to do that had a car accident, Jayne. They don't make brake lines so reliably in those foreign makes."

Needless to say, even when coroners found the poison, no one suspected the grieving, not overbright widow, as they reckoned her, but authorities were out looking for someone who fit their idea of a dangerous spy or criminal.

"One more thing before you hang up, Jayne: You must act against Mrs. Kerr now. Wheedle swore revenge if anyone got him, and something terrible is coming. Kerr would take full advantage of it. No time to explain. Take care of her. You know how."

Chapter VI

Jayne, seemingly an intoxicated mess, sobbing for "Ramon", went to Kerr's home, as if to seek a maternal figure. Kerr disdained the girl utterly, considering her, as she had once said to Wheedle, "a waste of hair dye", but did not want Jayne to make a scene outside her home, a home always watched by agents of more than one country.

Inviting Jayne, who acted as if she could barely stand, into her home, Mrs. Kerr sent Carlos, her servant, to get coffee for Jayne. By the time Carlos returned, Jayne had already dispatched with Mrs. Kerr, using Dim Mak, I am told. As an unfortunate witness, a petrified Carlos discovered that Jayne, like Trench, was an adept thrower of knives.

Rosalind Kerr being gone, Clawboy had no loyalties, but would continue to be the most physically dangerous criminal on the streets, for profit and sport, beginning with an armored car robbery in early November, 1963, an incident that left two guards dead.

What Trench said about Joseph Wheedle's threats was, according to the best sources, true. He had threatened more than once that if anything happened to him, he had a "Communist cell" that would "remove" the most important man on Wheedle's long list of compromised individuals, and the "cell" did so, on November 22, 1963.

Chapter VII

By the end of November, several more robberies and deaths, some too terrible to describe, marked wherever Clawboy had traveled, hitting several cities so that a pattern would not, by most, be noticed.

Some took notice, however, including Jayne. She was back on the car phone.

"I know Clawboy has no agenda anymore, but in a way, he is off his leash. Enough more of this, especially if he did too much in one city, and it would worsen the crisis in public trust that is already inevitable, after what happened to the President, and given what the new President is."

"You are correct, Jayne," said the by now familiar, quavering voice, "And I intend to act."

"You know better than anyone where he is, Trench. Just tell me and I'll do it."

"Jayne, have you ever read of Clawboy's idea of amusement back in Cleveland? You are a deadly woman, but if you and Clawboy ever met, you would go that way. I must insist. The only person alive better at violence than Clawboy is me, and I must do this one personally."

Chapter VIII

A limping, elderly hobo hobbled down a rural road not far from Baltimore. A blue Bel Air drove up behind him, driven by a grinning Michael Pocius, who thought he would play some games with the old man.

Clawboy drove the car directly at the hobo. There were no witnesses in sight, so it was just the two of them. The old man managed to throw himself to one side, but could not return to his feet. Pocius parked his car on a dime, and got out, strutting triumpantly and chuckling, pulling out a knife in his gloved hands, one with a finely carved handle.

The transient seemed resigned to his fate, smoking one last cigarette, as Clawboy, like Trench and Jayne, was about to practice his knife throwing skills, but suddenly, Pocius fell over, and was obviously no longer living when he hit the ground.

The "cigarette" had been a blowgun, and one assumes, the "elderly hobo" was an elaborate disguise of Trenchcoat.

Philip Morris passed away in 1964, and last I heard, Three Eyes and Linda Aeons had joined a commune in the vicinity of San Francisco, California.

Sincerely,

Trenchcoat

[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 6)

Previously...

they don't talk for quite a while after crossing the river into tennessee. lena needs some time to process this new information, and kara seems to sense this need. the blonde goes back to staring solely at the road ahead, occasionally tapping little rhythms on the steering wheel and humming little songs under her breath -- though she'll often stop herself, as if she thinks that lena needs complete and utter silence to sort her feelings out.

lena doesn't. she can appreciate the humming, even -- kara has a lovely voice and carries a tune well, and the distraction is a welcome one from the complete mess she's trying to unravel in her mind. it creates a soothing pace to the crops and occasional cows speeding last lena's window, almost lulls her to sleep despite her tangled lines of thought.

it's late afternoon and the sun is going low, low, low in the sky when kara finally says something.

"there's a motel a few miles ahead. we'll stop there for the night," she says, but then she quirks her head towards lena briefly, eyes hopeful. "if that's ok with you, i mean."

lena stops staring through the passenger window for a moment -- she's been looking at miles and miles of crops and farmland as far as the eye can see, and her eyes are beginning to glaze over.

"of course."

she studies kara’s expression, wondering why she’s suddenly giving her any sort of say at all on where they’re going. kara just looks ahead, maybe a little sheepishly. 

“ok, then.” 

the motel is… well, it’s a motel; it’s not any nicer than any of the other ones they’ve stayed at recently, but it’s also not any worse, either. they check into a single room -- kara rarely has lena out of her sight, minimizes those occasions as much as she possibly can -- but on the way there, the blonde spots a payphone, right by the corner of the building, and shoots lena a look. 

“do you mind if i…?” she doesn’t finish her sentence, but she doesn’t need to; she simply cocks her head towards the payphone expectantly. 

“go ahead,” lena says, trying to give her a heartfelt smile for… encouragement, maybe? she doesn’t know if she succeeds, but kara smiles back earnestly and turns on her heel to walk briskly to the phone, hand already reaching into the pocket of her jeans for another roll of coins. 

the keycard takes a few tries to unlock the door, but eventually the lock clicks and lena practically stumbles in, dropping her worn duffel on the floor, right there by the entrance, onto a rug with some questionable stains. she feels exhausted, mentally and physically drained to a degree she can’t recall ever experiencing before. 

it’s been hard, lately, to get her thoughts in order, but lena suspects that’s nothing to be too surprised about. she’s used to compartmentalizing--it’s one of her talents-- but right now the knowledge that alex danvers is the one hunting her fills her with dread. even if alex knows her sister is alive (she was the one to revive kara after all, according to kara herself), she still doesn’t know that kara is essentially harboring a fugitive. she still thinks lena is running out of her own volition. 

she still thinks lena meant to kill kara. 

that thought doesn’t mix well with the multitude of other worries swimming in her head, at the moment, doesn’t sit well in her chest and makes her stomach curl uncomfortably into knots. 

lena’s not so out of it that she misses kara’s fumbling with the lock, but she does almost miss the look of defeat in the blue gaze once kara finally gets the keycard to cooperate. 

kara sinks into one of the chairs by the little table in the corner, sighing audibly as her whole body seems to deflate. 

“no luck?” lena tries, and kara shakes her head in the negative. 

“nope,” she murmurs, popping the ‘p’ as she digs little shapes onto the cheap wood of the table with her nails. “nothing yet.” 

lena nods--she’s not sure what to say, here. she’s a little conflicted on how she should feel about kara finally getting in touch with alex--part of her wants answers, but a much bigger part of her is terrified of an agent danvers on the warpath. she knows alex would move heaven and earth for kara, no question about it, but with lena in the picture?

she’s not so certain what the reaction would be. she’s not sure she wants to find out. 

“are you hungry?” kara asks, breaking her grimmer trains of thought. “i grabbed a flyer for a pizza place nearby--looks like they do delivery. personally, i think we could use a break from the cup noodles.”

lena smiles a little. “i haven’t had so much instant ramen since college, i think.” 

kara laughs, and it sounds so...so free, unreserved, so alien to their current predicament, it’ almost easy for lena to join in, too. it’s not even a funny comment, not a particularly snarky observation, but for some reason they’re both having a small giggle fit and it feels good, cathartic even, to be sharing a laugh with kara again. 

“well,” kara quips, yanking the crumpled flyer out of her pocket and smoothing it over the tabletop, “i don’t think tey have that fancy kale monstrosity you liked to order at gino’s, but at least it’ll be better than instant ramen, right?” 

“right,” lena chuckles. “just… get me something with at least a vegetable in it, for the love of god.”

kara makes a face, but she’s still smiling as she reaches for the phone. “as you wish, as you wish,”  she says dramatically, muttering there’s no accounting for taste, really and tutting under her breath while she dials. 

lena smiles--wide and real, she can even feel her eyes crinkling at the corners--as she listens to kara rattle off their order (three large pepper--you know what, better make that four--four large pepperoni pies, wait, no, extra large, and then…) and, unbidden, her mind seems to get stuck on a different time, an entirely different reality, when she and kara would just… order pizza (though kara limited her order to two large pizzas back then), watch movies, and just talk about everything and nothing until the sun came up. 

lena misses that peace. 

kara seems to be in the same wavelength; she has a wistful look on her face once she hangs up, as if she’s reading lena’s mind, experiencing the same brand of nostalgia in the same moment. 

lena has to break it; it’s too painful to wallow in it. “kara? can I ask you a question?” 

“Hm?” kara hums distractedly, craning her neck to look at lena’s direction with a little smile. “just one?” 

“wel. no, not just one,” lena admits, trying to organize her thought again. there’s just so much she wants to ask, so much she needs to know, and she’s not sure where to start.

kara just waits, her gaze unwavering. 

“back in national city,” lena starts, picking a lane and sticking with it, so to speak. “ when you… when you died… when alex brought you back… who exactly brought me to you? it couldn’t have been alex, if she doesn’t know i’m with you.” 

kara looks pensive for a moment, steepling her fingers over her thigh. “what do you remember?” 

lena has struggled with precisely that for the past couple of weeks. the truth is, the time between watching supergirl drop like a rock from the skies and being shoved into the jeep with a kara that was very much alive is a complete blank.

“pretty much nothing after you fell,” lena answers honestly, and she looks to kara for an explanation for this significant gap in her memory, but finds nothing. “but then… someone took me from somewhere and suddenly… and there you were. who was that?” 

for some unfathomable reason, kara looks amused. “oh,”  she chuckles like she can’t help it. “that was nia.”

lena can feel her own eyes bugging out. “nia?? are you telling me nia nal put a bag over my head and basically kidnapped me?” 

kara snorts. “that’s exactly what i’m telling you.”  she turns serious, suddenly, and her lips tighten into a line for a moment. “alex prepared the jeep and a few supplies, but nia had a dream--a vision that she wouldn’t explain. she just told me to take you with me, and I wasn’t about to argue.” 

lena can’t lie to herself, she’s a little hurt, but definitely not surprised, that bringing her along had not been kara’s intention. she chooses not to dwell on it -- there’s already far too much to dwell on. “oh,”  she says instead, looking for words. “what happened between the time you were… recovering and the time we ran off? was i not…” lena stops, struggling to remember but drawing nothing more than a blank. “was i not arrested or something?” 

it occurs to lena that she has no idea how much time it took kara to recover, or what happened to her while alex nursed her sister back to life. she can’t explain how kara survived; she can’t explain what happened between her fall and their escape, she can’t explain how lex hasn’t found them yet. 

kara can only shrug her shoulders. “i don’t know. alex sent me to the jeep’s location the minute i was well enough to not need the sunlamps; when i got there, nia was already there with you. didn’t exactly have the time to argue--lex would definitely find out i was alive if i stayed in national city.” 

“ain’t that the truth,” lena quips bleakly. a thought occurs to her. “frankly, i’m surprised he doesn’t know. he owns the DEO in this reality.”

“thank rao for small miracles,” kara mutters. “we sure need them, the way things are going.”

another thought occurs to lena--she thinks back to the past few days, but more specifically, to mere minutes ago, when kara was gouging faint little marks on the wood of the table with her nails--something so trivial, something she used to do herself as a child, bored and anxious at boarding school-- and she realizes with sudden clarity that there’s a lot that she can’t explain--but one thing seems to stick out, glaringly.

“kara,” she says, trying to add up the days in her head and not liking what she comes up with at all. “it’s been at least two weeks, right?” 

kara nods, looking grim as if she knows exactly what lena is about to ask. “give or take, yeah.” 

lena’s question comes out as a statement, and at the exact same time someone knocks on their door, startling them both. 

“and you still don’t have your powers.”

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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[sepublic]

What constitutes a ‘Demon’?

There’s been some discussion amongst this fanbase about what exactly a ‘demon’ is. We know they come in a wide variety of shapes and forms, and we know that demons are evidently capable of full sapience (but not all of them are).

From what we know thanks to King, our not very preeminent scholar on the matter, demons are “grim tricksters of the twilight, creatures of sulfur and bone,” that they “live only to create chaos and misery”, and all have a weakness to purified water (and passive-aggressive comments).

What purified water exactly is in the context of this show, I’m not sure and it might not even be elaborated upon, but it’s fun to think about! So perhaps ‘demon’ refers to any creatures with a weakness to purified water. While King’s account should admittedly be taken with a grain of salt, considering how inaccurate he was with the Snaggleback (or not, since according to @anistarrose we may have simply encountered a juvenile and not a full adult), what his words seem to imply is that demons are nocturnal, are said to cause chaos, and are made of sulfur and bone. That last bit intrigues me the most- Humans already have sulfur in our body, so that implies that demons have a particularly high ratio. That, or witches simply have little to no sulfur in their bodies, seeing as how humans aren’t from the Demon Realm and wouldn’t be included in that context.

But what about magic? I’m of the assumption that demons can’t do magic, and perhaps that’s what differentiates them from witches. However, in Covention, two witches from the Bakers Coven try to invite King, which seems useless since we know he doesn’t have a magic bile sac.

And how do we know? In Episode 8, Eda is in King’s body and attempts to cast magic while trapped at the Kitty Cafe. Eda is an incredibly skilled and experienced witch, so she’s never had an issue with the skill of casting magic, and even if King had an incredibly diminutive sac that hasn’t fully developed, it should’ve yielded at least some kind of spell. Eda states that she’s “no longer a witch” indicating she knows King isn’t, and Roselle and Dottie agree.

However, if one considers the theories about King having once been the King of Demons, and even the Boiling Isles Titan, then... he could be a one-of-a-kind person. Meaning, there’s no one like him, so no one actually knows his true capabilities and nature. However, King is certain that he was the King of Demons, so for now, let’s just say he is one.

So why would those two Baker Witches be interested in King joining, if he can’t do magic? Perhaps they don’t realize he’s not a Witch because they’ve never seen anyone else like him. Maybe it’s just a throwaway gag/joke that I’m taking too seriously. Perhaps non-witches have some value to covens as testers and voluntary subjects. Amity says the Covention is only for witches, did those two bakers just assume King was a witch because he was there? We see this guy at the Covention;

And he looks a lot like this demon;

But it’s highly likely he’s just there as a placeholder background character.

Could a demon perform magic if you transplanted a magic bile sac to their heart? If so, would ‘demon’ more specifically refer to beings who are born without magic, but still capable of it later on down the line? Eda seems to be under the impression that Luz can’t ever gain a bile sac, so presumably neither can demons, but maybe there’s a difference between human and demon anatomy to be considered.

The line blurs when we acknowledge Adegast, AKA that one-off minor villain who died in his debut. Eda calls him a puppeteer, specifically a “demon who specializes in scamming and manipulating people.” Adegast is a demon, but he can also conjure powerful illusions. Do these illusions count as magic- Specifically, illusion magic? When we first meet ‘him’ in his wizard illusion, he briefly summons two spell circles, but is that actual magic or just an illusion that looks like magic (versus actual magic that creates an illusion)? Perhaps Adegast’s illusions technically aren’t magic, at least not magic as the Boiling Isles defines it (presumably something to deal with a bile sac). If he were an Illusion Witch, why is he in the Potions business? Is it like Willow, where she was placed into a track she wasn’t good at?

We see Adegast create an illusion by spraying Luz with a cloud of smoke, and when his puppets are destroyed, they dissipate into smoke, so perhaps that’s what they all are; Just smoke and mirrors, minus the mirrors. So because Adegast’s illusions don’t come from bile, it’s not magic, ergo he’s not a witch and this lends further credence to the ‘Demons are those who can’t do magic’ theory. On another note, we see Adegast revert to a smaller ‘true’ form after being wounded by Luz... is this form the result of magic, or just an illusion or the effects of a potion?

(If his illusions don’t come from magic and he can’t perform it, then Adegast probably shouldn’t have entered the Potions business when Potion magic is such a big deal that there’s a designated major coven for it. Even if he got Eda out of the way, he’s competing with literally every other Potion Witch in the Boiling Isles, and they have the advantage of magic! Maybe he uses his illusions to make his potions seem more potent than they are, who knows? This lends to the unpleasant image of him spiking potions with his illusionary gas, but this show has always been pretty horrifying, so.)

Hooty is referred to by the Demon Hunters as a ‘house demon’. There’s the possibility that Hooty was made by Eda, since her owl constructs resemble him so much, and Hooty mentions Eda teaching him everything he knows. However, the Demon Hunters also mention removing Hooty from the house, when he IS the house... Perhaps this is a case of characters not fully understanding who they’re interacting with? We do see living alarm bells at Hexside and the Covention center, and a doorknob that tries to eat Luz in Episode 2. Could the term demon also apply to living fixtures who are made for a purpose?

If demons also refers to living beings who are made, I assume Abominations don’t count as demons because they don’t eat and thus aren’t living, which would explain that distinction.

Is that why Eda calls the Bat Queen a demon, since palismans are living beings who are made? However, we don’t know if Eda is aware of the Bat Queen’s palisman nature or not, so her being a demon could just be an assumption on Eda’s part. Palismans also presumably have magical abilities (and we see the Bat Queen appear to use a spell to bind Willow and Gus). So, CAN Demons perform magic, or is there a misconception here?

There’s also the possibility that ‘demon’ is just a catch-all term. An othering term, meant to describe anything that isn’t a witch. Only... witches come in a wide variety of appearances, some more inhuman than the rest. Are witches all the same species, and thus able to procreate with one another (and thus a demon is a being a witch couldn’t reproduce with)? Do all witches, amongst their bile sacs, share a common DNA or ancestry? Are they all the same species, merely different in appearance because that’s just the way they work, or because of magic causing changes? Or does it just refer to non-humanoids?

Maybe ‘demon’ is just a societal definition, and a loose one at that. Maybe it DOES refer to animals and beasts, but because of social biases, some characters are called demons when they’re not? Beast-keeping is a term, but Demon-keeping isn’t, as far as we know. Getting into further speculation, could ‘demon’ refer to the original inhabitants of the Boiling Isles? Could witches have come from another land beyond the bones of the titan? Are demons the creatures born directly of the titan’s flesh, or perhaps the parasites that inhabited its body? The descendants of its equivalent to gut bacteria and white blood cells? The Boiling Isles is located within the Demon Realm, which could imply they’re progenitors of some sorts. Of course, maybe demon also has multiple definitions as well.

Overall, here are my proposed ideas for what defines a ‘demon’ in the Boiling Isles;

-Not capable of magic due to lacking a bile sac

-The indigenous population of the Boiling Isles

-Wildlife in general, as well as those linked to beasts or like them

-A social term for those perceived as more animalistic, regardless of such an observation has actual scientific accuracy or not. Perhaps the social aspect of the term is also for beings who aren’t immediately identifiable, don’t belong to a specific species, are one-of-a-kind, etc. AKA it’s the Boiling Isles equivalent to the term ‘cryptid’

-Non-humanoids

-Those vulnerable to purified water, with a presumably high concentration of sulfur making up their anatomy

-Anything living that isn’t a ‘witch’, specifically the species (this applies to living constructs as well, presumably, though if it extends to Palismans is unknown)

-An unknown, perhaps yet-to-be introduced factor

-A term with various definitions and meanings depending on the context

-Some combination of the above-mentioned ideas

What do you guys think? It is worth noting that King refers to demons as “creatures like me,” which implies perhaps some shared genealogy/something objective and physical, not just societal, but who knows? Perhaps the most important question to ask is;

Am I overthinking things?

[sweetsmellosuccess]

Sundance 2021: Day 4

Films: 4 Best Film of the Day(s): Mass

Mass: Predictably, Fran Kranz’ film opens with a shot of a church, but the title turns out to be a reverberating double entendre   —  both the religious service towards forgiveness; and a term commonly used in conjunction with a multiple-homicide shooting event. The church, Episcopal it turns out, is the agreed-to meeting place for two sets of grieving parents: Gail (Martha Plimpton) and Jay (Jason Isaacs), whose teen son Evan was killed some years before in a high-school massacre; and Linda (Ann Down) and Richard (Reed Birney), whose son, Haden, was the shooter, before killing himself in the school library. They have agreed to meet, long after the lawsuits and legal wrangling have been settled, to possibly provide answers and solace to one another. As can be expected, the atmosphere is fraught with tension  —  a setting Kranz, an actor making his directorial and writing debut, expertly mines before the couples arrive, with a kind but overenthusiastic church administrator (Breeda Wool), fretting about the details of the food arrangement  —  and the couples, wary, at first, of letting things get hostile, work diligently to avoid disagreement by staying mild (an arrangement of flowers Linda brings is speculated upon a great deal). Eventually, however, the four wounded parents get down to more brass tacks, Gail and Jay eschewing their therapist’s call for them to avoid “interrogation” questions, to get at the root of what they are after. In truth, as Kranz has the characters cannily come to understand, there are no details that shed new light, no explanations that help rectify what they’ve lost, only a grim understanding that, as parents, they are all subject to the laws of chaos and chance. Unsurprisingly, Kranz has an actorly sense of conflict and explication, but, despite the limited setting (this could easily have been an adapted play), he gives his actors plenty of room with which to work, and the quartet are more than up to the task. They are each terrific, and given opportunity to shine, but it’s Plimpton’s monologue near the end about her son that becomes the film's singular tour-de-force moment, a scene with so many hooks and edges, it sticks to you like velcro. Kranz is careful not to overstep his dramatic boundaries, difficult given the potentially melodramatic elements of the story, and allows his actors enough time to breathe so it avoids feeling polemic or preachy (an early scene with Gail and Jay in the car before they arrive is a scintillating bit of set-up, where words are spoken, but our attention, like that of the characters, is entirely elsewhere). No easy answers, thankfully, just brutal realizations that can’t be avoided.  

A Glitch in the Matrix: By this time, documentary filmmaker Rodney Ascher has carved out a sort of niche for himself: As with Room 237, and The Nightmare, he has gathered up fringe thinkers displaying a sort of group psychosis in order to explore other ways of seeing, and interpreting, our world. His docs don’t come down on either side of a given conundrum  —  are any of the far-out, would-be explanations of The Shining in 237 the least bit sensible? Is it possible in The Nightmare for people experiencing the horror of sleep paralysis to share in the same horrific vision?  —  but he carefully doesn’t contradict any of his subjects either. His new film, an exploration of what’s known as “simulation theory,” concerns a pattern of thought described back in 1977 by the heavily adapted science fiction author Philip K. Dick during an appearance in France, suggesting, Matrix-style, that all that we think we see and know is actually an intricate virtual reality, brought to us by an unseen technological force. True to his form, Ascher interviews numerous applicants to the theory  —  many of whom portrayed by VR avatars in their own homes  —  including scholars, practitioners, and skeptics, and bolstering their arguments with an assortment of other media, from Minecraft, Philip K. Dick-based films, and crude computer animations, to video games, and youtube videos. The views are intentionally conflictive  —  one subject suggests the very idea of such conflict is the basis of the simulation  —  and anything but conclusive, but, of course, that’s the very point. Less unsettling than The Nightmare, one of the few true horror movies of the documentary genre I’ve ever seen, save for the account of Joshua Cooke, who pled guilty to killing his parents in cold blood after cementing his belief that the ideas portrayed in The Matrix were completely real. Listening to his step-by-step description, from prison, of his descent into madness, and where those impulses took him, is to drop into first-person shooter psychosis.

Coming Home in the Dark: Both Australia and New Zealand are blessed with spectacularly beautiful land that is filled with wide-open, terrifying vast spaces in which any amount of evil may lurk. In dark, violent films like Wolf Creek and Killing Ground, all that beauty and space is turned on its head by far more chaotic inclinations, rendering brutally effective, and stomach-churning sadism as a means of displaying the horrible duality of the land. Kiwi director James Ashcroft attempts to add to this cinematic legacy with this film, a murder-abduction sort of thriller, in which a family on a camping trip in the wilds, is brutalized by a pair of killers they come across. In a twist that at least one of the killers, Mandrake (Daniel Gillies) would have us believe is a coincidence, it turns out the patriarch of the family, Alan (Erik Thompson), used to teach at the abusive orphanage school in which both Mandrake, and his partner, Tubbs (Matthias Luafutu) suffered as children. It’s not a believable conceit, which Ashcroft seems to readily admit, but because it makes the connection, the film attempts to work as a kind of metaphor for the violence which we didn’t perpetrate, but also did nothing to stop. Mandrake as an avenging angel, foisting Alan’s lack of empathy back onto him in violent spades. It’s difficult to fault a film for not being transgressive and shocking enough, exactly, but despite the theatrics of the situation, and Mandrake’s coldly comic engaging of the couple in “regular conversation,” it doesn’t have the heart to be as effective and unsettling as it needs to be. It plays it too safe, which saves the audience from being plunged into the all-too-realistic terror of, say, Killing Ground, but also dilutes the stronger point it wants to make about systemic brutality.

The Blazing World: Related to the 17th Century Margaret Cavendish novel in basic concept, Carlson Young’s feature debut walks a wobbly line between linear narrative, and neo-gothic opera  —  only with a soundtrack instead of singing. The story concerns a young woman, Margaret (Carlson), who loses her twin sister to a drowning accident as a child, but has imagined ever since that her sister lives in some alternate vortex of reality, heralded by a grinning demon, Leonid  (Udo Kier, of course). Coming back to her childhood home before her battling parents (Dermot Mulroney and Vinessa Shaw) move out altogether, Margaret meets some old friends, does some drugs, and finally enters the fantasia-like world that Leonid has been beckoning her to for most of her life in order to find her trapped sister. There, she must amass a series of keys, plucking them from demon versions of her parents, and confront her own guilt and pain in order to unlock her twin and set everyone free. It would be easy to say Young’s reach far exceeds her grasp, but the fact that she was willing to attempt such an audacious project says something about her artistic chops. And for every moment that hits wrong, there are several more that work in interesting ways. Her aforementioned use of music, and sound design invokes a kind of Kubrickian aesthetic, and her commitment to her vision is palpable. This likely won’t be the best film she ever makes, but it does portend to a filmmaker worth keeping an eye on, going forward.

Sundance goes mostly virtual for this year’s edition, sparing filmgoers the altitude, long waits, standing lines, and panicked eating binges  —  but also, these things and more that make the festival so damn endearing. In any event, Sundance via living room is still a hell of a lot better than no Sundance. A daily report.

[beyondalicerp]

Name: Musetta Mist Age:  18-24 19 Date of Birth: February 4th Gender: Cis Female Sexuality: Undecided Residence: N/A Occupation: Thief Species: Merperson Affiliation: None Face Claim: Annalise Basso          Suggested: Madelaine Petsch, Katherine McNamara, Sophie Turner Played by: Ofir (They/Them)

Musetta the Mellifluous has never been the ideal young Mer. Since they were a child they were very clearly one with a large rebellious streak. Their parents were strict, but they were stubborn. They developed a plain disinterest in authority and mermaid culture from a very young age as they watched their people cringe beneath the rule of the Elders. Despite their displeasure, Musetta endured their life in the Sea until the inevitable moment came: the announcement of their marriage by the Order to none other than Chanson the Chaotic. They expected it long enough to have planned carefully. Panic was unnecessary. For a few days Musetta went along with the traditions. They wanted to convince everyone they were ready for this. After enough time had passed, with the help of a couple of sprites, they had sneaked around the gates to the River, never to turn back. They thought they had gotten away with it, finally free of the suffocating grasp of the Sea of Song, that is until they discovered their now betrothed was hunting them down to bring them back by any means necessary.

Chanson the Chaotic: Musetta never developed much of a fondness for their intended fiance. They had been planning this escape for so long that needless Mer traditions never came to matter and they hardly paid the other Mer any attention. However, while Musetta knows its counteractive, seeing how well Chanson is hunting them down has gained them some admiration. Part of Musetta, the part that loves to be entertained, is rooting for Chanson to succeed. The other part, the reasonable part, knows to fear that any small mistake might mean Chanson will drag them back to the Sea once and for all. Musetta won’t have much time to congratulate them if they’re dead.

The Wild Willow: The Rose Rogue did not expect anyone to want to help them when they first escaped the Sea. They had come across the Willow on accident when they were resting on the edge of the River. When the two locked eyes, it seemed neither knew exactly what they should do. But the Willow showed them kindness - kindness they had not experienced... ever. The reason they got their new title as the Rose Rogue was because they had to commit so many crimes just to stay alive this long, but now if they ever fail to get what they need, the Willow is always there to check on them. They aren’t sure if this is friendship, but it’s certainly more than they ever had in the Sea.

The Blind Beast: Musetta first noted the Blind Beast as a possible threat, but they quickly realized that was not their intention. The Rogue, having been brought up with their prejudices from the Sea, is probably the only one who understands in the slightest the way the Beast feels about the people of Wonderland. The two have talked only briefly, with passing respect for one another, but perhaps it’s time Musetta finds themself a new ally in Wonderland.

The Rose Rogue is currently TAKEN.

Musetta’s life seemed to be defined by dysfunction. Unfortunate, then, it was for her to be born in the tightly ordered Sea of Song. Such tight order made such a disorderly girl feel isolated. Perhaps it was this ostracism that allowed her to see the cracks within the rule of the Elders, and for sure it was this ostracism that made her develop such an independent personality that she no longer saw a place for herself in the Sea of Song. As a result, she had developed carefully calculated plans to leave this place, and almost no plans as to what she would do once she got out.

The first crack she found was in her parents. From birth, she was raised to think that the Elders set up perfect matches, and many thought her parents held up that ideal. Musetta knew better. Her mother, Aoede, was only fifteen when she was set up with a dimwitted, arrogant man who abided by the Elders’ ideals just enough to curry favor. A year later, Aoede was with child. One would think to ask the Elders their logic when deciding that Aoede should be wedded and bedded at such a young age, but it seemed the mer held no such thought. Nor did they think to ask if Aoede would be a fit mother at such a young age. Instead, Aoede seemed to have a perpetual identity crisis, appearing as a compliant mermaid in public and breaking down from overwhelming responsibility in private, the latter causing her to be rebuffed by her older husband.

Best mating pair? Musetta saw early on that that wasn’t the case. Her parents, Aoede and Nereus, did not think to question their match out loud. Instead, they took their anger on their daughter, harshly forcing her into compliance. When her parents’ methods failed, they would volunteer her to other authorities within the Song of Sea. Such authorities would “break” her, to her parents satisfaction.

This worked. For a little while.

The second crack was in her song. It wasn’t hard for the mer to come up with beautiful songs to lure in prey. Some sang of paradises that awaited the poor folk who wandered close to their shores, others sang of riches meant to tantalize greedy man. As for Musetta? She sang of sad things, grim tales to render her prey in a state of catatonic despair. It was one thing for her to viciously lure in those who left their footprints in the wet sand and tear them apart with her teeth – any mer would approve of that. It was quite another, her peers decided, for her to sing any song that revealed her own sorrows and anger. Well, anger toward the sea. Had she sung of hatred for those on land, they would have a little less a problem.

The third was in the idea of strength. Strength, the Elders said, lay in their commitment to their ideals and to their people. Strength lay in nothing but unwavering hatred of anyone on the outside. Strength lay in being vicious, merciless, and pitiless. It also lay in being physically strong, the mer said. Musetta thought she could muster up the last one, having withstood even the harshest punishments, both physical and psychological. She withstood the temporary draining of her magic, the sort that made her siren song ineffectual, her transformative abilities gone, her magical energy weakened. She was sure that every part of her had been broken at some point. Strength, she thought, was managing to do without, and coping with isolation that would have broken any other mer, on account of how familiar she was with loneliness.

For her whole life, she was taught that the mer were stronger, superior, that all others were unfit to be anything but the merfolk’s prey. However, one encounter near land proved her wrong.

One day, Musetta had snuck away from a tedious ceremony. Sneaking around wasn’t all that hard for Musetta. It was just a matter of finding out which guardians had the poorest attention span, which areas were the least protected, which paths the mer were least expected to take. Musetta combined her knowledge of those things with her ability to take advantage of the merfolk’s overconfidence to slip away, as she did often. She went to a part of the shore that the merfolk didn’t often frequent, and she dwelled in those waters, singing her siren song.

At first, she sung something sad and angry, thinking that the mer were too distracted to hear her now. Something about drowning, or about watching someone disappear and not feeling even a hint of loss. It was around sunset when she found a girl wandering around the beach, and she thought she would lure this girl into the sea, easy. But, the girl…. just kept wandering.

“How?” Musetta had asked. She was frustrated, at first, that this girl had not succumbed to her song like the other fools did, but then, she was curious. Curious and impressed. She had to know this girl’s secret.

Doing so meant going, sneaking onto land. Even with all of the rebellious things she had done, leaving the water without the permission of the elders was not something she had done before. So, going on land meant two things: breaking a bigger rule than she ever had, and learning to adjust to a new center of gravity. So, for the first time, Musetta went on land and let her legs dry. Musetta wasn’t sure what to expect when she tried her land legs on for the first time. She certainly didn’t expect to be humbled. She had attempted to push herself up, only to trip on her own feet and scrape her knees against wet rock. Then, she would push herself up again and take a few steps. She would fall again, and again, and again, until she was reduced to a pathetic crawl. She remained where she fell, dejected, until the girl turned around on her own accord and saw Musetta apparently struggling to use her own two feet.

In a sudden moment of empathy, and perhaps surprise, the girl ran to help Musetta up. Yet another shock to the mermaid, who had not expected help from the girl she tried (and failed) to lure to her death. When the girl hoisted Musetta up and sat her down on a warm, nearby rock, Musetta noticed an odd accessory on the girl’s ear, and did not understand what it was for until the girl turned on a switch and asked, in an odd accent, “What happened?”

Oh, Musetta had realized a little ways into their conversation. The girl is deaf!

The realization had Musetta cackling. Who would have thought that such a thing – a trait that Musetta’s sea-bound peers would have considered a weakness – would have resulted in the girl inadvertently saving her own life? The oddness of the situation had Musetta so baffled and impressed that she did not take advantage of the girl’s trust when she turned her hearing aid on. Instead, she let the girl talk and talk and talk. Apparently, the girl was from a world beyond this place, and it was a world in which no magic existed. Instead, the place had complex technology, from electricity to life-saving surgeries to odd, flat devices that allowed you to contact people remotely and find the answer to any question you had. The girl apparently didn’t know much about the merfolk, or the siren songs, or about how dangerous this beach was. Nah. It was just by pure chance that the girl forgotten to turn on her hearing and when she had walked into a land of luring siren songs, and only thought to flip the switch later, when she needed to talk to the stumbling girl on the beach.

After a bit of chit-chat, Musetta thought to ask the girl why she didn’t keep her aid on all the time, or better yet, ask for a spell to restore hearing entirely.

“Because,” the girl said, “this is nothing to be ashamed of. This doesn’t make me less than. Just different.”

The conversation couldn’t last much longer than that. Not when both Musetta and the human girl saw heads poking out of the water. Musetta told her to turn off her hearing device just before she heard the siren songs, and Musetta made a mad dash for the water before the mer could detect her on land.

She never saw that girl again.

The thought that you did not have to conceptualize a difference as something missing gave Musetta a different sort of strength. It certainly gave Musetta a new way to think about the numerous punishments she had been given throughout the course of her life. That time she temporary lost the use of one of her hands? She now knew how to do complex tasks with just one. The time parts of her tail had been clipped? She had to learn how to deal with other means of locomotion. With this thought in mind, she learned to think of that brief moment on land not as a moment of humiliation, but as one in she would have to learn, yet again, how to cope with a disadvantage.

It gave her strength again when the Elders decided to punish her harshly for leaving the important ceremony. It was those mermaids – the ones that found her on the beach – who had managed to track Musetta down and bring her back. Those girls had reported to the Elders what they saw. You saw a human on land, they had said, and you didn’t kill her like you should. Angered by what looked to them was yet another moment of Musetta’s weakness, they had imprisoned her and temporarily drained her of all her magical abilities, feeding her only when they deigned to show her mercy. It was during her imprisonment when Musetta fantasized about leaving this world behind. After her release, she started to formulate a plan of escape. She knew it couldn’t be immediate. She would have to plan long term, find more cracks in the Elders’ rule, and befriend the right people on the other side.

It wasn’t long before she found more cracks. She knew that Aoede and Nereus weren’t in a happy marriage. What surprised her, though, was the sight of Nereus with another mermaid. A flagrant example of disobedience toward the order of the Elders. Musetta had thought to tell her mother, if only because she thought it would encourage her to petition the match. Instead, her own mother rebuked her.

Just how and why was Aoede willing to put up with Nereus’ infidelity? Perhaps Aoede blamed herself, or perhaps she was just brainwashed. Whatever the case, Musetta hoped she wouldn’t become that. Hell, she secretly wished she’d be considered too rebellious to be suitable for anyone at all.

But life had a way of throwing a wretch to her wishes.

She had known of a particular mer named Chanson Welles. Known of. She did not know him personally, nor had she any desire to. All she knew was that, somehow, she had a gut feeling that the Order would pair her up with him. Logically, though, she couldn’t be sure why. He was fierce and loyal to the rule of the elders, merciless and pitiless in his treatment of outsiders, and certainly disapproving of her past displays of rebelliousness. Worse still, was that this match followed the same pattern as her parents. Musetta, a young mermaid who had barely lived. Chanson, several years her senior, ridiculously obedient to the Elders. The thought of losing herself to this mer filled Musetta with dread, and it gave her plans of escape a sense of immediacy.

Time to play both sides.

In public, she had carefully constructed an image of a girl expressing remorse and showing slow and steady improvement. Too hasty of a change, and someone would grow suspicious. Too slow, and she would incur more punishment. She slowly regained the trust of her parents. An easy thing to do, since they were focused on wedding preparations. Those who knew her, even the mermaids that had reported her for going on land, were none the wiser.

Privately, she had made contact with a few sprites from the other side, message-in-a-bottle style. Their messaging system had to be secretive. She had to find their messages carved in code among a pile of seashells she had gathered as decorative jewelry for her wedding ceremony. She had to pass a message along to a bunch of salmon that planned to swim upstream to lay eggs. She had to have faith that her messages got to a few sprite contacts whom she had barely known. Then, on the night before the ceremony, she had to make a mad dash toward the gates and let the two sprites help her slip away.

The escape went on without a hitch. The two sprites, Moselle and Destan had guided her up the Restless River, where she remained temporarily. Moselle and Destan didn’t really become her friends, though. In Moselle’s and Destan’s minds, helping her escape and not revealing her location to anyone was all they owed her. The rest of her escape – learning about how Wonderland worked, and, ya know, walking on land – was up to Musetta. So, she tried her best, learning to catch food without the help of her siren song, and practicing her land-walking whenever she could. She needed to learn the latter very quickly. Musetta had no plans to stay in the Restless River for long, and she heard from some passers-by that Chanson, the very mer she was betrothed to, had been given permission to follow her and hunt her down.

Musetta stuck it out in the southernmost part of Harmony Grove, putting her skill of sneaking and weakness-detection to good use. Turns out, everyone’s basic psychology was the same. There were times of inattentiveness, or overconfidence, or underestimation of Musetta’s abilities. The first thing Musetta had picked up was theft, stealing dresses off clotheslines and loose change from hanging pockets. She used her knack for sneaking to sneak into a room at a different inn each night. Sporadically, she returned to the river to recover her strength. She found that, if she needed to successfully hide from Chanson, she would have to return to the Restless River less and less. Her only comforts at night were the advantages she had over Chanson: her having become quite adept at using her land legs, and her being accustomed to working without magic in a world that punishes its use.

[thejokesonthem]

Full article under the cut for those who can’t access the link.

The hatchet came later. Rocks were rare in the Red Hills of Kansas, where Carry Nation lived, so, when God commanded her to destroy establishments where alcohol was served, she gathered pieces of brick from her yard and wrapped them in brown paper to look like packages. On the morning of June 7, 1900, she walked into a saloon in Kiowa, told the proprietor to take cover, and began throwing her “smashers,” as she called them, at the mirror above his bar and all the bottles on it.

Later that day, Nation did the same thing at two other bars in town, though when her brick failed to break the mirror at one of them she hurled a billiard ball from a nearby pool table to finish the job. She was detained in Kiowa, but not arrested. Her first jail sentence came nearly seven months and many smithereened bars later, in Wichita. “You put me in here a cub,” she cried from behind the bars of her cell. “But I will go out a roaring lion and I will make all hell howl.” And so she did, switching from “smashers” to hatchets after her release, and getting arrested at least thirty more times for wielding them at bars from San Francisco to Coney Island.

Carry Nation’s wrath was a response to matters both private and public: she was furious at her alcoholic husband, and furious at the legal system that let men like him drink freely to the detriment of women, children, and society at large. Although her means were unusual and her desired ends unfashionable, she was representative of a recurring figure in American history: the woman whose activism is fuelled by anger. Such women are much in the news today, and much in the streets, too, although generally without the hatchet. Since the 2016 Presidential election, countless numbers of them have set out to make hell howl—by disrupting government hearings, occupying federal buildings, scaling the Statue of Liberty, boycotting businesses, going on strike, coming forward with stories of harassment and assault, flooding congressional telephone lines, raising a middle finger at the Presidential motorcade, and attending protests by the millions, sometimes carrying with them representations of the President’s castrated testicles and severed head.

In previous political eras, women like these would have been told to hold their tongues or act more ladylike. These days, however, we are being encouraged, at least in some quarters, to embrace our anger. A slew of new books are challenging the ancient notion that rage can be dangerous for both self and society, arguing instead that women’s anger is, as the respective subtitles of these books insist, their “power,” their “revolutionary power,” even their “superpower.”

Like any emotion, anger is easy to recognize but difficult to define. We know it when we see it, and certainly when we feel it, yet most definitions struggle to wholly capture it. Philosophers sometimes describe anger as a response to the feeling that something one values has been wronged or harmed. Biologists might explain it as a feeling of pain or discomfort or anxiety, accompanied by the release of hormones, like adrenaline, that increase blood pressure. Psychologists often classify it as a secondary emotion—one that follows from a primary reaction, such as fear or shame, and can take many affective forms, from tears to screaming to silence.

This definitional slipperiness inevitably haunts any effort to make anger into a political tool—what, exactly, is being valorized, an ethical objection or a rush of adrenaline? But one thing is clear: responses to anger depend, to a remarkable degree, on whether the person expressing it is a man or a woman. In “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger” (Atria), the writer and activist Soraya Chemaly notes early on that women “don’t need books, studies, theories, or specialists” to prove how reviled our anger is. We are all familiar with the stereotypes whereby femininity demands the suppression of anger while masculinity rewards its expression, and whereby angry women are hysterical harpies but angry men—white men, at any rate—are heroes. Rather than dwell on how female rage is received, Chemaly presents a thoroughgoing assessment of its causes: an account, organized thematically, of the private and public abuse, bias, and discrimination faced by women.

The result is both relentless and revelatory. American women between the ages of eighteen and forty-four are nearly twice as likely as men to report feeling exhausted every day; women, if they have sex with men, have fewer orgasms than their male partners; they make less money than their male colleagues; of the thirty highest-paying job categories, twenty-six are dominated by men, while women dominate twenty-three of the thirty lowest-paying categories; female patients are treated for pain less often than male patients who present with the same symptoms; one in four women lives with domestic violence; one in five women has been sexually assaulted; and two-thirds of women have experienced street harassment, roughly half of them before they turned seventeen. Chemaly deftly balances these statistics with grim stories to illustrate them, so that the cumulative effect of reading her book is not merely to legitimize women’s anger but to render it astonishing that we are not even angrier.

All the facts that Chemaly musters were true before the most recent Presidential election, but in its wake many women are refusing to stay quiet about their experiences. Chemaly says that she is calling for a change in our cultural thinking on anger, gender, and politics, but in truth she is responding to one that has already begun. It was on display on January 21, 2017, the day of the first Women’s March, and since then has grown steadily more prominent, and strikingly more personal, with the #MeToo movement. Chemaly’s book has autobiographical passages—many of her female relatives get vivid cameos—but she chooses not to emphasize her own story. By contrast, the Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper builds a manifesto mostly from memoir. “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower” (St. Martin’s Press) considers African-American feminists from Michelle Obama to Beyoncé, but it is chiefly a chronicle of how Cooper learned to stop disguising and dismissing her own anger.

Cooper writes movingly about coming of age as a black woman in the Baptist Church and on the campus of Howard University—two bastions of black power and, in her experience, black patriarchy. She describes carrying around Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider” like a “feminist bible,” and it is mostly from Lorde that she derives her account of how rage can be made useful. Lorde owns anger the way that Monet owns water lilies; no one writing about the emotion today can ignore her address at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in 1981. Delivering “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”—a title too often abridged at the colon—Lorde described the bigotry within the feminist movement, and then argued that anger was an appropriate response, because when “focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

It was essential for Cooper to develop that focus, she says, in order to make use of her anger: “The clarity that comes from rage should also tell us what kind of world we want to see, not just what kind of things we want to get rid of.” Focus, of course, is really the ability to adjust our vision, measuring one thing accurately against another, and Cooper’s attention to the complex dynamics of anger is illuminating even for readers who don’t agree with the positions she ultimately takes. She weighs her desire to join the first Women’s March as an act of feminist solidarity against her anger over the long-standing failure of white feminists to make common cause with women of color. (In the end, she skips the march, but feels ambivalent about the decision.) She considers her frustration that President Obama did not send troops to rescue the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram alongside her wariness about “getting in bed at any level with the logics of patriarchy and militarism.” (Despite those qualms, she wishes Obama had done more for the girls, many of whom have still not been found.)

That sort of self-critical reflection is often missing from the journalist Rebecca Traister’s “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger” (Simon & Schuster). Traister, who covered both of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaigns, is a kind of feminist first responder who writes often and sometimes instantly about sexism in America. Her columns and profiles for New York magazine are astute accounts of the daily attacks on women’s rights, and the argument she makes in her book is partly one of accretion. Women’s rage, she claims, has long fuelled progressive social change, and the women galvanized by Trump’s election are part of a grand tradition of radicalism. Traister sees parallels between the participants in the Women’s March and the members of the National Women’s Political Caucus who protested when the press failed to cover their presence at the 1972 Democratic National Convention; between the gun-control activist Emma González and the labor activist Rose Schneiderman; between the men who demand smiles from women today and those who, in previous centuries, put women in branks (a metal muzzle, also known as a scold’s bridle, used to silence and publicly humiliate those who were forced to wear it); between the women of #MeToo and those who stormed Versailles during the French Revolution; between herself when she published an angry column and Rosa Parks who, as a girl, picked up a brick and threatened to throw it at a white boy who was bullying her.

Traister writes, “I had no idea how old and deep and urgent was women’s impulse to sometimes just let their fury out without a care to how it would be evaluated, even if that expression of rage put them at risk: in young Rosa Parks’s case, at risk of death; in my case, at risk of being mocked on the internet.” Of course, the Internet these days is very much real life, and abuse there can lead to abuse offline, but the problem with Traister’s comparison is that no semicolon can bridge the gap between those two experiences. That is, in fact, a problem with the book over all: juxtaposition is not a sufficient structure for a political argument. Traister focusses on isolated episodes of anger among progressive women of various races, classes, and eras, while failing to adequately reckon with crucial differences among the circumstances that provoked their anger and the ways in which they chose to respond to it.

But those aren’t superficial differences. They are critical distinctions that lead some angry women to be applauded while others are attacked, and that lead many rebellions to fail while only a few revolutions succeed. Traister writes that she does not wish “simply to cheer” anger, and acknowledges that the rage that fuels insurrections “has the power to burn them up.” But her case for ire is undermined by a rampaging elephant in the room: anger knows no political persuasion. For every Maxine Waters, there’s a Michele Bachmann; for every Gloria Steinem, a Phyllis Schlafly. At the same time that Chemaly, Cooper, and Traister were watching their own angry takes and rage-filled tweets go viral, Ann Coulter, Candace Owens, and Jeanine Pirro were watching theirs do the same.

This failure to parse politically inconvenient anger is, as Ogden Nash once put it, “a notable feat / of one-way thinking on a two-way street.” “Eloquent Rage,” “Good and Mad,” and “Rage Becomes Her” give little space to Sarah Palin, the women of the Tea Party, and the legions of women who—in what they, too, feel is an expression of righteous anger—lend their voices to the anti-abortion movement. All of the books do, however, acknowledge a fact that undercuts their attempts to valorize women’s anger: one of the angriest demographics in America before the 2016 Presidential election was white women, and the majority of them voted for Donald Trump.

That the words “President” and “Trump” came together anywhere outside of a Mad Lib is itself perhaps the most straightforward argument against anger as a political virtue. According to exit polls and endless postmortems, many people were so furious about immigration, the economy, the election of a black President, the potential for a female one, Black Lives Matter, the War on Christmas, and any number of other real and phantasmagorical issues that they voted for Trump. Was there ever a better example of blind rage?

That blindness is one of the oldest objections to anger. The ancients generally regarded rage as uncontrollable and violent; it led to bad decisions and endangered the well-being of individuals and collectives. The University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum shares that view, and, unlike Chemaly, Cooper, and Traister, she is not sanguine about anger as a political tool. In “The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis” (Simon & Schuster), Nussbaum acknowledges the seductions of anger but warns against its side effects.

“Anger is a poison to democratic politics, and it is all the worse when fueled by a lurking fear and sense of helplessness,” Nussbaum writes. That is true regardless of the angry person’s gender: it clouds the judgment of men and women alike, and increases the likelihood of error. Because the sort of insults and injuries that provoke anger can occur by accident, and because their causes can be difficult to determine, it is easy to get angry at the wrong person, or to settle for a substitute for the unavailable or unknown source. Even if we accurately identify the responsible party, Nussbaum argues, we can still err in assessing the severity of the transgression or in selecting an appropriate response. Anger, according to this view, is almost always retributive; even when it does not seek personal redress, it demands the suffering of others.

History is filled with examples of how easily anger can be exploited or manipulated, but Nussbaum summons from Greek tragedy an evocative illustration of how it can be redeemed. She tells the story of how, in the Oresteia, the Furies, vengeful beings that drip ooze from their eyes and vomit blood, are transformed into the Eumenides, beautiful creatures that serve justice rather than pursue cruelty. Athena establishes a system of law, and the changed Furies are part of its foundations. To Nussbaum, Aeschylus offers a metaphor for how individual passions can be tamed by reason and how collective anger can be converted to the cause of justice.

Of course, classical mythology is one thing and contemporary reality is another. Yet resisting anger personally and rejecting it politically is a crucial, if never fully realizable, duty of democratic citizens. That may seem like a reactionary message for a political era such as ours, but it is worth remembering that this age of rage was preceded, for progressives, by an era of hope, and that earlier injustices have been fought by political movements devoted to peace and nonviolence. Nussbaum cites Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela in her account of protest without payback. (The fact that all three are men does not, needless to say, reflect a masculine attraction to nonviolence but, rather, our failure to canonize female political heroes. She could have written as convincingly about Susan B. Anthony, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Clara Luper.) Nussbaum quotes King explaining that, though anger might have brought people to his protests, an essential task of the movement was to purify the emotion so that it could serve the cause of civil rights.

That belief came partly from King’s deep theological commitment to nonviolence. But it may also reflect a tactical awareness that people who feel, even erroneously, that they are losing power can be angrier than those who are seeking it. It is the deforming nature of anger to blur the boundary between unjustified and justified; if it weren’t, only the righteous would ever be angry. Instead, rage is most often forsworn by those who seem most entitled to it, and civility is demanded by those who least deserve it. The civil-rights marchers and the Freedom Riders were the ones with the calm clarity of the Eumenides, while their white neighbors were the ones who looked and sounded like the Furies.

All these authors are right to note that a major problem with anger is that some people are allowed to express it while others are not. That disparity was vividly on view during the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Christine Blasey Ford calmly testified about being sexually assaulted in high school and her alleged attacker, the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, seethed and shouted at the senators, behavior that was applauded by conservative pundits and politicians as evidence of his innocence.

It was an upsetting display, and hardly one to make the case for the virtues of anger in the political arena. Indeed, the hearing suggests that, instead of encouraging rage from people who have traditionally been denied it, we might be better off defusing it in those traditionally rewarded for it—not only for the sake of our democracy but for ourselves. However efficacious anger may seem in the short term, even righteous anger is likely to be deleterious in the long term, to the individual body and to the body politic. Repressed emotions are dangerous, but, as countless medical studies have shown, sustained anger is both physically and emotionally destructive.

Women have every reason to be livid right now, and our anger should not be mocked, censored, or punished. But that does not mean it must be celebrated, or that hard-won efforts to manage anger and discourage aggression in the general population should be reversed. Tellingly, Cooper’s book concludes with a meditation on joy, a benediction of sorts that ends with a reminder: “What you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down.”

Anger is an avaricious emotion; it takes more credit than it deserves. Attempts to make it into a political virtue too often attribute to anger victories that rightfully belong to courage, patience, intelligence, persistence, or love. These days, we remember Carry Nation’s hatchets, but forget that she sold souvenir versions of them and used the proceeds not only to pay her own bail but also to support a shelter for the wives, mothers, and children of alcoholics. Nation’s anger accounts for only a sliver of her political activism; the majority of her life was spent in constructive rather than reactive efforts, and it was also spent in community with other activists, through the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Such solidarity, rather than the rage that occasioned it, feels like the secret subject of these new books. What is powerful isn’t so much women’s anger as their collective action. That is what has changed most radically since this past election, hopefully not in a burst of rebellion but in a revolution of lasting consequence. ♦ This article appears in the print edition of the October 15, 2018, issue, with the headline “Fighting Mad.”

[bella-vida-bellarke]

Shirbert FanFic: Came to the Cold just to See You

Okay, so this is my first ever fanfiction! I loved the series so much, I had to write my own canon divergent variation of the already beautiful funeral scene.   Inspired by the song below and its lyrics  Honestly, as soon as I heard this song I thought about Anne and Gilbert and how well it suits their story. This is unbetaed and so I would like to extend an invitation towards anyone who has any suggestions!

“Josh McBride” By The Head and the Heart “Came to the cold just to see you Standing there in expectation Pulling coat and blue eyes staring Oh, this vision does me good.” ________________________________________ “…so it’s more than possible that when Gilbert finally comes back to school…he’ll be an orphan.” Anne’s own contemplative words kept ringing incessantly in her ears throughout the entire funeral. The regret of having never realized how dire the circumstances actually were for her schoolmate, regret of having treated Gilbert as if he would be returning to school soon enough, as if his father wasn’t slowly perishing before him. Everyday–how painful it must’ve been for him. The weight of having to grow-up too quickly, of losing his innocence, of losing his father must be unbearable too him now. So much that he carried himself as if he physically was burdened by the weight of everything he’d lost…. How naïve! You should’ve been there for him. Why hadn’t she? Within his pleasantly dark eyes, there was a sadness which resided there, deep within them, always masked by the crinkles around them produced by his boyish grins and knowing smiles. Even now, moving towards the quaint graveyard across the sea of white, providing such a grim contrast between the mourner’s black clothing and the essential incandescence of snow. Anne had never particularly cared for the winter months as the bleakness offered little to room for the imagination. After all, a grand sweeping romance never should take place in the middle of winter, not when it embodies the death of all beauty in the world. There are no more vibrant flowers winking back towards Anne as she walks to and from school, no more waving blossom tree just outside her window, no more bird songs to distract her from her own self-deprecating inner monologues, and no more youthful, fun-loving Gilbert Blythe. Anne thought it interesting to notice how if she were an outsider looking into this flock of mourners, she wouldn’t be able to identify who was the immediate family member of the decreased. Gilbert blends into the crowd with such easiness, something he’d never been able to do, simply disappear within a sea of people; Gilbert Blythe stands out as a lone yellow daisy amid a passionate flurry. If only to Anne, who couldn’t tear her stare away from him long enough to even blink. Funny, before she would’ve happily averted her curious eyes from Gilbert’s own winking ones all day long, perhaps that is why she never noticed how he had begun to recede within himself, collapsing under his own weight. It’s so clear to her now, painfully clear.       Gilbert’s tendencies of being a gentleman to everyone around him has caused him to hide a fundamental part of himself and a fundamental phase of his life; him mourning his innocence. Perhaps, he had felt it weeks or months before this day had finally arrived, his childhood ending along with his father’s life. Maybe, like Anne, he suffered from an abundance of the imagination and imagined what his life would be like if his father was well. Would Anne have met a different Gilbert Blythe then? Orphan. There is a possibility of Gilbert knowing his father wasn’t going to get better and that he was to become an orphan with time when he first met Anne. When he first defended her and enquired as to whether she needed any more dragon’s slain; Gilbert might’ve known who she was and where she had come from, causing him to feel the ghostly presence of the empathy to come. Anne tried to maintain her composure throughout the service, she hadn’t registered when the party had become still or when the priest had begun to deliver Mr. Blythe towards his final journey; her eyes began to water. The icy chill thankfully prevented her from crying, as the arctic winds quickly dried all humidity from her reddening eyes. She struggled to blink back her tears as slowly as possible as to not shed them in such a public manner. This was Gilbert father’s funeral and he stood as still and as pale as his father was lying in his coffin, before his son’s distant downcast gaze. It wasn’t Anne’s place to cry for a man she barely knew or for his son’s sadness- a boy she had actively been pushing away. If anything, Gilbert needed those around him to be strong, just as he was being in the face of such a personal tragedy.   Gilbert possibly wouldn’t have been as eager to befriend her; Anne, the pale, skinny, red-haired, orphaned girl, if he wasn’t already experiencing the beginnings of being all alone in the world. Anne had no way to gauge the true nature of Gilbert’s friendly advances and general chivalry, not then and not now. How could she? Anne barely knew him, even after having visited his home to deliver books and homework, she still scarcely knew anything about Gilbert Blythe. Perchance he’d been reaching out towards the only person who’d be able to fully and absolutely understand what he was going through. But of course, Anne being the socially inept girl she had always been, she brushed the well-meaning boy off. Based off of all of the anecdotal accounts from schoolmates and her experiences with him, Gilbert is a good person. He doesn’t deserve this and he certainly doesn’t deserve the way she has treated him. Gilbert Blythe deserves a clean slate just as much as anybody else—no pun intended. A silent solemn promise was the way Anne wanted to end her stretch contemplating her time with Gilbert; she promised to be a better friend to him and most importantly– a more understanding and compassionate one as she observed how Gilbert painfully clenched his jaw and tightened his fists as the service ended with the priest’s final mournful words, signaled by the gentle closing of his tattered Bible, never once glancing towards his neighbors and friends once they began to unhurriedly disperse towards the Blythe residence for the reception. Marilla was too overcome with the funeral to notice Anne’s reluctance to leave with her, but nevertheless she blindly headed onwards with the rest of the congregation of people. Anne almost followed suit, Gilbert needed time to process alone. At least, that’s what she told herself to justifying leaving, but she moved at a snail’s pace, blaming the rough fallen snow of being a primary hindrance to her movement, but couldn’t help herself from glancing over her shoulder towards Gilbert. Mathew took a few moments to release his sister in order to whisper to Anne if she wanted to meet them inside. This shook her from her reverie enough for her to catch Mathew nodding towards the now orphaned boy, as if he knew exactly the cause of Anne’s hesitation. They were soon becoming the last people left in the clearing and so Anne quickly delivered the most convincing nod and smile she could materialize at the time, not wanting to break the sudden silence around them, when in truth she wanted nothing more than to run and hide. Mathew knowingly nodded towards the house and reassuringly gripped her shoulder. Before long, everyone had disappeared into the Blythe house, now filled with the glaring absence of either Blythe men. Gilbert gave away no indications of being aware of Anne’s lingering presence as he unhurriedly made his way towards a stone bench on the other side of his father’s grave and the men who now deliver Mr. Blythe back into the earth for eternity. Anne decided to continue towards the house to make her way around full circle towards Gilbert, without having to approach him forthright and to give off the illusion of Anne deciding to join the Cuthbert’s inside. In that time, Gilbert had extended his palm towards the greying heavens, effectively capturing a single snowflake. Somberly, Gilbert watched it melt and slowly slide from his palm and onto the ground at his feet, as though that single liquefied snowflake were the tear he couldn’t bring himself to shed. And Anne knew she had never seen him look so depressed. Rose had mentioned how the sadness within Gilbert appeared to accentuate his already handsome features and although that statement may be true… Snap out of it Anne Shirley Cuthbert! Before Anne could realize, she now stood beside Gilbert’s bench as the men too began to retread towards their respective modes of transportation back to town, but the boy before her paid them no heed as they expressed their condolences before departing.  Anne didn’t know what to do or what to say but she oftentimes found that the most profound thing anyone could do for a hurting friend, is to simply express their earnest support and listen to their friend. Yes, that’ll have to do. The already barely above freezing temperature was beginning to drop even lower and Anne wished she had the good sense to bring her gloves along as she watched Gilbert place his on, as if getting ready to leave himself. Just before he could do so, Anne interrupted him, “Hey Gi—I…” Anne cleared her throat, she didn’t want to begin the conversation in such a nonchalant manner, but she was becoming noticeably uncomfortable at the moment and just like in most situations, Anne could feel a nonsensical nervous rant coming along.   “Do you mind if I join you, Gilbert?” she asked, awkwardly reaching for her braids to place them on either side of her chest, only to remember they were in a pretty ribbon at the moment.  Gilbert glanced upwards and quizzically raised an eyebrow at her ministrations, she quickly made as though her intention was to straighten her knitted cap and once again cleared her throat. “Of course you may,” he replied, moving further down in order to give her more space and to Anne’s surprise, she thought she detected a faint twinkle in Gilbert’s dark eyes, as though he were about to crack a smile at her antics. Suddenly without words, Anne straightened her skirts as best she could to avoid the incoming chill and in an attempt to maintain her freezing hands occupied. Still they shook and so she decided to simply hug herself as though it could aid her in keeping her wits about her without spilling her guts all over the place. It was comfortable, more so than she had imagined, it was nice just to sit next to Gilbert, without arguing about school or him calling her “Carrots”. Not even with Anne’s extensive creative capabilities could she have envisioned such a peculiarity. And then she remembered what she had mustered all of her courage to do, the constant fog emanating from her mouth without words to follow, ripped Anne from her reverie. She turned her contemplation towards Gilbert, who had returned to clenching his jaw, his nostrils visibly flaring, perhaps from the cold. But they were in the presence of his father’s freshly dug grave and Anne couldn’t imagine what she would do in his situation. “I wanted to express my sincerest condolences for the loss of your father, Gilbert,” Anne said, nervously clasping her hands within each other, Gilbert nodded pensively and his eyes settled on her shaking hands, “I’m fine,” she reassured him, but next thing Anne knew, he was removing his gloves, “No I’m fi—“ “Anne, you’re shaking,” Gilbert scolded, handing her his black woolen gloves. Anne couldn’t help appreciating how comfortable they looked, but she instead quickly grasped Gilbert’s warm bare hands, “Anne?” His brows were furrowed and she could see his chest rising and falling with greater speed.   Anne ignored her creeping blush and breathed in deeply, “Although I hardly knew Mr. Blythe, I do know that he was a good father to you and that you love him deeply. I cannot fathom what you must be enduring now, Gilbert. I know that because of my pride, I haven’t been as good a friend to you as I should be. I want you to know that if you ever need anything at all, you can come to me.” Anne’s hands had become warm from griping Gilbert’s so tightly, as if he were about to be enveloped by the earth itself if not for her anchoring him to her, “I’m so sorry, Gilbert.” Her last words came out as a whisper now, she felt light-headed and relieved and proud of herself for finally moving on. Anne beams now and is at the brink of tears as she witnesses Gilbert’s own smile, “I appreciate that Anne.” Precipitously, Anne removed her hands from Gilbert’s and immediately misses their warmth, but settled on keeping her own from the cold within her coat’s pockets. “You know,” Anne grinned fondly in the direction of Mr. Blythe’s grave, “When I met your father-I was delivering your books from school that first day, he complimented my hair.” “He didn’t call you carrots did he?” Gilbert questioned, causing Anne to friskily nudge his shoulder in mock indignation, “I don’t imagine you had your slate on you that day.”  Soon enough, they were both snickering. “Seriously, Gilbert! I’m trying to invoke fond memories you have of your father. You didn’t give a eulogy, but I know there’s at least one memory of him you never want to lose. Sometimes, when I really miss someone and I’m overcome by the grief of it all, I remember the best bits I never want to forget, in order to preserve them and keep them with me,” Anne turned to Gilbert expectantly, giving him time to remember something good, “You don’t have to tell me what it is.” “Thanks, Anne. Really, but there’s too much of him I wish I could still hold onto,” Anne nodded, distracted by the snowflakes in Gilbert’s dark hair and how much he resembled his self from a few weeks prior during her first visit here. Gilbert noticed where her gaze had fallen and he quickly rustled his locks, ridding them from the snow, “I think I still have a lot of things to sort out when it comes to my father and what he would have wanted.” Gilbert now stands before Anne, he brushes off his coat and offers her his hand. She gladly obliges and lets herself be escorted towards the now brightly lit Blythe residence. Gilbert hesitates before approaching the door. “God, you’re really freezing Anne. You should go inside,” Anne regards him curiously, suddenly aware of how cold her nose and cheeks had become, but is about to retort, “I can’t—I can’t go in and face everyone right now.” “I understand,” she relents and is about to turn towards the door to leave him be, but then is overcome with the tragedy of leaving Gilbert outside all alone in the cold, “Could I be so bold as to ask if I may hug you?” Now it is Gilbert’s turn to be caught completely off-guard, a slow blush colors his cheeks, and something told Anne, it wasn’t just due to the cold. He simply blinks at her for several beats, as if assessing whether or not she was being serious or if it was just something that had slipped out of her mouth without her thinking, but he doesn’t find any hesitation. “You may…” With that, Anne wraps her scrawny arms around him, gripping the back of his coat to her shaking fingers. She slowly becomes more comfortable once he encircles her and tightens his hold ever so slightly. She immediately becomes engulfed by his earthy scent as she breathes him in, burying her face into his chest, “You’re going to make it through this Gilbert Blythe. I’ll be here, whenever you need me…”    

[ron-is-awesome-sauce]

Alright, so we all know that one of the most unforgivable things that happened in the movies concerning Ron is giving Hermione his" If you want to kill Harry " line, but the hatred I feel towards this is not just about me being angry at Kloves showing off his disrespectful favoritism by giving away Ron's lines, but me being angry at just how badly he screwed over ALL of the Golden Trio in one simple scene. The entire Shrieking Shack scene was a disservice to the book and the Golden Trio, and by extension Sirius and Remus( but that's for another day), so let me let breakdown exactly why I hate this scene so much.

Note that this is a long post because I have a lot of feelings about this.

Now, let us start with the most obvious problem, what was done to Ron.

In the book, the "if you want to kill Harry " line comes from Ron after he's just been bodily dragged by Sirius, who was in his Grim form, a form Ron was deathly afraid of, into the Shrieking Shack, after having his leg broken in such a brutal way, Harry was able to audibly  hear the crack. In the time that it took Harry and Hermione to get to Ron, he was stuck with Sirius; who took his wand, who Ron knows is brutal enough to escape Azkaban , a fortress he had grown up all his life being told is inescapable  and break into Hogwarts, who at the time everyone thought was a convicted murdered, who Ron no doubt grew up hearing horror stories about; completely alone, handicapped and in an immeasurable amount of pain. Could you imagine what could have been going through his head? A thirteen-year-old with no means to defend himself, trapped with the man who not only killed his best friend's parents but 12 innocent people and laughed about it while getting arrested.

Any normal person would have been terrified.

But not Ron. Ron was determined whereas other people would have been afraid. His first reaction when Harry shows up is to warn him of the danger through the pain that's he's feeling. When that doesn’t work his second reaction is to protect Harry when he puts himself in immediate danger.

Sirius addressing Harry, and Harry putting himself in danger gave Ron the sheer willpower to not only pull Harry back from the danger but to stand on a BROKEN LEG, look into the face of a convicted murderer and tell him that if he wanted to kill Harry he had to kill him first.

You cannot buy loyalty like that.

This is clear cut proof that Ron was perfectly willing to die for his friend.

In this moment, Ron is to Harry what Harry was to Dumbledore in the Chamber of Secrets.

When Ron said this line in the book, I had to put it down to absorb what he just did. The sheer impact had me shook.

And this is my ultimate problem with giving the line to Hermione. It takes away the impact. When Hermione says this line in the movie it's not an earnest declaration of loyalty but an attempt to put on a brave front. She doesn’t seem to think she can back up what's she's saying, whereas Ron had complete conviction behind his words. He wasn’t just trying to be brave, he was willing to stand beside his friend in the face of danger, injured, in pain and at a complete disadvantage. I think this is shown perfectly in that Ron is at Harry's side in the book instead of in front of him like Hermione was in the movies when this line is said. It's not 'I'm going to try to protect you' i t's  'I'd go to hell and back with you'.

There is none of this with Movie Hermione, there is no struggling through pain, no fear, no overcoming that fear. For Ron, it was a character  establishing moment, for Hermione it's just a throwaway line with no meaning or impact.

But it doesn’t stop there, because Kloves takes away another important line, this time from Harry, the main freakin character. The 'I trusted you' line.

This brings favoritism to a whole new level, because Hermione had absolutely no right to be given that line.

Remus was until this point Harry's only legitimate link to his parents. Sure there's Hagrid and Dumbledore, but they would not have known them as personally as Remus. Remus is an invaluable source of knowledge to Harry. He could tell Harry what his dad was like when teachers weren’t around, what his mom was like, and it would all be a personal account. It doesn’t help that Remus's formal introduction to Harry is him saving him from the dementors.  There would defiantly be some hero worship going one.

Finally, Harry had an adult that he could know on a personal level as a parental figure, even if he was a teacher. He spent hours with Remus alone and defenseless, thinking of Remus as someone who genuinely cares for him outside of him being Harry Potter, who helped him other come a great fear. But the most important thing he did was put his truest in Remus  even after the fact that one DADA professor was working for Voldemort and the other had no problem attempting to erase his memories.

You can just feel the betrayal and hurt that he experienced when he sees that Remus and Sirius are in league with each other.

(And yes we all know how it really turns out  but at this point Harry didn’t)

But once again the impact is lost, because the line comes from Hermione and to be frank, who cares if Hermione trusted Remus or not, or if she felt betrayed. She didn’t have that emotional tie to Remus, she didn’t put herself in a vulnerable position with Remus for weeks. Her feeling betrayed didn’t matter because she wasn’t the one who lost her parents to the madman her professor just embraced.

It made no sense to give her this line.

This was a moment that would have been amazing to see come to life. The tension is at an all-time high and it keeps going higher. It's the perfect blend of drama and action. Here we get our first in-depth glimpse at Harry's anger and what it can do to his character. Yeah, we see glimpses of it in the first two books, but it's really expanded on here. His anger makes him reckless, his hate make him murderous , and the betrayal from Remus brings these feeling to its peak.  It was the perfect look into how all those negative feelings altered him in the fifth book, but it came to its height in this moment. We could’ve all of that on screen, but we didn't get it.

Instead, we got that hammy scene in the movies with Harry crying under his invisibility clock.

And the injustice doesn't end there.

It comes full circle because this scene doesn't just take away from Harry and Ron but Hermione too!

In the book, Hermione is terrified of what is going on. She talks very timidly and politely to Sirius and Remus, she whispers all of her words, she freaks out when she helps stun Snape, She’s so horrified of Pettigrew she cannot physical speak when he comes close to her, she closes her eyes when Sirius and Remus are about to kill Pettigrew.

The words to describe Hermione in this scene all point to extreme fear. She's petrified, she's whimpering. And that brings a whole new level to her character, because though she's afraid of what's going on, she just as invested at protecting Harry as Ron, but in a completely different way than in the movies. She shows her inner Gryffindor by being deathly afraid but still tacking Sirius with Ron when she's given the chance. She helps hold Harry back when he  tries to go to Sirius , she offers support in every way she can while still being afraid. I don’t know about you but courage in the face of extreme fear is more admirable to me than being a hardened badass all the time.

But of course, this wasn’t shown in the movie because Hermione has to be a Knight Templar and tackle danger with no fear and basically be a warrior goddess always ready to bail everyone out.

Kloves favoritism not only damaged Ron and Harry but Hermione as well. The irony is he was so blinded by that favoritism that he made Hermione an entirely different character in the movies. She can't be dynamic. She can only be one of two things, Smart or Badass. She can't be a flawed character and thus she can't be herself at all.

I could talk for hours about everything wrong with just the Shrieking shack scene alone but this post is already long enough. Ultimately, Steve Kloves fucked up everyone's character, he didn’t get anyone right, not even Hermione his so called favorite character. The Shrieking Shack was the scene that showed me Kloves ineptitude at portraying these characters and even though four out of the eight movies are very important to me I cannot overlook just how badly they screwed up these characters.

[pussymagicuniverse]

‘Getting Nowhere Fast’: Girlhood, Illness, and a Strange Predilection for Beauty in Contagion

We're not looking forward and we are not looking back We've lost the warranty, we'll never get our money back My baby's buying me another life, getting nowhere fast.

– “Getting Nowhere Fast” by Girls at Our Best!

Earlier this week, I went through the tedious work of scrolling through my Instagram feed. I have not had a personal Instagram account for six-months, but I recently cracked and created a small account to follow a subset of bloggers, therapists, artists, and writers as a pool of (meticulously curated) inspiration. As I scrolled in my typical glassy-eyed fashion, I happened upon an account titled @GirlsofIsolation. My interest was instantly piqued at the somber black-and-white photographs that were carefully laid out on the account’s feed. I went through each image diligently in that sort of hungry way that consumes me when I feel a spark of connectivity in the mass of social media panic. @GirlsofIsolation brands itself as an archival project which showcases the self portraits of girls and women during their self-isolation and quarantine. The creator of the account, Isabella (@isabella_fldw), wrote the following caption on a post from April 2nd:

“I’ve always been in awe of the ways girls decorate their bedrooms. What we put on our walls is a continuous reflection of whatever it is we are obsessed with at the moment, whoever we’ve decided we want to be. But beyond that, a girl’s bedroom is often one of the few places where she is the one in control. So these are the girls of isolation, or self-portrait of a lady in quarantine. Or quaranteen girls.”

During times like these, most things that I have ever found beautiful or purposeful feel immensely trivial. There is a certain seductive quality to romantic mundanity – baking, taking an afternoon stroll (in a socially distant fashion), breathing in deeply and feeling thankful for that life that has been granted to this mortal coil. It’s seductive… and difficult to maintain without feeling like it is a performance. For me, trauma, performance, and fear go hand-in-hand. That frantic urge to bake decorated focaccia, diligently clean and scrub the floors, take a mile-long walk at exactly 5:00 PM each day. There is the necessity to maintain your vitality, your viviality, I know. But as someone who has lived to perform femininity, womanhood, and beauty in the most perfect of measures for the better part of twenty-three years, I know this anxiety all too well. I know this frantic energy all too well. And I know the crash even better. Surviving these days of quarantine feels an awful lot like the quivering, brittle edge of an uncertainty that has become my strangest and closest bedfellow. What is this strange predilection for beauty in contagion? 

In the 1892 short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, our unnamed narrator slowly descends into madness after she is forbidden from working in order to treat her “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency.” As her decline begins, our narrator begins to notice the strange olfactory qualities of the wallpaper in her room:

“... It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.

It gets into my hair” 

When I look through “Girls of Isolation,” I see the kind of ennui and subtle restlessness that settles in the bones, carries itself in the eyes, waits for you and gets into your hair. It is the heavy kind that wraps itself around your shoulders, allowing you to do nothing else but surrender to its cause. There is a paucity of performance in these photographs; honest displays of girlhoods suspended by the onset of pandemic. The images are displayed in the format of a collage. Each photograph and selfie is carefully organized as if they were behind the clear plastic pocket of your mother’s college photo album. The camera’s gaze on each photograph has the distinct intimacy and nuance of imagery that is controlled, selected, and delicately submitted by the individuals in the photo themselves. Girls surrounded by the ephemera of their lives, strings of fairy lights and sports bras and vanity mirrors. Tender photos of their beauty processes collapsing the visage of constant construction. Girls taking photos at angles where their bodies bend, roll, slump, lay. This is not tucked and cinched imagery. It is not a commandeering or performative lens. It is simply girls at their best. And also, perhaps, their worst. 

The toll of self-isolation in this context is not a topic I wish to broach callously. As I write this, I am swaddled under five pounds of polyester cotton sheets and the weight of the world. Yes, it is dramatic. Yes, it is heavy-handed. But the moment through which we are living is one that lends itself to a bit of maudlin sulking. The other option is a grim despair that takes me to the edge of that which I cannot, or refuse to, touch. So I am swaddled in my drama and my grief for a world teetering on the brink of a certain collapse- perhaps not total collapse, but a certain one nonetheless. 

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has chipped apart the facade of a system that had already lost its glimmer for many of us. Though there is mass effort to collectively mitigate the global trauma that we are experiencing, the breadth of this trauma may not be parsed until after the contagion has reached its zenith. As a girl in isolation, a girl whose early womanhood is shaped by the consequences of quarantine, I give myself time to pause. These nights, I cannot sleep in the dark any more. My apartment is too quiet at the midnight hour. I’ve taken to turning on my honey-colored lamp and watching seasons of “Bob’s Burgers” on Hulu until I am too exhausted to keep my eyes open. The fear that grips once the sun sets is entirely irrational, but it seems that if I let my eyes close one moment too soon, the world as I know it will be gone by the time they open once again. It is dramatic, I know. But it is a fear that I know I do not struggle with alone.

Milka is a Kenyan-American writer interested in the intersections of beauty and power. As an English Literature student, they primarily centered their research on marginalized bodies and the interiority of black women in postmodern literature. Currently, they focus their writing on creative non-fiction narrative that explores desirability politics, beauty labor in the Internet age, and the tender magic of body liberation. You can find their work in Turnpike Zine, Undertone Magazine, and in little Twitter musings.

[viralhottopics]

How dropping acid saved my life

When writer Ayelet Waldman fell into depression she started microdosing with LSD. She tells Rachel Cooke about her extraordinary experiment with acid

Some time ago for reasons that will become apparent I am not allowed to say when, exactly the American writer Ayelet Waldman scored some LSD. She did this, not on a street corner or via the dark web, but middle-class style, through an acquaintance of an acquaintance, for which reason the drug arrived at her home in Berkeley, California, in a stamp-encrusted brown paper package whose sender (an elderly professor, she believed) identified himself only as Lewis Carroll, a fellow resident of her town. Mr Carroll had, however, troubled to write her a brief note. Our lives may be no more than dewdrops on a summer morning, it said. But surely, it is better that we sparkle while we are here. The bottle he enclosed contained 50 drops of vintage quality LSD, of which he advised her to take two at a time. Waldman was delighted. Not to put too fine a point on it, she believed this drug might save her life.

For as long as she can remember, Waldman has been held hostage by her moods. When she is up, she is up; when she is down, she is down. These highs and lows she has managed over the years with the help of therapy and a number of drugs, with which she has had varying degrees of success. At the time of the parcels arrival, though, she had entered a new and much more scary phase.

I was so profoundly depressed, she says. It wasnt the kind of depression where you fall into bed. Ive been through that before, and while its grim, its manageable. This was more of a mixed state, a kind of activated depression, and thats a dangerous place to be. I was doing everything I could to ruin my own life. I was afraid that if I stayed on that track, I would force my husband to leave me, and that I would probably attempt suicide and being a very capable person, I dont think a failed attempt was on the cards.

It was while she was in this state of mind that she stumbled on The Psychedelic Explorers Guide, by the psychologist and writer James Fadiman, who since 2010 has been collecting reports from individuals who have experimented with regular microdosing of LSD and psilocybin, a naturally occurring chemical found in a variety of mushrooms. Fadimans book is certainly not the result of a scientific research project; there has never been an officially sanctioned study of microdosing.

Here comes happiness: Ayelet Waldman at home. Photograph: Barry J Holmes for the Observer

But the people whose accounts it gathered together spoke repeatedly of experiencing, thanks to LSD, increased focus and better mood. They reported rarely losing their tempers, and becoming more fun to be with. None, moreover, had suffered any side effects. To put it simply, they went to bed feeling they had enjoyed that most elusive of things: a really good day. As Waldman read on, she grew envious. How she needed to have one of those! Was this her glimmer of hope? She thought it might be.

Waldman contacted Fadiman, and received a memo entitled To a Potential Self-Study Psychedelic Researcher. The protocol was simple. In order to participate in his international self-study group on the effects of sub-perceptual doses of LSD, she should take a microdose of the drug every third day. The suggested dose was a minuscule 10 micrograms, one 10th or less of what a person would have to take in order to experience an altered state of consciousness (ie to trip).

Meanwhile, she should lead life as normal, pausing only to record her moods, productivity and physical symptoms. Did this sound to be blunt preposterous? It did. Waldman is a middle-aged mother of four who, in addition to writing novels, lectures on the criminal justice system (she is a Harvard-educated former lawyer). As someone who is law-abiding and swotty, nothing in the world irritates her more than hippies, slackers, free spirits. Even people who wont stay on the right hand side of escalators drive her nuts. Ken Kesey she is not. But she was suffering. She had nothing to lose. Why shouldnt she try it, just for a month?

Having found a supplier, then, she did indeed begin taking the drug, an experience she has now recorded in her own book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. Its publication is certain to cause controversy. In fact, the madness has already begun. When we speak via Skype, a month or so before it arrives in bookshops, she tells me that only a few days earlier an excitable reporter got in touch to inform her that his editor had given him permission to drop acid with Ayelet Waldman. (Her response to his question about when they might schedule this journalistic endeavour was: Like, never.)

Loved up: Waldman and husband Michael Chabon. Photograph: Albert L Ortega/WireImage

Attitudes to drugs in America are irrespective of those states that have legalised cannabis far from liberal. Trump has appointed to the Department of Justice a war-on-drugs advocate [the Alabama senator, Jeff Sessions] who is so retrograde in his thinking, he believes the US suffers from an under-incarceration problem, she says. Its for this reason that she wont reveal when her experiment ended: there is a three-year statute of limitations on drugs charges. Do I think a white, middle-class lady will be high on his list of targets? No. But in this crazy new world we live in, you cant be too careful.

Its reception will also doubtless be muddied by the fact that she is its author. In America, Waldman is well known as an acclaimed writer in her own right and as the wife of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, to whom she has been married since 1993. When she writes about herself, moreover and this is something she does a great deal in A Really Good Day people have a tendency to respond with unnerving fury.

Most famously, this was the case in 2005, when the New York Times published her essay Motherlove, in which she declared that she loved her husband more than her children (If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother.) In the days that followed, ABCs daytime show The View hosted an unaccountably vitriolic debate about Waldman, her neighbours could be heard tearing her to shreds in Starbucks, and her inbox filled with emails from strangers threatening to report her to social services, the better that her children might be taken away.

Waldman is clever and funny and open-hearted. But as she readily admits, even her more sympathetic readers may sometimes have cause to wonder, in the case of A Really Good Day, which aspects of her behaviour her compulsion to tell the world things that others might prefer to keep private among them are simply the result of her personality, and which can be attributed to her illness. It is hard to distinguish between them, she says, almost wonderingly.

Still, she is probably better placed, now, to cope with any onslaught. Waldman is no longer using LSD her experiment really did last for only a month but its effects have, in some ways, been lasting. I miss its anti-depressant quality, and I miss the way it made me focus. It was like Ritalin [a drug commonly prescribed in the US to children with ADHD] without the side effects, which is frankly incredible. But that month got me out of a dark place. Within the first couple of doses, it was like the computer of my brain had been restarted. I was still moody. I had some really good days, but there were also crappy days, and days when it was just the normal shit. Somehow, though, the bad days were not hellish days, and so I had the capacity to work on issues I just couldnt before. Sure, I was hoping for joy. What I got instead was enough distance from the pain I was in to work on the things that were causing it.

Expand your mind: 1960s LSD advocate Dr Timothy Leary, who advised us to turn on, tune in, drop out. Photograph: AP

That work continues. Im still not on an even keel. Im still struggling with my moods. But Im committed to that. Im doing a new kind of therapy that is working quite well, even if not quite so well as it might be if I was still microdosing. If someone sends her a mean tweet in the coming weeks, she is unlikely to respond as venomously as she might once have done, or even at all.

Given its benign effect on her, why didnt she just find herself a new supplier, and continue taking it? There were, she says, two reasons. The first was her complete inability to purchase illegal drugs: towards the end of her book, she describes how, having made contact by text with a dealer, she panics, having convinced herself that Lucy is a police informant. The second was her determination to write a book about her experience: for that to be safe, she had to no longer be using.

If I could have overcome those things, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have carried on. Of course, it might not have kept working; Ive been on medication before that seemed to be working, and then wasnt. But if it was to be made legal, Id be the first in the queue, and I periodically remind myself that, if I get desperate again, I do have the option.

Her book is well-researched and, in the matter of LSD itself, careful and no-nonsense. The drug, a variation on the ergotamine molecule (ergot is the fungus responsible for the disease known in the Middle Ages as St Anthonys Fire) which was first synthesised in Basel in 1938 by Dr Albert Hofmann, has, she argues, an undeservedly bad reputation. The scare stories it trails of young men and women whose LSD hallucinations lead them to jump off high buildings have little basis in reality. Rather, they are largely the result of conservative Americas response to the 1960s counterculture, to Timothy Learys suggestion that people turn on, tune in, drop out. Twenty million people have used it in the US, and millions more around the world, with no ill effects at all.

Its complicated, but when it comes to the drugs possible use in the treatment of mental illness, what you need to know is that LSD stimulates the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, which in turn leads to the stimulation both of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), something a pharmacologist described to her as like Miracle-Gro for the brain It stimulates growth, connections, and activity, and of glutamate, the neurotransmitter most responsible for brain functions, such as cognition, learning and memory. (Hence its supposed new-found popularity in Silicon Valley, though Waldman thinks that, in reality, there are more magazine articles about tech dudes using LSD than there are, well, tech dudes using LSD: If there were some mass secret movement, it would have been a lot easier for to get hold of my drugs.)

She believes that during her experiment her neuroplasticity was enhanced, and that this didnt only enable her to work for hours at a time, to achieve a real sense of flow at her desk, but that it also made her happier and less impulsive. What little research has been done backs her up a study at Imperial College London showed that even a single dose of LSD produced robust psychological effects though scientists still dont fully understand the relationship between what happens in the brain, and the psyche.

Why isnt more research carried out? The simple truth is that LSD still carries with it a lot of leftover political baggage. During the writing of her book, the few researchers sanctioned by the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) who are out there were reluctant to allow Waldman to quote them, fearing that to associate themselves with a personal experiment would tarnish their hard-won credibility.

So far, so good. However, when her book is on more personal territory, as it frequently is, Waldman is vastly less cautious, and for the reader especially, perhaps, the British reader this can be, well, excruciating. I know! she says, when I tell her this. Can you imagine what it would be like for me if I lived in London? Chabon, a feminist with whom she shares the childcare, has the power of veto over everything she writes. But because hes a writer, too, this seems not to be something he often invokes. In A Really Good Day, nothing is out of bounds, from their agonising couples therapy (My husbands eyes filled I collapsed in his arms, crying so hard I soaked his shirt), to their sex life (I know you love me, I said, as we made love), to their periodic use of MDMA, aka ecstasy, as a way of opening up their lines of connection. What we did was talk, she writes, of the first time they tried it, in a hotel room theyd booked specifically for the purpose. For six hours, we talked about our feelings for each other, why we love each other, how we loved each other.

Waldman reveals that her moods can be triggered by everything from her writerly insecurities, to the dog, to the sound of her husband eating nuts (she suffers from misophonia, or selective sound sensitivity syndrome): I handed him a handful of almonds, and walked out of the kitchen I heard a crunch, the smack of lips; I felt a wave of anger. She is also fed up that her husband earns more than her, and that she has to share his writing studio, which has an uncomfortable couch: Though hes welcomed me in, I feel like a girlfriend whos been given a drawer in the bachelor pad bathroom. Poor Michael Chabon. The reader begins to feel he is some kind of saint.

Well, he is somewhat saintly, Waldman says. He makes my friends crazy. He gives great gifts. He has impeccable taste in clothes and jewellery. He is a know-it-all, but then, he does sort of know everything. Hes misanthropic, in that we [the family] are all he has space for; he doesnt have any close friends, which I think he would benefit from. I was about to say that hes far better than I deserve, but thats the pathology speaking, because I am a very good wife for him.

Isnt he ever mean to her? Yeah, sure he is. He encouraged her to embark on LSD experiment because he was desperate, too.

Before we hang up, I have to ask: does she ever worry her extraordinarily intense relationship with Chabon on Twitter she has been known to post pictures of her husband, along with a line informing her 15,800 followers just how much she loves him might be another symptom of her illness? For the first time in our conversation, she is hesitant. The gale of her voice drops to a light breeze.

Yeah, I have thought about this. I have said to him: If I were to get healthy, would I still love you, and would you still love me? There is a way that Ive confused needing with loving. I dont want to sound like a Hallmark card, but love is [supposed to be] unselfish, and in my most internal, whirling dark places, I think I need him so badly because he takes care of me, protects me, makes me feel safe. One of the things that saved our marriage in that [dark] period was when I brutally tried to disentangle those things.

The upshot is that she thinks, now, perhaps its OK to need him. After the LSD, when I was having this intense new therapy, I took a drive one night in northern California, where the countryside is very beautiful. I had this thought: maybe I dont love him after all. It was terrifying, and I was crying. But then the phone rang, and it was him. How did she feel then? His voice filled me like a glass of water.

People have been curious, even excited: an extract from A Really Good Day

A fewdays ago, I began tentatively to tell people about this experiment. To my surprise, I encountered few negative reactions. Every once in a while a listener might arch an eyebrow or smile uncomfortably, as if trying to figure out whether her discomfort meant that she wasnt hip enough, or whether I really was nuts. But those have been in the decided minority. Most people have been curious, even excited.

Those with histories of mood disorders were intrigued to hear that my spirits have lifted, that though I sometimes feel the familiar clutch of anxiety in my chest, I am generally able to use mindfulness techniques to make it dissolve. When I told them that I have not gained weight and that my libido has not withered away, they got really excited. The side effects of SSRIs are so ubiquitous and unpleasant that the idea of a medication protocol with fewer of them is thrilling.

Friends who incline to the spiritual were disappointed when they heard that Ive experienced no connection to the divine, but reassured when I mention the pleasure Ive taken in the natural world, the tree outside my window, the smell of the jasmine beside the city sidewalks. Risk takers and hedonists were disappointed that I was unable to provide details of hallucinations. No kaleidoscopic colours, they asked wistfully, no feeling that the floor was shifting beneath your feet? I live in California. The last thing I want to feel is the floor shifting beneath my feet. They urged me to try a real dose. It would change my life, they said, as though my problem is that my life has been too devoid of weirdness. Besides, my life is changing.

Tonight, however, was a different story. These two writer friends are about 20 years older than my husband and me, which puts them firmly in the boomer generation. They were in their 20s in the 1960s. Theyve travelled the world, rejected a life of secure conformity in favour of the risks and rewards of art. What better people to confide in? I thought.

Well, I said, Ive been writing, but not working on a novel. Ive been writing about microdosing with LSD.

What does that mean, the woman of the pair asked? Are you writing some kind of nonfiction article on people who use LSD?

I took a breath and then explained.

Her face froze. If she had been wearing pearls, she would have clutched them. She looked horrified, even disgusted, as if Id told her that Id taken up murdering baby seals. Her husbands reaction was only slightly less disturbing. He smiled uncomfortably and changed the subject. I immediately agreed, yes, the antipasto was delicious, and, no, I didnt want any more.

Their reaction launched a series of cascading anxieties. Will I be condemned for doing this? Will people reject me as a nutcase, a crank, a deluded acid freak? Will I lose whatever credibility I have in the world? Will parents not let their children come over to our house any more, under the misapprehension that I keep drugs in my home?

As soon as dinner was over, I tried the technique for dissipating anxiety that my cognitive behavioural therapist recommends. I took a few deep breaths, exhaling for half again as long as I inhaled. My chest and throat unclenched. The anxiety ebbed. I was calm again. I was OK.

Also, I had some perspective. This couple were young in the 1960s, when Timothy Leary was spreading the gospel of psychedelic recklessness. For all I know, they had complicated histories with the drug that influenced how they responded to me. In all likelihood, their discomfort had far more to do with them than with me.

A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life by Ayelet Waldman is published by Corsair at 13.99. To order a copy, go to bookshop.theguardian.com

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