#blowing up with everyone talking about me and @ing me and three separate people saying this better not be true because now theyll have to

[pervertcreep]

me and johnny while literally everyone and their mother and dog has us on their mind rn

[coffeegnomee]

Writing this because I don’t see anyone analyzing the Kab lore and I’m genuinely intrigued as to how people are viewing it.

It’s just such an interesting and all over the place story atm. I have a huge amount of faith that she will make an amazing story by the end of the season. I’m willing to let her cook. She has to get practice in this somehow.

But also she’s just so all over the place. And not really embracing the depth of mcrp, but that's a different story.

This started from having a hard time drawing the line between lore and not lore because I refuse to just say “Kab in the box was lore and everything else is not” even though I’m pretty sure that is like exactly how she views it. 

Because the moment Red killed her she went to chat and said something like “chat it only took me three weeks to get lore on the server!” Like girl it’s been lore. All of it is lore. 

And then the box arc was just like, enter the box angry at Red because he’s forcing you to hide, go through your friends and realize you care about them, go through the rest of the team and remember you f-ing hate all of them, including the friends at the start. Leave the box angry at Red, using pacifism as a cover to get close to Woogie to destroy Red. 

Like am I crazy to say that she didn’t change in the slightest because of the box and you could take that whole arc away and nothing would be different? 

But what IS interesting about that is how she never got over Red killing her. Never. I think she hoped that the box would soothe her out of that hate and come to a different conclusion, but by the end the (almost too real) rage about him killing her, especially after she made him that armor, pervades to this day. 

Now THAT’S lifesteal, holding the hurt until it has a real resolution, not trying to get yourself over it quicker. As Red said last season “we make our best content when we actually hate each other” (not a direct quote, Zam said it) and as uncomfortable as that is to blend real hate into the ability to tell a story, there is real truth to that, that unless you, You the Writer, actually Care about the stakes of the story, you’re not going to write a good story. And nothing makes you care more than actually caring.

But Kab puts up these walls around herself to delineate character vs streamer. She is, to her credit, quite good at being in character, to the point where when she drops the character it is so jarring to be told none of it is real, this is just lore. It’s wildly jarring. And makes it quite difficult to find her character to be endearing? At least for me. Because she consistently does little things to break the fourth wall like clearly having left the box to get materials. Girl PLEASE why did you not just include getting materials and being paranoid about being caught as a PART of that story?? Sigh. 

So she, in her mind, has a very clear distinction for what is her character. And a distinction for what she herself is willing to do. And that separation makes basically everything she says “in character” a lie; like she can say what she wants, be dramatic and make a cool tragic character, but that will not have a real meaning on who she is as a character on Lifesteal as a whole.

And what I find fascinating is that despite that, she is a mirror to whoever is in front of her. She absolutely becomes whatever the person in front of her is. 

She comes out of the box saying she will use pacifism to get to Woogie. But then Flame blows up spawn and she feels bad, so she talks to Zam and within 5 seconds you can tell she’s fully dedicated to that task. She fully embraces being pacifist. Because Zam is pacifist. 

But then Zam leaves to practice MCCR and next thing you know she’s talking to Wemmbu and within 5 seconds he convinces her to kill Planet publicly and with everyone online, breaking her away from pacifism. 

This also despite the fact that Wemmbu is Shit at instigating people like Zam and Pangi. He tried SO HARD to get them to kill him or change their views. But one devil on the shoulder to Flame got him to blow up spawn and one second with Kab got her to cave and kill Planet (TWICE! And get Mid’s heart!). SOOOO interesting how his approach works so wildly differently on new members vs old. 

So she mirrors whoever is around her. What a fascinating character trait out of the master manipulator. Is it manipulation? Or does she really fully and truly emotionally believe what she says in those moments? Does she come back with manipulation ideas after to fit whatever impulse she had in the moment? 

And then there’s the Mapicc castle. I 100% believe she was the one to blow it up. Maybe I’m just projecting. Maybe it was wemmbu during the window he had his pc and when he didn’t. Maybe it was someone else.

But she just declared herself evil. It’s only natural to try and instigate chaos and get the members blaming each other for things that you did. 

But she was SO GOOD during that conversation. Brainstorming and giving ideas for who else it could be, pinning the wemmbu heads on Mid but also pulling back and saying it couldn’t be her for the explosions, trying to work out the timeline. Like in so many ways she sounded like Spoke making up a story and being Unhelpful(TM). And she went out of her way to drive to her office just to have this conversation.

But also she seemed so helpful, so genuinely trying to brainstorm and pick apart this juicy puzzle in front of her. And therefore just curious, not manipulative. 

GAH I just can’t decide! She’s either completely brilliant or completely incompetent and succeeding by accident!

And it’s even more interesting given the thought that she came into Lifesteal riding the high of MoneySMP and how she pulled off a betrayal arc super well. But that was Kab vs rando content creators in the mcyt space. 

Now she’s Kab vs the very people who defined betrayal in mcyt. Everyone on lifesteal shares her ability to lie and manipulate. The thing that once made her unique is the very fabric of the server she is on. She thinks she’s got a leg up on everyone, but she’s merely on the same playing field. And that’s so dang interesting. Because she still doesn’t consider herself to merely be on the same playing field. She still thinks she’s better at this than anyone else. 

She said during the stream where Mane destroyed the Mice base (7/23/24) that she likes playing cocky characters because it makes the fall all the greater. But she just IS that cocky at times. Every time she’s jumped she’s giggly and cocky about being slick and avoiding being killed again because she sits on the respawn screen. 

So she’s cocky and willing to cause chaos, but she’s not the progenitor of chaos. She is not a worldender. She only causes chaos when someone nudges her towards it, not out of an internal desire to be chaotic and an understanding of the need for chaos on lifesteal.

And perhaps it’s because deep down, she cares about the people on the server. Not in the way Zam cares where he feels awful about everything he does that is evil and repents and has remorse over his actions. 

But she is affected by her caring. One of the most interesting moment of Kab lore was when she saw the photo of Mane standing in the blown up Mice base. 

KAB: “wow […] I knew he would blow it up, but like seeing the image is still like, fuck”

CLOWN: “really?” 

KAB: “THIS HASN’T HAPPENED TO ME BEFORE” 

CLOWN: “hasn't it happened to you like twice?” 

KAB: “he didn’t blow it up last time [...] I think, I think I have to leave. I think I should leave. I’m putting like hannah and red and leo at risk right now” 

It’s an involuntary reaction, something that is intrinsic to her core. She immediately went to: I should stop being on this team so I can save Hannah and Leo. I don’t want to see them get hurt. 

And this is before she knew Woogie was wanting to leave the Mice because he thought she was a threat!

This was before Red killed her! 

She came to this conclusion that she was dangerous to her friends outside of them agreeing with it. 

And she never brought this back up when she was in the box. She to this day thinks she did nothing intrinsically wrong (ie dangerous to others) by antagonizing Mane. At least as a character she refuses to accept this. But for a second there Kab Kaboodle came through and knew that to be an intrinsic fact. And then she didn’t expand on it. Missed opportunity tbh. 

And then I’ll end with an analysis of the Mane conversation after he blew up the base. Because it’s so interesting to see Kab banter in lore (though I suppose from her pov it wasn’t lore yet because this was before Red killed her) and see her say Way Too Much. She says she’s a master manipulator but girl you leak freaking everything. 

So, she says what she said above, then a few minutes later gets in vc with Mane.

MANE: “you didn’t think I had the guts.. To blow up the base of [unintelligible]” 

KAB: “[talking over him] you didn’t blow up the other one”

This whole conversation Kab interrupts Mane so much. She has to say things, to prove herself. Even when staying silent would give her so much more information.

MANE: “I’m gonna be honest, I was just looking for a reason” 

Every pvper on lifesteal ONLY acts evil when they have a reason. It’s so consistent. It’s never “just because”.

Kab says she put posters up of him bc she thought it was funny. 

 MANE: “yeeaa I find it funny too um. You said you're not scared which, I- I find pretty amusing” 

KAB: “ok!” 

MANE: “because you're obviously pretty scared” 

KAB: “you’re not scary. Dude. like your strength of the sword doesn’t fucking scare me dude. When you actually get smart and shit then then come talk to me” 

Super cocky. Super dismissive. Just looking for a power dynamic to make her regain control over the situation. That’s not manipulation that’s just a power grab.

MANE: “Ok. I’ll talk to you when I get smart I guess but I mean, I dunno, according to these dogs here you've been at, at the deepest level of the cave for for a while, almost like you’re hiding. [pause, Kab freezes and pulls up coords] am I right about that? That seems pretty scared to me. I dunno. But um” 

Mane absolutely cooks in this conversation but Kab just refuses to be affected by his lines and instead mocks him for being stereotypically tough guy. And yet she got scared there. She brought up her coords. 

KAB: “[scoff] alright buddy” 

MANE: “I dunno the way that you’re like, you're like interacting and the way that you’re like going about this is not the way that I would go about it personally”

KAB: “well, we’re very different people” 

MANE: “I mean. Okay. how do I rephrase this. The way that you’re going about this is not the way any other person has gone about this before” 

KAB: “thank you!” 

MANE: “it’s not a complement.” 

KAB: “I think it’s a complement. I appreciate that” 

MANE: “I’m calling you stupid.” 

KAB: “I try to be original” 

MANE: “you’re being stupid” 

KAB: “maybe in your eyes yea” 

MANE: “cause you’re gonna make a new base, I mean, you haven't even stopped to question how I found this one, which is quite interesting.” 

He’s calling her stupid for not asking more questions. Especially after she just called HIM the stupid one. He’s clearly smarter than he looks

KAB: “oh I know how you found it” 

MANE: “how did I find it” 

KAB: “my team already told me, I’m not telling you” 

Instead of fishing for more information, playing dumb, Kab instead goes for posturing that she is far smarter than him. She could’ve used this to make him think she’s stupid or to actually learn how he found the base so she can be safer in the future (later she tells chat the she has no idea how he found the base). And interesting move out of someone who wants to manipulate people. Usually you would want to play dumb, not play cocky.

MANE: “[scoff] you don’t know how I found that base” 

KAB: “okay! You can believe that” 

MANE: “yea, because if you did, there’s no secret to keep from me. Like the way I found the base myself”

KAB: “[interrupting] girl you know I don’t use that base right?” 

MANE: “okay. That’s your teammate’s base” 

KAB: “that’s fair. That is my teammate’s base. I more feel bad for them rather than me.” 

MANE: “yea. Yea. I feel bad for them too. It would suck to like, like, if I had a teammate, you know, especially considering like the fact that you, you- overall you’re team’s isn’t like the most skilled um if I was always suffering the consequences of my teammate’s actions who obviously doesn’t care about what they say” 

He’s using the info Woogie gave him to make her feel bad/see if she does feel bad AND SHE DOESN’T HIDE A SINGLE THING!

KAB: “girl if you’re trying to guilt me it’s not gonna work” 

MANE: “I’m not trying to guilt you, I I’m just saying like, if I was your teammate I- I would feel horrible, you know? You’re like” [.... devolves as mane is like if you want to loose teammates you can, and kab goes don’t mansplain to me (again, being cocky. refusing to be scared)] 

MANE: “even if you’re not scared, you’re putting your teammates in jeopardy, which you clearly already know, which is very interesting, very interesting trait for someone who cares about her team. So. I just wanted talk to you and get your consensus on the situation” 

He was fully going to stop the conversation there. But she just missed the cue and started to willingly gave him more information because her adhd ass thought that was a question not a statement /pos

KAB: “yea.. I’m I’m not overly fussed. It’s inconvenient. and that’s about it. It’s inconvenient” 

MANE: “for who?” 

KAB: “me” 

She’s revealing that her motivations on lifesteal revolve around herself. She cares more about herself than teammates in the long run. Like I said earlier, she intrinsically does care about people, but on lifesteal in particular she will first care about herself. 

MANE: “oooooh. See but you just said you care about your teammates and [unintelligible]”

KAB: “I do, but let’s be real two of them don’t log on very often and Leo’s been doing his own thing anyway. So” 

MANE: “oh. I guess you’re team’s already disbanded so” Mane brings back up how he just wanted to see what she thought about it. Again she just keeps talking.

KAB: “I think you’re being predictable and I think that’s helpful” 

MANE: “aw yea bro, glad I could help out”

[…more chatting] 

MANE: “If hiding doesn’t mean that you’re scared, I don’t know what hiding means” 

KAB: “I mean not everything has to have and emotional reaction” 

MANE: “I mean it’s not really an emotional reaction: if you’re hiding you’re scared of something” 

KAB: “scared is an emotion” 

MANE: “nah, fear is an emotion” DAMN SON. he really can just drop the dramatic bars bro. 

KAB: “fear is an emotion. I say being fearful and being scared is the same thing.” 

MANE: “if you weren’t fearful you wouldn’t be hiding” 

KAB: “that's not necessarily true” 

MANE: “how” 

KAB:” okay-” 

MANE: “hold on hold on hold on. [wanting direct clarification] Before we get into that, you’re saying that you’re not scared.” 

KAB: “no. [laughing at him]” 

MANE:” You’re not scared at all”

KAB: “no. I’m not scared at all” 

MANE: “Okay. as long as we get that out of the way” 

KAB: “I’m just not an idiot. But I’m not scared at all, no.” 

MANE: “okay. Ooooh, so you’re saying like the smart thing to do is hide” 

(/genuinely realizing this in real time. He did not understand this until this very moment)

KAB: “I mean, yea. Let’s be realistic. You are much better at pvp than I am and you have more hearts than me [ect] I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to keep my survival. HOLY SHIT I JUST REALIZED A PARALLEL. You’re a lion and I’m a rabbit” [derailed, mane says he got what he wanted, thinks she got something out of it too] 

KAB: “can I ask you one thing quickly?” 

This, I think, is the only thing Kab actually cared to ask this whole conversation. She was not being purposeful in anything else, just responding to what Mane was saying and saying things. But she wasn’t really listening to what was happening, she was too focused on looking tough and explaining herself. Until this moment.

MANE: “mmmhm?” 

KAB: “why did you go after my base and try and kill me? Was it the posters? Is that why?” 

MANE: “well, the posters were just a good reason” 

KAB: “you just want to do it?” 

MANE: “I’m gonna be honest. It’s just fun” 

KAB: “oooh. So I did categorize you correctly. Ok cool!” 

MANE: “[sad] ooh. okay.“ 

Leaves call KAB: “yea Mane is just as predictable as I thought he was”

Clown comes back in vc KAB: “[explaining the convo] he just wants to. He just thinks it’s fun. He’s just a crazy villain. I told you!” 

But like, I don’t think it’s that. I think we learned that you can get Mane to hunt someone very very easily, just give him a small excuse and he’ll gladly do it. Which is useful if you want a villain or want someone to hunt you. So in that way he is super predictable. But he isn’t “a crazy villain” the posters were just an excuse, an excuse he had been looking for. Because he wants an excuse. That is very different than pure “it was for the fun”. 

The fact that she comes to the conclusion that he’s just a crazy villain after that conversation is crazy. I feel like she just was looking for confirmation for a hypothesis she had rather than really looking for research to see who Mane is. 

Which is a huge flaw for someone who wants to figure out why people are the way they are so you can manipulate them. 

I feel like Mane, if he is smart, learned far far more information about her than she did from him.

The tension for the Kab lore here lies in how this will all blow up in her face. I think she will cling to things and copium her way into believing she won no matter what. But she will have been absolutely destroyed. 

And I keep getting hit with her being incompetent because she like, wildly, and I mean WILDLY, makes wrong assumptions about the older Lifestealer’s motivations.

Which is crazy to me because she WAS a viewer! She, in theory, (but probably not in practice because no cc has enough time to watch another smp with as much attention to detail and analysis that we do) should have a really solid understanding of the crew, and she self reports that she does but she’s been wrong so many times. 

Like not only does she get Mane completely wrong here, but when Spoke logged on one night and said he was betraying the empire because of jepex she flat out believed him??? And like brought it up again later like it was true. 

She thinks Zam has a huge plan of becoming evil. She had this whole moment in the box where she mansplained to chat that we are being fooled by him. We were being gaslit by him into thinking he isn’t planning on being evil at the end. And it was just so painful to watch because she’s just so wrong. 

Because Zam has never ever thought of his lore like that. He’s reactionary to the extreme, believing he will take the current lore to the end of the season regardless of how early it is in the season. He becomes evil by the end more often than he doesn’t, but it’s not premeditated. And she should know that. 

And she assumed that Red wouldn’t kill her. Like, no, I didn’t see it coming either, but it was a very Reddoons move. To take it personal when someone causes him anxiety. There were other small assumptions she made on older life stealer motivations that I can’t remember now. 

But to clear it out, what motivates Kab Kaboodle?? She hates not being believed. That’s what I took from all this. This is her trigger, the thing that will motivate her forward. 

Because she does lie and manipulate. And that relies upon being believed. So when someone believes something that isn’t true about her (like Red’s assumptions that she was leaking info to Clown) it hurts a hell of a lot more. 

But because she lies, nobody will ever believe her when she desperately tries to get them to believe the truth.

So yea. What do you guys think about Kab and her lore? 

[godkilller]

@izzabizz139

I wanna hear you rant about the Gin vs Hitsugaya anime fight bc I love seeing your pov and you clearly write better than whoever extended that scene :) pretty please

          out of character.  DON’T ENABLE ME SO MUCH !!  No but I cackled when I first saw this ask because oh my god, clearly you saw a taste of my annoyance about the anime adaptation -- no, adaptation implies it was accurate, I’ll say the anime’s take was “inspired by” the manga’s quick run-in. I’ll start by saying this moment is supposed to be a bit important considering, via the audience’s point of view, THIS IS THE FIRST WE SEE OF TWO CAPTAIN-RANKED SHINIGAMI CLASHING. The only other captain-involved fight we’ve seen thus far in the manga is Kenpachi  ( who is an outlier and should not be counted... no, I joke... but, still, Ichigo was not an equal to him, his sword was sliced through like butter. )  The whole reason I enjoyed this encounter between Toshiro and Gin was simply this; it wasn’t some fancy multi-chaptered fight. IN THE MANGA, THERE ARE ONLY TWO BLOWS MADE. One, by Toshiro, to begin the fight. The second, to end it, is Gin’s strike.

          I want you to know that I’ve rewatched this specifically to answer this ask, and only due to this, as I wouldn’t have ever sought it out otherwise. HONOR MY SACRIFICE.

          Read more for length. I’m merciful.

          In the anime, they monologue at each other, and it’s mostly a combination of Toshiro making three separate death threats  ( he starts this off by saying “I’ll kill you before Hinamori arrives” and then goes on rewording it each time, and then also repeats the death-threat he gave Gin prior to this conflict about “I’ll kill you if Hinamori bleeds” )  and then also Gin and Izuru talking about how truly powerful and amazing Toshiro is -- no, this isn’t me being bitter or petty, I literally shit you not, Gin has a line that is legit “AS EXPECTED FROM HITSUGAYA TOSHIRO, CAPTAIN OF THE TENTH DIVISION, A CHILD PRODIGY OF TH' SORT THAT ONLY COMES ALONG ONLY ONCE EVERY FEW CENTURIES. HOW VEEEERY DANGEROUS. YOU’RE SERIOUS, AIN’T YA?” like don’t get me wrong, love a good sarcastic little shit comment like that, but the amount of times the anime pumps Toshiro up like he’s their shinest new cash cow ( and he is, at this point, it is not even 50 episodes into the series and they’ve realized everyone likes him and he’s jumped to high ranks in popularity polls... earning him filler spotlights, and eventually his very own non-canon movie )  so everything coming out of Gin’s mouth feels like more bullshit than necessary. Izuru’s already literally monologued, internally, how powerful and amazing Toshiro is anyways. Why this ?

          Not to mention that, prior to saying that long-winded shit, Gin’s haori changed length three times  ( and once it was longer than his entire body by several feet, and no not in a ‘to show motion’ way )  and most importantly Shinso was drawn, consistently, at katana-length for the duration of their little spat where the following, too, happened: Gin frog-leaps after doing a backflip, Toshiro gives Gin two (2) haircuts, Gin ruins some floorboards and gives Toshiro at least one splinter in his arm, Toshiro whilst wearing socks lands on Shinso’s blunt edge and pushes the sword down with his footsie because that’s how that works, there’s another backflip somewhere in there that Gin doesn’t need to be doing, twirl, twirl, and ballet, Gin’s face elongates until his chin is bigger than his face, Gin spends ten+ seconds purely dodging very close strikes to his face as Toshiro is the only one making breathy growly and ‘tsuuaaah’ sounds, there is a brief moment of no gravity as Toshiro keeps hacking at Gin midair and Gin blocks it over and over again but they still stay in the air but they’re not standing or jumping or using reiatsu they’re just like, momentum-locked I don’t fucking know, Gin frowny faces as he blocks because like somehow this kid who doesn’t even have more reiatsu than him, whose arm strength should not be an issue, is like. making him nervous?? as sword sparks fly. if you know me at all you know I hate when they fuckin’ firework sparkler-ify swords clashing.

          Anyways, all of this happens whilst Shinso is the wrong length and Gin’s hair is getting purpler by the second and this entire thing is somehow a big jack-off to Toshiro’s immense strength even though he’s screaming and wailing at Gin like a child and Gin’s just a vessel at this point to Enhance Toshiro, which, fine, okay, but at least be more accurate with it god damn. ANYWAYS,

          THEY JOUST. They literally run at each other, swords centered, and run past / to the side of one another. Jousting. “Cause that’s how that works. No slashes, no cutting motion. Just swords centered, because the animators were like “no worries guys I know swordfighting basics that’s a legit pose” yeah it is WHEN STATIONARY. Not rUNNING IT DOWN.

          And then Gin’s sleeve is cut, somehow, from the Jousting, because wow Toshiro wow wow wowowowow, and then Toshiro comes back and starts wailing at Gin again and Gin blocks it, again, and it’s all very annoyingly repetitive, and Gin’s frowning and sparks are flying and Gin’s using Shinso, the katana-length wakizashi I guess, with two hands because like I said, the animators knew basics and basics are “katana are used two-handed” like. Okay, you’re not wrong, but I cannot stress this enough: SHINSO IS NOT A KATANA. It’s shorter and meant to be used single-handed!!!! sTop!!! So then Gin rips off the tattered part of his sleeve and throws it at Toshiro, who swipes it away from his face using his Zanpakuto because that’s intelligent and a piece of cloth was definitely threatening enough to use your sword to bat it away  ( btw, Hitsugaya wasn’t holding his sword with two hands at this precise moment, so he could have just... used his other hand )  and then Gin goes in for the classic “stabby stabby rapidly at you while the animation gets a little breather because we repeat this cycle a few times with flashy bgs and phew money made” ... WE ARE FOUR MINUTES AND THIRTY SECONDS INTO THIS FIGHT BY THE WAY. Gin does this for seventeen (17) agonizing seconds straight. Yes, I counted. That was sixteen and a half too many seconds for me, personally.

          Toshiro somehow lassos Shinso whilst Gin is stabby stabby-ing with Hyourinmaru’s chain component. I say component like it’s somehow some type of beauty guru’s lipstick holder, but really am I that wrong ? When else has he ever used this feature ? Anyways, he lassos Shinso because yeehaw I guess, god I’m falling apart at this point can y’all tell????? I need a drink.

          and so, because now Toshiro has Gin’s sword somehow trapped with chain even though it’s just looped around it, he backflips over Gin for a cool trickshot, no blow issued, just vibes, and Gin uses a big brain moment to tug Shinso and the chains slide off. okay now what. We’re past five minutes into this fight, nonstop.

          SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD TIME FOR GIN TO PAUSE AND APPRECIATE TOSHIRO AGAIN! “I see, I shouldn’t have underestimated you, HItsugaya Toshiro” I’m starting to have a feeling Gin’s VA was told to just wing these lines because the amount of times he fills silences / Gin’s mouth movements with Toshiro’s long-ass name is astounding, he’s definitely drawing blanks here but he sure as hell knows one thing: that damn ice-boy’s name. He continues by saying “I suppose I’ll end up regretting it afterwards.”

          Toshiro says that’s not enough, and it’s really dramatic and cool. His eyes even glow all icy and blue and pretty, like his flowy reiatsu. Aesthetic points were gifted entirely to Toshiro’s animations in this scene. Gin was finished in MS Paint and each new scene they had to draw Shinso from memory and try to remember what hue of purple his hair was at gunpoint. Toshiro lets off a big wave of reiatsu and then it vanishes, and he jumps up reaaaally high. like this guy’s flying. his eyes arent glowing anymore that’s sad. Bring Back Glowing Eyes For Strong Shinigami 2k21.

          Toshiro releases his Shikai, and it’s badass, the sky darkens, Izuru looks distinctly more worried than usual, and Gin’s frowning with his teeth out like Bugs Bunny’s having a bad day, all is right in the world. Toshiro and his released Shikai have a nice moment for the Pics, and a big epic freeze frame blur moment happens with it all coiled and swirling around him. Wrow!  ( click the ‘wrow’ it’s a link to my exact reaction )  Izuru narrates for the third time about how powerful Toshiro is, his reiatsu, his Zanpakuto being a deity who is only unlocked every few centuries. The strongest ice-type sword. Pardon the pun, but that’s... you could say, so cool.

          It can even control the weather. So hey, next time it’s rainy, cold, icy, or snowing and you’re unhappy, it’s time to direct a big fuck you at Toshiro.

          Gin dodges the first dragon, and blocks the second with Shinso because blocking water and ice with a sword makes sense right? This actually takes a solid amount of seconds as Gin cuts through the entire length of this ice dragon noodle. Things dissipate, and pause, too, to really drag this out. Surprisingly, this reveals that Gin’s made a boo-boo, his left arm’s frozen, which doesn’t even mean anything because Gin is right-handed, and Toshiro teleports himself behind Gin in true fighty fashion.

          We have arrived at seven minutes and just under twenty seconds of this fight, and Gin turns, DOES THE UNTHINKABLE, gasp! He opens his eyes. His red, dull, evil, gray-eyebrowed with purple hair eyes, and shoots Shinso through its hideout spot behind his haori. This nearly takes off Toshiro’s eye and upwards of his head, but the little guy dives down fast. The rest happens in slow motion, supposedly, because it takes an eternity and people talk entire full sentences in its span of time.

          Gin asks Toshiro if he’s sure he’d like to dodge that  ( it’s a little late for that ) and says that Momo’ll die if he does. SHINSO SCRAPING ALONG AGAINST HYOURINMARU STRANGELY MAKES NOT A SINGLE SOUND. Mute. Even though before they had no problem animating and adding sounds to them smacking blades earlier. There are soundless sparks though, so there’s that. Yay. Can you tell how exhausted this’s made me? I need a nap.

          Shinso is already more than halfway towards Momo, still unconscious, she most definitely has a serious concussion via Toshiro backhanding her midair consider she’s been unconscious for longer than ten minutes. Toshiro has time to get up off the floor where he dropped to dodge, realize with a shocked gasp, turn, shout her name, and watch as Rangiku arrives in a random glow of gold which never happens ever again and blocks the attack with Haineko. Haineko almost cracks on the impact, and continues growing in damage as Rangiku holds Shinso there, implying that she’s stopped it from reaching one-hundred sword’s lengths to pierce Momo. Yes I’m including that implication / note in here because we love to see Rangiku succeeding in life and being Not-Helpless, all while potentially damaging Haineko severely if it wasn’t able to hold him off. Yikes, Gin!

          Rangiku threatens to join the fight if he doesn’t withdraw his sword. Gin smiles, withdraws it, and then Shunpos away.

          Whatta mess. Oh, and the anime fight was pretty fucked up, too.

          This is a long post, but here’s the manga version:

Toshiro leaps into the air,

This is where the fight actually starts between them:

And end. 

Five pages. Two blows. Does not equate to ten minutes of non-stop fighting and monologues. Sometimes, and I mean this in the most unbiased way possible, less is more.

[kierongillen]

Writer Notes: The Wicked + the Divine 36

Spoilers, obv.

Well, this was a fucker.

I wrote the following while drunk a few weeks ago.

This is something I only found myself chewing over the way home from drinks in town when I select a Spotify playlist for fist-pumping tracks. And it's mainly stuff like Ram Bam's Black Betty and My Sex Is On Fire or whatever, but it also includes Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire. Which is out of place in such a playlist, but also welcome.

It's a song which came out during the brief period between me becoming someone who bought pop music and someone who was a hardcore metalhead. It's a song I bought, and intensely loved. It's perhaps not a surprise. It's in its deeply unfashionable way, entirely me. A pure burst of reference pop.

It's a gimmick song. A list song. It's a list of events from Joel's life – it gives the impression of building towards the present day, but really is pretty fucking random from across the timeline, selecting stuff as it would occur, a ramble. The song is so sleight to be sarcastic, but it's delivered with a frustration and attack. The words are all meaningfully chosen, with juxtaposition between huge events and trivia equally sang with commitment, but the context is so traditional a frame to be almost dismissive. Yet with this disengagement – and with tricks thrown in to maintain interest from its monotony and add towards a slowly build tension – it builds towards an apocalypse, before backing off to a statement of that is how life feels as it is being lived, and the sense of apocalypse is an illusion, and the real horror is that this will continue ever onwards.

So, I was listening to that, while thinking about this issue, and sort of smiling.

And I can see what drunk me was getting at.

Okay – this is a tricky issue to talk about, as you slice somewhere and its guts come falling out. I've written a lot, but I'm also aware that writing that begs more questions which begs more specific answers. As always with these notes I say "This is a collection of thoughts from the making of the issue, but not comprehensive." Even in one like this where I'm saying a lot, that still holds true. This could have gone on forever. And on and on and on and...

Yeah, you get the point.

Perhaps the most common request from WicDiv fans is “Are we ever going to get a list of all the pantheons?” or, for the more demanding, “are we ever going to get a list of all the gods.” The latter makes me blink, for reasons I'll probably segue into, but we did want to do the former, at least as best as we could within the limitations we've set ourselves.

But also, I always think of the nature of murder and plans stretching across time. “I have been murdering people for hundreds of years” is a cool line, thrown off, never examined. I kinda wanted to examine it, and play with what the human brain does with repetition.

I recall a critique of the brilliant (and highly influential on yours truly) Heavenly Creatures, of the considerable sympathy you hold for the titular teemage murderers despite the horror of the murder on screen. The critique noted that the murder on screen was highly sanitized, and the actual murder had forty-five injuries, over twenty of which were head wounds. So the three or so blows shown in the murder were bad enough. When we're forced to really live with the actuality of what the murder required, to not just hit thrice, but again and again and again and again and again and again and many more times, at which point does any sympathy we have evaporate in the face of the actual reality of the horror of what they did. Murder is ugly.

I found myself thinking of an aside in one of the WW1 episodes of Hardcore History, which describes American reporters sitting in Belgium, watching the German army march past on the first offensive. It's over a million soldiers. The reporters sit in the cafe, and it's instantly astounding. And then it goes on, and the effect deadens a little. And then it becomes almost comic. And then, hours later, when you realise it's taken an entire day for these people to stomp past, it becomes surreal, brains shaking at the sheer size of it. That.

Also, Modern art, especially music, is about an exploration of repetition with minimised variations.  Paul Morley's Words And Music posited all pop music as a line from Alvin Lucifer's I Am Talking In A Room to Kylie's Can't Get You Out Of My Head, from which a city emerges. That.

And a lot more – that's a selection of thoughts that went into this. It's idea rich, and frankly there's some stuff which – like any experimental piece – was a surprise for the team itself. We walked away with new stuff in our heads, learned from having a jackboot stomp on a human face across all human history, and what we saw when we juxtapose all these things together. I highly recommend trying the impossible, at least once.

When I first suggested it to Jamie, he was excited. The thought was that it'd be a whole issue, with three panels a page. This would have been an easier task, partially as it would be the only work required in the issue, and also the framing in a wide panel would require more detail, but less total research. In short, you wouldn't have to worry about what people were wearing on their legs in periods with scant research.

That fell by the wayside when I did the tight plotting for the arc. We couldn't afford the space, and I can only imagine what the response to the issue among the anti-this-kind-of-stuff readers if we had.

(The response was exactly what we expected it be, in terms of strong polarisation between The Best WicDiv Thing Evvvvaaa! and those who it had no effect at all, that its non-traditional form of comic narrative was essentially invisible.)

It was a few other things as well – in one way, I just wanted to give Jamie a guitar solo. I think he's the undisputed costume designer of his generation in the American field – even putting aside his work on WicDiv, he's responsible between three of the most influential looks of our time, two of which are going to be everywhere for the next five years at least (Miss Marvel and Captain Marvel being the Everywhere-ers, and Ameican Chavez being one of those period touchstones.) The idea of having half an issue devoted to 128 new and individually reseached character designs is absolutely a mike-drop. No-one's done this. No-one would try to do this. I wanted Jamie's peers to cry at the idea of even considering trying this. Admittedly, this involved Jamie crying doing it, but the cost of doing business.

So yeah – while arrogant and desperately overambitious, especially in the context of a monthly comic book (this is easily as much work as two monthly comics) this is one we're intensely proud of.

I have also promised everyone I will never do it to them again. Because once you've done it once, there's no need to, right?

Okay – let's do this.

Jamie/Matt's Cover

Continuing the theme of the arc in terms of covers of “Persephones” and “Anankes” and “Minervas”, and clearly set up to be a “Hey, here's a new interesting character.”

Babs Tarr Cover

God, Babs is a hell of an artist. As usual, we just asked what she's be interested in, and the Persephone on Bike seemed too good to resist, with the implicit MotorCross Crossover thrills. Wonderful stuff.

Page 1

Cutting this to the bare minimum is always the thing. Enough to treat the characters as iconic as the ones in the present – the three panels with 2/3rds main image is what we use for the vast majority of the traditional transformation, and with small tweaks we keep the same beats.

We'd normally do a LOC CAP or similar in this scene, but that would step on the effect as we start LOC CAP-ing on the next page.

Of course, by now, we know how this scene goes...

PAGE 2-12

I'm not going to go too deep into this, and try and talk about top level thinking and the choices you make when going on this kind of an endeavour, especially when you know that there's no ideal one. History is a mess.

If you want a panel by panel walk through of the periods, I direct you to Twatd's extensive 6000 years of murder. They've also just put it in an ebook for their patreon folk, if you want to throw them some coins. I'll be picking up some various bits of details.

First leg of this fucker was me, basically on my own with the history books and the spreadsheets.

The main part of that was simply positioning each one, for definite. Until now, I've allowed myself some flexibility, based into the nature of the recurrence. I didn't need to know the exact dates until I wrote a story in the period, so I didn't nail them down. As we set up in the first issue, it's every ninety years from the end of the previous pantheon. The Pantheon length varies between 1-3 years, depending how quick the gods die. A 1 year pantheon would be them all dying in two calendar years, and a 3 year one being a very slow one. There's few of them. Most Pantheons are across 3 calendar years (Therefore, a 2 year pantheon). I'd checked I could land a pantheon on 455 earlier, based on the squishiness in these math, but I learned how to actually work a spreadsheet, put the math in, and tweak.

On another bit of the spreadsheet I started doing the other half of the work, which works in parallel (but mostly separate) from the main thrust of history. As in, Ananke's story. Where she is at each point in history, what she learns there and what she's trying. There's some areas where the change in her tactics is quite obvious, and can be discerned from just what's shown in the panel. The ones where it's major but bemusing are likely the ones we'll be delving into in the future – either next issue, the final special or some other point.

Even writing this part was strange, entering the mind of someone who's been working on a project for 6000 years, and the waves of ennui and experimentation and strangeness. How to think like Ananke? It's hard. Every ninety years this thing happens. How she gonna play it this time? You occasionally get WicDiv readers asking “Why doesn't Ananke do X thing?” and this answer she probably gives would be “Yeah, tried it a few times, doesn't work nearly as well as you think it would.”

The biggest problem is choosing the pantheons, and the narrative it's choosing to tell through it. With the big list of pantheon dates the two core questions are...

What's the most culturally influential thing going on in this period that we know about?

How can we get the best global sampling that we can?

The latter is the fucker, because records are bad, and while history isn't written by the winners, history is written by those who write histories or at the least those who make things which historians can find or those historians have bothered to try and find. That warps the options for choices intensely, and often ways which frustrate our desires and choices. The script draft had multiple options for each category, and we chewed them over – there's a page in this month's Image+ which shows some of my notes there. Especially with the super-long-lived cultural empires, we looked opportunities to justifiably use anything other than them to just avoid 3000+ years of alternating between China and Egypt.

(Seriously, of all the many things this project has given me, a better understanding of the physicality of time, both its expanse (as in, HOW LONG HAS EGYPT BEEN THIS CULTURAL CENTER?) and its shortness (It is 66 full-lifetimes between us and the start of this mess. The last page skipping back from 2013 hits the majority of what we think of as history. It's a vertiginous book if you let it get beneath your skin, and we had to.)

Equally, we should unpack “culturally influential.” “Culturally Influential” normally means “invaded and killed a bunchy of other folks and made them take on your culture.” This is mainly a list of cultures who've dominated their locales. This has always been there in WicDiv. The 20th century Pantheon is primarily (though not solely) American. The 19th century one was primarily European. 455 is about the fall of Rome.

I'm not sure if I have to state the obvious: all the choices flow from the nature of WicDiv gods as cultural epiphenomenon (or, if not epiphenomenon, heralds. Or both. Either way, the gods dovetail with the rise of "civilization")

We map the gods to known history. If it's troubling, it's troubling because world history is troubling. And I do find that troubling.

At the same time, the concept of the book also lets us create spaces for possibility. We are showing one god from the period - Persephone. There's another dozen elsewhere. While we've shown some pantheons work with a tight geographical focus (such as the London/UK one) others have sprawled across considerable spaces, covering at least a continent and sometimes more. Some of the pantheons shown in this issue imply that kind of gap, normally signified by Ananke dressed in culturally different garments than the Persephone. Equally, some of the more extremely positioned Persephones are a snapshot that implies that gods can end up that far afield, at least occasionally.

In other words, if we drop a pantheon anywhere on the continent it implies that in some of the pantheon are in areas other than the direct place we're putting them. Steppes People bar one Hunnic one. Africa South of Mali. Most of East Asia, bar China and Japan and one Vietnamese Persephone we squeezed in. A lot of South and North America. We just don't have the history to know what or when to pick, and the relevant reference to draw even if we could.  

(The exception we forced was Australia, as we didn't even have a single god on that continent. As such, it was key to show a god on that continent to show that gods could be on that continent and by implication they could in one of the other pantheons.)

The above grates, but this issue was one of a bunch of compromises and decisions. This

There's also an attempt in the Ananke/Persephone pairings to talk about various stories. Sometimes the Persephone prefigures a culture's dominance. Sometimes it prefigures its fall. Sometimes it prefigures an option simply not taken. There is an implicit complexity and ambivalence to what we're showing here, as human history resists easy answers.

The naming is the other major bugbear. After the above choices were made, I spent a clear week going back and forth for a standardised naming system to use. Having one which I felt made sense, I spot the couple of exceptions where it didn't, and flick back entirely the other way. There's been times when the whole thing had generalised “Africa” or “Europe” captions. There was times when I considered not even having any captions at all – but these sacrifice so much in terms of the thrill of the mystery of these names. When (say) “Uruk” turns up it's meaningful and interesting, and losing that seemed a huge cost.

The rules we went with were as followed...

If we want to place this Persephone to a specific locale that exists and I want to specifically set the story in that limited locale, we use that name. (e.g. Athens, Uruk)

If a cultural region exists, and I don't want to tie the story to happening to a specific settlement in it, I use the cultural region (e.g. Egypt). If I want to be a little more specific, we can include geographical detail (e.g. Northern China).

If nothing exists for sure, use pure geography (e.g. The Upper Nile.)

All this also ties into my own knowledge of any areas. Some areas I have more confidence in choosing where to place the implied story. Some, I'd rather step back and be broader. This is based upon the background knowledge in a section. To do otherwise, I'd have to do reading akin to a WicDiv special for every panel in this issue, and as each WicDiv special is basically 6 months work, I'd have to had spent 33 years on this one.

This has one eye on the future – if we ever go back and do stories in WicDiv's history when all this is open, I want as much room to manoeuvre as possible. Do not close stuff off we don't have to, while also leaving enough room for people's imagination to populate the world.

Christ – this is 2500 words already, and I haven't said anything yet. You should see the script. There's actually a page of it which is going to be in the next Image Plus. I was a little reticent, as any one page was either too long or too fragmentory. We included one, which includes a couple of notes in from various levels of the production. The basic structure is that the panel is split between a “What the interaction is between the Ananke and the Persephone” and the “What period is this set in or what choices do we have?” And then there's a mass of conversation, both online and in person, after that. We say that all scripts are conversations, but it was never moreso in this issue.

The main take away from the second half was wanting to give Jamie as much room as possible and cut as many corners as he needed to get through it.

This is Jamie. He's never going to cut any corners.

(There's sections at the start where I suggest doing things like dropping backgrounds entirely and making it symbolic or whatever, but Jamie! That guy. THAT GUY.)

The baton of the workload then passed to Jamie. This is simultaneously a much bigger workload and a significantly different. I was performing a great filter. He was digging into specifics.

To get an idea of the scale of this, hired a costume researcher for this for a week of solid work, and they managed to do about a quarter of the periods, and even then not completely. The rest were done by Jamie and Katie as they proceeded through the issues.

Our costumes and choices are most conservative in the periods we know least about, and are normally excused by “if we don't do this, we miss this culture out entirely.” The further back we went, the harder it was, but even that isn't on a level playing field. When we get past the history and into the quasi-myth it also becomes tricky. It's just tricky.

As this was all only completed right up against the hard deadline, it also left barely any time to actually do the level of due diligence we wanted. We were expecting that we'd have stumbled over something accidentally mortifyingly offensive by accident in terms of colour choices or something else easy to stumble over, but the surprise is that there's been relatively little about that. We were expecting to have to do a bunch of tweaking when we come to the trade, and just mea culpa. In fact, there's only a handful of things to tweak – one place name which, after due consideration, I think I'll change and one architectural mishap. Frankly, this is much better than we were thinking, though I guess there's time for more stuff to be spotted.

Right – let's do a quick tour through the pages, with me pulling out bits and pieces which spring to mind.

Page 3 – still dealing with regions-rather-than-places, with Uruk being a side-step. Also sets up the rhythm of things staying the same and then things changing – as in, repetition enough to let people know there's a pattern, then a subversion. As it's the opening, the pattern is pretty obvious – straight murder until a Persephone gets wise and fights back, and then a change of tactics. Er... I'm not going to go in detail on this stuff from now, as that's reading the bloody comic for you, and I'm not one of those comic reviewers who just do a synopsis of the comic and sticking a 7/10 at the bottom. Even when I was a critic, I was the type to write a synopsis and stick a 6/10 at the bottom as I was a big ol' meanie.

The thing which most strikes me as sad about the research is that any headwear is a total waste. Man! Decapitation is the worst.

Page 4 – Japan 2942BC is one of my fave Persephone looks. I also like Ananke Northern China.

Yes, the “Crete” one is very clearly a “Wait – what happened here?” one. More anon.

Page 5 – Watching Ananke across this period is the interesting one.

Wrangel Island is one of my favourite historical things, in that it's the last place Mammoths were alive on Earth, around this period. There's a story I've wanted to do that is set this period. Maybe one day I will. I want to do it as an OGN, but part of me thinks it's actually a 5 page short story.

Egypt shows the arrival of the Pyramids here – architecture in backgrounds is one of the trickier things we had to deal with, but something that big and iconic is hard to resist. This was one of the problems culturally speaking – that there's many cultures we couldn't get good (or any) reference for their houses, so they tended to be put in rural/wooded situations, which carries an implication we weren't fond of. Occasionally we pushed it as far as we dared with simple housing to avoid that.

Man, I love the movement Jamie does in the middle two panels – plus the treatment of colour from Matt. That's actually worth stressing – I said it was a huge amount of work for Jamie? It's equally hilarious for Matt. He normally gets to set up a palette on a scene, and then carries it to other panels. Here, he has to reinvent it every single time. Stuff like the transitions from Egypt to Wrangel Island is dazzling.

Page 6

I resisted the Druidic one for a while – the earlier Western Europe one too – but they were both also (I think) Egypt ones. Basically everything here which is us going “We can use this for another locale” is taking out an Egypt or a China. Egypt and China have done so much stuff, guys. It's kinda scary.

Australasia is clearly one where we played it particularly tight – by definition, Ananke will have travelled here, and we minimise as much of Persephone's clothes due to not knowing for sure what people would wear in the period.

Page 7

Honestly, with out own interest in decapitated head, we were hardly going to resist the Olmec heads, right?

I like the implication of the story with the Egypt one here. You can see Ananke taking the Persephone all the way beneath the surface for this scene.

Page 8

Any time I look at the Assyrians I think of taking my friend Sarah Jaffe – not someone who is into ancient history – around the British Museum. When passing through the Assyrian display, I tried to work out how to sum up the Assyrians. I ended up with “The Assyrians... well, the Assyrians were tossers.” I may have used a stronger word than “Tosser.”

How do we know this? They spent a lot of time carving pictures of how much a tosser they were, just so we all know thousands of years later.

I find myself wondering what looks Ananke most liked? Does she look back fondly at certain periods? Almost certainly.

Page 9

It's around this point the sheer size of ancient history starts to get to you. Especially in the earlier Egypt/China-duopoly drafts it was like being punched in the face. It goes on and on and on and on. Which is the effect we were looking for, of course.

I kinda wished I could find somewhere other than Macedonia to do this one, but I couldn't find anything that made sense.

Eturia is one of those implied-other-story ones. This is near Rome, but not Rome. Eturian culture was significantly different from Rome, and you wonder what a more Eturian influenced Roman culture could have been like. I mainly ramble by way of example in my thinking for some of these.

Page 10

Yes, I smiled at Judea. Into the AD!

The South East Asia one is Vietnamese, and one of the ones we had least to draw off, but when there was so many East Asia pantheons, having them all be China and Japan felt worse than doing one with minimal sources.

The Eastern Europe one is my one complete fuck up when scripting this – it was originally the Hunnic invasion of India, with Persephone as a Hun. Except I had just read a number wrong, and the Hunnic Invasion of India was a century later, at a similar time to the Fall Of Rome Pantheon. A quick last minute panic kept it as Steppes People, and just had it out there, in the regions were the Huns were pre most of this, foreshadowing.

454 is earlier in the Fall Of Rome special. One of my reads in my research on that one was that Roman failure to integrate Germanic peoples into the empire to rejuvenate it (as they had with previous migrant groups) was one of the prime causes for the western fall, so this seemed a symbolic way to go. And look at the dappling!

Page 11

Tikal is the one I'll tweak. That's a more modern name. I'll likely tweak to Yax Mutal in the trade.

The Constantinople panel is the architectural problem – that Hagia Sophia look is simply from a much later period.

The acting in the first four panels are basically my favourite thing in the whole issue. Yes, the fourth one is “that time with the Franks” as referenced earlier in this arc.

I did try to tweak numbers and end up with a 999 pantheon, but couldn't make it land, and I decided that the Nun Lucifer story would work better later, circa the Black Death. As such, doing a millennial pantheon this far from the AD timeline appealed. And look at the fashion!

Page 12

The next special is 1373, so close to the fourth panel here. More to come, etc.

First two panels are the Crusades, mirroring one another.

Page 13

When planning this originally, I thought 60 pantheons. I then failed to realise I did the math wrong, and if I started close to 4000BC, it'd be 66 pantheons – so we'd need 11 pages. I did have a draft with a slightly longer start, but I realised that I couldn't afford another page, when I had a lot of work to do in the latter half of the issue.

I also realised that it's not 66, as the first one is actually the one we saw in 34, which is by definition, not in this sequence. Which left us one panel at the end. We played with various options, but calling back to a sequence from issue 9 seemed a good move. It's a scene which, of course, reads differently now.

These are the most familiar pantheons, of course.

Page 14

Interstitial, a nod to the Kanye track. I originally had this as the interstitial at the end of last issue, but felt that it contextualised Baal in a crass and deceptive way, and made it more likely to be taken as literally without any nuance. By placing it between these two horror stories, applying the word to both Ananke/Minerva and Baal, there's more space to think about it.

Page 15

I normally do a tight synopsis for the whole arc before starting. I did for this arc, and it actually expands to next arc too. However, these always change. When I reached this issue, especially when I realised it would be 12 of the 20 pages, I did some reworking of plot threads, moving a couple of other beats either to a teaser for next issue or just to next issue – as next issue is one with much more space available for present day stuff.

I did it as basically Baal's origin (there's no other word for it – Baal is a classic superhero origin story, as pure as Spider-man's) requires the space. He's earned it.

Still – as there is one other key thing which needs space, the question how to approach it was there. The final choice was minimalistic and cleanly. Three panels here, into the flashback. Red colouring. Baal's colours now.

Flame fade out to flashback, ala all performance-storytelling we've seen so far. As in, Gods' signature segues to flashback.

Page 16-17

I love what Matt is doing here with texture and shape. It makes everything feels alive, like ornamental, pushing against Jamie's art. It's like a mural, it's art.

Not a back garden but a playpark. I imagine Baal on the way home, crossing across here, meeting the lady and...

2 page scene. This needs space, in its own way.

Page 18-19

A spread, but this is effectively one page in terms of page use. Trying to get as much story as we can from the limited page count available. This is almost all Star Superman in cutting to the basics – a single image showing a fragment of the fight, and one of Baal's line.

More red. You see where we're going, as it's building up.

“that night, I did it” just made me shiver.

Page 20-22

We talked about various approaches to this – on a single page. but we chose to burn pages. As always, these are free, and don't come from the page count of the issue. In this case, it lets us dwell on it, and hit it again and again.

Page 23-24

And a segue out, back into reality. This is where we crunch the details we feel people need to know.

Of course, this is why Baal has always taken the Great Darkness more seriously – not least he knows what he has to do if the Great Darkness isn't dealt with before another three months ticks over. You can probably chew over yourself how much is him believing it's saving the world and how much he believes it's just saving his family. I don't think you have to choose one or another.

“You don't need to know” is a very WicDiv choice, isn't it?

It's one of the things which is there, but never stressed – Baal, for all his bluster, has never won a fight in all of WicDiv, when actually fighting against someone who fights back. Here's the reason.

It's worth noting Baal had the necklace, at least occasionally, before issue 4 of WicDiv. Woden is completing it as he hands it back. As in, it's been tuned up for a while – obviously it needs to be completed with what Ananke suspected may be coming with Lucifer. Er... this is probably too much to say here? It just occurred. It's the sort of stuff we chew over.

I suspect “I want to die/but I want to live” is one of those axis which WicDiv is built around? I found it upsetting to write, which is normally a tell.

Page 25

I said this when asked about the pregnancy plot when the issue came out...

Thanks for your faith, but I understand cynicism. It’s not as if there’s much track record for media doing this well. I’ll probably write a little more about it in the writers notes - I just deleted a paragraph here as I want to chew over my exact wording carefully. The short version is, like everything we do, we take it intensely seriously and we didn’t go here lightly. I also have faith in the readers unpacking it and making their own sense of it as we continue - I think Pomegranate’s take is basically the best sort of response we could have hoped for at this point, really.

… and after chewing it over, I don't think there's much I can add to it, really. Further into WicDiv I'm sure I will, but it's too connected to everything, and any explanation just leads to questions I can't answer yet.

I do wish I had slightly more space here to push the pause as Baal chewed it over longer.

Page 26

The idea that Baal would burn down Valhalla only struck me as I was writing this sequence. Of course he would. It just made sense.

This is a great example of Jamie being an amazing storyteller. I put her outside, and Jamie asked questions about how far, what would be nearby and so on. So we end up with an image which grounds this melodrama back to reality, hard. We see this godly palace burn sown from a simple London street. The movement between the two worlds. And morning. This is real. We wake up.

Also – Matt follows him. After the mythic colouring we've seen earlier, here we have this very normal, very real dawn. He's wonderful.

Worth noting there is a considerable time skip. By implication, Baal's performance lasted much longer than it took to read.

Mildly frustrated the issue printed a little dark, so the message was nearly unreadable, and was missed as the cliffhanger it is. Namely, a message from someone (I suspect many will guess who) catching up on the nights events... and The Norns being locked up again after Cass has said stuff?

In the original draft for the text I used the phrase “Sectioned” but was informed it's something which wouldn't make sense for a North American audience. I suspect I'll tweak again to get a cleaner message out.

Anyway – mildly frustrated the information doesn't 100% land here, but next issue goes at it running.

Page 27

I wanted a simple title here. It's Baal's story.

And that's it. God knows how much I'll edit out of this mess. The next issue is out tomorrow, and hopefully you'll find it interesting.

[kawaii-music-notes]

Shiwasu Kakeru : Yuki Kaji

師走 駆 : 梶 裕貴

Thank you for your cooperation~ Thank you for your cooperation~ Have you made your reservation for the Christmas cake? We have all sorts of Christmas cakes available~ How about a cake reservation?

Yes, what is it? The limited edition cake? Please wait for a while... Let me see... ［ruffling of leaflets］ Ah, it’s okay. You can still make a reservation. Right now, the real thing is being displayed at the store, if you don’t mind please go and have a look.The shop is over there, right after turning that corner. Yes, thank you very much!

Ah! Yes! The size of the cake? Which type? Ah, this one? As the smallest one is 18 cm, well... it would be around this big? (chuckles) Ah... No, no, please treat us well!

Thank you very much!

(sighs) Is it because Christmas is getting near? Today I feel like I’m going to get called out more than usual.

Ah, yes! This cake is made from chocolate base with fruits in between, on top of it is a tree... ［Fade-out.］

［TIME:1:35］ Thank you for your cooperation~ Thank you for you cooperation~ Have you made your reservation for the Christmas cake? We have all sorts of Christmas cakes available~

［TIME:1:42］ Dear Father, Mother. This is Kakeru.

Nowadays, if you walk down the street, it’s as if the “Jingle Bells” song is going to leap into your ears, how are you two doing? …as if, I tried to act like I’m affected by it but such event has nothing to do with my daily life itself, it’s just as always.

Every day I go to school and then work part-time after school and during the holidays. It’s a modest and peaceful kind of every day. If I have to complain or more like, state the inconvenience... Since I live alone, I guess somehow I tend to rely on eating out?

(chuckling) The convenience store’s oden is now my soul food. I think there’s nothing that can win against the combination of white radish and pounded fish cake.

Which reminds me, my friend Koi, Kisaragi Koi, frequently said that in the next era, guys that cook will be popular. So for a period of time, I tried my best to cook for myself but... reality is pretty harsh.

Even so, I still go and attend school without getting any serious injuries or sicknesses, and I have friends too.

As for a girlfriend... Well, let’s just say, be sure to expect for it in the future. Anyway, I’ve been able to found a profitable part-time job from this Christmas until the end of the year, and also I, in my own way am living to the fullest and doing fine.

So, please don’t worry, okay? How corny!

［TIME:3:20］ Alright, it’s the last one. Thank you very much!

［TIME:3:28］ [A train passes by.] Haa... Cold, cold. Come to think of it, didn’t this morning’s weather forecast did say that it'll snow tomorrow? It’s gotta be cold. (blows air into hands and rubs them together)

Ah... even though during the part-time job I didn’t feel the cold~ I want to go home quickly and enter the kotatsu—No, I might as well want to dive in and stay under just like that until morning co...

［Phone rings］

Hm? Uhh... a phone call from Koi? I wonder what is it?　

［Sound of a button］ Yes? Hello, Koi? Yeah, good job today~ Today, Koi is... Um... weren’t you being kept in for the committee meeting? It ended earlier than I thought, huh?

Me? Ah, I just ended my part-time job a short while ago, as well, I’m on my way home. What job this time? Didn’t I tell you before? I’m giving out cake shop’s leaflets.

Yes, yes, that one. The one that goes ‘How about a reservation for the Christmas cake?’

Ah… the rustling thing is my dinner, convenience store’s oden. Ahaha... too bad, it’s not a cake~ Haha.

(Talking to himself:) Ah, but… wouldn't it be nice to get the left-over cakes? A support on food and clothing, especially food, it will definitely help saving up. I should try asking them about it next time. I have nothing to lo--

(Returning his attention to Koi:) Ah! Sorry, sorry. I was just talking to myself.

And so... Why did you call? You did call because there’s something up, right?

......Eh? You got a phone call from someone who was claiming to be my father. When? This evening? To Koi’s cell phone?

(pause)

...Ugh! That person, really! I’m sorry, Koi! I’m really sorry! I’m pretty sure he checked up Koi’s cell phone number!

Ah, sorry, I’m sorry, okay? Aah, seriously... How should I put it, he really has no common sense, or more like he knows but just ignores them. He’s a person who has that kind of behavior. And yet, even I left the house because of that in the first place, he never learn his mistakes at all!

Eh? That’s right, I had a huge fight with my father, I left the house and am now living by myself though...

What? Koi, why are you panicking like that...

Eh? What?! ［oden sloshing around］ Ah! That was dangerous! The oden! That was close!

No, they are not dead!! They’re not dead, they’re not dead, my parents are alive! Ah... That’s right! Both of my parents are alive! They’re fine, fine, really fine! If anything, they couldn’t be killed even if you trie- Ah, that’s not it!! They just live overseas, so why are would they dead all of a sudden? ［cars drive past］

［TIME:6:46］ ［door closes］

(pause)

(heavy sigh)

(pause)

Today was really surprising... Before I knew it, I was known by the others as a child that got separated from the parents because of their death, I can’t laugh at that.

I just said it as it is, that I have no parents so I’m living by myself......

Ah... I guess it can be taken that way, huh?

Even then, everyone is observing too deeply..... they read the situation too much. They might as well ask the person himself directly...... (heavy sigh)

I see...... At times I felt that I was strangely being treated considerately, so that’s what it meant?

(sigh) It’s not like I was aiming for that but this feeling of guilt is too great......

Or rather, I feel too apologetic towards the people who are really facing hardships! Ugh...! What is this? It’s awfully hard to say things like, “I'm living alone because I left home.” To say it now, after such a long time is just so hard! Ugh...

(pause)

(sigh) Even if I worry, it can’t be helped huh?

For the time being, let’s eat dinner. ［splitting chopsticks］

(eating) (satisfied sigh) Even at times like this the white radish is delicious~

Hm. It’s father’s fault. Yes, that’s right! It’s father’s fault. The reason I’m living alone, the reason I’m having this weird feeling of guilt right now, if I trace them back to the original cause, it’s all that person’s fault!

(eating agitatedly) If he wants to know my current condition in the first place, couldn’t he just call me directly!? Ugh... Just because it’s awkward, why did he have to look up my friend’s personal information? Moreover! Even though he never met Koi, why does he giving Koi assault-calls? He’s just a suspicious old man! That’s obviously even worse! Still, his secretaries should have stop him! It’s a crime!

［opens a bottle］(drinks)

(sigh) Ah... Thank goodness that the person involved was Koi, really. While he may not look like it, Koi is really thoughtful. He’s the type that could laugh it off just like that.

Huh... I should give him a treat next time... Ah, a cake. I wonder if it’s okay if I give him the cake from my part-time workplace? If I remember correctly Koi likes sweets after all.

［leaflet ruffling］

Christmas... Huh? Even I used to love Christmas. Until Father said things like ‘Surprise!’ and completely blew up my room. (nervous laughter) Ah! no good, no good! I almost opened the door of the trauma.

Ermm... Right, that’s right. My aim is to achieve these three words! ‘Stable’, ‘Ordinary’, and ‘Peaceful’. Right now, to me Christmas is a day I work hard, properly and diligently at my part-time job. It’s fine if I’m plain, peace is the most important thing! It’s absolute!

［phone rings］

Huh? Mail? (small gasp) A message from father at this timing? I only have an endless bad feeling about this.

Hm... Well, well. Let’s see...

(reading the message:) It seems you are doing well which is all I can ask for. For Christmas, Father too will work hard to plan a... surprise, so be sure to look forward to it......

(pause)

(agitatedly:) If you’ve announced it beforehand it’s no longer a surprise, no, an advance crime notice has come! The emoticons are conversely weird! Despite this, he’d totally just committed a frightful crime before to begin with, do you think I could look forward to it, you idiot!

[luirlar]

HOLY SHIT. Kara has John, John has bombs attached to his chest, they have a virus of some sort. Flashbacks and present time events introduce a new big bad while sending off an old one. Everything looks very big and very bad in this episode, and it is great to watch. And I get a lot of John x Harold feelings, which is great to witness, I hope. This one is long but I am pretty happy with it. Buckle up.

I have watched the whole show before, so SPOILERS MIGHT HAPPEN. Big spoilers will be blanked out but references and irrelevant spoilers are going to be out in the open.

Last bits on POI: After months of looking for The Man in the Suit (I cannot ever overstate how ridiculous this nickname is to me), Donnelly finally catches on and catches up with Carter and Reese. He is ready to bring them to jail and then Kara Stanton rams a literal goddamn truck into the plot (and my heart), shoots Donnelly, and sedates John.

The episode opens exactly the moment where we left off. Carter’s phone rings: it’s Finch. Carter tells him that she thinks the woman who took John used to be his CIA partner, and just as she says this, Finch enters the latest number he’s received from the Machine: Kara Stanton’s. So what the hell is up? A fucking ride that awaits us in this episode and the mess that it triggers, which directly and indirectly carries on till the series’ end. It’s that big of a bad, friends.

John wakes up in a bus, next to Mark Snow (who we last saw warning Joss about a Big Thing “She” Has Planned), opposite to Kara, and he strapped to a bomb vest.

Kara: I know you don’t care about yourself, John, but you’ve got enough semtex strapped in you to spread a lot of misery around.

Gosh. Kara Stanton makes me melt every time she opens her mouth. So cold, so evil, so calm and certain about the absolute havoc she can wreck.

John: So what’s this really about? Kara: This is about three dead little spies in a brave new world. It’s about the afterlife, John, and us negotiating our places in it.

Well, that sounds like a good, wholesome time.

Carter is called to the crime scene where Donnelly was shot, where she was but isn’t telling. Fusco suspects something is up, but Joss can’t tell him squat. I always feel a special appreciation for Fusco. He knows the least about what’s going on at all times, and he knows people hide shit from him, and yet he always helps. He has faith in the team, and I love him for it. They all set out to find out more about Kara and what she might be up to, which is difficult, what with her being declared dead a few years back and all.

On the first stop of their #assassin #throwback tour, John and Mark are supposed to pick up a hard drive, but the sellers try to get smart about the payment, so Kara gives out a kill order. Both Mark and John hesitate, so Kara shoots the sellers for them. Wait, she was in the room with them? No, no. From a rooftop, across the street, with a sniper rifle. She gives no shits whatsoever.

*fans self*

[2010] We are taken back to a scene we’ve seen before, where Alicia Corwin and Mark Snow send Kara and John to Ordos to retrieve the laptop, and where Mark tells both Kara and John separately that their partner has been compromised and needs to be killed. We also get a repeat of the scene where John refuses to shoot Kara, Kara shoots John, and John connects the dots about them being set up. We again see John running away from the building just in time to escape the missiles sent to bump them both off, but then… we see Kara wounded, and being picked up by some sort of uniformed squad. She wakes up in a hospital-looking place, and an Ominous British Man (not yet named) greets her. He tells her that he knows who she is and why she’s there and he doesn’t need her to talk, and that they’ll get along great. Not creepy at all.

John and Mark’s second stop is knocking out some ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms) agents and impersonate them. In what? A fake bomb threat in an office building. Because Kara couldn’t resist the joke, apparently. I too love joking around while strapping explosives to my former coworkers. John sends a text to Finch indicating he is carrying explosives, and the text allows Finch to know where he was, and who the phone belonged to.

Once inside the building, Kara tells the bomb bros to go to a super secured floor that doesn’t exist in the building’s public records. We know this because Carter, Finch and Fusco are good at detective-ing. Because the episode was not stressful enough, Kara informs us that the signal might be bad inside whatever super secured secret place the boys are headed to, so she puts a timer on their bomb vests.

[2011] We’re back in the hospital-looking place, but some time has passed (I hadn’t noticed the time stamp! This episode and plot point makes more sense to me now!).Ominous British Man babbles about the Titans – Kara’s bosses are the old gods, Kara is part of the new gods, the old gods wanted to eat her because they were afraid of her, or something – and Kara is done with his shit.

Kara: If I break your neck, can I go back to watching TV? She may be tired and is probably being tortured, but she can still sass people out like a champ.

Ominous British Man clarifies that he doesn’t work for any government, and that money is not his business, information is. He offers Kara the name of the person he labels as responsible for the state she is currently in, the person who sold the laptop Kara and John were sent for. (How badly did they psychologically torture and manipulate Kara for that to make sense to her, that the person responsible for her misery is not who gave the kill order, but the person who sold a laptop that she knows nothing about?! Anyway.) In exchange for what, Kara (and we) ask?

Ominous British Man: Do you remember how the Titans were finally killed? Before they could eat their youngest child, Zeus, he wrapped a boulder in his swaddling clothes, then watched as his father choked on it.

What the hell is this Brit on? It’ll all become clear in time (or not, I had to think really hard and read some wikipedia shit to get it, but I’m not a greek mythology buff so maybe you know exactly what this means right now.). He speaks in very obnoxious riddles. I wish Kara would have broken his neck to be honest.

Carter and Fusco are at the building where John and Mark are, but downstairs. John manages to quickly call Finch, and they both figure that since theyre basically in a DOD cyber weapons lab, Kara is probably trying to steal a virus that would shut down the entire internet, or specific networks, or something. She’s stealing something big, that’s for sure.

Unless… Unless John is the most predictable broody white knight in the world and Kara is a cold-hearted bitch who knows him too well. Kara knew John wouldn’t follow orders, would assume Kara wanted to steal something, and would erase all the drives with all the Very Bad Viruses.

Kara didn’t want any of the Very Bad Viruses, because she had a Very Very Bad one. Or at least, a very specific one that she needed to delete the others for. I don’t know how any of that works, can you tell? In any case, she unleashes the virus into the world, sets the timer of the bomb vests to 5 minutes, and skedaddles. But not before John tries his usual emotional “you don’t have to do this, we can hold hands and make the world better together” shtick, and Kara stares dead in his eyes with zero emotional response. Yikes, John, your white knight moves are starting to rust or something.

Mark tries to make a run for his life, with less than 5 minutes to do whatever he can. And then, then All Of The Feelings happen: As John is trying to head to the rooftop (cause his broody white knight redemption arc has to end in a fucking rooftop, right?) to try to hit as little civilians with his explosion as possible, Carter gets to his floor.

Carter: You don’t have to do this. John: You know I do. ‘Cause you’d do the exact same thing.

I mean, I mock his broody self-sacrificing shtick a lot, but it is absolutely the thing to do when you know you’re in all likelihood gonna blow up. And I think it’s because John’s character rarely shows emotions in his face, on purpose, but when he does, it cuts through my misandrist soul and makes me want to hug him and then punch him for making me Feel Things. Between that, and the amazing score as per POI usual, and Taraji’s always amazing performance, I am More than a Lil’ Stressed™. John heads to the rooftop, ready to die. Show’s over folks. But then again…

Finch: So I see I’m not too late…

So, you see, when John warned Finch over the DOD phone to stay clear of the building, what Finch actually heard was, “get as close to me and the building and the fucking bomb as humanly possible”. John tries to stop Finch by… pointing a gun at him? Which, for one, is rude, and more importantly, ridiculously useless in this context.

John: This is my past catching up to me. This doesn’t concern you. Harold: But this moment does. I’m not leaving you, John. So can we please stop wasting time?

Husbands that hang ’round bombs together, stay together. Unless their remains are scattered by the explosion. Sorry. Finch has 3 attempts at one of five combinations. Yikes. And the first one fails.

John: … Sorry.

In the meantime, Kara is making her way out of the building and calls Ominous British Man, who is still not given a name, a purpose, a boss, or a plan. Just a vague creepy Big Bad feel. He carries on speaking in riddles, making grand empty statements, and Kara cuts him off and asks for the goddamn name of the person who sold the laptop and indirectly sent her to Ordos, the name she went through all this trouble to get. Ominous British Man tells her a name is all he has, since this person apparently doesn’t exist in any known database. She jots down a name in a piece of paper. *INTRIIIIIGUE*

Back up in the rooftop, everyone is about to cry. Except me, I’m already crying.

John: I’m pretty sure I’d be dead already if you hadn’t found me. Harold: It’s hard to say. John: Not really.

This is a beautiful moment, except… why does Harold say it’s hard to say? It’s pretty straight forward to say, no? (Except… wait for it.) Harry looks like he is about to cry, which I guess one would if a bomb was about to blow up literally on the face. Goddamn, though, Michael Emerson is an acting champ. This is, on paper, a super contrived moment, but they make it work for me. In a completely unrealistic cliche moment that is only made bearable because the alternative would have been Captain America and his sugar daddy dying, Finch deactivates the bomb on the third and final try, 7 seconds before it is set to detonate.

We’re taken back to Kara’s car, and something is beeping. Her backseat. That has Mark Snow in it. He decided to do something positive (in-universe, negative for all Kara fans like myself) with his life for once, and take Kara with him to the sweet sweet afterlife. Goodbye, you sexy Big Bad motherfucker. John gets back to the library where Bear greats him happily, and John thanks Finch, all teary eyed. At the precinct, the FBI tells Carter that Mark Snow must have been the Man in the Suit, so they close that case. All’s good and right and there are no mysteries left to solve here. Ta-dah!

  What, you thought that was all? Sweet summer child. Did you forget Kara got the name of the guy who sold the laptop and started a whole trainwreck of events that brought us to this very episode, and in a way, brought this whole series into being? Maybe you don’t care. That’s fair. Who cares. Fuck The (Ominous British) Man.

Unless…

Mother of HECK. Yes, you read that right. Harold Finch! How? Why? When? What was that latop, then? (Sure, *now* you wanna know..!) WHAT THE FUCK?! *INTRIIIIIIGUE*

I know, I know. But the whole history of the laptop will not become clear until the second half of season 3, so you’d better get comfy with that unsettling feeling in your stomach. Aaaaand the virus Kara activated is set to go off in five months and change. *INTRIIIIGUE*.

  ** A note on Kara’s time with Ominous British Man: BIG SPOILERS FOR SEASON 4 AND 5 AHEAD ** Why do I say she was in all likelihood tortured? And that the time stamps make this episode make sense to me? Well, the first (and second) time I watched this episode< I wondered how come Kara turned so easily on her country – because remember, she always did her job, or said she did, for her country. Why would she do a job for a dubious mysterious man, a job that could endanger a lot of people? She asked zero questions for a man who was in no way her boss, or shouldn’t have been. I suspected some torturing or intense indoctrination might have taken place, but I didn’t think much of it other than “really? that easy?” But then season 5 happened. And we see how Shaw gets tortured and gaslighted and manipulated. On the one hand I’m glad we don’t get to see that, but on the other the blanks that aren’t filled make Kara seem like a godless spiteful easy traitor. Not because your bosses sending to kill you isn’t good reason to be vengeful, but it shouldn’t be for a trained, hardcore agent. Unless extreme measures were used, which they probably were. Anyway, I love talking about Kara Stanton and I love her.

Today I (re)watch: Person of Interest, 2.13 HOLY SHIT. Kara has John, John has bombs attached to his chest, they have a virus of some sort.

[showdepremiosclub]

Household Experiences on the Salmon River Rafting

Toil as well as water mix on a raft trip; A Salmon River run deals something for the entire family, with berry selecting, campfire singing, cave checking out, even pedicures.

By John Muncie

When the cool, deep shaft of the abandoned copper mine ended in a wall surface of rock, overview Mike Thurbert resorted to the team and said, "Shut off your flashlights."

We had to do with 100 lawns right into an Idaho hill. The lights went off as instructed as well as, in a moment of solemnity, 19-year-old Thurbert silently asked us to contemplate the sensation of utter darkness. For that split second, each of us was an island, alone in the black tunnel.

Then someone made a creepy ooooo-ing audio as well as, to screeches of giggling, all the flashlights clicked back on, the majority of them beaming up under chins, transforming faces into grotesque Halloween masks.

Solemnity remains in brief supply on a river rafting journey filled with kids.

If you're questioning what a stroll in a copper mine involves river rafting, you'll possibly question the very same about blackberry selecting, speeding down sand dunes, Wiffle-ball and also toenail sprucing up.

Our white-water rafting trip on the Lower Salmon River had as much to do with old-fashioned family members enjoyable as it performed with running rapids. It was the warm as well as unclear points-- singing around the campfire, eating meals with each other, developing video games, informing poor jokes, debating big issues with know-it-all teenagers-- we bore in mind long after the white-water thrills faded.

My partner, Jody, and I chose this specific adventure for family reasons. Good friends of ours, the Fullers, had actually looked into the journey-- 4 days, three nights on the Salmon as well as Serpent rivers starting in Idaho with the Outside Adventure River Specialists, or OARS, rafting company-- and asked whether we intended to join them. John Richer teaches scientific research to our 14-year-old kid, Sam, and also Richer's son, Woody, is a chum of Sam's.

Our journey began on a Monday, when we took a bus from Lewiston to the Pine Bar put-in point on the Salmon, 62 miles upstream from our eventual location, Heller Bar. We pushed out into the river around 11 a.m. Our little flotilla contained three rubber boatings, 3 wooden dories, a big paddle boating as well as 3 inflatable kayaks.

Barry Dow, 57, a 30-year expert of the Salmon, Snake and also Colorado rivers, was our journey leader, yet the remainder of the seven- person staff seemed remarkably young. Actually, 3 of them remained in their teens. When we questioned them regarding their backgrounds, we discovered that rafting seems to be in their genetics.

" My mom was pregnant with me when she was on the river," stated Thurbert, whose papa was a river guide. Thurbert, who made his very first ex-utero rafting trip when he was 3, piloted the guest- powered paddle boating on this journey. His directions were both counterproductive-- "Always lean into the wave, constantly favor the rock!"-- and also uncomplicated-- "Listen to what I claim and also, when doubtful, paddle."

Eric Shedd, 19, had a similar story. His moms and dads were river overviews and fulfilled on a rafting trip. "My mommy claims I was less than a years of age when I was first on the river."

The prize for the toughest river ties mosted likely to Zak Sears, 18, who made his initial river journey when he was 6 months old. Sears pointed downriver and also stated his daddy was at the next campground guiding another rafting trip. Then he pointed the various other method, smiled and also stated, "My sis's 250 miles upstream and my brother's concerning 150 miles."

Tossed into the drink

The initial 3 days of our trip got on the Salmon, a 425-mile river that starts in the mountains of central Idaho as well as finishes at the convergence of the Snake River near the Oregon-Washington boundary. The Salmon is the lengthiest free-flowing river left in the Lower 48. For rafting purposes it's separated into the Middle Fork (the upper component), the Key and also the Lower Salmon.

Each has its beauties and its advocates. Depending on water levels, our component, the Lower Salmon, typically has less and much less hard rapids. We dealt with just a couple that count as Course III. (Course IV and V rapids are scarier and much more unsafe; Class VI is taken into consideration unrunnable for a business journey.).

The absence of huge white water may make the Lower Salmon a little tame for thrill-seekers, however it was excellent for our band of youngsters and their moms and dads that intended to obtain them familiarized with river rafting without the threats of big water.

" This is nothing," said expert rafter Jim Eisch, 40, of Tampa florida, Fla. Eisch brought his daughter Kelsey, 8, boy Jimmy, 11, and daddy, Ted, 69. "However I didn't want to make them so scared they really did not wish to do it once again.".

If we could have fast-forwarded a trip tape to the last day, it would certainly have revealed Jimmy grinning widely after his 3rd back flip off a raft and stating, "I don't wish to go house. Following time I'm taking place a 17-day trip!".

With children as young as 8 on the trip, threat was on every family members's mind. Before we put in, the overviews offered us numerous safety and security talks, describing what we were to do if we overdid in a quick-- or "went swimming," as they say in river parlance.

There was a great deal of information to absorb, entailing, to name a few things, head-patting signals, toss ropes, flip lines and also the "La-Z- Young boy" float setting. All of it washed out of our heads when, independently, Jody and I were thrown from our kayaks at the Class III Bunghole rapid on the 2nd day.

Disoriented after getting toppled in the opaque wash cycle of Bunghole, we promptly bobbed to the surface. In much less than a minute we were within understanding of a boating or dory, and also in less than three, we were back aboard our kayaks paddling.

The important points, it ends up, were not just treatments but additionally the vigilance and also unflappable nature of our crew as we obtained tossed too far and also forgot all our lessons. That as well as the bright orange life vests we always used.

The blow up kayaks-- like beach boatings with sides-- offered one of the most heart-pounding flight. It's just you as well as a little bit of plastic careering via the rapids. When the waves of white water huddle and assault, the secret is to paddle hard. "No lily dipping," overview Marci Whittman told us before we set off the first day. "No tea-and- crumpet handling.".

Two days later on Sam wiped out at the start of one of the most technical (river-speak for unsafe) of the rapids, Eye of the Needle, sending him swimming through the spinning water.

At the bottom of the rapid, he gladly climbed up back in his kayak. The guides were impressed. His mother was tense. Sam had a blast. "That was fantastic," he stated.

Yet the very best ride, as far as we were worried, was in the dories. Even Sam and 15-year-old Adam Mowery agreed. "The dories were outstanding," Adam stated.

Since the wooden boats are inflexible, they don't flex to the waves, making the highs much higher and the declines like a tiny roller rollercoaster. And for the best flight of all, the overviews allow us ride the bow. That suggests covering your legs around the prow, getting hold of onto a rope as well as riding the watercraft a like throwing bronco.

Comply with the sun.

Aside from the occasional white water, river days were comforting stretches of lazy rocking and recreation, framed by stunning landscapes of golden hills and also deep chasms. At the beginning, journey leader Dow had recommended we leave our watches behind. The sun became our clock, and also the plaintive note Dow blew on his conch covering our phone call to dishes.

We would pack up as well as press off after breakfast each early morning, after that invest two or 3 hrs on the river, occasionally dropping crazy for a swim to cool down. We would stop at a sandbar for lunch and more swimming or games, then go back to the river for a few more hrs.

We usually pulled up around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, which left a lot of time for onshore activities. The very first day established the tone. A number of papas tried their luck fishing while the rest of the grownups sought remedy for the 95-degree-plus heat as well as the kids horsed around at the water's edge. Later, someone began a Wiffle-ball video game. When wind blew the ball into the river, 13-year-old Amy Richer shouted, "Seventh-inning stretch!" as well as everyone delved into the trendy water.

Eventually, large clouds steamed up, bringing color as well as relief, thunder and also a couple of declines of rain. By early morning it was clear and dry.

The opening night, prior to we came down to the business of family members enjoyable, Dow talked about the threats of onshore life. It was rather tame things-- poison ivy, hornets, the rare brownish monk and also black widow spiders, as well as the rarer rattlesnakes. "This is important," Dow said solemnly. "Don't damage the animals. This is their home. We're visitors." Several of the moms and dads wished the guides' respect for the river and its locals would certainly abrade on their children.

" My youngsters are city youngsters," said Susan Mowery, the Indiana mommy of Adam and his sisters, Anna, 12, and also Abbi, 10. "I want to show them there's more to life than Disney Globe.".

Overview Matty Wilson, 28, aglow in the orange campfire light, took out a guitar and also, with fellow guides Sears and Thurbert, sang people as well as pop songs, some so old that even the parents identified them.

Soon the fire went out, leaving a soft night breeze, the audio of guitars, a big moon attempting to beam via the clouds and a group of pleased parents watching their children do something besides playing video games.

That was simply among lots of special shore-leave minutes. At that camping area, much of us had our toe nails repainted. Whittman, an art educator in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, when she's not a guide, established a salon in her raft. At the backside was a studio where the ladies and also a few of the more youthful young boys repainted rocks and also made sand art. In the center, she repainted toenails.

Having scientific research educator John Richer along on the river journey was an added reward. For Fuller, truths are fun, and also it had not been long after our departure that he obtained journey leader Dow to speak about the river and also its flow. At the time, it was running at a mild 7,000 cubic feet per second, or CFS, yet throughout floods, it ran greater than 100,000 CFS. Dow pointed out driftwood trees high up on the banks and also claimed, "Imagine the river that high. It's like a wild pet.".

Richer's favored minute on the trip, medically at least, came at a blackberry spot just listed below the mouth of the copper mine. He viewed amazed as one overview threw a berry 50 feet right into the mouth of another guide. And also it gave him an idea for a science laboratory, including the physics of throwing grapes (in the absence of blackberries).

There was no need to educate the physics of enjoyable; the kids on the trip were experts. By the second day, progressively certain in their brand-new environments, they were embarking on the plethoras right into the water to cool off. By the third day, they were swimming down a Course III rapid. Water splashing battles routinely burst out.

On Thursday afternoon as we came close to Heller Bar, our location, nobody wanted the trip to end. That night overviews and clients fulfilled for a farewell supper at a dining establishment near Lewiston, although two family members needed to change their travel plans to make it.

During salutes and also endorsements, Dow increased and promoted the overviews, claiming, "We wish the river spoke to you and offered you an unique present, since it does to us.".

As we left the dining establishment, family members were exchanging e-mail addresses and Whittman was painting minority staying blank finger nails left on the little girls.

Months before, when the Fullers had pitched the family rafting suggestion, Woody, with adolescent ridicule, called it "the stupid trip." Later, he had a new name for his rafting journey down the Lower Salmon River.