#bringing him back would just discredit his death and the impact it had

[tysoninatoragain]

I'm so sorry to tell you this but Jason is NOT coming back in TSATS, it would literally make no sense for his arc and Apollo's arc

[vex-bittys]

In Your Dreams: A Horrortale Story

Raffle prize for @purplesangel. When your life is a living nightmare, is it any surprise that your dreams are just as bad? Thankfully a dream-walking human has arrived to help, but will she still want to help Axe when she finds out what he’s done to stay alive?

WARNING: character death mention, language, blood mention, some disturbing imagery including cannibalism (no details)

READ ON AO3

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Life in the Underground was an endless nightmare for Axe. During his waking hours, he checked his traps and hunted in the forest, often returning home empty-handed only to see the disappointment and desperation in his brother’s sockets. Supply trains became frantic riots as too many monsters competed for their share of too little food, and the sharp pain of hunger lingered even after the skeleton brothers’ meager meals.

Madness seeped in through the hole in his skull, distorting reality. He clawed at his skull, trying to release the pressure of the frenetic energy that consumed him. He could feel the darkness lurking, waiting for him to make a misstep, some seemingly trivial mistake; that’s when it would strike, shredding his thoughts and shattering his focus. There was no escaping it, and Axe knew that one day it would swallow him up.

Sleep provided no reprieve. In his dreams, Axe continued to suffer. He watched his brother fade away to nothing from starvation. He felt the gnawing emptiness of his own unsatisfied hunger. Feasts appeared before his single working eyelight only to transform into grains of sand that slipped through his fingers when he reached for it. He ran through the shadowed forest outside of Snowdin, fleeing an unknown terror in the night while thorny tendrils of a deeper darkness caught him, slowing his progress, dragging him down, and allowing his madness to suffocate him.

Days dragged on into months, and months melted together into years. Waking life remained bleak with monsters still struggling (and at times failing) to survive. Food sources dwindled, and the gathering of other resources fell by the wayside as every creature in the Underground focused on filling their stomachs as best they could. Everything stagnated in its state of destitution and decay… everything except Axe’s dreams.

Axe’s nightmares repeated themselves night after night until slowly, they began to change. It started with the appearance of a new character- a human that Axe didn’t recognize, though he thought it might be a female. At first the human only observed the horrors that lurked in the sleeping world of Axe’s mind. Gradually, though, she began to interact.

It all started during one of Axe’s nightmares about his brother. Crooks would turn a pleading gaze to his brother, mouthing a soundless plea for food. Axe would fall to his knees, sobbing and pounding his fists into the ground. Crooks slowly collapsed, and the gradual dissolution of his body sent his dust drifting towards his brother, filling Axe’s mouth and nasal cavity until he choked himself awake… usually. This time things turned out differently.

“I’M SO HUNGRY, BROTHER,” Crooks’ voice came from the air around them and not his mouth, the teeth there long since broken or knocked askew from gnawing away at non-edible items simply to assuage the need to chew.

The human appeared, but instead of observing the unfolding scene, this time she glanced around until her eyes fell upon Axe.

-

Since the very first time you’d stumbled across this heart-breaking nightmare scenario, you’d worked hard to return to it. Dream-walking involved focus, practice, and a bit of luck, and in this venture, the fates were on your side. You’d walked this collection of now-familiar nightmare images many times, slowly working out which participant it belonged to and why the skeleton with the broken skull kept replaying these torturous situations in his sleep.

Now, you were ready to interact and hopefully restore some peace to the sleeping world of the monster in front of you. You extended a tentative hand towards him, unsure if he would welcome your touch as a form of physical comfort. He just stared at your outstretched hand as if it would bring some new and unfathomable horror to his disturbingly familiar nightmare. You let your hand drop. Words would have to suffice then.

“It’s not real,” you told the stocky skeleton firmly.

His sockets narrowed suspiciously. “what do ya mean, ‘not real’?”

“This-” you gestured to the vague, nondescript surroundings and very crisp, well-defined figure of the tall, starving skeleton behind you, never breaking eye contact “- is not real.”

The skeleton with the broken skull laughed, a harsh and humorless sound that grated against your ear drums. You sighed, frustrated but determined. It rarely improved a situation to reveal yourself while dream-walking; most dreamers forgot their nightly travels when they returned to the waking world anyway. Those who didn’t merely discarded your presence, along with any advice you might give, as part of a nonexistent scenario that could not influence their waking lives and should thus be ignored.

Normally, you resigned yourself to this and walked through dreams as a silent observer, but this skeleton’s torment tore at your heart and brought forth a tenacity within you to help him in the only way you could: by walking through his nightmares and defeating them, one by one, until nothing remained but peaceful slumber.

The skeleton with the broken skull scoffed. “you don’t know nothin’,” he growled obstinately.

“I know that your most frequent nightmares involve food, madness, and losing this other skeleton-”

“my bro,” the skeptical skeleton clarified.

“Losing your brother,” you amended with an edge to your voice, “to starvation.”

“it’s not like you’re some expert investigator piecin’ together the clues, pal. we’re all starvin’ and dustin’ down here,” he said, dismissing your observations. You frowned. Was there some truth to these nightmares? Often dreams represented thoughts and fears in a metaphoric manner, but maybe this skeleton didn’t have room in his troubled mind for subtlety.

Regardless, you would do what you could for him in the only place that you could reach him.

“I don’t know what your life is like in the waking world,” you conceded softly, “but this? Everything around us now? It isn’t real.” You continued in a rush before the skeleton could interrupt you again. “You’re asleep, and your mind is processing your fears… and your reality… into nightmares.”

The skeleton inhaled, obviously ready to argue again, but you stopped him by making a sweeping gesture towards his brother. Had this nightmare been reality, the taller skeleton would be dust by now. Instead, the image was frozen in place thanks to the stocky skeleton’s change of focus. “Look,” you ordered boldly.

-

Axe begrudgingly allowed his single eyelight to stray from you to his brother. While it was true that nothing had changed in the scene since he had turned his attention to his unexpected visitor, the moment he looked back, the scenario resumed. Flakes of dust drifted loose from his brother’s body, floating away on an unfelt breeze to disappear as they dispersed until nothing remained except the unbearable weight of guilt and his brother’s ghost of a voice whispering “Why?” over and over again in his head.

Why didn’t you save me?

“It’s not real,” you whispered solemnly behind him, but honestly, that didn’t matter. Watching his brother die of starvation that he should have prevented sent jagged pains through his SOUL whether it existed solely inside of his mind or not. Your next words, however, carried a much greater impact: “I can teach you how to change it.”

-

The most frustrating part of dream-walking was the inability to change the contents of people’s dreams or nightmares yourself. While you could view the unfolding events, you possessed no real power over them. Only the dreamer could affect their dreams. Thankfully, unlike dream-walking, lucid dreaming is a skill that can be taught.

As with every teaching experience, some students learn more quickly than others. Axe, as he eventually introduced himself to you, was not one of those students. The most difficult aspect of lucid dreaming for him happened to be the very first step to lucid dreaming at all: accepting that what he experienced while he slept was a dream instead of a warped reality that lived inside of his cracked skull and broken mind.

“These images all come from your thoughts,” you explained again. “You can control them, but first you have to accept that you can control them.” 

You knew that the dreams involving his brother were far too emotionally charged to make good fodder for lucid dreaming practice, and you preferred to steer clear of the choking darkness since you had no idea what effects such a powerful and overwhelming negative force could potentially have on you, even as an observer within someone else’s troubled subconscious. This only left the dreams of an untouchable feast to practice on… and practice was not going well.

As with your many previous attempts to gently guide the stocky skeleton towards seizing control of his nightmares, the lesson had quickly devolved into a squabble. You insisted that Axe could learn to control his subconscious surroundings; Axe stubbornly insisted that he could not. You would point out that this was his dream, and his mind; he would attempt to discredit your existence as just another piece of the complicated web of nightmares that plagued him: a human offering him false hope in a bleak and hopeless world.

It did bother you a little bit that Axe considered you- a (mostly) patient and helpful human- to be nightmare fuel. Only monsters lived in the Underground since the long-forgotten war, so why would Axe’s guilt-riddled dreamscapes include humans?

You decided to save the questions for another time.

“Try again,” you told Axe, who only answered with a weary, frustrated sigh.

-

Irritation swirled through Axe’s excessive magic, though it was aimed more at himself than at you. Every night you tried to help him take control of his dreaming mind, and every night, despite your calm instructions, he failed. You made it sound so easy, so why couldn’t he just grab a stupid spider donut off of the stupid table and shove the stupid thing into his big, stupid mouth?

“Try again,” you told him patiently as he brushed the gritty sand from his finger joints. He uttered a weary, frustrated sigh.

“i am trying,” he grumbled, biting back a deluge of unhelpful comments and curses. He touched another piece of food, a french fry, still steaming though it had been sitting on a pile of its doppelgangers since the nightmare began. The entire fry stack crumbled to sand before he’d even lifted one free; Axe’s patience dissolved along with it.

“if this was as easy as you claim,” he shouted, letting his anger overflow into sharp words, “then i’d be able to pick up these plates and smash them on the floor like i want to!” Without any conscious thought, Axe lifted one of the plates in question and hurled it at the ground. It shattered, leaving silence in its wake as Axe and the dream-walking human stared down at the shards on the ground in awe.

Axe gave an entire stack of plates an experimental shove, sending them cascading over the edge of the table and onto the ground where they created an inharmonious symphony of destruction. You applauded the spontaneous mess and squealed with glee, and Axe swept you up into a quick celebratory hug, spinning you around once before setting you back on your feet. As soon as he set you down, he grabbed a donut and crammed it into his mouth. Chewing, his sockets narrowed in utter bliss, he picked up a second donut and offered it to you. 

Nothing tasted as sweet as victory… except for maybe a spider donut.

-

You didn’t want to dampen the skeleton’s joy by telling him that you wouldn’t be able to taste a donut in his dreams, so you took a bite, your head still spinning from his sudden show of physical affection. With a promise to see him the following night, you stepped out of his nightmares. You felt content that you’d taken the first big step on a journey to giving Axe the power to sleep peacefully without constant, horrific nightmares plaguing him.

The next lesson would be more difficult; you intended to guide Axe through banishing nightmares of his brother’s death. Out of consideration for Axe’s privacy, you had never asked him why he had such specific nightmares about his brother, but nightmares involving a sibling death as vivid as Axe’s hinted at some very dark and complex situations existing in the skeletons’ waking world. Those hints aside, Axe had outright stated that things were terrible in the Underground where he lived. Maybe working through his dream would give him some insight into fixing his real-life situation, at least the one he faced with his brother.

You hoped so. During the nights you’d spent helping Axe learn how to lucid dream, you had come to consider him a friend. You hated the thought of him suffering. You especially hated that you could only reach him during his nightmares. You wished you could do more, but how? Those were thoughts for your own waking world.

Tonight you wanted to focus on Axe’s progress, and once he’d gotten some practice at lucid dreaming, you’d work on changing the heart-breaking nightmare of his brother.

-

Sweat beaded on Axe’s skull as he waited for you to appear. He could feel himself slipping towards darker dreamscapes, and he fought to stay in the safe in-between place like you’d shown him. He told himself that the tremors in his bones were caused by his unstable magic and not by fear. What if his previous successes were a fluke? What if he failed when it mattered the most? 

Thoughts of failure sent him spiraling into the guilty nightmare of his starving brother. After all, his failures in reality led to this, and the dire consequences that he saw unfolding in his subconscious lurked only a step behind him in the waking world. Soon his real life would become this very same nightmare, and he would be left as powerless to stop it there as he felt to stop it here.

Thankfully, you appeared within seconds to chase away the grim meanderings of his mind and help him focus on the task at hand- Crooks.

Axe’s brother loomed in front of him, eyes pleading, begging for something that Axe could not give him. He watched the image of his brother twist and reshape itself, growing alarmingly large, the bones stretching from an influx of magic that still somehow managed to provide almost no nutrition. He whispered his brother’s name, frozen in place and unable to remember what he was supposed to do to stop the scene unfolding in front of him.

A small hand slipped into his; he had forgotten about you as his familiar fears swamped him. You looked up at him with a calm expression and nodded, encouraging him.

“You can do this.” Your words bolstered his courage. He dragged his panic back under control and turned to face Papyrus… or what had become of Papyrus under his inadequate care: the monster now known as Crooks. 

“You know what you need to do,” you whispered.

Axe stepped towards his brother, focusing on Crooks as he had seen him last: tucked into his bed, the blanket no longer quite long enough to cover his lanky frame, wishing Axe a good night and sweet dreams and promising to see him in the morning. Keeping that image locked in his mind, Axe let his lone eyelight travel over his brother’s altered frame. Sure enough, not a single mote of dust rose from the other skeleton. Crooks simply stood there, watching him through sunken sockets.

Though he’d brought his brother’s recurring death to a halt, the words that swirled and echoed around him continued, too faint at first to make out individual words or phrases. His brother’s voice whispered accusations like poisoned arrows that pierced his SOUL. A chorus of questions, all beginning with “Why…?” slowed, sharpened, and gained clarity. Crooks spoke, though his mouth never moved and the words seemed to thrum within his very bones, tangible beyond mere sound.

Normally Crooks’ omnipresent voice asked him why he would allow his brother to starve, but this time the question differed, though it still sent chills to the very marrow of Axe’s bones.

“WHY DID YOU MAKE ME EAT-”

Axe quickly hushed his brother, stealing a glance at you to gauge your reaction. You simply made an encouraging gesture as if to say “Go on, you’re doing great.” He wondered if you’d feel the same way if you knew what Crooks’ next words would have been.

“i couldn’t let ya starve,” Axe spoke softly, tilting his head to maintain eye contact with his much taller brother. “i’d do anything to keep you alive.”

“EVEN-”

Axe nodded, nearly choking on guilt. “yeah. even that.”

“BUT I TOLD YOU I DIDN’T EVER WANT-”

Remorse softened Axe’s expression, and his gravelly voice hitched. “i couldn’t let ya dust. i had no choice. i’m so sorry.”

-

Without warning, Crooks slumped, but he wasn’t collapsing into dust. Instead, he crushed his brother against his ribcage in a tight hug. You sensed a loosening of the guilt and remorse that gripped this particular nightmare so tightly. Things weren’t resolved yet. Nightmares could rarely be banished in a single lucid dreaming session, but you’d given Axe the tools he needed to seize control of his sleeping world. 

Only one challenge awaited you now: fighting the suffocating darkness of the final nightmare. You made plans to tackle that monumental task once Axe felt satisfied that he could manage this current nightmare on his own. Working through the tangle of emotions that his brother’s death awakened would take quite a bit longer than satisfying himself that he could eat his fill of dream donuts, but you were willing to go the distance to help Axe.

You actually wanted to do this, no matter how much the slithering darkness terrified you. Axe just meant that much to you.

-

“I think we’re ready for the final nightmare,” you declared after a dream session in which Axe showed off by summoning various items for his brother to eat.

In the lucid dreams about Crooks, his dream-brother mostly stood or sat nearby providing companionship and support as Axe practiced controlling his consciousness. Axe enjoyed the time with his brother, despite the knowledge that this version of Crooks existed only inside of his mind. It gave him a tentative sensation of hope that perhaps someday he could experience this type of peace with his brother in the waking world, free of the constant mad scramble for survival.

Your words shattered fragile, fleeting calm. Sweat beaded on Axe’s skull. The final nightmare contained his deep, dark fears, his madness, his guilt. Tendrils that reeked of his unspeakable crimes dragged him down into the cesspool that used to be his SOUL. He didn’t want you to see that part of him. He didn’t want you to know what he was truly capable of.

You’d never come back, and he’d be left alone with the echoing, blossoming psychosis that suffocated him. It would be worse now though. You’d shined a light into his life, and now he risked that glimmer of goodness being torn away… torn away because of what he’d done.

The punishment would fit the crime of his continuing survival.

-

You stepped into Axe’s dream world, excited and nervous at the prospect of facing the unknown horrors of this last nightmare that plagued him. The endless grey limbo that surrounded you came as quite a surprise when you expected inky vines of darkness encased in the thorns of Axe’s painful emotions and memories. Axe refused to meet your eyes when you approached him. Something was off about the whole situation.

“Is everything ok?” Maybe Axe wasn’t ready to face the darkness of the upcoming nightmare. You didn’t mind; you weren’t going to push him towards something that he didn’t want to do. You weren’t exactly eager to face it either, and besides, you thought you might enjoy just spending some time with Axe.

When he raised his head to meet your eyes, you couldn’t suppress a gasp of fright. Goosebumps erupted along your arms, and you shivered.

Axe’s single red eyelight… it glowed with an eerie flickering light, seeming to swell until the socket could barely contain the vortex of its power. Axe tilted his head at an unnatural angle and laughed at your reaction. You forced yourself to stand your ground despite your fear. This was not the monster you knew. Axe now embodied the darkness of his own inner turmoil, and it froze the blood in your veins.

“nothing is ok!” Axe’s snarl dissolved into sinister chuckles that made his broad shoulders shake. He lifted a hand, phalanges curved like claws to scrape at the hole in his skull. You lunged forward to pull his hand away before he caused more damage to himself, and he shoved you roughly away.

-

The hurt and confusion in your eyes filled Axe with dark satisfaction. You needed to know just what kind of monster he was. You needed to fear him, to run away and never come back. Instead, you offered him your compassion yet again.

“Let me help you.” Tears filled your eyes. His madness must be breaking your sweet, loving heart, but he drove home his depravity because if he let himself care, you’d find out the truth eventually anyway. Losing you would hurt more if he actually had you first.

This time when you reached out for him, he dodged, letting your momentum carry you to your hands and knees on the floor. He loomed over you, oozing menace like a thick fog.

“help me?” Axe’s scornful laughter echoed around the empty landscape. “and why,” he asked cruelly, “would you help a murderer?”

“Murderer?” You repeated the word as a question, as if you weren’t completely sure you knew what it meant. Your eyes widened in shock as tendrils of darkness climbed Axe’s arm, sliding over his bones like living tattoos until they pooled in his hand, taking on the shape of a huge meat cleaver.

“how do you think i’ve survived so long, little human? i hunt, and i kill.” He grinned, his mouth stretching into a disturbing parody of joy. “humans mostly. honestly, did you think the blood on my hoodie was mine?”

-

You admittedly hadn’t thought much about the blood stains on the hoodie. Maybe they were his. Maybe they were ketchup. Maybe in his dreams he wore the stains of his brother’s imagined death. Dreams and nightmares created their own reality with its own details pulled more from a dreamer’s mindset than accurate memories. It shocked you to think that Axe truly wore a hoodie that had once been soaked with fresh blood.

Human blood.

You trembled. Axe began to circle you like a hungry wolf, casually swinging his gigantic cleaver.

“Do you regret it?” you finally asked in a tiny voice.

-

Those four words penetrated the armor of madness that Axe was using to push you away, and they struck him like a well-timed attack. He reeled, reaching for some lie to keep you from seeing the truth and pitying him.

He found nothing.

The meat cleaver fell from his shaking hand. Axe sank to his haunches, covering his face with his hands, trying to hide from you and your perceptiveness. He wanted to scare you away before you could judge him and abandon him, but you shot your question straight to his SOUL, refusing to believe the worst of him.

“every fucking minute of my life.”

This time, when you tentatively reached for him, undaunted by his previous rejection, he leaned into your touch. He hated himself for his weakness, but every second that you stayed, even if you left eventually, was a second he would cherish until time wore away even the memory of his dust.

With his first admission, however poorly he’d delivered it, out of the way, Axe couldn’t stop himself from confessing even more of his transgressions and regrets. “i lied and told my brother it was meat from an animal in the forest. he didn’t want to eat humans, but i tricked him. i couldn’t let him starve” The words poured out of him; he feared that as soon as things went quiet, you would realize what an irredeemable abomination he was and flee. “i shouldn’t have done it, but i didn’t know what else to do. we were so hungry… and it messed up our magic. there’s no way to hide what we did. no way to undo it.” 

-

Axe’s words stumbled to a halt, and you sat for a moment in the heavy silence of the grey dreamscape, contemplating them. You hated what he had done, but you also understood that his only other option would be watching his brother starve to death. The circumstances didn’t allow for any winners, and Axe suffered with the knowledge of the things he’d done. 

“You were trying to survive.” Your voice nearly cracked on the final word. You could not fathom the desperation that drove Axe to his decision.

You remembered all of the heart-breaking stories that Axe told you about the Underground: the human who’d stolen the SOULs that the monsters had gathered and fled, taking the monsters’ hope with them, the death of their monarchs at the human’s hands, the Royal Guard Captain’s ascension to a throne that she didn’t possess the skills to manage, and the unbearable suffering of monsters starving to death or falling down because of an unshakable despair.

You raised your eyes to meet Axe’s eyelight, expecting to see softness there once more, but instead his horrified expression stared back at you. You didn’t need to puzzle out the cause because a moment later, barbed shadow vines lashed you, wrapping around your legs and dragging you towards a puddle of oozing darkness near your feet. You struggled against the thorny tendrils, and they tightened, driving each wickedly sharp thorn-tip into your flesh.

Pain seared your legs, real physical pain… in someone else’s dream. Panic washed over you, and you fought harder to escape, causing the barbs to rip deeper into you.

You screamed.

-

Shaking off his shock at the sound of your scream, Axe lunged forward. He wrapped both of his arms tightly around you and wrenched you away from the grasping vines. A writhing mass of them rose up behind him, swarming over him like living things. Staggering a few steps forward, Axe set you on an empty bit of space, but the vines quickly pulled him off of his feet and into a kneeling position. More tendrils rose to wrap around him, and the inky darkness of the puddle rose up to meet them, slithering up his body and swallowing him up in the darkness.

“i can’t protect you here… i can’t keep you safe from me, from my mind.” Axe choked out the words through the darkness consuming him. He couldn’t let you come back. He wouldn’t allow you to be in danger because of him.

This had to be good-bye.

He focused his mind.

“don’t come back.”

-

You jolted awake, that one last glimpse of Axe’s red eyelight, brimming with pain and regret burning in your mind. He had kicked you out of his dreams and told you not to come back. You couldn’t dream-walk in a mind that wasn’t open to your presence. Your throat constricted, and you felt tears sting your eyes. What if you never saw Axe again?

When you tossed back your blankets, you half expected to see scratches on your legs where Axe’s negative thoughts and emotions had touched you, but your skin was unbroken. You’d never experienced a nightmare so vivid and intense, but you breathed a sigh of relief that it couldn’t reach you in the waking world. If only Axe would let you come back, you could tell him that despite your panicked reactions, his dreams had no power to harm you.

Instead, he would continue to face the torment of his past mistakes all alone… for now.

Because while you had been helping Axe deal with his nightmares, you hadn’t neglected the appalling circumstances of his reality. If you could make your waking project work, you would be able to truly save the skeleton that you cared for so deeply.

I won’t let you push me away, you vowed.

-

Axe settled himself on the bench of his sentry station, taking a break from prowling the forest for potential meals. The barren snowscape left him all alone with his thoughts, and he hated it. In one bout of unhinged boredom, he’d created a sign for the outpost: “Head dogs, 5G.” It made as much sense as anything else in the Underground. Besides, there was no such thing as a hot dog in this frigid wasteland.

The narrow lines of dead tree trunks shifted if he stared at them too long, and the wind that howled through them carried voices whose words he could not quite arrange into coherency. The windblown whispers rose in volume until the roaring of innumerable voices filled his skull. The blazing white of the snow surrounding him only added to the sensory overload. He couldn’t hear, couldn’t see. 

“shut up, shut up!” Axe chanted, clawing at the hole in his skull. Reality warped, the passage of time quickened and slowed, and nothing made sense anymore…

… and you were standing in front of him.

Axe recoiled in disbelief. How could this be happening? He hadn’t fallen asleep… or had he? Maybe you were a cruel hallucination conjured by his loneliness. He refused to accept the vision of you even when you reached out in that oh-so-familiar way to calm the scrabbling of his phalanges against the jagged edges of the hole in his skull.

Axe’s hand shot out as quickly as a striking snake and grabbed your wrist. He yanked you forward until you were partially bent over the sill of the sentry station. He raised his massive knife high above his head; his eyes held no recognition, no clarity, no sanity.

You held completely still, unflinching. The meat cleaver hovered threateningly above you, but it did not fall. You and Axe were frozen in the moment, but despite the madness that absolutely radiated from him, you trusted him not to hurt you.

“you’re not real,” Axe accused you in a gravelly whisper. You weren’t even sure if he meant to speak aloud at all.

“Are you going to kill me?” Your voice didn’t waver, and you kept your eyes locked with his single eyelight, calm yet firm.

Axe lowered the knife. Real or imagined, starving or not, he would never hurt you. You knew him too well. He released your wrist, hoping he hadn’t hurt you by grabbing you like that. He wanted to ask how you’d gotten here, but other matters demanded a higher priority.

“you aren’t safe here,” the skeleton scolded gruffly. “didn’t you listen? monsters here kill and eat humans!”

“Good thing I found you first then.” You tried to diffuse the tension with bravado, but you had to admit that your choice to come to the Underground was a risky one. Axe’s eyelight travelled over your body, searching for injuries while surreptitiously taking in the sight of you. His obvious concern for your safety filled you with warmth and determination.

“there’s nothing good about this,” Axe growled though he had to admit that seeing you again definitely felt like a good thing to him. That little bit of goodness could be snuffed out in a hurry though if another monster saw you and attacked. “i’ve got to get you out of here.”

Axe lumbered out of his sentry station, glancing furtively around the barren landscape, though it wasn’t entirely clear whether he expected to spot an enemy or an escape route. The skeleton stopped right next to you, attempting to block you from prying eyes. You found his protective stance rather charming, but you weren’t here to be charmed. You were on a mission.

You slipped your backpack from your shoulders, swinging it around into Axe’s line of sight and opening it. Seven clear canisters sat inside, each with a brightly-colored heart shape inside of it. Axe’s mouth dropped open in shock.

“are those…?” Axe sounded almost reverent, and with good reason.

“Human SOULs? Yes. I gathered these from willing donors who wanted to help set the monsters free.” It had taken dedication and time, but you’d meticulously interviewed potential donors until you tracked down all seven SOUL types that you needed. Now, only the path to the Barrier stood in your way.

Without warning, Axe swept you into a crushing hug, then proceeded to spin you around. Your feet actually left the ground, and you laughed softly at the thrill of it.

“you’ve got to meet my brother, then we’ll smuggle you into the Capitol.” For once you heard excitement and hope in Axe’s voice. His eyelight gleamed with resolution as he reached for your hand. You placed your hand in his without hesitation. Axe’s declaration that he knew a shortcut still rang in your ears as the world spun beneath you and everything went dark.

Disoriented, you tried to take in the scene around you. You’d been outside, standing in a forest choked with dead trees and carpeted in snow, but suddenly you found yourself in a house. The loud colors of the bowling alley style carpeting had long since faded, and the couch had obviously seen better days. Everything in the house was touched with the same look of elegant decay: faded colors, worn fabrics, the yellowing of book pages, and the subtle musk of disuse. 

A fine film of the dust of time spoke volumes about the life of two monsters who devoted so much of their lives to simply surviving that they were forced to neglect the basic upkeep of their home. The house looked so long abandoned that the presence of life within it seemed almost surreal. You couldn’t find words to break the silence that permeated the house, soundless echoes of what it had once been.

Movement caught your eye; a lanky figure detached itself from the shadows and stepped in the dust-mote-filled light. Your eyes travelled up and up, an impossible height despite the figure’s hunched posture, until you found facial features that you recognized from Axe’s dream. The vivid colors of Axe’s subconscious bore the same washed-out appearance here that characterized their home, but you knew this must be Papyrus, now known as Crooks due to the effects of his recent tragic diet.

Crooks wrung his hands shyly, awaiting your reaction to his somewhat terrifying appearance. His teeth were crooked and broken, caked with something red that you tried not to think about too much. His nervous actions tugged at your heart, and you offered him a gentle smile which he responded to with a smile of his own.

“I’D OFFER YOU SOME OF MY SIGNATURE SPAGHETTI AND EYEBALLS, BUT WE’RE ALL OUT OF PASTA.” His apologetic tone did little to distract you from the fact that the skeleton brothers were short of pasta but not eyeballs. 

“That’s alright. Really.” You didn’t hold out much hope that Crooks had misspoken considering Axe’s earlier admission. The sooner you got these monsters out of their Underground prison, the sooner they could return to normal healthy eating habits.

“my friend here wants to help us get to the Surface. they’ve got plenty of pasta up there. we just need to talk to ol’ Queen Undyne first,” Axe interjected, using a light tone to dispel the awkwardness of his brother’s offer. 

Crooks perked up at the mention of Undyne. “UNDYNE WILL BE SO RELIEVED. I DON’T THINK SHE LIKES BEING QUEEN VERY MUCH…” You clutched your backpack and its precious cargo of SOULs, unzipping it slightly to show the mingled glow of seven vibrant colors. Crooks peered at them with a mixture of curiosity and delight.

Axe shifted uncomfortably. “yeah, relieved,” he mumbled, refusing to meet your eyes. You didn’t have much time to wonder about the skeletons’ very different reactions to Undyne because Axe extended a hand to you and Crooks. As soon as your fingertips brushed his smooth, warm bones, everything went dark again.

In the few seconds it took your eyes to communicate the view of a once-opulent throne room to your poor confused brain, a glowing blue spear appeared and slammed into the ground so close to you that you felt the force of the impact thrumming up the shaft of the weapon. If Axe hadn’t yanked you backwards, you would’ve been impaled. Where had it even come from?

“UNDYNE WAIT! THIS HUMAN IS A FRIEND!” You followed the direction of Crooks’ voice to see an armor-clad monster with a wild mane of crimson hair. She held another glowing blue spear, and her single yellow eye focused on you with murderous malice. You staggered backwards from the force of her glare. 

“No human is a friend to monsters,” Queen Undyne roared, launching a volley of her spears at you. You resigned yourself to your doom, regretting that your rescue attempt had been such a short-lived failure.

A wall of bones erupted from the tiles of the floor, blocking the attack. Crooks and Axe both stood next to you, arms outstretched to summon the defensive maneuver. More spears struck the bones, causing them to shudder, but they remained standing. You turned wide, panicked eyes to Axe, searching for some explanation or reassurance.

“can you hold her off?” Axe asked Crooks, who nodded somberly. The stocky skeleton grabbed your arm and dragged you down a hallway of soaring pillars coated thickly in cobwebs and floor to ceiling windows of cloudy, cracked glass. Away from the immediate danger, you began to tremble. Tears welled up in your eyes.

Axe pulled you close, wrapping you in the safety of his arms and gently rubbing your back. He made soft shushing sounds, and you realized that your tears had turned into terrified sobs. Your body shook, and you hiccuped, trying to catch your breath. Axe held you until the overwhelming wave of emotion subsided.

“i’m so sorry. i thought maybe we could talk some sense into Undyne. she and my brother used to be really close, but the last human who came through here… well, that human killed a lot of monsters and stole the SOULs that we had collected towards breaking the barrier. they left us with nothing but despair and dust, and Undyne blamed herself for not stopping them. it… affected her.” Once again, Axe looked guilty.

“How can we convince her that I’m trying to help?” You gripped your backpack with determined hands. You didn’t gather these SOULs for nothing, and you didn’t plan to leave the starving monsters in the Underground without at least making an effort to save them.

“you aren’t going to convince her of anything.” You opened your mouth to protest, but Axe laid a phalange against your lips to silence you. “i want you to get out of here. it’s not safe, and i would never forgive myself if something happened to you.”

“What about breaking the Barrier?”

Loud crashes sounded from the Throne Room. Axe shot a quick glance over his shoulder before pushing you further down the hallway. “i need to go help my brother. if we can convince Undyne to trust you, i’ll meet you at the Barrier to break it and free the monsters.”

“What if you can’t?” More sounds of destruction threatened to drown out your whispered words, but Axe was close enough to hear you over the cacophony. Sorrow filled his single eyelight.

“i won’t put you in danger.”

“That doesn’t answer my question!” Actually, it did answer your question, and the implications left you frantic with worry for him. You wanted to explain how you felt about him, why his plan tore your heart to pieces, that you couldn’t just leave him behind, but the sounds of battle were approaching quickly. 

Crooks slid backwards into the pillar-lined hallway, kicking up dirt. He held bone attacks in his gloved hands, and he used them to deflect wave after wave of spear attacks. The barrage of attacks drove him backwards again, closer to you and his brother. Axe stepped between you and the sound of Undyne’s war cries.

Turning, he cupped your cheek in one large, bony hand. His eyelight drank you in as if to memorize every feature of your tear-streaked face. He leaned forward and kissed your forehead. “go,” he murmured, pressing his forehead to yours.

Then he was gone, teleporting to the entrance of the hallway to join Crooks with bone attacks flying. 

If you stayed, it would only distract him. He wanted you to go, to be safe. It took every bit of willpower in your body to walk away, to step through the Barrier without him, knowing that he never would’ve fought Undyne if it wasn’t for your meddling.

You waited.

And waited.

The seconds stretched out, each one lasting a thousand excruciating years.

You waited.

-

Axe curled up on the couch, full to bursting from a delicious dinner prepared by his brother. Yawning, he rested his skull in your lap, and you gently stroked his scapulae, smiling as he began to doze. He no longer feared nightmares. In fact, he rarely dreamed at all anymore. After all, what would be the point in dreaming?

Life on the Surface far surpassed anything that his subconscious could fabricate, and he already lived that dream every single day, with you.

INDEX

[kabira]

09 | scientific inspiration

pairing — spider-man!vernon x ofc

featuring — joshua, yeji (itzy), felix (skz), yangyang (nct)

word count — 3.6k

genres — spider-man au, marvel au, fluff, action, angst, humor

warnings — none.

note — so here it is, the big Science Dump that will form the basis for one of the major arcs of the story. now, i don’t pretend to know too much of what i’m talking about, but hopefully all the hours of scrolling through obscure genetics articles will hold up. hell, they probably won’t, but this is superhero fiction about a sixteen-year-old man-spider vigilante, so please excuse it !!! a lot of this is borrowed from the ultimate spider-man comics lore by brian michael bendis.

Vernon was still thinking about Luce’s offer when he got to work later that day.

Normally, he would have tried to keep his head clear during his work, but since all he had to do that day was log data entries, it didn’t really matter. Doc hadn’t come back to the lab yet, so it was just him and the janitor, but from the open holograph display on his table, Vernon figured he’d be back pretty soon. Despite the state of his office, the doctor didn’t like messes, especially not in his workplace.

He hadn’t expected Luce to even consider inviting the others, even though she had been friendly with them. Movie night was something that belonged to just the four—three—of them, something sacred and untouched by outsiders. The thing that had surprised him even more was his own willingness. For someone who had been so acutely ticked off by their unannounced arrival, he sure had warmed up to his new teammates quickly.

Vernon was only a few entries in when Dr. Connors entered the lab, holding a cup of steaming coffee from the cafeteria. He smiled at Vernon when he came in, not bothering to glance at the screen to check what he was doing before making his way over to the work table. One of the things Vernon liked the most about this place was that despite being nothing more than a research assistant, he was still allowed to help out in more impactful ways than simply entering and saving data.

“You’re here early,” Dr. Connors said, setting down the Styrofoam cup on his table. He looked tired, Vernon noticed, probably why he had bought that cafeteria coffee despite it being a thick, dark color and tasting like tar. There were dark circles under his blue eyes, and his usually neatly combed brown hair was slightly disheveled.

“I came here directly after school was over,” Vernon said. “Figured I’d save a lot more time that way, and I don’t really have much left to do.”

“Hm?” The scientist faced the holographic model, hitting a few keys on the pad below it. His movements were listless, but his shoulders were still tense. Reminds me of seniors before finals, Vernon thought. It wasn’t exhaustion like he had assumed, but stress. “Then perhaps you’d like to help me out here.”

“Really?” Vernon tried to keep the excitement out of his voice, but failed. Probably for the better, because it sparked a small smile on Dr. Connors’s face. “What are you working on right now?”

He didn’t get an answer for a long moment. Vernon spun in his chair and pulled himself to his feet, ignoring the remains of exhaustion weighing his body down as he made his way over to the doctor’s table.

“It’s something your father and I were working on before…before this project was abandoned, almost a decade ago,” Dr. Connors said. He was looking at the display with a different kind of intensity in his eyes, like it was something to be defeated rather than discovered. “When I lost your father, I gave up all hope of ever getting back to it, but after all my recent failures, I think I need to revisit my roots.”

Vernon pursed his lips at failures, but said nothing. The hologram looked like a DNA strand—a double helix blown to the size of a poster tube. It shone with a dull blue light, lighting up Dr. Connor’s features, illuminating the creases around his mouth and eyes that Vernon wasn’t sure had been there before. Standing next to him made his own tiredness feel like a minor inconvenience.

“This was your father’s brainchild, after all,” the man said, still staring at the display. “A completely independent protoplasmic model based on the body’s own genetic edifice built to fortify the weaker structure of a sick body.”

“A protoplasmic model?” Vernon’s eyes widened. “I thought it was supposed to be controlled AI, like nanobots or something.”

“Imagine that, except a sentient being with the ability to detect and eradicate weaknesses in the body on its own, without any direction,” Dr. Connors said. “Something to cure everything—the right combinations of proteins able to use the body’s own natural resources to fight any infection, overcoming the problem of grafting and able to treat everything from neural atrophy to genetic diseases to cancer, contained in a small tubule.” His eyes shone. “The perfect cure.”

The perfect cure. Vernon glanced back at the holographic model, now seeing the inconsistencies in its structure when compared to normal human DNA. The idea was intoxicating and exhilarating, made even more amazing by the fact that it had been proposed by his father. It made his chest ache with longing, thinking of the possibilities of fulfillment if his father had been alive still—not just for the experiment, but for Vernon himself.

“He was way ahead of his time, Richard Parker—in that sense, you are a lot like him,” Dr. Connors murmured in a low, wistful voice, as if speaking to himself. “It had become almost impossible for us to receive any support or funding for our project, because of how wildly imaginative it was. We were ridiculed, discredited, called mad for our ideas before we finally got the deal with Oscorp. We had worked on the cure for so long, and just a couple of days before the deal’s signing, your father called me one night, sounding excited about a fresh prospect.” He shook his head. “But then…”

He didn’t need to complete his sentence. Vernon caught the drift of it, and turned away to hide the pained expression brought onto his face by the flood of emotions. He didn’t know if he felt good about being so close to his father’s work, or bad about being so far away from his father himself. Even the mere presence of his old colleague, still alive while he wasn’t, seemed to taunt Vernon.

Snap out of it, he told himself firmly. His father’s death hadn’t been Dr. Connors’s fault—he knew that, but still had to avoid even thinking of that idea, because once the seeds had been planted in his brain, Vernon knew he wouldn’t be able to work with Dr. Connors in harmony. Plus, watching him talk about the work he and his dad had done together, no one could say that the scientist didn’t care about his former partner.

“What did he discover?” Vernon prompted.

Dr. Connors’s eyes turned sad. “I never did get to find out,” he said. “Just two days after the call, he was finally going to come back to the state to share his discoveries with me, so we could compare notes and build on what was lacking. The first step to phase two, he called it.” His jaw tightened. “And just when we thought something was going to go right for once…”

Vernon hung his head. Maybe knowing his father had been on the verge of a breakthrough should have made him feel better about his achievements, but he only thing that Vernon could think about was what all the world had lost when he had lost his dad. A revolution in medicine. A father. He was almost a little uneasy thinking about which kind of loss affected him more. The world could have been a much better place, but all Vernon wanted was his dad back.

“I’ve been unfair to you, Vernon,” Dr. Connors said, breaking him out of his reverie. He straightened while keeping his eyes fixed on the DNA hologram, then faced Vernon with a sad look. “You should have had someone to help you come to terms with your father’s death, someone who could have told you about his great ideas and even greater work. I shouldn’t have left you alone to deal with everything, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to…”

His voice had lowered with every syllable until he trailed off, making Vernon think that his voice had finally become too small for anyone to hear. Vernon swallowed, unable to think of anything to say. He was usually good at talking to people, even heart-to-hearts, but when the subject touched his obscure past, words failed him.

“I understand,” he said, the first words that came to his blank mind. He tried for a reassuring smile, unsure of what the result actually looked like. “You shouldn’t blame yourself for it. And anyway, I am here now.”

Dr. Connors smiled a little. “That, you are,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been doing your genius intellect a great injustice by assigning you all these menial tasks.”

“Hey, someone’s gotta do the menial tasks, right?” He smiled back. “My experience with research is next to nothing compared to that of the other people in this lab, so I’m fine with where I am. And not all the tasks are exactly menial.”

“Still.” The man sighed. “Since it was your father’s genius that came up with this idea, it feels only right to have you develop it further—or at least play a role in its creation.”

“I’m here whenever you need me,” Vernon said, glad about the lightening of the atmosphere. He wasn’t sure how much more of that weight he could have taken. He cocked his head, studying the listed proteins. “What made you want to work on this ‘cure’ again after so long?”

“A lot of different reasons,” the scientist said. “I think I had been avoiding this project for so long because I couldn’t bear to continue it without Richard by my side, but meeting you, his son, and having you take up a position in my lab felt like a sign.” He gave the boy a sideways smile. “And from a scientific viewpoint—before this, I’d been working on a different kind of cure, a serum with a principle based in cross-species genetics. It was supposed to be give a person the ability to regenerate lost limbs like a lizard, but the premature human trials went off the rails.”

Vernon nodded, keeping his mouth clamped shut. “I see,” he said, not wanting to bring up the Lizard incident unless he was sure Dr. Connors was ready to address it.

“However, after someone helped…fix the problem by making an anti-serum, the new formula for it gave me an idea,” the man continued. “Scientific inspiration, I guess you could call it. There’s a lot to be done, but I still have the anti-serum here in the lab, and have been studying it for over a month now.”

The gears had already begun turning in Vernon’s head. He had been the one to create the anti-serum as Spider-Man, and no one knew the methodology better than the original creator. Most of it had stemmed from the original Lizard formula, and with a bit of recalibration and measured reversal, the formula had worked. That makes me wonder…

“Hey, doc,” he murmured, brow pinched into a thoughtful frown, “if you had a sample of perfectly bonded human and non-human cell structure, do you think you would be able to mimic it and engineer a matching structure for the cure?”

The man frowned. “How do you mean?”

“I mean…” Vernon hesitated. Because of the OZ formula transferred into his blood by the spider bite, his DNA was perfectly bonded to spider DNA, which gave him what they called in post-human-speak a ‘healing factor’. It wasn’t as effective as Wolverine’s, but it was still something—and it was based on the same principle as the cure. Like the OZ formula helped his body develop a natural cure for anything he could be hit by—be it a paper cut or a head wound—by using its own resources.

The only difference was that it heightened his facilities by combining human abilities with spider abilities, which gave him things like his spider sense. However, if Vernon could use his own blood to develop a kind of skeletal structure for the cure. If it did work, it would only work on enhanced spider/human DNA, but at least then he’d have a start. The possibilities after that were endless.

“If there already existed a perfect sample of blood which had an in-built system like the cure,” Vernon said, trying not to give away too many details.

“Like mutant DNA?” Dr. Connors asked. “They have a completely different genetic structure in place, though, Vernon. They have the X-Gene. Their nucleotide sequence itself is mutated.”

“No, not like that,” Vernon said. “Like human DNA, just…enhanced. Bonded with something like the cure, just not—not living.”

Dr. Connors raised his eyebrows. “Well, having a perfect sample would reduce the needed brainwork to a tenth,” he said. “But you couldn’t acquire a sample like that, because, well, it exists only in theory.”

“Right,” Vernon muttered, but already the beginnings of a smile had started to curve his lips. “Only in theory.”

Vernon’s mind was buzzing with so much excitement from his idea for the cure that even web-slinging hadn’t been able to distract him from it.

He and the rest of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team had spent the evening scouring the city for any signs of something that could substantiate Vernon’s theory, but had come up with nothing except a few petty criminals, who had been easily stopped. The other three had left early, telling him to use their new communication devices (which looked an awful lot like kitschy wrist bands, except for the fact that they could turn invisible) if anything came up.

Nothing did.

It was nine p.m. and Vernon had still not changed out of his Spidey suit, spending the free hour to swing around the city and try and clear his head. Too much had happened in one day, and his mood was seesawing between elation at his new project and trepidation because of the dreaded return of movie night. Funny that a high school hangout was a source of more nervousness for him than trying to imitate his own radioactive blood sample to finish his dad’s decades old design.

When I put it like that, it sounds even more absurd, he thought, scrolling through the usual evening homework-help texts on his phone as he waited in line to buy eggs and a carton of milk at the not-so-local grocery store. Even Spider-Man had to obey queues when he was out doing chores for Aunt May.

He paid for the eggs and milk without the tattooed cashier giving him a second glance, and stepped out into the street with the bags. Aunt May wouldn’t be back until ten; he had about an hour to kill until curfew, but he wanted to get home early to talk to her about movie night (yet another reaction to dread) and hopefully study his spidery OZ-bonded radioactive blood under the lens of his old microscope that Uncle Ben had gotten him over a year ago.

“Yo, Spidey!”

Vernon looked up to see a chubby, tanned guy in his late twenties beaming at him like an old friend as he jogged up to meet him. “Hey, I remember you,” he said, pointing at the guy. “You’re uhhh…” He squinted at him, trying to remember when he’d last seen him. “That pizza delivery guy who almost got abducted by aliens!”

“That’s me! Paulo!” the guy exclaimed, his wide smile widening even more upon being recognized. “You saved me from those killer robot aliens last month, remember? And I promised you free pizza in case you ever needed it,” he added. “How’s it going?”

“As usual.” He raised the bag containing the groceries he’d just bought.

“Running errands when you get a break from crime-fighting, eh?” Paulo asked, giving his thick dark curls a shake. His smile refused to dim even a bit, like someone had switched on a light bulb with a permanent power source. “Keeps the superheroes humble.”

“Tell that to Captain America.” Vernon checked the comm device on his wrist, almost groaning out loud when he saw it was almost half past nine already. “Great. Uh, Paulo, I’ll have to catch you later. It’s late, and I gotta get back well before curfew in case there are delays on the way.”

“Of course! Go do your Spider-Man thing.” Paulo lifted his hands, mimicking the thwip-thwip gesture of shooting webs, and grinned. “See you later, Spidey!” he called out from behind him as Vernon swung himself up to a lamppost before launching himself into the air. “Remember the offer with the free pizzas still stands!”

“I will!” Vernon yelled back as he swung away. And he wasn’t just saying that, either—free pizzas were free pizzas.

He had to change in an alleyway again, but thankfully this time it didn’t have an open dumpster or smell like someone had thrown out a decayed cheese slab in the trash. By the time he got back home, Aunt May was already back, as indicated by the lights in the kitchen. Just perfect, he thought miserably, as he unlocked the front door with his spare key and trudged into the hallway.

“Vernon! You’re back early,” a voice yelled from the kitchen when she heard the door shut behind him. A woman with short silver hair, clad in a comfortable t-shirt and yoga pants came out into the living room as he entered it, wiping her hands with a hand towel. “Did you get the milk and eggs like I asked you to?” Aunt May asked.

For an older lady, she sure has great hearing. “Yep,” he said, swinging his bag off his shoulders and unzipping it, internally praying he hadn’t squashed the milk carton from all his swinging like last time. Thankfully, they were undamaged. “Did you come back from yoga classes early?”

“Oh, Denise pulled a muscle in her back, poor thing,” May said. “I offered to bring her back home, but she refused to let me ice it for her, saying she’d get Mac to do it instead.” She disappeared into the kitchen once again, coming out without the hand towel this time. “Put the groceries in the fridge, won’t you?”

For an older lady, Aunt May also had a lot of things going for her. Yoga classes on Monday-alternating weekdays, squash sessions over the weekend, classes for baking and music and whatnot—she might even have been busier than Vernon himself.

“Will do,” he said, obeying. His mind was still swimming with all the older thoughts, but now that he was standing right in front of Aunt May, the worry about movie night had pushed itself to the forefront, demanding all of his nervous attention.

He stood at the fridge even after closing the door, chewing his lip and wondering how to bring it up. Words really had failed him today. “Aunt May?” he ventured, unable to keep the hint of nerves from his voice. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“What is it, honey?” she asked, poking her head out of the kitchen. Around her waist was an apron that said Don’t Kiss the Cook. “Vernon?”

He kissed his teeth, teetering back and forth on the balls of his feet. “It’s about movie night.”

She stilled. “What about movie night?”

Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, Vernon thought, pursing his lips. Aunt May hadn’t exactly been close with the Osborns, but he knew she had cared about Harry in her own way, the same way she cared about any neglected kid that Vernon brought home like an abandoned cat. She gave them as much comfort as she could, tried to give them the family they never really had, even if she knew she couldn’t completely replace them. It had happened before: Harry, and Luce—and now, Vernon thought with a little sigh, maybe even the team.

“Luce asked me to ask you if you were okay with us doing movie night this weekend,” he said slowly. “And there are these new kids, and she told me to ask them too, but if you’re busy we can always—”

“Vernon!” Aunt May smiled widely, coming out of the kitchen to rest her hands on his shoulders and give them a big squeeze. “Of course I’m okay with it! Oh, you don’t know how I wished you kids would do one of those again, I’m sure that’s what Harry would have wanted too.” She gave him a motherly smile, one that was soft and sad at the same time. “I’ll leave the house to you kids that day.”

“Oh, no, Aunt May, that’s not necessary—” he started, but she cut him off with a wave of her hand.

“Don’t be so formal with me, kiddo,” she said. “I know movie night means a lot to you, and if you have new friends coming over, I’m sure you don’t want a chaperone around.” She raised her eyebrows. “Although I would like to meet them before I go out.”

Vernon sighed, but there was a tiny smile on his face. “God, you’re the best.”

“And don’t you forget it.” She winked. “Besides, even an old woman like me needs to go out with her friends every once in a while, too. This might just turn out to be a good break for both of us.”

He nodded, feeling a welling of emotion in his chest that wouldn’t go down no matter how much he tried to push it away. One less thing to worry about, he thought half-heartedly, trying not to think about how Aunt May’s agreement meant movie night was on, which had the potential to be an even more worrying prospect. “I hope so.”

[tracynotabi]

Riptide Day 2 / Undertow

September 11, 2021

D-Day.

Kevin, Ivan, Joey, and I were getting a ride from Spencer, who was also taking Narq to the venue, while Robert and Parker got a ride from someone else. Well, at least we didn’t have to walk to the venue. I didn’t pack sunscreen.

At 9am, about half an hour we were supposed to leave, Kevin gets a stomachache.

Me: He just needs to poop. Spencer: The classic.

We end up going to the lobby to wait for Spencer in Narq, which was fine considering we actually didn’t want Spencer, our ride, waiting for us.

Spencer: Okay, Narq’s just using the bathroom rq lol Me: Is he also having tummy problems Spencer: Nah just bein stoner and forgetting to do stuff lol Me: The classic

We go get Chick-fil-A and I’m sitting underneath the dashboard again by Kevin’s feet. I think the employees were very bewildered, as the woman on the other side of the window did a double take. I would, too, if I saw a smaller-than-average person just hiding underneath the dashboard sipping on a cup of Coke.

Some time after I get to the venue during doubles, I end up talking to Jimmy (j u m), when Kevin comes rushing over to me, a panicked look on his face.

Forgot to mention, but Kevin actually couldn’t get all of his poop out before coming to the venue and now it is back with a vengeance.

He tells me that he’s unable to go to any restroom because there were three stalls in the men’s restroom: two were occupied and one was clogged with poop.

He had tried flushing the poop one but it only made it worse. It just clogged more and the water level rose. If he had sat down and insisted on finishing, his balls would be touching the water and that’s a no-no.

He tried asking the front desk for other restrooms, but he was informed it was the only one. He was desperate and you could just see it in his eyes that he was about to break.

Me, using the big, wrinkly brain that I had, told him to use the women’s restroom. He froze, not even realizing that that was an option.

Now before anyone complains, hear me out.

I would rather be in a restroom with a male in the stall next to me, than exit the restroom and see someone standing outside the men’s restroom trying to wait for a stall with a shit stain in his pants. Excuse the vulgarity, but it’s true.

If you’re ever at one of my tournaments and you need to go and no male restroom is unoccupied, for the love of god, please fucking use the women’s restroom. I do not need this mess on my hands and you best believe I’m shoving myself in the men’s restroom if I gotta fucking go expel unicorns and rainbows.

I go to the restroom with Kevin and stand awkardly on my phone to keep watch, because he didn’t want any of the staff members actually seeing him and risk himself getting kicked out of the venue.

That would’ve been extremely unfortunate.

Luckily, nobody else needed to go use the restroom while Kevin was in there and he was able to safely compete his duty (lol).

If anyone is upset at my suggestion, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t about to not provide such a simple solution for Kevin’s emergency.

Anyway, the tournament start shortly after that.

First match I pay attention to is Kevin vs. Wombat. In my head, I think it’s pools so I shouldn’t worry too much. I try to watch Kevin’s sets, but it makes me physically ill sometimes because my anxiety is wracked up like crazy and I just want to throw up. Many have witnessed me walking away and trying to distract myself multiple times at multiple different tournaments.

It’s like that gory horror movie that you can’t keep looking away from.

Besides knowing that I get sick, I figured it would be fine since I actually enjoy trying to support my boyfriend and watch him come out of pools winners’ side. Not meaning any disrespect by Wombat, by the way. He’s great. Just realistic. It’s like how I expect Kevin to lose to Bob.

Kevin loses Game 1.

Ooh my tummy’s doing barrel rolls like the way Twisty did with that pullout bed. I look away but I’m just so distracted by the crowd noises.

I totally get it, though. Obviously, it’s sick that Wombat’s holding his own against Kevin, who is seed 3 of the tournament. I’d be excited, too, if my friend was making an upset on someone else. But Kevin’s my boyfriend, so obviously, I want him to win.

Kevin barely wins Game 2 and I’m like ooooh boy. My tummy’s going to town and I think I gag a little by how sick I feel. Gotta focus on getting Joey his next match. *deep breaths*

When heartswaptv airs the whole tournament, definitely check out the set. It was really good (as far as I can hear, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the rest of it).

Kevin comes over to me after he’s out of pools and I scold him for making me worried.

AND YOU NOW WHAT HE SAYS?

Kevin: Babe, it’s fine - I almost lost to Zeddy at Redacted City and I got 2nd. I’ll be fine. Me: T____T *incoherent whining noises*

Does Kevin thinks he’s fucking cute for saying that or something? I was not amused.

Since I didn’t have to volunteer TO the entirety of the tournament, I bounced around mingling with other people.

At one point, I get a message from Suvir in our group chat about how he, Sosa, and Narq were planning on coming to visit NorCal. Of course, since Narq was already here, I decided to just go up to him and ask.

Me: So I heard you’re coming to NorCal? Narq: I am? Me: That’s what Suvir said. *shows phone* Narq: I guess I’m going to NorCal!

Suvir: Narq doesn’t actually know. Sosa just said he’d take him with him and said Narq would agree to go because he’s Narq. Me: Oh that makes sense why he had no idea what I was talking about.

It wasn’t until around top bracket did things start to pick up. Not too many spoilers, because (1) no spoilers before they upload the vod and (2) I have a terrible memory when it comes to the matches.

I remember holding up Kevin’s phone to stream to our Discord because we had some non-PM player friends who wanted to see and I think Kevin wanted Thomas (ThundeRzReiGN) to give him some advice throughout the tournament. Not actually coach, but to critique his play.

As more and more top players fell, Kevin made it a goal to do his best not to fall into the landmine that was Losers’. So many heavy hitters were large threats to him: Techboy, Malachi, Akimi, Cloudburst...

Not to say that Winners’ side didn’t have their fair share of monsters: Peter, Parker, Kumatora, Twisty, Nogh, Lunchables...

Kevin’s first match in Top 32 was against Bongo, who people sleep on quite a lot. For those of you that don’t know him, he’s a Captain Falcon from NY who actually beat Kevin at Flex Zone 3 in 2018. Kevin had beaten him at Encore, but it wasn’t easy.

Not to mention Falcon is a pain the butt for Mario. Unfortunately, the match was not recorded (as far as I know), and it was a very exciting match from what I heard. I avoided watching it because based on how long it took, I knew it had to have been a Game 5. During that time, two matches have been finished on “stream.”

Kevin had said his match against Bongo was the toughest one he had - not to discredit his other opponents, of course - but according to him, it was the scariest and closest. Also the threat of being put into Losers so early would’ve made the climb to Top 8 a lot harder.

His overall goal was actually to make Top 8. Despite being a third seed and rank 5, what I’ve noticed about Kevin is that he does have doubts about himself quite often. He’s never complacent in his opponents and worries all the time about being upset and I don’t think anyone puts more pressure on him more than himself.

As I watched my friends progress through bracket, all I can think is there’s not much I can do. I don’t understand the game very much, despite my heavy involvement in the scene. In fact, more often than not, I believe I understand the game the least compared to everyone else.

A tangent from the actual tournament itself is coming, but I think I should address why I’m even in this community:

While everyone loves the game, I love the community behind it. I find it worth it to sit/stand in one location for hours at a time because it allows my friends to enjoy the game they love comfortably without worrying how the tournament is progressing. They can focus on their own growth and passion.

I think what I see is completely different. Like I said, I don’t really understand this game - I can’t differentiate uairs, bairs, d-smashes, etc. I compute it in my head, but can’t visualize it. I don’t recognize most combos - in fact, more often than not, I’m sitting there just staring at the screen kind of blankly. Sometimes, it does make me wonder if I really am part of this community because I don’t really understand the game.

I can’t say I particularly care too much about the game, but I understand how much of an impact it’s made on me and for that, I’m very thankful for this game because it’s led me to some great people.

Back to the actual event and less sap. lol. Is anybody still even reading?

For something put together in a mere two weeks, Trin and their team did an amazing job. Three recording set ups, graphics, a pot, a venue... props to them for gathering the scraps and making a whole out of it. And to think we almost didn’t go.

Madeline (Swanner) ended up coming and it was honestly so good to see her. We aren’t particularly close, but she’s someone I’ve come to care for and just want happiness for her.

Major spoiler, but I don’t think anybody who cares about PM/P+ doesn’t know Kevin won the tournament.

Everyone expected a pop-off, but Kevin just sat there, crying.

I don’t think there’s ever been anything that Kevin has been more passionate about. He loves this game; he loves this community. Never did it ever occur to him that he would win.

I wish I could say more, but honestly, him winning stunned me speechless. And if you didn’t know, the first thing he said after was that he had to call his mother.

His mom is one of his biggest supporters and I love her to death. She has such a huge heart and has never, ever frowned upon Kevin’s love for the game, whole-heartedly supporting it.

I hugged Maddy, because I can’t even imagine how heart-breaking it must be for her to see what could have been on the mainstage. I imagined how much it must’ve hurt her because she just loves the game and the community, but to see it constantly be torn down by Nintendo and her unable to do anything... Give Maddy a hug and thank her if you see her. She deserves the world.

We ended up walking home with PNW, Bob, Mar, Bongo, Cameron (LoyaL), Ivan, and a few others, honestly too dark to completely see and name. It was a very nice night.

We did, however, pass by the rundown house that definitely looked like if we were to talk in there, we’d be killed by the axe murderer that lived there.

Kevin also lagged behind a lot because his phone notifications were going off like crazy and I was worried he was going to just get lost in the darkness or get hit by a car. Stop looking at your phone when you cross the street, dammit.

We got back to our hotel room and ordered pizza - it was bad. God-fucking-dammit, Ohio, why do you suck so much? Kind of a shitty dinner to end the day on, but nothing else was open at 2am. FeelsBadMan.

[diguerra-moved]

Also write Cella's reaction to finding out her husband died at the Red Wedding, and then write when she finds out he actually survived 8)

UNPROMPTED ASKS // always accepting.

tldr: She would be devastated. 

Even if it was an arrangement that brought them together in the first place, by this point not only there would be love either way, even if it wasn’t the reason why they originally married. If Myrcella is his wife by the time the Red Wedding happens, this means she has set aside her loyalty to her family as those she is primarily loyal to and has chosen to give it instead to Robb (and to his House, and to the North). Not only that, it would be a position she publicly assumed, as his queen, but also in her actions as his queen and in taking his people and family and House as her own, because it would be very clear for anyone around them that she is with Robb, not the Lannisters, and when it comes to Myrcella this is actually saying a lot because her family (by which I mostly mean her mother and brothers) came before anything else for as long as she lives; which is why even when identifying as a Baratheon and refusing to believe the accusations she is Jaime’s daughter Myrcella ends up having much greater affinity and allegiance for her Lannister heritage.

So by the time the Red Wedding happens she is in deep, and she wouldn’t be if she didn’t feel how she feels about him. So learning he was murdered would be enough to drown her in grief; that it happens as it does, in such a brutal way in what was supposed to be a safe environment, it only makes things worse (and even if she wasn’t there and wasn’t betrayed herself, Myrcella would be no less impacted by it, and I don’t see her trusting much anyone beyond a very select few, since she isn’t open and trusting by nature and by learning at court in King’s Landing).

Myrcella has a great flexibility to adapting to circumstances, and in great part this is somewhat tied with survival and surviving the sort of role she was always taught to fulfill, but in part it really is more survival and doing the best she can with the pieces she’s presented; I don’t think she’d give up on it even losing him, even if she might initially be hit hard enough by his loss that she’d consider the point of insisting on playing the game or even living. She is a Lannister in the end, though, and a Lannister always pays her debts; and Myrcella would be intent on having vengeance for him and for the others lost in the Red Wedding as well. 

And ofc, if they have or are expecting children by then, giving up would never even cross her mind; she has to continue Robb’s fight or in the very least keep her child safe and hidden until they can return to claim Winterfell and the North again, because winning the crown and northern independence is the only way her child will ever be safe. 

I don’t think either way she’d be in a position that would allow her to mourn him properly, though. Considering she’d publicly have supported her brothers’ contender, her family would likely deem her a traitor, and at best they’d ignore her decisions on it and try to weave the narrative Robb made her do what she had been doing to bring her back as a piece that can be used for their purposes, since she could still be a tie to the royal family on the Iron Throne and there are those who’d be willing to overlook her former marriage because of that. So there’s that if they get her, and even if they don’t, the North wouldn’t be safe; they don’t have the military strength to keep Winterfell against the Boltons backed up by the Freys and the Lannisters, so she would have to flee and hide to remain free and survive.

No matter how long passed, she’d never really get over Robb’s death, though. It would be a pretty permanent sort of mourning, and it would definitely be noticeable considering how sunny Myrcella’s disposition tends to be and how it would shift with his death. Even if she came to reclaim Winterfell in his name somehow, this wouldn’t change; and for as long as she had a choice, she would never marry someone else. 

Learning he’s actually alive after a considerably long while (that would have felt much like an eternity regardless of how long it had actually been) thinking he died would be a shock to say the least. If she heard about it before seeing him, she wouldn’t believe it; Myrcella would discredit it as someone trying to pretend to be him at best, or just a senseless rumor. If she saw him without expecting it, she would doubt her sanity in a first moment; because there was no way he could have survived the Red Wedding, and so many different accounts claimed him dead, how could he still be alive. When she did see it is really him and he is alive and he is there, Myrcella would break again; she usually does a good job of keeping herself together even if she doesn’t feel that put together or strong, but that would falter upon learning of his death as much as it would when she discovered he was alive. Expect lots of tears and disbelief in both cases, honestly, but she would fall apart with an overwhelming sense of relief and, I don’t know if happiness if the word, I think it is in part, but yeah in meeting him again after thinking he was dead she’d be so overwhelmed by her feelings and overjoyed that he’s there and he’s real. She didn’t expect to see him again, at least not until death brought them together once more; so having him back would feel a little surreal at first.

Those are very general because more details I think would depend on how things happen exactly, but this fits mostly everything in a very general way.

[truthbeetoldmedia]

iZombie 5x01 "Thug Death" Review

We are back in New Seattle, and relations between humans and zombies are as tense as ever. The first episode of iZombie’s final season is mostly about setting the table, putting into motion some strong narrative threads that will take us to the finale.

The episode starts with a six-month time jump, establishing that there is now an accepted workflow in the city. Blaine’s brain business is booming, paying off border agents to help him smuggle brains into Seattle in order to keep the zombie population fed. Major is settled into his role as commander of Fillmore Graves, and assesses case of people who want to go beyond the city wall (medical emergencies and special cases only), while Liv, still acting as Renegade, assesses cases of people who want to be brought in, hoping that a zombie scratch can save their lives. Dale and Clive are stronger than ever, taking advantage of the cure, and are expecting a baby. But when a woman is murdered by zombies and it’s caught on camera, it threatens to blow open some carefully curated processes.

Liv and Clive get on the case, without the brain of the murdered woman. They have to do some old-fashioned police work, cold calling and using security cam footage to get leads. They run across Bix Cahill, the boyfriend of a potential victim. In a rare turn for iZombie, this case isn’t solved by the end of the episode, giving us a cliffhanger that might carry into next week, or maybe even longer. Rather than just a open and shut homicide, this one is going to have ripple effects on all our major players.

Peyton is still the acting mayor, and she’s attempting to hold everything down. She agrees to go on local TV and unfortunately finds herself caught in a debate with a concerned human woman, Dolly Durkins (Jennifer Irwin). The conversation escalates to Dolly advocating for bringing the guillotines back. Later, we find out that she’s more than just talk — she’s running some kind of violent human rebel ring out of a fish food truck. A customer places a seemingly innocent order that results in an explosion at a Fillmore Graves checkpoint, devastating Major and his squad.

After watching the brutal assault video, Blaine’s border patrol agents back out on their deal, threatening the state of brain food in Seattle. He brings them in and roughs them up a bit, but one doesn’t back down, telling Blaine that he doesn’t work for zombies anymore. Will the other agents follow his lead, or will Blaine make good on his promise to turn them into zombies for disobeying him?

Liv’s Renegade operation has become a little more sophisticated over the last few months, fake wardrobe walls and all. While reviewing applications to be smuggled into New Seattle, she is particularly moved by a teenaged boy with a brain tumor and abusive foster home. When her coyote shows up, the boy has brought two of his young foster sisters with him, and they convince the coyote to take all three of them. At the risk of sounding cold-blooded, this is a terrible idea. The coyote only brought one ID, and a slip up like this could ruin the whole Renegade operation. Sure enough, they don’t make it past a checkpoint, and a border agent finds the young girls hiding on the bus. I hope that Liv has a trick up her sleeve to save this one.

Meanwhile, I’m delighted by the show’s addition of Dr. Collier (Quinta Brunson). Viewers might know Quinta from her internet content, particularly from Buzzfeed. Personally, I’m a huge fan of her, so I hope that iZombie can take advantage of her comedic chops. Here, she plays Ravi’s new brilliant liaison at the CDC, who she fights to get face time with — this proves to be a struggle while he’s on a ridiculous Jason Statham-ish brain. She gets him to focus enough to tell him her theory about a cure using the post-mortem brains of the victims of “Freylich Syndrome.” Freylich Syndrome was the rare disease that Isobel (RIP, sweet baby girl) was plagued with, and her brain did in fact produce a cure. Ravi tells her she’s correct, but cautions that it would put a target on teenage kids who are already diagnosed with a terminal disease. Ravi seems to believe that a lead on a zombie cure is too valuable to be ethically pursued at this time. Dr. Collier listens, and tanks her own idea during a conference call with her supervisors. There’s something that feels uncomfortable about this — I didn’t love watching a black woman discredit herself in order for the plot to work, but I’m hoping that we see more Dr. Collier in the future, and hope she’ll play a big role in finding the cure by the end of the series. I’m looking forward to her teaming up with Ravi.

The past few seasons of iZombie have had some fantastic case-of-the-week brains, while having some overly ambitious, fuzzy overall season arcs. With showrunner Rob Thomas insisting that the show will be wrapping everything up with no ambiguous endings, perhaps this season will have a more focused and determined arc. I hope the show doesn’t bite off more than it can chew, narratively speaking.

Stray Thoughts

A huge motif last season was the impact of viral images and what is (and what isn’t) caught on camera, something that continued here with the season opener. The showrunner has been open about how New Seattle often mirrors modern day America, with varying degrees of subtleness.

Seems like iZombie and co might be saving their budget for other things, the explosion at the checkpoint happens so off screen that it’s almost confusing.

One of my favorite small moments of the episode was when Dale sends Clive out for chocolate, but he has to rifle through a picked-over convenience store to no avail. I love that the showed how resources are low through the lens of Dale’s pregnancy cravings, as if women with child don’t have it hard enough.

Peyton’s new haircut looks SO good that I didn’t even notice that it was a new cut until Ravi said something! On the other hand, it’s been five seasons and Liv’s wig is as terrible as ever.

Blaine eats a brain that has a  PhD in Information Science, and starts rattling off very specific, memorized facts about all his hostages. As a person who is a few weeks away from earning their Master in Library and Information Science I have to say…this is...not exactly how that works.

They couldn’t have given Quinta a scene partner with a reasonable height for her introduction scene? She’s practically craning her neck to look up at him, and the composition of the shot is so strange. I get that the point of the scene is that her character is underestimated, and perhaps the height differences were meant to show that, but it was distracting.

iZombie airs Thursdays at 9/8c on the CW.

Haley’s episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝

[natsubeatsrock]

The Rewrite of Fairy Tail: Part 16 (Lisanna)

Why keep Lisanna? 

I’ll be honest. Lisanna is a bit of a weird character to start the discussion of characters outside the Strongest Team with. It would make more sense in the minds of many to talk about other characters who have more of a direct impact on the series like Gajeel or Jellal. Maybe even start a discussion about Zeref as a character and antagonist. Not to mention her siblings who both get much more time in the spotlight than her. Heck, I haven't even talked about the Exceeds on the strongest team. So, technically, I really haven't finished discussing the Strongest Team. 

However, I want to start with a discussion of arguably the most controversial character in the series. About the only other character to draw as much ire from as many fans and haters of the series is Juvia, yet another character someone I'm sure was expected to talk about first. Believe me when I say that Juvia has far more fans and defenders than Lisanna. I can count on one hand the number of people who have actually defended Lisanna's return and/or existence besides myself and most of the people I'm thinking of also ship Nali. (Not that it necessarily matters.) 

The most important thing to note about the question at hand is that it isn't a matter of if Lisanna should or shouldn't return, as normally is the case. The issue I'm addressing is why Lisanna should be kept. In other words, the series was written and the decision was made to have Lisanna not remain dead. Why am I continuing to keep her return, which is a major problem for people who have gotten into Fairy Tail, as an element of the series? After all, I've argued for making major changes to other elements of the series seen as less problematic by fans and critics alike.

Thank goodness that keeping Lisanna isn't a terribly spontaneous choice for me to make. After all, one of the many things I am known for is defending both Lisanna and Nali from fandom criticism at large. If everything works properly, this will be posted on the three year anniversary of my giant post about Lisanna. I was bound to make this argument in some way, shape, or form. In fact, I started making the first draft of this post even before deciding to rewrite Fairy Tail. 

All that said, how bad was Lisanna's return? 

Now I know that many people who are even slightly familiar with my views on Nali may think I'm going to spend the rest of this post arguing that this was totally fine. But that's not really the case. I actually do think there are problems with Lisanna's return. 

The obvious problem with this moment is that this is the return of a character who was established as dead. If you haven't read my post regarding my thoughts on Lisanna, I said that this is one of the things about Mashima's writing that I'm not a fan of - him presenting characters as dead only to bring them back later on. I say his writing because this has happened in every long series that I've read from him and he's outright said this is something he enjoys doing. 

I feel like I need to make an important correction. I said that the upshot of doing this is that you can cause greater pain when you actually kill people off. After over a year of watching fake death after fake death, I feel like I should add in that this can only work if you're actually willing to kill people. If you don’t, it feels more like cheap emotional manipulation. Weird enough, since my post in 2016, he doubled down on his insistence that he didn’t want characters to die Fairy Tail.

Another big problem I have with the actual moment that no one seems to have brought up involving this moment involves the way this moment was explained. When we get to the chapter "Lisanna", we learn that Lisanna disappeared in front of Mirajane. We don't actually learn that until this specific moment. The fact that Mirajane and Elfman are even going to a tomb for Lisanna makes it weird to find out that she wasn't actually with them in the first place. 

But, of the times that a character has been presented as dead only to be brought back, I think this is one of, if not, the best versions of this trope within the series. Before Edolas, we were presented with the idea that there are two of the same people through Jellal and Mystogan. The arc begins by showing that things can be brought from Earthland to Edolas through Anima. In the anime, it's specifically stated that Lisanna's body wasn't left behind when we see actually her for the first time in Edolas. 

So enough elements were in place that the explanation that we got for Lisanna's death was possible. At the very least, there was enough in the series for the anime's director, Shinji Ishihara, to have originally planned to act as if she never died. That’s always been a weird element of that interview we always bring up when discussing whether or not Lisanna was forced back to life. Even if that was just his personal wish, that such an idea was seen as possible by the anime director leads me to believe her return isn’t as terrible as it’s often made to be.

“Okay, but what about the negative impact on character growth?  Isn't this a bad lesson for these guys?”

Only kind of. 

I want to hold off on talking about how Mirajane and Elfman were impacted by losing and gaining Lisanna in another post. This is an issue I hear a lot and it deserves more attention than a few sentences in a post here. The big issue that I can see is how it affects Natsu's character. Some people argue that real lost opportunity with this is that Natsu wasn't allowed to properly and completely mourn the loss of someone important to him.  

As someone whose favorite character is Natsu, likes Nali because of its impact on him and made an entire post about how bad Natsu is with handling loss, I can empathize with this argument. I can imagine what it would be like if Natsu actually did lose Lisanna forever but actually learned to let go of the pain it caused him and lived not to see other people die. This might be one of the best reasons I've heard not to like Lisanna's return. 

However, I think that this is just a symptom of Mashima not allowing Natsu to actually mourn throughout the series. This is a great example of that, but it's not the only example. The handling of Natsu's search for Igneel was bad. I don't discredit Natsu's feelings when he finally sees him in Tartarus arc or when he watches him die in. Again, this is why I’m making some of the changes that I’m making involving him. 

But, to be honest, I don’t think you fix this issue by keeping Lisanna dead. It’s not a bad or particularly unreasonable way to fix that issue. However, if Natsu has to learn that lesson, I’d personally have him learn that with Igneel. In a sense, I’ve personally always thought of this as a bit of a misdirect for Natsu. He thinks that since he found Lisanna, he can find Igneel. It makes the fact that he gets separated from him that much more painful. 

"But wait! Isn't it bad that they built Lisanna up, brought her back and did nothing with her?" 

Yeah... but no...? 

Yes, it's bad and disappointing that we know so much about Lisanna and she hasn't done a whole lot since her return. Just as we know a lot about other characters like Levy and the members of Crime Sorciere who have been castigated to the background. I would have loved to see Lisanna do a whole lot more than she has. I wrote a whole thing about wanting to see more of Lisanna and how fans perceive her because we don’t get as much about her as her siblings.

But was Lisanna really built up that much? 

In the manga, she almost exclusively shows up in flashbacks and is mentioned by characters up until we actually see her in “Fairy Hunting”, which is chapter 170. And the only people that seem to care about her before Levy tells Lucy about Lisanna in chapter 168 are her siblings, Natsu, Happy and Gildarts - people who, for the most part, would be most hurt by her death. No offense to the Strauss kids, but they're not the most important characters in the series anyways. 

In the anime, before Natsu and crew go to Edolas, she's only mentioned in like 5 or 6 episodes. She's an important character with her own actions in only 2 of them, both of which are episodes before the current events of Fairy Tail. One is based off a special chapter and another was mostly original content added to one chapter. Keep in mind that over the span of 79 episodes.

Again, that's not to say that we don't learn a whole lot from the few moments about what Lisanna could have been. At the very least, we know that she had an important bond with Natsu, which is reason enough to be disappointed at how little they interact throughout the series, even if you don't ship them. It would be cool to have Lisanna do more than just stick around the background a few times.

But I don’t think we were supposed to expect her to be some kind of hidden weapon for Fairy Tail. As if Mashima was holding back on developing a great character that would fundamentally change the series. Heck, in that exact same time span, Mystogan was built up to be a much more interesting character with more relevance to him and I don’t plan on doing much more with him than what we got in canon.

How I think a more relevant Lisanna looks...

...is something I’ll get to that when I talk about the Strauss siblings. (I still haven’t finished the first draft of that post.)

For now, though, I hope my mindset in handling characters outside of the main members of the Strongest Team is clear. I don’t intend to make Lisanna a character who is as important to the series as, say, Wendy or Gajeel. I want her to interact with other characters and have more moments to shine as a character. I want her to have an impact on characters like Juvia and especially Natsu, in light of what we know in canon. But I don’t think she should take much more of an elevated spot in canon than she already has because of those interactions.

I don’t think that the solution to making characters who were disappointing is either making them be infinitely more important than they were or cut them from the series. After all, the only way a character can be disappointing is if we had expectations for them to begin with. What I want to do is play with the expectations we may have had for characters in ways that make sense within the series universe. This shouldn't come with the addition of unnecessary importance or outright removal of their character.

While this is true for a number of other characters, I’m most terrified of how this affects my handling of Lisanna. Considering my obvious stakes in this, I could easily have planned to make her take up the same place Lucy took in the original for Natsu as a partner the instant she comes back. I don’t think that’s the right way to go about reworking their relationship considering what I want to do with the rewrite in general. I want to make that clear now in hopes that my intentions for this rewrite are clear to those who will inevitably disagree with my choices in changes.

Introduction | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Word and deed in the Unification Church – Rabbi A. James Rudin investigates

A VIEW OF THE UNIFICATION CHURCH

Presented by Rabbi A. James Rudin

Assistant National Director of Interreligious Affairs, The American Jewish Committee 

at the American Academy of Religion Convention

San Francisco, California, December 29, 1977

Even as the Unification Church has every right in our pluralistic society to present its claims within the religious marketplace of ideas, so do we have every right to examine and analyze those claims in the light of our own studies, experiences, and faith commitments. I deeply believe that a religious movement must be judged not only by what it teaches but also by what it does; the deed is just as important as the creed. The Unification Church is no exception.

My paper will thus examine two aspects of the Unification Church:

1) Its specific teachings about Jews and Judaism and

2) the impact and results of the Unification Church’s teachings upon a significant number of its members. [revealing testimonies below]

In my study, (“Jews and Judaism in Reverend Moon’s Divine Principle,” The American Jewish Committee, December 1976) I assert that “my systematic analysis of this 536-page document (Divine Principle) reveals an orientation of almost unrelieved hostility toward, the Jewish people, exemplified in pejorative language, stereotyped imagery, and sweeping accusations of collective sin and guilt. Whether he is discussing the ‘Israelites’ of the Hebrew Bible or the ‘Jews’ as referred to in writings of the New Testament period, Reverend Moon portrays their behavior as reprobate, their intention evil (often diabolical), and their religious mission as eclipsed. There are over thirty-six specific references in Divine Principle to the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible—every one of them pejorative.” Three examples citing collective faithlessness make the point: “The Israelites all fell into faithlessness” (p. 315), “All the Israelites centering on Moses fell into faithlessness” (p. 319), and “The Israelites repeatedly fell into faithlessness” (p. 343). (Emphasis added)

Unification Church supporters claim that such references actually reflect the Hebrew Bible and present a fair description of early Israelite communal life. For me, it is a limp and highly defensive argument. In all cases of alleged Israelite errors and stubbornness, the hope of redemption and atonement was always present. The Hebrew Bible credits the people with the ability to repent. Divine Principle seeks to discredit the ancient Israelites in order to transfer God’s heritage to another people. Incidentally, the words “faithless” and “faithlessness” nowhere appear in the Hebrew Bible.

In similar fashion, Divine Principle records some sixty-five specific examples and references reflecting the attitudes and behavior of the Jewish people towards Jesus and its role in his crucifixion—again, every one of them is hostile and anti-Jewish. A few examples will suffice: “…due to the Jewish people’s disbelief in Jesus, all were destined to hell” (p. 146), …“we can see that Jesus’ crucifixion was the result of the ignorance and disbelief of the Jewish people…” (p. 145),  “As a matter of fact, Satan confronted Jesus, working through the Jewish people, centering on the chief priests and scribes who had fallen faithless, and especially through Judas Iscariot, the disciple who had betrayed Jesus” (p. 357), “Nevertheless, due to the Jewish people’s rebellion against him, the physical body of Jesus was delivered into the hands of Satan as the condition of ransom for the restoration of the Jews and the whole of mankind back to God’s bosom; his body was invaded by Satan” (p. 510). The last two statements, linking the Jews to Satan, go beyond even the infamous deicide charge—“Christ killer”—that has been hurled for so long against the Jewish people.

Apologists for the Unification Church claim that the Divine Principle passages dealing with this controversial subject have only indicted the “Jewish priests and leaders,” not the people. Yet the record speaks otherwise: the “Jewish people” in their collectivity are implicated time and time again in Divine Principle. The four examples cited here are illustrative of many other selections.

The anti-Jewish thrust of this theological document carries forth into an interpretation of Jewish history and of the current status of Jews and Judaism. There are nearly thirty such references and all are hostile, generally reflecting the worst aspects of traditional Christian displacement theology, and viewing the persecution of the Jews across the ages as punishment for their sins. Thus “Due to the Israelites’ faithlessness, the Jewish nation was destroyed” (p. 431), “God’s heritage has been taken, away from the Jewish people” (p. 519), and the “chosen nation of Israel has been punished for the sin of rejecting Jesus and crucifying Him” (p. 226). Reverend Moon brings the readers up to modern times:

Jesus came as the Messiah; but due to the disbelief of, and persecution by the people he was crucified. Since then the Jews have lost their qualification as the chosen people and have been scattered, suffering persecution through the present day. (p. 147)

Indeed, Moon declared in 1971 [in Master Speaks on February 14, 1974], “By killing one man, Jesus, the Jewish people had to suffer for 2,000 years. Countless numbers of people have been slaughtered. During the second World War, six million people were slaughtered to cleanse all the sins of the Jewish people from the time of Jesus,” In Moon’s linkage of the Nazi holocaust to the Jewish rejection of Jesus we have the total obscenity, the wicked result of a system of indemnity gone wild. This statement is a murderous update of the ancient malevolent deicide charge.

But there is more. Last December, the New York Times carried a full page advertisement signed by Reverend Moon in which Moon notes that if only the Jews had been members of the Unification Church they would have been spared Hitler’s actions. So, even in their death, the 6,000,000 slaughtered Jews are treated as theological pawns to be moved about on a Unification Church chessboard.

Thus, in Divine Principle and in other Unification Church documents, we are confronted with over 130 examples of an unrelenting litany of anti-Jewish teachings. Nowhere in Divine Principle does Reverend Moon acknowledge the continuing validity and authenticity of Jews and Judaism. From Abraham until the present day, Jews are seen as a people devoid of any genuine faith and spiritual qualities. “The inner contents are corrupt” (p. 532), Moon says of Judaism. He depicts the Jewish people as collectively responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus as allies of Satan. Jews have been replaced by a “second Israel” (who, interestingly enough, must soon be replaced by the “third Israel,” the followers of Reverend Moon). Furthermore, the Jews have lost God’s “heritage” and are still being “punished” for their many sins. The Unification Church’s basic teaching document is a feculent breeding ground for fostering and fomenting anti-Semitism.

The Unification Church’s response to my charges of anti-Semitism blandly noted that “Because there are almost no Jews in Korea, there was no danger of a careless phrase (sic!) abetting anti-Semitism as it might in other countries…” I believe I have shown that the anti-Semitism in Divine Principle is more than a “careless phrase,” and a total insensitivity to the Jewish people is patently clear in this tepid defense. Apparently it is all right to malign a group that does not dwell in one’s midst.

One must ask why the Unification Church has the need to transmit such hostility and anti-Semitism. In its announced attempt to build a new religious order, the Church states that “When a brighter light appears, the mission of the old one fades. Today’s religions have failed to lead the present generation out of the dark valley of death into the radiance of life, so there must now come a new truth that can shed a new light.” (p. 10). But as a student of religious history, and as a Jew, I must ask “What does the Unification Church intend to do, first, in a theological way and, then, in a political way with those religious communities who have seen, the “brighter light” but who have chosen to remain faithful to their “mission of the old”? Historically, Jews and Judaism have often stood alone against many of the world’s “brighter lights,” and many times the price for such action was death. That is why I, unlike some other observers of the Unification Church, am appalled and deeply concerned about the extant anti-Semitism in the Church’s teachings. Although it claims to wish to unite the human family in love and truth, the Unification Church continues to transmit in its sacred text and in other writings the same teachings about Jews and Judaism that have historically resulted in expulsions, pogroms, and murder.

Surely, we have the right to demand that the Unification Church, which professes a “New Adam,” a new life, not teach the same pathological untruths that earlier forms of Christianity did. If the Unification Church truly seeks to heal the human family, then its first obligation is to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism in all its forms. What is needed now is a complete revision of Divine Principle that eliminates every vestige of anti-Jewish teaching. No religion can bring harmony and peace to the world if its own soul is corrupted and filled with the poison of anti-Semitism.

And what about the non-Jewish world that does not accept the “new light” of the Unification Church mission? Does the Unification Church, which uses the principle of religious pluralism to justify its right to exist itself, allow for pluralism of belief? The statements of Reverend Moon are not encouraging. In an article in the New York Daily News of November 30, 1975, it is reported that Reverend Moon made the following statement at a private gathering:

So from this time [of peak] every people and organization that goes against the Unification Church will gradually come down or drastically come down and die. Many people will die—those who go against our movement. [Sun Myung Moon, Master Speaks February 14, 1974]

So much for the creed of the Unification Church; now let us look at the deed. What is the impact of the teachings of the Church on its members? How are the ideals of improving the world, of uniting mankind, carried out in the concrete actions of the Church and its followers?

I am convinced that the Unification Church uses dishonest recruiting techniques, hiding behind nearly seventy front groups, of which “Collegiate Association for the Research of Principle,” “Creative Community Project,” and “New Education Development Systems, Inc.” are three of the best known. Recruiters never identify themselves with Reverend Moon or the Unification Church until the potential member has already made a commitment. By the time the recruit realizes what he is really involved in, he is often so confused and disoriented from intensive weekend retreats, long seminars, sleeplessness, constant frenzied activity which is tightly supervised, non-nutritious food, and “love-bombing” that he may not have the will or strength to refute the demands of the group at that point. The skillful Unification Church members play on the recruit’s guilt, forcing him to renounce and remove himself from his past life, including job, school, and family. They weaken his identity, then, with strong guilt-oriented and approval-oriented sanctions, remake his identity according to Unification Church theology and role models.

After his initiation the new recruit is frequently put to work in what is called a “Mobile Fund-Raising Team [MFT].” He may work up to 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, collecting funds from the public, carrying out what is termed “heavenly deception” upon a generous and unsuspecting public. The new Unification Church member usually lies by stating that the collected funds are for various social welfare projects when, in fact, the large amounts of money go directly to Reverend Moon’s New York City bank to support the Church’s many real estate and media operations. Much of it goes also to support an increasingly luxurious life style for Reverend Moon and his chief aides, while the new Church members live in almost abject poverty, without privacy, often, without adequate medical or dental care, and without proper nourishment. Berkeley psychologist, Dr. Margaret Singer, has interviewed over 250 former Unification Church members. Her most shocking finding was the “psychological turning off of the hormonal process.” She has seen “repeated cases of menstruation ceasing in women and of men’s beards ceasing to grow.” Dr. Singer concludes: “These young adults have narrowed down their thought processes, constricted their vocabulary …and wouldn’t let their negative feelings show because of extreme pressure from those around them.”

The Unification Church’s theology and ideology has produced some disturbing actions among its members. Ellen Galligan remembers her MFT speeding across Michigan on a remote highway where one might pass another vehicle perhaps only once an hour. One early morning they passed an accident and they saw a “person flagging us down. Another man was standing there with blood all over his face. Our driver woke up our team leader, who said, ‘Don’t stop. Keep on going.’ You see we had to drive the whole night to get to the city the next morning for fund raising, and it was more important to keep going. There was never any concern about other people. I guess we just considered it was indemnity for salvation for them.”

In case after case, it is clear that the Unification Church’s zealous preoccupation with raising money transcends every other activity, even one of stopping on a lonely highway to assist an injured person.

Tony Gillard, a former Church member, “worked the ghettos. I would go in a migrant camp and take the last dollar from a poor family,” he says. “I did the same thing on Indian reservations.” Gillard, a black, was once brought before Rev. Moon for special praise because of his outstanding fund raising ability. “The Unification Church had its ‘house n*gger’”, Gillard notes, and he now considers the Church racist.

The record of forced separations of parents from children, monitored telephone conversations, intercepted mail, and even the threat of violence is now too well documented over and over again by former Church members to be dismissed as the usual “sour grapes” that any former group member may feel. The following story has been repeated by other Church members.

A CARP leader became involved in a serious automobile accident because of sheer fatigue (a common condition among many members). Faced with the possible loss of his legs and a serious operation, the Unification Church “Family” felt it could no longer tend to the young man’s needs. The Church called his parents, the “agents of Satan,” and they came to help their son. The Unification Church’s theology of love and caring apparently does not translate itself into the real world of accidents, illnesses, and medical operations.

Why do I deal with specific names and cases? What do they have to do with the cosmic theological claims of the Unification Church? I believe a clear pattern has emerged that shows the Unification Church, in its actual practice, to be an organization that is obsessed with raising money by means of “heavenly deception”, and through the efforts of thousands of drone-like members.

Earlier in this paper I called for the Unification Church to completely revise all its teaching materials in order to eradicate every vestige of anti-Semitism. I have two additional proposals to make. I urge that the Unification Church open its financial records to the general public and submit them to an independent audit so that the Church’s members, as well as others, can clearly learn how the Unification Church’s funds are raised and how they are spent. Only in this way can it begin to gain the credibility it so obviously and desperately seeks. Only in this way can the serious questions of fiscal integrity be resolved. If the Unification Church seeks to participate in our pluralistic religious society, these basic steps of openness and candor are absolutely necessary. Anything less than total public disclosure will only fan the flames of doubt and suspicion, and will prevent the Unification Church from gaining the sense of public legitimacy it craves.

I would also urge that a high level “blue ribbon” commission be appointed to investigate fully the many charges of human rights violations carried out by the Unification Church against its members. Such an independent commission would be composed of academic, legal, medical, and religious leaders who would undertake a comprehensive investigation of the Unification Church’s recruiting and educational methods and practices, as well as the Church’s treatment of its members. Even as we profess our deep commitment to the cause of human rights throughout the world, so, too, we must be just as vigorous in our own land in this struggle. If the Unification Church is, in fact, violating the human rights of any of its members, and if it is using coercive measures, then immediate legal remedial steps must be taken. If the alleged violations are not taking place, then I would be among the first to call for a cessation of the charges and counter-charges that are currently swirling about the Unification Church. Such charges, if false, do a grave disservice to all parties concerned.

As I indicated earlier, the Unification Church is free to proclaim its version of religious truth. It is free to press its claims and its doctrines. It is not free, however, in our society to perpetuate and transmit any form of anti-Semitism to its members. That grotesque pollution of the human spirit will continue to erode the Unification Church’s foundation. It is also not free to collect sums of money in America without any public accountability or disclosure. Such a closed system as currently practiced runs counter to the spirit of our open, and pluralistic society. Finally, the Unification Church is not free to violate the human rights of any potential or actual members. This is totally unacceptable, and it flies in the face of the Church’s professed doctrine of justice, love, and compassion, thus undermining the theological basis of the Church,

In Divine Principle we read: “Today’s religions have failed to lead the present generation out of the dark valley of death into the radiance of life, so there must now come a new truth that can shed a new light.” (p.10) That is the claim of the Unification Church, but I am deeply convinced that no new truth can emerge from a group whose teachings foster anti-Semitism, whose financial dealings are hidden from public view, and whose methods and style violate the human rights of others.

Sun Myung Moon:

“Our motto this time is for each of the fundraising teams to earn $12,000.00 a month, a high goal....If I mobilize 1,000 members, each earning $10,000.00, then we will make three million dollars a month, which is a usable sum. I will train the fund-raising team to make at least $3,000.00. When I mobilize 10,000 members, it means $30 million in a month. Then we can buy Pan American Airlines, and the Empire State Building. We shall buy Ford Motor Company, not to speak of the Empire State Building. That’s possible. …

In order for us to be able to do this would you prefer to sleep seven hours instead of six? (No.) We are used to sleeping, for instance, six hours. Would you prefer to sleep for seven hours or five hours? (Five.) Would you prefer to sleep four hours or five? (Four.) Would your prefer to go to work without sleeping? (Without sleeping.) I don’t want you to die so I will let you sleep barely enough to sustain your life.”

From MS-452, 9/22/74, Master Speaks, Where We Are Situated Now. Tarrytown, New York, September 22, 1974,

[skamfairy]

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - thoughts after reading it for the first time

hello pals, well damn, it’s officially been about two days probably three, after i finished ootp because I needed to process the hell out of it before i could discuss it sjhshjhjsa otherwise i would have just spent this whole post screaming WHYYYY sahjhasj so lets do this

how in the world did this book make my love for harry GROW EVEN MORE??? i didn’t think that was possible but here we are. We really see in this how everything is effecting him mentally and it’s incredibly heartbreaking and realistic. i love him so much and the whole time reading this i just wanted to hug the poor boy :(( 

OKAY THE ORDER i love the order. they are so cool and different and really fun to read. like the first part of the book shows them all engaging with each other and their dynamic so well, and it’s soooo fun to see. one of my fave scenes still remains to be mrs weasley and sirius arguing over how to raise harry sjhashjshjhsa that was just sajhsahjhjas i love seeing all these people who care about harry interact it’s really fun to read. ALSO tonks is SO COOL

alright alright, i should probably acknowledge the elephant before i continue otherwise the rest of this is gonna be me in denial asjhhajs SIRIUS :(( SIRIUS. i really really really love this character you guys, he’s everything i have wanted since the moment i met harry. all i asked for was someone who could love him and support him, someone harry could talk to and trust. someone who loved harry like a parent and harry could go to for love and comfort like a parent. and then we finally got sirius.  This book really made me see the dynamic between sirius and harry, crystal clear. it showed how alike they are. and when harry was angry, it was like sirius was the only one who understood that anger cos he felt it too !!. harry had someone who understood him, loved him and would do anything for him. he finally had a parent.  So, i ask you this, WHY WOULD THEY JUST TAKE THIS AWAY FROM ME AND HARRY????? HUH??? H U H?? IM SO MAD YOU GUYS IT’S BEEN DAYS AND IM STILL MAD AND SAD BUT LIKE NOW IM MOSTLY MAD. it’s not fucking fair it’s not. and the ending when harry finds that mirror that would have saved sirius?????? my heart literally died. IT DIED. they didn’t even get a proper moment to really be together you know? like they couldn’t talk and see each other the way they wanted to because harry was so worried about losing him. and now it’s just. it’s over. and it happened so suddenly it just,,,,he was there and then he wasn’t. STAB ME. the impact of this was huge and i can’t explain the kind of emotion it invoked in me. it was so intense and that alone is one of the reasons i absolutely adored this book. 

on a nicer note, i absolutely love Luna Lovegood. She is such a good character, ever time she appeared i would instantly smile or get excited, like she brings something so different and exciting to the story. she’s super different to them all and because of that they judge her at first but she continuously turns out to have so much wisdom and help to give if they just listen to her. WHAT I REALLY LOVE THO, is how throughout the whole book we see harry be completely discredited by the ministry and because of that no one believes him, and it’s incredibly frustrating and isolating. but then we see that mirrored in luna. like harry, she’s also discredited by everyone who knows her, so much that they call her “looney” lovegood. and because of that, no one takes anything she says seriously, just like harry about voldemort. but we see that when we do take her seriously, what she says is helpful. I especially love this because at the end when harry is empty and grieving, he desperately seeks something that could give him that tiny shred of hope or comfort that he desires. he even seeks out nick the ghost, but then in the end; the person who is able to understand how he feels the most, is the only other person that has been just as discredited as him. and it’s luna who is able to give him the comfort he needs. and i really really love that. it’s so perfect to me. and i see luna as such an important character i better see MUCH MORE OF HER PLEASE

umbridge can go to hell

I LOVED DUMBLEDORE’S ARMY !!!!! that was incredible and the room of requirment !!!! ahhhhhh i love. it was so cool to see harry accept his talent for defence against the dark arts, and to use that to rebel against umbridge and teach his peers. i really love how at the end the people who go to harry to help are who harry sees as the people in the DA he’d want help from the least, which makes them all unlikely heroes but they are all so incredible. like i adore these kids you guys. i would do anything for them. i can’t wait to see more of them ahhhhhh

as always the twins were AMAZING i love them so much they really are two of my ultimate fave characters in ANYTHING EVER like i would literally do anything for them. I BETTER still see them in the next book a lot even tho they aren’t in school anymore. pls pls pls gimme my fred and george content 

i should probably acknowledge cho because harry’s first experience at dating was super amusing and tiring but it feels like that was a lifetime ago. i really liked how they showed that tho. like they were both more into the idea of each other than the real thing and that’s often what a first crush is. i really liked how this was depicted. 

asbhjjbhdsajhbdsahb HAGRIDS GIANT LITTLE BROTHER i just have to say that i adored this sjhaahjshjsa it was so fun among the angst thank you hjshjsajhas

Okay that ending was incredible but more than anything, the scene in dumbledores office and the PROPHECY was so so so good. not so much for the info dump but more for the way we saw the relationship dynamic between the two and the feelings it gave me. like i really felt what harry was feeling and the fact that i was able to feel that is amazing to me. that’s what i want out of books and this whole book, but especially that scene did that for me. the prophecy is holyyyyy fuck. it breaks my heart. harry finds out on the night when his godfather died trying to save him, that the reason his parents died was because voldemort wanted to kill him. it’s horrible. but also i find it so interesting how it could have easily been neville (which im also proud of because i kept asking my friend questions about why neville and harry are SO SIMILAR *flips hair* im that good) but voldemort CHOSE THE HALF BLOOD  which can i just say, is so contradictory to voldemorts entire motive of this war. to keep the wizard world pure blood only; but his greatest enemy is the half blood like him. not the pure blood.  like dude you’re admitting the half blood is the only wizard strong enough to beat you soooooooooo  i also really wanna learn more about this and why he chose harry like AHHHHHHHHH IM GOING CRAZY WITH FEELINGS AND THOUGHTS I CAN’T BELIEVE I ONLY HAVE TWO BOOKS LEFT

OH OH OH i almost forgot !!!! dumbledore continues to talk about snape like he’s the greatest thing since a beard comb and it’s so frustrating. especially when harry and i are fucking grieving because they keep killing off the people we love and not asshole bullies like snape. like ugh CAN HE STOP whats his deal??? like we know he was bullied (to be fair apparently he also fucked with james back) but how does that justify him literally being a DEATH EATER??? speaking of death eaters, i hope they all die painful deaths, especially bellatrix. she’s disgusting. BUT I DIGRESS, i guess i don’t know how to feel about snape tho. idk. i hate him just like harry does don’t get me wrong. but im so CONFUSED like what is he playing at?? did he tell sirius where harry was going to help or to make sure sirius would be there so his friends can kill him? like im sorry but i don’t trust him. idk guys im just WHATS THE POINT OF THIS DUDE?? 

okay so i probably missed a lot of stuff cos there is way too much in this to cover, and if i missed something you really want my opinion on please shoot me an ask, but overall i LOVE this book. i think it’s my favourite one so far I SAY THAT ABOUT ALL OF THEM but you can’t blame me. they are all SO SO SO GOOD AHHHHHH help me i’m so obsessed. but seriously this book invoked emotions in me i didn’t know i possessed. I cried so so so much in this over so many different things and i feel like i have a connection with these characters i’m not entirely sure how to explain. i just really love them and this story and im hurting right now, but i really hope harry will find happiness it’s just SO UNFAIR sdhhjashjas im sorry im okay im okay. im gonna start the next one soon hopefully knowing i’m grieving with harry will help ashhjas.  ALSO part of the pain of this, was when sirius died i couldn’t stop reading to react to it because i was so sure it wasn’t real and that he’d come back because HOW COULD IT BE REAL? and that’s exactly how harry felt so once again, i love how this story makes me truly feel and see things like harry i love that i’m able to connect to it like that and it’s a massive reason why i love this as much as i do AHHHH <3 

[sleemo]

The All-Stars of ‘Star Wars’

Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver and their “Last Jedi” comrades discuss the difficulties of new relationships, the joys of villainy and those porgs. — The New York Times | Dec 8, 2017

LOS ANGELES — While they tell tales of Death Stars and daddy issues, the “Star Wars” movies are also stories about duality: how goodness and evil can coexist — on the same planet or inside the same person — and what happens when they collide on an intergalactic scale.

These themes are revisited once again in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” the eighth episode in the science-fiction saga that George Lucas started in 1977. “The Last Jedi,” which opens on Dec. 15, is the first to be written and directed by Rian Johnson (“Brick,” “Looper”). It follows the resounding success of “The Force Awakens,” directed by J. J. Abrams in 2015, about two young heroes, a scavenger named Rey (Daisy Ridley) and a renegade stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega), caught up in the search for Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill).

The new film continues where “The Force Awakens” left off, as Rey and Luke are about to meet on the planet Ahch-To, and it promises a further exploration of their relationship to the sullen evildoer Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and his nefarious master, Snoke (Andy Serkis). It also features the final performance in the series from Carrie Fisher, who played Leia and who died last December.

At a running time of some two and a half hours, “The Last Jedi” continues the adventures of Finn and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and their adversaries Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie) and General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson). Somehow it finds room for the new characters Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) and Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern), and a wide-eyed alien species called porgs.

Like the film they made, the creator and cast of “The Last Jedi” can encompass a spectrum of darkness and light, seriousness and silliness, all in the same conversation. Just days before the movie’s opening, they gathered for what felt at times like a solemn high-school graduation and, at other times, like its after-party.

Here, Mr. Johnson, Ms. Ridley, Mr. Boyega, Mr. Hamill, Mr. Driver, Mr. Serkis, Mr. Isaac, Ms. Christie, Mr. Gleeson, Ms. Tran and Ms. Dern discuss their work on “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and some of the questions it raises. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Audiences have a strong sense of what they think a “Star Wars” film should look and feel like. But Rian, you make films that are personal and idiosyncratic. How do you do that in a “Star Wars” movie?

RIAN JOHNSON I don’t think you try to. It would be bad news if you came into this saying, “How do I make this mine?” You’re just desperately trying to make a good “Star Wars” movie — to me that means that it’s a balance between opera and bubble gum. It should make you come out of the theater and feel like you’re 10 years old, and want to grab your spaceships and start flying around. On top of everything else.

For the veterans of “The Force Awakens” —

DAISY RIDLEY I’m not a fan of the word “veteran.” We did one movie! How about actors?

JOHNSON Sophomores.

As you make your way through Star Wars High —

OSCAR ISAAC I was so high the whole time. [Laughter]

— there are actors you were paired with and worked with closely on the last film. What was it like to have those relationships scrambled and rearranged on “The Last Jedi”?

ISAAC What Rian did so well was that he asked the really tough questions. Not only of the characters, but also about the themes that “Star Wars” brings up. What is to be a Jedi? What is it to be a hero? What is it to be, in my case, a hotshot pilot? And then try to find the opposite of that — the hardest thing, the thing that’s furthest away, and have that be what the character has to deal with. Even in pairing the characters, he’s taking away what you know, and making you as uncomfortable as possible.

Was it bittersweet to have Finn and Rey, our heroes from “The Force Awakens,” split up?

JOHN BOYEGA It was horrible when I read the script for the first time and I wasn’t with her. We auditioned together. We went through this whole experience together. To be split apart was scary for me. But then I understood that is something that we could draw from — something that Finn really feels, and Rey really feels. And then I was like, “Oh! Rian does know what he’s doing.” [Laughter]

RIDLEY I felt the same. When I read the script, I didn’t cry right away. I was like, “Wobble, wobble, wobble, [shaky voice] I’m probably going to cry and I need to see Rian.” Then I went into Rian’s office and I was crying my eyes out. I’m not great with new people. I think Mark can attest to that. [Silence, then laughter]

ADAM DRIVER No one says, “No, you’re great!” Everyone else is like, “Yeah.”

RIDLEY I find it really difficult to relax. And then that’s influencing someone else’s performance. You don’t want to be the thing that’s holding something back, when there’s me, going, [awkwardly] “So … how’d you get into all this?” Mark and I were lucky enough to have proper rehearsal time, and then we could talk through everything with Rian. It ended up feeling great, but it was nerve-racking.

We were just getting to see the relationship between Luke and Rey before the curtain came down on Episode VII. In Episode VIII, were you able to pick up where you left off?

MARK HAMILL We had no relationship in VII. It’s left up to the audience to decide if he knows who she is. They established earlier that I had a telepathic ability with my sister — would I know what’s going on now? Would I know I lost my best friend? That’s all left up to the audience, and that’s in the great tradition of the cliffhangers that inspired George in the first place. “Continued next week.” Two years, in this case. But don’t worry, it’s only five months until the next one. [Rolls eyes] Great marketing there, Disney. [Laughter] What are they going to do, fire me?

LAURA DERN Luke Skywalker, ladies and gentlemen. That’s why they titled it “The Last Jedi.”

RIDLEY When I meet people I’m not like [gasps]. [Mr. Hamill pretends to pout, as Ms. Dern playfully rubs his back in comfort.] I’m more impressed with a human than a reputation. To me, I was working with Mark, I wasn’t working with Luke. I was nervous because I was working with a new person and I wanted to do my best, and I wanted the scenes to go well. Luke is regarded in this way, and Rey does understand that. But Rey, on a very human level, is asking something of Luke: “I need some advice here.” We were able to pick up right where we left off, chronologically, and it worked very well.

Is it uniquely satisfying to play a villain in a “Star Wars” movie, where you get to be especially villainous?

DOMHNALL GLEESON It was a delightful surprise, having people come up to me after “The Force Awakens” and say, “You were so bad in that movie.” It meant a lot to me. [Laughter]

GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE It’s always exciting to be bad, isn’t it? It’s even more exciting to be bad as your job. And in a context where it doesn’t impact human lives. It’s particularly resonant at the moment, the idea of, what is a better use of human energy: to serve the group or to serve the individual?

Andy, you play Supreme Leader Snoke, one of your many motion-capture characters, so there’s a whole other layer to your performance.

ANDY SERKIS There’s a gold lamé layer. The Supreme Leader as Hugh Hefner, that’s something that I particularly grabbed onto. The luxuriousness of it all. The thing about Snoke is, leaders are fearful people, because when you’re in a position of maximum power, you can only lose power. And that fear drives nearly all decisions. That fear then makes you aggressive. It makes you want to destroy others. It makes you unable to see or care about others. But when you’re creating a villain character, it’s about humanizing — there’s something important in the task of creating Snoke to find his vulnerability, because that makes him even more dangerous and despicable.

Adam, I wouldn’t say that Kylo Ren is strictly an evil person, even though we’ve seen him do terrible things. Where does he come from for you?

DRIVER The best way I can describe it is, it’s like a conversation that we started with J. J. and it continues through this film. It was less interesting to think of him as pure evil, because I don’t really know what that is. He’s someone who thinks he’s right, more than he thinks what he’s doing is bad. When I meet people who are unable to hear the other side, who not only think they’re right but they’re justified, then there’s no end to what they would do to make sure that their side wins. To me, that’s more dangerous, because the boundaries are limitless. As opposed to just being evil, that seems like it can’t sustain itself. When you feel morally justified, that feels more long-lasting and more unpredictable.

He has a lot of emotional conflict but you seem pretty even-keeled. Am I reading you correctly?

DRIVER No. [Laughter] I’m a rational person. And then I killed my father. [Laughter]

This is the first “Star Wars” movie for Kelly Marie Tran and Laura Dern. What is it like to be initiated into this franchise?

KELLY MARIE TRAN It is both horrifying and amazing. Obviously, I was intimidated, but I never felt intimidated, personally, in Regina George fashion. Every single person sitting here was honest and open. I was allowed to go to set when I wasn’t working and watch them perform. I felt like I was in this epic acting school that I didn’t have to pay for. Someone just gave me the key.

DERN I have to discredit you, Daisy, with your comments about yourself [not being great with new people]. When my daughter came to set, she said, “Oh my God, Mom, do you think we get to see Rey?” I was like, “Oh, we don’t want to bother people.” And then your trailer door opened, and you went, [singing to the “Jurassic Park” theme] “Laura Der-rrrr-rrn, Laura Der-rrrr-rrn.” [Laughter] My daughter was like, “She’s the most welcoming person.”

HAMILL Another royalty for John Williams.

How do you make a movie that finds time to provide moments for every one of these actors?

JOHNSON That’s part of the reason that this movie is a little longer than all the others.

ISAAC He made sure everyone gets to cry.

JOHNSON “Star Wars” is on the public stage in a way that nothing else is. But even on a big scary thing like this, every single one of these people was excited to step outside their comfort zones, to go to places that were really interesting but not necessarily easy.

HAMILL Like the top of Skellig Michael [the Irish island whose steep, precarious mountains are used as the setting for Ahch-To].

JOHNSON I offered to carry you on my back, Yoda-style, but you didn’t trust my legs.

HAMILL Really, when I read VII, I said, “Oh, they’ll do it with green screens and J. J. will be up the road — I’ll be done by lunch.” Little did I know, I’ll suffer for your art, kid.

JOHNSON In the edit room, you get to a point where you realize, ah, we could make the movie shorter but we’d have to give somebody short shrift, and we’re not going to do that because every one of these guys has an amazing journey in the movie.

Is there a character, other than your own, that you wish you’d gotten to play in this film?

ISAAC What Adam does in this movie is insane. It’s incredible. [Mr. Driver begins looking around awkwardly, as if searching for a way to escape the room.] It’s so wild and unpredictable and very magnetic. It made me very jealous.

BOYEGA I have to second that. I was blown away by the conflict and the change in the character arc. And the fights.

ISAAC Oh, the fights. The beautiful fights.

BOYEGA It reminds me, as a guy, of the transition from a boy to a man, learning how to maintain a certain type of energy that you have and choosing the way you let it free. That’s what he struggles with.

Who here got to meet the porgs?

RIDLEY I got to meet the porgs, but also, I’ve gotten about 300 questions about the porgs. What’s the big deal about porgs? They wouldn’t even be able to fly. Their body-to-wing ratio is like a chicken. They can’t!

DERN The more I went on about how adorable they are — it was like looking into the eyes of E. T., I loved those eyes so much — Oscar only continued to talk about different recipes.

ISAAC Porgs with roasted turnips. Glazed porg.

What would you like to see happen to your characters in Episode IX? Do you want to have that much influence over them?

ISAAC Sorry, I was still talking about porg recipes.

JOHNSON It depends on who survives at this point.

GLEESON I only have a small part to play in all this, but if I had decided what I was going to do, from the last one to the next one, it wouldn’t have been nearly as surprising as what Rian came up with it.

ISAAC It’s amazing to think about giving up that feeling of control. You have to just be open and see what’s next.

[uomo-accattivante]

LOS ANGELES — While they tell tales of Death Stars and daddy issues, the “Star Wars” movies are also stories about duality: how goodness and evil can coexist — on the same planet or inside the same person — and what happens when they collide on an intergalactic scale.

These themes are revisited once again in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” the eighth episode in the science-fiction saga that George Lucas started in 1977. “The Last Jedi,” which opens on Dec. 15, is the first to be written and directed by Rian Johnson(“Brick,” “Looper”). It follows the resounding success of “The Force Awakens,” directed by J. J. Abrams in 2015, about two young heroes, a scavenger named Rey (Daisy Ridley) and a renegade stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega), caught up in the search for Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill).

The new film continues where “The Force Awakens” left off, as Rey and Luke are about to meet on the planet Ahch-To, and it promises a further exploration of their relationship to the sullen evildoer Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and his nefarious master, Snoke (Andy Serkis). It also features the final performance in the series from Carrie Fisher, who played Leia and who died last December.

At a running time of some two and a half hours, “The Last Jedi” continues the adventures of Finn and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and their adversaries Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie) and General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson). Somehow it finds room for the new characters Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) and Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern), and a wide-eyed alien species called porgs.

Like the film they made, the creator and cast of “The Last Jedi” can encompass a spectrum of darkness and light, seriousness and silliness, all in the same conversation. Just days before the movie’s opening, they gathered for what felt at times like a solemn high-school graduation and, at other times, like its after-party.

Here, Mr. Johnson, Ms. Ridley, Mr. Boyega, Mr. Hamill, Mr. Driver, Mr. Serkis, Mr. Isaac, Ms. Christie, Mr. Gleeson, Ms. Tran and Ms. Dern discuss their work on “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and some of the questions it raises. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Audiences have a strong sense of what they think a “Star Wars” film should look and feel like. But Rian, you make films that are personal and idiosyncratic. How do you do that in a “Star Wars” movie?

RIAN JOHNSON I don’t think you try to. It would be bad news if you came into this saying, “How do I make this mine?” You’re just desperately trying to make a good “Star Wars” movie — to me that means that it’s a balance between opera and bubble gum. It should make you come out of the theater and feel like you’re 10 years old, and want to grab your spaceships and start flying around. On top of everything else.

For the veterans of “The Force Awakens” —

DAISY RIDLEY I’m not a fan of the word “veteran.” We did one movie! How about actors?

JOHNSON Sophomores.

As you make your way through Star Wars High —

OSCAR ISAAC I was so high the whole time. [Laughter]

— there are actors you were paired with and worked with closely on the last film. What was it like to have those relationships scrambled and rearranged on “The Last Jedi”?

ISAAC What Rian did so well was that he asked the really tough questions. Not only of the characters, but also about the themes that “Star Wars” brings up. What is to be a Jedi? What is it to be a hero? What is it to be, in my case, a hotshot pilot? And then try to find the opposite of that — the hardest thing, the thing that’s furthest away, and have that be what the character has to deal with. Even in pairing the characters, he’s taking away what you know, and making you as uncomfortable as possible.

Was it bittersweet to have Finn and Rey, our heroes from “The Force Awakens,” split up?

JOHN BOYEGA It was horrible when I read the script for the first time and I wasn’t with her. We auditioned together. We went through this whole experience together. To be split apart was scary for me. But then I understood that is something that we could draw from — something that Finn really feels, and Rey really feels. And then I was like, “Oh! Rian does know what he’s doing.” [Laughter]

RIDLEY I felt the same. When I read the script, I didn’t cry right away. I was like, “Wobble, wobble, wobble, [shaky voice] I’m probably going to cry and I need to see Rian.” Then I went into Rian’s office and I was crying my eyes out. I’m not great with new people. I think Mark can attest to that. [Silence, then laughter]

ADAM DRIVER No one says, “No, you’re great!” Everyone else is like, “Yeah.”

RIDLEY I find it really difficult to relax. And then that’s influencing someone else’s performance. You don’t want to be the thing that’s holding something back, when there’s me, going, [awkwardly] “So … how’d you get into all this?” Mark and I were lucky enough to have proper rehearsal time, and then we could talk through everything with Rian. It ended up feeling great, but it was nerve-racking.

We were just getting to see the relationship between Luke and Rey before the curtain came down on Episode VII. In Episode VIII, were you able to pick up where you left off?

MARK HAMILL We had no relationship in VII. It’s left up to the audience to decide if he knows who she is. They established earlier that I had a telepathic ability with my sister — would I know what’s going on now? Would I know I lost my best friend? That’s all left up to the audience, and that’s in the great tradition of the cliffhangers that inspired George in the first place. “Continued next week.” Two years, in this case. But don’t worry, it’s only five months until the next one. [Rolls eyes] Great marketing there, Disney. [Laughter] What are they going to do, fire me?

LAURA DERN Luke Skywalker, ladies and gentlemen. That’s why they titled it “The Last Jedi.”

RIDLEY When I meet people I’m not like [gasps]. [Mr. Hamill pretends to pout, as Ms. Dern playfully rubs his back in comfort.] I’m more impressed with a human than a reputation. To me, I was working with Mark, I wasn’t working with Luke. I was nervous because I was working with a new person and I wanted to do my best, and I wanted the scenes to go well. Luke is regarded in this way, and Rey does understand that. But Rey, on a very human level, is asking something of Luke: “I need some advice here.” We were able to pick up right where we left off, chronologically, and it worked very well.

Is it uniquely satisfying to play a villain in a “Star Wars” movie, where you get to be especially villainous?

DOMHNALL GLEESON It was a delightful surprise, having people come up to me after “The Force Awakens” and say, “You were so bad in that movie.” It meant a lot to me. [Laughter]

GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE It’s always exciting to be bad, isn’t it? It’s even more exciting to be bad as your job. And in a context where it doesn’t impact human lives. It’s particularly resonant at the moment, the idea of, what is a better use of human energy: to serve the group or to serve the individual?

Andy, you play Supreme Leader Snoke, one of your many motion-capture characters, so there’s a whole other layer to your performance.

ANDY SERKIS There’s a gold lamé layer. The Supreme Leader as Hugh Hefner, that’s something that I particularly grabbed onto. The luxuriousness of it all. The thing about Snoke is, leaders are fearful people, because when you’re in a position of maximum power, you can only lose power. And that fear drives nearly all decisions. That fear then makes you aggressive. It makes you want to destroy others. It makes you unable to see or care about others. But when you’re creating a villain character, it’s about humanizing — there’s something important in the task of creating Snoke to find his vulnerability, because that makes him even more dangerous and despicable.

Adam, I wouldn’t say that Kylo Ren is strictly an evil person, even though we’ve seen him do terrible things. Where does he come from for you?

DRIVER The best way I can describe it is, it’s like a conversation that we started with J. J. and it continues through this film. It was less interesting to think of him as pure evil, because I don’t really know what that is. He’s someone who thinks he’s right, more than he thinks what he’s doing is bad. When I meet people who are unable to hear the other side, who not only think they’re right but they’re justified, then there’s no end to what they would do to make sure that their side wins. To me, that’s more dangerous, because the boundaries are limitless. As opposed to just being evil, that seems like it can’t sustain itself. When you feel morally justified, that feels more long-lasting and more unpredictable.

He has a lot of emotional conflict but you seem pretty even-keeled. Am I reading you correctly?

DRIVER No. [Laughter] I’m a rational person. And then I killed my father. [Laughter]

This is the first “Star Wars” movie for Kelly Marie Tran and Laura Dern. What is it like to be initiated into this franchise?

KELLY MARIE TRAN It is both horrifying and amazing. Obviously, I was intimidated, but I never felt intimidated, personally, in Regina George fashion. Every single person sitting here was honest and open. I was allowed to go to set when I wasn’t working and watch them perform. I felt like I was in this epic acting school that I didn’t have to pay for. Someone just gave me the key.

DERN I have to discredit you, Daisy, with your comments about yourself [not being great with new people]. When my daughter came to set, she said, “Oh my God, Mom, do you think we get to see Rey?” I was like, “Oh, we don’t want to bother people.” And then your trailer door opened, and you went, [singing to the “Jurassic Park” theme] “Laura Der-rrrr-rrn, Laura Der-rrrr-rrn.” [Laughter] My daughter was like, “She’s the most welcoming person.”

HAMILL Another royalty for John Williams.

How do you make a movie that finds time to provide moments for every one of these actors?

JOHNSON That’s part of the reason that this movie is a little longer than all the others.

ISAAC He made sure everyone gets to cry.

JOHNSON “Star Wars” is on the public stage in a way that nothing else is. But even on a big scary thing like this, every single one of these people was excited to step outside their comfort zones, to go to places that were really interesting but not necessarily easy.

HAMILL Like the top of Skellig Michael [the Irish island whose steep, precarious mountains are used as the setting for Ahch-To].

JOHNSON I offered to carry you on my back, Yoda-style, but you didn’t trust my legs.

HAMILL Really, when I read VII, I said, “Oh, they’ll do it with green screens and J. J. will be up the road — I’ll be done by lunch.” Little did I know, I’ll suffer for your art, kid.

JOHNSON In the edit room, you get to a point where you realize, ah, we could make the movie shorter but we’d have to give somebody short shrift, and we’re not going to do that because every one of these guys has an amazing journey in the movie.

Is there a character, other than your own, that you wish you’d gotten to play in this film?

ISAAC What Adam does in this movie is insane. It’s incredible. [Mr. Driver begins looking around awkwardly, as if searching for a way to escape the room.] It’s so wild and unpredictable and very magnetic. It made me very jealous.

BOYEGA I have to second that. I was blown away by the conflict and the change in the character arc. And the fights.

ISAAC Oh, the fights. The beautiful fights.

BOYEGA It reminds me, as a guy, of the transition from a boy to a man, learning how to maintain a certain type of energy that you have and choosing the way you let it free. That’s what he struggles with.

Who here got to meet the porgs?

RIDLEY I got to meet the porgs, but also, I’ve gotten about 300 questions about the porgs. What’s the big deal about porgs? They wouldn’t even be able to fly. Their body-to-wing ratio is like a chicken. They can’t!

DERN The more I went on about how adorable they are — it was like looking into the eyes of E. T., I loved those eyes so much — Oscar only continued to talk about different recipes.

ISAAC Porgs with roasted turnips. Glazed porg.

What would you like to see happen to your characters in Episode IX? Do you want to have that much influence over them?

ISAAC Sorry, I was still talking about porg recipes.

JOHNSON It depends on who survives at this point.

GLEESON I only have a small part to play in all this, but if I had decided what I was going to do, from the last one to the next one, it wouldn’t have been nearly as surprising as what Rian came up with it.

ISAAC It’s amazing to think about giving up that feeling of control. You have to just be open and see what’s next.

[moonlitgleek]

Bit of a wish fulfillment question, but what is the impact of a dragon being born and bonding? Like say to Baelor Breakspear Or Rhaella Targaryen? Or baby!Rhaenys Targaryen? (Mostly I want the dragon to burn anyone who looks at them cross-eyed and Conqueror-wannabe Daemon seeing his trueborn half Dornish nephew get a dragon kills me).

This ask is officially older than dirt. Nevertheless.

There are a few variables here that could leave a print on the Targrayen dynasty and change the entire narrative, the most important of which is how the dragons hatched and if that process could be repeated. The return of the dragons in canon was due to a one-off magical event that aligned several factors that are almost impossible to replicate but while Rhaella’s dragon could very well hatch as a result of whatever magic was done at Summerhall, making for another magical event that can not be replicated, Baelor Breakspear did not encounter any such magical event to attribute a dragon hatching to. The relevance here lies in the possibility of finding a viable way to hatch dragons and how that could change the entire narrative irrevocably. There’s also the question of how only one egg hatched during whatever attempt took place, the question of the person of the king whose reign witnesses that miraculous return and what is bound to be vastly different reactions personally and politically.

Putting that aside for now, a dragon means changes on two fronts: the political and the magical. For Baelor, the political angle is intrinsically tied with the Blackfyre rebellions. The first thing that springs to mind here is how difficult it would be for Daemon to sell his Daeron Falseborn narrative with his brother’s line possessing such a visible sign of legitimacy. Mind you, Daemon’s narrative was that Daeron II was the bastard son of Prince Aemon the Dragonknight and Queen Naerys, both Valyrian-blooded on both sides and thus entirely capable of producing a dragon-riding line because dragons don’t care about bastardy, but for better or for worse, dragons were seen as a sign of legitimacy as we’ve seen in how the dragon-riding ability of Rhaenyra’s Velaryon sons was used as an argument for their legitimacy. Certainly, it would be exceptionally difficult for Daemon to argue that Daeron had usurped the throne when it’s his line that was blessed by the return of the dragons, or so the people might say. Indeed, Baelor’s possession of a dragon after a few decades of them dying and after several kings attempted everything from sorcery to prayer could be regarded as a sign of the gods to prove Daeron’s right to the throne, in the same way that the gods have proven Queen Naerys’ innocence of charges of infidelity and treason, disappointing Aegon IV’s ardent efforts to discredit and disinherit Daeron by casting shadow on Queen Naerys’ fidelity. That the gods exonerated Naerys and then bestowed the ultimate sign of Targaryen-ness on Daeron’s line is a tough public narrative to argue against. Politically, the sword Blackfyre had such weight in painting Daemon as the heir to the Conqueror’s kingdom, so imagine what an actual living dragon would do to frame Daeron’s line as the true heirs to the dragon-riding legacy of the Targaryens. Daemon might bear the sword but Baelor held the most visible sign of Targaryen-ness there was, one that is intrinsicallytied with the forming of the monarchy and the throne Daemon was trying to claim since it was dragons that formed Aegon the Conqueror’s kingdom and throne. Any half-effective PR campaign from the crown could directly tie Baelor Breakspear, already a hailed warrior known for his chivalry and martial prowess, to his dragon-riding ancestors in the eyes of the nobility. As far as symbol politics go, strike one for Team Red Dragon.

While that does not mean that the Blackfyre rebellions won’t happen (Bittersteel and Fireball still have a strong personal incentive to push Daemon to rebel, and the nobility was still smouldering over Daeron’s favoring of Dorne), it would certainly hurt Daemon’s cause and the striking figure he cut as the King Who Bore The Sword, especially if Baelor rode his dragon to the Redgrass Field (which would tip the power scale dramatically towards the red dragon, instead of the royals only triumphing by the skin of their teeth) and the image of the crown prince riding a dragon overhead brought to mind the Conqueror and the Field of Fire. How well would that undercut the future rebellions is speculative but I imagine it would, to an extent at least: Bittersteel wouldn’t back down even for dragons, but the Westerosi support for the Blackfyres might dwindle much faster than IOTL, especially since dragons have long lives and thus Baelor’s would probably bond with another Targaryen after her rider’s death and continue to be an unmatched advantage for the ruling Targaryens. I suspect that Westeros would still see, at least, the second and third rebellions, as the presence of one living dragon would enforce Daemon the Dreamer’s belief that a dragon would hatch for him at Whitewalls, and Bloodraven’s police state and the mounting displeasure with the ineffectiveness of Aerys I’s rule and his abandonment of feudal obligations would drive nobles to the Black Dragon’s banner. How things might progress from there, though, would largely depend on the fate of Bittersteel and just how much dragonflame cripple his army.

Now, the return of the dragons also affects the long-term political presence of the Targaryens. The ruling dynasty’s power was significantly reduced after the death of the dragons and continued to weaken as the years went by and the practices of several monarchs alienated the nobility till the War of the Ninepenny Kings made it clear to the nobles that the power are in their hands now rather than the monarchy. A dragon in the mix shifts the balance of power back towards the Targaryens, though as the example of the smallfolk riots during the Dance of the Dragons showed, it might not be enough to quell the discontent brought on by first Aerys I and Bloodraven’s policies, then Aegon V’s pro-smallfolk reforms that bred discontent among the nobles and that, in the presence of draconian power on the side of the monarchy, would be steadily pushed and enforced despite their objections, as Aegon thought that having dragons would give him the power to enact his reforms.

In short, with the long life span of dragons and the possibility of them accepting other riders after their original rider dies, Baelor’s dragon could survive and even have a rider all the way through Aerys II’s rule, resulting in a different-looking realm and a completely different balance of power within the Seven Kingdoms. But that does not only rest on the presence of a dragon, but also on the identity of her rider. Baelor was truly the greatest crown prince the Targaryen dynasty had ever had, and had the potential of being one of the best kings if he hadn’t been cut down in Ashford, but the royal family was rife with people ill-suited for the power of being a dragon-rider. Imagine if Aerion the Monstrous had a dragon under his control, or if Bloodraven’s police state and his Blackfyre tunnel-vision was supported by his dominion over a dragon, or if Aerys I’s negligence was underlined by his failure to utilize his draconic power to protect his vassals, or if Aerys II’s madness and fascination with fire was served by a dragon. Dragons were double-edged swords to the Targaryen dynasty, “the grief and glory of [House Targaryen]” in Maester Aemon’s words. They bring undisputed power but also an easy potential to abuse it for personal gain. They are weapons of mass destruction that can be devastating in the wrong hands, that have been devastating to the realm in the hands of the like of Maegor the Cruel, Aegon II, and Rhaenyra. As the uprising against Maegor, and the storming of the Dragonpit during the Dance of the Dragons demonstrated, dragons can easily bring the downfall of a monarch who abused them as much as they can be utilized to prop royal policies. Not every Targaryen king was of the caliber of Jaehaerys I or Daeron II or Viserys II, people who wanted to reform and benefit the realm; in the wrong hands, dragons can incite rebellions instead.

Besides the political effect a dragon can bring, we can not ignore how that changes the belief in the prophecy among the Targaryens. The news of the return of the dragons had been foretold in the arcane texts Aerys I was fond of studying (probably the same texts great-great-grandnephew Rhaegar found that prompted him to become a warrior) long before the Ghost of High Heart made her prophecy of which line the savior prince would come from. With the dragons already returned as foretold, you have a dynasty with an entrenched belief and investment in that prophetic destiny even more than usual. That belief would only enforce Rhaegar’s obsession with the prophecy and if by any chance Baelor’s dragon was riderless at this point, you can bet everything that the wannabe Prince Who Was Promised would try to claim him for his own.

As for Rhaella, my scenario got a bit too ficcy, and not the fun kind since Aerys makes this a rather dark scenario. A dragon hatching from Summerhall would enforce the belief that the prophetic savior was really to be born of Rhaella’s line. To have dragons returning just a few years after the Ghost of High Heart gave her prophecy gives credence to her words, and since it’s almost certain that Jaehaerys II was aware of the prophecy about the return of the dragons, he’d take this as a confirmation of the identity of the savior. Rhaegar certainly would too, since the symbolism of a dragon emerging from the raging fires of Summerhall just as a little dragon was born to the Targaryens is too strong to ignore, which would only immerse him even more in his belief in the prophecy. The bad news is that it would annoy Aerys to no end that his sister-wife acquired a dragon and he did not (and really, that one dragon would hatch out of all the dragon eggs at Summerhall would be extremely odd, but I’m not about to give Aerys the chance to be a dragon rider) and that might spell bad news for Rhaella. As I’ve said before, Aerys’ animosity and suspicion of both Rhaegar and Tywin in OTL doesn’t seem to have been precipitated by anything either of them had done. It seems like they attracted his ire simply by gaining power that he felt threatened his own, a classic case of jealousy that others enjoyed some regard or standing that he felt belonged to him or that he thought rivaled or took away from his own. So for the sister-wife that he disliked to receive such a striking mark of distinction while he got nothing, I imagine he would not take too kindly to that. Unfortunately for Rhaella, her father died barely two years into his reign leaving Aerys as the king and no one to protect the newly made queen, and if Aerys could not control the dragon himself, he could control it through Rhaella by controlling her. Certainly, he’d crave that control more and more as his fascination with fire grew, and that can only mean that his attempts to hatch the dragon eggs found at Dragonstone would increase, probably to the point of severity considering his deteriorating mental state particularly after the Defiance of Duskendale. An Aerys that had proof that long-fossilized eggs can hatch, and had a living dragon taunting him with its presence under the control of his sister-wife (and that would be enough for him to suspect Rhaella of conspiring with Rhaegar against him because of course she was) could easily go to some extreme measures to hatch the dragons, especially if he made the connection between a dragon hatching and blood magic. The chances of him causing a bloody catastrophe chasing dragons are high, and depending on the extent of his extremism, this could very well end up what causes a rebellion before Rhaegar pulls his stunt with Lyanna. Imagine how the lords would react if Aerys started burning people by the droves to hatch dragons, for example. The caches of wildfire under King’s Landing might come much sooner.

As for Elia’s Rhaenys, I do not see a scenario where a dragon bonds with her. Most of the remaining dragon eggs in Westeros were destroyed at Summerhall, and the only known clutch of eggs left was the one found on Dragonstone that Aerys tried to hatch (and the one sitting under Winterfell, if you believe that rumor, which I do. But no one in-universe does). Rhaenys simply had no way to bond with a dragon since the Targaryen tradition of putting a dragon egg in the cradle of little Targaryens had long ended, and grandpa the Mad King wouldn’t allow his “Dornish-smelling” granddaughter anywhere near a dragonite if he managed to actually hatch them, neither would Mama Elia because children below the age of three have no business going near a fire-breathing lizard, tyvm.

[megacircuit9universe]

Alien Tip Off

WED SEP 16 2020

Woodward’s tapes of Trump, extensively admitting how well he understood the dangers of SarsCoV2, way back in the spring... that it was airborne, that it was far more deadly than the flu, etc... have stayed in the news all week, with longer and longer clips being released that utterly destroy any possible, devil’s advocate, arguments in Trump’s favor on this... the single most important issue facing the nation.

It’s safe to say we’re all stunned!

He was simultaneously smart enough to grasp the true danger of the virus... yet stupid enough to... agree to go off about this on tape with Woodward and... still do what he did in his response to the threat.

The tapes don’t JUST justify his impeachment, and expose every Senator who voted to acquit, as dastardly cowards... but they gut any possible, devil’s advocate, arguments for Trump, by anybody with any grip on sanity.

This puts the current GOP Senate in great peril... even as it reduces the base of loyal Trumpist voters they were banking on... to only the criminally insane.

No more fluffy padding of evangelicals, and other right wing conservatives who, held their nose, so does speak, and went along for the sake of the party. They’ve now formed a very visible, and powerful movement to deny Trump, and any of his hardcore Senate loyalists... another term. 

And they’re doing it for the same reason they originally held their noses and went along... to save their party from the brink of irrelevance in a world where the blast doors of history are closing on old school conservatism.*

Which brings us to TikTok...

The deadline for the TikTok ban, as outlined by a sketchy executive order by Trump a while back, draws near.  

And while American companies like Microsoft and WalMart scrambled to get a deal done in time, China also chimed in last week and said... Yeah, no... if ByteDance sells it’s American operations... the new owners can’t have the algorithm without our say so... and... we’d rather see TikTok die in America than bow to Trump’s silly demands so... haha, just saying! :D

Meanwhile, TikTok has been challenging the original executive order in court, and everybody is now saying even if the deadline passes, Trump can’t just shut down an app like that... and he’d have to get both Android and Apple to agree to disable it in their app stores... which would lead to more litigation and... well, it could take many more months than Trump has left in power, to sort out.

Unless he gets reelected... or successfully remains in power despite being voted out.

Which brings us to the aliens!..

Monday night (September 14th) TikTok was suddenly flooded with videos of UFO sightings over the United States... concentrated in, but not limited to New Jersey, Colorado, and Nevada.  

The earliest and most viral of these was being debunked immediately as the GoodYear Blimp, but... the people at Goodyear Blimp have since said, no... that was not our blimp.

The videos depict a lot of different types of UFOs... they don’t all look the same.  Some were singular glowing orbs, or true flying saucer looking crafts, while other videos showed groups of strange lights acting in concert.

The common denominator for all of them, however, was... all are pretty lengthy and clear... corroborated by multiple TikTokers in any given area... and all have so far defied any rational explanation.

Blimps, drones, skydivers with flares, swamp gas, you name it... none of the off the cuff discredits have yet proven out... much less any explanation for why so many sightings happened simultaneously across the continent.

Of course, lots of alien lovers have been quick to tell us this is some message of peace or whatever... but when something like this happens, I can only go to my own model, as established here in this blog.

And I can draw no other conclusion than this... the Aliens were behind it, and they were deliberately using TikTok to spook Trump... and the other powerful men in his Junta (Barr, McConnell, etc).

Recall that earlier this year I speculated that Kim Jong Un was not only dead, but that it was likely the Aliens who killed him, because he was too likely to start a nuclear war.

North Korea has yet to admit that Jong Un is dead... but the rest of the world assumes, these many months later, that he must be.  He’s not re-emerged, and the few video reels of him released this year... barely even try to be convincing.

The media hasn’t talked much about this, because so much other shit’s been going on this year... but no... I’m not backing off my conclusion that he’s dead, because nothing’s come along to even slightly prove me wrong on that, much less embarrass me about that conclusion.

He’s dead.  

The aliens killed him.

And now those same aliens are using TikTok to spook Trump.

This implies that Aliens are a lot more familiar with the intimate details of our daily life than we normally think... knowing not only that we all have smart phones with cameras, but that we also have a hugely popular app that would ensure any sightings would go viral immediately... and that this is the same app Trump is trying to shut down.

What’s the message for Trump?

Well, first... a bit more context...

This past week, the other huge story in the news has been the west coast wild fires.  We’ve seen out of control wildfires on the Pacific coast in late summer for the past four years, as we did in Australia in their late summer, this past January... but this year’s fires in America have been record breaking in terms of their devastation.

The aliens... who’ve been monitoring this planet periodically since humans first learned of fire... paying closer attention after we developed electricity... and who have been permanently stationed in the solar system since we figured out fission bombs at the end of WW2... have had, as their main objective, to stand down, and observe us... unless the planet is in danger of a cascading failure due to either a nuclear or climate catastrophe... or both.  

In such cases, they are willing to intervene... for the sake of preserving the level of intelligence, and diversity of life that’s evolved here... because it takes so goddam long for this kind of intelligence, and this kind of diversity to evolve in the first place.  

Still, they’d always rather just hang back and observe.  

So... since World War Two... they’ve tolerated all kinds of nuclear bomb testing, and everything else, without feeling the need to do much more than hint, to world leaders, that humanity may not be alone in the universe.

Until very recently, when they pinpointed two individuals who were a direct threat to the planet... Kim Jong Un, and Donald Trump.  

Jong Un had no real impact on the climate, but he did pose a nuclear threat, dangerous enough, they had to intervene and just off him.

Trump poses both a nuclear threat, and a climate threat, so... Jong Un’s death was a first warning sign, and this latest stunt on TikTok, at the peak of the wildfires, is yet another.

Don’t think you’re commanding the most powerful military force in the universe, because you’re not.  We’re real, and you can’t touch us.  We know what you’re doing.  We know what you fear (TikTok), and we WILL take you out, Space Force or no Space Force... buddy!

Assuming I’m right about this... which I think you at least have to grant is possible this late in the game, given all that’s happened... it’s an unprecidented show of force, from an intergalactic army so shy of confrontation, we barely have any evidence they exist.

That tells you what a dire juncture we are at, right now, on this timeline**.

But the fact that the aliens would use TikTok to make this statement... does seem to suggest that they do have AI bot agents, on our internet, who are in communication with our own advanced AI bots from the future, left behind by our time travelers... and that they are all in cahoots to save the timeline.

Recall that while Alien propulsion tech is likely based in the manupulation of microsingularities, or mini-black holes, to frame-drag spacetime around the ship... for Aliens it’s more about space travel, than time travel.

Time travel doesn’t really mean anything on intergalactic scales.  It only has meaning for primitive humans hanging very close to Earth, moving back and forth through the span of a few decades locally, to grab objects, get footage, and leave bot agents behind to promote human rights.

The aliens hanging out in our solar system are more or less just as pinned to our timeline as we are... or the bots those time travelers leave behind.

And if you don’t get that by now, I would suggest reading back in earlier entries, but maybe I’ll do another one as a refresher soon.

It was encouraging to see a TikToker on my For You Page this past week actually mention John Titor, and go into a little depth about him, but as usual, nobody could follow it.***

But more encouraging was this display by the aliens, that gave the first confirmation I’ve seen, that they do know and care what’s going on down here, in times as dire as we’re currently living through.

And with that roundup of a week’s news... it is time for bed.

*With GenX turning 50, Millenials turning 30, and GenZ turning 20, the tide is turning forever away from old school conservatism, with all of it’s racism, sexism, and classism. November 2020 could be the first time, all three of these generations turn out to the polls in force (millenials were too apathetic before this, and Z was too young to vote) to drown out the fading influence of the Boomers and Silents, once and for all.

My guess, as I’ve said, is that the current anti-Trump conservatives will all move to the Democratic Party, leaving the Republican Party to die as a haven for neo nazis and KKK sympathizers... while the progressive left will form a new party to counter the comparatively conservative new democrats, who at least acknowledge climate change, and don’t pin everything else on the single issue of abortion.

**Worth noting that this passed week news also broke that scientists had detected a marker for microbial life in the atmosphere of Venus.  It appears to be the strongest evidence yet that life is not exclusive to Earth.

***Not to suggest I’m so much more clever than ordinary people.  It took me upwards of fifteen years of studying physics through videos, lectures, and audio books to get the full picture of how Titor’s distortion unit worked, and how the many worlds theory resolves the kinds of paradoxes most people imagine would happen. 

[letterjaey]

Keith Wants to See Shiro as His Brother

But he doesn’t.

In Season 2, episode 8, “The Blade of Marmora” we get the debated line of “Shiro, you’re like a brother to me,” suggesting that Keith views Shiro in a familial sense and not in a romantic sense, therefore discrediting any possibilities of the two characters entering a romantic relationship or having been in a romantic relationship previously.

I think it actually supports, maybe even confirms the possibility that Keith has romantic feelings for Shiro…

Prepare, for this will be long and arduous

“The Blade of Marmora” is hands-down my favorite episode of the series thus far, not only because it is Keith-centric, but it is a complex episode about who Keith is.

Keith is a mysterious character. There isn’t much known about him compared to the other paladins. We know Hunk, Lance, and Pidge have families. We know the three are students and we know what they like and dislike; Lance has a thing for flirting, Hunk loves food, and Pidge is a tech genius- we know this all from the first episode. Keith, however, is an enigma. We don’t know his family, we don’t know what he likes or dislikes- hell, we barely know why he got kicked out of Galaxy Garrison. What we know about him is largely defined by his interactions with Shiro, and isn’t that interesting?

Up to this point in the series, we have learned that Keith and Shiro share a history. They have known each other for some time and that Shiro has had an impact on Keith’s life (see Season 2, Episode 1, “My life would be a whole lot different if it weren’t for you”- Keith to Shiro). Then in “Blade of Marmora”, we gain some more insight on their relationship.

LOUD VOICES, THERE ARE LOUD VOICES

Keith is clearly acting out of character and is obviously agitated. He has recently discovered that the small blade he carries bares the same mark as the blade of a Galra man, Ulaz. Everyone on the ship thinks it’s simply Keith’s character, that he’s a standoffish, volatile person. Remember, Lance doesn’t view Keith in a great light, although he may acknowledge his skills, Lance sees Keith as a rival. I don’t recall Hunk having much of an opinion on him, and Pidge parodies Keith as being “emo” (see Season 2, Episode 1, “Across the Universe”), possibly implying that Keith is hard to read and unwilling to let others in. It is Shiro who seems to know Keith best, choosing to talk to Keith afterwards and ask him what the real issue is.

Then Keith is chosen to accompany Shiro to the base. Let’s just give a shout-out to the Voltron people for how perfectly orchestrated this arrangement is. The base is situated in an extremely difficult situation to maneuver.

Physicists, explain this

Not one black hole, but two?? And an exploding blue star??? Who the hell is able to fly through that? Who even thought of that??!?! The base could have easily been in the inside of some planet to which any other paladin would have been capable of traversing. Instead, we chose extreme death star and being pulled into two separate directions at the speed of light at near impossible temperatures. And why even bother allowing two people to a super secret base??? What kind of tactic is that?!!? Shiro gives good reasons to why Keith should be the one to accompany him, although you have to wonder if it’s also for other reasons (like if he were to die, he’d rather die by Keith’s hands). Ultimately, his choice shows his extreme faith and knowledge of Keith’s skills and ability to keep them alive, essentially trusting Keith with his life.

If it’s gonna get hot, then I want his space lion, if you know what I mean..

In the lion ride to the base, Shiro brings up the potential Voltron leadership role for Keith, carrying implications of extreme trust and belief of Keith as a leader, even though we had not seen Keith as a leader much before. So apparently Shiro knows enough about Keith to know he would make a great leader, which is high praise from Shiro. And then Keith counters Shiro, denying the possibility that he would ever need to lead Voltron and immediately wanting the topic to end.

It’s interesting that Keith doesn’t bring up other reasons, such as him being incompetent or the other members refusing to listen to him, therefore making him a bad leadership choice. In fact, he’s actually pretty confused that Shiro would consider him. I think Keith actually knows that he can lead, knows he has the skills to do it, but chooses not to because to him, the obvious choice has been Shiro.

I don’t wanna hear it, babe

Keith cannot accept the idea that such a situation would occur where Shiro was gone, or that Shiro would not be there to guide him and does not want to discuss it further. I know when I want to end conversations, it’s for a few reasons, one of them being afraid that talking about it would make it all the more real. The reaction is baseline and childish, but it is a sign of vulnerability and an attempt to cope. Notice how soft Keith is around Shiro. It’s absolutely precious. Keith isn’t usually like this with others. For whatever reason, Shiro brings out strong reactions from Keith.

Sorry, babe, I just don’t want to lose you

They make it to the base and we get it, the two have some sort of history. Maybe it’s extreme admiration or true friendship- whatever it is, the members of Marmora could care less. Or so we think.

Keith is immediately taken down and even Shiro has trouble determining which way is up and down. Keith is carrying some sort of secret weapon that belongs to Galra which Shiro had never seen before.

It’s actually really funny, because Keith admits that Shiro knows Keith, although it is now apparent that Shiro doesn’t. Shiro is staring at his [insert whatever the loving hell they are to each other] pinned to the ground, someone who he probably thought he knew, all things considered previously in the episode, only to find out that Keith has a secret he never knew about. Poor guy, no wonder he threw him under the bus.

Also, it’s sort of cute how painfully honest he is in this moment. It’s time like these where Shiro becomes painfully young. Then you have to wonder why he answered so honestly when he was among potential enemies. Torture, anyone?

I HAVE KNOWN HER- John Proctor, The Crucible

Shiro does manage to gain his bearings and attempts to hustle both Keith and him outta there, which is fucking hilarious. It really is. Shiro has put his life on the line, put Keith’s life on the line, put the whole team in jeopardy, and decides fuck all, they’ll leave empty handed.

No, fuck this shit. No one hurts my baby. We’re getting the fuck outta here. Fuck you and your super secret boy band. Fuck you all.

I don’t even know how to interpret Shiro’s reaction. I can’t stop laughing. Now I want to know what his plan B was gonna be.

Back to Keith and Shiro’s relationship. Keith decides that he’s not gonna be man handled any further. He has questions and he wants answers. Keith participates in the trials of Marmora. Fascinatingly enough, Shiro is allowed to watch this super secret trial to unlock the keyblade of Marmora. He basically gets a front row seat AND he can ask questions and receive answers, even if they’re cryptic as hell.

Oh shit, is that me?

I don’t even know what to say to this. I’m just as confused as Shiro. Why is he even looking at himself. My initial thoughts believed Keith would have to battle mindscape!Shiro in this simulator. I was so wrong. You can tell that Shiro thinks that BOM has some super cool technology and probably thinks that Keith will have to destroy his clone. He asks Kolivan what the hell that is, probably prepared to break in and beat his clone ass to save Keith. I mean, could you imagine how it would have been to see Keith being beaten down by Shiro and then having to destroy Shiro, even if it was a clone? It’d be fucking awful. So props to the creators, they picked a different route instead, a very interesting route.

Kolivan informs Shiro that the suit Keith wears, somehow manages to tune into Keith and disclose his greatest hopes and fears. I’m not sure what the point of including one’s hope is, because it’s not like the suit makes your greatest hopes into your fears, it displays both of them. It sounds like being the master of not your physical powers, but your emotions is the focus of BOM more than anything.

Kolivan doesn’t owe Shiro anything. There is no need to tell him any of this, except he does. Almost like he’s just as confused as to why Shiro is the one Keith desperately wants to see in this moment. I mean, imagine if someone else had appeared, like Allura. It’d be without a doubt, a romantic implication. The problem is we don’t know what the illusory choice means since it was Shiro, the person who was with Keith, that appeared. It does tell us that Shiro falls nicely into Keith’s greatest hopes though. To desperately want to see someone as you have fallen, exhausted, beaten down, in a strange place without certainty of knowing you will survive. I don’t desperately fear, I desperately hope.

Also, it’s interesting that Kolivan has categorized Keith and Shiro’s relationship as friends, or that Shiro views Keith as a friend while Keith does not. This means, in the short time he has seen the two, he has enough information to believe they are friends. I think maybe that’s why he looks at Shiro. Or maybe Kolivan just looks at him for dramatic effect. I just know he looks at Shiro because this statement is clearly important.

Are you seeing this? Your “friend” isn’t just a “friend”, you fool

Then, this is where I think the mindscape kicks in and Keith’s fears show. I actually think that anything mindscape!Shiro said is something that Keith fears. Keith struggles with his identity and mindscape!Shiro shoves it all aside, calling him selfish for only thinking of himself. How awful, and for some of you, this situation may be entirely too familiar in a different setting. And then Shiro refers to him as Keith’s family.

Ok, so it all makes sense. Keith says that line in response to a family line that mindscape!Shiro says. I guess they are just family

But

And that alone is so important. Keith acknowledges that Shiro is like a brother, but-

But something else for him. Maybe a friend, maybe a non-blood related individual, maybe more.

Keith values his true identity more than this labeled identity of being like a brother to Shiro. And then the worst thing happens.

Keith is willing to give up who he really is for Shiro. He decides being family to Shiro is better than being who he actually is and losing him. What we learn from the mindscape is that Keith is afraid that the person he truly is will cause him to lose Shiro, that asking to be himself is too much, too selfish, and that he should just be happy with being family. What a fear, indeed.

Ok, but seriously, why is Shiro so important to Keith?

“Thought you died since, you know, I left you on your own in a shack out in the middle of desert nowhere for years”

I couldn’t have been the only one that thought Keith’s dad looked eerily like Shiro. I mean, looking at it now, he really doesn’t, but he’s got the same facial structure, that smile, even a scar.

I’m thinking this is on purpose. Shiro looks a lot like Keith’s dad, to probably evoke a type of familial relationship. Given Shiro’s relationship to Keith, yeah, brother probably makes a hell of a lot sense (they probably aren’t brothers). Keith probably sees Shiro as a big brother. Shiro has impacted Keith’s life, Shiro knows Keith, they also get along pretty well and trust each other. They’re bros.

But.

What if something happened, like, I don’t know, something crazy like one of them got kidnapped by aliens on their cool space mission and no one gave a damn that he disappeared and even blamed him for the disappearance and made class lessons out of the mission failure, while the other watched as the person he looked up to got torn down so quickly and torn out of his life and there was nothing he could do so he got booted from the fancy school and ran around the desert for about a year and decided to find meaning in some cave paintings of blue cats because what else could he do? x I would think his feelings changed a lot from being “like a brother” to “desperately wants to see you”

I think Keith wants to be a family to Shiro. I also think he realizes his feelings run much deeper than that and I think it scares him. I think he wants to see Shiro as a brother, but he doesn’t.

I think he desperately hopes for something else.

[roguewn]

Adam Driver’s statement in VF and what it might imply for Kylo

This is both a personal brainstorming and a reply to this post, I could’ve reblogged it and added my two cents but I prefer to write a new one.

So, Adam’s brief statement about Kylo has caused a little bit of a ruckus, even though he stayed as enigmatic as always (damn you Driver, we want answers!!!).

First of all, let’s refresh our minds. This is what Adam said in the VF interview:

Adam Driver, alluding both to Finn’s state and the scar seen on his own face in the trailer, told me, “I feel like almost everyone is in that rehabilitation state. You know, I don’t think that patricide is all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe that’s where Kylo Ren is starting from. His external scar is probably as much an internal one.”

Now, this is my personal view on the matter and I’ll tell you right away that is very positive for those of you who believe in the Kylo redemption arc (and to those of you who don’t... why do you hate yourselves?)

I’ll try to be as clear as possible even though I’m not sure if I can make my point come across the way I want it to do!

1. “Almost everyone is in that rehabilitation state”. This can be read literally (as in, physical rehabilitation - Finn) and metaphorically (spiritually), in my opinion. What is rehabilitation? The literal meaning is “to restore a condition of good health”. But “rehabilitation” is also a sort of purgatory, a state in which you’re in between your old self and your new self. Think about people who go into rehab for example: they go through a long and hard process during which they go from their broken self to their new, clean persona. I think this is closer to what rehabilitation means for Kylo. In his case, I think it’s more of a spiritual matter. He killed his father, he met someone who’s probably as strong in the Force as he is if not more (Rey) and with whom he shares a peculiar and mysterious bond with, and overall, his doubts and insecurities might be coming back to bite him in full force. Kylo is probably in a state of utter confusion and inner fights after what happened at the end of TFA. He already was, but now they probably got worse. And he’s probably trying to go back to how he used to be (Kylo Ren), but he might not make it and come out of this ‘rehabilitation’ as someone ‘new’ instead. Aka reedem himself.

2. “I don’t think that patricide is all that it’s cracked up to be”. This was very interesting to hear from Adam himself because I think he’s probably the one who understands his character better than anyone else, writers included. And the first thing that came to my mind is how they said killing Han Solo was a sort of test for him to bring him closer to complete his training to the Dark Side. But we all remember his words before he did the terrible act “I'm being torn apart. I want to be free of this pain. I know what I have to do but I don't know if I have the strength to do it” and we all know JJ Abrams said that Kylo came out of that act “weakened”. So, why did Adam say that the patricide “is not all that it’s cracked up to be”? Maybe he meant that the consequences of that act don’t bring Kylo where he expected? Aka to complete his training and fully become a Dark Side fighter? Could it mean that, on the contrary, the guilt, the mixed feelings about what Kylo has done, could bring him closer to the light? Be careful, I’m not saying we will see a on-the-way-to-redemption!Kylo at the start of The Last Jedi. Not at all. As I said, the rehabilitation process is a long and hard one. It might even take the whole of episode VIII and IX for him to finally come to his senses. But I’m sure we will see the walls around him starting to crack in TLJ, for many reasons.

3. “Maybe that’s where Kylo Ren is starting from”. About this line, the OP of the post I linked wrote “it might imply that the REAL dark side of Kylo Ren is going to start/ come out”. Now, that’s their opinion and I fully respect that. I didn’t write this post to discredit anyone, but just to give my view on the matter, because it’s almost completely the opposite and I thought it would be interesting to see the two sides of the coin, sort of!

So, the real dark side of Kylo is going to come out and he’s going to become a full villain? It may be. There’s speculation that the FO will win at the end of TLJ, so it might be that Kylo turns to the Dark Side completely in the movie. But from what we’ve seen in TFA, I really don’t think so. It’s true that he’s a villain “in the making” and exactly because of that, it might be ‘easier’ for him to turn his back to those who have manipulated him his whole life (Snoke) and decide not to make that extra step that would completely turn to the Dark Side.

If you think about it, the prequel trilogy showed the downfall of Anakin from the “light” to the “darkness”, while the original trilogy showed us how Darth Vader went from being completely “in the darkness” to coming back to the “light”. So they started from the very opposite of what they would become in the end. If they wanted Kylo to become a full-range villain, I don’t think they would have shown him so conflicted in the first movie. I think they left those hints in hope someone would pick up on them and realize that Kylo’s path might not be what everyone expects from him (aka the Dark Side). Killing Han Solo has been a strong and dangerous decision as well, and I don’t think they would have done it if it didn’t have a more than legitimate reason (aka to start the Kylo’s redemption arc). Harrison Ford said he wanted his character to die in a way that had a meaningful impact on the story, and what more meaningful impact could his death have than bringing back his son from the darkness?

So, back to the line “maybe that’s where Kylo Ren is starting from”. In my opinion, this doesn’t mean that Kylo is starting his downfall to the dark side, but on the contrary, Han’s death and everything that happened at the end of TFA might be the starting point for him to realize that he can still redeem himself, save himself and find a way back to who he used to be. And I feel that that line implies that Kylo will have a lot of brainstorming to do which will eventually bring to a deep character development and (hopefully) to a change of heart. What I hope is that, even if the FO supposedly wins at the end of TLJ, Kylo won’t be with them anymore.

I won’t dig into the line “His external scar is probably as much an internal one” because I think it’s WAY too obvious. And this post got way too long, I’m so sorry.

AGAIN, I didn’t write this to go against the other OP, I just took this chance to express my opinion on the interview :) Feel free to leave me your thoughts as well xxx

[wr8tur]

SUPERGIRL RANT 10

THIS RANT WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE SEASON FINALE… I forgot I had written one....

In hindsight, the more I think about it, the more I believe that Jack’s death should not really impact Lena that much. They’ve been broken up for almost a year, maybe more, so the fact is Lena has proven that she can survive without him. Yes, it hurts because she loved him, but she clearly knew he didn’t fill that void within her, probably didn’t love him enough to stay.

If she loved him, she’d have chosen him instead of L Corp. Besides, what’s up with him making her choose in the first place? Is it because he didn’t think two CEO’s in a relationship could work? Like what was that about?

Unless they meant it to be a parallel concerning Kara and Lena, showing the audience that Lena is much more selfless for choosing to prove that she’s a force for good rather than Kara who chose her love life over the planet she swore to protect. But honestly, I don’t think the writers consciously intended to do so seeing as they want the audience to believe that “true love” is worth fighting for and risking everything for….

Or maybe they meant that by choosing L Corp instead of Jack, Lena’s actually more selfish? Because Lena wants to help people, to make the name Luthor synonymous with hope instead of fear, to further her ambition and good intentions, rather than stay with Jack?

The motivation for “Ace Reporter” is to get Kara’s job back and more importantly so Lena could have a moment between choosing between Kara and someone important to her.

Thing is they’re trying to make Lena’s weakness be for maternal love so they should have probably introduced her birthmother instead of Jack. I mean, make her bio mom be some topnotch scientist working with/for Jack Spheer who’s still the head of the company bio mom works for and that he actually implanted nano bots inside bio mom who agreed to help Jack because he gave her a chance because Lionel fired her and had her discredited, maybe even locked up in the loony bin so that he could take Lena and just made it seem like she was dead so Lillian wouldn’t be able to protest so much. But then Bio Mom doesn’t know that Jack’s been controlling her with the bots, thinks Jack took them out but really they’re inside.

And then in that moment when Lena has to save Supergirl, Lena’s not just choosing between friend and family, she’s choosing her future.

Because Jack was someone from her past but that ended already. Yes, they thought about opening that chapter back up, but it had been closed and Lena had been able to function and run L Corp. The loss of Jack shouldn’t have been enough to drive Lena to this state of vulnerability. And Lena’s killed a man before so I doubt she’s losing sleep over killing Jack. And like I said, I understand that Lena loved Jack and that she’d been forced to end his life, but she’d been able to walk away from him once and if her gloom is because she had to kill someone important to her, it’s clear the Jack wasn’t that important because she was able to thrive without him in her life.

Plus, her actively missing her bio mom could be a reason why she’s so drawn to Rhea and her sob story about a mother losing her child because of another party and just trying to find her way home, much like her own bio mother’s story of her just trying to find her way to Lena.

It doesn’t make sense that Lena would believe and hope in a stranger being a good mother when all she’s known is manipulation and rejection from the only mother she’s ever known.

I mean Rhea lied yet Lena chose to work with the liar, which just makes Lena stupid.

And if she didn’t trust Rhea but chose to work with her because she thought the warp gate could really be beneficial to Earth, then she would have created a failsafe for the project and not give Rhea her complete trust, which judging by the fact that Rhea managed to create her own failsafe within the project without Lena knowing just makes it clear that Lena gave Rhea carte blanche around the lab. I mean Lena looked over those plans herself so if there was a failsafe in the programming, she would have caught it! Unless they’re trying to make her deliberately stupid.

Her actively just trusting Rhea after she lied to her just makes Lena seem like some weak willed simpleton who’s easily manipulated because she’s so starved for affection but if that were the case, then she’d make a shitty businesswoman and L Corp would have been well on its way to bankruptcy if Lena simply ruled with her heart instead of her mind.

Honestly! Whatever badassness Lena had last episode was actively erased in this episode! Was it because they wanted Mon and James to shine?

Seriously, the focus on James and the importance of human capability was irrelevant and felt completely insincere, as though writers just wanted to stick the idea that compassion can go a long way as well as give James character growth. Like honestly, his whole struggle this episode is something that Kara went through herself, fighting crime without Superpowers........ It was repetitive and dull.

Also, why would James bring Marcus to CatCo? He clearly won’t get any work done, hence why he cancelled all his afternoon appointments, so why would he take this kid to a public place where everyone James knows would question who he is? Honestly, James is an idiot for doing this. He should have taken him to the park to take pictures or done something a kid would enjoy. Taking him to the office won’t get a kid to relax! It’s clearly an obvious ploy to write in the destruction of CatCo and bring Cat Grant back. It’s a sad attempt in forming any semblance of congruency.

Would have preferred it if Rhea actively blew up CatCo to get back at Kara rather than it being due to James’s carelessness.

But the character that’s getting massacred the most this episode was Lena. I swear, the writers are screwing up Lena's character with their inconsistencies. Do the writers not read each other’s scripts? Because it doesn’t seem like they know what happened in between the episodes. Yet again, the inconsistencies are running rampant!

It really doesn't make sense that Lena would put so much trust in Rhea just because she gave some sob story. If Lena were to let her heart rule then L Corp would have suffered so many losses and closed within a year!

Are they trying to make Lena’s fans hate her character so that we’ll ship KaraMel? Because I am going down with SuperCorp ship! Also, another inconsistency with this whole thing is that Daxamites have been portrayed as a savage misogynistic planet where they value money and power yet Rhea their queen is a genius who understands all of Lena's scientific babble? Like come on! If they had brains then why would they still adhere to a monarchy? The writers are just messing this up! Like honestly... And alien invasion just feels a lot like the recurring theme from last year! I seriously think that if Lena's going to turn dark it’s because her adoptive mother will save her, thus sealing their bond, and proving to Lena that aliens just want to take over the planet, and she'll probably feel betrayed because she'll find out that Kara is Supergirl and that Supergirl could have stopped all of this if she just let Rhea have Mon-El, her son, back. Or, Kara will have to choose between saving Lena or Mon and she'll choose Mon and then Lena will feel the ultimate betrayal once again because Kara promised always but didn’t deliver so Lena will choose the devil she knows and side with Lillian to take the aliens down. Or, Lillian will die while trying to save Lena, knowing that this will endear her to Lena and get Lena to finish what she started, and Lena will discover that Kara is Supergirl and that Mon is Mike which means Kara’s the reason why Rhea wanted to invade the planet, think that this whole thing could have been avoided either by her knowing about Kara being Supergirl or by giving Mon El back to his mother, so she'll feel betrayed, accuse Kara of being selfish, think that Kara is a hypocrite, grow to hate her, and become the villain for the third season.

Or to “throw us off” they’ll have the President be the main villain in S3. But then alien invasion will become a recurring theme and that’s going to be boring…