#but because he’s a man he doesn’t feel the societal urge to act on many of his beliefs about beauty

[the-dalseum-duet]

there is a reason kohls is strictly yaoi and there is a divine rule that I cannot interact with any other interpretation of them. because if they were a tall anorexic bitch in designer heels and her fucked up little girlfriend in thigh-high socks with a gore tumblr blog sharing cigarettes and dark lipstick… it would have been So Over for me

[hualianff]

More Than This

Modern AU where famous actor HC and landscaper XL meet through a dating app. HC had a reputation of being a massive flirt who bedded people left and right, which wasn’t completely wrong–just blown out of proportion. His partners were usually other celebrities who mutually swore to keep their mouths shut in the preservation of their own images.

When HC received a message on the dating app asking about the brand of the wristwatch he wore in his profile pic (which only showcased his hands), the other user hoping to purchase a cheaper, similar style for his friend’s birthday, HC responded for the first time since downloading the app.

What could he say? The other man was gorgeous and if he were simply asking just to slide into HC’s DMs, the actor wasn’t opposed.

Turns out XL asked out of genuine curiosity. FX’s birthday was still a month away. Why XL thought about gifting him a watch similar to the one the stranger wore when XL should’ve been paying attention to the sheer strength those large hands seemed to possess was beyond him.

The name in the bio read: San Lang. The few pictures that were displayed on his profile were minimalistic yet downright sexy. XL blinked in wonder as he typed out another message, hoping to continue the conversation.

Two weeks after chatting back and forth through the app, XL asked if he could meet HC in person. The actor pondered this for a grand total of thirty seconds before agreeing to meet. XL seemed like a sincere character, someone who put other peoples’ comfort above any task at hand–if his emoticon overkill and frequent check-ins with HC were anything to go by.

HC figured he’d cross the bridge once XL recognized him as a well-loved actor starring in the hottest films in the media.

Except when HC arrived in his expensive jeep that screamed wealth, dressed in appropriate clothes for a hike with a baseball cap concealing his features from far away, XL did not have an aha! moment.

“Hello, San Lang! It’s me, Xie Lian,” XL waved as he bounced his way over. “I hope the ride up the mountain wasn’t too scary. You get used to it once you begin visiting more often. Thank you for meeting with me today.”

“It’s no problem at all. Nice to meet you, Xie Lian,” HC greets, guiding them away from his car as soon as he locks the doors, not wanting to draw any onlookers’ attention.

XL gives him a kind smile, adjusting the clasp of his bamboo hat. He explains that there are three main trails and he was thinking they could take the medium-level route. Judging from his white work-out T, jean shorts, and hiking boots, HC deduces that XL spends much time outside, even when he’s not gardening for his clients.

“Lead the way, Gege,” HC says, the title naturally falling from his lips. In XL’s dating profile, his age read thirty-two, just under three years older than HC. (This was followed by a dozen tree, flower, and water emoticons.)

“Okay! Onwards.”

Following their initial meeting, HC met up with XL numerous times after, attracted to XL’s mellow and eccentric personality. Whenever it was XL’s turn to plan their time together, he brought HC to different places each time. National parks, plant nurseries, museums–places that could be considered unconventional compared to the standard meetups from dating apps.

HC’s fondness for XL only grew because of this.

Their chemistry flourished in the bedroom as well, both HC and XL eager for giving and receiving pleasure. In addition to being fuckbuddies, they quickly developed a wholesome friendship that HC never saw coming.

But then again, this was XL. Once HC got a taste, his infatuation with the landscaper shouldn’t be surprising. HC stopped seeing his other speed dials after he met XL.

One of their nights ended by watching a film, XL mentioning off-handedly how he doesn't keep up with pop culture–including popular films–but his friend SQX had begged XL to watch this one. Of course, this had to be a film HC was in, one of his most recent projects. There was no avoiding the impending reveal.

They sit side-by-side on XL’s lumpy couch, watching the movie when XL gasps as the antagonist comes into view.

That is his San Lang! On the screen!

When XL pokes HC on the bicep, asking why the actor hadn’t told him, HC simply says that “My fame isn’t important to who I am.”

To HC’s surprise, XL accepts the answer without protest, nodding.

“San Lang is San Lang, who happens to be a marvelous actor,” XL solemnly says, flashing HC a delighted smile. HC hums in content, subtly repositioning his arm so it rested on the back of the couch, curling around XL’s shoulders.

Except after the movie ended and a google search later, XL finds out that San Lang isn’t San Lang after all.

“Should I call you Hua Cheng from now on? Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’ve been calling you the wrong name for three months now-” XL rushes out, guilt painted across his face.

“Gege, it’s fine. I used it as an alias for my profile to protect my identity,” HC explains. He reaches forward to tuck a long strand of XL’s hair behind his ear. “Besides, I quite like it when you call me San Lang.”

“Really?” XL sheepishly asks.

“Really.”

From that moment on, HC and XL clicked perfectly, learning more about each other when time permitted them to meet up. XL felt a little foolish for not knowing who HC was as a celebrity. But like HC said, his fame did not define him as a person, which XL clearly saw from the playful way he held himself when there were no cameras around.

HC matched XL’s enthusiasm in whatever activity they were doing, even if it was something XL’s previous partners couldn’t care less about. Eight months into their arrangement, XL finally admitted to himself that he had deep feelings for HC.

While they had great chemistry as friends, XL selfishly wanted more.

But how could XL ask for something more? They already agreed to keep things casual, to remain as friends who used each other to release their sexual urges. It didn’t matter how delicate HC cleaned XL up or always ran him a bath after their climaxes. It didn’t matter how HC always set out his clothes for XL to stay the night. And it didn’t matter how close HC held onto him as they slept.

XL was simply a landscaper with a passion for nature and helping others. He wasn’t built for the limelight. He was barely in the loop with societal trends, and only recently began watching the latest movies with HC–many of which HC himself acted in.

Frankly speaking, HC could have anyone he wanted. XL was the one who should be grateful HC even sought him out a second time.

XL is thirty-three now. He wanted to find someone to settle down with, to spend the rest of his life with, falling deeper in love with every single day. He was not sure HC, who was just entering his thirties and continuing to make a name for himself, would want something like that with someone like XL.

Even when every one of HC’s actions alluded that he truly cared for XL, XL had learned that hope was a dangerous thing to mindlessly cling to. XL has had past partners come into his life, then leave him like he was nothing, like none of him was worth staying for. XL didn’t think he could bear it if HC became just another name on that list.

Furthermore, XL didn’t want to put HC or his career on spot, nor put his heart in a position where it was bound to be broken.

As XL grappled with his perceived one-sided feelings, HC only allowed himself to yearn when laying on the bed in his penthouse. It was much larger than XL’s bed. It was also much lonelier.

HC was unable to grant XL the verbal confirmation of where they stood, held back by the weight of his status, which had always been his selling point alongside his hypersexualized image. Not only did HC not want to risk pressuring XL into pursuing a relationship with a celebrity, but somewhere deep inside, HC didn’t believe XL could want him for who he is–even after the year and a half they’ve known each other.

Much of HC’s self-worth had come from his accomplishments as an actor, untouchable yet fantasized by the public. Peeling back all the layers he hid behind, HC saw his true self as too ugly, damaged, and undesirable; phrases many people in his past have spat to his face, including his parents.

In HC’s mind, he had already tied XL down to their routine no-strings-attached meet-ups. While HC savored every moment he spent with XL, he didn’t want to further intrude on XL’s simple life and have the other man resent him in the end.

《II》

(Thanks to @no-one-says-hi for helping)

[zalrb]

How would you have written damons character as an antagonist, in a way that is believable for elena to fall for him? Or do you have any examples of shows that have done thaf dynamic well?

OK well first of all, the main thing, like I’ve always said, is that Damon can’t do what he did to her friends and family. It’s too much.

He rapes Caroline

He tries to kill her

twice

actually, no, three times

He tries to kill Bonnie

He’s responsible for Vicki

Turns out that he’s the one who killed and turned her birth mother and they’ve had sex

He kills Jeremy

Not to mention that he got Jenna stabbed

Like he causes too much carnage to Elena’s circle specifically that her falling for him in any capacity doesn’t make sense unless Elena is actually just a terrible friend and sister.

Eric doesn’t even do this much damage to Sookie’s circle, the most he does to her friends is chain Lafayette in his basement and then feed on him, which actually has context because Lafayette was selling vampire blood and that’s a grave offence among vampires.

So that’s the first thing that I’d have to change.

The second is that he has to have a story that is actually sympathetic and not just, I fell in love with a woman who told me specifically that she’s interested in me because I love her more than she loves me

because that’s stupid. I have so many different posts about this but in 1864, I would’ve made Damon a pillar of the community with a wife and kids because at that age he would’ve had a family and then Katherine comes and completely torpedoes his life, she promises him an eternity of them together and swears that her being with Stefan is just to use him, she actually seduces him and perhaps compels him and has him so wrapped up in her that he abandons his family and his wife finds out that Katherine’s a vampire and tries to out her but Katherine convinces him to put her in an asylum, like actually have Katherine be malicious in how she deals with him and have Damon do all this terrible shit, only for his father and the townspeople who he had once considered his community turn on him and kill him and he can’t see his kids again and he’s destroyed his wife’s life and he carries that guilt and that anger for over a century, just biding his time for the comet to get Katherine out because she promised him eternity only to find out that she wasn’t in the tomb, she knew where he was and she didn’t care, and she always loved Stefan and then just have him completely break. That kind of storyline doesn’t paint him in the best light but with the right acting and the right script and the right dialogue and the right chemistry, it makes him sympathetic and his hatred of Katherine and his hatred of the town is rooted in something real. So if Elena is going to feel any sense of sympathy toward him, with that kind of storyline I can understand it. And I could see her helping him realize that the people who live in the town now don’t deserve to die so when he has that whole “I came to this town wanting to destroy it but I found myself trying to save it”, it’s earned.

In terms of Elena “falling” for Damon, I have always said there are various ways this could’ve been done. Like actually make them a dark relationship:

If Elena becomes a vampire and that’s supposed to be a game-changer then she has to change internally. I would want Elena to feel constrained by Stefan and have a reason for it, like if Stefan is all about here is how you control your urges, here is how you appear as human as possible, then I would want Elena to realize that she’s actually curious about losing control, curious about the blood, curious about the freedom of vampirism and Damon gives her that.

The show thinks it did that but it didn’t because Stefan did everything right. He taught her how to hunt, how to defend herself, he stimulated her sexually, he took her to parties so she could learn how to socialize while being oversensitive, he provided opportunities like the motorcycle so she could relish the power of vampirism and he looked for the cure secretly, he consistently told her she would make it through this period, he even celebrates her being alive with champagne, like Stefan was actually perfect, the ONE thing he couldn’t do was teach her how to feed on humans, that isn’t enough of a chasm. And Elena constantly said how she didn’t want this life. If Elena didn’t actually say any of that and did things like, Maybe I should learn how to feed on humans and he shut her down, or if she compelled someone and he was like Elena, I know it’s tempting but you need to not do that and she just felt stifled then I could see why she would go to Damon.

Then when she’s with Damon, he encourages all of her worst impulses. She no longer looks at her friends as friends but as food and it’s not something that Damon helps her navigate because she’s a vampire and this is how vampires feel, they feed together, they drink like crazy together, they drive like maniacs together, she leaves school because fuck it, she has eternity, why does she need to be confined by human rules anymore

Another thing I said I would do is I could see the triangle being like Will/Elizabeth/Jack in PotC:

Elizabeth was attracted to Jack and I think that’s fair because he’s attractive and because he did everything she wanted in that he followed his impulses, he was outside the law, outside societal constructions, he did what he did because he wanted to do it and yet she knew he also had morality in him. So it was this tension of sexual curiosity and the belief that he could be redeemed. And Jack plays on her sexual curiosity, there is a ton of innuendo, a lot of flirting and when it really counts he proves her right in being a “good man” but that’s also directly related to Will, helping Will, saving Will, trusting Will and while Will believes she loves Jack for like half of POTC At World’s End, Jack and Elizabeth both know it’s always Will. There’s no question. And I think that could’ve been Delena. I think Elena could be curious about Damon and attracted to Damon and I think he could play on that because he’s Damon but when it comes down to it, for both of them, it’s about Stefan.

Jack works because he’s not bound by romance, his love is intangible, it’s the sea, it’s it’s the Black Pearl, it’s being a captain,  it’s his crew, it’s the components that construct what freedom is to him and I would’ve given Damon something like that, unconcerned with earthly preoccupations like love particularly since he’s a vampire and immortal and I think that would’ve been very interesting with Elena being there as a sort of reminder that earthly preoccupations aren’t always a waste of time, like a good bond that’s in between friendship and romance but never crosses over to either. So I could see that happening.

I have also said that I could see Elena being attracted to the idea of Damon, the way the Delena fandom is attracted to and romanticizes the idea of Damon where, like, a part of her that she really hates --- and we see that she hates it --- we get a Buffy-esque breakdown like this

likes the fact that he’d let everyone die to save her, is flattered by the fact that when she says something to hurt him, he spirals out of control, misconstrues his toxic behaviour as intense love and finds herself curious about him because he comes on strong all the time, so she wonders if being with him would be passionate and consuming, have her romanticize the idea of a consuming relationship only for them to get together and realize how unbelievably awful it is to be in that relationship where every time they fight and he storms out, she calls her friends to make sure they’re safe and tell them to avoid Damon at all costs because he’s on edge, have her feel the guilt of knowing a fight between them caused an innocent to die etc.

[theexistentiallyqueer]

I really hate waking up to see that there was good meta that was circulating during the night and I have so many things I want to say but I have to go to work like a responsible adult in this capitalist hellscape. I’m specifically referencing this, this, this, and this, and I just got home from work and it was balls to the walls fucking crazy today, so excuse me if I seem incoherent and disjointed.

All of this made me think of a few very specific theories I have, which I’ve already mentioned in passing, but now I feel the urge to lay them out all together in one post, which are:

Loki is Goro’s original persona, and Yaldabaoth hand-picked him for a reason

Yaldabaoth, disguised as Igor, served the function of psychopomp cognitive guide to Goro that Morgana serves to Akira, Teddie serves to Souji, and Mitsuru serves to Makoto

Goro used Loki’s berserker power on himself so he could kill Wakaba

Robin Hood is the persona born from Goro’s bond with Akira and represents the justice he wishes he believed in

Goro is not a true wildcard and never was one

Plus some other ones reading today’s meta made me think about

So, without further ado.

Loki as Goro’s original persona aligns most strongly with two things: 1. actual dialogue during his boss fight, and 2. the larger framework of the game Yaldabaoth was playing.

For his boss fight I’m referencing specifically the JP-ENG comparison of that scene. One of the things the anon who did the comparison repeatedly references is that “psychotic breakdowns” is an incredibly erroneous translation of what Call of Chaos actually does:

!! 暴走させる means “to make [something] run wild/rampage/act reckless,” not to drive the psychotic. While it can be used to refer to someone wildly lashing out at others, it can also be used for a runaway car, losing control, acting without regard or just being reckless in a potentially dangerous way. In the Persona series, this term has also been used in reference to losing control of one’s Persona, and to a Shadow going berserk (for those who’ve played Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, the JP name for Shadow Frenzy, シャドウ暴走, also uses the term).

Goro’s ability makes people act recklessly without regard for others; it doesn’t make them outright psychotic. (Strangely enough, the first scene at Leblanc in the game translates the incidents related to this ability as “rampage incidents,” which is closer to what it should be, yet they consistently screw it up in later scenes.)

And the original dialogue follows up on that:

Makoto (JP): あんな、人を操ったり狂わせたりする力を、自分自身の心から生み出してたなんて…(“To think that the power to manipulate and drive mad others was born from his own heart…”)

And more subtly:

Futaba (JP): なのに人生ソロプレイだったから、目覚めた力は、自前の『嘘』と『恨み』の、たった２個だけ… (“Even so, ‘cause you went through life in single player, the powers you awakened were just your "lies” and “resentment”…“)

I feel like the original text upholds this argument, especially considering Goro consistently refers to Loki as his “true” power, and he is way OP with Loki in a way he’s not with Robin Hood–almost as if he’s had more time to level-grind with Loki than he has with Robin.

As for Yaldabaoth, I think the context of what Yaldabaoth actually wants is very clear: Yaldabaoth wanted Goro to win. He created a blatantly unfair “game” modeled after the normal “game” played between Philemon and Nyarlathotep, and the first thing he did was give a persona to one player two years earlier than the other. Yaldabaoth wants to destroy and remake the world, and he would have cherry-picked the angriest kid in the barrel to make that happen. Goro didn’t have some psychopomp cognitive guide in the form of a talking cat to explain the metaverse to him, and I think it stands to reason that Yaldabaoth groomed Goro as much as Shido did: Yaldabaoth was Goro’s psychopomp cognitive guide. Goro’s not-dumb enough to be immediately suspicious when a random app installs itself on his phone; it stands to reason that he only paid it any attention because some half-bald fucker with a nose longer than Goro’s Robin Hood mask planted the idea in his head of what it could be used for. Akira tries to delete the app twice, and it’s only after Ryuji accidentally triggers the Nav that he stops trying to get rid of it.

(I’ve seen the Goro was a subject in Wakaba’s research theories too as an explanation for how he could know so much of the metaverse without Morgana around to catsplain it to him. I’m not a fan of them, mostly because I think subtle writing is a concept Atlus is very much not at all engaged with, and if he really was a research subject that would have been dumped on us with all the subtlety of trying to assassinate someone by dropping roof tiles onto them, and I like my HCs and theories to be as in line as what can be explained most comprehensibly with canon until I decide to throw the entire baby out with the bathwater and say MY PLAYGROUND NOW. It’s a cool theory, it’s just not one that I’m into. The people who play with this theory are smarter and more valid than Atlus will ever be. And who knows, maybe Royal will prove me wrong. I am open to being proven wrong and Krist is already starting to feed me food from Royal that has me second-guessing, but I’m going to wait until the international release in March to have takes on this.)

As for Goro himself–I’ve always, from the first time I played P5 when I thought Goro as interesting enough in concept but wasn’t really ready to be a Goroboy, thought that Goro represented the Justice Arcana in reverse, which is interesting in that this Persona game you can’t reverse confidants’ cards. Goro is reversed Justice in and of himself within the main context of the narrative.

I don’t really jive with the idea that Goro started out with Robin Hood as representative of his ideals before he was manipulated and twisted by Shido, because it contradicts the context in which he had his awakening and it removes whatever degree of culpability or autonomy Goro did have in what he ultimately became. Goro is full of rage, and Goro acted on that rage. Goro got the slightest taste of power and went from 0 to acting on a desire from revenge in about thirty seconds flat. He definitely didn’t realize he was signing on for murder and Shido definitely groomed him into being his psychopomp hitman, Goro is the one who took the initiative to approach Shido in the first place because Goro wanted to destroy the man who destroyed his life and who did, in some sense, kill his mom. Not that I think it’s disingenuous to say that Goro did originally believe in a justice that was, well, more just, but there’s a vast chasm between the boy who used to pretend to be a hero of justice and a boy who decided what he wanted most was to humiliate his fascist of a father. Goro’s sense of justice was already hugely warped by the time he awakened to his persona. Justice is exposing Shido publicly and holding him accountable; justice for Goro was making Shido’s life a living very personal hell.

Loki’s power isn’t even necessarily to make someone go berserk. Goro actually explains how Loki’s power works at the start of his boss fight, and it’s carried through pretty well in the English translation.

Goro (JP): ちっぽけな存在でも、心の枷が外れると、桁違いの力を得る事がある。 ("Even a tiny being, once you remove the bonds on its heart, can gain unimaginable power.”) Goro (EN) Even the feeblest existence can gain tremendous power once the chains on its heart are broken. !! 枷 has a double meaning of both literal restraints (shackles/chains/etc) and more metaphorical ways to bind someone (such as relations to others, or societal restrictions on what you’re allowed to do). While “chains on its heart” is a valid translation, it fails to maintain that wordplay in English, and given how the power he’s talking about works, it’s almost certainly on purpose.

Loki’s power works by shattering the restraints on a person’s heart that stop them from acting recklessly in ways that hurt other people. I think a case could very much be made that the reason this seems to always result in violence on the part of those of Goro’s targets (and Goro himself) is because when you’re in that state, you stop feeling sympathy or empathy, and the dark impulses you bury deep inside (which everyone has) can reign unchecked.

When I first started to choochoo along the “Goro went berserk to kill Wakaba” train, one of the first things I started to speculate was that he was the first person he used Call of Chaos on. I started to reevaluate that today when I read all of that delicious food and found myself rethinking how Goro would have approached Shido, and I found myself drawn the conclusion that Goro brought Shido two things–the ability to gather secret knowledge and the ability to drive people berserk–but Shido would have wanted proof. And Goro’s an idiot, but he’s not dumb; he would have had that proof ready in advance. Goro would have been causing some psychotic breakdowns on a smaller scale before he approached Shido, just enough to make the news and catch Wakaba’s attention in her research, but not enough to cause widespread chaos on the scale that’s referenced in game, before he stepped foot through Shido’s door.

I find it very hard to believe that Goro didn’t know the basics of Wakaba before he killed her: single mom, no father in the picture, daughter roughly his age. Goro is the type to hoard information because it makes him feel in control, so he’d be given this name from Shido and want to know everything he can uncover about his target first–also he’s the one with the metaverse nav app and he’d need to know as much about her as possible to figure out what her distortion is.

(This is assuming Wakaba had a palace as opposed to residing in Mementos. I have no grounds to base this theory on, but I think she did. I won’t go into it in too much detail, but I HC that Wakaba’s palace was modeled after the Library of Alexandria, and Wakaba’s shadow was Hypatia. I’ll save the thematic whys of that for another post because they’re neither here nor there.)

I have a hard time buying that a teenager would just go from zero to being okay with murder without having some pretty critical hangups in the process, especially a teenager who kind of thinks of himself as a hero who has to get his hands dirty. You can’t really justify murdering an innocent woman who did nothing wrong when you measure her against people like Okumura. Especially when so much of that single mom’s life story should probably logically resonate with you.

(This is another reason I get upset that nothing in canon ever has Goro actively acknowledge his murder of Wakaba, because if it did it would have to grapple the between Goro and Futaba and the fact that Goro did to Futaba was exactly what was done to him, but way more directly. Atlus is not subtle and is also not capable of nuance or depth.)

So the logical line of thought is that Goro used Call of Chaos on himself to break the chains on his own heart (the feelings that would make him sympathize with Wakaba and see his own mother in her) so that he could kill her. I’d also argue that layered on top of of all of this is that Goro didn’t know killing her shadow would kill her, because Shido guarded her research closely and Yaldabaoth wanted a boy who would be willing to smash things. They were both grooming him to be their perfect little murderer.

By the point we meet him in the game Goro is heavily tied up in Shido’s conspiracy and all that that entails. His already jaded sense of justice will by this point have been warped beyond repair–until he meets Akira. Akira is probably the first person Goro has ever bonded with in his entire life, and a wildcard’s power is rooted in the ability to form bonds. Positive bonds specifically, because it’s only through those that their power can grow. I think we can all look at Goro’s life and agree that his relationship with Akira is the only positive one he’s had since he was like…….never years old.

And I specifically think that it’s through his relationship with Akira that Goro starts to reawaken to his true sense of justice. It’s textually canonical that Goro is jealous of the fact that the Phantom Thieves found a way to achieve their goals without collateral damage. I think that bonding with Akira–in a way Goro has literally never bonded with anyone else before–is what caused Goro’s second awakening and his tentative re-embrasure of the belief that justice is about helping, not hurting. Except he’s in two such different places at this point. I’m very on board with the BPD!Goro hc that’s become a thing lately, thanks to Krist and the goroboys discord server, but I’m not going to go into specifics because I’m not BPD. I just think that from what I’ve read of BPD it sounds valid, and if a person who is BPD says they get that mood from him, that’s extra valid

But Goro’s sense of self is clearly very split between Loki and Robin Hood and what they thematically represent. He wants to be a hero, but he still dresses like a tokusatsu villain half the time. He wants to be a hero, but he’s also a murderer. He can’t reconcile these aspects of himself.

Goro isn’t a true wildcard because he lacks the ability of connection. While the wildcard ability is granted by a cosmic entity (Philemon/Igor/Yaldabaoth/etc.), the degree of its manifestation is dependent upon the wildcard’s ability to connect with other people. The case could be made that Adachi and Namatame are wildcards because they’re both selected as game pieces by Izanami, but only Souji manifests the wildcard ability because only he is able to connect with others. The implication to be taken from that is that a cosmic force can grant an individual a persona and the corresponding wildcard ability, but that ability can’t manifest itself unless the individual is capable of wielding it–which Goro is not.

And very much unlike a wildcard, if you take the necessary steps Goro’s two personas do fuse into an ultimate whole. If you complete the development of Goro’s character to the extent the game requires, then Loki and Robin Hood fuse to become Hereward. I have some thoughts about this in relation to the fact that I can’t find any evidence that Hereward is tied to the Robin Hood myth, but all that aside: Goro’s warped sense of justice and his true sense of justice fused together in a way that’s, uh——-

Robin Hood is very bara and Loki is very twink. Hereward looks extremely similar to Robin Hood, but has a dark grey, an almost black, color design. Hereward literally represents Goro embracing that justice is grey, and that it’s okay for Goro to both want to be the hero and to want to see people struggle with the hard questions of how the hurts they’ve inflicted, intentionally or not, have impacted the people affected by them.

Goro was never a true wildcard to begin with. Yaldabaoth chose him because he was isolated. That he found his other half in Akira was dumb luck of the draw.

[absentlyabbie]

Flommy. Soulmate AU of sorts. Kiiiind of canon divergence, very loosely.

First, the canon divergence:

So all the pre island shit still happens. Rebecca Merlyn dies when her son is eight years old. Her husband abandons their child to gnash his teeth on a global tour and develop his plan for class warfare and eventual class genocide. Thea Queen is conceived and born. Tommy Merlyn grows up under neglect and contempt as his father manipulates and strong arms his fellow one percenters into committing to his deeply shady undertaking, becoming more criminal and morally bankrupt the deeper they all get into Malcolm’s plan. Oliver Queen grows up lost and misunderstood and acts out as badly as a rich white boy can until he’s looking to sabotage every relationship he has (that isn’t with Tommy) because he doesn’t like himself and doesn’t know who else to be.

Instead of boarding a boat to China that Malcolm sabotages, setting into motion the chain of events that make Ollie into the Hood, the Queen men elect to fly. (Not sure yet how Sara is involved but she probably is; also the flight thing might not be how it goes down) and Malcolm has them kidnapped before they reach the airport.

It’s a huge national story. Billionaire CEO and playboy heir abducted and missing for three weeks. No calls for ransom. No leads. So many tabloid stories being nasty at Moira and about Robert’s history of infidelity.

Meanwhile, Oliver and Robert are held at an obscure facility as both are interrogated and at times tortured, as Malcolm seeks to know how, he believes, Robert is planning to betray him.

Robert gives away nothing, but two weeks in, Oliver is in terrible shape, often tortured to try and break Robert. Robert in their cell does his shitty confession and putting his burdens on his son, making Oliver memorize names and dirty deals and connections and giving him cryptic clues to a cache of incriminating evidence against Malcolm and all the others. Then Robert makes a half assed escape attempt, wresting a gun from a guard and trying to force them to set them free. When it’s clear that won’t work, he apologizes to Oliver and shoots himself in the head, hoping that with no more reason to hold him, they’ll let Oliver go.

Oliver, crazed by grief and days of torture, violently assaults the remaining two captors, disabling one. Little does he realize the authorities have found them and the FBI sweeps in just as Oliver finishes beating a guard to death.

This helps get him into the situation that comes next.

Oliver ends up turning state’s evidence. To protect his mother and sister, to get revenge for his father, and because he is threatened with a trial by agent Amanda Waller.

So, traumatized, changed forever, and on a mission, Oliver can’t bear to return to Starling. When Tommy tries to visit him, before it’s known it was Malcolm behind it all, the encounter goes very badly. Oliver is dark, angry, obsessed. They feel impossibly far from one another. Tommy goes home heartbroken and feeling abandoned again. Oliver pursues revenge disguised as justice. This however leads only to more pain.

Two revelations come at the same time: his mother was as deep in as his father and therefore could be subject to prosecution, regardless of the pressures that put her there. Also, at last, the man behind it all. Malcolm Merlyn, his best friend’s father.

Oliver knows this will destroy Tommy’s life. For that alone he would hesitate. But. But. Malcolm is poison. A monster. And he has only one chance to broker a deal to save his mother, and giving up Tommy’s father is it.

And so, the Undertaking is averted, but its full scope revealed to all. Malcolm is arrested and charged. Oliver could only bring himself to tell Tommy at the last minute. The two are in such hurt and anger they do not speak for the next few years. Still, Tommy does testify at his father’s trial. For the state. He corroborates details and speaks to Malcolm as a father: cold, cruel, exacting and contemptuous. Tommy is dragged in the press plenty on his own. The final nail in the coffin of it all is when Malcolm flies into a rage at the Merlyn house the last day of the trial and almost kills his son.

Malcolm is sentenced to life in prison for numerous crimes, including conspiracy to commit domestic terrorism and attempted murder of his own child. In prison, soon after, he is killed in a prison riot (actually dead or orchestrated disappearance? Who knows.)

Meanwhile Tommy is left to grieve and process and pick up the shattered pieces of his life. The Queens leave Starling, and Oliver becomes almost a hermit to, like, bodybuild and try to psychologically heal and hopefully stay out of Waller’s clutches. Tommy stays in Starling, his trust and assets and inheritance tied up or seized at large by the federal government, the board of Merlyn Global desperately seeking a rebranding or possibly overall firesale, and the city and world in general associates his last name with violent class hatred and corruption.

Years pass. Oliver and Tommy don’t talk. Oliver does not return to Starling. Tommy regains fractions of his fortune over time, maybe opens a business, definitely opens several clinics, charities, and nonprofits across the city. To some he is a hero, a prince of redemption. To others he’ll never shine bright enough to be free of his father’s shadow. Laurel is his good friend and he has been quietly repressedly in love with her for some time, and doing nothing about it.

Now,  the concept:

Soulmates happen, though they’re referred to as soul bonded. They’re not always romantic relationships. It’s a metaphysical bond between people uniquely suited to understand, support, and be complemented by one another.

Being bonded is not a given. It happens, not infrequently, but not so much so that everyone can assume it will happen to them.

Being bonded also doesn’t mean there can’t be breakdowns in the relationship. It’s still something you have to choose to work at. Being bonded just means really that this is a person so well suited to being a vital part of your life, why wouldn’t you choose to work at maintaining it?

So. The way it works. You encounter a person who is your bond partner in the wild, and a mark appears, typically near the chest region, often over the heart or center of the sternum (anomalies do occur.) You can’t miss it because it appears with a feeling almost like you’ve been branded, and it’s described by those who experience it as an electric current tethering you suddenly to your bond partner. You become hyper aware of them.

To outsiders, the bondmark is unmistakable. They couldn’t draw it or describe it in detail, but there is something visceral in the human brain that recognizes it, and recognizes when they match. Even when directly photographed, this holds true to observers.

In this way, bond marks cannot be copied or forged. They cannot be imitated with tattooing or obscured by scars or burns.

(Because even in stories I’ll never write I go hard on world building.)

The bond does confer certain unique connections. Not like telepathy or viewing through one another’s eyes or walking in dreams. But that hyper awareness of your bond partner doesn’t go away. It’s almost an empathetic awareness. It hums, and it carries non verbal understanding, and it feels most settled and right when the partners are together and spend time with one another as best suits who they both are and the dynamic they establish between them.

New bonds are tricky. They are intense and absorbing, and can even be uncomfortable and strange and almost obsessive at times. This newness can last for a period of typically three to eight weeks. This period is referred to as “settling.”

It’s the time during which the new bond through physical and psychological stimuli encourages the new partners to get to know and become comfortable and familiar with one another.

This is typically characterized as a time when new bond partners have difficulty focusing on things unrelated to their partner for long stretches, and a need to not just be in each other’s presence, but often physical contact. This may mean cuddling, sitting closely, thoughtless, casual intimate touches. Ignoring or denying these settling urges can lead to physical discomfort, anxiety, and emotional and mental distress.

Bond partners who are romantically or just physically suited often get rapidly intimately involved during this period, though that doesn’t always mean it will stay that way, and it’s not a given.

(You can be bonded to more than one person, of course. Multiple people can even be bonded to each other. For now the idea is Flommy but let’s not pretend OT3 isn’t always an option with me and it’s definitely an option this concept allows for.)

That’s the other thing, though. First: bonds do not manifest until after maturity, typically no earlier than age 20.

Second, and this is the thing least understood: bonds most often manifest when mature partners first encounter one another. BUT not always, especially with people who knew each other prior to maturity.

There’s a lot of theories, most popular that the bond manifests when both partners are ready to be bonded, or in other words, have grown into the version of themselves truly suited to their partner. But no one really knows. It’s not an exact science.

And plenty of scientific research has indeed been done on soul bonding. There’s a department of the national health organization dedicated to it, legal provisions made for bonded partners, including work and school accommodations for those in the settling period.

(Settling can typically be physically measured through hormones via bloodwork.)

There are societal benefits to bonded relationships after all. Bonded partners tend to be more stable members of society, the possibility of your bonded being anyone promotes empathy, outreach, and social safety nets being extended more broadly, and on the local scale, many studies have shown that bonded partners have a stabilizing, sometimes even calming effect on their immediate social groups and environments.

And of course, there’s plenty of media romanticism of bonded relationships. It’s the biggest subgenre of romance books and films, but is often prevalent in all other genres, especially popular in law enforcement/war story/etc stories.

Now for the actual story:

Tommy visits Queen Consolidated one day to try and woo the board into partnering with one of his charities. He leaves uncertain if they will take it as an opportunity for redemptive PR or treat associating with a man named Merlyn like bathing in radioactive waste. On his way out through the lobby, he literally runs into a cute blonde he wouldn’t have really glanced at twice.

And nothing will ever be the same.

The bonding is instant, electric, and undeniable. However, it is also... unwelcome.

Neither of them is remotely happy that it happens.

Tommy is in love with Laurel and has been talking himself into making a real move. This is the worst timing. And bonding or not, the idea of letting someone get close to him like that is terrifying. He has been abandoned and betrayed and discarded his whole life. In his mind, not even a bonding can make someone want to keep him around in any capacity.

And if they do, he would think it was only because they “had to” because that bond. That’s not how bonding works, but it’s a popular and persistent misconception.

And new bonds can put serious strain on preexisting relationships. When opposite sex, attraction-compatible partners are bonded, the general public has a hard time believing it’s not sexual and/or romantic, and even still insecurity and jealousy from nonbonded romantic partners can complicate matters.

So Tommy is exasperated and suspicious and unhappy.

Felicity is no happier, however.

New bondings require mandatory paid leave from work during the settling period and Felicity has been trying to make advancement finally happen in her career at QC. And bonding leave has historically had a more negative effect on women’s career trajectory than men’s.

It’s still our world, unfortunately.

It’s no different than women starting families.

Beyond even just the career implications, however, Felicity has never wanted to be bonded. Not in any way she’d admit to anyways.

Her parents were bond partners. And still her father walked away from them when she was six.

Her mother, when she is drunk and feeling reflective, will admit they were never meant to be romantic partners. He was her best friend. They rarely slept with each other after settling, but it wasn’t never. The pregnancy wasn’t planned. Donna was delighted. Her husband had never wanted children.

And while he loved Felicity, he never really took to fatherhood. The strain broke down their relationship. And even bonded, when you stop communicating, and circumstances are adverse to both partners’ needs being met, and you stop working on your relationship... no relationship is perfect or safe forever from hurt. Not even a soul bonded one.

(Because in my concept, being soulmates isn’t a magical fix for everything. It’s too much an easy button sometimes. I find that dissatisfying.)

Now, what happened between Felicity’s parents isn’t impossible. It’s even understandable, if tragic nonetheless. And her father still made cruel choices in abandoning them and never returning.

But Felicity was six and it hurt her deeply while her ideas of the world were still forming. She decided as she grew up that bonding was bullshit and looking to be bonded so you could feel safe or be happy was asking to get your heart broken, a fairy tale you would be stupid to trust.

So now here she is, bonded to someone whose last name is almost synonymous with domestic terrorism, who doesn’t want to be bonded either, and is in love with someone else. And right when she’s trying to take control of her career, too. Add to that how impossible it will be to maintain her happily anonymous life when bonded to one of Starling’s most infamous sons and none of this looks like a good time.

But you can’t take back a bonding. You can’t undo or break it. Some people are made to have a home in your heart, and the best you could do is evict them and board it up. Still leaves a chamber empty. You can live with it, but you’ll always feel it. And the settling is unavoidable. Even if you choose to never see each other again after, you have to get through settling first.

(You cannot, by the way, be bonded to someone who would truly abuse you. If they would rape or willingly harm you, they’d never be the person so suited to you that you were bound.)

Like there are ways to get through settling on the bare minimum. If both partners are not interested in fostering their connection to its full potential, they can do the least possible to get through settling with minimal discomfort, then simply choose to drift apart and not keep up with each other or stay in contact. (Even then, though, you’re still bonded. Sometimes you’ll just Know something is happening. You’ll feel the urge to reach out, to look in on their life. Hearing about them will always make you pensive for a while. But it’s up to you what to do about any of that.)

Felicity got this far forcefully assuming she’d never be bonded with anyone. Insisting to herself and anyone who asked that she actively didn’t want to be. Tommy had always thought if he bonded with anyone it’d be Oliver. And when that didn’t happen at 20, and things fell out as they did, he assumed... well. He was too broken. Too fundamentally unlovable. Too tainted by the loneliness of his childhood and the selfish monstrosity of his father. His parents weren’t bonded. They chose each other completely on their own, was how his mother put it. He used to think that was even more romantic. As he got older he talked himself into believing it was because of how terrible and cold a person Malcolm was, incapable of bonding equally to anyone at all. Talked himself into believing he must be enough like his father to be similarly incapable of bonding.

(And you know, in every soulmate au I’ve ever toyed with that’s held true. Tommy has always assumed it would be Oliver.)

So when the bond happens to Tommy and Felicity completely out of the blue, two perfect strangers, oh they are pissed. And resistant. They assume they will get through settling and never bother one another ever again if they can manage it.

They want very much to keep it quiet.

That lasts less than a day.

After all, it happened in public. Bondings aren’t entirely commonplace but they’re not rare. If you’ve ever witnessed one, you knew it. That sense of electric connection isn’t imaginary, and at point of contact, can be felt like a ripple by those around the connection. Like holding your hand up to an old tv boxset screen just after turning it off.

All it takes is for someone to follow the feeling back and realize they recognize one of the people now staring at each other with their hands on their chests.

A call to a newspaper or tabloid. “Tommy Merlyn just got soul bonded in the lobby of Queen Consolidated!”

The news is spreading before Tommy and Felicity are even properly grappling with it. By the time they’ve had their first conversation and already decided they want to settle quietly and go their separate ways, it’s already a Twitter rumor and the trashiest tabloid in town is putting out speculation about the mystery bond partner of the infamous Merlyn son.

So. Tommy and Felicity don’t get to settle quietly. The first dent in Felicity’s knee jerk hostility towards Tommy is when he immediately works to do what he can to keep her identity concealed once it’s out there that she exists, just not who she is.

Things get complicated fast too. They can’t keep her identity hidden for long at all, though it matters that Tommy tries, and when higher ups at QC find out that the new bond partner of Tommy Merlyn is an employee of theirs (and a bonafide trending topic), it shifts their standing on his proposal for partnership.

He was right that they were leaning towards not partnering with his charity out of a conservative desire to keep the Merlyn and Queen names still separate. It’s only been five years after all. But as interest in Felicity grows it will be impossible to avoid connection since she works there, and if they fired her to try and cover their asses they’d open themselves up to a lawsuit and public backlash. It’s bad optics to make employment decisions based on a person’s bond partner(s), and if provable is illegal in certain circumstances. It’s also wildly unpopular with the public.

So they pivot to cozying up and trying to maximize on it. They’ll do the partnership and even go over the requested funding, but only if Felicity agrees to participate in the PR push. They intend to go with the partnership/redemption/community healing spin.

And won’t it look pretty to partner with a Merlyn charity for lower income health care initiatives with Tommy Merlyn showing up with their employee, much closer to that class than his own, on his arm.

All of this is complicated by the initiative rolling out the pr push during their settling period, a time most new partners choose to stay out of public by and large.

It can be pushed back slightly, but not enough.

So that will be Felicity’s first public appearance as bond partner to Tommy Merlyn, at a donor gala soliciting funding for free clinics and other low income healthcare initiatives.

In the meantime, they have to actually deal with their settling period, and hope they can be balanced enough at the time of the gala not to be petting each other in front of the press corps.

After all, what happens when you have two deeply lonely and desperately touch starved people bonded at the soul level?

Intense need and desire for physical contact.

Most new partners actually move in together during their settling period because need for prolonged physical contact between bond partners is extremely common.

Think Tommy running his hand up and down Felicity’s arm. Felicity absently playing with his hair when they’re alone. And Felicity’s gala dress will have a plunging neckline (showcasing the mark) and an even more plunging back. Tommy will not be able to stop running his hand down her spine. He isn’t even conscious of it most of the time. She hardly is either, just unconsciously leaning into the instinctive comfort of it. But there will be plenty written about it before press time the next day.

The touching starts soon in the settling process. Before they realize it tbh. They’re angrily telling each other they don’t want this and yet they keep touching each other. Hand on her arm to pull her out of the lobby to talk privately. Pushing at his chest to underscore her point. Etc.

He probably guides her to an unused conference room or whatever and she probably immediately ignores him to start unbuttoning her shirt in a panic, looking for her mark, brand new and right smack in the middle between her breasts. Tommy wigs out at that and they’re on the wrong foot from the jump.

(Tommy’s is upper left pectoral. Literally right above his heart)

“Whoa! Whoa whoa whoa, I did not drag you in here for sex, stop undressing!”

“Shut up! I need to see it. Don’t you need to see it? I can feel it. Oh my god. Oh my god, this can’t be happening to me. Do you see it? Tell me this isn’t real.”

They probably argue until the frustrated tears in her eyes lead him to suddenly unbutton his own shirt and prove to them both the marks are real.

But every second since the bonding that electric hum ratchets up til it’s an impossible to ignore itch. They part ways at some point, within hours after, but it’s hardly dark out before Felicity is getting in her car. She tells herself she’s just too damn ansty to be still and needs to go driving. She winds up outside his apartment building without even knowing that’s where she is. He thinks he’s gone downstairs to take a walk and sees her instead.

So Felicity goes up to Tommy’s place once they realize they were literally being drawn to each other. She spends the night there. They talk long into the night, admittedly a lot of it arguing and snarking, but once they’re sitting on the couch with no space between them he starts playing with her fingers without even realizing it. Once they do, they both just watch his fingers toying with hers in loaded silence until she abruptly bursts into tears.

He’s startled, panicking and trying awkwardly to comfort her and please tell him if he did something wrong. But she’s so frustrated with her tears and it’s making her cry harder. She only barely, figuring it out out loud, manages to articulate that she can’t remember the last time someone just touched her like this, and it’s killing her, and she doesn’t want him to stop and that scares her.

And he terrifies himself by nearly crying too because fuck he gets that. He wants so badly for her to just please let him keep touching her like this, because it hurts how much his skin aches to touch another person so simply, just simple human contact, and he’s not sure that’s okay and why would she want to let him touch her, and how do you even ask for things like that without sounding like a creep?

And she doesn’t look at him like he’s evil incarnate, or the son of it. It helps that she moved to Starling after it all happened. She heard about it, but in the abstract way you hear about local taxes going up, or how everyone hates that one sports team.

He was an abstract concept. She didn’t research him or read the articles or follow his big moves into charity work.

He’s just a person to her.

He’s just himself.

Everyone has baggage.

His is just larger scale as far as she’s concerned.

Not that they get into that right away. That first night is still kinda awkward. The getting to know you small talk mixed with late night slumber party deepness interspersed with bouts of silence and a whole lot of cautious casual touching.

But it does make them realize that they’re going to have to deal seriously with being bonded and especially settling.

Whiiiich necessitates certain moves.

First, Felicity has to deal with work. Before the board has moved on their big idea, she puts in her notice of bonding, starting the paperwork to initiate her government mandated settling leave.

The process is completed by a doctor's note stating that bloodwork shows she is indeed in the settling phase of bonding.

Which precipitates their next stop.

Most hospitals and clinics have specialists for this sort of thing. Not just for bloodwork but for sort of... entrance counseling. They talk to the partners separately, confirm bloodwork, provided documentation legally recognizing the bond, and if the partners choose, they can then also be counseled together. It’s the point at which most people get their questions answered about both being bonded and the settling process.

In his individual session, Tommy is probably asking questions about the practicalities of settling, and how to maintain relationships outside a settling bond, and what to do about being in love with someone else while the bond is making you focus on a different person entirely.

(His doctor, a handsome black man in his later thirties, smiles in amusement at that and reminds him not all bonds are romantic and they are certainly not automatically exclusive of other relationship possibilities.)

But Felicity.

Felicity is after the numbers and statistics. How many bondings go badly, what’s the average length of a settling period, what percentage are platonic vs romantic, and do bond partners who are attraction-compatible always end up romantically or sexually involved or can they remain platonic from the start?

So many questions. Her doctor is a youngish Latina woman, close to 30, maybe a little past, and she takes Felicity’s frenzied questions in stride, patient and reassuring but not condescending. When Felicity asks that last question the conversation veers a bit.

“Do you want the speech I’ve already given you about your continued autonomous freedom to choose and control over your actions? Or do you want more numbers and statistics?”

“Numbers, please. Unknowns bother me. Not like scare me, but they bother me, I just need to know, I need cold, hard numbers. Numbers are trustworthy, numbers are reliable.”

He doctor gives her a tolerantly skeptical look. “The cold, hard numbers it is then. In most studies and surveys, the numbers have been pretty consistent. This doesn’t change anything I said about choice or your control over your decisions, but statistics wise? Typically, for attraction-compatible partners, in all honesty, it’s above 80% odds that the partners at some point become romantically or sexually involved. It doesn’t always remain that way, but that’s the odds of involvement at some point over the lifetime of the bond.”

Felicity gapes. “Eight... eighty percent? More than eighty percent?”

Doc nods. “More than 80%. Of course, that does include brief flings and even oneoff intimate encounters. Are you ready for more numbers?” Felicity gulps and nods. “About 93% of those partners get romantically or sexually involved during the settling period. Even if it never happens again, if it’s going to, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of it being during the most intense period of the bond, while it’s still new and the partners haven’t found their balance quite yet. After all, it’s a very absorbing, intensely emotional period.”

Felicity sits there looking poleaxed. The doc looks at her a little pityingly. “Still prefer those numbers?”

Felicity groans and falls backward on the examination table. “So I’m definitely going to sleep with him? Or, ugh, fall in love with him?”

The doc shakes her head, rolling her eyes heavenward while Felicity isn’t looking. “Not definitely. But it’s a strong possibility.” Felicity muffles a low scream in her forearms. The doc snorts and, when Felicity sits back up, smiles brightly. “But hey, even if it does happen you don’t have to worry about getting pregnant. Protection is still best in all cases, but an aspect of the hormone cocktail that indicates the settling period does preclude the possibility of successful conception.”

Felicity is not really reassured by this.

So Tommy asks the existential questions at the clinic and Felicity asks how screwed (ha) they are by statistics. Neither is feeling particularly awesome about things after their individual counseling sessions but because they are stupid they opt not to also be counseled as a pair.

They’re morons who are resisting the trust and communication aspect of being bonded.

Idk if I’d end up splashing plot around on this thing or just focus solely on the relationship aspect.

Regardless, even if plot, large focus would be on these two getting to know each other during settling and slowly realizing that the bond—and each other—might be exactly what they needed in their lives. It would be hellaaaaa slow burn.

And then there’s the option to expand.

Tommy and Felicity settle before I’d let Oliver butt in, that’s certain. Adding him to the mix too early would be a disaster.

So big focus on Tommy/Felicity relationship development. Lots of talking and cuddling and minor metaphysics. Eventual shift towards the romantic, and its undoubted accompanying angst.

But also possibly some at least minor plot developments in regards to Felicity pushing to further her career, and plenty of entanglement with Tommy’s reputation and unearned notoriety as well as his efforts to make up for his father’s sins by furthering the legacy of his mother’s life’s work.

I’m thinking there miiiight be an incident of some sort at the charity gala.

Not sure if like... an actual attack aimed at Tommy or like disgruntled people going too far.

And I have this line in my head of them like hiding out in a dark spot somewhere and Tommy miserably apologizing for dragging her into his family bullshit. “You were living a normal, safe life until I happened to you. I’m so sorry.”

And Felicity is half ignoring him as she tries to figure out how to help the situation, and just smirks at him wryly. “Please don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re the most interesting thing to ever happen to me.”

And of course at some point in the chaos they’ll get separated and it will drive them crazy, frantically searching through the crowd until they find each other. The photo of them clinging desperately to each other once reunited probably makes a few front pages.

Laurel may or may not be there, and Tommy will no doubt end up deeply conflicted about that.

Felicity at some point follows him around on the job with his various charities and nonprofits he’s either started or is deeply involved in and she develops a troubling passion for the work he does. Troubling because she initially wonders if it’s her own passion or something she’s picking up from him.

She starts making mental notes of things that could be improved.

Not on purpose. But when she notices things that could help she can’t just not tell him of course.

And that’s it that’s the meta thus far.

@abuiltinremedy @sweetme86 @illgiveyouallofme @arrowsgirlfriday @folly1977 @memcjo @it-was-a-red-heeler @karolstrange @hungrytiger11 @adeusminhacolombina @lfcoffee @trinket-the-bear @tosailuponthesea @julandran @fiore-della-valle @deathandindignitybedamned @obscure-sentimentalist @dullbittylife @posterchildforinsanity @msbeccieboo @mell-bell @thebravething @lemmyeatspeaches @soaringcities @inevermindyou @sickandtwisteddoc @acheaptrickandacheesyoneline

[birdeyetheory]

Transatlanticism as a Gay Narrative

The biggest thing that made me interpret Transatlanticism as gay initially was the fact that the singer barely uses any gendered pronouns. From there, my specific interpretation of all the songs just took off. To me, the album overall reads as a story about a guy who has bad luck in love because he’s actually gay and is denying his true feelings. The album shows snapshots of his journey of coming to terms with his sexuality. Not all the songs completely tie to this narrative, but many of them lend ideas that support it. I’m just going to go song by song and give you my interpretation of them within this framework. I will also cover them in the order that I feel makes the most sense for the timeline of the story.

Lightness - This is one of the only songs where the singer appears to be talking about a girl, as he references a dress. The person seems to be suffering (“there’s a tear in the fabric of your favorite dress”) and he’s trying to figure out exactly why (“looking for patterns in the static”). This is continued with the lines “Your brain is the dam / And I am the fish / Who can't reach the core.” The “ivory lines” seem to represent the cause of this distress. However, not just the girl has these “lines”, as the next part is talking about the distress that the singer experiences. The lines “Instincts are misleading / You shouldn’t think what you’re feeling / They don’t tell you what you know you should want” scream to me that the singer’s instincts/feelings are telling him to love boys, but he knows that this is wrong because he’s been told all his life that he is supposed to love girls.

The Sound of Settling - This song is around the time where the singer is starting to fully realize his sexuality. The lines “I've got a hunger twisting my stomach into knots” and “My brain's repeating / ‘If you've got an impulse, let it out’” refer to him wanting to act on his love for other guys. However, he knows he can’t go through with it, as indicated by the following lines “That my tongue has tied off” and “But they never make it past my mouth.” These ideas are very reminiscent of the part in Lightness discussing the singer’s “impulses.” He then reflects on how his time for finding love is running out (“Our youth is fleeting / Old age is just around the bend”) and that he is going to regret never finding anyone to be with. The “settling” refers to settling for someone he doesn’t truly love (i.e. a woman) just because he doesn’t want to be alone when he’s old.

Expo ’86 - This is pretty much the “I Suck at Love” song. The cycle that “never ends” is him constantly failing at love, due to the fact that he can’t fully accept his true feelings. Still, he doesn’t want to “move [his] place in line” because then he’ll never find love and end up old and alone (as mentioned in The Sound of Settling). While standing in line he’s “waiting for something to go wrong” because of all the ways he’s messed up before. Despite all these mistakes though, he never learns his lesson (“Sometimes it seems that I don't have the skills to recollect / The twists and turns of plot that turned us from lovers to friends”). At this point, he’s basically resigned himself to never finding love (“I am waiting for another repeat / Another diet fed by crippling defeat”).

The New Year - This song is after the singer realizes his sexuality. The line “I don’t feel any different” means that despite resenting the fact that he is gay, he has to admit to himself that the feelings haven’t changed. Still, as a form of “self-assigned penance” he has “no resolutions” to actually act on his true feelings. Notice the use of the word ‘penance,’ which has a strong Christian connotation of repenting for sins. Obviously, being gay is seen as a sin in many Christian churches, so he might feel as if he has to punish himself for his feelings. Additionally, instead of coming to terms with his sexuality, he just wants to pretend that everything is okay.

Tiny Vessels - This is one of the most obviously gay songs on the album for me. It is the only one that repeatedly uses female pronouns, yet it’s also all about how he doesn’t actually love the girl he’s singing about. He recognizes that the girl is beautiful and that he should love her, but he just doesn’t, as indicated by the constantly repeated line “She was beautiful, but she didn’t mean a thing to me.” Still, he tries to love her, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re a boy and you recognize that a girl is beautiful. Additionally, this could be the “settling” that he was referring to in The Sound of Settling. He goes through all the motions of loving her and tells his friends that they are together, but deep down he knows that it’s all fake and empty (“It was vile / And it was cheap”). When he realizes this, he still can’t bring himself to tell her, because he doesn’t want to accept it himself. He knows even if he could accept his sexuality, he could never be honest about it (“So when you ask, ‘Is something wrong?’ / I think, ‘You’re damn right there is, but we can’t talk about it now’”). When they finally separate, they both know that it was never real to begin with (“We’ll pretend that it meant so much more”).

Transatlanticism - This is one of the harder songs to interpret, both within and outside of the given narrative. For me, ‘crossing the water’ can be seen as a metaphor for falling in love with someone. While most people (i.e. straight people) greatly enjoy it and have great ease navigating to the person they love (“Most people were overjoyed / They took to their boats”), the singer views himself as being trapped by the love he feels (“I thought it less like a lake and more like a moat”). Additionally, he feels he is incapable of ever fully reaching the one he loves because of the figurative distance between them (“The distance is quite simply much too far for me to row”), likely referring to having to overcome both personal uncertainties and societal expectations. The chorus, “I need you so much closer”, means he wants to be authentically closer to the one he loves, so that reaching them (i.e. falling in love with them) can be simpler.

Death of an Interior Decorator - While this song has the least to do with the over-arching narrative, it does have strong ties to the song Transatlanticism. After the woman is heartbroken, she “walks into the angry sea.” As mentioned before, travelling through a body of water could be a metaphor for falling in love with someone, which is supported by the following line, “It felt just like falling in love again.” The man who left her “took a lover on a faraway beach”, meaning he is both literally and metaphorically distant from her. Therefore, she would actually have to cross water to get to him (as he is on a beach) and figuratively have to cross the water to fall in love again. However, since the love is tainted, the waters are ‘angry’, so as she tries to cross them she presumably drowns.

We Looked Like Giants - This is the other song that seems the most obviously gay to me, as it appears to tell the story of the singer and another person (presumably a boy) secretly dating. They secretly meet up at a set time and location, likely so no one knows that they’re together (“Every Thursday I’d brave those mountain passes / And you’d skip your early classes”). To me, the line “We’d learn how our bodies worked” alludes to the fact that many newly realized gay people are unaware of how intimacy works between two people of the same sex. The fact that this is the start of his experiences with other guys is also indicated by the lines “God damn the black night / With all its foul temptations” and “I've become what I always hated when I was with you then.” He still thinks that being with another guy is wrong and feels guilty for giving in to these urges. Because of this guilt and fear of judgement, they are forced to hide their intimacy from everyone else (“Fumbling to make contact as the others slept inside” and “But I've never been too good with secrets”).

Additionally, notice the parallels to Tiny Vessels, the other obviously gay song on the album. Tiny Vessels describes openness and warmth (“The California sun / Cascading down my face”) while We Looked Like Giants describes secrecy and coldness (“In a shroud of frost”). While the singer could openly bask in his relationship with the girl, he had to conceal his love for the boy. In Tiny Vessels he told all his friends and left marks on the girl for everyone to see, whereas in We Looked Like Giants the two had to be intimate in secret, and the singer was extremely paranoid that anyone would find out (“I swear on my name / They could smell it on me”). Additionally, he does not have fond memories of his brief relationship with the girl, as he never loved her to begin with, while he loved his time with the boy and regrets their parting.

Passenger Seat - This song is pretty straightforward. It provides a brief snapshot of a relationship that is actually working out for the singer. While the exact nature of the relationship isn’t specified, it’s likely meant to be interpreted as romantic. The singer is being driven home by his partner and is simply pondering the night sky. The lines “The world doesn’t matter / When you feel embarrassed / I’ll be your pride,” is him reassuring his lover that, at least in this moment, it doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks of them (likely referring to their relationship). I like to imagine that this is the same person from We Looked Like Giants, and that this is a moment late at night after secretly meeting, where they’re together and content.

Title and Registration - In this song, the singer is reflecting on a lost partner of his (presumably a boy) that he seemed to have truly loved at one point. However, for some reason their “love did slowly fade” and his lover left him. While he claims that “there’s no blame” for this, later he also says, “And here I rest / Where disappointment and regret collide.” Clearly, he regrets something about their parting, indicating that perhaps he feels it was partially his fault that his lover left. I believe that this guilt is because he was unable to fully commit himself to the relationship, as it was another boy and he still hadn’t come to terms with his sexuality. It’s likely that his partner wanted to be more open about their relationship, but the singer wasn’t ready to take that next step. He decided to choose safety over his feelings, so his partner left him. This lover could have been the one discussed in We Looked Like Giants, as that relationship was kept secret from everyone around them.

A Lack of Color - This is the resolution of the story, following the potent regret he feels in Title and Registration. In the line “All the girls in every girly magazine can't make me feel any less alone,” he emphasizes how girls cannot make him feel less alone. He’s fully facing the fact that he will only ever be happy loving another boy. After this realization, he calls a guy that has left him previously (again, likely the one from We Looked Like Giants) as he’s finally ready to have a relationship with him. Unfortunately, the guy is not ready to forgive him and refuses to “come home.” Still, the singer remains resolute in his conclusion. Closing with “This is fact not fiction / For the first time in years” indicates that he has finally fully accepted who he is and is ready to openly live as his true self from now on.

[kababage95]

Apophatic Feminism

As with my last “essay” (not sure it should be called that but as I can’t think of a better word it’s what we are going with), I am not an expert on anything written below. I have not studied sociology or gender studies or anything on feminism. The below is my opinion and I am always open to discussing anything written below (with one exception that is pointed out at the time).

There is a philosophical theory (Apophatic Theology) that the only way to truly describe god is through describing what he is not, so perhaps I will try applying this idea to feminism. There are a number of things that feminism does not mean, and once people understand what it isn’t, perhaps then they will be willing to admit to themselves and the world that they are in fact a feminist.

Feminism is not the hatred of men. Gender stereotypes are, in reality, against the nature of feminism. Given this, the notion of “men suck” falls squarely into the category of anti-feminist. Indeed, when you really get into it, feminism tries to challenge the ideas that men are emotionless, aggressive and impulsive. What feminism does realise it that men have privilege. It accepts that this privilege can be used for good or for bad depending on the person, but that privilege is undeniable. When people, whoever they are, use privilege to assert power over other people, its part of a democratic society that we are allowed to call those people out on it, and that’s what feminism seeks to do. At its heart feminism is a social justice movement. This means that it absolutely should place the welfare of those that are most harmed above the ego of any who would benefit from the privilege that it seeks to remove. Note however that this clearly isn’t about how men are, or how they should be. It is a fact of the world that men have more power than women. It is this imbalance that feminism seeks to change; not because it wants to hurt men, but because it aims to free people from expectations and stereotypes that are harmful to everybody.

Coming off of the first point, whilst feminism is not the hatred of men, it is also not the belief that women are superior. There are a lot of people out there that see feminism as a celebration of womanhood; it isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that womanhood shouldn’t be celebrated, but let’s make it clear that they are not the same thing. In reality, feminism seeks to challenge the very idea of womanhood. Femininity is a construct of society, and in reality, whilst societal norms confer some benefits to being a woman, they are few and far between and it is for this reason that feminism seeks to challenge the idea of womanhood. Yes, it is considered more socially acceptable for women to be open with their emotions (another notion that feminism seeks to tear down), but is this really suitable recompense for disadvantages such as higher risk of sexual and domestic violence or for being economically disadvantaged? For being denied basic human rights in certain parts of the world and the many other negative side effects of being born with two X chromosomes instead of one X and one Y? Clearly the answer here is no, categorically not. Being a feminist isn’t about saying that being female is better than being male, it’s about wanting to be able to say that being a woman, or any other non-binary gender is as good as being a man and having it be true. At the moment, it simply isn’t.

Moving away from men for a second (feminism isn’t all about men?! Shocking I know), it should be clear that feminism isn’t the idea that dresses and the colour pink are bad. Feminism is not anti-feminine. You have to hand it to the patriarchy, managing to convince people that feminism is both a hatred of men, and the hatred of things associated with women was a stroke of genius. By doing so, you eliminate the vast majority of those that would otherwise support the movement. Feminists don’t hate the colour pink or wearing dresses (my best friend is the best proponent of feminism that I know and she wears more dresses than anything else). Far from the idea that those things are bad, feminism is the idea that those things shouldn’t be inherently associated with women at all. It’s about being able to understand that certain things have actually been devalued by being classed as feminine; how unusual is it to see things, and even people, being mocked for being feminine? Being a feminist means acknowledging that there is absolutely no valid reason at all for anything to have any gender associated with it and that more than that, gender doesn’t confer value. More than anything else feminism is about choice. If a woman wants to wear a pink dress and be a stay-at-home mum, that doesn’t mean she isn’t a feminist or make her less of a feminist. Equally, a woman who wears a suit and devotes her life to her career is no more or less a feminist.

Building on this idea, and I cant believe I have to make this point, being gay isn’t a bad thing. Let’s get this cleared up right now. Firstly, being LGBTQ is not, in any way, a negative thing. There is no link whatsoever between sexual orientation and being a feminist. More and more I see anti-feminists telling those that identify as a feminist that they are gay, with gay being meant as an insult. Feminist women being called lesbians because feminists must hate men. Feminist men being called gay because its “girly” to be a feminist. This is the one part of this “essay” that I am not willing to have a discussion over. Using any form of sexual orientation as an insult is not acceptable in any situation. Ever. The end. You absolutely can be gay and be a feminist and it is true that being gay may influence a person’s feminism, it’s called intersectionality, look it up. But the two things are not intrinsically linked. Just one final time for those that are struggling, “gay” is NOT okay to use as an insult and “feminist” is not a dirty word. I urge all of you to call out anybody that you hear using gay as an insult, it is not okay. It is despicable behaviour that should be called out at any opportunity.

“Feminists do nothing except complain”. Yeah okay buddy, go crawl back under whatever rock you just crawled out from. There are two things here, firstly, the idea that someone complaining must be feminist, have you seen any of the world ever? The human race took complaining and turned it into a skill that most everybody everywhere has mastered. I really wish that everybody who complained was a feminist, the battle would be over, the entire world would be feminists and gender equality would be achieved tomorrow. Clearly, that’s not the case. Secondly, the idea that the only thing that feminists do in the world is complain is clearly BS. Feminism gives people hope, it makes people laugh and cry and it inspires people. Without feminism women wouldn’t be able to vote, there would be none of the advances in the work place and it would still be acceptable for a husband to force his wife to have sex with him (something that wasn’t illegal in all 50 US states until 1993 and which will be covered in more detail in a separate essay). Feminism has achieved so many things in the last 100 years, it still has a way to go before its aims are fully realised, but its pretty clear that feminism is not only about complaining.

The final thing I want to point out that feminism is not is that it is not the aim of feminism to turn humanity into an identical whole. It is not unusual for feminists to be accused of trying to make humanity one great big homogeny by removing gender roles and for sure, if you are only willing to view diversity as things being male or female then feminism is going to challenge that. But is that really what diversity is? Two groups? To me, diversity is about having an infinite number of groups, of which each individual belongs to any number of. Instead of having men and women, male and female, masculine and feminine, diversity is about recognising that its stupid to try force fit 7 billion (and growing) people into one of two groups. If you were born a man that wants to masculine then that is absolutely fine, nobody is trying to take that away from you. If the stereotypes of the gender you were assigned at birth fits you like a glove then lucky you, and more power to you. But the truth is that for the vast majority of people, those stereotypes leave something to be desired. Feminism is saying that people shouldn’t feel pressured to feel or act in a particular way because the patriarchy deems, from the day you are born, that you should act in a way that conforms to their ideals. What seems to amaze certain people in society is that, when people act in a way that they are being who they truly are, and not in a way that society tells them they must act, the world goes on spinning and doesn’t implode. More than that, when people don’t feel the pressure to behave how others say they must, when people behave how they want to, the world doesn’t divide itself neatly into only two categories, and that’s okay!

So if that’s 6 things that feminism isn’t, then what do I think feminism is? To me, feminism is so many things, but more than anything else, its about choice. Yes it is the political, social and economical equality of the genders but its about choice. It’s about the freedom to choose to not wear make-up or to wear make-up no matter who you are. It’s about it being okay to aspire to be a full time mum or dad. It’s about everybody, everywhere being free to choose who they want to be, without the fear of being judged because “that’s not ladylike” or “that’s girly”. Yawn. Get over yourself. We aren’t born knowing that little girls play with dolls and little boys play with trucks and blocks. My partner of almost 6 years is an Early Years teacher, she works with babies from 6 months up to two years 5 days a week, and let me assure you that there are plenty of little boys who enjoy playing with the dolls and at that age, its generally the little girls who are better at building with the blocks. They don’t know about gender norms until society influences them and, given that, I am forced to conclude that far from trying to implement a new societal norm on society, what feminism is actually trying to do is to revert society back into the way that society would naturally be without 6 millennia worth of misogyny.

That concludes another essay! As before, I fully accept that some of you may not have read all of this as it is really rather long, if you read any of it, I hope you have taken something away from it! For those of you that are curious, I am a white, 22 year old male who currently lives in London and has never lived outside the UK, I had a number of DMs from people asking for that information after the last post so thought I would get ahead of it this time!

[marta-bee]

This is intended more as a love-letter to Sherlock S3, than a criticism of Sherlock S4, so please take it in that vein. :-) (But equally please be aware of the possibility of a not-wholly-positive impression from S4, and scroll on past if you prefer.)

I was reading @silentauroriamthereal‘s really interesting analysis of the “Watson domestic” in His Last Vow. My summary (but do read it for yourself) : defenders of Mary often point to Sherlock’s forgiveness of her as an argument for why we the reader should absolve her, too; but Sherlock is much less motivated by whether we can really trust Mary than what’s good for John. Protecting John and enabling John’s happiness, along with solving the case (which doesn’t apply here) has consistently motivated pretty much every decision he’s made across three series; and with a heart about to give out on him, Sherlock was trying to manage God’s understandable, justified but also unsafe-to-express rage at that evening’s revelations. He was trying to make sure John survived Sherlock’s impending cardiac episode, when Sherlock wouldn’t actually be able to do anything to help him.

I’m not saying that’s the only possible analysis. I will say it makes sense of a heck of a lot about HLV, including the imbalance between Sherlock’s “John Watson is definitely in danger” revelation in his mind palace and his urging John to reconcile with “that wife.” It also doesn’t necessarily require Mary to be evil, just dangerous and acting as an antagonist. Good antagonists can have their own motivations and their own agency (the best usually do in my experience!), and not every antagonist need be a villain.

Whatever your stance on Mary and Sherlock’s “forgiveness” of her, though: what really caught my attention about SA’s analysis here is how well she captures the psychological drama of HLV generally. Good God, those characters! You have Sherlock returning from his own private war, still physically busted up and certainly bearing some definite psychological wounds, justified for faking his own death in one sense (he was saving John and the others) but not in another (he engaged Moriarty without proper planning (I’d argue) and so allowed himself to be painted into that corner). Like so many returning veterans he expected the world to have frozen at the moment he left it, and be ready for him to slip back into it; though of course it couldn’t work that way. Then you have John, who of course has moved on and has his own entanglements which flow both from Mary being his “type” and deeply-ingrained societal cues about masculinity and respectability, and rejecting the rootless, “bohemian” life he had with Sherlock that burned him so badly. (You see this so clearly in his blog entries surrounding TEH, where he uses Sherlock’s transcendent intellect and perceived lack of human connection and emotive self to let him off the hook.)

And then there’s Mary. Mary, who was dishonest and denying John's agency in an entirely different way, who through her status as a woman almost against both their wills ensnares him in a pregnancy and all the familial duties that entails for a man like John, who is perhaps inexcusably criminal, perhaps excusably so, but still a force to be reckoned with. There’s this simply delicious parallel between the lies she told and the ones Sherlock did. There’s so much potential for such a really glorious analogy there.

This without getting into the Gay Stuff (TM): the romantic connection between John and Sherlock and the Jolto and Sherlock/Janine mirrors, the tension between John, Sherlock, and Mary coexisting in some sense versus “we can’t all dance,” the natural tension (and I’ll admit this was my first hope, that they’d go there, when I first heard S3 would involve John’s wedding) between Mary and Sherlock operating in entirely different spheres of John’s life, made possible by Victorian sexism, and those separate spheres not really being compatible with modern expectations of marriage. I still want to read (or write) a fic that takes seriously how a modern Mary would make her peace with a John who was always haring after Sherlock, disappearing for days at a time and with so little notice. And of course there’s the flip side of this dynamic: in a modern setting at least, John seems to demand emotional monogamy from Sherlock while he is free to maintain competing relationships with Sherlock and Mary. Just look at his first confusion and then outright betrayal, that Sherlock would do with Janine precisely what he’d done with Mary.

Clearly I have a lot of thoughts here. My point is that Sherlock S3, and His Last Vow in particular, easily has the most potential for character-driven drama of probably anything I’ve ever seen on TV. There’s such potential for payoff.

And I think that’s what makes the tail end of HLV and S4 even moreso, more than a bit painful. It’s not the frustration of my TJLC hopes and dreams (though, yes, there is that as well). It’s Mary, really. It’s not that I want to hate her, want her to be awful; rather, it’s that I feel like I never really got to know her; her character seemed such a cocktail, and I’m still not clear which of the many versions Mofftiss present of her is meant to be the “real” one. Which mean that all of those fascinating questions I had surrounding her in S3, they never really take a definite form, let alone offer a resolution of any kind. So she dies, and I’m left more confused than impacted. Clearly Sherlock an John mourn her deeply (and that’s so beautifully told - that lonely image of John drinking in his flat’s hallway!), but it’s not something I’ve really been able to access, personally, because I don’t feel like I understood Mary or her death. 

That’s a recurrent problem with S4 -- it’s Schrodinger’s storytelling, both here and not-here, meaning that any answer it had to all those questions I had from S3 are really only answered in what I choose to bring to the table. Which I can do, I’m a fanfic writer so of course I could play with these characters and take them in whatever direction made for the best story. But as a consumer, it feels like that’s not really my job in this mode; and as a fanfic writer it does feel like the foundation's not entirely there. Which is sad, because as I said: So. Much. Potential.

And I grieve for Mary’s character (if not her death), and am dissatisfied with it, for much the same reason. It’s not that I disliked her or wanted her to be pure unadulterated evil. But I did want her to be something, and if she is that, I’m not entirely sure I know what it is. Or at least what Mofftiss meant for her to be.

For the record, TST actually comes reasonably close to my preferred vision of Mary’s character: a military assassin, possibly with a history of branching out for private clients, not itself inexcusably immoral and not all that different from John and Sherlock in their way, but certainly the kind of thing that would need accounting for and certainly something John should have learned about before they married if only because her past put his future at risk through their association.

Give me super-sekrit black opps Mary who has to balance her own safety against John’s wellbeing (and maybe even his life), who’s not inexcusable but equally whose choices and past put her intractably on the other side of the final showdown with John and Sherlock. Bonus points if Mycroft Knows and/or (*gasps*) is complicit.

[hotwifeencounters]

Cuckold creampie cleanup is hugely popular among the men (and some of women, to be fair) that are into this thrilling lifestyle. It generates a primal, deeply arousing response for the guys that are into it. It drives them wild with desire in so many ways. If you’re reading this, it’s almost certainly true that the idea of cleaning another man’s cum from your wife’s freshly-fucked, messy pussy makes your cock hard.

There’s great joy to be found in cuckold creampie cleanup for both the husband and his wife. It comes in different forms, of course, but it can be a source of pleasure and intimacy. I’m going to talk all about those joys, but first let’s explore why this element of cuckolding is so arousing.

A Cuckold Creampie Upends Marital Norms

Another man’s cum in your wife’s pussy.

Another man’s cum in your pussy.

In some ways, the appeal of a cuckold creampie can be found in those two sentences. It’s hot enough for a cuckold to see his wife have sex with another man. It goes to a deeper, more primal level when that other man is cumming inside her.

That’s supposed to be the husband’s job, place, or right, depending on how you want to look at it. That’s the societal norm. When you marry a woman you become the only man that cums inside her. That’s a husband’s role (when it comes to reproduction, at least).

That’s part of what makes cuckolding so thrilling. By introducing another man to your marriage you’re upending societal norms. You’re inviting someone else to fuck your wife. You’re inviting someone else into your pussy while your husband watches.

Removing condoms from the equation ups the ante. It makes it a little bit naughtier. It makes it a little bit sexier, hopefully for both husband and wife.

Instead of cumming in your wife, you’re watching someone else do it. Instead of hearing her say, “cum inside me,” to you, she’s saying it to another man. Instead of using a condom, you’re watching his bare cock penetrate her pussy and pleasure her.

As you might already know, it’s quite common for men and women to find “taboo” sexual subjects to be hugely arousing. Step outside of your desires for cuckolding for a second and consider this: Is there anything more “taboo” within the bounds of a marriage than having another man cum inside your wife?

Let’s talk about how husbands and wives can find great joy in this uniquely naughty form of pleasure.

The Joys of Cuckold Creampie Cleanup for Husbands

I want you to picture your wife in bed. I want you to admire her naked body and let your gaze fall between her legs. I want you to see her wet, puffy, pink labia. Most importantly, I want you to see another man’s cum leaking from her pussy.

It turns you on, doesn’t it? You love that someone else just came inside her. You’re not sure why and it doesn’t really matter. You just know that in the moment, nothing is hotter than seeing that thick, creamy cum leaking out of her. He fucked her, he made her cum, and then he filled her with his hot load.

The joy of cuckold creampie cleanup begins before you’re even between her legs. It begins when he slides into her without protection. That’s when you know what he’s going to do. It continues as he fucks her, especially if you have a beautiful view of her pussy while his big cock is pumping in and out of her.

It reaches a beautiful crescendo when she says, “Cum inside me,” to him. Maybe she wraps her legs around him to pull him deeper inside her. Maybe her hands run over his back and ass. Maybe she looks completely lost in lust at the idea of having someone else fill her with his seed.

Your wife’s desire to have his cum inside her is part of the pleasure for you. You like when she urges him to fill her with his seed.

Of course, the best part is when she invites you between her legs. “Clean me, cuckold.” Don’t those words turn you on? Don’t you love reading them? Imagine those words in her voice. Imagine your beautiful wife saying that she wants you to clean her pussy.

Isn’t that joyful? She wants you to crawl between her legs and lick another man’s hot, sticky, thick cum out of her pussy. She wants her husband to dutifully eat someone else’s sperm from her beautiful body. It’s kinky as hell and of course it makes your cock hard.

What’s incredible is that you haven’t licked even a drop of cum out of her yet and already you’re wildly aroused. Your cock is hard and dripping precum. You can feel that beautiful sense of desire that courses through your whole body when you’re insanely, overwhelmingly turned on.

The actual creampie cleanup is where fantasy meets reality. Your first time, you might not like it very much. Cum tends not to taste very good. It can be strong enough to make you gag.

Of course, that can also be part of the pleasure. You’re turned on. Your wife has welcomed you between her legs. She had seduced you into cleaning her messy pussy.

If it doesn’t taste particularly good, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, humiliation is often a part of cuckold creampie cleanup. It doesn’t have to be overt humiliation, of course, but the very act of licking up another man’s cum should generate mildly humiliating feelings at the very least.

Because of that, you should find great joy in cleaning the messy creampie even if it doesn’t taste good. Maybe you’ll find even more joy in it. Plus, you’ll get used to the taste, and that in and of itself should be thrilling.

Think about that for a second. Think about getting used to the taste of another man’s cum. That means you’re eating a whole lot of it. That means you’re cleaning cuckold creampies so frequently that your taste buds have adjusted to his salty, thick, sticky load. Your cock is nice and hard just thinking about it, isn’t it?

Every cuckold couple that enjoys creampie cleanup will develop their own particular way of doing it, and it’s in those specifics that you’ll find even more joy.

Imagine your wife running her fingers through your hair and calling you a “good boy” as you lick up her lover’s load.

Imagine her demanding that instead of crawling between her legs you get on your back and let her feed his load to you. “Are you ready to be fed like a good cucky boy?” she asks. That would make your cock hard, wouldn’t it?

Imagine her sensually kissing the man that just came inside her as you’re cleaning his mess. Imagine them sharing a romantic bond and almost completely ignoring you as you do your duty. She’s turned you into her cuckold servant that exists to make her and her lover happy.

Perhaps you and your wife will come up with something completely different. The point is that there are so many ways for you to experience joy when you’re cleaning a creampie out of your wife’s pussy.

[lligkv]

damnation follows any attempt to recover paradise

A while ago, I read Mark O’Connell’s 2017 book To Be a Machine, in which he investigates the transhumanist project of achieving a merger of the body and technology that allows the body to live forever—and, essentially and paradoxically, to fall away, to become a nonfactor, so you can experience yourself as pure consciousness. It’s like, if the average human wavers in the Cartesian split between mind and body, uncertain, transhumanists break the impasse by betting firmly on mind.

The book is thoughtfully constructed. All the major transhumanist figures you hear about appear: Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, Zoltan Istvan, Peter Thiel, Nick Bostrom. And O’Connell covers many facets of the transhumanist movement. He discusses life extension and cryonics; “whole brain emulation,” or the creation of a mind independent of any corporeal “substrate,” like the brain, which could feasibly be downloaded into any number of different bodies or substrates altogether; the possibility of artificial ultraintelligence, and the corresponding activism in the face of the existential risk such AI poses to humanity; the augmentation of the human body, as pursued by corporations and the state and military and as pursued by the laypeople and amateur biohackers known as “grinders”; and the idea that we could within our lifetimes reach “longevity escape velocity”—the magical point at which the science of life extension has advanced far enough that it’s easy to access and take advantage of and the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die becomes irrelevant.

It’s all shot through with a few major themes. One is the battle transhumanists wage versus “deathism,” their term for what they believe their critics suffer from, namely a need to protect yourself from death by trying to convince yourself it isn’t terrible. And two, transhumanism as but the latest incarnation of an age-old religious impulse: the desire for transcendence and eternal life—now, through technology, as before through religion.

I had such strong feelings of anger and contempt for the transhumanists after reading it, though. Maybe I’m guilty of being “deathist”: perhaps I mask my terror of death by pretending I’m okay with the fact that I’ll experience it. It’s certainly true I haven’t confronted death as closely as, say, Roen Horn—a young man who accompanies Zoltan Istvan in his campaign bus as his assistant during Istvan’s bid for the 2016 presidential nomination as the Transhumanist Party candidate, who came to transhumanism after a terrible childhood accident made him nearly bleed out. And it’s a clever move on O’Connell’s part to characterize Horn as he does. Initially, Horn seems a textbook incel type—being twenty-eight and so convinced a woman would cheat on him that he’s never pursued a relationship. But then O’Connell reveals the fact of the accident and the “darkness” it reveals to Horn, the “black terror beneath the thin surface of the world,” and that makes you realize why Horn is frightened by death as he is. It’s harder to dismiss him after that.

Transhumanism often seems the result of such extreme near-death experience. Tim Cannon, one of the grinders O’Connell writes about, had experiences of addiction that reduced his lived condition to its animal essence—making him beholden to his body, all urge and impulse beyond his own conscious control—in ways that left him desperate to hack it and transcend it. And Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, a VC firm focused on life extension technology—and all of twenty years old when O’Connell speaks to her—reports being rattled to her core by watching her grandmother die. The experience brought her to understand there’s a bodily decay in store for her and everyone she knows that she can do nothing to stop. And it leaves her obsessed with extending the human lifespan as the “correct” thing to do.

But it's only children who fear death in as total and paranoid a fashion as Deming or Cannon seem to. And at some point, children grow up. They become adults. They come to understand death as an inevitability, even if that’s only in the abstract. They come to realize it’s death that gives the time we are alive its meaning. They don’t need to denigrate the human body by sneering that people are mere “monkeys,” as Cannon does. They don’t live in atavistic terror of aging as do Deming or Aubrey de Grey (who leads the transhumanist group SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). And they devote their time and attention to curing the ills that plague the world now, rather than fixing their eyes on projects like defeating death. Or creating colonies in outer space—which seems driven by a similarly childish zeal on the parts of people like Peter Thiel, if one that’s less terrified—and bringing on the Singularity, the point, predicted by futurist Ray Kurzweil, at which the merger between humans and technology becomes so complete that technology’s evolution entirely supersedes human evolution.

“To the charge,” O’Connell writes, “that such a merger” between human and machine “would obliterate our humanity, Kurzweil counters that the Singularity is in fact a final achievement of the human project, an ultimate vindication of the very quality that has always defined and distinguished us as a species—our constant yearning for a transcendence of our physical and mental limitations.” When I read those lines, I wanted to yell at Kurzweil: The yearning to transcend our physical and mental imitations is not meant to be fulfilled! I remember scribbling that line in my notebook on the train home from work just as I heard a man in the seats across from mine telling his seatmate about the intense cancer treatments he was going through. And that’s bravery to me. That’s what I admire: the ability to face the fact of the body’s fragility, rather than looking to obliterate it.

Sometimes I found myself thinking that the transhumanists, driven by greed (to experience, to colonize) and fear (of death, so childish in its intensity) were deformed people. I know this isn’t a good word to use. But I wasn’t a good person I was reading this book. I could feel my heart turn in revulsion as I encountered all these people who treated being alive, finite, human as a problem to be solved. The chapter on the grinders, “Biology and Its Discontents,” was particularly trying. When O’Connell reveals that Tim Cannon, deep in his alcoholism and spiraling, had once tried to kill himself, for a vicious instant I thought, If only he had succeeded. I just couldn’t take his sneering contempt—his saying, so often, things like, “People want to stay being the monkeys they are. They don’t like to acknowledge that their brains aren’t giving them the full picture, aren’t allowing them to make rational choices. They think they’re in control, but they’re not.”

There’s this moral superiority there. This assumption that you’re better than other people; other people are idiots, and you alone are stripped of illusion. I hate that—that loathing for your fellow man’s fallibilities as though you yourself have none. I hate that more than anything.

What’s more, I hate the apparent lack of regard for consequences on the part of so many transhumanists. In her book Being Numerous, Natasha Lennard writes about Paul Virilio’s notion of the “accident”: that “which is contained within, and brought into the world by, the inventions of progress […] itself.” In other words, when you invent a plane, the possibility of a plane crash follows. Often the transhumanists seem entirely unconscious of the possibilities their tech is bringing into existence. That’s simply outside the scope of their narrow remit. When Randal Koene, who runs the whole brain emulation organization Carboncopies, is confronted with the possibility that the downloading of minds to different substrates might unlock an entirely new level of invasive advertising, he basically shrugs it off. In that, he’s like just about everyone O’Connell talks to, every tech billionaire and devotee of any renown in our horrible historical moment: in love with the possibilities, unconcerned with the consequences.

Just because the possibility of developing a certain type of technology is there doesn’t mean it needs to be done. Where is the restraint? Maybe that’s longer a virtue in a late capitalist society, after the end of history, in a time when we don’t have any overarching societal narrative that would make restraint something to want to practice or that would make some notion of the human something we want to consider before we eradicate it. In this world we live in, everyone, atomized, pursues their own ends. What you want, what’s possible, and what you have the means to make possible are the only standards by which a decision to act is made.

Most of the transhumanists are frighteningly cavalier, to the layperson of a humanist bent like me, about the stages of the revolution they foresee. Ray Kurzweil, for one, talks about the trajectory he’d like to see so casually. “What would be a nice scenario is that we first get smart drugs and wearable technologies. And then life extension technologies. And then, finally, we get uploaded, and colonize space and so on.” And so on. Again, reading that line, I wanted to yell: Nothing entitles you to space! Have we not learned not to colonize?

It all speaks to the experience of reading To Be a Machine, which is this kind of Mobius strip of revulsion (“hell no”) and relenting (“I mean, maybe” or “well I guess” or “am I the problem here?”). At one point, O’Connell drops a quote from D. H. Lawrence: “science and machinery, radio, airplanes, vast ships, zeppelins, poison gas, artificial silk: these things nourish man’s sense of the miraculous as magic did in the past.” And it’s like “miraculous” is one side of a coin whose other side is “horrifying,” and O’Connell spends the entire book flipping that coin as he talks impartially about the transhumanist movement, showing you first one face of it and then the other.

It's a credit to O'Connell that he could stay as evenhanded as he is reporting on these people. I even came to dislike his repeated tendency to express fond, largely tolerant and even feelings toward people who sounded as inhuman and afraid of life as Roen Horn did. Maybe I was disappointed I couldn't be as gracious as he was even though I like to consider myself a kind person who's inclined to empathy.

Or more likely it’s because I lack O’Connell’s proximity to religion. Ultimately, his ethos of impartiality comes from being able to so clearly see the parallels between transhumanist and religious desire. This is a parallel that I, not being a religious person at all, having no real religious instinct, would never have felt so intuitively or described so convincingly. It leads O’Connell to afford the transhumanists the same respect he would the devotees of any other religion. As he’s listening to Tim Cannon share his vision of eventually being not a body but simply a “series of nodes” peacefully exploring the universe for all time, he writes

I was going to say that all of this sounded hugely expensive; I was going to ask who was going to pay for it all. But I thought better of it, in the way that you might think better of making a joke about the central tenets of a person’s faith after they had taken the trouble to explain them to you.

And transhumanism is ultimately a faith: a contemporary reflection of the ancient desire to be delivered of the body, redeemed of its weakness and sin, no longer subject to its curse. The Singularity—however that is defined, whatever particular perfect union between human and machine a particular transhumanist aims for—is the Rapture. The world after this Singularity, affording as it does answers to all scientific questions and cures for all diseases, will be Eden.

And everyone in this book believes themselves to be among the elect.

And if, as the transhumanists believe, humans are effectively computers, in the way their minds operate—just with substrates made of meat—it’s also the destiny of obsolete technology to die. And so it is just for humans to wipe themselves out to usher in cyborgs and AI and superintelligence. It’s just technology, drawing all the way from the first spear a human being ever threw, achieving its teleological end.

But—as O’Connell also points out, the attempts religion has made to make good on its own teleological narratives tell us that damnation always follows any human attempt to recover paradise.

[petrichorate]

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: Thoughts

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Elena Ferrante)

My notes on the first two books from this series: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name

In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena and Lila are adults—they’ve both experienced family life, while the same themes of turbulent relationships and societal uprising run throughout the novel. For some reason, I didn’t feel as connected to Elena in this book (I’ve never really felt a connection with Lila). It might have been because I haven’t gotten to that point in life yet—marriage, children seem far off—but I suspect more deeply that Elena’s personality has diverged more and more from her character in the first two books. 

Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading about Italy (especially since Elena moved to Florence), and here are some passaged that were particularly striking to me—especially the second to last quote about disguising the naturalness of the body for men:

Elena, using language as a kind of shield in a society she has escaped: “As soon as I got off the train, I moved cautiously in the places where I had grown up, always careful to speak in dialect, as if to indicate I am one of yours, don’t hurt me.”

Elena, on the irrationality of extracting emotional states from academic performance: “Studying was considered a ploy used by the smartest kids to avoid hard work. How can I explain to this woman—I thought—that from the age of six I’ve been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?”

On feelings for women versus feelings for men:  “I admired her, there were no women who stood out in that chaos. The young heroes who faced the violence of the reactions at their own peril were called Rudi Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and, as in war films where there were only men, it was hard to feel part of it; you could only love them, adapt their thoughts to your brain, feel pity for their fate.”

On the transient nature of relationships with men: “‘A male, apart from the mad moments when you love him and he enters you, always remains outside. So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him. He liked me, I liked him, the end. It happens to me many times a day—I’m attracted to someone. That doesn’t happen to you? It lasts a short time, then it passes. Only the child remains, he’s part of you; the father, on the other hand, was a stranger and goes back to being a stranger.”

Elena, on achieving grand things but still feeling subdued by others’ ordinary achievements: “I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.”

Elena, on her work defining her state of life, and losing the streak of greatness: “So the things I wrote had no energy, they were merely demonstrations of my formal skill, flourishes lacking substance. Once, having written an article, I had Pietro read it before dictating it to the editorial office. He said: ‘It’s empty.’ ‘In what sense?’ ‘It’s just words.’ I felt offended, and dictated it just the same. It wasn’t published. And from then on, with a certain embarrassment, both the local and the national editorial offices began to reject my texts, citing problems of space. I suffered, I felt that everything that up to a short time earlier I had taken as an unquestioned condition of life and work was rapidly collapsing around me, as if violently jolted from inaccessible depths. I read just to keep my eyes on a book or a newspaper, but it was as if I had stopped at the signs and no longer had access to the meanings.”

On feeling proud of your journey but at the same time only expressing anger and no pride in regards to inequality: “I suspected, in those moments, that the words he had shouted before (shut up, you speak in clichés) hadn’t been an accidental loss of temper but indicated that in general he didn’t consider me capable of a serious discussion. It exasperated me, depressed me, my rancor increased, especially because I myself knew that I wavered between contradictory feelings whose essence could be summed up like this: it was inequality that made school laborious for some (me, for example), and almost a game for others (Pietro, for example); on the other hand, inequality or not, one had to study, and do well, in fact very well—I was proud of my journey, of the intelligence I had demonstrated, and I refused to believe that my labor had been in vain, if in certain ways obtuse. And yet, for obscure reasons, with Pietro I gave expression only to the injustice of inequality. I said to him: You act as if all your students were the same, but it’s not like that, it’s a form of sadism to insist on the same results from kids who haven’t had the same opportunities.”

On Pietro’s insecurity and demand for affectionate, supportive attention: “I was his wife, an educated wife, and he expected me to pay close attention when he spoke to me about politics, about his studies, about the new book he was working on, filled with anxiety, wearing himself out, but the attention had to be affectionate; he didn’t want opinions, especially if they caused doubts. It was as if he were thinking out loud, explaining to himself.”

On being born with everything: “‘As a girl I would have liked to be like you.’ ‘Why? You think it’s nice to be born with everything all ready-made for you?’ ‘Well, you don’t have to work so hard.’ ‘You’re wrong—the truth is that it seems like everything’s been done already and you’ve got no good reason to do anything. All you feel is the guilt of what you are and that you don’t deserve it.’ ‘Better that than to feel the guilt of failure.’”

Elena, on intellectually supporting one stance but wavering when it approaches her own family: “Only in the elevator did I realize that my entire self had in a sense slid backward. What would have seemed to me acceptable in Milan or Florence—a woman’s freedom to dispose of her own body and her own desires, living with someone outside of marriage—there in the neighborhood seemed inconceivable: at stake was my sister’s future, I couldn’t control myself.”

On comfortableness with people who you feel are lesser:  “And all while Pietro, with that capacity of his for feeling at ease with people he considered inferior, was already saying, without consulting me, that he would very much like to visit the center in Acerra and he wanted to hear about it from Lila, who had sat down again.”

Elena, on the absurdity and irrational urge to "camouflage” herself completely for men: “In recent years I had begun to be interested in fashion, to educate my taste under Adele’s guidance, and now I enjoyed dressing up. But sometimes—especially when I had dressed not only to make a good impression in general but for a man—preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn’t, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn’t. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water. And then the anguish of not succeeding, of not seeming pretty, of not managing to conceal with skill the vulgarity of the flesh with its moods and odors and imperfections. But I had done it. I had done it also for Nino, recently. I had wanted to show him that I was different, that I had achieved a refinement of my own, that I was no longer the girl at Lila’s wedding, the student at the party of Professor Galiani’s children, and not even the inexperienced author of a single book, as I must have appeared in Milan. But now, enough. He had brought his wife and I was angry, it seemed to me a mean thing. I hated competing in looks with another woman, especially under the gaze of a man, and I suffered at the thought of finding myself in the same place with the beautiful girl I had seen in the photograph, it made me sick to my stomach. She would size me up, study every detail with the pride of a woman of Via Tasso taught since birth to attend to her body; then, at the end of the evening, alone with her husband, she would criticize me with cruel lucidity.”

On the hazy origins of money, no matter how it is obtained: “I thought of how many hidden turns money takes before high salaries and lavish fees. I remembered the boys from the neighborhood who were paid by the day unloading smuggled goods, cutting trees in the parks, working at the construction sites. I thought of Antonio, Pasquale, Enzo. Ever since they were boys they had been scrambling for a few lire here, a few there to survive. Engineers, architects, lawyers, banks were another thing, but their money came, if through a thousand filters, from the same shady business, the same destruction, a few crumbs had even mutated into tips for my father and had contributed to allowing me an education. What therefore was the threshold beyond which bad money became good and vice versa?”

[eng2100]

blog 07 - cosmogony

Fellas, are we ready to get dirty? To get completely nasty? To get disgustingly Jungian? Welcome to Hero’s Journey Part 2 Electric Boogaloo!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-

preface

I liked this part more than the first part. Before we wade knee deep into some fairly hard to parse ideas, let’s start with a primer on Campbell’s psychoanalytical foundations-- the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. 

Freud (🔫) was primarily known for his psychosexual theory, which posited that Everything Comes Back To Dongs; Freud was more or less a gender essentialist and a hardcore Heterosexual Rapscallion, and to him, everything about human psychology looped back around in some way or another to sexuality. He separated the human psyche into three major components: the id, which is the “unconscious” and includes all instinctive urges including procreation, the superego, which is a person’s conscience and learned societal standards that keeps the id in check and makes you feel guilty for sucking, and the ego, which is more or less the middle between the id and superego, represents a person’s realistic ambitions and the “conscious”. 

The other big concept of Freudian psychosexuality (besides his developmental theory, which is gross and we won’t talk about it) is the “Oedipal Conflict”The Father figure is the lynchpin of Freudian theory, and acts as the catalyst for the development of children-- for boys, they “compete” with the Father for the Mother’s love and self-actualize through imitation of the Father-- for girls, they’re really down about not having dicks and self-actualize through accepting that they’re breeding stock. You can see some of The Father and The Mother in the Freudian sense pretty readily in Part 1 of Campbell’s works.

Carl Jung was a student of Freud and loyally followed his ideas for many years until the two had a falling out over a number of differences in ideas and personality that sent them on permanently separate paths. Where Freud cut his teeth on his wack psychosexual stuff, Jung primarily concerned himself with the concept of a sort of universality. His conceptualization of the human psyche is similar to Freud’s in some ways, yet differs in one big way: the collective unconscious-- the concept of the inherited, aggregated experience of humanity (sounds familiar to Campbell’s ideas, doesn’t it?). 

The through-line of Freud and Jung’s work is more or less a distinctly modernist mindset-- “modern” referring to the school of belief that all things can be studied and understood universally through the scientific method. Campbell ascribes to this same belief, which is the bedrock of his work.

We good? Let’s get to it

01 emanations

“Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography; history, and cosmology.”

from psychology to metaphysics

Following in with Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, Campbell posits that myths are expressions of our dreams-- of that very same unconscious. However, where dreams are untouchable and uncontrollable, myths can be directly manipulated and given formal shape by our conscious minds. The “universal doctrine” more or less states that Literally Everything is an effect of “ubiquitous” power that both creates and destroys in perpetuity. Myth, then, is an expression of our consciousness’ limited ability to understand the full breadth of the universe’s energy.

the universal round

The universal round is the concept of the cycles in which myth and our existence follow, mirroring that of the cycle between night and day. Our consciousness goes through a cycle of waking experience, dreaming experience, and dreamless sleep, in which we follow our own sort of Hero’s Journey to enlightenment.

out of the void - space

Myths have a sense of “doom” to them, and are innately tragic, yet they also serve towards a sense of fulfillment, as myths cast us in an “immortal” light. This is essentially the beginning of creation myths-- something from nothing.

within space - life

Here, the world becomes “corporeal” and is broken up from “one” into “many”, separated male and female. The Hebrew Zohar explains the idea pretty aptly:

“Each soul and spirit prior to its entering into this world, consists of a male and female united into one being. When it descends on this earth the two parts separate and animate two different bodies. At the time of marriage, the Holy One, blessed be He, who knows all souls and spirits, unites them again as they were before, and they again constitute one body and one soul, forming as it were the right and left of one individual…This union, however, is influenced by the deeds of the man and by the ways in which he walks. If the man is pure and his conduct is pleasing in the sight of God, he is united with that female part of his soul which was his component part prior to his birth.”

the breaking of the one into the manifold

Ole Joey C. calls to attention the primary two modes of myth-- one in which the gods work for the cycle, and one where the gods stand against its progress. The Christian creation myth is a good example of the former, while the story of Marduk and Tiamat is a good example of the latter, in which Marduk slays and dismembers Tiamat, a “female personification of the original abyss itself: chaos as the mother of gods, but now the menace of the world.”, for the sake of mankind’s continuity. Yet Tiamat doesn’t truly die-- everything is created of her “essence”, and so she endures. This is the paradox of myth-- creation is marked by great suffering, and surrounded by harmony-- growth is violent.

folk stories of creation

Simple folk stories could be said to portray the world “as it seems to be” rather than how it is. They tend to tell more straightforward stories, and frequently feature clown characters. These stories are often more playful, and it could be assumed that they aren’t actually believed as much as more proper mythologies. Folk stories don’t seek the meaning of existence of creation, they only observe.

02 the virgin birth

mother universe

Some creation myths involve the passing of energy from the Father Spirit to the Mother Universe, while some myths choose to focus on the maternal rather than the paternal entirely. The Finnish tale of Kalevala is a good example of this.

matrix of destiny (haha matrix)

This is where the mother of creation will appear to humanity in disguise, comprising both birth and death, and accounting for the three steps of the cycle (waking, dreams, sleep)-- in the end, the divine parental figures depart the Earth, leaving humans to figure their shit out on their own.

womb of redemption

Now that mommy and daddy are gone, shit goes sideways for humans with the introduction of ego and vice, and creation in general suffers. Enter our hero-- best example being the virgin birth of Jesus who would go on to bear the sins of humanity and send the cycle on an upward tilt.

03 transformations

the primordial hero and the human

We’re gonna kind of breeze over this part because I have a giant headache from reading in the dark. This is sort of where the divine meets in the middle with humanity and, by extension, actual history. There’s one big example that I’m sure has already come to your mind.

childhood of the hero

While the first entire half of the book detailed the human hero who rises to the occasion, this part is more about the hero as an extension of divine will. He goes through a similar thing, coming to his enlightenment then bringing said enlightenment to the world at large in some way. This hero will usually be held back from achieving true greatness for awhile, and usually possesses some kind of inhuman ability like Herc has his strength. The childhood of the hero ends when he is no longer obscure-- you could even phrase it as when he goes from a zero to a hero.

the hero as the warrior

This part mostly involves a great victory over a big bad monsters, but represents the greater idea of the Hero upending the status quo in some way, freeing the world to move on and to change.

the hero as a lover

The Hero, having overcome whatever, is free to get laid. This comes with its own set of obstacles to overcome and usually involves the lover acting as some kind of mirror to the hero.

the hero as emperor and tyrant

The Hero, as an agent of the Cycle, comes to one of two endings here-- either he is blessed by His Freudian Daddy and takes over as ruler, or he is rejected and loses his divinity, becoming a despotic human tyrant that must be, in turn, overthrown by another hero.

the hero as world redeemer

This is a progression of the emperor bit from the last section-- passing two initiations, first as emissary to his father, then realizing that they are one (wack). This usually is followed by a period of awfulness in which the hero’s human vices wreak some sort of havoc on the world, in which he becomes either a tyrant or a martyr. It’s worth noting that Campbell stresses that these are two ways of telling essentially the same story of the son taking the father’s place.

the hero as a saint

This hero has totally moved beyond self-interest and is one with the wholeness of the universe. Nice!

the departure of the hero

The hero dies or has to leave in some way, stories do always have to end. From Cu Chulainn to Charlemagne, everybody dies (or goes into a plot coma Until They Are Needed Once More).

04 dissolutions

the end of the microcosm

In the end, we are all Spiderman.

the end of the macrocosm

The world has to die just like the hero, also.

[stumperpumper]

That Sweet Summer Anime That’ll Hit The Spot

Hello my digital otaku children! Welcome to another passive-aggressive passage of StumperPumper, the blog where “opinionated guy watches anime then talks about it.” So that you, the reader, can decide if you want to watch ‘said anime’ or not. An update on the nature of this blog, you can now catch posts at the same stumpy time on this very pumper channel. Which means, in Layman’s terms, you can catch original new posts about anime (like this one) every Wednesday on this blog. So if you follow me, look forward to new posts every Wednesday! Hurray!

This week we’re talking about sexy Summer “feeling” animes, and which ones in the pack are worth your time. I’ve taken some liberties though in picking some animes from a few years back, because for some reason these animes are the ones calling to my Summer spirit this season. They might just call to yours too. Now, let’s get on with it.

Tsuritama

free to watch on Crunchyroll

I don’t really give a damn if this anime came out back in 2012, so what if it’s 5 years old!? That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still fill that epic void of wanting an anime that fits that sweet summer niche. Every time summer rolls around I just feel the need to watch a “summer-anime”, I don’t really know how you describe that? An anime that just feels like summer I suppose. Like Free! (below, top) or Nagi no Asukara (below, bottom). We’ll touch on those anime in a minute, but for now let’s talk Tsuritama.

Tsuritama is a fishing anime. Yup, there’s a fishing anime folks. We’ve got a fucking anime for everything, I swear. But don’t be dissuaded, this anime is glorious. I actually had never really fished until I watched this anime. That’s right, after watching this anime I started fishing. That’s how compelling this anime was my friends. No regrets either, fishing has actually turned out to be one of my favorite things in life. There’s something special about doing nothing while you do something, sitting about in the warm sun with a friend just being in nature, yet you’re fishing. It’s an amazing thing I tell you. 

Tsuritama is a Japanese anime television series that aired in spring 2012 season. It premiered on April 12, 2012 and ended on June 28, 2012. That’s really it’s whole history, it’s just a pure anime. No light novels, or manga, none of that jazz. A pure work of animation. It was directed by Kenji Nakamura who went on to direct both of the Gatchaman Crowds animes; and written by Toshiya Ono who went on to write Gatchaman Crowds (coincidence, or do these guys work well together?). 

The show follows our protagonist Yuki. He lives with his grandma and her job makes their family relocate a lot. Due to this Yuki has never really had any friends, and he tends to freeze up in social situations. He’s really relate-able if you’ve ever been a kind of introvert. To this day I think this anime best shows what it’s like to speak in front of a classroom when your super nervous and stressed about being judged. A scene you can watch in episode one, it’s gorgeous and well done. 

Just a gif of that mentioned wonderful scene

Needless to say, this summer will not be the same for Yuki, lest we be unable to make an anime out of it. A self-proclaimed alien named Haru, a boy known as the “Prince of Fishing”, and the simple act of fishing itself will ensure Yuki’s life gets a bit more... interesting. This is like a slice of life. comedy, fucking masterpiece of an anime. There’s even a pet duck named Tapioca being toted around by a suspicious Indian man named Akira. If the duck doesn’t get you to watch this anime, then you’re fucking broken.  I mostly recommend this anime, regardless of whether it’s summer or not, because it’s so fresh. There’s no other anime that FEELS the way Tsuritama does. The only way to see what I’m talking about is to watch it yourself. 

Don’t even bother looking up what other people review this anime at. Just trust me, it’s a solid 8.5 out of 10. The anime's damn good fun and the amount of work that went into making it look phenomenal is worth noting too. 

FREE

free to watch on Crunchyroll

Guilty, guilty, little Free! . Oh how you make me seem so very NOT heterosexual at times. But who even cares, this is 2017 channel your inner millennial and loosen up about what’s “gay” to watch. Firstly, I request that you leave any outside stereotypes, preconceptions, racism, generalist thinking, or whatever societal hate based ideology you have AT THE FRONT DOOR when you watch an anime. Anime has very little if anything at all to do with our personal comfort zones, or our personal ideologies. Anime’s here to tell a story and show us that anyone and everyone can be a part of that story, get to know the characters, and internally understand/view new concepts and emotions via a fantasy constructed by another person. Not to get all ideological, but frankly I think anime is complex and conquers a lot of the social issues that burden most of the world. Like any book or story, it has a lot of ideas that pertain to real life and can teach us how to not be such a closed in little prick all the time. While it pertains to the real world it remains separate and pure, untainted, etc. I digress. 

The general point I’m making is that you needn’t be interested in men, or savor boy’s love fantasies to like Free! . That’s not me excusing myself, it’s just a fact. The anime’s good, it’s funny, and it feels like summer; AND IF YOU AIN’T DOWN WITH THAT, THERE’S THE DOOR -->. I for one get a lot of laughs from this anime, and you bet your ass I ship those men together. If you don’t there’s something wrong with you. The anime’s just fun to watch though, on a serious note. The competitive nature of the swimming offers notes of legitimacy and seriousness, but the characters give us many opportunities to laugh and get carried away with our personal shipping labels. It’s a nice anime, and it’s worth your time if you’re looking for a fun watch that is unlike a lot of other animes. Go ahead, name a better swimming anime. You can’t? Me either, because this anime’s almost a fresh as the sweet Summer sun baby. 

MyAnimeList gives this anime a 7.6 out of 10. I think that’s pretty fair actually, I’d probably lean a little more towards a solid 7 out of 10 myself. But, different strokes for different folks. 

Nagi No Asukara

free to watch on Crunchyroll

This anime, I don’t even know exactly why I’m putting it on here save that I’ve been craving a re-watch of it. The closer Summer gets the closer I come to turning on this mediocre anime. Do I recommend it? I mean, yeah I recommend it. Mostly because for some reason I’m gonna watch it a second time. I don’t know what that reason is, but I’m gonna do it. So there must be something there compelling me to do that, which is more than likely merit-able of a recommendation. I mean, just let me tell you what it’s about. 

It’s about mermaids who come up to the surface to go to high-school but they gotta get water by the end of the day so they don’t dry out and... jesus, it’s literally so benign. But it actually works pretty well, there’s a love triangle aspect that pulls off nice too. So, I’m solidly recommending this. Because I’m gonna watch it too. But, don’t be mad if you end up not liking it. You’ve been warned, it might be just my own personal urge to watch it that put it on this list. That said, you might love it... If so, HAHA! I knew you’d like this one, which is why I put it on here. 

MyAnimeList gives it an 8.3 out of 10, which I thinks a little too high. I’d probably aim more around a 6.5 out of 10, or a 7 at best. It’s not AMAZING, but it’s solidly mediocre and definitely has it’s niche with a number of people. 

Don’t judge me

Wondering what else you can watch right now, that’s brand new THIS SEASON!? I have a post about that right HERE. I spent a lot of time sifting through this seasons anime, and you can get my recommendations for the current season by just reading that post. 

As always, thanks so much for reading, I do appreciate it. But what I’d appreciate more than anything is a bit of feedback. So, if you like this content, then like this content. Duh! Then, Reblog this content to share it, because you share things that you like right? Obviously! If you want to read more of this type of content, then FOLLOW my Blog. That way, you can read more of my content as soon as I write it: WE WRITE FRESH NEW POSTS ON ANIME EVERY WEDNESDAY. But you totally knew that already.  

Also, if you have something you’d like to tell me (ideas, recommendations or questions etc); you can. Shhhh, it’s OK. We have a feature for that, you can use the MESSAGE feature to MESSAGE me whenever!  

You can read more articles I’ve written by clicking this link right HERE.

If you want, our little secret.

[gravitascivics]

A JACKSONIAN DUALITY

This posting, via the use of several quotes, is visiting a recurring theme on this blog.  That is that this nation had, as a dominant political, mental construct, a form of federalism, but that through the years that view was challenged by another view.  The other, which eventually became dominant, is the natural rights construct. The evolution of how the nation went from one view to the other was a slow process, one that was noted for its back and forth progression, and started at the time when the nation was engaged in the ratification of the US Constitution.

         The first quote is one that he feels best describes and emotes the urgency the advocates of the natural rights construct feel.  It is from a film, issued during the Cold War, that narrates a bizarre tale over the “communist menace.”  The Manchurian Candidate[1] has a character that is only seen for a few minutes, he is a presidential candidate who is to be an assassination victim.  

It doesn’t work out that way, but before the shooting starts, he utters the following:  “Nor would I ask of any fellow American in defense of his freedom that which I would not gladly give myself – my life before my liberty.”[2]  In terms of political values, that describes a trump value assuming the character has the usual attachment to his life as most people do.

And why is liberty so valued?  Does it guarantee happiness, wealth, a rewarding family life, or eternal salvation? No, but natural rights advocates hold this value at the pinnacle and perhaps that is because they see it as a precondition for any of these other results.  It doesn’t guarantee happiness, for example, but happiness is impossible without it.  That is true, in these advocates’ eyes, at least, for Americans.

This blog has pointed out that liberty itself is viewed differently today than it was seen in the nation’s early days.  In those earlier times, John Winthrop’s view of liberty, defined as the freedom to do what one should do,[3] was the common notion of liberty.  That was a Calvinist view.  Today, the nation views it as the freedom to do what one wants to do. The earlier view can be associated with federalist thinking (although early natural rights advocates saw it similarly); the latter view is more attuned to a current natural rights view.  

This more recent sense of what liberty is, in the opinion of this writer, has led to the narcissistic levels the nation is suffering from today.[4]  Advocates, who lead responsible lives, might see the resulting problem as just being the price of liberty.  The question that is considered here as useful to ask is how and why did American political culture shift from the more obligated view of liberty – associated with federalism – to the more libertine view of today.  

This blog has identified certain historical events and developments that encouraged or helped cause this shift.  Among them was the western movement of settlers, the rise of corporations with the resulting disassociation between ownership and management, the bureaucratization of government through the Progressive movement and the New Deal that detached citizens from their government and allowing an individualism to erupt.  Another set of events can be associated with the presidency of Andrew Jackson.

According to the historian, Richard Hofstadter,[5] Jackson’s terms of office were situated at a time when entrepreneurship was experiencing a boost.  Till that time, and even after, most “businesspeople” were farmers of small farms.  Hofstadter offers a telling statistic:  only one in fifteen Americans lived in towns of 8,000 or more.  The bulk of the population lived on farms.  In the 1830s there is a sudden uptick in people starting businesses.

Part of the debate over the national bank was due to this change.  For those who need the reminder, Jackson set upon himself to bring the national bank to an end in favor of state banks.  This was seen as more readily assisting the business startups of that time.  What should be remembered by this move – one that was very controversial – was the notion that Jackson was concerned over equal opportunity and adopted a central argument of the natural rights view.

To illustrate, the veto message Jackson issued – the one that shot down the reauthorization of the bank – reveal this natural rights perspective. Here’s part of it:

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.  Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions.  In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society – the farmers, mechanics, and laborers – who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.  There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rain, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.[6]

It was felt here that, given the more recent attention Jackson has enjoyed since the current president has claimed Ol’ Hickory is his model for an effective president, he deserves some focus here.[7]  More to the point, one can detect both strains of influence in this quote.

         On the one hand, yes, he provides the natural rights sense of equality.  Currently, people call that equal condition and Jackson gives the standard used in this view of equality:  government should confine itself to bestowing equal treatment.  If the law says its provision affects one person one way, that law should affect all people the same way.  According to Jackson, if government kept it to that, all would be well – a very natural rights’ bias.

         But, if one looks for the reasons of this view, a more federalist view peers through.  His concerns regarding the national bank originate with an economy that was skewed so much in favor of the rich – nothing new there.  Yes, he understood that there will always be unequal distribution of income and wealth, but artificial advantages, not all caused by unequal treatment by government, needed to be addressed.  Perhaps government could be used to assist those caught at the short end of the economic stick.  This reflects a more proactive role for government.

         And one sees this when the national bank is killed, he distributes its moneyed assets to state banks that were more accommodating to the financial needs of the lower ranks.  This did not end well in that these banks were so speculative in their lending practices that the economy fell into a serious inflationary phase that later led to a depression.  But the point here is that Jackson’s calls for advancing self-interest could not escape a more fundamental federated message.

         In what way?  Federalism is about creating a sense of partnership among the citizenry. It is not about providing a landscape for energetic citizens getting the most out of the system irrespective of what happens to the whole national community.  As stated before in this blog, strong government was not seen as an institution that provided “giveaways” to the poor, that had never happened to that time.  Strong government was an institution that was instrumental to making the rich richer. This undermined a federal sense of a union or of a commonwealth.

         Is there any other evidence indicating this view of Jackson or of what was an ideal at the time?  To this end, here is the last quote of the posting:  

Could it really be urged that the framers of the constitution intended that our Government should become a government of brokers?  If so, then the profits of this national brokers’ shop must inure to the benefit of the whole and not to a few privileged monied capitalists to the utter rejection of the many.[8]

One more item this blog has highlighted is the difference, at the individual level, between theories-in-use and espoused theories.  This writer believes one can make the same distinction at the societal level.  When this blog claims that federalism was the dominant view of governance and politics, perhaps a more accurate statement would be, it was the dominant espoused construct.  That is, federalism was the source of its ideals.  That can no longer be claimed.

[1] John Frankenheimer (director), The Manchurian Candidate (United Artists, 1962).

 [2] Ibid.

[3] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution?  Thoroughly” Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar (presentation materials, prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1994).

 [4] Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.

 [5]  Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1948).

 [6] Ibid., 62. (emphasis added)

[7] Focus yes, admiration, given his history associated with the Cherokee removal and Trail of Tears, no.

[8] Ibid., 45.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Arcade Fire Gives Up on Life

To learn how crushingly the new Arcade Fire album has disappointed fans, critics, and providers of online content, one need only glance at their Metacritic page. To fully comprehend why requires several listens, each more dumbfounding than the last. Anyone who associates the band with uplift will find the new Everything Now, out since July, an enervating thing: a sniveling black hole of negativity, littered with ostensible protest songs aiming to critique societal problems from a soapbox ten million miles above their fanbase. “Infinite Content,” for example, jolts over a straightforward punkish beat as lead rock hero Win Butler repeats the same line over and over: “Infinite content/infinite content/we’re infinitely content.” Get it? “Content” meaning posts on social media, but he’s making a pun on “content” the adjective! He’s calling out the emptiness of our technology-addicted lives! He doesn’t think we’re infinitely content at all–he thinks the internet lulls us into a false sense of security! The next song, a slower, sweeter country-tinged jangler, is also called “Infinite_Content”, with the same exact lyric, except they’ve added an underscore to the title. Get it? Computers!

These songs baffle the critical faculties. To state point blank that “Infinite Content” and “Infinite_Content” aren’t clever is to belabor the self-evident. Likewise, calling Everything Now a failed stab at profundity feels as productive as feigning shock that the current president said something vile and semiliterate in the media yesterday. How exactly the band wound up here is the relevant question.

I won’t mimic the consensus and call Arcade Fire a great band undone by sanctimony when they’ve been bombastic and heavy-handed since day one. Since their beloved debut, Funeral (2004), they’ve specialized in spacious, grandly beautiful rock anthems, undercut by specific deflationary moments of bathos that could easily have been excised. Funeral’s “Wake Up,” widely considered their greatest and most moving song, soars over rhythmic power chords, acoustic classical instruments from violin to accordion, and a massive, wordless football chant of a chorus. The effect rouses — right up to when Butler, pumping his figurative fist, ends a verse by screaming “I guess we’ll just have to adjuuuuuuuust” as if expecting cheers from all the young adults in the audience who’ve felt growing pains, whereupon the mushy qualifiers (“I guess”) and the weak verb (“adjust”) collapse under the weight of the anthemic moment. Often they powered through anyway. Their second album, the scary, deeply felt Neon Bible (2007), infamously recorded in an abandoned church, uses the consequently murky sound to simulate a humming, ominous “Ocean of Noise.” Guitars and pianos and booming organ and, by metaphorical extension, the entire world, all crash down apocalyptically around them, lending physical reality to the political urgency of their songwriting. The Suburbs (2010), a relaxed, rhapsodic variant on the same classically textured arena-rock blend, is pretty enough, at least to compensate for an overlong running time and the band’s labored attempt to make a definitive statement on maturity, adolescence, and the decline of tradition in the modern world. But ever since Pitchfork anointed them voices of a generation — articulating the existential anxieties of kids who grow up, move to the city, and struggle with adulthood and their place on the traditionalism/modernity axis — they’ve always felt the weight of the world more heavily on their shoulders than any band deserves or should presume. Condescending social commentary by a large, communitarian band of Canadian art-rockers will inspire nobody in 2017. Music that once swept and thundered has turned tighter, harsher, and more unpleasant. Songwriting that once voiced progressive resolution now howls with conservative despair.

To students of rock history, Everything Now and its predecessor, Reflektor (2013), will sound awfully familiar: didn’t U2 already make these albums in the ‘90s? Arcade Fire’s career arc resembles U2’s exactly: insufferably earnest arena-rock band starts out sincere, anthemic, grandiose before tiring of their own reputation and deciding to embrace electronics, irony, and such. My, how history repeats itself. It must embarrass fans across the global indie-rock community that U2 did it better; few bands anywhere have matched the sonically warped, chemically tainted, wacky garish neon fury of “The Fly” and “Staring at the Sun.” Reflektor and Everything Now, meanwhile, stand as definitive proof that those who don’t know what irony is shouldn’t dabble in it. While rock-conventional song structures still dominate, both records abound with glittery synthesizer, honking horns, jaggedy postpunk beats, dancier tempos and textures, really, anything to prove they’re not some stodgy old rock band, they’re cool. They display no aesthetic commitment to these musical usages themselves, flaunting them instead as tokens of edge, an association that works only when being a stodgy old rock band is the backdrop.

Despite many flatfooted attempts at disco and the unfortunate choice to follow a song called “Hey Eurydice” with “Hey Orpheus,” Reflektor occasionally sparkles, primarily on the soaring guitars of “Normal Person” and the xylophone-backed nursery rhymes of “Here Comes the Night Time.” On Everything Now the musical blend curdles utterly. The glowing keyboards, dinky flutes, angry rhythm guitar parts, assembled sound effects, and the like are incorporated poorly, failing to mesh with the grander rock structures that subsume them, sticking out like otiose clip-on accessories. The resulting music is awkward, pinched, and ugly. “Signs of Life,” whose death-march bassline is repeated exactly by an abrasive horn section, epitomizes a cramped strain that is now the band’s operative mode. “Creature Comfort” is perhaps definitive: the song’s cheerfully affectless guitar riff plus synth squelch, combined with Butler’s declamatory talk-singing, aim to evoke classic dancepop, New Order’s “Temptation” maybe. The talk-singing more closely resembles an eager parody of a) white singers trying to sound rhythmically astute; b) Bono’s vocal delivery on “Hawkmoon 269”; c) Arcade Fire’s prior output.

That’s to say nothing of the lyrics. “Creature Comfort” is an anti-suicide plea ambiguous enough not to specify whether the band’s own “first record” saved a fan from suicide or drove her to it. There’s no empathy; the person in question is treated like a cautionary tale to wring one’s hands over. I count two songs on Everything Now that haven’t completely given up on life: “Peter Pan,” whose plinked keyboards and funkoid bassline are sparse enough to let the song’s emotion breathe, and the penultimate “We Don’t Deserve Love,” whose climactic descending guitar hook suits both the queasy synth noodling in the verse and the quiet pathos of a romantic anthem that, after an album’s worth of vitriol, aims to establish love as humanity’s redeeming factor. As for the vitriol, it’s disheartening. Once they wrote compassionately and from experience, especially on The Suburbs; their grand proclamations about alienation and adulthood were delivered by narrators implied to have lived through such processes. The songs on Everything Now diagnose the evils of millennials — kids these days! — from the voice of an older man who knows everything. Few things are more tedious than a band lecturing their fanbase on the fanbase’s moral failings and the necessity for everyone to act more like the band. Which song is the most insulting, you ask? Is it the title track, whose blandly suburban mall keyboards accompany a rant against information overload and the media-literate? Is it “Chemistry,” a rhythmically wooden reggae-inflected blues-rocker that lists cliched pickup lines as if revealing something deep and horrifying about gender relations? I vote for “Signs of Life,” a lament for the supposedly repetitious, joyless ritual that is party culture: “Spend your life waiting in line/you find it hard to define/but you do it every time/then you do it again/looking for signs of life/looking for signs every night/but there’s no signs of life/so we do it again.”

Ah — the futility of hedonism! The misery of affluence! Cool kids who pretend to have fun because everyone else does, but secretly feel empty inside! Where have we heard this before? From Halsey, from Lorde, from Frank Ocean, from Drake, from the Weeknd, from the fucking Chainsmokers. With Everything Now, Arcade Fire joins the vast litany of artists who’ve taken it upon themselves to explain Why Modern Kids Suffer and Why Millennials are Ruining Society. That they exempt themselves from their social critique, unlike the aforementioned artists, proves only that exclusionary indie elitism is alive and well. Listening to Neon Bible in the wake of Everything Now perturbs; one wonders if their urge to hide under the covers from the “ocean of violence” outside really targeted Bush, or if the chaotic entanglements of modern life just offended their regressive notions of purity. Their earlier albums surged with positive energy, while Everything Now is the bad album that previous good albums made inevitable. A collapse from idealism into cynicism should surprise nobody. Those who believe in false if rousing ideals can inspire, as Arcade Fire has in the past, and that they’ve gradually become bitter over 13 years after being disappointed in such ideals doesn’t mean they no longer believe in them. On the contrary, they hate the world for not living up to how it should be. Idealism, cynicism, these are not opposites — it just depends on whether the sentimental idiot in question is in a good or bad mood.

Tellingly, their famously energetic live show transcends the negativity of the record. Playing to a festival crowd at Lollapalooza this year, they jumped around, traded instruments, conjured uplift from despair, and generally made joyous, triumphant, cathartic noise. Behold — a welcome sign that they still believe in humanity. I hope their next album, also, yields such evidence.

Everything Now (2017) and Reflektor (2015) are available from Amazon and other online retailers.

The post Arcade Fire Gives Up on Life appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2fTDgmM via IFTTT

[thesportsplanet]

The Hypocrisy of the Anti-Kaepernick Crowd

After watching a video with former Baltimore Ravens’ Shannon Sharpe and Ray Lewis, my initial goal of this post was to chronicle QB Colin Kaepernick’s summer as a free agent. A quick summary of the University of Nevada product’s career shows a dynamic, dual-threat signal caller that went 25-14 in his first 3 seasons of play--including a trip to Super Bowl XLVII against the team that is currently deciding whether they ought to bring the free agent on board. The last two seasons have been filled with injury and poor play, posting a 3-16 record as the team has had two one-and-done coaches since QB guru Jim Harbaugh departed the Bay Area franchise. There are many opinions about Kaepernick’s abilities moving forward. The QB will turn 30 this upcoming season, yet fans and NFL personnel continue to wonder if Kaepernick is more like the QB that lead his team to its first Super Bowl since 1994 or the seventh year pro still struggling to master the fundamentals of ‘proper quarterbacking’.

The facts: Kaepernick has a Super Bowl appearance, a 28-30 record as a starter, 72 touchdowns, 30 interceptions and a 4-2 playoff record. 

My personal ‘football’ opinion states that Kaepernick would be a QB whisperer’s dream project with his strong arm and scrambling talent. San Francisco became a stale situation the minute Harbaugh left and Jim Tomsula was named as his successor. If placed in the right environment, Kaepernick could possibly ‘put it all together’. To label his career dead based on the past two seasons (without factoring in the mess with the Niners front office and head coach) is premature and short-sighted.

What became the focus of the 2016 season instead was Colin’s protests. Frustrated by the pattern of unjust murders of African-Americans followed by no repercussions, the Niners QB announced he would not stand for the National Anthem until he saw changes in the trend. While the team went on to win only 2 games, landing the #2 pick in the 2016 NFL Draft, reports from the 49ers’ locker room did not show the chaos many critics of Kaepernick’s protest perceived there would be. In fact, much of Kaepernick’s backlash came from sports fans and analysts nationwide. Fans who disagreed with Kaepernick’s cause and/or method of protest threatened to boycott the NFL to showcase their disapproval. 

Despite Kaepernick’s philanthropic and volunteering efforts since his announcement and his pledge to cease his National Anthem protesting method; Kaepernick, now a free agent, is having a difficult time finding employment. The most prevailing assumptions for Kaepernick’s long summer are: 1) that owners are either fearful of the response from their respective fanbases and/or 2) that owners are in disagreement with the QB over his protests, keeping the QB out of the league to make a point to other players considering following suit. 

Whichever is the case in this situation, the largest problem I see is the hypocrisy of either reason. That more than anything requires our discussion and focus.

One of the draws of sports as a societal institution is the idea that athletics, at all levels, serve as a functioning example of a meritocracy. We boast that on the field of play, everything is earned. While we know this is not always true--with a coach’s kid getting preferential treatment or a high draft pick being coddled by a franchise based on upside and investment--we believe it nevertheless and continue to use it to market the good of sports. The problem I see is that as a society we don’t call things the way they really are. The truth is that rules are not for everyone. There are ‘perks’ that talented athletes--and celebrities--have that do not apply to others. If you are a fan of a NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL team you could probably name at least one player from your team that was involved with an issue of any kind and received a lessened punishment (or no punishment at all) most likely based on their skill level. In just as much time, you could also come up with the name of a celebrity that skirted the law in some capacity as well. Instead of coming out and acknowledging that this is the case in our society, we try to push the opposite. We say “this” is the punishment for “that” event and then when it occurs with someone we don’t want it to, we push it under the proverbial rug. In the same breath, we’ll be quick the throw the ‘kitchen sink’ at someone to make an example of them for breaking a law/rule. We then go on to profess that rules are important and must be followed yet we are not consistent in their application. Professional sports owners repeatedly (again repeatedly) sign and draft players who come with ‘baggage’ or ‘off the field concerns’ in the name of winning. These players may have a history with domestic abuse, driving while intoxicated or a pattern of poor judgment and decision making yet owners are able to face criticism of those signings because of the athlete’s skill/marketability means more income. 

This issue with Kaepernick does not solely lie on the shoulders of NFL owners. Fans are fickle. I am a fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team. Two years ago, my favorite team made the controversial decision to draft Jameis Winston with the number one overall selection in the 2015 NFL Draft. There were questions about his maturity with many tales of childish behavior throughout his three years in Tallahassee. Being accused of sexual assault at Florida State turned the narrative from a young guy who needed to grow up to a story of the epidemic of spoiled athletes in a patriarchal society that believe the world is their oyster. My belief is that something happened between Winston and Erica Kinsman. I was against the team drafting Winston for obvious reasons. I did understand his talent but could not empathize with taking the risk he posed especially when Marcus Mariota was also available and the complete opposite of controversial (also a really good QB prospect who I am still a fan of to this day). I admit that I still struggle with the dichotomy of how to go about my fandom as it relates to the Bucs and Jameis. On one end I am a fan of this team, want the team to win and Jameis is the quarterback of the team. One the other end it does not feel appropriate to cheer for someone who may have been accused of rape. 

I am not alone, though. While other teams and fans may not have the exact situation as this (except the Steelers which I’ll get to in a bit) every team has a story where the team--and by extension its fanbase--put an controversial issue aside on Sundays. The reality of the situation is that if the person is good, more times than not we’ll get over it. Ask Pittsburgh Steeler fans about how they feel about Ben Roethlisberger who was accused of sexual assault, twice! The QB has gone on to win two Super Bowl trophies in his 13 seasons in the league and is considered to be a lock for the Hall of Fame. Philadelphia Eagles fans cheered as Michael Vick led the team to a playoff appearance in 2010, only two years removed from being released from prison on felony dogfighting charges. Peyton Manning even had a story of sexual assault come to light recently. 

Right now, Kaepernick is being linked to the Baltimore Ravens. The team has attempted to put ‘feelers’ out there, gauging fan reaction to their potential interest in signing him. The Kansas City Chiefs did something similar as their owner stated the team would have no reservations signing the free agent although the team does not appear to have a pressing need at the position. Ryan Fitzpatrick and Josh McCown have gone on to sign with teams this off-season. Both had a  worse 2016 season statistically than Kaepernick and possess lower upside. Allegedly many Ravens fans have expressed disapproval in the team’s consideration of Kaepernick but would be the same fans cheering every week if Kaepernick returned to his 2012-14 form in a Baltimore jersey. Owners also deserve criticism for showing little hesitation in signing athletes with a track record of abuse toward women and other criminal acts but showing near refusal to sign an athlete using his position to enact societal change, breaking no law whatsoever. As a consumer of the National Football League, I question the priorities of its decision makers and urge fans who believe they are enraged with Kaepernick to recognize the wool being pulled over their heads. You deserve just as much of the Game of Thrones style “Shame” chant as the owners who show that violence against women is less important than civil rights/”politics”. Speaking of politics, Patriots QB Tom Brady publicly endorsed Donald Trump--a man that drew the ire of many for his statements/actions in his past as a real estate professional and during his Presidential campaign--yet his fans remained loyal cheering him on to a fifth Super Bowl win a few months ago. More evidence that we pick and choose and aren’t nearly the perfect moralists we attempt to show ourselves to be. I wish people would be more upfront with the fact that they are picking and choosing instead of trying to hide this action. Of QBs with at least 300 pass attempts last season, only two had just as many or fewer interceptions as Kaepernick: Cowboys sensation Dak Prescott and Super Bowl winner Tom Brady. Kaepernick had more touchdowns than Chiefs starter Alex Smith and a better completion percentage than Cam Newton. If football is a meritocracy, could someone tell me how he doesn’t have a job?

Before you go pointing the finger at Kaepernick, maybe you should check yourself. Fans and sports owners, alike.