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that-spider-witch · 3 months ago

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Ok, this pissed me off. Let's try to break this down:

"a group with no official ties to Project Moon and who slandered the company relentlessly and wanted to bleed every penny from the company because....really just because they could."

Wow so greedy. So greedy in fact that now that the fundraising has finished and they have what they need, they have stated that they will send you your money back. Ain't that greedy?

It should be noted that this whole "They are greedy scammers" narrative seems to be rooted solely on misinformation and personal bias. The PMUA, now known as the KGCS, appears to have a good track record of helping artists and not keeping funds and donations to themselves for personal use. And yet the Project Moon fandom calls them scammers because... They once rented a truck with a sign written in broken english? Back when they were still getting started? If you are gonna make that heavy of an accusation, please at least make it make sense. Show evidence.

As to why they have a grudge against Project Moon ever since the Vellmori incident: Project Moon filed defamation charges against them (which got dismissed, btw), all the while they did nothing against the incel hate mob that harassed their own former employee. No legal charges, no direct condemning of their actions. Nothing.

This isn't even something they say. This is just me writing about actual stuff that happened. That's the context of the situation here.

"Her work is non-canon and can no longer be viewed officially so why would she even try and fight for the copyright?"

Because this has nothing to do with money. This is not a legal battle to keep the comic because she wants to publish it and keep earning profit from it. She has stated that she had a bad time working for Project Moon and no longer wants to have something she did be associated with them, so she wants WonderLab gone.

From here it is speculation, but given Monggeu's allegations against Project Moon, it is probable that she has a similar motive: Characters and story may belong to Project Moon, but she no longer wants them to use the pages she worked on. Project Moon may have also started this since apparently in Korea, freelancers (contractors) actually keep their copyright by default, so this might be more of Project Moon trying to make Monggeu give up the copyright she has over the part of Leviathan she worked on to them, rather than the other way around.

Also: If the allegations of work mistreatment are true, wouldn't it make sense that the artists would want to keep ownership of their work from a company that has repeatedly shown them disrespect and disregard for their wellbeing?

"Vellmori WAS NOT FIRED. She left OF HER OWN ACCORD AND PM WAS FINE WITH IT."

Here's the thing: I have yet to be presented with a single news article, a single video or interview or tweet, or any other piece of media or information in which Vellmori herself is saying that.

If you want to believe on Project Moon's official statement on the matter, cool. But please understand that in the current state of both South Korea and the gaming industry, it is not unheard of female employees "leaving of their own accord" after the company peer pressured them to quit. I don't blame anyone who thinks that's what happened given the world we live in.

Am I saying that this was an example of this? No, because I don't know if there's enough actual proof of that. But I'm also just not gonna buy the whole "Vellmori left of her own accord and everything was dandy" because of that very same reason: I haven't seen enough proof that's what happened other than the fact Project Moon themselves said that's what happened. And I'm sorry, but anything a company says should always be taken with a grain of salt. Yes, even if it is an indie company. Yes, even if it is a company you love.

You say that Vellmori leaving was her own decision. Ok, show me the damn proof.

"Regardless of your feelings and KJH (Kim Ji Hoon), that does not give you any right to not only go against everything PM says simply because you dont like the guy, and by every god, does not under any circumstances mean you get to spread misinformation."

Ok, allow me to ask you the very same thing, then: Regardless of your feelings towards KJH (Kim Ji Hoon), that does not give you any right to go against everything everyone else is saying simply because you like the guy, and by every god, does not under any circumstances means you get to spread misinformation.

I'm just gonna make this a full post because why not. As some of you may know, Project Moon has found itself in more drama. And surprise, it involves misinformation because people dont know how to read. Currently PM is in a legal battle against Monggeu, Mimi and the Game Consumer Association because Monggeu and Mimi are filing copyright on their respective works (Leviathan for Monggeu and Wonder Lab for Mimi).

I'm just gonna start with the GCS. If you've been a fan since before 4.5, you might remember the incredibly stupid Vellmori drama, where a bunch of incels hot mad at the CG artist because the ID artist drew Ishmael in a skin tight wet suit rather than a bikini. I bring this up because the GC went by a different name then, the PMUA, or the Project Moon User Association, a group with no official ties to Project Moon and who slandered the company relentlessly and wanted to bleed every penny from the company because....really just because they could. They are a group who will do anything to see Project Moon burn to the ground, and so in another brilliant idea, are backing Monggeu and Mimi in the lawsuit....except they arent because they themselves have stated that they do not have the money to do so and are asking for donations.

Getting to the copyright stuff, Monggeu and Mimi are filing copyright claims for Leviathan and Wonder Lab respectively, two comics/mangas that are set in the Project Moon universe. However they have an issue, they do not own anything within those comics. Nothing in either of them are by right theirs and are instead owned by PM in their entirety. The best they could hope for is owning the names. PM has already show proof that they worked with Monggeu when it came to Leviathan which completely destroys any claims they could make to owning Leviathan, as PM was working on it as well. Mimi......Mimi is in a weird case as her work would also technically not be hers as Wonder Lab is still set in the PM universe. But PM did take it down when she asked and also made Wonder Lab non-canon....but that just brings up the question of why even do this then? Her work is non-canon and can no longer be viewed officially so why would she even try and fight for the copyright? I dont have an awnser, I'm just asking the question.

This last segment will be used as a PSA for everyone. Please for the love of everything wait till both sides get their side of the story out and actually read what both sides say before making judgments. Regardless of your feelings and KJH (Kim Ji Hoon), that does not give you any right to not only go against everything PM says simply because you dont like the guy, and by every god, does not under any circumstances mean you get to spread misinformation. I have already seen a post showing the GCS/PMUA post about this and in that very post is misinformation. Specifically from GCS/PMUA, but since someone spread it here and others have reblogged it, they are also spreading misinformation. Vellmori WAS NOT FIRED. She left OF HER OWN ACCORD AND PM WAS FINE WITH IT. Not liking KJH because is isnt the sharpest tool in the shed does not mean you are allowed to spread any misinformation, and if you spread it unknowingly, then atleast they to correct it. And for the last gods damned time. VELLMORI LEFT OF HER OWN ACCORD, IT WAS HER OWN DECISION, PROJECT MOON DID NOT FIRE HER.

tldr: Project Moon is fully within their right to fight this false claim as these claims are coming from an outside source that does not own any of the IP and were simply contract work. And these false copyright claimers are also being backed by an organization who hates Project Moon and will do anything to see the company burn, and use misinformation to do it. Dont spread misinformation and if you do it accidentally, try to correct yourself. Misinformation is how innocent people get canceled, lose their jobs or possibly lose their lives. Dont. Spread. It.

I do wanna add something on here (so this is an edit fyi), but Project Moon isnt a perfect company. Perfect is an impossibility. Perfect cannot exist. PM has made mistakes and will keep making them, we all will. Does that mean they should be excused? Absolutely not, that's not how this works. PM isnt perfect, KJH isnt perfect, none of us are perfect, and no one can be perfect. PM has done some stupid things in the past, but they dont deserve this. They do not deserve to be continuously slandered against by a group who is out for their own gain when that same group said they were here to help people. PM is not perfect, but PMUA/GCS is far less perfect than PM could ever be. They are greedy and selfish and will continue to spread misinformation to make PM look bad. You do not need to support or even like PM, but please understand that the other side is far worse and do not care for anyone other than themselves. (This is not talking about Monggeu or Mimi, as far as I'm concerned, they are good people and nothing I'm adding here is against them. Just the PMUA/GC)

2nd edit: it has been confirmed with the official english translation that Mimi and Monggeu were both not just contract work, but effectively temporary PM employees during their contract. These means they were paid as much as any other employee. I did not mention this as I wasnt sure if this was accurate from the translations available. Along with this, according to PM, while Monggeu said it was PM's decision to cancel the manga for Leviathan, it was in fact Monggeu's choice and PM respected and accepted this. I would also like to mention that the letter from the PMUA/GCS stated that because PM didnt directly contribute to Leviathan or Wonder Lab, that PM owned nothing and only Monggeu and Mimi owned everything. One, this is false as PM has already said they worked with both during the creation of Wonder Lab and Leviathan (Wonder Lab had more freedom) and two, personally, that is incredibly insane. Just because I make a new comic in the DC or Marvel universe with some new characters does not mean I own everything in the comic.

link for anyone wishing to read PM's statement in English: https://x.com/LimbusCompany_B/status/1816630063154233644

#project moon

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lunarfly · 3 years ago

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Essay: Harry and Hermione’s chemistry

We all know that Emma and Daniel had excellent chemistry so Harry and Hermione naturally had great chemistry in the movies. It was quite obviously visible. But many book readers have claimed that Harry and Hermione’s chemistry only exists in the movies and they felt they lacked chemistry in the books. It can be quite tricky at first since the book scenes are only imagined in our heads and we can’t see the author’s imagination and her views on the scenes and interactions. But, luckily, canon has provided us with plenty of evidence that Harry and Hermione had excellent chemistry, visible to many people around them. Let’s take a look:

“That was a really horrible trick of Hermione Granger’s,” said Cho fiercely. “She should have told us she’d jinxed that list —”

“I think it was a brilliant idea,” said Harry coldly. Cho flushed and her eyes grew brighter.

“Oh yes, I forgot — of course, if it was darling Hermione’s idea —”

“Don’t start crying again,” said Harry warningly.

It’s very obvious that Cho has noticed how close Harry and Hermione are and she’s jealous, even suspicious that there’s something going on between them. It’s clear that whatever interaction between Harry and Hermione Cho has witnessed, they had chemistry.

If this was all of our evidence of H/Hr’s chemistry, I’d ignore it and assume Cho was only jealous because of their disastrous date when Harry left Cho to see Hermione. Perhaps most of her jealousy came from that scene. But this isn’t all of our evidence. We see even more people being jealous and getting suspicious about H/Hr’s relationship:

When at last they had reached a quiet stretch of ground a short way from the Beauxbatons horses’ paddock, Krum stopped in the shade of the trees and turned to face Harry.

“I vant to know,” he said, glowering, “vot there is between you and Hermyown-ninny.”

Harry, who from Krum’s secretive manner had expected something much more serious than this, stared up at Krum in amazement.

“Nothing,” he said. But Krum glowered at him, and Harry, somehow struck anew by how tall Krum was, elaborated.

“We’re friends. She’s not my girlfriend and she never has been. It’s just that Skeeter woman making things up.”

“Hermy-own-ninny talks about you very often,” said Krum, looking suspiciously at Harry.

“Yeah,” said Harry, “because we’re friends.”

He couldn’t quite believe he was having this conversation with Viktor Krum, the famous International Quidditch player. It was as though the eighteen-year-old Krum thought he, Harry, was an equal — a real rival —

Very interesting indeed. Not only is Krum so jealous that he’s “glowering” (”have an angry or sullen look on one's face; scowl”) at Harry, he also doesn’t believe Harry that he’s just friends with Hermione, even after he explained it very clearly. He still adds how much Hermione talks about Harry, he’s looking suspicious and feels the need of a reconfirmation that H/Hr are not dating. It’s possible that Rita Skeeter’s articles are influencing his thoughts and sure, Hermione talks about Harry a lot (already indicating that she’s very passionate about Harry, we talk about things we like, or feel strong emotions about) and that could be the only thing that makes Krum “suspicious” about H/Hr but would he really still be that jealous if there was absolutely no chemistry between Harry and Hermione? This is definitely a clue on Harry and Hermione’s chemistry in the books.

Another extremely interesting detail is that Harry is enjoying this. He likes the idea of Krum being his equal, a rival! This has nothing to do with their chemistry, of course, but it’s definitely suspicious...

Still think there’s no chemistry between them? Here’s another person who noticed that Harry and Hermione were very close, a little too close:

Harry has at last found love at Hogwarts. His close friend, Colin Creevey, says that Harry is rarely seen out of the company of one Hermione Granger, a stunningly pretty Muggle-born girl who, like Harry, is one of the top students in the school.

So Colin Creevey noticed how much time they spend together, but I just can’t believe that’s the only thing making him believe they’re in love! There has to be some noticeable chemistry between them to come to this conclusion.

I know it’s Rita Skeeter assuming that H/Hr are so close only because they’re dating, but Colin probably told her more than it’s written here. Would Rita believe Colin that Harry and Hermione are boyfriend and girlfriend merely because he said they hang out often? I don’t think so. I think Colin elaborated on his suspicions of H/Hr. But maybe it was just one of Rita Skeeter’s exaggerations. Either way, there’s more proof of their chemistry:

“Are you going to tell us — ?”

Hermione shook her head warningly and glanced at Mrs. Weasley.

“Hello, Hermione,” said Mrs. Weasley, much more stiffly than usual.

“Hello,” said Hermione, her smile faltering at the cold expression on Mrs. Weasley’s face.

Harry looked between them, then said, “Mrs. Weasley, you didn’t believe that rubbish Rita Skeeter wrote in Witch Weekly, did you? Because Hermione’s not my girlfriend.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Weasley. “No — of course I didn’t!”

But she became considerably warmer toward Hermione after that.

So even Molly believed that Harry and Hermione were boyfriend and girlfriend (and Hermione had ‘broken Harry’s heart’)? Come on, their chemistry was so noticeable that even Molly thought it was believable enough. ...Although Molly does believe everything that newspapers and magazines say. And maybe she didn’t know them well enough because she assumed Hermione could break Harry’s heart.

Still don’t believe that Harry and Hermione had lots of chemistry in the books? Maybe you’re right, we need to actually see the chemistry, not just have others notice it. And guess what? We do get to see their chemistry. This often happens when Ron becomes suspicious of a possible H/Hr relationship. Ron, their closest friend who knows basically everything about them, suspects that Harry and Hermione are secretly in love. And he is quite rightly suspicious of them when we have moments like these demonstrating their perfect chemistry in the books:

“We’ll go down after Quidditch,” Harry assured her. He too was missing Hagrid, although like Ron he thought that they were better off without Grawp in their lives. “But trials might take all morning, the number of people who have applied.” He felt slightly nervous at confronting the first hurdle of his Captaincy. “I dunno why the team’s this popular all of a sudden.”

“Oh, come on, Harry,” said Hermione, suddenly impatient. “It’s not Quidditch that’s popular, it’s you! You’ve never been more interesting, and frankly, you’ve never been more fanciable.”

Ron gagged on a large piece of kipper. Hermione spared him one look of disdain before turning back to Harry.

“Everyone knows you’ve been telling the truth now, don’t they? The whole Wizarding world has had to admit that you were right about Voldemort being back and that you really have fought him twice in the last two years and escaped both times. And now they’re calling you ‘the Chosen One’ — well, come on, can’t you see why people are fascinated by you?”

Harry was finding the Great Hall very hot all of a sudden, even though the ceiling still looked cold and rainy.

“And you’ve been through all that persecution from the Ministry when they were trying to make out you were unstable and a liar. You can still see the marks on the back of your hand where that evil woman made you write with your own blood, but you stuck to your story anyway. . . .”

“You can still see where those brains got hold of me in the Ministry, look,” said Ron, shaking back his sleeves.

“And it doesn’t hurt that you’ve grown about a foot over the summer either,” Hermione finished, ignoring Ron.

“I’m tall,” said Ron inconsequentially.

Wow. Hermione really made up a whole monologue about Harry being fanciable and attractive! If this conversation doesn’t convince you that there was chemistry between them, probably nothing will. Let’s analyze this scene:

Hermione starts talking about Harry and how fanciable he is, how interesting he is, how attractive looks and qualities he has, going on and on... Hermione is clearly showing her interest in Harry and basically flirting with him. But what interests me is this moment:

Harry was finding the Great Hall very hot all of a sudden, even though the ceiling still looked cold and rainy.

He’s actually blushing. Hermione’s compliments have a very obvious effect on him. But something that fascinates me more is the way this is written. He isn’t just blushing, no. Harry never said something like:

Harry was feeling his face growing very hot all of a sudden.

Instead, we have the Great Hall going “very hot”. It isn’t just his face and his blush, it’s the whole hall. This indicates clear tension between Harry and Hermione.

You could say that all of these compliments that Hermione is giving Harry are just facts and reasons why other girls find him attractive. But this isn’t the case. There’s obvious romantic tension between them.

Another thing to note is Ron’s jealousy. He “gags on a large piece of kipper” and he keeps interrupting Hermione, saying and showing why he is fanciable too. The chemistry is undeniable at this point.

You could argue that Hermione was complimenting Harry to make Ron jealous, that his suspicions were expected and intended. And it does seem so at first sight: Hermione compliments Harry in front of Ron, also being very impatient as if she had been planning this conversation, as well as pointing out lots of “fanciable” things that apply to Ron as well (the scars, the height), ignoring Ron to make him more jealous. You may be tricked into thinking so. But this isn’t the case.

First of all, if she wanted to make Ron jealous, don’t you think Hermione would’ve been enjoying the reaction? Why is she giving him these “looks of disdain”(note that this isn’t the first time she has given him nasty looks)? Wouldn’t she be looking away from him, smiling to herself? At least looking a little pleased?

And if she really wanted to make Ron jealous, why would she use Harry of everyone? Maybe because he and Ron had a lot of similarities that could be convenient for making him jealous? But this isn’t like Hermione at all. This isn’t her technique of making people jealous.

“What’s happened to you?” asked Harry, for Hermione looked distinctly disheveled, rather as though she had just fought her way out of a thicket of Devil’s Snare.

“Oh, I’ve just escaped — I mean, I’ve just left Cormac,” she said. “Under the mistletoe,” she added in explanation, as Harry continued to look questioningly at her.

“Serves you right for coming with him,” he told her severely.

“I thought he’d annoy Ron most,” said Hermione dispassionately. “I debated for a while about Zacharias Smith, but I thought, on the whole —”

“You considered Smith?” said Harry, revolted.

“Yes, I did, and I’m starting to wish I’d chosen him, McLaggen makes Grawp look a gentleman. Let’s go this way, we’ll be able to see him coming, he’s so tall. . . .”

Hermione picks the people Ron despises the most to make him jealous - like Cormac McLaggen and Zacharias Smith. Hermione had no reason to use Harry to make Ron jealous. She had no reason to make Ron jealous at all. So that argument is definitely debunked.

Could Hermione have told Harry all of these things because she really didn’t mean them and was just pointing them out from a different teenage girl’s point of view? That just can’t be the case. Otherwise she would’ve been complimenting Ron too. If the only purpose for this speech was to show Harry his attractive traits, she would’ve laughed at Ron’s remarks and agreed that he was fanciable too in other girls’ eyes because he had many of the same “fanciable” traits.

So Hermione was definitely showing her attraction towards Harry which is also made obvious by Harry’s reaction to it and the romantic tension between them that even Ron couldn’t deny.

Believe it or not, this isn’t the only moment when Harry and Hermione are literally flirting. Take a look at another scene of Ron third wheeling Harry and Hermione and looking suspicious:

As they came into the castle they spotted Cormac McLaggen entering the Great Hall. It took him two attempts to get through the doors; he ricocheted off the frame on the first attempt. Ron merely guffawed gloatingly and strode off into the Hall after him, but Harry caught Hermione’s arm and held her back.

“What?” said Hermione defensively.

“If you ask me,” said Harry quietly, “McLaggen looks like he was Confunded this morning. And he was standing right in front of where you were sitting.” Hermione blushed.

“Oh, all right then, I did it,” she whispered. “But you should have heard the way he was talking about Ron and Ginny! Anyway, he’s got a nasty temper, you saw how he reacted when he didn’t get in — you wouldn’t have wanted someone like that on the team.”

“No,” said Harry. “No, I suppose that’s true. But wasn’t that dishonest, Hermione? I mean, you’re a prefect, aren’t you?”

“Oh, be quiet,” she snapped, as he smirked.

“What are you two doing?” demanded Ron, reappearing in the doorway to the Great Hall and looking suspicious.

“Nothing,” said Harry and Hermione together, and they hurried after Ron. The smell of roast beef made Harry’s stomach ache with hunger, but they had barely taken three steps toward the Gryffindor table when Professor Slughorn appeared in front of them, blocking their path.

Try denying their chemistry here.

Just imagine two (straight) friends of the opposite gender, the boy grabbing the girl’s arm and turning her around (the tension!!!) and her acting all defensive, and then the boy telling her something that makes her blush and admit something while whispering. Then the boy jokingly teasing her about it and smirking while the girl tells him to be quiet playfully. Yeah, that’s called flirting and they have extremely obvious chemistry.

The funnier part is Ron noticing this and suspiciously confronting Harry and Hermione while they quickly say “nothing” at the same time and catch up with him.

I don’t think an explanation is even necessary, anyone who denies their chemistry in this scene is basically lying to themselves and is willingly blinding themselves.

Here’s another interesting scene from HBP with Ron getting jealous of H/Hr’s chemistry once again:

Malfoy looked rather as he had done the time Hermione had punched him in the face. Hermione turned to Harry with a radiant expression and whispered, “Did you really tell him I’m the best in the year? Oh, Harry!”

“Well, what’s so impressive about that?” whispered Ron, who for some reason looked annoyed. “You are the best in the year — I’d’ve told him so if he’d asked me!”

Hermione smiled but made a “shhing” gesture, so that they could hear what Slughorn was saying. Ron looked slightly disgruntled.

Here Harry and Hermione’s chemistry isn’t really made clear but just look at the way Hermione turns to Harry. He literally sees her expression as “radiant” (this adjective has also been used to describe Ginny’s smile) and Hermione looks simply delighted. They were clearly having a great moment here, so good, in fact, that Ron becomes jealous and annoyed and tries to pretend Harry’s compliment wasn’t a big deal. He compliments Hermione the same way as Harry did but she doesn’t have such a “radiant” smile this time, does she? Instead she shushes him(poor Ron just wanted attention from his future wife!). Ron has every right to be disgruntled in this scene.

This is the third time in HBP that Ron is third-wheeling Harry and Hermione. Whether anti-H/Hrs want to admit it or not, Ron is a third-wheel to Harry and Hermione very often and becomes very jealous of their chemistry. JKR, it really isn’t funny, where are the R/Hr flirting moments? They’re supposed to be the endgame couple, aren’t they? Why do you have so many moments between Harry and Hermione when they’re clearly flirting and demonstrating what excellent chemistry looks like?

Apparently, Harry and Hermione have had such chemistry in the past that, even when they’re not flirting, Ron still becomes suspicious of Harry and Hermione’s ‘possible secret relationship’:

“Because she was crying,” Harry continued heavily.

“Oh,” said Ron, his smile fading slightly. “Are you that bad at kissing?”

“Dunno,” said Harry, who hadn’t considered this, and immediately felt rather worried. “Maybe I am.”

“Of course you’re not,” said Hermione absently, still scribbling away at her letter.

“How do you know?” said Ron in a sharp voice.

“Because Cho spends half her time crying these days,” said Hermione vaguely. “She does it at mealtimes, in the loos, all over the place.”

Ron suspected that Harry and Hermione had kissed before. His suspects are quite obvious, judging from the tone of his voice. No matter how insecure Ron is, he is still their best friend, he should know that they’re not interested into each other romantically. But it seems like it’s so apparent to everyone that Harry and Hermione have something going on.

Here’s another moment showing us Harry and Hermione’s chemistry:

“Harry!” Hermione cried.

“I know!” Harry shouted. Unable to contain himself, he punched the air; it was more than he had dared to hope for. He strode up and down the tent, feeling that he could have run a mile; he did not even feel hungry anymore. Hermione was squashing Phineas Nigellus’s portrait back into the beaded bag; when she had fastened the clasp she threw the bag aside and raised a shining face to Harry.

“The sword can destroy Horcruxes! Goblin-made blades imbibe only that which strengthen them — Harry, that sword’s impregnated with basilisk venom!”

“And Dumbledore didn’t give it to me because he still needed it, he wanted to use it on the locket —”

“— and he must have realized they wouldn’t let you have it if he put it in his will —”

“— so he made a copy —”

“— and put a fake in the glass case —”

“— and he left the real one — where?”

They gazed at each other; Harry felt that the answer was dangling invisibly in the air above them, tantalizingly close. Why hadn’t Dumbledore told him? Or had he, in fact, told Harry, but Harry had not realized it at the time?

“Think!” whispered Hermione. “Think! Where would he have left it?”

“Not at Hogwarts,” said Harry, resuming his pacing.

“Somewhere in Hogsmeade?” suggested Hermione.

“The Shrieking Shack?” said Harry. “Nobody ever goes in there.”

“But Snape knows how to get in, wouldn’t that be a bit risky?”

“Dumbledore trusted Snape,” Harry reminded her.

“Not enough to tell him that he had swapped the swords,” said Hermione.

“Yeah, you’re right!” said Harry, and he felt even more cheered at the thought that Dumbledore had had some reservations, however faint, about Snape’s trustworthiness. “So, would he have hidden the sword well away from Hogsmeade, then? What d’you reckon, Ron? Ron?”

Harry looked around. For one bewildered moment he thought that Ron had left the tent, then realized that Ron was lying in the shadow of a lower bunk, looking stony.

Just look at the intensity of this scene!

Firstly, when Harry and Hermione find out exciting news, they figure it out themselves and alone, they didn’t even think of Ron. Then look at how happy Harry and Hermione are feeling, their hopes high, their spirits lifted, their excitement causing the tension! Hermione’s face is “shining”!

Then they start discussing, knowing what the other is thinking and finishing each other’s sentences! The way they interact is precious, they’re “gazing” at each other, feeling something “tantalizingly close.” They start whispering. It’s so intense and full of tension and chemistry. They’re so excited. They even completely forgot about Ron(I feel so bad for him), Harry even thought that he had left.

This is one of the strongest Harmione scenes ever, the chemistry between them is incomparable to anyone else’s. Just imagine being Ron right now, watching the love of your life have this intense conversation with your and her best friend, sharing this exciting moment, experiencing all of this without you. And you just sit there and watch. Just watch. Ron’s jealousy, intensified by the horcrux, was the one thing that made him leave Harry and Hermione in the tent. And Ron did have a reason to be jealous.

So they do have chemistry in the books, everyone sees it, including Harry and Hermione’s dates, their closest friend, their “families”, their fans. Everyone except for anti-Harmiones. I tried making up excuses for why others assume Harry and Hermione are together, that maybe I’m misinterpreting something and it’s not because of their chemistry. But when you put everything together, it should become obvious. You have to be insanely biased and willingly ignore everything to come to the conclusion that they don’t have any chemistry.

I’m not even going in detail about physical contact between them. It would take too long. They grab each other’s hand/arm, they hold onto each other for strength and protect each other, they’re very comfortable with hugs and kisses and their physical connection is another piece of proof of their undeniable chemistry.

Even JKR has admitted that they had some “charged moments” in DH in the tent, which is her way of saying that they had intense chemistry:

[Kloves] felt a certain pulll between them at that point. And I think he's right. There are moments when [Harry and Hermione] touch, which are charged moments. One when she touches his hair as he sits on the hiltop reading about Dumbledore and Grindelwald, and [two] the moment when they walk out of the graveyard with their arms around each other. Now the fact is that Hermione shares moments with Harry that Ron will never be able to participate in. He walked out. She shared something very intense with Harry. So I think it could have gone that way.

In conclusion, Harry and Hermione have excellent chemistry in the books, even better and stronger than in the movies. None of the movie scenes showed their chemistry with this intensity. Their romantic tension was much better in the books. Harry and Hermione have chemistry.

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quillquiver · 4 years ago

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On SPN, Burying Your Gays, and Being Heard

I am shaking, I feel sick, I feel like I’m insane. And did I run a little wild with the theories? You bet. But you know what didn’t help? The botched clusterfuck that was this entire goddamn finale debacle. How was I supposed to believe anything they said in panels when M&G dialogue would leak saying the exact opposite? How was I supposed to grieve and move on when there was nothing from the cast and crew? Nobody said anything! And any info leaked just destabilized what we already knew or directly contradicted what we’d been told. In light of that, how was I supposed to trust anything anyone said? One rogue translator reciprocated the love confession and I was practically sold, because there were so many questions surrounding the English text that this was something good, something that logically fit, and something I wanted to hold onto.

Because they hurt me. This is about so much more than one episode or a ship; for years queer fans have seen ourselves in these characters and been told that we were crazy. That we were reading too much into it. I’m not sure how people get upset and offended when a storyline that doesn’t exist... doesn’t exist! said Guy Bee (2013). And then, after all of that, they turned around and said magnanimously, you have your version, I have mine... and that’s okay. But it’s not okay. It’s not okay, because that doesn’t erase what came before - that doesn’t erase the baiting and the gaslighting, and that invalidates everything we felt in the time leading up to that episode. It gave them an open window for all the subtext that came after. It allowed them to brush us off.

And then we got Cas’s love confession. I watched that scene about 500 times. Added to the rest of the season - to the fandom avatar being presented as successful and intelligent, to arc being the death of the author - I felt seen. Really seen, by a show that made it its mission to erase me. I had been okay with Cas dying at first because I had been sure the romance arc would carry through. I had been convinced that after everything, there was no way they would give that to us and then take it away.

But they did, because this is Supernatural. To anyone saying this is not bury your gays, I implore you to read up on the Hays Code. This link is to an amazing queer history podcast and the episode that covers it. In short, the Hays Code was a legal document that came about in 20th Century Hollywood during the puritanical war on the American entertainment industry, and it stipulated what was not allowed on screen. Not all of it was queer - there’s a whole section about kissing - but what the Code is most remembered for is that queerness was not allowed on screen. But queer people are resilient, and so they started testing the waters... and it turned out that you could in fact code queerness into a narrative, as long as it was subtextual, or as long as the queer character died/was punished, or both. The point is that the character is not allowed to live their truth openly. They are buried, either in the ground or punished in the narrative. The former is normally what we refer to these days, because the latter just doesn’t really happen anymore.

Until Supernatural.

Castiel is immediately punished for speaking his truth - and please don’t tell me he leveraged that punishment and so he had agency. Literally the only thing that could make him happy was confessing his feelings, and so the Empty deal was directly related to this idea of queerness-as-punishment. That being said, Bobo wrote a beautiful scene. Cas’s confession was a love letter to queerness and coming out... but everything that came after buried him. Castiel may have ended the series alive but he was effectively written out of the last two episodes, and that means that he actually never really got to live his truth. He was silenced by the narrative - that is punishment.

Dean is a whole other can of worms. Does one rogue translator confirm canon bi!Dean? Or do we have to read our own version of the text? The fact that we even have to ask these questions firmly places us in the realm of queerbaiting. Were the writers trying to get bi!Dean approved but were unable to? I have no idea, but queerbaiting requires proof that the writers encouraged a reading they had no intent of following through on, and we certainly don’t lack in evidence of that. Not from this writers room, but from those of previous eras. Did these writers try? They might have, but the funny thing about queerbaiting discourse is that there has never been a show to bait this long, and I’m making the call that even if you tried at the end, you baited me with half the ship and all the years that came before.

Of course, the narrative leaves open the possibility of bi!Dean so if you do read the show that way, that means Dean also falls into the bury your gays category; if you read the show this way - which many of us do - the mere suggestion that Dean Winchester was bisexual was enough to punish him. And he was punished. We’ve all written extensively on this, but he was given a random death, on a case his father never finished. All that growth, all that time spent having him accept himself, love himself, that was all taken away. He died the way he always thought he would: as a tool, in service of his father, protecting his brother. He had always believed he’d been a body to throw on the sword and in the end that’s all he was. And when he gets to Heaven? He’s also silenced. He barely speaks in the episode except to monologue during his death, and that is 100% Sam-centric. He is scared.

It was horrific to watch. I sobbed so hard my roommate was seriously concerned.

I had been fully prepared for Supernatural to end disappointingly. I had figured everything would end with a huge heaven reunion because white, straight, cis-male S&F writers love the idea of death as a reward, but instead of being disappointed I felt like I had witnessed a slaughter. Every single one of the queer themes intrinsic to the show: found family, resilience, speaking your truth... were gone. And I know we’ve talked about this too, but it bears repeating, because in doing this, in writing the queerness out of its narrative, Supernatural effectively looked every one of us queer folx in the eye and said: you are not important. You don’t matter. All of that stuff that came before is all good and well, but what really matters at the end of all things is blood family. It’s two brothers in a car. Life sucks but at least we get to die and go to paradise - real paradise, that your angel buddy died for and then made for you and who we never hear from again.

I felt insane. I felt cheated. I felt humiliated. I felt devastated. I still feel all those things, but listen to me. You have been heard. Not by Misha Collins, who is a great guy, but doesn’t get it. Not by Jensen Ackles, who is a similarly great guy, but also just doesn’t understand. And not by anyone else who worked on this show.

You know who heard you? Me. The people who follow me. The people who follow you. We saw each other, and heard each other, and we gave each other a leg up. We made memes. We wrote fic. We drew fanart. We made gifs. All for ourselves and all for each other. We broke Tumblr multiple times. We donated over $60,000 USD to multiple different causes. We got multiple hashtags trending at multiple different points, and today kept it up because we demanded answers and then we got them. There were at least 5 articles written about the show today. We made that happen. We made people listen.

Supernatural didn’t deserve me, and it didn’t deserve you. It didn’t deserve Dean. It didn’t deserve Cas. It didn’t deserve Misha and Jensen. But this show ended with a bleak, awful message and we turned around and showed them that love is loud. So what about all of this is real?

We are.

#alex talks #spngate #archived #this was very therapeutic #and i honestly don't know if i will ever be able to love something like this again #because i have been burned oh man #but this fandom is amazing #and i am proud to be a part of it #and i am not going anywhere #journaling #15x18 #15x19 #15x20 #castiel #dean winchester #destiel

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elfwreck · 1 year ago

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Damn why wasn't ChatGPT available when Prenda Law was doing their shenanigans?

...We can expect more of these. Slimy lawyers who got where they are by being born rich and white, who take on cases against targets who don't have the legal know-how to fight back, are always looking for a way to dodge doing the actual work of lawsuits. And hey, here's a bot that will give you legal quotes from cases! The bot swears it's not lying!

You can't lie on the internet; everyone knows that!

As noted: Courts give absolutely zero leeway for "but I didn't know it was fake!" You went to law school for years; you have been practicing for more years; you are required to understand the rules of the profession. If you admit that you do not actually understand the rules of the profession, or are somehow unable to follow them, you may be disbarred. The license to practice law is contingent on the ability and willingness to practice law.

If we're all extremely lucky, someone on Trump's team will try using a chatbot (aka "autocomplete generator crossed with a grammar-check app") to put together some of their filings.

Enjoy the show (this one and the next one; there's gonna be a wave)... because the bad news is, courts will now feel compelled to verify all the details for every. single. citation. in every legal brief or motion. And every quotation.

Quotes from legal cases? Easy to verify or not. Sometimes time-consuming, but the whole point is, the citation system tells you where to find the ruling. It's either in the legal databases or you have to go find the actual paper book where those are stored. A nuisance, but complicated.

Quotes from other sources? HAH. If someone quotes a book or news article (perhaps to indicate that a given phrase's meaning is commonly understood, or as evidence that X thing existed before Y date), now the court has to track that down. (Or rather: Now the court will demand that the person quoting a source, provide proof that the source (1) exists and (2) contains that quote.)

This will not speed up the courts, which are still lagging behind from the Covid shutdowns.

The people most hurt by this are not the scammers (well, they might get censured or even wind up in prison, but most of them are going to get a few harsh words and that's all - because the courts, unlike Tumblr, aren't going to be watching for a stream of chatbot-driven legal documents.) The people who'll get most hurt are the ones who need speedy trials, who are going to suffer through extra delays, and requests for extra time, and oh-he's-on-vacation-this-week, and so on.

When I said that chatbots could be useful for legal document FIRST DRAFTS, this is not what I meant. I meant they can create the draft and THEN SOMEONE HAS TO CHECK THE RESULTS to confirm that they're (1) accurate and (2) applicable to the current situation.

...Bot-generated case opinions would probably be terrific student exercises.

Oh dear.

So as some of you may know, I love to point and laugh at bad legal arguments. And as fun as legal dumpster fires are when they are made by people who aren’t lawyers but think this whole “law” thing seems pretty simple, it’s even funnier when an actual, barred attorney is the person dumping gallons of kerosene into the dumpster.

And oh boy folks, do I have a fun ride for y’all today. Come with me on this journey, as we watch a lawyer climb into the dumpster and deliberately pour kerosene all over himself, while a judge holds a match over his head.

The court listener link is here, for those who want to grab a few bowls of popcorn and read along.

For those of you who don’t enjoy reading legal briefs for cases you aren’t involved with on your day off (I can’t relate), I will go through the highlights here. I will screenshot and/or paraphrase the relevant portion of the briefs, and include a brief explainer of what’s going on (and why it’s very bad, but also extremely funny). (Also, I’m not going to repeat this throughout the whole write-up, so for the record: any statements I make about how the law or legal system works is referring exclusively to the U.S. (And since this is a federal case, we are even more specifically looking at U.S. federal law.) Also, I don’t know how you could construe any of this to be legal advice, but just in case: none of this is, is intended to be, or should be taken as, legal advice.)

First, let’s get just a quick background on the case, to help us follow along. In brief, this is a civil tort suit for personal injury based on defendant’s (alleged) negligence. The plaintiff is suing the defendant (an airline), because he says that he was injured when a flight attendant struck his knee with a metal cart, and the airline was negligent in letting this happen. The airline filed a motion to dismiss on the grounds that there is an international treaty that imposes a time bar for when these kind of cases can be brought against an airline, and the plaintiff filed this case too many years after the incident.

The fun begins when the plaintiff’s attorney filed an opposition to the motion to dismiss. (So far, a good and normal thing to do.) The opposition argues that the claim is not time-barred because 1) the time bar was tolled by the defendant’s bankruptcy proceedings (that is, the timer for the time limitation was paused when the defendant was in bankruptcy, and started again afterwords), and 2) the treaty’s time limit doesn’t apply to this case because the case was filed in state court before the state statute of limitations expired, and the state court has concurrent jurisdiction over this kind of case.

I’m struggling a bit to succinctly explain the second reason, and there’s a reason for that.

You see, the whole opposition reads a bit…oddly.

This is how the opposition begins its argument, and it’s…weird. The basic principle is...mostly correct here, but the actual standard is that when reviewing a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim (which is what the defendant filed) the court must draw all reasonable factual inferences in the plaintiff’s favor. But even then, you don’t just put that standard in your opposition. You cite to a case that lays out the standard.

Because that’s how courts and the law work. The courts don’t operate just based on vibes. They follow statutory law (laws made by legislature) and case law (the decisions made by courts interpreting what those laws mean). You don't just submit a filing saying, "here's what the law is," without citing some authority to demonstrate that the law is what you say (or are arguing) it is.

Again, this isn’t wrong (although I'm not sure what it means by new arguments?), but it’s weird! And part of the reason it’s weird is that it is irrelevant to the defendant’s motion to dismiss. The defendant filed a motion stating that based on the facts in the complaint, the plaintiff has not stated a claim based on which relief can be granted, because the complaint is time barred by a treaty. There is no reason for this language to be in the opposition. It’s almost like they just asked a chatbot what the legal standards are for a motion to dismiss for a failure to state a claim, and just copied the answer into their brief without bother to double-check it.

The opposition then cites a bunch of cases which it claims support its position. We will skip them for now, as the defendant will respond to those citations in its reply brief.

The last thing in the brief is the signature of the lawyer who submitted the brief affirming that everything in the brief is true and correct. An extremely normal - required, even! - thing to do. This will surely not cause any problems for him later.

The next relevant filing is the defendant’s reply brief. Again, the existence of a reply brief in response to an opposition is extremely normal. The contents of this brief are…less so.

Beg pardon?

Just to be clear, this is not normal. It is normal to argue that the plaintiff’s cases are not relevant, or they aren’t applicable to this case, or you disagree with the interpretations, or whatever. It is not normal for the cases to appear to not exist.

Some highlights from the brief:

Quick lesson in how to read U.S. case citations! The italicized (or underlined) part at the beginning is the name of the case. If it is a trial court case, the plaintiff is listed first and the defendant second; if the case has been appealed, the person who lost at the lower court level (the petitioner/appellant) will be listed first, and the person who won at the lower level (the respondent/appellee) will be listed second. There are extremely specific rules about which words in these names are abbreviated, and how they are abbreviated. Next, you list the volume number and name of the reporter (the place where the case is published), again abbreviated according to very specific rules, then the page number that the case starts on. If you are citing a case for a specific quote or proposition, you then put a comma after the beginning page number, and list the page number(s) on which the quote or language you are relying on is located (this is called a “pincite”). Finally, you put in parenthesis the name of the court (if needed)(and again, abbreviated according to extremely specific rules) and the year the case was decided.

So the plaintiff’s response cited to Zicherman, which they said was a case from 2008 that was decided by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. However, the defendant was not able to find such a case. They were able to find a case with the same name (the same petitioner and respondent), but that case was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996, and the lower court cases associated with that case weren’t in the 11th circuit either. (The United States Reports is the only official reporter for the U.S. Supreme Court, and only includes SCOTUS decisions, so it’s not necessary to include the name of the court before the year it was decided.)

Just to be clear. The defendant’s brief is saying: the plaintiff cited and extensively quoted from these cases, and neither the cases nor the quotations appear to exist. These “cases” were not ancillary citations in the plaintiff’s brief. They were the authority it relied upon to make its arguments.

This is as close a lawyer can come, at this point in the proceedings, to saying, “opposing counsel made up a bunch of fake cases to lie to the court and pretend the law is something different than it is.”

That, “Putting aside that here is no page 598 in Kaiser Steel,” is delightfully petty lawyer speak for, “you are wrong on every possible thing there is to be wrong about.”

By page 5, the defendant has resorted to just listing all of the (apparently) made up cases in a footnote:

(skipping the citations to support this proposition)

This is where I return to my struggle to explain the opposition’s second reason why the motion to dismiss should not be granted. I struggled to explain the argument, because they failed to explain why the argument they were making (that plaintiffs can bring lawsuits against airlines in state court, and the state court have specific statutes of limitations for general negligence claims) was relevant to the question of whether the plaintiff’s specific claim against the airline was time barred by the treaty. Because 1) this case is in federal court, not state court, and 2) federal law - including treaties - preempts state law. Again, it’s almost like plaintiff’s attorney just typed a question about the time bar into a chatbot or something, and the machine, which wasn’t able to reason or actually analyze the issues, saw a question about the time to bring a lawsuit and just wrote up an answer about the statute of limitations.

We also end with a nice little lawyerly version of “you fucked up and we are going to destroy you.” The relief requested in the defendant’s original motion to dismiss was:

In their reply to the opposition, however:

“The circumstances” in this case, being the apparent fabrication of entire cases. Because courts tend to take that pretty seriously.

And the court took it seriously indeed. The defendant’s reply was docketed on March 15th of this year. On April 11th:

AKA: you have one week (an extremely prompt time frame for federal court) to prove to me that you didn’t just make up these cases.

On April 12th, the plaintiff’s attorney requests more time because he’s on vacation:

The judge grants the motion, but adds in another case that he forgot to include in his first order.

On April 25th, the plaintiff’s attorney files the following:

(And he lists the cases, with one exception, which he says is an unpublished decision.)

But he says of all of the cases except two, that the opinions…

Which is…nonsense?

First of all: if you cited a case, you had to get it from somewhere. Even unpublished opinions, if you are citing them in a brief, you are citing them because you pulled them off of westlaw or whatever. Which means you have access to the case and can annex it for the court. (There are even formal rules for how you cite unpublished opinions! And those rules include citing to where you pulled the damn case from!)

Secondly: remember that long digression I went into about how to read case citations? Remember that bit about how you include the name of the reporter (the place the case was published)? Yes, cases are published. They are printed in physical books, and they are published online in databases (e.g. lexis or westlaw). If the specific online database you are looking in does not have the case, you look somewhere else. If you have a judge telling you to get them a copy of the case Or Else, you track down a physical copy of the reporter if you need to and scan the damn thing yourself. You - literally - can’t just not have a copy of the case! (Especially published federal circuit court opinions, which multiple of these cases are! Those aren’t hard to find!)

And what kind of “online database” doesn’t include the entire opinion anyway? I’ve literally never heard of a case research database that only included partial opinions, because that wouldn’t be useful.

Maybe if we look at the attached annexed copies of the cases, that might give us some answers.

...

My friends, these things are just bizarre. With two exceptions, they aren’t submitted in any sort of conventional format. Even if you’ve never seen a legal opinion before, I think you can see the difference if you just glance through the filings. They are located at Docket entry #29 on Court Listener (April 25, 2023). Compare Attachments 6 and 8 (the real cases submitted in conventional format) to the other cases. Turning to the contents of the cases:

In the first one, the factual background is that a passenger sued an airline, then the airline filed a motion to dismiss (on grounds unrelated to the treaty's time bar), then the airline went into bankruptcy, then the airline won the motion to dismiss, then the passenger appealed. And the court is now considering that appeal. But then the opinion starts talking about how the passenger was in arbitration, and it seems to be treating the passenger like he is the one who filed for bankruptcy? It’s hallucinatory, even before you get to the legal arguments. The “Court of Appeals” is making a ruling overruling the district court’s dismissal based on the time bar, but according to the factual background, the case wasn’t dismissed based on the time bar, but on entirely other grounds? Was there some other proceeding where the claim was dismissed as time barred, and it’s just not mentioned in the factual background? How? Why? What is happening? Also it says Congress enacted the treaty? But, no? That’s…that’s not how treaties work? I mean, Congress did ratify the treaty? But they didn’t unilaterally make it!

In the second case, there’s an extended discussion of which treaty applies to the appellants claims, which is bizarre because there are two relevant treaties, and one replaced the other before the conduct at issue, so only the new treaty applies? There isn’t any discussion of the issue beyond that basic principle, so there is no reason there should be multiple paragraphs in the opinion explaining it over and over? Also, it keeps referring to the appellant as the plaintiff, for some reason? And it includes this absolutely hallucinatory sentence:

…the only part this that makes sense is that the argument is without merit. I’m not going to discuss the actual merits of the legal arguments in the opinion, because they are so bizarre and disjointed that even trying to describe them would require a Pepe Silvia-sized conspiracy board. Like the previous case, both the facts and the legal posture of the case change constantly, with seemingly no rhyme or reason.

The third one…oh boy. First, large portions of the “opinion” are individual paragraphs with quotations around the whole paragraph. What’s happening there? As far as the content of the opinion itself - I can’t. I mean that, I literally can’t. What is being discussed seems to change from paragraph to paragraph, much of it contradicting. It makes the first case seem linear and rational by comparison. The court finds it doesn’t have personal jurisdiction over the defendant so dismisses the case based on a lack of subject matter jurisdiction? But also the defendant hasn’t contested jurisdiction? And also the court does hold that it has both subject matter and personal jurisdiction over the defendant? And then it denies the motion to dismiss the case? Also, at one point it cites itself?

…also, even if this was a real case, it doesn’t stand for the propositions the plaintiff cited it for in their opposition? I’m not going to go into the weeds (honestly it’s so hallucinatory I’m not sure I could if I tried), but, for example, the plaintiff’s reply brief states that the court held “that the plaintiff was not required to bring their claim in federal court.” The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is a federal court, and there is no discussion of any filings in state courts. The closest the “opinion” comes is with the statement, “Therefore, Petersen’s argument that the state courts of Washington have concurrent jurisdiction is unavailing.” (This statement appears to be completely disconnected from anything before or after it, so I am unsure what it is supposed to mean.)

Moving on, case number four is allegedly a decision by the Court of Appeals of Texas. It includes the following line:

Honestly, the plaintiff’s attorney best defense at this point is that he wasn’t intentionally trying to mislead the court, because if he was doing this on purpose, he would have edited the cases to make them slightly more believable. (Context in case you’ve lost track: these documents are supposed to be copies of the opinions he is citing. The screenshoted line makes it clear that what he is actually citing is, at best, someone else’s summary of an "opinion". It would be like if a teacher asked a student to photocopy a chapter of a book and bring it into class, and instead the student brought in a copy of the cliffs notes summary of that chapter. Except that the book doesn’t even exist.)

The actual contents of the “opinion” are, as is now standard, absolutely bonkers. First, the court decides that it doesn’t have personal jurisdiction over Delta because “Delta did not purposefully avail itself of the benefits of conducting business in Texas.” This was despite the fact that the factual background already included that the appellant (sorry, the plaintiff, according to the “opinion”) flew on a Delta flight originating in Texas. Like, this is just wrong? It’s not even hallucinatory nonsense, it’s just facially incorrect legal analysis. Then the court starts discussing the treaty’s time bar, for some reason? Then it goes back to talking about personal jurisdiction, but now the trial court denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, and the appellate court agrees with the trial court that it does have personal jurisdiction, even though this is the plaintiff’s appeal from the dismissal for lack of personal jurisdiction and the court already ruled it didn’t have personal jurisdiction? And even though on page 1, the plaintiff was injured during a flight from Texas to California, now on page 7 she was injured on a flight from Shanghai to Texas? Also the trial court has gone back in time (again) to grant the motion to dismiss that it previously denied?

Also, I’ve been trying to avoid pointing out the wonky text of these submissions, but:

Everything ok there?

Case number five is similar enough to number four that it’s not worth repeating myself.

Thank god, cases six and eight, as noted above, are real cases, so I’m going to skip them. The defendant alleges that the cases do not stand for the propositions the plaintiff cited them for, and I’m going to assume that is true, given the rest of this nonsense.

Case number seven looks legitimate on the surface. But neither the defendant nor I could find the case through any legitimate search mechanisms. The defendant looked up the purported docket numbers on PACER and found completely different cases; I was able to find a case with the name “Miller v. United Airlines, Inc.,” but it was for a different Ms. Miller, it was a California state case (not a Second Circuit federal case), it was decided on a different year, and the substance of the case was entirely different from the alleged opinion filed with the court.

On top of that, this might be the most morally reprehensible fake citation of them all? Because it is about the crash of United Airlines Flight 585, a real plane crash. Everyone on board - 25 people in total - was killed.

The individual cited in this fake court case was not one of them.

I cannot imagine conducting myself in such a way where I would have to explain to a judge that I made up a fake case exploiting a real tragedy because I couldn’t be bothered to do actual legal research.

Now, I know you all have figured out what’s going on by now. And I want you to know that if your instincts are saying, “it seems like the lawyer should have just fallen on his sword and confessed that he relied on ChatGPT to write his original brief, rather than digging himself further into this hole”? Your instincts are absolutely correct.

Because obviously, the court was having none of this b.s. On May 4th, the court issued an order, beginning with the following sentence:

That is one of the worst possible opening sentences you can see in an order by the court in a situation like this. The only thing worse is when judges start quoting classic literature. If I was Mr. Peter LoDuca, counsel for the plaintiff, I would already be shitting my pants.

“I gave you an opportunity to either clear things up or come clean. Now I’m going to give you an opportunity to show why I should only come down on you like a pile of brinks, instead of a whole building.”

We are getting dangerously close to “quoting classic lit” territory here.

If I learned that the judge in my case called up the clerk of a circuit court just to confirm how full of shit I was, I would leave the legal profession forever. Also, the judge is now also putting quotes around “opinion.” When judges start getting openly sarcastic in their briefs, that means very very bad things are about to happen to someone.

So I’m guessing the delay between this filing and the court order was because the judge’s clerk was tasked with running down every single one of the additional fake citations included in the "opinions", just to make this sure this order (and the upcoming pile of bricks) are as thorough as possible.

If you are following along with Dracula Daily, the vibe here is roughly the same as the May 19th entry where Dracula demands Jonathan Harker write and pre-date letters stating he has left the castle and is on the way home.

Also, hey, what’s that footnote?

Wait, what?

Folks, it appears we may have notary fraud, on top of everything else! Anybody have bingo?

So on May 25, one day before the deadline, Mr. LoDuca filed his response. And oh boy, I hope ya’ll are ready for this.

Hey, what’s the name of that other attorney, “Steven Schwartz”? Where have I seen that name before…

...I ran out of room for images on this post. So I'm going to have to leave this as an accidental cliffhanger. Part 2 to follow once I refresh my tea.

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wiypt-writes · 4 years ago

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Guilty As Charged

Guilty As Charged: Bucky Barnes One Shot

Summary: Defence Attorney James ‘Bucky’ Barnes is the absolute bane of your life…

Pairing: Lawyer AU Bucky Barnes x Reader (Frenemies!)

Warnings: Bad language words.

Word Count- Under 2k

A/N: This was originally posted on my old blog ages ago, but I’ve just given it a little polish and thought, seeing as I’m on the Bucky Train at the moment, I’d bring it back. Also, my knowledge on US Criminal Law is sketchy at best, so humour me…

Disclaimer: This is a pure work of fiction and classified as 18+. Please respect this and do not read if you are underage. I do not own any characters in this bar reader and any other OCs that may or may not be mentioned. By reading beyond this point you understand and accept the terms of this disclaimer.

Bucky Barnes Masterlist // Main Masterlist

*******

In God We Trust, the words set about the Judge’s podium were fixed in your vision, motes of dust moving freely in the rays of sunlight which were streaming through the large, ornate windows of the court room and you took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, concentrating on expelling the nerves you were feeling with the air that left your mouth and lungs.

No matter how many times you were in this position, the reading of the verdict still got to you. Your gaze turned to the jury, as the judge did the same, that all important question ringing across the room, the air stiflingly tense.

“On the charge of murder in the first degree, do you find the defendant or not guilty"

“Not guilty.”

Fuck.

Cheers from the defendants family drowned out your loud groan as you rubbed at your temple. Looking over at your colleague, Sam, you shook your head in utter disbelief.

The judge continued through the remaining charges, second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter, and your despair grew as the same verdict was returned for each.

You’d lost. And it stung, not merely because of your near perfect conviction rate, but for the family of the victim you were one-hundred percent convinced the accused.

"Y/N this wasn't your fault.” Sam stated in a low voice but you simply sighed again and shrugged.

"I was sure they'd see through his lies,” you glanced over to your right where the defence team, headed up by James Buchanan Barnes of Barnes and Rogers Law firm were shaking hand with each other and their defendant. Barnes' face was arranged in the usual smug look that you always had the urge to slap right off it. His partner, Steve, glanced over at you and gave you a genuine, sympathetic smile.

He’s always the most courteous out of the two, the one you actually didn’t mind dealing with when it came to cases.

"He fucking did it Y/N," Sam's voice was almost a growl, "I know he did."

"Well in the eyes of the law he didn’t." You stated, standing up.

The commotion continued behind you, as the defendant was told he was free to go. Making sure to keep your head down, you hastily shuffled your papers back into their respective files and packed your briefcase up. Picking up your jacket, you shrugged it on, smoothing down pencil skirt before you head to leave the courtroom before Barnes can pipe up with his usual smart ass quips. But you're not quite fast enough. "Commiserations Miss Y/LN, can't win em all." The familiar Brooklyn drawl hit your ears.

"Buck," Steve sighed "c'mon pal..."

You grit your teeth. You know you shouldn't rise to it, but you just can’t help it. The man is an utter jack ass in the courtroom. Spinning to face him, you shot him your best contemptuous glare, the one you always reserve for those people you really cannot stand, and looked at him like he was something you'd just trodden in.

"You know Barnes, there is such a thing as being gracious in victory as well as defeat." "Defeat?” He asked, looking at Steve with a puzzled expression on his face, “no, not sure what that is." "Eat shit.” You mumbled before turning to Sam who was stood behind you, watching the exchange. You nod to him and the two of you continued up the aisle towards the exit. The victim's family were congregated outside and all at once the start barraging you with questions.

"How did that happen?"

"You said it was a cert he would go down!”

"What about a private prosecution?”

You sighed and turn to look at them, you were exhausted. "I'm sorry.” You shook your head. “That new evidence that his attorney submitted, it was just threw too much of a doubt into the juries mind..." you held your hand up to gently silence them. “If you're serious about a private prosecution then I can meet you next week to discuss and put you in touch with a few people but I’m sorry, as far as the State’s involvement goes…I can’t do anymore."

Escaping as quickly as you could, you and Sam headed back to your office. After a short meeting with your boss, the District Attorney, who was as pissed as you were that the prosecution had failed, you emerged feeling twice as tired and battered as you had when you’d left the courtroom.

As Sam stated, there was only one thing left you could do. Drink alcohol. A lot of alcohol.

It was a short walk to your preferred bar, having decided to abandon your car and collect it in the morning. You were going to get drunk. Really drunk. "Hey Y/N, hey Sam." Clint, the bar tender greeted you. “I hear it wasn't a great day.” You looked up and saw he was pointing to the TV behind the bar. It was on a news channel, focussing on a report from earlier that afternoon which wasn’t surprising. The case had thrown up huge public interest ever since the body of the teenage girl has been found in the alleyway in Queens. The defendant confessed but somehow, the new evidence submitted was an alleged recording that the defence had gotten their hands on as proof the confession was taken under duress. If you were being totally honest, you had to admit that it didn't sound great, the officer did seem to be leaning heavily on the defendant, but the other evidence was, no, IS overwhelming.

But all it needed was that little seed of doubt, which the defence sowed expertly, and the jury couldn't convict. And now, thanks to Barnes and Rogers, specifically Barnes, in your mind a dangerous killer was walking free. As you stared at the television, you saw Barnes on the screen with the defendant, all smiles and Steve at his side. Barnes greeted the press with a raised hand. "Clint turn it over man." Sam almost pleaded and Clint shot you both a sympathetic look, before he pointed the remote at and flicked the report over to a mundane, late afternoon game show. You ordered 2 beers, and then settled at the bar on one of the tall chairs, crossing your bare, heeled legs as you and Sam began to dissect the case. You couldn’t help it, you always did this, analyse where you went wrong or right.

The pair of you got that enthralled in your discussions, that before you know it, it was an hour lager and you're now four beers deep... and Sam was fielding an angry phone call from his wife, Natasha. "I gotta go, boss." He sighed, apologetically, “it’s my little girl’s dance recital at six and if I miss this one, Nat’s gonna hang me out to dry!” You waved his explanation off. “Its fine, Sam. Oh, and take the morning tomorrow. That case has had us working all hours and I don’t intend on being there till lunch. Clint, gimme a bourbon please?" "Don't let Barnes get to you.” Sam sighed. “You know what he is like" "Smug, arrogant and annoyingly self-righteous.” You nodded. “Yup, I got it.” Sam smiled and dropped a friendly kiss to your cheek. "See you later." Clint slid the glass of bourbon over to you and you smiled before pulling out your phone to check a few emails and your social media. You were just reading through an article about a Billionaire in Manhattan who had designed some kind of metal suit that allowed him to fly (because that's gonna end well), when a familiar voice broke your concentration. "Can I buy you a drink?" You rolled your eyes and looked up at Bucky Barnes as he leaned on the bar, still in his suit, although he had dispensed of his black and white tie, and opened his top button. This was another thing you hated about him. He is utterly gorgeous. Like GQ cover gorgeous, especially in his sharp suits and silk ties.

And he fucking knows it, too. "Depends." You shrugged, throwing back the remainder of your bourbon. "Does it come with a side helping of irritating smugness?" He chuckled. "I'm off duty, Doll so no."

"In that case I'll have another Monkey Shoulder." You slid the empty glass back to Clint. "Take it you're not driving home?" Barnes asked, his azure eyes running over your bare legs. "Well if I do and I get caught, I'm sure you can get me off any charges.” You replied sharply, shooting him a look that made it clear you caught him eyeing you up. And it isn't the first time either. That's another reason you clash so much in the courtroom. Sexual tension. Fucking jerk. He barked out a laugh "You're really not happy with me are you?" "Not particularly." You shook your head, thanking Clint as he pushed the now full glass back to you, with a small wink. It's a double, you noticed. That should set Barnes back a bit. Bucky reached for his beer and after a pull he looked directly at you. "Come work for me." He said and you groaned.

Not this again. "I'm a prosecutor." You rolled your eyes. "Not a defence attorney. I told you that last time you asked. And the time before, and the time before that." "I'm nothing if not persistent." He winked, turning in his stool so he was facing you. "Besides, I can teach you the ways of the dark side." "You’d love that wouldn't you?" You snort. "Oh, Sweetheart you have no idea." He leaned forward slightly, his elbow on the bar and this time he is blatantly staring at the flash of skin that was showing above the buttons on your blouse. "My face is up here, ass hole." With a smirk he raised his deep, blue eyes and they locked onto yours. Despite yourself, you feel your breath hitch slightly. Dammed him and his sex appeal. "Why are you always this insufferable?" You eventually tore your gaze away from his and picked up your drink, glancing up at the TV as an excuse not to look at him. "Ah come on Y/N, don’t be like that." He reached out to squeeze your hand which was resting on the back of the tall chair you were sat in. "We could make a great team..." You raised an eyebrow and looked at him. "Professionally.” He added, his eyes not leaving yours as he took another large drink of his beer, and you pulled your hand away from under his. "I'd kill you within five minutes of us being in the same office." You glared at him as you took another sip from your drink. He chuckled and eyed you again, “to be fair I'm not sure Stevie would be able to function with a beautiful dame such as yourself in close proximity. He still flusters around any woman that isn’t his Peggy.” "That's because Steve is a happily married man." "So am I." He shot back. Ah yes, Mrs Barnes… "Your wife deserves a medal. She must have the patience of a fucking saint to put up with you." You said into your glass. "I have other hidden qualities which mean she's prepared to overlook my slightly less favourable personality traits." He quipped, and you looked back to see that lopsided grin on his face that flips your stomach. Behave Y/N. "They must be very hidden." You mused, and he let out another loud laugh. "You're killing me, Doll.” "Good." You drained your glass. The liquid burnt your throat and you could feel the effects of the alcohol from the last few hours as your brain started to hum. You looked at Barnes who was watching you, his eyes shining with all the cheekiness of a teenage boy and you know you need to leave before you do something stupid.

Like snogging his dumb, handsome face off. "I think it's time I got going." You said simply, standing up. Barnes gave a nod, draining his bottle. “Yeah I should be making tracks too. Wife to see to, you know how it is.” You stood and he did the same, and you realised he was holding up your jacket, ready for you to slide your arms into. Narrowing your eyes slightly at his sudden chivalry, you couldn’t help the small smile that flickered across your face as you turned and allowed him to help you into it. His hands dropped to your shoulders and he span you round gently and smiled with those perfect teeth, a smile that lit up his beautiful face, his eyes crinkling in the corners. "Lead the way Mrs Barnes.” He instructed softly, dropping a tender kiss to your lips. "You know it's a good job I love you,” you smiled, sliding your arms up round his neck. "Yeah, I know." "Although right now I'm struggling to remember why." "Well, when we get home I'll just have to show you some of those hidden qualities I was talking about, see if they help jog your memory.” You bit your lip slightly at the dark flash of desire that flit across his eyes, and you leant up to brush your lips across his stubbled jawline. "Unanimous verdict,” your voice drops slightly as you pull back and he smirked again, “guilty as charged.” You tossed Clint a good bye, linked your hand into your husband’s and he walked you outside into the brisk wind, his arm pulling you close, his lips pressed a soft kiss to your temple. Yeah, James Buchanan Barnes might be an insufferable, arrogant ass hole in the courtroom, but outside it he's simply your Bucky.

#bucky barnes #buck barnes fic #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #lawyer au

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ravennm84 · 4 years ago

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Don’t Mess with my Friends, Don’t Mess with my Family

TRIGGER WARNING: This story contains physical, verbal, emotional abuse and talk of rape; please be aware before proceeding. And know that if you are a victim and need help, don’t give up, there are people out there who can and want to help you.

This is a story told from Lila’s point of view, about how down hill her life has gone because of the choices she’s made. Lots of Lila salt to come!! Warm-Fuzzies and please enjoy!!

Life had not been kind to Lila Rossi for many years now. It had all fallen apart during lycee, starting when she had pushed that bitch, Marinette Dupain-Cheng, down the stairs. It had been the first day at their new school and she hadn’t noticed the hall monitor, the teacher, or the security cameras. They had caught video and audio of Lila threatening the girl before giving her a hard push down the stairs. Before she could even say a single thing in her defense, the teacher had grabbed her by the arm and marched her down to the principal’s office to wait for her mother. No matter how many times she tried to lie, the witnesses and video proved that she was the one who hurt Maribrat.

Lila had been suspended for three weeks and later expelled at her hearing after evidence of her harassing the same girl during college had surfaced during the investigation by the Board of Governors. Lila’s mother, had been absolutely furious and had been struggling to find another lycee that would accept her daughter; but the assault, bullying, and forgery of her signature and multiple doctors’ notes were now on her permanent record, making it a struggle.

The next incident occurred two weeks after her expulsion, Hawkmoth had been defeated and unmasked as Gabriel Agreste. That meant no more akumas for her to try and destroy Marinette or Ladybug, no more being a Gabriel model, and no way to force Adrien into being her boyfriend. She had lost her ride to the top.

In fact, with his father out of his life, Adrien seemed to have grown a spine and did a tell-all on TVi News a few days later. He admitted how his father seemed to change after his mother “disappeared”, how he tried to do anything and everything to please him, but it was never enough. He talked about the long hours on photoshoots, which were against child labor laws, and the way his diet had been strictly monitored. How he’d considered it a large victory to finally go to school, but that freedom was constantly under threat by his father if anything went wrong.

Then he went into the first time something did go “wrong”, when he had borrowed his father’s book to look over it, only for it to be stolen.

“You say ‘stolen’, do you know who did that?” Nadja Chamack asked him.

“Yes, I do. Her name is Lila Rossi and she has been the bane of my existence since the day I met her.”

Lila was speechless as she and her mother watched the news. She wanted to hide in her room but her mother kept her in her seat as they continued to watch Adrien vent his grievances about her.

“She stole the book from me and threw it away after she got what she wanted out of it. If my friend, Marinette, hadn’t seen her take the book in the library and then throw it in the trash, it might have ended up in a landfill somewhere. She then claimed to be the holder of the fox miraculous and Ladybug’s best friend. Only Ladybug, herself, showed up a couple minutes later because she had seen Lila’s fake interview on the Ladyblog. She told her to stop lying since it was dangerous and she hated liars. I can’t even be mad at Ladybug for calling her out, since she was right.

“After that, Lila practically became a stalker. She followed me everywhere, lied to people about how close we were, lied about one of my best friends, Marinette, to isolate her since she knew Lila was a liar, lied her way into my house and got Nathalie and my bodyguard in trouble, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. She started working with Gabriel to keep an eye on me.” Adrien practically spat his father’s name, looking absolutely hurt and disgusted as he continued on. “He made me start working with her while she kept trying to isolate me from my friends, telling him who the ‘bad influences’ were in my life, and telling everyone that we were in a relationship. I couldn’t even contradict her because she threatened me!”

“How did she threaten you?” Nadja asked, her voice full of concern when she saw Adrien shaking.

“Told me that if I didn’t do everything she said and agreed with her when she lied, she would get me pulled out of school again. I didn’t realize how bad it could be, but then she started tou-touching me and kissing me without my permission. When I told her to stop, she’d grab my arm and dig her nails in until I bled, I’ve still got scars from all the times she grabbed me too hard.”

Lila really wanted to be anywhere else but sitting beside her angry mother at this point. Everything Adrien was saying maybe true, but there was no actual proof. Those scars could have been caused my anyone and she had never written down any agreement with-

“The only thing I could do was get proof of what she was doing, so one of the times when Lila was forcing herself on me, I had a camera going in my dressing room. I even made sure to have the manager put up signs that the area was under video surveillance so it would stand up as evidence in court.”

Well, shit.

“With your permission, Adrien, may I play the recording.” Nadja asked him, her voice gentle and reassuring. Taking a breath, Adrien nodded while closing his eyes and covering his ears.

The recording showed Adrien getting his shoes on in his dressing room before standing quickly and backing away when the door opened. “What are you doing in here, Lila? I’m trying to get dressed.”

“I don’t mind, there’s nothing wrong with a girlfriend seeing a little more of her boyfriend,” Lila purred as she stepped into the frame.

Adrien took a step back. “We’re not dating, and I’m not comfortable with you being here. Now get out.”

Lila gulped, remembering this day. It hadn’t struck her as strange at the time why Adrien seemed to be talking back to her more than normal, and she had taken her anger out on him. Now it all made perfect sense…

The video showed Lila stomping over with a cruel grimace on her face before she roughly pushed him against the wall. She then proceeded to dig her nails into the soft parts of his arms. “I think you’ve come to the delusional conclusion that you actually have a choice in the matter, Adrien~,” her voice continued to purr, but the angle of the video showed a threatening gleam to her eyes. “Unless you do what I say, you can kiss everything good in your life goodbye. You’ll go back to being homeschooled; your little friend, Marinette will be expelled again and it will stick this time, I’ll even tell everyone that you tried to rape me and people will believe it because I’m a girl.”

Lila dug her nails in harder, causing Adrien to whimper before she leaned in to give him, what the audience saw as a forceful, sloppy kiss.

“Hurry up now, we don’t want to keep the photographer waiting.” Lila said in a sing-song voice before skipping out of the room.

Adrien took a few breaths before looking at the camera and stepping closer. Pulling up the sleeves of his shirt, the video clearly caught the nail marks that were already bleeding and forming bruises before the video stopped and returned to Adrien and Nadja. “That is only one of multiple incidences where Lila hurt or forced herself on me. I tried talking to my fa- to Gabriel about what she was doing, but he only told me that Lila would be a ‘good match’ for me and that I should consider dating her. Now that he’s out of my life, I want everyone to know the kind of people both of them are. I refuse to let Lila Rossi have any more power over me. I’ve already filed police reports and a restraining order, given them the video recordings, and sworn statements. Even if it feels like I’m running away from my problems by doing this, I never want to see either of them ever again!”

The rest of the interview became background noise as Mrs. Rossi began screaming at her daughter for doing such despicable things, but was interrupted when the police came knocking on their door a few minutes later. Her mother ordered the police to get Lila out of her sight and that she would be waving whatever diplomatic immunity she may have.

That was eight years ago. Since that night; Lila had stood trial for her crimes against Marinette and Adrien, was found guilty, and had been deported back to Italy where she served seven years of a 10 year jail sentence. Now that she was out, all she could think of was the same thing that had been on her mind since that night, destroying Marinette Dupain-Cheng and Adrien Agreste. First thing she did was look them up on the internet at the library, since she didn’t have a job, laptop, or smartphone anymore.

Adrien was reported to be living a quiet life at an undisclosed location in France. He’d quit modelling, sold off his father’s company, and had graduated from a private lycee with his close friend, Marinette. Lila tried contacting her followers from college to discern his exact location, but many had changed their numbers. Those who hadn’t, hung up the moment they figured out she was calling and then blocked her number. Deciding to save finding Adrien for another day, Lila decided to focus on Marinette. That bitch was a lot easier to trace; and the more she read, the angrier she got.

Marinette had become well known as a designer; becoming the go-to girl for musicians, movie stars, and the powerful elite. There were multiple articles on her clothes, how they were always praised and seen as the new wave of fashion. She had won countless awards and had founded her own fashion house two years earlier! Lila recognized one of the models as that quiet, goth freak, Juleka. That girl had been named the top female model three years in a row! Lila quickly decided that she would take the time to ruin that girl’s life as well, once she was done with Maribrat.

More research showed that Marinette also did charity work; including multiple high end donations, school sponsorships, and there was even a video clip of her standing with Rose and Prince Ali doing a ribbon cutting at a children’s hospital in Achu. The look of pure happiness on both of the women’s faces made Lila’s teeth grit so hard they almost cracked.

But the worst, the absolute worst thing she read was an article in which Marinette talked about balancing her career and family life. The bitch hadn’t married Adrien, it was a small comfort, but not much. Instead, she had married Luka Couffaine, Juleka’s older brother. He’d made a name for himself as an international rockstar, only rivaled by his father, Jagged Stone. Reading his list of popular songs, Lila’s anger swelled when she realized that she’d heard more than a few of those songs over the radio in prison. The two had a blissfully happy marriage, no scandals or anything that Lila could use against them. They even had a child! A little girl named Melody that looked to be three years old.

Lila had never hated Marinette Dupain-Cheng… Marinette Couffaine, more in her entire life! The bitch had the life that should have been Lila’s; rich, famous, respected, and with a handsome/rich husband. Even her brat daughter looked cute. SHE HATED IT!

She was five seconds away from screaming and punching out the computer screen when she saw the most recent article. Marinette and her family were coming to Milan, Italy next week for Fashion Week. She was going to be showing her autumn and winter lines and was scheduled to be one of the biggest shows of Fashion Week.

A cruel smile stretched across her lips as her mind was already forming a plan, but things would be different this time. She wasn’t going to stop with just hurting Marinette or ruining her reputation. No, this time, nothing would satisfy Lila other than that bitch’s life.

~oOo~

In the days leading up to Fashion Week, Lila had made her way to Milan and staked out the airport to wait for her prey to arrive. She watched the arrival of every limo that came, day and night, until the family arrived. When she saw them, she sneered at how sickly-sweet they appeared. Luka held his guitar case in one hand, Marinette held her purse on her opposite hand, and their daughter was giggling between them, holding both of their hands and wearing a small Ladybug backpack. The little girl giggled as her parents swung her into the air by her hands and they smiled down at her in adoration.

Lila easily followed them to their hotel, stacking it out as she learned their routine. Within three days, she saw how the three of them would have breakfast together every morning before Marinette would walk to the venue where her show would be held a couple blocks away, while Luka stayed with their daughter. Luka and Melody would go to the venue later in the day to pick her up, and then they would walk back to the hotel together. Deciding to make her move on the fourth day, Lila stole a decent sized kitchen knife from a restaurant and waited half way down the second block during the morning.

Sure enough, Marinette came strolling down the sidewalk, seemingly without a care in the world. However, there was a slight difference today, her daughter was holding Marinette’s hand as she sang one of her daddy’s songs. Lila barely pondered for a second if she should hold off on killing Marinette until the little girl wasn’t around, but immediately disregarded the thought. If nothing else, she could kidnap the girl while leaving the bitch with just enough life to hear her daughter screaming for mommy. That would be even better!

So, brandishing her knife, Lila jumped away from the the building she’d been leaning against to kill her hated enemy and get revenge for ruining everyt-

The next thing Lila knew, was waking up to an EKG machine beeping to her right, her left arm handcuffed to the bed, and her entire body hurt. Her right arm and right leg were both in casts and she could feel a large bandage on her head. She would find out later, when speaking to her court appointed attorney, exactly what had happened to her. And it wasn’t because he told her, oh no, it had all been caught on another damn surveillance camera.

Lila had jumped from her spot with the knife, only for Marinette to push her daughter behind her, grab Lila’s wrist on the third swipe, and break her elbow over her knee to force her to drop the knife. When Lila had continued to attack her; Marinette had kicked her in the side of the knee, dislocating her kneecap, and then punched her in the face so hard that she’d flown backwards and was knocked unconscious when her head hit the street. There were also dozens of witnesses to the attack, all claiming that Lila had a mad look in her eyes and that Marinette had been fighting like a mama bear protecting her cub.

The lawyer then told her that he would defend her to the best of his ability, but that her case didn’t look good. She had violated her parole, violated the restraining order, and was being charged with stalking and two counts of first-degree attempted murder.

Days later, while still handcuffed to her bed in the hospital, nearly every news channel was showing Fashion Week. And who had the biggest show with the most coverage? Maribrat, that’s who! The critics couldn’t get enough of her fashion lines or the recent attack on her and her daughter.

To Lila’s never ending frustration, Marinette stayed calm and demure the entire time as her daughter cuddled her side and Luka kept a supportive arm around her shoulder. “I’ll admit, the attack happened so fast, all I could do was react. I just kept thinking that this person had a weapon and might hurt my baby, so I attacked and didn’t stop until she was down. It wasn’t until she was unconscious that I recognized her as Lila Rossi, a girl from my past that had done a lot to try and hurt me and my friends. Last I knew, she was in jail and I had a restraining order filed against her. This time, I have a team of lawyers at my disposal and I’m going to make sure that she’ll never be able to even try to hurt my family or me ever again.”

Just like that, sales for Marinette’s brand skyrocketed, with critics describing her as a strong woman designing clothes to empower people around the world.

Lila lost her case, the lawyer had attepmted to argue that it was never her intention to hurt the child, but no one believed it. She was forced to finish her previous sentence, and had a life sentence added on top of that. And because she had broken her parole to stalk and try to kill Marinette Couffaine, she was denied the possibility of parole ever again.

Taglist:

@animegirlweeb @iamablinkmarvelarmy

@karokatten @abrx2002

@delightfulcookiesrecipespizza @unmaskedagain

@insomniac-nerd-posts-things

#marinette dupain cheng #luka couffaine #lukanette #marinette x luka #adrien agreste #lila salt #lila karma #lila gets exposed #self defense

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thecollectter · 10 months ago

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Ooooh yesss. Such as I love Danny bringing the Chaos that is his life to Gotham, I love the idea of Tim having vague memories of a brother he shouldn't have and finally finding proof of said Brother. Danny on the other hand? I doubt he remembers that the Fentons aren't his Parents. So he'd never even go looking for a lost Brother. Besides he's to busy keeping a lid on Amity parks Chaos to go anywhere else.

So Tim finds Evidence of him actually having a brother who either was given up for adoption by parents who only "needed one child" or mysterious vanished(wow clockwork) and the parents covered up the fact they ever had a second child because the media attention would be "bad" for that.

If it's the first, Tim simply tracks Danny's adoption records to Madeline and Jack Fenton. The couple drops off the map shortly after the adoption(moved to amity) but with some dedicated research he'd find their college research and such, learn their belief in ghosts, and more research would lead to a town called amity Park that's rumored to be very haunted. But he can't find it on the map(suspicious) but he does know it's general location of where it's SUPPOSED to be so he takes it upon himself to find the missing town that may or may not house his missing brother.

OR for the route of Danny vanished via Clockworks intervention, clockwork would totally leave a hint for Tim to follow. I'd bet a simple article about a purple-backed gorilla would be interesting to him. This way, he doesn't know anything about Ghosts, just a town called amity Park that's he can't find anywhere else, where someone that looks exactly like him lives. So he goes in not having an inkling about Ghosts at all. Just that "This town exists but I can't find anything about it so SOMETHING suspicious must be happening. Any my brother might be involved." Cue him running off on his own to find his brother and this town that supposedly exists somewhere in Illonois near and Elmertom city.

Mind you, he's not going to tell anyone about this until he FINDS said brother. Or he'd leave a message letting Bruce know his discoveries but only after he's already left to find Amity Park. Information that includes his missing brother, suspicious government coverups (cause how else would a town simply cease to exist?), crazy? Ghost hunting parents.(depending on the route taken). Or maybe he wouldn't leave anything. I could totally see both happening with tim.

And then of course the chaos of him FINDING amity and all the crazy things is that happen there. No idea how meeting Danny goes, but I'd bet you Danny would be SHOCKED to find that not only is he adopted, but he has a twin, his birth family is filthy rich, his twin was adopted but BRUCE WAYNE, and his twin is Red Robin, AND the Justice League hasn't been ignoring them for years. Mind. Blown. He may or may not take it well. Maybe ignore the whole family thing and deal with the Justice league side of things cause MAN, Danny would LOVE some help with these ghosts and the GIW agents who want him on a direction table. And maybe his parents but he elects to ignore that bit

Do with this what you will, I'm just brainstorming here. Probably won't actually write a story for this. I'd love to see what others build off of it though! Cool idea @hyperfixatinator

I have a DP x DC AU brainworm about Danny and Tim being long lost siblings (twins or otherwise).

Because both of them have faced evil future versions of themselves who've almost ended the world in some way through altering time. If Clockwork had been watching Danny's world-ending timelines, then who's to say he wouldn't keep tabs on Tim's as well?

Imagine that the brothers had to be temporarily separated at a young age to ensure a peaceful future. Danny had to be in Amity Park to gain his ghost powers and become the new Ghost King. Meanwhile, Tim had to stay in Gothem to become the new Robin, something he'd have been less likely to do if Danny stayed in his life.

However, their separation was only supposed to be temporary. What if both Dan and Future Tim were from futures where they never reunited as teens? Heck, what if both of them were from the SAME future?

The Nasty Burger explosion happened, Danny killed Vlad and absorbed his soul, and became Dan. Dan grew too powerful for the GIW to handle anymore, so the government tried reaching out to the Justice League. But oops! Future Tim already killed off and tore down that whole organization, meaning the world no longer had it's protectors to stop this new foe.

Though they were strangers, the future brothers unwittingly collaborated in sealing the world's fate.

Back to the present, the Observants wanted Clockwork to get rid of Danny and also Tim before that timeline came to pass. What they didn't understand was Clockwork's plan.

See, the Infinite Realms needed a new monarch to replace Pariah Dark, but not just anyone would do. In timelines outside of Dan's future, the U.S government would've started a war with the Infinite Realms anyway. One that would guarantee Earth's destruction and offset the balance of other realms near it.

The war is set to start in Amity Park, but the information blackout is preventing it's citizens from getting outside help. Mid-to-late teen Danny can't bring down the Anti Ecto Acts alone. He'd be struggling to keep the Realms beings from invading his home as it is. And the government's iron grip on the city makes it nearly impossible for news to get out to the masses.

Danny being the brother of a vigilante detective across the country is another story.

Batman's mentorship would give Tim the training needed to eventually track down his lost sibling. And through Red Robin's connections to the Justice League, Danny could get help overturning the Anti Ecto Acts while he keeps declarations of war at bay on his end. Danny and Tim's combined efforts could be what's keeping the world at peace instead of ending it.

Long story short: Clockwork kills two birds with one stone by uniting a pair of long lost brothers through the prevention of an interdimensional war.

#dc x dp #dpxdc #danny fenton #tim drake #danny and tim are brothers AU #I personally like the headcanon of Tim vaguely remembering Danny's presence in their early childhood before he just disappeared #and the Drake parents (out of grief or guilt) gaslit Tim into believing Danny never existed #They thought it was a white lie that would help him move past it #but it actually became an early contributer of his self-doubt growing up #Grieving the foggy memories of someone you're supposed to doubt the existence of #Never sharing this with anyone in fear of someone calling you crazy for it #(Fearing they might be right)#((That fear doubling after the Joker Jr. incident if we include that))#The need to gather and compile evidence supporting your thinking at a young age #because if the facts line up then that proves you know what you're talking about #Tim discovering he was right about his brother being real all along might not fix everything #but it'd probably be a relief at least #prev tags #tim is “smart” twin #who plans everything out and knows everything about anything #danny is the street smart twin #who flys by the seat of his pants and still manages to come out on top

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stillness-in-green · 3 years ago

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Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Part Three)

An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front

Introduction and Part One Part Two

PART THREE: Ethical Problems

Law Enforcement Conduct

The first thing that jumps out—the thing everyone talks about first and foremost about the raid—was Hawks’ murder of Twice. Murder is a controversial word in this context, I know, but I stand by it: regardless of his guilt or his intent, Bubaigawara Jin was a fleeing man who Hawks made a cold, rational decision to quite literally stab in the back. In that moment, Hawks appointed himself as an executioner of the state and murdered a man without due process—no trial, no judge, no nothing. It was an extrajudicial killing,[26] and while I know many people in the U.S. have gotten kind of jaded about that sort of thing, let me assure you that police brutality is still police brutality even when it’s being exercised against people who have committed crimes.

To illustrate this, allow me to share a few more excerpts from the Penal Code:

Assault and Cruelty by Specialized Public Employees: When a person performing or assisting in judicial, prosecutorial or police duties commits, in the performance of their duties, an act of assault or physical or mental cruelty upon the accused, suspect or any other person, imprisonment or imprisonment without work for not more than 7 years is imposed.

Abuse of Authority Causing Death or Injury by Specialized Public Employees: A person who commits a crime prescribed under the preceding Article and thereby causes the death or injury of another person is dealt with by the punishment for the crimes of injury or the punishment prescribed in the preceding Article, whichever is severer.

The punishments for Criminal Injury are imprisonment for not more than fifteen years or a fine of not more than 500,000 yen or, if the injury results in death, imprisonment for not less than three years. That’s really what Hawks ought to be looking at for Twice's murder, save that apparently heroes just aren't liable for this stuff, otherwise they'd be up against it all the time in the course of “fighting villains.” Certainly, Hawks doesn’t seem to have faced any repercussions thus far, beyond having to apologize in a press conference.

Now, again, many American readers of My Hero Academia are deeply embedded in a culture that normalizes police violence, and so there is a lot of callous handwaving about how Hawks did the right thing because Jin was a significant threat. In response to such dismissal, let me provide a few more numbers:

In the U.S. in 2019, law enforcement killed over a thousand people.

In the same year in Japan, law enforcement killed two. Two people.

In the U.S., a major factor in how police keep skating on these deaths is the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which is nominally intended to protect officers from frivolous lawsuits in cases where they’re ruled to be acting in “good faith,” a vague ruling which has made successful prosecution of police brutality and negligence all but impossible.

Japan, and I cannot stress this enough, does not have this doctrine. The significance of law enforcement taking a life is not so casually brushed aside in other places in the world, so please don’t try to tell me that Horikoshi was trying to get across the idea that Hawks did the right thing, easy as that. The critical depiction of heroes and Hero Society dehumanizing their enemies is all over the manga.

When the Tartarus guards discuss what the government is doing about Gigantomachia, one of them complains that the higher-ups can’t use missiles—missiles!—on him because he’s quote-unquote-human.[27] During their battle at Kamino, All Might tells All For One that this time, he’s going to put him in a prison cell—he characterizes his attempt to kill All For One six years ago as a mistake. Even in the spin-off manga, Vigilantes, designated police representative Tsukauchi[28] looks absolutely aghast at Endeavor’s willingness to use lethal force against Pop Step, an innocent-until-proven-guilty minor, even though, at that time, they have all the evidence in the world that she is actively engaged in setting off bombs in populated areas.

Most prominent is the series’ treatment of the High End Noumu. The heroes rationalize them as corpses, monsters, inhuman, all in order to kill them guilt-free,[29] and this rationalization spills over to Shigaraki during the War Arc, as the chasm of understanding between heroes and villains reaches its most stark. Yet, that same arc was proceeded by the reveal of the truth about Kurogiri, which had Tsukauchi directly acknowledge that they may have misunderstood the Noumu as the series dangled the possibility that Kurogiri possesses lingering awareness from Shirakumo Oboro. Earlier, we had Ending, a man who wanted Endeavor to kill him and thought Endeavor would do it specifically because Endeavor killed the High End, and this act set him decisively apart from the non-murdery heroic norm. Even into the War Arc itself, we were getting new information on the Noumu: to wit, we were shown incontrovertible proof—in the form of Woman’s internal monologue in Chapter 268—that the High End Noumu do think.

Even if we assume the government has relaxed its prohibitions about public servants assaulting people in the course of carrying out their duty, it does not follow that Hawks’ extrajudicial execution was totally fine. Heroes are not supposed to kill because police are not supposed to kill, and in Japan, it isn’t assumed that they will the moment they run into resistance.

And look, this is not to say that Japanese police never get away with police brutality. Obviously, the country has its own problems with the issue, typically involving racism and ethnocentrism. But the way that some people in the fandom just brush off Jin’s death does a disservice to the way the series frames Hawks’ actions and what that framing is communicating to a Japanese reader.

Also, even putting aside the matter of his death, openly taunting a mentally ill man about how easy it was to fool him definitely pings me as an act of mental cruelty, though of course there’s no one to sue Hawks over that one, seeing as he murdered the victim and only witness. (Chapter 264)

That all said, there are other issues with the heroes’ actions during the raid. One is called out right in the text: Midnight acknowledges that the use of chemical agents is illegal, but calls upon Momo to engineer knock-out drugs to use against Gigantomachia anyway. Is that an action Momo will face any repercussions for at all? And if not, what does it imply about the setting that she won’t?

Here’s another big one: what’s the legality of heroes using their quirks against civilians? Because that’s what the vast majority of the PLF are, civilians. Oh, they’re suspects, sure, but throughout the manga, “heroes” aren’t set up as people who just fight any and every tiny crime they come across. From the very first chapter, heroes are set up as a specific counter to “evildoers” designated as “villains”—legally defined as people who use their quirks illegally two or more times.[30]

There is a very illuminating scene in the second chapter of Vigilantes in which Aizawa confronts Knuckleduster for his assault of a random businessman and, the moment he realizes Knuckleduster is quirkless, apologizes for the misunderstanding and walks away. If Knuckleduster doesn’t have a quirk, Knuckleduster by definition cannot be a villain, and thus, Aizawa is not authorized to throw down with him.[31] It’s somewhat unclear, not least because a lot of the evidence is in the more-interested-in-systemic-worldbuilding Vigilantes, but there is reason to believe that heroes are not allowed to use their quirks against people who are committing mundane crimes.[32] If anything, I should think that heroes only using their quirks on people who are using their quirks illegally is part of the philosophical scaffolding that gives heroes their moral authority—you see this argument from the first bearer of One For All, who loudly espouses that people not only should not use their quirks selfishly, but that quirks should only be used to help others. This kind of supposed selflessness is what MHA’s current society is built on.

To see the relevance here, consider Trumpet. Oh, he absolutely was using his quirk illegally, but can the system prove that?[33] After all, he only ever used it on allies—do you think they're in a big hurry to snitch on him? Do you think Mr. Compress is going to? And if the police can't prove Trumpet used his quirk illegally, then is he even a capital-V Villain? What about all those other rank and file types? Certainly we saw the ones at the villa fighting back with quirks, but what about those supporters at bases scattered around the country? Did they fight back, and if so, did they do it with quirks? If not, was it legal for them to be targeted by heroes?

More importantly, can they mount an argument on that, be it a legal or a moral one?

The Scope of the Operation

The next big ethical problem actually predates the raid itself, and it’s this: how did the Commission know where to target their raids? How did they obtain that information? Specifically, how many privacy violations were involved? It strains credulity well past my personal breaking point to imagine that Hawks and the Commission were able to get every name, every base of operations, especially given the limitations they were under—the fact that Hawks couldn’t communicate openly, the hard time limit before the PLF put their plan in motion, making sure they didn’t tip off someone in the massive secret organization that had people working in heroics, the government, the infrastructure, etc.—but let’s consider the sorts of avenues the HPSC did have available to them.

So to start with, they send in Hawks, who’s specifically trained to extract information from people without raising suspicion about his motives. Doubtlessly, he’s able to get all sorts of names,[34] starting with the higher-ups—not just Re-Destro and his inner circle, but also any of the advisors that e.g. run businesses that they invite him to patronize, MLA heroes, and so on. And with a decent crop of names in hand—let us assume for the sake of argument that Hawks had some way to communicate those names to his handlers—the HPSC can start doing background checks and digging in.

Where do these people come from? Where were they born, and, if they moved, where did they settle? Where do they work? What are their social pastimes? Trace the commonalities, look into publicly available records, use wiretaps…

Yes, the police in Japan can totally use wiretaps if they suspect organized criminal activity—it was one of the powers expanded significantly under that controversial 2017 law I footnoted earlier. One thing to note is that this does require a warrant, or at least the expectation that a judge will grant a warrant.[35] But how far does that go? Can they get a warrant for financial records? How about phone records? E-mail accounts?

Can they wiretap people for no reason save their association with a name Hawks provided? If a PLF member attends a Jazzercize class on Thursday mornings, does every member of that class start noticing a weird little reverb on their phone calls for a week? Does Re-Destro’s hometown have an influx of people poking around evaluating its potential as a place to live? If Slidin’ Go once snatched your dog out of traffic and you subsequently bought a Slidin’ Go keychain, are you and your family now under investigation?

Getting details on people like the CEO of Detnerat and the head of the Hearts & Minds Party is probably pretty straightforward; heck, investigating Kizuki Chitose’s publication history was probably a goldmine in and of itself. That sort of surveillance gets more complicated and difficult to justify—and to make credible to the reader—the further down the chain of command you go, though. Sooner or later, the HPSC would have had to make a call: knowing that they don’t have the time, freedom, and resources to perfectly get only and exactly everyone that’s a real threat, do they overcompensate or do they undercompensate?

You only have to look at Hero Society to know which answer they were going to go with.[36]

To be fair, undercompensating, while it clearly would have been easier on their strained resources, ran the risk of leaving threats out there to come back to bite them later. They likely thought that they’d done enough undercompensating for Shigaraki Tomura, compounded by the fact that apparently there hadn’t been enough done about Destro’s followers back in the day, either. I mean, better to grab everyone and then let the courts sort it out, right? Rather than risk innocents getting hurt?

Well, let’s talk about innocents. Innocents, and the costs of overcompensating.

Pictured: a man who was in daily close contact with the leader of the movement and who was at one point in time in possession of a copy of the movement's manifesto. (Chapter 218)

The problem with grabbing everyone in a group, even the most obviously PLF-aligned groups, is that there are always going to be both people who don’t seem to know anything because they’re very good at living double lives and aren’t particularly active on the recruitment front, and people who don’t seem to know anything because they legitimately don’t know anything.

The Gunga Villa is straightforward enough—on paper, it was probably reserved for a business retreat for four months, because you certainly wouldn’t want some random newlywed couple booked for a nice mountain honeymoon recognizing Shigaraki Tomura wandering around. Same story for the employees; the MLA wouldn’t have put the League up at the villa if there was a chance that anyone there would rat them out. So I think we can assume relatively fairly that anyone in the building the day of the conference is solidly implicated, whatever their claims might be otherwise.

Of course, plenty might well try to claim that they were just there for the vacation, or just started work last week and had no idea the place was a nest for conspiracy, but that was where Hawks spent most of his time, and most of the people at the villa presumably fought back against the heroes. It might be a complicated process, matching hero eyewitness testimony to every person there, but you can at least sort of see the path to it.

Other groups, however, are a lot less straightforward. Consider the following categories:

The Liberated Districts

As I discussed earlier, Deika was presumably a high watermark on societal saturation, but Deika still only counted 90% of the population as “Liberation Warriors, lying in wait.” That leaves 10% unaccounted for. So who are those 10%? Are they children?[37] Some children too young to know anything about the PLF, and some old enough to know but not yet old enough to be considered warriors for the cause? Are they instead elderly people, maybe remnants from when the MLA first started to infiltrate the town that have just never had enough close family or social life to get pulled into the Liberation Army by the usual vectors?

By far the worst option is if Trumpet’s 90% accounts for anyone even remotely connected to the MLA—that would mean one out of every ten people in Deika is legitimately completely ignorant of what the powers that be had brought in. How on earth are you supposed to tell those people apart from the other 90% when the heroes sweep in and arrest absolutely everyone? Or are we to believe that the HPSC had time to get in an agent to flash a covert L-sign at everyone in town and they only arrested people who visibly acknowledged it?

These problems only get worse for our hypothetical town that’s 70% PLF. That opens you up to far more people who have only recently started getting drawn in. Consider the disaffected twenty-something whose family has no idea what’s been keeping him out so late in the evenings. The young mother who met the nicest and most convincing people via the daycare, but whose husband is always out of town on business trips so she hasn’t had time to introduce him to anyone. The working parents who just joined up and whose kid, away at hero school, doesn’t know anything—yet.[38]

Evaluating these peoples’ social circles and financial history for other PLF attachments is going to turn up a ludicrous number of false positives unless the Commission can narrow down exactly when and where such people crossed paths with the ideology of Liberation. So many people would have been raised to it, people whose entire lives are suspect, but mistaking even one new recruit for a lifelong loyalist gives you exponentially more avenues to baselessly suspect people—and as established, the Commission just doesn’t have the time to be overly discerning.

Detnerat, Shoowaysha, and Feel Good Inc.

This is another line of attack that seems like it should be a bullseye, but is actually quite the opposite. Detnerat is a business that is run by the leader of the entire movement, yet the fact that not everyone who works there is a member of the MLA is one of the very first things we find out about them! Miyashita was something akin to a personal aide or secretary to Rikiya, someone Rikiya liked well enough that he was on the verge of introducing Miyashita to his other friends—and Miyashita didn’t know the first thing about his boss’s true affiliations. It’s patently obvious from that alone that not everyone at Detnerat is PLF, and it's likely that the numbers of the faithful are even thinner at Curious and Skeptic's outfits, where they're high-ranked executives but, crucially, not actually in charge.

This is, of course, complicated further by the fact that people who work at e.g. a publishing house are probably there because they agree with that publishing house’s politics, whether or not they know what’s going on behind the scenes. Ditto with Detnerat—certainly there would be people there who just needed a job and could charm their way through an interview without an inner passion for the work, but loads of people probably work there because they legitimately believe in the company’s ethos. So how do you tell people who have relatively radical personal politics without having any idea about the terrorism apart from the people who are absolutely PLF/ex-MLA but who are now lying about it because their organization's cover is blown and the response to that is, “Well, time to go back underground!”

The Hearts & Minds Party

Membership of this party would seem to be a good indicator, but using it that way too unquestioningly is also very flawed. This is because the HMP particularly is probably an excellent recruitment tool for the MLA/PLF. The note above about having radical political beliefs but still being ignorant about the planned acts of terror is especially true for the HMP. The Commission cannot just pull the voting records and arrest all of them because plenty of them are going to be totally ignorant of what was really going on with the heart of the party, only joining up because they believed in the kinds of things the HMP was platforming on—less repressive quirk use laws, prison reform, very possibly issues like the abolishment of the legal category “villain” or greater social safety nets. Just because someone votes for those things, doesn’t mean they know about or would support the MLA’s violent extremism or the PLF’s anarchic goals.

So at what level of initiation does the Commission call a cut-off? How long does someone have to have been voting straight-ticket HMP for them to be considered condemned by that association?

Over and over again, the question arises: how did the heroes and the police distinguish the initiated from the uninitiated? And given that Japan’s legal system at least nominally requires that guilt be proven, what are they going to do when huge numbers of those people claim innocence?

The Presupposition of Guilt

Let’s take a few minutes to circle back to what I talked about earlier, the presumption of guilt and how it relates to arrests, convictions, and the perception of arrestees in Japan. This is going to swerve hard back towards real-life Japan issues for a bit, but it is exceptionally relevant when examining what’s likely to happen to the people arrested in the raids, innocent and guilty alike, so thanks in advance for bearing with me.

In Japan, the rate of conviction is extraordinarily high—if you’re in anime fandom and active in social justice circles, you may have seen the tumblr posts about the country’s famed 99.9% conviction rate.[39] There are a range of explanations for this. Defenders argue that, compared to police in many other countries, police in Japan are very cautious and don't move to prosecute unless a case is all but airtight; thus, many who are arrested may well be released without charge if there is even the slightest doubt that the case will hold up in court. One can easily see truth to this by looking at the numbers on how many people are arrested in Japan versus how many are actually charged: Wikipedia notes (albeit without citation) that in the U.S., roughly 42% of arrests in felony cases result in prosecution, while in Japan the figure is only 17.5%.

Conversely, critics note that a major feature of convictions in Japan is the confession, and confessions can be coerced, particularly in the sorts of conditions that those imprisoned in pre-trial detention are kept—no legal representation, no contact with their families, loved ones or employers, no requirement that they be informed about what they’re being charged with, potential weeks upon weeks kept in isolation, sessions of questioning that can extend for most of the day.

There have also been cases in which confessions have been found to be falsified, for example by having the suspect sign a paper and then filling in or altering other details after the fact.

There are some other factors about confessions to be aware of here:

In Japan, it is not legally permissible for a suspect to be convicted solely based on their confession. The constitutional provision in this regard is something called himitsu no bakuro, the “revelation of secret.” The revelation of secret is something in the confession that is factually verifiable and which, at the time of the confession, only the suspect could have known. Common examples are things like the location of a previously undiscovered body or the time and location where a weapon used in the crime was purchased. The majority of verdicts that are overturned in Japan are overturned because of issues with a confession.

Sentencing is also very lenient compared to the U.S., particularly if the suspect was cooperative with police and admitted guilt (seen as showing remorse). Thus you wind up with a situation in which suspects believe that they’ll lose a case if they go to trial (because practically everyone does) and prosecutors—rather more aware of the weaknesses in a case than a confused and vulnerable layman—don’t want to bring a shaky case to trial, and thus both parties are invested in whatever will get the suspect out with a minimum of effort. The result of this is a high number of people released on “suspended prosecution,” which is an admission of guilt, but with a prosecutor's decision to show lenience while still establishing precedent for possible later offenses warranting more severe punishment. This is a particularly common result for first-time offenders, especially in non-violent crimes.

Note that suspended prosecution is not at all the same thing as being released for lack of evidence; a suspect is conceding their guilt by accepting the arrangement. However, many suspects who the police might not be confident in convicting are known to sign confessions and accept the arrangement regardless, because, along with fear for their livelihoods, it’s known that judges tend to view extended time in detention as a sign of guilt. Also too, if admitting guilt is seen as showing remorse, then maintaining one’s innocence is often perceived as a lack of remorse—leading to fears that fighting the charges will result not only in defeat, but also in harsher sentencing!

All of these factors combine into a problem with perception of guilt that feeds on itself endlessly at all levels. Let me use a run-on sentence to summarize: the general public views anyone who is even arrested as probably guilty, because the police are seen as generally only moving on those who are guilty, because police specifically only prosecute those who they can all but prove are guilty, but guilt can be “proven” by a sufficiently detailed confession, and while confessions are required to have some corroborating evidence, they can easily be falsified and may well be offered up with minimal resistance because the suspect is also convinced that judges will only be harsher on them if they put up a fight because suspects also believe that they will be convicted at trial because everyone knows the conviction rate is unbelievably high.

Japan likes to think of itself as a “safe” country, which is in large part why its deeply concerning arrest and detainment procedures have held up repeatedly in court. These things help keep people safe, after all, and who wouldn't want people to be safe?

Returning, then, to the matter of My Hero Academia and the Paranormal Liberation Front mass arrest, I don’t think it’s overstating things to claim that the dehumanization of villains and the glamorization of heroes has probably exacerbated these problems.

Cruel punishments are illegal under Article 36 of the Japanese constitution? But what if someone really, really deserves it, though? (Chapter 94)

You can see that willingness to shrug off civil rights violations as long as it means safety in the symbol All Might represents, a hero who is there to beat up baddies, not ask questions about why they're being bad. Ditto Tartarus, where the Bad People get put, regardless of whether their Bad really warrants so awful a punishment or whether the severity of such a punishment serves as an effective deterrent.[40]

As to the presupposition of guilt, if a hero thinks they saw someone Doing A Bad, and confidently testifies to that effect, who’s going to doubt them? It’s blunt to the point of headache-inducing that Midoriya Izuku, the boy who will be the greatest hero, who’s treated by the story as if he’s the first person in history to think about “saving” a “villain,” doesn’t even start to think about such a thing until he literally experiences a psychic impression of a five-year-old crying within the heart of Shigaraki Tomura.

At the press conference in Chapter 306, it’s illustrated numerous times that huge portions of society don’t particularly care about Dabi’s accusations. They don’t ask for Hawks to face justice for the murder he openly admits to committing; they don’t ask for apologies for the heroes’ wrongdoings. They ask for heroes to make them feel safe. Even if it means lying to them; even if it means asking Endeavor to go out there and “take down” his firstborn son. People are uneasy about the accusations, certainly, but what they want is not for heroes to take responsibility for their actions, to atone for them, but rather to deny that there’s any truth to the accusations at all.

This is not a society that, in the wake of Gigantomachia’s rampage, is going to be open to the possibility that some people caught up in the mass arrest are legitimately innocent and that everyone, even villains, deserves to be afforded the full extent of their rights.

The Dissolution of the HMP

Speaking of rights, let’s go over one that we can immediately see has been flagrantly violated in the manga compared to the state of real-life Japanese law—the overnight dissolution of the Hearts & Minds Party.

As discussed earlier, it's unlikely that every member is a dyed-in-the-wool terrorist. There are bound to be perfectly innocent people in the country who just so happen to agree with the HMP’s campaign platforms. Now, all of those people are going to turn on the evening news[41] and be blindsided with the news that their political party has just been dissolved and some enormous percentage of its membership arrested. This was not publicized or forewarned; it just happened, in a matter of hours. Do you think those people—people who are members of a party that specifically opposes the current status quo—are just going to nod and say, “Oh, wow, that sucks, but who am I to question the wisdom of the government and its agents? Time to find a new political party, I guess!” Would you?

I can assure you that you wouldn’t, because let me be clear: under current Japanese law, what we’re told happened to the HMP is unbelievably illegal—not only because they were dissolved at all, but particularly the speed with which that dissolution was carried out.

I mentioned earlier, in the section “Japan and Illegal Organizations,” that there were methods by which organizations can be dissolved. Now I’d like to look at that in more detail.

Any organization that’s been flagged as a potential threat—that “terroristic subversive activity” designation—can come under investigation from the Public Security Intelligence Agency. Their recommendations are then passed up for evaluation by a member of the Public Security Examination Commission,[42] who can pass a variety of prohibitions—the bans I mentioned earlier on printing activities, public assembly, and a few others. These prohibitions are issued in periods lasting up to six months, at which point they are re-evaluated and can be dismissed or renewed.

If the Public Security Examination Commission decides that the comparatively soft-pedal restrictions on freedom of the press or freedom of assembly are not sufficient to deter the organization in question from committing terroristic subversive activity continuously/repeatedly in the future, the Commission can elect to order the organization dissolved. This revokes their rights mentioned above entirely, and further stipulates that they liquidate their assets,[42] and that no member of or representative for the organization can take actions in the organization’s interest (e.g. things like opening bank accounts or buying property). The only exception to the latter restriction is a designated representative for the organization who is granted the right to manage its assets in the process of overseeing the dissolution.

Any of the designations above can be appealed, but dissolution is permanent until specifically overturned.

Now, it might well seem that the HMP could be targeted under the “advocating for subversive terroristic activity” criteria, but here’s the problem with that: that criteria is based on the organization engaging in/advocating for such terroristic subversiveness as an organizational activity—that is, the activity in question is a foundational, core aspect of the organization’s endeavors. And I simply don’t think that’s how the HMP operates. To reiterate, I believe they’re a recruitment tool, meant to siphon people into the MLA (later the PLF) proper, but otherwise a perfectly legitimate political party with real political aims, outreach, goals, and so on.

Of course, I can easily see the anger over all the destruction leading the Ministry of Justice to being heavy-handed in its response to the Paranormal Liberation Front and any organization even suspected of being associated with it, of which the HMP is the most prominent. I could also simply be wrong about what the HMP says at their rallies. Regardless of either of those possibilities, however, there is still the matter of the timetable.

There was a period in Japanese history that organizations—political parties especially—could be dissolved on the spot. The Meiji Constitution granted that right to the Minister of Home Affairs, a Cabinet position appointed by the Emperor, and indeed, any number of socialist, communist, or labor-oriented parties were banned and dissolved within scant months of their establishment for their alleged leftist or subversive leanings.[44] The Farmer-Labor Party of 1925 was dissolved three hours after its establishment! So clearly there’s some precedent—or at least, there was. Like many things, the power to summarily dissolve organizations did not survive the Meiji Constitution’s transformation into its modern-day incarnation after World War II.

The Subversive Activities Prevention Act, the same one that lays out the causes for dissolving an organization, also details a legally mandated process by which this dissolution is carried out. Most prominently, organizations cannot just be dissolved with no notice, no chance to defend themselves. Any disposition curtailing an organization's activities, from the bans on their printed material to complete dissolution, is required to be announced both via the government's official gazette[45] and, if the residence of a chief officer or representative of the organization is known, also via written notification. These notifications must be sent at least seven days before the hearing date—a hearing which, further, the organization has the legal right to send agents to in order to present statements and evidence in their own favor, as well as examine the evidence being presented against them.

This clearly did not happen. Bare minimum, Hanabata Koku, as leader of the Hearts & Minds Party, should have had an address the Commission could get ahold of, especially given all the snooping they so obviously must have been doing to unearth the extent of the PLF’s reach.

It’s instructive, in this regard, to look to history. To wit, I’ve said a lot about how gun-shy Japan is to dissolve organizations outright, thanks to its history of governmental repression—but how true is that really? If the government really wanted to, couldn’t it just decide to crack down on something and ride out the controversy? Has it done as much before?

To put all this into proper perspective: no. It hasn’t. The government has invoked the Subversive Activities Prevention Act against a group rather than individuals only once in all the time since the act was passed in 1952.

It was against Aum Shinrikyo, and it didn’t happen until seven months after the subway attacks. Even with nearly unanimous desire to prosecute, even though Aum had been under police surveillance prior to the attacks, even though lawsuits against them were and had been ongoing, meaning at least some measure of investigation was being done openly, it still took seven months to gather the evidence, submit it to the Public Safety Examination Commission, allow Aum their appeal, and enact the ruling. That’s because, in a society ordered by democratic processes, these things take time.[46]

But the HMP? No one who wasn’t a member knew about their affiliation with the League of Villains—much less an underground army!—until Hawks got the word out, and the Hero Public Safety Commission had to be rigorously careful that news of their investigations not leak because they knew they had their own moles to deal with. So far as we know, the Hearts & Minds Party remained a legit organization right up until the day of the raid. It is functionally impossible under current Japanese law for them to have been dissolved in the scant few hours between the commencement of the raid and the attack on Tartarus in which the two guards mention the dissolution.

Even if the relevant agency in the Ministry of Justice submitted their paperwork the absolute minimum of time in advance, there is no way the HMP and Trumpet—and therefore Re-Destro and the League and everyone else—shouldn’t have known that the government was moving against them. The only answer is that the Ministry of Justice was evading its legal obligation to notify both the public[47] and the HMP itself, or that the Japanese government, in the wake of the Advent of the Exceptional, throttled back on constitutionally guaranteed freedoms exactly the way human rights activists today are always warning about.

Stigma and Recidivism

In the same way that In Custody is not (or shouldn't be) a magic status effect preventing villains from escaping from police, In Jail is not an endgame state. Most people in prison are not there for life (or death) sentences, particularly not in Japan. Even if the majority of the PLF gets stuck in prison for decades, there will, eventually, be an “after” for them. So what happens “after”?

Well, like many countries, Japan has made efforts in the modern day to offer training classes and parole officers to help reacclimate ex-convicts into society once they’ve done their time, but it remains a difficult process, and the country has a relatively high recidivism rate. Given the stigma against criminals—present to a degree in all countries, but particularly exacerbated in Japan—it is frequently difficult for released prisoners to find stable housing or employment—both key factors helping to prevent recidivism.

So does MHA’s Japan have similar programs? Well, it’s hard to say, given that the only prison we’ve actually seen is Tartarus, which is obviously a poor model to base a lot of judgement on—save, of course, that any country that could develop a place like Tartarus is a country with an appalling deficit of care for criminals’ human rights, which doesn’t bode well for their other prisons.

Speaking of things that don’t bode well, though, we have two obvious examples in the canon of how convicted criminals fare: both Gentle Criminal and Twice are, it’s suggested, prosecuted for their foundational fuck-ups—Tobita for obstructing public duties[48] and Jin for his traffic infraction. It’s unclear whether they went to prison or not—given the relative lenience shown to first-time offenders, I’m inclined to think probably not—but even given these very mild offenses, their lives were turned completely upside-down, and no apparent efforts were made to help them through chaotic periods that saw Tobita apparently disowned and Jin losing his job.

Consider the harsh reactions they garnered and the apparent lack of assistance from any social structure despite the relative mildness of their wrongs, and things start to look very bad indeed for the PLF. Will there be any steps taken at all to deradicalize them? Does taking such steps seem likely, given what we've seen of MHA’s legal and carceral systems thus far? Further, if there is no plan for deradicalization, how exactly do the heroes propose to stop this from happening again (and again, and again and again and again)?

Here’s another alarming thought: what will be done with the children? There’s no way around the fact that the MLA, and therefore the PLF, included children[49]—and I don’t mean it in the tumblr sense of describing a sixteen-year-old as “a literal child,” though there would be some of those, too. No, I mean the grade-schoolers, the toddlers, the babies. Maybe some of them will have non-PLF family they could hypothetically go to, but as I have written about in the past, there’s a very real bias about orphans and other children separated from their parents in Japan, and even blood ties are not always enough to overcome that stigma. Alternative care is in a woefully sorry state as it is in Japan, and this would only be compounded for PLF kids—damned first for their criminal associations and again for being the children society doesn’t want.

However many thousands of them that may be.[50]

So here again, a question recurs. Where before it was, “How do you tell the guilty from the innocent?” here it’s, “How do you stop the societal backlash from ruining countless peoples’ lives both now and for decades into the future?” What kind of stigma will all these people—rank and file who come out of prison deradicalized and ready to rejoin society, children who were too young to understand why heroes took their parents away, ignorant family and friends who just lost loved ones to a massive government sweep, innocents swept up in the net and imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit—going to be facing? How long, then, before that stigma sees them radicalized in turn?

You cannot sweep 115,000 people under the rug and not expect there to be a stain—and given the narrative themes of the rest of My Hero Academia thus far, it’s absurd to think that’s even an option.

Next time: how scrapping the ex-MLA portions of the PLF undermines MHA's narrative integrity.

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Footnotes (Part Three)

[26] And in the legal sense, murder in the second degree.

[27] For the monstrous callousness of his comments in that conversation, said guard is immediately murdered by karma All For One. I very much hope we ever get Shishikura’s opinion on this, because I’m pretty sure the guard was his dad.

[28] Who, in Chapter 35 of that series, leads a group of police firing rubber bullets at an active villain, emphasizing that the police are trained in non-lethal tactics, and any escalation from that is not to be taken lightly.

[29] Indeed, you could make a fair argument that that’s exactly why the manga included the Noumu to begin with, though the lower-tier ones wind up captured as often as not.

[30] Vigilantes, Chapter 74.

[31] This sidesteps the matter of “rescue heroes,” those who focus on disaster response and evacuation. Note, however, that this is not a categorization that pits those heroes against non-quirk-abusing civilians. Non-quirk-abusing civilians are criminals for police to deal with, not heroes of any stripe.

[32] This would be in keeping with real-world de-escalation tactics. So for e.g. the purse-snatcher in Chapter 1, where we’re told he didn’t use his quirk until he’d been backed into a corner, I would bet that Kamuy Woods or whoever confronted the thief didn’t start actually using their quirk on the man until he went into giant mode. That is anyway a kinder interpretation than noting that he was a heteromorph and would have been using his quirk automatically just by virtue of existing in public.

[33] After digging him out from under the stairway it had a teenager drop on top of him, I mean. Did he even have much of a chance to use Incite at the villa, do you think?

[34] Though given that literally every member of the MLA we’ve met is addressed solely by their code name, I don’t for a second believe he could have gotten real names out of everyone he talked to.

[35] And judges virtually always grant warrants. It’s that presumption of guilt thing again.

[36] But that panel of the normally taciturn Edgeshot shouting at a bunch of high schoolers not to let a single person escape is pretty damn telling too.

[37] 14% of the Japanese populace is under 14 years old, so that’s not too far off, though I’d be inclined to think, based on everything we know about them, that the MLA was having more kids than Japan at large, not fewer.

[38] This should have been Uraraka, by the way.

[39] An exaggeration, but only by a handful of tenths of a percentage point.

[40] Though until recently, it’s served as a great check on recidivism, clearly.

[41] You know, assuming that they weren't all arrested in the middle of their workday or cleaning house or going to university or what have you.

[42] Both are among the agencies that make up the Ministry of Justice. I’d be willing to bet that, in-universe, the Hero Public Safety Commission is also under the Ministry of Justice umbrella.

[43] The funds are then remitted to the National Treasury.

[44] Though one thing to note for our current context is that, even when those parties were dissolved, it did not automatically follow that any duly elected representatives were expelled from office. Unless there was legal reason to remove them, any elected officials were simply rendered “Independents” rather than being affiliated with a political party. The constitution stipulates that Diet members can only be expelled by a two-thirds majority vote, though in such circumstances, most politicians choose to step down from their positions before it comes to such drastic measures.

[45] A newspaper or other bulletin officially authorized by the government to publish public and legal notices—in Japan these days, it’s an online site/newsletter.

[46] And they’re often still controversial with progressive activists, as the invocation against Aum was even contemporaneously! Incidentally, Aum’s dissolution lasted for a mere two years before the government panel ultimately declined to make it permanent.

[47] And if you don’t think the HMP had someone watching the official Japanese government website, you’re clearly not taking them seriously.

[48] And possibly more besides; the dialogue in question trails off in a way that suggests that the obstruction charge is only the first in a list.

[49] Start at Yotsubashi Rikiya being inducted when he was still in schoolboy shorts and continue right on up through the people we see in school uniforms in various mass battle scenes involving the MLA rank and file.

[50] And it easily could be thousands. If, say, even 10% of the PLF are minors, that’d be well over 10,000 kids, and thus we’re right back to overcrowding problems, except this time they’re about Japan’s child services programs, and the last thing they need is a new group of kids that numbers a full third of the number of children already in their care in real-life Japan. Naturally, the number only climbs if you think Re-Destro wasn’t counting kids in his initial reckoning of the MLA’s membership.

#bnha analysis #bnha meta #paranormal liberation front #meta liberation army #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #bnha #bnha spoilers #my writing #plf arrests #stillness has salt

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