#but it could totally be two middle aged men fighting for their lives socially

[cowboysmp3]

not to b crazy but i think a regency romance narumitsu au would fuck supremely and this is totally not just because i think edgeworth could be the awkward autismcore stuffy high status man who accidentally offends wright at fancy balls or anything,,

[bimbonaparte]

daddy lessons (parenting in spn vs. being human)

I have not been able to stop thinking about this for weeks and it’s making me insane, so apologies to all but here we GO. McNair (Being Human UK) and John Winchester (Supernatural) both raised their sons to be weapons in a secret war and did unforgivable things in the process, but thanks to some key differences in their parenting approach, we get wildly different kids out of the equation. To recap the middle bit of the Venn diagram here, both fathers:

Dragged their kids around the country, raising them like soldiers to fight a supernatural enemy; it’s unclear when anybody’s first kills took place, to my knowledge, but we can safely say that they were at way too young an age

Weaponized the memory of a dead mother as an excuse for their crusade

Moved them around constantly and denied them almost any outside connections; by design, their whole world is wrapped up in each other

Raised their kids (Tom and Dean most successfully*) to have little identity outside of hunting and to be entirely beholden to the cause, leading to a very upsetting self-sacrificial streak

Demanded military-esque obedience; some questions may be allowed here and there, but ultimately dad is the superior officer and it’s his call

Lied repeatedly to their kids “for their own good” and kept them on a need-to-know-basis, even for stuff that they REALLY needed to know

*(I’m generally focusing on Dean & Tom in this analysis, since I think Sam escaped some of this by rebelling against the notion of a “good son”)

Hell, they even had similar deaths (i.e., made the decision to keep their kids in the dark -- rather than, say, explaining anything or asking for help -- and walk into a confrontation with an old enemy that they knew they wouldn’t survive). But despite all this overlap, we end up with two wildly different characters: jaded & emotionally volatile Dean, who drinks & throws punches to cope with feelings and performs toughness as if there’s a panel of judges in the corner at all times; and sincere & emotionally vulnerable Tom, who is also quick to throw a punch but who talks about his feelings, cries easily, and is totally unconcerned with whether or not he’s perceived as tough or masculine. I literally can’t stop thinking about it.

If you ask me, the two diverge thanks to some key differences between the McNair and John Winchester school of parenting. Despite the NUMEROUS mistakes McNair made in Tom’s upbringing, we have to give credit where credit is due:

McNair loved Tom. Unequivocally. Thought he was the best person to ever exist. Told him this daily. Told any given random stranger who stood still long enough in Tom’s general proximity. Reinforced it with physical affection and affirmation. Tom never had cause to doubt this for even a second during his entire upbringing, and it shows.

McNair must have realized at some point that Tom was different, that his take on the world was always going to be a little bit naive. Instead of trying to change this or toughen him up “for his own good” (which I can very much imagine being the John Winchester approach), McNair seems to have thoroughly embraced this aspect of Tom’s nature.

Part of that is expressed through the "code.” McNair raised Tom to live by a strict code geared towards a) survival as nomad werewolf vampire hunters, and b) survival as Tom, specifically, who has incredible physical aptitude but struggles with other kinds of learning & social cues. The code has its downsides (namely the unquestioning obedience bit mentioned above), but otherwise functions as a sort of framework that Tom can follow for navigating the societal rules & interactions he doesn’t fully understand. (There’s also the whole “teaching Tom to respect others” thing, which I could honestly write an entire dissertation on).

Beyond the rules McNair thinks they need to survive, however, McNair seems to delight in Tom simply being Tom. This shines through most with Tom’s disarming sincerity -- which he retains largely because McNair (and society at large) never tried to train or polish it out of him. There are a dozen examples where Tom cuts through layers of conversational propriety and is just genuine, because it doesn’t occur to him to be otherwise. Where other characters (like Hal) can’t help laughing at him at least a little, we see McNair take him seriously, respond with encouragement, and even match his sincerity (see: “You’re perfect”) despite the fact that McNair was raised in a society that would frown on men talking like this to their grown sons.

We therefore end up with a Tom who earnestly says things like “virginity is like a flower” with zero self-consciousness. Who would have come along to tell him men don’t talk about sex like this? McNair certainly wouldn’t have; his top priority throughout is supporting Tom as-is, not molding his personality into some idea of what a man is or should be.

The end result of all this is a very sweet, very straightforward, emotionally vulnerable killing machine. “Always be polite and kind and have the materials to build a bomb,” indeed. Tom is obsessed later on with being “a success” in a very performative way, but -- as all the characters around him repeatedly remind him -- this is not something that McNair ever cared about or put on him.

What I would love to do next is a) also acknowledge the incredibly profound ways that McNair wronged Tom (starting with killing his parents, which cannot be glossed over) and how this fucked him up; b) contrast all this with the John Winchester approach to raising child soldiers (SIGH) to see how it is that we ended up Dean; and c) look at Dean and Tom’s perception of their respective fathers. BUT. I unfortunately have to go do actual work stuff or I am gonna be in big trouble (plus this is getting LONG), so I’m gonna be revisiting this another time. In conclusion tho: Tom McNair fascinates me beyond measure, I cannot get over this, and I do not want to. TBC.

[okay-victoria]

Random Personal Rant

For anyone somehow here not from the original thread, this started off me getting asked what finishing school is and me getting shit off my chest that is only mildly relevant about how I could both be of the social class that gets sent to finishing school and grows up on welfare.

With an understanding that in many parts of the world it wouldn't qualify as so, as far as the US goes, my dad is from what counts as a very old money family from Baltimore & Philadelphia. Both his siblings went to college and one now owns a major hedge fund, and his sister is married to a C-level executive at a huge conglomerate. His parents went to college. His grandparents went to college. All eight of his great grandparents went to college. My dad...did not go to college. He was not about that life, and while I don't mean it as an insult, when I say his primary occupation until I was ~5 was a drummer in a mediocre band I mean that he opened for a lot of great acts, and if you lived in the Boston to Atlanta area in the 80s you may have heard him play, but he was never a huge national name. But he wasn't an amateur band playing for free at some random local gig either.

My mom grew up on a chicken farm in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania but also completely rejected her heritage and became a model, sort of like my father, of mediocre status. Not Giselle Bundchen, but had national contracts and if you have a Graco ad/box from 1990-1993 you might see both me and her on it. They met because my mom's friends placed bets, one each, on who could sleep with a member of their favorite local band first and my mom picked my dad and...my mom was actually supposed to go be a model in Tokyo and found out she was pregnant with me and couldn't go 😂

So, after my parents had two kids back to back with a third on the way and determined they needed lifestyles more in line with having three children, they became much poorer than they originally were because my mom stopped working and my dad, with a barely-passed-high-school education but needing a true "day job" worked day labor in construction. My dad's father was too proud to give us money/help if my dad didn't beg for it; despite having eventually four young children my dad never did so we ended up on all the state assistance programs one could imagine. My grandma jokes that dinners at my parents house were BYOC - bring your own chair, because we didn't own any.

My mother and paternal grandmother had no such pride issues and I live in eternal gratitude that my welfare childhood was not as crappy as it should have been because my grandmother would have my mom accompany her on grocery runs and buy us food without my father or grandfather knowing, and every Christmas and birthday my grandparents/godparents could give us the one big ticket gift all the kids wanted that year. But, on the other side, I once got stung by a bee inside my mouth because my brother threw a hairbrush through a cracked window at me and broke it and we couldn't afford to fix it for about two years and a hornet got in one day and rested himself in my coke can (my parents were the very American type that fed me coca-cola in baby bottles at age 8 when I was jealous of my younger siblings lol).

It is hard not to believe in "toxic masculinity" when two men warring over dumbass pride issues would rather their children/grandchildren go without food than suck it up and decide 'help' isn't the worst word in the English language, and you know you've only been saved by two women who came from totally different backgrounds and entirely disapproved of each other but reached out the hand to shake when it came down to toddlers getting the short end of the don't-bend-the-knee stick. It wasn't that either of the men were bad people, I loved them both and got along great with both, but on a societal level I feel they were socialized in a very fucked up way if that was the end result, as both claimed "male pride" in these instances [my dad took multiple thousands of dollars I'd saved from working during college from me during the 2008-2010 financial crisis and didn't tell me and that was the reason I was given for why I hadn't been informed/asked, because it would be too emotionally difficult for an adult man to ask a young woman. My graduation present was them repaying me 1/3 of the money they'd taken from me without asking because I'd like, trusted them when it had been in a joint account that was a holdover from when I was <18 and couldn't have my own bank account].

While in some ways my parents on the surface achieved the American dream of going from nothing to a bunch of money, the real factor in play was that my dad's father was the bank. My parents had no credit and couldn't get real loans. My dad worked construction and during the two major periods that flipping houses was very lucrative, he never had to get an actual loan or pay actual interest, he just had to ask his father to pay out cash and then repay him at a flat 2% interest rate that didn't even accrue over time, just...whenever you are ready, repay the value of the loan + 2%. Because my father was doing something productive, in these instances, my grandfather was happy to pay, because it wasn't giving away money, it was loaning it. I had a very weird situation of mostly being poor but like also getting taken to the "big donors" events at the Kennedy Center and my grandparents regularly buying me a dress as a child worth more than my mom's wedding dress and also needing to pretend I fit in with these people.

And look. When I say "these people"...honestly, by and large, most wealthy people, whether inherited or not, are not the assholes you want to imagine. Most of them are extremely nice. Most of them are generous when it comes to the less fortunate who are in their personal sphere of being. Most of them are just really out of touch. The 100% kindest of all of them that I know once relayed to me that she thought people would be happier if once a year they did what she did...go to the airport with a purse packed full of absolute necessities, buy a one way ticket to the most appealing destination on the flight board, buy your clothes and book your accommodations after you'd arrived, and come back after you felt you'd 'centered' yourself. She didn't understand why there were so many unhappy people who weren't taking this very obvious route to being happier. I didn't quite know how to explain that saying "most" people couldn't afford to do that either financially or from a job/career angle didn't even cover it, as "most" sounds like 70% instead of 99.7%.

I was both my parents eldest son and eldest daughter in the worst combination possible. I was the eldest son because I was the most stereotypically male of all my siblings, in everything from desire to physically fight the battles I was given to dislike of shopping/fashion to lack of emotional connection to my relationships, so I can now fix your average household plumbing/drywall/electrical issue better than most "city" guys I interact with and remain less clingy to them in the process. I was also very much the oldest daughter from a responsibility perspective, I managed our household and from age 10 - 24 managed the finances of our family business, my mom almost died giving birth to my youngest brother after a ruptured uterus that should never have happened in the first place if we had adequate insurance to get her a non-emergency C-section (I was just past 9 years old at the time) and I was informally withdrawn from school for two years to take care of the family when she couldn't because there is no paid parental leave in the US and we got double-fucked by the medical industry because she got a bad "mesh" put in and then had to have a further surgery to repair that which we also had to pay for and didn't have the money to win a lawsuit over.

I don't know quite how to put this, but in the deepest fuck you of the universe, my rich-immigrant-ggggg grandfather's money led to him owning banks, insurance companies, etc, and the family cashed out in a big way when their ownership was bought by and merged with what is now Cigna, one of the biggest US healthcare insurers, and my nuclear family specifically got screwed by the American health insurance industry, but anyway, we were the people selected for that karmic comeuppance so if you want to feel schadenfreude at my expense, I'll allow it without begrudging the sentiment, my family might have fucked up your family’s life too, not just their own.

I got up twice a night to feed my brother because my dad had to sleep unmolested in my room to get to work and my mom was too weak to carry my brother or even hold him against her while she nursed so I had to hold him up to her. Adjusting to living in a city and hearing lots of random noises all the time was not easy when I'd had mom sound instincts from age 9.

I learned to drive the fall my youngest bro was born because my mom couldn't and I had to get my middle brother to preschool and go the grocery store on my own. While I hold absolutely no ill will towards my father or grandfather for this and given that about 1/3 of my paternal family either has an autism diagnosis or should, I fully feel the struggles they both went through to be communicated with, my father wouldn't ask for help, and my grandmother that lived 20 minutes away couldn't give enough help because my grandfather refused to do a single dish on his own as that was outside their "marriage contract" type agreement and she couldn't ever stay with us overnight when there wasn't a clearly-communicated need, so they let the burden fall on a 9 - 11 year old child and that really shaped a lot of my life in both good and bad ways. My youngest brother is 22, and we have only just climbed out of the medical debt his birth left us with between my dad's life insurance and my oldest brother and I paying for the extra cost of out-of-state college tuition.

The irony of all of this is that because my father died before his father, when my grandmother dies, my siblings and I will all inherit enough money (as a non-blood relative my mom, despite keeping her vows to part at death and not having remarried in eight years, is cut out entirely) to make this a non-issue, but my grandfather couldn't conscience spotting his unluckiest child some money in the end of days to pay for my youngest two brothers' education and take that worry off my father as he was dying. The day before he died I had to hold him down in bed to keep him from trying to climb in his truck to go to work because he was so anxious about trying to provide for us in spite of his father having fuck you money, because his father didn't think it was fair to the other siblings (who, at the time, still owned a major hedge fund and were married to a C-level executive of a huge conglomerate). A day and a half later I went back to my job because at the time I was then the sole provider for the family and didn't want to risk asking for the standard week's bereavement leave when I knew I was capable of showing up at work the next day and was fresh out of college so hadn't built up a reputation yet.

My father worked the day each of us was born, so I suppose it is only fair and he smiled at the choice. In spite of what it may seem, I gave a baller and very heartfelt speech at his funeral to all his rich friends that over and above everything, he'd taught us how to be happy with our own lives no matter what, and multiple of them emailed my mom in the aftermath to say they'd reassessed their relationship with their children in light of it, although...tbh I kind of doubt that lasted and they probably changed nothing 😅. The last good talk I had with him, two weeks before he died [his liver was going and it sent toxins to his brain that de-personed him after that and he no longer recognized me as his daughter, but as his sister], I reassured him that though we would all be sad he'd gone, we'd live on just fine without him because that's how he'd raised us, and according to my mom that was what gave him the final bit of peace he needed. Although honestly, I don't think I will ever see the strength in another human again that it took my grandmother to sit next to him and stroke his hand and tell him to close his eyes and imagine he was happy on a beach and die, for God's sake, because he was unaware and in pain and just prolonging it for our sake by then.

That type of obsession my grandfather had with assessing his children and grandchildren on the basis of economic productivity and a very black and white idea of "fair" is one you don't easily forget, I promise you. My hedge fund uncle is currently positioning himself to screw us out of our inheritance because of janky writing in the will and I'm doing my fuck all best to gain the wherewithal to go toe-to-toe with this cold motherfucker in court as the oldest and representative member of my happily much nicer and softer younger brothers who I want to remain that way not because I even care that much about the money, I know what bills affect your credit first and what you can put off paying and all of us have good enough career prospects to do our own thing, but just because I want to give the middle finger to a man that was a multi-millionaire and drew lines on his milk and orange juice bottles when I came over so he knew if I drank what my parents couldn't afford when I was approximately six. Anyway, ask me why I support major reforms in wealth taxation. I don't care who it goes to, just not that guy, you feel?

Having expendable income was very exciting for a bit after I started working but once I got to the hateable point of assessing my annual bonus and internally complaining that I'd spent the money I should have spent on a Sauternes cellar to drop five digits on bedset materials (to be fair they are drop dead gorgeous, very comfy and the factory pays a living wage for people to handmake the sheets/duvets/pillows to people in San Francisco, which is not cheap, so maybe I did more good than harm with that), I two seconds later nodded to myself and went "the government needs to confiscate more money from me". The narrative is always that the "undeserving" will use it for dumb things they don't need like iPhones or refrigerators...?...but like...I could also have gone to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought a very nice sheet/comforter set for at most a tenth of what I paid so am I really spending it responsibly either....?....who is going to get more joy out of this misspent money....?....not me, that is for sure, I probably would have had more fun going to BBB and laying on all the demo beds and buying something there.

My lifelong dream, which may become possible if/when I do have something of an inheritance, is to provide food security for one of the many towns in the US were most residents don't have it. It's the thing I remember the most distinctly over the years. I never could quite believe it when I got to the point that I could just...pay to eat at a restaurant. One of the most disappointed my mother has ever been in me is when I was twenty five and confessed I actually had no idea how much a gallon of milk cost in a city grocery store besides that it was probably between $1 and $5, because I didn't have to know. For now I make a weekly drop off of my excess produce to a mom group I met under somewhat weird circumstances but I was walking through the cut-through that went through the low-income housing back to my apartment at like 2 AM on a Saturday and these moms were out there partying and smoking weed with their kids all strapped in strollers around or the older ones watched by a rotating member of the group and I felt very safe and like these moms had a very good vibe of both living their own lives [seriously for mental health parents but in most cases specifically mothers need to be able to keep up relationships with people their age] but keeping their children safe and accounted for while doing so and trying their fuckin' best against all the odds to figure out how to make that happen when life had dealt them a shit hand.

...anyway, looping way back to the original question of what finishing school is, when I was almost done with middle school my dad had built a legit construction business that then very quickly took off because we lived in a commutable zip code to the now-rich-in-their-own-right people he went to high school with who trusted him to redo their homes. We eventually moved to that zip code but I stayed and commuted back to my old high school. But, i was a pretty wild kid which my father appreciated for a long while because I would follow him around on jobs and enjoy doing physical labor, but once I was mid-puberty and also he had to maybe show me to his high school friends that did not fly.

I snapped - not broke, snapped - my left thumb and my parents had to trap me like a wild animal to get me to go the hospital. Then I got a deep cut that partially injured a tendon in my leg and at eleven I tried to beat the shit out of my dad to prevent him from picking me up to strap me in the car and go to the hopsital. Next I got a deep splinter due to my eternal-barefoot tendencies and it wouldn't come out so got infected and I refused to go to the doctor [another weird back story but I was minorly sexually assaulted [[to be clear, not raped or anything big traumatic]] when I was eight and had to stay in hospital for a week and my parents couldn't be with me all the time so I have a permanent heebie-jeebie about going to the hospital, not true anxiety, I will go if I know I need to and I don't breathe heavy or anything, and I'm actually not permanently weirded out by sex or anything, just doctors in hospitals specifically I kind of unconsciously try to justify not needing to the extent I can rationalize it] and my dad was tired of my antics so he was like "fine if you don't go I will slice your foot in half with a Swiss Army knife to get it out" and I called his bluff and laid down on the floor, stuck my foot on his lap, and he didn't really know what to do when a barely fourteen year old girl called his bluff so my brothers watched in fascinated but horrified awe as I got my foot sliced open spectacularly so that the infection/splinter could come out and I didn't even make a sound out of spite despite it being quite painful to my recollection almost twenty years later.

They saw me cry from pain exactly one time when while trying to break up a fight between all three of them (it was over ice cream) I got pushed and my ankle got dislocated and what actually made me cry was snapping it back in place and they realized it was not a joke. These dumb assholes that I love have ragged on me for "skipping" chores the day after I was in the hospital because the day before that I had to spend 18 hours running Thanksgiving as a good sub-hostess like I didn't have a serious infection that needed treating and couldn't rest because none of them were up to any task beyond peeling potatoes.

After the Swiss Army knife incident, my dad's discussion of sending me to finishing school became real, which I knew when my mom made me take a walk with her and talked about it. Finishing school is like...etiquette school....? In ye olden day when finishing high school was not the norm for anyone, wealthy men finished high school and wealthy women often went to "finishing" school to have a combined education on being a proper lady but also being able to hold a decent conversation with your presumably-educated husband, so it wasn't entirely etiquette non-academic. It was more just like "what a rich man wants in a wife" school, which was sort of household management and knowing enough about cleaning/cooking to correct the staff if they fucked up, how to be a polite hostess, and how to not entirely bore him when you were alone together and had done your five minutes of sex or whatever so actually had to have a conversation. In modern times it has obviously expanded to be less bleak.

I said miss me with that, I can be a girl on my own, so I went full throttle into the girliest sport they offer in high school and ever since have gained the inestimable advantage of knowing how to also use femininity to my advantage, which I am very grateful to my parents for making me learn. It would be great if we lived in a world where that didn't count, but it did/still does, and they really set me up to operate in all the worlds.

It is weird for me to tell the story to Internet strangers because it's one of those things that makes your parents sound terrible and abusive in the general tone of the Internet nowadays, and while I support gender nonconforming children I don't remember my childhood or parents that way. But, I feel like the bits and pieces of my life I've given don't always make a ton of sense together without the context, so here it is, and in the end, I think a number of parts of it are areas where you can probably understand where it makes me have the opinions I do when I write.

Anyhoo, this makes my life sound far worse than it is, I actually have a great life and I am not unhappy with it at all and feel I was on the whole blessed with many more turns of luck than unluck, so, please, do not take this as a depressed artist rant, it is more like a rant of a very energetic person who rants about a lot of things all the time and didn’t need to come out but just did because the question was asked and the time was right with my life being in a bit of flux to think about how I got where I am and where I want to go and why.

Always remember no matter what problems it seems like I have, if I didn’t solve them on my 2 year round the world traveling hiatus I took from working, it’s my own fault, I definitely had the time and money to solve them and just chose not to.

[thebluelemontree]

Hiya blue lemon it's me again. Do you have any criticism in the way GRRM wrote Sansa in book1/2? EX:.Sansa and Jeyne are BFF but we amolst never see the girls talking to eachother, and when JP is sex traffikced sansa just forget about her(we could have a scene where sansa try to find what happened to JP or at least grieve for her). Every time sansa appears as a non-POV in AGOT she's been mean and whe we have her POV she's mean for no good reason(SANSA III AGOT). >PART 1<

And the worst is why GRRM wrote sansa goin to Cercei to tell her the "Ned Plans", it's just bad writing, Cercei kill lady so Sansa going to her was OOC GRRM just wrote that to we hate Sansa And in the book it's not explained what "the Ned plans" was(And it was nothing imortant at all, and would make no difference at Ned's fate) so ordinary readers blame Sansa for Ned's death and GRRM does that too in book 2 Cercei put all the blame for Ned death in sansa nd "the Ned Plans" Your thoughts?PART 2

There’s a lot to unpack here. 

I get a sense that in the early books, George was not as comfortable writing female relationships as he was writing male relationships or even male-female ones. I mean, Catelyn has no female friends, no companions like Margaery Tyrell’s cousins, no fostering wards of her own, no correspondences with other ladies except that one letter from Lysa for plot reasons. This is just weird for the lady of two major houses. It is neglectful on George’s part to give most of the important social connections to men. This doesn’t mean he was totally inept at writing female relationships, though, and it does seem like he’s tried to improve upon highlighting the positive in later books.

By comparison, the positive side of the brotherly relationships are presented so strongly that it tends to smooth over the conflicts with many readers. Jon can feel envious and resentful of Robb, but the love and loyalty is always in the foreground. The conflict between Arya, Jeyne, and Sansa does have legitimate character arc and plot purposes, so this isn’t bad writing. It’s unfortunate that GRRM presses down so hard on the constant bickering and occasional nastiness, but he did write some positives (albeit they tended to be revealed in later books) and there are understandable reasons for the dynamics. It was not done in a totally unrealistic way. What’s depicted is a typical and relatable rocky period for that age group, and there was negative adult influence at play. It’s not a permanent feature of the sisterhood. It’s all there if you pay attention and you’re inclined to be charitable toward the mistakes of young girls.       

If a reader is already predisposed to see the bonds between male characters as more pure and more able to overcome the negative aspects, then they probably also view the bonds between female characters as inherently weaker and more fraught with conflict. Fandom misogyny is not GRRM’s fault. That sector of the fandom will always have contempt for girls for being girls, especially preteen girls. They will always hone in on their faults and belittle their virtues. 

I don’t think that is true that we hardly ever see Jeyne and Sansa talking. They are nearly always in each other’s company. There was real friendship between Sansa and Jeyne, because what George does do well with them, is realistically write the way girls cement their bonds. Young girls strengthen their relationship by communicating and confiding in each other. Sharing secrets, crushes, hopes, fears, and pieces of gossip builds trust and intimacy. Jeyne and Sansa do this all the time, even though they can have different opinions and disagree about a lot.  Yes, there is some one-sidedness in that Sansa socially outranks Jeyne and believes that makes her more mature and wiser than her friend. Jeyne is dependent on her closeness to Sansa as a highborn lady and future queen to rise successfully, so she’s not going to push back on Sansa’s dominance. This is also a reason Jeyne sometimes bullies Arya to supplant her as Sansa’s “sister.” When Sansa has something to share, she goes to Jeyne to talk about it. I think it’s hilarious that the girls have a debate over which castle Gregor Clegane’s head will get spiked. Sansa wants Jeyne at her side for these new and exciting events like the tourney. When things get serious and dangerous, they comfort each other. Again, this is not all George’s fault if some readers don’t recognize or value the way girls do friendships.  

It’s stated quite clearly why Sansa tries to not think about Jeyne or her deceased family members very often. It’s fucking traumatic and her survival while among her captors depends on mentally holding herself together. 

If only she had someone to tell her what to do. She missed Septa Mordane, and even more Jeyne Poole, her truest friend. The septa had lost her head with the rest, for the crime of serving House Stark. Sansa did not know what had happened to Jeyne, who had disappeared from her rooms afterward, never to be mentioned again. She tried not to think of them too often, yet sometimes the memories came unbidden, and then it was hard to hold back the tears. Once in a while, Sansa even missed her sister. By now Arya was safe back in Winterfell, dancing and sewing, playing with Bran and baby Rickon, even riding through the winter town if she liked. Sansa was allowed to go riding too, but only in the bailey, and it got boring going round in a circle all day. -- Sansa II, ACOK.

Following her father’s beheading, Sansa was in a suicidal depression for days. She wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t bathe, welcomed drug-induced sleep, and contemplated killing herself. If she thinks too much on those she lost, she falls to pieces. She can’t openly weep and mourn for “traitors” if her life depends on appearing to be loyal to Joffrey. Most of her grief is suppressed inside. This also includes asking too many questions she doesn’t feel psychologically prepared to hear the answer to. She was there when the decision was made to shuttle Jeyne off to Littlefinger; however, she has no idea this is going to result in Jeyne being sent to a brothel and worse. I would also keep in mind that even if she did ask, it’s not like Cersei or Littlefinger would ever tell her the truth. Why would they? Does she really want to hear lies and have to think about what the horrible truth might be when she can’t do anything about it?  When it comes to Arya, Sansa believes her sister escaped on the ship bound for home. She comforts herself with imagining that Arya is safe and free, and that’s enough to keep her going.  

And she prays and sings for Jeyne, wherever she is.

She sang for mercy, for the living and the dead alike, for Bran and Rickon and Robb, for her sister Arya and her bastard brother Jon Snow, away off on the Wall. She sang for her mother and her father, for her grandfather Lord Hoster and her uncle Edmure Tully, for her friend Jeyne Poole, for old drunken King Robert, for Septa Mordane and Ser Dontos and Jory Cassel and Maester Luwin... -- Sansa V, ACOK.

It’s only until later in the books that Sansa feels emotionally at peace enough to start remembering the good times with Arya and Jeyne without breaking down into tears. We can also see the conflicts weren’t always a thing, and the love was strong with all three.

Sansa began to make snowballs, shaping and smoothing them until they were round and white and perfect. She remembered a summer's snow in Winterfell when Arya and Bran had ambushed her as she emerged from the keep one morning. They'd each had a dozen snowballs to hand, and she'd had none. Bran had been perched on the roof of the covered bridge, out of reach, but Sansa had chased Arya through the stables and around the kitchen until both of them were breathless. She might even have caught her, but she'd slipped on some ice. Her sister came back to see if she was hurt. When she said she wasn't, Arya hit her in the face with another snowball, but Sansa grabbed her leg and pulled her down and was rubbing snow in her hair when Jory came along and pulled them apart, laughing. -- Sansa VII, ASOS.

It was most unladylike, but Alayne sound found herself laughing. For just a little while, as she ran, she forget who she was, and where, and found herself remembering bright cold days at Winterfell, when she would race through Winterfell with her friend Jeyne Poole, with Arya running after them trying to keep up. -- Alayne I, TWOW.

So it’s not even that the girls only bond through confiding. They run, play, and roughhouse with each other. It’s interesting that AGOT!Sansa tried to be so mature and proper, but now that she’s older, she’s remembering how good and freeing it was just to be a kid. But let’s not act like this part of the story is over. Jeyne is still very much alive and seems likely to run into Arya in Braavos. We can almost be 100% certain that Sansa will find out the truth about what happened to Jeyne and what Littlefinger did to her (and her parents), then watch out. Sansa will turn all that buried pain into a righteous fury at Littlefinger.  

Now as for Sansa being mean for “no reason.” Um... yeah, LOL. Sometimes she’s just a total unwarranted bitch to her sister, and it’s not meant to be a good look. Sometimes she’s superficial, insufferably immature and annoying, judgmental and prejudiced AND THAT’S OKAY. I mean, she sounds no better or worse than your average middle-schooler if they were of the privileged nobility. Guess what? Sometimes preteens are really like that. Sometimes siblings have ugly, knockdown drag out fights where they say horrible things to each other. Most will grow past those phases and still wind up just as loving and close. It’s realistic and believable. Sansa has flaws, but they aren’t deep moral flaws. She does an amazing job at growing, learning, and overcoming those flaws over the course of the books. In TWOW, she’s warm and affectionate with people, easy-going, nonjudgmental, and genuinely more mature than ever. She took the stick out of her ass and became a happier person for it. What’s the problem? What did you want her to be? Perfect? Unfailingly kind and loved by everyone all the time? She’d be a saint, not a multifaceted human being. Even with her occasional ugly side, Sansa is still a strong, smart, compassionate badass. I don’t care if some people don’t like her as she is written or if they vilify her with their misinterpretations or ignore her strengths. What bearing does that have on GRRM’s vision for her character? He never set out to write any character that the whole fandom would either unanimously love or hate.    

This is not bad writing. This NOT bad writing. This is GOOD writing.

*Sigh* Listen... this whole nonsense about Sansa being to blame for Ned’s demise has been going on since ASOIAF was written on clay tablets. You don’t have to listen to every stupid thing the fandom says about anything. It’s just factually wrong. End of story. This misinterpretation and reader inattentiveness is not GRRM’s fault, because he lays out all the details of everything that went down between Arya, Ned, and Sansa’s POV as it was happening. It’s totally understandable why an upset and frustrated Sansa would go to Cersei, the mother figure she implicitly trusts and admires. She didn’t go to Cersei to betray her father’s plans. She went to the queen to intercede in what she thought had to be some big misunderstanding, having no idea what was really going on or at stake. 

This is not OOC for her to go to Cersei after Lady’s death. The hand that killed Lady was her own father’s, a undeniable breach of trust that wounded their relationship. Ned just doesn’t really do a lot to deal with the emotional aftermath either. Ned and Sansa are very similar in turning a blind eye when confronted with unpleasantness from someone they love. Ned is also at that moment disillusioned with Robert’s failure to do the right thing after the Trident incident. He begs Robert in the name of their brotherly love and the love he bore Lyanna, and Robert turns his back on Ned anyway. Yet Ned immediately goes right back to believing in the best of Robert’s nature, despite all evidence to the contrary. Every sign points to this being a one-sided friendship with Robert being lazy, irresponsible, and completely selfish. Like father, like daughter. Sansa has a very hard time accepting that Joffrey and Cersei are not the people she thought they were, even when she’s seen some cracks. And since she can’t understand her father’s actions and the communication has been shot to hell between them, of course she runs to Cersei with her problems. Cersei can flip a switch and pretend to be kind, loving, and understanding. 

This is so typical of a teenage thought process:  “Dad just doesn’t understand and he’s making a big mistake. I don’t understand why he’s doing this. He doesn’t get how important this is to me. This will all work out if a sympathetic adult steps in and fixes it. Everything will turn out great and we’ll all be happy.” While Sansa is pouring her heart out about how it isn’t fair she can’t say goodbye to Joffrey, Cersei pretends to be that sympathetic mother figure that really understands her. How hard would it be then to pump Sansa for information? Like “Oh my sweet little dove. I know how much you love my son. Don’t worry. I’ll help you straighten this out. You said your father wants to send you away? How? When? What’s the name of that ship again?”  

And that line from Cersei’s POV is horseshit. Cersei is a liar and regularly lies in her POV to absolve herself of responsibility and force the blame entirely on others. In this case, Cersei is acting like she didn’t totally manipulate a trusting child to betray her.  We also know this is a lie because Ned was the one that told her himself of his plans to reveal the invest and remove her as queen. Sansa had nothing to do with that. All Sansa did was give Cersei information that allowed Cersei the opportunity to take her hostage before the girls could leave by ship. Cersei’s plans against Ned were already well underway. Sansa never came to her with the intent of knowingly betraying anyone, but she did have selfish reasons for going to the queen to complain in the first place. GRRM said himself that Sansa wasn’t to blame for Ned’s capture or death, but she did play a role in the events that transpired. That’s fair. All that makes her is a kid who made a not entirely innocent mistake, but a mistake nonetheless, which she immediately learned from. Does she trust Cersei or Joffrey again? Hell no.  

Relax, anon. It’s fine for her to not be nice all the time. It’s fine for her to have some realistic, garden variety flaws. It’s one of the most universal human mistakes to fall too hard and fast for the wrong person, act the fool over them despite all the red flags, only to realize you only saw what you wanted to see in them. And Sansa learned this lesson at eleven when some adults haven’t learned it at all. Relax. She’s a great, well-written, relatable character who has overcome most of these issues successfully.  

[chibsytelford]

Battle of the Alphas - Angel x Miguel x Reader NSFW

*** GIF CREDIT TO CREATORS ***

Authors note - Okay me and @rebel-without-cause-x​ decided to write another threesome fic following on from our Chibs x Jax x Reader one. The idea literally came from nowhere and like 2 hours later we had finished it. We both really love this and hope you all do too!

We are both posting it so it’s easier to just whack it onto our masterlists so sorry if some of you get 2 notifications as I know we have a similar taglist. This was also my first ever time writing smut and I must say I’m really proud of myself. Loved writing this with you @rebel-without-cause-x​

Word Count - 3945

Warnings - swearing and smut. that is all.

Taglist - @agirllovespasta​ @everyhowlmarksthedead​ @whyisgmora​ @starrynite7114​ @jadesamhart​ @fangirlingaesthetics​ @angelreyesgirl​ @blessedboo​ @sheeshgivemeabreak​ @elcococruz​ @lady-pswrld​ @talicat713​ @angelxshiba​ @xx--day-dreamer--xx​ @thisishowdynastiesareborn​ @trulysuccubus​ @scuzmunkie​ @sadeyesgf​ 

The only sound that could be heard in the coffee shop was the stupid clock ticking, you were so bored as you sat on your stool with your feet up on the counter scrolling through your phone. It was the same every single Wednesday at 11am. Dead.

You were in your own little world as you scrolled through your social media whilst sipping on your iced coffee, you didn’t even hear the bell ring, signalling someone had entered the shop.

 “Not very hygienic querida” the voice of Angel Reyes boomed through the shop.

 “Unless I’m going crazy I don’t see anyone in here” you shrugged placing your phone on the counter but not moving.

 “Hello I’m stood right here you goof” he grinned waving like a kid

 “Right what can I get you” you sassed rolling your eyes.

 “Don’t sass me”

 “Or what?” You smirked, biting down on your bottom lip, leaving him all flustered. 

 One thing you enjoyed in life was leaving two men in particular flustered by your actions.

 “Wrong time, wrong place” he mumbled rubbing the back of his neck.

 It was a rare sight for Angel Reyes to be shy and quiet, but you would be lying if you said it didn't turn you on just a little bit.

 "Can you say that a bit louder?" You were determined to get him to repeat what he had mumbled.

 He stepped forward never taking his eyes of yours. He knew what game you were playing and he wasn't going to let you win.

He was now standing in front of you behind the counter and just as he reached out to place his hand on your leg the bell on the door went signalling you had another customer.

 Looking over you saw it was none other than Miguel Galindo. Now things were going to get very interesting, albeit a bit awkward too.

 You lightly shoved Angel back and smiled at the man in the suit who was looking at you both with a hint of jealousy and anger in his eyes.

 "What can I get you?" You knew Miguel's order as he came in everyday but the awkward silence was unbearable so you needed to say something.

 “Angel" he nodded at the man who was now at the right side of the counter standing inches away from Miguel.

 “Urm no sorry” Angel spat venom laced in his voice “I was here first”

 Rolling your eyes at the two men you dropped your feet off the counter grabbing two takeaway cups and simultaneously made both of their coffees at once, leaving both men standing in awe.

 “I do have two hands you know” you said in a totally innocent way but as you spun round both of them had their eyebrows raised.

 However neither of them had a comeback.

 It was now Thursday and the shop was stupidly busy, seen as the colleges had started back this morning and you were a staff member down because of the flu so stressed was an understatement.

 As if on queue both Angel and Miguel walked in at the same time.

 Turning your back you looked up at the ceiling raising your palms up.

 “Really testing me today big man” you muttered rolling your eyes, you weren’t religious but right now you were praying neither of them started shit especially when you didn’t have time to deal with it.

 “Morning mi dulce” Miguel said, flashing his smile as he leaned against the counter.

 You turned around giving Miguel a smile. "Morning, the usual?" As you asked him you gave him a quick look up and down noticing his hair was more neater than usual and he had a different colour of suit on. Secretly you wished he did it for you but you knew the chances were very slim.

 "Please" he replied rolling his eyes and clenching his jaw as Angel now stood right beside him.

 "Again Reyes? Really?" You noticed the harsh tone that Miguel used when speaking to Angel and you wondered what was going on with the two of them. It was a small town and you knew that the pair were in business together so you figured they'd be friendly or at least civil.

 "I'll take my usual too mi amor" Angel winked at you.

 "Coming right up gentlemen, also can you move over to the side so I can take the next customer's order please?" You kindly asked them.

 The next customer was a good looking middle aged man. He was a different type of handsome compared to Angel and Miguel but he was still attractive nonetheless.

 "What can I get you sir?" You asked him.

 "A toffee latte and your number please" he replied flashing you a smile.

 Before you could answer you saw both Angel and Miguel move towards the man at the same time from the corner of your eye. You needed to diffuse the situation and fast before there was a fight.

 You quickly hopped the counter before the two men reached the customer. You grabbed Angel by his kutte and Miguel by his shirt and led them both outside the coffee shop, but not before gesturing to your only other colleague that you'd be back in a second.

 “Seriously today of all days you both decide to act like fucking top dog” you spat running your tongue over your teeth as you shoved them against the wall. “I have had it up to here with you two pendejos”

 They were both shocked at your outburst.

 “For the last 6 months it’s always the same when you both come into the shop” you glared “always at each other’s throats, I don’t care what is happening with your little business partnership but you sure as hell don’t bring that into my grandpa’s shop”

 Both of them looked guilty.

 “Sorry” Angel mumbled.

 “Yeah I didn’t realise this was affecting you querida, so I’m sorry,” Miguel nodded.

 “So with that being said neither one of you can step foot in this shop until you sort your shit out” you scowled crossing your arms across your chest. “Now if you don’t mind I’ve got a shop to fucking run”

 Leaving both of them standing there you stormed back inside. Linda shot you a worried look.

 “Don’t worry about it Lin, just the two biggest pains in my ass but I’ve sorted it” you nodded as you pulled your hair into a messy bun getting back to work.

 The next couple of days had passed and it was boring without Angel or Miguel coming in to flirt with you, however they had both been blowing up your phone non stop. Texting them both telling them to meet at your house at 8pm. You were going to end this shit today and it was happening tonight.

 If they couldn't come into the coffee shop without being civil to each other then they both deserved what was coming. You were going to act as a mediator and you weren't letting them leave your house until they sorted their shit out.

 Miguel arrived first being punctual as always. You opened your door before he could knock and you waved to Nestor as he drove off.

 You were nervous having a man like Miguel Galindo in your home and you couldn't believe you hadn't invited him before. But there was no good enough reason before whereas now there is a perfect one.

 "Come in, make yourself comfortable" you gestured for Miguel to enter and he did so whilst buttoning his suit jacket. You had made coffee and had put it on the living room table. Miguel noticed there were 3 cups instead of 2 but he didn't say anything, instead plopping himself down on your sofa.

 "Why did you ask me over querida? Not that I'm complaining" Miguel poured himself a cup of coffee and poured you one out too.

 A knock on your door saved you from answering his question and you told him you'd be back in a second. Opening the door Angel Reyes was standing there wearing his red and black checkered shirt with some jeans. He looked delicious and you momentarily forgot why he was here.

 "Who is it?" Miguel's voice pulled you back to reality and you saw Angel clench his fists.

 "What the fuck is he doing here?" Angel questioned you.

 “Please just come in, for me?" You gave Angel puppy dog eyes and were not surprised when they worked.

 You both entered the living room and the tension could be cut with a knife.

 "For fucks sake" Miguel muttered as he held the bridge of his nose. "You have got to be kidding me".

 “Nope” you said, popping the p as you sat on the other sofa, grabbing the pillow as you sat crossed legged, trying to protect your dignity, in that moment you felt severely under dressed in your over-sized baggy Guns N Roses shirt and a pair of bright blue fluffy socks.

 “Right” you said taking a deep breath “this ends tonight, whatever beef you two have got going on you will sit and talk about it like grown adults and neither one of you will leave until it’s done. And if either of you raise your voice even a little bit I will fucking punch you”

 “Are you being like 100 percent serious right now?” Angel asked, staring into your eyes.

 “Deadly” you said no emotion in your voice “now talk, clear the air and if you manage to do that I will make it worth both of your time”

 "Fine you want us to clear the air then I'll start" Miguel sat forward and cracked his knuckles and turned his body to face Angel who was sitting on the sofa to the right of him. "If it's not your father fucking with my life it's your brother, and if it's not your brother it's you" Miguel pointed at Angel.

 “Me? And what did I do Mr Mighty Miguel Galindo?" You glared at Angel who held his hands up in defeat. "Sorry, what did I do Miguel?"

 "I saw her first" he told the Mayan. "You know I saw her first and still you continued to go in and flirt with her"

 "I'm not a fucking mind reader" Angel laughed. "I didn't know you saw her first, but to be honest if I did know it wouldn't have stopped me anyway" he shrugged.

 You were gobsmacked. The men didn't fall out over business. They fell out over a female.

 “So hold on a second” you said running your hand over your face. “None of this was over business and it was over me the whole damn time”

 “Yeah” they both shrugged as you took in the information.

 “I mean who wouldn’t want a goddess like you on their arm” Angel smirked.

 His words did something, your skin suddenly felt hot, like you were on fire. Shifting in your seat as both men stared at you.

 “Now that is something I can agree on” Miguel smiled leaning forward resting his arms on his knees “so mi dulce, now the truth has been laid out on the table, who do you choose? Me or him?”

 It’s like you forgot how to speak as the words got lodged in the back of your throat, you couldn’t really tell them you wanted both of them, could you?

 Just the thought alone made your skin tingle and a familiar heat between your legs. Every time you tried to speak the words wouldn’t fall off your tongue.

 “Urm..I...er” you stuttered.

 "I need some water" you managed to choke out before you abruptly stood up from where you sat and practically ran to your kitchen. You heard the chuckles of the two men and you knew you were in trouble.

 Downing a glass of water you felt a bit cooler but you were not ready to face them yet. You didn't need to be because they both entered your kitchen with their arms folded looking at you expectantly.

 "I don't have all night princesa" Miguel practically purred at you. He knew what he was doing and it was working. The effect the two men had on you was ridiculous and you didn't know how much longer you could last.

 Taking a deep breath you decided you would just be honest and tell them you wanted them both. You figured one of them would back down and give up but little did you know they had other plans.

 "To answer your question from earlier" you said "the choice is impossible and I've always been a greedy person, so I want you both". You didn't know where the sudden confidence came from but the truth was out now and there was nothing you could do about it.

 Angel was the first to make a move, literally taking two large strides until your back was pressed against the worktop.

 “I think we can work something out" Angel said, his tone husky as his fingers played with the hem of your shirt grazing against your soft skin.

 “And you did say if we worked things out that you would make it worth our time” Miguel smirked running his tongue across his bottom lip. “I mean you invite us round to sort this mess out and all your wearing is that shirt, that tattoo peaking out, you knew what you were doing princesa”

 Both men stood in front of you, grinning down with lustful looks in their eyes. They hadn’t even touched you yet and you were aching at the thought of both of them having their way with you, and there was that familiar feeling between your legs.

 “Well what are you waiting for” you giggled biting your bottom lip earning what you swore were growls from both of them.

 Miguel took your shirt off in one go and you cursed yourself for not wearing a bra and pants. They hadn't even properly touched you yet and your nipples were already hard begging to be sucked.

 As if he read your mind Angel took one nipple between his fingers and one in his mouth and sucked and rolled them gently. The feeling was magical and you could barely stand up.

 You pulled Miguel down to your face and smashed your lips against his, immediately putting your tongue in his mouth. You moaned into his mouth when he brought his hand up to your neck and wrapped his fingers gently around your throat.

 You managed to pull away from Miguel long enough to take his suit jacket off followed by his shirt leaving him in only his suit trousers. He was a sight for sore eyes.

 Reaching out you dragged a finger from his chest all the way down to the waistband of his trousers. You could tell he was hard just by looking at the solid shape in his pants. Not wanting to leave Angel out and wanting to touch him aswell you pulled his head away from your chest and discarded his shirt leaving him in nothing but his jeans.

 You couldn’t believe your luck, as you looked up at the men through your lashes, you literally had two of the most alpha males waiting to pleasure you and you wanted to tease them a bit more before you let them have their way with you.

 Jumping up so you were now sat on the work top, legs spread giving them a clear view of the prize they so desperately wanted. Running your hands down your body you squeezed your boobs.

 “Right enough play time princesa” Miguel growled as he threw you over his shoulder carrying you back to the living room. He wasted no time dropping you on the sofa.

 “Final chance to back out sweetheart” Angel said as he ran his fingers down your cheek “you sure this is what you want?”

 Biting your lip as you nodded sending them a pleading look, you were so turned on right now it hurt, squeezing your thighs together to try and release some pressure. Then Miguel pulled your legs apart, running his fingers across your core making you whimper at the sensation.

 The sound of a belt buckle dropping on the floor made you open your eyes to see Angel stood there now completely naked, your mouth watering at the sight of his thick cock.

 You waggled your forefinger at him gesturing for him to come closer. You were desperate to have his cock in your mouth and you didn't want to waste another second.

 Angel smirked at you shaking his head but nevertheless he obliged and he stood in front of you. You immediately took his dick in your hands pumping it a few times before opening your mouth and putting it in. He was big but you managed to get him all the way to the back of your throat even if you did choke on it a few times.

 He closed his eyes and grabbed a fistful of your hair encouraging you to keep going faster and deeper and you did.

 Whilst sucking Angels cock Miguel had planted his mouth on your clit and was now rolling his tongue across it causing you to moan on Angels dick. The vibration from your moan caused his dick to twitch in your mouth and you looked up at him and gave him a wink.

 Miguel was a pro when it came to eating you out. He used his tongue perfectly and within seconds you had your first orgasm of the night.

 Your screams were muffled with Angel still fucking your mouth, tears were streaming down your cheeks as well as saliva running down your chin.

 This was better than you had ever dreamed of and you knew by the end of it you would be completely spent.

 Suddenly Angel pulled out making you whimper.

 “Unless you want me to cum right now it’s for the best” he winked before nodding at Miguel, silently telling him it was his turn.

 Within seconds you now had Miguel’s dick in your mouth, using your hand to play with his balls whilst Angel slipped two fingers into your entrance, moaning at the feeling of being stretched out as he soon reached his knuckles, curling his fingers perfectly, hitting your g spot. You were still sensitive from your first orgasm and were honestly so close to another.

 Your breathing became erratic as both men continued with no signs of stopping.

 “That's it princesa” Miguel grunted “god you look so pretty with your lips wrapped around my cock, now the final question is who gets to be the first one to feel you wrapped around their dick?”

 There was the alpha-ness coming out to play. You pulled back slightly so you could talk.

 “Don’t know” you moaned as Angel continued fingering you “don’t care. Just need to be fucked”

 "So needy" Angel murmured.

 The two men looked at each other and seemingly decided between themselves as Angel removed his fingers from your soaking folds and lifted them up to his mouth tasting you.

 "Delicious" he said as he moved away from you, letting Miguel take his place.

 You expected Miguel to use his fingers but he lined up his cock at your entrance and looked at you for approval.

 "I'm on the pill" you told him and that was all the confirmation he needed. He sunk his cock deep into you and thrusted slowly at first but quickly picked up the pace. The sound of your bodies hitting against each other echoed around the room.

 Miguel pinned your hands above your head and hoisted your legs over his shoulders so he could go deeper if that was even possible. You were having the best fuck of your life so far but Angel was still to have his way with you.

 Angel was standing over you watching the pleasure on your face stroking his own cock. He looked amazing and you couldn't wait until his cock was deep inside you. He again took your nipple into his mouth gently licking it causing you to moan.

 “Shit” you whimpered “Miguel, oh god, please don’t stop”

 “Don’t plan on it” He panted as he thrust into you harder, his name falling off your tongue.

 You were being pushed closer and closer to that edge again and you loved it, looking up you watched Angel tug at himself watching you getting fucked senseless, his breathing becoming erratic. Without warning you screamed, moaned and whimpered as another orgasm washed over your leaving your legs shaking, you knew you didn’t have much more left in you as Miguel thrust one last time shooting his seed into you.

 “You got one more in you” Angel asked as he bit his lip as Miguel moved out of his way. “I’m not gonna go easy on you okay”

 “Okay” you whispered, feeling your eyes starting to drop.

 “Come on princesa keep your beautiful eyes open” Miguel whispered as he palmed your breasts as Angel pushed himself into you with ease.

 “God you feel so good” he grunted as he grabbed your hips no doubt leaving bruises in his wake.

 "Tell me what you want querida" Angel wanted to go fast and hard but he knew how exhausted you were so if you wanted slow and sensual he would oblige.

 "Fuck me harder Reyes" you panted and he did. He intertwined his fingers with yours bringing your knuckles to his mouth and kissing each of them gently. The gesture took you by surprise and you smiled up at him causing him to slow down his thrusts considerably.

 "I'm gonna cum if you keep looking at me like that” Angel said.

 "You've done so well tonight mi amor" Miguel praised you now stroking your hair whilst slowly circling your clit with his other hand. He knew you were close and so did Angel.

 "Cum for us" they both said in unison and you did, spilling your juices all over Angels cock. He followed soon after and admired his cum pouring from your folds with a proud smile on his face.

 "Let's get you all cleaned up" Angel said removing his dick from you and heading to your bathroom to get you a wet cloth to wipe yourself.

 All you could do was lay there, with a mix of both men’s cum and your own pooling onto the sofa, your breaths were heavy, and so were your eyes. You had never experienced a high as good as this and you weren’t one to shy away from turning blunts down.

 “You did amazing querida” Miguel whispered kissing your head. You didn’t even have the energy to reply so you grumbled as Angel returned with the wet cloth, gently he ran the cloth against your thighs as he traced your tattoo with his fingers.

 One of them retrieved your shirt from the kitchen and pulled it over your head. It was only 10pm and you kind of expected both of them to leave pretty soon but they surprised you as they pulled their boxers back on before Miguel scooped you up in his arms as he sat on the other end of the sofa as Angel brought you a mug of coffee he just made.

 So you were now snuggled in between both men, completely spent from the activities of the evening, your eyes were getting heavier as Angel played with your hair and Miguel massaged your feet.

 “You hungry Reyes?” Miguel asked Angel and that was the last thing you heard before you drifted off to sleep.

[dwellordream]

“...Today, most – though by no means all – free countries (along with a number of rather unfree ones) have shifted from mass conscription based militaries to professional, all-volunteer militaries. The United States, of course, made that shift in 1973 (along lines proposed by the 1969 Gates Commission). The shift to a professional military has always been understood to have involved risks – the classic(al) example of those risks being the Roman one: the creation of a semi-professional Roman army misaligned the interests of the volunteer soldiers with the voting citizens, resulting in the end (though a complicated process) in the collapse of the Republic and the formation of the Empire in what might well be termed a shift to ‘military rule’ as the chief commander of the republic (first Julius Caesar, then Octavian) seized power from the apparatus of civilian government (the senate and citizen assemblies).

It is in that context that ‘warrior’ – despite its recent, frustrating use by the United States Army – is an unfortunate way for soldiers (regardless of branch or country) to think of themselves. Encouraging soldiers to see themselves as ‘warriors’ means encouraging them to see their role as combatants as the foundational core of their identity. A Mongol warrior was a warrior because as an adult male Mongol, being a warrior was central to his gender-identity and place in society (the Mongols being a society, as common with Steppe nomads, where all adult males were warriors); such a Mongol remained a warrior for his whole adult life.

Likewise, a medieval knight – who I’d class as a warrior (remember, the distinction is on identity more than unit fighting) – had warrior as a core part of their identity. It is striking that, apart from taking religious orders to become a monk (and thus shift to an equally totalizing vocation), knights – especially as we progress through the High Middle Ages as the knighthood becomes a more rigid and recognized institution – do not generally seem to retire. They do not lay down their arms and become civilians (and just one look at the attitude of knightly writers towards civilians quickly answers the question as to why). Being a warrior was the foundation of their identity and so could not be disposed of. We could do the same exercise with any number of ‘warrior classes’ within various societies. Those individuals were, in effect born warriors and they would die warriors. In societies with meaningful degrees of labor specialization, to be a warrior was to be, permanently, a class apart.

Creating such a class apart (especially one with lots of weapons) presents a tremendous danger to civilian government and consequently to a free society (though it is also a danger to civilian government in an unfree society). As the interests of this ‘warrior class’ diverge from the interests of the rest of society, even with the best of intentions the tendency is going to be for the warriors to seek to preserve their interests and status with the tools they have, which is to say all of the weapons (what in technical terms we’d call a ‘failure of civil-military relations,’ civ-mil being the term for the relationship between civil society and its military).

The end result of that process is generally the replacement of civilian self-government with ‘warrior rule.’ In pre-modern societies, such ‘warrior rule’ took the form of governments composed of military aristocrats (often with the chiefest military aristocrat, the king, at the pinnacle of the system); the modern variant, rule by officer corps (often with a general as the king-in-all-but-name) is of course quite common. Because of that concern, it is generally well understood that keeping the cultural gap between the civilian and military worlds as small as possible is important to a free society.

Instead, what a modern free society wants are effectively civilians, who put on the soldier’s uniform for a few years, acquire the soldier’s skills and arts, and then when their time is done take that uniform off and rejoin civil society as seamlessly as possible (the phrase ‘citizen-soldier’ is often used represent this ideal). It is clear that, at least for the United States, the current realization of this is less than ideal. The endless pressure to ‘re-up‘ (or for folks to be stop-lossed) hardly help.

But encouraging soldiers (or people in everyday civilian life; we’ll come back to that in the last post in this series) to identify as warriors – individual, self-motivated combatants whose entire identity is bound up in the practice of war – does real harm to the actual goal of keeping the cultural divide between soldiers and civilians as small as possible. Observers both within the military and without have been shouting the alarm on this point for some time now, but the heroic allure of the warrior remains strong.

...But as I noted above, we’ve discussed on this blog already a lot of different military social structures (mounted aristocrats in France and Arabia, the theme and fyrd systems, the Spartans themselves, and so on). And they are very different and produce armies – because societies cannot help but replicate their own peacetime social order on the battlefield – that are organized differently, value different things and as a consequence fight differently. But focusing on (fictitious) ‘universal warriors’ also obscures another complex set of relationships to war and warfare: all of the civilians.

When we talk about the impact of war on civilians, the mind quite naturally turns to the civilian victims of war – sacked cities, enslaved captives, murdered non-combatants – and of course their experience is part of war too. But even in a war somehow fought entirely in an empty field between two communities (which, to be clear, no actual war even slightly resembles this ‘Platonic’ ideal war; there is a tendency to romanticize certain periods of military history, particularly European military history, this way, but it wasn’t so), it would still shape the lives of all of the non-combatants in that society (this is the key insight of the ‘war and society’ school of military history).

To take just my own specialty, warfare in the Middle Roman Republic wasn’t simply a matter for the soldiery, even when the wars were fought outside of Italy (which they weren’t always kept outside!). The demand for conscripts to fill the legions bent and molded Roman family patterns, influencing marriage and child-bearing patterns for both men and women. With so many of the males of society processed through the military, the values of the army became the values of society not only for the men but also for women as well. Women in these societies did not consider themselves uninterested bystanders in these conflicts: by and large they had a side and were on that side, supporting the war effort by whatever means.

And even in late-third and early-second century (BC) Rome, with its absolutely vast military deployments, the majority of men (and all of the women) were still on the ‘homefront’ at any given time, farming the food, paying the taxes, making the armor and weapons and generally doing the tasks that allowed the war machine to function, often in situations of considerable hardship. And in the end – though the exact mechanisms remain the subject of debate – it is clear that the results of Rome’s victory induced significant economic instability, which was also a part of the experience of war.

In short, warriors were not the only people who mattered in war. The wartime social role of a warrior was not only different from that of a soldier, it was different than that of the working peasant forced to pay heavy taxes, or to provide Corvée labor to the army. It was different from the woman whose husband went off to war, or whose son did, or who had to keep up her farm and pay the taxes while they did so. It was different for the aristocrat than for the peasant, for the artisan than for the farmer. Different for the child than for the adult.

And yet for a complex society (one with significant specialization of labor) to wage war efficiently, all of these roles were necessary. To focus on only the warrior (or the soldier) as the sole interesting relationship in warfare is to erase the indispensable contributions made by all of these folks, without which the combatant could not combat.

It would be worse yet, of course, to suggest that the role of the warrior is somehow morally superior to these other roles (something Pressfield does explicitly, I might add, comparing ‘decadent’ modern society to supposedly superior ‘warrior societies’ in his opening videos). To do so with reference to our modern professional militaries is to invite disastrous civil-military failure. To suggest, more deeply, that everyone ought to be in some sense a ‘warrior’ in their own occupation sounds better, but – as we’ll see in the last essay of this series – leads to equally dark places.

A modern, free society has no need for warriors; the warrior is almost wholly inimical to a free society if that society has a significant degree of labor specialization (and thus full-time civilian specialists). It needs citizens, some of whom must be, at any time, soldiers but who must never stop being citizens both when in uniform and afterwards.”

- Bret Devereaux, “The Universal Warrior, Part I: Soldiers, Warriors, and…”

[tackyink]

So, uh. It's 3 am and I have come after reading the rest of Anomaly in one sitting. So ideas are not ordered at all

I am tearing uppp ;-; idk where to begin,, just everything was so right aaaa

I really liked Mako's character development and the relationships with other characters :)) Kurama was obvious, but it didn't make it worse in any way, I am very soft for the two. Yusuke is another obvious, but by far my favourite platonic dynamic, more so at the last chapters (I will get onto those in another paragraph) they tease the hell of each other, share hardships and are there for each other in happy moments too,, I really really loved their interactions! As for Hiei, not too much of mushy things (obviously, but I really liked how low-key was their friendship(? acquaintance (?? they are in the middle of the two words, enough to have Hiei on character). The one I didn't expect was the Kuwabara-Makoto friendship? Like, I read how they were awkward in Shiori's wedding (queen) but I feel it was really natural, like when you are at the beginning of a friendship and still don't know how to make conversation,, and the next chapters only enforced that :)) it made me very happy somehow!

As for the girls, I have a lot of things to say! They were so funny in the DT arc and you captured their character so well during and after it, I felt it was impossible for Makoto to stay away completely. I feel that if they were real they would be the type of people who just suck others into their orbit without being overbearing, and they made such a nice mix! Of course with their differences and not too close (like Fumi and Mako, for example!) but just enough to feel good while reading their interactions ♡

About Fumi's decision to swore off men, you go girl it's best choice lmao and for Chizuru, damn jealous

The last two chapters were too much for my poor heart, it was beating like crazy while I was laughing. Chapter 25 is such a Mess™ (plot-like I mean, poor Mako can't have a rest) and it was in tune with the anime/manga Mess™ also accidental marriage proposal + accidental confession? Sign me up. The chapter I enjoyed the most by far and that is saying a lot because there isn't a single chapter I haven't enjoyed. But that sweet scene between Mako and Kurama when he appears in chapter 26 and the proposal to go to Makai together? That made me mush and melt in my bed. Repeatedly. I have not simped so hard for a pairing like them.

Honorable mentions: 1. Mako being petty as hell is my new religion and I shall follow through. The fox plushy. I will never forget. Also, reminding your half-boyfriend he stood you up/making puns about stolen things AND nagging him because he cannot end a fight without needing a hospital? True gf material/j

2. The part when mako went to Kyoto again & the encounter with the fox demon and the will-o-wisp is one of my favorite scenes too. I don't know why, it just is.

3. I live for Doraemon crumbs. I love the cat.

I don't think I have anymore to say for now JAJAJA if I remember anything I will come back, but for now I will go cry into my bed because there isn't more Mako&Kurama-- /hj

Once again, best wishes (>︿<｡)♡

I woke up in the middle of the night, saw this at 4 AM and proceeded to fall unconscious again.

Writing Kurama’s relationship with Mako was fun because there’s this person in a very similar situation to him but with a ridiculous age gap and a totally different outlook on life, and I like that what sparked the whole thing was that both thought that the other was really fucking weird and they wanted to know more. I seriously didn’t know how the thing was going to pan out. I feel like Anomaly wrote itself and the characters held the wheel the whole time. As I said, same applies to Yusuke. I thought Mako would dismiss him as an idiot and he’d avoid her because of her personality, but Yusuke’s such an open person and Mako’s so unused to not being judged that they just. Clicked. (This is canon btw: after Anomaly, Yusuke’s roping Mako into helping with his Spirit Detective-lite cases in exchange for ramen. He did it at first when he was stumped and Kurama wasn’t available, but now he does it whenever he feels like it because he relishes in knowing he has the power to summon her from the mountains. She complains all the time but goes anyway.) I was a little sad that in the end Hiei didn’t show up much in the fic because he didn’t cross paths with Mako many times. I think they have this sort of distant respect for one another and they’re like, this is not the first nor second person I would go to for help, but if shit hits the fan the other’s going to be there and that’s what matters. Hiei’s opinion of Makoto hinged on Kurama’s (“I respect this guy and he seems to respect her”) and Yukina’s (“they get along”) own impression of her. Yes to the observation about her and Kuwabara! They’re still learning how to talk to each other. But they’re trying! Look at them fumbling their way through a social situation!

Makoto was a fool for even thinking she could escape the grasp of the other girls. She’s one of them now, whether she likes it or not, and I like how clear that was when she was all worried about Yusuke possibly dying again and asked Atsuko for a hug, and Atsuko just jumped at the opportunity. This is her kid too. She didn’t know what to do with the first kid, much less a second, but she’s going to take her anyway.

Fumi/Shizuru is the true power couple of the fic and it happens in the background because otherwise they’d take over the story.

I was so unsure about those extra chapters. I’m always afraid to touch Anomaly because I think I finished it the best way possible and I’m terrified of messing it up by adding more to it. I wish I had the drive right now to work on the sequel(s) and other extra chapters I had in mind, but for now and as long I’m lost in the Grand Line, I’m satisfied that you find it satisfying. <3

1. Hey, Kurama’s a little shit, so if he can dish it, he can take it. This is a balanced relationship.

2. I loved writing that part! Everything is told from Makoto’s perspective, but this was purely her part of the story, not Yusuke’s, and it shows in the general feel of the chapter. I don’t know how to say it, but it’s very Mako? She has a way to look at creepy and make it feel natural instead of scary.

3. Look. Mako picks up on other people’s thoughts and feelings, not hers. This cat loves her so much that little Mako got a vision from him before they met, that's why she knew where to find him. He trips her all the time but that's because he's a tsundere. Can’t let her go soft.

Thank you so much for your messages, you’ve made my day again. （*’∀’人）♥ Take care!!

[avelera]

A few fun notes I’ve picked up on the Crusades, as would be relevant to Nicky and Joe, courtesy of leaving Great Courses lectures on in the background while doing other stuff (meaning if you’re a huge fan of the history of the Crusades you definitely know more than me):

- Nicolò di Genova could have been one of several, not necessarily mutually exclusive things before embarking on the Crusade - the second son of a wealthy/noble family (it would explain how he could afford the journey and weapons/armor), a poor brigand (one reason the Pope called the Crusades was to redirect European infighting and banditry) and/or a devout Christian who was spiritually moved by Pope Urban II’s call to arms. The devout option does not necessarily preclude either of the previous two possibilities, because the Pope promised total forgiveness of ALL sins (before and during) committed in one’s life and during the Crusades, so those who may have turned to banditry out of desperation but felt guilty for their immortal souls could have also been lured by the promise of spiritual reward, not just material reward.

- I’m going to go out on a limb and say Nicky was part of the Princes’ Crusade in 1096, the official one that Pope Urban wanted and I distinguish because there was a thing called the Peasants Crusade before of people who rose to the call but were, unfortunately, all non-fighting men, peasants, kids, fanatics, etc. and it went... badly. Very badly. The “crusaders” themselves (which means “cross bearers” btw) were pretty awful and killed a lot of innocent people on their way to the Holy land, and then they were wiped out when they got to Turkey anyway, and likely Nicky would be aware of these events (or even saw the piled bodies on his way to Jerusalem, if you want to go for a dramatic scene). 

I’m guessing Nicky was with the Princes’ Crusade because he actually got to the Holy Land AND again, because he’s got armor (according to the comic flashbacks) which was pretty damn expensive. (A Watsonian rationale, the Doylist one is that Rucka was going for the image of foreign knights fighting in full plate and may not have thought out all the class and wealth implications of them having that armor). Oh, and Nicky if he traveled with the Princes’ Crusade in 1096 would have spent some time in Constantinople (November-April) while on his way there. 

- The Crusaders captured Antioch before they made it to Jerusalem. I’m not sure The Old Guard clarifies which battle he and Joe first encountered each other in, it might have been Antioch, but I’m going to say it wasn’t, for several reasons. One, because of the credits that lists 1099, the year after, when Jerusalem fell, which was the last year of the First Crusade. (The other famous crusade, the Second Third Crusade of Orlando Bloom’s “Kingdom of Heaven” fame isn’t for almost 50 years after that.) And further, while it’s possible that Nicky fought Joe in Antioch before the Crusaders even made it to Jerusalem, but the push-pin in the map is also in Jerusalem and it’s where the most famous events of the First Crusade happened (and I’m not sure Rucka would be able to resist), so just from a dramatic standpoint too I think they probably fought in Jerusalem. 

- To just couch it in a scene for a second, the Crusaders seeing Jerusalem for the first time was, by all accounts, breathtaking. It was a profoundly spiritual moment for these people who had taken up arms to fight for their God and traveled for years across strange lands and lost many of their compatriots to the fighting in Antioch as well as starvation/thirst/exhaustion/disease along the way, to reach this holiest of holy sites in the Christian canon. 

- Unfortunately, the sight of Jerusalem might be the last moment of beauty we can expect from the European Crusaders. The accounts of the sack of Jerusalem are horrifying. The Crusaders laid siege to Jerusalem for just over a month, and once inside the gates, they massacred every single person in the city, until blood flowed through the streets.

- (Side note: if Nicky didn’t arrive with the main Crusader force coming over land through Turkey, he probably arrived instead with Genoese merchants who also brought the supplies needed to make the siege engines that broke through the walls, so it is possible Nicky was with them and came by boat, in which case he may feel a different kind of guilt for the atrocities that followed.)

- Having claimed the city, the Crusaders established the Kingdom of Jerusalem which would endure just barely over a hundred years. There would be constant fighting between Seljuks and the Crusaders throughout that century, complicated alliances between the Crusaders and the Seljuk’s rivals, the Fatimid Caliphate. Basically, you’d need to be a scholar or read something by a scholar who understands this much better than me to unwind it all. 

When did Joe and Nicky meet in all of this? Is the Siege of Jerusalem the setting of their first mutual murder of one another? Or did they meet at a later battle? A lot of that is up to the writer, because based on the line about how they’d been taught to hate one another, one could take away that they’d been on either side of the conflict for a while, at least long enough to build up some animosity towards the other side, before they encountered each other. Or, one could take the line to mean that Nicky and Joe met early in the conflict, and had only the hatred they’d been taught driving them to fight. 

Certainly the clash of the Franks, as the Seljuks called them (a word that is still found as a root for “foreigner” in Arabic to this day) or the Saracens, as the Christians called them, was a moment that was not, shall we say, hampered by sympathy on either side. The men of the other army must have been foreign and terrifying to both sides, both saw the other as infidels to the true faith, both had more or less a free pass by their religion and circumstances to not even see the other side as human (but, let’s remember, the Europeans were the invaders and the atrocities they committed are too lengthy and horrifying to go into here). 

If Nicky and Joe had stayed in the Levant throughout the events of the following centuries of Crusades (perhaps together now? perhaps still on opposite sides for some time?) they could have been caught up in a rich and complicated world of the clash of civilizations between Europe and the Middle East, Christianity and Islam, met major historical figures like Richard the Lionheart and Saladin (or, An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub if we’re being accurate) the latter of which is one of the greatest examples of chivalry the world has ever known, to an extent that was hailed even by Europeans (seriously, it’s some Hollywood-level stuff, Saladin is amazing and would be the obvious hero in any historical fiction set during the Second or Third Crusade, I could see Yusuf sticking around just to serve him and Nicky even switching sides to do so, especially compared to the leadership on the European side and bastards like Raynald of Châtillon, but again, for a fun intro to these events watch “Kingdom of Heaven” with a heavy grain of salt). 

A few final notes, before this becomes its own lecture on the Crusades. With regards to homophobia, it might not have been quite as present as many modern readers would assume. And you might be surprised by who would have been more OK with it. 

- On the European side, homosexuality was a sin, sure, but pretty much all non-procreative sexual practices were a sin and it wasn’t as fiercely persecuted in the early 11th century as it would come to be later. This is not to say homosexuality was celebrated, but the punishment you’d receive was basically a civil punishment for being caught, needing to do penance for a few months to a year, not execution or torture or anything like that. 

- And let’s remember throughout history, men have had few limitations enforced on their sex lives as long as they also fulfilled their duties to their families and the Church and that going on Crusade meant all of your sins were wiped away, before, during, and after (which is probably what led to the uninhibited nature of the atrocities committed by the Crusaders and I mean seriously, even the Pope who ordered the Crusades was horrified when he heard what happened). 

So what I’m saying is, even if someone like Nicky was worried about going to Hell for having sex with men (and really, it would not be the #1 sin to be concerned about by any means in those times) he wouldn’t have to worry specifically while on Crusade. He’s in the clear at least as far as his immortal soul goes, though social censure could be another matter (assuming everyone else even cared about social censure too). Actually, it would be funny if Nicky’s generally relaxed demeanor in the modern era around murders and stuff is because as far as he’s concerned, he’s still got that Papal order saying all his sins are cleared because he joined the Crusades, lol. 

- Meanwhile, on Joe’s side, we’re still in a time period that’s called the Islamic Golden Age where social strictures are relatively relaxed compared to what they’ll be at other points in Islamic history (sweeping generalization! please take it as such!) but it’s worth noting that Abu Nuwas, one of the most famous and acclaimed Islamic poets, wrote a ton of love poetry in the 700s and a not inconsiderable portion of that love poetry was devoted to homosexual love. Meaning, yeah, Yusuf wouldn’t just be able to quote poetry at Nicolò, he could quote specifically gay poetry at Nicolò, from one of his culture’s most renowned poets. 

Similar to Europe, if my research is correct, homosexuality was pretty accepted, at least it’s not a high-priority punishable crime for men of privilege during this era the way it would be in some later eras. I don’t want to expound much more on Joe’s side because it’s definitely the one I have less knowledge of and authority to speak about but I will leave you, if you’ve made it this far, with the fact that being two men in love with each other when they met was much less of a serious issue than being two infidels (to the other’s religion) would have been, from a social standpoint.

[ofthelibertine]

did [DIAMOND BELLEVUE] chase one of seven sins seven miles down the coast? originally from [NEW YORK CITY], the [22] [CISFEMALE] is a [SUPERMODEL] and has lived in the key for [THREE MONTHS]. [SHE] is suppose to call [THE MEADOWS] home, but there is always temptation lurking between the streets and the ocean that keeps [HER] from heading back. sinners and saints take many forms, but they look like [ZENDAYA] and on their way to make decisions, good and bad, they always seem to sway to the beat of [DRUNK WITH MY FRIENDS BY ASHNIKKO].

Trigger Warnings: eating disorder, bipolar disorder, NAS, drugs, alcohol, underage drugs, underage drinking

- B A S I C -

Full Name: Diamond Nathalia Bellevue Nickname(s): Dime, Dia, Di Age: 22 Occupation: Supermodel, but she also runs her own online beauty and fashion shop. Birthday: December 15th Aries: Sagittarius Sexual Orientation: Bisexual Neighborhood: The Meadows

- F A M I L Y -

Father: Winston Bellevue Mother: Betty Bellevue Siblings: Four older siblings (all adopted) Children: She has a 13-month-old son, named Dante.

- B I O -

She is originally from New York City. Diamond was born to a teenaged drug addict and was willingly put up for adoption the second she was born, only to be adopted a few short months later by Winston and Betty Bellevue - an older couple in their late forties who hailed from London, England. They had just moved to the Upper Eastside of Manhattan a few years prior, along with their four other adopted children. Her father was one of the top cosmetic surgeons in the state of New York, while her mother was a leading patent attorney, so they were often kept quite busy with work. Despite that, their work didn't stop them from being really attentive parents to their children. Dime had a great relationship with her parents, and though her siblings were significantly older than she was, she was still quite close to each and every one of them. That said, there were still some clashing personalities and views of opinion from time to time among the family - they weren't perfect, after all - but overall, everyone got along fine. There weren't any disputes that didn't go unforgiven for too long, which was nice. She had a very serious habit of shutting out her family, or even withdrawing completely for a while, as her work or mental state allowed it to happen...but her family eventually reeled her back in and she was grateful to them for that. They really were her rock, at the end of the day.

Despite being adopted by a wonderful and loving family, that did not erase the damage done to her by her addict birth mother. Dime was born with NAS (Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome) and this is believed to be the leading cause of her overall mental illness and eating disorder and later on, her own drug addiction later down the road.

When she was just toddler she was diagnosed with ARFID - she'd always had an aversion to food, starting from infancy and that never changed as she grew older. It worried her parents, because there were many times when she just wouldn't eat anything for days - refused all kinds of food - and it would end up with her in the hospital, being force-fed through a feeding tube, lest she starve. Her childhood diagnosis of ARFID has since turned into a full blown and rather serious eating disorder that she is still constantly battling to this day. When she turned seven, she was officially diagnosed with Bipolar, which she had apparently inherited from her birth mother also. The diagnose did not come as a huge shock to her family, since Diamond had always had very extreme mood swings - one minute she would be incredibly social and rambunctiously hyper, talking people's ears off and the next she would go very quiet and closed off and sink into a very noticeable depression. So by the time she was in middle school, she was taking meds and seeing therapists frequently, which was...tiresome to say the least. Despite her rather poor mental and physical health, Diamond still led a pretty normal life in Manhattan. She was a major hobbyist, even as a child, and so she was always bouncing from one activity to another, easily bored with things once she'd mastered it. She was always wanting to try and learn new things. Dime took up dancing, vocal lessons, piano and violin lessons, and dabbled in painting, scrapbooking, journaling, photography, needlework...you name it, she's very likely tried it at least once. Her interests in dancing, painting and photography were still strong, especially dancing. At the age of five her parents put her in her first dance class and she fell in love with it. She learned ballet first but quickly grew to love contemporary hip-hop the best and delved right into it. She still danced today, and could have gotten a full ride to Juilliard if it weren't for her modeling career taking off as quickly as it had. She was first introduced to modeling at the age of nine, when she was scouted while in the mall with her mother, and after getting both her parents' consent, Dime was allowed to be signed on to the agency and soon she began work as a child model. Child modeling soon turned into full-time as soon as she turned sixteen and by the age of nineteen she was at the top of her stardom. With her parents’ naively trusting that she would be well looked after, Diamond moved out of her parents’ home at sixteen, once she began making really good money off her modeling, and into an apartment with several other young models - five others, to be precise. So it was crowded, with it being only a three bedroom place, but they managed. The apartment building was full of other models who lived in various apartments, women and men alike, and soon these people because her ‘crowd’.

They partied together, slept together and fasted together. Fights were also not an uncommon occurrence among the models, since the industry was known to be quite competitive and brutally cutthroat. Within her first year of living with the other models, she became heavily addicted to narcotics and alcohol - it was ridiculously easy for her to get addicted, too, since she was predisposed to it from her birth. Sadly, in her new social circle, drugs and alcohol ran rampant at parties, even to the underaged.

It didn’t take long before she stopped taking her meds altogether and stopped going to therapy sessions, and instead Diamond submersed herself deep into her new life. Outside of modeling, when she wasn’t working, she often spent her nights out with her fellow models - partying, drinking, doing drugs and having a lot of fun and a lot of sex and she grew further and further away from her family. A family that she still loved with all of her being but whom she rarely saw anymore. She let the lifestyle pretty much consume her life, to the point where her world became a permanent sort of blur; she was rarely sober. Just shy of turning 20, Diamond met an older man named Ivan, who worked as an up and coming actor. He lived in Los Angeles but had been in New York shooting a film. The two had ended up bumping into each other at a party and had hit it off and began dating shortly thereafter. It would prove to be a very short-lived relationship - lasting only a few months, just long enough for Ivan's film to finish and for Diamond to fall pregnant. Unsurprisingly, Ivan flipped the hell out when she told him the news and he immediately fled back to California with his tail between his legs, wanting nothing to do with the baby. Deep down, Diamond couldn't really blame him - his career was just getting off the ground, same as hers and becoming a parent was a total derailment of his plans. As a young working woman herself, Diamond understood that...but she was no less pleased about it. After four years of living on her own, away from her parents, Diamond returns home - not really knowing what else to do, now that she was knocked up. Thankfully, her family welcomed her back with open arms. No one was anymore thrilled with the news of her pregnancy than she or Ivan were, especially given her obvious addiction to drugs, but they were far more supportive with her decision to keep the baby. However, her parents had insisted that she go to rehab and get clean and get back on her meds, first - for the sake of both her and their unborn grandchild - and though she initially fought them on it, Dime had agreed to go in the end. She ended up spending three months in rehab, getting clean and sober and getting back onto her meds and starting up therapy once again. It was an arduous process, but one she wouldn’t regret. When she welcomed her son, Dante - with a clear mind and a heart filled with nothing but love for the infant boy that she cradled in her arms - she’d felt immense relief that she had listened and had gone through the program. A year later and still clean and living with her parents in Upper Eastside Manhattan, while raising her son and still working full-time as a pretty well known supermodel, Dime made the rash decision to buy a beach house down in Key West, Florida. For her, her son and her family when they needed a place away from hustle and bustle of the city. She loved New York City, it was her home and where she worked, but she didn't want to raise her son there, at least not solely. Their Manhattan residence would always be there as their primary home, but a vacation house in the Keys sounded rather nice.

- W A N T E D   C O N N E C T I O N S -

OLDEST (ADOPTED) SIBLINGS - She is the youngest of five, and all of the Bellevue children are adopted so ANY ethnicity will work. (age ranges: 26-40)

BEST FRIEND(S)

Casual Friend(s)

Bad Influences

CLUB / BAR HOPPING BUDDIES - people she can rely on to always be up for going out drinking / dancing with

DANCING OR WORKOUT BUDDIES - She loves to go dancing (she’s a trained dancer) and working out, either at the gym or going on hikes and long walks, so it would be fun to have someone she can go with.

Fellow Models that she’s possibly worked with in the past.

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Rivals / Enemies / Frenemies

Neighbors of Silverwood Terrace

Babysitter / Nanny / Daycare - for Dante

LOVE INTERESTS AND / FLINGS & ONE-NIGHTERS - She’s got a thing for older men, so it would be fun to explore that a bit, in either a serious or casual fashion.

[star-anise]

why would your social environment affect if you identify as a woman or nb?

I don’t know if you meant it to be, but this is a delightful question. I am going to be a complete nerd for 2k+ words at you.

“Gender” is distinct from “sex” because it’s not a body’s physical characteristics, it’s how society classifies and interprets that body. Sex is “That person has a vagina.” Gender is “This is a blend of society’s expectations about what bodies with vaginas are like, social expectations of how people with vaginas do or might or should act, behave, and feel, the actual lived experiences of people with vaginas, and a twist of lemon for zest.” Concepts of gender and what is “manly” and “womanly” can vary a lot. They’re social values, like “normal” or “legal” or “beautiful”, and they vary all the time. How well you fit your gender role depends a lot on how “gender” is defined.

800 years ago in Europe the general perception was that women were sinful, sensual, lustful people who required frequent sex and liked watching bloodsport. 200 years ago, the British aristocracy thought women were pure, innocent beings of moral purity with no sexual desire who fainted at the sight of blood. These days, we think differently in entirely new directions.

But this gets even more complicated, in part because human experience is really diverse and society’s narratives have to account for that. So 200 years ago, those beliefs about femininity being delicate and dainty and frail only really applied to women with aristocratic lineages, and “the lower classes” of women were believed to be vulgar, coarse, sexual, and earthy, which “explained” why they performed hard physical labor or worked as prostitutes.

Being trans or nonbinary isn’t just or even primarily about what characteristics you want your body to have. It’s about how you want to define yourself and be interpreted and interacted with by other people.

The writer Sylvia Plath lived 1932-1963, and she said:

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars–to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording–all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.”

She was from upper-middle-class Massachusetts, the child of a university professor. A lot of those things she was “prohibited” from doing weren’t things each and every woman was prohibited from doing; they were things women of her class weren’t allowed to do. The daughters and sisters and wives of sailors and soldiers, women who worked in hotels and ran rooming houses, barmaids and sex workers, got to anonymously and invisibly observe those men, after all. They just couldn’t do it at the same time they tried to meet the standards educated Bostonians of the 1950s had for nice young women.

Failure to understand how diverse womanhood is has always been one of feminism’s biggest weaknesses. The Second Wave of feminism was started mostly by prosperous university-educated white women, since they were the people with the time and money and resources to write and read books and attend conferences about “women’s issues”. And they assumed that their issues were female issues. That they were the default of femaleness, and could assume every woman had roughly the same experience as them.

So, for example, middle-class white women in post-WWII USA were expected to stay home all the time and look after their children. Feminists concluded that this was isolating and oppressive, and they’d like the freedom to pursue lives, careers, and interests outside of the home. They vigorously pursued the right to be freed from their domestic and maternal duties.

But in their society, these experiences were not generally shared by Black and/or poor women, who, like their mothers, did not have the luxury of spending copious amounts of leisure time with their children; they had to work to earn enough money to survive on, which meant working on farms, in factories, or as cooks, maids, or nannies for rich white women who wanted the freedom to pursue lives outside the home. They tended to feel that they would like to have the option of staying home and playing with their babies all day. 

This is not to say none of the first group enjoyed domestic lives, or that none of the second group wanted non-domestic careers; it’s just that the first group formed the face and the basic assumptions of feminism, and the second group struggled to get a seat at the table.

There’s this phenomenon called “cultural feminism” that’s an attitude that crops up among feminists from time to time (or grows on them, like fungus) that holds that women have a “feminine essence”, a quasi-spiritual “nature” that is deeply distinct from the “masculine essence” of men. This is one of the concepts powering lesbian separatism: the idea that because women are so fundamentally different from men, a society of all women will be fundamentally different in nature from a society that includes men.

But, well, the problem cultural feminism generally has is with how it achieves its definition of “female nature”. The view tends to be that women are kinder, more moral, more collectivist, more community-minded, and less prone to violence. 

And cultural feminists tend to HATE people who believe in the social construction of gender, because we tend to cross our arms and go, “Nah, sis, that’s a frappe of misused statistics and The Angel In the House with some wishful thinking as a garnish. That’s how you feel about what womanhood is. It’s fair enough for you, but you’re trying to apply it to the entire human species. That’s got less intellectual rigor and sociological validity than my morning oatmeal.” Hence the radfem insistence that gender theorists like me SHUT UP and gender quite flatly DOESN’T EXIST. It’s a MADE-UP TERM, and people should STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. (And go back to taking about immutable, naturally-occuring phenomena, one supposes, like the banking system and Western literary canon.)

Because seriously, when you look at real actual women, you will see that some of us can be very selfish, while others are altruistic; some think being a woman means abhorring all violence forever, and others think being a woman means being willing to fight and die to protect the people you love. As groups men and women have different average levels of certain qualities, but it’s not like we don’t share a lot in common. The distribution of “male” and “female” traits doesn’t tend to mean two completely separate sets of characteristics; they tend to be more like two overlapping bell curves.

So, like I said, I grew up largely in rural, working-class Western Canadian society. My relatives tend to be tradesmen like carpenters, welders, or plumbers, or else ranchers and farmers. I was raised by a mother who came of age during the big push for Women’s Lib. So in the culture in which I was raised, it was very normal and in some ways rewarded (though in other ways punished) for women to have short hair, wear flannel and jeans, drive a big truck, play rough contact sports, use power tools, pitch in with farmwork, use guns, and drink beer. “Traditional femininity” was a fascinating foreign culture my grandmother aspired to, and I loved nonsense like polishing the silver (it’s a very satisfying pastime) but that was just another one of my weird hobbies, like sewing fairy clothes out of flower petals and collecting toy horses.

Within the standards of the society I was raised in, I am a decently feminine woman. I’m obviously not a “girly girl”, someone who wears makeup and dresses in ways that privilege beauty over practicality, but I have a long ponytail of hair and when I go to Mark’s Work Wearhouse, I shop in the women’s section. We know what “butch” is and I ain’t it.

But through my friendships and my career, I’ve gotten experiences among cultures you wouldn’t think would be too different–we’re all still white North Americans!–but which felt bizarre and alien, and ate away at the sense of self I’d grown up in. In the USA’s northeast, the people I met had the kind of access to communities with social clout, intellectual resources, and political power I hadn’t quite believed existed before I saw them. There really were people who knew politicians and potential employers socially before they ever had to apply to a job or ask for political assistance; there were people who really did propose projects to influential businessmen or academics at cocktail parties; they really did things like fundraise tens of thousands of dollars for a charity by asking fifty of their friends to donate, or start a business with a $2mil personal loan from a relative.

And in those societies, femininity was so different and so foreign. I’d grown up seeing femininity as a way of assigning tasks to get the work done; in these new circles, it was performative in a way that was entirely unique and astounding to me. A boss really would offer you a starting salary $10k higher than they might have if you wore high heels instead of flats. You really would be more likely to get a job if you wore makeup. And your ability to curate social connections in the halls of power really was influenced by how nice of a Christmas party you could throw. These women I met were being held, daily, to a standard of femininity higher than that performed by anyone in my 100 most immediate relatives.

So when girls from Seven Sisters schools talked about how for them, dressing how I dressed every day (jeans, boots, tee, button-up shirt, no makeup, no hair product) was “bucking gendered expectations” and “being unfeminine”, I began to feel totally unmoored. When I realized that I, who absolutely know only 5% as much about power tools and construction as my relatives in the trades, was more suited to take a hammer and wade in there than not just the “empowered” women but the self-professed “handy” men there, I didn’t know how to understand it. I felt like I was… a woman who knew how to do carpentry projects, not “totally butch” the way some people (approvingly) called me.

And, well, at home in Alberta I was generally seen as a sweet and gentle girl with an occasional stubborn streak or precocious moment, but apparently by the standards of Southern states like Georgia and Alabama I am like, 100x more blunt, assertive, and inconsiderate of men’s feelings than women typically feel they have to be.

And this is still all just US/Canadian white women.

And like I said, after years of this, I came home (from BC, where I encountered MORE OTHER weird and alien social constructs, though generally more around class and politics than gender) to Alberta, and I went to what is, for Alberta, a super hippy liberal church, and I helped prepare the after-service tea among women with unstyled hair and no makeup  who wore jeans and sensible shoes, and listened to them talk about their work in municipal water management and ICU nursing, and it felt like something inside my chest slid back into place, because I understood myself as a woman again, and not some alien thing floating outside the expectations of the society I was in with a chestful of opinions no one around me would understand, suddenly all made sense again.

I mean, that’s by no means an endorsement for aspirational middle class rural Alberta as the ideal gender utopia. (Alberta is the Texas of Canada.) I just felt comfortable inside because it’s the culture where I found a definition of myself and my gender I could live with, because its boundaries of what’s considered “female” were broad enough to hold all the parts of me I felt like I needed to express. I have a lot of friends who grew up here, or in families like mine, and don’t feel at all happy with its gender boundaries. And even as I’m comfortable being a woman here, I still want to push and transform it, to make it even more feminist and politically left and decolonized.

TERFs try to claim that trans and nonbinary people reinforce the gender identity, but in my experience, it’s feminists who claim male and female are immutable and incompatible do that. It’s trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people who, simply by performing their genders in public, make people realize just how bullshit innate theories of gender are.. Society is going to want to gender them in certain ways and involve them in certain dynamics (”Hey ladies, those fellas, amirite?”) and they’re going, “Nope. Not me. Cut it out.” I’ve seen a lot of cis people who will quietly admit they do think men and women are different because that’s just reality, watch someone they know transition, and suddenly go, “Oh my god, I get it now.”

Like yes, this is me being coldly political and thinking about people as examples to make a political point. Everyone’s valid and can do what they want, but some things are just easier for potential converts to wrap their minds around.. “I’m sorting through toys to give to Shelly’s baby. He probably won’t want a princess crown, huh?” “I actually know several people who were considered boys when they were babies and never got one, and are making up for all their lost princess crown time now as adults. You never know what he’ll be into when he grows up.” “…Okay, point. I’ll throw it in there.” Trans and enby people disrupt gender in a really powerful back-of-the-brain way where people suddenly see how much leeway there is between gender and sex.

I honestly believe supporting trans and enby people and queering gender until it’s a macrame project instead of a spectrum are how we’ll get to a gender-free utopia. I think cultural feminism is just the same old shit, inverted. (Confession: in my head, I pronounce “cultural” with emphasis on the “cult” part.) 

I think feminism is like a lot of emergency response groups: Our job is to put ourselves out of a job. It’s not a good thing if gender discrimination is still prevalent and harmful 200 years from now! Obviously we’re not there yet and calls to pack it in and go home are overrated, but as the problem disappears into its solution, we have to accept that our old ways of looking at the world have to shift.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Hell is For Children: Animorphs as Children’s Lit

[Guest post from Cates!]

So a couple of months ago Bug asked me to write a post about why Animorphs is Middle Grade/Children’s Fiction, not Young Adult. Since she asked, I’ve read several wonderful posts from other people questioning or explaining what the difference is between Middle Grade and Young Adult, where Animorphs fits, and why it matters. Here’s my two cents as a children’s literature scholar.

To start, Animorphs’ 20,000-30,000 word count per book is a big hint it’s not YA fiction. Obviously, a book with a low word count is not automatically a children’s book, and a book with a high word count is not automatically a book for adults. But if Animorphs was aimed at teens, Applegate would likely have been expected to make the books longer. While there are a lot of great YA novels that are as short as or shorter than your average Animorphs book (check out BookRiot’s list of 100 YA novels under 250 pages,) most YA series, and especially fantasy or scifi YA series, are expected to top 100,000 words. (The three books in the Diviners series by Libba Bray have a total wordcount of 520,000 words; Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy tops 400,000 words, for example.)

Animorphs’ word count isn’t enough on its own to exclude the series from YA classification, but Animorphs’ short word count also fits the trend of children’s—not YA—series fiction in the 1990s. In order to understand this trend, and why it produced books specifically for children, not teens, we need to jump back in time to WWII. Because so many American men were drafted into the military, women took over jobs that had been almost exclusively done by men, like mechanics, sales, electricians, etc. When WWII ended, thousands of men returned home, but women didn’t leave the workforce. Realizing they had an excess of young men and not enough jobs, the US government created the GI Bill, allowing soldiers to attend college for free or at a steeply reduced cost, thus stemming the influx of workers and giving the economy and industry room to grow.

At the same time, families were having children (and those children were surviving) at an unprecedented rate. Thanks to the GI Bill, college was no longer something reserved for wealthy white men, but something available to the middle and even lower class. A college education offered social and economic mobility, and the Baby Boomers, children of the GI Bill recipients, became the first generation to grow up with the idea that college was something that could and should be pursued by all.

Then, the Baby Boomers began having children in the late 1970s through early 1990s, meaning a large chunk of those children (including Bug and I) were in elementary school in mid 1990s to early 2000s. Thanks to their parents, a higher percentage of American adults than ever before had attended college. Thanks to advancements in women’s medicine, psychology, sociology, and education, among other fields, people understood as never before the importance of instilling a love of reading in children at a young age. The huge middle class was willing to invest lots of time and money in their children’s educations, because at this point not having a college education was seen as a barrier to success.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. (Kidding).

Children’s publishing exploded in the 1990s because children—or, more accurately, their parents—were seen as a huge, untapped market. Previously, children’s publishing didn’t receive as much money or attention because, the logic went, children did not have money and therefore couldn’t buy books. But then the publishing industry realized that there were literally millions of parents willing to spend money on their children’s education, and publishers like Scholastic, Dutton, Dial, Penguin, Random House, and others rushed to take advantage of this new customer demographic.

Of the ten books featured on this Scholastic bookfair poster from 2000, seven are series fiction.

Serialized fiction—ie, stories that took place over the course of several books about the same characters and/or in the same setting—was the perfect way for publishing houses to capitalize on this new market. And hoo boy was it successful. From 1993 to 1995, Goosebumps books were being sold at a rate of approximately 4 million books a month. That means roughly 130,000 books were sold every day.

Here’s a few names to bring you back: Bailey School Kids, The Magic Treehouse, Babysitter’s Club, Junie B. Jones, Encyclopedia Brown, Cam Jansen, Horrible Harry, Secrets of Droon, The Magic Attic Club, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Bunnicula, The Boxcar Children, The American Girls, Amelia’s Notebook, Dear America, Wayside School, Choose Your Own Adventure…we could keep going for days. All of those series have two things in common: one, they were either published between 1985 and 2005 and/or experienced a huge resurgence in the 90s, and two, they’re all middle grade novels. Some are aimed at younger children, like Junie B. Jones and The Magic Treehouse, and some are aimed at older children, like the Dear America series and A Series of Unfortunate Events.

The point is, Animorphs is so clearly a product of its time (and not just because of the Hansen Brothers references,) it slots perfectly into the trend of series fiction for children. If you want to claim Animorphs is YA, you also need to claim all of the series I just listed above.

Now, let’s talk about the main argument I see in favor Animorphs being YA: the dark content.

This is my personal wheelhouse. I’m planning on someday doing my PhD dissertation on trauma, violence, war, and trauma recovery in Middle Grade—not YA—fiction. I always find it funny when people use descriptors like cute, sweet, innocent, silly, light, and simple to describe children’s books. While there are certainly plenty of children’s books that are one or more of those things, there are also dozens that are the polar opposite—dark, complex, serious, violent, and deep. I once read a review of The Golden Compass which said “it’s not like other children’s books with a clear cut good guy and bad guy and a simple message.” I don’t know how many children’s books the author of the article had read, but I’m guessing not a lot. Let’s just do a blunt reality check with a few of my favorites—including some picture books which are typically for an even younger audience than Middle Grade. Spoilers for all of the books I’m about to mention.

Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki This book follows a little boy who is sent to a Japanese interment camp during WWII. He and his family deal with abuse, starvation, and sickness. Suggested reading age*? Kindergarten and up.

*(For this and all subsequent books I used reviews from Kirkus, the Horn Book, and School Library Journal to determine suggested reading age.)

Check out this picture of Shorty playing baseball while an armed soldier watches him from a guard tower. Isn’t it cute, sweet, and innocent?

Pink and Say by Patricia Polacco Pink and Say are 15-year-old boys serving as Union Soldiers during the Civil War. Confederate Soldiers kill Pink’s mother, Pink and Say become POWs, and Pink is hanged because he is African American. Suggested reading age? First grade and up.

Fox by Margaret Wild This book starts grim and just gets grimmer. Dog and Magpie have been burned in a wildfire. Dog loses an eye, Magpie a wing. Magpie rides on Dog’s head—she is his eyes, he is her wings. Fox comes and convinces Magpie to leave Dog and come with him. There are definite sexual undertones. The book ends with the possibility that Dog and Magpie will be reunited, but no certainty. Suggested reading age? Six and up.

[The text says “He stops, scarcely panting./ There is silence between them/ Neither moves, neither speaks./ Then Fox shakes Magpie off his back/ as he would a flea,/ and pads away./ He turns and looks at Magpie, and he says,/ ‘Now you and Dog will know what it is like/ to be truly alone.’/ Then he is gone./ In the stillness, Magpie hears a faraway scream./ She cannot tell if it is a scream of triumph/ or despair.”]

Tell me this isn’t a total punch in the gut.

The Rabbits by Shaun Tan The introduction of rabbits to Australia is used as an allegory for European colonization and the casual destruction of the Aboriginals’ lives and cultures. Suggested reading age? Six and up.

The Scarlet Stockings Spy by Trinka Hakes Noble A girl spies on the British during the Revolutionary War while her brother fights. He’s killed and there’s actually a description of her finding the “bloodstained hole” in his coat where the bullet struck him. How cute and silly! Suggested reading age? Second grade and up.

Meet Addy: An American Girl by Connie Rose Porter I think this works as a nice comparison to Animorphs because it’s another long-running, popular series aimed at kids just starting to read chapter books. Among other incidents, there’s a graphic description of Addy watching her brother get whipped by an overseer and a passage where another overseer forces Addy to eat worms. I actually give American Girls a lot of points for not shying away from the uglier parts of history. They don’t always get it right (*cough* Kaya *cough*) but those books are more complex than I think most people realize. Suggested reading age? Second grade and up.

My Teacher Flunked the Planet by Bruce Coville From the sight of a child starving to death to homeless children freezing in the streets, Coville certainly doesn’t avoid the darker side of human nature. Pretty sure most adults only noticed the funny green alien on the cover. Suggested reading age? Fourth grade and up.

“That was the day we crept, invisible, into a prison where men and women were being tortured for disagreeing with their government. What had already been done to those people was so ugly I cannot bring myself to describe it, even though the memory of it remains like a scar burned into my brain with a hot iron.

“Even worse was the moment when it was about to start again. When I saw what the uniformed man was going to do to the woman strapped to the table, I pressed myself against the wall and closed my eyes. But even with my hands clamped over my ears I couldn’t shut out her scream.”

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai The Vietnam War, migrants drowning in the ocean, refugee camps, racism…this book is a bit like Animorphs in that it’s got a surprisingly dry sense of humor even as awful events take place. Suggested reading age? Fourth grade and up.

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Patterson A pretty harsh look at the realities of America’s foster care system as told by a girl who could give Rachel Berenson a run for her money. It’s not afraid to show that parents aren’t automatically good people. Suggested reading age? Third grade and up.

Stepping on the Cracks and Wait Til Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn If WWII, bullying, dead siblings, draft dodging, and parental abuse are too light and fluffy for you, you can always read about a child consumed with survivor’s guilt because she started the fire that killed her mother. Suggested reading age? Fifth grade and up.

“‘How do you think Jimmy would feel if he knew his own sister was helping a deserter while he lay dying in Belgium?’

‘It wasn’t like that!’ I said, stung by the unfairness of her question. ‘Stuart was sick, he needed me! I wish Jimmy had been down there in the woods, too! Then he’d be alive, not dead!’

Mother slapped me then, hard as she could, right in the face. ‘Never say anything like that again!’ she cried. ‘Never!’”

I could go on (and on and on and on) about trauma narratives for children, but suffice to say while I think Animorphs is probably the most brilliant one I’ve ever read, it’s far from the only one. Kids’ books can be dark, which is good, because if we only tell stories about white, able-bodied children living in big houses with two loving parents then we’re excluding the majority of real children’s lived experiences from our narratives.

There’s one more point I’d like to address: without sounding overly accusatory, I think a lot of the compulsion to consider Animorphs YA instead of children’s fiction is born of the adult bias against children. I’ve mentioned this before on the podcast, but Children’s Literature scholar Maria Nikolajeva created the term aetonormativity to describe society’s tendency to value the adult over the child. Like I discussed above, we have this idea that children’s books are somehow sweet and innocent, while YA fiction is darker and grittier because it addresses so-called ‘adult’ topics like sex, drugs, suicide, violence, and death.

As I hope I’ve established above, just because a book addresses these topics that doesn’t automatically mean it’s for teens. Books about heavy subjects can, are, and should be written for children. I think most of us are fans of Animorphs because it’s a series that sticks with us long after we close the neon-cloud covers. It’s a series that strongly disputes the notion of a clear right and wrong, and doesn’t shy away from the atrocities of war. And it was written for children. It was sold to children. It was read by children.

Some of us adults are just cool enough to read children’s books that treat child readers with the respect they deserve.

— Cates

[ikenbar]

Ikamara One Shot: Saint Richards

Hey there! Trying something new here with these one shots in the middle of the story. To give a background to Ike and a sense of tension as you wait of the next chapter!! Thank you for reading and coming this far in Ikamara’s story. I hope you enjoy and I hope these clear up any questions you guys have for her! Thanks again!!

~ Ike ‘n Bar Productions Productions

Warnings: Slight cursing (extremely mild), Fighting, Suggestive comments, Drunks being aggressive, annoying men, and Ike being a total boss

Read more of Ikamara’s story!

Chapter One parts one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven here :)

And Chapter Two prologue and parts one, two, three, four, five, and six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven here :D

Chapter three coming soon :D

One shot: Saint Richards

“It shouldn’t be this hard to avoid drunk college girls.”

Ike planned to find a place to celebrate moving into her new apartment. More specifically she was looking for a bar. One she could regular since the other bar she went to was too far to casually attend anymore. Ike never liked that place anyway. It was close enough to a community college so young adults would often overtake it at night. Sure, she was still a young adult of college age but she didn’t like associating herself with that kind of image.

A few clubs appeared on Ike’s walk but none of them enticed her to go in. They were either full of bustling drunks or ear piercing music that you could hear from the other side of the street. Ike turned a corner, considering going back home, when a flickering light lit up the pavement in front of her. She turned and found herself facing a window to a small bar. It had a light wooden aesthetic with old pictures and instruments hanging in clusters on the walls. If it weren’t for the groups of middle aged patrons dressing in regular clothes, Ike would have thought she was thrust back in time of the old west. Everyone there seemed to be kept to themselves, talking casually in their little groups and avoiding anyone else around them. That alone was enough to keep Ike from hesitating as she walked into that bar. If she didn’t hurry, those freaks would find her and destroy such a perfect place.

A jingle came from above Ike as she opened the door, drawing the heads of the patrons to look at her for a moment before redirecting their attention back to each other. Ike approached the bar and took a seat on one of the many empty stools. A young, Carmel skinned, bartender stood behind the bar, mixing a drink for a patron.

“What can I get you?” The bartender asked, handing a patron his finished drink. The bartender’s voice was higher than Ike expected, but it gave him a softer, more teddy bear-like, feel about him.

“Moscow Mule, neat, house liquor is fine.” Ike responded resoundingly, trying to make herself unapproachable. If she were to attend that bar she was going to do it by taking a load off and avoiding human interaction. She had enough of interaction at her current job as a bounty hunter. So she didn’t go to socialize or be hit on by older men. Let alone to make new friends that only know you for your drinking problem.

“You got it!” The bartender said, immediately working on her drink. Ike settled in her seat, prepared to zone out and enjoy the silence. But the bartender had other plans. 

“Hey, I don’t think I’ve seen you around before.” He sparked a conversation, annoying Ike slightly, “You fresh to these parts?”

“Just moved into an apartment a couple blocks away.” Ike spoke frankly.

“Oh really? Well welcome to the neighborhood!” The bartender smiled widely, “Though, I’ve got to ask, What brought you to a place like this? You look like a lively young girl. Wouldn’t you rather be somewhere with people your age?”

“You’re one to talk.” Ike snapped.

The bartender chuckled, “You got me there. But don’t avoid the question.” The bartender placed Ike’s finished drink in front of her and leaned on the bar, arms folded and stare piercing, “Why, of all places to drink, did you decide on a washed up 'ol bar like this one?” Ike looked intently at the man for a second, trying to read for any ill intent. After finding none, she sighed.

“I’m trying to find a new regular place to go to after work. Preferably someplace I can walk to from my apartment. Not to mention one without loud music and headache-inducing college chicks who are wasting their life away.”

“Well, you’ve found the right place! Though, I don’t know if I can vouch for the music and college girls. We have karaoke Friday nights.”

“Oh really?” Ike rolled her eyes, hopes of the bar becoming rotten.

“Yup! I even have a game that I play as I watch them.” the bartender chuckled happily.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it’s called, ‘take a shot every time a drunk girl faints on stage.’” The bartender winked at Ike. Ike arched an eyebrow.

“Sounds interesting.” Ike said as she took a drink, “How do you play?”

The bartender opened his mouth excitedly to respond but a jingle from the door cut him off. Ike turned and looked to the door where three men were standing. They all supported matching leather jackets and had tattoos all over their bodies. They looked middle-aged with their receding hairlines and patchy skin. They were all practically the same person but there was a clear leader as the man standing in the middle of them was taller and wore a red bandanna. He had long bleached, thinning hair that was pulled down the back of his head and away from his dark brown eyes. His yellow teeth were quite abundant as he sucked on the tobacco in his cheek and scanned the room. 

Ike was quick to dismiss these men but the bartender wasn’t. He wore a face of concern as his grip around his folded arms tightened. Ike looked around to the rest of the bar and found everyone had gone quiet as they nervously looked at the men at the door.

The leader of the group caught the eyes of the bartender and grinned crookedly. “Hunter!” The man billowed in a scratchy yet powerful voice as he approached the bar. As he walked, the rest of the bar resumed their conversations, if not a bit quieter this time, “I didn’t know you were working today!”

“The old man asked me to cover for him while he visited Becky in the hospital.” The bartender, supposedly named Hunter, stood up as the leader leaned on the bar, uncomfortably close to Ike.

“Ah is she still not feeling well?” The leader laughed and shook his head, “Mayhaps it’s for the best that you let her go, kid. Don’t want no dying chick taking up the space that someone could use to actually get better.” Hunter tensed slightly.

“Yeah, right.” He said with a strained chuckle and annoyance dripping from his tongue, “Good one. The usual then, Judy?”

“Yeah, and another drink for the lady here.” Judy, finally acknowledging the woman next to him, nudged Ike slightly. He looked down at her and smiled as Hunter left to make the drinks, “I don’t think I have had the pleasure.”

“And you won’t.” Ike pushed Judy away, “Also, Hunter was it? Don’t make that other drink. I don’t take handouts from people who suggest that lives can be exchanged for rooms.”

“Hey now,” Judy put his hands up and laughed lightly, “I was just joking! Right, Hunter? You know I love your sister!”

“Right.” Hunter didn’t keep his eyes off the drinks he was making.

“I’d like her even more if she’d let me play ‘carpenter!' Amright, bois?!” Judy slapped the stomach of one of his buddies as they laughed heartily at his joke. Ike rolled her eyes and tried turning away from the detestful scene. Judy noticed this and chuckled. He leaned on her arm, drawing her attention back onto him. “Let me buy you a drink.”

“I’d rather just take the money.” Ike hissed as she pushed Judy back again.

“Oh come on!” Judy laughed and moved inches from Ike’s face, “What’s the harm in one-” Ike grabbed ahold of Judy’s shirt and, in one quick motion, forced him down and stood up from the stool so she was looking over him dominantly.

“Listen, punk,” Ike spoke through her teeth, spitting on Judy’s face as she spoke, “My job involves beating and taking scum like you down. Believe it or not, I came here to relax and get away from all of that, but I would be more than willing to clock back in if prompted to do so. So, unless you want me to show you exactly how I 'hit on' guys, I’d suggest you take the hint and back the hell off.” Ike threw Judy away from her, causing him to stumble backwards and collide into this group. Judy quickly recentered himself and looked angrily at Ike.

“Fine then!” He huffed, smoothing out his shirt, “You could have just asked! Come on, boys.” With that, Judy left with his group to one of the booths on the other side of the room. Ike cursed to herself and sipped her drink. 

Hunter whistled as he walked back over to her, “I’ve never seen anyone tell Judy off like that. I’m impressed!”

“Like I said, I deal with people like him everyday.” Ike sat back in her stool and aggressively grabbed her drink, “I’m sorry, but I’d really rather be left alone right now.”

“Completely understood.” Hunter picked up a tray of drinks and smiled kindly to Ike, “Just let me know if you need anything. And here.” Hunter placed a bowl of olives in front of Ike, “To take the edge off.” Ike watched Hunter leave before looking at the bowl in front of her. She sighed and picked up an olive.

The rest of the night had gone on smoothly. With Ike alone with her drink and no more disturbances with the boy band, it seemed as if the night would be a quiet one. But it wasn’t. 

Ike had just about wrapped up for the night when a clattering came from the other side of the room. She looked up and saw Judy pinning a middle-aged man to the table of his booth. Judy was red faced and blurry eyed. He had clearly been indulging in many drinks that evening. Judy swore at the man, spitting in his face with every syllable. “Keep your eyes to yourself!” Judy spoke through the swears, “I don’t need you checking me out every five minutes like I’m some sort of zoo animal!!”

“Everytime.” Hunter groaned from behind the bar, putting down the rag he had been using to clean. Hunter rounded the bar quickly. “Judy, please don’t make me call security!”

“Security?!” Judy laughed, “You mean your dad?! The one who isn’t here?! What is he going to do from the hospital?! Clear you a bed?!” Judy let go of the man and approached Hunter menacingly, “Or are you going to stop me?! What are you going to do, huh?!” Hunter gulped. Ike placed down her cup and stood up.

“Judy, you’re drunk.” Hunter said firmly as he backed away from Judy, “Let’s handle this calmly.”

“Even drunk I am more the capable to beat your-”

Ike pulled Judy’s arm, forcing him away from Hunter. Judy stumbled backward and into the booth he was sitting in, clashing with his friend and spilling their drink all over Judy. Judy stood back up and blurrily looked over to Ike. He glared at her.

“What the hell?!” Judy sputtered, advancing towards Ike.

“You’ve had enough to drink.” Ike stood her ground and spoke firmly as Judy towered over her, “It’s time for you to leave.” Judy moved his face close enough to surround Ike’s senses with the alcohol on his breath.

“Who are you to tell me what to do?” Each syllable landed with a prod to Ike’s shoulder, “I’m going to stay here for as long as I want. Unless, you’re the security Hunter was blathering about?” Ike looked over to Hunter. He was looking at her with worry as he held a phone to his ear. Ike shrugged.

“Sure. Why not?” She sighed, taking Judy’s ear and pulling him down to her level, “So, get out of here before I make you.” Judy puffed out his cheeks and let out a hearty laugh, spitting globs of saliva at Ike’s face.

“And… how… are you... going to do... that?!” Judy asked through his laughter, giving Ike a look that screamed, Bring it. 

So Ike brought it. 

Ike took a bundle of fabric from Judy’s shirt and twisted herself, flinging Judy over her shoulder and onto the floor. Judy let out a gasp as all of the air was knocked out of him. He then coughed and twisted himself so that he was laying on his stomach and cursed as he struggled to stand again. Ike rolled her eyes and approached the spluttering idiot. She pulled on his hair so he was facing her.

“You want to ask me that again or are you ready to leave?” Ike asked calmly. Judy’s face was slacked, unintentionally giving Ike her answer. Ike dropped his hair, took the back of his jacket, and dragged him to the door. She kicked it open and threw Judy onto the pavement outside. “Don’t let me catch you here again.” Ike threatened as she turned back into the bar. The two men that Judy walked in with blew past her and to the door, rudely shoving her shoulder as they passed. Ike barely moved to their petty attack and shut the door behind them.

Ike walked up to the scene she had just left, avoiding the looks all of the patron’s seemed to have on her. Hunter was talking to Judy’s victim with a very apologetic look in his eyes. Ike made eye contact with the victim, who met her eyes with a complex look. “You... alright?” She asked, uncertainty.

“Sure.” He muttered, “Thanks.” He smoothed himself out and approached his group of friends at a separate table. Ike only got a glimpse of his friends looking worriedly at him before Hunter took up her vision.

“Are you ok?!” He asked worriedly, putting his hands on her shoulders,

“I’m fine.” Ike assured Hunter, pushing his hand off of her shoulder, “Though I could use another drink.” 

“You got it!” Hunter looked relieved and his smile returned, brighter then before, “Don’t worry about paying this one. It’s on the house.” Hunter walked with Ike back to the bar and he quickly got to work on the drink, “That escalated way more than it usually does. Normally I have my father here to help me with him. But of course the one day my dad isn’t here-”

“How long has Judy been coming here?” Ike interrogated Hunter as she took a seat.

“Four months? He comes every day and makes a scene. It’s the reason this place is so barren. Hopefully, he doesn’t come back. We could use the business.” Hunter handed Ike a fresh drink

“No kidding,” Ike accepted the glass. After a moment, Hunter held out his hand.

“I don’t think I’ve formally introduced myself.” Hunter beamed, “I’m Hunter Richards.” Ike took his hand.

“Ike.” She said, shaking his hand.

“Ike, huh?” Hunter smiled, pulling his hand from hers to lean on the bar, “A badass name for a badass girl!”

“It’s short for Ikamara. Though, it does pay to have a name that criminals can quake at the sound of.” 

Hunter laughed, “So, Ike, I hope Judy didn’t ruin any chances of you being a regular here. I’d love to have you around while I work.”

“Oh really?” Ike arched an eyebrow, “Are you just saying that because I saved your neck?”

“Yes,” Hunter admitted, “and you’re a good relief from people I see every day here. It’s nice to joke around with a customer without them thinking I’m insulting or hitting on them.”

“Wait, you’re not hitting on me?!” Ike widened her eyes overdramatically, “Well then I saved your hide for nothing!” Ike smirked as she went to take another sip of her drink. Hunter tapped the bottom of her glass, sending a wave of alcohol into her face. Ike coughed as Hunter burst into laughter. Ike threw a punch at his arm, causing him to back up and put his hands in the air.

“Ok ok I’m sorry!” He said through his laughter, “I’ll make you another one if you want! Just please don’t hurt me!”

“No promises.” Ike rolled her eyes. Hunter looked happily back to Ike.

“So, Ike, you gonna be a regular or what?”

“Give me that drink and I may consider it.” Ike placed a hand on her chin and gave Hunter a look. Hunter smiled warmly and nodded. As he returned to his station at the bar, Ike looked around at the pub. Though the place would likely become busier without that idiot there, it was an endearing place. With the old aesthetic and the jolly bartender, it was like she was welcomed there. Even without the drink promised to her, Ike had made up her mind about St. Richards.

(Next)

(Chapter three coming soon :D)

[tokumusume]

tokumusume’s list of best and worst movies and dramas watched in 2019:

There’s a new category this year. Inspired by kpopalypse, welcome the Honorable Mentions! Movies that weren’t exactly bad but also weren’t good. Movies and dramas are qualified to enter if I watched them for the first time this year, not that they were released this year. Click on ‘keep reading’~~

Best Movies:

1.      Parasite

Another masterpiece from the director of Snowpiercer (let’s pretend Okja never existed). A poor family con their way to a rich household. Choi Woo-Shik from The Witch (see below) is the eldest son and mastermind, fabulous as always. Definitely the best movie of this year. For me, movie of the decade.

2.      The Witch Part 1 The Subversion

This movie is amazing, hard to describe without spoilers. A perfect mix of Stranger Things and Hanna. Choi Woo-Shik can come to my house and kick my ass anytime. I can’t wait for part two.

3.      Death Trance

Visually stunning, kinda like Amemiya Keita’s style in early Garo or Mad Max. I wish the movie was longer and the characters were better fleshed out, Ryuen the monk and the little girl had so much potential... The most interesting thing about this movie is how sexualized the main male character is compared to the female ones, and apparently, the swords were designed to look like veiny penises (can’t find a source for this info), and yes, they do look like veiny penises. The final showdown is heavy with sexual energy. Have I already said that Ryuen deserved better? #RyuenRights

4.      Gintama 2: Rules are made to be broken

The barber shop scene is a fucking cinematic masterpiece. I never laughed so much like I did with this movie. The way it doesn’t take itself seriously, the meta jokes, everything is perfect. Even better than the first one.

5.      Kingdom

While I think that some fight scenes were way too long (like the bamboo forest one), the dynamics between Shin and Hyou/Eisei were highly entertaining, at least in my shipper eyes. I like that (SPOILER) the King of the Mountain People is a woman and not once they try to call her Queen. She is a King. Hashimoto Kanna is adorable as a Ten, Kanata Hongo does a great job as Eisei’s psycho brother, Sakaguchi Tak waves his sword around, the usual stuff but with added layers of dirt and sweat.

6.      Bravestorm

A movie I lovingly call “Japanese Pacific Rim”. Full of Kamen Rider stars (Hino Eiji! Misuzawa Haruka! That girl from Heisei Generations, the one with a sword! She has a sword in this as well!) and giant robots (god, I love giant robots!), I waited so much for this movie and it exceeded my expectations. I just wish I could’ve watched in theaters, it had a limited showing in my country.

7.      Twelve Suicidal Children

What begins as a murder mystery ends with a twist you won’t see coming. All of the actors are amazing, but special mention to Sugisaki Hana and that guy from that one boy group I forgot the name but can’t be bothered to Google.

8.      Gakkou Gurashi

Four girls and their teacher try to survive the zombie apocalypse trapped inside the school. This one destroyed me for days.

9.      Forest of Love

I’ve watched some Sono Sion movies but nothing prepared me for this. Be aware of extremely gory sequences and sensitive topics. Hinami Kyoko is so amazing as blue-haired, punk girl crush Taeko that I totally didn’t notice she was AkibaBlue in Akibaranger.

10.  The Host

After watching Parasite I decided to go on a Bong Joon Ho binge and watched this horror movie. Not as good as Snowpiercer and Parasite in my opinion but heart-wrenching nevertheless. The little girl is the star of the movie.

11.  The Hungry Lion

A story about the dangers of social media and slut-shaming. I want to punch Mizuishi Atom in the face.

12.  Cromartie High

A little absurd comedy about yakuza-style high school boys (played by middle-aged men lol) forming a club to battle aliens summoned by themselves just because. It made me laugh like a child. A hidden gem.

Honorable Mentions:

1.      River’s Edge

Depressing as fuck. Warning: the cats die. It’s not graphic but it’s traumatizing. Yoshizawa Ryo is a gay boy who sleeps with old men for money. There’s a graphic sex scene (not Yoshizawa, sadly) where my only thought was “That thing is gonna get stuck in there! Use a condom!” Can’t remember much from it except for these three scenes.

2.      The Disastrous Life of Saiki K

Yamazaki Kento has the acting chops of a dead fish but it comes handy for playing a teen with psychic abilities and zero social skills. Hashimoto Kanna is one of the prettiest girls in Japan. Yoshizawa Ryo with white and blueish hair looks more like Sakata Gintoki than Oguri Shun in the Gintama live action. The end is a huge let down but the fun ride is worth it.

3.      Ano ko no, Toriko

Congratulations to Yoshizawa Ryo, he has FIVE movies in my list of favorite movies this year! This is to make up for crowning GIVER as the biggest waste of time of 2018, this list is totally not biased, lol. “Ano ko” could be just another romance movie but the (very) little insight into how the entertainment industry works and not focusing on school life made me love it. Poor Sugino Yosuke being left behind again, when will this boy get the main girl?

4.      Monstrum

It doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it’s pleasant enough to fill a rainy afternoon with a lot of blood and spilled guts. Hyeri of Girl’s Day is the heroine and Choi Woo Shik is the commander she falls in love with.

5.      Weirdo Go

I confess I watched this one just to see Ji Li (aka my snake son Nie Huaisang) dressed as a woman but it was enjoyable and not that problematic.

6.      Real - Kanzen Naru Kubinagaryu no Hi

Directed by the same guy that did “Creepy” and “Before we vanish”, there are lots of twists you won’t see coming. And a dinosaur. A fucking dinosaur.

7.      Tomodachi Game: The Final

The movie loses its focus halfway through then picks up again minutes before ending. Yoshizawa Ryo delivers again as the sadistic Yuuichi, much like his role in Gintama. The plot twists are the star of the movie.

8.     The Living Dead

Sorry Wen Ning. I saw the plot twist coming in the first 30 minutes of the movie, not very smart of the writer. His personality did a 180° turn for worse and I’ll demote the movie to an honorable mention for it. Gao Han is cute though, I would like to see him as a better character.

9.      Backstreet Girls

Some recycled scenes from the drama to situate the viewers, a completely new story for the movie, it is certainly funny and enjoyable, if you can get past the forced gender reassignment surgery background and transphobic jokes (you shouldn’t get past it btw). I like the soundtrack.

Best Dramas:

1.      The Untamed

Do I need to say more?

2.      The Tale of Nokdu

This Korean romance had everything to be a mess but it wasn’t!!! *claps* I don’t hate the main female character and the whole palace politics actually kept me interested until the end. The complete shift of atmosphere mid-season was strange at first but ultimately very welcomed.

3.      The Naked Director

Netflix original Japanese content is amazing. This one is a look at the life of a legendary porn director in the late 80s, I learned a lot about the history of Japanese porn and censorship (yay pixels!) and went looking for his, erm, works. Very graphic, 69/10 don’t recommend watching with people in the house.

4.      Channel wa Sonomama!

I don’t remember it well but it’s about a news station and what is like to be a journalist and it was very interesting and funny.

5.      SCAMS

Forgettable. Sugino Yosuke with black hair cons old people via phone calls.

Worst Movies and Dramas:

1.      The cat in their arms

The cats spend 90% of the movie in human forms, and halfway through it they simply abandon the cats’ plot to show a fucking long montage of a weird guy painting a picture of a nude girl. It’s also super creepy to see a grown-up man acting like a cat, getting belly rubs and eating cat food from a bowl. Yoshizawa needs to choose his roles more wisely.

2.      Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun

A waste of Suda Masaki’s talent. Can Japan stop casting Tsuchiya Tao already?

3.      Samurai Marathon

Almost two hours of dirty men running through a forest. Maybe Japanese History experts will enjoy it, because I certainly didn’t.

4.      Lady Vengeance

While there are legit great moments, I didn’t find this “classic” to be anything special. The animal cruelty was too much for me.

5.      Hot Gimmick

This movie makes Bohemian Rhapsody’s editing look like a work of art. There are more flashing cuts than a T-ARA music video. I have no idea who likes who, who’s banging who, what even are they saying. Too much poetic shit for my like. I wanted to see Shimizu Hiroya naked. I was bamboozled.

6.      The Divine Fury

While some parts were interesting, at the end I still don’t know if the protagonist is possessed by a demon (if yes, then why would he help a priest destroy his friends?) or if he was blessed by God when his father died and talked to him (the glowing hand thing, why and how??). The exorcism parts are really, really scary, or maybe I’m just a chicken, but I had to avert my eyes. The best (only) part is that the protagonists are hot. Hello Woo Do-Hwan, you can sacrifice me to Satan any time…

[punkrockpolitix]

Strap in for an Ugly Ride

by Mitch Maley — This week, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden did the most Joe Biden thing left to do in announcing that centrist NeoLiberal Senator Kamala Harris would be his running mate. The establishment left swooned and suburban liberals rejoiced, while the lunatic right clutched their collective pearls at such a “radical” choice. Meanwhile, the rest of us yawned as the stage was set for an absurd, bizarro world, alternative-reality election that will take place in the midst of the most unstable American society in modern history.

The chaos created by the 45th President of the United States has a way of wearing the reasonable mind rather thin. After all, who aside from the angry mobs of nativists does not long for a return to the normalcy of the early aughts when all we had to worry about was forever wars in the Middle East, an infinitely-expanding wealth gap, 50 million Americans without healthcare, and trade policies that had hollowed out the middle class. Sure, the children of white collar elites would continue to thrive (so long as they could avoid pill mills and heroin needles). Meanwhile, the offspring of former factory workers who couldn't afford an increasingly cost-prohibitive college education would toil in Amazon warehouses with few benefits and no shot at the kind of modest defined-benefit pensions that had allowed their parents to enjoy some modicum of prosperity in their twilight years and increasingly gloomier chances of even enjoying the social security payments that have kept millions more from abject poverty once their working days were behind them, but that was certainly a little easier to swallow than 2020 has thus far been.

Sure, automation had already begun eating away at more jobs than even offshoring had, we'd done nothing to address the climate crisis beyond symbolic, feel-good policies that avoided pissing off the wrong special interests, and the only amber waves of economic growth in the past 30 years had been driven by engineered bubbles. So what? Wall Street was happy (the stock market tripled under Obama) even if the big party was being floated by artificially-cheap credit, and besides, we could all go to sleep each night relatively certain that we wouldn't face a zombie apocalypse type situation on any given morning which is more than you can say about our current situation.

But let's not forget where things had gotten by 2016 when populist spasms on both sides of the ideological spectrum saw our traditional two party-driven political process totally upended. Harnessing the power of the internet had been largely responsible for President Obama successfully splintering the Democratic establishment in 2008, but let's not over-romanticize the grass or the roots. Obama was the product of an inter-party schism that saw a large number of career Dems break from the Clinton dynasty and its requirement for complete fealty to the party's grudge-bearing first family.

Obama was not an anomaly. He was Wall Street approved, Bilderberg-blessed and mainstream media anointed because, regardless of what others projected upon him, he was a typical center-right Dem who wouldn't rock any of those boats. Yes, the right labeled him a dangerously-radical liberal, but those who paid attention in the 2008 primary will recall that the actual semi-progressive candidate, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, had to be actively cropped out of the debates in order for that narrative to take hold. After all, it wouldn't do to have Kucinich onstage talking about Medicare for All and explaining how to get out of Iraq tomorrow any more than it would do for Ron Paul to be onstage in Republican debates calling out the NeoCon likes of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Under Obama, the war machine kept rolling, taxes remained at historic lows, deportations skyrocketed and we expanded warrantless surveillance and other Big Brother police state tactics, including sending "surplus" tanks and other military armament to your local police forces. In other words, most of the things liberals hated most about the Bush era continued only they didn't hate them as much anymore. That said, institutional norms remained in place, our allies were quite happy and Americans, or at least those who weren't driven mad by the thought of someone with brown skin holding the highest public office, could hold their heads high knowing that they had an intelligent and articulate statesman at the helm who wouldn't embarrass them with Bush's tangled English or Clinton's infidelities. He was a family man who loved his wife and children and treated even his most vile-mouthed opponents with the courtesies of polite society. Yes, it's easy to grow nostalgic for such normalcy in the age of Trump.

However, years of bailing out Wall Street banksters who'd crashed the economy, allowing hedge fund managers to pay lower tax rates than teachers and failed companies to hand out huge bonuses often paid for by the taxpayers themselves took its toll. Millions of Americans who'd seen their homes foreclosed upon were scolded for buying into the worthless products being pushed by those same banksters—reverse mortgages, sub-prime interest-only loans, etc.—and lectured about "personal responsibility" and the "moral hazard" of bailing them out, even as those same fat cats who'd been rescued themselves swooped in to buy up all of those empty houses for cheaply-borrowed pennies on the dollars in order to make money hand over fist renting them back to the creditless schmoes who'd been kicked to the curb. It turns out a lot of people were fed up.

Enter Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump, two men, as different as can be, who nonetheless each managed to harness enough of the sometimes dangerous power of populist anger to finally upset the apple cart that had been two-party politics. While their platforms were radically different, the essential nature of their messaging was the same: you're getting screwed and have been for a long time. Their message was particularly well-received by working-class whites in formerly industrial states who'd been ignored by both parties for decades, beyond rhetoric from the right about it being the fault of illegal immigrants and rhetoric from the left about educational programs that would retrain the working class for the jobs of tomorrow. Regardless of whether they believed in or even understood the solutions either candidate was offering didn't matter so much as someone at last acknowledging that the reality they'd been experiencing actually existed.

The Clinton machine, with the DNC's foot on the scale and the MSM distorting perception, was able to (barely) keep Sanders at bay. Meanwhile, the GOP may have been able to do the same had it not been for the sheer giddiness of legacy media outlets like WAPO, the New York Times, MSNBC and CNN for what they saw as the death of the modern Republican party should it actually nominate a crass, foul-mouthed blowhard of a third-rate reality TV star (who'd until recently been a Democrat) for President. Make no mistake, Clinton's people desperately wanted to take on Trump, believing it amounted to not only an easy win, but a path toward retaking Congress, despite having been gerrymandered out of contention (for those of you who came to politics late, the GOP's electoral success in 2010, saw them take over a majority of state legislatures just ahead of the once-every-decade reapportionment that follows a census, allowing the party to gerrymander Congressional districts to such a degree that Democrats could not gain ground, despite regularly receiving millions more total Congressional votes than Republicans each cycle).

Everyone inside the beltway was caught sleeping in 2016. The Republican establishment never saw Trump coming and didn't know what to do with him when he arrived. Remember how sad Jeb Bush seemed in the debates? Remember how ineffective Marco Rubio was when he tried to sink to Trump's name calling? By the same token, the Democrats were so tone-deaf as to who Bernie was appealing to (far more aging New Dealers and working-class labor Democrats than the teen radicals they imagined) that they actually thought making trans-bathroom laws a wedge issue would drive turnout for their side. Imagine living in Michigan and working the counter at a Dollar General because the stamping factory you used to work at moved to Mexico, wondering whether your kid's rehab from Oxycodone would finally stick this time while being told that the real fight to be won was about where the gender fluid would take a leak.

That's not to say that trans rights aren't a worthy issue, so much as to point out how out of touch you would have had to have been to think it was a winning one in that moment of time. And if you think there was something more altruistic behind it, ask yourself how much energy has been expanded by the party on the same subject since. Like abortion-related ballot referendums used by Republicans to drive evangelicals to the polls, out-of-touch Beltway Dems thought that identity politics was the path to uniting the left-wing of their party and getting the Bernie crowd to turnout for Hillary, even after the DNC got caught smoothing her path to victory. After all, the donor class Dems never mind looking woke, especially if it prevents them from having to get behind things like a living minimum wage that might actually mean less coins falling into their coffers. And that my friends is what created the relatively small yet curious "I voted for Bernie in the primary and Trump in the general" demographic, not sexism, spite or misogyny.

Fast-forward to 2020 and Bernie is finally poised to emerge as the resistance candidate. Despite the MSM again selling alternative facts that kept explaining away his success, his path to the nomination looked inevitable until the Democratic establishment again intervened, this time with Obama in the role of Clintonesque king maker, convincing moderate establishment favorites Pete Buttiegeg and Amy Klobuchar to take one for the team ahead of Super Tuesday so that a path could be cleared for a sputtering Biden campaign to claim the nomination. For his part, Biden's 40-year record is as right of center as a Democrat can be without going full Joe Lieberman, so the remaining question was how not to repeat 2016 in alienating so much of the left-wing as to ensure Trump another four years.

Then, like a gift from the political gods, Trump began shooting himself in the foot so frequently in his responses to the pandemic and civil unrest that his approval rating—which has never even hit 50 percent even once during his presidency (not surprising considering he won the White House with a smaller share of the vote than either Romney or John Kerry managed in losing)—sunk to a pathetic 35 percent, convincing the NeoLiberal bosses that it was no longer necessary to kiss any rings on the far left. Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and even Tulsi Gabbard and AOC had already bent a knee to Uncle Joe, imploring their supporters to vote blue no matter who, so why not instead go after the moderate Republicans and Bush-era Never Trumpers whose ideology make the Democratic donor class feel much more comfortable than the progressive left’s anyway?

Enter Kamala Harris, who, to the Democratic donor class at least, signals nothing less than a female Barack Obama. And they’re not exactly wrong in that she’s a highly-articulate, ideologically-flexible politician capable of putting a friendly, progressive veneer on the modern NeoLiberal platform. That’s probably why the left-leaning corporate media outlets tried so hard to give her a push in the primary, even though voters simply didn’t find her to be a compelling candidate. Despite a healthy fundraising machine and the focused attention of MSNBC and CNN, Harris didn’t even make it to Iowa, dropping out ahead of what surely would have been a bottom tier finish in her home state of California. In that sense, it’s hard to see what she brings to the ticket in terms of electoral success. Fortunately, she won’t have to deliver her home state, but while much has been made of the fact that she’s the first woman of color to be on a major party ticket, it’s worth noting that there’s little to suggest she’ll help turn out the African American vote as most polls had her fourth of fifth even among black voters, who preferred Biden, Warren and even Sanders over the Senator from California.

As long as we’re on the subject of Harris’s race, however, it’s worth noting that the we're-not-racist right immediately went down the rabbit hole with birther conspiracies disgustingly-similar to those used against Obama that, within moments of the announcement, were used to question her eligibility to ascend to the presidency and fear monger that it was all a plan to install Nancy Pelosi when an aging Biden stepped down soon after being elected. Harris was born in the United States and, furthermore, born to two U.S. citizens. Her eligibility shouldn’t be in question to anyone who’s taken a junior high civics class, yet from what we’ve seen already, I’m sure it won’t be long until someone asks to see her birth certificate.

That said, despite the RNC's painting Harris as the most radical choice possible, her politics are no more progressive than Biden's, as evidenced by the two articles in the Wall Street Journal about Wall Street “breathing a sigh of relief” at her selection. In fact, one of the audition rounds for the veepstakes included hosting a Biden fundraiser and insiders have suggested that it was deep-pocketed Obama donors and not Uncle Joe himself who put her over the top. In Harris, the NeoLiberal establishment has all but cordoned off the progressive wing of the party, perhaps for a decade to come. Like Obama, she allows them to market a progressive package to make affluent suburban liberals feel good without making Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech, or the military industrial complex the least bit nervous. In fact, in a communication to investors, Goldman Sachs essentially said that even if it means the Trump tax cuts go away, the stability and predictability of a Biden administration would be at least as good for the 1 percent's bottom line.

To hear the Trump campaign tell it, however, Biden's selection of Harris is nothing less than a signal that, in his cognitive decline, Sleepy Joe has acquiesced to becoming nothing more than a puppet for far left radicals like Bernie, AOC and the rest of The Squad. In their narrative, if elected, he’d be doing the bidding of Antifa, while doing away with everything from God and religion to guns and even the suburbs, and the dangerously radical Harris is only further proof of that. In one of their weirdest turns yet, the Trump campaign is literally showing clips of what America has become under Trump himself and warning that this is what will happen if Biden is elected and only by reelecting the man that brought it to you in the first place and has failed to end it by uniting the country (or even trying) can you stop our present from becoming our future. When taken literally, it is a message that says the world I brought you is the world my opponent will bring you and the only way you can stop that from happening is by keeping the guy who brought it to you! If that doesn't make sense, congratulations, you're not an imbecile.

However, if you buy the narrative that the radical left has taken over the Democratic Party then I'm sorry to report that such may not be the case. Biden-Harris is literally the most Law & Order ticket I can imagine either party fielding. It’s the guy who brought us the Crime Bill, supported the private prison industrial complex and paved a smooth road for Clarence Thomas paired with the AG who wanted to jail young single mothers whose kids missed too much school, blocked access to DNA evidence of the wrongfully convicted, supported marijuana criminalization and pretty much accumulated the least progressive record any prosecutor could ever hope for. 

So no, Harris's pick wasn't to appease the progressive left. It was a middle finger to them, just like the initial convention lineup which didn't even feature AOC or Andrew Yang, the two stars of that set. Meanwhile, NeoCon warmonger John “life starts at the first heartbeat” Kasich is in primetime, along with Jeb Bush acolyte Anna Navarro. AOC finally got space for a 60-second pre-recorded (read vetted) afternoon spot, and the Yang Gang was able to kick and scream until their candidate was given a low-billing slot as well. In other words, if you don’t see that the progressive left is not only not running the show at the DNC but is all but powerless in the party’s politics, you’re simply not paying attention.

Why are NeoLiberals more interested in Bush-era Republicans than the media rock stars on the left who seemingly hold the future votes of the party in their hands? Simple, there's less of a difference in platforms, which means unlike working with the left, they don't really have to give anything up to court NeoCons. That’s because the age of Trump has seen those Republicans give up on social issues they never actually cared that much about from gay marriage to abortion in exchange for a seat at the table on the issues they do—things like energy policy, deregulation, aggressive foreign policy and, above all, jockeying their snoots into the trough of money that the winning team gets to eat from.

Excited because a Black Lives Matter protester is going to Congress? Slow down, Ace, as the hallowed halls are also about to get their first QAnon member. We've reached peak lunacy under Trump, this much is true, but the wheel has spun back to same old song and dance, remixed for 2020. The American empire is falling apart and one side is offering four more years of the lunatic king, while the other is betting that such a thought will scare voters enough to accept the same brand of politics that brought us that President in the first place. All that remains to be seen in whether Dems finally got the calculus correct. Are progressives so infuriated by life under Trump that they'll vote blue no matter who, or have they picked off enough white suburban Republican women for it not to even matter? We'll find out, though likely not until weeks after November 2, assuming we aren't fighting each other in the streets by then.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here. 

[gayiconwaluigi]

Non-binary Elliot Anderson text support from the Red Wheelbarrow companion guide

“Bottom line is, how the hell do I become normal after this? Is it possible?...Is there any way to come back from this? Can I later down the road be a normal person with a wife and a dog and tell my kids the story about the one time I lost my FUCKING mind and started seeing...I can’t think about this anymore.”

This quote showcases Elliot’s desire to live a patriarichal, heteronormative life--to subscribe to institutional normalcy/normativity, but he can’t because of his DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). He sees his DID and anxiety as the barrier to normalcy. He rallies against normalcy because he can’t achieve it. 

“I guess my gut instinct tells me I’d want to be normal...Do I really want to be normal? Okay, I’m not done with that question. I’ve thought on it some more. I don’t think normal is the right word. I think it’s happy. Normal is too nebulous and subjective. So is happy, but I think that to be whatever I think is normal is just to feel right. To not be afraid of who I am. I want to believe that the other people who understand who I am are okay with me as is and accept it.”

This following quote builds on that idea of normalcy past his experience with DID and mental illness in general. He wants to be satisfied with himself, whoever and whatever that entails. Elliot is extremely unhappy with who he is, which includes having his mind manifest Mr. Robot, alienating his friends due to his control issues and social anxieties, and basically causing people to die.

But this isn’t who Elliot is. For a show concerned with identity, Elliot doesn’t have much of one. He focuses on “fixing” society and “fixing” his friends’ lives. He’d probably identify himself as a nerd and a hacker, but other identities (gender, sexuality, race, etc) are pretty much untouched in his narrative because his relationship with his mental health is such a large part of who he is.

The companion book doesn’t delve into how Elliot views his ethnic background or his racial identity other than that he’s “not white.” Those are his words. He doesn’t identify beyond that, which makes me wonder (was this book written by a white person or) does Elliot distance himself from that identity because of his hatred of his mother, who is a woman of color. 

And with how the above two quotes read, it feels like he’s speaking beyond his mental illness. He doesn’t want to be afraid of who he is, and of course because of that fear, he hasn’t delved into or developed parts of his identity.

“Krista, Angela, Carla, and Darlene were all having dinner in my mom’s house...And in the living room, Gideon, Lloyd, my dad and Tyrell were all sitting around watching football. I was just standing in the middle of both rooms, not sure which one to be in...I was a little lost, stuck in my space between both groups, but I didn’t feel totally alone.”

This quote is the most specific reference to gender and gender roles. Elliot dreams of salient women in his life sharing a meal, and meal preparation is a traditionally female gender role in hegemonic America. In the other room are the men in his life enjoying a traditionally male past time. Elliot exists in the middle, not able to choose which room to exist in or not being able to move from his spot in the middle.

Elliot is incredibly smart but just so not self-aware when it comes to compulsory aspects of culture. He feels happiness with Darlene in season 1, so that must mean he is attracted to and wants to kiss her because she is a woman. [Don’t get me started on how I think Elliot’s attraction to all the women in his life is compulsory. If there is a woman in his age range, he will “fall in love” with her! Minus Carla because of the show’s latent transphobia...]

He’s decoded the faults with America and consumerism and capitalism, but he’s distanced himself from his own identities so that he’s incredibly ignorant as to who he actually is. The first time we see him, he’s literally erased himself and exists on morphine, which numbs him. He doesn’t want to experience himself. Essentially he wants to exist but as a different person. He wants to know people but not for people to know him. [Leon: Do you dream, Elliot? You scraping so hard like you never asked yourself this before. I said, do you want to be here right now?]

We can draw from the bullying we know he experienced. That stemmed from his nerdiness and other’s perceptions of his neurodivergence. It’s understandable why he hasn’t developed past these identities because if people hate him for being socially different, he certainly doesn’t want to discover something else about himself that people could hate him for.

And here is Elliot’s fairy tale sequence transcribed from season 2:

“If I do close my eyes, what is it that I picture years from now? Like Leon said, doesn’t one need to understand that before they’re ready to fight for their existence? How would my future fairy tale unfold? Will I finally connect with those I deeply care for? Will I reunite with old friends long gone? See the ones I love find true happiness? Maybe this future includes people I’d never dream of getting close to. Even make amends with those I have unfairly wronged. A future that’s not so lonely. A future filled with friends and family. You’d even be there. A world I’ve always wanted. And you know what? I’d like very much to fight for it.”

I want to emphasize that each of the scenes Elliot describes are incredibly stereotypical portrayals of happiness that you might see in a commercial for any medication. Two people [man and woman] speaking at a bar. Friends at an outdoor venue. A man proposing to a woman. Meeting a smiling family [man and woman and child]. 

It is essential to recognize the table scene is an homage to the Thanksgiving table scene in Raising Arizona where the protagonist describes his vision of the future. This film is a scathing critique of 1980s Reagan-centric America where a couple unable to have a child steals a child in order to fix all their problems.

In the Raising Arizona scene, the protagonist and his wife sit at the end of the table, whereas only Elliot sits at the end of the table. If we were to believe Angela was his romantic counterpart, she would be sitting with him. Instead Angela is sitting across from Darlene--an analogue to his sister.

Despite all his talk of revolution, Elliot wants a hegemonic happily ever after because that’s what he’s been fed his entire childhood of popular 1980s film tropes. He struggles to understand that people and life extend beyond these tropes.

[kiraawrites]

The Shed

A fiery youth blazes her way out of an underground prison for the weak, empowered by the suffering of her fellows and the death of her loving mother.

Word Count: 1486 (word limit was 1.5k)

Constructive criticism welcome!

“Kathryn Shaham. Birthdate: 07/12/2150. 7 Intelligence. 4 Strength. 15 Charisma. 4 Dexterity. Total: 30/100. Status: The Shed,” read her name card as she peered at it through the darkness that shrouded her.

Kathryn glanced around the humid tunnels that were covered by the smell of human sweat and filled by constant groans of discomfort. Stepping through the mountains of filth, she felt kicks in her abdomen and looked down at her swollen belly. Every strike was a sharp reminder of the life that would soon be released into the chaotic storm of the Shed, where one’s voice became lost in the murky tunnels. Kathryn furrowed her brows as she toyed with the possibility that the child would be satisfactory for life on the surface. 35 points. Is it really that hard? Her heart pounded at the suggestion of salvation, for the Shed was Elysium’s Purgatory.

The guards beside the gate to the surface would always say, “It’s for balance. Perfect distribution of social classes. Our society is a better place without the Unskilled.” They always explained with a clipped voice, making sure to never look them in the eye. The truth ached. The government felt that their life was not worth living. They were burdensome, like defiant children that did no chores. Kathryn fumed when told that she was privileged; privileged to be housed in a slum built on the shabby bricks of dishonest lies and violent anarchy. The Shed swallowed up whoever could not bring themselves to do one of the two things that would give them enough pennies for a plate of food. Its seedy undercurrents have ruthlessly drowned numerous souls that did not sell themselves or sell contraband. This harsh reality wrapped itself around Kathryn’s heart; a barbed wire sinking even deeper into her sore flesh every waking morning when the smuggled clock beside her tiny bed would scream with the same agony that spread around the Shed with the strength of a tsunami wave.

The act of selling one’s body to strangers was what brought about Laila’s existence. The baby wore a mop of brown curls and was glued to her mother. Her meaningless babbles gave meaning to Kathryn’s cavernous heart, filling it with the warmth of familial connection. Without a breath of hesitation, Kathryn swore that she would never commit these indecent acts again for Laila’s sake. Grabbing a handful of bronze coins, Kathryn built a stall in the not-so-discreet black market. She traded cigarettes which men bought so eagerly, each stick being a grasp at temporal happiness, numbing the emotional wounds that have tormented them over the years.

8 years sped by at an alarming rate in their mundane lives. Kathryn was 26 and had built a following, her charismatic skill playing greatly to her advantage. The family of two had aged like fine wine, working in tandem to scavenge for success where, to the untrained eye, there was none. Among the regulars, Laila could easily recall one of them. He had a tall and well-built figure and worked as a hitman. Recognising Kathryn from her past work, he would attempt to wrap her around his little finger with the desperation of a puppy begging for treats. Alas, she knew better than to be a trusting fool.

He had been pursuing her for 6 weeks when one evening, he trudged to her stall with a wine-red face and a bottle of it in hand.

“Come with me, my dear. You will not have to wallow in this miserable market any longer.”

It was true, for hitmen topped a society ruled by spilt blood. Kathryn shook her head and pushed him away. His eyes shone bitterly and he raised the bottle over his head. He swung it down. Again, and again. Her screams echoing each blow as blood poured from her nose. When she dropped to the ground, forever silenced, Laila ran. She flew through the crowds to the house of the elder that took care of her living area. Shaking him out of his nap, an endless torrent of words and tears poured from her face.

Gin, calling a man who wanted child entertainers for his business, stopped mid-shout when Laila spat out, “B-but I can sell! Mother taught me. We had the cigarette stall.”

His eyes softened. He did have a necessities store that needed tending. Behind the cashier counter, Laila matured into a teenager with the charm of her mother and fiery ambition fuelled by a calling to rewrite fate. Gin showered her with his wisdom, teaching her how to fight anyone with both punches and prose.

On her 20th birthday, she banded together a resistance using Gin’s connections to every part of the Shed. Their mission was to end this systematic oppression and prove to the world that the Unskilled were not merely bumbling proletarian fools trapped in a dungeon, satisfied by their meagre possessions and empty future. In their early days, they would charge against the gate and fail. The guards were too many and too strong. Lives were lost. Soon, Laila began to hear giggling whispers wherever she walked.

If one gate closes, another one must open. On her way to the store, she looked up at the roof. Eureka! In a matter of hours, her men were armed with metal spades, ladders and tons of rope. Having chosen a place where guards did not usually tread, they started their work with passionate hearts. Heave-ho! Heave-ho! Layers of sweat built upon their foreheads as they peeled off the soil’s layers. Freedom was literally at their fingertips, as they broke through a grassy patch and daylight’s glory was unleashed, dousing the tunnel floors with a blessed yellow glow. Jubilant cries leapt from the mouths of the men that had been dreaming of this since they were a wee baby, crying in the dark tunnels; a house they rejected from being their home. The elders, with the recollection of living on the surface as young toddlers, felt a stabbing pain. They remembered being taken away as blossoming children, thousands of futures stolen by an idealistic government that wanted to polish its people to perfection.

Waves of people erupted from the small hole in the ground, their sweat clinging to the air like the scent of revolution. However, the positive energy that emanated turned rancid at a twitch of the clock’s second hand. It started with a surface dweller (or “normal” human) whipping out a pistol and firing at the wall of dirty flesh. He curled his lips at the beasts before him, clad in holed-out rags and smelling like a living garbage dump. Restless howls echoed through the city, waking every soul on that Sunday morning.

Laila wove her way through the fallen bodies and pounced on the gun’s owner. With a tiger’s growl, she threw his weapon to the road that was soaked in blood, a canvas of a thousand shades of red. An armour-clad squadron encircled her, their arms tensed and ready to fire. A rabbit in the middle of a wolf pack, she had been drained of all rationality. She shivered and gaped like a fish until she heard Gin’s cry.

“Retreat!”

Submission. Defeat. A raging forest fire started in Laila, wanting to burn these unspeakable outcomes to the ground.

“Take me to your leader,” she growled, glaring daggers at the squadron.

“I’m already here. Turn around.”

————————————————————————

“You do realise that our economy will drop drastica-”

“What economy? More than a quarter of your people are stagnating underground. You talk about economic productivity while leaving us to rot.”

“In Elysium, we value the best of the best. There is no sub-par item, person or activity being carried out in this nation. Your presence is akin to a faecal stain on the Mona Lisa.”

“The very foundation of your nation is subpar! The surface broke with a measly few spades.”

Their chests were heaving in the President’s office. He motioned for his secretary and whispered into his ears. The secretary then pulled a long black box from the top of a shelf and handed it to him.

“We’ll sign this deal.”

Laila’s heart leapt from her chest at the sight of the pen that would ink their freedom. She bit her lip, her breath stopping in her throat. This was her life’s pinnacle. The sweet ambrosia she had been chasing for so many years.

“But you are… Another matter altogether.”

He grabbed the box’s insides and pulled out a slender gun. She choked on her own anguished surprise, shooting a hand out to grab it.

“A danger to society.”

He fired. The bullet flew past her hand and dived straight into her gaping mouth, piercing the soft tissue folds of her throat. Her eyes rolled back and her body thudded on the floor.

“Secretary, decorate the gas chamber like the wedding of a beloved child. We’ll have a sweet party in there.”

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