#but it would be funny if his revolutionary years came back to bite him in the ass

[ozymandian-hymn]

WIP - Human beings have friends, Wilby-boy! Where the hell are yours?

finished!

[olympeline]

More thoughts on national animal forms in Hetalia:

Their beast selves are slightly bigger than what’s considered normal for the species. Not to such a degree that they’d look like freaks, but big enough to make you take a second glance.

They’re incapable of human speech while in animal form. I’m on the fence as to whether they’d be able to speak to each other as beasts or whether they’d have to change back to hold a conversation. Leaning towards the latter, honestly. These forms are wild and primal and speech of any kind just feels too human.

The appearance of a nation’s human guise stays mostly consistent throughout their lives, but their animal form is different. It can change radically depending on what’s happening in the world. This is most often seen with territories and settler colonies who break away and ascend to true nationhood. Like Alfred, who only became a bald eagle after the USA won independence from the British Empire. Before that he was a young lion. And if you’re wondering whether a super badass Lion King style battle ever took place between him and Arthur during their war? I’m happy to inform you the answer is: yes. Absolutely Hell Yes it did. 👌

Only real animals count. So no unicorn form for Scotland, dragon for Wales, etc. They’re cool but I prefer the consistency of everyone having creatures that actually exist, you know? Oh and, if you’re curious, I picture Scotland’s animal form being a stag. Not sure about Wales’s yet.

Speaking of the UK family, Arthur is a lion but he didn’t start out that way. He was a rabbit in the distant past. Quite the transformation. When did he change? Hard to say. Definitely not before Roman Britain ended. Most likely it would have been either during the reign of William the Conqueror, or else at the start of the Hundred Years War.

The manner in which an animal form changes depends on the circumstances behind why it’s changing in the first place. For Alfred, who won his freedom in battle’s flame, it was a fast, violent, and painful process. The first night after the war was won, Alfred bloodily tore off his golden lion’s pelt and cast it into the fire. Then he resculpted his fleshy, naked, skinless body and reclothed it in a bald eagle’s feathers. The whole thing was over before the sun rose above the newly made country. And as agonising as it was, it was also a relief for Alfred. His lion’s skin hadn’t felt right ever since the start of the war. It itched, and chafed, and burned, and almost drove Alfred mad. Even as a human, it tickled and whined and gnawed at him in the back of his mind. Only getting worse as the war dragged on. Eventually Alfred was assuming his beast form regularly just so he could bite and tear at himself in a frenzy. The revolutionaries got used to seeing their fledgling country covered in the wounds he’d gouged into himself in a futile attempt to find relief. None came until victory was won and he could cast off his lion form - and his old self - for good.

Meanwhile Matthew, who peacefully slipped into a fluffy lion cub form after Arthur won him from Francis, was very different. His independence was gradual and diplomatic so there was no need for a violent ripping of flesh. Instead, over time, Matthew quietly started using his lion form less and less the more Canada drew away from Britain. Until one day, when he badly needed release from the trappings of the human world, he assumed his beast form for the first time in decades. Only to find it had changed. Something Mattie had been expecting for a while but it was still a shock when it suddenly happened. There wasn’t any pain or anguish for him, though. Just a small feeling of wistfulness at the realisation he’d never wear his lion form again. It’s fine, though: a Canadian horse suited him better. Fit like a glove right from the start.

Mattie ultimately becoming a horse is funny too because, while I haven’t made up my mind yet about what Francis should be, a horse is an option I’m considering. Which would mean Matthew went from French foal, to British cub, then ultimately back to horse again, lol.

Maybe…maybe a horse is good for Francis? Maybe? Urgh, I don’t know! Seriously, I’ve only just started this AU thing and already Francis has become the bane of my existence. 😂 France is a world power and England’s historical rival. So his animal form would need to be something that could not just fight, but win against a lion. Yeah, a rooster ain’t cutting it, lmao. A big destrier style war horse could conceivably kill a lion by kicking or trampling it. Horses are prey animals but that doesn’t mean predators aren’t still scared af of a horse’s kick caving in their skulls and smashing their bones to powder. Also, historically horses are symbols of wealth, grace, war, and just plain pretty to boot. All of which fit Francis. My only other idea is that he’d be another lion. Because England got its lion from French nobility. Or maybe he’d be a lion up until the French Revolution? Then he’d pull an Alfred and rip off his pelt - or have it ripped off him by force during the Reign of Terror - and be remade as a horse. Lions are one of the symbols of monarchy so it’s some nice imagery there. Napoleon relied heavily on his cavalry too. Yeah, it could work. Maybe…? What do you guys think? Any other ideas? Post em below if you have em.

A nation-person doesn’t always change their animal form completely if their real world circumstances are altered. Take Argentina for example; a Spanish colony who started as a black calf and still remained a bull after locking horns with Antonio and driving him out of his part of South America. A bull suited Argentina so a bull he stayed. Though his coat and horns did turn from black to silver post-independence. Argentina. Land of beef. Land of silver. Silver bull, geddit?

Finally, there’s the differing effects of conquest where the original inhabitants of the land aren’t replaced like what happened in the Americas. Cases like Romano: a nation whose animal form never changed through all his ups and downs. Not after Antonio conquered him, not after being set free, and not after unification with Feliciano. Romano remained an Italian wolf through it all. Change was possible but it never happened for him. I guess it would depend on factors like how much of the original culture survives, how tightly the controlled nation is under the thumb of the master nation, etc. In the most extreme cases a conquered nation’s animal form might change completely to mirror that of their conqueror. Other times they might shift only a little. Like, say, if Ireland’s original animal was a wolf. Then, after being crushed and occupied by England, that wolf began to look more doglike. Symbolic of the English (later British) goal of “taming” wild Ireland. Stuff like that. A case by case basis, really.

(That’s all for now. Hope you enjoyed reading. I’m tagging this as my national animals AU ☺️)

[athingthatwantsvirginia]

The Steinbeck Agreement

PART TWENTY-THREE OF THE DO YOU SEE HER FACE? SERIES

Pairing: Jess Mariano x Original Character (Ella Stevens)

Warnings: discussions of familial physical/emotional abuse please read with caution, serious angst, anxiety about future, plentiful pop culture references

Word Count: 6K

Summary: Ella makes some major changes in her life, and Jess reluctantly returns to town for his mother’s wedding.

The afternoon light streamed golden through the diner windows as Liz and Luke came in, Ella leaning on the counter with her sketchbook in front of her. Too enveloped in the drawing of a field of murderous daisies, Ella didn’t even register what they were talking about until she heard them mention her name.

“...maybe Ella could do it,” Liz said, tilting her head at the young woman with dark eye makeup and EAT ME printed across her shirt.

“Hm?” Ella asked, looking up from her sketch with furrowed brows.

Luke rolled his eyes at her distracted nature. Ever since she’d moved out of her childhood home, she’d been in a worse mood, focused almost solely on her terrifying drawings. He’d had to tell her a couple times to make sure to keep the sketchbook off the counter when there were children present.

“Be a flower girl,” Liz said, a big, dreamy smile on her face. She was dressed in a long, floral red dress. “Most of the Renaissance fair crowd doesn’t have small children. But if we’re gonna have a wedding, we’re gonna have a real wedding. Can’t be a wedding without a flower girl.”

“Sorry, whose wedding?” Ella asked, straightening up and raising an eyebrow.

“Mine, sweetie.” Liz had a high, wispy voice that reminded Ella of the fairies she used to imagine playing in her mother’s garden. “We’re having it right out in the square next week. It’s gonna be beautiful, all our Renaissance fair friends will be there, and it’ll have this great medieval theme! And you could be the flower girl!”

“Oh, I don’t…” Ella began with a shy smile, but Liz only waved a dismissive hand at her, continuing.

“I can loan you one of my fair dresses,” she said excitedly, not picking up on Ella’s doubtful expression.

“Yeah, Ella. You can finally perfect your whole Bride of Frankenstein look,” Luke teased. His expression was far more pleasant than Ella could have predicted. Happy. Happy, in its simplest form, looked so strange on Luke. The past few months had seen the true finalization of his divorce and his having to watch Lorelai date some rich snob from her father’s company. But the news seemed to brighten his mood inexplicably. She was sure the laughter at her expense wasn’t exactly a drag on the day either.

Rolling her eyes, Ella shot him a pointed glance. “Y’know, you would be lost without your best waitress.”

“I’m quaking in my boots. Besides, I’ve got Lane working for me now, anyway.”

Though she narrowed her eyes at him, she could think of nothing more to say. He was right. She would never quit on him. The diner was more of a home to her than anywhere else in the world. Hell, it had almost single-handedly fed her during the worst few months of her life. Along with Lorelai’s frequent feasts of junk food.

“I can just see it, Ella! It’ll be so much fun and you’d look so beautiful!” Liz exclaimed, grabbing one of Ella’s hands in a pleading gesture.

Biting the inside of her cheek, Ella did her best to protest. She still wasn’t Liz’s biggest fan, despite wherever it was that she stood with Jess. The alcohol, the neglect. But Luke seemed not entirely angry about the match, especially considering his view on TJ when the two had first been introduced back in February. And Liz’s smile was so large, so radiant. Her eyes were desperate and almost kind. Heaving a huge sigh, Ella nodded. Luke was much more than her boss. And he gave a smile so rare when she agreed. She would do it for Luke, she decided. In fact, it was the least she could do.

.   .   .

Sat on the lumpy couch in Lane’s living room, Ella found herself smiling just a touch. The band, finally named Hep Alien, was getting better with every practice. Though the room was piled high with dirty clothes and video game equipment, and it remained cluttered no matter how many times Ella tried to clean it up, she was beginning to get more comfortable. Her king mattress was so old anyway, and sleeping on the plaid couch wasn’t much different. As she had run from the only house she had ever known, she’d packed as much as she could into her station wagon, which had once been her aunt Julie’s. It wasn’t like her old room fit much anyway. Mostly, the backseat was filled with her records, books, clothes.

Loud music making her ears ring, she sketched Lane behind the drums, living the way she had always wanted. As fun as it was watching band practice nearly every night, Ella was eager for her summer classes to start. If she played her cards right, she could graduate a year early with art as a minor. Ella’s mind drifted to the night she left, the day after she finally finished her first year of college. And, over a modest celebratory dinner, the conversation had drifted, as it always did, to the future.

.   .   .

two and a half weeks earlier

Tugging with one hand at the ends of her hair, Ella felt an odd mixture of distasteful nostalgia and happiness in her stomach. The lasagna tasted exactly as her mother’s had, and Ella knew Fiona had followed the recipe, scribbled in the back of the ancient cookbook, exactly. But she would keep quiet. Fiona truly seemed proud of her, beaming and giving her a hug the moment she walked through the door after work. Slowly, very slowly, Ella was beginning to accept it, the motherly love. Though occasionally it still rubbed her the wrong way, it didn’t send her spiralling into anger and melancholy as it once had.

And it wasn’t as though Fiona was a bad person. She had a sunny disposition, glossy hair, expressive eyes. Ella could understand how her father would want to marry her. But she was just too unlike her mother. Would never understand Ella the way her mother had. It still felt like bizarro-world when Fiona tried to give her advice or compliment her on her piano skills. But she could manage dinner every once and a while, and accept pride in her academic accomplishments. She was on the Dean’s List, after all.

Adam pushed his food around his plate as he spoke. From the glances they’d shared, Ella could tell he tasted the same memories from childhood she did.

“We’ve still got about a month, but I really think we can get first place,” Adam said of his mathlete competition. His voice had gotten deeper, and he was finally growing taller. Ella could tell he would end up looking a lot like Noah.

“That’s great,” Jake said, nodding with a half-smile.

“Really is,” Fiona echoed, grinning widely.

As silence fell on the four of them, forks scraped on the Corelle plates and throats were cleared. Awkward silences had quickly become staples of family dinners. Eventually, Jake began twisting his wedding ring and looked straight at Ella, who sat at his left side. The light in the peach kitchen was bright despite the cloudy darkness outside. The May evening was humid and buzzing with cicadas.

“And what about you, Ellie?” Jake asked.

Looking up carefully, Ella put down her fork and faced him. “What about me?”

“Do you have any prospects for the summer? Besides the diner?”

She shook her head. “No. Unless Patty needs me to fill in. Might start painting more. I’m thinking a small easel would fit pretty well near the window in my room.”

Narrowing his eyes doubtfully, Jake tilted his head slightly. “I don’t know. Seems like a waste of money.”

“Why?” she asked instantly.

“We don’t have to discuss this now,” Fiona interjected patiently.

Adam looked down at his plate as he ate.

Jake breathed a frustrated sigh through his nose. “You’re majoring in history. You’re living with us for at least three more years. I don’t think now’s the time for pipe dreams.”

“Hm,” Ella nodded, giving a thin, vicious smile. “It’s funny you say that. When mom was alive, you always thought I should put as much time into my art as she put into her music.”

“You were a kid. Things change. The best you can hope for is being a history teacher at Stars Hollow High, and you have to be happy with it,” Jake explained with cold logic in his voice. His eyebrows were raised in condescension.

Ella’s cheeks heated up. “Oh, so all this time you’ve just been humoring me? Telling me I had talent?”

“Not exactly. But you’re not O’Keefe, either.”

“Never said I was,” Ella snapped, standing up from her seat. “I can't do this right now. I’m buying my fucking paint, dad.”

“Hey!” he shouted, rising from his own seat and following her as she stormed into the living room towards the hall entrance. “Don’t you use that language with me, young lady!”

“Why not?! Might as well let you know how I actually talk if you’re gonna let me know how you actually feel!” she yelled back, gesturing wildly with her hands.

Jake rolled his eyes at his only daughter. “Toughen up, Ellie! You’ve only got so much time on this earth and I’m not gonna watch you waste it on your doodles!”

“Oh, and lecturing about the revolutionary war in the town where I’ve always lived wouldn’t be a waste?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

“At least you’ll make a living! You’ll still be around people who love you, who take care of you. You’ll always be near us,” he argued.

Ella let out a bitter, humorless bark of laughter. “People who take care of me?! I’ve been taking care of you for almost five years! All of you! Especially you! When mom died, I was the one who fed us, I was the one who cleaned and tried to cook! And you did fuck-all except drink and lie around crying!”

Eyes darkening, Jake took a step closer to her and she immediately recoiled. “I lost my wife. You will never understand that!”

“I lost my mother!” she screamed, hands clenched at her sides, so hard her knuckles turned white. Angry tears snuck up on her eyes but she swallowed them back to the best of her ability.

“If I’d have known how much you’d bitch about helping out, doing what a daughter should, I never would’ve let you take that job at Luke’s!”

“Doing what a daughter should?” she asked immediately, eyebrows shooting up. Her jaw was set firm with tension.

Fiona appeared from the kitchen behind her husband, putting a hand to his shoulder. “Baby, let’s just all take a minute to cool down.”

“You brother and I needed you and all you could do was complain!” he roared.

Ella scoffed. “You needed me? You needed me to keep you alive long enough for you to find a new wife to coddle you and baby you and cry with you when you told her about your tragic high school sweetheart! Why do you think she hates you, huh?”

Her stomach did a flip when she saw the hurt on Fiona’s face from the corner of her eye, but a fire burned so hot inside her, and she couldn’t keep her words contained any longer. She’d tried to play the dutiful woman of the house long enough.

“Do not talk about my marriage!” Jake warned. “It’s none of your business!”

“Of course it’s my business! It’ll be my business when I have to pick up the pieces once she leaves you!”

“You have always been such a little brat! You were a nightmare to raise for me and for Sophia!” A vein had popped out in his forehead, and he shrugged Fiona’s touch from his shoulder.

“Fuck you!”

Crack! Ella seemed to hear it before she felt it: a sharp, searing pain as his open palm struck her cheek. It was a feeling she hadn’t experienced in so long, not since she was ten and had mouthed off at the dinner table. A sinking feeling struck her stomach as silence filled the room. Because she suddenly discovered she had always been expecting it. Always knew it would happen again, someday, somehow. And she’d been almost surprised he hadn’t smacked her in the months following her mother’s death. But, the levee had to break. It always did.

She brought a hand to her stinging flesh, and her father stopped in his tracks. Remorse washed over his features and he went to reach out for her. Flinching away from him, Ella felt her fingers grip at her necklace.

“Ellie, I’m so sorry, baby. I told you not to use that language with me. And you know how my old man was about-”

“No,” she said softly, shaking her head. “No.”

.   .   .

The final, strong bass note of the White Stripes song Hep Alien played broke her from her memories. She could see the dull sky as she packed up her car the best she could, the night crossing over into morning as she offered Adam a quick goodbye. He’d been upset, but also somewhat calm. And when he’d come to visit her a week later during one of her shifts at the diner, he told her he had always known Ella would leave. From the first night after their mother had died, he’d known. Though he knew it was fruitless to try and convince her not to feel guilty, Adam had told her not to worry. He could handle home on his own, he was confident. He’d never been slapped. And they were both smart enough to understand why.

And when she’d come to Lane in the early hours of the morning, still painfully holding back her tears with the entire contents of her life parked out on the street in the station wagon, she knew everything would change. Lane had welcomed her with open arms, of course. Had seen Ella cry for only the third time in all their years knowing each other. There was something so sweet about her new freedom, but a heaviness still sat in Ella’s heart. Constant guilt and fear for Adam, heartache over her mother, who she still missed everyday. And she felt so lost, it was all-consuming. She didn’t know what the next step was. Would she still be able to pay for college? Would she ever speak to her stepmother again? Would she even stay a history major, if she was lucky enough to continue her education? She had never been more glad for Luke’s, and for her friends. There were few comforts in her life, continued existence as a waitress, or knowing Adam was only a few blocks away in case something ever happened. She clung to the only constants left for dear life. She’d been dreaming of leaving the house for so long, but it managed to be even harder than she thought it would be. A gloomy cloud had been hanging over her for a few weeks, as she walked through her existence with an aimlessness she had never known before.

Clapping some, Ella offered a big smile and watched as Zach, Gil, and Bryan began to talk amongst themselves about the new tattoo Gil had shown up to practice with. Lane excused herself from the conversation only because of the temptation. She wanted a tattoo, really did, but didn’t want to increase the chances of her mother disowning her any more than she already had. Instead, she came to join Ella on the couch, plopping down and putting an arm around her friend. Ella kept her smile and rested her head against Lane’s shoulder. Since moving in, Ella was reminded every day of what a wonderful person Lane was. They came from such different worlds, but never judged each other, always took care of each other, helped each other with their respective escapes. Working together at Luke’s had been even more fun than Ella could have ever imagined. It was a welcome end to the long, lonely year after Jess’s departure, just she and Luke sulking around together. There was a place for sulking, but the time for it seemed to be coming to an end.

“You guys were fucking great,” Ella said, then gestured down to the picture she had just drawn. “You’re a regular Meg White up there. Really.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Lane chirped, beaming with pride.

Snorting a laugh, Ella put the sketchbook aside and bit back a yawn. “Don’t I know it.”

“Hey, are you okay?” Lane asked, brows furrowing.

It almost made her want to laugh. Over the past two weeks, Lane had asked her that question more than had once seemed humanly possible. “Yeah, Lane. I’m fine. Just a long day. Got roped into being a flower girl.”

“What?”

“Yeah, Luke’s sister. Liz. Have you met her before? You weren’t working at the diner yet the last time she was in town,” she said tiredly.

“No, I haven’t,” Lane replied. “Jess’s mom, right?”

“She is indeed.”

“And why exactly are you filling what is traditionally a role for a girl in pigtails and Mary Janes?”

Blowing out a sigh, Ella shook her head slightly. “I don’t even know. She just sort of told me...didn’t exactly ask. It’s next week in town square, so there’s not enough time. And Luke really seemed like he wanted me to and I just...I don’t know. Maybe she’s a witch.”

“Always a possibility,” Lane nodded, going along with the bit as she always did. “And have you heard from Jess lately?”

Again, Ella shook her head. “He still doesn’t have an actual phone number, and now I don’t either. Not optimum communication conditions.”

“Yeah, that’s not ideal,” Lane said, commiserating.

“I wish it had crossed my mind, but I moved out in about forty-five minutes,” Ella said, fiddling with her necklace.

A guilty look painted her features. But she’d only been out of the house a little while, maybe he hadn’t called.

“Do you think he’ll come for the wedding?”

Ella scoffed. “Not a chance in hell.”

.   .   .

“Are you sure I can’t help with anything else?” Ella asked, arms crossed over her chest.

Her chewed pencil sat behind her ear, and her hair fell in a loose, hasty braid over her shoulder. One of her booted feet tapped constantly against the tiled floor, and she smoothed over her blue skirt every few minutes. And she only looked half as stressed as Luke. The wedding was in two days, and nearly everything had been dumped on him. As a consequence, Ella had been dealing with the diner business while Luke argued on the phone with vendors who could give him the proper medieval food and decor.

The midday lull had finally come, and Lorelai stopping in was sure to bring a little sunshine. Though she had been pretty overwhelmed herself, lately. The new Dragonfly Inn opening was only weeks away.

Luke shook his head at Ella when he’d finished giving Lorelai the rundown of the week’s events. “Not right now, kid. That was the last call I had to make. At least for the time being.”

“Just say the word,” Ella shrugged, finally letting herself relax a touch, leaning her forearms onto the counter.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“So, am I caught up on everything, then?” Lorelai chimed in, brows raised and eyes expectant.

“Yeah, I’d say so…” Luke began, but the bell over the door jingled.

A familiar scowl appeared in the diner’s entrance, and Jess trudged up to the counter with a finger pointed at Luke. “I’m not paying for a motel, so I’m stayin’ with you!”

Lorelai gasped dramatically and narrowed her eyes at Luke. “Liar!”

As he passed on his way to the stairs, Jess gave Ella a curt nod. She reciprocated, but felt unnerved by his demeanor. Was it shy? Was it angry? It certainly didn’t seem pleasant. They hadn’t spoken in nearly three weeks, the longest time since he had first run away to California.

“I didn’t think he was coming,” Luke muttered, watching Jess disappear up the stairs. A wistful, fond smile crossed Luke’s lips. “I went to see him in New York.”

“You did?” Ella asked, brows furrowed.

“Yeah. It was a total pig sty and he may or may not be a drug dealer. But, hey, at least he came,” Luke said, shaking his head in a mixture of amusement and wonder.

Sighing through her nose, Ella looked down at her feet and bit at the inside of her cheek. Her gaze focused on nothing in particular, thoughts swimming around and colliding with each other inside her already crowded mind. “Yeah. At least. I’m gonna take my ten minutes. That alright?”

Luke was busy, back to his banter with Lorelai, and only gave a half nod her way. She snickered at how enveloped in each other the two of them were. Without much effort, she slipped behind the curtain and climbed up the stairs unnoticed. Nerves coursed through her, and her heart sped up in her chest. She gave two short, harsh knocks on the window of the shabby apartment door.

After waiting a moment and receiving no response, she rolled her eyes to herself. Who was she to be nervous? He was pretty much her best friend, besides Lane. And she hadn’t done anything wrong. With a new, determined quality to her steps, she walked through the front door and found him just where she expected, on his old bed, nose already buried in a book.

Crossing her arms over her chest, she plastered on a confident smirk and sat down on the end of the bed. She recognized the book instantly, her own copy buried in the pile of belongings in her car: Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck.

“The only author we could ever agree on,” she said, eyeing the book though Jess still hadn’t lifted his head.

“Pretty much,” he replied flatly, biting at his bottom lip as he focused on the words in front of him.

Sighing shortly through her nose, Ella turned to face him fully, sitting criss-cross applesauce on the familiar brown afghan. Jess unconsciously brought his feet in closer to make room for her, his knees up in the air, blocking her view of his face slightly. But she could see his hair, longer still and without any gel.

“See you’ve completely ditched the pompadour look,” she muttered. “Couldn’t handle being mistaken for an Elvis impersonator any longer, huh?”

“My God, you should do stand-up,” Jess said dryly, eyes widening in feigned amazement as he kept reading.

Shaking her head slightly, Ella let a harsh chuckle escape her lips and furrowed her brows at him. “Out with it, jackass.”

“Hm?” he asked dismissively, taking a pencil from his pocket to underline a phrase.

Ella pursed her lips in frustration. “Well, it’s obvious you’re pissed. I say we skip the passive-aggressive theatrics and you just spill it. But, hey, this is a democracy. You also get a vote.”

Rolling his eyes, Jess finally shot a glance over his knees. Heaving a sigh, he shut his book and tossed it into the open duffel bag on the floor next to the bed. In one swift movement, he mirrored her sitting position and tilted his head at her in askance.

“Have you been doing a lot of hard partying lately? Really taking advantage of this college thing? Or have you been avoiding my calls?” he asked, though he wasn’t angry, despite the sarcasm. There was a defeated tone in his voice which surprised her; almost disappointed.

Biting the inside of her cheek, she gave another small shake of her head, and she spoke firmly. “Well, first of all, I’m not required to take your calls. I asked you to call me because you fucked off to California without telling me and I wanted to make sure you hadn’t been serial-killed.”

Jess gave a begrudging nod, almost preparing for a dressing down.

“But, no, I haven’t been avoiding your calls, alright? Paranoid much?”

He scoffed, but she cut him off before he could retort.

“I moved out.”

Immediately, his eyebrows shot up in surprise. “You did?”

She nodded. “Yeah. About two weeks ago. Wasn’t exactly seamless, and I bet my dad will disconnect my old line at some point. I’ve been staying at Lane’s with her and the band. They don’t have a phone yet. And you change your number pretty much every week, so it’s not like I could let you know.”

A smile crossed his features. “I’m...that’s great, Eleanor.”

She snorted a laugh of disbelief. “Yeah, it’s so great living out of my car and sleeping on Lane’s forty-year-old couch.”

Jess shrugged. “Gotta start somewhere.”

“I guess.”

He looked flabbergasted. “I’m so proud of you.”

A blush heated her cheeks and she chuckled breathily in confusion. “What?”

“For moving out. I mean, I can’t imagine it was a quiet affair,” he said, face falling slightly.

Again, she shook her head, glancing down at the space between them on the comforter and clutching her necklace. “No. It wasn’t.”

“What happened?” he ventured without hesitation, searching her face and exposed arms for any yellowed bruises or healing cuts. Sometimes, he could give even Ella a run for her money when assuming the worst.

Ella shrugged noncommittally, throwing a glance down at her watch, then facing him again with a small smile. “Long story. I’ve only got a couple minutes left on break. You gonna be in town for a little while?”

“Until the minute the wedding ends.”

“Okay, we’ll find some time to catch up,” she said, smirking. “Luke tells me you’re a drug dealer now. You’ve gotta let me in on all your behind-the-scenes Scarface facts.”

Jess rolled his eyes. “God, Luke is such a drama queen. I’m a messenger.”

“Nice cover. Very convincing.”

“Don’t you have coffee to pour?” he shot back, defensive.

Snickering, Ella rose from the bed, smoothing down her skirt and apron. “Whatever keeps the guilt at bay, tough guy.”

“G’bye,” he muttered, grumpy, as he settled back against the wall and picked up his book again. But, just before Ella reached the door: “What time are you off, Eleanor?”

“Six-thirty. Luke’s closing up early to play wedding planner,” she said, hand poised over the doorknob.

Jess chuckled. “Pizza at Antonioli’s tonight?”

“Sure. I even promise not to wear a wire.”

The pillow Jess had thrown barely missed her as she exited the apartment, laughing under her breath.

.   .   .

Sighing softly, Ella ran the key along the chain of her necklace and looked down at the half-eaten pizza crusts on her paper plate. The old wooden table in the pizza place was slightly sticky, and carved with the names of various people and couples who had shared a pie there before. But, they could watch the Stars Hollow evening turn from golden to blue as the sun went down, sitting by the front window. Jess had to leave by eight, and it was half past seven by the time the stars came out. Summer had almost come, and the days were long and bright with sunshine. Chilly breezes swept past at night, but it was getting warmer still.

“So...yeah. It only took me about forty-five minutes to pack everything up. Didn’t realize how little stuff I had until I could fit almost everything in my trunk and back seat,” she said, a small, humorless smile on her face.

Jess nodded, rolling a balled-up napkin absently in his hand as he listened, his face stony. “Was it just yelling? Or did he hit you?”

Breathing another long sigh through her nose, Ella bit the inside of her cheek. “Just once. He just slapped me once. He told me not to swear at him, but I-”

“Eleanor,” he interjected, voice firm but gentle. “Once is way too much. Even a slap. It’s way, way too many times.”

She only shrugged. “I know. I mean, of course I know that. It’s just…”

Again, he nodded wordlessly. Jess knew what it was like to have a parent, or a step-parent, who used hurt as a tool. And he knew the confusion. Sometimes monsters wore masks. She didn’t have to say anything more.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

Ella shook her head. “It’s not your fault. And I’m moved out now, Jess.”

“Right...and I meant what I said. I’m so proud of you, Stevens.” Jess reached hesitantly across the table, and took her free hand in his. Gave it one squeeze.

She flashed him a tiny smile, squeezed it back. Then she disentangled their fingers and tucked her hair behind her ears, clearing her throat and straightening her back. The severity left her features, a new, mischievous twinkle lighting up her hazel eyes. Her chest was less heavy, and she was glad he knew. Glad he could understand with so few words.

“Proud of you too, Mariano. This time, I didn’t have to watch you step out of a sheriff’s car when you got to town,” she smirked, picking up one of the crusts and taking another bite out of it.

He frowned. “Ugh, please don’t mention Andy Griffith. That car is my property. The only reason I even called Luke after I got to Venice was to ask about the car and he-”

Still chuckling, Ella raised her hands in surrender, cutting him off. “White flag.”

Jess offered a sardonic, lop-sided smirk. “And, believe or not, Luke will be the sanest person at the bachelor party tonight.”

“Why are you even going?” she asked, brows furrowed as she took a sip of her water, ice melty from time and the May heat seeping through the splintered wood of the front door.

Shaking his head, Jess glanced down at his watch and noticed he had only ten minutes before he and Luke would have to hop in Luke’s ancient green truck. “I don’t know. Luke mentioned me not wanting to go to Liz, and then she spent thirty minutes babbling until she finally wore me down.”

Pursing her lips, Ella nodded. “Yeah, she’s very persuasive.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re looking at the flower girl,” she admitted, gesturing to herself.

He laughed breathily. “No way.”

“Yep. I’ll be there in the renaissance dress and all. Though, Lorelai said she would make some alterations for me. I’m going over to her house in a little while to sort out the whole corset situation.”

Jess snorted another chuckle. “Good luck.”

“Right back at ya, Mariano,” she teased. “Where on earth would TJ want to go for his bachelor party?”

“It’s a cliché I’m sure you’ll be able to guess on the first try,” Jess said with a dejected frown.

After only a moment with brows furrowed, realization flashed across Ella’s eyes and her expression turned to one of disgust. “Ugh, Jesus. A strip club?”

“I know,” he grumbled. “Believe me, I’ll be there in silent protest.”

“Mouth off to one of the owners if you get the chance, would you? For me?” she asked.

“Will do.”

.   .   .

“I don’t hate my mother,” Jess grumbled to Luke, rolling his eyes slightly.

He ran a hand through his messy hair, crossing his leather-clad arms. Maybe he should’ve known he would get into a fight with TJ at some point, considering his history with Liz’s past boyfriends and husbands. All it had taken was TJ hitting the Austen novel out of his hands, as he read begrudgingly in the low-lit strip club. And they’d come to blows. And Luke was pissed. They were sat down at a table in Luke’s, the diner completely dark glowing only from the streetlamps and twinkle lights in the square. All the chairs, save for the two they sat in, were stacked up on the red tables. Luke was interrogating Jess about why he’d come for the wedding anyway, if he was so mad about it. As if he hadn’t stormed into Jess’s apartment trying to convince him to come only a few days earlier.

“You don’t?” Luke asked, eyebrows raised in expectation. “Then why did you come, anyway, if you’re so against your mother finding happiness? And it’s pretty clear you hate me.”

Jess sighed heavily at Luke’s dramatics. “I don’t hate you. I came here because of you.”

“Stop that,” Luke scolded in disbelief.

“You said it was important to you. Remember?” Jess asked, voice tight with annoyance.

“I didn’t think you were listening.”

“Oh, I was listening.”

Luke stared at his nephew for a long moment, leaning back in his chair. “So, you don’t hate your mom. You don’t hate me. But, really, all it took was me coming to New York to yell at you?”

Sighing, Jess said nothing. His lips were set in a thin line, and he averted his gaze from his uncle. He ran a hand over his mouth.

Eyes widening, Luke cracked a knowing grin. “You came because of Ella? But, you haven’t been together in...what? A year?”

Jess gave a sheepish nod. “Yeah, but, we still talk every couple weeks. She didn’t tell you?”

Luke snorted. “Well, I remember her chewing you out that first time you called. Telling you to let her know you were alive. But I didn’t know you were really talking.”

Running a hand over his mouth again, Jess gave another nod.

“So?” Luke asked, prodding. “Why’d you need to come here...if you call so often anyway?”

Jess bit at his bottom lip, squirming under the questions. “Since she moved out, she hasn’t been picking up. I didn’t know what happened. I wanted to...make sure. Because…”

“What?”

“I think...I mean...I’m in love with her, alright?” Jess spit out, an anxious bite in his voice.

Luke’s eyebrows shot up, and a flabbergasted look formed on his face. “Wow!...You think you’re in love with her?”

Jess shrugged. “Pretty sure. But, I’ve been thinking that since I was seventeen. And she doesn’t believe in love, anyway.”

Scoffing, Luke shook his head. “I know she says that, but it’s crap. What do you love about her, Jess?”

“Excuse me?” Jess asked, brows furrowing.

Luke rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Jess, I think it’s great that you know how you feel. And like I said earlier, I’m not gonna keep trying to change you. You are who you are. And Ella is who she is. If you’re gonna tell her how you feel, you have to do it carefully. And you have to be sure. So, tell me what you love about her.”

Scowling, Jess looked long and hard at his uncle. “What, do you wanna hold hands and skip afterwards?”

“Do you want to do this right or not?”

Finally, Jess relented. “Okay. Fine. I love that she...she’s so passionate. About everything. And she talks with her hands. And she eats peanut butter right out of the jar when she’s sick. And she hums while she works, without even realizing it. She..she cares so much about her friends and her brothers and her aunt and...I don’t know. She does everything for other people. She doesn’t think she’s a people person. But she really is. Even the way she talks to customers...you can really see it.

“And she’s such an amazing artist. She can feel art. And music. I’ve never met anyone else like that before. I can talk to her for hours...or not say anything at all. I miss her when she’s gone. Everything is...just better when I’m with her.”

When Jess looked up again, he found his uncle with a smug smirk. As Jess was speaking, his eyes had taken on a far-off quality. And though he didn’t want to be talking, his lips had started to curl upward at the corners anyway. Just from thinking of her. Luke recognized everything in Jess’s expression.

Jess shook his head slightly, jaw tense, embarrassment swirling in his stomach. “What?”

“Nothing,” Luke said lightly, almost mocking. “I’ve just...never seen that look on your face before.”

Rolling his eyes again, Jess scoffed angrily.

“Alright, alright,” Luke said, fighting off good-natured laughter. “Open two-way communication is the foundation of love…”

[khentkawes]

“The Avengers have been known to pass a mantle or two, but who is equipped to guide us through the texts and metatexts of this ultrafranchise now? As much as we may adore Hemsworth, Pratt, Tom Holland, Brie Larson, and the rest of the crew, they lack the larger story that drew the world’s people so close to Downey. It’s genuinely unclear whether anyone can carry the torch in quite the same way. As Pepper points out in Tony’s first film and his last, Iron Man was proof that Tony stark has a heart. We have yet to see firm proof that the MCU still has one.”

(via The Vulture “What Will Marvel Be Without Robert Downey Jr?”)

This last paragraph of this article has been shared pretty widely around tumblr, and even though I read the article a while back, the last line keeps sticking with me. Even the producers and directors have said that Tony Stark and RDJ are the heart of the MCU. So...where does it go now? What happens now that it’s heart is...gone?

My biggest concern for the MCU going forward is this: they have yet to create a character with as much heart as Tony Stark. He is the most human, the most fallible, and the most relatable of all their characters. That first Iron Man movie worked, and was revolutionary in its own way, because it showed that a man who was far from perfect could still be a hero--that he could make himself into a hero. No magic, no super-soldier serum, no spider bite. He made himself into a hero through his own intelligence and grit and determination, even though he was flawed and imperfect and “not the hero type.”

I think people have forgotten how incredibly unusual and unique that was at the time. I didn't even see Iron Man when it first came out, but just from hearing about it, I knew it was a groundbreaking shift in the way heroism is portrayed in mainstream action/adventure/superhero films. It paved the way for the rest of the MCU, and while some films have mirrored the basic concept (Thor goes from a spoiled prince to someone willing to sacrifice for others; the GOTG franchise, despite my issues with its execution, is all about “assholes” learning to become a family and stand up for others), none of them have done it quite so successfully. Largely, it is because the other films have struggled to create complex story arcs that allowed their characters to develop over multiple films in interesting and organic ways. They do try, and the directors/producers are right to point out in interviews that these are character-based films (it's a huge part of their appeal). That’s one of the things that the MCU gets right. But most of the times, these attempts at character-based films aren’t wholly successful because the actual character development is spotty and inconsistent. I keep thinking of Chris Evans when he was asked at an ACE comic con event how Steve had changed over the course of the films, and he was like, "well, he hasn't really changed. He's still the same guy, just reacting to new situations that are thrown at him." And that's...a real problem. That is the old model of hero movies where the hero is "good" and "constant" and is more of an archetype than a human being. There's a place for those stories, but they don’t often resonate in the way that Iron Man did when it first came out (and, I would argue, it’s a sign of poor character development for Cap when his actor can’t explain how he has changed/grown after six films).

We all know that a big part of why Iron Man was so relatable and so deeply real as a character comes down to RDJ as an actor, as someone who wants to show Tony's humanity and his brokenness and his complexity. He has made this character more human, more multidimensional, more relatable, and more heartfelt than I think anyone could have predicted.

Now the MCU has nothing to use as a replacement for that...nothing that can replace RDJ’s subtlety in crafting a complex character or that can replace Tony’s heart and his humanity. Tom Holland's Spiderman probably comes closest, but Spiderman: Homecoming was much more about fun and teenage adventure, so it’s not set up to take over the heart of MCU; it’s not grounded in realism and humanity the way the Iron Man films were. I had hoped Brie Larson's Captain Marvel could step up for this role, but while it was a funny and exciting movie, with some genuinely great character beats, it didn't have the heart and complexity of Iron Man. We don't get inside Carol's head as a person and we don’t really see her struggle or a sense of psychological depth; we mostly just saw her as a superhero who is learning to step into her powers--again, more archetype than human being.

In that respect, I still think Wonder Woman is the next best superhero film based on heart and humanity. Black Panther is pretty grounded in heart and humanity, too, actually. And if we'd had a bit more time to develop him and connect him to the other characters, I think T'Challa could become the heart of the MCU. But he's not there yet. So it feels like we are in for a few years of soulless MCU films that wander without much direction or heart. The plot will provide the only direction, and the action sequences and “shock value” twists will drive the movies, instead of the humanity of the characters driving the films. And I just don't think Feige and the people at Marvel have realized this yet. I hope they figure it out quickly and course correct as needed, but...only time will tell.

I could be wrong, of course, and maybe the next phase of MCU films will be the best yet. But I’ve never been a marvel diehard who thought all the films were brilliant. A lot of the MCU movies are just “okay” in the writing and character development, but they manage to skate by with pretty effects, exciting action sequences, and some dazzling cinematography. Will that be enough, going forward, without Tony Stark as the beating human heart of the franchise? I guess time will tell.

[theosdoros-blog1]

❝ Wish somebody would’ve told me I’d end up so lost without you leading me astray. ❞ ALEX FITZALAN? No, that’s actually THEODORE BURKE. A SEVENTH YEAR student, this RAVENCLAW student is sided with THE DEATH EATERS. HE identifies as a CIS-MAN and is a PUREBLOOD who is known to be EGOTISTICAL, BOISTEROUS, and FLIPPANT but also VIBRANT, AUDACIOUS, and STAUNCH. { CAMI, NINETEEN, GMT, SHE/HER }

THE BURKES

old money, old names, old houses - although their name was proudly featured in the list of sacred pureblood families, kept pure throughout the ages, the burkes were never truly a part of that group. their ancestry was foggy, with no dusty records of alliances and ministry positions. their wealth was sufficient, yes, but never in the expected way. the oldest record of a burke they could relate to the present family was a healer of little consequence, and the rest mostly worked for others, especially under the great names they supposedly considered their equal. to marry a burke wasn’t treason, but it was a step down, the acceptance of an insignificant middle-class life.

the family wealth grew when, in 1863, they partnered with the borgins to establish a shop in knockturn alley. their business? buying and reselling wizarding artifacts, mostly belonging to other more reputable families. the burke’s most potent claim to fame and respect was to be the money-hungry keeper of the deeds and inventories of their superiors. that stigma still accompanies the family to this day, anchoring them in a position of SERVITUDE to the other great families - the burkes are not able to make their own history, so they buy and sell others’ for what they’d consider small change.

nevertheless, it has put them in the public conscience, even if negatively. the shop has grown over the last nearly two centuries, but has remained strongly in the family’s hands. borgin and burkes is where people from all walks of life can attempt to sell their latest steal or inheritance, and where one may find the cursed objects capable to cause all sorts of pain, death, misery. the burkes may be inferior, but they are resourceful and plenty useful. their contacts with the criminal underground of the wizarding world and their possession of dark magic objects turned them into a desirable addition to extremist movements, even if never in positions of high power. grindelwald’s army simply led to half the family being imprisoned, some dying while evading capture. some years later, however, the remaining burke’s gave a chance to a young man who would not forget the name he worked for. the job gave tom riddle a public justification for his search of knowledge in areas of magic so nefarious that no other place would allow for them to be explored but borgin and burkes. when he finished his ascent from man to power, he kept in mind those names. the recently graduated children of his employer, with whom he’d spent some shifts at the store during their summer breaks, got the promotion of their lives, with a mark on their arm and a mask over their faces. when their dark lord returned, it was their children’s turn.

merrick burke didn’t share the devotion of his elders, but certainly felt the same gratitude. to be picked, from all possible choices, to join the forces of the new era was, once again, the promotion he would have never dreamt of. in a perfect world, he’d have remained in the store, mostly dealing with finances as he’d always prefered, a quiet life that would leave barely more than a footnote in the writings of history. but how could he refuse such an offer? the man took the mark immediately, ready to pledge his all to the cause.

when their attempt at a fully fledged second war failed, merrick retreated to the store, forever hiding the lines on his skin. his girlfriend, esme flint, did the same, and their short-lived part in the second rise of the dark lord faded from memory. between then and the reformation of the death eaters, the couple married, devoted themselves to the shop and to evading association with their previous criminal activities, vowed to never speak of the darkest things they’ve done, and had two children.

BEFORE

born on august 13th, 2007, theodore talbot burke was brought into a peaceful world. the small cottage in upper flagley, yorkshire, made up most of his existence for a few years. the world of impressive estates and ancient manors was the stuff of books and the occasional wedding or birthday celebration of some family friend, or acquaintance from his parents “old job”. the young boy’s loud personality made it possible, however, for even those encounters to grant him friendships he held dear, even when he was stuck in his small village. he always prefered those other children, though. at least with them he didn’t have to be careful to mention his parent’s store or which spells they were performing at home. after all, upper flagley was mostly wizard populated, but still had a handful of muggle families settled there. a preference was clear in his mind. children with magical families like his, no matter how different from the burkes, understood him better than the rest. they were EASIER.

hogwarts was the adventure theodore had been craving for ever since he could remember. it was bigger and much more interesting than the broken clock that was upper flagley. it was a place where he could spend all of his time with the types of people he actually liked, those whose experiences were the same as him, with no fears of saying something he should not say. in many aspects, it was a reinvention. at last, he could attempt to become the person he’d rather be, full-time. one single train ride was enough for him to make sure most people his year at least knew his face, as he popped in to chat for a while. the sight of the castle came with a clear indication: he was finally somewhere big enough to contain all of him. his energy quickly had him dubbed as the wannabe class clown, evidence in the story of how the burke boy, while playing around in the small boat that’d lead them across the lake and pretending to be their legendary sea captain, tripped and fell into the water.

theodore was sorted rather quickly into the ravenclaw house, and that made sense to him. his mother was the smartest person he knew, and she owned more books than he could recall. his father was a genius with numbers. he’d certainly get his chance to prove his intelligence at hogwarts. the first year was a rude awakening.

try as he might, the boy seemed to lack behind in most things. in a highly individualistic group such as the ravenclaws, he found himself more and more alone in times of need. sure, theo was funny, he’d make the entire classroom giggle; he’d entertain his dorm room until near dusk; yet his connections felt hollow. he wasn’t creative. he wasn’t very book smart. his house felt less and less like home - perhaps the hat had made a mistake. maybe he was a gryffindor like his mother, or a slytherin like his father. perhaps an hufflepuff even.

during his second year, theo was louder, more boisterous, a bit too much for some people’s tastes. what he lacked in grades and proper friendships, he made up in stage presence. it was near impossible to not notice when theo was sitting right next to you, or even in the same room. he tried out for the quidditch team (and failed), and ended up joining a few extracurriculars to fill his time with things he could actually be good at. years of learning the violin with his neighbor, an elderly witch who’d done some tours with some forgotten orchestras, came in handy when he joined the hogwarts’ orchestra (although he only ever got truly good at it during his third year, with intensive practice). the debate club became one of his favourite activities, it being an outlet for the endless bite in him, to the constant need in theo to say something back until only he could have the final word. without realising it, he expanded his skills into things he could actually do. creativity. music. spontaneity. an ability to think on his feet at all times. a pompous nearly-suave way of being.

after over a decade of struggling, the burkes at last brought to the world another child and for the rest of the school year, that was all theo could talk about. philippa, philippa, philippa. to this day, she is his favourite person in the world and he cares about her just so much.

NOW

the following years were a constant discovery of who theodore burke truly is. although he’s been achieving no better than passing grades, except at DADA, which most have attributed to all the knowledge he gets by working summers at his family’s store; theo’s proven himself in the two extracurriculars he’s in, and spent most of his sixth year training to join the dueling club and not make a fool of himself, or at least no more than one would expect from him.

a big part of that discovery was a conversation his parents had with him during one summer, when he asked them in the middle of the store why they hid their dark marks. while not the most astute of people, a fourteen year old theo had heard enough about the boy who lived, the dark lord who’d terrified the word, and his many followers. he’d seen enough pictures from trials and attacks in some books. the kernels of ideology he’d been catching all his life came together in that kitchen table, when he was told of the generous and righteous man who’d attempted to make a new world time and time again, for which the rest were simply not prepared. it wasn’t exactly an hostile story, but rather one of a rebel that kept being taken down by the establishment. the darked deeds the burkes themselves had been involved in? necessary evils. an escalation of events easily preventable had the ministry done something more.

it was a stark contrast. the loud boy that played the violin and made paper planes with his unfinished exam sheets. the legacy of a revolutionary line that was waiting for its new leader.

he digested it the only way he knew how - by sharing his experience to those who understood him. that group kept getting smaller, and by the end of his sixth year it was mostly those who carried the same expectation to join the ranks as soon as their leader returned to continue the war.

the dissonance caused him great confusion. still struggling to understand his very own moral compass, theo began his final year at hogwarts with a bang. suddenly the big question was no longer what the orchestra should play for the christmas concert or what he’d do after hogwarts before he resigned to his faith of working at knockturn alley. no. it was who to turn to as his world shifted more than it ever had. it didn’t take long for one side to attract him, the one he’d gotten the closest to in the previous few years, those who understood the weight of his burden. their names had history too, much longer than his, more scarier. theo has quickly adapted to his role as support. he isn’t the brightest, the strongest, the fastest, but he’s been training like hell. he has the connections the group might need at times. he isn’t seen as exactly a powerhouse, and that gives him some manoeuvre room many don’t possess. he is a part of the revolution. and he has no clue how much of himself he’s ready to commit to it.

MORE

some stats, which you can find HERE.

some character parallels: jake peralta (b99), albus potter (cursed child), greg serrano (cegf), richie tozier (it), eliot waugh (the magicians), quentin coldwater (the magicians), nick miller (new girl), percy jackson (pjo+hoo), felix dawkins (orphan black), haley dunphy (modern family), eve polastri (killing eve), eleanor shellstrop (the good place)

WANTED CONNECTIONS

ravenclaw friends: i’m assuming mostly from the creative side of the house, rather than the studious one. people who’ve grown up with theo, gone through some of the same challenges of being pulled towards a characteristic of their house that often gets neglected. just creative out-of-the-box nerds pls thanks

ravenclaws that do not like him as much: this is really more of a default house sort of thing. theo doesn’t fit the most general template for ravenclaws lots of times, and in fact, mocks it a lot. gets house points deducted all the time. just not a general fan-fave.

a tutor: or more really. someone his year (or a professor who’s given him the extra time and help) who gave him a hand in some subjects and kept him from truly failing them. he’s a slow learner, a distracted one at that, but he pours all of his loyalty and care into those who help him out along the way. but also makes them want to bang their heads against the wall.

childhood friends: so we’ve got two options here. someone who was also raised, at least partially, in upper flagley. OR one of the pureblood kids around his age that he’d visit with his family. either way, people who knew him before hogwarts and had seen his changes over the years.

borgin and burkes clients and traders: the biggest claim the burke family could make within the DE was always that they have the connections to be good supplies, and so they did. the same applies to theo right now, who uses the knowledge of cursed and dark artifacts he learned at his family’s shop, and the connections they’ve gained throughout the ages, to be of use. his face is a staple there during the summers so many characters would have dealt with the boy.

ex ex ex: theo falls fast, hard, and then crashes and burns everything around him. he’s had many absurdly short-lived relationships in the past, usually ended by his own making. fight him.

ex friends ex friends ex friends: see above. he’s just terrible at human connections wow

orchestra friends: or just musically inclined really. playing was one of the few things he discovered pretty soon he’s great at, so he can often be seen practising, listening with heart eyes to others’ music, or testing out instruments he does NOT know how to play and thus sounds horrible. music pals !!

debate club pals: his tongue is sharp, fast, and accompanied by a wannabe suave personality and an intense need for validation. the only times theo can be seen in the library are doing research for debate topics, and he’s really just invested in perfecting how to talk his way out of things. that, however, leads to more philosophical and introspective conversations than he’d rather have, so lots of room for development all around for characters !! he became the president of the club this year and he is devoting so much of himself and his to it, it’s ridiculous and mentally provoking and i love it

pine trees galore: his this is theo and he falls in love too much. it’s obviously not always a two way street and he’s not ashamed to proclaim to his peers that ‘you see that one over there with the yellow jacket? i will marry him someday’. be the yellow jacket person

ravenclaw 7th year dorm room: who has had to share a bedroom with this idiot for the past 7 years and how tired are they?

duelling partners: he’s not in the official duelling club, as he feels like he has enough on his plate this year, but he’s made tremendous progress in the last year. theo’s been practising more and more, for what he isn’t certain. it started as training to join an extracurricular. then it turned into perhaps a need to protect himself and those he cares about in the upcoming dark times. and maybe it’s a way for him to prove himself within the death eaters and show his worth as their soldier. whatever the reason, he needs people to practise with him so LETS FIGHT

death eaters: this is a bit of a vague one and applies to regular ones and students. theo is a good fighter, but not great. he’s a diplomatic talker, but no expert in mental warfare. he can’t brew the easiest of potions to save his life. however, he’s loyal to a deep fault, especially to the PEOPLE, not the cause. death eaters and their legacies are mostly what he grew up surrounded by, and those he’s navigated towards the last few years. he’s the loyal servant who keeps trying to prove he can be more than that, and the resourceful one who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy. sometimes, however, others may doubt his commitment to the cause, or need to shake him up a bit to get hi to loosen his morals. that may cause some connections of friction or suspicion, some of superiority (with him being seen very much as the loyal dog and not an equal in many occasions), and some of protection, both him protecting others (be it from the DE, from their enemies, or them themselves and their own actions) or others protecting him in the face of all the impulsive illogical decisions he makes or his lack of care for the ideology.

[pickalilywrites]

uhhhhhhhh gimme Sasha x Nikolo where Nikolo makes a whole bunch of different foods from around the world for Sasha and realises that her (and the other Walldians) aren't that bad, and then develops a lil crush on her. Please and thank you

Was thinking about writing something like this when your request popped into my inbox and thought they fit quite well! I was reminded of this very small scene in Revolutionary Girl Utena when Anthy suggests that she poisoned these cookies that Utena is eating. This fic is nothing like that, but I just thought I should mention it ^^ Hope you like it!

Last Meal

Sasha x Nikolo. Canonverse. 

979 words.

They eat like pigs, he thought when he had first gone to Paradis. Sometimes they disregarded their cutlery entirely, choosing instead to eat with their hands.  It was like they were ravenous, like they hadn’t been fed properly in years. Was it that the rest of their chefs are mediocre? That now he’s arrived on Paradis, he’s the best chef they have? Or is it simply because…

“Your cooking is delicious!” Sasha says, hurriedly biting off another leg of crab. The sauces and juices drip down her chin, but she wipes them away with the back of her hand before licking them off again, not wanting to waste even a droplet of his cooking. “I could eat your food all day!”

“I can believe that,” Nikolo mutters under his breath.

Of the people he’s met on Paradis, she must be the strangest one yet. She’s quite talkative too, even telling him that she comes from a family of hunters. He thought that meant that she would be more familiar with different dishes, but she always marvels after a taste of his food like it’s something new. She wolfs it down like a hungry animal, he thinks, but she cleans her plate so prettily. Whenever she’s done, it’s spotless.

Still, he’s curious as to why she eats his food with such gusto, such an eagerness that he’s never seen anyone eat before, not even when they were starving. She can’t be starving with how much she eats all the time, so he thinks that perhaps she’s just a glutton. He thinks that might be the case, but she savors each bite in a way that no one does.

“So this is what you call ‘crab,’” Sasha says, peeling away the shell. She’s more careful than she was last time she ate a shellfish. When he had introduced her to lobster, she almost cut herself on its hardened shell because she was so eager to eat it. “It’s very sweet, isn’t it? A lot sweeter than most of the things you’ve cooked from the sea, and it’s soft, too. The lobster was a bit chewier, I think. Ah, but they’re both good. What did you cook this with? Salt? Pepper? A little lemon? Something citric, I’m sure.”

It’s almost funny to watch her as she eats and talks at the same time. She chews with her mouth open, talks with food in her mouth, but she never drops a crumb of her food. And even though she’s nearly finished with her meal, she’s salivating and she’s dreaming about the next seafood dish he’ll prepare for her.

He had never thought that he’d be taken as a prisoner and forced to live on an island with people like these but to make him cook for them? He’s always found it incredible that they would allow someone like him to cook their meals.

Nikolo watches Sasha lick the sauce off her fingers. She looks so satisfied with her meal. She’s so easy to please. Had she been in Liberio, he’s sure she would be even more amazed and delighted than she is now. He would have all the proper ingredients at his disposal, then he could show her what a proper Marleyan meal was like.

He immediately feels like a traitor for having such thoughts. This isn’t what he should be doing. He should be off in Marley, perhaps preparing for another battle to be fought, not sitting here having a meal with the enemy.

How can she eat so easily when he had arrived on the island only a few weeks ago, ready to come for the blood of her people?

“I could have poisoned that,” he says to her, nodding her plate that sits empty save for the empty shell of her crab. He had meant to sound tough, to scare her a bit so that she would stop looking at him as if they were friends sharing a meal, but instead he feels like a child trying to act older than he actually is.

Sasha looks at him curiously, but she doesn’t seem worried. She simply sucks on her thumb before wiping it on her pants. “Did you?” she asks. She asks it like she’s asking him if he’s washed the dishes or finished cooking the rice.

“What if I had?” he asks her.

“Then I would be grateful,” she replies, a smile on her face, “that my last meal on earth was cooked by a chef as wonderful as you.”

He knows she’s talking about his talents as a chef when she says “wonderful,” but for a moment she thinks that perhaps she thinks him as “wonderful” and that brings a brilliant blush of red across his cheeks. Why is he touched by words by someone as silly as her?

He stands up immediately, taking her plate away to get it ready for washing if only to have an excuse to hide his blushing face. “Well, stop eating so fast or else you’ll choke,” he mumbles. “Then it really will be your last meal.”

She looks at him, surprised for a second, and her face breaks out into a brilliant smile. It’s the same smile that had intrigued him when he first came, the one she had on when she had finished the first dish he had ever cooked on Paradis, the same one she wore when she had thanked him for such a wonderful meal.

“I’ll eat more slowly next time,” she promises, the smile still on her face. “I look forward to our next meal.”

He shouldn’t be doing this, but he’s already planning on the next dish he’s cooking in his head. He shouldn’t be doing this, but he’s thinking about what flavors she’d like to taste the most at dinner tonight. He shouldn’t be doing this, but he’s looking forward to the next meal they share together too.

[buffster]

The Initiative (BTVS 4.07)

This is part of my ongoing Buffyverse Project, where I write notes/meta for every episode in an attempt to better understand the characters and themes of the shows. You can find the BTVS list here and the ATS list here. Gifs are not mine.

The Initiative isn’t that interesting at first glance, but it sets up several different storylines: Buffy and Riley as a couple, Willow’s depression, Spike’s escape, and our first peek of the Initiative and how it operates. 

Riley, Graham, and Forrest are sitting in the cafeteria discussing hot girls when Buffy walks in. I love getting to see Buffy from an outsider’s perspective. When we’re watching her slay it’s so easy to see her as this effortlessly cool person. But as she spills soda and breaks the yogurt machine we see she’s far from it to most of the world. It reminds us that she’s still an outsider and someone we can identify with. Forrest and Graham notice how hot she is but Riley think she’s peculiar (I wish this was their ship name). 

Xander and Giles are spending a lot of time together as the two that feel lost now that Buffy’s moved on to college. When Buffy decides to take Willow to a party instead of patrolling they decide to go instead. Xander has several military weapons but is slowly forgetting the things he learned in Halloween. I’m glad–his plot-ready military knowledge was becoming tired. 

We get our first glimpse of what happened to Spike. He’s in a white cell and when he touches the glass he gets shocked. Later a blood bag drops from the ceiling, which he eagerly reaches for, but a neighboring cell mate tells him it’s drugged and they’ll do experiments on him. It’s Tom, the vampire they got in The Freshman. Since all he remembers is facing the slayer, both decide she must be behind this. Spike is enraged. 

Spike: I always wondered what would happen when that bitch got some funding. 

I am always here for Buffy sass. This episode it’s directed at Maggie Walsh, which is even better since she seems to intimidate everyone. Willow tells Maggie that Oz will be back after they leave him out of roll call, but Maggie says she has to think of the whole class and it would be best if he not come back. Willow walks away devastated. 

Buffy: You know, for someone who teaches human behavior? You might try showing some. 

Professor Walsh: It’s not my job to coddle my students.

Buffy: That’s right. A human being in pain has nothing to do with your job. 

Professor Walsh: I like her. 

Riley: Really? You don’t think she’s a little peculiar? 

I loved this moment as well because we saw Buffy cower before a professor in the start of the season despite his cruelty. But Buffy is always strongest when defending others.

Just when I thought (hoped) we’d seen the last of Parker Abrams, he walks up to tell Forrest, Graham, and Riley about his experience with Buffy. He says it was great (she has stamina) but she was too clingy. When he makes a crude joke comparing her to a toilet seat Riley punches him. Which…finally!

Riley: I just didn’t like hearing him talk that way about Buffy. I think I … well I guess I like her.

Forrest: You’re kind of like a moron.

Riley: So you knew that I had feelings for her.

Graham: Everybody knows, man…

Forrest: 'Oh, she’s peculiar…’ Dead giveaway, Buddy! –She’s strange, she bothers me…’

Look, I get that Riley’s story isn’t exactly revolutionary. He’s a guy that always applies himself and “gets it done” but he’s suddenly thrown by a girl. He’s a soldier. He’s about as Joe Regular as we’re going to get in the Buffyverse. But I just kind of enjoyed him. He was a breath of fresh air, you know? I needed the break that was Riley between the Angel and Spike drama. 

Riley goes to see Willow but quickly realizes she’s going through something. She asks if he’s planning to fall in love and get his heart broken. It’s a dramatic moment that’s immediately broken by Riley quipping, “Yep. That’s the plan.” and Willow calmly responding, “I figured it was.” Buffy almost always levies the heavy with the light, which is what works so well about it. 

One of my favorite things about season four is the Buffy/Willow friendship. Willow analyzes Buffy’s attire and declares to Riley that she’ll mostly be dancing and heavy conversation is out of the question. Trouble is, Riley can’t dance. 

Willow: If you hurt her I’ll beat you to death with a shovel. 

Riley: *stares*

Willow: A vague disclaimer is nobody’s friend.

Spike manages to escape the compound after throwing Tom into a group of guards. The writers really dropped the ball in his relationship with Harmony. Buffy is a show centered around supernatural metaphors, and yet they completely missed the domestic/emotional abuse metaphor in Spike/Harmony and played it for laughs. She tries to be tough with him when he returns, but when he says he missed her she immediately melts. He makes a few promises but soon leads right into his obsession with Buffy again. Harmony takes some of his things to burn in frustration, which is when she meets Xander and they have their slap fight/hair pulling contest. Doesn’t she have super strength? I mean, don’t get me wrong, the fight was funny. But I’m not sure it logistically makes sense that she couldn’t overpower him. Maybe she just wasn’t really in the mood.

Riley, Graham, and Forrest enter a secret elevator and go down to the Initiative. Maggie informs them of Hostile Seventeen’s escape and Riley is put in charge. When they spot Buffy, Forrest suggests using her as bait. Riley denies him and pulls rank, which throws Forrest in such a way we know he hasn’t done that before. Buffy is shaking up more than just Riley’s world. 

I loved the scene where Buffy and Riley are each trying to make the other go away so they can find Hostile Seventeen/Spike. Both are acting insanely weird but the other is so focused on their mission they don’t notice. Riley agrees with Buffy’s comment that boys can take care of themselves and girls need help, which is our first glimpse of some potential issues down the road. Riley has been raised with certain gender ideas that Buffy has come to smash to pieces (in fairness to Riley, Buffy doesn’t exactly appear to be packing the muscle to defeat a vampire).

Spike arrives in Buffy’s dorm to find Willow. He attempts to bite her but his head explodes in pain. Buffy would have been disgusted at the pathetic creature Spike is, but of course Willow takes it personally and as a sex metaphor.

Willow: You came looking for Buffy, then settled. You didn’t want to bite me, I just happened to be around.

Spike: Don’t be ridiculous. Why, I’d bite you in a heartbeat.

Willow: Really?

Spike: Thought about it.

Willow: When?

Spike: Remember last year? You had on that fuzzy pink number with the lilac underneath…

I wonder why we didn’t get more of Spike and Willow. This is the second such conversation where they sort of understand each other. Riley, Forrest, and Graham come into the building and lock it down. Buffy arrives just in time and they all fight without seeing who the other is. Spike escapes and Riley aborts the mission. In his report Riley concludes Hostile Seventeen has an accomplice–someone or something big. 

Riley has the courage to talk to Buffy again, and this time she calls him peculiar, which he takes as a good sign. 

Character Notes:

Rupert Giles: Like Cordelia, Giles can draw. This is all a little too convenient. 

Spike: There’s another subtle hint to Spike’s growing feelings for Buffy–after declaring his feelings for her, Riley says he’s “going to see a girl”. We then cut to Spike, who says the same thing. He likes the Sex Pistols. He’s known as Hostile Seventeen.  He says he is one hundred and twenty six years old. 

Riley Finn: Did we really need to throw Riley’s characterization over the top by having him use the term “court” when talking about Buffy? Jeesh. His number is 75329. 

Willow Rosenberg: A Dingoes Ate My Baby song plays at the party and throws her. Riley gets it turned off. 

Xander Harris: Xander calls Riley a teutonic boy toy. He still seems slightly upset at the idea of Buffy being with a boy.

[inaweofdiana]

would you mind 68. (awkward hug) for Marco&Sabo or 26. (a kiss on the temple) for Makino & Luffy?

SO ive been trying to think of one for the first request since I got this and ONLY JUST realized it says Marco n Sabo, not Sabo and Ace like i thought it did bc im a dumbass who doesn’t know how to read SO LIKE THAT ONES COMING i already have a little fic fragment i was working on the other day that’ll work for it but ayooo have some temple kisses (n forehead kissed) from Makino and Luffy

-

“The locals say that the hurricane on the next island lets up once a year for a week and that the log pose only takes a day to set.” Nami entered the library where everyone was gathered with a sigh. “And that window’s not for another five months.”“So what’ll we do in the meantime?” Franky kicked back in his chair.“We could take a damn vacation for once where we’re not trying to escape being eaten for two years straight.” Sanji grumbled.Zoro snorted. “If anyone here was in danger of being eaten, it was me. You were just on crossdresser island.” He dismissed.Sanji looked pained. “They wanted to eat me one way or another.”Robin and Jinbe laughed. “You’re too cute not to eat.” Robin comforted, sending Sanji into spinning delight. They all looked at Luffy, one at a time. He was thinking, face screwed up. “We should go back and visit everyone!” He finally cheered. “We can start at my hometown and then work our way back here! It didn’t take us that long to get here the first time, if you don’t count all the butt-kicking we did on the way here! Right Nami?”She was already scribbling in her notebook. “With Sunny’s speed, travel time will be reduced, letting us spend more time at everyone’s islands. So Foosha village, Syrup town, Cocoyashi village, and the Baratie back in the East Blue, then we can hit Reverse Mountain before we hit Drum island. If we have time between Drum and Water 7, we can stop by Alabasta and Skypea. We can also probably spend some time in Sabaody before we head down to Fishman island. Do we need to stop by anywhere else? I can work on a timetable tonight.”“I’d like to stop by one of the revolutionary bases.” Robin chimes in. “It’s in East Blue, so it’s not very far out of our way.”“I’ll pencil it in if you can get me exact coordinates.” Nami agreed. “We should visit Hammock too!” Luffy added. “But we gotta visit Foosha first! And make sure Shanks isn’t there!”“You got it, your majesty.” She grinned.Luffy tipped his head back and laughed. “Let’s set sail then!”-“So this is where you grew up?” Chopper asked as they approached the calm looking island.“Yup! That’s Goa kingdom over there, they’re total assholes! Then over that way is Foosha! Brook! Further south!” He called. After a moment, the Sunny tilted slightly to their new course.“And this is where Dragon brought you?” Robin asked.“Nah, he gave me to Gramps. Gramps brought me and Ace here when we were little to live with the mountain bandits.”“Mountain bandits, Marines, Pirates, and Revolutionaries… You know everyone!” Chopper marveled.Luffy looked surprised as he processed but then laughed. “I guess I do! I’d never thought about that before!”“Don’t forget bounty hunters.” Zoro joined them at the rail. “Only the fun ones!” Luffy threw himself at Zoro, utterly confident that Zoro would catch him.Zoro didn’t disappoint, catching him with one hand and offering him one of Sanji’s smoothies with the other. “If you wanted one, you could ask.” He pointed out.Luffy grinned. “That’s not as much fun.”They landed shortly and disembarked, Luffy leading the way up through the village, pointing out “That’s where Shanks and I used to fish!” or “One time I beat up a tiger over there!” before they reached the tavern.“Are you even old enough to be in here?” Jinbe asked, concerned.“I’m 19.” Luffy pouted up at him. There was a gasp from behind the bar before a woman was rushing around it. “Luffy! Is that really you!”Luffy’s face lit up. “Makino!” He grabbed her in a monster hug, wrapping his arms around her several times over before spinning her. “I missed you!”“Luffy, I can’t believe you’re here, back on Foosha, after everything!” She beamed back. “We came to visit!” Luffy released her to turn and introduce his crew, chattering away.Makino seemed genuinely enthused to meet everyone, Robin reflected. People like that were rare in this world, she’d found. She was glad Luffy had her.Once word got around that Luffy was in town, the bar was packed and he was surrounded by well-wishers. The rest of the crew was surrounded by their share of fans as well, everyone wanting to know about them or asking them for more stories about Luffy. They ended up staying the rest of the day and well into the night, the pub throwing a huge party for them. Around nine o’clock, a huge red-haired woman burst into the building, yelling.Zoro had his hand on his swords in a heartbeat, and up on the impromptu stage, Robin had her hands crossed. She dashed across the room to try to deliver a flying kick at Luffy but he ducked under her leg with a grin and an excited laugh, wrapping her up in much the same way he’d hugged Makino. She struggled and kicked and yelled but she looked secretly pleased around the corners of her eyes and at the twist of her mouth. Makino and the Major were laughing at the spectacle like they’d seen it before, so Zoro and Robin and the rest of them stepped down.The party died down around two or three in the morning. Brook was up on the stage playing a quiet melody on the piano. Dadan and Jinbe were drinking by the fireplace. Zoro was leaning up against Jinbe and snoring while Robin was sitting on the other half of the piano bench with Brook. Nami was drinking against Sanji and Usopp, while simultaneously teaching Chopper the proper way to take a shot. Franky was elbow deep in the stove, making improvements after his seventh bottle of Soda. Luffy was sitting on the bar, talking to Makino, just as energetic and excited as he had been earlier. Makino looked a little frazzled around the edges, but equally happy.“We’ve got your poster here, see? I was going to show you earlier, but then everyone got here and wanted to talk.” Makino gestured to the wall where a blown up copy of his poster was hung with care.“So cool! Can I sign it?” Luffy bounced on the counter.“Of course!” She handed him a marker. “We have Shanks’ too, but we made yours bigger because we love you more.” She winked.Luffy grinned widely, jumping off the counter. “Well duh! I’m gonna be king of the pirates and he’s just an emperor!” Makino laughed. “You’ve been saying that all these years, and now you might actually make it.” She watched him scrawl his loopy signature across the bottom of his photo. She giggled when he added a scrunched sketch of his Jolly Roger. “Of course I will.” Luffy replied when he was done, having been biting his tongue in concentration. Makino cupped his face gently, smoothing back his bangs to look at his face.Luffy stood still and let her examine his entire face in the yellowed lighting of the bar.“You’ve gotten so old.” Makino murmured. “I can’t believe one of my boys is the pirate king.” She shook her head with misty eyes before pressing a kiss to his forehead.Luffy slung an arm around her neck with a softer smile. “I’m not the pirate king yet, Makino! Don’t tell me you’re getting sea-bile in your old age!”“Senile.” She corrected with a laugh. “Huh, that makes more sense, huh?” Luffy rubbed at his chin. After another hour or so, they left to go sleep on the ship. Jinbe was carrying a snoring Zoro like one would carry a baby, and Franky was carrying Sanji slung over one shoulder, Robin perched on his other shoulder.“Let’s put them in the same bed together, bro! It’ll be super funny!” Luffy could hear Franky laughing with Jinbe. Nami laughed with him, carrying a tipsy Chopper. Robin was laughing as well. Usopp was laughing and avoiding Brook’s grabs to try to carry him back to the ship as well.“You just want to see my panties!” Usopp was cackling.Brook groaned. “You never use the hamper! I don’t want to see them!”Makino laughed at the antics of her patrons and Luffy grinned at the sight. “We’ll be back tomorrow.” He informed her. “I’ll probably take them up to Dadan’s tomorrow though!”Makino giggled. “Dadan is asleep in my bed right now, give her ‘til about noon at least.”“Oh, okay! We’ll probably have a late night anyway!” Luffy slid off the counter. He noticed that he was finally taller than Makino, now that she’d taken off her tall shoes. He wrapped his arms around her in one last hug for the night and pressed a kiss to her temple. “But either way, see you tomorrow!” He stretched out an arm to grab Usopp by the back of his overalls and yanked him over. “Want a piggyback?” He asked brightly.“Luffy’s the best captain!” Usopp declared. “Free piggybacks for life!” He screamed to the ceiling.Makino laughed out of her moment of surprise. “I’ll see you boys tomorrow then!” She waved and watched Luffy lead a mad dash down towards the docks. That boy never did anything slowly, she reflected as the rest of the crew broke into a run to follow, laughing all the way. She was glad he’d found people to run with him.

[ecotone99]

[RF] A New Night

The third party of the week. A few known faces, certain acquaintances and large number of unknowns. Well, socialising is tough. And it’s even tougher for persons who know very few people and fear a lot of the strangers. Third party of the week and already done up the schedule for the next three weeks. Home, bed and TV. Sounds like doing nothing much really, but it helps a lot. Somewhat like yoga, but with chips, takeaways and a lot of fictional characters for company. That is fun! With this revolutionary thought at the back of his mind (feeling quite proud about himself for this) and a sly smirk on his face, he browsed through the flock of faces, who seemed to look like they were trying to have a good time with the use of catalysts, products of mass manufacturing intended for events like these (basically vodka and pizza). He didn’t really know whose birthday or anniversary or whatever it was. He was drafted into this by a good friend, like a soldier who signed up for the war just to look at all the cool guns in store. This is the first time he’d been to this place. A rich bungalow, with a pool and whatnot. In lieu of not being at home, and for having come here, he took upon himself to enjoy a beverage. A humble beer, amidst the overpowering presence of vodka (Russians, sigh!) Amongst the multitude of faces, was one, which he thought (slightly doubted) he had seen at earlier events. At the pub on Tuesday night, at the fast food place last Sunday. Looks like a very social person, that. He now had to clear this doubt to check whether it was the same face. But, as all social interactions go, this was equally daunting. He had to ask his friend or any of the acquaintances, as to who this person was. Who she was. Terrible! Just arrived and very hungry, she now had to push people around to get to the food. Not much work, but so many people could stop her and ask how she was. Why does everyone want to know that? Why can’t they wait just a few minutes until she takes a bite out of something delicious? As she was making herself ready for this sport, she seemed to notice a familiar but unknown face, reaching out for the beer. She observed his mannerisms and quickly did the math and voila! The guy from an earlier event. Or maybe his twin or an impersonator. The hungry does not think properly. An impersonator, what the hell! With no further thought about that person, she heroically pushed through and got herself to the sanctum of food! What a feeling! He had now made up his mind and gathered up all his courage to really go and ask someone. It actually took a lot of pacing around, a lot of scenarios and probable ready-to-answer questions to get to here. The means doesn’t matter, the end goal does, he thought. As he was looking for his friend, his neck stretched, in a subtle but not weird way (he didn’t wanna call out his name, obviously), he saw the valiant and physically overpowering push-through happening, making him chuckle. That’s some hungry lady, he thought. He then just stood there, with the beer in his hand, tapping his foot in rhythm with the fingers tapping on the bottle, and just gazing at her, and also simultaneously seemed like he looked past her, as if she wasn’t there (sly!). He seemed to not wanting to do the thing of asking someone. He’d rather do it himself (that’s new!). However smart, sleuth like capabilities were exercised by him, it did feel like he was staring at her. And she did find that out. She didn’t feel that was weird. She didn’t think he could be someone who did this at parties. The last two events didn’t really give much scope for her though. Why would she see what an obvious stranger would do? Only this third time, did she really notice this person, beer in hand and eyes on her. As he watched her taking a huge bite out of the burger, he gave a smile that meant that he could afterall, make an effort to go talk to her. Did he like her? Could it really be something? Obviously not, cause in all of his awkwardness and ‘society deemed brooder’, he’d never seen himself as the one that falls for a stranger (careful!). But, through the years, he had learnt to let go of opinions of what others would think about him. A rather saintly approach to romance and bittersweet friendships with persons of the opposite gender, not generally attributing the negatives in his life to his behaviour alone. A myriad of thoughts flowed through his mind. Sill tapping, still blankly staring, but very well aware of the person observing him from yonder, who until now was seated, started to get up and proceeded towards him. She savoured the burger, devoured it actually. Then came a dilemma, should she use a napkin or just simply clean up the amazing sauce by, you know. That wasn’t that much of a dilemma, especially since in the net two seconds she had already done the latter. As she was finishing up, she noticed the guy again, this time he looked worried as though he was thinking of something. Maybe he wanted to talk to her, maybe he was a shy guy, afterall. Or maybe, she should go talk to him and check who he is. He does seem to recognise her, like she did, she thought. She isn’t really that much of a social person, but people do know her. At the last party she came off as a bit too hot headed when someone mentioned that her favourite band wasn’t really good in the recent days. It was just a comment during a discussion but she did go a little far with that, claiming how his tastes were a bit too ‘normie’ and ‘mainstream’ and etcetera. She didn’t want that image to be put in those people’s heads, but here she is, fresh from a petty fight (sad!). In the next twenty seconds, she noticed that the staring guy started getting restless, a little pace up and down, rapid foot tapping and huge gulps of liquid going in. She then stood up and walked towards her gazer. Only the first hi from him after her greeting took sometime, but the rest of the conversation did really go well. So much for worrying, he thought. In all of the parties in town, of all of the people that attended parties in this town, and of all of the people that talked to him in all of the parties in this town, she was the best to talk to, to laugh with and to get drunk with, he thought. They conversed for 30 minutes, where they talked about themselves, their favourite music that played at this party, their cruel and/or sweet bosses, favourite brand of cola, mutual acquaintances and mutuals of mutuals etcetera. Normally, 30 minutes of conversation with a stranger at a party would only mean one thing to him. He was kidnapped and tortured by some mean sociopaths. But not this time. This was evident when he asked her as she was preparing to leave, as to why she was leaving early. She had something that came up (sorry!). The third party of the week was coming to a close. It felt it was going to be another one of those mentally draining participation events for him at the start. Now, he’s fine, and not mentally drained too (good!). As he was leaving with his long gone friend (he seemed to have a pretty good night) who was a bit tipsy, he remembered a lot of the instances where he was funny and amusing to her and she was joking about his awkwardness. He remained silent the whole journey back home, thinking to himself, ‘Yes. I did have a really good time, today’.

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[ultrasfcb-blog]

Maurizio Sarri: Who is the new Chelsea manager and what is his football history?

Maurizio Sarri: Who is the new Chelsea manager and what is his football history?

Maurizio Sarri: Who is the new Chelsea manager and what is his football history?

Highlights: Eden Hazard’s first-half penalty helps Chelsea beat Man Utd to win FA Cup

Forgive Antonio Conte if Friday felt a little like groundhog day. After all, it’s not the first time he has been sacked and replaced by Maurizio Sarri.

Implicated in the Calciopoli match-fixing scandal in 2006, the job of keeping Arezzo in the second division was never going to be easy with a six-point penalty. Fortunately, club president Piero Mancini had an eye for a top manager. Unfortunately, he kept panicking.

Mancini famously fired Conte in October 2006, pinning his hopes for survival on Sarri. But it wasn’t long before Mancini got cold feet. Back came Conte in March and, although results picked up, it was too late. Arezzo were relegated and have never recovered.

Sadly they went bankrupt in March. “I had the future manager of Italy and Sarri and we still went down,” Mancini sighed, incredulous. It’s a funny old game.

Who is Sarri?

Sarri worked as a foreign currency trader at the Banca Toscana

Sarri had already been coaching for more than 15 years when he succeeded Conte at Arezzo. He began in the same summer as Italia 90. If you’ve ever been to Tuscany, the chances are you have driven through a village whose team was coached by him at one time or another.

Sarri never made it as a player. He was a rugged, non-league centre-back mentored by the great Kurt Hamrin, the Swede who used to regale his players with stories about playing against Brazil great Pele in the 1958 World Cup final and all those goals he scored for Fiorentina.

Unable to make a living as a footballer, Sarri worked as a foreign currency trader at the Banca Toscana. He was attached to the international department, which involved business trips to Europe’s financial centres, including the City of London. But the role never stoked Sarri’s imagination quite like football did.

He coached part-time, hopping from one Tuscan town to another: Stia, Faellese, Cavriglia, Antella, Valdema, Tegoleto – you get the picture. Strongly influenced by Arrigo Sacchi, whose AC Milan side he taped and studied with great attention, Sarri one day decided to follow in his footsteps.

Sacchi worked for a shoe company and used conventions in Europe as an excuse to watch Ajax before jacking it all in to become a coach. Like Sarri, he had a non-playing background and coined the famous phrase: “You don’t need to have been a horse to be a jockey.”

So, in 2001, as Italy prepared to adopt the euro and foreign currency traders like him were no longer as useful to banks as they had been in the past, Sarri decided to take a leap of faith and leave his well-paid nine-to-five for what he says is “the only job I would do for free”.

Unlike Sacchi, who was 41 when AC Milan appointed him in 1987, and Conte, who got his first top-flight job with Atalanta shortly after his 40th birthday, Sarri did not reach Serie A until four years ago, aged 55. He did it the hard way.

Sarri was not plucked out of the lower divisions as the next big thing in coaching, like Juventus boss Massimiliano Allegri was when Cagliari took a punt on him after he achieved promotion to the second division with Sassuolo. He needed to take a team up himself in order to show he belonged there.

That Sarri’s talent went unacknowledged for so long in the upper echelons of the Italian game has become a source of some embarrassment in Italy. One reason Sarri lay undiscovered is because he had to wait years to get on the famous Supercorso at Italy’s elite coaching school. He didn’t have the contacts, nor the pedigree of being an ex-player to be put at the front of the queue.

Another is the lack of patience in the Italian game. Often Sarri got the boot before his ideas had time to take hold. “Like every revolutionary Sarri was long misunderstood,” wrote Francesco Saverio Intorcia in La Repubblica.

“The young Walt Disney was sacked because he lacked imagination. They advised Marilyn Monroe to become a secretary and Elvis to go back to driving a lorry.”

Luckily Sarri did not pack it all in and return to the banking sector. Had he done so he would now be chancellor of the exchequer, Inter manager Luciano Spalletti has quipped.

What can Chelsea expect?

Sarri came up against Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City in the Champions League last season

Pep Guardiola, no less, is a huge fan of Sarri’s. Before Manchester City played Napoli in the Champions League last season, the Catalan couldn’t hide his respect for the Tuscan’s brand of football.

“I encourage you and the fans to come next Tuesday because they will watch an amazing game,” said the City boss. “Two teams with the same idea: high pressing, win the ball, short passes, dynamic in front. I am very pleased to face one of the coaches I admire the most.”

At a charity golf day put on by former Chelsea player and manager Gianluca Vialli every year to raise money and awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Guardiola called the football Napoli play “a brindisi al sole” – a toast to the sun – presumably because you can’t help but raise a glass to it when confronted by its splendour.

Shortly afterwards, Guardiola went out for a bite to eat with Sacchi and Sarri in Milano Marittima, which sounds like a fantasy dinner party for football purists everywhere. It speaks volumes that Sarri has the respect of two of the game’s pioneers.

But Sacchi and Guardiola are not the only ones. When Bournemouth manager Eddie Howe attended some of Sarri’s training sessions at Empoli, it opened his mind to a different way of approaching certain phases of play.

At a coaching conference in Rio de Janeiro last summer, former Milan, Roma, Juventus and England boss Fabio Capello recommended his South American colleagues fly out to study Sarri’s methods up close.

He said he told them: “There’s something new in football thanks to Sarri. Something interesting. Every 20 years there is some innovation. After Ajax there was Sacchi’s Milan, then Guardiola, who sent football to sleep a little. Luckily Sarri is waking it up again.”

Vialli put it another way in La Gazzetta dello Sport. “Going to [Napoli’s training ground] Castelvolturno is like going to Palo Alto [part of the high-tech Silicon Valley near San Francisco]. There’s innovation, creativity.”

How will he fit into Chelsea’s structure?

Maurizio Sarri’s Serie A record at Napoli

Just as Conte changed the Premier League with the back three, expect Sarri to enrich the game in this country from a tactical perspective. Chelsea can expect to transition from one style to another.

The contrasts are stark between Sarri and Conte. But the players will experience the same meticulous attention to detail.

In the summer of a World Cup dominated by set-pieces it feels entirely appropriate that the Premier League is welcoming a manager who was nicknamed “Mister 33” for the sheer variety of corner and free-kick routines he devised.

Watford midfielder Nathaniel Chalobah spent a year on loan at Napoli two seasons ago and couldn’t believe how much time was spent on throw-ins.

“I got there and I’d never practised a throw-in in my life,” he said. “They have 10 different signals and they gave me a sheet of paper to study after my first day. At this point I’m lost.

“He got really impatient with me as he expected me to pick it up really quickly. I used to stand behind [Marek] Hamsik and follow him to see what he was doing.”

Think of them as brushstrokes in the masterpiece Sarri painted at Napoli.

He didn’t win anything in his time at the San Paolo. But as Spalletti said of his fellow Tuscan, Sarri deserved “lo Scudetto del Manuale del Calcio” – the textbook title – because football, as Sarri teaches it, is how it should be taught everywhere.

It’s beautiful to watch and should generate great excitement among Chelsea fans.

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Maurizio Sarri: Who is the new Chelsea manager and what is his football history?

Media playback is not supported on this device

Forgive Antonio Conte if Friday felt a little like groundhog day. After all, it’s not the first time he has been sacked and replaced by Maurizio Sarri.

Implicated in the Calciopoli match-fixing scandal in 2006, the job of keeping Arezzo in the second division was never going to be easy with a six-point penalty. Fortunately, club president Piero Mancini had an eye for a top manager. Unfortunately, he kept panicking.

Mancini famously fired Conte in October 2006, pinning his hopes for survival on Sarri. But it wasn’t long before Mancini got cold feet. Back came Conte in March and, although results picked up, it was too late. Arezzo were relegated and have never recovered.

Sadly they went bankrupt in March. “I had the future manager of Italy and Sarri and we still went down,” Mancini sighed, incredulous. It’s a funny old game.

Who is Sarri?

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Sarri had already been coaching for more than 15 years when he succeeded Conte at Arezzo. He began in the same summer as Italia 90. If you’ve ever been to Tuscany, the chances are you have driven through a village whose team was coached by him at one time or another.

Sarri never made it as a player. He was a rugged, non-league centre-back mentored by the great Kurt Hamrin, the Swede who used to regale his players with stories about playing against Brazil great Pele in the 1958 World Cup final and all those goals he scored for Fiorentina.

Unable to make a living as a footballer, Sarri worked as a foreign currency trader at the Banca Toscana. He was attached to the international department, which involved business trips to Europe’s financial centres, including the City of London. But the role never stoked Sarri’s imagination quite like football did.

He coached part-time, hopping from one Tuscan town to another: Stia, Faellese, Cavriglia, Antella, Valdema, Tegoleto – you get the picture. Strongly influenced by Arrigo Sacchi, whose AC Milan side he taped and studied with great attention, Sarri one day decided to follow in his footsteps.

Sacchi worked for a shoe company and used conventions in Europe as an excuse to watch Ajax before jacking it all in to become a coach. Like Sarri, he had a non-playing background and coined the famous phrase: “You don’t need to have been a horse to be a jockey.”

So, in 2001, as Italy prepared to adopt the euro and foreign currency traders like him were no longer as useful to banks as they had been in the past, Sarri decided to take a leap of faith and leave his well-paid nine-to-five for what he says is “the only job I would do for free”.

Unlike Sacchi, who was 41 when AC Milan appointed him in 1987, and Conte, who got his first top-flight job with Atalanta shortly after his 40th birthday, Sarri did not reach Serie A until four years ago, aged 55. He did it the hard way.

Sarri was not plucked out of the lower divisions as the next big thing in coaching, like Juventus boss Massimiliano Allegri was when Cagliari took a punt on him after he achieved promotion to the second division with Sassuolo. He needed to take a team up himself in order to show he belonged there.

That Sarri’s talent went unacknowledged for so long in the upper echelons of the Italian game has become a source of some embarrassment in Italy. One reason Sarri lay undiscovered is because he had to wait years to get on the famous Supercorso at Italy’s elite coaching school. He didn’t have the contacts, nor the pedigree of being an ex-player to be put at the front of the queue.

Another is the lack of patience in the Italian game. Often Sarri got the boot before his ideas had time to take hold. “Like every revolutionary Sarri was long misunderstood,” wrote Francesco Saverio Intorcia in La Repubblica.

“The young Walt Disney was sacked because he lacked imagination. They advised Marilyn Monroe to become a secretary and Elvis to go back to driving a lorry.”

Luckily Sarri did not pack it all in and return to the banking sector. Had he done so he would now be chancellor of the exchequer, Inter manager Luciano Spalletti has quipped.

Sarri replaces Conte at Chelsea

What can Chelsea expect?

<!–

Pep Guardiola, no less, is a huge fan of Sarri’s. Before Manchester City played Napoli in the Champions League last season, the Catalan couldn’t hide his respect for the Tuscan’s brand of football.

“I encourage you and the fans to come next Tuesday because they will watch an amazing game,” said the City boss. “Two teams with the same idea: high pressing, win the ball, short passes, dynamic in front. I am very pleased to face one of the coaches I admire the most.”

At a charity golf day put on by former Chelsea player and manager Gianluca Vialli every year to raise money and awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Guardiola called the football Napoli play “a brindisi al sole” – a toast to the sun – presumably because you can’t help but raise a glass to it when confronted by its splendour.

Shortly afterwards, Guardiola went out for a bite to eat with Sacchi and Sarri in Milano Marittima, which sounds like a fantasy dinner party for football purists everywhere. It speaks volumes that Sarri has the respect of two of the game’s pioneers.

But Sacchi and Guardiola are not the only ones. When Bournemouth manager Eddie Howe attended some of Sarri’s training sessions at Empoli, it opened his mind to a different way of approaching certain phases of play.

At a coaching conference in Rio de Janeiro last summer, former Milan, Roma, Juventus and England boss Fabio Capello recommended his South American colleagues fly out to study Sarri’s methods up close.

He said he told them: “There’s something new in football thanks to Sarri. Something interesting. Every 20 years there is some innovation. After Ajax there was Sacchi’s Milan, then Guardiola, who sent football to sleep a little. Luckily Sarri is waking it up again.”

Vialli put it another way in La Gazzetta dello Sport. “Going to [Napoli’s training ground] Castelvolturno is like going to Palo Alto [part of the high-tech Silicon Valley near San Francisco]. There’s innovation, creativity.”

How will he fit into Chelsea’s structure?

<!–

Just as Conte changed the Premier League with the back three, expect Sarri to enrich the game in this country from a tactical perspective. Chelsea can expect to transition from one style to another.

The contrasts are stark between Sarri and Conte. But the players will experience the same meticulous attention to detail.

In the summer of a World Cup dominated by set-pieces it feels entirely appropriate that the Premier League is welcoming a manager who was nicknamed “Mister 33” for the sheer variety of corner and free-kick routines he devised.

Watford midfielder Nathaniel Chalobah spent a year on loan at Napoli two seasons ago and couldn’t believe how much time was spent on throw-ins.

“I got there and I’d never practised a throw-in in my life,” he said. “They have 10 different signals and they gave me a sheet of paper to study after my first day. At this point I’m lost.

“He got really impatient with me as he expected me to pick it up really quickly. I used to stand behind [Marek] Hamsik and follow him to see what he was doing.”

Think of them as brushstrokes in the masterpiece Sarri painted at Napoli.

He didn’t win anything in his time at the San Paolo. But as Spalletti said of his fellow Tuscan, Sarri deserved “lo Scudetto del Manuale del Calcio” – the textbook title – because football, as Sarri teaches it, is how it should be taught everywhere.

It’s beautiful to watch and should generate great excitement among Chelsea fans.

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Maurizio Sarri: Who is the new Chelsea manager and what is his football history? was originally published on 365 Football

[topmixtrends]

FOR THE KARL MARX Bicentennial Forum, Jason Barker spoke to Clive Coleman, co-writer with Richard Bean of Young Marx, a play about Marx and his family’s early years in London. The play opened at the Bridge Theatre in London on October 27 and ran until December 31, 2017. It was directed by the Royal National Theatre’s former artistic director Sir Nicholas Hytner, and starred Rory Kinnear in the lead role, Oliver Chris as Engels, and Nancy Carroll as Marx’s wife Jenny von Westphalen.

¤

JASON BARKER: Many people will be familiar with your TV credits on The Bill and Spitting Image. How did you come to co-write a play about Karl Marx, which seems like a different proposition entirely?

CLIVE COLEMAN: As a writing partnership Richard [Bean, co-writer] and I go back a long way. We used to write comedy together in the mid-1990s. We wrote a sketch show called Control Group Six for BBC Radio 4, so we’d always been in touch. Richard became a well-known playwright and I went on to work for the BBC as its legal correspondent. We worked together on a play about phone hacking called Great Britain within five days of the verdict in the big criminal phone hacking trial in which Rebekah Brooks was acquitted and Andy Coulson convicted. [1] We worked on that in 2014 and wanted to do something else. Then Richard was approached initially to write the libretto for an opera about Karl Marx. That didn’t happen for various reasons but through talking to him about it we started reading around Marx — we read a number of biographies — and were just amazed by the fact that in 1850, as a young man, all the things you would never have imagined of this imposing figure — this bust in Highgate Cemetery — actually happened to him. He lived the most extraordinary life. All the incidents in the play actually happened. He did apply for a job on the railway as a clerk, he did have terrible boils on his backside, he fathered a child illegitimately with his housekeeper, and he lived in absolutely penurious circumstances. At one point the Prussian spy who was spying on him reported back to Berlin that Marx hadn’t left his Soho apartment for five days. Why? Because he’d pawned all of his own clothes; he was too poor to leave the house. So there was a ready-made door-slamming farce right there, with bailiffs banging on the door and his beautiful German wife fobbing them off while he hid in the cupboard. There was an amazing collection of ingredients that we thought would make a fantastic play. Initially we thought of it as a pure farce. Then we backtracked slightly because when you’re putting a genius on the stage farce is actually too slight a vehicle … That was basically it. I think we slightly fell in love with the young Marx because he was such an amazing character. Flawed but charismatic, energetic, crackling with intelligence, and the kind of person to whom things happened and who made things happen. So the character we found magnetic and fascinating.

I agree that farce is too slight a vehicle for Marx. But I could have imagined the play as an opera. You focus on a lot of material that lends itself to melodrama.

The producers were keen to have an opera with Freddy Demuth, who was Marx’s illegitimate son, grown up, but we fastened on 1850 as the play’s setting because it was a time when an awful lot was happening. We really wanted to focus on Marx as a young man, the one people don’t really know about. Some of the information has been hidden from the public …

Almost certainly a lot was censored by Marx’s daughters, maybe self-censored.

Yes. People are more comfortable thinking about him as an austere and iconic figure who gave birth to communism then Stalinism, et cetera. No one’s thought about lifting the curtain and looking at the life he was living, all the normal problems, so for us this presented an irresistible opportunity. No one’s written a play about Marx and put it on the English stage, even though he lived in England for the majority of his adult life.

In focusing on the young Marx you’re perhaps contradicting the audience’s expectations, both of the image of the man as well as Marxology. It’s easier to think of Marx as a great thinker when we’re presented with him as this sedentary old sage with a big beard in the way that all the Victorian sages are presented: Darwin, Dickens, et cetera. Did you deliberately set out to smash this image?

The thing that comes across if you read Marx’s letters, particularly those to Engels, is how funny he was; witty, funny, very well read. He would quote Shakespeare at length, he knew poetry, literature. He and Engels would ridicule their opponents, quite cruelly, actually. I’m not sure that this ritualistic side to Marx and this caustic wit ever really left him; I’m not sure he became so different to the way he was previously in terms of his sense of mischief and ribaldry. That bust of him at Highgate Cemetery — somewhat strangely — casts a long shadow. I happen to believe that lurking in the background there’s a real person. One of the things that draws you to him is this incredible intellectual energy he had. Maybe that magnetism is in some respect what makes him into a leader. If there was a room with five hundred people in it and he walked in you’d know he was there. He was someone who drew your attention. That energy was something that everyone found attractive. So in that sense I don’t think there was a deliberate effort to smash the image of him as an older man.

I’d like to come back to the question of farce. Young Marx is a very dynamic play and there’s a lot of outrageous physical comedy, like the fight scene in the British Museum, where Marx meets Charles Darwin (apparently without realizing who he is). But the mood of the play shifts with the death of Marx’s son, at which point it becomes a tragedy; Marx realizes the error of his ways and makes peace with the chaos. In reality, of course, when his son Guido dies in 1850, it turns out to be only the beginning of a long sequence of tragic events. In 1851 his wife Jenny gives birth to a daughter, Franziska, who only survives a year; then Edgar, his eldest son, dies in 1855. And for the next 15 years Marx is still persecuted much as he was before by bailiffs and landlords, and he doesn’t make serious headway on his “economics shit” for years. Even after Das Kapital is published in 1867 he complains to Engels that he’s never been in more dire financial straits and feels like he’s at death’s door. In 1860 he writes a work entitled Herr Vogt, which is this huge exposé of an obscure German activist who, years later in 1870, turns out to be a spy of Napoleon III. By this point Engels is almost tearing his hair out, imploring Marx to finish his book on capital. But he can’t. In this sense one could say that the farce is never-ending. Why did you decide to curtail the farce at the point you did, in 1850 or thereabouts, when in reality it had only just got going? 

In any piece of drama or comedy, when you’re dealing with such a full and eventful life, you have to bite off a digestible chunk. But you’re absolutely right, we compressed a lot. The Marxes lost several children, whereas we focused on Fawksey. In fact it was Edgar who lived up until just before he was eight years old, who Marx absolutely adored, and who was a brilliant Artful Dodger–type character. He would stand outside their Soho apartment and fob the debt-collectors off as well. All of that is equally great material but we wanted to get as much of his young life into as short a period as we could. So much happened in 1850; that year draws in all of the incidents that took place around it. You’ve only got two hours on stage. Had it been a box-set TV series we could have expanded it. You mention how he felt as if he was at death’s door. He was frequently ill due to a terrible lifestyle of smoking cigars and drinking far too much but also just getting through the run-of-the-mill everyday things of life. As writers, we had to make a decision about what a reasonable chunk of his life is, and if there were great things that happened outside of that then which ones we should try and work into that space.

I suppose the staging of the play might also have encouraged that compression. Young Marx is performed at the Bridge Theatre in London, a purpose-built brand-new state-of-the-art theater on the Thames at Tower Bridge. You have this fantastic revolving stage that allows the action to change locations in an instant, from Soho to Brussels, and which serves the piece very well. Did knowing you had that machinery at your fingertips influence the way you wrote the play?

It started quite raw. The Marxes lived in two rooms in London’s Soho in what’s now the Quo Vadis restaurant. We knew we wanted to have scenes in the Red Lion, where the Communist League met. We also knew that we wanted the duel scene, which actually took place in Antwerp, and where Konrad Schramm went to fight August Willich on Marx’s behalf. Schramm was grazed by a bullet, everyone thought he was dead, and then he turned up in Soho a few days later. But, actually, the truth is we wrote the play and Mark Thompson, the brilliant set designer, came up with this amazing revolving set. There were still a few scenes that the director cut. But we wanted the London of the time, which was a dirty, grubby Soho, awash with émigrés and revolutionaries from the 1848 revolutions in Europe. So we wanted this Dickensian pea-souper type of London together with this fetid atmosphere of revolutionaries plotting and planning. And also factions splitting. At least one of the communist factions wanted to spark revolution through pure violence. Marx never wanted that and believed things would happen through a historical process. It was all those things together that led to the way in which it was staged.

Whenever I fall into conversations with people about Marx, people always tend to express the same opinion. Armchair enthusiasts, people who haven’t read him much, or at all, usually start by insisting that while they admire Marx and agree wholeheartedly with his ideas in theory, they don’t see how they could possibly work in practice. I’m curious to know whether you’ve had similar conversations with people and whether you share the sentiment. The reason I ask is because that skepticism doesn’t come across in the play at all. Overall it ends up feeling optimistic and dispenses with the lunacy, along with the cliched idea that Marx is a utopian fantasist, irresponsible, nothing but a drunken raver, et cetera.

I’m someone who’s sympathetic to the man and his dilemmas. Marx was a young man married to a beautiful German aristocrat who was four years his senior. He was living in difficult, penurious circumstances, managing a young family and trying to hold a political movement together through the Communist League at a time when it was splitting up. So he had a lot on his plate! But can I answer the question in a slightly different way?

Sure.

Put it this way. A play about Karl Marx cannot avoid his writings. It would be absurd to try to do that. No one goes to the theater to have two hours of Marx’s theories rammed down their throat. That would not be a particularly entertaining evening. But we wanted to tackle his writings and we thought long and hard about finding ways and the right speeches in order for him to do that. So there’s a scene in the play where they’re making breakfast and Marx has an epiphany, and it’s through making breakfast that he manages to expound upon alienation. Something like alienation is a difficult concept to get across and we wanted to find ways to ground things like that in situations that might have sparked his imagination and enabled him to come up with them. And especially in those domestic situations. But I don’t think we ever took on or made a value judgment about whether these concepts were workable in practice. It was a moment in time. It was 1850. So no one had really put any of this stuff into practice. We were many years away from him actually completing Das Kapital. He’d been working on it for about five years and hadn’t done much, I think. So that wasn’t the focus of the play. I’ve slightly dodged your question there.

I think it’s fair to say that Marx in 1850 is an unusual character. At the time he was experimenting with communism and socialism, which were still fairly minority underground sects. He doesn’t know how things are going to work out, he’s grappling with it all; even though Marx’s “theory” is itself a practical undertaking. He’s not an abstract theorist.

There was one speech we put in the play and which I was very keen to have in. Marx had a great optimism that history would play out in a particular way and in the speech at the Red Lion he says there will be a time when the money’s eaten itself, banks will be bust, there will be no money to pay the police or the army and so we won’t need a revolution; we shall simply walk in and take over. There was also another speech we put in. Although he had this optimism, capitalism has clearly turned out to be hugely elastic and shape-shifting. It hits one crisis then it finds a way, whether through the invention of credit cards or state intervention to prop up banks. So in actual fact it’s proved to be a very powerful foe and perhaps more so than Marx imagined. So in the play he gives another speech when he’s at his nadir and in which he describes capitalism as a seven-headed hydra that can never be beaten. And I wonder whether he ever thought like that. Did he ever consider: What if I’m wrong about this? What if the enemy is more powerful than I thought? I take the view that anyone who believes so much in something must at some point reflect and think: what if the thing is more difficult to beat than I ever imagined?

It’s the Marx bicentennial this year and Marx’s ideas about class struggle and economic exploitation are still live issues. I wonder whether this explains why there have been so few TV or theater dramatizations of Marx’s life. Do you think producers are frightened, not so much of Marx, but of what he represents? Or do you think there’s a more innocent explanation? In passing I’ve heard it said that the Raoul Peck movie The Young Karl Marx has been struggling to secure an English distributor, which may go some way toward explaining why more Marx films don’t get made. Clearly it can’t be for lack of a good story, or one that’s worth telling. 

I don’t think there’s a big capitalist conspiracy to blunt any drama about Karl Marx. There have been lots of documentaries and books. I think it’s because people associate him so much with the writings and the history that followed it. And for a lot of people that’s a bit of a turn off.

But it’s still very visual. Your play has a great visual language in terms of the spies and all these archetypes you have in it. It’s interesting that the Marx story should remain so overwhelmingly on the page.

Well, having said that the Young Marx play has been on about a thousand cinema screens on National Theatre Live, so it has been seen in cinemas. There may end up being a film of the play. Who knows? You have these sleeping giants. For years and years, when I was writing sitcom, everyone said you cannot write a sitcom about people being in an office. People are in an office all day and they do not want to come home and sit for another half an hour and watch people in an office. And then Ricky Gervais wrote The Office. Sometimes you have a long period where people think things aren’t doable. Then suddenly times change, attitudes change, and those things become popular. So you never know. This may be a time when people are going to look again at Karl Marx. He certainly deserves a look.

And as a dialectical thinker of contraries he’s perhaps the greatest sleeping giant of them all. One should never say never with Marx.

Well, exactly. Maybe we’ve helped to start something new.

¤

Jason Barker is professor of English at Kyung Hee University, South Korea. He is the writer-director of the German documentary Marx Reloaded and author of the novel Marx Returns.

¤

[1] In 2011, it emerged that The News of the World, a mass circulation UK tabloid Sunday newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, had hired a private investigator to hack into the phone records of Milly Dowler, a young British teenager who went missing in March 2002, and whose body was eventually discovered six months later. In July 2011, it was reported that during the period of Dowler’s disappearance, during which the newspaper supported a public campaign to find her, the private investigator and journalists from the paper listened to voice messages left on her phone, and deleted others in order to free space for new incoming messages. This created the false impression that Dowler was still alive. Following pubic outrage the paper ceased publication in July 2011. In 2013, former editors of The News of the World, including Brooks and Coulson, were prosecuted for their involvement in the related phone-hacking scandal.

The post “Young Marx” at the Bridge Theatre London: An Interview with the Writer Clive Coleman appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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