#but it's really because he believes himself unfit and unworthy for the role

[every-jiraiya]

[fallen-gabrielle]

Lucifer AU!!

Nigel might look like hyper confident, but behind that pompous smile, he's actually hurt. He was raised by Father in Hell. He found out one day that his uncle had been lying to him about his parents so he left Hell to findn them. But then he meets with Sector V and so he decided to join them just to spite his uncle (he already knew about the KND, hearing stories from Father whenever he returns to Hell). He doesn't listen to his hierarchy, something Rachel can't stand. But eventually, with time, they will open to each other. He doesn't say at first he's Father's nephew, because that's how everyone always called him in Hell. He wanted to be his own person, that people would judge him on his actions, abilities and personality rather than just "Father's Nephew". At one point Sector V will discover who his relatives are, but since they all have an evil relative and that Nigel explained them why he came to Earth in the first place, they didn't hold a grudge against him. And despite telling everyone that he is a demon, nobody believes him.

Some demon lore: there are seven "big" important families, based on the seven deadly sins. Obviously, Father and co are wrath. They have a huge tradition that the first born (no matter if it's a boy or a girl) will be the head of the family. Father, being the second, had a hard time to impose himself in Hell. But they are the most dangerous family with their hellfire powers, so demons learned to respect him anyway (mess with him and you're basically dead). Also, demons do not take care children who aren't their own, it's to keep their direct lineage safe. Even if said child is a relative. So when Father took Nigel in, it was more or less a scandal, but no one dared to critisize much because you know, Father can be extremely dangerous. That's the reason why Nigel has a rivalry with his cousins: Father was recognized as the head of the family, giving his children legitimacy to be the next in line. But since Nigel is the only son of the eldest brother, and that he already has his powers, he is the best candidate for being Father's true successor. He was constantly told that his role/destiny/future was to become the next Dark One (villain name by default until he discover his own nickname). But, since he is actually half demon,  he has a certain goodness in him that doesn't fit with the rest of the demons. They can feel it, he can feel it, he doesn't feel comfortable in Hell, but he doesn't really have a choice. Until he learns his uncle lied to him about his parents : while Father never explicitly said they were dead, he let Nigel believe that. In this AU, Monty somehow send his father's mind in Hell while his body stayed on Earth: in Hell, he is underpowered, that's how Benedict was able to become the chief of the family, despite the fact Grandfather didn't want that, but fuck him. Let Ben be in charge. If Nigel is more or less close to his uncle, he is definitly not to his grandfather Grandfather forbid to talk about Monty whatsoever (even depowered and stuck in Hell, he still makes the rules, something that even Father can't undo). So Nigel doesn't know shit about his own dad, even less that it was him who trapped Grandfather there. Something else: if demons find their babies unworthy/unfit for them (whatever the reason), they tossed them in a pit where they live miserably until they die. Many gossips turned around Nigel: a rejected boy (even if his dad didn't follow the demon way) isn't worth of his position. So for all his life, Nigel always heard backbiting about him. When he joined the KND, he found his first friends and that was the happiest experience of his life.

The first time he saw Rachel, he sensed so much goondess in her he asked if she was an angel. That sounds like a lame pick up line, but he meant it. He never met an angel before but he heard so much about them. He thought that if his dad was able to find happiness on Earth with a human woman, why can't he find it too? BUT.... here's more angst : Nigel finds out he has a twin brother. The idea that he was indeed rejected by his parents pretty much fucked him up. Not knowing the whole truth is hurting him but he can't trust his uncle anymore, so he doesn't go ask him anything. He will avoid his uncle as much as possible, because he doesn't want to go back to hell. and he's pissed at Ben, so he doesn't want to see him.

[nexstage]

Starless

Andy Demayo: Changes passing, essence unmoving

Life is a roller coaster of changes.

The weather changes: one day it's all sunny then the next day you are drenched because of the rain.

Society changes too. The once venerated politicians become a thing of the past people want to remember or forget and new candidates prepare themselves to compete in elections.

The whole Earth changes. Millions of years ago, dinosaurs inhabited every piece of land as if their reign was eternal, then, a moment later, a rain of asteroids kicked them out of their throne and humanity came, taking their place.

Many things change. Fashion, religion, family structure, romantic relationships, educational system, technology. Andy could never stop listing how many other aspects change. However, there is one thing that is invulnerable to that: essence.

No matter how much time might pass, rocks are still rocks in any corner of the world. Big, small, of any shape or color, in mountains, hills, in the deepness of the ocean or in a desert, they're still rocks.

The same can be applied to trees. They can be tall, short, with or without fruits, with too few or too many leaves, and they would still be trees.

Animals too. The lion is still the king of beasts, a predator whether he lives in a zoo, a circus, a refuge or a cave. The sun and the moon can still shine in their own time even if one eclipses the other. The stars are still in the sky even if there is rain or hail.

Change could come and go whenever it wanted, but the essence was immovable. It was eternal. Sure you could change your way of seeing things, or acting towards others, you could be the bad guy today and become good the next one, or inverted. Still, you were you.

But not everyone feels comfortable by being oneself. Not everyone sees the true worth in their essence, and by that he meant Steven.

To think one moment he was that happy-go-lucky child who wanted everyone to get along no matter if they were gems or humans and now he was gone. Disappearing with his car with an unknown fate ahead of him. It sounded surrealistic.

Surrealistic and absurd. Steven had everything with him and he was so loved by everyone so why leave?

Then he remembered that Greg told him: 'The Gems listened to some things he planned to say just to himself, Andy. Pretty worrying things. Like he needed to be needed, everyone stopped needing him as if he saw himself as a tool and he also thought some ugly things about the Gems and kept them in secret. Now we don't know where the hell he is!'

The explanation was certainly disturbing but confusing at the same time which made Andy wish he had met Steven and watched him grow up to see if what Greg has told him was true.

But after listening to him one more time, more calmed and composed, the gears of his mind started working and the pieces of the puzzle regrouped into a clearer image. A clearer and very concerning image of Steven's future.

The first time he met Steven, he thought he was a naive and sweet kid, too kind for his own good whenever he talked to people, and yeah, that part was true. Years later, he was still being a social butterfly, always willing to help.

Always. Willing. To help.

If there is something he has learned is that it's impossible to live with the term 'always' applied to every aspect of your life. Because you can't always have every answer, you can't always solve every problem, you can't always be there for others, you can't always make people happy. 

You can't always be everyone's messiah.

You might explode if you try to, that's why balancing 'always', 'never' and 'sometimes' is the healthier way to live.

Unfortunately, no one taught Steven that motto. Or cared to do it.

He wishes he was there to teach him that, though. Maybe this mess would have never happened if someone had put more effort into telling Steven to take things easy instead of waiting for people to need him or put a lot of pressure on his shoulders.

And now he's gone.

He's gone because he felt useless. Gone because he felt lost.

Steven's gone because he felt like an obsolete thing while the people around him are changing, upgrading and enjoying better things.

He got that sentiment.

'Why'd you leave?'

'I'm the only one who didn't! It was your goofball father who was the first one to hightail it out of here. Then after him, it was Aunt Deb. She and her partner got the RV. No reason to stick around with that thing! Grandpa moved to the keys, too old to make the drive anymore. I was the only one who tried to keep everything how it used to be. I knew what it meant to really be a family. And look what that got me, huh?! Nothin'! It just doesn't feel fair, everything got so different. I wanted everybody to stay the same, but they- they just didn't. Geez. What am I even doing? I got an airplane. I could've been visiting everybody, everywhere they went. I could have known about you. I guess I could have just changed too, you know?

It's not too late. We're here. If you want us to be.'

He wishes he could tell Steven the same things he told him when Andy felt so frustrated and lost with himself.

Back then, it was him and Greg and Grandpa, and the others of the family. But then Greg felt like life had better things for him and wanted that, so he left to pursue his musical career despite his father's protests. After that, the world went downhill for Andy. Moving on and going to other places became the 'new trending', and while the rest of the family was happy with that, he couldn't accept it.

He became old-fashioned and obviously when something gets antiquated, it is forgotten. But the problem didn’t come from him being forgotten because of his traditional ways, it came from the fact that he didn't make space for the new times to accommodate in his life. He was so caught up trying to keep the family together that his old-fashioned ideas blinded him. He could have balanced traditionality and change, but just stayed in the same spot thinking the others went insane when the crazy one was him. Thankfully, Steven encouraged him to reconnect with Greg and be more open-minded with change without losing himself in it.

Maybe that's what the kid needed all this time: someone to help him live through the multiple changes and cheer him up to be himself whether people need him or not.

Besides, why being needed when you are so loved and estimated by everyone?

That's another thing that Steven hasn't figured out or had trouble figuring out: he didn't need to be needed. If he has a family and friends that love him for who he is, it is because they truly feel that way, not because they have some ulterior motive to want Steven around.

If things were like that, then there would be no family and no friends, just people riding on his coattails to get what they want.

That's not the kind of people he has been having around. That's not the kind of change Steven wanted around him.

Or that was what Andy hoped.

No, wait! He was jumping into conclusions, the kid's family wasn't like that, it was just that Steven couldn't handle change in a good way.

And obviously, he was desperate to change alongside the others but it was like he was stuck in quicksand while the rest of the world could get itself out of that bad place and keep moving.

He wondered if Steven was mad at the others because they were leaving him while he tried to keep things static, unchangeable.

Andy shook his head, no no, that was him back then not Steven. Maybe the boy was mad at himself because he couldn't advance like his friends or his family and came to the conclusion that he wasn't necessary anymore.

If he couldn't change and became obsolete then it was better to go to the trunk of memories and stay there.

It was really worrying. Now he got why Greg was so desperate to find him.

But the question was what would they do once they found Steven?

The boy has stopped seeing his self-worth as something beneficial for everyone, he might have believed himself as unfitting for change and therefore unworthy to try, so even if they talked with Steven he would push them away as if that would make everyone a favor.

They needed a wise approach to get through the kid.

Shit, he didn’t have a single idea of what to say when the moment came.

Any word, any good intention could be interpreted in the wrong way.

Steven might think he was being a burden on his family, that everyone was wasting their time on him, that it was better to hide much farther away than before.

No, stop that nonsense! This wasn't the time for worst-case scenarios, this was the time for action!

On the road, he would think what might be the best approach to give Steven some well-deserved encouragement, but now finding him was the priority.

He hoped it didn't take that long, though. Teenagers who ran away from their homes didn't have it as easy as the ones who are kicked out.

Geeez, it was so hard to believe that the roles have changed. Here he was, Andy Demayo, someone who Steven helped with kindness and empathy, looking for the same boy who gave him a bit of hope to embrace change.

Well, it was time for him to return the favor.

And he'd do it like Steven. With his whole heart open to listen and comfort.

The kid deserved it, after all.

He deserved to take a break and not focusing on if he is changing enough for everyone or not, to live life carefree and do stupid things like all teenagers without caring about the consequences, to believe his future is much more than being a self-sacrificing messiah.

He deserved to know that even if millennia passed in front of his eyes, Steven would always be loved for being himself.

Because that's how you let change enter your life without losing yourself.

[magicalusuki]

progen dragon sharing, inspired by a post by @goannafr that ive had in my drafts since may 12th of this year! wow i am good at being late

varsha- custom progen

so the colors i chose for varsha.... well, i didnt choose them. which is fully. i was in school in the middle of a movie in health class, and id snuck onto my phone and made an fr account because the registration window was about to close and i was going to be busy the rest of the time it was open, or maybe i was just too impatient.

i didnt realize you could even change the colors of the dragon- i just chose the breed and my flight (wind), and actually moved to ice almost immediately after because wind was such an impulse decision. 

i actually hated her colors once i realized that i could have picked them myself, because i would have probably made a seafoam/rose dragon. but now i love her. it might have been cool if she at least had a different blue for the wings, so if i could remake her (and assume she got the same tert) i would give her storm wings. it brings out that gray tert in a really cool way and just makes her a biiit more interesting. i mean, look at that! it look great with her apparel, too.

i chose to make her a fae, because i though that they were cute. i didnt like any of the other starter breeds when i joined because i was a coward. i wanted the cutesiest dragons ever, which is funny considering now varsha is super badass

i had like... the vaguest clue of what fr was, because i was in the neopets community and a ton of the blogs i followed were into it, but i didnt really understand it in depth. fun fact! my original username was twinkling. 

exaltation

so when i first joined fr, from what i remember we had... very few tert options. i believe we had basic, crackle, underbelly and circuit? and with varsha’s tert being grey, and yukienne’s being denim... basically nothing looked even slightly decent.

on top of this, i really wasnt in the forums or community much at all- so i wasnt aware that maybe exalting your progens wasnt a great plan, and how special they can be. and i certainly wasnt thinking about future genes. i mean, its been 5 years and STILL the best tert for varsha is stained and i dont particularly love any i have for yukienne!  ive grown to like stained on varsha, but for real. even irishim couldnt save that grey tert, and i used to be OBSESSED with irishim

.im not against geneing yukienne fully and i have a few options planned, but denim is not.... its not an easy color to work with, which sucks because sky and violet work together so well, and then you have this random greenish-grayish blue. why. which is why he is not gened at all because oh my god. please fr give me something that makes denim purpley ill die for you

this is his current most likely scry but im still... not sold... at least sky is one of my favorite colors on site! hes still a pretty lucky random progen all things considered, i know some people were truly cursed. they also have a pretty okay range, so thats nice! i brought these guys back as quick as possible and was so excited i got the option so do so.

lore and clan roles

in the end, exaltation gave my progens a lot of character- although i was so upset about having done it for literal years, lol. my clan lore felt super weak up until bringing them back.

varsha is clan leader, but im undecided about yukiennes role- all i know is that he did essentially abandon varsha in exaltation and didnt actually fight to earn his right back to this plane, and she resents him for that. i can imagine they did talk initially about him rising up the politcal ladder rather than being involved in the war itself, and i imagine initially he was actually quite gentle and perhaps a bit skittish- she had more pity for him then, and understood he wouldnt fare as well. maybe she even thought it would help his confidence. but seeing him live a bejeweled life as she fought endlessly.... well, thats just not great. on top of it, he sees himself as responsible for their return, not acknowledging varshas efforts, and he does this despite the fact that there was no evidence of it.  so yukienne likely doesnt do much in the clan, and i imagine varshas bodyguard- nevara- keeps an eye on him until or if varsha decides hes trustworthy to help. in the end, he doesnt especially want to do things for the clan anyways- he doesnt feel the dedication that varsha does, and though varsha doesnt realize it hes worn himself. hes tired of lies and a political lifestyle, and i dont imagine hes as confident as he might come off- its likely more a force of habit, and in saying it was because of him they got home, he just more than anything wants validation that his suffering was just as painful and he worked just as hard as varsha. but she really cant see that. in her eyes, hes still sitting on a pedestal, lying and spoiled rotten. even if now hes just lost and tired more than anything else.

varsha obviously is very strong willed and stubborn, and sometimes has difficulty empathizing with others- particularly those she perceives as having caused her harm. shes not especially friendly, and a bit paranoid. still she cares a lot about others, particularly her clan members who she views as her responsibility, and so she pushes away her own feelings best she can. shes more prone to trust those from wind than from any other flight, and is working on her distrust of those from ice. 

she has a close bond to nevara due to her wind heritage and time spend together on the battlefield, and trusts her deeply. she also deeply trusts aer, the very dragon that first found her and yukienne, and the only from the clan at the time that did not know of her exaltation until it was too late. she appreciates the effort on her behalf to keep the clan in order and understands aer was also very hurt by what her clan members had done, and is glad to have someone from that time who had missed her. 

varsha also finds amaryllis sort of cute and charming.the wind heritage probably helps yet again in this case, but even beyond that, she appreciates someone so unfit for the role trying their very hardest to play leader to keep their clan together in her absence. she sees her somewhat like a little sibling, despite not having a large gap in age.

since mako worked so close to both amyrllis and aer during her absence, she was one of the first ice flight members in their clan that she warmed to. with her optimistic and free spirited attitude, and the fact that shes still willing to work in a political position (unlike amaryllis, who was happy to retire) she helps to balance out varshas negative views of people and also is very useful in giving intel and helping create strong bonds between their clan and others, since varsha... would probably never do so on her own, but does see the necessity.

yukienne, at this point, lives a fairly solitary lifestyle. being rejected by the person he admires most as well as feeling he betrayed and failed her, he sees himself unworthy of deeper relationships. at the same time, he is stubborn and unwilling to discuss and feels he doesnt deserve sympathy or to explain his side. all interactions and relationships he has are shallow. at the very least, he is genuinely very proud of his appearance, so thats probably the one thing he has actual confidence in.

[him-e]

Due to SW I've been thinking about our perceptions of power and of course ended up thinking about ASOIAF. Would you say that power-hungry Tywin did raise his kids in a way that they can't see the power they actually have? While all his children crave power (in different ways), they constantly end up at the mercy of others, often by their own design. Cercei reduces herself to her vagina, Jaime to his sword, Tyrion to his Imp image (though he does it the least, prop because of his intellect).

Any examination of power and whether the lack thereof is real or perceived and how this can be a consequence of parental abuse needs to take into account the fact that Westeros is a deeply unbalanced society because of its rampant sexism, ableism and classism. So when you say that Cersei and Tyrion can’t see the power they actually have, the obvious objection would be: do they really have power? I mean, they both do compared to the lower classes—Cersei is the queen, and Tyrion is the son of a high lord, lives at court, has been hand of the King for a while etc. But the class privilege they possess is incessantly undermined by how Westeros’ society sees respectively Cersei’s gender and Tyrion’s disability as things that make you inherently less human—that happens when the default human being is thought to be male and able bodied—thus incapable, or unworthy, of wielding actual power.

It’s a combination of Tywin not valuing any type of power that doesn’t come from being male, straight, able bodied and rich by birth and transmitting this ideology to his kids, and the fact that by societal norms they have very little power compared to what an able bodied male would have in their exact social position. This lack of power makes them lash out and/or overcompensate, which inevitably leads to technical/tactical mistakes. They actually lash out more, and more messily, than most characters in a similar position do (which means they particularly attract this sort of “why can’t they use their power properly” discourse), and that’s because the only role model they have is Tywin who is the epitome of the kind of violent, aggressive masculine power that they both cannot access to no matter how they try. 

So there’s a huge dissonance between what Cersei and Tyrion are told they are allowed to do and what House Lannister is supposed to be.They’ve been simultaneously taught that they have to be Tywin to be powerful and that they’re unfit to be Tywin because of things outside of their control. They know that to make father proud they have to behave “properly” i.e. not exceed the limits of their gender and disability, but at the same time they understand that this sort of behavior is the opposite of What Tywin Would Do. For example, Cersei gets told to be a good broodmare and just shut the fuck up, but it’s no wonder that she struggles with the idea when it’s so clear that Tywin despises all things culturally feminine and prioritizes aggression and violence. It’s also no wonder that, being raised to believe that her only value is in her reproductive parts, she weaponizes those and remains blind to other ways to climb her way to power. Because those ways are inherently harder and imply a much greater defiance of societal norms that Cersei, who deep down still wants to please Father, isn’t ready to commit to.

The thing with House Lannister is that it replicates (exacerbating it) everything wrong with Westeros’ culture on a personal, familial scale, showing very clearly how bad it is to enforce a patriarchal, gendered idea of success and power on people who cannot adhere to it, and then punish them for trying. To make things worse, the current generation of Lannisters has no idea how to incorporate the feminine in their “hear me roar” mindset, in no small part due to the tragic absence of a matriarch in the house, one that could stand her ground against Tywin, show their kids that he’s not an absolute, and that different outlooks on power are possible. (for all that GRRM’s abuse of the *dead mother* trope is despicable, he has done his homework and knows that the easiest way to fuck a character up is to deny him (or her) access to their inner Feminine. And in turn the easiest way to do that is to prematurely sever their bond with the Mother)

Tywin’s role model is so toxic and unattainable that it fucked up even the one among Tywin’s children who was both male and able bodied. Jaime was, on paper, capable of “becoming Tywin” one day, according to Westeros’ cultural rules. But he ended up crippling himself LONG before he was physically maimed in ASOS. He joined the Kingsguard, essentially giving up his birthright; and then killed Aerys, utterly destroying his social respectability. Beyond the material reasons behind these actions—he killed Aerys because Aerys threatened to blow the entire city up and took the white because Cersei asked him to, of course—it would be interesting to analyze the ways in which those things might be a subconscious reaction/middle finger to the pressure of being ~Tywin’s designated heir~ and by extension a rejection of his ideology (though an incomplete, flawed one). (in fact, I would put the twincestin this category too, as it’s something that effectively taints Tywin’s legacy and hyperpatriarchal ideal of perfection)

[how2to18]

THE SLIPPERY NATURE of Araminta Hall’s American debut, Our Kind of Cruelty, is established from the very first page with an epigraph chipped from Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea: “One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.”

The implication that what follows will also be a love story is both true and misleading, which sets the novel’s tone and identifies its central paradox: “[H]ow do you show someone that what they believe to be true is really not the truth?” This is, essentially, a love story; a story about love. It’s no starry-eyed romance, but a love story in the tradition of Wuthering Heights or Caroline Kepnes’s You, in which love manifests as darker, more obsessive, with lovers prepared to burn down the world that would keep them apart, even if they self-destruct in the process. Or, as the narrator of this book declares: “[S]ometimes two people need each other so much it is worth sacrificing others to make sure they end up together.”

These two people are Mike and V(erity), a young West London couple who spent eight years in a psychologically complex, all-consuming relationship before Mike’s work took him abroad to New York, where the strain of distance and one drunken mistake caused V to end their relationship, soon afterward becoming engaged to another man. This decisively removes any chance Mike has of winning her back. Or does it?

This is dark and thought-provoking psychological suspense, eschewing the typical “he said, she said” structure to instead present an intense single-perspective dive deep into the core of a relationship whose truths have always been veiled. Here, there is only the “he said”: the book opens with Mike sitting in prison after he’s killed a man, reluctantly writing a detailed history of his relationship with V at the request of his barrister. What emerges from this account is a portrait of a relationship with an intricate power dynamic characterized by role playing, sexual exhibitionism, and a deeply rooted choreography of cues, codes, and signals developed between two lovers for communicating undetected by outsiders.

These signals were carefully orchestrated behavioral props for use in the Crave — a bit of performance engineered by V as a lark, mingling danger and violence in a sexually charged ritual in which the couple frequently indulged over the course of their relationship. The Crave always took place in a crowded public space, a nightclub or bar where V would allow a man to buy her a drink and encouraged flirtation while Mike watched from a distance, waiting for V’s signal. As soon as she tugged her silver eagle necklace, he would push through the crowd and angrily confront the man hitting on her, using his extraordinarily muscular body to threaten him until he left, emasculated, and Mike and V would celebrate their triumphant rush by having sex in the nightclub bathroom, V turned on by Mike’s violent potential: “I love seeing how scared they are of you.”

These are the moving parts of their relationship; V setting the stage, calling the shots, Mike watching intently, waiting for his cue to act, intimacy triggered by theatrical heroism and the threat of violence. And as for the men from whom Mike had to “rescue” V, well, both love and war have their share of collateral damage. “We had played enough times to know that the end moments often seem cruel; that for us to get what we want others have to get hurt. If we could have done it another way then no doubt we would have, but there was no other way; cruelty was a necessary part of our game.”

Four months after their split, during which time V rebuffed all of Mike’s attempts to communicate, he emails to tell her he is moving back to London, and she responds warmly, apologizing for her behavior during their breakup, hoping they can renew their friendship when he comes home, and telling him of her engagement to a man called Angus. Although initially stunned, Mike quickly understands that her blithe announcement is both a punishment and a challenge — an opportunity for him to make amends:

Her breezy tone was so far removed from the V whom I knew, that I wondered for a moment if she had been kidnapped and someone else was writing her e-mails, although the much more plausible explanations were that V was not herself, or that she was using her tone to send me a covert message. There were two options at play: Either she had lost her mind with the distress I had caused her at Christmas and jumped into the arms of the nearest fool, or she needed me to pay for what I’d done. This seemed by far the most likely; this was V after all and she would need me to witness my own remorse. It was as if the lines of her e-mail dissolved and behind them were her true words. This was a game, our favorite game. It was obvious that we were beginning a new, more intricate Crave.

V broke up with Mike in response to “the American incident,” an offense Mike committed while overseas, and as he parses out the subtext of what would appear to others to be a casual email, he sees she is offering him reconciliation. Only he knows her well enough to see the coded offer she is making — the chance to redeem himself in their most elaborate Crave yet; an apology in the form of a grand romantic gesture, to rescue V from Angus — just another unworthy man, the latest dupe in a series of dupes.

Is this too difficult a request to make of Mike, a man she has cold-shouldered for months after breaking his heart? (“‘If it’s easy it’s probably not worth having,’ V said to me once, and that made me smile.”) And is she, in fact, asking, or is Mike just seeing what he wants to see, believing that this whole separation has been a test of his resolve, that “V and I were never meant to be apart.” Is he responding to the rules of a game V’s stopped playing? (“‘Everything is a game,’ V used to tell me; ‘only stupid people forget that.’”)

The ambiguity is thick. On the one hand, this is a couple with a long history of using mind games as foreplay. On the other hand, the reader is limited to Mike’s point of view, which is demonstrably unreliable, through his own admissions. But just because we don’t see the messages he sees in V’s words and behaviors doesn’t mean they aren’t there, not in a couple as opaque to outsiders as they were, and as comfortable with manipulation. Hall bats the question back and forth in front of the reader the whole way through: Do we have one unreliable narrator or two? Is this the work of two sociopaths in love or the misinterpretations of one delusional man? Is this Crave or Cray?

Mike is certain of his truth: “I knew what she was doing, it was all fine.”

It’s an intensifying thriller, building momentum as it progresses, bringing Mike’s narrative closer to his crime, keeping the reader guessing as to V’s intentions and the level of her culpability. She may not have a direct voice here, but her power over Mike is clear in his account of their romantic history and his devotion to her, even now.

V is a woman with the kind of entitled confidence found in the young and beautiful who are well aware of their beauty and the power it grants, accustomed to having people bend to their whims. In her personal life, she is impulsive, sexually adventurous, and fond of provocation, using Mike to shock her conservative parents. Professionally, she’s a successful and well-respected figure in the field of artificial intelligence, conditioning machines to be more human, and the persuasive influence she wields at work bleeds into her her relationship with Mike. “It is true to say that the Crave always belonged to V,” and in fact, she controlled every aspect of their relationship. Their compatibility wasn’t a case of two people perfectly matched; it was the result of V shaping Mike into what she desired at the time, even referring to him as “Frankenstein’s monster.” And Mike, who grew up in a foster family after his alcoholic mother was deemed unfit, basked in her attention and gladly adapted to please her (“I like the sense of dedication that has gone into creating me”). Grateful to V for everything, he changed his routines (“V likes me to lift weights and start all my days with a run”), his body (“V sculpted me into what she jokingly called the perfect man and she wasn’t happy until every part of me was as defined as a road map”), as well as his habits, tastes, and manners. One could construct quite a profligate drinking game from the number of times the phrase “V taught me how to…” appears.

For his part, Mike is unusually malleable, a care home kid with anger issues and a history of poor impulse control and acting out in rage, whose own written account exposes periods of blackouts, struggles with social cues and interactions, and disproportionately aggressive responses to small frustrations. V choosing to love him was an unexpected honor; she gave him purpose, a home, and a sense of belonging he’d never had before. He stresses frequently that he and V stand apart from the rabble: “V and I are not like others.” Their love elevates them beyond ordinary expectations, and Mike relishes his role as V’s protector; the “them-against-us” aspect to their games. “‘We make a funny pair,’ she said to me once, ‘you with no parents, me with no siblings. There’s so little of us to go around. We have to keep a tight hold of each other to stop the other from floating away.’” And Mike is determined to hold on tight.

Even after their split, he remains in her thrall. Like a dog trained to fight, he responds to one master and he’s in the ring for her whether she’s still commanding him or not. Conditioned by the Crave to observe her down to her most unconscious gestures, even the phrasings he uses are suggestive of a canine presence: “I would wait, my eyes never leaving her, my body ready to pounce at all times.” He’s eager to please, dead loyal, and trained to obey V’s subtext and cues even when they don’t line up with the facade she’s presenting to the rest of the world, which sustains the uncertainty throughout, Mike “knowing” what V would want, even when he suspects she may have gotten lost in her own game.

Getting Gillian Flynn to blurb this is a perfect choice. In many ways, Hall’s is a similar take on Gone Girl’s toxic relationship theme; a lack of honest communication and an uneven power dynamic are contributing factors to the relationship’s struggles, with a special emphasis upon a man’s frustration with the inscrutability of a woman. There’s even a deliberate echo to Gone Girl in a scene where Mike reveals he loves to watch V sleep and fantasizes about uncoiling her brain, both to understand her and to direct her thoughts toward him. The attractive vulnerability of a sleeping woman, the impulse toward violence as a tool for understanding; it’s the refuge of an emasculated man in thrall to a woman who outmatches him.

Despite the nod, this is no Gone Girl rip-off, and it actually becomes a thoughtful response to Gone Girl and all of the subsequent authors of psychological suspense homesteading on Gillian Flynn’s land. There has been a glut of post-G.G. novels in which manipulative women mastermind intricate webs of deception, so much so that it has almost become a cliché of the genre. Hall upends the reader’s expectations by removing direct access to the female character, and whenever V appears to be innocent, doubt is automatically triggered in the reader by these ingrained genre presumptions about gender and power.

This all gets thrown for a loop in the third-act courtroom scene, where Gone Girl gives way to a modern-day The Scarlet Letter, and the truth, previously twisted through Mike’s flawed perspective, is now professionally twisted through a legal wringer and the scope of the story becomes larger than a domestic dispute, much more insidious and timely.

Of course this is a love story, but it is a love story built upon emotional extremes:

They say that hate is the closest emotion to love. And passion certainly exists in two forms. The passion of sex and the passion of arguments. For V and I one would merge into the other all the time. One second shouting, the next fucking. We needed each other in a way that sometimes made me feel like it wouldn’t be enough until we’d consumed each other. I read a story once about a Russian man who ate his lovers and I sort of understand why he did it. Imagine your lover actually traveling through your blood, feeding your muscles, informing your brain. Some would see that as the basest level of cruelty, others as an act of love. Ultimately, that is what it means to Crave.

Love, cruelty, passion, and lies, manipulated to serve the theatrics of court and Crave alike, where the truth looks different depending on what you have to protect, what you have to lose, and whether you’re getting paid. To reenlist Murdoch’s epigraph, “Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face.”

¤

Karen Brissette is a voracious reader and the most popular reviewer on Goodreads.

The post Love, Cruelty, Passion, and Lies appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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