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mariacallous · 6 days ago

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In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

Moldbug acknowledged that his vision depended on the sanity of his chief executive: “Clearly, if he or she turns out to be Hitler or Stalin, we have just recreated Nazism or Stalinism.” Yet he dismissed the failures of twentieth-century dictators, whom he saw as too reliant on popular support. For Moldbug, any system that sought legitimacy in the passions of the mob was doomed to instability. Though critics labelled him a techno-fascist, he preferred to call himself a royalist or a Jacobite—a nod to partisans of James II and his descendants, who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opposed Britain’s parliamentary system and upheld the divine right of kings. Never mind the French Revolution, the bête noire of reactionary thinkers: Moldbug believed that the English and American Revolutions had gone too far.

If Moldbug’s “Open Letter” showed little affection for the masses, it intimated that they might still have a use. “Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, and Václav Havel,” he wrote. “What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd.” The best place to recruit this crowd, he said, was on the internet—a shrewd intuition. Before long, links to Moldbug’s blog, “Unqualified Reservations,” were being passed around by libertarian techies, disgruntled bureaucrats, and self-styled rationalists—many of whom formed the shock troops of an online intellectual movement that came to be known as neo-reaction, or the Dark Enlightenment. While few turned into outright monarchists, their contempt for Obama-era uplift seemed to find voice in Moldbug’s heresies. In his most influential coinage, which quickly gained currency among the nascent alt-right, Moldbug urged his readers to rouse themselves from their ideological slumber by taking the “red pill,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” who chooses daunting truth over contented ignorance.

In 2013, an article on the news site TechCrunch, titled “Geeks for Monarchy,” revealed that Mencius Moldbug was the cyber alias of a forty-year-old programmer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin. At the same time that he was trying to redesign the U.S. government, Yarvin was also dreaming up a new computer operating system that he hoped would serve as a “digital republic.” He founded a company that he named Tlon, for the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which a secret society describes an elaborate parallel world that begins to overtake reality. As he raised money for his startup, Yarvin became a kind of Machiavelli to his big-tech benefactors, who shared his view that the world would be better off if they were in charge. Tlon’s investors included the venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, the latter of which was started by the billionaire Peter Thiel. Both Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, then a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had become friends with Yarvin after reading his blog, though e-mails shared with me revealed that neither was thrilled to be publicly associated with him at the time. “How dangerous is it that we are being linked?” Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—“wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.”

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret.

In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor at N.Y.U., told me. His work has revived ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society, Singh said, and created a road map for the dismantling of “the administrative state and the global postwar order.”

As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

Earlier this year, Yarvin and I had lunch in Washington, D.C., where he had come to celebrate the regime change. He was in his usual getup: bluejeans, Chelsea boots, a rumpled dress shirt under a motorcycle jacket. After taking a few bites of a cheeseburger topped with crispy onions, he pushed his plate away. Last year, he explained, he’d decided to start taking an Ozempic-like drug after a debate with the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania about the relative merits of monarchy and democracy. “I destroyed him in almost every way,” Yarvin said, nudging a tomato with his fork. “But he had one huge advantage, which was that I was fat and he was not.”

The injections seemed to be working. As I ate, Yarvin’s phone filled with messages, some of them complimenting his glow-up. That morning, the Times Magazine had published an interview with him, accompanied by a moody black-and-white portrait. Until recently, Yarvin, with his frazzled curtain of shoulder-length hair and ill-fitting wardrobe, had seemed indifferent to his appearance. Now, wearing his leather jacket, he glared out at the reader through stylishly tousled hair. His friend Steve Sailer, a writer for white-nationalist websites, said he looked like “the fifth Ramone.”

In person, as in print, Yarvin expresses himself with imperious self-assurance. He is nearly impossible to interrupt. “When the rabbi is speaking, you let the rabbi speak,” Razib Khan, a right-wing science blogger and a close friend of Yarvin’s, told me. Even his friends and family, however, acknowledge that he has room to grow as a communicator. He talks in a halting monotone, rarely answers questions directly, and is prone to disorienting asides. In the middle of saying one thing, he is always getting distracted by something else he could be saying, like a G.P.S. that keeps suggesting faster routes.

Yarvin, for his part, was relieved at how the interview with the Times had gone. “My main goal was, how do I not damage any of my relationships?” he said. For years, Yarvin was best known, to the extent that he was known at all, as the court philosopher of the Thiel-verse, the network of heterodox entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and hangers-on surrounding the tech mogul. He mentioned that a businessman he knew had once complained to a journalist that Thiel had not invested enough money in his company. “That’s one strike and you’re out, and he was out,” Yarvin said, sighing theatrically. His second goal, he said, was to reach the Times audience. This seemed surprising: he has called for the government to shut down the paper. “I tend to be more interested in outreach to people who share my own cultural background,” Yarvin explained.

He likes to tell the story of his paternal grandparents, Jewish Communists from Brooklyn who met at a leftist gathering in the thirties. (He has less to say about his maternal grandparents, Tarrytown Wasps with a cottage on Nantucket.) “The vibe of American communism was ‘We’ve got thirty I.Q. points on these people, and we’re going to win,’ ” he said. “It’s like, what if all the gifted kids formed a political party and tried to take over the world?” Yarvin’s parents met at Brown, where his father, Herbert, was pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy. After finishing school and failing to get tenure (“too arrogant,” Yarvin said), Herbert tried his hand at writing the Great American Novel, then joined the Foreign Service as a diplomat. In the following years, the family lived in the Dominican Republic and Cyprus. Herbert was cynical about working for the government, and Yarvin seems to have inherited his disdain: he has repeatedly proposed closing America’s embassies, a prospect the State Department is now considering in parts of Europe and Africa.

Yarvin is reticent on the subject of his childhood, but friends and family suggested to me that his father could be harsh, domineering, and impossible to please. “He controlled their life with an iron fist,” someone with close knowledge of the family told me. “It was absolutely his domain.” (Yarvin vehemently rejected this view, saying that people who are controlling tend to be insecure, “and that is very much not the way of my father.” Better words to describe him, he said, would be “stubborn,” “intense,” and “formidable”—like “a good manager.”)

Growing up, Yarvin was sometimes homeschooled by his mother, and skipped three grades. (His older brother, Norman, skipped four.) The family eventually moved to Columbia, Maryland, where Yarvin entered high school as a twelve-year-old sophomore. “When you’re much younger than your classmates, you’re either an adorable mascot or a weird, threatening, disturbing alien,” Yarvin said, adding that he was the latter. Yarvin was selected to participate in a Johns Hopkins study of math prodigies. He attended the university’s Center for Talented Youth, a summer camp for gifted children, and was a Baltimore-area champion on “It’s Academic,” a television trivia show. Andrew Cone, a software engineer who currently lives in a spare room in Yarvin’s home, told me that Yarvin’s childhood seems to have left him with a lifelong feeling of inadequacy. “I think he has this sense of being not good enough, that he’s seen as ridiculous or small, and that the only way out is to perform,” Cone said.

Yarvin went to Brown, graduated at eighteen, and then entered a Ph.D. program in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Former peers told me that he wore a bicycle helmet in class and seemed eager to show off his knowledge to the professor. “Oh, you mean helmet-head?” one said when I asked about Yarvin. The joke among some of his classmates was that the helmet prevented new ideas from penetrating his mind. He found more of a community on Usenet, a precursor to today’s online forums. But even in groups like talk.bizarre, where intellectual peacocking was the norm, he stood out for his desire to dominate. Along with posting jokes, advice, light verse, and “flames” (blistering takedowns of other users), he maintained a “kill file,” a list of members he had blocked because he found their posts uninteresting. “He wanted to be viewed as the smart guy—that was really, really important to him,” his first girlfriend, Meredith Tanner, told me. She was drawn to Yarvin after reading one of his virtuosic flames, and the pair dated for a few years. “Don’t get involved with someone just because you’re impressed by how creatively they insult people,” she warned. “They will turn that skill on you.”

Friends from Yarvin’s twenties described him as a reflexive contrarian who revelled in provocation. “He wasn’t a sweet kid, and he could sometimes be nasty, but he wasn’t Moldbug,” one said. Politically and culturally, Yarvin was a liberal—“a big old hippie,” as Tanner put it. He had a ponytail, wore a silver hoop earring, dropped acid at raves, and wrote poetry. Tanner recalled that when she once questioned the value of affirmative action in college admissions, it was Yarvin who convinced her of its necessity.

After a year and a half of doctoral work, Yarvin left academia to seek his fortune in the tech industry. He helped design an early version of a mobile web browser for a company that came to be known as Phone.com. In 2001, he began dating Jennifer Kollmer, a playwright he met on Craigslist, whom he later married and had two children with. Phone.com had gone public, leaving him with a windfall of a million dollars. He used some of the money to buy a condo near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and the rest to fund a self-directed study of computer science and political theory. “I was used to getting pats on the head for being smart,” he said of his decision to leave the cursus honorum of the gifted child. “Diverging from the pat-on-the-head economy was a strange and scary choice.”

Out in the wilderness, Yarvin delved into recondite history and economics texts, many of them newly accessible through Google Books. He read Thomas Carlyle, James Burnham, and Albert Jay Nock, alongside an early-aughts profusion of political blogs. Yarvin traces his own red-pill moment to the Presidential election of 2004. As many of his peers were being driven to the left by lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Yarvin was pulled in the opposite direction by fabrications of a different sort: the Swift Boat conspiracy theory pushed by veterans allied with the George W. Bush campaign, who claimed that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had lied about his service in Vietnam. It seemed obvious to Yarvin, who believed the accusations, that once the truth emerged Kerry would be forced to drop out of the race. When that didn’t happen, he began to question what else he’d naïvely taken on trust. Facts no longer felt stable. How could he be confident in what he’d been told about Joseph McCarthy, the Civil War, or global warming? What about democracy itself? After years of energetic debates in the comments sections of other people’s blogs, he decided to start his own. It did not lack for ambition. The first post began, “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.”

The German academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe is sometimes described as an intellectual gateway to the far right. A retired economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hoppe argues that universal suffrage has supplanted rule by a “natural élite”; advocates for breaking nations into smaller, homogenous communities; and calls for communists, homosexuals, and others who oppose this rigid social order to be “physically removed.” (Some white nationalists have made memes pairing Hoppe’s face with a helicopter—an allusion to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing opponents by throwing them from aircraft.) Though Hoppe favors a minimal state, he believes that freedom is better preserved by monarchy than by democracy.

Yarvin nearly ended up a libertarian. As a Bay Area coder and a devotee of Austrian-school economists in his late twenties, he exhibited all the risk factors. Then he discovered Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God That Failed” (2001) and changed his mind. Yarvin soon adopted Hoppe’s imago of a benevolent strongman—someone who would govern efficiently, avoid senseless wars, and prioritize the well-being of his subjects. “It’s not copy-and-pasted, but it is such a direct influence that it’s kind of obscene,” Julian Waller, a scholar of authoritarianism at George Washington University, said. (Over e-mail, Hoppe recalled that he met Yarvin once at an exclusive gathering at Peter Thiel’s home, where Hoppe had been invited to speak. He acknowledged his influence on Yarvin, but added, “For my taste his writing has always been a bit too flowery and rambling.”) Hoppe argues that, unlike democratically elected officials, a monarch has a long-term incentive to safeguard his subjects and the state, because both belong to him. Anyone familiar with the history of dictatorships might find this idea disingenuous. Not Yarvin.

“You don’t ransack your own house,” he told me one afternoon, at an open-air café in Venice Beach. I’d asked him what would stop his C.E.O.-monarch from plundering the country—or enslaving his people—for personal gain. “For Louis XIV, when he says, ‘L’état, c’est moi,’ ransacking the state holds no meaning because it’s all his anyway.” Following Hoppe, Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a “patchwork” of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler. The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—“a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?”—could manage the transition between regimes.) To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.

Mass political participation would cease, and the only way that people could vote would be with their feet, by moving from one SovCorp to another if they became dissatisfied with the terms of service, like switching from X to Bluesky. The irony that dissenters like Yarvin would probably be repressed in such a state appears not to concern him. In his imagined polity, he insists, there would still be freedom of speech. “You can think, say, or write whatever you want,” he has promised. “Because the state has no reason to care.”

Yarvin’s congenital cynicism about governance disappears as soon as he starts talking about dictatorial regimes. He has kind words for El Salvador’s strongman, Nayib Bukele, and has encouraged Trump to let Putin end the liberal order “not just in Russian-speaking territories—but all the way to the English Channel.” Picking at a plate of fried calamari, Yarvin praised China and Rwanda (neither of which he has visited) for having strong governments that insured both public safety and personal liberty. In China, he told me, “you can think and pretty much say whatever you want.” He may have sensed my skepticism, given the country’s record of imprisoning critics and detaining ethnic minorities in concentration camps. “If you want to organize against the government, you’re gonna have problems,” he admitted. Then he returned to his airbrush: “Not Stalin problems. You’ll just, like, be cancelled.”

For certain people, like meth addicts or four-year-olds, Yarvin said, too much freedom could be deadly. Then, gesturing to the homeless population camped in the neighborhood, he suddenly began to cry. “The idea that this represents success, or this represents the ‘worst of all systems, except for all the others’ ”—he was referencing Churchill’s famous comment about democracy, which I’d paraphrased earlier—“is highly delusional,” he said, wiping away the tears. (A few weeks later, on a trip to London, I watched him break down while giving a similar speech to a member of the House of Lords. It was less affecting the second time around.)

Presumably, Yarvin’s monarch would act decisively to safeguard his wards. At the Venice café, Yarvin lauded the Delancey Street Foundation, a nonprofit rehab organization, whose strict program he has characterized as exerting “fascist-parent-level control.” Some of his own proposals go further. On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco’s underclasses into biodiesel to power the city’s buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

Yarvin’s call for an American strongman is often treated as an eccentric provocation. In fact, he considers it the only answer to a world in which most people are unfit for democracy. An “African country today,” he told me, has “enough smart people in the country to run it—you just don’t have enough smart people to have a democratic election in which everyone is smart.” Because of such remarks, Yarvin is sometimes identified as a white nationalist, a label he delicately resists. In a 2007 blog post titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist,” he explained that, though he is “not exactly allergic to the stuff,” he finds both whiteness and nationalism to be unhelpful political concepts. During lunch, he told me that he feels a rueful sympathy for the bigots of the past, who had some of the right intuitions but lacked the proper science. Neo-reactionaries tend to subscribe to what they call “human biodiversity,” a set of fringe beliefs which holds, among other things, that not all racial or population groups are equally intelligent. As Yarvin came to see it from his online research, these genetic differences contributed to (and, conveniently, helped explain away) demographic differences in poverty, crime, and educational attainment. “In this house, we believe in science—race science,” he wrote last year.

For several hours, Yarvin shuffled through his pitches for strongman rule, like an auctioneer desperate to clinch a sale. I listened patiently, though I was often puzzled by his factual distortions and peculiar asides. “What is the right policy in a completely new-from-scratch regime for African Americans?” he wondered aloud at one point. At first, this seemed like a non sequitur: I’d been pressing him on how he would define success in the second Trump Administration. Answering himself, he said that the “obvious solution” to problems of inner-city drug abuse and poverty would be to “put the church Blacks in charge of the ghetto Blacks.” Yarvin, who is an atheist, is not particularly interested in theocratic rule, but he advocates creating different legal codes to govern different populations. (He has cited the Ottoman millet system, which granted religious communities a measure of autonomy.) To keep the “ghetto Blacks” in line, he went on, they should be forced to live in a “traditional way,” like Orthodox Jews or the Amish. “The approach that the twentieth century took is, if we could just make the schools good enough, they would all turn into Unitarians,” he said. “If you’ve seen ‘The Wire’ and lived in Baltimore, both of which I have, that does not seem to work at all.” It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

Yarvin is not known for his discretion. He has a habit of sharing private correspondence, as I discovered when he started sending me unsolicited screenshots of text messages and e-mails he’d exchanged with his wife, his friends, a fact checker at the Times Magazine, and someone nominated to the new Administration. He seemed troubled by the thought that the wit and wisdom they contained might be lost to posterity. He was more guarded about his friendship with Thiel, but he did mention a conversation they’d privately filmed together last year and boasted about a fortieth-birthday gift he’d received from the billionaire: Francis Neilson’s “The Tragedy of Europe,” a contemporaneous commentary on the Second World War, though not the first edition that Yarvin had been hoping for.

Thiel has always had a prophetic touch. He co-founded PayPal, became the first outside investor in Facebook, and created Palantir, a data-mining firm that has just received a new contract to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carry out deportations. Thiel supported Trump back when doing so still made one a pariah in Silicon Valley. In 2022, he donated fifteen million dollars to J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign, the largest amount given to a single candidate in congressional history. A longtime libertarian, Thiel appears to have taken a Yarvinian turn around 2009, when, in a widely quoted essay published online by the Cato Institute, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Yarvin linked to it approvingly in a blog post titled “Democraphobia Goes (Slightly) Viral.” They soon met for the first time, at Thiel’s house in San Francisco, and, according to private messages I reviewed, struck up a confiding correspondence. Yarvin’s e-mails were long and homiletic, full of precepts gleaned from pickup-artist blogs; Thiel’s were straightforward and concise. Both men seemed to take for granted that America was a communist country, that journalists acted like the Stasi, and that tech C.E.O.s were their prey.

In the fall of 2014, Thiel published “Zero to One,” a best-selling treatise on startups, with Blake Masters, his employee and a longtime Moldbug fan. Before the book tour, Thiel asked Yarvin for advice on fielding questions he might get on how to steer more women into tech. The premise appeared to strike them both as misguided, since women, in their view, were less likely to have men’s aptitude for computer science. As Yarvin put it in one e-mail, “There’s simply no way short of becoming a farce for Google, YC”—Y Combinator, the startup accelerator—“etc, etc, to ‘look like America.’ ” Yarvin suggested that Thiel deploy a pickup-artist tactic called “agree and amplify”—that is, ask a journalist, who probably had no solution in mind, what she would do to tackle the problem. “The purpose here is not to get the interlocutor to sleep with you, but to get her to fear this issue and run away from it—and ditto for future interviewers,” he wrote. Once, at a dinner, Thiel quizzed Yarvin on how one might go about taking down Gawker. (As it turned out, Thiel had already decided to secretly bankroll Hulk Hogan’s defamation lawsuit against the online publication, which eventually bankrupted it, in 2016.) In e-mails obtained by BuzzFeed, Yarvin bragged to Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart editor, that he’d watched Trump’s first election at Thiel’s house and had been “coaching” him. “Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos replied. Yarvin wrote back, “Less than you might think! . . . He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

When I recently visited Yarvin’s Craftsman home, in Berkeley, I noticed a painting that Thiel had given him: a portrait of Yarvin in the style of a role-playing-game character card, bearing the legend “Philosopher.” As I sipped tea from a novelty mug featuring an image of Yarvin with a cartoon crown, he told me that it would be “cringe” for him to broadcast his relationship with Thiel—or with Vance, for that matter, whom he met through Thiel around 2015. “Does a normal Ohio voter read . . . Mencius Moldbug? No,” Vance reportedly said one night at a bar during the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.” “He’s a really cool guy,” Yarvin said of the Vice-President, who followed him on X earlier this year. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.” After Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon, the two got to know each other; they texted and went to brunch long before Andreessen came out as a Trump supporter, last year. Andreessen has been known to urge his associates to read Yarvin’s blog. “Tech people are not interested in appeals to virtue or beauty or tradition, like most conservatives,” the State Department official said. “They are more like right-wing progressives, and for a long time Moldbug was the only person speaking to them this way.” (Andreessen and Thiel declined to comment.) Apropos of his relationships with powerful men, Yarvin paraphrased to me “a wonderful piece of advice for courtiers” that he’d picked up from Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters to His Son,” an eighteenth-century etiquette manual addressed to the author’s illegitimate child: “Never bug them. And never let them forget you exist.”

Yarvin has had more success as a courtier to startup founders than as a founder himself. He launched Tlon in 2013, with a twentysomething former Thiel fellow. Yarvin approached computer science the same way he approached the U.S. government—with, as he put it, “utopian megalomania.” Yarvin’s visionary goal was to build a peer-to-peer computer network, named Urbit, that would allow users to control their own data, free from scolds, spies, and monopolies. Each user on the Urbit network is identified with an N.F.T. that acts like a digital passport. Even though Urbit promotes decentralization, the system is designed around a hierarchical model of virtual real estate, with users owning “planets,” “stars,” or “galaxies.”

In an early sketch of the system, Yarvin named himself its “prince,” but he struggled to attract subjects to his imaginary kingdom. Like Yarvin’s political theory, his programming language, which he wrote himself, was daring, abstruse, and sometimes mistaken for a hoax. Ever the contrarian, he reversed the meaning of zeros and ones. After decades of work and an estimated thirty million dollars of investment, Urbit seems to function less like a feudal society and more like the Usenet forums of Yarvin’s youth. (The trade publication CoinDesk has called it “a slower version of AOL Instant Messenger.”) “It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to,” a former Urbit employee told me, describing Yarvin as “the world’s first computer-science crank.” Yarvin left the company in 2019.

No longer needing to worry about spooking investors, Yarvin threw himself into the life style of a self-described “rogue intellectual.” Under his own name, he launched a Substack newsletter, “Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince.” (Today, it is the platform’s third most popular “history” publication.) He became a fixture on the right-wing podcast circuit and seemed never to turn down an invitation to party. On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.

Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”

Such people have come to be known as the “dissident right,” a loose constellation of artists and strivers clustered around the Bay Area, Miami, and the Lower East Side micro-neighborhood Dimes Square. The milieu was drawn together by a frustration with electoral politics, Covid lockdowns, and the strictures of “wokeness.” Vice signalling has been central to the scene’s countercultural allure: instead of sharing pronouns and employing the approved nomenclature (“unhoused,” “Latinx,” “justice-involved person”), its members have revived insults like “gay” and “retarded.” Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, the hosts of the “Red Scare” podcast, are among the most prominent avatars of the scene. In 2021, Thiel helped to fund an anti-woke film festival in New York, and Yarvin read his poetry at one of its packed events. Urbit now hosts a literary magazine designed to look like The New York Review of Books. “If you are an intelligent Jewish-American urbanite who wants to play around with certain Nietzschean and eugenic themes, you aren’t going to join tiki-torch-bearing marchers chanting that ‘the Jews will not replace us,’ ” the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari observed in an essay last year. “No, you turn to the dissident right.”

Yarvin has emerged as a veteran edgelord of this crowd, which he compared to San Francisco’s gay subculture in the seventies and to the Lost Generation of literary modernists—tight-knit communities whose members bonded over their sense of being outsiders. James Joyce, he said, sold few copies of “Ulysses,” but his friends, like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, “knew that what he was doing was good.” So it was with the creatives of the dissident right, whose endeavors, he felt, had been overlooked by the intolerant Cathedral. This past April, Yarvin pitched Darren Beattie, the acting Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, on a plan for “dissident-right art hos” to take over the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Lately, Yarvin has been trying to flip some of his newly acquired cultural capital into the real thing. Last year, he returned to Urbit as a “wartime C.E.O.,” after which several top employees resigned, and in February he raised more money from Andreessen Horowitz. According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”

The night before Trump’s Inauguration, I drove Yarvin to a black-tie “Coronation Ball” at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C. The event was organized by a neo-reactionary publishing house, Passage Press, which recently released Yarvin’s book “Gray Mirror, Fascicle I: Disturbance,” the first of a planned four-part cycle outlining his vision for a new political regime. Its endnotes predominantly consist of QR-code links to Wikipedia pages: “Denazification,” “L’État, c’est moi,” “Presentism (historical analysis).” As I negotiated the icy streets, Yarvin explained that during the Elizabethan era the finest minds in the arts and sciences were to be found at court. When I asked if he saw a parallel with Trump’s inner circle, he burst out laughing. “Oh, no,” he said. “My God.”

Like most journalists, I had been denied entry to the ball, so I ordered a drink at a bar in the lobby. Standing next to me was a man wearing a cowboy hat and a burgundy velour suit—a Yarvin enthusiast, it turned out, named Alex Maxa. He ran a party-bus company in San Francisco, and in his free time he made memes featuring Yarvin’s likeness. He said that he was drawn to Yarvin’s work because “it makes me feel like I’ve got something that people in Washington who think they’re really smart can’t actually make a compelling argument against.” He’d wanted to go to the ball but tickets, whose price had surged to twenty thousand dollars, were now sold out. Not long afterward, I met two of Yarvin’s friends, who encouraged me, and another journalist I was with, to confidently walk into the party with them. Maxa was already inside, having taken a similar approach. “Lol I just waltzed right in by asking where the coat check was,” he texted.

Passage Press had billed the event as “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” It was not false advertising. In a banquet hall awash in pink and purple light, Anton, from the State Department, Laura Loomer, a Trump whisperer known for her anti-Muslim bigotry, and Jack Posobiec, who popularized the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, mingled with venture capitalists, crypto accelerationists, and Substack all-stars. Earlier that evening, as guests dined on seared scallops and filet mignon, Steve Bannon, the ball’s keynote speaker, called for mass deportations, the “Götterdämmerung” of the administrative state, and Mark Zuckerberg’s imprisonment.

Eight years ago, Mike Cernovich, a first-gen alt-right influencer, had co-hosted an inaugural party known as the DeploraBall, a winking reference to Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate crack about half of Trump’s supporters belonging in a “basket of deplorables.” It was, by all accounts, a shambolic affair, plagued by journalists and protesters. One of Cernovich’s co-organizers, Tim Gionet, who goes by the online pseudonym Baked Alaska, was removed from his role after posting antisemitic content on Twitter. Now, at the Coronation Ball, Baked Alaska was served for dessert—a nod, it seemed, to Gionet, who was then on probation for participating in the January 6th insurrection. (He was pardoned by Trump the next day.) Cernovich pushed a baby around in a stroller and marvelled, like a proud father, at how far the movement had come. “I was one of the oldest guys in the place!” he tweeted the following afternoon. “Real right wing. High energy and high IQ.” In 2008, Yarvin, in his “Open Letter,” had called for a reactionary vanguard to form an underground political party. The Coronation Ball made it clear that this was no longer necessary. His web-addled counter-élite was now the establishment.

Yarvin was dressed in the same tuxedo, including a bright-red cummerbund, that he’d worn to a party at Thiel’s house in D.C. the night before, where, as Politico reported, Vance had amiably greeted him with “You reactionary fascist!” He’d also worn the tux to his wedding last year. Yarvin’s first wife died in 2021, from a hereditary heart disease, at the age of fifty. At the ball, he was accompanied by his second wife, Kristine Militello. A former Bernie Sanders supporter and an aspiring novelist, Kristine described herself as having been “red-pilled” during the pandemic, after losing her customer-service job at an online wine retailer. She first encountered Yarvin on YouTube, where she watched a video of him arguing against the legitimacy of the American Revolution, and proceeded to read everything he’d written. She sent him an admiring e-mail in 2022, seeking advice on how to break into New York’s dissident-right literary scene, and they met for drinks a few weeks later.

Recently, Yarvin has taken to describing himself as a “dark elf” whose role is to seduce “high elves”—blue-state élites—by planting “acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds.” (In this Tolkien-inspired metaphor, red-state conservatives are “hobbits” who should submit to the “absolute power” of a new ruling class made up, unsurprisingly, of dark elves.) He didn’t always express himself so quaintly. In 2011, the day after the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed sixty-nine people, many of them teen-agers, at a summer camp in Norway, Yarvin wrote, “If you’re going to change Norway into something new, you need the present ruling class of Norway to join and follow you. Or at least, you’ll need their children.” He praised Breivik for targeting the right group (“communists, not Muslims”), but condemned his methods: “Rape is beta. Seduction is alpha. Don’t slaughter the youth camp—recruit the youth camp.”

Yarvin’s own recruitment efforts seemed to be working. Near the open bar, I spoke to Stevie Miller, a sprightly sophomore at Carnegie Mellon who has been reading Yarvin since the seventh grade. (Yarvin told me that he’d encountered several gifted Zoomers who’d read him as preteens because his “high-I.Q. style” served as a “high-I.Q. magnet.”) Two years ago, Miller hung out with Yarvin at Vibecamp, a gathering for nerds and techies in rural Maryland. Yarvin, who left early, asked Miller to help him throw his own party in D.C., which came to be known as Vibekampf. Afterward, Miller became Yarvin’s first personal intern. “My parents, New York Jewish liberals who I love, were totally mystified,” he said.

After half an hour, I was escorted out of the party, as were other reporters throughout the evening. Security mistook Maxa, my friend from the lobby, for one of our kind, and he was ejected, too, though not before pressing through the crowd to get his photo taken with the dark elf.

Even Trump’s most pessimistic critics have been startled by the speed with which the President, in his second term, has moved to impose autocracy on America, concentrating power in the executive branch—and often enough in the hands of the richest men on earth. Elon Musk, an unelected citizen, has led a squadron of twentysomethings on a spree through the federal government, laying off tens of thousands of civil servants, shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, and seizing control of the Treasury Department’s payment system. Meanwhile, the Administration has launched an assault on civil society, revoking funding at Harvard and other universities that it claims are bastions of ideological indoctrination and punishing law firms that have represented Trump’s opponents. It has expanded the machinery of immigration enforcement, deporting three U.S.-born children to Honduras, a group of Asian and Latin American immigrants to Africa, and more than two hundred Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they may remain until the end of their lives. U.S. citizens now find themselves with a government that claims the right to disappear them without due process: as Trump told Bukele, the President of El Salvador, during an Oval Office meeting, “Homegrowns are next.” Without a vigorous system of checks and balances, one man’s crank ideas—like starting an incoherent trade war that upends the global economy—don’t get filtered out. They become policies that enrich his family and his allies.

Since January, a cottage industry has arisen online to trace links between the government’s chaotic blitz of actions and Yarvin’s writings. Yarvin is hardly the Rasputin-like figure with Oval Office access that certain Bluesky users imagine him to be, but it isn’t difficult to see why some people may have come to this view. Last month, an anonymous DOGE adviser told the Washington Post that it was “an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.” Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. “Did I hear someone say ‘beachfront?’ ” he wrote on Substack. “The new Gaza—developed, of course, by Jared Kushner—is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Whenever I asked Yarvin about resonances between his writing and real-world events, his response was nonchalant. He seemed to see himself as a conduit for pure reason—the only mystery, to him, was why it had taken others so long to catch up. “You can invent a lie, but you can only discover the truth,” he told me. We were in London, where he was attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a conservative conference co-founded by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. (Yarvin described Peterson to me as “a dandy” with “a weird narcissistic energy coming off of him.”) Accompanying Yarvin on his travels were Eduardo Giralt Brun and Alonso Esquinca Díaz, two millennial filmmakers who were shooting a documentary about his life. Their goal was to make a naturalistic character study in the style of “Grey Gardens,” in which, as Brun put it, “the camera just happens to be around.” It wasn’t going to plan. Yarvin kept repeating the same monologues, which meant that much of the footage was the same. The filmmakers worried that his racist remarks would turn viewers off. One afternoon in London, Díaz had filmed Yarvin getting his portrait painted with Lord Maurice Glasman, a post-liberal political theorist who has been called “Labour’s MAGA Lord,” for his support of Brexit and his ongoing dialogue with figures like Steve Bannon. At one point in their discussion, Yarvin had pulled out his iPhone to show Glasman that he’d hacked the chatbot Claude to get it to call him by the N-word.

Some thinkers would envy the attention Yarvin is receiving. But he dismissed his influence as a “fraudulent currency” since it has yet to cash out in the revolution he desires. He poured scorn on DOGE (“so much libertarian DNA”) and Trump’s tariff plan (not mercantilist enough). In a recent essay on Substack, he criticized the decision to dispatch plainclothes ICE officers to jail college students and professors for political speech—not on moral grounds, but because the thuggish optics were likely to provoke resistance. Yarvin’s oracular pronouncements and bottomless disdain for actually existing politics have inspired a viral post: his face under the words “Your anti-regime actions work well in practice. But do they work in theory?” The conservative activist Christopher Rufo has compared Yarvin to “a sullen teenager who insists that everything is pointless.” I came to think of him as a reactionary Goldilocks who would be satisfied with nothing less than the inch-perfect autocracy that he’d constructed in his mind.

This apparent desire for control also shows up in some of his relationships. Not long ago, I visited Lydia Laurenson, Yarvin’s ex-fiancée, in Berkeley. The two began dating in September, 2021, after Yarvin posted a personal ad on Substack, explaining that he’d recently lost his “widower virginity” and was looking to meet someone of “childbearing age.” Laurenson, a freelance writer and editor, replied the same day: “I have historically been a liberal but my IQ is really high, I want kids, and I’m incredibly curious to talk to you.” Yarvin went on Zoom dates with other women who answered the post—among them, Caroline Ellison, the ex-girlfriend of the now imprisoned crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried—but he and Laurenson soon found themselves in an all-consuming romance. She told me that the ethos of her relationship with Yarvin was “ ‘We’re going to be geniuses together and have genius babies.’ I’m making fun of it a little bit, but that really was it.”

Like Yarvin, Laurenson had been a precocious child who went to college early. She’d also maintained a blog with a cult following, where, under the pseudonym Clarisse Thorn, she wrote about sex-positive feminism, B.D.S.M., and pickup artistry. She and Yarvin fought often, sometimes about politics. Laurenson had moved away from the left, but she hadn’t fully embraced neo-reaction. When I asked her if she’d ever changed Yarvin’s mind about anything, she said she’d gotten him to stop using the N-word, at least around her. (He later told this magazine that he was not using the word in the spirit of “a Southern plantation owner.”)

The bigger source of tension, according to Laurenson, was Yarvin’s autocratic attachment style. When they fought, Laurenson said, he insisted that she provide a rational justification for ending hostilities. She felt that Yarvin’s slippery personal attacks resembled his manner in public debates. “He makes up explanations that seem reasonable, but are actually false; he attacks the character of the person who is trying to point out what he’s doing; it’s like a DDOS attack of the soul,” she told me in an e-mail, referencing the cyberattack strategy of overwhelming a server with traffic from multiple sources. James Dama, a friend of Laurenson’s who had his own falling out with Yarvin, recalled, “He would make a coarse joke about Lydia’s weight or looks, not get a laugh, and then get angry at Lydia for being too stuck up.” (Tanner, Yarvin’s first girlfriend, described a similar pattern of insults and demands.)

Laurenson and Yarvin broke up in the summer of 2022, while Laurenson was pregnant. He told me that his desire for closeness might have struck Laurenson as “overbearing and stifling,” and that he had a bad habit of making “a joke that’s sort of a barb,” but he denied that he was ever purposefully cruel during the relationship. (He added that, after the relationship ended, “my natural instinct was, I’m going to cut her down to size every time I can”—something, he noted, he was “very good at.”) A few weeks after their son was born, that December, Yarvin sued for partial custody, which he received. An ongoing family-court case remains acrimonious. “The parents are in disagreement about nearly every issue,” their mediator observed last year.

Now that they share a toddler, Laurenson spends a lot of time thinking about Yarvin’s own childhood. “He has this class-clown thing going on, where he very much craves attention,” she said. To her, it seemed that his embrace of a provocative ideology was a kind of “repetition compulsion,” a psychological defense that allowed him to reframe the ostracization he experienced growing up. As America’s most famous living monarchist, he could tell himself that people were rejecting him for his outré ideas, not for his personality. She wondered if he’d first adopted “the monarchist thing” as a kind of intellectual sport, a bit from Usenet, and then, like the parallel world in the Borges story, it had slowly taken on a reality of its own. “Is it just like you found this place where people admire you and allow you to troll as much as you want, and then you just live in that world?” she asked.

In the past decade, liberalism has taken a beating from both sides of the political spectrum. Its critics to the left view its measured gradualism as incommensurate to the present’s multiple emergencies: climate change, inequality, the rise of an ethno-nationalist right. Conservatives, by contrast, paint liberalism as a cultural leviathan that has trampled traditional values underfoot. In “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018), the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that the contemporary American emphasis on individual freedom has come at the expense of family, faith, and community, turning us into “increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Other post-liberal theorists, including Adrian Vermeule, have proposed that the state curtail certain rights in the service of an explicitly Catholic “common good.”

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch. Since the advent of neoliberalism in the late seventies, political leaders have increasingly treated governance like corporate management, turning citizens into customers and privatizing services. The result has been greater inequality, a weakened social safety net, and the widespread perception that democracy itself is to blame for these ills, creating an appetite for exactly the kind of autocratic efficiency Yarvin now extolls. “A Yarvin program might seem seductive during a period of neoliberal rule, where efforts to change things, whether it is global warming or the war machine, feel futile,” the historian Suzanne Schneider told me. “You can sit back, not give a fuck, and let someone else run the show.” Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing, or about humans in general, who appear in his work as sheep to be herded, idiots to be corrected, or marionettes controlled by leftist puppeteers.

Whatever gift Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions. He has read widely, but he uses his knowledge merely as grist for the same reactionary fairy tale: once upon a time, people knew their place and lived in harmony; then along came the Enlightenment, with its “noble lie” of egalitarianism, plunging the world into disorder. Yarvin often criticizes academics for treating history like a Marvel movie, with oversimplified heroes and villains, but it’s unclear what he adds to the picture by calling Napoleon a “startup guy.” (He has favored the revisionist theories that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and that the American Civil War, which he calls the War of Secession, worsened living conditions for Black Americans.) “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he has proclaimed, which would come as news to historians.

Some of his most thoroughgoing critics are on the right. Rufo, the conservative activist, has written that Yarvin is a “sophist” whose debating style consists of “childish insults, bouts of paranoia, heavy italics, pointless digressions, competitive bibliography, and allusions to cartoons.” He added, “When one tries to locate what it is that you actually think, he cannot help but discover that there really isn’t much substance there.” The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

Intellectual seriousness may not be the point. Yarvin’s polemics have proved useful for those on the right in search of a rationale for nerd ressentiment and plutocratic will to power. “The guy does not have a coherent theory of the case,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy, from Connecticut, told me. “He just happens to be saying something out loud that a lot of Republicans are eager to hear.”

It is not difficult to anticipate the totalitarian endgame of a world view that marries power worship with a contempt for human dignity—fascism, as some might call it. Like his ideological nemeses the Bolsheviks, Yarvin seems to believe that the only thing standing in the way of Utopia is an unwillingness to use every means possible to achieve it. He claims that the transition to his regime will be peaceful, even joyous, but fantasies of violence flicker throughout his work. “Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty,” he wrote in a Substack post in March. “You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right?”

Yarvin’s strong opinions on how the world ought to work extended to this profile. Some of his suggestions were intriguing: he floated the idea of staging a debate with one of his ex-girlfriends, and invited me to follow him to Doha for a meeting with Omar bin Laden, one of Osama’s sons. Others were officious. At one point, he sent me nine texts objecting to my use of the word “extreme”—“a hostile pejorative,” he explained, which my article would be better off without. (He’d previously boasted several times in our taped conversations that he was more “extreme” than anyone in the current Administration.) A few days after the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel, he wrote to The New Yorker to complain that I’d walked in without his publisher’s permission; he said that he hoped the incident would not turn into “Watergate 2,” and referred to himself as “certainly the most media-friendly person in the scene!” (Jonathan Keeperman, his publisher at Passage Press and the host of the ball, once suggested that the Republican Party should “lamppost”—that is, lynch—“the journos,” so this was not a particularly high bar to clear.)

One morning this winter, I woke up to twenty-eight texts from Yarvin expressing concerns about my reporting technique. “The problem is that your process is slack and I can feel it generating low-quality content—because it’s not adversarial enough,” he wrote. “When the process is not adversarial, I don’t know what I am contending against.” He briefly considered whether I was “too dumb to understand the ideas,” or whether I’d succumbed to the mental self-censorship that Orwell called “crimestop.” He urged me to watch “The Lives of Others,” an Oscar-winning film that depicts the relationship between an East German playwright and a Stasi agent who is tasked with surveilling him. The Stasi agent, he wrote, “can actually write up the ideas of the playwright, *without even thinking them* It is not even that he is ‘opposed’ to the dissident ideas. It is that he does not even let them touch his brain.” In the film, the Stasi agent eventually “cracks,” after he comes to sympathize with the playwright’s views. Yarvin, presumably, was the playwright.

He said that he was coming to see me, on the other hand, as an “NPC,” or non-player character. He proposed giving me a Voight-Kampff test, the fictional exam in “Blade Runner” used to distinguish androids from humans. His version would involve the two of us debating “the ‘blank slate theory’ versus ‘racism’ ” and recording the conversation. (“By ‘racism’ I mean of course human biodiversity,” he elaborated.) When I explained that my reporting process did not include submitting to on-demand tests, Yarvin sent me a screenshot of “August 1968,” W. H. Auden’s poem about the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring:

The Ogre does what ogres can Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech

He went on to say that although he’d agreed to participate in this story because “no publicity is bad publicity,” he would now try to kill it if he could.

I was struck by the contrast between his messages and the coolheaded tone he’d recommended that Thiel and other friends deploy when handling the media. After the 2013 TechCrunch article identifying Yarvin came out, Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur, proposed in an e-mail “to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them.” Yarvin dissuaded him. “What would Heartiste say?” Yarvin asked, referring to the white-nationalist pickup-artist blog “Chateau Heartiste.” “Almost always, the right alpha answer is ‘nothing.’ Say nothing. Do nothing.”

On a balmy afternoon in late February, Yarvin and his wife, Kristine, were driving down a country road in the South of France. They were accompanied by the documentarians, Brun and Díaz. “Where are we going, Kristine?” Brun asked from the passenger seat, turning the camera around to film her in the back beside me.

She said that she had only the vaguest notion. “Honestly, he just tells me everything last minute,” she explained. “It’s kind of like being a dog. You just know that you’re going in the car, and you don’t know if you’re gonna go to the dog park, or you’re gonna go to the vet, and you’ll find out when you get there.”

“Spontaneity,” Yarvin chimed in.

“That’s a word for it,” Kristine teased.

We were on our way to meet Renaud Camus, a seventy-eight-year-old novelist and pamphleteer, who, in 2011, published “The Great Replacement,” an incendiary manifesto that argued that liberal élites were behind a conspiracy to replace white Europeans with migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The title phrase has since become a rallying cry for white nationalists around the world, from Charlottesville, Virginia, where, in 2017, marchers chanted, “You will not replace us,” to Christchurch, New Zealand, where, two years later, a man who’d published a manifesto with the same title as Camus’s killed fifty-one Muslims.

As we crested a hill, the walls of Camus’s castle, Château de Plieux, loomed into view. “Does anyone know if he’s related to Albert Camus?” Yarvin asked. “I think he’s not related to Albert, but he’s a lovely, old, gay, literary Frenchman.”

Brun, who is Venezuelan, wondered what he would do if Camus “has a sign that says ‘No Foreigners Allowed.’ ”

“Well, are you here to replace us?” Kristine joked. Nobody replied.

Yarvin rang an impressive metal bell beside the door, and we were soon ushered inside by Pierre Jolibert, Camus’s partner. Upstairs, Camus was waiting for us with a bottle of champagne. With his manicured white beard and brown corduroy jacket, complete with a bow tie and gold pocket-watch chain, he looked like a nineteenth-century man of letters. Speaking perfect English, with an English accent, he made it sound as though he’d had no choice but to buy the castle, which dated from the early thirteen-hundreds, after his library grew too large for his small Parisian flat. That was thirty-five years ago. Now, acknowledging the stacks of books that were overtaking his cavernous study, he said that he was running into the same problem here.

Over several glasses of champagne, Yarvin fired a series of questions at Camus, though he rarely waited long enough for his host to give a full answer. What did Camus think of Philippe Pétain? Charles de Gaulle? Napoleon III? Napoleon I? Ernst Jünger? Ernst von Salomon? Ezra Pound? Basil Bunting? More than an interaction, Yarvin, the former trivia champion, seemed to want a pat on the head for his display of learning.

After we headed downstairs for lunch—strips of sizzling duck, a quiche Lorraine, red wine—Yarvin resumed his cross-examination. Did Camus rate Thomas Carlyle? Michel Houellebecq? Louis XIV? What would he say to Charles Maurras if he were alive today? What would Dostoyevsky have thought about the Covid lab-leak theory?

Camus let out a high-pitched giggle whenever Yarvin asked a particularly odd question, but he was baffled by his guest’s repeated inquiries about Brigitte Macron, the French First Lady, who Yarvin suspected was actually a man. “We are dealing with the most important thing in the history of the Continent,” Camus exclaimed, referring to the rise of nonwhite immigration to Europe. “What does it matter if Mrs. Macron is a man or woman?”

Brun asked the men to move to a window so that he could shoot them from outside. As Yarvin gazed at the patchwork of neatly tended fields below, he spoke about the Great Replacement as “one of the greatest crimes” in history. “Is it greater than the Holocaust? I don’t know. . . . We haven’t seen it play out yet.” He’d been drinking since his arrival and seemed to be in an emotional state. “I have three children,” he told Camus. “Will they be basically lined up and marched into mass graves?” They had been discussing Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic novel, “The Camp of the Saints” (1973), which depicts an invasion of Indian migrants destroying European nations. Sobbing now, he continued, “I want my children to die in the twenty-second century. I don’t want them to experience some kind of insane post-colonial Holocaust.”

After dessert, coffee, and a rum from Guadeloupe, it was time for an evening stroll. Carrying a wooden cane, Camus led Yarvin through the small town of Plieux. Spring had arrived early: a cherry tree was blossoming with little flowers. As they passed the local church, Yarvin took out his phone to show Camus a photo of the toddler he shares with Laurenson. “The mother of that child was not my wife,” he said confidingly. A moment later, he was reading a poem by C. P. Cavafy, in tears once again.

When Yarvin and Camus went on ahead, the filmmakers paused to assess the day’s shoot. Brun said that Yarvin reminded him of the long-winded character in “Airplane!” who talks so incessantly that it drives his seatmates to kill themselves. We wondered what Camus was making of the afternoon. It wasn’t long before we found out. “If intellectual exchanges were commercial exchanges—which they are, to a certain extent—the amount of my exports would not reach one per cent of that of my imports,” Camus wrote in his diary, which he posted online the following day. “The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations.”

It was dark by the time we all returned to the château. “Thank you so much for your hospitality and your duck and your castle,” Yarvin said, looking around. “How much money did you spend on it?”

Lovingly squeezing Yarvin’s arm, Kristine said, “You can’t just ask people that!”

Camus gave Yarvin some of his books as souvenirs, but Yarvin’s mind already seemed elsewhere. Tomorrow, he would fly to Paris to meet with a group of red-pilled Zoomers and Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who once ran to be the President of France.

As we headed to the car, Yarvin was buzzing with boyish excitement about his performance. He turned to me and the filmmakers. “Was that good?” he asked. “Was that good?”

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childlikegoblinqueen · 2 years ago

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Chapter 83 Notes:

Spoilers and actual history which inspired the last line within.

Chapter 83 had a considerable amount of fluff. I wanted to give the tense relationship between Hunter and Darius a reprieve.

What better way than to have Darius teach Hunter how to dance for his very first Grom?

Some inspiration for that came from the scene in book 3 of ATLA where Aang and Katara rework their Katas into a dance.

There’s plenty of examples of the correlation between dancing and fighting within pop culture and so many articles on it, but after an offhand conversation with @threegoblinart about Baz Luhrman’s Strictly Ballroom, I went a different route.

Also, fun fact! My spouse, whom I met in martial arts class was a competitive ballroom dancer when he was a teen. He was an amazing fighter too.

I loved the image of all of these adults whom Hunter was out at odds with under Belos taking on a nurturing role aside Camila and helping him figure out how to redirect the years of combat training into something like dance, so he could get to enjoy his first school dance with his girlfriend.

It felt like a sweet healing moment.

ThreeGoblin and I also agreed that Hunter would loose his mind over Swing Dancing, and the movie Swing Kids came to mind. Under the Third Reich, Swing Dance became part of a movement of youth who opposed the nazi party. Swing Kids was a simplistic look at the history of the movement, but not necessarily a bad place to start. I dropped a wiki article about that at the end of the chapter.

ANYWAY this is a perfect chance to drop info about a covert historical operation which VERY LOOSELY inspired the big reveal at the end of the chapter.

Please take into consideration that my refrain when asked about Darius’ deal in SCOM has always been that Darius has made a series of poor decisions.

That said, he is essentially the head of the CIA for the BI. Intelligence is the shadowy part of the military. Defense is the more front facing one. It’s not fleshed out by any means and in this story the two work together very closely, but if Darius was to answer Hunter’s questions with the classic,

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” It would go very badly.

The concept of a current government working with former enemy scientists to develop weapons /etc is based on Operation Paperclip.

So Darius being directed to work with Kikimora to develop Miki- Ultra has a real world precedent.

Doesn’t mean he liked it or even wanted to do it.

Much less scope in the fic, of course, but information about this below.

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autisticlee · 4 months ago

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why is the only way for republican politicians to do anything seemingly good for the Democrat politicians to oppose the good? like banning tiktok if you want to see that as bad because free speech and people make a living there or whatever. democrats are against it and ban it and suddenly trump supports it when what he wanted originally was it banned because "omg China ew" or whatever. he should be happy the democrats did that and reached his goal. but how dare they take his fame for doing it! he needs to do the opposite now and get the fame from saving it! now he gets to pretend to be the tiktok hero. the hypocrites flock to the big ego hypocrite. they love that shit. they love contradicting themselves. so they can pretend to ~always be right~ and place all the blame on everyone else and never take responsibility for anything.

if you make him and his people think the idea came from themsleves because their only goal is to do the exact opposite of the democrats, then it would be a very dumb yet big brain move. it would make the democrats look awful and makes none of us want to support them. but it makes the "worse of two evils" that is currently in power "look better" or at the very least get to pretend to be better once in a while. they pretend to he heros because they are tricked to do the right thing.

it's all such childish nonsense. the government looks like a battle of petty 4 year olds. "I don't want to do what he does. i'm not like other girls" behavior. but I don't think the democrats are smart enough to purposely make Trump and his baby brigade choose the right things by playing the villain. or they would have done it more. unless it's a test. because god forbid the two sides ever agree on anything. they MUST disagree on every single possible thing for some reason. how dare they ever agreed and work together to actually help their people. 🙄

it's the most pathetic and childish game and most lfnthis country eats that shit up. they cheer for their government sports team or they jump ship to the winning team. it's not what we need as a country or as humans but it's the only thing these government people will do. that and dance for money basically. i'm tired of this. I hate it here. please end our suffering. I don't want to participate in this childish bullshit that puts our lives in danger.

#lee rants #political rants #waiting for the most ridiculous laws that cause people to put their guns where their mouth is and civil war or something #do something and stop all this nonsense!#also can i say i hate how quickly trump followers all change their opnions as soon as trump says something opposite #its so weird amd culty. but they claim all us non-trumpets are the “brainwashed” ones that “cant think fkr ourselves” lmao ok #says the ones who once hated musk and wanted to see him go down until trump decided he likes him. now they all love and pretect him🙄#i think for myself and didmt like or trust that man from the beginning. stop being brainwashed losers

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une-sanz-pluis · 10 months ago

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Was Margaret of Anjou's murder of Humphrey proposed by the Tudor dynasty?

Margaret's involvement in Humphrey's downfall was first proposed in the sixteenth century according to B. M. Cron in her MA thesis, "Margaret of Anjou: tradition and revision". I'm yet to discover who was the "first" to claim she was involved in Humphrey's murder, however. Polydore Vergil, followed by Holinshed and Hall, claimed that Margaret was involved in a conspiracy to deprive Humphrey of power and influence but he doesn't explicitly connect her with the plot to murder him. I've included an excerpt from Vergil on Humphrey's death behind the cut.

Whether or not Margaret was actually involved is something we'll probably never know. Although most contemporaries believed Humphrey was murdered, most historians think he died of a stroke or heart attack brought on by the stress of his arrest. Margaret gave Humphrey a New Year's gift in 1447 which might suggest (as Cron suggests and Maurer perhaps hints at) that Margaret was uninvolved in the plot against him.

Henry VI certainly approved of the plan to arrest Humphrey on charges of treason, while William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk has traditionally been seen as the architect and prime mover of the plot against Humphrey. Margaret, plausibly, could have been aware of the plot or even involved, especially given her close links to Henry and Suffolk. However, the claim he had opposed Henry's marriage to Margaret, thus earning Margaret's enmity, seems to have originated in Polydore Vergil's 16th century account rather than any contemporary sources.

I've taken this extract of Vergil from Dana F. Sutton's hypertext critical edition of the 1555 version of Anglica Historia.

But his wife Margaret was a very prudent woman, eager for glory, full of reason, counsel, officiousness, and manlike enterprises, in whom you could see much intelligence, much diligence, much vigilance, much carefulness. But she was not free of a womanly nature, being headstrong and fickle. When she came to realize that her husband Henry was ruling in accordance with Gloucester’s will rather than his own, and that he was devoting no great diligence or thought to the war, she decided to take that care upon herself, and gradually to deprive the duke of all the great power he enjoyed, so that she herself would not be called a goose for allowing her husband, now growing to maturity, to be governed by another man. Therefore a little later Margaret strove to put her plan into practice. But when the woman had once attempted this of her own volition, suddenly some men ready for sedition, prompt for violence, prone to crime and murder, rose up who sought to make Gloucester unpopular and egged her on [...] Fired by these urgings, the woman seized control of the kingdom, together with Henry her husband, and although this was nothing else but to plow a field by yoking together an ox and a donkey, as the saying goes, she nevertheless began spiritedly to undertake that responsibility. First she not only barred Gloucester from all public affairs, but also declined to shield him from his enemies’ insults. For not long thereafter some nobles conspired against the duke, accusing him of many misdemeanors, and particularly that he punished men convicted of crimes with greater severity than the laws of England prescribed. [...] Although the duke made a very creditable response to his accusers, he failed to help his case because he had already been marked down for death, save that he freed his mind from distress in that he was not obliged to listen to his condemnation and did not know the time appointed for his death. For the conspirators, fearing that there would be rioting if they subjected this popular man to a public execution, they decided to take him unawares. Therefore by authority of the Privy Council they summoned the nobility to appear on an appointed day at a parliament at the Abbey of Bury. When Gloucester made his appearance with the rest, he was suddenly arrested and on the following night, setting the worst example in human memory, he was strangled, with all his retinue thrown into prison at a single stroke.

Vergil's account is at odds at what we know - that is, we know that Humphrey's political influence had been waning for some time before his marriage to Margaret and that Henry had rarely, if ever, governed according to Humphrey's will (Humphrey wishes that was the case!). It is, however, close to how we see in Shakespeare depict Margaret and Humphrey's relationship in Henry VI, Part Two. Vergil's characterisation of Humphrey is in the "Good Duke Humphrey" vein and it's possibly for that reason he makes no mention of Eleanor Cobham's existence let alone the witchcraft accusations.

While Margaret's depiction isn't wholly negative, her flaws are associated with her feminity ("she was not free of a womanly nature, being headstrong and fickle") and her behaviour is linked to internal division and the death of the Good Duke, even if she is not actively involved.

#there is much more you can say about how vergil writes margaret and how he genders her #but kavita mudan finn's the last plantagenet consorts does this better than i could (and i would be cribbing off it anyway)#margaret of anjou #humphrey duke of gloucester #ask #anon #the death of humphrey duke of gloucester

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alanjporterwriter · 1 year ago

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Books Read in 2024 #9 - “Frank Whittle: Invention of the Jet” by Andrew Nahum

It’s long been a repeated tale that Frank Whittle was the solo genius who invented the jet engine and was ignored and shunned by the British government and aviation industry, until he and a bunch of friends got together to fund the development of a prototype. At which point it was all taken away from him. - A tale oft repeated by Whittle himself.

In this relatively slim volume Nahum digs deep into government records and the papers of Whittle’s “Power Jets” company to paint a different picture of the unprecedented levels of support he was given to act as an unofficial jet-research lab, and the subsequent problems of him not wanting to collaborate when it came time to turn his ideas into a scalable production technology.

It’s a times a bit of a dry read with too many direct extracts from archival material that would have been better summarized, but it builds a fascinating picture of the early days of a disruptive technology that shows, as with most disputes, that the actual story probably lies somewhere between two opposing viewpoints.

#books #reviews #2024 reads

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mermaidsirennikita · 2 years ago

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I'm only halfway through s2 of vikings: valhalla but I'm so glad they separated harald and freydis because these 2 didn't have any chemistry, anytime they were together on screen it was always boring land to me. And I could say the same for leif and his dead girlfriend from season 1 that they tried to convince me he was super in love with when she was so forgettable I couldn't even remember her name

Lol her name was Liv and I liked her just fine but she definitely didn’t do anything especially exceptional. I think that you could make an argument for her representing like…. Leif feeling like he’s a flop pagan Viking, which he kind of is, but yeah she was not this grand love.

The thing that has always been an issue with this franchise is building love stories over time. Even when they have pairings with a compelling hook and chemistry between the actors, they don't allocate a lot of story time to them, and the actors have to fill in the gaps--which means that when the writers take sudden turns, it's even more jarring. Take Rollo and Gisla, a ship I think was fairly popular, that actually did have a multi-episode "falling in love" arc that most of the show's ships didn't get, with actors that had chemistry. She basically hated him until suddenly she didn't and they fucked like bunnies, and it was fine because a lot of people, myself included, liked them--but then a time jump happened and they had huge issues and it was like "oh, this is sudden".

Now, Michael Hirst (who I think...... is prone to this kind of relationship writing or lack thereof) is not as directly involved in the new show. I think he's largely involved in a capacity wherein he came up with the concept, but it's not really something he guides; at least, that was the case last I checked. But I think you see his fingertips in the relationship writing. When you've got a good hook and chemistry, you can make it work--Leif and Mariam, I found really charming because of chemistry, and because I liked Leif, who seems to be very torn about his place in the world and his relationships with people who have big ambitions and opposing religious stances (Freydis as a pagan and Harald as a Christian), forming this romance with this learned woman who helped him grow. Even if it's like, oh wow, Leif, who is mourning a woman, is now falling in love with a woman who's dying from the outset lol. It's Vikings. Women Big Dying.

And I think this approach also works pretty well with Emma and Canute, who really don't have a lot of screentime together... But the actors have chemistry and their entire bond is really compelling. They're both plotters and schemers and politicians, and he's super into her big brain while having a different approach to governing.

I actuallllly really like the romantic alternative they set up for Harald in season 2, even though there was way less screentime devoted to development than I'd like. I loved where it ended in the season (what a hook) and it made way more sense for him, imo, than Harald and Freydis.

Like, I have no idea why Harald is into Freydis. She really doesn't seem to align with his vision (and at the end of the day, Harald is all self-centered ambition and we love that for him) and she has like... zero respect for his religion. And don't get me wrong, I am not saying "Christians good", but the show's huge "pagans good, Christians bad" thing is.... boring lol. Like, Freydis really hates Christians, Harald is a Christian, and like. She's right in the premiere. They should just stop.

I don't get Freydis as a character at all. The performance doesn't do it for me, to be honest, and she's basically incredibly disconnected from EVERYONE in the main cast. Like, yeah, the England arc is disconnected from the BIG ARC (which is Harald and Leif) but.... There's way less time devoted to it than there is to Freydis, and there are several established mains involved--Emma, Godwin, and to a lesser extent Canute. Whereas Freydis was mostly on her own last season, with characters who really didn't end up carrying over to this one with her, and this season they basically had to make people up to interact with her. And the only one I cared about was Bradley James, who SOLD EVERY DAMN LINE LOL.

And the show did such a NOTICEABLE 180 in s2 (which I definitely enjoyed) versus the end of s1. You end s2 with Leif and Harald split and Harald with Freydis. Suddenly, by the end of the s2 finale, Harald and Freydis are big broken up, and Leif and Harald are back together and have an entire BRO ROAD TRIP the whole season, during which Harald is set up with another woman who I suspect will be pretty important to his ambitions. Yes, Freydis has Harald's baby, but I'm 90% sure that this was largely because the show super wants a kid with Harald and Leif's DNA in it.

Like, clearly Freydis was written to be a Lagertha 2.0, and as much as I hated Lagertha by the end of the original series, she was a very popular character and basically the face of the show for much of its time post-Travis Fimmel. I feeeel like they basically have to have that locked in so that they can promote their "ooh woman roar shield maiden rah rah" bullshit that got them viewers with the first show... But they know Freydis individually didn't play as well for viewers in the first season as Harald and Leif, lol. They know the thing that's most fun about this show is watching This Hot Guy Who Thinks He's Kinda A Big Deal and His Zen Friend Who Somehow Is Going Along With This have zany adventure with wacky hijinks. Like, Leif and Harald will never kiss, because Vikings, but the show is investing more time and development into that relationship than any canonical romantic relationship. Much like... some other... homoerotic relationships... on the original show... pick one of 500.

(Sidebar: I like Emma and Canute together a lot, but I also think that Emma and Godwin have a similar deal going on where they don't canonically have a romantic thing happening, but because they are not romantic the show actually devotes more time to their, in this case contentious relationship, so you wanna see them kiss. And Godwin has fabulous chemistry with Emma AND Canute, and Emma and Canute have chemistry, so it's like whenever they're all together I wait for Canute to be like "you guys fight so much, you know how we can resolve this?" before pushing their faces together. Canute seems like the type of guy who'd initiate a threesome that way.)

Anyway, I really enjoyed s2 but that was something I noticed a lot. Freydis basically having an arc you could totally fast-forward through without missing anything related to the main plot (again)... While Leif and Harald have the meat of the story. She's supposed to be as important as them, but I don't think the writers have their hearts in it with her. So she's basically a total cypher. She's the Keeper of the Faith, and it's like? Cool? Harald is like, going to be an actual king and Leif is gonna discover America, but they need a Strong Viking Woman because they can't let Emma be the Strong Woman rep because she's not a viking and also wears dresses a lot, which means she is not actually strong.

Also, everyone who is against Freydis needs to be a super legit bad person because she gets to be Cool and Good, whereas Emma must be Cool and Treacherous. Because she does not fight with a sword (straightforward and masculine), she fights with politics and her brain, which are bad (subversive and feminine). Though I really had fun with Emma's arc this season and I don't think they were like... trying to make us hate her the way they used to try to make us hate Aslaug, it was kinda funny to watch the contrast.

Anyway. Bring on season 3 and for the love of God, continue to lean in to with Leif and Harald shenanigans versus Freydis like. Midsommar singing.

#vikings: valhalla #lol my eternal complex feelings about the vikings franchise continue #but overall i think this show has been much more consistent than the original #it's early days yet tho #i mean s3 is set but i can't imagine netflix allowing it to go on far beyond that if at all beyond that #being netflix #BUT LOL............................ THAT MAY BE FOR THE BEST #the original show actually had a p solid first couple seasons and the cracks.... really got big in s3

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ofwraithsandwords · 2 years ago

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Sees: "This sort of goes into my headcanon on how Integra's father has influenced her conduct with her subordinates and her position as director, but that's another subject entirely."

May you please explain more about this! (same anon btw). I am very interested! I feel like it might be in the minority of thinking she's not a very good leader/director. Her go-to solution to most things is to send Alucard out. Which always leads to a mess. Even her father realized that using him too much could've been bad. Not sure why or how he came to that conclusion. Or if ever learned from it in his later life… But I do find it interesting that his daughter proceeded to use Alucard for everything involving vampire extermination. Even gaining a replacement for alucard in seras during the 30-year gap.

More likely, stuff like that was written for cool set pieces/fights rather than show questionable leadership choices. Thus some of my confusion comes from whether this is sloppy writing or was actually intended in some way. Also, I should end this by saying this isn't a knock on her character. I just like to overthink ideas in this manga too much.

Hey again, Anon! Sorry for the delay!

Yeah, I do feel like Integra's leadership skills are definitely lacking in certain situations, but like you said, this is likely more of a way to showcase Alucard's abilities and violence in the anime as opposed to showing how Integra is kind of an incompetent director.

But here's the thing: you have to remember that Integra was given the organization when she was...14, I think? So she basically had 7 or 8 years to learn all the ins-and-outs of not only vampires as a species, but occult/supernatural-related subjects as well AND has to direct, supervise, plan, and mitigate any incidents/operations thrown her way. All the while keeping this secret sector of the English government totally under wraps. So...no pressure?

Like you, I don't think less of Integra as a character if she's seen as a faulty leader. In fact, I think it makes sense in certain cases and makes her characterization more complex and nuanced.

Anyways, as far as my headcanons about how her father shaped some of her mannerisms goes, I think it was his more clandestine behavior is what really effected Integra the most. The womanizing, drinking, smoking, fraternizing with other officials and superiors, keeping the true nature (or at least part of) the Hellsing Organization from his only daughter - the list goes on. Being around this behavior is going to have an impact on a child, especially seeing how her father probably treated women as little more than arm candy and a means for pleasure.

I think this might've been part of what drove Integra to dress in suits, to smoke cigars, and go by "Sir" in order to be on the same pedestal as her male counterparts. You could argue that it's because only knights could join the Round Table of Protestant Knights and not dames, but honestly? It's not like they couldn't make an exception. They wouldn't have had a choice. Regardless of what your opinion is, Integra chose to go by "Sir". No one calls her Mistress Integra, Lady Integra, or Dame Integra - there's only one person that refers to her with a female title and it's the Nazi war criminal himself with "Mein Fräulein".

I also have a headcanon that until Seras showed up, Integra was very in the closet and had a good bit of internalized misogyny. I mean, she grew up around and was raised almost exclusively by men, most of which who implicitly benefited from their patriarchal government. I'm sure a few of them had a few choice things to say about women and minorities in general despite Integra being half-Indian.

Anyway, once Seras was introduced and she and Integra spent the next 3 decades together, I like to think that Integra really unlearned quite a bit of the prejudice that was put on her at an early age and came to be proud of her identity as a half-Indian woman.

Most unsavory comments are met with criticism or a good glare from her which ended up causing quite a rift between her and some of the other knights. But most of them are maggot food at this point, so it doesn't really matter.

I will say though, despite her being much more respectful than her father, she's been known to put on the charm in front of a pretty lady once in a while.

#hellsing #ask #integra hellsing #arthur hellsing #seras victoria #headcanon

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paramoira · 8 months ago

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the opposing facets of ariadne's life had always attempted to house a strange kind of separation, though in equal measure had always been magnets attracted to each other, pulled by some invisible force of inevitability. her mother had always maintained a distance from the family she'd married into aside from kadir-- had always encouraged her father to find his base further and further into the light than the shadows. for awhile, he had, and the heavens knew he wasn't as involved in uncle nik's operations as he could have been. and yet, he still was involved; sometimes ariadne wondered if that and her fathers' continued absence was her fault on some level.

would he have been as involved if she hadn't nagged him so many times when he had actually been present to take her on a trip two hours outside of london?

would he still have been as involved if these trips hadn't allowed for an ulterior motive for him to go hence?

the short answer is, her father had always been the person he was and regardless to her irrational wonderments, he was always going to be on the path he'd chosen decades ago.

ariadne thinks, maybe, that was her parents problem before all the other shit came into play. her mother had attempted to change him, to turn him into someone he wasn't without accepting all of him. his choices hadn't made him a bad man, just.. complicated. he'd held his own reasons and perhaps some of those same reasons, even if he hadn't always been as present in her life as others, were what had governed her ability to accept elements of life others would find much more difficulty within. but ariadne understood, perhaps better than most these days, that there was a difference between seeking to bring and inspire light into someone's life and seeking to change them into someone they weren't. and that maybe, just maybe, even as people evolved, it was merely watering the seeds which had always been part of them.

maybe her parents were doomed even had things played out differently.

it's strange how she thinks about that often these days even when ariadne hasn't spoken to her father in sixty-seven days. and there inlaid how ariadne's life stood upon a precipice of magnetic forces attempting to collide so often. maybe in some other world she could maintain the distance. she couldn't imagine her life in any scenario being fully black or white-- family, loyalty.. it was too integral to who she was as a human being. yet she wondered if in another life a boy named tommy hadn't entered her world what that would have looked like because sometimes she considers those strange early mornings years ago when she came to help polly and now with her presence in brimingham so regular despite working with the coppers in london, that from the moment tommy shelby blasted into her life there was an inevitability within; cosmic forces determined to intermingle in the same way like called to like for her father, him always having a foothold in nik's world.

and yet, how strange it was that ariadne could walk these streets and feel at home among people her coworkers never would. people that perhaps most people wouldn't. their worlds to outsiders shouldn't make sense together. but for children that hadn't mattered. it did, but it didn't. she liked tommy because he was tommy and she thinks he liked her the same. perhaps in ariadne's mind there was a kind of separation of some things, an ability to accept both sides of the coin of life. being connected to the shelby family didn't correlate to an inability for her to help the coppers bring justice to a murder victim. they were all facets of her life and she was okay with that in a way her mother never had been able to be with her father. in a way her mother had never been with ariadne's relationship with the shelbys either-- but she hadn't been around enough to prevent it and perhaps, even as a child, araidne had held enough sense when her mother or grandparents were around to not push in the same ways she did with others she knew would accept such dynamics in her life.

again, strange, the fashion in which her mind makes these parallels.

tommy shelby was.. her friend for nearly as long as she can remember. even if the weight he brought upon her heart these days was nearly unbearable. even if sometimes she wanted to hate him for the words he let come out of his mouth since his return and the harsh tone to her own at times. 'i didn't come here to see you. john called me.' she'd said once, a few weeks ago after the disaster of his words toward her the visit before. but had she meant it? in her heart? perhaps not and she thinks he knew that. didn't that make it all the worse? that even when they were so distant, when he was pushing her away from him over and over again she was positive he still knew her? understood her? could read her? it was infuriating. it'd have been so much easier if she could have hated him. but in what world could ariadne ever do that? in what world would she not see the weight of sadness, of trauma in his eyes? the confliction he always attempted to hide from her?

there was more too this. more to everything. she knows it in every cell within her body even if she doesn't understand the specifics. she knows him more than she thinks he wants to accept. maybe it's why she keeps showing up. sure she'd usually come there for polly or arthur or john or even others but there was something more. like calling to like, even if she hadn't fully come to realize just how true such was. furthermore, ariadne had never given up on anything that mattered within her life and she certainly wasn't willing to give up on tommy fucking shelby even if half the time he made her want to push him into the canal. and yet, perhaps, this was at the forefront of a strength within her that her mother never held. ariadne, even in her lack of true understanding of the details which governed so many people within her life, had never sought to change those people. she'd accepted them in the same fashion they had accepted her.

loyalty, understanding, respect. it's something that strikes her lacks when she's there at the garrison, watching interactions between people and the blonde women behind the bar. she's not entirely sure why she notices, except she'd seen the woman, grace, and tommy talking and perhaps that'd caused her to pay attention. she rarely allows herself to allow her thoughts to wonder upon it. but it was these concepts, respect at the forefront, which were why uncle nik was so proud when she went into forensics, even when she'd gotten her placement when by all accounts it should horrify a crime boss because she wasn't on the take. she was in the work because she cared. because she believed in it. it was also why ariadne had been able to walk into the garrison for years and feel safe that any of patrons saw her as simply ariadne and not as some narc or enemy. because she'd never judged them. they lived the lives they'd chosen and she did the job she'd chosen. it didn't have to be opposing, it just had to not be related to each other in a professional manner. maybe she was naïve for that mentality but it was who she'd always been and ariadne saw it as a strength and her mother's lack of an ability to adapt as a weakness. life had never been black and white. wasn't in any world or scenario. there was little benefit in attempting to force it to be. perhaps that was unkind to her mother's memory but it was the truth.

it was reality.

an inevitability in the same way that ariadne's destination now, on this cold night, was inevitable. because she didn't know who this random woman who'd shown up one day was really. she was willing to allow her the benefit of the doubt, to see the good in people, but grace was asking questions. too many questions and ariadne wanted to understand why. tommy shelby was being a god awful human being to her lately, but she was going to be damned if she wasn't going to show up when something felt.. unsettling about this woman's interest. maybe grace likes him, she'd considered with a kind of shift of her mood she'd managed to ignore. that'd have been an innocent enough thing and one perhaps she allows to be at the forefront of her mind because she wants to trust people even if she's faced half-truths so often in the past. but the fact remained. grace was asking about tommy and ariadne needed to know why. she could push tommy shelby into the canal tomorrow for being a dick. tonight, she was going to make sure he was.. what? protected? as if she held any real power in his world?

still, ariadne had always liked a challenge.

there's something in the air tonight, as if the wind has agendas of it's own-- a wraith in the night. unsettling... dreaded. ariadne feels the weight of it in her bones, the chill as she'd walked upon old streets.. echoes. echoes of a time when blood seeped into layers underfoot. down deep into the ground, through eras buried by time. perhaps blood still seeped, the reaper taking. she reads the news, the settings upon her phone tending to cause notifications to steer toward the places she frequents. (and when was the last time she hadn't frequented this city? even in tommy's absence-- especially because of tommy's absence. she still remembers those weekends when she'd helped polly with a young child and a group of kids reeling from loss and then tommy wasn't there. he wasn't there and she hadn't fully known why.) troubles found this place, then, now, in the moments it takes her trainers to crunch the ground of an area of turned up stone.

why is she there?

she'd asked herself when she'd entered some time ago now. of course, ariadne had known why she was in brimingham again-- john this time, polly last time. yet was it not truly because of thomas shelby in the end? hadn't it always come back to the boy who'd taught her to throw her first punch? there's little talk at first, a strange kind of awkwardness in the stifling air of the bar. ariadne allows it, doesn't push first, waits, wants to see where grace begins. the women's lips part and then the door rattles nearly off it's hinges. at least that's what it feels like and it sets ariadne on edge. makes her heart jump because it's unexpected. because she remembers a door, a shaking door that her mother had been trying to open when she'd run away from her and then the silence which had followed. it takes her a moment, held breath released as grace moves away from the bar and toward the door. ariadne watches, regaining control of her senses as tommy enters and she knows, gods she knows before he even speaks that something is terribly wrong.

she almost speaks, wants to ask what's happened before he even sees her there and yet grace speaks first, trying to tell him the place is god damned closed. who the fuck tells thomas shelby the garrison is closed? can't she see the creases in his features? can't she see the built up tension radiating off him? maybe she can't. because grace doesn't see him in the same way she does. danger. danger. they mean to kill him. her breath begins to catch again when he sees her, when she watches the way panic starts to rise in him and maybe, maybe in some strange way there's a truth in his anger and the way he points at her. there isn't indifference toward her. he's scared because she's there and there's people coming to kill him. he's scared because he cares. there's more to it. she remembers her own thoughts. all the swirling questions she's had since he'd gone and since he'd come back. yet none of it mattered now when there were men coming to kill him in moments.

grace fumbles for answers. ariadne gives her none.

then there's a gun and edicts given and it should shake ariadne more than it does. the whole of this situation. yes, there's fear rising within her. there's a kind of panic that's making her palms sweaty and her skin to turn a shade lighter. yet she's forcing her breaths in and out, forcing herself to remain in the moment because there was danger and people were coming to kill tommy and ariadne couldn't imagine a world where he wasn't in it. she'd known what it was like to lose him, but this was different. absence wasn't death. she watches grace take the gun. she sees tommy's fear so clearly laid before her that she takes a step forward because she wants to reach out but there's no time. there's no time. there's no time. and then comes the anger, building within her as he speaks of back doors and upstairs. she's shaking her head without even realizing it. as if her body is physically revolted at the notion.

why would she leave him? how could she leave him? she should. it was the safer option. it's what the panic and fear within her was telling her to do.

he steps closer and she can feel him even without touching. the way their energies sparked with fear of loss. he speaks in her native tongue and it takes her the infinity of a second to understand his meaning. cops would come. cops. she worked with cops but these cops... the were on the take. it didn't matter. it did, but it didn't now. no. he's worried about her, about perceptions. about implications even when he's about to stare death in the fucking face and it makes her want to shove him for his stupidity. for the ridiculousness of it. she'd maintained a separation in her life for so long but what the fuck did it matter if a cop saw her now, in this moment? what the fuck did it matter when tommy was staring at her with such fear in his eyes that she could literally feel it?

and then he's moving. out of her space. time is moving again, too fast. she feels the weight of years of loss and she's scared. what she should do and what she does are contradictory. her voice rebels against her body. against her fears. because even if her life's conclusion was within the infinity of a few moments, perhaps especially because of it, she refused to allow fear to take over. ariadne had never had any issues saying no to tommy before. not like other people did. she'd also never abandoned him before. she wasn't about to start now.

"no." she replies, simply, as if it's the easiest and most sure answer she's ever given him. she speaks it in the language he taught her and then she moves. let him be angry. let him hate her even if it's the last thing they'd share. but neither of them would be alone. maybe that mattered more. she pulls out the chair and sits next to him forcing her facial features to appear less terrified than she is. she's digging her nails into her thigh so hard that it's bound to leave marks. because she is terrified. she's terrified of so many things and she has no idea what the fuck she's doing. this wasn't her world. it wasn't her world. it wasn't. and yet, maybe it had been, a part of it, all along. a part she'd been sheltered from, but still a part of it all the same. she didn't know what to do what that. but it didn't matter. it didn't matter. because all that mattered was that when those entered the bar she was sitting at a table next to the first boy that'd she'd ever felt truly comfortable with. the first boy that she'd loved in the the most pure and innocent way. he'd been her first true friend and... simply, because he was him and she was her. and, well, he had taught her how to throw a pretty epic punch.

NEVER IN HIS LIFE HAS THE TICKING of the stopwatch in Tommy's waistcoat so thunderously resounded through the cavity of his skull, the imperceptible scratch of thinned metal against gears grinding away in the background of each movement of the second hand. It sounds as though Death himself approaches, growing close enough to let his victim hear the last seconds of their own life through some strange spell. He has three minutes and forty-two seconds to get inside the Garrison and explain five-minute plan to the only person he could expect to be there, and even that is a long shot, this late in the evening. Part of him is mortified when he tries the door to find it locked, his knuckles white as he grips the door handle and shakes the entryway door hard enough to hear the glass warping with the wooden frames.

His rising panic is quenched at the sight of Grace's silhouette filling the lace-covered windows, and she bends to unlock the bolt in the ground barring him from entry. As soon as the lock is undone, Thomas shoves his way inside, too focused to roll his eyes at the attempted protests from Grace.

" W-We're closed, Mr. Shelb- "

Thomas cuts the barmaid off with a dizzying sort of intensity, almost manic in a sharp gesture with his flat hand. " Leave the door unlocked. I don't have much time and I need a favor. When the clock at St. Andrews' chimes at midnight, two men will come through that door. They plan to kill me. Are you alone.. ? "

His voice fades to something that sounds much more like panic than he'd have liked when he turns and sees Ariadne standing awkwardly like a bad thief caught with her hand in a safe. He freezes completely, the cold blue of his eyes darkening to something frenzied and angry as he turns sharply back to the barmaid with a demand. He points a long, calloused finger at Ari.

" What the fuck is she doing in here ? "

Grace, stricken, looks to Ariadne as if she expects the woman she'd invited ( convinced, rather ) to stay to have access to her own reasons as to why she'd done it. Her shoulders jump and her gaze returns to the man in the entryway when he barks at her again.

" Don't fucking look at her. I'm asking you, Grace. "

She opens her mouth to respond but the second hand of Tommy's pocket watch begins to quiet down in his head, and a cold flash of dread returns him to reality just in time. He has less than ninety seconds left.

Thomas presses the heels of his hands to his eyes and heaves a sigh that sounds so exhausted you'd think he'd been up for days. Perhaps he has. He's... looked better.

It takes him a moment to compose himself, but he withdraws a pistol from the inner pocket of his overcoat, checks to ensure that it is loaded, and turns back to the barmaid. She seems as unsure as anyone as to his intentions with the weapon, and could not appear more shocked when he offers it to her, grip-first, to carry for herself.

" When the church bell strikes midnight, two men will come in through the front door. I will be sitting there. You will be hiding back there. When I make a toast, you come out with that thing cocked and loaded. You just point it. Don't shoot. "

He uses his finger to point out each location and the weight of their significance with seconds left to enact a shaky plan that has been thrown off entirely by the presence of Ariadne, through no fault of her own. That makes it worse.

Another victim to being attached in any way to Thomas Shelby, through no fault of their own.

" Fuck, " he hisses, doubling over with his head in his hands, hiding a face twisted with sorrow. His breath hitches once, as if he is about to cry ; but as if nothing had happened, he quickly rights himself again to look at Ariadne with eyes so full of fear and guilt that it hurts to see. " You need to leave, Ari. There's a back entrance some ways past the stock of new kegs in the cellar... "

You don't have enough time. The cellar door is probably already being covered by IRA snipers.

" ... But... it isn't safe. " Fifty seconds left before the bell. " Upstairs, or behind the bar, or into the snug... "

Cogs turn in his head and he cannot bear to imagine the consequence of choosing the wrong order to give, to have her be caught up in all of this shit of which he's been so determined to keep her out.

Tommy has had his suspicions about Grace for a while. She asks too many pointed questions, asks for too many specifics. She doesn't mind her own business. She seems intent on getting Thomas to speak to her like he trusts her. None of it had been anything even close to damning, easy to write off as a mixture of her curiosity and his paranoia. But this...

This is a bit different.

" Hide somewhere, and stay quiet," he says, then steps forward and lowers his voice, switching instead to Turkish to keep Grace in the dark.

" The police are due at the sixth chime of the bell, and I do not want you seen here when they arrive. "

Like he's cast a spell the second hand of his watch stands eerily still, and he seems to spring to action, loading his own gun only to tuck it away again and rushing to carry a bottle of whisky and a pitcher of water with three glasses to a nearby table. In English again, he shouts over his shoulder at the woman standing in front of the bar, no doubt consumed with confusion and fear.

" Ari, go. Now. Now. "

@paramoira

#thread; passed the point of no return #proofwhisky #v; may you be in heaven before the devil knows you're dead

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rocksrntpeople · 2 years ago

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MCU Rewatch - Iron Man 2

So, turns out I did know what Iron Man 2 is about and just thought that it was Iron Man 3. What the hell is Iron Man 3 then? Something, something, annoying little kid, something, something, Iron Man? Idk, but at the very least this is the last one that makes me go, “what the hell was this about again?”

Granted, Iron Man 2 was a lesson in cinematic dichotomy and I had a hard time feeling engaged with the Ivan Vanko plotline. It seemed super shallow and just generally less interesting than what Stark was dealing with.

So, the main plot of this movie is actually tri-fold. Firstly, we have Tony Stark dealing with palladium poisoning. He’s dying because of the device that’s keeping him alive and it’s the first time he’s dealing with failure somehow, and there’s just a lot of internal strife going on.

Alongside this is the much more public battle of Iron Man’s identity. The U.S. government wants the Iron Man suit to be a symbol of the US military, to represent power and glory over all through violence, but that’s not who or what Iron Man is. Up against Stark is a bloated (literally) politician and a weapons contractor who may be one of the most annoying characters in the MCU.

And this leads us into the third, kind of shoe-horned-in plot of Anton and Ivan Vanko. When Anton dies at the beginning of the movie, his son Ivan decides that now is the time to take revenge on Stark, as opposed to a few years earlier before he had the Iron Man suit and before Ivan’s dad bit the dust. But okay. And what is he mad about? That Tony Stark’s dad “stole” the arc reactor idea from Anton and then decades later Tony actually made it somewhat useful.

I’m sorry but that is just a stupid plot. So this guy, who’s been trapped in Siberia for decades, finally decides to leave and his motivation is that some guy whose dad used to work with his dad used old technology to create new technology? And he’s going to combat him with…whips? Powered by technology that, not only was totally available to this villain since well before Tony “stole” it, but is also literally impossible for some of the world’s best scientists in top facilities to create?

(Do you remember this, Marvel? It was two movies earlier.)

Meanwhile, the other two plots are doing great work with the whole dueling egos and themes of identity crises between private and public personas. Plus there’s a whole overarching moral lesson of friendship is power!

Once again, chef’s kiss; perfect. It’s clear that Favreau loves Iron Man; it’s where he started and it’s where he thrives. Despite having to shove in a fairly generic action plot, he manages to tie together the rest of the movie to create seriously humanizing moments that endear us to Iron Man.

There’s a lot to like about this movie, but it’s mostly in the quiet moments, the atmosphere, the snappy comebacks Stark tosses out like nothing. The cuts to the Vanko story were often jarring and felt like commercial breaks cutting into what I really wanted to watch.

And to be completely honest, what I wanted to watch was a lot of world and character building. We’re still in the dawn of the MCU here, and Iron Man 2 and 3 do a lot of heavy lifting as far as establishing new characters and letting viewers see how the rest of the world responds to superheroes.

I was more excited to see Black Widow than I thought I would be. I don’t dislike her or anything, but when she came on screen it was electric, like this is it, the world is expanding. She doesn’t belong here; she’s not part of the Iron Man team. Yet here she is, meddling.

Along with Romanov, we also get Coulson on the scene again and of course, Nick Fury. The little nods to Thor throughout the film were shockingly enjoyable. I didn’t know shit about Thor when this came out, so going back knowing everything that will happen…it’s a whole new kind of tension. This is gonna be a theme for a while, I think. The MCU ball doesn’t really start rolling until after Captain America shows up.

While SHIELD is basically only in the movie to give Iron Man some much needed pep talks, the rest of the cast does a great job supporting Tony Stark. He doesn’t make it easy, but by the end he’s friends with Rhodey again (after getting into a mech fight and having Rhodey steal one of the suits), he saved the public from US military contractors, he gets together with Pepper finally, and he even gets a message from his father validating his love for him! Come on! Everyone is in Iron Man’s corner!

Except, obviously, the main bad dude Vanko (and also that idiot Hammer). This guy kept saying “you lose” like he didn’t waste his life in Siberia being evil, and then just…explodes. Okay; girl, bye.

Can we talk about how cool this movie is for a second? As time goes on, the movies begin to rush the action a bit, especially as the battlefields become more complex, but in Iron Man 2 the actions make sense.

For example, Tony Stark’s germ thing. There are many possible reasons why he might have an anti-germ thing, primarily the fact that he’s dying throughout most of the movie, but what’s awesome is how he asks Pepper to put on a mask when she’s coughing, how he refuses to take things handed to him, how he shirks away from people trying to touch him. Those little continuity details make a big difference.

I especially loved when Black Widow and Happy are fighting at Hammer Industries and you can literally see Happy fighting in the background while Black Widow has a whole long fight scene.

(And yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s a little ridiculous that she got changed and moussed her hair in the car. I don’t care; I overlooked Vanko and I’ll overlook the little Black Widow gaffes too.)

Then, there are so many awesome shots done for no reason other than Iron Man is cool as fuck.

Whereas Iron Man established Tony Stark’s character, Iron Man 2 established his new personality, the one that can just barely handle failure and needing help and overall considering the impact of his actions beyond his immediate circle.

Most of the MCU characters have this type of personality evolution, and it’s one of my favorite elements of the franchise. Stark will undergo a few personality shifts throughout the series, as you’d expect since he was the first one in. I’m very excited!

Speaking of personality shifts, I’m so excited for Thor! I have just a bit of hatred for the original Thor characterization, but the other characters are great, the plot is decent, and it’s just really amusing to see this fancy, stuck-up Thor, knowing what’s to come for the character.

Iron Man 2 gets a 6/10 for me overall. Definitely one of the weakest MCU movie, but it had plenty of redeeming qualities.

#iron man 2 #marvel #mcu #mcu rewatch #thor #pepper potts #justin hammer #black widow #nick fury #captain america #ivan vanko #howard stark #stark industries #hammer industries

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roydeezed · 2 years ago

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One Piece-Chapter Round-Up(Chapter 1080)

This chapter we whip around to another part of the world to see our favourite fearless hero rescuing his protege. This makes me straight up terrified ya’ll. I’ll go into why later. Though this might seem like a pretty self-contained chapter, it puts forward some heavy implications about the state of conflicts going forward. Mainly, how many different factions there will actually be. Oda usually likes to keep the focus pretty dialed in on the Strawhats so it was wild that he not only cut away to Law, but also Sabo and Kid. And now with this focus on Koby, he makes his intentions clear. Not only will this upcoming conflict focus on the newer generation, Luffy as a Pirate, Coby as a Government Agent, and Sabo as a Revolutionary, but many, many factions will be involved, including the Revolutionary Army, The World Government, SWORD, The Strawhats, The Red-Haired Pirates, The Blackbeard Pirates, and Cross Guild. And the reason why Oda’s cutting away so much is that he needs us to understand how it all came together. This is the world that the Marineford War set into place, and it shows that the death of one of the strongest people in history, Whitebeard, was only the lighting of a powder keg. I’m gonna go in-depth on this chapter past the “Keep reading” so check it out for more thoughts.

These are some Departed, Infernal Affairs type vibes I'm getting here.

Okay, so there’s no way Garp makes it out of this alive, right? Both sides can’t make it out of this unscathed so there needs to be some sort of give from one side. Blackbeard needed to split his focus among several places and getting Poneglyph rubbings were a priority for him so he went to the least contested island the victors of Wano were going to. By splitting Blackbeard’s crew Oda gets to do a few things. Through the story he gets to showcase the different abilities of the Blackbeard Pirates in order to set them up as proper rivals to the Strawhats, and as Blackbeard he gets to show us his priorities. First of all, let’s look at the breakdown again. So since Van Auger, Burgess, and Doc Q were with Blackbeard fighting Law, and Shiryu, Pizarro, Sanjuan Wolf and Vasco Shot are on Hachinosu, that leaves Catarina Devon and Lafitte with Aokiji on Egghead. Let’s examine the dynamics there because I think Blackbeard’s about to betray Aokiji and Moria is actually the tenth titanic captain.

First of all, knowing he would fight someone quite capable he brought his homies with him. He only needs one guaranteed victory. So why send someone to egghead? And with only 3 people as opposed to the 4 each on Hachinosu and against Law? Because Catarina Devon and Lafitte, the two sneakiest members of the Blackbeard Pirates, aren’t there to help Aokiji take anyone down. They’re there to kill Aokiji. Maybe if it’s me imagining things and giving Blackbeard too much credit but he’s not dumb. As soon as Aokiji is forced to explain SWORD, Blackbeard’s whole demeanor changes. I do believe he intended to use Koby as a bargaining chip but now he’s possible bait. I think Blackbeard has realized that Aokiji is SWORD and is sending Lafitte and Devon there with him to assassinate him. I think this would be confirmed we see Lafitte and some other person with Aokiji since if Devon is disguised in front of Aokiji, it’s him she’s trying to trick.

Next, narratively I don’t think it makes sense for Garp to get out of this alive. One, it would be an excellent chance for Garp to pass on his will to Koby and second it would provide more motivation for Luffy to take down Blackbeard. It’s also is a good chance to show off his powers and introduce us to his squad that he’ll sacrifice himself for. I just don’t see him having a part in the final fight going forward. And that brings us to one key thing, that decides if Hachinosu itself is a trap for Garp or not. And that’s if Blackbeard knows how much Koby means to Garp. If he does, this whole thing with Koby trying to free Moria could be a trap. While Moria loves his crew, why would he stand up to such a ruthless pirate such as Blackbeard and why would Blackbeard even leave him alive? The only other reason than it being a trap is that Blackbeard hasn’t found who he will give Moria’s fruit to and the previous owner needs to be alive before the transition. Also there’s the fact that Blackbeard has beef with Garp since Blackbeard we clearly in some way shape or form an admirer of Xebec, who was officially taken down by Garp. Maybe that’s why he was originally going after Luffy before switching his focus to Ace.

In this chapter we find out the fruit’s of some of the other titanic captains and get another mention of the rocky port incident in which Blackbeard acqquired Hachinosu with Koby’s help after Law instigated it. I really love how it flavours the world as this huge event that took place while we weren’t observing Luffy. Pizarro ate the island-island fruit which seems to be an evolution of Pica's fruit the same way Akainu’s fruit is an evolution to the mera-mera-no-mi. Vasco Shot has a fire based fruit and Sanjuan Wolf ate a giagantification fruit which I guess makes him able to become even bigger. This chapter, more than anything seems to be setting up for the future conflict by letting us see the players in action before the final conflict as we also see some Marine’s in action like Kujaku with her whip-whip fruit that can command inanimate objects, Prince Grus with his squelch-squelch fruit that probably made the clay infantry, and Hibari, who can use some variety of powers. While most marines seem to match up against pirates, it seems these agents, who are probably SWORD, match up more with the revolutionary army, with Kujaku mirroring Belo Betty, Prince Grus mirroring Kurasu, and Hibari mirroring Koala while being a tsundere like Pudding.

I really love the characterization this chapter. Koby is such a damn hero while also putting into perspective how terrible his life has been that he doesn’t believe anyone would rescue him. I really want him to know the lengths that Hibari and Helmeppo went to save after this cause my boy needs to know his self worth. I also adore that Garp put on such a huge display of love for Koby. Believe in your worth Koby, you’re a gem. Koby also readily sacrifices himself to be bait and even looks death in the eyes calmly, he’s rreally shaping up to be a great rival to Luffy. He’s still got a ways to go as Luffy is already a Yonkou. We also see that Blackbeard probably trusts Shiryu a lot as he left him in charge of three incredibly destructive people in San Juan Wolf, Pizarro, and Vasco Shot.

With Oda jumping around so much, I don’t know where the story is going to go next but I’d love to see this conflict play out fully. We might head back to Egghead before cleaning this one up just like we did with the Kid conflict. Either way, we’re in for another break week so strap in folks.

#one piece chapter 1080 #one piece #manga recap #manga discussion #one piece spoilers #blackbeard #monkey d garp #koby one piece

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volturiwolf · 4 years ago

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Soulmates - A Demetri Volturi x Reader Imagine

A/N: This is the first imagine I finished and uploaded, and it came quite unexpectedly while talking with @volturidoll13 who suggested a Demetri Volturi one-shot where the reader would follow Bella and Alice to Italy and would accidentally say “wish he’d choke ME” out loud (see my post for reference). So, here it is. Also, I’m sorry if something doesn’t make sense. English is not my first langage. Enjoy :)

No of Words: 5749

Mentions of: Swear Language, Anxiety, Panic Attacks, Dying/Death, Killings, Self-doubt, Self-consciousness, Kinky Choking, Sexual Arousal

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I think I had enough of Bella. No, I know I've had enough of her. She may be my best friend, the one who truly understood me the moment I stepped foot in Forks High School, beginning of last year, but this was just too much.

I have spent countless hours trying to support her when Edward Cullen left her, 5 months ago. I was there to be her emotional support, and even spent time with Jacob Black, an old friend of Bella's, who stayed at the Quileute reservation.

Jacob seemed kind of polite, although his attempts to flirt with Bella whenever he could were cringy, to say the least. But I supported her then too, trying to be sort of the third wheel / the one who tried to show Jacob she wasn't really interested in him that way.

His friends, Embry and Quil, were as nice and polite as they were beautiful. When Embry abandoned Jacob and Quil, Bella and I were there to support him. When Jacob abandoned Bella, I was there to support her.

Even when Bella was sad, angry and desperate to know what happened to Jacob, I was there to calm her down. I was there when she went to see him and he turned her away. I was there when she slapped Paul in the face. I was there when he turned into a huge wolf, and I couldn't help but scream.

Jacob explained everything about the wolves to both Bella and I. He told us how it's part of their DNA; how they are meant to protect the tribe from dangerous outsiders; how the metamorphosis from human to wolf can be somehow controlled over time, with practice and persistence. THAT I could understand.

What I couldn't understand was how vampires existed in this world! It wasn't Bella the one to reveal that secret to me, rather Alice, Edward's sister. Apparently, she saw Bella dying, the day she supposedly went cliff-diving, which I told her not to, having a severe fear of heights myself.

Bella took the risk, and if it weren't for Jacob, she would most likely be dead by now. That's what Alice said she "saw" - she explained to my incapable self that, as a vampire, she had a gift, the gift of predicting the future, based on others' decisions.

All this information was overwhelming me. I could swallow the harsh reality of wolves existing, but vampires, too? It seemed too much for me in such a short period of time.

Alice quickly explained some basics to me, like the fact that the Cullens were vegetarians, but the majority of their kind fed on human blood, as well as the fact that they even had a sort-of-government of vampires, residing in Italy, the Volturi.

She then turned to Bella to scold her about her recklessness and how she was prone to "life-threatening idiocy". I couldn't agree more with the short brunette right now. Bella has been nothing but reckless the last few weeks, and she was putting her life in danger for no reason.

They were talking about Edward or whatever, but I wasn't paying any particular attention until Jacob showed up. I decided to give them some space to talk, and Alice followed behind me, stepping out of the house.

Her face was a mix of disgust and worry, not paying any particular attention to me, probably trying to hear Bella and Jacob's conversation from the kitchen. After a minute or two, I heard her taking a sharp breath, her eyes fixating on nothing in particular; they were just staring ahead of her.

She took a sharp breath, as she regained consciousness, stepping quickly into the house. She walked in quite wide and quick strides, considering her miniature figure, and, though taller than her, I had some trouble following behind her.

She ran directly to the kitchen. "Bella. Bella, it's Edward. He thinks you're dead. Rosalie told him why I came here."

They both looked at Jacob; Bella practically screaming to his face, accusing him of not giving her the telephone to speak with Edward herself.

"Bella, he's going to the Volturi. He wants to die, too." The small brunette continued.

Within a minute, Bella made her decision: she was going to Italy to save her ex-lover. She promised us that she would just make sure he lived, and then, she would go back to her "boring" life.

Alice ran outside, starting her car immediately, as Bella was followed closely by Jacob, who tried to convince her not to go, pleading with her, all in vain. Bella was as stubborn as she could get, and nobody could change her mind.

I turned to Jacob, without really thinking about my next words. "Don't worry. I'll go with her. I'll make sure she's back safe, okay?"

All Jacob could do is nod at me, though his face was full of concern, frustration, and he was clearly distraught by Bella's decision to leave him and save Edward. As if all this time she, Jacob and, sometimes, I spent time together meant nothing to her.

I jumped in the back seat of the car, not waiting for either Bella's, or Alice's approval. I knew it would be a huge risk for me to go to the vampires' lair, but I also knew that Bella could use all the emotional support she could get.

As much as I hated Edward for what he did and said to her, I knew that he was everything to her, like her own little haven. Her own little oasis, which I guess felt more like a tundra, compared to Jacob's flaming hot desert. I rolled my eyes at my embarrassing thoughts, but I assumed that's how she thought of them.

The drive to the airport felt like a ton of weight crushing my shoulders. I had no place to follow them to Italy, as it was truly none of my business. But I promised Jacob, and though Bella could make me so frustrated with her lack of self-confidence and self-respect, I liked her company a lot, and I needed to make sure she was alive and safe.

In the couple of months that she came out of her apathetic state, we reconnected again, reminiscing about our unorthodox friendship, both of us being new to the town, shy and not particularly sociable.

However, Bella was the ideal friend to keep you grounded and connected with reality, which I, sometimes, had trouble with; my mind was running wild and free most of the time, while my mouth was staying shut.

So, I was willing to go across the ocean for her, to an unknown place, in a castle full of bloodsucking vampires. I wasn't pleased, but I was willing. Willing to help her save her stupid ex-boyfriend, and hopefully not get killed in the process.

During the flights, Alice tried, more or less, to explain the dynamics of the vampire world; the Volturi, being this sort of government-slash-royalty of the vampire kind, were tasked with imposing their laws over the other vampires. Their most important law? Don't expose your existence to humans, unless you want to die. Well, there goes that!

Alice had already talked to me about their kind; Bella knew through her association with both Edward and the rest of the Cullen family. The chances of any of us making out of there alive seemed slim to none. I was literally flying towards my death. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.

I was trying to calm down my nerves, which did not work at all, when all I could think about were those Italian vampires. Alice told me that the vampire Kings, especially Aro, who seemed to be their leader, were interested in collecting talented vampires.

So, it was pretty obvious that he would, most likely, get rid of Bella and myself, and would gladly keep Alice and Edward, who, as Alice told me, has the gift of reading people’s minds. So, we were actually doing that Aro guy a favor there; bring him the “talents” and get rid of the “intruders”, the humans. Great. Just, great.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We were currently on our way to Volterra. Alice had stolen a yellow Porsche from the airport’s parking lot, which neither Bella, nor I opposed to, for now. It was a fast way to get to Volterra, plus I’ve never actually been in a Porsche, and I felt pretty amazing. Alice seemed like a skillful driver, and drove pretty fast, which I liked, especially if I was the one driving. Bella and Alice’s conversation interrupted my thoughts.

“What? What do you see?”

“They refused him.” That was good, right?

“So..?” Bella knew there was something else behind Alice’s vision.

“He’s gonna make a scene. Show himself to the humans.” Why the hell, Edward?!

“No! When?”

“He’s gonna wait until noon, when the sun’s at its highest.” Bella seemed more and more worried and anxious, and I heard her heavy breath, which seemed like she was starting to go on panic mode. I stroked her shoulders lightly, trying to calm her down. As much as she deserved to get worried, given the events that led us here, this was not the time to panic.

“There’s Volterra.” Alice pointed to her left, at a beautiful, picturesque town that looked as if it had jumped out of the Renaissance era. The scenery of Tuscany was beautiful, and it had always been part of my bucket list to travel across Tuscany in a small rental car. That was not how I pictured that trip, or how I pictured my last day on Earth.

Alice was running through the city’s narrow streets by now, never stopping to honk at people passing by, who moved left and right, trying to avoid the “crazy driver who decided it was a good idea to drive a sports car through such a city’s small, narrow, occupied streets”; at least, that’s how I saw it.

Alice did not back down, and continued driving skillfully through the city’s small arteries. It was odd though, the fact that everyone around us was wearing red capes, red clothes, everything was red. Bella questioned it out loud and Alice informed us that today was the celebration of Saint Marcus’ Day, the day that the Saint expelled all vampires from the town. The irony.

Bella was experiencing a full on panic attack, as we were only 5 minutes away from Edward’s shenanigans. Theoretically, everything was in order, until the moment we were stopped by the local police who refused to let us go any farther. Bella opened her door. She would go on foot, to find Edward before he exposed himself. Alice would park the car somewhere outside of the town’s walls, and we’d then go and find them.

I turned around my seat, to watch Bella running through the streets, to the plaza where the clock tower, which Edward was going to expose himself from, was located. Alice left the car outside of the walls, but still, close enough to have easy access.

For me, it was quite easy to walk around now, as my skin was not sparkling like Alice’s was. Alice had to wrap herself around a coat, a long, thick scarf and gloves, and wear sunglasses to protect her identity even more. I was walking in the middle of the streets, watching around carefully, as good as my human eyes could see, trying to help Alice go unnoticed, as she pushed herself more towards the buildings’ walls, trying to avoid the sunlight.

That went on for a while, until we were close enough to the clock tower, where Alice took my hand on hers and, with long strides, walked towards the main entrance, which was, thankfully, shaded enough for her to walk through.

She must have heard the conversation inside the building, as the moment we stepped in - Alice breaking the lock that kept the door momentarily closed, she started talking to the others, who I mistook as being Bella and Edward. As another sign of my unluckiness in life, she was actually addressing two other vampires, a tall brunette and a shorter blond.

They both looked gorgeous, but they could probably kill me as easily as it was for me to blink. I instantly became stiff, and Alice must have felt it, but she kept on holding my hand, trying to play it cool in front of the others, while trying to get rid of her disguise with her free hand at the same time.

“Come on, guys. It’s a festival. You wouldn’t want to make a scene.” She tried to play it nice and cool, though I knew she was just as worried being here as the rest of us.

“We wouldn’t.” The brunette vampire responded, now looking at me, who, by now, I have lost all my confidence in coming to Italy to help Bella.

I caught the blond vampire looking me up and down my body, and felt rather self-conscious. I didn’t have the best relationship with my own body and my own self; I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror, most of the time. So, I made up for what I lacked in self-confidence with sarcasm, bad humor, honesty and snarky remarks. I would be really going off of him right now, if I wasn’t shaking.

Though beautiful, the blond vampire also scared me, just as much as his brunette partner. I stared back at him, looking at his confident stance, one hand behind his back, and a smirk across his face.

When my (Y/E/C) eyes met with his red ones, I started shivering even more, holding on Alice tighter than before. I felt my heart beating faster, my breath became both sharper and deeper, and I felt as if I would cry, right then and there, in front of everyone. I saw the blond becoming a bit stiff, his jaw clenching, swallowing deeply, but he still wouldn’t take his eyes off of me.

Alice and Edward exchanged some looks, as if they knew what was happening, but chose to not tell anyone else. The scene in front of me was interrupted by the clicks of heeled shoes, and a blonde girl came into our view.

“Enough.” Her voice was stern, and her stance was stoic as she came closer to us.

“Jane.” Edward recognised her and lowered his head towards the ground. He didn’t seem scared before, when it was just the two vampires in front of us, but the small woman now seemed to have him terrified.

“Aro sent me to see what was taking so long.” She looked between the two vampires of her coven, as if she was criticizing them for their incompetence to bring us all before Aro. Then, she turned to us, looking us straight in our eyes, or rather our souls, probably to warn and scare us at the same time, before walking back to where she came from.

Alice turned towards Bella and I, the only humans there, who clearly looked more terrified than she and Edward did. “Just do as she says.” She simply said and we followed behind the girl, with the other two vampires closely behind us.

The blond one was so close to me, I could feel the coldness radiating off his body, making me shiver. The brunette gave Edward the red robe I didn’t notice he was holding before, probably to cover himself in front of the Kings. The blonde girl moved between Bella and Edward, and Alice and I. Edward was trying to comfort Bella but I couldn’t exactly make out what they were saying, my mind making all shorts of scenarios about how the vampires would kill me and the others. The more I thought about it, the more I was shriveling on Alice’s side.

We reached an elevator - I never thought vampires used elevators, but maybe it was for the humans around? The brunette and the blond entered first, as the blond turned around to stare at us, turning his gaze at me afterwards, before fully stepping in. Then, it was time for Edward and Bella to get in, followed by Alice and I. The blonde girl stepped in last, before the elevator’s doors closed shut.

The elevator music, an operetta, was supposed to calm peoples’ nerves. Yet, in this tight box, it had the opposite effect. Surrounded by vampires, vegetarian and non, the music was just creeping me out.

The fact that the blond vampire was merely two inches away from me was making my knees weak and my heart pounding, though I, myself, didn’t even know if my own body was reacting out of fear or attraction towards the blond vampire. I felt him leaning closer to me and barely heard him sniff around, but I clearly saw Alice turning her head around and giving him death stares, to which he retrieved back to his original position.

The elevator stopped and we all stepped out. We walked past a receptionist’s desk, the woman standing up, smiling and wishing us a good afternoon - based on the few Italian that I knew. From what Bella and Edward said, the receptionist was a human, wishing to become a vampire, like the others.

“And so she will be.” Demetri smirked, looking at me, who I still haven't abandoned Alice’s hand.

“Or dessert.” Jane interrupted, and I felt myself losing consciousness for a split second, before I felt the blond vampire grabbing my arm to stabilize me. His hand was cold and his grip tight on me, not leaving me even after I looked at him with wide eyes. He just smiled and continued walking ahead.

Jane opened the doors in front of her, leading us to a massive room, made out of marble, and decorated with Roman columns and scriptures on the walls. Surprisingly, it was well-lit and bright, compared to the dark halls that we passed through just a minute ago.

“Sister. Send you out to get one and you bring back two. And two halves. Such a clever girl.” A brunette boy, a bit taller than Jane, called towards her, as she walked by his side.

The blond vampire let me go and walk farther into the room, still holding Alice’s hand like I was holding on her for dear life. The blond vampire now stood a few feet behind us, next to the tall brunette one.

A black-haired vampire, who seemed a bit too excited, started walking towards us. “What a happy surprise! Bella is alive after all. Isn’t that wonderful. I love a happy ending. They are so rare.” He was talking with fake happiness in his face, as if he was reading from a script, grabbing Edward’s hand in the process.

“La tua cantante.” Your singer. The vampire seemed to know how much Edward craved Bella’s blood, and questioned how Edward could do so easily.

“Aro can read every thought I’ve ever had with one touch.” Well, that explained a lot. And now I placed who Aro was within the Volturi.

I now learned more about Edward’s gift, which was more similar to Aro’s than anyone else’s, but he couldn’t actually read Bella’s thoughts. Aro requested if he could test his own gift on Bella, probably hoping that he could read her thoughts and brag about it. But when Bella offered her hand, which he took too willingly, his face was unreadable and then, disappointed and angry, not being able to read her either.

Then, he turned towards me, still by Alice’s side. His red eyes were cold and hostile, and his face uninviting. I felt small and vulnerable, exposed, in front of his critical gaze.

“Dear (Y/N), excuse me for the waiting. Edward has presented me a very..intriguing image of you. Could you offer me your hand? I would like to get to know you, as well.”

My lips were trembling, not being able to say a word, and my eyes were glistening. Please, don’t cry. Please, don’t cry. I knew that whatever Edward had shown him I couldn’t avoid. So, I took a step forward, leaving Alice’s hand and extending the other one towards Aro. I felt a breeze behind me, as Demetri came to stand on my right side, looking closely between Aro and I.

The mind reader took my hand between his hands, and I felt my thoughts being examined and tossed around my head, like a small whisper trying to cast a spell on me. The vampire looked at me, deep in the eyes, and his face was filled with fascination for whatever he saw inside my head.

“Fascinating, indeed, dear. Your mind is just filled with thoughts and images, though they are not very distinct. You are not an easy book to read. I still haven’t figured out who you really are. Although…”. He looked at the vampire standing beside me, motioning for him to give him his hand.

The blond obeyed his master. Did he have any other choice? Probably not. Aro took the blond’s hand, and his wicked, sick smile came back.

“Oh, this suddenly became even better than I would have expected.” He turned towards the vampire sitting on the throne, looking sad. Marcus? The vampire in question nodded, and Aro turned around in an almost theatrical move, with open arms, for everyone to see.

“It seems that our dear Demetri has finally found his mate in (Y/N). I’m so happy for the two of you!” His face was smiling, but his voice sounded as fake as ever.

I didn’t know what “mates” meant. Alice didn’t have enough time to explain every “vampire term” to me, so I was clueless regarding this part. The blond, who I now knew as Demetri, must have seen the confusion in my face, as he leaned slightly towards me and whispered “Soulmates” in my ear. My eyes widened and he giggled lightly.

Whether it was how close he came near me, or his giggle, or the fact that we were “soulmates”, my heart responded immediately, thumbing faster in my chest, and I felt my cheeks burn - I was clearly blushing in front of everyone, as if I couldn’t be any more awkward than I was before.

Aro interrupted my embarrassment, as he turned once again towards Bella, wanting to test if she was immune to the others’ gifts as well. He turned towards the blonde girl, Jane, asking her basically to show off her own gift. Edward ran forward to stop whatever it was going to happen, only to end up in pain, writhing in an inaudible pain, as Bella was practically screaming to stop.

I honestly didn’t mind Edward suffering, even if it was for a few seconds, considering that Bella had it worse for over 5 months. He finally dropped to the floor, as Alice ran to his side, and the blonde girl’s brother ran to grab Bella, to stop her from going by her lover’s side.

I had no idea what was happening. I was just looking around, shocked and scared, as all these unfamiliar things were taking place in front of my untrained eyes. I felt a hand stroking my arm up and down. I turned around to see Demetri smiling slightly at me, trying to calm me down. I sighed a bit and felt my heart slightly at ease.

That was until the Kings decided that Bella was a liability - I wasn’t? - and Aro called out for Felix. I turned around and saw the tall brunette smiling evilly, while the shorter brunette turned Bella around and left her there, exposed, in front of the giant. Edward seemed to know what it would be happening, as he immediately stood up and ran by Bella’s side to protect her.

He immediately ran forward, attacking the tall brunette, and knocking him down. Alice ran towards Edward to help him out, but she was immediately stopped by Demetri, who I didn’t notice had left my side, grabbing her by her neck and immobilizing her, dragging her away from ever reaching her brother.

“Alec!” Demetri shouted towards the brunette boy, who had just left Bella at Felix’s mercy, pointing towards me with his eyes. The boy, Alec, came by my side, and practically dragged me farther from the scene that took place in front of me. His grip was a bit too much as he squeezed my arm, making me slightly cry in pain. Demetri growled at him, and Alec’s grip loosened significantly, but he still kept his hand on my arm.

Felix was pissed by now, as he immediately started fighting Edward, pushing and slamming him around the room. However, I couldn’t focus my gaze on them; not because they were fast, but because I was focused on watching Demetri, and how he was still holding on Alice’s neck tightly, never letting her go.

Watching Demetri’s hand around Alice’s neck should have made me feel appalled and sorry for the small brunette girl, but it didn’t. On the contrary, I felt rather aroused, watching his strong hand wrapped around the brunette’s neck.

Honestly, I felt a wave of jealousy and annoyance hitting me. That should have been me! Only I was worthy to be touched by this sort of demon who masked his true identity with the facade of an angel. It should be me! I couldn’t help myself, my jealousy building up inside me.

“Wish he’d choke ME!” I told myself, getting more frustrated by the minute.

“Patience, cara mia. All in due time.” Demetri smirked at me. I did not realise I said that out loud, until Alec started snorting beside me, clearly laughing cheekily, and Felix started bursting in laughter, his grip tight on Edward’s jaw by now.

I had embarrassed myself in a room full of vampires once again, the majority of them being part of the Volturi coven. If the Earth opened in half and swallowed me, I would pretty much welcome it at that point.

Bella brought me back to reality, as she was practically screaming, begging the vampires to let go of Edward, as she looked clearly distraught and upset. She even offered herself instead of Edward! Why, Bella? Just why? I have understood by now that they were mates and they’d do anything for each other, but she would sacrifice her own life for Edward?! That didn’t make sense to me.

Aro seemed to agree with me, but he thought more of the “soulless monster” perspective, while I thought more of Edward’s character, and how much his absence had scarred Bella. Alice told me, on our way here, that he thought he was doing everything to keep her away just to protect her, that being close to him put her in danger. But, from my own experience with Bella, she was suffering more away from him than he thought she would.

Aro looked disappointed between Edward and Bella, wishing he would give her immortality, which he did not seem willing to do. Aro moved menacingly towards the terrified girl, prepared to end her life. I fell forwards, attempting to reach her, to move in between them, but Alec’s grip tightened, keeping me back, both of his hands on my arms now. Aro was basically licking his lips, when, suddenly, Alice stopped him.

The small brunette confirmed that Bella would become a vampire like them, and that she would even be the one to change her, as she saw in her vision. Aro called her forward, and Demetri let her walk towards his Master.

He then moved towards Alec and I, replacing the brunette boy, but, instead of grabbing my arms like Alec did, he embraced me tightly, not letting me move away from my position. His cold embrace sent shivers down my spine, but, surprisingly, I let myself relax in his arms, feeling safe, and like that was where I belonged. I felt him smiling and relaxing, as well.

Aro seemed pleased with whatever Alice had shown him, and intrigued by her own gift of predicting the future. Alice had told me that her gift was subjected to the decisions people made, and the future could just change at any point. However, if Aro believed that her vision would eventually come true, we had no reason to tell him otherwise.

Aro turned to Bella. “Your gifts will make for an intriguing immortal.” He whispered as he touched her face, Bella clearly feeling uncomfortable under his touch. I would, too - Aro seemed creepy in his own way, his behavior and movements just as unpredictable.

He then told us to leave, and prepare for Bella’s transformation, and Felix let go of Edward. Marcus told everyone that a woman named Heidi would be coming soon and thanked us “for the visit”, as Aro said his goodbyes. Demetri walked towards the exit, me still in his arms. Edward grabbed Bella by her hand and Alice followed them behind.

As we were walking through the corridor, a beautiful woman walked past us, many people - they looked like tourists - following behind her. She had long, wavy brown hair and purple eyes, which could only mean that she was most likely wearing blue contacts over her red eyes. Her aura was full of confidence and power; she knew what she was doing and she took her job seriously.

“Nice fishing, Heidi.” I heard Demetri addressing the woman from behind me. So, that was the Heidi Marcus was referring to. Wait.. Nice..what?

“Yes, they do look rather juicy.” The beautiful woman replied, eyeing between Bella and I, as she continued leading the tourists down the hallway.

Demetri must have seen her reaction, as he brought me closer to him. I was in shock, and started trembling more than before. These people, these poor people would be the vampires’ snacks in a few seconds. Like Bella and I could have been just minutes ago. I tried to not think about it, but the screams that echoed through the hall would probably haunt me for the rest of my life.

Demetri opened another door as we approached the end of the corridor, and we found ourselves back in the reception area. The Italian woman greeted us once again, but I didn’t listen to what she said, still in shock, just waiting to leave this horrible place as soon as I could.

“Just wait here. You will be able to leave in a few hours, when it’s dark outside.” Demetri instructed Edward and Alice, and took his arms away from my body, turning to look at me. “Wait here, cara mia. I’ll be back soon.” I nodded, not being able to say a word.

Demetri turned and ran towards the throne room. I knew he left to feed, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of him killing innocent humans. I couldn’t keep myself from crying, as I started trembling and losing balance.

Alice came by my side, trying to stabilize and calm me down, while Edward tried calming down a hyperventilating Bella. We were both losing our sanity, not being able to keep up with the Volturi’s lifestyle, as it seemed. I was craving Demetri’s touch but, at the same time, I couldn’t stop the human in me, the logic, the sense that said that I should stay away from the vampires who killed people.

I heard Alice and Edward talking with the receptionist, but I couldn’t make out exactly what they were talking about. Alice, slowly and carefully, with her hands still on my arms, led me to a nearby bench, as the receptionist walked away. I was rocking back and forth, trying to calm down, realizing that we are still alive. I saw the receptionist coming towards us, offering a glass of water to both Bella and I.

“Grazie mille.” I thanked her, my voice barely audible.

“Prego.” She smiled at me, and walked back towards her desk.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I didn’t realise how much time passed, until I heard footsteps coming towards us. I was way more calm by now. Lifting my head towards the direction of the footsteps, I saw Demetri and Felix. I shyly smiled at Demetri, and he smiled back, with a smile wider than mine, a smile that warmed my heart.

“Hello, again, amore mio.” I felt as if my heart stopped for a split second upon hearing the words he used to address me. I would still be weak to my knees, if I didn't already sit down.

Felix was the one to inform us that we were allowed to go now, being way past nighttime. I stood up, and attempted to walk forward, towards Bella and the two Cullen siblings. I intended to leave with them, but I was stopped by Demetri’s hand on my wrist.

“Where are you going, cara?” He looked at me, knowing why I was attempting to walk away.

“I.. I thought we’d.. be leaving? That I’d be leaving? With the others?” At least, I was hoping I would be leaving with them.

“I’m sorry, amore. I can’t let you go, not now that I found you. You’ll be staying here, with me.” Demetri sounded so natural and serious, and I could only stare at him, my mouth agape.

“But.. I thought it was okay for me to leave. I have a life behind, you know. I have a school to finish, I have my family, I have things to do.” I still looked at him dumbfounded, waiting for him to allow me to go, just for now, just for a few months at least.

“I’m sorry, (Y/N). But I cannot risk anything happening to you. I will make sure you are safe and protected here. We will arrange everything with your school and your family, and whatever else is needed. Please, stay.” Demetri’s eyes were pleading, and a shiver passed through my body, just by looking at him and hearing him talk.

It took me a few minutes to respond; nobody said a word all this time. “Okay.” I said faintly. “I will stay.. here.. with you.”

Demetri’s face lit up, and he leaned closer to me, wrapping his arms around me. He was careful to not hurt me, and I knew, at the moment, with my heart full of love and affection for that man, that that was where I was supposed to be. With Demetri. For as long as it lasted.

#demetri volturi #volturi #demetri volturi x reader #twilight #twilight saga #twilight post #twilight renessaince

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