#combined with him torturing her lover for century...

[maegalkarven]

I'm going for a run, but when I return imma gonna write about how BG3 really said "I see you all bitches with parental issues".

Bhaal, Raphael, Cazador, Ketheric, Gortash's parents, Shar, even Selûne and Ravengard are the examples of not so perfect parenting. No wonder I latched into these dynamics.

[ezra-fell-and-co]

Aziraphale & Shostakovich

The moment in the record shop when Aziraphale said he was picking up a Shostakovich record I had So Many Thoughts.

The symphony he's listening to is Symphony No.5 in D Minor, Op. 47, composed in 1937 and premiered in Leningrad to a thirty+ minute long standing ovation. Prior to this piece, Dimitri S. spent many nights sleeping in the hallway outside of his apartment so that his family wouldn't see if the government police in charge of enforcing Stalin's brutal rule came for him in the middle of the night. His last pieces had been received harshly by critics and called unpatriotic, which was just about the worst thing a composer living during The Great Terror (1936-1938) could do. Those who were not loyal to the regime and explicitly portrayed it in their art were branded as traitors and sent to gulags or were straight up executed.

The San Francisco Symphony describes the 5th symphony as "the story of a fall from grace and redemption.". Shostakovitch has gone from being a golden example to being eyed as a traitor almost overnight, the 5th Symphony becoming his redemption back into good graces.

So basically Dimitri S. was a man with contrasting ideologies to the powers that be, so to say, who was living under the threat of death, torture, or excommunication from his homeland. Haha, so weird that Aziraphale would want to listen to his music specifically.

(If you've never listened to Symphony No. 5, I highly encourage you to go listen!)

To set the scene-

From The Houston Symphony's 2018 Fighting the Barbarian Artist article on Symph. 5:

"In January 1934, Dmitri Shostakovich scored one of the biggest triumphs of his career with the premiere of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, a work official critics hailed as the first great Soviet opera. Based on a nineteenth-century novella by Leskov, it follows the misadventures of Katerina, the illiterate wife of a well-to-do country merchant who is driven to murder in order to be with her handsome but unworthy lover, the laborer Sergei. By turns satirical and tragic, Lady Macbeth explored themes of oppression with a potent combination of sex, violence and some truly beautiful music that played to full houses for two years. Then on January 26, 1936, Stalin went to see it. Two days later, on page 3 of Pravda (“Truth”—the newspaper that continues to serve as the official mouthpiece of the Russian Communist Party to this day), Shostakovich found an anonymous review of Lady Macbeth headlined “Muddle Instead of Music.” One representative quote declared that the opera “tickles the perverted tastes of the bourgeoisie with its fidgety, screaming, neurotic music…”" ...

There is debate about if Stalin himself wrote the review to make a point, or if he just signed off on it being printed. It's also unclear if Shostakovitch was being targeted specifically, or just because of his notoriety to prove that no matter how big a name you are you're not safe if you don't fall in line, or if he was just being used as a pawn in the ongoing power struggles of the day.

Either way, he was very aware that he was in danger. A friend of Stalin's was vanished when he wrote to Stalin in defense of Shostakovitch's work after the fateful review.

The 5th was a result of Dimitri knowing he needed to get back into good graces, so he had to give them something that they wanted. Or at least something that sounded like what they wanted.

Symphony No. 5 is very sneaky in how it subverts the expectations and requirements of Stalin's Russia.

For one, it's form- a symphony is a very structured form and very Western, popularized by Beethoven and co. It's also instrumental, which allowed Shostakovitch to hide a lot of references, subversions, and musical sarcasm/critiques without the untrained critics and government officials being any the wiser.

D minor, the main tonality of the symphony, has been described by various music theorists about what kind of emotional experience it portrays. John Mattheson in 1713 described it as "Serious, Pious, Ruminating. Melancholy, feminine, brooding worries, contemplation of negativity."

However, for our purposes, Aziraphale is listening to the fourth movement, which is also the most political. (More excellent write ups about the entire work can be read here, here, here, and here. There is a PBS documentary about it here.) ((It also shifts to an ironic D Major as one point, which Mattheson describes as "Triumphant, Victorious War-Cries. Screaming hallelujah’s, rejoicing in conquering obstacles. War marches, holiday songs, invitations to join the winning team."))

The fourth movement is bombastic, letting the brass section loose right at the start. The main theme in this section is from an unpublished song that Shostakovitch had written as a setting for a Pushkin poem. The piece as a whole and specifically this movement is a direct critique of Stalin himself.

The poem?

With sleepy brush the barbarian artist The master’s painting blackens; And thoughtlessly his wicked drawing Over it he is daubing. But in years the foreign colors Peal off, an aged layer: The work of genius is ‘gain before us, With former beauty out it comes. Thus my failings vanish too From my wearied soul, And again within it visions rise, Of my early purer days.

Which I think speaks for itself in what kind of mentality Aziraphale might have listening to the symphony.

I'm not sure which recording he listens to, but in the record shop we are shown that it's a record with a blue label on the disk. There are several recordings that have blue labels including the 1972 Moscow Philharmonic with Kiril Kondrashin and the 1989 Scottish National Orchestra with Neeme Jarvi. Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic have a very famous recording as well.

But I think the most likely is the 1962 Vienna Philharmonic with Constantin Silvestri. Why? Well, here's the record:

[torturedcoveydepartment]

The Tortured Poets Department but it’s all tbosas (two favorite things combined, cannot get any better. Both pivotal for my well-being) 🤍

1. Fortnight

A period of 14 days, so I’d like to say it’s something the mentors put together during the preparation and running of the hunger games. Perhaps even one of the tributes? Though I believe the calamitous events of suffering went on for a week or so (reaping to death)

2. The tortured poets department

Definitely about our dear favorite covey. Referencing to themselves as tortured poets in the way of being locked down, unable to use their voices to express their minds freely due to peacekeepers banning their songs (such as with the hanging tree) The feeling of being told what’s right and wrong about THEIR EMOTIONS. Obviously also from the mistreatment.

3. My boy only breaks his favorite toys

Ladies, gentlemen and beautiful souls - it’s time for a Lucy Gray ballad about Billy Taupe begging at her feet, as well as Coriolanus fucking up. I don’t believe it would be a downbeat melody, but a real statement.

4. Down bad

Coryo realizing he’s in love with both the lovely district 12 songbird, and his handsome friend originally from 2. Said what I said.

5. So long, London (So long, Panem)

A song the covey’s ancestors left behind as they got killed during the dark days. It’s about how they saw Panem change, and that what they used to know is long gone. Their nomadic days are over. Their freedom is gone.

6. But daddy I love him

OKAYOKAY my very first thought was Sejanus confessing with teary eyes to his father about his feelings and caring for Coriolanus. How he wishes him the best even if he got caught cheating in the game.

7. Fresh out the slammer

CORIOLANUS COMIN BACK FROM 12 HAHA

8. Florida!!! (Once again, we’re changing it to “Panem!!!”)

Grandma’am singin about her beloved country of Panem. Poor Tigris and Coryo are about to suffer through another one of her banger morning concerts.

9. Guilty as sin?

Lucy Gray accused herself, putting the blame on herself for being “responsible” for the deaths of children in the arena. Wouldn’t point directly onto the victims, but use metaphors to make the situation transparent for those who knew her in and out.

10. Who’s afraid of little old me?

Young age, old soul. Why am I imagining Maude Ivory singing something about people not taking her seriously cause of her age. Invalidating her feelings & fear when Lucy Gray got reaped.

11. I can fix him (No really I can)

First thought is ironically enough Livia Cardew? Though I believe a great amount of people viewed the blond boy’s change as an empowerment of the state, unwilling to even try and change his obvious controversial behavior (apart from dear Tigris)

12. Loml

Barb Azure to her girlfriend <3 IDK I THINK IT’S SO CUTE?!?! Now let’s wait and see if it really means “love of my life”, or ends up being “loss of my life”.

13. I can do it with a broken heart

Lucy Gray can do anything at any fateful condition. Even with a broken heart she will kick the ass of anyone who does her wrong.

14. The smallest man who ever lived

SLAP EM LUCY GRAY BAIRD. Definitely pointed against her former lovers assholes who betrayed her. None of them will ever manage to break her, because she’s stronger than any haunting scar.

15. The alchemy

GAUL GAUL GAUL LMAO. The most absurd thing about this scary woman is how she enjoys chemistry and biological genetic engineering?

16. Clara Bow

Old covey song from centuries ago about a tortured actress, first it-girl and country’s thirsting desire.

[clumsiestgiantess]

I’ve been working on some DNAliens stuff recently and realized I don’t have a height chart with all of them together, just them beside human height for reference.  So, in case anyone wants to know a bit about all the DNAlien ocs I have, as well as their heights, here’s a little guide.  (Illustrations to be added over time; I’ve posted a few on my blog already)

Now without further ado..

A quick guide to all the DNAliens that live/have lived on earth

Tselani (aka my self-insert with a separate backstory): Her three mutations are human, ancient ground bat, and kentrosaurus.  She lives in the dense cold forests between Canada and North America, and has the ability to reanimate corpses by combining what’s left of them.  After the village she cared for was destroyed in the War, she settled down in the Rocky Mountains as a suitable refuge from humankind.  She’ll occasionally reveal herself to or befriend them if they seem kind enough.

Jactol: His three mutations are gorgonopsid, anomalocaris, and DNAlien.  He lives in a deep cave system beneath South Africa, and has the ability to exhale a heavy noxious gas that will rapidly choke victims to death.  A misunderstanding between him and Tselani caused them to fall out of love.  After nearly being poached by humans, he grew a hatred and now vindictiveness for them, and will often toy with and torture any that cross his path before he inavitably kills them.

Aethra: Her three mutations are jerboa, cuttlefish, and DNAlien.  She lives in a large open cavern within the southeast section of the Himalayan Mountains, and has the ability to manipulate a creature’s desires.  She's like a cat lady but with humans, and keeps a minimum of three or four of them in her home at one time.  Unfortunately, she takes them against their will and many of them don’t want to be there.

Eracin: Her three mutations were screech owl, snow leopard, and Terrinu (a creature not native to Earth).  She roamed the Eurasian Steppe until settling down with Aethra, and had the ability to slow time with her heartbeat.  Her and Aethra kept humans safe during the War, but unfortunately they were attacked and Eracin laid down her life to give Aethra and the humans time to flee.  Unlike her lover, Eracin viewed humans as intelligent beings in their own right — on a similar level as her own kind.

Vremonl: During his brief time on Earth, he only took one mutant strand besides his own DNAlien one, a chausie cat.  He stayed around an ancient city in Egypt that sat near the Nile, and has the ability to morph additional limbs along his body.  He only stayed on Earth for several centuries to study various types of the planet's natural fauna before returning to Firsthome.

Helleia: Her three mutations are human, tussock moth, and locust.  She lives in the swampy everglades of Florida, and has the ability to infect living things with her hivemind that she can instruct with simple directions.  One of her favorite pasttimes is taking unsuspecting humans into her domain, luring them to herself with a proposed relationship.  She’ll occasionally take the time to build relationships with humans, but it's a facade; her abilities work stronger on those who have emotional ties to her.

Tserem: His three mutations are human, eastern brown snake, and arthropleura.  He is a wanderer and doesn’t have a definitive home, though he does tend to shelter in places where other DNAlien friends reside.  He has the ability to quickly expel any ailments or illnesses.  Tserem used to live in Central Europe with a beloved human, but he hasn’t stayed in a single place for very long since her passing.

Xr: Their three mutations are jaguar, toucan, and DNAlien.  They live in the craggy mountains of the South American rainforest, and have the ability to infect beings with disease by looking at them.  Xr has been living in the same place for epochs as he is older and isn’t interested in finding any other place to live.  He has a fairly large cult of natives who have been worshiping him and keeping him alive for generations.

Kraken: His three mutations are human, giant squid, and megalodon.  He lives deep in the Atlantic Ocean avoiding any human contact, and has the ability to generate and manipulate water and wind currents.  Ever since he was betrayed by the group of pirates he worked for, he’s been in hiding from humans.  However, he understands that not all humans are cruel and will act kindly towards them unless hostility is shown.

Corven: His three mutations are human, bold jumping spider, and plourdosteus fish.  He lives in an open cavern in the Mexican desert, and has the ability to bind two beings in an unbreakable oath that shuts down the oath-breaker’s internal systems for periods of time.  In his younger years, his rare ability gave him a quick rise to fame, but a quick rise to burnout as well.  He lives on Earth to hide from his fame, and later humanity as well, but will still give out binding deals to those who manage to find him.

Harneon: His three mutations are human, grizzly bear, and woolly rhinoceros.  He lives in the open grasslands of North America, and has the ability to stimulate muscle tissue to go above and beyond its limitations.  While his home is here, he often takes extended vacations to several other planets.  Rumor has it that he has several other ongoing relationships that he participates in on each planet, and Earth is his getaway from all of them.

Enercill: Her three mutations are human, jackrabbit, and killer lizard (a species not native to Earth).  She has the ability to hide her third mutation and mutate between two forms at will.  Enercill travels between largely-populated human cities, thriving off clubbing and nightlife there.  Underground, she’s made quite the name for herself, and people come from all places to.. spend time with her.

Siem: Her three mutations are human, sturgeon, and dunkleosteus.  She lives in the place humans call the Bermuda Triangle, and has the ability to magnetize her body.  Commonly she uses her ability to hunt down shining metals, and is an avid collector of anything with bright colors or shining properties.  Occasionally she’ll kidnap humans who are artisans and keep them on deserted islands like pets to make her more valuables.

Wraith: His two mutations are deinonychus and DNAlien.  He lives off-world, and has the ability to combust as well as be completely fire-resistant.  He was an avid supporter of the ‘humankind are subservient animals’ group during the War, and ruled over a large civilization before he was bested by Atnoir, who was fighting for the ‘equal rights of humans’ group during the War.

Atnoir: His three mutations are saichania, woolly mammoth, and human.  He lives near the arctic circle to steer clear of any humans, and his ability is heightened senses, which comes in handy when you’re the size of a small mountain.  Before the War, Atnoir used to live in Northern Europe where he took care of many human civilizations, and fought for them in the War.  However, he has banished himself to a human-less place after even his own humans turned on him.

Orner: Their three mutations are human, anaconda, and elasmosaurus.  They live between several uninhabited islands of Japan, and they have the ability to multiply their body like a single cell organism, and regroup.  They’re a trickster at heart who overall means no harm, but once in a while they take things a little too far.  They've befriended several humans, but usually gets them killed accidentally.

Orin: His three mutations are maned wolf, flying squirrel, and moray eel.  He lives in the mountains of Alaska, and has the ability to connect and disconnect beings’ consciousnesses.  He can cause both mass hysteria and deep emotional connections within the network of beings he connects, but has no way of controlling what actually happens.  His altruistic tendencies often backfire, and even his own kind are wary of him.

Arn: Her three mutations are human, roe deer, and stone pine.  She’s one of the few DNAliens to ever mutate with a plant; while it is possible it’s hardly ever practical.  She lives in a forest near the Mediterranean coast, and has the ability to coax plants into growing incredibly fast.  She's always been extremely docile and elusive.  Back when humans believed in benevolent mythical beings, she traded plants with people to better her large garden.  She still tends to it to this day in honor of her beloved, who courted her and helped her tend to the garden when it was still small.

If you have any questions about any of my ocs, leave me an ask!  I’m more than happy to rant about them, or draw you a sketch! Most of them have full background stories I plan to write one day, like Tserem’s and Tselani’s, but these are just quick rundowns of each

[ladyartemesia]

TEASER: Kim Seokjin and the Mean Omega

Pairing: Nerd Alpha Kim Seokjin x Popular Omega Reader

Genre: A/B/O • Enemies to Lovers • (Sorta) College AU • Best Friend's Brother AU (Who is surprised? No one?)

Teaser Word Count: 3.6K

Teaser Warnings: A/B/O sexual dynamics • suggestive content

Rating: Explicit (18+) (Teaser is PG-13)

Summary: In the modern world, alphas are almost unheard of so why even bother learning about them? After all, as a spoiled (but reasonably kind-hearted) omega who is used to getting whatever she wants, you have better things to do. However, when unexpected circumstances throw you in the path of (extremely) nerdy and (probably?) shy Kim Seokjin, you're shocked to discover that he won't be wrapped around your little finger as easily as all the rest. Bringing that infuriating geek to his knees quickly becomes your personal mission in life... But it turns out that Kim Seokjin is not what he appears to be and the mean omega who eats beta boys for breakfast is about to get way more than she bargained for...

Author’s Note: This story would not be here without the love, support and friendship of my incredible support system. You talk with me, you laugh with me, you listen when I’m crying, and you read my chaotic drafts when I am ready to pull my hair out of my head in frustration. I love you all. @ppersonna @xjoonchildx @untaemedqueen @lemonjoonah. ALSO thank you to each and every one of you who encouraged me to post this story. This fic is dedicated to all of you as a token of my love and appreciation. Your support keeps me writing. Never doubt that for a second.

“...due to discriminatory anti-alpha policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, alphas were nearly eliminated from the general population…”

You heaved a weary sigh and rolled your shoulders—stretching the buttons of your high-end Oxford shirt to their limit. The beta sophomore to your right whined audibly and you smirked.

“...despite efforts to restore the genetic balance of designations, alphas currently comprise less than one percent of the population…”

Your back arched slightly as you crossed your legs, letting the absurdly short hem of your skirt ride up even higher. The poor boy you were tormenting shifted miserably in his seat.

How was he supposed to focus on a Human Biology and Designation Studies lecture when the living breathing embodiment of every sweaty undergrad’s fantasies was twisting her fingers in her hair and wrapping her pretty pink tongue around a strawberry lollipop right there in the middle of class?

“...unlike betas and omegas, alphas possess enhanced strength and the ability to compel other designations with their voice. Unmated alphas especially were often baselessly feared and distrusted...���

You knew exactly how you affected boys like him. You were a shameless tease who relished their attention and the power it brought you. Who needed drugs when driving a man mad with desire was a rush more potent than any high?

“...and that’s all for today so please read pages 450-466 in the text over break and remember to turn in your essay on scent and consent in intimacy—”

That poor sophomore looked like he had finally worked up the courage to speak to you, but you were already out the door and tearing down the hall toward your beautiful (and entirely platonic) counterpart, Kim Taehyung.

“Do you think Professor Moore is unaware that class is over at 3:25 or is he just torturing us for science?”

Taehyung shrugged, falling into step beside you with practiced ease.

“I mean I would torture you for free so it’s hard to say.”

The corner of your mouth quirked up at his characteristic dry humor, but the irritation at being held in that sweltering lecture hall for an extra ten minutes had frayed your temper.

“It’s the last class before spring break, I’m sure he was on some sort of twisted power trip.” You dug around in your purse for some chapstick, ignoring Tae’s amused snorting, “Alphas barely exist anymore and none of us are likely to meet one. Why bother learning what they can do?”

Taehyung tilted his head in amusement.

“You might be surprised.”

The final party before the beginning of spring break was always a laid back affair.

Many people had already caught planes to their various destinations, but your flight was scheduled for early tomorrow morning—leaving you with some time to kill.

Taehyung pressed his newest experimental concoction into your hand within minutes of entering the house (a surprisingly neat bachelor pad owned by two seniors, Jung Hoseok and Min Yoongi) and then darted back to the kitchen to craft more questionable alcohol potions like a deranged party warlock.

You had just found a comfortable place on the couch and were contemplating whether sampling your best friend’s mad scientist elixir would be worth the probable damage to your body when—

“H-Hello...”

It was that sophomore from your Designations Studies class. What was his name again? Jungwoo? Jinwook?

“Jungkook,” you smiled, delighted to have remembered before it became awkward. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

You motioned to the empty cushion next to you and the man in question scrambled over like he’d won the lottery.

“I—I know we don’t know each other well, but I noticed you were absent during Professor Moore’s lecture on intimacy and scent consent so I—” he blushed deeply, “I wrote the essay for you—and I brought a copy on my flash drive if-if you want it.”

Your heart melted immediately.

“Oh my gosh Jungkook, that is so sweet of you!”

Your gaze darted over his muscular form and thick brown curls.

Sweet indeed.

“I don’t want to miss out on the learning though,” you pouted, placing a hand on his tattooed bicep. “Can you explain it to me?”

Jungkook nodded vigorously even as his wide eyes fell to where your fingers were sliding slowly over his chest.

Scent consent was a pretty basic and universally known concept, but you really were touched by the handsome sophomore's consideration.

Why not give him (and yourself) a little reward?

“Um so basically if two people are involved in...intimate activities—”

You leaned forward to nip his ear lightly and he whimpered.

“Like this?” you asked innocently.

“Y-Yes. Like that.” He gulped. “In an intimate situation consent or refusal can be smelled. The scent of refusal or reluctance in intimacy is strong, unmistakable, and has a high chemical potency.”

“Is that so?” you drawled, sliding over onto his lap. Jungkook’s eyes rolled back into his head and you bit back a grin.

He was adorable.

“Uh-huh—it—oh my gawd,” (you were nibbling on his ear again) “it can immediately block sexual arousal and performance in the other partner. Meaning, if consent is not present, then it becomes difficult or—ahh” (his voice began to waver under your continued attention) “—or even impossible to continue with intimate acts.”

Your hand slid up to his cheek, bringing him closer till your lips were almost touching.

“Then what does it mean if I’m still so turned on right now?”

“It means,” Jungkook shuddered—nearly delirious with your scent, “that I really really want you.”

Across the room, Park Jimin chuckled as he watched you seduce his enthusiastic friend.

Jeon Jungkook was such a sweet kid.

Hopefully he wouldn’t get too attached.

“Wow... Some people are genuinely born blessed I suppose.”

Jimin turned to see Jung Hoseok eyeing the dimly lit corner where you and the eager young sophomore were exploring each other.

It was a rather...provocative spectacle. Not quite raunchy (you weren’t truly an exhibitionist)—just insanely sexy.

Jimin’s gaze lingered on the smooth curve of your thigh where Jeon Jungkook was currently holding on for dear life.

Lucky bastard.

“Ah you know how she is,” he sighed. “That boy isn’t going to get any farther than anyone else.”

It was relatively common knowledge that you liked to mess around but rarely—if ever— fully hooked up with anyone.

Jimin asked you about it once during a drunken game of truth or dare and you had just shrugged, mumbling something along the lines of avoiding STDs (which—to be fair—was at least part of your motivation), but the truth was a little more complicated than that.

In terms of experience, you weren’t a virgin, but... you hadn’t actually had sex in years.

You loved the chase, the foreplay, the build-up—the game of cat-and-mouse between two people who were attracted to one another.

But the final consummation was always so…

Wildly unfulfilling.

Every encounter left you frustrated. Empty.

Grumpy—even.

So you stopped bothering with it all together. (That was what sex toys were for after all.)

At the end of the day you were perfectly content being labeled a tease—it meant that people tended to know what they were (or rather weren’t) getting into when they rolled the dice with you.

Besides…it hadn’t even put a dent in your throng of admirers.

You were sunny, spoiled, indulgent, almost universally adored—

And you loved every minute of it.

“You know…” Hoseok took a long sip of his drink. “I always thought she would end up with Taehyung, but it’s been three years.”

Like you, Kim Taehyung was a trust fund brat and it was only natural that two beautiful and absurdly privileged people would gravitate to one another. You met at a freshman pledge party and had been an inseparable (and formidable) dynamic duo ever since.

The undisputed king and queen of campus.

Yes—maybe the two of you were a little self-absorbed at times, but it was hardly your fault that people tended to instinctively cater to the force of your combined looks, wealth, and charisma.

And it didn’t hurt that neither of you were ever intentionally cruel or unkind.

Just... habitually thoughtless.

(Though not when it came to each other. If anything your friendship was one area where you were both a little more human.)

Jimin shook his head.

“Nah that’s never gonna happen.” He tapped his nose. “They’re scent-crossed.”

Hoseok’s eyes widened.

“Really?”

Scent-crossed pairs didn’t smell sexually attractive to each other.

Like. At all.

No matter how physically or visually appealing an individual might be, it would be near impossible to form a sexual or romantic attachment to them if you were scent-crossed. Alphas, betas, and omegas were all subject to their noses first and foremost in the realm of attraction.

You and Taehyung smelled like comfort and home to one another...

But you were more turned on by a crisp cup of apple juice than you were his scent and the feeling was quite mutual.

He might as well have been your actual brother.

“That explains so much.” Hoseok snorted as he watched a drunken Taehyung do a flying leap on top of both you and Jungkook.

“Why is sunlight so offensive?” you croaked, dragging yourself and your luggage toward the boarding ramp next to an equally miserable Taehyung.

“The next time I book a flight before 9 AM, please shoot me,” he grunted.

Your parents were celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with a month-long European cruise so your best friend had graciously invited you to spend two glorious weeks of spring vacation at his family estate.

The invitation had actually come as somewhat of a surprise because—for all your closeness—Taehyung was uncharacteristically tight-lipped about his family.

Not that he was deliberately withholding information per se… It was just that he never really brought them up beyond an occasional passing comment.

The one time you did ask him about them directly he sighed and said—

“We’re very close, but… I suppose we’ve just gotten used to being very private.”

There was clearly more to the story, but you were confident that Tae would share it if and when he was ready.

“My parents are in Seoul opening a new branch of the company. They took my little sister with them and my older brother has his own house so it will be just us.” He snuggled deeper into the first class seat directly next to yours. “We’ll hang out by the pool and chill during the day, then hit up some of the new clubs or whatever at night.”

“So… No one from your family will be there?”

Perhaps the invitation was not so surprising after all.

“Nope. Just you and me and thirty acres of ocean front property.”

You grinned.

“Perfect.”

“Whose room is that?”

The two of you were lugging your bags down the main hall of Taehyung’s expansive mansion when a strange hint of...something caught you right by the nose.

Your friend turned to find you frozen and staring curiously at a familiar door near the balcony.

His eyes widened, but you were too preoccupied to notice his momentary concern.

“That’s just Jin’s room.”

A firm hand wrapped around your wrist and dragged you away, but your eyes stayed glued to the source of the mysterious scent until you were around the corner and out of sight.

Your suite for the next two weeks was right across the hall from Taehyung’s. There was a whirlpool, a full bath, a balcony, and an ocean view that would rival the cover spread of any travel magazine.

Tae headed for the shower (to ‘wash the airplane off’) immediately after showing you the room and you were thinking of doing the same except…

Your mind kept going back to that door and the hint of scent you detected.

There was something… different about it.

It was faint—and far from fresh (which made sense considering that one of the few things you did know about Kim Seokjin was that he hadn’t lived in this house for years).

But still…

The need to smell it again pressed insistently at the back of your mind.

Suddenly the sound of Taehyung singing raunchy lyrics in the shower carried over through the walls and you found your feet moving almost of their own accord.

What Tae doesn’t know won’t hurt him, you rationalized, making your way down the hall toward Jin’s door. Besides—it’s not as if I’m going to steal anything…

You just needed to find that scent again.

By the time your fingers closed over the knob every one of your nerves was strangely—acutely—alert but nothing could have prepared you for what was waiting behind the door.

Oh. My. Gosh.

“What a colossal nerd.”

The room was covered floor to ceiling in Nintendo memorabilia.

Bright primary colors assaulted your eyes from all directions in the form of action figures, posters, pillows, and every other conceivable merch variety known to man.

In the center of the suite stood a large king-sized bed covered in a custom black couture toile-style Mario-verse bed set (that looked every bit as expensive as it was geeky) and a mountain of high quality Nintendo character plush toys.

Everything was simultaneously luxe and nostalgic—a rare combination of sophisticated aesthetic balance and childlike indulgence.

And the scent was there.

It was faint and covered under layers of cleaner and air fresheners, but still lingering just below the surface—too weak for you to get a really good whiff, yet potent enough to torment you.

You moved forward unconsciously toward the strongest source of the hypnotic smell—the strangely inviting expanse of Kim Seokjin’s mattress.

Suddenly the urge to climb—no crawl—across the bed itself and roll around in it like a kitten in catnip gripped you out of nowhere.

“What the hell?” you muttered, rubbing absently over the mating gland at the base of your neck.

Something very odd was going on with your body.

Your restless gaze zeroed in on one of the stuffed toys piled atop his pillows. It was a cute little mushroom man your brain recognized as a Mario character named ‘Toad’.

Take it.

Your mouth dropped open in shock.

You need it.

“Am I going insane?” you wondered aloud.

You have to take it.

Muscles in your hand began to twitch involuntarily. You bit your lip.

Bring it back with you.

Several minutes later a freshly washed Taehyung wandered over to your room and found you sitting perfectly still on your bed while staring off into space.

His head tilted in curious concern.

“Everything ok?”

You started a bit at the sound of his voice, but recovered quickly.

“Never better!” you chirped—almost too brightly. “Let’s go get some dinner, I’m starving.”

Then you grabbed his hand and pulled him down the hall toward the kitchen—shutting the door before he could catch a glimpse of his brother’s stuffed Toad doll stashed underneath your pillow

“...a critical water main rupture in the city’s New Market district early this morning has forced several residents out of their homes as flood water swelled up to nearly two feet. The governor declared a state of emergency and ordered hotels around the city to accommodate the displaced citizens. Crews are still clearing the water and assessing damages. We expect—

“Hey!” you shouted through a mouthful of cereal, after Your best friend switched off the television, “I was watching that!”

“And what you should be doing is getting ready for the pool.” Tae snatched your cereal bowl and dragged you by your shirt collar toward the stairs. “It is the first morning of our vacation. I’m not trying to waste any time. Now go.” He shoved you forward, smacking your ass for good measure.

You swatted back at him half-heartedly as jogged back up to the room where you enjoyed a surprisingly restful sleep last night.

Kim Seokjin’s door glared at you accusingly as you shuffled past—unable to let you forget that you had kidnapped it’s little mushroom man in an unexplained fit of kleptomania, but that was a problem for your future self.

The you of right now was going to zen out in the Kim family's premium glass-enclosed indoor pool (it was still a little chilly for the outdoor pool) with her best friend and bask in the simple joys of good company and no responsibility.

...Or not.

A few minutes later you bounced into the living room wearing a simple black tankini with a cute floral cover only to find Taehyung on the phone with his head in his hands.

“Yes, sir. I understand… I...I know this is my responsibility...”

That didn’t sound good.

After a few more tense moments, Tae hung up and collapsed backward into the couch with a heavy sigh.

“That water main break you heard about on TV this morning was the last straw between the province and its current contractor. They called an emergency meeting for new bids.”

Your heart dropped as you sank down beside him.

“Your dad wants you to go...doesn’t he.”

Taehyung nodded miserably.

“He can’t leave the Seoul opening on such short notice and managing government construction contracts is part of what I’ve been training for. This could be huge for our company.”

“Well...why doesn’t your brother go?”

“Jin is the brains behind most of our patented gaming and tech innovations. He wouldn’t even know where to begin with this sort of thing. Besides,” his lips quirked up in a rueful grin, “my brother doesn’t have the patience to stroke entitled geriatric egos for hours on end—which is likely what I’m going to have to do.”

The two of you headed back to Taehyung’s room where you helped him pack some suits and toiletries for his trip.

Naturally you were disappointed but...this was a great opportunity for your best friend to prove himself in his chosen field and you both knew it. In fact, he was already starting to brighten a bit.

“The meeting is about a hundred miles north of here. My dad’s secretary already handled the flight and hotel room.” His eyes darted around the suite to see if he was forgetting anything.

It was clear he was nervous, though you were sure he didn’t need to be. Kim Taehyung was a trust fund brat, but he was also talented and deeply passionate about his family’s company.

Someday this would be the norm. The two of you were stealing time in college, determined to live a little before the expectations of your powerful families transferred fully onto your shoulders.

It was becoming more and more clear, however, that your carefree time was slowly running out.

Mother had already spoken to you about potential marriage alliances and your father expected you to intern with his Vice President this summer just as your elder sister had...

Taehyung’s voice suddenly interrupted your bittersweet introspection and you couldn’t help but smile at how grown-up he looked in his suit and briefcase ensemble.

Everything was going to change, but not quite yet.

“They estimate negotiations should take around a week or so…” He walked over and pulled you into a tight hug. “There should still be some vacation left for us when I get back.”

“Hurry back then,” you mumbled grumpily into his chest and he chuckled.

“I will.”

Taehyung had been gone for less than twenty minutes when you decided that the best use of your time would be to eat more snacks.

The last thing you expected when you skipped merrily into the kitchen was to find it occupied by a shaggy-haired homeless man in glasses.

Your first instinct was to scream which caused the homeless man to drop the apple he was biting right onto the floor where it rolled around for a small eternity before coming to rest at his ankles.

Your second instinct was to grab a butcher’s cleaver from the nearby knife block and wave it chaotically at the intruder while shouting something along the lines of—

“You’ve made a huge mistake! My boyfriend is the biggest, meanest mafia boss in Seoul! Leave now and he might let you live!”

The homeless man continued to stare at you with a mixture of confusion and shock, but made no move to run away in terror like you were hoping.

So you tried again.

“Didn’t you hear what I said?! The last man who touched me drinks his steak through a straw now! Do the smart thing and leave before my boyfriend comes down those stairs and it’s too late!”

Infuriatingly, the homeless man was still not fleeing for his life and frankly you were starting to get frustrated. You drew in a deep cleansing breath and were prepared to issue another grandiose threat when he finally spoke.

“I’m sorry, miss. I... think there’s been some sort of mistake. Who is your boyfriend?”

There was no rational explanation for what came out of your mouth next, but it rolled off your tongue so smoothly and you didn’t even flinch.

“Kim Seokjin.”

For the first time in your entire exchange, the intruder looked truly alarmed.

Now that’s more like it.

“You’ve heard of him I see. He’s a dangerous man and my body belongs to him.” You slammed the cleaver down onto the countertop with a (hopefully) menacing slash. “Kim Seokjin doesn’t like when other men put their hands on what belongs to him.”

There was a long, unpardonably tense moment of silence…Then the stranger slowly reached forward and picked up a mobile phone from the table in front of him.

His eyes remained locked with yours as he pressed a quick series of buttons, brought the phone to his ear, waited a few seconds and said—

“Taehyung… Would you mind telling me why there is a half-naked, knife-wielding omega in our kitchen claiming to be my girlfriend?”

Hello! Please comment on this post if you would like to be added to the taglist!

You guys were all so wonderful, and encouraging, and excited that I literally got this teaser out in three days! If you like what you read so far, please let me know! I cannot put into words how meaningful and valuable feedback is to me. I truly treasure it! It fuels my creativity and keeps me writing. I would love to hear from you!

[greensaplinggrace]

honestly THANK YOU for saying all that abt baghra bc i thought i was going crazy from not liking her??? bc i haven't read the books and only summaries of them on wiki and like. i dunno why ppl like her actually even in the show bc this guy, her son, is like "i wanna make the world better for us grisha" and she's just like "no." even tho he sees that she's MAKING HERSELF SICK from suppressing her powers! she's literally like in bed coughing in the flashback yet seem much healthier at the little palace. also like after everything, after her disapproval, after the fold, after centuries of waiting for the sun summoner.. he never abandons her. he makes sure she's cares for. he doesn't harm her. and i have to wonder if baghra has ever thanks him for that, for just not leaving her alone. like i dunno how im suppose ro believe aleks is a heartless villain when he still cares for his abusive mom like this. like has baghra even told her she loved him (honestly she reminds me of a classic emotionally unavailable asian parent but maybe that's just me). also im wondering if baghra ever told aleks that he had an aunt.. bc like.. now that u bring up her isolating him it's like hmmmm...

not at me being like alina... why do u trust the bitter old woman who literally beats u with a stick and verbally abuses u every chance she gets.. just bc she showed a bad painting... like.. pls use two braincells to see that who u figured out as his mother... is also using his protection..

like baghra could've upped and left with alina. but no. she stayed bc she knew she was safe under aleks's protection.

alsoim just impressed that after his first friend tried to drown him and harvest his bones... he didn't go into hiding???? he still wanted to make a safe heaven for grisha!!! HE STILL WANTED TO PROTECT GRISHA EVEN AFTER HIS GRISHA FRIEND TRIED TO KILL HIM FOR HIS FUCKEN BONES. like... this is the guy im suppose to believe is the villain???

honestly i feel like part of the reason why LB's plotlines seem so bad and disconnected (and sometimes outright racist but that's another rant) and why darkles is disproportionately more violent and villainous in the later books is bc she didn't expect the darkling to be so popular and wanted to stick with her guns of making him the villain. but also wanted the money from aleks's popularity. but like you can't have ur cake and eat it too.

Well thank you for sending this ask! It's very sweet and very passionate. I'm glad you liked my post! I didn't put as much thought into it as some of my others lol. I kind of just talked. But it was nice to be able to finally talk about some of the problems I have with both her character and the fandom/author's perception of her.

HERE is the post this is referring to, in case anyone's wondering.

👀👀 You've hit the nail on the head for so many things, here!

Baghra is extremely emotionally unavailable, basically to the point of neglect. She's also verbally and physically abusive, traits which I doubt were only reserved for her students and not her son. Baghra claims she would do anything to protect him, but I've known a lot of parents who have that mindset and yet still harm their children because they think it's "good for them".

Aleksander stays at Baghra's side for years, and even when they're opposing each other she's never too far away from him. Idk if you've read the books but he does eventually hurt her. And as much as I don't like Baghra, I think his actions were horrid. But I'm also honestly kind of surprised it took him so long lmao.

Yeah I mean, in terms of isolation, let's not forget that she never wanted to introduce him to his father, either. Baghra's sense of eternity clouds a lot of her judgments on relationships, which means she views most people as dust and therefore teaches her son to as well. The problem with that is that he's a growing child, and he needs those social and emotional attachments for healthy development.

I would bet quite a bit of money that Baghra has either never told him she loves him or she has told him so few times it's practically forgettable.

And everything becomes more complicated because so many of Baghra's actions are understandable because of her life and her history, but the impacts they have on the people around her, especially Aleksander, are permanently damaging. And the fact that that's never gone over in critical depth in the books or how it's glossed over in fandom is just very disconcerting. Like, acknowledging Baghra's failings doesn't mean we're excusing Aleksander's actions, it just means we're holding Baghra liable for her own. Which the fandom should be doing, considering she's the epitome of an abusive parental figure.

And Alina trusting Baghra over Aleksander is even more confusing! Especially in the show!! This is the woman who beat her and abused her and tortured her friends when they tiny little children (and who probably still does so now that they're adults). This is the woman who mocks you and harasses you and insults you on a regular basis. Why does Baghra revealing she's Aleksander's mother make Alina change her mind?! Like fuck, I'd just feel bad for Aleksander. No wonder he kept it a secret, I would too! And that painting is enough evidence?! Really?! A random painting shown to you by this abusive mentor that's been making your life hell. That's what you're going to betray your new lover over?

The friends trying to harvest his bones thing is a good point, too. I think Aleksander, especially show Aleksander, is incredibly idealistic. I think he cares too much for others - those he's deemed worth his care (a sentiment given to him by Baghra). Despite everything she's tried to teach him about hiding and abandoning others and never caring and never doing anything to help or reach out or connect with people, Aleksander still continues to do so. It's likely because he never got it from Baghra growing up, and so is desperate for those emotional needs to be fulfilled elsewhere.

His turning point, when Baghra tells him it was understandable that those kids tried to kill him because the world is such a hard place for them - that's crucial. And the reason it's possible as a motivating factor is because of that idealism and that desire to help and that desire to be everything his mother isn't. Baghra tells him this trauma he just experienced was because of the oppression of his people, and instead of following her lead and accepting that, going into hiding and abandoning everybody to their misery, he goes I can do something about that. I can make it so this never happens again. Which is usually how trauma like that combines with one's core personality traits at a young age, especially when there's none of the essential support systems in place to aid in recovery (ie, the role Baghra should have been filling but wasn't, because she decided to exacerbate the problem instead).

And yeah, one of my biggest problems with the ham-fisted "beating you over the head with a sledgehammer of evil deeds" look-how-bad-this-character-is! portrayal of the Darkling in the later books comes from the impression I get that Bardugo doesn't trust her readers. She's so desperate to have us hate this character and think him an irredeemable villain, not trusting any of her readers to engage critically with a morally gray character, that it feels quite a bit like condescending fucking bullshit. Which ew, I know how to engage with literature, thanks.

She really does seem to look down on a large part of her fandom, and imo, the infantilization of the female characters in her books seems to carry over to her impression of most of her female readers as well. Which is why the Darkling's character arc gets fucking destroyed. But he's still a good cash grab, of course, so she'll shake his dead corpse in front of the fandom for money every time she wants something from it.

Also! Another reason I think her plotlines feel disconnected (I'm sorry Bardugo I respect you as a person, but shit-) is because the writing in SaB is just bad. I mean, nevermind the absolutely nauseating implications of the way she portrays the Grisha as a persecuted group who's situation is never actually fully addressed as it should be, considering Grisha rights is what her main villain is fighting for (imo for a series called the Grishaverse, LB seems to be pretty anti Grisha), but her characters and story alone are just wrong for each other. They don't fit together.

And the ending is one of the main pieces of evidence in that regard! You can’t say the ending where Alina isn’t Grisha anymore is her “going back to where she started” when she’s always been Grisha. She just didn’t know she was Grisha because she denied that part of herself that she was born with.

Alina is reluctant to move forward or change, she struggles with adapting, and she’s very set on the things she’s grown attached to throughout her life. She also has some latent prejudices against the Grisha, and so denies the possibility of being Grisha for those reasons as well.

Alina’s lack of powers in the beginning of her life because she willfully doesn’t learn about them to avoid change versus her lack of powers at the end of the book when she’s accepted them and then they’re stripped away from her by outer forces are two entirely separate circumstances. You can’t make a parallel about lost powers and lack of Grisha status bringing her back to the start when she was always Grisha and she always had powers and she simply refused to come to terms with it because of personal reasons.

The first situation is an internal conflict that indicates a story about growth and a journey of self acceptance. Denying herself the opportunity to learn about her heritage and to find acceptance with a group of people like her because she’s tied to the past and because of the way she was raised is the setup for a narrative that tackles unlearning prejudice and learning how to connect with a part of her identity that was denied her and learning how to grow independent and self assured. It’s the setup for a different story entirely. The second situation is an external conflict that centers around the ‘corrupting influence of power’... for some reason.

In a world where Grisha do not have social, political, or economic power and they are hunted, centering your heroine’s journey of self acceptance and growth around an external conflict about... the corrupting influence of power (in a group of people that don’t actually have any power?!) just doesn’t work. It is literally impossible to connect the two stories Bardugo is trying to push in Shadow and Bone without seriously damaging the main character’s developmental arc.

The only way a narrative like this would work, claiming that she has gone back to where she started, is either a) if the Grisha weren’t actually a persecuted group and instead were apart of the upper class, or b) if the one bad connection between the two instances is acknowledged - that Alina denied a part of herself crucial to self acceptance and growing up, and that losing her powers at the end has also denied her. It is a tragedy, not a happy ending.

Alina suffered because she didn’t use her powers. She grew sick. It was bad for her. This was not a resistance to 'the corruption of power and the burden of greed', it was her suffering because she couldn’t fully accept herself.

Framing the ending as a return to the beginning can’t be done if you don’t address how bad the beginning was for your main character. You brought her back to a bad point in her life. You regressed her. This should be a low point in her arc. It should be a problem that’s solved so she can finish developing organically or it should be something that is acknowledged as a tragedy in it’s own right, for the future the world (the writing) denied her.

This is a ramble and it makes no sense and I’m really sorry, but my point is that Bardugo put the wrong characters in the wrong story. The character arc required for organic development doesn’t match the story and intended message at all. The narrative doesn’t fit the cast. She's got two clashing stories attempting to work in tandem and she ends up with both conflicting messages that fans still can’t comprehend in her writing and an ending that doesn’t suit her main character to such an impossible degree that it’s almost laughable.

So yeah, there's a few reasons why I think the story and the plot feels so bad and disconnected. I hope you don't mind me making this answer so long! 😅 I was not expecting to write this much.

[themousefromfantasyland]

Creatures of Yuletide: Krampus, the Christmas Demon

He sees you when you're sleeping

And he knows when you're awake

He knows if you've been bad or good

So be good FOR YOUR OWN GODDAMNIT SAKE!!!

Christmas season is full of magical beings and creatures that travel through our world. Jolly old men from the north, elves that sleep in our homes, goats that give presents, the holiday season is full of all sorts of weird and wonderful characters. However, Santa Claus tends to me the most famous among them, and the most remembered in popular culture. This was, until some years ago, when a forgotten Christmas character rose in popularity in pop culture as an antithesis of good old St. Nick. I’m talking about Krampus, the Christmas Demon from German and Alpine lore.

One of the reasons why I believe Krampus became so popular recently is because he’s a scarier and less commercial alternative to Santa. In older posts I talked about how people used to tell scary ghost stories during Christmas and how Christmas once had this spooky side to it. Then one day it hit me that, in a way, Krampus is exactly a call back to these traditions. While not a ghost, Krampus brings back the scary atmosphere to the holiday. People tell stories about Krampus, they dress like him, they fright their neighbors in these costumes. People in general like to be scared, and in particular, even though they won’t admit it now, children too. Krampus is celebrated because he brings back the fun that overly commercialized Santa took out from Christmas.

Jeremy Seghers, organizer of the first Krampusnacht festival held in Orlando, said this in an interview to the Smithsonian Magazine:

"The Krampus is the yin to St. Nick's yang. You have the saint, you have the devil. It taps into a subconscious macabre desire that a lot of people have that is the opposite of the saccharine Christmas a lot of us grew up with."

Krampus is mainly a holiday tradition from the Alpine region and Central Europe in general. His name is derives from the German word krampen, meaning claw. On the night of December 5th, the eve of Saint Nicholas Feast, Krampus, and Saint Nicholas himself go out in the streets to punish or reward kids. This makes him one of the Companions of Saint Nicholas, a group of holiday figures that would help him in punishing kids. While they do the punishment, jolly old Nick brings the kids gifts, in a sort of Good Cop, Bad Cop dynamic.

Our friend St. Nick fills the shoes of good children with fruits and sweets. Krampus carries birch branches for senseless beating the misbehaving ones. On his back he is often depicted carrying a sack or a basket. This is to carry the naughty kids to his layer for more torture later. He can also eat them, threw them out in the river to drown, or bring them straight to the depths of Hell. In some parts of Austria, Krampus presents the families with gold-painted twigs that are to be displayed year-round in the house, constantly reminding the kids of his ever-watching presence.

What lovable fellow!

It was common in the 19th century to exchange Gruß vom Krampus, “Greetings from Krampus” cards that contained humorous rhymes and poems. In these Krampus is depicted looming menacingly over children. In others the creature receives sexual undertones, pursuing scantily dressed women.

There is also the Krampuslauf, or, Krampus Run, where people dress up as him and parade through the street dressed in fur suits and carved wooden masks and carrying cowbells. This one is very important for understanding Krampus origins.

Now, no one really know where Krampus comes from. The most popular theory is that he was a fertility god from the Alpine Region before Christianity retconned him as demon. Scholars often link him, Pan, and the satyrs to the archetype of the Horned God. Some claim he’s the son of Hel, but I didn’t find any real or credible source to this.

What we do know is that Krampus has some connections to a goddess in the Alpine region called Frau Perchta.

Now Frau Perchta is a very mysterious figure from the German folklore. She had many different names depending on the era and region. We don’t know a lot about her before Christianization, but what we do know is that in the folklore of Bavaria and Austria, she was a witch said to roam the countryside at midwinter, and to enter homes during the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany. Good children would find a silver coin in their shoes. Bad children would have their bellies sliced open, their stomach and guts removed, and she would stuff the straw and pebbles in the hole left behind. She had two forms in which she could be encountered, beautiful and white as snow, or elderly and haggard.

Perchten is plural for Perchta. Originally, the word referred to female masks representing her, but the name come to refer to the animal masks worn in parades and festivals in the mountainous regions of Austria.

A Perchten mask

In the 16th century, the Perchten took two main forms: Schönperchten, "beautiful Perchten", or the Schiachperchten, "ugly Perchten”. The beautiful Perchten came during the twelve nights of Christmas and festivals to bring luck and wealth to the people. The ugly Perchten, who had fangs, tusks and horse tails which were used to drive out demons and ghosts. Men dressed as the ugly Perchten during this time and went from house to house driving out bad spirits.

From the Smithsonian Magazine: A man dressed in a traditional Perchten costume and mask performs during a Perchten festival in the western Austrian village of Kappl, November 13, 2015. Each year in November and January, people in the western Austria regions dress up in Perchten (also known in some regions as Krampus or Tuifl) costumes and parade through the streets to perform a 1,500 year-old pagan ritual to disperse the ghosts of winter. (DOMINIC EBENBICHLER/Reuters/Corbis)

People would masquerade as these devilish figures and march in processions known as Perchtenlaufs. The Church didn’t like these creatures and tried many times to ban these practices, but due to the sparse population and the rugged environments within the region, the ban was useless.

In Catholicism, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of children. His saint day falls in early December, which helped strengthen his association with the Yuletide season. A seasonal play that spread throughout the Alpine regions was known as the Nikolausspiel, "Nicholas play". In these plays St. Nick would make questions about morality and reward children for their scholarly efforts. Eventually the Perchtenlauf, in an attempt to pacify the Church, introduced Saint Nicholas and his set of good morals. Krampus, the in-chains helper of Saint Nicholas, was then born.

In 1975, anthropologist John J. Honigmann wrote that:

"The Saint Nicholas festival we are describing incorporates cultural elements widely distributed in Europe, in some cases going back to pre-Christian times. Nicholas himself became popular in Germany around the eleventh century. The feast dedicated to this patron of children is only one winter occasion in which children are the objects of special attention, others being Martinmas, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and New Year's Day. Masked devils acting boisterously and making nuisances of themselves are known in Germany since at least the sixteenth century while animal masked devils combining dreadful-comic (schauriglustig) antics appeared in Medieval church plays. A large literature, much of it by European folklorists, bears on these subjects. ... Austrians in the community we studied are quite aware of "heathen" elements being blended with Christian elements in the Saint Nicholas customs and in other traditional winter ceremonies. They believe Krampus derives from a pagan supernatural who was assimilated to the Christian devil"

Is worth noting that this is exactly what happened to the Yule Goat. He was a pagan symbol, people dressed like him to keep winter spirits at bay, but the Christians demonized him. There are illustrations of Saint Nicholas or of Father Christmas riding the Yule Goat during Christmas and these were meant to represent the power of God over the power of the Devil. Krampus is represented in chains by the same reason. However, the Yule Goat came to become a gift-giver and a more positive force in holiday lore, with people dressing as goats to deliver gifts to their families in the 19th century. Krampus didn’t have the same luck. I really wonder if the Yule Goat and Krampus came from variants from the same or similar cultural traditions, but that took drastically different routes.

I must say that, although I'm more in the team Santa, I learned to love Krampus over the years. It’s undeniable the amount of fun he brought to those who wanted something a little more darker and creepier in the holidays, and as someone who identifies itself as 90% lover of cheesy, cutesy and sappy stuff and 10% lover of everything earie and macabre, the idea of a monstrous boogeyman in the shadows of good old Santa Claus is fun. I personally think there’s enough space for both, the terrifyingly scary and the joyful jolliness.

Fun fact: Krampus, the one people rescued from German obscurity to combat the overly commercialized Christmas, is now being criticized as being too commercialized. C'est la vie

Story time: In my country I once heard the tale of a guy that went as Santa to deliver Christmas presents to children in a poor community. He brought many gifts and toys with him. The children loved them, until there were no more gifts to be delivered. The remaining children and their parents became so angry that they chased away the guy, throwing rocks at him. The guy came to them with free stuff, helped as much as he could, and people still threw rocks at him and chased him away, almost seriously hurting him.

I admit, there are cases where Krampus is truly needed 🤣🤣🤣

Art by Helen Mask

[gascon-en-exil]

Crimson Flower lets Edelgard institute all her progressive reforms, and puts a definitive kibosh on both the Agartheans and the dragons. Various other character endings describe the slitherers resurfacing and being foiled again. Dmitri the emperor, and he's a well-meaning lad who probably makes reasonable strides against racism and systemic crest bias, but he largely keeps things going as they were. He makes it very clear that he hasn't thought very hard about his position in the world.

Edelgard, on the other hand, is justified in everything she does by virtue of her circumstances. At no point does she have any options other than declaring war on the continent or dying, because she has been in the clutches of the Agartheans her entire life. They want to use her as a figurehead, but make it very clear that they will bump her off if she steps out of line. She cannot prevent the war, so she instead makes it her own, and rallies her forces until she's can make a move against them.

Dimitri is a hereditary autocrat who secures his family's grip on the entirety of a continent, 2/3 of which he obtains through conquest. Really struggling to see the 'not an autocrat' angle here even if he does some positive reforms later in life. Like we get a fairly decent look at how non-traumatized Dimitri acts in CF and it all sets up that he entered into a political marriage and had a quick child to secure the inheritance. Hereditary monarchy is a scourge even if you have a 'good' monarch

FIrst, let’s get the most obvious thing out the way: there is no evidence that Dimitri has a political marriage and an heir in CF. 

The line about the Blaiddyd line continuing almost certainly refers to his uncle Rufus, who is killed in Cornelia’s coup in the non-CF routes but is presumably still alive in CF because she never gets the chance to carry it out. In the Dimidue death scene Dimitri expresses regret for not being able to get revenge for his family among others, so he’s still thinking of family in terms of his slain father and stepmother. I’ve also pointed out several times that Dimitri’s fondness for orphans is noted in story text and in AM’s ending tapestry, such that it’s entirely reasonable to conclude that he adopts regardless of circumstances as a way of diminishing the role of Crest-based inheritance. In CF his circumstances seem to be nearly identical to the Dimidue paired ending where there is no queen in sight and Dedue is a royal consort in all but name. I highly doubt they chose to adopt while fighting a war that’s by now been dragging on for over five years, so the conclusion about Rufus stands (even more so because he’s noted elsewhere to be a shameless womanizer so it’s likely he’s got one or more bastards somewhere). If you’re looking for a hereditary monarch who founds or perpetuates a dynasty, that would be Claude, or Byleth in various VW/SS endings. Quibbling over monarch vs. emperor has little meaning in this context, especially when Edelgard stepping down after an indeterminate amount of time and naming a successor is fully in line with real world dictatorships. Non-democratic systems of government are the standard for all of FE, although the beginnings of a representative government mentioned in Dimitri’s solo ending might be the single closest instance of a significant movement away from that even if it’s only a constitutional monarchy with the heir to the throne a Crestless adoptee. This follows naturally from the years of the timeskip where Dimitri was homeless and in and out of the slums of the Kingdom, where he saw the suffering of the common people firsthand and, as seen in the AM parley, came to understand their needs better than Edelgard ever attempts. In conjunction with Claude’s ignorance of the lives of the Almyran people as seen in his Cyril supports, it’s actually reasonable to conclude that Dimitri has thought about his position relative to his subjects more than either of the other leaders.

And speaking of Claude, Dimitri does not conquer the Alliance in AM; rather, Claude hands it over to him unexpectedly after the Kingdom army comes to his aid and fights off the Imperial army invading Derdriu. If Hilda is recruited in AM her monastery dialogue the next month reveals that the Alliance council peacefully agreed to go along with Claude’s decision to cede their territory to the Kingdom. This is incidentally a much better deal than the Alliance gets in either VW or SS, where Claude disappears either at the end of the game or after Gronder and it’s given to Byleth with no further discussion (and the same thing also happens to the Kingdom in both routes). The Empire at the end of the game is in much the same situation as every other antagonist nation in FE, with no one to rule it following the counter-invasion from the protagonist nation(s) because they’re all dead. Similar to Genealogy the picture does open up a bit depending on who’s alive, with Ferdinand, Lorenz, Marianne, etc. governing their respective territories if they’re recruited. Ditto unseen noble heirs like Holst and Caspar’s older brother who are still around to inherit their titles even with Byleth or Dimitri ruling the continent. As far as the Empire is concerned the two of them are as much imperialists as Marth, Seliph, the Renais twins, etc., a far cry from Edelgard in CF invading and conquering two sovereign nations without provocation, predicated in part on the basis that centuries prior they were part of the Empire so it’s acceptable for her to conquer them.

Now, onto Edelgard. You must be aware that Edelgard chose to ally with the Agarthans at Hubert’s suggestion, and she continues to make that choice for nearly a decade without any attempt at checking them despite knowing all the terrible things that they’re getting up to behind the scenes at the monastery and that they enacted earlier without her direct involvement to destabilize the continent and make her conquest easier, like the Tragedy of Duscur and the death of Claude’s uncle. As myself and others have noted attempting to spin her as a helpless victim of their machinations only makes her look incompetent and terrible in her choice of allies - not just the Agarthans themselves but also known murderers Hubert and Jeritza whom she cannot fully control with one frequently going behind her back and the other openly disobeying her multiple times on the battlefield. This in combination with Hubert’s status as the Manfroy to Edelgard’s Arvis leaves me very much in doubt of the Agarthans being truly eradicated in the postgame. Not only is this unsatisfying for the player, but given Hubert’s use of dark magic and dabbling in the Agarthans’ experiments (plus that he was the one who suggested the alliance in the first place, for all that he grumbles about Thales ordering him around) it’s more likely that he eradicates their leadership and then installs himself at the head of the remaining cult, folding them into his established network of spies and assassins. Hubert is one of my favorite characters in this cast, but he’s anything but trustworthy especially if his primary motivation really is wanting Edelgard to sleep with him when it turns out she never will, not even in their paired ending. In keeping with his status as the pathetic hopeless suitor pining for this game’s headlining waifu despite her overt attraction to the self-insert, sexual frustration is built into his character even if he gets a wife or if he and Ferdinand become the most notorious lovers in Enbarr.

Plus, if you look Edelgard actually does rather than what she says she aligns more with what the Agarthans want than the stated goals of her own propaganda. She completes their genocide of the Nabateans and unifies the continent with Agarthans in positions of great power. On the other hand she doesn’t eradicate the nobility as a whole but only replaces those who would oppose her seizing absolute power, which goes to support that it was the Insurrection of the Seven and not the Agarthan experimentation that truly shaped her worldview and motivations. The stated reasons she wants to destroy the church are provably incorrect - she knows they didn’t create Relics or Crests thanks to secret Imperial knowledge passed down from Wilhelm, and she must know that they aren’t all-powerful as the Empire disbanded the Southern Church completely a century before the events of the game with apparently no pushback from Rhea or anyone else - and one must therefore conclude that she instead targets them because they, like the Imperial nobles she replaces and like Claud e and Dimitri defending their nations, would oppose her solitary rule of the continent. It’s just awfully convenient that this goal also accomplishes the Agarthans’ main goal of killing or driving into hiding all of the remaining dragons. Saying that the war was inevitable because the Agarthans were slinking around setting it up to happen doesn’t absolve Edelgard of the responsibility of choosing to ally with them and playing right into their hands, especially when her conquest only noticeably improves her own situation, and possibly Hubert and Jeritza’s now that they have a license to kill, torture, etc. for an entire continent. All of the other Eagles go on to inherit what they would have inherited anyway, and all the reforms mentioned in the CF endings are the same or better in endings for the other routes only your side didn’t start a war and complete a genocide to bring those about.

[coasttocoastreads]

Welcome back to Week 2 of Coast to Coast Reads! Who’s still alive? Katya and I are dying while social distancing, but at least we had a few laughs discussing this book:

Crescent City (House of Blood and Earth) // Sarah J Maas

★★ / ★★★★★

Summary in one two gif(s):

Real Summary:

Crescent City, a place where vanir (supernatural beings such as angels, fae, shifters, etc.) and humans freely mingle and go about their days. Bryce Quilan is a 20-something fae/human who’s still reeling from the murder of her friends 2 years ago. But after she’s commissioned to help search for an ancient artifact, Bryce, along with her new angel partner Hunt, unearth previously buried secrets about the murder that threaten to expose a worldwide conspiracy. 

Pros:

Great side characters. I would die for each and every one of them.

Lots of different mythological creatures! Not just another Fae Book™️

Cons:

It’s literally ToG 2-7 combined. If you read Throne of Glass, you’ve already been spoiled for this book. 💀💀💀

It’s wayyyy too long

Drags a lot in the beginning

Plot .5/5 (the .5 is for you, Lehaba)

What can I say. SJM literally plagiarized herself by taking the plotline of the tog books and translating it to this new setting. The writing itself was subpar, and most of the time it felt like the author herself had no idea where the plot was going, instead letting it drag on until a plot twist that makes no sense is revealed. (You’ll know which one I’m talking about when you get there.) I’ll compare CC with ToG with spoilers under the cut. 

Pacing 2/5

The beginning is full of info-dumping as SJM tries to set up this world which is metaphorically like ours, but everyone’s hot and does fantasy cocaine all the time.  It narrates boring day-to-day schedules that could have been condensed into a paragraph and at times I was tempted to skip ahead. The plot does pick up near the last 25% though, so I’ll give it that. 

Worldbuilding 2.5/5

It was confusing. To be fair, after all the info was dumped at the beginning, I didn’t bother going back to try to figure things out when they popped up again after. But like still??? I think I only started understanding the hierarchy of the government with the Asterrii(?). Also what are the Triarii I am still lost. SJM attempts to blend a more modern society with one of fantasy creatures, and for the most part it succeeds, but it often just feels...strange. I think the one thing I’m most hung up about is why swords and guns still coexist. Like ??????? it’s one or the other plssssss abandon the “aesthetic” Also while they literally have cell phones and keurig machines there aren’t common things like cars? Why.

Characters: (This is unconventional, bear with me)

Main Characters: -infinity/5 they could go die for all I care

Bryce and Hunt were both super unlikeable, 10/10 would let fall from a cliff. They are literally just rewrites of Aelin and Rowan? Bryce is like ahahaha yeah people think I’m Just a dumb vapid Female™️ who parties too much and gets trashed but SIKE I’m actually the chosen one and I’ve been hiding it this whole time because I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings uwu. And did I mention I’m actually a trained Warrior who can keep up with The Boys? It’s Aelin y’all. There are numerous times where a character says that she’s not stupid and I’m like...are you sure... This girl makes the poorest decisions, yet ofc, there aren’t any long term consequences... (Also 99% of her problems come from ghosting people literally just respond with “k” sis)

Hunt is... idek what to say about Hunt. He’s just Rowan but in angel form. His inner monologue cycles between I must pay off my debt so I can gain Freedom 😔, why is Bryce so hot 🥴, and Shahar 😭. Once again, literally Rowan who also was bound to some evil villain, had the hots for their CENTURIES YOUNGER pupil/protectee, and had an old lover die tragically which led to them believing they can never find love again UNTIL BryLin comes along. Snooze. 

Side Characters: Infinity/5 

Ruhn Danaan was the most valid character and that’s the hill I’ll die on. He literally just wanted to protect his sister cuz she’s stupid af but she keeps pushing him away bc he’s an “alphahole” (haha how subversive :/) I want a whole book about him and Hypaxia, preferably fanfiction so I don’t have to read “soft feminine breathing” ever again.

Literally all the supporting cast- Lehaba, Therion, Ithan, Jesiba, Flynn, Connor, etc, etc. had more compelling characters and side stories than Bryce/Hunt. I was 100% more invested in them and I can’t wait to read/write more about them. 

(Pls let me marry Jesiba Roga or Therion 🥺)

But while the people on the “good” side were spectacular, the villains all felt one-dimensional and the product of over-recycled and overused tropes mashed together. Sandriel and Pollux are literally just Maeve and Cairn (is that his name)

I’d recommend for:

People who loved Throne of Glass and are lamenting the absence of new content. Please read about Rowaelin 2.0

People stuck at home during this global crisis and have too much time on their hands. (If you need that free epub, hmu)

People who are willing to skip all scenes that feature just Bryce and/or Hunt 

People who hate themselves

Would I travel here?

Sorry, what? Already shredded my passport, not getting a replacement, sorry. 

Overall thoughts:

I wish I could somehow take those hours of my life back but alas. 

See y’all in two weeks with a hopefully better book selection,

Tiff

Spoilers under cut

Okay time to VENT

OKAY so CC=ToG, let’s break down how

Danika’s death is the Nehemia Incident, setting the mc up for a journey of self discovery/reclaiming their power. They both show up as ghosts later to encourage mc in a time of great self-struggle.

Syrinx if Fleetfoot. bc all female mc’s need a pet to reveal her Feminine and Soft side

Sandriel and Pollux are Maeve and Cairn. Evil female character with vast power and her torturer? COOKIE CUTTER FORMULA. The scene where Bryce offers herself up for Hunt in the lobby also kinda mirrors that scene in..HoF? QoS? Don’t remember, but pretty sure that happened. Also that scene was so fucking dumb, I really thought Bryce had a Smart Plan, but I was bamboozled once again. 

A gem from my notes: “Bryce is Aelin but with cocaine”

I think the whole demon portal thing is a ripoff of ACOWAR (or is it KoA I can’t even remember), sacrificing yourself to close the rift, etc, etc. 

Anyways, Bryce = Aelin, a party-girl front with a sob backstory that’s her superpower origin story who always has a Plan. 

Hunt = Rowan, broody warrior busy repaying debts getting orders they don’t want while pining over a lost love. They reluctantly let the female mc in and voila they’re in LOVE

The whole “plot twist” that revealed Hunt’s true plan along was so fucking dumb...

It wasn’t a plot twist, it was just plain bad writing

There was no set up at all, nothing alluding to Hunt secretly masterminding an attempted coup with the help of Magic Meth

The whole time I was like “...this is part of their plan right. There’s no way he legit planned this...”

Character’s POVs should reveal what they’re thinking, even if you’re just hinting at something to reveal later...this was just lazy

Another thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was the sudden reveal that Fury and Juniper had been in a relationship the whole time? Despite like above, there was no prior allusion to that?

It felt like half-assed representation at best and completely irrelevant to the story with it coming up again in a throwaway line near the end

Also? I’m fairly certain there was a scene in the beginning where they were all out clubbing and Juniper hooked up with some rando while Fury was also at the club with them? Was this before they got together or did SJM insert this so last minute that no one caught it?

Wtf is sunball. Can someone just help me out here.

Some people have been saying Hunt is Asian coded? Where???!!!!! All I’m seeing is the same stuff she pulled in ACOTAR where all the Illyrians were tan so people could claim they were poc for woke points but not get in trouble for art depicting them as white ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

SJM pls stay away from “like calls to like” you don’t deserve it

[cssns]

Hello again everyone!!! Please help me welcome @shardminds to the CSSNS!!!

Tumblr Name 

@shardminds​

How long have you been in the CS/OUAT fandom? 

It's been about six months. I binged watched OUAT in September '19 and immediately dusted the two years of dust off this tumblr account to get stuck in. I've met so many lovely people and met some fantastic friends!

When did you start shipping Captain Swan? 

Tallahassee! I know they hadn't had much screen time at that point and Killian was well and truly a bad guy but enemies/rivals to lovers is one of my favourite tropes. I started reading fic when I was partway through season 5 and that just solidified my love for them as characters and as a pairing.

What drew you to this event? 

EVERYTHING! The combinations of CS and supernatural subject matter is a match made in heaven for me. I love supernatural elements in fiction. Vampires? Werewolves? Ghosts? Magic? Demons? All of it! I'm so excited to be able to take part! Also, so many fantastic CS works have come from this event in previous years. I can't wait to see what this year brings!

What inspired your topic? 

In short: The Witcher universe. I hadn't even considered that I could use it as my CSSNS idea until Nat @carpedzem​ reminded me that I'd promised her a CS Witcher!AU late last year. It's all grown from there. I could go on and on about the lore and the intricacies of the world have been my favourite to get lost in for the past 5 years but... I'm hoping it'll all show when the fic drops. 

If you would like to share a snippet/sneak peek/summary of your fic or artwork, please use the space below. 

For the first time in a long time, he’s asleep before his head hits the pillow. The exhaustion of the weeks passed weighing his bones like lead, as if they’d sink straight through the mattress and into the nether below. He wishes they would. 

“Killian.” 

He jerks awake—no, not awake. Asleep. Further into the embrace of a dream. Oppressive darkness and silence surround him, his keenest senses rendered useless in their wake. Beneath him, a plush leather armchair. It’s painfully familiar. Precious, somewhat. Worn and comfortable and moulded to him as if he’d spent a century sat only here. This dreamscape. This void.

 Oneiromancy. Perfect. 

“Killian.” 

A woman’s voice— her voice. 

“Emma.” 

“And I thought you’d forgotten about me.” She smiles, suddenly appearing in his lap, hips straddling his thighs as if it hadn’t been almost five years since they’d last parted. Five long, arduous years. 

“Impossible, love. You’re not so easy to forget.” Killian can feel the steady beat of her heart as his hands instinctively take her waist. Soft, so soft. And centuries old. 

“You never thought to stop by on your travels then?” 

“The path is—”

“The path is the path. I know.” Pouting, she brings her arms around Killian’s neck. The thin swath of lace she’s wearing does nothing to hide her figure but its intricacies marr the details he wants very much to focus on; the blush of her breasts, the swell of her arse, what lies between those slender legs. Each time he tries to take her in, see past the veil of fabric, it shifts, obscuring his gaze once more. Fucking magic. “But I have missed you terribly.” 

“Emma Swan, legendary sorceress and advisor to the throne of Misthaven, missing but a lowly Witcher?” The pale expanse of her neck calls for his kiss, so close and yet so far. “People will talk.” 

With a violet flash, Emma winks. “Noise complaints, hopefully.” 

His eyes slip shut, trying to maintain what little composure he has left. As disconcerting as dream magic is, he doesn’t want the spell to end. The feel of her so close is maddening. Waking to an empty bed will be torture. 

Words he can’t possibly say nor mean jump to his throat, aching to be whispered against her mouth, passed to her tongue by his own. They burn. 

“Come see me.” 

“Emma—” 

“I need you. I can’t tell you why—not here—but I need you.” There’s a silent plea hidden in her words, behind the typical bravado she always favours. He almost doesn’t catch it. She adjusts herself slightly, sitting back on his knees and letting her hands reverently trace the scars across his shoulders and chest. Ones she’s seen before and ones she hasn’t, long healed but still raw to her touch. It’s been too long. Her tongue darts out to wet her lips and it takes every modicum of restraint he has not to kiss her there and then. “Come to King David’s court in Misthaven. There’s a tourney one week from now.” 

“I’m sensing I don’t have a choice.” 

“Of course you have a choice. It’s in your best interests to make the right one.” 

Killian sighs, letting his palms slide from her middle to her thighs, taking in the phantom warmth he’s missed so greatly. Emma Swan is an enigma. She’s centuries of power wrapped in mystery and untold sorrows and it lingers beneath her skin. She’s the first kiss of morning sun, the dark chill of winter, the wild lilacs that grow along the dirt roads of Misthaven. She’s true love’s first kiss and the denial of destiny. She’s nothing and everything, the beginning and the end. 

And, occasionally, his. 

“One week?” He muses, too focused on the way her nails feel against his skin, as if she were there, as if it were real. Her eyes, green as woodland moss, captivate him in the way they always used to, but they’re not the same. A mere mimicry. Beneath his fingers, the dream begins to fall away.

There’s no depth, no glimmer of magic below the surface. 

Everything’s hollow and when he finally presses his lips to her fading visage, all he tastes is ash, dirt and the absence of all things. 

“One week.” 

It echoes around the cramped room, a whisper in the darkness not yet reached by morning’s soft first touches. A reminder. 

What are you looking forward to most about participating in this event? 

READING EVERYONE'S ENTRIES! SEEING EVERYONE'S ART! CELEBRATING THIS SPECTACULAR SPOOKY SUMMER EVENT ♥

I’m not familiar with the Witcher universe, but I am BESIDE myself for this fic!!! I can’t wait to read it when it drops on July 13!!! Everyone go welcome Ems to the event and give her lots of love!!!

[missysmadhouse]

Full Moon Rising: Beware of the Big Bad Werewolf

Source: BBC News

Alongside vampires and zombies, werewolves have long been a part of everyone's favorite "things that go bump in the night." Werewolves have been stalking us in our nightmares (or dreams - however you like it) from the 1941 film "The Wolf Man" to 80's classics "The Howling" and "American Werewolf in London" to the Underworld series of the 2000's and beyond. Werewolf stories have evolved over the years from 1941's tortured Lawrence Talbot to rebellious, proud lycan Lucien in the Underworld series. Werewolves have carved their own niche in fiction, film and TV. What inspired tales of humans who morph into animals by the light of the full moon?

The first image of a human becoming a wolf is in the oldest known work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates back to 1800 B.C.E. in ancient Mesopotamia. Gilgamesh rejects a woman after finding out that she turned her former lover into a wolf. An ancient Greek myth, The Legend of Lycaon, tells the story of how Zeus turns Lycaon into a wolf after Lycaon serves him a meal made from the remains of a sacrificed boy. The Saga of Volsungs is a Nordic folktale about magical wolf pelts that can turn anyone wearing them into a wolf for 10 days. In the story, a father and son find the pelts and go on a woodland killing spree, which ends with a brutal fight between the two. The father dies and leaves behind a leaf with healing properties which the son uses to recover from his injuries.

Traditional folklore dictates that a human becomes a werewolf by being bitten by a werewolf, can only change during the full moon and can only be killed by a silver bullet. Over the centuries, folklore has provided many other ways a person could become a werewolf: sleeping outside during a full moon on a Friday, eating a combination of wolf and human meat, a witch's curse, being conceived during a new moon, drinking water touched by a wolf and eating certain herbs.

Many people associate the moon with werewolves. The origin of the belief that the full moon can cause all sorts of chaos is unknown. After being reinforced over the years, this belief has created an expectation of nothing but trouble during a full moon.

Source: Wikipedia; Illustration by J.W. Smith

There were, however, several cures for werewolves to rid themselves of their affliction. Some cures recommended by medieval medical practitioners included surgery, vomiting, drinking vinegar and bloodletting. Sometimes, these cures were the exact opposite, leading to the death of a patient. The alternatives to medicinal cures were an exorcism or a silver bullet.

Any being that's part of folklore has had gained fame or notoriety with a real person or event. Sightings and encounters with all sorts of beings have been reported throughout the ages such as vampires, sasquatch, fairies and lake monsters. The history of werewolves includes many cases of people who claimed to be werewolves.

In 14th century Germany, Peter Stubbe, a wealthy farmer, claimed that he owned a magical belt that turned him into a wolf and that, in wolf form, he had killed several people. There was a group of hunters who claimed that they saw him change from wolf to human. Stubbe confessed to 12 murders that were allegedly committed over a period of 25 years. Stubbe made his confession after being subjected to brutal torture. There was no evidence of any murders having committed by Stubbe.

In an odd little twist, Stubbe was executed on Halloween in 1589. He was beheaded, then burned at the stake. Belief in werewolves was common during the middle ages. The consensus was that werewolves were created by a witch's curse.

Three other confessed werewolves would meet the same fate. During the same time period in France, Giles Garnier, Michel Verdun and Pierre Burgot, in three separate cases, all claimed that they had an ointment that turned them into wolves, causing them to kill and devour children. They were all burned at the stake.

Let's return to Germany, home of the infamous Peter Stubbe. During the 18th century, a young boy was found in the woods exhibiting animalistic behavior. Dubbed "Peter the Wild Boy," he was unable to speak, walked on all fours and ate with his hands. The general consensus was that he was either a werewolf or raised by wolves.

"Peter" was eventually adopted as a "pet" by the courts of King George I and King George II. Current medical knowledge has been applied to Peter's case. Most likely, he suffered from Pitt-Hopkins syndrome, which was discovered in 1978. Pitt-Hopkins syndrome impairs speech, intellect, the respiratory system and can cause seizures and also affect facial features.

Two people who were born with hypertrichosis. Top photo: Barbara Vanbeck; Source: Medical News Today (Image Credit: Wellcome Images, 2014); Portrait by R. Gaywood, 1656. Bottom: Petrus Gonzales, the Wolf Boy of the Canary Islands; Source: Ashland Science

Many other conditions both physiological and psychological have contributed to the werewolf myth. Hypertrichosis is a rare genetic disorder that causes hair growth to the extent of giving a human being a wolf-like appearance. Lycanthropy is a rare psychological disorder which causes a person to have delusions of changing into an animal. Rabies has also been mentioned as a possible culprit contributing to werewolf folklore as well as food poisoning and hallucinogenic herbs (perhaps ingredients in a "werewolf" ointment).

The mention of food poisoning and hallucinogens makes me think of the theory that ergot poisoning led to the infamous 18th century witch hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts, which led to the execution of several alleged "witches." Ergot poisoning is caused by fungus that grows on rye as well as other types of cereals. In 1976, Linnda Caporael presented the argument that many of the characteristics exhibited by those who were described as "bewitched" in records of the trials, matched the symptoms of ergot poisoning (hallucinations, muscle contractions, psychosis, etc.). Besides an abundance of rye in the area, the climate would've caused conditions that could've produced the fungus.

Eating bread produced by tainted wheat may have caused mass witch hysteria in Salem. Food poisoning could have also created werewolves.

From the myths of ancient civilizations to contemporary pop culture, werewolves have captured our imaginations in many ways. Whether we love to hate them, hate to love them or long to embrace them, werewolves and other shape-shifters will continue to fascinate the dark side of the human imagination for many years to come.

- Missy Dawn

Sources:

"Werewolf Legends," August 21, 2018, History.com, by History.com editors

"Werewolves: Lore, Legend & Lycanthropy," by Benjamin Radford, LiveScience

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: The Volturi

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

The Twilight Saga is one of the most intriguing works of literature of the 21st century, particularly how it has a rich, expansive cast of characters with interesting backstories and motives that get sidelined for the story of the two most generic characters in the entire tale. This is apparent mainly in the Cullens – Carlisle, Jasper, and Alice especially – but it also does hit the villains particularly hard as well.

The Volturi are the most powerful coven in the world of Twilight, essentially the lawmakers and royals who govern all other vampires. For 3000 years, they’ve governed over the vampire rule with iron fists, stamping out anything that might expose the existence of vampires to humans. Their word is unquestioned by the vampires of Earth, their justice is swift to those who break their laws, and their three leaders – Aro, Caius, and Marcus – are forces to be reckoned with.

Naturally, they never receive any sort of comeuppance and are relegated to minor, supporting roles in the story. But what a role they have, and how oh so very interesting they end up being even with their limited interactions with the central cast.

Actor: Aro, the conniving leader, is portrayed by Michael Sheen in the films; naturally, he is the best character of the lot, because Michael Sheen is just a treasure and much of what he touches turns to gold. He really puts forth that charming, affable front Aro needs while giving that beautiful undercurrent of manipulative sleaziness that makes Aro a fan-favorite villain.  As Todd in the Shadows said on Twitter, “The first TWILIGHT gives Michael Sheen the least to do (he's only given a meager zero seconds of screen time, what a waste). He's also not in ECLIPSE (the best movie in the series) but I feel much happier knowing that he at least exists in this universe,”

Jamie Campbell Bower, best known for playing the twink from Sweeney Todd, is Caius, and while this might seem rather silly, the juxtaposition of how absolutely gorgeous Caius is and how absolutely, horrifyingly evil he is just really makes him a more enjoyable villain. Sadly he does not quite steal the show to the extent that Aro does, but expecting other actors to be Michael Sheen is not a good thing to do in the first place.

Christopher Heyerdahl rounds out the trio as Marcus, and while he has the absolute least to do as Marcus is such a depressed slug he does nothing of note in the books or movies, he does at least accurately portray the uncomfortable melancholy and abject boredom Marcus feels in a way that I feel is rather overlooked. As little as he contributes on a surface level, I do feel that the Volturi would be missing something with Marcus and his glum demeanor hanging around, so props to Heyerdahl to adding that extra little spice to the trio, even if it is ultimately easy to miss.

Motivation/Goals: Their goal is simple: to rule over vampires and ensure the species is not wiped out by ensuring they stay in the shadows and don’t overfeed as well as ensuring to keep the numbers in check and recruiting powerful allies to their cause. Their rule is such that even the mere mention of their name can strike fear into the hearts of vampires, and their law is so ingrained in vampire culture that the rules are passed down from vampire to vampire with ease. And yes, if all this sounds totally reasonable, I do agree in principle; the problem is, at least in Aro and Caius’ cases, they are power-hungry psychopaths who seem to be going a bit mad from ruling for about three thousand years.

Aro in particular has gone way beyond the pale in his desire to rule, down to murdering his own sister so that he can manipulate Marcus into ruling with him, while Caius is just an out-and-out psychopath who enjoys violence and torture. Marcus is really the only one who gets away relatively clean, as he is just too depressed and bored to do much of anything, but it’s not like he really argues against what his co-rulers do.

Personality: Aro stands out the most, thanks to be cheery, outgoing, and friendly in his dealings with Bella and the Cullens, but of course this is all but a front; he is a tyrannical vampire dictator after all. He’s also a little bit loopy after thousands of years of exerting his rule, which certainly is evident in how Michael Sheen portrays him. I think what really seals the deal on his true nature is the fact he murdered his own sister, who his friend Marcus loved, just to keep him in the Volturi, and to this day Marcus has never discovered his lover’s killer, never known that he is always right nearby posing as his friend. With actions like that, Aro certainly seals himself in as the most wicked of the Volturi, a tall feat considering Caius.

Caius is absolutely cruel and merciless. He always advocates for the cruelest methods in any given situation, he never wants to take the peaceful route, and if the opportunity arises in which he can end something in violence, he will take it; look how he resolved things in Breaking Dawn where, unsatisfied with a peaceful resolution, he gained a compromise by slaughtering the vampire Irina. He is certainly the most outwardly evil of the three.

Marcus is the least developed, but there’s actually a good story reason for this: he’s bored and depressed due to the death of his beloved, and really feels like he only goes along with Aro because he is his brother-in-law.

Final Fate: Shockingly, the Volturi not only don’t really suffer any sort of setback in Breaking Dawn, they leave peacefully; Aro does witness all of them dying in the most epically gruesome ways possible in a vision, but that doesn’t exactly count, so despite all they do they receive absolutely no comeuppance for their centuries of cruel actions. Aro and Caius really have it coming, to be honest, so it’s a shame that the vision was, well, a vision.

And though they do end up leaving peacefully, there is a catch; they are not exactly pleased with the Cullens for their actions. Kind of makes you wonder if the idyllic little happy ending of Edward and Bella’s will one day be rudely interrupted by the armies of the Volturi holding them down and forcing them to submit or die. We can only dream…

Best Scene: The trouble with the Volturi is that they are almost always all together, but by god, does their death scenes in the vision from Breaking Dawn: Part 2 really take the cake. Bella and Edward tag team Aro and end up decapitating him and then immolating his head, poor Marcus just accepts his fate and commits suicide by allowing himself to be torn apart, and Caius gets the single most brutal death in the franchise where they tear the entire top half of his head off. And it is just as brutal and horrifying as it sounds. Considering how they get away scot free with all of their heinous actions, this is pure and utter catharsis, though let’s be real, poor Marcus did not deserve that. Shame it was all just a vision.

Best Quote: Aro has easily one of the best quotes in the whole series, and it’s really not a quote: it is the utterly hilarious laugh he gives in the second Breaking Dawn film. Witness it for yourself and you will understand. I for one can’t even comprehend how a human being could possibly make a sound like that with their mouth, but by God did Michael Sheen find a way to do it. Frankly, it makes up for the fact the other two really have nothing particularly noteworthy to say.

Final Thoughts & Score: I think the Volturi are some of the best characters Stephanie Meyers created, and I find it a shame that she never really does anything with them other than have them steal every scene they’re in. It’s so weird, because we are so obviously supposed to be rooting against them due to them constantly getting in the way of the Culllens, but as evil and manipulative as they are… it’s hard to argue with some of the points they make. Like their most major and important rule is that vampires not be noticed by humans, and they make sure to regulate numbers of vampires so they don’t cause their stock to dwindle. Considering the behavior of a lot of other villainous vampires in the series, it’s hard to really paint them in a negative light. These guys are pretty much the only thing holding their entire race back from a self-destructive war with humans they know would not end well for them, so are they really that unreasonable?

I’d argue no, at least in theory. It’s pretty inarguable Caius and especially Aro are ruthless and power-hungry, desiring nothing more than to have total control over the vampire world, which they have gone out of their way to ensure they keep control of over the past 3000 years, with the open defiance of the Cullens being the big snarl. But the fact that Bella, Edward, and Renesmee all come across as ridiculously bland, obnoxious, unsympathetic, and creepy makes it really easy to root for them and wish they’d succeed. And of course, the fact that they have Michael Sheen portraying their leader in the films only exacerbates this; it’s the same sort of issue Ferngully had, really.

Aro is easily a 9/10, a testament to how good Meyers could be if she knew where to focus her writing as well as a testament to the fact that Michael Sheen is just an absolute blast. His performance steals the show from everyone else, and he easily overshadows his compatriots; combine that with just how evil and manipulative he is and you have a delightfully devilish vampiric villian. Frankly, Sheen really does deserve most of the credit, because he is able to not only carry the Volturi scenes due to Aro talking the most in them, he manages to make the others look cooler just by being in close proximity to him. They don’t have to do anything, just the fact they’re working alongside this manipulative loon is enough to make them cool.

Caius is a solid 8/10. While he’s nowhere near as hammy and enjoyable as Aro, he is just so disgustingly, unrepetantly evil and cruel it’s not hard to be a fan of him. Combine that with the fact he’s such a gorgeous man, a stark contrast to his hideous black heart, and you have quite a villain, even if he doesn’t quite reach the levels Aro does. The fact that he gets the coolest death in the entire series (even if it doesn’t actually happen for real) really is just icing on the cake.

Marcus is a bit tricky. He really lacks any sort of presence, he’s sort of a non-entity, and he frankly feels like a waste of a character. Here is a character who, with what his backstory reveals, would be a perfect candidate for a turn against his fellow Volturi and perhaps lead to a grand full-scale vampire war in which the Cullens overthrow the “oppressive” government. And Meyers does absolutely nothing with this, and the movies don’t really do anything with it either. Still, I do like the backstory given in supplementary material, and he just seems so sad and miserable all the time; you really get the feel of the tragedy of this character, even if you don’t necessarily have it spelled outright to you. I think he deserves a 5/10 at the least, because I love his concept, backstory, and just general sadness, but so little is done with him I can’t justify giving him anything higher.

It says a lot about how accidentally great the Volturi are that even the guy who barely does anything at all except look sad still gets to be average at worst, though. I don’t think Meyers really comprehended what she had on her hands with these guys, but their actors sure did, and the fans realized more than her, and altogether the Volturi have become one of the most popular parts of the series. And really, they deserve it, as they are portrayed perfectly (especially Aro, though I’m sure I’ve stressed that enough) and steal every single scene they are in. The whole Twilight Saga is so overdone, overdramatic, and campy that this trio of utterly extra vampire dictators are not only the logical step for the villains of this tacky romantic tale, they make the story infinitely better by existing in it.

[tisfan]

Title: (Consider this) The Hint of the Century @tisfan Square: R1 - KINK: mind-controlled sex WinterIron Bingo: B2 - Losing Religion @27dragons TSB: S4 - Resurrection  Warning: dub-con (ish), anal sex, ghosts, possession, Bucky has a plan, this wasn’t it Pairing: Bucky/Tony Summary: It’s just a box that they found in the crypt of a desecrated old church that rumor says is haunted. What could possibly go wrong?Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19107763 Word Count: 7382

For @tonystarkbingo and @winterironbingo

A/n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Puller_von_Hohenburg Richard and Anton are, in fact, real people who had a real relationship and were burned at the stake for it. Obviously, we’ve fic’d it up a bit, but here’s where the origin story came from. 

“God, this place is probably older than I am,” Bucky said, looking around the demolished remains of the cathedral. Admittedly, they were in central Europe in one of those countries that Americans could never seem to remember the name of, and therefore something that was only five hundred years old were ‘upstart buildings.’ So it probably didn’t matter that they’d wrecked the place.

It really wasn’t their fault, Bucky was going to raise his hand and swear before God that they did not mean to knock down the church.

Some wanna be sorcerer had taken over the joint, raised a bunch of zombies with some magical… thingie… and made a complete mess of the entire area, terrorizing the locals. The Avengers hadn’t been called in until the Ghost dude -- he’d shouted his villainy name as being the Ghost Whisperer, or something -- had brought down a damn aircraft with a resurrected pterodactyl. Bucky wasn’t entirely paying attention to the rant-and-rave, being much too involved in the set up and take down part of the operation -- and he was being dragged away by a combination of local police and Dr. Strange.

Tony was consulting with the local police, which involved a lot of hand-waving, and he was clearly growing more and more annoyed by the second. Finally, he stomped back over to Bucky, rolling his eyes so hard that it looked painful. “Strange says the guy had some kind of magical pendant that he was using to... he wasn’t controlling the zombies with it -- that was the grimoire -- but to protect himself from them, maybe? I don’t know, magic doesn’t make any sense to me. Anyway, he doesn’t have it on him, so it’s got to be in there somewhere.” He waved a still-gauntleted hand toward the half-destroyed old church. “And the locals refuse to muster a crew to search for it, because they think the place is haunted.” Another eye-roll. “We just arrested the guy who was haunting it; you’d think they’d get that. But they don’t. So it’s up to us to dig through the mess and find the pendant.”

“Great,” Bucky said, watching Tony stride around through the rubble, occasionally assisted with a repulsored hop or delicate leap. Watching Tony in that armor was like witnessing a very aggressive ballet dancer. Beautiful, powerful, great ass-- Bucky sighed, shook his head. “Seems a little, I dunno, heretical or somethin’. Don’t you think? Digging through church wreckage? I feel bad enough about smashing the building to bits in the first place.”

Tony glanced back over his shoulder. “Didn’t take you for the religious type, Klondike. It’s just a building, really. And Strange says we really can’t let anyone else walk off with that pendant; we’ll just end up with another villain in three weeks.”

Bucky shrugged, a little sheepishly. “I grew up in in the 20’s and 30’s, Stark. I was an altar boy and everything. Used to take communion and listen to the litany in Latin.” He grumped about that; he’d been back to church a few times since Hydra. His first confession in seventy years had taken almost four hours, and he’d barely been able to talk for two days after he was done with his penance. But the service itself was in English, and that had been weird enough that Bucky had mostly given up the habit.

Tony tipped his head a little, which meant he was conceding the point. “Still, I’m pretty sure this place was deconsecrated long before we got here. Zombies will probably do that.” He crouched, took hold of a fallen beam, and heaved it out of the way. “...Huh. There’s a door in here. I didn’t notice that before.”

(more below the cut)

“Where, in the Sancrist-- oh.” Bucky stopped. “Uh. I think I know where he was getting the zombies from. That probably leads down to the catacombs.” He crossed himself, kissed his thumb, and then pushed the door open, very slowly. Haunted, the locals said. Bucky wondered if the place had been haunted before the Ghost Whisperer showed up.

Tony muttered something and a soft, wide light shone out of his chestplate, dimly illuminating the stairs leading down. He eyed the passageway. “Strange definitely said that closing the grimoire would drop any remaining zombies wandering around. So there’s nothing down there to worry about. Just...”

“Dead people.”

“Yeah, that.” Tony hesitated a moment longer, then sighed and started down the stairs. “Okay. Might as well get it over with.”

Bucky crept down behind him, torn between wanting to hold Tony’s hand, because part of him was always going to be that scared Catholic boy who was positive he was going to hell, and the other half wanting to yell Boo and see if Tony shrieked like a little kid, because that would be funny as shit.

“Did the locals specifically say what was haunting, around here, I mean, are we talking angry poltergeist that throws the bones of the dead at us, or just scary sounds at night?”

He was working himself right up, that’s exactly what he was doing. Given that they’d been fighting zombies in the morning, complete with the whole hunger for brains and the horrible smell, he was pretty sure he could be excused.

Still…

“Nope, just ‘haunted’ and ‘cursed’, over and over,” Tony said, sounding annoyed. “There was a bit in there about... it didn’t translate well. The two in one body? The two who became one? Something like that.” He glanced back as he reached the bottom, flashing Bucky that insouciant smirk. “So maybe there’s only two ghosts. I bet we can take ‘em.”

“Lovely,” Bucky said. “I don’t really want to take them anywhere. It’s not like it’s their fault that they’re dead. Someone mucking around with the natural order of shit. Oh-- look at that!”

Bucky turned as something glinted and glittered. It probably should have been blue, reflecting the arc-reactor, but it wasn’t. It was golden, sunshine, and pure. Beautiful. A tomb, carved from marble and inlaid with gold.

On the top of what looked like a double-sized burial chamber were two marble statuettes, naked and beautifully done, almost lifelike, reaching for each other but never quite touching.

“Wow.”

“You said it,” Tony agreed. He came over to look at the tableau. “There’s no dust on them.”

“It’s beautiful,” Bucky said, staring up at the statue. While gorgeously done -- Michelangelo's David might well have been jealous -- the expressions on the statues faces were of people who were in terrible pain. Grief, or despair. Bucky’s gaze was drawn to the space between their hands. “Sad, though.” He walked all the way around the statuary, and then-- “Huh, what’s this, I wonder.” He pointed to a reliquary at the end. There were strange marks on it, but the container didn’t look locked or anything.

“How should I know?” Tony wondered. “You think the pendant might be in there?”

Bucky reached for the box; gold and colored enamel, pictures. He squinted, picked it up. “There’s a story here.” He turned the box around in his hands until he found the beginning, an ancient series of events. A wedding, but the man was looking over his new wife’s shoulder-- at her brother, maybe? The estranged couple fighting, the man fleeing to be with his lover. “God, they were burned at the stake.” Bucky shuddered, still looking at the pictures.

“Well, that’s horrible. What are they doing in the church? I thought heretics weren’t allowed proper burial, or something like that?” Tony came closer, shining his light a little more clearly on the box.

“I don’t know,” Bucky said, his fingers grazing over the lid. “I wonder what’s in it.”

“You probably shouldn’t open that,” Tony said sharply.

“I just want to see,” Bucky protested. “It’s just a box, what harm can there be in looking inside a box?”

“Have you not paid any attention to the movies we’ve watched? At all? There are dozens of movies that explain why it’s a bad idea to open random artifacts in a cursed graveyard.”

“If I took your movies seriously, I wouldn’t go to the beach, either,” Bucky said, getting his nails under the lid and prying at it. “Man-eating sharks and everything.” Ahhh, there, there was a little catch under one side, and he pressed it. “Ha, got it!”

The box opened with a soft hiss and a delicate blue mist flowed out, all shiny, pretty, something highly magical is going on here fog. Great special effects, Bucky had time to think before he inhaled--

Richard von Hohenburg opened his eyes for the first time in six hundred years, looking around. The church, where they’d been tortured, forced to confess, burned, and then cursed. As if what they’d done was so terrible.

He’d been locked in a tiny space, no body, no anything. No contact with the realms of the dead. And sensing that Anton was nearby, sensing it, but not being able to touch him, tell him, apologize, nothing.

But he had eyes now. He could see now.

“Anton?”

                                                        ***

“It’s just a box, what harm can there be in looking inside a box?”

Tony nearly choked on his own spit. “Have you not paid any attention to the movies we’ve watched? At all?” To be fair, Tony hadn’t been paying a lot of attention during those movies, himself, largely because he’d spent them surreptitiously watching Bucky. Not that he had any intention of ever telling Bucky that. “There are dozens of movies that explain why it’s a bad idea to open random artifacts in a cursed graveyard.”

“If I took your movies seriously, I wouldn’t go to the beach, either. Man-eating sharks and everything.” Bucky was peering around the edges and seams of the box, and Tony couldn’t quite suppress a foreboding feeling.

“Maybe we should--”

“Ha, got it!” Bucky flashed Tony a grin, that bright, boyish smile that lit up the room and seemed to dissolve at least half a century’s worth of suffering from Bucky’s eyes.

Which meant that Tony saw, before Bucky, the glowing blue mist that curled up out of the box. “Bucky, back away!” But the mist had already slithered into Bucky’s mouth and nose like a hundred sparkling snakes, and was spreading rapidly.

Tony snapped his helmet closed. “Bucky! Are you okay?”

Bucky’s eyes met his, and for a moment, their normal stormcloud gray flickered and flashed the same blue as the mist.

“Shit, Bu--” The mist was seeping right through his armor, because of course it was, because fucking magic, and this was why Tony was never going on a magic mission again without--

Anton Mätzler gasped his first breath in centuries, since the smoke of the fires had choked out his last. He staggered back, away from the cursed relic with its compartments, keeping him from his beloved even in death.

“Anton?”

Anton’s head turned toward the sound of his name, a voice that was both utterly unfamiliar and at once well-known. “Richard, love?”

“What’s… what’s happened to us?” Richard was staring down at his hands, one was normal, human, if wearing strange gloves with no fingers, but the other-- the other was gleaming silver, unyielding metal, but as flexible as a normal hand. “And you, Anton, my dearest, look at yourself, clad in armor, like a knight?”

Anton looked down at himself. It was a strange armor indeed, with more of magic about it than metalsmith, ghostly messages and symbols writ across his very vision. “A strange knight, indeed,” he said uneasily. “I wonder how one removes such armor.” No sooner had he spoken the words than the armor... unfolded itself, spilling him out into the dank air of -- the crypts? Long abandoned, the sacred tombs fallen into disrepair and rot.

Anton felt no pity for them. Not after what they’d done to him, and to Richard.

He turned toward Richard, hands outstretched. “My love... I know not how this miracle has come to pass, but I can only be joyful to see you again. To touch your hand, your face...”

“I must say, you don’t look quite like yourself, but--” Richard came over to stand directly in front of him, clasped Anton’s hands in his own, and spread them, admiring. “It is a good form, nonetheless. And quite well-displayed in those strange garments. T’was always your brilliant mind that most captivated me, my dearest, although I did not object to a lithe form beneath me.”

Anton laughed. “Nor did I object to being beneath you, though it was your kindness and patience for which I first loved you.”

“Hey, hey, hey, sorry to interrupt, guys--” the voice that came from Richard’s throat was the same, but had a faster, less formal way of talking, an almost incomprehensible rumbling accent. “Tony-- Tony, you okay in there? Stark. Come on--”

Anton shook his head. “I know not this Tony--” And then it seemed he was rudely pushed aside, shoved to the back of his own consciousness, though he felt his throat working as he said, “I’m here, I’m here, Buckaroo, I’m okay. I think.”

Anton tried to push his way back to the forefront. “What sorcery is this?”

“I’m fuckin’ possessed,” Richard complained. “I owe you, like a hundred fuckin’ beers man, when we get out of this--”

“Stop! These forms are ours now,” Richard continued, face working uncomfortably as he seized control of the spirits that shared their bodies. “We have earned this, through countless centuries of torment. You will not--”

“Uh, no, dude, no, just-- ow!”

Richard went to one knee, heaving as if he was going to cast up his accounts, but when he looked back up, from his position on the floor, the twinkle in his eye and the suggestive smirk was entirely Richard’s own. There was a time when Anton would have killed for that look; a time where he had died for it.

Anton felt his own co-habitant jostling him, and wrestled for control. “Bucky! What the hell did you do to him, you--” Anton twisted back into place. “Please,” he said. “We died for our love, only to be held forever apart, unable to so much as whisper. Grant us a short while, at least!” With all his strength, he summoned his memories of the torture -- beatings and burnings, heavy chains and the ducking stool -- and pushed them at his host.

The body stumbled, and it was not Anton’s doing. “Christ,” the other said. “That’s--”

“Here, I’m here, my darling,” Richard said, and it was beyond heaven to be clasped in strong arms, willing to hold him, eager and exalting. “Let me kiss those honeyed lips, so long denied me.”

A kiss, tender and sweet, was pressed against Anton’s forehead, and even if the body was not his own, he felt it, keenly. Doubled, even, with a taste of regret, guilt… longing, underneath, until the sensation was almost unbearable.

Anton pressed into Richard’s arms, and if the feel of the metal one at his back was strange and unyielding, the gentle caresses of the other more than made up for it. “I love you,” Anton whispered, aching with the strength and sincerity of that emotion. “I could not recant that, even in the flames.”

“Nor did I,” Richard promised him. “Thus, this elaborate prison to keep us apart.” He spat through his fingers, protection from evil magics. “And I have you back, in my arms again, and nothing will keep me from you.” He stroked his fingers through Anton’s hair. “Say you will still be mine?”

“I have never been anything else,” Anton swore, “not since the moment of our first meeting.”

“Uh, hey--” The spirit that inhabited Richard’s body shivered and shuddered, “look, no, come on, romantical as all this is, I ain’t-- that’s Tony’s body and this one’s mine, and we’re gonna have to take up habitation again, an’ okay, no, seriously, that’s not fair, get out.. Get out of my memories!”

Anton felt his host’s frantic terror and fiery rage and laughed, delighted. “I believe these two hold each other in near as much esteem as we feel for one another,” he confided.

“It’s not like that--” Richard’s host snarled. “I ain’t nothin’ to him, an’ I don’t…”

“Shhhh, it shall all be well, my host,” Richard said. “You hunger for him, and you shall have him. It will be well. We will treat him… very well.”

“He doesn’t hunger; are you insane?” Anton’s host snapped. “Look, I’m sorry you got killed and locked up in a box for so long, but he’s not interested and you can’t just--”

Anton wrapped mental arms around his host. “My Richard does not lie,” he promised. “Nor are we mad, except with wanting each other. Let us have this, and enjoy your own desires come into fruition.”

“Tony--” and there was not a lot of change in the longing in Richard’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t know, maybe it’s me. I can’t… I can’t fight it.”

“Bucky.” Anton’s hand tightened on Richard’s. “It’s, it’s okay. I don’t mind. Not if it’s you.”

And then, with an eager, fervid groan, Richard’s mouth was on his; a kiss of no finesse, no sweetness, but instead all avid hunger, devouring Anton, as if they could become one, as if they could hold each other tight enough to never have to let go.

Anton moaned, surrendering himself to that kiss, wrapping his arms around Richard’s shoulders, clasping at Richard’s clothes and hair and arms, anything he could reach, scrambling to press closer and closer yet, as if determined to merge their bodies into one.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you, Tony, it’s okay,” and that was not Richard, but as he’d stopped fighting, and was letting those hands touch and caress, seemed to know how to unfasten the strange clothing they both wore, had stopped resisting and was now actively helping… well, it was good. It would be well.

Anton’s host -- Tony, apparently, and how strange that their names were so similar -- came forward again, more gently this time, showing Anton the strange clasps and catches that held Richard’s clothes together. “Yeah,” he said. “You always do. I’ve got you, too.”

Too hungry for his lover’s kiss to speak, Anton pressed their mouths together again, tongue flicking at the corner of Richard’s mouth, teasing and tasting.

Richard cupped his jaw with one hand, his thumb teasing at the corner of Anton’s mouth, coaxing it open. “Ain’t you sweet,” he murmured and Anton didn’t even know anymore, who was who, but it didn’t matter, those clever fingers were stroking his skin, raking passion up from the coals that had long since been banked.

Richard ran those hands down his chest, thumbing nipples erect, and then, “Beltpouch, second from the left,” he said, which made no sense whatsoever to Anton, but his host -- Tony -- was already sliding their hand into the indicated-- pocket? On a belt?

What Tony found there was some sort of packet, shiny like metal but softer, and whatever it was, it amused Tony greatly. “Really?” he said. “On a mission?”

“Look, you wanna go in dry with some randy old ghosts, be my guest,” Bucky said, and that didn’t make sense either, but that metal hand was curling around Anton’s member, stroking light. The metal wasn’t cold, either, but warmer than human flesh, and there was the faintest shuddering to it, a vibration from deep inside that stimulated and aroused. “But I done my share of trench quickies, an’ I’d rather be prepared.”

Still amused, Tony conceded the point. A deft twist of their hands opened the packet, and then Tony retreated a little, shooting Anton a burst of memories demonstrating the purpose of the contents -- it was like oil, it seemed, for this very purpose. Anton poured some over his fingers and -- oh, Tony had not been exaggerating; it was so much better than oil. Slicker, smoother. Anton reached between his legs and pushed the stuff into his hole, shuddering at the sweet burn of it.

“God,” Richard said. “You’re so beautiful.”

And Richard was nudging Anton over onto his knees, helping spread the oil, rubbing at the opening of his body eagerly, spreading it, tugging. “Careful now, you gotta-- gentle. It’s… well, I ain’t gonna apologize, but it’s a lot.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Anton returned, teasing. “But I have waited too long to delay any more than necessary. I would have you, my love, and soon.”

One finger pressed inside, thrusting, the slick easing the way, smooth and silky and perfect. Then a second, and that burned, but Anton had experienced fires much more potent, and all it did was make him whine and twist his hips, urging.

The fingers withdrew and then, yes, there it was, pressing urgently on him, and he bent his back, fingers clenching at the stone underneath him.

“Tony--”

“Yes,” they gasped, and Anton wasn’t sure which of them it was, speaking. “I need you, now.”

A strangled moan, hands gripping Anton’s hips, and he was pulled, slowly, impaling himself on Richard’s fine tool, filling him up, stretching him out. One hand went to the small of Anton’s back, rubbing in soft, soothing circles, tracing the line of his spine, and then gripped the curly mass of his hair, tugging his head back.

Anton gasped, curving his back even more, keening at the overload of sensations. “Fill me,” he begged, all shame long since gone, burnt up in their holy fire until all that was left of him was wanton desire, a burning need hotter than any flame. “My love, please!”

“I have you, I--” It was all hard, urgent rhythm then, being thrust into and pulled back from. The body that covered his was unfamiliar, and at the same time, that same, tender lover that Anton had given everything to, and been everything for. They moved together, hurried, racing toward release, eager to share in each other, the way they always had, and it was sweet, and rough, and just this side of blissful.

They moved together, push and pull, rocking together, words unimportant, only feelings, and the fire inside them, until..

“Oh, yes, yes, my darling!”

Anton cried out, groping for his own member; it took no more than a half-dozen frantic strokes before he was spilling, his whole body aching as it tried to clench down around Richard’s still-firm erection. He shivered and shuddered with the force of his release, a sudden wash of relaxation sweeping over him, like a deluge of warm spring rain.

Richard matched him, then moved slowly with him, stroking him down, soothing and sweet, and then he stiffened, biting down on Anton’s shoulder to stifle his scream. “Oh, oh, my darling,” he was saying, kissing the skin, as if tasting the imprint he’d left, his soft tongue stealing away the sting. “It’s always been you. Always you. Forever.”

“Until the end of days,” Anton promised, lassitude creeping in. “My only love.” How he longed for a bed, or even a rough pallet, where they could lie together and rest, tangled in one another’s arms.

“Look, a bed we got,” Richard said, apparently negotiating with his host. “Jus’ need to finish our mission here, yeah? There’s a guy, he hurt a lot of people, an’-- we’re looking for a pendant, about -- so big? You seen anything like that?”

“The priest who tried us wore an amulet of that size,” Anton recalled, sitting back on his heels. “He would have been buried...” Anton considered the catacombs, then pointed. “In that chamber.”

“Thanks,” Richard said, and offered him a hand up, already finding and pulling on his clothes. He made a face, apologetic, and handed Anton a-- surprisingly soft -- pale white shirt with no buttons and no laces. “T’ clean up--”

Anton might have protested, but what else was there to use? He wiped away the oil and the rest of it, rolling the shirt up around it. His host rolled their eyes. “Come on,” Tony said, “let’s find this pendant and get out of here.”

That chamber had been half-heartedly cleaned, and someone had set up a bedroll, and a desk. The cellar had been partially cracked open, perhaps in the battle, but Richard’s host was able to lift a portion of the collapsed rock out of the way.

“Our ghost whisperer,” Richard’s host said. “So, he probably already ransacked this place. You see anything in this mess, Tony?”

Anton moved over to the desk, looking it over. It was a spindly little thing, flimsy and unimpressive. He pulled open the first drawer and shuffled aside a few scraps of paper, and--

Anton backed away. “I don’t like it,” he said decisively. The pendant gleamed with power, sharp-edged enough to separate a man from his own shadow. He couldn’t quite take his eyes off it.

Richard went to him, as if to shield him from the amulet. It buzzed with surging energies, gleaming. “That is what our forms came to find,” he said. “To destroy it, or see it safely locked away, so no one else would suffer what we have suffered. They are, I believe, good men.”

Tony grunted. “Well, that’s the goal,” he said. He looked around. “We need something to put it in, until we can make other arrangements.”

“The box,” Anton said, pointing back the way they’d come. “The prison held us for centuries; it will surely hold this amulet for as long as you need.”

“I shall retrieve it,” Richard said, and he leaned in to kiss Anton’s cheek, soft and sweet. It shouldn’t have hurt to watch him walk away, he was barely going out of sight, and Anton would be able to hear him the whole time. But still, it ached with concern, throbbed with fear. The last time he’d let Richard out of his sight, they’d been separated, imprisoned. Told always that if he was willing to recant, to confess, to point the finger at his lover, that he would be spared. Told that Richard had recanted.

Anton had never believed that. Ever.

And, in the end, he was thus proven. Faithful, through all the long-- “How long, even, has it been, good host? What is the year?”

“What? It’s twenty-nineteen. Er, two thousand nineteen.” Tony, too, was watching the way Richard had gone, though Anton rather suspected it was the host who occupied Tony’s thoughts.

“That is… quite a long while to be imprisoned and alone,” Anton said. “We died in the year of our Lord, 1482. Richard was a knight, from Switzerland. I was his servant… and his downfall. He gave me gifts, clothing and jewels, and-- I looked too high for my station, so the church… declared us heretics.”

“I’m sorry,” Tony said. “Things are... better, now.”

“This thing ain’t exactly light,” Richard’s host complained, coming back into the room, “but I guess it’ll do as good as any. Strange’ll make heads or tails out of the whole mess anyway. Pop it in the box.”

Anton reached out and then hesitated, not quite able to make himself touch the horrible thing. Tony took over, scooping it up. It felt cold, much colder than mere metal and stone should be, even in a crypt.

There was a tug, like something pulling at his soul, loosening it.

“You know you have to go, right?” Richard’s host said, and it was very gentle. He reached out, touched his flesh hand to the other side of the medallion. “Not back in the box, but… you died. It’s time t’ move on. Tony can make a big church donation, get the bishop t’ do Last Rites, or whatever.”

Anton’s vision blurred. “Must we? We’ve only just come together again, and I’ve missed you, my love, so much.”

“Wish for it,” Richard’s host said. “You can feel it, right? The power the amulet’s got over the dead. Stay together, all eternity. No heaven or hell without the other.”

“Richard?” Anton wasn’t even sure what he was asking, but he needed to see the spark of his lover in those strange gray eyes, one last time.

“I am here,” Richard said. “And I will-- always protect you. Even if I failed before, I can-- together. Always.”

“Always,” Anton promised through his tears. “Until the end of days.”

There was another tug, and--

“Well, that’s… look at you, all non-corporeal and shit,” Richard’s host said, although he wasn’t really the host anymore, and Anton couldn’t seem to bring himself to call him Bucky, like he was some sort of pet deer or something.

Nor was Anton still in Tony’s body. Rather, they floated above the two men, and when he looked at Richard, he saw -- a ghost, like a wisp of smoke caught in a Richard-shaped glass, but it was Richard, the countenance he’d known and loved. “Oh, my love.” He reached out and, incorporeal as Richard looked, he felt solid, even warm, to Anton’s touch.

“My most beloved,” Richard said. “Always. We will have it, our forever.”

“Uh, so, like, it was good to meet you an’ all, but we really need to get this thing gone and safe,” Bucky said. “An’ like, totally take a shower.”

“I’m seconding the shower idea,” Tony agreed. “You two lovebirds have a good time, now. Don’t spook anyone who doesn’t deserve it.” The ghosts barely even glanced at them, then they were fading away entirely, hands twined and hearts in their eyes.

Tony dropped the pendant into the box that Bucky was still holding and twisted the cover into place. “Right, well. That’s that, then, I guess.”

“It… uh, it was somethin’, all right,” Bucky said, not quite meeting Tony’s gaze, cheeks and neck flushing.

And they were both standing around in an abandoned and half-destroyed church’s catacombs in their underwear. Because they’d let a couple of ghosts use them to fuck.

Yeah, that was going to land pretty high on the Weird Shit rankings, and Tony was just going to hope Bucky attributed the embarrassing stuff Tony’d said to ghost. That would probably be for the best. “So. We should probably, you know. Get dressed. And get this back to Strange.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Totally that’s what we should do.” His hand fluttered a moment, like some wounded butterfly, in the space between them, and then dropped it before he could make contact. “Uh. Are you okay?”

“What? Fine,” Tony said, only a little brittle. “Never better. Well. Tired. And I really want that shower.” He eased past Bucky and went back to where his armor waited, his clothes still crumpled on the floor where they’d been dropped. He picked up his jeans and pulled them on.

“You know,” Bucky said, staring at his tactical armor, all over the place. “This is why Strange can portal. I gotta put all this shit back on… for what, ten minutes while we cross town?” Bucky gave Tony a grin, a little hesitant, like he wasn’t sure that Tony was going to laugh at his jokes anymore.

Tony grinned back. It wasn’t like he’d forgotten how to fake being relaxed and easy with someone he’d seen naked. And he didn’t want to stop laughing at Bucky’s jokes, anyway. They were friends, these days; once the awkward wore off, Tony wanted them to stay that way. “I mean, you could stroll across town shirtless,” he suggested. “Earn a lot of local goodwill that way.”

“I am shirtless,” Bucky pointed out. “You… uh… yeah, I have a tac-vest, but. My undershirt was sacrificed to the cause. It’s good, it’s great. I mean… we’re okay, yeah?”

“Of course,” Tony said. He pulled on his t-shirt and stepped back into the armor. “I mean, awkward. But no reason not to be okay.”

Bucky just nodded at that, threw the tac vest on and didn’t bother to lock it in place, showing off arms, and ribs, and the very bottom strip of his belly between his pants and the bottom of the vest. He bent down and hefted the case under one arm, and his gun in the other hand. He didn’t say anything then, either, just jerked his chin toward the exit, watching Tony with eyes that seemed somehow… thoughtful.

Tony wondered what those thoughts were, but shut that down almost immediately. It didn’t matter. They were going back to their separate rooms at the hotel, take hot showers, and catch a night’s sleep. And then in the morning, everything would be back to normal. He nodded and made his way back out of the church.

                                                          ***

Bucky couldn’t decide if he was feeling satisfied and smug, or guilty, and the two extremes were yanking at him. He showered, water hot enough to boil a lobster, until his skin was pink and stinging. It would fade soon enough. It always did.

Ug. This was not how he wanted any of this shit to go down.

Tony had been drawing back the whole time between when the spirits departed and when he’d faux-cheerfully waved Bucky off into the next room.

They needed to talk.

And god damn, if there was one thing Bucky was really, really bad at, it was talking. And in that subset of bad things about talking, there was talking about feelings. Bucky hadn’t had bloody damn feelings in so long, figuring out what to do with them sometimes took him all damn day.

Sit a plate in front of him, and he’d eat. Ask him what he wanted to watch on the television and he’d freeze up for an hour or more, trying to decide.

But letting Tony get back to the Compound without talking about this, or making a terrible attempt at talking about this, and Bucky wouldn’t see him for a week or more, while he hid down in the ‘shop and pretended that nothing ever happened, he was fine, why?

“Fuck.”

Well, yeah, and that’s exactly what had happened, too.

Bucky yanked on a pair of soft sweatpants, a tee, and a hoodie, his preferred clothing for between missions.

Knocking was pointless. Tony would pretend not to hear him, if he didn’t want to talk. Bucky was going to go with the Natasha method of talking shit out. It took him exactly six seconds to scramble the hotel’s expensive key-card entry system and he let himself into Tony’s room.

Tony… was still in the shower.

Which was, in and of itself, a little worrisome. Was he washing… Bucky off?

Bucky threw himself down on Tony’s bed and prepared to wait it out.

Not too much later, the water shut off. Another moment or two while he dried off, and then the bathroom door opened, and Tony walked out, stark naked, still scrubbing a towel over his hair and humming something under his breath.

“Oh shit! Fuck!” Tony practically teleported back three feet when he spotted Bucky on the bed, jostling the towel down to cover himself, more or less. Mostly less. “What the fuck!”

“Oh, my god, stop screaming, it’s just me,” Bucky said, sitting up. “And I literally just saw… all of that, like not two hours ago.”

Tony pressed a hand to his chest, the other one still holding the towel over his groin. “Jesus, don’t do that shit. Christ, you take in a handful of spies and assassins and suddenly there’s no privacy anymore.” He grabbed up a pair of sweats and pulled them on quickly, half-turning in an effort to preserve his modesty that only gave Bucky a really fantastic view of his ass. “What do you want?”

“You--” Bucky said, and Tony shot him a look so incredulously disbelieving that Bucky amended his statement somewhat. “To talk this out with me, Tony. I mean, maybe you didn’t notice, or somethin’ but we just had sex. I think… we should talk about it.”

Tony huffed, then opened the mini-fridge and pulled out a couple of bottles of beer. Local stuff, so it probably wasn’t swill. He tossed one toward Bucky. “What, you want a Yelp review? ‘Four stars; excellent technique and presentation but the ambiance left something to be desired.’”

“That was shitty technique,” Bucky said. “I totally would have-- it was rushed and relatively unconcerned about your pleasure. I’m just saying. If I was… in control of the situation.”

Tony took a swig from his bottle, throat working as he swallowed, his still-damp hair dripping water down his chest. “If you were in control of the situation,” he said, “it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Well, no,” Bucky admitted, “because I ain’t crass enough-- okay, no, not true, I’m totally crass enough t’ ask a fella for a quickie after a near-death experience. Jus’, you know, not… you. I wouldn’t do you like that. An’ I’m sorry as hell that it went down this way.”

“This way?” Tony was giving him that sardonic look, the one he used a lot when he was being snarky at the press. “What way would you have preferred, dare I ask?”

“I had a plan,” Bucky muttered. “I know they say Steve’s the man with the plan, but that idiotic bastard jumps out of airplanes with no chute, he doesn’t have a plan, he’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of the Titanic. I… I had a plan. Thought it might have been goin’ well. These days, we split off for a mission, I’m usually your backup. Which is good, right? You trust me… trusted. Me.”

Bucky sighed. Tony probably didn’t trust him at all, anymore. And Bucky didn’t blame him, not one bit, really. It wasn’t his fault, but-- but it was. He was the one who opened the damn box, wasn’t he? And he was the one who didn’t fight it, because he wanted Tony, and it was so damn easy to just let Richard have his way, have his body, have Tony’s body under him.

God damn it.

Frowning, Tony sank down onto the little desk chair. He rolled the bottle between his hands, intent. “You had a plan,” he repeated slowly. “For... me?”

“Yeah,” Bucky admitted. “We already-- the concert series, this spring, that we went to? I know you like music, an’ I’m still tryin’ to figure out what I like, so… we had fun, right? That was fun?”

“Yeah, that was great, I-- Wait, that was... part of the plan? The plan where... What, exactly, is the end goal of this plan?” Tony’s eyes couldn’t possibly get any more focused.

“The plan, Tony--” Bucky said, and he couldn’t quite resist the urge to roll his eyes, “was for us t’, you know, figure out if we liked each other. I mean, that’s what people do, when they like a fella, think he’s somethin’ else. If we like spendin’ time together, not the whole saving the world shit, that gets old, but… normal stuff. An’ then, I was plannin’ to see if maybe you liked me back, an’ we could spend more time together. I got… I got so much time back, Tony, and I just want to live it, an’ share it with someone special, and I thought… maybe that could be you.”

Tony’s lips moved, soundlessly, repeating the phrase someone special to himself. “You’re talking about dating,” he said, looking startled. “The plan was to date me?”

The plan itself had gone up to dating.

That Bucky had wild and crazy flights of fancy after that, well, he didn’t need to dump his whole heart on the ground right this second, did he?

“The plan was to find out if we wanted to date. Or… whatever,” Bucky said, waving a hand. “Who knows, you couldda been terrible to hang out with. Not… I mean, you weren’t, you were great, it was… yes. The plan was to date you. I thought it was goin’ well, and now it’s all smashed to shit, an’... it wasn’t my fault, except that it was, and Tony, I am so, so sorry.”

Apparently he did need to dump his whole heart on the ground, right this second.

“Oh my god, I’m an idiot,” Tony said. He was staring at Bucky, though at least he didn’t look angry or disgusted. “Those were dates. How did I not-- Well, obviously, because I was too busy trying not to let on how much I wanted them to be dates to realize they actually were.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Idiot,” he reiterated.

“So, uh, it was goin’ well?” Bucky asked, because Tony was getting really deep into self-recriminations, and that wasn’t the direction Bucky wanted this to go, at all.

Tony lowered his hand, and he was smiling, not that practiced press smirk, but a wry, almost hesitant smile that was purely Tony. “It was going well,” he said. “Maybe a little slower than it needed to be.”

Bucky blinked. “I tried for a kiss once, and you backed off an’ asked me if you had cheese on your shirt,” he pointed out. “I thought… I dunno. But you didn’t say no, the next time I asked you to go somewhere, so--”

“I thought I was imagining that,” Tony said. “I thought... overactive imagination, it’s a thing, with me. Also, I did in fact have cheese on my shirt,” he pointed out. “Your first kiss with someone shouldn’t be with them looking like a slob who’d just nosedived into the nachos.”

“They were really good nachos, though,” Bucky said. “I was brushing crumbs out of my shirt, too.” He inched a little closer, probably not being as smooth as he would like to be. “So, what-- should my first kiss with someone be like?”

“It probably should also not be because you’ve been possessed by a couple of horny ghosts,” Tony said. “I think... I think maybe it should be after you’ve told someone you like them, just so you’re both on the same page. And then it should be...” Tony swept forward, fingers curling into Bucky’s hair, palm cupping the back of his neck as Tony’s mouth brushed over Bucky’s lightly once, twice, three times, teasing, drawing away when Bucky tried to lean into it, and then finally lingering, tongue flicking against Bucky’s lip. “A little like that,” Tony finished, a little breathless.

“Just a little like that?” Bucky asked, his thumb brushing against Tony’s jaw, coaxing him to stay, to sit down, to-- enjoy the moment, Barnes, you didn’t think you were going to get to have one.

“Well, you know, there’s a lot of variables, it’s impossible to account for all of them at once.” Tony hadn’t pulled away, was tipping his head into the light caress. “Lots of different ways a kiss can go, you know.” His eyes were wide and dark and full of something like wonder.

“We could, uh, try some of them out, if that… was a thing you wanted to explore?” Bucky suggested, hopefully.

“We’ll have to test all of them,” Tony said thoughtfully. “Probably more than once. Science requires repetition, you know.”

“It’s only science if you write it down,” Bucky said. “An’ uh, I was thinkin’ this was more of a what happens in Zurich stays in Zurich kinda sitch here. I mean, not the dating. Or the kissing, that’s… I’m totally open t’ you know, having the team. Well, know. Not that Nat doesn’t already, but… spies, what can you do? But… I think we can skip on the whole sexual possession post-mission report.”

“Uh, yeah, that’s fair, that’s... definitely not anything anyone else needs to know about,” Tony said. “Went down into the catacombs, found his camp and the necklace, the end.” He brushed his thumb down the side of Bucky’s neck, considering. “So what’s your candidate, then? For a kiss?”

“Oh, I kinda like those standing kisses, pushin’ someone back against a wall, and kiss til your legs get all weak an’ the wall’s the only thing holdin’ you up,” Bucky said. “That’s my favorite.”

“Yeah?” Tony looked around. “Oh look. A wall.” He hooked his hand in Bucky’s shirt and tugged until they were both upright. “Want to show me?”

"I would, in fact, love to," Bucky growled. New plan, his brain decided. How to get Tony out of these pants and into the bed, a three phase project.

[dweemeister]

Joker (2019)

On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot and nearly killed United States President Ronald Reagan, wounded a police officer and Secret Service agent, and permanently disabled Press Secretary James Brady (whose death in 2014 was ruled a homicide from the gunshot wound thirty-three years prior). Found not guilty due to insanity, Hinckley obsessed over Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) while planning his actions. Like Taxi Driver’s protagonist Travis Bickle, Hinckley plotted to assassinate a famous politician. Besotted with Jodie Foster (who starred in Taxi Driver) and disappointed by not attracting her attention after stalking her, Hinckley planned the assassination attempt to impress the actress.

Hinckley and Taxi Driver were both on my mind when watching Todd Phillips’ Joker. Not only do they share thematic connective tissue and similar color palettes, but both films have been plagued by discourse about whether they will inspire someone to commit horrific violence – I respect Taxi Driver as one of the best films released in the 1970s, but it is not something I could rewatch easily. Filmmakers, indeed, should have a sense of social responsibility in their creations. Joker, as a character study first and foremost, paints its politics in broad strokes – preferring to submerge, as character studies should, the audience into the mindset of its protagonist. Joker invites the audience to empathize with a tortured soul who, failed by the state and refusing to hold himself responsible for his worst actions, consciously moves beyond redemption. That point, where the Joker is beyond redemption, is found where Batman fans know him best: murdering only to see if that murder is funny. Whether he reaches that point within the bounds of this film is up for debate.

It is 1981 in Gotham City. The city belches with urban malaise. A garbage collectors’ strike roils the city; socioeconomic inequality is rife; “Super Rats” plague the streets; the municipal services are overwhelmed. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a clown-for-hire living and caring for his aging mother, Penny (Frances Conroy). Money is sparse and one of the few joys Arthur and Penny have is Murray Franklin’s (Robert De Niro in a role not far removed from his turn in 1983′s The King of Comedy) primetime talk show. Arthur suffers from random paroxysms of laughter (a real-life affliction known as emotional incontinence, among other names) that, at the very least, invites disdainful looks from strangers who then avoid him. Arthur is seeking help for his depression and other unspoken problems, but Gotham’s social services are soon defunded by the city government and various other events force him to his breaking point.

Also featured in this film are Arthur’s hallway neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz) and cameos from Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), a young Bruce Wayne (Dante Pereira-Olson), and Alfred Pennyworth (Douglas Hodge).

The film does not glorify any of its hideous violence, but those who are not critical consumers of media will interpret this film how they will. Nevertheless, Joker is less on the side of its protagonist than the likes of Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and will likely result in a similar reverence once this film has exited theaters. Within the film’s confines, there is nothing surprising about any of its violence; how the violence happens is shocking in its immediacy and realistic ferocity. It is contextualized as being the inevitable result of a sociopolitical system that cares not for the downtrodden, the mentally ill – to reiterate, Phillips is painting with broad political strokes. Arthur, who keeps on seeking professional help and ways to quell his silent rage, is attempting to stay his destructive behaviors long after his first homicide (as the film does not glorify violence, it also does not target those with mental illness; it directs its ire towards those without sympathy for the mentally ill). Those efforts are stymied by factors beyond his control – an almost-plot twist to shock even ardent Batman fans, the idolization of an unnamed clown who has executed three members or accomplices of Gotham’s elite.

It is here that Joker separates itself from the social cynicism and post-Vietnam War disillusionment and of Taxi Driver; it is here that Philipps’ film becomes just as much a reflection of the era it was released in and the nation of its origin as Scarface (1932 original with Paul Muni), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and The Dark Knight (2008) once did. Those films respectively capitalized on fears of Italian and Irish mafias making urban centers their criminal playgrounds, countercultural diehards claiming free-wheeling Jazz Age outlaws as their own, and a vast surveillance state crafted to declare war on terrorism. For Joker, the societal diagnosis by Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver (2010′s The Fighter) is double-sided, damning those with and without power. The film decries individuals and groups who deify charismatic or compelling figures claiming their actions and/or rhetoric to be indicative of the common person’s interests. These revered figures incorporate grievance into their persona, weaponizing the language of victimhood not only to bring attention and (justifiably or unjustifiably) force change on a problem, but to absolve themselves of their personal sins. They are, dare it be written, populists. Beware those who invoke “the people” to vindicate their crusades.

Arthur Fleck, as an underemployed clown, does not ask for the attention of the masses. He wishes, “to bring laughter and joy to the world,” yet finds fulfillment in making a handful of children’s hospital patients smile. During Arthur’s first appearance as Joker, he assumes the accidental and public mantle that has set Gotham aflame – legitimizing the homicides he has committed and the public’s brutalization of authority figures by playing victim. He is consumed in self-pity; his words become a simplistic screed. Notice how appealing his words are, how rapidly rhetorical animosity precludes political violence. In Joker’s darkest sequence, the protagonist will destroy the last remnants of Arthur Fleck and become the popular icon of violent upheaval rarely seen in any of his depictions in DC Comics. This is Joker at its most dangerous, if only because of how violence – whether in oppression or in resistance – is as integral to the United States as political compromise.

We hear these beats of populism elsewhere, too, mixed with capitalist can-do. It is present in Thomas Wayne’s television appearance announcing his candidacy for Mayor of Gotham City – “I alone can fix it,” this man of wealth implies. This is a departure from otherwise sympathetic depictions of Bruce Wayne’s father over the decades in Batman comic books. As a plot development, it (along with the “almost-plot twist”) seems unnecessary if only to ground Joker in the Batman mythos. Contrast this to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where ill-intentioned, humorless capitalists operating within the military-industrial complex are repelled by the wisecracking “good” capitalists within that same system (see: Tony Stark). Murray Franklin, as a talk show host, concocts a scheme to bolster his ratings by humiliating someone in a worse life station – no background checks needed, let alone any semblance of attempting to understand his subject. Thus, Gotham is subject to personality- and grievance-based politics wrung through the corporate avarice of Network (1976). Joker may not have to space to critique capitalism in its entirety – it is a character study, after all – but the entire apple barrel seems spoiled here.

The least controversial element of Joker is Joaquin Phoenix’s magnificent lead performance. Phoenix has made a living playing men whose lives contend with inner turmoil and unsympathetic worlds. His work in The Master (2012) remains has career-defining role, but as Arthur Fleck and as Joker – through the pained laughter spells, his bodily contortions with his ribcage jutting from his frame, and a brooding nature tempered by an initial gentleness – this will be the role that crosses artistic and popular boundaries that segregate filmmaking. Phoenix may now be defined by this role, as Cesar Romero (a solid contract actor for 20th Century Fox despite being typecast as a Latin lover) and the late Heath Ledger (whose work in The Dark Knight overshadows the rest of his filmography) have been.

Director Todd Phillips, best known for The Hangover series, does an excellent job making Gotham City a character. So often consigned to be the faceless and unfortunate city wracked by domestic terrorism from curiously-named villains, never in a film has Gotham seemed like a place with its own history and haunts. The scenes on mass transit alone sell the city. Phillips’ indulgence for slow-motion (with cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s fawning camerawork) during dance sequences and almost constant dollying can be irritating. One montage between Arthur Fleck and Sophie – specifically, when he enters her apartment, confirming how unreliable a narrator he is – displays a lack of trust in the audience to make their own inferences.

Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir has crafted a score for her second film for a major American studio. Guðnadóttir’s career has been defined by an unpleasant mix of bass strings, percussion, and synth, droning repetitively, lacking the emotional catharsis that the films she has worked on are striving for. Her work on Joker is an improvement, but this is as difficult a listen as Joker is to watch. The score is almost entirely texture, not melody – melody is for those older films with sugary sentiment and Hollywood endings that do not reflect life’s ugliness, we are increasingly told. Outside of those with an ear for experimental classical music or instrumental music that groans amelodic passages rather than combining lyrical voices, this music has almost no life outside of the movie. Finally, Guðnadóttir’s style fits the film she has scored for.

As a psychological character piece, the only way that Joker could have secured a wide theatrical release in 2019 would be to tie it to bankable comic book lore. Even as Phillips pitched the idea, Joker faced stiff resistance from Warner Bros. executives – including former chairman Kevin Tsujihara and Greg Silverman – who still had the 2012 massacre in Aurora, Colorado on their minds (that tragedy took place during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises). Warner Bros. noting how poorly Zack Snyder’s vision of DC Comics adaptations was faring, needed to extricate itself from Snyder’s adolescent approach.

In the months before Joker’s release and even within the film, Warner Bros. has embraced its past. Of all of Hollywood’s major studios, Warners always seems to be the most conscious and celebratory of its history*. During the 1930s, Warner Bros. became known for the darker content of its films (its rivals MGM, Paramount, and Fox preferred spectacle, maximizing production values, and prestige pictures). The studio became the spiritual home of the gangster film and hardboiled dramas that pushed the boundaries of violence in American cinema – but not for the sake of depicting violence. Even in their musicals (a genre stereotyped as pure escapism), Warner Bros. layered progressive social commentary amid economic depression. Joker – though its own commentary could be more focused and succinct – inherits the legacy of The Public Enemy (1931), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), and its numerous Warner Bros. ancestors.

How curious that a drama with origins from superhero comic books has been little praised for not following the assembly line production methods of numerous films from similar source material. Cinephiles fret, correctly, that movie theaters are becoming a home to superheroes/villains and explicitly-for-children animated features to the exclusion of everything else. The mid-budget character piece is endangered; certain genres have vanished from theater marquees. Joker, to some consternation, has it both ways. It is an excellent, arguably irresponsible, work to be seen with wary eyes.

My rating: 8/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

* Okay, okay you classic film buffs who have already recognized Joker’s references. Modern Times (1936) and Shall We Dance (1937) are from United Artists and RKO, respectively. But both films have long been part of Warners’ library by acquisition.

[daysswithyou]

V. Sungjin - Bet

Characters: Sungjin x You

Genre: enemies to lovers!6

Warning: some cursing and swearing

Credits: @7abshy and @parkjaeins; for helping me figure out how annoying teachers can be

Words: 5k

Description: There is always more than meets the eye

Author’s note: This wraps up the enemies to lovers!6 series :) I hope you’ve enjoyed all 5 of them! 

-----

I’m late, I’m late, I’m late, shit!

You repeatedly mouthed the words to yourself under your breath as you squeezed past the throng of people crowding the hallways, occasionally throwing an apology across your shoulder if you bumped into someone. Opting to not take the front entrance into the lecture hall, you ran up flights of stairs to reach the back entrance. By the time you reached the top, you were gasping for breath, your thighs were burning and you could feel the first beads of sweat roll down your back. Slipping through the crack of the heavy wooden door, you settled into the closest empty seat, trying to steady your breathing as your pants became too loud within the enclosed space.

Deep breaths Y/N, deep breaths...

You internally heaved a sigh of relief when you saw the empty podium in front, glad that your professor for this class will not have a bad impression of you.

But your relief was short-lived as the booming voice right next to you soon commanded for attention.

“Alright let’s get started, now that the last student is here.”

As he walks down the flight of stairs to reach the podium, it gives you enough time to observe the authoritative figure. His black leather jacket and ripped black jeans made him look exceptionally tough, and you swore you saw some male students flinch when he walked past them. His hair, which was the colour of warm chocolate, was too long and brushed against his eyelids.

He looks like a model that has just stepped out of a Harley Davidson advertisement.

But you mentally berated yourself for the inappropriate thought, and proceeded to haul it out of the window.

When he stepped onto the podium, he surveyed the whole room before starting again.

 “Good morning. My name is Park Sungjin and I’ll be your TA for this semester and for this class.”

 Ah, so this was the legendary Park Sungjin that you had heard so much about during your first semester. He was famous for being the top student of the graduating batch, with an impeccable portfolio to match. Apparently, he’s so good to the point that many companies and graduate schools have offered him a place amongst them. But, he is also notorious for being a tough TA and everyone’s advice was to just stay away from his bad side if you ever had the fortune (or misfortune) of being in his classes.

All you wanted was to pass this class peacefully so you made it your goal to not cross the line.

However, when he opens his mouth to give the next set of instructions, you knew that you were already on the wrong side of the line.

“So now, if you’re ready Ms Y/N, I’ll begin with the introduction on the topic.” Giving you one last hard glance, he turned to face the screen. Everyone else was furiously copying down notes, but not you.

He said my name, he knows who I am. I’ve been singled out.

It felt like someone had just passed you the death sentence.

-

A week passed by uneventfully and you tried your best to not attract attention to yourself in class. You were on time, and you were attentive in class. You never gave Sungjin trouble – or Mr Park, as you know him by now. Yet, such tactics did not work on him. You knew that you had his full attention when he stares at you from the front as he is giving lectures, even if you’re sitting in a last row. He’ll always linger a little longer behind you as write answers to the mini quizzes in class. You made the mistake of looking up at him once, and you nearly combusted under his hard gaze. What’s worse is that you can’t decide if he approves or disapproves of your work. Perhaps that was the most agonising part.

Today was no different. After handing up your papers for the quiz to the front, you attempted to slip away with the crowd but you just couldn’t slip past Park Sungjin’s attention.

“Y/N, could I have a word with you?”

You halted in your steps, his monotone voice sending chills down your spine.

Why me…

Squeezing your eyes shut and taking in a shaky breath, you turned around to face him before walking in his direction. Your steps were a little too hesitant and you were obviously clutching onto your bag too tightly because this was the first thing that Sungjin said when you finally stood in front of him.

“You can loosen your grip on your bag strap, your knuckles are turning white.”

“O-o-oh. It’s a habit, sorry.”

“What time do your lessons end today, Y/N?”

“6pm. My last lesson is Introduction to Psychology.”

“Good. Meet me at Conference Room 2 of the Social Sciences block, 6.30pm sharp.”

“Yes. Anything else…?”

“That’s all. You may go now.”

Giving Sungjin a curt bow, you scurried out of the lecture hall as fast as you could, dreading the time when you had to see him again.

 6.30pm came too early for your liking, and you soon found yourself face to face with Sungjin once more. A thick stack of papers were sitting by the corner of the table beside him and you knew immediately.

“I’m here to grade papers?”

“More or less; I’ll be giving the final grade and you can help me critique.”

You simply nodded before assuming the seat in front of him.

The next time you looked up, your neck popped up with a loud crack and the clock read 12am. Sungjin kept you thoroughly occupied for the past few hours, papers being presented to you in a systematic manner. You’ve said more words to him a few hours than you’ve said to all your professors combined last semester. While disguised as ‘extra exposure’ for you, deep down you knew that this was Sungjin’s special torture method – and you finally understood what others meant by getting on his bad side.

But the torture didn’t end there.

“Y/N, don’t forget that we have an assignment due the next day. Oh, and don’t be late. See you tomorrow.”

Everything sounds really innocent but you knew what Sungjin really meant was “Don’t mess up tomorrow Y/N.”

You wanted to let out a sigh of frustration but instead you swallowed it and merely replied with a spritely “Yes” before leaving the office.

 -

And this went on for months. Every single time Sungjin gave your class a quiz, you would find yourself in the conference room with him grading papers; sometimes at the expense of your own work. It gradually extended to grading papers from his other classes, but never once did you complain. You knew better than to argue with teachers, much less Sungjin. Every time he looks at you, your words die in your throat; how on earth were you supposed to hold an argument with him? But, of course, when you were back in the comfort of your dorm, which was when you were cursing and swearing at him. At one point in time, your roommate almost called an exorcist, thoroughly freaked out by the way you were flaying your limbs in the air as you continued screaming in frustration.

Needless to say, the late nights left with less sleep, and little energy to pay attention. You were up till 4am last night (or should you say morning), rushing out assignments due today for 2 different classes. You had burst into Sungjin’s lecture hall a good 20 minutes late but in your state, you didn’t care anymore. As usual, you settled into the closest seat you could find, one hand combing through the tangles in your hair, the other rummaging through your bag for your lesson materials. But you were so thoroughly exhausted that you fell asleep 10 minutes later, you pen stopping midway across your paper.

The next time you regain consciousness was when Sungjin’s voice calling your name rang through the speakers.

“So, Ms Y/N, what do you think of the question I just raised?”

You awoke with a start and you scattered your stationary across the floor in the process. You could hear the whole hall snickering at your blunder; save for the few kids sitting around you that helped you pick up your stray pens.

What was the question even? That was the most urgent question for you to answer. You shot a hard look at Sungjin, one that said, “How dare you call me when I’m in this state because of YOU.”

You were sure that he understood your gaze, but he merely raised an eyebrow, as he always did. It was the one that you recognised as “Go on, I’m waiting for your answer.” You knew that there was no way out of this except to answer his question. Panicking, you stared at the last word you wrote in your notebook before rattling off.

“The most famous poem from the Old English period, widely recognised by most is Beowulf. And for – ”

“Oh Ms Y/N, I didn’t know that Scandinavians spoke Old English in the late 10th century. Clearly, someone needs to keep her eyes and ears open. Also, I asked for your opinion, not of those from the 10th century.”

From beneath his long locks, Sungjin gave you a mischievous glint and smirked at you as the entire hall erupted into raucous laughter. Everyone was laughing, except you. Everyone found this funny, except you. Everyone was in a good mood, but you were livid.

How.fucking.dare.you.Park.fucking.Sungjin. I’m suffering in class now because of all your stupid “extra exposure” work after school. Yet you purposely picked on me to answer your question, knowing full well that I can’t. Why do you like picking on me so much? Why do you like embarrassing me in class so much? WHY PARK SUNGJIN!!!

You might have felt better if you actually said it out loud, but you didn’t. You just kept repeating this thought to yourself like a mantra until the end of the lesson.

It’s ok Y/N, just another 30mins of sitting in this hall and looking at his face. Afterwards you can leave and get yourself some ice cream to make yourself feel better. Yes, that’s right… everything is going to be ok Y/N...

But that day, things were not ok and you left the hall in a foul mood. For the final project of the year, you were paired up with Song Jihyo, the girl in class that was notorious for not doing her work.

Its official, Park Sungjin hates me and wants me to burn in Hell. That day, your whole body ached at the thought of more late nights and instead of eating your ice cream, you remembered hurling it at an innocent, nearby tree.

-

Everything that you thought would happen did happen. It’s as the saying goes, “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.” And in this case, you were helpless against its happening. The only time that you talked to Jihyo was deciding on the thesis and after that, she was virtually uncontactable. You eventually gave up trying to arrange a time to meet to do up the thesis; you merely assigned her parts – which, to be fair, she did do. But they were of such poor quality you ended up deleting most of it and redoing it yourself. But no matter how hard you tried, nothing seemed fresh and you decided to bite the bullet and ask for help.

Lucky for you, Mr Kim was in class today and you immediately ran to him for help.

“Good morning Mr Kim. I have some questions about the final project thesis, is it alright if I ask a few questions?”

“Ah Y/N aren’t you? I’ve heard so much about you from Sungjin! I’ll be glad to help, let me take a look.”

Eagerly, you showed him what you had done so far and when he smiled, you felt a small smile creep onto your face, silently happy that you had gained his approval. But soon, the smile was wiped off your face.

“First of all, an excellent thesis choice, I must say. I remember Sungjin doing something similar for my class 3 years ago, why don’t you ask him for help? He is in a better position to help than I am.”

“Yes sir, I’ll ask Sung- I mean, Mr Park. Yes, I’ll ask Mr Park for advice. Thank you.”

With a light pat on your shoulder, he left you alone and when you turned, you found Park Sungjin standing right in front of you.

“I heard you need help?”

“Yes...” You hated it; you hated having to admit that you needed help from Park Sungjin.

“Hand it over.”

Reluctantly, you passed him your phone and turned to the side, not wanting to see his face further.

When he finally passed back the phone to you, you didn’t feel any more enlightened.

“You can do better than this.”

“What do you mean? That isn’t helpful!”

“That’s all I have to say. You know what to do, so do it.”

“I don’t! I don’t know what to do, which is why I’m asking for help!”

“Then sit down and figure it out.”

So that’s how it’s going to be – you won’t give me a consultation when I need it the most. Fine.

But that was not what you said. You said this instead, “Ok, I’ll figure it out.”

From then onwards, without help from anyone, you trudged through the group thesis yourself. This was on top of the individual thesis that each of you had to prepare for. You were literally typing so much (or rather, punching) your keyboard so hard that one of the keys fell out and you had to send your laptop for repairs. Not only was school draining your sanity, it was also draining your money. Due to the delay in repairing your laptop, you were left with a week to finish half of your thesis.

The outcome: later nights and heavier eye bags. By now, you were too tired to curse and swear at Sungjin for the terrible grouping since it was already taking insane willpower from you to even show up in class. You merely bottled up your indignation, and kept working to avoid thinking about it. After placing the stack of papers in Sungjin’s letter tray, you went back to your dorm and crashed for 12 hours straight.

This signalled the start of your 1 week break, and one week of not seeing Park Sungjin.

Thank goodness.

-

The next time you saw Park Sungjin, you were glad that it was the last time that you would have to see him. After all the torture he had put you through for the past semester, you were glad that you’ll be done with him now.

Yet, as always, Park Sungjin manages to make your life a living hell till the end.

Group Thesis: C

Individual Thesis: E

Overall: D

Comments for Individual Thesis: Clear presentation of key ideas and mostly factually correct. Choice of thesis could be better.

Signed: Park Sungjin

Choice of thesis could be better. Park Sungjin failed me, just because he didn’t like my topic.

You were brought out from your shock by a large shove from behind. Whipping around, you found a smiley Jihyo in front of you and her next words made you want to punch her in her perfect little teeth.

“Thank you for helping me pass the class Y/N! How much did you get?”

Without your consent, she ripped your papers from your hands before handing them back to you with a frown.

“That’s odd; we had the same choice of individual thesis, why did you do worse?” But Jihyo had no time to contemplate on the answer to her question when she was dragged away by her friends to celebrate their good grades.

I can tolerate everything that Park Sungjin has put me through, but not this.

Running up to Sungjin, you stopped him from leaving before asking to see him.

“Do you have time now?”

“Yes. What is this about?”

“This is about my thesis, can we talk somewhere else?”

“Conference Room 2 of the Social Sciences building in 10 minutes, I need to talk to Mr Kim first.”

“Ok.”

You were going to clear this once and for all.

-

“So, what is it about your thesis, Y/N?”

“You failed me just because you didn’t like my topic, didn’t you?”

You’ve rehearsed this part many times in your head and this wasn’t how it was supposed to sound like. It was supposed to sound polite and less accusatory, but fuck that. You wanted answers, and if you had to demand it from him, you will.

“Yes, I did. What’s the issue with it?”

“It’s not fair.”

“Nothing is fair in this world Y/N; I thought you’d know that by now.”

“Yes, I do know that. But what you’re doing is not only unfair, but also downright discriminatory.”

“How so?”

“Jihyo told me that we both had the same choice of thesis, and I got and E and she got a B. My grades are clearly a personal attack against my character. You never liked me from the start, I get it. But it’s wrong to simply disregard my entire thesis because you didn’t like the topic! What is wrong with this topic? It’s within the list of topics that you’ve given us, I met the word count, I met deadlines. I did everything!”

“And I’m supposed to give you a A for that?”

"I’m not saying you have to give me an A for it. I'm just trying to prove the fact that – " "A fact is already a fact, you don't have to prove it." "God damn it Sungjin! Would you just lay off me for a second? Would it kill for you to not correct my grammar for once? Would it kill you to not pick on me for one second?" "It's Mr Park, for you. It still is. And no, I won't lay off your grammar – you are an English language major that has taken my class, there is no way that I'm allowing you to continue to speak with bad grammar." "I hate you." "That can technically count as swearing at a teacher. Are you testing my patience?" "No. I'm just saying that it's not fair for you to give me a bad grade just because you did not like my choice of thesis. That's just being biased." "I'm not changing your grade." "I can't fail this module Sungjin! I need to pass this module to go for the Advanced English module. Yes, it's not a perfect thesis but I don't deserve to fail for this!" "Welcome to the real world Y/N." "I hate you Sungjin. I really fucking do." You pick up your bag and slam the door on your way out. That night, for the first time, you cried. And you hated the fact that you were crying over stupid Park Sungjin.

-

The next day, you awoke with puffy eyes but nonetheless, you showed up for lessons. You nearly bumped into Sungjin on your way to Psychology but you immediately detoured. You couldn’t get close to him – you might just punch him and be charged for assaulting a teacher.

That evening, you had just ended lessons when your phone buzzed and Sungjin’s name lit up on your screen.

Mr Park: You have another chance to redo your thesis and not fail the class. Deadline is January 20th, 2 weeks from now. Papers in my tray at 6pm sharp; don’t be late for the submission.

You swiped his notification away quickly, but you remembered the words and that night, you began sourcing for more ideas for your individual thesis.

For the next 3 days, Sungjin just wouldn’t leave you alone. Your phone buzzed with his name every now and then, and he was so distracting that you nearly wanted to block his number.

Mr Park: Are you going to resubmit your thesis?

Mr Park: Have you chosen a thesis yet?

Mr Park: What is your choice of thesis? How many words in?

Mr Park: Do you need help? Just drop me a message; I can help you check your thesis.

Help me with my thesis? Is he playing saint now? As if I’m going to accept help from him.

As you turned your attention back to your screen, you found that a shadow has fallen in front of your laptop. You found yourself staring at a pair of familiar, battered, black Converse and looking up only confirmed your suspicions. The man was here in person – Park Sungjin.

“Why aren’t you replying my messages?”

Why must I hold myself accountable to you? Buzz off.

You continued typing, completely ignoring Sungjin. You heard him sigh before inviting himself to sit in front of you.

“Y/N, what is your thesis? Hey, answer me. I came all the way down here to find you.”

“You came here voluntarily, I didn’t ask for your help. You can leave.”

“You’re still angry at me?”

Of course I am, you asshole. You’re just asking the obvious.

With each thought, you punched the keys on your keyboard harder.

“Stop typing so hard, you’ll spoil your keyboard. Working in spite is not going to produce quality work Y/N.”

Without your consent, he lifted your laptop into the air and onto his lap and scrolled through your entire document for 15 minutes. Passing it back to you with a smile, you stared at him in shock for 5 minutes.

Park Sungjin never smiles; did he just smile at me?

“You did it.”

“What did I do?”

“You figured it out. This was the choice of thesis I wanted you to choose in the very first place. Furthermore, you’ve chosen the correct area to focus on.”

“Thank you… I thought…”

“What did you think about?”

“I thought I might not be on the right track. But your words makes me feel a little more reassured now.”

“Well, I’ll leave you alone now.”

Park Sungjin then took his leave, but he was lying when he said he’ll leave you alone. He never did. Till the submission deadline, he visited you every alternate day.

As expected, you got an A for your individual thesis.

-

When you got an email from Mr Kim saying that he wanted to meet you, you thought you were doomed; most likely a disciplinary case on your head after what you said to Sungjin. But turns out, it was an interview for the Advanced English course, and they passed you immediately. When you walked out of the room still stunned that that you had entered the course of your choice, you found Sungjin waiting outside for you, almost like he knew you were going to be there.

“They passed you didn’t they?”

“Huh?”

Hearing his voice reminded you of what Mr.Kim said to you just now:

“We’ve received high commendations of you, Ms Y/N. All the professors pushed for your recommendation into the course, and Sungjin, especially. He was the first one to mention offering you a place in the course. He spoke of your remarkable working attitude.”

“May I ask something?”

“Yes, anything at all.”

“What exactly did Mr Park say about me?”

“He mentioned that you work well even under immense stress and long hours, catching up really fast even if you fell behind. But, most importantly, he spoke of your willingness to try again after failure. That is the most important quality that we are looking out for: tenacity. We have no doubt that you’ll be a suitable candidate to enter this demanding course. We would love to offer you a place, should you choose to accept.”

“I would love to, thank you. Thank you to the faculty and professors for having me.”

Sungjin hates me, why would be recommend me for the course?

“Follow me.”

Taking him by the wrist, you dragged Sungjin all the way to the bridge in the school park before letting him go.

“What’s with the rush, Y/N?”

Hands on your hips, you turned to face Sungjin with wide eyes, your lips set firmly in a thin line.

“I don’t understand you Sungjin. First, you torture me in lessons by making me so many extra work and now you’re putting in good words for me and recommending me for my dream course? Did you suddenly decide that you like me more now overnight?”

“Ah, so they told you everything I said. Mr Kim promised to not tell, I should have known he wouldn’t keep to it.”

“You’re still not answering my questions.”

“I’m getting there. First of all, that extra work was not torture, they were a test. I loaded you with many things to see how much you can handle before you snapped but thankfully and luckily for me, you never did.”

“I did silently curse and swear at you.”

“That is a given. But you didn’t say it out loud, so it doesn’t count. You’ve proven to – ”

“To be able to work well under immense pressure and long hours.”

“Yes. That is an important quality for taking any Advanced courses. I took the same course with the same professors that you’ll be having so I know how intense it was. I had to put you under pressure to see if my bet was correct.”

“I was your bet?”

“Yes, I was betting on you all along. You have great potential.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh? I thought someone hated me before.”

“Like you said, that was before. I don’t anymore. What you put me through was tough, but they did teach me more about myself and my limits. So, thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now that I’ve managed to help you get a place in your course, I think it’s time to return the favour?”

“What’s your proposal?”

“Come to my graduation ceremony next spring. It’s in April.”

“Ok. That’s all?”

“That’s all for now.”

But when a soft smile lights up Sungjin’s face, you knew there was more in store for the both of you in time to come.

-

April 20th

You had come early to get front row seats and as you watch Sungjin give a speech representing the graduating batch, your heart swells with pride. You’ve seen him work very hard for the past one semester and to see him being handed his graduation certificate made you feel like all his efforts paid off.

You were the last to greet Sungjin because there was simply too many people crowding around him. You watch from afar and you giggle when you see Sungjin frantically asking Kang Younghyun if he’s seen you around. He does this thing where his eyes grow big like saucers, so big that you thought they were going to pop out of their sockets. You could also hear the fear in his voice – he speaks a little faster and slips into the Busan dialect. So when you greet him by gently tapping him on the shoulder, he whips around so fast the wind nearly knocked you over. But when you see his facial expression melt from one of worry into one of happiness, you nearly melt into a puddle there and then. You’d given anything to see those sparkly eyes and sweet smile.

“Ah finally you’re here Y/N! I saw you in the front row just now but then afterwards I didn’t so I was worried that you left but I haven’t got a photo with you yet. I was so sad  because I haven’t asked you my question yet – ”

“Calm down Sungjin! I’m here now right? Also, happy graduation! I got this for you.”

Proudly, you hold up the bear plushie you had custom made for him, decked out in the exact same graduation gown that he had on right now.

“It looks like you, right? I named him Bang!”

“Why Bang?”

“Because you always say goodbye in a very cute manner and Bang seems like a cute name to capture that cuteness. Also, I gave him eyelashes! When you observe the details, he really looks like you right?”

When Sungjin finally notices the eyelashes, he bursts out laughing and you swore your heart nearly stopped. When he finally stopped laughing and took over the bear from you, he finally remembered the question he wanted to ask you.

“Y/N- ah…”

“Yes?”

“If I ask you out…will you say yes?”

Just to tease him a little, you decided to look up at the sky, and contemplate your answer for a little while.

“I don’t know…maybe?”

“You can’t do this to me! I waited so long to ask you this question!”

“Why did you wait so long then?”

“I had to wait till I graduated. It wouldn’t be right for a teacher to ask his student out right?”

“That’s true…but I still don’t know if I’d go out with you. How about we make a bet?”

“With what?”

“With a coin. You flip a coin and I’ll decide. Which side are you confident of getting?”

“Heads, I always flip a head.”

“Ok, go ahead then. Heads for I’ll go out with Park Sungjin and tails for…”

With utmost concentration, Sungjin flips the coin and slams his palm over it when it lands. Opening his palm, his face immediately becomes crestfallen: staring back at him was a tail.

But you haven’t finished your sentence yet.

“Tails for…I’ll still go out with you anyways!” you said, as you gave him a quick peck on the cheek.

“Really? You would?”

“Ask any more questions and I’ll reconsider.”

“Ok, ok I won’t ask any more questions! What do you want to eat?”

“Fried chicken!”

“Oh, I was betting that you’ll say fried chicken!”

“Betting on fried chicken is great Park Sungjin, but I'm betting on something else now.”

Sungjin turns to look at you and he says, "So, what are you betting on now?"

"I'm betting that you'll give me a kiss."

"Really? How are you so sure?"

"I know you Park Sungjin, I know you'll do it. So, am I getting a kiss or not?" 

Without another word, Sungjin closes the space between the both of you, so close that if either moved, your lips would touch. You closed your eyes and waited for the impact, but instead you felt something soft press into your forehead and you immediately smiled. 

"Not where I was expecting, but ok Sungjin."

"I'm saving the best for the last."

"I'm holding you accountable for that statement."

"You can bet your life on it that I'll fulfill it."

Not only was he your best bet, he was your favourite bet too.

[chiseler]

The Madness of Ken Russell

Critical thinking in Britain has always taken the view that Ken Russell was a wild, ill-disciplined talent who ultimately went artistically mad: this was also the view in the film industry. The only major disagreement was about when he went from being merely excessive to being balls-out crazy: different parties chose different tipping points.

(WAIT! WHO CARES ABOUT CRITICS?)

(Bear with me: in Russell’s case, the critical consensus serves as a valuable reverse barometer.)

Russell, a suburban boy, former merchant seaman and Catholic convert, made a few brilliant short films with his wife and fellow genius, costume designer Shirley Russell, before landing a job at the BBC’s flagship arts program, Monitor. His stint here taught him to fight, and placed him under the stern patronage of producer Huw Weldon, probably the only authority figure he ever respected. Many good fights were enjoyed. When Russell joined the program, there was an absolute ban on dramatization and re-enactment: the most he was allowed was to show a composer’s hands at the piano. By the time he finished up on the show, he’d managed to twist it out of shape to the point where he’d been allowed to make complete dramatic works in the guise of documentary. These TV plays are highly cinematic, kinetic and bold: like Kubrick, Russell had a love of both stark symmetry and dynamic movement. Control and its opposite.

Russell found actors he liked, including Oliver Reed, with whom he enjoyed a strange kinship: both were heavy drinkers, both affected a casual attitude to their work, though Russell was never ashamed to call himself an artist. Ollie became the John Wayne to Russell’s Ford (in a roiling, nightmare vision of classical cinema).

The point when Russell moved out of TV is the first moment his detractors choose to mark his decline into self-indulgent craziness. He made a modest, eccentric comedy, French Dressing (with mounds of inflatable girls piled up like Holocaust victims) and a wild, idiosyncratic spy movie, The Billion Dollar Brain, a Russophile anti-Bond movie full of flip humor and Eisenstein homages. Critics saw these films as work-for-hire, as perhaps they were, and largely discount them. They are quite brilliant.

Women in Love is counted by others as the last pre-madness film, and its relative sanity can be attributed to the control exerted by its writer-producer Larry Kramer. Russell’s excesses are held in check, it is argued, and the tension between its creators was productive. It’s a very good film, but I find it too sedate in places, though the vivid color and Shirley Russell’s bold designs, and some scenes of genuine wildness and invention stave off actual boredom.

The Music Lovers, his dream project, expanding the TV composer film to the big screen and color, is where a real case for craziness begins to be made: the choice to explore Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality now seems mature rather than lurid, but Ken is undeniably pushing the biopic into unfamiliar terrain: fantasies of decapitation by cannon-shot, a filthy madhouse, a demented honeymoon on a train rocking like the Starship Enterprise, complete with crotch shots. Maybe even worse, from the critics’ viewpoint, Russell, who had directed one TV commercial before walking away from that business in disgust, co-opted the visual language of the shampoo commercial to depict the images conjured by the composer’s music. Russell was in love with romanticism but saw through it too. Ironically, the filmmaker constantly castigated for unsubtlety injected an irony into the film that critics missed, taking the soppiness at face value and not seeing how the concealed satire blended perfectly with the overt caricature and phantasmagoric visions.

Still, the subject was respectable, but with The Devils, Russell managed a film maudit that took decades to be reappraised, and earned him criticism of a uniquely vociferous sort, admittedly in keeping with the hysteria of the film itself. An account – or channelling – of a 16th Century witchcraft trial in France, the movie didn’t so much push as cremate the envelope as far as sex, violence and blasphemy were concerned: Russell, who had converted to Catholicism in his youth, lost his faith while making this one, converting to an animist worship of the Lake District, a religion of his own devising. Well, he did have a substantial ego.

Russell was upsetting: apart from the torture, abuse and madness, the film threw in discordant tonal shifts, creative anachronisms and deployed all of his cinematic influences, which prominently featured Orson Welles, Fellini, Fritz Lang’s German silents, and the musicals of Busby Berkeley, which supplied the top-shots used to depict the rape of Christ on the cross, a scene cut by the censor and lovingly preserved by the director for a future restoration, still explicitly forbidden by the film’s backers, Warner Brothers.

Asides from his crisis of faith and crises in his marriage and his dealings with the studio, Russell was also knocking back the wine. “Better before lunch,” was his prop man’s characterization of the director. Production designer Derek Jarman recounted Russell asking him, “What can I do that’ll really offend the British public?” “Well you could kill a lot of people,” mused Jarman, “but if you really want to upset them you could kill some animals.” A plan was then devised to have King Louis with a musket blowing the heads off the peacocks on his lawn: the birds were to be fitted with explosives at the neck, like Snake Plissken, but Russell backed away from this extreme, even by his standards, approach, and instead had the target practice performed with a man dressed as a blackbird, and the King saying “Bye-bye, blackbird,” and Peter Maxwell-Davies’ remarkable score quoting the popular twenties song, and that infuriated the critics just as much as actual bird-blasting would have.

Less amusingly, Russell was also guilty of unsafe practices involving the naked girls and rowdy extras: the stories here get really dark. As does the film: a demented masterpiece that shows Russell for once engaging with the political: a film about corruption that uses physical disintegration alongside social and spiritual rot.

Just to confuse us even more, Russell made The Boy Friend the same year, an epic music and a miniature at the same time, allowing him to recreate Busby Berkeley’s pixilated fantasias in a seedy English theater. It’s light and charming, but Russell’s version of these qualities was not recognized by the critics, and it’s true that his wit is clodhopping, his whimsy grotesque, everything is overplayed, in your face: but you have to climb aboard the film, get into its spirit, and then it really is a very lovely reversal of the usual nightmare.

The seventies brought more composer films, Mahler and Lisztomania, and also the rock opera Tommy, which earned Russell slightly better reviews as his boisterousness was judged more in keeping with the material (critics, it seemed, could not stand the idea of a filmmaker responding to classical music for its passion and energy, its rock ‘n’ roll qualities, rather than for its assumed civilising effect). Russell got away with showing Ann-Margret humping her cushions while slathered in feculent chocolate sauce, shot Tina Turner with a 6mm lens to uglify her as she thrashed around a steel sarcophagus studded with hypos, and put Elton John on ten-foot platform shoes.

Lisztomania is another movie that’s seen as marking the decline into lunacy: its producer, David Puttnam, hugely impressed by Russell’s flare and his ability to shoot Mahler after half the budget fell through, felt that ultimately the relentless negative press knocked his enfant terrible off-balance. Instead of rolling over in submission, Russell perversely doubled down on the excess and became a parody of himself. And he had already been a parody to begin with (but a parody without an original, unless we take him as a combined burlesque of all his cinematic influences). I’ve always adored Lisztomania, which knows it’s going too far, knows its japes and conceits are ludicrous and indefensible, knows it can’t get away with Roger Daltrey as Liszt and Ringo Starr as the Pope. And just. Doesn’t. Care.

Valentino, which marked the end of the Russell marriage (there would be a bunch more), was dismissed by Russell as the fag-end of his first British period, “everything about it was bored and boring, including me,” but it’s actually rather good. Nureyev as Valentino (well, he was used to being called Rudolph), Russell as Rex Ingram wielding a megaphone the size of a cannon. The twenties, as lived by Rambova, Dorothy Arzner, Fatty Arbuckle, or as dreamt by Mad Ken.

Russell had made his career in Britain at a time when the industry was in collapse: he largely missed the explosion of energy that marked Swinging London, the British new wave, and the only kitchen sink he liked was the one he was always throwing in. Now, the domestic business seemed to have expired of ennui, senile dementia and blood poisoning, but Hollywood beckoned. Russell was bottom of a long list of directors who all turned down Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States, a late-mid-life crisis film about sensory deprivation tanks and psychedelics which takes John C. Lilley and fuses him with Dr. Jekyll. Russell took it on despite being forbidden from changing a line of dialogue, but got his revenge by having his actors speak fast -- like Jimmy Cagney fast, not so much throwing away their lines as firing them like tennis balls. And by having them eat at the same time. And by expanding the hallucination sequences until they took over the movie, so that they were all anyone talked about. Druggie audiences would hang out into the lobby, Russell gleefully reported, posting a sentry in the auditorium who would yell “Hallucination!” whenever one was starting, and everyone would rush back in to get a hit of audiovisual delirium.

A bit like Women in Love, Altered States benefited from the creative clash between director and writer (who took his name off the script in protest at Russell’s backhanded fidelity), but the reaction among respectable types was mainly a theatrical eye-roll: the maniac was up to his old tricks. Crimes of Passion, starring Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins, was next, with she as a Belle de Jour career girl by day, working girl by night, he as an insane sex-obsessed preacher, some forgettable soap opera type as leading man, the whole thing soaked in neon colors and spliced full of Bearsley and Hokusai, whom the American censor duly deleted in horror. “They cut out anything to do with art,” observed the filmmaker.

And that was it for America, save occasional pieces for HBO, progressively more televisual, the locked-off symmetrical winning out over the kinetic. Russell returned to the UK to make theatrical features, and again you heard the cry off “Whatever happened? He used to be good!” Gothic dealt with Byron and the Shelleys and the birth of Frankenstein, and was fruity, literate, dirty good fun. The Rainbow was a return to Women in Love territory, on a lower budget and with less energy and star wattage: Russell declared it his best film since that imagined zenith, and a few critics wanly agreed. The Lair of the White Worm was another journey beyond the pale, thrusting some of the same actors into a ludicrous vampire and snake goddess phallic farrago with Hugh Grant and a kilted Peter Capaldi attempting to snakecharm with bagpipes. A vampirized policeman gets his head impaled on a deco sundial. Marvelous. And the sequence was rounded out with Salome’s Last Dance, which stages Oscar Wilde’s biblical wet dream in a Victorian brothel, an inspired no-budget solution and a film which, unlike Altered States, really respects its words, lingering over them, rolling them salaciously over its tongue. Add in also Ken’s episode of Aria, in which he stages Nessun Dorma as an accident victim’s operating room hallucination, with porn mag model Linzi Drew, a new Russell favorite, in the lead.

Time was running out, the budgets shrinking like a Fu Manchu death chamber, the ceiling pressing down and clearly constraining what Russell could achieve, despite his continuing ambition. Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the BBC scored huge ratings, and he was never asked back. Commercial television’s top arts programme, The South Bank Show, run by Russell’s old screenwriter from Women in Love, Melvyn Bragg, kept him going with more-or-less annual commissions: he’d come full circle, or did when he moved back to home movies, shot in his garden or in his favorite Soho pub, which he hoped to “flog on the internet.” The symmetry of the career, its ourobousness, is more pleasing to contemplate than it must have been to live, though the last marriage lasted and was happy, and the ever-moving critical pendulum had reached the place where people were starting to say that The Devils and some of the other seventies work was really good, actually.

I can admire everything up until the final home movies, and maybe I’ll come round to them: Russell was right to admire all his earlier films. He spent decades more or less brushing off French Dressing, then saw it on TV and thought, “This is a masterpiece!” which it is. But only a minor one compared to what was those around it. Seaside-postcard humor, musical comedy performances, pop art imagery, Wagnerian and Stravinskian soundtracks, a defiant rejection of subtlety. “I don’t believe there’s any value in understatement […] This is the age of kicking people in the balls and telling them something and getting a reaction […] Picasso was not restrained, Mahler was not restrained!’” His detractors thought he should be, possibly in a straitjacket and with megadoses of Thorazine, but Russell was a volcanic eruption in cinematic form, a purple-faced tyrant of the Stroheim school, a demonic force driven to possess reels of celluloid and make them glow in the dark with a sugar rush radiation that has yet to decay. He was too big, too vulgar, too beautiful, too nasty and too beautiful for a national cinema mired in lethargic literary-theatrical respectability. “The visual arts have never had a foothold in England,” he sneered.

Ken!

Life is not a Ken Loach movie. It is a Ken Russell movie.

by David Cairns