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feralphoenix · 4 years ago

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BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE NOT PREPARED TO TRY

if you’re following my blog or if you read my fanfiction, you may have seen me talking in tags or comments about how the radiance hollowknight was a pacifist. “feral, wtf?” you may have thought. “she’s the freaking final boss and tries really, really hard to kill you and all her attacks do 2 entire masks damage. where on earth do you get pacifism out of that???”

to you specifically i say, that’s an understandable reaction! the short version of how i got here was that i started thinking about the story implications of radi not inflicting contact damage and took a deep dive into game mechanics and lore. when i came up for air i had made myself Very Sad.

if this intrigues you and you would like to know more, come along with me, i am happy to point out the things i noticed and share the Big Sad around.

this essay is also available on dreamwidth for accessibility purposes, since my layout’s text may be too small for folks on pc with high-res screens.

CONTENT WARNING: This essay discusses pseudo-zombie plagues and associated body horror, colonialism and genocide, horrible things that happened in real life Australian history... you know, the usual topics that come up when I’m talking about Hollow Knight.

ADDITIONAL NOTICE: TPK fans of the “TPK meant well/was working for the greater good”/“TPK and Radi are equally bad”/“TPK is bad but Radi is worse” variety please give this one a pass, it ain’t for you.

finally if youre from a christian cultural upbringing (whether currently practicing, agnostic/secular, or atheist now), understand that some of what i’m discussing here may challenge you. if thinking thru the implications of this particular part of hollow knight worldbuilding/lore is distressing for you, PLEASE only approach this essay when youre in a safe mindset & open to listening, and ask the help of a therapist or anti-racism teacher/mentor to help you process your thoughts & feelings. just like keep in mind that youre listening to an ethnoreligiously marginalized person and please be respectful here or wherever else youre discussing this dang essay

BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE NOT PREPARED TO TRY: The Radiance Doesn’t Deal Contact Damage And That’s Kind Of Fucked Up And Sad

The vast majority of hostile creatures in Hollow Knight deal contact damage: This is to say, if the Wandering Knight (who I’ll probably spend most of this essay calling by their affectionate fan name Ghost) touches a hostile creature, this harms them.

There are exceptions to this rule. The most notable and most oft-memed example is the game’s literal actual true final boss, the Radiance. Not only will Ghost not be harmed by running into any part of her body, but during her stagger animation, where she drops to the boss arena floor on her front with her whole body splayed out, Ghost still isn’t harmed if she lands on top of them! What’s more, this holds true for her full-power form Absolute Radiance, the secret final boss of the Godmaster quest/endings.

A lot of people find this amusing, because it’s a little absurd that a game’s final boss is an exception to such a consistent element of gameplay! Hence all the “haha moth too soft and fluffy for contact damage” jokes. It is objective facts that Radi is very soft and very fluffy, so it’s very easy to understand why people don’t overthink this too much.

Thinking about things I like in gross detail is unfortunately my hobby. When it comes to Hollow Knight this usually leads to me making myself really sad. I’d like to share the fruits of my theorizing with the class, so other people can be sad with me.

Now, from a game design perspective I can think of a lot of reasons why Team Cherry chose for Radiance not to inflict contact damage. Her hitbox only covers the central part of her body. Her limbs are large, so because of the way she floats, if she did contact damage she would be protected from nail strikes from below and to either side. This would give a player who prefers nail combat a punishingly small margin through which they could inflict damage without also taking a hit, potentially forcing them to adapt to a new and unfamiliar play style at the very end of the game. That’s not fun for anybody and tends to make players feel very frustrated.

In addition to this, Radiance’s attacks are all bullet hell-style spells. All of them except the floor hazards inflict two masks of damage, meaning if you want to stay alive and identify points where it’s possible to heal, you need to learn the spell patterns and dodge a lot. Radi is a large boss. If running into her hurt you this would make the bullet hell elements of her fight extra punishing.

So, I think the purely game mechanics reason for Moth Too Soft And Fluffy is in interest of keeping her boss fight fair, and helping players feel like they have a chance of actually defeating her.

Part of why we all love Hollow Knight, though, is that there’s not much in the game that only exists for purely mechanical reasons. There’s always some form of story or lore integration.

So what on earth is the story reason behind why Radiance doesn’t deal contact damage?

OTHER ENEMIES THAT DON’T DEAL CONTACT DAMAGE

Radi isn’t the only enemy (here defined as fightable/killable creature) in Hollow Knight who doesn't inflict contact damage, so let’s take a look at her fellow exceptions to the rule to see what we can learn.

Broadly speaking there are two categories of Enemies That Don’t Deal Contact Damage. The first is enemies or bosses who used to be hostile, but have become friendly to the player. For instance, when characters like Ogrim and Hornet are not being fought in boss battles, touching them won’t cause damage to Ghost. These story characters who Ghost has more or less reconciled with can’t be damaged by the player out of combat either.

In terms of generic enemies who used to be hostile but have become friendly to the player, we have the mantises of the Fungal Wastes and the Siblings/Ghost’s Shade. We learn from the game’s lore that the mantises Did Not Like The Pale King and were hostile to Hallownest, but that they established a ceasefire conditional on their keeping the people of Deepnest (who were also hostile to Hallownest) from leaving through the area’s main entrance/exit in the Fungal Wastes - essentially the two native kingdoms were pitted against one another by the Pale King.

Now, just because there was a ceasefire, that doesn’t mean the mantises take kindly to Hallownest bugs brazenly trespassing into their dang house; they will get in your face and try to kill you unless you have permission to be there. But once you’ve defeated the Mantis Lords in combat and proven yourself worthy of the mantises’ respect, they’ll let you pass through their turf unmolested. They are no longer actively hostile and don't deal contact damage.

(You're still able to attack them, though - maybe because you’d be locked out of receiving the Hunter’s Mark if you complete the Respect quest/achievement before you’ve successfully killed enough mantises? - and if you attack them, or if your pet charm familiars attack them, any mantises you aggroed will fight back and deal contact damage again.)

The Siblings, as well as Ghost’s Shade, are initially indiscriminately hostile. Our window into Shade psychology is limited, but we know that the Shade died violently and the Siblings probably did too; they may be lashing out. They’re also Void creatures, and Ghost looks a lot like the Pale King, whom we can guess from context clues pissed the Void off significantly by using it as his personal play-doh to make tools and toys with and also using its house as his personal garbage dump for baby corpses.

However, once Ghost recalls their past and breaks the mask of the Kingsoul charm to reveal the Void Heart at its core, the Void recognizes them as a part of it, and Ghost becomes able to direct/lead the Void to some extent. As an extension of this, the Siblings and Ghost’s shade become docile and can now be killed by any weapon in one hit instead of just the Dream Nail (which is made of Radiance’s Light and is the Void’s natural weakness). They don’t deal contact damage anymore either.

That’s it for “enemies that inflict contact damage at one point, but stop inflicting it after becoming friendly or neutral to Ghost”.

The generic enemies which don't inflict contact damage include shrumelings, maggots, maskflies, and lightseeds/lifeseeds. These enemies are incapable of inflicting any damage on Ghost whatsoever, because by themselves they are completely helpless entities with no natural defenses.

Shrumelings are infant members of the mushroom clan who are usually protected by adult fungi like shrumal warriors and ogres. Lightseeds and lifeseeds are harmless single-celled organisms. Maskflies are similarly harmless. Maggots, we glean from the Hunter’s Journal and dialogue from False Knight/Failed Champion, are the bottom rung of Hallownest’s society because they are weak and helpless, and are forced into menial and slave labor by other Hallownest bugs because they cannot defend themselves. The maggots’ plight is the whole reason why False Knight/Failed Champion stole Hegemol's armor in the first place, as he wanted to protect his people.

All of these enemies flee when Ghost approaches them. (Some maskfly groups’ flight triggers are set to specific areas on a map and won’t flee if you can avoid stepping on/passing through those areas, but this is clearly due to a programming oversight because their whole Thing is running away.)

But, there’s something interesting to be observed in the case of lightseeds and maggots: They can fight back against and harm Ghost if they use tools. The little flock of lightseeds you chase around the Ancient Basin eventually get sick of Ghost’s shit and take over Broken Vessel/Lost Kin’s corpse, which they puppet around to try to murder you. By doing so they gain access to Broken Vessel/Lost Kin’s considerable combat prowess and become very dangerous, contact damage included in the bargain. (The lightseeds’ doing this seems to evoke the vessel’s spirit, since they reach for Ghost when defeated. That’s not a gesture the lightseeds have any reason to make. The Lost Kin fight, by which the spirit seems to gain some form of closure, becomes available here too.)

False Knight/Failed Champion’s fights work on the same general principle. Now that he has a weapon he can attack Ghost, and his armor deals contact damage. The maggot inside the armor does not inflict contact damage; essentially both his boss fights consist of your whacking the armor until he’s stunned and pops out of the armor for a moment so you can hit his vulnerable real body, which is the only part of him that yields Soul when you smack him. In fact, his boss fights will last forever if you let him recover from being stunned on his own.

Between these two groups, Radiance very obviously doesn’t fit in the first, as she’s the final boss and is very vigorously trying to kill Ghost with various magic spells. You can tell from her Dream Nail dialogue that she’s furious about what the Pale King did to her and her people, and is afraid for her life. She is willing to use everything at her disposal to try to destroy Ghost so she can survive, go free, and get revenge for the Pale King’s crimes. If she could do contact damage to Ghost she would.

So, the only logical conclusion to make is that Radi falls into the second group of enemies that don’t inflict contact damage. She is physically incapable of causing any harm to anyone with only her body. Her magic is deadly as all get out and the 2 masks damage explosion noise probably haunts the nightmares of anyone who’s struggled fighting her, but without it she is helpless.

WHY CAN’T RADIANCE DO CONTACT DAMAGE?

It might be pretty hard to reconcile the fact that a character with Audre Lorde energy as potent as Radi Hollowknight’s is has a whopping 0 ATK. The biggest clues we get in terms of story context for her inability to inflict physical harm of any kind can be found within the culture of the moth tribe, who were her people.

Thistlewind, the backer-designed moth ghost who can be found in the Resting Grounds, tells you that the majority of moths were pacifists, and that individuals like them and like Markoth who learned to wield a nail were in the minority. Thistlewind appears to have learned to fight as a means of self-defense while they explored the crater area, and describes Markoth as having done so in order to “[brave] the edges of this world, hoping to uncover a truth long forgotten”. It sounds to me like Markoth was trying to recover parts of moth culture that were lost when their tribe was assimilated into Hallownest, or maybe even searching for Radiance or trying to learn what happened to her. (Judging that his corpse is hidden behind one of the Pale King’s shade gates it seems this didn’t go well. Thanks TPK.)

As far as fighting moths go there’s Marmu too, but she seems to be a special case, possibly raised in Hallownest's culture instead of with her tribe. We don’t actually get any sort of canon explanation for how a baby moth wound up as a child soldier who died defending the Queen’s Gardens, but given the overall tone of Hollow Knight as a game and all the colonization/Australian history parallel subtext, some horrifying possibilities come to mind.

So, if Thistlewind, Markoth, and Marmu are Outliers Lepidoptera and should not be counted, how did the majority of moths spend their time? According to Seer, who knows more about the tribe’s history than most (and to Quirrel, who points you to her if you defeat Uumuu before picking up the Dream Nail), the moths’ main prerogative was cultivating and developing dream magic. From the way the Seer describes dreams as a living history as you collect Essence, dream magic seems to be a parallel to the Dreaming (or Dreamtime), a spiritual concept in Indigenous Australian religion related to both history and myth.

To translate this into simple terms, the moths were by and large pacifists whose culture celebrated art, history, and spirituality.

Team Cherry tends to adapt at least some aspects of real-life bug behavior and biology into their sad cartoon bugs, so moths-as-pacifists tracks: Real moths do not really have any way to fight. They defend themselves from predators via their mobility and their markings, which tend towards either camouflage that helps them hide or bright markings intended to scare predators off by indicating they’re poisonous (therefore not good to eat) or look like the face of something much bigger and more dangerous than they are.

There's not that much we can glean about the moths in pre-Hallownest society aside from Seer’s dialogue, because Hallownest destroyed their civilization so thoroughly: Except in the Dream Realm (which is filled with Essence spirographs and the wisteria charms that decorate Seer’s room), their architecture can only be found anymore in hidden parts of the Resting Grounds and at the very top of the Crystal Peak where Radi’s statue and a fuckton of lore tablets Ghost doesn’t know how to read are located.

But, we know that the crater pre-Hallownest was home to a ton of diverse bug nations - the mosskin, the mushroom tribe, the mantises, Deepnest, the Hive, the flukes - and every SINGLE one of those had some kind of warrior tradition, as well as their own unique cultures. In the midst of all that it was only the moths who were pacifists, so from there we can tentatively assume that they were on good enough terms with their neighbors for there not to be any fighting. The mosskin in particular also had and still have a Higher Being on their side, though in the modern day Unn seems to be rather conflict avoidant to say the least.

And we know from Hallownest’s past dealings with the mantises and Deepnest that even having Two (2) Higher Beings isn’t enough to keep rival civilizations off your nuts if they hate you, so it’s improbable that Radiance just did all the moths’ fighting for them.

The only hint that the moths ever had beef with anyone at all is one of Radiance’s Dream Nail lines, “ancient enemy” - this is popularly theorized to refer to the Void and might be corroborated by the Void’s willingness to follow Ghost into Radi’s boss fights and fight alongside them. As the Void seems to be some sort of Higher Being/god of darkness and nothingness, and the Dream Nail’s only offensive ability is to kill Void creatures, the Void and creatures of Light appear to be in a position of mutual vulnerability. Some of the Pale King’s writings in his workshop, which identify the Void as a power in direct opposition to his, support this too.

It’s unclear whether the Void civilization and Radiance ever directly came to blows or whether they were just giving each other the stink eye over being natural enemies - personally I think the latter is more likely because the two civilizations existed on opposite sides of the crater*, and again, the moths were pacifists; plus when Ghost brings the Void along to Radi’s boss fight she is quickly and gruesomely overwhelmed by it.

What I am saying here is that if pacifism was such an integral aspect of moth culture, and Radiance epitomized her people’s culture, and she is 100% incapable of inflicting physical harm, she was probably a pacifist too.

DEEP DOWN YOU KNOW YOU WEREN'T BUILT FOR FIGHTING

Hallownest flourished for a long, long time between the Pale King and White Lady first establishing it and the initial outbreak of the Infection.

There’s no conclusive information in-game as to why this is. We can only guess: Maybe Radiance was so badly hurt or weakened by the moths’ assimilation that it simply took her That Long to become capable of the mass dream broadcast to Literally Everyone In Hallownest that would eventually become the Infection when Hallownest’s people tried to suppress it. Or, maybe it just took a long time for her to come up with a way to fight back. It’s possible that it took her a while to find the resolve to actually fight back, too, with her principles of pacifism in conflict with the necessity of defending herself and taking her people back. Maybe there was a change in the moths’ situation in Hallownest somewhere down the line that compelled her to step in - all the moths are super extremely dead at the time Hollow Knight starts, after all. Even Seer is eventually revealed to be a revenant like Ze’mer the Grey Mourner, only lingering in the world to pass on the Dream Nail and tell Radiance’s story. Maybe it was a combination of all those factors. Barring Team Cherry dropping in to explain this bit of Sekret Deep Lore, we are never going to know.

All we DO know for sure is that when we mosey into Hollow’s brain (and/or Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny our way to the top of Hallownest’s Pantheon) and challenge the literal actual sun to a fight, Radi takes the challenge with extreme prejudice and comes in swinging.

Something interesting I noticed while comparing the Radiance boss fights with the Pure Vessel fight is that some of their attacks are vaguely similar. Where warrior-mage characters like Xero and Markoth have physical weapons that they summon and manipulate with magic, Radiance and Pure Vessel both create nails and daggers out of Essence and Soul respectively. Both characters’ magical weapon attacks are similar in nature too: Some are used to create hazards that must be dodged or avoided, and some are fired directly at Ghost in radial patterns.

This begs a very sad chicken-and-egg question. Did Radi and Hollow develop these battle techniques independently of each other, has Hollow in their prime form somehow absorbed similar techniques to Radi through osmosis since they’re currently chained together by the brain... or is Radi mimicking and innovating on these attacks she knows Hollow can do?

All her other attacks seem very obvious for a light-themed character, after all: Beam attacks and blobs of light. A flash of bright light is also how she shakes off the Void the first time it tries to grab her, too, making for a strong argument that that’s the original natural defense she possessed, and that’s what she based most of her attack magic off of.

Making sword’s and knive’s from Essence when most of her people didn’t even handle these sorts of tools even at the height of her power and influence, though... that seems less like something that would come naturally to her. i don’t really know i don’t have a definitive answer or theory for this one it just Seems Possible and it’s fucking me up guys

Even the Infection - which began life as Radiance’s attempt to communicate, let’s remember, before it progressed to “The End Of Eva Disease Will Continue Until Someone Actually Listens To Me” and then finally Radi screaming “FUCK U LET ME OUT, GET THAT NEW SUNNY D BOTTLE THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, HALLOWNEST EAT SHIT” during canon - does not appear to be fatal to living bugs until the tumorous growths grow so large they impede bodily functions, like real cancer. We can observe this phenomenon via a number of NPCs and enemies that are rediscovered as tumorous corpses after the whole Crossroads area becomes infected.

At least to me, all of this points to Radiance being a character to whom violence and causing harm doesn't come naturally, and who has resorted to these methods in desperation.

It actually reminds me a lot of False Knight/Failed Champion. It’s a very common theory among fans that when he stole Hegemol’s armor he killed Hegemol - this is a reasonable thing to believe, since Hegemol is the only one of the Five Great Knights of Hallownest who never appears at all in-game, not even as a corpse like Dryya and Isma. Like Radi, False Knight/Failed Champion is a character who rose up and turned to violence in order to protect his people, despite the maggots not being a belligerent species.

False Knight is one of the game’s first major bosses, sometimes the first boss that players encounter at all. And so Hollow Knight’s story bookends with two separate victims of a predatory system, one who lived within and was cannibalized by it, one outside of it who was deliberately targeted by the Pale King. Neither of them started out as a fighter, but both of them still adopted violence as a tool to protect themselves and their people. Radiance is as doomed as False Knight by the Pale King’s genocide, but just like False Knight, she has no intention of going quietly, and will rage against the dying of the light as only the literal actual sun can.

Cue Deedee Magno Hall voice clip. You all know the one.

*A footnote: There’s no conclusive evidence to tell us whether the Void civilization was contemporaneous with the other pre-Hallownest indigenous bug nations or whether it predated them. Mask Maker has a line suggesting that the Void civilization tried to expand throughout the crater in its heyday and that maybe this was linked to its collapse, but in general the Void lore is just too darn thin to draw firm conclusions - it’s like trying to speculate on the ancient stone age cultures of the Americas that came before pre-settler Indigenous countries when the only sources you can easily access are elementary school level US history textbooks. (To non-Americans: We mostly teach kids propaganda until they hit college-level courses and it sucks so much ass.) This is very realistic worldbuilding, but also please Team Cherry I want to know more about these ancient bugs who apparently got lost in the sauce

#hollow knight #hollow knight spoilers #hollow knight meta #the radiance #hk radiance #essay #long post under cut -#bad and naughty catholics go in the catholic wiggler

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annecoulmanross · 5 years ago

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A Re(sponse)-Re-Re-Review, Re: The Terror (2018)

I’ve recently read through all of the gorgeous review posts of The Terror (2018) from @rhavewellyarnbag and I just want to say that I think they’re incredibly beautiful and thoughtful responses to this show – all three amazing rounds of them.

I started out simply collecting quotes that were amusing to me, but my notes document very quickly became full of my own responses and confessions. Basically, I ended up making my own response/review of the whole thing, which is what you’ll find in this post.

So, thank you @rhavewellyarnbag for your many insightful thoughts about this show and my responses are below the cut! (Also, your repeated efforts to drive Goodsir to the hospital are a truly noble service, and bring me comfort in these dark times.)

01x01 – “Go For Broke” (One, Two, and Three)

“Ciaran Hinds looks like a grand old walrus.”

This was the line that made me realize I needed to start keeping track of quotes that made me laugh like a seal barking.

“‘You should cherish that man.’ I cherish that fucking line of dialog. I don’t even mean it in a filthy way. That line is so goddamn sweet, I could punch myself in the face.”

Amongst all the beautiful content produced about this show, almost nothing will ever surpass, for me, this description of this line of dialogue paired with that post about “Idiot Boat Caesar, who knows a slow-burn when he sees one.” Sir John has an astonishing capacity to be truly warm on rare occasions, and this is one of the few scenes in which we really get to see James experience that warmth, both genuinely and, here, in the form of a truly gentle, well-meant rebuke that probably cuts James far more than we see.

“This is an interesting scene with the diving suit. This could potentially go very badly. The man in the suit may be dispatched by the mysterious horror following them, or, in order not to give it away, and to show a scientific curiosity, he may die of decompression of the suit.”

Fun fact: one of my great-grandfathers apparently died of decompression from using an early-model diving suit. I learned this when I was word-vomiting to my mother about The Terror. I am now even more terrified of historical diving suits. All diving suits, really.

“If James’ characterization plays around with gender, it does so in this sense: James is constantly acted upon, by the bullet that wounded him, by the disease that fells him, by others’ opinions of him.”

Watch me attempt to cite your reviews of the The Terror in a dissertation, because everything about this description is exactly the gender framework around which I’ve draped the two historical men with whom I’ve fallen in love, one being my actual subject of research, the other being James Fitzjames.

“I’ve previously compared James’ bravery, his very person, to a woman’s beauty: bestowed upon her, not earned; understood to be temporary; dependent upon others’ admiring, desiring of it. Does James exist when no one is around to observe him?”

I adore everything about this description and also it makes me cry.

“There are a great deal of unfortunate classical references in this episode.”

This is my entire mood about The Terror, always. The nods to Philoctetes and Medea as components of the Argonaut myth that Sir John invokes are also distinctly worth exploring in this context, though I’m not going to do so here because the Argonautica (broadly speaking) is not my speciality.

01x02 – “Gore” (One, Two, and Three)

“James and Sir John are about the same height. They look not dissimilar, which James probably liked.”

Oh James.

“Strangely, [Sir John] doesn’t seem particularly pleased with James, who adores him.”

It’s true, and it’s quite painful. I don’t think Sir John is a good role model for James, but it doesn’t lessen the fact that I know James is perceptive enough to know that he’s not being adored in return, and that’s a brutal thing to know.

“You don’t have to be a drunk redheaded sea captain to see that James is empty, hollow, aching, desperate to be the things he tells you he is, desperate to see himself reflected back at himself. Desperate to be loved.”

I have a type, and this is it, apparently.

“Goodsir is a character from another sort of work, entirely. That’s its own kind of tragedy, the tragic juxtaposition. Goodsir is a sweet, gentle, utterly ordinary little pudding, an incidental character plucked from a more innocent narrative, and he’s no-doubt going to die horribly.”

This is the early impression of Goodsir, before any of us see what’s beneath Goodsir’s surface, but it’s also not wrong at all. In another sort of work (perhaps, as noted, a work by Jane Austen), Goodsir is (uniquely, among these men, perhaps) capable of living a sweet, gentle, utterly ordinary little life, with a more innocent narrative.

“It’s strongly implied that Irving’s imagination is so open that he has to work to close it.”

That’s certainly true of the historical Irving, as I read it. I have many more complex thoughts and feelings about Irving now than I did after just watching the series through the first time, but I’m not sure whether that’s because his story-line is actually rich, or because I’ve come to like him separately. (Unlike, for instance, Fitzjames, whom I have come to adore separately, but I can safely say does also have a rich story-line in these ten episodes.) The real Irving is more elusive than I think I at least gave him credit for originally.

“Oh, James Fitzjames, you overly-familiar little strumpet, you.”

I’m sobbing.

“Scurvy doesn’t care what kind of person you are.”

In many ways this is true, because we do see scurvy acting indiscriminately on different men, here, without a care for age or station or morality. But also scurvy, in this narrative, attacks most vividly those with some sort of previous wound that the scurvy can reopen. Notably James, but also Morfin, whose flogging-scars we never see but can assume from his conversation (also, for that matter, Jopson, who, historically, had a major scar on his leg, of unknown origin). Scurvy may not truly care what kind of person you are, but if you’ve led a dangerous life, scurvy has one more way to hurt you.

“Who among us has not been desperate to discuss our interests, to the point where there is almost a flirtatious edge to the broaching of the topic? One must be careful, so as not to give away too much, both for the gentle handling that one’s interests require, and for the sake of not alienating some poor rando who made the mistake of asking a bland, vague question simply to be polite.”

Ah, so I see you understand, then. I’ve taken to apologizing in advance of discussing the gorier elements of the Franklin expedition, as though I’ve exposed myself in public. (But seriously, this is the most excellent description of the discomforting feeling of very more obsessed with something than is socially acceptable.)

01x03 – “The Ladder” (One, Two, and Three)

“John Ross is the Jacob Marley figure, I take it.”

The beginning of many intriguing resonances between this show and Dickens’s Christmas Carol, and I think, one of the most elegant. The actor who plays John Ross would be an excellent Jacob Marley.

“Jopson would not talk about Francis’ drinking! You take that back, Gibson.”

This is what I adore about Thomas “Mr. Hears Everything” Jopson – he’ll only ever tell things about others to Francis; he’d never tell things about Francis to others. That’s a moral compass upon which we can unerringly rely, and one that is in no way affected by the magnetic changes at either pole.

“The spyglass sticks to the skin above Francis’ eye, as though it wished to force him not to look away.”

This is an amazing take, especially re: the way spyglasses are used to show foresight and the future in this show. Francis is forced to know look at what is coming for them, the future that waits ahead, hungrily salivating for his men.

“James is completely shattered, but he looks luminously beautiful.”

He does, doesn’t he?

01x04 – “Punished As A Boy” (One, Two, and Three)

“Lady Jane’s response is: ‘Fuck you. I know Charles Dickens.’”

Much as I detest Dickens, and much as I have my own problems with Lady Jane, she is never anything less than badass, particularly here.

“Lady Jane, clad in burgundy, ‘the wine-dark sea,’ stands between Francis and Sophia.”

Oh good god that’s it, though? It was through Lady Jane that I first found the Franklin Expedition, oh, four years ago (it feels like four hundred), and the first thing I ever said about the matter was “I’m confident that she knew Greek.” I’ve never been able to prove it, but she writes, in her letters, like someone who reads Greek. Lady Jane is well and truly our Homeric Hera. Brilliant and vengeful and matronly and brutal. I do adore her.

“Of course Goodsir’s never been lashed. He’s a nice man. He’s probably had the opposite of a flogging. People probably throw roses at him when he walks down the street. I know I would.”

I’d be happy to attend this rose-throwing Goodsir-parade. I already have a bad habit of bringing roses to the pseudo-graves of historical men whom I love; we can add Goodsir to the list without too much hassle.

01x05 – “First Shot’s A Winner, Lads” (One, Two, and Three)

“[Re: James and “Your nails are a terror, Mr. Wentzall]…the checking of collars and fingernails is a very maternal duty.”

I love spotting feminine traits in James, but what I’m getting out of this is actually imagining James’s adoptive mother Louisa Coningham examining the fingernails of a very young James. It’s an adorable, if slightly tragic, image.

“Irving doesn’t seem like a hard man, but like a man trying desperately to be hard, and often failing. He should have forgotten about the navy, stayed on land, gone to France and become an early Impressionist painter.”

This fantastic description of Irving makes it even more tragic that he DID try to forget about the navy and stay on land, and it didn’t work. Canon divergence AU where Irving moved to France instead of Australia?

“We’re told, repeatedly, including by Goodsir, himself, that Goodsir isn’t a doctor. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding: people think they know who Goodsir is, or who he wishes to be, but Goodsir has no desire to be anything but what he is. Perhaps appropriately, it’s Hickey who recognizes and names Goodsir (“You’re an anatomist.”) One may say that Hickey ‘reads’ Goodsir. Though, Hickey’s understanding is, as it often is, flawed. He may know what Goodsir is, but he doesn’t know who Goodsir is.”

I very genuinely wonder – did Goodsir want to be thought of as a doctor, by any of them? What were Goodsir’s thoughts and preferences on the matter?

01x06 – “A Mercy” (One, Two, and Three)

“What Sir John left them was a means of dissembling, a facade. Cheer in a cheerless time, which holds the dangerous allure of forgetting.”

This is perfect, because Carnevale, at its center, is “the dangerous allure of forgetting,” in no small part because, structurally, Carnevale fills the role of the Homeric island of the lotus-eaters. (It is also a labyrinth, though, and that’s an interesting doubling.)

“The half masks in the trunk have the semblance of the faces of dead men we’ve seen. The creature has the habit or practice of biting a man’s head in two, or biting off part of the cranium.”

I had never noticed this but it’s entirely true.

“Francis is bracketed by Thomas’, neither one of them a doubter.”

I will SCREAM

“‘I don’t like to hear a woman laughing now.’ I suppose it’s fortunate that Jopson’s professional life allows him to be around men, exclusively. What would Jopson have done later in life? Marriage is obviously out of the question if women’s mirth causes him such distress. Would he have stayed on boats? Francis promotes him to lieutenant, but would that have made him happy? He has a love of, an instinct for caring for others that obviously can’t be transposed onto a marriage, both because of Jopson’s limits and because of Victorian gender roles. The best possible course for Jopson would have been valet, a gentleman’s gentleman. His rank and background would have made him an asset, and no more devoted valet would there have been.”

The fanfic writes itself. (I have nothing to say yet, I just adore this speculation; more below, though.)

“The drop of blood falling from James’ hairline onto the mask’s cheek to make a kind of morbid beauty spot is a gorgeous image, like a piece of decadent poetry.”

I personally find James unbearably beautiful, and the whole extended sequence with the dress and the drinking and the blood dripping is so subtle and lovely and I think, like with poetry, what we get out of it is never simple.

“James is dressed as Britannia. Which makes James mother to them all.”

Though I, selfishly, would have loved to see James in something more scandalous than his Britannia costume, I think it’s symbolically the best possible choice for him. This is an outfit that is technically crossdressing, but it’s very subtle thanks to the choices James makes – we don’t see any dramatic woman’s wig or other feminine elements. This is an outfit that reminds the men of home; reminds James of home, and of his adoptive mother, whose poetry was full to the brim and spilling with Britannia.

“Blanky looks great. I wonder if the visual reference to the Ghost of Christmas Present is intentional.”

I’ve always assumed he was meant to be Bacchus, but of course the Ghost of Christmas Present has more than a little Bacchus in him also. All of these Christmas Carol overlaps are exceedingly interesting – John Ross’s Marley warning Franklin’s Scrooge, and now the Ghost of Blanky Present reminding Crozier that others are – for good or ill – having fun without him.

“One may imagine that Edward has disguised himself as someone who enjoys parties.”

OH GOD.

01x07 – “Horrible From Supper” (One, Two, and Three)

“Hickey can’t move on from humiliation, because he would see that as more humiliation. Keeping the humiliation alive in his mind is the only way to gain some mastery over it. He holds the wound open, so that no one can deny that it’s a wound, that it happened, that it mattered, that he matters, but it means that he can never heal, never be whole. Scurvy.”

The Hickey/Fitzjames parallels are STRONG here. Also, this resonates really well with a conversation I had with a friend about Eleanor Guthrie from Black Sails – she’s unable to move past being hurt and I just can’t fault her for it, even as her stubbornness just hurts her more. And I feel that sympathy for James, too – he’s bottled up so much hurt inside, and it has kept hurting him his entire life. If Hickey didn’t “hold the would open” by, you know, making wounds in other people, literally, I’d probably even feel bad for him.

“There is an emotional and psychological toll, which Francis tries desperately to reduce by keeping the men together, reinforcing the bonds between them, persistently humanizing them.”

The Jopson’s promotion scene warms me on cold nights. That’s all.

“Jopson’s role is the opposite of Lady Silence’s: the fact of her gender alters nothing about it; Jopson’s informs it. Make Jopson female, and he clearly functions as Francis’ wife. If Jopson is male, though, what is he? A paid servant, in the literal sense, but his obvious pleasure at caring for Francis long ago eroded the patina of duty. I think we can safely say that Jopson loves Francis, loves and cares deeply for him. Is invested in Francis’ safety, well-being, happiness. Enjoys the details of his service to Francis, beyond the enjoyment of a job well-done. Add a sexual component, and it becomes a marriage. Leave it out, and the relationship is something else. Drop Jopson into a marriage with a woman, and he becomes a husband. Leave him with Francis, and he remains Francis’ wife.”

This is what I find so fascinating about Jopson – everything about his identity has the potential to be contingent, to change, but as the expedition’s tragedy unfolds, we see all of the possible threads of Jopson’s future cut off, one by one. From the beginning, Jopson can’t be female, and thus can’t serve a wifely role in British society, even though he’s clearly fit for it. We learn that Jopson has some very specific PTSD triggers related to women that might prevent him from ever being married to one, even if he wanted to be. Jopson seems to wish to continue serving Francis in perpetuity, to continue being as close to a wife as Francis will ever have, but Francis, sober, no longer needs the same kind of care that Jopson used to provide, and, eventually, Jopson becomes unable to care for Francis at all, so that Francis has to care for him. Jopson is all change, all tragedy.

“I would like to thank the director, cinematographer, anybody else who may be responsible for that stunning shot of James in profile. James really is beautiful, even, maybe particularly, at this stage of his infirmity. I’ve said it at other times, but there’s something, well, I suppose, romantic about his illness, because he is young, and beautiful, and heroic, so desperate to be loved, and so loved, in the end.”

*sighs* I’m not okay about James.

01x08 – “Terror Camp Clear” (One, Two, and Three)

“I don’t know how I didn’t notice before, but James is a leggy creature.”

I will still treasure the term “a leggy creature” when I am in my grave.

“Sir John was not a top, and I know that for a fact, because I just got Lady Jane on the Ouija board, and she told me.”

I WILL SCREAM.

“[Francis] doesn’t look on James as a sick person in need of careful handling. There’s no sense of the separation necessary for pity between Francis and James. He is this way toward James because he cares about James.”

I know we all joke about the quote “it’s rotten work” / “not to me, not if it’s you,” but this is what that quote has always meant to me (the Anne Carson of it, that is, not the original Greek). Caring for someone via pity, via distance, takes effort, is painful, is rotten, even though it is sometimes worth it. Caring for someone via care, via love may still take effort, and may still even be painful, but there is no separation, no alienation, from the service of providing care. That’s where Francis’s tenderness comes from, I think. That closeness.

“James, you big, beautiful racehorse. Even chapped and cracked, he’s radiantly beautiful. He has such a warm quality.”

In the confessional spirit of this review, I will admit: I find James more attractive than I am capable of expressing. The interesting thing, to me, is that I don’t have the same response at all to Tobias Menzies or to any other character I’ve seen him play. He’s a great actor, certainly, but he doesn’t do it for me. But James does. I’m still puzzling this out.

“James’ bravery is treated somewhat like a woman’s beauty, in that he believes it to be conditional, temporary. It’s dependent on others’ appreciation of it; when he’s alone, James doesn’t feel brave.”

I will say, admitting that it’s probably James’ femininity that is attractive to me gets you a long way toward understanding why I do find him so terribly appealing.

“Oh, please, baby Jesus, don’t let Jopson flip. Jopson’s one of the few things I have left to hang onto, here.”

Jopson will never flip, such that Jopson’s death really is the point of no return, here. He’ll die before he flips. (Notably, it’s important to be clear that by “flip,” I mean turn his loyalties away from Crozier. I have reconciled myself to the idea that, though Jopson is upright and innocent in a way even my James isn’t, he is capable of violence and even unjustified, offensive violence. But only ever in the service of his captain.) And again here, Jopson very well might not be immune to the seduction Hickey’s definitely attempting, but bending to Hickey’s wiles means betraying Crozier, and that’s an impossibility for Jopson.

“Bridgens, who’s a cozy old piece of furniture…”

….and Henry Peglar would like to sit on him. (I get it Henry, I do.)

01x09 – “The C, the C, the Open C” (One, Two, and Three)

“Oh, Bridgens. Where’s Henry? Where did Henry go?”

I think a real triumph of this show is getting you to know, by this point, that when you see Bridgens, you should ALWAYS ask yourself, “Where’s Henry?” Because yeah, “They are each other’s loved one,” and there can’t be either one of them without the other. Bridgens knows this, and makes himself into a memorial for Henry. The only kind of monument Henry Peglar can ever have: Bridgens, with his own body, preserves Peglar’s words for the future, for us. I’m just going to cry for Bridgens and for Peglar for a minute, that’s all. Please excuse me.

“Hartnell watches Bridgens pick up Peglar, Peglar’s arm around Bridgens like, ‘… Wait a minute…’ Hartnell also misses Hickey’s innuendo about Armitage. Tom Hartnell tragically has no gay-dar.”

Oh precious Hartnell. This lack of gay-dar is part of why Hartnell had to get written out of what I’m currently writing (I’m sorry Hartnell! It’s not you it’s me.)

“There’s something of a horrible wooing about it: Goodsir, like an unwilling bride, forcibly taken from his own people by unscrupulous men, installed in as luxurious surroundings as can be had, with his trousseau, for the purpose of catering to an unspeakable hunger. His innocence is taken from him, and he’s turned against himself. His body is stripped naked and consumed.”

(a) What a horrible and horribly accurate description. (b) This is another one of those places where this show is unafraid to place male characters into narrative metaphors of womanhood. For me, the most vivid is always Jopson, but Goodsir is also often made to face this sort of feminine role, and for Goodsir it’s so much more often about violence and shame.

“James says “I’m not Christ,” before he tells Francis to feed the men his body. It seems like something of a non sequitur, until one imagines James’ train of thought. As the impulse to give his body to the men occurred to him, so may have also come a last flicker of self-mockery: “What, James, do you think you’re Christ, now?” So that his announcement that he’s not Christ comes in response to this: he knows who he is, and who he isn’t. Finally, he knows this.”

I think that’s exactly what went through James’s head. And more than that, I think back on that beautiful gif-set that placed James’s “I’m not Christ” beside Francis’s “Like Christ, but with more nails.” Francis, whose self-hatred is clear and undisguised, begins to heal by recognizing what is Christ-like in himself: his suffering, and the compassion that is borne from the suffering. James, whose self-hatred is buried under masks and lies and stories and gilded dresses, begins to heal by admitting what is not Christ-like about him: his mortality, his humanity; and that doesn’t make James any lesser, and James finally, finally begins to see so.

“Can’t Jopson’s story end differently, this time?”

That’s what hurts. In no version of this story that happens with Hickey AND the Tuunbaq AND the inevitable deaths of 129 men, should James die any different, or Goodsir, or Bridgens. If they were going to die, they should do so showing bravery and brotherhood; agency and defiance; commitment and love. There are other men who deserved so much better than the ignoble deaths they got (Irving comes to mind) but Jopson is the warmest light and receives the coldest death. There’s no reason for his story NOT to end differently, except for the sheer narrative cruelty of it all. The Terror is brilliant because it knows to reserve this sort of agony for the worst possible gut-punch. Any more than one, or maybe two, utterly, pointlessly cruel deaths, and we would be immunized. But we have no immunity to prepare us for the dizzying nausea of Jopson’s death.

“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. Death, ultimately, isn’t mysterious. Whatever might happen to one afterwards is immaterial to the living, still bound to this plane of existence. One may fear it, but once it happens, it’s over. Love is a way of life, though. It changes over time. It changes the person who feels it, and the person they feel it for. Both Francis and Jopson were changed by their love for each other. Jopson goes to one mystery still in the grip of the other: it’s Francis he sees, reaches for, cannot touch.”

Jopson’s death is still haunting me. It’s like Tantalus, all that food that would save Jopson’s life, if only he could eat it, and yet he crawls right past, toward Crozier. What does that say about Jopson? The way the world tortures him is to hold Crozier just outside of his reach – what on earth is Jopson being punished for? (These aren’t intelligible thoughts anymore; I’m just broken-hearted for my boy.)

“In a narrative that encourages empathy for everyone and everything from a colonial expedition to a monkey to an eldritch monstrosity that rips men’s heads off, why should Hickey be exempt?”

A beautiful way of putting it. I’m still working through my initial disgust at Hickey, but intellectually, I can’t help but agree.

01x10 – “We Are Gone” (One, Two, and Three)

“…the experience of being through so much with these characters that I care about so much has been like living several lifetimes.”

My mother, who has not yet watched this show, told me recently that she thinks these characters have become my family. In part, this is due to the historical research I’ve been doing on the real men of the Franklin expedition, but the show played its own large role in making me fall in love with these men, making me desperate to live as many lifetimes with them as possible.

“Why does Goodsir do it, though? He seems to have made up his mind before Francis appears, and with Francis comes the hope that Edward will rescue them. If anything, Francis’ presence makes Goodsir more resolute.”

As another dear friend said, Goodsir definitely had the plan in mind before Francis showed up, but the plan needed a trigger: it needed Francis, a good man worth dying for. Someone for Goodsir to look at and say, “Maybe my actions will help this man.”

“I think I just confessed to being in love with a man who doesn’t exist.”

Ahh, this lovely club. Even the men I’m in love with who actually lived two thousand years ago don’t really exist, at least not in the way I love them.

“The Terror is like a play put on by a theater company that has no female actors, so all of the men must play female roles…without any women to place in certain contexts – caretaker; lover; victim; object of desire – those dramas necessarily play out on the bodies of the men.”

Watch this space. The Terror is a classical Greek tragedy, and I can prove it.

The description of Goodsir’s preparation for death is richer and more complete than anything I will ever write. GO READ IT.

I also think it’s fascinating to see this scene through the eyes of a reviewer who readily admits “This is an unusual case. I like Goodsir. I don’t usually like the men I’m looking at. I care for Goodsir.” I confess that, though I also like and care for Goodsir, when I am looking at “eroticized male bodies” in media, I only really “feel at home in a text” when I also like and care for those men. If a male character is too morally objectionable to me, I find no erotic appeal to viewing him, because I am so distracted by my own sense of his evils. I simply cannot find anything to pull me, aesthetically or sexually, to someone like Hickey. (I can never find anything sensually appealing about Hickey/Tozer, for instance.) I am pulled to James, in contrast, because he is beautiful to me visually, and because his life (as far as I can see) shows me a person who cared, who tried, who loved. Who is worthy of my care and trust. And though I don’t think I’m in love with Goodsir in the same way than I am with James, I care deeply for Goodsir and thus can find the appeal in watching him, visually.

“‘There is wonder here.’/ ‘Then, there will be the angels.’ The first thing angels ever tell any human being who beholds them is not to be afraid. Wonder isn’t always delightful, isn’t always something that humans can understand, or possibly, even, survive.”

Fear is something I don’t often enough examine closely with this show, though it is so terribly central. “Be not afraid” and “We have too much fear.” How can one dispel fear? Wonder obviously isn’t enough; wonder might even make it worse. Being told not to fear rarely works out so well for those visited by angels. I think, sometimes, that all we can do is – as Peglar does – admit to those we love that we have too much fear, and hope that they can help us carry it.

I can’t NOT give you the end of the first round of these reviews, because, like the description of Goodsir’s preparations, it’s literature:

“The Terror, a show taking place one hundred, sixty years ago, manages to be timely without even trying. Lead poisoning. Environmental catastrophe. The baggage of colonialism. The treatment of indigenous people by white people. Information and misinformation. What it means to be a leader. What it means to be in a marriage. The role of women in society. Gay marriage. Income inequality. Ethical consumption. Consumerism. Members of the armed forces working far from home. Mental health. Addiction. All of these fit neatly into what can also be taken at face value, a well-constructed and -acted tale of adventure and loss set in a faraway place and time. The Terror never tries to force meaning on the viewer, never struggles under the weight of its lofty aspirations- because it has no aspirations. It’s an utterly guileless production, seeking nothing but to present its characters and situations honestly. In doing such a simple thing, it has created the world.”

And, finally, I leave you with: “I’m not looking for a way out. I just want more time with the characters. I don’t want to leave them.” To me, this gives an answer to David Solway’s question “Do you have a tolerance for ongoing narratives which generally turn out to be the same narrative?” And that answer is “yes.” I think there’s a tolerance – or, even, a hunger – for ongoing narratives that turn out to be the same narrative, in this fandom, because why would anyone want a way out anymore, if it means the end of our time with these characters?

I know I don’t.

“The end of The Terror isn’t a sad end, nor is it a hopeful one. It’s not even properly an end, because we know what comes next. What comes next? Well, we do.”

#thank you op for the reviews #everyone else go read them if you haven't #what an unending gift this show is #a ship is its captain's confessor #long post #the terror #the terror amc #terrorposting

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feena-c · 6 years ago

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Just saw Aquaman. Critical review with spoilers under the cut.

Okay. History, Man of Steel was the first movie I’ve ever wanted to walk out of. It was, in my opinion, a bad movie technically and morally grey in a way which was ugly, rather than challenging or thought provoking. It was mean spirited.

Aquaman is beautiful. On the outside. It is morally corrupt and emotionally dead underneath, and it nearly made me cry in the theater for how beautifully it was packaged, and how tragic its message was.

At two points, it gives lip service to the idea that actions have consequences (Aquaman letting Black Manta’s father die, in his conversation with Mera about this, and at the very end, when he spares his brother rather than killing him and the Angelic Mother comes in to say “Violence is wrong, love each other!”)

Every action in this movie, particularly from Aquaman himself but others as well, enforces the idea that Might Makes Right. It glorifies violence and ignores discussion or kindness at all possible points, except the two mentioned above which provide only minimal lip service to the ideals of mercy and considered action.

I am not going to go into everything I think about this movie, but let me just say this.

Aquaman starts this movie by letting a man die, horribly, while his son begs Aquaman for help. Are the two people in question good people? No. Is it right for him to rule there that they deserve death, slow and horrible? Is that just? Perhaps it is just. But is it kind? Do we want a society that punishes with a swift sword? Or in a court, with consideration and a chance for rehabilitation? I do not say a guarantee of redemption or of freedom, but the chance.

By starting the movie this way, you set Aquaman not as a sympathetic (to others, not our view of him) hero, but a vigilante in the most cruel and cold sense. A distributor of justice; ultimate, final, irreversible justice, as he sees fit.

The movie tries, poorly in my opinion, to address this in his conversation with Mera. He says to her “You could have been hurt due to the enemy I created with my actions.” He’s right. He should have acted more carefully. What does the movie then do? Undermine this lesson. She tells him “It’s not your fault.” A lesson which is wrongfully reinforced later by his mother, when she tells him it’s Not His Fault she was brutalized by her people. These are not equivalent, but the movie presents them in parallel.

Let’s look at the rest of the movie, and Aquaman’s actions. What is his goal in the movie? To claim his thrown? That’s not HIS goal. He gets that position by the end, but he never expresses a desire for it. Even at the end he treats the position as a joke. Does he want revenge for his mother’s ‘death’? Sort of, although that’s not presented as his main goal is it? That wouldn’t be Heroic. Orm says that Revenge is something Atlantians understand when addressing Black Mantis. It is framed as bad, and so not presented as Aquaman’s goal. What are we then left with? He wants to protect the land (humans) from being murdered by Orm. A good and heroic goal. We, humans, have done wrong to the ocean and deserve to suffer an equal fate--wait wait, no, that’s not right. We are ignorant of our sins, we need to be given a chance. We need Mercy. Aquaman is here to protect us. To be a bridge between our peoples. Our people, including the ocean dwellers.

Oh, except the climax of the film is Aquaman showing up with the Biggest Weapon on the Biggest Monster he can find and indiscriminately killing literally everyone around him. The Brine people who are resisting Orm? They’re getting crushed by this giant sea monster. The mermaid people who’s princess was forced into this war after the brutal murder of her father? Her people are here and in the middle of all this carnage. Mera’s people, and Aquaman’s own people the Atlantians, led my misguided (or even evil? Certainly not Good) leaders are here. Are they all deserving of indiscriminate death until the moment they bow to Aquaman’s Right to rule, as demonstrated by his power of destruction? Aquaman says it himself, with no irony, to Orm in their final conflict. He takes Orm’s words as his own mantra. “By Bloodshed, let the gods show their will.”

What a line for our hero. What a lesson he is demonstrating.

Actions speak louder than words. Now I speak to the film itself, how it presents itself.

Unlike Man of Steel which ignored the casualties of Metropolis until later films in light of public reaction (negative), this movie again gives weak lip service to higher ideals. Mera comes to Aquaman in the midst of the fight and says to him “The casualties are too high, we have to stop the fighting! You have to defeat Orm.” She tells him that he must use his might to make right, not to seek any peaceful conflict resolution. And then? The movie stops, It does a 360 camera turn as they kiss (don’t get me started on their romance) with the music swelling in the background in time with... what are those? Fireworks? No. Explosions. Those are people dying, dozens to possibly hundreds at a time while our Hero pauses to slowly and sensually claim his prize, then the movie makes a joke and he’s off to his final fight.

There he handily beats Orm now, because now he has the bigger Trident. And Orm? He stops -- when the movie presents his mother (the angelic female) who tells him violence is bad and they should stop fighting. But what if she had not shown up just then? I have no reason to believe from what is shown in the film that Orm would have yielded, and with the rah rah adrenaline build up of the climax, no reason to believe Aquaman would have hesitated to kill him had he continued resisting.

“But he felt bad about letting Black Manta’s father die! He learned killing was bad!” His actions don’t back that up. He killed, in his mind, intentionally, Black Manta. He threw a chain around his neck and smashed him through rocks into the ocean after blowing up his helmet in his face. That was not a man who has learned to consider the consequences of violence. That was a man still ready to kill whenever convenient. It is by chance of the film that Black Manta survives, Aquaman doesn’t know that. And he shows no remorse for killing someone who he had pushed further into violence. No lesson has been learned here. Aquaman shows up at the ending ready to kill hundreds and thousands, actively directing a gigantic creature to do so. He has not learned anything about the consequences of violence.

This leads to my final point about the presentation of this film. Aquaman is PG-13. Yet it is one of the most Violent films I can ever recall. I do not mean it cartoonishly splorts blood at the screen like some hack and slash chainsaw massacre ripoff. I mean it does everything it can, with it’s sound, it’s camera work, it’s editing, to emphasize the violence in this movie. The punches shake. The blood of the Trench dwellers soaks the deck of the ship. Black Mantis’ father screams and his son is in anguish over his horrific impending death. It is Hard. It is Brutal. And it glorifies every moment. This is shown in the kiss, framed by explosions and a swelling score. The final shot of Aquaman himself, turning to the camera and screaming in the same barbaric manner Orm did to his colosseum audience, raising his weapon, his Might Makes Right symbol and metaphorically beating his chest. He is not a Hero. He is a king, and his path to power is built on violence, bloodshed, and death.

Aquaman is not a hero.

To draw this out into the real world, what do people with extreme views of any sort learn from Aquaman? Do they remember the brief lip service to mercy? Or do their minds go away filled with over 2 hours of extreme violence ending with victory through power, without consequences or showing the horrors left in the wake of our hero’s quest? Do people who believe themselves somehow Right over another group learn to talk, to reason, or to crush; thus proving their Rightness? Do people outside the US, because movies do not exist in a vacuum, see this and see a country which values mercy, benevolence, understanding and friendship, or one that will crush you until you have no choice but to submit, then maybe spare you if you agree they were right all along?

Aquaman is not a hero, and I fear for what version of “heroism” he might lead others to follow.

#Aquaman critical

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maraudersmessrs · 6 years ago

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Remus Lupin and the Prisoner of Azkaban--- Chapter 36: What’s In a Name

Ao3 link

Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12 / Chapter 13 / Chapter 14 / Chapter 15 / Chapter 16 / Chapter 17 / Chapter 18 / Chapter 19 / Chapter 20 / Chapter 21 / Chapter 22 / Chapter 23 / Chapter 24 / Chapter 25 / Chapter 26 / Chapter 27 / Chapter 28 / Chapter 29 / Chapter 30 / Chapter 31 / Chapter 32 / Chapter 33 / Chapter 34 / Chapter 35

It took...awhile before actual thoughts started to connect, like pieces from a child’s train set slowly relinking itself.

He was sitting in his office armchair, staring sightlessly across the room at his desk. He wasn’t exactly sure how long it had been since he had returned and mechanically prodded the boggart, glowing belligerently, from trunk to cupboard, and sat down. It had all felt distinctly distant, as if he had been mentally sitting in this armchair the whole time, watching his body stoically going through the motions of what was needed. The fire popped and he looked at it. He must have started that at some point. His hands flexed and he looked at them instead. They were no longer numb, and so he could see the deep, purple-red grooves from where he had unknowingly balled his fists, digging in his nails. The pain was like a dull ache on the outside of a glove; not quite present.

Nothing in him wanted to touch the memory of the morning. It felt strangely packaged up, as if it were a self contained quarantine he could look at from the outside, even talk about in vague terms. Almost as if it was a horror story told to him by someone else. He looked at the trash bin next to his desk, where his wolf contaminated sheets and clothes had been stuffed.

The idea that there was something in him that came out and left tangible evidence of its presence behind made him want to dig through his chest and tear it out, like some invasive tumor. The knowledge that those mad eyes were in him, now, in his blood, written in every cell of his body, tainting and contaminating everything he decided to become a part of made him want to just start running and never stop. Not in an emotional way, which was almost more frightening. It wasn't disgust, it wasn't fear or hatred or shame. It was clinical. Passionless. Logical. He wanted to remove himself.

In that moment, it made sense. He had wondered, the first time he encountered a boggart visiting James’ house why his was the moon and not a werewolf. Now, in this daze, he knew that the only wolf he had ever seen was in his past, in his nightmares. That fear belonged to the boy whose normal life had ended that night--his human life ripped from him. After that night, he had never seen another wolf, because he was a wolf.

And he was no longer scared of being hurt. Every month, each bone in his body was broken, every sinew shredded and reconnected. This pain he knew. Anyone who had ever looked at him and known every failing and loved him still was dead. This pain he knew. Nearly every moment of the past 12 years had been spent in weary isolation. This pain he knew.

But this thing that answered the moon did not just hurt him. This thing would murder and eat children, children like Thora. Like Harry. This thing broke free and used his body to try to escape captivity and destroy as many bodies and dreams and families and human lives as it could. And then it would sleep and give him the broken shards of these memories to hold until it ripped free the next month and it would never ever go away.

This thing that was as inseparable from him as his own flesh and mind lived in the deepest fears of children and in his own body. And he was lying if he said that he wasn't that thing. He felt it, moving in his depths with his temper, with his own darkness. It would push up beneath his thoughts, still seeking that escape as the moon thinned him until the wolf was just under his skin, staring out of his eyes with that hunger. Without him actively submerging it every moment, it would gladly swallow him as well.

He could lie all he wanted. He could pretend all he wanted. It didn't change what he was.

It wasn't the monster he feared, because the monster was himself. He could hate it, but it wasn't him that had to face it. It was everyone around him. They would look into that murderer’s gaze, the way Thora had looked into her attacker’s, the way he had looked into his. The way he would never have to look into his own.

There was a pain that came with killing someone, even when you meant to and he knew that pain too. But the wolf was not war. The moon is what made him indiscriminate. The moon is what made him a butcher. The moon is what made him a boggart.

A knock at the door suddenly startled him from his sightless reverie. He stared at it. His hands and feet tingled as the jolt of surprise reached them, the quickening of his heart making him feel uncomfortably as if he were coming back to life from being dead. Even if he wanted to see someone else, he wasn’t sure any words would come. No second knock came.

Then, there was a shuffling at the door and a piece of paper was slipped under, skimming across the floor until it bumped his rug. He peered down at it, bemused. Then, he rose slowly, leaned down and picked it up. It was a thick parchment, carefully and riotously adorned with colorful ink and little sketches of cakes, Christmas crackers, and, inexplicably, an airplane. It read;

Luna Lovegood’s 12th Birthday Party

February 13th

Lunch time, Location to be decided

No gifts, just company

Please RSVP!!!!

Just as he reached the bottom, another paper was poked under, catching on the edge of his shoe. What on Earth...He looked at it for a moment, then stepped back and pulled the door open to see Luna crouched down with a stack of parchments in her arms, looking up at him. “Oh! Hello, Professor Lupin, I thought you were out,” she said cheerily and stood, holding out the paper that she had been sliding in. “I found an interesting article about Hinkypunks and the new theory that’s out on them.”

Taking it, he read the title, ‘Hinkypunks; Impish Ne’er-Do-Wells or Desperate Bodhisattvas??’ then looked back at her. Today, her hair was bundled up high on her head with her wand stuck through with what looked like little purple sea urchins as her earrings, and her boots were bright blue. “It proposes that Hinkypunks aren’t actually trying to lead people astray so they die in the swamps, but are actually trying to take them to an enlightened plane of existence that we can’t follow, on account of them being able to move through dimensional walls. It’s fascinating; I need to do some more research on it myself, but I thought you might like it.” Her eyes went to the first parchment in his hand and her face brightened further. “Oh, and it’s my birthday next month! I’m excited because this is the first time I think I’ll have someone actually come; though, it would be 2, if you showed up. I usually pass out flyers and put them around the castle, but no one really shows up. It’s alright, though--it usually means more cake for me. Do you think you’ll be able to make it? I know you’re fairly busy. I’ve never invited a Professor before, but none of them were easy enough to talk to. Do you think you’ll come?”

The onslaught of happy chatter washed over him, seeming to ground him, one word at a time until he blinked, realizing she was done and staring at him expectantly. “Er….”

She eyed him, pale and rumpled and dazed, then said, as if in realization, “You look awful. Gilliwiskins again?”

He gave a tired smile, one that he felt and one that he meant, and said, “Something like that.”

In the face of her knowing nod, the part that had slammed down on any emotion within him warned, It will hurt. Just like Thora.

The part that desperately wanted to stop sleepwalking in his own internal chaos said, I don't care. He held the door wider. “Would you like some tea?”

“Oh, that would be lovely,” she drifted in past him, depositing her arm full of party invitations on the edge of his desk, and perched on the armchair in the corner, feet pulled up onto the cushion.

He peered at the drawings again as he used his other hand to slowly rummage through the scratched cupboard where he had stowed his meager tea fixings. “These are… quite good, Luna. Why an airplane?” The more he talked and began setting up tea, the more real he began to feel. The pain in his palms was becoming uncomfortable, which he supposed was a good thing.

“My father got me a ticket to go on one this year for my birthday; I’m quite excited. A metal tube launched high into the sky with dozens of people inside. It's almost like a sort of magic. Muggles think of the most fascinating things, don’t you think?”

“They do, at that. You'll have to tell me how it goes; I've never been on one before. Where are you going?”

“Oh, we're not sure; he's just going to pick one when we get there and just go wherever. Dad will Apparate us back home!” she gazed happily into the middle distance, obviously already envisioning the trip.

He vented a brief chuckle and poured the tea he had instantly boiled into his 2 trusty, worse-for-wear mugs. “Sounds like quite the adventure.” He passed her one and hooked one of the office chairs with his foot, dragging it round to face her and sat.

The first sip of the hot, earthy tea felt like the final stitch of fastening him back in his body, solidly landing him here and now, with Luna. He sank back into his chair, letting the heat and scent seep into the weariness he could suddenly feel again. Taking another sip, he managed to give her another small smile, saying,“So...a birthday party. Who else is coming?”

“Oh, I don't want to jinx it, I've asked quite a few people, and I only count the RSVPs, but one so far.”

“You sure you want someone old like me crashing your party?”

“Of course; you give me the impression of being a good party guest,” she said, sounding surprised

A small chuckle escaped him. “Well, now I'm curious--what about me seems like a good party guest?”

Luna shrugged. “I wouldn't know. I've never been to a party and no one's come to mine, but you strike me as someone who would be one, whatever that entails.” She waved a hand at his general person and took a drink.

Remus laughed. “I would be delighted to come to your birthday party, Luna. Where is it being held?”

“I hadn't decided anywhere until I had guests, so that's something that I will need to do, I suppose.” She pulled a quill that has previously been hidden from view in her chaotic bundle of hair, dipped it in something hidden in her robe pocket and scrawled something onto her palm.

Watching her, he pondered a moment and said, smile still tugging his mouth, “I suppose a picnic is right out.”

“Not necessarily,” she said breezily, tucking the quill back into its nest. “The only problem I've run into is that it's hard to eat cake with mittens on.”

“I would imagine so,” he replied, amused.

A voice sounding behind startled them both, saying, “Awww, how sweet--Loony Lupin's got himself an ickle Loony Lovegood.” When he turned, he saw Peeves floating above his desk and when they met gazes, he took a huge breath and blew the essays from his desk to the floor and shot them a nauseating grin. “Loony Loony’s. Is she your gir--?”

Having had enough experience with Peeves to know exactly what he had been about to say, Remus calmly flicked his wand, saying, “Silencio.”

The poltergeist's lips kept moving, but nothing came out, making his devilish face twist and grow bright red in fury. He opened his mouth again but Remus turned in his chair back to Luna, propped one ankle on his knee and went to sip his tea, saying, “You were saying?”

Luna was watching over his shoulder, curiously. “He's--”

“I know he is,” Remus said, pleasantly, as the thump of books raining off his desk sounded. “What were some other ideas?”

“Well…” She paused as his empty briefcase sailed through the air and crashed into his door, then said. “I supposed we would do it somewhere nice where they allow food….”

“Not the library, then,” he supplied, calmly brushing off the cloak that flopped over his head. “I would gladly supply my classroom, if you have need of it.”

“That would be lovely,” she said, “Or perhaps the greenhouses.”

“Certainly, just ask Professor Sprout.” He continued mildly, without pause or change of inflectionas her eyes flicked behind him again and widened considerably, “I would like to remind you, Peeves, that if you actually damage any of my belongings, I will be forced to report it to Dumbledore.”

He heard his desk chair slam back down and watched as Luna’s eyes tracked up to the ceiling, following the small man’s obvious retreat, then back down to Remus. “He had a very creative potty mouth,” she observed mildly, taking another drink of tea and recrossed her legs, still perched on the edge of her seat like a bird. “Usually, people get mad at him.”

Remus smiled. “That's exactly what he wants--and I try not to make a habit of giving people who harass me extra hand holds.” Rising, he swept his wand and said, “Accio essays.” As they flew to him and shuffled into another neat pile in the crook of his arm, he added, “I hope none of Peeves’ antics made you uncomfortable.”

“Oh, no,” she shook her head and drained the last of her tea. “I’ve heard much worse.” She got up and began gathering up his books from the floor and said, airly, “I don’t mind,” when he tried to object.

They tidied his now trashed office in companionable silence. It felt good to feel solid again, to be able to move and touch without it being through a thick glass wall feelings couldn’t penetrate. He could appreciate the smell of the old books, the texture of their covers, the warmth of the fire and the sun through the window. Perhaps his whole day wouldn’t be marred by the morning. He was ruminating on this when he saw Luna begin to open the large cupboard beneath his desk and he straightened in alarm, “Not that one, please!”

She blinked in surprise but closed it quickly, looking at him, half crouched with an arm full of books.

“Sorry, that’s where I keep the boggart for classes. It was...a chore to find it and I would hate to have to do it again,” he said, sheepishly, back twinging in remembered pain of the several day excursion, just leaving recent memory.

“Oh!” Luna sounded fascinated, she peered at the cupboard as if she could see through it to the boggart behind the door. “What’s its name?”

Nonplussed, Remus stared at her. “Er...pardon?”

“Its name, what have you named it?”

“I...to be honest with you, I have never thought of naming it.”

She laughed out loud at his baffled expression and stood up. “That’s the first thing that I would have done, I think everything deserves a name! Especially creatures that live such solitary lives. Names give meaning to things, you know. Once you name a thing, you can know a thing, and once you know a thing, it doesn’t seem quite so scary.” She set the stack of books on the corner of his desk and patted the edges until they all aligned into a neat pile. “Not that it would make much of a difference to the boggart--they might even have their own names for themselves. But you can’t really respect something if all you do is fear it; I don’t think the fear leaves room.”

“That’s...very wise, Luna.” Remus looked down at the cupboard door, wood darkened and scuffed with age. There was a softness in the way she spoke of monsters that didn't quite lay comfortably in the space he had made for them in his own understanding, at odds with the rawness he often felt, being one of them. He wasn't quite sure what to make of it.

“I think it’s just common sense!” She sounded surprised. “What about…Theodore. Aloysius? Barnaby? Achilles.”

“Ironic, in a Greek sort of way.”

She tapped her chin, deep in thought. “Rhonda?”

“Bob?” Remus suggested dubiously

She stared at him for a brief moment, then doubled over and practically shrieked with laughter. “Bob the boggart! Bob the boggart, perfect! Oh, it has to be that!” She straightened, wiping tears from her pale eyes. “Oh, yes!”

“It's been a while since anyone has found me that funny,” he couldn't help but chuckle at her over the top reaction, though it couldn't have been anything but genuine, coming from her. “Bob the boggart it is.”

“You're plenty funny, Professor Lupin. I like spending time with you; you always listen when other people say I'm being foolish,” she smiled up at him.

He couldn't help but smile back, despite the creeping weariness growing like a thick fog within him. “I don't think I've ever thought you were being foolish, Luna. You're a very bright person with a unique way of experiencing the world.”

“Well, that's a nice way of putting it,” she said, frankly. He laughed, but the inexplicable weariness from the weight of the morning bore down more heavily and, as pleasant as Luna was to be around and as light as she had made his spirits, the urge to simply curl up and do something--anything--other than interacting with another person was becoming unbearable. Luckily, as if in response to this feeling, she retrieved her mug, and handed it to him.

“I still need to put up the rest of my posters, so I think I'm going to leave now. Thank you for the visit and for agreeing to come to my party.” She drifted over and picked up her stack of parchment they had rescued from the floor.

He was glad, for he didn't think he would have the heart to ask her to leave and collapsing mutely in front of a student seemed bad form. “Anytime, Luna. It was a pleasure, as always.”

“It was, wasn't it?” She remarked, and drifted out.

It struck him, as he watched her close the door, that Moony had been the name given to his friend's monster. For a brief time, he hadn't just been something to fear; their naming had made room in him for more than that and for a few handfuls of years, Luna had been right--he had been known. And where did that leave him now, among boggarts and corpses, traitors and the nightmares of young children? Just Remus. And for some reason, that feels harder.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. Enough. He was tired. And he didn't want to think any more. He put the mugs in the side table and went to sit by the fire.

#my stuff #remus lupin and the prisoner of azkaban #ficlet #It's been mostly finished for a while now and it took so long to get the last few bits upAAAAAAAAAAA #This is like totally unedited I just had to push through this so I hope it makes sense x.x

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magic5ball · 4 years ago

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Nature Trail to Hell Arc III: The Blood Curse of Tako Shak (7)

Chapter 7: Tako Shak Part III: The Shak is Whack

It was a Sunday when it happened. At least, I think it was a Sunday. Tako Shak, at least the back part, seemed to exist in its’ own little time bubble apart from the rest of the universe. Even Father Time has to wait in line for his extra churro sauce, it seemed. Say what you will about the Shak, it is a jerk to everyone and everything equally and indiscriminately. But really, we all know you’d come back for that five takos for $5 deal. Everyone does.

ANYWAY as my soul was being grinded away by monotiny I started dreaming my fairy Godmother would come, turn a Tako into a carriage, and take me away from the stupid place forever. ‘Course, with the Blood Curse and all, I couldn’t step ten feet out of the restaurant without getting the sensation of ten thousand cattle prods burning into my skin. So steel wool in hand, I scrubbed that stupid floor until I could see my reflection it, took customer orders so fast I gave out change for guys who wouldn’t be arriving until next week, washed the dishes so spotless I could have sold them as diamonds, and several other things that by all means should have killed me from exhaustion. But I could not die, because I was still bound to the stupid Blood Curse. All the while, I found myself singing the old camp songs, having finally found something that made them look darn near like heaven by comparison. Also took my mind off my Mom, who would probably be none too pleased her firstborn ran off to join the fryboy life. Better than being a gangster, I guess, but still, I wished SOMETHING would happen. And you know what they say about being careful what you wish for…

I was mopping the back, on account of a fry spill while Howard handled the front. Knowing he liked to slack off, I peeked through the door splitting the front of the store from the back, just in time to see an all too familiar face cross those automatic sliding doors.

“Bienvenido from Tako Shak, Senor!” Howard greeted with a voice so deadpan it practically lurched out of his mouth. “What can I get for you today, Mr…”

“Silverstein. My name is Shel. Shel Motherf*cking Silverstein.”

Then Howard did the worst thing of all: He breached company protocol and started chatting with the customer! With fifty people behind him in line!

“Oh! Famous guy! So, Mr. Silverstein, what brings you to our humble little tako town?”

From behind the door, I saw the bald man glower, eyes dark as coals in his face.

“Demotion, that’s what! There’s this dumb kid I sent to the Underworld, but NOW, he’s escaped.”

“So what’s the big dealio? Guys escape Hell all the time.”

“Because that’s my job as a seraph: leading souls to the afterlife. But now that I BOTCHED that, the Angelic Council has decided it’s my responsibility to track him down since I sent him there!”

Despite it being over a hundred degrees in the back, a slight shiver ran down my spine.

“And until I do, I’ve been demoted from Seraph to Magical Girl! MAGICAL GIRL!” He turned his head skyward “Do you forks not know who I am?! I’m Shel Motherf*cking’ Silverstein, and I will reclaim my rightful place as a seraph!”

As if my day couldn’t get any worse, Howard just had to drop this line:

“So who is this fugitive, anyway? I’m all ears.”

“Some punk kid named Wuterdon or Watson or something. ‘Bout this high.” He held his palm flat beside his body, he around exactly what my height.

My mind began racing with a single thought: Please don’t tell please don’t tell please don’t tell…

“As a matter of fact, I think I do know a kid like that.”

F**k you, Howard.

For a moment I considering throwing myself in the deep fryer. Might be less painful than being dragged back to the Underworld.

“-But that costs 50 cents extra. Would you still like to add that information to your order, sir?”

Silverstein wasted no time slamming two shiny silver quarters on the counter.

“Okay. He has black hair.”

The great poet stared, realizing just what a bad purchase he made.

“What?! But I thought-“

“Listen Mr. If you want to get good info, you have to pay for good info.”

Silverstein slid a $500 dollar Canadian Nickel down the counter.

Howard lifted a hand to his chin, grinning all smug-like. “I dunno… If you want the real good stuff…”

It was then I caught on the Howard’s game. There was a rumor among us Tako boys that if you managed to make an order of over $10,000 and became employee of the month, you would get you freedom. And dour as Howard was, it looked as if he was holding onto a glimmer of that hope after all. At the moment though, as a shouting bargaining broke out between Howard and the customer, I didn’t know if whether to call him a low lying snitch or my savior. Either way, I snuck back to do dishes, so full of despair I’d started singing camp sham songs. Forking Camp Sham songs!

At least, until someone nabbed my shoulder.

“Hey, nice singing. Did you attend Camp Sham, by any chance?” Whoever was holding me, they had a smug, cheeky tone that could only be the Manager’s.

Steadily, I looked behind me, expecting to face my doom. What I saw instead was a familiar face. Sure, he was now wearing a blonde wig and three piece suit with a tag labeled ‘Manager’, but his face was unmistakable.

“Freddie the Ferret?!” I said.

“Watterson?” He answered back.

“HOLY CRAP!” We cried together, followed by “How’ve you been?!”

We struck up conversation real quick after that, me having to take the occasional break to make sure the dishes in the sink got cleaned. (We might have been old acquaintances, but he was my boss, after all.) Basically, I told him everything I’ve written until now between him giving me bits of survival advice (“Don’t just throw knifes in the sink, kid, you’ll scratch your hand and it will hurt, really, really bad. Most painful thing in America.”) By the time I’d finished, Howard was still trying to squeeze more money out of Silverstein.

As for old Freds, it turned out he really DID flee to the butterfly farm and didn’t, y’know, die. And while he was there…

“I struck this oil deposit. A big one. We’re talking YUGE! I had the whole place paved over and employed all the butterflies. Made the most profitable oil rig in the state. We made so much money and created so many jobs. It was great, you should have seen it. Truly, amazing.”

He sold the rig for a tidy trillion dollar profit and from there, it was just a hop, skip, and jump to becoming the district manager of Tako Shak. Of course, being manager wasn’t all perks. For some reason, he now had a weird obsession with firing people and wearing crappy blonde wigs.

“So, have you been to camp recently?” I asked.

“Yeah. Hilda turned it into a Siberian Gulag.”

Around me, time seemed to freeze as I processed what Freddie had just said.

“What?”

“Hilda turned the camp into a SIBERIAN GULAG. I don’t know what’s so hard to understand. I said it smartly, like a smart ferret. Which I am. Smartest Ferret in America.”

“She WHAT?!”

Once I’d taken a good half hour to cool my jets, Freddie explained in more detail.

“Alright kid, this is gonna sound crazy, but you know all that stuff Hilds said about freeing the camp? That was what the people in my business call a fact: something that’s only half true. See, she wanted to free the camp… but only so she could take it over and rule it with an iron fist! Really powerful, dignified stuff. That involved her Dad or something. Very interesting. . .You should ask her yourself sometime.”

“Show me.” I demanded. Something had stabbed me in the heart, but not the killer death sort. No, this stab had sent a life, a burning passion inta me I hadn’t felt since getting to the final boss in Super Luigi Bros. II.

The ferret shrugged. “Watt, I’m contractually obligated to only tell you half-truths at most, but if you insist….”

He pulled out his wallet. Opening it, a ladder of pictures tumbled out, depicting such scenes of inhuman horror that it had not been for my rigorous training at Tako Shak, most likely would have driven me mad. Also made me throw up a bit in my mouth.

Freddie looked at the photos “Well shoot! Those aren’t photos of csmp! Those are of my Aunt Carol’s 4th of July party! Word to the wise kid: never put more than four ferrets in the same place or things go downhill real fast. Terrible, not good, very bad things happen then.” He fished out more photos from the wallet (which I was starting to suspect he didn’t actually keep money in). “Here’s the Camp photos.”

Even though the photos showed scenes of gaunt, hollow eyed kids laboring away at some sort of quarry while soot covered their backs, even though these kids were shown so beaten down they no longer had tears to cry over their sawdust-loaf breakfasts, I’d been so broken down by the things I saw at the Shak the most emotion I could muster was a single, passive

“Huh.”

Because as far as I was concerned, camp really wasn’t much worse than when I left. But beneath the dark, grey canyons of despair, beneath the cabins, completely gutted to create firewood to burn those who misbehaved, there was a picture of me, or to be more specific, my sleeping body, stuck in a case like Snow White waiting for her prince. Despite there being a guardrail, Freddie was leading his shoulder on the case, mugging the camera so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if it gave him all its money.

“But wha-? How?! I’m right here!” I cried, too shocked to form proper sentences.

Freddie waggled a finger at me. “Correction: That’s your body. Right now, you’re not really in Pennsylvania. At least, not totally. See, this right here is limbo, where all the ghosts and elves and stuff live. The fact you can see me in my true form is proof of that you are at least as dead as my rap career. Which, by the way, was a great rap career. Really fantastic!”

“And why am I in Limbo?”

“Because you died, you moron!”

I thought back to that time I ate the millipede in the woods. Yeah, that made sense. Sorta.

“So, what exactly is Hilda doing with my body?” For some reason, I did not like having someone else having control over my body like that.

“Oh, you’re just the founder of Communism.”

Communism. That word echoed around my head like a stone falling into a well.

Communism.

See, it might not seem it, but my Mom had raised me well. And the most important thing she ever taught me was

“Sweetie, no matter what you do, I will always love you. Unless you turn out to be a commie, then we are no longer related.” It was a lesson that stuck with me to this day. And with that, the latent passion within me erupted into a furious desire to get my body back.

“I need to get fired.”

The ferret looked at me all funny like for a second before realizing what I was saying.

“Look kid, if you’re thinking of escaping, its’ NEVER going to happen. You’re a valuable employee. And by that I mean I’ve seen seagull poop worth more than you, but that just means we can pay you whatever we want! It’s a great, wonderful, absolutely terrific deal that works out for everyone!”

“You can do that?”

“Of course, you moron! The Blood Curse exempts you from every child labor law in this universe and the next five dimensions!” He pulled my contract from his furry little pocket, pointing to a sentence written in text so small you’d need a military-grade microscope to see it.

At the counter, I could hear, Howard get Silverstein up to $9,500, and I wasn’t exactly eager to find out what that old poet was going to do once he got his hands on me. Still, there was one last, desperate gambit I could make, one that, if I was lucky, would save my skin. I breathed in slow, like the school guidance counselor taught me. If there was ever a time where I could sink or swim, this was it.

“But Freddie. You have to fire me! For YOUR sake!”

The ferret’s ears perked up at this. Looked serious. “Explain.”

I pointed to the front. “See that guy in front of all those angry customers? That’s Shel Silverstein-“

“Well, of course it’s Shel Silverstein! I can see that with my two, good, very good eyes. Absolutely incredible. What they are seeing. Right now.”

“Not the point! The point is, I’ve escaped from Hell, he’s looking for me, and if I’m found out, he’ll put you in deep, deep, trouble!”

Freddie smiled (more like a ‘u’ shaped slit in his face, really). “But why don’t I just hand you in, then? I could get famous for turning in a criminal. The publicity would be good. Very good.”

His smug grin made me nervous, yet my mind was now racing at a million miles per hour. It was to late to stop now. “And the publicity would be good HOW?! Think about it, dinkleburg! If he finds me, it’ll be proof Tako Shak was keeping a refugee. And if THAT happens, you’ll be fired by you bosses for making a scandal!”

The U on Freddie’s face flipped right upside down. “Y-you’re bluffing! They can’t fire me! I’m a very, very, valuable manager!”

The tables were turning. Now it was my turn to grin. “Face it, Fred! Everyone here is a cog in the Great Tako Masheen! There’s probably a billion ferrets who were possessed by demons out there who could do your job just as good, if not better!”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“Oh yes I would! And if I get caught, I’ll even tell the news you were employing ACTUAL MEXICANS!”

The little fuzzball finally kneeled in defeat. “I’ll never be able to go home to my mansion if that happens! Okay! You win! JUST! LEAVE!”

“But I can’t! I still have the Blood Curse keeping me here.”

Trembling, Freddie took the contract and ripped it into a million pieces. I don’t know what my blood experienced in that paper, but whatever it was made it jump right back through my finger into my vein.

Freddie pointed his index finger at me, all dramatic-like.

“Watterson Tostig, YOU. ARE. FIRRREEEDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!” right as Howard had gotten old Shel up to a $9,999 dollars.

With one powerful kick (ferrets can kick pretty darn hard!) he punted me like Charlie Brown would have punted that football, right through the ceiling on that fastfood hellhole and into the wild blue skies of the PA countryside. I shot up like a rocket, at least half a million mosquitoes smearing themselves against my face before I reached the peak of my flight. For a few tranquil seconds I floated in the air so high I saw the peak of Mount Davis, the highest mountain in the state. As far as I could see in every direction, there was nothing but forests, while a red-tailed hawk soared below. It was the most peaceful thing I’d ever experienced.

At least until I realized that cheapskate Freddie had forgotten to give me my last check! The dirty rotten cheapskate!

And, you know, freefalling from thousands of feet in the air. That tends to put a damper on your day.

Part III: The Blood Curse of Tako Shak: End

#My writing #Nature Trail To Hell #fast food #ferret

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paris-mystere · 8 years ago

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o fortuna: chapter thirteen

Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug Content Warning: the fight scene in this chapter is pretty brutal. violence, gore, body horror, dark thematic material. Summary: “So, Tikki. You want to tell me why you share a name with an ancient Greek goddess?”

Chapters: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

AO3 | FF.net

xiii. o hateful life

"You already know why, Marinette," she says. There is no tenderness in her voice.

Tikki looks up to meet Marinette's gaze. Those bright blue eyes used to seem so innocent and guileless, but now Marinette can only think that they look old. She had always thought that Tikki was cute—big-eyed and cuddly, more like a cartoonish stuffed animal than a real ladybug. But now that all melts away, a pierced glamour that can no longer sustain itself. The Tikki that she sees now is a monstrous creature, ancient beyond human comprehension, caught halfway between bug and fairy. There is nothing cute about those gauzy wings, protruding mandibles, uncannily human eyes.

Her kwami isn't a benevolent sprite or a guardian angel. It isn't even a person. Tikki is Good Luck itself—dispassionate, indiscriminate, unsentimental.

"Tikki, Tykki," the kwami says slowly, each word heavy in its mouth. "Tykkeh, Tukka, Dukka. Human languages are as changeable and inconstant as humans themselves. I have had many names, Marinette. Is it really such a surprise that I shared one of them with a goddess?"

In retrospect, it seems obvious.

"Was she named after you?" Marinette asks, voice hard. "Or were you named after her?"

Tikki stares at her, unblinking. "Does it matter?"

No, Marinette thinks. It really doesn't.

"You lied to me," Marinette says. Tikki looks unbothered by the accusations, and it makes Marinette's heart clench. "I asked you directly, and you told me that Alya was wrong."

"I told you that you didn't need to worry about it," Tikki says flatly. "That was the truth."

Marinette shakes her head slowly, still unable to reconcile the creature before her with the compassionate friend and confidant that had always been by her side. It's like she doesn't even know Tikki anymore.

"You were misleading me on purpose," Marinette says, feeling stung. "You know how I feel about lying, Tikki. Why would you..."

She trails off, and Tikki's eyes soften sympathetically. "Oh, Marinette," the kwami says gently, its entire demeanor shifted. "Sometimes you lie too. You know that sometimes we need to lie. I was only trying to protect you."

For a moment, Marinette almost believes her.

"Protect me from what?" Marinette asks coldly. "The truth?"

"You are young," Tikki says, as if that is enough answer in and of itself.

"But old enough to save a city, apparently!" Marinette shoots back.

"You are more a child than you realize." Marinette takes half a step back, feeling strangely wounded, and Tikki looks away. "I take no joy in lying to you, Marinette. But there are some truths that are best left untold."

Marinette stares at her kwami, disbelieving. Then she falls back heavily onto her chaise.

"We don't mean anything to you, do we?" she says. It is not a question.

"I care," Tikki says. It is not an answer.

"You didn't want me to learn about past Ladybugs," Marinette says. "Why? What happened to them?" When Tikki remains silent, Marinette scoffs. "Do you even remember?"

"Of course I remember," Tikki says softly. "I remember all of my humans."

"Did they die? Is that why you didn't want me digging around?"

"All humans die eventually, Marinette."

Marinette clenches her teeth together. "How many of them got killed because of you?"

Tikki's eyes flit over towards Marinette, then away again. A few long moments pass as the kwami composes its thoughts, tapping one jointed leg against Marinette's desk.

"Many of them," it admits calmly. "Some wielded their Miraculous for decades. Others only a few days."

The worst part, Marinette thinks, is how apathetic her kwami sounds about it. Like none of their deaths upset Tikki at all.

"Now that you know this," Tikki continues, in the same smooth monotone, "does it change your decision? Would you give the Miraculous to someone else?"

"Of course not," Marinette says, scoffing. "Papillon is still out there."

"So you have made your choice," Tikki says. "Jeanne made her choice too. So did Nizam, and Calliope, and Jezebel.

"You knew from the start, Marinette, that this was dangerous work. But you decided to do it anyway. There was no need to burden you with the knowledge of what happened to your predecessors."

Marinette sits down heavily, crossing her arms over her chest.

Maybe none of this should be surprising to her. But she feels hurt. She'd trusted Tikki, and Tikki had repayed her trust with half-truths and lies by omission. All that sweetness, all those kind words...

Tikki sighs heavily. "Oh, Marinette. I do care, you know I do—"

"Don't," Marinette interrupts, her tone sharp. Tikki fall into silence. "You know how I feel about lying," she repeats.

After a pause, Tikki says, "Very well then."

Marinette quietly glowers at Tikki for a moment longer, not sure what she should think of the creature. Now that she can see the kwami for what it really is—both literally and metaphorically—she feels... somehow smaller. Humbled. How had she ever mistaken this centuries-old being for something humanlike?

A slight shiver runs up Marinette's spine as she sits. At first, she thinks nothing of it. But something in Tikki's expression shifts slightly, and Marinette feels a faint twinge of worry deep in her belly.

"An akuma?" she asks hesitantly. But even before she has finished asking the question, she knows what the answer will be.

Tikki locks eyes with Marinette.

"It's Chat Noir," Tikki says curtly. "He needs you."

Chat Noir stands in the shadows, perched delicately on an eave near the corner of Rue de Rivoli and

Avenue Victoria. This intersection, at the heart of Paris's 21st arrondissement, was once among the most crowded places in the city. Now it is deathly silent, empty save for a single black-armored man who strides purposefully down the center of the street.

The Chevalier Noir has reduced his usual arsenal for today, carrying with him only a single sword. The few passers-by who are out on the streets of Paris give him a wide berth, and refuse to meet his eye.

If this bothers the Chevalier, he shows no sign of it. He keeps walking, unperturbed, with an almost unsettling air of calm. Chat Noir follows him, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, for ten, twenty, thirty minutes. They cross the Seine and enter the Latin Quarter, where there are more people out on the streets, and Chat has to navigate more carefully to remain out of their sight. He almost loses the Chevalier twice, but at just the right moments the Chevalier slows down long enough for Chat to catch up to him again.

The Chevalier navigates carefully through parks and university campuses and residential areas, and at long last comes to a stop in from of a very ordinary looking building along Rue Monge. On his left is a tourist-trap of a restaurant. On his right, a hotel.

And, directly in front of him, an innocuous-looking arch. Dozens of native Parisians pass by every day without so much as glancing at it. The inscription at the top, engraved in pseudo-Roman capitals, reads: ARENES DE LVTECE.

The Chevalier passes under the arch, and Chat follows overhead. He lingers on the rooftops and watches the Chevalier enter the park that's hidden on the other side. Stretching out in front of him is a wide circle that has been cut into the earth, surrounded half by weathered ruins and half by recreated stone terraces.

Two thousand years ago, the Romans had used the Arènes de Lutèce to stage gladiatorial combats. Nowadays, it's just a public park, one of the dozens of lesser-known Parisian monuments. The ancient arena is home to sports games and small festivals, and despite its long history there were surprisingly few people in Paris who even knew that it existed...

The Chevalier meanders slowly towards the center of the amphitheater, the only person in the park, the moonlight glinting off his armor. His casts his eyes up towards the sky, but doesn't turn around.

"Why don't you come out of the shadows, Adrien?" he calls up.

Chat Noir takes a few running steps, and leaps down into the amphitheater. He lands on all fours, a safe distance away from the Chevalier, and straightens out slowly.

"How did you know?" he asks quietly.

There's a breath of laughter from the Chevalier, muffled by his helmet. "You wield your staff like a fencing sabre," he says, "and there aren't that many left-handed sabreurs in Paris. Even fewer with your skill."

The Chevalier hesitates a moment, then reaches up to remove his helmet. He tosses the helmet aside, and it rolls across the arena, eventually settling at the bottom of the terraces. He turns around slowly to face Adrien, and it only confirms what he'd already known.

"Once I realized who you were," D'Argencourt continues, "it suddenly seemed so obvious. Of course you were Adrien. Your face, your mannerisms, your technique... I wondered how I could have missed it for so long. But I suppose that's part of the magic, isn't it?"

Chat doesn't answer.

D'Argencourt cracks a small, self-deprecating smile. "People can stare right at you and still not recognize who you are. Much more convenient than disguising yourself in a suit of armor."

He takes a few steps, then sets one hand lightly on his sword. It's a small gesture, but the threat is clear.

"I always liked you, Adrien," he says sincerely. "I don't want to hurt you. So why don't you give me that ring of yours?"

That's what it's always been about, hasn't it?

What could you do, with the power of destruction at your fingertips? How much could you accomplish as the vessel for the god of bad luck?

Chat Noir is a nice enough boy, of course. But his heart is too soft. He's just a child. Wouldn't the power of destruction be much more potent in the hands of somebody who is willing to use it?

Papillon is not the only one with a thirst for power, you know.

Chat Noir doesn't refuse outright. He hesitates, giving the question a moment's consideration. D'Argencourt's expression grows strained.

Finally, Chat speaks. "Why?" he asks softly.

D'Argencourt scoffs. "Adrien, you cannot be serious—"

"Why?" Chat asks again, louder this time.

D'Argencourt seems taken aback. His frown deepens, and he steps back slightly. But he does explain.

"You are fourteen years old," he says. "You are not old enough to vote, or buy alcohol, or drive a car. You cannot expect that I would allow you to keep gallivanting about as you are."

"Most of Paris doesn't seem to have a problem with it."

"Because they're afraid," D'Argencourt says, eyes flashing, "and selfish, and ignorant. Bourgeois is too much of a coward to deal with Papillon himself, so he has children do his dirty work for him. But things cannot go on this way. It's been nearly a year now, and you're no closer to stopping Papillon. All you've managed so far is damage control. Let me take the ring, Adrien, and I will be able to fight him better than you can."

Chat would be lying if he said the offer wasn't tempting. But he shakes his head slowly.

"You would kill them," he says. "The akuma victims."

D'Argencourt forces a tight-lipped smile. "Adrien," he says kindly, "you have to understand. Those people are not innocent. I don't wish them any harm, but when they succumb to their dark temptations, there are going to be consequences. You can't save everyone."

"Ladybug can," Chat counters, a little petulantly. "She always has."

"Ladybug is a child!" D'Argencourt snaps, his composure beginning to slip away. "It's naive to think you can go on fighting that way."

"It's compassion," Chat says sharply.

"It's weakness!"

D'Argencourt's words echo slightly around the park. Chat Noir is silent for a moment, contemplative, as his eyes flit around the darkened arena. It is completely empty, save for them. If anyone overheard D'Argencourt's outburst, they didn't come to investigate it.

After a pause, Chat speaks softly. "I want to believe you," he says, because he does. "But I'm afraid that you would use these powers for evil."

Anger flashes in D'Argencourt's eyes. "I would use it to rid Paris of monsters."

"They're people," Chat says. "Human beings."

D'Argencourt shakes his head slowly, lips curling into a sneer. "I should have known that you would be too naive to understand," he says coldly. "I am not asking anymore. If you will not hand that ring over to me I will take it from you."

D'Argencourt has hardly finished the sentence before he launches into his first attack. Chat Noir parries it easily with his staff, more out of habit than conscious thought, knocking the blade away. D'Argencourt attacks twice more, feints low, then makes an honest attempt to bury his sword in Chat Noir's chest.

Chat manages to evade the attack, dodging backwards, but it's a bit of a startle nonetheless.

This is nothing like fencing practice. For one thing, D'Argencourt isn't usually trying to actually hurt him. For another, his staff makes a poor substitute for a real sword. The balance is wrong, and his grip is off—he'd never really realized until now that he had no idea how to use this thing.

"Can't we talk about this?" Chat tries desperately, barely managing to keep up with the pace of the battle.

"We already have," D'Argencourt says, taking another swing at him.

This time, Chat is just a hair too slow. He raises his staff to block D'Argencourt's blade, but doesn't quite manage to stop it before it draws blood, grazing across his left thigh. Chat swears under his breath and tries to back away, but D'Argencourt presses on, each strike coming quicker than the last.

Another slice catches him in the bicep. The next, a barely-there nick along his gut. A third attack knocks his weapon out of his hands, and his staff clatters as it rolls away.

Cursing under his breath, Chat Noir ducks under the next attack, and D'Argencourt's sword swings through the empty air above his head. Chat Noir rolls away, tumbling gracefully towards the far side of the ancient arena, and once he's on his feet again, he makes a dash for the tiered seating that surrounds them.

"You can't run!" D'Argencourt calls out. Chat dodges to the right, and D'Argencourt's sword rings noisily as it hits stone. "I know who you are now! I will be able to find you, wherever you go!"

Well, that sounds delightful.

Running might not be a viable long-term plan, but Chat Noir keeps running anyway. The added agility from his transformation is to keep him just barely ahead of the armor-laden D'Argencourt, leading him in a game of cat and mouse as they climb up and down the aging stonework of the Arènes. When Chat has finally managed to circle back around to his fallen staff, he dives to the ground, scooping it up and whirling back around the face D'Argencourt.

D'Argencourt pauses a moment, breathing heavily.

"Give it up, Adrien," he says. "I don't want to hurt you anymore."

"Then stop," Chat Noir says.

D'Argencourt swings again, and this time Chat Noir raises up his staff in a steady two-handed grip to deflect the blow. D'Argencourt feints high and Chat sidesteps him, twirling his staff between his hands to swipe D'Argencourt's legs out from underneath him.

My some miracle, it actually works. D'Argencourt topples, bested by a move that would definitely be illegal in sabre fencing, and his sword falls to the ground. Chat Noir kicks it away.

On the ground, D'Argencourt is laughing dryly.

"Congratulations," he says, in a way that doesn't sound congratulatory at all. "You've defeated me."

Chat doesn't answer that. His thoughts are all a jumble right now, and they are not helped by the faint sting of pain from the wounds that D'Argencourt managed to inflict on him. His mind is racing as he tries to figure out what he's going to do next. And what is he going to tell Ladybug?

D'Argencourt grows visibly impatient at Chat's silence. "Well, don't just stand there," he says gruffly. "You know there's only one way this fight can end."

Chat hesitates. "I don't understand," he says slowly.

D'Argencourt's eyes darken.

"You do understand," he says quietly.

The worst part, Adrien thinks, is that he does understand.

"It doesn't have to be like this," he tries, extending one hand out plaintively towards D'Argencourt. "We don't have to fight. We could—"

In a surprisingly quick motion, D'Argencourt leaps up to his feet and lunges at him, reaching for his right hand. Reaching for the ring. Chat Noir draws back, but that hardly seems to deter D'Argencourt. Caught off guard, D'Argencourt manages to tackle the Chat Noir to the ground, relying on his heavier weight against the superhero's greater strength, and pins him down.

"Stop it!" Chat Noir says, even as D'Argencourt keeps scrabbling for the ring. "Stop—"

D'Argencourt's fingers finally managed to lock around the ring, and just as Chat begins to feel it sliding down his finger, he clocks D'Argencourt solidly in the jaw with his left fist.

D'Argencourt hisses in pain, drawing back, and Chat Noir manages to find the leverage to push him off.

But D'Argencourt isn't holding back. Even weaponless, he's in this fight to the bitter end. Before Chat can get back onto his feet, D'Argencourt throws himself at the boy again, hands curled into fists.

After the first blow, Adrien feels like he's spinning. After the second, he's back on the ground.

D'Argencourt steps over to where he's fallen, and reaches for the ring. Chat snatches his right hand back and makes a half-hearted swipe at D'Argencourt with the other. His claws catch him just under his chin, leaving four thin, red lines of blood across the side of his neck. D'Argencourt hisses and draws slightly back. He reaches for a fistful of hair instead, and Chat hisses as D'Argencourt drags his head back roughly.

D'Argencourt seems to have forgotten about the ring now. Instead of reaching for Chat's unguarded hand, he slams his fist into Chat's face, again and again. Spots of blackness flash across his vision. Chat weakly tries to fight him off, scrabbling desperately against his arms, but D'Argencourt hardly seems to notice. He draws back his hand again, landing another heavy blow against his jaw, and this time Chat Noir feels something shatter.

Maybe this fight had started over the Miraculous. But now, in the heat of battle, D'Argencourt is interested in only one thing: proving a point.

Adrien doesn't know if he's going to be able to survive another hit.

The whole world seems to move in slow motion. D'Argencourt is pulling his fist back again. Chat Noir reaches out and grabs at one of his arms, claws scratching into metallic armor.

"CATACLYSM!" he shrieks desperately.

And then for a moment everything goes very, very quiet.

D'Argencourt staggers backwards. Chat Noir sits up slightly, watching him with huge, horror-struck eyes. His entire left arm and a sizable portion of his chest have been obliterated entirely out of existence. Blood wells up along the seams to fill the empty space where they used to be, coating his armor in dark red and splattering softly onto the ground below.

"Shit," D'Argencourt says blankly. "I didn't think you had that in you."

Then he collapses, falling first to his knees and then flopping forward onto his face. He hits the ground with a sickening thud, and lies motionless in the dust.

Ladybug sees Chat Noir first. He's dragged himself out of the pit of the amphitheater and is sitting on one of the weathered stone terraces, covered in blood. It's on his hands, in his hair, streaked at the corner of his mouth where he tried to wipe it away. His suit is damaged, sliced open in some places and torn in others, and there's a lump on his jaw that has swollen so large it might be comedic if it didn't hurt so badly.

"Oh my god," she breathes out, rushing to his side. At her words, Chat shifts slightly to face her, and she can see that his eyes are nearly swollen shut, covered in inky black bruises. "What happened to you?"

Healing magic is flowing out of her hands before she even reaches him. Pink light wraps around him, soft and warm, and Chat Noir breathes out heavily as her cure begins to take effect. Bruises fade, broken bones knit themselves back together, and his shattered jaw realigns itself. Even his suit is fixed, the fabric joining seamlessly back together.

He still feels sick to his stomach, but he guesses that isn't really something she can fix.

"Chat Noir?" she asks softly, reaching out to him. Her fingers brush against his arm, tentative, and Chat leans in toward her, resting his head against her collarbone. Ladybug holds him, arms wrapped lightly around his shoulders, rubbing her thumb in circles on his back. She's trembling slightly, but her voice is smooth. "What happened, chaton?"

"The Chevalier," he whispers hoarsely.

Ladybug takes half a step back, looking stricken. "Where is he?" she asks, her voice gone low and dangerous.

At that, Chat Noir finds himself laughing. Once he starts, he can't stop. Each rumble of laughter, harsh and bitter, feels heavy and painful somewhere in his chest but the laughter keeps coming, and Chat realizes that he's slipping into shock or hysteria or something equally as concerning. Ladybug's brow furrows in confusion.

When the laughter finally dies away, Chat shakes his head slowly. "Oh, Ladybug," he says softly, half-delirious. "Ma coccinelle. I messed up. I messed up bad."

Ladybug's confusion grows, lines creasing her forehead. She takes another step away from him, eyes scanning the arena until finally she spots the body, lying half-submerged in a pool of blood.

She takes a few steps towards it, looking dazed.

"Miraculous Cure," she whispers, holding her hands out towards the body. As healing light engulfs D'Argencourt's corpse, his body is restored—his armor scrubbed clean of blood, his missing limb restored. Even the scratches on his neck fade into nothing.

But he remains quite thoroughly dead.

"Miraculous Cure," Ladybug repeats, her voice stronger this time. She wavers slightly from the exertion of her magic, but nothing changes.

"Ladybug..." Chat says.

"MIRACULOUS CURE!" she shouts, growing slightly desperate.

Chat Noir grabs her lightly by the wrist. "It's no use," he says. "You can't..."

Ladybug jerks away from him. For a moment, Chat's afraid that she'll keep trying to heal him, that she'll run herself into exhaustion fighting a battle that she can never win. But instead she turns back to face him, pale white, mouth strained.

"What do we do?" she asks him, voice trembling.

She doesn't look like a superhero, not now. She looks like a child, frightened and desperate and helpless.

Maybe D'Argencourt was right after all, Adrien thinks bitterly.

Out loud, he says hoarsely, "I don't know."

#I wish I had something pithy to put in the tags but I really don't #this chapter... is what it is #miraculous ladybug #ml fic

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tiny-pickle-riiiiick-blog · 7 years ago

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It’s On My Mind

I’m a wolf

I don’t quite know what I’m searching for

A pup, a meal, remnants of my past form

Peace and solitude cannot last for the fragility of the ego cracks as fast as glass, a boneless mass of innocence cast in the abyss of heinousness acts that no one ever has to confess

The darkness never leaves just contains and understands it’s place away from any shine but when no lights are bright how can darkness not lose stability and become darker than itself

I never quite understood light and dark such similar forces that behave based on one another light cannot pass through all and therefore dark is always present but the mere presence of light makes darkness disapate in an instant

Here I stand once again the darkness inside growing more present as most light is slowly fading and there that glimpse of glimmering hope stays burning brighter than ever as the darkness closes in too stubborn to snuff too brilliant to burn out

Will that abyss ever claim the hero’s soul I’ll never know I’ll let you know but you’ll never know what I know I can’t know what you know what I knew was not known and what I know is I am not known but let it be known that I know now what I knew then can never be known for it is my own

Do you hear that whisper that strange sense of consciousness

It’s nameless call it’s irksome chatter drives you mad don’t think that I hear voices that is not the case it’s the voice in the back in the deepest reaches either you have it or you don’t excuse the dramatic explanation of Spidey senses but it tells you when everything feels out of place and it’s best to keep moving despite the blistering callouses of bare bottom feet

I recount the heroes in my heart ones I’ve rarely spoken of each struck with tragedy and each achieving redemption. Each being stood for nothing in the beginning and by the end became a part of something more grand. Such cheesy heroics but it was my own world for a time.

Miles was the first to be born from my mind. A young high schooler who used a magnetic asteroid to create a hovering board. I was 13 at the time so I admit my imagination was out there and silly. Eventually the stone and several other stones that came to earth gave him and his friends and even some enemies magical abilities. He is unable to escaped his destiny to fight these other young magical beings one in particular who despises his very existence. Miles is seeking freedom. Through flight and freedom from his destiny but no matter how hard he tries he must end the battle himself and put his life on the line for the fate of the world. This aspect is my yearning for freedom from responsibility I suppose.

Kidd was the 2nd being to spawn from my imagination. I can’t believe I’m admitting to creating a vampire story but here it is. Gunned down in the streets and left to die his vampiric parents appear after abandoning him since their turning. With no other option and knowing they face execution if they do, they each turned him. Unaware of the consequences, they created a hybrid between their two vampire strains one who could pass as human and one who was guided by pure insanity. This fusion left their son partially mad and quite strong and by chance he is unborn with the rare affinity for lightning but as they were cut down he was left to be a pawn of the prince vampire. He is a tool. A sword. An attack dog who loses the will to think for himself when he realizes his parents gave their immortal lives for him. But eventually he learns that the prince arranged his turning and his parents execution and vows to destroy the upper class of vampire society. This aspect is my anguish and my need to feel alive and worth something.

Next in my subconscious is Colt. A young teenager in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. How is it unique from every horror movie made about zombies? Colt battles with an inner darkness. A murderous bloodlust that personifies as a second half of his mind. This dark rage full being inside him makes him prone to violence in school well before the apocalypse begins, fighting off most of his class in a fit of agitation and losing control of this darkness he breaks blood vessels and bones as the apocalypse begins outside. With this newfound bloodlust he battles with morality on an even larger scale than any other in this situation. Making choices both pure of heart and purely cruel, fighting for control with his darker half. This aspect is the concept of my own emotional instability and how I fear it could one day overtake me as a physical force.

Icarus is the next conjuration of my heart. My own image of great mythical warriors and creatures and dieties being harbored inside coins. Only special individuals born under tarot signs are able to summon them. Icarus is of the fool tarot and is known for never quite getting along with his users. His new user is completely unaware of his ability to summon Icarus and fight against other coin beings until one day he is attacked by a Cerberus monster of the Strength tarot. Through battles they slowly begin to understand one another and become the first fool tarot and user to fuse and fight together. Eventually they come to more cataclysmic battles each making Icarus more powerful and bringing him and his user to the brink of death and defeat. This aspect is more my never ending desire to push my limits and make myself worth something while also not really wanting to have to answer or prove myself to anyone.

Adam is a more tragic shard of my imagination. In a post apocalyptic nuclear wasteland the remnants of humanity are militarized and trapping and hunting a mutant race of humans born from the nuclear radiation. As each society struggles to survive on it’s own, humanity viciously hunts men women and children with special abilities, using them as forced labor slaves to rebuild cities and hunt other mutants and mutant animals of the waste. Adam was 12 when he and his parents were captured. His mutation allows him to absorb and convert energy into a pure form. He defies the laws of thermodynamics and rapidly absorbs radiation, light, heat, electricity, toxic chemicals, and explosive blasts. He was to be used as a human battery and be drained for the rest of his life painfully and endlessly. His father died breaking them out of their prison. And his mother was snatched away from him as he awoke to his powers and crushed entire armed squadrons with his bare hands. He was a walking nuclear bomb emitting radioactive blasts from his hands and crushing machines and all manner of weaponry searching for his already moved mother. In a quest for vengeance he liberates what’s left of the mutants, brings peace with what few good humans are left, and destroys the mutant Hunter in charge, instilling himself as a nearly immortal protector of the wasteland. Adams aspect is my sense of rebellion. My desire for justice. My need to make change for myself and those around me.

Finally there’s Dante. A higher being in a world of demons and angels each out for blood his and each other’s. Each kill in battle is a soul absorbed that makes you stronger and he indiscriminately destroys anyone who gets in his way of avenging the death of his father who was cut down right in front of him at 14. After a series of betrayals and realizations he comes to peace with the angels, at first only beginning to stun them instead of kill them in a jest of good faith. He then discovers that his family orchestrated the war between the two races and left them to lead each other to Extinction. These divine beings were Dante’s kin whom left him to suffer expecting him to die a weak and frail being. Yet he slaughtered endlessly for vengeance in the name of his father whom was revived long ago and watched him live in pain and anguish as a hunted beast suffering wound after wound only his will and sheer stubbornness keeping him breathing, a desperate thirst for bloodshed in the name of retribution. In an attempt to make one or the other stronger he battled his newly discovered mother, the leader of the angels, to the death and absorbed her powerful divine spirit both hurting him to his very core and breaking his heart but also making him strong enough to take down his evil family. With a newfound rage against his father he ventures for even more blood than in the war against the angels and demons. Dante I feel is my aspect of good and bad inside myself. Not necessarily the concept of morality but also to do what needs to be done be it good or bad and following through.

These are all parts of me. Parts I’ve shared rarely and only to few. They feel like real other world’s. They feel like my escape.

#poetry #heartbreak

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petitalbert-blog · 7 years ago

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Ok but now I'm thinking about it, I do want to tackle the question "what is objectively the most powerful form of magic". (Remember my number 1 answer is "whatever you believe in and commit to". This is an answer from a different angle, a "but what if we could compare?" angle. I'm not convinced at all that comparisons are actually useful or accurate. But let's imagine an answer, as if there was one - what would that answer be?) We grow up being taught of a God who is, in some way, linked to white light as a symbolic quality of his purity and omnipotence. He is the backdrop of paganism. He can't really be ignored. I don't think he necessarily exists, and yet His believers evidently believe strongly enough to bring him into existence. He has millions of believers, and although the monotheisms are very different, they essentially evoke the same being. What I've found in my work is that the ceremonial style things, things which also end up evoking that infinite being, feel like sticking my finger in the mains. So much power. Because lots of Pagans believe in Him too! Not just Christian Witches but - lots of people who would describe themselves as New Age, lots of people who are not pagan but nevertheless believe in Crystal Healing of light healing, and certainly everyone on a ceremonial and ritual tradition path. (It's something I struggle with as someone who loves those high traditions, but am uncomfortable with monotheistic views of the world. I understand the Lesser Pentagram Banishing works, and works well, but it doesn't sit well with me what I am banishing and how. As a Pagan, it's that spiritual grot and unhallowed things which are my divine. Really, high magic was birthed from Christians who wanted to do magic which was coherent with their wider faith. There's no way around it. Paganism doesn't have a comparable concept to the ineffable indivisible light of Kether) Everyone tends to shield or banish with an image of white light. And certainly Satanists and Luciferians and workers with demons and angels, they also evoke Him if only by His absence. We have grown up watching Christian imagery used in banishments and I feel like a fair few of us would fall back on them in an emergency. Paganism doesn't tend to have easy images of good and evil, which means when we need a power representing goodness, light, safety, and incredible power, He's usually the only one around. For reconstructionist sorts, there's also the unavoidable history that we lost and continue to lose. For polytheists, we need to find coherent answers why our gods have not smited this one and his followers. There are answers. I think witchcraft is always to be associated with the shadows, to be the light's strange face. My understanding of the Landweird is, in part, based on the existence of Christianity - it's the uncanny and sublime which always will exist in the landscape, which no one can explain away, but it needs Howie too to come from the mainland expecting his God to work the same way everywhere, it needs his horror at finding the strange places of England where the wild never died. There will always be an undergroundness to what we do - our Mysteries, which must stay hidden, our trickster gods who win by subterfuge, our inability to ever fully understand the Landweird or to hold it in mind. I think a lot of our gods are canonically less powerful than Captain Omnipotent: they have limited portfolios or perspectives. They're also canonically capricious - although we can't argue that He isn't - but I think when God drops a church on his followers, they tend to think it's part of the plan. When my gods hurt me, I tend to think it's either my fault or they're being petty or im wholly incidental to their goals. I think in a straight up witch fight, we have good previous: true the God of the Christians vanquishes evil, but the forces of darkness tempt and subvert the unwary. We are not without power in that scenario. I think my understanding of the divine is objectively correct, shifting principalities of local spirits and minor gods with some power but no omnipotence and not much interest in man. Despite that, my understanding of chaos magic is - even if He doesn't exist, and I really think he doesn't, His believer's collective belief in His almighty power is a force to be reckoned with. I think certainly, objectively the most powerful magic force must be divine magic - magic enlisting the aid of a deity - but I am less certain of our ability to call on some of the huge, great Weird and be heard and indulged. Some of our figures like Horus and Nuit and Ishtar and Odin, I have no doubt at all of their power. And the stranger more ancient things like Cronos and Uranus, if we could somehow communicate with them. Wordless, ancient things, gods of the firelight and hunt. And yet I feel more wary of invoking them in a fight, the way a Christian would have no hesitation whatsoever to blast me with holy light and fire. I have a perception that we ARE weak, and perhaps that perception goes some way to disabling us further. Still, we are a hidden religion; when we show our faces, we burn. I don't believe that to be literally true in England, at least, but on a spiritual level i guess I actually don't want my gods to go up against St Michael. The power of the Land is slow, and it has a Land's priorities - whatever they are. St Michael is an indiscriminate flamethrower, vanquishing any nonconformity, anything it does not understand. I feel our power is in watching and waiting, like roots of trees which slowly take up the tarmac, like the ants and insects which will outlive us all. So that's my considered answer. I don't believe He exists, but if you asked me to gird myself for battle with another religious tradition that's the one which would worry me most. I think anyone who has seen the believers circling at Mecca, or been present at an evangelical mega-church "prayerquake anointing", should recognise how powerful that sort of thing IS. Certainly when the Trump hex was a thing and they started reporting that there were prayer grids to protect him, as well as being the funniest news story in weeks, it definitely made me think - well, bollocks. I don't want to spiritually wade proudly forward into a firewall of Christian might. That ends badly! I don't believe in the literal truth of any monotheistic tradition, but I think godforms representing concepts like Light and Goodness and Retribution likely exist, and that the combined belief of believers in the monotheisms make these forces hell to contend with. I believe in our power, and that much of that comes from cleverness and patience - not from spiritual riot cannons. I believe it comes from our celebration of the land and seasons, or devotions to our gods, or service to our spirits, and so forth - and this is a slow process, and I believe we endure, thst there's something in the Landscape thst no one can overcome. It's not something you can win instantly by accepting the forgiveness of Jesus, and it's also not access to a limitless supply of white light you can blast people with. So yeah. That's my answer. I don't believe the white light is real, or rather, I don't believe the religions that believe in it are wholly correct. But you're a fool to go up against it directly without a very clever plan. And if your goal is to be The Most Powerful, it's a solid choice (cf also the Pope, the various Catholic leaders who ought to be jailed but won't be, culty Christian sect leaders, generations of presidents, He tends to get His followers into positions of real yet unaccountable world political power, it's a good route to power on the material plane never mind the spiritual.) (I'm open to discussion, but take this in the spirit in which it was written: I'm musing on ideas based on my perception and exploring thoughts and playing, rather than definitively laying down a spiritual hierarchy or making declarative statements about how powerful this or that is. I'm not willing to discuss this with anyone who is pissed or eager to get into circlejerks of rage, but I am interested in other angles if you have them. Imagining there was an answer to this question, I think it's naive to assume that not just your Pagan tradition but anyone's can meaningfully take on the old man in the sky)

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