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janyxbeloved · 2 days ago

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I don't think I've ever mentioned the academy history - So I made the explanation and the history, it's heavily re-tweaked too, so I hope you enjoy!

If you guys thought that I wouldn't explain the lore, y'all were wrong HEHE-

Also, please read Origins to make sure confusion of why unknown names are there.

I'd also like to mention that there are six student council tapes, recorded by the 1989 student council.

Also, Sonoko has long hair here!!!!

I stated that my oc's are involved canonically in this rewrite.

This is like almost the entirety of the lore so please bear with me.

Sakura nō Hana Academy is a school built around the late 1950's by the Department of Education in Japan, which was funded by Saisho Saikou - Ichiko Saikou, his daughter, was one of the enrollees there. But shortly after her disappearance back in the early days of 1990, her case was ultimately closed as she is legally an adult by then so there was no point in asking her to come home. However, the school kept functioning even without their biggest donor as he had already died before 202X. As of then, the supportive parents of students pay heafty sums of money to keep the school going for future endeavors. The school was functional from 1955 up until 202X, almost closing down in the 1980's.

“I don't usually talk about these stuff but I feel like I have to vent what's been on my mind recently... The night patrol system is really messing with my brain, like I keep seeing something that isn't there or... Misplaced items like my ballpen, I put it down, but when I get up, it's not there anymore... And I'm kinda scared, it feels like those... Horror novels that the occult club reads... I never really liked the idea of ghosts being here in the academy but... Those are just... Tales, right? They aren't real! It's all just... In my head... I just hope it's mental fatigue, I've been sleeping unwell recently...”

~ Kyonashima, Kenji "Ken" - Council tapes #3

Like most schools, the academy also had it's fair share of ghost stories and tales as old as time. However most have been debunked, many still believe that the supernatural lurks upon humans, who knows, one may have already passed by one, perhaps not. It's just a tale used to scare students to make sure they don't overtime.

“This seems pretty exaggerated if you ask me. Why make us do this and put us at risk? We're people too y'know! It's almost hard to comprehend that we're only teenagers. We aren't security guards, we're only tasked to reinforce the law here! Man, I wish people understood that we can't be taking huge responsibilities at ages like this, it's total bullshit! Ghosts and legends aren't real!”

~ Aragaki, Daisaku - Council tapes #5

The night patrols were a common thing, from 1955 until 1990, two to three members of the student council would overtime until 8PM to ensure that the school was locked up for tonight, however, in 1989, during the presidency of Reiichi Tanaami he had said that he would wish to abolish the night patrols and let the student council go home the same time as normal students.

Safety was the priority, but what exactly was the cause of safety being prioritized?

“I never quite understood why we were tasked with these to begin with, it's not like there's a ghost here in the academy, that just sounds like pure bullshit... But then again, orders are orders - You can never defy them no matter how hard you want to. I just wish that the headmaster didn't take safety this far because I sacrifice sleep for this, and it's usually not worth the time nor effort, I have to cover shifts for some of the others due to the fact that they have important stuff to do. But I can't help but have this nagging feeling in my gut that something isn't entirely safe about the school, what makes me think of that? The cherry tree behind the school, the tales say that's where the school's name originated from, but I always found it... Odd that it's on top of a hill, but I'm not the type to usually question that...”

~ Tanaami, Reiichi - Council tapes #1

Reiichi didn't trust the fact the headmaster was having young teens take on such a responsibility, night patrol was scary enough, especially to Joze, who was only 14 in 1989. Reiichi allowed Joze to fall back and not participate as obviously, he was young, and he was also scared.

“I want to admit this for my sake but... I'm sort of terrified of the idea in joining night patrols... I don't trust it. It doesn't feel safe. I don't have much time to admit how I truly feel because the others might come back soon. Meu deus, the others might think I'm a coward... But then again, they probably understood... I'm afraid of the dark but I also feel somewhat unsafe whenever I get close to that cherry tree behind the school, something feels... Off about it. I don't wanna talk about it too much because I might be going crazy... I'm too scared to ask for reassurance that I'm not crazy because I don't want to look mentally unstable infront of the others, it would be humiliating and even concerning...”

~ Silva, Jose - Council tapes #6

It was unclear as to student council on why Joze never took the nightshifts, they knew he was scared but we're unsure of the main cause, not like the school had ghosts... Unless there was. Arutea Torentino, the vice president of the student council and Reiichi's right hand woman, was very wary and scared herself, but she had to bite her tongue and man up, she has a rosary on her person a lot. She's not overly religious in any way, but still keeps it with her at all times.

“The first nights of my night patrol weren't that bad, but I never really liked it either. Me and my friends have the same thought, even though they don't express it, I can tell that this whole night patrol thing is unsafe and puts our lives at risk. I never trusted the idea but I had to agree, I was pretty hesitant, which was already odd enough. I don't usually hesitate to good ideas... But something deep inside said that it wasn't. But I had no choice but to bite my tongue and man up for it because I have no choice. It was never easy to leave the room and go on patrol, but atleast you're never alone, you have someone to keep you company, and as long as you and your companion have a flashlight, it doesn't feel that unsafe... But still, something about schools at night still freak me out, I used to overtime a lot back in the Philippines but never had I expected to relive the same nightmare here in Japan... Hopefully, the headmaster changes his mind and abolishes the idea entirely...”

~ Tolentino, Althea - Council tapes #4

Reiichi had many reasons to entrust Arutea to be the next president, it's because he had faith in her that she will lead with a head held high and never back down from any challenges. The student council is about teamwork, not who can outbest who. As Arutea stepped to become the next president, she abolished the night patrol thing, leaving the school at peace...

“I never really planned to cut my hair, I didn't but I just randomly thought of it one time during night patrol. I don't usually think of cutting my hair since it's long enough that I'd like to keep it that way. However, something feels weird, like I do get startled when something gets stuck pulls my ponytail like a metal rod or something, that's why I switched to putting my hair in a bun, but I randomly decided to keep it as a permanent hairstyle choice, I usually patrol alone at night, despite how mentally exhausting it can be, I do get paranoid, but I don't like having the others scream all the time. I usually enter the gym when on patrol too, but one night, my body didn't allow me to move any further past the doors. Like my mind was telling me to go inside but my guts didn't like the idea of going inside at all. So I just shut the gym doors, turned on my heel and went back to the meeting room to give in my status report... It was odd but it felt right to not go inside. Also, the cherry tree behind the school was dead at the time, I don't know why but it just refused to bloom, but it did bloom the following week and at the same time, the nagging feelings were gone.”

~ Sakanoue, Sonoko - Council tapes #2

Though despite how unsafe it was, many people still enroll their kids in the academy, the tales are lost to time and won't be remembered at all, hopefully that parents and students alike will remember the motto of Sakura nō Hana Academy is: "Your future is what we nurture!"

#the tales of sakura nō hana academy #yandere simulator #fuck yandere dev #yandere simulator rewrite #reiichi tanaami #Arutea Torentino #ken kyonashima #daisaku aragaki #joze shiuba #sonoko sakanoue #tw horror #this is somewhat analog horror #schools are scary at night btw #can confirm #im a marching band member #i over time at school when i have trainings

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banananutmilk · 9 months ago

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Carrie Film Essay (1976)

By Jacob Christopher

Carrie (1976) is a supernatural horror film directed by Brian De Palma and adapted from Stephen King’s novel of the same name released 2 years prior. The plot follows a highschool girl named Carrie, who discovers she has been born gifted with telekinetic powers. The conflict of the film is that of the abuse Carrie endures by her own mother and school peers. Carrie (1976) is a critically acclaimed film for it’s subject matter of teenage isolation and angst, creatively expressed within a supernatural horror genre. In regards of it’s box office qualities, Carrie (1976) with a budget of 1.8 million USD had managed to garner 33.8 million worldwide. Along with positive reception, such as deemed by Pauline Kael from the same year, “ Carrie is a terrifyingly lyrical thriller. The director, Brian De Palma, has mastered a teasing style- a perverse mixture of comedy and horror and tension”.

(article linked in image above)

The film deals with the subject matter of puberty, sexuality and the criticisms on purity culture. We begin the film following Sissy Spacek who plays the tragic protagonist Carrie, a highschool girl who within the first act of the movie has her first menstruation and left confused by her own body. Followed by a horrific act of bullying, in which the gym full of girls react to Carrie’s plea for help by throwing tampons at her shouting “Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up, plug it”. It’s within this scene we can interpret the metaphors for the horrors of girlhood. Carrie is shamed by the world around her and told contradictions.

A revelation made during my research of the historical events of 1976 is that of the first apple computer launch from the time period. Comparing the time the film had come out along with the release of a product bound to become a common lifestyle necessity, had really put the age of the film into perspective. The perspective makes the film more impressive, especially with the utilization of editing in it’s production. Makes me give the editing and production team more kudos for editing that can be done on phone applications now.

The aesthetic of Carrie has become an influence, with the sequel and two readaptations of the Stephen King novel, both noticeably inspired by the 1976 film. As pillars of the popularity of the medium. Other forms of inspiration from Carrie are the 70s style of fashion. The film has an eerie tone, often through the dialogue deliveries of the characters and the predicaments Carrie has to handle when treated in distasteful manners throughout the film. Suspense is often built up through the interactions between Carrie and everyone else, culminating into moments of alarm for when Carrie’s patience is tempted. What gives Carrie (1976) it’s edge is the choice to be blatant with their audience. To not hide what is gonna happen, the audience feels sick and grapples with their anxieties, absolutely helpless to be bystanding victims. The age of the film’s grainy quality actually has fermented gracefully into a dark gradient staining the screen, adding to the already thick atmosphere. There is great emphasis on the distinct cinematographic style of De Palma. Using split screens for dramatic scenes and the dream like sequences experienced by Carrie.

The qualities of Carrie (1976) can be interpreted as both conventional and unconventional depending on what factors matter more to the critic. The movie incorporates many expected tropes and tactics used in it’s horror genre. Exemplified through it’s usage of the highschool setting, jump scares of sudden loud music and snappy movements. However what makes Carrie (1976) an outlier from it’s contemporaries is the subject matter displayed. Touching upon and criticizing religious fanaticism, exemplified through Carrie’s mother’s overbearing nature and blind faith to her Christian belief. Along with the themes of adolescence and the struggles of young women. If it were to come to my personal opinion, I would deem Carrie (1976) to be more so unconventional than conventional due to it’s subject matter’s taboo nature. Overall Carrie has earned it's cult classic status through it's unconventional thematic and great reception to affirm it's reputation.

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a-small-batch-of-dragons · 10 months ago

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I saw your tags on a post about becoming the mc in one of your novels. Gothic, where the character is more monster than damsel and i am 👀

Would you be willing to talk about it? The story, the character, anything?

(for those of you who did not see my tags on the post anon is referencing, the post prompt was basically 'you are now the main character of your most recent WIP' and my tags were: #technically I think this would put me as the MC of my novel#in a gothic mansion that houses a monstrous lord said to steal people’s souls#in a village the inhabitants view as a cage#after faking my death to escape an abusive arranged marriage#discovering that I am more monster than damsel)

so i talked about it briefly when i ran this poll a while ago asking which one of these two novels you'd all like to see first. it is the one that won, the gothic found family: Of Beasts and Wretched Things (working title). feel free to click through to the poll if you want to see what the results were, what the other option was, and what people's initial reactions were!

Of Beasts and Wretched Things is an inverted 'Beauty and the Beast' coming of age story that wrestles with the monstrosities of girlhood and the inherent horror of self-creation.

When the Lord of Crosswell Estate plans to wed his niece to a brutish lord to save his wealth, she runs away and stumbles upon Illthern, a forgotten trading village under the control of the monstrous Theodoric Gaut, whom she deceives in order to gain his protection from her wrathful uncle; but when she finds herself face to face with Lord Gaut, who is not what the stories would have her believe, she must wrestle with the monstrosity of her own making before he discovers that his supposed long-lost relative is not what she claims to be.

(More under the cut bc wow I...got a bit carried away.)

working on this project has helped me work through some of the trauma i have around my own relationship to femininity and womanhood. the MC struggles with the legacy of abuse inflicted by her blood relatives and what it means to be the person they tried to make her into. the inherent fear of things labeled 'monster' and the consequential fear of being monstrous is a predominant theme, as well as questions of how many of the monsters are things we make ourselves.

what really drew me to the gothic genre was the emotional weight i wanted to give these characters and this world; so often in gothic works it is the characters' own emotional turmoil that drives the plot and shapes the setting, you are the ghost haunting the house even though you still draw breath, etc. even in this real world, there are these weights of what society things a woman should be, the pressures of girlhood especially during adolescence, and these weird half-mourning periods of killing the person you used to be. i think because i wanted these characters to be steeped in the emotions they have about their situations in life and themselves, i found myself drawn to gothic conventions just because it fit so well with what i wanted to explore

with regards to the characters themselves, and particularly the MC, i really wanted them to feel like they were driving the story. the MC has the brilliant and terrible certainty that I know at least I had when I was a teenager. Theodoric is very similar to most characters you'd expect to see in a gothic setting: ominous, more than a bit sinister or mysterious, yet I wanted it to feel like he was always hiding a bleeding heart just under his coat. did i mean to make him autistic? no, but when I was proofreading i was like whoa yeah this man has the spicy brain. i'm a sucker for monstrous things that treat others with tenderness first, what can i say. i don't want to talk too much about any other characters just yet, I don't want to spoil anything :)

WIP-wise, I'm in the midst of getting the manuscript ready to submit to agencies and publishing houses. it's funny, as i'm doing the research to see what that entails, the other story seems to be way easier to market. who knows, maybe i'll self publish OB&WT the way I did Tales from Thicketdown Forest and then go the traditional route for the other one. we'll find out, i guess.

i did sort of know this was going to get long but jfc i went way harder with my prose here than i thought i was going to. uh, hope this answers your question????

Tl:dr; gothic found family h/c, heavy on the comfort, with tender monsters and monstrous girls :)

#dragonbabbles #i do have opinions on the matter #original work #my work #my writing #gothic #found family

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ireadyabooks · 2 years ago

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Read with Pride! 🏳️‍🌈

Representation across the queer spectrum is crucial, as all readers should see themselves reflected in the stories they love! 🏳️‍🌈 We’ve pulled together a list of books to read that feature gay, bisexual, trans, non-binary, asexual, aromantic, and sapphic relationships, characters, and stories.

Here are some of our favorite books encompassing the LGBTQIA+ community! ✨

Heartstopper Volume 1

Now streaming on Netflix! Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. A sweet and charming coming-of-age story that explores friendship, love, and coming out. This edition features beautiful two color artwork.

Nick and Charlie

From the mega-bestselling creator of Heartstopper, a must-have novella in which Heartstopper's lead characters, Nick and Charlie, face one of their biggest challenges yet. Nick will soon be leaving for university, and Charlie, a year younger, will be left behind. Everyone knows that first loves rarely last forever. What will it take for Nick and Charlie to defy the odds?

Loveless

From Alice Oseman, author of Heartstopper, comes an honest and relatable novel about realizing that it’s okay to not have sexual or romantic feelings for anyone — because there are plenty of other ways to find love and connection.

I Was Born For This

A funny, wise, and heartbreakingly true coming of age novel. I Was Born for This is a stunning reflection of modern teenage life, and the power of believing in something — especially yourself.

The Honeys

A twisted and tantalizing horror novel set amidst the bucolic splendor of a secluded summer retreat.

The Feeling of Falling in Love

A new kind of love story about the bad decisions we sometimes make... and the people who help get us back on the right path. Perfect for fans of Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston and What if It’s Us by Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli.

This is Our Place

Three teens — in three different decades — navigate life, love, and family. This is our Place is a novel about queer teens dealing with sudden life changes, family conflict, and first loves, proving that while generations change, we will always be connected to each other.

Destination Unknown

From Stonewall Award winner Bill Konigsberg, a remarkable, funny, sexy, heartbreaking story of two teen boys finding each other in New York City at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Gay Club

Barney’s a shoo-in for his school’s LGBTQ+ Society President at the club’s next election — until the vote is opened to the entire student body. Can the club members put politics aside and stand united? Gay Club is a landmark comedic novel about a group of queer teens at their worst — and ultimately their best.

The Library of Broken Worlds

A girl matches wits with a war god in this kaleidoscopic, thought-provoking tale of oppression and the cost of peace, where stories hide within other stories, and narrative has the power to heal — or to burn everything in its path.

Love Letters for Joy

Joy is asexual, but that’s no reason she can’t experience first love. She writes to Caldwell Cupid and falls for the mysterious voice behind the letters - until the letter-writer turns out to be the last person she would ever expect.

Magical Boy

A hilarious and heartfelt riff on the magical girl genre made popular by teen manga series, Magical Boy is a one-of-a-kind fantasy series that comic readers of all ages will love.

#readwithpride #pridebooks #lgbtqbooks #yabooks #pride

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metataxy · 1 year ago

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Grimm: Hexenbiest!Juliette/Nick, Part 6

Summary: What if, when Juliette was becoming a Hexenbiest, she told Nick before Renard?

In which people actually talk about their feelings, and Nick discovers the benefits of having a Hexenbiest for a girlfriend.

<—- Part 1 Here , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4, Part 5. Part 1 is posted to AO3, but the rest isn't being archived until I have a clear idea where it's going.

Warnings: Miscarriage, eldritch horrors.

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For a while, everything is okay. Better than okay.

Adalind and Henrietta hadn’t lied. The paternity test returns. Nick is inarguably Tristan’s father. Adalind and Juliette, bizarrely, are both listed as probable grandparents.

Coparenting with Adalind is easier than it has any right to be. Adalind’s rehired by her former law firm and rents a luxury apartment within walking distance of both her office and the police precinct. Nick usually drops off the baby and breakfast on his way to work, and brings him home every other night. Both Nick and Juliette’s schedules are usually flexible enough to watch Tristan the day or two each week when Adalind can’t bring Tristan into work. The rare times none of them can watch Tristan, Monroe, Rosalie, and Henrietta practically compete for who gets to babysit.

Surprisingly, what disrupts this pleasant equilibrium isn’t a wesen, but a Grimm.

It happens on Nick and Juliette’s long delayed honeymoon. They go to Florida. Because it’s impossible for Nick Burkhardt to go anywhere without something terrible happening, they stumble into a case where a group of Mellifer migrant workers, most of them adolescents, most of them undocumented, are being hunted by the local Hexenbiest.

The Mellifer do not trust Juliette, but they trust Nick, and they introduce him to their other allies: a family of Grimm, the Jaegers.

He’d never met so many of his kind in one place before. There’s the matriarch of the clan, Tana, a shrivelled old woman in her seventies who still moves faster than she should despite her age. Her son, who presented late like Nick, and her daughter, Bertha, who lost an eye in a streetfight with a skallengeck when she was still a teenager. Her grandchildren, most of whom are too young to present. The oldest girl though, a skinny twelve-year-old, is a Grimm.

They like Nick. They meet him when he’s out picking up pads for Juliette, whose period started unexpectedly and who didn’t bring any supplies.

(Except it’s not her period. It’s an early-term miscarriage, dammit. She wasn’t going to tell him about any pregnancies, not until she knew for certain. If this resolution contradicted some of her earlier ones about communicating more with her husband, well, Nick wasn’t the one who had to come to terms with carrying a child a fair number of people would want to kill on principle).

They meet Nick when he gets into a fight between a Hexenbiest and a couple of Mellifer on the way home. They invite him to dinner with Juliette. And then they learn she’s a Hexenbiest.

In the course of their uneasy alliance over the next week, there are the usual warnings about the enchantments and treachery of Hexenbiest. Then there is the novel reproach to Juliette from Tana that if she loves Nick, she’ll stay away from him.

“Funny,” Juliette retorts. “That’s exactly what they said to him about me before I became a Hexenbiest.”

“And you see where it has lead, ja?”

“To being happily married to my best friend?” she challenges the old woman, face rippling with the woge.

The little old woman taps her cane and shakes her head disapprovingly.

“Is different, a Grimm with a human. A Grimm with a wesen? You will infect him.”

“What?”

“I have heard. My grandparents.” She’d shuffled around the sitting room where she, Bertha, and Juliette had gone for this tête-en-tête. Her hand slides along the old tomes. Nick and Juliette have already promised them a hard-drive with all the digitized books they’ve collected. Bertha and her brother have promised them the same, once they can scan the five books the family owns. She picks up a book and flips it open to a page triumphantly.

There is a picture of a wesen in colour. The eyes are deep-set and dark as the sockets of a skull and the skin’s been tinted bluish-grey. The lines of wings, or perhaps a cloak, have been sketched out above her shoulders, and her hands are bloody. She’s standing atop a mountain of bodies with the heads and hands of beasts.

“I can’t read German.”

“Pshaw,” Tana complains, turning to Bertha. “Can’t read German! She is a Hexenbiest! She is married to a Grimm! And she can’t read German!”

“Nick can’t read it either,” Juliette informs her drily.

“The children these days. How do you read your books if you cannot read German?”

“There’s a very nice werewolf who does our translations.”

Tana looks at her incredulously, like she’s not sure whether to believe her, but lets it go.

“What kind of wesen is it?” Juliette asks, peering at the book open on the desk. Bertha snorts.

“That’s not a wesen.”

“It’s a Grimm,” Tana tells her. “An infected one.” She clears her throat and begins slowly translating. Juliette pays her no mind, but Bertha does make sure they take home a scanned copy of that section when the situation with the mellifer has resolved and their honeymoon comes to a close. Rosalie and Monroe are delighted.

“A Grimm book that actually studies Grimm?” the man crows. He scrolls down the page on his frankly antiquated laptop. “I mean, geez, I’ve studied every single book Nick got from Aunt Marie and everything we got from Uncle Felix, and I haven’t seen anything like this. Do you think they’d let me study their books if I paid them a visit?”

“They’d probably shoot you and mount your head on a pike,” Juliette tells him humourlessly. “What’s it say?”

Monroe shrugs, face closer to the screen than it strictly needs to be, squinting in the low light of the spice shop’s basement. The man was ruining his eyes peering at watches and gears all day. Juliette reminds herself to ask Henrietta and Adalind if there’s any elixir to correct poor vision. “Well, pretty much what they told you,” Monroe says. “It’s a warning for Grimm not to be intimate with wesen lest they catch some kind of incurable disease and transform into monsters themselves. It’s like some kind of case study with stages and symptoms of the disease.” He flips to the images. “They start to woge. The first step is when ‘the breath and heartbeat slows, and the skin goes grey as a corpse.’”

He pauses, glancing over the top of his laptop at Juliette and Rosalie. Nick is on duty right now. “After he got hit in the face with that toxin from that voodoo pufferfish priest, that started happening. You don’t think…”

“The second stage is the Black Gaze becomes visible even to wesen, even when we aren’t woged.”

“See? Nothing to worry about!” Monroe tells her.

Rosalie sighs.

Monroe looks over the top of his laptop at his wife, then Juliette. “There’s nothing to worry about, right?”

“Nick’s eyes go Black all the time nowadays when I’m not woged.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“Yeah, because it only happens when he’s fighting, and then you’d be woged anyways, or when he and I are together.”

“Why wouldn’t it happen when Nick and I are together?” Monroe asks dumbly.

Rosalie smirks, chin in her hand. “I don’t know,” she asks, leaning in. “Juliette, why wouldn’t it happen when our husbands are together?”

“Oh,” Monroe says, as the girls start snickering. “Oh, I don’t mean—you know what, let’s forget I ever said that—”

“I don’t think I can,” Rosalie laughs.

“You know,” Juliette chortles, “before they actually let me in on the whole Grimm thing? With how secretive they were being about all their time spent together, I seriously thought they were having an affair. I almost thought Nick was going to come out to me when he took me over to Monroe’s house for him to show the woge.”

Rosalie almost falls off her stool laughing.

“Nick’s an attractive guy,” Monroe says defensively.

“He is,” Juliette howls.

“And there’d be nothing wrong with it, if like--”

“Of course not,” Rosalie agrees, hiccoughing with delight at her husband’s awkwardness.

In fact, Juliette’s Hexenbiest hindbrain considers there to be a good deal right with the notion of her Grimm getting closer with their dear friends. The part of her that is still human isn’t any more ready to deal with that though than Henrietta’s pointed invitations to attend traditional coven, or the stir of secondhand lust she feels when Adalind looks too long at her husband.

It takes them another five minutes to compose themselves.

“Okay, so the rest of this is just bonkers though,” Monroe tells them. “Stage three involves loss of rationality and bloodlust, scaling to stage four, where the Grimm grows invisible wings and stage five, where whatever this thing is happens—”

The accompanying illustration has more in common with the descriptions of biblical angels or Lovecraftian horrors than anything Juliette’s ever seen in these books. It doesn’t resemble a person. It’s a black sphere, sprouting arms and wings, eyes peering out between its manifold limbs. There are bloody wounds on the bodies of the men and wesen it touches. It’s floating over a battlefield of corpses.

“Yeah,” Rosalie says drily. “I think this was probably just a scary story to keep teenage Grimm from hooking up with the attractive Hexenbiest down the road. Most wesen have some version of that.”

“Right,” Monroe snorts. “Don’t sleep outside your bloodline or you’ll go blind.”

“Just blind?” Rosalie asks. “You got off easy. My grandma always told us all our hair would fall out and our babies would be born with three heads.”

“Gotta love that stuff,” Monroe says, looking mellow. “Anyways, I really don’t think there’s anything to worry about, Juliette.”

“But the first and second stages?”

“Some wesen do present, or evolve, in response to specific environmental triggers,” Rosalie says thoughtfully. “I know a Selkie who had no idea what she was until the first time she swam in saltwater. I can’t imagine thinking you’re human until you’re thirty and then turning into a seal-person in the middle of a cruise.”

“Right. Or like, it’s really rare, but a human that’s at least a quarter Mellifer will woge, no matter how old they are, if they’re in proximity to Hexen or Zauberbiest.” Juliette glances at Monroe, alarmed. “Don’t worry about it, you’d have to be like, around them all the time.”

“Like I’m around my staff at work?”

“Sure. Oh. Yeah.” Monroe rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah. It’s probably not an issue. Mellifer really aren’t into mating with non-Mellifer. I’ve never met anyone personally it happened to.”

She’s not exactly reassured.

“The point is,” Rosalie says, “maybe some of this is accurate. Maybe Grimm are wesen, and maybe the reason we’ve never seen them develop anything but their unusual eyes is because the trigger was proximity to wesen. We’d never know, because I’ve never heard of any Grimm before Nick spending more time around us than was necessary to kill us.”

---------------------------------------

“I have,” Henrietta tells her, one night when Tristan’s finally gone to sleep, and she and Adalind are studying with the older Hexenbiest in her lab.

“What? Seen a Grimm who spent enough time with wesen to turn into a creepy floating blob?” Adalind snarks. Juliette hadn’t meant for Adalind to see the pages, but Nick had left them on his passenger seat and Adalind had seen them when he’d driven by her workplace to drop off Tristan that morning, and then Adalind had brought them up with Henrietta. So much for discretion.

“Seen a Grimm exhibit symptoms up to stage three after sleeping with wesen.”

“Holy crap,” Adalind exclaims in interest, sipping at her herbal tea. As generous as she is with general information pertaining to the unseen world, Henrietta rarely tells them of her past experiences. “What century was this? Where was this?”

Henrietta fixes Adalind with an unamused look. “The last one, and here.”

“So in the 1800s—were there like, what, Grimm cowboys running around?” The idea of Nick running about with a Sherriff’s badge and leather hat, hunting down their enemies on horseback, has a certain appeal for Juliette.

“20th century,” Henrietta stretches out her hand, and lazily floats a jar of cream down from the shelf, begins applying it to her hands. It’s more like shoe wax than skin lotion. “It was your Grimm’s aunt, Marie Kessler.”

“What?”

“I never knew her personally, but she had a certain reputation in the community. A rebel. She went to wesen bars and beat down the bouncers if they tried to deny her entrance. Went to the cage fights and won her right to watch by besting their champions. She never killed though, even while your Grimm’s grandfather and mother were leaving a corpse a month for the cops to find.” Henrietta’s lips quirked. “All the lesser Grimm, the mice and sheep and deer, were terrified of her, and half the predators as well. The other half though—they hunted her.”

“And she didn’t kill them?” Juliette asks dubiously.

Henrietta laughs. “Did you kill your Grimm? Grimm are strong and deadly, and have their own innate magic that surpasses that of any race but the Royals or Hexenbiest. You are not the first to whom it has appealed. Some of those who chased Marie Kessler did it, no doubt, with the clear intent to kill a Grimm. I’m not sure all of her pursuers understood their own intentions though until they caught up with her.”

“The one who did—he was a Steinadler, right?”

Adalind’s eyebrows rise.

“He was one of them. There were others. A Ziegevolk actually came to me for a love potion when he couldn’t entrap her himself. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I didn’t give him the potion. She still took him to bed, once, told him he ‘was okay, but she’d had better’. Completely ruined the man’s self confidence. He couldn’t seduce a barfly for years after that. Then there were the Weten Ogen, and finally, yes, the Steinadler. That was really when it went wrong.”

“How?”

“A Zauberbiest killed her younger brother. He was kiehrsehten. I suppose he might have been like your Grimm, a late bloomer. We’ll never know. Her father and sister tracked the killer, but Marie and her Steinadler got to him first. It was Christmas. The Zauber wasn’t alone. He had a Kiehrsehten wife, adult children, guests. One of the latter let her in, assumed she was invited. She and the Zauberbiest fought in the middle of the foyer, in front of the guests.”

“Jesus,” Juliette breathes.

“If the Zauberbiest hadn’t fought, that might have been the end of it, but he did fight. The guests only saw this woman attacking their friend. They were armed. They drew on her. At least one of them put a bullet in her, injured her badly enough that she should have dropped. Instead,” Henrietta paused, “they simply attracted her attention.

“After it was all done, almost everyone was dead, and the only reason I say almost is because the Steinadler rushed the children out of the house when he realized Marie was out of control.”

“Holy crap. How did she not end up in prison?” Adalind demands.

“How do you know any of this?” Juliette asks.

Henrietta looks at them, face impassive as a death mask.

“I am the eldest of the Hexenbiest in this corner of the world. You are strong, the both of you, but there are abilities that develop only with age, and one of these is an awareness of the powers arising in others. I felt it when she saw her brother die, even if I didn’t know what it meant. It felt like all this time that I thought I’d been safe had been an illusion, like I, we, thought we were living on earth, when we were really in a submarine sixty leagues under, a submarine with walls thin as a tin can’s and the waters outside teeming with sharks, and someone had just driven a nail through those walls, and the water was pouring in.

“We scorn the kiehrsehten and the lesser wesen for how little they know of the unseen world, and assume we since we see further, we see clearly, that we see all. We don’t. There are beings moving through the world whose power our minds can’t fully apprehend, who we sense about as clearly as the mundanes sense us—the sense of eyes on our back in an empty office when you’re working evenings on a Friday, the waiting silence in the true dark of forests far outside the city, where the only light are the stars in the trees, or the eyes gleaming down from the branches.

“I felt something move that night, and I didn’t know what it was, so I made enquiries, and Marie came for me.”

Adalind’s mouth fell open a little. “What did you do?” she asks dumbly.

“I ran,” Henrietta said flatly. “I ran, and I kept running, and didn’t return until I heard Marie Kessler was quietly studying literature at Berkeley and your Grimm’s mother was abroad.” The woman’s lips pursed. “People see your Nick, talk with him, and feel relieved he’s just human, just a regular human, safe, and all the stories of slaughters by Grimm must be wrong. Because it’s an easier story to believe, the story we tell ourselves to stay sane—that we know how things are, that this is all there is, that we are the apex predators, and the Grimm aren’t just one of many thresholds for the real monsters behind the door.”

They are all silent for awhile after that.

“Well shit,” Adalind says, and practical as ever, looks for a way to distract them all with a less oppressive topic. “Do you have anything we can feed the baby that would make his diapers smell less like the city dump? What?” she protests, seeing Juliet’s incredulous look. “You can’t say you wouldn’t appreciate it too.”

“I take care of my godson two or three times a week,” Henrietta reminds her, smiling despite herself. “Adalind, if such a thing existed, I would have given you the recipe and an entire crate premade.”

#Grimm #nick burkhardt/juliette silverton #adalind schade #hexenbiest

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rhetoricandlogic · 1 year ago

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Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed

By: S. Qiouyi Lu

Issue: 24 February 2020

Nick Prasad has always been Joanna “Johnny” Chambers’s sidekick. Friends since a young age, Johnny has rocketed into an early and brilliant career as a child prodigy scientist, while Nick has lived a quiet, mundane life in which his biggest concerns are work and family. But the two of them still have a regular, teenage friendship, one filled with banter and misadventures. So when Johnny comes up with a new invention that could change the world, Nick doesn’t think much of it at first: after all, this is the seventeen-year-old girl who has already fitted the world with solar panels, created lifesaving medications, and perfected tools that assist millions of people’s lives—to name just a few of her accomplishments.

When strange things start to happen, Nick soon realizes that this invention isn’t like the others. An aurora borealis that shouldn’t be visible from their latitude heralds the coming of monstrous creatures, relentless in their pursuit of Johnny and her new invention. Bit by bit, the scale of what’s happening comes together: there are other realms beyond ours where terrible evil lurks and waits for its opportunity to trigger the next apocalypse. Those beings, “The Ancient Ones,” are responsible for the annihilation of civilizations ranging from Carthage to Cahuachi to Çatal Hüyük to Atlantis. And now, they’re after Johnny’s invention and the power it can unleash to destroy the world again.

But that’s not all. Suspicious of how much Johnny knows about the origin of these monsters, Nick pries the truth out of her and discovers that she’s made a covenant with the Ancient Ones. One of their terrifying pursuers, Drozanoth, is here to uphold that covenant, and will do anything to make Johnny hand over the invention responsible for calling the Ancient Ones back to Earth. Now, only she has any idea how to close the gates that are opening between realms. Determined to help stop the apocalypse, Nick embarks on a wild scavenger hunt with Johnny across the Maghreb and the Middle East to gather the items they need to put an end to the invasion.

Beneath the Rising, Indo-Guyanese author Premee Mohamed’s debut novel, is a rollercoaster of an experience. Although Mohamed draws from cosmic horror tropes as classic as Lovecraft’s, she challenges the oppressive foundations on which Lovecraft built his career. The novel is set in an alternate history shortly after a failed terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The impact of September 11 doesn’t go unnoticed: instead, it, and the period setting of the early 2000s, deeply inform the characters’ every movement through the world and the global context around them. Nick, who is Indo-Caribbean and often refers to himself as “brown,” details the various ways in which his racial and class background affect how he sees the world, and how the world sees him. Unlike Nick, Johnny, the wonder-kid know-it-all seemingly blessed with endless genius, is White and rich. Although the sexism she faces is made clear, her privilege on other axes is called out in a way that feels natural to the characters and important to the narrative.

Lovecraft’s work often relies on racism to fuel its narrative and to lend horror and dread to cosmic horror elements. Mohamed, on the other hand, lays out the intersecting foundations of that marginalization and shows how those systems of oppression are the all-too-mundane backdrop against which otherworldly cosmic horror can play out. On top of that, Mohamed brings a genuinely global scope to her doomsday narrative. It is not just the West that faces an imminent catastrophe in Beneath the Rising. Rather, most of the main events occur in the Maghreb and across the Middle East. The rise and fall of civilizations across a broad set of cultures at the hands of the Ancient Ones feels like a smooth integration of all parts of the world, creating a truly global and historically linear scope of events that adds urgency to the narrative.

When it comes to the technical details of craft, Beneath the Rising shows Mohamed’s masterful command of description, pace, and emotion that renders powerful characters and settings. The prose is lean and deliberate, a short story writer’s novel. Mohamed, who also has several short fiction publications to her name, makes sure that every sentence, every paragraph, every simile serves multiple purposes. A sentence can reveal period- and character-appropriate details while also being embedded in an unusual, yet apt, metaphor that vividly describes and furthers the events of the story:

[Johnny] was trembling so hard she was almost flickering, like a poorly-tracked VHS tape. […] This [fear] felt more like something from outside of me, like secondhand smoke, greasily invisible, sinking into my pores, blown from someone unseen. (pp. 56–58)

Mohamed’s command of the rhythm of a sentence shows through in her control over the pace of the story as well. When Nick and Johnny have room to breathe, the prose is denser and slower as it lingers on fuller descriptions.

In the moment of relative safety I craned my head to try to take it all in, wishing I had sunglasses or a hat—it was so bright it just seemed like a spangled kaleidoscope of car windows, men in suits, tiny booths hawking electronics, sunglasses, clothing, CDs, food, tiles, everyone gabbling around me in languages I didn’t know, plus blessedly recognizable if not actually comprehensible French and English. People bumped and buffeted me apparently without even noticing. I had been picturing … I don’t even know what. Some mud-brick city from Raiders of the Lost Ark? Flowing white robes? Tintin books, for absolute sure. (p. 144)

But when Nick and Johnny are on the run, Mohamed’s prose goes into fight-or-flight mode, highlighting only the barest of actions, reactions, and sensory details. The reader barrels along, breathless, with the characters.

I shut the closet door, hearing first a bang, and then—oh shit—the musical tinkle of falling glass from the living room. A multilegged shadow, all spikes and floppy appendages and translucent nodules, firmly struck the hallway wall, like an ink stamp. I cast about, left, right, left, right. Kids. Bedroom. Two quick steps: empty. (p. 103)

At the same time, Beneath the Rising isn’t just an action-adventure chase after a string of McGuffins against a backdrop of tentacles, shadows, uncanny eldritch pawns, and imminent apocalypse. It’s also a slow tale about a different kind of unrequited love between two teenagers who were forced to grow up too early, and who have never had the space to address their lingering PTSD after surviving a shooting during a hostage crisis. Woven between the multidimensional chaos of the Ancient Ones’ return is a poignant, melancholy tale of what growing out of childhood ideals means and feels like. As Nick confronts the codependent nature of his love for Johnny, who turns out not to be the person he thought she was, he shores up memories and emotions that illustrate the processing he’s doing internally while also showing his growth as a character. The vindication of his fury and betrayal feels both earned and deserved.

The biggest strength of the novel, however, comes from the shocking reveal toward the end of the book that explains the true nature of Nick’s “friendship” with Johnny, and why he was even dragged along on such a dangerous journey he had no hand in creating. I’ll be including spoilers from here on in order to fully discuss the impact of the ending.

Instead of being a magnanimous scientist who simply wants to help the world, Johnny practices “altruism” as a reflection of her own need for power and worth. She may be doing good with her work, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t channel great evil and also be a villainous mad scientist. Her prodigal power and inhuman brilliance stem from a covenant she struck with the Ancient Ones. In exchange for time off of her life, Johnny can speed up her mind, like a supercomputer’s processing power getting a boost, to do what she does. But with that covenant came another clause that Johnny only reveals to Nick when she can no longer hide it. Afraid that her unbelievable talent would alienate her from the rest of the world, leaving her alone forever, Johnny bargained for Nick to be forever by her side as a companion. Nick’s true relationship to Johnny is as a slave.

This Faustian covenant, however, didn’t have to take place. Johnny admits that, if she’d refused the covenant, she would have still lived a comfortable, successful life, and would have still been a great scientist. But, lured in by power and the opportunity to influence the world, saving millions of lives in the process, Johnny agreed to a deal with the Ancient Ones. She justifies her actions with all the good she’s done—but Beneath the Rising is, at its heart, a novel about the true cost of power, and whether the ends can justify appalling means. After all, the Ancient Ones would never have been attracted to the world if Johnny had refused the covenant in the first place. The millions of lives potentially lost in a global apocalypse don’t factor into Johnny’s calculations of how much good she does and her positive impact on the world.

Therein lies the extended metaphor that forms the secret crux of Mohamed’s narrative: Johnny’s covenant, and Nick’s role as her “companion,” are tools to critique the legacy of colonialism; in particular, slavery. In a key character turning point, Nick reminds Johnny that his family, of Indian descent and from Guyana, descends from indentured servants who were exploited for the sake of the British Empire. Nick takes deep offense at the way Johnny doles out money, as if to buy people and solutions to her problems. Johnny’s race is actually the most insignificant reflection of her position as a symbol for colonization and empire. It is her utilitarian attitude toward people and her perceived self-importance as a representative of “the greater good” that motivate the true horrors that Johnny commits. Loyalty can always be bought. Nick’s loss of agency, the loss of his potential livelihood, and the psychic toll of not being a genuinely free individual, never enter into Johnny’s mind. Nick isn’t truly a friend, an equal, or even a person to her. He is a sidekick, a person to be uprooted from place to place so that Johnny can always have someone to carry her when she is weak, provide strength when she has none, and sacrifice his life if she needs him to. Nick is merely a resource she can exploit as an extension of herself. How many families, societies, and whole cultures have similarly been torn apart to support the advancement of Western civilization?

No matter how euphemistically slavery is named, whether as “indentured servitude,” “incarceration,” or “debt bondage,” it is ultimately the real covenant that robs people of their time and life force. The lasting socioeconomic impact of slavery, too, oozes through Beneath the Rising as the gulf in wealth between Nick and Johnny, as well as the gulf in opportunity and attitudes toward self-worth between them. No eldritch covenant needs to be made for oppressors to keep subjugating the oppressed. Through Johnny, the whole empire of colonization is laid bare and exposed: for all the “advancement” purportedly created by colonizers, for all the status colonizers lay claim to, millions of people whom colonizers considered as second-class were sacrificed. When Johnny sets out to “save the world,” what she is truly saving is the status quo of her own world of privilege. Nick’s world, the world of the subjugated and oppressed, has long since been lost.

On a micro scale, Beneath the Rising is the best inversion of the sidekick trope I’ve ever seen. The effect of a reckless superhuman crashing through the world are called out early: who will clean up? Who will pay for property damage? Who will handle witness protection? Insurance? Jobs? How will people recover from the trauma of such a disruptive event? Then, when the true nature of Nick’s slavery is revealed, we see the rare story of a sidekick walking away—of codependency not being romanticized, but called out for the real destruction it can cause. Nick’s anger and betrayal are validated narratively as he sets boundaries at last and recovers from Johnny’s exploitation. The scale of Johnny’s betrayal and the evilness of her act are never downplayed, even as Johnny herself, like many benefitting from the legacy of colonization, remains clueless of her impact, even going so far as to still believe that she is doing good, and that all the devastation behind her can be a footnote to her altruism.

Beneath the Rising is a near-flawless debut novel. While it works well as a standalone, the story and worldbuilding leave room for sequels as well. Multilayered and richly rendered, Beneath the Rising is a darkly humorous romp through unspeakable cosmic horrors that also paints a portrait of two hurt teenagers grappling with their place in the world and their relationship with each other, all while navigating complex inner worlds impacted by the legacies of colonization, slavery, racism, and sexism. Like a doomsday device, Beneath the Rising is compact, powerful, and devastating as it hurls the reader through a brilliantly crafted narrative. Prepare for an epic journey, and don’t forget to bring a barf bag for the turbulent ride.

#Premee Mohamed #Beneath the Rising #mahreviews #long post

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brightbeautifulthings · 1 year ago

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Dreamcatcher by Stephen King

"SSDD: Sometimes it's just what you say. And sometimes you believe in nothing but the darkness. And then how do you go along?"

Year Read: 2005, 2023

Rating: 4/5

Thoughts: Against all logic, I still love this book. I read it for the first time in high school after instantly falling in love with the movie, and it was one of those books I practically memorized and internalized so hard that I don't even realize some of my thinking comes from here (until I'm rereading and going omg that's where that idea came from). It isn't just nostalgia that makes me love it though. As you probably know from my reviews, I went through a breakup, a summer depression, and a hideous book slump (the latter two from which I'm still clawing my way free). I was a little afraid to reread this, fearing it wouldn't hold up and that would only make the slump worse, but I flew through this like I was still a teenager, devouring books at a time when all of them are still new and wonderful. It might be the easiest reading I've done all year, and I was happy to sink back into King's world with my old Derry friends.

Objectively, I know this is not King's best. It's brutally gory, scatological, and full of some downright repulsive body horror. Had I not already internalized King's aliens at a young age and accepted them as perfectly fine, I might have been way more put off by his unnecessarily gross biology. (Although one need only look at the chest-bursting Xenomorphs to know this is practically standard for the genre. I don't think there's anything in here worse than that, and they're about on par for truly awful ways to die.) I'm not even typically a fan of alien novels, so this already beats the odds.

Assuming you can get past the gore, or that you're as desensitized to it as I am, it's also extremely ableist in its characterization of Douglas Cavell ("Duddits", affectionately), a character with Down's Syndrome who is also the magical key to defeating a race of aliens. King frequently falls into this unfortunate trope of giving his minority characters super special (and often stereotypical) magical powers, and Duddits has the added advantage of Incorruptible Pureness even in the face of bullying, cancer, and gut-eating aliens. There are also frequent slurs, "retard" being the most frequent, and it's used even by the main characters. It forces readers into the awkward position of being grateful to even see a disabled character portrayed positively, while recognizing that the characterization comes with its own issues.

Yet, I find myself returning to my original thesis: Despite its very real and present problems, I adore this book, and it's really the characters that make or break it. I fell in love with Duddits, Jonesy, Henry, Beaver, and Pete at first sight, and their friendship is at the heart of the novel. King does characters and childhood friendships so well, and Dreamcatcher's live and breathe off the page every bit as much as the Loser's Club from IT. I love them in the flashbacks and the present timeline, and their love and loyalty to each other effortlessly carry the story.

Despite its hefty page-count (nearly 700), the pace never lagged for me either, and I never found myself getting bogged down in the minutiae of the history or world-building the way I sometimes do with King. It's fairly well-focused on character development and moving the plot forward, and the only times my interest waned were in Kurtz's chapters. He's a fairly banal villain alongside Mr. Gray, and I would always rather spend my time with the boys and their odd, Shining-like power. I'd forgotten a lot of the differences between the book and movie lore, aside from the very obvious differences in the endings, so that was a fun comparison as well. I think it works without getting too in-depth about why the aliens work the way they do (but I've also been hugely spoiled by Mira Grant's deep dives into supernatural biology). All in all, this is still one of my favorite King novels, and I won't be hesitant to read it again when I want to visit my friends.

#book review #dreamcatcher #stephen king #horror #horror fiction #4/5 #rating: 4/5 #2005 #2023 #tw: ableism

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lilmackiereads · 1 year ago

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A TAXONOMY OF LOVE (2018) BY RACHAEL ALLEN - SPOILER-FILLED REVIEW

For the review WITHOUT SPOILERS, click here. To continue WITH spoilers, begin reading after the cover photo.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I am actually surprised with myself for giving this such a high rating as I am easily very bored with the teen romance novels. Of the few YA romance that I have read in the last year this has been my favorite which was a total surprise! I actually almost gave up reading it in the first 50 or so pages because I found the initial few chapters from Spence’s point of view unrealistic. For some reason I just didn’t feel like the dialogue and thought processes going on in this 13-year-old boy’s head felt accurate to the tween boys I’ve known growing up. There wasn’t enough swearing or boyish grossness. For instance, I feel like he needed a bit of a sprinkle of yucky (belching/ nose-picking/ farting/ name-calling) like the boys in Stephen King’s “The Body” aka Stand by Me (1986), The Sandlot (1993) or Stranger Things (2016) because many boys at this age are generally just pretty gross and obnoxious in my experience. (I grew up tween to teen between 2008-2018 and babysat lots of kids and now I work with middle school and high schoolers…)

HOWEVER, I think Allen did nail Spence’s dorkiness, which is why I ultimately kept reading because he is pretty adorable and his taxonomies are pretty funny.

Unlike John Green (The Fault in Our Stars, 2012 and Turtles All the Way Down, 2017) and Becky Albertalli (Simon vs the Homosapien Agenda, 2015) who are two of the best teen writers that can accurately display the minds of the opposite sex in my opinion, I feel like Allen struggles a bit with writing Spence’s point-of-view. I found Hope’s p-o-v more realistic (and relatable) as a female, but I think that Spence became more realistic as the book progressed from age 13 to 19. Especially once he hit puberty, I think the romantic stakes and thoughts were more accurate to a teenage boy. Haha. But what do I know? I’ve never been a teenage boy.

Hope reminded me a lot of myself because I’m generally happy-go-lucky, but I had a major emo-phase in high school that really warped my attitude at the time (and admittedly comes out to play occasionally as an adult.) I wish we had more chapters from her perspective. I was bummed out when her sister died. It's hard to lose someone so close to you, especially when they're so young. The only thing I didn't like about Hope was her last name, Birdsong. I think it was just a little too on-the-nose. If we're really going for the "girl next door" she could have just had a basic last name like Smith or Miller.

I really liked all the little parties the characters through for the holidays and the references to Hamilton (2015), Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Grease (1978), and Pokémon. Jayla and Spencer's Pikachu and Ash costumes sounded adorable. I feel like Hope’s transition over the story is actually a lot like Sandy’s! Also, the two girls at the Halloween party who were Sandy before and after, such a cool costume idea!

Jayla and Dean were both kind of annoying at times, but ultimately, I think they had good hearts, but were just a little too self-involved for their own good. I really appreciated after Dean went to college and grew up a little and started to stand up for Jayla and Spencer.

I also like that the book goes over some important topics like racism and the Civil War, disability awareness, bullying, mental health, and using sexual situations as a coping mechanism.

My top three favorite parts are:

The Vice Principal’s Surprise -- I mean DICK CONFETTI? How much better can it get?

2. The Tree Stand in the Rain -- My little heart at all the romance:

3. The Lightning Bugs -- Just such a sweet and magical moment.

Would I Read this Book Again?

Low key kind of want to read it again right now! I hope they make a movie of this!

#book review #spoiler review #ya novel #rhps #rocky horror picture show #tourettes syndrome #disability rights #disabled community #ya romance #teen romance #georgia #grease #pokemon #hamilton #rachael allen #a taxonomy of love

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sleepymarmot · 2 years ago

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Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

[Rewatched on May 21st]

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of the films that I watched perhaps a bit too young, and my teenage self was quite impressed by it. The vague but fond memories lingered until last year, when I participated in Dracula Daily and realized what this adaptation had done to the characters and storylines from the book. At first I wanted to rewatch it, but I didn’t want to spoil the novel for myself with whatever this adaptation did get right; then, the deeper into summer and autumn, the more I was repulsed by what I remembered of its portrayals of Lucy and Mina. Now enough time has passed that the impressions of my first reading feel distant enough for me to stomach whatever crimes this adaptation has committed, and the new round of Dracula Daily has reminded me of my plans to rewatch this through a new lens.

[Warning: spoilers for the movie and the book]

Well… my impressions are about the same as I expected. The only thing that surprised me was that I underestimated the level of character assassination involved. Lucy and Mina got the worst of it, but pretty much everyone’s personality and motivations are sanded down to the most superficial characteristics and dragged through dirt. Jonathan and Mina(!) don’t have any personality left whatsoever. The less said of poor Lucy, the better. The way this 1992 film is by far more misogynistic than the 1897 novel is absolutely astonishing. The film’s internal system of values is completely incoherent (as opposed to the novel, where it was very clear even if obviously dated). The story keeps switching back and forth between “edgy smutfic that has little to no basis in the novel” and “abridged adaptation that proudly insists on bringing up minor characters and events for a minute or two” which leads to the extreme inconsistency of the narrative and especially Mina’s character. All of the tense and suspenseful parts of the novel are galloped through at a breakneck pace that drains them of all emotion.

I guess I did watch it at the right age after all; as a teenager randomly catching this on TV I was susceptible to all the dramatic romance and sucking blood from the chest and whatnot, but as an adult who has read the novel this is unwatchable. Even worse is seeing people call this a faithful adaptation. If you think the novel is too bland and want to do your own thing that’s fine, but why drag Bramothy’s name and characters into it then?! This could have been either a decent gothic romance or a passable Dracula adaptation, and by trying to do both (and also due to their staggering misogyny and love for victim-blaming) the director and the writer achieved neither.

An extremely frustrating thing is that “loving someone who became a vampire, and being willing to follow them into undeath” is compelling, and it didn’t come out of nowhere! Mina’s compassion for Dracula and identification with his plight, and Jonathan’s devotion to Mina even at the cost of their souls is a potent but underdeveloped part of the novel that I would love to see elaborated on in an adaptation! In the film Jonathan is even allowed to keep two whole lines that gesture at these conflicts! But instead of simply turning this aspect of the Mina/Jonathan relationship up to eleven, the screenwriter cuts and pastes it into the Mina/Dracula relationship without adjusting the rest of the story accordingly. There’s also something that is present in the novel and removed from the movie even though it would have helped make Mina/Dracula more believable. In the novel, vampiric transformation completely changes one’s personality. This serves as a major source of horror and raises questions like: can the vampire version of your loved one be considered the same person? would you kill their vampire self to release the real one? shouldn’t any vampire, no matter how vile, deserve compassion on behalf of their original self? Under this interpretation, it would have made sense for Dracula’s wife who only knew him pre-vampirism to continue loving him even as a vampire. But in the movie, vampirism only makes people more sexual and aggressive, and otherwise there is little change: Lucy is shallow and vulgar even before being turned; Mina loves Dracula and wants to be with him even before being turned; as for Dracula himself, the narration describes his atrocities but doesn’t specify whether he committed him as a human or a vampire. This is a huge disservice to all characters involved, and to the entire story.

Congratulations to the costume designer and the cinematographer for being the only people to do a decent job in this bloody circus. Gary Oldman and Keanu Reeves look nice but that doesn’t help much when the script messes up their characters so badly.

Current rating: 6/10 for the visuals and the parts of the story I actually like. Might lower it later.

---

Liveblog / notes about specific scenes

As much as I hate to see Dracula/“Mina”, good for him for turning against the church that declared his beloved damned. Giving him Jonathan’s traits right within the first five minutes, huh. The bleeding cross is pretty silly, though.

Hilarious to see the title “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” after this intro that completely goes against the letter and spirit of the book.

Huh, Renfield is serving him already?.. LMAO they merged Renfield with Jonathan’s employer! That explains it. A pretty fun choice, actually.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but I’ve always continued to picture Jonathan like Keanu Reeves in this movie, throughout the whole book. No good acting or chemistry found in the first scene with Jonathan and Mina, unfortunately.

The typewriter! She types so slowly though lmao.

Woow the carriage scene completely misses the point of the original. Why is the driver not trying to save Jonathan? What does “For the dead travel fast” even mean when you don’t have Dracula arriving earlier than the humans hoped?

Not a fan of Dracula brandishing a sword at Jonathan straight away.

Love the giant London map. And Dracula’s misplaced shadow, lol.

“They say you are a man of good… taste.”

Um, they pulled this diary entry about Jonathan not wanting Mina to be spoiled out of their asses, right??

Why does Mina have a random book with smutty images on her desk and also act scandalized about it aloud when she’s alone?

How old are Mina and Lucy supposed to be? They act like they’re fourteen or something… They’re of marriageable age, surely they know what it entails!

I didn’t know how good I had it during the Dracula-Jonathan section. It’s truly painful to watch the character assassination of everyone involved.

Wow, Lucy says her dumb innuendo (an invention of the script, obviously), then Quincey immediately calls her “little girl” (as in the novel) not even half a second later. That was certainly a choice.

Jack comically tripping and falling is the only good thing about this scene.

I’m sorry why does Renfield’s asylum look like THAT?!

“A foul bauble of man’s vanity!” He said the thing!

Just as I was about to type “Where’s the Lizard Fashion?”, here it was.

Is it supposed to look hilarious when one of the three weed smoking girlfriends rises from between Jonathan’s legs? Because it was hilarious.

Oh good point actually; did Jonathan in the novel leave the crucifix at his bed instead of wearing it?

The staging of the three vampires’ scene and a hard cut to Jonathan calling himself “faithful” in the letter… The film positively hates him.

On the other hand, the film not only adds sex to Dracula feeding on Lucy, but very pointedly specifies that it was not consensual. What was the intention here? “Punish” her for being “promiscuous” in the interactions with the three suitors?

What in the award season red carpet is this dress

Mina as a title-seeker who is jealous of Lucy and her fiancé and immediately becomes interested in Dracula when he says he’s a prince — pray tell, which part of the novel is this supposedly based on? That’s right, you pulled this disgusting slander right out of your ass.

Of course the suitors talk about Lucy in a rude way and dismiss her illness. And Arthur has a pervy smile on his face as he watches the sick Lucy. This film is determined on character assassination for absolutely everyone involved.

I admit, I still think “I have crossed oceans of time to find you” is a good line.

Cute fluffy doggy :3

Cute fluffy bat :3

Van Helsing saying “My god, she’s only a child” as the camera severely oversexualizes Lucy is also a choice, see above.

“Don’t worry about spoiled little Lucy” — this is the first in-character thing that Lucy has said. 1 hour 12 minutes into the movie.

“Perhaps, though I try to be good, I am bad.” Great dialogue writing here. /s

“A bitch of the devil, a whore of darkness” I hate this movie as much as this movie hates women.

“She is a willing recruit, a breathless follower, a wanton follower.” Wait, no, it would be impossible to match this script’s misogyny, actually.

Absolutely reprehensible how this movie has the female victim herself specify that what happened to her was against her will, then has a male character waltz in and state that she “asked for it” anyway, and the narrative seems to side with him. Rape culture on steroids.

They just completely skipped past the entire “Mina learns what happened to Jonathan and types up the first half of the novel”… Why did they even show the typewriter then?

Men will read a scene in which a woman is semi-metaphorically raped and think “yes I will turn this into a romantic scene in which the woman confesses her undying love and declares her intent to be together forever”

God, I remember how betrayed I felt last autumn when I reached October 3rd in the novel and realized that the scene I found romantic and sensual as a teenager was based on that… And on rewatch, even without taking the novel into consideration, the film’s version doesn’t make internal sense. When Mina started weakly punching Dracula it looked so unserious that at first I thought she was playfighting, not reacting to the revelation that her lover had raped and murdered her best friend and imprisoned her husband.

It’s also notable that the film adds several rape scenes that weren’t in the book, but throws out the rape scene that was in the book. I interpret this as the creators confessing that they don’t seriously care about turning the “vampirism = sexual violence” subtext into text, and everything the movie did to Lucy exists because they thought it was hot and wanted the viewers to find it hot too. Absolutely vile.

Why does Mina cry “Unclean! Unclean!” in this version if it was her idea… Or was that supposed to be mind control as well, even though Dracula was arguing with her?

(Unexpected addition to my yonic wound list though)

Spent all this time thinking that at least van Helsing remained in character (except for the misogyny), and now he’s making out with Mina.

The final scene in the chapel was surprisingly good, all things considered. “Mina” tenderly kissing the bloodied lips on Dracula’s monstrous face still works for me. And she looks her best with her hair down.

So what is supposed to happen after this? In this version, Jonathan is mediocre, and Mina doesn’t love him as much as she loved Dracula — does she just go back to him for a loveless marriage?

#dracula #dracula 1992 #liveblogs and reviews #blah blah blah

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musingsofabookworm1 · 2 years ago

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My Last 13 Reads

Another "dump" post. School's done now, so hopefully I can keep up again. I read 105 books from the last day of school last year to the last day of school this year. Down from the norm. Hopefully next year will be better.

Without further adieu...

Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken by Nita Tyndall - 3 stars - YA World War II novel set in the Swing Youth Movement (I did not know what this was prior). Charlotte, "Charlie", goes to an underground club and begins a queer romance with her friend, but the romance and the war both don't go the way Charlie had hoped. Lots of comparisons to books I've enjoyed, but it wasn't as good as those (ie Ruta Sepetys).

Whiteout by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone - 4 stars - another YA by the same authors as last year's Blackout. Teens come together during a snow storm that shuts down Atlanta at Christmastime to help one of their own with a big apology. It's better than it sounds, and these authors are amazing!

Venco by Cherie Dimaline - 3 stars - Venco is a coven (See what she did there with the anagram?) posing as a business. A silver spoon that has "SALEM" engraved on it takes Lucky St. James and her grandmother on quite the journey. Another witch book that was average.

Just the Nicest Couple by Mary Kubica - 3 stars - Definitely not Kubica's best. Nina's husband goes missing. Her coworker and husband seem to be covering something up. More average lieterature. I still think Kubica's first novel, The Good Girl, is her best.

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty - 3 stars - This came highly recommended, but I found it, too, average. Vacca Vale, Indiana is a rundown town. Four teenagers who've aged out of the foster system live in old apartments searching for freedom. Side note: one of said teens is named Blandine, and that name made me roll my eyes in annoyance until the very end.

All Hallows by Christopher Golden - 5 stars - Horror fans, pick up this one that brought me out of an average slump. 1984. Halloween. Massachusetts. Two famlies are falling apart at the seams while children go door-to-door and run the streets afraid of The Cunning Man. You will not be disappointed in this supernatural thriller!

Sam by Allegra Goodman - 3 stars - And back to average. Maybe it would not have been if I'd known it was more the character route versus plot. Sam's parents divorced in her youth. Her father came in and out of her life and, at one point, got her into rock-climbing which was a positve overall.

Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradal - 4 stars - I'd been waiting for this one. It wasn't as good as his previous two novels, but it was good. It is the love story of Mariel, who inherits a Minnesota supper club from her grandparents, and Ned, who inherits his family's restaurant chain.

Beyond That, The Sea by Lauren Spence-Ash - 5 stars - VERY good read. I heard about it on the All the Books podcast and bought it immediately with an Amazon gift card. As bombs fall in 1940s London, a couple sends their only child, Beatrix, to live with a family in American for safety. Honestly, you don't need to more than that. The story is rich, the characters are memorable, and there were some tears at the end. Not your average WWII novel as it's set in the US.

Lone Women by Victor LaValle - 4 stars - If you've read Victor LaValle, you know his plots are unique. And this is not different. In 1915, Adelaide Henry, a woman in her 30s, leaves her parents for the first time and heads west to California to start fresh. WIth a trunk. The trunk is the key to the story. And you'll never ever guess what's inside.

Forget Me Not by Alyson Derrick - 5 stars - I heard about this YA on All the Books and bought the ebook immedialtey after not finding in at the library or on Libby. Stevie is the daughter of very right-wing parents. They do not know about her secret girlfriend of two years and how the two of them plan to leave town at the end of the summer together as both have graduated. But in the first chapter, as Stevie and Nora (g/f) are hiking in the woods, Stevie falls, hits her head, and has short term amnesia. She cannot remember the last two years of her life - including Nora. And their relationship was a secret, so nothing in Stevie's life can jog that memory. Nora will do anything to help Stevie remember but does not want to upset Stevie's parents or her own mother.

Jacqueline in Paris by Ann Mah - 3 stars - Last book of the school year. This is a novelization of the year Jackie Kennedy spent in Paris as an undergrad. The writing is good. And the plot is good. But it got slow in parts in the middle.

Tell the Rest by Lucy Jane Bledsoe - 4 stars - First book of the summer. The ending made this one jump from 3 to 4 stars for me. In the opening chapter, Delia and Ernest are teens who've escaped from a conversion camp. They'd not seen or heard from each other since. Delia is back in her Oreogon hometown coaching high school girls' basketball after she gets "let go" from the college program she coached. Ernest, a poet, lives in NYC with his boyfriend but heads to Portland for a temporary teaching position and in hopes to write a poem that's been lurking inside him since his teens. I wanted more of the converstion camp storyline. It did come through at the end, but the buildup was a bit slow.

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queering-the-classics · 2 years ago

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Last Night at the Telegraph Club Book Review

-⨳-

In recent years, the amount of queer YA literature has grown at a near exponential rate. In plenty of major bookstores, libraries, and even within some schools, young adult readers can find LGBTQ+ literature from a wide range of genres— romance, mystery, horror, comedy, sci-fi, and more. Though, if you’re a sucker for historical fiction that includes romance, suspense, and drag shows like I am, then an awesome book to check out would be Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club.

This novel takes place in San Francisco, California during the mid 1950s, in which the United States were in a time of political and social unrest. The narrator, Lily Hu, is the teenage daughter of Chinese immigrants. After Lily finds an advertisement for a “male impersonator” performance at a lesbian bar called The Telegraph Club, her perception of herself is turned upside down. Her exploration into her lesbian identity becomes much more intense after meeting Kath Miller, another teenage girl from Lily’s high school (who is very familiar with the queer scene in San Francisco, and the people within it). It is hard not to fall in love with these two as they navigate their romantic feelings towards each other in a time where their love is forbidden.

Now, this book is a slow burn (emphasis on the slow) when it comes to the romantic aspects of it. However, Lo does an amazing job of keeping the reader’s attention with her depictions of the gay/lesbian and Chinese neighborhoods of San Francisco. This book is overflowing with culture, within both the Chinese and queer populations of the city, and guarantees that readers will finish it with a deeper understanding of these groups. Lo also does an excellent job of depicting the tensions caused by the Red Scare in the United States— the fear of communist spies infiltrating the nation and attacking American democracy. As the daughter of Chinese immigrants, Lily is not only face with the threat of people learning about her sexuality, but also the threat of her father being deported back to Communist China.

Like other books I have reviewed, Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a story about resisting the harmful expectations of society and finding pride in one’s identity. It is tender, loving, very passionate at times, and leaves you wanting more (in the best of ways).

My Overall Rating: 8.5 / 10 (this is a pretty lengthy book, and while the build up is nice, it can sometimes drag a little— but once it reaches the “good part,” it stays good. you’ll know it when you get there)

Audience Age Range: 17+ Years Old (this book does include some sexual themes and scenes, so if you are uncomfortable with these topics, this one may not be for you) Other Recommendations: The Boy in the Red Dress by Kristin Lambert & Music From Another World by Robin Talley

-⨳-

#book blog #book review #lgbtq #ya literature #romance #historical fiction #malinda lo

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pickledpascal · 2 years ago

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The Missing Link

Chapter Four: Hindenburg

Warnings: Panic attack, Miles Bron is closeted (?), some swearing.

Word Count: 7.4k

The Missing Link Masterlist

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

Out of all the people Detective Blanc expected to arrive at the dock earlier that day, Ezra Wayne and his daughter were not one of them. Birdie Jay, why wouldn't he? She was the problematic fashionista who was clinging onto relevancy by trying to come up with something new and revolutionary every few years. Duke Cody was a men's rights activist, pleading for his audience to trust everything he said. And they did, not thinking to make at least one Google search to check if he was telling the truth or not. Claire Debella and Lionel Toussaint were similar in that much of their money to do their work was provided by Miles, in turn they'd basically support everything he did.

Ezra Wayne was the outlier.

Why would he come all the way to Greece to meet an old friend who he was very vocal about not liking anymore? He didn't owe anything to Miles as far as Blanc knew. Ezra started his acting career from nothing. No help or reassurance was given to him by any of his past friends.

He knew this because of some of the interviews he'd seen. It was safe to say Benoit was a fan. Who wouldn't think the tall, dark, and handsome man wasn't the best looking in all of Hollywood anyway? He was also a great actor too, starring in anything from a silly rom com to the scariest of horror movies. Blanc liked versatility in his men.

Seeing Ezra in person was certainly something. His gray's were much more prominent than in the movies, showing his age. Maybe he hadn't gotten around to re-dyeing it yet. Then there was the part where Birdie deadnamed him. Ezra didn't seem that bothered, just annoyed.

When he got his chance, Blanc smiled kindly as Ezra turned to him. "I must say, I absolutely love your films! I've seen almost all of 'em, you're amazin' in every single one." He was nervous but he needed to get that out as he looked Ezra up and down. It felt like he was a teenager again, talking to the most attractive boy at school. Ezra always looked absolutely beautiful on screen but it didn't compare to seeing him in real life.

Once on the boat, Benoit wanted to get an inkling to each person's personality. It just so happened that he was walking into the boat to talk with Lionel when Elle waved him over. It was hard to say no, especially with such a beautiful man in the room. But nerves, they were never something Benoit got over easily. He was a relatively calm person, even after the sheer amount of dangerous cases he's been through that would send any sane person running. Who takes on the mysterious case of the death of the mystery novel writer? Apparently, Benoit Blanc does. When Benoit did get nervous, though, they didn't leave as swiftly as he would hope.

After all, meeting your celebrity crush and escaping a near death experience are two completely different things. Although, they might meet on this isolated island.

Conversation with the father-daughter duo was certainly interesting and insinuated something Benoit wasn’t sure he wanted to admit. As much as he wanted to focus on the matter at hand, it was hard with someone as determined as Elle to make both himself and Ezra a blubbering mess.

Benoit pursed his lips, he might as well use this time to try and eliminate Ezra from his suspect list. Or try to. “Y’know, Ezra, you and your daughter seem to be out of place among all these…. Eccentric personalities. For an actor, it’s strange of me to admit such a thing.” It was peculiar that Ezra was here. If he wasn’t the murderer–which would be horrible for Benoit–-then why was he here?

“I like to think it’s because I grew up poor and didn’t compromise myself or leech off of others in order to get rich and famous.” The brunette explained with a hum. Benoit nodded at Ezra and looked down at his hands.

The others happened to grow up in middle class families, besides Birdie–she was the daughter of a famous model, making her famous even before she was born. And Lionel, a little different too. He intimately worked with Miles, being employed by him for the sake of doing what he always wanted to do. Only for the sake of science of course.

—------

Now, Benoit did not know of Ezra before his transition but the actor was always open about that time, sharing photos of himself and even his deadname but Benoit didn’t think it was that difficult to call Ezra by the name he goes by now. Apparently it was very hard for Miles.

“Liz-Ezra…. You look amazing. Great, actually. I’m glad you’re here.” Miles’ eyebrows furrowed as he corrected himself. Benoit observed him as he walked the length of the glass dock. It seemed Miles was blushing a little but it didn’t look like embarrassment.

Huh, interesting…. Oh.

Oh.

Well, it’s reassuring that Benoit isn’t the only one attracted to Ezra. He glanced at Helen who stared at Miles. His main objective was to get her some answers, he needed to focus on that. If he happened to get a boyfriend out of this case, well, that would be nice. Benoit closed his eyes for a moment to get his head in the right mindset, fixing his sunglasses.

“Can we just take a second and fully inbreathiate this moment together?” Miles said with a gentle smile. Benoit pursed his lips and cocked his eyebrow, he ignored it but something inside him was saying that he needed to remember that for later.

Benoit was quiet as the tour started, mostly hanging around Helen to give her some semblance of comfort. Someone here killed her sister so he didn’t blame her if she was tense and weary of everyone, even if some of them seemed too dense to commit a murder.

“Get settled in! Change. Let’s meet up at the pool.” Miles told everyone with a happy smile. “We’ll have a chill afternoon and then the game begins!” He announced, letting everyone fiddle with the bracelets around their wrists to find their room. As expected, Miles requested Benoit come with him for a private chat.

—-------

The pool seemed to be calmer but that meant it was time for Benoit to start gathering some information, among other things. He looked around the rectangular pool, catching sight of Birdie and Claire on the pool chairs off to the side while Miles was playing a tune on the guitar. He made his way over the Miles and grabbed one of the drinks inside the cooler.

“Oh! Baby Blue!” Benoit exclaimed, a light smile on his face as he twisted the cap open and took a drink. His nose wrinkled slightly at the taste. It was like Jared Leto somehow bottled how he smelled. Benoit had never met him before but that’s what he imagined he’d smell like.

Duke took a sip of his drink, “Yeah. Miles, you remember when you almost pancaked me outside Andi’s–”

“Anderson Cooper’s birthday party? Yeah, Coop's parties are memorable.” Miles laughed with an almost nervous smile as he grabbed a bottle as well.

Benoit stood from his crouching position and looked over at Ezra and Elle. They were talking with each other. No one seemed to want to talk to them. Peculiar, with such a close-knit group like this. He made his way over to the pair and sat at the other pool chair next to Ezra. “Have you always been…. The outcast in a group like this?” He asked, careful but still blunt.

“Eh, kinda.” Ezra lowered his sunglasses so they covered his eyes, the sides of his lips were tense. “I was the only one who wanted a job in the performing arts and then I told them I was also trangender, kinda put the nail in the coffin.”

“Hmm.” Benoit nodded, catching a glimpse of the scars ever so slightly showing from underneath the half-open shirt on Ezra’s shoulders. “You look…. Great.” He said with a light smile, knowing his face must be some shade of red. He assumed crimson. It didn’t take the detective much to get him a blushing mess. It just depended on the person and if they had the means to.

Ezra let out a small laugh at the compliment. “Thanks, Detective. I could say the same for you.” Benoit bit the inside of his cheek. Was he flirting with him? Holy shit. “I mean, I would be very proud of myself if I was the most attractive detective alive.” Ezra shrugged.

Benoit let out a flattered laugh, feeling as if he was a boy again. “Some might say you’re the most attractive actor alive.” It was weak, but it was all he could come up with. It was like his brain was short-circuiting. Only for a second.

—------

After the little stunt at the pool, Helen and Benoit met in the gym as it seemed no one was using it or was going to use it in the short time they were there. Of course, that led to Benoit snooping around the compound to eventually find Duke watching Miles and Whiskey…. Doing their thing in front of a window. Honestly, though, how could Miles not see Duke. Weird.

Helen got a little closer, wanting to hear what the pair was talking about behind the glass. Benoit pursed his lips, shaking his head at her. She was good but damn if she got caught, that'd be the end of their investigation.

—------

"My mom took me to Paris when I was six years old. First time I looked at this lady, it changed my life. You know Da Vinci invented a technique for brush strokes that leave no lines?" Miles gushed over the real Mona Lisa, the one in songs and meant to be the museum of art in France. Guess not these days. "That's how you can look straight at her and her expression changes every time. Her smile's there, then it disappears. Is she happy? Is she sad? Is it something else?"

Benoit never was one to be interested in art, at least not high art like the Mona Lisa or any of Goya's paintings. He appreciated it, sure, just not one to dedicate his whole life to caring about them. It seemed Ezra was similar in that aspect, taking a sip from his glass with an unbothered look in his eyes.

Helen kept staring at the painting, nodding. "It really is something." Benoit glanced up at the painting before he looked back at Miles.

Claire looked from Miles to the painting and narrowed her eyes. "Wait a minute, Miles. Why do you have the Mona Lisa in your living room?" Her tone was pointed, like she knew something the rest didn't. Or, that Claire knew Miles was gonna do something she didn't like.

Miles let out a breath, a cocky smile appearing on his lips. "In one week, I've invited world leaders and members of the press from all over to unveil the future." He said as he grabbed a crystal-like object from his pocket and showed it to everyone in the room. Most looked confused…. But Claire and Lionel…. "You know what this is?"

"You know damn well we do." Lionel gritted out, tapping at the lip of his glass. "What's going on, Miles?"

Benoit raised his hand, letting out a strained laugh. "Uh, I don't." It seemed, neither did Ezra or his daughter who's attention was peaked at the crystallic object. They seemed to have felt the rise of tension in the room.

"Don't drop it." Miles threw it at Benoit who caught it with ease.

But Claire, she was concerned. "Oh my god!" Perhaps something would have happened if the little crystal touched the floor. They were all in trouble, then.

Benoit looked at the crystal between his fingers, carefully staring at the grooves and small bubbles that seemed to be trapped inside.

"That's a new solid hydrogen fuel. It's incredibly powerful." Miles explained, "It's radically efficient. Zero carbon emissions, and it's derived from abundant seawater. I call it Klear, with a K." Because of course he did. "And at this event, we are going to announce 'Klear America.' Our affordable home power solution. Klear is going to be powering people's dreams, all over this country, by the end of this year."

Ezra shook his head, he may not have been a chemist or anything that had to do with the sciences but the looks Claire and Lionel had on their faces weren't hard to read. They were concerned, devastated even.

Lionel slammed his glass down on one of the podiums, causing the glass on the Mona Lisa to lift back up. It was protecting itself, from what? It didn't know just yet. "No. No. Because I was clear with you. I told you I need two years minimum to test this stuff to see if it's safe or even viable. Claire and I are not gonna be responsible for putting something out in the world before it is tested. And–" He paused once Miles pointed up at the air around them.

"Shit." Ezra breathed. So much for being safe on this summer vacation. They were walking around in a ticking time bomb….

"Oh, no." Lionel realized as well, stepping back from Miles.

Miles nodded with a smirk, "Oh, yeah."

Benoit's eyebrows furrowed as he looked back at the small crystal in his hand. "You're running this entire place off this?"

"The whole Glass Onion is powered by Klear." Miles let out a light laugh. He was giddy, his dreamlike fuel was working. As far as he knew. "Come on, let's…. Let's eat!"

It was clear that both Lionel and Claire weren't sure they could trust Miles anymore. He was being reckless. More reckless than he usually was. Elle narrowed her eyes at Miles before she looked at Ezra who let out a light breath. Maybe they could get through this night and leave as soon as possible in the morning. Ezra didn't want to stay too much longer if the whole island was dangerous and he also didn't want to feel responsible if something were to happen to his daughter.

This was a huge mistake.

—----

Dinner was short-lived, Benoit solved Miles' "mystery" in just a few short seconds and Ezra had to refrain from the urge to laugh once he saw his defeated face. The pair went upstairs, leaving Ezra and Elle with everyone else who deemed it was time to get royally hammered after their weekend was ruined.

Duke's notifications went off, causing the glass vault to go back up. "You know, you could just power it down." Lionel suggested to Duke.

"Ah, it's my Google Alerts. Got them for all you guys." Duke explained, taking a sip from his glass. "Whiskey, sports I like, general interests."

Ezra rubbed Elle's back while she leaned on him. She was tired even though it was only 8:30 but he couldn't blame her. The whole day was filled with…. things out of the ordinary. Plus she found another father figure and half her time was spent getting him and Ezra together. Well, Elle's work seemed to be done. They may never see each other again after Ezra leaves tomorrow. It was sad, thinking about the future and the fact that each time Elle would look at a magazine with Benoit's solved cases on the front cover, she would ache for something that could have been.

Lionel was unimpressed as Duke's phone rang yet again. "You have a Google Alert for the word 'movie?'"

"I like movies!" Duke defended. "Don't hate. Nerd." Says the guy who started off on Twitch as a gamer.

Ezra took a sip of his drink, looked at the red table in front of him. His eyes glazed over as he thought about what may happen after this. He'd be glad to go home, back to his normal life. Which was weird to think that being an actor everyone sought over was normal. But it was for him. Though, Elle knew differently. He longed for someone to be with, and if that someone just so happened to be Benoit Blanc…. Well, wouldn't that be nice?

Birdie let out a relieved sigh as she sat down on the couch, "Thank God for Benoit Blanc. We don't have to spend the weekend spelling hedges." She sipped her drink through her straw.

"Well, I'm outta her. Tomorrow morning. Gone." Duke stated, waving his hand.

Whiskey shook her head, "We just got here." She was on the floor. Ezra wasn't sure why or how she got there and he didn't really care either.

Duke mockingly whined like a baby. Elle's gaze hardened at him, she could treat Whiskey much better than him. If only she could let him go and leave him, Duke didn't deserve her. Not to mention, Duke was at least twenty years older than Whiskey. "You can stay. Have fun."

"Fine. You're murdering my vibe." Whiskey grabbed the bottle of tequila next to her and stood up, walking outside.

Birdie whined, "No! Miserable in paradise. We've all earned this."

Andi walked towards the group, "Yes, you have." She seemed more tense than before. Perhaps she was gonna blow up again.

Ezra helped Elle stand from her place on the couch and retreated outside with her by his side. He didn't want to hear whatever argument that was going to happen. It would have been entertaining but Ezra's brain was close to shutting off. And if Elle was anything like her father, he knew it was the same for her.

Soon, Andi was leaving too. She stopped to say a few words to Whiskey then made her way to Ezra.

"You-you are the only good one. And I don't blame you for leaving all those years ago." She said before running off.

Ezra cocked his head somewhat confused while Elle looked off into the distance, admiring how the moonlight danced with the water. Whatever happened in there, must've been enough to set her off. Not that Ezra blamed Andi at all. After everything that's happened between her and Miles and suddenly she's cut out of the company. Ezra didn't know many details about why but he assumed it was because of something big….

His eyes widened, shaking his head a little. He was being dumb. It was because of that Klear stuff, wasn't it? Andi knew it was dangerous and didn't want Miles to be distributing across the entire country. No wonder….

—-----

Well, they certainly picked the wrong time to make their way back inside. Duke looked as if he was choking, falling down on one of the coffee tables until his harbored breaths were silenced. He died. Right in front of their eyes. Ezra immediately shielded Elle's eyes, holding her tight to his chest while Benoit inspected his body.

"I'm afraid Mr. Cody is…. Is dead." Benoit said as he looked up at Claire. There was a certain sense of bewilderment in his eyes. He's seen plenty of deaths before, it was a part of his job, but none quite like Duke's.

Birdie started to scream while Whiskey cried, "No, Duke! No!"

The rest of the conversation seemed to buzz in Ezra's ears. Someone killed Duke. That much was obvious. The question was who? And, well, there were only a select few on the island.

"Fuck." Ezra cursed under his breath, loosening his grip on Elle. "We have to get the fuck out of here." He ran a hand through his hair.

Sure, Claire could see the headlines but Ezra could see them too. He was an actor, a transgender one at that so criticism was something he was used to. But this…. This would be a whole new level. Ezra hated red-pill "truthers," so being on an island with one who just so happened to die would automatically blacklist him. Progressives in Hollywood wouldn't cast him anymore and the conservatives didn't cast him at all because he was trans.

"My dear, hey, you're gonna be alright." Benoit told Elle softly, wrapping his arms around her for a moment while she sniffled softly.

Even if Duke was an asshole and a bitch, witnessing his death wasn't something Elle was particularly fond of. Sure, he might have deserved it with the harm he caused on little boys minds but…. This…. This was different. It would haunt Elle for the rest of her life, she was sure.

"Boat can't come till low tide in the morning. Six am at the earliest." Lionel announced as he walked back.

Benoit patted Elle's shoulder for a moment before he looked at Lionel. "Do they understand the situation?" He asked with a frown.

"There is no other landing point, and Miles' dumbass Banksy dock was set to low-tide height and it isn't buoyant. It is a piece of shit." Lionel explained, tone very reasonably pointed at the man who decided to have said dock.

Ezra wrapped a blanket around Elle's shoulders, knowing that sometimes she needed the weight to feel normal again. This certainly wouldn't help all the things going on inside her brain. And, holy shit, was Miles saying someone was trying to kill him and not Duke? Well, then they royally fucked up. Poison in the person's drink was rather cliché wasn't it? And clumsy because shit like this could happen. You could mix up the drinks and accidentally have given it to the wrong person.

Hm, maybe Ezra could be the new Harlan Thrombey…. Without all the parts of suicide and…. Well, Benoit Blanc appeared in Ezra's life too. Maybe that was a sign.

"Forget about his phone. Look." Lionel pointed at Duke's holster…. Which was missing the gun. The gun that Duke was famous for always keeping with him.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck…." Ezra ran a hand through his hair, squeezing Elle's shoulder to comfort her. Now someone was roaming around the island with a goddamned gun. So much for a little light hearted fun.

Elle shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut. "I can't believe this is happening." Her lungs were screaming for air, her esophagus closing up. "D-Dad…." She said weakly. She could feel her heartbeat going faster and faster. She couldn't breathe.

She was having a panic attack.

Ezra's eyes widened. He knew these signs. He didn't care about what was happening behind him, he needed to focus on his daughter. "I'm right here, Elle, c'mon look at me, okay?" He tilted Elle's head towards him as he wrapped his arms around her. "Take a few big breaths, honey. I'm here for you, whatever you need, okay?" Ezra squeezed her tight, not missing the concerned look Benoit had for her. But it was like he knew Ezra would help her through it.

"Blanc, you have to help me. Help me! Help me!" Miles yelled right before Benoit slapped him across the face.

Benoit shouted, "What happens at ten o'clock!"

As soon as those words left his mouth, all the lights powered down. They were showered in darkness, the only light that didn't turn off was the lighthouse just outside. It rotated, causing only a sliver of light to run through the house.

Against Benoit's wishes, no one stayed in the living room. Well, besides Elle and Ezra. Weirdly, the light seemed to help Elle out of her panic attack. Her heart was still beating fast but she could breathe again which helped marginally.

"Alright, that's good, sweetheart." Ezra said calmly, cupping her cheek softly as he wrapped a blanket around her. "I'll grab you some water, okay. Stay here." Turning on the flashlight from his phone, he found his way to the kitchen and grabbed a glass to fill it with water. Once he was back in the living room, Elle took it gratefully and downed it. Her throat was feeling better, less dry than before. "There we go." Ezra kissed the top of her head. "I love you, kiddo."

Elle buried her face in Ezra's chest, letting a few tears flow. "I love you too, Dad. So much."

—-----

"Who?" Claire asked, that's the thing all of them were thinking but it seemed only Benoit had the answers.

Benoit, looking off to the side for a moment, smacked his lips. "Well, I keep returning, in my mind, to the Glass Onion." Ezra cocked an eyebrow at him. He's heard of the weird ways Benoit had explained the truth of a case but…. What did the Glass Onion have to do with any of this? "Something that seems densely layered, mysterious and inscrutable. But in fact, the center is in plain sight. And that is why this case has confounded me like no other." Benoit gently rubbed Elle's arm before walking the length of the living room.

"Why, every complex layer peeled back has revealed another layer and another layer and come to naught." Benoit looked around at the room, at the different people standing in front of him as his eyes narrowed momentarily. "And that was the problem, right there. You see, I expected complexity. I expected intelligence. I expected a puzzle, a game." Where was he going with this? Ezra kept Elle close, not knowing if they were in a room with a murderer or not. "But that's not what any of this is. It hides. Not behind complexity, but behind mind-numbing obvious clarity. Truth is, it doesn't hide at all."

Ezra looked around the room. Who would be the most obvious choice to murder both Andi and Duke? He could think of many reasons why all of them would want to kill Andi but Duke? He was dumb, he had no ill intentions. At least, not to them. To the greater public? Probably.

"I was staring right at it." Benoit sighed, feeling somewhat dumb for not assuming it at first. "The killer nearly struck my Achilles' heel. But thank high heaven, at the last moment, I realized what had teased my brain through this entire case… "inbreathiate." It's not a word." Benoit shook his head, glancing at Ezra for a moment.

It seemed obvious he would start to catch on out of all of them. Not to say that Whiskey wasn't smart or the rest weren't but they all believed Miles and how "smart" he portrays himself to be. Ezra, on the other hand, does not.

Lionel shook his head for a second, not getting how this related to anything. "What?"

"'Inbreathiate.'" Ezra repeated. "It's not a real word, it just sounds like one but it's…. Made up. Like something a kid would say to sound smart." He explained, blinking a little as the pieces started to fall into place.

"Precisely." Benoit nodded, "And "reclamation," that is a word. But it's the wrong word." His eyebrows furrowed for a moment, sighing. "This entire day… A veritable minefield of malapropisms and factual errors." Now, Ezra would be lying if he said he knew any of the words Benoit used in that single sentence but he was sure the detective was using them correctly. After all, Benoit had this way of speaking that felt like he would be more at home in the 40s or 50s if he should ever set foot in that time period.

Benoit turned and pointed out the window. "That is the Aegean Sea." Right…. Miles said the Ionian Sea. But if what Benoit was starting to say was true then… It was Miles all along. But he couldn't, right? Miles was too dumb to pull off a murder.

"Oh, yeah. It is, it is." Claire said, not understanding what Benoit was trying to explain.

"His dick doesn't float. His wonder-fuel is a disaster. His grasp of disruption theory is remedial at best." Aw, and just when Ezra was going to turn to the dark side. Yeah…. No. "He didn't design the puzzle boxes. He didn't write the mystery. Et voilà. It all adds up. The key to this entire case. And it was staring at me right in the face." Benoit then clarified, clicking his tongue as turned back the group. "Like everyone in the world, I assumed Miles Bron was a complicated genius."

Ezra chuckled, shaking his head. "First mistake, Detective." He shrugged. Miles couldn't come up with his own idea if it saved a million lives.

Ezra knew that and he warned Andi against partnering with Miles… but she didn't listen. And that's why he left. Sure, the transphobia was part of it but he couldn't bear to watch Andi throw away all her ideas and let Miles get all the credit. Alpha was hers, never Miles'. He just so happened to run into Andi and she took him along for the ride.

Benoit glanced at Ezra, a slightly amused look in his eye. "Look into the clear center of this Glass Onion… Miles Bron is an idiot."

Whiskey covered her lips, a little shocked Benoit would say such a thing. Miles' jaw tensed, "Oh, please." He grumbled, shaking his head as he crossed his arms. "Just tell us who tried to kill me."

"No one tried to kill you, you vainglorious buffoon." Benoit countered, shoving his hands in his pockets. If Miles was the murderer, Benoit certainly did not seem scared when he insulted him to his face.

Miles exclaimed, growing frustrated and not in the way that would make him seem innocent. "Duke took my glass!" He wouldn't make a great actor, Ezra could see all his tells easily.

Keeping his composure, Benoit looked at Miles unpressed. "That's what you told us he did. He must've picked it up by mistake, you told us, right after it happened." Ezra cocked his head slightly as he started to remember. It was right in front of them. Miles couldn't be that dumb? To attempt murder right before their eyes. "Ignore his lies, everyone, and think clearly now! What did we all actually see?"

"Y-You handed Duke your own glass. In front of us! And you lied. Made us think you didn't." Ezra said, letting go of Elle once it seemed she was alright. "I must admit I'm not sad that he's dead but…. You traumatized my kid for life.

"Blanc, Ezra… you're telling us Miles killed Duke?" Lionel asked in disbelief.

Benoit nodded, "Yes."

"Why?"

"Because the night Andi sent you all the emails, when Duke got to Andi's house early on his motorcycle he saw Miles leaving. Was almost struck by him." Benoit explained, Ezra wasn't following this time. What email? "In fact, he told all of us. Right in the open, he told us. That night, at Andi's."

Claire nodded, rubbing her chin slightly. "That night…. Duke told us he almost got in an accident. He… pancaked?" She realized.

"Okay yeah, but Miles had been living in Greece the past six months." Lionel said. He couldn't accept the fact Miles would kill one of their closest friends. Even if Duke was…. Duke.

Benoit let out a light huff, a laugh almost. "No." It was clipped. "Whiskey." He made his way over to her. This piqued Elle's interest, what did all this have to do with her? "Miles saw you on your birthday in New York. Gave you that necklace for your birthday. You're a Taurus." He whispered.

"I am." Whiskey said in a light whisper as well before she realized, "Two weeks ago. May 9th."

Benoit shrugged as Peg ran back into the room. "Forget the hydrofuels, and the sweatshops, and the consensual cuckolding for cable news assignments." Cuckold? God, that had to be the first time he's ever said that for a case. It made Ezra snort out a laugh.

"Sorry what?" Peg asked, face clear with confusion.

"And focus! On the envelope." Benoit motioned with his hand to a staircase.

Everyone's heads turned at the staircase to reveal Andi descending from the steps. Birdie let out a shriek, while Claire yelled a few curses. Ezra, on the other hand, was utterly confused.

"Andi?" Lionel asked, appalled.

Ezra looked from Andi to Benoit, "What the fuck is going on?" She was dead not more than two minutes ago when he thought she was dead, the grief was just starting to set in until she came back.

"Who did the envelope threaten?" Benoit didn't expect Ezra to know, maybe he should have explained but it's not like Whiskey really would have known either. "Miles Bron." Almost as if Miles' mom just died in a house fire, his expression became sour and hardened. "That night, Lionel faxed Andi's email to Miles who received it in New York. The one thing that could destroy his empire of lies, the truth in the hands of the only person unafraid to tell it. So Miles drives his Baby Blue Porsche to the scene of the crime, and Andi let's him in." Benoit cocked his head at Miles, eyes narrowed.

Benoit never had any remorse unveiling the truth, especially with cases with such…. Shitheads. "Of course she did. Miles' machine of lawyers and power could destroy her through sheer dumb force. But Miles himself? Oh, she was clever enough not to fear Miles." If this was going where Ezra thought this was going… then who was the woman that looked exactly like Andi? "But she didn't see the real threat, the obvious threat until it was too late. Duke alone knew you were there that night, but he didn't know Andi was dead."

Ezra ran a hand down his forehead. Wait… Andi had mentioned she had a sister to him, maybe a few times just when families were brought up in conversation. She didn't happen to say her sister was twin but… What else could this be? The actor looked up at the "imposter"—if he could really call her that–and realized. That had to be Helen.

"No, no, he didn't know that until this evening." Benoit continued as he pointed out, "Right here, when he got a Google Alert on his phone, which has now fallen strangely silent." He made his way around Miles and grabbed something from his pocket to reveal that Miles had Duke's phone ever since he died. Ezra was somewhat scared Benoit was feeling him up or something, thankfully it didn't seem Benoit had a kink for villains. "Which he showed to you… because you don't own a phone."

"Did you really think you could stop all of them from finding out about Andi's death? They all have phones." The blonde made her way towards the group, her southern accent was thick.

"He didn't need to hide the death, he just needed to hide that Duke has shown him the death moments before he was killed." Benoit spun the tail a little further… Well, not so much spinning, more like weaving. Putting the pieces together so they could see the finished product more clearly. "Right out in the open, Duke showed him. And told him exactly what he wanted in return for his silence. So what does Miles do?" The Detective stepped away from the man in question.

The woman followed Benoit, "Does he keep a vial of poison in his tooth or something? Is that some rich person thing?" If it was, Ezra was in trouble.

Benoit sighed, shaking his head in slight disappointment. "No, no, no, no, it's just… it's so much stupider than that. Birdie, what are the ingredients to your Cuban Breeze?" He asked.

Suddenly the attention was on her and it winded her for a moment. "Um, vodka, amaretto…."

"Oh, God." Whiskey gasped, raising her hands to her mouth as she realized.

"And… pineapple juice." Birdie finished after a little while.

Benoit strained, slightly disgusted and appalled. "An allergy!"

"He can't even have a drop."

"Pineapple juice!" The detective exclaimed in frustration. "He just put pineapple juice in his whiskey! It's so dumb." He shook his head, raising a hand to his forehead to rub at it. It teased his brain in the worst way possible.

Birdie, probably drunk, gasped in amazement. "It's so dumb, it's brilliant!"

"No! It's just dumb!" Benoit exclaimed, rubbing a hand against his forehead.

Ezra didn't need to check as he went up to her while the rest went to check their phones, reading off the first article about Cassandra Brand. "You must be Helen Brand…" He said softly.

"You know Helen?" Claire asked. It seemed none of them knew who she was, or they didn't pay much attention when Andi told them about her.

Helen glanced from Claire to Ezra. "We met once. He was in Alabama for some movie and recognized me." She explained, fiddling with the red envelope in her hands as Miles realized… The person he just tried to kill wasn't Andi at all. But an entirely different character all together.

"And now we come to Helen's attempted murder. Which, I have to give you credit for, did have a sound foundation of thought." Benoit said, earning him a glare from Ezra. The actor could see it being a bad habit already, the detective praising a criminal for their creativity just because it tested him enough. But Ezra didn't mind if that was the worst thing about Benoit. "You realized the opportunity laid out in front of you. You have a house on a remote island, filled with desperate people, all of whom have a real-life reason to wish this woman harm. You–" Benoit paused suddenly, narrowing his eyes as he looked at Miles. Something started to become abundantly clear in his mind.

Benoit continued, somewhat weary, "Furthermore, you have a loaded gun conveniently within reach. And the lights had even been turned off." He let out a heavy sigh as he brought a hand to his forehead. "Heavens to…" Ezra didn't want to laugh but the sound escaped him anyways. Benoit may have described Ransom and Harlan in an older case as "drama mamas" but he wasn't exempt from that description either. "You dim-witted, brainless… jackass!" Elle jumped a little as she wrapped the blanket tighter around her form.

"Your one murder, with any panache at all, and you stole the whole idea from me." It seemed he knew how it felt now. Andi got her ideas stolen by Miles for years, the napkin wasn't the only thing. They all knew that.

Lionel cocked his head, "And after all that, you…. You still kept the envelope? Didn't burn it or anything?" He asked. It could have been seen as a trophy of some sort but if someone–like Helen–were to discover he still had it then his empire would fall.

"You recognize this?" Helen asked, almost smug as she took the napkin out of its packaging. "Andi's handwritin'. I got you, son of a bitch." Miles almost looked scared.

Miles shook his head, "Oh, let's slow down there, sister. Okay? Because first, how could you ever prove that that's the original?" He countered. "She might have copied mine."

"No. The bar closed nine years ago, and hers has one thing that yours just doesn't." Helen pointed at something, Ezra couldn't see what since he was standing behind her. However, Ezra was prepared to jump Miles if Helen asked him to.

Miles hummed, glancing over Helen's shoulder to meet Benoit's eyes. "Okay, but second…." He clicked on his light to set the napkin aflame.

Benoit and Ezra ran over to Helen. "What the hell did he do?" Benoit exclaimed as he looked at the pile of ash that suddenly formed at Helen's feet.

"He just burned it!" Helen gasped as Benoit squatted down to see it for himself.

"Burned what? I didn't see anything." Miles shrugged.

Ezra growled, "You are acting worse than a child! And I should know, I have one." Elle pouted, shaking her head. At least Ezra raised her right. Who knows what Miles' parents were like.

"This will not stand." Benoit ground out, his jaw clenching.

Miles chuckled, "Uh-huh. Well, did you see this proof, this smoking napkin, Blanc?" He asked with a knowing smile. They had no more evidence. Nothing that could prove Andi's death. "No. Did anybody?" The group casted their gaze downward, defeated and silent. They couldn't go against Miles, he had them in his pocket. "Okay, then wow! Wow! We got some big accusations flying around here. Except, everybody seems to have a very foggy recollection of what they actually saw–"

"Well, I did see you burn something." Ezra countered.

"And there's nothing but totally circumspective evidence." Miles continued, completely ignoring Ezra like he did most of the time a decade ago. "So, if this was just us playing my murder mystery game, which we should have been doing all weekend, then Blanc wins an iPad Pro this time." He joked softly. "But this is the real world. And in the real world you need more than a neat, little detective story. You need evidence. And you've got… nothing. Do you?"

Ezra looked from Benoit to Helen. He was right. You need evidence and you need witnesses. And if Ezra was going to be the only to side with Helen then the courts would never work out in her favor. Miles had the majority here.

Benoit pursed his lips, a sad glaze rolling over his eyes. He hated losing in a game as serious as this. "He's right." He sighed, pursing his lips. "The contents of that envelope and his possession of it were our only physical evidence."

"Right." Miles pointed at him, clicking on his lighter yet again to fiddle with it. "Wanna take that to the cops? You wanna take that to the courts?" He laughed quietly, "Look, pick your poison. Anywhere you go, it's going to be your word against mine. How do you think that's gonna go?"

Benoit took his jacket from the glass pedestal he hung it from and put it on as he walked across the room, ushering Ezra with him by setting a hand on his back.

Miles shrugged, clicking his tongue slightly. "I think it's gonna go about like it went for Andi."

"Jesus." Lionel whispered under his breath, glancing at Helen. He could have been good. But no. Lionel wasn't quite there yet.

"And I do want to say, your sister was a complicated woman, but she meant the world to me." Miles pursed his lips, trying his best to sound sincere. But if it was sincere… would he have ever killed her? "And I'm so sorry for your loss."

Dejected, Helen made her way over to Benoit. "Blanc. I need you to do something." Tears started to form at the edges of her eyes, threatening to fall. After all this work and… nothing.

"I'm sorry, Helen." Benoit shook his head, eyebrows drawing together. "I gave you the truth. This is where my jurisdiction ends. I have to answer to the police, the courts, the system. There's nothing I can do." He took a quick breath as he grabbed the glass with 'Andi' written on it. "Except maybe… offer you some courage." Benoit handed Helen the glass. "And a reminder of why your sister walked away in the first place." He quickly handed her something else, Ezra could only imagine what it was.

Benoit turned away, whispering to Ezra, "I suggest you and your daughter come with me." He said. It was a very serious tone and Ezra hadn't had the time to think it through much so he followed his instructions.

Ezra grabbed Elle by her arm and walked outside, following Benoit to the docks. He wondered why Benoit was in such a hurry to leave. Or maybe… not? He didn't seem that worried.

But, well…. The entire Glass Onion blew up a few minutes later and Ezra would be lying if he said he didn't enjoy the fireworks.

"Disruption." Benoit laughed as he took a drag from his cigar.

"Fuckin' A." Derol laughed as well, his joint firmly between his lips as he lounged on a chair.

Ezra ran a hand through Elle's hair while a proud smile was on his lips. Helen sure knew how to shake things up, Ezra didn't mind though. Miles deserved to have his house blown up.

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