#divorce lawyers northern

[hyteche]

lawyers fairfax va divorce

[divorce-lawyer-in-new-jersey]

Divorce Lawyers Northern Virginia

Divorce Lawyers Northern Virginia

Divorce Lawyers in Northern Virginia are legal professionals specializing in handling divorce cases in the region. They have in-depth knowledge of Virginia's divorce laws and regulations and offer expert guidance to clients throughout the divorce process.

[tamlinweek]

Tamlin Week 2024 Master List

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This post is the Super Mega Ultra Tamlin Week 2024 Master List! It has links to all the master lists for each day of Tamlin Week, with every single submission. At the bottom are links to more of the fun/helpful posts we've made in the lead up to Tamlin Week. Enjoy!

Tamlin Week 2024 Master Lists

Day 1: Heir of Spring/Human Tamlin

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Tagging all the event's participants so everyone knows this is up!

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[morbidology]

Laurie Dann led an unassuming childhood, growing up in an affluent northern suburb of Chicago. She was remembered as being somewhat awkward and lacking in confidence. It's believed that’s why she completely altered her face with plastic surgery at quite a young age.

She attended the University of Arizona for several years but never graduated. While working as a cocktail waitress at Green Acres Country Club, she met Russell Dann, the son of a wealthy family. The duo were inseparable and settled down and got married in September of 1982. They moved into a large mansion - something that had always been a dream of Laurie.

Shortly thereafter, Russell began to notice some bizarre quirks about his new wife. For example, she would keep her makeup in the microwave, would throw money into the back seat of her car, and would put clothes away while they were still soaking wet. While the couple remained together for several years, Laurie’s quirks began to worsen and worsen.

Eventually, she completely stopped leaving the house and refused to cook or clean up after herself. The relationship was doomed but it reached calamitous heights in September of 1986. Police received a phone call from Russell. Somebody had stabbed him with an ice-pick while he slept and he was certain it was Laurie. In fact, a store clerk would come forward to say Laurie had indeed purchased an ice-pick just days previously. The ice-pick missed his heart by just an inch.

Considering Russel was asleep and didn’t see his attacker, the charges against Laurie were dropped. The couple divorced shortly afterwards. As the divorce was underway, Laurie’s ex-boyfriend from five years previously started to receive threatening phone calls from Laurie in which she claimed she was pregnant with his child. The harassment finally ended when his lawyer contacted her parents.

Laurie moved from the marital home and decided she wanted to become a babysitter but this quickly failed when she was accused of stealing from her client’s homes and slashing up their sofas, rugs, and curtains. Following this failed business idea, she moved into a dorm room on the northwest campus. This too fell apart when Laurie starred to hide rotten meat inside furniture as well as hiding rubbish in other student’s rooms.

In January of 1988, she moved to a dorm in Madison, Wisconsin, where she became known as “elevator lady.” Students recalled her riding up and down in the elevator all day long. Once again, she started to leave rotten meat around the dorm and would often be seen stark naked in the communal areas. A month after moving in, a dorm room was set alight. Many believed Laurie had caused the fire intentionally but with no evidence, she was never charged.

By now, Laurie’s sanity had completely unraveled and nobody thought to get her more suitable professional help. After threatening a fellow student and slashing his clothing, Laurie baked buns and injected them with arsenic. She sent these laced treats to several frat houses and homes in the area before making her way to the home of a former babysitting client, asking if she could take their kids to the local fair. She gave the two children poisoned milk. Thankfully, they threw it out after saying it tasted strange. The arsenic in the laced treats she had sent out was so diluted that it caused no damage.

From here, Laurie went to a local daycare and tried to set it on fire before returning to the former clients home which she then set on fire. They were lucky enough to escape out of a smashed window. By the time the family escaped, Laurie was en route to Hubbard Woods Elementary School. Armed with two handguns, Laurie started shooting indiscriminately as soon as she entered the building. She shot and killed 8-year-old Nicholas Corwin before critically wounding another five.

Laurie ripped off the bloody shorts she was wearing and tied a plastic bag around her waist. After fleeing the school, she crashed her car into a tree and then broke into the home of Ruth and Phillip Andrews. Laurie held the terrified family hostage for six hours, claiming she had shot and killed her rapist and was now on the run from the police. Phillip grabbed the gun from Laurie as his family escaped. During the scuffle, he was shot in the chest but managed to stagger into the garden.

Alone in the Andrews home, Laurie shot herself dead.

[whencyclopedia]

Pilgrimage of Grace

The Pilgrimage of Grace is the collective name for a series of rebellions in northern England, first in Lincolnshire and then in Yorkshire and elsewhere between October and December 1536 CE. Nobles, clergy, monks, and commoners united to oppose both the decision of Henry VIII of England (r. 1509-1547 CE) to split the Church in England from Rome and his policy of closing monasteries and confiscating their estates, the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Other grievances included the fear of new taxes and confiscation of Church property and a general lack of political representation in the north of England. The Pilgrimage of Grace, so-called because its participants considered themselves 'pilgrims', did not threaten London, but it was the largest rebellion of the Tudor period (1485-1603 CE). The 40,000 protestors were dispersed by the threat of armed force and false promises of pardons and reforms but, ultimately, many of the leaders, including the lawyer Robert Aske and Lord Darcy, were executed as traitors and Henry continued apace with the Reformation in England.

Henry VIII's 'Great Matter'

Henry VIII had a problem. He wanted to divorce his first wife Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry the younger and more beautiful Anne Boleyn (c. 1501-1536 CE) who might give him what he so desired: a male heir. The problem, which the king called his 'Great Matter', was that in the Catholic Church divorce was not permitted. After much diplomatic activity, the Pope refused to grant Henry an annulment of his marriage. The king, aided by his Chancellor Thomas Cromwell (l. c. 1485-1540 CE), then decided he would make himself head of his own Church in England and so be able to grant himself his own divorce. Consequently, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury formally annulled Henry's first marriage in May 1533 CE which meant that Henry could now marry a second time (which he had already done in secret a few months before). There was the additional consequence that Henry's daughter with Catherine, princess Mary (b. Feb. 1516 CE), was declared illegitimate and so disinherited. Henry was excommunicated by the Pope for his momentous actions, but this was only the beginning.

The Act of Supremacy of 28 November 1534 CE formally made the English king head of the Church of England which meant that Henry, and all subsequent English monarchs, only had one higher authority: God himself. The next scene in this momentous drama came in 1536 CE when Henry presented Parliament with a bill to abolish all monasteries in his kingdom, the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The bill was passed and the estates of the monasteries began to be redistributed to the Crown and Henry's supporters. The abbots of Glastonbury, Colchester, Reading, and Woburn were all hanged. And so began the English Reformation which would see Catholicism give way to Protestantism in England. Finally, Cromwell introduced The Injunctions in August 1536 CE, a set of recommendations on what exactly the clergy should be teaching their congregations such as explaining better the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins.

Continue reading...

[darkspellmaster]

I wanna know your family headcanons for most/some of the guys beyond the vague confirmations of who's got one parent/both.

Like, names of those confirmed with siblings their names/personalities, maybe something on what you think is up with Vil's mom/Deuce's dad?

Okay gonna go by Houses to make it easier for me. *Spoilers head for a few characters in future books*

Any names that are not from the games are my own creation. A vast majority of the characters I haven't named yet. Those who have names are going to be featured in Season 1, ones without names will probably get them in the future. (Some names may change)

Heartslabyul

Riddle

Parents are separated, or living apart for the most part, it's one of the reasons his mother gets away with a lot of stuff with her son. Father travels a lot and visits his family (namely his sister and his parents) who live in the northern part of the country. Mother's family is from the capital and comes from old money, father is not that well off, but known for being well versed in medical healing and also normal medicine.

He has an Aunt on his father's side that is a Vet that lives to the north, and she has two kids, not sure about her own husband or wife.

No siblings as of this time. That's about all for Riddle that I know.

Trey

From Cannon, his parents run a bakery, and he has several siblings, I think with him he has seven, Trey being the oldest. Three girls, and with him four boys. I figured they might be a cat family, or a rabbit family as far as pets go. Maybe a duck. Not sure yet.

He has both sets of grandparents who live not to far from the family home. Both of his parents have siblings. Dad has two brothers and a sister. One brother is married, the other is not, the sister is married too. Married siblings have at least two kids each, brother has four, sister has two. Mom has three brother and two sisters. The sisters are married one brother is engaged, the other one is dating still and one is divorced but is dating a person who has kids.

Cater

As we know he has a Mom and Dad, and two older sisters. Both are in college, they're roughly a year or so apart in age. One wants to be a dress designer, the other is into making her own jewelry. They adore their brother, but don't quite get him. They kind of wanted another sister, and tried to make him into a girly boy without realizing how that is affecting him.

Mom is a photographer, and she, like her son loves to use social media. More professional and tends to take landscapes and non people images, like sweets and other such things. She also knows how to edit videos. Works for essentially Getty photos in that world. His dad works in a Bank, he's a higher manager and is extremely math oriented and very organized. Also very sociable when he wants to. His hobby is kite making.

Cater's parents have kinda spoiled him from time to time, because of all the moving. They don't know about his issues all that much because he hides it. He has his own convertible red car that he can drive at home, it's an older model, but he likes it a lot. His mom gave him a go-pro to film his skateboarding which she actually uploads for him on Magitube, it's small but it's her way of supporting him.

Mom has a twin brother who lives out of the country. Not sure where, he's apparently a long time traveler and doesn't communicate much with the family outside of postcards, infrequent calls and suddenly showing up. Dad has two sister's (younger one is named Mary) and a step brother. Not sure about one of the sisters other than she's a lawyer with kids and is frequently at functions that the family needs to attend. She's always busy so Cater's family over the summer has to watch her two daughters, who are more of a handful than Cater's sisters. His other Aunt, Mary, is a hippy/beatnik type person. She's very sweet but absent minded, which is nice for Cater because she's very chill and lets him get away with shit. She lives in the Shaftlands not too far from the Fairest City. His Uncle is a broker, and likes to boat a lot, maybe queer, unsure.

They have a pet parrot from his Mom.

Ace

Ace's Mom is the mage, she's a teacher at a local elementary school. His dad used to be a stage magician, and now created props and other things for the local theater in his hometown, as a small time business owner. His dad doesn't have magic, but is an avid reader of Mage Histories. Basically his brother complies to Cannon.

Ace's older brother is seven years older. According to Ace, his bro more excited about Ace getting into NRC than Ace's parents were. He's an alumnis and previously in Heartslabyul. Ace talks with his brother over the phone until the wee hours, on occasion, which can make him over sleep thus being late to class. Ace's older brother built up a whole repertoire of magic tricks from his days as a student. Ace learned them by watching, playing, memorizing and replicating, since his brother refused to tell him how to do it. It's through these experiences that Ace has become quite adaptable.

Both learned slight of Hand tricks from their Dad. When ever the three of them are together they challenge each other to pull off various magic tricks. Ace said that his older brother told him, "The most convincing lies are sprinkled with a dash of truth." this implies that Ace learned to lie thanks to his brother or at least was inspired by him. Ace's brother bought an expensive watch with his first paycheck, he framed it as if it was Ace's birthday gift but gave him an empty box instead. He later apologized, and gave Ace candy, which annoyed Ace. Ace's brother purposely snuffed out the birthday candles on Ace's cake, resulting in a fight between the two. We can tell that Ace's brother is a prankster. Ace's brother did his internship at a theme park management company designing shows and attractions.

He currently works for that same company. There's a picture of Ace's brother in the hallway by the teacher's lounge, it's when his brother led the card parade for the Interschool Spelldrive tournament. Ace says his brother is not the type to make sweets for him. Ace's brother wasn't interested in dorm life. He also told Ace about ways to kill time at the dorm. Ace describes his brother as light hearted, casual and easy to get along with. Ace also admits it's advantageous to have a brother since they a role model to follow, as well as refences his school life and job hunting as examples.

They have a pet dog named Rascal, he's a mutt and likes belly rubs.

Deuce

Mom, Dylla delivery driver. She met his dad in High school and the two hit it off well. Her father was a contractor, and her mother worked at a animal shelter, not sure if she was a SAHM, or had another job. Family loved to garden though.

Deuce's father passed away when he was about five years old. His family is wealthy, but he was the rebel of the three kids and the youngest. His parents wanted him to continue in the family business, accounting since the older siblings passed on the title, and he refused, wanting to become a mechanic and work on cars and motorcycles. After he met Dylla in school and the two hit it off as both enjoyed similar music, they started to date, and when he proposed to her in senior year, his parents threw a fit, and cut him off.

Deuce has not met his paternal grandparents, he has one Aunt and one uncle that he's yet to meet. His Aunt is an artist, and his uncle works in the offices at an animation studio in Fairest City. Both of them would like to meet Deuce at some point, but they don't know how to properly contact since their brother kind of cut them all off after his parents disowned him.

Grandpa passed when Deuce was 11, so it's been him, his mom and grandma. They have no pets but they did have a rabbit that eventually passed on after 15 years. Haven't had a pet since. Grandma likes to do jigsaw puzzles with him, and they play board games together. Deuce learned to crochet from her.

In my story the leather jacket he wears is his later fathers.

Savanaclaw

Leona

Has one older brother Falena, who is the regent right now. When they were younger they were super close and Leona would follow him around like a puppy. Falena still loves his brother to bits, and isn't sure how to help him as Leona pulled away from him. His wife is Shani, the two have known one another since childhood. Her father is one of the members of the parliament. Where as Falena is very soft, open and welcoming (Mufasa meet Alexis Leon Midford) she can be strict and some what serious most of the time, keeping her husband and son in check from causing trouble (Think Francis Midford meets Sarabi). She's known for being very dignified, but she has a soft spot for Leona and has been trying to get the brothers together again.

Of course everyone knows Cheka, he's covered.

Other family include, His mother Kito is the more serious one of the two parents. She is helping Falana run the country while her husband is ill. She is the one who disciplined the brothers when they were younger, she also was once the bodyguard to their father. That's how they met. She likes puns as jokes, and has a dry wit. She plays music, and is very good with bead work, but sucks at cooking, much like Lilia. His father is Nyata. Kind and wise, known for his compassion and willingness to be diplomatic over destructive. Highly loves the natural beauty of the country. Loves Chess and taught both Leona and Falena how to play. Knows how to carve and whittle, and made Leona the chess board and set he has on his desk. He was very robust, and muscular before he grew ill, it's a genetic disease, but he's still kicking and doing his best to help his sons. He wants both Falena and Leona to make up. Loves them equally. (Kind of twisted from King Richard from Robinhood)

Leona looks like his mother, while Falena looks like his dad.

As for other family members. Zawadi is Cheka's best friend and cousin via Kito's family though her second sister. Kito has three sisters, unknown status right now about them other than Leona has mentioned his crazy Aunts to Ruggie before.

Bahati is his former governor and is now Cheka's though he sees Leona as his own son. Bahati has a brother Omari who is a lawyer as seen in Book 3.

Clarus Martelli is Cheka's guardian/bodyguard, is not a mage, and distantly related to Leona through his Sister-in-law, via her mother since her mom, Imara is his Mother and Father's bodyguard. Clarus is a no nonsense person when it comes to guarding Cheka but she and Leona have been friends since they were little, and up until he pulled away from her friendship. She's like Edward in some ways, can be strict but also very kind, and competitive. Also they share a unique dynamic, and Cheka keeps trying to play match maker, he tells Clarus all the time he wants her to marry his Unca Leona, to which she says, when he gets the thorn pulled out of his behind, maybe. Cheka keeps trying to find that thorn on Leona. She is 20 like Leona. (She's slightly twisted from Pretty scar from Tokyo Disney Sea and a bit of Kovu)

Imara is not a fan of Leona, and is more like a kinder version of Zera. She is very strict, very serious, doesn't seem to laugh at all. Cares deeply for her children to sometimes a worrisome degree. She's extremely protective of Kito and Nyata as they saved her live after she fell into a depression when her husband up and vanished after the birth of her youngest daughter.

Jabari is the oldest child of Imara, at 25. Not a mage like his mother. He is very different than Nuka whom he's twisted from. He's a very chill and loving guy. He became a kindergarten teacher rather than follow his mother into becoming a guard. He's a pacifist, by choice and a Pescatarian, and enjoys growing herbs and spices in his garden. he does know how to fight but prefers words over fists. Likes to do thing honorably, and always tries to let others go before him. He loves hand crafted crap, and is the sort that will buy the dumbest souvenir that he can. Also tends to collect anime figures, and enjoys singing on a ukulele. He's very tall and lanky for a lion, and always seems to be in a meditative mood. "Leona...my man, just Zen, reach inside and pull out that inner child. Enjoy the macaroni and glitter. It'll make you smile, and when you smile, the world will smile back. See...the sun's smiling now."

Asami is the youngest child of Imara at 15. She just started the mage school in Sunshine city, getting it from her father. She looks the most like her dad, and she hates it. Sweet but rebellious, very much your typical teenage goth in some ways. She prefers lots of black, likes metal and is part of a rock group called the Sheer Cons (Ha ha ha). She and her siblings get along very well, except for the clothing and make-up which her and Clarus butt heads over, as she wants to be a guard, but also doesn't want to be uniform. Has a crush on Leona, and makes it fucking clear in that she's interested in him. Very competitive, and likes to play sports. Loves soccer/football, does spelldrive, and intends on beating Leona one day with the express intention that if she does, he's gotta marry her. She's been saying this since age 5.

Clarus's father has a relation to the royal family distantly, but has not been seen in fifteen years. He was sweet talker and went to jail for a few crimes. It's rumored he may have been the one to point out where the princes were for the attempted kidnapping. (He's twisted from King John)

Ruggie

Lives with his grandma in the slums outside of Sunshine City. His mother died when she gave birth to him. She was very sweet and was very excited to be a mom. Never finished college as she married his father after she found out she was going to have a kid. Ruggie has he picture in his room, when she was in High school. She, like her father, was a mage. She wanted to be a doctor with magic. She met Ruggie's dad in college, both dropped out.

Ruggie's father, non mage, tried to raise him but left during Ruggie's third birthday, leaving him with his grandma. Grandma calls him a deadbeat and couldn't hold down a job. We don't know where he is at this time. He has a brother who does keep in contact with Grandma, but the family is distant due to the situation with Ruggie's dad. They seem to dislike him as well. They also come from the Slum area, though they're a bit more well off.

Grandma is known for playing bingo, and making donuts, and knitting. Strong woman who raised her daughter on her own after her husband tragically passed away in an accident. She worked two jobs, one as a secretary for her husband's bakery which was owned by his older brother and one as a night janitor. She recently retired and does part time work at the local library. Warm and kind but no nonsense. She's very much a protector of her grandson, who looks a lot like her daughter down to the droopy eyes. Ruggie, like her daughter is very smart and cunning. Always sends him care packages, and was very proud of him getting into Night Raven.

Jack

Don't have much on Jack's parents yet. I know that his mom and dad are mages, and I know that they are soulmates as he puts it. His mom is a white wolf, and his dad is gray. They do a lot of outdoors stuff as a family, I think his father writes books, but I'm not sure if it's textbooks or fiction, but it has to do with outdoor things. They did meet in college, and I think his mom edits the books for his father and does maybe the page layouts for him.

Jack has a younger brother who is not a mage, and is in middle school, so about 11-12 in age, while his sister is 6 going on 7, or somewhere around there. His brother can be a handful at times, as he can play jokes on Jack, though it's more of a kids teasing thing. He's good at outdoor stuff too, though not sure what he specializes in. He likes to draw though a lot and paint. His sister likes Vil a lot and has a kiddy crush on him. His brother can get moody about not being a mage. But they love him dearly and look up to him and Vil as big brothers. She's very energetic and tomboyish. She tends to get into more trouble than he older brothers, and likes to swim a lot and does dancing for fun. She also likes to rearrange her room and has said she wanted to be an interior designer at one point. She and Jack's brother likes to watch DIY shows for fun when they're being lazy.

No pets as far as I'm aware.

Octavinelle

Azul

We know his mom runs and owns a restaurant and his step dad is an attorney. His biological mom and dad are divorced. He has a very good relationship with his mom and his Stepdad. His stepdad got him a book to help him collect coins and encouraged him to do so as a hobby. His mom is very active in the community and likes to help out a lot when it comes to supplying food for events.

(He might be getting a sibling in the future since Ursula had one in the sequel movie and Najima is based on Jafar's sister from the game, so...yeah I'm holding off on this aspect right now. )

He hasn't seen his bio dad in a long time and he's not interested in getting to know him again. All he remembers is that he made his mom cry, and he's an octopus too. He may have been a chef. There used to be a picture up on his mom's wall that she took a marker too before she put it away of them.

He does have his mom's parents around, but his material grandparents live in a different town than him and it's harder for them to travel as they had their daughter late in life.

Jade and Floyd

Father is a mobster who seems to work with some shady people, he helps to run a company but I don't know what type yet. Their dad has the personality of Lau in a lot of ways, and comes off as loyal but also shady as hell at times. He shares the black hair of the twins, and the last name. Unknown if he's got siblings or not, or if he's an only child, and where he came from. He's very quiet about his past, even to his family.

Their mother looks like them, and is a very cunning woman from a family that has mob connections. However she runs her own business legally and has no ties to what her husband does, and keeps it that way. Should her husband go to jail, she will happily protect her sons first over saving his sorry ass for getting caught. She is a investor of sorts, and runs a business to help with stocks under the sea. She's very much a mama bear type, but will knock sense into her sons should they cross the line.

As of now I don't know if they have any siblings. Their mom has sisters and brothers, but I don't know how many or how many cousins they have. They do have a large extended family though.

Scarabia

Kalim

Kalim's father was not the oldest son, in fact he took over after his two older brothers were killed by rival family members who wanted the family company. He is not a mage, and met his wife on a boat tour, as she was visiting family in the Silk city. Kalim's dad is a very hospitable man who can be a bit naïve in how he does things. He's been best friends with Jamil's dad since they were little. Always smiling, he comes off as friendly and very bubbly like his son. Though he's constantly worried for Kalim, and is a shewed business man, he is also someone who follows the rules to a T, and this can sometimes end up hurting Kalim and his siblings. Regarding Kalim's grandfather and Grandmother on his dad's side, both have since passed but he has a unknown number of siblings, some of whom are from his father's second, third, and fourth marriages. Not at the same time! Kalim has mentioned to Cater that his grandfather had a bad habit of leaving his other wives after his grandmother passed because he wanted more sons and they gave him daughters. Kamil has said if he was a girl, he still would have been given the slot for leading as his father feels that anyone can do a good job leading the company.

Kalim's mother is very sweet, but she has her own negative aspects. Kalim is the only one who is a mage like her of her biological and adopted children. Yes all 30 are not hers, and no her husband doesn't have a harem. She is very close to Kalim, and trained him before he went to Night Raven College. She would have preferred him going to her old school in the Scalding Sands, but he wanted to go where Jamil was. She also has a weird thing about his hair, as it once was as dark as hers, but now is white due to the poisons that he has dealt with. She used to say his hair was lovely, but now when she looks at it it only causes her to be sad, so she tried to hide that when she compliments him. His hair is never brought up. He has one Aunt on his mother's side that he knows of.

Of his 30 siblings, seven are biological, the rest are all adopted via his father and mother wanting to have a huge family. We know of his younger brother who is also studying to become a advisor to Kalim, and is far more business savvy than Kalim. All the sibling love one another and they call one another by nicknames since Kalim can't always recall their real names.

He is also the direct cousin of the Prince that is the ruler of the Scalding Sands. Who has a beef with Jamil as he doesn't trust him with Kalim and is very protective of his cousin. Not sure of his age, yet. The Prince's cousin is also at Night Raven as a fourth year who is right now on his internship until spring semester. He doesn't like Kalim at all and was upset that his elder cousin gave the Housewarden position to Kalim.

Kalim's elder cousin was previously at Night Raven college, related to his mother, and was the previous Housewarden. He is now working somewhere in the Scalding sands but writes Kalim every few weeks to see how things are going.

Jamil

Jamil's father has been a friend of Mr. Al Asim since they were kids. Jamil's grandfather and down the line, has been an advisor/butler to the Al Asim family since an incident where the Al Asim patriarch saved him and they have a kinda life debt owed to the Al Asim. So the family has since worked as the Advisor/Vizor/Butler for god knows how long. Jamil's father is very strict and dedicated to Mr. Al Asim who he respects and sees as dear friend. He doesn't want to lose his post because that would mean a loss of high status and station which he prides himself in. Jamil's grandfather was more strict on his Jamil's dad, and pretty much beat (not literally) into Jamil's father the sense of tradition and how a Advisor/Butler should act and gain the favor of the Master of the house.

Jamil's mom is a kind woman but also someone, who, like her husband is staunch on traditions and status seeking. Jamil looks a lot like her, and took to braiding his hair due to his Aunt, mother's sister, doing it for him when he was younger, before she left. His mom is very much a person who cares for her son but like her husband sees her kids as a bit of a means to an end in some cases. Think Mommy influencer type in some ways.

Jamil has at least one Aunt who travels around, and she was very kind to him and Najima when she lived with them as a teenager/twenty something year old.

Najima, is his sister, and she looks very much like His father.

Pomefiore

Vil

Vil's Father Eric Venue gets along wonderfully with his son. He started out as a bit player in theater, graduating into soap operas in his late teens, eventually becoming seen as a leading man. He eventually left the show to become an actor on a popular prime time tv series as part of a team of Robin hood like characters that would take back from greedy people. It was While on this show he met Vil's mother, who was a up and coming starlet, she was one of the main characters on the show. The two hit it off and dated for the majority of the shows run, Eric leaving after several seasons to star in smaller movies, and then moving up the chain. He and Vil's mom married, but the marriage wasn't a happy one, and after they had Vil she ended up realizing that she wasn't cut out for motherhood. Eric and her separated, and she gave him sole custody of their son. The two moved to a smaller apartment, as his ex wife wanted to keep the larger one. Eric is a kind father with a wry sense of humor much like his son. Vil has learned a lot from his dad, and gained his smile, and laugh, along with aspects of his eyes. He later started in a famous Video game movie, as he also enjoys video gaming when he was younger, though he hasn't had time to play console games, he does like on the go games to play with on down time (think 3DS, or Switch light or mobile games). He reads a lot and is a producer, does script writing, directs plays and has directed TV series as well, he also runs a smaller talent agency, and still acts in plays, movies and tv series. He recently ventured into Voice acting and also teaches as a Professor at the local University in Fairest City in the Theater and Speech department.

Vil's biological Mother, is an unknown person to him as he wants no contact with her. She's a well known actress who looks a lot like her son. Vil inherited his sharp features, violet colored eyes, and blonde hair from her. She is considered one of the most beautiful actresses in the movie industry. When she first met Eric she figured she could use him to prop herself up and the two grew as actors, until Eric began to outpace her in getting Movie Roles. After they married she started to grow jealous of his assent in acting and the push he got in the show they were both starting in. Eventually the show was cancelled and she went on to make several independent films. On the outset they looked great, but internally she was seething that Eric was doing better than she was. Upon learning she was with Vil, Vil's mom was thrilled at first, but then found out that it would be harder for her to be offered parts where she was seen as the sexy lead. Having a baby was hard on her, and she eventually came to the realization that she wasn't in love with Eric, and didn't want to have a child with him. After a year of taking care of Vil, she abandoned both of them, with the intent of restarting her career, free of a husband and a son. She has been watching Vil from Afar for years, and more recently, with his Social media influence, and fame, she's considered making contact. She's remarried in recent years to an older actor who already had grown kids. She wanted to reconnect for a documentary she's doing on her life.

Vil's stepmother is Vanessa Lee Schoenheit. Vanessa and Vil have a very strong relationship, and have had one since they first met when Vil was about 3 going on 4 years old. Vanessa has an interesting past, one that Vil respects highly for her being "true" to herself and her feelings about her music. When Vanessa was a teenager she and her brother started a band HALYX, which they gathered friends to help fill out the band. Vanessa was the lead singer, along with her brother and one of her best friends being back up vocals. The band did well enough that when they continued it into College, where they met an Agent who offered them a chance to become produced by a record label. The group took the chance, and they recorded and did what he said. The Agent ran away with their demo and money, leaving the group in debt. Vanessa, not wanting her friends or family to have to deal with the situation took on the full debt herself as she was the lead, and spent years paying back every debt that the band got stuck with. After the situation with the Agent, the bad split up. Vanessa finished college and became an lead event manager and coordinator. (Basically part of the team that handles the Met Gala or Film Festivals.) During one of the events that she was coordinating for a Charity, Eric happened to notice Vanessa and had his friend, who was his date for the night, play wing man to get a chance to ask her out for coffee. After several friendly meetups, the two started to date, and Eric slowly introduced Vanessa to Vil. It was love at first sight for her to the little boy, the two got along well, and after three years of dating, Vanessa married Eric in a private ceremony. She still works as an event coordinator and Vil considers her his mother. She is his biggest supporter and fan, ready to always help him out and comfort him when trouble arose. She was also his earliest singing coach and taught him to play a piano, even though he doesn't keep at it. She was trained until college in dance, so also taught him dancing, and the two hang out doing shopping and make up as well. Vanessa and Eric have tried to have a child, but have been unsuccessful over the years and are happy with just Vil as their one and only. She's a natural blonde, but used to dye her hair black.

Vanessa's brother is Vil's Uncle, and works as a lawyer and Professor. He and Vil are close and his family visits during the summer and holidays. Vil's cousins are very excitable at times, but he deals with them rather well. They always want "Cousin Vil" to praise them. He is married to his partner, and the kids are from his partner's first marriage.

Both Vanessa and Eric's parents are still alive. Vil's grandparents do not live in the same town as they do, and he doesn't get to see them very frequently due to his and his parents work schedules. They do come down for holidays and send him cards and other gifts for his birthday.

Rook

I don't have a lot on this one because of how limited the information on Rook is...But...

Rook's family is pretty much the equal of the Phantomhive Watchdog family in Twisted Wonderland. While not reporting directly to a specific ruler, they work for a international group, ala Interpol, who deal with Blotings and other matters that the world doesn't want causing a new war.

His father is a gentleman, serious and firm but kind. He wants his children to be able to fend for themselves, and unfortunately he's kind of caused Rook's emotional state to be stunted for a while. He does care about his son, it's just that he wants Rook to be a person that is able to deal with the serious implications of taking a life.

Rook's mother is a softer person. Still strong and brave, and like her husband dedicated to their work. However she is more involved emotionally with their kids. She isn't always approving of her husband's methods. (She's twisted from Helga from Atlantis)

Rook's older siblings are very proud of their brother, but I'm not sure they share his sense of beauty, but they support him and his efforts to better and enrich himself. His younger siblings, thanks to Rook, are being more emotional and he managed to get his father to agree to do a different test for them rather than send them out into the jungle.

Epel

We've met Epel's grandmother, so...Not much to add on that front.

Peepaw is a very kind soul and a strong person. He was very good looking when he was younger but is now shorter and older looking. He is a happy old timer with a strong work ethic that he instilled into his grandson and tries to teach him about the land and farming. He also likes to brag about Epel's carving skills, and show them off to his friends.

Epel's dad is a kind father who finds it amazing that his son looks so much like his mother in law. He met his wife when he was working as an hired summer hand on the farm. He eventually married her after a while of courting, and the two had Epel. His family knows Epel's mom's family and has for years since the two families live in Harveston. His father's family runs a small gift shop in town, they moved to Harveston when Epel's Dad was a kid.

Epel's Mom is Meemaw and Peepaw's second youngest daughter. She always wanted to be a witch like her mother but wasn't. As one of the main business operators to the farm, she and her siblings help keep the farm running and are always looking for a new way to help keep the business afloat. She looks like her father and is a very cute type of person with a strong work ethic and ambitions. (Based on a twisted form of Slue-Foot Sue) Epel get's his hair and eyes from her and her mother, though she looks more like her father. She was thrilled when Epel found out he had magic and wanted him to go to school for it.

Cousins, Aunts and Uncles, I don't have much on them, other than Several of his family are much like Epel. Only one of his cousins is not like the rest of the family, and she lives in the Capital of the Shaftlands, working in the hospitality industry. She's the daughter of His Grandparent's eldest daughter. His youngest cousin, a boy, does horse riding for fun.

Ignihyde

Idia and Ortho

We've met the shrouds, so all I can say is the following.

We know a bit about Grandma Shroud, so not touching that.

Papa Shroud in my mind looks a lot like Vincent, but has a grown up OCiel's personality. He's shy and mindful of others, but also can be firm when he needs to be and is very gentle with his sons. He also liked to read to them stories of adventure and started their toy collection to ensure that Idia and Ortho had joy in their lives even though they couldn't go outside. Idia and Ortho inherited their father's eye color and flaming hair. Idia got his father's eye shape, while the rest of his features are based on his mother. The two met while at work, when Idia's dad brought over coffee and teas to the tech department, and Idia's mom fell head over heels for the shy boy. She actually perused him and while it took a while, eventually she proposed to Papa shroud and he said yes. He's always worried about Idia's future, and wishes that his son didn't have to continue the family tradition.

Mama Shroud is the bubbly one. She comes from outside of STYX and started to work there after her time in her magic Academy in the Kingdom of Heroes. In my mind she looks a lot like Rachel Phantomhive, but personality wise she's a mix of her and a grown up Elizabeth Midford. She's outspoken and everything excites her. She can be strict, but is a loving mother who would do anything for her children. Prior to Ortho's accident, she and her husband did try several times to persuade the Olympus organization to allow the boys time outside of the STYX facility but it fell on deaf ears. While her husband has flaming blue hair, her hair is a red/pink color, which she likes to keep in pigtails or ponytails and she has him braid it at night. When they first met Mama Shroud knew that she wanted to be with Papa because of how kind his eyes were and she wanted to make him smile. They became friends and she fell for him hard, leading to her pursuing him, much to his shock and shyness. Eventually she asked him to marry and he said yes. She loves building models with her sons, and is proud of both of their accomplishments and hopes to see both graduate and do what they want in life.

Diasomnia

Not touching too much on family for various characters as we have a lot on that now.

Malleus

We know about his mother and somewhat about his grandmother.

Levan, or Raverene, Malleus's dad we already know a lot about personally, I'm only going to add that he was a blue color due to the shading in Malleus's hair, and that Malleus has his father's deep and polite voice. (For myself I'm twisting him from the Reluctant Dragon who is very much a model for Levan's personality). I don't know enough about him other than I think he was close with Lilia too.

Malleus's Grandfather, I see as a noble knight who courted the then Princess Maleficia, and they had their daughter. I feel like he may have been an older fae and passed on before his daughter was of full age. Malenore (Maleanore -where the hell are they getting these spellings from?) has her father's sharper angled face, and his sense of rebelliousness that he gave her.

I have a very strong suspicion that Maleficia grew up a lot like Queen Victoria where her life was pretty much monitored and she was very lonely from the get go, only getting freedom when she became Queen. Her husband I see more as Albert, who grew up as a normal noble and was very shy but also kind and gentle as a person. Both parents loved their kids, but Malenore's dad was more the giver of hugs while her mother wasn't good with kids.

I think that Malleus has distant cousins but not sure about them.

Lilia

So what I know so far is that Lilia's parents were weavers. At some point earlier in his life his parents passed away. He did seem to have an elder brother as a sibling, but he too pass during some event that had him and several other members of Lilia's village venture out past the mountain range of the Black Scale Castle.

While the Queen and King were passing through his village, Lilia, was spotted by the King and Queen. The former liked his energy and took him in to raise him in the castle. Maleficia loved him but didn't know how to raise him, he had a better relationship with her husband, who trained him in swords and got him to want to become part of the royal guard.

Arawnwye (Pronouced Ah Ron Wee), known as the Witch of the Forest, her blood line goes back to the days of King Taran and Queen Eilonwy, who were once one of the rulers of Briar valley before the rise of Briar Rose and Philips line and then the Draconian family. Ages ago one of her ancestors helped to defeat a mage who was a monster, and in doing so, the family was cursed to have a long life, where it was hard to have kids. She was the one stuck with the curse to have no kids. As a strong mage she helped out the humans and had a good relationship with the fae, and her skills were whispered about around Twisted Wonderland. (Think third most powerful mage in the world at the time.) She met Lilia after he was wounded in a battle and he ended up in her garden where she asked him if he was trying to water her flowers with his blood. She became his first human friend, and helped him over time. The house he eventually took Silver too was hers. The two became close, eventually becoming a couple, which was hidden for reasons, only Malleus's dad and mother knew about the relationship and were sworn to secrecy. The others that eventually knew of them were his two friends, Baul and Finnius (Ptitsa's father). She and Lilia had pet nicknames. She died before Malleus was able to be born, and five years after Melenore passed in her battle. (I can't say more due to not wanting it to spoil too much).

Silver

We know about his family, so I don't think we need to go over this too much.

Sebek

Mother is the daughter of Baul, and she is very much like her father. She helps her husband in his dental practice, and watched over Silver from time to time for Lilia when she wasn't working.

Sebek's father lived on the Coastal Cities. He became a dentist to help others, and followed in his grandmother's footsteps. He has an Uncle that lives in the Queendom of Roses.

I kind of see him and his wife as Milo and Kida from Atlantis.

Sebek's brother is a zoologist and is trying to work on the conservation of Briar Valley's flora and fauna. He is a happy go lucky person like his father, and looks like his mother, much like Sebek. His sister is local studying to be a linguist and teach others Nocturnal and Demiural fae languages. She has her mother's eyes, but her father's brown hair and features. She adores her grandfather and loves to fish and cook. She and her brother consider Lilia their great uncle, and call him uncle Lilia all the damn time.

STAFF

Crowley

Nothing as of right now.

Divus Crewel

Parents are from the Queendom. His mother is a fashion designer, who uses magic to do her work. He inherited his magic from her. His father is actually a toy maker who has his own shop and line of toys in the Queendom and they're very popular. His mother is very kind but comes off as aloof like her son. His father is warm and jovial, and has bright blue eyes. Divus inherited his looks from his mother.

He has an older brother Andre, who, while a mage, isn't as strong as Divus. When they were younger they got along well, then Andre changed and the two drifted as the older brother started to work as an Accountant and began to see magic as not such an impressive thing, and seems to be jealous of Divus for an unknown reason to him.

Sabine is Divus's younger sister who works with his father making toys. She enjoys fashion and is very much the sort that loves to annoy her brother Andre with tricks, but also adores Divus. She has no magic so she went to fashion school to be a designer, but it didn't work out and she started a fashion doll line for her father's shop which does well.

Ptitsa Zhar

His mother is a mage bird beastman from Sunset Savanna, and his father is the main archivist lord Finnius, formally a member of the Royal guard. His mother is where they get their last name, and is stern but kind. (Think Francis from Black Butler) while his father is as bubbly as all get out and is always trying to be kind. He's an owl nocturnal fae (though there maybe some Day fae in his family line).

Ptitsa has a younger sister who's signature is the opposite of his and can make things grow. She looks more like their father, and is twisted from the nature sprite from the Firebird short from Fantasia. She and Sabine are friends, and like to tease their older brothers.

Ptitsa looks like his mother but has his father's sharp and large eyes, with his mother's color. His sister is short and looks like their father, but with her mother's eye shape.

Mozus Trein

We learned about his family in the Masquerade event so nothing new here yet.

Sam

His grandmother is known as the Queen of the Bayou.

Maika McNamara

Half Mermaid half Human, his mother is a cousin of Prince Rielle, and part of the royal family. His father was a fisherman.

He is married to Klara who is a therapist/psychologist, and they have two kids. Clarabelle who is the youngest and Horace who is the oldest.

And that's what I have. XD

[sundaramasamyr]

virginia family law attorneys

[rogueemmy]

I know many of you are having a real "what happens now", post-election panic. There's a lot of fear-mongering happening right now too. I know when my anxiety spikes, action can often be a good deterrent, and so I'll offer you the actions I, and my friends, have taken.

Order copies of all your documents. Birth certificates, social security cards, passport (if you have one), marriage license, divorce papers, all the paperwork that tells others that you exist. I got three copies - one for me, one for my partner, and then our master copy.

Get a real ID at minimum, a North American travel card, or a passport. No, really. First of all, you have just ordered all the documents for a real ID, you may as well use them! In many states that upgrade to your license is under $10 for a duplicate, in some places it is free. The travel card is cheeper than the passport, gets you on a plane and through both northern and southern borders, and again, you have all the documents! The passport gives you more travel options. It is also a great document to have handy if you are applying for new jobs, may as well get one if your budget and circumstance allow.

Document your decision makers - in most cases, parents or a spouse makes financial and medical decisions if you can not. This is generally a given. But, if you have concerns about court decisions being overturned, it hurts nothing, and costs very little, to draw up the paperwork for a medical power of attorney. Document, by name, who you want making those decisions.

Get a will - now, this sounds extreme, but frankly, every adult should have one. If you have pets, children, shared property - you need a will! Even married people need a will, in the best of times. There are will-in-a-box lawyers everywhere, your workplace may offer legal insurance that includes a will, there are even online versions, though I would prefer you do that with an attorney to ensure the fullest force. Then, if your worst fears are realized, you still have that legal document to back up your desires.

Keep cash on hand - I have a friend who is better off than I am, financially. He is planning to keep both Mexican and Canadian currency in case he needs to hop the border. Some choose gold or silver, some go with jewelry. This is more radical - personally, I just like to have enough cash on hand for a nice dinner or a tank of gas. Not always financially possible, but a goal I work towards.

Ensure you have a 72-hour kit. FEMA recommends everyone have one for disaster anyway, floods, tornadoes, hurricane, or just a heavy winter storm. A minimum of 3 days of shelf-stable food, water, and clothing. If possible, increase that supply to a week. because in a disaster, that's how long you may need to be self sufficient. And if you need it for other reasons, it's there, you have it, and can rest a bit easier.

Someone I saw today suggested a garden, yes, even a winter garden. You can grow herbs and lettuce indoors, if necessary. In some southern climates, a cold frame may be all that's needed. But make plans for some summer plants. Even in an apartment, a pot full of tomatoes and peppers and perhaps even a zucchini can greatly increase your food options if prices skyrocket. (I mean more than they already have.) Be creative, check with your neighbors or even online (carefully) for some ideas to make it work!

If you have a lawyer, a financial advisor, or other professional, they can help you with what you need to protect the partner in your life. If not, start with the above list. It gives you something to work at to still your current anxiety, makes you a more fully functioning adult, and those steps are all recommended anyway - no wasted effort. Simply consolidating things you should already be doing.

Please friends, do not panic. I've been on this planet a few decades now, and I can tell you that my worst fears have never come true. Do take action to quell your own concerns - the above list may not be for you, but there are likely very reasonable things you can do to address your own concerns. In the end, things are likely going to work out. I saw a post today that reminded everyone that there were people who lived very decent lives as the Roman Empire was collapsing.

[the-martyrfication-of-the-matron]

I am going to give you my fandom opinions from a fandom you are not a part of cause you always seem down for just random knowledge.

So I grew up watching Criminal Minds, my mom loved the show and I do to but much like you with 911 I am also a "vaguely interacts with fandom but kind of just watches it due to its weird toxicity but still has OPINIONS". Anyway, there are 2 characters on the show that get so much unessesary hate.

One of the characters is Haley Hotcher, who was the wife of one of the main characters, Aaron "Hotch" Hotchner, and eventually becomes his ex-wife, AND SHE IS HATED SO MUCH. For the record, the reason why she left is completely reasonable, she and Aaron had a child, and he CONSTANTLY put work above his family. She signed up to be married to a lawyer and while she did support him joining the FBI she didn't know that it meant he would never be home and when they had their son, he was still never there.

Now, there is a single scene where it can be inferred that she cheated, with a stretch. The house phone gets a call, and Hotch picks up, but it immediately hangs up and calls Haley. A lot of people took it as cheating, but it was most likely a divorce lawyer because either in the same episode or the following, Hotch is served with divorce papers. But since in can be inferred, she cheated, and that neglectful father #1 is fan favorite, she is now a horrible character. (Even though after divorce, she is then put into witness protection and then MURDERED!)

Character #2 that I find unreasonably hated is Will, the husband of one of the characters but his is much more interesting cause it is a fandom trend flipped. You know how everytime there is a female love interest for a character that is in a gay ship that female character IS SUDDENLY EVIL AND BELONGS IN THE DIRT? It is that trope but flipped! He gets in the way of a popular lesbian ship even though he is such a good dude! Genuinely just a nice man, but now he is evil!

Another part of his hatred actually comes from a problem that is very prominent in America, the hatred of characters with southern accents if the don't fall into "cowboy". The character Will has a Cajun accent (that isn't quite right, but still pretty accurate) and he is hated so much for it. There is a large history of like, can't describe it other than accent ablism, in America so like Northern American fans of the character JUST HATE HIM and it is so weird.

But yeah! Here is some fandom drama that has nothing to do with youuuuuu!

My mum actually had criminal minds as one of her ‘watch this shit on loooooop’ shows, and I watched a little bit with her. And I have a friend who’s a big fan too. So I’m on the outskirts haha.

But yeah, the cons of Big Fandom is that ex-wives? Fucking trash. Ship-cockblockers? Clearly the worst.

If a character, in any way, interrupts what the Fans Want, they’re evil and need to be destroyed. And god forbid they’re a woman, or gay, or a racial minority, or disabled, or even slightly on the fringes of being any of these things. If someone can negatively stereotype them; then they WILL

Even 9-1-1 fans, who pride themselves on being woke, do this a lot. And it’s such a shame to not be able to enjoy things because hoes can’t be normal

[mithliya]

Here is a critique: Argue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with feminism’s core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists? Where’s the outrage? For a brief moment after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.

But the rest is feminist silence. You haven’t heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them—“provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,” in the words of the Gulf News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can’t talk to men over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the professor’s lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.

You didn’t hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much attention—stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world—except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant.

You didn’t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, “defending my honor, family, and dignity,” who cut off his seven-year-old daughter’s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.

The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment’s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.

In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations—an accusation leading to his sister’s barbaric punishment—as a way of covering up their crime.

Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities “among educated and liberal families.” In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times “to cleanse the family honor,” and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her “immoral behavior,” had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. “The whore is dead,” the family announced.

As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women’s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.

To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women’s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to “lose their voice” in the face of women’s oppression.

The first variety—radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers’s term)—starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending, every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March: “The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime.”

Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence—and specifically, male violence against women. “Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money,” according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches “The Sexuality of Terrorism” at California State University in Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists’ view. As Sharon Lerner asserted bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists’ “discomfort” with the Afghanistan bombing was “deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a result of most wars.”

If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable—“Antiwar and Pro-Feminist,” as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they believe, would never justify war. “Most women, Western and Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives,” wrote the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. “They are concerned with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic], liberation, and pluralism.”

Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn’t have Joan Crawford in mind), that’s because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as “renunciation,” “resistance to injustice,” and “reconciliation.” The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking after the United States invaded Afghanistan. “I feel like I’m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming ‘He started it!’ and throwing rocks,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “I keep looking for somebody’s mother to come on the scene saying, ‘Boys! Boys!’ ”

Gender feminism’s tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naiveté hasn’t stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in Foreign Policy: “The key reason behind women’s marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace.” Even female elected officials are on board. “The women of all these countries should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace,” urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. “If we’d had women at Camp David,” he said in July 2000, “we’d have an agreement.”

Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan Women’s Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her website, the summit was made up of “meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops, tears, and dancing.” “Defense was mentioned nowhere in the document,” Ensler wrote proudly of the summit’s concluding proclamation—despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. “[B]uilding weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category,” Ensler cooed. “Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights.”

Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born female.

Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: “When you’re wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.” Now it’s clearer than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons’ efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel, killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of 26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking, indeed.

The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn’t an authentic, indigenous—and therefore appropriate—expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.

The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against “global hegemony.” He was mesmerized by this new form of “political spirituality” that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, portended the “transfiguration of the world.” Even after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the husband’s demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small matter like women’s basic rights, when a struggle against “the planetary system” was at hand?

Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism—not to mention with women’s rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men.

The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress “gender complementarity” rather than equality and that would pay full respect to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and jobs.

Attacking from the religious front, a number of “Islamic feminists” are challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur’an. These scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur’an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity’s challenge to traditional arrangements between the sexes.

What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic world—and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam—in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious elite—Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the charge.

At the same time, though, the issue of women’s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur’an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment—the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women’s equality—except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there’s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.

To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she might refer to Israel’s “masculinist military culture”—Israel being white and Western—though she would never dream of pointing out the “masculinist military culture” of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the “degradation” of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of “the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,” as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a “device for ranking the ‘other’ men as inferior or as ‘uncivilized,’ ” according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak called “white men saving brown women from brown men.”

Spivak’s phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. “When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women,” Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. “Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context of globalization,” she says. “What is driving Islamist men is globalization.”

It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating “agency” against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. “Polygamy can be liberating and empowering,” Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her about it. “Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working,” she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won’t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn’t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? “I don’t know,” Cooke answers, “I’m interested in discourse.” The irony couldn’t be darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of the “Other” endorse that Other’s repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda—subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.

The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing “group rights for minority cultures” over the well-being of individual women. Okin admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision, and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a “barely tolerable institution.” Some women, she went so far as to declare, “might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . . . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.”

But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women’s Day—“Afghanistan Is Everywhere”—was in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don’t women in the West parade around in bikinis? “It’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive,” columnist Jill Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria.

As Nelson’s statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it doesn’t really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive vision of “women’s human rights,” meaning not simply women’s civil and political rights but “economic rights” and “socioeconomic justice.” Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state “as an emancipatory institution,” in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are “unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members” and seeped in “nationalist ideologies” as well as in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, nations “depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood,” writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University.

Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the “gender perspective” in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: “Gender Perspectives on Landmines” and “Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,” whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)

The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement’s ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women’s right to vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from above, requiring nations to “take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women” and to eliminate “stereotyped roles” to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child care. The treaty’s 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, “the personal is international.” The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating Mother’s Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya for not interpreting the Qur’an in accordance with “committee guidelines.”

Confusing “women’s participation” with self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women’s Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections “to leapfrog women to power.” Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the totalitarian.

That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn’t feminists want to shout out their own profound discovery for the world to hear?

Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it would be bad for business.

The truth is that the free institutions—an independent judiciary, a free press, open elections—that protect the rights of women are the same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly, feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same things—and that those are things that they themselves already have. And recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.

There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury. Consider, for instance, women’s attitudes toward war, a topic on which politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46 percent of men cited national security as the country’s top priority. There has been a “seismic gender shift on matters of war,” according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there’s little to compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are threatened.

Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase “America the Horrible,” went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war “was worth it.” Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go out alone now.

As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of women is a universal demand—that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.

my god this dude wrote the world’s worst thesis and sent it to the worst candidate possible (a muslim-born woman from the middle east that regularly talks about the issues feminists apparently never talk about)

[ladycatofwinterfell]

Hi! I just wanted to make sure I tell you that I love your Harrenhal NedCat series before I drop the NedCat prompt that has been harassing me mentally for months:

Basically NedCat as lawyers. Specifically, lawyers that never heard of each other before but are now representing Robert and Cersei respectively in their highly publicized and messy divorce. Ned may or may not also be taking care of Jon while Lyanna is finishing her education (that's what I was headcanoning, but I'm leaving the inclusion of Jon up to your discretion), and Catelyn may have a vaguely canon-inspired B-Plot going on with LF and a possibly pregnant Lysa.

That depends on how elaborate you're willing to go for this prompt. But I'm never going to write this fic myself so I'm hoping to read it from you, please and thank you :) I'm sure it'll be great either way!

Hi, anon! I’m very glad you like the Harrenhal au, that’s so fun to hear! I really want to do an as elaborate and planned out version of this prompt as you have envisioned someday because it’s honestly an amazing idea and I love it, but as of now I unfortunately don’t really have the time for it. Sorry to disappoint in that sense, but I hope this little drabble can bring you some small satisfaction

“Catelyn Tully, pleasure to meet you.”

Ned didn’t have time to look up from his glass before she had sat down on the bar stool next to his. He was so taken by surprise that he just watched her in silence as she ordered a lemon drop martini from the bartender.

“You don’t have to introduce yourself, I know who you are” he said once she had ordered.

They had seen each other for hours every day all week, he was perfectly aware of who she was. Catelyn Tully, apparently an esteemed lawyer, represented Cersei in the divorce. Despite that he had never heard of her before. But she was a sharp thing, that hadn’t taken him more than a few seconds to realise.

She glanced at him, the corners of her lips twitching upwards.

“I know that, Eddard Stark, but I thought a formal introduction would be polite.”

“Is court not formal enough for you, Ms. Tully?”

“You’re not a person to me in court, you’re a lawyer and we have been introduced to each other as such. When you’re sitting here it’s another story.”

She apparently didn’t have less edge out of the courtroom. Quick and clever, Cersei couldn’t have chosen a better representative. Ned would have been worried for Robert if it hadn’t been for that he represented him himself.

“How come you decided to sit here with me?” he asked.

The bar of the hotel was far from empty, but there were still free spots here and there. But she had taken the seat next to his.

“I just came down for a drink and saw a familiar face. Not a lot of those around here.”

She nodded towards the bartender as he put down her martini in front of her.

“Cheers” she said, raising the glass towards him.

“Cheers” he responded, raising his own plain whiskey.

He took a sip while she did, made sure she lowered her glass before he did.

“Your accent isn’t as noticeable when you’re here” she told him. “Is it on purpose?”

The fact that he could not tell if it was curiosity or a taunt bothered him. It could be either, he didn’t know her expressions yet. In court he could read people like a book, but she proved to be more difficult in a private setting.

“I lessen it unconsciously when not around people with my accent” he said calmly. “As most people do with their accent.”

He guessed she had wanted him to ask how she knew what he sounded like usually. If she wanted to tell him she had made her research she would simply have to say it.

“That you’re a northerner is still obvious, but one can barely tell you’re from Winterfell. Surely your years in the Vale must have contributed though” she continued. “How come you didn’t study in Winterfell? That university is great.”

She crossed her legs, leaned slightly more towards him. What was she trying to do? He didn’t understand her at all. Was it an intimidation tactic? Why would she do that?

“I was recommended the University of the Vale by a family friend. You studied in your home city, how come?”

Catelyn Tully wasn’t alone in having made her research. The moment he had realised he had no idea about who she was he had decided to look into it. Born and raised in Riverrun, studied there, still lived there. Not that there was anything wrong with Riverrun, but she could have climbed high in King’s Landing had she chosen that path.

“It’s a wonderful city and studying law there was an opportunity.”

She locked eyes with him, refused to look away. As did he. It felt like a power play of some sorts, a game. He couldn’t decide if it was fun or not.

“And now we’re both here, in the middle of a messy celebrity divorce” he said.

It was beginning to grow uncomfortable, he turned his gaze away and hid in a glass for a moment.

“Though only partly because of skill within our work. I wouldn’t have guessed you knew Mr. Baratheon beforehand if I hadn’t seen you in pictures with him” Catelyn said.

She ran a finger along the brim of her glass. As she did so he noticed the red mark her lipstick had made when she held it to her lips.

She took great care into how she looked. Her hair laid in perfect curls, her dress did not have a wrinkle, her makeup was perfect. Except for the slightly smudged lipstick.

“He also studied in the Vale.”

Not that Robert had studied particularly much, but he had been there.

“But you knew Ms. Lannister beforehand as well, didn’t you?” he asked before she could fire another question at him.

Catelyn laughed, but it struck him how controlled it was. Almost rehearsed. She knew what she was doing down to the smallest detail. How she sat, how she spoke, what she said, how she laughed.

“That story’s not as proper as yours” she said.

“Nothing about this whole story is proper.”

“That’s why people enjoy it.”

It was on the cover of every tabloid in the whole country, the topic on everyone’s lips. The whole marriage between Cersei Lannister and Robert Baratheon had been tumultuous, and when it crashed and burned everyone wanted to see the spectacle for some reason. He had never quite figured out the obsession with celebrity relationships.

“I don’t understand it in the least” Ned confessed.

“Neither do I, dearest colleague, neither do I.”

He noticed how her gaze ran over him, from his head to his feet.

“It’s been long since I did a divorce” she then asked. “Do you think they ever loved each other?”

Fighting to keep his face from showing his surprise at that proved to be a challenge, but Ned managed it. He had been told that was one of his strengths in his career, the way he could always keep a cool expression.

“Does it matter?” he countered.

“Do you think so?”

Ned leaned against the bar disk, considered for a moment. It was all an ugly and angry mess, would it be even uglier if there had been love there before? Why had they even married in the first place? He had wondered that several times.

“As we both know this is a terrible mess, but it’s even sadder if they ever did love each other” he said. “So in that sense it does matter.”

Catelyn considered for a moment, looking down at her drink.

“I agree with you” she then said.

As Ned’s phone buzzed the screen lit up, making the time visible. It was quite late and he had to get up early the next morning. The same went for her.

So he downed the last mouthful of his whiskey and put the empty glass down before him.

“I believe it’s time for me to get back to my room” he told her, beginning to stand up. “But it was nice talking to you.”

She nodded towards him, a small smile playing on her lips.

“Very nice indeed.”

Then he turned and left without another word, still trying to wrap his head around her and their conversation. What had that all been about?

[tamlinweek]

Tamlin Week Master List: Day 1

Fanfiction

Ill Met by Moonlight, Chapter 1 (Tamlin/Rhysand's sister) by @fieldofdaisiies (AO3 link)

The enemy of my enemy may possibly be the father of my child (Tamlin/Rhysand) by @umthisistheonlyusernamenottaken

Kidnapped by the Faery Queen (Tamlin/Feyre) by @achaotichuman (AO3 link)

Spring's Awakening (Gen Tamlin) by @songofthesibyl (AO3 link)

The Sorcery of Slumbering Secrets (Tamlin/Briar, Tamlin/Rhysand's sister) by @booksnwriting (AO3 link)

The Blessing of Spring (Tamlin/Female OC) by @nocasdatsgay (AO3 link)

Take Me Out (Tamlin/Lucien) by @northern-polaris

Know Me As Yourself (Tamlin/Feyre) by @positivelyruined (AO3 link)

Prythian High Gossip Mill (Tamlin/Cassian) by @duaghterofstories (AO3 link)

A Mother Always Knows (Gen Tamlin) by @goforth-ladymidnight (AO3 link)

Prone to Infatuation (Tamlin/Reader) by @thelov3lybookworm

Wildflowers: The Lost Chapters, Heir of Spring (Gen Tamlin) by @mathiwrites (AO3 link)

no one left to grieve (Tamlin/Rhysand) by @praetorqueenreyna (AO3 link)

To Old Gods (Tamlin/Reader) by @tadpolesonalgae

Princes can play music too! (Gen Tamlin) by @lorcandidlucienwill

The Last Evergreen Heir (Gen Tamlin) by @shi-daisy

Archeron's Anatomy (Tamlin/Feyre, Tamlin/Rhysand) by @mathiwrites (AO3 link)

lev animam, grave caput, Chapter 1 (Gen Tamlin) by @feyres-divorce-lawyer (AO3 link)

The Heir of Spring (Tamlin/Archeron!Reader) by @b0xerdancer-writes

Spring's Stars (Tamlin/Rhysand's sister) by @simmanin (AO3 link)

Fanart

Heir of Spring (Tamlin/Rhysand) by @taymartiart

The scarf scene from A Second Chance (Tamlin/Lucien) by @thrumugnyr

Spring family portrait (Gen Tamlin) by @copypastus

Our favorite Heir of Spring (Gen Tamlin) by @arson-09

Contemplative Tamlin (Gen Tamlin) by @dopeartisanprincess

Miscellaneous

Human Tamlin meme (Gen Tamlin) by @szalonykasztan00

Amarantha's limericks to Tamlin (One-sided Tamlin/Amarantha) by @rin-u-pos

Heir of Spring moodboard (Gen Tamlin) by @sonics-atelier

Chrysanthemums (Gen Tamlin) by @sonics-atelier

Amarantha's curse headcanon (Tamlin/Feyre) by @lorcandidlucienwill

Tamlin and his brothers (Gen Tamlin) by @achaotichuman

[ledenews]

James Francis Companion - July 29, 1941-September 18, 2024

James “Jim” F. Companion (83) of Wheeling, WV, passed away peacefully at his home on September 18, 2024, following a hard-fought battle with cancer. Supported by his loving family and devoted friend, Reno DiOrio, Jim finished the race strong. Born James Francis Compagnone on July 29, 1941, in McKees Rocks, PA, the only son of Frank Dominick Compagnone and Mary Ventomiller Compagnone, Jim moved with his parents and sister Fran to Wheeling in 1950, and soon met his life-long pal, Tony Figaretti, on the baseball field. Jim attended Triadelphia High School, where he excelled in academics (graduating as class co-valedictorian in 1959), in leadership as class Vice President, and on the athletic field in varsity football, baseball, and track, culminating with playing in the OVAC All-Star Football Game. During the summers, he teamed up with friend Bill Hanna to sell aluminum siding, awnings, and replacement windows for the family business, Companion Products Co. Jim was captain of the varsity football and baseball teams at Bethany College, from which he was graduated Magna cum laude with a B.A. in Economics in 1963. Bethany inducted him into its Athletic Hall of Fame with the 1981-82 class, and Jim presided over and served on the Bethany College Board of Trustees for many decades. Following his graduation with honors from the University of Michigan Law School in 1966, Jim returned to Wheeling to practice law and soon thereafter married Linda “Lin” Blackmon Companion, the mother of his 5 children: Christie, Cathie, James, David, and Beth. With his father’s encouragement, Jim legally changed the spelling of Compagnone to conform to the English pronunciation prior to running for election to the West Virginia House of Delegates, where he served from 1969-1970. He also served as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserves from 1967 to 1972. Jim was appointed as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia from1973 to 1976. He then joined Wheeling’s oldest law firm, currently named Schrader, Companion, Duff & Law, where he spent the next 47 years. He never retired. In fact, until his cancer diagnosis, Jim almost never missed a day of work. Even when his health had failed him, Jim’s primary goal was to get back to the office. Jim was devoted to his family and maintained a warm relationship with Lin despite their divorce. In 1996, Jim married Marilyn Purpura and welcomed her son Mike. Together, Marilyn and Jim enjoyed attending their children’s weddings, having grandchildren, traveling to the Outer Banks and Hawaii, and raising their beloved dogs. After Marilyn’s death in 2010, Jim was blessed to meet and marry Rita Lazarus, who brought with her to the family fold not only her own daughters, Kim and Shannon and their families but also the Lazarus clan, including Beth, Randy, Amy, and Bob and a collective of 17 grandchildren. Jim and Rita were gracious hosts of backyard barbeques and formidable competitors in trivia and cornhole. Life was centered around family and friends as they spent the last 14 years of their lives together. A soldier in the courtroom and an avid amateur historian, Jim took inspiration from heroes named and unnamed of the grand battles of the American Civil War and World War II. Persevering and stalwart in the face of adversity or pain, Jim exemplified the qualities of duty, honor, and diligence and earned great respect among his peers. Grateful for the mentorship of Dr. Forrest H. Kirkpatrick, Jim in turn mentored many Bethany graduates and younger lawyers and fostered the education, endeavors, and careers of his children and grandchildren. The James F. Companion Leadership Institute at The Linsly School is a fitting legacy. A humble man, Jim never bragged of his many accolades and achievements. Even his children often only learned of an award or honor from news reports. Jim was a member of too many organizations to catalog, but a few highlights include the Blue Pencil Club, Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference, Ohio County Bar Association (President), Beta Theta Pi (President), Dimmeydale Neighborhood Association (Treasurer), the N.D.W.V. Chapter of the Federal Bar Association (Treasurer), and St. Michael’s Catholic Church. Over his career, Jim zealously represented many clients pro bono, most notably the inmates at the West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville in a class action habeas corpus action asserting the conditions of confinement constituted cruel and unusual punishment and resulting in the closure of the over 120-year-old facility. Jim cherished his many friendships, including his lunch group, Reno DiOrio, Jim Seibert, and Fred Stamp; daily breakfasts and trips to Pittsburgh Steelers games with Art Schmitt; and an after-work Coors Light with Richard Humphrey and Chris Castellucci. Jim is survived by his sister Francine Compagnone Schmitt of Phoenix, AZ; children: Christine (Rob) Companion Varnado of Mt. Pleasant, SC; Cathleen (Scott) Companion Morgan of Haddonfield, NJ; James (Kim) Francis Companion, Jr. of Charlotte, NC; Elizabeth (Mike) Companion Johnson of Wheeling; stepchildren Michael (Betsy) Purpura of Newport Beach, CA.; Kimberly (Chris) Smith Castellucci, of Wheeling, and Shannon (Greg) Smith Flaherty of Redondo Beach, CA; grandchildren Bennett Louise Companion, Mollie Cate Morgan, James “J” Francis Companion, III, Davis Bratton Varnado, Finley “Finn” James Morgan, Anne Wilson Varnado, and Levi Jack Johnson; step-grandchildren Kate Purpura; Orlando “Lundy”, Michael, and Mia Castellucci; and Isaac “Ike”, Piper, and Vaughan Flaherty; nieces Lisa Marie Schmitt of Wheeling and Carla (Herb) Schmitt Booth of Perkasie, PA; nephew Artie B. Schmitt of Phoenix, AZ; and cousin Marian Spadaccia Marnich of Pittsburgh, PA. He was preceded in death by his parents; wife, Mary Rita Tofaute Companion; wife, Marilyn Jordan Purpura Companion; son, David Wilson Companion; step-mother Pearl Newman Compagnone; brother-in-law Arthur B. Schmitt; and cousins Angela Spadaccia Ciccone and Lucille Spadaccia Renschler. Jim’s family will welcome his friends and colleagues to join them at a celebration of Jim’s life on Saturday, September 28, 2024, at the McCormick Stables, 232 Equine Drive (Washington Farms) in Wheeling, starting at 1:00 p.m. with a reception to follow, ending at 4:00 p.m. Arrangements by Kepner Funeral Home, 900 National Road, Wheeling, WV 26003 (304-232-2732). Jim and his family wish to acknowledge the excellent care provided by Nancy Federoff, Valley Hospice, and IC Care during his final months. In lieu of flowers, donations in Jim’s memory may be made to The James F. Companion Leadership Institute at The Linsly School, 60 Knox Lane, Wheeling, WV 26003 or The Bethany Fund, Bethany College, 31 E. Campus Dr., Bethany WV 26032-0419. “he time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.” 2 Tim. 4:7 Read the full article

[maranofamilylawyers]

Sydney Family Lawyers

A Sydney Family Lawyer can help with various legal matters. Some of these include divorce and separation, children’s matters, property settlement, and domestic violence. It is important to choose a family lawyer with good communication skills and empathy.

If you are experiencing separation issues, it is best to hire a Sydney Family Law Specialist who has the knowledge and expertise to handle your matter. They can help you navigate the process and get your life back on track after separation.

Doolan Wagner Family Lawyers

Doolan Wagner Sydney Family Lawyers is a based law firm that specializes in family law. They handle cases involving divorce, property settlement, child custody, and domestic violence. They also offer legal services for restraining orders and appeals. Their lawyers have extensive experience in the industry and are well-versed in the local laws.

The firm’s criminal law practice handles matters related to bail applications, Section 2 application (mental health), and District Court appeals. They have an in-house counsel, a notary public, and solicitors agent. They are available to assist clients 24/7.

Family law is a complex area of the law that involves numerous facets of a relationship. A good family lawyer in Lower Northern Sydney can help you navigate this challenging process with sensitivity and empathy.

Shore Lawyers

Attorney Shore has been practicing law in New Haven County for nearly a decade. She is a member of the Connecticut Bar Association and has been on several committees, including the Family Law and Estates & Probate sections and the Young Lawyers Executive Committee. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the New Haven County Bar Foundation.

She is a partner and co-owner of Wolf & Shore Law Group and practices in family law, estate planning and juvenile law. She has completed GAL and assigned counsel training and is accredited in veterans benefits.

She is a passionate client advocate and zealously advocates for clients’ rights in courtroom trials. She also coaches a high school mock trial team. She is a proud member of the Electric City BNI group.

Maatouks Law Group

Maatouks Law Group offers legal services in Sydney CBD, Liverpool, and Narellan. Its lawyers specialize in family, property, and immigration law. They also offer mediation and arbitration services. They are available around the clock to assist you with your legal needs.

Peter Maatouks began his legal career in 1993 when he commenced employment with a medium sized firm in Parramatta. Since then, he has become one of the most sought after Sydney lawyers. His success is due to his willingness to be accessible to the Australian public. He puts his face and contact details out in the public domain and takes calls 24/7.

The firm’s criminal lawyers handle bail applications, Section 2 applications, and District Court appeals. Their family lawyers help clients with divorce, property settlement, and same-sex marriages.

Goldman & Co. Lawyers & Attorneys

Goldman & Co is an international legal firm specializing in dispute resolution and litigation, private investments, international tax, wealth and assets. Its discreet commercial private client expertise attracts high net worth individuals and wealthy families both locally and internationally.

Janet Goldman has developed extensive relationships with financial and insurance companies, fellow attorneys, and the Rhode Island courts. She uses these connections to guide clients through the complexities of bankruptcy and other debtrelated issues, divorces, and family law matters.

She also has experience in complex real estate and commercial litigation, including mortgage foreclosures and landlord/tenant matters. She has counseled and litigated numerous issues pertaining to condominiums and cooperatives and has experience in arbitration and mediation. She has also lectured extensively on the subjects of employment and insurance coverage law.

O’Sullivan Legal

Alison O’Sullivan delivers multifaceted and compassionate legal Legal advisor Sydney to private clients in complex family law, guardianship, and contested estate matters. Her extensive experience in these sensitive cases, combined with her empathy, allows her to guide clients through every step of their legal journey with compassion and expertise.

In addition to family law, she has significant commercial litigation and creditor’s rights experience. She also has an active international practice, advising public and private companies on a variety of corporate transactions and disputes.

After graduating from Cornell Law School summa cum laude, she clerked for Chief

Judge Levin Campbell of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the Supreme Court of the United States. She also has substantial experience in complex financial litigation, including mergers and acquisitions and white-collar criminal defense work.

[johnalexcooper]

Comprehensive Legal Solutions in Edinburgh: Navigating the Scottish Legal Landscape

Edinburgh, the dynamic and ancient capital of Scotland, serves as a focal point for cultural, economic, and legal activity. With its rich legal heritage and the presence of esteemed institutions, the city offers a robust environment for addressing various legal needs. Whether you are an individual seeking legal advice or a business in need of comprehensive legal services, Edinburgh's legal landscape is equipped to handle a myriad of issues. This blog explores the diverse legal solutions in Edinburgh and highlights why seeking professional legal assistance is crucial.

Understanding the Legal Landscape in Edinburgh

Edinburgh's legal system is deeply rooted in Scottish law, which is distinct from the legal systems in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. This unique legal framework necessitates a thorough understanding of local laws and regulations. Legal professionals in Edinburgh are well-versed in Scots law, ensuring that clients receive advice and representation that is both accurate and relevant.

Types of Legal Solutions in Edinburgh

1. Family Law

Family law encompasses a wide range of issues such as divorce, child custody, adoption, and domestic violence. In Edinburgh, family law practitioners provide compassionate and knowledgeable support to help clients navigate these often emotionally charged matters. They aim to achieve fair and amicable solutions that prioritize the well-being of all parties involved, especially children.

2. Criminal Defense

Facing criminal charges can be a daunting experience. Legal experts in Edinburgh offer robust defence services to individuals accused of crimes, ranging from minor offences to serious felonies. The objective is to guarantee that clients are provided with a just trial and that their rights are safeguarded during the legal proceedings.

3. Personal Injury Claims

Accidents and injuries can have a significant impact on an individual's life. Personal injury lawyers in Edinburgh assist clients in claiming compensation for injuries sustained due to accidents, medical negligence, or workplace incidents. They provide expert advice on the merits of a case and work diligently to secure the best possible outcome for their clients.

4. Property and Real Estate Law

Edinburgh's bustling property market requires the expertise of legal professionals who specialize in property and real estate law. Whether you are buying or selling a property, dealing with landlord-tenant disputes, or navigating complex property transactions, these legal experts offer invaluable assistance to ensure that your interests are protected.

5. Corporate and Commercial Law

Businesses in Edinburgh benefit from the comprehensive legal services provided by corporate and commercial law specialists. These professionals offer advice on company formation, mergers and acquisitions, contract negotiation, intellectual property protection, and compliance with regulatory requirements. Their expertise helps businesses operate smoothly and mitigate legal risks.

6. Employment Law

Employers and employees alike must have a solid grasp of employment law for a successful working relationship. Legal practitioners in Edinburgh guide employment contracts, workplace disputes, unfair dismissal claims, and discrimination cases. Their goal is to promote equitable and legal workplace procedures while addressing disputes reasonably.

7. Wills, Trusts, and Estates

Planning for the future is essential, and legal experts in Edinburgh assist clients with drafting wills, setting up trusts, and managing estates. These services ensure that an individual's wishes are respected and that their assets are distributed according to their preferences.

The Importance of Seeking Professional Legal Assistance

Navigating the legal system can be complex and challenging, making professional legal assistance invaluable. Here are several reasons why seeking legal solutions in Edinburgh is crucial:

Expertise and Knowledge

Legal professionals in Edinburgh possess extensive knowledge of Scots law and are adept at interpreting and applying legal principles to various situations. 1. The knowledge they possess guarantees that customers are provided with precise and pertinent guidance. 

Protection of Rights

Whether you are facing criminal charges, dealing with a family dispute, or negotiating a business contract, legal experts work to protect your rights and interests. They guarantee that you receive fair treatment and that your legal rights are respected.

Effective Representation

The outcome of a case can be significantly influenced by the calibre of legal representation provided. Lawyers in Edinburgh are skilled advocates who can present your case persuasively, whether in court or during negotiations.

Peace of Mind

Legal issues can be stressful and overwhelming. By enlisting the expertise of a proficient legal practitioner, you can rest assured that your case is being handled by competent professionals. Legal professionals handle the complexities of the legal process, allowing you to focus on other important aspects of your life.

Customized Solutions

Every legal case is unique, and legal professionals in Edinburgh provide tailored solutions that address the specific circumstances of each client. They take the time to understand your needs and develop strategies that align with your goals.

Conclusion

Edinburgh's legal landscape is rich with expertise and resources, making it an ideal place to seek legal solutions for a wide range of issues. From family law and criminal defence to corporate law and personal injury claims, legal professionals in Edinburgh offer comprehensive services that cater to the diverse needs of individuals and businesses. With the assistance of an experienced legal expert, you can navigate the complexities of the legal system with confidence, knowing that your rights and interests are protected interests are being safeguarded.

Whether you are a resident of Edinburgh or a business operating in the city, understanding the importance of legal solutions and the benefits of professional legal assistance is essential. With the right legal support, you can achieve favourable outcomes and ensure that your legal matters are handled with the utmost care and expertise.