#does that help. anyways i love all of his ugly and beautiful facets

[dellamortethelesser]

Please Mahanon Tabris... I want to know.... about.... him........ I am so intrigued

oh lord okay. Mahanon Tabris is my canon Hero of Ferelden and he started out as a character study and a criticism of the "perfect victim" narrative. Being trans and being a city elf are the two most defining social characteristics that he brings to the narrative of being a grey warden and he approaches the joining as a chance to live a new life.

death and rebirth and the cycles of trauma are huge themes in his story, and although he considers himself to be "the paragon of a grey warden" in the aftermath of origins, his whole approach to being a grey warden is antithetical, given that his motivation is living at any cost rather than being willing to offer death as a sacrifice.

he handles the fifth blight as an angry, desperate twenty year old who has no mentorship and no real support--everyone either tacitly agrees with your plans or argues with them, but the burden of the choice is still on you (a consequence of the medium that i enjoy incorporating narratively). he makes choices he thinks are necessary; he kills connor at redcliffe, destroys the werewolves out of a familiar vengeance, he defiles the urn and becomes a reaver. this escalates to the point of recruiting loghain and being aghast that alistair would abandon everything then.

in my personal headcanon for mahanon, alistair comes back at the last minute and sacrifices himself which is something that mahanon cannot and does not forgive and remains angry about to the point where he really can't think about it. loghain goes off to orlais leaving them with a very terse formal stilted relationship. mahanon does romance zevran but time and distance means they're more off and on.

i'm torn how he will handle awakening lol--i waffle between he fucks off and comes back just to burn amaranthine or he stays around and still burns amaranthine before fucking off. great character

he ties into nadasa thorne, my rook, as the role of his mentor and fucks him up in new unique esoteric ways that varric and everyone else get to deal with. mahanon is a horrible person and i love him for it.

[bettyannbutterworth]

Asleep - Chapter 5 (After the rain)

Tom finishes preparing two tea mugs of strong, milky tea and joins her at the table.  He smells like he had a shower as well, and he wears a very nice grey jumper with fresh dark jeans, not a tear or hole in sight.  The top could be cashmere, it looks very soft and warm. So does he.

[...]

“Yes, that was the goal.  To tire Toby out.  Let me put your things in the dryer.”

Alex holds her trousers, shirt, and smaller wet items to her chest.

“Just tell me where it is?”

She ignores his amused smile and follows the directions to the appliance, 30 minutes should do.

Returning to the living room she can hear soft music in the background, it sounds dramatic but pleasingly so.

“What’s that playing?”

“The score to a movie called Conquest of Paradise.”

“It’s nice.  I rarely go to the cinema and I don’t own a TV.  Does it bother you that I’m clueless to your… prominence?”

She is honestly curious.

Tom chuckles, “No, not at all.  Believe it or not, I like it…I’m enjoying it.  All too often, when I meet new people, the conversations center around my job, the perks, that kind of stuff.  I like that I can talk with you about anything but that.”

Alex sips her sweet tea and considers.

“My circle, which admittedly is not as exciting as yours must be, might be also rarified.  There are so few of us who specialize successfully, that one might consider me a celebrity of sorts.  Being the daughter of a world-renowned scholar, having extensively researched and published myself…” She laughs, “though to most people, it probably wouldn’t compare.  But I like that you share my passion about my field of interest and at the same time it’s refreshing to talk about other things, do other things.  Maybe even learn new things.” She looks over to the snoring Toby.

Both start to say something at the same time, Alex gestures for Tom to go ahead.

Tom pauses for a moment but Alex insists. She isn’t sure if she should really voice what’s in her head, the mood that has been created in the last hour and now by the homely setting, almost an intimacy, is unfamiliar to her, making her feel soft and vulnerable.

“Well, I was still wondering about the things you told me while we were walking.”

Tom waits, watches to see if she understands that he is not trying to pry, that it’s up to her whether to continue or stop.

“Yes?”

“After the loss of your mother, how long did you stay in France?”

“A little over a year. Grand-mère was 80 already at the time and her health was deteriorating and the doctors wanted her back at her home in London.  She said, ‘there is only so much that France can heal, some things simply need time and the love of a father’.’  And she was right.  Even though I was terribly sad to leave Severine, I missed my dad and home, so we returned.”

Tom would like to keep asking, to dig deeper, remembers that he had interrupted her.

“What did you want to say before?”

Alex is debating what to do but finally gives in to the urge to be candid with him. Also, she has the weird feeling Severine is standing behind her, nudging her on, giving her a thumbs up.

“I just thought. Well. We had mentioned our… occupation and the things that might come with it. I meant to add that I have to admit, it threw me a bit when I looked you up online.  Obviously, there’s the fact of your success, your,” Alex can’t think of a better phrase and makes a face, settling for “fame.  But what really surprised me, was how different you do look in person to me from some of those pictures. I know actors, the good ones anyways, are like chameleons, but honestly, even if I had seen you in a movie before you walked into the shop, I’m not sure I’d have recognized you.”

Tom snorts and shrugs his shoulders, “The short version is, I’m a lazy bastard.  Contact lenses dry my eyes, shaving is a hassle and to be honest it irritates my skin, so I only do it if I really have to. Make up obviously helps… does the hair bother you?” He jokingly strokes an imaginary Gandalf beard. “I’ll take it off immediately, just say the word!”

Alex laughs, “No, I quite like it, actually.”

She doesn’t add that it helps her to not get too distracted by his intelligent eyes, but it’s a close thing.

“Is that right?” Tom asks, as if hearing her thoughts and although she is aware that she might be crossing the line from innocent teasing, she feels compelled to speak about what's been on her mind since Wednesday, when the search engine had corrected her spelling of his last name and offered  ‘Results for Tom Hiddleston’.

“You must have thought me naïve, for not knowing who you are.  And I felt naïve, if not embarrassed later because I did what a person that loves reading as much as I do, should know better than to do – I judged the book by its cover.“

“You took one look at my hairy self and drew the conclusion I was a tortured, suffering artist? A poor scholar?” Tom raises his eyebrows jokingly.

“No. I mean, maybe, yes, a little. And just for the record I was fine, with you being any of these things. But I’m referring to later on, the moment I saw pictures of your... actor persona, the man in a £4000 suit. The award winner. Posing.” She presses her lips together for a moment. “I judged. And assumed.”

She tries to say it without bias, even smiling, and Tom interjects that not all the suits are that expensive and posing in them is, well, required, but she can see he understands that she is serious. She continues with a small voice and Tom has to lean in to hear her properly.

“You are obviously an attractive man, inside and out, but these pictures…Beauty, or what is perceived as beauty, can be a distraction.  It can be used as a cloak to hide behind and I admit, I was once deceived by it.  And hurt.  I take responsibility for my actions then; I wanted to believe that inner ugliness could not be hidden under outer elegance, that outer beauty must be a reflection of what is inside.”

Alex stares into her cup, apprehensive to look up at a silent Tom. She finishes her tea and her line of thought, “However, I learned, that it’s mostly a mask, a superficial disguise to hide something, and to tell you the truth, I thought, when I looked you up and found this other facet of you…that I had discovered yours.”

Tom remains still and when she finally gazes up at him, he gives her a tiny wistful smile.

“I’m afraid you have, Alex.  I am an actor and I have perfected so many disguises that I sometimes don’t know any more who the real me is.  People do judge books by their covers, and people in turn by their looks.  I would be lying if I didn’t admit to doing the same at times.  I too have my experiences with confusing perception versus reality.  Sometimes, Alex, I even encourage it, preferring to wear a mask – however, when I do, it’s not to hide what’s inside, but rather, to protect it.“

He takes a deep breath, “Your, as you call it, naivety is actually a superpower.  It made you immune to my deception, and I have to say I am grateful for the moment when you looked up at me with unclouded eyes and ordered me to leave my damn cup at the shelf.  You gave me the chance to be myself, and you have no idea what a joy that is.  As is finding out,” he smiles, “I like who I am when I’m with you.”

[coffeecomicsgalore]

A Night to Remember

Fight, Fight, Akuma

Ao3

Chapter 20 – The Battle to Remember

Lila ran her fingers through her loose locks, a smug look crossed her face as she pulled out her compact to relish in her beauty. She touched up her lipstick with the tips of her fingers and snapped the little mirror shut before waving at the driver and stepping out of the car. Just like she had planned, she arrived about 15 minutes early just so she could see how the brat and her friends were faring after seeing the disaster she left behind.  

She could already see it, visions of what the space would look like clouded her brain. The mural would have to be taken down and the wall of mats would be in its place. It would make the room look cold and gross. There would be no candles to light up the area so the gymnasium lights would have to be used. No flowers or balloons to decorate the place would make the gym feel sparse and uninviting. Then to top it all off, there would be no music, no way for the partygoers to dance and have the time of their lives. Marinette would be a laughing stock of the entire school. An incompetent brat who couldn’t decorate a simple space and give the classmates something to remember their last year of lycee before graduating. Marinette would probably be crying in the corner somewhere with that foolish model boyfriend trying to cheer her up. All of her hard work gone in a matter of an afternoon.

It will definitely be a night to remember, the night that Marinette Dupain-Cheng loses making Lila the winner in the end. Nothing could damper this mood. Nothing at all.

She chuckled quietly to herself before composing her features of feigned innocence as she walked through the courtyard. She could hardly wait.

Lila saw students walking hand in hand as they enjoyed some quiet conversations. Some were laughing, others had a soft look of happiness, but none had the look she was hoping to see. Maybe they haven’t seen the room yet? Surely that had to be it.

As she walked within meters of the gymnasium doors, the sound of upbeat music emanated from the space. A bubble of anger started to grow in her belly and a slight growl left her lips. Her plans should have worked. Everything was done when the brat left. How is this happening?  

No.  

Her feet picked up quicker movements as she made her way towards the doors. She didn’t notice the looks of disgust on the students faces as she slammed open the doors, heavy panting from the anger that had now ravaged her being. She was too focused on what she was about to witness to even care.

Soon the room that was once filled with laughter started to die down to quiet murmurs. Her eyes quickly scanned the room. The mural was still there but had been updated into something more edgy. The candles were back in its lanterns and were lit up. The vases were filled with the flowers she destroyed. But in the corner of her eye, she saw something that wasn’t there earlier. She turned around, jaw clenched and hands balled up into fists before the ear-piercing screech filled the space.

If people weren’t looking, they were looking now.

Large photos upon photos lined the walls of what Lila had done earlier. There was no way to deny the photos. One of her smirking as she walked out was staring right at her, mocking her in disgust.

“You no-good fucking brat!” She yelled as she stomped her feet in anger.  

----

Marinette had paused from her conversation when she heard Lila’s screech. She was staring intently at the brunette, watching Lila’s eyes flit from one picture to another. There was a moment of realization that she was caught and that her plan had failed miserably. Adrien’s hand moved to her back; a small gesture that helped her feel stronger over the impending storm that was about to hit.

“You no-good fucking brat!” She yelled as she stomped her feet in anger. Each stomp brought her closer and closer, waves of dancers separating as she made her way through. Adrien squeezed Marinette’s hand but then his protective instincts took over and he moved his way in front of her.

“Get away from her!” Lila screamed at Adrien before turning to the raven-haired girl. “You!” She launched herself towards Marinette. Adrien held her back, narrowly missing her erratic movements in her attempt to attack. “You ruined everything!”

A crowd of students surrounded the three teens in awe over the situation. Students that were close the Marinette knew of the hatred Lila had towards her, but watching the situation in action was nothing short of interesting. The adults had made their way through and tried to intervene, but their words fell on deaf ears. Lila knew she wasn’t going to get away with this now that her destruction was posted against the walls, but she would die trying anyways.

Marinette was seething. She maintained her position behind Adrien as she calmly made her case just like she did all those years ago during Stoneheart. “The only one who ruined anything, Lila, is you. I’m only showing everyone what you truly are. A lying, conniving bitch that twists everything to get what you want not caring who you trample over and hurt in the meantime. You believe you deserve the world? Well, guess what? It’s time to wake up and realize that your lies do nothing, not even for you. Just look around you. All you care about is trying to get ahead in the world. But all you’ve done is make enemies.”  

Lila stopped her flailing. Her teeth were still tightly clenched and her eyes were ablaze in rage. Adrien continued to shield Marinette and refused to move from his spot. The last thing he needed was for Lila to take an open moment and attack his girlfriend.

Lila growled instead. “You will never see the last of me, Marinette. Just you wait. One day, everything you love will be gone. You will lose your precious,” she eyed Adrien up and down before turning back to Marinette, “toy, and you will lose all your friends. You’ll never make a name for yourself. You will just be a gold-digger in the face of the press. You are nothing and will be noth-”

Whack!

Lila stopped and slowly lifted her hand to the tingling sensation on her cheek. She looked to her left to see who was bold enough and close enough to have slapped her across the face. “Ro- Rose?” She choked out. She was surprised to see the overly-sweet, bubbly blonde in stilettos be so brash in her movements.

“Listen here, Lila. I’ve stood back and watched you tear down my friends one by one. You even went as far as getting me akumatized! But no more. No more will I let you talk down and threaten my friends! This ends today.” Rose shouted in a high-pitched yell. “None of us will let you harm Marinette if it’s the last thing we do.”

One by one, students from their class walked through the thick crowd and stood on either side of Adrien, making a human barrier to protect Marinette from Lila. Adrien, who had been standing in his defensive stance this entire time, finally stood up straight and grabbed onto Marinette’s hand in assurance.  

Lila backed up slowly, her hands raised in surrender as she eyed the wall of students. The adults started making their way towards her, no doubt to remove her from the premises. In the corner of her eye, she spotted the one thing that she had been waiting for weeks, her only way out in order to destroy those around her. Laughing maniacally, she clenched her fists and waited until the black butterfly merged with the rhinestone pin in her hair.

Students watched in horror as the pink butterfly masked Lila’s face and engulfed her in the purple foam. But she did not stay her size. Continuing in her manic laughter, students started to flee as the adults ushered them out. Adrien and Marinette held their position with determination as they watched her form take shape.

She increased in size until she was close to five meters tall. She looked like a medusa looking goddess with her long, black, fitted dress ripped into eight lengthy tentacles that curled and moved around her. Her anger and emotions controlled the tentacles erratic movements, each step causing them to whip wildly against her grand frame. Her hair pin turned into a pointy crown adorned with the same rhinestone facets. In a way, she looked like Ursula from The Little Mermaid and her demeanor matched her ugly figure.  

“Lila, stop this! Give me your crown and we can settle this the old fashion way.” Marinette shouted.

“I’m not Lila, you disgusting snake. I am Tentecala and I will destroy you all! Ha-ha-ha-ha!” Her tentacles acted like legs, moving her upwards and helped her soar through the air.  

Screams of students echoed throughout the gymnasium, tables overturned in the panic. There were still students making their way through the dance floor, taking any exits that were not clogged in the chaos.

Marinette and Adrien held each other’s hands tighter as they inched their way backwards. “Adrien, we need to watch from the sidelines until we see what she does. Her anger is going to make this battle hard. No puns, got it?”

“Oh, come on, my lady. You know my puns are purrdy awesome mid-battle.” Marinette groaned. “Alright, alright. I got my head in the game, don’t you worry. You tell me where to go and I’ll be-”

Adrien saw a tentacle reach out to grab Marinette, but his instincts kicked in, pushing her out of the way. Tentecala’s limbs narrowly missed Marinette by a hair and the missed capture elicited a murderous growl from deep within the akuma’s chest.  

Marinette had been thrown to her side but instantly rolled to her feet, watching for a moment where she could sneak away and transform. As soon as she found it, she bolted transforming underneath a table one room over.

Ladybug ran back into the gym and watched as Adrien was being squeezed by the akuma, his face scrunched up in pain as he tried to wiggle himself free. Tentecala taunted the model, trying to break down his stamina until there was nothing left. “I told you your girlfriend was nothing. She left you here to fend for yourself. Some girlfriend she is.”

Adrien grunted. “She will always – ugh – be better – ahh – than you.”

Tentecala growled. “You will pay for saying that.” She squeezed him harder in her grasp, his face turning shades of red to purple and finally to blue as she waited for her next move.  

Ladybug froze in shock. She had to figure out what to do and she needed to do it fast. Adrien needed to be saved first and she didn’t want to defeat Tentecala without him. As she tried to formulate her plan, Ladybug witnessed the alarming moment of Adrien’s body going limp in Tentecala’s grasp. The akuma chuckled like it was part of her plan and then threw him across the length of the gym without a care in the world.  

“Adrien!”

[mimik-u]

Diamond Fall

Summary: In the battle against White Diamond, Yellow is possessed.

A/N: This is messy as all get out, but honestly, I just wanted to write some angst before "BOHAM" came out, lolol. Hope you enjoy!

AO3

i.

They are monsters—oh, it’s true—but not like this.

Pink Diamond is splayed beneath them, still and pale in his Pearl’s arms. She pulls her long fingers over his cheeks, his curly hair, his gem, but he doesn’t so much as stir. A faint red line drips down his right eye.

The fusion yells at them.

They deserve it.

They’re monsters.

Dictators.

Rulers.

Tyrants.

Villains.

They are, they are, they are���the war machine tells them as much in so many words—but not like this, she wants to say, wants to scream, wants to cry.

Not for Pink.

Blue Diamond tilts her head slowly to the left, cerulean eyes clashing against gold, and Yellow’s sharp chin descends into a brutal nod—militaristic and ready.

“Lecture us later,” she tells the Garnet, nose upturned in both apparent and felt haughtiness (if haughtiness is a clever disguise for shame).

“Or don’t,” Yellow adds gruffly.

“It’ll take White a few moments longer to disconnect completely from Homeworld’s mainframe, so until then—”

“Run, hide, take shelter—get Pink off this damn planet.”

The other Diamond’s gloved hand is clenched into a fist only inches away from her own. Blue desperately wants to breach the space between them. Wants to temple their fingers and whisper final secrets into her willing ear. I’ve adored you. I’ve needed you. I’ve loved you. Wants to walk Homeworld’s long hallways with her as their tall shadows lengthen in the dusk. Wants another moment, another second of this eternity they’ve stolen together by believing in their own invincibility.

But that was just another lie, and this is the truth.

There is no more time.

There is only facing White and losing.

Blue Diamond’s hand remains by her side.

“We won’t be able to hold her for long,” she admits, “so make the most of what we can give you.”

Her gaze is on the boy, the gem, the Diamond, extinguished in the Pearl’s arms.

Beyond his eye, the star on his shirt has been torn through, too.

And so here are some more wants, clawing up inside her like a storm: she desperately wants to kiss Pink’s forehead one last time, wants to tell him so many things, while wishing he would forget others—wants to say sorry most of all—but at the slightest shift of her heavy robes, the little band of Crystal Gems stiffen into defensive positions. The Pearl’s defiant chin flick is her weapon in place of a spear.

“How do we know this isn’t a trick?” The Amethyst demands, her dark eyes narrowed into slits.

“Yeah, clods!” That truly mouthy Peridot chimes in. “Prove that you’re not gonna, like, like, backstab us while we’re trying to make a run for it!”

“Insolent—“ Yellow starts, but Blue raises a firm hand, silencing the deluge before it can even begin.

“Believe us, don’t believe us—on your gems be it,” she says coldly, “but know this, Crystal Gems. We love Pink more than we fear White.”

A beat.

A pulse.

Pink continues not to be awake.

“Then prove it,” the fusion snarls.

And so they do.

ii.

They prove it by hurling electricity and energy and everything else in their arsenal at this bastardization of the Diamond they once loved. White Diamond used to stretch out in the pools with them, her long neck craned backwards in a high, lilting laugh. She played Pink’s games, and she called Blue Moonlight without sneering it. She looked over Yellow’s reports on mining efficiencies, and they would strategize new methods of production together. She told them they were special.

She meant it back then.

And she didn’t—she absolutely did not—sacrifice her sanity to a dying Homeworld.

She was White Diamond, and she led it.

“Aren’t you two a little old for these foolish games?” The Diamond laughs as their attacks glance off of her as harmlessly as pebbles. She saunters forward on her impeccable heels in the very way a predator might play with its meal, one foot over the other, her translucent cape swaying behind her like an eager tail. Behind the pitiful wall Blue and Yellow form together with their bodies, stand White and Pink’s ships, gleaming in the reddish light of Homeworld. “Stand aside now, and perhaps I’ll be lenient with you later.”

The word lenient rolls across her elegant tongue before landing with the hard t.

Blue flinches, and Yellow growls, “Like you even know what that word means anymore! Look at you, White! You’re, you’re—”

White Diamond swoops down upon the half-sentence like a vulture, her teeth razor sharp. “I’m what now, Sunlight?”

Sunlight rolls and lands, too.

Venomously.

It is both a threat and a promise.

It is a taste of what’s yet to come for the disobedient Diamonds.

Yellow Diamond, for once in her eternal life, does not say a word.

“That’s what I thought,” White hums, a sickly smile spreading across her black lips like a scourge. Close enough now, she extends a clawed hand—slowly, as though she has all the time in the world—and places it under Yellow’s imperiously lifted chin. “Oh, you know, you’ve always been my favorite, Sunlight. So utilitarian and obedient. I draw the lines in our black sands, and you toe them oh-so-carefully like a good little general.” She throws an amused glance Blue’s way. “Moonlight, I adore you, too, of course… but you’ve been, ah, rather useless for the last six thousand years. And Starlight—dear me, Starlight…”

She drags her coal black eyes into the very direction that Blue and Yellow had deposited Pink and the Crystal Gems.

Of course she knows.

Of course.

The goddess shakes her magnificent head.

“I’m going to ensure that Starlight doesn’t see the sun for another six-thousand years more.”

Blue Diamond screams, and Yellow Diamond lunges—a great golden mass of brutality and anger and fear and bravery. Her eyes are electric with rage; lightning crackles across the sharp planes of her face.

(They are monsters—yes, Garnet, it’s true—but not like this. Not for Pink.)

She reaches for her creator’s gem.

She’s almost there...

... yes!

Fingers outstretched and closing upon the shining facets of White Diamond.

But in an instant faster than seems possible, White’s arm shoots upwards, and in another incomprehensible second more, she has apprehended her Sunlight, has her dangling in her claws.

She grabs Yellow’s long neck with one hand—eliciting an awful choking sound—and curls her fingers around the Diamond’s temples with the other. White energy begins to flood all the way down from her head to the train of her gown.

“Oh, Sunlight,” she says sadly, “I wish you wouldn’t have done that.”

iii.

“I didn’t want a puppet,” White Diamond murmurs so softly that it almost sounds like a dream, “but, dear me, Moonlight, I couldn’t have her charging at me like that, could I?”

Yellow Diamond screams as White pours herself into her, but Blue cannot hear a sound, because there is white light spewing from her mouth where noise should be, and her beautiful golden irises been erased, have been replaced with white, too. White, white, white—that’s all there is—and Blue is on her knees, scrabbling as close as she can to Yellow without looking at her face directly.

She grabs her hand, like she should have done before—before, when it was not too late, before, when the world around them wasn’t crumbling to dust.

But Yellow does not squeeze back.

Her fingers are in tangles of agony.

She screams and screams and screams some more; Blue is almost relieved that she can’t hear.

“Cease this madness, White!” She gasps. It’s all she can do. “Please. Go back to your altar! Release Yellow! It’s pointless to do this to her! Pink’s already gone!”

White’s own irises are eradicated, too, but she sneers at Blue anyway, her black lips parting to reveal threateningly perfect teeth.

“Go back?!” she laughs. “Go back! Are you a broken record, dear? Is that all you want to these days—to go back? I mean, it’s a commendable goal, but, Moonlight, there is no unpressing the button now! There’s no unringing the bell! Starlight left us, and now she has returned, and you have attacked me, and now I’m about to direct Sunlight to attack you! Oh, the circle of life! Isn’t it lovely?”

Grasping for coherent words feels like gasping for air.

She comes up with nothing.

She’s suffocating.

Yellow Diamond wrenches her fist away from Blue’s hand violently, clenching it closer to her side.

“We’re your Diamonds, White!”

“You disobeyed me,” she snarls immediately, her facade breaking and then reforming just as quickly as it had shattered. The ugly lines in her face rearrange themselves back into that even uglier smile. “And so I will not forgive you.”

The light in White Diamond’s eyes suddenly fades, leaving nothing behind but blackness.

She plucks her fingers from Yellow’s temples, one by one by one, and smiles some more.

“Sunlight, do be a dear and make sure Blue Diamond is distracted for me.”

Yellow’s sharp chin tilts downwards to where Blue is still on the ground, her lank hair falling in curtains around her face.

Once upon a time, she would have helped her up.

Would have sang to her.

Would have gotten a Pearl to sing to them both.

Once upon a time, cerulean eyes would have met gold, and all of the hard feelings between them would have melted like rivers.

Yellow Diamond’s eyes are white and glowing.

A snarl cuts through her face, transforming all of the harsh lines in them into open wounds.

“Yellow��”

But the Diamond is unseeing and unhearing.

A bastardization like the bastardization who made her.

A toy.

A killing machine.

White Diamond snakes between them, her long cape brushing Blue Diamond’s cheek like a kiss.

Or a sting.

Or a knife.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go capture a star.”

iv.

“When we were younger Diamonds, we used to fight over who would get to colonize a planet first,” Blue Diamond whispers, slowly moving backwards, her bare feet brushing against rubble and debris, metal and dust. “You used to call me a clod for getting to White before you did, and I’d tell you that your language was uncouth enough to belong to a mere Quartz.”

Yellow Diamond advances as Blue retreats, boot over heavy boot, sure and steady, a miraculous combination of shiny limbs and angular lines to behold.

But her eyes are not golden.

Stars, they’re not even close.

“And when we turned three-thousand, you took me to Andromeda, where we watched a star explode some millions of lightyears away. That was the first time you took my hand, Yellow.” She slipped her glove off, and she gently captured Blue’s hand, and in that moment, that carved out fraction of eternity, they discovered that their hands were precisely the same size. They built a temple between their fingers as the supernova bruised the sunset blue; they laid their palms upon the gently swaying grass and thought they would never die. “You said it was entirely possible that we were built for each other—that we were equals, partners, goddesses, and queens.”

Blue’s foot clips a jagged piece of exploded floor, and she collapses backwards onto the landing platform before she can find purchase. Shards and fragments knife into her skin, her spine, her elbows, her hair.

Yellow Diamond stops in front of her, her boots scuffing hard against the stone.

Her face is disinterested.

The real Yellow could never be so detached.

Her plump lips are set into a cold, hard line.

“And then Pink came to us! Pink!” Blue exclaims, hysteria climbing up the rungs of her throat as the Diamond slowly bends down, her fingers twisting tightly into the heavy fabric covering Blue’s chest. “She used to perch on your shoulder like a little bird and hum songs into your ear, and because of this, you were always the best at guessing the hymns she sang underwater. How you laughed. How she did!”

Blue feels herself slowly being excavated from the ground, drawn up into the air with an iron fist.

“You prefer sunny planets to rainy ones because the light reflects handsomely on your armor.”

Shards fall like rain from Blue Diamond’s ascending body, and Yellow's pupiless gaze smolders like the sun.

“Every time I called for you, and even the times I didn’t—which was more often because I’m quite stubborn—you were there for me anyway. You found me at altars, at the zoo, on Earth, and in her chambers. You tried so hard to be cruel, but your tiny kindnesses leaked out anyway.”

They’re at eye level again; Blue’s feet find tentative purchase against the platform, her toes dancing against rubble, but Yellow, possessed and self-possessed, doesn’t let go of her robes, her white stare boring into her emptily.

Every harsh line in her face says nothing of the memories that bequeathed them to her.

“I hated you for trying so hard to save me.”

Her free hand begins to glow with electricity, lightning sparking off her fingertips.

“I loathed that you believed I was worth saving.”

And that electric hand curls into a fist, and that same fist rears back at a deadly angle.

The trajectory is Blue Diamond’s chest, is the diamond pulsating at her very center.

If it the blow lands, Blue will become nothing, a stone clattering to the dusty ground.

“But stars, you loved me,” she murmurs, reaching out and touching Yellow’s cold cheek. The Diamond flinches—Blue's not sure if it's against her will or White's. She doesn't move her hand. Her thumb brushes against the single tear dripping from a glowing eye. It spills over her cerulean skin and down the slender lines of her wrist. It snakes around her arm like a bracelet. “You kept trying anyway.”

“Do it, Sunlight.” White Diamond’s command issues from behind Yellow’s teeth.

It’s blasphemy.

“I love you, Yellow.”

It's the truth.

As Yellow Diamond’s hand hurtles through the air, Blue pools energy into her palm, the tips of her fingers glowing hot.

The world explodes around them in a burst of white light.

v.

They are binary stars falling—orbiting one another and crashing all at the same time.

The drop from the platform to the abyss below is approximately 300 feet, and the landing in store from them is full of jagged rocks and broken injectors, shards and debris.

But they’re Diamonds.

Invincible.

Immortal.

They won’t shatter…

… but they won’t survive either.

Not that the difference matters to Blue Diamond in the brief eternity between the flight and the fall.

Death is just a word, but Yellow Diamond, suspended above her, is so achingly real that it hurts to even look at her. There are scratches on her impeccable armor and wind fingers in her hair, dividing every perfectly stiff strand of her pointy coiffure. And her eyes—her eyes are golden again, widened in fear and anger and shock and grief. They search wildly for understanding, something to cling to, something solid to rationalize, and eventually, as they always do, land on:

“Blue!”

“Yellow!” She laughs hysterically as the wind whips her hair all around her. She is a maelstrom of emotion. Silver strands fly into her mouth.

“What the hell are you laughing about?” The other Diamond shouts, extending her arms outwards. Her hands find Blue’s waist, and with panicked deftness, draws them together.

They fit like puzzle pieces.

Even their diamonds are touching, binary stars defying gravity to collide.

“Nothing,” she laughs again, the sound long and feral. Yellow stares at her incredulously as the light of Homeworld’s stars falls further and further away. “Or, I suppose, everything. Those two items tend to be one in the same.”

“We’re going to die," she says, so matter-of-factly, all disbelief in the face of Blue’s absurd amusement. Her hands have found the small of her back, and they’re solid there, foundations to lean upon.

Blue's laughter dies away, suddenly snatched up by the wind.

They're falling fast.

It feels like they've been falling all of their lives.

“But we’ll come back,” she murmurs, gently pressing her chin into the crook between Yellow’s neck and shoulder, “and then we’ll save Pink, and then…”

“And then?”

Yellow Diamond’s armor stiffens on top of her.

The ground must be close.

Death is just a word, but Blue closes her hooded eyes against it anyway.

“And then… we wait and see.”

[jadewing-realms]

Voltron S8 Thoughts

warning: there will be spoilers ahead

So, I wanted to give myself some time to ponder this before I threw my thoughts out... I don’t want to just say more of what’s already been said, and I don’t really have the brain capacity for a super long rant right now anyway, but... there are a few things I feel like I want to contribute if I can.

I’ve seen some people claiming that those of us who are upset about this conclusion to the show are only upset because “our ships didn’t happen.” Others seem to defend the “tragedy” of this ending as a positive element from an artistic vantage point. Those are the things I want to address mostly, I guess.

On the matter of ships: I’m a writer myself. I’ve been studying the art of story for 10 years now, so that’s usually the lens through which I view most shows and movies. And while I’m sure some might be upset over ships alone, from what I’ve seen, most have cited most of their problems with this season/the latter half of S7 as being from a story point of view. Which I have to echo.

For example: I don’t hate Allurance. Really, I don’t. It’s not my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t have had a problem with it if it felt... genuine/not rushed/not a rebound/not flat by comparison to the previous canon-confirmed ship that was Lotura. The problem with how Allurance panned out, to me, depends entirely on the context. 

Like, one of the major problems with the ship that I’ve seen is that Lance is a human boy from Earth, who loves Earth and his family there, and he’s never expressed interest in being a diplomat. Which isn’t a bad thing. 

On the other hand, Allura was the princess of a lost race, the last remaining relic of a culture that existed 10k years ago. She had dedicated her life to being a diplomat who would rebuild the universe. Once everything was said and done, she shouldn’t have been expected to abandon that role (this is, for the moment, ignoring the fact that the show did more than have her do just that). Ideally, she would have had to stick with it, lead New Altea, continue to seek peace as any good leader does.

If the Allurance subplot could’ve addressed some of these themes and complexities, I would’ve found that interesting, even if it’s not my ship. It would’ve been intriguing to see how a couple might face those kinds of challenges together. I can get behind any character relationship if it’s done well, has depth, and makes sense.

For me personally, the execution of Allurance (and then of course, Shiro and his unnamed SO that seemed to get tossed in as an afterthought) had none of these things. My distaste for these is not due to the fact that my chosen ships weren’t endgame; in the end, that’s not what it comes down to for me. It’s more about the characters and what feels right for them in context of the show as a whole, and their pre-established character arcs. 

The way it was actually manifested, Allurance felt shallow and rushed to me, Shiro seemed tacked on to the season as a whole, and all in all, I was left with a feeling like the characters themselves were not done proper justice (regardless of who they ended up with). That their potential had been let down hard.

Then in regards to the tragedy element, I’ll start by saying that I LOVE a good tragedy. I live off dark themes, it’s what I love to write myself. One of my favorite shows is Attack on Titan. All in all, I don’t mind seeing things ending horribly for characters, okay? 

But it has to be executed properly, or else tragedy just ends up feeling like blatant manipulation. Like a bid to make the viewers feel something in an otherwise shallow emotional context. 

Viewers of Attack on Titan could never complain about the brutality of that show because it establishes itself as brutal from Episode 1. It sets the tone to tell viewers ‘this is gonna get ugly, don’t get comfortable’. It prepares viewers for a rough ride, so that when we see characters die in horrible, gruesome ways, it’s not as jarring as it might’ve been had we had no warning.

Season 8 of VLD seemed to fish this tragic element out of left field. The show was not built to be a tragedy; up until the end of Season 7, there was no indication that that’s the direction we were going to take. If there HAD been evidence of it, the subtle laying of the foundations of darker elements, it would’ve been fine. But because there was no precedent for how horribly things went, it had all the emotional tact of a freight train barreling down a city street with no tracks (Inception reference, anyone?).

Lotor and Allura both became critical victims of this (though the entire main cast suffered from this ultimately). They both deserved better, and I don’t mean from their universe. I’m talking from a story point of view, as characters, they deserved better from their writers. Even if they both still ended up dying, they were both well-done characters who deserved for their arcs to reach satisfying conclusions. Especially as representative characters.

Lotor specifically spoke to me on a more personal level, as a victim of paternal abuse/neglect myself, as someone who’s constantly checking myself and my flaws because I share that fear of becoming the person who hurt me so deeply. It’s always felt like there’s no way anybody could truly understand what it was like growing up in the environment I did. Like I have to bear it alone. 

So to have a character presented with hints of these same struggles was really validating, especially when it seemed like these things were going to be called out. Addressed. Dealt with. Other characters would find out the truth about the depth of Lotor’s suffering and he would find peace and solace in newfound friendships. Such an ending is idealistic, yes. But it’s a nice thought that even if I struggle to find that kind of peace in my own life, it happened to this character. And maybe some day, it could happen to me.

Instead, Lotor is betrayed so wholly and completely by those newfound friends, based solely on circumstantial evidence, that his fragile state of mind can’t take it. Guilty or not isn’t relevant; the Voltron team stuck him in the Rift and FREAKING LEFT HIM THERE TO DIE and that was never once addressed as a problem. The Voltron team was painted as The Good Guys who totally did the right thing, until the very end when Allura (who incidentally was the one previously shown to be the most incensed/angry/bitter over what Lotor did) conveniently acknowledges that Lotor was just trying to do what was right and that he deserved better--which just fell flat coming from her, who up to that point, had not been shown to feel any sort of guilt over what she and her team did to him. Even that acknowledgement was not any sort of admission of fault on her part; only an admittance that Lotor thought he was doing the right thing.

All in all, this does not paint a hopeful picture for me as a victim. It creates a theme of inescapable pain... the idea that my trauma might haunt me so thoroughly, only death brings an escape. Heck, even if Lotor still had to die unfairly (if they had to show us those flashbacks, confirm what a horrific life he’d led, and then show us his melted corpse), the least they could’ve done is dealt with the ramifications of that... show the Voltron team realizing how wrong they were, feeling guilt and shame for their drastic, cruel actions, and THEN admit that even if Lotor had done some horrible things, nobody deserved the fate they dealt to him.

Instead, the message presented is the idea that Lotor, the manifestation of the pain Zarkon caused over the course of ten thousand years, was unable to endure his suffering. That there was no hope for him. He was unable to defeat his upbringing, and was then sentenced to a torturous death for the resulting crimes. And the people who were both betrayers and executioners felt absolutely no remorse for it. And yet I’m supposed to think of them as the Heroes. 

I don’t know... maybe all of this is just circumstantial. Maybe I’m biased due to my chosen field of study and my own personal background. But I don’t see how this season was in any way satisfying on a plot or character level... and I certainly can’t bring myself to see any beauty in the injustice of my own childhood, so it stands to reason I can’t see value in the needless tragedy of Lotor’s suffering. Or even Allura’s death (the necessity of which is debatable, btw; there was literally no explanation for WHY she absolutely HAD to die).

I can’t speak for everyone, but the thing that originally kept me watching this show was the characters. Not the plot, not the space battles or giant robots or weird aliens. I watched for the people--for Lance, Pidge, Hunk, Keith, Shiro, Allura, Coran, Lotor, etc, etc--and how they interacted, how they got to know each other and understand each other and help each other. How they made each other better. Because that’s really all any of us can hope to get out of life, isn’t it? To be known, to be validated, to be understood, to love and be loved. This is what I read/watch fiction for, because if I have a hard time finding those things in real life, then at least I can watch it happen to characters I care about.

In the end, though, this season left me in the depressing state of wondering what the point of it all was, which is probably the last place any content creator should want to leave their audience. What was I supposed to take away from this, if not the idea that this show, which obviously fell in love with itself somewhere along the line, pretended to represent many varied facets of the human condition, only to conclude those facets with pat answers, hasty romance, cheap monologues, and shallow tragedies?

I’m not angry. I am simply disappointed.

[artemis-entreri]

[[ This post contains my review/analysis of the Forgotten Realms/Drizzt novel, Timeless, by R. A. Salvatore. As such, the entirety of this post’s content is OOC. ]]

Genre: Fantasy

Series: [As of yet unnamed]: Book I | Legend of Drizzt #34 (#31 if not counting The Sellswords)

Publisher: Harper Collins (September 4, 2018)

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Review Title: Salvatore’s Best Work to Date

Additional Information: Artwork for the cover of Timeless and used above is originally done by Aleksi Briclot. This post is very long and CONTAINS SPOILERS. Furthermore, this discussion concerns topics that I am very passionate about, and as such, at times I do use strong language. Read and expand the cut at your own discretion.

First, before I get into the breadth of this post, I feel that I need to make it clear that the success of Timeless most likely has no bearing on whether there will be other Forgotten Realms novels by authors aside from Salvatore. It was much speculated by many longtime fans of the Forgotten Realms novel line that if Timeless is successful enough, that Harper Collins would contract with other FR authors as well. While it would be nice if this were the case, numerous sources within the publishing sphere have indicated that such a development is highly unlikely.

Now, on to Timeless. If you’ve followed me for a while, you’d be right to suspect that there is some degree of sarcasm in my review title for this book. Indeed, a statement like that from me normally would be followed by, “but that’s not saying a whole lot”. However, with regards to Timeless, I am completely serious (insofar as my review title is concerned anyway). I feel that Salvatore has achieved a new height with Timeless that I, quite frankly, had not thought possible for him. After over three decades of writing and over 30 books of following the same formula, Salvatore has finally produced a book that makes me hopeful for his future works in the series. Overall Timeless is a decent book, with improvements in writing style, storytelling, characterization, and consideration of the Realms as a whole. Nonetheless, my hope is a cautious one, as the potential for a lot to go wrong is still there. However, Salvatore has also shown potential for a lot to go right. I’d really like to see the future bring much more of the latter than of the former.

Timeless represents a turning point in the Drizzt saga, as well as for the Forgotten Realms as a whole. The Drizzt franchise has been licensed to an external publisher for the first time since its conception, and with that many changes have come. Salvatore has declared that as far as he’s concerned, the “Legend of Drizzt” is over, and that Timeless represents a new story, that anyone could leap into. While this is certainly true at some level, I feel, after reading the book, that it may not stand alone anywhere near as effectively as it stands as part of Drizz't's overall story. Perhaps stating that the legend of Drizzt ended with Hero is not altogether accurate.

I’m a huge critic of Salvatore’s work, as well as being extremely critical of it. Perhaps sometimes I’m critical to a fault, but hey, I’ve got a lot of emotional investment in one of the characters he’d created (can you guess who? ;P) and I’m passionately in love with the world that character lives in. However, it was love of the character that led me to my love of the world, and if I didn’t love the world as much as I do, I might’ve fallen out of love with Artemis Entreri, especially after the treatment he’d been given in the Homecoming Trilogy. I’d first branched out into reading other FR novels because I wanted to learn more about the world that my favorite character lives in, so that I could better understand and portray him. What came as a result of me broadening my horizons was so much more than a deeper sense of connection to Entreri. This world became my escape of choice, one that I want to understand and know every aspect of, and the place in which I want to tell my own stories. The Forgotten Realms novels were more than simple entertainment for me, they were encyclopedias full of facts that I could compile about the world that I love, and no fact was too small for my fascination. Then, a strange thing happened (or perhaps not so strange): the more I’d read, the more I’d wondered how Salvatore became the most successful Forgotten Realms author. The Forgotten Realms franchise as a whole has a reputation for having third-rate fantasy, which is really unfair to many of the authors who published works within it, and I can’t help but imagine that this reputation has a lot to do with the fact that the Drizzt books are the most known out of the FR franchise. I do believe that the Drizzt books rightfully deserve to be called third-rate fantasy, but I’ve railed on Salvatore often and profusely in the past about what made his writing poor so I don’t need to do it again here. Timeless is a big change. As I was reading it, I was reminded of the better works in the Realms. Or, perhaps I should say, of the best works, which is high praise for Salvatore indeed, as while other low quality Realms novels are pretty forgettable in their specifics, passages from my favorite Realms novels stick in my mind, embodying within their evocative word choices the beauty and magic of the Realms. Although nothing in Timeless has made me feel transported to the side of the character, for once I could feel the tug, and that tug is the potential that never existed before.

Many times during my reading of Timeless, it felt like I was reading a different author -- a noticeably better one. I didn’t have (and still don’t have) an explanation for why this is the case, despite my having always held out a sliver of hope that Salvatore’s writing would improve. Over all of these years and too many books, I’d been disappointed over and over again. The best case scenario that I could hope for in reality was that Salvatore couldn’t get any worse, but oh boy did he get worse in the Homecoming Trilogy. Now that I’d suddenly gotten what I’d come close to giving up on, I’m really not sure how to handle it. I’m happy of course, but I want to know why and how it happened, and most importantly, if it is sustainable. Was it due to Salvatore himself, or his publisher? Unlike Wizards of the Coast, publishing books of all kinds is what Harper Collins does, and they’ve got more than enough expertise in publishing successful novels. As such, Harper Collins would have personnel who are much better equipped to assist Salvatore with all facets of his writing, and I’ve no doubt that they have editors who are better writers than Salvatore himself. I’ve seen enough good authors to freely admit that the greatest boon to their work wasn’t their own creativity but rather the contributions of their editors to know just how valuable a good editor can be. Perhaps Salvatore’s “leveling up” is due to having access to better editors. If this is the case, I do hope that they continue to help him as they did in Timeless.

I suppose it wouldn’t be fair to Salvatore to completely attribute all of Timeless’ writing improvements to his editor(s). He had to be willing to listen, to accept that what he’d written could be improved, and this wasn’t something that I’d thought he was capable of, given the thin-skinnedness that he routinely displayed on social media. Salvatore was willing to get rid of a lot of the tropes that I’d criticized him for, to the point that there are very few occurrences of what I’ve given the term “Salvatorisms”: his “cliché stable" was practically empty throughout Timeless and that alone was a huge improvement. I was so thrilled that “six hundred pounds of panther” didn’t appear even once, nor did the inane adjective of “killing” with regards to Guenhwyvar’s teeth and/or claws. Granted, Guenhwyvar didn’t have much “screen time” in Timeless, but that certainly didn’t stop those descriptors from showing up in the past, so this change is a great sign. Even more exciting than that is not a single appearance of the “how [character] [action]ed!” sentence construction reared its ugly head. This sentence construction is one of the worst Salvatorisms as well as being one of his favorites, so it’s a HUGE deal to me that it is completely absent in Timeless. For those unfamiliar with what I’m talking about, I’m referring to the overuse of expressions like, “how he howled!”, pervading Salvatore’s previous books. Now, for the first time as far as I can remember, “how he”, “how she” and “how they” are FINALLY used correctly to convey by what means and in what manner someone did something, instead of being this vague exclamation about something doing something to a degree that we’re supposed to know about because there’s an exclamation mark ending the sentence, but in fact we don’t know anything about because the quantification is completely empty. I honestly didn’t think that Salvatore could get to eliminating this so quickly AND so thoroughly. I’d expected to see a reduction of it like what happened with “six hundred pounds of panther” appearing less and less before disappearing completely. To the total elimination of the incorrect exclamations involving how things occur, I say this: Hallelujah and huzzah!

Of course, some aspects of Salvatore’s diction could still be improved. He is still exceptionally fond of using “magnificent” and “fine” for more things than he should. The former occurs 17 times throughout Timeless, which is more than in many of the previous Drizzt novels. Furthermore, 14 of those occurrences could really be substituted with more evocative and appropriate descriptors. The latter appears 53 times, and that includes the adjective forms. I didn’t count how many of those “fine”s were used as ineffectively as the 14 “magnificent”s but suffice to say, there are too many. But this isn’t a big deal and is an easy thing to fix. Even if Salvatore didn’t want to spend the time to expand his vocabulary, thesauruses are easy to come by, and even should he misuse a word, he has very capable editors to help him find an appropriate synonym.

While I certainly appreciate Salvatore changing things up, at times, I felt that he tries too hard in this regard, namely by attempting to change or create things that are fundamentally unnecessary. There were two main instances that stuck out to me. The first was the application of “fashioned”, as it applies to a gesture and then a facial expression. The former of these usages is less egregious, but the latter is just strange and awkward, as though Salvatore was trying to write in a fancy, archaic and/or eclectic way that ultimately just fails to become anything but pretentious. What makes it even more strange is that these awkward uses of “fashioned” occurs twice in one chapter, and then never appears again aside from the proper way in which the word should be used. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the other tryhard new word application: “eyeblink”. This word rubs me the wrong way for several reasons. It’s redundant, it’s awkward, it’s contrived, it’s a poor rip-off from the much more poetic measurement of time “heartbeat”, it doesn’t have any precedent in FR literature, and it just isn’t necessary. I don’t know why Salvatore felt the need to interject his own measurement of time when there is a rich plethora of it in FR, or why he’s apparently decided that he doesn’t like “breath” as an expression of a short amount of time. I couldn’t find a single usage of “breath” in Timeless following the conventional method in FR literature to mean a very short amount of time. I wouldn’t mind Salvatore changing things up and adding new things if they weren’t so artificial, and the word “eyeblink” is like an ugly speed hump there to trip up the brain as it rolls along what would otherwise be smooth passages.

So, with the negative writing style details out of the way, moving on to the positives. Unlike previous books in the Drizzt series, Timeless feels like something that Salvatore actually put in effort to write. It felt like he actually associated some degree of emotional attachment to what he was writing, rather than making a desperate bid to have all of his characters stick out in Forgotten Realms lore and/or reap in as much $$ as he could because it was his last chance to do so. While his better descriptions aren’t at the point in which they stick in my head, seeing them for the first time did make me raise an eyebrow and nod approvingly, and I do remember that they exist, but sadly, not well enough to find them again without a re-read. Salvatore does a lot better job of showing and not telling, although he still has room for improvement. Regardless, similes and metaphors color the spoon-fed flat details like how many drow soldiers marched in whose compound or how many demons stood against our heroes who are fearless because we are told, not shown, that they are fearless. Additionally, Salvatore actually tells us more details of what the characters look like. It’s still not as specific as I’d like, but knowing, for instance, that Zaknafein had/has short hair and that both he and Drizzt have less angular features than other drow is a big plus from vague or absent descriptors. Previously, we’d take the “canon” appearance of the characters based on the artists’ interpretations of them. For instance, Zaknafein was thought of and portrayed by many to have long hair with a partial-ponytail because that was how Todd Lockwood painted him, when apparently, canon is very much otherwise. We’d also not known anything about what Drizzt looked like, other than that he’s “handsome” and has purple eyes. While “less angular” still leaves much to be desired in terms of description, at least it’s more specific. A detailed accounting of someone’s facial structure has the potential to be boring, but that potential doesn’t have to be realized. As an example, perhaps Salvatore could drop a line about the shape of father and son Do’Urden’s nose and how it’s like or unlike drow noses, thereby giving us more details while at the same time providing some drow lore. Or, perhaps the next time that Drizzt quirks an eyebrow, there could be a line in there about how the shape disrupts what normally has the grace of a willow branch. I don’t know, just throwing examples out there. Although I do like “beautifully curving skull” for Jarlaxle’s head, as it conveys both his own sense of narcissism as well as his attractiveness, it leaves much to be desired in terms of details. Is Jarlaxle’s head actually prettier than the average drow head, or is that all within his own mind? We might never know.

Speaking of drow lore, Timeless does give us more of it than we’ve seen in a long time, from Salvatore at least. Part of this is because the endless machinations of the Matron Mothers of Menzoberranzan don’t provide anything new even when it’s a different Matron Mother doing the machinating. In Timeless however, we are given even more forgettable names, but we’re also provided with more glimpses into the detailed lives of the residents of the City of Spiders. We see that the priestesses of Lolth engage in activities other than praying to their goddess and having sex with each other in their endless power struggle. We meet female drow who are not just basically replicas of one another, and male drow aside from the most powerful and notable who might have more of a role to play in their society than their society would care to admit. We see more parts of Menzoberranzan than just the greatest of the noble houses. We even travel to a drow city that isn’t Menzoberranzan. We learn details such as grease and Gelatinous Cube goo being used as hair styling products by drow (or just Jarlaxle). And, of course, we’re told a lot more about the Do’Urden household, and although this topic is as uninteresting to me as Drizzt is, I still found it intriguing when Briza was revealed to be fathered by Uthegentel Del'Armgo, that Nalfein was fathered by Rizzen and inherited his lackluster nature, that Malice had killed her mother to succeed the position, and that Malice is small for a drow (smaller than males even). I’d be interested to learn who fathered Dinin and Maya. I’m not really sure what purpose it serves for us to be told that Malice is very good at sex, just as I’m not sure why it’s pertinent that Zaknafein is as well, but hey, I guess drow society needs something to gossip about. It’s probably part of the whole “sex sells” tactic, and at least it’s better than the fetishization of lesbians that Salvatore routinely engaged in in the past. Not a single incident of gratuitous sex between drow female and yochlol in drow female form occurs in all of Timeless, or any unnecessary female/female sex scenes for no reason other to titillate certain readers who enjoy the objectification of a type of people. I’m really proud of Salvatore for this, I hope that this is a trend that will continue. In any case, previously, most of the “behind the scenes” aspects of Lolthite drow societies had to be excavated from other FR books and/or resources, such as the War of the Spider Queen series, the Starlight and Shadows series, and the Underdark/drow-related D&D supplements. While Timeless doesn’t paint the full picture itself, it does a decent job of fitting into all of it if not tying it all together, and that is far more than I could say of any previous Drizzt book. In fact, the first part of the book reminded me of what it felt like when I was reading about the Underdark for the first time. After being tired of and frustrated by Salvatore for 30+ books, I’d long forgotten the sense of wonder and fascination I’d felt that first time. I think that it makes a certain degree of sense for each author who writes about the Underdark to introduce it in their own way, and although Salvatore’s was the first introduction I’d read to the Underdark, Homeland fell flat on its face compared to what Elaine Cunningham does in Daughter of the Drow. I can’t say that Timeless’ introduction to the Underdark is as good as that of DotD, but this time Salvatore has come much much closer.

Some of the details that Salvatore provides in Timeless made me recall something from one of the Underdark sourcebooks, but I can’t remember which one it is. Specifically, that sourcebook states that drow who have “off color” eyes like blue or purple are not purebred drow throughout their entire history. They’d have a surface race’s blood within their ancestry, most commonly a surface elf’s. I can’t help but wonder if Salvatore is going in the direction of a “grand reveal” that Drizzt had a surface ancestor. This would certainly explain the less angular features that he and Zaknafein share, especially if there was, say, a human ancestor in their bloodline. Furthermore, the drow as a race are horribly inbred, given how they have elitism within elitism. It is the case in our world that “mutts” are stronger and healthier than purebreds, and if we assume that that’s the case in FR genetics as well, Zaknafein and Drizzt being drow “mutts” would certainly partly explain their physical superiority among the drow. I’m a bit torn as far as my feelings regarding Salvatore linking Drizzt’s trademark purple eyes, with the supporting not as angular features, to canon established in previous source material. On one hand, I always support and clamor for Salvatore to make his books less insular, and a willingness to step back from always making everything contribute to Drizzt’s special snowflake status would show Salvatore to be not as shallow and egotistical as I’ve come to believe him to be. But ultimately, I think that I hope that Salvatore doesn’t go this route with Drizzt and Zaknafein. The “it was always meant to be!” reveal would certainly be mind-blowing to sadly most of Salvatore’s fans, but there’s a lot of problems with this trope, other than that it’s incredibly cliché. The idea that “goodness” being bred into him rather than a choice that he made would really rob Drizzt of the significance of his morality, as well as convey the really problematic message that what we are is more predetermined by accidents of birth than by our own choices. From an in-universe perspective, it would also imply that purebred drow are inherently evil, which has been a consistent theme in Salvatore’s books. However, the history of the drow indicates that this isn’t the case, but sadly, through the intentional erasure of non-evil drow deities, Salvatore has warped the canon. Most of the contents of this paragraph are speculation though, and it could just be that Salvatore isn’t going anywhere with Drizzt’s and to a lesser degree Zaknafein’s curious physical characteristics. It could just all be a coincidence, and I do hope that it is.  

So, while I like a lot of what Salvatore has done in terms of worldbuilding in Timeless, there are also things that I really don’t like. The biggest of these is what I feel to be him taking liberties with things that he shouldn’t take liberty with. It’s one thing to state that Bregan D’aerthe, which not-so-coincidentally happens to be an anagram of the words “Baenre gathered”, is one of the possible ways to say “assassins for hire” in drow, but it’s an entirely different thing to inject modern real world political things into an established canon. I’m referring specifically to this:

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE that Salvatore did this. I can’t express how thrilled I am at seeing him show a spine and take a stand against something blatantly wrong. While Salvatore expresses sentiments that I agree with on his social media, he hasn’t previously put his pen where his mouth is, and in fact has done quite the opposite. I’m referring to the aforementioned fetishization of lesbians as well as the omission of male lgbt+ characters in a world whose creator has stated that pansexuality is the default sexuality and that the concept of discrimination based on sexuality is nonexistent. So, I’ve always sort of looked at Salvatore’s “social justice” stance with more than a little skepticism, and as much as I’d like to believe in him, because that would definitely make my life easier, I couldn’t. What he’s done here is impressive because it’s the sort of thing that could get someone into a lot of trouble. He’s risking losing his conservative readership with such a move, whereas previously his writing has just always been catering to the masses, avoiding confrontation, and directed wherever the money will come from.

So then, what’s my beef? I realize this makes me sound like I’m never going to be satisfied but I possess a great deal of the love of the Realms as a whole, a love that is fueled by the contributions of the array of creatives. The Realms is a beautiful quilt comprised of pieces created by different people, each one a different style, meshing together to make this whole big amazing work of art. Although I love what Salvatore has done, I wish he didn’t do it here. I wish that he’d done it in his own books, not in the one that’s part of a shared world. What he’s done with the covfefe thing in a Forgotten Realms novel is like if he’d taken a sharpie and written “Fuck Trump” on that quilt. The sentiment is good, and most of the people that created the quilt probably agree with him, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s rudely put a jarring mark on top of the quilt. From this day onward, not only does FR canon state that the drow language contains a word that’s just all-too-coincidentally the same as the nonsense construction created by the angry tangerine currently in charge of the United States, the word is also apparently now part of an established drow concept. I don’t really care for drow, I think they’re edgy and overrated, but I feel bad for what this does to them. It makes them even more silly and artificial. Not quite to the degree of Twilight’s sparkling vampires yet but certainly trending that way if this keeps up.

While we’re on the subject of the drow, let’s talk about demons, since the two seem to be closely linked, although I can’t figure out why the drow haven’t learned from millennia of dealing with demons that it never works out in their favor. The demons are either too incompetent and stupid to get things right or are too chaotic and unpredictable to do what the drow want, or some combination of both ends up blowing plans involving them in the drow machinator’s faces. It’s truly strange that Lolthite society has survived with all of their self-destructive tendencies, courting with demons being one of them, especially since being elven folk, drow aren’t particularly fertile, even with the massive amount of sex that they have, especially when, according to Salvatore, a great amount of that sex happens between priestesses and/or with yochlols, and there are only so many hours in a day to do things. All said, the drow should be at least endangered as a species. I get that they’re supposed to be chaotic but it’s gotten past the point of starting to get ridiculous that this species survives in the cutthroat Underdark. Sure, there’s the whole “it’s magic!” argument, but really, that doesn’t make it an excuse for lazy worldbuilding. I can get following this route when you’re just starting out, but the Drizzt books have been out for nearly three decades now and D&D is even older. Salvatore is definitely not contributing to the practicality of this race with yet another major plot that uses demons. Besides, Rage of Demons was so 2016. I get that the novels have been put on hold for two years but it’s lazy to just pick up as if those two years haven’t happened. They have, and the Realms have experienced changes. The demon rampage should be behind us, but apparently, they’re still very much a threat to the world thanks to Salvatore. He really needs to stop doing this, he doesn’t get to dictate the flow of the Realms, WotC does, and even though WotC gives him leeway due to his moneymaking prowess, it’s still incredibly egocentric of Salvatore to command a SHARED world to move, or more accurately adhere, to his pace and his events. Heck, Salvatore isn’t even consistent with himself. I can understand the demon threat still being an active concern if the Demon Lords had succeeded in getting out of the Underdark, as the Out of the Abyss adventure proposes an alternative ending scenario in which heroes don’t save the world and Faerûn is ruled by demonic influence. But the thing is, we saw Drizzt strike down Demogorgon, and we witnessed other demon lords retreating back to the Abyss. I get that demons aren’t very smart, as they seem even more interested in pursuing self-destruction than the drow, but it should be obvious to anything with even a pea-sized brain that if the biggest and most powerful among your kind can’t succeed at something, the chances are that you, an average whatever, aren’t very likely to succeed at it either. All in all though, it doesn’t make sense for the drow to keep using demons and it doesn’t make sense for the demons to keep being willing to be used in the same repeated ploys over and over again. The demon trope is a crutch that is being leaned on by someone too lazy to create a new one. Along the same lines of the repetitive plot is the yet another attempt to take over the surface world. Matron Zhindia’s name (had to triple-check that was the correct one) is as forgettable as all other priestesses of Lolth who have tried to take over the surface world and/or hunt down Drizzt because after the first ones to do it, namely Yvonnel the Eternal and Malice, it’s really a case of been there, done that. Do we really need to see it happen (and inevitably fail) again?

I’ll break up this negativity with some Timeless plus sides. First, on the whole, Timeless does feel a lot more like a Realms novel than most if not all of its predecessors. Salvatore’s tendency was to insulate his corner of the Realms so much so that he’d ignore the existence of aspects that should have a significant bearing on his plot. Namely, the erasure of drow deities other than Lolth, notably the siblings Eilistraee and Vhaeraun, is especially glaring. Given the activities that followers of both engage in, it was very unlikely that Drizzt, or even Zaknafein, weren’t discovered by them, and brought to be among other drow of like mind. My suspicion is that acknowledging the existence of those drow would be taking away from the special snowflake status of Drizzt as the only goodly drow. What was done was petty, small-minded, disrespectful to the rest of the setting and honestly, pretty pathetic. However, and very shockingly to me, there’s a chance that Salvatore has done the unthinkable in Timeless: he might’ve made an allusion to Eilistraee. Jeyrelle Fey, a member of Bregan D’aerthe, is described as a priestess of a goddess who isn’t Lolth, but Jeyrelle wouldn’t give the details when asked by Zaknafein who her patron was. Of course, she could just as easily be a follower of Kiaransalee, another evil drow deity whose existence wouldn’t threaten Drizzt’s "special snowflake only goodly drow" status. Or, even more strangely, Jeyrelle Fey could be a follower of surface elf deity Sehanine, and as unlikely as it is for a priestess of Sehanine to be in Bregan D’aerthe, I wouldn’t put it past the guy who elevated a minor and unrelated nature goddess to a position that should’ve been occupied by the drow deities whose portfolio specifically included non-Lolthite drow. Still, I’m holding out hope for the best case scenario. Yvonnel 2.0 is still receiving spells from presumably Lolth, but even she recognizes that she shouldn’t be in Lolth’s favor due to the degree to which she betrayed Lolth. And really, Yvonnel 2.0 shouldn’t be in Lolth’s favor, for Lolth has dropped followers who haven’t denounced her quite as flagrantly as Yvonnel 2.0 had. It would make a lot of sense for Eilistraee to take note of and to take Yvonnel 2.0 under her wing, but I fear that Salvatore will pull the whole “Lolth loves chaos and loves this the most because it was too unpredictable even for her” card. The thing about Lolth is that, despite what she supposedly stands for, in reality, based on the way that she’s portrayed by Salvatore, she’s more about absolute devotion and getting what she wants. Chaos would mean that things would work out roughly so that she gets what she wants about as much as she gets the opposite, but we’ve seen how badly she reacts to getting even a bit of what she doesn’t want. Someone like that is about order and absolute rule, not chaos. I would like to see Salvatore accept and incorporate the existence of the entire drow pantheon into his work. I’ve always believed that acknowledging the presence of other goodly drow (or at least, not totally evil drow) outside of Drizzt’s immediate family would be a boon. If anything, it would be a great chance to make Drizzt special in a less artificial way. Especially now, as it begins to require a crane to suspend disbelief that Drizzt, and his widely-traveled and very knowledgeable friends have somehow been totally ignorant to two not insignificant sects of non-Lolthite drow. Now its definitely possible that our favorite Paladi... oh wait, uh, Ranger? has developed in a such a way that he might have some trouble relating to Eilistraeens and Vhaeraunites, I nonetheless could see him being excited when meeting them for the first time. He'd likely then feel awkward and/or put off by the specifics of their worship but even so its something that should happen. For instance, while Drizzt would certainly get along better with an Eilistraeen than a Vhaeraunite, I could see him being very uncomfortable with the ritualistic dancing naked under moonlight, as he is rather prudish. I could also see him being freaked out by the fact that male priests of Eilistraee would often participate in their ritualistic dances after using magic to change themselves into female forms. Furthermore, while Eilistraee’s followers tend to be a motherly type of matriarchal, Drizzt likely has severe enough trauma associated with matriarchies that he’d see issues where there aren’t any, which is something that he’s already prone to doing. Certainly, while experiencing all of these things, Drizzt wouldn’t be showing himself in the most positive light, which might contribute to why Salvatore is hesitant to incorporate Eilistraee and her followers into his story. But the story of Drizzt is in no small part about acknowledging your weaknesses and becoming better for it, or at least, it’s supposed to be about that, except unfortunately we’ve gotten a lot of acting out in immature ways and not really confronting existent issues but magicking in unnecessary ones for the golden boy to add to his accomplishments. Again, though, this would be a chance to set some of the past transgressions right, by finally bringing into the fold elements that should be a piece of any goodly FR drow’s history. Eilistraee’s song reaches every drow from the highest matron mother to the lowest male slave, instilling in each of them her wish for them to live in freedom and happiness. Of course, if additional development isn’t enough impetus, Drizzt being freaked out by Eilistraeens could make for some very hilarious scenes, and comedy is far from the lowest form of entertainment.

As for Vhaeraun, while Drizzt would appreciate the elevation of male drow to equal status as female drow, the specifics of what Vhaeraun stands for, especially as he’s represented in 5th edition, would be antithetical to Drizzt’s beliefs. Nonetheless, interacting with a Vhaeraunite would be an interesting moral quandary for Drizzt, for it’s possible for one to not be overtly evil, especially when he could relate to their desire to oppose and free themselves and others like them from the Lolthite matriarchy. Drizzt loves projects, and the starting material would be something that he could relate to better than he’d ever could and can to Artemis Entreri. There’s some great storytelling potential here if Salvatore would just embrace more of the Realms rather than shutting it out.

There’s a great deal of emphasis placed in Timeless about it being unknown where Zaknafein’s soul has been all of this time. Of course, it would’ve made the most sense that Eilistraee or Vhaeraun scooped it up before Lolth got her clutches on it, and that result would even be consistent with when Cadderly inquired about Zaknafein’s soul and found that it was in a “good place”. The Demonweb Pits could hardly ever be categorized as “a good place”. Salvatore could actually eliminate an inconsistency (and ho boy does he have so many inconsistencies already) by acknowledging Eilistraee and/or Vhaeraun, but I fear that the repetitive assertions of “it doesn’t matter”, as spoken by the Priestesses of Lolth as well as by the narration is just yet another nail in the coffin of the hope that Salvatore will acknowledge Eilistraee and Vhaeraun at last.

I’m always a little scared whenever Salvatore touches a character that wasn’t created by him. I still feel that it was self-aggrandizing when he had Alustriel Silverhand, who is usually very busy with large-scale threats to Toril as a whole, take so much of an interest in Drizzt that she agrees to personally teach Catti-Brie magic. It isn’t quite as ridiculous as relegating Elminster to that role, but I suppose if it were Elminster, Salvatore couldn’t hint to the average reader that there might’ve been something more than friendship between Drizzt and Elminster, although I’d have so much more respect for him if he was open-minded enough to do that. Unfortunately, Drizzt’s encounter with Alustriel took place during the over two decades of books in which the only creatures capable of non-heterosexuality were universally female. Oh, and pedophiles. This period was obviously not exactly known for its flattering representations. But I do think that incorporating the unfolding fate of Dagult Neverember into Timeless is a good choice, for not only does it introduce some intrigue that isn’t the typical and vastly overdone Menzoberranzan intrigue, it fleshes out a story in a way that is in accordance with what we’ve been told already. The stuff that happens in late 4th edition leading up to now has set Neverember up in a position where he isn’t well-liked by people in his world or those outside of it, and those who have been following the tale wouldn’t mind reading the details about his ultimate fate. I have a feeling that the events that happen in the cities, especially Waterdeep, was designed to dovetail with the events in the upcoming adventure, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. Timeless does leave us wanting for details for a location as rich in lore as Waterdeep, and while other authors have done a much better job of painting the details of the City of Splendors in their works, I don’t really mind that Salvatore doesn’t meet their measure because of what we were given in Death Masks, as well as what I hope we will receive from the two Waterdeep adventures. I’m ok with Salvatore not trying to reinvent the wheel especially when said wheel is already so smooth and well-crafted already.

Even with a cursory view of Waterdeep, I’m glad that Salvatore dared venture within it. I can imagine that it’s a daunting task, not like the much smaller by comparison Luskan, or even the still under construction Neverwinter. By stepping into Waterdeep, he’s tapping into a rich Realms resource, and unless he’s desperate to make his mark on it like he did upon the Realms in the Homecoming Trilogy, Salvatore only stands to benefit. Using the location of Thornhold as a plot point is also a good move in my opinion, as it is a place with a history that’s been explored in other works, leaving behind a precedent that Salvatore can build upon instead of overwrite, and thus far, he’s done a good job of building instead overwriting. It’s also really refreshing to see Salvatore write a drow city that isn’t Menzoberranzan. With all the emphasis placed on Menzoberranzan, readers not familiar with the Forgotten Realms as a whole would likely think that it’s the ONLY drow city in the Underdark. Certainly, Menzoberranzan is arguably the most zealous Lolthite city, but if one has not read the War of the Spider Queen books, one might not even know about the existence of drow strongholds outside of Menzoberranzan. Of course there’s the chance that Drizzt-only readers of the Realms now think that Menzoberranzan and Ched Nasad are the only drow cities, which is a shame since Ched Nasad is no longer exists. However, it’s still great that Salvatore acknowledges Ched Nasad in his own publication, which is different from it appearing in a project he supposedly oversaw. With the existence of a second drow city, it’s easier for readers to imagine that there are third, fourths, and many more out there. Furthermore, Salvatore’s description of Ched Nasad, including how the characters in Timeless use its unique structure to do combat, is true to and consistent with how it was portrayed in the past. In all of this, it’s so good to see Salvatore work in conjunction with that which was left by his peers. I want to see him doing more of this sitting at the table expanding the tapestry, rather than writing his name in sharpie all over what’s been woven before.

One of the things that Salvatore does is serve up ridiculously souped-up versions of classics in D&D. Guenhwyvar is perhaps the best example of this tendency, as in addition to being immeasurably more powerful than a normal figurine of wondrous power, she’s also intelligent and possessing of free will. She gets to choose her owner, for even though the magic of the figurine has some ability to compel her, as we saw with Masoj Hun’ett, ultimately,  Guenhwyvar calls the shots for herself. In Timeless, we see that Salvatore’s not done with the already overpowered Guenhwyvar, for Catti-brie the Chosen of Mystra is looking into ways to extend her ability to stay on the Prime Material Plane, which means that soon, we’ll see Guenhwyvar being even more unlikely to be matched by anything similar. Is it really necessary to make Guenhwyvar even more overpowered? As if that’s not enough, Salvatore has to change one of the basic and most commonly practiced D&D spells: Comprehend Languages. For those unfamiliar with D&D, Comprehend Languages is a first level divination spell that multiple different classes can take. Even though taking it would mean giving up one of your first level spell slots in lieu of a combat spell, many low level characters take it anyway because of how useful it is. However, being a first level spell, it should serve no more than what it’s intended to do, namely, help a character understand languages that they don’t understand, and even then only providing the literal meaning. What Salvatore has done with it is made it into something that should be a much higher level spell, because according to him, using it on a person enough times helps that person to learn the language. The quantity that constitutes “enough” can’t be all that high either, because Zaknafein hasn’t been with Drizzt and Catti-brie for all that long. Comprehend Languages lasts an hour, and there are only so many hours in a day to necessitate refreshing the spell. Catti-brie is probably high enough level enough of a wizard that casting all of those spells wouldn’t be a problem, but unless they were unnecessarily refreshing the spell before the duration wore off, which they’d have no reason to do, what Salvatore has done is make a basic spell into something much more powerful. What’s the point of learning languages at all if one could just be zapped with a bunch of first level spells to gain a language that would be appropriate to a situation rather than finding oneself with an inappropriate language for one’s station in life? This modification is just unnecessary and is one of those shared world elements that Salvatore shouldn’t be tampering with. It’s one thing that Drizzt in the novels is an unbeatable master swordsman but the character sheet version of him is a total joke by comparison, but it’s another to start giving plot armor to fundamental spells just because it makes Salvatore’s own job easier.

For better or worse, one of the most talked about aspects of the Drizzt books is the combat scenes. Some people think that they’re great, but I’ve never much cared for them even before I’d learned about how they’re written more like hockey games than sword to sword combat. There’s a lot of chopping and slashing using weapons that are designed to stab and pierce, and I’ve never understood why Drizzt specializes in cavalry blades when he’s never engaged in the style of mounted combat for which those blades are designed. But, I suppose in a world with magical weapons that aren’t breakable by mundane means, people can do whatever they want with their weapons, but that does beg the question of why they choose a specific shape of weapon other than to “look cool”, a factor which should be at the very bottom of any self-respecting martial artist’s list of priorities. Nonetheless, Salvatore’s fight scenes, especially ones involving drow, tend to be rote and formulaic. After the first few books or so, the fight scenes don’t offer anything fresh, and the many pages in which they’re described just tends to run on and not serve any purpose, especially when Salvatore often uses the same adjectives over and over again, i.e. “wades in”, “whirling scimitars”, “pumping arm”, “blades working in circles”, etc. This has gotten so bad in the Homecoming Trilogy that the phenomenon that I’ve come to describe as C-rated Hollywood stop-motion battle scenes was high praise. Timeless sees a marked improvement in that the fight scenes are truncated and punchier, and the aforementioned descriptors that are repeated endlessly throughout the series hardly make an appearance at all. A large part of this might be attributable to the fact that Drizzt isn’t the focus of Timeless, Zaknafein arguably has stolen that position. Furthermore, although we’ve never seen him use a whip before, the whip has suddenly become one of Zaknafein’s core weapons in Timeless, so much so that we barely see him in combat without one. He is a Weapons Master, so presumably he has expertise with a plethora of weapons, however the whip is portrayed to be such a central part of his fighting style in both his past and present incarnations that it’s more than a little strange that we’ve never seen him use one before. I suspect that this was done largely to change up the fight scenes, and honestly, it’s a pretty lazy approach. It was strongly implied that Zaknafein was the most proficient with dual-wielding fighting style, which is something that he’d imparted upon Drizzt through training. However, we’ve seen so much of Drizzt’s dual-wielding and are likely to see a lot more. Salvatore could’ve perhaps done some more research into various dual-wielding styles so as to distinguish between father and son, but instead he took the lazy route and introduced another inconsistency into a work that already has so many that it hardly needs more.

Speaking of inconsistencies, it’s strange and difficult to suspend disbelief when we see Drizzt struggling against two normal marilith demons when he’d defeated Marilith, the greater demon responsible for the name of her race. That happened when he didn’t have the new and improved Twinkle-reforged-with-Vidrinath. Along the same lines of it being difficult to suspend disbelief, there’s no tension when any member of the Companions of the Hall are “in danger”. Even before they’d died and come back to life, they’ve been in “mortal peril” for more times than I can count but always managed to survive. This pattern has continued to repeat, for as we’ve seen, even a literally world-shattering event designed to kill off short-lived races wasn’t enough to penetrate their plot armor. The scene with Regis and the Water Weird was neat, however I rolled my eyes at the “tension”. After everything that Regis had gone through, the suggestion that there was a chance that he’d die alone and undiscovered in the sewers beneath Waterdeep is just melodramatic. Were Salvatore R. R. Martin, I might’ve not been sure, but Salvatore’s star characters are immune to death to the degree that they’re immune to danger. The final thing that really makes me roll my eyes at is how we’re supposed to believe that Jarlaxle still has a chance of betraying the Companions of the Hall. I get that he’s supposed to be a very unpredictable character who ultimately is in it for himself but he’s shown himself to go to great lengths and expend unimaginable resources to help the CotH. He’s not only one of their most powerful and resourceful allies, but also one of the most steadfast. He might be the way he’s supposed to be with other people, but at least with regards to the CotH, Salvatore has made him so pathetically predictable that the CotH must truly be very stupid, or otherwise very hypocritical, to still suspect him. It’s really a shame what Salvatore has done with Jarlaxle, in his usual way of “redeeming” all the characters he’s made them flat, one-dimensional and calculable. Jarlaxle’s also lost a lot of his edge and sense of menace, he is far from what he used to be in the earlier books, and not in a good way.

On the bright side, the flashbacks to Jarlaxle and Zaknafein’s past are memorable. Perhaps this is because their story is one that Salvatore has wanted to tell for a long time and has already written most of, leaving him more time to tweak it before the finalization of Timeless. I feel that those scenes have more the mark of having been pondered thoroughly and extensively than the much more forgettable “current” events in Timeless. The thing that sticks out the most in my mind among those latter events are the fight scenes involving dwarves. Salvatore’s definitely a lot better at writing dwarven combat than he is at writing drow combat. His dwarven characters also talk a lot more consistently like Realmsians, which can’t be said of his other characters. It’s not as jarring as the dialogue in the Brimstone Angels books but, “You mean the dead guy out at the desk”? Seriously?

Zaknafein was my first favorite character. He gradually slid out of this role for me because he died before we got to know him very well. As time went on and I got to know the rest of the cast better, I became of the opinion that the only reason that Zaknafein remained cool was because he’d been dead, thus not giving Salvatore a chance to do to him what he’d done to Jarlaxle and Artemis Entreri. With Zaknafein’s resurrection, since I no longer cared about him one way or another, I was more curious than dreading to see what Salvatore might do to him. This hasn’t happened, and I hope for the sake of readers who love Zaknafein still, the ones capable of introspection and analysis, that it doesn’t happen. Other than the weird thing with the whip, Zaknafein feels about the same. Which, while it isn’t a bad thing, unfortunately, it isn’t really a good thing either for a character who has a book dedicated to him to not receive much development beyond what he was before. My feelings toward Zaknafein have evened to a bland neutrality that wasn’t piqued one way or another by the characterization in Timeless. For lack of a better word, Zaknafein is boring. His key defining feature in the early books was that he stood out from the rest of the drow in that he possessed mercy and wasn’t a senseless killing machine, except for when it involved Priestesses of Lolth. However, Drizzt has usurped the role of being the “only good drow” so thoroughly that not even his father can share the limelight. So, Zaknafein had to pick up a different defining feature that sets him apart from his son, and that defining feature turns out to be drow racial elitism. I’m actually quite pleased with this choice, because it does make sense for Zaknafein to have it. He might not think that “lower” lifeforms are worthy of death, but he had lived in a society that heavily indoctrinated that mindset into its members for centuries, unlike Drizzt who’d spent most of his time on the surface and experienced the pains of racism directly. What I also like about Zaknafein’s elitism is that it makes him similar to male drow from other FR series, namely, Ryld Argith from the War of the Spider Queen books. Ryld wasn’t a bad guy, but he wasn’t a good guy either, as I’d realized when he watched indifferently as a surface dweller died while he could’ve done something to save them. Zaknafein is perhaps more of  a “good guy” than Ryld was, but he’s not Drizzt. This is actually really good that Zaknafein isn’t another special snowflake, but instead someone who could embody the mentality of drow males in general in the oppressive Lolthite matriarchy. It makes him more believable as a character, and his world more reasonable. While I said that the characterization of Zaknafein is boring, I do feel that it shows experience and maturation of Salvatore as a writer. I may just be being optimistic, but the sense I get from Zaknafein is that Salvatore’s years of writing Drizzt has taught him something that he applied to Zaknafein. Perhaps it’s because Zaknafein manages to be similar enough to Drizzt without being annoying, since he doesn’t preach and act sanctimoniously. I do wish that Salvatore would let Zaknafein become his own character though, without the none-too-subtle comparisons between him and Artemis Entreri. Jarlaxle may like Entreri as much as he likes Zaknafein, but the two are dissimilar enough that it’s really pushing a forced point to keep drawing the analogy. At times with Zaknafein, I also felt like Salvatore didn’t fully think out aspects of his character. For instance, Zaknafein professes to not care about House Simfray, and he shouldn’t given his character, yet he still wanted to personally slay Matron Hauzz for destroying “his” house. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because most if not all of the males of House Simfray, whom are the only things that Zaknafein cared about as far as that was concerned, were rescued and claimed by Bregan D’aerthe. It could’ve been just an excuse to kill another Priestess of Lolth, but Zaknafein expended a major bargaining chip with Jarlaxle to attain something that didn’t have that much value. It’s yet another typical Salvatore not well-thought out inconsistency.

All in all though, Zaknafein is all right. He might be being used as a symbol of regressive perspectives, but he’s mature enough to try to reconcile himself to literally a whole new world, while knowing when to hold his tongue. I got the feeling that Zaknafein was really trying his best, and although he gives in to his biases at times, the occasions aren’t extreme and are very understandable given his circumstances. I think that, whether it was by intention or not, Zaknafein is actually a good role model, because he never loses sight of what’s most important, and actually acts consistently with that fact. Even though it’s difficult for him to stomach the idea of his flesh and blood with an iblith mate, he doesn’t avert his eyes, but instead takes in the love that Drizzt shares with Catti-brie, and struggles to reconcile himself with it. When he knows that his beliefs don’t fit in a certain environment, rather than broadcasting them and/or forcing them down others’ throats, he attempts to keep them to himself. Zaknafein actually places the most important thing to him, his son, before himself, and is willing to go so far as to take himself out of that most important thing’s life because he thought that it was what was best for Drizzt. Drizzt, on the other hand... I’m not sure if it’s Salvatore’s intention to paint his golden boy in such a negative light, but I sincerely hope that it was his intention, because if he considers Drizzt’s behavior to be the right course of action, I’m going to be even more leery of people who try to emulate Drizzt.

One of the things that have always concerned me more than a little is how much of a pedestal Drizzt is elevated to in Salvatore’s novels, even when he does some really questionable things, and then those things are blamed entirely on the other party involved in the activities. Quite frankly, the thought of people emulating Drizzt terrifies me, because Drizzt has routinely engaged in activities that are very problematic. Even though he believes himself to be empathetic and sensitive to the needs of others, the reality is that his actions don't align with his statements. Drizzt is very egocentric, he surrounds himself with people who don’t do a lot of deep thinking and who only disagree with him on minor things. Other than the sanctimony and preachiness, Drizzt’s most problematic trait is that he’s convinced that he knows what the “correct” path is, and that the best way to “save” someone who has strayed from that path is to have them follow in his own footsteps. He has been through a lot, sure, but it’s still far from having experienced everyone’s hardships. Even though Salvatore would rather bestow upon Drizzt the opportunity to struggle with magically-imparted mental illness instead of exploring that experience through a character that would actually struggles with it (*cough* Entreri *cough*), Drizzt is still a far cry from being an expert on all things. However, Drizzt certainly seems to think that in his two short centuries that he’s seen everything, and his self-righteous diary entries are more insufferable than ever. Especially the one in which he goes on about how much he’s grown, it’s really hard not to roll my eyes and gag at it. Far from being shining examples of good, Drizzt and the Companions of the Hall are very similar in effect to a popular clique in high school, carrying about like they’re the best and the model of what’s right, living in an echo chamber of their own beliefs. Occasionally they’ll take pity on a deviant and try to “fix” them by pushing them down the same path that they followed, but really, Drizzt and the CotH are privileged in many respects. This sort of practice, the belief that Drizzt possesses that “evil” people need to be “redeemed” following the way that he knows best isn’t too different from the mentality behind practices like conversion therapy.

Had I any faith in Drizzt left, I would’ve lost the last of it in Timeless. There are two main things that contribute to this. The first is that Drizzt is disgustingly vain. I get that he’s supposed to be humble, but anyone who preaches about humility as much as he does doesn’t truly understand the concept. At least he’s self-aware enough to admit that he enjoys being in shape and that it’s flattering when Catti-brie spies on him during his morning practices. However, although he holds his tongue from lecturing Yvonnel about being vain, he doesn’t realize that her making her eyes the same color as his in order to entice him, and that tactic being effective, is a sign of the depths of his own vanity. Perhaps this is no big deal, but I don’t find vanity either heroic or noble, and since Drizzt is inflated to be one of the greatest heroes of all time, it dismays me that he possesses these sorts of qualities. More egregious though is Drizzt’s treatment of his own father, by which I was thoroughly disgusted. I don’t know how anyone would come out of reading that still admiring Drizzt, and knowing that they will makes me even more leery of those unshakable Drizzt fans. Drizzt’s only redeeming feature seems to be that he’s a good fighter, but for all of his years of being alive and all of his talk of having matured so much over those years, he acts like a giant manchild. I get that he’s in emotional turmoil because of Zaknafein’s return and his own struggles of reconciliation of the past to the present, but to say that Drizzt handles that much less gracefully than Zaknafein does is a massive understatement. Drizzt’s intolerance of Zaknafein being unable to instantly see things his way is pretty typical behavior for Drizzt, but it’s especially hard to stomach because Zaknafein gave up everything, not only once, but twice, for Drizzt, and later shows himself to be willing to do it as many times as necessary. Drizzt is a disgrace, not only to the drow who sired him, but also to his monk training. Using his new abilities to literally destroy dinner with his wife and father? Seriously? Physically assaulting his father because Zaknafein couldn’t convert fast enough to his perspective? It really scares me to think about how many people out there might be cheering Drizzt on as he throws a tantrum, and I fear encountering even more people like that in this fandom, when Drizzt already inspires them to feel justified in sending people death threats for pointing out their hero’s foibles. I think that Salvatore was trying to convey that there should be no tolerance for bigotry, but he’s going about it in a really bad way. While it is indeed the case that some people out there can’t ever be changed, there are others, like Zaknafein, who can be, but in the face of a violent response, the opposite of the desired outcome is what usually comes to pass. Furthermore, not every Zaknafein will be as noble as the one in Timeless, nor will every Zaknafein continue to give the benefit of the doubt out of unconditional love for that which not only wouldn’t return that benefit but also treats him with condescension. Drizzt continues his trend of being disrespectful to people he supposedly loves with Catti-brie. When he shattered the dinner table, he not only destroyed the furniture in their house, which is hers as much as it is his, and thus not his to destroy on a whim. Further, he completely upset the dinner that she’d worked hard to make for the three of them without even a thought, to say nothing of the familial atmosphere that she was striving towards. On the plus side, Catti-brie has been really shining lately, much more so than when Salvatore pumped up her Mary Sueness by dropping god-tier arcane knowledge and magic items into her lap with little effort. If nothing else, that woman deserves to be the Chosen of some deity for putting up with Drizzt’s bullshit. Catti-brie does everything that Drizzt should’ve done with Zaknafein, and although I’ve felt distaste for her since her resurrection, I’d have to give her credit for putting aside her own emotions to try to connect with someone even though the object of that someone’s disgust is herself.

Finally, we come to Artemis Entreri, who is responsible for leading me to the rest of the Realms, and who is the main reason that I continue reading the Drizzt books. It goes without saying then that Entreri is very close to my heart, and the handling of him in the Homecoming Trilogy was probably the lowest point of, in my opinion, the weakest trilogy of all the dark elf books. I think that it’s very telling that the people who celebrate all of Drizzt’s foibles, who believe in things like Dahlia being totally to blame for everything that transpired between Drizzt and her and feel that she deserves to die for her actions, think that Entreri’s “redemption arc” is the greatest thing ever. Needless to say, I disagree, as I’ve made clear in my review/analysis of Hero, but thankfully, Timeless seems to backtrack a little bit from the disagreeable conclusions made in the novel preceding it. The main problem with Entreri in Hero is that, much like what happened to Jarlaxle over the years in the Drizzt books, he’s lost his dangerous edge. We’re told repeatedly that he’s dangerous and deadly but the ease to which he conforms to the CotH’s code regarding “friends” thoroughly defanged him. So he kills a few priestesses of Lolth, but they’ve become like the Red Shirts of Star Trek, and it no longer felt like Entreri would do whatever it takes to achieve something in the most efficient way, with no time wasted on moral quandaries as he eliminates anyone who dares to obstruct him. In Hero, he read very much like a poorly thought-out facsimile of who he’s supposed to be, bent to the writer’s whim in order to achieve some cheap effect that the writer feels would gain the most positive response from an unthinking and very social-normative mass. I found this especially tragic because this nonsensical sort of character twisting that hardly deserves to be called “development” is what happens in the type of fanfiction that gives it and those writing it a bad rep. For all of my criticism of Salvatore, before Hero, I’d never felt that his canon was worse than fanfiction, and, well, Hero took me there. Timeless does bring back some of what made Entreri great, for instance, he gets some of that edge back in through his display of confidence, nonchalance and directness. His sarcasm is, for the most part, appropriate and characteristic, rather than thrown in at awkward moments to make that weak facsimile. However, what tempers all of this is that he’s too chatty, too willing to reveal things that he shouldn’t be willing to reveal, especially given to whom it is that he exposes himself. I understand that Salvatore wants to put Entreri in there for Entreri fans, as well as to touch base with what Entreri’s up to, but it’s done in a lazy and forced way, akin to what was done with Entreri in Hero, albeit not quite so bad. The character responsible for drawing this information out of Entreri is someone whom at most has a business relationship with Entreri. Clearly, the two don’t much care for one another, and add in the fact that the halfling is a wizard and thus someone that Entreri likes a little more than he likes priests, it makes little sense that Entreri would disclose what he does in this very short exchange. First, Entreri would’ve simply stopped at a shrug at most when Wigglefingers asserted that he cared for Jarlaxle and Drizzt. More likely, Entreri would’ve just stared at Wigglefingers unblinkingly, rather than revealing that he does care for them with his small nod. Second, and immediately thereafter, while Entreri might mention his reasons for needing payment to Wigglefingers, it’s unlikely that he’d mention Dahlia. He might to Jarlaxle or someone with whom he shares a longer history, but certainly not someone who’s barely a business associate that he also holds in contempt. Mentioning Dahlia not only represents him willingly divulging a potential weakness of his, but also puts her in danger. These are two things that Entreri would never allow if he could help it. Finally, and the instance that pitches Timeless’ Entreri back into Hero’s Entreri were the case an isolated one, is what would be a tirade for the assassin about caring for his friends. It doesn’t matter that this speech is delivered after a long pause, it shouldn’t have been said by Entreri at all. Wigglefingers is nothing more than a middleman, possessing less significance to his organization than Entreri to Jarlaxle. Entreri wouldn’t think it worth his time to correct the halfing wizard’s ignorance. Furthermore, how easily Entreri throws out the word, “friend”, just feels extremely unnatural. It indicates strongly to me that in addition to not knowing how to write a character who has experienced even an ounce of the betrayal and distrust that Entreri has, Salvatore either never met anyone like that, or is unable to project his thinking into the mind of someone like that. This isn’t surprising given how Drizzt is, but all in all, I find it discouraging. It was sad enough seeing Jarlaxle lose all of his teeth as far as the CotH is concerned, it’s very distressing and discouraging to see Entreri trend towards becoming a simpering follower of the CotH as well. Entreri’s tirade alarmingly has notes of the sanctimony and preachiness that Drizzt’s journal entries have, and I really hope that Salvatore stops going down this road of wish fulfillment for the social-normative crowd with Entreri. It’s so counter-intuitive how much he does this already in a series that’s about being different and reconciling with that, and he’s already got Drizzt as well as a lot of other characters to do this with. He doesn’t need to do it with Entreri too. Not everyone’s happily-ever-after is to be married and surrounded by friends as they go together “helping” everyone “in need”. Let the journey of recovery from a lifetime of abuse and trauma be enough for what it is. Heck, there are plenty of real people out there who can’t hope to even achieve this much, because it’s a lot harder than it looks, and connecting with others isn’t always possible. Give them something to relate to too, not everything has to become a Drizzt clone.

I don’t normally talk about the artwork for the Forgotten Realms novels because, on the whole, I find it very good. After they moved past the initial awkward phase of old man Drizzt and strangely busty illithids, I feel that they’ve been really good and on point. Todd Lockwood did a superb job of settling a strong precedent that his successors followed well, and even during that brief phase in which the Drizzt covers looked like Drizzt was modeling for hair product advertisements, nonetheless, the quality of the art was present. I could scarcely believe that the artist who did the cover for Timeless was the same as the one who did the covers for the Homecoming Trilogy. Other than for the cover of Hero (let’s face it, everything about that book was a complete disaster), Aleksi Briclot demonstrated mastery sufficient to put him alongside Lockwood. I’ve read the exposé regarding the conception of Timeless’ cover art, and I sort of understand what they were going for, but my biggest question remains: why?! Briclot did make a valiant effort to deliver what they asked for but the end result has me wondering who the heck approved this thing. It’s just ugly. It’s messy, chaotic, confused and overall looks like someone tried and missed badly. It’s an embarrassment for Briclot’s portfolio and I’d hope that he doesn’t show it even as a demonstration of his ability to “branch out”, because it’s a total disgrace to the Sumi art style that they apparently wanted him to emulate. Sumi art, or Sumi-e, is a style that has a great deal of tradition, and the philosophy behind it is very interwoven with the Eastern cultures that practice it. More than a visual art, Sumi-e is a belief, a practice, a lifestyle. It’s about so much more than the elegance of the brushstrokes and the patience and dedication that goes into mastering them. Understanding the harmony in working with how the ink permeates through the Xuan paper is akin to meditation in the journey towards enlightenment. Because of all the spiritual elements associated with Sumi-e and the aspects that have to do with the specific nature of the media, it is difficult to replicate digitally. Some have made good efforts in doing so, but most of the time, digital Sumi-e attempts fail to convey the sense of flow that is characteristic of traditional Sumi-e pieces. It can be achieved, but a lot more time needs to be invested in manually adding in emulations of the effects of ink permeating Xuan paper, as well as a good understanding of fluid dynamics and the paper’s qualities to achieve the proper impression. The thing about Timeless’ cover is that, while the gold isn’t a bad touch, the brushstrokes are messy. They bear no relation to one another. Far from conveying the sense of interconnectness that any Sumi-e piece is supposed to, Timeless’ cover art feels like lines forced together, and the “energy” I read in it is disruptive rather than peaceful. I feel like it’s a stack of sticks that have been sloppily tied together, ready to burst apart. Not all Sumi-e has to be zen either, there are as varied pieces as in any other media, however an overarching theme that’s central to Sumi-e is self-consistency and flow. Sumi-e pieces that convey tension and chaos have a powerful impact in which all of it synchronously does so, but the cover art for Timeless is anything but synchronous, and there is about as much flow as a river that’d been blockaded by a pile up of litter. There are so many different themes going on in one piece, and before you ask, no, that’s not a good thing. Sadly, it’s probably too late to not follow through with this Sumi-e travesty for the rest of the trilogy, but I do hope that the art director doesn’t decide anything so ridiculous again.

All in all, Timeless is a clear and definite improvement for the Drizzt series. I was dreading a reality in which the Drizzt books were the only Forgotten Realms novels that we’ll get, and I’d preferred that the Drizzt line died out with the rest of the FR novel line rather than drag its legacy through the mud. Over the years, I feel that Salvatore has taken a lot more away from the shared world than he added to it, so a future with only Drizzt seemed bleak indeed. While it seems unlikely that there will be any other FR novels, Timeless makes me dare to hope that reality might not be as bad as I’d feared. Although one of my favorite things about FR is the plethora of different voices and styles contributing stories to it, I’m not inherently opposed to one voice doing all of it, so long as that voice is considerate of those that came before it. Before Timeless, it’s always felt like Salvatore was more interested in one-upping those other voices. I really hope that the Drizzt books continue on the trend of improvement seen in Timeless, and that Salvatore will continue to write without being concerned about powering up his characters to ridiculous degrees so as to cement them in the hall of legends of the world. I hope that the experienced editorial staff at Harper Collins will continue to help him elevate his writing style. And, most of all, I dearly hope that Salvatore will broaden his thinking even more, to consider and accept the validity of different paths in life, and maybe to realize that what makes the greatest hero is the ability to accept those things, not the ability to “fix” everything. 

[shardclan]

There was a lot that Riley already knew as she waited at Thunder's March to be cleared for passage to the mainland. That the Lightning Liaison, for example, was some love-burned old battleaxe with the sense of humor of a salt lick. That she was the one who made the rules, but her primary enforcer was Paradise, who would most certainly have remembered Riley and probably taken the opportunity to have a little power trip. Good-natured or not, a mother like Paradise wouldn't forget someone who price gouged them for information on where their seemingly kidnapped child was. 

Riley was careful to have her glamour up well before she arrived at the ugly as hell copper customs check, and even though nobody in the old clan had ever seen her glamour before, she had dressed as unlike herself as possible. Her naturally harsh, angular face and beady eyes aside, she bore almost no resemblance to the Riley that was once a part of Clan Shard. And while it was an immense annoyance to be covered in flowers and lace like some prissy grandma, it had the effect she wanted.

Like a rat released into an unsuspecting silo of the finest golden grain, Riley was granted passage into the idyllic sunlight of a perfect late summer day in the Sunbeam Ruins.

Ostensibly, her primary target was the new heir. But it would be incredibly obvious to walk in and go right for her. There'd be someone eyeing her if she came on too strong. Better to make a day trip of it. Maybe update some of her long out of date records of the old clan members and see if there was anything interesting to be sniffed out among its newer members. 

The experience wasn't without its certain kind of nostalgia. As she smoothly dodged the welcome center at Noon Point, she saw a young, blindingly blonde imperial male and knew he was one of Saber and Galbana's even before she saw him happily fussing over a luscious looking cake. Her tongue flicked in irritation; their family had never given Riley anything worth keeping note of and she had been hoping they would come away a little more damaged. Instead they had another kid that was pretty much a reflection of his surroundings.

Noon Point was bright and warm and unguarded--nothing like the foot of the Focal Point, which had been dark and easy to skulk in. Here she had to lean in to the mannerisms of a lazily curious window shopper to stay inconspicuous and watch the little things happen. She bought a bauble and some cake, munching and making notes in her book as she went:

Kea, fruits and vegetables dropped off with a pearlcatcher = too many horns and a clearly visible glow. 

Parhelia-turned-pearlcatcher = Old, already-published news

Skydancer that looks on the verge of his seventh major nervous breakdown. Mail dragon. Occult shop next door. Omen’s? 

Not enough sage/inkwells laying around.

 Cloudwhyte and Alchemilla flirting in front of the Sundial Brewery like not a godsdamn thing has changed since the day they first started throwing fuck me eyes at each other. 

Even the prison looks harmless. From the outside. 

Merchant selling weapons.  Huge inventory + small stall = few buyers.

Not a true seller. Listened too hard. Waiting for me to say some keyword. Overcharged too.

A fae with a sewing basket at his stall - something exchanged. She left the basket.

Primsy. Seamstress. Same guild as Fletch/Willowalk. Helping the weapons trade somehow?

Eventually, she had meandered to the edge of the point, well beyond the transient bazaars, to find what she was looking for. The library was tall and stately and warded like a vault. She noted uncomfortably that some soft, not particularly martial-looking serthis (by their species standards, anyway) were visible through the enormous windows on the ground floor. They were speaking with a pearlcatcher that bore an impossibly strong resemblance to a mossy cerdae.

Noisily sucking sugar off her fingers, she ambled up the steps and made her way inside and to the upper floors, padding as silently as possible. She had reliable intel that the mages in the clan were only allowed to practice their magic at the top floor, and the new queen was supposedly well on her way to becoming an archmage, so it made as much sense as anywhere else.

"Does it hurt at all?" a small voice asked.

Riley stopped, and had her notebook and pencil out in a single flick of her hands.

"It feels weird," a much bigger, scratchier voice answered. "Doesn't hurt though. Are you sure you're okay, your majesty?"

Two females, and that 'your majesty' certainly wasn't being directed at Telos. Riley peeked her head above the floorboards, and spotted the large one first. Guardian woman with cherub patterns, deeply red and incredibly messy hair, pink and blue opal. She was holding hands with a small fae girl whose age Riley couldn't quite figure out, but she was wearing a white crown that every now and again flickered with a vaguely pink facet. That would be 'her majesty', the Heiress Rebis. 

Where her hand met the guardian's, there was a deep pink stain in the coloration. But more interestingly, the opalescence was actually growing. Not spreading but jutting out in the distinct pale blue quartz formations distinct to celestine.

"We always thought my opalescence was inert," the guardian said curiously. "Guess not."

Rebis pulled her hand back, and looked thoughtfully at her own hands. "Rubranova, I can't approve of this. We don't know what effect that has on you."

"Sure we do." She reached down the spire that had growing from her forearm and with the brutish strength of a healthy young guardian, broke it off. The sound elicited a small shriek from the heiress, but Riley watched silently with a rapt and almost lustful expression, scribbling as fast as her fingers would go. 

Rubranova flexed her hand and waggled the rod of celestine at Rebis. "You shouldn't freak out like that. I'm a doctor. Or at least, I'm a doctor's daughter. Good enough. Anyway, your eyes are gold again. First time since you came back."

"That's not enough to put you ask risk," Rebis insisted.

"Sure ain't. So we're going to go to Ashes and get me re-checked. See if this is poisoning me or something. At the very least, this means I should be your aide or something. Who else is going to be able to help you in an emergency? Me being there might be the difference between life and death for you, you know?"

Rebis' fins drooped. "You don't...even know me."

"You're the next queen. And I might be able to help you in a way no one else can. Isn’t that enough?"

"You're barely grown!" the heiress cried earnestly. “Too young to be burdened with this.”

Riley watched Rubranova scratch her chin with the piece of celestine that had previously been a part of her body. She seemed more confused than offended.

"So are you."

Riley snapped her book shut and slid down the railing back to the ground floor. She couldn't believe she was lucky enough to have caught all that. A jaguar-patterned bogsneak she didn’t recognize reprimanded her at the bottom.

"A strange choice of place to use as your playground," she remarked with an imperiously raised brow. “Another place will suit your whims better, I think.”

"Sorry," Riley said with a barely contained grin. "I'm just on my way out. Can I ask you something, though? I just saw a beauty of a guardian up there. All red, kinda pinky blue opal? You know anything about her?"

"Rubranova," she answered with a slow nod. "Spare your attempts to woo her. The Tahalils are a family of beauty, but that one has no interest in romance or its pleasures."

“Tahalils?”

“The doctors,” she clarified. 

Haematica’s stock then, Riley thought with a slight needle of worry. One of Haematica’s daughters had married a son of Camellia’s. As Riley remembered it, Camellia had always mated with rarer breeds, but it wasn’t as though that was a rule. She didn’t have any rules. Rubranova might very well be Camellia’s grandchild, and with Heaven supposedly missing, that wasn’t anything she wanted to be caught dabbling in. That meant getting far, far away from Noon Point. 

She took a flight through the southeast part of the territory, admiring just how much like a crystalspine House Betelgeuse really looked. (And truthfully admiring even more that they had convinced the Lightweaver to let such an obvious Arcane structure stand so monolithic on her land. There was dirt there but even she wasn’t stupid enough to defy a deity their privacy. At least not when she wasn’t sure she could get away with it. ) She curved around, peering down at the geometrically perfect concentric columns and arcade of the Court of Five Lights. As curious as she was, that place would be full of familiar faces. And the last thing she wanted was to cross paths with Azricai. House Perihelion and the Leyline Gardens dotted the landscape in the far west, but lacked the grandeur of the central and eastern districts. With no idea where the little imperator of the clan would be, she swung north toward the Shadow border. 

Riley had wanted to visit Bramble Step since the day she first heard about it. And it didn’t disappoint her. 

The fog! The darkness! The dedication of the people to keeping their head down but their ears open! The constant whisper of secrets being exchanged! It was the closest she had ever felt to patriotism. 

“--angry you think she’ll be?”

“This close to leaving and the wedding still in the works? She’ll probably want to throttle the little asshole.”

Riley froze at the familiar voices, and melted easily into the nearest fog bank, squinting busily at her book. Her mind raced, because she thought one of those voices was Atsushi and they had been on terms of a reasonable kind once. Trading him information on where Carnelian was at any given time had once been both a great way to keep tabs on eastern sornieth’s goings on, and an even better way to piss Carnelian off. 

But far more importantly, her adrenaline was racing because she knew damn well the other voice was Carnelian himself. It didn’t make sense. Atsushi was literally everything Carnelian hated. Obsessive, two-faced, self-serving, all but blind to personal boundaries, and a necromancer on top of that. Hell, she had specifically let it slip to Atsushi that Carnelian wasn’t solely into females to make their interactions worse and Carnelian had shown up the very next day and tried to tear her horns off. And now they were chatting? Amicably? What the fuck was going on? 

Something good, the more focused part of her mind pointed out. 

“She wouldn’t do that,” Atsushi said casually. 

“Not a chance. But it would take a saint to not at least consider it. As long as Junior and Jorah are fine, she’ll accept it.” 

“I mean, they were when I left, but I felt Camellia around so they might be dead now.”

“Mmm, something happened at House Betelgeuse so Lutia went out there too.”

“...We might be able to go save them,” Atsushi teased, smirking.

Carnelian snorted, but Riley could see him grinning. “Eleven rest them and you too if you want that suicide mission.”  

 A cloud of smoke scented of sweet tobacco and fiery cindermint joined the fog, turning Riley’s stomach. His choice in smokes was still abysmal. She didn’t dare move, so she strained to hear them as they passed her by.

“So is it technically the Twelve now?”

“Nah, I don’t think so, it’s not like he’s a separate element. Maybe it explains the Arcanist’s constellation though.”

“The Emperor?”

“They don’t call it that anymore, its-- Wait, you’re into astrology?”

“Not really, but whenever Omen pens the horoscope, I pay attention.”

Riley’s mind was reeling. A twin of the Arcanist? She wouldn’t have believed it if Lutia and Camellia hadn’t also been involved. What had happened to it? Where was it now? She was filled with the kind of questions whose answers had gotten her in trouble in the past. And because she had not changed at all, she immediately chased after them. 

The click of her shoes was deafening in the fog. She hadn’t noticed at all that their passing had been entirely silent aside from their voices. They turned back to look at her rather casually. They didn’t seem bothered that they might have been overheard, or followed, but the moment Carnelian parted the fog to see what manner of idiot or lost tourist he was dealing with, he froze. 

Riley tried to look the least like herself possible, but the look on his face suggested there wasn’t a glamour or mask or choice of wardrobe in all of Sornieth that could have hidden her identity from him. So she dropped the bit and lit a cigarillo.

“You two have certainly gotten close~” she called, leering over the smoke. 

Atsushi clearly remembered her--the look of recognition at the sound of her voice was telltale--yet he wasn’t quick to be his candid self. His eyes went to Carnelian, who hadn’t moved an inch and was coolly staring her way. 

The last time they had spoken had been in front of his daughter’s burning corpse. No doubt seeing her face again was bringing back all kinds of bad memories, and she didn’t have a good grasp on what kind of man he had become after all that. He had ripped a pearlsnatcher’s wings off, sure, but that wasn’t much different from the violent imperial she had stalked in eons past. 

Finally, Carnelian gave an indifferent huff, and kept walking. “Anyway, Omen’s horoscopes have probably saved my life at least once.”

“Really?” Atsushi went after him without a second glance at Riley. “I would never have picked you for the superstitious type.”

“It’s about as superstitious as an almanac if a witch writes it.”

Riley stared after them both. Atsushi was one thing, if he had Carnelian’s attention she hardly found it odd for him to have tunnel vision. But Carnelian had just...ignored her entirely. It should have been a red flag, but she took it the way she usually did: as permission. 

She walked right up and before she could even begin to overstep her boundaries, Carnelian had her by the horns. She stared at him, feeling terror well up even as he continued to look at her with complete detachment. Almost as if he were regarding an uninteresting bug.

To yet more of her surprise, he released her entirely unharmed. Atsushi shrugged somewhat impatiently her way when she looked at him for an explanation. “Things change.”

“Enough for you two to be friends?” she spat, as skeptical as she was disgusted.

Carnelian’s brows drew together. He flicked the last of his cigar into an alley, very carefully blew the last of the smoke into Riley’s face, and leaned down to kiss Atsushi. 

Riley’s mind blanked. It was happening right in front of her, but some vital connection between the act and the implications was failing and in its absence it became as if she had accidentally happened on strangers kissing in the street. How else was she supposed to make sense of Carnelian, who could barely be caught giving his own daughter an affectionate gesture, openly kissing someone he had previously hated at least as much as he hated her--in the middle of the street no less?

It was the growl that snapped her out of it. A half-rumbled remark about Atsushi being short before Carnelian abandoned the effort of bending and scooped him up instead. And something about Atsushi’s calves crossing over Carnelian’s lower back sent a bolt through Riley that lasso’d her rapidly disassociating mind back to ground zero. 

“WH-WHA-” she stammered, making a lot of noise but very little sense.

Atsushi surfaced from whatever the fuck was happening, and she was almost glad for the familiarity of the manic look in his eyes. But it quickly took a turn into radiating menace, and he snarled at her with more force than she thought possible from someone so breathless. 

“GO. AWAY.”

At that point, having gotten far more information that she really wanted, she was more than happy to obey, and in fact obeyed her way all the way back through Thunder’s March, taking nothing but her notebook and a bottle of the stiffest alcohol she could find.

On her way out, Paradise wished her safe travels and hoped she would visit Aphaster again. 

Riley closed her eyes and got to work removing the cork. It was going to be a long trip home. 

@boyonetta

[flannelpunkcalum]

Ayo 👀 I was hoping to get a ship ♥️ First off though I wanna ask, what are you like? I can give a proper ship in return then c: But anyway here I go, about to take up your ask box because what are short answers (Also I have a face page if you wanna check that out too) : 2. I love romance, but too much mushy stuff lowkey freaks me out and tbh I have a hard time being romantic myself but I can get pretty romantic if I really wanted to ya feel? It’d just be in more unexpected or unusual ways

3. She’s hilarious and chill af. She’s the realest out there and always has my back god bless 6. Going to a carnival/fair and then going back to one of our places to get drunk and watch netflix sounds chill/fun tbh 7. Closer by Nine Inch Nails bYE or After the Party by The Menzingers 8. The closest thing I have to a type is being a sucker for either - green eyes | black hair | blondes | curly hair 9. My aesthetics usually either consist of pastels, reds, black&white, or spacey stuff .  18. Traveling and art. I would pursue it relentlessly because I’m an artist and every field of art intrigues me and so does the world 20. Not well tbh. I’m complicated and all over the place. I’ve been told many times that I’m hard to actually read and figure out even though I appear otherwise 21. That soulmates exist 25. I love rainy weather and thunderstorms. I love the smell of rain and how the world looks when it’s gloomy. To me it’s beautiful, calming, and cozy 🖤 

Um first of all you’re cute and second of all I think Ashton is kind of the obvious answer here??? Even before I saw him on your blog I knew. You’ve both got that big artist energy and I get super heavy “no small talk” vibes... like within thirty seconds you’d be discussing the heat death of the universe or the collective unconscious or something

Y’all remember that tweet Ashton did about “starting an online romance with you”? I feel like that’s how this starts, like he’s following you and you’re following him and one day on one of your posts he leaves a comment about how he's been loving your comments and posts… you’d message him privately saying how much that meant from him and he'd mention your glowing presence again… someone would definitely use the words “beautiful mind”... And suddenly you're each other's “2am thoughts” buddies, the “this street art made me think of you” friends, and he feels like he can talk about anything with you but doesn't feel pressured to and that's such a gift. You know that person? He's yours and you're his, and for a while that's enough, until he realizes he wants you completely.

The thing about him being so chill to talk to, though, is it's easy until it isn't. You're both complicated and I feel like the moment you didn't feel comfortable sharing something with him he’d know and it would drive him wild. It must be terrible, right? Some big secret that could eat him alive. What else aren't you telling him? In the moment, it would make him feel so powerless and angry and sorry he'd go all sullen and pick a fight. It’s akin to him throwing a tantrum. He knows he's not entitled to your every thought, but can he help it if he wants to be a part of everything in your mind? “You tell me everything, how the hell is this any different?” Maybe you get riled, end up shouting back at him, saying something you don’t mean. When you both calm down, he apologizes, and a fight like that doesn’t happen again. But in the moment, it’s a lot.

I feel like the absolute best dates for you guys would be museum dates; from the Louvre to MoMA you two would make that shit your playground. He’d love to take pictures of you in front of huge works, love to make jokes about some 16th century guy’s face in his portrait he sat 75 hours for, love to explore the galleries silently with you with one hand in your back jean pocket. Maybe you guys would get tipsy on wine after, talking about what you saw and what you love, and you can’t look me in the eye and tell me there wouldn’t be at least one painting recreated for Instagram. Here’s what I think; so much in Ashton’s life is a performance. Half his time is spent with one eye looking for the camera. But honestly I think the exception would be his love for you. 

I feel like Calum would have a crush on you because he’s kind of branching out and I think he’d like someone to challenge him artistically and intellectually

......and if you DO wanna do a little ship for me the most important facet of my personality is that I’m a very big nerd (I’m studying molecular biology) and that I make fun of everything? To answer a few of my own questions: 2 I am such a bad romantic. slow dancing in the kitchen is all well and good but that doesn’t really mean anything when times get tough. I am a hideous flirt, though. 9. I like to describe my personal style as “nerd in a teen chick flick after her personal style is transformed by the cheerleader, but then she realizes she needs to stay true to herself”. 17. Mantis shrimp. 26. Big ugly jacket, leggings, and low cut shirt baby!!! sorry I don’t really know what I’m saying so no pressure or anything 

[fatphobiabusters]

Anonymous Submission. TW: aphobia, amatonormativity , swearing, fatphobia

Hi. I wrote this blog some months ago asking about the relationship between amatonormativity and fatphobia because I wasn’t able to find anything on the subject. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve been turning it over in my brain, and I thought I’d compile a ranty essay about my personal conjecture on the matter.

>> Seven years ago, teen me was talking to people in a chat room. Upon learning I was a girl, another user assumed I was looking for a boyfriend and asked lightheartedly what physical attributes I preferred in a boy. Short? Tall? Muscular? Fat?

At this point, I was completely unaware of the fact that I was a-spec. As someone who now identifies as both recipromantic (experiencing romantic attraction only after someone else expresses interest first) and asexual, I have to say physical attraction always eluded me a little bit. I’d never even actively thought about it until then. After a moment, I supposed the only requirement was that the boy liked me first.

So I wrote, “I don’t care. I’m not picky.”

The other user’s response felt like a sneer through the computer. “That is such a fat thing to say.” He proceeded to make fun of me, crying, “Fatty! You’re a fatty!” until I left.

When I look back on that incident now, I still feel angry. But I also know enough now to have realized that he used fat as a “threat” to challenge my “straightness” when I still assumed I had it. That it was a combination of his fatphobia and mine that led me to leave.

Not gonna lie, I’m not certain in my a-spec identity. I’m always worrying, what if I’m wrong? I’ve questioned multiple times if maybe I wouldn’t be a-spec if I wasn’t also fat. What I’ve realized since then is that what I was asking myself was really, “Would I still be the same person I am if I hadn’t been ridiculed for being fat?”

I don’t have the answers to that. Maybe. Maybe not.

____

One of your followers said the game surrounding fatness and amatonormativity is rigged, which can’t be truer.

IMO, to be Straight with a capital S as defined by our thinphobic, beauty-obsessed society requires certain levels of artifice and performance that I’m not at all comfortable with. Fat people have extra burdens put on them to appear hypergendered in order to be accepted in the public eye, let alone be considered potential partners. They aren’t exactly free to express themselves however they want regarding their mannerisms, creativity and dress, but instead must edit these aspects for others’ consumption.

That coupled with the stress of trying to appeal to others romantically and/or sexually is akin to the stress of having to pass multiple tests. Each grows harder than the last when you’re not naturally inclined to the whole song and dance due to being, y'know, a-spec.

For many people, a breakup or botched date gets processed as grave failure. Eventually the thought strikes me as absurd. Why would anybody want to put themselves through this? Is being alone really so bad a punishment as amatonormativity’s making it out to be? After all, there’s no one I have to “perform” for when I’m by myself; I don’t have to run counter to my nature and wear makeup and watch what I dress and do and say just to ensure a boy—or anyone else, for that matter—likes me.

Just because I’m a-spec doesn’t mean I don’t want to be cared for and listened to, even if not in romantic or sexual ways. Yet those are, for a while at least, the only two options I see.

When teen me goes to school, I drown in a sea of amatonormativity and fatphobia. I can feel the other students’ eyes run over my body and deem it an ugly, repulsive thing that diminishes my worth somehow … And I can’t help but feel I have to wade through a sea of bullshit to grab whatever straws of affection I can find. In doing so, I also can’t help but begin to think there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.

My friends try to get me to dance. They insist I’ll be okay if I take off my jacket and reveal my bare upper arms, but I don’t want to. It’s this small ring of people who don’t see the fat I dread when they look at me.

Even then, they still date and go out with each other. I feel so incredibly lonely when they do because I experience what I fear the most: being left behind. And that leads me to enter a relationship I’m not ready for because I feel “it’s time,” “no one else will ask me out as I am anyway” and that it’s what “adults” do, rather than because, “Yay, I want to!”

So … Is it any wonder I’m relieved when the relationship ends? I don’t have to pretend to be Straight anymore. I don’t have to deal with the anxiety of timing my hugs when I’m touch-averse, of appearing “cute” to my boyfriend to keep his attention, of thinking, “Maybe I’m a bad person” for feeling aesthetically attracted to others and feeling my attraction to him fade. Of fearing that people may mock me and laugh at me behind my back because I dare enter a relationship While Fat™.

I once read a post that said the reason why people cut down the fat person who claims their own happiness is because they feel that person has “cheated” the institutions that reward thinness, and the fat person doing this somehow cheats them.

Likewise, aphobes say that a-specs “only love themselves” and “need to go outside” for what I suspect are similar reasons. If a-specs claim their lives are already full and complete without romantic love and sex, then they’ve walked away from the power our sexually compulsive, amatonormative society exerts over them. That angers and frightens those who’ve spent years trying to “win” the game, even if only on a subconscious level. Besides, it’s easier to condemn those who don’t conform to traditional narratives than to reexamine one’s own belief in those narratives.

Aphobia, fatphobia and amatonormativity each share the tendency to objectify the fat a-spec. The conversation turns external to the speaker, as if whatever attraction (or lack thereof) the person feels is irrelevant; it is instead what othersthink of them that shifts the focus toward potential partners, spouses, strangers, family and children rather than the real person who is hurting right now.

Don’t most fatphobic conversations steer toward how the fat person can gain thin privilege on an individual level? “Lose weight and people will treat you better. Stop being a-spec, and people will treat you better.” Both fat and the a-spec orientations thus become things to be denied, diminished, rather than celebrated.

Then there’s the denial, the gaslighting. Aphobia says, “You don’t experience attraction? You must be lying.” This strips the a-spec person of agency because it implies that they cannot trust their own judgment.

Likewise: “You’re fat and happy? You must be lying.” The common misconceptions that fat people must lack self-control and are victims in their own narrative also strip them of agency.

Amatonormativity asks, “Why haven’t you begun looking for a partner yet? You’re not complete without one! You can’t be happy without one!”

For the a-spec, pinning our source of happiness to a concept we may not even be able to believe in or access is a terrifying thought. How many fat people have felt similarly broken due to not being able to secure partners?

Lastly, fatphobia says: “Hush, a-spec. You’re only this way because you’re lonely and sad and you haven’t managed to find someone who’s attracted to you (regardless of whether this is true or not).”

And all of this? Is complete, utter nonsense.

In that vein, “Have you tried dating?” isn’t a very different question from, “Have you tried losing weight?” Besides being flippant and dismissive, it doesn’t offer much in the way of actual help that listening and empathy would.

What makes it even more insidious is that these intrusive, probing questions often get couched in terms that make it seem as though the asker is coming from a genuine place of concern. Even if they are, that still doesn’t erase the fact that the fat person’s identity, privacy and personal standards for happiness will always seem like open debate topics.

Furthermore, the pathologization of fat and a-spec orientations puts a double whammy on the fat a-spec by using “legit-sounding” misinformation to make them doubt themselves. As if it’s not bad enough we’re demeaned as worthless, “broken,” and less-than-human despite our character and achievements: apparently, nothing we do or become can ever “make up for” this perceived lack, not in a society that prizes sex and romance.

No, internalized fatphobia and aphobia ensure we constantly have this nagging voice in the back of our heads, saying: “You’re only aro/ace because you had no other options.” “No one will love you the way you want when you’re this fat.” Sometimes these two thoughts get combined in an especially insidious way: “You’re not a valid aro/ace because you’re fat and you believe no one will love you.”

NEVER MIND that drive (libido) does not equal attraction.

NEVER MIND that some aces experience hypersexuality and have naturally high sex drives, and that aromantic people can experience hyperromanticism, and that the a-spec is a spectrum above all and encompasses a wide range of backgrounds, circumstances and orientations—yes, including fat.

NEVER MIND that fat people have been engaged in relationships of all types for ages, and it’s society that perpetuates the lie of the “lonely fatty” to terrorize us and keep us from finding happiness.

NEVER MIND a fat a-spec can still experience the typical hormone imbalances that always get thrown at a-specs as “proof” of their “deceit,” and those imbalances still wouldn’t invalidate them in a thousand years.

Listen. As someone who’s battling all these doubts and more, I just have to say this in conclusion to other fat a-specs: I see you. Maybe you won’t find all the answers you’re looking for. Maybe you’ll never be 100% now-and-forever sure. Maybe these facets of your identity overlap too much for you to separate them, and maybe you don’t want to separate them. The important thing is, you’re recognized, you’re valid.

And you’re not alone.

[sarkastically]

Participation Medals of the Heart

(Runaways fic written to A Softer World prompts. Uh oh. Here we go. Featuring pining Gert, Molly the best sister, and Chase.)

08. Ah, unrequited love.  When your best isn’t enough. (Participation medals of the heart.)

Molly is currently staring at her like she has caught herself on fire and leapt screaming over a cliff for a cause. To be honest, Gert thinks that might be better than what she is actually doing, which is standing in the middle of a room watching Chase watching Karo watching Nico watching Alex. Being on fire and leaping over a cliff for a cause would at least be doing something for a cause, political revolution, the end to isms, equality, something. She wonders what movement would allow that sort of action. She wonders whether she can find one on short notice and join it when she is not yet eighteen and has a younger sister and a pet dinosaur to look after. A whole host of evil parents to try and take down. And a crush that has slowly been consuming her from the inside out.

There is a lot happening in the life of Gert Yorkes, but the only thing she can currently focus on is Chase watching Karo.

It’s dumb. It’s dumb. This is dumb. The worst thing is that she knows it is dumb, is fully aware of the facts and the circumstances and the knowledge that unrequited love is messy and problematic. That the fairy tales where the ugly duckling becomes a beautiful swan and gets the guy are just that, fairy tales, which are, intrinsically, lies or, depending on the story, warnings. Do not go into the forest because something bad is there and it might eat you. Do not trust the man with bushy eyebrows because he might be a wolf in disguise who only wants to use you for his own means. Do not eat people’s houses because it’s rude as shit, and they will inevitably try to make you pay for it.

So, yeah, she knows, but it doesn’t mean that she heeds the lessons. Not completely. For all that Gert is this person who knows herself and tries to control herself and every facet of her life, her heart, dumb heart, doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t let her control it.

It just keeps going. Pining.

Gert Yorkes has never felt dumb in her entire life, but she does when it comes to all of this wishing and wanting and yearning and thinking. With every small word said to her, with every little look, that hey, you know, maybe. Maybe he’s paying attention. Maybe there’s something in her that he can see. Maybe they’ve shared a moment. And then it blinks out. She wakes up. She realizes that, no, none of that is actually a thing that is happening anywhere except inside her head.

There is an entire world inside of her head and, unfortunately, not all of it is schemes to demolish the corrupt government and establish something new. No, at least 65% of it, which is too much when there is so much else to do, is devoted to whether or not Chase’s eyes soften a little when they look at her. They do not. She is sure that they do not. Except, perhaps, maybe that one time. Or that other time.

Or maybe no time at all.

“What are you doing?” Molly asks, though the look on her face has slid from annoyance into knowing, and Gert is equal parts pained and glad to have her sister who is so smart and so chipper and so kind. Even if she is sometimes a pain in the way that all siblings are pains.

I don’t know what I would have done without you, she thinks about saying to Molly sometimes but never does because she doesn’t know how those kinds of words work. So instead she tells Molly that dance team is patriarchal and terrible and reinforces gender stereotypes when what she means to say is good luck, I love you. And Molly, who has been with her forever, will already know what she means behind the words. Like Molly knows when she is nervous. Like Molly knows when she is sad.

Molly knows Gert’s emotions before she knows them herself most of the time. Because Molly is better with people. Always has been.

“Nothing,” Gert says, slides her glasses up her nose, fists her hands into the pockets of the jeans jacket Stacey bought her, laughing and pointing out how she would have worn something similar when she was young in a way that made Gert die a little inside because how embarrassing rather than how terrible, which is the way her parents make her die a little inside now.

She says nothing, but Molly knows better. Gert can tell by the way she looks across the room and sighs and shakes her head before linking their arms together. Molly is taller than her. Everyone is taller than she is, but this is okay because it just means she has to make her voice and her opinions louder, stronger, taller so that no one can step on them. Like her heart. Dumb heart.

“Come on,” Molly says, tugs her away from the middle of the room. “Let’s find coffee. Or chocolate. Or something for me to bench press.”

Gert rolls her eyes and laughs in the way that only her sister can make her laugh. “No bench pressing. You’re not passing out on me here.” Don’t leave me alone is what she means to say, and Molly leans against her, a solid weight that is as calming as any of the mantras they taught her to help her through her anxiety attacks long ago.

“Fine,” the girl says with a huff but with no irritation in her voice because she already knows the heart of the comment.

Gert wonders if any of the rest of them will ever fully figure out all the things she says behind sharp words, if they were will ever pause to consider the other meanings, the way her tongue cannot form soft words except in song. No. Probably not. She couldn’t even teach Chase Spanish, after all, why would she be able to teach him something infinitely more complicated, something that even she herself cannot always make sense of? Besides. He wouldn’t have any interest in it anyway. “So, Mols, where to?”

And Molly leads the way through twisted, curving hallways, and Gert follows with her mind and her eyes, though she thinks a part of her heart remains in that room watching Chase watching Karo watching Nico watching Alex.

No one watches me, part of her whispers, and she hates it. Hates the thought. Hates the feeling.

Molly laughs and teases her into walking along an edge she normally wouldn’t go near because Molly is brave and has never been anxious the way that Gert can be as her mind spins up a hundred thousand worst case scenarios. “Stop thinking about it,” Molly says, voice high, clear, young. Hopeful even when things around them are bad because that is. That is Molly. That is her sister.

“I’m trying,” Gert says, and she means it, understand it in all the ways that Molly is trying to convey. Even though she can’t. She knows she can’t.

It just doesn’t work that way. This stupid unrequited love. This stupid attempt that she makes where her best, which is normally so much more than needed, just isn’t enough. It means as little as those medals she got in kindergarten for participating. The ones her parents thought were super because everyone came away with something, though Gert always saw how hollow they were, how flawed. And they lost their shine so quickly, the sheen flaking away under her fingers. Thanks for trying. Glad you made it. Here you go. Your participation medal for your heart. Nevermind that it’s cracked across the face. At least you tried.

“I’m trying,” she repeats again to no one in particular, and Molly looks over her shoulder at her, older than her years, and smiles the way she smiles when Gert is sad and tugs her hand forward, onward.

“It’s okay,” Molly says. “It’s okay. Trying is enough sometimes.”

Gert tries to smile back, but her dumb heart just winces and it falters on her lips. “I don’t like losing.”

“Believe me, I know.”

The tone is fake annoyance, and Gert almost shoves her playfully off the ledge but doesn’t because sisters. Because when everything else washes away, what will she have, really? Molly. Just Molly. And this stuttering, breathless, uncontrollable gasp of her dumb heart, which does not listen to logic or sense, just continues to beat and pound and make her act in ways she doesn’t really like because she doesn’t know what else to do. “Watch it. I know where you sleep,” she teases, and then Molly playfully shoves at her, which sends her skittering off the side of the ledge because Gert has never been the agile one.

Here we go, she thinks, something else to make me look stupid because she expects to be picking herself off the ground in the next instant. Only she doesn’t because there are hands steadying her, and she knows those shoes because she is a dumb idiot with a memory that catches and holds onto everything.

“You okay?” He doesn’t even pause before continuing. “Molly, you should be more careful.”

Gert blinks at the eyes, and the set of Chase’s mouth, which is concern instead of amusement. You’re hiding, too, she thinks. We’re all hiding. She pushes her glasses up her nose even as she steps away from the hands, which do not grasp too tightly, which let her leave the instant she wants to. Chase Stein, terribly careful about respecting boundaries and secrets. All of them. Maybe that’s what annoys her most. The things he does, he does for everyone. Nothing is for her. But why should it be?

“Thanks,” she manages, glances over her shoulder to look for Molly who has continued walking along the ledge like it is the high bar, something that Gert could never master with her vision and her balance. “I’m fine. Thank you. Thanks.” She should shut up now. “Shouldn’t you be?” she hooks a thumb over her shoulder toward the building where the others likely are.

Chase shrugs, and Gert doesn’t know what that means so she just looks at him for five seconds too long while her dumb heart forgets that she is trying to be cool. “It was boring.”

“Oh. Well.” What can she possibly do that will not be boring? “You can hang with us? If you want. If not, that’s fine. It’s fine.” Launching off a cliff on fire sounds so good right now. Letting their parents put her into the weird glowing thing actually seems like a more pleasant outcome than painfully scraping through a conversation with Chase when he looks soft instead of cocky and perfect, which is his normal setting. Cocky and perfect Chase Gert knows how to deal with, what barbs to throw. They have years of practice in that setting. Soft Chase, the Chase who clung to her when they thought the dinosaur was going to devour them, is different. Soft Chase is unexpected.

She is not even trying her best.

“No, that’s fine,” he sits on the ledge and folds his hands in his lap and seems to take up less room than should be possible when one considers his height and size. Like he is trying not to be seen.

Gert has words behind the ones she says, but she thinks that Chase has words behind every move he makes. Gert likes languages. She wonders how she can learn this one.

Molly continues to walk along the ledge without even looking back, but Gert knows she knows what she’s doing.

“Tell me about the dinosaur,” Chase says.

Gert sits. Talks. Gestures with her hands and loses her nerves in the middle of a conversation about something that fascinates her, and there it is, her dumb heart thinks, a moment when his eyes go soft.

[septembersung]

A good friend of mine has a graduate degree in art; she’s also a writer. As an MFA (creative writing), I have an appreciation for that complementary formation and we find lots to talk about artistically across mediums. But despite our complementary talents and education, as well as certain ethical similarities, we do not share a common religious conviction. That’s made it difficult to get at what I really want to say when certain subjects come up, notably, the amorality of contemporary art. I almost always write to work out not just what I think, but how and why I think it; ideally after committing this to blog form I’ll be able to explain myself better in conversation...

Under the cut because this became a rambling monster of a post. I’m not great at synthesizing and presenting what, for me, is a cohesive world-view, in clear syllogisms. Practice makes perfect, right? Anyway: the “amorality” of much contemporary art:

The phenomenon of amoral (and therefore, immoral) art I would also call “the ugliness of contemporary art” and “the unartisticness of contemporary art.” These phrases are related but not synonyms; they describe different facets of the same problem.

The most recent example of this unartistic-art subject that came up in our conversation was the widely debated Game of Thrones, as books and a show. I eventually recommended to her, and do the same to anyone reading this, an article called “A song of gore and slaughter.”  It is a fantastic breakdown of the underlying problem of which ASOIAF/GoT is just one example, and situates it within the genre as a whole. The author’s essential thesis is that violence, gore, and all manner of immorality - what he sums up as “splatterporn” - have become the center of the genre, and moved way, way beyond shock tactics to prove a point (a debatable tactic on its own, whatever Chuck Palahnuick says,) but are rather lauded as goods in themselves. In short: GoT and similar works are pornography, in the broad sense that encompasses far more than sex. The article examines praise for one such “splatterporn” series and responds, 

“Stomach-churning, it happens, is a good physiological description of what I referred to above as ‘objective disgust’. Being revolted until you puke, you see, is good for you now: it is something that you ought to want from a book, and if you don’t, you need to be ‘dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century’ yourself. The horrors of the 20th were not enough; Hiroshima and the Holocaust are, like, so five minutes ago. We shall outdo them all, and you shall like it. That is the gospel according to the up-to-date critic.” 

I agree wholeheartedly with the author’s general thesis, and will not reproduce the argument here - really, you should read the whole thing - instead, taking it as a given, what I want to explore on my own terms comes in a paragraph of the author’s towards his conclusion:

The touchstone of Elfland — the most characteristic characteristic of fantasy — is the eversion of symbolism. The One Ring is not merely a symbol of power; it is power. Excalibur is not merely a symbol of kingship; it confers kingship. In these terms, we can say that the recent novels of Martin and Abercrombie (among lamentably numerous others) not only symbolize but are the walls around a concentration camp in Faërie. This is the camp of ‘edginess’, where the gaolers are grimly determined that no memory of sun or moon, tree or flower, stone or sea, goodness, truth, or beauty, shall remain to the inmates, but only the unending, ever-increasing, bloodshot craving for the pleasures of torture and the pornography of pain, suitably euphemized as ‘moral ambiguity’.

The striking thing about the “eversion of symbolism” is that, in less explicit forms, it turns up in all kinds of genres; perhaps because  it has - and I am speaking here as a Catholic - a true, real world, counterpart: sacramentality. (For a fascinating, and non-religious, examination of this concept, see Robert Bly’s The Sibling Society.) And that article even names explicitly the trifecta which contemporary art has anathematized: truth, beauty, and goodness. You can’t have one of those three without the others, and they in turn depend, in art as in the life it imitates, on sacramentality.

To understand my point we need to be on the same page regarding what sacramentality actually is, so we begin with Catholic sacramental theology:

A sacrament is an efficacious sign of grace: it actually is and actually gives what it symbolizes. Bread and wine do not “just” symbolize the body and blood of Christ; at His word (”This is my body; this is my blood”), the bread and wine become, truly and substantially, objectively in reality and not subjectively in the mind or body of the communicant, His body and blood. Baptism does not just “represent” spiritual cleansing or “joining the church”; by the power of God given to His priests (e.g. Mt 28:18-20) baptism removes the stain of original sin (and the personal sins of someone above the age of reason) and truly brings that person into the Church, the New Covenant, into a state of grace. Holy orders is not some kind of graduation ceremony, it does not symbolically “set apart” a man as a leader because he’s studied theology. Holy orders truly makes an indelible (unerasable, permanent) mark in the man’s soul, conferring - kind of like Excalibur confers kingship on Arthur - the threefold reality of Christ on him: priest, prophet, king. He is truly “another Christ” (alter Christus), not merely “like” Christ. All of the seven sacraments can be summed up this way: their materials symbolize what their essence is and confers: grace, that is, the life of God.

Sacraments have both matter and form. What the form and matter are vary from sacrament to sacrament. The Eucharist is a clear example of this principle: the matter is unleavened wheat bread and grape wine, and the form is the words that confect the sacrament, in this case “This is my body,” etc.

Sacramentality forms the weft of the nature of reality in four ways: 

1) Sacramentality is the consequence of Creation in general and the Incarnation specifically. 

We have to unpack this a bit in order for its full significance to become clear in the following paragraphs. Creation means more than just “all this stuff we see around us,” and even more than the flat statement, so apparently unremarkable in our day, “God created the universe.” To put it extremely briefly, Creation is the order of reality, of all that has been made. The Triune God, who exists outside of all things and is complete unto Himself, created all things out of nothing as act of love, and those things are ordered with particular natures and to particular ends. (For an incredible and readable short introduction to the theology of creation, you can’t do better than Pope Benedict XVI’s little book In the Beginning.) Creation in a broad sense is incarnation: literally en-fleshing the thoughts, will, and love of God. The Incarnation is the highest manifestation of this en-fleshing, the “first sacrament” in a sense: God Himself became an enfleshed being, a physical, material person. That which is bigger than all of creation, outside it and above it, became joined to creation, went down into it, and assumed the nature of the created being, a human person. The Incarnation, which began with Mary’s “fiat” at the Annunciation at Nazareth when Jesus was conceived, enervated creation: that which was big and outside, without losing its bigness and outsideness, became inside and little. 

In short, physical, material, created things convey God to us.

2) Reality expresses its sacramental nature the seven sacraments proper, as discussed above, administered through the Church, as the active and physical workings of Christ - that is, grace - in the world. The sacraments are the direct consequence of the Incarnation: they are the continued presence of Christ on earth, the fountainhead of all truth, goodness, and beauty in the world. When speak of the sacraments, we are speaking of the Divine Person of Christ.

3) Reality is “sacramental,” in the technical or theological sense, which means a holy object, blessed by a priest, which has no objective power on its own but has a subjective beneficial power. Sacramentals proper include things like holy water, rosaries, crucifixes, and holy/miraculous medals. Sacramentals do not objectively confer grace in the way that the sacraments do because their efficacy is related to the personal devotion and belief of the person using them. For example: an infant, who is incapable of understanding baptism, nonetheless receives the indelible mark of Christ in his soul, is sanctified and made a member of the Church, because baptism is an act of God, whereas the spiritual benefits of using blessed objects, like a rosary, depends on the disposition (in a state of grace or not) and intentions of the person using them. 

4) Reality is sacramental because is it is full of sacramentals in the analogous sense: material, physical things and actions both describe an effect and help to cause that effect in those who participate in the thing or the action. This aspect of sacramentality exists because of and depends upon the sacramental reality, Christ.

Sacramentality in this fourth sense - as a created thing which describes an effect ands helps to cause that effect in those who participate in it- is, as you may have seen coming, a beautiful broad definition of art. Art itself is (a) sacramental, in this fourth sense of the word. Art only “works,” only has the effect on us that it does, because reality is sacramental: created objects have meaning, in a meaningful universe, and the form that they take is, and is the means of, their communication of that meaning to us; and at root what they communicate is the trifecta at the heart of all that humans aspire to: truth, beauty, and goodness.

Thus could J.R.R. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, described the work of artists (including writers) as a “sub-creation.” We participate in the creative, incarnational work of God when we make art. Truth, beauty, and goodness are both our subject and our goal, our content and the form of our content. 

Thus the creative, incarnational work has the three primary characteristics that describe God himself: it is True, Good, and Beautiful. Art is most successful, most fully itself, when it understands and works with its nature. 

(If your immediate objection here is, “but ugliness and darkness are important/valid/necessary/have a place!” I don’t necessarily disagree with you - but hold off, because that is not the point of, and not in contradiction of, what I’m getting at here.)

But human beings what we are, we often fail to understand the nature of things, and to actively act against our nature.

If art is not simply “whatever we make,” or “whatever I want it to be”; if it has shape; purpose; character of its own; then we must see what passes for much of contemporary art in a whole new light. Where contemporary art is amoral, immoral, ugly, and unartistic, it is so because it is unsacramental, indeed, it is anti-sacramental. Another word for this anti-sacramentality is iconoclastic.

And yet it cannot escape its own nature.

With that said, let’s back up to the importance of the Incarnation within the expressed theology of Creation:

As the Father showed his people throughout the Old Testament his presence through physical signs, e.g. leading them through the wildnerness as a pillar of smoke and a column of fire, or settling His presence as a cloud on the tent of the tabernacle, and later, the Temple (which, it should be noted, is fulfilled in the New Covenant with the perpetual physical presence of Christ in the tabernacle in the Blessed Sacrament), just so God makes His presence known and effects his will through matter. Most importantly, this began with Jesus, God-made-flesh. The Incarnation is the fulfillment of God’s promises in the Old Testament; it utterly changed the world. 

Then, Jesus Christ, God incarnate, revealed his divinity, his presence, and bestowed his grace, through physical works: The touch of his hand brings the dead back to life; a brush of his garment heals the sick; he gives sight to the blind through the medium of mud and spit; he gives us his divine person as the final, actually efficacious, sacrifice, under the appearances of bread and wine.

As the grace of new Covenant and the breaking down of the old walls between Jew and Gentile made all foods lawful and “clean,” so Jesus appearing as the image of the Father, a face to know and love and caress, turned the old prohibition against “graven images” - idols - inside out. Now the danger of idolatry from made things had passed because the Father had given the true, living image of himself, the Son, Jesus, to us to see and to imitate.

The history of Western art (and to some extent Eastern) from the Resurrection up until the eve of the Reformation is the history of Christendom exploring what that means. It is often said that the Gothic architecture of the middle ages fulfilled the word that the “very stones would cry out” in praise of God. 

Christians began creating art, particularly sacred images, even while they were still persecuted; the catacombs are filled with such art. In time, as the Church became, first just legal, and eventually the foundation of society, building Christendom - Catholic culture in nations avowedly Catholic - the developing skill of artists gave us what we see now as the history of art: not just methods and skills, but subjects, purposes. All was for the glory of God. What is true? What is good? What is beautiful? How can we express it? The history of the development of art in Western civilization is the long playing out of the logical consequences of the faith of the Incarnation. 

As the spirit of God was given form in the divine person, the man Jesus Christ, so his truth, goodness, and beauty, and that of all the faith which flows from him, Revelation and its logical inferences, overflows into the creations of his followers, for teaching, praising, worshipping, and evangelizing. This art achieved its glory at the height of Christendom: in no small part, it built the great civilization from which our own culture springs.

And then it all started to go wrong. 

Henri Daniel-Rops gives a great overview of how the secularization of art began, as one of the roots of and/or entwined with the roots of the Protestant Reformation, in his book The Protestant Reformation. What fascinates me, personally, is that the subjectivization of religion led directly to one of the most violent periods of iconoclasm in history, the Protestant image-breaking, which was practiced across denominations. The reasons behind it went far beyond the oft-cited “idolatry” to cut at the very foundation of the Catholic faith: they rejected sacramentality as such. (Yes, some Reformers and their descendants kept some of the language of the sacraments or quibbled over the number, but even they - and of course this is a generalization as they all disagreed with each other - put forth their interpretations as a direct counter to the Catholic understanding of reality and what “sacraments” and “sacramentality” mean.) Denying the sacramentality of reality ends up with denying the Incarnation, and without the Incarnation, there is no Christianity. Without Christianity, there is no art. We are still living with the descendants of those ideas and their consequences. This post is already a novel so I won’t trace that out in detail; another post for another day. But to paraphrase Hilaire Belloc, the revolt against the Catholic faith begins with “just” the Church, but ends in a revolt against reason, human nature, and reality. We are left without form or matter.

While I do not endorse this vlogger in general or his other videos, I offer this short video as an example of the general problems I’m talking about with contemporary art: Modern Art Insults Me. If you want a sense of what I’m talking about beyond “splatterporn,” that’s the video to watch.

Art that is produced by people and a culture that has utterly rejected not just the Catholic Church, but the rational foundations on which the Faith is built, including the sacramental nature of reality - in all senses of the word - is art that is trying to escape its own nature. Art is trying “to art” by being not-art. It’s still a creation, yes, in that it literally has been made, but it denies its nature and purpose; it has nothing to say about, or actively rejects, truth, beauty, and goodness. In many cases it rejects form (as a poet, and a defender of vers libre, I could go into detail - but in another post) and rather than glorifying matter, instead degrades it. I would go so far as to say what most accept as contemporary art is no such thing, but anti-art - a phenomenon more commonly known by another name: iconoclasm. 

Iconoclasm is the opposite of art. Definitions vary; it’s most commonly used to describe the destruction of art and/or the philosophy of people who believe destroying art to be a good thing. Art - that is, a given creative effort - that tries to become destruction in itself, that tries to operate outside of and/or actively rejects the trifecta of truth, goodness, and beauty, is iconoclastic.

In place of real art, we see two primary phenomena today: 1) Self-expression, and 2) Politics. 

Don’t misunderstand me: genuine art can be and incorporate self-expression, and genuine art can, and in some cases should, engage with politics. 

But what we’re seeing across the majority of mediums today practiced as art is not art, but acts of iconoclasm: acts of deliberate unbeauty, untruth, ungoodness - ugliness, falsehood, evil. The concept of revolution has been enshrined as the only “form” which art may genuinely take; and it proves to be no form at all. “Gritty realism” is the banner cry, because this vision of the world and humanity is one that is without an overarching purpose, a fundamental nature that cannot be violated, without the moral compass of a rational, created, universe. Rather than a cohesive, crafted, universe built out of and predicated on communicative love - gift and grace! -we see cruelty, purposelessness, isolation, and fragmentation as the standard; and not only described, but celebrated. In just a few brief years - speaking from the perspective of history - we’ve gone from the glory of “The Waste Land” to “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Angel.) The “splatterporn” of ASOIAF/GoT is just one popular pernicious example. The sorts of things created in many art programs also qualify; as my friend described what she and her colleagues were creating at one point, “lumpy,” “ugly,” “blobs” of “stuff.” 

I have to wrap this up somehow before it becomes a book. (Give me a few more years; there’s easily a dozen books in this topic.) I’ve made a lot of claims and raised a lot of questions. To pick just two: The “but shock value is so important!” argument isn’t easily laid to rest, even though as noted above, and in that first linked article, it’s actually a separate discussion and far from a certain truth. “But does ugliness and darkness have a place in art?” is the next logical question. The answer is that it does, but again, that’s actually a separate issue from the actual question being considered here, which is: “what is art in its nature and what is its purpose?” My answer is, art is sacramental in nature (and therefore intimately tied to the Catholic faith) and its purpose is to portray and effect truth, beauty, and goodness. Not a novel thesis, certainly, but one that needs a great deal more hearing in a world where the monstrosities that is ASOIAF/GoT is proclaimed “great,” “good,” and - most bitter of ironies - “realistic,” where the actual nature of ourselves and the universe we inhabit is utterly denied - and not only denied, but reviled.

Further reading: 

For a fascinating look at “post-iconoclastic icons,” and the paradox - I would say contradiction - of the Incarnation, the natural and indeed essential art of the Christian faith in the Protestant world founded in large part on the breaking of images, Joseph Koerner’s The Reformation of the Image is a great look at the topic from within Lutheranism. 

Minimalism Gets It Wrong - don’t be fooled by the title; this article gets at the heart of what I’m trying to say.

And finally, go get yourself a copy of the incredible little book Only the Lover Sings by Josef Pieper. The relationship between feast - celebration - and art, and the perequisites of art - love and gratitude - feature prominently. He writes:

[I]f the disposition of acceptance and love is absent, not only can there be no feast, but no song either! C'est l'amour qui chante, love alone knows how to sing.

Also: I’ve written about these issues before in tags like art and catholicism and theological aesthetics.

[ftyeonjun]

Beauty & the Beast (2017) MBTI - in depth

Belle: INFP (FiNeSiTe) Fi - doesn’t need other’s praise to know she’s a good person, she already knows this (opposite to Gaston’s constant need for praise), she isn’t exactly open about her feelings but experiences them very intensely, changes subjects when Beast subtly asks her if she could ever love him or be happy with him (“Can anybody be happy if they aren’t free?”), deep down she wants someone to understand her, to be happy being the outcast with her (“And for once it might be grand / To have someone understand”); Ne - she has a whole song (Belle (Reprise)) about how she wants much more than what the people of Villeneuve are content with (“I want adventure in the great wide somewhere / I want it more than I can tell” & “I want so much more than they’ve got planned”), she creates some kind of washing machine so she can read and travel to her fantasy worlds, although she really wants to go and travel the world and be something more, she can’t do that and instead chooses to read as some sort of escape from the “poor provincial town” she lives in; Si - she’s attached to her past mainly her mother (“Easy to remember / Harder to move on”) and the Montmartre scene is just that -- Belle going back to discover more about her past, she becomes very emotional when she learns how her mother passed away and it hits her that she never really will see her again (“Knowing the Paris of my childhood / Is gone”); Te - Belle invents a primitive washing machine, she knows when to affirm herself (“I will never marry you, Gaston!” & “I’d rather starve than eat with you!”/“I told you to join me for dinner!” “And I told you no!”)

more under the cut

Prince Adam/Beast: ESTJ (TeSiNeFi) Te - extremely logical person (beast?), speaks very matter-of-factly (“Your father’s a thief. He stole a rose.”, “Once this door closes it will not open again.”, “You will join me for dinner.”), believes in the logic of things even though he witnessed his staff turning into objects and he was himself turned into a beast (“There is no… one.”), asks specific logical questions (“And how will I know [that the moment is right]?”) so he can guide himself; Si - attached to his past and, just like Belle, to his late mother, everything he does is very related to his past experiences -- short temper and telling Belle what to do comes from when he was younger and his father “twisted him up to be just like him”, a ruthless man & everything he does after being attacked by the wolves inclusive (opening up to Belle, saving her life, giving her a library, helping her clean it, etc) is connected to how his mother raised him when he was a “sweet and innocent lad”; Ne - he’s locked himself away to escape from his ugly reality -- that he’s a beast and it’s very likely no one will learn to love him --, he has a book that allows him to do just that, quite literally, the Enchantress’s book, thanks to Belle he starts opening up to things like true love; Fi - he needs to be threatened to tell Belle that he’s in love with her (“(..:) and tell Belle how you feel. Because if you don’t I promise you’ll be drinking cold tea for the rest of your days!” “In the dark.” “Covered in dust.” “Dark and very, very dusty.”) and even then he doesn’t exactly tell Belle he loves her but instead dismisses his feelings with a “It’s foolish, I suppose… For a creature like me to hope that, one day, he might earn your affection.” after stating how he felt about dancing after all those years.

Maurice: ISFJ (SiFeTiNe) Si - he’s very focused on past events of his life especially his late wife, he lives off routine -- always making music boxes and always brings something back from the market for Belle (“Every year you ask for a rose.” “And every year you bring it.” “And I shall bring you another.”) --, uses former experiences -- the music boxes -- to pick the lock in the asylum carriage, “I lost your mother. I won’t lose you, too.”; Fe - he gets very frenetic the second Belle is in danger, promises her it’s okay for her to leave him in the castle, his good nature is what makes Agathe save him from being eaten by wolves, is open about his meeting with Beast even mentioning it and “talking teacups” to everyone in the tavern and more in detail to Gaston and LeFou; Ti - logical person but isn’t ruled by it, he learns how to build music boxes and uses it later, he isn’t exactly thrown off by a magical castle and its inhabitants, leaves his wife when she tells him to so he can save Belle; Ne - although he is content with life in Villeneuve (as much as he can be at least, due to his Si), he wants much more for his daughter, he builds music boxes that retell his past to get away from his present life without a wife

Gaston: ESTP (SeTiFeNi) Se - lives in the moment, takes advantage of what surrounds him to have his way (leaving Maurice to the wolves or taking advantage of Belle showing the Beast to the villagers), he’s a “risk taker” -- drinks, assumingly partakes in casual sex (we can only assume that’s what happens when he goes to the triplets after speaking about Belle with LeFou), ties up Maurice to a tree to die right after punching him and knocking him out, shoots the ceiling at the tavern as some sort of emphasis on his “I don’t care” lyric, is overall a very impulsive person who doesn’t exactly care about the consequences of his actions (Maurice’s and the Beast’s deaths, property damage in the tavern, the many consequences of him drinking, etc); Ti - he’s a very logical person (argues with Maurice about the impossibility of there being “such things as beasts, or talking teacups, or magic” and let’s him know right away that while those things don’t exist, “wolves, frostbite and starvation” are very real), he knows when to take action and what to do when taking action; Fe - he relishes in people’s praises of him, uses this function to get his way more than once (manipulates LeFou using his love for him so he’d lie for Gaston, manipulates the villager’s fear of the unknown so they would agree to kill the Beast), calms down almost instantly when LeFou tells him so, thinks he can use this function to get Belle to marry him; Ni - he has one focus during the movie, marrying Belle, and although by the end it expands a little (it’s now killing the Beast and marrying Belle) it never really leaves its origins

LeFou: ESFJ (FeSiNeTi) Fe - extremely good at perceiving people’s emotions, especially Gaston’s, and is the first person to fill him with praise, tries to appeal to Gaston’s common sense to get him to consider untying Maurice (“To exhaust all of our options, do you maybe wanna consider a slightly less… gruesome alternative?”), opens up to Mrs. Potts despite having just met her and gladly accepts her advice (“Well, I used to be on Gaston’s side but we are so in a bad place, right now.” “You’re too good for him, anyway.”), openly talks to Gaston about how he feels about Maurice even though Gaston assumingly has told him he doesn’t care -- he gives LeFou a glare -- (“You know it’s not too late! We could always turn back…” & “It’s just… every time I close my eyes I picture Maurice stranded alone. And then when I open them…”), explicitly states, even though people might not be hearing him, what he thinks of Gaston’s newly found cruel facet (“But I fear the wrong monster’s released”), is vocal about his desire to be like his best friend (“One of these days I’m going to learn to shoot like you, (...) And talk like you. And be tall and handsome like you.” - novelization); Si - his Fe and Si work together: he calls to Gaston’s past experiences to calm him down (“Go back to the war! Blood. Explosions. Countless widows.”), is extremely upset to learn that Gaston isn’t exactly who he thought he was and calls him out on it, relies on past experiences to praise Gaston and help him feel better -- he knows what makes Gaston cheer up from previous experiences --; Ne - by the end of the movie, just before The Mob Song, LeFou begins to use his Ne, begins to understand Gaston isn’t as perfect as he seems and as LeFou believed him to be for all these years -- he realizes this when he turns to Gaston to help him calm down and maybe reconsider doing something else and is met with an angered “Do you want to be next?!” --; Ti - he isn’t exactly logical -- he believes in Maurice’s tales (”You must be the talking teacup!”) but assumingly doesn’t speak about it in fear of getting laughed at by Gaston -- but he does use his Ti by the end of the movie, and with the help of his dominant Fe he realizes that Gaston doesn’t deserve him and that he himself doesn’t deserve to be treated like an object, in a quite literal manner, by Gaston.

Mrs. Potts: ESFJ (FeSiNeTi)  Fe - she’s very open about what she feels and even uses her Fe to make Belle change her mind about escaping -- she notices the ladder and she offers Belle some tea with a dash of an advice (“I have found that most troubles seem less troubling after a bracing cup of tea.”) --, she is very passive about letting people know what she wants but still vocal, a bit less so when she threatens to serve “cold tea for the rest of [Beast’s] days” if he doesn’t tell Belle how he feels, before succumbing to the curse she isn’t worried about her own welfare but instead her son’s, Chip (“Have you seen Chip? He ran off. Where’s my little boy?”), and is open to her son and husband that she loves them and missed them (kissing them repeatedly in the reunion); Si - she uses her past experiences as advice (“People say a lot of things in anger. It is our choice whether or not to listen.”) and is the first person to speak about Beast’s past to Belle, she dwells in her past -- thinks about her days in the sun and when she used to be human and with her husband; Ne - she manages to understand why Beast and the staff were cursed even though she wasn’t present to see it unfold until the Enchantress was placing the spell, she’s somewhat skeptical of Belle and Beast falling in love at first and sees possibilities about what would happen if they fell in love or not -- becoming “antiques” as she puts it, or the curse breaking and them being human again; Ti - she realizes and understands that her and the rest of the staff, with the exception of Chip, were responsible for the curse even if not directly.

Lumière: ENFJ (FeNiSeTi) Fe - Lumière is a very warm person and his Fe is something very characteristic of him, he’s the first person to welcome Belle to her “new home”, he’s very open about his feelings (“I would do anything to kiss you again, Plumette.”), firmly believes in true love and that Belle is the one and she can, and will, fall in love with Beast, has an entire song & music number about welcoming Belle, even tries to get Cogsworth to be more optimistic (“What do you want to be for the rest of your life, Cogsworth? A man or a mantle clock?”); Ni - he is very focused on one thing and one thing only -- breaking the spell --, he states things before they happen and dismisses Cogsworth’s criticism of his thinking (“I am telling you, this girl is the one!” & “You know she’ll never love him.” “A broken clock is right two times a day, mon ami, but this is not one of those times.” & “She is the one.”), arranges a dinner and song so his plan can come through; Se - he knows how to take advantage of what surrounds him to help him achieve the goal of breaking the curse -- making Belle feel at home with the many rooms in the castle --, uses Maestro Cadenza to help him with the song for the goal above, he has a very strong sense of fashion (“Okay, I can fix this.” after the disaster of Beast’s make-over) and even puts himself in his gimmicks (“I do tricks with my fellow candlesticks!”); Ti - although he analyzes things, he does it very quickly, which demonstrates his inferior Ti and dominant Fe

Cogsworth: ISTJ (SiTeFiNe) Si - he’s very traditional and wants everything to be just in order (“Lumière, as head of the household, I demand you put her back in her cell at once!”), he holds to his thinking of “if no one has loved Beast until now and Belle isn’t any different”, urges Lumière to keep it down because he doesn’t want to disturb Beast and the order of the castle, even after he claims that “True love really does win the day!” when he’s proven the opposite by the villager’s visit he goes immediately back to his old thinking (“So much for true love.”), he wants to go back to how things once were as soon as he sees his wife (“Turn back into a clock. Turn back into a clock.”); Te - he’s extremely skeptical of the possibility of Belle falling in love with Beast and isn’t exactly quiet about it, letting Lumière know he thinks his plans are overbearing (“You know she’ll never love him.”); Fi - unlike Lumière, he isn’t immediately warm with Belle and instead lets Lumière lead the way, he becomes irritable when Lumière forces him to be apart of his plan during Be Our Guest but eventually warms up to it and by the end he’s singing along, he takes much longer to be warm with Belle and we’re never shown whether he becomes friends with her or not; Ne - by the end of the movie, and we can argue that it’s too late, he starts to welcome the possibility of Belle really loving Beast and of her being the one that will break the spell.

[frankierising-blog]

Crappy Lair Review for Passenger

-Okay, a few things I forgot about as I haven’t done Lair Reviews in a long time. 

1. I’m terrible at them. 2. I ended up swearing a fair bit. 3. They take me.... AGES. I’m sorry!!

Before I go into it, overal:

LOVE your lore... but there’s not enough! You tease us with the intro and with Crow and then there’s only little teasers. I AM ADDICTED TO YOUR LORE, FEED ME!!

Also, love the subtlties of a lot of your customisations, there seems to always be flecks of blue, green, yellow that perfectly contrast or compliment the outfit!

Okay, onward!

@fr-ari

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:

I love how discrete the Customisations are! At first glance your lair looks quite plain, there’s lots of neautral colours and when you’re just looking at the thumbnails it all looks very simple... but the longer you look, the more details and differences and personalities that you start to see! I thought that was neat!

Okay Individuals:

Luc:

Um.. ex freaking SCUSE ME!? Wine/Cin/Wine is SO freaking amazing! I had no idea! And the Facet/Glimmer looks GORGEOUS with Skink! LOVE THIS SO WELL GENES HOLY CRAP! 

But... are you going to add apparel? ARE YOU GOING TO DRESS THIS BEAUTIFUL MOFO!? IS THERE LORE? IS THIS A WIP!?

Crow:

Crow’s story is awesome! I love the simplicity of his apparel! I imagine having to wear a respirator that ends up giving you your nickname would kind of make you want to avoid drawing any more attention to yourself – so you’re probably try to stay as neutral as possible!

I feel like I want to see him in a trench coat or something, but I guarantee that’s only because of the goggles.

Question, are they part of the respirator or for another purpose?

The artwork though! There’s two broken image links on my end but I can see the top one and it is STUNNING! LOOOOVE CROW!!!

Lovett:

Okay, so I assume Lovett is geared up for flying, but boy you’re not fooling anywhere. Patchwork, leaves and smoke everywhere? Oh, you’re flying alright... Tert: Smoke ;)

But hecking heck, how GOOD does shadow and goldenrod look!? And the little green (*wink*) flecks throughout, hot dayum!

Flint:

Hnnnng.

 HNNNNNNG

 HNNNNNNNNNNNNNG!!!!

 Flint, you sexy m*** f*****!!! Look at this flying steampunk robot dragon!!! I love this so much, holy crap! The cheeky little accent underneath Silver Steampunk Wings is cheeky AF and gives the whole thing a kind of a creepy undertone. Like, Ridgebacks always look like they’re smiling, so I immediately thing this is a jolly pilot, deliveryman or otherwise helpful fellow who loves life…. But that sneaky little hint of red under there…. Suspicious….. BUT ALSO MATCHING FAMILIAR IS YES GOOD… but fuck that Hooded Dodo, they’re always puffed up arrogantly, smug bastards.

 Slaid

Holy crap, I can’t tell if Slaid is rich or poor! HE’S GOT WRAPS AND MISSMATCHING STUFF BUT THEN THERE’S ALL THIS GOLD AND STEAMPUNK! The mismatch kind of gives me the impression that he’s comfortable, but perhaps doesn’t always acquire his goods from the most honest of sources? Does that make sense? Like he’s been collecting his gear as he goes along in his travels.

 CROW’S LORE WAS SO GOOD, I WANT MORE LORE ABOUT THESE GUYS!!

I really like this outfit though, it’s cluttered and miss-matched but everything sort of fits together nicely, nothing is clashing. You’re really good at subtly matching colours! (TEACH ME!)

Cardani

THE HAT SORT OF LOOKS LIKE A FEDORA ON GUARDIANS, I AM LAUGH! But bloody hell, are the Greens intentional? Oh wait, Wind Flight… so probably. WELL EVEN SO CARDANI IS KIND OF BAD ARSE! I’M REALLY GLAD HE DOESN’T HAVE MUCH APPAREL ON HIS MIDSECTION BECAUSE THE IRI/SHIM/CRACKLE LOOKS BLOODY AMAZING!!! <3

Bonemother

 It took me a second to actually see the dragon under all that, dayum. I LOVE the Guise and the Skin together, that looks so dark and kind of ghoulish, but I feel like there’s just a little bit too much going on here. I feel like I’d like to see it with either the Crown of Bones OR the Bone Antlers on their own and maybe with a few less accessories? Mind you, that’s just my opinion and my lair looks like a dumpster so wtf do I know?

 BTW WHO DID THE TOP ART FOR BONEMOTHER AND CROW!?

Fausten:

Subtle greens, Subtle Greens, SUBTLE GREENS! Yaaay! Also loving how much the shoes match it’s Secondary! <3

Vedere

ExfuckingCUSE me right now!? This is perfection. PERFECTION! THE SIMPLICITY, THE INTRICACY! It’s beautiful, delicate, fierce and horrifying, I love it! You have NAILED IT!!! GOD I WANT LORE! MORE LORE MORE LORE MORE LORE!

Kell:

LOVE IT! CREEEEPY AS FUUUUUCK!!! Hopefully that was the intention! The art is effing AMAZING TOO!! Who did it!?

This one is busy too but I feel like it’s the perfect amount of busy - I get the whole Voodoo vibe, but is that too shallow an interpretation of Kell?

Hallow:

OMG I love him and I hate him! I mean, he’s gorgeous and he seems charming.. but on the other hand, look at all that discrete gold. It’s subtle but flashy and he’s waving his Light Sprite around, acting all chill, but you just know he’s mocking you… or is he? Still don’t know if I hate him or I’m jealous of him (in the scenario where I am somehow a dragon responding to his existence, haha).

 The colours though, the accent, the subtle yellows… dayum. He better have a super gorgeous mate when I click next or I’m so freaking stealing him. I’ll find a way!

But I have to ask, Why Hallow and Trick or Treat? IS THIS JUST A COSTUME!? IS HE ACTUALLY UGLY UNDER THERE? OR is that flirtatious?

Shiver:

Bleaurgh, look at this queen! Fire and Ice, BLAAAARGH!!!! BLLLAAAAAAARGH! BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!! I’VE GOT ANOTHER ELEMENT FOR YOU: VOMIT.

 But seriously, you’ve put this together really well, everything compliments eachother perfectly so it looks fantastic!!! I just hate Twilight for using that STUPID ROBERT FROST POEM! BLAAAAARGH! BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!

Liden

OH MY GOD, YES, GOOD! YES! THIS IS FANTASTIC!!! PERFECTION! I don’t have enough to say about Liden because he’s freaking perfect! Per. Fect. I am starting to dislike you as a person over how nice some of your dragons are, purely jealous!!!

 TRULY IS A FINE MINT CANDY BUT WHERE IS THE MINT CANDY LORE MY FRIEND!?

[Okay, I see I have more notes now and I feel like I need to try to get a few more done before I finish work, so I’ll try and get a few more in but maybe with shorter responses]

Ari

Okay, Ari and Liden together are a pretty freaking nice Fire & Ice style thing - especially as you could also see this as Autumny more than Fire, but next to the ice.. yeah. Anyway.

SEE, EVEN ARI HATES THE FIRE AND ICE THING AS MUCH AS I DO! But seriously, I really like the simplicity of the apparel, it makes the accent pop so hard, and Ari looks like he has resting dick face so he’d probably be a little prick if you tried to jazz his outfit up too much!

Lear

NO, STOP, THIS IS SO FREAKING BEAUTIFUL!!! THE LITTLE WINGS WITH THE CROWN - ALL THE CUTE LITTLE PINKS AND PURPLES FUUUUUUUU- 

Lear seems almost out of place in you lair, I like that! She’s so freaking beautiful, holy crap!

Griffin

THIS REMINDS ME OF LINK FROM ZELDA! HOLY HECKY HECK, THIS IS FREAKING AMAZING! PERFECT AMOUNT OF GREEN AND BUSY AND LOUD AND SUBTLE ALL AT ONCE!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAH1!!! Griffin is my favourite! I like how the goggles and the accent sort of tie him to the rest of the clan but he still seems like such an outsider! LOOOOVE!!!

Okay, I’m gonna end this here. I’m sorry if this wasn’t what you were hoping for! Feel free to not pay if it’s offensive or not up to standard!

Regardless, hope you liked it and thanks for your patience!

[justasmallbloginabigklainefandom]

The Great ATOG Reread; Grey part 2

Well, this is different.

Chapter 5

She flexes her hands, and doesn't lower her head. "I just held him. Just for a second, I just used telekinesis to - he always thinks he can walk out as soon as he wan-" "You -" Oh god no. "Jesus. Jesus, don't ever do that, what the hell were you -"

I. FUCKING. HATE. HER.

I AM LITERALLY SHAKING WITH RAGE, JUST LIKE PHALANX. I KNOW HE’S AFRAID OF HIMSELF, BUT AT THIS MOMENT I WISHED HE’S BLASTED HER HEAD OFF.

I know she will redeem herself, and she will even be a great friend to both of them (fuck, even Santana will redeem herself), but I am getting so tired of her attitude. I am getting so tired that she is satisfied by watching people hurt. 

Just FYI, if you’re reading this, with ATOG and the first four chapters of Grey, I read them on my eReader (going against my ‘no fic on my eReader’ rule, but then again, these two are completely different stories), and then write posts afterwards. I have the actual fic open on a different tab so that I can copy quotes and shit. Because of that, I clicked the “part 5″ link and I guess chapter 5 will be a liveblog?

Anyway, back to Quinn. I will end up loving everyone on that team, including Quinn and Satan (heh), since they will redeem theirselves and they have a valid reason for their behaviour, and I am all for character growth and giving them a chance, and they will take that chance, but that still doesn’t really excuse that these two women bullied them.

"Sidekicks should be seen and not heard."

I mean, really. As a feminist, Quinn of all people should know that this is not acceptable. Change ‘Sidekicks’ to ‘Women’ and we can talk about a shit ton of history of opression and wow, Quinn would delve on that cause she’s feminist as fuck.

The conversation/fight she has with Agent Sylvester and the Ghost is the first step to redeeming herself (and to unraveling the secret)

And she stares back at him quivering with rage, but he sees the second of something else behind her eyes, because he knows every nuance of fear, every facet of it, he is as fluent in fear as in French . . .

Quinn, I love you, but you are not stronger than him.

The evening is a bit weird after that. Quinn is reserved, and as a reader you know why. Santana is bitching, but tell me something new. Phalanx is once again asking for a ‘normal’ evening, right after he got to Blaine problem no. #1. He’s not a sidekick.

(Really, I should list these problems. OKaY. For future reference, the sidekick thing and everything involved is Blaine’s problem no. #1, the want for normal non-hero shit is no. 2#. Kurt losing grip of his powers is Kurt’s problem no. #1)

It's never been like this. He didn't know it was supposed to be like this. He wants to kiss him but he doesn't want to break the dance, he doesn't want it to end, not ever, the warmth of his breathing body in Phalanx's arm and his hand given to his. He wants to say, Do you understand how rare this is - ? but he thinks that he knows that, the Ghost who never even asked to be in love, wouldn't have thought to ask to be loved, he knows that. How many people do you meet, and how many could ever know you to dance like this, slow and trusting like there's nothing but the way they move and the way the music moves them, nothing but the safety of the other's body, and the Ghost's arm tucking him closer by the waist, the Ghost's hip against his with each step because they know.

For the first time, they dared to show a little bit of themselves and their relation in front of the team.

Chapter 6

Well, I’m on a roll now.

AND HOLY SHIT GUESS WHAT’S BACK? THE FUCKING FANDOM. I can’t tell you if I’ve missed them or not.

Well, I sure as fuck did miss Draxie, BB, and Ghostly. What a way to reintroduce them. Draxie is cheerful and bubbly, talking about drabbling. BB isn’t even online, but someone recs her fic. And Ghostly is mentioned because people are afraid of her, but shit son, she’s right with her meta about entitlement.

Blaine grunts, still scrolling. Damned fandom, it's a full-time job just to keep up with it . . .

He’s right, though. He braces himself for the meta, and oh, how I missed Ghostly.

P&G: Because they, the idiot ignorant children, fetishize homosexuality in the most contorted and disturbing way possible. Because they're fine with him being gay - happy that he's gay, since they can use his name and form for all their little m/m fantasies on a whole different level of appropriation now. But how dare he, human being in his own life, how *dare* he not conform to strict gender stereotypes at the same time. He's perfectly well allowed to be gay, as long as he does it the 'right way'. God forbid he be any kind of queer that disturbs them, though. TV: There was a lot of negativity.

P&G: They don't want to see a male hero stand in a 'feminine' pose. It demeans him. It makes him less heroic.

But wait, there’s more

P&G: I have a rant brewing, if that's what you mean. The fandom entitlement complex links into fandom sexism in a really strange and powerful way. Because fandom feels like it *owns* its figures of fetishization; they are what they are because we made them that. There is an enormous sense of ownership, like they're just the scaffolding, *we* construct who they are. And of course, they can't live up to that. They're real people, not our dolls. And when they fail to live up to our particular construction we either ignore the facts and go on as before or else we get *really fucking angry*. How *dare* they be actual human beings. They're supposed to be *my doll*, not any real person. Especially not any complicated real person! They should be as simple as possible because I can't conceptualize more than three personality traits in my head at any one time, I am *actually* that dumb! TV: Ahem. Plus we live in a patriarchal society and we construct our dolls along the strict and misogynist gender lines given to us, which oversimplifies them in very dangerous ways.

The entire ‘dolls’ thing is still a thing I use to descibe how I feel about fandom and RPF shipping. I love you, Ghostly, for that brilliant metaphor.

This is not a hero/sidekick relationship. They have strengths and weaknesses and they complement each other. They actually are, in every sense of the word, partners.

Oh boy, if only more of the fandom would get this. It would save Blaine all the shit from problem 1#.

And oh shit.

Time for a...

Blaine's hit back from the post he was on - no way in hell he'll read all that text - and while he's been asleep the fandom's . . . "Oh Jesus." he mutters, and rubs his forehead. "Blaine, what?" "There, um, I don't know, something . . ."

Wankfest.

A human being, scared for real reasons in a genuinely scary world, came to us to reach out for another human being to not feel alone. You bullied them into deleting their blog within a matter of hours. Well *done*, fandom. This really is the grossest mockery of everything that the Ghost and Phalanx, unlike you, actually bother to do. Which is to think about someone else and not just themselves for every single second of every fucking day. The _1_and_only, if you do see this, fuck all of them; they don't know what courage means, they're both too stupid and too spineless to understand the concept. Not all people are like them. When you ask people for help, sometimes they will not be ugly self-absorbed morons, sometimes they will try to *help* you. The Ghost and Phalanx taught us that if nothing else. I hope that you're well, and good luck with your life and your powers. If your power turns out to be the ability to smack people at a great distance, I advise you to not be afraid to use it as much as you fucking need. And now I'm getting a drink because fandom can, very seriously, go fuck itself.

You also get someone shitting on Draxie? I mean, people shitting on Ghostly is just, well, ‘normal’, but this is Draxie and - wow, no surprises, it’s about entitlement. Did. They. Not. Read. That. Meta?

Blaine sits in his desk chair feeling strange and sad, while Kurt takes his post-aikido nap on the bed. He'd had to lie to him, earlier, after swallowing his own shock, because he doesn't know what it would do to Kurt of all people to find out that people were being abused on the internet in some weird way on his behalf. And he'd looked really honestly scared at what Blaine might have been stunned by online, Kurt doesn't understand and isn't entirely comfortable with the Ghost's fans and he'd had no idea what they might have done, in his mind it could be anything and it's really not like Blaine could tell him the truth . . .

But really, guys, doesn’t it fuck you up?

Doesn’t it fuck you up that people fight and hurt on behalf of their idols because ‘they love them’? 

I never got that. I remember when Heather Morris fans were bashing Darren, because they loved Hemo. Or when Darren fans bashed Dianna. BECAUSE THEY LOVE DARREN? And so on. We do not know anything about their off-social media relationship.

People in fandoms hurt and harrass people on behalf of their idols.

BECAUSE THEY LOVE THEM.

Jesus.

Phalanx . . . it's different in difficult ways when it's him and not Blaine. People talk about Phalanx and he mostly lets it run off his back, he knows it's nothing to do with him, really. He knows the way they talk about the Ghost is nothing to do with Kurt, after all. He lets himself keep the good things. He knows that every time they say that the Ghost is brave and strong and good and beautiful it's true, so he lets himself keep the good things they say about Phalanx, and he tries to ignore the rest. Haters gonna hate. But it must be so hard to ignore them when they're saying it right to you, safe behind a computer screen's shield. How can it be okay to say that to someone just because you don't have to look into their eyes and see the person they actually are, the person you're actually hurting . . . ?

The phandom bashes the Ghost, because they love Phalanx.

The fanghosts bash Phalanx, because they love the Ghost.

And this will all lead to the combination of Blaine problem 1# and 2#. 1#, because why can’t people see they’re equal and that this isn’t hero/sidekick and 2#, because how can he stand it that people use his hero identity to hurt others?

Kurt might feel bad for leaving New York City astray, but Blaine can’t handle leaving the fandom astray.

[latesthollywoodnews]

Selena Gomez' Mom Mandy Teefey DISHES On The Hate Selena Gets

Selena Gomez' Mom Mandy Teefey DISHES On The Hate Selena Gets

Jeremy Brown - Latest News - My Hollywood News

Selena Gomez’ Mom Mandy Teefey DISHES On The Hate Selena Gets, New Hollywood Celebrities 2018.

Top Rated Celebrities and Most Popular Celebrities, New Hollywood Celebrities 2017, Selena Gomez’ Mom Mandy Teefey DISHES On The Hate Selena Gets.

List Of 2018 Hollywood Films Celebrities Coming Out In 2019 all Celebrities of Walt Hollywood Studios The Walt Hollywood Studios is an American film studio, one of the four major businesses of The Walt Hollywood Company and the main component of its Studio Entertainment segment. The studio, best known for its multi-faceted film division, which is one of Hollywood’s major film studios, is based at the eponymous Walt Hollywood Studios in Burbank, California.

Who married Sleeping Beauty?

Prince Phillip tells his father that he has met a young woman in the forest and that he will marry her, against his father’s will. Unbeknownst to Hubert, this young woman is Aurora under the disguise of “Briar Rose”, the fake identity the fairies have given her to protect her from Maleficent.

How many official Hollywood princesses are there?

As of 2017, the eleven characters considered part of the franchise are Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, Rapunzel, and Merida. The franchise has released dolls, sing-along videos, apparel, home decor, toys, and a variety of other products featuring the Hollywood Princesses.

How did Walt Hollywood begin?

The Walt Hollywood Company started in 1923 in the rear of a small office occupied by Holly-Vermont Realty in Los Angeles. It was there that Walt Hollywood, and his brother Roy, produced a series of short live-action/animated films collectively called the ALICE COMEDIES. The rent was a mere $10 a month.

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Selena Gomez’s mom is opening up about why she doesn’t defend her daughter from the haters.

We’ll be honest… it kind of makes sense!

Alright, guys… when you’re as famous as Selena Gomez, receiving hate on the Internet sort of comes with the territory. And although Sel’s learned to shake most of the haters off, many fans still can’t help but wonder why her mom hasn’t really come to her defense when the negativity’s become too much to bear.

When a fan took to Twitter to ask Selena’s mom, Mandy Teefey, what she thinks of all the hate Selena gets and why she doesn’t ever speak out and defend her daughter, she explained that she simply won’t fight ignorance online because she doesn’t believe it will lead to anything positive.

She wrote, QUOTE, “Hate isn’t worth attention. I protect everyone I love, but hate is ignorance and I would live in a world of hate if I sat online fighting ignorance.” Not gonna lie… she has a pretty good point!

Don’t worry, though! Mandy may not defend Selena on the reg, but she does have some famous friends that have no problem coming to her defense.

Just recently, designer Steffano Gabbana came under fire for calling Selena ugly on Instagram. In response, Miley Cyrus clapped back saying that what he said was QUOTE, “false” and total BS. She also called Sel Fine AF, so it’s safe to say these two former Disney Stars still have each other’s backs.

Anyways, what do you guys think about Mandy’s policy of not responding to hateful comments about Selena? Let us know in the comments section below and thanks for watching! Please Click to the right to watch another new Video and don’t forget to subscribe to our channels. I’m your host Miriam Isa and I’ll see you next time!

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Celebrity Latest Story, Hollywood Celebrity Rating, Hollywood Celebrity News 2019, Latest Celebrity Releases, Selena Gomez’ Mom Mandy Teefey DISHES On The Hate Selena Gets.

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