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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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New X-Men Xtrospective Part 2: Germ Free Generation (Annual, #117-120)

Hello all you happy mutants! And welcome back to my look one of my faviorite runs of one of my faviorite super teams by one of my faviorite comic book writers!

For those of you just joining us.. it’s been a while. I did the first instalment of this retrospective back in early January as a present to my friend for christmas, as he had never read E is for Extinctoin and what with this run being vital to the current, utterly brilliant Krakoa era of X-Men. But with both Black History Month and Valentine’s day, February had no real room for this one and march ended up being just as crammed with me doing essentially the entire della arc of ducktales in one month. I didn’t mean for this retrospective to get pushed so far back, but since I gave up doing weekly coverage of Final Space I had some room on the schedule so this retrospective is back with a vengance with two entries this month and hopefully at least one a month afterword to keep it at a decent clip.

Last time I covered the background of this run and didn’t really find much for the issues after, so I won’t have to spend as much time on background.

So since i’ts been a few months, a refresher is probably in order

PREVIOUSLY, ON X-MEN: Our merry mutants enterted a marvelous new era. As Charles redidciated to the dream with new equipment and a new uniforms our hero encounter a new villian: The Mysterious Cassandra Nova, a powerful telepath who used an uwitting patsy from the trask family and a defucnt sentinel factory to slaughter the mutant nation of Genosha, killing 16 million mutants in the most horrific act of genocide against mutants ever known. And the fact there has been more than one genocide against mutant kind MIGHT, just MIGHT be the reason they blackmailed for peace with life saving drugs instead of helping willingly and freely in the current comics. Just maybe.

Cassandra was captured by the X-Men soon after but escaped and nearly got a hold of Cerebra only to be stopped thanks to a combination of former enemy, genoshan resident at the time of the genocide, and that bitch Emma Frost who snapped her neck and Charles himself who uncharacteristically shot Cassandra in the head. That night Charles took a bold step over that would change the X-Men forever and told the world on live tv:

While all of this was going on we got caught up on the team’s personal struggles, currently consisting of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast and Wolverine with Emma joining as of the issue we’re about to cover. Beast is grappling with a secondary mutation that makes him look like Aslan, the jesus of narnia and all lions. Meanwhile Scott and Jean are grappling with their non existant sex life as Cyclops possesion by Apocalypse shortly before this story has severely rattled him and caused him to close himself off emotionally.

So that’s where we pick up. Our heroes are now no longer hiden saftely in the shadows from a world that hates and fear them but are out front and center with the world watching. And we’ll see both how that helps their cause and how it puts them directly in the cross hairs under the cut. Content Warning: This review discusses Transphobia and a scene involving a school shooting. If either of these are a trigger for you or something you do not want to read about please skip this part of the retrospective for your own well being. Thank you and have a lovely day.

The Man From Room X:

We have three stories today: an annual that introduces our final team member and the main villians of our next arc, a one off that moves the main plot for the first 12 issues along, and a three part arc about said villains. Before we get into the Annual, I have to talk about it’s weird gimmick: The issue is entirely sideways. I don’t mean it’s bad though some parts are problematic I mean when bought it’d be on it’s side and in my trade I have to flip the whole thing over on it’s side to read it. It’s just a .. weird choice. Not the weirdest thing about this issue somehow but not unexpected from Grant as they like to play with the formula.

We open in said Room X, a location in China where a mutant named Xorn is kept and showed off to a mysterious group of dickweeds in suits representing “Mr. Sublime”. His jailer, General Aao Jun,, shows him off as most bad guys would : By undoing his helmet and thus disntegrating two innocent children just by looking at them. Sublime says they have a deal.

Meanwhile also in China the X-Men are there for a funeral and Emma and Scott trade insulting questions back in forth: She mocks him about his lack of sex with Jean lately and he brings up her criminal past. As for why Emma’s still with the x-men.. it’s out of pragmatisim. WIth Genosha gone, the x-men are the saftest faction to throw in with.

As for why the X-Men are in China, Charles has rapidly expanded his operations now he’s public by setting up X-Corps, a multinational humantarian aid organization dedicated to helping mutants in need wherever they sprout up. He’s set up offices in Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Mumbai and Melborne.

He’s also half assed it, at least for the Hong Kong office and only gave them two employees: Domino, who those of you not as familiar with the comics may remember from deadpool and Risque.. who I honestly had never heard of before New X-Men and frequently forget existed. I just looked her up for the first time and she’s a minor mutant who was an associate of X-Force and Warpath’s love intrest. She could compress matter causing it to implode. My assumption here is that Morrison simply picked a minor mutant at random for the job.

But yeah naturally with only two mutants charged with, according to domino “All of asia” went horribly and the x-men are there for Risque’s funeral and to find out what happened. Unsuprisingly it’s tied into our cold open: Risque had found evidence of a mutant trafficking operation and died fighting them off and Dom is naturally f eeling in over her head since said operation involves the chinese goverment, who according to her exccute most mutants at birth and John Sublime and his cult.

We soon see a press confrence from this asshole and find out what his deal is: Sublime is the head of the U-Men, a group that belivies they are a “third species” of mutants trapped in human bodies that deserve to have the surgery to make them into mutants, and thus wear weird suits until the world is pure and allows them to have surgery for it.

Yeahhhh this.. this is really fucking uncomfortable and is going to be present throughout today’s piece so let’s just go ahead and rip that band-aid off: The U-Men come off as HIGHLY transphobic. They use terms similar to trans people call themselves trans species and are trapped inside a body they don’t belong in. It’s VERY uncomfortable to read as a result and something that hadn’t really sunk into till thsi reading but once it had.. oh god does this not age well.

The one thing that keeps this from runing the run and Grant Morrison as a whole for me.. is that I do not think for one second it was intentional. Grant themself is genderqueer, nonbinary and a cross dresser. None of this means they CAN’T be prejudice, being Queer does not magically make you immune to being prejudiced. But before this Grant had the genderqueer sentient street Danny the Street over in doom patrol and a trans main character in his book the invisibles, Lord Fanny. And given New X-Men’s biggest flaw as a whole is clumsy early 2000′s unforutnate implications such as a good chunk of the things about Cyclops affair with Emma, we’ll get to that at the right time, Angel in the next arc and Dust, who was introduced as from afganastan wearing an outfit not seen in the country and speaking a language not spoken in the country. Grant didn’t make these mistakes TWICE, it’s why I still have respect for them, and this won’t be the first or last comic i’ve forgiven for being stupid for it’s time. But I will still call Grant out when I see it. Just because I respect an author just because they changed my life does not mean I won’t call them out when they fuck up. And if they prove to be truly vile, have harmed someone or what have you I will cut them the fuck out of my life. I’ve done it with JK Rowling, Warren Ellis, Brad Jones and Joss Whedon. I would do it with Grant if I truly belivied they were transphobic and instead didn’t just write something very stupid without thinking the metaphor through 20 years ago.

So anyway back to the comic book bollocks as Wolvie and Dominio prepare for an infiltration and flirt a bunch. We also find out Jun is a mutant himself with a power only Grant could dream up: his skin, hair and what have you that falls off him turns into a naked golem for a bit before expiring. And if you hadn’t read this issue before reading this review, yes that actually happened. While the first arc had a BIT of Grant’s trademark batshit insanity, the series REALLY starts to pick it up from here: This issue has a mutant with functioning star for a head, a poorly thought out bucnh of sci fi new age organ theives, and a general whose power is “makes naked clones out of his dandruff”. Oh and his fondest wish?

I just... I don’t know how to respond to that. I don’t know how you respond to an old man’s weird murder fetish that he tells a somehow even creepier cult leader while said cult leader is paying him to buy a star man, and their both surronded by the creepy old guy’s skin golems that weirdly look like mudokons. Look i’ve read Grant’s entire utterly bonkers run on doom patrol. I’ve seen a man who looks like a question mark use a bicycle that makes everyone high like their on LSD for president. And THIS is what breaks me.

So while.. THIS is going on, Dom and Wolverine plan to do it all night long on the professor’s credit card, no really he gives all his professors carte blanch to use school fun, and inflitrate, Dom through the elvator this horrorshow just took place in and Wolvie james bond style. Also I gotta say I REALLY love how Morrison writes Domino. She’s wittiy, entertaining and her power is as awesome as always, super luck if you didn’t know. It’s a real shame he didn’t add her to the team: She wasn’t on any other x-teams, with X-Force having been rebranded into X-Statix by this point. She would’ve been a fun addition to the cast.

Naturally wolverine is found out.. but that was the entire plan, for him to serve as a distraction then cut his way to domino while she steals something from the vault. As for the rest of the X-Men, Cyclops, Beast and Emma are all downstairs in the parking garage and find a secret entrance. Jean is not on this trip and that’s a major plot point for this run. This is where Risque died.. and it only get’s worse when Hank goes inside, finding a bug like child, basically htink a giant caterpillar but with tons of human arms inttead of legs with her wings cut off.

Thankfully as Logan and Dom escape above, the U-Men are dumb enough to storm down bellow.. and while they incapacitate beast with some launched tiny knives, designed to incapcicate but leave them in tact for harvest, Emma beats the shit out of them and get the info out as only she can....

Granted she could’ve just turned back to normal and used her telepathy.. but what fun would that be? Plus they have blockers and you know CUT UP A FUCKING CHILD. SO yeah fuck them, let emma have her fun.

Thanks to her they find out the U-Men are a front for illegal organ harvest, and while they can’t prove sublimes attached Emma suggests killing him. Good idea but Scott suggests the lighter approach and we find out what Dom stole, a key, something Emma can psychcially scan. She warns it might take her a bit to get something.. only to be flooded instantly and we find out who the man in the box was. Shen Xorn... i’ll let emma tell you more herself.

It’s stuff like this why, despite some serious flaws like the U-Men debacle and some stuff to come, some I mentioned above other that’s just with the plot that i love this run. Morrison just gets how to really tell an x-men story and the real tragedy of being a mutant. That just for being diffrent, you get shut out, or in this case thrown into a box when you could’ve and should’ve been something more. As emma turns herself to diamond to deal with the psychic backlash, Beast has some solemn words to share.

That night Scott rests in his bedroom while presumibly hearing some truly horrific and sexy things next door while talking to jean before clocking out.. only for Emma to head in in a sexy dress with champagne. What happened? Well we won’t know for sure for most of the run.

The next day the U-Men prepare to load and we get some scrap of what the idea was supposed to be: John talks to Ao Jun about his procedures. We see wings crudely sewen to his back and his throat implaants hurting “But one day I will fly”. THe IDEA is their supposed to be lunatics, people who envy mutantkind but don’t actually respect their culture or their sense of personhood. It’s not the worst idea and had Grant not used trans termnology for htis, it would’ve been a great one. I think he INTENDED for them to be coopting the idea of being trans and what not to maks their true intentions.. which is problematic due to debates like the ones on bathrooms where a lot of transphobic asshats make the bad faith argument a bunch of people are going to pretend to be trans to assault people.

We’re.. we;’re not even to the main storyarc yet.

But things soon go wrong as Xorn’s starhead starts to collapse into a black hole, with no solution as the x-men took the key to his helmet.. and assault the compound. Turns out the star collapse thing is Jun’s revenge on humanity for lockig him down here and he gets his neck snapped. Scott has a solution though.. and it’s stuff like this why I fucking love Scott Summers and get annoyed when people call him “boring”: He realizes Xorn is comitting sucicide.. so he’s going to talk him out of it. Not just for everyone else but he deserves to live. And while Emma points out only logan among htem knows chinese and she can’t get through to Xorns’ head due to the way his brain works, Scott has a simple workaround: Use the nearest chineses speaker to teach Scott chinese. So.. with that he talks to Xorn.

And that my friend is Scott Summers. A man who faced with powerful man whose given up, whose lost all hope... convinces him he can still go on. That living’s better than dying.. and that it does get better. The issue closes with Xorn basking in the sunlight for the first time in decades while Domino sweats having an extremley powerful unknown mutant out in the world. Scott’s already thought of that.. and signed him up with the x-men. Granted it won’t be until our next article that he actually fully joins the team, but w’ell get to that next time.

This issue is great... while the U-Men stuff is pretty bad and isn’t going to get better, the tale of xorn is excitiong, Aao Jun is an intresting antagonist and the sideways gimmick suprisingly works. So now we’ve finshed our apitizer let’s get on to the main course.

Danger Rooms:

We open in well.. the Danger Room with Beast training a new student.

This is Beak. Beak is my faviorite character Morrison came up with and one of my faviorite X-Characters. Beak is a bird like boy who can fly, it’s just a struggle and due to looking diffrent and not having the most impressive power has very low self esteem. It’s also part of something Morrison took a concerted effort to do: introduce more mutants with genuinely odd apperances and drawbacks. Like we saw with Ugly John last time and Aao Jun in the previous issue, Morriosn really likes adding weird mutants but he also uses it to give a genuine downside to being one. While this isn’t NEW to x-men, Morriosn upped the scale and number of characters like this with weird powers and apperances. We see a bunch of human passing ones too but the backgrounds just jammed with all sorts of unique designs and students. It’s also the point where the school became far more crowded like the movies, a good call on my part both to help those coming in from the movies, and to help sell the mutant baby boom going on. After all it wouldn’t make sense if the school was just about 5-7 students and a bunch of grown adults doing superhero stuff like usual would it.

But we get to see that Hank is a good teacher, as he reminds the boy that he’s getting better and won’t be an x-man overnight, and worries about him to the professor, wanting the boy not to slip through the cracks, figuratively, and not to feel like an outcast.. especaily here. But Hank dosen’t feel blue for long, metaphorically he was blue long before he became the lion minus the witch and the wardrobe, as he has a date to night.. and so does Charles.

Or rather he did.. his girlfriend trish, a long time love intrest of his and a reporter.. breaks up with him. Over voice mail. While in washington. And the reasons she gives are not great

Yes Hank’s transformation is radical.. but not only was it not his choice... she’s being a coward, sending the message it’s okay to dump someone because hteir a mutant or because they happen tobe diffrent and that efffects your career. Again it’s moments like this that make the run soar over the more awkward bits.

Meanwhile Logan’s off doing logan stuff, i.e. gazing at a deer. Wow. Jean followed him. Both notice a space ship: Despite recently outing himself as a mutant, leading to an increased number of students and a bunch of rioting morons at the gates, Charles has decided NOW’S a good time to take a vacation to the Shiar empire. As for why Jean’s really out here, her marriage to Scott isn’t doing so good and while Logan encourages her to stay it’s just not that simple: Her telekenisis is coming back, stronger than ever. She feels the most alive she’s been while he’s shutting her out and feeling his deadest. She tries to turn to logan for comfort but he shuts her down. Just wait two decades jean... he’ll open up to a threesome. In all seriousness though having Jean try and come onto Logan .. will backfire slightly on later storylines. But we’ll get to that eventually.

In the basement Hank is studying Cassandra or rather a virtual version of her since her body is naturally in storage. And he’s found out something disturbing: She’s Charles Genetic Twin.. oh and it gets way worse. The Professor’s weird behavior? Barely staffing the hong kong office, leaving suddenly with rioters t the gates, outing himself? About that...

Cassandra tourtures Hank with the possiblity he’s devovling and then tries to mind controlli him into cleaning himself with his diploma when Beak enters. The good news is this allows hank to shake off her control and tackle her, showing off why hank mccoy is fucking awesome in the process.

That is the Hank McCoy I know, love.. and miss dearly. The one we’ll probably never get back sadly after what others did and what Percy’s had to do to reconclie with all they did.

Unfortunately beak being around means cassandra can force him to beat beast into a coma with his bat. She plans to tear Charles dream down around him and make him watch.. and cryptically says he tried to kill her. She then cheerfully leaves Jean in charge.. and talks about just how much damage one could do with an entire interstellar empire in the wrong hands....

This issue is also excellent and sets up the next two arcs nicely while giving us a nice peak in hank’s head. Great stuff. The artist also hid the word sex in a lot of the images see if you can find them.

Germ Free Generation Issue 1:

So now we get into our main story for today. This story and the one before it were drawn by Ethan Van Sciver whose a talented artist.. but also highly contrversial for being a conservative. I myself.. don’t know what he’s said or did, though calling himself “Canceld Superstar’ on twitter really isn’t a good sign. So I really can’t comment on it but I also know someone would mention it if I didn’t bring it up and if you know what he did please enlighten me.

So we open with a school shooter who also scooped out a guys eyes and is part of the U-Men. He get shot by the swat team while making his speech> it’s an effective opening but one that’s become more uncomfortable to read with each passing day due to school shootings going up and up in number. And mass shootings in general and I... I need a second. I need something to relax me

Thank you Stoopy. Your doing Odd’s Work.

So the news reports on this and we soon see how Jean watches the news.. by using Cerebra to read the minds of every person on the planet. Neat. Everyone’s talking about them. We also get a hint for later as we hear on the suicide of one martha johanson who wrote the note in her own blood. She’ll be important later.... and I mean that both in the context of this retrospective and for the fact she’ll go on to be part of x-men in perpetuity.

This is also where another great concept of Morrison’s pops up: Mutant culture. After all mutants are a minority, they should have their own culture. It’s something Hickman’s era has taken and ran with, but it’s a damn good idea and one that it shoudln’t of taken almost 20 years for someone else to use given Decimation was undone way back around 2012 in Avengers Vs X-Men, aka that event half hte articles on the mcu around the fox sale used as either their image for the article or asked about happneing. And yes that is a pet peeve of mine: while I do think like Civil War AVX could use a movie version to make it better, I don’t think it’s an event that could be done right away and would have to be almost entirely redone anyway given the context for AvX is entirely couched in decimation i.e. something NO ONE wants in any x-adaptation.

So it turns out while watching the news in a next level way Jean is also talking to Logan. “Stay out of my personal fantasies”. Yeah I .. I don’t think your ready for a hairy canadian dry humping a transformer.. specifically killbison. And yes.. that is an actual transformer and why yes, I have been waiting to bring him up.

And he is , and I am not making any of this up, part of a group of decpticons known as the breastforce. Your life is better for knowing that and you are welcome.

Anyway as you’d imagine a genocidal old woman in her brothers’ body leaving the X-Men to fend for themselves after having a teenager bludgeon one into a coma after publicly outing them with a rabid bunch of bigoted morons at the gates has not gone great. Henry is still out and despite the short staffing Jean needs logan to stay where he is as he’s close to an emerging mutant and within range to go get her.

Emma of course has never been so fucking irate in her whole life and is plotting various forms of psychic tourture with the help of her proteges the Stepford Cucokoo, 5 teenage mutants who functoin best as a unit and are easily some of MOrrison’s most prominent additions to the x-cast. Unlike a lot of the x-kids, they’ve been featured prominently in every era of x-men after this including the current one.

Jean decides for a less “Make them hate us even more” approach, but no less pissed off, opening the gates and going out directly to chew out the assembled bigoted morons, pointing out the ones carrying “Mutants Go Home!” signs are especailly dumb as this IS her home. And while she dosen’t point this part out, it’ the same for all of them: most of the mutants are either adults who choose to live here, teenagers who along with their parents choose to live here, or in the majority teens who have no where else to go due to either being abandoned by their families or it being way to dangerous for said families for them to stay due to bigoted assholes like the ones holding mutants go home signs.

A member of the press asks if she’s willing to talk to the media and she refutes most of his bullshit allegations: He asks if their building an army, she and Scott respond they are not and are simply educating mutants and protecting them. When he counters with the fact their living weapons and wearing uniforms... she counters with the fact she’s wearing them to protect herself, rightfully, from people like her, and the x-men are an aid orginzation going where needed to protect the world and while asshole points out no one apointed them.. jean shuts him down by pointing out there are no mutants in goverment and a genocide just happened, so someone has to do the job. Another random asshole tries to pipe up with “Genosha declared war on us” and Emma senses this is just going to go round and round and round and simply presses the assembled mob’s “bliss buttons” in their brains to knock them out. Non violent but honestly warranted: A dangerous part of bigoted assholes is they’l bring up racist bullshit to try and couch it like an actual conversation. None of these complaints really hold water if you looked at the x-men’s history for more than 5 minutes. Yes Charles is training them to fight and yes hte ingial class was an army but every class since has only been trained for self defense: they still got into adventures and what not, but it was usually by their own choice or because they were thrust into them by circumstance. Xaviers is exactly what jean said and endudgling these morons, while good on paper, only makes them seem legit.

Jean retreats to the infirmary where she’s on the verge of breaking down from the sheer weight of everything. Cyclops proves that despite not being the best husband right now... he still loves his wife, offering to go look into Sublime with Emma and hoping Hank wakes up. Turns out his mind for now is a big blank room.

So she can’t get any info off his skull, and neither of the two think what happened with Beak adds up. Something is up here. Their also coming down with colds which will be important later. And just as important.. Magneto is becoming a symbol among people and merch sales with his image are on the rise. We then get this.

So Jean is trying to be a supportive, honest wife, and while the questions incredibly insulting.. his answer is equally so. Spoilers, as mentioned we do get an answer long after this.. and they did not. So Jean is wrong to be suspcious, at this point, but is at least trying to be polite about it and gave him the benifit of the doubt.. and Scott basically said he slept with her without actually saying it despite not having to. You could’ve said “no we did not have sex, we simply talked all night”. It’s not ENTIRELY better given the horrible state of their relationship right now, but it’s still better than HEAVILY implying he rocked her body to the break of dawn for no damn reason.

So we meet our next major addition to the cast Angel Salvador, an abused teen who is a mutant.. and whose abusive and molesting step dad beats her and throws her out over this. The scene’s a bit overdone, coming off like an after school special.. but it’s what happens AFTER that’s truly heartwrenching.

A poor scared teenager clutching herself, finding herself homeless alone and desperatly wishing she wasn’t what she was. It’s just a striking image and shows how well Grant uses the mutant metaphor. I could easily see myself in that position had my parents not been good peopl and had I come out far sooner as bi. The idea of desperatly hoping your not what you are simply becaus eof what hell it brings, despite all the joy it can bring too. . it’s heartbreaking to hear.

Naturally though things don’t get much better as the next morning the U-Men have found her, calling her a freak and successfully kidnapping her.. if only because while she uses acid spit to escape, she flies into a power line.

We then get Sublimes meeting with Emma and Scott and a BETTER use of teh u-men as while Grant made the horrible mistake of calling them “transpecies”, seriously what the fuck were you thinking, the way sublime frames it here is a MUCH better, much less accidently bigoted concept.

The idea isn’t bad: A group of humans jealous of the mutants powers, blatantly ignoring the horrible downsides and mountain of persecution that comes with being one. Grant just made the mistake of couching in in Trans metaphors, clearly trying to have the U-Men steal from Trans People too as a way to make themselves seem legit. And I say if you want superpowers.. fine.. wanting to be a superhero or a mutant is fine, the issue with the U-Men is their copoting a culture, trying to be part of mutantkind without having any of the drawbacks and by actively butchering them. It’s why the concept HAS shown up elsewhere; it’s not TERRIBLE, Grant just made a bad creative choice that’s only gotten worse as Transphobia has ramped up further and further.

Sublime denies it when our heroes bring up Hong Kong.. but naturally he’s simply just keeping them talking long enough to bring out his trump cards, an army of u-men and a brain in a jar he uses to incapacitate them.. and announces his plan to use the school as an organ farm for his third species.

Meanwhile Logan finds the U-Men in their truck preparing to rip angel apart.. and given he snikit’s soon after.. i’ts very clear whose REALLY about to get ripped apart.

Germ Free Generation Part 2:

Part two begins wth Sublime monologoging about how Mutantkind are just cattle to them and reveals the brain is martha’s, her sucicide having been faked and her brain currently being controlled to use as a weapon.

So while Johnny monlogues we find out what happened with Wolverine last issue he didn’t cut up the guys yet as they fired their little flichete guns at him... it was about as useful and effective as you’d expect and the massacre you were expecting occurs. Though in a nice bit of reality the fact wolverine’s soaked in blood and just killed a bunch of blood shockingly does not make the already frighttend teen feel he’s safe and she spits acid on him. Logan pours some stuff on the acid, figuring rightly a black ops murder farmacy would have something to counteract it and tells her she’s safe now .. and tells the guy behind him not to try it. He’s stupid and does anyway and likely gets a claw to the head off panel.

They go to a diner to eat and find a local asshole who threatens them with a shot gun to leave once angel uses her power to digest and goes on a rant about how he snapped his own son’s neck to prevent him being born a freak. Just.. fucking hell this arc is not good for my depression. We get some more angst from Angel and whiel her dialouge is not the best, i’ts a too bit mark millar flavored edgelordy for my taste and if I wanted that i’d go read Ultimates or Ultimate X-Me, her pain is real and Logan helps her through it.

Back at the Mansion the U-Men are on their way to strike, whlie Jean unaware continues to buckle under the weight of all the shit she’s had to deal with, feeling SOMETHING is making them weak with the colds and something worse is going on and thus tries going to Beak’s mind instead and gently helps talk him through it, showing her grace and empathy.. and in return finding out Charles was the one responsible. The alarms flair up and Jean tries calling the police now that’s an option.. but it goes exactly how you’d expect.

Also a second artist took over for this issue and the next Igor Kordey. He’s fine, but not nearly as good as Quitely or Van Sciver and it shows. Meanwhile Beast awakens and heads for the body drawer with Cassandra’s body, and professor’s mind in it.

However Jean’s finally had enough and got her second wind. She’s outgunned, outmanned and left to her own devices. And she’s fucking fed up with it. She steels herself and assembles the students. This is obviously a last resort.. but some of them can defend themselves and their going to need to. But today they won’t be learning.. they’ll be teaching and as the U-Men call them defensless Jeans simply asks “Are you sure about that?”

Germ Free Generation Part 3:

So we come to the finale of this arc. Angel is once again an ungreatful brat to logan and he opts to just leave her there if sh’es going to be like that pointing out being a mutant sucks, it’s going to keep sucking.. and she needs to deal with it instead of lashing out at him and herself over it.

We get back to the U-Men, one of whom is utterly flabergasted they want to him to cut of Cyclops head... only for Emma to awaken.. and take back her regular form meaning she has her telepathy back. The only reason they were able to get her ealier is she was in diamond mode which is stronger but lacks that, a nice way to check and ballance her new powers. She quickly takes them out and disables Martha.

Back at the school we get one of Jean’s definting moments for me and a true chance to show how badass she can be. Before this while Morrison wrote her well, and his version’s still my favoirite, she didn’t really get to do much and was motly in the background. This arc has been her time in the limelight, having trouble grappling with all the stress of running this place by herself.. and emerging from it stronger, more capable and ready to kick some racist weirdo ass. She tries a few diffrent tactics first, having a mutant with a voice power project it to make them think their san invisible army and having the cuckoos fuck with their heads but when both fail, Jean REALLY gets to show off. Thier blade ammo gets turned into a cool looking 3 dimensioinal shape with her telekneisis, and in a cool moment and a wise use of something gross makes the only one of them with useable powers throw up, before issuing a badass boast, wreathed in flames all while she crumples their guns into uselessness. and tears open their suits.

Bad ass.. and logan and Angel arrive just in time for the cecendo as hte u-men flee in terror

The Phoenix has been Reborn. Jean Grey has risen from the ashes and returned to full power.

Meanwhile Sublime is pankcing.. and it gets worse when Emma shows up, fully enraged after all of this and has some words for him.

Iconic. Emma prepares to drop him out of a building but Scott rightly tries to get her to back off, pointing out the pr nightmare it’d create and the fact that they have enough evidence ot shut him down. Martha however has other ideas and gets him to let go of his own accord, falling to his death.. but given he’d aranged a stunt for the press apparently this gives our heroes deniability and Martha her revenge.

So we end this three parter as Jean revels in her new power, and Beast returns with an announcment:

Final Thoughts for Germ Free Generation: This arc is pretty good if forgetable. The struggle of Jean to run the school herself and her rising from the ashes of her own pain at the end with the power of the phoenix at the end is fantastic, finally both giving her a chance to shine.. and a worrying sign for her friends given what her phoenix force copy whose memories she has a copy of, long story, did is awesome. The other parts are okay and ehhhhhhhhh though. Scott and Emma’s investigation into the u-men while having a really good climax, is pretty standard x-men stuff, and Wolverin’es trek with angel is just okay with Angel being highly intolerable during this arc, with Morrison trying a bit TOO hard to make her a “realistic” teen instead coming off as horribly unplesant. She’s supposed to just be lashing out but comes off obnxious as a result. That said this arc does furhter a lot of Morrisons best idea and introduce more, and is a great setup for our next arc, which we’ll get to in two weeks. Soooo

Next Time On X-Men: We find out just what the hell Cassandra Nova is, what her plans are, and what happened with her and charles as our heroes come down with a cold as the might of the shiar empire bears down on them. It’s IMperial in two weeks.

Next Time ON This BLog: Speaking of long Delayed Projects, I finally return to The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as a young Scrooge starts his prospecting career, learning the ins and outs from a rich new mentor, and finding the price tag striking it rich comes with. Raid a copper hill with me tommorow.

If you liked this review, subscirbe for more, join my patreon, and if there’s a comic you’d like me to cover suggest it in the comments or outright comission a review from me via ask. See you at the next rainbow

#new x-men #grant morrison #cassandra nova #shen xorn #beast #hank mccoy #jean grey #cyclops #scott summers #wolverine #logan howlett #angel salvadore #beak #barnell bohsk #the stepford cuckoos #the u-men #john sublime #marthan johanson #ethan van sciver

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join-the-joywrite · 4 years

Text

Hamish & Vera soulmate au headcannons

Sometimes I'm like a red traffic light and sometimes I'm like the Flash of writing. Would you look at that, another one for the collection! Seriously, please write these and tag/link me I'm begging--

For today's rambling, we have what you write on your skin appears on your soulmate's. I'm aiming for a little happiness, given I'm still upset about the colours one and the first/last words one. Allons-y!

Vera and Hamish were best friends as soon as Hamish finally learned how to write. They shared all their stories with one another and for the most part, told each other everything.

Their parents got them washable markers when they were 10 and 6 respectively because it was getting a little hard to stop children from writing on their arms with pens that were stubborn or toxic markers.

Strange thing was that they never actually introduces themselves and they never really noticed that they didn't know each other's names. It never mattered. This was the one person in the whole world that knew them better than anyone else -- and they had no idea who the other was. It was kind of special.

Hamish wrote about how he got bullied for wearing sweaters. They called him a nerd and teacher's pet in tones that said it was the most hateful thing to be.

Vera wrote back the most cunning ways to get back at the bullies until Hamish ended up being almost a poster boy for his school while still maintaining some kind of commanding aura. At age 8.

Hamish was the first person to learn that Vera was pregnant.

"WHAT? But -- but you are a child!!" "We are leading very different lives."

"I asked my mom and she said children shouldn't be having kids but I think you'll be okay. You're stronger than anyone I know and I think your kid's gonna love you lots." Vera never tells anyone that she finds the most support in a little twelve year old kid whose name she isn't really inclined to learn.

When Vera's baby dies, Hamish is the only person she speaks -- or writes -- to. He's the only person she's never afraid to spill all her secrets to.

"If you got invited to join a secret society that could possibly be a cult of murderers, would you do it?" "What do they offer, though?" "Free drinks and magic." "I'd say go for it."

Hamish thinks it's a joke and Vera knows a 14 year old kid isn't gonna know any better but she listens to him anyway and powers through initiation, catching the eyes of her Temple Magus and the then Grand Magus.

"Hey, remember that cult I was telling you about? I accidentally got the leader killed but I got a promotion." "I'm so proud of you! Hey, what do you think about law school?" "Absolutely not." "For me?" "Oh. Go for it. I believe in you."

And it's that message from Vera that makes Hamish push through his first year at Belgrave, despite being turned into a werewolf somewhere in the third month.

Vera is the most respected Adeptii in the entire Order. She has her eyes set on Temple Magus. Most would think she was after power, but Vera just wants to set things straight. She just wants to make the Order everything it promises to be.

She's staying late at the temple one night. She feels a light tapping on her arm and rolls up her sleeves. Had she imagined it or was she starting to feel her soulmate's thinking stage?

"Remember that girl I told you about from that club I joined?" "Yeah. Did you finally ask her to be your girlfriend?"

Vera's teasing smile vanishes when she sees "she's dead" printed on her arm. The ink starts to run. She knows he's crying. She waves her hand over her arm and the ink vanishes. If he notices and asks her about the sudden disappearance, she'll say it was just a wet cloth.

"Do you want to talk about it or do you want me to distract you?" There is a long pause and Vera feels her heart beat faster. He wouldn't do anything irrational, right? "Distract me, please."

Vera tells him all about her day. She tells him how she's mastering all the skills the cult (she only ever calls it a cult on her arm) requires and she's almost at the top of the food chain. She tells him she wants to get a job at the university and she tells him she's afraid she won't be able to make a change in the world.

Despite his grief, Hamish manages to slowly write to Vera how he truly believes in her and that he knows she can do anything she puts her mind to.

Years pass. Hamish tells Vera about two new family members he's found. Vera tells Hamish about how she's got the job of her dreams. Hamish tells Vera that if they met by chance one day, he'd ring her into the family. Vera tells Hamish that she would induct him into her cult. They laugh but still, they don't reveal themselves. The anonymity of it gives them a sense of security and strangely enough, safety.

With the entrance of Jack Morton comes a whirlwind of drama and action to both of them. Their stories are filled with tales of this new member and all the strange things he does.

"I'm his boss! I'm his boss and he just does not listen to a word I say! Today, I found out he's been practicing skills only for professionals. It's like giving a kid a gun for a pinata. He is driving me insane."

"You're telling me. Our 'gender-neutral collective's new member is having a severe mental breakdown and I'm pretty sure I saw him talking to a coat rack earlier. I gave him a drink and he took it like a shot so I gave him a shot to see what he'd do and. He. Sipped. At. It."

Neither of them are aware that they're talking about the same person.

"I think I have a soft spot for the screw-up."

"I know the feeling, we call ours the family screw-up. Affectionately, of course."

"Of course."

After the burning of the Vade Maecum, Vera lies awake in bed, unable to find rest. So she grabs her marker, only to find a message waiting for her.

"Dear Diary, today I met a girl unlike any other. She's sharp, strong, brave and powerful. She reminds me of you. She helped me defend my dumbass family from some pretentious assholes. Honestly, she's a force of nature on her own. I wouldn't want her to hate me because I'm pretty sure she'd kill me if she did."

Vera smiles. "Sounds like someone has a crush."

"Gross, don't be so middle school."

Vera manages to find peaceful rest after a few more minutes of talking.

A few days later, Vera asks about the girl. "What girl?" "Nothing. How was your day?"

Vera doesn't understand why she no longer hears stories about the family of oddballs.

Vera doesn't make the connection.

She tells him she's head of the cult. Hamish draws party streamers and balloons. They're absolutely terrible but they make Vera laugh. "I'm proud of you." "Thank you."

"Dear diary, today I joined a secret club." "What, like a book club?" "Well . . . there are a lot of books here."

Vera finds a welcome sense of familairty and faintly, home, when the stories start pouring in about the family again.

"So today I had to pull a thorn out of a baby's foot. Said baby is turning 19 this year."

"Oh, you poor soul. A couple of new members drank the entire cult's worth of booze last night. Who even drinks that much and can still walk well enough to leave?" Hamish thinks about the welcome party at the temple. "You'd be surprised."

"I almost died today." For a second, neither of them realise they've written the same sentence. They make the connection to Belgrave and Rogwan. Neither are sure that other is saying that because they met the demon and did stupidly dangerous things or because they knew about the Excidium. Neither asks that question. "I almost died today and one of the biggest regrets I would've had was that I never got to see the face behind all the stories I've come to adore." "I know." "We should try to find each other." "We should."

But they don't. Anonymity protects them, it keeps them safe and it keeps their soulmates away from the dangers of the Order and the Knights -- so they think.

Instead, Hamish talks about losing Lilith. He calls her his feisty, brash, smart and loving little sister. He cries. Vera watches the ink run. Vera thinks about Lilith, about the sacrifice she made so that the Vera wouldn't perform the Excidium. Vera's sure that Lilith didn't do it for her or for Belgrave, but for the Knight down in the corridor with her and the knights running around Belgrave with no fear. Regardless, Lilith is what stopped the Excidium and a great deal of people owe her their lives -- Vera included. Vera thinks about Jack watching the portal swallow Lilith up whole. Vera thinks about Hamish having to carry her loss. Vera thinks about Randall having to soldier on without one of the few people who have never judged him about anything. The ink runs on their arms, but not just from Hamish's tears.

Late one night, Hamish can't sleep and watches the words write themselves om his arm. "I thought about her today. But it was so so powerful. Like being physically hit with those memories. You'd think by now I'd have come to terms with it--" "You can't keep blaming yourself." "Knowing that doesn't change the fact that I do and I will." "I know. Do you want to talk about her?" And Vera talks about her daughter until she falls asleep. Hamish reads the words filled with love and loss and adoration and joy until he falls asleep too.

When Foley and Salvador attack, behind thinking about what the hell will happen to the Knights and the Order without them, Vera and Hamish keep hoping that their soulmate doesn't start panicking. Vera recovers from Foley first and leaves a message. She needs someone to talk to, someone who won't feel the consequences of knowing and someone she knows will never turn her weaknesses against her. Hours later, she tries again when there's no response. As time ticks by, she starts getting restless. Not only is Hamish missing, but now so is her soulmate.

Once Jack and Randall break Hamish out, to keep himself from storming up and tearing Foley apart, he lifts his sleeve. Shit. "Randall do you have a pen?"

"Why would I have a -- yeah, okay, I do. Here."

"Sorry," he writes, "got a little held up and I lost my marker. Are you okay?"

Vera is slightly relieved. One of them is okay. But Hamish is still missing. "Waiting on someone. He's not supposed to be gone this long."

In her worrisome state, Vera doesn't notice that the pen ink is vanishing just as fast as thr washable marker. If she had been paying it any attention, she would have come to the conclusion that Order member or not, her soulmate was a practitioner.

"Is everyone okay?" She stares at Hamish, relief flooding her body. Damnit, she wasn't supposed to get attached to someone. She didn't think she could do that. But what was there to do now?

"Hey, I've got something to tell you." "Go on." "Remember that girl I told you about last year?" "Yes." "I think" Vera waits for the rest of the sentence. "You think?" "I really like her."

Vers suddenly doesn't feel guilty about Hamish anymore. She sits up in her bed. "Tell me all about her." "You sure you won't get jealous?" Vera laughs to herself. "I won't if you don't." "Oh! Someone has a new boyfriend!" "Maybe. Now tell me about this girl."

And Hamish starts. And Hamish cannot stop. Vera's watched his wipe his arm already three times and he still hasn't stopped. When he pauses, Vera takes the chance to write "You don't like her." "I do, though." "No, you don't. You LOOOVE her!" Vera can't shake the image that if they were sitting together and speaking, she would have sprinted away by now to avoid the attacks her teasing would bring. It makes her smile.

"Shut up! Tell me about your new boyfriend." "He's not my boyfriend." "Yet." Vera pauses. "We'll see." "Tell me about him."

Vera starts. And Vera cannot stop. Hamish watches the words appear and can't help falling in love with the way she loves this man. "Someone's in luuurve!" "Am not." "Are too." "Whatever."

He thinks about Vera. You don't like her, you love her. Maybe. Yeah, maybe he does.

"I lost her. I could've helped her and I didn't." "I don't think there was anything you could've done more. You said she was attacked." "I drove her away. I pushed her into leaving the one place that could've prevented the attack. And I couldn't save her. I just I can't keep losing people. This cult is poison. I thought I could make it better. I thought I could take it by the reigns and guide it. Instead I keep getting the younger ones killed." "It's not your fault." "I could honestly really use a drink right now but I already sent the boyfriend home. He's gone some stuff to deal with too. His family is . . . hinging on broken."

Vera wonders if he fell asleep when there's no response. She lays her head on her upper arm, looking at the words on her forearm. And then they vanish. Like . . . like magic. How the hell had she never noticed before?? Very slowly, new letters form

V . . . e . . . r . . . a . . . ?

Vera shoots up and sits straight, holding her arm. What the fuck? What the fuck did I say that gave me away?? And who the fuck knows me well enough to figure me out based on something I said??

Vera is grateful for the distraction her phone brings as it lights up with a text -- from Hamish. "I heard you could use a drink."

Vera tiptoes downstairs warily, relieved to find Hamish behind her counter with a drink in front of him. A drink for her.

"I thought I sent you to the den. The knights--"

"Are all asleep. You, on the other hand, aren't."

Vera takes a seat at the counter, hands around the glass. As Hamish tidies up, she catches sight of his bare forearm, where her name is written in the same hand writing as on her own arm. When his back is turned, she uncaps the marker and writes, Hamish?

He laughs softly to himself. Then, "Do you want to talk about it?"

"About what?"

"Alyssa."

"Do you want to talk about Lilith?"

"You're right, a distraction would be better."

And distract each other, they did.

I might write this one out oop

See other soulmate aus I've attacked

#hamish x vera #hamish duke #vera stone #vermish #the order #the hermetic order of the blue rose #the knights of saint christopher #the knights of the blue rose #soulmate #soulmate au #mara-writes

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asoftervirge · 4 years

Text

Of “Love” & Murder - (5/13)

CHAPTER TITLE: The Tragedy of Roman Scarlet

RATING: M PAIRINGS: P. Sanders/V. Sanders (main/one-sided); R. Sanders/V. Sanders (former); V. Sanders/L. Sanders (former); V. Sanders/D. Sanders (former); Remy/E. Picani (side); T. Sanders/OMC (mentioned)

CHAPTER WARNINGS/KINKS: mentions of Remus, mentions of Lovecraft & his Racism, Alcohol, Singing, Musical References, Flirting, Kissing, Touching, Implied/Referenced Smut, mentions of Murder CHAPTER SUMMARY: Roman tells Virgil his backstory on how he met Virgil.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: And here we’re introduced to Roman! :D Again, from here on, the content warnings are heavier than the previous chapters, so please take care of yourself if you decide to keep going! Have fun reading everyone! xx Virge

INSPIRATION: This post by @phantomofthesanderssides

AO3 || Buy Me A Ko-Fi!

Patton blinked in astonishment while the figure continued to smile gently at him.

Was— Was he dreaming, or was this actually happening?

A soft giggle breaks him out of his shocked state. It was a very melodic sound, and despite the surprise that was currently surging through his body, it somehow put him at ease.

“What’s the matter, darling?” the voice called to him, almost amused by Patton’s shock. “You happen to look quite pale. Paler than the man who lives here, and he happens to wear quite a lot of foundation.”

Backing away slightly, Patton tugged at his sweater nervously. “You…Who are you?”

The person— ghost? vision? hallucination?— gave him a sparkling smile. It almost made him blush. “You don’t remember who I am?” he asked. Patton was confused by this. “Perhaps you should get a closer look. Come, come. There’s no need to be shy! My face is a familiar sight for many of my adoring fans, especially if they who went to Storytime.”

If they went to the bar? Patton became a little more confused, but he did as Roman asked and stepped closer, albeit shyly. With his smile still bright, Roman moved his head about to give the confectioner a glimpse of his profile. As he did so, baby blue eyes widened in sudden realization.

The sharp angles and high cheekbones. The ruby red lips. The hourglass figure. The curly auburn hair and reddish-brown eyes. There was no mistaking who this was anymore.

“Wait,” he breathes out. “You…You’re Roman Scarlet.”

“So you’ve remembered.” Roman smiled wider. “I am, indeed.”

Patton looked at him in awe. This was the famed Scarlet Rose who Remy and Thomas gushed about so much. The one whose photographs hung on many of the lounge’s walls.

Though he looked very different from both the painting here, and the photograph that he saw at Storytime. Instead of a beautiful, glittering red dress, it was a three-piece suit. A suit that consisted of a cream blazer with a yellow shirt underneath, along with white dress pants and black boots. Red and gold patterned designs decorated his attire in various places. And a red-colored ascot was wrapped around his neck.

Nonetheless, he was still very handsome as he was beautiful.

“I-I…” the confectioner didn’t know where to begin. “How— How are you here? How am I able to see you like this?”

A sad smile now came to Roman’s face. “I’m here to warn you,” was all he said.

“Warn me?” Patton echoed confusedly. “About what?”

Roman didn’t say anything. He kept his head down, gazing at his clutched hands that sat upon his lap. The confectioner noted how his nails were colored the same as his lips. His eyes held a bevy of emotions in them: bittersweetness and a little bit of mournfulness.

“Ms. Scarlet?”

“It’s Mr., actually. Oh, don’t look guilty, dearie, it happens.” Roman reassured as he saw Patton look bad for accidentally misgendering him. “I’m just,” he shook his head. “It’s not the most pleasant thing to look back upon.”

“You don’t have to—”

“No,” the former thespian said firmly, suddenly, causing Patton to look surprised. He corrected himself, using a much more calmer tone, “No. I need to warn you of the Cruel De Vil that lives in this house.”

Patton let out a noise and nodded. “Take your time, Mr. Scarlet.”

“Call me Roman, please,” Roman tells him with a faint tug of his lips. “And…I suppose I should start at the very beginning. It’s a very good place to start.”

Patton nods again, waiting patiently as the former thespian takes a deep breath.

“As I was growing up, I always wanted had a passion for singing and dancing,” he begins. “All types of music would play from either the record player or Mama’s radio.” A faint smile traced his ruby lips. “My parents always encouraged us to follow our dreams in the same way my grandparents did them when they first came to America so many years ago; and I’ve stuck by that ever since. I remember putting on little performances for my family after dinner or whenever we had guests come over; I remember how joyous I felt whenever I received applauds or cheers from my audience. That only fueled me to aspire acting unlike my brother, Remigio, or Remus as he likes to be called, who pursued literature…albeit of the more…horrific genre. Think Edgar Allan Poe or, even worse, H.P. Lovecraft.”

Patton shivered, an ugly feeling forming in the pit of his stomach. Roman agreed with his sentiments.

“Don’t ask me why my brother would want to affiliate himself with a notorious racist,” he scoffed with a small eye roll. “Once he read The Call of Cthulhu, by the head of Nessie, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. All of his works had some form of cosmic entity, or encryptic language, or some reference to a cult that always gave me the heebie-jeebies.”

The confectioner grew a little bit sick.

“Now where were we?” Roman mumbled to himself as he lost his train of thought. “Ah, yes! My life story, not my brothers’. When I was in high school, I started joining drama clubs, classes, and performing at my local theater. My first ever performance was Teen Angel in Grease; it was a small role, but I immersed myself in it. So much so, that I started grabbing people’s attention from the get-go. I then stared in My Fair Lady, Annie Get Your Gun, and a couple small name plays.”

“However, my biggest chance came through when I got the parts for two big productions: Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, and Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.” Patton could see Roman’s eyes light up as he talked. “It was these roles that could show people that I was serious about acting, that I wanted to be more than a celebrity in my community. And boy did I wow them! I made them laugh, I made them cry, I stunned them with my acting. Nobody could have that more so than me, and I did it.”

“That was when I was scouted by a talent agent in the audience. He told me with my voice and my talents, I would become star on the Great White Way.” Roman shook his head, almost like he still couldn’t believe it. “And I took the leap of faith, and thus, Ramon Alexandre de la Rosa became Roman Scarlet.”

“Why change your name?”

Roman shrugged. “I had to appeal to the Americans somehow. No one would remember someone with a Spanish name like mine. Besides, a lot of us celebrities changed our names in order to reach fame.”

Patton nods. It made sense. “So how did you end up performing at Storytime?”

“About a year or so after it opened. I wanted to go back to my roots of performing for small audiences. I was performing in Hamlet when I met Alejandro Reyes and Thomas Sanders. We had dinner that night and the rest, as they say, is history. I started performing there on the weekends when I didn’t have a show.”

“And that was how you met Virgil?” Patton dared to ask.

Roman grew silent. Then chuckled emptily. “Yes,” he said finally. “That, was how I met Virgil. Or rather, how Virgil met me.”

…

One of the first things Virgil saw upon entering Storytime were a bunch of excited people clambered near the stage and its runway, faces aglow by the spotlights as they yearned to see their Prince. As he moved towards the bar, he took a closer look at the steady stream of people; it was a remarkably varied group— a mix of skin colors, genders, ages, along with sexual and romantic orientations mixed together. The air was thick with excitement as they continued to fill the lounge like sheep or cattle.

He casually slid onto one of the barstools, back against the bar and elbows resting on the counter; he reclined languidly, crossing one leg over the other.

Virgil looked around and also noticed some performers in scantily-clad outfits, sequin sparkling as they swayed their hips, going up to the bar to order some liquid courage. The fingers of the musicians drummed against their instruments, creating a low, thumping bass noise as they tested them and got them ready for the show.

“Hello, there,” a kind voice spoke from behind him. “Can I interest you in a cocktail?”

Casually, almost nonchalantly, Virgil tilted his head back so he was staring at the bartender from upside down. They were looking down (up?) at him with kind eyes and a pleasant smile, in his hand was a cocktail shaker.

Virgil thought a moment then nodded. “One espresso martini, please.”

The bartender nodded as he prepared his drink. He mixed vodka, simple syrup, coffee liqueur, and freshly brewed espresso together in the shaker with ice. He strained it into a chilled cocktail glass, garnished it with espresso beans before sliding the glass to Virgil.

He took a long sip of his drink, the taste of vodka and coffee hitting his palette pleasantly. He looked at the bartender and nodded, signaling that he did a good job. The bartender smiled wider and then moved on to making cocktails for the other patrons that walked to the bar.

Sipping again, Virgil blanked out any of the noises surrounding him until he caught wind of two very familiar looking people near the far-right corner of the bar. One having dark brown hair with lavender dye, the other having burnt orange hair; the both of them were chatting about something, but what, he didn’t know.

Remy’s golden brown eyes met his for a split second. He whispered to Toby before pointing to Virgil. This caused him to force a smile and nod cordially, receiving a wink and a blow of a kiss back. If he were honest, he was glad they didn’t motion him to join their conversation, otherwise, he would’ve just hissed and made sarcastic jabs at them.

Then the lights flared dramatically; all who were still standing quickly made their way to any open seats available as a man appeared on stage.

“And now, ladies, gentlemen, and all of our beloved guests here at Storytime, please welcome the star of the hour— Ms. Roman Scarlet!”

The audience broke out into the loudest of applauses as the starlet’s name was announced, though they quickly quieted down as the lights dimmed and a singular spotlight shone against the thick velvet curtains.

“You had plenty money 1922,” the voice crooned as a long, smooth leg appeared onto the stage from the small parting left open. Then the curtains slowly drew back as the instruments picked up to her voice. “You let other women make a fool of you…”

Virgil sat up a little, looking slightly fascinated.

Red-painted lips twisted up into a sultry smile as they strutted over to the piano, leaning against it in a suggestive manner. “Why don’t you do right, like some other men do?”

She then sauntered across the stage to the cheers and hollers and whistles. Her red sequin dress had a long slit that left little room for imagination. “Get out of here and get me some money too?” Roman stops to raise their long leg up, running the skin of her foot along the jawline of a lucky patron. You could almost swear they were nuzzling it.

“So, this is the illustrious Scarlet Rose that charms people to their knees, hmm?” Virgil notes as he takes another sip of his martini glass. He says this as if he doesn’t know who Roman Scarlet is, but everyone in the city knows who they are.

“Yep.” A voice rung from beside him. He looked to see Toby and Remy eyeing him with teasing looks that really made Virgil want to hiss and growl at them. Toby smirked and took a swig of his whiskey.

“And ain’t we lucky people to watch this bombshell every weekend, sugar?” Remy lowers their sunglasses and winked at him before taking Toby by the arm and leading him to a more secluded part of the lounge.

When they left, Virgil turned back to the stage. The dress clung to her body like a second skin, showing off her toned and slim figure; muscles shifted visibly as she prowled, blowing kisses and winking at the captives surrounding her.

“You’re sitting there wondering what it’s all about. You ain’t got no money, they will put you out,” Roman’s fingers carded through her hair, tousling it in a flirtatious manner. “Why don’t you do right, like some other men do? Get out of there and get me some money too?”

Roman then strides down the runway, one hand sliding down her belly and resting on her hip. “If you had prepared 20 years ago, you wouldn’t be a-wanderin’ out from door to door,” She reached down and ran her free hand down the side of a lucky patron’s face. They kept their eyes trained on her as their mouth hung agape. “Why don’t you do right, like some other men do?” she crooned as she slid her fingers away from their chin.

They nearly fainted.

She then hops onto one of the tables, heels clicking against the wood. Some of the patrons volunteered their hands for Roman to take as she steps off the table. “Get out of here and get me some money too?”

Virgil watches as she moved away from the stage and runway, the thickest part of the crowd and over to the bar. “I fell for your jivin’ and I took you in,” The bartender slid Roman a dry martini with a couple of olives. “Now all you got to offer me’s a drink of gin,” He watches with an impressed look as she slams the martini down the back of her throat, then popping both olives in her mouth.

The bartender takes the glass and Roman smiled sweetly at them, leaning in to kiss their cheek. “Why don’t you do right, like some other men do?” She looked over to her left and wiggled her fingers at Toby and Remy when she saw them. “Get out of here and get me some money too.”

Finally, her passionate eyes finally met the stormy eyes of Virgil Nyx.

A cheshire grin appeared on her face as trailed her hand across Virgil’s back, fingertips gently scratching at the back of his neck making him grown more and more intrigued. Then she was moving in front of him, both hands moving from Virgil’s back to his shoulders. She slid her hands underneath of his trench coat, touch blazing even through his thick turtleneck.

“Why don’t you do right,” she purred, now wrapped her arms around his neck as the audience whooped in delight. As she straddled him by a leg, Virgil felt the flames of her presence burning brighter. “Like some other men—”

Roman squeaked as Virgil instantly pulled her onto his lap, now sitting on him completely. She was warm and solid there as they were pressed chest-to-chest, stomach-to-stomach. The raptured audience’s breath hitched along with Roman as they all saw this sudden and dramatic interruption of the song, but none of them minded; in fact, they were equally drawn to the mysterious man boldly challenging their starlet.

Her heart hammered frantically against her chest as she felt skinny, calloused fingers tickle her back, seeing the smirk in his eyes as she squirmed on top of him. Whether she was squirming closer or further away from him, Virgil didn’t know, but he enjoyed watching such a composed performer crumble from his touch.

Virgil leaned closer until their noses nearly touched, breath brushing each other’s lips. Despite Roman knowing they were in a room with a mass crowd of people, all clinging onto to her every note, but in that moment, with the spotlight shining on both their faces, they were the only two people in the building.

“— D-Do~…” Roman finished the last note with a small stutter as she slid off Virgil’s lap, quickly trying to bring the sensual look on her fact to no avail.

The drums, followed by the bass, and finally the piano sounded the encore of the song as the Scarlet Rose strutted (more like scampered) back to the stage. The spotlight faded entirely, and the curtains swung closed, Roman’s last not echoing through the showroom.

There was an crescendo in applause as it died, not really wanting to break the enchantment, but wanting to scream their love at their diva. A few claps, followed by more, then it became a roar or feral howl that couldn’t be tamed by the band’s random playing during intermission.

As the spell broke over the audience, many of them went over to the bar to refill their drinks while others went and chattered to other patrons; and there were those that grabbed others to drag them to rooms outside of the lounge (probably to either smoke, make out, or have a quickie.)

It was during this time that Virgil turned in his seat and casually ordered another espresso martini. The bartender (who he learned was named Thomas) smiled and complimented at how he made Roman flustered like that; apparently it was a rare thing to do. Virgil hummed and sipped his martini, silently shooing Thomas away, who complied and filled even more drinks for patrons.

Perhaps five or more minutes later, the piano started up in a jazzy, ragtime tune. The crowed swarmed back to the stage, runway, and any empty seats as Roman sauntered back onto the stage with a less flustered face.

She got into position in front of the microphone, long fingers wrapping around it suggestively. Virgil turned back to the stage as Roman started singing another tune: “All that Jazz” from Chicago. Even he, who wasn’t all that much of a purveyor of the glitz and glamor of The Great White Way, could see the appeal— though this might’ve had more to do with the actual performer than the performances themselves.

Roman held the audience in the palm of her hand for another four more songs after that. She toyed with them playfully as she danced and swayed her hips in that very provocative dress and her high, alluring voice raising goosebumps on fevered skin.

Eventually, the final song, “Nowadays/Hot Honey Rag,” also from Chicago, came to a crashing halt and Roman stood on the stage, damp with sweat and grinning triumphantly. A model shotgun was in her hands and a red top hat was on her head.

“Thank you, ladies, lords and non-binary royalty!” She blew a kiss, gathering bouquets and individual roses in her arms. “Thank you for another wonderful night! I’ll see you again next weekend!”

The curtains fell to thunderous applause, yet Virgil cancelled it out. He stood up along with the audience as they gathered their belongings; then discreetly walked backstage as they now prowled the lounge. Dark grey eyes narrowed and scanned the halls at the other performers, backstage crew, costume designers, and makeup artists scuttling about. Finally he caught sight of a glittering gold star with the cursive ’Roman Scarlet’ underneath.

Making sure no one was looking, he opened the door with a single twist. Walking inside, he closed it with the faintest of clicks. His eyes grew intrigued and wicked as he glanced over the dressed-down starlet.

Roman’s sequin dress and boa were hanging on a mannequin in the far right corner of the room, which was decorated in red wallpaper with golden details. The furniture— a couch, fainting chair, and vanity seat— matched the seating in the lounge, also red velvet cushioning. Four lamps darned the walls to give it extra lighting even with the lights from the vanity table. Speaking of the vanity, makeup ranging from palettes, lipsticks, and polishes were scattered about its surface along with playbills and pearl jewelry. A giant bouquet of red and pink roses lay on the floor by the actor’s feet, next to her red heels.

The star herself was sitting in front of the mirror, wiping any remnants of sweaty makeup off her face and reapplying it. Her curly auburn hair glowed in the lighting, and her skin looked a little shining from being on stage. Covering her body (or barely) was a long, red chiffon robe with a silk ribbon tied loosely around her waist, attached to the sleeves and bottom were red feathers that looked identical to the white ones on her boa.

In the silence between them, Roman was quietly humming a tune: “What’s New, Buenos Aires” from Evita.

Virgil smirks faintly as he shuffled across the room. And as the final bars of the song were hummed, he finally addressed her, “Roman Scarlet. I’ve heard so much about you before I came here.”

A squeak, followed by the dropping of something. (A palette? A compact mirror? Virgil didn’t know and frankly didn’t care.) Roman turned around to see the amused man standing behind her. “Y-You?!” she cried out in surprise. “H-How did you get in here?!”

“Door’s unlocked,” Virgil motioned to it. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is, I’m finally pleased to make the acquaintance of someone of your caliber.”

Roman blinked, a flattered blush dusting her cheeks. “I-I thank you, truly,” she tells him. “But I’m not that special, for I am only an actor. Nothing to shout about, only a person enjoying their passion.”

“But you’re more than that,” Virgil insists, sitting on the arm of the couch. “When you act, you take us away from the squalor of the real world.”

The surprised expression on Roman’s face quickly disappeared, eyes lighting up in an excited manner. “A man who also knows Andrew Lloyd Webber?! Are you trying to tempt my theatrical heart?”

“Depends,” Virgil shrugged, raising a cocky eyebrow. He moved closer to the actor, pulling out a dark red rose tied with a black ribbon out of his trench coat. “Is it working?”

Roman takes the rose, breath hitching as their fingertips brush each other. She observes the richly colored petals before smelling it. She’s been given all sorts of roses throughout the years, but never one like this. “I believe it might be.”

Virgil smirked. “Good.” He rested his right ankle over his knee. “I must say, you have quite the voice, Ms. Scarlet. Or is it Mr. now?”

“It’s Ms. Scarlet currently. And thank you again for your praises.” Roman says, her newly painted lips twist into a smirk of her own. Her eyes grow half-lidded, allowing Virgil to see her sparkling red eyeshadow. “So,” she coquettishly crossed her legs. “What brought you to Storytime, Mr…?”

“Nyx. Virgil Nyx.”

Roman hummed. The name sounded very enticing in her mind. “You seem to be of the dark and gloomy type who doesn’t enjoy the nightclub scene. Again, what brings you here to flirt with a someone like me, hmm?”

“Well, I just so happen to remember some old friends who come here regularly, Remy Moerani and Toby Hallows.” That wasn’t completely true, as Virgil had only met them once or twice while still working at the bookstore. He would barely call them acquaintances, let alone friends. “But I personally came to see the beautiful rose performing at this establishment.”

A bright blush came to Roman’s face. “O-Oh come now!” she squeaked, averting her eyes from Virgil. “Y-You’re just being charming!”

“I mean it.” Virgil moves so he was directly kneeling in front of the vanity seat. His fingers carded themselves in her curly auburn hair, causing her breath to hitch again. His hand moved to where it was now caressing Roman’s cheek.

His thumb lightly ran across her bottom lip, the smooth and glossy lipstick coating his calloused skin. They parted obligingly. Dark grey eyes met reddish-brown ones; ones were sharpened in concentration, while the others were widened in anticipation.

Then, in a blink of an eye, Virgil kissed her.

Roman melted into the kiss the second their lips met. Her long, delicate fingers entangled themselves around Virgil’s neck and in his hair. In turn, he could feel the other man’s trailing magically down her body, causing her to squirm and writhe deliciously in his arms.

It was like an explosion— unrestrained and all-consuming.

As quickly as it started the kiss broke, and when Roman was about to whine and complain, she felt lips marking her skin. Fang-like teeth grazing against her sharp jawline, rapidly-beating pulse point, all the way down her hourglass figure.

Biting her reddened (and newly smeared) lips, she looks down at Virgil with hazy eyes as he touches her in a way she’s never been touched before. His faded hair tickled her skin as his kisses got lower and lower; she whines at him tracing the hem of her red, lacy panties before resuming all the way down her thighs, legs, and to her feet. Her fingers gripping and loosening against the arms of her chair.

“Wh— What are you doing…?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Virgil looked up at her with seductive eyes as he kissed all the way back up her leg and thigh, nipping occasionally. Roman gasped sharply, wanting to throw her head back and let herself be immersed in this tantalizing pleasure, but she kept her gaze on him. “I’m tempting your theatrical heart,” he continued, smirking. “Or better yet,” He kissed the hem of her panties before tugging them in his teeth. “Your body.”

Roman whimpered and felt herself growing weaker. “V-Virgil~” She really wanted him, but she was worried since, well, they were in her dressing room and not her apartment in the upper part of town. “W-We’ll get caught—!”

“Well, if someone decides to listen in…just tell them we’re playing patty-cake.” He tells her sitting up, unbuttoning and unzipping on his uncontrollably-tight leather pants.

Roman gulped and nodded, sighing happily as she was pulled into another searing kiss. Lips messily attacking each other, and hands roaming and groping each other. The balls of her heels were pressing hard into the small of his back.

She could feel herself slowly growing weak, weak for Virgil Nyx, weak for what he was doing to her, weak for the fire growing ablaze in her belly. She was pressed closer and closer until Roman couldn’t think of anything but heat, skin, pressure, pleasure, Virgil.

Virgil, Virgil, Virgil.

Her hands flew to his turtleneck and trench coat, yanking and tearing them off his body. As she did this, Roman could feel him undoing the ribbon around her waist then swiftly taking off her panties.

The first moan ripped from her throat after a few agonizing minutes of kissing, touching, and prepping each other. Her nails begin clawing and scratching Virgil’s back as he rocked his hips in and out of her, panting and groaning lowly against her ear.

Any members of the show or crew that were backstage blushed and gossiped amongst themselves as they heard pleasured cries, deep grunts, and lewd praises/comments.

(When Roman came out of the dressing room and made her way to the lounge— fully dressed and with a bright blush on her cheeks— reactions to her varied. Most giggled while some dared not look at her in the eyes, others coughed awkwardly and some even wolf-whistled. Her friends were no different. Toby snorted into his whiskey glass, Remy cackled and slid her a screaming orgasm, Alejandro sighed and made his way to the stage, while Thomas shook his head and tended to other patrons.)

…

Patton blushed furiously as Roman giggled. He didn’t expect the ghost to give him such…details about his love life with Virgil, even if he glossed over some things (which he was grateful for). Then again, he suppose it came with the territory of being some so sensational like Roman, and mystifying like Virgil.

“Oh, I apologize, darling.” Roman said with an apologetic look. “I don’t mean to make you redder than Dorothy’s shoes, but it’s something I can’t help. Virgil was…well, quite the tempestuous lover,” A thrill went up his spine, a blush appearing on his own cheeks. “Just one little touch in the right place and he made me weak in my knees~” A blissful sigh.

“S-So uhm…” The confectioner said a little suddenly, growing redder. He didn’t know how to continue in the conversation in the first place! “H-How did you remain so close with Virgil?” he asked lamely. “D-Did he keep coming to Storytime or—?”

Roman snapped out of his lovestruck trance and moved over to the dresser. Patton didn’t know why, but he felt a sudden chill come through the room. He returned with a beautiful white picture frame with golden embossing on it, the stand out of it was the photograph of Roman and Virgil.

Baby blue eyes stared closely as he inspected the details. Auburn hair tickled a pale cheek as they curled into each other’s sides, arms linked with one another.

Virgil looking surprisingly handsome. His hair was actually kept out of his eyes and more violet than what it is now. A distant smile was on his face that was half-turned towards the camera. His attire was also fancier than his usual trench coat and turtleneck; he was wearing a wine colored button up, black suit pants, a lilac vest, and purple tie. He was also wearing dark eyeshadow and purple lipstick.

Roman also looked very beautiful, lovely even. He was wearing a white, lacy mermaid gown that fit snugly on his body. The detailing on it was also lined with gold, from the bodice, to the sleeves, and all the way to the skirt. His signature red makeup painted on his face. A thin, lacy veil was adorned on his hair attached to a sparkling little tiara. In his hands was a giant bouquet of red roses.

They were standing in front of Storytime, surrounding them were Thomas, Alejandro, Remy, and Toby. All of them had varying expressions on their faces, but they all had one thing in common: happiness.

Written on the bottom right corner of the photo, in bright red ink were the following words, a red heart encircled around them:

‘Virgil + Roman February 14th, 1975’

“He became my husband.” Roman says, confirming everything Thomas told him. “We were married on Valentine’s Day.” He looked at the photograph, his face softening as he recalled that day. “It was magical. The most happiest day of my life. Everything seemed so wonderful back then. Like nothing horrible was going to happen.” His expression then turned sad, almost bittersweet. “How foolish and naive I was.”

Patton look at him. “What do you mean?” he asked in confusion. “What happened?”

Silence.

Then something Patton wasn’t expecting at all.

“He murdered me.”

#Sanders Sides #Patton Sanders #Roman Sanders #Virgil Sanders #Moxiety #Prinxiety #Of Love & Murder

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ofravensandgenesis · 5 years

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For Faith, maybe?: “This isn’t what I wanted.”

A/N: Characters: Tracey and Faith. Summary: Tracey has a late night conversation with a visitor who’s not really there. Content includes: swearing, smoking, mentions of blood/canon-typical-violence, emotional manipulation, cult content, angst, ex-friendship, etc.This was fun to write, and made me think more on Tracey and Faith’s potential interactions and such during the time of the Reaping, which I appreciate. Thank you for the prompt Chyrstis!! :D ♥Ao3 link here, to avoid tumblr disaster formatting on mobile.

————————————

“You’re smoking again.” There was a note of disappointment in Faith’s voice and an almost parental disapproval that, mixed with the little almost exasperated little curl of a smile dancing about her expression, made it feel very much like Faith was humoring her.

Tracey snorted, pulling the lit cigarette away from her own lips with an abrupt, angry motion to flick the ash off of it impatiently. “Yeah? ‘s rich coming from you, Faith, playing daddy’s little flower girl from on top of Mount Smokey with your Angels and hanger-ons.”Faith sighed, looking away to one side, having the air of long-suffering patience, which was utter bullshit in Tracey’s opinion—”Faith” of all people knew Tracey well. She wasn’t going to pretend everything was alright, like she was happy to fucking see her ex-best-friend once again as yet another damned “hallucination” or what the fuck ever the Bliss was.It happened often at night, particularly the nights Tracey couldn’t sleep…or she hoped it was only on those nights. Tracey did not need the mental image of Faith creeping on her while slept. Didn’t want the reminder of waking up to finding a blanket tucked in around her whenever she’d fallen asleep somewhere uncomfortable, as Tracey did sometimes.There shouldn’t have been anyone who did that for her anymore. No more surprises. It’d almost made Tracey cry in rage the first time it’d happened again, after…after.She’d found out later it was from Virgil, and anger had given way to relief. But a small part of her head always wondered if Virgil was always the one who left a blanket draped across her shoulders.Tracey wasn’t in the mood for this. Not tonight.“Get lost Faith. I’m not in a mood to talk to fucking ghosts.”“Oh? And who you gonna call if I don’t?” Faith asked, turning to give Tracey a coy and playful look.Once upon a time, the answer would’ve been a matching playful smirk along with the answer Ghost Busters.That’d been one of their favorite shared movies, once.It pissed Tracey off how it just made her feel sad to see Faith—Rachel—doing that now, like nothing had changed. It was moments like this that made Tracey uncertain if this was “real” or just all in her head. It felt more like the latter. Like missing her once best friend. It made her feel sick.“Fuck off.” Tracey’s words tasted bitter in her mouth, like ashes. Lies. Had it all been a lie, their entire friendship, or had it been real, and just…gone wrong?The little smile Faith had been wearing withered away, like a flower caught in the frost. Typical. She looked away with a sigh. “This isn’t what I wanted.”“Oh? And what did you want, if it wasn’t to go play princess in your own little kingdom of make believe?” Tracey asked, throwing the remains of her cigarette down with a vicious abruptness before grinding it out under her heel with a great deal of prejudice. “To pretend those aren’t fucking people you’ve turned into your own damn puppets and mindless dolls to dance to whatever tune you decide to play? Grow the fuck up and own up to what you’ve done, what you’ve fucking become, Rachel, and stop living in a goddamn dream. And stay the hell out of mine or whatever the hell this is, a day dream, hallucination, or whatever other bullshit Bliss fuckery it is. I’ve told you already and I’ll say it again: get lost.”Faith looked at her, now suddenly brittle and with a flash of actual hurt and anger that was there like the sparks from a fire striker—bright and hot one moment, but gone the next without something to burn. But sparks were dangerous like that: they could catch and smoulder, for a long, long time, without giving away that something was burning until the fire had already caught on.“You could’ve stayed.” The words were short. Choppy. The closest Rachel ever got to actually arguing, fighting, and it was with Tracey. How ironic. “You could’ve stayed and helped us build something wonderful together, Tracey. You could’ve stayed with me.”“Oh this old fucking bullshit again,” Tracey said, lip curling upwards in a show of disgust, nose wrinkling to pull her entire expression into a sneer. “I told you the Project was fucking bad news once I’d caught on, but you didn’t fucking want to listen,”“That’s because it isn’t!” Faith insisted, fists balling in the sides of her skirt as her entire posture stiffened with affront—good. She was actually angry enough to fucking look the part.“It fucking is and you know it Faith. You’ve got people walking on their hands and knees along that godless “Pilgrimage” of yours until they’re leaving bloody trails of handprints and busting kneecaps against the stone, if they’re not fucking eaten by a goddamned mountain lion along the way. Oh and let’s not forget all the people you’re fucking murdering or turning into yet more mindless Angels to play fucking house with. Can’t even stand to do your own damn gardening and risk getting your frocks and petticoats dirty?”There wasn’t much actual substance to that last statement other than the intention to spite Faith, given that the other woman had taken to walking around barefoot like some hippie woodstock lovechild who hadn’t ever heard of broken glass fragments, or splinters, or dog shit or such.“We do what we have to do to accomplish our goals, Tracey,” Faith said, expression actually turning a touch sullen at that. Tracey knew it was because Faith knew that her usual religiously-themed clap-trap about the Project and the Father’s “Collapse” didn’t do anything except piss Tracey off even more. “You’d know that if you’d stop running and look around you at the opportunity you’ve been presented.”“Oh for—fuck off with that nonsense Faith, joining a goddamned doomsday cult isn’t a fucking opportunity!”“You’re talking like that because you’re afraid.” Faith said, the glint in her eyes like the flick of a pocket knife blade pulled open in the moonlight. “That’s why you run, that’s why you always run, whether something’s good or bad. You don’t trust. You never trust. You never trusted me. You don’t trust anyone. But I can help.” Faith reached out to her with both hands, beseechingly.“Let me help you, Tracey, and you won’t have to be afraid anymore. You won’t have to be alone anymore. You have a place here, in our family. You just have to have a little faith, in me, in us. Please. I’m not asking much. Just trust me, this one time. I can make a good life for us, for everyone. Please, Tracey.”And didn’t that take the entire fucking cake. Faith actually sounded like she fucking believed what she was saying. Believed that she could do all that. Believed that any good would come of all this blood and fear and pain and despair and all this…this…fucking awful shitty crap.It made Tracey so damned tired. She didn’t want to deal with people. Not like this. Not if they were going to just, fucking, turn around and hop on the crazy bandwagon and leave her.Tracey wasn’t an easy person to get along with, she knew. But she tried. She tried to make up for that, as best she could. She’d tried to be there for Rachel, time after time after time again, to do what she could to support her friend.

And what good had that done, in the end?“That’s what you say to everyone now.” Bitterness, rather than anger, colored Tracey’s words. It was true, she’d heard enough from other people’s stories of what Faith said to them, what Faith said to make them feel special, like they were loved, like they were cared for with her. And Tracey knew Faith didn’t care about much of anyone at all, among those she pulled in with those fucking honeyed words and innocent doe eyed glances.The way maybe she’d pulled Tracey in, back when they were younger. Back when Tracey had thought they were really, truly friends.She didn’t bother to answer Faith, knowing the ghost of her former friend would just continue insisting that she was right when she got like this, using soft words and circular logic to exhaust a person into submission, to make someone feel like shit for disagreeing with such an “innocent” and “well meaning” young woman.Lies. It was all lies. It’d always been lies. Tracey had to remember that. She couldn’t doubt…or she’d just be another one of the ghosts Faith would send packing to shamble on in as a mindless Angel to kill whoever the dainty little Herald pointed at, until Tracey wasn’t even a shell anymore, and was thrown away and forgotten. Just like how Faith had forgotten and thrown her away before. Thrown their friendship away.She turned her back on the apparition, ghost, projection or what the fuck ever it was.“Tracey…”She didn’t answer, just kept walking, heading for the stairs to head back inside the Jail.Faith’s voice sounded forlorn, but not so forlorn as the silence that followed afterwards.It was times like this that Tracey hated, hated everything with a blind, pain-riddled kind of emotion that felt like she should be thrashing about like an animal in its death throes. But she didn’t thrash. She simply opened the door, and walked inside, footsteps echoing hollow along the tiled floor and bare walls.She didn’t know if Rachel had ever been her friend, now or back then. She didn’t know if those night time conversations were just her own consciousness manifesting and talking to her, or if Faith was actually fucking there, talking to her.…she didn’t know if any of it had been real. Any of it at all.

#Far Cry 5 #FC5 #Faith Seed #Tracey Lader #fanfiction #FC5 fanfiction #I said it'd be a drabble but here we are #technically it's more a oneshot #prompt writing #prompt response #thank you for the ask!! :D ♥#chyrstis

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canimal · 5 years

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I wanted to write a time travel fanfic and about Evan Rosier/Hermione Granger as a main pairing but... I'm stuck. I didn't choose the most redeemable character (Rosier was killed by Moody after a magical fight) and it's complicated bc how Hermione can fall in love with someone like Evan no matter how charming and smart he is ? How did you deal with that (Hermione, Death Eater and their ideology) ? All I can see is something like Jaime/Brienne (GoT) and a very slow burn. But it still feel wrong.

(Please bear with me as this is going to be a super long response. I’ll put it underneath the cut so those who want to read it can read it and those who want to scroll past it can do so quickly.)

To be perfectly honest, if a story feels “wrong”, you shouldn’t be writing it. Trying to force something that you don’t feel comfortable writing and don't fully believe in will not only make for a story that feels forced and unnatural to the reader, but it will also become a story that you will not enjoy writing. (Never forget that this is our hobby, not our job.). Eventually, you would likely hit a wall where the story was unable to progress further and you’d be stuck. Lots of writers try to write a story with certain elements or pairings that are “trendy” and end up stuck because they forced a story. Writing should flow fairly smoothly. I’m not saying that writers should never stumble or feel blocked, but I am saying that if you’re not allowing a story to remain organic and grow naturally, you will find you quality and likely your own enthusiasm and enjoyment in writing the story suffer.

Why do you want to write a story with Evan Rosier? Is it because you find his character fascinating or you want to uncover more about him? Or is it because he’s not a character that’s written about a lot and you’re hoping to stand out in a growing sea of Death Eater stories?

I promise I’m not trying to be rude or condescending, even if it seems like it. This is an honest question. If your answer is on the first couple, awesome. Go for it.

But, if you’re hoping writing about him will get you instant recognition and a large number of followers on your story immediately, I’m sorry to tell you that that probably won’t happen. Most readers don’t want to take a chance on unknown characters. They just don’t. I’ve mentioned this many times, but when I first started writing Thorfinn Rowle as more than just a one-dimensional bad guy in the background in first, The Dark Mage’s Captive and then Parolee and His Princess, I frequently got PMs and reviews asking me who the fuck Thorfinn Rowle even was and that I might actually get more people to read my stories if I didn’t write such weird pairings. 🙄 (Let’s not forget the troll who commented “This should’ve been a Dramione” on literally every single chapter at least twice. Sigh.) So it’s both amusing and incredibly frustrating to have readers in the fandom announce that Thormione is their OTP when most of them wouldn’t have given my stories the time of day when I was writing them and they were the ONLY Thorfinn stories in existence on FFN for certain and probably everywhere else. Because so few people were interested in reading a story with Thorfinn as the main love interest when I was actually writing Parolee and His Princess, if I was only writing the story in an attempt to stand out and not because that was the story I wanted to write, then I likely would’ve gotten frustrated and quit before I ever finished.

So, if you’re serious about writing an Evan Rosier story because it’s what you want to write, I wish you the best of luck. It’s always challenging to write a character with little to no background info in canon. Challenging can also be a great deal of fun. If we never challenge ourselves as writers, we won’t ever get any better. Writers must be willing to learn and try new things if they want to get better. Practice is crucial. Too many writers (professional and otherwise) get to a place where they don’t believe they need to improve and their writing gets stagnant. It’s sad.

Now to your question about how or why Hermione might fall in love with someone with such a different and dangerous ideology... there are many different ways this can be tackled. I must stress thought that you make sure the decision you make makes sense within your story. Don’t try to force something. Let it grow naturally.

First of all, I don’t believe anyone is unredeemable. (Or irredeemable. Same meaning, right?) Perhaps it’s because of my own personal faith and religious beliefs, but I don’t believe anyone is wholly evil or wholly good. Yes, even in this hyper-partisan world we now live in, I don’t believe that anyone (even those who might disagree with me) are pure evil. This has actually gotten me a lot of grief from angry trolls and super sensitive former readers alike. I’ve been accused of being an “apologist” for all manner of depravity including, but not limited to, rape, violence, murder, racism, all the bad things ever, etc. simply because I believe that no is unredeemable... irredeemable. Ugh, whatever. You know what I mean.

Everyone has good qualities in them, even those who appear to be nothing but evil. Far fewer good qualities than most certainly, but still there. I’m also a firm believer that people, even really bad people, can have an existential change of heart and want to be a better person. Many just have to be given the opportunity to change. Of course, I don’t believe that they shouldn’t be punished for their crimes or they should be excused just because there’s something good about them. I’ll never understand why I’ve been accused of being an apologist. 🙄 Some people are truly exhausting.

For every story about a Death Eater falling for Hermione, there’s a different explanation. If you’ve ready any, you’re probably already familiar. Because I try very hard to make every story I write unique from the others I’ve already written, I’ve mixed it up. Antonin only joined for knowledge and power without realizing until too late what was really happening. Rodolphus was pressured by his wife in one and his grief and depression made him fall further in than he meant to. Sometimes the Death Eater was pressured by family to follow in their footsteps; others by their peers. There are countless reasons why people join these kinds of groups. Disillusionment, looking for a place to belong... you really could make it anything. I’ve known people who were drawn in and brainwashed by cults because they were desperate for purpose, for belonging, for a feeling like their life actually mattered. It can be super easy to get sucked into a cult and takes years to get out... if you can.

JKR wrote the Death Eaters as being simply bad for bad’s sake. They’re almost all one-dimensional. No person is actually one-dimensional. They have hopes and fears and dreams just like everyone else. Maybe they thought they believed in the sort of pro-Pureblood world that Voldemort imagined, but once they got in they were in over their head. Reality rarely meets our expectations. People grow and change. Even my own beliefs have changed as I’ve grown older. What I used to think was important no longer is and there are issues I have done a complete 180 on as I’ve grown up and begun to live in what I call “grownup reality”. (Life is much different for me than it was even when I was just in my twenties and how I see the world has changed drastically in some instances.). So if experience and time has been able to shape and change my beliefs and even my values to a minute degree, why could the same not be said for a Death Eater who discovered all was not as it seemed when they were recruited?

It’s also important to remember that no one thinks, acts, or believes like everyone in their set group one hundred percent of the time. Each individual has their own thoughts and beliefs. Maybe they joined because they hated Muggles, but then they realized they were wrong to do so. Maybe their family pressured them to join but they didn’t agree. Maybe they were afraid to die so they joined. I know a lovely man whose father died in World War II fighting for the Nazis - not because he was an admirer of Hitler and believed in everything dreadful and evil the Nazi party believed in. No, his father was conscripted into the German Army and fought because he would’ve been arrested in the best case scenario and executed in the worst. His young wife and their two small children could’ve also been in danger had he refused. It’s a terribly sad story. And hardly the only one. That’s just one example. History has countless other incidents all over the world when scared people fought and fell in line with a terrible leader because they had no other choice. Or at least it seemed like they had no other choice. Not everyone is strong and brave enough to stand up to injustice and evil when their lives are on the lines. Humans by our very nature can be quite cowardly at times.

It’s possible that a person who has done evil deeds or believed just absolutely atrocious things could want to change and be a better person. Though it wouldn’t be easy, someone like Hermione could choose to forgive them for their past. Especially if they’re truly remorseful.

Of course, it’s also unfortunately true that there are sometimes relationships that are just absolutely toxic. Love can make idiots of us all. How many women (and men to an extent though not nearly as often) see the potential in a man and want to change them into something good and perfect? It happens so often it’s a cliche. Woman falls in love with bad boy. Wants to change him. Stays with him with hopes and dreams that he’ll stop being so awful. Is disappointed over and over again. Have you ever known someone who fell in love with a truly terrible person and even though their relationship wasn’t healthy whatsoever never seemed to quit them? Kept going back for more even when everyone told them it was a terrible idea? I’m pretty sure you have. You might’ve even been in one of those relationships yourself. I know I was. No, he might not have been a murderous minion of a madman, but he certainly had his terrible qualities that I thought I could help him get past. Tale as old as time.

I could go on and on and on about reasons why Hermione might fall in love with a completely unsuitable man who might even wish her dead, but there’s no reason. It could be for a thousand reasons. And don’t forget, Hermione isn’t exactly some innocent paragon of virtue herself. She’s pretty dark even in canon. Trapping a lady in a jar? Cursing a girl’s face possibly permanently? Leading another witch into a forest knowing there are centaurs in there who are dangerous? And those are just the things that unobservant Harry noticed! Who knows what she was doing off-stage? She has her own darkness and her own demons to fight. She’s not perfect nor is she some pure angelic creature who only uses light magic for good. Nah, she’s pretty twisted at times. (On a side note - Please don’t try to write her as being all-powerful, perfect, and never do anything the least bit bad. That’s not her character at all. It bothers me to see her written as some sort of pearl-clutching virgin who has never done anything bad in her entire life. That’s NOT the Hermione I read in the books.)

You just have to find the right motivation in your own story. If you’re not forcing the story and allowing it to develop naturally, you’ll figure it out. If you’re forcing it, I’m afraid you’re going to stay stuck.

I hope this can be so some help! Sorry I’m rambled on and on and on.

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steve0discusses · 6 years

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Yugioh S1 Ep28: Bakura Can Still Kill Everyone If He Really Wanted To

First off--my apostrophes work again! Many thanks to the tumblr staff who helped out and will never see this post. Now I can update without looking like my computer is encrypting itself as I go.

So guys, I’m all about weird TV and weird movies. I watched the entirety of Color of Pomegranates. I just want you to know that because when I say that “wow this got weird real fast” we are going by my metrics. It’s not as weird as Color of Pomegranates, because well...it has a plot that isn’t under four layers of symbolism and esoteric Armenian poetry, but whenever we have a Bakura episode, stuff just gets UNEXPECTED.

But first, the most wonderful thing has happened:

I mean kind of a weird choice to put some of these things together, but this was about .5 seconds of screen time, I’m just special and can pause to realllllly take it in. Mm.

(Read more under the cut for EVEN MORE FOOD)

Man!

MAN!

What did I do to deserve all this good anime food in the same episode as Bakura doing something completely nuts (again)?

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and we have to go back to cards, which for some reason is still the crux of this show...I think. This is still a show about cards, right? I’m no longer completely sure.

At the start of the season, Yugi was gifted these two cards as entrance tickets to the Island of Regret where they are now hanging out. These cards are how you collect your prizes if you win. The one with money is the prize of 3 million (or is it 300 million? It’s been a while since I’ve heard the number). The blank one is the chance to beat Pegasus. I assume your soul will go in the blank one after he beats you.

Youknow, it’s really a shame we never got to see the stats on Grandpa, Mokuba, and Seto cards. I don’t think they even had any. I mean, when Bakura turned his friends into cards, at least they had stats.

Anyways, some of our contestants have suddenly remembered that they actually have no right to this contest.

But, turns out Pegasus also has an interest in anime food, so he’s done something a little extra for...some reason.

DEAR LORD. I mean it’s not a real eyeball but think about the eye grease for a moment. Firstly, I don’t even know if you have to grease up a false eyeball and I want to look it up but I am too afraid. Secondly, now my mind is thinking of every unctuous substance that may or may not grease up a false eyeball. It does not pair well with pumpkin soup.

There’s eyeballs...in the soup...

This is when you go home. This is when you say “sorry Gramps, but...I am pretty sure that guy is a cannibal, I gotta goooooo.”

I mean, again, it’s not a real eyeball but freakin A are they having a weird halloween dinner party? Why would you do this? Why would you EVER put your own eyeball facsimiles in the soup? Is it like “eat my ass” but “eat my eyes” ?

Pegasus doesn’t get many guests and I can start to see why Kaiba hated him so damn much. Can you imagine working with this guy on a daily basis as the head of a large corporation while constantly getting pranked with his weird ass eyeballs?

Does it say “I open at the close?”

Why did they do -- what?!

This was all about a stupid bracket? What the hell, Yugioh?

The boys decide to throw caution to the wind about what may or may not be in this bizarre dinner that not even Pegasus wants to eat and they fully gorge themselves and get a real good food baby belly going.

I guess Yugi didn’t really eat because he is fully alert and his empty beacon eyes are still one of the most spooky things on this show.

Yugi decides to hand off his card to Joey right in the view of Bandit Keith, and Joey only takes it when Yugi convinces him that now they’d have twice the chance to beat Pegasus. I mean, not really, actually, but it was still a nice thing to say. Yugi is a kid of sooo many good intentions.

Mai goes to bed and says this actual line from the show.

Despite the fact that she’s so acidic about...eh...75% of the time, she really is the nicest person they have met on this horrible, terrible island. In fact, everyone is ready to tuck in to the most clearly haunted murder castle as if eyeballs weren’t just hanging out in their soup. What a bizarre heartwarming round of goodnights, as if there wasn’t clearly several people out to very much kill them living in the same castle as them.

This is how Agatha Christie novels start.

This episode does not actually dive into Joey’s gigantic donut dream, which is a shame.

Because this episode, it’s time for our B-team to shine.

I love the implication here that Tristan first knocked on Bakura’s door, woke him up with this and then Bakura clearly answered along the lines of “Bollucks, Tristan, I am not doing this right now” to which, Brakura dragged him down to Tea’s door in the hope that Tea would be at all reasonable.

Which backfired him in a major way because Tea and Tristan are desperate to chase some snipes and prove themselves useful.

I honestly can’t tell if Bakura even likes these guys. I mean, I get that they’re school friends but, this guy was introduced as totally murdering them and then getting magically “cured” with the same cure that failed on Seto Kaiba. The fact that this meek little fake-british accent can get so easily snowplowed by Tea and Tristan is never clearly just an act or just him getting snowplowed.

But, apparently there’s some part of him that is still that tiny little nice-side-of-Bakura, so dutifully, he decides to babysit, since the only other psychic they got around is currently having an eyeball-soup induced dream.

Back at the dueling arena, Tea decides to stand guard/do nothing as usual.

Tristan reveals why he has a grudge against Psychics.

Tristan’s character is pretty flat. It basically revolves around mothering everyone elses problems and pining about Serenity who is barely a character on this show. I always figured that Tristan was at least smarter than Joey and Yugi, who can be kind of...dumb, but it turns out Tristan is just as empty between the ears.

He gets completely fascinated by a beam of light shining through a window. Forget looking for cameras. Forget the fact that this room was full of Pegasus’ mooks, some of which were standing right behind Kaiba. Na. He’s gonna Sherlock Holmes straight to this window.

During Bakura’s desperate pleas to get these two assholes back to bed, Yugi is getting some crazy as hell conspiracy theories from Grandpa.

Oh, so he’s like a normal grandpa then? Once my Grandma told me that the entirety of San Fransisco would fall into the ocean during an Earthquake and she was EXTREMELY concerned about my safety (despite the fact I live inland, not in San Fransisco), so this dream Yugi’s having sounds like a pretty average dinner conversation with your Grandparents.

No one expects Bakura, not even the colorist.

And then for some reason they want Tea to go first in their climb up the tower although no reasonable girl in a mini skirt would do this in front of two boys.

Isn’t she a freakin dancer? Maybe she’s not as strong as Tristan but she’s certainly the best balanced of the two and could climb way easier because she’s lighter. And Bakura is clearly the weakest but, whatever.

Back in dreamland, Yugi’s grandpa join’s up with the other cards in card hell as if they’re some sort of Grandfather, asshole son, and ghost child card hell trinity

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot I was watching an anime for a second. Nothing like devilish blue fire to make you remember oh yeah, that’s a fine anime fire choice.

But rather than dwell too much on that artistic direction of blue fire, lets see if anything at all was inside of the red herring tower.

They’ve been slipping a picture of this chick all over the place. I’m surprised it took until now, when she’s like 15 feet tall, for them to finally notice “Hey maybe there’s something up with this random chick who is clearly a dead person Pegasus was close to”

Now I gotta get a little art nerdy on you for a moment because this storyboarder is really good at sneaking in people’s reactions right near the focal point without making them the focal point. This whole framing of Bakura’s tired face happens so quickly and I just want to spend a little moment for us to appreciate our storyboarder’s sense of humor.

Now, somehow. SOMEHOW things are going to get weirder.

Because with all this dream sequence stuff happening this looks like it’s a dream but I’m going to come out and say no, this is actually happening. They have, indeed, fallen into some tomb under the castle covered in Egyptian murals and people are chanting about sacrificing souls as offerings.

This happens SO QUICKLY.

THE HELL????

Like remember when I was like “How did all these skeletons get here? what’s up with these skeletons?” I didn’t actually really want them to tie up those loose ends but here we are.

So this has been going on this entire time!? For the past 28 episodes? When Kaiba was like “man Pegasus is the worst!” He didn’t feel like bringing up the crazy killer cult that was living under the island?

And to top it off, Bakura already knows what’s going down. He knows and is quickly getting more and more urgent to get away.

Oh, and PS, The cards we’ve been using these past 28 episodes are now giant stone tablets. Bakura mentioned once that the millennium ring was supposed to work alongside Duel Monsters. And he was like “but duel monsters is like ten years old so whatever” but it turns out that was a complete lie because there’s an ancient version that uses 10 foot tall tablets instead of cards. Their decks would be like 6000 lbs.

Also you die at the end of Ancient Duel Monsters, that part is different, too.

I have so many questions.

I mean you find out when you’re a kid that Ring around the rosies was actually about people dying of the plague and go “eh that’s sad” but it’s nothing like Ring around the Rosies killed people and made serial murderers into magical evil psychics.

I mean it’s never actually said, but there’s enough evidence here that I’d like to think Yugi was sleep running all over the castle during half this episode saying “grandpaaaazzzs” while Bandit Keith was like “OMG are any of them going to go to bed so I can finally steal their stuff?”

But back to the stuff that is actually not a dream and definitely happening. Pegasus pulls back his hood and decides to give them a quick Q and A before he outright kills them.

And so, Bakura, who has been playing dumb for...I dunno, 10+ episodes, who has been doing nothing spectacular and who has been clumsy and sort of a space cadet finally reveals that “yeah, that mind wipe did literally nothing, I’m a still an evil son of a bitch”

And they have a...shine off. Or something. It’s very hard to look directly at.

Thing is, from what we’ve learned, Pegasus is super duper powerful because he’s been killing people under here for many, many years. Every time he does a murder, his power grows. Which means...Bakura should be at a loss since he’s like 12 and...how many people can a 12 year old really murder?

Says a lot about your relationship if you can’t take 2 steps forward without getting Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-ed 4 steps right back where you started.

Welp that’s it, guys! that’s Season 1! Bakura did it! He beat Pegasus! Why Bakura decided to retcon the REAL ending of Season 1 and just put everyone (including the villain) back as if it never happened is a little weird, but hey--at least I got through it. I did it. I recapped all of Yugioh Season 1. I’m proud of me!

Bakura will go back to playing dumb probably for another 10-15 episodes until he can steal that eyeball off of Pegasus. Apparently there wasn’t a good enough opportunity for eyeball theft when he was doing the weird laser show thing.

I assume somewhere, Pegasus is also sitting on his bed in his day clothes and thinking “the hell just happened?” but rather than look at one of his zillions of security cameras is like “well, that’s psychics!”

I’d like to think that Bandit Keith saw Bakura dragging Tea and Tristan’s bodies down the hall and they just nodded at eachother like “crazy evening, amiright?”

Also, a lot of this episode would have been different if any of these people locked their own doors. Like this, for instance, wouldn’t have been able to happen.

Then five minutes later the sun rose.

I mean it’s the only explanation for all the nuts stuff that went down last night.

Next week, on Yugioh:

Will Pegasus have a splitting headache for all of tomorrow and be wearing sunglasses the whole time? Will Pharaoh reveal that in his time off he got really into All My Children? Will they seriously go the third day without washing their clothes? These kids must SMELL.

The hell just HAPPENED?

#Yugioh #yugioh recap #photo recap #humor #bakura #tea gardner #tristan taylor #mai #bandit keith #joey wheeler #maxamillian pegasus #I didn't think it would really go this direction so quickly #but it just went hard this direction and was like lol watch me retcon everything #Once Upon a Time also did this but it took an entire season for them to memory wipe their problems away. This did that in one episode.

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Riverdale Season 5 Episode 4 Review – Chapter 80: Purgatorio

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Riverdale reinvents itself as the fifth season properly gets underway.

This RIVERDALE review contains spoilers.

Riverdale Season 5 Episode 4

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“To be honest, it doesn’t even feel like Riverdale anymore.”

You can say that again Archie.

Following three episodes originally intended for last year and a seven-year time jump, Riverdale‘s fifth season gets well and truly underway with an installment designed not so much with shaking up the status quo but reinventing it completely. To borrow the name of a Flaming Lips song — you just know NYC writer’s block-stricken Jughead listens to lots of the band’s output — suddenly everything has changed.

In the near decade since he was last home, Archie has been through hell fighting in an unnamed conflict in which he feels responsible for one of his fellow soldiers losing a leg. He has dreams that mix battle imagery with the formally idyllic existence he had in high school. (At least that’s what I think we’re supposed to feel here, even though Archie’s teen years were fraught with bear attacks and attempted murders aplenty but I digress). The point being that Archie sees Riverdale, despite its obvious flaws, as a safe haven. Always one to embrace a cliche though, he quickly learns that you can’t go home again. Riverdale is now just as dangerous as his overseas battle. It wasn’t a nightmare he had, it was a premonition.

Ordered to run Riverdale High School’s ROTC program, Archie comes home is quickly brought up to speed by Toni — pregnant and running the reborn White Wyrm out of the former space of La Bonne Nuit. Lawlessness prevails throughout town, leaving Riverdale largely empty with the exception of those who are too poor or proud to try to restart elsewhere. The city is without hope. Mayhem reigns. Is Archie Batman now? God I hope so.

Responsible for the community’s downfall is, you guessed it, Hiram Lodge. Without the influence of Hermione or Veronica to keep his worst instincts in check, Hiram has become the villain he has always longed to be. (He’s enlisted Reggie to be his right hand man, making that character the closest to his pain-in-the-ass comic book counterpart to date). Some murky dialogue vaguely explains that Hiram’s wrongdoing is connected to his long-gestating SoDale real estate development, but the specifics don’t matter. What does is that Mr. Lodge is in power like never before, and all of Riverdale is suffering as a result.

Meanwhile at Quantico, FBI trainee Betty is also haunted by her recent past. While pursuing the hilariously named Trash Bag Killer, she didn’t wait for backup — becoming the killer’s captive before he escaped in the process. Her loving partner — let’s call him Molder for now, Mad magazine style — is worried that she isn’t dealing with the trauma of her experience, as is her therapist. But soon she too is called back home to deal with what we think is a crisis but is really just a very sweet thing. More on that in a few minutes.

We catch up with New Yorker Veronica, who is married to real estate tycoon Chadwick Gekko (Chris Mason, portraying a character from Katy Keene that Reid Prebenda originated). Apparently she used to be the “she wolf of Wall Street” until she lost her mojo after being involved in a near-fatal helicopter accident with Chad. Since then, she’s been secretly working in an upscale jewelry store that let’s her take advantage of the smart business acumen she frequently demonstrated during her high school years. But when she sells a Glamorege egg that Chadwick gave to her, it’s clear that their relationship is more than just a little fractured.

Also in the Big Apple is Jughead, and he’s just full on skeezy now. With dubious facial hair and a penchant for sleeping with fans, this version of Jughead is easily the most disturbing new version of one of the series’ core four. We learn that his first book, the S.E. Hinton meets Pop Tate’s Chok’lit Shoppe pastiche The Outcasts was a mega success that made him a fleeting media darling. But now Jughead has severe writer’s block…not to mention debt collectors literally pounding at his door and toxic boyfriend tendencies we see him display briefly. Basically he sucks. If anyone can use a priority realignment it’s him. Fortunately, he too gets a call beckoning him home.

Once the gang is back together in Riverdale, for Pop Tate’s retirement party!, awww, we get an update on Cheryl. She has successfully rebuilt Thornhill and rehabilitated the Blossom family name over the past seven years…with a cost. She still feels cursed by her family’s misdeeds and spurns Toni’s attempts to reconcile and instead chooses to live as a recluse. (I mean, for at least the remainder of this episode).

Finally reunited with all of friends, Archie is determined to enlist their help in saving the soul of Riverdale. Not that any of them seem too happy to join this crusade. But the episode doesn’t dwell on their responses as it is too busy establishing a new mystery — a murderous trucker is on the loose. And our heroes are the only one who can stop him. Obviously.

This episode is a very typical one in that it bombards the viewer with new information. True, it doesn’t feel like Riverdale as we know it, but that’s a good thing. After a previous season that was a bit middling, I am more than supportive of this quasi reboot happening here. The series has been renewed for a sixth season, so it’s likely that it will find it’s new rhythm over the course of the upcoming installments and a new normal will settle in. For now though, there’s a lot of possibility here. Riverdale‘s biggest mystery right now? Where it will go next.

Riverdale Roundup

• Along with Saving Private Ryan, the nightmare that starts this episode is also a reference to the excellent Archie 1941 miniseries — which explored how World War II impacted Riverdale and its characters.

• Since Archie and Betty are now both experiencing PTSD, will their shared trauma bond them together?

• I absolutely believe that each of these characters would return to Riverdale to bid farewell to Pop Tate, given how important his shop has been in each of their lives.

• Let’s hear it for more screen time for Vanessa Morgan’s Toni Topaz! Choni forever! (That baby bump was real by the way, she gave birth to her first child last week).

• Archie reads Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, in case any of you were worried that the series’ fondness for anachronisms would be lost during the seven year time jump. Also, Archie being able to read is canon!

• Even though Katy Keene is long-cancelled, it’s nice to see that show’s title character (and her employer, Lacy’s) get referenced here.

• As an Archie comics diehard fan, I am incensed that the show has ditched his iconic whoopee hat. Yet I have a feeling by the time this season ends we will witness him throwing it back on in an effort to reclaim the artistic power that his former self possessed.

• Kevin and Fangs are established as still being together, with the former working at Riverdale High. Alice’s current whereabouts are unknown. I hope Vegas has been rehomed.

• In case Betty’s Silence of the Lambs parallels were a tad too understated for your taste, her therapist’s name is Dr. Starling. And if someone doesn’t sing “Goodbye Horses” this season I will be very upset.

• The FBI waited seven years to dismantle the two-person (one of whom wasn’t even a real agent) Riverdale field office? Actually, given government inefficiency, this sounds just about right.

• Veronica and Chadwick’s helicopter accident happened while they were on their way to “Marsha’s Vineyard,” because apparently Riverdale 2.0 now does fake places as well as brands.

• That abandoned doll Archie found in Pickens Park is super creepy.

• Betty’s cat is named Coffee, and given her history as a pet owner, I fear for the feline.

• Towards the end of this episode, new character Tabitha Tate (Erinn Westbrook) bids farewell to drifter Lynette “Squeaky” Fields. Given that Fields’ nickname is a Manson Family reference, could Riverdale have a death cult on its hands?

• Other mysteries raised by this episode: Who is the father of Toni’s baby? How will Veronica feel about La Bonne Nuit becoming a Serpent hangout? How long have Betty and her partner been together? Will Jughead get a razor? Who is the Lonely Highway killer? How did Reggie get involved with working for Hiram? What exactly are Hiram’s SoDale plans? How long until someone punches Chadwick? Where’s Mary Andrews? How long have the Ghoulies been back in Riverdale…and Archie’s house for that matter? If Riverdale is such a cesspool, what exactly does Tom Keller do all day? I suppose we will just have to wait for answers to all of these questions and more. Until next week!

The post Riverdale Season 5 Episode 4 Review – Chapter 80: Purgatorio appeared first on Den of Geek.

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Ross Barkan, Exterminating Angels, 46 The Baffler (July 2019)

The American myth of the progressive prosecutor

When Kamala Harris spoke in front of the Commonwealth Club of California in the winter of 2010, the presidency wasn’t yet on her mind. Or, if it was—as it usually is for any ladder-climbing politician with a pulse and a dream—she wasn’t going to talk about it. Harris was San Francisco’s district attorney, one year away from narrowly ascending to statewide office. The following year, she would be sworn in as California’s attorney general; in 2016, she was elected to the Senate and is now a top-tier candidate for president, at least in the view of many pundits.

It is unlikely the Harris of 2010 believed that what she was about to say to the Commonwealth Club would be held against her in a future primary race. While the criminal justice reform movement had gained ground in the early days of the Obama presidency, the tragic deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner were still several years off.

Harris, then, was on safer ground laughing about locking parents up.

“I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime. So I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy,” Harris said that day. “Well, this was a little controversial in San Francisco.”

Harris, laughing, broke into a wide smile, the subtext clear enough: the granola-crunching investment hippies in Haight Ashbury weren’t going to like this one.

“Frankly, my staff went bananas. They were very concerned because we didn’t know at the time whether I was going to have an opponent in my re-election race,” Harris continued. “But I said, ‘Look, I’m done. This is a serious issue and I’ve got a little political capital and I’m gonna spend some of it.’”

Harris went on to describe her office as a “huge stick,” with letterhead alone that could compel people to do what she wanted. In a letter to every parent in the school district, Harris outlined the connections between elementary school truancy and a future life of crime. “A friend of mine actually called me and he said, ‘Kamala, my wife got the letter, she freaked out, she brought all the kids into the living room, held up the letter and said if you don’t go to school, Kamala is going to put you and me in jail.’”

A clip of the event, unearthed anew in January, quickly went viral. Progressive critics faulted Harris for joking about jailing parents and misdiagnosing a problem that runs much deeper than a morality deficit or lack of supervision. California public schools are still woefully underfunded, and criminalizing truancy can have the unintended consequence of sending more young people of color to prison. In every sense, Harris’s remarks at the Commonwealth Club have aged terribly, especially as she vies to become the nominee of a diverse Democratic Party that has rejected wholesale its tough-on-crime heritage.

So, fittingly, Harris’s candidacy has sparked new questions on the left. Should a former prosecutor—someone who celebrated putting human beings in cages—be elevated to the presidency? Can someone who held such a position be considered an ally of the ascendant progressive movement? Is prosecuting an original sin? Is the institution, even in an age of reformist prosecutors, beyond redemption?

The final question is the most pressing for the left and arguably the most difficult to answer. Conservatives—even those who have called into question decades of punitive and wasteful policy that imprisoned a generation of black people and shattered countless communities—do not seriously question the role of the prosecutor. They are there to keep us safe. The judge and jury referee but the prosecutor plays; the courtroom, in every sense, belongs to the prosecutor in the United States of America, and it’s on this field where the lives of the country’s most vulnerable are decided every day.

Liberals don’t usually challenge these assumptions either. Legislators and executives are asked to make better laws that help keep innocent people out of prison. Prosecutors, then, are expected to seek justice within this framework. Good laws, it can be argued, make better prosecutors. And prosecutors, with their enhanced sense of discretion, can change lives for the better—as long as good people are elected to these positions.

American Mythdemeanors

It’s important to consider the relative absurdity of Harris’s remarks in a historical and global context. The United States is a hegemon and cultural trendsetter, but it does not see its governing structures replicated elsewhere. Many countries will take our fast food and pop music. They will pass on our uniquely demented presidential system, preferring the suppleness of parliamentary government and executives who do not enjoy virtual immunity. We are both leader and mutant on the world stage: an example of everything to avoid, yet inarguably an influencer.

American prosecution endures as an anomaly par excellence. The United States is the only country in the world that elects prosecutors. As Michael J. Ellis explained in the Yale Law Journal, local public prosecutors were an invention of colonial America. They were originally appointed and lacked prestige. By the time of the Revolution, the job was only part-time. In state court, prosecutors were paid by the case or conviction; defense lawyers were the stars of the era.

In the nineteenth century, popular democracy fueled the American imagination. Americans wanted more elections, at least for the white men who could vote in them. Reformers believed electing prosecutors would combat corruption and patronage. In 1832, Mississippi changed its constitution to give local voters the power to elect district attorneys, and by the Civil War, most states had followed suit.

At the time, supporters of electing prosecutors gave little consideration to how this trend would affect the criminal justice system. The chief concern was expanding the franchise and making yet another office accountable to voters. The rise of elected prosecutors allowed for the conferral of new power on a post that was once a bureaucratic afterthought. District attorneys, liberated from their status as de facto clerks, gained discretion over when cases could be prosecuted and began to collaborate with newly formed police departments. Almost every state that joined the United States after the Civil War adopted the election of prosecutors, mirroring already existing state constitutions. Today, there are only five states that appoint prosecutors: Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.

The twentieth century brought the cult of the prosecutor. Though no president in modern times served as a district attorney or top prosecutor, one came very close: Thomas Dewey. A Republican from New York, Dewey was emblematic of the institution’s growing glamour. As a young Manhattan district attorney in the 1930s and early 1940s, Dewey crusaded against the mafia, successfully prosecuting organized crime kingpins and other nefarious figures. Destined for stardom, Dewey was elected governor of New York in 1942. In 1944, he was the Republican nominee against Franklin Roosevelt when the New Deal architect sought his fourth term. Roosevelt’s margin of victory was narrow enough to assure Dewey the Republican nomination in 1948, when most pundits predicted he would be elected the thirty-third president of the United States.

One seismic political upset later, Dewey’s political career was over, but Harry Truman could not reverse the tide. The prosecutor was now the leading man. Sure, the American public could swoon over their Clarence Darrows and Atticus Finches. But the prosecutor stood atop the machine, inspiring fear and awe while attracting the attention of a fawning press.

Before he debased himself as Trump’s orcish counsel, Rudy Giuliani was a hustler in the Dewey mold, a New York prosecutor bound for greatness. The two poles of prosecutorial eminence in New York are the Manhattan district attorney and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, often referred to, half tongue-in-cheek, as the “sovereign district” for the wide discretion the office enjoys. Giuliani was a U.S. attorney and, like Dewey, a Republican reformer who chased the mob.

By winning convictions against mobsters like Carmine “The Snake” Persico, the murderous Colombo crime boss, Giuliani became a hero to New York and national media alike, a young Hercules cleansing the city’s Augean stables. Even otherwise cynical reporters were not immune to the Giuliani mythos. In City for Sale, their investigative tome of 1980s municipal corruption, Wayne Barrett and Jack Newfield portray Giuliani as a white knight with a moral compass that always pointed true north.

Giuliani parlayed his local fame into two terms as New York City’s mayor, and for a time, he was viewed as serious presidential timber. The dream would die quickly in 2008 following humiliation in the Florida Republican primary. It would take another New York Republican, a thuggish real estate developer and tabloid obsession, to propel him into the White House’s inner circle.

In retrospect, Giuliani’s turn as prosecutor-as-hero was exceedingly well-timed: the second half of the twentieth century would make local district attorneys and federal prosecutors into crusading protagonists of a dangerous myth, one that would destroy the lives of countless black and brown Americans. In the late 1960s, violent crime spiked across America and continued to climb over the next two decades—against which Democrats and Republicans united to endorse policies that would fuel an unprecedented incarceration boom. The number of people locked up in the United States has quintupled since the 1980s, ballooning to nearly 2.3 million, a population larger than almost every American city. It is a level of imprisonment far beyond all other liberal democracies.

Enemy Combatants

We are a prison state, but how exactly did we end up that way? Were the police and political elites simply out of control? The journalist Emily Bazelon thinks she has an answer. In her well-researched, provocative new book, Charged, she traces a line directly from punitive prosecution to the prison explosion. “American prosecutors have breathtaking power, leading to disastrous results for millions of people churning through the criminal justice system,” Bazelon writes in the book’s introduction, noting that local prosecutors handle more than 95 percent of America’s criminal docket. “Over the last forty years, prosecutors have amassed more power than our system was designed for.”

Bazelon argues that the “unfettered power of prosecutors is the missing piece” in explaining America’s unconscionable incarceration boom. “Our justice system regularly operates as a system of injustice, grinding out unwarranted and counterproductive levels of punishment. This is, in large part, because of the outsize role prosecutors now play.”

Prosecutors and defense lawyers, in the layperson’s conception of the criminal justice system, are perceived as quasi-equals. On shows like Law and Order, a charismatic assistant district attorney jousts with a suave, sometimes garish defense lawyer. They have their own bags of tricks. One will win, one will lose, yet they each have a reasonable shot at victory. It’s simply a matter of who makes the best case, who produces the most scintillating comeback.

Any person who has the misfortune of entering the criminal justice system knows prosecutors and defense lawyers are asymmetrical combatants. This is Bazelon’s point. One has a cache of sophisticated weaponry, each carrying the power of annihilation, while the other waves around a stick, or hopes words are enough. They usually aren’t.

In the American system, prosecutors stand even above judges. They answer to no one and make virtually all key decisions in a case. They choose the charges, make the bail demands, and regularly determine the plea bargains. They can add charges on a whim. They can delay trials indefinitely, letting defendants rot in jail cells. They are the angels of mercy and the executioners. It all depends on which one you run up against.

Prosecutors have another weapon at their disposal: the press. Powerful prosecutors can selectively leak favorable tidbits of their investigations before indictments are even brought. In larger media markets, this is the preferred mode of operation, endangering defendants long before they even make it to trial. Striking details of former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara’s most high-profile investigations often reached daily newspapers weeks or even months before formal charges were filed. His targets could be tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. His successor, the Republican Geoff Berman, is not so flamboyant, and overeager journalists have been forced to subsist without regular leaks.

Crime Organized

An overwhelming majority of cases in the United States of America end in plea bargains, never even going to trial—a trend that has only worsened in the last half century. Prosecutors can intimidate defendants into avoiding trials and pleading guilty, even if they didn’t commit the crime. The pressure to plea is immense: heading to trial always carries the risk of a far worse sentence if a jury or judge finds a defendant guilty.

For the vast number of people, many of them low-income and nonwhite, faced with this devastating choice each day, there is no way out. Either take the plea and leave with a criminal record or go to trial with an underpaid, outmatched public defender, facing a jury ready to convict you because you match their media-inflected conception of a criminal.

It’s no coincidence that the culture of the late twentieth century valorized a man like Giuliani, a conservative white prosecutor who, when he became mayor, encouraged his militarized police force to crack down on the African American and Hispanic residents of his city in the name of controlling crime. Prosecutors are human beings who take cues from the culture; if the zeitgeist cries out for prisoners, prisoners they will make. More important, many prosecutors are politicians, typically elected in four-year cycles, responsible for meting out justice and glad-handing with the very people (other politicians, the police they work with) they are theoretically charged with trying to lock up.

There is a reason other countries choose not to elect prosecutors—they do not want to reproduce scenes like Kamala Harris’s at the Commonwealth Club in which prosecutors yuck it up about political capital. This is the danger of the system we have inherited from our ancestors. The gravest matters—guilty or innocent, life or death—are reduced to whether prosecutors believe such choices will alter their political futures.

Status Quo Economy

Some have argued that electing prosecutors itself is dangerous. An elected official must single out tangible results for the district he or she represents or champion certain votes that led to direct positive outcomes. The lines of argument are clear: I’ve done enough for you, return me to office so I can do more.

Prosecution is murkier. What is a deliverable? What counts as a win? Most elected prosecutors point to convictions and crime rates. They believe racking up guilty convictions or appearing “tough” on crime will help them get re-elected. One 2015 study found that 95 percent of prosecutors in America are white, fueling a process that is inevitably tortured and toxic: powerful white people, usually men, campaigning to imprison large numbers of people who do not look like them. The progenitors of Jim Crow would be proud.

Elected prosecutors are expected, in most instances, to bring justice in cases where police officers have killed civilians, many of them black. The construct of the office and local electoral politics make this all but impossible. Police unions endorse district attorneys, donating to their campaigns and mobilizing votes. To lock up more people, district attorneys must constantly collaborate with police. Again, Law and Order—accurately this time—regularly illustrates this reality. How can the same district attorney who was endorsed by police and relies on the police to put more people in cages also prosecute them when they break the law? In New York, at least, cases of police killings of unarmed civilians are now in the hands of the state attorney general instead of local district attorneys. The attorney general is also elected but has more remove from individual localities, allowing a degree of impartiality. District attorneys, predictably, have decried this change.

Politicians fall into a similar camp. A district attorney, with rare exceptions, does not get elevated without support from the political establishment and does not remain in power without the help of elected officials and party organizations. The same dynamic that thwarts adequate investigations of police misconduct rears its head when district attorneys, particularly those who want to stick around, target the very politicians who donated money and lent their endorsements and volunteers to the cause. Even when district attorneys pursue political corruption cases, the public is left to wonder how fair they can really be. The party boss helped put the district attorney in office; the young black man just prosecuted on a marijuana possession charge did not.

Shiny and Merciful

We are now in the era of the reformist prosecutor. This is a new phenomenon. The criminal justice reform movement, which has gained most of its steam in the last decade, only recently expanded its focus to electing new prosecutors. The liberal billionaire George Soros began spending millions in 2016 on efforts to elect African American and Hispanic district attorneys who share his goal of reducing racial disparities in sentencing. Soros knows how to get bang for his buck. It costs less to elect a district attorney than a senator, and the senator will never have such a tangible and immediate influence on the lives of thousands of people like a district attorney can.

For progressives, there are now shining beacons. Larry Krasner, the new Philadelphia district attorney, is a former public defender who ended cash bail in many cases, sought more lenient sentences, and forced his prosecutors to explain for the public record why taxpayer money should be spent to incarcerate a particular defendant. In 2018, Krasner’s office worked to expand a public list of police officers who lied on duty, used excessive force, violated civil rights, or racially profiled.

In Chicago, State Attorney Kim Foxx raised the threshold for felony theft prosecution to reduce the number of shoplifters who go to jail. Mark Dupree, the district attorney in Kansas City, Kansas, created a unit to scrutinize old cases with questionable police practices. And Rachael Rollins, the new district attorney in Suffolk County, Massachusetts (which includes Boston), won office last year promising to end prosecution for low-level, nonviolent crimes.

Bazelon and other observers believe the best hope for undoing the damage of the mass incarceration age is the election of more progressive prosecutors. They are optimistic that this groundswell, a product of the Civil Rights movement, Black Lives Matter, and even libertarian skepticism of government overreach, can begin the work of permanently altering a system that has existed largely to shackle poor and black people.

Eric Gonzalez, elected Brooklyn’s district attorney in 2017, got his start in the tough-on-crime 1990s. He is now one of the leading progressives and a subject of Bazelon’s book, in part because he is guiding the criminal justice system of one of the most populous counties in America. In April, he announced he would no longer contest most parole cases. This is the mode forward-thinking prosecutors now operate in, and it’s a welcome change from fifty years of deliberate punishment. The progressive sets aside (some) of their weapons in the name of justice.

In terms of how the word “progressive” is understood in our political context, the prosecutor who champions reform is not like the senator or presidential candidate proposing a bevy of new policies and laws to strengthen the social safety net. Progressive prosecutors don’t want more government in people’s lives—ultimately, they want less. Progressive prosecution concerns the restriction and negation of power. It’s about discretion.

“The Progressive Prosecutor’s Handbook,” a guide published by UC Davis Law Review, suggests the new breed of prosecutors allow for internal appeals and reviews of wrongful convictions; disclose exculpatory evidence; avoid the pursuit of fines, forfeitures, and fees; reduce case delays; pursue independent and transparent investigations of police shootings; and diversify staff. The new progressive prosecutors adhere to many of these benchmarks, and candidates for the office, at least in Democratic-leaning areas, are in support of many of these initiatives.

Cutting the Dragnet

Reform movements are confined by institutions until they seek to topple them altogether. Progressive policing practices can’t negate the reality of an armored human being with a uniform, a gun, and handcuffs. Prosecutorial reformers—or those who look to elections as the answer—are dependent on the wisdom of individuals and a political climate that encourages their best instincts. Give Eric Gonzalez or even Larry Krasner another violent crime wave of the likes we saw forty years ago, and will they keep restraining themselves? As voters, who do not pay much attention to the nuances of a district attorney’s office, cry out for more convictions in the erroneous belief that these alone will halt rising crime, will these prosecutors be able to defy popular appeal and stay the course?

Today’s progressive prosecutor is working to strip away the armaments, to present a softer veneer—but they haven’t quite vanished. Crime is a social and economic problem, and the prison-industrial complex has not brought healing. Most reform comes at the provisional discretion of sage prosecutors; few laws are being written to strip them of their awesome power.

Prosecutors’ offices are complicated organisms. The largest employ hundreds of lawyers, investigators, and support staff. The elected district attorney can only keep so much watch over the so-called line prosecutors who are in the grind, handling cases daily. Just as important, the elected district attorney is not about to shrink the office permanently or limit its scope. He or she merely sets some power aside for what is, naturally, a limited amount of time, since they can all only serve in office or live so long.

The institution will only allow reforms to go so far, so maybe progressives should place less faith in well-meaning prosecutors operating in a retrograde system. This is thrust of a recent argument in the Harvard Law Review, “The Paradox of ‘Progressive Prosecution.’” Reformers ask prosecutors to restrain themselves in an environment that allows for near unlimited leverage over defendants. In sprawling offices that process many thousands of people a year, this is a daunting task, especially when most lawyers who seek to work in district attorney’s offices are conditioned to “win” cases and score convictions.

What about the jurisdictions that won’t embrace progressive prosecutors at all? Many of the African Americans most victimized by our system are clustered in the Republican-controlled Deep South. If a conservative majority won’t allow Krasners to take bloom in all the counties and municipalities that regularly send Republicans to the state legislature and Congress, criminal justice reform remains theoretical to those who desperately need it most. There are more than 2,300 prosecutor offices in America and the zeal for change has not taken root in many of them.

Few have called for defunding or shrinking prosecutor offices altogether. This is still a radical suggestion outside the lexicon of most reformers—much like calls to end cash bail, which can lead to questions about the morality and efficacy of jails existing in the first place. To keep black and brown bodies outside the dragnet of prosecution, it only makes sense to reduce the net or cut it altogether. What this will look like remains to be seen.

Any movement toward a narrower, weaker mode of prosecution is guaranteed to spark backlash, especially in an era that so readily manufactures psychological threats, whether it’s terrorism, immigration, or fears of fresh crime waves. Even the most noble-seeming people, when handed power, are loath to surrender it permanently. Kamala Harris enjoyed it, after all. As she said, she had a little political capital. Now she’s spending it.

#kamala harris #liberalism #hypocrisy #prison reform #incarceration #carceral state #prosecutors #criminal justice system #criticism #emily bazelon

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ethanalter · 7 years

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HBO Oz 20th Anniversary Oral History

(GIF: HBO)

In today’s Peak TV landscape, television creators have a multitude of content-hungry outlets eager to attract an audience for their wares: Streaming services and premium cable compete alongside basic cable and network television, while viral video-generating Internet hot spots like YouTube and Funny or Die are cranking out original programming as well.

It’s a brave new world, one that began to take shape 20 years ago on July 12, 1997. That’s the date that Tom Fontana’s sprawling prison drama, Oz, premiered on HBO, setting a channel best known for replaying movies and the occasional cult comedy series like The Larry Sanders Show on a course to becoming a dramatic powerhouse that lived up to its famous tagline: “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.”

And Oz was the kind of bold, provocative experiment that only could have aired on a restrictions-free cable network looking to shake up its image. Set in Emerald City, an experimental incarceration unit inside the fictional Oswald State Correctional Facility, the show offered an addictive fusion of gritty prison drama, dark comedy, graphic violence, and even a touch of soap opera romance. Oz‘s serialized storytelling and ensemble cast — J.K. Simmons, Eamonn Walker and Dean Winters were just some of the future stars who passed through Emerald City’s glass cells — attracted the attention of critics, as well as those within the industry. Two years after Oz premiered, HBO debuted a new show from David Chase called The Sopranos, and the rest is Peak TV history.

To commemorate the prison drama’s milestone anniversary, Yahoo TV talked with 13 key players in Oz‘s groundbreaking premiere and eight-episode first season. (Sorry, Keller and Beecher ‘shippers, that means no Chris Meloni, who joined in Season 2.) Read on to discover which famous hip-hop star played the role of narrator Augustus Hill before Harold Perrineau, how Simon Adebisi acquired his name (and famous hat) and the unsung heroine behind both Oz and the premium cable boom.

The Participants (In Alphabetical Order) Kirk Acevedo (Miguel Alvarez) Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Simon Adebisi) Chris Albrecht (CEO of Starz; Former CEO of HBO) Jean de Segonzac (Director of Photography; Director) Tom Fontana (Creator/Showrunner) Ernie Hudson (Warden Leo Glynn) Terry Kinney (Tim McManus) Darnell Martin (Director) Tim McAdams (Johnny Post) Jon Seda (Dino Ortolani) Lee Tergesen (Tobias Beecher) Dean Winters (Ryan O’Reily) Luna Lauren Velez (Gloria Nathan)

‘Oz’ creator Tom Fontana (Photo: Getty Images)

Chapter One: The Wonderful Wizards of Oz Tom Fontana never set out to be a premium cable pioneer. The Buffalo-born writer was a creature of network television, getting his start as a writer and producer on the beloved NBC medical drama St. Elsewhere, before collaborating with Barry Levinson and Paul Attanasio on NBC’s acclaimed police series Homicide: Life on the Street. It was during the making of Homicide that Fontana found himself contemplating what happens to criminals after they entered the penal system. That germ of an idea eventually grew into Oz, which he developed in collaboration with Levinson. As Fontana quickly discovered, his show never stood a chance at making it onto a broadcast network.

Tom Fontana: I grew up watching cop shows where at end of the episode the bad guy traditionally got arrested and went to prison while the cops sat around in the last scene and did a funny little joke. Then we all went to bed feeling [satisfied]. While I was doing Homicide — where the bad guy didn’t always get arrested — I thought, “Maybe the more interesting story is what happens to these people when they go to prison.” In David Simon’s non-fiction book [that inspired Homicide] there’s a section about a prison riot in Baltimore, and I decided to expand on it for an episode, [Season 5’s “Prison Riot”] and bring back some of the murderers we had seen in previous seasons. That was my first swing at seeing what writing a prison show might be like.

While developing Oz, I spent about two years going to prisons all over the country, and I saw that there were two kinds — these old Gothic horror chambers, and new, experimental prisons. But there was never a place where the two were together, and it was important to me that you had the old and the new butting up against each other. When I talked to prisoners who were in places like Emerald City, they were very clear that it was worse for them because they had no privacy. I found that very moving, and so that’s where Emerald City came from, and the idea of glass so that everybody could see everybody else at any given moment.

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Back then there were only four networks, and none of them were the least bit interested in my version of a prison show. I sort of pathetically adapted it as I got each rejection. I can’t remember which network I pitched which version to, but one of them was set in a juvenile detention center, and another was a Club Fed, where it was rich white collar guys who been sent up the river. Once I really started to examine what I wanted to do, I went back to the idea of that Homicide episode, which was a down-and-dirty prison with all sorts of crazy characters.

I was lucky that Chris Albrecht at HBO was looking to start doing original material. At that time, HBO had a comedy side — they had Dream On and a few other comedy shows — but they hadn’t really had a drama side yet. Chris had the vision to say, “We need to expand the reach of our network.” He told me that the [network] had had success with prison documentaries, so he had an instinct that a prison show might appeal to his subscribers. He said, “I’ll give you a little bit of money to shoot a presentation, about 15 to 20 minutes, and let’s see what it looks like.”

Chris Albrecht: The show had been in development for quite a while before we were really even contemplating doing a lot of original programming. There was a change in management, and we wanted to ramp up our originals. We hadn’t ever done an hour-long drama before. I went to Tom and said, “Look, we’ve put you and Barry [Levinson] through the ringer here. I’m not going to ask you to make any more changes, but we need to shoot something, so, here’s a million dollars. Shoot as much of this as you can.”

Fontana: I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will — it wasn’t enough money! We shot it in Baltimore while we were shooting Homicide, so we would book a location and I would say, “Okay, we’ll shoot the Homicide scene here, and then we’ll shoot the Oz scene.” So, in a way, NBC paid for it a little bit, if you know what I’m saying.

Darnell Martin: I had directed a feature, [1994’s I Like it Like That], but Homicide was my first television experience. They gave me the script for “Sniper: Part 2,” and it was written like a film, with helicopter shots and blockaded streets. I kept trying to figure out how to do that for the budget and time that we had. Maybe that was a seller for Tom. He asked me to direct the Oz presentation.

Fontana: The cast of [the presentation] was different. Jon Seda and Terry Kinney were in it, but the part that Lauren Velez [now Luna Lauren Velez] played, Dr. Gloria Nathan, was played by Jennifer Grey. The reason I later made the change was I really felt like the cast was [too] white, and I also liked the idea of a Latina woman in the midst of all these men. And there was a different guy playing Augustus Hill than Harold Perrineau.

Martin: I cast Mos Def as Augustus. He was amazing. Amazing. He was recast. It was crazy! I begged and I fought — not with Tom. It was above Tom; Tom couldn’t change it. Harold is wonderful, but you know, Mos Def had something really special.

Harold Perrineau as Augustus Hill ‘Oz.’ The role was played by Mos Def in the original presentation (Credit: HBO)

Terry Kinney: Tom had cast me in a Homicide episode, [Season 4’s “Map of the Heart”] and he said that he’d always wanted to make up for that, because it was an indecipherable episode. I played an NSA mapping guy, and to this day don’t know what it was about! I remember meeting Tom and Darnell for the Oz presentation, and they were talking about a character that was a die-hard liberal in a way that seemed extremely naïve. I basically played the warden, whose name was still McManus.

Jon Seda: I worked with Darnell on I Like It Like That, and she raised the bar for me. I told her that anything she ever does, I’m going to say yes to it. Sure enough, they said, “Hey, listen, there’s a script that’s called Oz. It’s a presentation. Darnell Martin’s directing.” I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” I didn’t even know what the role was. What a lot of people don’t know is that at the same time that I was shooting that, I was also shooting the movie Selena. So when I met with Darnell, I said, “You’re going to have to help me, because I’ve been living as this sweet guy Chris Pérez for a couple months already, and now I have to play this ruthless Dino Ortolani.” I didn’t know how I could do it, but she said, “Just trust me. Put everything in my hands and it’s going to be great.”

Jon Seda in ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Tim McAdams: I had built a pretty strong relationship with Pat Moran, who was the local casting agent for Homicide. When they decided to do the presentation for Oz, I auditioned and got cast. Nobody knew what Oz was or really thought anything of it; I just knew it was a show I got hired for and I was a young actor trying to work. We shot this presentation, and Mos Def and Jennifer Grey were in it, so I was like, “Wow! We got some names in this thing, and maybe it’s gonna get some traction!” I was honored to work with Jennifer Grey; I remember how excited I was and how friendly she was. And growing up in that era, having a chance to spend time around Mos Def and watch him transition to becoming an actor was really exciting. Sometime later I got a phone call about the show being picked up by HBO, and they said, “They’re gonna be doing a lot of recasting, but they’re going to allow you to play Johnny Post.”

Fontana: That initial presentation was more tonal; it was a real attempt to say, “This is the kind of subject matter we’re going to cover, and these are the kinds of characters we’re going to see.” You have to remember, this was before we built the Emerald City set, so it was all hallways and rooms, but it wasn’t what the show eventually looked like. Though, if you watch the first episode of Oz, there are a couple scenes that are from the original presentation, like the shower scene where Seda gets the s**t beat out of him by the COs. And I think the hospital scenes are from the original presentation.

Ernie Hudson as Warden Leo Glynn and Terry Kinney as Tim McManus on ‘Oz.’ In the pilot presentation, Kinney played the warden. (Credit: HBO)

Kinney: Jon Seda and I were two of the survivors of that 15-minute presentation. I didn’t think that I was going to make it to the series. I remember that I was in Los Angeles doing something else, and I called Tom and he said, “You know what, you’re my guy. Let me work this out.” What I think they’d done is they wanted the warden to be African-American. They wanted Ernie [Hudson], and they had a relationship with him. So Tom made me the keeper of the Emerald City section of the prison. I was grateful [for] his loyalty.

Albrecht: At the end of the presentation, the lead guy, Dino, gets killed in his cell. I said to Tom, “He comes back next episode, right?” And they said, “No, he’s dead.” I go, “What do you mean, he’s dead? He’s the lead in the show!” They go, “That’s what’s happening here.” That’s when I realized that they were gonna change the rules.

Seda: What’s funny is that I remember that the death scene wasn’t supposed to carry over [to the pilot]. I was expected to come on and be a regular on the show. I think what happened was that HBO just really loved the idea of the lead guy actually dying. That kind of set off the trend on Oz.

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Fontana: We got an eight-episode order. I was literally yelled at by friends of mine and peers of mine on the drama side of television. They said to me, “Why are you going to work over at HBO? It’s a movie channel. Nobody watches it.” And I said, “Well, who cares if nobody watches it? They’re going to let me make the show I want to make.” Literally people thought it would kill my career, that I made the wrong tactical move and that I should be doing Touched by an Angel! I’d like to tell you that I’m the visionary who had this incredible sense that cable would someday dominate the television world, but it wasn’t that. It was simply that there was an open door and I went through it.

Chapter Two: Populating Emerald City Having walked through that open door, Fontana’s next task was assembling his prison population. At the time, and still today, Oz stands as a model og diverse casting; it’s large ensemble encompasses a multitude of races, religions and sexual orientations. And shooting in New York, Fontana tapped into a deep reservoir of veteran actors and fresh faces.

Fontana: Our feeling about the penal system in America is very cyclical; you go through periods of “[Prison] should be about redemption” and then “[Prison] should be about retribution.” At that time, it was about retribution and there was this sense that prisoners were bad people, and there were no heroes in those stories. The truth is, I wasn’t interested in writing heroes per se. And that was the great thing about Chris. I’ve often quoted him as saying, “I don’t care if the characters are likable as long as they’re interesting.” That was what I needed to hear because I wasn’t planning to make likable characters — I was planning to make interesting characters.

J.K. Simmons in ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Throughout the life of the series, we were able to get some wonderful, brilliant New York theater actors. We’d used J.K. Simmons in an episode of Homicide, so I gave him the part of Vern Schillinger because I knew he could do it. Dean Winters had done Homicide episodes, and was my favorite bartender before that, so I wrote Ryan O’Reilly specifically for him.

Dean Winters: Tom had come up with the idea of Ryan O’Reily by watching me bartend. When I was a bartender, I was a real hustler. My motto was, “If you leave my bar with cab fare, then I failed.” I would try and drain you of every dollar you had. I quit my bartending job and was in Los Angeles doing my first movie, Conspiracy Theory. It was a real leap of faith. Tom came out to visit, and we had a long talk. I told him, “You know, I really don’t think this acting thing is for me, it doesn’t feel right.” And he goes, “Listen: I was doing a little presentation for HBO about a prison, and I think it might turn out well for all of us.”

Dean Winters as Ryan O’Reily on ‘Oz.’ (Credit: HBO)

Ernie Hudson: The first time I heard of Oz was when I got a call from Tom. I did a six-episode arc on St. Elsewhere [in 1984], where Tom was a writer and producer. I got to know him a little bit on set, and when he called me about Oz he said, “Do you remember we talked about working together on a project?” I didn’t remember that conversation, but I pretended that I did. I based Leo loosely on Robert Matthews, the first black warden of Leavenworth prison in Kansas. I read a book where he talked about how father was a minister, and wanted him to go into the ministry. Later on, he said to his father, “This is my ministry.” I thought of it that way. He was a guy who finished college, but probably started at junior college, and went to night school. He’s worked his way up. He’s the guy who loaned money to the friend and never got paid back.

Luna Lauren Velez as Dr. Gloria Nathan on ‘Oz.’ (Credit: HBO)

Luna Lauren Velez: My first film was I Like It Like That, directed by Darnell Martin. She called me and said, “Do you want to do this show, Oz?” And I said, “Well, I’m doing this other show, [the Fox drama New York Undercover].” She said, “It might be a one off, I’m not even sure what’s going to happen with the character,” and then she said, “Jon Seda is doing it.” Jon and I had done I Like It Like That together, so I came onboard and they just kept asking me to come back. My understanding was that Jennifer Grey played Dr. Nathan in the [presentation]; everyone had glowing things to say about her, but said, “We decided to go a different direction.”

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje: I went in and read for the casting director [Alexa L. Fogel]; there were only two lines and I read them in a British accent, an American accent, an African accent and a Jamaican accent just to show what I could do with it. She told me to wait, auditioned a few other people and then closed up shop and took me over to Tom’s office. He was in the middle of writing, and she told me, “Okay, he’s going to give you two minutes.” He didn’t even look up; I performed the lines in those various accents, and he said, “All right, stop. That’s enough.” That was it! He didn’t say I got the part — he didn’t say anything.

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje in ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Alexa called me the next day and said, “Tom liked the African character, the Nigerian one. He doesn’t have one of those in the show, and he’d like you to play that.” I was a little bummed, because I wanted to play an American. Then she said, “What he wants to do is he’s going to write it as an American and he wants you to be able to translate it into the African character,” which was freaking great. When I met Tom again, he told me that he had a Nigerian friend he went to college with whose name was Bisi. So he said he would use part of my name and part of his friend’s name: that’s how Adebisi was born.

Fontana: Eamonn Walker was someone I didn’t know until he came into audition, but he was so incredible that it was a foregone conclusion he’d be part of the cast. I was obsessed with getting that character of Kareem Said right. And Eamonn was equally obsessive about getting it right. Some of the extras in his Muslim Brotherhood prisoner group were actual Muslims, so he would go once a week to the mosque, and pray and experience the whole religious side of what it is to be an Imam.

Eamonn Walker as Kareem Said on ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Kirk Acevedo: Originally Tom wrote Miguel Alvarez for someone else, and then I came in and I got the gig. I remember the exact audition: there were five actors ahead of me, and the scene was an emotional scene where you had to go in and scream and yell about some s**t. Every actor who went in before me screamed and yelled, and I was like, “Well, I can’t scream and yell, because no matter how good I can do it you’re gonna get tired of seeing the same fucking thing.” So I played it just the total opposite, and I stood out and got the gig.

Lee Tergesen: I had been doing a show for USA called Weird Science, which had just finished up, and I was working on Homicide for a couple of episodes. I was down in Baltimore and Tom said, “When you’re done, can you come up to New York? I want to talk to you about something that I have in the works.” So I went up and he and I started talking about something that ended up being Oz. We talked about a couple of different ideas he had for parts, one being a guard and the other one being this guy who ends up being in jail as sort of a fish out of water. I was like, “That sounds more interesting than a guard.”

Fontana: Initially HBO didn’t want me to cast Lee as Beecher. I was like, “Well, what’s wrong with him?” And they go, “Oh no, he’s a brilliant actor. It’s just not who we had in our head.” I said, “Well, he’s who I had in my head, because I wrote the part for him. So you’re stuck with him.” And then, of course, they were [ultimately] thrilled with him. But at first they were a little nervous, because he didn’t look like who they thought Beecher should look like. I never understood what that meant.

Albrecht: I do remember talking about that, because Lee was such a prominent character in the beginning. We were kind of new to it all. I had worked pretty closely with Garry Shandling on The Larry Sanders Show and Marta Kaufman and David Crane on Dream On, but this was really the first time that we had this size of a show, and this kind of serialized drama. So I think we were just babbling at Tom and Barry, who obviously had a lot more television experience than we did.

Lee Tergesen as Tobias Beecher on ‘OZ.’ (Credit: HBO)

Tergesen: In retrospect, I know that happened, but Tom didn’t make me aware of it at all in the beginning. But yeah, my understanding now is they [thought]: “This character is so important, and this guy has just being doing Weird Science.” And Tom was like, “Well, don’t worry — you’ll see, you’ll see.” I wonder what they think now!

Fontana: I had met Rita Moreno at a party at Elaine’s that was marking the end of The Cosby Mysteries, which she had been a regular on. I went up to her and said, “It’s such an honor to meet you — I’m such a big fan of your work.” And she went, “Well, if you’re such a big f***ing fan of my work, why didn’t you f***ing write me a part?” I went, “Okay, I will!” So years later, I took her and her husband to dinner and was talking about Oz. She goes, “It all sounds fantastic. What would I play?” And I went: “You would play the nun.” Well, she laughed for about a half hour and then said, “Tom, I’ve played hookers, I’ve played bandits, but no one’s ever had the balls to ask me to be a nun.” I also talked to her about my sister, who is from a very liberal order of nuns. In the summers, she would run the hospitality house at a prison near Buffalo. I always thought it was so incredibly ironic that my sweet sister was scheduling conjugal visits for prisoners. I told Rita all that, and she said, “Okay, just as long as I’m not going to be in one of those habits.”

Martin: Tom was fabulous in the way that I could say, “Tom, check this guy out. Is there a place for him?” And he’d say, “Yes, I’m going to write him into it.” There were some people that were just out there in the world, and not necessarily actors yet. He was really open to bringing people in, looking at them and trying to find the place for people who had this very specific New York vibe. With a network, you try to get someone hired and it takes so long. With HBO, it was fabulous: if Tom and I liked an actor, we would go to the one person over there and it turned around real quick.

Rita Moreno as Sister Peter Marie Reimondo on ‘OZ.’ (Credit: HBO)

Fontana: I was very clear in the auditions, and when people signed the contract that they might be asked to be nude, and that there would be violence. I didn’t want people who were going to be skittish.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: Tom made it clear that this was going to be groundbreaking, and that he was really targeting authenticity, so that meant that it required certain actors and certain characters to go in places that may be uncomfortable personally. There were rape scenes and all kinds of complications that weren’t going to be comfortable. He made it clear that if you don’t want to do that, then you’re not the actor for the part.

Acevedo: No, he never warned us! I think there was a nudity waiver because there might be nudity. But every week it was like, “Alright, Kirk, today you’re gonna eat s**t out of the toilet.” Every week we were just like, “Dude, as long as I don’t get raped, I’m alright.” It wasn’t a scary thing, it was kind of titillating. It wasn’t like we were all nervous about it, because we would do it. It was more of like, “What’s he gonna have us do?” I don’t ever remember him warning me, but then I’m pretty sure there were people he didn’t have to warn because we were all game to do it.

Kirk Acevedo as Miguel Alvarez on ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Winters: I was there from the inception of the show, and I told Tom, “Look, I’ll do anything you want.” And I did. The smart actors knew that we were doing a show about a prison, not a show about a prep school, and it’s cable television. If you had half a brain you knew that this was not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and it was not going to be a walk through the daisies. So that’s the way that I approached it, and obviously there were people who had a hard time with it. Some guys didn’t want to do this, some guys didn’t want to do that, but that’s the nature of the beast, I guess.

Kinney: I remember in the first episode that Edie Falco [who played a correctional officer] and I were supposed to have a love scene during an execution. As someone was being electrocuted, we were supposed to be having sex in a cell. As much as everybody took their clothes off on the show, both Edie and I felt it wasn’t the right choice, and asked if we could do it in a way that was less graphic. From that point on, that’s how my character was treated. I wasn’t one of the people who had to do [anything graphic].

Edie Falco as Officer Diane Wittlesey on ‘Oz.’ She later was cast on ‘The Sopranos’ but made occasional appearances on ‘Oz.’ (Credit: HBO)

Fontana: I have to say, over the course of the series, there was only really one actor who lied to me and said he would do whatever I asked him, and then when it came time he said, “No, I’m not going to do it.” But he wasn’t a regular and I was able to kill him off fairly quick. Let them guess who that was!

Chapter 3: Getting Into ‘The Routine’ Some TV shows take a little while to find themselves, but Oz‘s series premiere lays down the law about what viewers could expect from their time inside Emerald City. Written by Tom Fontana and directed by Darnell Martin, “The Routine,” swiftly establishes all the elements Oz would become infamous for, including densely-intertwined narratives, a parade of compelling characters, shocking acts of violence and a pervasive sense that nobody is safe within Oswald’s walls. Especially not the person you think is the main character…

Fontana: In terms of the writing of the first episode, Augustus was the first voice I heard in my head. In terms of the design of the show, Beecher was the first character that I came up with, and then McManus. One is there as a prisoner, and one is there as a warden. It just seemed like, for the audience, Beecher’s our Dante coming into the Inferno. He’s the one who’s guiding us into this world where we’re going to be exposed to these different cycles of violence.

Jean de Segonzac: The very first scene we did was in McManus’ office where he tries to put the glass on top of the cockroach. That was the very first shot on the very first day.

Kinney: I hated that scene. It was a trained cockroach; there was a cockroach handler, and back-up cockroaches. That’s a delicate area for me, cockroaches. We did endless angles on it, because Darnell did a lot of angles.

Winters: I knew no one on my first day besides Lee Tergesen. So it was like the first day of school at a juvenile delinquent reformatory. Everyone’s kind of looking around going, “Oh yeah, so you’re Alvarez, alright. I got to keep my eye on you.” Or “You’re Adebisi, alright, you’re big and scary, okay.” Or “You’re playing Said; okay, you’re kind of cool, but what’s up with the English accent?” In the first couple of days, it was just like, “What the fuck have I gotten myself in to here?” But in a good way, obviously.

Tergesen: Nobody really talked to me in the beginning. In the first four or five episodes, the extras would not talk to me. But once Beecher went crazy and attacked Schillinger [Episode 7, “Plan B”], all of a sudden everybody was like, “Hey Beecher, Beecher, Beecher, oh hey Beech!” It was so weird. It was like high school.

Fontana: This is a little piece of backstage history: we shot the pilot and the first season in Manhattan at what is now Chelsea Market, and what used to be the old Oreo cookie factory. The cafeteria had really high ceilings because the stoves had to go up to those windows to let out the smoke from baking the Oreos. We always had to cut if somebody left the cafeteria, because there was no way they could walk to the next set. It was all a bunch of different rooms.

McAdams: I’ll never forget the first time I arrived on set. You’d get off the elevator, and it would be like a normal office with people going about their duties. Then you’d turn the corner, walk down a little bit and you’re in prison.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: We were about five floors up; the first four floors were offices, and then when you got to the fifth floor, it was literally Emerald City. At any given time, there were 300 or 400 extras in there. The cells were real cells, with the right size and proximity. It was hot, sticky and you felt claustrophobic, like you were in prison. In between takes, there were waiting room areas where we could go, but I chose to stay my cell for the whole time.

Seda: It was scary when the reality hit you that this is the life for so many; at least we were actors and able to walk away at the end of the day. All the details were incredible, and it just really added to making it just so authentic. The set itself was probably the biggest character of the show.

Hudson: It was like being transported to another world. I’d walk to work from the Upper West Side down to where we were shooting, and the contrast of being on the streets of New York and then going in and being on the set of Oz was cool.

Winters: People used to ask: “How did you prepare for the role?” It was very easy. You just got off the elevator, and walked down to the set. It was a f***ing prison! With the glass cells, you realized that everyone was being watched all day long. It was very unnerving. I remember Vincent Gallo came by the set one day, and he was looking around and goes, “Man, this set’s the f***ing cream.” Meaning, they really nailed that set. And my brother [Scott William Winters, who joined the cast in Season 2 as O’Reily’s brother, Cyril] actually spent the weekend on the set by himself, just to get that feeling of incarceration.

Adebisi and Beecher get to know each other in ‘The Routine’ (Credit: HBO)

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: For my scene with Beecher in the first episode, Lee and I were meeting for the first time as actors. It was kind of organic because his character was entering the prison, and it was a new world for him, whereas I’m a lifer. The thing for me was to establish that I own him. I own his life, I own his physical body; he was going to be my bitch and do exactly what I told him to do. I had the luxury of sleeping in my cell, and I would not wash. I became one with my own odor to stake my territory [despite] the complaints of the DP and the crew. Quite often they said, “Perhaps you should shower.” But I told them I was going to stake my claim. Whatever feeling I would evoke in the crew was exactly the feelings that were intended when the actors would come in my cell: repulsion, fear and disgust. It was lovely!

Tergesen: I don’t remember that! I do remember Adewale being ridiculous. He was so f***ing good in that part. I used to say that being in that cell with Adebisi was like being on a date from hell that lasted a month. I mean, he literally grabbed my penis more than women I had dated for a month.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: I had two scenes in the first episode, and was meant to die in the second episode. But Tom liked what he saw [in the premiere], and kept liking what he saw. I’ve lived a life that gave me an insight as to what it was like to be in a gang in my teenage years, so I just brought that rawness to it. I wore my hat in the way that I used to wear when I was a teenager on the street myself. I knew that the tilt of the hat represented defiance. The costume and production were very much against me wearing the hat initially, because they wanted everybody in prison to be uniformed. I had to respect that, but I just knew that I needed to put my stamp on the character. That scene with Beecher was the first scene I shot, and when they said “Action,” I pulled the hat out of my pocket and put it on. When we wrapped and moved onto my next scene, the director said, “Wait a minute — he had the hat on. Now we have to keep it.”

Tergesen: I was so happy to get out of [Adebisi’s cell], but then I go to Schillinger’s cell. We didn’t rehearse at all on that show, so J.K. and I just met when we started shooting. The funny thing about him is when we’re playing those initial scenes, it’s like he’s the nicest guy on the planet. You know, he’s always smiling. It’s like, “I can trust this guy!” And then it just devolves. The branding thing ends up looking like I’m getting f***ed in the ass, which I didn’t realize was going to happen. Not that I minded, but when he was burning my ass it was causing me to like buck like I was getting f***ed. That was my ass, bro! No stunt ass.

De Segonzac: One image I have, which I can’t get out of my head, is Tergesen’s ass two inches from my face while Simmons is branding him. I’m just going, “This is the weirdest way of making a living that I can ever think of.”

Fontana: When it came to shooting the first episode, moments like the swastika on the ass were defining moments for the show. And the moment when Dino is naked and getting beat up in the shower was, at the time, as brutal, a scene I’d ever seen on television. Those are, to me the moments that said to people this isn’t your father’s [TV show].

Seda: The shower scene was wild. It showed how quick things can happen in prison. Dino wasn’t afraid of anyone, and I was so into being that guy that I carried that with me. I literally walked onto set butt-naked. I walked right up, and stood there talking to Darnell as if I had clothes on. I said, “Okay, let’s go. Let’s shoot this scene. What do you want me to do? You want me to do this? Want me to be here? Want me to do this? Okay. Great, let’s do it.”

Velez: The storyline with Dino and Emilio [a prisoner dying of AIDS] really resonated with me because I have friends and a family member who are HIV positive. I also loved working with Jon. There’s one scene where I could barely keep a straight face because we had done that movie together, so there was something delicious about watching him play this wise-ass character. It’s really one of the few times in the pilot that you see Gloria engaging with one of the inmates in a fun, slightly flirtatious way.

Seda: Jose Soto did such a fabulous job as Emilio. What I love about that scene was how well it was written. It wasn’t that Dino just didn’t like Emilio because he had AIDS; Dino actually found compassion for him. The fact that he honored his request to take him out was done from compassion. That was a way for Dino to be in touch with his heart. It was just brilliant.

Fontana: When I talked with Chris Albrecht, he said, “What’s the one thing you’re absolutely not allowed to do on a broadcast television?” And I said, “Kill the lead in the pilot.” And he said, “Well, then go ahead and do it.” So I hired Jon and told him this is what’s going to happen. He was cool with it, and then I hired him on Homicide, to sort of compensate for the fact that he was killed off.

Seda: For Dino, there’s a point where what was keeping him afloat was the fact that he still has his family out there. There’s a scene where his wife comes to visit him and the kids are there playing and that’s when he makes the decision that it’s never going to happen. The reality of the fact that he’s here for life really hits him. Darnell and I added a moment where Dino taps the glass, kind of like he’s touching her for the last time as a family. I don’t know if a lot of people realize or catch it, but that tap on the glass to her is basically saying that’s the last time she’s ever going to see him. From that point on, it’s just a matter of time for Dino.

Winters: I remember reading the script and going, “Oh, Dino’s a badass!” And by the way, Tom named the character after me, because my nickname is Dino. Then all of a sudden he’s dead, and I’m the one who has him lit on fire. My first thought was, “I feel pretty f***ing good, because I’m not the one dying!” But I was also blown away that this was what Tom was going to do.

McAdams: To say I was excited [to kill Dino] would be an understatement. At that point, I didn’t realize that I would be the first inmate to kill somebody on Oz. That didn’t connect until way later, what I realized the show had a reputation for killing people off. The idea that I was going to be killing someone was just a thrill, and I knew that it was going to be memorable. The fact that they were killing Jon off in the first episode told me how edgy the show was going to be. No one’s safe, and episode to episode, you don’t know what’s going to happen, who’s going to die, and how it’s going to happen. You just don’t know. You have to tune in and watch.

Seda: Talk about going out in a blaze of glory, right? That’s what he did. It was pretty wild how it was shot. I remember seeing the dummy that they had made up in the makeup trailer, and I said, “Oh my gosh, that dummy looks just like me!” When we were shooting it, I remember just looking up and telling Tim, “Hey, hey, hey, don’t actually light it.” A couple times, he kept forgetting and actually lit it. I’m like, “Wait! You’re going to drop this on my face, dummy!”

McAdams: Dropping that match under the camera and watching those flames come up was the most exciting and invigorating feeling. To this day when I see it, I still get excited. Because that wasn’t CGI, it was a glass plate. Also, being given the creative autonomy again to just go in there and have fun with it. Johnny Post wasn’t wired right, so just dropping the match would’ve been one thing. But dropping the match like, “Boom, you’re gone,” was so fun as an actor, because we were so deep in the character at that point.

Fontana: I wanted to do a show in which the audience never relaxed, because I these men who are in prison don’t get a chance to relax. So if I’m really going to try to convey what they’re going through, then the audience should never be able to kick back.

Winters: I’ve never seen this before or since: the scripts would come out, and people would take one and rush to their dressing room, a corner of the set or go in a jail cell, and read the script and see if they’re still alive at the end. It was nerve-wracking.

Seda: I don’t remember any [farewell] party. I think it was just, “All right, you’re dead. Goodbye.” But Fontana came to me and said, “Don’t worry. I’m going to bring you on Homicide.” So that worked out great! [Seda played Detective Paul Falsone on the final two seasons of Homicide.]

‘OZ’ director Darnell Martin (Photo: Getty Images)

Chapter 4: The Future was Female When the histories of cable’s rise have been written, they tend to dwell on the accomplishments of male showrunners like David Chase, Alan Ball and Shawn Ryan. While Tom Fontana is certainly part of that group, both he and Oz‘s cast are quick to note that one of the show’s key creative architects was a woman. As the director of the original pilot presentation, and then the series premiere, Darnell Martin established the innovative visual language that distinguished OZ from anything else on TV at that point. Having gotten her start as an independent filmmaker before landing television gigs, she sought to infuse the series with some of the same spontaneity and energy that defined that era of indie movies. Martin continues to alternate the occasional feature film, like 2008’s Cadillac Records, with a diverse slate of TV credits that includes such series as Grey’s Anatomy, Grimm and Blindspot. If Tom Fontana is among the founding fathers of the premium cable boom, than Darnell Martin is its founding mother.

Fontana: I’m not a director. I never aspired to be a director, and I have no real interest in it. So I rely very heavily on directors to create a visual style that goes with the storytelling, and I trust directors that I hire to bring their best game to the playing field. Darnell was there from the beginning. She and I had worked on Homicide together, and I thought, “Oh, she’s really got some stuff going on here.” I suppose back then the idea of a woman directing a male prison show didn’t make sense to some people, but it made sense to me because of Darnell.

Martin: The funny thing is, I didn’t want to do it at first! I had brought another project to Tom, and we brought it to ABC and ABC ended up not making it. I really didn’t want to do this show. Not because I didn’t like it, it was just because I had a thing about people in jail. I grew up in a very rough place, and I know a lot of people that really needed to go to prison because the neighborhood was a lot safer with them not there. I had my own very real and personal reasons not to want to glorify that. Then I said, “Let me go visit some [prisoners].” So I visited prisons, and said, “You know what? People in jail are human beings, and there but the grace of God go I.” I didn’t want to do it if they were going to be other than me. [But when I] saw people in prison and how they were living, that helped me emotionally get around dealing with the show and made me want to do it.

Albrecht: Darnell was such a critical part of setting the tone and the style; she worked with Tom on the production design and how to shoot this. I think we all set out to do something different visually. Drama has been a staple of network television obviously, and the fact that we [at HBO] were now entering that arena, the one thing that everybody felt was we really needed to differentiate ourselves. I don’t think if any of us on the HBO side had any idea that Tom and Darnell were gonna take that so literally, and just make something that startlingly different.

Winters: Darnell Martin is no joke. She came in with a vision, and her vision just happened to match Tom’s. I think she’s kind of left out of the conversation a lot of times when it comes to Oz, and she should really be part of the conversation, because she came in there as a woman, in a hyper-male environment and she laid down the law in this jail. She really did; and people took notice.

De Segonzac: She’s someone with a real vision. Tom was always telling me, “Just do your thing.” And I, of course, was trying to do Darnell’s thing. The [visual] theme was us being in these tight quarters, just participating. Basically, we just did whatever we felt like within the moment. As you’ll see, some scenes are all on a dolly and laid out, and others are completely handheld. For one shot, I remember being on a foot dolly, and going around the edge, while Jon Seda is trying to force feed a guy who’s dying of AIDS.

Jose Soto as Emilio and Seda as Dino (Credit: HBO)

Martin: There’s an idea in television that I don’t think makes the best television, and that is you have a plan before you get there. If you’re new at doing this, that’s probably helpful. The bad thing about it is that you can have a plan, and then all of a sudden the light is over here so you have to deal with shadows or maybe an actor has to go to the hospital. There’s always some kind of issue in this business. What you need to do, and what I like to do, is go to a place, sit in that place and come up with all the ways I could shoot it. I think shot lists are so reductive, because you can go through every scene [ahead of time], but in reality, you didn’t even work with the actor. You have an idea of blocking, but it’s only you know that knows exactly how you’re going to block it, and then you’re going to make that actor a puppet. That’s a big problem. These actors were very passionate about their characters, and had very strong ideas about their characters, and they all had their homework done when they came in. They were all willing to rehearse and find it and they were generous to one another.

De Segonzac: We had to go fast, fast, fast because there was so much to do. I remember that the dolly guys would just be sitting on the dolly [between takes], and I was like, “What the f**k are you doing? There’s not sitting around here.” At 7 a.m. all the cameras were built, the sound cart was ready and the actors were on set in costume. There was one time where we were running out of time, and Tom happened to be visiting the set. Normally, he wouldn’t be there, but he showed up and he was angry that we were going to go late. So I’m saying [to Darnell], “We’ve got to go fast, so if I do this and this, will you be happy?” And she was angry at me. Tom pulled me by the arm and said, “Why are you talking to her? Just do your thing. Just do whatever you always do.” 15 minutes later the scene was done.

Kinney: Sometimes somebody would be late, and that was a bad thing, because we had to start at 7am and finish at 7pm. If somebody showed up for the first scene late, then that person had sole responsibility for killing our day. We all understood that. For the most part, there was never a hitch in any of it. Darnell had a very specific shooting style; it was a lot of pushing in. The camera was its own character. It was cool to be a part of, but at the same time, you had to hit marks a lot in terms of your acting with that style. You had to turn at exactly the moment the camera arrived. She did a lot of things as one-offs, and that saves some time, but it also makes for very complicated shots. We used to get into little dust-ups about it, but it wasn’t anything that was bad. I would just say, “I’m trying.”

One of Martin’s signature push-ins (GIF: HBO)

Tergesen: She was a very strong personality, but I got along with her pretty well. Every once in awhile there would be something camera-wise [that was tough]. I remember I had a scene with Terry Kinney, and I thought, “Why would I stand right here in a place where he can look at me?” And she’s not letting up or even letting me have an idea about what I wanted to do. She’s rolling the crane across the big main room, and I’m like, “Is this about a crane shot?” She said, “No,” and of course it was about a crane shot. It was a cool shot! Sometimes you have to give up to the people who know what they’re doing.

Hudson: I like Darnell. I did not like the fact that she really liked Eamonn Walker more than me. That really annoyed the hell out of me. She kept praising him, and didn’t have a damn thing to say to me. Since then I’ve gotten to know her. In fact I did a series called APB for Fox, and she directed one of the episodes. I really like her a lot.

Velez: I can put any episode on, and say, “Darnell shot this.” She’s got a great eye; it’s the specific way that she’ll shoot something. Or those unexpected, beautiful tracking shots that Darnell does. It’s almost like a dance with her, and theatrical as well, because it has to be seamless.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: Darnell would do these sweeping moving shots where she would literally introduce about 10 characters at the same time. There was a lot of movement, and you just had to do all your dialogue on the move, and interacting with other characters. It was very fluid style, which was tricky because as an actor you just have to be very ready, and very much engaged in your character so that you don’t miss a beat. You had to be in rhythm with the flow of the camera, because it moved a lot with Darnell. It was alive, and I think that’s what it was meant to capture.

De Segonzac: We shot everything on 16mm; there was never any question of going 35mm. Back then, the 35mm cameras were immensely huge, and very heavy. For the spaces we were crunching ourselves into, it never would have worked. We were just constantly doing stuff you could never do with a big camera or a huge dolly. At one point, I got enamored with the Dutch tilt [a canted camera angle], so I’d start my shot at a Dutch and then move back and straighten it out, or maybe even Dutch it the other way. I wanted to have fun. After a week of doing that, somebody tapped me on the shoulder and gave me a phone message from Tom, and it said, “Enough of the f***ing Dutch tilt.”

An ‘Oz’ Dutch tilt (Credit: HBO)

Fontana: The cube that Augusts is in was her idea. I kept saying to her, “We’ve got to find some place where he’s isolated, but I don’t want him to be in front of black curtains or something.” She was at some museum, and there was some kind of cube there. She told me, “You’ve got to see it, because that’s what I think we should use for Augustus.” Every director after her hated that cube! But I insisted that they had to use it in some way, shape or form because it was so expensive to build that I wanted to amortize it over the course of the series.

Martin: I was at the Whitney Biennial, and I saw this box in a room that was tilted on its side. I wanted to utilize something like that, and I brought that to the production designer [Gary Weist] who was phenomenal. From there, we started to riff; we riffed about 2001: A Space Odyssey, the way they’re kind of under this glass. We started talking the tricks we could do with the box and really show this idea of isolation, and no longer having any privacy. You can’t even go to the bathroom without the world videotaping you and watching you.

De Segonzac: I saw the same show at the Biennial. The box just looked like a silver box with windows; some kind of construction art. I was not impressed by this thing at all, and it didn’t occur to me to think twice about it. But she came while we were building the set, and she was talking all about this box that she saw. Perrineau’s character was supposed to be in a wheelchair, so he had to be able to get into so that his wheelchair would be latched down and the whole box would turn and move. We built a box that had a crank and a motor on it, and we could put Harold in there, strap him down, and send him upside down.

Seda: I got a chance to be in the box in one of the episodes where Dino comes back as a ghost. [Season 6, “A Day in the Death”] It was pretty wild. Harold had so much dialogue, and [I loved] the way he made it flow in that setting. I’m sure Harold would say he loved it because it made him become one with the character. That cube just became his M.O.

Tergesen: The crank made so much noise that you couldn’t shoot sound with it. So Harold had a lot of looping to do. I did a few things in the box, and, of course, J.K. and I did that Barry Manilow song, “The Last Duet.” [Season 5, “Variety.”] That was a song I was gonna do in the 10th grade with my girlfriend, but we never did it. As soon as I thought of it [for the episode], I knew Tom was going to love it. And then two years ago, I was sitting next to one of the guys who wrote the lyrics for that song. He said, “You used one of my songs in your show.” And I was like, “No s**t. I picked it!”

Kinney: I really liked the cube. In the two episodes I directed, [Season 3, “Cruel and Unusual Punishments” and Season 4, “Wheel of Fortune”], I did some very fun stuff with it. In my first episode, I remember making Harold be in smaller and smaller boxes, until he was inside a little dark thing. I didn’t find it an entirely successful exercise; I would have needed production values that we just didn’t have at the time. For the second one, I made the cube a big lottery thing. We spun it around with all the balls inside. I strapped myself in and tested it out before I put Harold in there to see if he was going to be able to talk and hang upside down a lot. He was amazing, that guy. He’s an acting machine. Every time he gets to the cube, he’s not only super-prepared with those monologues, but ready to take on any challenge to get it done.

Fontana: Where I get nervous is when a director creates a visual style that isn’t telling the story, because then I think they’re just showing off. But if you have a director who stages a shot like that great shot that Darnell does in the first episode where we see Emerald City for the first time, and the camera moves wide? That to me is excellent visual storytelling.

Martin: What’s great about Tom is that he understands filmmakers; he’s not trying to prove anything, and he’s really open to being collaborative. The problem now is that that we’ve dumbed down the idea of directing episodic TV. On a lot of these shows, anybody can walk in and do it. Directors like working for Tom, because Tom doesn’t consider them idiots. He created these wonderful stories, he had a great vision, and then he put it in the hands of other artists who gently put it through themselves and added new colors to it. I think he set a tone because he was not a dictator or micromanager. No one knows I directed the premiere. It started with a female director, and that was only possible because it was a forward-thinking man who thought that was important.

Chapter 5: Life in the Big House As Oz’s first season unfolded, the cast and crew became comfortable inside this prison of their own making. Largely left to their own devices by HBO, a familial atmosphere flourished on set that was nourished and encouraged by Warden Fontana. As with all families, tensions occasionally arose, but nothing like the prison riot that closes out the first season.

Fontana: What was important for me, and what I always worked very hard to do, was take a character who was despicable and turn him into a sympathetic person. And then, just when the audience was rooting for that person, have them do something despicable again. So if you watch the series over all the seasons, you’ll see character like O’Reily who do the worst possible thing and then have this incredible moment of vulnerability. And then as a reaction to that, he does something worse! The other thing I promised to myself was that every character in Emerald City belonged there. I didn’t want to do the wrongfully convicted story. Not that that isn’t valuable; it’s just that I met so many men in prison who told me they were innocent that it felt like almost like a joke. It would also feel more mainstream to suddenly have a character in there that was innocent.

Kinney: In the first episode, Darnell saw McManus as one of those misguided, but well-intentioned educated white guys. He thinks everybody can be rehabilitated, and put back out onto the streets. But the prison system itself teaches you otherwise. Given that conundrum, this character was an anomaly in the prison. In the first episode, I was campaigning with Tom to change that. I said, “We’ve seen that guy, and he’s going to wear out. You’re going to lose interest. Let me change. Let the prison system seep into me. Let me become more and more one with it.” Slowly but surely, Tom agreed to start shaving my head a little more, to grow the beard, and to start to look a little more like a prisoner.

Hudson as Leo Glynn in ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Hudson: I thought Leo was as balanced a guy as you can get under those circumstances, but I’ve heard people say, “He was the worst. He was an awful guy.” I’m like “Really?” There was a website in the late ’90s where fans could give their comments, and I remember going online and some guy had said, “Leo seems to have a stick up his ass. That actually broke me of the habit. Even now, 20 years later, I don’t go online to find out what people think. The thing I take away from my character is — and I’m sure Tom would hate me saying it — but he was the dumbest warden! He was a well-intentioned warden, and he could be stern, but he never got to the bottom of anything. He had a murder a week and he never figured anything out. I’m like, “Can I just solve one of these frigging cases?”

De Segonzac: During the first season, there was only one accident, which I was the fault of. We were doing the riot scene in the Season 1 finale [which De Segonzac directed], and with 150 guys running around, you had to find someone each of them could do. Tergesen had the fire extinguisher and was spraying it all over the place. He was like, “Really?” and I said, “Yeah, it’ll be great, you’ll see.” There was this one young guy — who I think in real life was a violinist and he somehow got a part on the show — the guards beat him up, and they put the cuffs on him behind his back. The scene felt like it was about to lose energy, so he screams at the guards, “Get them off!” They grab him by the arms, but he’s handcuffed and that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Now the guy is squealing, and I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty f***ing good.” But it turned out that the cuffs had cut him to the bone! I was very embarrassed.

Velez: I wasn’t in the riot episode at the end of Season 1, and that’s because Tom said, “I don’t want you to be in that episode.” Because the prisoners talked about Dr. Nathan a lot, and would be like, “Oh, Nathan’s hot.” He said, “I’m afraid it would have to get graphic. They’d wind up raping Gloria, and I don’t want that.” Which I thought was very interesting. In some ways, it would have been predictable; you would expect that to happen to the character. But then she could never go back there and I think there were all those considerations as well. We’d have to lose her, because there’s no way she would come back to work in this prison. No way at all. Tom had the wherewithal to think about the totality of the show, and being able to see it going beyond what we saw.

Velez in ‘The Routine’ (Credit: HBO)

Acevedo: At the end of every season, what Tom would do is sit down with you and say, “How’d you feel about your arc? Where do you feel that you could’ve gone or that you maybe want to go next season?” I’ve worked with everybody, and no showrunner has ever done what Tom Fontana has done. The whole storyline in the third season about Miguel being too white, and not Latino enough was something I brought up with Tom, because it was a big issue for me growing up in the South Bronx. He put all of that into the show.

McAdams: I just remember not wanting Johnny Post to go out like a punk. So I loved reading my death scene, and realizing they set him to go out in all his glory, cussing and fussing and telling people to kiss his ass. The fact that they decided they were going to chop his penis off and deliver it back as their message meant that I knew I’d spend the rest of my life being laughed at. My only request was that it was delivered in a big box, not a small box.

Velez: Tom was always really great about discussing where he thought something was going to go, and it was always in a very off-handed manner. At one point, we hung out and had steak and whiskey, and he said, “I’ve got something I’m thinking about, and tell me if it’s crazy. Would this woman ever fall in love with a prisoner?” And I said, “Absolutely.” He said, “I’ve spoken to other women and they said no.” I replied, “When you fall in love with somebody, sometimes you can’t help who that is. The more complicated the better. Please make that happen!” So she fell in love with Ryan O’Reily. I’ve never had a woman tell me that they didn’t buy it or that they thought it was inappropriate.

Fontana: Initially, we had a consultant who had been in prison, but he wanted to be a writer and he just would have preferred if I had just handed him the pen and said, “You can write everything.” So that was very short lived. All I can say is I that did two years of research, and I continued to read and talk to COs and ex-cons, so I kept having conversations about what was going on in prisons. The thing about prison is that no two prisons are the same, so I had a lot of room to make up s**t. But I also took my responsibility very seriously; I didn’t want anything to be salacious or sensationalistic just purely for that. Anything that happened had to come out of character. On the other hand, you also find out stuff that really happened, like a guy who worked in the prison cafeteria hated this other guy so he fed him broken glass. My attitude was if something was real, then it was fair game. Oddly enough, as the series went, I would get yelled at for something I didn’t make up, but people assumed that I had made it up.

Albrecht: We were certainly put back on our heels a few times [by the content], and I don’t remember if we ever actually asked Tom to change something or just voiced our concerns about things. We really were charting new territory here. We had no idea what was possible to do, and the content of Oz was certainly beyond any of the content of the movies that were on HBO.

Winters as O’Reily in ‘The Routine’ (Credit: HBO)

Winters: I’ll tell you one thing: I had two friends in prison during Oz, and they were like, “You motherf***ers got that s**t right.” Prison is a microcosm of our society, and a lot of bad s**t happens in our society every day. I’ve been on panels where I’ve heard this question from some white guy whose face is melting into his khaki pants, blue blazer and red tie: “Oh, is this really [accurate]?” It’s like, go f**k yourself. Have you ever been in prison? Have you ever even visited a prison? Because I’ve visited prison, and it is not a cute place. There is some horrific s**t that happens there. I don’t think Tom went deep enough. He could have gone so much darker, because the stories that we heard while we were making this show, would never even pass the HBO censors. So, you know, suck on that.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: In terms of the sexuality and sensationalism, there were occasions where I felt it was not always necessary. But then there are occasions where it would go there because it was written from an authentic place. I think there’s a wonderful balance, and Tom was always open to that collaborative dance. We all trusted Tom. We didn’t necessarily like him, and I mean that in the best possible way. He’d done meticulous research so you knew it was not just some flippant, sensational kind of thing.

Martin: There’s a scene with Schillinger after he’s branded Beecher where he’s just talking to him. I said, “You know what I want you to do? I would like you to have your shoes off and your foot in his lap, and you’re making him give you a foot rub.” For some reason, that just seemed right. The branding had nothing to do with sex; it was about power. There’s such an intimacy to the foot rub, and J.K. just ate it up; he was tickling Lee with his toe. That scene explains to me, in a weird way, how I handled [the sexuality]. Sex, in general, is not an empty thing to me, and sex scenes are not about, “Lay on top of this person and bounce harder, and then it’s over.” It has to be about something. Beecher probably massaged his wife’s feet, you know what I mean? So that scene is about something other than power, because we just played that beat with Schillinger tattooing the swastika on his ass.

Kinney: When the romance between Beecher and Keller started [in Season 2], here were two straight guys that were being asked to engage in a graphic depiction of a gay prison couple. They were a little bit shy going into it; one of the things that happened was that everything was out in the open. Everything was shot in a wide open space, so there was no sense of, “Hey, this is a private set.” We would all stand at the monitors and watch this stuff. And they went for it. The whole dynamic in that building was “Go for it,” and that’s what those guys did. What was surprising was how it caught fire. That was one of the first things that became a really popular element of the show. There were a lot of viewing parties for those two.

Chris Meloni joined ‘Oz’ as Chris Keller in Season 2 (Credit: HBO)

Tergesen: I loved the part of the show. In my opinion, it was never about them being gay, it was just about them being in love. If you can find love in a place like that, you’re lucky. My first memory of Chris is that he came to set for a costume fitting, and he was wearing a Tool shirt. And I was like, “This guy seems like a tool.” I told him, “Listen man, let’s go have dinner.” So we went out to dinner, and I said, “You’ve seen the first season, so you know we’re trying to push the envelope. I know the tendency is for two guys who are not gay to try and skirt around it, but I have a feeling we’re going to be doing a lot of this and I think we should try and make it sexy.” Chris looked at me for 10 seconds and then said, “Wow.” But I feel like we did that; there were some amazing moments of tenderness [between them], and I love that it was just about the love. The funny thing is, just as an aside, he and I went to a Tool concert the other night!

Acevedo: We worked together twelve hours a day, and then we would go out four to five nights a week with each other. We were all in our twenties, and we saw each other at work and after work. We all hung out with each other in general, but there was a devious mentality with the inmates. Adewale would get these scenes where it would be like “Adebisi rapes this guy,” and we would be like, “What you going to do?” He would say, “I don’t know,” so we would give him [advice]. Like, “I think you should grab him by the hair or rip his pants.” That was the best part, because the material was so heavy and emotional. You can’t walk on set and be like that the whole day; you’d be so burnt out. It was easier to joke around during those moments.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: There were several times when we had extras on the set where altercations would break out. They would! They were quickly broken up, but it was just the nature of the beast. When you’re being pushed to be as defensive as you can without actually being the actual prisoner, there were times when it would spill over. I know for myself, certainly with the guards or the warden, I wouldn’t mix with them. Because they were guards, you know what I mean? Many times there were blurred lines, and in the heated scenes you’d go overboard sometimes. That’s why you got such great chemistry and great work coming out of it.

Hudson: I knew Adewale [before Oz]. We shot the movie Congo in Costa Rica together and we became, I thought, really good friends. When I first got the show and found out he was going to be on it, I was like, “Great!” Then he became Adebisi and suddenly I go, “Who the hell is this guy?” He maintained that character for years. Towards the end, in the last couple of seasons, we went, “Okay, we can let our characters go. We do know each other.” There was about four years there where I don’t think I could even speak to him.

Velez: I remember the first time I met Adewale on set, he literally almost skipped towards me! He took my hand, and with the most incredible smile said, “I’ve been wanting to meet you.” I was like, “What?” We just walked hand-in-hand across the stage just gushing about each other, and this is this guy who plays Adebisi! Take your pick between him and Schillinger about which is more reprehensible. I had the same experience with J.K. when he was in the infirmary. At one point, he was sitting there and he had the most beautiful, glowing smile. It was interesting. Sometimes in the beginning I couldn’t put two and two together between the actors and the characters.

Kinney: I went out with Adewale all the time. People would recognize him immediately because of that little hat and everything else. He’s a beautiful man. We’d go to bars, and he was quite popular. I hung out with everybody, especially Tom and his posse — Lee and the Winters brothers.

Adebisi abiding in his cell in ‘The Routine’ (Credit: HBO)

Winters: At the end of the day, we were all just a bunch of kids, even the guards. Most of us were new to this. You would want to think that there was animosity on the set between the guards and the prisoners, and there might of been a little tension off set here and there. But the truth of the matter was that we were just a bunch of golden retriever puppies in a storm box going bananas. In between scenes and during down time, there were guys break dancing, having a push-up contests, working on their one-man shows and reading poetry. It was really like the Royal Fontana Company, a kind of theatrical experience during the day. Tom and his crazy roving company of just insane bandits, just going, “What the f**k just happened?”

Chapter 6: What Oz Hath Wrought By the time Oz ended its six season run in 2003, HBO’s ranks of original programs had swelled to include such era-defining shows as, The Sopranos, The Wire, and Sex and the City. The larger cable landscape had changed as well: Showtime had ramped up its originals slate with Soul Food and Queer as Folk, and in 2002, FX premiered The Shield. In several cases, these descendants overshadowed their ancestor in terms of ratings and awards. Still, 20 years later Oz remains a singular TV series, and a foundational experience for everyone involved in its making.

Fontana: HBO didn’t bother us with ratings. If they did marketing or demographic research, they didn’t share it with me. The thing that Chris said to me was, “I don’t care if this show is talked about in the TV section of the newspaper. I want it on the op-ed page.” So anytime somebody on an op-ed page made a reference to the show, he considered that a 40 share of a Nielsen rating. He wanted HBO and the show in places where people who don’t watch television are looking. I had no idea what the ratings were; all I knew is that he said, “Let’s make more of them,” and I said “Yippee.”

Albrecht: I got a lot of comments [about Oz] from people who were my peers in the entertainment business, so I knew that people were paying attention to it. I think that was the first step towards having it be an impact. I don’t know how many subscribers we had at that time — 15 or 17 million maybe — but the fact that we were getting that kind that kind of attention for something that we had done for our programming strategies [told us] we were in uncharted territory. There was a bridge here we could continue to widen and build as long as we were prepared to make the investment.

Winters: Back in 1997, who had HBO? I didn’t. Did you? And given the content of the show, we were going to work thinking, “Are these people f***ing crazy? No one’s going to watch this.”

Tergesen: Right before it started to air, a bunch of us had this thought, like, “Oh my God, what the f**k are people gonna say when they see this thing?” And there were definitely some people like that. One of my favorite reviews was a review that said, “This show offends God and it offends me.” But then it came on, and it was such a great show. And it was a great show to be in New York doing, because people were so verbal. When the show was on, there was always a bunch of stuff happening with people on the street. People who had been to jail would be like, “Yo man, I love that show you’re doing, but I just gotta tell you — the sex stuff, it’s not like that.” Like really bro? You need to tell me this on the street? I wasn’t thinking about whether or not you had sex in prison until you just brought it up now.

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Hudson: I got a call on to be on some talk show on MSNBC; the Monica Lewinsky thing was going on, and the wanted me to come on a panel to discuss Bill Clinton. I didn’t know why they asked me, but I go on the show and I say, “Well, you know, we all make mistakes.” The commentator said, “That is not what you said on the show.” Then it occurred to me that they actually thought I was a warden! They were dealing with it like I was this authority having worked in prison. I don’t know who did their homework, but I’m like, “I’m an actor. What I say on the show comes from Tom Fontana and the writers. It’s nothing to do with me.”

Velez: There was some strange fan mail about outfits they wanted Gloria to wear. I was like, “Wow, this is just a little bit too much.”

Acevedo: All of us would get mail from prisoners. I would get mail constantly. “You remind me of me. You remind me of my brother.” Or, “Hey, can I get a job? Because I was really in prison and I know what’s up.” Stuff like that. The one complaint that people did say was, “Goddamn, everybody’s so handsome in prison!” All of us were too good-looking to be in prison. We’re actors, though. I think probably none of us would survive in prison.

Fontana: I took the responsibility of doing the first drama series for HBO very seriously. Because when you’re given unlimited freedom in terms of language, sexuality, and visual storytelling, it’s very easy to go, “I’m free at last! I can do anything I want!” It was a real lesson for me to try to truly use the violence and the sex when I felt it was necessary for character stuff, and not just to put it in because I could. Not knowing who the next people at HBO doing drama series would be, I felt a responsibility to them. If I f***ed up, Chris would say to them, “I trusted Fontana and he f***ed it up, so I’m not trusting anyone after that.” Fortunately, I didn’t f**k it up too much, and David Chase was the next guy in the door.

Albrecht: First and foremost, OZ was an “Open for Business” sign for HBO. But it wasn’t like all of a sudden the floodgates opened; it was still a growing process. Even The Sopranos was brought to us through Brillstein-Grey, because Brad Grey had been a dear friend of HBO for a long time. The idea that he was going to pitch a show to us was not unusual, but what was unusual was that it was an hour-long drama instead of Fraggle Rock or a comedy special.

Winters: When HBO got wind that hour-long programming could work, they greenlit The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and then Oz kind of got lost in the conversation a little bit. I’ve always looked at that as a little unfair to Tom, because Tom really needs to be credited as the guy who literally broke down the walls of late night [original] programming for cable television. It’s not sour grapes at all, because those shows were amazing. All I’m saying is that Oz was the guinea pig, and guinea pigs usually get left out of the equation. But you’d have to be really academically bankrupt or just stupid to watch OZ and not see the bigger picture. In mean, in 1997, one of our lead characters was a Muslim. People are talking about Muslims on TV now, and we did it 20 years ago. Tom was so ahead of the game that it frightened people, and they’re just figuring it out now.

Kareem Said talking to his Muslim brothers. (Credit: HBO)

Kinney: All of us were resentful; that’s just the truth. The Sopranos came on, and we loved that show. I still do, obviously. We just really felt like the bastard cousin. We kept wanting recognition; we kept wanting marketing and publicity to put us out there more. We kept wanting to be put into at least the mainstream of cable, since we were the first cable drama ever. We were all working under the radar, and we were all wanting the radar to find us a little bit.

McAdams: Twenty years is a long time with multiple generation gaps, so there are a lot of people who just don’t really know the value of what this show meant to cable television. They don’t know how it set the foundation for all these other shows that came on HBO that everybody loved. Not just The Sopranos; I’m talking about shows like The Corner and The Wire. I was blessed to work on The Wire for a number of seasons, and people get more excited about me mentioning that then they do when I mention Oz. That’s because they don’t remember Oz

Albrecht: I think maybe from the subject matter point of view, Oz was a tougher show to watch than a lot of the others, even though the others were groundbreaking in their own way. Oz was more violent, and that’s saying a lot compared to The Sopranos. Even in The Sopranos, you didn’t see people get killed a lot; they god killed off-camera. In OZ, the violence and stuff like that happened right in front of your face. The other shows were maybe easier on the stomach for people.

Tergesen: You now, whether Oz gets included in a list [of influential shows] or not, it doesn’t matter. I know what it was, and to this day, I find people are always stopping me and talking about it. So was The Sopranos a major hit? Yes. But it was part of a process. There wouldn’t have been a Sopranos if there wasn’t an Oz.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: I think the very reason that we’re talking about it today shows that it’s not overshadowed. We were first, and Oz was probably an uncompromising show that was always going to be a hard pill to swallow. But what it has become as a result is a cult phenomenon. The Sopranos was slightly more commercial, and a little bit more palatable but Oz was uncompromising.

Martin: I think Oz was so far ahead its time, because it didn’t have a Tony Soprano. That was deliberate on Tom’s part, because he really wanted an ensemble piece and he loved this idea of the guy you love might die. In a weird way, Oz shot itself in the foot, because there’s nobody for you to hold onto. Tom would kill them off so quickly. You watch for the performances, but not for any one performance. That couldn’t work for a very long time, and now where do we see it working? Game of Thrones also has no Tony Soprano. Oz is the one that started that. It’s a very forward way of thinking, and now everyone’s thinking that way.

Fontana: Even though they were both about criminals, The Sopranos was so different from Oz that it wasn’t like it a copy of something we did. It existed in its own universe. I’m glad Oz worked for HBO, and gave them the courage to keep pushing the boundaries that it did with The Sopranos and Six Feet Under and all the shows that have come since.

Albrecht: I learned a tremendous amount by doing Oz Tom was a consummate showrunner and supportive friend. There’s a real bond that’s made when you go through something like that. I’m incredibly proud of the show, and I always talk about it like Tom and Barry were a little like Lewis and Clark, looking down at the Pacific going “Holy crap, we made it.”

De Segonzac: What I like about the show is that it’s completely timeless. Re-watching the first episode, it could be happening today. It’s also just a great memory of what filmmaking can be about, and the kind of feeling that happens if the people involved are given free rein.

Tergesen: Oz changed me in a lot of ways, and most of the time work doesn’t, you know? I learned a lot about myself as an actor, and I have a career that’s largely based on the fact that I did this show 20 years ago. I’m so happy that I got that chance, and the relationships that I still have to this day. When J.K. won the Oscar for Whiplash, I texted him, “Wow, I just realized I licked the boots of an Oscar winner.” And his return text was, “If memory serves you also shit in the face of an Oscar winner.”

Future Oscar winner J.K Simmons as Vern Schillinger on ‘Oz.’ (Credit: HBO)

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: No matter where I go in the world, people will always call me Adebisi, and that’s cool with me because it’s been the foundation of my success. Whatever role I play is a result of writers, directors and producers watching Oz. And I think it made people aware of what goes on behind those bars. I was invited to Rikers to speak to some of the younger offenders in there, because the prisoners were some of the most popular viewers of the show, and felt that it was an authentic voice as far as it could be.

Seda: Every now and then, someone will be like, “Hey! I love Dino, man. It was the best character. Why’d they kill you?” I’m like, “Aw, thanks.” It’s great to be a part of something that when you pour so much into and you get so much passion in your heart. It was just a great project to be a part of.

Acevedo: This is gonna sound so mushy, but Oz was the truest sense of an artistic family that I could ever, ever have. I was in New York two months ago, and I had drinks at Tom’s house. I still talk to most of the guys. So there’s that sense of family, and other actors looking out for you. This whole business is really not forgiving, so for that to be one of my first jobs spoiled me. When I go on any other show, and I see a guest star come on the set, I think about how nervous I was [on Oz]. So I try to be as welcoming as possible. I go, “If you want to ad lib, throw it at me.” I make them feel that it’s okay to f**k up.

Velez: This truly was a family. You hear people say that, but I just remember hanging out watching people’s scenes, and I remember the level of commitment to the work and to the collaborative spirit. You don’t get that often in your career. It made me a better actor and gave me something that I’m proud of to be a part of. And I met some great people that I love.

McAdams: Oz set the foundation for what my career is today, working as a professional stuntman. That only happened because of the exposure I had to the stuntpeople that I met on Oz. It changed my family’s life, too, because when I left New York and went back to Maryland, the dream was real at that point. Oz showed me what was possible in life, and the belief system and faith that I gathered built my confidence for everything else I’ve been able to accomplish.

Hudson: For me, Oz brought a certain integrity and honesty that touches you on a deeper level. It was the most amazing cast I think I’ve ever worked with.

Winters: I’ve been on a lot of great shows, but Oz is the biggest, baddest motherf***er I could ever have been a part of. That was a period of time that will never be repeated, and for that I’m eternally grateful. Plus it was where I got my chops: I learned how to fail, and I learned how to succeed. Nothing will ever come close to it, ever.

Kinney: I have two personal legacies that really shaped my entire being as an artist. One is my theater company, Steppenwolf, which shaped the way I see the world through art. The second thing is Oz. Tom gave me the language for filmmaking and that side of things, and the idea of having one person be the captain of the shop. Tom was the great decider for all of us, and that really shaped so much of how I treated everything after that as an artist. I don’t do anything unless I think it has that kind of vision now. Because of Tom, my standards were raised, and I think all of ours were.

Fontana: As a writer, Oz liberated me in a way that I didn’t know that I needed to be liberated, in terms of how to tell stories and how to develop characters. On a personal level, being friends with the cast has enhanced my life. I get asked every couple of weeks when I’m bringing the show back. But the sets are gone and the actors are all too expensive, so there’s no chance of it. I couldn’t afford Dean Winters or J.K. Simmons anymore! So I can’t say that I sat up night cursing the darkness that we didn’t get the recognition [at the time]. What’s funny is that it’s taken 20 years, but now everybody’s saying that. You know what I mean? I lived long enough to hear it.

Oz can be streamed on Amazon Prime and HBO Go.

Read More From Yahoo TV: ‘Twin Peaks’ First Look: Bring Home the Log Lady From Comic-Con ‘Game of Thrones’: Ranking the Couples From Ewwww to #Goals Review: Joe and Mika’s Smug Appearance on ‘Colbert’

#_revsp:wp.yahoo.tv.us #hbo #_author:Ethan Alter #peak tv #oz #_uuid:4cfd0e6f-728f-3b93-aeb8-b9063963e54a #_lmsid:a0Vd000000AE7lXEAT

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mrfancyfoot · 8 years

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Some Assembly Required: It Didn’t Come With Instructions So I Googled and Found the Swedish Version, pt.1

Since I’ve been asked to clarify/explain/spoil “the spirit” companion of Bevin more than a couple times now, I figured that I would make a one stop post for this and other stuff since bits are kind of scattered throughout several chapters now and I can’t blame anyone for needing a refresher. I’ll make two sections: one for where we currently are in SAR and one for where I’ve currently developed (i.e. spoilers and in-depth explanations). To explain the spirit will also need me to explain some of Bevin’s powers and a little more background, so that will also be included in both sections, though primarily the latter. Also added are other fun bits. Spoilers are included, as I’ve mentioned, but they will be in the bottom section for if you don’t want to read them.

I’ll try to update this as the story progresses, but if I fall behind, just let me know.

The Spirit so far:

Bevin officially meets the spirit in Chapter 12. She starts off as the soothing presence that Bevin feels after having one of her “nightmare visions” of the torture she went through in the Red Future.

After her talk with Dorian, who is fleetingly concerned about potential spiritual possession after witnessing it in the Red Future, the spirit makes herself known so that Bevin can throw Dorian off of this line of inquiry. A “that must have only happened in the alternate timeline” kind of excuse.

The spirit explains that she is the one responsible for protecting Bevin from the eruption at the Conclave. She saw Bevin pulled through and decided that an outsider was what Thedas really needed. Specifically, she says: “I was but an ever-weakening spirit, watching our worlds for over two thousand years from inside the Fade. I saw you pulled through that very first rift between the worlds. I believed that an outsider was the exact thing this tumultuous land needed, and used what power I had to protect you.”

So, two thousand year-old (at least!) spirit who was able to watch both worlds from some corner of the Fade.

She goes on to mention that she knows nothing of how Nikki came to be involved or anything about the Conclave.

During talks, the spirit frequently uses terms that Bevin knows to be elven.

She specifically calls her “‘Ma da’isenatha” which translates to “my little dragon.”

The spirit refers to Solas as Bevin’s “hahren” or “mentor” frequently.

Bevin’s Powers:

From the very first chapter, we learn that Bevin has weird powers and brand new facial markings.

Powers = foresight

Markings = blood red sideways tear drop shape angled across either cheek near the outer corners of her eyes that she describes as being about as big as her thumb(nail).

In Chapter Three, Solas deduces that Bevin is passively syphoning in mana from the environment somehow. Her storage limitations and general output are still very low, so any sudden increase in intake (such as magic applied directly to her) creates a surge that bounces right back out (which makes her face itch and sneeze).

To a much slighter degree, all Mages recover mana from the Veil this way, and some can learn in intake excess mana from around them as a very temporary, active skill. Solas and Dorian discuss this briefly during their general party banter in the game.

Dorian shares (also in Chapter 12) that the markings on her face are from syphoning magic. It’s an old Art, the effects of which were known to “make one’s palms itchy.” He has never heard of anyone being able to sustain the magic passively before.

“Passively” here meaning “without trying.” The magic automatically draws in mana from the environment around Bevin.

Bevin eventually deduces that she is also taking in what she calls life energy. This is something that everything living has (people, animals, plants, etc).

She thinks this is driving her innate healing ability and has fears that it might leave her with a form of at least temporary immortality based on her knowledge of fictional lore and mythus.

Bevin’s (Awful) Background:

Chapters Four and Five are where most specifics of Bevin’s past begin appearing.

In ch.01, Bevin mentions that she’s from Michigan.

In ch.04, Bevin visits the Fade for the first time.

She starts off in a memory of her childhood that she recognizes as the precursor to a particularly bad event. When Solas joins her dream, she immediately asks how to stop it and he dispels it, drawing her deeper into the Fade.

Soon, they are attacked by Fearlings that have taken on the forms of various church elders and her father. Her magic, fueled by her anger is able to get rid of them but draws the attention of a Rage demon. Solas kills the demon for her, stating that she is not quite to the strength to be able to take on and defeat such a demon.

In ch.05, Bevin and Nikki are prompted into sharing details of their lives prior to being dropped in Thedas.

Bevin tells the group that she had just finished her university studies for Linguistics and Criminology and was working as an intern for the local Coroner (also known as the Office of Medial Examiner). Fairly certain somewhere she mentions that she’s going on to graduate studies.

Following more prodding, Bevin shares that she grew up in a religious cult.

Said cult was made up of fanatics, many of whom were eventually found guilty of murder, namely her parents, due to her efforts.

She grew up homeschooled, so would attempt to sneak out to the forest around her house any chance she got when her dad was gone.

Remained homeschooled up until highschool (when it becomes state mandated that children join a public/private school at least part time - no idea if this actually applies to her state, but it did apply to mine :P).

Here she gains access to the internet and eventually talks to someone who wants to get her out of her situation. Through the help of “kind internet strangers” she is eventually able to escape her family by the opening of a successful murder investigation against them/the cult.

As is made clear from ch.04, memories of her father in particular still haunt her.

General (not entirely so awful) details:

Has a number of “adventurous” piercings and hints of a tattoo on her back

Underwent surgery to remove her uterus following health complications.

To be continued via edits as the story progresses. :]

The Spirit (and everything else) as a whole:

Spoilers galore from here on out for almost everything in SAR (for the past and future). This part will touch on the spirit, Bevin’s powers, Bevin’s background, Solas’ thoughts/actions/inactions, background plotlines, future plotlines, and my own personal headcanon/lore-bending. Basically, I explain all the nuances and shit here. It’s very hodge-podge and I try to keep relevant stuff together if not in chronological order. If I’ve missed anything or you want more for some part, let me know.

Open secret that the spirit possessing Bevin is actually Mythal.

The first time the spirit makes her debut is actually in Chapter 10 during Nikki’s venture into the Red Future. The is the entity that takes over when Bevin is too frail to help with the fight (to note, Mythal is still very weak here).

In this alternate future, Solas is captured along with Leliana when they mount a rescue attempt that ultimately fails. Solas originally leaves the Inquisition following the Herald going missing/presumed dead, but becomes overcome with guilt and agrees to join with the Nightingale once seeing that his plans have little to stand on with the Elder One gaining so much power in the first place. They see getting the others back as an all or nothing effort.

Well, they’re captured. Solas spends the days/nights listening to them torture Bevin and Leliana while he’s very slowly dying of lyrium poisoning. He attempts to entertain and soothe Bevin with stories of the Fade and his past. He doesn’t really bother hiding anything at this point. Future-Leliana is far more concerned about getting Nikki back to the past to defeat the Elder One than she is with sharing Solas’ identity.

Later in present day, when Bevin is getting flashbacks of these days, she hears bits of these stories, but doesn’t have much context for them. She sees them as the bits of sunshine that peak through her nightmares. She’ll start to wonder about certain details later as some will conflict with what she otherwise knows.

When Bevin officially meets her present day, Mythal explains why she saved her. But she’s leaving out a lot of details and not at all telling the whole truth. Let’s break down her lieslines:

“I am the reason that you survived that eruption those months ago.”

Yes, well, she’s also the reason that Bevin was pulled through in the first place. Bevin’s entire involvement is due to Mythal.

“I was but an ever-weakening spirit, watching our worlds for over two thousand years from inside the Fade. I saw you pulled through that very first rift between the worlds. I believed that an outsider was the exact thing this tumultuous land needed, and used what power I had to protect you.”

She’s conveniently skipping over the part where she used Flemeth as a host for a long time. Mythal/Flemeth have been aware of the other universe for a long time. A habit of theirs has been watching select occupants as they live their lives unknowing. Mythal takes a shine to Bevin and her plentiful childhood struggles growing up in a crazy cult of psychopathic murderers. She reminds her of a much younger Fen’Harel. Upon seeing the fleeting opportunity, she decides that Bevin would make a perfect companion for her old friend given her unique insights and experiences.

Bevin is brought through the Breach and confronted by Flemeth, in an exchange that she has been made to fully forget for her own good. Mythal is transferred to Bevin who becomes the new host. In exchange, Mythal states the she will help Flemeth with her desires in the future (namely the events following the Well of Sorrows saga with Morrigan). Mythal ultimately sees this as getting what she wants. Solas succeeding with his plans and being happy is vengeance against the other gods for killing her. Bunch of long con-ers.

She’s not above poking and prodding, but, for the most part, she stays out of Bevin’s relationship with Solas simply so she can prove a point later when Bevin inevitably figures everything out. She made the opportunity but never forced or groomed her into anything.

When asked if she knows anything about Nikki’s involvement: “I am afraid not. Her circumstances are a mystery to me, just as those surrounding the events that took place here.”

This is actually true. She has no fucking idea about Nikki or the Conclave. She merely saw an opportunity and took it.

During talks, Mythal frequently uses terms that Bevin knows to be elven.

She specifically calls her “‘Ma da’isenatha” which translates to “my little dragon.”

Bevin garners the nickname from Mythal’s affinity for dragons and because of the large, ornate dragonfly tattoo across her back.

The spirit refers to Solas as Bevin’s “hahren” or “mentor” frequently.

There’s some lore bit somewhere that I read - absolutely no idea if it’s actually canon or not anymore since I have a horrible habit of not taking note of precisely where I read things (definitely my headcanon, hehe) - that mentioned that student/mentor romantic relationships were almost expected in some elvhen clans/alienages.

Within SAR, I’ve made reference to this through Solas. He uses his mentorship of her to keep her close and help enforce a sort of private authority over her even while she gains influence within the Inquisition and Thedas. He does, ultimately, want to include her in his plans, and that means ensuring that she listens to him above anyone else. He gets a bit underhanded.

Leliana’s doing something similar with taking Bevin under her wing (minus the romantic angle). Solas recognizes this and it creates a sort of rivalry between the two that escalates over time.

Bevin’s Powers:

Okay, you read all the general stuff on her powers above, so this is the nitty-gritty of it.

Solas really doesn’t have a clue about this particular magic beyond how he has used a form of it to intake excess mana from around him in a kind of “one fell swoop” gathering of it. He can sustain himself via the Fade for prolonged amounts of time, but this isn’t quite the same thing.

So he keeps an ear out for any new information regarding it, both in the Fade and out. It irks him to no end that Dorian has more knowledge of this area than he does while still not knowing enough about it.

Bevin’s syphoning magic is knowledge passed from Flemeth and Mythal.

She’s essentially been “branded” with it by them.

It’s involved in most of Bevin’s “peculiar” gifts.

Her vast, perpetual stores of mana from syphoning is part of what is powering her Foresight abilities.

The other part is spiritual energy, as is conveniently provided by Mythal.

This is why Mythal becomes dormant to recover after visions, especially more “involved” ones or after times where there are multiples.

As Bevin’s mana stores are depleted, Mythal grows weaker. As they become larger/stronger, Mythal grows stronger.

Foresight wasn’t actually a purposeful endowment by Mythal or Flemeth but an odd happenstance that came about from combining the powerful magics just right within one particular person (Bevin). To a much lessor extent, spiritual/Fade magic is used in minor divining and fortunes.

Cole, as a spirit, is also able to influence her visions. When he happens upon one, he can help make her “lucid” during them so that she has free range to move.

The life energy that she’s intaking is what is driving her healing ability.

To a more extreme end it is also part of what is changing her into an immortal being.

The other part being her gradual merger with Mythal/spiritual energy.

Her healing still has its limits: she cannot regenerate lost limbs or organs.

Cutting off her head would still probably kill her if it’s not reattached quickly. Smashing her head in would definitely still kill her. If a blade were to be shoved into her heart and twisted a few times, there’s a chance that she’d recover from it as that would still leave it mostly intact. Just removing her heart from her chest would kill her, though.

Her healing will revert her back to the body that she gained the ability with. So her prior scars will remain. She’s not getting her uterus back spontaneously.

So, Bevin is well on her way towards immortality.

A kind of “gift” from Flemeth/Mythal.

Flemeth has used spirit energy to remain effectively immortal for many, many years. Mythal helps deliver the spirit of the old god Urthemiel to her to fulfill their exchange so that Flemeth retains her immortality as well.

Yes, this is my hack for fixing this issue with her being human with Solas. >.>

After she fully merges with Mythal, she’d still be human, but she’d have an Elvhen mana system...thing.

Bevin’s other powers:

She’s primarily Storm natured, with a secondary nature for Fire (thanks to Mythal)

She can’t use Ice magic for shit (not the whole of the Winter School, but this is where most of her struggles lie).

Water’s not fun, either, but not seemingly impossible for her.

She eventually will learn that she can manipulate plants/nature magic.

And thus thinks that the entirety of Circle magic teachings are a load of bullshit.

She’s, like, half right.

Lotta bullshit, but she’s practically using Elvhen magic herself since she hosts Mythal, so she’s also not entirely right.

I am, of course, referring to the bit of game lore that says only Elves can use Nature magic/certain other aspects of Creation magic.

Mythal teaches her to shapeshift.

Beginning with forcing her into the body of a fennec and making her figure out how to turn back.

This first comes up in the Schematics side bit, “A Foxy Look for You.”

Bevin really likes her Barriers.

A lot.

Defensive magic is her A-game.

As a recap:

Mana

Life energy (I’m toying with just calling this “chi”)

Spirit energy

How Other Lore Ties In:

My pet theory for SAR.

Certain people from our world, typically of more creative minds, have been able to see dreams and memories from the Fade while asleep/dreaming.

Popular works of fiction have elements based on things that actually happened in the DA world.

Religions here have influences from events and religions there.

So when Bevin’s noticing an awful lot of similarities in the cultures and histories of the two worlds, it’s not just a coincidence.

Spells and magic theories that she’s read/heard/watched frequently have real world counterparts in the DA world.

And this is why some of her seemingly bizarre magic works.

Bevin’s Really Awful Background

Bevin’s background is based on bits of actual events/cases that I’ve read about/studied and my own experiences with growing up in a highly religious area and finally being able to “escape” it. This will move fairly chronologically through her life.

In ch.01 she mentions that she’s from Michigan, but she means this as in “I was living in Michigan at the time.”

She actually grew up in Louisiana, born Bébhionne Chael Ní Hallmhuráin (which is read “Bevin, daughter of Chael, (female) descendant of Hallmhuráin” in traditional Irish).

Daddy wanted a boy and took out his resentment on Bevin after they were unable to have any more children.

As a clan/cult elder, he dictated her life. She’s forced to participate in his extreme tutelage to follow their religion (which she describes as “quote-unquote Catholic.” Anything viewed as a mistake or slight to his demanded perfectionism of her resulted in mental/physical torture.

Her mother basically enabled him through her passivity, as is what is expected of women in the cult. She did nothing to physically abuse or detain Bevin (beyond neglect), but would inform on her to her husband. So there was some mental abuse, there.

Bevin has a couple friends from the cult that she would sneak off to play with (not all families were as strict as hers).

The first time her father catches her, he shaves her head to humiliate her.

Bevin tells herself from then on that she doesn’t care about her hair, but she still can’t stand to have it short. Once in Thedas, she really only wants it shorter to make it easier to manage.

Past that, though, it was more beatings/locking her in the closet/etc.

Also results in Bevin’s fear of small, dark places/claustrophobia.

Becomes best friends with a female cousin named Delanay, who has epilepsy.

Her clan had essentially overrun a small, isolated bayou town, which lead to her physical struggle to leave it.

Bevin tried numerous times to run away from home, each time spending a number of weeks/months surviving off the land as she tried to work her way further from the town. The first time she ran away to seek local authorities was when she learned that they would only delivery her right back home.

The last try, she’s hunted down by dogs until they’re attacked/scared off by the local, highly territorial pack of red wolves. She proved herself to the pack, gaining a new set of scars across her ribs, but voluntarily goes back home after one is found shot dead and threats are made on the rest of the pack.

She’s given up on life a lot by the time she’s in highschool.

She’s the small, quiet, awkward homeschooled kid that no-one really pays any attention to. This was her first exposure to computers and the internet. She uses the time waiting for her bus departure to explore online and eventually finds people that she talks to.

Someone points her in the direction of a group that helps minors leave abusive households.

She initially reached out to the group and even agrees to meet with an investigative lawyer named Jeremy after months of talking, but got cold feet, stood him up, and quit all contact.

When she was fifteen, she witnessed Delanay die of a seizure during an exorcism ritual performed by her father and other elders/clan members.

Following this, she’s plagued by guilt and reaches out to Jeremy again thinking that if she had followed through in the first place, this could have been avoided.

Through her talks with Jeremy, she learned that there was a case being built against the cult following several suspicious deaths and missing persons. She knew of evidence to support this and agreed to help him out, even though she has the physical evidence (in the form of scars) that could more easily get her removed from the family.

She then learned that her family was planning on marrying her off to a much older man. With this new development, she worried that she would no longer have access to where she knows that evidence is hidden since upon that marriage, she would be moved out of the home.

Bevin sneaks off to the forest in search of a certain plant warned to be avoided for its high degree of toxicity. She doesn’t want to kill the man outright, but knowing of her family’s superstitious nature, she takes advantage of the extreme hallucinogenic nature of datura (also known regionally as ‘devil’s snare’ or ‘moon flowers’).

The man was brought over to see her and she managed to poison him via his frequent drinks of alcohol.

His following extreme behavior that lasted for several days was enough to put off her parents before he managed to drown himself.

Bevin later greatly distrusts alcohol (and other “mind altering substances”) and the general culture of drinking due to this incident. She doesn’t like how easy it is to take advantage of someone under the influence, so will not partake herself.

Bevin used this time while they were distracted to gather the evidence needed and take it to Jeremy. After a time of further investigation, they had all that was needed to turn it over to the proper federal authorities, who ran with the case.

Aside from murder, most of the cult/clan was involved with money laundering among other crimes. The cult was disbanded.

Once free of her clan, Bevin changed her name by anglicizing it and taking on the name of her best friend (Delanay) in order to cut ties with and formally disown the clan name.

She was transferred to a group home in Michigan before being adopted by the man she had come to see as a father figure over the past year. She stayed with him for a quick two years until she was accepted to a university on scholarship and funds brought in from interviews and donations.

With life finally settling down following the initial trial verdicts, Jeremy took on another case through a boy trapped within another cult. This one gets a target painted on him and eventually killed for his efforts.

Bevin very much retreats into herself following his death, and throws herself into her coursework.

Running into a friend named Greyson from the group home finally brought her back out of her shell and she started actual therapy. She began volunteering in projects, including the study and tagging of wolves. This took her back to her roots where a group was looking to relocate her pack of red wolves to a protected reservation.

Throughout these years in uni is when she amasses her collection of piercings and select friends “civilize” her to the modern world.

A friend recommends a tattoo artist who ends up doing her dragonfly back piece.

Which Bevin gets to cover up the physical scars of her childhood.

Also saw a doctor about frequent abdominal pains that often completely incapacitated her. One thing lead to another, and she ended up with a hysterectomy to remove her uterus.

She had already intended for her family line to die with her, and was more than okay with this outcome.

In my headcanon, Solas is perfectly fine with this. He’s not looking to personally revive his people through the fruit of his loins.

I will never write about babies.

Puppies. Everyone gets puppies.

This mostly takes us to the present day.

Other details:

English is not a native language for Bevin (despite growing up in the US, her family spoke Irish almost exclusively), and she forgets words all the time. Sometimes the entire language. She had to learn it for high school and pushed herself really hard in order to make the most of her little online time and to not flunk out of school and be more permanently stuck with her family.

She grew up speaking Irish and Latin at a native level thanks to her clan roots and religious influence.

To a slightly lessor extent, she speaks fluent Bayou French (which is kind of more of a creole language).

She purposefully lost her Irish accent and adopts the General Midwest Dialect.

She occasionally lapses.

Solas and Leliana

As pointed out a bit above, there’s a growing rivalry between the two.

They both take on different mentoring roles for Bevin quite early. While Nichole learns more about the troops and warrior-ing, Leliana takes Bevin under her wing and teaches her more about the scouts/spy network.

Starts off as minor things at first: basic cyphers for messages, handling the ravens, general workings of the network and The Game.

Leliana increasingly sees Bevin almost as a younger version of herself.

Leliana doesn’t fully trust Solas from the beginning but not for the typical reasoning of him being an apostate.

She’s very aware that he doesn’t have a known background, and she’s worked to verify the little he has shared.

When she’s unable to, she becomes suspicious of him.

And worried about Bevin since the others rather lobbed her under his care exclusively.

Her agents’ inability to track him for very long also rings alarm bells.

So she knows that he’s likely more knowledgeable/ skilled than he lets on.

He is constantly under surveillance.

She sends Scout Kalen Highridge, who’s been in charge of watching out for Bevin, along with them when they head out after the lead on the Grey Warden.

He’s been kinda flirty with her before, and takes advantage of her reciprocation (she sees him as fling material) to try and wheedle his way into answers about Solas.

Her being not forthcoming at all really irks him as he’s begun catching actual feelings from their growing “relationship” and internalizes this as a kind of betrayal.

He “doesn’t see what she sees in him.”

He ends up botching his mission by pissing off both Bevin and Solas in such a way that makes it obvious what he’d been trying to do.

Solas specifically warns him away from Bevin for his duplicitous intentions.

Bevin has every intention of confronting Leliana, who she knows put Kalen up to it, but isn’t able to get the woman alone prior to the attack on Haven.

Had the attack on Haven not occurred, Leliana would have lobbied for the removal of Bevin from their shared hut.

Given that, she’s quite pleased that Bevin is given her own quarters at Skyhold.

Not so pleased that Bevin continues to spend quite a bit of time with the elf.

Bevin’s increasing duties take away most of her free time, so Solas begins seeking her out instead.

Leliana is the source of a lot of this work, and she takes the time to pull Bevin aside to have a “heart to heart” about their resident apostate.

Pretty much warns her but also says that she won’t come between them (just make it really difficult).

Also around the time that Bevin realises she has feelings for him, but this reaffirms to her that Solas may have ulterior motives or a sketchy past.

Game Solas vs Concept Art Solas

This is something I’ve been toying with for awhile that I finally decided to make into SAR canon.

They’re the same person. Solas uses a complex glamour spell, rooted to the halla jawbone he keeps on him. Removal of the jawbone wouldn’t result in an immediate change, but a gradual one as the weaving of spells wore off, so temporarily removing it would not be cause for alarm.

He created himself as-is out of the mildest parts of himself. He purposefully tries to make himself look bland to blend in with the first elven populations he comes into contact with upon waking up from uthenera. Older looking, no hair, lighter skinned, slightly softened bone structure.

Keeping it tied to the bone makes it so that he expends the least amount of mana/energy on it and so that it’s harder to detect.

Bevin can tell there’s magic attached to it, but doesn’t really question it, yet.

Bevin (and we) first sees a glimpse of him in Ch.21 when she finds herself in one of Mythal’s memories. He looks different enough that she isn’t struck by any kind of familiarity (and such a thing would not occur to her at this time, anyway).

The Minor Bits and Details:

““Never thought I would meet another sky watcher in these parts,” he heard the Avvar Mage mumble as he stepped to follow after Bevin. Turning, the Mage faced away to the flames, head once more upturned to the sky.”

Found in Chapter 23. Totally headcanon, but Amund is also able to see mana and life energy the way Bevin can. He recognizes the way she “watches the sky” as he does, leading to an offhand comment that Solas picks up, but has no context for, so pays it no mind.

To be continued via edits as the story progresses. :]

#Some Assembly Required #MrFancyfoot #The Details #SAR #dragon age fanfiction

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