#even if it means implying that sexist people are right when they pretend that basic ass feminist talking points

[r-osehips]

I just finished a book about femicide in Mexico and it really crystallized something for me, which is: a society that blames the victims is a society that deputizes the perpetrator.

People say “she was asking for it [femicide] because of how she acted” — but what they mean is, “women are not allowed to be free in that way, and if you dare to be free the punishment is death.”

People say “well you can’t really blame him, boys will be boys,” but what they mean is, “we willingly deputized this man to carry out the death sentence that we decreed.”

Of course this applies to assault and rape and abuse too. We live in a patriarchal society, so men who kill and terrorize women are acting as approved agents of this society. Patriarchy does not just handwave these actions; it demands them, because free women are threats to patriarchy’s existence.

Which is obvious, and I knew all of this, but I hadn’t thought of it in such clear terms until now.

As a feminist in the U.S. I have overwhelmingly heard, and used, the mainstream feminist framing that we must decry victim blaming. Which is true! But imo we need to also talk about the deputization of the perpetrator too, or else we’re missing half the point.

(the book is Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza, and if ppl have recs for more reading about the Mexican feminist movement I’m all ears.)

[nervoustragedyluminary]

Absolutely this too thanks for adding, they also erase enbyphobia /ceterosexism/exorsexism and Gnc phobia and butchphobia

Editing to add:

"transwomen" /"transmen" without the space because terfs don't acknowledge trans women as women or trans men as men it's a dogwhistle to "you're not really a woman /man" & an example of that "I'm not touching you I'm not touching you!" bigotry - the point is to put enough plausible deniablility for other cis people; "whoopsie I forgot the space Omg trans people are SO sensitive look at how they're making a big deal of not putting a space there I'm not even calling them subhuman[yet]?! " but imagine you see someone only ever typing "Lesbianwoman/en" instead of "lesbian woman/en" & going on to say stuff like "lesbianwomen are lesbianwomen & straight women are women"? it's that same idea that trans women can only be "transwomen" & not "trans women" or "women who happen to be trans /women with trans experience /history " it's a dogwhistle to the speaker about not viewing trans women as women and seeing cis women as "real" women. Ditto for "transmen" instead of "trans men"

TIM /TIF /TRA "trans identified male/female" or "trans rights activist" [Derogatory] mostly well known acronyms at this point that basically ammount to "you're a male/female but you iDeNtIfY as trans" - calling trans women "males" and trans men "females". "TRA" is an attempt to equate trans people with cis MRAs & comes from the false belief that trans rights are driven by cis MRAs in order to end feminism (they equate trans women with cis MRAs and trans men with cis women "honeybadgers" /supporters of MRA BS & claim that trans women are just pretending to be women in order to "steal/hijack" the feminist movement it's basically like the great replacement conspiracy but substituting cis women for white people who are apparently "in danger of being replaced" ) and some even claim that the existence of trans people is part of "the great replacement" & will veer into antisemitic conspiracies about Jewish people creating/controlling media/pornography in order to "trans" people to "destroy western civilisation /the family" this is usually where the terf to tradfem/alt-right pipeline comes in

DSDs or "disorders of sexual development" when talking about intersex people they will often refuse to use the widely accepted non-dehumanising term "intersex" & instead call them "DSDs/DSD males/females" because in terf ideology intersex people are seen as inherently "disordered" & any "correction" [Genital mutilation medical abuse and CSA] is thus justified as "normalising them for their own good" all intersex people are pushed into a category of either "male /female" & Intersex people who refuse and refute this categorisation are rejected mocked and harassed as being "part of the problem"

"genetic/biological male/female" - same idea as calling trans women "males" or "TIMs" & trans men "females" or "TIFs" with added dehumanisation of implying that trans people aren't "biological" cis women are referred to as "Biological/genetic females" & cis men are referred to as "Biological/genetic males" basically they mean "real women/men" but they think that using the words "biological" /"genetic" makes them sound more scientific in their bigotry and dehumanisation... See also 'bio vaginas/breasts'

"handmaidens" - any cis woman or trans man or assumed 'afab' person who speaks out against transmisogyny or for trans rights in general- equating allies of trans women to the MRA "honeybadgers" group with added sexualisation and completely misunderstanding the handmaid's tale because terfs love victim blaming survivors even fictional ones. In the minds of terfs the trans liberation movement is lead /controlled by trans women and zero trans men or trans neutrals - they erase trans liberation figures who are trans men transneutral and nonbinary and will assign them as either trans women or trans men & use their sexist stereotypes of "males/females" accordingly ;so a trans woman or people they categorise such who speaks out about trans liberation is presented by terfs as "entitled delusional angry violent male who is dominating & needs to be brought back in line" & trans men or people terfs categorise as such are presented as "hysterical delusional female who is betraying us& doesn't understand what she's doing and needs to be brought back in line" - this isn't the be all and end all of how they talk about trans women and trans men and other trans people they force into those categories just a simplified overview & as with everything there is nuance and contradiction basically the "point" is that trans people can't "win" it's like the Madonna /wh*re dichotomy"(I've seen it called the "baby/predator" dichotomy in Anti-Transmasculinity & transandrophobia discussions) depending on if they think they can "convert" you or not, they'll be more overtly hostile if they judge you as someone not vulnerable to their grooming & more likely to try infantalising & "lovebombing" you if they think they can "convert" you.

"compelled speech" /"asking me not to misgender trans people is compelled speech"

Afabmisogyny - terf attempt to twist discussions of transandrophobia and misogyny to being about "'afabs' are all oppressed by 'amabs' and all have a shared universal experience that amabs could never understand" they'll use this to group trans men and people they presume to be afab with cis women as a unified group being oppressed by 'amabs' grouping trans women and cis men together ad an oppressor class- enbies and intersex people are forced into one of these binaries/erased/ignored as usual in radfem rhetoric

Some TERF DOGWHISTLES TO BE AWARE OF:

"sex class /sex based class" analysis that ignores and erases intersexism and transmisogyny in favour of equating trans women with cis men (misgendering)

"male supremacy" - and assuming (the small minority of) trans women who are awful to other trans people are that way because they are some kind of crypto MRAs and not just radfems and or assholes in their own right. Any harmful behaviour done by a trans woman is immediately assigned to "male supremacy"

"AMAB supremacy" just the same as calling trans women "male supremacists" & equating them to cis men and cis men MRAs - terfs seem to think that this is a way to get their "trans women are MRAs" shite past our BS detectors

"male socialisation" - especially when talking about (mischarecterising for grooming purposes ) intracommunity trans issues eg "trans women dOmInAtE and oppress trans men and trans spaces due to their male socialisation /experiences being raised as boys & trans men are demure in spaces and unwilling to speak up against the mean domineering trans women because of female socialisation "

"AFAB solidarity" - "trans men are my sisters (in the fight against the eevil trans women) " rebranded

[yesimwriting]

Would you write a Kaz Brekker request where the reader is a bookworm and a crow and basically Kaz asks the reader to read to him as his way of apologizing after a argument that was his fault?

 it ​​a/n i did something kinda similar in a 'promise of rain' blurb,, but this concept is so cute to me:)) love it sm i moved it up my request cue lol

also IM IN COLLEGE NOW!! WHAT?? AND IVE BEEN TO A PARTY! AND IM JOINING A SORORITY AND I DID DRAMA AUDITIONS AND AHH !! SO DIFFERENT! I MISS MY MOM AND SISTER AND DOG AND EVEN MY DAD BUT IM HAPPY HERE!! 

also im a little worried this might not portray kaz superrrrr accurately bc it's been awhile so just let me know,, feedback leads to improvement:)) also kinda set this up for a part 2 bc...well youll see 

--

They've always said a lot of things about him, and I've always heard them. But I've never quite believed them. Sure, I get why the dark things that have flourished in the poisoned soil that is Ketterdam consider Kaz Brekker the darkest thing of all. I understand the nickname 'Dirtyhands' for the gloved criminal who has fooled each crime boss at least once. I understand each terrible thing they've said about him.

But I've never agreed with them. I've never even considered agreeing with them. Until today.

The thought that maybe everything people say about him is correct in a simple context struck me worse than the silence after our argument. It made me feel like both a fool and hypocrite. Kaz and I have had our fair share of spats over the relatively short time we've known each other, but never like this. Never so badly he stormed out of the room before I could. I squeeze the book in my lap even harder, desperate to focus on the words on the pages.

You didn't hurt him. He walked away because he decided you weren't worth the cost of his expensive time. I repeat those thoughts in my mind over and over again, letting them bitter me further. It's a lot easier to be mad than hurt. A lot easier to fuel your pain than try to understand your mistakes. Besides, tiredness is already dredging around in my chest and if I don't calm down a little I won't be able to fall asleep.

I had escalated the fight more than I should have. Knowing Kaz is like performing in a tightrope act. One must always be aware of where they're going. Watching what's in front of them without ever thinking too much about what's beneath or behind them. Today though, when I needed my balance most I chose to fall. I chose to dive, and apparently there was no net.

"Oh, you're doing that thing."

I roll my eyes at Jesper's voice as I fight down a yawn. I wipe my face with the back of my palm before turning. The burning behind my eyes never resulted in full tears, but I feel better after doing so. "What thing?"

"That terribly noble thing where you find it in yourself to take full blame for every single conflict you and boss man fall into." The slight humor in his voice is enough for me to roll my eyes again. "Between you and me, I'm sure the reason he's so angry now is because you didn't do that for once."

I press my lips together as my chin angles itself upwards slightly. "I never do that." He raises an eyebrow. The slight sympathy that colors the look is more offensive than his accusation. "If I pick and choose my battles, it's for good reason."

"Clearly."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He shrugs once before further entering my room. I say nothing when he sits at the foot of my bed. "Oh, you know," Jesper stretches back casually, resting his back against the wall and extending his legs, "You and Kaz--Kaz and you."

Has he been drinking? Perhaps he's not here because of my unusual absence from downstairs after my fight with Kaz but because he's already too tipsy to think right. "What?"

At my confused look he grins, flashing all of his teeth with an arrogance that outshines the whiteness of them. He taps the still open book in my lap. "Let me put it in terms you'll understand." Jesper sits up a little further, amusement clear in his features. "You two make a shameful Elizabeth and Darcy--"

"Oh, shut up," I groan, glaring at him, "This isn't Pride and Prejudice. And Kaz and I," Jesper's smugness returns when I can't quite think of what I want to say, "We're barely friends--we're barely anything, let alone what you're implying."

Jesper pulls his legs up and shoves me gently. "Dearest, y/n," he ignores my glare, "You should know better than anyone that 'barely friends, barely anything' with Kaz is more than it is with anyone else?"

"That doesn't mea--"

"You two say goodnight to each other." Once. Kaz and I said good night to each other in front of Jesper once. How dare he assume it happens regularly? He's right, but that doesn't mean I'm okay with it. "You play cards with him. Not for money, not for skill--"

"It's for practice." The look Jesper gives me is enough to tell me that my defense didn't land.

Damn him for ever finding Kaz and I on one of those strange nights. One of those nights in which he lurks at the stairwell...the one that divides my room and his attic. One of those nights in which it feels like he's a phantom and I'm the only one that can really see him. A night in which we both silently find each other.

I couldn't quite believe it the first time it happened. I'm not exactly a Crow--I don't feel enough a connection to the Dregs to join them without some kind of guarantee--but I was needed for some obscure job. but I was needed for some obscure job. The Crows needed an insider who could blend into high society, and I needed a place to stay away from my father.

It worked. I worked. And with each passing day I found myself enjoying the Crows more and more. That's why I stayed. That's why I started checking the stairwell practically every night, a set of playing cards in my hand.

The first time had been awkward. I couldn't sleep and my room felt too quiet, but the rambunctious club felt too loud and a little unsafe considering the hour. So I settled for the only space in between. When Kaz found me sitting on the steps and playing a solitary card game I had been so stunned by embarrassment I just offered to deal him in. I had been more shocked when he silently accepted my offer.

"Practice?" Jesper repeats. "You were laughing, I heard you."

"That was one time--how do you know we didn't just happen to play cards together the one time you saw it?"

"Because you laughed about a play you considered 'predictable'."

Sighing, I sit up a little straighter. "I'm not having this conversation. Occasionally saying 'goodnight' to someone who lives in the same space I live in and sometimes playing cards with said person because we both happen to be up at a certain time doesn't mean anything."

"And the way he looked at the contact that was flirting with you?"

Oh...this conversation again. "For the last time, the contact wasn't flirting with me. We had to dance to blend in and when he leaned towards me to whisper in my ear...it was to tell me the intel Kaz just had to have."

"And when he tucked that strand of hair behind your ear?"

"He just wanted to sell our cove--"

"Y/n, he kissed your cheek and I'm fairly certain he would have kissed you if Kaz and I hadn't made it to the corridor at that second."

Why is everyone so obsessed with what would have never happened? The contact had been attractive, tall with fair eyes and hair. But it's not like I feel anything for him, nor would I have been so foolish during a job. A fact that Kaz refuses to believe. I'm tired of this argument...I'm just tired. This job required me to start getting ready early in the morning and lasted long into the night.

"I wouldn't have kissed him and even if I had, the fact that Kaz is so mad about feels...sexist." A stupid argument, considering that Kaz couldn't care less if the person he's working with is female, male, or anything in between because the only thing he cares about is profit. "It's a stupid thing to be mad about, but you hit on anything with a pulse at any time and--"

"I resent that--"

"For the first two weeks I was here I thought you might've been a prostitute."

I can feel him holding in a laugh. "Did you at least think I was a good prostitute?" When I glare again, he finally actually laughs. "Not the point--got it."

"Then what is the point? You're bored and obsessed with gossip so now you're shaking me for information you don't need."

"The point is you're oblivious." Rude...I move my leg in a weak attempt to push him off my bed. Jesper catches my ankle easily, ignoring my attempt at a fight. "You thought the contact was only doing his job and you don't know the real reason that Kaz blew up at you for the first time the way he blows up at everyone."

"Okay, well since you know everything, tell me why he's mad."

He lets out a sigh like he can't believe I even needed to ask that. "It's not the best look that the first time you let him pick a fight with you happens to be about some guy."

...Maybe he is drunk? "Don't be so cryptic. I don't like you enough to put up with that."

Jesper half-sighs again before pushing himself off my bed. "I'm going to pretend I think you're smart enough to piece things together from that."

"Asshole," I mumble instinctually as he walks towards my door. "Are you not telling me because I tried to push you off the bed?"

He turns when he reaches my door in order to lean against my door frame. "It's not not because of that." I should throw my book at his head. "In all seriousness, think about it. If you don't you'll either kill each other or kill me."

Ugh...he's so confusing. This time, I let him go. He leaves he door open, which is beyond annoying. I stand up to close it, promising myself I will focus on my book the second it's in my hands again. As I walk back towards my bed, my eyes land on the deck of cards on my nightstand.

Does it send a signal I don't want to send if I don't go the stairwell tonight? Do I want to send a signal? I don't know...actually, the only thing I know is that I don't want to think about this a second longer. I don't ease as I read, but my eyelids become heavier with each word they cross. I feel the weight of them as my focus slips, farther and farther away until I can no longer focus. When my eyes fall shut I can't bring myself to think or force them open.

--

I notice my surprised before I register that I've just woken up. Falling asleep feels so far and yet the crick in my neck confirms the obvious. Rubbing the eyes with the back of my hand, I push my book from my lap and sit up. The only indication of how much time has passed is how much my bedside candle has melted.

How long have I been asleep? How did I manage to fall asleep? I thought I was too mad at Kaz to manage anything but pouting in my room. I hadn't even decided if I wanted to talk to him.

I stand even though I haven't decided anything. I should at least change if I want to go to bed. But is leaving this alone for even longer a bad idea? I think Jesper thought so...though my conversation with him is far from clear. It's not the best look that the first time you let him pick a fight with you happens to be about some guy. I'm going to pretend I think you're smart enough to piece things together from that. What does he want me to do with that?

Maybe he was partially intoxicated and felt the need to play the role of a good friend. Or maybe this is his idea of a joke.

Whatever--regardless of Jesper, I have a choice to make. A tiny part of me hopes it's insignificant, but I know Kaz enough to know that nothing is insignificant to him. He holds onto things the way he holds onto his kruge. Perhaps I'll seek out Inej, she seems to be the best at rationalizing. Though she might be asleep by now, or on a job or...I don't even know.

How late is it? Is it late enough to be one of the few hours Kaz claims to reserve for sleep? Maybe my bad luck is still around and he's already in bed for once. Does that mean his anger will extend to tomorrow?

I shouldn't care. It's not like I'm in the wrong. Did I escalate things? Maybe a little...but I won't apologize for defending myself. Even though that makes everything a little easier. I feel stuck, like in some kind of place of half sleep. A single knock at my door is enough to make me want to jump. I rub my eyes a little more firmly in hopes of waking up more before someone sees me.

I approach the door without worry. Maybe it's not as late as I assumed. Or maybe it's really early? I open the door while still fighting against my slight disorientation. I'm so focused on acting normal, I almost don’t register the person standing at my door. 

I don’t know who I expected, or what--maybe Jesper, much more tipsy than he was before, slumped against the doorframe, only knocking because he’s too tired to push the door open. Maybe even Inej, on her way here to deliver some kind of job or notice of dismissal. But it’s nothing I could expect. It’s...Kaz. 

The Dirtyhands stands at my door, expression as hard as ever yet something behind his eyes that burns the sleep away from me. “Uh--hi.” I bite my tongue to avoid cringing at that very awkward beginning. “Are you here to kick me out yourself?” The only response I get is the slightest shift of his gaze off of my face. “No? Well then I think I’m going to bed. It’s late.” 

My tone and words are clear. Get out of my doorway, I’m in no mood to go back to arguing.  When he still doesn’t say anything, I’m emboldened by my nerves. I push the door between us without breaking eye contact. 

Before the wood can meet the doorframe, he moves his cane, wedging it between us. “Y/n.” I don’t understand the way he says my name, but I’m certain he’s never said it like that. “I...” When he’s not prompted by the uncomfortableness of silence, I raise an eyebrow, my grip on the door tightening. “What I said shouldn’t have been said.” Wait--is he admitting fault? I’m so thrown I almost melt entirely. “Not to you.” 

The addition leaves him so lowly a part of me wonders if I’ve imagined it. I’m so thrown by it I don’t even think to reply until a long second has passed. “You seemed to believe the opposite a few hours ago.” 

His lips press together for a moment. “You didn’t ask me to play cards tonight.” He took that as intentional? At least that got me some kind of apology? I keep my mouth shut, greed making me want more information. I guess he must sense my silent tugging because he head inclines slightly. “Don’t push.” 

I fight down a grin. “Push what?” His only response to stiffen further. “I’m going to tell you something as a peace offering.” That seems to intrigue him in some way. I can’t tell if it’s a good kind of interested, but I note the slight raise of his eyebrows and his intentional silence. “I didn’t chose not to ask you to play cards.” He gives me no indication of anything, which is fair...considering my vagueness. “I was mad, obviously, and in the middle of deciding on a course of action...and then I fell asleep.” 

A long pause of silence. “You fell asleep?” 

I’m not sure if his incredulous tone should offend me or not. If I wanted to lie, I’d like to think he knows me well enough to know that I’d have thought of a better excuse than that. Or at least a less embarrassing one. “Yes, it’s not that difficult to believe. Today had been long and all I wanted to do was read, but then Jesper came in to say the oddest things and then leave me to...” 

Oh--oh. I guess there’s a reason people say to ‘sleep on’ something. Because now, actively remembering Jesper’s words for the first time since I fell asleep...I understand what Jesper was implying in the oddest way possible. He meant that Kaz and I...that perhaps there is a Kaz and I in a context that’s more than just grammatical. Wow. I really had to realize this with Kaz right in front of me. 

My face feels warmer than it did before, an irrational bout of anxiety forcing me to consider that me might be able to read impossible, embarrassing thoughts from my expression alone. 

“What did Jesper say?” I’m too lost in my own spiral of confusion and panic and some feeling I can’t recognize to register how Kaz asks his question. There’s an edge to it, an odd one, but that could easily just be Kaz. 

This is most definitely the last conversation we need to be having. I’m still mad at him for his earlier dramatics. So I just shake my head, feigning an exhaustion I could lose myself in. “Nothing and everything all at once.” I resist the urge to rub my eyes again. “I’m pretty sure he was drinking, and I wasn’t really listening. I was just trying to read.” 

Kaz’s expression hardens briefly as he takes in my words, and then he exhales, nodding once with the breath. “What were you reading?” 

My lips part instinctually, ready to spew off details about the latest novel that’s captured my attention. But before I can let myself take off, the reality of the situation strikes me directly in the chest. This is not Nina, or Inej, or even Jesper after what he considers a ‘good night’. This is Kaz Brekker, the man believed to not have a soul. I’ve spoken to him before about casual things, though most of the nights in which we end up playing cards or just sitting near each other are spent in silence. But he’s never prompted me before. Not in the one topic he knows is guaranteed to turn me into an overenthusiastic, gushing fountain of poor summaries and character analysis. 

I guess this is his peace offering. This shouldn’t warm the way it does. He was still unbelievably dramatic and treated me like I’m some kind of unreliable fool. “It’s late, and you know how I can be. I’d hate to keep you for nothing more than a poor summary and honestly, an embarrassing rant about plot or characters, because there’s just nothing as frustrating as when two people so clearly care about each other and both are too stubborn and oblivious to acknowledge it.” 

Kaz’s eyebrows draw together just enough for me to be able to make out a shift of expression in the poor light. Perhaps his lingering irritation is preparing to rear its ugly head. The corner of his mouth seems to threaten to tilt upwards as Kaz angles his head to the side slightly. “I can’t imagine that position.” 

No kidding. I bite my tongue to keep the sarcastic comment and awkward laugh that would sure follow it away. “Who can? That’s like half the point of reading.” 

How can interaction feel so over and just at its beginning all at once? I press my lips together to avoid filling the silence with things I’d no doubt instantly regret. It’s easy to be mad at Kaz in the moment. Too easy. But to stay mad at him when his temper has passed and he returns with some kind of begrudging and admittedly awkward and uncertain truce is another task entirely. 

“I’ve never understood your attachment to written words.” 

“It’s not about understanding, it’s about everything else.” 

“And you say I’m cryptic.” Is he...kinda almost joking? I straighten my spine, too tired to fight and too wounded to forgive. “There’s understanding in everything, nothing can survive on sentiment alone.” 

“If you read the way I did, you’d understand.” 

His lips press together as his expression remains unwavering in its hardness. “Read to me.” 

...Interacting with Kaz in any way often leaves me feeling like I’m wandering through unknown territory. But this, this is undeniably different. So different I can’t even think of a way to react. I watch his expression as cautiously as possible. He’s purely reserved, no distinction from the look he wears during business propositions. Except there’s a tightness I can’t quite understand.

Maybe it’s because I don’t want to fight anymore. Maybe it’s because exhaustion is leaving me partially delirious. Or maybe it’s the weird feeling in my chest that I can’t quite place. That I don’t want to place. “Okay.” I shift carefully. “If for no other reason then to prove you wrong.” 

Never did I think I’d end up in the position of sitting in my bed, book in hand, with Kaz Brekker sitting next to me. But here we are. I’m so tired, I almost let out a nervous laugh when he first walked in. So brooding and tall, gripping the head of his head cane as he sits at the foot of my bed, on my pastel quilt. 

I’m glad for the excuse to keep my gaze away from him and on the words in front of me. I read out loud, feeling more and more comfortable with each page I finish. But as my inhibitions slip away, so dos my hold on consciousness. My eyelids seem to grow heavier with each word that I read. 

“You’re falling asleep.” 

I straighten my spine on instinct. “Am not.” I’m not sure why I feel the need to deny something so simple. 

“You’re impossible.” 

From him, that statement is laugh worthy. “I’m impossible? Do you not remember earlier today?” 

From the way his jaw locks, I realize that he’s in no mood to be light about this topic. I don’t understand why. It’s not like I’m the one that wronged him. “I remember your lack of focus.” 

Keeping my hands at my side to avoid rubbing my eyes, I frown. “If you want to have this argument again, fine. Jesper is more ‘distracted’ than me half the time and you’re much more lenient on him. It’s not like I was flirting with someone or gambling or doing anything but having a two second conversation. One that I needed to have to get information that you wanted.” 

The last time we fought, I had more energy to restrain myself. This could be atomic. I hold my breath, waiting for Kaz’s retaliation. He exhales, eyes not meeting mine. “Arguing with you when you’re present is exhausting enough. It’s not worth it when you’re half asleep.” 

This angers me further. I hate that he’s right. “I’m not half asleep.” He leaves it at that. I glare even harder at him, slumping further into my bed. “But for the sake of argument, I’ll drop it. Something you’re incapable of doing.” 

At that, his eyes meet mine. I try to hold his gaze, but the harder I think about not seeming tired the more exhaustion slips in. A yawn escapes me before he looks away. Great. “I know when to lie in the grass in wait.” 

Rolling my eyes, I shift back slightly. He’s incapable of being less dramatic than this. Still, I can’t imagine the effort it’s taking on his part to not start an argument. Maybe this is why Jesper spent so long implying that there may be a Kaz and I in any capacity beyond a vague kind of friendship. “I’ll admit you’re tactful.”

“Resourceful people recognize that trait in other people.” 

Blinking twice, I lower my book slightly. Am I truly exhausted, or did he just compliment me in a way? “Careful, I may start to think you find me tolerable.” 

“Let’s not exaggerate.” Okay, now I know I’m exhausted because I think he might have just attempted a joke. Rolling my eyes, I decide not to acknowledge this lightness in fear that I’ll scare it away. “Y/n?” 

I press my lips together, worried about the destruction of our peace. “Yes?” 

“What did Jesper say to you? Earlier?” I pause, slightly unsure why we’re moving backwards. 

We’re in a decent place now, and I’d hate to ruin it. I’m too half asleep to lie eloquently. And it’s not like he’s an easily convinced man. “Oh, he said it so cryptically it took me longer than it should have to understand. And it didn’t help that it was something so...well, you might find it funny. As funny as you find anything, anyways.” Wow...I’ve spent such a long time talking. Rubbing the back of my eyes, I avoid his gaze. Exhaustion and awkwardness mix in my stomach oddly. “It seemed like he was trying to imply that you and I...me and you...” Why is this a difficult thing to say? It’s not like I was implying it and Jesper’s known for his oddness. “I think Jesper was implying that there was a you and I, or at least that there could be.” I’m too lost in a haze of almost sleep to watch his reaction. I let my head rest against my headboard even further. “Isn’t that odd?” 

He’s quiet for a long second, and then he finally speaks again. “Odd, even for Jesper.” The response doesn’t satiate me...what’s that about? I exhale, deciding that feeling is tomorrow’s problem. When I blink, I decide to let my eyes stay closed. Just for a moment. The sound of something shifting is what makes my eyes squint open. Kaz is standing, his expression unreadable as he straightens. “Goodnight, y/n.” 

At that, I sit up slightly, ignoring the exhaustion behind my eyes. “I haven’t finished the chapter.” 

“You’ve convinced me of enough.” A concession? How exhausted do I seem? My lips press together as I think of my next argument. Before I can get it out, Kaz leans forward. He grabs the quilt at the end of my bed and tosses it onto my legs casually. “Goodnight, y/n.” The meaning of his repetition is clear. His word is final. 

I find enough energy to manage a glare, but I pull the quilt over my legs anyways. “Goodnight, Kaz.”

[baited-beth]

My close friend, a TRA, has just gone home after spending the night and god did we have a deep and difficult discussion on women's rights and tran's rights... I love her and I'm so thankful she's happy to remain good friends and wants to plan to meet up soon, but we just really really disagree on this and I'm emotionally exhausted. She's so intelligent, but she is absolutely blind to the flaws in her arguments. Practically all of her reasons for disagreeing with me are:

dismissing the points without really engaging in them and saying that that's obviously not what's happening

saying that they're just headline fodder intended to cause outrage

simply stating that my point is hateful (rather than biological fact)

believing that a study should be dismissed because it hasn't been repeated/she doesn't trust the conditions it was conducted in (although lack of study into puberty blockers is fine🤔)

a seemingly willful belief that women can't be subject to male violence if the male person states they are trans

A general lack of understanding in the differences between male and female bodies and how puberty works

She got really uncomfortable when I asked her what a woman was. She tried to say it was anyone who identified as a woman. So I pointed out you can't use a word in its definition, and asked again. She said that it was anyone was felt more comfortable with the woman's shape or clothes etc. I tried pointing out that was a sexist assumption of what a woman was. Does that mean butch lesbians aren't women? She kept distracting from the point by implying I was only asking the question as an excuse to exclude trans women.

I also asked her why a 12 year old child bride was being married off and she responded "power and paedophilia". Okay, so why isn't it happening to 12 year old boys? If a 12 year old boy goes round telling everyone he's actually a girl, they aren't going to marrying him off. Apparently it probably does happen to 12 year old boys and I'm making a generalisation.

FGM. Who does that happen to? People with female genitals apparently. Why? "Power. And not wanted them to feel pleasure". Okay, so why is that not happening to boys? "Well it's happening to trans boys." Right, but what do they have in common with the girls? It's happening because they're female and they can't identify out of it. Apparently this argument isn't helpful because we really should be talking about the UK where this isn't particularly prevalent (which I wish I had countered now).

I pointed out the yearly stats for the number of trans people killed is actually mainly trans women who have been prostituted in Brazil and South America, and that actually the number is either 1 or 0 in the UK. Apparently she knows anecdotally that the number is far higher and thinks suicide should be included. I tried to point out that suicide isn't necessarly occurring because they're not being accepted as trans, but instead because they have mental health issues that have not been solved by transitioning.

We didn't get too deep into trans athletes, but she seems to think that oestrogen and surgery significantly reduces male strength to female levels... similar to how she's convinced that puberty restarts straight away once you come off puberty blockers. Completely misinformed on how different hormones and puberty affects bodies based on their sex.

She had no idea about the Karen White case. Apparently that kind of thing shouldn't happen because the crimes of the 'trans women' should be taken into account when they're transferred to a women's prison. I'm annoyed I forgot to bring up the recent ruling on this. I also tried to argue that a number of men were starting to pretend they were trans to be transferred and she again argued that the prison services should be able to separate the real from the fake, and she made a big thing about how trans people need to live in their chosen gender for a year before they're allowed a GRA so obviously prisons wouldn't allow it until they'd done this (laughably false). My point that the prison service can't make that decision without being labelled transphobic fell on deaf ears. I even pointed out that in California they out condom machines in women's prisons because of this and she dismissed it as something that probably got made up and blown out of proportion for headline fodder. She also seemed to think that I was wrong to point out that male people were more likely to be violent and that trans women were male. Apparently this shouldn't apply because they're trans women?

Oh, the best bit was when I asked why women and children should be subjected to a penis in a single sex changing room. Apparently "trans women don't go into changing rooms just to wave their dicks in people's faces". And rather than them, as a very small population, making women feel safe by taking a third option for changing spaces, women should accept them and deal with it if they feel uncomfortable.

When I pointed out that men will take advantage of the safeguarding loopholes created by gender ideology, her basic argument was that will men access those spaces if they want to regardless so it makes no difference. Which absolute amazed me? She was almost angry with me for suggesting the safeguarding needs to exclude some people in order to protect a bigger group. There was a lot of refusal to admit that women are more vulnerable to male violence and so need single sex spaces.

There was so much else we talked about and I'm proud of myself for actually sticking to my guns and having examples and difficult questions to back up my corner. But it amazes me how willingly blind she is. She really is spouting out the same lines I see all over TRA's blogs and twitter feeds without actively engaging with what they mean. She also said she thought she was being 'quite generous' with me about some of my opinions which... given she couldn't actually give a definition of what a woman is?

Anyway, we parted friends and agreed that we would exchange books so we could get out of our own bubbles. I'll read Detrasition Baby if she reads Trans by Helen Joyce. Hopefully some of what I said will stick with her and she will begin to question things more.

I feel like I should add links to all my above points but right now I just need a nap.

[blackgirlsuperherorants]

With more articulation, I'm ready to talk about why the push for Lokius simply bothers me, and this can be said for other m/m or w/w ships that fans push to be canon so hard just because they ship it.

It's the framing. The framing that if Marvel doesn't do it (or whatever the brand is), it's because homophobia, and if other fans don't like it/ship it, it's because homophobia (even if they ship other queer ships and are queer themselves.) And the biggest problem with that is that it overshadows the REAL issue of lack of queer representation on screen in mainstream nerd media, especially from big things under the Disney umbrella (Marvel and Lucasfilm/Star Wars, especially.)

It makes it bad that your ship isn't canon instead of bad that there haven't been any queer romances on screen in the MCU.

And like, as a writer myself, I find myself dissecting the stories of other media all the time. I can watch an MCU movie or series and pretty much assess what direction the story is going in by the narrative points they're hitting. I knew Sylki was basically gonna happen (even if just a kiss) because narratively, that's what the show was doing as soon as they had that "what is love" conversation on Lamentis-1. It didn't mean I liked it. But I knew it was happening.

Similarly, there's no romantic undertones to Loki and Mobius. None. For Marvel to make them a couple, it would mean they'd be doing it simply because the two present as men and it would make stans happy. And while there's something to be said for fan service, it would be annoying to watch them cram two guys together who aren't romantic in the slightest. I'd much rather see Loki meet some guy and have the same type of undertones they were giving to Sylvie and form a real bond to where the kiss feels earned and warranted. Not just put him with the nearest man because "he gay lol."

And how you guys are claiming it's being queer that makes you want this is beyond me. It's not being queer that makes you want this. I don't want queer characters that fuck everyone of whatever gender(s) they're attracted to even when it doesn't make sense for them to. I want real love stories. I mean, yeah, sometimes we can have a slut character, because that's fun, too, but that's not even what y'all think Lokius is. You seem to want them to be in love. But why? Because he's the first friend Loki made that isn't through Thor?

I hate that, too, because I hate this idea that queer people cannot have friends of their same gender without wanting to fuck them. IDK how y'all are, maybe y'all are like that, but I almost never have wanted to fuck any of my friends. The only few exceptions have been when I tried to befriend someone I had a crush on (in which case, usually the friendship can't work, really, because I have a crush on them.) I also think it's okay if you can have casual sex with friends, or if you have a friendship that develops into romance, but Jesus, do you people not have friends that you don't want to fuck? I am bi, maybe more pan (gender kind of doesn't matter to me, I guess) and I'm friends with people of all kinds of gender identities and like... I love them as people, which is why they're my friends, but I DO NOT want to fuck them. Especially my closest friend. I talked about her, before, here, but she's like my sister. The thought of fucking her is gross, to me. Not because she's gross, but because it feels incestuous.

Loki shouldn't want to fuck Mobius just because they developed a friendship. And that's very much how it's written on the series. They almost dislike each other (or Mobius is at least indifferent to Loki) and then they become friends.

That's not to mention the power dynamic that exists, there. And I know some of y'all are subs, but yeah, it's a bit gross to imply a sexual relationship with Loki's captor.

But on to Sylki. It sucks that I feel like most of y'all hate Sylki because Sylvie is a girl, and not just because it's bad in other ways. Like, the reasons Sylki is bad have less to do with "it should have been Mobius" and more to do with it being a lazy 1980s action movie plot that should have never happened. I'm not as creeped out by the selfcest (as many of you wouldn't have been if she was a he, I'm almost positive), but what's bad about it is that they couldn't have a strong female lead character without her being the love interest of the main guy. She didn't need to be, especially because she was a Loki variant, anyway. There was no need for it to have romantic undertones, and there was no need for them to kiss. It was sexist more than it was homophobic (and I can't help feeling like y'all are kind of being biphobic in this case. Maybe I'll talk about that, later, but yeah.) It was sexist bullshit. And there's valid criticism that Sylvie is underdeveloped. She's just angry and something for Loki to project affection onto.

I was also hoping they'd do a "found family" type of thing with Sylvie and Loki and let her be like the sister he never knew he needed, but no, they had to go trope and make her the love interest. It was lazy and bad and basically went "If Loki girl, main Loki want bone!"

Basically, having the main character fall for a character just because of their proximity and gender is bad and I hate it (and it would have been bad with Mobius, too, but yeah.)

Both the Mobius and the Sylvie thing also feel kind of racist, to me, because the show has prominent Black women who aren't even presented as desirable to Loki. And y'all, of course, ship him with anyone but the Women of Color. Y'all can pull true love with Mobius out of your ass, but he couldn't possibly fall for the Black women. lol.

Anyway. Not every show needs ships, and this show shouldn't have had any. I hate it. It's bad.

I guess on the biphobia front, I have heard some takes that it's not biphobic because Loki being queer in the MCU which hasn't shown any queer relationships, and Loki being the first openly queer character means they shouldn't have shown him with a woman presenting character. Which, I guess I get where you're coming from... but I have also been in fandoms for a long time and I see mostly girls saying this shit, which is what leads me to feel like it's simply jealousy. It happens all the time when a long-beloved single male character/celebrity suddenly starts dating a woman. Everyone hates it. And like, we haven't seen Loki be with ANYONE in the MCU, because mostly he's been doing villainy and his dating life hasn't been relevant. If the demigod says he's bi, he can kiss a woman. Especially a woman version of himself. Like I said, I hate it for other reasons, but pretending it's because he should have kissed Mobius is utterly delusional. He probably shouldn't have kissed anyone. Not in this series. There was no reason for any canon romance, especially because the show has a season 2 and we'll have time to see Loki develop earned, deserved romance with someone.

I'd much rather see them create a character just to be his boyfriend than have y'all push Marvel into making Lokius canon, which is a nonsense ship that only happened because Mobius is the only prominent male-presenting character before we meet the other Lokis.

My sincere wish is for people to remember that their ships are just ships and to enjoy them without getting all self-righteous about it. I TOLD y'all that Lokius wasn't gonna be canon like 4 episodes back, and here y'all are acting shocked and like Marvel took something from you. NOBODY expected y'all to ship Lokius. It's not even queerbait.

You can make clear arguments as to why Sambucky was queerbait. It's there in undertones in the actual series.

You cannot watch Loki and tell me you thought it was queerbait, unless you think men can't have conversations or hug goodbye without being romantically involved. Which means, in my opinion, that you need to learn about healthy masculinity.

Again, this is not a defense of Marvel. They DO need to let characters be queer, for real, and not just by saying " A bit of both". Like, let Loki be queer. Let Deadpool be queer. Let these queer characters be queer on screen. Yes.

But please stop making it about your ship. I'd rather see a flashback of Loki dating a guy and see him kiss someone he loved back on Asgard than watch y'all force Lokius. Because my queer rep is not about your crackship. It really isn't. And the fact that y'all keep calling us homophobic for not liking your ship REALLY needs to be addressed.

Like, when will y'all stop? I got on Stucky shippers about this shit in the past. All of us gay as hell, too, we just don't like YOUR ship. A lot of us like other queer ships. A lot of us like queer ships in other fandoms, too, and even have queer OCs. YOUR ship just ain't it. Stop forcing it. Literally, most of the ship wars between MCU fans have been queer ship vs queer ship, not really queer ship vs straight ship. Like, the number one Stucky rival ship was Stony. Not Steggy. People are not homophobic for not wanting your ship.

Sometimes it's because they ship something else.

And sometimes, like me, it's because they want something to make sense narratively and not happen for the sake of it happening. It's always better writing to have a character meetcute a new love interest than to magically turn a platonic friendship into a romantic relationship. Like, even when the characters are straight. Like, when Moesha dated Hakeem. It was just weird, even if he was kind of a great boyfriend. He was just supposed to be her friend, and people didn't really like it because it didn't fit narratively.

And that's why ships for the most part should be left to fanfiction, with the exception of a few where fans are right to call out the writers for not making it canon because it's clearly bait (like what happened to Destiel shippers. To see Lokius shippers compare themselves to THAT was so ridiculous. Destiel shippers had a decade of evidence only to be let down by a criminally unfair ending. Lokius shippers saw two men have a deep conversation once and lost their minds.)

Anyway, I'm not saying don't ship Lokius. I don't even hate it, really. I just think it obviously shouldn't be canon, and fans pretending like they were robbed of it is ridiculous. Literally, Ao3 exists for this reason. I will never see Steve fuck Sam Wilson, so I wrote it into my fanfic. I am not mad that they didn't actually date in the main MCU storyline.

[vampish-glamour]

Have you noticed that most of the responses on homophobic posts are about trans and bi people? Like I saw this post where a straight woman was talking about how she can't relate to lesbians because she can't give up dick and she doesn't like pussy (which,like, that is the point of her sexuality) and most of the responses were people saying that "some women have dicks" or mentioning strap-ons. Or when someone says that they oppose same sex marriage or think being gay is unnatural because same sex couples can't reproduce and most of the responses are about bi people in straight relations or pre op trans people. These people think it's like a great gotcha moment but I think it's so dumb because it doesn't tackle actual homophobia. When you see someone saying that lesbians are weird because they don't like dick and your immediate response is "some women have dicks" you are just enforcing the idea that lesbians love and miss dick or whatever. That's also homophobic. When your immediate response to someone saying that same sex relationships are bad because they can't reproduce and you say "bi people in straight relationships can" you are not actually dealing with homophobia. Sorry for the rant

Oh, I’ve definitely noticed that!! I’ve made a post before about how sometimes it feels like online, transphobia is taken way more seriously than homophobia. I’ve even found myself laughing a good amount of times because people will list of undesirable traits (like racist, sexist, etc.) and list transphobic but not homophobic.

First of all, I really really hate the “sOme WoMeN HavE DiCks” argument. Because yes, while many trans women don’t get bottom surgery, I don’t think that’s something they want you to point out. And considering how small the population of trans people is, and how the population of trans women either pre-op or who don’t get the snip would be compared to that... “some women have dicks” as an argument seems as unnecessary as “some people have one arm”, y’know what I mean?

Also, don’t like the “some women have dicks” being brought up when it comes to lesbian attraction. Lesbians aren’t attracted to dick, even if it’s on a woman. Plus, trying to make lesbians seem more “acceptable” by saying “well some are with women who have dicks”? Super homophobic IMO. Because people hate homosexuals for our same sex attraction, so it’s not great to reassure them that “dw it’s not always like that”.

As for strap ons, I genuinely can’t wait for the day when people realize that a piece of plastic on a belt is insanely different from a human body part. It’s so gross to me that people try to pretend the two are the same, because it always ends up being to try to convince lesbians to like or tolerate penis.

The same sex marriage thing... that’s just such a nonsensical argument lol. Bi people in opposite sex relationships aren’t in same sex relationships, so they just aren’t part of the equation. Saying “yeah but bi people can reproduce with their opposite sex partner” has the same weight in the argument as “yeah but straight people in opposite sex relationships can reproduce”.

Mentioning pre-op trans people is a weird response, too. Because it’s basically saying “don’t worry, some same sex couples are like the couples you approve of, they can make babies!!”. I’d argue that it encourages homophobia, because it implies that the Acceptable same sex couples are the ones with trans people able to reproduce. Meaning, “the only same sex couples that are acceptable are the ones closest to opposite sex couples”.

You are absolutely right that these sort of responses don’t tackle homophobia. As I said, I think it almost enforces homophobia.

Instead of saying “some people are different from you and that’s okay”, it’s saying “yeah fine you don’t like gay people... but have you considered these things that can make a gay person more like you? Those gay people are acceptable.”

Appropriate responses would be

“You don’t need to relate to lesbians to accept them. You’re heterosexual, they’re homosexual. Of course you’re attracted to different things”.

“So what if a couple can’t reproduce? You’re not saying that infertile straight people can’t get married, are you?”

But anything that involves “yeah well sometimes gay people can be [insert something more “acceptable” to a homophobe]” doesn’t tackle homophobia. Especially when you’re pulling the “some women have dicks” thing to insist that don’t worry, some lesbians like penis!! To people who hate same sex attraction.

It often feels like homophobia is downplayed, or overshadowed by other Xphobias. People need to remember that homophobia affects every letter in the LGBT acronym.

LG because they’re homosexual and the main target of homophobia

B because homophobes hate same sex attraction, and hate bisexuals for experiencing it

T because homophobes often lump trans people in with homosexuals, and treat them accordingly

So it’s about time we tackle it directly instead of throwing all these weird arguments out that often just dwindle down to “but you can agree that these gays are acceptable, because they follow your norms, right?”

(Also, no need to apologize for ranting! 💖)

[rosebloodcat]

A Harry Potter Confession/Rant

Ya’ll are free to ignore it if you want. I’m putting it under a Read More so it won’t clog up the dashes of anyone who doesn’t care about it. If you DO click the Read More, be warned, this got really frigging long.

Firstly, I want to say I love Harry Potter. Like, I really love it and it means a lot to me.

It was an introduction to fantasy for a lot of people. It’s created amazing communities, connected people around the world, and spread a ton of wonderful, uplifting messages.

The kind of power that comes from Love, that something as simple as caring can make huge difference for another person.

Harry Potter has gotten a lot of people to think critically about the world around them, and reminded them that things aren’t always as wonderful as they first appear.

It touches on things like racism and classism in a way that people can understand. It tackles things like morality and how it is different for every person who sees it. That doing what’s right wasn’t easy, and sometimes even the best intentions could make things worse instead of better.

The stories are amazing and suck people in. The foreshadowing is done well in each book and lends itself to the stories in subtle and fantastic ways.

No one had written a series like hers and took off as well as what she’d created. There had been other Magic School-type stories before, but she’d found the right channel to send it out. And now it’s something everyone can name and talk about.

For me, the great thing about Harry Potter was the doors it opened.

How modern fantasy for kids could be written. How a magical community could work in modern world (along with all the good and bad things that were in it). How something as amazing as magic could stay hidden for as long as it had (and the effects it had on everyone involved).

It’s community and the people mean so much to me, and it’s become a strong center to my own views and life.

But that doesn’t mean I’m oblivious to it’s flaws.

Looking at the way the world works, and the relationships of the people in it, gives a very clear view of Rowling’s flawed world view.

And people have written entire essays on all the flaws of her writing, so I don’t think I really need to go into tremendous detail about them all. But I think I can sum the basic idea of it pretty well.

Yes, she can write a great story. But that doesn’t mean she wrote a great world. (As all of her post-story retconning shows.)

Looking back, I openly admit many instances in the books had red flags that showed how bad things actually were.

From character relationships to the corrupted government, the racism and classism, the sexism and abusive undertones. Even just the shitty tracking of things between stories and blatant ignorance of how schools and societies should function!

There are so many flaws and screw ups I can hardly keep track of them all.

So many of the character relationships read as abusive or horribly fractured, that would leave more broken hearts and hurting feelings than should be let stand.

Ron/Hermione is one “couple” I can think of. They’re constantly fighting and at each other’s throats, and had only ever tried to get along due to being friends with Harry.

They’d be that couple who would always be fighting and breaking up with each other and separating, then forcing themselves back together because “This is how love it supposed to be, right? We always fight because we love each other. It’s why everyone said we were like an Old Married Couple. Right?”

(No, that’s not how it works. I know some people still ship them, but I feel like they’re better off friends than lovers. It’s less hurt for them both.)

Or Mrs Weasley, who ruled her house with an Iron Fist and would force her family to follow whatever plan she had set up for them.

From destroying the twins projects and trying to force them into a Ministry job, or her obsessive coddling of Ron and Ginny, or even forcing her husband to not talk about his hobbies/passions and making him need to work in the shed just to enjoy things he liked.

She drove of BOTH of her oldest sons away from home with her overbearing nature, yet so few people seem to see the problems with that.

Remus and Tonks getting together out of grief and just about falling apart when she got pregnant. I honestly don’t know if they were in love or were just together to deal with their grief. (Which would definitely cause problems later down the line if they’d lived.)

(And let’s not get into Harry and Ginny. I think that’s one pairing that everyone else has already beaten into the ground.)

The fact that all of these are the GOOD GUYS, the people that usually show some form of ideal the writer has, says a lot about how Rowling thinks love should be.

The Ministry is so blatantly corrupted and poorly planned, it’s a wonder the Wizarding World hadn’t just flat-out collapsed on itself yet.

Rowling goes out of her way to argue against everything she’s set up that would have made it possible to save the Wizarding World from it’s own corruption. From ways to get around the Truth Serum to blocking people from entering minds to find the truth.

She’s making thousands of excuses for why she didn’t use her own tools to make things easier for her character, but the actual reason is simple. So simple that if she just said it, she could have avoided all the problems people had with it.

She wanted a corrupt government for the story she was writing.

That’s it. That’s why there were no trials with Veritaserum. Why prisoners weren’t interrogated by people who could preform Legilimancy. Why no one had to swear magical oaths to prove they were telling the truth or weren’t on the Dark side.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but if she had just said that instead of making excuses, I would have been fine with that. Sometimes, as writers, we have to admit that the reason we didn’t do things that would have made it better for our heroes is because we needed things to go bad.

AND THAT’S OKAY. Not every story needs to have a million well thought out arguments for why the bad guys were able to get as far as they did. Sometimes we just need to say “they were really corrupt/clever” and that��s fine.

Rowling was really bloody lazy, had no idea how to do things practically, and had a ton of sexist/racist/toxic views that she really should have just kept her mouth shut about.

A ton of the issues in Harry Potter go back to this.

Her researching skills were terrible even when the things she needed to look up would have been as simple as looking at the weekly paper. (The price/value of gold is literally something you can look in the weekly news paper to find.)

She never looked at how culture differences would have effected things when she talked about “international” magics and said things that were just plain stupid because of her lack of research.

(The Mahoutoko School of Magic. ”Mahoutokoro” literally translates into “Magic School”, meaning the school is called “The Magic School, School of Magic.” I don’t think I need to explain why that’s stupid.)

She had no idea how to arrange a schooling/class schedule and was completely oblivious to how understaffed her magical school was. None of the class schedules made sense, none of the arrangements made sense, and even the number of students in the school makes no sense.

(Without getting into how many schools of magic there are in the world when you consider the size of the human population.)

Then, of course, there are the racist/anti-lgbtq+ stereotyping done through the magical beings of HP. From Goblins to werewolves, there’s a lot of poor, negative, and outright offensive representation wrapped up in there. (Really, her Anti-Trans stuff is just the tip of the iceberg there.)

That said, I still really love Harry Potter.

I know it’s flawed. I know there’s a ton of bad shit wrapped up in it. I’m not saying people should excuse it.

It’s a flawed work by a flawed person, and people should remember that.

We shouldn’t try to erase or ignore those flaws by trying to explain them away or claim someone else wrote it. Because that allows for complacency.

It implies that we can excuse these things in other works if we like them enough and that they aren’t problematic. If we can ignore them in one place, we can ignore them in other places. That they aren’t as bad if we can pretend they aren’t there.

And that is a problem. People need to accept that, just because they don’t like something, they can’t just disregard it and act like it isn’t there.

It’s real. It’s there. And we need to acknowledge it.

But just because the series isn’t perfect doesn’t mean people can’t still enjoy it.

We shouldn’t magnify the bad things in it until that’s all that can be seen. Because that would erase all the good things people have come away with from this series.

People shouldn’t be shamed or put down for liking Harry Potter.

There are people who’ve discovered importing things about themselves because of Harry Potter. People who found strength to get past difficult and traumatizing events in their lives. People who have found their best friends and even love because of their connection to this series.

There are even people who have found the confidence to embark on their own writing and artistic journeys because of Harry Potter. That it inspired numerous wonderful and amazing things created by it’s fans.

And I think that’s just as important as all the flaws that Rowling’s stories have.

We can still love something while admitting that there are bad parts to it. Books and media don’t have to be perfect. They don’t have to be utterly flawless to be considered “enjoyable”.

We don’t need to act like everything has to be black and white, perfectly defined good and evil, to be good. We can still love things while accepting that there are problems with it.

I just wish more people could understand that.

TLDR: Just because Harry Potter is a flawed, imperfect series written by a flawed, imperfect (and kinda shitty) person doesn’t mean people can’t still like it. And I really wish more people would accept that.

[jcmorrigan]

In Defense of Archibald Snatcher

Oh, wow, we’re coming up on almost the sixth anniversary of The Boxtrolls, my favorite film of all time, and though the fandom for it seems to be either dead or in hibernation, I still have the torch lit.

I actually have been of the mindset of the opinion/s I’m about to present here for all those six years, but never really thought it prudent to lay them out until I recently had a friend I was recommending the film to who I warned about some of the elements considered “problematic” and I offhandedly mentioned that I could do a whole essay about why they don’t bother me and said friend replied with a desire to want to hear it because we share infodump for infodump, so here we go, I’m poking the hornet’s nest surrounding a controversial film with a dead fandom.

But if you were on Tumblr back in the heyday, you might’ve seen the reaction to this film when it first debuted. Specifically, what a lot of people honed in on wa that the villain, Archibald Snatcher, employed a dragsona to be able to push his agenda and implement his evil scheme. There was outrage. There were accusations. There was lambasting. And above it all, one question hovers: was this transphobic?

I want to start, before we get into the weeds, by saying that if you are anywhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and you were offended by this film or this character, your experiences are completely valid. I’m about to present the counterargument in language that assumes my take is fact for the purpose of not having to write fifty thousand clunky disclaimers, but analytical as this may be, it IS an opinion, and if you don’t think it’s right, then hey, that’s super valid, and I’m not gonna try and change your mind, because if you’re hurt, then you’re hurt! You just may want to nope out of this post right now because I’m about to lay out my observations and thoughts to the contrary of the accusations of this being homo/transphobic.

First of all, the obvious facet that comes to mind is how strange it is that we only ever saw the word “transphobia” put on this phenomenon rather than “homophobia” when using a female alter ego as a disguise or a performance art is not the same as being a woman assigned male at birth. One only needs to take a look over at RuPaul’s Drag Race to see examples of this culture. Lots of gay men wearing dresses. No women perceived male.

All the same, I will say that on the surface, adding any kind of queercoding to the story’s villain, who the audience is supposed to boo and hiss at, looks really, really bad on paper. However you interpret it, Snatcher is definitely queercoded. He openly flirts with the man he’s trying to trick as a means of getting what he wants, he displays sincere enjoyment of wearing the dress, and he runs the gamut of flamboyant hand gestures. But if you dig a little further, there’s even more to the story: his tale is one of a man who desires to pass as one of the elite class in his society, but is held back by something he can’t change about himself no matter how he denies it.

Let’s look at the rest of his story. Snatcher is in pursuit of the White Hat: the ultimate status symbol. To that end, he’s decided to otherize the Boxtroll population of the town and play upon the culture shock in Cheesebridge to convince the humans of the “upper world” that the Boxtrolls are predatory monsters who must be killed. This sounds like a pretty black-and-white good-and-evil scenario, right? You’ve got your population of innocent sweethearts being attacked and your genocidal racist orchestrating their destruction. But there’s a third layer still: Lord Portley-Rind, the chief White Hat himself. Lord PR is actually the worst of the lot. It’s because he doesn’t accept Snatcher that Snatcher feels he has to resort to this tactic. He demonstrates open hatred of the Boxtrolls and of Snatcher (”I’m not sure who should be more worried: the Boxtrolls or us!”). There are implications in how he treats his daughter that he’s a textbook sexist who believes there are men’s roles and women’s roles in society and nary the twain shall cross. And he’s the rich guy controlling the entire city and letting children’s hospitals and crumbling bridges go to waste by spending the budget on frivolous cheese. In short, Lord PR is basically the ur-example of a nightmarish fictional Republican (and oh, how I WISH he hadn’t been so prophetic).

I’m not saying Snatcher was justified or good. No. He’s in no way redeemable. But over the course of his interactions with Lord PR, you can see just how much society’s elites treat him as inhuman or like a dirty buffoon. He’s looked down upon, he’s insulted even when he’s doing the “service” Lord PR desires, he’s rejected until he’s gone above and beyond his contract and I think it’s even a little bit implied that Lord PR would’ve reneged on the whole deal if the mob hadn’t cheered for Snatcher in the end. So what you have is a prim and proper billionaire who subscribes to gender roles telling a man of the lower class, obviously economically downtrodden, that he doesn’t deserve what Lord PR has.

The idea of meritocracy is woven throughout the film. Listening to the speech in the background of Snatcher’s anaphylactic attack, while the visuals are focused on Eggs rescuing Fish, you can hear Snatcher rambling about how his father told him that if you work hard, you will receive a White Hat, but he worked hard all his life and got nothing. One of the White Hats literally says he got his through being rich. It’s not hard to infer that Snatcher has figured out how broken the system is and realized the only way to win the game is to cheat.

But there’s still one more thing holding him back from his victory, something that actually trips him up when he achieves what he wanted. Cheese is presented as another status symbol: the rich eat it and are connoisseurs of its flavor. Snatcher is deathly allergic to it. The goal he’s chasing, he can’t even have without threat to his own life. His reaction is to pretend he isn’t allergic and to expose himself to having allergic reactions on the regular to show how much he’s ready to become part of the elites. I’ll reiterate: Archibald Snatcher wants to join the elites, but is held back because of something about himself he cannot change that only matters because the upper crust said it should.

Okay. So we’ve established the man is gay, or somewhere on the queer spectrum. How is this not really, really horrible?

Because the narrative invites you to feel some sympathy for him. No, not for his actions or any secret soft side or tragic backstory (that’s a job for the fans), but because he is chasing a dream he cannot attain. Perhaps the film’s biggest shortcoming is how little consequence comes to Lord PR in the end, because Lord PR, for all intents and purposes, is the worse villain on the board. Snatcher’s ploy is to take the class below the one he inhabits and paint its members as the bad guys: a nuisance that must be exterminated for the betterment of society. And we’ve seen this. We’ve seen plenty of real-life examples of have-nots turning on have-lessers because the haves benefit from oppressed groups infighting and being distracted from who holds the money and the power. A lot of times, you see that while intersectionality is definitely something we need to pay attention to, racism, sexism, and homophobia are not concepts that are all explicitly linked. If you experience one, that doesn’t mean you don’t project one or two of the others on other people - particularly if you’re trying to make yourself feel better about the discrimination you face.

When you look at the hierarchy, Snatcher is, I reiterate, a very bad person. But he’s also a victim. Not as much of a victim as the poor Boxtrolls, who get the malice trickling down from both the Red Hats and the White Hats, but he is a victim. We see him mocked, laughed at, turned away. And though he’s not redeemable, there are aspects in which he is sympathetic.

But what about Frou Frou? What about that particular disguise?

Well, for one, it’s used to make yet another allegorical statement. Snatcher is able to get attention paid to him if he weaponizes female sexuality - though it is a very shallow attention that largely results in the straight men of the town swallowing his propaganda while also objectifying him. Most of the comments made on Frou Frou are slimy, smarmy “compliments” on her body from the White Hats. Lord PR’s wife harbors a distinct distaste for Frou Frou because her husband most certainly prefers ogling Frou Frou to actually paying attention to their marriage. Frou Frou is a propaganda vehicle to make it look like more than one person is on the same page as Snatcher; Snatcher himself drives the action of his scheme and gets the dirty work done.

It’s also worth noting that if you take away the implications, villains using alter egos to trick their nemeses is a tale as old as time, from sea witch Ursula making herself more supermodel-esque in order to marry the prince to mythological Loki actually crossdressing much in the same vein in order to fool the Frost Giants. There’s a reason disguise masters and shapeshifters are intriguing villain archetypes: because we’re always a little bit afraid that someone isn’t who they say they are, and because - yeah, I’m about to go here - I think we all wish we could shift shape ourselves to take on new forms that suit the goals we’re trying to accomplish, even if that means “fooling” others. So it’s reasonable to think Laika wasn’t aware that there was any queercoding to even be had here - but I do think the crew was aware, and not in a malicious way.

However, watching Snatcher’s scenes as Frou Frou, there’s something that comes across in his character that you don’t see so often when he’s presenting male: he’s legitimately having fun. He dances, he flirts with the crowd, he adds more flourishes to his speech, he gets sassy. Frou Frou is a means for him to express himself, to allow himself to be feminine when he has built his philosophy on needing to do “what a man does” (he repeats this at least twice) in order to achieve greatness. He can be a little more himself when he’s Frou Frou, even though Frou Frou isn’t him. Taking a new identity that’s allowed the other half of the gender roles allowed in Cheesebridge (which runs on a binary because it’s run by the White Hats) lets him act a little less like what he needs to be to be taken seriously and a little more like he has freedom.

Put this back in context of the greater narrative: given all the parallels we’ve seen, it’s safe to assume that Cheesebridge, as a whole, is not accepting of deviations from gender roles, whether it’s being open and proud of your LGBTQ+ identity or simply wearing the clothes that don’t belong to your gender. Snatcher is taking an enormous gamble here by using Frou Frou at all. On one hand, it’s a calculated risk; he knows if he can appeal to Lord PR’s unchecked sexist libido, he can secure another avenue to being heard. On the other, however, it’s not really much of a leap to say this is something he wants to do, someone he wants to be more like, and isn’t allowed to, and since he’s cheating at the game anyway, he might as well go all the way and do what he wants with his life.

I’ve seen a lot of people take issue with the scene where he reveals himself to Lord PR and comparing it to some actual homophobic/transphobic media. And again, if that still stands to you as your primary analysis and emotional reaction, then feel free to turn away, reject my analysis, and know your thoughts and feelings are completely valid. But I think this scene differs from your usual “person with male parts tricked you into thinking they were a woman” scene in a couple ways.

For one, Snatcher decides to out himself on his own. To Lord PR, it’s when he’s got nothing left to lose. Again, when he realizes the game is broken and the odds are against him, he takes control and decides to be himself a little more. Now everyone knows he likes to act a dragsona because he wanted them to. But also, earlier on, when he revealed himself to Eggs, it was again on purpose. Eggs didn’t figure him out. Snatcher needed Eggs to know the level of the threat he was dealing with: that he was the person Eggs has been running from since the start and is no less dangerous in a dress. It’s always been of his own volition. There’s no “I thought you knew” or disrobing to see a body that doesn’t match expectations - Eggs ripping Snatcher’s wig off is maybe a little iffier, but again, in context, that’s him trying to show Snatcher’s identity, not as a man but as Archibald Snatcher, to expose the corruption, and Snatcher actually plays it completely off because he’s that good of an actor.

Which brings me to my second point. There’s only one person who reacts in an “Oh, gross!” manner to this revelation, and it’s Lord Portley-Rind. The one we’ve established is sexist, homophobic, and your textbook Rich White Straight Cis Man. The one at the top of the food chain. The one who’s been objectifying Snatcher and acting like a slobbering pervert about Frou Frou from the beginning. The homophobe realizes he has been a little gay. The sexist realizes his objectifying a particular person he perceived female has consequences. And this is why to me, that scene is actually hilarious. Because I don’t feel like I’m laughing at Snatcher’s expense. I’m laughing because Lord PR just got called OUT, and this is exactly the kind of discomfort that is karmic given how he’s treated his daughter, his wife, and everyone in his city who’s needed him.

Cycling back to when Snatcher outs himself at the ball, Eggs doesn’t really seem to care that there’s a gender-role-play involved here. His concern is not that this is actually a man; his concern is that it’s specifically the person who he knows is trying to ruin everything. Same with Winnie when Eggs passes it on. Eggs trying to reveal Snatcher to the crowd doesn’t even begin with “Frou Frou is fake,” but a line I will never forget: “Archibald Snatcher has lied to you all.” Not even drawing attention yet to the fact that he’s in the room. Starting out by having everyone remember that guy they are all sure ISN’T there and pointing out he’s bad news.

To look at Lord Portley-Rind’s “Oh my God! I regret so much!” as a dig at Snatcher is to say that Lord Portley-Rind is the lens through which we should be viewing this story, which it most certainly isn’t. The lens is Eggs and Winnie. Adjacent lenses are Fish, Shoe, and Jelly. Lord Portley-Rind is an antagonist to every single character in this film save the other White Hats.

Which is why if this film falls flat anywhere, it’s in letting Lord Portley-Rind get away without consequence. I think I can take a guess as to why this primarily happened: it needed to wrap up in a little under two hours, and dismantling systematic oppression and abuse of socioeconomic power can’t be done in a two-hour escapade. I still wish he were at least villainized a little more, as that’s where the narrative was leading up to that point. One of his earliest scenes with Winnie foreshadows that he will have to choose between her and the hat, and it takes him two tries to make the right choice. This story, until the very last act, has not supported him being a character to like or sympathize with, even in such subtle ways as Trout and Pickles stealing his hat and running around with it to taunt Snatcher - showing that a symbol is really only a symbol, and doesn’t indicate your worth. Anyone can put on a hat. Lord PR has just been brought onto an equal footing with them, if only for a moment.

Okay, so why have this whole three-layer narrative anyway? Couldn’t we have made this story more clear-cut between the Boxtrolls and White Hats, with no queercoded villain to get in between?

Yes...but I’m not sure that would have been best for the viewing audience. And there’s plenty of precedent as to why Laika thought it was a move for the better.

Queercoded villains are in every aspect of our fictional and fandom lives. Here’s a bitter pill to swallow: all your favorite Disney villains are queercoded. All of them. “But Frollo’s arc is about - “ Being a man in a religious system afraid of being tainted as sinful for being attracted to the wrong person. “Gaston, though, is - “ Very chummy with LeFou, and I’m talking the animated versions. They’re all colorful, flamboyant, foppish for the men and full of socially-unacceptable strength for the women. These were the cornerstones of our childhood nostalgia and characters we still feel culturally attached to.

It’s not just in Disney. Are you a fan of musical theater? Well, then your favorite villain probably got a big song and dance in which they wore some glitter. Classic lit? Google the name of your favorite literary canon villain and “queer theory” and see what happens.

I don’t think we can really say this is good or bad. On one hand, it’s not great that a marginalized group can only see themselves in the character we’re supposed to hate. On the other, though, we don’t always hate that character. Villains hold a unique place in our culture. They do bad things, horrible things, but the story can’t take place without a conflict, and we like when that conflict has a name and a cool design such as a tall, imposing sorcerer/witch in flowing robes - or perhaps a tall, graceful man in a long red coat and a towering crooked top hat.

I’ve had lots of friends and trusted Internet reviewers talking about how queercoding in villains can actually be really empowering. If you’re a fan of the villain, you get to see a power fantasy in which someone who has something very big in common with you gets to enact karma on others for wronging them! You get to wear the cool robes, sing the fun song, do things that are not really legal or acceptable! I think a great analogy is if you check out the book “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” by Sady Doyle. It’s primarily about sexism rather than queer issues (though it does touch upon them!), but examines how women throughout pop culture and storytelling history have always been the witch, the monster, the demon, and how that sucks, but it also means that women have a great pile of fictional power fantasies to pick from to indulge in. It’s the same principle. I myself may not be same-gender-attracted, but I am asexual, and still waiting on my glamorous villain who uproots society as revenge for being forced to do something analogous to having a sexual relationship...*taps wristwatch*

Meanwhile, queercoding is not as prevalent in heroes. And I think that’s where everything’s tripping on its own feet. Because a gay villain among a bunch of straight heroes does look pretty bad. Are some of the heroes queercoded as well, though? Well, that’s just realistic diversity. People are gay, and there happen to be some good ones and some evil ones here. I don’t think Snatcher’s dragsona is entirely unproblematic, but I do think it could have been mitigated a lot with more implications that Eggs and Winnie might be queer in some way (and believe me, I choose to interpret them that way, because the more the merrier).

The thing is that in pop culture as of late, there seems to be a trend to scrub away all villainous queercoding because it’s seen as a black-and-white issue. To go back to the Disney villains, do you feel like the live-action recreations of Jafar, Scar, and Gaston are missing a certain je ne sais quoi? Well, think about it through this lens and it might be that you savez quoi after all. They’ve all been made incredibly straight as of late, with off-the-record actor confirmations about having obsessive crushes on the film heroines. I can’t speak to why this has happened; there’s a lot of history behind any given social movement, and I haven’t managed to really unpack this one. “Blame Tumblr” is too easy; I would want to know who were the loudest voices, why they said what they said, and what was the intended accomplishment, not to mention if this had built on other social-media or real-life platforms over the years and was influenced by any outside source by news or marketing. I can’t say why queercoded villains are being burned; I can only say it’s happening. And it was happening big-time in 2014, when The Boxtrolls was released.

I also feel like I would be remiss to mention that The Boxtrolls is based on “Here Be Monsters,” which I believe to be one of the worst books I’ve ever read, bar none. That version of the story has...pretty much everything that’s perceived to be in the film version’s text as problematic. Frou Frou is presented as something to laugh at Snatcher about throughout, largely because everything about Snatcher is presented to make him seem gross or like a buffoon. There’s a whole scene of the hero rifling through his desk to find soiled underwear. Not to mention that the original purpose of Frou Frou in the text was to manipulate the town’s women by dictating the fashion trends they should follow and the beliefs they should hold in order to fit in. This is something that does need commentary on it, but in that text in particular, it seems like the women are silly and easily swayed, and that they’re the town’s weak link because they’re slaves to fashion. The Boxtrolls completely flips this around so that the town’s weak link re: Frou Frou is the rich MEN who objectify women, particularly the men that happen to be in charge of the whole town, and looking at that divide alone tells me how much care was put into this adaptation at every level.

So why’d I do this, besides having a friend who wanted to read it? Because Archibald Snatcher is legitimately one of my favorite fictional characters. Yeah, I know, he’s a horrible person and terribly racist, and no, I don’t think his demonizing an entire people is anything to be emulated. But on one hand, there are places where I not only empathize but identify with him, particularly where it comes to living out the majority of one’s life trying to live up to a meritocracy - I did everything right, so why am I not on top? He’s also just fun and satisfying to me. He’s the exact brand of evil I eat up. He’s quippy, flamboyant, sadistic to a point, and altogether enjoying his job way too much. Even though he isn’t in power all that long, he is a power fantasy for me, too - wishing I had his talent to talk my way into others’ hearts by saying the right thing, and maybe cultivating a little bit of that I didn’t realize I had (but not to use for evil purposes). I loved him from the moment he turned up because of his sheer dynamic presence - his drawn-out vowels, his sinister smile, his silver-tongued manipulations - and to this day I find him an inspiring character when it comes to writing fiction, both in the realms of fanfiction and original villain creation. You could say he’s a comfort character to me. And maybe this has been the delusional rambling of a woman trying to protect a character she likes for surface reasons by spelling out what look like analytical points of discussion.

But I don’t think Laika was trying to be mean-spirited or homo/transphobic in their character creation. I think they were trying to make an engaging villain who had some layers you could pick at to see more about the narrative as a whole and the message of societal corruption and how the way to overcome it is to be true to yourself rather than defined by your status: a lesson Snatcher fails at the finish line when Eggs gives him one last chance to “make you.” And ultimately, if you really and truly did like Archibald Snatcher, you’re not wrong or invalid in the least.

[linkspooky]

One Bad Day - League of Villains

can you explain the meaning of all it takes is one bad day meaning my hero academia? I saw it used with twice but i thought that it might appy to some of the villians we saw in the manga. 

In the most recent arc “My Villain Academia” the story flipped to the villain’s side rather than the heroes and we saw the world through their eyes. In that same arc, Hori made several allusions to The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, a comic that explores a darker take on the relationship between batman and the joker and one potential take on the Joker’s Character. It just like My Villain Academia is a story told mainly through the villain’s eyes rather than the hero’s, and it’s all about the narrative a villain tells himself. 

What was Hori’s purpose in referencing the killing joke? Did he take inspiration from the story? Is he just a nerd making a comic book reference? Did he believes the themes espoused in the Killing Joke to be true? Let’s take a look under the cut. 

1. The Killing Joke

The most logical place to start is with the material Horikoshi is referencing himself. I read the Killing Joke several years ago, and reread it for the purpose of this meta. The funny thing about the killing joke (har har) as it’s one of those stories that gets misinterpreted a lot by fans. 

It’s actually a pet peeve of mine when people blame the original work itself, like saying it’s Fight Club’s fault that people misread it. The common misreading of the text is that Joker is right, that he’s actually this really deep person that sees through the lies of society. Even when the entire point of the story is that Joker is wrong, the characters even say this out loud as direct  dialogue. This story is the exact opposite of subtle, it’s very in your face with it’s themes, almost too loud.

 People confuse the Joker’s own personal narrative, that he sees through these things and is therefore deeper and more aware than anybody else, with the framing of the story that frames Joker as petty and shallow. But, you could have Joker wear a t-shirt that says “I am wrong and a hypocrite” the entire work and people would still misread it. 

The point of this preamble being, I don’t think Hori misinterpreted the killing Joke. I do not think his reading of the story is so shallow he referenced it because the joker is a cool villain who says cool things. I hope that will show as I continue, that there is a lot of thought put into these connections. Even if it’s not a direct adaptation of the themes of the killing work the two separate works make for a really interesting comparison. 

Joker says many things about the world., but the killing Joke isn’t about the world at all, nor does Joker really care about the world. The Killing Joke is not a comment on society, it’s a character study, primarily about the relationship between Batman and the Joker. It starts and ends with the titular killing joke. 

See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum, and one night, one night they decide they don’t like living in the asylum anymore. They decide they’re going to escape. So, like, they get up on the roof and there, just across this narrow gap, they see the rooftops of the town stretching away in the moonlight, stretching away to freedom. Now, the first guy, he jumps right across with no problem but his friend, his friend daredn’t make the leap, y’see. Y’see he’s afraid of falling. So then the first guy has an idea. He says “Hey, I have my flashlight with me. I’ll shine it across the gape between the buildings. You can walk along the beam and join me.” But the second guy just shakes his head. He suh-says. He says “wh-what do you think I am, crazy? You’d turn it off when I was halfway across.” 

The Joker's joke, which is an analogy of how hopeless it is for one insane man to try saving another insane man. It's so sadly relevant, Batman can't help but join the Monster in bitter laughter. The entire story is a character study of the foiling between Batman and the Joker, and how both of their actions, becoming a hero, becoming a villain, is a response to meaningless tragedy in their lives. Yet, even if Batman recognizes that they’re both victims in a way he can’t save joker, because it’s impossible for one insane man to save another. 

That is the main theme, of the Killing Joke. In a way it’s a failure of empathy, because batman’s methods won’t save the joker, punching him in the face won’t fix him. That is also what I believe Horikoshi disagrees with.

The main conflict of the Killing Joke is that the Joker is trying to make a point. That he’s not that different from everybody else, that anyobdy when exposed to the meaningless tragedy of the world would go insane. That it’s the right response and everybody else, clinging to to society, and it’s made up rules are the ones who are really man. 

It’s basically what is called moral nihilism. 

Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that ethical claims are generall false. It holds that there are no objective moral facts, or true propositions - that nothing is morally good, bad, right, wrong, because there are no moral truths. 

Basically, because morals are made up ideas by human beings therefore morals cannot exist. The thing is while it insists there is no value to the things we believe are proper and right about the world, it’s not Nihilism or not in the nietzschian sense of the word. 

See, the thing is Joker is right that all of these institutions are meaningless, that they’re not as set in stone as humans would like to pretend they are, that the earth under your feet could fall out under you at any time. 

But that realization is not necessarily something that leads to evil, or even madness. Like, nihilism is very subversive of power structures. People use the idea of meaning, they use ideas, they use the way the world currently is as unfair as it is to insist that the world has always been that way, to keep in power. Therefore, rejecting what you are told by existing power structures and finding their words meaningless and thinking critically instead is something that could lead into something better. The formation of new ideas inevitably involves the rejection of old ones as meaningless. 

However, the joker isn’t interested in any of that. Nothing he says is subversive of power structures at all. He doesn’t care about the injustice of the world, or the way power structures let people like him fall through the cracks. In fact, Joker recreates the same power structures he is trying so hard to subvert and laugh at. 

Joker’s entire (possible?) backstory is that he was a victim of poverty that the world didn’t really care about, was utterly indifferent to, and the realization of the world’s indifference to him is what drove him mad in the end. However, the thing about the Joker is, he sucks at telling jokes. His attempted parody or satire just ends up recreating the same ideas of the society he is trying so hard to say that he’s above. 

In his backstory, the Joker makes a pretty misogynist joke. While a victim of poverty himself, he looks down on women victims of poverty who sell their own bodies and try to live just like he is. Joker’s problem isn’t society itself, it’s that he’s the one being stepped on, and not the one stepping on others because he thinks it should be the other way around. A guy like him should have never ended up society’s victim, society’s punchline. 

Which is why he insists that he’s normal. He’s the same as everybody else. And in a way he’s right, Joker reflects the attitudes of society, he’s sexist, he looks down at the poor, it’s implied he takes his feelings of inferiority out on his wife.  He’s normal for all of those reasons, not because it would be normal to go insane. 

Also, this is just a side tangent but there’s a lot of philosophy on whether normal people are good or bad which is too lengthy to get into, but whether people are born good or bad by default, normal people will carry within them the ideas society raised them in. 

“You must stop your fooling around with women. You’ve gone far enough. Society won’t stand for more.”  What, I wondered, did he mean by “Society?” The plural of human beings? 

No longer Human, Osamu Dazai. 

Society is the plural of human beings. Joker is a part of the same society, a reflection of the same society, a response to it, just like any other person is, and in that way he’s normal and not as outside of society as he believes himself to be. 

The work then goes on to make the point that while this may be our society, there are also people who try to be better even in situations like these. Gordon the entire time, tells Batman it’s wrong even if Joker is a bad person who murders people, to beat him up because police brutality is wrong. 

So we finally reach the scene which Hori is quoting. Joker’s speech to Batman, the grand point that he is trying to prove. That everybody is the same as he is, they just haven’t realized it yet. That anybody would have gone mad being put through what he was put through, the revelation that everything was meaningless. 

However, once again Joker doesn’t actually care whether society is meaningless or not. In fact, his actions are the opposite of NIhilism. He is trying to make a point. A point, as in, the opposite of meaninglessness. He thinks there are ideas that are correct, that there’s such a thing as being right about this world. 

Which is why we see is his slow breakdown amidst his own monologue. What he really wants is to prove to someone else his perspective is correct. So that he can finally feel justified in it, and maybe because batman isn’t responding he has to pause a minute and consider that he’s wrong?

What Joker fears is true meaninglessness. So everything he does isn’t reveling in meaninglessness like he supposes, it’s the opposite of it. He’s trying to create a narrative to life, he’s trying to give it themes, he wants to teach a lesson. Joker’s views are just a reflection of the society that created him. Joker thinks everybody else is wrong, but the idea that he himself might be wrong genuinely breaks him. 

Which is why Batman’s line here is so important. Because I’ve heard it before. What Joker says is no different from society. He carries the same attitudes. Society isn’t just some idea floating out there, it’s made up of human beings, people like the Joker. 

So, the work of the Killing Joke itself is subversive to the idea that one bad day is all it takes to turn anyone into a villain. However, at the same time the Killing Joke is not trying to make a point about society, or insanity, or victimhood and trauma or anything like that. All of those ideas present in the work, but they are basically just window dressing because the central part of the story is a character study between Joker and Batman, two people who let their entire lives be ruined by one bad day. 

However, at the same time Killing Joke is heavily flawed. Just like the joker is misogynist, etc. etc, the work itself is rife with the nineties it was made in. On that front it’s much more a product of its time than ahead of its time in any signficiant way. Like, there’s the obvious fridging of Barbara Gordon, but also as I said the point they are trying to make isn’t reflective of mental illness or trauma or anything like that. The joker went mad because he was a bad person to begin with. 

See the thing is I also believe that mentally ill people are perfectly capable of being bad people at the same time. There’s nuance there. No Longer Human, by Osamu Dazai is an example of this. The main character isn’t a bad person because they are mentally ill. The fact that they are a victim of trauma never goes away throughout the book. Yet at the same time, you see the person just uses other people as things for them to cope with, they could care less about the feelings of others, they see no one else as an individual. The way they cope with their mental illness when they are given access to healthier alternatives, is what makes them a bad person. 

While yes that is also a part of the Joker’s character, he’s always been double sided as a bully, as someone who is looking for an excuse to exploit others not really to make any kind of point. Which is why the ideas of mental illness and victimhood and whether society is at fault for creating people like this by the act of letting people fall through the cracks isn’t really suited to a character like the joker. This is something Alan Moore himself admits. 

I’ve never really liked my story in The Killing Joke. I think it put far too much melodramatic weight upon a character that was never designed to carry it. It was too nasty, it was too physically violent. There were some good things about it, but in terms of my writing, it’s not one of me favorite pieces.

“Alan Moore”

There are a lot of ideas about society brought up in the Killing Joke, but none of them are substantial, and none of them really matter because the work itself is not trying to develop them. 

However, the ideas themselves are still good which is why I like to think Hori’s work in My Hero Academia, his insistence that one bad day is what created people like Shigaraki, Twice, and Redestro is not a misinterpretation of Alan Moore’s message but in fact an interesting response. 

2. Shigaraki’s Bad Day 

There are a lot of connections between Shigaraki, the character and the Joker for instance, it’s pointed out right a way in the same sense as the Joker is throughout the entire Killing Joke comic, that he does not really mean what he says and he isn’t actually trying to prove any kind of point through his actions. 

However, Horikoshi’s writing and humanization of Shigaraki is really different and takes a different direction than the Joker. Here let’s talk about good victim bad victim again. 

The reason good victim bad victim is bad, because it basically tries to strip away victimhood of characters in order to render them in black and white ways. It gives the implication that reacting certain ways to trauma makes you a bad person. The feelings of the victim are entirely stripped away and they’re stopped from being seen as a human being, because other people want to fit them into a simpler black and white narrative.  Nuance is the best way to approach these scenes. So, let’s look at this scene with what we now know. Shigaraki is a victim of abuse. Not only that but he became a punching bag for his father, directly because All Might’s Master abandoned his father to raise All Might Instead. He was raised in domestic violence, and then adopted by a violent person and molded into becoming more violent raised with no stability, no home and constantly exposed to danger that would threaten his life.

So, yes Shigaraki’s words might be nonsense but the feelings behind them are still real. This is what All Might’s Mistake is, he could not care any less about the feelings that the person he is fighting has, and he just sees them as someone to punch in the face. This is also something that bites him later when he realizes that Shigaraki actually was someone he was connected to. 

Of course All Might is trying to save a bunch of kids, does he really have time to listen to the feelings of somebody threatening to kill kids? Who knows. That’s the thing about reality, it is mesy and indefinite, there are more important questions to ask then whether victims are good or bad. You could also say at the same time that All Might is completely oblivious to the feelings of victims of abuse. That he still fails to see what kind of person Endeavor is, and insists he has good things to teach people, because Endeavor is a part of the same sytem that heroes is. 

Anyway, the point of that tangent was to establish a good aspect of Hori’s writing, characters are people first. Shigaraki is a victim first before the question of whether he is a good person or a bad person is even asked. 

Shigaraki is also, someone like the joker thinks he seees above society because he sees it from an outsider’s perspective. He views other people as clinging onto meaningless ideals and unable to see or think for themselves, because they’re too concerned with the illusion of safety. 

Shigaraki also shares the same relationship with Deku that the joker does with Batman. Even though they do not know or understand each other, the two of them are set up as mortal enemies and keep fighting each other because their masters pushed them into this fight. Deku even denounces Shigaraki the same way that Batman does the Joker. 

Shigaraki and the joker both experience a moment where they snap. Almost as if their entire lives have been defined by one bad day, where a lot of it amounted to coincidence. Joker loses his whole family in one day and falls in the chemical tank, Tenko’s quirk activates after a particularly bad day of abuse in his abusive household and his family is caught up in an accident, and then when his father attacks him he tries to defend himself. 

Here is the primary difference though. With Joker there’s the idea written that Joker was like that all along, that he wanted to hurt people and take out his shitty life on others, and that his madness just revealed feelings that were already there. This mostly works in the case of the joker because he’s a bully, a bad person, that’s who he’s always been. 

But, Shigaraki is 1) five years old, and 2) we see the kind of person Shigaraki is before trauma. 

He’s a kid who is in fact, victimized by the patriarchical ideas of society. Unlike the joker who believed he deserved more, not only was Tenko literally just a kid trying to be himself and follow his own dream who was abused by patriarchical authority figure in his own house, but Tenko even as a victim still cared about the feelings of other people, fellow people who were being excluded like him and he went out of his way to look out for them. 

There are absolutely no hints that Tenko was simply a bad person all along, and that he was looking for the excuse to simply act on his impulses to hurt other people and destroy things. In fact this idea itself appears in story as a narrative that All for One feeds him in order to manipulate. The Joker’s ideas appear in the story, but the one that uses them, the one that’s just a bully taking advantage of weaker people is All for One, not Shigaraki. 

Shigaraki is deliberately raised not to have empathy for others, to only act on his own impulsive feelings to destroy, to be impulsive, to act to hurt whoever he wants, whenever he wants. 

Now, I don’t know if there are truly good or evil people in this world. Good and evil might not even be real, but, at the same time jerks are real, and they’re out there in the world being jerks. For the sake of simplicity let’s just define a jerk as somebody who does not care about the feelings of other people in the least, especially when it comes secondary to their own feelings. Shigaraki does not fit that criteria. 

Shigaraki listens to the people around him, he treats them with care. Even though Shigaraki suffered one bad day, and then several bad days after that, the part of Shigaraki that All for One tried so hard to destroy where he actually wants to reach out and connect to others and stand up for them is still there. 

So, in a way Horikoshi is using Shigaraki for a much more empathic take of one bad day, which sort of validates both sides of the argument. Yes, someone’s entire life can be ruined by one day and they can fall through the cracks that easily and the society that was supposed to take care of them won’t. It’s a stance that acknowledges that villains are made, and trauma exists and will always affect people whether they are good or bad people. 

However, at the same time that does not necessarily mean the person you are will be gone forever. One bad day cannot destroy you. The Joker’s view is pessimistic because he believes there’s no hope for someone like him, that both he and batman are completely broken and will have their lifes defined by their one bad day their entire life. Whereas, not only are the good parts fo Shigaraki still in there, but he also is someone slowly recovering from his trauma when placed in a much healthier environment. The Shigaraki at the beginning of the manga, and the Shigaraki we know now are different, because Shigaraki does not want to be stuck in one bad day his whole life, he’s trying desperately to become his own person outside of his trauma. 

In the end, one bad day can in fact ruin your entire life. Which is why the message of the Killing Joke ends up coming off as a little ableist, by saying that if you were a good person you would not have let it ruin you. It’s kind of like saying that Dabi is a bad person because he chose to be a villain in response to Endeavor’s abuse, even though Shouto was abused and chose to become a hero. Like, that’s a pointless argument to make, and holds Dabi accountable for his own abuse instead of holding Endeavor accountable for the people he abused. 

Shigaraki isn’t the joker, because Shigaraki is a lot more human than the joker as a character. 

2. Twice’s Bad Day

The other fundamental difference between the Joker and The League of VIllains is that the Joker really is not trying to make any kind of anti-establishment point, nor does he really care about the society around him, whereas the League of Villains definitely does care. The Killing Joke isn’t actually about society, but My Hero Academia, the central conflict of the story is about the society the story takes place in, a society that basically manufactures it’s own villains. 

Twice, just like the joker, and just like Shigaraki is someone who is driven insane by one bad day. Specifically because society as a whole neglected him and let him fall through the cracks. He’s also like the joker, someone who while at the same time as being insane, genuinely is able to observe the world around him from an outsider’s viewpoint and pick up on things. He tends to be more aware than the other characters, even while babbling like he’s just comedic relief. 

However, Twice’s views are also in direct contrast with the Joker’s. Twice himself believes that it’s fine that normal people are able to enjoy their normal everyday lives, and that people exist in this society who have no problem fitting in at all. 

Whereas, the joker loathes normal people and anyobdy else who can fit into society in a way that he cannot. He dismisses them all as idiots and laughs at them. That’s because, as a character Twice is far more self aware, unlike the Joker who is in denial of his want for people to understand him that’s exactly what Twice wants and admits to wanting. He knows his views are outside of normal society, so instead of trying to prove that he’s right, Twice seeks out people who are like him. 

He also knows that society will not try to save or sympathize with a person like his. The thing is the things Twice is saying aren’t grandiose claims to the true meaning of the world or seeing through everything, instead they’re much more grounded observations that are true because My Hero Academia is trying to prove a society that has failed people like Twice. 

Twice’s story even mirrors the joker in several ways. He is basically the same, a guy down on his luck, dealing with poverty who eventually resorts to crime when all of his other options fall through. 

Let us count the actual societal injustices that are present in Twice’s Backstory. Twice obeyed the law, and the person he hit did not. However, because the person he hit was a rich person and Twice was not, Twice was the one who was punished instead. Almost as if laws that supposedly protect everybody favor rich people and people with power already. 

The foster system left Twice alone when his parents died from a villain attack. 

Not only is Jin given a permanent record which affects all of his future employment because society treats felons like they are not people, but rather a lower class, but he also was fired from his job because someone abused the power they had in society to carry out a personal grudge against Twice. That person got away scott free and Twice lost his entire livelihood. 

Twice retaliates and he turns to crime in order to survive, and yes there were better ways that Twice could have responded, but the only reason that Twice was put into the situation in the first place was several abuses of power in society directed towards him. People like to insist over and over again that victims should always just remain good people forever, without lashing out, or hurting others in order to survive but then not say how they are supposed to survive in those situations. 

Twice however, takes full responsibility for his actions and realizes that his lashing out, his decision to live selfishly and steal and try to live the good life abusing his quirk was not what he wanted at all. His actions result directly in his bad day. 

However, Twice too is given an option to recover. All it takes is one bad day, and anyone can become a villain is not the Joker trying to point in the context of My Hero Academia, it’s a statement of empathy. That Twice, Shigaraki are not alone in their trauma. That they are both able to find each other, and start to see themselves as human when they realize they were people driven to be this way and not bad people who were always this way. In Horikoshi’s writing it becomes a much more humanizing statement. 

The sense of understanding that Joker is depserately trying to find in batman by proving a point, by forcing him to see the world this way, Twice and Shigaraki find in each other.

The Joker’s descent into madness is  sign that he is permanently broken, whereas when Twice imitates that same pose and expression it’s used in a moment of healing for him. It’s him realizing broken as he is, he’s still here, he survived his one bad day. 

As a final note, while portraying this humanizing message Horikoshi also manages to succesfully illsutrate the original point of the killing joke as well. It’s almost like having multiple examples of mental illness present in your stories, you can better explore the more negative reactions to mental ilness as well without coming off as ablist. 

The commentary that Joker is a part of the society he thinks himself better in, that he repeats what he’s trying to subvert, that he entirely fails at sattire is something that is repeated in Rikiya. 

Rikiya and Joker are both capable of observing the society around them. They know the society around them is wrong. RIkiya’s ideals as Re-Destro that people should not be judged by their quirks and that quirk society as a whole tends to restrict people entirely based on their quirks, something that they are born with and cannot control, and that society should be trying to adapt to people and change rather than just putting certain people down for the benefit of the people who can fit in better. 

However, both the joker and Rikiya are shown explicity not really to have attachment to the other people around them, or see them as people. They are jerks. Rikiya sees people as dispoable sacrifices to his great goal of reforming society. 

Rikiya however speaks of how evil society’s prejudgices is, and then he goes and repeats them. He looks down on the league of villains for being poor and disabled when he himself is a wealthy businessman. He suggests that Shigaraki is uneducated as an insult to put him in his place. 

His followers who espouse how people should not be judged by their meta abilities, judge the league as worthless and unworthy people because of their quirks. 

Destro says not to judge people by their quirks, and then goes and immediately insists that Shigaraki can only be a bad person who wants to destroy people, because he happened to be born that way. 

Re-Destro claims to be anti-establishment, but not only does Rikiya thrive in this exact kind of society (he’s a wealthy businessman he’s on the top of society, punching down at people who fell through cracks and were living as genuinely homeless going day to day for survival), but even if he were succesful at destroying the current society his ideals would just recreate the same unbalanced society just with him at the top. 

Rikiya would create a society where people are still discriminated on based by their quirks, he would create a society where people with stronger, flashier, quirks are able to have more freedom in life, and find more success and people with weaker quirks cannot amount to anything. How is that any different from the society he’s a part of? 

Rikiya is a part of the society he is trying to destroy. Yet, even he is still a victim in a way, he was raised in a cult to think that way and told that he had to believe these things because of who his father was, and he’s constantly at conflict with himself because of it. 

Rikiya, Shigaraki, and Twice in addition to other members of the League of Villains who fell through the cracks, all of these characters read as responses to different aspects of the jokers character and different ideas he presented in The Killing Joke. Rather than just a reference though, it is an intelligent response, that Horikoshi clearly made these ideas his own and shows off his priorities in wanting us as the audience to forget that these characters we call villains are human first. 

In the end the Killing Joke and My Villain Academia play with the same ideas to come to different conclusions. The Killing Joke ends with the idea that an insane person cannot save another insane person. Batman cannot save the joker. The joker is not someone who can be saved, and at the realization of that batman starts to strangle him and gives into his worst instincts to commit police brutality. 

My Hero Academia uses those same ideas to tell a story where insane people can save other insane people. Unlike Batman and the Joker, I genuinely believe that Horikoshi is writing towards a conclusion where Shigaraki is someone who can be saved by Deku, not someone he is meant to continually fight with until one of them dies or the other. 

In the end they are two different stories one of them illsutrates a failure of empathy and the other illustrates how empathy among insane people brought them together. 

[milk-luvr-dot-com]

“A New Assistant” - The Thick Of It - Chapter 3

Summary: Nicola juggles a grieving redhead and a moronic, neurotic press advisor. Ivy and Malcolm have a falling out.

Word Count (this chapter): 5108

Rating: Mature (For adult situations, language)

Warnings: No Ao3 Warnings, Explicit Language, homophobic language, fatphobic language, sexist language, ablest language, implied/referenced past abuse

Categories: F/M, Gen

Tags: Falling in love, crushes, comedy, slow burn, explicit language, original  female characters, AU - canon divergence, mutual pining, friendship, friends to lovers, angst, implied/referenced past abuse, additional tags to be added

Chapter 1, Chapter 2

Full chapter and Ao3 link under the cut.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/24510592/chapters/59509222

Ivy and Malcolm walked down the halls of the hotel, briskly, and popping along the way to say hello to mindless news people and other members of the cabinet, who were all nervously preparing and memorizing speeches. Ivy wasn't sure why Malcolm had invited her. She was gonna be like a bump on a log the whole weekend, since she was still too new to fully deal with the press on her own. Maybe Malcolm saw it as a training opportunity. Maybe he just wanted to not deal with a bunch of bullshit this weekend. Maybe he just wanted to spend time with her.

The latter was what was actually true. Malcolm just wanted to spend time alone with Ivy. I mean, it wasn't weird to invite your assistant with you to the party conference, right? It wasn't weird to get a room with two twin beds. Right?

Well, actually. Touch of a problem with that. As sitcom as it is, when they opened the door to the room, there was only one bed. A queen size bed. It's as if the fucking people who booked the hotel were trying to tell them something. It was actually pretty likely, rather, because they both had recently pissed off one of the desk jockeys in the department. It wouldn't have been hard to make a quick last-minute change.

"You're actually fucking kidding me, right?" Malcolm said, massaging the bridge of his nose as they entered.

"I'll sleep on the couch."

"What? No. No, I'll just call and ask for a room change. Hang on." He set his small suitcase down and made his way over to the side of the bed with the phone. He sunk in immediately. The bed creaked dreadfully. He cringed.

She sat about 3/4 of the way down the bed on the opposite side of him.

"Hello, sorry, is it possible we could get a room change? You see it's just that-... Jesus Christ, you're kidding. FUCK!" He slammed the phone down, rubbing his face. She whipped her head around. "Hm?"

"They're completely booked. No other rooms."

"Looks like I'm sleeping on the couch, then." She shrugged, looking back and staring at the painting hanging on the wall above the dresser. It had blues coinciding with a dash of yellow, a close-up of a field of forget-me-not flowers. "Pretty painting."

Malcolm was lost in thought, staring at the neutral carpet grain that hadn't been changed since the 70s. "Huh?"

"That painting. It's pretty. I don't know the name of those flowers. And trust me, I've seen a lot of flowers, I used to work in the funeral industry."

He turned, shifting further down the bed. "They look familiar." Ivy looked over at him, confused. "My mother used to garden. I'd help her occasionally."

She smiled, in a snarky manner. "Malcolm Tucker's a poof."

"Shut up. Right," he clapped, rising. "We've got to get a wiggle on, we've got reporters to jack off."

She stood up as well, following him. "A wiggle on?"

"You know what I mean. Come on, come on, come on."

  They met up with some press people, among other friendly faces. It was still fairly early. T minus 2 hours until Nicola inevitably embarrasses herself.

"I mean, these are the worst pictures I've seen, really, they are. I don't know who was taking them." He pointed to one of his mates' ID badge photos. The bloke picked it up, looking at it briefly. "They've got Roy fucking Orbison doing that."

"I've heard he wasn't even blind." Ivy added, elbowing him. She was purposefully trying to embarrass him, as a joke. 

"Malcolm?" The woman who's badge read Angela Heaney inquired.

"Yeah?"

"Have you seen Rob Holt's blog today?"

"Oh, yeah, of course, I read Rob Holt's blog. I read all the blogs. 'Cause basically I'm an underemployed fat fucking loser. Got nothing better to do with my time than sit in my bedroom like a fat space-hopper in a tracksuit, reading inconsequential, unspellchecked shit, fabricated by other fat, farting, fucking losers."

Ivy pressed her lips together, going wide eyed briefly to show her annoyance, albeit agreement. Angela began to explain, "Well, he's saying that the big health numbers in the PM's speech, they're from a false sample. Apparently, they're lifted from Andrew Dover's blog, not ONS."

Malcolm shot a look at Ivy, who immediately pretended to take a call, and walk off. "I wouldn't take any notice of it. There's nothing in that at all." He said.

"Nothing?"

"Nope, nothing. Catch you laters, alright?" He walked away, joining Ivy, who looked at him as soon as she said, "Whoever fucking leaked it is going to be leaking drool for the next six months after I've beat them into a shell of a human with a golf club. Fix it, or you'll hear worse from Malcolm. Right. Bye."

"Jesus. You're really hurling the colorful insults now."

She brushed past him, and began walking to their next destination. He followed. "Well, I learned from the best."

“Okay. So,” He clapped, “I need to phone the PM and tell him.”

“Uh, we could go up to the halls. No one’s up there.”

“Yes, right,” he pointed at her, “good. Get away from all these leeching journalists.” 

They took the lift up a couple levels. Ivy didn’t expect him to stay near the lifts. No, Malcolm liked pacing. She wasn’t sure if it was a nervous habit of his (because she wasn’t sure if Malcolm was ever nervous,) or if walking around just made him feel important. Either scenario was realistic.

They lurked around the halls. Ivy was pretty sure their room was nearby. Maybe she’d pressed the same button as before by muscle memory. She could hear background chatter from various rooms of important people cheersing and toasting for important causes. But it was mostly drowned out by Malcolm’s stern voice. Being honest with herself, Malcolm was more important than anyone in those rooms.

She expected to get ambushed at least once by some eavesdropping journalist, like Nicola did. Oh, who was she kidding, Malcolm wouldn’t let that happen. He’s got a stick far too up his arse for that. He was like a light sleeping soldier in a warzone with that sort of thing.

What they did get ambushed by, instead was the crack-addicted Timothee Chalamet (Or Olly, if you prefer,) and a ginger woman.

“Oh, hey, Malcolm, Ivy. How’s it hanging?”

“Like the Gardens of Babylon. Do you know where Lord Clarkham’s room is? I’m gonna go and try and stick his balls in his fucking trouser press.”

Ivy looked Olly up and down, then smirked sarcastically, “I see you’ve pulled.” She winked.

“Uh- look this is Julie Price. She is the people’s champion that Nicola is announcing in her speech.”

“Julie Price?” They both stopped in their tracks and turned, shaking hands gently with her.

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Ivy cocked her head sympathetically. “It was a massive tragedy, bless you. Are you being looked after? Olly treating you well?”

“Oh- oh not bad, yeah.”

“You stick with Olly. He’s a good guy. I know he looks a bit like an anorexic Leo Sayer, there, but… Hey, could I have a picture taken with you?” He pulled out his phone, handing it to Ivy. “I’ve got a little collection of memories, you know. Mandela and stuff. Ivy, could you do the honors?”

“Mhm! Of course.” She stepped back. “Smile!” She said.

Julie flirtatiously hit Malcolm, calling him a stunner or something along those lines. Ivy took it as an opportunity to mischievously scowl at Olly. “You really are impressive. Hey, do you know who else is impressed by you? The PM.” He mentioned, grinning.

“He has a nice part in his speech where he’d be honored to introduce you and have you on. If, you’re up to that, that is.” She clasped her hands in front of her.

“B-But that might clash, a bit. Uh, you know because Nicola’s having her on.” Olly said, looking pathetic.

Julie excused herself to the restrooms. Olly clenched his fists, desperately trying to convince Malcolm otherwise. “Y-You can’t do that!”

“You gonna stamp your foot and slam the door to your bedroom next, little Timmy?” Ivy mocked.

“Boo-hoo, Olly. Can do, have done.”

“You want us to think of a whole entire new speech in 2 hours? 2 hours?”

“We don’t want you to do anything, but if you’d like to keep your reputation and probably your jobs, you will.”

“But that’s not fair!” He made a concerned face.

“Suck it up, fuckface. If she goes on with Nicola, she’ll be watched by 15 house-bound mouthbreathers. And the swelling ranks of the unemployed, who hate us, by the way. If she goes on with Tom, it’ll make 10:00 o’ clock news.”

“It’s for the greater good.”

“Yes, the greater good, thank you, Ivy.”

“Julie, hello. Feeling better?” Ivy smiled gently, yet falsely. “So, what’ll it be, Julie? Would you like to stick with Olly here, or do you want to run with Tom, or sorry-” She laughed, as if to seem sweet. “The PM, for your speech?”

“Uh.. I’m going with the big boys.”

“Great! Good, yes, the big boys.” Malcolm said.

“Oh, sorry Olly. It was lovely meeting you.”

“Right this way, we’ll introduce you to the PM.” They walked off, leaving Olly a pathetic begging loser. They walked down the hall, standing either side of Julie like bodyguards for organized crime. Malcolm began making light conversation.

“Are you in the hotel?”

“Oh yes.”

“Oh, lovely.”

“Well,” she chuckled, “I wouldn’t call it lovely.”

They laughed along. “Oh, John!” Ivy called the bearded bloke from earlier over, who looked like he was in a rush. But he was always that way, she guessed.

“This is John, the press organizer.”

“Yes, we’ve met before.”

“Oh, have you, lovely! Are you a texter?” At some point, Julie began fiddling with her phone, and appeared to be texting someone. Malcolm shot a look to Ivy, then glanced briefly at John. She nodded.

“I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Excuse us for just a tick.” Ivy pinched the sleeve of John’s suit jacket, dragging him down the hall a bit. “Look, okay. I need you to just casually mention to Alan Dunn and…  I guess Lindsay Anorexi at The Mail, that the PM has commandeered Julie Price for his speech. Okay?”

She turned, but was cut off. “B-But that’s not strictly true, is it?”

“Yeah, and strictly come dancing isn’t strictly dancing, there’s also a bit at the beginning where an old man dribbles. So what?” She got in his face. She was going for intimidation, but it was clear John was uncomfortably turned on. So she guessed she’d settle for dominatrix.

“I-I don’t know what that means, but-”

 Just then, Glenn came hobbling down the hall like a washed-old Bradley Walsh look-alike in a Sainsbury’s cracker aisle. Ivy didn’t notice, but Malcolm sure did.

Glenn brushed past Ivy. “Oh, Glenn, I can see you’re a tad peeved.” He got in Malcolm’s face.

“I’m not having it, you’ve gone too far!”

“Get a grip, Glenn. I didn’t fucking cum in your fucking mouth.”

John began laughing, which caused Glenn to turn attention to both Ivy and him. “Are you in on this?”

“Nope, just following orders. Like a nazi guard.” He did the anti-semetic salute. “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

“...No?”

“Oh, good.”

“Ivy, can you take her?” She nodded. “Julie, if you could just step in there for a moment and have a chat with some lovely people. Have some tea and biscuits. We’ve got to deal with a um… internal issue. You do understand, don’t you? Good, go on.” She didn’t wait for a response, she just shoved her gently into the room.

“You,” Malcolm pointed at John, “fucking Henry the 8th’s lobotomized cousin, piss off and back to your sad job.”

John, did not in fact, piss off. The dank cream colored hallway slowly grew more lively with increasingly angry chatter paired nicely with erupting laughter from important people in important rooms. Like a fucking wine and cheese pairing. Malcolm and Glenn were bickering about Julie, which had an intermission with one of Malcolm’s famous quips, “Oh, shit, wow here’s the beige fucking power ranger now!”

Glenn continued, pushing harder each time. “We’re taking her back!”

Olly, John, and  Ivy began trying to diffuse the situation. She swore to herself this was the last time they were going to agree on anything. 

“Can we get a bit more sane about this?”

“Malcolm, calm down, please. Glenn, just fuck off and help glummy mummy write her new speech. Let it go!”

“Let’s not argue here!”

Glenn continued insisting, getting redder and redder with rage. Malcolm grew more and more annoyed. Ivy’s eyes widened, knowing this was going to get ugly quickly (well, actually, the ugliness had already peaked when both Olly and Glenn showed up at the same time.)

Then suddenly, it fucking happened. Ivy shut her eyes, cringing. John covered his mouth. Glenn went down, landing over Olly.

“Malcolm!” Ivy half-shouted, putting herself between Glenn and him in case it continued, her hands on his chest. He seemed to be over it, shaking out his fist in pain. 

“You hit me!” He whimpered out, kneeling on the floor.

“No! I did not hit you! You hurt yourself!” Malcolm lied, artfully. She lowered her arms, knowing the worst was over for now. “Respectfully, what the fuck sir!” She hurriedly whispered.

Glenn whined that he thought his nose was broken. “Noses can’t break, it's a myth.”

“What the fuck are you on about?”

Ivy went to go help, “lean forward, c’mon, mate. I used to be a barmaid, don’t worry, this isn’t the first suckerpunch to the nose I’ve dealt with. Does anyone have a towel? Good, good, yeah. Here you go.” She let him dab the wounded area. She sucked through her teeth, “It doesn’t look good.”

Malcolm told Olly to get him back to this room. Julie was dealt with by John, not very well, but still fine enough. “No one saw that?” He asked Ivy, who was the only other person who remained, and thankfully it was just her. Anyone else would likely have received another of the same if they happened to cross Malcolm. “No, no one. Fuck, Malcolm!”

He hurried off in the direction of their room. He opened the door, letting her in before slamming it back again. “Jesus fucking tapdancing Christ, Malcolm, you broke a man’s nose!”

“Oh, he’s fine.”

“It is so not fucking fine!” She stood there, shocked, choking on words coming out of her mouth. He sat down in the chair that faced the door, looking at her stoically. “Do you know what fucking makes this worse? Hm? This didn’t fucking help anything. Glenn and Olly and Nicola are all still going to be seething with rage at us for taking their fucking star player!”

“So what?”

“So fucking what? You’re actually kidding me. You’re so fucking caught up in the moment, so fucking primal like a tiger looking for it’s next meal. You don’t even fucking think of the future.” Ivy’s voice began breaking, on the verge of tears. “Do you know what all that career hopping taught me? It taught me I was fucking wrong. I was fucking wrong so many, many times. I was so fucking wrong to waste money on schools that got me no more happiness, I was so wrong to waste my remaining teenage years bunging around the cinemas with my friends instead of being at my bedridden mother’s side. And right now, I’m thinking I’m wrong in getting involved with you.”

He slapped the arms of the chair, getting up so fast. “THEN FUCKING LEAVE, IVY! I NEVER ASKED FOR YOU! I NEVER ASKED TO BE AROUND YOU 8 HOURS OF MY FUCKING DAY!” He stood over her. She backed off quickly into the skinny entryway of the room, touching the wall almost. Her eyes widened, out of fear. Making eye contact with him, she let tears begin dripping down her face. She covered her mouth, muffling whimpers of things like “please don’t hit me.”

Malcolm bit his lip, backing up, and pressing his back against the other wise of the entryway. He could have sworn his eyes felt wet with salty droplets, which refused to fall. “I’m sorry.” He whispered.

“What?”

“I’m so fucking sorry, Ivy.”

She stayed quiet for another minute, wiping away her tears, and sniffling. Strangely, she began chuckling. “I’m not the one you should be apologizing to, you stupid old man.”

He furrowed his brow, confused. "I'm gonna go apologize to Glenn for you."

"You don't have to." He covered his mouth, looking down, ashamed.

"I know." She said as she wrapped her arms around him, pulling him into a one-sided hug that didn't last more than a few seconds. He blushed, looking down at her, frozen. "Right, I'll be back later."

  "Jesus, Ivy!" Nicola shouted when she entered the room almost silently.

She didn't react. "You alright, Glenn?"

"I don't want to speak to you Ivy, sorry. Nor Malcolm."

"I think you should leave."

Ivy ignored her, turning to the bathroom door. "I've come to apologize, Glenn. On behalf of myself and Malcolm."

"Oh, what, 'cause Malcolm couldn't do it himself? Had to get his winged monkey to go out here and do it? Fly my pretties, fly!" Olly tacked on to the conversation, helping nothing.

She shot a look at Olly, before turning around and putting her hand on the door frame. "I'm really sorry, mate. Sorry he did that in the heat of the moment, you know? And I'm sorry I didn't stop it, it was really quite stupid and shortsighted of me. We're under a lot of pressure, right now, you know. It's a fucking war zone. We're soldiers, you gotta expect there's just a bit of friendly fire."

"Yeah."

"Good. Good. I would uh, hug you but I don't want to get any blood on my blouse. Shake on it?" She stuck out her hand, and he took it. The half-dried red liquid between their hands squelched disgustingly. She cringed.

Malcolm entered the hotel room, "How's the patient?"

"I'm fine, Malcolm. Just sore." He called out from the bathroom. Ivy ran her hand under water and dried it off with one of the fancy paper towels. "I've already apologized, sir."

Malcolm nodded, clapping and turning to Nicola and Olly. "Alright, so you've lost Julie. You've got a cavity the size of a prisoner's arsehole in your speech. Got a back-up plan?"

"We'll figure it out, thank you."

"Why don't we help you, hm? I mean, it is the least we could do." Ivy piped up.

"Yes, yes, yes, roll some tits up the flagpole and see if anyone gets wood."

"Christ. Okay, well, all we've got is Mannion's second holiday."

Ivy sat down on the couch behind Nicola's chair. Malcolm joined her. The couch was tiny, as was everything else in the room, so they were pretty close quarters. They didn't mind, but Malcolm didn't stay for long. Again, he liked to pace, and pace he did, like a caged tiger. Glenn joined the group, sitting in the remaining single seat. "He works really hard at planning his holidays." Glenn said.

"Fucking A+ quality sarcasm there that you're lobbing at 'em. Boom."

"I feel like I'm in a therapy group being run by my own rapist."

Everyone's cell phones chimed, all in sync. "Oh, shit." One of them said. "It's got out!" Another added. Olly sarcastically said, "No, I thought it was room service cold-calling."

"Who the fuck leaked it? No one saw it, right?" Ivy looked at Malcolm. He was preoccupied checking around the internet. "Fuck! It's on Rob Holt's blog! Okay, we need to get your people's champion out of this hotel, before some tabloid minge-flannel starts soft-soaping her."

"So we've got her back again?" Nicola asked.

"Jesus, don't be so sensitive about this!" Malcolm yelled.

"My fucking responsibility! Fuck the speech!" Nicola yelled also, slamming the door to the bathroom.

"Women! Women, huh? Slamming the fucking door. Where did this idea come from? Wilma! Fuck off." He spat.

She called out to him, "I'm making a phone call."

"Make a phone call, phone a fucking friend." He collapsed next to Ivy again into the couch.

"Women," Ivy mocked in a nasty tone. "Okay, Fred Flintstone."

"Shut up." He smiled, looking at her softly. She giggled.

"God, get a room you two." Olly said, without looking up, continuing to type.

"We have a room, sod off and write your mummy's speech." She squinted at him, crossly

"Ivy, we should go back and get ready for the stupid banquet thing." He touched her shoulder, which caught her off guard. Normally she instigated physical contact. "Right you are, yeah."

  They joined some reporters to have wine and break bread in fancy dress. Malcolm dawned a bow tie, which Ivy made mental note of to make fun of later. Glenn had joined them, feeling a bit better, and no longer bleeding.

"Have a bit more, Glenn, go on." Malcolm poured him a bit more. "Watch your step, though, don't go tripping up again."

"Absolutely." They laughed along.

Angela, same reporter as earlier, piped up. "D-Day. What is it, Malcolm? I thought you were one of the boxers, not the emcee."

"No, I've just got to rear my ugly head, as you would have it, at a few receptions this evening. Including the Rod Hughes do for Tom. Believe me, I'd rather slip into something more comfortable. Like a coma." Again, they laughed along.

The same woman continued, "Malcolm, you've started beating up your own guys. That has to be a bad sign."

"Oh, he didn't hit Glenn," Ivy swiped with her hand, smiling, defending him. "No, I didn't. Why would I do that? And there's no proof that I did."

"Yeah, whatever you say, Malcolm," she chuckled.

"Watch," He threw a fake punch "he doesn't flinch."

"Malcolm wouldn't hurt a fly, and trust me, I'd know, because I've had to roll up Sunday's paper and whap a few in his office for him." Ivy said, grinning.

"We're pals, I mean," He went to go stand next to him, "Look at the size of this guy, I wouldn't hit him. Look, he's a fucking man-mountain!"

"Are you calling me fat?" Glenn jokingly attacked back.

"Heh, that's the banter."

They continued for a few more moments. The conversation was slowing, like a dying fireplace on Christmas eve. Malcolm gave Ivy a look, which said "we've got to get going," and they excused themselves. Once they rounded the corner into the halls once again, they saw John, the fucking idiot, from earlier. They stopped, and Malcolm shoved him into a room. Ivy was a bit concerned, considering that she didn't know who's room that was. She figured she might follow them, eavesdropping on their conversation. Maybe she'd pick up a few classic Tucker scare tactics.

She heard something about tweezers from the twat, something about bullocks, and then finally, she heard Malcolm answer his phone, announcing that Julie was the leak. Something about Twitter.

Malcolm opened the door quickly after that, which startled Ivy half to death. "Were you listening in?"

"Of course I was, I wasn't just going to sit outside the door waiting for you like some primary schooler waiting for her mummy, all arms crossed and lunch box in hand."

He raised an eyebrow, smiling slightly, "...So, anyway, Julie's the leaker."

"I know."

"Well how'd you know, I only found out a minute ago?!" They left the room, almost running into a maid on their way out. He looked at her. "Oh, listening in, right. Sorry, I forgot."

"You're as daft as a goat sometimes, you know, Malcolm?" She teased.

"Shush."

Malcolm and Ivy went to Glenn's room, where the 3 fuckheads of DoSAC were increasingly panicking, trying to finish Nicola's speech while she memorized it.

"Squeeze my cock and call me Nancy," Malcolm announced, pushing open the door to the room and inviting himself inside. "Were you born in a barn, Glenn? Keep the door and your arse cheeks tightly fucking closed, right?"

"That's a fucking tiny kettle. Did they use your dick as a ruler, because boy, it sure fucking looks like it." Ivy said.

"Where's glummy mummy?"

"She's having a pee." Glenn delivered.

Ivy suck out her hands, "Oh, Julie!" Julie was seated on the edge of the bed, twiddling her thumbs. "How are you?" She clasped them in front of herself.

She shrugged, "Could be worse."

Nicola came out of the bathroom, jumping at Malcolm's presence. "Fucking hell, Malcolm."

"Julie, darling, could we have a wee word with you?" He said.

"...Why, is something wrong?"

Malcolm squatted down next to her, awkwardly. "Do you know a man called Rob Holt?"

"I've never heard of him, why, what's all this about?"

"Well it's just that he's one of your uh, followers, on... Twitter?" Malcolm looked at Ivy. She nodded, echoing, "Twitter."

"And we think that some of your uh...?"

"Tweets."

"The tweets that you've been doing have actually been reported, out there."

"Well." She exhaled, "What're you accusing us of?"

"We're not accusing you of anything." Nicola said.

"You all look like you're accusing us of something! You fucking sound like you're accusing us of something!"

"No, no, no, no-"

"I've seen Spooks! You have treated me like a bag of shit all day!" Julie began, standing up. "I mean, I'm a very, very patient person, but I've had it up to here with yous lot! I should've known not to trust yous lot, when you fucked over them Metric Martyrs. All I was trying to do was right by my Jason, right? And if he was here now, he'd be fucking appalled by the way yous lot are carrying on. He always said you were a useless bunch of wankers."

Olly came in, holding a bag of crisps which crinkled obnoxiously. Although nothing could be more obnoxious than whatever was about to come out of his mouth. "Oh, Julie! Oh you're back! Excellent. Every epic needs a hero. Put tiny kettle on, lad, I'm gasping."

Malcolm was staring darkly at him, arms crossed. The awkward air was so thick you could cut it with a butter knife. "Uh, everything okay? What's-What's going on?"

"Uh- Malcolm, could you just come to the toilet with me, for a moment." She pushed him into the toilet. Ivy turned to look at it, making a confused face. She leaned towards the door once it shut, to try and hear some form on conversation. She only managed to pick up the gist of the plan.

Malcolm covertly told Glenn something. Ivy was too tired and too over it to figure out what. Julie left by herself in a ferocious hurry. As soon as the door slammed closed.

"Good riddance." Ivy mumbled.

"Do we have anything we can use against her?" Malcolm demanded.

Nicola rubbed her temple, crossing her arm over her chest. "Metric Martyr stuff. That's all I can think of."

"Fruit by the pound?" Ivy lifted herself off the wooden hutch, joining them near the bed. "That's it?"

"Fruit by the fucking pound. Fuck. Okay, well, we say we're dropping her for extremist views. How about that?"

The group shrugged, mutually agreeing that it was good enough for them. "Just don't go into detail, otherwise they'll crawl up your arse like a dirty little Syrian dwarf hamster all over again."

Ivy snickered at her own joke which was in her head. "How do you like them apples? By the pound?"

Olly and Nicola sighed heavily, one of them remarked, "Jesus."

  After quite a night of wine drinking, toasting, celebrating, or otherwise partying, Malcolm and Ivy said their goodbye's and goodnight's to friends and coworkers. They both looked like Hell. Well, it could be worse, but still Hell. Malcolm's bow tie was crooked and half undone (it was actually surprising to Ivy that he both knew how to tie one and had a real one, not just a pre-tied one). He had spilled droplets of dried cherry colored wine on his white button-up, which he had failed to notice in time, so it was likely that they'd leave irreparable stains. Ivy's makeup was smeared, a faint streak of eyeliner spread across her temple from a forgetful moment where she wiped the corner of her eye. Her dress was wrinkled, her hair messy. They were both half wine drunk. The clock read 12 am.

Despite looking like an embarrassing mess, Malcolm thought she was so incredibly gorgeous. He caught himself staring through the cracked door and into the mirror while she was washing her face and brushing out her curls. Good thing her eyes didn't catch his or he'd never hear the end of it. "Who's sleeping on the couch?" She asked, kneeling down beside her bag to pull out her pajamas.

"Huh?" He said, setting his tie in his overnight bag and removing his jacket.

"I said, who's sleeping on the couch?" She went back to the bathroom, this time closing the door so she could change.

He pulled his shirt out of his trousers and began unbuttoning it. Malcolm didn't listen to a word she said. All he knew is that she asked a question. So, he responded, "Sure."

"Were you even listening?" She laughed.

"No."

"Whatever. Are you decent?" Ivy had finished getting dressed. So had Malcolm, apparently, since he answered with a "Yes."

She stepped out of the bathroom, crouching down once again to put her clothes away. Malcolm felt his heart skip a beat. Oh God, he thought, she's even more stunning now. She was wearing a plain black spaghetti strap tank top and soft pajama shorts. She wasn't even trying to be attractive, she just plain was. Ivy had her arms crossed over her chest, staring at his face stoically.

"Right, I don't really feel like hunkering down on the couch tonight. So I'll sleep under the covers, you sleep on top."

"What?"

She sat on the side of the bed that had the flower painting. "Do you need hearing aids? We're both adults, get over it." She said, sliding into bed and rolling over. "Just don't snore."

"Fine." He pulled the spare blanket off of the top of the armchair, fluffing it out over the bed and laying under it. "Goodnight, Ivy."

"'Night, Malcolm."

[arsenicandfinelace]

Anon submitted:

I just saw you reblogged that post on abusive Gendry, and I totally get you and @baratheonarya. Like, I don’t mind people writing what they want, for whatever reason they want, it doesn’t hurt anyone, as long as it’s tagged and easy to filter out. But when they don’t tag…even after several people ask them to…

Like, back in the days, there was this big name Gendrya writer (they later moved on to Jo*sa, so that explained a lot), and they had this thing for manly man, dominant Gendry, which was fine and all if they got it right. But they rarely got it right, there was this fic (and I saw it still being recced earlier this year, so ugh), where Arya is being forced by Jon to marry Gendry, (it was a very OOC Jon as well, he claimed the Targ name, but also decided to keep reforged Ice for house Targaryen instead of returning it to Bran, because he was an ableist shit), and is guilted into it after refusing several times. Gendry had fought with Jon against the Others, (while Arya was still in Braavos, and I think she was blamed for that as well), and demanded Arya as his bride. Gendry was portrayed as possessive, controlling and sexist, but that was never acknowledged as a fault, he was also written as being better than Arya at things she prided herself at, like horseriding and swordfighting. He also forced her to marry in a sept instead of the godswood. I think there even was a scene where Gendry decided to punish Arya by spanking her against her will, and saying Ned should have done it to her as a child (conveniently forgetting how Yoren and Weese would cane her, Weese to the point where blood ran down her thighs) but somehow, even after all of that, the author refused to admit they were writing an abusive relationship, and refused to tag it no matter how many people asked it of them. They even implied that Arya being so scared of Gendry that she pulled Needle on him, somehow made her the abusive one. Oh, and I think I remember the fic lowkey bashing Arya, calling her selfish and childish, and they also made her say Gendry was too good for her, even after she was treated like shit by him and everyone. Sorry for unloading on you, I still have so much anger about that fic even years later, and I never really got the opportunity to rant about it until now. 

So yeah, I totally get you, those fics should be tagged (at least the author did the bare minimum and tagged it as “Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings”, because at least that implies there’s something in there to be wary about)

Oh god, I know exactly what fic you’re talking about. I’m ngl, it had some good sex scenes, but the actual text was horrific. You’re right, it showed such contempt for Arya, to the point that I wondered why the author was writing for her if they so clearly disdained everything about her. She was bloody-minded, capricious, immature, spoiled (!!!), and basically all of her defining characteristics were either erased or warped into flaws to be corrected. I mean, Jon (Jon!) viewed her with suspicion because she was too damaged for them, and the only person she was close with was Sansa (*eyeroll*). And the spanking scene. The spanking scene. Gendry spanked her against her will, while she tried to force herself to endure it despite her discomfort with the situation, and he only felt bad about when he found out she was pregnant because it’s fine to use corporal punishment on your wife so long as she’s not pregnant. The whole thing was basically The Taming of the Shrew, in a situation where I did not sign up to read Taming of the Shrew. (I never would, by the way; fuck that play.)

And yeah, I think that one, much like that other hotly debated fic, was emblematic of a really disturbing thing you sometimes see in the Gendrya fandom, where Gendry is propped up as this pure-hearted hero and Arya needs to fix herself (or forcibly be fixed) until she’s worthy of him. And when I see that I’m baffled because to me, the thing that makes Gendrya amazing isn’t the “rebellious rich girl/guy from the wrong side of the tracks” dynamic. It’s their partnership. It’s how much they respect each other’s beliefs and talents, even when they’re pissing each other the hell off. I don’t want fics where Gendry is a spineless little victim or fics where he’s a bullying He-Man because they both ruin the chemistry between them, which is based on them struggling to maintain an equilibrium in a society that desperately wants to stratify them.

And you know, some people do want that. I’m not going to pretend I’ve never enjoyed dubcon before in other fandoms/ships; that would be a lie. But the crucial thing is that people reading Gendrya are going to assume that they’re in for a relationship between consenting equals. Some people think they can still claim that’s exactly what they’re offering when they write fics about Gendry holding Arya down to have sex with her while she says no or hitting her because he’s mad at her. They can’t. They can either switch to a fandom/ship more accustomed to that unequal power dynamic, or they can tag their shit.

[that-curly-haired-lesbian]

The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo + Taylor Swift: a master post - Part 2/6

Hi guys, welcome to part 2 of my masterpost regarding parallels between Taylor Swift and Evelyn Hugo, the fictional actress from the book The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo by author Taylor Jenkins Reid!

Before proceeding please be aware that there will be 

**MAJOR SPOILERS**

for the book ahead and please also read my disclaimer!

It’s very important that you read these in order so if you haven’t yet go ahead and check out the previous part right here, thank you and enjoy!

Monique goes home for the weekend consumed by the question “who the hell was Evelyn Hugo in love with?” This goes to the point that she finds herself no longer dwelling on her own relationship problems, but instead focuses on Evelyn’s love life for the whole weekend. (pg. 37)

This of course is similar to how Taylor’s fans and media instead of relating songs to their own love lives and experiences or writing about the quality of the music are obsessed with finding out who in her life she wrote the songs about. (x)

Essentially Taylor’s stories substitute or overpower fans’ own love lives and her love life overshadows whatever could be written about her in a professional sense…Apparently??

Similarly instead of wanting to ask Evelyn something regarding her remarkable career (or her childhood, or what have you) Monique finds herself immediately drawn to (both as a journalist and a consumer, she’s sure to point out, just like how both the fans and the media are drawn to this aspect of Taylor’s public persona) asking about the men in Evelyn’s life, which is frankly, a very sexist angle to take.

When it comes to Taylor fans and media seem especially interested in (or unable to let go of) Taylor’s “relationship” with Harry Styles and likewise Monique’s best guess for who the love of Evelyn’s life could be is the appropriately named Hollywood producer Harry Cameron aka beard/husband #5. A man who we later find out (pg. 72-73) is not only very flamboyantly gay, but also Evelyn’s best friend and closest confidant, the friend who she trusts to tell everything without fearing it might get out.

At her second wedding Evelyn and Harry have an interesting conversation, Evelyn asks Harry why he’s never tried to flirt with her (like most men she encounters in the industry has after all.) He asks Evelyn if she ever wanted anything to happen between them (since she’s the one asking him about this) she says no, but Harry catches onto the fact that Evelyn wanted him to want something to happen and she offers:

  “’And what if I did? Is that so wrong? I’m an actress, Harry. Don’t you forget   that.’   Harry laughed, ’you have actress written all over your face. I remember it     every single day.’ ” (pg. 72)

In response to why nothing has ever happened between the two Harry vaguely implies that he’s gay and Evelyn immediately gets it, but says nothing about it until years later when Harry is the first person she comes out to after realizing her own queerness. After which the two agree to always tell each other everything.

Harry’s vague coming out at the wedding is however not what interests me about that scene, instead it is the use of the word “actress” of course in Evelyn’s case this is literal, she is in fact an actress, but it’s Harry’s response that causes me to reach…

On the surface his comment seems to be him admitting that despite his preference for men he can see that Evelyn is an attractive woman (like actresses generally are), but if we are to put this in a different light let’s consider that Taylor often either uses the word “actress” in her songs:

   She's not a saint and she's not what you think She's an actress

                                                   //

                I’ll be the actress starring in your bad dreams

or implies that she’s playing a role a few examples being All of Blank Space, and I Did Something Bad and parts of Don’t Blame Me.

I’ve gone on record in my analysis of the song Better Than Revenge as saying that the acting theme may be a reference to bearding and if we are also to look at the fact that Harry comes out to Evelyn in this scene it reads to me as if the underlying subtext is someone who beards (like Taylor) asking a gay male friend why they have never bearded together despite this friend’s knowledge that this Someone (Taylor) beards a lot (or is an “actress”) the friend agrees that he knows she is indeed a prolific bearder and that anyone with eyes can see she’s gay (the fact that she is gay and beards, or “is an actress” if you will, is “written on her face”.)

This might seem like an extreme reach even for this context, but given the fact that Evelyn and Harry actually end up bearding together later in the book and Evelyn does mention shortly before this conversation with Harry takes place that she sometimes feels like her public persona is someone she’s pretending to be (aka a role she’s playing, just like Taylor implies she feels about her public persona in the songs mentioned above.)  I just found the conversation and Taylor’s bearding-connection to the word “actress” interesting in this context…

--

On Monday Evelyn tells Monique:

   “People have so closely followed the most intricate details of the fake story of    my life. But it’s not…I don’t…I want them to know the real story. The real     me.’” (pg. 38)

Similar to how Taylor told us:

“We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us.” 

“When this album comes out, gossip blogs will scour the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song, as if the inspiration for music is as simple and basic as a paternity test. There will be slideshows of photos backing up each incorrect theory” (x)

Monique responds:

  “’Alright, show me the real you then and I’ll make sure the world understands.’”

Like I said before people like Evelyn and Taylor are famous enough that this flies, they call the shots. Just like we are agreeing that Taylor is coming out in her own time, Monique agrees to listen to whatever Evelyn has decided she has to say. Meanwhile we’ll keep speculating and so does Monique.

At one point she even questions if Evelyn is capable of telling the truth after all those years of hiding it? (pg. 38)

I’ve personally had more than one anon questioning why Taylor keeps “lying” about her personal life and whether she’ll be able to ever stop and just come out? (For my thoughts on all that, please read this.)

--

As Monique agrees to Evelyn’s terms she’s put in a bit of a bind, given that Evelyn contacted her through Vivant when the story was truly never intended for the magazine but for Monique this basically means that one of their writers is about to steal a story from one of the most famous magazines in the world and she could of course be fired for this. With a sinking stomach Monique realizes that the only plan she has is to lie to her boss about how the story is going and act as if she’s still doing the original piece for Vivant in order to save her own career. (pg. 32)

She even points out later that being fired from Vivant for stealing a story would be disastrous for her reputation in the industry.  (142)

I imagine that Monique’s confusion about what to do with Vivant mirrors a young Taylor’s initial unwillingness to “lie” to us (the public and the fans) regarding her sexuality at risk of losing her contract with a label.

Being let go from a contract and a label for making her sexuality publicly known would’ve been disastrous for her reputation in the industry and probably harm her chances at ever being mainstream famous/get on the radio. Had she gone against the advice she was getting at the time and made her sexuality public knowledge/decided to sing about girls or whatever she could’ve lost her career, her job.

In Monique’s case she would literally be fired form a job, in Taylor’s case it’d be more in the sense of falling from grace in the court of public opinion, or being left out of the community in Nashville. Something that country singer Chely Wright has mentioned was a legitimate fear for her upon coming out. (x)

 When Frankie does find out what’s going on this is what happens:

  “’She used us to get to us?’ Frankie says as if it’s the most insulting thing she     can think of. But the thing is she used me to get to Evelyn, so…” (pg. 142)

This scene is yet another reminder that it’s all power play, a game and lowkey blackmail in the entertainment industry and that everybody does it, even the media.

…Baby let the games begin

--

 And so Evelyn’s story starts once and for all. She tells us how she wanted to run away from her abusive father after her mother died and how she at fourteen romanticized Hollywood and believed her life would get better if she could only get there:

  “It would take me years to figure out that life doesn’t get easier simply because   it gets more glamorous. But you couldn’t have told me that when I was   fourteen.”

New to town with a made up name in the angel's city,

Chasing fortune and fame.

And the camera flashes, make it look like a dream

You had it figured out since you were in school.

Everybody loves pretty, everybody loves cool

                                     //

  Wish you could go back and tell yourself what you know now                               I didn't know who I was supposed to be at fifteen

14* but close enough, right? What I’m saying is, major Lucky One/Fifteen mashup vibes…

--

Evelyn does eventually get to Hollywood, by seducing a dude named Ernie who is a light technician on movie sets, she doesn’t love him and she lies about her age (she says she’s 16 when she truly is 14) but she gets a ride to Hollywood as she puts it, out of their marriage (pg. 44)

Having arrived in The City of Angels Evelyn does what she has to in order to launch her career and that included doing something rather bold for such a young, inexperienced actress:

“I did something not many other actresses at my level would have had the guts to do, I knocked at Harry Cameron’s door.” (Pg. 47)

This of course reminded me of:

   “Hi, I'm Taylor. I'm 11; I want a record deal. Call me.” (x)

At this point in the book Evelyn is 16 or 17 and not yet explicitly queer, so that isn’t what Harry (here representing the movie/music industry) points out they have to “get rid of” when it comes to Evelyn’s image if she wants to make it. Instead, when Evelyn does get her audience with Harry Cameron she’s immediately told she has to get a more American-sounding name (her maiden name was Herrera, and now being married to Ernie her name is Diaz which in the industry’s eyes isn’t much better) and dye her hair blonde.

Instead of her queerness it’s her Hispanic heritage that has to go, in Taylor’s case however, it was of course the queerness, even in the early days. Moving to Nashville at 14 (just like Evelyn and Hollywood) Taylor signed with Big Machine Records at 16 and after seemingly previously being out she was back in the closet by the time her first album was being recorded.

--

To begin with Ernie is supportive of Evelyn’s attempts to make it in acting, but eventually he gets resentful when she doesn’t wanna be a house wife or give him children. This understandably frustrates Evelyn:

  “I’d told him I was someone else. And then I started getting angry that he     couldn’t see who I really was.” (pg. 47)

Of course I wouldn’t truly know, but I don’t think Taylor has ever used someone as a beard/for PR without their consent the way that Evelyn does to Ernie here, but if it is to be claimed that Taylor Swift did what she had to get her career off the ground then the obvious example of this would be her closeting, she told us she was someone else (with the aggressive heterosexuality of The Old Taylor™) she thought the closeting was a price worth paying for the professional success, at first…and then it started to frustrate her that she couldn’t be open to us about who she really is.

Just like Taylor though, Evelyn is all too happy to agree to the studio’s bigoted terms if it means she’ll get to be an actress, so she agrees:

  “And in so doing I set the star machine in motion.” (Pg. 50)

Hmm, interesting choice of words, Evelyn…

As Evelyn’s image is starting to take shape Harry introduces her to the concept of bearding or in this case, since she hasn’t realized she’s queer yet, “dating” for publicity:

  “The studio thinks it would be a good idea if you were seen around town with     some guys…*proceeds to list various fictional male celebrities*” (Pg. 52)

So Evelyn Swiftly (pun intended) divorces Ernie and starts being seen around town with fellas of New Hollywood™

Here she shares her thoughts on those early days of bearding:

  “I was OK with it for it for two reasons. One I had no choice but to be all right     with it because I didn’t hold the cards. And two, my star was rising. Fast.” (Pg. 60) (x) (x)

  “Don and I had been seen around town, our photos taken at every hot spot in     Hollywood. … And we knew what we were doing, parading around in public. I     needed Don’s name mentioned in the same sentence as mine, and Don   needed us to look like he was part of the New Hollywood. Photos of the two of     us went a long way toward solidifying his image as a man-about-town.” (Pg. 68)

Bearding 101…

It’s not just bright sides to the bearding and PR though, on page 56 Monique calls Evelyn “calculating” that word (or a less kind option, “manipulative”) is often thrown around by both media and antis when describing Taylor both in her professional life and in her love life…. (x) (x) (x)

There are also dark sides to not just the bearding but to fame and Hollywood itself as we’ll soon find out.

At this point in Evelyn’s story she has genuinely fallen in love with one of her PR boyfriends (she’s bi and don’t you forget that) and so they decide to get married and at first Evelyn’s second marriage is going swimmingly (again, pun):

  “We had pool parties nearly every weekend, drinking champagne and     cocktails all afternoon and into the night.” (Pg. 74)

*TIWWCHNT plays loudly in background*

However sadly Evelyn is about to learn just why they can’t have nice things, it turns out her new husband Don is both physically and emotionally abusive and it doesn’t take long for him to start regularly hitting her and this ruins the glitz and glamour of Hollywood.

  “I’d made my way three thousand miles from where I was born, I had found a     way to be in the right place at the right time. I had changed my name. changed    my hair. Changed my teeth and my body. I’d learned how to act. I’d made the     right friends. I’d married into a famous family. Most of America knew my name.   and yet…And yet.” (Pg. 78)

  And they tell you that you’re lucky.

But you’re so confused,

'Cause you don’t feel pretty, you just feel used.

   “I got up off the floor and wiped my eyes. I gathered myself. I sat down at the   vanity, three mirrors in front of me lined with lightbulbs. How silly is it that I   thought that if I ever found myself in a movie star’s dressing room that meant   I’d have no troubles?” (Pg. 78)

The same sadly seems to go for a singer’s dressing room I’m afraid…

--

Just like in Taylor’s case it’s not just Evelyn’s personal life that gets affected by various PR strategies though, her career does too. Ever since Evelyn heard that the studio was planning to adapt Little Women she’s been pushing to get cast as Jo and Harry is saying she will get that role, if she agrees to doing a few more run of the mill movies alongside her famous boyfriend. Evelyn all but rolls her eyes and asks Harry if he’s saying she should be predictable in her career choices, Harry denies this:

  “I’m saying you should be predictable and then do something unpredictable,   and they’ll love you forever” (Pg. 67)

This strikes me as very similar to what Taylor did in her transition from country to pop, she put out three full-on country album and then came RED and Taylor famously said that album isn’t “sonically cohesive” why? Well, it straddles the line between the two genres, but not enough to make anyone uncomfortable, it’s still country, she’s still being “predictable” and THEN she dropped 1989 her first 100% pop album and just as Ha-I mean Big Machine probably predicted, we loved her forever!

Evelyn agrees to not doing Little Women right away and admits she didn’t have much choice in the matter:

  “My contract with Sunset was for another three years if I caused too much     trouble, they had the option to drop me at any time.” (Pg. 67)

While I fully believe that Taylor is in charge of her PR these days we cannot forget that she was a minor when all this started and back then I think she let “the adults” handle her PR, she would do whatever they thought was best as long as it’d get her on the radio long-term, including staying closeted. However, now that the contract with her old label is up  and the Rep tour has basically been one giant glass closeting event we’ll see what’s to come in terms of bold PR moves.

--

When she finally gets to do pop Little Women Taylor Swift Evelyn Hugo meets Karlie Kloss Celia St. James. Celia is an actress too and they become fast friends complete with Celia calling Evelyn out on her bullshit over milkshakes:

  “So many women around here are full of crap in everything they say and do. I     like that you’re full of crap only when it gets you something.” (Pg. 97)

Just like Taylor Evelyn is genuine…for the most part and Karlie and Celia know this.

      Even in my worst times, you could see the best of me

      Flashback to my mistakes

     My rebounds, my earthquakes

    Even in my worst lies, you saw the truth in me

                           //

           You must like me for me

--

Both Evelyn and Celia realize that Celia is a better actress than Evelyn while Evelyn is better at playing the PR game than Celia, so the two agree as their friendship blossoms to teach each other what the other knows better.

Evelyn says about Celia:

  “She did teach me to find moments of emotional truth in false     circumstances.”  (Pg. 101)

This is of course in regards to acting, but it made me think of what Taylor’s early girlfriends and her exposure to PR games and bearding must have taught her, to find moments of emotional truth in false circumstances. That’s how she can write and sing songs with the wrong (male) pronoun and make it seem so genuine, she projects the feelings she has for the women she dates onto these wrong pronoun, it’s like I pointed out before, to some degree Taylor has always told the truth about her own emotions, even when she’s hid them behind male pronoun and false heterosexuality the emotion has been real all along. Moments of truth in false circumstances.

--

Even genuine friendship can be played up for PR in the world of celebrity and when Evelyn has to deal with some bad publicity Harry suggests using a shopping spree with Celia to get Evelyn back in the tabloids’ good graces.

It has been speculated over the years among Kaylors and non-Kaylors alike that parts of Kaylor’s 2014 glass closeting could have been played up to “get Karlie’s name out there.” Even genuine friends (or girl pals) call the paps from time to time, but in this case Harry’s suggestion that they could “call Photoplay and let them know Evelyn and Celia will be on Robertson” is shot down by a scheming Evelyn with a better idea, she is going to fake a miscarriage to get some sympathy and make the press eat their words about her “not giving Don a baby.” (Pg. 102-104)  

  “’How did you learn all the underhanded, sneaky stuff you know?’ Celia asked.   ‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said coyly.   ‘You’re smarter than you let on to just about anybody.’ ‘Me?’ I said.” (Pg. 109)

We play dumb but we know exactly what we're doing

Taylor is smart, she knows just how to play the game. See: Blank Space.

Similarity Evelyn has learnt the industry by now, she manufactures her own scandals, playing with her own narrative for professional benefit.(x)

--

One night when Don is away somewhere (probably in the club doing I don’t know what) Celia comes over to Evelyn’s and they drink some wine…As you can probably tell it’s about to be gay up in here! Celia calls Evelyn the most gorgeous woman to have ever been created and Evelyn immediately counters, saying Celia is a KNOCKOUT with her BIG BLUE EYES

(Karlie’s eyes do look blue in some lights…See: “Oh damn, never seen that color blue”)

The night continues and as it gets chilly the girls decide to make a fire…Yes, seriously:     “I asked her if she knew how to make a fire.    ‘I’ve seen people do it,’ she said, shrugging.    ‘Me too, I’ve seen Don do it. But I’ve never done it.’    ‘We can do it,’ she said. ‘We can do anything.’”  (Pg. 109)

 (s)he built a fire just to keep me warm

--

What follows is all from page 111-112:

As the night progresses Celia spills some wine on herself and has to borrow a clean shirt from Evelyn, they go into the bedroom and Celia decides that now is the right time to get personal. She asks Evelyn if she loves Don, Evelyn is caught off guard and finds herself answering that she used to love him but doesn’t think she does anymore. Celia asks if it’s all for publicity and when Evelyn denies this Celia asks if she’s sexually attracted to Don (and by extension, men in general) Evelyn says yes, Celia is jealous and uncomfortable and she seems to feel she’s said or asked too much. The scene that plays out embodies:

  Is it cool that I said all that?

  Is it chill that you're in my head?

  'Cause I know that it's delicate (delicate)

  Is it cool that I said all that

  Is it too soon to do this yet?

Just like these lines from Taylor’s song could (in my opinion at least) represent sneakily trying to find out if your new crush is gay too and worrying that the questions will make them uncomfortable as the subject is delicate. Celia’s awkward question seem to really be her trying to ask Evelyn if it’s cool that she thinks of her in a gay way and that she talks about that fact?

The word delicate even shows up in the scene when Evelyn describes Celia as being more delicate than her when trying to find a clean shirt that might fit.

--

Finally she does find a shirt and hands it over to Celia who comments on how gorgeous it is, Evelyn agrees and confesses she stole it from the set of one of her movies and asks Celia not to tell anyone. As she takes off the soiled shirt Celia says:

  “I hope you know by now that all your secrets are safe with me?”

Evelyn comments on how she’s sure that line was something Celia said casually, but that it meant a lot to her nonetheless. Because as Celia said it Evelyn realized she believed her and she’d never had that with anyone.

  “People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When     you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to   them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘You’re safe   with me’ — that’s intimacy.” 

Secrets and truth (and intimacy) are, of course a huge theme on Reputation:

1.    “No one has to know” (…Ready For It?)

2.    You've been calling my bluff on all my usual tricks, so here's the truth from my red lips (End Game)

3.    But when you get me alone, it's so simple/ But when I get you alone, it's so simple (So It Goes…)

4.    “Your love is a secret I’m hoping, dreaming, dying to keep” (King of My Heart)

5.    “I loved you in secret” (Dancing With Our Hands Tied

6.    “Our secret moments in a crowded room” (Dress)

7.    “Even in my worst lie you saw the truth in me” (Dress)

 “I wondered if this was what it felt like to love someone?  […] To throw your lot in with theirs and think, ‘whatever happens, it’s you and me’”

  Don't read the last page   But I stay when you're lost, and I'm scared   And you're turning away   I stay when it's hard, or it's wrong   Or we're making mistakes”

--

Celia goes to put on the shirt and says that she’s not sure it will fit her, Evelyn says that if it does fit Celia can have it.

Other people we know share/wear a lot of similar clothes too.

--

Just as Celia gets her own shirt off and Evelyn starts checking her out (spoiler alert: it’s really gay) Don enters the room and teasingly asks just “what is going on in here?” Just like that the spell is broken and Evelyn hurriedly assures her husband that “Absolutely nothing” is going on in that bedroom.

Here Don represents the shippers and the media alike starting to question the nature of Kaylor’s relationship during the height of their glass closeting forcing Taylor to assure “Don” aka us that “absolutely nothing” is going on between her and Karlie, but I’m getting ahead of myself, more on #Kissgate later…

Anygayyyy, let’s just say that those two pages are, as they say A LOT™ for my Kaylor feels!!

--

Thanks for reading, please read part 3!

[pass-the-bechdel]

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

No.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

One (7.69% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twelve.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Excellent! Full of as much heart as action, the film takes on the complicated task of delivering a Captain America for the modern world, avoiding jingoism while also acknowledging the origins which brought the comic-book hero into being. Against the odds (and my personal expectations), it is a sound success, and I consider it easily the best of the Marvel franchise’s early films.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Obviously, that didn’t happen.

Female characters:

Peggy Carter.

Male characters:

Johann Schmidt.

Steve Rogers.

James ‘Bucky’ Barnes.

Howard Stark.

Abraham Erskine.

Arnim Zola.

Gilmore Hodge.

Chester Phillips.

Brandt.

Fred Clemson.

Timothy Dugan.

Nick Fury.

OTHER NOTES:

I’m mad about the Hydra symbol being the coolest insignia in this franchise. I would wear the heck outta some Hydra merchandise, if it weren’t for the, y’know, evil Nazi fascism stuff. 

I love little Steve. They pulled that off so well.

I don’t love that Peggy’s introduction revolves around her being disrespected by a guy and then knocking him on his ass. It feels far too prescribed, too Strong Woman Cliche, so expected as to be rendered essentially meaningless. It implies that these are the most important things about the character - she’s a woman and she’s tough - and it panders to the sexist perspective by requiring Peggy to ‘prove herself’ upon arrival in a traditionally-masculinised way. They could have handled this introduction much better.

Man. This movie has such a good cast. The goodness of this cast has no chill.

“So many people forget that the first country that the Nazis invaded was their own.” This the good shit.

“Go get him! I can swim.” Snort.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, ‘Star Spangled Man’ plays over and over again in my head. That’s probably why I can’t sleep.

“Do you...fondue?”

The thing where someone gets hit and they fly off-screen in an exaggerated fashion is never not funny to me.

Characters surviving explosions without a scratch, however, is never not rubbish to me. 

A super-soldier is never late, Peggy Carter, nor is he early; he arrives precisely when he means to.

Steve really isn’t very precious about choosing his team: they’re all just Bucky’s friends. He basically just went “ok, show of hands, who loves Bucky Barnes? Good, you guys are with me”. I mean, it’s solid reasoning - he trusts Bucky, and these guys have Bucky’s endorsement, and that’s good enough for Steve. I note that only one of the other guys on the team besides Steve and Bucky is a white American - the other guys are a black American and an Asian-American (and I see you there, recognition of racism against Japanese-Americans which led to their incarceration during the war, etc.), and then there’s a French dude and a Brit. That’s Captain America’s elite team: not all-American, and racially inclusive. I DIG that subtext.

*hisses* why is this whole Natalie-Dormer-mackin’-on-Steve thing even here? It’s a useless contrivance, plus I am extremely displeased at having Peggy being so petty in her jealousy that she actually fires a loaded gun straight at Steve. I sure hope she heard Howard’s explanation about the properties of the vibranium shield, or that she already knew them, because otherwise this is completely outrageous, but even then: what if the shield hadn’t performed as advertised? What if a bullet ricocheted and hit someone else? This is such a dangerous thing to do, and did I mention it is in service of a useless contrivance anyway? Peggy deserves better writing.

Lemme tell ya straight up: I thought I was gonna hate this movie. I mean...it’s Captain America. I expected cloying patriotism, a blandly self-righteous hero, probably some good ol’ war glorification as well. What we got instead was a film that barely even mentioned the good ol’ USA outside of the (explicitly recognised as) propaganda rigmarole that Captain America slogs through - a tool used to excellent effect to acknowledge the character’s history (the comic was created as propaganda during WWII in real life) while also carrying through the idea that what Captain America stands for is something far grander than nationalist fervour - and Steve himself is imbued with unassuming charm, fueled by the strength of his personal convictions but never forcing those convictions upon others in a show of moral grand-standing: an essential facet of the character is that he’ll pursue what he believes to be right regardless of whether anyone else follows him, and he accepts that there are consequences to his actions; he never props himself up with holier-than-thou declarations, he never shames anyone for disagreeing with him, and he never claims any kind of superiority over others (an important distinction when you’re juxtaposed with a Nazi Ubermensch villain). Other characters are inspired by Steve, but the film wisely never positions them as if they were weak or wavering without the symbol of Captain America to unite them: the war is a grindhouse, and they know the only way out is through. No one is fighting because they perceive battle as a great and noble cause, nor because they are righteously empowered; they fight because their enemy is too terrible to let pass, and there is no room for glory in that.

I can (and will) still quibble about the representation of war in the film: while the fact that it is sparingly shown does help to avoid the glorification of violence and death in battle, it also undersells the horror of war, which runs the risk of looping back around to glorification by making it all into fun skirmishes with faceless goons and glow-weapons. Additionally, Captain America clashes exclusively with Hydra and its operatives; while Red Skull severs his ties with Hitler early on through the welcome disintegration of a few Nazi representatives, the film cannot entirely distance itself from Hitler’s legacy (which Red Skull actively takes on for himself), and I take long-standing issue with anything which uses Nazis as an evil catch-all but fails to acknowledge and respect the victims of their reign. After Steve’s heroic nose-dive in the Valkyrie ends Hydra’s campaign, the film cuts to celebrations of the end of the war; they don’t actually state that it was Captain America who just defeated the Nazis by taking down Red Skull (despite the fact that Hydra’s soldiers with their fancy tech and also, um, actual-Hitler and his armies, are all still out there), but the implication is there, and it feels a mite bit insensitive, to say the least. I do think it is better that Steve has his own corner of the war to fight, rather than taking on the whole thing and battling actual-Hitler in the end (now THAT would be insensitive), but I do wish that the destruction and evil of the war at large were the backdrop of the film, rather than the comparatively sanitised Hydra operation that we see.

In this context, the weight of the war and the toll that it takes on the psyche of those suffering through it is carried almost exclusively by Bucky Barnes, who emerges from the unseen tortures of a Hydra work camp changed, his buoyant enthusiasm from the beginning of the film subdued, locked up behind the shattered look in his eyes and the fragile way he carries himself, determined to see this thing through to the end so that he can fall apart later, if he makes it that far (he doesn’t). Fandom has made much of Sebastian Stan’s understated performance, and with good reason: despite a minimal number of scenes there is a richness of detail in Bucky’s character, and as the emotional sinking ground for tragedy - both as the personification of the war’s devastation, and as a personal loss for Steve Rogers - Bucky’s narrative importance belies the amount of time dedicated to him in-text. Fandom has also made a strong point - with which I agree entirely and for which I will not pretend to take unique credit for noticing - that despite expectation, Bucky’s archetypal function in the film is not as the Hero’s Sidekick; he is, in actuality, fulfilling the cliche of the Love Interest, not in competition with Peggy Carter but instead of; Peggy, likewise, is not an archetypal Love Interest at all, because she’s the Hero’s Sidekick.

I am entirely of the opinion that this is an essential part of what makes Peggy - the sole named female character in town - work out so well, against the odds. As Steve’s sidekick, Peggy’s primary functions are to support him and give him advice; the sidekick is traditionally a rational role, someone who keeps the hero grounded and helps them to make the right choices, especially when they are emotionally conflicted. The Love Interest compels the hero’s emotions, sometimes (often) framed as driving them to acts of recklessness, to joyous heights, and depressive lows. Bucky is Steve’s damsel in distress; Steve is compelled to act when he learns that Bucky has been captured by the enemy, action which is tempered and assisted by Peggy’s influence and which ultimately brings Captain America out of propaganda mode to practice what he has preached, and be the soldier Steve always hoped to be. When Bucky falls, Peggy is there to talk to Steve, as a friend, and help him stop wallowing and concentrate his grief into the resolve which carries him through the climactic confrontations of the film’s final act. I’m not going to argue that Steve wanted to join the army just to be with Bucky (presumably that was a factor to some extent, but to call it the primary motivator would be to ignore the value set which made Steve into Captain America in the first place), nor that he was willing to sacrifice himself in the end because Bucky was gone (Steve’s mourning for Bucky certainly played a role in his mental state at the time, but ultimately, bringing down the Valkyrie was a practical choice, not an emotional one), but undeniably, Bucky was either integrally or tangentially attached to all of Steve’s major decisions across the film, as is common for a Love Interest, whereas Peggy consistently filled a support-and-guidance role, as any good sidekick should.

This is not to imply, by any measure, that Peggy can’t or shouldn’t be seen as a viable (lower case) love interest (or that Bucky’s time as a hero’s sidekick somehow doesn’t count as what it is); actually, I think that both character’s relationships with Steve benefit from being framed in this switched fashion. Bucky’s lifelong friendship with Steve comes across stronger and more meaningful due to the emotional pitch, allowing it to resonate as something deeply significant to Steve despite the limited exposure we have to it in action - extra important considering that Bucky is also fulfilling that sacrificial-character role. For Peggy, the fact that she is presented as a love interest but coded as a Hero’s Sidekick is even more important in its effect: since she is the only woman around, we have been taught by approximately All Media Ever to perceive her as the Love Interest from the second she steps on screen, and with that perception we are also encouraged to devalue her character as essentially existing for no other purpose than to be an attractive female prize for the Manly Male Hero to win by story’s end. By reinforcing Peggy as a friend to Steve, we subvert the expectation that she has no real function and/or that her personality is irrelevant, because narrative coding has taught us that sidekicks (almost exclusively male) matter, they have things to say and their influence on the hero is meaningful. Whether they are stalwart sidekicks, or bumbling fools, comedic, or secretly-insidious, a sidekick should be noted, because they’re a lot more likely to have something plot-relevant going on than a boring old Love Interest. Being presented as a helpful, sympathetic presence in Steve’s life who also Has Her Own Shit Going On allows Peggy to meet Steve on more even ground, and her interactions with him are not built around being romantically or sexually available: by having a working relationship built on a foundation of understanding friendship rather than attractive chemistry, the development of feelings between the characters comes across more as extraneous and organic, rather than a prescribed cliche. It still is a prescribed cliche, but it’s not one that compels Steve to do dumb stuff or that undermines Peggy’s relevance as a person in her own right, and that makes it a much more palatable romance than what we usually get.

This is also why that idiotic ~jealousy~ contrivance I flagged earlier is so out of place - I mean, it’s out of place because it’s idiotic, it has no impact on the story in any way and its an insult to the characters and I don’t know why it exists or why they kept it in the final cut of the film because it’s asinine rubbish, but it’s also out of place because it approaches Peggy as a Love Interest, scorned and emotionally lashing out, an attempt to generate Love Interest drama where it has no place in the movie, for the characters as the people that they are, with the established dynamic that they have, or in the context of their situation. Throwing a misunderstanding and some hurt feelings on top of a relationship which has worked refreshingly well thus far because of the honest and open conversations the characters have shared is utterly tone-deaf, and it’s one black mark on what is otherwise a shockingly strong and tonally-consistent film. She may be all alone in the movie, but I will happily argue that Peggy is the best, most-rounded female character in the MCU at this early stage, and she’s playing across from an eminently worthy leading man in Chris Evans’ charmingly-sincere Steve Rogers. The supporting cast is there - Seb Stan, of course, but also Stanley Tucci! Tommy Lee Jones! HUGO WEAVING! - being wonderful and engaging across the board, and there are no weak links (except Natalie Dormer, but that’s not her fault, and at least the misstep is brief and POINTLESS so that it doesn’t taint the rest of the film). Captain America: The First Avenger may not be absolutely perfect - nothing is - but it is a great ride, sometimes surprisingly nuanced, sometimes intriguingly subversive even while it plays straight with the expectations of its genre. I went into my first viewing of the film just hoping it wouldn’t make me mad, and I gotta tell ya: I ain’t mad at all. As far as I’m concerned, this is the platonic ideal of superhero films.

[schxbetta]

🔥

Send me a “ 🔥 “ for an unpopular opinion.

(( Something in the RPC that has really come to bother me is the super-sensitive nature of writers now. Like, I keep on seeing people afraid of writing certain characters or themes...AFRAID?! Like, why the hell are people afraid of WRITING fictional content?!?!?! What the hell happened to us? 

I saw an ask earlier on a blog and the user was concerned about playing an anti-human character because they were frightened of the racist connotations behind the character. It shocks me. 

I’ve played racists, sexists, murderers, sadists, implied-rapists - everything, before. 

I can’t believe people are frightened to play these flawed or terrible characters because of the backlash that they’ll get. More-so, I hate that it’s become widely accepted to feel this way! Like, if I chose to play Alex Delarge from A Clockwork Orange (because he’s a superb character and let’s face it, he’s EXTREMELY popular), would I be allowed to? Because canonically he’s a murderer and a rapist. 

Hell, even the character I play right now has made racist jabs towards other characters in the show and I’m not afraid to write him doing so either. 

Does that make me a racist or an advocate for rape? Of course not. It’s a fictional character and honestly how boring would literature be if every character was a sugar-coated softball? Like, we need these questionable characters. Morally-grey characters. Evil characters. 

I absolutely love the idea of playing a character as a human being. Like, a person can be entirely likeable but have prejudice - that is human nature. I know so many people I care for deeply who have skewed views or make offensive jokes. Shit, I’m hardly politically correct. Like, it’s human nature to be flawed. Characters should have bad traits! 

Basically, I’ve waffled - but I just hate it how it’s become something to be - feared - to play a controversial or dark character. Like, people are scared of being called out and people actually call people out for these things, too. 

It just makes me really angry - more-so, when people DO play these controversial characters but then they erase what makes them controversial or offensive in some way. Like, they rid away a part of that character as a means to stay ‘likable’ to the fandom. That’d be like me pretending that my character never uses racially offensive terms or sees his own rape as something to be embarrassed / ashamed of / totally his own fault. It removes a part of that canon character. Couldn’t do it. Hate it when others do. :/ ))

[fyeahfantasticfour]

REED RICHARDS: A DEFENSE, PART ONE

Because I have just seen someone actually blaming Reed for the space-flight accident that gave his family powers, and I am floored that anyone could be so infuriatingly ignorant of Fantastic Four canon, let’s get a few things straight, followers:

Reed did not “force” anyone to go with him on that spaceship. There is absolutely no evidence for that ANYWHERE in canon. None of the various revamped origin stories allow for that interpretation. 

In Fantastic Four v1 #1, Sue, for one, is depicted as willingly accompanying Reed out of a sense of love and loyalty but also patriotism – she wants the US to beat Russia to the moon. Johnny goes because Sue does, and where his sister goes, he follows. Ben goes because of his own toxic masculinity, because Sue calls him a coward, and Ben – who was already a decorated war hero – felt the need to prove her wrong. Could he not simply have pointed to the WWII medals on his wall, or explained that he is an experimental test pilot, which requires a fair amount of bravery? 

And can I point out that it’s been canon since Fantastic Four v1 #1 that Reed tried to talk BOTH Sue and Johnny out of going because he and Ben were experienced at that sort of thing and they weren’t, but Sue and Johnny both insisted on going despite Reed’s warnings? Where from these panels does anyone get “HE FORCED THEM TO GO OMG HE’S SO AWFUL”??? I am truly baffled at how anyone can read these panels and see that. They all had their own reasons for going. No coercion was involved.

If you are going to accuse a character of something, you might want to, I don’t know, actually read the story in question. Just a suggestion.

More beneath the cut!

As a matter of fact, Fantastic Four: The Wedding Special makes clear that Sue’s adventurousness had much to do with encouraging Reed to leave the lab, and that without her egging him on, he never would have dared try to steal the spaceship. Reed, nevertheless, tried to convince her not to go:

What do the Reed haters want Reed to have done, deprive Sue of her right to make her own decisions by knocking her out and tying her up so she couldn’t do as she wished? I can see that the anti-Reed crowd is a HUGE proponent for female agency and autonomy. /sarcasm 

Sue went on that spaceship because SHE wanted to. She was bored with her life, she wanted an adventure, and, suffice it to say, she got one. The adventure of a lifetime. Reed did not force her to do anything, for fuck’s sake. He simply respected her decision – and the fact that it was her decision to make – which is more than I can say about the anti-Reed crowd. When even a male character from the 1960s is more of a feminist than you are, you know you’re pretty damn sexist. 

Personally, I hate it when people pretend that Reed forced Sue to tag along because it very misogynistically erases the fact that Sue loves exploration and discovery every bit as much as Reed does, if not more. People who make that argument do not understand Sue or her motivations in the slightest and are doing her character a great disservice, unsurprising since they clearly do not understand Reed either, and, I suspect, have never cracked open a Fantastic Four comic in their lives, since they do not know even the basics about Reed and Sue’s lives and personalities. Sue goes on adventures with Reed because she loves them, him, and believes in what he’s doing, in their joint project — trying to make the world a better place through a combination of scientific advancements and philanthropic endeavors. So stop underestimating and mischaracterizing her.

Let me also point out that it’s been canon since Fantastic Four v1 #2 that Reed feels TREMENDOUSLY guilty over the accident, even though, again, IT IS NOT HIS FAULT.

People. There is a huge difference between a character BELIEVING something is their fault and it actually BEING their fault. Why is it that so many people seem incapable of telling the difference?

Reed feels so guilty over the accident, in fact, that no matter how emotionally or even physically abusive Ben becomes towards him, Reed simply accepts it and doesn’t even try to defend himself, because he honestly believes he deserves the punishment, as we see in Fantastic Four v1 #66:

Reed, there is a point where you stop being responsible for Ben’s actions, and that point is when he starts physically assaulting you.

But, then again, that’s who Reed is. What he does. Takes responsibility for everyone and everything around him, as he makes clear in Fantastic Four Special 2005:

That is a line that sums Reed up fairly perfectly. 

I think people miss that Reed takes responsibility for all of the FF in ways they’re not necessarily even aware of. In Thing v2 #1, Reed tells Johnny that he’s ensured that Ben’s always lived like a millionaire, even if Ben didn’t know it:

And in Marvel Two-In-One v1 #37, after the FF has temporarily broken up, Ben’s arrested for destruction of property and sent to jail, and we discover that the only reason he hasn’t been in the past is because Reed stepped in and paid for all of the damages, every time. He protects Ben as best he can, and kept him from being sent to jail long ago and treated like a monster. Without Reed’s protection and support, Ben is ostracized and imprisoned and treated like a monster.

And we see Reed’s guilt crop up again in Fantastic Four: First Family, which takes place immediately after the crash. Reed is so traumatized by the accident and paralyzed by his guilt that he is catatonic for days:

until he sees another inmate of the military prison he and his family were taken to killed in front of him and realizes his life and his family’s are all in danger:

and then he immediately tries to behave as nonthreateningly as possible, even apologizing for his “off-putting” catatonia:

But he does take the time to beat himself up over the accident: 

Reed understands, the moment he sees the other inmate murdered, that he and his family are going to be considered non-human “freaks” by unsuperpowered humans. He understands that he needs to protect his family, and that’s what he does. He makes them heroes, makes them celebrities, so the world will be able to look past the terrifying powers and see who they really are – the best and bravest people Reed’s ever known, which he says in Fantastic Four v3 #60. This is where Reed explains that his entire life — everything he ever does — revolves around protecting his family and ensuring their happiness. He tries to keep them wealthy and famous and give them everything they could ever want because he loves them, but also because of his guilt, because he cannot bear the knowledge that he has, as he sees it, destroyed their lives and put them all in constant danger:

People miss — people always seem to miss — that Reed thoroughly despises himself for what he perceives as his many failures, chief among them his failure to protect his family during the space-flight accident. Reed’s guilt isn’t an invention of Mark Waid’s, either, as I’ve seen people argue -- it’s been canon almost as long as Reed has existed. It is even, I’d argue, one of his chief motivations for his superheroics and virtually everything he does.

Honestly, I could pull dozens if not hundreds of panels that span the breadth of over fifty years of Fantastic Four canon that demonstrate that Reed never forced anyone to go on the space flight with him, that the crash wasn’t his fault, that he feels deeply guilty about it regardless of that fact, and that he has dedicated his whole life to making amends for something that he had no control over and was just as much a victim of. If you don’t understand that Reed hates himself and blames himself for the space flight accident, my god, you do not understand the first thing about Reed Richards. The Reed Richards you are describing — a man who would EVER force the people he loves to do anything against their will — simply does not exist in the pages of Fantastic Four comics. He is purely the product of your imagination.

So, for fuck’s sake, stop demonizing Reed over something for which there is zero, I repeat, ZERO canonical evidence. If you don’t believe me? Go read Fantastic Four comics and try to find a SINGLE, I mean just ONE, moment in canon that even so much as implies that Reed did any of this on purpose, or that he is in any way glad that it happened. I challenge you to do so, but I assure you, you will not find it. I mean. There is literally a comic – Fantastic Four vs the X-Men – that floats the idea that Reed possibly engineered the space-flight accident on purpose, but it turns out that it was all part of a trap set up by Victor Von Doom. So the idea has been presented in canon and thoroughly debunked. In other words, you are dead wrong – even laughably so, for people who have actually read the damn comics, which I am so very sure you have not – so, again, stop accusing Reed of something he very definitely did not do.

Part Two, or ‘Sue Very Definitely Loves Reed And Does Not Just Stay With Him Because Of The Kids,’ may be following shortly. How does Part Three, or ‘Why Victor Von Doom, Tyrant, Mass Murderer, Torturer, and Rapist, Is Definitely A Worse Person Than Reed Who Is None Of Those Things, AKA, I Can’t Believe I Actually Have To Say This, What’s Next, Why The Red Skull Is A Worse Person Than Captain America?’ sound?

[the-desolated-quill]

A Good Man Goes To War - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen A Good Man Goes To War. I remember at the time thinking it was dumb, but I had forgotten just how dumb it actually was until now. I’ve seen bad Doctor Who before. I’ve seen stupid Doctor Who before. But A Good Man Goes To War reaches new levels of bollocks I didn’t even think was possible to reach. It’s really quite astounding.

So Amy is trapped on Demon’s Run with Eye Patch Lady about to steal her child. And already we’ve hit our first problem. I’ve mentioned in the past how rubbish Moffat is at writing female characters, and this episode is where its most obvious. Eye Patch Lady is taking her baby away and all Amy does in response is throw sassy putdowns at people. Now if someone were to take away my child, I’d be in fucking hysterics. I’d be shouting and screaming and trying to put up a fight. But as I’ve said in the past, Amy isn’t a character. She’s a plot device. And Moffat writes her as such. She is pretty much nothing but a walking womb.

Meanwhile the Doctor is travelling around time and space and calling in markers in order to save Amy. And here is our second problem. Does this sound like the Doctor to you? Expecting favours from people as a repayment for helping them out in the past? Again, I find myself asking, has Steven Moffat ever actually watched Doctor Who before? The Doctor helps people because it’s the right thing to do. He doesn’t do it with the cynical expectation that they’ll return the favour at some point down the line. It’s just wildly out of character for him.

I suppose I’d be a little more comfortable with it if we actually got to know the Paternoster Gang. Find out how they met the Doctor and why they feel they owe him a favour, but we don’t. For some strange reason people really seem to like the Paternoster Gang, but for the life of me I can’t see why. They’re complete non-entities. There’s nothing remotely interesting about them. Strax is basically just the shit comic relief, diminishing any possible threat the Sontarans could have in future stories with every unfunny one liner, and we learn precisely fuck all about Madame Vastra or Jenny other than they’re gay (on a side note, why do they keep casting Neve McIntosh to play Silurians? Don’t get me wrong. She’s a good actor, but the Silurians aren’t like the Sontarans. They’re not clones).

At this point it seems appropriate to talk about LGBT representation. Specifically how rubbish Moffat is at doing it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that Moffat is willing to put gay characters into his stories, but the way he does it is a tad dodgy to say the least. See, when you’re writing a gay character, there needs to be a lot more to them than just being gay. Russell T Davies understood that perfectly. There were a number of queer characters during his tenure as showrunner, most notably Captain Jack Harkness, and they were all written fairly well for the most part. What I especially appreciated was how their sexuality was never the primary focus. Rather it was just another aspect to their character. Look at Jack Harkness. He’s openly pansexual, but they never make a big deal out of it. It’s just casually mentioned and treated as any other character trait. Plus there’s a lot more to Jack than just being pan. He’s an outgoing adventurer. He seeks redemption for his conman days. He puts on a cheery facade to hide the dark traumas he went through during his long, immortal life. This is good LGBT representation because what it does is it normalises his sexuality. The show treats him as any other character. There’s nothing special or different about him. He’s no different from a heterosexual person. He just has different sexual preferences, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong or strange about that, and so the show doesn’t treat it as such. I think that’s a really good message to send to kids.

Then we come to the Moffat era. Madame Vastra and Jenny are gay. That’s their sole defining character traits. That’s not representation. That’s tokenism. Whereas the queer characters of the RTD era felt like real people, the ones in the Moffat era feel like cardboard cutouts with the word ‘gay’ written on their foreheads. And it just gets worse when those two Cleric marines show up:

“We're the Thin Fat Gay Married Anglican Marines. Why would we need names as well?”

Ugh! Okay, let me tell you precisely why I hate this line so much. It’s incredibly important, particularly in a kids show, to represent and normalise the LGBT community. My issue is this. If being gay is perfectly normal (which of course it is)... why is Moffat drawing so much attention to it? That would be like me making a big fuss about the colour of the sky. The only reason you would do that is if there’s something unusual about it, which is precisely the opposite thing you should be conveying. It’s heavily implied that the Thin Fat Gay Couple are the only ones who are gay, and that’s treated as a novelty. They’re such a novelty in fact that they don’t even have names. The reason I hate this so much is because they’re not characters in their own right. Rather they’re the equivalent of a carnival sideshow attraction with Moffat as the ringmaster inviting spectators to pay tuppence to poke the freaks in the cages. Rather than putting in the effort to write gay characters that are actually well developed and complex, he’s just using these shallow caricatures to boast about how seemingly progressive he is. He’s more bothered about winning brownie points and massaging his own ego rather than providing compelling representation for minority figures. 

He treats his female characters the same way. He boasts about how strong Amy and River Song are, but they’re really not. Yes they’re seemingly independent at first glance, but they very frequently fall into the same, tired old sexist tropes we’ve seen dozens of times before and we never actually learn anything significant about them outside of their lives with the Doctor. Look at this very episode. Amy loses her baby, but she never reacts in a believable or empathetic way. She just resorts to her sassy putdowns and pointing guns at people because that’s the only way Moffat knows how to write women. In fact Amy isn’t even that independent. In a rather telling scene, the Doctor asks Rory’s permission to hug Amy as though she’s Rory’s property as opposed to the strong, independent woman she apparently is. Moffat keeps insisting he’s a feminist and yet he doesn’t see anything wrong with a woman not being able to hug another man without her husband’s permission first.

This is the biggest reason why I hate Moffat as a writer so much. It goes beyond the plot hole riddled stories, the convoluted series arcs and the bad characterisation. Moffat is a man more concerned with looking progressive rather than actually being progressive.

So anyway, the Doctor and Rory (who is dressed in his Roman gear for some stupid reason) manage to save Amy without a single drop of blood being spilt (you know, if you don’t count the Clerics that got killed by the Headless Monks during the Doctor’s deception or the millions of Cybermen that the Doctor kills just to make a point. Brief side note, why would the Cybermen know or care where Amy is? Okay their Legion monitors everything in that particular quadrant, but somehow I doubt that extends to pregnant women. Plus it’s highly unlikely the Cybermen would want to divulge any information after you’ve just blown them up).

Actually it’s a shame that the Headless Monks were wasted on this stupid series arc because I actually thought they were a pretty cool idea. The theology is well thought out and it could have potentially served as a damning criticism of organised religion (thinking from the heart as opposed to the head. I like it). Instead we get treated to more bollocks. So the Monks, Clerics, Silence and Eye Patch Lady have all teamed up to kill the Doctor because apparently he’s a very bad man. Why do they think that?

I don’t know! I’ve got no fucking idea! I mean I’m not going to pretend that the Doctor is a saint, but if you want us to believe he’s a dangerous warrior, you’re going to have to show us some actual evidence. And that’s the problem. There isn’t any. Yes the Doctor has killed, but it’s always been for the greater good. To help others who couldn’t defend themselves. He may not be perfect, but he’s a good man at heart. Unless you give me a compelling reason to believe otherwise, I’m just going to snort and roll my eyes. Obviously Moffat isn’t giving us the full story until much later, but all it does is negatively impact this one. Basically, in this episode, the only reason we’re given as to why Eye Patch Lady thinks the Doctor is evil is ‘trust me. He just is.’ Not good enough.

Also, if you want to kill the Doctor, WHY NOT JUST KILL HIM?! He’s standing right there! Don’t let him finish his monologue! Just shoot the fucker! (Also raise your hand if you saw the Flesh baby plot twist coming. If you didn’t, you’re lying).

And it just gets worse when River shows up at the end to lecture the Doctor about how he’s too violent.

Now I’ll repeat that.

River Song, the gun toting archaeologist who massacred a bunch of Silence in her last appearance and clearly enjoyed every minute of it, is chastising the Doctor for being too violent. Fuck off!

And then the moment none of us have been waiting for. Who is River Song? She’s Amy’s daughter.

Um... I mean... OOOOOOH! Well I did NOT see THAT coming! And here’s me thinking she was Rassilon’s second cousin! Silly me!

Yeah, not only was this head thuddingly obvious what with the aquatic surnames and everything, but also Moffat gave the game away right at the beginning. Melody Pond. get it? Give me fucking strength.

What’s even weirder is that the focus is all out of whack. The reveal is directed more at the Doctor than Amy and Rory (you know, her parents). But why would the Doctor care? And more to the point, why should we care? Okay, River Song is Amy and Rory’s daughter. That’s some interesting information, but that’s hardly mid-season finale material. What we really care about is who River is in relation to the Doctor. And I suspect that’s what the Doctor is more concerned with too. And while I think of it, how is the Doctor learning about River’s true parentage constitute as ‘his darkest day?’ He doesn’t seem to take the news badly or anything. In fact the opposite.

It’s all so mind-bogglingly stupid. A Good Man Goes To War represents the point where Moffat officially starts to disappear up his own arsehole, weaving a convoluted web of bullshit whilst forgetting all the ingredients that make a good story. The answers we’re provided for some of the series arc mysteries are painfully obvious, unsatisfactory and just plain daft, none of the characters act like actual people or behave in a believable way, and crucially I don’t give a shit about anything that’s happening onscreen because at no point does Moffat ever give me a reason to care. Better get used to this folks because these issues are going to become the staple of the Moffat era going forward.