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potteresque-ire · 3 years ago

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Hiya! I've only just started watching Chinese dramas and the drama behind the drama is already blowing my Western mind. Thanks for your meta btw! I was thinking about what you said about Chinese government not explicitly banning anything, rather people had BETTER catch on to what they mean 😨 Is it possible that delaying OOL is their way of warning future productions to think twice before involving Xiao Zhan, because they want to undermine his popularity? As he is 'too entertaining' 💀

Hiya Anon!! The decision to air a c-drama lies in both the government and the platforms. Once the drama gets the distribution permit from the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), it's up to the platforms to schedule the airing date.

The distribution permit for OOL was issued in May 2020, and so the government cleared it for airing a while ago. And so, it is the platforms that are holding the airing date back.

Multiple considerations go into the decision of when to air any drama. Here are some financial considerations I can think of: are there fierce competitors in the same period? It's usual for multiple c-dramas to begin airing on similar dates. The week between 2019/06/23 and 2019/06/30, for example, 9 series began airing—including The Untamed on 2019/06/27. And on that very same date, another prominent, very well-made drama also began its airing—The Longest Day in Chang'An 長安十二時辰).

And then, has a popular drama of a similar genre been aired right before? If so, it may be wise to push back the airing date a little. Is it exam period or is it summer, with students being on vacation and having more free time to watch TV, chase after their favourite idols and buy merchandises? That’s the golden season for idol dramas! Are the production studios, platforms under pressure to produce a solid profit report to their investors? Better move a series with very bankable stars then ...

Afterwards, there are, of course, political considerations. For those who may be worried about c-ent’s current upheaval, I’d like to emphasise this: the government swooping in and say, or hint, that this and that popular thing displeases its Socialist sensibilities isn’t new. Dangai isn’t the first genre to be soft-banned, for example; before that, there was the ... Imperial Harem infighting genre 宮鬥劇 (sorry for the silly translation, I don’t know what’s the proper name for it!), which was extremely popular at the time of the ban with recent hits such as The Legend of Zhen Huan 後宮甄嬛傳 and Story of Yanxi Palace 延禧攻略. There was the time travel genre 穿越劇 (For example, Scarlet Heart 步步驚心). The state criticism against��“sissy” 娘炮 idols also made its former round in 2018.

And so, while there may not have been precedences where the government targets c-ent’s obsession with “traffic” 流量—a relatively new term that describes the heavy flow of social media posts, of buzz and cash surrounding a beloved something or someone, c-ent has a long history of, and ample experiences with, dealing with their government’s displeasure at something that its audience loves, that is financially lucrative for the industry and most importantly, along that line, something the industry wishes to keep.

The last point may be worth emphasising: the production studios, the platforms (streaming, social media etc), the marketing companies, the yxh, the companies who employ celebrities as their spokespeople etc etc, all of them desperately want to keep stars like Gg and Dd around. This is especially true with c-ent being in its “bitter cold winter” financially since 2018, with the tightening censorship that means hit dramas, and "top traffic” 頂流 stars, are increasingly more difficult to make or come by. “Top traffic” stars, in particular, are very attractive to the industry because their fans are (far) more willing to spend money, generate the needed buzz on social media to bring in more “passer-by” audience and in turn, more revenue, and more investment, and more endorsements and sponsorships (see: the number of Dd commercials in SDOC4).

Therefore, as fans and audience, I think it’s safe to assume this: at least on the front of wishing to protect Gg and Dd’s star status, to protect potentially popular dramas and genres such as OOL, these financial interests stand with us. Does this “saving” go against what is safe for these companies? One can say so. It would be safer for the platforms, for example, to air ... um, say, The Best Speeches by President Xi in place of dramas like OOL. The act would likely please the government very much; signal, perhaps, that the platforms have caught on its ultimate dream, with Xi being the One Idol of China. But this decision would also go against the very nature of these companies as for-profit entities, these Capitalist Existence that are traded in stock markets and are driven to make as much money and as quickly as they can.

What, then, is the easiest way to protect traffic stars like Gg and Dd, like Yang Zi 楊紫, the lead actress of OOL who is also very popular and who, reportedly, also has her own rather ... rambunctious corner of fandom? What’s the easiest way to “save” a potentially popular drama like OOL? Saying what is *the* easiest way may be difficult, but I believe I can name one easy way: to simply keep these popular people, these (potentially) popular things out of attention for a while, especially with October 1st (Communist China’s birthday) drawing near and in 2021, the year of the Chinese Communist Party’s Centennial.

After all, regulations from the Chinese government tend to come in bursts—axes falling left, right and centre for a while and in quick succession, followed by an extended period of silence (and neglect). The wait, therefore, doesn’t have to be long at all. As short as after a few month’s time, certain parts of c-ent may return to what it was like before and these c-ent companies, having had so much experience in working around situations like this, would know when that time comes, when the coast is clear.

Meanwhile, as fans, we wait. Being in i-fandom means our words and actions have relatively little effect, but if we were in China, our best action would, too, likely be similar to the platforms that delay the airing of OOL, except we cross out the the word “popular” and replace it with “beloved”: we keep our beloved people, our beloved things out of attention. We refrain from going around and complaining, no matter how much we wish to watch the show. We refrain from starting fights. We stay out of hot searches. The Chinese government is bureaucratic and corruption is rampant, which means often times, the higher-ups in charge of dropping the axes have little knowledge about who or what their axes are supposed to fall on, and little care if they get it wrong. In such circumstances, the key to survival is to not stick one’s head out; to make sure we don’t offer our neck, and more importantly, our favourite stars’ neck, for the axes to fall on.

It may be difficult sometimes. We’ll hear hisses, from antis, from doubters, from those who simply aren’t familiar with the situation, that will tempt us to put ourselves and our favourite stars out in the open where the axes are raining. Patience and independent thinking are important in times like this, qualities that allows us to stop, excuse ourselves from the virtual crowd and think ~ wait, is what is being said true?

The government’s attack on “traffic”, for example, together with the soft-ban on Dangai, have led to soft hisses that Gg and Dd are the targets.

I invite everyone to step back and think a little—are they?

Here’s one small, but important point that may be lost in translation (and lost, too, even in some Chinese discussions where netizens have scrolled through their feeds too quickly): in the state opinion pieces, the term used against “traffic” stars has consistently been “唯流量”, with 流量 = traffic, and 唯 = only. The presence of the character 唯 is crucial: 唯流量 are not simply “traffic”, or popular stars; they are stars with only traffic, with nothing but traffic. No acting skills, no singing or dancing skills, no other demonstrated capabilities beyond getting their fans to vote and comment and buy things for them.

Are Gg and Dd 唯流量?

Here’s Gg:

youtube

(For those who may not know: A Dream Like A Dream 如夢之夢 is not just a Chinese language play. A Chinese adjective that has been used to describe it is 殿堂級 ~ “palace hall grade”, ie, it’s a royalty. Trivia: the version in China ends with a cappella with Patient #5 singing about himself, which means Patient #5 can ruin the finale of the 8 hour show if he fails to sing well, and beautifully.)

And here’s Dd:

youtube

I think I can rest my case. My fellow turtles, what do you think?

Such rumours—that so and so, this and that are the alleged targets—are currently running rampant on Chinese social media, with almost every noteworthy celebrity and media projects etc being named by a few who dislike them. However—or rather, ironically, one may say?—because everyone and everything under the sun has been named, the net effect is not that different from if nothing has been named at all.

If a similar rumour, if more of such rumours creep onto the shores of i-fandom, therefore, please do not be afraid and remember—these speculations, these noises will most likely fade into obscurity unless the populous Gg+Dd fandom amplify it with their voices, even if theses voices are words of defence.

Silence can be a defence. Silence can be the best defence.

For the time being, with the greater sociopolitical environment being what it is, with “Capital” being reportedly targeted by the state (previously discussed here), platforms and TV stations that are part of Capital may be extra careful and temporarily keep all traffic stars out of their productions, out of sight.

But I remind myself this ~ this isn’t about Gg and Dd. This probably isn’t about 99.9% of the stars who may be temporarily kept out of these productions in the coming weeks, some of whom may have starred in Dangai. As a corollary, I find it important to remind myself that too, to think twice before wondering aloud who may be the targets, to make sure I do not, even accidentally, put any non Gg Dd star and their fans under the axes—not because my words can influence the Chinese government, but rather, because of a simple, almost cliché reason: Do not do unto others what you do not want others do unto you.

After all, one step outside fandom, people cannot tell one idol from another, cannot tell one drama from another, cannot tell cpfs from solos ...

As fans of c-ent, we’re in this together. ❤️💛💚

#pie metas

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silverthornwitchery · 3 years ago

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Joyofsatan.org (JoS) is ran by people of color and JoS has stated that they follow non-white Gods. Shannon Outlaw is a black woman and she’s a JoS High Priestess who created the website Blacksforsatan.org. JoS also follows gay/bisexual Gods. The JoS forums (ancient-forums.com) have their own spaces for people of color.

The abrahamic religions are anti-Pagan, anti-Satanic, anti-gay and anti-women so why can’t JoS be anti-abrahamic? JoS supports gay rights and women’s rights.

Fun fact being lgbt and being a person of color doesn't give you a pass to be antisemetic. And specifically it's Romanized Christianity + its off shoots that are, in the modern day, that are bigoted. There are many progressive sects of the abrahamic religions and to be against ALL abrahamic religions throws other persecuted religions under the bus.

Don't get me wrong, I DO NOT like the God of Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christianity + its off shoots. He's an asshole + his entire existence is stemmed from the appropriation of Judaism + misinterpretations of early Christianity. The Roman empire came in and, when they made Christianity the dominant, legal, religion, they warped everything to justify their imperialism + that form of Christianity spread and when king James got a hold of it, it got way worse, so you can thank the Roman empire + King James for fucking over the old religions, not Abrahamic religions as a whole.

And while yes, in general, the early abrahamic religions did demonize ancient gods, the dominant pagan religions + their followers ALSO did some horrific shit (looking at you, roman empire + Egyptian empire). The ancient world was usually always at arms with one another over religion, the myth that all pagan religions lived in harmony is VERY inaccurate. Look at the gallo-roman wars for example.

And it's ok to be pissed that ancient gods got demonized, I am too, however what's not ok is using that as an excuse to promote an openly neo-nazi cult that Preys on younger (specifically teenage) satanists. You can show that the old gods are not dead simply by worshipping them, and talking about them. I think they'd be quite ashamed and pissed that you're using what happened in the ancient past to justify hatred of other, marginalized groups.

Also the Gods we call Satan, was only given that name/title AFTER Christianity came about. We're reclaiming the force used to fear monger, so it's to be expected that Christians wouldn't like satanism, that's kind of the point. The point of satanism is standing against the bullshit Christianity has put in place + the harm its done, so your argument that the Abrahamic religions (Or rly, Christianity but you like to lump everything together) being Anti-Satanic falls flat because THATS THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT OF US BEING SATANISTS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

The vast majority of us satanists, theistic or otherwise, don't want you in our community, and as someone who almost fell into your stupid cult as a 13 year old who didn't know better, fuck off.

#satanism #theistic satanism

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simonjadis · 5 years ago

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Anon I’m ASSUMING that these are from the same person; apologies if they are not

I would say that my feelings are similar to yours, but not quite identical ...

Disney’s handling has been imperfect, and some of the mistakes have been made the highest level (I know that people give Kathleen Kennedy a hard time, but if rumor is to be believed, some of the interference that made IX kind of weird came from higher than that)

for example, Kennedy said in an interview that she tries to find people who just make big, successful movies to make sure that these are also big, successful movies. I can understand that as being a safe bet from a business stand point, but that’s not the same thing as finding someone passionate about very specifically telling good, new Star Wars stories, which we did not really get in the Sequel Trilogy

(one of the most common theories that I saw from TLJ apologists was that people didn’t like that it was new/different than what they were expecting, which was really not the issue for me or my friends. Also it was just a speedrun of parts of Episodes V and VI)

I think that I’m “too close” to Star Wars to see it as a financial asset rather than a beloved universe full of characters and stories that I adore, but I don’t think that “literally just rehash the Original Trilogy for two movies and barely acknowledge any other part of Star Wars until IX” was a good idea

Rey deserved her own story. and Luke deserved to not be retroactively robbed of his

as for George Lucas, I do think that years of backlash over the Prequels sucked the fun out of it for him. Also, who doesn’t want four billion dollars? it was a sweetheart deal for Disney, of course

the sad thing is that this meant the end of Clone Wars, because Disney took one look at Lucasfilm’s budget and was like “OH NO YOU CANNOT SPEND THAT KIND OF MONEY ON A CARTOON” which is why Season 6 was paid for by Netflix and why Maul: Son of Dathomir was a comic

I love Star Wars Rebels and I’m not trying to knock the show at all, but the budgetary difference was palpable. Clone Wars did have it a little easier because of the Clone Troopers (all having the same face), but on Rebels, you notice that 90% of the Imperials are the same guy wearing a hat with his visor obscuring most of his face. market scenes show just a few people (but plenty of Storm Troopers)

the designs of the main characters -- Ezra, Hera, Sabine, Zeb, Kallus, Thrawn, Kanan, etc -- are great and loving and detailed and most of those change a little over time, but there’s a reason that we only see so many planets on Rebels. look at the huge armies and crowds in Rebels. my friend @drunkkenobi is the first who pointed out to me that in Clone Wars, you sometimes see lines of ships (Space Traffic) and each ship in line will be unique, distinct from the others

it’s not Rebels’ fault that they didn’t have that kind of budget. that’s also why their space battles (and space ships) never quite look right. meanwhile, for Clone Wars, if they wanted a particular scene or ship that went over their planned budget, all that they had to do was ask Uncle George

eccentric billionaires funding expensive media isn’t necessarily the most sustainable model for storytelling, but it sure worked out well for Clone Wars and for The Expanse

(Jeff Bezos personally called up the head of Amazon Prime programming, who had already been considering acquiring the extremely good but expensive show, and was like “hey the cast from this show is at a thing where I am, I’d love to just tell them that their show is saved, give me it?” and we saw as many new locations in Season 4 as we did in the first three seasons)

but streaming -- where you actually get money directly from customers who then, through their activity on your platform, show you exactly what they want to see aka what is keeping them on your platform -- offers a new opportunity for high quality genre media. remember, scifi and fantasy were EVERYWHERE in the ‘90s and the early aughts, and then because too expensive for regular TV unless they had huge audiences. only through streaming do we have these new Star Treks, The Witcher, and the real possibility of a new Stargate series

why do I bring up streaming? because

The Mandalorian goes to show that Disney can 100% do good Star Wars. Rebels was good, despite its budget, but can you imagine how much better it would have been if it had aired on Disney+

as with the DC movies (three of which are good and I’m also excited for Birds of Prey), the solution to the our-movies-made-a-lot-of-money-but-aren’t-strictly-speaking-good is literally just “let the people who do the cartoons make the movies”

and now we’re getting a final, seventh (half) season of Clone Wars! twelve episodes looking better than the show has ever looked!!

if you’re like me, you probably thought to yourself “gee, only 12?” and, cynically, you figured that it’s a trick -- announced at ComicCon in 2018 to build up the first wave of hype for Disney+

and it is ... but it 100% worked on me, I signed up for Disney+ and will pay anything for Clone War

my HOPE is that this is a test run to see if people really like high-quality animated Star Wars stories enough to continue with it. there’s only so much clone wars that one can cover (my suspicion is that we will see Ahsoka fake her death during Order 66 in these eps, so yep, that’s the end of the Clone Wars right there)

imagine a well-written series with everything that Clone Wars had in terms of content and visual quality, but it’s set after Episode IX. to my frustration, IX ends with effectively the same worldstate as VI which essentially means that nothing much happened in the Sequel Trilogy. but imagine a series set after IX. we could see a new set of (Force-wielding) characters. we could see Rey, Finn, Poe, and Rose during some episodes. Rose could finally get to do something that’s not an insulting fool’s errand (she deserves so much better!!!!!)

we don’t need a new Big Scary Empire/First Order thing, just organized crime and pirates and Hutts and bounty hunters and individual planet systems going to war as the characters try to assemble a NEW New Republic (gods I hate the unchanged worldstate)

now, I know that Star Wars Resistance is not ... reassuring. this is the only screencap that I have from it because I couldn’t get into it. it’s not the animation (I enjoyed Tron Uprising and Iron Man: Armored Adventures and this is the same kind of deal), but three things:

-I watch Star Wars for the Force primarily; other stuff can be cool but I need the Force

-I will never care about ships racing and really I don’t care about an individual ship flying; I’m a Command Ship kind of space nerd

-apparently the writing doesn’t improve much during the first season. people tell the main character to not do something, then he does it, and disaster ensues. that’s ... it’s fine, it’s fine to exist as a show, it’s just not for me

obviously, not all Star Wars media is for me, but when something -- like TLJ or the Sequel Series as a whole (even though VII and IX are enjoyable) or Resistance -- disappoints me, I would never accuse it of “ruining Star Wars”

Star Wars is a whole franchise. the breadth of canon isn’t all wiped away by some disappointments. was the MCU ruined by Age of Ultron? no. it was a bad movie but from the same franchise that gave us The Winter Soldier and Thor Ragnarok. hell, Dawn of Justice doesn’t “ruin” Wonder Woman or Aquaman or Shazam. bad movies aren’t contagious

for the past several years, the Entitled Dude crowd has felt empowered. they were radicalized in the altright/redpill/MGTOW/meninist/nazi/gamergate/comicsgate/etc spheres of the internet and now they just have a reflex where they see any sort of representation and decry it as “SJW,” which they also seem to think is a bad thing

in the same way that well-meaning people on tumblr can get radicalized into being antis/puriteens, people with certain vulnerabilities on reddit or youtube can get sucked into a world that tells them that they are the default and that other people existing is “political” in media and in real life, and that people being upset by outright cruelty towards them is both funny and means that the cruel person is the victor. they need therapy and studios need to not listen to them

unfortunately, sometimes there are movies that are bad despite having things like solid representation. Ghostbusters 2016 was a delight, but my friends and I with whom I saw TLJ (all of us queer feminists) left the theater angry. we’ve bitten our tongues a lot (even if it seems otherwise) because publicly criticizing the film too often leads some incel monster to chime in with agreement, and we’re just like

the redpillgate crowed et all is a natural ally of conservative white evangelicals, even though the former group is generally made up of New Atheists (the short version is atheists who hold socially conservative views because racism/misogyny/transphobia benefit them without using christianity as an excuse). it’s kind of like how terfs will side with conservative hate groups because, though they’re natural enemies, they both despite trans people just for existing

unfortunately, when you’re looking at who went to see a movie or who hated it, not everyone posts with an ID card saying exactly their demographic. which is only going to make studios like Disney even more nervous about including queer content in Star Wars and in the MCU (I mean real queer content with characters whose names don’t have to be searched on a wiki)

that was a bit of a tangent, but yeah. sorry if I missed anything

#star wars #clone wars #anon #ask #anon ask

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joeybelle · 5 years ago

Text

Starlight - Chapter 26

Cassian Andor x Original female character

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Strong language, Violence

Size: 7300

The war room was incredibly busy and the air was heavy with tension. She wasn’t used to seeing it filled to the brim with people staring at unfamiliar holo-maps and blinking lights on screens, but she knew the concerned looks on their faces really well. The already intimate feeling of dread had accentuated and it seemed that she wasn’t the only one feeling it.

“It’s been brought to our attention that you know Galen Erso personally,” Mon Mothma said, looking just as poised as ever. “Could you tell us more about that?”

Cora had to make an effort to pry her eyes from one of the blinking screens. Her throat felt incredibly dry. “Well, I assume you know the circumstances in which I met him.” Mon Mothma nodded and Cora had to swallow the panic. If Cassian had seen fit to tell them about that, then something really bad must have happened. “Then you probably know everything already.”

She could see Draven fidgeting uncomfortably in the corner of her eye, but he kept silent. She wondered if Cassian had been able to somehow stop him from intervening; or was it all Mothma? Speaking of Cassian, where was he?

“What do you know about what he was working on? What do you remember?”

Cora frowned, making an effort to remember. “Some sort of new fighter ships, but I don’t know much about them.” It felt odd going back to being interrogated, although she could feel the atmosphere was nowhere as hostile as it used to be. “As you might have guessed, they didn’t really talk openly about this in front of a kid.”

“But you’ve looked at the files,” Draven chimed in, apparently unable to keep his mouth shut. “You must have seen something.”

She returned his glare. “The details of whatever the Empire was doing weren’t really my priority back then. You keep forgetting I’m a doctor, not a spy.” He shut his mouth and crossed his arms over his chest, his face going back to looking moderately annoyed.

“Do you think this was the only project he was working on at that time?” Mothma asked, a lot calmer than Draven had been.

The frown on Cora’s face deepened, but it was of little use. “No… I don’t think it was the only thing he was working on.” She closed her eyes, trying hard to remember the things that had happened such a long time ago. She’d never thought that they would ever become relevant. “I remember pretty well when they first came to Corinthia, because it was so unexpected to have another family living with us. It was a big deal for us too, because Krennic was going to coordinate this thing. He called this project my mother was part of his ‘pet project’ and that he was working with Galen Erso on something else. Something about Erso doing this as a personal favour… or something.” It wasn’t very convincing, but her brain was just patching together broken memory fragments. “He was regarded as a very good engineer as far as I know. I guess they could have had him working on more than one project at a time.”

“Did anyone ever talk about what this other project was in your presence, or might you have overheard something?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“Would you tell us, even if you did?” Draven mumbled and Cora could swear she saw him roll his eyes.

“If you ask nicely,” she spat back, but a raised hand from Mon Mothma silenced them both.

“You mentioned they lived on Corinthia?” She took back the reins of the questioning and steered it into less hostile territory. “For how long?”

“Six months to a year? I don’t really remember.”

“That’s a huge margin,” Draven concluded.

“I was a kid.”

Mothma ignored the interruption and continued as if nothing had happened. “So you knew them well.”

“His wife more than him. She was really motherly. I remember liking her a lot.” However, she couldn’t remember her name.

“And you knew his daughter too. Jyn Erso.” Cora nodded. “Were you two close?”

“As close as the only two kids on a warship can get.” Cora shrugged. “Yes, I guess you can say we were pretty close.”

“Did you ever wonder what happened to her or try to reconnect after your mother’s death?”

“No. I didn’t really have time to care about others that much.” She was pretty sure it sounded a lot more janded than she intended.

“Do you know Saw Gerrera?” Draven asked, looking a little impatient.

“No, who is he?”

“He used to be part of the Alliance,” Mothma explained, and for the first time Cora noticed a shadow pass over her features. “However, his views are a lot more extreme than ours, so he decided a long time ago to follow a different path. He’s caused us a lot of trouble over the years.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know him.”

Draven snorted. “Didn’t they bother to at least teach you the names of those you were meant to kill?”

The level of annoyance was rising, but the anti-hangover medication seemed to have the secondary effect of mellowing her out, so what came out of her mouth sounded surprisingly detached. “I seem to keep having to repeat myself, General: even when I worked for the Empire, I was still a doctor. We’re not the ones doing the killing.” She turned her head to look at Mothma. “How is any of this relevant and what’s it got to do with me?”

“We know that Galen Erso left the Empire at some point and went into hiding. Sometimes after your mother’s accident, we assume. He did it with the help of Saw Gerrera,” Mothma explained. “After his wife was killed, he was forced…”

“We don’t know that,” Draven interrupted.

“He returned to his former duties within the Empire.” Mothma shot him an icy glare. “His daughter wasn’t captured, but was rescued and raised by Saw Gerrera. He trained her like one of his fighters. She fell off the radar for a while, but we managed to track her down.”

Cora nodded. She had to admit that she hadn’t thought about Jyn in years, and even when she did it was just a passing thought. She hoped she was happy though. From what she remembered, Jyn was a small and soft child, always afraid of Cora’s shortcuts though the darkness of the ventilation system. She would have never guessed that she could ever be trained to become a fighter, but time and circumstances change people. She was a prime example.

“Do you think it’s possible that she’d remember you?”

Cora had to once again pry her eyes from one of the blinking screens at the edge of her field of vision. “Perhaps? She was quite young and I don’t think I’ve made such a big impression, but she might remember me.”

Mothma nodded, but her expression was unreadable, besides her usual motherly vibe. “Would you be willing to talk to her?”

“Are you trying to recruit her?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.” Cora waited for her to elaborate, but it seemed no further explanation was coming.

“And classified?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. She was really tired of being treated differently from everybody else. Although she was now one of them, she could still feel a cloud of suspicion looming over her head.

“Well, no…”

“Yes!” Draven interjected, taking a step forward. “All you have to do is talk to her, and get her to be a little more… cooperative.”

“I would really love to know what I’m getting myself into, General,” Cora said through gritted teeth. “With all due respect.”

“There’s been talk of a pilot,” Mon Mothma said, ignoring Draven’s protests. “An imperial cargo pilot has defected. He’s supposed to be carrying some news from Galen Erso for Saw Gerrera, regarding one of the projects he’s been working on. We’ve tried intercepting him, but he seems to have reached Gerrera already.”

“I see.” And there it was again, the sinking feeling that something really bad was going to happen really soon. Now Cora was convinced it wasn’t just an empty feeling. Once again, she was afraid. “So that’s where you’ve sent Cassian to,” she said out loud, before she realized that she had no good excuse for knowing that Cassian had already been shipped. Luckily, she was probably too livid to be able to blush in embarrassment.

“Yes,” Mothma replied, appearing to completely ignore Cora’s confession. “And as you might have guessed,” she sighed, “Saw Gerrera isn’t very keen on talking to us anymore, but we would like to know what sort of information the Pilot might be carrying.”

“So you need Jyn to talk to Saw Gerrera for you.”

“Correct.”

“And you need me to talk to her because… she might not be so keen on talking to you either?”

Mon Mothma nodded. “We think seeing a familiar face might make her a bit more willing to cooperate. Being surrounded by strangers might be a little intimidating. We wouldn’t want her to think we’re hostile towards her in any way.”

They hadn't been so thoughtful with her. Cora grimaced and wondered if Mon Mothma didn’t sense the irony in her own words or if she just ignored it. However, by the not so subtle roll of eyes from General Draven, Cora assumed that they were instead intended for the General’s ears. A warning, perhaps.

“Alright,” Cora agreed. “I’ll talk to her, but don’t expect much. I’m not sure she remembers me, or if my presence here can change anything really.” But she wanted to be there anyway, just in case Draven decided to bark at her like a rabid dog. She still remembered with dread how they treated her when she was first brought before them.

“Thank you,” Mothma said, with a slight tilt of her head. “We appreciate your help.”

“Yeah,” Cora mumbled. “Glad to be of use. Let me know when you need me. Anything else?”

“No, thank you. You may get back.” The smile on her face was probably the friendliest Cora had ever gotten from the poised senator and that gave her a little hope that at least she didn’t consider her a traitor anymore. She smiled and got up to leave.

“So you said found Jyn? How’s she doing?” Cora asked before exiting the room.

“We found her in an imperial labour camp,” Mothma said, following her to the door. “Not doing great I suppose.”

“Neither are we.”

“How so?”

“I don’t really know,” Cora said, embarrassed. She hadn't meant to say that out loud. “I just got this feeling that something bad’s about to happen.”

“You might be right,” she said, her face suddenly turning somber. She followed her outside of the war room, letting the blast doors close behind them. “There’s been this rumour that the project Galen Erso was working on is in fact a weapon,” she said, keeping her voice down so the passersby couldn’t hear. “A planet killer, someone called it.”

Cora froze in place, her eyes widening slightly as she turned her head to look at the Senator. The woman’s expression was just as unreadable as ever, but it had lost its usual warmth.

“Do we stand a chance against it? If the rumour’s real, I mean.”

“Of course,” she replied, and her face broke into a reserved smile. “We have to.”

Cora nodded, but she was sure her face reflected every bit of her inner turmoil. She really hoped that whomever spread that rumour had been wrong, otherwise she wasn’t sure what a handful of rebels could do against it. “I’ll be around, if you need me,” she let the Senator know, excusing herself. She needed a stiff drink.

“We’ll call for you. But until we know anything for sure,” Mon Mothma added before returning to the War Room, “there’s no need to cause any unnecessary panic.”

“Yeah, of course.”

Cora wasn’t sure how she managed to reach the med bay downstairs, for the world was a bit of a blur. It didn’t help that the shock had undone whatever effect the hangover medication had on her, and now her stomach was protesting loudly, threatening to expel its contents right then and there. She had to take a moment to regain her composure before she could move on to look for her friend.

“Are you feeling okay?” Lewella asked, concern pretty visible on her face, once she saw Cora’s livid face.

“More or less,” Cora replied taking a seat next to her friend on a supply crate.

“Eat something,” she said, pushing her plate of food towards Cora, but even the smell made her nauseous.

“No thanks,” she replied, grimacing and pushing it back.

“Rude,” Lew mumbled. “Are you really alright? You look awful.”

“Hangover,” Cora said in a really detached voice that didn’t really sound like her own.

“That bad?”

“Something bad’s about to happen,” Cora said, before she could stop herself. She knew she shouldn’t worry her friend, but there was no one else she could talk to and it was killing her. “Something really big’s coming.”

“That’s just hangover induced paranoia,” she said with a raised eyebrow. “Did you drink something weird? I swear, if Melshi’s brought anything weird from his missions again, I’ll ice him.”

“No, I’ve been feeling it for a while. It’s like… It’s like it’s always there in the back of my mind lately.”

“We’re all feeling things like that sometimes, you just learn to ignore it after a while,” she said, poking at her food, but Cora could see she wasn’t eating anymore.

Cora kept her mouth shut. It wasn’t something she could rationally explain, not without telling her what Mon Mothma had asked her not to. So she just stared into the distance, watching the ships come and go.

“Besides,” Lewella added, dropping her food to the side and inching closer to Cora so she could comfortably place an arm around her shoulders, “if anything is coming, we’ll be here to face it. All of us, together.”

Cora smiled and leaned into her friend’s touch, finding a bit of comfort in her presence. “Do you need help with anything? I’d like to keep busy for a while, keep my mind off things.”

“I could find something for you to do.” Lew yawned and hopped off the crate. “But I’m not letting you overwork yourself. By the way, weren’t you supposed to be working today?”

“Took a couple of days off,” Cora mumbled, remembering once again the reason why she did so.

“And you drank without me?” she said, looking completely bewildered, so much that Cora burst into laughter.

“It wasn’t a happy occasion,” Cora tried excusing herself.

“I don’t care, you know I can drink for every occasion! Have I told you about that time…”

Cora laughed, only half-listening to what her friend was saying, and ushered her towards the door, leaving the busy hangar behind.

It wasn’t until the next day that she heard anything from the War Room. The wait had been excruciating, her mind full with the wildest scenarios, weapons and armies and imperial warships. She tried to imagine what something called a planet killer would look like, but she failed. Her mental state hadn’t been in the best of shapes, so the new information had sent it into overdrive. But deep down, she knew she was afraid. Most of all, she was scared for Cassian.

She was always a bit wary when he was away, wondering where he’d ended up this time, what he was doing, in what sort of danger they were putting him. But right now she desperately wanted him back, safe. Because right now the stakes were insanely high.

She couldn’t understand, if the rumours of a weapon that could destroy planets were real, how they’d even stand a chance. How do you fight a weapon that has the power to wipe you, and your army, and the whole planet along with your base? As far as Cora was aware, and she was sure she wasn’t wildly off the mark, the Rebellion had nothing that could compare to that. It was still a small resistance against the might of the Empire. They had no chance, and yet she knew they would not give up easily.

She wished she could still be a coward, but unfortunately that time had gone. Her love for Cassian hadn’t managed to make her fearless, but had made her willing to confront her fears. She knew she couldn’t throw everything away, she couldn’t just jump on a ship and run anymore. She was here, where she belonged, and would be here until the end, whenever and wherever that might be. She only wished Cassian would be by her side too.

She was working when they called her to the War Room. There was an odd tension surrounding her, like the whole world was buzzing, but it could very well be that it was she who was the tense one.

“You’re currently calling yourself Liana Hallik. Is that correct?” she heard Draven say once she passed the blast doors, arriving in the middle of the interrogation. They hadn't had the courtesy of inviting her from the start, but it was better than never, she assumed.

A wave of conflicting emotions washed over her. Her mother’s name had been Liana. It was still painful to hear it spoken by someone else, but that also meant that maybe Jyn remembered the time spent on ISD Corinthia.

She moved closer, hoping to get a glimpse of the girl she hadn’t seen since they both only reached a stormtrooper’s knee, but instead her heart nearly jumped out of her chest when she saw Cassian leaning next to a screen. He was looking at her with the corner of his eye, and a discreet nod of his head took the place of hello. Cora smiled, despite the nervousness and focused her attention on the woman being interrogated.

She was about Cora’s age, which was consistent with what she knew about her. She bore very little resemblance to the little girl Cora remembered from her youth, but that was also to be expected. People change a lot in...sixteen? Seventeen years? That’s almost an entire lifetime.

Jyn looked exhausted and more than a little apprehensive, but Cora’d been in her position before and she knew how uncomfortable it could be to have all those eyes fixed on you. Especially Draven’s pronounced frown. And if she were to he honest, Cassian wasn’t really helping either. Over time she’d forgotten just how intimidating he could be to someone who didn’t know him. They were all ganging up on the poor girl.

Cora wished she could chime in, try to shield her a little from the assault, but she knew it wasn’t her place to speak yet. She trusted Mothma’s judgement, and if the threat was as big as they thought, they didn’t really have much time for pleasantries.

“We’re up against the clock here, girl,” Draven barked, looking annoyed. “So if there’s nothing to talk about, we’ll just put you back where we found you.”

“I was a child,” she defended herself, and Cora felt really bad for her. “Saw Gerrera saved my life. He raised me. But I’ve no idea where he is. I haven’t seen him in years.”

“We know how to find him, that’s not our problem. What we need is someone who gets us through the door without being killed,” Cassian said, and it was almost a flashback to her own interrogations. He really needed to learn how to be nicer.

They all explained to her what they’d told Cora the day before: there was an imperial defector—currently being held up by Saw Gerrera— that was claiming the Emperor was building a super weapon with the power to destroy planets, that her father was in fact one of the lead engineers and he’d been the one who sent the pilot. They promised her freedom and a clean record in exchange for her help. It seemed they’d become more lenient over time. Cora was only a little bitter about it.

There was more talk about the hows and whens and wheres, but to Cora those meant nothing. The details didn’t interest her because she wasn’t going to be included in the mission anyway. She just wished Cassian wouldn’t be involved either, especially with the looming feeling of doom still very much present. She watched him from the corner of her eye: he looked tired and worried.

Gone was the glow he had the day before. He once again looked older than his age, the lines on his face deeper than before and the dark circles pretty noticeable. He usually looked like that after long, tiring missions, but all this change in just a couple of days. She had to wonder what had happened.

Cora wished she could step closer, put her hands around his chest and hold him tight, tell him that whatever weight he was carrying on his shoulders she was willing to share with him.

“This here is Doctor Corinthia Enoch,” said Mon Mothma, pulling Cora back from her thoughts and reminding her that she wasn’t there just to spectate. “You might remember her from your childhood. She’s one of our doctors.”

Jyn’s eyes narrowed as Cora took a step forward, trying to look as harmless as possible although she knew the medical uniform could be just as intimidating as the military ones. But the girl smiled, even if it was half a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

“You’re the girl in the vents,” she said, and Cora couldn’t help but burst into laughter.

“I’ve been called worse,” she laughed, which somehow eased the tension a little. Cora took a seat so she wasn’t towering over her. Draven had turned around and focused his attention on something else, so the atmosphere was a lot friendlier all of a sudden. As friendly as it could get in something called the War Room. Cassian was still frowning in his corner, but Cora knew that was just his work face.

There was an awkward silence between them, while Jyn carefully studied her. She seemed to consider whether to trust her or not, or maybe she was just trying to remember things about their shared childhood. Cora waited patiently for her to speak. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do anyway, as far as she was aware, Jyn had already agreed to work with them, so she was there only as a sort of moral comfort.

“Never thought you’d end up being a doctor,” Jyn said after a while. “I thought you were pretty set on becoming a pilot.”

Cora smiled a sad smile. “Yeah, well, life happened,” she replied. “Not everything turns up as planned.”

“And a Rebel?”

“That’s… a more recent development to be honest,” she smiled, a bit embarrassed. “But one I don’t regret in the least.”

“Really?” She looked at her with questioning eyes, and Cora didn’t know if there was distrust in them or not. “What made you change sides?”

That was an easy question with a very complicated answer. Cora took a deep breath, taking her time to find something to say. She could see Draven watching her from the corner of his eye, his back still turned to Jyn, but his whole stance told her he was listening. She wondered if she was there to help win Jyn’s trust, or prove her own loyalty. After such a long time, his distrust was insulting.

“I realized I was believing a lie. I had my eyes shut for a very long time only choosing to see what didn’t oppose any of my convictions.” She took a deep breath. “But once I started looking around and started seeing more than two meters in front of me, I couldn’t just pretend everything was alright.” It was all very vague, but being more specific would have taken a very long time and she assumed no one had time for that. “It still took a long time for me actually leave. Being kidnapped by a certain Intelligence Officer helped a lot in making that decision,” she concluded, pointing a finger in his direction. Cassian snorted, but he did a very good job keeping a straight face.

Jyn smiled the same half smile, but she seemed a little more relaxed this time. “Sounds like quite the story.”

“Yeah. Remind me to tell it to you one day,” she said with a smile. “When we’ll have more time and some… uuuh… better company. Hopefully alcohol too.”

Without Draven listening in and with Mon Mothma seeming to have disappeared, the atmosphere was a lot friendlier. If only Cassian would have sat down beside them so it would just be a talk among friends, instead of a negotiation. But he was talking to Draven in a corner, not paying attention to them anymore.

“Welcome to the Rebellion,” Cora said, smiling at the girl. Jyn blinked a few times in surprise, before mumbling a ‘thank you’. “Don’t worry too much about Draven and the rest. They put up a tough front, but they’re not bad people.” Cora hoped she was right. Unfortunately, Cassian and her few friends were the only ones she could genuinely say that about. Draven was still a mystery. “Anyway, if you ever need me, your best bet is the med bay.”

Jyn looked at her and nodded. She looked tired, but what else was to be expected from someone who had just been rescued from a labour camp. Cora wondered if she could end this meeting and save Jyn from it, since it seemed like nothing else was currently being discussed. She was still a doctor and she could always invoke the patient’s well-being, but she didn’t know if in this case they would listen to her.

Before she could open her mouth to say something, Cassian took a few steps towards the table. “We have to go,” he said, looking at the girl.

Cora’s heart sunk. “Already?” She was unable to hide the disappointment in her voice.

“Soon,” he replied, and Cora could tell he was looking away. “We still have some preparations to make, but we’ll be leaving soon. Thank you, Doctor, we’ll call you if we need further assistance.”

His eyes were cold when he looked at her and Cora wished there was no one around them so she could hug him until some life seeped back into them. She had hoped she could catch him alone for at least a couple of minutes before being shipped again, but that might not be happening.

She nodded and got up. “It’s been my pleasure. Captain Andor, Jyn,” she saluted, before excusing herself and leaving the room.

The feeling of doom followed her on the busy corridors until she entered the med bay. Doctor Crane was sitting at the desk, diligently taking her place since she was away.

“You don’t look too good,” he said, not lifting his eyes from the data-pad in front of him.

“I don’t feel too good,” she admitted, taking a few steps towards the window. It seemed like there was a different kind of rush that day.

“We’ll get over this too,” he said, after a couple of minutes of silence.

“You think?” Cora asked, not bothering to turn around. “A planet killer?”

“I trust the Rebellion and I trust you all. One way or another, we will win. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day, there will be light again.”

“I hope you’re right.”

She didn’t feel hopeful, if she were to be honest, but she trusted Cassian. She trusted him with every cell in her being. And if there was anyone to have a chance, it was him.

She tried piecing together the information she had gotten from Jyn’s interrogation. So there was a super weapon that Galen Erso had built, but he had also built a flaw in its design, so it could be taken down at the right time. And now he had sent someone to bring this information to the Rebel Alliance.

Cora couldn’t wrap her mind around how much this man was risking sending word from the middle of the Empire directly to the Rebellion. He must really have balls of steel not only to secretly work for years to sabotage an Imperial super weapon, but to risk everything by sending a cargo pilot to hand them the information. Cora was starting to get nauseous just thinking about it. Compared to these people, she’d never be more than a coward.

“Doctor Enoch,” she heard Mon Mothma’s voice coming from the other side of the room and turned to look at her. “Can I please have a word with you?”

Cora nodded and followed her out of the med bay. There was a sense of weariness as she walked behind Mothma. She wasn't used to get this much attention from the members of the council, all in the same day. She didn't like that she wasn't in the med bay anymore, the place where she felt most in control. But she followed her anyway.

“I know this comes very late, and I have to say I personally am very ashamed of this,” Mon Mothma said once they were safely away from everyone else, in the privacy of one of the personal offices—one that Cora assumed existed, but had never previously entered. There was another officer there holding the duffle bag she had taken with her when she had left her job on the star destroyer and ran away with Cassian. That was unexpected. “We’ve decided a while ago that we would be giving back the things that we took from you, but because of my personal negligence and the things that have happened lately, it seems to have slipped the minds of those responsible with giving it back.” She smiled, but there was no note of embarrassment on her face. “You will see that everything you had in it is still there, we made sure that everything was kept under strict supervision.”

The officer handed her the bag and Cora looked inside. As far as she could tell, everything was still there, including the healing field generator. Especially the healing field generator. She always assumed that they had taken it and given it to one of the field medics, but it seemed that somehow they respected her ownership over the stolen device.

“Lieutenant Marek has a list of everything that was inside at the time of your… imprisonment. You can both go over it, make sure that everything’s alright.”

“There’s no need, I’ll take your word for it,” Cora said, flinging the bag over her shoulder. “Why now?” she asked before leaving the room. “Why give it back now?”

“As I’ve said, we were planning to do it a while ago, but…”

“Yes, but why remember it today?” Cora interrupted her, knowing full well that she was being rude. “Ma’am,” she added, for good measure. “Why today? Have you all decided that you trust me enough not to try and run away or have you given up hope that the Rebellion will survive?”

“Neither,” she said, and seemed not to notice the snark in Cora’s voice. Or she had been expecting it. “You are free to leave whenever you want.”

Cora’s eyes widened and she burst into an incredulous laughter. “And my tracker bracelet?”

“It will be taken down whenever you wish. You have my word.” Cora still looked at her with wide eyes, not being able to fully comprehend the sudden turn of events. “If you wish to leave, we’ll ensure transport for you to a safe place in the galaxy. Also, we won’t forget the help you provided us with until now, so if you ever need us, we’ll be here for you.” The woman was smiling and sounded really genuine, dispelling any suspicion Cora might have had that this was some sort of test to prove her loyalty once again.

“I’m not leaving,” Cora said with determination in her voice. “I’ll be… in the med bay if you need me,” she said.

The amount of things that had happened in only one day was overwhelming. Cora was used to working and staying alert for 12 hours straight, but even on one of the busiest days at work she didn’t feel like there was this much information to process. First, there was the threat of being wiped by an imperial superweapon; then the knowledge that Cassian was being sent to fuck knows where to find a pilot who might have information on how to destroy said planet killer; and now, all of a sudden, she was no longer a prisoner and all her stuff had been returned to her… She was overwhelmed.

“Anything I can help you with?” Dr Crane asked, looking at her with a worried expression on his face as she dropped the duffle bag on one of the tables.

“Ummm…” she looked around her, completely lost. She had no idea what to do next, so she focused on the only thing that was clear in her mind: seeing Cassian before he left.

Once she’d decided this, it was like her mind was in working order once again. All the other things she needed to process were put on a mental shelf and left to be dealt with another time, right now Cassian was the only thing that mattered. She started unloading things from her duffle bag and checking them. Most of the medication and survival gear she had stolen from the Empire seemed to be in working order.

“Doc, can I borrow some supplies?” she asked, already opening one of the medicine cabinets and pulling some stuff out.

“Be my guest,” he said, smiling at the frenzy with which she was shoving things in her bag.

She knew Cassian would do some stupid shit, she was convinced of that. And even if he wouldn’t, someone else would, and he’d still end up injured. She knew, she’d treated him so many times before. And she couldn’t be there with him to save him, if anything happened. So preparing a bag full of survival gear was the best she could do. The portable healing field generator could end up being a lifesaver and she was more than happy to give it to him.

She was putting the supplies in order, deciding what to leave in the bag and what was just her own personal stuff when her hand touched the blaster. She’d forgotten about it, and she was still surprised they’d given it back to her. She pulled it out and checked it. It was still working and it seemed like someone even changed the energy cell before giving it back, making sure that it was fully loaded. Cora lifted her eyes to look at Doctor Crane, but he wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. She hid the weapon under her medical tunic.

“Doc, is it okay if I take half an hour off?” she asked, flinging the bag over her shoulder.

“Of course,” he said, still busy with reading something. “Grab something to eat on the way back too.” Cora nodded and made a mental note to stop by the mess hall, even though she wasn’t hungry in the least. “And wish him good luck.”

She smiled before bolting out the door and running towards the elevators. Hopefully she’d still be able to catch him.

The distress could be sensed everywhere, in the rushed way people walked down the corridor, in the weary way they looked at each other. Cora wondered just how much they knew. She doubted the rumour could be kept a secret for long and from the way they talked to Jyn Erso in a room full of people, they didn’t even try that hard.

She found Jyn next to the ER, heading towards Cassian’s ship. She seemed ready to go wherever the Rebellion was sending them, her face a mask of determination.

“Leaving already?” Cora asked, trying to match her pace. “They didn’t give you much time to rest, did they?”

Jyn nodded. “We are up against the clock, it seems,” she said, mirroring Draven’s snark and Cora couldn't help but smile.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Cora asked, showing just how much she didn’t listen to what had been said in the war room.

“Jedha. After that, I have no idea.” She shrugged. “To find my father, hopefully.”

Cora had heard about Jedha, but mostly since she’d joined the Rebellion. She knew it had become a dangerous place since the Empire’s occupation, with frequent fights between the locals and the occupying forces. Jyn had to be careful—well, all of them, but she trusted Cassian and K2. Jyn didn’t seem as seasoned, but maybe she was projecting her own insecurities on her. Her image of Jyn was still that of a frail, easily scared child.

“I hope you find him,” Cora said, and she was happy that Jyn returned her smile even if it was short lived. “And when you do, I hope you’ll both visit so we can all have a drink and laugh about our childhood.”

“I still can’t picture you as a rebel,” she said, and her voice sounded a bit sarcastic, but Cora brushed it off. “You were quite the Empire supporter back in the day.”

“Also young and naive,” she laughed, a little embarrassed.

Cora stopped and looked around, at the place that had become her home over time. She wasn’t sure when that had happened, when she’d started calling it home and when she felt like she truly belonged, despite Draven’s insistence to make her feel unwelcome. She didn’t even hate him anymore. She’d gotten used to him and his attitude and he didn’t intimidate her anymore, he was just an annoyance. But she was glad she had gotten the chance to stay and become part of the Rebellion.

“Anyway,” she continued, forcing herself to not get too lost in her own thoughts, “do you have any idea what you’ll be facing when you get there?”

“I guess we’ll have to see.”

Cora wondered if Jyn was really as tough as she tried to look. Probably not, and certainly not without a weapon. Cora had noticed that she hadn’t been given one, and since she had been picked up from a labour camp, she doubted that she had her own. Maybe Cassian would give her one once they’d take off. Somehow she doubted it, she knew he wasn’t the most trusting. But they couldn’t send her in the middle of the battle completely unarmed. Cora could feel her own blaster hard against her body.

“Here, take this,” she said taking it out and handing it to her. Jyn looked from the weapon to Cora and frowned. “I’ll want it back, but you can have it for now.”

“Thanks,” she said, still a little cautious, but taking the weapon nonetheless. It looked a lot more natural in her hand, Cora thought.

K2’s tall, dark outline caught her eye, reminding her why she was there in the first place. “Shall we?” Cora said, pointing towards the U-wing.

It didn’t take long to spot Cassian in the crowd, a little further away, talking to Draven. From the sour look on his face she was sure he didn’t like whatever the general had to say. No wonder Cassian looked so tired all the time. She sighed and waited for him.

“Captain,” she greeted once he had gotten closer.

“Doctor,” he replied, and the frown on his forehead relaxed considerably. “How are you?” he said in a low voice, as if anyone would be listening in.

“Oh, you know, the usual. This whole thing with the pilot seems to have stirred things up a little.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking down. “I wish I didn’t have to tell them anything about…”

“No, it’s alright,” she said, her heart filled with joy knowing that he really meant to keep his promise to her. “Glad to have been of some help. Though I’m not sure I’ve helped much. Anyway,” she said, trying to keep things short as she could see Jyn and K2 already seeming to be butting heads. “Got my stuff back today.” She took the duffle bag off her shoulder and showed it to him.

“They should have done that a long time ago.” The frown was back and although Cora appreciated his indignation, this wasn’t the time.

“Better late than never.” She opened it a little to show him what was inside. “There’s a healing field generator and some stuff that might save your life, so I'm giving it to you. Wait, where are you running off to?” Cassian had started walking briskly towards the U-Wing and Cora strode after him, fully determined to slap him over that stubborn head of his head once he caught up to him.

“Keep them. We’ll be fine.”

“Cassian! I know you and I know the state you come back to me in and I won’t have it! Take the bag.”

“Stop worrying for a second, will you?” he mumbled, still a few steps in front of her.

“Cassian!” she whisper-shouted after him, but the stubborn ass was still walking. “They said they’ll take the tracker bracelet off if I want to.”

Cassian stopped and turned around to look at her. His eyes darted from her face to her hand and Cora couldn’t understand why, for the briefest moment, he seemed scared.

“They said that I’m free to go anytime I want. They’ll take it off and I’ll be free to go.”

“Why didn’t you take it off?”

“I don’t know. Figured it might help me come back home if I ever get lost.”

“So you’re...”

“I’m not leaving. I’ll be here when you come back.”

Cassian nodded, but didn’t say anything, instead he turned around and walked into the ship.

“Cassian, the bag!” she yelled after him, still holding it in her hand. She heard him yell after the others to hurry and Jyn walked into the ship, leaving only Cora and K2 at the bottom of the ramp.

“Why does she get a blaster and I don’t?” K asked, in a tone that probably meant he was pretty offended.

“I don’t know, but I think you and I both should complain to Draven.”

“Maybe.”

“K!” Cassian shouted from the inside of the ship, sounding more and more impatient.

“Take this,” she said, handing the bag to the droid. “Please take good care of it and make sure it doesn’t get lost. I packed some things that might save your lives in case of an emergency. Please look after it.”

The droid looked at it. “Even mine?”

Cora’s words died in her throat, and for a couple of seconds she could do nothing but stare at the black, expressionless face. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, and she could feel her heart aching.

“Don’t worry about it. Cassian will take care of me.” He walked up the ramp, towards and increasingly impatient Cassian, holding the bag in his hand. “I’ll look after it, Doctor Enoch.”

“Good luck!” she yelled after them, as the door closed behind him.

Cora stood in the same spot until Lewella came by her side, staring at the patch of sky where she saw Cassian’s ship disappear. She felt lost, like the whole world had shifted under her feet and she couldn’t regain her balance.

“Are you alright?” her friend asked, rubbing soothing circles over her back, as if she was trying to pull her out of her numb state. Cora nodded, afraid that if she’d open her mouth, she’d start bawling. “Let’s go get something to eat,” she said, guiding her back into the building.

Masterlist in bio

#cassian andor #cassian andor x reader #cassian andor x oc #star wars #rogue one

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dillydedalus · 6 years ago

Text

what i read in march

several antigones & some other stuff

call me zebra, azareen van der vliet oloomi

oh boy. i really wanted to like this one, but uh. nah. so this book is about zebra, a young iranian-american from a lineage of ‘autodidacts, anarchists and atheists’, still traumatised by her childhood experience as a refugee (incl. her mother’s death on route). when her father dies years later, zebra decides to retrace the route of her exile thru barcelona, turkey, and back to iran. this sounds great! the beginning is good! but zebra is a quixotic figure (don quixote is unsubtly flagged as THE intertext several times), delusional about her own importance, obsessed with some kind of great literary mission and obnoxious & condescending & egotistic as all fuck (she looks down on students but treats her realisation that like, intertextuality is a thing, as this grand revelation when like..... we been knew since Lit. Theory 101) - and this is intentional & part of the quixotic thing & in general i approve of abrasive & bristly & difficult female characters BUT i expected there to be a gradual process of realisation where she sees that a) maybe her entirely male lineage of geniuses ain’t all that, c) her mission is uh.... incomprehensible. instead, once she reaches spain, she gets bogged down in endless pretentious bullshit and a #toxic relationship that takes up way too much space. knowing that all of that is likely intentional doesn’t.... make it good. also the writing is pretty overwrought for the most part & not even your narrator’s voice being Like That excuses plain bad writing, like the absurd overuse of ‘intone’ and ‘pose’ as dialogue tags. i see the potential and i see the point & i liked some of it but uh. not good. 2/5, regretfully, generously

in the distance, hernan diaz

i don’t really go for westerns or man vs wilderness stories but damn i’m impressed. despite the violence & deprivation and sheer amount of gross shit, this story of a swedish immigrant getting lost in the american west for decades remains at its core so human, so tender, so sad (honestly this book is SO SAD, yet sometimes oddly hopeful), so evocative of isolation, loneliness, and the desire for human connection. 4/5

notes on a thesis, tiphaine rivière (tr. from french)

god, if i ever considered doing a phd i sure don’t anymore. this is a short graphic novel about a young woman’s descent into academic hell while writing her dissertation about labyrinths in kafka. it’s funny, the art is expressive and fanciful, and it is incredibly relateable if you’ve ever tried to actually write your brilliant, glorious, intricately constructed argument down, battled uni administration or had a panic attack over how to phrase a harmless email to a prof. Academia: Not Even Once. 3.5/5

red mars, kim stanley robinson

this is a very long hard sci-fi novel about mars colonisation & terraforming, discussing the ethics of terraforming, the potentials of a truly ‘martian’ culture, and how capitalism will inevitably fuck everything up, including outer space. all of this is up my alley and i did really like the first half (early colonisation efforts), but the 2nd half (beginning of terraforming, lots of politicking) was a slog - i liked reading about how terraforming was going, but the rest was just bloated, scattered and confusing. also there’s a tedious love triangle the whole time. 2/5

dragon keeper (rain wild chronicles #1), robin hobb

i love robin hobb she really can write a whole 500+ page book of set-up, characterisation and politicking and make it WORK. anyway, this has disabled dragons, a quest for mystical city, lots of rain wilds weirdness, a dragon scholar in an unhappy marriage, liveships, a sweet dummy romance, and uh... a lil penpalship between two messenger bird keepers? not much happens but it’s so NICE & so much is going to happen. also althea & brashen & malta turned up & i screamed. 3.5/5

season of migration to the north, tayeb salih (tr. from arabic)

this is a seminal work of post-colonial arabic literature, a haunting tale of the impact of colonialisation, especially of cultural hegemony in the education system, the disturbing dynamics of orientalism and sex, and village life in a modernising post-colonial sudan. it’s important, it’s well-written, it’ll make you think, but fair warning, there is a lot of violence against women - it has a point but still uh... wow. 3.5/5

dune, frank herbert

SOMETIMES.... BOOKS THAT ARE CONSIDERED MASTERWORKS OF THEIR GENRE.... ARE WORSE. so much worse. the writing in this is atrocious (”his voice was charged with unspeakable adjectives”), herbert somehow manages to make court intrigue and plotting UNBELIEVABLY DULL and sure, it was the 60s, but i’m p sure people knew imperialism was bad in the 60s! the main character, the eugenically-engineered chosen one or whatever, literally spends years among the oppressed & resisting natives of a planet ruled by a space!empire and at the end he’s like ‘i own this planet bc imperialism is Good Actually’. emotionally neglecting/abusing your wife, who you (!!!) decided (!!!) to marry for political reasons bc you’d rather marry your gf is also Good Actually (cosigned by the protag’s mother....) the worldbuilding is influential for the genre, sure w/e, but mainly notable for there just.... being a lot of it, the whole mythology-science makes No Goddamn Sense, all around this is just Bad. Bad. 0.5/5 i hope the Really Big Worms eat everyone

dragon haven (rain wild chronicles #2), robin hobb

this healed my soul after toxic exposure to dune. anyway w/o spoilers: everyone is very much In Their Feelings (including me) and there’s a lot of Romance and Internal Conflict and Feelings Drama and Complicated Relationships and Group Dynamics and also dragons, which are really like very big, very haughty cats who can speak, and a flood and a living river barge with a mind of his own (love u tarman!). it’s still slow and languid but so so good. also: several people in this have to be told that People Are Gay, Steven, including Sedric, who is himself Gay People. 4/5

an unkindness of ghosts, solomon rivers

super interesting scifi story set on a generation ship with a radically stratified society in which the predominantly black lowerdeckers are oppressed and exploited by the predominantly white upperdeckers, mixed in with a lot of Gender Stuff (the lowerdeckers seem to have a much less stable and binary gender system than the upperdeckers) and neuroatypicality. it’s conceptually rich and full of potential, but just doesn’t quite stick the landing when it comes to the plot. 3/5

sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass, bruno schulz (tr. from polish)

more dreamy surreal short stories (ish?). i didn’t like this collection quite as much as the amazing street of crocodiles, but they are still really good, even tho you never quite know what is going on. featuring flights of birds, people turning into insects, thoughts about seasons and time, fireman pupae stuck in the chimney, and the continuing weird fixation on adela the maid. 3.5/5

angela merkel ist hitlers tocher, christian alt & christian schiffer

a fun & accessible guide to conspiracy theories, focusing on the current situation in germany and the current boom in conspiracy theories, but also including some historical notes. i wish it had been a bit less fun & flippant and more in-depth and detailed bc it really is quite shallow at points, but oh well. also yes the title does indeed translate to ‘angela merkel is hitler’s daughter’ so. yes. 2.5/5

the midwich cuckoos, john wyndham

fun lil scifi story in which almost all women in sleepy village midwich are suddenly pregnant, all at the same time. the resulting children, predictably, are strange, creepy, and possibly a threat to humanity. i get that it was written in the 50s but it is strange to read a book where almost all women, and only women, are affected by A Thing, but all the main characters are men & no one tells the women ‘hey we think it’s xenogenesis’ - like realistically 80% of women affected went to the Neighbourhood Lady Who Takes Care of These Things like ‘hello, one (1) abortion please’ and the plot just ended there. i still liked it tho! 3/5

antigone project

antigone, the original bitch, by sophocles (tr. by fagles)

god antigone really is That Bitch. that’s all i have to say. 4.5/5

antigone, That Bitch but in french, jean anouilh

the Nazi-occupied france antigone. loved the meta commentary on what tragedy is and how antigone has to step into the Role of Antigone, which will kill her “but there’s nothing she can do. her name is antigone and she will have to play her part through to the end”. i didn’t really like (esp. given the ~historical context) the choice to make creon much more sympathetic, trying to save antigone’s life from the beginning. hmm. 3.5/5

antigonick, anne carson

look, antigone really is That Bitch and you know what? so is anne carson. best thing i’ve read so far this year, don’t ask me about it or i’ll yell the task of the translator of antigone at you. 5/5

home fire, kamila shamsie

honestly i really wanted to like this bc politically it’s on point and an anti-islamophobia antigone sounds amazing, but it just doesn’t succeed as a book/adaption. it spends way too much time in build-up/backstory (the play’s plot only starts in the second half of the book!), waaayyy to much time on the weirdly fetishistic antigone/haimon romance, and even the most interesting characters (ismene & creon) don’t fully work out. sad. 2/5

currently reading: the magic mountain by thomas mann, but i should be done in a week or so! also: the paper menagerie by ken liu, a collection of sff short stories

#the books i read #long post

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alexthegamingboy · 6 years ago

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Toonami Weekly Recap 3/30/2019

Sword Art Online: Alicization EP#07 - Swordcraft Academy: Two years have passed since Kirito and Eugeo left Rulid Village. They are now the primary trainees of the North Centoria Imperial Sword Mastery Academy. The duo reflects on how they won in a swordsmanship tournament at the northern town of Zakkaria, then afterwards gained the requirement to enroll themselves into the academy. Their aim is to graduate from the academy as top students and stand a chance to become Integrity Knights, which means gaining access to Central Cathedral. Kirito has a special training spar one day with his mentor, Elite Swordswoman Sortiliena Serlut, who is the second seat among the seniors. Although Kirito doesn't manage to defeat her this time, Sortiliena laments that her sword skills are still unrefined enough. She also suspects Kirito not showing everything from his Aincrad style and requests him to do so before her graduation soon, which Kirito agrees. After meal, Kirito and Eugeo visit the garden to have a look at the zephyr flowers which Kirito was attempting to grow. Eugeo anxiously asks Kirito whether he will return to his homeland if he regains his memories, in which Kirito assuring him that they will stick together to the end. The next day, Kirito goes to receive a black sword made out of a branch of Gigas Cedar from a craftsman named Sadore, with Eugeo accompanying him. While trying his new sword in a park, Kirito accidentally slips and stains the uniform of Elite Swordsman First Seat Uolo Levinteinn. Uolo willingly let go of the fact that Kirito is training on a rest day but he points out the stain as an excuse to invite Kirito to a spar as a "punishment" to Kirito. The two prepare while Eugeo, Sortiliena and other audiences become witnesses to an impending duel.

Sword Art Online: Alicization EP#08 - Swordsman's Pride: Before the duel, Sortiliena warns Kirito that the secret of the Levinteinn family's power is by imbuing their sword with the blood of their enemies, in order to get stronger, thus Uolo's request for a match with real swords. During the duel, Kirito manages to increase the power of his sword and scratches Uolo's shirt, before the match is interrupted by one of the instructors and declared a draw. Later at night, Kirito discovers that the zephyr flowers he was growing were destroyed by two classmates with a grudge on him, and as he laments, he is instructed by a voice to use healing arts to transfer a part of the life energy of the other flowers in the garden to the zephyr flowers, restoring them. In the next day, having learned from Kirito's match, Sortiliena defeats Uolo in combat and graduates as First Seat, with Kirito presenting her with the zephyr flowers as a parting gift. Some time later, Kirito and Eugeo themselves are promoted to Elite Swordsmen, focused on their main goal of reaching the top of Centralia's Tower to find Alice.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable EP#29 - Highway Star, Part 2: Believing there is a connection between Highway Star's user and the Futatsumori Tunnel he resided in, Josuke gets in contact with Koichi, who suspects the user to be someone hospitalized from a traffic accident stealing nutrients to heal himself. While Josuke makes his way to the hospital while keeping ahead of Highway Star, Koichi manages to find out the identity of its user, Yuya Fungami. Despite being caught by Highway Star upon reaching Yuya's room, Josuke manages to recover his nutrients with an IV drip, healing Yuya's injuries so he can pummel him without guilt. Meanwhile, at the Kawajiri household, Shinobu finds a British Blue cat hanging around the basement.

My Hero Academia: Forest Training Camp Arc EP#43 - Drive It Home, Iron Fist!!!: After defeating Muscular, Izuku carries Kota back to the camp and runs into Eraserhead. Izuku passes Kota over to him, as he has a message to deliver to everyone through Mandalay's telepathy. The teacher asks Izuku to deliver a message from him as well. Mandalay delivers both messages: That “Kacchan” (Katsuki) is one of the villains' targets and the students have permission to use their Quirks to defend themselves. Meanwhile, Tetsutetsu and Itsuka find the source of a poisonous gas that is filling part of the forest: a villain named Mustard. The two work together to defeat Mustard and this results in the gas dissipating. Izuku runs into Mezo while searching for Katsuki and learns that Fumikage's Quirk, Dark Shadow, is out of control.

Black Clover: Witches’ Forest Arc EP#63 - Not in the Slightest: Asta awakens with one half of his body glowing with black magic. He and Ladros duel fiercely while the Witch Queen reveals Asta normally only releases a little anti-magic at a time. With her blood inside him, however, the anti-magic pours out uncontrollably and will eventually turn him into an anti-magic demon. Asta destroys Ladros' implanted magic stones to defeat him. When Asta reveals his intentions to help the injured and demands Ladros heal quickly so he can apologise to everyone for his actions, Ladros accepts defeat. With the black magic disappeared, Asta decides he wants to master the devil's power. However, the Witch Queen suddenly traps everybody and takes control of Asta's body with her Blood Control magic, since she cannot use his anti-magic sword herself. To test her new power, she decides to have Asta kill everyone.

Hunter x Hunter: The Chimera Ant Arc EP#136 - Homecoming × And × Real Name: After the fall of the king, the remaining Chimera Ants move on with their lives, each following their own path. However, Gon is still in critical condition after his battle with Neferpitou and Killua departs in search for a way to heal his body. Meanwhile, the top members of the Hunter Association, the Zodiacs, assemble to organize the election to choose the next president, following the will of Netero's last message.

Hunter x Hunter's 13th Hunter Chairman Election arc will begin next week.

#Toonami #Toonami Weekly Recap #Recap #Spoilers #Sword Art Online #Sword Art Online: Alicization #JoJo's Bizarre Adventure #JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable #My Hero Academia #Forest Training Camp #Black Clover #Witches' Forest #Hunter x Hunter #The Chimera Ant Arc #Final Episode #Final Arc Episode #Anime

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crimethinc · 6 years ago

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A Century since the Bolshevik Crackdown of August 1918: Tracing the Russian Counterrevolution

Following up on our book about the Bolshevik seizure of power, The Russian Counterrevolution, we look back a hundred years to observe the anniversary of the first time that the Bolsheviks used the Russian military to crush protests from the workers and peasants who had helped to put them in power. If we don’t want tomorrow’s revolutions to turn out the same way, it’s up to us to learn from the past.

August 2018 marks the 100-year anniversary of a bloody milestone in the evolution of the Bolshevik counterrevolution: the suppression of the rebellions in Nizhny Novgorod and Penza. Both of these were protest movements spurred by the Red Army’s policy of “requisitioning” food and other materials they deemed necessary from the common people. The protests and subsequent mass executions carried out by the Bolsheviks took place in a context of growing clashes that saw the Russian Revolution shift into the Russian Civil War. It was the first time the Bolsheviks used mass executions and terror not just against their political opponents, but against the peasants and workers as a class. This terror came to characterize their relationship with peasants and workers over the following years.

Bolshevik apologists justify their actions by citing the extreme violence on all sides, as the White Army sought to reimpose the brutal tsarist regime. Some even go so far as to claim that the peasants who were protesting in the Penza region were White agents. A hundred years after their murders, we have to examine these claims. In order to do so, we must begin by studying what the Bolshevik strategy—their obsession with controlling state power—had done to the Revolution after ten months.

War Communism

The peasant protests were sparked by “requisitioning,” a central part of the policy of “war communism” adopted by the Bolsheviks in June 1918, just two months earlier. “War communism” was a cruel euphemism for wholesale theft by bureaucrats and commissars of everything the peasants had. In theory, the Red Army and Bolshevik commissars were allowed to take the “surplus,” but there were no mechanisms for accountability, and many Bolsheviks had no experience with farming and no idea what constituted a surplus and what constituted the food supply of peasant families. Essentially, party members were given absolute power and impunity to enrich themselves at the cost of the peasants.

What’s more, ignoring the pleas of his erstwhile comrades, Lenin signed a peace treaty with the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires in March 1918, ceding them what had been the breadbasket of the Russian Empire in Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltics. This almost guaranteed a famine in Moscow, Petrograd, and other cities, forcing the Bolsheviks to squeeze the countryside to the east even harder. To stomp out dissent and cement his hold on power, Lenin effectively pitted the cities against the countryside, putting the former in acute danger of starvation and forcing the latter to accept total subjugation even worse than what had occurred under the tsarist regime.

To fan the flames and motivate the Red Army to requisition pitilessly, Lenin and his party apparatus spread the myth of the kulak, the wealthy peasant who acted as a rural capitalist, exploited landless laborers, and condemned city residents to starvation. In reality, peasants in a wide range of different circumstances were punished under war communism. A tiny minority of peasants had amassed lands and wealth after the end of serfdom, but the Bolsheviks systematically labeled landless, impoverished peasants “kulaks” to justify arresting and executing them. Lenin himself was largely ignorant of peasant life—he was financed by his wealthy mother throughout his first decades of activism, even in Siberian exile, where he spent the time translating, swimming, and hunting. In his writings, he used the “kulak” as a politically expedient scapegoat.

Unlike the anarchists and Left SRs, the Bolsheviks did not effectively support land redistribution in the countryside, so peasants of all stripes had cause to protest against their rule. And when the “requisitioning” began, these protests only spread. The peasants of Penza and elsewhere had a realistic understanding of their own interests. In just a few years of war communism, millions of peasants starved to death as a direct result of Bolshevik policies. By the time war communism ended and the New Economic Policy was inaugurated in 1923, bringing capitalism back to Russia, the peasants had been effectively crushed as a social force; this is one of the reasons Stalin was able to reorganize them in state “collectives,” essentially a plantation system with forced labor not so different from the ones that provided the basis for value extraction in the American and British models of capitalism.

The peasants were right to protest against war communism from the beginning. In hindsight, we can see that the policy was justifiable neither as an end nor as a means.

Bolshevik anti-kulak poster.

The Revolt

On August 5, 1918, protests against the requisitioning gained momentum among peasants in the Penza region. This movement quickly spread to neighboring areas. Penza had also been a theater of the Pugachev Rebellion in the 18th century, a multicultural peasant and indigenous uprising against serfdom and Russian imperialism. It was a region with a history of standing up to oppression.

Accounts vary as to the nature of the movement. The Bolsheviks referred to it as a revolt, whereas many other sources merely refer to protests. There were certainly armed peasant revolts against Bolshevik power over the following months. It’s likely that the events of August 1918 constituted nothing more than a rowdy protest movement, but that after the Bolshevik response of mass murder and terror, the peasants got a look at the true face of the new state and realized that if they wanted to change things, mere protest wouldn’t suffice.

In any case, the chairman of the Penza soviet, Kurayev, wasn’t particularly concerned about this revolt. He thought that the Bolsheviks should respond with propaganda, not armed force. Lenin disagreed. By August 8, just three days later, Bolshevik troops had crushed the protest movement in Penza. Not content with simply regaining control, Lenin sent a telegram on August 9 to Nizhny Novgorod, perhaps the largest city in which protests had broken out. Claiming that the protests were a clear sign of a “White Guard” conspiracy, and thus denying any agency or claims to survival of the peasants themselves, Lenin wrote:

“Your first response must be to establish a dictatorial troika (i.e., you, Markin, and one other person) and introduce mass terror, shooting or deporting the hundreds of prostitutes who are causing all the soldiers to drink, all the ex-officers, etc. There is not a moment to lose; you must act resolutely, with massive reprisals. Immediate execution for anyone caught in possession of a firearm. Massive deportations of Mensheviks and other suspect elements.”

On August 11, three days after the protest movement had been suppressed, Lenin sent a telegram to the Central Executive Committee of the Penza soviet:

“Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand such actions, for the final struggle with the kulaks has now begun. You must make an example of these people.

(1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers.

(2) Publish their names.

(3) Seize all their grain.

(4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday’s telegram.

Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so. Reply saying you have received and carried out these instructions. Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people.”

Only on August 18, after these instructions went out, did an actual armed uprising break out in the Penza oblast, in the town of Chembar. The uprising was led by Left SRs. It was also crushed.

Lenin’s message demanding the public hanging of at least 100 people.

The White Threat

Communist apologists today justify Bolshevik mass murder on the grounds that imposing “discipline” on the masses was necessary in the face of the far worse White threat. It is true that from early on, the White Army executed anarchist and Bolshevik prisoners and massacred villagers suspected of supporting the revolution. However, the claim that White violence forced the Bolsheviks’ hand is an excuse for a Bolshevik strategy that had already been in progress for a long time. Bolshevik political repression against their opponents dates to the very first months of the Soviet government. Already in April 1918, the Bolsheviks attacked 26 anarchist offices and social centers in Moscow, killing dozens and arresting hundreds, in response to anarchist propaganda critical of Bolshevik power. They also carried out raids and arrests in Petrograd and numerous cities in the interior, such as Vologda, where anarchists had growing support from peasants and railroad workers.

What’s more, the White threat cannot justify Bolshevik repression in Penza in August 1918 because at that time, there was not really a White Army to speak of. In June of 1918, the White Army only numbered less than 9000 troops, and they were based over 1000 kilometers away, having fled to Kuban after losing nearly every battle. Even their supreme commander, Kornilov, had been killed. In August, they were in disarray and on the defensive, rearranging their chain of command and desperately trying to recruit more troops. Until the end of 1918, when Great Britain, France, and the United States began providing significant material support to the White Army and General Denikin began an offensive in the Caucasus after having gained the support of numerous cossack fighters, the chief threats to Bolshevik power came from the Left. Lenin speaks of a “White Guard” organizing the protest movement, but as he well knew, it was the Left SRs, the enemies of the White Army, who were most active among the peasants in the Penza region.

Another major force on the field was the Czechoslovak Legion, which contained as many as 60,000 veteran fighters who had been recruited during World War I to fight against the Austro-Hungarian Empire (occupier of Czechoslovakia). Caught in Ukraine when the October Revolution broke out, they stayed on the front to stop multiple German advances, while negotiating with Soviet authorities for safe passage to the port city of Vladivostok, so they could be transferred back to Europe and continue fighting on the Western Front.

In May 1918, three months after they had been granted permission to ship out from Vladivostok, the Legion was spread all across the Trans-Siberian railroad. None of them had been evacuated, as Soviet authorities had obstructed the process and requisitioned the Legion’s weapons. A dispute broke out when trains taking Hungarian POWs to be repatriated were given priority—Hungary being one of the countries occupying Czechoslovakia, and, as an ally of Imperial Germany, one of the countries with which Lenin had signed a peace treaty. The repatriation of Triple Alliance troops and the stonewalling of the Czechoslovak Legion’s return to the war via Vladivostok substantiated their suspicion that Lenin was still working on behalf of Imperial Germany, the same accusation made by the Left SRs when they quit the government in March 1918.

Lenin ordered the arrest of the Legion, at which point they rebelled and took over the railroad, constituting an autonomous armed force in Siberia. Only several months later did the Czechoslovak Legion join the White Army, though they consistently supported the democratic factions of the Whites (the ones in favor of the Constituent Assembly) and occasionally opposed the tsarist faction. Their chief political goal was to achieve independence for Czechoslovakia, which led them to follow the directions of the Entente powers and support the Whites.

The Czechoslovak Legion was one of the most effective fighting units to oppose the Bolsheviks; they seized nearly every city in Siberia at some point in 1918. Yet the conflict with them was provoked almost entirely by Bolshevik policies. It was either Lenin’s paranoid distrust of autonomous forces or his secret collusion with Germany that caused him to order the arrest of the legionaries, which is what sparked their rebellion in the first place. The rebellion was spontaneous, going against the orders of Legion leadership and the plans of the Entente to ship them back to Western Europe. Lenin’s use of repression as a first resort helped the White Army to recruit, furnishing them with their most potent force in the first year of the Civil War; this, in turn, encouraged the Entente powers to intensify their interventions in the Russian hinterland.

In any case, the Legion did not get any closer to the Penza uprising than Samara, about 400 km away—at that moment, they were focused eastward on Vladivostok, not attempting to break through to Penza.

Neither the White Army nor the Czechoslovak Legion posed a threat anywhere near Penza at the time of the peasant protests, as Lenin well knew. His claims of a “White Guard” conspiracy represent demagogic manipulation designed to cover up the fact that the demonstrators in Penza were common people protesting Bolshevik authority.

The Left SRs

The presence of Left SRs in Penza after the peasant rebellion had already begun makes perfect sense in context. They were a socialist party that had long championed land reform, retained strong support among the peasants, and had recently been suppressed in Moscow after an unsuccessful uprising.

Whereas the chief objective of the Bolsheviks was to seize power, the SRs had some basic principles they stuck to, although this probably made them less effective as a political party. It could be said that they had maintained a principled opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the disastrous peace treaty with Imperial Germany. When it was signed in March, they quit the Soviet government; in July, Cheka units in Moscow controlled by Left SRs assassinated the German ambassador Mirbach and tried to take over government and telegraph buildings. They hoped their action would sabotage the peace with Germany, and that in the process they could replace the Bolsheviks at the head of the Soviet government. Their revolt was not designed to suppress the Soviets, but to set the revolution back on what in their minds was the right course.

Of course, the SRs were just another political party trying to control the revolution. No one should not romanticize them. Their suppression simply illustrates that the Bolsheviks were more adroit at power plays: they did not hold back from using any tactics to stay in power, nor did they remain loyal to principles that were not politically expedient. If the SRs had come out of the revolution on top, it probably would have been as a result of using tactics similar to those of the Bolsheviks.

In any case, as far as the Penza uprising is concerned, the involvement of Left SRs confirms the falsity of Bolshevik claims. Far from being White sympathizers, the only organized element among the Penza peasants were Left SRs, who had always stood on a platform of agrarian reform for greater peasant autonomy. They were committed opponents of the Whites.

The Red Army

It is also possible that the Left SRs decided to rebel in July 1918 because the preceding month, the Bolsheviks had solidified their control over the Red Army by bringing back an aristocratic hierarchy (led overwhelmingly by ex-tsarist officers), ending any vestige of self-organization, and appointing political commissars as well as a vast network of spies and snitches to ensure political obedience.

For nearly a year already, the Bolsheviks had taken action against revolutionary elements in the military. Foremost among these was the Dvinsk Regiment. To tell their story, we have to go back to 1917.

The Dvinsk Regiment was comprised of tens of thousands of soldiers on the Eastern Front who had engaged in mass disobedience against the war. Alongside the guerrilla resistance in Ukraine, this provided one of the principal examples of the kind of revolutionary warfare with which anarchists proposed to topple both the Russian Empire (whether under the tsar or Kerensky) and the imperial states on the other side of the battle lines.

Cossacks refused to execute the resisters; instead, thousands were imprisoned. The prisoners were released in September 1917 after major public protests. At this point, they constituted a revolutionary regiment. The Bolsheviks tried to take control of the regiment, but instead, the regiment elected Grachov, an anarchist, as its leader. In the October Revolution, which saw fierce fighting in Moscow, the Dvinsk Regiment was at the front of the fiercest clashes, seizing City Hall, the Hotel Metropole, and the Kremlin.

Grachov was critical of the authoritarian direction of the Bolsheviks. He began carrying out a plan to arm the workers on nonpartisan grounds, sending weapons and munitions to factory committees. At the end of November, the Bolsheviks summoned him to Nizhny Novgorod, supposedly to discuss military matters. Away from the rest of the regiment and the anarchist bastion in Moscow, he was shot to death inside the military commissariat. The Bolsheviks claimed it was an accident. Subsequently, Lenin and Trotsky disbanded the Dvinsk Regiment and all the other revolutionary units that had taken part in the fighting in the October Revolution.

Over time, it became clear to the Bolsheviks that eliminating individual figures would not be enough. In June 1918, the Bolsheviks were preparing to introduce war communism. They would need a military fully under their control, capable of carrying out any atrocity—much like the tsarist army that had upheld the old system. So they abolished of worker control, canceled the election of officers, re-instituted saluting, drastically increased the pay and privileges for the officers, imposed top-down discipline, carried out a massive recruitment of old tsarist officers, and fully integrated the Cheka—the political police—with the military. By the end of the Russian Civil War, 83% of Red Army officers had served under the tsar.

While the Bolsheviks convinced many tsarist officers to serve in the Red Army by blackmail, holding their families hostage, others served voluntarily, realizing that tsarism was dead and the Bolsheviks were to become the new defenders of privilege. After 1917, the surest way to hold onto their privileges was by becoming communists.

The revolution did not need tsarist officers to succeed. All the prominent leaders of the anarchist formations in the Civil War—Maria Nikiforova, Nestor Makhno, Fyodor Shchuss, Olga Taratuta, Anatoli Zhelezniakov, Novoselov, Lubkov—were chosen by their comrades according to their abilities. They were workers or peasants, but they were among the most effective on the battlefield, frequently defeating White armies that fielded several times more troops. Trotsky repeatedly called Zhelezniakov and Makhno to the front when the White Army was gaining ground against the Red Army.

Considering the authoritarian changes to the Red Army, it is not surprising that in August 1918, the Bolsheviks sought a military solution to the peasant protests. In June, Lenin and Trotsky had decided to make the basis of their power a hierarchical military and a policy of forced requisitioning and mass starvation. This established them as the enemy of the peasants of the workers, provoking a conflict they could only win through force of arms.

When you topple the monuments, be sure to take down the pedestals as well.

Conclusions

If we are to be charitable and believe that Lenin was a sincere revolutionary, we can only conclude that the problem was his Jacobin theory of revolution—in which it was necessary to seize the state in order to impose the revolution through mass terror. Unless we to take the view of many of his contemporaries, who believed that he was simply a power-hungry dictator, the only explanation for his actions is that, conflating the success of the revolution with the seizure of state power, he was willing to put principles aside in order to do whatever was necessary to increase the power of the Soviet government. Yet the more power his government amassed, the more enemies he made, and the more violence was necessary to preserve his position.

Lenin made an alliance with Imperial Germany as a political expedient to free up the Russian army for domestic deployment against the supporters of the Constituent Assembly, but it caused the Left SRs to rebel. The Bolsheviks had to crack down on anarchists in April 2018 because anarchist propaganda and criticisms of the Bolshevik government were mobilizing increasing numbers of supporters, but this caused anarchists to redouble their efforts. After the Bolsheviks gave Ukraine away to Germany, they need war communism in order to feed the cities without giving concessions to the peasants. But war communism provoked more peasant protests. To stop the protests, Lenin crushed them with military force, and this catalyzed actual popular uprisings against the communist state.

An iatrogenic condition is an illness caused by medical treatment. As the song goes, “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly…”

At the end of August 2018, SR Fanny Kaplan carried out the first attempt on Lenin’s life. Immediately thereafter, the Bolsheviks instituted the policy of Red Terror. They claimed that the Terror was necessary to defend the revolution from a White conspiracy—but in reality, the White Army had not yet begun any effective offensive. The immediate causes of the Terror were the criticisms, protests, and attacks that the Bolsheviks were facing from anarchists, SRs, and the ordinary workers and peasants whose interests Lenin claimed to represent.

The purpose of the Terror was to defend the Bolsheviks from the Revolution. The authoritarian political character of their project becomes clear from a statement in the Bolshevik press: “Anyone who dares spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be immediately arrested and sent to the concentration camps.” This was a reference to the gulag system, already established after just ten months of Bolshevik authority, part of the apparatus of Bolshevik repression that would eventually claim millions of lives.

Today, one hundred years after the Bolsheviks turned their newly consolidated military might against protesting peasants, we can reflect on the folly of their strategy, and any similar belief that the state has revolutionary potential as a tool for liberating the masses. The state can only preserve its existence by controlling and repressing the masses. By very nature, it is a counterrevolutionary instrument.

The Bolshevik party contained many sincere revolutionaries, but they surrendered their free will to the dictates of a hierarchical party. In obeying their leaders, in believing in the revolutionary potential of the state, they became torturers, censors, jailers, and executioners. Those who refused, those who opted for more peaceful approaches or for tactics based in solidarity, were pushed out of the way. Only the bloodiest and most ruthless could rise in the party ranks, egged on by Lenin himself. Just ten months after seizing power, the Bolsheviks already had a functioning system of hit men, secret police, and concentration camps for revolutionaries who refused to accept their authority, and they were ready to use mass murder against the peasants and workers who did not bow down before them.

From there, it only got worse.

Bibliography

Paul Avrich, “Russian Anarchism and the Civil War,” The Russian Review. Vol.27 No.3: 296–306. July 1968.

Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists. Oakland: AK Press, 2006.

Nick Heath, “Bolshevik Repression against Anarchists in Vologda,” libcom.org October 15 2017

Nadezhda Krupskaya, “Illyich Moves to Moscow, His First Months of Work in Moscow” Reminiscences of Lenin. International Publishers, 1970.

George Leggett. The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Lenin, “Telegram to the Penza Gubernia Executive Committee of the Soviets” in J. Brooks and G. Chernyavskiy, Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State: A Brief History with Documents (2007). Bedford/St Martin’s: Boston and New York, p.77

James Ryan. Lenin’s Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence. London: Routledge, 2012.

Voline, The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921. New York: Free Life Editions, 1974.

Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Additional Reading

Ilyich Moves to Moscow, His First Months of Work in Moscow, from Krupskaya’s “Reminiscences of Lenin”

Bolshevik repression against anarchists in Vologda

April 2018: One Hundred Year Anniversary of the Beginning of Bolshevik Terror

Lenin Orders the Massacre of Sex Workers, 1918

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heavyarethecrowns · 7 years ago

Photo

Those that have married in to Royal Families since 1800

Japan

Masako Owada

Masako was named Masako Owada before she was married. She is the daughter of a career diplomat and former ambassador to the United Nations. Her ancestors were samurai. Other members of her family include prominent professors, scholars and headmasters.

She speaks six languages: English, Russian, French, Japanese, Spanish and German. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford and received a law degree from Tokyo University, Japan's No. 1 university.

After completing her studies, Masako worked for the Japanese Foreign Ministry, performing such duties as interpreting for U.S. Secretary of States James A. Baker III and putting together position papers on controversial foreign trade issues such as the sale of semi-conductors between the United States and Japan.

Masako loves sports, music and the outdoors. A natural athlete, she skies, enjoys hiking, plays tennis and once tried out for an all-girl wrestling team under the name Nancy. At Oxford, she was the coxain on the all-male, rowing eights.

Prince Naruhito met Masako Owada, when she was 22, in October 1986 at an afternoon tea in honor of Princess Elena of Spain. It is said he immediately took a fancy to her. Recalling the meeting he later said, "She is so pleasant, she makes me unaware of the passing of time."

Prince Naruhito spent six years trying to convince Masako to marry him. The process began with a discreet meetings and an introduction to the Emperor and Empress, who were "favorably impressed." The meetings between the prince and Masako were always in the company of chaperons.

The prince's first proposals and later proposals were politely turned down for more than five years. Finally in December, 1992 Masako accepted. In a phone call before the acceptance, the Empress reportedly promised Masako there would be no mother-in-law problems. If Masako had turned down the offer of marriage, it was rumored, she and her family would have been ostracized.

On June 9, 1993, Prince Naruhito married Masako. Before the wedding Masako reportedly received 62 hours of private tutorials on matters such as the correct way to walk and the proper angle for an Imperial bow.

In her debut as Princess, Masako sat between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin at a palace banquet for the leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized nations. She spoke Russian with Yeltsin and English with Clinton and no doubt probably translated for them. She also small talked in French with Françious Mitterrand.

Many people have commented what a tragedy it was for her to get married and sacrifice her career as a diplomat. People hoped that she would be a Japanese blend of Hillary Clinton and Princess Diana. Many were disappointed. Rather than challenge the Imperial status quo she dutifully played her role and disappeared into the “gilded cage," rarely speaking in public or making public appearances.

Unlike some members of the Imperial family in the past, she kept in touch with her old friends and they came over tea and meals at the palace residence. Masako reportedly spent much of her time writing waka, traditional Japanese poetry that "members of the royal family are expected to master."

The marriage between Prince Naruhito and Princess Masako appears to be a happy one. In July 1994, the couple moved into the new Crown Prince's residence in the Akasaka Palace compound in Tokyo. They raised two Akitas---Pippi and Mari. In 2000, Princess Masako wrote the following poem about her husband: With my husband as my guide through these seven years, Our words of the heart grow deeper with each passing day.

Masako was once criticized for speaking 39 second longer than her husband and reading the works of Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, who has been critical of the imperial family. Once in a fit of anger, Masako reportedly poked a finger at a paparazzi and called him a worm.

On December 9, 1996, on of eve her 33rd birthday Masako, meet with reporters for the first time without her husband present. She answering the three question directed to her. In regards to her duties, she said, "At times, I experience hardship in trying to find the proper point of balance between traditional things and my own personality. While placing importance on the old things that are good its is also important to take into account the demands of a new age."

She also said, "In my daily life, I try as much as possible to consult with His Imperial Highness on any matter...I am certainly not in a state of depression so I hope no one will worry." She spoke for about 30 minutes, and then politely excused herself, saying she was a "little horse" from speaking for so long.

On December 1, 2001 Princess Masako gave birth to a baby girl. It was their first child after 8½ years of marriage for the 37 year-old princess and the 41-year-old prince.

In December 2003, Princess Masako was hospitalized with a case of shingles, a stress-related viral illness, and the Imperial Household announced that she was suffering from an “adjustment disorder” and “headaches and vertigo." She was treated with anti-depressants. There was a rumor that he she had a breakdown. Many attributed her illnesses to the stress of the gilded cage and pressure to produce a male heir.

After that Princess Masako lived in seclusion and was not seen in public. In May, she failed to accompany her husband Prince Naruhito when went t a string of royal wedding in Europe. It was the first time the price and princess has been apart for a long period of time.

In an unprecedented move, Prince Naruhito criticized the Imperial Household for its efforts to “negate Masako's career and personality." He added, “In the past 10 years Masako, who gave up as a diplomat to marry me, did everything possible to adjust to the environment of the royal family. This has exhausted her."

The Imperial Household Agency was flooded with angry e-mails from ordinary Japanese that were sympathetic to the princess and angry with the agency. The Emperor said he was “downcast” by the prince's statement and wrote “there are still some things that I have not fully understood yet." The crown prince's brother Prince Akishino criticizes his brother for not talking over the matter first with emperor before gong public.

Masako's condition was officially listed as an “adjustment disoder." Psychiatrist Rika Kayama told the Asahi Shimbun that Masako's illness most likely was the result of career-woman's ambitions behind stifled by life in the Imperial cage. “Imperial duties are rather passive and symbolics," she said, “making it difficult for the princess to feel challenged or rewarded, which may have gradually eroded her self-esteem and identity." A former school mate of Masako said, although she was not “career-crazed” she “appears to have felt she was not fulfilling what she expected from herself, and thus felt stymied."

In recent years patience with Princess Masako has started to wear thin as people have asked, “Is it really that difficult to make a few public appearances and smile and be nice?” She has been photographed dining at expensive Chinese, Mexican and French restaurants when she said she was too depressed to make public appearances. The editor of a magazine that reports about the Imperial family said, “People are angry with Masako for making many private outings, although she can not carry out official duties."

Right wing supporters of the Imperial family have called for the Crown Prince to divorce her because of the damage she is doing and the shame she is bringing to the Imperial family. Kaniji Nishio, a right wing academic wrote: “the members of the Imperial family are the passengers of the ship named the Imperial System. If one individual gets seasick and cannot stay on board, then there is no alternative but to disembark."

#crown princess masako #japan #1800

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onwesterlywinds · 7 years ago

Text

Conflagration

Domitian goe Velius had left the door to the interrogation chamber ajar - as a concession to their Thavnairian friends, he had told her, to make them feel more at ease upon their arrival. They had come bearing valuable intelligence on anti-Garlean insurgencies in their region, news that other legions might use to quell whatever riots had sprung up in the Near East. If verified and swiftly acted upon, this information would give their bureau a clear edge, and perhaps even the emperor's favor.

But the open door swung both ways, impartial in its call for transparency: for all that it represented a free and welcoming environment for any would-be informants, it was as certain a sign as any that Domitian did not trust their guests enough to offer them the secrecy of an untapped room. Whenever scraps of their conversation filtered into the main hall, Alma's unspoken mandate to listen in took precedence over her many other tasks.

"It was good of you to offer us this protection," said the woman in green about midway through the afternoon.

"But to continue further," said her partner, a man in blue, "we will need to be assured of a more permanent arrangement."

Domitian's reply was warm but measured, and Alma wondered when he had last slept or taken a stimulant. "We do try our utmost to offer sanctuary to informants whenever possible. It would make our jobs all the more difficult otherwise."

All the while, Alma diligently continued the rest of her work: typing out from memory annotations of each of the reports she had read so far that day. She stopped every so often to wipe her palms against her black uniform dress trousers and could not determine even to herself why she was so anxious. But the ins and outs of the Frumentarium cared nothing at all for her anxiety or anyone else's, and she was afforded no time at all in that day's agenda to contemplate something so base as feelings. She had barely a second to compose herself before another familiar face entered the office: a junior frumentarius, carrying yet another fulm-tall stack of his own paperwork for her to proofread. He cast her a cocky smirk, aware of her obligation to drop everything at his behest and turn her attention to his higher-priority assignments. She did not offer to share in his enthusiasm.

At the top of the papers lay a brief memo for Domitian - nothing urgent by any means, but something that would offer her an excuse, however flimsy, to stretch her legs. Alma stood and rolled out her shoulders, much to the disapproval of the departing frumentarius, and made for the interrogation chamber to pass off the note to her supervisor.

Domitian inclined his head toward her in acknowledgement even before she handed him the paper, but the two informants - a man and a woman - did not follow his cue of gratitude. Much to the contrary, they cast her sour looks.

Strange, she thought. Most of the non-Garleans she had met over the past ten years had been friendly to her as a rule, more inclined to trust her for the fact that her skin and her stature marked her so openly as an outsider within the XIIth. Of course, plenty others had deemed her a traitor for seemingly working alongside the Empire of her own will, but they were fewer in number than even she had expected and she found solidarity from her fellow conquered peoples more often than not. She could derive no meaning from the Thavnairian informants and their open disdain, given how little they had seen of her and vice versa since their arrival that morning.

"Thank you, Malla." Domitian's voice cut through her thoughts, and he handed her back the slip of parchment. "Tell him the matter will be closed by tomorrow evening."

"And ser, I..." She cleared her throat, forcing her attention back to the man seated on the near side of the glass interrogation table. "That is, we may need to go over the Raithw-"

Domitian waved a hand. For the first time that day, his face hardened into a scowl. "Later, Malla."

Knowing better than to argue, she turned away to leave.

The woman raised a sleeve to scratch an itch at her collar. The fabric at the garment's hem held stiffly with her every movement.

Alma's heart very nearly skipped a beat in her haste to exit the room calmly. When at last she rounded the corner and was out of sight of the interrogation chamber, she scrambled over to her desk.

She turned over the memo Domitian had just handed back to her and dipped her quill into her inkwell only to find it empty. She loosed a low stream of curses and dashed over to his desk to grab his pen, scribbling hard across her own annotations to ensure it worked. She scrawled out a note of her own onto the blank side of the half-page, unused to its remarkably fine tip.

THEIR CLOTHING IS MADE OF COTTON DAMASK - UL'DAHN.

REAL THAV. DAMASK IS SILK.

Domitian straightened his back in his seat as she entered again. She handed over the page without saying a word and his brow furrowed ever so slightly - first in annoyance, then confusion, then recognition.

She took up an attentive position at his right side.

"Well," he said. He crumpled the note in his left hand and placed both palms down on the desk as if preparing to stand. "I thank you both for your testimonies. There's another urgent matter that requires my attention-"

"No!" the woman snapped. She glared up at Alma. "I don't know what it is she's told you-"

"She's informed me of a grievous error in one of our existing casework files. If you will allow me a moment's leave, I'll return with your belongings-"

The man's hand twitched; a moment later, he withdrew a ragged crystal glowing opalescent, its colors continuously shifting. Alma had seen the item only once before, in a copied diagram from some report on contraband from Nagxia.

Auracite.

Everyone in the chamber stared down at the stone in the informant's hand.

"For the Resistance."

The stone flared.

"DOMITIAN!"

It was the first she'd spoken his name aloud, even in private, but that thought never registered in the moment. She moved on instinct to shove him away a split second before-

There came a rush of noise and pain to engulf everything. One moment she was on her feet; the next, she was lying face-down against the interrogation table in agony.

"MALLA!"

The woman was no more, her body blown away, but the man yet stood; he reached for Alma with fury in his eyes and his companion's remains staining his imitation silk tunic. She tried to raise her left hand to halt him, and all that aided her was a mangle of flesh and a steady gush of blood.

She could only cry out through her pain and her terror and her realization that this, this was how dear Marco had died so long ago.

But Domitian was alive - that, at least, had gone right. Domitian stepped in, took hold of the man by his mop of graying hair, and slammed him against the side of the table until he moved no more; when that was finished and his hands were as red as hers, he reached out for her.

"Alma," he whispered. Her name. Her real name.

She tried to lean her weight against the table but misjudged the exertion and instead fell into him.

He tore off the white sash at his waist and used it to bind whatever remained of her arm, then lowered her to the tile floor. Footsteps resounded from behind her; Domitian screamed at whoever had arrived to get a medicus. "Alma," he murmured again into her ear once the footsteps had receded, practically cradling her in his grasp. "Stay with me, Alma. Scream, cry, curse, whatever it takes, but stay with me."

She could comprehend nothing beyond her pain and her name, nothing beyond Domitian holding her and the words that left her trembling lips: "I'm so sorry, Tia. I'm so, so sorry."

Her consciousness returned to her in an imperial medical bay, and she struggled to combat the deep-rooted pain in every fragment of her being. Everything was a blinding white and reeked of some harsh chemical disinfectant.

Domitian slept at her bedside in a portable chair, his face tucked into his folded arms somewhere down by her feet.

She prayed to Rhalgr that the imperials had not taken her arm during her unconsciousness, that she would still be able to write and spar and do the only things that brought meaning to her already diminished life - but when she reached out to Domitian to wake him, her left arm was gone at the elbow.

#Alma Malheur #Domitian goe Velius #In Sheep's Clothing

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