#for literally killing men when they violate her boundaries

[empress-hancock]

I have been mad about Kuina for years she is one of the reasons I peaked she is a girl that’s the point a girl being hurt by misogyny and feeling hopeless enough to kill herself because of it because it’s unfair and does actual real damage to women

[nikethestatue]

So one thing that is important and never brought up enough is when you just focus on Sarah as a writer and human is that in all of her books, she has NEVER rewritten a losing virginity scene

NEVER

I can’t remember if she explicitly stated somewhere that she won’t, but after 10 years of reading her books that is something she’s never done, which as a romance writer HAS to be intentional. She’s written people fucking in the sky while flying, but the few times someone is losing their virginity it’s always been a fade to black or brief mentions of it but not the actual full scene.

The closest we get is “-and gave him everything she had.” Which was her first published sex scene, and “so Lorcan did.” Both in ToG. Justice for Elorcan😔🙏🏻

I 100% people should respect that authors can have boundaries too, like that can be a heavy topic for people! Especially for women who often have their literal worth tied to their virginity. EVEN IN HER BOOKS Mor and Lysandra 1. suffer consequences for losing it on her own terms or 2. have hers be auctioned off AT 17🤢

She’s a sex positive author, and yes this post sounds like I’m basing a characters worth on if they’ve had sex so I’m sorry I swear that’s not what I’m doing BUT THEY’RE CHARACTERS. SHE MADE UP. Not that being a virgin is a bad thing because it’s not. She just has a pattern for smut and even if we exclude the no virginity scenes I’m so sorry to the other ship BUUUUT having one of the 3 men who are in positions of power and have basically unlimited access to characters who’ve been SA’d, do people really think Sarah would make THAT a foundation of an entire ROMANCE BOOK AS IF THAT’S NOT A COMPLETE ABUSE OF POWER? If Rhys or any member of the inner circle, ESPECIALLY MOR(!) don’t kill Az if he did that, I’m sure his MOTHER or the other priestesses would. Could you imagine being a priestess and finding out your trainer and one of the few men you have contact with is trying to get his dick wet with one of your sisters? How violating that would be, no matter how professional he’d behave like Cassian during training? Thought Cassian and Nesta are a completely different circumstance, even if g and az were mates. They’d lose all of the Valkyrie’s and any sense of safety with the night court.

And to those doubting Elain getting a book, why would Sarah throw in that Elain lost her virginity off page? Entirely pointless, ESPECIALLY for a character viewed as a prude UNLESS she is laying the ground work for her future main character in a series where people fuck. A LOT. That’s literally Sarah’s pattern as a writer, hence one of the reasons we saw Nesta use sex as a coping mechanism and why Cassian didn’t take her v card, which I think started in frost and starlight off page BEFORE Nesta’s book.

Plus homie can’t even stand to visit Illyria bc of how they treat women, how people think Az would go after someone under his care who he literally rescued is genuinely terrifying???

Or that she’d force a Elain to be with a man who makes her uncomfortable no matter how likeable he is because someone/something/a-big-ass-pot decided for her at literally the worst moment in her life? Choice is so important to her as a writer

And again no one’s worth is based on their sexual history, whether it’s consensual or not because only you define yourself, which is one of the main messages she’s always had. And while these are characters are on a page, to whoever reads this you are a real person and your story is worth telling. (I know this is a sensitive topic and I’m trying so hard not to offend anyone and you don’t have to post it I am just so confused. Like yes people who’ve experienced such things like myself can and do still have sex, but if she -the writer- BARELY touches on Rhys’s assault during sex with Feyre, not even his own pov, or Nesta with Tomas or even Lidia, WHY would she go from zero to 10000 and write g’s sex scene who is a virgin.)

Who knows, maybe one day she’d write her story, but I’m sorry to say not starting out without her having sex before it starts.

The funny thing is that she said exactly that--she doesnt write virginity scenes because she doesn't like the power imbalance.

Especially since she tends to have these massive age gaps. But then she always gives actual magical power to the women to balance the age thing out.

I don't know why people don't understand how bad it would look. Especially given Azriel's mother's history, where she had no autonomy, and was made to be a virtual slave to the lord. No one is saying that that's Azriel obviously, but it would be a terrible breach of trust and could only be viewed as predatory. What I don't understand is that the same people screech that Rhys assaulted Feyre UTM (I categorically do not think that he did, but that's beside the point) but at the same time they feel that a Gwynriel relationship would be appropriate. Oh, well what if they are mates! Mate bonds aren't a ticket to do whatever the hell one wants, under any circumstances.

Azriel getting it on with a priestess from the Library is just not appropriate under any conditions. Especially with one who needs to ask Clotho for permission to go to a sleepover with Nesta and Emerie in the same building she lives in.

[haggishlyhagging]

The Dionysian solution for women, which is violation of our own Hag-ocratic boundaries, is The Final Solution. To succumb to this seductive invitation is to become incorporated into the Mystical Body of Maledom, that is, to become "living" dead women, forever pumping our own blood into the Heavenly Head, giving head to the Holy Host, losing our heads. The demonic power of Dionysian deception hinges on this invitation to incorporation/ assimilation, resulting in inability to draw our own lines. To accept this invitation is to become unhinged, dismembered. Refusing is essential to the process of the Self's remembering, re-fusing.

The madness which is the Dionysian Final Solution for women is confusion—inability to distinguish the female Self and her process from the male-made masquerade. Dionysus sometimes assumed a girl-like form. The phenomenon of the drag queen dramatically demonstrates such boundary violation. Like whites playing "black face," he incorporates the oppressed role without being incorporated in it. In the phenomenon of transsexualism, the incorporation/ confusion is deeper. As ethicist Janice Raymond has pointed out, the majority of transsexuals are "male to female," while transsexed females basically function as tokens, and are used by the rulers of the transsexual empire to hide the real nature of the game. In transsexualism, males put on "female" bodies (which are in fact pseudofemale). In a real sense they are separated from their original mothers by the rituals of the counseling process, which usually result in "discovering" that the mother of the transsexual-to-be is at fault for his “gender identity crisis.” These "patients" are reborn from males. As Linda Barufaldi suggested, this fact was symbolized in the renaming of the renowned transsexual of tennis, Renée (literally, "re-born") Richards, whose original first name was Richard. The rebirthing male supermothers include psychiatrists, surgeons, hormone therapists, and other cooperating professionals. The surgeons and hormone therapists of the transsexual kingdom, in their effort to give birth, can be said to produce feminine persons. They cannot produce women.

The seduction of women—including feminists—into confusion by Dionysian boundary violation happens under a variety of circumstances. A common element seems to be an invitation to "freedom." The feminine Dionysian male guru or therapist invites women to spiritual or sexual liberation, at the cost of loss of Self in male-dictated behavior. Male propagation of the idea that men, too, are feminine— particularly through feminine behavior by males—distracts attention from the fact that femininity is a man-made construct, having essentially nothing to do with femaleness. The seductive preachers of androgyny, of "human liberation," dwell upon this theme of blending. When they put on the mask of Dionysus, the Myth-Masters play the role of Mix-Masters. "Mixing Up the Victim" is the name of their mime.

The illusion of Dionysian freedom, then, drives women into madness. As defined by Honor Moore, M-A-Dness is Male Approval Desire. She writes:

M-A-D is the filter through which we're pressed to see ourselves— if we don't, we won't get published, sold, or exhibited—I blame none of us for not challenging it except not challenging it may drive us mad . . .

It is true that the Apollonian mask of god drives women into madness, but this is the madness of one who sees the face/ mask of the Destroyer, and who desires his approval because she knows she needs this in order not to be raped, maimed, starved to death, imprisoned, murdered. This is a clearheaded M-A-Dness. But the Dionysian method is to break the boundaries that make such methods in our madness possible. Dionysus, the "gentle-man," merry mind-poisoner, kills women softly. Male Approval Desire, under his direction, lacks a sense of distance from The Possessor. The Dionysian M-A-D-woman desires the approval of her god because she loves him as herself. She and he, after all, are two in one flesh. She and he are of one mind. She has lost her Self in his house of mir-rors, and she does not know whose face she sees in her beatific visions.

Thus Dionysus drives women mad with his femininity, which appears to be a relief from the stern masculinity of Apollo. Kerényi points out that Dionysus "was called Pseudanor, the man without true virility' —not to speak of all his joke names such as gynnis, 'the womanish,' or arsenothelys, ‘the man-womanly.’ This is the ultimately deceptive glorification of femininity, convincing women that it is desirable for men and also desired by them, luring females into forgetting the falseness of femininity, blinding us to the fact that femininity is quintessentially a male attribute.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

[warmmilk-n-honey]

I always had a feeling these days while i watched and rewatched the Noah's Ark Circus musical when Baldroy just told Beast "I wish i could have met a girl like you in a bar, drinking something. Not like this." before killing her that made me want to choke Baldroy. I don't hate Baldroy, i wanna say before someone attacks me, i just find the line very fucking mysogynistic, and wanted to know if i was the only one. We all know Yana fucks up a lot with stuff.

Nah, I get you that line always rubbed me the wrong way, especially when you consider how Beast was treated by Sebastian, Seb even says something like "You're dressed in such a way that I wouldn't expect you to be upset." After he violates her boundaries, and starts literally feeling up her prosthetic! He basically says "Well you're dressed like such a whore you were basically asking for it 🙃" Like fuck off?!! Not to mention the ableism of touching her prosthetic and then acting like she's a bitch when she rightfully feels violated. I get he's a demon or whatever but he's meant to be playing a gentlemanly persona. I think the Bard comment wouldn't rub me the wrong way so much if Beast wasn't treated so misogynistically by the writing so consistently.

And I know people are gonna say "it was the victorian era and she's a lower class woman, of course she's treated like shit" Like c'mon let's be fucking for real here, we are not meant to see Sebastian or Bard's actions as morally dubious in these scenarios-(only when Seb sleeps with her are we supposed to see his demonic intentions) Yana consistently treats sexual harassment as like a funny quirky character trait, like it's some kind of silly fun thing-I mean just look at the Viscount of Druit (I swear attractive men get away with ANYTHING in kuro) Sebastian harassing her is treated more like he didn't understand a social cue than malicious.

Again it's not that Yana has morally grey characters or that she brings up dark themes it's the framing of those characters and themes that's the issue, we are clearly meant to see Beast as bitchy and over reacting to Seb harassing her, Bard's comment was just the cherry on top of how she was objectified. Sadly this kind of sexism is super common in anime and manga, so I can't even put it all on Yana, sexual harassment being used for "funny" character moments is by no means a kuro only problem.

Also I know the only reason Seb treated Beast that way was because she used a whip on Betty the fucking tiger!! Think about what he's teaching his son!! That treating women like shit is okay in service of cats?!

[masterthespianduchovny]

I’m going to have an uncomfortable, but necessary conversation.

What Nate did, kissing Keeley without consent, was sexual assault. Whether or not you like a person, whether or not they’re a victim in other ways, and regardless of them being drunk and regretting it, that it STILL sexual assault.

And yes, there are many many instances of popular kisses (and worse things) that ARE sexual assault, which wasn’t treated as such. Countless people seek to address these harmful moments being framed as a good thing. Even a real life event, such as when Adrien Brody kissed Halle Berry after his Oscar win. She did not consent to that. Many people appropriately call this sexual assault now. And he definitely didn’t have a misunderstanding about that moment.

Sexual assault isn’t just rape, here’s a screenshot from Columbia’s website outlining what sexual assault consists of.

Calling what Nate did a misunderstanding trivializes what happened. Nate was essentially acting like a Nice Guy. Because a woman was nice to him and enjoyed being his friend, he felt entitled to her romantic and sexual gaze. There is literally nothing that supports why Nate “misunderstood” Keeley’s feelings.

Nate kissed Keeley because he wanted to regardless of how she felt and relationship status. Because she negatively reacted he realized that he’s not the alpha dog he viewed himself as. That just because he’s more confident and assertive women aren’t going to automatically want him.

The only misunderstanding Nate had was his sexual charm.

And I want to be clear here, even if Nate hadn’t had this arc where he’s spiraling and was the Nate of the first season, it still would be sexual assault. Bad people aren’t the only ones capable of sexual assault, good/“good” people are as well.

We live in a society that constantly encourages violating women’s boundaries. That teaches men that no means yes and pester women until you wear them down to get them. That they don’t need to learn social cues.

In this same conversation with the person in the screenshot, they argued that since Keeley wasn’t bothered and tried to comfort Nate, it wasn’t assault. Sexual assault is a complicated and complex thing. People don’t always react how we thing they should or how we think we would. Many women have said that they just knew how they were going to react if something happened to them and when it did, many said they froze. That they couldn’t believe that this thing was happening. They were frozen in shock and didn’t know what to do. They felt helpless.

Often times, when a woman is in a situation like this, we often try to be placating because of the risk of the situation escalating. You know when women fake flirt, fake smile with men they aren’t interested because they don’t know what could happen if they express disinterest. There are women who’ve literally been killed by strangers for saying no and turning them down. Hell, a guy killed his female classmate because she rejected going to homecoming with him because she was going with her boyfriend.

There are other times people try to rationalize their sexual assault. Some are in denial about what happened to them. It’s hard to wrap their minds around it.

But yes, he did sexually assaulted Keeley and him allegedly feeling sorry afterwards doesn’t negate this fact.

And this is not a conversation I want to have, especially as tensions have been high surrounding Nate in general. I understand why people are protective of Nate, however, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, anyone who did what Nate did would’ve committed sexual assault.

I’m addressing this situation because it’s a necessary conversation to have. No matter how much we sympathize with people, even if they are oppressed, they are still capable of harming others even if they don’t intend to. You can still defend someone and admit that they did something wrong. It’s not an either or situation. People are more complex than that. Two weeks ago, despite defending ted for walking Dr. Sharon him despite her protest, I readily admitted that he did violating her boundary by coming into her home. It’s not as serious as what Nate did, but we have to admit when characters we like do wrong regardless of if it’s big or small.

Someone can still have valid criticisms about some of the comments about Nate being racist and admit, “yeah, him kissing Keeley was still assault.”

There can be so many thoughtful people regardless of where they stand on many given issues, but at times, the TL fandom can have a glaring lack of nuance about some things. Or maybe it’s just tumblr. Or social media.

I don’t know.

But non consensual kissing is sexual assault. It doesn’t need to be rape to be assault. Any sexual advance that isn’t consensual is sexual assault. That includes kissing, groping, various forms of penetration, etc. When we don’t know or can’t acknowledge this nuance we do the topic and so many people a disservice.

[moontheoretist]

I love Bakarina, but this?

This is crossing the line into a very rapey territory.

Currently, in my country there is happening a huge conversation around what is rape, how rape should be defined and what actually is consent, because men in my country cannot fathom that they have to ask for consent before they do something to another person and that consent which is not expressed clearly enough can create a situation in which a guy thought everything was fine, because he didn’t pay attention, while their partner felt uncomfortable and violated, and it basically crossed into rape territory.

They all claim that if she “didn't resist and liked it, then it wasn't rape”, which is bullshit.

So you should understand that I am very aware of it now, because I see every day women talking about feeling uncomfortable and scared while men dismiss it, claiming they’re exaggerating and throwing the idea of consent out the window, because it “kills the mood” or inconveniences them somehow.

And this what Keith is talking about? It is not only crossing a line into rape territory when he says that “if you enter a room of a man at night, you cannot complain about what he does to you”, but it also is sexist. It puts all the burden and the responsibility for protecting onto a woman and basically blames her for the consequences if she isn’t “careful enough” around men, excusing predatory behavior as “normal” and “natural” while justifying the rapist. Not to mention that he literally told her, “you are a woman, so you should know your place and act like a woman should if you don’t wanna get assaulted”. In Catarina’s case it even crosses a line into ableist territory, because she is not very much aware of social cues like an autistic person, so men consider her approachable, because she doesn't set boundaries, because she doesn't feel the need to do so as she sees all of them as her friends and people she can trust, so imagine that.

Guys like Geordo and Keith are basically using her child-like demeanor as an excuse to say, “you were all defenseless around me, so I was justified in doing what I did to you”.

(And they all were appalled when Sora pushed Catarina onto the bed, which also was pretty rapey, but now they are basically doing the same shit as if they were justified to do that).

I already had a mild issue with Geordo kissing Catarina without consent, but now Keith made a jump into a completely different bag of cats I don't wanna unpack. The fact that he kissed her forehead doesn't make it all less creepy, because he literally said that “he will settle for that FOR NOW”. Is it a threat, Keith!?

I am just saying that as much as it makes sense in the storyline for him to say it, because they are in a medieval like setting with magic, on a meta level it is highly fucking uncomfortable and shouldn’t be portrayed as cute or funny. Hell, I am starting to wonder why all those guys (Geordo, Sora, Keith) are allowed to act like that simply, because they love Catarina? Like, WTF.

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

we are our family, even if we don’t want to be.

Titans 3.07

a bit over halfway through the season, and we still don’t have all of our main characters on the board! i love this show.

as always, typing this up as i watch. live reaction, baby! *shadowboxes*

SPOILERS AHEAD

1. i don’t think i’ve mentioned this before, but i kinda miss the old ‘dc universe’ intro. it was cool! the whole idea of it was wild and waaaaay over-ambitious, but also very very on-brand because of it.

2. this is... the third time we’ve seen dick sleeping this season? that’s a record! checking another thing off my s3 wishlist...

2.5. i guess i rag on titans all the time for its wafer-thin plotting and bad pacing, but i have to admit that this season has been a step-up from the last one in this regard. titans has very reactive rather than proactive protagonists, and a lot of the last season seemed to be: x happened, the team reacted badly, then y happened, they reacted badly, etc. this time around, it’s not a huge leap up by any means, but at least they’re doing something about it. 

i do appreciate the focus on character arcs over everything else. and when i say everything else, i mean it: arcs that started two seasons ago with no big cathartic moments, intermittent payoff and multiple relapses. big bads have ranged from interdimensional demons to superpowered assassins to whatever in the world scarecrow is, but trigon’s big weapon against the titans was to... use their worst fears against them. slade’s was to... use their fears to break them up. crane’s is to... use red hood to use their fears to break them up. even the threat of gotham’s citizens being in danger doesn’t feel real: gotham is mythologised into an entity of its own, infecting our heroes like a parasite. like. this is not to say that most other superhero media aren’t big character arcs intertwined with the main plot, but titans doesn’t even make pretend that it’s anything but.

anyway. that’s my entry #2345 to ‘give a grand unifying theory for titans’. thanks. i’ll be back with more.

3. “anger is just fear in a little black dress.” god I HATE HIM

(what’s he doing with barbara’s likeness? oh... oh god. a terrible thought just occurred to me. what if they introduce hush at the very last minute for plastic surgery shenanigans? would you put it past this show?)

3.5. jason, nooooooooo

3.75. i mean, they’re making it very clear here that scarecrow is the one in control--the one who’s always been in control--and is manipulating jason and literally poisoning him, but i hope it doesn’t end up erasing nuance or jason’s autonomy. if jason’s to reckon with the issues that brought him here, then the lines of responsibility will need to be set somewhere. 

(this applies to dick as well but more on that later, i guess.)

4. just--the phrase “40% loss of income” is so funny to me. like, gotham is full of these larger-than-life characters who are idiosyncratic beyond belief, colourful and dramatic and creating chaos just for the sake of chaos, and then there’s the regular criminals and their henchmen who just want to make a quick buck sitting down with pie charts and graphs, griping about the joker reducing their returns or debating high risk investments in, i don’t know, two-face’s next scheme.

“yyyyeeeeeaaah, my financial advisor is telling me that going all-in with a guy who literally makes decisions on the flip of a coin is probably not the greatest idea.”

4.5. god i hate smug!smarmy!scarecrow so much

4.85. as big plans to “control” gotham go, it’s pretty bog-standard. clearly scarecrow has some bigger plan in mind but it really feels like we’ve got no clear insight into him and he’s this generic creepy mystery-man who knows more than he lets on and springs a twist/cliffhanger every now and then. i liked the scenes with him and dick in 3.04 where it seemed like he was genuinely on the backfoot and things weren’t going as he predicted. for all of his faults, dick is at least familiar with scarecrow’s bullshit and knows not to give what he wants.

5. i mean... i see where dick is coming from with the “he’s not jason anymore; he’s red hood” because his immediate glaring concern is scarecrow’s drug and the damage it could potentially cause gotham? i do not doubt that it’s something batman drilled into him, too, but when you’re expected to take point on a situation where the lives of an entire city weigh down on your shoulders, it’s better to simplify things and prioritise. i’m not saying it’s great or healthy! gar is absolutely right to consider this facet of the situation. it’s just dick can’t.

6. hmmmmmmm. HMMMMMMMMMMM. 

i don’t know that i’m super fond of this iteration of oracle???? it looks like a cross between cerebro from x-men and jarvis from iron man. it’s giving me second-hand embarrassment. somebody help me.

(at least they remembered dick’s middle name is actually “john”. i like to think bruce printed D in that contract because for a while he genuinely thought richard “dick” grayson was his full name. duck duck goose, dick dick grayson, i don’t know alfred, the kid was in a circus, maybe they thought it was funny. or maybe it was a test in anger control, who knows.)

6.5 “maybe you two would like some time alone?” even AI can’t help hitting on dick grayson in this universe.

“oh mr grayson, if i only had another eye to see you better...”

6.8. on one hand, it’s a bit disconcerting that the title of ‘oracle’ has gone from barbara herself to this gigantic machine; from my impression of the comics-verse, barbara had an extensive computing and surveillance system, true, but she was very clearly the brains behind the operation. on the other hand, i’m kind of glad that the ethical boundaries that this kind of surveillance violates is a sticking point for barbara. (tho let’s be real, the nsa would kill to have this in their arsenal).

6.9. also it’s now obvious that scarecrow’s big plan is to take control of oracle itself. it’s why he had lady vic take that picture of her eyes, or why he’s meddling around with it on his computer.

6.95. if only i could ‘command sleep’ anybody overstepping their boundaries re: personal information...

7. “you can just sit back and watch as the titans destroy themselves.” i mean... he’s not wrong

8. “dick’s parents were killed by a criminal mob; he won’t work with them.” it’s wonderful that you have this insight into dick, kory, i just wish we could’ve watched some of these conversations actually happen on-screen.

8.5. i’m glad that kom’s being treated with such nuance and understanding, though it’s obvious that she definitely has a Plan of her own. (and did i entirely imagine her ability to mimic other people flawlessly at the end of s2? or is that going to come into play at some point?) i think her story has the potential to be genuinely poignant, and in a universe where being Different, either because of mental health or physical differences or whatever else, leads a straight line to Evil, it’s important to acknowledge and then emphasise that the mere fact of your existence as a Different Person doesn’t predispose you to evil. maybe your act of destroying a system that has destroyed you and not scrambling to “fit in” is only evil as defined by that system. 

8.8. “you’re trespassing, i should call the authorities, i feel unsafe.” now this is a villain lady who’s definitely aware of her privilege.

8.85. kom smirking knowingly at her sister is everything.

“oooh that’s the kory i remember”

9. conner and dick working together woo!

9.25. god i hate a villain who’s always just a step ahead, no matter what. so crane anticipated dick using oracle to track his personal communications and set him up? how did he know when exactly dick would get to do this? how long did he have that poor man tied up in that van?

(the “save me, grayson” is a nice touch, tho. send dick spiralling even further! because if there’s one thing dick will do, it’s take responsibility for every goddamn thing that goes wrong.)

9.5. ahem. i’m going to need a million gifs of conner yeeting dick across that yard, fandom, thankyouverymuch.

(i understand conner is invulnerable to explosions, but how do his clothes survive??)

9.8. oooh crane is already in oracle! i’m just sitting here laughing helplessly because they’re overpowering this goddamned guy so much. he can build a lab in arkham’s basement! he has access to lazarus puddles! he has minions working across gotham, including a fully functional chemical laboratory staffed by chemists who only answer to him! he has the crime families of gotham quailing in his very presence! he has assassins at his beck and call! he’s enough of a manipulative bastard to have red hood under his thumb! and now he has enough of a tech know-how to not only be aware of oracle, but know how to hack into it! i’m sick of exclamation marks! i’ll shut up now!

9.95. dick leaving behind that smouldering grave for a person he failed to save without taking a second to process how he feels about it and running towards his next plan to corner scarecrow: a microcosm of where his head’s at right now.

10. really hammering in the themes of this season, aren’t we. 

10.25. the interesting thing is the titans repeatedly call themselves a family this season (none more so than dick) and while that found family has helped encapsulate and put away their traumatic experiences with their ‘original’ families, it’s meant that they’ve not really dealt with those issues. and dick and gar and jason come from ‘found families’ of their own: they are twice removed, traumatised two times over. they still cling to this identity however, and because of it they’re losing each other. a family isn’t static. it’s an ever-evolving dynamic and you have to put in work constantly to keep it healthy.

10.5. anyway, that’s entry #2346. i’m here aaaalll night.

11. lookit gar the detective! half-transforming and using his powers to deduce things! what a hero! i’ve said this for a long time, but gar is the bedrock of this team, and an unsung one at that.

11.25. i’m confused about him calling this room jason’s though. it seems to me that this is dick’s room that jason later used, and one that dick’s using now. so the unmade bed isn’t really jason’s fault; dick was woken by barbara that morning, and in his hurry, he left without making his bed.

(it still confounds me that bruce didn’t find jason another bedroom in that gigantic mansion of his. you really didn’t give this kid a chance, did you?)

12. oh well. so much for the oracle.

13. ... sorry, wait. you didn’t think i wasn’t going to address the bit with dick right now, did you?

12.5. i honestly don’t think it’s very complicated: dick’s been reeling from one traumatic thing to the next, and just when it seemed like at the beginning of the season, he felt happy and secure with his team and his place in the world, bruce ups and leaves gotham to him, specifically naming him a successor and calling him a ‘better batman’. he’s lost garth and jericho and donna and jason and now hank and dawn. he’s not even sure where rachel is or what she’s doing. after being told that batman was a psychopath for moulding him into a weapon, he’s also been told that his failure to be a ‘better batman’ lead to further disaster. of course he’s going to get batman-goggles. of course he’s going to be a prick. 

12.8. i don’t know what to say. i feel his frustration acutely. i don’t think he should’ve said what he said to barbara (can people stop pushing her around this season????) but that pressure to step in where your parent fails? to clean up their messes and try to think like them? to fall into habits drilled into you when you developed them as coping mechanisms growing up? I FEEL THAT. 

every step he’s taking he’s putting 110% of himself in it and scarecrow’s still playing mindgames with all of them: i absolutely feel his desperation to take control of that game and turn it on scarecrow, no matter what it takes.

and he did apologise almost immediately, and finally--finally--actually works with barbara. 

12.9. again, not excusing him! but i get it. and i think that’s a sign of great character writing.

“did you know i just reminded emmram of all of her daddy issues? what the fuck????”

12.95. i love that dick&barbara, kory&kom, and gar are all approaching solving this mystery from different angles, each as valid as the other. also, conner is there as... emergency bomb defuser man?

13. it’s like all fancy rich people in fancy rich houses do is pour fancy rich alcohol into fancy rich glasses on pristine, untouched tabletops. i wonder what it’s like to live like that.

13.25. I KNEW IT! poor michael. it was nice knowing you.

13.5. man, kory is contending with a lot of issues that she’s successfully bottled up and compartmentalised until now. the cold reality that a child can seek out their parents as refuge and they can view the child as a piece to be moved in a greater game (never out of cruelty, though, never, and somehow that makes it worse), that truth of blackfire’s treatment on tamaran because she’s different, and her own culpability in what happened. she exchanged one family for another, after all, and left that family to die and her sister to suffer. like dick, like gar, kory’s being forced to reckon with what the titans are meant to be, the larger implications of creating their found family in their own space.

14. it’s probably because it’s one in the morning and i’ve had two glasses of wine but i did not follow that bit of exposition at all and victor freeze??? what? 

anyway. look at them solving things! together! go team!

“you made a deal with the mob?” oh the sense of betrayal on his face! fuck off, dick, your issues aren’t kory’s. 

15. conner is really sweet and a bit of an awestruck crush on kom is to be expected. especially after that power rangers-esque transformation (i say this as a former huge power rangers fangirl. i’ve seen every series until 2007 including the original japanese versions and written fanfic for all of them. so i love a cool costume transformation, is what i’m saying.)

also?

FUCK YEAH

16. i love the gotham crime families just chillin’ around eating ice cream. I LOVE THEM

16.5. that was a fun fight sequence, if marred slightly by that bit of awkward flirting between conner and kom. i wonder if she’s really planning to use him in a larger scheme to get kory back to tamaran, or maybe something else. 

16.75. so i’m assuming that scarecrow has jason either so paralysed by fear that he can barely move, or jason’s withdrawing from the drug that he’s been sucking in every few minutes. 

17. it’s nice to see them chill after a successful mission! and it can be awkward, but conner’s crush on kom and him striving to impress her is also, well, uh... cute.

17.5. i guess the dick/barbara scene was inevitable, especially given the... unresolved nature of their relationship in the flashbacks? and they’ve been through a rollercoaster together this episode, discovering and then destroying an incredible tool within a matter of hours, re-discovering just how well they work together as a team. dick’s swimming in the nostalgia. i don’t expect it to last as a long-term relationship, but i totally get why this is happening now. and hey, they’re cute!

i have a weeeirrrrd feeling that kory is going to leave to tamaran at the end of the season and that dick and kory will rekindle--or rather realise--their relationship just before that. it’s going to be devastating and beautiful and painful and i will be writing essays about it which would be me just wailing into the screen.

18. gar found molly!!!!!!! MOLLY’S BACK! \o/ gar is the BEST

19. that was a fun episode! i love this silly show, even if it does destroy me sometimes <3

[backofthebookshelf]

One of the nice things about the way the TMA fandom has reached full large-fandom levels of toxicity is that I no longer care if people get mad at me for my opinions on characters! So, some Georgie meta.

(Because fandom is and always has been Like That, I do feel the need to clarify here that I love Georgie, she's one of my favorite characters, characters are more interesting because of their flaws, and I have no investment in the idea that women or female characters are inherently better or more emotionally competent than men or male characters. If I talk a lot about her relationship with Jon, it's because Jon is our point of view character and also the person she interacts with the most. Also, this rambles, sorry.)

I've been thinking about the Season 4 Jon Trauma post and how much I liked the way it talked about Georgie, and it's convinced me that if Georgie could feel fear, she's the one who'd be most afraid of Jon out of all of them. She's the one protagonist we have whose only interaction with the powers has been as a direct victim of them. She doesn't know what they feel like from the inside, like Jon and Melanie; she doesn't know what they're like when they're someone you love, like Basira; she doesn't even know what they're like as petty middle management, like Martin and Tim. What she knows is that one time a monster ate her (only) friend and traumatized her so badly she spent a year in a suicidal depression.

And now her ex - and yes, Jon and Georgie have a remarkably comfortable relationship in the beginning of season three, but they're still exes and they broke up for reasons, even if we don't know exactly what they are - has turned up on her doorstep, shaking and possibly bloody, with nowhere else to go and no access to his home. He's clearly lying about what's going on. He repeatedly violates her house rules. And then he tells her that he's turning into one of those same kinds of monsters that traumatized her and ate her friend. It's clearly enough to override any remaining affection she had for him, and by any definition he has now positioned himself as a trigger.

(Through no fault of his own: the only real response he has to Georgie's statement is "I can't believe you didn't tell me." She's the one who assumes that he Knew, somehow, that she also had a statement; she's the one who suggests he had alternatives. Both suggestions are plausible but we don't actually know for certain that either are true.)

But Georgie isn't afraid of Jon because Georgie can't be afraid -at least, according to her. I'm not sure how much I believe this in the grand scheme of things; it seems like an extremely unlikely mechanism for one of the fears to have. It seems much more likely to me that she's just never met anything as terrifying as that encounter was, and her subjective sense of fear has been massively recalibrated. In which case not only meeting but having hosted in your home another monster who self-describes as similar to the one that was so terrifying that literal threats to your life are no longer distressing would...probably ping. But she's conceptualized herself as a person who doesn't feel fear; it's even possible that was part of her recovery, identifying this as a possible benefit of what would otherwise have been a universally terrible, soul-breaking experience. She looked existential terror in the face and survived, and came out of it a person who cannot be afraid of anything left on this earth. That's kind of a superhero origin story, and I can't blame her for it. I think anyone with a mental illness has at least tried to find ways in which their suffering has made them a better, stronger person.

But whether she's suppressing and rationalizing away any fear she feels or she genuinely doesn't feel any of it, she does frequently behave as though her lack of fear gives her a more objective view of the situation than anyone else. I don't believe she actually uses the word "just," but it drips from her every interaction with Jon after Dead Woman Walking. Why doesn't he just stop reading the statements? Why doesn't he just quit? And, in Zombie, I honestly can't interpret her reaction to Jon when he wakes up from his coma as anything other than, Why doesn't he just die? If he hates being this so much, if he really doesn't want to be a monster, why doesn't he just die?

I really would like to think that it goes without saying that this is, at the very least, a massive failure of empathy, but she's so explicit about it and fandom spent so much time basically agreeing with her that apparently it doesn't. Not only is Georgie not afraid of the situation, but (and this is the part that makes me wonder if she's not rationalizing, rather than being supernaturally unable to feel fear) she can't possibly fathom how afraid everyone else is, and she never tries. She persists in treating the whole awful situation, as @findingfeather's post says, like this is a mundane problem with people who are refusing to help themselves, rather than a supernatural trap that has been specifically built to be inescapable.

Now, let me be clear, even if she were talking to, say, a drug addict who nearly killed themselves because they were in denial about how much of a problem they had, her attitude would be unforgivable. But in this case Jon had no choice in whether or not to become addicted to statements; it was done to him in such a way that he didn't notice it was happening until withdrawal was already incapacitating. He also didn't have the option to leave, as Tim's extended vacation made clear. And, on top of all of that, the whole reason he was in a coma in the first place was that he was trying to save the world. (Neither he nor she knows at this point that he was doing nothing of the kind, so that's really not relevant.) And - look, when Jon came to her after the end of season two, he was asking for help. When he rejected the kind of help that she offered it was because he knew it didn't apply to the problems he actually had, but she treats that like it's his problem, which is something like offering a leg splint to a person bleeding out from a gunshot wound and getting offended when they tell you that won't work. He was very clear that what was happening scared him and he didn't know what to do about it, and her only suggestion was "walk away," which he literally could not do, for multiple reasons.

She's lucky Jon has pretty much precisely zero self-worth at this point, because anyone else would have cut her off completely for behaving like a fucking asshole.

I say "she's lucky" because frankly, even though she says that she wants nothing more to do with him, she turns up at least twice in the Institute after that, with the excuse that she's picking up Melanie to take her to therapy. I don't know about you, but I have never once gone to someone's workplace to pick them up and gone snooping around inside, and no matter how fascinatingly weird that workplace is, I definitely can't imagine doing so when I know that workplace also contains a person I have definitely decided I never want to speak to again. She goes into the Archives, for Christ's sake, and she listens outside Jon's office door for long enough to catch a bit of the recording before letting herself in (so it's very clear she knows who's in there).

Now I'm not trying to paint her as a monster here; Georgie would hardly be the first person to have second thoughts about cutting off someone they still care about, or to break that boundary that they set themselves when they realize they do still want to know how that person is doing. But the fact is that she positions herself as having the moral high ground in every single discussion they have and that's just not true. She is not literally a supernatural monster, true, but if season four did anything with the concept of monsters it was breaking down the difference between "supernaturally driven no-longer-human" and "person capable of caring and empathy." (That's a whole different meta, though, one that I will get around to someday.) Not that Jon is any better, in that encounter specifically, at dealing with a complicated and contentious relationship - he deliberately goads her, even if he doesn't use compulsion. But that's the thing, they're both exes who have had a falling out and aren't handling it very well. Neither of them is in the right.

All of which makes me really wonder what her relationship with Melanie is actually like. We don't actually see hardly any of it directly, and of what we do, well, Melanie sounds like she's still high on painkillers, so it's hard to take that as an indication of anything. But given that people (who are not intentionally trying to manipulate those around them) tend to, y'know, be fundamentally the same person in their various relationships, though it may manifest in different ways, we can probably make some guesses.

I have always been bothered by, and I really can't ignore, the fact that they were getting together at the same time that Melanie was doing what Georgie has been demanding of Jon since season three: she did whatever it took to get out. I have to wonder if Georgie knows about the nonconsensual surgery part of Melanie's process of getting out, and if she does, if she understands how vital it was. I certainly wouldn't be surprised, if she does know, that she's managed to compartmentalize it: Jon inflicted this terrible trauma on Melanie, Melanie escaped the entity that took her over. (Subconscious implication: Jon is a monster; Melanie is better than him.) I would be very surprised if Georgie is interested at all in the fine distinctions between entities; she's shown no interest in learning what is actually happening to anyone in this situation beyond "it's bad and they should get out of it." But it's relevant, because by the time Melanie makes the decision to blind herself, she's in a much different position than Jon, enslaved by an entity but not consumed by one. She herself admitted to Jon that she would never have voluntarily escaped from the Slaughter.

And given how difficult Melanie finds it to talk about any of this - you can hear her dragging the words out from behind her teeth in her conversation with Jon in Flesh, truly incredible acting by Lydia Nicholas, my god - if Georgie doesn't want to hear it? I can't imagine Melanie insisting. Yes, Melanie is going to therapy, but let me tell you, I've been going to therapy for twelve years now and I have yet to have several of the important conversations my therapists have insisted I have. That shit is hard. But I can imagine a scenario where, having been told by her therapist (who, remember, doesn't have the first idea what Melanie is actually going through, because Melanie isn't telling her about the supernatural so she has to leave out a lot of really relevant details) that she ought to tell her friend/potential girlfriend/new girlfriend about these things, Melanie attempts to bring it up, Georgie says kind and reassuring things and refuses to let her clarify any of the details, and Melanie gives up in relief, thinking, well, I tried. Super valid all around, but it doesn't mean that Georgie has any clearer picture of what Melanie's traumas actually look like, never mind Jon's. There's no world in which I can imagine Georgie actually internalizing the idea that Melanie loved the Slaughter when it had her, and she would gladly have stayed with it if Jon and Basira hadn't intervened.

In Georgie's eyes, Melanie is being a Good Victim. She was hurt but she was strong; she fought it until she won; now she's going to therapy and setting boundaries and trying to heal. She got away.

(Except, of course, she didn't, because as of The Eye Opens no one has gotten away, because this is the entire world now. We have no idea how this has affected Melanie. Presumably she's out of reach of the Eye, given that Jon can't see her or Georgie (and there's some evidence on the side of Georgie's encounter genuinely having stripped her of fear, if she's also invisible to the Eye), but she spent a long time under the influence of the Slaughter. It had her firmly enough that her attacking Jon was enough to give him his Slaughter scar. If nothing else, Melanie certainly hasn't had her fear removed, and talk about a situation bound to retraumatize someone who had such a visceral revulsion to being trapped that Elias chose it as his mechanism of control over her. Melanie probably doesn't look like a Good Victim any more, and I'd bet her relationship with Georgie is suffering some serious strain because of it.)

We don't know when exactly Melanie and Georgie got together; the last time one of them mentions the other is, I'm pretty sure, when Georgie tells Jon that Melanie is back from India. So we know that Georgie and Melanie were friends; that's good, that's a good foundation for a romantic relationship. At the very least they know each other, they have some idea of what to expect. I'd be surprised if they were dating during that season 3/4 hiatus period, though, or frankly any time before Melanie's surgery, just because Melanie seems much too consumed with rage to have room for any other emotions, and I can't imagine Georgie putting up with that.

What seems way more likely to me is this: Melanie comes back from India, arranges to meet Georgie for drinks. Probably they don't talk about anything serious; possibly they talk about Jon, honestly, since we know Melanie was looking for him and Georgie talked to him about Melanie, but very likely in the same "stuck-up pompous ass" way that Melanie talks about Jon in early seasons. (I bet Melanie's roasts are amazing.) Shortly after that Melanie joins the Magnus Institute and then, very likely, either she never tells Georgie about it and therefore they don't talk much or she does tell Georgie about it and Georgie tells her that place is bad news and she won't have anything to do with it and they don't talk at all, until, whichever way that went, the Unknowing happens and Tim dies and Jon winds up in a coma and everything goes to shit. We know Georgie visits Jon in the hospital; we don't know if Melanie does, but frankly it seems unlikely. If they did cross paths during this time, it was probably very brief and superficial. Then: the surgery, and Melanie's recovery.

I'll be honest, I have a hard time imagining Melanie deciding on her own that she should go to therapy. It's possible Basira suggested it, but it really does sound like a Georgie thing to do. So I picture something like this: from the way Basira talks it sounds like they've all been pretty much living in the Archives for a while, and on top of that everyone in the Archives has just badly violated Melanie's trust, so Melanie pulls up her Facebook DMs and talks to the only other person she has. You were right, she says, this place is terrible, I can't handle it, there's no one here I can trust and I'm so alone. And Georgie, who is generous with help and advice (so long as it's accepted) and (like anyone) weak to being told she was right about something, starts talking to her. We know Georgie's got good boundaries, and we know she doesn't want to hear details about what's going on in the Institute, so I can see her saying, I can talk to you, I would love to talk to you, but not about this. For that you need a therapist.

So Melanie gets a therapist, and the prospect of going out amongst the monsters they know are stalking the Institute without that protective shield of rage (never mind the emotional vulnerability of going to therapy in the first place) makes public transit an unthinkable option, so she asks Georgie to take her, and she does, and she keeps taking her to therapy, which is, as far as we know, the only time Melanie leaves the Archives in season four, until she blinds herself and escapes it completely.

And so they have this relationship that's built up almost entirely around Melanie's trauma - with a foundation of friendship, certainly, so I do think that if they are willing to work through it they could make it a working, healthy relationship, but (and again this isn't stated in canon but is my speculation based on what we know about these characters) it is a romantic relationship that's built around the process of Melanie recovering from multiple traumas. Ones that we know that Georgie a) doesn't know many details about, and b) more importantly, refuses to know any details about. Now, I have no experience with romantic relationships and serious trauma; I might be wildly off base here. But. I know that boundaries are important and I know that trust is also important. And if Georgie is holding similar boundaries with Melanie that she has with Jon (and, as I went into excruciating detail about earlier, she has very solid emotional reasons to protect herself with those boundaries), that's drawing a hard line around what's basically the past two to three years of Melanie's life, and undeniably both the worst and most important things that have ever happened to her. That seems...difficult to manage in the long term.

(This is a bit more of a stretch, more of the germ of a fic idea than an argument I'm prepared to defend, but I also would not be surprised if Georgie told Melanie that she wouldn't date her while she was still working at the Institute. That's a very reasonable boundary, and it's good motivation - and probably healthy motivation, I do like the idea that Melanie had something to reach toward in escaping the Institute, not just the desperate flight from - but it's also something of an ultimatum. Which is not inherently bad, but it is the kind of thing that can fester, given other problems.)

Now it's entirely possible that Georgie isn't that internally consistent. People aren't! (See: Basira's attitude toward Daisy vs her attitude toward Jon in season four.) Maybe she's more flexible about being willing to listen to Melanie, maybe she's starting to understand some of what was happening and how genuinely impossible a situation it really was. But that has to be a struggle for her, too; it's not a perfect, sweet, unconditionally good situation that teaches you that you've been unfair to the point of cruelty to someone you used to care about. And by the time the apocalypse rolls around, Melanie is, if she's lucky, just barely able to say she's healed from the plain physical trauma of blinding, never mind all the other baggage. They've got to be having a rough fucking time of it, at the very least, even if you assume that they're suddenly both the kind of people who will sit still and listen supportively and talk honestly about their own messy and complicated emotions, when neither of them have been that kind of person before.

(Another disclaimer because Fandom Is Like That: This is in no way a condemnation of or argument against fluffy What the Girlfriends fic; fic is for making fluffy things that you want to happen to your faves, or building fluffy content that you desperately need for whatever reason. Gods know there are plenty of unhealthy parts of Jon and Martin's relationship that I ignore in most of my fluffy fic. This is me attempting to work through my thoughts and feelings about the relationship I see in canon in the hopes of actually being able to write some fic about these girls myself someday, because I personally can't write fic until I understand canon, and so much of them happens offscreen because they're not main characters, and they're written with such depth and complexity that you can't just slap a stereotype on them and call it good. Which is awesome! But it means I gotta do the work, and I post it because a) it's work, and this is fandom, and I want validation; and b) I'm hoping other people have insights that might also help me clarify my thinking.)

[silenthillmutual]

I beg your pardon! It’s me who is going mad.

So, I know I did a Twitter thread about the ways Daniil is manipulated in Classic, and I thought I’d put it on here too.

I’m going to stop short of calling it gaslighting here though, because too many people are using that term who don’t really understand what it means. Gaslighting is specifically a form of abuse where the intention is to make the victim feel they are going insane. Not all manipulation or abuse is gaslighting - which doesn’t make it less bad, just...not gaslighting.

That being said: in Classic, there are quite a few times where Daniil can say that he thinks he’s losing his mind, and there are times when the game seems constructed to make you feel this way. Particularly I had in mind the ending of the game, and not just the part where you find out you’re a toy and always have been (that falls more under cosmic horror). What bugs me about the end and how that fits into things, is the fact that the Sand Pest and its outcomes have been chasing you - the clouds, the angels, the muggers, the firestarters, the rats, literally chasing you through houses and through town, only for all of it to completely vanish without a trace on the exact day you’re meant to give a solution to it all. I made a point on Twitter about how people attempting to gaslight you will submit you to a large amount of damage - physical, verbal, emotional, take your pick - and then remove the abuse and any signs of it just before they’re caught. it’s how they show to others that it’s you who’s the problem, not them. 

Regardless of whether you think the intention is to make Daniil feel he’s losing is sanity or not, the question would be who is manipulating Daniil, and why? There are a couple answers.

The first answer is the Town. The first playthrough as the Bachelor of the game is probably the closest fitting to psychological horror as the game gets. Like Silent Hill, the Town is full of horrors that seem tailor-made to torture Daniil specifically: most of these people are uneducated (the Town doesn’t even have a school), their cultural beliefs (mostly appropriated from the steppe culture) actively prevent him from doing his job as a doctor, his word and name are constantly weaponized by people with ulterior motives, and men run around on the first two days beating women to death or burning them alive and intervening actively costs you reputation - which you need to do anything. He arrives with the hope of finding evidence to keep his lab opening and, as we later learn, keep himself from execution, only to find that both the man who would serve as this evidence and the colleague who informed you of his existence have been murdered just before your arrival. You have a lot of things riding on your success, and everything about where you are is actively working against you. The government wants you to find a cure single-handedly, but the Town has other plans for you. 

And those plans are: errand boy, and scapegoat. People throughout the Town will inform you that they are scared of you when you’ve barely interacted with them, let alone in ways that should inspire fear. It doesn’t matter how good your reputation as Daniil is (and through the course of the game, there’s very little you’re made to do that lowers your reputation, and it never gets bad enough for you to be attacked on the street or refused sale from shops), what matters is the fact that everyone in Town, from the nameless NPCs to the rulers, are putting every bad thing they’ve done down as being your fault. 

But the Town has another way it’s manipulating Daniil, by almost making him a member of it. I don’t think I got a screenshot, but I’m sure that somewhere along the line Daniil comments that he’s starting to talk like one of the townsfolk. You can see this happens to Andrey, too, later in the game; he talks in what Daniil calls “Griefisms”. 

You have been sent here to fight an adversary that inherently cannot be beaten - in foolish hopes that a miracle would happen and your outstanding mind would stumble upon a once-in-a-million chance. And just so that you wouldn’t give up, they kept insisting that the adversary must be destroyed. Do you see how insidious the Powers That Be are?     > But why? Their motives are becoming less and less comprehensible to me by the day.

The second answer is the Powers That Be.

Three people enter the Town that the Powers That Be want to get rid of: the Bachelor, the Inquisitor, and the Commander. It wants them all to fix or solve or demolish something in the town, and doesn’t really care what happens to any of them. Pathologic 2 spells it out clearer for you that Aglaya, Block, and Daniil will all be executed upon return to the Capital if their answers are not what the Powers That Be want to hear. And for the time that you are in the Town as Daniil Dankovsky, the Powers That Be - like the town itself - actively work against you. The trains that are meant to bring food and medication never, to my knowledge, arrive, and most days bring about a new letter from the Powers spelling out for you how disappointed in you and your progress they are. Some of the ways they attempt to manipulate Daniil through these letters are subtle, but most of them are unsubtle suggestions that what he’s been able to accomplish is not good enough, that he was meant to work alone.

Even one of your first letters from them is suspicious; early on in the game, they write to let you know that they are in no way responsible for the outbreak, which is an incredibly suspicious thing to say. What is the point of sending such a letter? Would the player have really thought that they were if they hadn’t suggested as much through denial? After all, what called you to Town was a letter from Isidor Burakh. But yet, the Powers That Be are the ones who leave you stranded in the Town with limited resources, no help, and constantly shifting goalposts. Aglaya makes this clear to you when she arrives: you were never supposed to be successful. 

The letters from the Powers That Be do not serve any purpose other than to upset Daniil, and most if not all of them contain lies: that a train will be arriving, that they don’t mind if you have help in carrying out your plans, that Thanatica still exists, referencing conversations you’ve never had, signing drafts of letters you didn’t consult on with your name. One of the reasons i had put this down as gaslighting is because people who gaslight like to keep you off balance and emotionally fragile so that you’re easier to manipulate. You’ll do whatever they want to make the feeling stop, because you just can’t handle the stress anymore, and in the process you come across to others as unreasonable, unhinged, crazy, dangerous, so that no one will trust you. And that’s exactly how Daniil starts to come across to the townspeople: deranged, strung out, dangerous, untrustworthy.

You can contrast all that to a different letter they send you where they claim to be proud to call you one of your own. Combine the two, and you get honeymooning. They want to remind you of the good (or at least, not-as-bad) times you’ve had with them. This behavior serves two, sometimes three purposes: to keep you off balance from the violent back-and-forth, dizzying nature of what they’re doing to you, and so that you’ll defend them to people who can see what’s going on and want to get you out of it. You’ll even convince yourself that you’re not really being mistreated. If you were being abused, would they be so nice to you? 

You are the last friend our family has. I hope our attachment to you doesn’t look obtrusive.      > It requires too much from me. I’m not comfortable with it.     > No, not at all. 

The third answer is the Kains. Specifically, Georgiy and Maria repeatedly manipulate Daniil, though I’ve no doubt in the text above Victor stating their attachment to Daniil is also a manipulation, and one possibly planned by either or perhaps both of them. The text above probably looks normal, but think about the purpose it serves: to reinforce that Daniil is friendly with the Kains. Your only two options are to say that it doesn’t bother you, or to express that you feel your boundaries are being violated by their attention. But I even thinking about picking that option... Well, it feels mean. 

Throughout the game, people will comment on Maria’s attachment to you and what they feel is your predestination to be romantically paired with her. All this, despite the fact that you don’t really interact with her that much. I’ve seen this be explained as forced heterosexuality, but I think it also is a way of the Kains manipulating Daniil into doing what they want. Daniil gets upset whenever people cry; when children cry, he tries to calm them and fix whatever’s upset them - there’s an entire sidequest after the army arrives in which Daniil kills a group of soldiers, spurred into action by upset children. Whenever he encounters Maria crying, he reacts with discomfort, and she uses these tears and upset to manipulate Daniil into thinking Aglaya has lied to him, effectively distancing him from one of the only people in the game with a rational mind to show him support and tell him the truth. I don’t think the two are in any way unconnected. Something abusers, manipulators, gaslighters love to do is isolate you so that you only have one source of information to go to. If they cut you off from other people, they can continue to feed off of you. You’ll never have a chance to question if what you’re being told about yourself or others is correct, you’ll just be a constant supply of drama for them. 

DANIIL: Was there any particularly notable backstory? I’m deadly tired of all these people. They’re inhuman. They tell the future, believe in walking zombies, and die in all manners of painfully abnormal ways. 

AGLAYA: Your line of thinking is obviously fallacious - and I was implying something rather mundane. I promise you no one can really tell the future around here and neither are deaths inspired by third parties uncommon. Mysterious phenomenons do occur here sometimes... but hardly more often than anywhere else.

You can see, first, the effect all this has had on Daniil, how dispiriting the past several days have been to him. But you can also see here exactly why a family that prides itself on multi-generational reincarnation and manipulation through “fortune-telling” wants to keep its blunt instrument in the dark. 

That is, ultimately, why they are manipulating Daniil. Georgiy knows full well when he tells Daniil at the beginning that everyone, even himself, will lie to Daniil, that being that honest upfront is more likely to lead Daniil to trusting him. They want to sway him to their cause; this is why you are told that your success here depends on the wellbeing of the people Maria considers useful: herself, her father and uncle - who she gets out of the way later on to come into her power, the architects of the Polyhedron - which she will use to ascend to power, and the theatre director who has pledged himself to be her loyal servant. Eva’s on the list, too, but her inclusion was deliberately set up to make you depend on the Kains later in the game, considering that it’s Maria who convinced her to commit suicide:

DANIIL: Why did Eva die then? AGLAYA: I have a distinct suspicion she was made to die. DANIIL: By whom?  AGLAYA: One of the Kains. I’d even go so far as to claim that they may have performed human sacrifice.

It’s a two-for-one deal: try in vain to make a Focus of the Cathedral, and remove from Daniil the last piece of influence who was not totally in love with Maria. Maria “cries” and is “upset” at you for thinking Eva’s death is her fault, but no one directly tells you Maria is responsible - all Aglaya does is tell you the Kains are at fault. The rest is just you remembering how nasty Maria was about Eva at the beginning of the game. I wouldn’t even say that Maria was removing a rival for Daniil’s affection. She really does only view Daniil as an object: if you speak to her on day 12, she assumes that you’re leaving, and doesn’t even ask you to stay (for kicks, contrast this with either ending of Pathologic 2 when you speak to Daniil as Artemy, where he’s supposed to be your rival. what was all that about Maria being in love with you...?); he’s not even present in his own ending cutscene. Even Mark Immortell says you’re leaving -

And actually, that’s a really fascinating conversation you can have with him on day 12. It’s where the game outright admits exactly what Aglaya told you: it’s all fake. Maria cannot really see the future, you’ve just been manipulated the entire game to achieve someone else’s goals, and unless you’ve gone around and saved Artemy’s or Clara’s bound, it’s too late for you to turn back and make a different decision. If you’ve picked Daniil’s ending, you just destroyed an entire town on the basis of outright lies. 

[amidst-thestcrs]

TAGGED BY: Someone tagged her in this on Summer’s old blog  TAGGING: @feralspace-bitch​, @fightan0therday​, @tr0ubled-s0uls​, @starrys0nder​, @implausiblynaive​, @defactomatriarch​, and anyone else interested!! 

layer one : the outside

Name -  Summer Elise Smith  Eye colour -  Light Brown almost akin to honey, but can sometimes appear almost golden when in the sunlight! Hair style / colour -  Naturally red hair that stretches down to her midback ish area, her hair is typically worn down and straighten! If not straighten then in just loose waves. Height -  5′6″  Clothing style - I think the best way to describe Summer’s fashion would be summertime casual tbh! She wears a lot of skinny jeans, shorts, and t-shirts. Occasionally she’ll wear tank tops or crop tops if she’s staying on a planet/dimension she feels safe in as well! Always form-fitting clothing with this girl too, I don’t imagine she’d find any sort of baggy cloths really appealing. Summer is also not a huge fan of formal or winter attire either tbh. She hates the cold and purposely moved to a dimension where she wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore, so in all honesty, Summer probably owns one light jacket and dress in her entire closet. Best physical feature - Summer honestly has one of the prettiest smiles! It can light up an entire room, but I also thing it’s pretty hard to earn a genuine smile from her. She usually uses fake or “overly sweet” smiles when dealing with people who annoy her, but when people close with her tend to earn her genuine smile.

layer two : the inside

Fears -  Loss of control/power over herself, appearing weak, men (whether she wants to admit that or not), letting others in/letting her walls down (too many have proven to Summer that it’s best to trust as limited amount of people as possible), and losing the few people she does care about/trust Guilty pleasure - Honestly, coding and hacking 100%. There’s just something so relaxing about programming various electronics to Summer, like for a moment she just shut down her mind and just work/not think (which isn’t something Summer gets to do often so she revels in it when given the chance omg). Once she gets started, she can literally go on for hours, sometimes even a whole day if someone doesn’t stop her.  Biggest pet peeve -  People going through her shit or digging their nose into her business. Summer’s a very private person, so someone deciding to take it upon themselves to put to put their nose where it doesn’t belong is an instant violation of trust and overstepping so many boundaries for Summer!! Ambitions for the future - Just surviving honestly/living to see another day. Ever since Summer was little, it’s always been about making it to tomorrow, just do what you can to get by so you can hopefully wake up to see another sunrise. When she was living with Beth it was always about making sure she had the bare minimum amount of food to live, then when she first got into space it was always about having money so they didn’t freeze to death outside. It’s always been about survival for Summer, and now even though she’s in a much, much better place than before her mind is still set in survival mode. She very much lives with the logic of “Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, so I might as well live each day as if it’s my last”. So honestly her ambition for the future is just living to maybe see it one day rip.

layer three : thoughts

First thoughts upon waking up: Honestly? “Welp, survived another day I guess, time to go make the most of it.” She very much lives life in the moment and spends every day as it’s her last. Summer tries not to think too hard on any responsibilities for the day when she first wakes up cause otherwise it’ll overwhelm her too much. Instead, on mornings like those, she just goes back to sleep for a couple of hours more.  What you think about most:  Her friends, Tammy and Tricia (both @tr0ubled-s0uls​).  I think she worries a lot about them and what they might think. Are they happy? Do they wish they hadn’t come with her and stayed on Earth instead? Would they still have stuck around with her for this long if it hadn’t been for all the shit she’s dragged them into? What would her plan be if the federation was to finally capture the three of them? Do they really like her or is it just a matter of circumstances? That kind of thing. Summer’s a ride or die kind of friend and would do anything for those two, kill or die for them (one of which she’s already done). She’s made so many sacrifices for her friends and has taken the wrap for them on multiple occasions, and I think the bigger part of Summer will always wonder if it’s enough or too little. Summer won’t say it a lot, but she truly does feel like a sinking ship sometimes, and she feels so horribly for dragging those two down with her, even though they both agreed to it entirely. If it wasn’t for them having a criminal record too because of Summer, I don’t think she’d feel so bad but that alone causes her a lot of guilt that she keeps under lock and key. What you think about before bed: I think she plays music a lot to try and quiet her mind of any thoughts or memories that always wanna come up before she goes to sleep-- so if she’d lucky, nothing. Although, if she’s not lucky, I imagine she thinks a lot on the past and she absolutely hates that. She’ll play music as loud as she can to quiet her mind before going to be if possible, if not possible, then it’s time to have a couple of drinks omg. Or if worst comes to worst, time to get up and try sleeping tomorrow night instead! What your best quality is: I know how it’s going to sound, but honestly her open-minded and accepting nature. Summer may not seem like it at first to strangers, but she actually quite understanding once you pick at all her tough layers. There’s a soft side in there somewhere, but not many people see it!! But those willing to work for it and dig hard enough that Summer deems worthy enough get to see that side of her.

layer four : what’s better ?

Single or group dates - Single - She loves her friends, but on the rare times Summer does actually go on a date, she prefers her and the other person are alone together so then she can get to know them a little bit better where as she’d be more distracted and withdrawn in a group date with some other people she may not know. To be loved or respected - Respected - Summer hasn’t seen any good side effects of being loved just yet, she’s only seen negativity come out of love so she’d much rather gain someone’s respect than love any day. Besides, in her opinion, at least she can do something useful with respect rather than love. Maybe one day she might prefer to be loved, but not until she can actually see some positivity come out of it. Beauty or brains - Brains - Summer cannot stand when someone looks so pretty but has absolutely nothing going on upstairs. She wants to be able to hold a conversation with someone that lasts more than a few sentences. Dogs or cats -  Dogs - In truth, she used to be neither, but ever since she got her boys, she’s been a dog person at heart. 

layer five : do you…

Lie - Absolutely. Summer is an amazing liar, she’s been doing it all her life to get by, one of the many skills she’s adapted along the way in order to survive. I don’t imagine she lies to those she cares about and trusts, but everyone else is fair game. Believe in yourself - For the most part, yes. I think Summer does have some days where she feels like she can’t do it anymore, but she lives by the philosophy, “I can do this, and even if I can’t, I have to.” so even if she doesn’t necessarily believe in her abilities one day she basically fakes it till she makes it. Although, Summer knows she’s smart and that she can do anything she puts her mind to so she puts a lot of faith in herself. After all, in her mind, yourself is the only person you can truly rely on so. Believe in love - No. I think Summer has been through a lot of heartache in the short time she’s been alive and that’s really jaded her a lot, to not only love but possible friendships as well. Not only just that, but I feel like Beth has literally told her from a young age that love isn’t real and to never “love” other people too much, which for the most part Summer takes anything Beth says with a grain of salt, but that’s one of the few things that stuck (mainly because Summer witnessed the effects that “love” had on Beth firsthand). However, that being said, I do feel like it would have to take a very special person (*cough cough* @fightan0therday​ 👀) that could possibly change her mind in the future omg. Want someone -  See now this is a complicated one cause I do truly that deep down a part of her does think it would be nice to have a special someone in her life, but again she just really feels like it’s all just one fairytale dream that will never happen so why even bother entertaining the thought? You could never catch her admitting that though! If you were to ask her, she would tell you no so fucking fast, it’s unreal omg. But again, there might be a special someone she’ll consider down the road ( *glances at @fightan0therday​ ) omg!!

layer six : ever been …

Been on stage: Oh gosh, I can’t think of a particular incident off hand, but I’m sure she has. Summer is not shy in the slightest so she and her friends would always get into trouble in high school, one of which being the time that she and Tammy ( @tr0ubled-s0uls​ ) pretended to be interested in cheerleading in high school just so they could do a not so school-friendly cheer routine in front of at least 20+ people. So if you count that, plus dancing on tabletops at bars among something else stupid she’s done I’m sure there’s been at least one time in her life! Done drugs:  Yes, but not so much anymore at all really. I feel like Summer has had one too many close calls while under the influence of drugs before when she used to dabble in them, so now she’d just rather not. She might occasionally smoke a joint with her friends on rare occasions, but only at a safe location with people she trusts. Other than that, she usually doesn’t because she doesn’t like not having control over herself or leaving herself vulnerable for others to do something to her. The same applies to drinking as well, she’d rather be the designated driver any day! Changed who you were to fit in: No. Summer changed because growing up at an early age was unfortunately vital to her survival, but she has never and will never change who she is a person for anyone just to “fit in”. Summer has always considered herself top dog, so why would she want to be some silly little “popular” girl?

layer seven : favorites

Favourite color -  I think it’s called peach? It’s that pale pink and orange mixture. Favourite animal - Dogs, or more specifically her Dobermans. She appreciates their undying loyalty to her. Favourite movie - Any horror movie, they’re always a good laugh for her and her friends! Favourite game - Summer used to play a little bit of softball in high school, but I’m not sure she’d say that was her favorite. Tbh I’m not sure!! Maybe trivia cause she’s really smart and it gives her a chance to show that off omg.

layer eight : age

Day your next birthday will be -   July 23rd How old will you be -  22 (Summer is always 22, I don’t typically age up my characters anymore.) Age you lost your virginity - Fifteen. It was some senior bad boy in high school that all the girls wanted and Summer had a crush on. He showed just a tad bit of interest in Summer, even going as far as flirting with her in the halls so she went for it, and then he wanted nothing to do with her after the fact. It’s still something she regrets to this day, usually just lies about her answer if anyone ever asks her this question. Or just gets defensive and changes the topic. Does age matter -  Depends on the situation. In dating, absolutely, Summer isn’t really interested in people way older than her. As far as someone telling her she’s too old/young to do something then no, cause Summer does what she wants regardless of anyone or anything.

layer nine : in a person

Best personality - Confident, intelligent, understanding, carefree, someone who won’t tuck their tail and run the second they start to learn about her past, self assured (that might not be the right word I’m looking for, but Summer doesn’t want someone who doesn’t have their own opinions/feelings and only follows along with what she says all the time) Best eye colour - I could see her being a sucker for brown or hazel eyes tbh Best hair colour - Darker hues tbh Best thing to do with a partner - Just be her true and honest self. Summer always has a front up to protect herself from others, so just having someone who she can wholeheartedly trust to put those walls down would be such a weight off her shoulders, whether she realizes that or not just yet.

layer ten : finish the sentence

I love - “my friends more than either of them will ever know. We’ve been through hell together and I’d do again if I had to.”  I feel - “like the multiverse is shit anyways and nothing matters in the end, so you might as well live life to the fullest and do what you wanna do.”  I hide - “everything... People only disappoint you, you can’t trust anyone really. I tried trusting more than two people before and it royally screwed me over, it’s a mistake I’ll never make again...”  I miss - “when things used to be simpler and it wasn’t always about running.”  I wish - “…I didn’t have to grow up being constantly reminded of how much of a mistake I was...”

[charlie-leau]

The Predator review - Chapter 10

Here’s my tenth review of The Predator by my dear friend @runyxwrites​! It’s still a mix of my reactions and thoughts, it’s still a mess, but it’s still hopefully funny and full of gifs (which do not belong to me, so credits to all the amazing gif makers out there, you’re life savers).

Happy reading.

Chapter 10 - Silencing

=> Okay so judging by where we left things off in chapter 9, I except the tension in chapter 10 to skyrocket! And if chapter 8 changed things emotionally for Tristan and Morana (because you know, they opened up their hearts a little), this one will definitely change things, well, uh, physically. Yay to that!

(Also, I can already tell this is going to be a tough one to review. Hence why I procrastinated yesterday. Ugh.)

 PART 1 – Morana.

 Let’s recap first, shall we?

My baby Morana is all alone in this world. Her father is a jerk who doesn’t love her. He sees her as his property, as an asset, a pawn he can use to serve his own interests. Her mother abandoned her when she was a little child.

Morana is all alone and she grew up in a dark, dark world.

Yet, she remains good. She is light in the darkness. She longs for belonging, she longs for freedom, but most of all, she longs for someone to see her, actually see her. Not just her body, but all of her. Her mind and her heart too. She longs for a connection to someone. But most of all, she wants to mean something to someone (hello Yennefer of Vengerberg vibes). She wants someone to love her, someone who will accept all the love she has to offer.

Morana feels intensely, deeply.

Problem is, Morana has grown up in a dark, dark world, where she isn’t allowed to feel anything, much less show it, otherwise she will die. She has been raised around sharks thirsty for the blood of her (shouldn’t that make them vampires, then?). She is crippled in a way, disconnected from her own emotions. Her light is dimmed and she doesn’t feel alive. Just cold and alone.

That is until she meets Tristan Caine.

Oh, the line between love and hatred has never been thinner than with these two.

Morana hates Tristan with a burning passion and so does he. And, coincidentally, it is what makes them so good for one another. Because, even though it is in a somewhat very unhealthy way, they make each other feel something. They make each other alive.

I think there is a reason why, all jokes aside, the way they stare at each other is so important. The way Tristan stares at her (because he is not so good at communicating, sadly) is important, because he is the one who actually sees her and understands her.

And that profoundly disturbs Morana.

In chapter 9, she’s caught in a swirl of emotions. That rainy night with Tristan has sent her mind reeling. I noticed, in my original review of The Predator (when it was still a ff) that they managed to connect at night, in the darkness, but when light came, it all faded away. Except, it did not fade away. Morana is acutely aware of that and it disturbs her. She’s conflicted because she has sworn to hate Tristan, has sworn to kill him, yet she can’t help but think about him. As much as she wants to detach herself from him, she’s unable to let go.

But Morana isn’t just caught in a whirlwind because of Tristan. She’s caught in a whirlwind because her father has decided to humiliate her, because a man has violated her boundaries and because Tristan, of all people, was the one who notices and does something about it. And what does he do, you will ask me? He dares her to do something, knowing full well she’ll rise to the bait. In that way, he helps.

It is also the last straw for Morana. She gets up and leaves and Tristan finds her in the bathroom where she is emotionally unstable. She has been feeling so much for so long, and has never been given the opportunity to let any of the things she feels out. Tristan coming in after her is like adding fuel to the fire burning inside her. And for a second, things clear in her mind and she is capable of making a rational decision. She can’t get back at her father directly, but she will by fucking the enemy. Plus, she will be able to exorcize all the mixed feelings Tristan has put inside her.

It will be her catharsis.

 Part 2 – Tristan.

 Let’s be honest, Tristan is a much tougher nut to crack.

In chapter 8 & 9, much to everyone’s surprise, he opens up. First, he refuses to let Morana sleeps at Dante’s, then, he tells her about his sister (whom I assume we’ll hear more of later) and finally, he fixes Morana’s car (and through that, he fixes a piece of her too). That’s a lot in a very short span of time, even more so for a man as secretive as him.

But, what does all of this tell us?

First, he has claimed Morana’s life as much as he has her death. Second, there are chinks in his armor. And third, he does have a heart.

Except, he doesn’t want us and most of all, he doesn’t want Morana, to see it. So, when Amara gives our girl her keys back, what does he do? He looks away.

Here’s what I had to say about that a couple years ago:

“There are a lot of things left unsaid between them, the most obvious one being the reason why Tristan hates her so much. So, how do they talk without actually talking?

Easy.

They stare. They glance. They gaze. They look. Their eyes say more than their mouths. And their eyes don’t lie. Because the emotions they convey are raw, primal and true. So, so true. Their entire dynamic, relationship is built on honesty. It’s a strong foundation, they’ll need that later. I really think that having Tristan look away from her when she gets the thing she loves most back, thanks to him, is not random. It also means a lot. He’s hiding something. The weaknesses in his armor, perhaps? Because honestly, at this point, it’s safe to assume that there is something wrong with his hatred. Does he really hate her? Are his feelings toward her changing?”

This means that, much like Morana, Tristan hasn’t been able to shake off the feelings that rainy night stirred inside him. And just he hasn’t been able to shake off his feelings, he is unable to take his eyes off her at dinner.

I’m convinced that, as much as Tristan disturbs Morana, she disturbs him even more. She never reacts the way he expects her to. He goes out of his way to intimidate her. He tells her he hates her, he tells her he’ll kill her. She never backs down. She may not win all their staring contests, and God knows how many of them there have been, but she doesn’t submit to him in any way. She stands her ground against him, even pushes back. He’s warned her off him, told her not to invade his territory, yet, she still finds ways to etch herself deeper into him, into his skin and into his heart.

And he both loathes and loves it equally.

That leads us to him opening up even more, in a much, much, cruder way and to him admitting to Morana that he wants her.

That brings us to chapter and the sex.

Part 3 – Tristan and Morana.

 This sex scene is a perfect summary of their relationship so far. There’s some push and pull. Tristan is his usual blunt self and Morana isn’t having any of it. She almost runs away from him. Morana is always running away from him (remember when she asked to work with Dante instead of him) and he always chases after her, Predator that he is.

But above all, this sex scene is a fight, against each other and against themselves (I will not write down the lexical field of fighting but just so you know, I could. There are plenty instances).

They hate each other, but I think they hate themselves more for wanting each other so. But, why do they want each other so terribly? Where does this all-consuming need come from?

Well, as I’ve been saying, they make each other feel alive. In that dark, gloomy, bloody world of theirs, where neither is allowed to express feelings and emotions, they come alive in their hatred for each other. Together, they’re not so alone anymore (though I’d argue Morana is lonelier than Tristan. He has Dante, she has no one. Literally.) And that is also why they hate each other so, because they’ve found something real with the enemy, with someone that is forbidden.

Morana, in that scene, is desperate to feel something. She is also taking over control of her body again. Her father tried to strip her of that power she holds over herself by letting one of his men grope her. She’s reclaiming that power hard, by letting none other than the enemy fuck her on a granite counter. Morana, who has been used and stared at and preyed on, is finally getting some back. That body people want to own belongs solely to her once more, as it should be. I’d argue this scene is all about her, her pleasure, her power over herself and over Tristan.

Because, try as he might, Tristan is not entirely in control. If you do not believe me, think for one second. The guy followed the daughter of his enemy to the bathroom, fucked her hard and well on the counter, and was almost caught doing so. For all that he holds her neck in a very dominating way, for all that he muffles her, he is the one who has lost it. If they’d been caught… he would have died and probably so would she. And he doesn’t give a fuck about that. Make of that what you wish.

Moreover, Tristan, in that scene, avoids Morana’s gaze. They say eyes are the windows to our souls and it’s even truer in his case. He looks away from because he’s afraid of what she’ll see in his eyes, what she might find out about him. Also, he’s probably a little afraid of what he might see in her eyes too. They are so close, yet so far apart, it makes me a little sad.

What happens after all that?

They hate each other and themselves more. And they’re not satisfied. Why?

Because even though their bodies have been satisfied, even though their bodies are spent, their hearts and minds aren’t. They haven’t fully given in to whatever it is that burns between them. They haven’t touched, haven’t kissed. They haven’t looked the other in the eyes. Until they do, I fear they will never be satisfied.

Here’s another quote of myself (I swear I’m not a narcissist) to shed some more light on this matter:

“They’re not out of each other’s system because they didn’t have sex. He just thrust into her until they both orgasmed. This is not sex. This is… I don’t know how to call it but it’s not sex.

They denied each other what they both wanted, what their bodies were craving: touch, intimacy. They listened to their minds and kept walls of concrete so thick even Hulk wouldn’t be able to destroy them.”

They both wanted more, but neither allowed themselves to take it. Neither wants to be the first to break, to give in. But one of them has to break. One of them has to take that first step.

 Part 4 – The aftermath

 My girl Morana, strong as ever, braces herself before she walks out of the bathroom, ready to be used and humiliated again.

“Break his arm next time.” Tristan tells her and this is yet again an underrated quote of his. Because this shows, he cares. He would never force himself upon a woman and he cannot stand those who do, especially when they force themselves upon the woman who has, much to his surprise, managed to get under his skin.

But Morana doesn’t see that he cares. She’s ashamed and hurt and angry. So she lashes out at him. And he lashes back.

“Once was more than enough.”

The blow lands where it’s supposed to. But it’s only that, a blow. Because Tristan, who has always been honest, texts Morana again.

“How many notches does that bedpost have?”

I wouldn’t go as far as calling him jealous, but he’s definitely checking the waters. And I bet he wants his notch on her bedpost to destroy all the others.

“Apparently, you’re not out of my system.”

Of course, Morana isn’t out of his system. He is not out of hers either. But for now, she doesn’t have time to linger on any of this. Her father knows something is up and sadly, here ends this review.

[zenosanalytic]

Great Beasts of Legend: Centaurs, Sirens and Chimaera: The Greeks and th...

I know I’ve posted this lecture by Dr. Jeremy McInerney before, but I was watching it again(third time; really love this one uwu) and at 41:55 he starts a discussion of a boundaries-based reading of Centaurs(good target for that given the melding/muddying of boundary btw animal and man Centaurs represent[1]), beginning with the Herakles, Deianira, Nessos Myth that I feel he doesn’t quite hit though he makes/brings up other great points and it made me want to write a short little thing about why this myth, specifically, is really open to such a reading:

Ok so the basic outline: Herakles and Deianira are traveling, they come to the river Evinos where Nessos[2], the Centaur, is selling his services as a living ferry(ppl sit on him and he carries them across). Herakles, of course, decides to swim across and pays Nessos to carry Deianira across. While doing so, Nessos attempts to rape her, Deianira calls for help, and Herakles whips out his bow and arrows dipped in Hydra’s blood, and shoots Nessos dead. As he dies but before Herakles reaches them, Nessos tells Deianira to take a vial of his blood(sometimes blood mixed with his semen). The story splits interestingly here, so remember this point for later. Years down the road, Herakles is off in some part of Greece partying in celebration of yet another city he’s plundered, and he sends a train of new slaves taken from said city-plundering back home, along with a messenger with an off-hand request to Deianira that she send his favorite cloak along cuz he plans to keep partying for quite a long while. This is another point of ambiguity in the story and its retellings so remember it, too. She steeps his cloak in water mixed with the vial of Nessos’s blood, sends it along and, while the poison doesnt kill Herakles cuz he’s part god and Hydra’s poisonous blood isn’t powerful enough to do that, it DOES cause him such enormous, unending pain that he builds his own funeral pyre and burns himself alive, apotheosizing into a god in the process.

So, regarding Boundaries:

Nessos, obvsl, is a physical manifestation of the close and ever-present boundary between humans and beasts; btw self-control and indulgence; btw “civilized” behavior and “uncivilized”, as discussed above, and particularly of the threat of rape Greek men present to Greek women.

This story involves a River, a physical boundary

Rivers are ALSO what separate the world of the living from the world of the dead to the Greeks, and this is a story ABOUT TWO DEATHS, both tied directly TO a River(one taking place in it, during the act of crossing it; the other a long-term effect of that event[but also Herakles’s hubris, though most versions, being written for men, don’t emphasize that totally obvs aspect of it]).

Not only that, it’s LITERALLY the story of Herakles’s apotheosis: of how he comes to finally transcend the boundary between God and Mortal which he has straddled his whole life.

Herakles is celebrating the sack of a city, ie, his violation&destruction of the Boundaries defining said city, when he dies. Greek cities are often protected by female divinities(Athena usually), so it’s yet another symbol of rape.

So Split 1: In most versions, the reason Nessos gives for why she should take his blood is that it is a powerful love potion that will ensure Herakles remains faithful to her if his eye ever strays. BUT, also in most versions, this is a lie and he’s secretly trying to poison Herakles, though how would he know Herakles’ arrows are poisoned with Hydra-blood? I remember reading a version where he presents it to her AS POISON, explaining about the Hydra, but I cant find any mention of it online, so maybe my brain’s just making it up(or maybe this was the Hercules TV Show version X|).

Split 2: BUT BUT, while in most version Deianira sends the cloak out of desperation to keep him faithful(and of course there’s a particular slave girl in the train she’s warned about just so all of this can be EXTRA the fault of women, rather than Herakles for being a giant asshole like he always is), in other versions she sends it OUT OF VENGEANCE, TO FUCK HIM UP because Herakles is being a giant asshole, wrecking up Greece, partying as much as he likes, flaunting his rapes and his victims in her face(this is VERY RELEVANT given the nature of other versions of this story), and leaving her to run his household alone while ordering her around like she’s a slave rather than his Wife.

These are mutually exclusive: she cannot be both seeking to punish him, and trying, in anguished desperation, to keep him faithful to her[3].

Herakles in this story, as is ALWAYS THE CASE IN ALL HIS STORIES, is flaunting the boundaries of Proper Behavior, in this case those defining a happy and successful marriage(IE Hera’s Domain; which you’d THINK would be kind of relevant, given the deep narrative connection between Hera and Herakles and her quickness to anger regarding marriage violations, yet it somehow perennially goes unmentioned), and getting punished for it.

Now here’s an ADDED kicker. There’s a version of this story were Herakles initiates the conflict. one day he visits the house of Deianira’s father, Dexamenus, and while a guest, rapes her. Dexamenus can’t fight Herakles, of course, but he demands by the gods and tradition that Herakles marry Deianira to “repair” the injury(WE LIVE IN HELL!), and Herakles agrees. After he leaves to prepare for the wedding, a local Centaur, Eurytion(name meaning “Widely Honored”) visits Dexamenus and proposes to marry Deianira himeself(you know: without the whole BEING HER RAPIST thing), and Dexamenus complies. Herakles arrives a few days later, kills Eurytion, and sees that their marriage is carried out. Presumably in this version, the blood poisoning the cloak would be Eurytion’s.

What I’ve tried to get across here is that, among other things, there are readings of this myth were Herakles is the bad guy and Deianira the agent of divine punishment, if not the actual Protagonist. And those readings suggest certain ideas we would be prone to consider “modern” about the agency of women, consent, personal and social boundaries, morality, Greek ~Heroic Masculinity~, and yes even Centaurs, might not have been so alien and “anachronistic” to the ancient Greek mind as we tend to think.

But anyway, even if you think that particular part of my little argument here is total Bunk, I hope I’ve managed to get across that Deianira and the Cloak is a myth Absolutely LOUSY with the theme of Boundaries, what they mean, what it means to Cross them, and the Consequences for which you Cross, when, how, and plain just choosing to cross them in the first place. It’s a really great example for him to suggest for this particular topic, and it really inspired me quite a lot today, and I just wish there was a lecture online where he developed it further uwu

[1]And not only that, but of course owning horses was a common sign of aristocratic status, and trading horses a common aristocratic activity(this is one way you know Hesiod’s claims of poverty are a put-on; his family breeds and sells horses). I feel like it’s pretty well understood that Centaurs are in someway a commentary and meditation upon the nature of Greek masculinity, on the capacity for violent cruelty and wanton appetite Greeks inculcated men into beside all the talk of civilized society, but I also feel it’s less well understood how open they also are to a similar reading regarding the appetites and barbaric capacities specifically of the upper classes of Greek society.

[2]In some versions Nessos and Herakles actually have a history, and the whole incident is Nessos’s attempt at vengeance. There is another story, where Herakles visits a centaur who is his friend named Pholos, and a gang of nearby Centaurs(I like to think they were Rowdy Teens myself u_u) smell the wine they’re drinking and crash the party to share some. Herakles, being Herakles, of course immediately begins killing them for the perceived insult, which inevitably leads NOT ONLY to Pholos dying(cuz Herakles isn’t careful and shoots him too, or in other vers bcuz he refuses to so much as retrieve his arrows from the bodies due to concerns with “pollution” from the corpses, and Pholos cuts himself on one of the arrows), but ALSO the poisoning, and eventual death, of Chiron, who was one of Pholos’s neighbors and who Herakles accidentally knicked while wildly chasing down and shooting the interlopers. Nessos is one of these Centaur teens, and the only centaur in the whole situation to survive (:T

[3]Which, btw, the whole “faithful” thing doesnt make much sense(even though it pops up regularly in Greek Myth), because her “competitor” in these versions is a slave. These next sentences are going to be gross and awful, but in the society which told these stories male slave-owners already had unrestricted sexual access to their slaves and, beyond that, I’ve never read a single example in Greek or Roman sources of a slave being legitimized and married as a wife(which doesnt mean such examples dont exist; I’m an amateur). So the idea that a slave could threaten Deianira’s position as Herakles’s wife seems very dubious to me(as does the general trope of slave women as threats to wives in Greek stories). Again: this is all super-awful, but it’s something complicating the traditional presentation of the myth, which is rarely addressed because most academics writing for a general audience are super-loath to deal with classical slavery as the awful, body and soul crushing institution which it was.

[gotgifsandmusings]

(Part 1 of 3) So I was discussing with some show-watchers on Twitter about Tyrion being an asshole in the books and the showrunners making everything they can to turn him into a Nice Guy™. One of the things I mentioned was him raping a sex-slave in A Dance with Dragons. A book reader retweeted this with a comment saying he also has raped Shae in A Clash of Kings. I couldn't remember this AT ALL, I literally Googled this to see if could find some thread discussing this. Nothing. I asked her the +

(Part 2 of 3) + context of the scene and she said it was when he went where Shae was hiding and there she was sleeping naked. That turned him on and he penetrated her and only woke up after he came. Once again, didn’t remember this happening, I had to read each of Tyrion’s chapters summary and then look it up on the book. Surprisingly, it happened indeed, but the way it’s written it didn’t seem like it was rape, especially because she got wet and moaned. Isn’t this… problematic? Am I reaching?

(Part 3 of 3) Because to me, it should’ve been considered as rape but literally no one else has said anything about this. Did you notice this as well?

There’s…a whole lot to unpack in this question. 

For one, I think we need to set aside the arguments of if someone “seems into it”, then it can’t be rape. It’s a dangerous mentality, it only focuses on “well are they going to enjoy themselves?” rather than them actually giving consent, there’s no one way anyone looks during a sexual act they did not want to occur, and it’s actually a big factor in why men raped by women are rarely taken seriously, since an erection “disproves” the lack of consent, or something like that. 

(We’re also going to set aside Tyrion’s POV bias in how the event is described.)

This particular situation is I think a good deal more complicated than say, the question of if someone can wake up their sexual or romantic partner with a sex act. In my book, that’s something that obviously needs to be discussed ahead of time. Even there, it’s heavily context dependent, and there’s certain acts where I know I’d have a discomfort no matter what. I’m definitely not the arbiter of sexual consent for everyone, of course. So the best we can say is, “have conversations with your partners about what your boundaries are.” If a partner violates a boundary they were unaware of, it can really vary how anyone would react or feel about it and how that would unfold, and what the nature of that boundary is.

Basically, some people might view something as assault that another person would view as like...a conversation to have. If a partner violates a boundary that had been communicated, then that’s obviously assault, however.

To be clear, I’m not trying to argue there’s “shades of rape” or any shit. I’m saying there is not one conception of consent we all walk around with, and we’re going to react differently and feel differently about certain sexual situations. As long as we all agree to respect each other’s consent, and defend each other if there’s a feeling of violation in that regard, then that’s what’s important. 

Okay, back to this scene: did Tyrion and Shae have a conversation about this first? I’m guessing not. And yeah, it’s made more complicated that she is a sex worker he’s contracting. There’s a power imbalance between them, and part of her services kind of involve this “girlfriend” experience. Does she seem “into” it? Well, it’s her damn job, and clearly we find out later that that’s the only extent of it for her. Could we have a missed an off-screen discussion between the two? No, they only exist on the page. So is it fair to point out there wasn’t consent here? Of course.

But alright, then Tyrion and Shae aren’t real. So when we’re talking about the rape of fictional characters in this setting (and in my book, I don’t see either of them viewing this as rape in a Watsonian sense), so what are we gaining from this conversation? Are we asking: is “does Tyrion have troubling views on consent and an entitlement with women where he ignores their agency and desires?” Cause uh, yeah, obviously. Dude married a 12-year-old political prisoner and then got frustrated that she wouldn’t be emotionally intimate with him. And yes, he rapes a slave very much knowing it’s wrong and rape in A Dance with Dragons.

Is Tyrion nicer than a lot of men in Westeros? Sure. That’s maybe more of a reflection of the setting, then, isn’t it.

So of the question “is this problematic?” Yes, most definitely. Martin didn’t write Tyrion and Shae’s relationship to be an example of positive, healthy consent among adults. Tyrion ultimately kills her because he gets the feedback that yeah, she was a sex worker doing her job who goes on to publicly embarrass him (in a situation where she basically had no recourse anyway). 

I think it is also valid to ask, “is this problematic in a way Martin didn’t see or intend?” Certainly the intention of this scene was to paint Tyrion as very earnestly into this relationship, and pretty much buying into the belief that it was reciprocal (though he does challenge himself internally on this a few times). Was it explicitly to paint Tyrion as indifferent to Shae’s bodily autonomy? I’m definitely doubtful. And frankly, this is reminding me exactly of the Cersei/Jaime sept scene where like...ya, it’s rape, though when the show made a choice where it was basically a complete attack that couldn't be viewed in any other light, Martin went on record saying that he meant for it to be a disturbing scene, but not in the way viewers were disturbed (aka, by the rape). 

I guess summarizing thoughts: this is not a thing you should do to a partner unless you’ve talked about it first, I don’t think Martin really thought through that aspect, in-verse characters certainly wouldn’t think twice about this because Westeros is such a fucked up place (though they’re not real unlike us, the readers, so not sure how helpful that values dissonance even is), and at the end of the day, I don’t think this really changes anything about Tyrion’s character, arc, behavior, or narrative function.

[wellward-a]

i reread the essay i started on lilith + abjection and it’s... actually not awful? but i have no confidence in myself to actually finish it so instead i’m gonna just bullet point the whole thing and maybe finish the actual paragraphs at some point 12 months in the future ok here we go

“abjection” is defined by julia kristeva in powers of horror as that which reminds us of our body’s debt to nature

the abject is not some thing, an ob-ject, which defines the bounded individual; it is that which threatens those very boundaries and suggests the dissolution of our conscious, thinking self into material nothing

obvious example: the decaying corpse. senseless matter, a place where a soul is not.

other sources of abjection: menstrual blood, excrement, sweat, saliva, other cast-offs of the human body.

crossing of boundaries is essential to the abject: bodily boundaries, social boundaries

the (cis) female body in particular is suggested by kristeva to be more inclined to abjection bc of its maternal qualities, which are ceaseless reminders of the body’s natural debt

lilith may seem like an odd choice to identify w abjection because she’s not visually abject e.g. she doesn’t bust out in boils like jesse putnam; in fact she’s extremely groomed, polished, and feminine. however i argue that the show gives us glimpses of lilith as abjected and possessing a foul and unbounded underside to the seemingly restricted image she presents

examples of lilith’s abject qualities:

her sexuality.

she is the only subtextual lesbian on the show. despite her apparent sexual tie to satan she has no interest in men whatsoever and is constantly disgusted and repelled by them

with women however she is vampy and flirtatious and sweetly manipulative even when it makes no difference to her ultimate purposes e.g. when she flirts with mrs. meeks

lesbian sexuality is unquestionably abject.

it is transgressive

it violates gender norms

it threatens the dissolution of patriarchal order

her bizarre maternity.

she is “mother of demons” meaning apparently every demon.

her children range from the humanlike but deformed batibat to the fat, sticky, razor-toothed leech apophis.

maternity is already, for its physical qualities, abjected. but the suggestion that a human being (one of the original human beings, in fact) could give birth to such a bizarre range of creatures hints at a range of repulsive pregnancies and births.

moreover she shows no maternal feeling toward her children. she does not humanize her relation to her monstrous offspring, thereby rehabilitating what is potentially abjected; she leaves it bizarre and disgusting.

her magical practices.

lilith uses poppets and other physical objects to engage in magical ritual.

other characters are shown making poppets and using them in magic, but only lilith makes poppets out of the physical leavings of her victims’ bodies: hair from a hairbrush, nail clippings, etc.

moreover, lilith uses spittle (another cast-off of the physical body) to enact her scrying spell on sabrina’s mirror.

the fact that lilith physically handles and plays with abjected material substances, what would be considered “dirty” or “gross” to touch, in order to enact her power over other ppl suggests her immersion in the abject and her use of the abjected as her natural element.

her cannibalism.

lilith doesn’t just reduce living beings to the abjected corpse. she literally ingests the abjected corpse

although other characters on the show do practice cannibalism, the major act of such is one of frenzied ritual (see “feast of feasts”) and it is narratively framed as repulsive and abhorrent.

lilith, by contrast to the ritualized cannibalism of the coven, regularly cannibalizes men as her source of actual sustenance, and targets both the innocent and not-so-innocent without regard for their personhood

her evident pleasure in this disgusting act links as well with patriarchal revulsion and distaste for female appetite, which is always seen as too excessive when expressed in any form; thus lilith embodies both the physically abject dimension of this act (the acutal cannibalism itself) and the more abstractly abjected fact of women’s unspoken and suppressed bodily hungers

all of these factors ultimately combine with the events of the show’s finale to display lilith as profoundly abject.

in the finale, lilith is holding principal hawthorne captive. she has already expressed her disgust and disinterest in him (forming part of her subtextual lesbianism) and is clearly planning to kill and cannibalize him (implied by her earlier suggestion that she would call on hawthorne when she was “in the mood for a real meal”).

just before she murders and devours hawthorne, lilith identifies herself to him as satan’s concubine and the mother of demons, drawing attention once again to her physical being, the penetration and rupturing of which has brought her monstrous spawn into the world.

maintaining eye contact with the camera, lilith begins to peel off her face: to literally remove the polished, feminine facade which she has constructed to hide her fundamentally abject and repulsive self.

beneath is the green-skinned skull-eyed face of a decaying, monstrous corpse.

(p.s. if you’re interested in more Rabbit™ Brand Discourse here’s my prev essay on lilith and materiality)

[ellie-bee242]

“Show Lexi some love” Show us she’s a valid character and not some basic sugar baby.

Nonnie….

Did you even read the whole ass rant I wrote out to that other anon where that “show Lexi some love” quote came from? Cause I think you just ignored it and that seems like a dumb move.

*sighs* but oh well. Guess I’ll just have to show you. Again.

just a warning that there is sensitive materials underneath the read more. be cautious because even if I’m pissed that y’all keep thinking this about Lexi I don’t want you to have a panic attack from the mention of a topic that triggers you.

Chapter One. Lexi is fucking kidnapped and she has moments where she cries but she’s still fucking badass enough to competently lie to some fucking teenagers so that they don’t get murdered with her. Because she definitely could have tried to escape when the elevator opened to them and gone “GET HELP THEY’VE KIDNAPPED ME” But she knew that it would only end in all three of their deaths. And yes. She cried. But she saw a man killed in front of her and that’s all she did. I would have thrown up, I would have sobbed and constantly begged for my life, I would have peed myself out of fucking fear. She saw a man killed in front of her, and then seconds later had men debating whether or not they should rape her before killing her. And then they decide that they’re going to hand her off to their boss, which we now know is Mitch who is not for that at all, but at the time in her mind, she had no idea. She thought they were going to hand her off to some pot bellied middle aged balding man or WORSE. And that he was going to violate her body before murdering her. And she fought them in the beginning and at the penthouse. I would have been a sobbing shaking mess, and I know that because a guy approaches me in a fucking crowded mall to tell me some vulgar compliment and I freeze and smile awkwardly until he leaves. Men are terrifying. And yet Lexi decided she would fucking fight these huge fucking walls of muscle. To at least try. And the second they throw her into the room, she’s looking for a weapon, for a way to defend herself. Badass survival woman.

Chapter Two. Lexi’s life has been threatened, and she’s been warned not to go to the police or leave town. So she smartly doesn’t do those things. She goes about her life like normal, and when the scary ass mob boss comes to her she doesn’t freak out or scream and alert a very crowded establishment that something is wrong because she knows that he would probably just kill everyone there because he clearly doesn’t have a problem with murder. And then the man basically forces her to come within reaching distance because she can’t refuse him otherwise people will know something’s wrong and that raises the same issue as above. So she goes to this man, and accepts the “hush money” so she doesn’t raise red flags. And then she finds out how much money he stuffed in her thong and immediately thinks “oh shit he gave too much I need to find him so he doesn’t come after me for this money”. And then when she goes outside she’s approached by a creepy, possibly drunk, dude who’s getting in her space and hitting on her and instead of having a severely PTSD induced panic attack (considering the last time someone invaded her space they threatened rape and murder) she stands the fuck up for herself and doesn’t let this man intimidate her. She physically incapacitates him until he promises to leave her alone. Badass.

Chapter Three. The man who could murder her at the drop of a hat gets her alone in a room and instead of refusing, which she technically could refuse him service, she braves it and goes in and allows him all up in her personal space. Which allows her to find out, “hey he’s not stalking me with the intent to kill me, he’s just interested in me and he’s got a dumb way of trying to show it”. And she completely takes control of the situation once she becomes comfortable with him. She lets him touch her. That’s a huge fucking step from “oh my god you’re going to kill me” to “hey you can touch me if you want to while I grind all up in your lap”. Badass.

Chapter Four. She’s fucking held at knife point for the second time in as many weeks and she doesn’t scream for help, she doesn’t cry. She doesn’t physically fight him because dude has a fucking knife to her throat, that would just be dumb since he just wants her purse. So she easily gives it up. Throws it behind him so he’d be forced to leave her and go retrieve it if he wants it so bad that way she can run the fuck away. And then. Mitch shows up. And kills a man. In front of her. Two times she’s witnessed murders and both are connected to this guy, cause the first was killed on his orders. Maybe she should run for the hills or go to the police but she already knows those are no-go’s because they would end in her death to protect his organization. And dude also just technically saved her life and her money. She lets him walk her home so nothing else bad happens to her. And yes I did say she let’s him. Because she knows she could tell him to leave her alone and he’d do it because he’s respected her boundaries (in twisted ways) so far. But she lets him walk her home, and she realizes he’s hurt and she invites him into her fucking home. DUDE COULD STILL KILL HER AT ANY POINT IF HE DECIDES SHE’S A LIABILITY TO HIS WORK AND SHE INVITES HIM INTO HER APARTMENT KNOWING FULL WELL THEY’RE THE ONLY TWO PEOPLE IN IT WHERE HE COULD KILL HER LIKE HE KILLED THE MUGGER. And she cleans his wounds. She shows care and compassion to this man even though he could very well murder her at any point still and she trusts that he’s being honest when he says that he won’t kill her. Badass and caring and trusting.

Chapter Five. I’ve mentioned chapter five a good deal. Men break into her apartment. Violate her safe space, rob her, violate her body, and when they leave she doesn’t curl up in a helpless little ball and become a mess, she goes and grabs a knife so that if they come back before Mitch gets there she can properly defend herself. Bad. Ass. And then when she’s at Mitch’s place (the place that terrified her in chapter one) she’s at ease, and she trusts Mitch enough to go to him when she has a nightmare and can’t sleep alone because of it. She has emotions and fears, and she clearly feels scared. And she seeks out comfort because she doesn’t have a problem showing her vulnerability to Mitch now because she trusts him.

Chapter Six/Seven. She is literally cuddling with a scary ass mob boss and talking back to him, and she teased him for not knowing his way around his own kitchen in the previous chapter. And in this chapter she clearly shows discomfort at the thought of Mitch paying for a storage unit to hold the things from her apartment, she tries to refuse the expensive phone that Mitch buys her and she refuses up until the point she finds out that if she does refuse it someone else could be negatively impacted.

Chapter Eight. She is tired of waiting for Mitch to ask her out so she takes charge and asks him, and then she tells him he isn’t allowed to go overboard. And when she tells him that if he goes overboard she’ll feel out of place he offers her money to buy a good outfit and she tries to deny him. She fights with him about it until he wins because Mitch is a stubborn bastard. And you know for a fact that at VS she would have used her own money had Mitch not told Luke to lift her wallet from her purse. (yes, he did that) She wants to be independent but Mitch keeps thwarting her plans. He wants to take care of her and spend money on her. This is all him and his doing, she’s not asking for his money he’s pushing it on her even though she’s shown discomfort with it.

Chapter Nine. I don’t know why I need to talk about this chapter because it’s clear she’s fucking badass, but I am breaking it down chapter by chapter so. SHE HOLDS THE ATTENTION OF AND CAPTIVATES A MAN WHO COULD HAVE LITERALLY ANYONE HE WANTED. SHE’S SO FUCKING CONFIDENT IN HER APPEARANCE CAUSE SHE FUCKING KNOWS SHE LOOKS GOOD. BAD.ASS.MOTHERFUCKER.

Chapter Ten. Same as chapter fucking nine thank you very much.

Chapter Eleven. She decides to go swimming and Mitch asks her to wait so she does, but when he takes too long she decides to go on her own and ends up alone with three other guys at the pool. And instead of shying away, she doesn’t give a single fuck because what is a couple frat boys to what she’s experienced now? And when they approach her she doesn’t want them bothering her so she agrees to sit with them and then proceeds to sass men who could probably hurt her, with no remorse. BADASS DON’T GIVE A FUCK.

Chapter Twelve. She takes good care of her man. End of. Fucking amazing. I wish I was in her position.

Chapter Thirteen. Yes she accepts the fucking shoes but he says he wants to buy them for her. She complains about their price and wanting them but only after he coaxes the truth of why she’s upset out of her. And she doesn’t ASK him to buy them for her. No. He offers. So she decides, what the hell, I want the shoes, he wants to fuck me while I wear the shoes, everyone wins. It’s just one pair. Yes it’s a three hundred dollar pair but she also knows that he won’t take no for an answer, and honestly if she had said no boy would have just taken her computer when she’s not around and gone through her search history until he found and bought them for her anyway. MITCH HAS NO BOUNDARIES LBR.

Chapter Fourteen. SHE. SETS. GROUND RULES. SHE KNOWS SHE CAN ONLY CONTROL HIM SO MUCH IN THE RESPECT OF WHAT HE BUYS HER BUT SHE DEFINITELY ENFORCES THAT CONTROL.

I’m going to summarize the whole “she’s living with him for free” issue since i already went in depth in that other rant. MITCH IS ALREADY PAYING FOR THE BUILDING AND HE PLOTTED HOW TO GET HER THERE BECAUSE HE WANTS HER LIVING WITH HIM SO SHE’S SAFE. IT WAS ALL HIS DOING AND ALL WHAT HE WANTS BECAUSE LEXI WANTED TO CONTINUE TO LIVE IN HER SHITTY UNSAFE APARTMENT. END. OF.

Lexi has always shown displeasure and discomfort in Mitch spending his money on her outside of maybe a date, and she even limited the amount of money he could spend on those.

Now. For the second, much shorter half of my fucking essay. Y’all keep calling her a sugar baby. SO. FUCKING. WHAT. IF. SHE. WAS? She’s not. But so what? THIS IS FICTION. THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO WRITE. IF I WANTED HER TO BE A SUGAR BABY I WOULD FUCKING DO IT. IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT WHY WOULD YOU READ IT?

I FUCKING WISH I HAD A MOB BOSS MITCH TO SPEND HEAPS OF MONEY ON ME SO I DON’T HAVE TO WORRY OR WANT FOR ANYTHING. THAT’S MY FUCKING DREAM AND I’M NOT AFRAID TO ADMIT IT. I WOULD LOVE IT. I WOULD LOVE IF MITCH OFFERED TO PAY MY WAY THROUGH COLLEGE AND BUY ME GIFTS AND TAKE ME ON EXPENSIVE DATES AND BUY ME SHOES AND LINGERIE. I WOULD FUCKING LOVE THAT LIFE.

A life where I not only get to have super hot kinky sex with a beautiful as hell man, but said man WANTS to buy me nice things and have me live with him for free in his hella pretty penthouse? A life where I don’t have to work if I don’t want to cause a super hot man is saying “let me take care of you”? Where the fuck do I sign up?

I don’t understand why people are faulting Lexi for this if that was what she was actually doing (which I keep clearly showing that she’s not but y’all are blind I guess?)

Like the only logical conclusion I can draw for this, why you read the story but tear Lexi down at the same time and try to put her in a category she doesn’t fit in is this: Y’all are jealous of her. I know I am, it’s okay to admit it. It’s okay to admit you want to be in her general position.

But if that’s not the case, and you just hate that Lexi is apparently nothing but a gold digging sugar baby, and you dislike that so much then why are you following this story? If you’re afraid to ask me to remove your tag, just ask me I’ll happily remove it because I’m tired of having people misconstrue my character and critiquing her so harshly.

The fucking truth of it is that Lexi is my character, and as her creator if I say she’s not a sugar baby or a gold digger, then she’s not. End of. You guys might disagree but she’s not yours, you do not know her like I do because I have sculpted this character from scratch and literally no one knows her like I do.

But go off I guess. And by that I mean, go off my fucking story because if you’re going to continue to dispute me and discredit MY CHARACTER then I don’t want your readership.

Thank you for your time.

[everpeasant]

Future Inclinations

His words rang through my head. “What is your biggest regret?” The words bounced around my skull, becoming distorted, contorted, and then he retorted. “Hey, you still there man? It’s been like a minute if you don’t want to tell me that’s fine.” He continued to stare at me as I struggle to spit out my words.

“No, I am out of the house anyway. I should probably open up a bit.” I slowly looked up, meeting his eyes, they are full of energy. I don’t know what it is, but Charles always is full of energy. Drugs? I don’t think so, his eyes aren’t bloodshot. They are crimson red, which is somewhat terrifying, but that isn’t the point. His words would continue to morph “What did you do?”, “Why did you do it?”, then finally into “You want to bring them back don’t you?” Why is a coworker asking questions like that, to me of all people? I was the loner, I didn’t cause trouble, I didn’t even talk to him really. Why was he interested in me, why did he invite me out? Is he just a nice guy trying to build me up, is he gay, does he want to rob me too?

“I had some trouble years ago with some bad men,” I say in a soft voice. “They were convinced that I owed them money, but I paid everything off! I shouldn’t have even taken it in the first place. I shouldn’t have taken the money…” I whisper to Charles, but really to myself.

Charles looks dumbfounded, he signals for the bartender to pour us a shot. “Hey man, I didn’t know I was talking to a walking logline for some b-movie”. We clink our shot glasses together and swig down the bitter gin. “What you need the money for anyway? You a gambler, like the ladies, maybe a senator’s son who lost his inheritance?”

As I finished cleaning out the peanut bowl set in front of me, I glance over for a moment. In the clouded mess that was my mind, I sludged through memories of pain and suffering, of mine, and of… I couldn’t get myself to say their names. “No, nothing like that.” I say weakly, “My wife and I needed to pay for medical bills, for the baby.”

“I didn’t know you had a wife and kid.”

I squint at the shell of a peanut that I was fidgeting with. “You wouldn’t. These bad men ran them off the road a couple of years back. To get to me, to send a message, the only message that I got was that my life was over. A worthless life. To have all of this hope for the future snuffed out in an instant is the most excruciating thing in the world.” I reached into my bag and pulled out a small purple plush octopus, its eyes are teared, and charred, some legs are missing, with a stained dark crimson on the mouth. “This was my daughters. She would bring this octopus everywhere with her, its name was Scylla, like the Kraken, I would always read my daughter Greek Mythology. I found this at the crash site. She was still holding it. My wife was only alive long enough to look me in the eyes, she held our daughter.”

Charles signaled for the bartender to leave the bottle for us. “You blame yourself then? I mean you think it's your fault.”

I turned to him, Charles reaches over the bar and takes two-pint glasses, fills one for him and one he pours and offers to me. I hesitate but take it. “I do. I killed the only two people that mattered to me in this world. I don’t even want to look at myself in the morning.” I take a swig.

“When was this?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“When did the accident happen?”

“May 3rd, 2018,” I say a little standoffish.

Charles gets up and finishes his glass. “Well, I gotta go piss, I’ll be right back.”

I nod to him as he walks away. That amount of alcohol should have killed him. Charles is a weird guy, although he can probably handle his drink, as for me I don’t want to pass out in an alleyway. I poured a little over half of my gin back into the bottle. I never really have had someone to talk to about this. Maybe it would be a good idea to talk to a therapist, I clearly am emotionally distraught about this.

Charles makes his way from the bathroom back to his seat. “Now don’t be mad.”

What would I be mad about? “What do you mean?”

He pulls Scylla out of his pocket, it is in pristine condition, just as my daughter had it. “I stole your daughters’ toy.”

I reach into my bag and the toy is gone. “What did you do? How did you fix it? Why did you-?”

“Nothing like that my friend. I did nothing except step through a wormhole I produced in the bathroom.”

“Is that some type of gross way to talk about you pooping?”

“No. I just…” Charles sighs “I am a time traveler. I literally took this from your daughter. The accident still happened; I just took this from your house the morning of.”

I sit still I feel like I have been violated. “No that’s not possible.”

“Felt that way for a little bit. I forgot to ask where you lived, took me several loops to find the right place. I remembered that you could look up who owns a property through a library database, thank god they have that.”

“But this can't be real, you must have bought a new toy. But why would you do that? Are you trying to fuck with me!” People start to stare at us.

Charles comes closer. “Listen, I am not monstrous enough to do something like that. Also, when would I have the ability to go get this exact toy, along with steal the one that you had?”

“You think that time travel makes more logical sense than getting a new toy and sleight of hand?”

“Well, I was never any good at sleight of hand. I am more used to time travel, so It's not too farfetched for me.”

I stand up and grab his coattails and drag him to the bathroom. He struggles. I kicked open the door and threw him to the ground. “Hey what are you doing!” Charles says rubbing his head.

“What the hell are you talking about?! You're a time traveler? You can go back in time and change things huh? Why are you lying to me, what are you getting out of this!?”

“I can prove it to you. Umm um um um… I can bring any famous person here, to prove it. Would that do it?”

“Anyone huh? Bring me, Socrates.”

“Well… that'd be kind of hard since he doesn’t exist.”

“What do you mean?”

“I feel like you say that a lot. Socrates was made up by Plato, and Plato was made up by Aristotle. Kind of a crazy story that one. Aristotle was trying to hit on this lady, but he was a pretty lowly philosopher. No name for himself, so he made one. He made up this sort of lineage of great philosophers that he descended from. It really is quite interesting.”

“Sure, I believe you. That sounds totally true. Okay, Why don’t you bring me Lincoln?”

“Yeah, sure give me a minute.” He walks into the stall and goes to close the door, I eyeballed him. “What I can’t do it if you are watching.”

The door closed; I rolled my eyes. A large flash blinds me as my hair shoots straight up. Wind circles around the bathroom sending paper towels, and toilet paper careening any which way. Trying to recuperate myself I pat down my hair and call for Charles. I get no response. I peek through the slot in the stall to try to see if he is there, fully expecting to be ridiculed for doing so, yet nothing. No ironic 50s horror movie woman scream, no tirade about personal boundaries, nothing. Charles was gone. The door was still locked. I looked around and saw no window that he could sneak out of. Could this be real? I thought.

That’s when a flash of light emerges, wind resumes its hectic tirade. The chaos dies down leaving me startled again. The stall door opens and out steps Charles in a Sergeant’s uniform followed by a tall man with a tall black top hat. His face is friendly but confused. “Where are we Sergeant Geller? I don’t know how we got in this Lavoratory, but it is dandy!”

I stared dumbfounded at the Former/Current President. Still trying to deny my eyes I ask Charles, “How on earth did you do that? How did you get this actor in here without me noticing?”

“Actor?” replies Lincoln

“Don’t say such things! President Lincoln here hates actors.”

“No, I do not.” Says the president.

“Well maybe you should,” Charles says as he ushers the president back into the stall. “Say goodbye to the President.”

I wave bye to Lincoln, still not fully believing what has happened to me. The light, the wind, it all returns. Charles walks out of the stall rather confidently. “Eh? Eh?” Charles spreads his arms apart. “What’d I tell you? Time fuggin traveler!”

“Was that Lincoln?”

“Honestly, just assume that I’m telling the truth at this point, it is starting to get annoying. Of course, it was Lincoln.”

“I need a second to breathe, this is all too much.”

“Sure thing. Hey while you’re waiting how about you pick if you want to bring your wife, or your daughter back to life.”

“Huh?”

“Who lives who dies, oldest trick and the book, right next to the ol’ stab em and rob em, that one’s, my favorite.”

“I don’t care about any of that! You can bring them back?”

“Only one. I kind of have this project I am working on, and I needed a test group.”

Rage fills my eyes, the next thing I know I am flying through the air, tackling Charles to the ground. “What do you mean only one!? You sick bastard, are you going to make me choose?! This is just some fucking experiment to you!”

“Well yes-” My fist decks Charles in the face. He starts to bleed from his nose a little bit. He tries to move his jaw. “-ow. Listen man my hands are tied, and not because you’re pinning them. The people I work for are having me do this.”

“We work for the same people!”

“You know you can have 2 jobs, right? Clearly not, otherwise, you wouldn’t have needed the mon-”, my punch lands on the other cheek. “-Fine that one was called for. I can’t bring back more than 1 person at a time. Trust me it gets messy if you do more than 1. Just give it some thought. Who do you want back the most?”

I let go of Charles. He looked relieved. Tears began to pour from my eyes. I ran to the stall to have privacy. “Wait not that one!” I slam the stall door and start to bawl. “It was just a joke… relax.”

What the hell is going on? Time travel? That is something that only happens in hacky movies that don’t know how to get out of a situation. But in real life? Oh my god! Do I have to choose? The love of my life? Or my precious daughter? I love Clarisse so much, she was the best woman a man could have asked for. She stood up for herself through any bullshit, even my own. She would make me a better person every day. Her laugh brought light to every room. I could use some light in my life right now. But Iris… my sweet daughter, I needed to protect her, and I failed… She would always wake me up early on the weekends and ask me to play with her, read her the Iliad, or make her favorite Chocolate Blueberry Pancakes. Those moments may have been the happiest of my life, raising my daughter to be the person she would turn into. Would… I sighed. I miss them both so much. I want them both back, but I can’t have that. Dark thoughts entered my mind, it was as if I was a whale, speared, hooks in deep, pulling at the barbs only making it more painful. Clarisse… I want you back. But I know you would never forgive me if I saved you instead of our sweet Iris. She has such a bright future. I hope you will forgive me.

I sit on the toilet, my eyes red, rubbed to the point of blistering. I am unable to cry more. I must accept fate, or reverse fate in this case. Struggling to my feet I push my hands to the side of the stall for support. My hand is placed next to a drawing of Kilroy, along with the quote “‘Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.’ ― H.G. Wells”. I open the door and slowly make my way to Charles. Standing above, I look him in the eyes and say, “Save my daughter, oh please dear god save Iris!” He looks at me, no quirky remark, he only nods. Blood still drips from his nose, covering his shirt. It looks like he used the wrist of his Sergeant’s uniform to clean blood from his face. He enters the stall and the bright flash and wind return. I stand nervously, not knowing how to feel. Was I mad? Was I glad? Panic set its sights upon me as the flash of light returned.