#for the record i do not intend to conflate these two as the same character because they are NOT

[crescentfool]

does anyone else want to stick these two in the same room together or is that just me... i simply think they are adjacent in vibes... (+a bonus thing???)

get u a fictional guy that makes you feel like this... seeing these guys just evoke a Similar Kind of Brain Chemical and Response. Help Me.

also have bonus yosuke doodle featuring the same brushes used here...! from january 23rd, lol.

[gray-gray-gray-gray]

On Distinguishing Voices from Alters

“Hearing voices” is a phenomenon that’s widely recognized to be an auditory hallucination and a part of a psychotic condition. However, research shows that people with DID/OSDD also hear the voices of their alters in a similar way to auditory hallucinations. As someone with a complex dissociative disorder and unspecified psychosis myself, I have found it hard to sometimes distinguish between the two - I find myself always asking, “Is this an alter, or are these the voices?” I believe the easiest way to reliably distinguish between the two, at least for myself, is familiarizing myself with the characteristics of each.

Of course, it is to be said that alters can influence the body and control it while voices cannot. If they can switch and control the body, then it’s a part. But what about experiencing alters as voices when they aren’t in control? How do you tell that what you’re hearing is actually an alter, especially if you struggle with hearing voices as a part of your psychosis? Especially-especially if you hear them both originating from the same space (both being inside the head, for example.)

The main idea in treatment for alters is that you have to accept and integrate them, while for voices you have to ignore them to make them go away. However, I find the latter to be ineffective for myself, preferring to accept and talk to the voices as well. Ignoring them often results in them only escalating in emotion and our ‘conversation’ then becomes an argument, while by responding to them we can have a pleasant conversation. Even if the way I treat both parts and voices are largely similar, voices are not actually real people inside my body that I’m talking to, so entirely conflating the two is dangerous.

I’d like to present a sequence of questions inspired mainly by the Maastricht Hearing Voices Interview (MHVI) and my own observations of my voices and alters. It’s intended to aid one in reflecting on the characteristics of their voices whether they be alters or purely hallucinations. If you want to use this for distinguishing voices and alters, I would recommend thinking of these questions and recording the answers to them when you hear a voice, and comparing the differences in answers between different voices and indicating whether you think/know if it’s an alter or a voice, to familiarize yourself with the characteristics of each and hopefully illuminate differences between them for yourself.

#1: General Characteristics of the Voice

Do you know the age, gender, and name of the voice(s)? Did the voice itself tell you these characteristics, or are you assuming them based on the sound of the voice?

Do you recognize the voice? Is it the voice of a person you know in real life, or a fictional character? Is it the voice of someone you already know is an alter? Is the voice consistently the same voice, or does it change? Do you not recognize the voice at all?

How frequently do you hear this voice? When you hear this voice, how long does it last for (duration of hearing the voice)?

Is there a time of day or certain situation that this voice seems to always talk during? Are there any other triggers for the voices?

Do you hear one voice at a time, or multiple voices speaking at the same time? If the latter, do they speak over each other or take turns?

What tone does the voice speak to you in? Is it kind, aggressive or angry, sad, condescending, etc? Is this tone consistent and characteristic of the voice, or does the voice’s tone tend to change?

What do the voices actually say to you? What were the situations that they were saying them in? Try to aim for exact words and whole sentences.

#2: History and Origin

When did the voice(s) first appear? What circumstances were you in when they first appeared (were you stressed, etc.)? 

What significant childhood/developmental events do you think could be related to the development of hearing voices? Did you go through any significant traumas or losses that impacted you emotionally?

How do you personally think this voice developed? Do you think it was from stress, or from something else?

Why do you think you are hearing voices? What do you think their goal or purpose is? What is your theory on where they originate from?

Have you received any treatment or support for these voices? How effective was it?

#3: Communication/Working with the Voice(s)

In what ways do the voices relate to each other, and you? Do you ever find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with the voice? What do the voices seem to think of each other or you? How do you relate to the voices?

How do you communicate with the voices, literally? Do you talk to them out loud or in your head? How do you talk to them, in the sense of your tone? Are you rude or nice to them, etc.?

How do the voices impact your daily life? Do they have a negative or positive impact? Do they impede on your ability to get things done or pay attention? 

What do the voices do for you? Do they give you advice and guidance, command you, punish you, or threaten you? 

How do you already cope with the experience of hearing voices? Are these coping mechanisms cognitive, behavioral, or physiological?

I’m now going to answer some of these questions for myself, to hopefully give an example for how these questions can be used. For me, personally, I find category 1 to be most useful in distinguishing whether it is a voice or an alter, and categories 2 and 3 to be more for coping with and understanding the voices/alters. However, I understand that this may differ for other people. Please keep in mind that I am NOT saying the distinctions I make between my alters and voices apply to everyone, only that I am making the distinctions as an example for how the distinctions can be made.

My Personal Experiences With #1

Overall, the quickest way I can tell that it’s a voice and not an alter is that if I recognize the voice. However, I don’t mean I recognize the alter’s voice, but rather that if the voice is of someone I know in real life or in fiction, I can know it’s a voice since I don’t have any alters that share the voices of people, fictional or not, to my knowledge. When I don’t recognize the voice as someone I know, it then becomes more complicated.

In general, if I can estimate or assume the age, gender or name of a voice, I probably recognize the voice as someone I know in the first place. When I hear a voice I don’t recognize, I can’t estimate age, name, or gender (unless they name themselves as one of my known alters). When I hear a voice I don’t recognize, it’s usually a deep and vague-sounding voice that I can’t exactly place. This deep and vague-sounding voice often is just that, a voice, and not an alter. Ina way, I’ve come to recognize the voice that I don’t recognize like that.

For me, alters tend to respond directly to things as if they were people, while voices just say things randomly. And, while the duration of how long I hear the voice wildly varies with alters, there is a direct correlation between my stress level and how frequently and long I hear voices for.

When I hear an alter’s voice, usually, there is a ‘want’ behind it that triggers it. It may be that they want to front/switch with me, that they want to play a game, that they don’t want me to eat a particular food I’m making and instead want me to eat something that’s more to their taste, that they want to respond to a text in a certain way, etc. It can be anything really. If there’s a want behind it, and identity with likes and dislikes and opinions and beliefs of their own, it’s likely an alter. If it’s randomly appearing, it’s more likely just a voice.

Usually, my alters tend to take turns with each other when speaking. If one of them cuts the other off, the other will stop speaking entirely. However, especially when I’m stressed, the voices have no qualms with speaking over each other freely.

Generally, my alters will all have their distinct tones to them, while voices either are paranoid and demeaning or have no distinct tone. The same applies to what they actually say. For example, one of my alters is very cheery and outgoing, and will typically respond in a tone that is characteristic of the average teenage girl. If I’m doing something that that alter doesn’t like, there’s a distinct whine in their voice that always reminds me of them. Another alter will typically speak in a kind, compassionate, caring, and communicative tone, even if they’re scolding me/another alter. Another alter has a distinct ‘edge’ and masculinity to their tone, another has a distinct childlike whine, another has a distinct darkness and quietness, another has a distinct compassionate grace. The majority of my voices do not have these distinct tones to them, and if they do, it’s that vague and deep voice I described earlier saying paranoid things into my ear. As for what they actually say, it corresponds directly to their tones: the voices who have no tones to them will say random things, while the alter with the childlike whine will say childlike things, and the alter that’s cheery and outgoing will say cheery and outgoing things, etc.

And that’s my experience in distinguishing voices and alters, based on their characteristics/category 1. Even though this makes it seem like there are a lot of differences between the two, often there are times where I genuinely can’t tell the difference. Due to the presence of alters, this often forces me to respond to the voice as if it were an alter or not respond to it at all, just in case (because my way of responding to voices is often fantastical and silly/not grounded in reality). However, by familiarizing myself with the characteristics that apply mostly to my voices and mostly to my alters, I can at least somewhat reliably tell them apart.

[ckret2]

GVK spoilers below, about conspiracy theories

I’m gonna get around to posting all my GVK reactions but this one got long so I’m putting it in its own post.

The Monsterverse series, in both KOTM and GVK, has some pretty interesting things to say about conspiracy theories and ecofascism; but, unfortunately, it doesn’t REALIZE that it’s saying any of them, so it keeps dropping the ball and missing opportunities to explore them.

Starting with KOTM, “there’s too many humans so we’ve just gotta let some die and that’ll fix pollution 🤷” is like false ecofascist claim #1 but at no point in the movie was it challenged as unfactual, it was just presented as a sad truth that people have to do morally ambiguous things about. Except that it’s just literally mathematically not true!

Emma could be such a GREAT, believable character—especially in this world with, like, frigging QAnon nonsense getting such widespread traction—showing a compelling, realistic tragedy of how this normal, intelligent, well-educated white mom who otherwise is likely left-leaning (pro-environmentalism, pro-nature conservation, got a doctorate and generally more academia correlates with more liberal ideals) got sucked into a far right ecofascist doomsday militia that combines hokey pseudo-environmentalist propaganda with “in balance with nature” semi-religious mysticism, because she was exploited at a time when she was emotionally vulnerable (when her kid had just died) and was lacking healthy emotional support (when her husband turned to alcohol and then ran off).

... Except the movie never says that her “overpopulation” beliefs are WRONG. It says that they’re RIGHT, and she was just forced to choose between two losing scenarios—deliberately kill most of humanity to hopefully save a few, or watch humanity kill itself.

Nobody bothers to mention that the size of the population isn’t the problem, it’s the disproportionate pollution coming out of first world countries. Nobody bothers to mention that when Emma talks about “overpopulation” and shows a screenshot of an overcrowded neighborhood, it ain’t affluent downtown skyscraper condos in Europe or America that she’s highlighting, but large masses of poor people whose neighborhoods look “dirty” to the white woman’s eyes, despite the fact that they’re contributing the least to humanity’s carbon footprint.

Emma’s beliefs are empirically wrong, and if KOTM had ever demonstrated that, it would’ve been brilliant. Instead, it tries to say “she was right, she just went too far,” and in doing so loses an opportunity to make Emma a deeply believable, timely, realistic, well-meaning but wrong villain.

And now we’ve got GVK, which has swerved away from the ecofascism but doubled down on the conspiracy theories. Here, Emma’s daughter, who was raised for five years with what amounts to a survivalist doomsday cult’s beliefs, when faced with the grief of her mother’s death and the struggle of trying to reconnect to her estranged father, turns—again—to conspiracies to make sense of the world around her. Because that’s what Madison’s been raised with, and even though she got disillusioned with the particular “we know something special that the normal people can’t handle” beliefs that she was raised with, that kind of thinking is still what she knows. She’s still doing what her mother raised her to do! She’s still pulling the “hypercompetent highly-trained lone wolf ‘survivor’ saves the world” shtick that Jonah’s gang taught her to do—but it’s never brought up that it was screwed up to raise a child like that and it’s screwed up for her to still be interacting with the world like that.

At least THIS conspiracy theorist isn’t literally advocating for global genocide. Bernie’s focus largely seems to be on “this corporation is trying to screw people over and screw up the environment—” (because in Monsterverse, as in Toho monster movies as a whole, kaiju/titans and the environment are symbolically conflated, so if a corporation is messing with Godzilla then they’re messing with nature as well) “—so I’m gonna find out what they’re up to and be a whistleblower.” Which is great! Solid start! We’ve got a guy taking aim at big business and who says “when the weather Godzilla acts erratic, it’s not random chance, it’s because a big business is doing something it shouldn’t,” so it looks like we’ve got a leftist conspiracy theorist, that’s different, could be interesting to explore.

Except then he starts talking about governments serving a “global elite” and facilities built by “lizard people” and then we’ve swung right back around to the far right by casually dropping in a couple of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Add that in with the whole “hollow earth” thing and damn, we’re namedropping a lot of antisemitic conspiracy theories, aren’t we? Granted, most conspiracy theories ARE antisemitic—but like, they could have dug around for some that aren’t. Have him talk some more about Roswell. Have him bring up things that we’ve actually got documentation happened and theorize that MKUltra research was used in Apex’s development of their pilot’s psychic mind link to Mechagodzilla. Have him bring up tailor-made-for-the-Monsterverse conspiracy theories that don’t exist here, “Monster Zero is actually the secret weapon of a nearby ‘Planet X’ that’s gonna invade,” whatever. Instead, nah, we went with the antisemitic ones.

Now, do I think the writers behind KOTM and GVK intended antisemitism? Do I think they’re closet alt-right trying to dogwhistle the fascists in the audience? No, I think they think they’re making fun of—or playing around with—what they see as harmless, unbelievable, way-out-there conspiracy theories. I think they know just enough about “hollow earth” and “global elites” and “lizard people” to make references to them, but not in a way that promotes the common antisemitic understanding of those theories as true. (Monsterverse’s hollow earth, a weird underground jungle where King Kong lives, sure doesn’t resemble the usual conspiracy theory.) To me, the way they were used suggests the writers didn’t deeply understand (or at least, didn’t deeply think about) what the theories really mean—nor what they imply about the beliefs of the characters who espouse them. Which is the crux of my issue with how the movies deal with conspiracy theories and ecofascists and so forth (beyond the fact that, hey, I just don’t like seeing likable characters casually referencing antisemitic beliefs): the writers didn’t think about the implications.

Because these things do imply a lot! For example, if, say, Josh, total newb to conspiracy theories, had asked about lizard people, I would have grimaced to hear it but I would have believed that he’s a teen boy that picked up the term at school and doesn’t know anything about what’s behind it. But on the other hand, I can’t believe a guy so deep in the conspiracy theory world that he bathes in bleach doesn’t know exactly what those conspiracies mean—or, even if he does somehow staunchly refuse to believe that “lizard people” is a code for “Jewish people,” that whatever circle of conspiracy theorists he runs with doesn’t use it as a code. Bernie didn’t pick up those beliefs in a void. I really doubt that’s what the writers wanted to imply about the goofy likable underdog with a podcast.

And sure, the “global elite” and “lizard people” references are presented like a “haha look how far out his beliefs are” joke—the same as the fluoride reference, which is basically Hollywood code for “bogus nonsense only complete lunatics believe” thanks to Dr. Strangelove—but at the same time, they’re never really disproven. Nothing he believes is challenged. Nor are any of Madison’s beliefs that she’s picked up from him. Everything they both believe is either a “wow that’s wild” throwaway joke, or else they’re presented as totally right, e.g. about Apex being up to dubious crap that’s irritating Godzilla.

Just like Emma, who was presented as in the wrong not because she was incorrect but because she WAS correct but took the wrong actions. And just like Rick in KOTM, who kept bring up the hollow earth theory like a running joke but then the joke was that he was right.

And that’s at the root of the issues with both movies’ portrayals of conspiracy theories. Aside from the jokes that are never explored (and therefore, never disproven), the movies say that, every time it matters, the conspiracy theorists on the fringe are correct, the heroes that need to be believed. Even though all (excluding Rick) are characters who have suffered deep loss, who have been hurt, who you can imagine as passionate but grieving people who turned to dangerously wrong extremism in their search for meaning... the movies don’t portray them as people who have been led astray by their pain, but enlightened by their pain. Which is what they themselves think they are, sure, but that doesn’t line up with reality.

The movies never forces them to grapple with how far they’ve gone astray from reality—and I think they should. I’d like to see them processing the revelation that their beliefs are wrong. Whether it’s as big as somebody trying to convince Emma that killing half the population doesn’t fix the pollution caused by corporations rich enough to weather a global hurricane, or as small as Bernie looking at Apex’s financial records and realizing the company’s money is going to the CEO’s vacation home rather than a reptile government and deciding to rethink those beliefs after they’ve checked out Hong Kong.

“Conspiracy theorist is right about everything” is already a common enough trope that Monsterverse isn’t breaking any new ground with it. And in a franchise like Godzilla, whose movies are rife with messages both allegorical and literal about environmentalism, corporate exploitation, the futility of military action, international politics, war crimes... letting the conspiracy theorists be wrong and showing that they’re wrong and what that wrongness can lead to would mesh far better with the themes of Godzilla.

Think about Jonah and Emma unleashing Ghidorah (who emerged from a destroyed ice cap and immediately caused devastating hurricanes—a perfect metaphor for climate change), and what that could say about how ecofascists who purportedly joined the movement because they support environmentalism are actually far more in bed with the destructive industries really at the root of environmental damage... if the movie acknowledged them as ecofascists.

Think about how Jonah collected Ghidorah’s head at the end of KOTM and by the time of GVK it was in Apex’s hands, and how this exchange demonstrates that “I want to unleash titans to destroy humanity to save the environment” Jonah the ecoterrorist and “I want to beat the titans to protect humanity” Simmons the billionaire CEO actually have far more similar ideals beneath the surface of their opposed goals—ideals that have less to do with the environment or with humanity and more to do with securing personal power and control... if the movie had explained how this exchange took place.

Think about how Madison’s mother died trying to mitigate just a little of the damage she did under the thrall of a doomsday cult’s skewed beliefs, how even though Madison broke free she found herself embroiled in similarly skewed beliefs just three years later, and how powerful it would have been if she recognized that she herself had walked right back into the kind of fringe beliefs her mother had led her into as a child, and if she had then resolved to learn how this kept happening to her and break this pattern... if the movie had ever let her realize that she was making the same mistakes, or even acknowledged them as mistakes.

There’s so much potential there, so many things you can see happening right beneath the surface... but the movies never touch on them. And so it looks like, in Monsterverse, all fringe beliefs are either right or harmless. And we never get the “disillusioned conspiracy theorist” story that could be so brilliant and that, right now, would be so relevant.

[dexi-green]

Okay so wrap up thoughts for ep. 4:

Where is Zemo? Do not let this man loose. Also bless marvel for releasing the longer cut of Zemo dancing earlier 🙏🏽

We love the Dora. However I wonder if the arm thing was a gag or if it’s going to come back. I could definitely see Buck having some questions and beginning to wonder whether they actually freed them or just put him under Wakanda’s control with a longer leash. He obviously has reason to be skeptical about people’s intention with him (see; how Zemo used him) I can definitely imagine them explaining that it was impossible to wipe out the WS controls but rather they just changed them and just never intended to use them, making him a sort of unintentional sleeper agent White Wolf for Wakanda. He is clearly very thankful and grateful to them, and is very close to the Dora, especially Ayo, so I could see that distrust being a good future character arc. But I stand by that with T’Challa in charge they would never seek to take advantage of Buck in that way. Also I was never a HUGE fan of Stan’s acting, I felt he got too hyped up for just brooding, like he was good but not Oscar worthy as some on here tried to say (you can just say you think he’s hot, you don’t have to lie about his acting to justify your adoration of him and watching his whole filmography, it’s okay I promise), but that scene at the beginning was actually amazing. I love the change between fear to relief and realization. Chef’s kiss.

As I mentioned several times, I love that this show is carefully exploring warring ideals, and actually saying them pretty plainly. It’s giving me what Civil War could’ve been. In Civil War there was just too many blatant misunderstandings and things that could’ve been cleared up if the Avenger’s didn’t share one (1) brain cell and it somehow ended up with Peter Parker who had homework to do. In this show, the ideals come from very understandable different perspectives, different lives lived. I know I want a conversation, but that alone won’t truly solve this like it would’ve in Civil War. It comes from very real criticism of our very real govt and society which I thinks helps cement this so much more in reality in a way that isn’t boring to watch like some other comic things that try to be gritty and realistic. The only part that has taken me out so far was the so very subtle cop scene in the second episode, which leads me into my next point

ISAIAH BRADLEY! Loop his story back in, let’s get some backstory and information and all that good stuff. Obviously Isaiah has made it pretty dang clear he wants nothing to do with any of this but obviously that’s not gonna happen, and it’ll be a tremendous waste of an absolute amazing and groundbreaking story to just bring Eli in at the end in some shoehorned way or something. Isaiah needs to be a part of whatever solution this story/season comes to. I’ve seen a theory floating around about either Isaiah being Wakandan (either like killmonger with one or both of his parents being from Wakanda, or more distantly) or perhaps Erskine’s secret ingredient for his serum was derived from the heart shaped herb (which would’ve made Cap White Panther 😬) which I think would be an interesting way to completely tie in Wakanda but perhaps a little unnecessary, specifically the first theory, we don’t need every future black person in the MCU to be secretly Wakandan. I just need his story to be more prominent then it has so far. It’s very important and not something that should just be a basically D grade side plot at this point.

I feel like we have shifted away from much focus on Sam. But I feel like the focus has pulled more on Zemo, Karli, Walker and Buck. Like Sam is doing what he needs but we aren’t getting as much insight into him as we did in the first episode. Which is why I think I liked his talk so much with Karli. We went back to his history of counseling and got to see how it uses it, how he calms down a situation, and his own insight into Karli’s ideals, he agrees but wants to go about it in a different way. We have constantly seen him offering help to others, but hasn’t really received much in return. I feel like now every time the shield comes up it’s just Bucky being all pissy that Sam gave it away which really turns me off his character. Sam already explained that maybe he made a mistake, but also Buck is so set in his way and his ideation of Steve that he can’t for a second consider Sam’s side. Like at this point it’s getting kind of annoying how Buck is being with Sam about it. I want more insight into Sam’s feelings about Steve, and Cap, and all that. Hopefully these last couple episodes with shift the focus back. At this point I feel I know more about Karli and John as people than I do Sam and that’s not great considering the title of the show. This was one of my earliest concerns for the series when it was announced, that it was going to focus too much on Bucky who has had his story almost front and center for almost all of the Cap films, they almost all in some part revolve around Bucky. Perhaps I need to rewatch and there has been some bits of Sam’s I haven’t appreciated enough, but it feels unbalanced, not in favor of him.

Sharon is being sketchy I fear. I do kind of like the idea that she is the power broker, but it’s hard to wrap my head around her threatening Karli like she has been. I mean she obviously has changed a lot, but if she is the power broker her motives have to be something different than what she is trying to lead people to believe. I think what’s more possible is her working for the power broker or perhaps working for/as the power broker as a cover for Fury or some other person/organization. She’s worked undercover for Fury before, she is obviously loyal to him, which might’ve changed since she talks to much about being abandoned by everyone, but I don’t know. It’s obvious something else is going on with her character, and while I love if she had just pivoted to this crime lord role, I just think of her speech at Peggy’s funeral and her loyalty to Cap and Fury in TWS. It’s possible she flipped on a dime like that because everything done to her and what she’s been through, and it may be too predictable for her to have the exact same storyline as TWS but who knows... that or she’s a skrull, always a possibility, can’t be too careful.

John Walker is clearly becoming the actual Anti-Cap. They are getting storybeats to line up. A ‘good’ soldier, turned propaganda tool, turned govt lap dog, serumed up, best friend dies, then what? Switched on by society? I love the moment with him and the flag smasher. It brought me back to when I was in the theater watching Civil War and I swore Steve was going to chop Tony’s head off with the shield. Steve just smashes the arc reactor of course, but John straight up murders this guy. And people are watching, the world is, people were recording. Definitely some purposeful similarities to our very real recording of police brutality irl. Which makes me think what will the govt response be? Will they spin it and try to get him out of this (which will feel really...weird? With the trial going on rn) or maybe will they abandon him completely and leave him high and dry? Hopefully we will see whoever the current MCU president is (prolly maybe Thaddeus Ross??) speak on it as well as the flag smashers and GRC. Walker is obviously not a good person at heart. I theorized before that he had already been given the serum, which clearly isn’t true so he has just taken it but there is something about his background that needs to be revealed. It has to be more than just “‘we did bad stuff while we were deployed” like... yeah it has a profound and damaging effect on people, but I feel like when he was talking to Hoskins it felt like they were remembering what went down slightly differently. I don’t know why, I’ll have to rewatch the scene. Either way, I think there is some stuff we still don’t know about Walker, something so terrible about him that made the serum change him like that. He was already clearly on edge, feeling insecure about people not giving him the respect he thought he deserved just from putting on the suit and carrying the shield, feeling that same imposter syndrome Sam did/does, and his pride was clearly DECIMATED by the Dora. He has this seeming obsession with super soldiers... he’s just giving weirdo vibes.

One thing I noted is that I think this series is taking apart Steve/Cap and spreading him out over several different people, and having them all pick at and dissect what makes/made Captain America the symbol he was, and what happens when you dig a little deeper. Karli seems to be the embodiment of the kindness/concern for others. She is fighting for the people, to protect them, as Cap was. But she is not holding back and is willing to put everything on the line, but where Cap was putting himself in the line of fire to protect people, Karli is putting others. Buck may be the classic idealism and Steve himself, I’m not 100 sure, but he seems to embody the kind of idea that people need something to put hope in, something to lean on, the idea of true good. He always brings up what the shield means and represents, doesn’t ever actually get specific though which is interesting. This may be because Bucky has a hard time separating Steve from Cap, since he saw the two grow up, when he talks about the shield and Cap he IS talking about Steve, there is no symbol or hidden meaning, just the Steve he knew. He conflates it all together. So I guess he represents whether or not the classic ideals can survive, the idea of hope, and Young Steve. Sam I think could be change. Where change is unwavering, like Cap’s fight for freedom never changed, but also where it is inevitable, in Steve and Cap’s place in a time that isn’t their own. How the idea of Captain America needs to be updated for modern times, or whether it should be thrown out altogether. I don’t know this is all ramblings. I though I had something but it’s almost 5am 😩

I believe we have 2 more episodes left so it’ll being interesting to see what they do with it. Fingers crossed 🤞

[nidhoggssoultrap]

Headcanon Part 4

I am the storm sent to wake you from your dream.My "Headcanon" (Nidhogg, Louie, and Yvette. Mostly Nidhogg) Part 1 This one is a long one, so I'll be splitting it into parts. I don't thinkI AM THE STORM SENT TO WAKE YOU FROM YOUR DREAM.

Headcanons/Vingettes/snippets part 2Oh lordy...this is it. Love Nikki has the longest list of headcanons EVER...or well, that I’ve written. Jesus...never thought a dress-up gamI AM THE STORM SENT TO WAKE YOU FROM YOUR DREAM.

Headcanon Part 3Dress up game...one character...inspired all this...wow. But, I was able to dig up some old “flames” because of this, so it’s all good. PrevI AM THE STORM SENT TO WAKE YOU FROM YOUR DREAM.

And now, page 4. I don’t think this record will ever be surpassed by any other fandom. Geez..Also, spoilers for the CN Dawn Front event that happened around Sept 15th.

1. When it comes to the human trafficking for Grey Raven situation, there is plenty of blame to go around. I believe that because Regent 7 is found necessary, Grey Raven has a lot more leverage in the Night Order than he should. Both Reid and Nidhogg balked at the idea the way Johnny Lawrence did when his sensei told him to “Sweep the leg” in the Karate Kid. Both used arguments similar to what I used in the Discord along with Reid saying that he has plenty of money for clothes/designers to use as a means of breaking the Curse through Styling Contests. However, Grey Raven was successful at manipulating both of them to gather prisoners and use them for his experiments/more Shade people. “Are you not the King of Swords?” Grey Raven asked. Nidhogg makes it clear that he would only do this when Regent 7 no longer works and “not a moment before”. Guess what conveniently happened? So, Nidhogg gives the order to send prisoners to Grey Raven. The Blood Curse mutates to resist any drug to counteract it, but it’s still convenient for Grey Raven, who has ulterior motives.

He actually has the GALL to blame Louie for this. The Nameless Knights hold the key to breaking the Blood Curse so the kidnappings for Grey Raven could have been prevented if Louie would simply give up the Key/NOT destroy shipments of Regent 7. I predict that someone in the Night Order(most likely Nidhogg) will use the victims as leverage against Louie in order to obtain the Key.

2. Speaking of Louie, when he rescued someone from the “holding camps”/Grey Raven, he was beside himself with rage. You could have heard him on another planet and he was especially vocal when fingers were pointed at him.

3. Nidhogg has pursued Louie twice by car. First instance, Louie tells him “you’re not man enough for me and even if you were, I WON’T STICK MY DICK IN CRAZY” before speeding off. Second time was after Louie rescues a victim who “lived among fields of gold.” The second time is where Louie goes off on him and he has other people in a “three way call”/eavesdrop. He knows that people might think he is crazy, but since the trafficking has become widespread with many escapees/whistleblowers, he is certain that people won’t easily believe that “it’s all made up”.

4. Grey Raven loves teasing Nidhogg. His other hobbies include slamming fingers in car doors and setting his hair on fire. Anyway, he views Nidhogg’s conscience as a “taint” and tells him often that “I can change that. I can make it go away. Things would be much easier then.” Nidhogg constantly refuses saying that “I am strong enough to bear the burden.” However, he admits only to himself that he has been tempted to let Gray Raven take away all feeling/conscience, but knew that doing so would mean losing a lot more.

5. Confession Bear: Grey Raven is a riot and I ADORE him. I don’t quite ship him with Nidhogg, but I love the teasing and Grey Raven being very much aware of the leverage he has in the Order.

6. The reason why Nidhogg killed Lunar was because Grey Raven wanted her for experiments as a means of getting back at Louie for ruining his reputation. He intended to make sure that she suffered immensely before making her into a “better version of Shade.” Nidhogg made it clear “that is not going to happen.” Since Louie claimed the body, Grey Raven would be hard pressed to find it, much less take it for himself.

7. The Night Order is on the hunt for butterfly jewelry. So is Nikki. Louie has one of the butterfly items(his veil), but that wasn’t made by Sayet. Still, he’s not surprised that Night Order would want it.

8. Louie has a lot of white wigs and some of them make him look more beautiful than he already is. But, like Griffith, he has the “hawk eye” along with a hard edge when provoked. The difference is that Louie’s temperament is well, a bit more hot and he can be frightening to witness. He has an astonishing amount of clothes and a lot of that is due to Blue Bird packages sent by Lunar. He tried to “ghost her”, but found that he couldn’t. He often joked about changing the name of the Nameless Knights.

9. He has two lieutenants: a young woman and a young man. Both are considered “voices of reason” to Louie’s occasional outbursts.

10. The trafficking situation is where everything started to “slip away” for Nidhogg and finally decided to do what needed to be done to gain the “great power.”

11. There were multiple whistleblowers in the trafficking and not one of them were found out. It is, however, known that they were appalled at what was happening and blew the whistle as soon as they had the chance. Everyone has their limits.

12. Louie didn’t ultimately leave because of the “kiss”, but because he didn’t want to go to Lilith to help with Nidhogg’s plans and he was not about to defer to Nidhogg. At first, they argued about it with Louie being shut down. He appeared “deferential”, but on the day they were supposed to leave, Louie packed up his things and left to become a mercenary—something Nidhogg never approved of him doing.

Louie was the one who tore up the picture of him and Nidhogg and left a torn half on the bed. That’s what Nidhogg came home to and it devastated him as he felt very much betrayed(ironic considering what he later on did in Lilith/Yvette).

13. Louie hated the fact that Nidhogg seemed to conflate understanding with agreement and repeatedly called him on, especially at the final car chase. He went so far as to call Nidhogg, “A victim piece of shit!” and that he was understood “ALL TOO WELL!” That’s the CHARITABLE way to put it. Please keep in mind that the drama between these two men were in front of a young woman, three teenage girls(Bobo was actually with them. I made a booboo in one of the parts) and a talking cat.

14. While a lot of what Louie claimed about Nidhogg was largely true, it doesn’t change my headcanon “fact” that he had a distorted view of his adopted brother. According to Reid, Louie was “blinded by hate”. ALL of the Night Order viewed Louie as the greatest threat with Nikki at a very close second(really, it’s Nikki, but Louie has a louder personality, a stronger Dawnblade, and ties to Nidhogg). They found it baffling that Nidhogg was willing to kill Nikki, but not Louie. After all, Nidhogg is “The King of Swords”, right?

15. Liliana was supposed to be the “alternative bunny” if Yvette didn’t work out. He wanted to take Liliana instead of Yvette, but the former was deemed “unacceptable.” Liliana would have been way more cooperative as she wasn’t fond of styling contests either and didn’t like the Blood Curse either as she felt that Styling Contests were imposed on everyone, regardless of their ability. Those with other talents were basically screwed unless they had support from those with “the clothes”. As for the Blood Curse, she has been affected by it on more than one occasion due to her constant misgivings about how disputes on Miraland are settled and the occasional refusal to do what is required should she lose. She loves Yvette’s school and appreciates the non violent revolution Yvette is leading.

16. This is really more of an odd theory, but I think that Hostess L may have been a Nikki lookalike who was part of the Nameless Knights, hence her name. Because of this, the Nameless Knights have “the key to the Blood Curse” if not one of them. I actually came up with this quite suddenly. Would be an interesting twist for sure and it would explain the suit she was wearing when she won(black dress with a sun pendant).

17. Despite what the current Lore says, I still consider Nidhogg a Scorpio. I have him born on November 13th(number of the Tarot Death). He shares the same birthday as Leatherstrip(industrial/ebm musician), ftr. Coincidence. Also, this year, it falls on Friday the 13th. But, since I still adore him, I guess he gets two Bdays. :) He really should have been an Air sign though. Gemini would have been perfect, especially since Bobo is currently the only one.

18. I also hold on to Nidhogg being 4 years older than Louie. At least I got the OLDER part right. :p I just fee like being under 30 is too young, but too much into the 30’s would be too old. 31 is just right, imo.

19. Before the black Camaro(aka, Maro) and the white Mustang(White Horsey), Nidhogg and Louie shared a Jeep. It was known as a “Rubicon” or “Rubi”. When Louie left, Nidhogg drove in that jeep to Lilith and Pigeon. He ended up eventually giving away for “image” reasons. He purchased the Camaro right before he became Prime Minister.

20. Glossing Rose was inspired by an abstract art piece done by Liliana. When he first arrived at Cicia Design School, Liliana, who was around 11 at the time, was among the first people he met and he knew her for years. He was accused of stealing from her when the Pink Bunny stockings were introduced “That’s not his style!” He admitted that they were inspired by one of Liliana’s drawings and she often was an inspiration. Emperor’s Woman, otoh, is clearly his actual design style and he does have a similar suit. He never actually stole from her nor did he ever claim credit for any of her works.

[potteresque-ire]

Daenerys Stormborn, First of Her Name

Here’s my first review post on Game of Thrones! Thank you so much for asking about Daenerys, @bixgirl1, @kikibluemay and @oceaxe-ifdawn. She was fascinating and tragic, and I couldn’t really stop talking about her... as in, I ended up writing a 4k+ word essay on her character.

Due to the length, I’ve crossed-posted to AO3 for those who prefer to read it there: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19119595 . As usual, never feel obliged to do anything! Fandom is a happy, carefree place for me :) .

Before I start, I’d like to say this—I’ve never expected GoT to be progressive. Its medieval aesthetics aside, the gratuitous violence and nudity really seal the deal. Therefore, this review is written decidedly without a social justice lens; I shall not argue if the showrunners were feminists, racists, imperialists etc. Also, I haven’t read the books and have read few metas and reviews; so these are my unfiltered thoughts and of course, my personal opinion. I got interested in Game of Thrones because the snippets I knew of it reminded me of ancient Chinese history, which I loved for its twists, its very blurred lines between truths and myths, its cynical record of human nature, clever strategies and bloodshed. Along this vein, I was, and still am, the most interested in how each contender of the Iron Throne got there, and as the theme of the story emerged (“the lies we spin, our fates they weave” is my way of describing it), the things they told for motivation—the lies and truths that, should they win, would become history.

Of all the contenders and their stories, Daenerys’ rise was the most…mythical and uplifting. She was easy to root for, partly because we’re conditioned to root for heroes like her. The last descendant of a dynasty. Orphan. Exiled, abused, went through her personal journey from little better than a slave to become queen. She even birthed dragons and rode them to war. I really enjoyed the part of her story as the Khaleesi. She grew into a queen in every way, and an ideal one, by the time led her small group of followers across the desert. I loved her—she was strong, resilient, intelligent, righteous. And she understood and respected a culture that was supposedly far below her (as her brother Viserys frequently reminded everyone). 

But then came Astapor, then Yunkai, then Meereen. She became a true ruler, without a Khal by her side… 

I started feeling a little uncomfortable. I was puzzled by that. Her cause was emancipation, one I believe was absolutely correct. Her stance was uncompromising. She walked the walk. Every single one of these traits was beyond admirable, and precious among rulers. Nailing 163 slave masters for 163 children might seem brutal, but the world of GoT *was* brutal. 

And yet, something felt...off.

Then I realized: after all the screen time in Meereen, I remained very much ignorant of the place, other than it practiced slavery. Slavery—and the barbaric practices surrounding it, such as the fighting pits—was presented as the only thing that defined her new constituents in her eyes. This could be by design, to show Daenerys’ “style” as a ruler. This can also be a reflection of the showrunners’ perspectives, their disquiet about tackling slavery for a larger audience.  But if I must judge the show by its own merits and ignore the hands behind it, the repeated shots of Daenerys sitting high in the Great Pyramid, she and her advisors donned in their foreign attire, telling the locals who looked nothing like them, over and over again, that they were wrong… 

She looked like a coloniser. My radars were beeping for that reason. I grew up in a colony, a well cared for one (ie, it would’ve fared far worse if it hadn’t been colonised). Colonialism is therefore an integral part of my life, and my views of it are coloured and educated by the experience. Controversial point: far from a general rule, but I recognise that colonizers can do great good. I’m a beneficiary of that myself. However, I’ve also learned that there’s an art to bringing these great goods to the colonised. One lesson: defining these people, especially when they’re foreign to the ruler, with anything that the ruler is seeking to eradicate — a habit, a tradition, a set of beliefs… —is not a recipe for success. It’s a matter of human pride—the pride of, in this case, the people who’d just suffered defeat. The former ruling class needs to feel some respect, which translates to a sense of security, for any transition of power to be smooth. One may say, the slave masters deserved neither pride nor respect nor security; this is very true, but there was a very practical consideration, one that Daenerys acknowledged: the ultimate goal of conquest is to rule. An un-governable colony won’t change for the better, because it won’t remain a colony for long. In Meereen, as in many real-world colonies, colonisers were few and their constituents were many. Revolts would favour the latter, in particular, the former ruling class who often had both financial and geographical advantages. The Sons of Harpy’s revolt did address that, albeit weakly.

No, I don’t mean Daenerys should yield on the issue of slavery. Lives were at stake and the emancipation had to be immediate. But then, merely insisting this was the right thing to do and punishing offenders with increasing severity, while reinforcing the segregation between the ruling class and the ruled (Daenerys pretty much sequestered herself in the Great Pyramid), was not a direction to take to render the emancipation permanent. Daenerys had to be out there. She had to make serious effort to find common grounds in the 3-way between herself, the former slaves and former slave owners, especially after she’d removed one of the pillars of Meereen’s sociopolitical structure. It didn't matter that the latter were despicable; she had to find a connection. And being a nation that had stood thousands of years, with its wealth and fine architecture, Meereen had got to have something benign and beautiful that Queen Daenerys could embrace, that she could use as a bridge to endear her to her constituents and at the same time, de-emphasize the role of slavery in defining what Meereen was. Wear their clothes. Visit the temples. Whether she actually believed in their gods didn’t matter. Join their festivities—if she did it enough it would matter much less if she skipped the fighting pits. Go to their Flea’s Bottom equivalent (as Margaery Tyrell did in King’s Landing; she would’ve made a good colonial governor). Talk to their craftsman and ask about their traditional crafts. Never for once did Daenerys consider these strategies. She could’ve used Tyrion as her ambassador—his stature and broken language skills, if utilized correctly, could loosen people’s defense, and the parties he’d attend would give him access to the good wines he craved and the setting for him to establish alliances with small talks. If governing foreign lands is indeed an art form, Daenerys didn’t pursue it in Meereen, even though from her time with the Dothrakis, it seemed unlikely that she was ignorant of its necessity (She did eat a horse heart for her Khal and her unborn child).

Again, assuming that the writers were merely following GRRM’s guideposts on her character arc, I had to contend with these possibilities that inform me about Daenerys the Ruler: 1) somewhere in her journey in Essos, she’d lost her ability to empathize with the cultures under her rule. This seemed unlikely. Or, 2) she no longer felt the need to do it, her power no longer derived from a Khal. Either way, with Westeros also being foreign to Daenerys, I started to wonder the kind of ruler she would end up being … 

… and it looked rather similar to the Daenerys in her final scenes, asserting that her moral compass should make the entire Westeros bent their knees. I started to wonder if the show intended this to be a good or bad thing, or something more nuanced, as it should be. My hopes weren’t high—after all, our own western world still retains much of its colonial sensibilities, which would’ve (rightly) praised Daenerys’ role as a Liberator, but would also (sub)consciously downplay her … colonising tendencies. 

Does it mean I see Daenerys as a bad person, or going mad? Not at all. Conflating character and ability to rule is, IMO, one of the major weaknesses of her ending (more on that later); it was also, perhaps ironically, Daenerys’ own fatal mistake. My question is merely one about her fitness to rule, which is itself a fluid thing. War-time rulers require different skills compared to peace-time rulers, conquerors to defenders. The serious contenders of the Iron Throne each had their own strengths, some better suited for rulership and some better for rulership at different times. Stannis was a strong general but was too easily swayed as a ruler. Daenerys was a conqueror. Jon Snow was a diplomat. 

One thing, however, is true and consistent in the world of GoT: to gain power, being morally righteous is not enough. Ned Stark’s detached head brought this point across all too well. Rulers win the hearts of their people. Not the brains, not the logic that decides what is right or wrong. Humans are inherently passionate about power, whether it’s theirs to own or not.

And this is, perhaps, Daenerys Stormborn’s greatest tragedy. She assumed her strict moral compass, along with her birthright and strong will, would be sufficient to take her to the Iron Throne. Her dragons further misguided her in that regard—punishments by Dracarys lent an extra mythical weight and poetry to her judgments, as if she had a higher power, like God, on her side. When she asked Jon Snow if she was to rule with love or fear, she asked as if the two were a dichotomy, seemingly blind to the fact that she had always treaded the line between the two. Love got her the Unsullied, the talents who came far and wide to advise her; fear got her the Dothrakis, the fragile peace in Essos. 

If you’ve read till here (thank you), you may assume I’d defend Daenerys’ decision to burn King’s Landing, or suggest it was foreshadowed. I’d say this: I find it to be within the realms of possibility, but only given my personal opinion about her rule in Meereen. I don’t see it as a botched coin-flip by the Gods, because nothing in her prior judgment suggested madness. Yes, she’d ignored advice before, but no more than, say, Robert Baratheon or Joffrey (Cersei simply killed those who gave her advice she didn’t like). Daenerys’ decision to march to King’s Landing immediately after the Battle of Winterfell—the last major decision she made before the sacking—might not be wise to some but was logically sound. I’d also venture to say this, perhaps in defence of the show’s writers: I’m also not quite sure if the show intended her decision to be a proof of madness. 

Because I’m not sure if the madness told in this show was real at all. 

Because curiously, while the coin flip had been mentioned several times, the show never offered us any concrete, visual evidence that Daenerys had suffered a loss of reason, which defines madness for us who live on Earth in the 21st century. The destruction of King’s Landing was portrayed at the ground level; we didn’t exactly see Daenerys cackling, or enjoying the carnage. Making a terrible decision does not a mad person make. She was seen to be sure of herself in her final scene with Jon Snow—but why shouldn’t she be, when she’d just emerged victorious and achieved her life’s goal, her revenge? If cockiness had been the mark of madness, half of the characters in the show would’ve been mad. 

Even more curious to me is this: people like Ramsey or Joffrey or Cersei, who’d done seriously mad things in our perspective, were never once described as “mad”. The adjective “Mad” had always been reserved for the Mad King. 

How was the Mad King mad then? This is important, because Daenerys supposedly inherited his madness. But the audience hadn’t been given much information. We know The Mad King killed his dissidents, but that seemed to fall within standard monarch behaviour. We know he and his advisors—including, notably, Varys—were at increasing odds with each other, but put a bunch of power-hungry men with immense power imbalance in the same room and that would happen more likely than not. He killed Ned Stark’s father and brother in a confrontation—so he was vengeful, distrustful, and brutal, yes, just like Joffrey or Cersei, but still, nothing that spoke particularly of madness. He was said to want King’s Landing destroyed, but the act was never realized; we only learned of his intentions via Jaimie. He set up the network of wildfires, which were terrible weapons but also … traditional in the Targaryen dynasty, if wildfires had indeed been invented as replacements of Dracarys. So how mad was actually the Mad King then, compared to his ancestors? Or was he called Mad only because he lost his game of thrones, and history was written by victors? When Varys claimed to be worried about Daenerys’ state—when he hinted at her madness and being a bad coin flip—was he merely repeating the same lies that had been told about her father, with the purpose of setting up a chain reaction that would propel Jon Snow to the Iron Throne, as the same lies had helped justify and cement Robert Baratheon’s reign? Varys might have been trying to feed Daenerys something. A “crazy potion”, maybe?  

Yes, I know. I’m probably reading too much into this. It’s my wishful thinking, perhaps, to not see Daenerys as mad (or the writers writing her as mad) because that would’ve taken away her agency. Because Daenerys’ character arc doesn’t deserve an ending equivalent to death by a falling flowerpot. Because, if her sacking of King’s Landing was meant to be the Shock of Season 8, she must retain her agency. It’s shocking because a good person did it. A good person is good only when she has the agency to make terrible mistakes.

So how am I reading Daenerys’ decision to sack King’s Landing? If I were to ignore all inputs outside the show—I don’t know if the showrunners had commented on anything—this is how I would “bridge the gap”, so to speak; how I’d imagine the thoughts running through Daenery’s mind as the bells rang, behind the few seconds the camera focused on Emilia Clark’s face in the show. I believe the series of tragedies Daenerys had suffered (losing Jorah, Missandei, a dragon son) had only made her more determined to wipe out, as Greyworm told Jon, everyone who’d served Cersei. But while this sounded like a simple task, carrying it out was much more complicated. Cersei’s armies were dispersed all over the city; they could easily remove their armour and feign innocence. Moreover, every resident in King’s Landing could be seen as an accomplice to Cersei’s reign; even the people in Flea’s Bottom, like Gendry, used to make weapons for the Lannisters. Were they to be wiped out as well? If not, where to draw the line? This order nonetheless confirmed Daenerys’ world view that the morally corrupt should perish without mercy, and Cersei was, indeed, corruption defined. Daenerys had seen Cersei’s treachery herself, and the sheer scale of it must be as foreign to her as Westeros itself. Her closest friends and followers, Greyworm and Missandei, didn’t even know how to tell a joke—the smallest, most benign form of treachery. Daenerys knew what treachery was, of course, she’d suffered greatly from it, but treachery in the game of thrones was a different beast and she wasn’t yet equipped to handle it, to make correct assessments of the kind of behaviours it’d instigate—unlike Cersei and Tyrion, who as Lannisters had been breathing it in since birth, or Varys, who’d been both an observer of multiple reigns and a ruthless Kingmaker himself. King’s Landing, the city itself, had also signified little but treachery to Daenerys—her father had been murdered there by someone who’d sworn to protect him; men had been sent from there to murder her since she’d been born. 

While Tyrion had told said that Cersei’s armies were serving only out of fear, Daenerys, who’d only had the most faithful / honest armies, the Unsullies and Dothrakis, probably couldn’t truly appreciate what that meant. She had every cause to be terrified then when the bells rang, especially when they rang so early, without her or her army and allies even close to the Red Keep. Ironically, perhaps, her own moral righteousness became her blind spot; she might have assumed Cersei’s forces had something far more sinister waiting for her—because how could they abandon their duties, their queen so easily?

And if they did abandon their duties and their queen so easily, what would stop them from committing the same treachery when Daenerys becomes queen herself? How could she vet the innocent and the treacherous and if she couldn’t—and she couldn’t, not with one dragon, a small army and no geographical advantage—what could she do? What could she do, when she was Daenerys Stormborn, who would never compromise to treachery?

I can see her feeling cornered. I can see her feeling she was left with one option: take the innocents out with the treachery. Do it like removing a tumour. Cut out a ring of good flesh around the bad. 

The ring of good flesh was King’s Landing.

Plausible? Maybe? That tragically, both the rise and fall of Daenerys Targaryen could be attributed to her moral code? That she didn’t lose this game of thrones because she was evil, but because war and politics have always been amoral and she was a misfit? People in Westeros change allegiance all the time; morals are fluid and carry a price tag. Appropriately then, the man who understood and lived by these rules, whose loyalty could always be bought—Bronn—was also the biggest winner of this game of thrones.

I’d say this though:  a plot point as significant, and as close to the finale as the sacking of King’s Landing, shouldn’t require the audience twisting their minds into pretzels to make it feel plausible, and my brain feels a bit pretzly at a moment. No matter what the writers intended, there remained too many holes for the watchers to fill with their imagination. I’ve read some who said the final season was too rushed; I’m not sure that was the issue. The issue, I think, is that even if given enough screen time, the writers didn’t quite know how to drive the characters without the books’ guidance—an issue that had become apparent by Season 6. The last three seasons felt…derivative, like fanfics of the first four. This isn’t a slight (well, not a big one)—Benioff and Weiss had managed what GRRM hasn’t been able to—but I felt a sense that their visions of the world had evolved to conflict with GRRM’s over the course of the show. Meanwhile, they still needed to hit the goal posts GRRM provided, while they wanted to focus on / believe in something else. The result was the later seasons that felt …schizophrenic at times. GoT had highly implausible moments since Season 1, but the first four seasons sold them because the showrunners believed in them. S8 Ep5&6, meanwhile, offered enough for me to logically agree that the sacking of King’s Landing and Daenerys’ downfall can be canon, but not enough for me to believe emotionally because…I didn’t feel the showrunners believed in them. The events felt written to serve a purpose other than storytelling—maybe to match GRRM’s notes, or satisfy the perceived need to shock; in all cases, I felt the hearts of the writers were somewhere else, somewhere perhaps more spectacular than dissecting the motivations of a fallen queen. The shift towards visual storytelling in the later seasons, perhaps to mitigate the difficulty of writing dialogues for an ensemble of deeply complex and intertwined characters, furthered exposed the incoherence of the show’s focus. While I love the visuals, GoT had its origins as a political show and politics is 99% talk. Similarly, the increased reliance on the actors to convey their characters via facial expressions and body language might work for someone like Brienne, who was taciturn and largely consistent personality wise, but insufficient for characters who used talking as a weapon (Tyrion) or underwent major transformations (Daenerys). 

Anyway, back to Dany. If there was one thing I truly, truly dislike about the close of her story arc, it was the very end, when Jon Snow drove that dagger into her. Painfully cliche aside (I’ll leave Cersei’s baby to another day), it also unfairly cemented Daenery’s highly un-rightful place as the villain of the story, given that Jon Snow, the uncontested Good Human of the show, committed the murder. The show pitted two sympathetic characters against each other just to let one … leech the sympathy out of the other, when neither of their characters deserved the treatment (yes, I found this decision to be as unfair to Jon Snow as it was to Daenerys). As much as I had reservations about Daenery’s ability to govern, I never doubted the heart that Jon stabbed, the desire in it to do good for the people. Yes, I said it isn’t enough, and yes, I believe that too inflexible a moral code forcibly imposed upon others can do great damage, but this is very different from saying that Daenerys Stormborn was a villain. Conflating character and ability is human, but I expected this show to know enough nuance to avoid this mistake. Having the heart, the desire to rule well, is a start. A great and important start. A start seen in few others in the whole series. The early seasons of GoT were particularly strong in depicting characters in the grey but Daenerys, sadly, was robbed of that; she swung violently from white to black.

And what was so disappointing is that it needn’t be that way. Daenerys could have caused the destruction to King’s Landing and still be sympathetic. Queen Cersei was still in the Red Keep, and the Wildfires buried by the Mad King remained all over the city. Innocents die in wars, there’s never an exception to that, even if the wars are waged with the best intentions. I’m no show writer, but this is what I could come up with to spare Daenery’s fate as a villain after a few walking trips around my city, while keeping most major plot points intact. Show writers can do (much) better. 

Just for the fun of it, below is the alternative ending for Daenerys I came up with, and I will end my very, very long thesis here :) . Thank you so, so much for reading! ❤️❤️❤️

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1) Start of the episode. Qyburn teaching his little birds a nursery rhyme about a Mad King and his Wildfires, and an Evil Queen who will set them all burning. He tells them to sing far and wide. (This is just an excuse to get another song from Ramin Djawadi)

2) Long shots of combustibles being laid in the same tunnels Lancel Lannister crawled through back in Season 6 Ep 10, before the explosion of the Sept of Baelor. That 10-minute sequence was so classic that the audience would likely remember the place. Piles of wood connect the stores of barrels that we know contain the Wildfires. Black tar flows down the sewers of the Red Keep, down the alleys in Flea Bottom, slicking everything, staining the innocents there with (Queen Cersei’s) muck. This sequence can be done entirely through visuals.

3) The Bell rings. Daenerys attacks the Red Keep with Dracarys. The tar and wood catch fire and carry the flames to the Wildfires around the city. As Wildfire is Dracarys’ substitute, the two augments each other and the city soon turns into an Inferno. Daenerys watches, horrified and unable to do a thing. The nursery rhyme becomes a prophecy: as much as a Lannister laid the grounds, the Targaryens are solely responsible for the King’s Landing destruction. Woods and tar are, after all, harmless without fire. And Daenerys Stormborn, who swore to protect and liberate the weak, ends up killing more innocents than Cersei ever had. 

4) Tyrion advises Daenerys that for now, she has no choice but to rule by fear. A reign cannot start with apologies, and what good will it do? So Daenerys gives the same speech to her armies on the steps of the ruined Red Keep, but noticeably distraught.

5) Daenerys must also restrain Drogon. She can’t afford him accidentally setting more fires in the city, while her armies scour every tunnel to make sure all Wildfires have been consumed. So the Breaker of Chains is forced to chain down her son, the symbol of her power.

6) Drogon, being intelligent but still a beast, maims Daenerys badly in his struggle to be free. Jon finds Daenerys, but she’s beyond saving. She tells Jon to keep what he saw secret, and if he can’t—she knows he can’t—to please lie for her, for once, that Drogon did it to avenge for the innocents she killed; that Drogon, and their family name he represents, knows justice above the fire and blood. When honest Jon reacts…honestly, she asks him to ask Tyrion for advice. She struggles to stand, says she wants to try the Iron Throne before she goes. She refuses Jon’s help; she walks, head high, blood trailing like a cape behind her, as she crosses the ruins. She won’t make it. Only her finger will get to touch the Iron Throne, as in her prophecy in the House of the Undying. Jon kneels behind her as she falls on her own knees. She will always be his queen. Drogon carries her away.

7) The waiting period can be a mourning period for all who have perished. Tyrion will still recommend Bran to be their King, as his proposal will be accepted as he remains the Hand. Jon would’ve asked Tyrion about the lying, and the issue can be brought up when “A Song of Ice and Fire” is presented in the small council. King Bran can then offer his wisdom as the Three-Eyed Raven, the Living History. What does he think, when he sees both the truth in history and the lies and prophecies told about it, that propel it? Does he approve of them? Disapprove? This will also wrap up the theme of the show, about the stories that make history, the history that makes us. Ser Davos can ask about the legend of Azor Ahai that cost Stannis Baratheon everything. Is it true? Does it matter? Also, how many swords actually make up the Iron Throne? Thousands, as the legends and Daenarys had believed? No more than two hundred, as Little Finger said in Season One? How many more swords have been buried for these thousands or hundreds?

[samuraiko]

Semi-Useful Notes for Writing for THE ROYAL TUTOR

(Author’s Note: This includes all twelve episodes of the anime (plus the movie), as well as up through Chapter 84 of the manga (18 Oct 2019) and what info I can glean from the Character Book (unfortunately it’s all in Japanese). I will continually update this post as the series progresses and new spiffy stuff shows up, so visit my Master List of my ROYAL TUTOR Stuff to see the latest version.)

While writing A Noble Soul (which is done, by the way!), I had the idea that I personally love the little touches of authenticity that make a story more 'real,' and hey, if nothing else, I learn a few things along the way. (I *am* a researcher, after all!) So I did a lot of searching to find the real-world analogues of the buildings, references, history, and so forth from the series. As you’ll see in the descriptions, I explain how I determined which ones were which.

You’re welcome to post questions, comments, share this, etc. Hope it helps anyone else who wants to write for the ROYAL TUTOR fandom! (Quick question - would everyone prefer me to include chapter references for stuff? It’d make this post much longer, but if the fandom thinks it’d be useful, I can give it a shot.)

So, here we go!

GRANZREICH FAMILY INFO

Viktor von Granzreich, current ruler of the kingdom of Granzreich, assumed the throne at 18 (considering his father’s much later death, this may have been for reasons of health on his father’s part, possible abdication on his father’s part, or other political reasons)

Maria von Granzreich, Viktor’s mother, still living

NOTE: Her sibling (name and gender as yet unmentioned) is the Queen’s parent

Father’s name as yet unmentioned, died of natural causes at ‘a ripe old age’

NOTE: The princes mention in earlier chapters that they do remember their grandfather from when they were small, so his death is relatively recent)

Viktor’s wife (appears only once in flashback, name as yet unmentioned)

NOTE: One of her siblings (not sure if brother or sister) is the parent of Beatrix von Lothringen

(Beatrix also has three younger brothers and one younger sister)

Viktor’s children:

Eins von Granzreich, Viktor’s eldest child and firstborn son

Kai von Granzreich, Viktor’s second son

Currently engaged to Beatrix von Lothringen, first cousin to the princes

Bruno von Granzreich, Viktor’s third son

Leonhard von Granzreich, Viktor’s fourth son

Licht von Granzreich, Viktor’s fifth son

Adele von Granzreich, Viktor’s sixth child and only daughter

LOCATIONS:

GRANZREICH (real world analogue: Austria)

Granzreich population: ~6 million

Side note: Both Viktor and Leonhard are shown riding white horses - these are the famed Lipizzaner stallions, from the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, Austria

Other side note: Viktor’s typical outfit is clearly inspired by the military field uniform of Franz Josef I, Emperor of Austria (the white variant that the princes wear on some of the covers/inside art is the gala/formal version); the three medals shown on Viktor’s uniform are the Order of the Golden Fleece around his neck, what appears to be a simplified version of the Long Service Cross over his heart, and what appears to be a simplified version of a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Maria Theresa just below that (a round circle with a cross).

90% of Granzreich’s population is Gherman (see below)

3% of Granzreich’s population is Kvel (see below)

Wienner (capital) (real world analogue: Vienna, Austria)

Wienner's population: ~1.3 million

Weissburg/Weisburg Palace (both spellings are used) (real world analogue: Hofburg Palace, Vienna, Austria) - specifically, the part often shown as denoting the palace is the Neue Berg wing

Karl Theater (real world analogue: Carltheater) - operettas

Remnant Theater (possible real world analogue: Raimund Theatre) - operettas

National Opera House (real world analogue: Staatsoper (originally Vienna Court Opera)) - opera house

National Art Museum (real world analogue: Kunsthistorisches Museum - directly opposite the palace, it is the largest art museum in the country; the image of the museum behind Heine when he announces the prize matches the façade of the building)

Granzreich University (real world analogue: there is no University of Austria, per se, but there is the University of Graz (the second largest city in Austria), which is the second largest and second oldest university in Austria)

Wienner University (real world analogue: University of Vienna, the building shown in both the anime and the manga is the main building - this is where Doctor Dmitri (and later Bruno) comes to lecture – it is also recognized as a leading institution for studies in Humanities – Bruno would do well here studying Philosophy!)

Prunksaal (real world analogue: Prunksaal) – the national library (also housed within the palace in another building)

Within the Prunksaal is the Royal Archive, where historical documents, judicial records, going back hundreds of years, and other documents the royal family keeps from one generation to another are preserved; only royals and a fraction of statesmen are permitted to use it (this is the place referenced in the anime that Prince Licht says even princes can’t visit without the king’s express permission)

The plaza/fountain where the KaseKrainer stand is (real world analogue: Donnerbrunnen Fountain in the center of the Neuer Markt)

Granzreich Military Academy (real world analogue: Theresian Military Academy (one of the oldest in the world) - yearly had 100 nobles and 100 commoners enrolled)

Princes are enrolled at the age of 15 (in-series)

Schwarz Palace (real world analogue: Schloss Neuwaldegg, aka Villa Schwarzenberg - at first I thought this was the Palais Schwarzenberg, but double-checking the architecture confirms it's the Schloss) - in-series, given to a general who played a major role in the war 150 years ago by the reigning king, Friedrich IV, and currently Prince Eins’ residence

Kohl Street, the site of Café Mitter Meyer's second location (real world analogue: Kohlmarkt, which is indeed right next to the palace, and leads past the Catholic Church of St. Peter)

The train station (mentioned in-series when Viktor gives directions, as well as the departure point for various trips) (real world analogue: Wien Südbahnhof, Vienna’s main train station)

Wienner Grand Hotel (mentioned in-series as Herman Koenig’s previous place of employ) (real world analogue: Grand Hotel Wien, Vienna’s first Grand Hotel, opened in 1870, and *the* last word in elegance - Herman would have worked in the Kavalierbar, the hotel’s bar/lounge) 

Augustinian Church (Augustinerkirche) (not mentioned in series, just a useful note) - the parish church of the royal court (located next to the Hofburg)

Salzichl (the royal villa and hot springs) (real world analogue: the Kaiser Therme at Bad Ischl, aka the ‘Emperor’s Spa, favoured holiday resort of Emperor Franz Joseph I - and yes, the architecture as shown in the manga is exactly what the villa looks like... Leonhard would his own reasons to love it there, as it also has a renowned pastry shop)

OTHER NATIONS:

Fonsein/Fonseine (both spellings are used, though Fonseine is used more often) (real world analogue: France)

Capital - Fleur (real world analogue: Versailles - while the capital of France is actually Paris, Versailles was the primary residence of French royalty until the revolution, and the art in the manga depicts the Palace of Versailles and its famed gardens (which, as Bruno ruefully notes, are in fact larger than the gardens of Weissburg Palace, aka the Hofburg). Rather than differentiate between Versailles and Paris (approximately 15 miles away), the manga conflates the two of them together, as the map that Claude shows the princes depicts Paris’s center. Also, the manga accurately states it’s a half-day from Wienner to Fleur by train - at a guess, the train station that the princes arrive at is Gare de l’Est.) Some of the famous sights in Fleur include:

The Etoile Arc (real world analogue: the Arc de Triomphe, and as Claude points out, is a monument to France’s endurance through war and hardship, and is carved with bas-reliefs indicating peace and friendship)

The Opera House (real world analogue: the famed Paris Opera House (immortalized in literature by Gaston Leroux in his novel The Phantom of the Opera), stated to have been completed “five years ago” (as the Paris Opera House was completed in 1875, this puts the current date at 1880-ish)

The Art Museum (real world analogue: the museum depicted here is the Louvre, and Claude is not kidding when he says you could spend a week and STILL not see all the art museums in Paris)

The Cathedral (real world analogue: Notre-Dame de Paris - immortalized in literature by Victor Hugo is his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, although Leonhard possibly mis-translates Claude’s description as to when it was built - Notre-Dame de Paris was completed FIVE hundred and fifty years earlier, not FOUR hundred and fifty)

The Department Store (real world analogue: because the interior art is so limited, this is likely one of three places - Le Bon Marché, the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville (BHV), or Printemps Haussman)

Current queen: Queen Isabelle (distant blood relatives of the same family as the von Granzreichs) (real world analogue: debatable, as post-1870, France was ruled by republican government, rather than a monarchy - also as of Chapter 69, Claude confirms that his mother and father are both abroad (so yes, Isabelle is currently married).

Her son, Claude, first prince of Fonseine, the only child (and a child not much older than Adele, and THIS is Adele's intended fiance!) (I was under the impression she was affianced to someone else already!)

Granzreich and Fonseine have been in friendly relations for the past 200 years through royal intermarriage

AND EINS IS TO BE ENGAGED TO SOMEONE IN FONSEINE (correction - Eins is later revealed to be engaged to the Princess of Belgian (see below); however given the close intermarriages between their real world analogues of France, Austria, Spain, Germany, and Belgium, this may have been a negotiation point between Fonseine and Granzreich for upcoming treaties or other political purposes)

Beyer (real world analogue: Bavaria (southern state in Germany))

Belgian (real world analogue: Belgium)

Current queen: Queen Charlotte (real world analogue: Charlotte, Princess of Wales, wife to Leopold I of Belgium)

Princess Paola, second princess of Belgian (later referred to in Chap 77 as Charlotte) (real world analogue: Charlotte, later Empress of Mexico - possible reason for the name change is to avoid confusion - her brothers are also mentioned in the chapter... real life analogues for them would be Leopold II and Phillippe (their third brother died in infancy)

Viktor confirms in Chap 77 that the two nations are still on good terms

Ghermany (real world analogue: Germany)

Iel (real world analogue: Palestine/Israel)

Kingdom fell 1800 years ago. Kvel is used more as an indication of the Jewish populace rather than a specific nation, both in terms of bloodline and social/religious heritage

Madri (real world analogue: Spain)

Nederland/Neterlanden (both spellings are used) (real world analogue: the Netherlands)

Orosz (manga)/Erosz (anime) (real world analogue: Russia)

Capital - Pietarigrad (real world analogue: St. Petersburg - while the capital of Russia is Moscow, St. Petersburg (at one point named Petrograd) is Russia's second largest city, is Russia's cultural capital, and is the port city referenced here) (and it's 1800 km from Wienner to Pietarigrad, and the railroad route they show IS accurate to travel from Vienna to St. Petersburg!)

Grand Hotel Orosz (real world analogue: Grand Hotel Europe (confirmed via pictures of the architecture compared to the manga; opened in 1875, and one of the three most luxurious hotels in St Petersburg)

Orosz University (real world analogue: Saint Petersburg State University, the oldest university in Russia)

Doctor Dmitri references an art museum while discussing Pietarigrad (real world analogue: the Russian Museum)

Grand Theater (real world analogue: Mariinsky Theatre, the preeminent music theatre of late 19th century Russia, and the site of the premieres of most of Russia's most famous ballets, operas, and other music)

Romano (real world analogue: Russia or POSSIBLY Poland, more on that in a second)

King: Alexander Alexandrovitch Romano (real world analogue: Czar Alexander II)

Crown Prince Ivan Alexandrovitch Romano

Prince Eugene Alexandrovitch Romano

Russian uses patronymic names, so your middle name is a derivative of your parent)

ALTERNATE real world analogue: Poland - since Austria and Russia do not share a border (and mention is made of inspecting mines on the border between their nations), it’s possible that instead Romano (while borrowing heavily from Russian inspiration for names) is actually Poland. (Rationale: what is modern-day Czechia was originally part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which DOES share a border with Poland.) While Polish is traditionally written in Latin script, it *can* be written in Cyrllic.

I’m still nailing down whether the Romano flag is based on an actual nation flag.

Venezia/Veneto (both are used) (real world analogue: Venice)

Laguna Empire (real world analogue: TBD)

Kingdom of Kataro (possible real world analogue: Qatar)

Yapan (real world analogue: Japan)

Eastern Continent (real world analogue: Asia)

Western Continent (real world analogue: Europe)

GRANZREICH’S ECONOMY:

1 florin = 100 kreutzer (real world analogue: the florin and the kreutzer, ratio the same following Austria-Hungary's decimalization of the currency system in 1857)

A doll costs 55 kreutzer

The Royal Guard makes 30k kreutzer/year (300 florins/year, as per the anime and the manga)

The ransom for Maximilian and Heine was to be 1500 florins, or 150,000 kreutzer… meaning the ransom for Kai at 1 million florins was 100 million kreutzer -- Heine wasn't kidding when he says it's the annual budget for a small country in the 1880s, (In the manga, the ransom is set at 300,000 florins for the prince, and 1500 florins for Heine and Maximilian)

Licht, on the other hand, earns 120 florins working at the cafe... which strikes me as odd because he only works one shift a week (even if a shift is potentially 12 hours). Now, this might actually be him figuring he works full-time, which would make more sense. But this has to be a YEARLY income, there’s no way he makes this much in a month if a member of the Royal Guard makes 300 florins a year.

Rosenberg quotes a rent of 150 florins for a 2br flat... again, this has to be for a year, there’s no way this is monthly.

Economic crisis 30 years ago (real world analogue: the European financial crisis beginning in the 1850s)

Granzreich's main industries: porcelain and wine

Also agriculture, according to the author's notes at the end of Vol 2

1880s TECHNOLOGY:

COMMUNICATION: Cables/telegrams are now fast enough for a 24-48hr message even all the way across Europe -- and crossing the English channel by ferry takes 1.5-2hrs

LOCAL TRAVEL: Primarily carriages, horseback, and walking -- trains are for longer-distance travel

INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL: You can get from London to Perm, Russia within SEVEN DAYS

TRAINS: The Orient Express (1883) went from Paris to Vienna in 15 hours overnight (not much different from now, actually!)

TELEPHONES: The telephone exchange does exist but the infrastructure is still VERY new and not heavily in use yet

POWER: Electricity is rapidly gaining ground for newer construction, but older buildings are still using gas, lamps, candles, etc.

1880′s EUROPEAN CULTURE:

Ballet, opera, operettas, plays, music

Social halls are still separated by 'class' (nobility vs commoner)

Popular dances in Europe at this point include the waltz (DUH, this is Vienna), the redowa, the mazurka, the polka (big shock with Germany next door), the cotillion, and the varsouvienne (another Polish dance)

Social etiquette at an event included the use of 'dance cards' (or fans!) - these were presented with a list of the songs/dances to be held over the course of the event, and if a gentleman wished to engage a lady for one, he wrote down his name (like making a reservation)

There is a TON of information out there about how one does (and does not) behave at a social event during that day and age, and safe bet that our dear princes have had it drilled into them from the time they were small. Some fun ones include:

WHY one wears gloves (because bare hands indicates holding hands, which is SHOCKINGLY intimate)

Not dancing with the same partner more than once (unless you're either engaged or about to be, because it puts you on intimate terms with your partner)

What is socially acceptable to eat at a party (the reason trifles and 'snacks' are served is so no one can embarrass themselves at table)

Games are occasionally combined with dancing (if you've seen AMADEUS, where during the masquerade they're playing Musical Chairs as they dance, and the loser has to pay a forfeit, you get the idea)

[aros001]

First time read through light novel vol. 15. Random thoughts.

No waiting! Door's open! Car's ready! Let's go!

Oh, and just as an added note, I have not yet watched any of the second half of season 2. I wanted to wait until after I'd read this volume, which I believe is the first time I've ever avoided watching episodes of a TV series so that I wouldn't be spoiled on what happens in the book it's based on.

The greatest asset they had—Garfiel—was almost certainly already engaging the main threat—Elsa. Both possessed superhuman strength, so they could be considered evenly matched—or at least, Subaru hoped so. He couldn’t be certain.

It does occur to me that Subaru probably wouldn't be the best for judging people's relative power levels. He's met plenty of powerful people in this world; Elsa, Reinhard, Puck, Julius, Petelgeuse, Roswaal, Garfiel, etc. But the thing is they all completely dwarf him in power, to the point that on an even playing field he wouldn't even be able to put up a fight. Yes, Garfiel could be an even match for Elsa...but I could also see Subaru thinking the same about Frederica and she was way outmatched by Elsa. All Subaru was going off of was that Frederica was stronger than him in a way he could never naturally obtain himself and so is Elsa, so he immediately conflates the two in his mind as equal strength, simply because he's so low all the bars above him look like they're overlapping.

“Truly...it would have been better if Betty were simply a book.”

Unable to indulge in even fleeting fantasy, Beatrice confessed her sad, painful wish.

If only she could be a doll without a heart, a storybook unshaken by the passage of time, then she wouldn’t have to suffer.

Ironically, though books themselves can't suffer, they can certainly cause suffering, both in the meta sense with what Re:Zero puts its characters through and the audience along with it, and the literal sense with how the books of knowledge and their prophecies are ruining Beatrice and Roswaal's lives but they can't bring themselves to give them up.

“Even if it’s only within Roswaal’s book of knowledge, the fact that Betty has been recorded... Does that mean Mother has not forgotten about her daughter, I wonder?”

Though there's something to be said about those who wrote the books too causing the suffering. Again, both meta and literal.

“O-of course I thought about it! Betty tried checking if there was anything on these blank pages again and again...but nothing ever changed!”

“That’s why you’re an idiot! What about trying to heat them to see if anything was written in invisible ink?! These days, no one falls for that trick anymore, even when it’s a novelty New Year’s card! Consider some more possibilities, would you?!”

...

“Like what if your mother messed up and gave you the wrong book by mistake?!”

“Huh...?”

The latest theory Subaru proposed was so haphazard that Beatrice didn’t even know how to respond. That surprise quickly gave way to anger as Beatrice’s ire only grew.

“Do you intend to insult Mother, I wonder?! Mother would never make such a stupid mista—”

“Can you say for sure it absolutely couldn’t happen? You don’t have even the slightest doubt? Are you so certain the only possible explanation is that your mother deliberately handed her own daughter a book with nothing but blank pages?”

Subaru used fallacies and questionable logic to massage and obfuscate the truth.

Subaru's become kind of an expert on dragging people down to his level, hasn't he? Rem, Roswaal, Emilia, Garfiel. Now Beatrice. Also, he just keeps digging himself deeper against Echidna. First he rejects her in favor of Satella, then vandalizes her tomb by carving love letters into its walls, then he makes out with Emilia inside her tomb, and now his basically insulting her intelligence to her daughter. If they ever meet again I suspect Echidna might just try and drown Subaru in her tea instead of offering him any.

“M-Mother surely would never make such a mistake. I-is that not obvious, I wonder? This is Mother we’re talking about! Would you doubt your own mother’s words?!”

“Of course I would! The times I can trust her don’t come along all that often! My mom’s the same person who heard a report about a satellite falling into ‘the atmosphere’ and somehow thought it was ‘Aichi Prefecture.’ I stopped believing any news that came from her mouth after that! It’d be mega-embarrassing if I spread around something that stupid again!”

It was impossible to forget how he’d been mocked by his classmates and neighbors for taking that story seriously and sharing it with everyone. To top it all off, the original culprit herself forgot she had started the whole thing and even asked him, Why on earth did you tell people that?

I kind of love this, especially after Subaru's trial showed just how loving, kind, and supportive Subaru's parents are. This series makes a point of saying that good doesn't mean perfect, and that's okay. People are naturally going to have flaws and shortcomings and that there's nothing wrong with that, so long as those flaws aren't toxic or harmful to others or themselves. Nothing about Subaru's mom being an idiot who too quickly buys into click-bait sensationalist news keeps her from being the woman who saw him off to school and was supportive even after his long absences.

Emilia's Unknowable Present trial, getting to live a life with Fortuna and Geuse like Pandora and Regulus never came to their village, reminds me a lot of what the Black Mercy plant showed Superman when it got attached him, namely getting to live a life in a world where Krypton never exploded and thus he was raised by his birth parents and even started a family himself on Krypton. The plant feeds you a hallucination of your heart's deepest desire as it in turn feeds on you, and the only way to escape it is to basically give up everything you've ever wanted. For Clark, that was his son, who was as real to him as his actual child could be.

Interestingly, though the story is similar with both Emilia and Superman rejecting the fake world in favor of the real one, the state they're left in afterwards is very different. For Emilia, her resolve is strengthened and her feelings for everyone still frozen have only grown deeper, while for Superman he flies into a rage at the villain who put him under the Black Mercy, and once that fades he's just left with sorrow over what he lost. I suppose a cause for big difference is that Emilia can, in theory, get back at least some of what she's lost. Not Fortuna and Geuse because, well, they're kind of dead, but the other villagers she can save from the ice. Emilia's escape from the fake world wasn't just accepting what she'd lost but also a push for her to stop hiding behind the protections of everyone in her life, including her own, and actually face the world. She has a goal she can work towards to find strength in. For Superman it was meant to be just a straight tragedy.

“—Why do you desire a future that will hurt you so much?”

“I don’t want to be hurt. I’m searching for a future where I don’t have to be hurt, where I don’t have to run, hide, or push things away, where I can hold hands with others.”

“And the wounds you suffer? The pain? What you have lost will never return. Will you search for such a thing even so?”

“ ___”

Even Emilia had thought of what it would be like to have no one think of her as detestable. Many times over, she’d wanted to cast all the pain and suffering by the wayside.

The earnestness in Archi’s words gently and deeply touched upon scars that covered Emilia’s weak heart.

“...I want people to think I look cool.”

...

“I want to be like Mom, who I look up to so much. I want to be gentle and strong, like Geuse. I want to be like Granny Tanse and the others, who were never mean to me even once. I want to be like Archi, who smiled to the very, very end so that I wouldn’t get scared.”

“___ ”

“I want to be like Puck, who kept protecting me so I wouldn’t be alone. I want to be like Ram, who wants to work harder than anyone else for the person she holds dearest. I want to be like Otto, doing his utmost for the sake of his friend. I want to be like Garfiel, who refuses to speak one timid word or complaint.”

“Emilia...”

“And I want to be like Subaru, who suffers and gets all beat up, who’s always reckless—who told me he loves me.”

I say it almost every volume but I'm loving the parallels between Emilia and Subaru. They don't want to be in pain, they don't want to suffer. They just want to be loved. They want to feel important and valued by those they love. They want to live up to the coolness and strength of everyone around them. Heck, Emilia seems to model herself after Fortuna about as much as Subaru seems to model himself after his dad. Both really are their parents' child (even if Fortuna is Emilia's aunt).

Even just her thanking Echidna like Subaru did for showing her the trial's world and giving her some closure she never could have had otherwise. Though Echidna's reaction is quite a bit more hostile than it was to Subaru.

The way to end the Trial was for Emilia to find herself and seek out a way to acknowledge, accept, and understand that self.

I'm curious if that is the general theme for the 2nd trial or if it's just specific to Emilia, because what we saw of Subaru's unknowable present, though he lost the right to face any more of the challenges, could certainly fit that description depending on how you view it. Emilia acknowledges, accepts, and understands herself by finally seeing herself as she is in the present and no longer turning away from her own reflection, while Subaru acknowledges, accepts, and understands himself by finally seeing the value in his own life beyond being a chip he can cash-in for RBD.

I am curious if there's any meaning to the differences in how Subaru and Emilia go through their trials though. Emilia's 2nd trial is like Subaru's 1st, where she's actually living and interacting with the world the trial created, with her memories of the real world needing to come back to her, while her 1st trial is like his 2nd, looking in on the world the trial creates only as an observer and unable to interact with anything.

Of course, it did not even think of defying the orders of its master. But it would obey those orders and nothing else. It simply owed a debt to the master, who had liberated it from the Curse of the Horn. Accordingly, it had listened to her request.

Hm. Now that's a curious bit of thought from the Giltirau. It's been established that demon beasts will obey whoever cuts off its horn. I'd always just assumed there was no choice in the matter. So is this just what the beast thinks is the case and it's deluding itself or under some kind of mind control, or is this genuinely how the beasts think and it obeys the cutter in order to pay them back for freeing them from the horn? If it's the latter, why is the horn a curse then?

“Eat the power of science, baby—Dust Explosion!”

Science, bitch!

The candle remained on the floor, showing no further sign of change. The one who had thrown it was frozen in place and sounded like there’d been a miscalculation.

Opp. Never mind. Subaru should have taken a lesson from Goblin Slayer. That man knows how to cause a dust explosion.

You know, one spoiler I got for this volume was that the mansion would catch on fire. I thought it'd be some way Subaru would be trying to free Beatrice from the library and the book of knowledge. I didn't think it'd be because of Otto accidentally burning the place down by using too much oil to kill a lion. Poor guy is going to be back to square one after this, if not horribly under debt. He only came along in the first place to try and sell his wares to Roswaal. If he burns down the clown's home he'll be lucky if Roswaal just declares them as even.

The Trials first showed a past linked to one’s greatest regret; then they showed a present that did not and could not exist; last, the challenger was shown a future she would inevitably have to confront head-on. These were the entirety of the Trials the tomb had prepared for her.

Yeah, I'm not going to lie, I couldn't make heads or tails of anything Emilia saw in "Face the calamity to come". I get the message and why she's able to pass but the descriptions were way too vague for me to get even hints of what was to come in this potential futures. Even looking it up didn't help much. All I've got for certain is Emilia telling someone she was once close to how much she hates them.

Of course, I am now wondering what Subaru's third trial would have been, had he not lost his qualification.

So the woman in the coffin looks like Echidna but isn't Echidna, at least from Emilia's POV. I've got three theories as to what that could mean:

This could be a case like how Satella and the Witch of Envy are technically two different people due to a split personality and thus Echidna and the Witch of Greed are two different people.

It is not Echidna's complete soul that was bound to the tomb. We know the soul transfer was an experiment that failed due to it not working out the way she wanted, so perhaps some parts of Echidna were lost in the transfer. Or we're going with Horcrux rules here and the Echidna in the trials is only a piece of her soul.

It was never Echidna who was giving the trials and having the tea parties but rather someone/something else assuming her form.

Then, as Emilia raced out of the tomb—

“—Eh?”

—the skin-stabbing cold and the ferociously blowing snow covering the Sanctuary made Emilia let out a white breath.

Aw, f**k.

“You ain’t immortal. It’s that ya won’t die till someone kills ya, right? Ain’t that right, vampire?”

“...You knew.”

“I had a hunch. Me, I loved readin’ books since waaaay back. I knew there were special sorts like that. Didn’t think I’d meet one right after leavin’ home, though.”

Oh! That explains a lot about Elsa, actually.

Elsa's story about growing up an orphan in the cold, being nearly (and thankfully only nearly) raped by a man she tried to rob, killing him and then finally feeling warmth from his blood and insides reminds me of a pitch I'd heard for a movie about Dracula's origins. After becoming the first vampire Dracula would take revenge on all those who had wrong him in his tortured life and the audience would feel sympathy for him...but only for a moment. Because whatever justice or righteous vengeance that might have been had is quickly overshadowed by the realization of the monster that has been unleashed upon the world.

“—I’m gonna kill ya, Elsa Gramhilde.”

“—It is because you will kill me that you are my first love, Garfiel Tinzel.”

Yeesh. They not on complete opposite ends of the spectrum but it's still hard to imagine a contrast more different than Elsa and Ram. Heck of a love triangle for Garfiel.

And of all the ways for Elsa to finally be slain, I can't say being crushed underneath a giant hippo thrown by a teenage man-tiger was one I expected.

“I’m impressed by how meticulous you are. How and when did you cast that spell on Lia...?”

“Spell...? Great Spirit, to what do you refer...?”

“Well, just listen. It got really hard to come out of my icon ever since we returned from the royal capital. If that was all, I would’ve pegged it as some kind of scheme by the Witch Cult group that attacked the village and the mansion, but I was stuck in there even after reaching the Sanctuary. So the spell had to come not from an enemy but from one of our own.”

...

“Fortunately, Lady Emilia was in low spirits from her argument with young Subaru. A little sabotage of your pact with Lady Emilia before departing for the Sanctuary was a trifling affair.”

“On the other hand, a pact between spirit and spirit mage is sacred... It’s not something that can be toyed with from the outside.”

“Even so, I have lived with Beatrice for quite a long time, you seeee. For better or worse, creating loopholes in predetermined things is a specialty of mine—though that girl is too obstinate for such things.”

Okay then. So while Puck definitely isn't a good father overall, it actually wasn't that he was refusing to come out when Emilia needed him. Roswaal used a spell to make sure that he couldn't, which makes sense given his big scheme, shown in a past loop, was to isolate Emilia from everyone and break her mentally.

“Love me? What are you saying?! You hate me. I am the man you hate. To you, I am a man linked to the cause of your homeland’s destruction. Surely, the truth is that you hate me enough to kill me!”

“In the beginning, it was so, but now it is not. Now Ram loves you.”

“That is absurd...! Who—who, I ask, would believe in such cheap emotions?!”

I'm not quite sure how to feel about this, and it's not because of any shipping reasons because I don't really have anyone I ship with Ram. Obviously I knew she had an attraction, I'm just wondering what it was that caused the change in Ram's feelings and what caused her to fall in love. With Subaru for Emilia and Rem for him we see how those feelings were sparked and even Garfiel for Ram has reasons that are simple attraction but easy enough to understand. So what was it for Ram?

“To Ram, this is...the root of all evil.”

Roswaal’s face went pale as he raced over to Ram. Smiling faintly at his action, Ram did not hesitate—she hurled the book of knowledge into the green flame still clinging to a fallen tree.

Sometimes the conditions for victory have little to do with actually winning the physical fight.

“No matter how far you go, you’re still human—you’ll never be like that devil.”

As the spirit flew off, his voice became distant, and his presence vanished, leaving behind only a soft glow.

What remained was the scattering snow and a girl carried by a devil—Nay, there was only a clown.

He was a wretched fool who had tried to become a devil and failed.

That is a really good line. I'm assuming the devil in question is Hector, given he's called the Devil of Melancholy. It is an interesting concept, trying to act like/resemble something you fear and horribly humbled you in the past.

“I won’t let anyone say it’s fine. As long as we’re alive, there’ll be none of this it’s fine stuff—that’s why I don’t want to give up on anyone, not anymore!”

She stood up. That instant, Emilia whirled around, thrusting her arm toward the forest behind her.

She froze to the bone the demon beast leaping toward her, enveloping it in blustering snow and glacial cold.

The creature she had caught was white, small enough to fit in her palm.

However, this was a ferocious being with gleaming red eyes.

—It had arrived. The demon beast known as the Great Rabbit had finally come.

Well....that definitely qualifies as a badass moment for Emilia. I remember when I first started reading the LNs I was worried I might have an unintentional bias against Emilia since, while I liked her fine in the anime, I liked Rem and her pairing with Subaru a lot more. Thankfully the books have really done a great job with Emilia, especially in her character development. I said back during the royal selection that LN Emilia definitely feels like she has more fire to her than her anime counterpart, at least in season 1. I don't think I ever would have expected her to yell at Roswaal the way she does here, and with it still being in character as she's doing it because she's worried about him and Ram.

Puck was a Great Spirit with origins identical to Beatrice’s. However, unlike how she lived according to the will of Echidna the Witch since days long past, he had started a new life long before the birth of the Sanctuary, and she had not seen him since.

Does that mean Puck has a witch as his "mother" too?

But what she found surprising was that he knew of Beatrice’s talents yet did not desire them in any way. Indeed, when he came to ask about curses, it was Beatrice, and not the archive of forbidden books, he came to consult.

The boy harbored no interest in the knowledge left in her care or Beatrice’s power whatsoever.

It's kind of funny how Subaru's ignorance and cluelessness have been both his greatest strength and biggest shortcoming since coming to this world. It wasn't even a thought in his head to consult the books for answers to his problems...probably in part to the fact that Subaru can't read this world's language. His logic was more than likely "Books might have the answer to my problem Beatrice has read a bunch of books. I should ask Beatrice for help!"

—She felt like she had reduced herself to a frivolous and very cheap clown.

Roswaal: "Achoo!"

For as Subaru ran through the inferno, swearing he would bring the girl with him, he was enveloped by an incredibly dense black miasma, almost like a cloak of shadow that shielded him.

Is this because of the Unseen Hands witch factor he got from killing Petelgeuse? Because the black miasma instantly make me think what happens when he tries to tell people about RBD and thus makes me think it's some protection the Witch of Envy is giving him.

A figure dressed in black emerged from the flames: a black-haired woman holding a black blade in her hand.

“Elsa...?”

OH COME ON!

“You’re not Elsa anymore, are you?”

When Subaru posed the question, Elsa—nay, the thing that had been Elsa—turned its empty black eyes toward him. There was no glint of life within them, only bottomless darkness. Subaru was peering into an abyss.

An empty body, a departed soul, and obsession incarnate. Driven by inexhaustible bloodlust, it dragged its smashed lower body along as it crawled toward Subaru through the raging fires.

This was far beyond an unnatural vitality that kept death at bay. The power had become nothing but a curse.

Just like Subaru’s Return by Death, it was nothing save a curse, a yoke placed upon her very life.

I've said it before, I like that dark magic in Re:Zero's world isn't just "spooky evil bad stuff" magic but rather DARK magic. Unnaturally and feels like it should not exist in the world. Elsa's a vampire but usually being a vampire in most stories tends to just equate to drinking blood, strong, and being hard to kill. Here, being a vampire makes Elsa truly seem like some unholy monster. Something truly undead. She's not a vampire because she was bitten by Dracula but rather she's a vampire in that she's a curse upon the world.

I really like how Subaru finally wins Beatrice over, and it's consistent with how he typically tends to make progress, by just being honest with people. He knows Beatrice doesn't need him and that he doesn't have anything to really offer her. So he simply tells her that he needs her and that he wants her around. He could lie or assume and just say he's the person she's waited 400 years for, but instead his words put the choice more in her hands. He's not going to set her free, she has to choose that freedom for herself.

Also, if Subaru's lifespan is just a blip in comparison to hers, what does Beatrice have to lose? If it's a waste of time, well then it's basically just a minute of her time being wasted, all things considered.

“—You wanted someone to take you outside! Isn’t that why you always sat in front of the door?!”

With a decisive sound, that world finally met its end.

The girl’s lonely cage, that solitary world known as the archive of forbidden books, was engulfed by flames and vanished.

But just before that happened, there was a sound.

—The sound of a single tome falling to the archive’s floor.

I HAVE WAITED SO LONG FOR THIS MOMENT!!!

—So began the pair’s first battle, one of the many, many times Beatrice the spirit and her contractor, Subaru Natsuki, would fight hand in hand.

I'm just imagining Subaru shoving Beatrice into Julius' face to brag about her.

Subaru: "You can keep your six little spirits, Julius! I got the best one of all right here!"

Beatrice: "Kindly keep Betty out of this dong measuring contest."

Once they gather the Great Rabbit's copies all in one place I thought they were going to either burn or freeze them all, but sending the Great Rabbit into another dimension was probably the better idea. If Beatrice's theory is right and the rabbit can only create a finite number of itself, even if it can spawn up to that number and infinite amount of times, then even if they failed to get all the copies, say one or two, then the remaining ones would be far less dangerous, since it can't spawn new copies as they all would still technically exist.

“I think you should say something to the one who worked the hardest.”

Subaru couldn’t help but give a short sigh when he saw her childish, cheek-puffing gesture. Then—

“Waaah!”

—sweeping an arm under her, he hoisted up her light body.

Ignoring her cutesy, plaintive cry, Subaru continued to embrace the girl as he twirled around on the spot.

“You did awesome! That’s my Beako! I love you!”

“W-wait a—! That’s not... W-would you let go, I wonder?! Betty is not...!”

“Good girl, good girl! You’re so, so cute! You’re wonderful, Beako! You’re the best, Beako! Beako forever!”

Aww. Subaru's such a good dad.

Given that Roswaal is indeed the original Roswaal, student of Echidna, having lived on into the present day by transferring his soul into the bodies of those in his direct family line, what age is the child when he transfers his soul into them? Is that like a Tanya situation, where Roswaal remembers everything from his old life but has to restart each time as a baby? Or is this like a rite of passage for the men in Roswaal's line and they take on the burden of the original's soul once they come of a certain age? It's difficult to say which is worse.

“It’s just—I think we need to have a proper talk about the baby in my belly!”

“...Excuse me?”

“I don’t know if it will be a boy or a girl, but we need to give it all the love and attention it needs! Still, I don’t know anything about these things... That’s why I have to discuss it with the child’s father...”

...

“Emilia-tan, you know babies aren’t delivered by birds or harvested from cabbage patches, right?”

“But babies are made when a man and a woman kiss, aren’t they?”

...

Given Emilia’s mindset at the moment, Subaru’s words were tantamount to saying he wanted to have lots and lots of children with her. Certainly, there was a part of him that did wish for that, but his top priority was setting Emilia straight.

“C-curse you, Puck...!!”

Subaru directed an angry murmur toward the absent kitty spirit, who continued to sleep deep inside the magic crystal.

—In the back of his mind, he felt like he could see the kitty spirit putting a paw on his head and sticking his tongue out with a thbpttt.

That is just bad parenting right there. Even if Emilia's mentally 14 her body is still physically 18 and would be dealing with at least the aftermath of puberty, if not puberty itself. Regardless of whether she should or shouldn't have sex it's still something she should know about, especially in a world like Re:Zero's where life expectancy probably isn't that high and thus it'd be more common for people to get married and have children at younger ages than in ours.

Also, I'm just kind of amused that in Rising of the Shield Hero, Raphtalia thinking pregnancy was caused by kissing was an anime-only thing, as in the LNs she was well aware of what sex was. Now I'm just going to be expecting Re:Zero to do the opposite and have anime Emilia know what sex is.

“Even if you’re not at full health, you just stood back and watched while people settled things with Roswaal. I was sure you’d flip out seeing him get smacked around that much.”

“What a foolish thing to say... Even Ram does not think Master Roswaal is someone who is never mistaken. If being punched is the natural course of events, he must accept what he deserves. But Ram is free to treat him with great gentleness after the fact. To not comprehend such a thing is the height of foolishness.”

Well, at least Ram's not blind to Roswaal's faults or unreasonably loyal.

“...This is your mother, right?”

“More importantly, this is Echidna, Subaru. Not the ‘Witch of Greed’ you are familiar with.”

Subaru echoed a question first hailed by Emilia, wondering about the two different Echidnas. At present, neither she nor Subaru had found a suitable answer to what that actually meant.

More fuel to the first two theories I had.

So the condition of Subaru's pact with Beatrice is that he can't form contracts with other spirits, and she used up all the mana she had stored up over 400 years to kill the Great Rabbit, meaning she can't do anything like their big battle again. Subaru's gate is completely collapsed, meaning he can't use magic at all, and just keeping Beatrice out during the day consumes all the mana he has. ...Fair enough. It does fit with how Subaru wins each arc, by drawing every sword he has to use and just barely winning despite what he loses in the process. Heck, he still is somewhat in the green here with what he's gained, given he has Garfiel on his side now. And I still feel like Subaru is going to brag about Beatrice to Julius. It also goes along with Beatrice's thoughts of how she and Subaru interacted in arc 2 anyway. He wasn't there for the knowledge or power in her possession. He came there simply for Beatrice. Everything from their pact to her knowledge and powers was simply an afterthought, if even a thought in his head to begin with.

“Emilia—I am your knight and yours alone.”

“—Yes.”

When Emilia responded to the words he spoke, an irresistible wave of emotions brought tears to her eyes.

Yet, even then, Emilia somehow managed to maintain her composure as she gently brought down the sword she had raised. She returned to Subaru, who continued to kneel, the symbol of a knight’s pride.

Reverently accepting it with both hands, he returned the sword to its scabbard.

Completing the ritual, Subaru looked up. With Emilia nodding in assent, he stood on the spot.

And then—

“Emilia-tan, it’s a bit late to mention this, but you look cute and superhot in that outfit.”

“Idiot.”

—with the solemn atmosphere of the ceremony shattered, Emilia stuck out her tongue at him with a reddened face.

My feelings for the Subarem ship haven't lessened but this arc has definitely raised the Subamilia ship up for me, and I didn't even dislike it before. I really did just need them to communicate and have more honest back and forths and this arc really managed to develop that nicely for them. I can buy that these are two people who will eventually have a romantic relationship.

“Mentally speaking, Anne and Emilia are not as far apart as some might think. If anything, Anne puts on greater airs than Lady Emilia. She might very well be the more mature of the two.”

“I’m still holding a grudge against her for planting the idea in Emilia-tan’s head that babies are made by kissing.”

Yeah, I'm still gonna blame Puck for not setting her straight on that.

“And now that you have rejected the path of the Sage and chosen the path of the Fool, I will never allow you to compromise. Is this not natural? It is you who wished for this.��

With Subaru unable to speak a word, Roswaal took a step forward, closing the distance between them. Then, reaching out with a hand, he grasped Subaru’s shoulder, gently pulled his face close, and whispered into Subaru’s ear.

“—Hereafter, if you lose someone around you who you should have protected, I will swiftly burn the remaining others away without hesitation and, with the cursed seal, become ash myself.”

“—?!”

“You have decided to shoulder all. You must not abandon anything. I will not allow a lost world to continue into the future. I reject your compromise—now that I have lost the book of knowledge, I have only you to guide me to Teacher, young Subaru. You and the path you walk.”

Jeez, Roswaal is such a good villain. Yes, he'll work with the hero and he'll do it willingly and genuinely...but that doesn't make him any less dangerous than before. If Subaru falters or fails, Roswaal will push him into using RBD to do things over. And there's little doubt he will, since we've seen him in a few loops already in this arc perfectly content with dying or throwing everything and everyone away when a plan didn't work out, either because he knew Subaru would loop and another life would be better...or simply because continuing on in a world where his plan failed wouldn't be worth anything. It's a good little wrench to throw into the story now that Subaru is going to try to rely on RBD less, and it's a good way of showing Roswaal has not magically changed 100% from who he's been throughout the story and that even bound by a curse he can still do a lot of damage.

The girl walked forward, her long pink hair swaying as she murmured to herself.

The Witch had been released unto the world once more.

...That's probably not good. If I'm reading this right, Echidna, or at least the not-Echidna of the tomb trials, has come back from the dead by way of soul-transfer into the body of one of the Ryuzus.

I cannot state enough how happy I am for this volume to come out and for this arc, that I did really enjoy, to come to an end. Not only was I not letting myself watch the anime until I got this but I wasn't going to let myself start on the web novels either until I finished reading this arc in the LNs. Since vol. 16 doesn't come out until the near end of June and there's no f**king way I'm waiting that long again, I think at some point I'll just start on arc 5 in the WNs and go all the way until wherever it is in the present because I NEED TO KNOW!!! Might even do random thoughts on both the WNs and LNs, which would be kind of interesting. The only comparisons I've been able to do before is the LNs to the anime. I've heard the LNs are pretty faithful to the WNs but I have heard of some differences, like Puck not being in the battle between Ram and Roswaal (and just Puck being a bit more of a prick in general in the WNs).

Original Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Re_Zero/comments/m64crq/novels_first_time_read_through_light_novel_vol_15/

[tinymixtapes]

Music Review: Death From Above - Outrage! Is Now

Death From Above Outrage! Is Now [Last Gang; 2017] Rating: 1.5/5 Outrage! Is Now is a fucking boring album. Yes, it “Rocks”®. That’s something I can’t touch. It’s musically engineered from elements so well worn that it couldn’t possibly fail. Death From Above treat listeners to endless Guitar Center-tested minor pentatonic riffs set over athletic dance rock beats acutely designed to tease the difference between a dance floor and a mosh pit. The main riff that drives opener “Nomad” may well be lifted from classic rock revivalists Wolfmother and their 2006 breakout hit “Woman” (which itself is lifted from actual classic rock band Black Sabbath). Beyond this, listeners are treated to tired production gimmicks right off the bat: twice in the album’s first five minutes we get to hear a tinny high-pass filter give way to a more massive, blown-out full-band sound, a trick built of cinematic drama and self-aggrandizement that we continue to be treated to throughout the remainder of the album. I can’t tell you that these tricks don’t work well, because they do. But what I can tell you is that they don’t exactly constitute creativity, leading to music that feels regurgitative, calculated, and industry-tested. This wouldn’t be an issue were it not for the fact that the album positions itself as somehow relevant to its surroundings, somehow speaking to a climate of outrage, despite its seeming insincerity regarding the political and social contexts it finds itself in. The shallow cynicism and apathy that animates so many of its songs are under-interrogated by its writers, instead finding form as a pessimist’s non-committal, inconclusive pouting. Several of the album’s central lyrical hooks rely on cheap wordplay of the sort that suggests further meaning but adds little poetic value. Consider the refrain “Nomad, never home/ No matter where you go/ Push them like they push you/ No matter what you do,” which takes its central subject of a nomad from the meaningless pun between the word “nomad” and the phrase “no matter.” Beyond the absurdly insubstantial forced resonance between the two words, these lines lack insight altogether1. Worse yet is the wordplay from which the album’s faux-political front cover declaration stems. “Outrage! Is Now” begins with this tone-deaf incitation: “Outrage! Outrage! I’m Out Of Rage Maybe It’s My Age But I Can See A Clear Light So What. So What. Maybe I’m Wrong Suddenly, I Don’t Belong To Anyone, Or Anything” I’m surprised that lyrics this offensively mediocre can fly, even from a duo whose initial success was primarily pinned on one lucky album and a successful design campaign. The beautiful irony of these lyrics is that their concern with age bring the duo back into conversation with their indie revival rockstar peer James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem), who they once, in 2004, so eloquently “threatened” with death2. But while 2017’s aging Murphy looks inward to bring himself to show vulnerability and acknowledge that it may be best to sit out and watch the valuable conversation being had (“I’ve just got nothing left to say/ I’m in no place to get it right […]I’m just too old for it now/ At least that seems to be true”), Death From Above’s lyrics lack any of the same introspection or self-awareness3. Outrage! Is Now feels like a stranger’s interjection into a heated conversation of which the stranger has little insight, and instead of asking questions or simply listening to others, the stranger is overwhelmed by an urge to voice an opinion. This is the attitude that deceitfully puts itself on the cover. The boring and ignorant version of nihilism that occupies Outrage! Is Now is delivered from a pulpit, the major cause of utter annoyance I feel when I listen the album. It’s an unfortunate step up to the plate when the band hardly even took the soapbox in their first incarnation. While You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine wore its womanizing sexual agenda on its spine, it nonetheless proceeded to be a truly interesting intersection of rock and dance music for its imbrication of harsh noise, explicit sexuality, and succinct repetitive hooks. Outrage! Is Now, however, cowers under a political agenda and, as such, loses all essential character. Our self-proclamatory anti-anthem “Outrage! Is Now” couldn’t be bothered to show up before the arrival of the four-minute sleaze-rock pickup line that is “Caught Up,” a song that drunkenly whispers, “I’m not caught up like all the other guys, but I’m still caught up on something.” The courtship within is incredibly bland, devoid of the excitement found in so much other sex music (including the band’s earlier work). Lyrically-depicted sex finds its place in the ambiguously titled banger “Never Swim Alone” (“Valet park my hump machine/ Backseat conceive, so unclean”), which shoots for the excitement of their earlier work but falls flat with forced rhymes referencing comment sections, Rinpoche, and carbonated water. The music video for “Freeze Me” follows suit, valuing signification over comment. It opens with a TV newsreel depicting breaking news of decontextualized “RIOTS IN THE STREETS,” then fixing its gaze upon a quintet of intensely muscled body-builders. These characters flex, pose, relax, and play in a lavish mansion on a hill for the larger part of the video. The camera’s gaze allows simultaneous sexualization of and alienation from its subjects, an absurdly neutral fixation that doesn’t lead on to any understanding of their role in the situation. By the end of the video, they look out over their valley, brandishing deliberate eye protection and watching the large city in the distance (already in flames amidst its political uproar) disappear under a cheaply rendered mushroom cloud. The implication behind this final moment is unclear, a reading that either (a) continues the band’s cheap, immature, and condescending nihilism, or (b) directly villainizes its othered and exoticized subjects. I know this shit is essentially 2017’s equivalent for the butt rock of yesteryear: fit to form, sure to sell, depoliticized by design. I also know that it’s meant to be fun and that hanging this much intellectual baggage on it might be a mistake (even picking up the lyric sheet might be a mistake of its own). Nonetheless, I can’t hear this record as not only an annoyance, but a bland extension of the overconfident, ignorant solipsism that once drove a self-serious sex rock duo to return to practice in 2011 with a messianic claim: “Jesse and I have decided that what we can do together should not be denied … The collision of two different worlds … we will reveal it to you. All of it happening, as it always has, in our own way.” 1. If the focus on nomadism here is intended to be somehow political, its argument is ahistorical. By insisting that their nomadic subject has been forced into nomadism and only retains that state due to permanent exile or displacement, the band seems to conflate nomadism with current situations of emigration and refuge. This makes the anathematized imperative “push them like they push you” not only naive, but condescending, insensitive, and unhelpful. If this reading seems perhaps too critical or too paranoid, then we can take the song’s interest in the nomad as an invested evocation, in which case it also fails. A wanderer is a likely source of relation for those who find themselves at the fringe of culture that may be part of why the archetype lends itself so well to hard rock and metal. However, “Nomad” not only forgoes relation by establishing that its speaker is distinctly not the nomad, but additionally by failing to provide any evocative details that allow a listener to walk in the nomad’s shoes, so to speak. “Nomad,” the album’s opening song, arises out of a single cheap pun and proceeds to say nothing. 2. James Murphy’s label DFA Records once entered a litigation suit with Death From Above (1979) over their right to use the name Death From Above. Death From Above (1979) reportedly responded at the time with a note on their website: “FUCK DFA RECORDS FUCK JAMES MURPHY WE DECLARE JIHAD ON THEM HOLY WAR ENDING IN THIER [sic] DEATH AND DISMEMBERMENT… james murphy is a selfish piece of fuck that will burn in the flames of a specially dedicated rock and roll jihad. if i had the resources i would fly a plane into his skull.” 3. Consider either of these examples against Suicide’s Alan Vega, who on his 2017 posthumous release IT (recorded at age 78) was able to summon the rage that begins a song with the shouted warning: “Racists, stay away/ Hey lousy white racists, stay away.” This is not to say that such rage is to be expected as a high standard of any artist of age, but that the under-interrogation and self-delusion that these artists come forward with is a truly lazy artistic copout. http://j.mp/2fLjhUJ

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 05/25/2017

Pen drawings of famous and recognizable company logos are grouped together under the instruction, "Name these brands". Next to them are drawings of leaves from different species of trees, grouped under the instruction, "Name these plants". One is much more likely to be able to identify the Facebook, Lacoste, McDonald's, Volkswagen, Apple, and Nike logos than leaves from the sugar maple, poison sumac, douglas fir, white oak, bigtooth aspen, and southern magnolia. Source.

Green Manifestos

Restless Vegans Manifesto: "Animal liberation and anti-oppression are theoretical causes. Veganism is a practical effect. The original motivation is always a cause not an effect. We observe that the effect begins to overshadow the cause. We adopt the practical effect (vegan identity in this case) while we attempt to clarify our political/ethical standpoint to members of dominant culture which basically asks us 'Then you don’t eat this?' etc. Prominence of 'vegan identity' instead of 'anti-oppression identity' or 'animal rights activist identity' occurs after we accept the consumerist culture of the society. It means we could not save ourselves from being homo-consumericus. Yet, life cannot be reduced to consumption. It makes no sense to discuss whether we are carnivores, herbivores or omnivore anymore. We are only homoconsumericus!" Note: The PDF viewer on the page isn't accessible, but the PDF can be downloaded. An account is needed, but there are plenty of disposable temporary email sites out there ;)

Destroying Civilization, Destroying Nature: Theses toward decivilizing and becoming dangerous: "1. One of the most harmful prevailing prejudices of our times is the belief in Nature as a unified being separate from, and even opposed to Humanity (also perceived as a unified being). In the context of this doctrine, what is specifically Human – what is created by conscious human activity – is called Artificial as opposed to Natural. 2. The concept of Nature (that is the concept that all beings, things, relationships and activities not created by human beings constitute a unified whole that stands in contrast to all the things, beings, relationships and activities consciously created by human beings) is itself a product of conscious human activity and, thus, artificial."

Drawings of three people whose bails were posted by The Bronx Freedom Fund. Donald worriedly looks out into the distance, with his quote below, "I was gonna miss Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's." Jorge dances with his wife, with his quote below, "The door was open and the guards told me, 'You're a free man.'" Makayla joyfully runs, with her quote below, "I wanted to join the choir. I wanted to dance." Source.

Get Rid of Prison

The Bronx Freedom Fund: "Why help pay bail for others? While bail was not intended as a form of punishment, it’s certainly used as one. Even one night in jail can place defendants in jeopardy of losing public benefits, healthcare, housing, jobs, and custody of their children. While detained, defendants have no bargaining power or ability to prove their ties to family and community, forcing many to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. This results in a criminal record that follows them the rest of their lives."

Chelsea Manning Is Free–but Whistleblowers Still Face Prison: "Human Rights Watch is glad that Chelsea Manning is free. A statement from the group’s General Counsel’s office notes that Manning’s “absurdly disproportionate” 35-year sentence for passing classified documents to Wikileaks in 2010, commuted by Barack Obama on his last day in office, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, which they warn still stands ready for use against the next potential whistleblower. The Act was intended to punish those who leak secrets to foreign governments, but the US government is increasingly keen to turn it against those who give information to journalists. Critically, those prosecuted under the Act can’t argue they intended to serve the public interest, and prosecutors don’t have to prove that national security was harmed at all, much less that it outweighed the public’s right to know."

An ad for the (unfortunately not real) medicine Islamophobin. A foil blister pack of green chewable tablets emerges from orange and blue medicine packaging labeled "ISLAMOPHOBIN: Multi-Symptom Relief for Chronic Islamophobia". According to the packaging, the “maximum strength formula” treats blind intolerance, unthinking bigotry, irrational fear of muslims, and US presidential election year scapegoating. Beneath these symptoms are the words “SPREADS LOVE” and instructions to take two and call a Muslim in the morning, along with a warning: May result in peaceful coexistence. Source.

Identity Politics

Identity Crisis: "Despite its progressive origins, identity politics has now increasingly become an obstacle to unity. In an ironic reversal, what once began as a critique of reductionism within socialist movements has now fallen into the same conceptual error. Historically, many socialist movements were mired by a crass 'workerism' that argued workers necessarily had the correct political worldview simply by virtue of the fact that they were workers. If any bad ideas had entered the movement, it was on account of petty-bourgeois influences. Those issuing from proletarian backgrounds were lauded, while those who did not were heavily scrutinized, forced to atone for parents’ occupations, or pressured to change their 'class identity.'"

Who is Oakland: anti-oppression activism, the politics of safety, and state co-optation: "This pamphlet – written collaboratively by a group of people of color, women, and queers – is offered in deep solidarity with anyone committed to ending oppression and exploitation materially. It is a critique of how privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by confusing identity categories with solidarity. This conflation, we go on to argue, minimizes and misrepresents the severity and structural character of the violence and material deprivation faced by marginalized demographics."

A screenshot of a Wikimedia list article titled "List of left-wing rebel groups". Underneath the title is a Wikimedia expand list request which reads, "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it." The words, "you can help by expanding it," is circled multiple times in red, with multiple arrows pointing to it. Source.

Activism

A collection of left-leaning tech-related groups in California’s Bay Area:

Ragtag

Techs and Balances

Tech Workers Coalition

Silicon Valley Rising

Tech Equity Collaborative

Tech Stands Up

Direct Action Item

Have any books been influential in your life? This week, talk to someone about it! If you have a physical copy, swap books with someone and learn more about each other's beliefs, politics, and lives.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[tuthillscopes-blog]

Henry Greens Party Going: an eccentric portrait of the idle rich

check it out @ https://tuthillscopes.com/henry-greens-party-going-an-eccentric-portrait-of-the-idle-rich/

Henry Greens Party Going: an eccentric portrait of the idle rich

Amit Chaudhuri revisits a masterful tale of revellers stranded in a hotel, which recalls Joyce and Woolf but resembles neither

In the late 1980s, after i would be a graduate student in Oxford, I purchased a amount of three novels by a writer I hadnt heard about, Henry Eco-friendly. The Eco-friendly everyone was speaking about then had an e in the finish of his surname, and the name was Graham. He was almost a precise contemporary of Henrys: born in 1904, annually before Eco-friendly, he resided considerably longer. Both belonged to well-to-do families, but Eco-friendly was particularly affluent. His father was an industrialist. Id attempted studying Graham Greene, but had not made much headway. Then Henry Eco-friendly arrived, and Graham quickly grew to become, for me personally, another Greene, after which not really that. About Henry Eco-friendly, however, theres an irreducible, longstanding excitement one of the couple of who’ve read him.

I have to have purchased the 3-novel amount of Loving, Living, Party Going because John Updike had, in the summary of the amount, not just given Eco-friendly centrality like a precursor, but known as him a saint from the mundane. The religious example was excessive, what had helped me admire Updike to begin with was the means by which hed deliberately made room for that mundane, for that banality that fills our way of life and means they are truly interesting. But I discovered Eco-friendly to become a different of author, with almost no chroniclers impulse that every so often directed Updikes decade-lengthy projects, with no abiding curiosity about realism, despite his remarkable eye and ear and the gift for recording character. Replying to some question offer him by Terry Southern for that Paris Review in 1958 Youve described your novels as nonrepresentational. I question if youd mind defining that term? Eco-friendly stated:

Nonrepresentational was designed to represent an image that was not really a photograph, nor a painting on the photograph, nor, in dialogue, a tape recording. For example, the deaf, like me, hear probably the most astounding things over-all them that have not actually been stated. This enlivens my replies until, through mishearing, a brand new degree of communication is arrived at. My figures do not understand one another greater than people do in tangible existence, yet they are doing so under I. Thus, when writing, I represent very carefully things i see (and I am not seeing very well now) and just what I hear (that is little) however i express it is nonrepresentational since it is not always what others hear and see.

Eco-friendly actually stands approximately James Joyce, in the inclination to become intolerant of ordinary British syntax and punctuation, and Virginia Woolf, in the feeling of how narrative could be formed by things outdoors of event. But, out of the box obvious from his remarks to Southern, Eco-friendly further conflates his aesthetic with disability and eccentricity. (Right at the beginning of the job interview, he will not field an inconvenient question for the reason he cant hear the interviewer, although it rapidly becomes apparent the deafness is opportunistic.) Greater than Joyce and Woolf or other author I’m able to consider, Vegetables contribution towards the modern novel may be the imprimatur of the unapologetic eccentricity and, through it, a reconfiguring of the thought of singularity.

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Communicated joy and delight Henry Yorke AKA Henry Green

I have seen that Picador omnibus edition in the hands of readers and teachers, creased, carried with a degree of protectiveness. But, by all accounts, it didnt do well and soon went out of print. Since then, Greens nine novels have had spasmodic resurrections, come and gone and come back again. What will it take for Green to penetrate the general consciousness? His writing went out of view after he died in 1973 (and he hadnt written a book for 20 years before that), though more recently a handful of influential literary champions made him something of a cause. But maybe its to do with what Ezra Pound known as age. Most likely the recent decades havent been receptive to some novelist whose sole purpose appears to become to fashion a language that to speak pleasure. Woolf was shockingly neglected her present status owes less to literary critics regarding feminism. Jean Rhys was absolutely forgotten until her last work, Wide Sargasso Sea, permitted her to become annexed later by postcolonialists. Joyces mythic scaffold and verbal play identified him to academia to be essential both to modernism and also to the work of hermeneutics. I mention these authors not just due to their ability to transform and delight but additionally because some facet of their writing continues to be converted advantageously into some terms which are vital that you particular literary historic moments. With Eco-friendly, were given one type of artist who, such as the poets of ancient India and A holiday in greece, is not to provide us but delight. We dont get sound advice with your a author.

I hesitate to Party Going a modernist work because its sui generis, stands by itself, and it has not given itself to the modernism industry. However it has something that is similar to standard modernist texts, through which I am talking about not just what Frank Kermode known as its mythic structure, or its mythic punctuation of dead pigeons and bathing women, or its purgatorial fogbound atmosphere, or even the periodic abnormality of their syntax, but the truth that its thinking about and not the journey however the waiting, and not the event however the interruption. Dense fog working in london causes all trains to become cancelled. Traffic on the highway reaches a dead stop some people enroute towards the station need to abandon their cars and walk a minute of both liberation from, and lack of, class privilege. Among throngs of frustrated but jubilant commuters several wealthy people has convened they expect to go to the south of France as visitors from the qualified Max Adey. Two women especially are in search of Max: Julia Wray and Amabel. Max continues to be intending to escape Amabel, but she tracks him lower. Meanwhile, the entire group continues to be gone to live in the station hotel and given rooms with baths the shutters towards the station happen to be introduced lower. Amabel in some way finds her way inside, and Max reaches once ashamed, trapped, and temporarily disarmed by her immense beauty. It appears to Julia, whom Max have been courting inside a room not lengthy ago, that her putative romantic holiday with Max isn’t to become.

The simultaneity from the narrative causes it to be less just like a text supervised by an omniscient narrator than the usual particular type of cinema, a cinema less invested in one protagonist as with whats happening at the same time in a number of rooms and also the spaces around them. The fabric continues to be organised by an auteur akin, in the method, to some film editor, like a montage of quickly intercut scenes that produces a fantasy of unity and continuity. The restricted but unique locale and also the limited time period of the experience stimulate Jean Renoirs The Rules of the Game, which depicting several upper-class individuals with conflicting love interests who end up stranded with their servants inside a manor house on the country estate throughout the weekend too constitutes a narrative from nothing. Released, like Party Going, in 1939, the show isnt about either belonging somewhere or just being in exile it’s about inhabiting a transient, busy condition of unfinishedness. The aesthetic of these two works is remarkably congruent. Both also appear before the destruction from the worlds contained within them, and both possess a strange indestructibility. Renoirs film was trashed by the best and also the left because of its pointless portrayal from the inefficient wealthy, simply to be recognised in later decades like a landmark of cinema.

Self-absorbed upper classes Satyajit Sun rays Kanchenjungha.

Kanchenjungha (1962) by Renoirs most gifted student, Satyajit Ray is known as following the mountain peak the films upper-class holidaymakers are advised of because they mill round the hill station of Darjeeling. They’re completely self-absorbed, as the Kanchenjungha provides an opening right into a world beyond that will not present itself. Are you able to believe this area was only a Lepcha village prior to the British switched it into the town? states the insufferable patriarch Mister Indranath for the finish from the film. Empire! It had been insubstantial by 1962, such as the mist. Its becoming intangible in Party Going too, but not really much. Its there, within the global allusions, the truly amazing railways.

Sun rays film is instantly. The expertise of studying Party Going approximates this a feeling of getting joined, through the sentence, a particular continuum and time period. The 4 or 5 hrs it requires to complete the novel can also be the time where the fog rolls in after which begins to lift. The spell lifts too, so we understand weve joined a global we cant possess. This conflation from the figures time using the readers suggests the authors preoccupation with and mastery of form, that is a different type of reality towards the one the novel is depicting the result of his abstract nonrepresentational method.

Party Going isnt a singular within the usual feeling of the word. It provides us a superbly comic account of their figures, but it’s also an assemblage of moments, as well as different types of awareness around the globe as well as of writing. Eco-friendly is certainly not otherwise mindful of his literary context: when Julia walks towards the station and registers the procession of headlights at nighttime, the narrator points to the novels antecedents: These lights will come like ideas in darkness, inside a stream There are the epic similes, signalling to all of us that Eco-friendly resided currently once the British authors inheritance went beyond European modernism. Here the narrator describes a couple in Maxs party browsing the station to place their host:

Like two lilies inside a pond, romantically some of it but infinitely remote, encircled, supported, floating inside it for a moment, but forecasted when you are different onto another plane, even though there am much water you can avoid seeing these flowers or were prone to miss them, was Miss Crevy and her youthful man, apparently peaceful, envied for his or her clearly easy conditions and Angela coveted on her looks by all individuals water beetles if you want, by individuals people standing round.

Eco-friendly makes them vivid, semi-ironical comparisons frequently. Here, the simile concerns the station masters look at crowds of smokers, every third person smoking it could have the ability to looked to Mr Roberts, ensconced in the office away above, like November sun striking through mist rising off water. As Max and Amabel talk on the telephone before he heads off and away to the station (he’s laying to her about his intentions), her observation that here i am like a few old washerwomen slanging away at one another sounds more striking of computer should, as though Amabel were unwittingly situating the storyline inside a world good reputation for the epic. Two pages on, as Alex proceeds with the fog inside a taxi, it appears the [s]treets he experienced were wet as if that fog 20 feet up had deposited water, and glare which lights slapped within the roadways recommended to him he may well be a Zulu, within the Zulus hell of ice, sitting down in the taxi in negligence Umslopogaas together with his axe, skin beating within the hole in the temple …. And Robert Hignam, because he presses with the crowd within the station, remembers:

When small he’d found patches of bamboo in the parents garden also it was his romance in those days to pressure through them they increased so thick you can avoid seeing what temple might lie in ruins just beyond. It had been now, these physiques so thick they may have been an outlet of tailors dummies, water heated. These were so stiff they may as well happen to be soft, inflamed bamboos in groves only while he had once pressed with these, moist and warm.

The shutters are soon likely to come lower within the station, keeping new commuters out Maxs group will probably be at the same time nervously and luxuriously ensconced within the station hotel. Regardless of the feeling of enclosure and jail time (we’re simply inside a condition of siege you realize), the narrative has ramified and been placed on the planet: Party Going is both a comedy along with a cosmology. It is not about being hemmed in or trapped, or about being British. It enacts a fluidity of perception where it is also about being Zulu, about people being when compared with branches, to household servants inside a princes service, where Amabel is famous not just in London however in northern England and Hyderabad, in which the a large number of Smiths, a large number of Alberts, countless Marys seen collected below from the hotel window appear woven tight just like any office carpet or, more stylishly made, the holy Kaaba soon to create out for Mecca. Party Going is partially art-house movie, having a unique soundtrack, and partially certainly one of individuals remarkable British texts, like Basil Buntings Briggflatts, by which locality, eccentricity as well as class flow interior and exterior other cultures. Its this flow that’s envisaged here with regards to the noise, the murmurs, the silences, the laughter and also the courtships that occur as the trains have stopped, to ensure that any time things might open within an unlikely way.

A brand new edition of Henry Vegetables Party Going is printed by NYRB Classics.

Find out more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/18/henry-green-party-going-amit-chaudhuri