#getting stuck with the three most pacifist people on earth

[berlingotesque]

I just rediscovered this doodle (drawn last month) of my boys that I didn't post and had to share it with you. I'm personally convinced that Norman is the most conventionally and socially free man in New York. Accompanying it, a very old experiment with colors and shading techniques (featuring two of my favorite batim pairings)

Also, I watched the The Last of Us series earlier this year and couldn't help but project some of my Batim faves into this kind of apocalyptic scenario (and note how Sammy, having never held a gun in his life, would absolutely rock that end of the world shit and die of old age lmao)

[mythicaldemigoddess-of-deltarune]

Credit for 22-Jump Street 2014 Movie goes to Columbia Pictures & Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Credit for Cuphead Series goes to StudioMDHR

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it seems that scene is really REALLY popular by fans,

that it has become a meme....I just had to draw it.

sure I can’t make it into animatic, but this is just as good.

I do plan to post this at the other place I go to.

but I think I will wait until later to do it, maybe a hour or so.

the word “Patty-Cake” seem like a good word to put down.

playing patty-cake can be personal to toons.

so yeah I am using the word as a censor for the real word

that is used and well even if I have only seen little bit of clips,

and seen the animatic crossover of the Captain’s Daughter.

I hope to watch the full movie someday.

as for who the Angel (with demon horns headband on to hide the fact she isn’t a demon.) is in this drawing.

she is suppose to be Devil’s Daughter and King Dice’s Step-Daughter.

and no she doesn’t have a Mom,

and the Devil didn’t just create her on purpose.

ya see when a Soul, even a former Angel like Devil,

they can go through a fragmenting, where a piece of their Soul

will break off from their very being and make what is called

a newborn soul, if there are two souls about to fragment

a part of themselves then the two fragments will merge together,

making the newborn soul that is formed have two Soul-Parents instead of one.

so yes the daughter in this drawing

was born Soul-Asexually.

and I know I said this before

but I will say it again, that the Asexual Reproduction

should not be confused for the Asexual Identity,

even if you only use the word “Asexual”

and could mean one or the other, it is best to be clear so there is no misunderstandings.

speaking of identities, I wonder if it is normal to form

a type of Species Identity?

is it weird the other day ago

I started to think of myself being Demi-Human...?

well with the soul/spiritual heritage I have,

I guess I would still be a Demi-Human either way.

I mean try to hope that me having Vampire heritage was just a prank,

but my pendulum gave another Yes about it,

went Yes again when I asked if my spiritual heritage 

is Earth Angel & Succubus.

well spiritual heritage is something you are stuck with for life,

even when you end up being reborn, it will be stuck with you for eternity.

 at least I was given a No when I asked if I have werewolf heritage.

but it be cool if it did give me a Yes about that question.

it did give a Yes when I asked if my Older Brother has werewolf heritage, so if I had to guess, if he supposedly has it,

it would most likely be from his dad.

my pendulum did give a Yes when I asked if my Brother

has Vampire heritage too, and another Yes when I asked if it comes from our Mom.

so if my pendulum isn’t pranking,

that would mean that my brother is like Vampire/Werewolf.

well I know I wouldn’t want to go all drinking the same thing as the full vampires....no thank you.

plus I do like garlic sauce and find it really yummy,

and I have a reflection.

well, even if I am some kind of descendant of some unknown vampire

ancestor (unless it is my and Vlad The Impaler’s shared paternal ancestor, who’s two wives make us distant half-cousins.)

that would only be my biological heritage, my vessel form.

like I said the spiritual heritage is something you are stuck with...

for life and eternity.

at least I got permission to go live with the Divine Mother/Goddess

over at Earth-Heaven/Neo-Heaven...

because of what I am, I don’t think I would fit in very well...

 I know one thing, if it is true that the 9 Circles of Heck

is in the 5th Heaven, then people might not take it very well.

I think I want to see that as a Fan-Headcanon for Hazbin Hotel.

of course it might only be Fan-Canon to a AU of it.

plus hypothetically let’s say that it is true

that the Circles/Rings of Heck/Hell is in the 5th Heaven,

 and is in Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss.

wouldn’t that mean that Charlie doesn’t know that her subjects,

both demon-born and former human/sinner-demon,

are technically already in heaven, they are just in the 5th part of it,

but are inside a type of Ring Prison.

wouldn’t that blow one’s mind if that turned out to be canon.

but I don’t think that would be added into those two shows.

but it would still be good and interest for Fanon-AU use.

some stuff that fans come up and theorize,

wont always be canon to the series and that’s fine.

well Starco ended up becoming 100% Canon.

which I think if things turned out different, Star could of ended up with Tom because of that vote/poll.......pretty sure that had something to do with Star and Marco ending up together in the very end.

also while playing Yandere Simulator the other day,

I had figured out that it is a bad idea to take a ring...

cause if you don’t put it in Osana’s bag

or keep it and then try to leave Akademi,

you will get in big trouble, so if you are trying for a Pacifist Route

and only want to befriend Osana and try to get her to be with Kyuji,

then do NOT take that ring that you will find on the rooftop

next to one of those two purple haired sisters.

I had to start all over because of that, of course I still have the save where I fully beat Osana and it now says that the new rival is Amai.

so right now I have two saves, and in the new save I wanted to try to save Osana’s cat and try to get her and Kyuji together.

so far Kyuji has changed himself to look like Osana’s dream guy,

I just hope me leading him to the library and getting him to study,

had helped....

of course when I did help him talk to Osana while hiding behind a tree,

I had to re-send that letter to Osana and tell her about it again,

because when I was waiting behind the school, she was a bit late.

so yeah I had to leave the place and go and send the letter again

and then I had to tell her about it again.

 interesting to know, that before I went to save her cat,

I got the blonde hair dye first (from using Ayano’s computer.)

and then when I ended up at the Stalker’s place,

Ayano’s hair was blonde, so that was fast.

and it was still nighttime in the game too.   

I also decided to join the cooking club,

I think if I am a part of the cooking club it might make it more easy

to try to talk to Amai, at least I can only hope it does.

each time I tried to talk to her in my other save,

she just couldn’t and was busy.

in my other save I am in the Music Club.

when I make another save, I want to try to join a different club.

I am taking a bit of a break from playing the game right now,

I will play more of it later.

I do have a theory about Fun-Girl from Yandere Simulator,

I can’t help but think of her being a like Gaster.

I even did a crossover drawing of Fun-Girl and Gaster.

I will post it up on here too, and also post it over at the other place I go to as well.

anyway back to this drawing, it is a crossover

and it is a reference to that 22 Jump Street Movie,

which once again I hope to watch someday.

and yeah Cuphead is holding a cross, for obvious reasons.

Mugman is of course is still thinking and processing

what Snake-Eyes are talking about.

well we know how it will end up,

and Mugman is going to be very amused.  

I don’t really feel like drawing that, so it’s fine that it is just this.

the OC in this drawing, in the role of the daughter,

might end up being a one-shot character...

if someone wants to do a continue drawing response to this drawing,

like make a short comic or animation of it, I guess I be okay with it...

but the likely of someone drawing a continue/comic version of this,

is perhaps very little and not likely to happen.

but at least I enjoyed drawing this.

I think sometime I will post a song I wrote a few years ago,

when I was in a very dark place, I was happy to find out that it survived

after what happen in March this year....

it is something I put some very personal feelings down in the song.

also it’s okay that not many agree with me having a species identity,

I mean if I am Aroaceflux, Gyno-Agender and Demi-Human,

then that’s just makes me, well, me.

even if it it did take me time to figure that out.

I just figured out this year on the Month of May,

that I started to see myself as a Demi-Human.

sometime I should draw three flags

that has to do with the Sexuality, Gender and Species Identities. 

also I need to point out that I have added a certain site

to my list of Semi-Misanthrope.

first I want to say that I have nothing against Jesus,

but that  Jesus-Is-Savior site.......

it is just....I can’t stand it, Rock’N Roll ain’t evil,

I mean there can be mature rock, but there are different forms of music.

 and even if someone is homosexual or homoromantic,

outside the human body and at the core of the soul,

we may appear Masculine or Feminine, but the soul doesn’t have a biological sex/gender, and has no organic binary.

plus if a man did like other man in his present life,

were to be reborn as a woman in his next life and still like men in her new life where she is reborn as a woman,

would that still make her a homosexual...?

I think that truth would kind of make anyone think.

if when I do get reborn, I don’t EVER want my biological body

to be male....I feel more comfortable with the other, and if it takes me time to figure out I am Gyno-Agender in that next life, then it’s fine by me too....

I don’t know if the humans who dislike homosexuals,

really think about the logic that has to do with when a human dies,

if they become reborn into a different bio-gender/sex

they might still be attracted to the guys or gals that they were in their past life.

I hope my explaining about that doesn’t get misinterpreted.               

I don’t like when my words end up misunderstood.

well small misunderstandings okay, but when it is big and ends up hurting feelings then that is really not good.

but yeah, I just don’t like the toxic stuff that is going on in that site.

 maybe I should try not to worry about it.

right now I am listening to some music,

I’m listening to Agnes’s Don’t Breaking My Heart.

anyway, I’m just gonna hurry and post this

and then post that Undertale x Yandere Simulator Crossover.

hope some of you like this drawing,

and I hope some like how King Dice

is making the scary eyes at Cuphead lol.

once again I enjoyed drawing this,

I even drew wedding rings on King Dice and Devil’s fingers.

and them saying the same thing to both Mugman and Cuphead.

[oceanera12]

Star Wars x Percy Jackson

Okay so this was a LOT harder then I thought it was going to be on the account that literally everyone in the GFFA is related to one another. So for the sake of my sanity (and yours) let’s just assume that no one is related so I can figure out what kriffing Olympian attributed to them (also we are keeping them all Greek to save me that headache)

Also to keep my sanity I split everyone up by Trilogy/TV Show so just assume each each are a new generation (with some overlapping)--

Also I’m not doing everyone because there is way too many kriffing characters so get ready for highlights and personal favorites. If you have anyone to add, comment or feel free to add! (Last “also”, promise! I stuck mostly with the big twelve to, you guessed it, preserve my sanity!)

Prequels:

Yoda is from Dionysus cabin--FIGHT ME ON THIS. I could not figure out why he talks like he does and came to the conclusion is he is definitely “drunk” on Kool-Aid. Also I like the idea of him growing vines and plants because of Dagoba. He is a camp councilor that’s been around for longer than anyone can remember by Chiron likes him well enough.

Mace is a child of Hades. ... I honestly don’t know why, but as soon as that image popped into my head I accepted it. Maybe it’s because of his stoic personality or maybe the fact he fights in a very angry style, to which I say, “skeletons ripping up from the earth”.

Qui-Gon-- for some bizarre reason the idea of Hypnos popped into my head and I now I cannot get it to leave me alone. So Qui is from Hypnos cabin. He gets a lot of sleep and even more visions of the future (such as a very powerful half-blood coming to camp and he’s now determined to find that kid)

Obi-Wan was tricky. I debated between a lot of cabins and none of them seemed to work for him. I finally settled on Hephaestus, which seems weird but let me explain. Obi-Wan feels like someone who would totally be into arts and crafts, if he could have. Hephaestus cabin usually has a good head and are quite smart

Anakin is from Zeus Cabin. Did you expect anything less? This kid is Mr. Lightning summoning, sword wielding, insane power with way too many emotions. (It was either that or Hephaestus but... “Chosen One” and all that)

Padme is 100% from Athena cabin. That’s it. Fight me.

Palpatine is a weird one because I’d usually just make him a monster or something like a Titan but... eh. I’m going Hermes because this boy knows how to lie and trick people (a lot like Luke, now that I think about it...). A friend of mine also suggested the child of Nemesis, the goddess of Revenge which could also work so pick your pick.

R2-D2 and C-3PO are satyrs. Very annoying, very loud, satyrs. 3PO goes on and on about the importance of nature and R2 follows behind him creating his own form of chaos. Most people avoid them.

Clone Wars:

Ahsoka is also from Athena cabin. I just like to picture her fighting with two knives and flipping around like a gymnast. But she’s more chill then Ares cabin--although she does love hanging out with those boys. She’s unofficially adopted by Ares cabin as a sister in arms so that’s cool.

Ares Cabin just consists of all the clones, okay? It was either that or Hermes but I just couldn’t imagine my boys without their military structure. Cody’s head of the cabin and has to try and keep all of his siblings in line-- very poorly, but he’s doing his best.

Satine is in Demeter Cabin. I wasn’t sure where else to put a pacifist but I thought it suited her well enough. Ex-girlfriend of Obi-Wan but they are on friendly terms (and there is a running bet on when they will get back together)

Rebels:

Kanan was really hard to figure out. I decided to make him Poseidon’s kid because he’s usually really chill in the show. For the most part, he’s really laid back and doesn’t use any water abilities unless he has too. Prefers to fight with a sword, but can use a crossbow surprising well. Has a street kid background so he gets along with the Hermes cabin really well and has kind of “adopted” one of the kids there (three guesses as to who)

Hera has to fly, okay? She has to be able to fly either a Pegasus or actually fly which leaves either Zeus, Apollo, or Poseidon as the main picks, which I don’t think any of those scream Hera. In fact, flip them, she’s a mortal that see’s through the Mist. She somehow got dragged into this world of monsters and demi-gods and is now chilling at the camp just for the heck of it. It may or may not have had something to do with her now-Boyfriend Kanan who may or may not have been on a quest at the time when he accidently destroyed her apartment because of a stupid hellhound.

Ezra is in Hermes cabin. This tiny little thief is wonderful and is a cute little blueberry. Kanan kind of unofficially adopted the kid so Ezra is usually drenched from swimming in the lake.

Zeb is from Athena cabin. Very skilled with a staff and very into battle meditation. Not super into the “intelligent” side of Athena, but he is in no way an idiot. Get’s into a lot of trouble with Ezra because why not?

Sabine I could totally see being the child of Apollo, but she joined Artemis Huntresses (maybe out of spite to her Dad but also because a bunch of warrior women? Heck, yeah!). Very artsy, excellent shot with a bow, and is much, much cooler then her dad.

Chopper is a very lazy, very stubborn Hellhound, fight me on this (and may have been the Hellhound Kana was fighting when he met Hera, but he’s now attached to this strange mortal woman who literally told off these two for destroying her house).

Original:

Luke was almost a child of the big three (specifically Hades for some bizarre reason--don’t ask me why, I don’t know how my brain got on that) but then I remembered that Hecate was a thing soooooo... Luke Skywalker, the son of Hecate, goddess of magic. He manipulates the mist and stuff like that. Also likes to fly Pegasi.   

Leia... okay, this is going to sound really weird but I kind of see Leia as a child of Aphrodite. Not obsessed with how she looks and all that stuff, but more like Piper. Very strong willed, determined, and keeps your attention. She fights for what she believes in (loves) and can kick butt. It was either that or Athena but... eh, let’s turn that on it’s side, shall we?

Han is Hermes. What did you expect?

Chewbacca is a satyr. I don’t know if you expected any differently, but I’m picturing Coach Hedge just not... insane. Very much likes to fight monsters and is very protective of Han.

Lando is... tricky. I’m going to go with Dionysus simply because of the party factor, but don’t cross him. He can mess you up.

Sequels:

Rey is unclaimed. She chills in Hermes cabin and has no idea who her Godly parent is... which she mopes about a lot. ((I literally could not figure out who’s daughter she would be because that’s kind of the whole Trilogy. And then it hit me like an out of control Pegasus.))

Poe is from Apollo cabin and can usually be found on a Pegasus. His favorite is nicknamed BB and is white with “orange” spots. Very good at flying and shooting a bow at the same time. Yes, he’s a show off and yes, he’s very good in a fight.

Finn is in Ares cabin. But he’s more like Frank in the sense of he’s definitely nicer then most of his cabinmates. Excellent fighter but does not have that stupid Ares temper... most days (don’t cross Finn or he will mess you up)

Rose gets to be a child of Hephaestus. She’s smart and is an engineer, simple as that.

Kylo/Ben is in Aphrodite cabin simply because I want him there. He’s prissy, full of himself, and a jerk and if that isn’t Aphrodite, I don’t know what is (I’m sorry, I just hated Aphrodite in the books and Kylo was kind of a “meh” character soooooooooo...)

[anteroom-of-death]

Life, For Dummies p5

a/n: deconstructed angst with a slice of life. idk, i cried too many times lately n now we here. enjoy my pretties.

You fell into a comfortable routine of sorts. No set pattern or time sheets to fill out, no schedule. Just adventure after scheme, mind-numbing body flaring fuck after pleasurable expeirence, after explosions and wine and dine. 

He’d even begun to train you to pilot the TARDIS. He made it fun, and used sex and punishment like a drivers education teacher uses gold stars and red pen. Land it perfectly or even in the right vicinity, he’d toss you up over the console and toss your legs behind his shoulder and eat you out like you were the last snack on the planet. Leaving you with beard burns and gushing…

Manage to wreck the TARDIS into something or massively screw up? He’d pull you by your ear until you were lower to the ground and take the notebook you’d eagerly scribbled notes into, tear your panties down and use it as a flogger, “Now maybe it’ll get through your skull now?” 

You didn’t know which rednesses were which anymore. 

Once you even set up in a kingdom after killing the King and Queen and using telepathic manipulation. It was an annual tithings feast akin to the Purge. The survivors of it would give the king and queen the losers goods. You did admit it was good having everyone fawn over you and treat you like royalty. The Master laughed and nearly died laughing the first time you truly didn’t fuss over the genuflecting, sputtering masses. After that was done, he took only the prettiest and most useful object and drug out the corpses of the former rulers and mockingly made them on their thrones.

He did take the most grand tiara and place it on your head one night and said, “Queen of the Whores...look at how well you know how to kneel!” Before cumming on it, your face, and the wall behind you.

You insisted on lots of rest days in the TARDIS and even out. He enjoyed having a solarium open to the most grand suns for naps during this time, all curled up, you on his chest and you knew this might be the legitimate only time the alien ever had some semblance of a sleeping schedule. 

He’d taken to playing slightly with your hair and humming a bit to you. It was simple and always drained out to a slight snore. He was opening up and relaxing more around you. Even informing you of his life. All the good with all the bad. It was slow to start, but you knew it was a lot.

He was right, all those months ago, this was the Real Way to See the Universe. Having it brought to you and not at random. Each day an a la carte and having loads of time to unwind. The days of randomness and ill-adept piloting, half lies mixed with earnest truths and long-winded explanations were a fever dream of lives past. You understood him better. At his level.

Things became clear and stuck.

You wondered off hand constantly if this was what regeneration felt like one day. 

“I can assure you. It’s much more painful.” He said, responding to your wonderment, tracing a small circle around the base of your neck one day at a beach on Momia 18. “You at least get to keep this smashing body, I have the lottery. Will I end up a dashing man with hands that can do this- “ He went lower and massaged the outside of your bikini bottoms, “And these lips you can never tear your filthy little mind away from…” He stopped and pulled you back, “Or something boring and less exciting.” 

“Damn, you have a point there.” 

If not for the people who he demanded you get called by your preferred name and or, regal terms, you half-thought sometimes you’d forget your name. What was it again? Y/N? 

You were always “Pet” or “my pet”. Unless he was being cool with you, then it was a terse “love”, which always made your heart plummet into your stomach. 

You’d only fought once so far, and it was over something so stupid, you happened to land on Earth and it was a festival and he wanted to scheme and lure in her, but you wanted a nice day perusing the booths and eating, maybe getting a haybale ride in. You ended up cutting your nose off to spite your face and slamming the door to your room and barricading it with a chair, screaming that he had best not come in there. You froze him out for three days and you two took two fucking weeks to make it up. 

It was, at the end, you paid in pain and delayed pleasure. He had you you choked out and chained on the floor of the TARDIS, slowly torturing you with fucking your brain up with images of him pleasuring you. All while using an electric zinger. The Master had you begging and pleading while informing you that Pets don’t get the chance to freeze out their Masters. That they were to be warm and receptive. Always obedient. Once you got the point, he brought you to the most extreme orgasm you ever had, then spent the next day caring for you and yet making sure you wore your new marks with pride.

You could have, in retrospect gone without him, but hindsight is perfect vision. 

You knew you were changing, you were constantly reminded, not just by your creeping suspicions, but by the few, brief times you checked in with your old reality on Earth. You said your excuses, blamed mental illness and lied through your teeth to poor Graham who wanted to send you a box of scones he made. 

He’d been a surrogate father to you in a few many ways.

Yet you never felt so far and so disentangled. 

Not that all change was bad. You were becoming more confident and stood straight up. You were always learning, whether at the hands of your Master, or by the innumerable amount of books he had falling over the place, even by your own tinkering. Your reveries became smaller and fewer in between. And you didn’t let fear get in the way of you doing anything, even falling great heights. 

You were a ghost within a ghost wrapped in a human shell.

Chaos over Chaos. 

The final piece of this fell in when you finally encountered her, the Doctor and all your old friends. Yaz, Ryan and Graham. 

It was an accident.

You’d been laying the foundations for rebellion to happen, the Master was quite put out with the establishment and told you, “Let them eat cake!” as you pointed out, that it’d be longer to wait, but more fun to sew the seeds of discourse and let them march the leaders' heads out on spikes, then swoop in later as glorious alternatives. 

He kissed you so hard you nearly stumbled over and quickly blurted out, “I love you for this! What a clever idea.” 

Of course, the Fam was here and trying to create peace and make sure “order” happened and not your beautiful chaos. 

It was a stand down and you’d literally just walked into those two circling around each other like snarling dogs for a meaty bone. 

“I knew you’d probably be behind something as sinister as this!” She barked. 

Yaz and Ryan were calming a crying leader’s wife and Graham was recharging his Laser shoes. You wondered offhandedly how a supposed pacifist would let him have a weapon purely for killing.

You allowed yourself one, “Fuck.” a little too loud to escape quietly and go deal with this and smooth over the best saving grace for your long plan you both poured all three of the available hearts into. 

“Y/N?” The Doctor pivoted and spun around to the shadow you’d been off stage in. 

The Fam all dropped whatever they were doing immediately and began to gawk at you.

“We thought you died? I went to your home to pick you up and it was deserted-dusty!” 

“We tried calling!”

“I mailed you a postcard!”

“We checked every local hospital and scanned the records for your death!”

So many voices and shouts shook you into the first of a massive reverie in a while. A dull ringing set in and snapped. People started bickering between. For a second you couldn’t hear a single peep from anyone and lost your mental footing.

“How could you betray me? After all we’ve been through?” The Doctor demanded, rolling into your face and nose curling in utter grievances. Fire and sadness filling her eyes. You felt guilt, but saw the pure disgust radiating out of her.

“Enough.” You pushed back and screwed yourself up again. 

“You left me, and them.” You pointed your commanding hand at the Fam. “All alone and on our own to get home! What was I supposed to do? Stand by and wait like I’m being stood up? We waited days. We always wait for you. Always.” Hurt and violence pouring out of every syllable. “What are we, hmm? Us companions? Toys for you to play with for character development then toss away when you learn your lesson?”

“He’s got your hypnotised! He’s evil! You know he’s a baddie!”

You let out a manic laugh, “So?”

“Look what he’s turned you into!” She pointed, “You didn’t look like this before.”

You clapped your hands and chortled, “I’m happy!”

You saw out of the corner of your eye everyone, even the Master, stepped back and observed the two of you’s scene. Yaz? Horrified and like she’d seen a murder. Ryan, confused and hurt. Graham, hurt, but just looking glad he wasn’t in the middle of it.

But your Master, you thought you heard him coo under his breath and felt a warm tingling in your brain.

Yaz, ever the Officer and The Gentlewoman approached you and asked honestly if you were okay. 

At the moment you didn’t know, you crossed a hand over your gut and inhaled sharply, slouching and swallowing a lump in your throat. Graham was beginning to look beyond concerned and in a fatherly sort of way. “You seemed shaken up the last time we talked, Y/N. Did he hurt you?” He approached you and put out to comfort you…

The Doctor was turning from shock to anger and betrayal overruled. “What’s that? It’s like he’s taken over you!” The Doctor made a broad sweeping gesture.  

The Master went to speak and you waved him off, your mind crashing around you. You could feel him getting worried and angry. He looked like he was to kill the Doctor. But not in the little smirking way you’d grown to adore. His teeth were out, but not in a wide, dopey grin. Purely feral and ready to open something like a can opener…

He stopped, looking confused but a little proud. He had a front row seat to your mind and the cacophony of thoughts inside it, yet was shocked. 

“Oh- it’s not like you don’t take us and mould us to your liking? Worlds speak in hushed reverent tones of you sacrificing your Children of Time. Then you go move on to another set. No big deal! You can always pick a bunch of suckers. Your TARDIS might as well be a white panelled van.” You tried matching her equally for the amounts of emotions or a monologue she would do. “You’re just as bad if not worse! You play the hero and the martyr! You lie to us!”

To rub salt in the wound you quietly added, “He’s many things, but I know he’ll never lie to me.” 

You didn’t know how much of a hard-ass you could successfully pull off. You considered her a friend and up until this moment still had a lot of loyalty and love for her. You still loved despite always being a misshapen puzzle piece the human part of the Fam.The ringing settled in your jaw and you felt her pain. 

Your facade began shaking.

You started to tear up. “What was I supposed to do, huh? Stay home? The world was in lockdown, and my anxieties were numerous. I was worried sick about you, and forget me? Graham’s elderly and has health problems!” Your lower jaw began to shake. You were scared for the first time in ages. 

“Sue me, so I left with the Master.” 

Your words rang out but not as intense as they should have.

“Did I really fit in with you at all?” You posed an easy question. Expecting an easy answer.

The tears began to fall freely.

“He’s evil...” She reminded you.

“Does not matter.” You rebutted. 

“He’ll kill you.”

“Whatever.” At this point you began wishing someone would murder you. 

She pivoted and lunged straight at him, “This a big part of your plans? Take my companion and pervert her? Then have her trot out…” she straddled him and grabbed him by the lapels. “Dressed like you dressed her? Huh? What method of mind control-” You went to go save him from the honey badger in blue. 

He began to laugh, not exactly manically, but not exactly mirthfully as well. “Oh, I’ve been more or less avoiding you. Out of respect for my pet.” The tone was taunting and bitter. “You think I wanted to hurt Y/N? Like this? Oof- how little your respect for me, Doctor!” He spit her name out like a fatwa. 

You closed your eyes and began to break. Mentally, you were draining down and physically it felt like you’d received a punch to your guts. You felt spiritually bereft. The Doctor and the Master fighting made you feel like some doll for these virtual children to deal with.

You wished you could pop a valium.

Giving the rest of the Fam an imploring look, you swallowed and gathered yourself up. You hoped your eyes could give them all the apologies and information you needed them to know. That you cared for him and weren’t in trouble. All the facets of you crashing and burning. You were being torn apart, playing a game with your held heart. 

But in the end it was fruitless. So you pulled the two Time Lords off each other, glowering at the two of them.

“I’m going back to the TARDIS.” You gave it your best shot to look commanding and in charge.

You turned around and tried to stalk out with all the bravery you could muster. You couldn’t relate to a happy state, feeling your blood run cold in your ears.

So you ran.

[dndwithsuperbestfriends]

SESSION 10

This will mostly have illustrations by me because Larkspurs player wasn’t involved because her side quest was a day ahead of us.

Now that Doorune is dead, we continue through the evil underground lair and explore a bit - we find a hatch that leads into the lake, some supply rooms with rotting foods, and a ladder that leads to a sewer grate of a street in Laketowns shipyard district. We keep this in mind for when we’ll have to leave later.

So after going through most of Monroe’s evil unground lair, we come to the secret room in the back that seems to be his evil underground office. He isn’t there, there's just a bunch of treasure and a mahogany desk. 

After the incident with the exploding the desk, Leswen, Erindur and Rocks stay in the hallway while Frank and Belladonna investigate the room.

While Belladonna looks around the treasure for Monroe’s shard, while Frank tries to figure out the desk. Turns our the desk is some kind of puzzle with mechanisms to unlock the drawers. He takes time to figure out; in the drawers there is nothing, except the top one has an unopened letter. 

He opens the letter, and inside there is only a calligraphed phrase;

W A S T E D 

“Knowledge is power.”

Suddenly, we hear clicks from the hallway walls and a bunch of explosions - it turns out the desk was a trigger to set off the self-destruct of the underground dungeon. Water begins rushing in through the collapsing walls.

It was a trap. Monroe knew the party was coming.

The party @#$%-ing books it. When we get to the hallway with the escape ladder, the water is at waist level. Frank grabs Belladonna and Erindur grabs Rocks because they are hobbits and too short for this water (also, Rock’s can’t swim. This will become a running gag) Frank swims no problem, but Leswen is swept under the water so he swims back for her and takes her to the ladder after dropping off Belladonna. He attempts to do the same with Erindur.

Attempts.

“NO ONE PICKS UP A DWARF.” Erindur shouts - his mouths foams a bit as he activates his slayer rage ability so he can angrily just march through the water instead of swim, he’s tall enough that the water is juuust at his sternum. Rocks, who is clinging to his back, just hopes that he doesn’t just carelessly throw them onto the ladder. (Spoiler: He totally does.)

When the party gets through the sewer gate, they realize the explosions weren’t limited to the underground lair. It was going throughout the entire shipyard district.

Also, there’s the sound of warhorn. Frank recognizes it because he has proficiency in shadow lore - it’s an Orc warhorn.

The mood of the party entirely is panicky - there’s explosions, people screaming, fire, and orcs. However, something about this situations resonates deeply within Rocks in particular, to them, something about this is hauntingly familiar.

They feel themself getting pulled within themself, but they shake it off for now, refusing to give into this haunting deja vu for now. They ground themself to reality by making an angry statement to the party instead.

Rocks: Monroe didn’t have to be like other hobbits, he didn’t have to be like humans; he didn’t ever have to be anyone but himself! But he shouldn’t be like Smaug! 

(Rocks and Leswen were both around during Smaugs temper tantrum destruction of Laketown, so both of them remember it quite clearly)

There’s a huge explosion and the party whips their heads and realize with horror when they see a large rising column of smoke that it had come from the college! All of Leswen’s colleagues, including Grypho, and the shards we’ve been collecting, were all there.

Rocks panics for a minute, freaking out that their family and their inn might have been targeted by Monroe also since who knows who they are, but Erindur assures them that he doesn’t see any smoke coming from that district. 

The party run in the direction of the college, but some docks collapse and form a rift in front of them so to continue they have to find a way past this large gap. No one has the skill to just jump it because it’s that wide, so we have to climb to the bottom and swim across, and climb back up.

Problem: Rocks, despite being from Laketown, can’t @#$%ing swim. Once again, they have be carried; Frank does it this time. 

So the party climbs down the dock, swims across, and climbs up the other docks. Erindur has trouble doing this because of the heavy armour he’s wearing, but manages to make it. Once they are all up there, Leswen watches as other inhabiotants of Laketown who’ve been caught in the crossfire struggle to repeat that the party had just done and she is conflicted.

As a healer, it is her nature to help people in need, it is instinctual for her to stay and help these people; but she manages to rationalize that she will ultimately save more people by continuing with the party, because most people from Laketown don’t have a problem swimming. 

(IRL the entire table looks at me with a look that just screamed “Except for you. Your character is the only Laketownian who can’t swim.”)

So they continue sprinting, and although they make it mostly out of the Shipyard district into the residential District, the party is split by a bunch of rubble falling, separating Leswen and Belladonna. 

Belladonna attemptsd to climb the mountain of rubble, but get’s stuck at the top. She fails a strength check and mentally curses herself for never doing pull ups so she’s stuck in the ‘hanging in there’ position holding a disjointed pole. The frustraton gives her a temporary shadow point.

Leswen has good rolls and manages to climb up the mountain of rubble and plucks the angry hobbit from her hanging spot and safely brings them both down to the other side where Frank, Rocks and Erindur are waiting for them.

They party makes it out of the district, but right before they get to the college they come across a group of civilians being waylaid by orcs and hobgoblins. The party rolls initiative.

The same haunting familiarity rolls over Rocks again - and this time, they give in. They collapse, and hallucinate themselves falling.

As they are falling down a void, they hear a song around them, and above them they can see a giant eye. It constantly shifts colour, but is focused on them. The song is ancient and cacophonous, but the one thing Rocks can focus on about the song is a single phrase;

“The First Theme.”

Rocks has been shown the first of three parts of the First Song that created Middle Earth. Because of how much a pacifist coward merciful hero Rocks has been, the Valar have deemed them worthy of their secret class - Herald of the Valar. This makes Rocks the first of the party to unlock their secret class, and the only one so far to do so without any prior hints.

However, once the song ends, Rocks is thrown into a flashback

And it becomes clear why the Orc attack on Laketown was so familiar

They see a village burning down - their original home in the shire, it was being raided by Orcs. Bravely, a Ranger had been felled trying to protect the village. 

A young Rocks was being told by their family to run away to safety - and they do so. They a bunch of other hobbit children escape into the Old Forest - but they are all picked off until only Rocks remains.

They flash foreword to when they had stumbled into the Barrow-Downs - a haunted area outside of The Shire. There, they come face-to-face with  a Barrow-Wight. 

(I do not own this image)

It had been this encounter specifically that terrified them so badly, that when combined with the trauma they just went through, they lost colour of their hair and eyes, and also their memories prior. (Marie Antoinette Syndrome)

Their memories are hazy from here, and the next thing they remember is somehow ending up in Bree, where they are found and adopted by Daralis and Harva, who who traveled to Bree for trading.

Although Rocks in unable to remember their birth name, or the names and faces of their family and friends, one thing does stick; they are a Stoor-Hobbit.

They go into another vision; but this time they are naked and looking at their reflection. Except their reflection is their true self; brown-haired and blue-eyed.

Rocks and their reflection reach out to each other, and then touch hands.

THE VISION ENDS

In real time only like six seconds passes and a wave of radiant energy pulses from Rocks into the immediate area. Although unconscious, Rocks’ white hair suddenly turns brown and slightly curlier, with only a few white streaks left. 

Leswen rushes over and pulls Rocks into her lap, putting a wet cloth on their forehead. She does a medicine check and finds that Rocks seems to have been suffering from a fever for a while, and they were pulsing energy she identifies as coming from the Valar. 

The fever and the Valar energy disapates and Rocks wakes up - now, their right eye is blue instead of grey.

“I j u s t s a w g o d.” Is what Rocks basically manages to stagger out, being very enthralled and disoriented.

“Sure you did buddy.” Leswen comforts, believing them to be delusional “Your hair changed.”

“I just learned a new song...“ Rocks says, standing up and picking up their shortsword that they dropped - and they begin singing The First Theme.

The First Theme works similar to the Mass Heal spell - it charges for two rounds, and them begins healing allies. It also exudes radiant energy.

The rest of the party don’t really pay attention to their Warden because they are still fighting Orcs and Hob Goblins, however, now that there’s another healer this means Leswen can now fight as well. She takes out a few hob goblins that try to attack her and Rocks, because they really don’t like this song.

The rest of combat is uneventful, but the party is successful.

The sessions ends here, but not before the party stares wide-eyed at Rocks, who doesn’t know that their appearance just drastically changed.

[rubberduckyrye]

I did not mean to imply that Kokichi is a twisted sociopath. I REALLY don't want to perceive him that way, but a lot of people see him like that. And it kinda feels... unnatural for me. To go to your blog, to see portrayals of him as a leader, as a boy who is rude, callous and a trickster, but who still cares about his classmates with all his heart, who did horrible things out of desire to help others, to see him as a human instead of the evil incarnate. "There must be some kind of a mistake" I

think, "You must have been mistaken about something. How the hell can you interpret him as a flawed, twisted(in later chapters) but still likeable human being? It's clearly wrong because he is a villain" I don't allow myself to even slightly ponder the fact that Kokichi has feelings, that he is not a sociopath that enjoys human suffering, because for some reason it is WRONG. And I don't want to see him as "Nagito + Junko + Hiyoko but worse", but somehow in my head every interpretation of him

other that "sociopathic nazi gremlin" is WRONG and blasphemous. Somewhat like with Chara several years ago when I was into UT. I liked the Narrator/Player Chara theories because they showed Chara as a very flawed individual who did a lot of things wrong but also had many redeeming qualities despite that, because it gave them some depth instead of reducing them to the one-dimensional "for the evulz" villain and also provided an interesting deconstruction of game mechanics(narration, interaction         

game mechanics. But the voice in my head kept telling me that this game mechanics. But the voice in my head kept telling me that this interpretation is wrong, completely not canon in the slightest bit, Chara is pure evil, you are just stupid for daring to assume sth else about them. Because of it, I eventually started to hate Undertale and everything pertaining to it. This is a very simular thing to my Undertale experience. Surfing this blog and finding UT and DRV3 content made me realise that.     

----------------------------------------------------------

All right gonna assume the rant is done here since that last ask looks like the end but tbh it doesn’t really matter because this is basically pushing my boundaries here and I’m getting really tired of this nonsense in my ask box.

Because gonna be blunt Anon, this sounds like a “you” problem.

First of all--this blog, impytricky, has over 900 followers. Meaning that ~900 people follow this blog and agree with the notion that Kokichi is not a terrible person. My blog over at @unweavinglies has over three hundred with a significant drop in total posts on that blog, and my theories there often get hundreds and hundreds of notes. People who don’t even follow this blog or that one will reblog my analysis posts in agreement.

So a lot of people see Kokichi as less “evil” and more morally grey. Actually, I’ve seen more positive interpretations of Kokichi than I’ve seen people making him into a true villain. That’s because making him a pure evil little bastard is kind of really boring and misses the entire point of his character and character arc.

You probably don’t see a lot of the “good” interpretations of Kokichi because you don’t go looking for it/ignore it/dismiss it when you come across it. Probably. Like how I see less of the villain interpretation because I don’t go looking for it/dismiss it/whatever.

Second of all: Kokichi is technically not a villain. While I still go by the policy that all interpretations are valid, it’s not canon that he is a “villain.” Narratively speaking, Kokichi is an anti-hero. An anti-hero is “a central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes,“ and yes, can be antagonists. Antagonists does not equal Villain, however. Anti-heroes are often marked by the idea of a hero doing bad things for the greater good.

Third of all: Please for the love of god cut that shit out with the Nazi thing. Kokichi is not a Nazi. I hated this stupid misconception before and I still hate it now--it’s offensive, outside of fiction, and it’s just plain inaccurate either way. This misconception comes from the fact that Japan especially tends to romanticize military attire, including attire in WWII Germany, which shows up in Kokichi’s hat in one promo picture. Another reason this misconception is the bane of my existence is because some fantranslator translated Kokichi’s ultimate talent to be “Ultimate Dictator” when it was apparently able to be translated as “Ultimate President” or “Ultimate Leader”. The Nazi misconception is just that--a huge misconception created by poor taste in design and fantranslations being inaccurate.

Please for the love of god, take that thought and unlearn it now. Seriously, it’s offensive. Stop it.

Fourth of all: This is where I see that this is more of a you problem above everything else. From what you’ve said, you seem to deem “morally grey” characters as “evil” or “Villainous” which comes with black or white thinking. From my perspective, what I’m hearing is “I can’t see shades of grey, so this must be black because it is not white.”

Let me ask you: Gonta Gokuhara. Whether or not Kokichi showed him the flashbacklight due to “””Evil””” intentions or whatever, he chose to kill Miu. Kokichi did not “trick” him into it, nor was he able to force Gonta into it via blackmail or what have you. Gonta chose to kill Miu of his own accord. This is a straight up canon fact. He chose to kill Miu because he believed that Mercy Killing her and everyone else before they found out the secret of the outside world would be kinder. This is canon fact that really cannot be disputed.

Let me ask you--is Gonta evil all of a sudden because he chose to kill someone? That he was aiming to kill everyone?

What about Frisk--or the player, in undertale--who has to actively choose to genocide run the game? Are players who choose ths path evil all of a sudden? What about Frisk, who would also be making this decision? Deltarune has implied that “Chara”, or the demon or whatever, is a separate entity that can control the character we play and we can’t control them when they’re in control. Meaning that for the whole Genocide route, Frisk had to actively choose to kill every single monster underground. If you go by the theory that the player isn’t just controlling their movements at any rate, you can see Chara take control in when thy kill Sans and Flowey. Yes, this means that Chara was not in control before then, thus putting the blame for most of the Genocide run on the player, or Frisk.

Yet the choice to do a pacifist run is there too. So which is it? What’s evil, and what isn’t evil? Can you really call Frisk pure good or evil? What about the player? What about Gonta?

That is the complexity of grey morality--the answer isn’t black or white and can’t be so simplified. Because what’s kinder, in Gonta’s case--killing everyone, or letting them find out that basically all of humanity was wiped out off of the face of the earth and the killing game they were forced into was all for nothing? Sure it’s terrible to kill someone, but it’s also terrible to allow people to be mentally tortured too, which the outside world basically did to everyone when they did find out.

It sounds like you’re stuck in the mind set of things being black or white. If you want to see characters like Kokichi and Chara as morally grey, then you need to tell that voice that says otherwise to shush up. No one is perfectly evil, no one is perfectly good. Good people can do horrible, terrible things and still be good people. Bad people can also do very, very good things, and still be terrible people.

I won’t be answering asks like this again. Please refrain from shoving your opinions down my throat. Maybe you didn’t intend to, but you are with lines like "There must be some kind of a mistake" and "You must have been mistaken about something. How the hell can you interpret him as a flawed, twisted(in later chapters) but still likeable human being? It's clearly wrong because he is a villain" because yeah that’s basically ways of saying “You’re wrong about Kokichi and I don’t like your interpretation.”

[tessatechaitea]

DCeased #5

I can't remember. Is Superman a zombie or Wonder Woman?

Oh sure. Now that it's a smoking hole, it's suddenly "our" city!

Flash, Wonder Woman, and Superman wage war on the Internet by attacking its foundations. That's the only way to win: by disabling servers, satellites, and underwater transatlantic cables. Otherwise you're just feeding the trolls. Imagine if Superman left a comment telling me I needed to stop blogging because I was endangering the lives of everyone on Earth. He'd be met with a harsh "Go away, dum-dum!" and it would serve him right! The world's survivors need a place to survive so the heroes choose Paradise Island and Gotham City. Sure, Gotham City was going to be covered in nuclear fallout soon but it was currently a jungle safe haven built by Poison Ivy. I'm sure she has plants that can protect against radiation, like sunflowers, Black Orchids, and Swamp Things. Oh, there was one other place that was a safe haven: the Fortress of Solitude.

But it's apparently only for VIPs.

Imagine being the Amazons of Paradise Island and reluctantly allowing refugees of man's world onto the island only to find out that Superman wasn't letting any normals into his home. I'd be fucking pissed! And for good reason even if a bunch of Magic the Gathering playing, turd licking, Watchmen-series dissing hatebeards were all, "Oh! Look how emotional the women are getting!" Poison Ivy makes some rules about not harming plants for people to stay in Gotham Jungle. I hope the Amazons have rules about not arguing about how a Maze of Ith interacts with a Serra Angel and shutting the fuck up about not-all-men. While arguing about whether or not the humans need to flee Earth, Lex Luthor claims he's the most intelligent person on the planet. He then double checks to make sure Batman's dead before repeating the claim. I don't think this is Lex admitting that Batman is smarter than he is. Sure, it's Tom Taylor trying to admit that! I just think Lex Luthor knows there are several people smarter than him but only Batman could figure out who they are. Like Doctor Smarty Pants the Omniologist that Scott Lobdell created during his Superman run. Why can't I remember her name?! She must have been smarter than Luthor! Although everybody Scott Lobdell wrote was supposedly a genius. Imagine thinking you're smart enough to write a realistic genius! Only a dum-dum could be that dumb!

Lex is just the kind of guy to blame a baby for the loss of its homeworld. Dick.

How many tacos do you think Lex could eat in one sitting? I bet it's something embarrassingly small like three. Sans salsa too. Of course Lois Lane punches Lex in the face on the next page. I was totally going to predict it because I totally expected the woman to get super emotional. Also, because the Maze of Ith targets an attacking creature, even though it explicitly states the creature untaps, the attacking creature doesn't have to be tapped for it to work on it. Everybody jerks off while Lex's nose bleeds and Superman fucks Lois softly because he's so turned on by her show of power. Also, fucking softly is the way Kryptonians fuck Earthlings hard. Lois usually can't walk for three weeks after a good soft Kryptonian fucking. Eventually, after feeling safe, zombie Martian Manhunter decided to show up to remind everybody who the most powerful DC hero really is. Sure, his weakness is super common. But nobody thought to bring any Oreos to the Fortress of Solitude. The Flash is turned into a zombie before Firestorm remembers he can make Oreos out of anything lying around and defeats J'onn easily. But now everybody is screwed because the fastest man in the world can now turn people into zombies. Also the smartest man in the world because Lex was attacked first. Mister Terrific should really think about getting his own series now that he's the smartest person on Earth. Superman flies off to stop Flash. He can't outrun him (unless it's for charity, I guess) so he flies around the world the opposite way and smashes right through him. Superman winds up with a few of Flash's fingers stuck in him so now he's infected too! He goes to the Fortress to say a bunch of insipid goodbyes to his family at super speed (Wally connects them to the Speed Force to make it possible. Or whatever) and then tries to fly into space to die in a vacuum. But before he can make it, he turns into a zombie. So I guess everybody is fucked, right? Unless Batman taught Damian how to kill Superman. Unless the last page of this issue, where Superman turns back to Earth and blasts it with his heat vision, is Superman doing the smart thing and incinerating Damian from a safe distance. DCeased #5 Rating: This series is so good your mama wouldn't stop reading it while I carried her groceries in from the car. Zing!

[aqua-dan]

I may as well try the Xenoblade ask things: all the story ones (11-30) and 50 if that’s not too many.

Oh my! That is quite a few! But hey, never let it be said that I’m a quitter! Thank you for the ask, my friend! Here goes nothing…

11 - Did you get any of the plot-twists spoiled to you before playing Xenoblade?: Nope! I mean, okay technically yes. But sometimes I can be really stupid and oblivious, and even though I was dropped some REALLY BIG hints, I still managed not to get it due to my sheer stupidity alone hah! I suppose being naturally dumb has its perks sometimes!

12 - Which character did you like the most?: This is one of those questions I can never truly have a solid answer for! I’ve re-played Xenoblade so many times, and I swear I have a different favorite of the main characters every time! They’re all very great in their own ways. But!! If we’re including non-main characters in this question, then Kallian and Alvis are solid faves forever.

13 - Opinion of Juju?: I’ve never minded him too much. He’s a little helpless, sure, but he’s got his own neat little arc with all the Colony 6 stuff! I think people make him out to be worse than he actually is. 

14 - Was there any scene which made you cry?: Aah,, It really might be a better idea to ask me which scenes DIDN’T make me cry, because I swear there are fewer of those. But regardless, the ending cutscene in particular always gets me pretty emotional.

15 - What’s your opinion of the ending?: Ah yes, speaking of! The first time I watched the game (watched a lets play before playing it myself), I didn’t really understand the ending all too well. But after playing it myself and dwelling on it for a really… painfully.. long time, I ended up understanding and also really enjoying the ending! It’s very bittersweet and it absolutely made me cry. Just seeing them all in normal situations after all of this is over, in a way beginning a new journey, it’s so lovely!

16 - Which character do you think deserved more spotlight?: KALLIAN. Listen, he’s actually one of the most important characters in the game, and I don’t think he’s often treated enough like it. I think it would have been really lovely to see more of him, hear more of his thoughts and how the events of the game affected him, and especially him interacting with Melia/Shulk/and various other characters. Also he’s really quite the dork if you listen to his lines and I love that. I’d love to see more of him.

17 - Did you want to kill Metal Face, even after it was revealed he was Mumkhar?: I’m pretty 50/50 on that one. I always love redemption arcs, and in truth, I’m VERY high-key a pacifist when it comes to the vast majority of things. But Mumkhar, he very well might have just been too far gone. He didn’t show (idk about feel) remorse for any of his actions. He loved to taunt, to gloat, and especially to put Dunban down. Clearly the dude has some issues to work through. But I suppose what it comes down to for me is whether or not it’s actually kinder to spare him. And in truth.. I think that’s a no in this case. 

18 - How do you think Xenoblade handled the two semi-love triangles? (Shulk/Fiora/Melia and Sharla/Reyn/Gadolt): 0/10 do not pass go, do not collect $200. The love triangles are really my one big beef with the game. I think the Reyn/Sharla/Gadolt triangle was handled better, personally. It started off feeling pretty forced, but in the end it did seem to work and I certainly don’t mind Sharla/Reyn as a ship! It’s really just the Fiora/Shulk/Melia love triangle that throws everything off for me. I had no indication before a specific line that Melia had any interest in Shulk other than being friends, Sharla and Dunban’s interference and comments were frankly weird and out of place, and the tension between Fiora and Melia then just seemed… so off-putting since I never really could get into Melia’s romance side of things. I’m very much a multi-shipper within the Xenoblade fandom, but Shulk & Melia just really don’t go together in my mind. However, I wish MOST of all that Dunban would stop making comments about Shulk and Fiora getting together. There’s like three of Dunban’s heart to hearts dedicated to that and I’m like DUDE. Let em sort it out on their own time, you’re just being weird about this. 

19 -  Favorite race in the game? (Nopon, High Entia, Machina, Homs, any Bionis enemies): High Entia! Probably not the most original pick, but I am just strangely attracted to these arrogant bastards with wings on their heads. (kidding, I love em, but they can be so incredibly stuck up)

20 - When heading towards the final battle, how did you react upon seeing our own solar system and then finally Earth?: I didn’t really understand it at first, but the second time I played it made a lot more sense! I think it’s very interesting, but honestly not very memorable. 

21 - Did you predict any plot-twists before they got more openly hinted at? (Like predicting Dickson’s betrayal before the “I feel bad about deceiving these kids” line): Once again, my own stupidity knows no bounds. I knew something was up, but the first time I saw the game, I took it very face value. 

22 - Is there any lore which you’d like to know more of?: Tons, actually! I loved learning about the history of Bionis in the game! But in a more narrowed down category, I would really love to know more about Alvis’s backstory. I have my theories, only somewhat backed up by the second two games, but it would still be nice sometimes to know more concrete things! Would definitely also help for me with writing fanfics. 

23 - Do you believe Zanza was redeemable?: Yes, actually. He was quite far gone, but I do think there were potentially things that could have ended up redeeming Zanza. The things he truly wanted could have been achieved in other ways. As Shulk said, his future and our future,, could have existed together. 

24 - Which of Fiora’s forms do you prefer – her Homs form, Face Nemesis form, Mech form, or Meyneth form?: Mech form! I mean honestly, she’s wonderful and beautiful in all forms. But Mech form is absolutely the most useful... and she makes for a very pretty robo-girl. Like y’all, I’m 100% gay and yet I’m still a little star struck when it comes to Fiora

25 - Is there any cutscene which stood out to you?: I really enjoyed the cutscenes from the second battle of sword valley. Kallian does indeed happen to be one of my absolute faves, so it’s easy to call me biased, but it’s so interesting to see his growth in the small moments you’re able to see it. He seems so much more confident here, so much happier than in other parts of the game. He’s doing what he believes is going to allow them to take the future into their own hands, and you can visibly see that it excites him! It’s cute!

26 - Which story arc is your least favorite?: Probably the whole Ether Mines thing. It’s not that the CHARACTER arcs were bad there, but the mines are just terribly boring. 

27 - Which line is your favorite?: “Your blade, it did not cut deep enough.” IT HAS SO MANY DIFFERENT MEANINGS LORD ALMIGHTY HELP ME

28 - Did you enjoy Riki’s role as a comic relief provider?: For the most part, yes! He’s a very enjoyable comic relief character! But I really appreciated his more serious moments. It’s refreshing to see comic relief with depth. Sometimes, on occasion, I wish he had more of those moments. But regardless, he’s well received to me!

29 - What’s your opinion of Shulk as a protag?: He’s such a good boy!!!! Okay, admittedly there are some Shulk moments I’m not overly fond of, and other characters I find more compelling, but he’s still really great and I wouldn’t have any other protag here!

30 - What’s your opinion of Zanza as the final villain?: EXCELLENT! I think having him as the final villain, it really summed up the whole feeling of the game, how changeable things are, and taking the future into your own hands. 

50 - How did you get introduced to Xenoblade?: Chuggaaconroy! What a dude!

[lexi-the-twilight-dragon]

Sooooo I said I'd write a fic regarding my dream ending to S17, so of course I had to finish it before S17 came out. Holy shit this fic turned out much longer than I expected, but I'm not sure an increase in length = a increase in quality? I did it tho, so here it is.

BROTHER TO BROTHER

That's when Grif notices something he never has before.

FANDOM: Red vs Blue. S16 spoilers. RATING: Angst/Fluff. WORDS: 1736 CHARACTERS: Grif, Doc (He got smashed into a wall and walked away from an explosion completely unharmed in S8, I think he can survive falling off an at most 442m building), O'Malley (mentioned?), Huggins (please tell me she's not permanently dead, RT), Deke Dufresne, OCs

~

To say the whole time-travel-fix-the-past-nearly-fuck-up-the-universe adventure was insane is a serious understatement. They were only trying to get some pizza for fuck's sake!

And honestly, when it's all over, Grif doesn't know what to do. How do you avoid getting dragged into other people's bullshit? He used to think he was good at that, but not so much anymore. (Pretty much since Wash showed up, huh.)

But it's over, it's finally fucking over, and for at least the next hour, they're safe. And yes, that's a "they". His friends are assholes, but that doesn't mean he wants to lose any of them. Not anymore.

That's when Grif notices something he never has before, and he knows full well what trouble his and the others' lack of notice caused.

He notices a distinct lack of a certain color that was here a few minutes ago.

Purple.

~

He catches the medic disappearing through the hills a little ways away.

"Hey Doc!"

Doc hesitates for a split-second, but doesn't stop walking.

"Doc, wait up!"

Doc starts walking faster. Grif nearly loses him again in the twists and turns of the landscape.

He wonders if this is what it looked like when he quit.

"Frank, stop!"

It's a name no one's used in fuck knows how long. Grif isn't sure he's ever used it. The medic has been 'Doc' to everyone for so long that Grif hasn't the faintest idea why he even remembers his real name at all. But he says it.

And Frank stops.

"Where the hell are you going?" He doesn't say it like an accusation, because it isn't one.

"What does it matter where I'm going?" Frank replies, barely even turning his head, "All that matters is that I'm away from you."

"... You don't mean that."

"Yes, I do. As long as I'm far enough away from anyone I could endanger, I don't care what happens to me. Maybe I'll even find my own little dimension again. Anything to keep everyone safe."

"Doc- Frank, you can't blame yourse-"

"Yes I can!" Purple armor breaks the stillness to whirl around and face orange. "I can because it is my fault! I can't..."

His voice cracks, and the anger seeps out of him as he takes a breath.

"I can't control him anymore, Grif. Who knows how long it will be before he takes me over again. Before he uses me to hurt more people. To hurt, to kill, to destroy..."

His hand flies for his Magnum, and Grif grabs his rifle just as fast. He doesn't actually want to hurt Doc, but if O'Malley were to take control of him again...

The pistol skitters across the ground some feet away.

Frank's arm doesn't move from where he tossed it, his visor and likely gaze lowered to the ground, and when he speaks again the tears are audible.

"You can't... trust me anymore. I don't trust me anymore. I'm more monster than medic, now."

He raises his head, and sees the rifle still in Grif's hands. Grif instantly regrets his actions.

"Actually," Frank says, "yeah, that's a better idea."

He raises his hands a little over his head and faces Grif squarely.

"Can't hurt anyone if I'm dead."

Grif hates the tone in his voice. It's the tone of someone who has accepted, and embraced, the fact that he's going to die. He's heard it in Simmons' voice, in front of the firing squad. He's heard it in Sarge's, on the Staff of Charon. He's heard it in Bitters' more times than he'll ever be comfortable with.

He'll never forget hearing it in Private Mayhew's as she bled out in his arms after the colony massacre.

But acceptance and a request are very different things. Frank is asking for it, and he's asking Grif to be behind the trigger. His hands are shaking already.

In theory, it's to protect other, protect the others. And from how the purple-clad medic sounds, it's be a mercy kill, too. In reality...

"No," Grif says, reholstering his rifle, "I can't do that, Frank."

Grif doesn't need to see his face to see the crestfalled expression on it. "But... but Grif, I'm a danger to everyone, you have to-"

"I can't do it, man. I'm sorry."

"Please!"

Purple shin-plates hit the ground as their owner falls to his knees.

"Please.. I can't... take this anymore. Just... end it, please."

If there's a tone that Grif hates more that that of someone who's accepted death, it's that of someone begging for it.

He kneels in front of the medic and clasps onto his shoulders.

"Look, I don't know exactly what you've gone through. I haven't grappled an evil AI for nearly as long as you. I haven't been stuck in an alternate dimension. But I do know what it feels like when your worst enemy is in your own head. And you know that I know, because that's something else O'Malley did to you, isn't it? Forced memories of all the people it jumped through into your head? It's the only way you could have known what my childhood was like.

"You're not a monster, Frank. You're you. You're Doc. You're our dorky, health-obsessed, pacifistic medic. I can't kill a guy like you, split personality or not."

Frank's visor is locked with his for a grand total of two seconds after that before he wraps his arms around Grif's own shoulders and breaks down into sobs.

Grif doesn't know what'll happen from here. He doesn't know how or even if Doc can be helped at this point. But, also at this point, he can't bring himself to abandon the poor guy.

And maybe, it occurs to him as Huggins flies around the corner looking for them, maybe the past can be fixed after all.

~

Doc didn't know what to expect when the orange-clad soldier got up from their semi-hug to go whisper conspiratorially with the cosmic light-ball.

He knows even less what to expect when Grif goes and grabs the frickin' time gun O'Malley had betrayed him with earlier. Are they going to exile him after all, only in a different time period?

Grif wordlessly pulls the trigger, and gestures at Doc to follow him through.

Doc follows him through.

The first thing he notices is an astonishing amount of green. His entire view consists of trees, ferns and undergrowth that greatly mottles but doesn't completely obscure the sunshine. There's the constant chortle of birdsong and other animal noises that instantly tells him that this is Earth. And if he listens hard enough over it. he can hear the trickling sound of a river.

His blood runs cold when he recognizes exactly where and when Grif has brought him.

"Th-this is..."

His spluttering is cut off by a distant cry of "Deke!" and the sound of splashing.

Through the undergrowth, down on the river's edge, he can see them, see himself. Two coffee-skinned boys, brown hair plastered to their faces as the panicked elder drags the limp younger onto the bank.

"Deke! Deke, can you hear me? Please wake up!" Young Frank DuFresne is shouting, though his brother is held close to him. The boy didn't know what else to do.

He didn't know how to save him.

"What are you waiting for?" Grif's voice tears his gaze away.

"W-what?"

The orange soldier turns his head to look directly at him. "He needs a medic. Go."

Purple helmet looks to the riverbank, back to the orange, then is shoved into the other man's hands.

"Thank you."

He tears into a run, tossing aside all vegetation between him and the bank. Between him, himself, and his little brother.

"Hey!" He drops to his knees as the younger him looks up. He knows merely from memory that the river water dripping down his face is mixed with sting tears.

"I'm a medic. I can help. His name's Deke, right?"

Young Frank nods vigorously. "He's not breathing, what do I do?!"

Hearing himself the panicked, even in clearly justified circumstances, makes it hard to keep his own voice level.

"We need to get him up onto more solid ground, I can treat him there."

A further few feet gets them some firmer ground. Not by much, but Doc doesn't want to waste any precious time.

"Lay him down here."

His movements are calm and practiced as he placed one palm over Deke's chest. Call him an unqualified medic all you want, but he has never forgotten how to do CPR properly. And this right here is the exact reason why. Even if he's internally dealing with the whirlwind of emotions of reliving the worst day of his life. But he can change that.

He will change that.

Deke remains unresponsive after one, two, three, four rounds of compressions as Young Frank watches in wide-eyed concern. But after the fifth, Deke's eyes fly open, and Doc rolls him on his side so he can cough up the water dislodged from his lungs.

"Deke!" Young Frank looks ready to pounce atop his brother in delight, but the older one stops him.

"He needs an ambulance."

Young Frank nods, before scrambling off through the trees to what Doc knows is his childhood home, where his parents are probably sitting on the porch drinking tea and waiting for their boys to come back from playing in the forest. Funny how things seem from a different perspective.

~

It's decided that Meredith DuFresne should ride to the hospital with her son in the ambulance. Frederick and Frank will travel behind in the car. It may take some recovery, but the paramedics say he's likely to survive thanks to the timely response.

Deke will survive. It's a dream come true in so many ways.

"Hey, mister!"

Young Frank catches the man in purple as he walks away.

"What's your name?"

The man looks at oddly for a second, then smiles.

"My friends call me Doc. I'm... a travelling medic."

The boy smiles back, then wraps his arms around the man's purple armor.

"Thank you, Doc."

Doc ruffles his hair, "Just some simple CPR. Might be a good thing for you to learn, huh?"

Frank looks up at him. Funny, Doc looks a lot like his father. Maybe he's a cousin or something?

"I will. I promise."

He lets go, and the man in purple disappears back into the forest.

~

A/N: Guess who jumped head first onto the Doc-Love Train with the recent season? Not that I ever disliked Doc, but being brutally honest, he was never really around long enough for me to get as attached to him as I was to the other Blood Gulch Crew. Season 16 tho... my jaw nearly hit the floor with his backstory monologue. It puts everything about his character in a whole new light. Why is there hardly anything about it on the interned? There needs to be more about it on the internet. So here's my piece. Even if I'm not completely happy with it.

[jamsque]

Bitterness in the Age of Fighting

I was excited when the first episode of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness appeared in my youtube feed last Monday, I’m willing to watch anything Jon Bois puts his name on right now. Most of his content is centered around American football and basketball and baseball, which is great, those are all sports I have watched at least semi-regularly at some point in my life, but for the past few years I’ve followed Mixed Martial Arts more closely than any of them. Felix Biederman, the writer and narrator of the show, was a new name to me: I know Chapo Trap House by reputation but the most I have ever heard of it is a few clips out of context.

That first episode did some strong establishing work to set the tone and context for the series, and then got to work telling the fascinating story of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Gracie family. It’s a story I know decently well, I think Felix did a good job of picking out the interesting characters and especially the moments of class struggle, and of course his words are backed up by the datawave audiovisual stylings of Jon Bois that we have come to know and love. The political ideas were more familiar and less interesting to me than the bits about fighting but I was curious to see how the show was going to try to draw connections and parallels between the rise of MMA as a spectator sport and the socio-political environment in which that rise took place.

I was engaged and I watched each episode as it came out through the week and by the end of episode four on Thursday I was starting to turn a little on the series. In this era of Youtubers with healthy Patreon support and good microphones I’ve gotten used to clear, smoothly edited, well recorded voice work and for me Felix’s narration falls short there, especially for a project with a major media company behind it. More than that, though, I was no longer on board with where the show seemed to be going, and I was worried that it would end on a sour note. I found myself agreeing with Felix’s political commentary but disagreeing more and more with his thoughts on MMA and the way he was choosing to frame the history of the sport.

The final installment disappointed me more than I had feared it might, enough to motivate me to make some kind of response to or critical reading of the whole series. Re-watching it with that in mind I (unsurprisingly) found more things I disliked. Fighting in the Age of Loneliness does an excellent job of telling the story of the ancestry, birth, rise, fall, second rise and anticipated second fall of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, but along the way it makes some pretty big missteps and takes some positions that I strongly disagree with. I’m not going to break down each episode individually but I do want to lay out the issues I have with the series and in particular dig in to the problems with the last episode. Towards the end I think I might even call Felix Biederman a fascist.

First, I want to provide some context for my own thoughts about MMA, and make some inferences and assumptions about Felix’s history with the sport that I think go some way to explaining why we see it quite so differently.

*

I am absolutely not a long-time hardcore Mixed Martial Arts fan, until relatively recently I didn’t have any interest in combat sports at all. Growing up in the UK around the turn of the millenium I was aware of boxing but only from a distance, it was already well on its way to fading from the forefront of the popular sporting consciousness, and my pacifist socialist middle-class parents certainly weren’t watching Mike Tyson fights. The first contact I had with what I would later know as MMA was a grainy video I remember watching on some pre-YouTube video sharing site as a teenager: a highlight montage of a man wearing black, red and white shorts kicking various different people in the head in various different boxing rings, with the same concussive effect each time.

I became more aware of the modern sport of MMA when I started noticing the UFC in mainstream sports media headlines around 2014. Three names kept appearing in those headlines: Jon Jones, for running into things with cars, Conor McGregor, for running his mouth, but most of all Ronda Rousey, for running through every challenger the UFC put in front of her. I suspect that there are a lot of newer MMA fans who, like me, were swept up in the hype surrounding Rousey and McGregor during that time, and stuck with the sport after they finally broke their respective winning streaks and came back down to earth.

Three years later even though I watch MMA most weekends and even though I have become almost as fascinated as Felix Biederman seems to be with the history of the UFC, the people who have fought in it, and the things that they have done to each other, I still consider myself a ‘casual’ fan. This is at least partly because when I think of ‘real’ or ‘hardcore’ MMA fans, I think of people like Felix, who have been around the sport for a lot longer and are, at best, skeptical about the results of its most recent jump in popularity.

Felix doesn’t explicitly talk about the genesis of his interest in the sport but there are hints in the text. The general tone of the piece goes from being detached and historical in the first episode to personal and emotional in the last, which I think is both a deliberate choice on Felix’s part and a reflection of his own experience. The third episode, when his narrative reaches the mid-2000s, is when I think it transitions from learned history to memory, and it’s around here that Felix starts making frequent references to goings on in MMA fan culture. If I’m correct then Felix Biederman has been following MMA for at least a decade longer than I have really known what it was. He has had the time to become emotionally invested in fighters and even the UFC as an organisation in ways that I am not, and of course his initial views on the sport were formed a relatively long time ago. MMA fights in 2018 don’t look all that different than they did in 2005 but the UFC has certainly changed a lot in that time, as have public awareness of and attitudes towards a new generation of combat sports stars.

*

That decade and a half of change in the UFC is the real focus of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, but it presents itself as something much broader. The first episode is titled ‘The Invention of Fighting for Money’ and in it Felix makes a lot of sweeping statements about the past that don’t hold water. He very much tells the winner’s version of history, the narrative favoured by the UFC and the Gracie family, who would have you believe that they invented not only the modern sport of MMA but somehow the very idea of fighting itself. Felix remarks on the marketing and promotional skills of Rorion Gracie in the second episode without seeming to realise quite the degree to which he has himself fallen prey to them, and he also comes across as having the slightly fetishistic attitude towards East Asian martial arts that has become common in the USA over the past half century or so.

As he transitions out of the prologue, Felix says “the true catalyst for MMA as a sport, business and spectacle go back to Japan”, and when he goes on to describe the spread of Jujutsu from Japan to Brazil he says “after hundreds of years, Martial Arts had finally broken containment.” At the end of the series he proclaims that the “fourth era of fighting itself” is currently beginning and that the previous two ‘eras’ only lasted a handful of years each.

These generalisations don’t stand up to even the lightest scrutiny. The history of Martial Arts or combat sports or fighting or whatever term you care to use goes back much farther than feudal Japan, and some of the other things Felix says imply that he is at least partially aware of this. As he is giving his starry-eyed take on the life of Judo’s inventor he says “As long as there are people, they will at some point want the ability to keep someone from kicking their ass, no matter how unlikely it is that they will ever get into a fight.” It strikes me as particularly American that his argument in favor of combat sports being inherent to human society is based on the concept of self-defence. I prefer a line of reasoning that is similar but based on competition: As long as there are people, they will at some point want to test their wits and skill and strength against each other.

Indeed, the story as we know it of unarmed combat sports is as old as recorded history: there are images of wrestling in four thousand year old Egyptian tombs, and the classical Greek Olympics included an event called Pankration, which could be roughly translated as ‘fighting with all of your power’, that had an almost identical ruleset to early Ultimate Fighting Championship events.

Felix oversimplifies the history of fighting as a whole, but even if we just look at what he says about Mixed Martial Arts he gets it wrong. In episode one he says “The entire sport of Mixed Martial Arts owes its existence to Mitsuyo Maeda” and then in episode two he alleges that “A world where proto-MMA existed outside of gymnasiums in Brazil seemed pretty unlikely in 1976.” A corollary of my earlier statement might be that as long as there are people testing their wits and skill and strength against each other, there will be other people who think they can do it better. People have been pitting different schools of fighting against each other and amalgamating them long before the Gracie clan existed.

A decade before the date when Felix claims that mixed martial arts were confined to Brazil, Bruce Lee was blending Wing Chun with other styles to formulate Jeet Kune Do. A decade before that a Japanese Karateka was devising a ruleset which would eventually become Kickboxing to facilitate competitions between karate and Muay Thai. In the 40s the Kajukenbo school was founded in Hawaii with the goal of rigorously testing multiple fighting styles against each other to determine which elements of each were the most effective. In the 30s a Czechoslovakian Jew was refining the boxing and wrestling he had been taught in gyms into Krav Maga in brawls against anti-semitic thugs.

In Victorian London the Bartitsu school taught gentlemen a blend of five different fighting styles from around the world, while in the music halls exhibition matches pitted boxing against Savate. Savate was itself developed over the preceding century by efforts to find a middle ground between the heavy-booted street fighting style spreading from French ports and the Queensbury rules boxing that was popular in England.

Even the legend of the birth of Muay Thai, a fighting style which has had arguably as much influence on the modern sport of MMA as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, is a story about mixed martial arts: when the Konbaung Dynasty of Burma captured a famous fighter during their battles with Siam in 1767, they offered him the chance to win his freedom if he could demonstrate the superiority of his Siamese boxing style against the Burmese school, which he promptly did by knocking out ten Burmese opponents.

Felix contradicts himself on this topic in the first episode when he describes Jigoro Kano studying western wrestling and sumo to augment his Jujutsu training and develop Judo. In the second episode when he says “In 1993 no one knew anything, and most people still thought that if you did karate the right way you could blow up somebody’s heart” he is obviously being facetious but he is also projecting his own ignorance outwards. There has always been fighting, all over the world, and there have always been evolving schools of thought about the best ways to fight and the best rules for fighting as a sport. The story of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Ultimate Fighting Championship is captivating but it is not, as Felix presents it, the only story about fighting. In this regard, as with others, he seems to have internalized the some of mystique that the UFC has cultivated around itself and its history.

*

Once the history lesson is over I think Fighting in the Age of Loneliness hits its stride and Felix’s passion for the Pride FC and UFC fights and fighters that drew him into the sport shines through in the writing and the narration. His criticisms of the ways that the UFC continues to underpay and otherwise mistreat its fighters are spot on and if anything he could have gone into its anti-union policies in more depth. Before I get to the final episode, there are a few smaller criticisms I want to get out of the way.

Firstly, I would like to have seen more about modern women’s Mixed Martial Arts in the show. I largely chalk this up to the difference in perspective on the sport between Felix and myself: a female fighter was what drew me to watch the UFC in the first place so my image of the sport is one that has always included women, whereas Felix got his start watching Pride, which had no female fighters, and an all-male era of the UFC. There were women competing in MMA at that time and a few exclusively female promotions but if Felix ever watched any of them he doesn’t mention it. In the end, Ronda Rousey gets a minute and a half, Joanna Jędrzejczyk gets about 30 seconds and Cristiane Justino gets a name check.

Rousey is the only female fighter to be mentioned outside of the quarantined WMMA portion of the show, and she comes up during a rather odd accusation of nepotism that Felix levels at Dana White, one which I have heard from other longer-standing UFC fans. I am no supporter of Dana’s and I’m not seeking to defend his character, but it seems far more likely to me that the reason the UFC put so many promotional resources behind Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor is not, as Felix supposes, simply because Dana White personally liked those two fighters, but rather because he saw the opportunity to make a lot of money off of them, which he did. Dana is a fight promoter, he is notoriously fickle in his affections and the warmness he displays towards any given fighter is directly correlated to their ability to drive pay-per-view buys for his promotion.

I also think that there are some more straightforward explanations for the UFC’s success than the poetic ones that Felix understandably focuses on. The ideas of the UFC as a refuge for outcasts and the alienated, both as fighters and as fans, and the honesty of single combat in an age of uncertainty are clearly very thematically important to Fighting in the Age of Loneliness as a project. For me the series places too much importance on the role those things played in the current popularity of the sport and doesn’t put enough emphasis on, or even mention at all, some more mundane but more significant contributing factors.

The vacuum at the top of combat sports that was created when boxing all but collapsed under the accumulated weight of decades of corruption and promotional malpractice, and the brief but significant success that the WWE had with a grittier presentation of professional wrestling in the late 90s both set the stage for the rise of modern MMA in the USA. That rise was helped along by things like the value of the walk-off head kick knockout and the fourteen second armbar victory in the age of the highlight clip and the animated GIF, and the mix of astuteness and good fortune that led the UFC to put out a reality TV show featuring actual physical conflict at a time when programming was being dominated by reality shows based on exaggerating and continually re-hashing interpersonal squabbles.

*

At the end of episode four, titled “As the world fell apart, the only magic was in the cage”, Felix’s rhetoric about the things that happen during UFC fights reaches its most florid, mythological heights. Against a montage of post-fight embrace photographs he says “The magic that we wish we saw everywhere else was in the cage [...] At least there was one place where unthinkable things actually happened, at least if you put two weird people with incredible abilities in front of each other their combined experiences and opposing martial abilities would create a beautiful, maddening story.” I am not criticising Felix for being more captivated by the emotion and passion of fighting than I am but the praise and reverence which he lavishes upon his favourite period of the sport’s recent history at the end of the fourth episode clashes brutally with the way he starts the fifth.

“No-one is ever content to just like something, especially not nowadays”, he says. “We’re not just fans of things any more. We declare our media consumption habits to determine the types of people we are [...] now if someone doesn’t like something we like they hate us” These lines and the visuals that accompany them are presented as a barb aimed at the legions of TV personality and pop star fans bitterly defending their territory on social media. Although there is a hint of self-deprecation about this segment I don’t read much self-awareness here, mostly just old fashioned middle-class punching down at the popular culture of the working class.

In the way he frames what he views as the best period of the UFC’s history, Felix is himself engaging in, as he puts it, “battles that our millionaire entertainers will probably never give a shit about or even find out about”. He has taken to the field of the culture war to defend his memory of a past version of a massive, sinister entertainment company against the changes that he perceives to be ruining it.

Here is where the bitterness begins to creep in, and build. Felix starts talking about the insecurity of modern MMA fans and the sport’s image problem, but then he abruptly dispenses with those concerns and starts arguing that MMA should remain insular and niche. A this point he also waves a huge screaming red flag by describing Jon Jones as a “weird person” who is “actually pretty fascinating once you get to know him” and who has “more depth than most would know”, but we’ll get to that later.

“Who gives a shit if we don’t have hundreds of millions of people watching with us every time, and why do we care if people think we’re fucked up or weird for watching it. We know what our sport is, and we know who we are [...] It’s our stupid violent insane spectacle sport for freaks and assholes that’s as legitimate or illegitimate as any other sport in the world. Well, at least it was ours at some point.”

I recognised this argument the moment I heard it. It sounds almost word for word like an insecure gamer defending video games as an art form and as a hobby that is just for real nerds and not the masses. I know that argument very well because I have been that insecure gamer in the past. In complaining that MMA is not “ours” anymore he has jumped from “if someone doesn’t likes something we like they hate us” to “if someone likes something we like for the wrong reasons they hate us”.

This is the tone that Felix adopts for the entire final episode, and he proceeds to decry three recent changes he thinks the UFC has made in an effort to bring the sport into the mainstream, changes that he declares as already being “to the detriment of the viewers, the fighters, and ultimately, [the UFC] themselves”.

The first is the Fox TV deal, of which his criticism is that it has led to too many fights and therefore too many fighters, but he doesn’t present any reasons why more fights has been a bad thing. He talks about how poorly the UFC compensates its rank-and-file fighters, which is a great argument for better fighter pay, but is not an argument for fewer paid fighters or fewer fight cards.

The second is the UFC’s apparel deal with Reebok, which he accurately assesses as a disaster for their fighters.

The third is drug testing, and for me this is where Fighting in the Age of Loneliness goes completely off the rails. The first thing he says in this segment is probably the only part of it I agree with: “the vast majority of your favourite athletes use steroids.”

*

Felix is right that the UFC asked the US Anti-Doping Agency to start testing its fighters more to provide an image of legitimacy than because they actually care about fair competition, but his main problem with the policy is that performance enhancing drugs are in fact cool and good. Earlier in the series he celebrates the way that Pride FC’s “loose medical oversight” and “pro-steroid policy” allowed its fighters to “consistently break laws of god and man,” now he gleefully exclaims that “Steroids are actually kind of amazing.”

“The human body is absolutely not designed to fight for 15 to 25 minutes, but steroids help make it work”. Felix provides no justification whatsoever for this claim, and it’s a ridiculous one that springs from the same myopic view of the history of combat sports that he expresses in the early episodes. To present just one counterexample, fighters in classical Greece did not have the benefit of modern nutritional science and training methods, let alone anabolic steroids, but the only time limit on Pankration bouts was sunset. Fights that last more than 25 minutes might not be the most fun to watch but they’ve certainly been happening since long before the steroid era.

Felix doubles down on this position. While he acknowledges that steroids “have their side effects” he asserts that “it is impossible to compete at the highest levels of fighting without some chemical help.” This is another absurd claim, he does try to back this one up but in doing so he immediately undermines it: “Talk to any retired fighter, and they’ll give a number anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of their former training partners juicing.” Rather than proving his point, this statement suggests that it is not at all impossible to compete at the highest levels of fighting without chemical help because at the very least ten percent of fighters are doing it. This scaled-back version of his original pronouncement does make the prospects of success seem pretty bleak for clean fighters, but Felix doesn’t care. He is happy to accept that if most fighters are doping then fighters need to dope to compete and therefore it is OK for fighters to dope.

USADA testing in the UFC has, in Felix’s opinion, fucked things up. There are a lot of very valid criticisms that he could make about the inconsistent way that the policy has been applied to different fighters or the odd ways it has conflicted and overlapped with state athletic commission testing policies or the lack of fighter engagement in the process of rolling out the program leading to confusion and uncertainty about the rules, but he doesn’t. Instead of talking about the massive unregulated supplement industry in the USA and the habit that some supplement brands have of ‘accidentally’ slipping a bit of the good stuff in their products to make sure that their customers get the gains they crave, he complains that fighters are being punished for “by-products of over the counter substances”. By-products and contaminants are not the same thing, I’m not sure if Felix just misspoke here or if he genuinely doesn’t understand the problem he is talking about.

He goes on to moan that the punishments for breaking the rules of the sport are longer under this new program. He doesn’t say why the longer bans are bad, just that the UFC has been ‘capricious’, and it seems obvious to me that the reason he disagrees with the longer bans is that he thinks PED usage is a good thing. Let’s address that idea.

There are two main reasons why I think performance enhancing drugs should be banned in almost all sports. The first is that PED use is bad for the long term health of athletes. We know that there are permanent negative effects associated with the use of anabolic steroids, and there are scores of other widely used PEDs that simply haven’t been around for long enough for the consequences of their use to be properly understood. It is possible to argue from this position for the regulation and standardisation of PED use in sports, and although I disagree with that line of reasoning I do think it has some merit, but there is no hint of this argument in Fighting in the Age of Loneliness.

I think the most practical way to prevent athletes from being incentivised to gamble with their future health for short-term gain, especially in a sport like MMA which already carries so much physical risk, is to ban the use of PEDs and enforce that ban with testing. Felix talks about steroids helping fighters to recover quickly from serious injuries, but I don’t think that is a worthwhile tradeoff to ask them to make, and I don’t think it would be a bad thing for the health of fighters if less prevalent PED usage meant that fewer of them had to endure the accumulated physical toll of fighting four or five times a year.

The second reason is a purely sporting one. The rules of all sports are arbitrary, but they usually constitute an attempt to delineate a competition that tests one particular set of skills and abilities in its competitors and excludes others. Chess is not designed to be a test of split-second reflexive reactions, 100 meter sprinting is not supposed to challenge your ability to predict the strategy your opponent is going to employ and prepare a counter-strategy, and as far as I am aware there is no sport that seeks to test its competitors ability to improve their bodies through medical intervention. I want the sports I watch to be fair competitions that are about what they are about, and Felix does too: he repeatedly praises the “truth” and “honesty” and “earnestness” of “what goes on in the cage,” but he fails to see how this contradicts with the idea of allowing the outcomes of fights to be heavily influenced months ahead of time by means of one fighter having access to less scrupulous, less restrained doctors than the other.

There is some nuance here around where you draw the lines between sports nutrition, necessary medical assistance and doping, but again Felix does not adopt a position so sophisticated. It’s been demonstrated in almost every popular sport that athletes with the help of an organised and scientific doping program have a significant advantage over clean rivals with similar levels of experience and training, and that’s not a contest I was ever interested in watching. Fighters shouldn’t use steroids any more than match sailors should use outboard motors, it is contrary to the very concept of the sport.

*

Felix isn’t just mad about USADA testing because he thinks steroids are nifty, though. He’s also mad that they took away one of his favourites. “At the absolute highest level of the sport, no-one was derailed by this as much as Jon Jones” This is another part of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness that emphasises the gulf between Felix Biederman’s perspective on the UFC and my own. He watched Jon Jones’ rise through the ranks and his multi-year reign as the consensus best fighter in the world, and was apparently completely captivated by it. In describing him Felix returns to the hagiographic tone of the third and fourth episodes, describing him as “a giant, freak athlete who did moves that he learned off of youtube to humiliate fighters we grew up with”, comparing him to Napoleon, calling him “a genius who can destroy world champions with stuff he saw in a movie, the equivalent to those savant kids who can hear a song once and instantly play it on a piano perfectly”

By the time I was starting to watch the UFC, Jon Jones had already sabotaged his career fairly comprehensively. I don’t know Jon Jones as a legend or a genius or the greatest fighter in the world because I’ve never seen the fights that earned him that reputation. Here are the things that I do know about Jon Jones, things that have happened or that I have learned about since I started following the sport:

Jon Jones is a homophobe. In 2012 Jon Jones crashed his car, plead guilty to driving under the influence, and received a slap on the wrist. In January 2015 Jon Jones tested positive for cocaine in an out-of-competition test and was issued a token fine. In April 2015 Jon Jones ran a red light and caused an accident involving two other cars that left a pregnant woman with a fractured arm, then ran away only to turn himself in after an arrest warrant was issued and eventually plead guilty to fleeing the scene of an accident, receiving 18 months of probation. In 2017 Jon Jones was given a one year suspension after testing positive for banned hormone and metabolic modulators, which turned out to be contaminants in an erectile dysfunction pill he had been given by a training partner. In 2018 Jon Jones tested positive for an anabolic steroid and was suspended again for 15 months.

On the front steps of courthouses Jon Jones is humble and apologetic, and in the immediate aftermath of being caught doing something he shouldn’t have he often talks about how hard the experience has been for him and how much he has learned from it and grown as a person. At all other times he acts as though the bad things that happen to him or around him are never his fault, that he has no responsibility to ever change or even reflect upon his own behaviour, as though in all these struggles he has been the victim of cruel circumstance and conspiracy.

The Jon Jones that Felix describes is not someone I recognise, and the way he describes him is concerning. “As we got to know Jon more, we saw his personal foibles, like his DUI arrest and rivalry with Rashad Evans” I don’t think that having a heated rivalry with a competitor is comparable with drunk driving at all, and in framing the incident this way Felix trivializes it. He does this again with Jones’ hit-and-run conviction, mentioning it in passing but quickly moving on to quip about how awesome Jones got at powerlifting in his year off. He calls Jones “a person with failings who sometimes acted like an asshole, got pissed off and said incredibly cutting things to his opponents”, reinforcing the impression that Jones’ main character flaw is simply being too fierce a competitor, instead of calling him, say, a person with failings who sometimes acted like an asshole, took drugs he shouldn’t and crashed cars.

Felix is constantly making excuses for Jon Jones in this part of the episode. When he gets to the second failed drug test, he says Jones “got popped by USADA”, a turn of phrase that subtly reinforces Jones’ own narrative of victimhood, especially since Felix has already established USADA as the bad guys who are fucking up the UFC. He wraps up the Jones segment with a ‘boys will be boys’ defence couched in another appeal to the glory of days gone by: “It used to matter less if you acted like an idiot. Everyone was a bit of an idiot in one manner or the other in life, but god forbid you now embarrass the sport”.

*

From here, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness whines to a messy conclusion. The segments get more disjointed, it’s at this stage that modern women’s Mixed Martial Arts gets all of two minutes of consideration, and then there is a rather reluctant summary of the UFC career of Conor McGregor, who Felix seems not to like. He certainly doesn’t describe him with close to the same kind of exaltation that he deploys earlier for fighters who had similar trajectories like Mauricio Rua, Anderson Silva and Jon Jones.

After that, Felix goes back to behaving like a fan of an indie band that has started making top 40 hits. He doesn’t like that the one of the UFC’s new part-owners is an asset stripping firm, even though in his golden age one of the UFC’s part-owners was an Emirati war criminal. Back in the first segment of the first episode he references “this modern era of fighting, where all of the things that used to make the sport unusual are mostly gone,” and now he returns to that idea and calls the supposed new “fourth era” of fighting “sanitized and oversaturated,” contrasting it with the “honesty of a fist-fight” and the “cultural haven for strange people” that the UFC offered ten years ago. He complains that there aren’t enough knockouts any more. When he brings up the recent long-anticipated fight between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov he says “sometimes the dam of normalcy breaks and we get momentary bursts of how things once were,” which strikes me as a rather ‘what have you done for me lately’ attitude to take about something that happened the month before this video series came out.

Things drag closer to an end and Felix keeps returning to his golden age. “What was once a weird refuge for those who needed it is now eroding into just another thing that’s as formless and indistinct as everything else. Fighting has rid itself of so much of its magic. It does not transcend the world any more.” The way that he constantly makes references to a bygone era when everything was simple and pure and good and as it ought to be, and wishes dearly that we could return to that era instead of continuing to face the injustices of this current moment in time, reminds me a lot of an ideology that has has a big resurgence in the USA recently.

The episode wraps up with one final spasm of bitterness. “This will happen to everything that you love. Nothing you like will remain untouched, and it will get further and further monetized into meaninglessness. This isn’t just our problem in our idiotic bloodsport. You’re fucked too.” He’s not wrong about the commoditization of entertainment and sports-as-entertainment but he sounds once again like a whiny gamer stereotype or a disillusioned popstar fanboy of the kind he mocks at the start of the episode.

And then the episode doesn’t actually end. The sort-of epilogue about Donald Cerrone fighting Nate Diaz seven years ago is a good little segment, but it doesn’t do anything here. It doesn’t serve to illustrate or emphasise any of the things Felix has been talking about in the minutes leading up to it, it doesn’t follow from them in any kind of narrative. It feels like a piece that some combination of Felix Biederman and Jon Bois just liked too much to cut, even though they couldn’t find a place to put it, so they stuck it here at the end. Maybe it is intended to provide some sense of denouement after Felix’s angry ranting. Regardless, it comes at the end of such an unpleasant half hour that its attempt at poignance failed utterly on me.

*

Felix Biederman likes different fighters than I do, he has a perspective on the sport of Mixed Martial Arts that often seems parochial and outdated to me, and I am puzzled by his obsession with the idea that combat sports athletes are all strange, broken people, but none of these things would bother me if Fighting in the Age of Loneliness did not present itself as an authoritative, comprehensive history of fighting, instead of what it is, which is the story of Felix Biederman falling into and out of love with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Together with Jon Bois he certainly tells that story well, their collage of tales of societal fracture and political indifference with images of single combat is a powerful one, but in pursuing its thematic goals the series fails over and over to justify or interrogate the positions it puts forward.

If the UFC disappeared tomorrow, or if it had never been created in the first place, fighting would still exist, Mixed Martial Arts would still exist, the “one two path of a punch to a guy snoring on the ground” that Felix claims to adore will still exist. Fighting is exactly as magical and exactly as mundane today as it it always has been and always will be, even if Felix Biederman doesn’t enjoy watching it as much as he used to.

[shanastoryteller]

original space drama preview

i’m going to be working on this on and off, so if you want to know what the heck it is, read below the cut. please note that this is SUPER ROUGH so fair warning

“This is your last chance to back out.”

Isaiah opens his eyes only to narrow them. The soft-voiced, hard-eyed woman standing above him had been beside him through his entire application process, his numerous physicals, and the small mountain of legal paperwork. He’s flat on his back, so he supposes any intimidation factor he may have had is at least halved. “I’m not going to back out.”

She tightens the straps on his arms and legs, silent as the dozen or so doctors and physics and technicians move around him like a school of fish just at the edge of his vision. Finally, she says, “I don’t understand why you chose the last slot. A thousand years is – a long time. We have no idea where you’re headed.”

“No one has any idea where they’re headed, but at least some know when,” he quips, repeating back the slogan printed on their promotional material. “Why are you trying to talk me out of this? As soon as I’m sent onward, you get a great big check for signing me on, don’t you?”

“CLEAR THE ROOM,” one of the technicians bellows.

She sighs, then leans down to carefully press her lips to his forehead. He’s so startled by the action he doesn’t even think to react to it. “I hope you find what you’re looking for in the future.”

She’s gone, and it’s just him, strapped down into a machine he can barely pronounced, with a small army of people watching him through three feet of solid glass. They’ve done this hundreds of times before. But this time is different.

He’d taken the last possible slot.

Time travel is a one way trip forward. No going back in time, which means once you arrive in the future, there’s no way to return. For smaller trips, a few years, a dozen years, they offer excellent salaries for doing nothing more than going in the machine and popping out the other side. Ever test had been successful. So far.

But for longer one hundred years, there was no safety net. Just the promise of something new. Something different. All they could promise was difference.

For a trip one thousand years into the future? They couldn’t promise anything at all. They couldn’t even promise he’d survive the trip.

“Goodbye Isaiah Dally,” the head of the program says, his voice crackly through the speaker and echoing around the chamber.  

Any response he might have given is cut off as the machine whirls to life, louder and more terrifying than any MRI machine. Light threatens to blind him, and there’s the oddest sensation of pressure on every inch of his body that isn’t quite painful, but it intense enough to make him nauseous.

He closes his eyes, knowing that if he opens them again, he’ll be some-when else.

~

Tara has been stuck on this shitty outpost in the middle of nowhere space for years, fixing up spaceships for crumbs, and somedays it’s hard to remember why.

Today is one of those days.

“Fifteen hundred denarios?” the Mitger growls, a species known for their bright blue skin and dozen eyes. “This is robbery!”

“It’s a bargain,” she retorts. “Your entire engine is shot, this is the completely wrong ship to take into deep space. If you want to get running again, and you want to actually make it to another station, that’s how much it’s going to cost. The parts alone are going to run me over a thousand. This is practically charity.”

“Charity from a Viatorum,” he sneers. “Your species is an eternal vagabond, searching for a planet to replace the one you lost, and entirely willing to swindle, steal, and cheat in the meantime! You’re a disgrace even to your own kind, not even stealing to get things. Your skin is looking a little blank there, girl.”

Tara is going to take that pipe and shove it down his stupid, ignorant throat. Mitger can breathe through the skin, so it won’t kill him. But it will be incredible satisfying.

She’s a pacifist. A pacifist. She’s not going to be shoving anything down anyone’s throat. Those days are behind her.

A single, steady beep emits from one of her monitors. She knows which one without have to look. There’s code rushing across it too fast for her to read, but that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. She knows exactly what it’s saying.

Finally.

“Get out,” she says, “I’m busy.”

He opens her mouth to argue, and Tara doesn’t give him the chance, grabbing him by his exceptionally bony shoulders and pushing him out of her shop. “I’ll fix your ship. Come back in two days.”

“Two days!” His face contorts into anger. She doesn’t have time for it, and slams the door in his face.

She runs back over to the monitor, scrolling through the mixes of ones and zeros until she finds what she needs. Coordinates.

When she enters them in, she curses, and slams the flat of her palm against the table. She’ll never make it there in time, not even if she had the materials to bend several of the rules of time and space. She’s a mechanic and an engineer, not a miracle worker.

She needs backup. They need back up.

Roksana is going to murder her.

~

“Hey, Han,” says a slim, petite Benaid witth the typical pale white color skin and wide pupiless eyes. He only comes up to Ji-won’s elbow, but he’s at least three times as strong as him, which is saying something. It’s obvious by the way he yanks a snarling, pissed off criminal on an electric lead like it weighs nothing at all.

“Barneet,” he responds, cordial. The tax evader who’s meekly following behind him seems even less impressive in comparison. Not that this is really a game he’s interested in winning.

Ji-won doesn’t like being a bounty hunter.

But he’s a quarter Human, a quarter Tilethikos, and half Pugnator.

The human is valuable, and the Tilethikian species is known for their empathy and intelligence.

It’s the Pugnator that damns him.

He’s never been able to get a clear answer on how his gentle, quiet father had ended up with a warrior bride of a species that spoke in crushed bones and bloody enemies more than actual words. It’s not like he can ask his mother either. She died a week after he was born, fighting over the rights to farm a couple miles of land that wasn’t even fertile enough to produce grass.

He can’t hide it either, there’s no way he can pass as mostly human, not like his father can. So he’s stuck doing this – hunting down wanted criminals and turning them in for reward money.

The irony isn’t lost on him.

He’s wanted criminal. If anyone found out who he was – what he used to do – then he’d always be on the run. The bounty on his head is ten times that of anyone he’s brought it.

Maybe that’s why Roksana betrayed them.

As soon as the thought enters his mind, he tosses it out. It’s been a long five years. Most days, he can keep himself from thinking about his former captain. Most days.

He turns his criminal in, gets his paltry reward, and is hurries back to his ship, nearly hitting his head as he opens the door and pulls himself inside. It’s cramped, a little thing, barely big enough for two people to squeeze inside. Addy is practically on his lap the few times they’ve flown together.

It can’t be helped. Addy has most of the world’s knowledge locked up somewhere in his head, but he’s not a mechanic, and it’s a struggle for the two of them to keep even a small ship in decent enough shape for cross-galaxy space travel. They make do with what they have.

Ji-won enters in the coordinates for Earth more out of instinct than anything else. He’s flown from this particular International Criminal Collection Center enough times that he could make the trip blind.

He checks his fuel level, then the crystal matrix, and he has enough fuel, and this crystal set is holding up much better than the last one.

Flying home usually takes around three days. But at lightspeed, it should only take about six hours.

Ji-won didn’t understand the math of it all himself, but he’s applied the equation enough times that he could make it work, even with a dinky ship on the periphery of deep space. He sends a quick message to Addy to let him know when he should be arriving, double checks his equation one last time, and shifts the lever forward.

If there’s something he’ll never get tired of, it’s the streak of starlight at the corner of his eyes as he maneuvers his ship around them.

~

Artificial Intelligence Human Simulation Unit #5432, more commonly known as Adexios, less commonly known as Addy, is falling apart.

He’s not quite the last of his kind, but he’s very, very close. It would be incorrect to say that that the Pandora Program had been a failure. It had, in fact, been a fantastic success. But they hadn’t actually wanted humans made of metal and code. They’d wanted something obedient and useful, and humans had only ever excelled at being the later.

That was over a hundred years ago. He only knows of one other unit still functioning, but considering one of her ongoing workplace goals is to see to his code deletion, it doesn’t really do him a lot of good.

He’s falling apart, and no one can fix him, not really. Even a hundred years later, he’s too complicated to reverse engineer, and all copies of the manual and his designs were destroyed long ago.

So now he’s here. A forgotten android on a forgotten planet.

No one lives on Earth anymore. It’s just him and Ji-won, trying to stop himself from falling apart, trying not to die before his lover.

Falling in love while he was falling apart is the worst thing he’s ever done. It’s one thing to die. It’s another thing entirely to die and leave someone behind. Adexios had tried leaving, had tried running, but his lover had simply followed him, all the way to a backwater planet where there’s nothing to eat but mostly poisonous plants and animals almost too tough to digest.

Ji-won had refused to let him leave. Because apparently they were both intent on making this as painful as possible for the both of them, it had just made Adexios love him more.

A high pitched beep echoes through the air, then another. He freezes, then scrambles into action, tripping over his feet and banging his hip against the side table in his rush. Pain shoots up his side, because of course his touch sensors are still going strong after a hundred years, even if nothing else is. He reaches the out of date tablet mounted on the wall, and swipes it open.

A Viatorum fills the screen, shoulder length white hair and dark navy skin. None of the tattoos Adexios knows she has are visible. “What’s wrong?”

He hasn’t spoken to Tara in years. Not since everything fell apart. She wouldn’t be calling him if it wasn’t an emergency.

“You’re on Earth,” she says, and he blinks, because, okay, clearly she’s been keeping closer tabs on him than he has her. “Tell me Ji-won is with you.”

“He’s off planet working on a job,” he says. “He should be back in a few hours.” There’s not a lot of work someone of Ji-won’s background can get. None of them are pleasant, and few are legal. They are trying so very hard to stay on the legal side of things. For once.

Tara slams her fist into the screen. The crack that appears across is on hers, not his, but for a moment it looks as if her anger had managed to force its way through the connection and break his tablet. “Damnit!”

“What’s wrong?” he repeats. “Why do you need Ji-won?”

Her lips press together and she asks, “Is this connection secure?”

He doesn’t answer, only crosses his arms. His body may be falling apart, but his mind is perfectly functional. As if any connection into his home wouldn’t be secure.

“The last one is coming, and Roksana just sent me coordinates and a time,” she says. “I’m too far away to try and intercept. You’re right there. I was hoping you could do it.”

If he had a stomach, it would lurch. He still feels a little queasy anyway. Roksana, who betrayed them, who left them for dead. Who found them and dusted them off and brought them together in the first place. “How could Roksana have gotten anything to you? I thought – they still have her locked up, don’t they?”

Roksana had abandoned them, had been captured, and everything else had fallen apart.

Tara ignores his question. “Can Ji-won make it back to intercept? We’re only going to have a two minute grace period after they arrive before the Agency swoops in.”

“You know this isn’t our job anymore, right?” he asks. He’s already grabbed a spare tablet to patch a message through to Ji-won. “What’s the time and coordinates?”

She tells him the coordinates, and it’s not too bad, right over where the main facility was, so at least it’s on the same continent. Then she tells him the time of arrival, and he just stares at her. “That’s in an hour! There’s no way Ji-won can make it back in time!”

“Then the Agency will get them,” Tara says. “Is that what you want?”

“How do you even know this information’s correct?” he asks.

She rolls her eyes. “Roksana sent it through. It’s correct.” She rubs at the bridge of her nose, “The Agency is really going to get them. The last human from the past.”

He’s known Tara a long time. This is the most emotional he’s ever seen her, which doesn’t seem like much, but of their team, she was always the one people assumed was a robot.

“I’ll go,” he says. He doesn’t realize he’s made up his mind until the words are already out of his mouth. “I don’t have any viable spaceships, but there’s a hovercraft that’s fast enough to get me there in time.”

Tara’s head snaps up, her eyes wide. “You can’t do that! With your luck, your legs will stop working and you’ll be caught and dragged before Madame President. Who would love nothing more than to wipe your memory banks clear herself, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“How could I forget?” he asks dryly, opening a kitchen cabinet and taking down a box of spare electronics. He grabs a remote, an old communicator, and a computer missing it’s screen out of the box and starts stripping them for parts. “She’s the reason I’m hiding out a planet that’s been empty for six hundred years.” He rustles around for piece of tinfoil, and ends up using a gum wrapper. He undoes a stack of manuals for basic robots just so he can take the rubberband. There’s a soldering iron around here somewhere – oh, there! Excellent. “I’m not going to fight. Or run. I wouldn’t be able to get them out of there before we got caught.”

“Is that a slingshot?” Tara asks.

He holds it up proudly, along with a piece of smooth metal no bigger than the size of the nail on his pinky. “Yes. And a tracker. I’m not strong enough to take on a half dozen Agency mercenaries. But I can at least get a tracker on this person, and maybe if we’re lucky they’ll have to stop somewhere to refuel, or have engine trouble, or – well, maybe we’ll be able to save them.”

“I thought this wasn’t our job anymore?” She’s almost smiling.

“It’s not,” he says. “But you’re asking for help. So I’m going to give it to you.”

Tara softens. “Thank you.”

“Just say something nice at my funeral. I’m a dead man once Ji-won finds out what I did while he was out.” He gives Tara a cocky salute, and it’s almost like how it was before. He moves to end the call, but hesitates. “It’s good to see you again.”

She smiles at him, a rare expression that isn’t a scowl, and closes the line herself.

Well, time to go do something stupid, unnecessary, and suicidal.

Just like the old days.

~

Thargelia had to give up a lot to keep her programing functional, to remain not only part of the Agency, but also the head of it.

Humans are a hot commodity these days. Everyone wants to say that they met one or worked with one or hired one. Across the galaxy, people tell stories about the species that burned too hot and too fast, who died before they had a chance to begun. A chameleon species, who from the stories could be anything and everything given the proper motivation. A supernova people, and people so did love getting their hands on a bit of starlight.

It’s why her business model was sound.

Find those rare travelers who popped into being, train them, house them, feed them, give them the choice of many lucrative and interesting career paths, and pocket half their check for all her trouble.

The problem was, humans were drying up. There were less and less travelers, and those that had traveled before were disappearing too, because she was far from the only person interested at profiting off human curiosities.

Most people weren’t as nice as her, though. She offered opportunity, comfort, fairness.

All the traffickers provided was destitution or death.

But it was fine. Her team was on earth, awaiting the arrival of the last human traveler. No over eager trafficers were going to get in their way. Not that any of them had been able to for the past five years. After this human, second generation or more would be their only option.

She’s make it work. She always did.

~

Adexios has seen many human travelers, but this is the first time he’s seen one appear. The coordinate locations were closely guarded secrets, and the Agency hovered around the forgotten planet Earth like locusts, waiting for travelers to show up so they could be snatched up.

There were a fair number of poachers who circled the blue and green planet, hoping to get lucky and snatch up a human that the Agency wasn’t poised to grab, but there weren’t many left these days.

When Ji-won had wanted to move here, of all places on this very large planet, Adexios hadn’t argued. They’d never said anything out loud, swore up and down they were done with trafficking and running. Yet, in the whole universe, they chose to settle on Earth, still ended up in the place were so many travelers popped into their time.

They were about as good at lying to each other as they were at lying to themselves.

He’s sitting up in a tall tree, waiting. Climbing had been a pain, putting too much strain on his already failing support structures and gears. He’s going to have to wait until Ji-won gets home to help him down if he doesn’t want to break some other part of him that he had no idea how to fix.

The only warning he gets is a heat shimmer in the air, then a slice of blinding light and a sound that would cause his ears to ring if he was organic.

When the light dies down, there stands a young human man. He falls to his knees and vomits, a reaction he’s heard from many travelers is inevitable. He has dark skin, curly brown hair, and has on the same light, skintight clothes that all travelers get sent through wearing.

Adexios looks down at his shaking hands and takes several deep breaths, trying to get them under control. He’s just nervous, not breaking. He’s most worried about losing his fine motor control in the long run. Once that happens, he’ll have to direct Ji-won to do the physical work for anything they have to make, and he’ll become even more useless.

He doesn’t have much time. He places the tracker in the slingshot, aims for the human’s neck, takes one more deep breath, and lets it fly.

It lands in his mass of curly hair, and Adexios slaps his hand over his face. He used to be much better at this.

It’s fine, the tracker will stick to hair too. He thinks. Hopefully.

The man doesn’t notice, still busy emptying his stomach of its contents. He wishes he could go over and help, he wishes he could rub a hand down his bag and tell him that everything will be all right. But he can’t.

He can just sit there are sleek white ships descend around him, and various people with the Agency’s logo stamped across the back surround the man. They pull the man up and half carry, half drag him into the closest ship while those around them raise their tasers into the air.

Adexios would like to say they’re being paranoid, but they’re not. Real, original human travelers are worth a fortune, and poachers will do almost anything to claim one for their own. And this man is the very last human traveler. From here on out, they’ll have to make do with alien tainted decedents and cheap imitations.

They leave, and it’s probably safe for Adexios to climb down from the tree and go home. Except if he does that, he can already tell his systems are going to overheat, and he’ll end up prostrate on the ground unable to move until he cools down.

There’s no need to make Ji-won any angrier than necessary. He’ll just wait. Hopefully, he’ll reach acceptable temperatures before his lover gets home.

~

Tara isn’t a pilot, or a captain, or someone who particularly enjoys flying a metal tube through space at breakneck speeds. She’s a mechanic. When necessary, she’s even a passable nuclear engineer. But she’s not a pilot.

Luckily, these days ships will pilot themselves. Especially fussy tourist ships that have no business being flown into deep space to begin with. She told the Mitger that his ship would be ready in two days.

Instead she does a barely passable patch job in six hours, considers feeling guilty for a moment, and instead throws her dresser’s worth of belongings into a couple duffle bags, inputs Earth’s coordinates, and takes that jerk’s ship into the sky. She hopes it will survive the trip.

It’s been three years of waiting, of silence, of rotting in the middle of nowhere waiting for a sign. Now that Roksana has sent her one, she’s not going to sit around wasting her time any longer.

~

Adexios gets an alert when Ji-won’s ship enters the atmosphere. As much as he doesn’t want Ji-won to see him like this, having his partner come back to an empty home would be so much worse. He gives in and sends him his coordinates along with a short message saying he could use a hand.

Less than a half hour later, Adexios can see Ji-won cutting through the field towards him.

He looks unfairly good in the light of the setting sun. A golden halo surrounds his short black hair, and it makes his skin looks warm, both the soft, tan human skin and the places where it blends to pebbly purple from his mother’s side in a neat diamond pattern. His clothes look like they’ve seen better days. It’s a good thing fabric is easy to manufacture, even if Ji-won is the only of them with any skill with a needle.

“What the hell are you doing up there?” he demands as soon as he’s close enough. “What if I hadn’t come back today? What if it had rained? You could have rusted!”

Adexios doesn’t roll his eyes only because he knows it will infuriate him. “All of my technological components are covered by three inches of waterproof synthetic skin. As you well know. I’m not going to rust.”

Ji-won crosses his arms, head craned back to look at him. “Addy. Why are you in a tree? Why did you waste your limited amount of energy to climb a tree?”

“How about you help me down first, and then I’ll tell you?”

Ji-won sighs. Adexios had struggled to pull himself up the tree, worried about moving too fast and overheating himself. Ji-won doesn’t have that problem, and he has the added advantage of Pugnator strength. He doesn’t even use his legs or set his feet down, just uses his hands to pull his entire body weight up the tree until he reaches the branch Adexios is straddling, not even out of breath. “You have a leaf in your hair,” he says, running his hand through Adexios’s hair, presumably to get the leaf out.

He picks Adexios up, an arm under the back of his knees and against his back. Adexios loops an arm around the back of his neck to help steady himself, but he knows he doesn’t need to. Ji-won jumps from the branch and he barely feels it when Ji-won’s feet hit the ground. He starts walking, presumably back to his ship, and Adexios doesn’t waste his breath saying he could walk on his own. “Thank you.”

“Will you tell me what you were doing now?” he asks. “I wish you’d wait for me to be home before doing stuff like this. What if you overheat or your code glitches in the middle of the forest?”

Adexios ignores the last part. While getting into that familiar argument might buy him some time, he’s still going to have to tell Ji-won the truth, and he’d rather he wasn’t in a bad mood from them arguing when he hears it. “Tara called.”

There’s a moment where Ji-won’s every muscle tenses, then he forces himself to relax. “Oh?”

“She had the coordinates of the last human traveler.”

Ji-won freezes. “No.”

“I couldn’t do anything, obviously,” he says, hoping he doesn’t sound as bitter as he feels. “But I put a tracker on him. I think she’s planning to go to after them.” He’s also pretty sure Tara’s going to ask for their help, but he’ll save that bit of information for later.

“Where did she get the coordinates?” he asks. “I thought she was pretending to be a no name mechanic in the middle of nowhere.”

To the sticking place, and all that. “Roksana.”

Ji-won slowly, carefully puts him back on his feet.

Adexios grabs onto his arm with both hands. “Don’t – look, don’t overreact.” He winces as soon as he says it.

“I’ll just be a couple of minutes,” he says in that completely calm tone of voice that Adexios hates. He pries Adexios’s hands off of him, then goes walking towards the nearest tree.

His purple, pebbled skin shifts and grows to cover him, and he snaps his arm out against the trunk of the nearest tree. A twelve inch long pale white blade snaps out of his skin and slices through the tree, then he does the same with his other arm. The thirty foot tree falls to the side with a dramatic crash that shakes the ground, but Ji-won has already moved on to the next one.

Adexios sighs, but sits on the ground and pulls his knees to his chest.

They don’t have secrets, but they do have silences. Roksana has been one that Adexios hasn’t been able to break through these past five years.

~

Isaiah has no sooner arrived in the future than he’d been ushered onto a ship by creatures that didn’t look anything close to human.

That answered the intelligent life question, at least.

They’re speaking to him, but he it’s in language he can’t understand, or a variety of languages he doesn’t understand.  Once they get him inside, they don’t touch him, just direct him to a seat, strap him in, and rocket into the air. They go past the clouds and break into the empty darkness of space, and Isaiah wishes his seat was next to a window.

A gangly bright yellow alien with four arms and two dozen blue eyes sits down next to him. It takes out a tablet, and presses a few buttons on it. A light, female voice speaks from the tablet. It sounds like – Chinese? Those two dozen eyes are all focused on him, and he just shakes his head.

She presses another button, and this time the same voice speaks in Spanish. He can order dinner and start a bar fight in Spanish, and that’s about it. He shakes his head again.

Another press of a button, and clear, familiar English comes out of the tablet. “Hello, traveler. Do not be afraid. You have arrived in the year three thousand forty eight. We are your friends. You are not the first traveler to arrive in our time, and you are being taken to others of your kind. The transition to your new home will go much smoother if you are able to understand those are around you, and be understood in return. Many beings in today’s day in age have a translator implanted in order to ease interplanetary communication. Do you consent to receiving this translator?”

He waits, but the voice doesn’t continue speaking, nor does anyone move to make him respond.

What’s got to lose? He’s a thousand years in the future traveling on a spaceship with a bunch of aliens. He nods.

The yellow alien stands up, and opens a compartment to pull out a large syringe, making him immediately regret his decision. It stands behind him and presses the syringe to the base of his neck. There’s a sharp pain, and for a moment everything goes hazy around him, but when he blinks everything back in place, the chatter surrounding him suddenly makes sense. It’s not that he understands the languages everyone is speaking, it’s that now they all sound like English. It’s all technical jargon and report he doesn’t really understand.

“Better?” He looks to the yellow alien. Its voice is deep, and soft. He nods again, slightly wary of speaking out loud.

“Do not worry,” it says, kind. “We are the Agency. It is our pleasure and duty to help the remaining humans and their decedents.”

“Remaining?” he echoes. He twists to look behind them to see his blue and green planet getting smaller and smaller behind them.

It places on of its hand on his back. It’s cold. “Your kind has been extinct for hundreds of years. All that remains is your travelers.”

It shouldn’t matter, not really. Everyone he knew is long dead either way. But it feels like someone dug out his heart with a spoon. “We’re all gone? Earth is just – vacant?”

“I did not mean to distress you,” it says earnestly. “Earth is home to much fauna, and a significant minority of animals. Some aliens choose to make their homes on this planet. But there are no more humans on Earth.”

“Oh,” he says. “Okay.”

That doesn’t make it better. At all. But he has a lot to process, including the extinction of his own species, apparently.

~

“Miss Sassani,” says an old, rough voice. From the sound, he’s standing right in of her, but it hurts too much to raise her head. “They are coming. They’ve retrieved the last human.” There’s a brief pause before he adds on, in case she couldn’t figure it out herself, “Your people failed.”

“Watch it,” she croaks, tilting her head back even with the white hot agony that it sends down her spine. The old man in a janitor’s uniform mopping in front of her cell looks almost entirely human, from his short grey hair to the wrinkles that settle naturally over his face. It’s the electric blue eyes that give him away. They’re almost glowing in the low light. “They can’t fail at an objective they didn’t have. I sent coordinates. Not instructions.”

“You wanted them to fail?” he asks. He’s not looking at her, so anyone watching them on the camera won’t notice anything odd.

She shrugs, unwilling to answer.

He sighs at her silence. “You know, if you were not so antagonist toward the Madame, she would not order such …creative interrogation methods.”

“If I give that bitch an inch, she’ll take a mile. If she wants my silence, she can kill me and take it from my corpse,” she says, and doesn’t flinch when her smile splits her bottom lip open again. “Get out of here, Archi. Too much time spent talking to a prisoner can’t look good for you.”

He almost looks like he wants to say something. Instead he finishes mopping the place in front of her cell and says, almost too soft for her to hear. “Get some rest, Roksana.”

Roksana Sassani snorts and leans against the wall. She makes sure Archi is long gone before letting her eyes slide shut as she takes in slow, careful breathes in an attempt not make her damaged rip cage even worse.

Her people don’t fail. What a preposterous suggestion.

[worryinglyinnocent]

A Brief And Hopefully Humorous Summary Of The 100 From Someone Who Has Not Seen It. 

So, after my weird dream earlier in the week, I was intrigued by The 100 and decided to check it out. On finding it was not available on Netflix, I decided to delve into Wikipedia, TV Tropes, Tumblr and Youtube instead for some recaps and information. 

My thoughts below. No offence is intended to the show or to people who enjoy it, this is all in the spirit of entertainment and I do really want to watch it now - I am sure I will get round to it. 

Season One

100 years after the first of what seem to be infinite nuclear apocalypses, 100 teenage delinquents are sent to a possibly uninhabitable Earth in exchange for not being blown out of an airlock, because... perhaps you won’t die of radiation sickness but you definitely will die of being blown out of an airlock?

Immediately Lord of the Flies mentality kicks in.

Lord of the Flies momentarily put on pause when it turns out that they’re not alone. 

Everyone attempts to survive. Some people do not. There’s murder and suicide within the first five episodes?

Meanwhile back in space with the adults there is Unresolved Sexual Tension. 

A supposedly important main character is in the pilot then never seen or spoken of again.

Teens make contact with adults slightly too late because some idiot broke the radio, there are explosions everywhere, and the adults decide to nope on out of space. 

Season Two

The adults arrive and their attempts to reimpose civilisation on the teens are not well received. 

There’s a not-radioactive mountain full of mutants, sort of. 

Unethical human experimentation.

Unresolved Sexual Tension now moves to the teens. Lead female character one teams up with love interest and becomes my first potential ship. 

More explosions. 

Lead female character two takes several levels in badass.

Lots of betrayal.

The mountain is now radioactive and lots of people are dead. 

Season Three

Where did female lead 1 get red hair dye from?

Former leader of the adults starts a cult. 

The badass beard arrives.

Infighting amongst everyone from space. And everyone from the ground. Charles Vane from Black Sails is also here.

The AI that caused Apocalypse 1.0 comes back for a second attempt. 

Black blood is a thing and is special.

One half of my first potential ship gets killed. 

One half of my second potential ship gets tortured. 

Mind control all over the place. 

Virtual reality skyscrapers. 

The attempt to recruit the pacifists on the oil rig to help with the cause goes about as well as can be expected. 

AI is defeated, but apocalypse 2.0 is on the way!

Season Four

So. Much. Infighting. 

So. Much. Genuine. Fighting. 

Second potential ship gets over the torture and has sexy times.

Female lead 2 turns up on a horse ready to throw down. 

The Hunger Games - pre-apocalypse edition!

The Hunt For Red October The Doomsday Cult’s Bunker.

So. Much. Fighting. Over. The. Bunker.

The teens who originally came to earth decide to nope on out of there back to space. 

Apocalypse 2.0 arrives!

Season Five

Time skip six years and the space crew come back down because they’re sick of eating algae.

At least they weren’t in the bunker. I was correct about the cannibalism but wrong on the timing... 

Sixteen year old girl goes bonkers as a result of everything she has to do to keep the human race alive, and proceeds to be stabbed in the back, thrown under the bus and demonised for it. 

Bunker Battle Royale 2.0: This Time Inside The Bunker!

Female Lead One adopts small child and spends the rest of the season protecting her at all costs to the detriment of some of her other relationships. 

Second potential ship has now become a codependent, drug dependent dysfunction junction. 

Everyone switches sides at the drop of a hat.

Sonic mining cannons!

Everyone is at war over the greenery.

It’s all for nothing because... Apocalypse 3.0 is here!

They all nope on back to space again, this time in convenient cryo-tubes. 

My back-up ship dies.

At least they got to grow old together. 

Season Six

There’s only so many apocalypses the earth can take, apparently, so they nope on out of there to a different planet altogether.

Invasion of the body-snatchers.

Second potential ship dies completely. Note to self, body-snatching is not the best way to say ‘I love you’.

Are any of the adults even left now?

(I mean they’re technically all adults now thanks to the post-apocalypse-2.0 time skip, but hey.)

Have I mentioned that I hate time travel?

Season Seven

Wormholes and time anomalies and doomsday cults and interplanetary travel via weird stones (hello Stargate?), oh my!

Despite promising to do better and not cause another nuclear apocalypse, they almost do. 

Humanity fast-tracks itself to judgement day and nearly fails.

Male lead gets stuck in a snow drift and joins a cult.

Most popular ship in the fandom gets shot down in flames. 

Humanity ascends to a higher plane of existence.

Some of them decide that the higher plane of existence is overrated and return to earth, which apparently did survive Apocalypse 3.0 after all. 

The dog lives.

[scaryastheyseem]

Animorphs October day 15-16: AU + Confessions

Tw for canon-typical body horror + canon-typical discussion of child death and endangerment

It’s weird, the things we don’t know about our parents. My parents have known me since the day I was born. They could tell you the name of every friend I’ve ever had, every food I don’t like, every teacher I’ve had since kindergarten. They know every time I had been sick. They remember every birthday party and every broken bone, every Halloween costume and bad dream.

 On the other hand, I didn’t that my parents had names until I was six years old. They were just ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’, until the day that my aunt called the house and asked for someone named Loren, and I learned that Loren was my mom, and Alan was my dad, and that they’d had entire lives as Loren and Alan, almost thirty years apiece before I came along.

 I still couldn’t tell you what they were like as kids. Or what their hobbies are now, or the names of any of their friends. That’s not because I don’t know. It’s because any information I give you about my parents could be used to find out who they really are.

 I won’t even promise you that my parents’ real names are Loren and Alan. Or tell your our last name. Even that could be enough for the Yeerks to track us down. And I can’t let that happen.

 Usually, it’s parents who have to worry about keeping their kids safe. They make sure they’re eating enough vegetables and aren’t staying out too late or going to parties where there might be drinking. If they’re like my dad, they keep us from watching violent movies and lecture us on the dangers of teen alcoholism like once a week, because my dad takes the very special episodes of Boy Meets World way too seriously.

 My mom says it’s because he worries about us, and that I shouldn’t let it bother me. I act like it does anyway, because that’s what a normal kid would do, and I like to think that I’m still pretty good at pretending to be a normal kid.

 The truth is that it doesn’t bother me. I know that my dad’s right to be afraid. Even if it’s not for the reasons that he thinks.

 See, my parents don’t know everything about me, either.

--

I coast back in through my bedroom window, so tired that it’s a physical ache, like someone’s reached into my body and wrung out my bones. Two years ago, I didn’t know that you could be tired enough that your vision blurred. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to find my open window on instinct, or glide through it on the silent wings of an owl and land on my headboard with no more sound than any other owl would make catching a mouse. Which is to say, no sound. Most people don’t think of owls as scary, because even the biggest ones only weight about three pounds. But they’re some of nature’s most silent and deadly predators. Silent flight. Talons that could crush a human’s hand. Better vision than humans at any time of day, and better hearing, too. Most of their prey die without knowing what hit them.

I hopped down onto my pillow and started the slow shift back into human. Morphing takes a long time, and demorphing takes me longer than it takes the other Animorphs. I’m not bad at it, exactly. It’s just that sometimes, when I’ve been in morph for long enough, I forget what it feels like to have arms instead of wings. Or teeth instead of fangs, or wavy blond hair instead of the curled horns of a bison, my battle morph. None of the others have this problem. I don’t know why I do.

 My toes split and shriveled. Marrow pooled in my bones. The other thing about morphing is that not only does it take a few minutes to go from human to animal and back, but the in-between phase is completely disgusting. I caught sight of myself in the mirror on my closet door. I was back to my full human height, but my face was still mostly screech owl, with huge yellow eyes and a thin beak where my mouth and nose should have been. Tufts of feathers stuck out of body at weird angles, and my fingers were still fused into long, chunky wings. I looked like a rejected design for the baby alien in Alien, or like somebody had skinned Big Bird. In short, totally gross.

 Which of course, was when my dad walked in.

 My already-human ears didn’t hear him coming until he was already opening the door. “Tobias,” he started to say, and then stops, eyes going wide. I froze. There was nowhere to hide, and no way to convince him that he was dreaming, or that this was all a trick of the light. It was a full moon, which had been convenient for our mission, but was now just letting me dad see that I was only maybe three-quarters human. My owl eyes saw every detail of his face as it sagged in shock, the color draining from his skin. I heard his T-shirt wrinkle as he sagged against the doorframe, the wood creaking as he gripped it for support.

 Jake’s going to kill me, was the first thing I thought. Or he’s going to kill my dad. Or Dad’s going to call the cops, and one of the cops will be a Controller, and then we’ll all be dead. I have to stop him before he calls the police.

 “Dad,” I tried to say, but it came out as a squawk. My vocal cords were still mostly bird, my lips hard and grey like a beak. I needed to get human, and say something, anything, that would stop him from screaming long enough for me to—what? Explain that I’d been given the power to turn into any animal I touched by a dying blue alien named Arbron, and that the reason I’d been making so many new friends lately was because we were fighting a guerilla war against mind-controlling alien slugs bent on enslaving humanity by masquerading as a coed youth charity organization? He’d think I was on drugs, or insane. Or worse, he’d tell me that I’d had a bad dream, that the stress of work was getting to him and making him see things. I’d go back to bed, and the next thing I’d wake up to would be Controllers swarming our house and dragging me and my mom and my sister down to the Yeerk Pool to be infested, while the thing in my father’s body looked on in approval.

 See, we’re pretty sure that Jake’s the only one of us with a Controller in his house. Ax keeps watch on our families while we’re at school, and the only one of them who goes to Sharing events—or inexplicably vanishes for hours on end, locked in a cage by the Yeerk pool while the slug controlling them soaks up Kandrona rays—is Tom. But we never really know.

 If my dad’s a Controller, I thought, I might have to kill him myself.

 “Tobias,” my dad said, “Are—are you morphing?”

 --

 We sat on the bed together, my dad in his sweats and old MIT T-shirt, me in the worn-out leotard that was the only clothing I could morph. My scalp itched where my dad was staring at me. I kept lifting my hand to scratch it, thinking that maybe there were still some feathers left in my hair. But it was just my dad staring at me like he always had when he thought I wasn’t looking. Like he thought that Abby or I would vanish into thin air if he took his eyes off of us for a second.

 “Does Mom know?” I asked.

 My dad nodded jerkily. “Loren knew me before I was human.”

 “But—how?”

 “She was abducted, abducted by a Skrit Na ship, along with another human. My fellow aristh and I were tasked with rescuing them and returning to earth.” His lips thin. “The mission became—became complicated.”

 My head spun. My mom had been in space. My mom had been abducted by Skrit Na, the dumpster divers of the galaxy. She’d been brought into space, and then met my dad, because my dad was an alien. An Andalite. An Andalite aristh, which meant he’d been a warrior at some point, or at least a warrior in training. Which was insane in its own way. I love my dad, but I was never one of those kids who walked around on the playground boasting that he could beat up everyone else’s dad. My dad was a California pacifist hippy, the kind of guy who goes to environmental rallies and puts bumper stickers on his Prius that say Give peace a chance, and meant it, and only owned a Prius because he was too uncoordinated to ride a bike. He had a stutter and shook hands like he was participating in an exotic foreign ritual. He cried during E.T. I mean, he didn’t even eat meat. It was impossible to picture him in battle. Impossible to picture him killing anybody, the way that my friends and I had.

 I love my dad. I love my entire family, so much that it scares me, sometimes. It’s why I’ve never been able to get mad at him for being so overprotective, even when it makes sneaking out to do Animorphs things way more complicated than it is for someone like Rachel or Marco, whose parents have probably never seen a very special episode in their lives. I thought I understood what he felt when he looked at us. The deep and terrifying love that comes from knowing just how easily the people you care about could be gone forever. We both felt it, even if it was for different reasons.

 Of course, it turned out that I didn’t understand at all. My dad’s fears came from a place that was a lot closer to mine than I’d thought. I suddenly got the insane urge to laugh, and had to bite down on my tongue to stop myself. All this time, we’ve been wondering when the Andalites will arrive to save us, and there’s been one in my house this whole time, warning me about the dangers of online chatrooms and making sure that I wear a jacket.

 When I was sure that I wouldn’t break into a hysterical giggling fit, or possibly start screaming and never stop, I said, “Does Abby?”

 “No.” He didn’t have to tell me not to tell her. Abby’s ten. She likes Archie comics and science books and learning baseball statistics. There are plenty of things a ten-year-old doesn’t need to know.

 “Are you going to tell Mom that I know?”

 “I already have.” He inclines his head towards the door, and I realize, thoughtspeech. This whole time, Abby and I thought that our parents always won at Catchphrase because they’d been married for so long. Weird that I’m thinking about Catchphrase. My dad is an Andalite. Was an Andalite.

 When I’d brought up my demorphing problem to Marco, thinking that maybe he’d felt the same thing, he’d looked at me like—well, I’d seen how Marco looked at me when I grew a third eye. This was weirder. “It’s two hours, dude”, he’d said. “I think it’d take me a lot longer than two hours to forget what it was like to be human. I mean, setting aside the issue of anyone ever forgetting this handsome face, have you forgotten about opposable thumbs? Buffalo can’t play Nintendo.”

 Of course, at that point Cassie’d had to chime in and tell him that my battle morph was an American bison, and then tell me that there wasn’t anything wrong with me. “Maybe your sense of self isn’t rooted in how you look,” she’d said, which would have been nice if it was true, like most of the things Cassie said. “I mean, you might not be the fastest morpher—“ She refrained mentioning that she was the fastest morpher, which was also very nice “—but you’ve always been the best at controlling new morphs, even ones with really strong instincts. You were the first one to fight off the ant morph, remember? You have an innate sense of Tobias that has nothing to do with the body you inhabit.”

I didn’t tell her that I thought the truth was something different. I thought it was just easier for me to come unmoored from my body. I wondered how long it had taken my dad to forget what it felt like to be an Andalite. I wondered if he was like me, and had forgotten quickly. I wondered if he still remembered.

 Sometimes when he was in human morph, Ax would shift his head like he was trying to use his stalk eyes to look around. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen my dad do that, but there was no way of knowing.

 “She’s making us tea,” my dad said, and it took me a moment to remember who he was talking about. My mom. Who’d known all along that her husband was an alien, and knew that I knew, which meant that were were probably going to have to have a whole other conversation about this.

 My dad reached out, slowly, so that I was prepared when he wrapped his hand around mine. I clutched his bony fingers in my fat ones and held on tight. Maybe some guys would’ve thought it was dorky for their dad to hold their hand, but I figured that I’d been fighting aliens an hour ago, and I could hold my dad’s hand if I wanted to.

 “I’m sorry,” he said.

 “What?”

 “I thought I was saving you,” he said. His voice sounded strained, like he was talking through a chokehold, and I knew that if I looked up at him, there’d be tears running down his face. He sounded exactly like Jake when he was trying not to lose it on a mission. I kept staring at our hands. My dad’s wedding ring, the hot-glue gun scar on his thumb, my total lack of callouses or scars or any sign that anything bad had ever happened to me at all.  Our bodies regenerate from our base DNA after we morph, and your DNA doesn’t store injuries. Even my chewed-up fingernails would come back whole. For all that my dad was a hippy, I’d never heard him cry before, and I knew that I didn’t want to see it. Just hearing it felt like my stomach was hollowing out. It was worse than Jake crying, because for all that Jake’s our general, he’s still technically another kid. My dad’s an adult, and he’s my dad. He might have been a pacifist hippy, but I guess part of me still thought of him as totally unflappable and capable of fixing all my problems, no matter how much I knew that it wasn’t true.

 “You and Abby. War is—war is a terrible thing, a terrible thing.” He was stuttering bad, the way he did when he got cut off in traffic or misplaced a semi-colon in his code. “I thought Earth was safe—safe and peaceful. They had just had a war. Loren said it was terrible, terrible, there wouldn’t be—another. Not this time. So—you would be safe. But instead you’re fighting your own war, you and these other children. Children.” He shook his head. A tear dripped down onto the back of his hand.

 Part of me wanted to scream at him for ever trusting that humanity could change for the better. For thinking that a species that invented the atomic bomb and then kept having wars would suddenly decide to lay down their arms and plant flowers. I suddenly thought of the psalm framed above his dresser. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn war any more. I always thought it was weird that it was on my dad’s side of the bedroom and not my mom’s. She’s the religious one. Ax told me that Andalite culture was mostly based around the military, but that before their long war with the Yeerks, they’d been nomadic grazers who wrote poetry about the beauty of how trees framed rivers.

 Rachel had snorted, and said that she couldn’t imagine any of the Andalites we met writing poetry, which had been my first thought too. But my second thought had been: Oh, that sounds nice. Like after the war was over, I’d like to wander and write poetry too. Maybe my dad had thought the same thing. I could be mad at him for taking that chance. Nothing I could say would unravel time until he took my mom—Loren, the girl he’d met in space—back to his homeworld and let Abby and I be born under a red sky. Or not be born at all. I don’t want that, and I need him to know that I don’t. That my life is violent and painful and worth living; that he gave me a life worth living.

 “It’s not all bad,” I say. “I mean, I get to fly. I’ve been a bird. I’ve seen the whole Santa Ynez mountains from above.” I tighten my grip on his hand. “That’s—that’s worth a lot terrible things.” I don’t’ have the words to tell him about the feeling that flying gives me. Feeling the wind rising under my wings and knowing exactly where I’m going, and how to get there, and that when I do, it’ll be under my own power. It’s like freedom, bottled and purified. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

 I can’t tell my dad that, but when I look up at his face, it’s lifted towards the window, where a few stars peek through the orange smear of the street lights. I can see tear tracks drying on his face, but he’s not crying anymore. “Yes,” he says. “I had forgotten. There is a certain joy to flying.”

 --

 My parents read a lot of books about how to be better parents. There’s a shelf of them in the basement. The Aware Baby. The New Baby. Siblings Without Rivalry. Raising Boys. Raising Girls. Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. Raising Positive Kids in a Negative World.

 I don’t know what any of those books said about what to do after your husband tells your kid that you’re an alien, and your kid tells you and your husband that he turns into animals and fights aliens after school. My mom had made tea, which as a response to family strife seemed like it would cover a lot of bases.

 We sat around the table in the kitchen, which felt overlit and yellow and slightly fuzzy around the edges, the way that kitchens are in the middle of the night. I drank my tea. My mom brought out a bowl of edamame, which no one ate.

 “You have to stop fighting,” she said.

 “We can’t,” I said, dully. “We’re the only ones standing in the way of the Yeerks completely conquering humanity.”

 “You’re children,” my dad protested.

 We were fifteen—mostly, Cassie and Marco hadn’t had their birthdays yet—but I was pretty sure that bringing that up wouldn’t do us any favors. I think that as soon as you turn into an adult, anyone under the age of eighteen might as well be a kindergartener as far as you’re concerned. There was a big difference between somebody my age fighting a war and somebody Abby’s age doing it, but try explaining that to my parents. “The Yeerks don’t know that,” I said instead. “And we’ve been doing a pretty good job so far. We destroyed a Kandrona generator that was supposed to be installed in a homeless shelter tonight, to transform it into a Controller recruitment center. That’s a couple hundred people we saved from being enslaved, easily.”

 My parents both looked shocked. I didn’t know if it was because I was talking so casually about aliens, or because I’d all but admitted that I’d killed somebody two hours ago. A few somebodies. I was pretty sure none of them had been humans, but then, neither was my dad. I imagined that I could taste Hork-Bajir blood in my mouth. I took another drink of tea.

 “What about the Andalite fleet?” It was mom who said it, which surprised me. The world Andalite sounded even weirder coming out of her mouth. “Have you made contact with them? Surely they’ll want to oppose the Yeerks on every front possible.”

 “We’re not an urgent case,” I told her. I could hear how flat my voice was, but the energy it would've taken to make myself sound gentle was so far beyond me that it might as well have been on the other end of the galaxy. “They’ll be here in three years. Maybe two.”

 My dad’s lip curled in anger. “I’ll contact them myself. They’ll listen to me—“

 “Will they, Dad?” I cut him off. “Will they listen to an aristh who abandoned his post? A voluntary nothlit? I’ve met Andalites; they’re not exactly accepting of alternative lifestyle choices. What makes you think that you can say anything that Ax hasn’t already?”

 “Then give me the morphing power.”

 It’s not what I’d been expecting him to say. My mouth fell open in shock, and he steamrolled on, stuttering but staring me down. “If you have the, the morphing power, then you must have an Escafil device. I may be a nothlit, but even a nothlit, even a nothlit can regain their morphing power, and acquire morphs in their new body. I’m an adult, an Andalite. I know the Yeerks, their strategies, their ships.”

 “Me too,” my mom said. She reached out and touched my shoulder. “I might not be an Andalite, but I’m not about to let my son risk his life without at least trying to keep him safe.” She paused. “Also, we can both drive, which I imagine would be helpful.”

 Weirdly, it sounded nice for a moment. I wouldn’t have to lie to my parents anymore about where I was going or what I was doing or why I was staying out so late. And they were right. They were adults. At least theoretically, it was their job to take care of us. To make the hard calls that Jake makes now, when there aren’t any good options. The ugly calls when there are good options, but the bad ones will hurt the Yeerks a little bit more. Or keep us alive for one more day. Or eliminate a threat that needs to be eliminated, no matter what the cost.

 I thought about David.  A bat cracking across my beak. Jake choking on his own blood. The terrible thing that Rachel had to do. I closed my eyes. “I’ll have to talk to Jake,” I said.

 “What does that mean?” my dad said.

 At the same time, my mom said, “Jake?” She said his full name. “That Jake? The sleepy-looking one who roots for the Padres?” My mom’s a Dodgers fan.

 “He’s our leader. Our war-prince,” I added to my dad. Though maybe my mom knew what a war-prince is, too. “If anyone’s making new Animorphs, it’ll be him making the call.”

 “He’s fifteen,” my mom protested.

 “I trust him, Mom. With my life, like once a week.”

 Her face got red and blotchy, which meant that she was about to start crying. My dad made a choking sound. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry we let this happen to you.” I stared at the chip in my mug and thought that I should have feel more awful about making my parents cry, twice. Or at least that I should have feel more awful than I did tired.

 I thought about explaining to my parents that the last time we’d given somebody else the morphing power, he’d snapped and tried to sell us out to the Yeerks before almost murdering half of us and forcing us to trap him in the body of a rat. That just made me feel more tired.

Mostly, I thought, I could have told them, all this time. I’d been lying to my parents for a year and a half. About my slipping grades, about why I was so tired, about what I was doing with the new friends that they were so relieved to see me make. About why I kept waking up screaming in the middle of the night. And all this time, they would have understood. Maybe better than anyone.

 “Dad,” I said, “Dad, I—I killed someone.” I hold out a hand like maybe he can see it, even though I’d used my back to crush the Hork-Bajir’s ribcage with a single blow and send them stumbling into Marco’s outstretched arms. Even though it had been my horns that had ripped someone open, stomach to sternum. Even though I’d demorphed inside the swimming complex at the Y and washed my feet and head off in chlorinated water before remorphing and flying home again, just like I did after every battle.

 I didn’t know how the others washed the blood off. I’d never asked.

 “I killed someone tonight,” I repeat, and my dad closes his eyes but he doesn’t flinch away from me. He wraps his hands around mine, and I think, this is what he will look like when he’s old. Then I think, he’s already old.

 “I love you,” he says, and I think of all the things I could tell my father.

[callmestp]

Tagged?

Tagged by @glassestouchdown​.  Thanks for considering me!  It’s been ages since I’ve been tagged on anything (big surprise there), and I like thinking up answers to the questions.

Rules:

1. Post these rules

2. Answer the questions given by the tagger

3. Write 11 questions of your own

4. Tag 11 people!

1. If you could change just one thing about the world what would it be? To take some lyrics from the Creed song “Higher”: “The only difference is to let love replace all the hate.” And that would be it.  Christ asked his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who would injure or persecute them (Matthew 5:44).  And 1 Peter 4:8 states that love covers over a multitude of sins.  Many other problems in this world, I feel, would be resolved in a few generations if people stopped their hate and loved instead.

2. Name a song that regularly gets stuck in your head. A song that has been stuck in my head lately is “Come for Us” by Evan Wickham.  You can listen to it here: https://youtu.be/Jen0s9V4e5Y A friend of mine called the melody “majestic” and I’m inclined to agree.

3. What was the last movie you watched at the cinema and what did you think of it? That would be “American Made,” starring Tom Cruise.  I was surprised to find out that it was based on a true story.  I had known of the historical events mentioned in the film -- the drug cartels in Colombia, the Sandinistas in Central America and the Contras fighting against them -- but didn’t realize there was one person who was getting involved in all those areas.

4. If you could take some time off and just go study in a foreign country for a while, what would you study and where? I had to think about this one for a bit, but then the answer hit me in the face like a ton of bricks.  If I could go abroad to study something, it would be to Israel, especially Jerusalem.  It’s such a hub of cultures, and it’s steeped with history, Biblical and otherwise.  Part of the reason I would go, would be as a pilgrimage to see the places where Christ lived and taught, and where he met His end.

5. What’s a skill that you don’t have at the moment that you would like to have? There are several ways I can approach this question.  I can think of it in terms of a skill I would like to have but don’t really need, or a skill I really ought to have.  In terms of a skill I’d like to have, I’d like to know how to play certain instruments: a steel guitar, a steel drum, and a church organ.  In terms of a skill I ought to have, it would be public speaking.  (It’s difficult for me to think up responses on the fly, making spoken conversation awkward for me.)

6. Who is the first fictional character that you felt really connected to, and who you still feel connected to today? It’s possible that there may have been someone different when I was younger, but in terms of what I can remember today: Sonic the Hedgehog was a video game character I connected to, from the first time I played one of his games, ca. 1996.  Without saying any words, I saw someone with a sense of adventure, traveling all over the place, fighting for what he thought was right.  I’m still a fan of the franchise and I still enjoy Sonic, but with all the other characters that have since been added to the cast, I adore the ancient Tikal the Echidna.  She was a girl after my own heart: spiritual, compassionate, nurturing, almost motherly.

In terms of something a little more contemporary, I quickly gravitated to Toriel Dreemurr in the 2015 video game Undertale.  I saw an older woman with a good heart, compassionate, protective (almost to a fault), left alone to wither away in the Ruins with only a few small monsters for company.  I felt so bad when I had to leave Toriel behind, and nearly cried when she hugged me and walked away.  Thankfully, in the Pacifist story arc, she got a chance to fulfill her dream of becoming a schoolteacher.

7. Are there any particular types of stories that you find yourself always drawn towards? I enjoy mystery stories, trying to piece together the clues before the protagonists can.  I also really enjoy underdog stories, where one or more “small time” people work to achieve what others would have dismissed as impossible.  These are probably why I love the movie Zootopia so much.

8. If you could meet a fictional character and spend a day with them, who would it be and what would you do together? To build upon my answer to question 7, I would like to meet and spend a day with Judy Hopps from Zootopia.  Though the movie shows a bit of her back story, I’d love seeing a day in her life right now: how things are going with her partner Nick, how she’s treated by Chief Bogo and the other cops at the ZPD now that she’s definitively proven her worth, and how she spends her free time away from work.  I’d also ask for more of her back story: exactly what age she decided she wanted to be a cop, what she did in pursuit of her dream between ages 9 and 24, and whether she’d have done anything different with her life if she had the chance.

9. What are three things you would never want to go without? Family, the Bible, and a means to connect with other people.

10. List three things about yourself that you take pride in. I hesitate to use the term “pride” because, while it’s good to have a moderate degree of self-esteem, runaway pride can be one’s downfall.  But in terms of things in my life that I’m glad are true:

A. I earned my Professional Engineering license in 2015.  By far, that is my crowning achievement in my career.  I’ve been wanting that ever since I was in college, and I put in the long hours for 6 months, studying for that eight-hour exam.  And I certainly make use of that license in my job, though sometimes I get the feeling that it’s being taken for granted.

B. Since 2011, I’ve been able to express my ideas through creative writing.  If I remember right, I’ve completed 11 fan fictions (plus one currently in progress).  The writing has gotten progressively better (and usually longer) with every new story I compose.  Regrettably, I’ve made little progress in this area during 2017, for all the other demands being made on my free time.

C. I’m glad that I’m at a point in my life where my circumstances are stable enough that I can help out others in need, whether that’s offering my time or my financial resources.  For years, my sister has come to me for help on her university coursework, and this week, I learned that she trusts no one else (not even her own classmates) to give her advice and support she needs to succeed.  I suppose I’m a victim of my own success, but still, for someone to actually say that I am valued that much...

11. What are you looking forward to in 2018? I am looking for a change in my life for the better.  As of right now, every day, my evenings and weekends are occupied by one of three things: I’m either working late into the night (as part of my job’s on-call rotation), filling out applications for a new job, or helping my sister.  If I was to get a new job -- and by tomorrow, I pray that some very good news is coming my way -- it would remove two of those three drains on my time.  Thinking more long-term, moving into a new apartment closer to where (I hope) my new job is located, because this apartment has all the memories associated with my current employer.  And maybe I can even work on other areas of my life I’ve been neglecting: finding friends, maybe even getting into a relationship.

The following questions are what I’m writing for this assignment.

1. If you could change one thing about yourself, whether it’s your body, your mind, or your life, what would it be?

2. (This is a morbid question, but it’s been on my mind since All Saints’ Sunday) If you died tomorrow, who do you think would attend your funeral?  What do you think people would say about you, good or bad, if they were being honest?

3. Name your favorite thing about where you live right now.  This could be in reference to your actual dwelling place, or the geographic location thereof.

4. What was something you had said or done when you were younger, that you now look back on and cringe?

5. Name your favorite hobby, and briefly explain what got you interested in it.

6. Your Tumblr blog: how’d you come up with the name?  How long have you maintained it?  Have you ever moved or changed names on Tumblr, and if so, what was the reason?

7. Christ Jesus once said that wherever your treasure lies, your heart will be there also (Matthew 6:21).  What is it that you treasure most in your life?

8. If you could step into the life of any other person, living or dead, for 24 hours, who would it be, and what would you do with the time?

9. Describe your preferred platform for video games.  Why do you prefer that platform over others?

10. If you had the option to be born into any time period, any place, where/when would it be and why?

11. What would be your thoughts of a world where humans co-existed on Earth with some sort of non-human sentient beings?  They could be existing Earth species (feral or anthropomorphic), they could be extraterrestrials, or they could be non-organic robots.

Usually, for me, the most difficult portion of this activity is finding people to tag.  On Tumblr and elsewhere, I tend to be a dead-end for most content.  I don’t follow many blogs.  Many are run by bots, and the ones that aren’t, I don’t know their authors personally.  The only blog I follow, whose author I know, would be @glassestouchdown, and for that, all she would have to do is answer my written questions.  Of course, anyone reading this, who follows my blog or otherwise, is welcome to try this themselves.

[silezukuk]

Bob Dylan - Nobel Lecture

———

When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful.

***

If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about eighteen and he was twenty-two. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Waylon Jennings and Buddy Holly, 1959 [***]

———

He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.

I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down. And somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.

It was on a label I’d never heard of with a booklet inside with advertisements for other artists on the label: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the New Lost City Ramblers, Jean Ritchie, string bands. I’d never heard of any of them. But I reckoned if they were on this label with Leadbelly, they had to be good, so I needed to hear them. I wanted to know all about it and play that kind of music. I still had a feeling for the music I’d grown up with, but for right now, I forgot about it. Didn’t even think about it. For the time being, it was long gone.

I hadn’t left home yet, but I couldn’t wait to. I wanted to learn this music and meet the people who played it. Eventually, I did leave, and I did learn to play those songs. They were different than the radio songs that I’d been listening to all along. They were more vibrant and truthful to life. With radio songs, a performer might get a hit with a roll of the dice or a fall of the cards, but that didn’t matter in the folk world. Everything was a hit. All you had to do was be well versed and be able to play the melody. Some of these songs were easy, some not. I had a natural feeling for the ancient ballads and country blues, but everything else I had to learn from scratch. I was playing for small crowds, sometimes no more than four or five people in a room or on a street corner. You had to have a wide repertoire, and you had to know what to play and when. Some songs were intimate, some you had to shout to be heard.

By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.

You know what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You know that Washington is a bourgeois town and you’ve heard the deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator and you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild Irish rover and the wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the fifes that played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white linen.

I had all the vernacular all down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.

***

But I had something else as well. I had principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally. I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were fundamental.

Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

———

Barry Moser - Moby Dick (book illustration)

———

Moby Dick

is a fascinating book, a book that’s filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue. The book makes demands on you. The plot is straightforward. The mysterious Captain Ahab – captain of a ship called the Pequod –  an egomaniac with a peg leg pursuing his nemesis, the great white whale Moby Dick who took his leg. And he pursues him all the way from the Atlantic around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. He pursues the whale around both sides of the earth. It’s an abstract goal, nothing concrete or definite. He calls Moby the emperor, sees him as the embodiment of evil. Ahab’s got a wife and child back in Nantucket that he reminisces about now and again. You can anticipate what will happen.

The ship’s crew is made up of men of different races, and any one of them who sights the whale will be given the reward of a gold coin. A lot of Zodiac symbols, religious allegory, stereotypes. Ahab encounters other whaling vessels, presses the captains for details about Moby. Have they seen him? There’s a crazy prophet, Gabriel, on one of the vessels, and he predicts Ahab’s doom. Says Moby is the incarnate of a Shaker god, and that any dealings with him will lead to disaster. He says that to Captain Ahab. Another ship’s captain – Captain Boomer – he lost an arm to Moby. But he tolerates that, and he’s happy to have survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for vengeance.

This book tells how different men react in different ways to the same experience. A lot of Old Testament, biblical allegory: Gabriel, Rachel, Jeroboam, Bildah, Elijah. Pagan names as well: Tashtego, Flask, Daggoo, Fleece, Starbuck, Stubb, Martha’s Vineyard. The Pagans are idol worshippers. Some worship little wax figures, some wooden figures. Some worship fire. The Pequod is the name of an Indian tribe.

Moby Dick is a seafaring tale. One of the men, the narrator, says, “Call me Ishmael.” Somebody asks him where he’s from, and he says, “It’s not down on any map. True places never are.” Stubb gives no significance to anything, says everything is predestined. Ishmael’s been on a sailing ship his entire life. Calls the sailing ships his Harvard and Yale. He keeps his distance from people.

A typhoon hits the Pequod. Captain Ahab thinks it’s a good omen. Starbuck thinks it’s a bad omen, considers killing Ahab. As soon as the storm ends, a crewmember falls from the ship’s mast and drowns, foreshadowing what’s to come. A Quaker pacifist priest, who is actually a bloodthirsty businessman, tells Flask, “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness.”

Everything is mixed in. All the myths: the Judeo Christian bible, Hindu myths, British legends, Saint George, Perseus, Hercules – they’re all whalers. Greek mythology, the gory business of cutting up a whale. Lots of facts in this book, geographical knowledge, whale oil – good for coronation of royalty – noble families in the whaling industry. Whale oil is used to anoint the kings. History of the whale, phrenology, classical philosophy, pseudo-scientific theories, justification for discrimination – everything thrown in and none of it hardly rational. Highbrow, lowbrow, chasing illusion, chasing death, the great white whale, white as polar bear, white as a white man, the emperor, the nemesis, the embodiment of evil. The demented captain who actually lost his leg years ago trying to attack Moby with a knife.

We see only the surface of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit. Crewmen walk around on deck listening for mermaids, and sharks and vultures follow the ship. Reading skulls and faces like you read a book. Here’s a face. I’ll put it in front of you. Read it if you can.

Tashtego says that he died and was reborn. His extra days are a gift. He wasn’t saved by Christ, though, he says he was saved by a fellow man and a non-Christian at that. He parodies the resurrection.

When Starbuck tells Ahab that he should let bygones be bygones, the angry captain snaps back, “Speak not to me of blasphemy, man, I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” Ahab, too, is a poet of eloquence. He says, “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run.”  Or these lines, “All visible objects are but pasteboard masks.” Quotable poetic phrases that can’t be beat.

Finally, Ahab spots Moby, and the harpoons come out. Boats are lowered. Ahab’s harpoon has been baptized in blood. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat and destroys it. Next day, he sights Moby again. Boats are lowered again. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat again. On the third day, another boat goes in. More religious allegory. He has risen. Moby attacks one more time, ramming the Pequod and sinking it. Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave.

Ishmael survives. He’s in the sea floating on a coffin. And that’s about it. That’s the whole story. That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs.

———

Flanders region of northern France / World War I / [***]

———

All Quiet on the Western Front

was another book that did. All Quiet on the Western Front is a horror story. This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You’re stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain. You’re defending yourself from elimination. You’re being wiped off the face of the map. Once upon a time you were an innocent youth with big dreams about being a concert pianist. Once you loved life and the world, and now you’re shooting it to pieces.

Day after day, the hornets bite you and worms lap your blood. You’re a cornered animal. You don’t fit anywhere. The falling rain is monotonous. There’s endless assaults, poison gas, nerve gas, morphine, burning streams of gasoline, scavenging and scabbing for food, influenza, typhus, dysentery. Life is breaking down all around you, and the shells are whistling. This is the lower region of hell. Mud, barbed wire, rat-filled trenches, rats eating the intestines of dead men, trenches filled with filth and excrement. Someone shouts, “Hey, you there. Stand and fight.”

Who knows how long this mess will go on? Warfare has no limits. You’re being annihilated, and that leg of yours is bleeding too much. You killed a man yesterday, and you spoke to his corpse. You told him after this is over, you’ll spend the rest of your life looking after his family. Who’s profiting here? The leaders and the generals gain fame, and many others profit financially. But you’re doing the dirty work. One of your comrades says, “Wait a minute, where are you going?” And you say, “Leave me alone, I’ll be back in a minute.” Then you walk out into the woods of death hunting for a piece of sausage. You can’t see how anybody in civilian life has any kind of purpose at all. All their worries, all their desires – you can’t comprehend it.

More machine guns rattle, more parts of bodies hanging from wires, more pieces of arms and legs and skulls where butterflies perch on teeth, more hideous wounds, pus coming out of every pore, lung wounds, wounds too big for the body, gas-blowing cadavers, and dead bodies making retching noises. Death is everywhere. Nothing else is possible. Someone will kill you and use your dead body for target practice. Boots, too. They’re your prized possession. But soon they’ll be on somebody else’s feet.

There’s Froggies coming through the trees. Merciless bastards. Your shells are running out. “It’s not fair to come at us again so soon,” you say. One of your companions is laying in the dirt, and you want to take him to the field hospital. Someone else says, “You might save yourself a trip.” “What do you mean?” “Turn him over, you’ll see what I mean.”

You wait to hear the news. You don’t understand why the war isn’t over. The army is so strapped for replacement troops that they’re drafting young boys who are of little military use, but they’re draftin’ ‘em anyway because they’re running out of men. Sickness and humiliation have broken your heart. You were betrayed by your parents, your schoolmasters, your ministers, and even your own government.

The general with the slowly smoked cigar betrayed you too – turned you into a thug and a murderer. If you could, you’d put a bullet in his face. The commander as well. You fantasize that if you had the money, you’d put up a reward for any man who would take his life by any means necessary. And if he should lose his life by doing that, then let the money go to his heirs. The colonel, too, with his caviar and his coffee – he’s another one. Spends all his time in the officers’ brothel. You’d like to see him stoned dead too. More Tommies and Johnnies with their whack fo’ me daddy-o and their whiskey in the jars. You kill twenty of ‘em and twenty more will spring up in their place. It just stinks in your nostrils.

You’ve come to despise that older generation that sent you out into this madness, into this torture chamber. All around you, your comrades are dying. Dying from abdominal wounds, double amputations, shattered hipbones, and you think, “I’m only twenty years old, but I’m capable of killing anybody. Even my father if he came at me.”

Yesterday, you tried to save a wounded messenger dog, and somebody shouted, “Don’t be a fool.” One Froggy is laying gurgling at your feet. You stuck him with a dagger in his stomach, but the man still lives. You know you should finish the job, but you can’t. You’re on the real iron cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your lips.

Months pass by. You go home on leave. You can’t communicate with your father. He said, “You’d be a coward if you don’t enlist.” Your mother, too, on your way back out the door, she says, “You be careful of those French girls now.” More madness. You fight for a week or a month, and you gain ten yards. And then the next month it gets taken back.

All that culture from a thousand years ago, that philosophy, that wisdom – Plato, Aristotle, Socrates – what happened to it?  It should have prevented this. Your thoughts turn homeward. And once again you’re a schoolboy walking through the tall poplar trees. It’s a pleasant memory. More bombs dropping on you from blimps. You got to get it together now. You can’t even look at anybody for fear of some miscalculable thing that might happen. The common grave. There are no other possibilities.

Then you notice the cherry blossoms, and you see that nature is unaffected by all this. Poplar trees, the red butterflies, the fragile beauty of flowers, the sun – you see how nature is indifferent to it all. All the violence and suffering of all mankind. Nature doesn’t even notice it.

You’re so alone. Then a piece of shrapnel hits the side of your head and you’re dead. You’ve been ruled out, crossed out. You’ve been exterminated. I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did.

Charlie Poole from North Carolina had a song that connected to all this. It’s called “You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me,” and the lyrics go like this:

I saw a sign in a window walking up town one day. Join the army, see the world is what it had to say. You’ll see exciting places with a jolly crew, You’ll meet interesting people, and learn to kill them too. ___

Oh you ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talking to me. I may be crazy and all that, but I got good sense you see. You ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talkin’ to me. Killin’ with a gun don’t sound like fun. You ain’t talkin’ to me.

***

[ note: Jim Krause wrote, “Some verses I once penned to Charlie Poole’s You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me” and there, lo and behold, are the verses Dylan included in his Nobel speech! –> https://goo.gl/W9F6rN ]

———

[detail] / Roman mosaic from the 2nd century CE depicting Odysseus and the Sirens. Displayed in the Bardo Museum in Tunisia / [***] / [***]

———

The Odyssey 

is a great book whose themes have worked its way into the ballads of a lot of songwriters: “Homeward Bound, “Green, Green Grass of Home,” “Home on the Range,” and my songs as well.

The Odyssey is a strange, adventurous tale of a grown man trying to get home after fighting in a war. He’s on that long journey home, and it’s filled with traps and pitfalls. He’s cursed to wander. He’s always getting carried out to sea, always having close calls. Huge chunks of boulders rock his boat. He angers people he shouldn’t. There’s troublemakers in his crew. Treachery. His men are turned into pigs and then are turned back into younger, more handsome men. He’s always trying to rescue somebody. He’s a travelin’ man, but he’s making a lot of stops.

He’s stranded on a desert island. He finds deserted caves, and he hides in them. He meets giants that say, “I’ll eat you last.” And he escapes from giants. He’s trying to get back home, but he’s tossed and turned by the winds. Restless winds, chilly winds, unfriendly winds. He travels far, and then he gets blown back.

He’s always being warned of things to come. Touching things he’s told not to. There’s two roads to take, and they’re both bad. Both hazardous. On one you could drown and on the other you could starve. He goes into the narrow straits with foaming whirlpools that swallow him. Meets six-headed monsters with sharp fangs. Thunderbolts strike at him. Overhanging branches that he makes a leap to reach for to save himself from a raging river. Goddesses and gods protect him, but some others want to kill him. He changes identities. He’s exhausted. He falls asleep, and he’s woken up by the sound of laughter. He tells his story to strangers. He’s been gone twenty years. He was carried off somewhere and left there. Drugs have been dropped into his wine. It’s been a hard road to travel.

In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good. And that’s still not all of it.

When he gets back home, things aren’t any better. Scoundrels have moved in and are taking advantage of his wife’s hospitality. And there’s too many of ‘em. And though he’s greater than them all and the best at everything – best carpenter, best hunter, best expert on ahnimals, best seaman – his courage won’t save him, but his trickery will.

All these stragglers will have to pay for desecrating his palace. He’ll disguise himself as a filthy beggar, and a lowly servant kicks him down the steps with arrogance and stupidity. The servant’s arrogance revolts him, but he controls his anger. He’s one against a hundred, but they’ll all fall, even the strongest. He was nobody. And when it’s all said and done, when he’s home at last, he sits with his wife, and he tells her the stories.

———

So what does it all mean? Myself and a lot of other songwriters have been influenced by these very same themes. And they can mean a lot of different things. If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means. When Melville put all his old testament, biblical references, scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge of the sea and sailing ships and whales into one story, I don’t think he would have worried about it either – what it all means.

John Donne as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, “The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests.” I don’t know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.

When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld – Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory –  tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.

Bob Dylan backstage during the Rolling Thunder Revue, 1975 [cropped]

———

That’s what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”

———

© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2017

———

[wesratcliffe]

GIVE ME A BAILEY N WESLEY KID IDK WHAT THE MEME IS BUT PLS

❛❛ i was scared of dentists and the dark — Autumn Fay Ratcliffe

Name :

{ A U T U M N } - meaning “the fall season”

{ F A Y } - meaning “fairy”

{ R A T C L I F F E } - meaning “red cliffs”

Birthday :

October 1

♎️ Libra (The Scales) The Libra Sun Sign personality is always performing a balancing act. They want to keep all aspects of their life in harmony. This can be a very difficult thing to accomplish. They can actually compromise their personality by striving too hard to keep the peace. The Libra Sun Sign is sensitive to others' needs, especially with their partners, with whom they may share an almost psychic bond. They are happiest as part of a couple. They abhor violence, cruelty and crudeness. Conflict drives them crazy. They will bend over backwards to make peace until they can't handle it any longer and blow their top. One of their problems is they may get that lid put back on before they've released all their anger and tension, so they are destined to explode again at a later date.

Gender :

Cis-Female

Appearance :

{ H A I R } - naturally brown with blonde highlights, short and wavy

{ E Y E S } - hazel

{ H E I G H T } - she stands at 5′2″

Personality :

{ G E N E R O U S } - Much like both of her parents, Autumn is a giving, selfless person. She’d readily give away her lunch to someone who forgot their’s and simply go hungry, or she would give money to people on the street when they asked for it. She has the biggest, most generous heart, and there isn’t a soul on this earth that she wouldn’t bend over backwards or give up herself to help. 

{ F E A R F U L } - More like her father than anyone, Autumn has always been a fearful person. Things were sometimes too intimidating, or too extreme, or too scary for her to have any interest in. When she was little, she had trouble going to sleep because of her overactive, fearful imagination. However, unlike her father, she tries to choose to confront that fear. While yes she may be afraid, Autumn tries her hardest not to let it consume her. 

{ P E A C E F U L } - Autumn has always been a gentle, peaceful soul. She’s like a breath of fresh air, always seeking to live a balanced, calm, and happy life. Her peaceful nature is almost infectious, and it’s not uncommon for her to be a mediator between two people who are having an argument. She’s got a diplomatic, almost regal way of working out conflicts. It’s incredibly unlike her to hold a grudge, and she’s always quick to forgive people. However, sometimes her forgiveness can be given out too easily. 

{ I N S E C U R E } - Again, like both of her parents, insecurity was something that seemed to be passed on. However, it didn’t really manifest itself fully until she was fifteen and her life took a drastic turn. Before the entire world wasn’t passing judgment on her father, and their entire neighborhood weren’t whispering about them — either in judgment or in sympathy — Autumn was a rather secure person. She thought her family was wonderful, and thought that she was pretty nice. However, now that even people she considered friends avoid her because of what they’ve seen on TV, that self-confidence is just about shattered. 

Special Talents :

One of the only ways Autumn can now find comfort, outside of spending time with her mom, is through animals. Her Animal Empathy always gave her a strong connection to anything and everything that crawled, walked, waddled, flew, or swam. She can often be found spending time with the family dogs, or even sitting out in the backyard and talking to birds. It helps her to calm down, and soothes her more than anything else ever could. 

Who They Like Better :

Autumn loves both of her parents more than anything. Her favorite childhood memories are when the three of them would spend time together and go on wonderful family outings. She thinks both of her parents are generous, kind, and loving. However, since the scandal with her dad, it’s been Bailey that she’s grown closer to. The two girls have stuck together through the chaos and grief of the whole situation, and they’ve truly sought comfort in one another. 

Who They Take After More :

Autumn is equally like both of her parents. She came in inherit the traits that they shared: generosity, insecurity, etc. However, she’s also her own person, as opposed to being a mini duplicate of her of her parents. Her struggle between pessimism and optimism, desire for peace and harmony, and fight to overcome her fearful nature is something that is uniquely her own. Appearance-wise, most would say it’s Bailey that she looks like.

Personal Headcanons :

tw: mentions of murder

Sometimes Wesley wondered exactly how things ended up this way, how he ended up having a daughter with Bailey. She was always someone he cared for deeply, but he never thought those feelings would shift from platonic to something more. Perhaps it was because he was lonely, or maybe it was because she’d stuck by him through the good and the bad. Whatever the reason, with time they steadily grew closer. She supported him, and he supported her, and he quickly found himself relying on her kindness. Their relationship didn’t begin with a dramatic confession, or nervous dates, or giddy excitement. No, they’d been close for far too long for that to happen. It wasn’t some explosive, all-consuming love, but it was stable and unconditional — two things Wesley had always desperately lacked. 

It was only a matter of time before Autumn Fay Ratcliffe was born. She was like a breath of fresh air for everyone she met. From the moment she was born, she became the apple of Wesley and Bailey’s eye. They were an incredibly close family, and remained that way all throughout Autumn’s childhood. They would go to the park with the two family dogs, have picnics, watch movies, and go on vacation once a year. It was as if they lived in their own, happy little bubble. However, much like the rest of Wesley’s life, the guilt he’d been so desperately running from caught up to him. 

Autumn was fifteen when things took a drastic change in her life. She was sitting at home with her mom watching TV when she saw her dad pop up on the news. It wasn’t uncommon to see her dad on TV. He often was the subject of many business-related news stories. However, this time he looked panicked and fearful. It was a look she’d never seen on her father’s face before. When she heard Bailey’s gasp, her gaze landed on the headline. “Infamous Entrepreneur Wesley Ratcliffe Accomplice in Murder?” The mere idea of it seemed ridiculous! Autumn knew her father. He was a pacifist; he was gentle, and quiet, and wouldn’t hurt a fly. There was absolutely no way he could have murdered someone. Bailey immediately stood up and tried to call her husband, and Autumn shut off the TV, not wanting to see any more of it. 

Wesley returned home an hour later with an army of reporters on his tail. He slammed the door in their faces and was instead met with the confused, worried, and slightly fearful faces of his wife and daughter. “There’s something I need to tell you...” he’d said. The rest of the evening was spent as a family. Normally when they sat together in the living room, the house was filled with laughter, home-cooked meals, and fun. Tonight was not one of those nights. Wesley explained his past to Bailey and Autumn — how he’d witnessed his father murder a man, how he’d been afraid and run away from home, how he’d lived on the streets for years, and how he’d eventually made a deal with his father out of fear of going to prison for not reporting the murder years before. 

To say that Autumn was overwhelmed would be an understatement. On one hand she was relieved; her father hadn’t actually murdered someone. On the other hand, he had knowingly agreed not to say anything. Did that make him guilty? Autumn didn’t know the answer, but she certainly didn’t see him as guilty. He seemed more like a victim of circumstances than anything. Although the peaceful part of her was a little conflicted, she readily told Wesley that she didn’t think he was guilty. Bailey agreed, and said that Wesley was a wonderful person who didn’t deserve this. Autumn hoped that her father would believe them, and that this would be the end of it. However, his next words are what really changed Autumn’s life. 

“I’m going to plead guilty.”

Wesley Ratcliffe pleaded guilty to Assisting After the Fact. He was fined $200,000 and sentenced to three years in jail. The trial for both her father and her grandfather was broadcasted on live television worldwide, and Autumn had to watch her father get taken away in handcuffs. 

The perfect bubble that existed in her life was popped abruptly. She relied heavily on her mom’s kindness and strength, but she knew that Bailey was having just as difficult a time as she was. All of her friends stopped wanting to hang out with her. Even though the world knew the truth, that Wesley didn’t actually kill anyone, it didn’t seem to matter. As far as her peers were concerned, her dad was a killer and the entire Ratcliffe family was to be avoided. 

Faceclaim :

Lucy Hale