#grief is objectifying. grief is always about the ones who remain

[yvtro]

there's a verse in louise glück's "a myth of devotion" that goes like that:

He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you’re dead, nothing can hurt you. 

and it makes me think of how bruce can't come to terms with jay being alive, and how he refuses any kind of emotional engagement with that fact. this verse encaptures one of possible reasons for this refusal so well. it's a form of self-preservation; he feels helpless when confronted with jay's anger and pain. if jason is alive, it means that he failed him again, that he already lost him again. and bruce can't live with that. denial, then.

you're dead, nothing can hurt you.

[princessfbi]

Hi my favourite Buckley Siblings person. I need some serotonin after reading some horrifically hot takes that basically said that Maddie and Buck is not a healthy dynamic and she has no boundaries when it comes to him.

So, I was wondering if you could give your too reasons as to why the Buckley siblings are elite? 💜

Isn't that always the curse of the eldest daughter? To be invalidated in your feelings and your trauma because you're expected to perform to an expectation that can be crippling. There's a joke somewhere along the lines of "are you an overachiever or were you just the eldest daughter?" that seems fitting this morning.

I mean let's talk about Margaret and Philip's history of invalidating their children's feelings for a second.

They forced Maddie to never talk about a brother who died that she remembered and had known for most of her life. Maddie was nine. She would've been a fourth grader! She was a kid who still had to walk in a single file line down the halls. Do you know what the big deal was when I was in fourth grade? I got to have my classes upstairs on the second floor. That was the big monumental life change for me in that grade. It was a big deal.

Maddie was a fourth grader who lost her brother, didn't even have a grasp of the concept of what death meant, was told to pretend Daniel didn't exist, and was aware enough that her whole life had changed.

That's a fourth grader being told never to talk about someone ever again. A fourth grader who is then taken away from her home, her memories, her friends and forced to pretend like nothing was wrong.

There's a reason emotional neglect has such a clear through line to later in life abuse. It's this idea that Margaret and Philip perpetuated with Maddie that there has to be this performance. Nobody understands our suffering and judges us. It both alienates a child and teaches said child that the world will not understand you if things are different. You see that with the way Maddie hides things with Doug, she makes excuses for him, it's different with her and Doug, she judges other victims of domestic abuse when they come into the hospital, and she deflects. All of this she learned from her parents.

Maddie hiding the abuse 🤝 Margaret and Philip hiding Daniel's death/their grief

Maddie making excuses for Doug 🤝 Philip making excuses for Margaret

It's different with her and Doug 🤝 Philip and Margaret crying victim about people judging them for having Buck because obviously that's not the same thing as other people who procreate children to save other children

Maddie judging other victims 🤝 Margaret and Philip judging Maddie for attaching herself onto someone who loves her (questionable but I think in Doug's own way he did)

Maddie deflecting about the abuse 🤝 Margaret and Philip deciding to move away and never talk about Daniel again

You see them do it again and again to Maddie ("You don't know what it's like you're not a mother yet") so it's no wonder Maddie does it to herself. She'd gotten used to it. You see her do it to herself with Buck, Chimney, Sue, Josh, and then for a brief moment when she's struggling with the PPD.

Maddie deflects but she also makes a point to not let Buck do that. That's why it's so meaningful that she came to talk to him after he revealed he was going to therapy because she thought he wouldn't want to talk about it freely with Chimney around. That's why she prods when Buck makes excuses for Abby's behavior towards him. That's why her scene where she calls Buck sad and lonely is so important. That sticks with Buck and instead of getting angry about it, he tries to get help. But then he does the same for her too "Because I always felt like you were sad too."

Meanwhile in regards to Buck, we see Margaret and Philip objectify Buck from before he was even born. I think a lot of people forget that objectifying someone doesn't strictly imply sexually. Being a donor baby already comes in a severe degree of objectification (you can see this as a major argument in regards to the whole concept of donor siblings ie the book Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro for example). Margaret and Philip objectified Buck from conception and when it didn't work, they didn't put the work in to shift that way of viewing Buck. He remained an object to them. He was never a baby, he was a thing. "We live with a reminder staring us in the face." They didn't just invalidate Buck. They didn't let Buck be a person.

And Buck had grown up being objectified his whole life which is why he doesn't even react when people are constantly doing it to him (people on the job, Abby, Bobby and the team to a certain extent.) I think it's interesting the way he reacts when Omar does the same thing when Maddie introduces him.

Maddie: Omar, this is my brother, Evan.

Omar: Oh, yeah, the football star.

Buck is so visibly uncomfortable when he says that it actually hurts my soul which is why that scene where Buck says "I'm going to be something... I just-- I don't know what it is yet" is so important. Because Maddie has spent her entire life being invalidated and she goes out of her way to make sure that doesn't happen with Buck. She validates Buck. She reminds him that he's a person. That he is someone.

So, when Maddie gives Buck the keys and the money to go away, she's not just giving him an escape. She's giving him permission to go be someone.

What I think people sometimes forget is that the trauma Buck experienced (the neglect which in my personal opinion, is a form of abuse though I know the technicalities are a gray point) was also what Maddie experienced. The difference is that Maddie got to be a person. She got to be their daughter. Their choice. Wanted. Buck wasn't given that consideration.

So, she did it. Maddie changed the course of trajectory for Buck.

And she started that when she was nine years old. A fourth grader decided that she was going to want this unwanted baby.

Maddie wasn't fighting her parents in Buck Begins about being able to talk to Daniel. She wasn't even fighting because they were invalidating her feelings again! She was fighting them because they were back in their lives and treating Buck like he wasn't a person again. She was fighting them because they came into town and gave a lackluster attempt at trying check and make sure Buck was fine before they dismissed him.

And Maddie wasn't going to let them do that again.

I mean just think about the "Don't be stupid, Evan"/"Don't talk to him like that" scene. It's so understated how significant those two lines are. It speaks volumes of the way Margaret in particular has diminished Buck's capacity as a human being and how she'd done it enough times that Maddie immediately jumps to his defense.

And it's not just Maddie who does it either. Because Buck knows Maddie deflects. He's seen her do it with his own two eyes (I just don't think he realized how much she deflects from him because again he thought they were on the same page). "C'mon you don't have to pretend with me. I know things aren't okay with, Doug." So Buck jumps in between Maddie and anyone who is a "danger" to her.

He does it with Margaret: "She's going to nursing school. You should congratulate her."

He does it with Doug: "Standing in between you and anyone who thinks they can hurt you is exactly where I want to be standing."

He does it with Gloria: "Want me to talk to her?"

And he does it again in the big build up at the infamous dinner scene with his parents. Buck has seen Maddie just take it, so he puts himself in the middle. "It was a compliment, Evan!"/"Oh, was it?"

"A united front."

"You and me in the world."

"Us vs them. That's what we always said."

I agree that I don't think it was Maddie's place to tell Buck's parents about his therapy (though, I know why she did it). But Buck is such a firm believer in the "People make mistakes. Doesn't mean you give up on them." and that came from Maddie and grew from his experience with Bobby, Hen, Chimney, Eddie, and Athena.

Buck and Maddie are never going to give up on each other. If they had, Maddie wouldn't have given him an escape. Buck would've stopped trying to contact her. Buck and Maddie show such a capacity of love and forgiveness towards one another it's maddening because they so easily could've not.

It's not Buck tolerating when Maddie "hurts" or "upsets" him. It's Buck loving Maddie so completely that he loves her in spite of her flaws. The same way she has loved him in spite of his failures.

I think that's really the saddest part about the people who don't quite understand the Buckley siblings relationship. It's people who don't get or haven't gotten to experience the profound love that comes from being forgiven for something. Forgiven completely and not just stated. I think to be forgiven, really forgiven, is maybe one of the greatest gifts a person can give you. Because to be forgiven is to be seen. It's be seen for all your faults and still accepted. Whether a person deserves forgiveness or not is really just a moot point if you think about it. Because to make the choice to forgive someone is a liberation of yourself by saying "I am not going to hold this baggage for you anymore." It's all you can control at the end of the day. How people respond when you say that is when you really get to see the true value you hold to a person. Like my sibling and I grew up hating each other. HATING each other. It wasn't until we were older that we started to connect. But I have never once, nor have they, questioned whether or not we would go to the mat swinging for each other. And yeah we have a lot of baggage we're still holding onto but one by one we're letting things go and we are still around for one another.

That's why I think it's fascinating Buck's capability for forgiveness and it stems from Maddie because Margaret and Philip I don't think have ever forgiven Buck. They may not have blamed him but they never forgave him either.

François Duc De La Rochefoucauld has a really amazing quote about forgiveness.

"One forgives to the degree that one loves."

Buck's capacity to love and forgive is because Maddie loved him so completely. She saw him as a person. She treated him as a person. She forgave him for being a person and she loved him for being a person.

They survive major childhood trauma together. It has created this codependency that is shifting for the better because Buck and Maddie are getting better. They're surrounded by people who love them the way Margaret and Philip should have loved them. They are surrounded by people who validate them the way Margaret and Philip should have validated them. They are surrounded by people who see them for who they are the way Margaret and Philip should've seen them.

"Cause it's hard to feel betrayed by someone you didn't really think you could count on anyway... and easy to lash out one the person that you know is always gonna forgive you."

So that's my top reason why they're elite. Buck and Maddie forgive one another the same way they love one another. Completely and entirely with their whole hearts.

[arduadastra]

Lost Faith - Part One

A/N ITS FINALLY HERE!! Thank you for the support and I can't believe I wrote this, if you want a part two let me know!

FINALLY updated to this gorgeous header by @sirtadcooper (who you definitely need to follow)

This is set right after the season two finale and is kind of what I imagine Din would be feeling right after he’s handed Grogu off and what it would be like to find him.

Also, the crest didn’t explode ok, I refuse to believe that.

- 2.1K - (what happened?!)

/// Din is alone. He’s been alone most of his adult life. Once he left the convent he’s captured quarries solo for years. He’s used to the quiet solace hyperspace provides, the occasional hums and beeps from the crest console and the sounds of starlight rushing past is nothing more than white noise at this point. So why does it feel different this time? He leans over and flips a switch. He likes quiet, he knows quiet. Talking has never been his strong suit - in fact, he actively avoids it if he can but there’s a tightness in his chest he’s trying to ignore and he needs a fucking distraction before he punches something. After he had handed... to the Jedi he doesn’t really remember much else. Bo Katan had said something about needing to discuss his future and the dark sabre but he hadn’t paid her much thought to be honest. He had felt numb and it just didn’t seem important at the time. He remembers looking at them all and how they looked back at him. He didn’t even really realise why they seemed to stare so much until he accidentally kicked the helmet at his feet. He hadn’t bothered to put it back on. What’s the point? He had barely managed to justify putting it back on after revealing himself for that imperial scanner. Every soul that saw his face after that had died, other than Mayfeld that is. Technically no living being had seen his face so his creed remained unbroken. But this time? Din caught himself staring and at a lever with a certain missing sphere on top. He looked away. His creed. The one thing he held above all else. The thing that he had engrained into him since he was a foundling and what made him who he is: a Mandalorian. Yet, he has met Mandalorian's and they did not cover their face. They had called him different. ’A child of the watch’ Bo-Katan had said - was he even Mandalorian then? The thought cast his eye to his helmet lying discarded next to him. He thought he’d feel bare without it and he did back with the IG unit but now he just feels angry. The creed he abided by is broken now, but that doesn’t piss him off nearly as much as the realisation that it might not have even fucking mattered in the first place. He huffs. No, that’s not it. It is but it isn’t. The pressure in his chest returns and he gasps. “Dank Farrik.” Din clenches his eyes shut against the pain, it’s not like any other pain he’s felt before and he has been hurt a lot. He feels a burning sensation behind his eyelids and he shakes his head, opening his eyes and setting his next coordinates before he can think too hard about why his vision is slightly blurred. ///

It was nearing the end of your shift and you took in the sparse patrons left around you. Bar work wasn’t really what you wanted to do with your life but it’s all you had. No siblings and dead parents made for one lonely existence so you needed the company your customers provided. Drunken patrons tend to have the best stories too. You’ve heard it all over the years: divorced from the wife, hiding from the boss, hiding from the police - those were the best kind. Usually, you could guess why each one was there and why but you were stumped by someone. You had noticed the lone Mandalorian in your bar a while ago. You wouldn’t take a second glance usually but what strikes you is the fact he hasn’t moved in twenty minutes and he’s just been sat staring blankly at his own helmet the whole time. The bar is quiet and you’re the only one working so who gives a shit if you’re polishing the same glass over and over, he’s interesting. You haven’t seen a Mandalorian before let alone one as stoic as him. You’d heard the stories, of course, battle-hardened warriors capable of bringing grown men to their knees in a matter of seconds… Now that's an image. You love people-watching, or thing watching this far out in the rim, and it isn’t often you see humans. Especially ones like him. He seems sad, but not in the obvious moping, crying, shoulder shaking sad - more like he’s grieving. He’s been sat staring at the helmet on the table for a while. His hands are balled into a fist in front of it and it’s like he’s looking through it to the wall behind. His dark eyes have barely blinked and his hair is tousled on his head. He’s tanned too and has the most striking lips you’ve ever seen on a guy. You cock your head as you look at him - he’s hot. You feel bad thinking that when the guy is clearly miserable but he’s gorgeous. You have a thing for stubble and you can’t help but think how it would feel against your skin. And strangely you hate to see him so sad. You have an idea so you turn around and start making your favourite drink while you check on him over your shoulder. After a while, pleased with what you’ve concocted you walk to his table and drop the drink in his line of sight. You smile at him. “On the house.” He doesn’t look up, doesn’t seem to even acknowledge you’ve spoken to him let alone standing two feet to his left. You clear your throat. “That means it's free." He looks up at that, seemingly broken out of whatever trance he was in yet his eyes still seem so far away. “I’m not thirsty.” You nod your head to the table. “Well if you want to keep sitting here, you need something in front of you.” The man looks back at the drink, bumping it with his right fist then stares back ahead. “Ok.” He’s a chatty one. You look back at your bar and around at the other tables, no one seems to need assistance and you’re sure as hell not about to go back to standing behind an empty bar so you take in the Mandalorian and decide to sit across from him. You sigh, “Well the least you can do is have a sip, I made it after all.” The Mandalorian meets your eyes silently then glances down at the drink by his hands. He seems to take a few seconds studying the contents before bringing it to his lips for a drink. You watch him, watch as he drinks from the glass and how it travels down his throat. You see the tendons stretch and his adam apple move as he does. God, how can this guy make drinking sexy? You chide yourself on the thought. This guy is clearly going through something and he doesn’t need some random woman objectifying him. He’s finished now and is actively avoiding your eye line as he looks around himself. He seems lost like he doesn’t know how to have company with him. You decide at that moment that you aren’t leaving this guy alone. “My name is y/n by the way. What’s yours?” Nothing. He’s still not looking at you. You try again. “How was the drink?” The guy must have some form of manners because he responds at that with a slight nod. “Good.” Not much but you’ll take it. You’ve gathered from this short conversation that

this guy isn’t much for small talk so you decide to cut straight to the point. “Who did you lose?” He seems surprised by that. He looks at you fully then and you’re startled by his eyes. The rest of him seems so closed off, so shuttered but his eyes are a dead give away. They swim with grief and pain and it takes your breath away. He doesn’t respond but he keeps looking at you so you take it as permission to keep going. “I know sadness when I see it. See it every day here,” you gesture around you, “but yours seems deeper than that.” He turns away from you and you notice his jaw tense slightly, subtle but you caught it. You’re on the right track at least. “Was it your wife...or husband?” “No.”

Very quick you notice, so not a partner then. “Your friend?” He’s still looking away. Not that then. You look at his face again, he seems older than you. “Your kid?” That gets a reaction. His jaw ticks and his hand's clench. You see his bicep flex at the action and your mind wanders again and just what he looks like under that armour. “Leave me alone." You continue, “What were they like?” He frowns, and looks back at you, “You’re very insistent.” You scoff, “And you barely talk but I don’t judge.” You take a pause then lean forward into his space, “I just know it's useless when people say ’sorry’ or ’that's terrible.’ You know that already. I always found talking about them is more helpful, means there’s someone else out there to remember them.” The Mandalorian doesn’t say anything for a long time. He studies your face, eyes scanning over yours before dropping to your hands that have instinctively reached out towards him. Your fingers are grazing ever so slightly and you think he likes the contact. He leans back slightly in his chair and casts his eyes over your shoulder. “He’s not dead.” You hum, “Ok…” You think, “ ...so he’s missing?” The Mandalorian seems frustrated and shakes his head "Not missing, I mean I don’t know where he is but I - “ He casts his gaze back to you, almost as if he didn’t realise he had been talking, “Why are you asking me this?” You shrug, “Dunno, you just seemed like you needed someone to talk to.” He keeps looking at you. You lean forward more and so does he. Your fingers bump more insistently and you struggle to not rest your hands over his. The energy between the two of you changes ever so slightly, and you feel your hair stand up on end as he stares you down. He’s very intimidating. You like that. Neither of you moves away and the silence between you stretches on. You refuse to speak first because you sort of want to see what his next move is. You get the impression no one stands up to this guy and you want to be the first. He narrows his eyes, his jaw tenses when he speaks coldly, “I don’t need to talk. Go away.” Undeterred you smile at him, flashing him your teeth when you say “Oh I disagree.” He scoffs at that and gets up, leaving the drink you made him and walks out the door. You stand to follow him, grabbing his helmet as you go - how did he forget that? "Hey, we were talking!” you call after him, pushing yourself through the few stragglers still around on the street. He keeps walking, ignoring your yells so you shout louder, “you didn't even finish my drink!" Still nothing, "and you forgot your bucket!" That makes him turn and he sees the helmet under your arm. You walk towards him as he crosses his arms and sighs. He reaches out his hand for it but you hold it out of reach, “ah ah ah, I said we weren’t finished.” He scoffs “I say we have. Give it back.” “Nope.” You say popping the ‘p’ and you smile at him, “Not till you tell me what’s wrong.” He stalks forward and attempts to take the helmet but you’re quicker and sidestep him and cross it over into your other hand, leaning it out of reach again. He growls at that, “I’ll just take it from you.” You dance backwards slightly, “Oh I don’t think you will.” He remains where he is and scowls, “Don’t you have work to finish?” You shake your head, “Nah it's quiet and they’ll all leave now I’m gone. Besides, this is much more fun.” He’s getting annoyed now and gestures towards you, “What? Standing there holding my helmet hostage knowing full well I can just come over there and take it?” He walks forward again, anger now very present on his face - you love that you’ve rattled him. You know it must take a lot to get this guy mad but it seems you’ve done it rather easily. You grin at him, “You’ll have to catch me first.” And with that, you turn and run. ///

If you want to be tagged for part 2 let me know!

Tagged: @darlingotaku @theoriquewitherseld @v-mack @soul-of-daisies @bbwithaknife @luciamajer @altarsw @redredchangesintheskys @thatoneidiot16 @24-blackbirds @dindjarin-mandalorian @engineeredfiction

[heterophobiclanwangji]

Stupid Sexy Shizun

(an unnecessarily long post about Shen QIngqiu, romantic storylines, and dangerous fanon)

I see a lot of varying characterizations for Shen Qingqiu, especially vis a vis his allure to the other (typically male) members of the cast. Frankly, I do think the entire thing is funnier if a lot of people are in love with Shen Qingqiu, who only really recognizes Luo Binghe (and even then only after nearly apocalyptic levels of drama), and I’m willing to believe that he is unwittingly attractive for the following reasons:

he unintentionally falls into suggestive situations (the Skinner incident with the immortal binding cables, the Huan Hua Palace Water Dungeon, also with immortal binding cables For Some Reason, the succubus incident with Liu Qingge, etc.)

he may fall into improper/informal forms of address (for example, calling Binghe by name the first time they meet, rather than Luo Binghe or any of the previous Shen Qingqiu’s, er, nicknames)

he doesn’t always understand physical boundaries the same way as other characters (yikes @ the scene in one of the extras where he gives Binghe spiritual energy via skin-to-skin contact and fails to understand how/why that would be inappropriate, and potentially the situation with Liu Qingge cleansing his meridians, although I have reservations about that)

he tends to objectify people, which makes more sense when you realize he’s evaluating them based on his understanding of their characters and function in the original plot and cataloging differences, but reads differently to people who don’t have that context (which is almost everyone) (he makes internal comments about how hot a lot of the characters are, and I feel like he stares at people, but I can’t remember a specific incident for this; in conversations, it comes up in lines like “even if something bad happens, it won’t happen to you,” or “I knew you would definitely win,” both spoken to Binghe--at this point Shen Qingqiu doesn’t know Binghe very well and still sees him as The Protagonist, but to Binghe they just seem like heartwarming moments of security and belief)

he has trouble enforcing platonic guidelines to his relationships due to his fundamental belief that no one would find him attractive, be it romantically or sexually, and therefore sees no reason to draw that distinction (not going to cite specific incidences for this, it’s more of a recurring combination of his low self-esteem and lack of self-awareness, which I may talk about later in another post).

however, some reasons I have seen in fandom that do not seem likely based on my understanding of the plot and characters (although I will be the first to admit that I do not remember every single detail of the novel or extras, and that Shen Qingqiu is not the most reliable narrator to start with) are as follows:

fan language (technically possible, no indications given in canon, and you cannot convince me that Mr. I-Named-This-Poison-With-No-Cure-Without-A-Cure, Great God Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky had the patience and wherewithal to research or create a comprehensive fan language)

owning and using slutty, slutty inner robes (this would require the cutthroat, inscrutable original Shen Qingqiu to own such robes in the first place, I don’t remember any canonical references to improper dress aside from instances where he has been disrobed--the Skinner incident, Huan Hua Palace Water Dungeon, and his QingSi treatment--, and Shen Qingqiu has a healthy paranoia about governing his appearances so people won’t realize he isn’t the original goods; yes, the Peak Lords suspect him of being possessed anyway, but to my knowledge their reasons centered around his personability and investment in his students rather than robes or hair ornamentation)

eating suggestive foods (this one is slightly debatable. again, he doesn’t see himself as someone people would find attractive, so I can’t discount the idea that he would inadvertently eat something in a suggestive manner. however, I saw someone have him request dishes involving aphrodisiacs, and I was like, WACK. He probably had a cataloged index of the different weird plants and monsters of PIDW before his transmigration and ranted excessively in the comments about all of the pointless precursors to papapa, up to and including creating different plants/animal organs that have the same or better effects and then yelled at Airplane for not keeping better track of his own inventions. This is the guy who saw Liu Qingge under the effects of succubus poison or whatever and immediately knocked him into a cold bath. you won’t catch him slipping that easily)

enabling Binghe to get away with suggestive/improper and sexualized behavior while he was still a teenaged disciple. I think this one really gets to me because that narrative of the virginal innocent Shizun and his perverted disciple is the exact view that the outside world has of their dynamic, as represented by the fragments of The Resentment of Chunshan that we see in the extras. People see Binghe as a depraved monster (he is a demon, after all) and make insinuations about his treatment of Shen Qingqiu’s corpse during the five years between his death and resurrection. For contrast, the crux of the novel is Shen Qingqiu realizing that Binghe is hurt and insecure and desperately begging to be loved. In the extras he even goes through some of Binghe’s memories and remarks about how, contrary to rumor, all Binghe did was keep his body from rotting while he searched for ways to revive him. I won’t say that Binghe wasn’t a teenage boy and never did what teenage boys do, but the extras showed us that Binghe would rather throw himself into a cold lake than act inappropriately towards his Shizun, and I can’t remember him making any sexual advances until after Shen Qingqiu came back to life. In canon, Binghe is ill-informed and generally bad at sex, which doesn’t speak to me like someone who was just waiting for the right moment to strike.

I will read a hundred fics about Shen Qingqiu inadvertently causing people to fall in love with him, but a lot of fanworks try to make it about a physical allure rather than his personality and the ways in which he feels comfortable interacting with other people. People respond to his kindness and his feelings of duty and honor, and it makes me feel cheated to see interpretations downplay characteristics of his actual personality, especially when it degrades the characters around him, too. Yue Qingyuan feels protective of him but generally listens when Shen Qingqiu tells him not to draw his sword, and in canon he gave Shen Qingqiu enough space that he was surprised by the extent of his grief when Binghe was in the Endless Abyss. Liu Qingge is also protective of Shen Qingqiu and is involved in getting Shen Qingqiu’s promise to remain with Cang Qiong Mountain Sect before the Maigu Ridge incident, but doesn’t stop him from leaving when he decides to go. Binghe makes some questionable choices, but his anger and insecurity are understandable even without the rampant communication failures and the influence of Xin Mo, and the end of the novel shows that Luo Binghe is willing to leave if that’s what Shen Qingqiu wants.

Sometimes fan interpretations get really intense about this, as if Yue Qingyuan, Liu Qingge, and Luo Binghe would catfight over Shen Qingqiu. Granted, Liu Qingge and Luo Binghe are willing to throw down at any given time, but the main romantic development comes from Shen Qingqiu treating other people with respect and receiving respect in return. While people do try to influence Shen QIngqiu’s decisions, the ultimate choice is his own.

One of the points of the novel is that people matter and their choices affect not only themselves but the people around them. I don’t care if Shen Qingqiu is some kind of accidental sex god, because his choices and especially his decision to care about other people give Yue Qingyuan, Liu Qingge, and Luo Binghe each something they didn’t have in the original storyline: Yue Qingyuan gets a chance to explain himself and his failures, and is relieved of his burden of caring for Shen Qingqiu; Liu Qingge gets to live and see his little sister grow up; and Luo Binghe gets to be loved and cared for.

As for Shen Qingqiu, he got to choose his own happy ending.

[angelkurenai]

More to lose - Thor x Reader

Avengers: Endgame SPOILERS BELOW read at your own risk

Title: More to lose

Pairing: Thor x Reader

Warnings: Avengers: Endgame spoilers

Summary: Devastated after being unable to kill Thanos and prevent everything that came afterwards, the god of thunder has started to lose hope that he’ll see you ever again. During a time when he needs the woman he loves more than anyone, and honestly all that he thought he had left after Loki’s death, he slowly starts to break down when all efforts to locate you leave him with nothing. Has he really lost it all or are you still there to comfort him?

“We're going to keep searching. We haven't stopped before and we're not going to do it now but...” Natasha sighed, arms crossed over her chest as she and Thor stared at your image projected before their eyes, similarly to everybody else they'd lost; the word “missing” in red right underneath once more like with everybody else.

Oh how bad Thor had wished you wouldn't be one of them, you wouldn't be gone just like everybody he had cared about because he knew that if he lost you too then he had no reason to fight at all anymore. He hoped you wouldn't be one of them too. He hoped so bad they'd be wrong, that you were about to show up any day now before his eyes but albeit, the days had passed and nothing changed. He stared at the photo just like he had done so many times before, the seconds feelings like hours and hours feeling years and soon eternity didn't seem that long; and he had yet to hear anything new from you ever since the snap.

“But the fact that she's, well, not human or of this world doesn't help find her.” she sighed, her eyes glossy as she glanced away, she too was broken beyond words “I won't let any information concerning her slip past my attention but wait is... the only thing we can do now. Especially after what uh happened with...” but she trailed off because as much as she didn't want to admit it, getting the stones back was hei last option and it felt like they lost you for a second time when they found out they were gone for good.

“Thanos?” he asked, voice almost void of any emotion just like his face “Why? Because there's nothing else we can do but wait for her to magically show up? Because we can't admit that she ended up like the rest of them? Because we lost every chance we had in getting them back after I failed to keep them alive the first time?” his words were nearly empty of any emotion and yet held so many in them as the tears welled up in his eyes, regret and pain, guilt and sadness and grief all at once coming through especially as he gave a humorless laugh “Because I failed her? Go ahead, say it.”

“I- I wasn't going to-” she stopped herself clearing her throat “That's not what I meant. We both- we all know you did your best, Thor. There was nothing more that you could've done, nothing to change this and I'm sure (Y/n) would think the same if she was-” the past tense made her tense up when she realized she used it but Thor only smiled bitterly.

“Yeah, too bad she's not here to say that herself, isn't it?” he asked bitterly, a pained smile on his lips “Just like everybody else... and they're not going to be.”

“Don't say that.” she shook her head, her too hurting to know that after Thanos had destroyed the stones that any chances they had were gone “Nobody's blaming you for what's happening, nobody.”

“Yeah. Well, I do.” it was blunt and it was true, painful and bitter all at once; before he tore his eyes away from your photo “I let her down. I let everyone I had already lost down and I let down everybody else too, but above all her. Couldn't keep the love of my life safe, what worse could happen?”

“Thor...” she started but couldn't say much, especially as he started walking away “Where are you going?”

“The only place I can be close to her.” he said with a heavy sigh pointing at your photo “Take that down, there is no chance to find her anyway. We both know where she is... and she's not coming back.”

~*~

Thor run his fingers through his still wet hair. Despite having dried it with a towel the few droplets still remained but he didn't have the mind to care about it anymore. With a pain of sweatpants he walked back into the room after the awfully long shower. All of his muscles ached for one but he had denied himself of it after everything that had happened the past days. He didn't even have the will to do things such as breath or eat, let alone have a shower or sleep because of how tired he was. He was getting used to exhaustion, he was getting used to the pain and he was getting used to feeling hollow but somehow the word hollow didn't seem to cover it. It felt like his own soul was slowly starting to eat itself up slowly but surely. And he had slowly started believing it himself, he was going to be a shell of who he had once been but he didn't care. So long as you were gone and not coming back, he knew the best other part of him would forever be missing. And getting in your room only verified that thought and fear.

He let out a shaky breath, looking around at the place he had been in so many times before but which this time didn't seem to bring him the same amount of happiness like every other time. Despite an Asgardian you had chosen to live in Earth and help the Avengers as much as you could. Granted, as much as he loved your big heart and what you did for the people you considered a second family , he couldn't deny he did miss you seeing as he had to be away. But every time he came to see you and he did come very often, the moments you wo spent on this shared bed and room were enough to keep him going for just as long.

Only now that he did look around, he couldn't find the same kind of happiness or eagerness to live more moments because – and despite how bad he wanted to find you, had almost let himself hope he'd walk in and you'd be there – you were not going to be in this room waiting for him just like every other time. The only thing he found was your things and memories. And memories of you was all he had left now and for the rest of his life and he had to accept it along with his guilt and empty-

“Well, not that I'm one to objectify you but damn this does look like a good welcome back.” his eyes had not shot open faster nor had his head or entire body turned so fast towards somebody's direction but he was desperate to make sure this wasn't just his wishful thinking “And now that... is certainly not a good welcome back.” you pointed at his face, bittersweet smile on your lips but to him your smiles were always going to be the most beautiful thing on all of nine realms so no point to think about it any more.

His lips parted to speak your name but the lump in his throat felt so painful. He didn't want to say it, fearing you'd either deny it or tell him you weren't really there. He wouldn't bear to hear it, it would crush him. He'd lost so much, he'd lost nearly everything that mattered the most to him, nearly everything and everyone he had and if he did end up finding out that he had lost you too – that he rally had lost everything everything – he didn't know what he was going to do.

Your features showed so much concern and pain that he knew nobody pretending to be you could be so precise, but he still managed to hold himself back. His body was frozen and his muscles were stiff almost ready for a fight; not that he was entirely sure he would ever find the strength to inflict you any pain even if it really wasn't you. Oh he hoped so bad it was really you.

“Tears” you whispered and it was a statement, not a question. His eyes were glossy but he was doing his hardest to hold them back, he had to keep his guards up “Who has ever done something so bad as to make my King look so sad?” you questioned again and he felt his breath get caught in his throat.

“I fear, they tried to take away my Queen.” his voice was hoarse to the point he almost didn't recognize it as his own. His walls were coming down but he still tried to have doubts and not let his hopes get the best of him.

“Stupid decision if you ask me, I'm too stubborn to let go of you.” you whispered as lovingly as you could, taking a step forward towards him. He would never back away from the enemy, of course, but even more so this time that he didn't know if it really was an enemy or the love of his life.

“I remember you using a different word for it in all honesty.” he said in a low voice, trying to catch some reaction and even more trying to find a reason that would let him know it was really you and not yet another enemy. He had no strength left to fight, that was the truth.

“Hmh possessive. That's the word.” you took another step closer to him, smile still on your lips but nowhere near as happy. You had lost. You had all lost, there weren't really many reasons to smile. “Besides, can you blame me? My man's the strongest Avenger and word has it that this new haircut makes you all the more irresistible, which I can definitely say for myself. Besides-” your smile softened, no teasing tone that you I used to try and cheer him up but right now was lacedwith melancholy “How could I ever let go of the man with the biggest heart and brightest smile that I've ever seen in my life? I fell in love with it long ago and there's no going back right now. So don't think you have a chance in escaping this relationship in any way or form, Odinson.”

The corners of his lips lifted into a smile that felt so strange and painful at the same time, especially as more tears welled up in his eyes. He shook his head but remained in his place, body looking so exhausted as his head hang low “That is something I would never wish, my Queen. But some things are beyond our power anymore. In fact, I... have none of it left anymore. I have no power to do anything, even protect the one I love. Even do the right thing to end-” but he stopped himself when he choked on a sob, shaking his head “I- I couldn't do one thing right. I couldn't-”

Your ips parted, ready to speak but either because of the pain of watching him like this or because of the lump in his throat, you couldn't say a single word. You paused for a second and took a good look at him, feeling your heart twist painfully inside your chest when you realized the reason he was keeping his distance. “You don't believe it's me... do you?” but you really needed no answer to that, you already knew it.

The smile on his lips was filled with pain as the tears finally rolled down his cheeks. He couldn't speak but he forced himself to “If- if you're here to mock me, if you're here f-for a fight o-or-” his voice was shaking, braking because of the sobs that only managed to break your heart in return. The way he shook his head and look so vulnerable, so defeated and broken was unlike anything you had ever seen him before.

“N-no. No! Thor-” you rushed towards him, taking hold of his shoulders and giving him a small shake. The mere touch shocked him at first, earning a gasp from him and thankfully making his wide glossy eyes meet yours “Thor, I'm- I'm here. It's me, baby, it's really me. I'm not gone, I'm here. With you. Always here with you. I didn't die, I didn't turn to ash, I was only gone for some time trying to fight him too b-but I didn't do enough either. I'm not dead, I'm not a part of your imagination nor am I an enemy. I'm just... me. Only me. (Y/n). Your (Y/n).” you were probably speaking too fast and your voice was filled with urgency but you knew he needed to hear this and he needed to believe this. And thankfully he did.

His body stopped shaking and his brows furrowed deeply. His eyes still remained filled with tears, pain and fear as he asked you in a weak voice “S-so you- you're not-” a tear managed to escape his eye “Here to torture me any more?”

You didn't even want to think about how much he had been tortured by thinking about you or having nightmares plaguehis dreams.

“N-no. No I'm not.” you choked out through a sob “No, I- I'm-” you fought with all your might to keep your tears back and be his rock “I'm here Thor. I'm really here, with you. And I'm not going anywhere this time.”

His lips stayed parted for a couple seconds, as his eyes remained almost wide before he finally choked in a hoarse voice “M-my Queen. My beautiful love, you're back. You're-” he breathed out a pained laugh, bring a hand up to caress your cheek as if still unable to believe you were there “Still so beautiful as I remember. Still-” but he couldn't continue, his head falling on your shoulder in exhaustion “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

“Wha- n-no. N-no, Thor, please don't-”

“I failed.” he pulled slightly away, jaw clenching as he tried to fight his tears, the anger he felt towards himself showing through “I failed everyone. I failed you. I failed to keep you safe, to keep everyone safe. It's my fault we lost. It's my fault everyone we care about is gone. I should have done more. I should have-”

“No. No listen to me. There is nothing more you could have done, nobody expected you to do more. Thor you did everything in your power and so much more, especially after everything you've gone through. Just because some may have these expectations of you, even if the entire world does, doesn't mean you have to live up to them. You don't have to be the person others expect you to, the hero others expect. We all break and we all lose, that's the part of being a hero that matters. That we learn from our mistakes, rise from our ashes and fight harder the next time to make things right. You-” you let out a shaky sigh “You did your best and nobody blames you for how things ended. I don't blame you, you have to believe me. I never could. I love you too much.”

“I can't lose you too.” he choked out, his biggest fear finally showing through after your words managed to make his defences crumble down. The god of thunder, the man you had come to meet as the bravest and most fearless in your life, the one who could go an entire army on his own, now looked so broken in your arms that you were sure you could only put his pieces together.

“You're not going to lose me.” you whispered, resting your forehead against his “Come on. You look so tired, my love. It's time for you to rest before we go to take everything back.”

[chpinthestacks]

In the Stacks with Kathryn Savage: Shape-Shifting

I was in Iceland less than a day when I was told by an Icelander that if I went for a hike alone in the hills above Laugarvatn, I might see people who weren’t really there. The landscape conspired with perception, revealed visions. It was the quality of the light and lack of trees. What I wanted to see I’d see, the woman who ran the residency told me.  

The first week, I saw a child dancing but it was really a towel blowing on a laundry line.

The second week, I saw rocks jumping sideways through hills but the rocks were sheep. 

It was always daylight in Iceland in July, the sky perpetually soft-lit, and the light foreshortened the landscape. Eventually, I began to distrust my vision and felt a need to clarify what I’d just seen, look again.

Baltic-region mythology depicts stories about shape-shifters, the deception of sight. Icelandic hidden people—the unwashed children of Eve who she hid from God and who are invisible to humans—live in the hills of Iceland unless they choose to be seen. 

The Icelandic folk story “The Sealskin” is about a man who steals a sealskin, and who, upon returning to the site of his theft for more sealskin, finds, instead, a naked woman. She is weeping and he takes her to his house to console and clothe her. Years after his theft of her identity—the sealskin—after his abduction, after they marry and have children, he goes fishing one day and she finds her sealskin in a locked chest in their house. She puts it on and dives back into the sea, never to return.  

Pagan Scandinavian mythology is unabashedly brutal. There are child-stealers, jealous dead lovers, and in the story of “My Jawbones!” to stop the haunting of her hearth, a woman must bury the jawbones of a child she finds in her house.

In one Icelandic myth, a stranger comes to town and encounters bad weather, so he spends the night in the home of an older woman and her two young beautiful daughters. He asks the mother if he can take one of her daughters to bed and she agrees. In bed, he tries to have sex with the woman, but when he touches her, his hands move through her body. “I am a spirit with no body,” the woman explains. “You cannot get pleasure from me.” 

These misogynistic myths of the young woman, someone who is little more than a beautiful body, often alone, primed to be taken, have hung around. Some of the more violent Baltic region mythologies are about women alone in the woods and the bad things that happen to them because they are alone.

The first funeral I went to was my second cousin’s. She was murdered by a stranger after he abducted her. She was rollerblading home alone one dusk on Kittson County Road 1, a northern Minnesota county road flanked by golden grain.

Lidia Yuknavitch’s essay “Woven” discusses Laumes, Lithuanian water spirits who can take the form of animals and beautiful water-women. She writes: “Laumes were both benevolent and dangerous. They could tickle men to death and then eat their bodies. They could protect women and children or punish them brutally.” 

In the same essay, Yuknavitch writes about violence against women and the difficulty of depicting such violence. “In America, it’s tricky to describe violence without it turning into entertainment.”

As a child, I was told my mother’s father was French. More accurately, he was a Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Turkish Jew raised in Nice, France, and later, Brooklyn. 

His mother went to Nice seeking refuge from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. There, she lived with her two sisters in a small flat where they worked as hat models in the city on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. 

I inherited my grandfather’s photos after he passed. Beautiful women in hats. Other details about the sisters’ lives remain hazy. When I write about them I come up with more questions than answers, so this past feels closer to mythology to me, to a set of exaggerated familial beliefs, some, perhaps, fictitious. This was Europe, late 1930s, and they were Jews who escaped to America. In Nice, some versions of the story go, they changed their names and assumed Christian identities. In Nice, they lived as themselves and as false selves. They shape-shifted.  

Intermediate spirits in Icelandic folktales, those who can shape-shift, are depicted, often, as beautiful women. The moral point of the shape-shift narrative is connected to punishment, to reveal dubious or desperate transformation and its consequence. It’s a relational trope reliant on a quality of before and after. Like a good secret, shape-shifting acquires its gravity by what it conceals and promises to expose later. Across cultures and mythologies, some shape-shifters are more deceptive or punitive, many are humiliated for their transgressions, some symbolize inner conflict, such as the werewolf who changes to reveal his true self. In some shape-shifting narratives, once a character takes on a new form, it becomes impossible to change back.

In a 2008 Grand Forks Herald article about my second cousin’s murder, a friend of hers describes how no women or children went biking or skating alone after her murder on the rural straightaway. It would be a betrayal to her memory, her friend said, to do these things alone now.  

In Nice, when Nazi’s found out that my great-grandmother’s sister had been assuming a Christian name, they murdered her children in front of her but let her live. The memory of that sight would be her punishment.

John Berger defines sight as the thing that comes before words. To Berger, the relationship between sight and knowledge is never settled and always relational, mediated by perspective, by sight relative to position. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, on the photography of atrocities, writes that “Photographs objectify: they turn an event or person into something that can be possessed.” Certainly narrative does this work of possession too and I feel the edges of shape-shifting as I write this: anything I say about grief or loss is my singular possession, incomplete and mediated, reflecting my flawed sight. What are the details I’ve included, the details I’ve left out? For you, reader, I objectify my experiences and lay claim to those of my family. I mold, omit, and transgress the past.

But the violence is real, the vulnerability that hangs around the edges of sight. Yesterday, I learned from a neighborhood community message board that a white man driving a gold car tried to abduct a child my son’s age two blocks from our home. When I walk the dog tonight, I stare down every honey-hued sedan, try to see inside every car, to every man I don’t trust, but I can’t. Dusk has turned the windshields to mirrored glass.  

In her essay “The Precarious” from her recent collection, The Reckonings, Lacy M. Johnson writes, “both autopsy and atrocity require a witness—someone who survives, who sees for herself, with her own eyes. But the violence changes the person who looks.”

One day I went for a hike alone in the hills above Laugarvatn. The hills were steep and mossy and rocky. All the people I saw were tourists like me in bunchy jackets and hiking boots. I was grieving and lonely and wanted something revealed to me. I knew this was ridiculous, but I wanted it anyway. Some unnamable more, some sight or being to lure me away from pain. In some shape-shifting stories, the mother appears and beckons the child home. Sometimes, this isn’t the mother, but a dubious figure able to assume the mother’s form. Instead, in the hills above Laugarvatn, behind mossy lava rocks, there were clumps of used toilet paper. A woman’s torn ticket stub from her flight to Iceland from Tel Aviv.

On a gray day at The Skagaströnd Museum of Prophecies, I gave every Króna in my wallet to a fortuneteller to look at my hands and face so she could see into the privacy of my nature, my past, reveal truths I couldn’t yet see.

Notes: Works used to research this post include John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Lydia Yuknavitch’s essay “Woven” originally published in Guernica, and Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings. The folktales and quoted excerpts come from Jacqueline Simpson’s Icelandic Folktales and Legends and Silja Aðalsteinsdóttir’s The Trolls in the Knolls. The Sontag quote can be found on page 81 in Regarding the Pain of Others and the Lacy M. Johnson quote can be found on page 28 in The Reckonings.

[orionsangel86]

So. 13x02. Was it just me or did that scene where Dean fights the demon in the hotel room for a while until Sam runs in and saves him just feel kinda rapey? Dean seemed really shook too. That demon was hella aggressive and inappropriate - more than usual for trying to kill a guy on this show. And the fight choreography - jeez. What was that about? Can I count this as the must-have-but-no-one-wants Bucklemming questionable consent moment / rape moment? What did I just witness? My poor Dean. WTH?

So yes this scene stood out to me for a lot of reasons, but I don’t actually see it as a negative moment nor equate it with Bucklemmings standard moments of dubious consent (that honour went to Mary and the rapey hunter dude - thanks Bucklemming).

I was gonna write about this in my review. My review which remains in draft form as I write this because I cannot focus long enough to sort out everything I wanna say. *sobs at own inadequacy*

So yes this scene. So you may not have heard but SPN has a new stunt and fight co-ordinator for season 13. So the fight scenes so far have indeed seemed more brutal than previously. Personally I think they have all been awesome. But this one does indeed stand out, and you are right that it seems kinda rapey. Why is that? 

Remember when we talked about 12x11 and Dean’s infamous ride on Larry? How the whole thing was framed to be sexual – look out for @margarittet meta on this scene compared to the movie Urban Cowboy for more info because it is eye opening.

Something SPN does extremely well is utilise standard filming techniques for the ‘male gaze’ but focused on Dean. Dean is quite regularly now framed in a way that would usually be used for a sexy female and it is so very interesting to me that they do this. It is extremely rare for mainstream film and TV to use these filming techniques on male actors. But Dean constantly gets the female treatment. There is an excellent slightly NSFW meta post going around about how Dean is always the character who gets holy water ‘facials’ and the sexual implications of filming said ‘facials’ in a certain way. Note how Dean is also always the character filmed shoving things into his mouth. These filming techniques are never used on Sam. 

Back to this fight scene, and the same techniques are used here. This fight scene was difficult to watch because it was incredibly suggestive, and sexualised. This gigantic beast of a male demon throws Dean down, gets him on the table with his legs up in the air and spread out, then proceeds to pick him up so his face is basically in Dean’s groin, to throw him down on the bed. At which point Dean cowers whilst Sam stabs him through the back.

The moment on the table is bad enough. He is literally lying there with his legs spread while this guy goes at him.and bends forward over him - effectively forcing Dean’s legs up and back like that common position you see in porn where you wonder how often those dudes have to stretch out their hamstrings cos jeez… at least we now know Jensen’s range of flexibility >_>

Then look at this:

I beg anyone to find me a scene in any action movie where this same choreography has been used for the male hero before. I would be very interested in watching it. You know where it HAS been used though?

Here.

In fact in the majority of black widow fights, she ends up with her legs wrapped around the enemy. Interesting right?

However when women use this type of fight style, the character usually has the upper hand. This is because women tend to be stronger in their legs and thighs than their arms. Men however have all sorts of sensitive dangly bits that makes this position extremely uncomfortable and vulnerable for them, so its just not ever done. Its still always framed as sexual though. Women fight this way because it appeals to the male gaze. “Ooh I’d like her to wrap her legs around me like that *wink wink nudge nudge*”.

Ignoring the glaringly obvious sexual undertones of the scene for a moment though, I have to ask why the new stunt coordinator would choose to put Dean in this position at all? Especially when it is then followed by this shot:

Dean, thrown on the bed, pushing himself back and away from his attacker, until Sam turns up at the last minute and saves the day.

Dean is extremely vulnerable throughout the entire fight. He’s not on form at all. This entire fight is showing just how off his game Dean is right now. He’s at rock bottom with his grief weighing on him heavily. Hence the demon gets the upper hand practically straight away. The fight appears sexualised and rapey because it is supposed to be that way. We are supposed to feel uncomfortable watching this scene and it is supposed to signify just how wrong Dean is at the moment. His grief has really wrecked him.

This isn’t the first time we have had shots of Dean in precarious positions however:

So it isn’t a new thing at all. This shot was from 10x18, when Dean was slowly succumbing to the Mark of Cain and was also in a vulnerable position. Another gigantic beast of a man comes towards him and it took something like 8 shots to the chest to take him down. There was genuine fear on Dean’s face in this scene. Dean got the upper hand eventually but the entire scene was framed with an air of discomfort for the audience. Especially since Mr Jacob Stein was leering at him in an overtly sexual manner the entire time his beastly accomplice had Dean pinned.

Two scenes reeking of sexual undertones, both where Dean is put on his back with his legs spread. Its supposed to feel rapey, its supposed to make him vulnerable. Both the 10x18 scene and the 13x02 scene are during times when Dean is travelling down a very dark path towards his own destruction. Whether through the Mark, or through his own heavy hearted grief. 

So there are two reasons why Dean was put in this position. The main reason being to express vulnerability. 

The other reason is to sexualise him and to suggest to the audience just how easily Dean fits into a certain type of sexual role. Of course with the first reason being dominant here the audience is left uneasy and wondering what on earth just happened. But Dean being sexualised and objectified is a pretty constant theme throughout the show. Especially by men and for men. Its part of his bisexual coding. It’s something we never see with Sam - or Cas for that matter. 

Or maybe they just thought spreading Dean’s legs for a huge beast of a man on camera for a second would go down well with fandom. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[sun-writer-blog]

Opening Night

The story behind this fanfic: I was watching The Grinch and there’s that one seen where he decides he’s not going out to Whoville and...

Enjoy some Pipercy.

“You’re going to look fine either way,” Piper insisted, lounging her feet on the armrest of the large, grey sofa-chair and twirling a thin finger in her auburn hair. “I don’t know why you’re so worried.”

Percy spread his arms out and turned to Piper. “I look ridiculous.”

Piper raised an eyebrow and stopped twirling her hair to study Percy. The midnight blue tuxedo wore had black lapels which brought out the white dress shirt underneath. It was perfectly form fitting and complimented his sea-green eyes perfectly. Even Piper had to admit Percy looked very attractive, which probably meant that all the girls in the crowd at the red carpet premiere of her dad’s new film were going to faint.

Still, in his own Signature-Percy way, he also looked very uncomfortable.

One hand kept running its way through his brand new undercut, which Piper thought looked great and reminded her of Olivier Giroud, the soccer player. Percy wasn’t used to “taming his glorious mane”, as he had so eloquently put it. It definitely showed. Still, Piper was grateful that her friend was willing to get cleaned up for the occasion.

The other hand was clutched around a black bow-tie which he could not figure out how to tie. The top of his dress shirt remained unbuttoned and his eyes looked defeated by the daunting task of putting the tie on.“You don’t look ridiculous, Percy.”

“I’ve never worn a suit this nice before in my life.”

Piper tried to stifle a laugh. “Yeah, it shows.”

Percy groaned. “That’s it, I’m not going!”

Now Piper acted, swinging her legs off the sofa and marching over to Percy. She ripped the tie out of his hands and flipped up the collar of his dress shirt, draping the tie over his neck as she spoke. “You are going, Mr. Jackson, because I am not sitting two and a half hours through this movie alone.”

Percy frowned. “You’re lucky you’re a good movie buddy,” he muttered grumpily.

Piper winked as she finished tying and adjusted Percy’s collar. “And you’re lucky there’s gonna be pizza at the after party.”

The boy perked up instantly. “Why didn’t you lead with that, Pipes? Let’s go!”

Piper rolled her eyes and headed towards the wooden double doors behind Percy. As she opened them Percy stared in awe, dumbfounded in the amount of clothes and shoes all neatly arranged in the walk-in closet. To call it spacious would be an understatement. “That is bigger than my room” Percy noted.

“Dude, you can have all this stuff if you want. They’re all gifts and I’ve haven’t worn half of it.” Piper moved precisely to the right corner of the room and plucked a deep royal blue gown off a hanger. It had one shoulder and a subtle amount of silver stars hidden in the fabric. She plucked a pair of silver heels from her vast collection and made a sick face at Percy. He rolled his eyes and closed the double doors of the closet so she could change in privacy.

When she reemerged the duo matched perfectly, their styles complimenting each other. Piper’s hair had already been neatly braided and was now draped along the shoulder that remained uncovered, falling to just below her collarbone. She wore minimal makeup – as usual – but whether by chance or some power inherited from Aphrodite in cases of public appearance her deep brown skin appeared flawless.

Piper moved past Percy to fix herself briefly in the vanity mirror she so rarely used, and Percy poked his head from around her. With her heels on she was just a bit shorter than him, but Percy was still able to rest his chin on the top of her head. Piper huffed air a particularly stubborn strand of hair and handed Percy a diamond necklace offhandedly. “Put this on for me, please?”

Percy did so handling the necklace with reverence. “You know, I’m no son of Hermes but-“

Piper elbowed her companion in the gut. “Don’t even think about it. I’m sure there were plenty of pirates who were sons of Poseidon.”

Percy considered that for a moment and moved suddenly, planting on foot on the sofa chair and striking a majestic pose. “Captain Perseus Jackson, scourge of the seven seas! Your dad should cast me in his next movie.”

Piper opened a drawer and rummaged through the mess to produce two empty water guns. She tossed one at Percy then aimed hers at him. Percy caught his new weapon in mid-air and pulled Riptide from his jacket pocket. Piper drew Katoptris from its sheath on her right leg, hidden underneath her dress. “Jackson, you have no idea what you just started.”

“I have no idea? You just challenged a Son of Poseidon to a water gun pirate battle, McLean.” Percy’s eyes flicked to Piper’s leg for a moment. “But I will say that leg sheath is very intimidating.”

Piper smiled proudly. “Really? Thank you, I try!”

The sound of Piper’s dad calling from downstairs broke them out of the brief moment of fun. “Time to get going, you two!”

“But dad!” Piper jokingly whined. “Five more minutes!”

“Yeah, dad!” Percy echoed. “I don’t want to go to school!”

“There’s pizza at the after party, Percy!” Tristan McLean responded.

“Curse my pizza addiction!” Percy complained. “This isn’t over, Piper.”

-

“’As always, Tristan McLean’s daughter strutted the red carpet –‘“

“Oh, strutted. Excuse me, ‘America’s Next Top Model’.”

“Shut up, Percy. ‘McLean’s daughter strutted the red carpet in a gorgeous royal blue gown which complimented her body perfectly. And the gown wasn’t the only thing on her hip.’

“Oh really? Tell me more, Vogue magazine.”

“You’re gonna love this part. Piper McLean was sporting the latest in America’s national eye candy, a twenty-year old heartthrob and Team USA Swimming hopeful Perseus Jackson.”

“I feel so objectified.”

“Percy’s handsome Greek face and amazing Ryan Seacrest line tuxedo were underscored only by those green eyes which reminded everyone of how the ocean just draws you in to find out more.”

“Okay, no way they said that.”

“Fine, I added that last part about the ocean, but they did say ‘Although Piper and Percy claim they’re just friends and both gushed about their significant others, Pipercy is one power couple we’d love to see more of.”

Percy and Piper’s laughs drowned out the sound of the music they were blasting out of Percy’s radio in his room. Percy was sitting on his bed with his legs dangling over the side and his back resting against the wall. Piper was lying with her feet dangling over the foot of the bed and her head resting in Percy’s lap. “Good grief, I didn’t realize I was agreeing to that ship name when we went to that show!”

Piper shook her head while she laughed, the open magazine falling from above her to cover her face. Percy laughed again, patting the magazine while Piper threw her hands in the air in an “I give up” motion.

[dkyler24]

Title: KIN

Chapter 1 /Part 1:

DANIEL,

Its been 18 years and everything that’s happened sort of feels like a bad dream, or complete delirium-guess it depends on how high I am on any given day. It’s crazy how it all started with a virus, the worst kind. Starts with a fever, cold sweats, loss of control of basic bodily functions; it spreads and spreads throughout the body( some slow, others fast), causes random bursts of uncontrollable aggression. At its peak, you eventually lose all the humanity and sanity you ever had, becoming an animal dead set on attacking anything that moves. We call people who’ve reached this peak Croats-after the virus, Croatoan-but you knew that.

I guess you could say my own sanity ended as well. Thankfully not in the way your probably thinking. No, what I’m suffering with just happens to be a bad strain of flu. Which currently seems to be killing me, slowly. Though, no matter how careless I got or what I risked for a simple bag of weed-I always came back 100% me. Or what’s left of me. It’s amazing, really, just how much humanity has changed me in just the span of several years. And all those gut wrenching feelings that came with it. Hopelessness, powerlessness, love, anger, fear. It was all garbage though, how humans cope with it all, I’ll never understand.

I’m not sure when drugs became more important than the mission, only that there was a time I wasn’t in a mindless haze 90% of the time-though I’m betting my ass it had something to do with the sleeping pills Dean had chucked at me my first night fully human- which, I assure you was only out of the purest intentions of helping me sleep through the night. Dean had his own issues, and sometimes I genuinely wondered why I was still here. He’d gone cold, everything I loved about him stripped away with time and loss. He was forever changed by the death of his brother.

I had to watch him turn into his father-maybe even worse. The perfect leader, a soldier, yet that love and warmth I’d fallen so deeply in love with so long ago, just gone. But still, whether I gave a shit or not, something still told me to stay. To be there.. just in case. After all, poor excuse for a man or not, I DID promise. I made a promise never to leave his side. Which will either end with me choking on pills or being gutted by a Croat whichever came first.

It was typical at this point in time to be so disoriented, that day looked like night and night looked like day. It was and still is the only way to get through the day without killing myself. As far as I knew, I couldn’t get by without a hit of something or an orgasm. I honestly didn’t think of the possibility of a child being born. I never really cared what happened to the women that came in and out of my hut. It didn’t seem worth it to get all sappy over any of them, it was an exchange of pleasure not love. The only love I’d ever know had been Dean, and the poor man didn’t even love me back, so what was the point in love? Especially when everyone we did care about were dropping like flies or raging monsters.

At first, I hated you, Because for the first time, I was forced to actually care about something other than drugs and self-sacrifice. You had been conceived through a typical night of depression and lust. The orgy must have consisted of 7 or so women( maybe, don’t quote me on that). I thank God every day, now( wherever he ran off to), that you were the only one. I’d have probably given myself up to the Croats if I had had 7 children running around this camp. Your mother, who’s name I either can’t remember or never bothered to, left you as an infant, screaming and kicking outside my hut. Later, I learned she’d been killed by a Croat during a raid( oddly convenient, huh?).

After Dean died two years later( curtesy of Lucifer) people began to pity me, ridicule me, or both. Whereas before, they accepted I’d always be a “ dirty hippie”, now they wanted me to replace Dean as head of the camp. It’s funny how desperate people get, turning to an orgy loving, dead beat druggie for assistance. Frankly, I didn’t care. Told everyone to right fuck off. To make matters worse, I still had a two year old little boy I wanted nothing to do with. The camp took pity on on you, of course. Basically did what I’d hoped and for the most part, tried to keep you away from me- which was all fine and good; but for some reason, you never seemed to care. Ignoring every warning, running back to me every damn time. Wanting to be around me. Talk to me. sleep with me. Maybe it was because we were kin, I don’t really know. Even during the nights I laid in bed, sick from whatever I’d taken too much of, you were there by my side. Willing to listen to my nonsensical babbling, cool my burning skin, and hand me water when I needed it. To say I didn’t deserve any of it was a huge understatement.

As the years went by, the camp got smaller and smaller, raid by raid, until only 8 of us remained. Unfortunately all of them were men. They all laughed at the idea of me not having women to objectify-but slowly began to turn in my favor once they realized I held the key to muting every terrible emotion this pandemic had caused. Soon, I was the main source for drug supply, they all bartered for nights of carelessness and sex. Gave me whatever I wanted as long as I took their suffering away. In a way, it made me feel like an angel again. Like I had a purpose in this crazy life. Never mind the depravity- it’s not like there were any angels left on earth to drag me down to hell for it. I was given a nickname- Smokey the Angel. Primarily to make fun of me, but when it stuck, I ended up adopting it for real. Wouldn’t Dean be proud of THAT legacy.

Eventually, the Croats seemed to evolve- like a deranged breed of human. They attacked in organized packs. They seemed to have regained the ability to talk and conform to a set of pre-determined standards. Instead of fighting like savages, most of them had taken up guns and other weapons. Favoring ambushes and raids of their own. Two men died after learning this the hard way. The remaining 6 men spent the next 16 years tracking and mapping out the Croats several camps and the evolvement of their intelligence, Which was not a slow process.

If I could secretly admit to being proud of anything, I guess it would be Your unwavering hunger for knowledge and your massive amounts of blind courage. It reminded me of a better time, when I was still useful, when giving a damn didn’t hurt so much. But more than anything, those bright green eyes, and that determined, focused drive that reminds me of Dean. Maybe that’s part of the reason I resisted you in the beginning. There were times, in my drunken, high drugged out mist, that I thought maybe Dean HAD been brought back. It wasn’t Impossible to believe my son could be the reincarnation of Dean. In fact, I’m believing it more and more the older you get. Not to mention, somehow your the spitting image of him.

Your probably wondering why I bother writing this, it’s not like you don’t already know half of this. I guess I just wanted you to know, that even though you were born out of despair, I don’t hate you. I never even bothered to be a father, if I had a do over, believe me, I’d try harder. You never deserved any of this at all. This life, full of fear and a man who can’t even see past his own self-loathing and grief to give you the childhood you needed. Even when I abused you, you never let go of your unconditional love for me. Deep down I knew I’d die in a heap of sweat with nothing good to show for the life I’ve lead-well, except you. My Daniel. Innocent, uncorrupted Daniel. You are my one good thing. I’ve asked too much of you over the years, I know, but if I could ask for one last thing, it would be to stay true to that.

I’ve arranged to send you somewhere you won’t ever have to suffer due to my neglect. A place without Croats, a fresh new world where you can start a new life away from all this. I never bothered to show you any kind of love, and that was my greatest mistake. So let this be a testament to how much I really do love you. Let this make up for all the times I abandoned you in your time of need.

Go through the rift, don’t ask stupid questions like how I did it and why I’m doing this. I won’t let you live the rest of your life in a miserable wasteland- and please don’t stick around to watch me die, you’ve been through enough.

I love you,

Your Father

..........................................

Daniel gaped at the letter, why the hell was he sitting here reading this instead of running to his side? “ what is this, a suicide note?” Eli gave him a look. “He didn’t give himself the flu.” Daniel glared at him. “That’s not funny. Now please for the love of God let me through, let me see my dad.” Eli shook his head, “normally, I wouldn’t give a rats ass what the man wants, but this was his dying wish. He told me not to let you see him until you read that letter. Personally, I think he’s raving mad, nearly dropped dead trying a second ago,” He shook his head in disbelief. “ still got so much energy..” Daniel tried to push past him, but the old man was surprisingly strong considering his bony frame. He stopped him, holding him back. “ why are you doing this! He’s gonna die while we’re out here bickering like little kids. I’m sorry if I’d like to hold my own fathers hand as he pass—“

“ Hey!” They heard a shout from inside. It was hoarse and ended in a fit of coughing. Daniel took that moment to shrug out of Eli’s grip and ran inside. There was a pitcher of water on a side table. He grabbed it and poured some into a plastic cup. Cas took it. “ Eli, I told you to have him read the l—“ Daniel huffed. “ Dad, will you forget about the damn letter for one minute and drink this, please?” Cas looked like he wanted to retort, but figured everyone would feel better after he’d downed the water.

“ why should I read some letter when you could just tell me yourself. I don’t want to spend your last moments waiting outside for you to die.” Cas grabbed his hand, “ In case you haven’t realized, I don’t have time for the I love you I’m sending you away speech; I’M DYING.” Daniels mouth fell open, “ sending me aw—Why? What the hell have I done?” Cas groaned. “ This would have gone so much easier if you’d just read the letter!” But Daniel set the letter aside. Squeezing his hand tighter. “ Screw. The. Letter. Look me in the eye and tell me everything, please.”

Daniel had always been stubborn, Cas should have known he wasn’t going to sit around and read a stupid letter. By some miracle, this man loved him- even though he never gave him a reason to. So, he gave up. He took a deep breathe, and proceeded to tell him everything. He’d managed to cut a deal with Gabriel, who thankfully was still alive, to open a rift to a timeline way into the future-one he knew Daniel would be safe in.

“ No, I’m not leaving you.” Daniel growled. Cas reached up to caress his face. “You always gave me a love I never deserved. Let me do this one thing for you please.”

“ well I don’t want it, any of this!” He seethed, tears creeping down his cheeks. “ why can’t you accept the fact that even though your a piece of shit, people still love you.”

“ I’ve had sex with everyone in this camp, repeatedly, trust me, at most they tolerated me. YOU always have, and whether you want it or not, I need to give it back, by taking you away from this empty, suffering place.”

Daniel closed his eyes. “ No. This is the worst thing you could possibly do.. but, your right about one thing, I will never stop loving you. DESPITE, how many times you’ve let me down.” He felt a hand squeeze his shoulder. Eli, probably. He refused to open his eyes as Cas dragged him down into a tight hug. He ignored the rug burn as he landed on his knees. “Goodbye Daniel” Cas whispered.

And that was that. The arms that had pulled him in with boa constrictor-like strength, when limp. One last exhale, his eyes fluttered closed. He laid unmoving, blood drying at the corners of his mouth and in certain areas on his shirt.

Just then, Daniel heard a loud crackling behind him. He spun around, grabbing Cas Hand reflexively, only briefly forgetting he was dead. A man stood there. Dusty brown hair and a stupid smile on his face. “ you must be Daniel.” Daniel didn’t respond. Given he’d just watched his father die from the flu, he desperately wanted to punch this guy in the mouth. Eli gave him a warning look and shook his head. He’d known Daniel long enough to see it coming. In fact, when the camp was bigger, Eli had been one of the only ones willing to take him under his wing. Care for him durning his childhood years when Cas wouldn’t. When he was 16, despite Cas’ protests Eli, Dean and Bobby started training him and eventually took him out to help on raids.

Daniel took a cautious step forward and turned to glance at Eli. “ Even I agreed this was for the best kid. There isn’t much of a world left to defend here. The rest of us are sittin’ chew toys. GO. It’s ok.” Daniel took a step back, then walked over to Eli. Gabriel’s smile faded into impatientness. “ Come on kid, I’m not as strong as I used to be I don’t have all day.” Daniel turned a scorching glare on Gabriel and he raised his hands in defense. Daniel attacked Eli, yanking him into an embrace. “ Thanks for everything Eli. Hold down the fort?” Eli had tears running down his face. “ you bet I will.” He thought about just shooting the bastard and running, but deep down, he knew his father and Eli were right. There was truly nothing left of this world.

Gabriel took Daniel by the hand. He felt a small shock sail through his body as he jump through the waiting rift. Which was flickering and glitching like an actual lightning bolt. In an instant, they were both on the other side. Daniel unclenched his hand, finding that Gabriel was nowhere to be found. He stood facing a building, which looked to be at least a couple stories high. Nothing else surrounded it. No houses, just a dirt path leading who knows where. ‘ Great’ he thought. Wherever his dad had sent him, seemed to be right smack dab in the middle of nowhere. He sighed, frustrated as he trudged up to what he hoped was the front doors and knocked.

He waited, his heart hammering hard in his chest. It seemed to take forever before he finally heard heavy footsteps on the other end. On impulse, Daniel drew his gun and an angel blade from his belt. Ready for anything. The door swung open harshly.

..............................................................

What Daniel hadn’t been expecting was to see none other than Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester... and his dad. All pointing guns and blades at him. Dean’s hard look sent shivers down his spine. To Dean’s left, stood his Dad. Right off the bat he noticed a big difference. For one thing, he was healthy. Not the sweaty, hacking man who’d just died in his arms. He also looked older, way older. Although his dad had been human for years, he hadn’t aged as fast as most men in the Camp. Some didn’t even believe he WAS aging. It seemed this version of his dad had aged quite a bit. Crows feet at the corners Of his eyes, forehead lines, gray hairs and all. He wore a white shirt with a thin black plaid pattern, the buttons undone a little to show a plain white undershirt, simple blue jeans and a black belt. He wore thick white socks and no shoes. Sam and Dean hadn’t changed much, except for the obvious signs of age.

He re-holstered his gun and blade against his better judgement. There was a possibility he could be killed, but he’d probably be killed faster if he kept a gun pointed at them. He really didn’t know much about this new world he’d been sent to. It was clear it was earth. Possibly an alternate timeline?

[newstechreviews]

August 2020 saw no soca floats sliding along West London’s Ladbroke Grove. No pink feathered wings or giant plumes of headwear. The Notting Hill Carnival was canceled, like all mass gatherings in late COVID lockdown, the streets still spare, the air still choked with grief. No curry goat or jerk pan smoke rose up into the city trees. And the music, the great churning music of the Caribbean islands, of Black Britain, of Africa and the Americas, did not thump to the foundations of the neighborhood terraces, making them tremble.

All of this would have been part of a normal summer for Edward Enninful while growing up in the area in the 1980s. His mother Grace might look out of the window of her sewing room in their house right on the Carnival route, and see some manifestation of Trinidad going by, or a reggae crew, wrapped in amazing sculptures of bikini and shiny hosiery. Edward, one of six siblings, would stay out late and take it in, all that sound and spectacle, which for decades has been the triumphant annual pinnacle of London’s cultural and racial multiplicity.

It was this world that nurtured his creativity and helped shape the vision he has brought to the pages of British Vogue since being appointed editor in chief in 2017. “I was always othered,” Enninful says on a nostalgic walk through the streets of Ladbroke Grove, a much gentrified, still bohemian part of London, where he moved with his family from Ghana at the age of 13, “you know, gay, working-class, Black. So for me it was very important with Vogue to normalize the marginalized, because if you don’t see it, you don’t think it’s normal.”

Today, Enninful is the most powerful Black man in his industry, sitting at the intersection of fashion and media, two fields that are undergoing long-overdue change and scrambling to make up for years of negligence and malpractice. Since becoming the only Black editor in history to head any of the 26 Vogue magazines—the most influential publications in the multibillion-dollar global fashion trade—he has been tipped as the successor to Anna Wintour, the iconic editor of American Vogue and artistic director for Condé Nast. The privately held company is navigating, on top of an advertising market battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, public controversies around representation both in its offices and on its pages.

Wayne Tippetts—ShutterstockEnninful at London Fashion Week on Feb. 16, 2019.

Enninful’s vision for British Vogue comes at a critical moment for the international publisher. “I wanted to reflect what I saw here growing up, to show the world as this incredibly rich, cultured place. I wanted every woman to be able to find themselves in the magazine.” He chose the British model Adwoa Aboah to front his first issue, in 2017: “When others took steps, Edward took massive strides, showing the importance of our visibility and stories,” she says. Covers since have featured the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna, Judi Dench (at 85, British Vogue’s oldest cover star), Madonna and soccer player Marcus Rashford, photographed for this year’s September issue by Misan Harriman, the first Black male photographer to shoot a British Vogue cover in its 104-year history. While other publications, including American Vogue, have reduced frequency during the pandemic, British Vogue has remained financially stable and is still producing 12 thick issues in 2020.

Under Enninful, British Vogue has morphed from a white-run glossy of the bourgeois oblivious into a diverse and inclusive on-point fashion platform, shaking up the imagery, tracking the contemporary pain. Its shelf presence is different—more substance, more political—and perhaps in part because of it, the shelf as a whole looks different. No more do Black women search mainstream newsstands in vain for visions of themselves. Now we are ubiquitous in my newsagent, in my corner shop, and it really wasn’t that hard; all it took was to give a Black man some power, to give someone with a gift, a voice and a view from the margin a seat at the table.

“My Blackness has never been a hindrance to me,” Enninful says. Yet he is no stranger to the passing abuses of systemic racism. On a Wednesday in mid-July, while entering British Vogue’s London headquarters, he was racially profiled by a security guard who told him to enter via the loading bay instead. “Just because our timelines and weekends are returning to normal, we cannot let the world return to how it was,” he wrote on Twitter. This summer, in the wake of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, we are seeing a seismic reckoning across industries, scrutinizing who is doing what and who is not doing enough to bring about real change in equality and representation. “My problem is that there’s a lot of virtue-signaling going on,” he says. “But everyone’s listening now, and we need to take advantage of that. This is not the time for tiptoeing.”

We meet at Ladbroke Grove tube station in a late-summer noon. When anticipating an interview with the leader of a historic luxury fashion bible, it’s tempting to have inferior thoughts about your Nissan or your Clarks boot collection or your latest unlatest something, but Enninful, 48, is unassuming, arriving in a loose navy suit, pale blue shirt and shades, the only giveaway to his sartorial imperium the no socks with his brogues. He is warm and relaxed, bearing the close-shouldered tilt of the lifelong hard worker; he rises at 5 a.m. most days to meditate before work.

I-D: Nick Towers; Vogue Italia: Steven Meisel From left: a Fashion Week report by Enninful in I-D’s January 1995 issue; Naomi Campbell on Vogue Italia in July 2008.

These days he resides toward Lancaster Gate, on the posher side of Ladbroke Grove, with his long-term partner the filmmaker Alec Maxwell and their Boston terrier, Ru Enninful, who has his own Instagram account and whose daily walking was a saving grace during lockdown. But the London Underground is where Enninful’s journey into fashion began, one day on the train in a pair of ripped blue jeans, when he was spotted by stylist Simon Foxton as a potential model for i-D, the avant-garde British fashion magazine. Being only 16, a shy, sheltered kid who grew up in a Ghanaian army barracks and who was less than four years in the U.K., of course he had to ask his mother. Albeit a clothes fanatic herself, a professional seamstress and regular rifler (with Edward) through the markets of Porto-bello and Brixton for fabrics, Grace was wary of the hedonistic London style vortex, the enormity of the new land, and reluctant to release her son into its mouth. He begged. He wore her down: “I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this, that something special was going to come out of it.”

He never had the knack for modeling, he says with characteristic humility. “I was terrible at it. I hated the castings, all that objectifying. But I loved the process and the craft of creating an image.” He soon moved to the other side of the lens, assisting on shoots and assembling image concepts and narratives, a particular approach to styling that impressed i-D enough to hire him as their youngest ever fashion director at only 18, a post he held for the next 20 years. Without the courtesy designer clothes later at his fingertips, he would customize, shred, dye and bargain for the right look, using the skills he’d developed at home in the sewing room. “I realized that I could say a lot with fashion,” he says, “that it wasn’t just about clothes, but could tell a story of the times we’re in, about people’s experiences in life. And that freedom to portray the world as you saw it.”

What was innate to Enninful—this blend of skilled creativity with the perception of difference as normal, as both subject and audience—was relatively unique in an industry dominated by white, colonial notions of beauty and mainstream. Legendary Somali supermodel Iman remembers a 2014 W magazine shoot in which she, Naomi Campbell and Rihanna were cast by Enninful, the publication’s then style director, wearing Balmain, designed by Olivier Rousteing. “Until Edward appeared, no one at the mainstream fashion magazines would have cared to commission a portrait exclusively featuring three women of color, and furthermore who were all wearing clothes designed by a person of color,” she says. “He’s an editor in vocation and a reformer at heart, compelled to spur woefully needed social change.”

Courtesy Jamie Hawkesworth and Condé Nast Britain Train driver Narguis Horsford, on British Vogue’s July 2020 issue.

He shows me his various old haunts and abodes, the top-floor bedsit where he used to haul bags of styling gear up the stairs, the Lisboa and O’Porto cafés of Golborne Road—or “Little Morocco”—where he’d sit for hours chewing the fat with people like makeup artist Pat McGrath, Kate Moss, Nick Kamen and photographer David Sims. Name-drops fall from his lips like insignificant diamonds—stylists, photographers, celebrities—but he navigates his domain in a manner apparently uncommon among fashion’s gatekeepers. Winfrey says of him, “I have never experienced in all my dealings with people in that world anyone who was more kind and generous of spirit. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”

Her shoot for the August 2018 cover of British Vogue left Winfrey feeling “empress-like,” and she ascribes his understanding of Black female beauty to his being raised by a Black mother. “Edward understands that images are political, that they say who and what matters,” she adds. Enninful’s father Crosby, a major in the Ghanaian army who was part of U.N. operations in Egypt and Lebanon, had thought that his bright, studious son would eventually grow out of his fascination with clothes and become a lawyer. But three months into an English literature degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying Hardy, Austen and the usual classics, thinking maybe he’d be a writer, or indeed a lawyer, Enninful quit to take up the position at i-D. His father did not speak to him for around 15 years, into the next century, until Grace suffered a stroke and entered a long illness. “Now that I’m older, I realize he just wanted to protect us. He’s come to understand that I had to follow my heart and forge my own path.”

He credits his parents for his strong work ethic—“drummed into you from a very early age by Black parents, that you have to work twice as hard”—and his Ghanaian heritage for his eye for color. His approach to fashion as narrative comes from the “childish games I would play with my mother,” creating characters around the clothes, sketching them out. “I can’t just shoot clothes off the runway,” he says. “There always has to be a character, and that character has to have an inner life.” Since Grace’s death three years ago, his father has lived alone by the Grand Union Canal and is very proud of his son, particularly of the Order of the British Empire awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 for his services to diversity in fashion. The Queen, incidentally, is high on Enninful’s list of Vogue cover dreams.

The British Vogue Enninful inherited from former editor in chief Alexandra Shulman three years ago was starkly different from today’s rendition. During her 25 years in charge, only 12 covers out of 306 featured Black women, and she left behind an almost entirely white workforce. Now the editorial team is 25% people of color—“I needed certain lieutenants in place,” he says—and similar shufflings are being called for over at Condé Nast in New York. Enninful is reluctant to tarnish names any further, maintaining that Shulman “represented her time, I represent mine,” and declining to comment on the U.S. headquarters.

Courtesy Edward Enninful A Polaroid of Enninful in the 1990s from his personal collection.

Enninful’s rise is particularly meaningful to people like André Leon Talley, former editor at large of American Vogue, where Enninful also worked as a contributing editor. Talley describes the new British Vogue as “extraordinary,” and was joyous at Enninful’s appointment. “He speaks for the unsung heroes, particularly those outside the privileged white world that Vogue originally stood for. He has changed what a fashion magazine should be.”

“I’m a custodian,” Enninful says of his role, sitting in a sumptuous alcove of the club bar at Electric House. “Vogue existed before I came, and it will still exist when I leave, but I knew that I had to go in there and do what I really believed in. It’s our responsibility as storytellers or image makers to try to disrupt the status quo.” Ironically, though, he does not see himself as an activist, rather as someone who is unafraid to tackle political issues and educate others, while remaining firmly within the Vogue lens. “They said Black girls on the cover don’t sell,” he says. “People thought diversity equals down-market, but we’ve shown that it’s just good for business.” British Vogue’s digital traffic is up 51% since Enninful took over. He previously edited the 2008 Black issue of Vogue Italia, which featured only Black models and Black women and sold out in the U.S. and the U.K. in just 72 hours.

Since the incident with the security guard in July—which Enninful reveals was not isolated and had happened before (the culprit, a third-party employee, was dismissed from headquarters)—building staff have been added to the company’s diversity-and-inclusion trainings. Enninful would also like to see financial aid put in place for middle management, “because we forget sometimes that the culture of a place does not allow you to go from being a student to the top.” In 2013, he tweeted about another incident, where he was seated in the second row at a Paris couture show while his white counterparts were placed in front. “I get racially profiled all the time,” he says, going right back to his first experience of being stopped and searched as a teenager, which “petrified” him. “When I was younger, I would’ve been hurt and withdrawn, but now I will let you know that this is not O.K. People tend to think that if you’re successful it eliminates you, but it can happen any day. The difference now is that I have the platform to speak about it and point it out. The only way we can smash systemic racism is by doing it together.”

Campbell Addy for TIMEBritish Vogue editor in chief Enninful in Ladbroke Grove, London, on Aug. 31.

Activism, then, is intrinsic. Fashion is altruism, as much as story and craft, as much as the will to capture beauty. For Enninful, there is no limitation to the radicalism possible through his line of work. Rather than the seemingly unattainable elements of style (the £350 zirconia ring, the £2,275 coat) obscuring the moral fiber of the message, the invitation to think and see more openly, the style instead leads you to it, perhaps even inviting you to assemble something similar within the boundaries of your real, more brutal, less elevated existence. “Relatable luxury,” he calls it, and though it’s difficult to imagine exactly how one might evoke a £2,275 coat without his customizing skills and magical thinking, I am inclined to accept the notion, partly because I saw soul singer Celeste in a £1,450 dress in the September issue and think I might give it a try. Anything is possible. “I still feel like I’m at the beginning,” he says with palpable optimism. “I feel the fire of something new.”

—With reporting by Cady Lang/New York and Madeline Roache/London

Evans is the author of Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a

Cover photo: Styling: Susan Bender; Suit, sweater, shoes: Burberry

[oldadastra]

The Broken Saga

Author note: Like legions of other fans, I’m grieving the death of Carrie Fisher. My heart breaks for her daughter Billie and her and brother Todd, and I recognize that the silencing of Fisher’s unique voice is more important than the loss of the character she played. 

This essay was difficult to write. Parts of it are a grief-filled rant. Parts of it explore my own thoughts about how the new saga can be concluded in a way which fulfills the storytellers’ intent while acknowledging the reality of Fisher’s death, and honoring the legacy she created in the iconic character of General Leia Organa.

Parts of this essay are angry. Because make no mistake, I’m angry.

 The intentional and unintentional breaking of the saga

Return of the Jedi ended on a high note; Vader redeemed, the Empire defeated, the bright promise of the future in Luke’s Jedi and Leia and Han’s love for each other.  In The Force Awakens, the creators chose to break the saga to provide the central conflict of the new trilogy. Lucasfilm and the Story Group took a risk in destroying all the ‘happily ever afters’ of the original trilogy when they began the new stories, and now, in a way they surely never intended, Carrie Fisher’s death has broken the saga in a manner that is irretrievable.

The Hollywood Reporter and other outlets recently published news that Rian Johnson and Colin Trevorrow (director of Episode IX), will be meeting this week (early January, 2017) with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy to discuss the way forward for the story in the wake of Fisher’s death on December 27. In the coming year and beyond, they will work to create a way to bring the new trilogy to the “deeply and profoundly satisfying” conclusion that Trevorrow promised us back in January of 2016, but Fisher’s death has, in many ways, forstalled this possibility. No matter what the creators choose to do, the new trilogy is now, at its core, a tragedy. Despite the fact that principal photography for VIII was concluded in mid-2016,– the pall of Fisher’s passing will shadow it too and may well affect the story Rian Johnson will give us at the end of this year.

“insiders say Leia was to have been a bigger part of Episode IX than VIII.”

- The Hollywood Reporter, January 5, 2017

It will never be alright again

Star Wars has always been a story about hope. Many of us see the new saga as an unwinding, or reversal of the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker. In this light, the opening words of the new saga, spoken by Lor San Tekka:

“This will begin to make things right,”

are resonant far beyond an implied jibe at George Lucas’ flawed prequels. Star Wars has always dealt in archetypes. In essays I wrote about the story during 2016*, I explored a number of different themes I see underpinning the new saga. From my first viewing of The Force Awakens, I believed that the large arc of the new trilogy will be one of homecoming, return, and redemption. As a fan who has spent the past year immersed in the world of the new saga, analyzing the plot, characters, and overarching themes of the new trilogy, reports that Fisher was anticipated to have a large role in Episode IX came as no surprise. All of central themes of the new saga can be gathered under the framework of one of the most ancient archetypal stories of all; The Prodigal Son.

Carrie Fisher’s death has rendered this tale difficult, if not impossible, to tell while remaining true to the characters created in both the original and sequel trilogies.  

Of course Fisher was anticipated to have a large role in the final installment of the tale; what is the return of the prodigal son but a process of coming to terms with the people and relationships one has left behind? The prodigal seeks forgiveness. The prodigal comes home. TFA killed Ben Solo’s father in the universe of the Galaxy Far Far Away. Tragically, Fisher’s death means that General Organa will also be gone before the story ends. From a symbolic standpoint, there is now no “home” to which a repentant prodigal might return.

Unless it was filmed for VIII (and from a narrative standpoint, I have no expectation that it would have been), here are some of the things which will never happen in the galaxy far, far away:

Ben Organa Solo will never see the living face of his mother again.

They will never speak to each other.

Ben will never be able to ask his mother for forgiveness. Nor will she be able to ask for his.

Leia will never see her son in the light again. Never see him whole. Never see him happy. She’ll never dance at a wedding, never hold a Skywalker grandchild.

Lucasfilm and the story group, Pablo Hidalgo, JJ Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan, Kathleen Kennedy - all of them: they destroyed the happy ending of the Original Trilogy, and have left us with this. I weep. I am filled with rage. They have a lot to answer for. Of course no one imagined it would turn out this way, but the storytellers have broken Star Wars in a way that strikes close to its heart, and on some level, no matter what they do, they cannot fix it.

For those of us who have loved the character of Leia our entire lives, this is almost unbearably sad. The storytellers set this particular tale in motion; they took what proved to be an ugly, risky gamble in choosing to tell this particular tale. They have broken the saga, and no matter how they choose to end it, even if they do it well; with sensitivity and courage, they have doomed the new trilogy to some level of tragedy.

Because the terrible reality is that the only honorable, logical, narratively appropriate way to deal with Carrie Fisher’s real death is that in the story, General Leia Organa must also die. This adds a bizarre, free-floating grief to the reality of Fisher’s passing. The destruction of the story – it is another kind of death. For those of us who knew Fisher only through her work as an artist, it is a loss that is bitter, bitter to bear.

“…she burns very bright, and has such a great, generous energy…for that suddenly to not be on set…to have her character; not just her character in the movie, but her character, missing from that very small unit, is a tragedy.”

Adam Driver, speaking of Carrie Fisher, January 6, 2017, with Stephen Colbert

How does the story go now?

At recent conversation around our dinner table, our family talked about how we imagined the storytellers completing the trilogy without Carrie. Most of the ways in which movie makers have dealt with this kind of loss in the past felt deeply inappropriate. It’s possible that our responses are still being strongly shaped by grief – as I write this, we’re only a couple of weeks removed from Fisher’s death in December. Still, I suspect that the views of our average family, consisting of both casual and hard-core fans is pretty representative. Here’s how people felt:

No re-casting.

The Star Wars saga films should not be treated like yet another superhero retread. Carrie Fisher’s Leia Organa cannot be recast to be played by another person. She’s not Batman or Spiderman, a costume to be filled by whatever flavor-of-the-month up and comer is presently in vogue.

No CG.

This is a more difficult question, and a reality it is probably impossible to avoid. With the example of the re-animation of Grand Moff Tarkin (and god, the young Leia cameo) fresh before us in Rogue One, bringing a person back to life onscreen is obviously a newly-emerging reality. Rogue One showed us exactly what that technology can presently achieve, and it is both woefully inadequate to carry the weight of a significant role like Fisher’s, and ethically questionable. Fisher herself was famously outspoken about her unhappiness at being objectified as a fictional character, and railed against the overexposure and exploitation she felt surrounding some aspects of her fame as Princess Leia.  She also understood how important the character was to many people:

“Movies were meant to stay on the screen, flat and large and colorful, gathering you up in their sweep of story, carrying you rollicking along to the end, then releasing you back into your unchanged life. But this movie misbehaved. It leaked out of the theater, poured off the screen, affected a lot of people so deeply that they required endless talismans and artifacts to stay connected to it.

Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist, page 194

In The Princess Diarist, Fisher describes making peace with the fact that Leia is her, and she is Leia. This passage hints at how she might have felt about the possibility of being turned into a computer-generated entity:

“It turns out she matters to me. Leia. I’ve spent the lion’s share of my life…being as much myself as Princess Leia. Answering questions about her, defending her…wondering who I’d be without her, finding out how proud I am of her, making sure I’m careful to not do anything that might reflect badly on her or that she might disapprove of, feeling honored to be her representative here on earth, her caretaker…[it] made me angry and resent it when other people would try to put words in her mouth without consulting me!“

Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist, page 244

Unless Rian Johnson had the foresight to capture footage of Carrie Fisher which could be used for Episode IX, the reality is that some degree of CG work involving Leia is likely to be part of the final installment of the trilogy. As fans, I think we actually have a role to play here by letting Lucasfilm know now, and emphatically, that the fanbase does not want to see Carrie’s Leia turned into a Tarkin-style zombie, that any CG work be kept to an absolute minimum, and that it be avoided altogether if the story can be told without it.

And can it? Could IX reach some form of acceptable ending (if not the “deeply and profoundly satisfying” conclusion described by Trevorrow) even with Carrie and Leia gone?

Yes, but.  

As I said earlier in this essay, Carrie Fisher’s death renders the new trilogy tragic in ways that were probably not anticipated, and now cannot be avoided. Even so, it is possible to wrest some form of peace and balance from this story at its end. Despite my angry grief with the story group and everyone involved in bringing us to this painful place in the story, I have some trust that the storytellers have the skill to do it right.

The reality is that the most straightforward way to deal with Carrie Fisher’s real death is that General Leia Organa will die in the story, and that this death will take place off-screen. To me, this feels like the most honorable and honest way to let the truth of Fisher’s passing become part of the Star Wars universe without resorting to awkward and potentially offensive use of CG or re-casting to complete the saga. But oh, just thinking about it hurts. A lot. Many of us who have spent a lot of time grieving in recent days will grieve deeply again. So be it.

As Carrie noted, Star Wars is a story that misbehaves; it won’t stay on the screen. Our understanding of the characters is unbreakably linked to the people who created them and to our own experiences. 

When news of Fisher’s heart attack first broke, I had the absurd thought that it was time for Ben Organa Solo to stop his descent into darkness and get himself home; his mother needed him. I can readily imagine a version of the saga in which Leia’s death is the impetus that turns Ben back to the light. I can just as easily envision a version of the tale in which his mother’s death is the blow which finally extinguishes the light in him, but I don’t believe that darker path is likely for the filmmakers to take. The redemption of Ben Solo was the most likely endgame of the new saga before Fisher’s death; now I posit that it is the ONLY acceptable way in which the new trilogy can end.

Is there a way to tell the story without CG or re-casting which permits some final reconciliation between mother and son?

Yes, but.

Star Wars is a universe in which the dead sometimes appear to the living in the form of ghosts, and it is possible to envision a version of the story in which Leia appears as a Force ghost. In fact, I would almost guarantee that episode IX will make use of this trope to give both the other characters in the story and the audience some form of closure. It’s a gift of fiction that we are generally deprived of in real life. We’ll have to trust the storytellers to handle this with sensitivity and skill.  

Star Wars is a universe in which people tend not to send letters, but rather use holos to communicate with each other, so some form of CG might be used to permit Leia to send some form of final message to her son. In Rogue One, this storytelling technique was used when Galen Erso gave his message to Bodhi Rook to carry to Saw Gererra. Galen did not know if his message would reach either Saw or his daughter Jyn; but it did indeed serve as his last message of love and reconciliation to his daughter. In a similar vein, a message from Bail Organa to Leia featured prominently in Claudia Gray’s novel, Bloodline. 

Leia, a wartime general, might well have had a “farewell” letter of some kind in keeping for Ben, in the way soldiers who know they might never see their families again have done for centuries.

Actually, we don’t have to invent a message written by the General Organa we met in The Force Awakens, because we know that in Bloodline, Leia composed a letter to Ben at the time their relationship to Darth Vader was revealed. The story so far has not revealed whether this message ever reached its intended recipient. It’s possible that Leia’s message to her son, written long before the events in TFA, might finally reach his hands in Episode IX. 

Bloodline didn’t tell us what was in that message, but we can easily guess: Leia told her son she loved him. She apologized for not telling him the truth of his family history. She asked for his forgiveness. She told him she believed in the light in him.

She told him she loved him.

In one of my essays written in 2016, I speculated that the “mystery box” Rey opened in the basement of Maz Kanata’s castle, in which she discovered the Skywalker lightsaber, was the same box in which Bail Organa’s message was found in Bloodline; a keepsake box from the lost world of Alderaan that belonged to Leia as a young girl.

If my speculation is correct, the box and its contents may have a meaningful role to play in episode IX. As far as we know, the box was left behind after the battle on Takodana, but there’s no reason to assume it was not recovered by Maz and returned to Leia. If it was Leia’s keepsake box from her childhood on Alderaan, it becomes a powerful talisman which the storytellers could use to connect Ben to his mother after her death. In TFA, we catch a very brief glimpse of the objects which were in the box with the lightsaber. I don’t know what the storytellers will do with this detail, but I hope very much that the box did belong to Leia, that its contents were her own childhood treasures, and that the box eventually finds it way into the hands of her son. Maybe Luke will give it to him. Maybe Rey will.

A box of keepsakes and a final message would be a heartrending end to a story which should, by rights, have concluded with Leia dancing at a wedding and living a peaceful life, surrounded by grandchildren, but sometimes even fairy tales don’t go that way. Like life.

With much love to our fandom and our storytellers.

The Force is with you, Carrie Fisher. You are one with the Force.

 * I’ll edit this and add some links to my old metas soon. XOXO

[leechangjoons]

The One Who Began It All

Name: Zhang Kaiyuan, Kevin 张凯元 Shifter Form: A draconic, red demon with flames running down his spine that starts from his head. He wears a pair of heavy silver gauntlets with fin-like blades on them, which he activates using the keystone around his neck.  Appearance: A stout and gaunt man with yellow-rimmed glasses, Kaiyuan has dyed auburn hair and sits atop a bright red powerchair. His gauntlets in this form are bracelets that are tight around his arms (strength inhibitors actually), and he’s usually seen in a white T-shirt under a dark blue, tie-dyed shirt that is always worn like a vest. He usually also wears jeans and neatly laced up sneakers- when in khakis, it’s painfully visible that his legs are quite scarred up and atrophied as well as a catheter bag strapped on his inner thigh. Kaiyuan usually has some random knick-knacks behind his chair, including a badly-scuffed tennis racket he refuses to replace.  Personality: Kaiyuan has come a long way from being the immature and brash man he had been before- he remains boastful and remorseless, however, but being forced into immortality has forced him to face the consequences of so many of his mistakes, and he’s been chastised by them to grow the fuck up and become a better person. He’s perceptive, quick-witted and draws from his experience to compensate for his ill temper and often unwarranted outbursts, making him a surprisingly efficient businessman as he slowly began to take over the business. He’s incredibly stuck up and snobbish, often collecting people around him as ‘token friends’ or even using them as stepping stones for his aims- though, at rare times, he does take interest in the average and he can be protective if he wants to, having been starved of parental love from a young age. To him, humans are curiosities (he has a terrible habit of objectifying those around him or seeing them as inferior or hostile to be able to take them down), and his rare friends in Ziyang and Yongyi often tread carefully with him for fear of his apathy and amorality costing them (which has on several occasions). He has a tendency to talk back and get defensive extremely fast in private, which often frustrates himself and others when it comes to being social. 

Kaiyuan has untreated post-traumatic stress, rarely discussing it if ever if he has to but always avoiding the topic as much as possible, which does nothing to help relieve it.  History: The eldest, orphaned grandson of a thriving Malaysian supermarket franchise owner, Kaiyuan was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and spoilt entirely rotten. Entitled and childish, he needed to get anything he wanted by hook or by crook, which made him not above raping a young lady named Jiawen in a futile attempt to have her. What he did feel threatened by, however, was the appearance of 2 new cousins, one of which was much more competent than he was. Jealous and bitter, Kaiyuan schemed to get rid of her, Kaiqing as well as the aunt he hated (along with her son, Ziyang). 

Being one-upped by Kaiqing, who was much more scheming that he was, Kaiyuan wound up driving a truck with faulty brakes and ran over an old man while trying to attack Yongyi, another girl he knew was linked to his family. At the last second, Kaiyuan had swerved, unable to continue with the murder, crashing into a wall and crushing his legs in the process. When he woke up, Kaiyuan found that he was paralysed in his legs and his dick was twisted, losing all sexual function and being forced to use a catheter permanently (since it hurt immensely for him to pee or have an erection). The prideful man contemplated suicide, but was talked down by Ziyang, who had no hard feelings towards him, and Kaiyuan, humbled by this, finally accepted Ziyang’s help. He also belatedly found out that the man he had run over and killed was Yongyi’s adoptive father, and was unable to wrap his head around why nobody seemed resentful to him for all that he had done. 

Learning to cope with his condition, Kaiyuan picked up wheelchair tennis, and found a racket in the rejected corner with a badly scuffed handle. Bonding instantly with the racket, he bought it and has kept it ever since. He also slowly began to mend fences with Yongyi, the girl seeing his stress mirroring her own and finally beginning to get past her grief to believe Kaiyuan was trying his utmost to be a better person. With his current disability, Kaiyuan initially tried making a mess in the company using sympathy points, but his aunt had none of this and threw him out once more: this was when Kaiyuan finally realised that no more tantrums would get him his way, and he was now level with the rest whether he liked it or not. Reluctantly, he ate more humble pie and started from the very bottom at his grandfather’s insistence, learning the ropes from scratch. 

At this point in time, Kaiyuan found he was forced to marry his victim, Jiawen- who proceeded to overdose and commit suicide the day before their wedding. Kaiyuan had wanted to work hard and make amends, but the trauma of seeing Jiawen’s dead body because of his wrongdoing was far too great for him. Ziyang sent a dying Kaiyuan to the hospital after the man binge drank for days despite his catheter (and was now going into septic shock due to being unable to process his urine), and in his coma, Kaiyuan was plagued by strange dreams. 

He met Junjie in this dreamscape, and Junjie explained that Kaiyuan was supposed to be dead in this current timeline- but he intervened, seeing that Kaiyuan could still be saved. With this understanding that he was now an undead demon, Kaiyuan was brought to Hell and given a rundown of his duties: capture and return souls to the underworld, or risk bursting into flames and disintegrating, damned to be in Hell for eternity for the sins he committed in the past timeline. Being a huge coward, Kaiyuan accepted this, gaining the bracelets he now wore and learning to slowly check and capture souls around him in his timeline. 

After eight years, Kaiyuan is now the representative CEO for the franchise after his grandfather passed on, his aunt impressed by his abilities and allowing him to take over with Ziyang. He remains close friends with Ziyang and Yongyi, often grateful for them helping him despite all he did and never once abandoning him when all else did. He travels frequently to various countries from his home apartment in Penang, unable to stay still and preferring to get away from a place that had brought him so much trauma. He continues to capture and imprison souls to hand over, tackling this secondary job with aplomb with enough experience.  Powers: Kaiyuan’s secondary form wields hellfire, and being an undead demon, his hide is impenetrable by supernatural forces and can only be pierced by holy weapons. He’s also severely allergic to religious artefacts and will start burning if in contact with them for extended periods. In his draconic demon form, he is blessed with boosted strength and agility not unlike a wolf’s, and he remains invisible to the human eye in this form unless the other has a sixth sense. Kaiyuan is also able to detect and ‘chain’ hostile ghosts using his hellfire that manifest into chains, and his blades are to attack and dispel ghosts that would mean him harm. 

Melee wise, Kaiyuan is obnoxiously rich, and owns a supermarket franchise. He’s very experienced in economics and diplomacy, often using this to his advantage to sneak into haunted places and continue his job while on the guise of development. Surprisingly, he has an innate talent for ‘good’ plots of land, which creates massive revenue as supermarkets are built over them. He’s incredibly proud and even snobbish about the family business as a result. Kaiyuan also speaks English, Chinese and Malay fluently due to his heritage, and is beginning to pick up Korean. Immortal/Semi-Immortal?: Immortal (undead)  Alignment: Chaotic Neutral  Other: Being undead, Kaiyuan looks like he’s always in his early 30s. He refreshes his features to appear older. 

[newstechreviews]

August 2020 saw no soca floats sliding along West London’s Ladbroke Grove. No pink feathered wings or giant plumes of headwear. The Notting Hill Carnival was canceled, like all mass gatherings in late COVID lockdown, the streets still spare, the air still choked with grief. No curry goat or jerk pan smoke rose up into the city trees. And the music, the great churning music of the Caribbean islands, of Black Britain, of Africa and the Americas, did not thump to the foundations of the neighborhood terraces, making them tremble.

All of this would have been part of a normal summer for Edward Enninful while growing up in the area in the 1980s. His mother Grace might look out of the window of her sewing room in their house right on the Carnival route, and see some manifestation of Trinidad going by, or a reggae crew, wrapped in amazing sculptures of bikini and shiny hosiery. Edward, one of six siblings, would stay out late and take it in, all that sound and spectacle, which for decades has been the triumphant annual pinnacle of London’s cultural and racial multiplicity.

It was this world that nurtured his creativity and helped shape the vision he has brought to the pages of British Vogue since being appointed editor in chief in 2017. “I was always othered,” Enninful says on a nostalgic walk through the streets of Ladbroke Grove, a much gentrified, still bohemian part of London, where he moved with his family from Ghana at the age of 13, “you know, gay, working-class, Black. So for me it was very important with Vogue to normalize the marginalized, because if you don’t see it, you don’t think it’s normal.”

Today, Enninful is the most powerful Black man in his industry, sitting at the intersection of fashion and media, two fields that are undergoing long-overdue change and scrambling to make up for years of negligence and malpractice. Since becoming the only Black editor in history to head any of the 26 Vogue magazines—the most influential publications in the multibillion-dollar global fashion trade—he has been tipped as the successor to Anna Wintour, the iconic editor of American Vogue and artistic director for Condé Nast. The privately held company is navigating, on top of an advertising market battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, public controversies around representation both in its offices and on its pages.

Wayne Tippetts—ShutterstockEnninful at London Fashion Week on Feb. 16, 2019.

Enninful’s vision for British Vogue comes at a critical moment for the international publisher. “I wanted to reflect what I saw here growing up, to show the world as this incredibly rich, cultured place. I wanted every woman to be able to find themselves in the magazine.” He chose the British model Adwoa Aboah to front his first issue, in 2017: “When others took steps, Edward took massive strides, showing the importance of our visibility and stories,” she says. Covers since have featured the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna, Judi Dench (at 85, British Vogue’s oldest cover star), Madonna and soccer player Marcus Rashford, photographed for this year’s September issue by Misan Harriman, the first Black male photographer to shoot a British Vogue cover in its 104-year history. While other publications, including American Vogue, have reduced frequency during the pandemic, British Vogue has remained financially stable and is still producing 12 thick issues in 2020.

Under Enninful, British Vogue has morphed from a white-run glossy of the bourgeois oblivious into a diverse and inclusive on-point fashion platform, shaking up the imagery, tracking the contemporary pain. Its shelf presence is different—more substance, more political—and perhaps in part because of it, the shelf as a whole looks different. No more do Black women search mainstream newsstands in vain for visions of themselves. Now we are ubiquitous in my newsagent, in my corner shop, and it really wasn’t that hard; all it took was to give a Black man some power, to give someone with a gift, a voice and a view from the margin a seat at the table.

“My Blackness has never been a hindrance to me,” Enninful says. Yet he is no stranger to the passing abuses of systemic racism. On a Wednesday in mid-July, while entering British Vogue’s London headquarters, he was racially profiled by a security guard who told him to enter via the loading bay instead. “Just because our timelines and weekends are returning to normal, we cannot let the world return to how it was,” he wrote on Twitter. This summer, in the wake of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, we are seeing a seismic reckoning across industries, scrutinizing who is doing what and who is not doing enough to bring about real change in equality and representation. “My problem is that there’s a lot of virtue-signaling going on,” he says. “But everyone’s listening now, and we need to take advantage of that. This is not the time for tiptoeing.”

We meet at Ladbroke Grove tube station in a late-summer noon. When anticipating an interview with the leader of a historic luxury fashion bible, it’s tempting to have inferior thoughts about your Nissan or your Clarks boot collection or your latest unlatest something, but Enninful, 48, is unassuming, arriving in a loose navy suit, pale blue shirt and shades, the only giveaway to his sartorial imperium the no socks with his brogues. He is warm and relaxed, bearing the close-shouldered tilt of the lifelong hard worker; he rises at 5 a.m. most days to meditate before work.

I-D: Nick Towers; Vogue Italia: Steven Meisel From left: a Fashion Week report by Enninful in I-D’s January 1995 issue; Naomi Campbell on Vogue Italia in July 2008.

These days he resides toward Lancaster Gate, on the posher side of Ladbroke Grove, with his long-term partner the filmmaker Alec Maxwell and their Boston terrier, Ru Enninful, who has his own Instagram account and whose daily walking was a saving grace during lockdown. But the London Underground is where Enninful’s journey into fashion began, one day on the train in a pair of ripped blue jeans, when he was spotted by stylist Simon Foxton as a potential model for i-D, the avant-garde British fashion magazine. Being only 16, a shy, sheltered kid who grew up in a Ghanaian army barracks and who was less than four years in the U.K., of course he had to ask his mother. Albeit a clothes fanatic herself, a professional seamstress and regular rifler (with Edward) through the markets of Porto-bello and Brixton for fabrics, Grace was wary of the hedonistic London style vortex, the enormity of the new land, and reluctant to release her son into its mouth. He begged. He wore her down: “I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this, that something special was going to come out of it.”

He never had the knack for modeling, he says with characteristic humility. “I was terrible at it. I hated the castings, all that objectifying. But I loved the process and the craft of creating an image.” He soon moved to the other side of the lens, assisting on shoots and assembling image concepts and narratives, a particular approach to styling that impressed i-D enough to hire him as their youngest ever fashion director at only 18, a post he held for the next 20 years. Without the courtesy designer clothes later at his fingertips, he would customize, shred, dye and bargain for the right look, using the skills he’d developed at home in the sewing room. “I realized that I could say a lot with fashion,” he says, “that it wasn’t just about clothes, but could tell a story of the times we’re in, about people’s experiences in life. And that freedom to portray the world as you saw it.”

What was innate to Enninful—this blend of skilled creativity with the perception of difference as normal, as both subject and audience—was relatively unique in an industry dominated by white, colonial notions of beauty and mainstream. Legendary Somali supermodel Iman remembers a 2014 W magazine shoot in which she, Naomi Campbell and Rihanna were cast by Enninful, the publication’s then style director, wearing Balmain, designed by Olivier Rousteing. “Until Edward appeared, no one at the mainstream fashion magazines would have cared to commission a portrait exclusively featuring three women of color, and furthermore who were all wearing clothes designed by a person of color,” she says. “He’s an editor in vocation and a reformer at heart, compelled to spur woefully needed social change.”

Courtesy Jamie Hawkesworth and Condé Nast Britain Train driver Narguis Horsford, on British Vogue’s July 2020 issue.

He shows me his various old haunts and abodes, the top-floor bedsit where he used to haul bags of styling gear up the stairs, the Lisboa and O’Porto cafés of Golborne Road—or “Little Morocco”—where he’d sit for hours chewing the fat with people like makeup artist Pat McGrath, Kate Moss, Nick Kamen and photographer David Sims. Name-drops fall from his lips like insignificant diamonds—stylists, photographers, celebrities—but he navigates his domain in a manner apparently uncommon among fashion’s gatekeepers. Winfrey says of him, “I have never experienced in all my dealings with people in that world anyone who was more kind and generous of spirit. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”

Her shoot for the August 2018 cover of British Vogue left Winfrey feeling “empress-like,” and she ascribes his understanding of Black female beauty to his being raised by a Black mother. “Edward understands that images are political, that they say who and what matters,” she adds. Enninful’s father Crosby, a major in the Ghanaian army who was part of U.N. operations in Egypt and Lebanon, had thought that his bright, studious son would eventually grow out of his fascination with clothes and become a lawyer. But three months into an English literature degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying Hardy, Austen and the usual classics, thinking maybe he’d be a writer, or indeed a lawyer, Enninful quit to take up the position at i-D. His father did not speak to him for around 15 years, into the next century, until Grace suffered a stroke and entered a long illness. “Now that I’m older, I realize he just wanted to protect us. He’s come to understand that I had to follow my heart and forge my own path.”

He credits his parents for his strong work ethic—“drummed into you from a very early age by Black parents, that you have to work twice as hard”—and his Ghanaian heritage for his eye for color. His approach to fashion as narrative comes from the “childish games I would play with my mother,” creating characters around the clothes, sketching them out. “I can’t just shoot clothes off the runway,” he says. “There always has to be a character, and that character has to have an inner life.” Since Grace’s death three years ago, his father has lived alone by the Grand Union Canal and is very proud of his son, particularly of the Order of the British Empire awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 for his services to diversity in fashion. The Queen, incidentally, is high on Enninful’s list of Vogue cover dreams.

The British Vogue Enninful inherited from former editor in chief Alexandra Shulman three years ago was starkly different from today’s rendition. During her 25 years in charge, only 12 covers out of 306 featured Black women, and she left behind an almost entirely white workforce. Now the editorial team is 25% people of color—“I needed certain lieutenants in place,” he says—and similar shufflings are being called for over at Condé Nast in New York. Enninful is reluctant to tarnish names any further, maintaining that Shulman “represented her time, I represent mine,” and declining to comment on the U.S. headquarters.

Courtesy Edward Enninful A Polaroid of Enninful in the 1990s from his personal collection.

Enninful’s rise is particularly meaningful to people like André Leon Talley, former editor at large of American Vogue, where Enninful also worked as a contributing editor. Talley describes the new British Vogue as “extraordinary,” and was joyous at Enninful’s appointment. “He speaks for the unsung heroes, particularly those outside the privileged white world that Vogue originally stood for. He has changed what a fashion magazine should be.”

“I’m a custodian,” Enninful says of his role, sitting in a sumptuous alcove of the club bar at Electric House. “Vogue existed before I came, and it will still exist when I leave, but I knew that I had to go in there and do what I really believed in. It’s our responsibility as storytellers or image makers to try to disrupt the status quo.” Ironically, though, he does not see himself as an activist, rather as someone who is unafraid to tackle political issues and educate others, while remaining firmly within the Vogue lens. “They said Black girls on the cover don’t sell,” he says. “People thought diversity equals down-market, but we’ve shown that it’s just good for business.” British Vogue’s digital traffic is up 51% since Enninful took over. He previously edited the 2008 Black issue of Vogue Italia, which featured only Black models and Black women and sold out in the U.S. and the U.K. in just 72 hours.

Since the incident with the security guard in July—which Enninful reveals was not isolated and had happened before (the culprit, a third-party employee, was dismissed from headquarters)—building staff have been added to the company’s diversity-and-inclusion trainings. Enninful would also like to see financial aid put in place for middle management, “because we forget sometimes that the culture of a place does not allow you to go from being a student to the top.” In 2013, he tweeted about another incident, where he was seated in the second row at a Paris couture show while his white counterparts were placed in front. “I get racially profiled all the time,” he says, going right back to his first experience of being stopped and searched as a teenager, which “petrified” him. “When I was younger, I would’ve been hurt and withdrawn, but now I will let you know that this is not O.K. People tend to think that if you’re successful it eliminates you, but it can happen any day. The difference now is that I have the platform to speak about it and point it out. The only way we can smash systemic racism is by doing it together.”

Campbell Addy for TIMEBritish Vogue editor in chief Enninful in Ladbroke Grove, London, on Aug. 31.

Activism, then, is intrinsic. Fashion is altruism, as much as story and craft, as much as the will to capture beauty. For Enninful, there is no limitation to the radicalism possible through his line of work. Rather than the seemingly unattainable elements of style (the £350 zirconia ring, the £2,275 coat) obscuring the moral fiber of the message, the invitation to think and see more openly, the style instead leads you to it, perhaps even inviting you to assemble something similar within the boundaries of your real, more brutal, less elevated existence. “Relatable luxury,” he calls it, and though it’s difficult to imagine exactly how one might evoke a £2,275 coat without his customizing skills and magical thinking, I am inclined to accept the notion, partly because I saw soul singer Celeste in a £1,450 dress in the September issue and think I might give it a try. Anything is possible. “I still feel like I’m at the beginning,” he says with palpable optimism. “I feel the fire of something new.”

—With reporting by Cady Lang/New York and Madeline Roache/London

Evans is the author of Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a

Cover photo: Styling: Susan Bender; Suit, sweater, shoes: Burberry