#he is the ONLY person to question Scar's motives at the beginning of the film

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

So, in Lion King The Musical, all the characters are, of course, played by humans. Either wearing costumes or operating puppets or, in some cases, a combination of the two. It's very well done and a brilliant way of adapting the musical to the stage.

But!

There is a gag during ‘Just Can't Wait To Be King’ where child!Simba is taunting Zazu, and ends up grabbing hold of the Zazu puppet and throwing it off stage.

The actor playing Zazu, rather than running off stage as well or voicing Zazu's screams as he's thrown into the abyss (seriously, dick move young Simba), instead responds by yelling “wait, where’s my bird? What did you do with my bird?” and looking around for the puppet. Later on, they show him spotting it off stage and running to fetch it.

This isn't really a fourth wall breaking musical in general. Pumbaa and Timon make a few pop culture jokes, and there's a slightly odd scene where Mufasa decides to remove his head while having a serious talk with Simba, but this is the only scene I remember where a character openly acknowledges that they're all just actors playing parts.

Hence my new and completely canon-compliant theory that, while all the other characters in Lion King the Musical are all animals just being played by humans, Zazu specifically actually is a human character— just a human character who chose/was forced to leave human society and started carrying a hornbill around all the time so as to integrate himself into animal politics.

The lions all know but pretend not to notice because it's entertaining, and he's a really good advisor.

[doctordumblesstark]

Themes that weave through season 3 of Alex Rider

Alex's reluctance to kill and maim

When Kyra and Alex take down the guards, both Nile and Julia are perplexed why someone only incapacitated and not killed the guards

Throughout all of Malagosto training we repeatedly see Alex refusing to strike against his fellow students or taking the "kill" shot

He can't kill Jones, even though he has every reason to at this point. Even Kyra points it out to him

He can't kill Nile even though he has no reason to be nice to Nile. Nile has been nothing but cruel to Alex and is more then prepared to kill him

Friendship and teamwork

We see it with how Alex works with Kyra and Tom in Malta

Alex puts Tom first and questions why he doesn't pursue filming with his brother

Alex doesn't understand how the Malagosto students are supposed to work together when they're also expected to strike each other on command

He questions Yassen about his friendship with John and especially Yassen's repeated lesson on not having emotions. We see how Yassen realises that Alex is right at the end and chooses to save Alex yet again from Nile

Jack learning when to leave Alex and trust him and when she needs to step up and help out. She sees Alex for the adult that he has to be in these situations but is also ready to be his guardian when he needs it.

Trust your team and be prepared, that whole speech from Jay to Kyra.

Trust

Not surprising to see this in a show about espionage, but trust is present everywhere

Blunt and Jones have a conversation about trust and double agents at the beginning and it's Jones who convinces Blunt to trust Alex and actually tell him the truth. Jones achieved something that no one would have thought possible, get Alex to trust Blunt, if even a little bit

Alex trusting Jack and defending her to Yassen, even calling out Yassen should trust someone

Tom and Jack being worried over Alex and telling themselves and telling each other to trust Alex even when it seems he may have changed sides.

Alex throughout the season has to choose who to trust, to be disappointed by Scorpia and then finally realising he could have trusted Jones to have his back all along. However, them trusting Alex with the truth is what finally puts them all on even playing field and really makes them into a good team.

Alex also trusted that Yassen was telling him the truth about how to find Scorpia and knowing John, even though Kyra suggested he could have been lying.

John and Alex

John shoots past Yassen to kill the arms dealers leaving a cut and scar on Yassen's face. Alex takes that same shot to kill the power for the transmitter leaving a cut on Nile's face

Alex chooses to go back to take the final blow to Scorpia knowing the risks and understanding it might kill him, but hopefully saving many others. The same John agrees to fake his death on Albert Bridge, knowing there is a chance he might not survive but willing to rescue one more person along the way.

Both Alex and John go undercover for Scorpia. Although very different motivations

John, Alex and Yassen

I am so happy we got to see this relationship in the show. I don't care if this was just fan service, I just loved that we got more of Yassen and Alex together.

Even though just hinted in the show the mentoring between John and Yassen and then Yassen and Alex has always been at the heart of the Rider&Gregorovich relationship

Yassen clearly thinks he has to help Alex and when he finds out Scorpia played him just as much as they did Alex, he knows not to be upset with John and steps up one last time to save his friend's son

Rings/Parallels between the seasons

Yassen takes out the clone at the end of season 1 from a rooftop and then takes out Nile at the end of season 3 as he attempts to take a shot at Alex. The parallel is obvious, but while Yassen chooses to stay hidden in season 1 he shows himself to Alex in season 3. I choose to read this as Yassen showing Alex he understands the importance of friendship.

The department using Alex to Alex choosing to work with them. He even walks out of there with a positive relationship with most of them and a job opportunity. The trust is still new but it's there

Jones and Alex relationship throughout the seasons. She's the only one that saw Alex for who he is from the beginning and is the only one ready to challenge Blunt over Alex

Pritchard's death kicking things off and Smither's bitterness when saying the "cause of death". Parallels Ian Rider's death and how the story started

Early list so feel free to add to it. I just thought the storytelling of season 3 really took a step up compared to previous seasons. It felt more rounded and like things paid off really well towards the end

[nonspecificfandomblog]

A She-Ra Film (According to Me)

I am very excited by the prospect of a She-Ra and the Princesses of Power film, and seeing so many theory posts has inspired me with my own plot idea for a She-Ra film, blessed we be that it happens.

Etheria is abuzz as Bright Moon prepares to host Queen Glimmer and Bow’s wedding, which shall surely be the event of the century after so many years spent fighting the Horde.

Aunt Castaspella and King Micah prepare a wonderful magical display, featuring Queen Glimmer of course, Perfuma and her people tend to the gardens and floral arrangements, Frosta crafts ice sculptures filling the entire castle, Mermista and Scorpia travel the seas, spreading the good news, and all feels good in the world. A strong turn-around from the last major event at Bright Moon (the coronation).

Adora is not happy however. She loves Glimmer and Bow and cannot wait for them to be married. Overseeing the entire operation with Glimmer, Bow, and Catra, the castle seems to haunt Adora. Visions and memories come in flashes as one person keeps coming to mind: Queen Angella. Her only daughter, coronated without either of her parents to support her, and marrying without her mother. Glimmer does not seem too bothered, instead smiling at Frosta’s ice sculpture and Perfuma’s hedge of her mom. Still, Adora sees only the reminder that she failed to save Glimmer’s mother, and she must now celebrate this important day without her.

Her friends notice how distracted she’s been, and finally after days of visions and nightmares, Adora comes up with a plan: to free Queen Angella from where she is trapped between dimensions, and finally rid the world of the Horde’s last gaping scar. Although it is not a clear plan, it’s Adora’s plan, and when does she ever think things through?

Adora enlists Entrapta’s help, hoping her experience creating the inter-dimensional portal will enable her to save Queen Angella. Entrapta excitedly agrees to help, bringing Hordak along with her, having created the portal together. Hordak explains the limitations, that as a portal to travel from one dimension to another, he is not sure how they can retrieve someone from between dimensions. However, seeing as the original portal was made with First Ones tech, it would make sense they might have a greater understanding.

The discussion triggers a vision, and Adora sees herself once again as a child--but not on Etheria. She does not know where she is, but as she looks at the two adults cradling her in their arms, she understands that they must be her parents. Overcome with emotions, she breaks down crying, declaring she cannot let Glimmer get married without Angella present. They are going to find the remaining First Ones.

During her outburst, Glimmer, Bow, and Catra had come in and after her declaration, voice their support. Adora cries again, voicing her guilt and shame over what happened to Angella as Glimmer tells her she has already forgiven her. But, if Adora is set on doing this, Glimmer will be with her the entire way. Bow and Catra agree, and the mission is set.

A few days pass, and all the Princesses have gathered to join Adora on her mission, leaving Castaspella and Micah alone to finish the preparations, never fully explaining their true intentions--to rescue Queen Angella--fearing Micah will stop them from risking their lives to save a wife he has already mourned.

Their mission begins and the Princesses start their search by returning to Krytis. Exploring the world with Melog at their side, they try to learn the history of the First Ones in hopes of finding where any who remain might have gone to. Finally, after a long search through the planet’s ruins, they find a clue to the last First Ones’ whereabouts. They set a course.

During the journey, tensions rise between Adora and her friends as her visions and nightmares worsen, now hearing Angella’s voice calling out to her, along with two voices she does not recognize. Refusing their support and comfort, Adora isolates herself, once again hoping to save the day at her own expense.

The team arrives at a planet and, detecting vast catacombs moving throughout the entire planet’s core, go down to search. Choosing to search with Entrapta, Hordak, and Mermista, Adora vents her feelings before trying to run off. Strangely, Hordak stops her and says something profound, having gained a genuine appreciation for friendship and love. Adora’s guilt and shame do not change how her friends feel about her, they only corrupt her perception of herself. Comforted, Adora and the group continue searching before finding a sealed pocket deep in the planet.

Unable to get a message to the two other teams, the group chooses to forge on breaking through the technology sealing off the pocket, finding the lost First Ones.

The First Ones attack, easily overpowering the team, taking them to prison. There, they are reunited with the other two groups who had found the First Ones in different catacombs and were captured. The group finds comfort in each other’s company, before they are interrupted by the Queen and King of the First Ones there to interrogate them.

As they begin questioning, the Queen can’t help but be distracted by Adora. She draws the attention to her, stating she recognizes her. Denying the possibility, Adora has another vision and she sees her mom and dad standing before her, and passes out.

Blinking awake, the Queen and King hold her in their arms, saying, “You’ve come back to us.”

Freed from prison, Adora and the Princesses celebrate with the First Ones as their Princess has returned to them after so many years.

After days of celebration, the Princesses tell the King and Queen their original intentions in finding them: to learn how to save Queen Angella. The First Ones agree to help them, deciding, having learned of the Horde’s dissolution, to come with the Princesses to Etheria.

On their journey, Adora’s friends become increasingly wary of the King and Queen and their motivations. They do not doubt they are Adora’s parents, though they do believe they have not been completely honest with them. They confront Adora who lashes out at them, upset they would doubt her family who she has spent so long not knowing, who she lucked into finding because she was trying to restore Glimmer’s family. The other Princesses become upset, Catra and Glimmer particularly hurt by the implication that they are not Adora’s family.

Entrapta and Hordak have begun working with the First Ones on the technology to bring Queen Angella back, but as they spend more time among them, they too become wary of the First Ones’ intentions. As they learn more and more about their history, their motivations become clear.

Just as they arrive at Etheria, Entrapta and Hordak warn Adora of the First Ones’ plans to harvest Etheria’s magic once more. Upset, Adora confronts the King and Queen hoping to easily resolve the issue only to find everyone’s suspicions were true. Betrayed and hurt, Adora lashes out before being subdued and captured by the King and Queen.

Waking up in the Bright Moon holding cell, Adora finds herself joined by Entrapta and Hordak, who the First Ones intentionally let tell her of their plans to see where her loyalties lied--with the Princesses, or with her “family.” Heartbroken the family she has spent so long wondering about has betrayed her, Adora wallows in self-pity as the Princesses quietly mount a Rebellion against the First Ones who have taken over Bright Moon and plan to conquer the rest of Etheria.

Barely escaping the First Ones, the Princesses landing in the Crimson Waste where they enlist their old friend Huntara to help them rescue Adora, Entrapta, and Hordak, and take back Etheria.

The rescue commences and, after freeing Adora, Entrapta, and Hordak, as the Princesses make their way to the throne room, Adora apologizes for her behavior. Family is about who loves and cares about you, and they do, not the First Ones.

Reaching the throne room, Adora confronts the King and Queen. Although their primary plans involve harnessing Etherian magic, they do want her to be with them, and offer to help rescue Queen Angella if she surrenders and declares her allegiance to them. She promptly rejects their proposal and attacks. A horrible battle ensues which results in the destruction of much of the First Ones technology and their forces.

The First Ones flee Etheria in ruins, saying one day they will return for Adora and Etheria.

The wedding having been pushed off by the First Ones invasion, it is finally time for Bow and Glimmer to be married. Having apologized to her family for how she treated them and forgiven herself for what happened to Queen Angella, Adora is finally at peace and ready to begin the rest of her life with her friends.

Lo and behold, Entrapta managed to steal many of the schematics from the first ones for their technology, and fashion a device to bring back Queen Angella. Telling no one, Entrapta waits until the ceremony is about to begin and uses the machine. Vast Etherian magic swarms around the wedding guests as the sky lights up, and floating down to them is Queen Angella.

Tearful reunion, wedding, happily ever after.

Obviously, this is just an idea, and there are plenty of things which might need to be fixed of changed if this were to be the She Ra movie, however, I think the main ideas are quite strong throughout. More than anything, I want the She-Ra movie to explore the First Ones, Adora’s parents--and subsequently the meaning of family, and reunite Queen Angella with her family. Thanks for reading my long, imperfect idea. More than anything, I’m just so hopeful that there will be more She-Ra in the world and I would love whatever Noelle writes.

[edelwoodsouls]

all roads lead - ch. 4

When his mother dies, Stiles runs away, straight into danger - only to be saved by Peter Hale. Seven years later, after burying their alpha, Stiles and Malia return home.

Word Count: 2,380 | Also on Ao3 | Other Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 5,

Chapter 4: WATER

Stiles has always been a creature who thrives on certainty. On logic. Control. Knowing the variables, knowing the future. Knowing what truly lies in people's hearts, their motivations, their secrets. Knowledge is power is control. Until the nogitsune. Now chaos hums in his bones, in the thrum of his heartbeats. He knows the two aren't so different now. Control is just an illusion, a sliver of rock above a sea of chaos that will drag you back under no matter how hard you cling, and isn't afraid to let the rocks claw you to shreds on the way down. The only true control is instigating the chaos. Still, not knowing where the future will lead is something that sits heavily in his chest, the beginnings of panic that Stiles is oh so used to, but still makes his fingers shake after years. His father went out to make a phone call, still shaken, eyes still glistening. Make yourself at home, kids, he'd said, eyeing Malia with renewed curiosity now the dam has burst. So naturally, Stiles headed for the showers. Four days on coaches across the country coats him in a greasy film, and he desperately needs the rhythm of the water against his skin, the liminal space that seems to exist only in showers, giving him a moment to breathe. He turns the heat as high as it will go, watches his troubles eddy and fall from him into the drain. Being here feels like curling up by the fire, beside Malia, watching as Peter plays the piano tucked in the corner of their apartment with the exagerrated motions of someone overly skilled for the piece he's playing. It's a false comfort, he knows, one he should think twice before allowing to smother him. But he's so tired. The weeks have leeched all the fight from his bones, and this place, Beacon Hills, his father, have reminded him of the days when childhood was something still permitted to him. Stiles has never had a shower so good in his life.

Whilst Malia takes her turn, Stiles stares at himself in the fogged-up mirror. His hair has grown out (when was the last time he cut it?); his bones jut out at awkward angles from his too-pale, shadowed skin (how often has he been eating?). He looks like a man possessed. Has he looked this bad since he actually was? Malia pokes her head around the shower curtain, and he's surprised to see a delighted smile on her face, eyes glinting in that mischevious way that never quite leaves her. "This shower is fucking brilliant," she declares. "I never want to leave." Me neither, a small, too-loud part of him whispers back. Instead he just grins back at her and flicks water from his hair at her. She squeals, vanishing behind the curtain. A moment later, the shower head is turned directly at him, spraying him once more with startlingly hot water. John finds them ten minutes later, deep into the most intense water fight of Stiles' life. The towel tucked around Stiles' waist is soaked, the walls slick, the shower half-heartedly continuing to spray from the bottom of the tub. The two of them are crumpled beside it, chests aching so hard from laughing that the room spins. His father, standing in the doorway with a bemused expression as he takes in the chaos, just sends them into another bout of giggles. "Hey, dad," Stiles says, still gasping, pulling himself up over the lip of the tub and bringing Malia with him. John blinks, something unnameable flitting across his features, gone in an instant beneath a sheriff's poker face. Or maybe a father's one. "I thought you might want a change of clothes," he says, holding up a stack of clothing in between his hands. His eyes look anywhere but the two of them. "Then we should have a talk. I only have clothes for a teenage boy, though..." His eyes drift to Malia's face. She stares at him with the unnerving edge of a coyote's challenge, then extends a hand out for the proffered clothes. Stiles tries, and fails, to imagine Malia in a skirt - the thought is nothing but funny.

"Thanks, Mr Stilinski," she grins at him, wolfish, and bounces out into the hall, letting her hand brush Stiles' for a brief second as she passes.

Then it's just him, and his father. Alone. Silence stretches, and eventually John backs out into the hall and turns away so Stiles can get dressed.

"She's certainly... a character," his father's voice rises eventually. He's looking off distantly down the hall in the direction Malia left.

Stiles snorts. "That's certainly one way to describe Malia," he shrugs.

"And is she...?"

"What?"

"Is she your girlfriend?"

Stiles almost slips over on the floor again. "No," he says vehemently, then stops. How can he explain to his father the utterly entwined connection the two of them have? Siblings doesn't run nearly deep enough (and he thinks most people would frown on naked water fights with siblings at this age). Friends, family - all of it falls short. Society would like to describe them as significant others, simply because normal society deems romantic attraction the highest form of love. But that's something neither of them have ever considered, never would. What they give each other is infinitely stronger, infinitely more empowering. "She's the closest person I have," he says eventually. "We've been through a lot together."

An understatement if ever he heard one.

The clothes he tugs on are soft and warm, far too large for him. Scott's clothes, he realises. Half of him wants to snuggle in closer to them, smell the familiar scent of his old best friend. The other half riles at the smell of another alpha, at the thought of taking his clothes, invading his home.

"So you and Melissa," he says, voice oh so light and casual. His father flinches, turns around instinctively- and stops. Stiles has pulled on most of the clothes, but the tshirt is still half over his head, his chest still clear to see.

Considering how painful it was when he got it, he forgets about the tattoo over his heart far too often. Simple black lines, the symbol of his pack emblazoned forever in his skin, the only scar his body would let him keep. To a layman he supposes it looks like a sharp, angular S, but Peter's love of tradition and meaning, combined with Stiles' own magical training, mean he has learned to read runes like English.

"Eihwaz," Peter had declared when he'd selected the rune as his symbol. "The yew tree. Stability. Endurance. Irreversibility. Perseverance."

And wasn't that the thing that held their little family together? Despite all the odds, they had survived. They had found each other. They had weathered irreversible change and chosen to plant roots, to seek stability, knowing better than most how easily it slipped between their fingers.

In the end, it had done very little to save Peter's life. But here Stiles was, here Malia was, still persevering.

Stiles shoves the tshirt down over the tattoo, and his father's eyes blink away.

"Me and Melissa," he says slowly, as if the ground might crumble with a single word.

"Dad," Stiles says shortly, cutting across. "It's okay, really. You don't need to make any excuses. It's been a while. I'd be surprised if you'd survived this long alone."

And doesn't that just kill the mood.

"Stiles..." his father's tone immediately sets him on edge. "Why are you here? After all this time, why now? Did you want to come home? Did you... did you have a choice?"

 Were you kidnapped or did you leave?

Why is he here? To reconnect with his father? To inform Derek and Laura Hale of their uncle's passing? Is he just searching for a reason to keep moving, a direction, a goal, or else he'll shut down and never move again?

"I wanted to come home," he says, and right now it's the truth. "As for choice, it's not that simple, and-" he breathes slowly to ground himself, to calm the swirl of thoughts in his head. "I'm not really ready to talk about it. But, I was hoping... I was hoping we could stay. Find our ground again. For the longest time I've felt like I'm falling, and finally here..."

It feels like home, he doesn't say, but oh how he wants it to be true.

"You're welcome to stay, Stiles," his father says, so quickly a small light flickers to being in Stiles' chest. "You and Malia both. We have a couple spare rooms. But to all the world, you're missing."

Ah. Crap.

"I need to take you to the station, do a full report. You're a minor, so there's a whole bunch of hoops to jump through. As the sheriff I have a certain amount of pull, but there are gonna be questions."

"Not just for me," Stiles cringes. "Malia is from Beacon Hills, too..."

His father nods in consideration, like he's just the corner of a puzzle he's been wrestling with for a while. Stiles really doesn't like that expression. "So she is Malia Tate. I thought she was, though it's been a few years."

The world stops. Stiles isn't here, but somewhere far away. The buzz of electricity in his ears. Blood leaking between his fingers. "You can't send her back there."

John looks up, surprised by the vehemence in his voice.

"I mean it, dad. Don't even tell her dad she's alive. He gave up any right to her when he sent her to Eichen House."

"Stiles..."

"Do you know what they did to her in there? Do you want to know what nightmare you've sent 'problematic' cases into? When we found her, she was-" His voice breaks. He doesn't want to remember the blood of that night, the wild look in Malia's eyes, so driven by animal terror she hadn't even recognised him or Peter.

None of them talk about that year, when Malia left to find herself and came back more lost than ever before. That night, more than anything, has kept him away from the west coast entirely. He's managed this long to keep Beacon Hills and Eichen House separate in his mind, distanced by time and trauma, but how far is it really? An hour's drive? The thought of Malia locked up there again makes something inside him cold with fury.

He won't let it happen, no matter what he has to do.

John doesn't say anything for a moment, clearly mulling over the information - too much - Stiles has just let slip. "I'll do what I can," he nods eventually. Stiles lets go of a breath he hadn't realised was burning his lungs. "I can pull some strings. I can respect your boundaries - up to a point. Eventually you're gonna have to talk to me about all this. Where you've been. How you and an asylum escapee are so close. Or you can talk to a therapist, at least."

The idea of a therapist attempting to untangle the utter clusterfuck of his brain makes Stiles smile.

"And you have to go to school."

He says this like it's a punishment, but Stiles suddenly, unexpectedly relishes the idea. He'd graduated early last year in New York, bored of school and pretending to be dumb just to stay at a regular pace. But the thought of being given something to fill the yawning chasm of time he's found himself with is a good one.

Malia won't like it, but she doesn't like anything involving written words and human social cues, all of which fester inside the halls of a school.

This is their chance, he realises. To live like normal teenagers. To meet people their own age, make friends who aren't pack. To play lacrosse and go iceskating, worry about inane things like homework, and clothing, and - just maybe - college applications.

"Of course," Stiles nods along. "Thank you, dad."

His father gives him an awkward, one armed hug, quickly lets go again. "How about I show you guys your rooms, that way you can get settled while I get started on dinner."

"You, cooking?" Stiles gasps in mock horror.

"Hey, kid, I am now a gourmet chef, I'll have you know. No more charred black fry ups or greasy take out. I'm on the straight and narrow."

"I'll see it when I believe it," Stiles grins.

"You will," John says earnestly. "I like to impress when it's my turn to cook - I'm doing shepherds pie today. Scott and Isaac'll be back from lacrosse practice in a couple hours, and Melissa finishes at six. Dinner at seven?"

Scott'll be back from lacrosse. In the excitement of finally seeing a road ahead of him, he's forgotten the small problem of the supernatural. Does his father know? Does Melissa? How long can he and Malia mask their scents living under the same roof as an alpha?

How the hell did asthmatic, wouldn't-harm-a-fly Scott McCall become an alpha anyway? The idea of Scott with blood on his hands like Stiles makes the world feel entirely wrong.

And who the hell is Isaac?

He manages a smile that's probably more a grimace, though his father doesn't seem to notice the difference. "Dinner at seven sounds great. But, uh, Malia and I only need one room."

"Are you sure?" John looks unsure. "I have two-"

"We sleep together." Stiles' tone leaves no room for discussion, a little too much of that alpha agression showing through. He relaxes immediately, hoping to glaze over the moment. "We both have pretty horrific nightmares. So unless you want screaming at 3AM, probably better for us to just stay together."

He can see his father is hardly convinced. John Stilinski is the sheriff of a town where tragedy is commonplace. He's seen trauma in all its shapes and sizes. He understands it all too well, how it makes an enemy of everything other. Malia and Stiles' closeness isn't simply a bond of friends or pack. They've been through things too awful to imagine together.

It's them against the world. Even against John Stilinski, if needs be.

But his father nods, once, firmly, and that's that.

[thekitchensnk]

and the spider lilies bloomed in the fall (chapter 3)

Rating: T Warnings: Violent imagery, trauma, allusions to potential sexual violence, sex work Pairing: Gin/Ran Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 “They say that lovers doomed never to see each other again still see the higanbana growing along their path, even to this day.”

A girl collapses on a dusty road one day. A boy takes her home.

The girl lives.

—

(The boy doesn’t.)

It was easy to forget how lucky they were.

He was making the long, tiresome journey from their house into town, though it barely deserved the name. The journey was twelve miles each way, and not a single mile of it made for a pleasant walk. The road was scarcely more than a beaten mud track, carved out through time immemorial by the souls of the down-trodden and the poor.

He was seldom alone on the road. It faded into the horizon, stretching on for miles and miles, and every time he took to it, he wondered what lay at the end of it, though the notion that there could ever be an end to its scarred and blasted drudgery seemed impossible to him.

One day, he thought, squinting into the distance, one day I might just walk to the very end of it and find out what’s out there.

But he knew even then that it was nothing more than a pipe dream, and so he plodded on.

His fellow travellers bore the tight, thin look and vacant expressions of those who had gone too long without water, and their limbs were emaciated. Frequently, they wore no shoes, and they were past the point of caring for their clothes, which more properly resembled rags. On more than one occasion, he had seen people, children especially, wandering the road without them, too impoverished to afford them, and mouths too dry to care.

He had long since learnt not to mind those with the vacant stares; they were too far gone to be of trouble, packaged away somewhere strange and distant in their own minds. It was the twitchy ones which gave him pause, and his hand never strayed too far from his knife when he came across them.

He knew too well the trouble they could bring. They thought that because he was small and skinny, he and his coin would make for easy pickings. They were wrong.

The last time anyone had tried anything, he had left them bleeding out in the dust of the road. Their skin had been starting to mottle, and a death rattle had been sounding in their chest. He had kicked in their skull until it had cracked in on itself like an egg. He had had to use some of his precious drinking water to wash away the scarlet blood and white bone fragments which littered his shins.

If it was going to be him or someone else dead, it was not going to be him. He would make certain of that.

He had returned home afterwards to Rangiku, going via the stream to finish cleaning up. She had been hunched over, writing things in the dirt. Something about that juxtaposition, about the man’s blood splattered across the soil and the clumsy strokes of Rangiku’s handwriting marking carved into the ground, that they somehow occupied the same space and existed in the same world, had made him dizzy.

He had put his grinning mouth against her delicate ear, and she had shrieked in panic, before realising that it was only him.

How odd that was, to have his presence soothe someone’s fear. That was not how it usually played out.

She had read out the words for him, because he could not do it for himself. She had written out his name, a series of mysterious, undecipherable lines which somehow meant him. He had never seen his name before, and he had stared at it in open fascination.

“And what does this mean?” he had demanded, pointing to another set of squiggles.

She had blushed an ungainly red and refused to tell him, had shaken her head and said, “No! You’re embarrassing me!"

It made him smile- a warm, genuine smile- even to remember it.

He had cajoled, and sweet-talked, and bribed until she had told him.

“It says ‘friend’. It says ‘friend’ three times,” she had huffed, her cheeks blowing out.

He had never had a friend before.

(He thought about her frequently on these walks.)

What had he felt of life before he met her? He genuinely could not say. He had not known her long, and yet, he knew with certainty, his life would have been a meagre, thin thing without her.

(It had been before; a mediocre, endless monotony of rising and sleeping, eating and cleaning, punctuated only with scarlet bursts of violence and the joy of inflicting pain on someone else.)

In truth, he still could not explain what it was that had prompted him to save her, but he found himself very glad that he had done so.

“Maybe I like you. Maybe I think you’re interesting. Maybe I even feel sorry for you,” he had said when she had asked him, but that had rang hollow even at the time. He had said it because those seemed like things that should motivate someone to rescue someone else, not because he actually felt them.

Pity had been a part of it, and curiosity too, but if he was honest with himself, his motivations came from a darker place, a deep, subterranean chamber of his heart.

Gin knew that it was not normal to feel so at ease with blood on your hands. He knew that the guilt of the act of murder was supposed to itch like an old wound, that taking human life was supposed feel harder than snuffing out a lantern.

But it wasn’t. It never had been. Not for him.

He didn’t know whether he had simply grown insensitive to cruelty, living for so long in this place ripe and rotten with violence. Sometimes, he wondered whether he had simply been born with his soul malformed. But part of him thrilled in it regardless, in seeing the hurt flash across someone’s face, in seeing the blood spill from their chest. It filled him with a fluttering, anxious kind of joy.

But when he had seen those men rip and rend her soul and take something from her, he had felt-

Hope.

He had hoped (hoped against hope) that with only half a soul between them, the girl- this powerful girl- would be the same thing as him.

(The same unnatural thing.)

He had hoped-

(He had hoped that it meant that he did not have to be alone anymore.)

But he had been wrong. She was nothing like him. She was a different beast altogether.

(And that... Wasn’t a bad thing.)

She was fierce and soft by turns, obviously still wracked with anxiety that he would throw her out, but ferocious nevertheless.

She looked at him with fearful eyes when she had eaten too much rice, certain that it would be the thing that caused him to revoke her invitation to stay. She bit her lip when he asked her a question and he knew that she always took so long to answer because she was seeking the answer she thought he wanted to hear.

He hated that.

But then he would splash at her from the river, and after a moment’s shock, she would laugh, and the sound would rush through him like electricity. And then she would leap in after him, her legs bare and her mouth smiling, and she would splash back, ferociously.

She was hesitant, but she could be bold too, and he craved that, craved that secret part of her.

It was, he thought to himself, interesting to no longer be alone- to have another pair of eyes with which to see and to see new things. Her presence in his life doubled his set of experiences in a way in which he could never have anticipated; to feel the joy she felt when he showed her his persimmon trees, to feel the gentleness of her smile set his own face to smiling as they lay watching the sun begin to set. He would experience the feeling first hand, and then feel it reflected again in her reaction, and again in her reaction to his reaction, like a strange and eerie cascade. Her smile would provoke his smile, her interest his interest, and so he found himself storing anecdotes and small, intriguing objects, things to share with her so that he could greedily watch her reaction, and lose himself in the spiral of her feelings.

To see her face, as she breathed in the steam curling into the air from freshly boiled rice, and to see the way her eyes lit up, past the ghosts of hunger; to watch the anger boil in her as he lazily beat her five times in a row at go in a situation engineered more to watch her than out of enjoyment of the game; to catch her looking warmly at him, when she thought he could not see her, and to  try to intuit what it was about him that she was thinking- he wanted it all, to prise open her secret inner world, to take it for himself.

She was like a prism.

Everything shone through her in new and revealing ways, and he wanted to see it all.

He-

(He did not dislike it.)

The town was starting to inch into view like a dark stain on the horizon. He didn't know its name, or whether it even had one for that matter. But that was not saying much; he did not even know the name of district of Rukongai in which he lived.

Children with the hungry eyes and the distended bellies of revenants watched him as he walked through the gates. He was careful to watch his step as he walked- a dull rainbow film of filth and the leavings of slop buckets filled the gutter and men and women both shambled blindly through the slum, drunk on the nastiest, cheapest fermented rice-spirit that could be purchased in Rukongai.

The air was thick and foul with a dozen sour, rancid human smells, and above him towered the ramshackle hovels which the people of the town called home, often housing ten or twelve to a room. The afterlife seethed and burst with human life.

His smile was easy as he passed the stall and set of threadbare stools which passed for a bar in this town, outside of which loitered the same old familiar thugs and louts, who played at dice rather than go and were prone to seemingly random fits of brutality. He knew one of the thugs at the bar by reputation, though not personally. He had soft, brown Labrador eyes, but was known for being soft in the head because he would not stop talking about his girl. He ignored the man and kept walking.

Clustered by the bar wearing yukata which must once have been garish and gaudy, but which had traded hands too many times since then and seen too many years of use to have remained so, were a handful of whores of varying ages. Their cheeks and lips were bright shades of red and pink; there was no money here for paints and unguents, and Gin knew that they had a particular trick of pinching and slapping each other until their faces rouged to achieve that glow. It was clever, he decided.

He reserved a particularly wide grin for a scarred, arthritic mantis of a man, who had often given him jobs in the past. He received a curt nod in return. This was Tadayoshi, the enforcer of the most brutal gang in town, and killings and intimidation were his purview. Gin had gotten in with him from an early age- he had a healthy respect for power, but an even greater appreciation for those who could use their heads, and the man had a sinister, twisted mind which Gin respected. The rice in his bowl had to come from somewhere.

He had no need of work for the moment though- he had money enough for the next two week's food, and for a little more besides. He was here not for work, but to shop, and so he moved onwards.

"Little boy, little boy," one of the whores cooed out to him. She wore her greasy, pitch black hair half up, and the rest fell about her shoulders, exaggerating her gaunt, once round features. "Come up closer and keep your sisters warm, little boy. The days are getting cold, and the nights colder still. I'm freezing to my bones. Let's keep each other warm." He was mildly impressed that she had managed to finish her sales pitch without laughing, such was its insincerity.

"Never knew I had so many sisters," he told her with an easy laugh. "Seems like our folks tumblin' into bed too many times got us into this mess in the first place. I'd not want to repeat their mistakes. Aah, look at ya'-“ his eyes flashed with playful cruelty. “I wonder how many nieces and nephews I have. Must be thousands, to judge from that belly,'." He kept on walking with a low whistle, and the whore swore vociferously after him. Another whore, with carved-out cheekbones and a vulpine face, berated her and watched him intently until he disappeared around the corner. More power to her if she wanted to stare, he figured.

The town's largest shop, like everything else there, did a poor trade. In wooden crates, a small variety of vegetables languished unpurchased. In this place where so many skirted the survival line, desperation gave few people the inclination to buy anything other than the essentials (alcohol, as life's natural tranquiliser for the ills of the world, counted as an essential here). Bulbs of garlic, packed amongst rough straw, were small and shrivelled, the scallions were aged and wilted and Gin was sure that the oil on the shelves must have turned rancid. He thought of the carrots and radishes which grew fresh in their garden, and he sighed.

The shop keeper was a bald man with a nose like a squashed tomato, whose eyes never left him as he walked around the shop.

"Mou, Mr Shop Keep, ya' makin' me nervous. If I knew ya'd be watchin' me so close-like, I'd have washed my face this mornin' and made more effort with my hair."

The shop keeper just grunted and muttered to himself and wiped his hands on his grease-spotted apron, but kept up his suspicious vigil nevertheless.

"I'd like the scallions, four eggs and the rice vinegar," Gin asked politely.

The man harrumphed, boxed up the eggs, scallions and vinegar and slammed them on the counter.

"Pay up."

"The sterlin' service is what keeps me comin' back," Gin informed the man cheerily, counting out his coins. It certainly wasn't the quality of the goods, he thought. His voice was light and conversational as he asked, "How's ya girl?"

The shop keeper's eyes narrowed. "Fine," he gritted out suspiciously.

"Why so prickly, Mr Shop Keep? I was concerned, see."

The man stiffened, and Gin hummed happily.

"Heard from Hatsumomo that she's been seen about with Nakamura-san, and you know that he’s in with a bad crowd. Strange though,” Gin tilted his head and mirth danced in his eyes, “that she'd be seein' him so late at night." Nakamura was the attractive thug with the warm brown eyes. The shop keeper blanched. Even his smashed-tomato nose went pale.

There was a pause. "Mind you," Gin said with a put-on air of thoughtfulness, "the whores do all say that Nakamura-san is a handsome man." He let that hang in the air, and gave the man a jaunty wave as he left.

There was a spring in his step as he walked, and he considered the contents of his bag, and the prospect of a glorious egg fried rice dinner with scallions. He and Rangiku had done well for themselves today, he reckoned, and the shop keeper's anguished reaction had almost made the wretched trip worthwhile.

He started to whistle a low, tuneless song under his breath (neither he nor Rangiku could carry a tune in a bucket, he had learnt, having coaxed her into singing along with him as he swept the shack clean. What they lacked in musical talent, they made up for in raw enthusiasm, which was potentially the worst combination of all).

He was looking forward to getting home and warming his fingers by the fire. Or by putting them on Rangiku's neck- he had not yet decided, though the thought of the indignant yelp his new houseguest would make was very quickly becoming a decisive factor. By his side, he started to swing the bag to and fro, distracted by the thought.

It was because of this distraction that he did not react immediately. One moment he had been standing, bag swaying by his side, and the next he had crashed to the ground, clutching the bag to his chest, heart pounding. Someone issued a ferocious kick right to his ribs, and pain blossomed across his side like red watercolour paint bleeding through water. His vision swam from where his head had smacked against the ground, and he let out a strangled hiss.

It was the kick which snapped him out of his panicked daze and back to his senses. There were three assailants, he estimated, his brain kicking into gear- maybe four. They must have seen him swinging his bag by his side like an idiot and thought him easy pickings. His eyes narrowed. Well, he thought furiously, they're goin’ to suffer for their mistake.

They were after the food, he guessed, and he clutched the bag to his chest. In order to get at his knife, he would have to relinquish his grip on the bag. He knew that the moment he did so, they would wrench it out of his grasp and run off- it was exactly what he would have done in the same situation. He gritted his teeth in frustration. The food was his and Rangiku's, and the only reason why he had wasted a day to make the fucking tedious journey in the first place. They wouldn't be getting any, he thought venomously.

That left only one choice.

It annoyed him to have to resort to it- he was right in the centre of town, and it would attract far too much attention- but it was that or lose the food, and he was not going to let that happen.

He could feel their fists rain down on him as they battered at his skinny body, and each blow set his nerves alight. He breathed through the pain, letting it wash over his body like the waters of the stream by his house, and he let himself sink down through it into the tenebrous reaches of his mind. The pain became distant as he sank, fading out of mind and the mind's eye like muffled music coming from another room, or lights on the shore slowly fading into pinpricks in the distance on a dark night at sea, until it felt almost like it was happening to someone else, someone floating high and distant above him. He found himself alone in the darkness.

Though he had come here frequently, he still did not know his way perfectly. The architecture of his mind was labyrinthine and infinite, an endless series of twists and turns, dark dead ends and pathways which stretched on forever. But he knew by instinct what he needed, and everything else was as immaterial as a shadow. He gave no resistance and let himself fall bodily through the blackened expanse.

Something gold and brilliant flitted across his vision, here one moment and gone the next, and a familiar peal of laughter sounded clear and musically, like a chime, ringing and echoing throughout the cavernous space. It put him on edge instantly, the thought of this intruder in his own mind.

And then he saw her, saw her as he had first seen her, collapsed on the ground, and a man's hand buried to the elbow in her chest, ripping something pure and beautiful from her. Rangiku's yukata was bunched up around her thighs, and her face was wan and marred with bruises like storm clouds. She was suspended in the void, flush against the velvet darkness, lying just as she had the very first time he had lain eyes on her.

He had almost forgotten the state she had been in when he had found her.

And now, with his own body suffering the same rough violence she had suffered, an odd kind of pity twisted in his chest. He found himself reaching out his hand to her desperately, as if to console her, or maybe to console himself.

As her assailant rose, he cupped her face almost tenderly, caressing her cheek. And then he slapped her, and the sound rang out across the silence.

The shadows around Gin seethed and writhed with a boiling anger, bubbling and vibrating with the purest rage he had ever felt. It boiled and spat and convulsed violently, and Gin’s eyes screamed murder.

He felt something in the darkness loosen and give way, and he swiped at it, too angry to pay attention.

That something whispered in his ear, a susurrus of a voice, something like the dry swish of paper and the hiss of a snake.

“My name-“

He bared his teeth. "Not now."

It was not what he needed right now.

He reached with clumsy desperation for the source of his power, grasping frantically at it, and when he reached it, he swung it outwards with all his might.

Eyes watched, and receded into the darkness.

---

When he opened his eyes, the earth was scorched for half a mile. Four charred corpses littered the ground, and a dozen houses had collapsed. His legs trembled as he rose, but he knew he could not linger at the scene. Weak and retching from the effort, he ran. He ran down that blasted and lonely road until the town was nothing more than a dark memory behind him.

[onethrills]

( KIM TAEHYUNG. DEMIBOY. ) Rumor has it that ( SEJIN HAN ) has been spotted skulking around New York City streets recently. ( HE/THEY ) is/are a ( 23 ) year old ( VAMPIRE. ) They have a good reputation for being ( EMPATHETIC & CREATIVE, ) but have also been known to be rather ( ANXIOUS & SELF-DEPRECATING. ) They’re known for being the ( HORROR ENTHUSIAST. ) 

Childhood/Adolescence

Sejin was born in a small town in California to two people who could not have been less alike. His mother, a stage actress and most definitely the more theatrical of the two, was oft times gone, leaving him to be taken care of by his accountant father and spend the majority of his earlier years with the man.

When Sejin turned five, his mother woke him in the night, the urgency in her expression and her voice alarming him in his half-awake state. He remembers crying as he clung to her, not knowing what was going on, and her hushing him until he quietened down. She carried him through the dark hallways of the only home he had ever down, a little backpack slung over his shoulders, holding some clothes and his favorite plushie. She didn’t explain anything to him then, and as he got older and that whole night became hazier, he only ended up with more questions.

‘Transient’ is the only way to describe the lifestyle they lived from there on out. Every time they would settle down in a town for a month or more, and Sejin would get used to the school, get used to his new friends, they ended up moving again. It wasn’t until his young teens and he started working within the theater communities his mother would integrate herself into that he found out why that was, after witnessing one of her meltdowns when she wasn’t appointed the lead role in their production.

This wasn’t the first time Sejin had begun to realize his mother was a less-than-responsible person, but it was the first time he bore witness to just how far that seemed to go.

As he grew older, he started taking on more and more responsibilities, the jobs that he’d do around the theaters evolving into something a bit more sustainable. His interest in makeup started at a young age and only grew as the years went by, until he was appointed as an assistant to near every makeup artist from every theater he and his mother would drift through. He ended up having an online presence, often uploading YouTube tutorials of the different looks he would do, and from there his skill was only honed, focused. 

Horror has always been a sort of escape for him. His macabre fascination with the genre began at the mere age of eight, when he saw his first made-for-TV scary film, and he jumped into it head first from there. It didn’t take very long for him to go from production makeup and ‘looks of the day’ to gruesome, gory monster faces and prosthetic’s. His creativity flourished, and his passion became clear --- if only his mother were stable enough to give him a foothold towards what it was he actually wanted to do.

Fast forward to age eighteen. It’s been years of him looking back on his earliest memories, on the loving warmth of his father and the absence of his mother, and years of him asking her what happened that fateful night when she spirited him away. Years of her avoiding the question, avoiding giving him details, avoiding anything and everything aside from telling him “your father left us.” It never made sense to him how things could go cold so easily, how the man who had always given him so much love, so much affection, suddenly no longer wanted him anymore. Answers are what he needed, what he sought, and once he was old enough, his mother could no longer stop him from seeking them.

Sejin was just past his eighteenth birthday when he finally found a number to call, an address in a different country, and various news clippings and missing person reports that made him feel so numb inside he wasn’t sure if he would ever feel again. As it turned out, it wasn’t only his mother’s aversion towards taking a background role that caused them to move around so much as he was growing up, and after the third or fourth time he saw his own five-year-old face looking back at him from a computer screen in a library he’d never set foot in before, he felt so sick he had to run. 

Confrontation had never been his strong suit, and he had the tendency to avoid it like the plague whenever the necessity came up. That day was no different than any other. He drained the money from his bank account, packed up his various makeup supplies, his clothes, and the other few meager belongings he had, and he fled. 

It turned out that night was the worst night of his father’s life, and it turned out that it was the worst night of Sejin’s, too. His mother had taken him. Taken him so that in the morning when the light shined in on his bed, and his father came to wake him up for school, there was no trace of ether of them left to be found. To this day he doesn’t know her motivations, the ‘why’ of it all, but nor does he want to know about them either. There’s nothing that she can say to him that will justify what she did to him, not just in kidnapping him, but also in the incredibly damaging way she had raised him. 

When he ran from her, he never looked back. Only forward. Only ever forward.

Early Adulthood

Getting in touch with his father was as easy as breathing. The moment he picked up the phone and Sejin heard that familiar voice, his throat closed up and tears flooded his eyes. International charges be damned, they both spent minutes of that call in silence, just crying together when they couldn’t articulate the right words, with his father repeating to him over and over that he never stopped looking for him. Sejin believed him.

A couple days later, and Sejin found himself on a plane to London, where his father had moved to be with his now-wife some years ago. He was welcomed into the family with open arms, finding out all in one day that he had a loving step-mother and two smaller siblings who would look up at him with wide eyes that matched his own more closely than he ever thought possible. 

It was in this environment that Sejin finally felt himself begin to grow into who he was supposed to be all along. Being given a healthy and stable place for him to explore who he was happened to be what he needed to discover that person, and everything from questioning his gender identity to his sexuality was accepted wholly and completely by the people who actually loved him.

Of course, even this couldn’t fix everything that had happened to him, and he bore so many barely-healed scars that it took a long time for him to be capable of seeing past them enough to accept the reality of him. It also took outside support, predominantly from one person in particular who turned out to be his soul mate. 

Bell was everything that Sejin ever wanted, and everything that he felt he couldn’t have. They were fast friends from the second that they met, and though his crush didn’t take long to develop, it never fully went away either. They became inseparable, supporting each other in every way they knew how, through thick and thin, and Sejin loved, loved him. Loved him a lot. He’d never had a friend like him, and he didn’t think he’d ever find one quite like him again. 

With his YouTube channel and Instagram taking off, Sejin finally found himself a stable job doing makeup in a theater nearby his father’s place. It was the first time he’d felt a real sense of community, of acceptance for who he was, and he melted into it like it’s what he needed all along. Happiness didn’t seem so far away during those early weeks, those months, and that went especially so for when he and the lead actor in the play started seeing each other after hours, once everyone else had gone home.

The affair was passionate, romantic, and Sejin’s heart was just naive enough to take it at face value. They couldn’t be open about their love because he (the other person) was closeted, and accepting that wasn’t a hard choice to make. What he didn’t expect nor accept was the one night that they got caught in one of the dressing rooms, his own clothes half-way off and his lips swollen from kisses, by one of his partner’s friends with their phone out and their camera app open. 

As it turned out, that particular friend of his had already seen them together once, and in order to preserve the “reputation” of the lead actor, they both had constructed this plan to humiliate and exploit/blackmail Sejin into not spilling the nature of their relationship to anybody else. It felt dirty, made him feel dirty, small, destroyed. They looked at him like he didn’t mean anything, and they spoke to him like he didn’t mean anything, too. While that wasn’t the first time he started to believe that about himself, it did begin to hammer the point home quite thoroughly. Sejin quit and never went back.

From there on, he had a long string of failed relationships, of hook-ups, of men telling him that he was only worth a night in the sheets, and of him believing them. He became closer to Bell, the only person in the world who could possibly understand what he was going through, and he clung to the happiness that he found with his family as being the only thing that he really needed.

Around age twenty-one, his Instagram had taken off enough that when he put his resume out there to various film and television production companies, he actually began to get jobs. He worked mostly as an assistant at first in cheesy B-movie horror films, and sometimes on television series as well. It felt fulfilling, like he was finally on the path to where he wanted to be.

Then Bell disappeared.

It was something that happened all-at-once, so suddenly he was in shock, and every attempt to look for him came up fruitless.

Currently

The last place that Sejin had known Bell to be was New York City, so after some time passed, he packed up his bags and set out to look for him. His efforts seemed to be in vain, however, and even after almost a year of searching, he kept coming up with nothing.

That was around the time that he met Valentine.

There was something acutely alluring about him to Sejin, something that drew him in more than anyone else had in this entire city, and a sort of infatuation began to develop on his end. From the way he dressed to the otherworldly grace with which he carried himself, everything about Valentine made Sejin want to be close to him, to get closer to him. He became sort of attached when, contrary to what he had been led to believe he was good for, Valentine made it quite clear that there was no desire in him to use Sejin for sex. He was just unlike every other man that he’d ever met, and even his speech patterns were enough to make him want to listen to him all day and all night. 

It was funny, then, when Sejin found out what he was, and it wasn’t even the least bit surprising for him to fit those pieces into place.

Vampires existing should’ve caught him off-guard, should’ve made him absolutely lose it with the improbability of it all, but instead it just drew him in more. There was no fear in the way that he looked at him, no guarded expression, nothing that would indicate he was in any way hesitant to remain with him, around him. 

Asking to be turned wasn’t a difficult decision for him to make, even knowing that he would give up the sun. Even knowing that there might be nothing left for him in the human world after that. It just felt... right. Like the right path for him to take. He was born to be a vampire, as he put it, and as it turned out, Valentine agreed with him.

Quick Facts

Sejin was turned by Valentine around the first of August, 2019.

Forever 23-years-old.

Demiboy (he/they, please).

Gay.

Makeup artist who thrives predominantly on Instagram and YouTube.

Speaks in a very flat voice 9/10 times, far too dramatic, emotionally vulnerable despite how much distance he attempts to keep between him and everyone else.

Pretty much exclusively dresses in black.

Bottom lip piercing and three ear piercings.

Lives in the manor with his sire and all of the other little vampies who drift in and out.

Knows very little to nothing about the war or about lycans in general.

He is babie.

Hmu here or on discord if you wanna plot!

[joeys-piano]

if you were to write and publish a book, what would it be about?

TL;DR - I would write a mafia/organized crime story about a man traveling to St. Petersburg to learn/uncover the truth behind an interesting Bratva that doesn’t kill.

Probably, the extent of publishing I’ll do is posting the story online for others to read. I’m not in the market for this story to be on a shelf or in a physical, bounded form. Nor, would I even qualify the story as a book. However, for the sake of this question, I do have a story in mind that has the potential to fit those qualifications.

If I were to write and publish a book, the story would revolve around mafias or in general, organized crime groups. Having grown up watching a lot of police procedural, detective noir, secret agents and spies, and international hitmen movies, this appeals to a niche-area of mine. I feel that for a first novel, it’s probably a good idea to write about something that interests you and it’s something that you’re comfortable working with.

For me, personally, I love watching international films where the characters are going to other countries and working on covert missions there. As one of the main “pillars” of the story, so to speak, incorporating traveling and cultural diversity is huge for me. I would love to explore language barriers and how characters can overcome, negotiate, or use those barriers to their advantage when they communicate with foreign partners/parties. In addition to that, I would love to explore the differences between how different organized crime groups operate, what is the “pecking order”, what skills – if any – do these groups specialize in, some of the coded terminology they use, and how the surrounding culture influences how the group behaves.

Typically when I watch the movies that I watch, there’s almost none or very little distinction between the crime groups. They all feel like they were cut from the mold with the same shape, and the only discernible differences are what the group looks like and where they’re from. Honestly, I feel that there could be more done than just that. I’d love to see how the political environment, the attitude towards authority and law, how ethics and morals are at play if they are at play, and how cultural and regional differences/variances contribute to the “make-up” of these organized crime groups. It would feel closer to real life, I think. It gives these groups a grounded foundation that they can build upon, and it’s easier to juggle with several groups where they’re all uniquely different from each other. That’s probably one of the most important things to consider, ‘cause it’s not fun reading about carbon clones of the same thing – over and over again.

Another reason why I would write a mafia/organized crime story is that I like the thrill, the action, the suspense, and sometimes the comedy that comes along with the entire package. Show me with a raise of hands of how many of us remember the daring feats, the sheer epicness, and the mesmerizing action sequences that come from stories like this. It plays with the adrenaline part of the body and it’s a very tactile experience. As someone who focuses a lot on introspective works but has a flair for dramatic action sequences, this would be a lot of fun for me and it would expand my knowledge/repertoire for writing these kinds of situations.

But while this is all fun and games in the end, it’s very fast-paced. Balancing these quick successions with slower, agonizingly cruel sequences of rich sensory detail in the form of torture or interrogation scenes would appeal a lot to my introspective-side of writing. I’m already comfortable with introspective writing but here, I’ll be able to apply it to a wider range of situations and explore the five-senses in ways that I’ve never been able to in other types of stories.

And lastly, I would write a mafia/organized crime story just because I want to do things differently. It’s as simple as that. Now, my only experience when it comes to reading topics or themes like this come from fanfic. I don’t know how published books go about this but I often notice that at least in fanfic, there’s a lot of attention focused on relationship-dynamics and violence. Arguably, those two are very intimately tied with stories like this. There’s nothing wrong with stories like this that focus on that, but it often feels like the first thing that people come up with. It’s like outside of violence that will scar you for life – figuratively and literally – and relationships (mostly romantic, from what I’ve read), there’s nothing else you can do in stories like this. This is where I want to change things.

I want to explore the story of people finding their purpose in life through the line of work that they do. I want to explore how they’re able to balance between the civilian and the crime life, how they’re able to overcome internal conflicts and personal issues that arise when those two worlds converge, and I want to explore how different people have found themselves working in a mafia/organized crime group and what events in their life led them to choose this life. I can see why not a lot of people explore those areas because they can be slow, they can even be boring, and they might feel out of place for a genre that seems gung-ho on thriller action and living out an epic fantasy at times. For me, I don’t want to approach the mafia or any organized crime group with an idealistic background on what they should be. Maybe it’s just me, but I want to write this as grounded to reality as I can.

There are real, legitimate reasons that people join these groups and why they reach out to seek aid from them. I want to explore that gray area.

Now, after all of that setup and building to the moment, you’re probably wondering what the plot is going to be about. I got you, fam. The story revolves around a Japanese man named Mr. Fukumori. Despite being a low-ranked mafioso, he receives word from his Bosses that he’ll be leaving the country in a few days. Instead of this being a reconnaissance mission or anything fancier than that, Mr. Fukumori learns that his mission is strictly negotiation-based.

He’s tasked to be a spokesman for the Syndicate, and his assignment is to forge a deal or an alliance with a very strange Bratva (Russian mafia group) in St. Petersburg. On paper, the alliance is to be mutually beneficial. However, what the Syndicate really wants is structural information. For the past three years now, this strange Bratva in St. Petersburg has grown in power and prestige – seemingly, overnight as soon as a new Pakhan stepped forward. From the edge of ruins, somehow the group pulled itself together and became one of the most dominant-figures in Russia’s league of organized crime.

Mr. Fukumori’s true mission, if he chooses to accept, is to uncover exactly how the new Pakhan had done it. And if he receives further orders from his Bosses after he attains the information, Mr. Fukumori is aware that there’s a high possibility that he may have to kill the Pakhan. Naturally, as an older individual and bordering on the end of leading an “exciting life” as a hitman, Mr. Fukumori is curious as to why his Bosses didn’t assign this mission to anyone else. Although he asks the question, Mr. Fukumori already has an idea of what the answer is. Despite currently being a low-ranked mafioso, Mr. Fukumori had quite a track record when he was younger. With 145 confirmed kills, 375 reconnaissances assignments, and numerous soft-skills he had perfected during his years traveling in and out of Japan for these sorts of things under his belt, Mr. Fukumori is the most qualified to take on this mission. More so, he’s the most qualified low-ranking mafioso to take on this mission.

Mr. Fukumori is aware that because of his rank in the Syndicate, he can be disposed of or viewed as an expendable pawn at any time. Though it’s never spoken out loud, it’s heavily implied that this is a suicide mission. The odds of Mr. Fukumori coming back alive from enemy territory is dependent on his own skills and how he’s able to navigate and negotiate through everything that he needs to do. With all of this stacked before him, Mr. Fukumori accepts the mission. In a way, he feels that the other reason why his Bosses reached out to him on this is because this will be the first, foreign assignment he’s received in years and will likely be his last. Ever since he failed his last foreign mission, over 12 years ago, Mr. Fukumori fell from his original rank in the Syndicate and has been confined to domestic affairs since then.

It almost feels like this is the Syndicate’s way of forgiving him for the failure he had done in the past, by giving him a suicidal mission that he’s comfortable with. There’s almost a childish glint of youth in Mr. Fukumori’s eyes, there’s a warmth that’s spreading from his chest because he’s finally coming back to the kind of mission that he loves. Safe to say, Mr. Fukumori loves to travel and he feels like a bird that’s finally free from its cage. He knows that if he dies on the mission, at least he’ll die doing what he loves. However, Mr. Fukumori has hopes that he’ll have more foreign missions if he comes back alive. With that as his motivation, Mr. Fukumori begins formulating his strategy plan before he boards a plane and lands in St. Petersburg.

[beccasbigworld]

The Mental Health Crisis in Film

Out of all of the five movies assigned to watch my two favorites were American Psycho and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I have to give credit though to the other three movies because they were brilliant. Especially Parasite, the cinematography and the way the movie flowed were exceptional. The endings of American Psycho and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stood out to me the most because of how raw and shocking of a reaction they left on me after watching. You could say that both of these movies made me a little psycho and cuckoo… I’m gonna pretend someone laughed at my embarrassing pun. Now let's get to the topic of discussion here with discussing the endings of American Psycho and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The ending of American Psycho played tricks on my mind because it made me believe that what Patrick Bateman did was just a false reality and it never happened. Rewind towards the ending when Bateman goes on a psychotic killing spree. After things keep getting worse such as killing the old lady who interrupted him trying to shove the cat into the ATM, killing NYPD officers, and blowing up two cop cars, the spree kept going. Finally, Bateman is in his Pierce & Pierce and makes a call to his lawyer, he tells him everything, as he is hysterically sobbing through the phone what had just happened. He confesses to killing more than 40 people. The next day Bateman sits and has drinks with his business colleagues and he sees his lawyer. He walks up to him and asks him if he got his voicemail. His lawyer thought the voicemail was hysterical and Bateman had a hard time understanding why his lawyer was laughing at his confession. Bateman says again that he killed Paul Allen and before he can get another word out his lawyer, Harold says Uhm no... I was just with Paul in London a few days ago and we had dinner. Bateman’s face got stiff, his face was shiny from all the sweat and I think this is the moment in the film that was the clear image of Bateman's hallucinations, false reality, and declining mental health. I believe the purpose of this ambiguity was to portray the pain that Bateman suffers every day because of his mental illness. According to the website CinemaBlend, “The more significant takeaway is meant to be present in the satire that comes in Bateman admitting his horrific crimes and nobody taking him seriously. He not only lives in an entirely shallow existence where "inside doesn't matter," but he has been driven to the point where he has become a mystery even unto himself, and only really knows that he wants to inflict his inner pain on others. Tragic as it is to say, the number of people he may or may not have murdered is inconsequential -- like the film's existence as Bateman's confession” (Eisenberg). His lawyer doesn’t even take his confession seriously so Bateman is left alone in his world to question what reality really is. Did he kill any of those people or was that just him imagining how he wants to inflict his pain onto others? The character's motives only lead to a temporary sense of catharsis like for example one of the most brutal scenes in the film was when Bateman kills Paul in his apartment. He played music that spoke to him lyrically and he got a clean ax, covered his floor, couches, and himself in plastic, and took his jealousy and frustration out on Paul by killing him viciously with a perfectly sharpened clean ax.

After Bateman would kill any of his victims he would relax for a little but yet not too long after he would be itching for another. The ending of American Psycho tied the movie up perfectly in my opinion. It didn’t necessarily satisfy my expectations. It left me in a curious state of mind because I thought wow did he even kill these people or was this all a part of his imagination? However, I think the way it was written was purposely brilliant because it ties in perfectly with the topic of mental health we are examining because was this a figure of Bateman's deranged mind, or did this actually occur. Overall, in my personal opinion, it was a fantastic movie.

The second movie that I will be diving into detail in is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. My Dad would watch this film when I was little. I would watch films like Indiana Jones and other older films with him however, I never watched this one so watching this film kinda reminded me of that experience I had with my Dad growing up. I enjoyed watching this film a lot, something about the aesthetic of an older film it just makes you feel so alive. The ending of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest left a permanent scar on me because of how raw and emotional the scene was. Mac's character when first introduced was a guy who was full of life and wanted to bring the same light to the men of the mental hospital. Towards the end of the film, Mac holds a party for the men and brings two girls along. Billy and the one woman end up hooking up in one of the rooms and come the next morning Nurse Ratched finds him. After the discovery of Billy, she threatens to tell his mom and this drives Billy off the edge. He takes a piece of glass and while he is sent to wait for nurse Ratched in the other room he kills himself. The discovery of Billy’s death infuriates Mac because he saw so much potential in him and because of Nurse Ratched's threats, Mac strangles her to the point where she almost dies. As an inhumane punishment Mac has a lobotomy that permanently turns him into a zombie. In the end scene, Chief which, over time becomes Mac's best friend in the mental hospital notices that Mac has become a zombie and makes the quick decision to kill him by suffocating him with a pillow. Chief does this because he knew that Mac would rather be dead than be a zombie in Nurse Ratched’s mental institution.

Similar to the ambiguous ending in the film American Psycho the ending of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had an ambiguous ending. According to the website Shmoop,” McMurphy has become a hero to the other patients in the ward because of his ability to stand up to Nurse Ratched. The others would be devastated to see Mac wandering around with dead eyes and a scarred forehead. So Chief decides to take matters into his own hands and to give Mac back his freedom, saying "I wouldn't leave you here this way" and smothering him. Then Chief gives freedom to himself by breaking out of the hospital and running off into the forest” (Shmoop Editorial Team). Chief and Mac discussed earlier in the movie that they want to run away to Canada and live a peaceful life so Chief decides to kill him to give him his power and keep Mac’s legacy living even when he is physically gone. This is why Chief purposely takes the sink out of the floor and throws it through the window so he can escape and run free to Canada to pay tribute to Mac. As for Mac's character, strangling Nurse Ratched I believe did provide him with a sense of catharsis because he was able to get revenge on her for unintentionally killing his friend Billy. However, the relief didn’t last long because Mac gets sent to be punished by the mental institution. Punished as if sent to be lobotomized. As for Chief's character, Mac helps him by leading him to a sense of catharsis throughout the entire movie. Before Mac officially came to the mental hospital Chief was considered hard of hearing and didn’t pay any mind to anyone. However, according to the website Looper, “ McMurphy impacts Chief the most. By watching Mac refuse to take anything lying down, Chief learns how to be as "big" in his actions as he is in stature — and he feels like he owes that to McMurphy. Without the con man giving him the confidence to talk and break free from the ward's toxic environment, Chief would still be silently sweeping the hospital floors at the movie's close. Chief knows that someone like McMurphy — who is so full of life — would never want to live after being lobotomized. Being a prisoner on Ratched's ward was hard enough for Mac without being a prisoner in his own body” (Harbet). Killing Mac gave Chief the final sense of relief one needed because he knew that Mac would never want to be a prisoner in his own body and with the courage he gave Chief, he finally breaks free, keeping Mac’s legacy alive and living his life.

The ending One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was so unexpected for me that my hand was over my mouth and my eyes were peeled to the screen. At first, I didn’t fully grasp why Chief was suffocating Mac however, once he ripped the sink out of the floor It all connected. I personally don’t think the ending could have been written any other way. It was a perfect way to tie the film all together while also highlighting the harsh theme of mental illness in that time and not fully understanding the negative consequences of treatment and what it can do to a person like Mac. It saddens me that this happened to Mac because he was a regular guy at the beginning of the film and a soul in a cold body at the end however, the ending gives the audience a sense of catharsis because we all know why Chief did what he did. Mac helped Chief get his life back and Chief helped Mac preserve his life for the man he really was. Overall I believe that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was one of the best films I have ever watched and I enjoyed watching it for this class for the first time.

[raendown]

@fineillsignup You requested this a million years ago and I cannot apologize enough that it took me so long to get to it!

Pairing: GaaraKarin Soulmate au: The one where once you meet you start to have dreams of your soulmate's memories

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

They met because of some sort of rehabilitation program her distant relative had come up with – or so she understood. Stupid Uzumaki Naruto insisted that almost all the criminals taken in to custody at the end of the Fourth Great War be given a chance at redemption. Karin rather thought she’d passed redemption a long time ago but she certainly wasn’t about to say no to the chance of escaping jail time. She’d had quite enough of being chained down and locked away.

Apparently part of the program mandated that those who participate be reintegrated in to the society they had the least connection to, in an effort to create a fresh start. Karin had little to no connection with Suna, having only been there a couple of times, and she was given little say in being shipped off to the middle of the desert at the height of summer. If she were in the habit of being honest with herself, Karin might have admitted that she was glad to be going somewhere she might be even a little bit free of her shadowed past. Too bad she wasn’t in that habit.

Some might consider it an honor to be greeted by the Kazekage himself upon arriving in the village. She knew exactly why he was here, however. Gaara of the Sand was here in official capacity to take custody of the ex-con coming to live in his domain. How nice of him.

What she didn’t expect was for him to announce that he was taking personal responsibility for her. His siblings didn’t seem too thrilled with the idea either.

“Is that wise?” the puppeteer asked hesitantly.

“Naruto offered me a second chance when I needed it,” the Kazekage said in his raspy voice. “I feel it’s only right that I give the same chance to anyone he feels is worthy.”

Karin wasn’t sure what shocked her more: that everyone else simply accepted the idea that easily or that someone had called her worthy. There were few people in this world who would call her worthy of anything – except worthy of a good swift kick perhaps, as Suigetsu might say. The offer was more than she had expected though, more than she knew anyone in her situation could hope for, so she said not a word against it and remained silent as she shook the Kazekage’s hand.

It took less than a day for the younger man – he was younger than her, how was that fair!? – to convince Karin to call him by his given name. She’d never been much of a fan of formality so that suited her just fine.

On the other hand, it took three full days for the first dream to come.

There wasn’t nearly the detail that all the mushy romance films promised. The world seemed dark and close, too close, like she was drowning at the bottom of a thick black sea. No light existed but for the sickly yellow glow that came from herself. Only she wasn’t herself, she was someone else. There was hatred in her, rage and anger and fear and so much loneliness she thought surely any moment she would split apart at the seams with it.

She woke panting and shaking, terrified of herself in a way she’d never been before. Something deep inside her knew that this was no ordinary dream, that it was a memory of the one her soul had been connected to since birth. The knowledge make her more sad than she knew she was capable of being. The sheer violence of the emotions she had felt from them was devastating and a great deal of it had been turned inwards. She could hardly believe that someone out there had ever felt like that.

It took several hours to shake off the cobwebs of her nightmare. She was silent as she was escorted to breakfast with Gaara and his suspicious siblings, not speaking a single word all throughout the meal. She followed the Kazekage to his office and sat upon a bench by the window, surrounded by the books she had asked for to amuse herself yet not reading any of them. She couldn’t seem to concentrate.

Gaara noticed, of course. Even after such a short time she had come to realize that Gaara had a habit of noticing the smallest details. She was the sort of young man who read the fine print of a document and picked up on all the petty little things that someone was trying to sneak by him. He was the type to really listen when a person was speaking, watching their expression and their body language and listening for the nuances in their voice. He didn’t always understand but he did always notice.

Upon seeing the strange mood that Karin was in that morning, Gaara declared himself tired of paperwork and announced his intention to check up on the reconstruction of the local hospital. She followed the one who held her proverbial leash without question, wandering after him under the watchful eye of everyone they passed. It seemed odd to her that the leader of their village was allowed to go about without any guards but it wasn’t something she was going to bring up. The absence of any other people permanently eyeing her with distrust worked out in her favor, after all.

The hospital was a strange mix of perfectly organized medical staff and messy disorganized construction. Gaara led them through a few sections, speaking with the heads of different projects and quietly answering questions from adoring citizens.

Karin crossed her arms and pretended to huff. She’d never seen someone so universally adored except perhaps Naruto. During her time serving under Orochimaru she had seen her fair share of fanatic followers. She’d seen people trapped by circumstance, serving against their will. And she’d seen people like herself, acknowledging power but following only because of a lack of anywhere else to go. It occurred to her to wonder if this is what the younger man had intended for her to see when he decided to rehabilitate her himself.

Probably not. He didn’t seem the manipulative sort.

What truly changed her day was when they entered the pediatric ward. Children of all different ages sat cozied in their beds, sick and wounded and yet happier than she had ever been at their age. They greeted the sight of their leader with smiles and exclamations of joy, some climbing out of their beds to come gather at his feet. It was disgustingly heartwarming and more effort went in to pretending she wasn’t affected than Karin really felt was warranted.

Incredibly, she was less upset when that effort failed than she thought she would be. Upon seeing the longing way she eyed the children around her, Gaara took her back the next day. And then the next. For a solid week he made it a part of their daily routine to stop by the pediatric ward of the hospital where Karin sat surrounded by children, interacting little but watching them enjoy the childhood that she had never been able to.

A day later she had another dream – a dream of childhood. It was not innocent.

She dreamed of blood and screaming, pain over her left temple. The air around her was obscured with a moving barrier but her vision was too hazy to see what it was made of. Just beyond the barrier she could see the form of an adult man slumped and dying. Something in her knew that this man was simultaneously the most important man in her world and her worst enemy. No one will ever love me, she heard herself thinking. So I must only love myself.

When she sat upright in her bed there were tears upon her face and a heavy weight in her chest that threatened to pull her under the water when she stumbled to the bathroom and slipped in to a hot bath. She’d never given much thought to her soulmate or the life that they had lived while she’d been suffering. It never occurred to her that, somewhere out there, they might have been suffering too. It occurred to her now as she soaked in the water, avoiding the beginning of her day, lifting one arm in to the air above her to gaze upon the teeth marks which littered her skin.

To shy away from what she was had never been her style. She had been nothing more than a tool for most of her life – pretty much all her life – and it showed in the marks that covered her from neck to toe. Karin had decided at a young age to own those marks, refusing to shy away from wearing revealing clothing. She presented herself with the confidence of someone with flawless skin. Hadn’t she just as much right to be beautiful as the next girl?

Her arm slipped back under the water with a soft ripple. What would her soulmate think of them? Would they see them as flaws? Honorable battle wounds? Just another scar earned in the senseless war between villages?

And why had she only begun to dream now? They said that most people only began to dream when they met their soulmate for the first time. She’d been exposed to so many new people since coming to Suna. It might be nearly impossible to pinpoint who she was bonded with unless her dreams gave her more details. Karin stood from her bath with a heavy sigh, eyes avoiding the mirror as she wrapped herself in a towel and gave in to the morning.

Gaara appeared to pick up on her mood easily, somehow managing to get through his office work in record time and have them on their way to the shopping district before noon had arrived. His words were perfectly calm as he said something about finding a suitable birthday present for his sister and yet Karin felt as though his motives lay in a different direction. Every time she was in the slightest funk this man always seemed to pick up on it and do something to help her out of it. It was the strangest thing. It was also strangely touching.

Karin couldn’t remember the last time she had gone shopping even just for necessities, let alone just a leisurely trip to the market on the off chance they might come up with some good gift ideas. She felt oddly light as she flitted from stall to stall, enthralled with the unique merchandise sold here in the desert. If she’d known Suna sold silks like these she would never have dressed herself in such inferior fabrics!

When Gaara stopped her to suggest they head back for something to eat, Karin realized three things. The first was that it had been hours already. She and the Kazekage of the Sand had spent hours doing nothing but freely walking through the marketplace, peering in to this stall or that, picking up an item here or there, and watching the entertainment found on random corners, tossing coins to each one they passed. In the end they hadn’t even gotten a present for his chief advisor and eldest sibling.

The second thing she realized was that for a very short while she had been happy, utterly carefree. Not once during those hours had she thought of her past or the strange memories being passed to her in her sleep. All she had focused on was the new discoveries waiting around every corner, brashly calling out each new find to her calm and passive escort. Gaara was like the steady center to the whirlwind she kicked up through the marketplace.

The third thing which Karin realized, the thing which furrowed her brow in serious contemplation, was that he really didn’t have to do any of this. She wondered why someone like him would take so much time out of their day simply to cater to the volatile moods of someone like her. She was a criminal and him the leader of a village. Shouldn’t he look down on her? Gaara never seemed to look down on anyone, to her confusion.

It took four days for the next dream to come to her. During that time she was allowed to visit the hospital each day, finding her own small corner of hope in watching over these tiny lives. Her knees nearly buckled with shock when Gaara enquired as to whether she might consider working with them as part of her rehabilitation. She could hardly believe that she would be trusted with the village’s children, their most precious commodity. Despite her shock, though, she was quick to jump on the idea. She could do good. She could do something that was hers.

When the dream did come it was nothing like the ones before. She dreamed of a rising sun in the shape of a boy. The boy was so bright she could hardly stand to look and yet felt compelled to anyway, as though her only chance for a future lay in his hands. It was like finding salvation in human form and knowing that it had come for her bearing a forgiveness she had forgotten that she even needed.

Upon waking the next morning she was crying not for her soulmate but for herself, full of too many conflicting emotions. She wanted to rage against the world – and for a short while she did. Karin shrieked out her frustration, fluttering her legs under the sheets and throwing her pillows against the wall. When finally she calmed it was only to gather one of her pillows back to her chest and weep in to the soft cotton covering. She was glad that her soulmate had found a path back to the light but where was her salvation? Why did it always seem like she was the one left behind in the darkness?

As he always did, Gaara read her mood easily. She wasn’t that surprised at this point when he took them away from his office after only a short while. What did surprise her was when he led her to a private training field, an enclosed area of sand and packed dirt, a few scrubby trees along one wall and target posts set up along another.

“If you would like to express yourself I will not take it as an act of aggression,” he told her. Karin stared, for a few moments stunned in to immobility.

Then she turned away from him as she flew to pieces.

Golden chains burst from her back as she bent forward and screamed as loud as she could, whipping the air in a physical manifestation of her tempestuous emotions. Why her? Why could she never catch a god damned break? And why did she have to be happy for some person she couldn’t remember meeting? It wasn’t fair! She wanted to be happy too! She wanted forgiveness too! Had she not gone through enough by now?

When shrieking no longer felt satisfying, Karin allowed her chakra chains to lash out around her at random, tearing at the earth and reaching for the clouds as though to pull them down on her own head. Her feet stomped and her fists waved and, strangely, it made her feel better. It took perhaps a bit longer than it should have for her to return to a rational state but it felt so good to just let it all out. She wondered how Gaara had known that this is what she had needed. Did he know why? She even found a small part of herself wondering what he thought of her display.

A quick peek showed that he was an unmoved as always, standing stolidly in the corner with his eyes trained steadily on her. Karin panted from the exertion but made no move to do anything else, unable to break eye contact. Instead of feeling trapped by his unwavering gaze she felt grounded, like she were borrowing his steadiness. More than that, she felt for perhaps the first time since she was a child that she was not alone.

It was beyond anything she had ever experienced and she didn’t know how to handle it, how to react to something so positive and open. She had wanted salvation. Was this it?

Karin fell to her knees, letting her legs splay to either side and sinking farther down until her bottom touched the ground. The powerful golden chains in the air around her dissolved in to glittering dust as the tears came again. She covered her face with both hands as quiet footsteps approached, stopping right next to her shoulder. Gaara took the time to collect his thoughts before speaking.

“I like to come here when I need to…let off some steam.” It was hard to imagine someone as composed as him needing to let off some steam. “I find it a good place to remind myself that the earth does not care for our anger. See the way it already heals itself?”

Lifting her head, Karin blinked around, immediately seeing what he was talking about. The shifting sands of the desert had already filled in the places where her chains had dug deep, covering the evidence of her outburst with so little thought.

“Well someone should care when we’re angry!” she insisted, returning her eyes to his and pretending very hard that she wasn’t merely seeking the stability that he seemed to offer so freely. Gaara tilted his head in a bird-like manner, in that way of his that said he thought he had to answer to some human behavior but wasn’t quite sure.

“That is why we should care for each other, is it not?”

She found herself staring at him again. He always seemed to know just what she needed and, even more incredibly, he almost seemed eager to give it. Karin made a wan expression, tired by her emotions and wanting nothing more than to curl up in his quiet office for the rest of the day.

“Why do you bother with me?” she asked. “There’s other people that you could have passed this burden to. Why deal with me yourself?” That no one else would have wanted her went unsaid. In response, he knelt down beside her, hesitantly reaching out one hand.

“I do not sleep often; a habit left over from my time as the One-Tail jinchūriki. I have slept only three times since you arrived in my village and only once did I dream. I…dreamed of being eaten. So many faceless jaws tearing at my skin and drinking of my chakra. I begged them to stop and still they took.” Karin couldn’t have moved if she wanted to, staying as still as a statue under the hand which brushed against the marks on her skin. “Uzumaki Naruto gave me a second chance to become a better person. I wanted to give you the same because I think everyone deserves that chance. That you turned out to be my soulmate is merely extra incentive. I bother because I wish for you to be happy.”

Just like that her tears changed. They became less of a mourning and more of an expression of relief. Karin felt as though the weight of the world had been pushing her down for so long without her noticing and now suddenly it had lifted.

Gaara of the Sand, Fifth Kazekage of Sunagakure, was her soulmate. He had seen the same darkness that she had and he had climbed back out of it, had earned every bloody step of his own redemption. And he had offered the same to her, not out of obligation from one soulmate to another, but simply out of the goodness of his heart. He was firm where she was wilted. He was calm where she was violent. He was the center to her storm. He was her future.

When Gaara stood and held out his hand Karin did not hesitate to take it.

He was her new dream.

[avelera]

What would you say makes a villain/antagonist a compelling one? Would it be their effect on the character(s)' development? Their effect on the overall plot? Both? Or is it something else entirely? Your thoughts on writing are always so interesting (and insightful) so I thought I'd ask you.

Once I would have said this: villains take action. I wrote extensively on this topic in one post about Character Agency, but in essence I said there that in a huge percentage of stories the villain is the person who sets the story into motion by doing a Bad Thing. The heroes are then stuck in the relatively passive role of Fixing the Bad Thing so that the world can go Back to Normal. Which, if mishandled, can make for rather boring protagonists. 

The villain is often allowed to swan around, chew the scenery, put together dastardly plans, and rub their hands together gleefully as their plan comes to fruition. The hero in this scenario… basically gets to look up at the sky in horror at the latest explosion, and then run around putting out brushfires. I certainly know who I would rather be in that scenario! The villain is having way more fun while the hero has to Be Responsible and do the ugly, boring, tedious, not-fun stuff of halting someone else’s ambition. The villain gets to wax poetic about WHY they are acting in this DEVIANT manner, while the hero basically has to stick with the milquetoast Generally Acceptable Morality for the Widest Possible Audience which is stuff like “killing is bad” and “don’t do the thing that is bad” and “don’t rock the boat.”

And the thing is, it’s very common that villains are written to include Sympathetic Motivations so often the villain’s reasoning can sound pretty reasonable! It’s “just their methods which are wrong!” For example, Magneto wants mutant equality, as does Charles Xavier. The narrative though, tends to agree that Magneto goes about getting it The Wrong Way.  

But we very rarely see the hero taking these actions The Right Way, we just see them stopping the villain from doing things The Wrong Way. Since the villain is the only one we see Taking The Action, it can kinda make the hero look like a contrarian and a stick-in-the-mud. After all THEY were just in a holding pattern keeping a rather shitty world the way it is, they weren’t taking active action to improve it, and rarely does the narrative show the world becoming a legitimately better place through their methods, it’s just shown Going Back to Normal because of the hero’s actions. 

Back to the X-Men example, Charles Xavier* (*in the live action films) never DOES anything dramatic to ensure mutant equality except hide out, maintain the status quo, and stop Magneto from expediting the process in his way. Because of the PG-13 rating we rarely even get a sense that anyone got widely hurt by the villain’s actions. There’s no blood, and just some distant screaming, which is hard to relate to compared to, say, the discrimination named characters face in the X-Men franchise, discrimination Magneto is trying to stop. In essence, Xavier insists on getting equality the Right Way but never seems to actually take action on a scale to ensure it. This creates a great deal of sympathy for Magneto for all but, say, the last 10 minutes when the script demands that he goes batshit crazy and starts wreaking destruction as a way of undermining his previous ideas.

So to answer your first question: villains get to have more fun, be more active, and often attempts to make them sympathetic are so effective and the counter-argument so unenforced that they really come across as a more active, motivated hero. That’s the simple answer, but in my mind it reveals a bigger issue with villains:

This issue has been growing in my mind lately and is a bit less flippant and a bit less comic-book-villain-based as an answer to your question. Namely:

Villains are allowed to be different.

And the problem there is: most people are different. 

Whether it’s on the inside or the outside, most people feel themselves to be different from everyone else in some way. However, in lazy writing, protagonists are often given very boring, milquetoast, mainstream characteristics. 

The villain gets to be different. Most people feel different in some way. Most people, therefore, at some point identify more closely with the villain.

Take, for example, being queer. For a very long time, I’d say it’s not actually over yet so let’s say to this day, most queer characters or queer-coded characters are villains or antiheroes. Look at just about every Disney Villain. But it’s more insidious than that. 

Have you ever noticed the shows where a protagonist is allowed to be queer? Black Sails springs to mind as being rich in queer characters. But here’s the thing, many of them are anti-heroes. They are literally pirates, who are traditionally Bad Guys. They live in “morally complicated times” and are part of a huge cast which also includes lots of straight characters. Shows about Ancient Rome spring to mind as well for allowing “good guy queers” BUT they too often do Bad Guys things due to their “morally complicated” setting – ie, they’re often thieves, murderers, etc but they also might have a “heart of gold” under all there and they’re allowed to be good guys and queer because they’re already outside mainstream values. 

Irene Adler is “morally complicated” and an antagonist if not an outright villainess in BBC’s Sherlock - she’s a dominatrix and works with Moriarty, even if she comes to regret it. “Deep historical dramas” that take place so long ago they’re practically fantasy are allowed to have some queer characters, if they have a huge ensemble cast that is majority straight because “those were different times”.  Stories that take place in prisons, like Orange is the New Black or Oz, technically are set in a place populated by traditional “bad guys”, ie they take place in a jail and are therefore “complicated”. Again, they also have huge casts. Hannibal - morally complicated, you’re not always sure if the good guys are really good or if they’re falling to darkness themselves are could be considered anti-heroes. Lucifer from the show “Lucifier” is literally the Devil. They’re are all outside the mainstream already so even if they’re “good guys” they have traditionally villainous traits of some kind allowing them to show these “deviant” characteristics while also being “good”. 

While there’s been improvement recently in the media, the point is: there’s very few cases of characters with non-straight sexuality who are unabashed protagonists in a show that is not about the “bad guys” or isn’t otherwise “morally complex” and riddled with atypical heroes and anti-heroes. 

Many times, when a writer wants to put a more morally complicated or otherwise “deviant” character into a mainstream story, they have to make them a villain or anti-hero. These characters are allowed to decry the status quo. They’re allowed to be interested in the same sex, they’re allowed to be poly, they’re allowed to express their sexuality in an unabashed way. 

This also applies to neurodiverse or neuroatypical characters. How many unabashed protagonists in morally uncomplicated shows are there out there? Troubled genius shows are quite popular, but almost across the board these characters like Sherlock and House  are introduced as anti-heroes, borderline villains compared to more typical heroes who are Nice Guys and Gals. “Legion” springs to mind as a neuroatypical protagonist but he also has traditionally villainess tendencies and behaves outside the mainstream. He is not an unabashed protagonist. Quite frankly the vast majority of neuroatypical characters in fiction are villains in horror franchises, with maybe the exception of PTSD which is portrayed sympathetically, even if rarely I’ve seen a character who begins the story with PTSD who is also an unquestionable protagonist (ex. The Punisher), rather it usually comes up in the course of their story and is dealt with as a consequence (ex. Frodo Baggins, Tony Stark, etc). 

Let’s look at the number of characters that are alcoholics and also unabashed good guys. Or we could look at the number of characters that are drug users or addicts and are unabashed good guys in morally uncomplicated stories. Let’s look at the number of protagonists that unflinchingly enjoy sex and are unabashed good guys. 

Look at the number of people who feel alone, depressed, anxious, weird-looking or otherwise like an outcast and see how many of them are unabashed good guys. Yeah, the protagonist can sometimes “feel like an outsider” but then the villain is often someone who also feels like an outsider, but unlike the hero they still do. OR if the villain is someone popular, by the end the hero has flipped the tables so that they’re the ones surrounded by loving friends, who has gained social acceptance, and the villain is now isolated, or scarred, or strange looking, or has a breakdown. 

So to this day, if you felt different at all, isolated or queer or strange looking or neurodivergent, addicted, unpopular, or hard to deal with, the villain was the only person in widespread mainstream storytelling who was like you. 

Look at Loki - he feels rejected by his family, he feels alone, he’s adopted and feels he was given less love as a result. Thor never expresses those feelings. Even as he becomes less of an asshole over the course of the first movie, it’s more that he lost his traits of being a popular bully to become merely well-loved and popular. Frankly, Loki is something of a protagonist for kicking that process off and making Thor a better person. Loki is the one who gets to express moments of vulnerability and anguish that come from inside of him, Thor’s lowest moment is that he gets rejected by his favorite weapon. It’s not hard to understand why many people felt closer to Loki than to Thor - most people’s sense of misery and isolation comes from chronic events in their life - friends, family, their appearance, their mental state, the things they love, whereas it’s hard to identify with Thor’s single moment of sadness in the real world, yet he’s the protagonist of the story that is set up as its moral center.

Also in such a story, the villain’s final explosion can feel forced, like in the above example of Magneto. Why did Loki suddenly go off the rails? He seemed very intelligent and rational before he suddenly decided that the only way to gain love and acceptance was genocide. It feels manufactured by the writer to give an excuse for a big fight at the end. Also, again, the necessities of PG-13 mean we don’t really see the blood and gore and human suffering - so Loki’s actions really feel like something many of us have longed to do: lash out at those who have hurt us and made us feel unworthy for years on end. Thor is an unworthy avatar of real world feelings of hurt. Most people in the world feel more like Loki at some point in their lives than they feel like favored-child Thor. 

But only villains in that instance were allowed to show even that level of anger at the circumstances that made them different from everyone else. 

Here’s where I start to get scared - because villains are the only ones allowed to be at all deviant, at all at odds with the status quo, at all angry at their circumstances. They’re the only ones allowed to be queer, megalomaniacal, to say what they’re thinking which is a big FUCK YOU to the world. 

Now you combine them with traditional villains throughout history, in order to drive home that they’re the bad guys and set up your plot. 

You combine them with Nazi ideology to drive home the point that these are unequivocally Bad Dudes that the hero can kill en masse. You combine them with genocidal ideology. You combine them with massive armies and gold statues and the iconography of every villain throughout history. Because you need to show they’re bad guys.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Now you have this problem where the villain is allowed to be different--to express ideas that the traditional protagonist cannot because they must be defenders of the Mainstream--BUT you’ve this villain to people who maybe don’t understand why they feel connected to those people, and maybe don’t distinguish between the actions the villain takes as a result of feeling that way. After a while maybe that audience can’t help but notice that the only people they identify with tend to be the bad guys. 

To me, this seems to be the obvious root of the very troubling movement I’ve seen within the geek community of sympathy towards the “Alt Right” and other such fascist movements. When only villains are allowed to be different, but they’re also shown to be horrible, it means people’s walls of sympathy begin to be broken down towards horrible people. I don’t want to clutch my pearls here, I don’t want to say what writers can and can’t write. But if bad guys are allowed to be different, and bad guys are cool and hey, bad guys often show parallels with, for example, Nazis, maybe it’s cool to be a Nazi or have Nazi-adjacent traits or iconography because that’s the only place where anyone like me has ever been shown. It might be Nazis, or it might be criminals, it might be murderers or thieves or pirates. But that’s the only place where people are scarred or rejected or crazy or giving a big middle finger to the world seem to reside. And the heroes are boring, and they’re not like me.

My solution though would be this: allow more unabashed neurodivergent, queer, vulnerable, hurting, active, scared, enraged protagonists. Don’t let villains be the only ones who are allowed any kind of authenticity because they’re the only ones allowed to break from the ideals of the mainstream. Don’t let villains be the only ones who get to set the events of the story into motion. Let the protagonist start something BIG, let the villain set out to stop them. Let the protagonist be an oddball and not just in a quirky fun way. Let the protagonist be as interesting and tortured and angry as the traditional antagonist.

I know this last part isn’t answering your question, and I don’t have a solution to it, but this seemed as good a time as any to get it off my chest. I hope the rest was valuable to you at least a little!

[ailuronymy]

Hello Grey! I was messing w/ the character generator, and I got "Callous apprentice molly with a grey-and-white pelt who is good at tricking others and doesn't make promises." Now, this would be *perfect* for an antagonist in my fanfic, who confesses her love for the main char, so maybe when they're warriors they can be mates, but the main char doesn't want a mate, and rejects her. She gets angry and calls out main char's BFF, convinced that she was lying to not hurt her feelings, and (cont.)

(cont.-callous grey & white molly) challenges the tom to a fight in secret, and he accepts. soon after the battle begins, main char 2 realizes she’s out for blood. now, after a scar, the fur can grow back white, and in her clan’s culture, white pelts are believed to be unlucky, & therefore unattractive. she plans to scar him badly, and that all his fur’ll grow back white, leaving the main char to choose her over him. now here’s the problem: main char is also a molly. I don’t want -cont again :I--cont. grey and white molly- I don’t want people thinking I’m putting gay chars in an evil light, but I find I prefer her as a molly than a tom. What should I do to establish I have no beef with gay/lesbian people/cats?

Hello, Ruddles! Thank you for writing in. This one is going to be a long answer, and most of it is going to be me asking you questions, I’m afraid. I’d like for you to consider them as carefully and truthfully as you can, but don’t worry, there’s not going to be quiz! They’re the kind of questions that you only have to answer to yourself, and I believe by asking these kinds of questions–whenever we’re creating–helps us become better writers and more self-aware people in general.

First of all, I’d like to ask are there other gay characters in your story? Is the protagonist gay/same-gender attracted? Is her best friend? Are any non-villainous supporting cast (with central speaking roles) gay? Having a gay villain in an otherwise straight story portrays a very different picture–and ideology–than a gay villain in a story that has a variety of other gay, non-villainous characters. The former inherently aligns gayness (and queerness) with deviant or evil behaviour–and that’s really not great. It’s also been a blatant long-time staple of Western media and a fundamental part of how character archetypes are conceptualised in film. (If you wanted to read more about that, I can recommend following up on the concept of “queer-coding.” It’s a built-in aspect of a lot of traditional mainstream television/film these days, and features prominently in Disney productions as well as many other franchises). 

The second thing I’d like to ask is what is it that makes you prefer her as a molly? What we like and dislike–and especially why–can be slippery to grasp, and harder to articulate, but as a creator, it’s something that you should ask yourself from time to time. What is it about this character in this story that makes you feel the role must be female? Because characters in stories are playing roles, and I think people sometimes forget that. Often we get attached to them (which is normal and part of the creating process for many people!) but they are still only non-living creations which we place in situations we’ve invented. We are making decisions, and that makes us responsible. Therefore, much like how we might play a game of Cluedo if finding the motive was the goal, intermittently asking yourself, “Why this person, why this place, why this action?” is a good way to interrogate your own habits, biases, goals, and assumptions, and that can only help you make informed creative choices. (You can even consider it practice for the questions people–especially critics–would eventually ask you about your story and your creative process). 

That’s not to say I’m encouraging you to turn her into a male character, mind you! If you did that, you would have the same story, albeit one that (unhappily) looked much more familiar to most people: an envious scorned man who acts out revenge on a woman who won’t date him, through violence against her friends/family. Although the exact details might change, I think we’ve all heard these stories in real life, about men who don’t know how to accept the answer “no.” I believe Warriors’ canon story of Ashfur isn’t too dissimilar either?–although, I admit, it’s been a very long time since I’ve read any Warriors book and my memory is foggy on specifics. Perhaps an additional question worth asking in this light is, to borrow a quote of Stanisław Jerzy Lec, is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork? Or, a more relevant version, is it feminist/equality/progress/[whatever word you prefer] if a woman is the one abusing other women, instead of a man? (My argument would firmly be no). 

The third question I’d like to ask is what is your reason for this story? In other words, do you believe it needs to be told, and told in this way? Importantly: what is this story doing that isn’t adding to a history of homophobic narratives and cultural perceptions? What is it doing that is adding to those narratives and perceptions, and what can you do to change that? How will you feel and how will you react if you write this story, put it out in the world, and receive feedback that it is, in fact, hurtful or offensive? If you’re concerned that you might not be able to tell a story in a way that isn’t going to be offensive (or your worry about the possibility of criticism is greater than your conviction in the value of your story), that might be a sign that you shouldn’t tell that particular story and should instead change it to something that doesn’t hold that fear for you. It’s not failure to evaluate your work and adapt when you feel out of your depth, or uncertain, or don’t believe in what you’re doing as much as you want to, or you’re not creating to the standard you want to be. That’s self-awareness, and it’s a valuable skill. It takes humility and maturity to make mistakes (or any kind of creative misstep) and learn from them. 

As far as advice goes, I feel that posing these questions to you is the best that I can offer. The short answer to the question of “how do I avoid being called homophobic for my writing?” is “don’t write homophobic narratives,” but I’m hoping that by asking these questions back to you, you–and anyone else with similar concerns and questions–can develop a practical way of thinking through these issues now and from here on. The solution isn’t not to write about gay characters: it’s to learn how to write about gay characters in a way that doesn’t mimic and perpetuate straight narratives, beliefs, and prejudices about gayness and gay characters. Learning how to do this is a skill, and it’s one I believe everyone can learn–just like learning how to use punctuation properly, or write snappy dialogue–and, like most skills, it can start off being a bit rough and difficult if you’re not used to it and things you make will probably not be perfect first go. But keep going anyway, because that’s how you become a master pianist or an athlete or a great writer. Good luck with your writing, Ruddles. I hope this helps.  

[painted-starlight]

Why does Mother Gothel Want to Stay Young?

Warning: Super Long Post and some swearing

An in depth analysis why Mother Gothel’s motivation to stay young doesn’t make any sense.

No seriously why does Mother Gothel want to stay young forever? 

Vanity as a flaw is an old  stereotype to pit young women against older women. But this sole motivation doesn’t really hold up when we compare her to other Disney Villains. The reason I say this is because there is a certain level of complexity that villains in Disney hold. Little things like character quirks, their occupation, their background, their ethnicity can give the audience subtle clues about why they at the way they do. 

For example, villains with a deep and shallow level of complexity would have to fulfill certain qualifications (note: I got a lot of helpful information on creating villains from Letterpile.com’s “Three Steps to Creating a Complex Villain”. I suggest you take a look, since I got a lot of my information on how Disney Villains are formed from this piece.): 

1) What does the audience know about them from what is shown? Their environment, their disposition, interactions with the hero, etc. Things we can see, and are shown. 

2) What is implied by the story about who they were before the events of the movie? Basically what’s not shown but what can be reasonably assumed by the audience. (Off screen mentions don’t count because film is a visual medium and what a villain does must be shown to audience in order to establish them as a threat.) 

3) Are their motivations understandable? Not an excuse mind you, and sometimes they aren’t relate-able (which is fine depending on their level of complexity. Not all villains have to have full backstories). But do their struggles parallel the hero in some way?  

An effective Disney villain doesn’t always follow these rules or answer these questions since so many are different. But here are a few: 

Dr. Facilier from the “Princess and the Frog”

Complex/Sympathetic Human Villain

We don’t know that much about Dr. Facilier, but what the audience is shown let’s fill in the clues. He is most likely had struggles financially, and is a victim of the racist system of Jim Crow. He had a mother, so there is a familial aspect to his life. 

Dr. Facilier is an understandable villain, because he has been denied the opportunity to prosper while the white upper class that practiced slavery lives in mansions. This is one of the most sympathetic villains Disney has created, and his struggles parallel Tiana’s since they both are black people living in a racist system.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t a villain, but the small moment of sheer hopelessness he has in the beginning (during “Down in New Orleans” ) while watching the descendant of slave owner ride around in a car make him a complex villain.  

Scar from the “Lion King”

Complex/Unsympathetic Non-Human Villain

Scar is a complex villain in the Lion King, but he’s not sympathetic. He is resentful of his position as the beta-male. He is smarmy, manipulative, and petulant. What we are shown is the level of his hatred of Mufasa leads him to murder his brother. It is Shakespearean, and his hostile takeover of the Pride Lands is driven by his selfishness. The failure of his reign is due to a lack of foresight and planning. Once he got what he wanted, he was a pretty shitty king. 

Scar is an effective villain because of his environment, his character quirks, and sarcasm make him memorable. He is antisocial and is shown lounging around alone while the celebration of his nephews birth takes place. His character animation is distinctive, and shows the audience his personality. 

There are supplementary books that shine a light on his past, but since most people have seen the first film we can’t really count that.  

Maleficent  

Simple/Effective Humanoid Villain

Maleficent is not complex. She doesn’t need to be because her character’s actions are consistent with the rules of the world she lives in. She wasn’t invited to a party so she cursed the host’s baby. Because she is a faerie, she doesn’t abide by certain human etiquette (or at least she doesn’t use etiquette when dealing with people who don’t take the time to use it for her). 

The rules are different. She’s not like Scar from the Lion King who is aware of certain rules and technically a part of the social structure. The Lion pride has a hierarchy of their own and a society with different nuances. While he is a social climber, Maleficent is a wild card that can come in at any moment and tear up the place. 

If she were human and had these powers, the audience would probably wonder what her deal is, but since she acts more like a force of nature and a Western audience is used to tales of gods and supernatural creatures with strange morals, it makes sense. Considering how the other three faeries are more or less clueless about how real humans act, this idea is consistent and not necessarily speculative to assume that that is just how faeries act. 

So where does Mother Gothel fit into this? 

She’s not complex, but she’s a human character that requires a reason for her to act the way she does. Her just being controlling, manipulative and occaisionally falsely charming has nothing to do with who she is because those are things that any villain can do. Who is Mother Gothel? Why does she do the things she do? 

Does she fear death? 

Not really. 

The film tries to tie in beauty with life and old age with imminent death in a really strange way. Just because you’re old doesn’t mean that as soon as you turn sixty that death is coming for you. Just because you’re young doesn’t mean that it’s going to be your best years. 

How does her being young translate into a fear of death exactly? 

It doesn’t make any sense from we know (very very little) of Gothel’s backstory. No subtle hints of backstory, no references to past marriages, partners, children, or even something she might have done that could raise an eyebrow. What does she even DO while Rapunzel is in the tower? 

We have no idea where she goes, what she does, why she needs to be young to do it, etc. 

During Mother Knows Best, she references some things like the plague, but the rest is just shit she made up and few disappearing acts. How does this factor into her character exactly? Was she a magician or a performer at some point? 

The reason why I ask is because if it’s true, what does that have to do with her staying young forever or a fear of death? It could be that she was performer and her acts rely on her being immortal or looking a certain way, but that makes no sense because everyone and their grandma apparently knows about a magic flower that makes people stay young forever and they made a big deal out of it. And she seems reaaaaly secretive. Like she doesn’t want anyone to know who she is. 

But what does she do when Rapunzel is in the tower??? 

Apparently she just walks around doing nothing. Like, what’s the point of her being young at all? If she were hiding from the palace guards that’s fine but why was she so obsessed with being young BEFORE the king and queen took the flower?

If she were really afraid of dying she would be obsessed with not getting sick, or being injured.She can’t be afraid of dying or getting seriously hurt since she scales a friggin tower every three days from a fall that could KILL her. 

The only thing that she seems to love is beauty and youth. But why? There’s no actual reason given. There’s no hint of sibling rivalry, or showing her being self conscious in front of other women because there are barely any other women in this movie. 

The only woman/girl she even talks to is Rapunzel. And that’s not a good frame of reference because she actively manipulates her and has complete and total control over her/her environment. She has full control and it’s all an act. 

When she’s technically “out of control” of Rapunzel, she still doesn’t seem to talk from experience. She is literally a caricature at points, mostly there to oppose Rapunzel and be the “Older Woman” who jealous of Rapunzel’s beauty. 

She isn’t paralleled with Rapunzel properly either. Usually a villain should be more than just a physical opposite to the hero. Her character arc should want the same thing as Rapunzel, and she does for a small part. They both want control of Rapunzel and her choices. 

But other than that, it kind of falls flat. Flynn/Eugene drives Rapunzel’s story and he pretty much becomes the center of her universe other than the floating lanterns. Mother Gothel internally has almost nothing for the audience to hold onto. She has no understandable motivations (no matter how twisted a villains motivation is, the audience needs to know what IT IS), and she parallel’s Rapunzel in the most basic, shallow way. Physically. And that’s not enough for a human character.

So what T*ngled is trying to say is this is guess: 

Mother Gothel wants to stay young because all women want to be youthful for no real reason. Just cause! When your young you stay young forever and never get old or injured. If you’re an older woman, you aren’t pretty anymore and you might as well be dust in the wind. (Unless of course you’re a white disney princess or her youthful looking mother lol) 

???????

Mother Gothel from T*angled

Mother Gothel is Simple/Unrelatable in the Disney Villain category. She’s basically on par with Clayton from Tarzan. Very one note, and there for opposition, a caricature. 

Simple in terms of characterization and the barrier between her as a villain and the audience. 

Unrelatable because of the missing elements of shown or implied backstory. Not enough information other than surface traits given to the audience. 

[rebeccadunne]

Your Chroma

by Sinead Gleeson from the latest edition of essential Irish literary journal Gorse

I

How does it start? The black of pre-consciousness, the pink

of uterine breaths, the red highways of arteries, splayed.

The beginning is red.

II

Fly over

This country

Of the body.

A spy photographer

On an aerial loop.

There is

breast and

brain and

bladder and

bowel.

Begin the descent to bone.

Dive into fissures of marrow,

To the source,

The red and white cells

of the blood.

Canada,

Japan,

Poland,

Peru.

Venal Vexillology.

III

To put down words about the body—medical, biological,

anatomical—is to present the body as fact. Its being in the

world—a being ‘being’—is irrefutable.

IV

There is a photo of you. Your child body in a red dress at

a trout farm, the brown glitter of a fish wriggling on the

end of the rod’s line. You smile for the camera, and avoid

looking at the bubble of blood at its mouth. Its red gasps.

V

‘Colour is consciousness itself, colour is feeling,’ said William

Gass, who prioritised blue above red. Blue, he writes, is ‘most

suitable as the colour of interior life.’ Blue, above corporeal

red? What was he thinking?

VI

How do we decide this interior colour? We are one colour in

life, another in death; one in youth, another in old age; one

in sickness, another in good health. We channel Yves Klein

and create a new shade for the interior. A born again hue.

VII

Because of his synaesthesia, Wassily Kandinsky associated

colours with shapes, and sounds. For him, red was a square,

the ‘sound of a loud drum beat.’

VIII

Repeat red over and over—red red red red red red red red

red red red red red red red red red red red red red red red

red red red red red—and it’s a hum, a drill, a drumroll. It is

also not-blue, not-green, not-black, not-white.

IX

In the Tate, Rothko’s reds are dreamlike, hazy around

the edges. Are they on the canvas or under it, bleeding

through?

X

In an old cinema, long closed down, we watched Derek

Jarman’s Blue. I’m curious about his choice of colour, but

don’t question his motivation to use blue. In his book Chroma,

he says: ‘I know my colours are not yours. Two colours are

never the same, even if they’re from the same tube.’ I think

of his eyes and his failing sight. To be a person who has

spent their life looking, photographing, regarding—and

now cannot see.

XI

You are both redheads, and tell me you like to mark this

by taking photos of the backs of your heads. You do this

in special places. Howth pier, the Cliffs of Moher, various

lighthouses.

XII

There is a black and white photo in a local newspaper,

dating from the 1930s. It’s creased, and heavily pixelated,

with that old photo blur. But it’s him, Red Con. This is the

only photo we’ve tracked down. I’ve never met him, nor has

my father, but we are related. I descend from red hair.

XIII

If blue, as Gass argues, is the colour of interior life, this

makes red a colour of the exterior. But red is the body. Red

is blood, organs, tendons, the red elements:

Rashes

Hives

Sores

The raised bridge of a new scar

Platelets working on the crust of a cut

The speckle of heat rash, like pebbles on the bed of a

stream.

XIV

Driving over the Golden Gate Bridge in a convertible,

sucking in cool Californian air, they argue about the shade

of the steel. Red. Scarlet. Terracotta. Red again, some

consensus. Circular talk of colour under the shadow of

heavy cables, but he knows the bridge’s shade is officially

called ‘International Orange.’ The company that makes the

paint sells a cheaper version called ‘Fireweed.’ He takes this

as a sign to roll a joint and tells his friends that 98% of

people who jump into the bay don’t survive. Those who do

always have the same injuries: broken vertebrae, smashed

ribs, punctured lungs.

XV

You say tomato

I say blood

You say traffic light

I say muscle

You say fire engine

I say vein

XVI

LITTLE

Across the woods, basket swinging on a girlish arm, she

weaves off the path to pick flowers. Hood as protector—

stay hidden, girl, cover yourself up—in a tocsin shade of red.

Anti-camouflage. Here I am, come and get me! it says. And so

the wolf did.

RED

Get up! Her mother pulls the blanket off her teenage bed.

Take this to your granny, and wear your hood, it’s cold. The girl

is menstrual, cramped, innards torn. Her mother relents,

returning with a hot water bottle, and a box of Feminax.

There is a wolf in her womb, and she placates it with hot,

vulcanised rubber and codeine.

RIDING

The girl remarks on the size of her grandmother’s ears, eyes,

and teeth, failing to notice the lupine mouth, the rich pelt,

the cross-dressing, the anthropomorphic imposter in the

bed.

HOOD

In the belly of the wolf, she is safe. She cannot be eaten again.

Consumption saves her from more (male) consumption.

Stay hidden girl. Belly as cave.

XVII

Fairytales are always about women’s bodies. Rapunzel’s hair

and Sleeping Beauty’s somnolent face and Snow White

choking and Cinderella dancing with glass-slippered feet.

XVIII

Not glass slippers, but her aunt buys her red clogs, the first

shoes she ever loves. The heavy wooden stomp on the

concrete of the street, the scarlet curve of the leather a

possibility. She learns that women are meant to wear heels;

that heels appear to lengthen a woman’s leg, to accentuate

her calf, to make her more attractive. She decides she will

only wear clogs, or no shoes at all.

XVIX

Four women in black body con dresses gyrate to a 1980s

song. Robert Palmer, dressed like someone’s office manager

dad rolls through Addicted to Love. The women are heavily

made up, their eye shadow a palette of storm-cloud colours,

but it’s their lipstick I’m obsessed with: my mother’s matt

pinks and creamy browns having nothing on this. This red is

a declaration of war. The gloss is so high it looks like glass.

I practise on my lips with saliva. The models are arranged

democratically, two either side of Palmer. The only contrast

in uniformity is their faces and length of their dresses. Their

whiteness is a shock, the scraped-back hair severe. These

porcelain-faced, storm-eyed she-tomatons are part homage

to Art Deco painter Patrick Nagel’s women. The shock and

sheen of their scarlet lips is the only thing that interrupts their

monochrome faces. Is it because it’s the ’80s that the scene

is so homogenous, so lacking in multiculturalism? White

bodies the epitome of capitalism, even in pop music.

XX

How should we present our face to the world?

How should we present our (female) face to the world?

Make-upped, pore-blocked in shades of ivory and sand.

Brow-arched, lash-lacquered, glitter-lidded. Branded by

brands.

XXI

We used to paint our lips with whale blubber, but now it’s

mostly wax and oils. I have yet to find the perfect shade of

red lipstick. Too orange, too ephemeral, too knife slash.

XXII

I once worked as editor of a spa magazine. I wrote dull

copy about acrylic nails and Glycolic peels, and was sent

endless products: emery boards and seaweed unguents,

poultices and tanning sprays; exfoliation aids in wood and

sisal. I interviewed a woman who gave facials with coloured

oils selected for a person’s mood and personality. Part spa

treatment, part mystical woo. In her tiny salon, above a pub,

she told me about oneness and inner beauty, self-examination

and higher powers. After a pause in her well-rehearsed pitch,

she pointed to a fleshy bump on my forehead and said:

Would you not get that removed?

XXIII

In 1967, Irish-born writer Lucy Grealy moved to the US

with her family. Life opened up with possibility, but aged

nine she was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare facial

cancer. Grealy endured thirty operations, radiation and

chemotherapy. In Autobiography of a Face, her novelistic

memoir, she writes: ‘This singularity of meaning—I was

my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also

offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching

pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognisable

place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life.

Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as

personal vanishing point.’

XXIV

I have never broken a limb, even if my bones are

troublesome.

I have never needed stitches because of a cut.

I have never exposed my insides except for surgical

wounds.

My skin resealed with metal, paper and thread.

XXV

When my teenage hip started to disintegrate, baffled doctors

kept asking increasingly random questions:

Did you fall?

(Who doesn’t?)

Have you ever been knocked down by a car? (Once, but the driver

was going slow and we lived in a cul-de-sac.)

Have you ever had a tropical disease? (Can you get one from

going to Spain?)

Have you ever been bitten by an animal or strange creature? (I tell

him about Lough Derg.)

XXVI

At Dromineer, Lough Derg was like a beach. I swam out

far from the shore to float in the navy current that skirted

the lake like isobars. Swimming back, I stood when the

water was knee high, and felt a sharp pinch on my foot. It

wasn’t glass, and felt more like a bite, but I couldn’t see what

lurked beneath. I thought of monsters and sea demons, the

creature of the lake. There are not enough horror films set

underwater.

XXVII

A hotel exterior, painted walls, a fleeing woman in a scarlet

coat, the vertical lines of blood on a hanging woman’s legs, a

nosebleed, a trickle from a mouth. In Suspiria, Dario Argento

reminds us that we bleed; that the body is vulnerable—not

just to psychologies and fear—but to knives and violence.

The body is the ultimate horror setting.

XXVIII

I look at the mottled skin at your back as a forensic scientist

examines blood splatter.

XXIX

After major surgery:

I wake up to find my skin yellow and assume this is iodine

or antiseptic used to prep the body for being opened to the

elements.

I wake up to find that this yellow is not an ointment, but

bruising, from the pressure of knives, the kneading of

hands.

I wake up to red and yellow patches, pools of colour, the

body’s semaphore.

I wake up during hip replacement surgery and feel strong

hands shoving, the weight of arms, a rearrangement.

Who’s pushing me? I ask, before the anaesthetist tops up

the spinal block, shoving me back under the waves.

XXX

Arthritis and surgery withered my bones. My left leg is

thinner than the right, full of metal and scars. Frida Kahlo’s

right leg was thinner than her left, a result of childhood polio.

Kahlo painted not just her body, not just pain, but body and

pain united. Exposed spinal columns, a womb that triggered

miscarriages, herself pierced by nails in multiple works. In

her diary, she wrote: ‘I am DISINTEGRATION.’

XXXI

Eventually Kahlo’s leg was amputated below the knee and

in 1953, a year before her death, she had a prosthetic limb

made. A laced-platform boot with Chinese embroidery in

red leather. Red as defiance, and for the body and for all the

blood she’d shed.

XXXII

For nearly three months, I wore a cast that covered most

of me. When it was removed, the skin had piled up, and

looked like wax. The sediment of immobility. Removing it

was like rubbing smudges on a windowpane. I felt like a

snake shedding its skin.

XXXIII

Bones are hard as rock but our edges—skin, lids—are not

shores. The body is an island of sorts, containing several

isthmuses, in the throat, fallopian tube, prostate, thyroid,

urethra, aorta, uterus. Body as outpost, as tidal island.

XXXIV

In Northern Ireland we pass bays and inlets, but also red

phone boxes, red postboxes. Imperial, post-Colonial red.

The red stripe of St George’s flag, many Red Hands of

Ulster.

XXXV

I think of you as though you are a map. Of the contours of

your jaw, the hill of your back, the compass of your arms. I

see them now, at 10 and 2, an almost-Jesus on a cross. I try

to imagine your body at 11:11, or 12:34.

XXXVI

We play The Alphabet Body game and you laugh when I get

Z. What about Zinn’s Zonule? I offer, but you think I’m making

it up. The suspensory ligament holding the crystalline lens

of the eye in place. It’s not immediately tangible; there are

no children’s flash cards like there are for eye or mouth.

Zygomatic Bone you say, and ask me its location. It sounds like

zygote, so I guess it is uterine or cervical. I’ll answer by kissing

you there you say, and brush your lips against my cheekbone.

XXXVII

After the birth of my daughter, by C-section, my husband

said he looked up at the wrong time and saw my intestines.

The operating theatre floor looked like a murder had been

committed. And you were red too on the outside, viscous

and slippery as albumen, but your skin was blue, your lungs

working to inflate.

XXXVIII

After the birth of my son, he weighs no more than a couple

of bags of sugar, but I cannot pick him up. A new pain

in my wrist is intense, and feels close to the surface, like

someone tipping a scalding cup over it. I take a glass lift five

floors to see a man who will fix it. De Quervain’s Syndrome,

he says. Can you get it from lifting babies, who are light,

almost not there? Two tendons wrap around each other in a

red embrace. One surgical slit with a scalpel, like a ribbon-

cutting ceremony and it will be free. This injury is also called

Washerwoman’s Sprain (not Washerman’s).

XXXIX

The patron saint of childbirth, St. Margaret of Antioch, was

a committed virgin. Tortured for her faith, her flesh slashed

with nails, she was given the title after an encounter with

a dragon. The creature swallowed her whole, so Margaret

made the sign of the cross and promptly burst out of its

stomach, Alien-style. (Film critic Mark Kermode once said

that Alien is a film about male fear of childbirth).

XL

I know a girl with Rosacea, which makes me think of

‘Rosary,’ not red. The skin is affected with papules and

pustules, reminding me of holy beads. I love these words

for awful things, and the galaxy of red under the moons of

her eyes.

XLI

You do not own your body if you live in this country. Your

womb is not under your control. Legislation owns your

ovaries. Lawyers lay claim to your fallopian tubes. The

government pays stamp duty on your cervix.

XLII

Tick tock, women’s body clocks.

Have a baby even though you’re not ready.

Have a baby when you can’t afford a home.

Have a baby when you’ve been raped.

Have a baby because you can’t afford the airfare to London

or Liverpool.

Have a baby between twenty and thirty-four, it’s the optimum

fertility window, they

keep

reminding

us.

The ticking of ovaries, your body as timepiece, swinging on

a chain.

XLIII

Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes.

Or

HIPS! TITS! LIPS! POWER! (REPEAT)

XLIV

Once you enter the medical system, there are rooms and

hospital numbers, blue disposable gowns and Styrofoam

cups. There are people speaking—always speaking—asking

questions, taking details. The body you think of as yours

is not private. It is in the system, on charts, in operating

theatres. Your body needs to take the lift to x-ray. Your body

needs to drink more fluids. Your body needs to come back

in three months. Your body is ours.

XLV

Just before her lumpectomy, photographer Jo Spence wrote

on her left breast: Property of Jo Spence? The question mark is

defiant and panic-stricken. The need to hold on to this part

of herself. To assert autonomy, even over the toxic growth

in her chest. To have a say in her own medical life. Later,

post-lumpectomy, Spence is photographed in profile, breast

puckered and scarred. Wearing a crash helmet, the image is

uncompromising. Come at me, it says.

XLVI

In the hospital, you are not supposed to use your hands.

In the bathroom, toilets flush and taps spill and blue

paper towels dispense with the wave of a sensor. Germs,

cleanliness, DO NOT TOUCH. The ward is a bubble,

confined and contained, and I feel like Margaret Atwood’s

‘Girl Without Hands.’

No one can enter that circle

you have made, that clean circle

of dead space you have made

and stay inside,

mourning because it is clean.*

XLVII

He used to give himself stigmata. Burning the hollow of his

hand with cigarettes. Pressing the red sieve tip into his heart

line, head line, life line. This is for you, he said, but I know it

connected him to himself.

XLVIII

The Catholic Church’s list of notable stigmatics is comprised

mostly of women, including St. Catherine of Siena. Born in

the mid-fourteenth century, she believed she was married

to Jesus, and that her (invisible) wedding ring was made of

his foreskin. Her stigmatic wounds were visible only to her,

and she suffered from anaemia. Every day, she fasted and

engaged in self-flagellation until she drew blood. In one of

many letters to her confessor, Raymond of Capua, she spoke

of a vision where she leads her followers into the wound in

Christ’s side, guiding an army into his blood.

XLIX

My birthday is the anniversary of the death of St. Ignatius

Loyola. Once a soldier, he was shot through the hip,

shattering his leg. I’ve never gone to war or been beatified.

L

There is no redness in death. Maybe this is where William

Gass’ interior blue comes in. But the body turns many

colours at the end: white, grey, blue, purple, a tinge of green.

The body spent and stopped and still is not red.

But when will the red stop?

When will I die?

  When will you?

[morganmulchi-blog]

And they overcame him [the enemy] by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony… (Revelation 12:11 NIV)

[ OVERCOME :: verb – succeed in dealing with (a problem or difficulty) ; defeat (an opponent) ; prevail ]

We can sit on our battle wounds, sit on our scars.  We can hide them.  We can push them under our coats of performance or perfection or “normalcy”. We can keep their stories quiet.

Or we can expose them, risk sharing them. We can share our scars’ stories and open them up to the oxygen outside their hiding places so they can breathe and heal, really heal.  We can tell the stories of our battle scars so others can hear them and so others can gain strength from them. We can tell the stories of our battle scars to celebrate the songs that they sing.

May we tell the stories of our scars to celebrate the songs they sing.

Songs of victory.

A Victory Song

It was 6th grade Health class.  We were watching a movie on suicide and suicide prevention, and my innocent ears couldn’t tune out the deep voice of the narrator as he shared stories and statistics on the topic.  I was sitting in the back of the classroom at my desk, scared to watch the video yet as a student, unable to leave the room for more than a quick bathroom break. The film was being so detailed about kids who were suicidal and what their tendencies were, what their thoughts were and how they acted. I was scared hearing these things.  It was a terrifying topic for my 11 year old mind to try and comprehend, and that was before the moment itself actually came.

But let’s not start there.

Let’s start from the beginning.

I was born during the time of boy bands and Furbies – an early nineties baby born into a family with two amazing parents, a beautiful older sister, and a little pink house in a small Charlotte neighborhood.

If you lived in that little pink house (which yes, in fact was pink), you believed in Jesus, said your prayers before bed and understood the household standard of southern hospitality and good ole’ love and respect. I grew up going to church and was baptized around the age of eight, fully aware of the decision I was making and fully aware of my God who created and loved me.  God was always there.

When I was still in elementary school my family picked everything up and moved from our cute Mellencamp house in Charlotte to a nicer home in Harrisburg, North Carolina, but my parents made sure we packed our great memories with us along with our deep faith.  Looking back, I am so thankful to have grown up personally knowing God like I did. There’s nothing sweeter than a childlike faith, and I’m grateful to have been raised in an environment that encouraged my walk with the Lord. I actually attest the foundational joy that I have now, which started as a young child, to knowing God for so long. He was always there.

However, middle school years were particularly tough for me, and I remember always being right on the outside of the ‘cool’ crowd, right on the outside of being…well, in. I thrived on academics and dance, but there was something about those few years of teenage awkwardness that I didn’t quite seem to have down (though who ever really does…it’s middle school!). As if the braces and red-framed glasses didn’t help enough, I remember sitting in the atrium of the school on the outside circle of the group of pretty people and class all-stars. Looking back, that moment served as a metaphor for where I sat in the social hierarchy of my pre-teen years.

And then came that day in 6th grade.

As I said before, we were in Health class and were watching a film on suicide (a topic I personally believe NO young mind should ever be exposed to). I was uncomfortable watching it because it frightened me, but being that it was the end of the day and I was likely not going to share my discomfort with the teacher (#SOuncool), I sat there in the back of the class squirming in my seat, writing “I love you Jesus” over and over on my notebook paper and trying to avoid hearing too much.

A part of the film came where the narrator spoke about the actions a teenage boy took in the days before he ended his life, one of those actions being that he gave away his personal items – things like his wallet. In those moments, in that Health class, I felt a question rise up in my mind – a deceptive and confusing thought that would follow me for many years to come: I’ve given some of my things away before.  I’ve done some of the acts he’s mentioned.  Am I suicidal? Maybe I am.  

At that moment, in that Health class, fear of self-harm and the harming of others entered my heart and mind.  I became overwhelmed by the dread and horror of such acts and equally as horrified that I had actually thought I might want to attempt such things. As you’re reading this correctly, you’ll see that it wasn’t my desire to do any of those awful deeds. I wasn’t suicidal. I wasn’t angry or vengeful. I was a vibrant and joyful young girl with Jesus in my heart and a bright future in my eyes (despite those desperately unfashionable glasses I wore…sigh). However, that simple lie from the enemy had so horrified me in my young age that I couldn’t help but feel confused about my motives and intentions, and because of that, feel dirty and ashamed.

Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings. (1 Peter 5:9 NIV)

The enemy is an awful one, isn’t he?  He doesn’t care about how young or innocent you are but will do anything he can to try and take you, God’s beloved, out of the game. His craftiness goes as far back as the book of Genesis when he confused Eve into thinking she could eat from the Tree of Knowledge. He twisted her perception and convinced her to believe something contrary to God’s truth, and unfortunately, she fell for it.  And so had I.

And surprising as it may sound, I couldn’t shake that fright. For years after that day I struggled with waves of fear, having terrible thoughts of wicked acts like suicide and murder roll through my head like destructive storms : they’d come in, tear the serene landscape of my mind apart, and then roll out, leaving me there to clean up the pieces. The irrationality of it seems crazy though, right? To have a fear of thoughts, a fear of doing something to myself or someone else that I didn’t in fact want to do – it almost sounds silly.  However, the deceptive seed that had been planted in my mind on that 6th grade day had started taking root and was choking out the garden of peace in my mind and spirit.

I questioned how much God could love and forgive me. After all, God had to be disappointed.  How could He love me with all of those terrible thoughts running around in my head? I wasn’t a bad person on the outside, and (because I didn’t WANT to do the bad things in my mind) I didn’t THINK I was a bad person on the inside, but those thoughts and that FEAR that haunted me (that I tried so hard to push away) made me feel that I had to earn God’s love anyway, which we know we can never actually do.  I would have conversations with my dad late at night saying, “Dad what if I think I’m good with God, but when I get to Heaven He says we weren’t on the same page and sends me to hell?” Or, in an attempt to divulge some of this inner turmoil, I would ask him, “Dad what if I have thoughts of bad things but don’t want to DO those things?” And though he made valiant attempts to comfort me with things like, “Morg, it’s not what’s in your head, it’s what’s in your heart,” I could never quite shake that painful confusion.

However, despite those seasons of inner turmoil, my upbringing was filled with beautiful moments of family, friends and JOY, and a common thread wove itself through all of my child, adolescent and teenage years – the thread of Jesus Christ. I look back and see times of sweet peace in my life, of progress and victory despite the waves of internal and external trial, and I know the only way that could have happened was because of God’s covering, His leading, His Spirit in me.  

The same childhood bedroom that saw tears from fear and confusion was the room that my parents let me cover with hand-painted Bible verses and was the same room filled with stuffed animals and sleepovers.  

The car that I’d drive to my dance studio (a refuge where my fear would temporarily subside) was a car often filled with uplifting worship music (sung countless times with an open sunroof and blasting speakers – some things never change).  

I even experienced God’s overwhelming peace for the first time as I prayed one day on my parents’ bed. I had cried out to God for help and received his awesome peace, not yet knowing the scripture Philippians 4:6 which only until months later would I read for the first time.

…by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:7 NIV)

Despite the enemy’s regular attempts to confuse me and take me out (quite literally), I continued to grow in my faith, walk into my destiny, and experience God’s love and hope in greater and greater ways. God was always there.

And even in my lowest points that came later in life – when I wouldn’t watch any movie or show with a lot of violence, when I cringed at medicine commercials as they mentioned “suicidal thoughts” as a side effect, when at age 18 I wouldn’t go into the kitchen for fear of touching knives and harming myself or others (yes, it’s true) - God was always there.

He was there when I hit my knees on my bedroom floor, close to giving up and praying to what only felt like the ceiling. He was there in the park when I sat at a picnic table trying to figure out what was going on with my life and desperate for answers. He was there the night I sat all alone at my apartment fighting contractions of anxiety with only worship music and His Word. He was there.

And he was also there when I thrived academically through high school and college. He was with me when I went on my (fully-funded) first mission trip to Los Angeles and first heard my call to women’s ministry. He was there when I left college and a 4.0 GPA to complete my second year internship at Freedom House Church.  He was there when I received my prayer language, when I spoke my first message on platform at Freedom House Church and when I came on staff and began this journey into ministry that I am so grateful to be on now.

Through the clearest mountaintops and the foggiest valleys, God has always been there, and because of that Presence, I haven’t limped through life with these challenges but I’ve actually grown and thrived DESPITE them.

And that’s just who God is.  He’s there with us in our lowest moments, in our times of trial, in our successes and in our greatest victories.  He has NEVER left us, and he never will – He’s a faithful, loving God who has a never-ending HOPE for our lives – lives filled with joy and peace in his Presence.

The thief [enemy] comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (John 10:10 NIV)

There are a few things I’ve learned from this journey and a few truths I’m still uncovering as I run this race. I hope these few encouraging words speak to you in YOUR personal journey with God.

1.    God is always with us, no matter what the enemy is up to or what life circumstances we face. The Bible says he is an EVERPRESENT help in times of need (Psalm 46:1), and he never leaves us or forsakes us (Deuteronomy 31:6).  The sun may be tucked behind the clouds some days, but we know at all times that it’s still there in the sky; the same is with our Heavenly Father.  Some days we feel his great warmth and some days we have to rely on our faith to know that he’s still with us, but he is.  And he’s still all-loving and all-powerful and is cheering us on as we walk out the calling he has for our lives. He is always there.

2.    As a mentor of mine has said to me for years – Know your Bible. The power in those three words is tremendous.  To face any trial, to nullify any lie, to be able to (I believe) survive and THRIVE as believers in this tough world we have to know God’s Truth.  It’s everything. God’s Word is our sword, it’s our bread, it’s our lifeline, and we need to have it ingrained in our hearts so we can BE encouraged and so we can also ENCOURAGE others in their own lives.  With as much emphasis as I can convey – we must know our Bible. If you have read this far in my story and are financially unable to purchase a Bible, please reach out to me and I will personally get you one.  It’s simply vital.

3.    Our lives are JOURNEYS, and if we are always looking for the destination, it can become quite exhausting when we realize how far off that destination actually is.  As much as I wish I could steer my life’s ship onto the golden shores of an easy, struggle-free life, that’s just not reality in this world.  Reality is that we will face trials of many kinds, and some of those we may wrestle with at varying degrees of difficulty throughout our lives (the enemy doesn’t stop his fighting!).  However, we can rest assured that with Jesus in our boats, we are SAFE, we are STRONG, we have AUTHORITY over the enemy (remember – he is under your feet!), we are LOVED and we are headed in a FIXED, GUIDED direction no matter the storms we face. We are meant to rest and ENJOY the ride because our God is with us, and he is GOOD.

The Lord is my light and my salvation – whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life – of whom shall I be afraid? (Psalm 27:1 NIV)

And finally, I’ve been learning throughout this journey the power in our scars and the power in their stories. We’re in a real, spiritual fight on this earth for God’s kingdom and for His people, and that means life’s difficulties will often leave us with battle wounds. However, God’s Word says we overcome by His Son’s blood and by our TESTIMONY, and though for a long time I kept this piece of my story quiet, God’s shown me that it is when I share the stories of my scars (even if I’m still in the midst of the battle), I find the MOST empowerment and am able to encourage others on their journeys too.

When we freely expose our scars to the oxygen outside their hiding places, they heal greatly while helping others to heal as well. When we tell our battle scars’ stories, they have beautiful songs to sing, and those songs need to be heard.

May you find encouragement today to tell the stories of your scars so their songs can be heard.

Because those songs, my sweet friend, sing of victory.

[earthamather-blog]

10 Mozart Quotes To Celebrate The Birth Of An Inspiration.

If you have listened to the phrase vision board prior to but never ever actually knew exactly what it was, it is a tool that is so helpful in people's lives. In conclusion I really feel that the neo classic style is a substantial impact on my layouts where it can be. The style can only be made use of where ideal and also carried out where able because of its elegant and detailed layouts needing big areas and also grand setups to completely appreciate the style. Art takes them to areas in their mind that they wouldn't otherwise go to, makes them feel things that they never knew they might really feel. Facebook quietly started the View Tags program a year ago with a choose team of partners that could just drop cookies just exceptional ads took care of straight with Facebook's sales group. OneWed, the firm previously referred to as Nearlyweds, is now on iPad The new application silently got here just before the vacations, supplying a brand-new method for brides-to-be to search, be influenced by, conserve as well as share wedding celebration imagery and ideas. After my post on how you can write flash fiction was released on the blog on Monday, I was pleased to see individuals uploading examples of their very own micro-fiction. Right here we talk about some prominent motifs as well as ideas you can take to create your personal personal masterpiece. In case you liked this post and you desire to acquire details about mouse click the following post i implore you to check out our own website. This of the most suitable motivational quotes to those that had actually been severely scarred by the individuals who they assumed would certainly like them back. For individuals like us that are moved by spiritual ideas, it is needed that we look for totally up until we reach our location. I wished to produce something that resembled it was created 500 years earlier and use the knots as a style aspect that is woven throughout the project. Solihull's miserable day was verified when midfielder Darren Carter was dispatched six mins from time, for a second yellow card, after a late tackle on Dawson. As well as while the company has actually long been infamous for internal secrecy, separating its projects on a need-to-know basis, Jobs seemed to be suggesting an extra permeable framework where concepts would certainly be a lot more freely shared throughout usual rooms. They're not a part of a large mothership of a company, they could essentially transform points 15-20 times a day and that's just how the procedure has been going. When reviewing his relentless search of credibility and also exactly what figures inspire him most, Eggers discuss the Dutch Golden era of art, Flemish painters, shocks of corn" (when you see those teepee-shaped cones of corn in an area), the Italian supervisor Luchino Visconti, the validity of boned corsets in 1630 (a mildly questionable subject), Stanley Kubrick, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodore Dreyer, Spanish painter Francisco Goya, Hammer Scary" films, Elizabethan witch pamphlets as well as more. So motivation is given up big and also little dosages to individuals throughout the day, on a daily basis. He assisted handle his father's comprehensive profile of residential housing jobs in the New York City districts, and took control of the company - which he renamed the Trump Organization - in 1971. Yet often, a healthy dose of imaginative ideas is in order. However researchers have actually found that when individuals think that they're specialists they come to be extra close minded, an idea termed gained dogmatism We're probably to obtain, and also remain inspired, when we have fresh experiences and details that can trigger understandings. As soon as you have discovered 3 or four suggestions you have fallen for, turn the tv off. . By giving DailyModi extra instructions-- there's just 3 sets of 20 photos to rate every day-- the application pairs ideas discovery with a feeling of achievement when you finish the available sets. When the people around me obtain motivated, they will certainly begin to act and those around them that do not know me will certainly obtain influenced too. • I constantly try to reshape my concepts in various other forms: dance, daytime drama, Olympic competitors, youngsters's video games, porn - anything that will certainly maintain transforming them for opportunities.

[ekniemisba1b-1]

‘Only in Animation’

To what extent does this Paul Wells quote apply to your chosen film? Explain how the medium and materials enter, shape, and define the narrative. If your chosen film subverts or ignores conventional expectations of a ‘plotted’ narrative, identify the strategies employed in its place.

Anomalisa (2015) is a stop motion animated film based on play written by Charlie Kaufman. The film is directed by Kaufman and stop motion animator Duke Johnson, from animation production company Starburns Industries. I will explain how the medium of stop motion and the materials used enter, shape and define the unconventional, but very human narrative of Anomalisa. I will investigate why it can be considered unconventional due to its deviation from expectations of a ‘plotted’ narrative, and what alternative strategies are put in its place, as well as detailing why the plot events can only be achieved through the medium of animation.

Live action film is usually a default for film makers as it is easy, well understood and culturally ingrained. When animation is used, especially stop motion which is rare for a feature film, it is usually an artistic choice to best suit the narrative. In Anomalisa, realism is part of the style of the piece by using realistic puppets with 3D printed faces and life like sets that pay very close attention to detail. According to Carol Koch, the character sculptor on Anomalisa, Kaufman and Johnson could “with a few simple words, draw very concrete pictures in your head” (Variety, 2015). The figures’ realism is a result of a combination of design choices for the materials. Each hair follicle was individually punched into the silicone skin on the arms, eyes and head. The main characters Lisa and Michael had mohair and alpaca hair respectively (Schildhause, 2015).  The eyes were a big focus for the directors who obsessed over making them “very reflective and look moist” in order to avoid uncanny valley and make them “feel alive” (q on cbc, 2016). Another step to avoid uncanny valley was to have bigger heads, hands and stubbier legs that aren’t proportionally human. In another example of hyper realism, the directors chose to show the physical seams of their puppet’s face because it “related to the themes that were in the story” (Smith, 2016). The silicone skin and 3D printed faces have a Caucasian flesh tone and an opaque quality that realistically reflects the light off the skin. The shape of the sculpt also implies a distribution of body fat that resembles a normal human body type. Finally, the doll sized clothing and props for the cast of puppets had a design that specifically complemented the personality of the character, like the long sleeves of both Bella and Lisa which they persistently tug at to show their nervousness.

In Anomalisa there is a heavy focus on the human condition: the film makers use the hyper realistic puppets as a tool to express this, knowing that the audience are innately drawn to faces. All characters apart from Michael and Lisa share the same face and are voiced by Tom Noonan. Using a 3D Program, the puppet makers generated an average face from composites of employees (Schildhause, 2015). With this cast of figures that share the same voice and removable 3D printed face, the directors are able to break the fourth wall in a way that can only be done through this medium. For example, when Michael is losing his mind, he starts peeling back the printed face to reveal the clip mechanism inside his head, then replaces it upon hearing Lisa’s unique voice. This direct acknowledgement of its own medium of puppetry and stop motion has a direct influence on Anomalisa’s narrative, although Kaufman declared that animation was “just another medium to explore”. His main focus was on presenting the narrative so that there is an “interaction between the person who’s viewing it and the piece”, hoping that it was layered enough so that “people can come away with separate and individual reactions to it” (q on cbc, 2016). I believe animation was key in shaping Kaufman’s plot because, in the words of Jennifer Jason Leigh, the voice actor for Lisa, stop motion is “evocative” since we can “project ourselves in a way that you can’t do maybe when it’s a real person” (ScreenSlam, 2015).

Anomalisa was originally a play written by Kaufman resembling a radio play with the actors sitting still on the stage with scripts, and with Carter Burwell’s original score the audience would create the imagery themselves. The same three actors Jennifer Jason Leigh, David Thewlis and Tom Noonan, voiced their characters before any creative design, and recorded them all interacting together. This voice over technique and production order is very unusual for animation, which usually has voice actors alone in booths recording after the animation has been made. Anomalisa’s narrative also ignores conventional expectations in terms of plot structure and its characters. A conventional story is about change, however this isn’t the case for Anomalisa’s main character Michael. Michael is a motivational speaker with a trait akin to the Fregoli delusion, where he sees everyone as the same person and can’t tell them apart. He is stuck in a cycle of loneliness, with an “inability to connect despite being more connected than ever” (Johnson, q on cbc, 2016). This state of mind is questioned when Lisa is introduced into his life: thinking he has finally found someone unique, he showers affection onto this insecure woman, nicknaming her Anomalisa, insisting on her singing for him and proceeding to have sex. However, in the morning she starts to become like everyone else to him; bland and uninteresting, she takes on the face and voice of the crowd, leaving a disappointed Michael to return home. In terms of narrative structure the turning point, Lisa, causes no change or resolution for the protagonist Michael, since he returns home the same as he was at the beginning.

A conventional plot gives us a complete, emotionally satisfying experience with no loose ends, but Anomalisa’s lack of resolution denies the audience this. Michael is also a very unlikable character, fetishizing this low self-esteem woman and dumping her as soon as he’s had his way. Some reviewers believe him to be a narcissist, “using the concept of mental illness as an excuse to treat others interchangeably” (Film Formula, 2016), theorising that Michael may not visually see everyone as the same but it’s how he thinks of them. Alternatively, there is a noticeable change in Lisa, the supporting character, who is shown in the final scene to be pleased with her nickname of Anomalisa, which translates as Goddess of Heaven in Japanese, being visibly more confident and happy. The strategies employed in the absence of these conventional expectations is in the attention to detail in the film’s medium, materials, true to life themes and natural comedy that comes from three talented actors performing together in real time. However, the narrative can also be perceived as conventional in the commonality of loneliness and isolation, making us pity Michael but also fear becoming him. This theme can make the narrative quite a common one, but viewers who look for the finer details find a possible second narrative.

It’s widely hypothesized there are two perceivable narratives within Anomalisa. Taken at face value, Michael meets a unique woman Lisa, spends a night with her, then in the morning they go their separate ways. Prior to the meeting, he drunkenly purchases an unusual antique while looking for a souvenir for his son: a Japanese sex doll. The next time we see the doll is when he presents it to his disapproving son. As it sings a traditional Japanese folk song his wife comments on the semen like substance coming out of it. The last time we see Michael, he is sitting opposite the doll staring at it as it sings with its unique voice. The second narrative hypothesis is that Lisa was this unusual Japanese sex doll. There are plenty of similarities between the two and clues to suggest that they are one and the same, and we must remember that we are seeing the story through Michael’s unreliable eyes, where things are not what they seem. “Characters are interesting when there’s friction between ‘what’s seen’ and ‘what is’” (White, 2016) and Michael is a perfect example of this. The initial piece of evidence is when Michael hears Lisa’s voice for the first time, during the sequence where he is losing his mind and peeling back his own face.  This is the trigger point where he starts to fantasise that Lisa is a real person. Lisa and the sex doll share a scar on the same side of their face, have a unique voice and both sing for Michael. They also have the same attitude towards Michael, “as a product the doll’s imperative is to please the consumer, just as Lisa supplicates Michael by trying to change herself and her behaviours according to his liking” (Film Formula, 2016). However, the most important piece of evidence is the sex scene and its aftermath. This scene is a long and continuous, focusing entirely on realism between these two characters, but they take no precautions and Michael ejaculates inside her. Kaufman pays very close attention to small details and Johnson “wanted it to be a natural progression” (q on cbc, 2016), so when Lisa has just met this man after not being sexually active for 8 years, you would expect precautions would be on her mind. By choosing not to include this, supports the second narrative since in Michael’s last scene, semen comes out of the doll as it sings. Anomalisa’s two different narratives within one, ignores conventional storytelling but this was exactly the intention of Kaufman so that viewers would have an individual reaction to the piece.

In conclusion, Anomalisa’s attention to detail in its medium and materials perfectly enters, shapes and defines Kaufman’s unconventional narrative, making it so painfully human in its realism, its animation, characters and story. However, despite its realism, Anomalisa still provides a unique experience thanks to the elements that are only available in animation.

Bibliography

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