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novastarrapter · 4 years ago

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New Skullgirls Muse(s)!

I’ve been wondering if I should commit to posting any more rp more muses here; and have been debating how quickly I wanted to throw in Muses here; as I have a feeling most of my muses will have many verse options. I’ll probably give a little alert here every time I have a new Verse or character uploaded in my Muse section! Though uh...I’ve got a bit of a feeling I will get easily carried away and post far too many ;v;

Note that all information on these characters are subject to change based on whatever is most convenient in a roleplay along with roleplay partner perference! The bonds and origins of this character are the default settings for her and I’m willing to change them in various roleplays based depending on the preference of others!! .O.

Also! Trigger warning as the backstory contains kidnapping, child enslavement, and gore!

Note to self: Update these artwork references

Raziel’s origin

(this section is optional depending on how powerful we wish for Raziel to be in a roleplay)

Raziel was originally a very tiny piece of Venus’s body (as it is stated that Venus’s true body exists beyond the threshold of human comprehension, thus I figured it’s a reasonable ability for Venus to take off tiny parts of her body to create mere scouts), to act as one of the various eyes of the trinity to keep an eye on the world. Her abilities are not nearly as vast as the trinity’s, yet she was gifted with the ability to transfer herself across different dimensions and realities(it was basically a concept of a plot device for others to reasonably reach the trinity for a roleplay I was in), yet after a certain incident; she’s become even more weakened and has forgotten how to use her abilities. She’s gained amnesia after falling from a great height (the exact reason I’ve never really specified how it happened, as I’m leaving it open for various interpretations and concepts of how to expand her character)

This origin is mostly how I’d describe her as having ‘hidden potential’ which makes her parasite so desperately cling onto her and thinks that raising her could allow her to become more powerful with time.

However it is entirely possible that the Trinity can still essentially use her as a remote video camera of sorts; as Venus can likely see whatever Raziel can see given she is a part of her.

Backstory

Raziel’s story starts with her seemingly falling through the sky; whether or not she was launched from a great distance or had some other event that caused her to do so is unknown; but it caused her to fall through the roof of an orphanage, where she was nursed back to health by the ones there.

She stated she had amnesia; presumably from her fall, she said she could only remember her name; Raziel. Because she had no memories of her parents or where she originated from, she stayed with the others in the orphanage.

This is the same orphanage that housed Marie and Patricia; though their relationship depends on roleplay partner preference if they prefer them to be close friends or mere acquaintances. Given the fact the orphanage had plenty of other kids inside of it, I figured it wouldn’t be too far fetched to say she could be one of the kids who resided there.

Raziel wasn’t exactly a very social butterfly; so she didn’t particularly spend a lot of time with others, but she was relatively happy being in the orphanage with everyone there.

That is, of course, until the Medici Mafia found the orphanage of course.

Like all of the other kids there, Raziel was enslaved by the Medicis, being forced into manual labor. She was scarred for life when she witnessed the brutal torture of Patricia. The fact that simple acts of rebellion towards them would result in them mutilating her body so horrifically was enough to make her give in to her own fear, feeling petrified at the mere thought of meeting a fate like Patricia had.

Raziel managed to catch wind of Marie’s escape attempt, yet was too terrified of the consequences to accompany her, and stayed behind. This was something that Raziel forever would feel regret for, as this moment made her realize how much of a coward she truly was for not following Marie in her escape. She never found out if Marie ever managed to escape or not. She could only pray that she did not get caught.

As the days went on, she was one of the few that stood the most in line, thus making her a more favorable slave to them, as they decided to keep her around rather than sell her, keeping her as a servant within the Medici Tower.

As Raziel kept serving the Medici Mafia, she almost felt as if her fear was growing stronger each day, at one point she was beginning to feel as if she was hallucinating as she could have sworn that she could see a black liquid leaking through her body, feeling as if her own shadow had a face smiling back at her, paranoid that there was even voices whispering in her head, getting the strange sensation of something crawling through her veins.

She honestly believed that she was beginning to go mad from the fear and anxiety she was dealing with each day. It caused her work to become less efficient as well, causing her captors to grow less patient with her mistakes.

Raziel wasn’t sure how much more she could handle, until one day she heard the voice speak clearly to her.

It told her that it could grant her the ability to set herself free. If they accepted them, they would allow her to never have to fear anyone again.

Raziel accepted the proposition the voice offered.

Within moments, the crawling in her skin began to intensify, she felt agonizing pain as they felt something attaching itself to Raziel’s body, before suddenly having various black tendrils rip out of her flesh.

There was a face being seen out of one of the tendrils, a face that looked like the ones she saw in her hallucinations. She could also see that the tendrils seemed to be made of a black liquid that seemed capable of transforming into a physical and semi-physical states.

The shadowy tendrils emitting from her body caused carnage to any mafia member that got too close to Raziel as she fled the tower, allowing her to successfully escape from the Medici Mafia.

Once in a more safe location; Raziel managed to soon get some answers from the shadowy demon that was lurking inside of her. He stated that his name was Nightmare. Nightmare was something called a Theon, or as others may more commonly refer to as a Parasite.

Raziel didn’t have any knowledge of what a Parasite was, so she was rightly confused. Whilst Nightmare may have skipped some details about himself, he did promise one thing. So long as he was by her side, nothing could harm her.

Nightmare

I made Nightmare a long time ago; and he’s always been that character that I know has a few oc Taboos such as being an overly edgy character that’s been more of an entity, but..I’ve always had a soft spot for him? So I’ve always kind of reinterpreted him time and time again ^^; I may reuse him for other things but this’ll be describing his skullgirl verse version.

Also I swear he wasn’t made to look like Sampson as I made him before I even saw Fillia or Sampson ^^; I know he has similarities to his design and abilities; though given how little we know about parasites/theons in the skullgirls universe; I feel like it isn’t TOO unreasonable for Parasites to share physical traits by coincidence. Though I have considered playing off this fact of him trying to impersonate Sampson, I figured it’d be easier to play it off as a coincidence for simplicity’s sake

It is entirely possible/optional for Sampson and Leviathan to have heard of him in the past given them being rather old parasites, but it also makes sense given Nightmare’s more secretive methods for them to have never heard of eachother.

Sekhmet is also a potential character that could have met Nightmare in the past; as I think it is possible that they could have had temporary alliances in the past, though I think both of them would be too smart to trust the other as proper friends or teammates given they’d probably know the other wouldn’t hesitate to stab the other in the back.

Abilities

Nightmare’s body is made of a rather bizzare black liquid of some form; yet capable of shifting each bit of it’s slimy form freely, and even capable of hardening itself into a physical or semi-physical shape.

His body is difficult to move without a host however. Even though his body can be split into various pieces, he can still move each part of his detached body remotely; although smaller parts would be slower and less capable; and could not become quite as mobile as his primary ‘body’.

An easy way to describe nightmare’s body would be to refer to the Symbiote from Spiderman; or Ragnarok from Soul Eater in a way.

If he loses more of his mass, he can acquire more mass by feeding on humans. He can either feed on their physical bodies for a more potent effect, or to keep himself stable he can instead just feed simply on either their emotions or parts of their mind.

When attached to a host; he usually lurks within the bloodstream of his Host; with the ‘core’ of his body usually lurking around the host’s brain, where he can leave parts of his body inside of their brain to cause their host to hallucinate.

These hallucinations can allow him to either discreetly communicate with his host, displaying a hallucination of his body to talk to them a bit more properly, or just to cause them to panic (as he finds fear to taste delicious.)

He has a large amount of control over his host’s body, although when he takes control; his hosts usually tend to freak out.

Once he is attached to a host; he is capable of ripping parts of his body out of the host for various attacks, as he is capable of focusing the full potential of his shapeshifting abilities when connected. He can also quickly knit the host’s flesh back together after ripping through it.

However; like all parasites; his host will die whenever he completely disconnects his main core body away from the host.

Backstory

Nightmare is a rather old Parasite; however he will insist to refer to him as a Theon, as he much prefers the title. Nightmare has always been intrigued by the potential of power; and has always grown curious of how great his personal strength could become.

He has lived throughout the years living in the shadows, observing closely the nature of those with much more capable powers than himself, studying the essence of power.

Unlike some of the more merciful Theons; Nightmare rarely felt any sense of bonding towards his hosts. He often referred to mankind as mere livestock, although he always made sure to be cautious to keep his existence secret if possible; as it made his research easier if the world didn’t know about him; preferring if he was left as a myth at best.

He will usually only keep a host around for as long as he deems them useful. Once he deemed a host is no longer suitable for his needs; he will drain their bodies dry; killing them from the inside out before moving onto the next host like a horrific disease.

Throughout the years he’s had more smaller parts of his body scout throughout the world to perform his research; plotting and planning as he wanted to rise in power. Though he hasn’t made as much progress as he would have liked; Nightmare was nothing if not patient.

One day; he had managed to find a human that had a body unlike any other mortal he’s found before. One with an unusual power that was tucked deep inside of her. It was a young child known as Raziel.

Usually he’d rip his way inside of the victim’s body; trying to take the body by force. But the fact her abilities were paranormal; and have not developed yet; he figured this host would need to last longer than any of his other hosts, so he’d have to practice caution not to break her too quickly.

Though with his sadistic nature; he couldn’t help giving her a few teases along the way. Playing with the sanity of mortals was a hobby that has grown into a habit for him; and quite frankly he admired playing with his food.

He even gave her the illusion of choice when he offered to make the connection. He could have connected to her at any moment, but he chose to lead her into a situation where she could not resist saying no to him. Make her believe that the devil was her guardian angel.

Nightmare caused the girl to make mistakes at the most horrific moments, causing her employers to grow less merciful towards her. When she was in her greatest hour of need, that was when he finally spoke to her and made his offer.

Once she accepted, he made the connection official.

Tricking and manipulating the girl was far too easy for him. She was just a stupid prey to him; playing right into his hands.

Tag: #Parasite | Raziel and Nightmare

#rp muse #Skullgirls #OC #Oc bio #Rp #Roleplay #Parasite | Raziel and Nightmare

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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One Handgun, 9 Murders: How American Firearms Cause Carnage Abroad https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/world/americas/one-handgun-9-murders-how-american-firearms-cause-carnage-abroad.html

With unregulated gun sales, the United States is fueling gun violence and murder abroad. #EnoughIsEnough

One Handgun, 9 Murders: How American Firearms Cause Carnage Abroad

Hundreds of thousands of guns sold in the United States vanish because of loose American gun laws. Many reappear in Jamaica, turning its streets into battlefields.

By Azam Ahmed, Photographs by Tyler Hicks | Published August 25, 2019 Updated 9:53 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted August 25, 2019 10:25 AM ET |

CLARENDON, Jamaica — She came to Jamaica from the United States about four years ago, sneaking in illegally, stowed away to avoid detection. Within a few short years, she became one of the nation’s most-wanted assassins.

She preyed on the parish of Clarendon, carrying out nine confirmed kills, including a double homicide outside a bar, the killing of a father at a wake and the murder of a single mother of three. Her violence was indiscriminate: She shot and nearly killed a 14-year-old girl getting ready for church.

With few clues to identify her, the police named her Briana. They knew only her country of origin — the United States — where she had been virtually untraceable since 1991. She was a phantom, the eighth-most-wanted killer on an island with no shortage of murder, suffering one of the highest homicide rates in the world. And she was only one of thousands.

Briana, serial number 245PN70462, was a 9-millimeter Browning handgun.

An outbreak of violence is afflicting Jamaica, born of small-time gangs, warring criminals and neighborhood feuds that go back generations — hand-me-down hatred fueled by pride. This year, the government called a state of emergency to stop the bloodshed in national hot spots, sending the military into the streets.

Guns like Briana reside at the epicenter of the crisis. Worldwide, 32 percent of homicides are committed with firearms, according to the Igarapé Institute, a research group. In Jamaica, the figure is higher than 80 percent. And most of those guns come from the United States, amassed by exploiting loose American gun laws that facilitate the carnage.

While the gun control debate has flared in the United States for decades — most recently after the mass shootings this month in El Paso and Dayton — American firearms are pouring into neighboring countries and igniting record violence, in part because of federal and state restrictions that make it difficult, or sometimes nearly impossible, to track the weapons and interrupt smuggling networks.

In the United States, the dispute over guns focuses almost exclusively on the policies, consequences and constitutional rights of American citizens, often framed by the assertion “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” — that the reckless acts of a few should not dictate access for all.

But here in Jamaica, there is no such debate. Law enforcement officials, politicians and even gangsters on the street agree: It’s the abundance of guns, typically from the United States, that makes the country so deadly. And while the argument over gun control plays on a continual loop in the United States, Jamaicans say they are dying because of it — at a rate that is nine times the global average.

“Many people in the U.S. see gun control as a purely domestic issue,” said Anthony Clayton, the lead author of Jamaica’s 2014 National Security Policy. But America’s “long-suffering neighbors, whose citizens are being murdered by U.S. weapons, have a very different perspective.”

Firearms play such a central role in Jamaican murders that the authorities keep a list of the nation’s 30 deadliest guns, based on ballistic matches. To keep track of them, they are given names, like Ghost or Ambrogio.

Some, like Briana, are so poorly documented that the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has nothing more than a piece of paper with the name and details of the original buyer, according to confidential documents reviewed by The New York Times.

Purchased in 1991 by a farmer in Greenville, N.C., the Browning vanished from the public record for nearly 24 years — until it suddenly started wreaking havoc in Jamaica. For three years, its ballistic fingerprint connected it to shootings, mystifying law enforcement. Finally, after a firefight with the police, it was recovered last year and its bloody run came to an end.

The authorities traced the serial number back to the handgun’s original owner. But that did not explain how the weapon wound up in Jamaica decades later. Or how the authorities could prevent the next Briana from arriving.

The mystery is no accident. By law, licensed gun merchants in the United States are not required to do much more than record retail sales, and usually don’t have to report them to the authorities. After that, if a gun is stolen, lost or handed to someone else, paperwork is only sometimes required.

Only a few American states mandate the registration of some or all firearms. Several other states explicitly prohibit it. And there is no national, comprehensive registry of gun ownership. The federal government is forbidden to create one.

Drawing on court documents, case files, dozens of interviews and confidential data from law enforcement officials in both countries, The Times traced a single gun — Briana — to nine different homicides in Clarendon, a largely rural area of Jamaica where violence has spiked in recent years.

It is just one of the hundreds of thousands of guns that leak out of the United States and overwhelm countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 100,000 people are killed every year across the region — most of them by firearms.

“I still love him and miss him all the time,” said Clovis Cooke Sr., weeping over the murder of his son, Clovis Jr., who was gunned down in 2017 with the Browning the authorities call Briana.

“He took care of me,” Mr. Cooke said of his son. “Every week he would come by and bring food and groceries and pay the bills.”

Jamaica brims with losses like his. American weapons are routinely funneled into the country aboard ships, flooding cities like Kingston, the capital, where high-grade assault rifles are wielded by warring gangs.

Jamaica’s own gun laws are relatively strict, with fewer than 45,000 legal firearms in a country of almost three million.

But it is awash in illegal weapons. The Jamaican authorities, who estimate that 200 guns are smuggled into the country from the United States every month, routinely ask American officials to examine some of the weapons they seize in raids, during traffic stops or at the ports.

Of the nearly 1,500 weapons the A.T.F. checked from 2016 through 2018, 71 percent came from the United States.

The figures are similar in Mexico, which has been lobbying the United States for more than a decade to stop the illegal guns flowing south. By some estimates, more than 200,000 guns are trafficked into Mexico each year, many to feed the vast criminal networks fighting over the multibillion-dollar drug trade to the United States.

But here in Jamaica, the killings are rarely driven by such enormous profits. The drug trade has fallen from its heyday, organized crime has been fractured and most of the historic kingpins have been killed or imprisoned.

Instead, the guns in Jamaica are often used in petty feuds, neighborhood beefs and turf wars that go back decades, to when political parties authored the majority of the country’s violence.

Because guns are so plentiful, small insults and old vendettas that might otherwise leave few casualties grow much more dangerous — not just for the combatants, but also for anyone who happens to be in the way.

“A lot of violence is the result of people settling their disputes, and with all the guns in the country, it is easy to settle things that way,” said Orlando Patterson, a Jamaican-born sociology professor at Harvard University. “That is where it’s at right now. The early factors, the politics, international drugs, they are gone.”

Even some of the gang members agree they are often fighting over small stakes — and sometimes no financial stakes at all.

“I mean, with or without the guns, we will still fight,” said one gang leader in Kingston, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of arrest. “But the guns make it deadlier. There would be a big difference without as many guns.”

From North Carolina Into Thin Air

Johnnie Ray Dunn walked into a North Carolina gun store in the fall of 1991 and purchased an American icon: a 9-millimeter Browning.

With its all-steel frame, the gun was built to weather abuse, with a reputation for accuracy and functionality.

Mr. Dunn, a farmer, handed over his details and went home with a gun that, if maintained, would last a lifetime.

That’s where Briana’s paper trail began — and ended.

President Ronald Reagan had signed a bill that prohibited the creation of any sweeping national gun registry five years earlier, a pivotal piece of legislation in the history of American gun law.

The National Rifle Association lobbied heavily for the bill, which many saw as a way of expanding gun sales by ensuring easy access to firearms. Underpinning the effort was a warning that still resonates with many of the law’s supporters today: that a national registry would enable the United States government to keep track of gun owners and crack down on their right to bear arms.

“It will be used to take away our guns,” said John Donohue III, a professor at Stanford Law School, explaining one of the main talking points against a national registry.

The law effectively ruled out a federal system of tracking all firearms. So when Mr. Dunn’s gun suddenly showed up in Jamaica, linked to a series of homicides from 2015 through early 2018, no one could figure out how it got there.

The A.T.F. was unable to trace the gun beyond its initial purchase, and Mr. Dunn would not have been required to report if it had been sold, swapped, lost or stolen. The weapon disappeared into what some experts call the black hole of American gun laws.

Mr. Dunn died in 2011, according to a local newspaper obituary, and is not considered a suspect in the gun’s path to Jamaica. The Times attempted to reach his family, without success.

Guns like his regularly torment Jamaican officials. Most firearms used in crimes are orphans of a system that seems geared to forget them. Purchased legally, they eventually fall into the vast ocean of what the A.T.F. estimates to be more than 300 million guns circulating in the United States, their chain of ownership often irrevocably broken.

“This is the stereotypical crime gun,” said Joseph Blocher, a professor at Duke University School of Law. “They almost all originate with a legal sale and are then passed on, stolen or otherwise vanish before reappearing in a crime.”

Because Jamaican officials cannot tell how handguns like the 9-millimeter Browning entered their country — even with the assistance of American law enforcement — they struggle to shut down the smuggling rings that fuel the nation’s violence.

All they know is that, more than 20 years after being sold in North Carolina, the handgun became one of the most lethal in Jamaica, the tool of a one-eyed gangster named Hawk Eye.

Samuda Daley got the nickname as a boy. He saw poorly out of one eye, and after an unsuccessful surgery left it covered in a milky film, his alias was born.

Mr. Daley was a product of violence, shaped by its near constant presence in his life. As a child, a relative said, his mother was stabbed to death by his uncle.

By ninth grade, he had dropped out of school to start working at a sugar factory, telling his family he didn’t want to rely on anyone. He joined the Gaza gang, a clique of young men who had grown up together in a knotted cluster of streets in Clarendon.

They began by hanging out, not fighting, his family said. But in the crucible of poverty and desperation, where small conflicts can turn deadly, they ran afoul of a similar group, the King Street gang. The rivalry grew quickly.

On Sept. 19, 2015, almost exactly 24 years after Mr. Dunn purchased the gun, the first sign that it had made its way to Jamaica appeared: A man named Okeeve Martin was killed with an unknown 9-millimeter Browning.

There was no money or territory at stake, residents say. The motive seemed to be revenge — the girlfriend of the Gaza gang’s leader had been shot by mistake in an earlier episode.

She survived, but the rumor mill led to Mr. Martin, and retribution came swiftly.

The gun lay dormant for a year before claiming the life of a 17-year-old, Shane Sewell, on Sept. 6, 2016. He was walking home, having left a bar after a night with friends. He ended up in a ditch, riddled with bullets, some from the mysterious Browning.

Officials believe he was killed in a dispute over a different firearm. In Jamaica, guns are often rented out by their owners, as a hardware store might rent out valuable tools. The borrower, looking to commit a robbery or even kill someone, pays a fee to use the weapon. Afterward, the gun is returned. Given a gun’s income potential, when one is lost or stolen, the consequences can be deadly.

In the summer of 2017, the Browning struck again. Kurt Mitchell, a fisherman believed to be a member of the King Street gang, was gunned down at a party — a reprisal for an earlier homicide against the Gaza gang, the authorities believe.

His death, in turn, generated still more deaths, in the tragic rhythm that violence often takes in Jamaica.

Much of the fighting today stems from political conflicts that stretch back long before the shooters were born. In past decades, armed groups loyal to one of the two major parties — the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party — battled one another for dominance.

The patronage networks eventually transitioned to crime, stripped of their political focus. Local leaders, known as Dons, grew incredibly powerful, as deep connections to the United States, Canada and Britain enabled their criminal enterprises to become transnational.

But that, too, changed as the government cracked down on the Dons and targeted the drug trade in Jamaica. By 2010, the Dons were all but a thing of the past, with the last major player, Christopher Coke, known locally as Dudus, arrested and extradited to the United States after battles that resulted in the deaths of at least 73 people.

“2010 was a watershed moment,” said Damian Hutchinson, the executive director of the Peace Management Initiative, which works to stop violence in Jamaica’s most dangerous neighborhoods. “The Don culture started to change. The political enforcers were now undermined by younger, less conscientious individuals with less purpose to the violence.”

The splintered factions began fighting one another, leading to more — and more random — violence. Wars broke out between once-aligned blocks and the gangs multiplied, to more than 250 nationwide today.

Those armed factions, fighting a small-scale war, have lifted homicides to new peaks.

The 9-millimeter Browning became a terrifying facet of this landscape, with evidence tying it to more than eight homicide scenes.

As officials tried to stitch together the clues, the gun was repeatedly being used as an enforcement tool of the Gaza gang, often by Mr. Daley, the killer known as Hawk Eye.

He was quiet, never bragging about his exploits, residents and family members said. He didn’t need to. His ruthlessness was well known, and neighbors afforded him a grudging respect.

Mr. Daley had become embroiled in a personal feud with another gangster, Christopher Lynch, and some of the shootings that plagued Clarendon in 2017 came from their hatred for each other, officials say.

They had once been close friends, almost like family, relatives said, but that former intimacy now burned with an equally intense hostility. Mr. Daley tried to kill him on a Sunday in 2017, when he spotted him walking home from a soccer game.

He fired at Mr. Lynch, who took off running through the woods and escaped, officials say. But a stray bullet struck a 14-year-old girl in the stomach as she prepared for church. Luckily, the girl survived.

Months later, Mr. Lynch’s father was at a wake, a late-night affair with drinks and music, a celebration of life common in parts of Jamaica. At around 10:30 p.m., investigators now believe, Mr. Daley stormed the wake and began shooting. The elder Lynch died. Three others were injured.

Once again, the bullet fragments connected the shootings to the 9 millimeter.

From Idaho to Montego Bay

Not all guns vanish without a trace and suddenly reappear, decades later. Some are bought openly and sent overseas right away.

From late 2016 through early 2017, a 74-year-old man from Idaho purchased three military-style rifles and a Glock .45 pistol in Meridian, Idaho, a town of about 100,000 people surrounded by more than two dozen gun stores.

Six months later, all four guns were recovered by the Jamaican authorities in a raid in the Montego Bay area, where criminal violence has overwhelmed the parish of St. James.

The area is a notable exception to Jamaica’s vendetta violence. A multimillion-dollar scamming industry has flourished there, inciting so many homicides that the government sent in the military.

The scammers — who swindle American citizens into sending money or divulging their bank account information — are well financed and capable of building armories to battle their competitors.

The weapons, like other illicit arms in Jamaica, arrive in containers aboard the hundreds of ships that come to the island each month. Often, they slip through in small batches, broken down into parts and hidden in freezers or car engines to evade inspectors.

Of course, not all illegal guns in Latin America and the Caribbean come from the United States. In some countries, including those with weapons left over from civil wars, fewer than half of the illicit weapons trace back to American soil.

But firearms trafficking from the United States is such a big problem that the A.T.F. says it is dedicated to fighting it. Commercial traffic between the United States and Jamaica has become more closely surveilled in recent years, so smugglers have started bringing in the guns through Haiti, too, often in exchange for marijuana or even meat.

Criminal networks, like those in the scamming industry, also turn to straw buyers in the United States — people who purchase the guns legally and send them to Jamaica, either complicit, misled or uninterested in how they are used.

The Idaho man may have been a victim of the scammers himself. Officials say the swindlers appear to have pressured him into buying the weapons, promising to return his pilfered savings.

It was the Glock .45 that caught the attention of American and Jamaican authorities. Only three months after the Idaho man purchased it, the gun was already in Jamaica — and had killed Jeffrey Cato, a 39-year-old mentally ill man, on March 17, 2017.

Mr. Cato, a beloved figure in the community of Flankers, had no obvious enemies. He seemed to float in his own space, neighbors said, harmless and uninvolved.

On the day of his death, Mr. Cato was getting food for one of his children. The police never identified a motive, but believe he may have witnessed a murder.

“He had no gang connections whatsoever,” said one detective, speaking anonymously because the investigation was still open. “In my eight years working, there’s only a few cases that still stick with me. This is one of them.”

Last July, the gun was used again, to kill Nicholas Kerr, a quiet 41-year-old who lived in the basement of his mother’s home. He was shot at a corner store, buying a soda.

“We’ve always had enemies here,” said Mr. Kerr’s mother, withholding her name for fear of retribution. “But Nicholas?” she added. “He was peaceful.”

‘Every Day They Kill People’

Joviane Hall was D.J.-ing at a local bar near Clarendon at 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 6, 2017, when gunmen burst in without warning.

After robbing the bar and its patrons, they opened fire, hitting Mr. Hall, who died on the way to the hospital. Officials recognized the culprit, a weapon they had come to loathe: the Browning.

The murder was the beginning of a spree. Two days later, another shooting occurred at the Three Sisters Bar. At around 10:50 p.m., two friends, Clovis Cooke and Otis Gordon, were standing outside, drinking, when a car pulled up.

The shooter fired 21 shots and sped off. Investigators found yet another set of 9-millimeter fragments.

Every murder committed, every life taken, left a wound that never healed. Ten minutes from the Three Sisters Bar, which is now dormant and overgrown with dense foliage, Mr. Cooke’s parents live in their simple, vinyl-sided home off the side of the highway.

His father, recovering from cataract surgery, plodded around in the dark, searching for overdue bills in the drift of papers on the small dining table.

He wept at the mention of his son, 33, who used to pay the bills and help out around the house. Married at 15, his parents grew up raising him. But time had inverted their roles, and now, without him, they were nearly destitute.

“I think about him everyday,” he said. “Every day they kill people,” he said, “and every day we grieve about it.”

The same void haunted the home where Jody Ann Harvey was killed less than two months after Mr. Cooke, in what some believe was a case of mistaken identity.

Gunmen charged into her one-room shack, kicking open the door and firing on Ms. Harvey and her daughter as they slept in the small bed they shared. Ms. Harvey covered the girl with her body, taking six 9-millimeter rounds in the hail of gunfire. Her daughter survived.

Last spring, the home still sat abandoned in a thicket of trees, its wooden stairwell rotting, its blue and green paint blistered. Ashley Wilson, Ms. Harvey’s sister, had come by — to visit, to fill the single room with memories. To mourn.

“I just miss her, I guess,” she said, swinging the rickety door open. “I go inside, into her room, where it happened. It brings back a lot of memories. I’ll look at pictures of her, listen to music we liked, talk to her daughter. This is how it goes.”

The deadly run of the Browning ended, in some ways, the way it began.

Joy Commock, the girlfriend of the Gaza gang’s leader — the person who had been shot by mistake and survived, starting the cycle of revenge that first set the handgun loose on Jamaica — was killed on Jan. 21, 2018.

The casings matched the earlier crimes: The gun killed Ms. Commock as well, officials say.

She was home alone with her daughter when she heard a noise, the police say. It was just after midnight and the smell of smoke filled the air.

She raced outside and found a fire burning in her front yard. She knelt to extinguish the flames, and was shot multiple times by an assailant hiding in the shadows.

Her daughter, one of three, hid inside. When the girl emerged, her mother was dead, lying face down in the yard.

“She was the sole breadwinner,” said Ms. Commock’s sister, Lotoya Evans. “They were her life.”

“They expect you to forget about it, but when you lose somebody, you don’t just get up and act normal,” she added, holding her own daughter tight.

By early 2018, the authorities were still no closer to finding the gun. They knew its caliber, and even the conflict the gun was caught in. But while Mr. Daley, the enforcer known as Hawk Eye, was still alive, no witnesses dared to testify.

At around 11 p.m. on April 28, an off-duty policeman was having a drink at a local bar in Clarendon when two men showed up to rob it. One of them was Mr. Daley, who flashed the Browning at patrons and demanded money. The officer drew on the two men and announced himself, officials say.

Mr. Daley turned and fired, but the policeman had the drop on both men, killing Mr. Daley on the spot.

And like that, the gun was off the streets.

Witnesses came forward to link Mr. Daley to other shootings, officials say, and the police later asked the A.T.F. to run a trace on his weapon.

It led all the way to North Carolina, to a time before Mr. Daley was even born.

#gun control #gun violence #guns #u.s. news #u.s. department of justice #u.s. immigration and customs enforcement #u.s. politics #boycott nra #nra #the nra is a terrorist organization #crime #crime / law / justice #criminology #criminal justice

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blindestspot · 6 years ago

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No Bastard Ever Won a War by Dying for His Country

Over the past year I've gotten a lot of asks about Jon and what I think is going on with him. During that time I've also managed to calm down about the inconsistent number of redshirts during the Wight Hunt. Yes, I remember that this was a thing that happened, along with a bunch of other dei ex machina, like Cersei's brilliant strategies for everything, Jon's repeated, increasingly dumb survivals and the whole Winterfell plot.

But calming down about them meant that I could think about Game of Thrones again in a manner that kind of naively assumes that the work is coherent . That 2+2=4, not 5, or orange, or a tiger. And this is what I think is going on with Jon and why it is so crucial to the whole work.

George R.R. Martin once said that A Song of Ice and Fire is supposed to have a bittersweet ending. Now that phrase covers a lot of ground. A bittersweet ending might be just ASOIAF's Scouring of the Shire (which at this stage is assured) and a few good guys passing into the Great Beyond (also nearly certain) – which would be a copy of Lord of the Rings.

A bittersweet ending might also be Davos, Brienne and Sam emerging alone from the rubble like the unhappy winners of a Battle Royale. A few good guys surviving would technically make the ending not a complete downer and thus "bittersweet".

However, a more nuanced look at a bittersweet ending should look beyond mere survival and destruction but at an ending that irrevocably changes the characters and how and what we think of them.

An issue that strikes readers as unrealistic about Lord of the Rings is that a lot of its human and hobbit-y heroes move on from the events of the story into psychologically very ordinary, uncomplicated lives that they would have lead even without the events of the story. Sam, Merry, Pippin's (and to a lesser degree Faramir, Aragorn and Eowyn's) easy passing into normalcy feels vaguely hollow.

If GRRM really plans to have a realistic take on Lord of the Rings and its "bittersweet" ending (and with his complaints about Aragorn's tax policy it appears that this is a crucial element of ASOIAF), then obviously he is going to continue what he has been doing all along and create an interplay between narrative events and characterization. Take Arya, for example. In the early parts of AGoT she would have not wanted to become a Faceless Man – for obvious reasons. But Arya from a few books later, after events have matured and traumatized her, wants to become one. And that choice will again impact her characterization and that will in turn impact future events.  It is logical that this interplay will continue right up until the end. So speculation has to take into account that these characters are dynamic and can be pushed by events into new directions. And not just "can" – but will be.

The question is not who will be alive to experience the Scoured Shire but who they will be at this point. And that change shouldn't just be cosmetic or physical, it needs to be psychological, visible, noticeable and profound. We shouldn't get an Aragorn who just walks into a kingship after a two battles, marries the cute elf girl and then doesn't have a tax plan.

And obviously, I am not talking about Gilly. I am very much talking about ASOIAF's Aragorn. I am talking about Jon.

...

Now here is a hypothetical scenario for Season 8: Jon with the help of Dany and her dragons (and, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, the usual stock characters who fight every fictional war for us, even those in space), fight the White Walkers, win, then fight Cersei, then win (the order of this is might be reversed) and then Jon's revealed to be true heir and has to rebuild Westeros.

How does any of this really change and mature Jon as a character? How does being right about everything (the White Walkers being the real threat), then leading a righteous force to victory over evil make him a realistic take on Aragorn?

It doesn't. 

What Jon needs after five books and seven season of making serviceable to great, sensible, ethical, right strategic choices (with admittedly a number of great tactical errors in between) is being wrong. And not just being wrong about failing to communicate to his sworn brothers what his strategy is, not just wrong about going on that Wight Hunt, not just wrong to send Sam away, not just lightly ethically challenged for exchanging a pair of babies against one mother's will or misleading his love interest on his commitment to her political cause... but wrong in a truly profound way that the audience cannot blame on stupidity or short-sightedness.

I admit that calling it "wrong" or even "profoundly wrong" is a bit of misnomer. What I am trying to get at is the character going into a direction where the audience cannot and should not easily follow. Those actions would be too alien as might be their rationalizations. These actions should strike the audience as questionable, reprehensible, immoral, unethical, or dishonorable.

A perhaps too perfect example of such an action is Cersei firing up the Sept. It's mass murder and it's intended by her to be mass murder. If anyone in the audience found it not reprehensible and immoral, I would have some questions for these people.

But Cersei firing up the Sept was a success. Her survival was at stake - and she survived. Before her kingdom was full of powerful enemies and afterwards it wasn't. And she even snatched the Iron Throne afterwards despite having no royal Targaryen or Baratheon ancestry.

In realpolitik terms, Cersei made the "right" choice. All other choices would have lead to her death. The first rule of anything is that you cannot do anything if you're dead.

And frankly, that's a lesson Jon desperately needs to learn. His twice-tried strategy of rushing alone against an army of his enemies is idiotic. It might be honorable for a war leader to be the first person on the battlefield but it's not a winning war strategy.

It's not a nice thing to say, but it's necessary for a war time general or commander to be willing to have other people die for him and his goal. And not just for him but in front of him, literally shielding him. An army commander who isn't willing to ensure his own survival, is gambling with such terrible odds that he has already lost the war.

Cersei's strategy of killing her enemies instead of allowing herself to be killed is profoundly wrong, immoral and yet Jon needs understand that when mankind's survival are at stake an immoral action like that might be a necessary choice.

His attempt to drown in an ice lake alone is a sign that at this point he hasn't understood the necessity of being alive to lead a war at all. As George S. Patton put it: "no poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb son-of-a-bitching bastard die for his country."

Out of all our main protagonists, Jon has never been willing to play as dirty as it should be necessary for an apocalyptic fight such as his. Unlike Sansa's willingness to go along with Littlefinger's nefarious plans for her cousin in the Vale, Arya's willingness to kill potentially innocent people for the Faceless Men, Tyrion raping a prostitute and killing Shae, the torture of innocents during Dany’s Slavers’s Bay arc, Bran warging Hodor... Jon has nothing in his arc that is as dark, dishonorable or questionable as these things. Jon appears to be a character class apart, like the hero of a more classic fantasy epic.

Is this because Jon's so special that his arc is a whole different genre or is this because he hasn't leveled up in realpolitik yet?

Or is there perhaps even a third option to deal with his relative over-the-top good guy characterization?

***

You know, when it comes to stories about morality like Game of Thrones a crucial factor for their success is not just the quality of the good guys but also the quality of the villains.

And what makes a compelling villain?

IMO, they hit more than one of these characteristics:

1. They are well-rounded, fully realized characters, drawn with the same care as the heroes.

2. They are able to win against the good guys. They are not a cardboard that will be blown over once the heroes wave a magic stick or sword around.

3. Their evil deeds get an emotional reaction out of the audience. (Most audiences tend to have a vague discomfort with CGI mass carnage while reacting to a well-executed scene of high school bullying with actual empathy or even horror.)

4. Their motivations are understandable, perhaps even sympathetic. At best they are a well-intentioned extremist, utilitarianism gone wrong, rather than setting stuff on fire because their mom was mean to them once.

Now looking at this list, it becomes obvious that GOT has a problem with its current crop of villains. Any of the three that are left (Cersei, the Night King, Euron) could be the Final Boss – to use a video game term. But none of them are very compelling villains. Two of them are inhuman monsters. To call their characterization shallow would be an insult to puddles.

And Cersei, the only one with a decent characterization (and some past Mean Girls bullying sins of her own) suffers from being incredibly stupid in the books, having a prophecy running against her and stealing Aegon from Essos' story in the show. In other words, Cersei's chances of success and survival and actually making it this far in the books are as good as that of a snowflake on a hot summer's day. One suspects that she is a show-only final-ish villain, so if one looks for GRRM’s final-ish villains, they would not find Cersei.

Talking about chances of success – the Night King isn’t winning this either. Because then ASOIAF would reveal itself to be a nihilistic mess in which all the human storylines were nothing but shaggydog stories. So the Night King is bound to melt in the summer sun along with Cersei. There is little question about it. And is Euron "was he even mentioned in the first book?" Greyjoy really going to win the Iron Throne in the end? Is anyone taking this possibility seriously?

And what are their motivations? Ambition, being evil and being anti-human. None of them are particularly sympathetic.

In one word, GOT's current crop of villains is not particularly exciting – especially if you compare them with some of the villains that came before them. And if one of these three is the Final Boss, he or she is gonna be lame.

But a lame Final Boss is actually a great tradition in the genre. In Lord of the Rings Sauron appears to be literally two-dimensional and about as interesting as a character. (Gollum gets to be the well-written villain and he is doing very little damage to the world at large.) Voldemort in Harry Potter is completely outshone as the most despised, scary villain of the series by the one-book-wonder Dolores Umbridge who excels at committing low-key evil deeds that make every reader/viewer wince in sympathy. The Emperor in the original Star Wars trilogy is... there and then dead and has fewer fans than a one-line bounty hunter. And the same fans that endlessly shout "Han shot first", don't even appear to care that he got a complete face replacement in the Special Editions. And if there is one consistent complaint about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's that its villains tend to be boring and forgettable. Yet they're lame and forgettable to the tune of billions of box office dollars.

So a lame Final Boss for the heroes to fight... that is indeed a thing. And that might be just the thing GOT/ASOIAF is doing. This is what we have to seriously consider. We are likely to get a MCU villain... you know on the level of Ronan the Destroyer or Malekith, the Dark Elf. And you probably need to google in which movies those two turned up.

That would be a terrible let down.

Or maybe it's not actually that terrible of a thing? Because if our final boss and villain is not Cersei, the Night King, or Euron, it's a good guy gone bad. Someone who is currently fighting on the side of the living before becoming someone who needs to be fought.

It's possible that this is in the cards. After "Ozymandias", the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad, aired, GRRM wrote on his blog that "Walter White is a bigger monster than anyone in Westeros, I need to do something about that."

The thing is that White appeared to start out as a sympathetic if flawed hero you were rooting for even as he was making meth. What made White monstrous is not doing depraved psycho shit beyond comprehension (like nailing a living, pregnant woman to a ship like Euron Greyjoy) but that he appears to evolve into this monster before the audience's eyes.

Breaking Bad tricks the audience into liking a character for much longer than he ever deserved and that becomes crystal clear in that penultimate episode. If GRRM wants a monster like White he can't use his old, repetitive trick of making a one-dimensional psychopath do depraved stuff. He has to logically progress a character we root for into a monster.

(Of course, GRRM might also not be able to pull it off, however much he wants to. It could be that he has not prepared the ground to make a main character go Walter White and thus it will always fall short of Breaking Bad's accomplishment. Sure, Greyworm or Dolorous Edd could become evil and monstrous but even GRRM should know that's not quite the same as making your main protagonist evil.

I might also be wrong on GRRM understanding what makes Walter White feel so monstrous. The first big sign that White took the road down to hell is not an act of murder or sadism but simply not helping someone who is choking to death. His monstrosity is based in a three-dimensional characterization, not in particularly outrageous acts of evil. He is monstrous because he used to be likable. If GRRM doesn't see that, he might actually think that one-dimensional psychopath Euron nailing his pregnant girlfriend to a ship is nailing the same kind of monstrosity.

He also could be talking about a plot point we now know about but that he has not published yet – like Stannis burning Shireen. So one should be careful looking for ASOIAF's Walter White.)

Interestingly enough, the trick Breaking Bad is pulling is quite old. White isn't making meth by chance, it was the worst thing his creator could think of besides him becoming an arms dealer. The twist of Breaking Bad's "Ozymandias" is actually not that White becomes bad but that he has always been bad. You'll find a similar character in Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita where his monstrosity is barely a plot twist and even Milton's Paradise Lost where it's none at all. (The trope of the protagonist being a piece of shit throughout the whole story usually goes down as "villain protagonist" and the list of stories containing one is pretty expansive.) But the plot twist of a surprise villain protagonist is such an old one that Aesop already codified it in his fable "The Farmer and the Viper" around 600 B.C. (Farmer helps harmless looking viper, then viper bites him because it's a viper. And has been a viper all along. Duh.)

Now if Dany, for example, turned into a villain then she would fall squarely into villain protagonist territory. But the fun thing is that doesn't mean that she is already one. The viper is not a villain until Aesop has it biting the farmer. If Dany decides to slaughter her future subjects by the thousands just so she can have the Iron Throne (and this is portrayed as despicable) then this will be in line with the Dany from the first season/AGoT who wanted the Dothraki to wage their type of warfare (pillaging, raping, enslaving, killing) onto thousands of her future subjects, so she could have the Iron Throne. But that doesn't mean that Dany will cross this particular moral event horizon.

Whether Dany will turn out to be a villain protagonist is not a question of foreshadowing. It's a question whether the authorial intent will will it into existence. The viper is a poisonous snake but if the author hasn't it biting the farmer, that poison doesn't matter at all.

Now Dany is a well-rounded character (same as Cersei) and might be difficult to defeat but her most likely, hypothetical, evil deed (mass carnage via dragon) is not particularly compelling and neither is ambition as her motivation. Villainous Dany is about as compelling as Cersei. Keeping Cersei for so long when there is Villainous Dany in the wings strikes me as a weak narrative choice: “Meet your new villain, same as the old villain...” The difference would be the element of surprise but that's a paltry surprise, especially since Villainous Dany was supposed to be The Big Plot Twist.

Honestly, Dany as the mass-carnage causing, ambitious type of villain is a low-hanging fruit. Call me edgy, but it's just nowhere near "Ozymandias". It's Boromir getting seduced by the Ring.

And there are not a lot of precedents for that storyline in ASOIAF. You know the story of a good guy gone beyond redemption evil. There is Theon, whose ambition, jealousy and insecurity drove him into sacking Winterfell and killing two children – but even he turned out to be not to be beyond redemption. There is Catelyn, but she goes crazy and becomes a zombie, so it's hard to compare.

But there is, of course, the most compelling, interesting and meaningful character arc of a good guy gone bad: Stannis Baratheon. But he isn’t a good precedent for a mass-carnage causing, ambitious type of villain.

***

You see, Stannis starts out as not exactly the most sympathetic character: he burns people and places of worship, he is a religious nut, he has his brother killed. But after getting defeating at the Battle of Blackwater, his arc does a 180. He gets the call from the North to save the realm, and out of all of the five Kings involved in the war of the same name, he is the only one he realizes that in order to "win the realm, you have to save the realm."

That isn't a coincidence. Stannis is also the only king who fights for a higher purpose. Joffrey, Balon, Robb, and Renly just fight for power (be it the power over all of Westeros or the power that lies in independence). Stannis is fighting not just for power but also for his religion, for his one true god; he is fighting a crusade. That out of all the kings, the king who believes that his religion will save Westeros ends up wanting to save it from a supernatural threat is not a coincidence. One thing clearly causes the other.

And once he makes this choice, Stannis, the Mannis (as he was lovingly called by his fans once upon a time) always fights the bad guys, he fights for the living. Of course, he doesn't stop being a religious nut, he doesn't stop burning people, he is inflexible in his beliefs, he still thinks he is the chosen one, he is Azor Ahai, he is the One True King, he belongs on the Iron Throne. But he is also the man who executes soldiers of his army who rape. He has good sides. But what weighs so heavily in his favor is that out of all the people in power in Westeros, he is fighting the bad guys.

And that matters – until it doesn't when Stannis strikes out to fight the Boltons. The Boltons are special because they are despicable without exceptions. Even the Freys have Robb's squire in their midst to have that one decent family member/bannerman that all of Westeros' notable houses appear to have. All but the Boltons anyway. There is not a good or decent living Bolton. They are the literal worst Westeros has to offer.

And yet, Stannis manages to cross a moral event horizon that makes everyone forget that he is doing it to fight the Worst. And that moral event horizon is not the sacking of a city, the killing of hundred of thousands. He is not extinguishing a house or a people. He manages it, doing something every single GOT character could do right now (save for little Sam.) He kills a single person.

And he doesn't come back from that. Like a proper Ozymandias, his hubris, his pretension to predestined, prophecied greatness is followed by his inevitable decline. Killing Shireen has Stannis losing his real world fans and his in-story followers, his wife, his fight, his priestess, his army, his purpose and consequently his life. He proves very quickly that not all ends justify all means. He is the living embodiment of the Friedrich Nietzsche quotation that "those who fight monsters should take care that in the process they do not become monsters themselves."

Stannis' final turn into villainy is actually paralleled by something another character does in ASOIAF. Except he is not a character we meet; he is a story-within-a-story; a legend, a prophecy or both. He is who Stannis thought he was: he is Azor Ahai.

And Azor Ahai absolutely does what Stannis did to turn into a villain, a monster: he murders... sacrifices an innocent to forge Lightbringer to end the Long Night. The way the story gets told makes that murder necessary, but Azor Ahai as the hero and winner of the Long Night gets to tell that story, gets to tell history his way. It's a legend and of course Azor Ahai is its hero. But remember the first person who claimed that "only death can pay for life" was a liar who wanted to make sure that "The Stallion Who Mounts the World" died in the womb. (The second was Melisandre who tends to be wrong on a lot of things and whose track record on human sacrifice is abysmal.)

So there is absolutely a chance that Nissa Nissa's death was as necessary as Shireen's. We won't get the opportunity to fact-check the legend, the ancient history. But if it's a prophecy we might see its reality.

Of course, if GOT really goes the way of making a good guy go bad, then they can do this the middling way, the mediocre way. Theon's Sack of Winterfell Redux or Catelyn's descent into madness and murder. Or by making Dany a villain protagonist who is basically just another Cersei with dragons. And despite not quite measuring up to Stannis' dark turn – ambition, grief, fear, insecurity, jealousy, vanity, or disappointment leading to mass carnage delivered onto a hundred-thousand computer-generated extras is still more interesting than the Night King Sauron with his ice dragon.

But the reality is that we don't care about the 100,000 inhabitants of King's Landing. We will cry over a single Hot Pie before ever giving a fuck about a massive number of fictional people without any characteristics. Mass carnage is easy to oppose morally because it's something we oppose in real life but emotionally there is no difference between 10 fictional people or a billion fictional people – if they are simply there to be nameless, featureless cannon fodder. The ability to cause mass carnage doesn't make you the most emotionally effective villain by default. Quite the opposite.

If Bran were to warg a dragon and set King's Landing on fire, we would get that this whole Three-Eyed Raven thing didn't work out well for his ethics and be, like, "okay". If Bran set fire to Arya, he would immediately become the most hated character ever on GOT. (And that isn't an exaggeration for effect). And any good intentions regarding defeating evil would matter as much as the fight against the Boltons did once Shireen started screaming.

I would like to add that Stannis died pretty much immediately after killing Shireen, blown over like a cardboard once Brienne showed up. But who would defeat or want to defeat a Stannis, an Azor Ahai who succeeded at ending the Long Night?

The ultimate story subversion when it comes to the classic "good vs. evil" plot is that the bad guy wins.

And wouldn't that be something if it was surprise villain protagonist? We get someone winning that we would have been okay with winning until they turned into GOT's least liked character? Wouldn't that be bittersweet? Getting who you were okay with, perhaps even wanted on the Iron Throne, who might even know which is the right tax plan and what to do with baby orcs... except they suck now?

Now who could that true Azor Ahai possibly be?

Is there someone who has been fighting monsters longer than anyone else has? Who has been so corrupted by that fight that he has tried and sacrificed already everything he could and had to defeat them? A man on quasi-religious crusade? A man who has the sort of righteous hubris and single-minded focus on the White Walkers that makes him often deaf to good advice? Who who has already laid down his life for a chance... and even a "no-chance-at-all-now-let-me-drown-in-an-ice-lake" at defeating the Night King? Is this possibly the same guy who we think is going to be crucial to the defeat of the White Walkers? The one who has the perfect bloodline to claim the Iron Throne in the end? The one who is shown to Melisandre when she looks for her prophecied chosen one in the fire? The one who appears to be the straight hero of the story, the Luke Skywalker, the only major character where pulling a Stannis would actually shock us? The one who has never been "profoundly wrong"?

I am not saying, we are getting "Aegon, the Worst of His Name". I am saying that if I wanted to create a villain who subverts all expectations while fulfilling them, a villain who is truly compelling and whose turn emotionally wrecks the audience, I would not make it happen by having Daenerys or Bran roast King's Landing. I simply would choose a more likable and successful version of Stannis and have him doing something terrible, wrongfully believing it's the right thing to do.

Now theoretically this could be anyone but little Sam. And regardless of that character's identity, they would be a great, compelling villain. Practically though, the best candidate for going off that particular deep end is not some random second tier character. And it's not Daenerys "What Even Are White Walkers?" or Bran "I'm a robotic, omniscient plot device now the Three-Eyed Raven now" Stark either.

It's Jon.

***

There is an issue with this though. Stannis murdering a family member/sacrificing a child for their royal blood to win a battle was simply a continuation of Stannis' previous actions. Stannis had no issue with his wife's uncle being burned as a sacrifice to R'hllor, had his brother murdered to win a battle, and attempted to have his underage nephew (Edric Storm in the books, Gendry in the show) sacrificed for his royal blood.

Killing Shireen is Stannis taking this to its logical extreme. Everything he does is simply something he has done before. Except this time the audience isn't given an out: Shireen doesn't escape like Edric/Gendry, we care for her (unlike Alester Florent) and she isn't Stannis' opponent in battle (Renly).

What Stannis is doing, is not surprising or entirely unprecedented. It is ultimately just a darker twist on something he has done before. Which is weird because you would think that something that crosses a moral event horizon would be a real departure from his previous actions. But it's not and that is really crucial if we want to discuss Stannis 2.0.

If a good character goes bad then having them simply do something they've done before – except this time it's just too much – makes sense. Just like the road to hell is paved with good intentions, escalating villainy should be a slippery slope of ever indefensible bad deeds.

And this is why it makes no sense to look at Jon and wonder who he is going to burn at the stake for R'hllor – because he won't. What he would do to incur the audience's disdain needs to be something he has kind of done before. And that he has done on the show before, because it stands to reason that the show would want to keep its foreshadowing. (Hence Gendry's slightly pointless kidnapping by Melisandre in the show.)

So the the baby swap is out since it didn't happen on the show. Breaking a vow is a bit too generic and on its lonesome will not evoke any emotional reaction. And making high-handed, impulsive decisions that end up with terrible consequences has been already done with Jon making a series of high-handed, badly thought through decisions that netted the Night King a dragon and destroyed the Wall and yet netted Jon no audience disdain at all. So probably not that one either.

That leaves his relationship with Ygritte. In the books, we only see this relationship from Jon's point of view with all his justifications and inner struggles and his self-knowledge that while he lies about his allegiance to the Wildlings' cause, his feelings for Ygritte are real.

Now if one imagines that relationship from Ygritte's point of view (as she is in the books), Jon would come out of that as a supreme douchebag. He lead her on, lied to her, pretended to have feelings for her, then left her, publicly humiliated her and finally participated in a battle with her on the other side. Jon doesn't kill her but he is willing to do so by fighting her.

Now a real neutral point of view that doesn't vilify Ygritte to prop up Jon as a cool dude (as the show has done with her allying herself with cannibals and the village massacre), would be more of a wash, ethically speaking. Jon lies to Ygritte but his life is at stake and it wasn't even his own idea in the first place. There are consent issues with their relationship and Ygritte is as willing to kill Jon when she participates in that battle as it's the case the other way around.

But then Stannis wasn't that unjustified to go after Renly who was willing to fight and kill him in battle after all. Killing Renly nearly rates as self-defense. And Edric Storm got away. The question is not how horrible Jon's actions towards Ygritte were. But rather what the escalation of that sort of overall action would be like.

Now due to time constraints the only relationship where Jon could pull an escalated "Ygritte" is his relationship with Daenerys. And here I am kind of puzzled by the discourse around the idea. Because as passionately as people argue about it, they actually agree quite fundamentally: that Jon is doing it/not doing because he is the quintessential good guy.

That he either betrays his lover or the plutocratic will of his nation is disregarded as some sort of higher purpose collateral that doesn't at all reflect on his moral character.

But isn't Occam's Razor to the question of how a "good guy" manages to betray either lover or nation simply to question the "good guy" part?

But let's step back a bit. The theory that Jon is playing Dany proposes that Jon initiates this emotional manipulation because she wonders aloud about two things (while he wants her commitment on the fight against the White Walkers): 1. Her ability to achieve her overall strategic goal of winning the Iron Throne 2. What happens to her rear if she pulls all of her forces north.

Now, Jon never actually answers any of these questions (or any questions on how to get the Northern Lords to remain loyal to him and Dany) and that is a bit problematic. Because the second question of what happens in a war if you leave one side open to your enemies is an enormously important one.

What Jon appears to do, is rely on a truism about the North: that it cannot be conquered in Winter (and Winter is here.)

*beleaguered sigh*

This truism exists in our world about two countries. One is considered unconquerable in Winter, the other unconquerable in general. And while these truisms have held true for few centuries now, the reality is that attempts to conquer them have devastated both countries on more than one occasion to the sound of millions of dead inhabitants and bombing it to the bottom of the HDI.

If Jon relies on Winter to protect him and his allies from Cersei, he is an idiot. If Cersei attacks the unprotected North from the South, his ability to fight the White Walkers will be profoundly diminished even if Cersei fails at conquering the North itself. Dany is right to ask this question and he is wrong to ignore it.

And if that theory pans out and Jon took these strategic, legitimate concerns as a sign that he needs to loverboy it up instead of thinking how to protect the North from the South, then that's next level mansplaining.

But forget that point for a bit and go back to the situation in which Jon supposedly initiates it. He is recovering after the Wight Hunt and Dany swears to avenge her dragon while musing on her overall strategy of winning Westeros. And while Jon isn't in good shape, he is not in mortal danger. Not in general, not specifically by Dany. She is letting her hair down and she's pledging her support to his cause.

Jon's life is not the least on the line and the question whether Dany would or would not have pulled out of the war against the White Walkers if Jon hadn't started flirting with her in that moment is an unanswerable hypothetical. No matter how you slice or dice it, it's not certain at all (not to the audience, not to Jon) that she would have pulled out.

So Jon had three choices in this moment: not initiate a romantic relationship with Dany, initiate a romantic relationship out of genuine feeling, initiate a romantic relationship to manipulate her.

None of these choices would spell certain doom. It's not at all like the relationship with Ygritte, where not going along with it would have blown his cover and cost his life. It's also distinct from that situation insofar as he didn't choose to go undercover with the Wildlings in the first place but was commanded into the situation by his superior officer.

If Jon initiated the relationship to manipulate Dany, he chose to do this voluntarily without true necessity. It's, in fact, as necessary as Littlefinger manipulating Lysa into intrigue, murder and ill-fated marriage was. Of course, without that manipulation Littlefinger would have never advanced at court and become Master of the Coin, Lord of Harrenhall and Sweetrobin's guardian. But none of these things were necessary to grant his survival at any time.

The key difference between Jon and Littlefinger is that Jon allies himself with Dany to ensure mankind's survival instead of personal gain. But on the balance, another difference between Littlefinger and Jon's situation is that the romantic relationship wasn't necessary to ensure Dany's support. In fact, even the idea that Dany's concerns are sign of her wavering in her commitment is a minority if not fringe opinion among GOT's audience.

And that makes the idea of Jon manipulating Dany very unpalatable. The lack of necessity makes him a Littlefinger, rather than a Robb or a Ned or even the Jon who lied to Ygritte. And audiences prefer to see their heroes as honorable fools rather than manipulative, emotionally abusive jerks.

Because there is the heart of the problem. If Jon is truly manipulating Dany, he is an emotionally abusive jerk. He is profoundly wrong. He is the guy that your BFF has warned you about. "He is just using you for [something.]"

And that hits home in a way shadowbabies and Frey Pies and Qyburn doesn't. We don't know any necromancers who vivisect people. But we know the kind of jerk that Jon would be. It's not theoretical, it's something we know and because of that will not appreciate.

***

But while this absolutely checks off “make the evil deed painful to the audience” point in the “compelling villain” check list, it’s still nowhere near as ethically questionable as Stannis burning Shireen.

But Jon's Ygritte storyline doesn't end with him duping, betraying and leaving her. It ends with her getting killed. And not just killed, but killed in battle against Jon and his brothers. While Jon is not directly responsible for her death – he neither instigated nor executed the killing – he was willing to risk that his actions would kill her in that battle. The goal of a battle is to win and to use the Patton quote from above "make the other bastard die for his country." Of course, Jon acted in self-defense, Ygritte was fighting that battle against him and the NW voluntarily, fully willing, ready and able to kill him.

But then, to go back to Stannis, Stannis was also just acting in self-defense when he send the shadowbaby assassin to kill Renly. Renly had the superior force and showed himself fully willing, ready and able to kill Stannis in battle. The question whether Stannis' assassination of Renly is justified is a digression too far because that is not the point. The point is that Jon and Stannis got some person killed who was really close to them (brother, lover) and that was kind of, maybe, perhaps justified self-defense. You can argue for it in both cases.

However, as I mentioned before, Stannis' ultimate escalation of Renly's murder is killing Shireen. There is no maybe, perhaps, kind of, about the lack of justification for it. Stannis did not act in self-defense, Stannis was not provoked. The true necessity was also absent... although the proof for that is just hindsight. The sacrifice was supposed to save Stannis and his army. It did not. Thus it was never necessary. The whole thing is just wholly indefensible.

Now would an escalation of Jon's Ygritte storyline limit itself to the affair and betrayal or would it go all the way down to that self-defensive arrow that Jon wasn't directly responsible for? Except for a Stannis-like escalation that arrow could not be self-defensive, it would have to be undeserved, unjustified, unnecessary and Jon's responsibility.

The audience doesn't even have to like Dany at that point. That would be just crossing all moral event horizons, turning Jon into a villain and serving a "King Arthur Aragorn Jon Snow is the final villain" plot twist that makes R+L=J look like child's play in comparison. It would be truly an epic twist, ending up in the plot twist pantheon next to "Bruce is a ghost" and "Soylent Green".

However, I don't think this is gonna happen. A villain protagonist on that level would have been foreshadowed much, much more, both in the books and the show. "The villain wins" is also really nihilistic and ends up on a quite bitter note with very little sweetness. Davos, Brienne and Sam emerging alone from the rubble would be a more positive and happier ending. It's also the sort of plot twist you think of five books and seven TV seasons later (too late), not when you conceive the story.

So what will happen to Jon instead if he doesn't become a villain?

There are really only two options: his characterization remains in a class of its own and he remains the only truly good guy protagonist or he takes a level in realpolitik and starts to play as dirty as necessary in whatever way. Not quite Jon, the villain but Jon the ethically challenged, Jon the Utilitarian.

(By the way, I am not saying that he has to play dirty with specific characters to qualify, just that that he has to play dirty somehow. In fact, playing dirty with certain characters might evoke a negative, emotional audience reaction that is not in proportion to the ethics violation it presents and thus the whole Utilitarianism bit might accidentally devolve into perceived villainy.)

The really fascinating bit about this is that Jon's characterization will define ASOIAF quite significantly. Jon is so crucial to the story's most fundamental conflict, that even if you discard the idea that he is The Protagonist, you would still have to agree that he is one of the most important protagonists. His characterization will contribute and lead to the resolution of that conflict. If he resolves it by playing dirty, the moral of the story will quite different than it is if he resolves it by always taking the heroic, high road.

And it's not just the moral of the story. Once the story decides to land on "Jon, the moral" or "Jon, the Utilitarian", the question whether we are consuming "Lord of the Rings with boobs" or a true deconstruction of Lord of the Rings will answer itself. And that will reflect on more than just Jon's storyline. If Jon stays heroic, Night King Sauron, our final, two-dimensional villain and other neat and flat resolutions become much more likely.

As such I would argue that the Jon’s characterization will define how good ASOIAF's famed realism truly is, what ideals it propagates, and what kind of story ASOIAF is.

I honestly can't predict how this will play out. But I remember that Ned and the Red Wedding promised a deconstruction of the genre, an acknowledgement that taking the high road constantly can be a dead end in real life. Jon not needing to be smarter than them in the end would break that promise.

#A Song of Ice and Fire #Jon Snow #Aegon Targaryen #ASoIaF #meta #Game of Thrones

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ruminativerabbi · 6 years ago

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Thanksgiving 2018

For as long as any of us can recall, American Jews have celebrated Thanksgiving out of a deep sense of gratitude to God for any number of different things that define our lives in this place: the great prosperity of this land in which we share; the security provided for us and for all by our matchless and supremely powerful military; the freedoms guaranteed to all by a Bill of Rights that basically defines the American ethos in terms of the autonomy of the individual; the specific kind of participatory democracy that grants each of us a voice to raise and a ballot to cast; the freedom to embrace a minority faith—or any faith—without fear, reticence, or nervousness about what others may or may not think; and the inner satisfaction that comes from being part of a nation that self-defines in terms of its mission to do good in the world and to combat tyranny, oppression, and demagoguery wherever such baleful things manage to take root among the peoples of the world.

None of any of the above strikes me as being anything other than fully true, yet I can’t stop reading op-ed pieces and blog postings that posit that things have somehow changed, that the world now is not as it even just recently was, that it is the past and all its glories that shine bright now rather than the unknown—and unknowable—future, and that every one of the reasons listed above for us American Jews to join our fellow citizens in feeling deeply grateful for our presence in this place could just as reasonably be deemed illusory as fully real. And I hear those sentiments, interestingly enough, coming from people on both ends of the political spectrum as well as from all those self-situated just to the right or left of center. Nor are American Jews alone in their ill ease: if there is one thing vast swaths of our American nation seem able to agree upon, it’s that the age of great leadership belongs to history and that it is thus our destiny for the foreseeable future to be led by people whose sole claim to serve as our nation’s leaders is that they somehow managed to get themselves elected to public office. No one seems to dispute the fact that this is not at all a healthy thing for the republic. But expressing regret is not at all the same thing as formulating a specific plan to address the situation as it has evolved to date.

To keep this creeping malaise from interfering in an untoward manner as we prepare to celebrate our nation’s best holiday, I suggest we take the long view.

Frederic E. Church was a nineteenth century man, born in 1826 when John Quincy Adams was in the White House and dead in the spring of 1900 as a new century dawned. He was also one of America’s greatest landscape painters, a member of the so-called Hudson River School and, in his day, one of the most celebrated artists alive. I mention him today, however, not to recall the larger impact of his oeuvre, but to tell you about one single one of his paintings, the one called “The Icebergs.”

As you can see, the picture (currently owned by the Dallas Museum of Art) is magnificent. But what made it famous in its day was specifically the way in which it was taken by many to capture the surge of self-confidence that characterized America’s sense of its own destiny at the end of the nineteenth century. One author, Jörn Münkner, characterized the painting’s appeal in this passage composed when the painting was put on exhibition at Georgetown University:

Frederik E. Church's "The Icebergs" pictured the Alpha and Omega of time and tide. It reflected the mid-19th century American world-view that was characterized by the belief in a “Manifest Destiny” according to which the United States…was the New Israel that had been prepared for by the divinity. 1861 saw the U.S. reigning from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Nature was regarded as holy and science as sanctified. The belief in the American Garden Eden whose very fortunes were guided by the Creator emanated out of the scientifically correct “The Icebergs.” It was the display of the rare and intoxicating American amalgam of science, religion, and nationalism. The relationship of the actual and the real that was concealed in the painting revealed the idea/fact that scientific thinking in America was shaped by a deep religious faith. Providence guided the scholarly painter's hand.

I find those words somehow inspiring and chilling at the same time, but I see what the author means: even after all this time, the painting hasn’t really lost its ability to suggest the majesty of nature or its timelessness. I get a bit lost on my way from that thought to the notion of manifest destiny inspiring America’s nineteenth-century rise to greatness (and, yes, the whole America as the new Israel is beyond peculiar, as surely also is the fact that the artist was thinking so expansively about American destiny on the eve of what in 1861 would still have been unimaginable carnage), yet I really can see the strength, the power, and the sense of ineluctable kismet mirrored in the majestic icebergs in the picture…and so finding in them a symbol both of America’s uniqueness and of its remarkable destiny is not as big a stretch as I thought at first it would be.

But other nineteenth-century types saw different things in the image of these gigantic icebergs afloat in an endless sea.

Edward Bellamy, once one of America’s most famous authors, has been almost completely forgotten. Yet his 1888 book, Looking Backward, was the third most popular American novel of nineteenth century, exceeded in fiction sales only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. An early utopian novel, the book tells the story of one Julian West, a young man from Boston who goes to bed one night in 1887 and somehow manages only to wake up from his sleep in the year 2000. Some of the author’s predictions are uncannily correct—he depicts West as enjoying the almost instant delivery of goods ordered without having to visit any actual stores—while other things West finds in 2000, like a universal retirement age of 45, have not turned out quite as the author imagined they might. But it is the author’s postscript to his own work I want to cite here, as he imagines America in the future and uses his own version of the iceberg symbol to express his dismay. Almost definitely thinking of Church’s painting and the expansive optimism it inspired, he wrote as follows:

As an iceberg, floating southward from the frozen North, is gradually undermined by warmer seas, and, become at least unstable, churns the sea to yeast for miles around by the mighty rockings that portend its overturn, so the barbaric industrial and social system, which has come down to us from savage antiquity, undermined by the modern humane spirit, riddled by the criticism of economic science, is shaking the world with convulsions that presage its collapse.

This line of thinking I also understand: for all it appears mighty and invincible as it rises from the sea, icebergs are, after all, just so much frozen water. They melt as they float into warmer waters than can sustain them, which may (or may not) dramatically affect the ocean into which they dissolve but cannot affect the iceberg itself once it disappears into the sea and is no more.

So one image and two distinct interpretations. Of course, both are right. An inert, uncomprehending iceberg was powerful enough to sink the most sophisticated ocean liner of its day in 1912. And the semi-famous iceberg rather prosaically named B-15, which broke away from Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf in 2000, is about to melt into the South Atlantic Ocean. At 3,200 square nautical miles, B-15 is larger than the island of Jamaica. Yet its doom was sealed not by weapons of mass destruction or acts of God, but by the sea’s slightly too-warm water. (To read more, click here.) From this we learn that strength and weakness are not as unrelated as their antithetical nature makes them at first appear. Indeed, they are each other’s twins…and from that thought I draw the lesson I wish to offer to my readers for Thanksgiving Day in the Age of Anxiety.

Our nation is currently divided down into people who see America’s great and mighty presence in the world pointing to a remarkable destiny framed by our nation’s ongoing commitment to the foundational principles upon which the republic was founded and still rests. Such people look at Church’s painting and are heartened by what they see because solid, powerful, majestic icebergs afloat in the sea remind them of our nation, its strong moral underpinnings, its commitment to (the American version of) tikkun olam, and its invincible military. This group includes members who vote red and who vote blue, but others see our nation coming apart at the seams, a country divided down into warring factions in which personal liberty is increasingly defined in terms of the sensitivities of the majority and in which justice is meted out entirely differently to people of different races and social strata. Such people look at Church’s painting and hear Bellamy’s warning that even giant icebergs that look stable and impregnable can be undermined by the gentle, unarmed presence of a warm current in the sea. Nothing lasts forever. Every Achilles has his heel. No garden thrives because it was once watered.

So who is right? I propose we give the last word to Bellamy himself, whose afterword to his own novel (which I am currently reading for the first time) closes with these words: “All thoughtful men agree,” he writes, “that the present aspect of society is portentous of great changes. The only question is whether they will be for the better or the worse. Those who believe in man’s essential nobleness lean to the former view, those who believe in his essential baseness to the latter. For my part, I hold to the former opinion. Looking Back was written in the belief that our Golden Age lies before us and not behind us, and is not far away. Our children will surely see it, and we too who are already men and women, if we deserve it by our faith and by our works.”

Despite it all, that’s what I think too! And I offer that thought—part prayer, part wish, part hope—to you all on this Thanksgiving Day, a day on which all Americans are united by the desire to recognize the good in ourselves and our nation, and to be grateful for the potential to do good in the world that derives directly from that noble sense of what it means to be an American.

#Frederic Church #Thanksgiving #Edward Bellamy

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insane-mane · 3 years ago

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Did you see either of the Venom movies?

I did. I hated the concept so much I refused to watch the first one when it first came out. It was obviously a cash grab by Sony that wanted to profit off of Spider-Man without actually having him in.

After watching it, I saw it was just as messy as I thought it was gonna be. Generic story, boring romance, and a weird performance from Tom Hardy. The best part about it is they at least got Venom’s physicality and voice down, even if they kinda dumbed down the design since there’s clearly no tie in with Spider-Man to give him the emblem.

Watching the second one somehow felt like both a step up as well as a step down. I didn’t hate the back and forth between Eddie and Venom, but something about how they filtered Venom’s voice compared to first felt so…off. Carnage is such a neat villain, but feels wasted here. Giving a movie with Carnage, a mass murdering psychopath, a PG-13 rating where the majority of it is just a romance story is dumb. Which, side note, Anne said Eddie’s problem was commitment…despite the fact they were both set to marry in the first and Eddie’s scummy reporting ethics is what tarnished both his reputation and their relationship since that got her in trouble as well. Just felt weird to bring that up in this movie simply cause it’s partially a love story.

No idea where they’ll go with this character. I know they’re setting SOMETHING up with the symbiote in the MCU despite Eddie being transported back…but who knows, maybe that could lead to Mac Gargan’s run as Venom…but I kinda hope not lol. I just want Scorpion, dammit.

All in all, I don’t really care for the Venom movies as it’s still just a way for Sony to profit off Spider-Man characters, but I’d rather watch these two again than EVER watch Morbius. Cause 1. It’s clearly confused as to what it’s going to be and where it fits in these constructed universes, and 2. Jared Leto is a cunt.

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Attack on Titan Season 4 Episodes 14 and 15 Review

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These Attack on Titan reviews contain spoilers.

Attack on Titan Season 4 Episode 14: Savagery

“You know what I hate the most in the world? People who aren’t free. They’re no more than cattle.”

”I wanted to talk with you guys…”

Those were the ominous words that Eren shared with his old comrades and new enemies at the end of Attack on Titan’s previous episode. This anime regularly features an exceptional amount of destruction courtesy of deadly powers and brutal battles, but this season’s development of Eren Jaeger is so substantial that seven words can be even more terrifying than dozens of strikes.

So, they talk. Nearly a third of this episode is talk as Eren calmly dresses down his best friends and every second of it is emotionally explosive. Floch takes over the Survey Corps with fellow Jaegerists and he talks to them to sway the masses and inspire a revolution. Zeke even talks to Levi in a manner that allows him to let down his guard enough that he’s temporarily able to make a play to escape. Attack on Titan is full of painful physical altercations, but “Savagery” is all about how the savage nature of words can hit harder than any Titan punch and sometimes be even harder to recover from.

Mikasa and Armin try to properly get inside Eren’s head and understand his recent actions, but he has absolutely no interest in justifying himself or explaining his actions like he’s a super villain in the third act of a story. Eren’s goal is very simple and rather than waste any time he systematically hits his friends with mind games where they’re left destabilized and vulnerable. Eren’s words are devastating, but his ice cold expression through the whole chat is just as alarming. He’s lost the Kruger outfit, but he’s even more unrecognizable.

Eren is absolutely ruthless when he flatly tells Mikasa that he’s always hated her and doesn’t flinch when her tears start to run. He knows better than anyone else how much this callousness will destroy Mikasa as well as how integral she’s been in his prolonged survival for all of these years. It’s heartbreaking to see Eren so thoroughly abandon the few remaining people that actually care about him as a person and don’t just view him as a means to an end or a weapon of destruction. He praises Zeke just as much as he insults Armin and Mikasa.

Armin and Mikasa are stunned through most of this and they have every right to be. A lot of time has passed offscreen, but it’s ridiculous to think that season three concludes with Eren and Armin excited about the future while they splash in the tide of the sea and now they’re decking each other out while they spill each other’s blood. It’s been a while since a conventional fistfight has come up in Attack on Titan and it hits even harder since it’s Eren and Armin.

There are clear parallels in the choreography of Eren’s beatdown on Armin that mirror the Attack Titan’s assault on the Armored and Jaw Titans. It’s a breaking point for this duo that have always had each other back and the audience is still left to question if Eren has truly fallen for Zeke or if there are still other levels of deception present here where this behavior is a mask for something bolder.

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Every second that passes in this conversation there’s another grain of the old Eren that falls through the hourglass and he’s less recognizable from the moment before. Every word bites and it’s even more gutting when Mikasa instinctively defends Eren and attacks Armin over the situation like she’s some brainwashed partner in a toxic relationship (and in many ways, she is). Mikasa is still compelled to help Eren, even after all of this and she’d probably even go down smiling and thank Eren if he just snapped and decided to eat her. Some of this has to do with the chilling information that Eren reveals about the nature of the Ackermans and how Mikasa is basically imprinted to him on some degree, but even without this inherent connection it still feels like Mikasa would selflessly be by Eren’s side and hope for the best.

Another component of Eren’s plan plays out elsewhere with Hange, Floch, and the new trainees in the Survey Corps. Floch is able to so swiftly influence these recruits and poison the well, which makes for a frightening extrapolation of the Jaegerists’ previous terrorism. So many honorable characters have fallen over the past episodes, but it stings to watch a group like the Survey Corps become completely bankrupt of values and just another tool for the enemy. So many characters use words like the ammunition for a weapon in “Savagery,” but it’s a strategy that fails Hange. She tries to share the news that the wine is spiked with Zeke’s spinal fluid, but she’s ignored and her treatment remains horrendous. It looks like she’s set to be a hostage for the time being, that is if she’s not just outright killed as some trust exercise that Floch puts his new recruits through like he does with Keith Shadis.

Whether Floch and company believe or care about Zeke’s spinal wine is irrelevant because everyone gets to figure this out the hard way once Zeke puts his power into action. The forest very quickly fills up with Titans and the second half of “Savagery” is full of action to balance out the war of words that happens earlier. Many of Marley’s residents get triggered by Zeke’s gambit and it’s exciting to see the side effects of this “wine hangover” go fully into effect.

Unfortunately, Levi’s own men enjoyed these libations, which forces him to take down his comrades with zero time to contemplate alternatives. This decision clearly weighs heavily on Levi and reflects how committed he is to his mission. “Savagery” makes this exercise especially painful as Levi sees the faces of his friends before he cuts down their Titan forms.

This is a mentally exhausting maneuver for Levi, but it’s also a stunning action sequence that’s one of the best fights in Attack on Titan since season three. There’s wonderful choreography to Levi’s carnage as he takes advantage of his claustrophobic settings. It’s satisfying to see the anime go all out with this encounter and that Levi doesn’t stumble over these obstacles and allow Zeke to get away.

The tension between Levi and Zeke has been present in Attack on Titan for seasons and the assault in Liberio only teased the tension that exists between these two. This has been a long time coming and it’s given the attention that it deserves. Perhaps the best part of it is that Levi shares this success with Erwin and declares that this is just as much his victory and that his spirit can find some peace now.

A lot is left up in the air by the end of “Savagery” and each episode continues to unearth the status quo more than before. Levi and Zeke’s story concludes on the most disturbing note of the lot as Levi keeps Zeke in a form of grisly suspended torture that would make Asami from Audition blush. It’s the most extreme action that Levi has ever taken and it’s another reflection of how everyone is getting pushed past their limits.

However, these past few episodes have proven more than anything that this type of radical behavior seems to be the only way to survive and those that don’t adapt to these heartless ways are the ones that get trampled over by “progress.” Zeke just wants to return to that game of catch from his innocent youth, but it’s impossible. The kids in Eldia and Marley are more familiar with hand grenades than they are with baseballs. “Savagery” begins this thought and “Sole Salvation” shows that the two can sometimes be equally dangerous.

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Attack on Titan Season 4 Episode 15: Sole Salvation

“Sole Salvation” begins right where “Savagery” finishes, but the two episodes are structured so differently that it’s hard not to get whiplash when watching them back-to-back. Levi’s torturing of Zeke greatly intensifies, yet the episode retreats into Zeke’s subconscious as he mentally suffers for his actions and hopes to stumble upon absolution while he physically gets ravaged and turned into living viscera.

This flashback into Zeke’s childhood and one of his last remaining moments of true innocence might initially feel like a disappointment from the heavy action that’s present in “Savagery.” However, it’s presence here is not unlike how memories from past Titan bearers will flood the current users at unexpected moments. They have no control over when these memories will overlap with their own and are left to ponder the greater significance of it all.

The purpose of “Sole Salvation” is nebulous at first, but then it becomes clear why this piece of the story is currently being told. “Sole Salvation” functions as a release of pressure from a run of episodes that have become impossibly tense. In the past, flashbacks have been utilized to fill in context from different perspectives and also allow the audience a much-needed breather. The jump backwards this time seems like it’s a gentle form of escapism, but there’s still a dark edge to it that amplifies the dread that’s prevalent in the present. It’s not so much a reprieve from danger as it is an explanation for the bloody turn that’s about to take place.

“Savagery” highlights Eren’s rage towards the “cattle” and “slaves” of the world, yet “Sole Salvation” underscores that these are exactly the conditions that brought Eren and Zeke into this world. Grisha’s entire mindset towards family and children is even comparable to a cattle breeder. The biggest question that’s hung over the second half of this season is how exactly Eren and Zeke have come to terms with each other and “Sole Salvation” beautifully gets that point across in the most tragic way possible.

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Zeke and Eren are two attempts at the same idea and they’re able to find an empowering and dangerous invincibility in their dark roots. It’s almost as if they consider their increasing need for bloodshed and violence vindicated because they were always designed to be destructive weapons. One doesn’t get upset at an atom bomb for exploding . Eren and Zeke are just the two explosions at the end of very long wicks that Grisha lit years ago.

Zeke’s upbringing succeeds as a valuable counterpoint to what’s been shown with the childhoods of Eren, Grisha, Reiner, Gabi, and Falco. Grisha hammers in the ideology to his son that if he hates the world then it’s his responsibility to change it. This mantra soon becomes synonymous with Zeke’s desire to become a Warrior, which begins as an extension of his father, but blossoms into a bold act of independence. A young Zeke gets pulled in two directions as he forms a friendship with Tom Ksaver, a Titan researcher and the previous bearer of the Beast Titan.

Tom’s influence on Zeke is a vital part of the boy’s development and Ksaver feels like the type of productive person that Grisha could have become under purer circumstances. Tom selflessly uses himself as a guinea pig for the sake of knowledge, whereas Grisha endangers his own family for data.

Tom isn’t without his own sins and he becomes a mentor figure for Zeke, but it’s fascinating to consider how differently Zeke and Eren’s lives might have gone with someone like Tom as their father. They could maybe be living normal lives rather than the immensely complicated scenarios that their existences have become. They’re ready to commit genocide to an entire group of people and Eren and Zeke still treat this like the lesser of two evils. It’s just an extended game of catch that’s been going on for generations.

“Savagery” and “Sole Salvation” do not mess around and in a season of very strong episodes they’re two installments that immediately stand out and feel memorable, but for completely different reasons. Both entries are emotionally draining and connect on every level. It genuinely hurts to see these characters tear each other down after they’ve gone through so much together.

So much of the second half of this season has revolved around Eren and Zeke’s secret plan and with only one episode remaining it’s truly unclear where this all will land. Eren’s half of the plan seems to be successful, especially from the Jaegerists’ perspective, but Zeke appears to have hit a real roadblock that may or may not ruin what Eren has in motion.

Other crucial players like Gabi, Annie, and Reiner also need to fit into all of this somehow. Attack on Titan has always been heading towards a dark and depressing ending, yet the moral compasses of so many characters have become magnetized and off center that even the “winners” might be too disgusted with who they’ve become to be able to celebrate.

At the very least they’ll probably stay away from the wine.

Savagery: 4.5/5 Sole Salvation: 3.5/5

The post Attack on Titan Season 4 Episodes 14 and 15 Review appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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thisdaynews · 4 years ago

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Bloody Sunday in Enugu as security agents hunting for IPOB kill unarmed people

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/bloody-sunday-in-enugu-as-security-agents-hunting-for-ipob-kill-unarmed-people/

Bloody Sunday in Enugu as security agents hunting for IPOB kill unarmed people

The residents of Emene community in the Enugu East Local Government Area of Enugu State are still in consternation following the killing of some youths by security agents comprising the soldiers, air force personnel, the police and operatives of the Department of State Services on Sunday, August 23, 2020, during a clampdown on members of the Indigenous People of Biafra.