#his problems are predominantly caused by the mother figures in his life

[famouslysleepy]

ya know after reading a translated and unabridged version of Madame Villeneuve’s Beauty and the Beast aka the oldest known written variation on the tale

i cant help but now give a little side eye to all those adaptions that gave the beast a dead mom and mean dad for added backstory depth

[im-whatchamccallit]

Crushcrushcrush//Kim Hongjoong (ATEEZ)

Request:  Hi i was wondering if you could do a soulmate werewolf hongjoong x human female reader angst and fluff like she over hears hongjoong saying something and she gets sad and shy and worried and stuff.....

Pairing: Kim Hongjoong x Fem!Reader

Genre: Angst with fluff at the end, Werewolf!AU, Soulmate!AU, a bit of College!AU

Warnings: Hongjoong’s kind of a dick with irrational thinking, cussing I guess

Word Count: 7.2k

(A/N: Lets just pretend I didn’t disappear for 6 whole months, but i am back and my medication is no longer giving me the big sad so I’m a little more motivated to write.This isn’t the best work I’ve done, this is actually idea 10 for this prompt and idk if it’s executed properly but Imma keep trying and hopefully, to keep from falling back into a slump, I’ll start a new series so I have a regular scheduled fic for everyone. Also, I think I botched expressing the AUS here but just let me know what you think. Sorry for always disappearing, I can’t promise I won’t go off the grid again but I’ll try harder to be active in anyway)

Your mother always said crushes stayed crushes for a reason: they hurt. Bad. But you thought she was wrong, that your feelings for someone could one day be reciprocated later if not sooner, and that’s what led you to him. Kim Hongjoong. The day you met was a complete accident, your body slamming into his as you wandered aimlessly during your freshman year of high school. He was gorgeous with wide brown eyes, beautiful pink lips and cheeks, his hair styled differently from the other boys to reveal his forehead, showing his individuality. He was perfection.

“I’m so sorry. Are you alright?” Those were the first words he spoke to you, his voice so gentle, so sweet. And the way he reached out to help you with no hesitation, holding your hands as he pulled you up effortlessly.

It was love at first sight, all until he looked down to your hands, eyes catching a glimpse of your wrist, a row of zeros peeking through the sleeve of your uniform jacket. He slowly pushed the fabric up, both your eyes widening to see your soulmate clock had finally timed out, his hands releasing yours to check his own wrist, a quiver to his lips as his clock matched yours, his once soft eyes now hard as he stared you down.

“Stay far away from me.” He warned, not saying another word as he headed to his homeroom, your body frozen as you watched him disappear. He was so harsh, yet you liked him. Maybe suddenly finding his soulmate scared him, but it was no problem to you! You were bound to end up together so you played the waiting game with him, being the perfect soulmate you could possibly be whether he accepted it or not.

And that led you here, now seniors in college and still acting the way you were when you met. Hongjoong was still cold, treating you like some plague while you could only smile along. You weren’t sure how you missed the fact you lived in a predominantly werewolf area until a public service announcement came on your television one night to remind humans to stay indoors during the full moon, that night dedicated to werewolves being as free as they could be, but it made you even more hopeful when you were on your way home from work one night, taking a shortcut through the woods since it lead right to your backyard.

You were 16 at the time, so the sight of a shirtless person would obviously make you flustered, but a shirtless Hongjoong? Enough to cause a nosebleed. He was 16 as well, the exact age a werewolf develops a mate bond and, seeing as you’ve already been confirmed as soulmates in the human world, the sudden desire to latch onto you and never let you go once you locked eyes only made your lifelong attachment more real, and he was freaking out. He didn’t speak, opting to shift without removing the remainder of his clothes, your eyes wide as he moved deeper through the thick trees and towards the horizon where the orange sky was in full view and, the grin on your face just couldn’t stop growing. You knew werewolves had a stronger drive to their mates, so the idea that he could avoid you forever was laughable. Sure, you were both 23 and he has uped his disdain for you from staying silent to calling you any vile name he could think of, but it was only a matter of time before he came around. You just knew it.

“(Y/n), stop gawking.” Miyeon joked, poking your side to snap you from your daydreams, your eyes widening when you noticed a few of Hongjoong’s friend’s catching your gaze, a blush painting your face as you turned away.

“I wasn’t gawking, just making sure their table was okay. I am their waitress tonight.”

“And every other night because you said, and I quote, ‘I wanna work at any table my Joongie’s going to be at!’” She mocked, your eyes rolling as you looked back towards them.

You took a job at a diner just a few blocks from both your apartment and college campus, the pay great and the distance convenient. It was the only time you had to yourself instead of lingering to Hongjoong, figuring out his classes and breaks to give him snacks and lunches you’d personally make for him since you overheard him complain about the campus food before, only to be told they tasted like shit and he’d find his own food. It was a bit of a kick to the face to hear that, but you had one saving grace: his pack. The first time Hongjoong sent you away with a bitter remark, they were curious about you, tracking you down when they weren’t with their alpha to get more info on who you were and what you found so loveable about the man treating you like some demon. They were surprised by how sweet you were and how accepting you were to be the unwanted luna of an eight-wolf pack. They could never hate Hongjoong but they sure as hell loved you just a little more than him. Unbeknownst to both of you, Yunho and Mingi found out where you worked, making a plan with the others to take Hongjoong there as much as possible so he would have no choice but to interact with you, even if he stayed silent to not appear like an asshole in front of the various strangers dining as well. Hongjoong would honestly never return if he had the choice, but something about the restaurant’s signature burger kept bringing him back, which is why he was here, sipping his soda angrily as he waited on his meal that would be served by his worst nightmare, you.

“I don’t know why you don’t just find someone else. Isn’t it easy for humans to reject soulmates? You could move on with no problems.” She said, helping you grasp onto the steel tray covered in various meals, a huff leaving you as you put on a bright smile.

“Because I know it’s harder to move on for wolves. You guys don’t have a choice on who your mates are, and you just accept it once you meet them. I know Hongjoong will accept me eventually, it’s just gonna take some time.” You gave one more smile before wobbling towards the table in question.

Hongjoong tried not to follow the gaze of his pack as they watched you happily approach them, letting out a huff as you adjusted the tray onto your shoulder, grasping the plates and placing them in front of the respective person, Hongjoong’s nose twitching at the smell of his burgers and fries, not wasting anytime to dig in as the other’s thanked you, but you shyly looked at the male before you, the tray pressed to your chest as you tried to find a casual way to speak with him.

“I-uh- I-I remembered last time you asked for extra cheese, so I decided to put cheese in the burger too! I hope you like it better than the tofu stew I made you for lunch the other week.”

“I didn’t ask for extra cheese this time, so why put it inside my burger where I can’t take it off?” He said spitefully, mouth still full as he set the half-eaten burger down.

Your smile faltered but bounced back as you reached towards his plate.

“O-oh! Well, I can take it back and make you another! This time I ca-“

“’This time’? You should’ve just done it from the start. Your job is to listen and do what you’re told and you can’t even do that? What can you do right?”

You swallowed hard, your eyes wandering to the people now staring at you as the scene unfolded, your heartbeat ringing in your ears as you tried to hold it together. The worst he’s called you in an idiot and that was usually under his breath, so to practically say it out loud, in front of strangers while you were in the middle of a shift and forced to do nothing but smile like you usually would, felt like you were being stabbed and burned simultaneously. You couldn’t keep smiling, looking down as you tried to apologize, only for him to cut you off once again.

“Go bother someone else. Or hide in the back if you’re just gonna keep fucking up this much.”

The space was eerily silent, even with the soft music playing, your eyes not leaving your shoes as you shuffled away. It was a pitiful sight, Seonghwa releasing a breath he didn’t realize he was holding as you went to a neighboring table to retrieve plates and glasses left by a couple from before. He was ready to tear Hongjoong’s head off, not as a gamma to an alpha but as one friend to another, his jaw tight as he prepared to berate him the way he did you but, somehow, Wooyoung beat him by asking a question none of them thought to ask before.

“What did she ever do to you that you have to treat her like that?”

There was a strange but tense silence as they awaited his answer, watching him taking small bites of his fries as he stared ahead at nothing before turning to them with what could only be described as a sadistic smirk.

“Imagine being 13 and finding out the best years of your life, the years of dating, hooking up, just discovering who you are, are gone because your mate decides to show up and take that from you.”

“Are you fucking stupid? That’s the reason we have mates, so we can do those things with one person instead of random people!” Seonghwa nearly yelled, trying to keep his voice low as to not alarm anymore spectators again.

“For the past 7 years, I’ve been trying to get her to leave or just reject me, but it’s clear to me now that she’s just an idiot that doesn’t understand she’s not needed, by me or anyone. And, if you’re as dumb as her, I’ll simplify it for you: she’s unwanted.”

Whatever pain you felt before suddenly disappeared into a numbness you couldn’t explain. He knew you were there, that you could hear him, that you would hear him, and yet he still said it. You were conflicted and sad, your lips curling in a mixture of disgust and anger before settling on a bright smile. Never mind the fact your tears finally spilled over, that your heart ached with every beat and your body felt heavy with the weight of being rejected by someone you waited so long for, you just had to smile. Soulmates were supposed to be a sure thing, supposed to be your happily ever after, yet it just turned out to be a crush, one that you should’ve let die the day you met him.

“(Y/n/n)…” Miyeon spoke cautiously as you made your way towards the bar, your other coworkers watching from beside her as if you were some strange spectacle.

“We have to start cleaning, y’know? It’ll help us get out of here a lot faster tonight.” You said in your usual cheerful tone, tears still flowing and a faint crack to your voice.

“How about you just head home for the day, (Y/n)? We can handle everything from here.” Your manager said, her eyes scanning your face as you moved past them and to the kitchen, their bodies following instinctively.

“What? No! I’m fine! We still have 4 more hours to go and I think if I get a head start with the chefs for tomorrow lunch specials I ca-“

“(Y/n), please-“

“I’m fine, Miyeon! Really! It’s not like I got broken up with or anything, I never even had a boyfriend! Just a crush on someone that thinks I’m a waste of space! Isn’t that super ironic? Spending most of your life chasing after someone that wants nothing to do with you? That’s really funny, right?” You choked out, lips pursing into a thin line to keep in your sobs but your attempts were futile, everything slowly starting to hit you at once until your body collapsed, one of the other servers catching you before you hit the ground.

It was all a blur from there, the words of comfort everyone offered turning into muffled noise as your cries of agony came out freely, the way Miyeon dragged you from the emergency exit at the back of the building and to her car to take you home, and even when you crawled into bed and managed to sleep despite the pounding headache. 7 years came and went and there was nothing to show for it. No soulmate, no boyfriend, no romance, not even a friendship. You were empty and for some reason the only thing filling your heart and mind was the person who broke you.

It felt like time stood still yet hours had passed, Hongjoong back in his own bedroom pressing away at his keyboard, stopping occasionally to write a few notes down from his new composition, but he wasn’t distracted enough to hear his door open, various footsteps entering and even a few bodies settling in on his bed, his eyes not bothering to leave his notebook as he figured this moment would come.

“You don’t need to lecture me.” He grumbled, going back to play a few more notes only to find his keyboard unplugged, Mingi tossing the cord away as his alpha stared him down.

“It’s only a lecture if you listen and learn, which you won’t, so we’re gonna make you feel as bad as possible for driving away the only person that gave a shit about you.” San said with a bright smile, a scoff leaving Hongjoong as he finally turned in his chair to face them, eyes scanning the room to see this situation wasn’t playful but truly hostile, almost like an ambush.

“So, you guys don’t care about me?”

“Trying to get you to accept your soulmate so you don’t die shows we care a lot more than we should.” Yeosang spoke, making himself comfortable as he sat against the pillow and headboard.

“But we’re the real assholes for trying to force her with someone as shitty as you.” Seonghwa finally said, Hongjoong’s head snapping in his direction as he let out a dry chuckle, shifting in his seat so he was leaning backwards, arms crossed as he told himself to stay calm during his friend’s potential tantrum.

“I feel like you have the most to say since you’ve been in love with my mate the longest, so go ahead, tell me how I’m such a bad man, Seonghwa. I’m all ears.” His smugness made the tension worse, Seonghwa stepping closer with clenched fist.

“I’m not in love with you mate, but if I didn’t know someone was waiting for me because we were fated to be together, maybe I would have asked (Y/n) out, because she deserves better than a lowlife with the brain function of a dead goldfish. But I respect her too much as your mate and my luna to not push those boundaries so I tried to help her get closer to you because I know you, Hongjoong. You’re not an asshole or a jerk, but to her? You treat her like shit, when really you’d have no one without her. You’re a short, scrawny, nerdy moron that locks himself in a dark room for days on end just to complete a single project, then emerge to eat cold pizza and watch Despicable Me because your pea-sized brain can’t comprehend anything that isn’t brightly colored animation. If you take away your alpha status, no girl would even look in your direction but you have someone literally at your side, the only human not afraid of you, trying to figure out everything there is to know about you, yet you can’t give her the time of day. You probably don’t even know a damn thing about her.”

“Unfortunately, I know more than enough about her.” Hongjoong spoke, all amusement gone as he glared at the older male, their mindlink clogged with threatening growls and barks, trying to keep their fight from getting physical.

That first sentence alone made Hongjoong’s blood boil, his face contorted in a mixture of pain and disgust. How could Seonghwa even say that to him, plotting to steal his mate all because he was a bit uncertain? That all it was, uncertainty! He didn’t hate you, or wish you weren’t around, he actually grew to anticipate and enjoy your ramblings about your day or whatever new thing caught your attention, he actually even loved the lunches that you’d make for him. He couldn’t help that over the years he grew to crave you more, but the thought of fully accepting you and solidifying that the best years of his life were about to be gone, restricted to one person forever before he could even determine for himself his likes and dislikes, what he considered real love rather than what fate wanted him to feel, was terrifying. So he distanced himself from you, spending the years watching you from afar in hopes that if he didn’t get too close he wouldn’t lose his free will completely.

But it was a bad habit that seeped into your college years, everyone assuming he cared so little for you when he knew everything there was to know. He knew where you worked before any of the boys did, where your apartment was, the fact you were a business major planning to open a bakery once you graduated, he knew you didn’t have classes on Fridays but always came back on campus because you prepared meals for the men’s and women’s wrestling team which is where Jongho first met you, he knew you hated mint chocolate chip ice cream just like him but loved chocolate ice cream with mint chips, he knew you were always cold but overheat at night and wake up at exactly 3am to change into shorts and a tank top to be more comfortable, he knew about the birthmark on your lower back and a scar on your hip from a cat scra-

“Holy shit, you’re insane.” Wooyoung breathed out, Hongjoong’s eyes focusing on the room in front of him, a mixture of shocked expressions and amused ones filling his vision.

“I liked it better when we thought you hated her but, hyung, you’ve been stalking her since your freshman year of high school?” Jongho asked cautiously.

It was a weird feeling bubbling inside Hongjoong, the primary one being embarrassment. He knew he’d sometimes unintentionally rant in their mindlink whenever he was upset but to make an almost decade long secret public to his pack, revealing the intimate details of how you slowly but surely ingrained yourself into not only his brain but his life until he felt like he was going crazy? It made him tear up, his face burn with a blush as he was finally forced to face the truth. He pushed you away but wanted you more than anything. He wanted to spend his years free to explore before finally settling down only to reject every girl that came close to him simply because they weren’t you, and he took that anger out on you. What was he so mad about? The fact you stood by his side with a smile happily accepting him while he tried and failed to lust after other women? Was he that pathetic? He could admit now that he was and, if he could turn back time, he would’ve introduced himself and walked you to class. Just the first step of fully accepting you.

“You’re still ranting in the mindlink, you know?” Seonghwa said softly, regaining the once again lost focus of his alpha who was too consumed in his own pity to notice the tension died down, their gazes soft as they tried to sympathize with their leader.

“Sorry. I wish none of you heard that stuff.” He admitted, sniffling as he realized he’d been crying, hand hurriedly wiping away tears from his cheeks.

“Well, it’s a good thing we did. We still think you’re a moron, but at least we know you’re feeling guilty about all of this.”

“Don’t worry, Joong, if you know (Y/n) like we do, she always sees the best in people, so she’ll forgive you. But you still have to apologize.” San followed up Mingi’s words, wrapping an arm around Hongjoong shoulders while giving a bright smile in response to his weak one.

“She’s my TA in Calc 3 and I have that class around noon tomorrow. She always stays after in case anyone has questions, so I can stall until you get there.” Yunho offered, Hongjoong feeling a slight warmth in his chest thinking about it all. He’d let go of his insecurities, fix everything he’s done wrong, and finally have you as his. Tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.

And tomorrow did come, but you were nowhere to be found. When Hongjoong arrived to Yunho’s class, he was met with a sympathetic apology on the account that you didn’t show up that day, you weren’t even at any of your other classes. The boys even tried to find you at work only to be met with a mob of your pissed coworkers led by Miyeon, threatening to rip their heads off if she saw their faces again. And that lasted for nearly 3 days, Hongjoong’s hope slowly dwindling away until he noticed two figures sneakily meeting halfway at the school’s entrance to exchange a large white cooler.

He recognized those bulky arms anywhere, and the thick Aussie accent was a dead giveaway as well, especially when it was followed by a distinct giggle. There was no mistaking it was Chan, but he could barely see the person with him, their voice low as they spoke to him and face hidden beneath a hood, but the scent emitting from them was strong, and beautiful, his eyes widening as he finally took it all in. You looked different, wearing a dark grey matching sweat suit which was a complete 180 from your usual attire, and you smelled faintly of passionfruit, possibly a change to your normal shampoo in an attempt to disguise yourself, but that thought only made his heart hurt more. Were you intentionally avoiding him? He could understand you hating him now but you were even ignoring the others in his pack, going from friends to complete strangers in a matter of hours and leaving them all devastated. He was going to fix this, here and now, if not for him and you than for his friends.

“Jongho’s been pretty upset about you not responding to his text. It’d really help if you stopped by to at least let him know you’re okay.” Chan pleaded, giving you a dimpled smile and hopeful gaze that made it impossible for you to hide your blushing face and grin.

“I just need a little more time, Chris. It’s like if you broke up with your mate and all the friends you made through her left you too. Except it’s me being broken up with by someone who was never my boyfriend and his friends came to me instead of me going to them. But, still, it hurts all the same.” You laughed slightly, trying to find some humor in the situation.

“You’re the only person that still calls me Chris.” He commented, trying to redirect the conversation as you clearly weren’t fine, neither of you noticing the burning glare just a few meters away.

“I just think it fits you best.” You admitted, neither of you breaking eye contact until you gasped, staring down to the box of food and drinks you bought.

“You should hurry to practice. You need to eat beforehand otherwise you’ll be weak after warmups alone. And I worked hard making those sandwiches and cutting that fruit, if it goes bad because you stayed here to cheer me up, I’ll really be mad.” You tried to put on your best scowl, your scolding undermined by his amused laughter.

“Alright, fine. Just stay safe, please?” You nodded, waving as you watched him turn to head to the school’s gymnasium, missing the way Chan glared at Hongjoong as he continued forward. Chan and Hongjoong’s packs were close, family almost, so the news of what Hongjoong did and why reached them in no time, and Chan was hoping today things would be fixed soon because, apart from you being the wrestling team’s beloved personal chef, you were like a sister to him.

You wasted no time leaving the campus behind, ready to go back into the darkness of your bedroom to forget you existed. You really wish you could disappear, that the ground would split beneath you and swallow you whole, but you couldn’t just leave when your phone was filled with calls and messages from friends and coworkers wondering where you were and if you were fine. So many people cared, what kind of person would you be to leave them all alone like this, especially when all they wanted was to help you? But being alone helped, trying to live life as normal as possible while adjusting to a Hongjoong-free lifestyle helped. It would take some time, but you’d find your normal someday. All you had to do was avoid-

“(Y/n)!” Your body froze.

He rarely called you by your name but his voice was distinct on its own, and it was the most sickly sweet thing you’ve ever heard. You wanted to run, to never have him see you like this. Dear god, how did you even look right now? You felt like shit, you probably looked the part. Dammit, Hongjoong was right all along, you were shit. You were worse than shit, you were just pathetic. A pathetic, lovestruck loser itching to just turn and say hi, to have the conversation you always dreamed of but you knew that wouldn’t happen. He’ll yell at you again. He’ll-

“(Y/n)? H-hi…” Hongjoong said shyly, standing right in front of you as you shrank into yourself.

His brows furrowed as you looked away, mentally arguing with yourself as you went over the days of self-reflecting you did, trying to find some lesson from your solitude to aid in this situation and it was starting to scare him. You were never quiet with him, you always had something to say even if it wasn’t important but, luckily, he had something important to say and hopefully you’d listen.

“I- T-the other day…. I w-was…. I-I’m sorry.” He stammered out, this confession a lot harder than he thought, especially now that you were facing him, eyes just as innocent as the day he met you, but he couldn’t run away this time.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, honestly. Everyone told me I was an idiot and I think they’re right. I treated you like you were garbage for years, all because I didn’t want to be mated so young. I just wanted to date around before I finally settled down with someone and, m-maybe I could’ve just said that, so you didn’t have to wait around for me all these years but, I never hated you, and I can’t hate you. I know you won’t forgive me right away but I think it’s only fair that I can be a good mate to you now.”

He swallowed hard, trying to suppress the desperate ‘please’ he wanted to add as your pupils began to shake, almost as if you were a machine malfunctioning, none of your self-reflecting preparing you for this moment, the only thing coming to mind being some sad blog article you found during your second day of isolation. ‘Forgiving and forgetting too soon is dangerous. Find yourself’. It wasn’t what you wanted but maybe what you need, what he needed. So, without hesitation, you smiled brightly at him although it never reached your eyes, clearing your throat as you tried to keep your voice steady.

“Hongjoong, I can’t forgive you easily. I waited for you, I tried to make you accept me and it always ended up with me getting hurt. Honestly, if I just treated you like a regular crush, maybe we could’ve forgotten we’re meant to be together until after graduation or something.” You laughed awkwardly, wanting to look away as his eyes softened in the saddest way, but you needed to do this, eyes locked on his as you exhaled through your nose.

“I couldn’t be by your side all the time, so whether you dated anyone is still a mystery to me but, I’ve been alone for seven years hoping you’d come around, and I think it’s time I take those years back. I’m not sure if what you said counted as a rejection or if we’re still mates but, if we are, we’ll come back to each other eventually. For now, I just need some time.”

You managed to walk past him without completely collapsing in tears, speed walking back to your apartment as you tried to swallow sobs, not even taking in the way Hongjoong stumbled to follow you, almost like a zombie as he attempted to plead for you to reconsider, to force himself to accept your decision but ask how long you needed, but he couldn’t do that. He tried to picture himself in your shoes, seven years of pining only to be publicly humiliated by the person you were meant to spend the rest of your life with. He couldn’t blame you for not forgiving him, and he sure as hell couldn’t force you, so he let you go, trudging in the opposite direction to his two story apartment just to hide in his bedroom until he didn’t feel like dying anymore.

But as more days passed and it only got harder for Hongjoong. He barely left his room but also never slept, every song he created was played in minor scales to fit his now melancholy life. The charisma he typically exuded was hidden with puffy red eyes from crying and a yellow knit sweater a few sizes too large for his body but it was the only thing that comforted him at this point, especially when knowing you had reconnected with everyone but him.

After exactly one week of distancing yourself from the world, you caved and meet with the boys individually (sans Hongjoong), apologizing for needing space although they completely understood, but the way each interaction ended made your guts churn with guilt. ‘Stay safe, luna’, that’s how all of them addressed you before they left, leaving you filled with the desire to return to how things were before. You missed your friends and, the fact your mate was finally ready to claim you, only made you want to forgive Hongjoong sooner. But you needed to be your own person for once. You had seven years worth of relationships to catch up on and you wouldn’t let them keep you from that.

Except when they did.

You should’ve known it was risky letting them know you had a date so soon, just some other human on campus that had yet found his soulmate. They sounded happy for you, Wooyoung going so far to ask where you met and where your date would be and what time, giving suggestions on what to say and wear since it was “your first”. It was a sweet gesture, and you thought nothing of it, but that information meant everything to him which led to now, the boys huddled together in their living room with a slightly paler and sickly looking Hongjoong curled into the corner of their loveseat.

“So they’re going bowling tonight at 8:30? We could ask her about it tomorrow in case she’s into him because hyung isn’t looking too great.” Yeosang commented, everyone looking to Hongjoong as he managed to drown his entire body within the sweater, only his head visible as he stared ahead like some lost puppy.

“He’s just weak from not being around her for so long, but their bond is still there so he’s fine. But we have nothing to worry about. She won’t fall in love with him so don’t get too involved, she’ll just stop talking to us again if we meddle too much.” Seonghwa warned, a chorus of ‘Okays’ confirming their dismissal as they all stood to retreat to their bedrooms.

“Wait, who is she going out with anyways? There’s only 10 other humans at that school.” Mingi’s question cause everyone to freeze, the silence in the room contrasting with the faint answer Woooyung gave in their mindlink, Hongjoong turning to look at him with hurt and pain.

“Why didn’t you say it was Yugyeom?!”

“I did! Just not to you, until now because I forgot to tune you out.” He said shyly, flinching as Hongjoong ran past him and right out their front door, none of them sure of what to do at that point.

It was such a minor yet major detail. Kim Yugyeom was admittedly the most wanted person any of them could think of. Human girls wanted him, werewolf girls wanted him, most guys couldn’t help but stare whenever he passed by. He was gorgeous with eyes that sparkled every time he smiled. He spoke about his soulmate with so much passion despite never meeting her, following his words with how he’d treat any girl before her with the same love and care. It was a pick up line meant to hook any hopelessly romantic girl in, the sweetest way to say their relationship wouldn’t last. But this was Kim Yugyeom, they knew it was only meant with good intentions, not wanting to string someone along with the false hope they’d be together forever. And that’s exactly what you needed. To explore while knowing you’d always come back to Hongjoong. But that’s not what Hongjoong wanted. He didn’t want you dating anyone else, finding temporary happiness when he was supposed to give you a lifetime of it. And humans were more flexible with their soulmates, they had the privilege to move one without the pain or withdrawals of losing their mate. Werewolves just died if they were rejected, heartbreak and loneliness consuming them, so there was no telling how your heart would react to someone exactly like you. Maybe you’ll fall in love with him. Maybe he’ll abandon his soulmate for you once he learns how amazing you are. Maybe Hongjoong would die from lack of food and sleep before he even reached your apartment, which he was still sprinting full speed towards. It was only 7:30pm, meaning he had an hour before you and Yugyeom went out, but he didn’t have a plan. He had no idea what he was doing, but he needed to stop you before you found yourself in love with someone else.

It was like some scene in a drama, Hongjoong’s chest heaving as he finally came to a stop just outside your apartment. His body felt like giving out as he climbed the two flights of stairs to your door, only to find you waving shyly to Yugyeom just as he turned away, trying not to lock eyes with Hongjoong but Hongjoong’s eyes were only trained on you, yours finding his as a panicked look crossed your face. Should you look away? Go back inside? What was he even doing there? You never told the boys your address… You gasped as he approached you, swallowing hard as you tried to remain calm, but how could you stay calm when you finally got a good look at him?

“Oh my god, are you okay?” You didn’t hesitate to ask, stepping further from your door to examine him, reaching for his face only to stumble back to your original position. You were making great progress, you can’t do that now.

“I’ve been better, but even then I wasn’t fine.” He said with a dry chuckle, your lips curling into a fake smile to not show how much his appearance affected you. He looked like he was on the brink of death. You knew wolves would get sick without their mates, but was it really killing him? Were you killing him?

“Joongi-Uhm, Hongjoong, how about you sit down? You look like you’re going to faint.” You offered, stepping back to allow him inside, watching him stumble past you and straight to your sofa as if he owned the place.

It was such an awkward moment for you, watching the poor boy curl into himself as his sweater practically became his body, a sigh leaving your lips as you shut your door. Instead of healing yourself, you had to heal him. It was oddly pitiful but your instincts screamed at you to do it.

Hongjoong shut his eyes as he eased into your sofa, feeling more comfortable than he was in his own home, even more so with your scent invading his senses, your body warmth radiating onto his as you carefully took a seat, trying to figure out what to do.

“Do you need food, or water? Or a doctor?” You asked, the giggle he let out this time weak but still enough to make your heart beat a bit faster.

“I just need you near me.” He admitted.

You let out a squeak as he shamelessly fell into your lap, head comfortably resting against your thighs as he laid face up. You couldn’t stop your hand from easing through his unnaturally colored locks, melting at how soft they were, bottom lip trapped under your teeth as you had to fight off the desire to cup his face. You’ve never gotten this close to him and he wasn’t telling you to go away, instead letting out content purrs as he nuzzled closer to you, your eyes burning with unshed tears. Why couldn’t he just want you from the start? You’d would’ve been able to hold him like this all the time, to see him happy and healthy rather than a shell of his former self. But he didn’t want you, and now he was at your apartment just to keep himself from dying. It was silly to think he cared about you as much as he did himself.

“Of course you do.” You whispered, laughing bitterly as your hand left his hair, moving to his arm to ease him back up into a sitting position.

You couldn’t get past him no matter how hard you tried, nor did you want to, but every word he said, everything he’s done, followed you like a ghost haunting some poor unsuspecting soul. Why did you have to love someone who didn’t love you the same? Why was this your life?

“Can you just hold me a little longer? P-please?” He asked with a cute whine to his voice.

You sighed and grabbed his arm, gently pulling him back into his previous position, fingers massaging his scalp as he finally opened his eyes to look at you. You were beautiful, even with the frown lines etched into your face. He wonder how long they’ve been there, especially when he’s only seen you smiling. Maybe you spent your alone time more upset than he thought. Where you upset before he came? You couldn’t be when Yugyeom was here, no one could be upset with him around. Except Hongjoong. He felt a grudge building inside him just from the mere thought of him with you. He felt like interrogating you on what he was doing here in the first place and why you gave your address out to just anyone, but it wasn’t his place to ask and probably wouldn’t be for a while, but jealousy and rage was all he felt so any reasonable thinking was thrown out the window.

“I don’t want you to see Yugyeom anymore.” He said definitely, your eyes widened as you stared at him incredulously, an amused giggle leaving your lips.

“That’s not for you to choose, Hongjoong. I told you I need time-“

“Those seven years you’ve been waiting I couldn’t be with anyone else. I always compared every girl I met to you and none of them came close to being as perfect, now I have to watch you date some dance major with pretty eyes because I was an insecure dumbass? He has a soulmate, and he’s always going to choose them no matter how much you like each other, so why not save your feelings? I’ll wait as long as you want me to, but just don’t fall in love with anyone else.”

You tried so hard to hide your smile. This wasn’t something you typically liked, possessive guys being on the list of things you found annoying, but considering it was Hongjoong, his soft eyes hard and sharp as their hue seemed to go pitch black as his words were both sweet and demanding, made you fall in love just a little more than you already were. You wanted to take this as his confession, as a truce in your previous one-sided enemyship, to tell him that you told Yugyeom you couldn’t go out with him because you could only see yourself with Hongjoong, but you needed time. Not time to date and explore the way you thought he had, but to watch him work as hard as you did to prove he was ready and willing to love you. It was a little malicious, sure, but it was all in good fun. He’d always be your mate after all.

“I don’t know, Hongjoong, you really hurt me…”

“It hurt knowing I wasn’t with you.” Your smile cracked through, causing his own to appear, your game already over.

“And how do you think I felt? You think you can make up seven years worth of waiting so easily?”

You squealed as he shot up, magically seeming more alive than when he arrived, eyes full of life and his lips and cheeks the same rosy color as when you met him, hands warm and soft as he cupped your face.

“Good thing I have forever to do it.”

The silence was comfortable but unbearable, especially as he hesitated to lean closer, your lips puckering to guide him but he didn’t seem to be catching on and, when he did, you shifted back, laughing awkwardly as you stared at one another, both of you taking a deep breath as you finally closed the gap between you, a weird electric sensation you could only dream of as your lips slowly grew accustom to one another, moving so slow yet feeling so urgent. It was all still new to the both of you, romance and dating only now becoming part of your lives, but it was exciting knowing that you had years ahead of you to perfect it, your entire lives dedicated to loving one another. And it only took a seven year crush to get you here.

[sparrowwritings]

Reporting on Something Unforeseen

So this is based off of a Final Fantasy 14 dual Warrior of Light AU that @thedovahcat and I came up with. The basic idea is that the events of the game are the same but some of the further (spoilerific) implications have drastically changed. Not to mention that the two are about 17 years old, so there’s some more character-based interactions that are slightly different but in a way that we find fun (which is kinda the point of AUs lol).

This takes place early early on in the story quests.

Roger belongs to her, Lara belongs to me, everyone else is from the game itself.

_____________________________________________________________

There is quite a lot of debate surrounding the nature of fate. Does it exist? If so, how much control does it have over the lives of men and beastmen? If not, then are our actions beholden unto the Gods, the mother crystal or something else entirely?

My master is of a mind that it doesn’t matter if fate exists. What truly matters is what one does with the life given to you, and what others remember you by. Most of the time, I’m inclined to agree with her. Yet, there are times when I witness something that has me pause and consider such questions with genuine curiosity. After all, all creatures great and small are connected to the world in various ways--that events should happen that could only happen because of a predetermined path set by said connections wouldn’t be entirely farfetched, at least in the short term.

But since this letter is not to be an essay on the nature of fate, I must describe to you the incident that has most recently caused me to think such things. I believe you will be most interested in this, even to the point of forgiving me for waxing philosophical for so long in this preamble. 

Just this morn, I had returned to Limsa Lominsa after having patrolled and noted the levels of aether near where the beastmen tribes tend to gather. (See the attached report that are included with this letter.) I had been about to write a far more formal letter when I espied the boy that Papalymo and Yda recently introduced to our little group, Roger Briden. It wasn’t hard to notice him--Roger’s eyes were the size of dinner plates as he wandered through the streets of the floating city. He was lucky he wasn’t in Ul’dah, though I suspect that the local pickpockets were disappointed about what little money he had on his person.

Part of me wanted to hail him and see what he was up to, but some instinct held me back. I listened to it and followed the boy. His path was meandering, but the general direction never wavered. It was as if Roger’s feet were following the directive of something his mind wasn’t privy to. 

Soon enough, the destination he was drawn to was evident: the Culinarian Guild and the restaurant that it employs with its members. Again, he stared about the place as if to drink up the sight of something new. I was again inclined to get his attention when a commotion from inside drew the boy and subsequently myself. 

There was some sort of celebration to be had regarding one of the guild’s younger members. I recognized her as someone that I have written about before: Lara Marner. As you may recall, she is predominantly a culinarian by trade. Nonetheless she is a skilled fighter and is known to assist the Yellowjackets with local problems as handily as any adventurer. The girl also has the same knack of being in the area of curious spikes in aetheric resonance that Roger does. 

At this point you might be realizing what direction this tale will go, but I must report what I witnessed with as much accuracy as possible for your consideration.

Having saved the life of another guild member, the master had offered a round of drinks to everyone in the restaurant in Lara’s name. She accepted the praise and adulation with a humility (and awkwardness) I’ve only seen in Roger before. For his part, he seemed to get caught up in the celebration and swept into being seated at a small table. A drink had been placed in his hands, but the boy ignored it in favor of trying to figure out who was being lauded. 

Instinct demanded I stay on the outskirts of the joviality. I now realize that this was so that I could have the perfect seat for what was about to happen.

Lara, after being thoroughly toasted for her heroism, made her way through the crowd to take the orders of awaiting patrons. Roger had gotten tired of waiting to see who was being cheered and stood up to leave just as she was heading in his direction. The greetings she had on her lips died the moment their eyes locked. Were this to have happened in a play, all other activity should have ceased around them. As it stood, only those two were still in the lively room for a prolonged moment.

And then the two pitched forward--each clutching their own heads in a discomfort you will be all too familiar with. Miraculously, they didn’t collide with how much violence the visions seized them with. It was then that I made my way to them at the same time as another--the master of the Culinarian Guild. Together, we made certain that the two were seated at the previously unoccupied table to be certain that any potential fainting spells could be circumvented. 

A brief conversation with him confirmed that Lara had indeed had such moments before, though never with such ferocity. He perfectly described what she must have told him--of the dream of Her voice calling out her name along with “Hear, Feel, Think,” and the visions that came from said dream of events never described but nonetheless known to her. All clear signs that, like Roger and yourself, Lara indeed possessed the Echo. 

Self-flagellation is the primary talent of Thancred, so instead I will apologize for not having discovered her before now and promise to make it up to you in whatever way you so choose at a later date.

Whatever it was that the two had seen while under the Echo’s effects, the moment they returned to this realm it was as if the two had been friends for years despite having only met just moments before. They spoke at length with such speed and enthusiasm that I quickly lost track of the plot of the conversation. The chatter of the children was enough to calm the worries of the master enough for him to leave them to me to handle. 

I have since been chaperoning Lara and Roger as she gives him a grand tour of the city. As I am writing, we have stopped by the marketplace for the two to browse the merchants’ wares. The two of them get distracted easily enough that I knew that a report could be written long before they could wander away once more.

Which brings me back to the topic of fate. How was it that Roger was led to the Culinarian’s Guild at that exact moment? The two have lives about as far apart as could be. He, a carer of chocobos in Gridania. She, a culinarian in Limsa Lominsa. Their lives shouldn’t have had the chance to interact. And yet, his notable deeds in the Black Shroud gave him permission and a task to come to La Noscea. And from there in a moment of whimsy Roger was able to discover another Echo user. One that had also made a name for herself with helping her fellow man in noteworthy ways. Was it chance or destiny that made such a series of events possible?

You need not reply to such musings, for there is a far more important question for all of us to consider.

Should we invite Lara Marner into the Scions? The people I have spoken with about her deeds sing her praises in similar ways that those who spoke well of Roger do. I will of course also attach what I have learned about her to this report for you to pass along to the others. 

I will await your reply in Limsa. Now that she knows my face (and Roger has been adorably gushing about how “amazing” I am) I feel that whatever is decided she will accept the information from me well enough.

Regards,

Y’shtola

[aion-rsa]

Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia: An Excellent Show Undermined by its Race Problems

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Marketed as an updated and darker version of Gilmore Girls, the idea of this new mother-daughter duo show, Ginny & Georgia, is instantly appealing. Netflix’s new top 10 show is about 15-year-old Ginny Miller, played by Antonia Gentry, who often feels more mature than her 30-year-old mother, Georgia (Brianne Howey). When the family moves from Texas to a new town called Wellsbury in Massachusetts, Ginny isn’t too keen until she meets her super cute neighbor, Marcus, and his twin sister Maxine. But life is not so simple, and as secrets come to light, things get more complicated.

After finishing the show in 24 hours, I wish I could sit here and write about how compelling it is and how well it portrays that point in teenage life where you’re impulsive, awkward, and nervous as you try to figure out relationships and find yourself. However, while the town of Wellsbury is picture-perfect, Ginny & Georgia is not as it is undermined by a significant race problem, primarily how it deals with its biracial lead.

The show’s failure to deal with its lead character Ginny’s biracial identity makes it hard for me to love all the other great aspects of the show, as much as I want to. Ginny & Georgia’s exploration of coming of age, self-harm, LGBTQ+ relationships, sexual abuse, and being an American Sign Language family is compelling and something I wish was more present on television. Even criminal mastermind Georgia Miller, whose life is full of secrets, murder, and lord knows whatever else, is undermined by the shows tendency to only acknowledge Ginny’s Blackness when dealing with racism. Her race isn’t considered in any other regard, which suggests being Black is nothing more than microaggressions and discrimination, and that racism makes up the entirety of the Black identity. 

“If you had an ass, you’d be perfect”

Ginny’s experience of racism, mostly in the form of microaggressions, is plain for the eye to see, particularly in the comments made by Ginny’s new friends. When her friend Samantha (Romi Shraiter) asks her, “What are you?” and then plays it off as a compliment because Ginny is so “exotic looking,” Ginny’s response is silence. An equal response is given when the same friend fetishizes mixed-race babies by saying, “I’m going to marry a Black man so I can have adorable little mixed babies.” Beyond the fact that this comment is weird, and that the show is in many ways portraying a main character who is struggling with their biracial identity, the show normalizes racist comments by not having Ginny call out her friend. 

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Celebrating Black Voices in Anime with Funimation

By Daniel Kurland

It’s the same situation when Ginny straightens her hair, and Brodie, one of those characters who thinks they’re the funniest person alive but actually just fulfils that stereotypical teen drama douchebag role says, “If you had an ass, you’d be perfect. It’s weird that you don’t.” The use of comments like these in the show aid stereotypes and fetishizations of Black women as objects of desire and the idea that Black women, like me, who don’t have large bums are somehow less Black.

The show attempts to deal with this issue by having Ginny discuss it with her boyfriend Hunter (Mason Temple). Though it is a lovely scene because they start to discuss their experiences of being biracial, it does not address the fact Brodie has just used a racist insult, which is a common occurrence among Ginny’s friends. 

Both of these sequences undermine Ginny’s character, who, when we first meet her, is outspoken and strong as she calls out her English teacher for constructing a syllabus containing mostly white men. The show weakens its lead character when it portrays Ginny as someone who can’t have hard conversations with her friends. 

“Too unconventional”

A particularly striking aspect of the show is Ginny’s interactions with her AP English teacher, Mr. Gitten (Jonathan Potts). Her interactions with him are reflective of a situation most Black people have either experienced or heard about during their education, and yet the way the show handles it is somewhat messy. In Gitten’s first encounter with Ginny, he assumes she is not as well-read as the rest of her (predominantly white) classmates. This is continued when he states Ginny lost the writing competition because her essay was “too unconventional” when he really means it was too Black for him. Never directly discussing the issue Mr. Gitten has with her until the last episode, the moment is the closest Ginny comes throughout the whole show to dealing with the racism she receives, and yet it is one of the most unrealistic portrayals I have witnessed on television. 

Instead of trying to get the teacher punished, Ginny’s approach to dealing with the racism she receives is to blackmail him, saying she’d out him as a racist if he doesn’t give her a glowing college recommendation letter. I can only speak on my experiences as a Black woman who’s faced similar situations, but Ginny’s approach is naïve and an impractical reflection of what racism in school is like for minority ethnicities. The solution to racism is not blackmail. By Ginny choosing to blackmail him instead of telling the school so he can get fired or just have another teacher to write the recommendation letter, it makes her less honorable. 

Also, many of the comments Gitten makes are in front of the class and something he’s been doing for years as Bracia tells Ginny she’s had similar experiences with him. So surely he really wouldn’t have felt that threatened? All in all, Ginny’s approach to dealing with Mr. Gitten’s treatment is shocking and unhelpful as it suggests this is a useful way racism is dealt with. 

“Your bars could use a little work, homie”

The show’s failure to fittingly deal with its biracial lead’s struggles weakens the rest of the show, as it opens the door to messy scenes such as the heavily criticized “Oppression Olympics” scene where Ginny and Hunter throw stereotypes at each other, while Hunter fails to see how Gittens’ treatment of Ginny is racist. While the scene can be criticized for many things, it does well to highlight how all people of color can experience racism, but their experiences are not the same. While Hunter’s experiences are 100% valid, they are not comparable to what Ginny is going through in relation to their English teacher. Hunter’s accusations that Ginny is “causing drama in class” is him painting her in the stereotypical angry Black woman image because she’s calling out discrimination and using her voice. 

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Firefly Lane and the Problem with Aging up and Down

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The dialogue the argument uses is embarrassing, to say the least, with Ginny saying to Hunter, “Your favourite food is cheeseburgers, and I know more Mandarin than you do, you’re barely even Asian,” while Hunter says, “But I’ve never seen you pound back jerk chicken. The last time I checked, Brodie twerks better than you. And I liked your poem, but your bars could use a little more work, homie. So really, how black are you then?” The entire argument, which consists of stereotypes to prove who’s whiter, is extremely chaotic as it perpetuates this idea that you’re somehow less Black if you don’t know how to twerk or “pound back jerk chicken” whatever that means. And beyond the awful dialogue, the worst bit about it is the situation, which happens in episode 8, is never resolved. It is as if the writers of the show were saying racial identity is something two biracial characters “should” be struggling with, and instead of showing how they do, we’ll just throw this scene in and have them throw derogatory stereotypes at each other. The writing in the scene undermines what could have been a powerful moment which explored both Ginny’s struggle with her identity and the racism she’s experienced since she arrived in Wellsbury. Instead, we’re left with a frustrating scene that only reinforces the show’s inability to deal with a biracial lead character.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

While Ginny & Georgia is a delightfully chaotic show that for the majority of it will have you hooked and on the edge of your seat, its inability to deal with the lead character’s identity seriously undermines it. By not dealing with the microaggressions and discrimination Ginny receives, the show normalizes racism. If there is a season two, I hope the show gets a better handle on Ginny’s identity and what it means to be biracial. 

Ginny & Georgia is available to stream on Netflix now.

The post Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia: An Excellent Show Undermined by its Race Problems appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[newstfionline]

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Virginia woman does 53 acts of kindness for 53rd birthday (AP) The pandemic didn’t allow Debra Ferrell to gather with her whole family for her birthday. So instead, she celebrated the day by giving back—with 53 gifts from her heart. Ferrell went on social media and asked people for suggestions on acts of kindness that she could perform for others during her birth month, one for every year that she’s been alive. “It’s one of the hardest times in my history, so I figured why not make other people smile,” said Ferrell. The requests for her Oct. 4 birthday arrived from across the U.S.: Parents who hoped for words of encouragement for their kids on their first year of virtual school. A woman who wished for a gift basket for her fiancé, a doctor at a hospital’s COVID-19 unit. A friend of a family in Minnesota that lost their 4-year-old to cancer, who wanted them to feel that they were not alone. “I know that might sound cheesy, but it’s just one of my favorite things to do,” said Ferrell, who works as a resident service coordinator at a retirement community. “I just feel that if we live our life trying to make other people smile, I’m the one who gets the most out of it.”

Some people actually had a pretty good year (NYT) Though a wide array of businesses are suffering this year, many that cater to professionals and the elite are doing better than ever. It’s now well-documented that the coronavirus pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated American inequality. While the wealthy and the highly educated haven’t entirely escaped the soul-crushing effects of the virus—quarantine-induced cabin fever, sharing at-home work spaces with Zoom schoolrooms and a number of other shared losses and stresses—they have also been, on the whole, getting richer. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that jobs that can be performed remotely made up a relatively small share of pandemic-related job losses, and according to The Wall Street Journal “workers with bachelor’s degrees or higher had nearly fully recovered jobs lost in early spring” by September. Meanwhile, the vast majority of workers are without college degrees. And many of those who have been unable to work from home have been struggling in shocking numbers. Women and especially mothers employed in the service sector were more likely to experience pandemic-related job loss. Black and Latino adults, who, because of health inequities, are more likely to contract and die from Covid-19 than their white counterparts, have also faced disproportionate financial struggles during this recession. A small but substantial sliver of America, however, is doing better than ever, or at least just fine: enjoying the freedoms that remote work paired with disposable income can bring, using this pause in the typical 24/7 busyness of professional-class social life to take a breath and to reassess and rejigger their lives.

Barr flies (Foreign Policy) U.S. Attorney General William Barr is out of the job, following an announcement by U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday evening. Trump tweeted a letter written by Barr outlining his respect for the president, ending with the confirmation that he would resign on Dec. 23. Barr had reportedly fallen out with Trump over the attorney general’s statement that no significant voter fraud could be found in the Nov. 3 presidential election. Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen will now take on Barr’s former post in an acting capacity.

Unwelcome in other countries, Americans are fleeing lockdowns and flocking to Mexico (Los Angeles Times) The pandemic was raging, but on the beaches of Cabo San Lucas it felt like spring break. Tipsy young Americans in bikinis and swim trunks vied for buckets of beer in a push-up competition at a crowded bar. Vendors in wide-brimmed hats plodded through the sand, offering rugs, massages and—under their breath—cocaine. Down near the water, 24-year-old Kierston Jackson sat entwined with her boyfriend, their matching blue surgical masks a concession to the coronavirus. “It’s a good change of pace,” said Jackson, a Houston resident, as she gazed at the gently lapping waves. “I’d definitely prefer to be here with a mask on than in my home without one.” Unwelcome in many countries as the virus surges worldwide, U.S. tourists are fleeing lockdowns at home and flocking to Mexico. Nearly half a million Americans flew to Mexico in October—the most recent month for which data is available—mainly to beaches on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. The influx of Americans is a ray of hope for the country’s battered tourism sector, which has hemorrhaged more than $11 billion this year.

Natural disasters cost insurance industry $76 billion in 2020—Swiss Re (Reuters) Natural disasters like wildfires which devastated parts of the United States and a record number of hurricanes in the Atlantic caused $76 billion in insured losses during 2020, Swiss Re said on Tuesday. The 40% increase from $54 billion in 2019 dwarfed the $7 billion in man-made losses during 2020, the reinsurance company said in its sigma estimate for the year. The total insurance industry losses of $83 billion made 2020 the fifth costliest year since 1970, the company said. “Losses were driven by a record number of severe convective storms—thunderstorms with tornadoes, floods and hail—and wildfires in the U.S.,” Swiss Re said.

ICC prosecutor sees ‘reasonable basis’ to believe Venezuela committed crimes against humanity (Reuters) The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor believes there is “reasonable basis” to believe Venezuela has committed crimes against humanity, according to a report published by the prosecutor’s office on Monday. United Nations investigators in September determined that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government has committed systematic human rights violations, including killings and torture, amounting to crimes against humanity. The Hague-based tribunal has been examining Venezuela’s case since 2018 and expects to determine in 2021 whether to open a full investigation. Though Maduro’s adversaries have celebrated the ICC’s probe of Venezuela, few believe the process is likely to lead to a short-term change in the struggling nation. ICC criminal proceedings stretch for years, and it has in the past struggled to carry out arrest warrants when it obtains them.

Netherlands to go into tough, five-week lockdown over Christmas (Reuters) The Netherlands will go into a tough second lockdown, with the closure of all schools and shops for at least five weeks, in a government-led push to fight the coronavirus, Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on Monday. “The Netherlands is closing down,” he said to the sound of protesters banging pots and pans outside his office in The Hague. “We realise the gravity of our decisions, right before Christmas.” The measures, detailed in a rare live television address, include limiting gatherings to no more than two people, also at home. An exception will be made for three days around Christmas, when three adult visitors will be permitted, he said. People were further advised to stay at home, not to travel to work and to avoid contact with other people as much as possible. From Tuesday, all public places—including daycare centres, gyms, museums, zoos, cinemas, hairdressers and beauty salons—will close until Jan. 19. Schools will close until Jan. 18. Supermarkets, banks and pharmacies will be allowed to stay open.

Chernobyl tourism (Foreign Policy) In a year has shown that what you do after disaster has struck is often more important than the disaster itself, it’s perhaps fitting that Chernobyl—the site of the world’s worst nuclear incident—is in a push to be recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site. The Ukrainian government is pursuing an initiative to have the site added to the heritage list in a bid to boost tourism to the area, 20 years after the power plant finally ceased operating, and four years since a protective dome over the doomed fourth reactor was completed. 124,000 tourists—a record number—visited Chernobyl in 2019 amid renewed interest following a popular television drama of the same name. Ukrainian Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko now hopes to boost annual tourist numbers to one million.

Russia’s Putin recognizes Biden’s win (Washington Post) More than a month later than most world leaders, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday congratulated President-elect Joe Biden for his victory in the election, a delayed recognition that could set the tone for icy relations. “In his message Vladimir Putin wished the president-elect every success and expressed confidence that Russia and the United States, which bear special responsibility for global security and stability, can, despite their differences, effectively contribute to solving many problems and meeting challenges that the world is facing today,” the Kremlin said in a statement. Putin was one of the last heads of state to acknowledge Biden’s win; Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and North Korea’s Kim Jung Un are other holdouts. The congratulations come after Biden’s victory became more formal on Monday, when 306 electors officially voted for him.

Silent nights (Worldcrunch) Catholic church officials in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, have announced Christmas carol activities will be banned, The Philippine News Agency reports. Churches were asked not to organize carolings in order to “protect the public and the choir members” as according to experts, the virus could easily spread through singing, officials say. Christmas carols are an important part of the holiday traditions in the Philippines, a predominantly Catholic country that celebrates the world’s longest Christmas season, from Sept. 1 to New Year’s Eve.

Package-tour diplomacy: Thousands of Israeli tourists flock to Dubai after peace deal (Washington Post) Ashish Negi prides himself on spotting the nationality of tourists as soon as they walk into his jewelry store—so he can be jokey with Americans, chatty with Brits and ready to bargain with Russians—but he was baffled by the man in the tall black hat and the curly sideburns who came in last week. “This was something I had not seen in Dubai,” Negi said of the first ultra-Orthodox Jewish visitor to reach his corner of the city’s traditional gold market, part of a wave of Israeli tourists who have descended on the United Arab Emirates in recent days. In the two weeks since commercial flights began between Tel Aviv and the Emirati cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Israelis have caused a remarkable tourism boomlet in the Gulf nation. Suddenly, Hebrew can be heard throughout the markets, malls and beaches of a destination that was strictly off-limits until the two countries achieved a diplomatic breakthrough in August and established normal relations. More than 50,000 Israelis have brushed aside covid-19 concerns, a terrorism warning and decades of tension to make the three-hour flight across the Arab Peninsula. Israeli tourism officials expect more than 70,000 to arrive during the eight days of Hanukkah, which began last week, in an unprecedented exchange between the Jewish state and one of its historically standoffish Muslim neighbors.

Ten years on, anger grows in Tunisian town where ‘Arab Spring’ began (Reuters) Ten years ago, a fruit seller set himself ablaze in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid after an altercation with a policewoman about where he had put his cart. Word of Mohammed Bouazizi’s fatal act of defiance quickly spread, sparking nationwide protests that eventually toppled Tunisia’s long-serving leader and helped inspire similar uprisings across the region—the so-called “Arab Spring”. Huge demonstrations broke out in Egypt and Bahrain, governments fell and civil war engulfed Libya, Syria and Yemen. Tunisians are now free to choose their leaders and can publicly criticise the state. Yet for all the chaos they have been through, many people look back on the events of 2010 and regret that their dreams remain unfulfilled. “Something went wrong in the revolution,” said Attia Athmouni, a retired philosophy teacher who helped lead the uprising after Bouazizi’s death by standing on the fruit seller’s abandoned cart to address the crowd the night he died. Protests have flared again in recent weeks across Tunisia’s poorer southern towns against joblessness, poor state services, inequality and shortages.

[fightmeyeats]

Fantasy Racism™ Sure is Pretty White: A Critique of “Carnival Row”

One of the problems with the “politically relevant” fantasy genre is that it frequently offers “representation” and “relevant” critiques of social problems in ways which favor the representation of the oppressions people face, rather than of the people themselves--meaning metaphors which parallel fantasy races to people of color while using a predominantly white cast. Often times this further reifies the unmarked categories of the cultural context the work is produced in (ie whiteness as the dominant & default category), further marginalizes and dehumanizes people of color, and positions white folks as the victims of metaphorical white supremacy. Amazon’s new streaming original Carnival Row is an unfortunately clear example of this continued fetishization of white poverty/desperation/vulnerability at the expense of communities of color. 

Spoilers below. 

While one might rightly critique the “trauma porn” genre and the way that people of color are often brutalized on screen or depicted only as victims of violence in discussions of oppression, with the solidarity and resistance of communities of color erased from dominant narratives, substituting white bodies into these sequences of violence does not offer us a useful subversion. In her book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Elizabeth Catte talks about the historical and contemporary use of a particular image of white poverty. The focal example of Catte’s book is J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016) where Vance consistently uses the image of the bad, dependent poor white to reify racist images of poverty and undermine the need for programs and systems to support poor folks--just one example of this is the way he insists that the “welfare queen” is real and implicitly argues that the use of this stereotype to undermine welfare programs is not racist because he has known white welfare queens. Outside of contemporary use, Catte also gives examples such as how in the 1960s “white poverty offered [white people uncomfortable with images of civil rights struggles] an escape--a window into a more recognizable world of suffering” (59), and the quotes Appalachian historian John Alexander Williams comments on the way that, in the displays of Appalachian poverty, “‘the nation took obvious relish in the white skins and blue eyes of the region’s hungry children’” (qtd Catte 82). This obsession with white poverty has little to do with addressing the actual problem; instead, it is a tool used to obscure oppression, resistance, and transformative solutions to these problems. 

Carnival Row offers a discourse on colonialism, racism, and xenophobia intended to mirror the political climate of the real world, namely the violence experienced by refugees and undocumented immigrants. It also attempts to comment on the way that Global North/colonial nations often create or are implicit in the creation of catastrophes which cause Global South/colonized nations and regions to become unsafe and result in refugee migrations, as well as the subsequent way that many times when refugees end up immigrating to the very nations that played a role in the collapse of their homelands, they are met with violence on multiple levels and their traumas are ongoing. In this current moment, this kind of discourse/intervention is “relevant” (I use scare-quotes because while the treatment of refugees in many Global North nations is horrendous in this current moment, this is not a new problem the way it sometimes is imagined) and I’m even willing to concede that there are some things which I think are done well. However--and this is a big however--the choice to make a predominantly white non-human population the metaphorical stand in for real life people who are predominantly of color greatly undermines what the series is attempting to accomplish. The implicit message is that it is easier for general audiences to sympathize with and recognize the personhood in non-human white figures than it is to sympathize with and recognize the personhood in real life people of color who are actively experiencing the violence fictionalized in this series. Furthermore, even as the victims obscure the real role white supremacy plays in xenophobia and the violence experienced by migrants and refugees, it still is a form of trauma porn. The only real difference is that because of the dominant whiteness of the victims, this version of trauma porn allows for the voyeuristic participation in systems of violence wherein many who are passively complicit (or even actively responsible) in the very systems causing violence are able to relate to the victims and experience a sort of cathartic release which allows them to maintain their complicity, feeling “good” that they consumed “politically relevant” content which allowed them to “care” safely, without having to address the reality that they are part of the brutalizers not the brutalized.

One of the ways that the show attempts to somewhat skirt around this problematic of white victimhood is by giving many of the white refugees, namely the main character Vignette (played by British actor/model Cara Delevigne), Irish accents and setting it in a time period which ambiguously mirrors the time before (as Noel Ignatiev puts it) “the Irish became white”. Celtic whiteness is used both in Carnival Row and with the case of Appalachia, and seems to be a particular favorite flavor for the fetization of white poverty. My personal theory is that this is because, when used in this way, the British colonization of Celtic peoples works to simultaneously obscure the racialized realities of both poverty and colonialism--in this fashion, Celtic whiteness is Othered just enough to justify the creation of white victimhood as a fetish object, but still undeniably white enough to connect this victimhood to the universal construction of whiteness. While there is nothing inherently wrong with including Ireland (or Scotland or Wales) in discourses of colonialism/neocolonialism because Ireland and other Celtic lands were and are colonized by the British and this colonization has had a clear and lasting impact on these regions and these peoples, using it as part of the fetishization of white poverty does not further anti-colonial goals, and again is being used to displace and obscure the way racism and white supremacy are central to anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric, policies, and popular practices.

During the first few episodes, I tentatively imagined myself commenting on the only semi-positive aspect I saw in the show’s use of whiteness: while obscuring metaphors for white-supremacist politics are deployed in many fantasy works, they often position people (humans) of color as being members of the human-supremacist groups which are meant to reflect real life white supremacy, further obscuring the real stakes of the topic being discussed. For the first four episodes, Carnival Row avoids this problematic and gives a representation of the metaphorical anti-immigrant/“pro-Brexit” crowd exclusively through white humans--and bonus points, they can be found in both the political elite and the working class/poor. While the whiteness of fantasy races means that the real life targets of white supremacist violence (people of color) are obscured, at least this allows us to remain clear on who is responsible. That, unfortunately, changes in episode five. One of the major places where we can see this change is in the introduction of Sophie, a woman of color, who takes over her (white) father’s seat in parliament after his death. Sophie gives a speech where she mobilizes her status as a woman of color to further fantasy-racism, stating that her mother had “desert blood” and experienced racism, but that the city overcoming racism and recognizing the value of racial diversity does not apply to the “Critch” because “our differences are more than skin-deep” (ep 5, 34:15). While this is predominantly intended to differentiate real racism (which I guess has been solved?) from Fantasy Racism™, it also serves to undermine the dehumanizing politics of racism which are continuously deployed. It reassures audiences that real life racism can be solved because race is just skin deep and we’re ultimately all pretty similar. This obscures the historical and contemporary claims about “race science” and “racial difference” which often explicitly and implicitly justify racism. While in this present moment “race science” has become a more latent belief--most people laugh at the idea of measuring skulls--everyone with a White™ Facebook friend who's taken a 23-and-Me to prove they’re 0.005% African can speak to continuing beliefs in biological race theory. 

Ultimately, like many other “politically relevant” fantasy works, Carnival Row’s use of a white washed Fantasy Racism™ as a metaphor for the systems of oppression that, in the real world, affect people of color remains highly problematic. In both our personal viewing practices and in our practices of creating and curating stories, we must think critically. Storytelling is a powerful tool in shaping how we perceive and consider reality, so when we choose to tell stories that represent marginalized communities exclusively by their oppressions, and especially when we choose metaphors that participate in the fetishization of white desperation and whitewash these communities we are doing real harm. 

[mvdipetsch]

Outside of London; A Guide.

Hello, friends! I think there’s a semi-substantial amount of roleplays based around England, but honestly 90% of them are in London and while that’s great, England is made up of a lot of cities and I figured I’d show some #representation. 

In this guide we cover: Housing in England, location and travel! 

Disclaimer: This is based off of my experience and the experience of those around me. Most of my knowledge is concentrated around Birmingham, as that is where I grew up, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool and Liverpool so I feel that I have a semi-decent shot at helping out. 

If you found this guide helpful, please reblog this as it helps to show me that there is interest and I’m not just shouting into a void. If you have any suggestions or comments about things I could/should cover in these guides please let me know! Any specific questions? Shoot me an ask and I’ll do my best to help you out. 

Location, Location, Location. 

England is divided into counties. There many of them, and realistically they don’t affect anything. All it really means is that your resources (police, fire, ambulance, charities, etc.) are organised by that one area. For instance - the buses in my city are all organised by Network West Midlands. They deal with every bus service (if it’s an NXBus) in the West Midlands. Ultimately, it doesn’t really affect anything. 

From my city to my university, it’s a 3-ish hour drive. That is a long drive. I know some people regard that as nothing, but when everything is so close together, it’s a lot. It’s not really a drive that people would make a lot - this is why train transport (while not that big) tends to be used to get from city to city. 

Only really in the inner cities are things that expensive. When you move away from the main city, things can get pretty affordable, but the inner city is still often really accessible via bus, driving or even train. When I’m at my boyfriend’s I’ll get the bus into the city centre, but when I’m at my mom’s sometimes it’s quicker to just jump on a train. Train tickets are also pretty inexpensive if you’re moving within the city. It’s when you’re heading to smaller cities that the problems arise. For instance, I can get to London for under £10, and to Liverpool for not much more. However, for me to get from Birmingham (a major city) to my University (a not-so-major city of about 200k) it’s £60+ with a change. On coach, it’s £14 with a change + it takes 5-ish hours (there are direct coaches that cost £30~ which is still significantly cheaper than the train) University students will commonly take a coach to and from their university to their hometown if it’s ridiculously priced. 

The higher north you go, typically the cheaper it is. This is dependent upon where in that city you are, but the general consensus is that north = cheaper. Obviously if you’re in Manchester city centre then it’s going to be a bit more pricey, but the general cost of living / food / etc. is seen to be cheaper the more north you go. A good way to judge how expensive a place is, is by how much the bus fare is. Birmingham bus fare is £4.00 for a daysaver (one ticket, on the bus as much as you like) but when I was in Liverpool I paid something like £1.20 for an U18 ticket. That’s a big difference. (For reference - Birmingham is the smack-bang middle of England. Liverpool is about 2 hours north, near Manchester.) 

Typically, when it comes to travelling; 

Driving

Cars in the UK are predominantly manual (with a gear stick) but we can still get automatic cars. Manual cars are also cheaper than automatic and you can drive an automatic with a manual license but you cannot drive a manual with an automatic license. 

My mom lives seven minutes from her work (she timed it, she’s got no life) but there are people who live up to thirty minutes away and have to take the motorway. This means that if there’s a massive accident, you can sit there for six hours, bored out of your skull

It’s also worth saying that if you live in a/the city centre, you’re not taking your car to work. It’s ridiculously expensive and parking is so few and far between, it’s really not worth it. People can and do drive, but plenty of people will also opt for a train or bus.

Buses

If you don’t drive the bus is often a very viable option. Buses will commonly run from 6:30/7 until 11:30/12 (at least where I am) but you can get night buses or buses that run later, they’re just a bit rare. 

Students (in college or secondary school, typically) are VERY common on buses. As in public buses. Unless someone has an impairment and go to a special school suited to their needs, you make your own way. Which often means that you jump on that bus with every man and his dog. 

Sunday service is real and it’s a pain in the arse. Buses that run every 10-ish minutes during the week drop to 20 between 9 and 5 and then drop to every 30 minutes after that (sometimes even every hour.) This means that if you miss your bus... you can be waiting for a very long time. 

Trains

Train’s are far more common for longer commutes. Also trains aren’t really that common for secondary school students (they either get dropped off in a car, walk or take the bus) but college students can and do take the train. My best friend takes an hour’s train ride to and from her college every day, and a lot of my teachers will get the train to college (my college is in the city centre, so it’s pretty logical.) Regardless, trains aren’t as common. 

Housing

Houses in England are attached. It is rare that you will see detached (stand alone) houses. Most houses will share their walls with their neighbours, unless they’re the end house in which case they’re called “semi-detached” cause... only half of them is attached. That tends to mean that if your neighbours have a baby, you can hear them crying. You can hear when the tv is too loud and all that kind of stuff. 

When you move out, there tends to be a few options in terms of who actually owns where you live. The options normally are:

Council. 

You sign up on the website, the council give you a priority rating and a set amount of points. These points are determined by the people in your household and your needs. A single mother with two kids will get more points than a single person with no dependants.

There is also a ‘bedroom’ tax, which states that you have to pay a tax if you live in a council property and are seen as having more bedrooms than you need. If, for instance you have two children of opposite genders that are aged seven and three, you have to pay extra tax for that third bedroom because it’s deemed as unnecessary. However if you have two children and they’re of different genders and one of them is over the age of ten (10) then you do not have to pay the tax. If they are of the same gender, then it is until one of them is sixteen (16).

Council and Housing Associations are most beneficial to those who are receiving benefits or are not working enough to cover rent by themselves. 

Housing Association

The way a housing association works is effectively the same as a landlord and the council. You apply on the council website for the aforementioned points and begin to bid on properties. When this happens, you may bid on a property that happens to be owned by a HA. The HA then acts as your landlord. HAs are pretty okay, dependent upon the area + such. When you live in a HA, any housing benefit you receive will immediately be paid from the council to the HA. This can cause issues if your money gets fucked up (which is more common than not because the housing system in the UK is BROKEN.) 

Private Rent

Private is when you have a landlord. I mean, that’s pretty self-explanatory really. You have an issue? Call the landlord. I’ve never had a landlord so I can’t really comment much on this. I will say that most landlords likely won’t accept housing benefit as a form of payment.

Private own. 

This is just the whole mortgage, thing. You know how this goes. 

There are a few different types of housing options when it comes to England and I’d imagine that this is pretty true for up and down the city.

Blocks of flats.

Blocks of flats are huge high-rises. They’re not as common anymore but there are still quite a few knocking about. If you remember the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, that was a high-rise. 

Blocks of flats can be owned by the local council or be privately rented. I’ve never lived in a flat, so my knowledge isn’t the best. They all tend to have names and there’s normally at least two together. 

A ‘flat’ is basically an apartment. So it’s a bunch of different flats (which, in high rises, commonly have two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and a bathroom) High rises have a lot of flats in them. Commonly there’s at least 13 floors, with between around four and six flats per floor. So you can get a lot of people in a high rise. 

Maisonette. 

A maisonette looks like a wide house. It’s normally one to two floors, with flats that have three (or more) bedrooms. Maisonettes are considerably bigger, in terms of the flats inside, and consist of maybe two flats per floor. Maisonettes can also be council, privately rented or housing association. 

Bungalow.

A bungalow is a home without any stairs. They can be council, privately rented or privately owned. Bungalows aren’t that common anymore, but they’re great for people who have difficulty with stairs and such. Also most bungalows are actually pretty decent sizes too. 

Houses.

Houses in the UK are broken down into one of three categories:

Detached

Semi-Detached

Attached

This is literally just based upon how many of your walls are shared with your neighbour. Detached houses are really uncommon in the UK and are usually found in richer areas. Semi-detached is mainly just the house at the end of your street, so semi-detached and attached are the main two. 

Also it’s pretty common that you only have windows of two of the four house walls. Even if you’re in a semi-detached house, you’ll only have front and back windows. 

Houses can be privately owned, privately rented, housing association or council.

Most houses follow a similar layout. Typically three bedrooms, with either one bathroom or a room just for the toilet + then the bathroom (with a bath + sink + such.) It’s also super common for one room to be a ‘box room’ which is normally pretty small. My room at my mom’s house is the ‘box room’ and it fits a 3/4 bed, a chest of draws, and a metal rack that I use as a bookshelf. There is not a lot of room in there. 

And there you have it! I think I covered most things regarding transport and housing in the UK, and I really hope that it was as informative as possible. Stay groovy, my dudes. 

[lululawrence]

2017 Fics Written by lululawrence (2/2)

Master Fic Masterpost / Buy me a Coffee?

(And Things Will Be) Hard At Times (35k)

Louis and Nathan had been talking about marriage and kids and a family for years now, but it had never felt right. If anything, the talking about it had petered out over the past while because they were busy living the lives they had settled into. It wasn’t that they didn’t think they’d ever have kids, just that they weren’t to a point where they were ready for it yet.

Well. Ready or not, it was happening.

Or the one where Louis and his boyfriend of five years unexpectedly find themselves pregnant and Harry is the paternity photographer that makes everyone think twice.

Wait for the End to Change (8k)

Harry was running late. He was running late, because apparently his electricity had been turned off overnight, which had caused his phone to not charge, which meant it died and the alarm didn’t go off. He would have just kept sleeping if it hadn’t been for the paper thin walls and his neighbor’s alarm being horribly loud. Anyway.

Harry took his second sip of his glorious morning coffee when someone biked past him and hit him with their bag. It jostled him enough to pour the hot coffee all down his front, staining his work shirt and trousers.

“Sorry!” the cyclist called over his shoulder, and Harry just stood there, staring at his ruined outfit. Maybe he should just go home, climb back into bed, and see if he could try starting the day over again.

Or the one where Harry has the Worst Day that won't stop haunting him, but Louis might be more than just the silver lining.

If It's Meant To Be (It'll Be, It'll Be) (4k)

“So, anyway. I’m done here and on my way to the airport. I think I’m expected to be there in the morning, around ten. I’ll let you know when I’m getting close.”

“Sounds good.” Harry pulled back from the window and threw himself onto one of the beds. Once he got comfortable, he steeled himself and then went for it. “It’s been too long this time, Lou,” he finally whispered. He watched as Louis bit his lip and nodded slowly.

“I know,” Louis agreed, just as quiet in return. “We have to swear to never go this long without seeing each other again. Two months is just...unacceptable. I’m gonna go now, but I’ll see you soon. ‘Kay?”

“Yeah. See you. Be safe,” Harry said, far too fondly for his best friend. He couldn’t help it though. It was how he always had been and probably always would be.

They hung up and Harry threw his arm over his face.

“I am so in love with him,” he whined to himself. “Fuck.”

You Can Read Me Anything (7k)

“So wait, why are you upset over having five classes so far with Louis?”

Harry heaved a dramatic sigh. “Because! It’s so exhausting trying to pretend to be somewhat cool all the time, Li!”

Liam stared at Harry, obviously unamused. “For Merlin’s sake,” he muttered before standing from the table. “I don’t have time to deal with this.”

Or...the one where Harry has pined over Louis from afar, but his sixth year at Hogwarts is when it all changes.

(This Could Be Forever) Right Now (3k)

From the time Mrs. Barkley met them as unruly and hyper twelve year olds in middle school, she took them under her wing. She’d breathed color and hope into their dreams, helped them realize that they could actually go out and attain them. When everyone else was telling them to be realistic and see that their future was just like everyone else’s, she taught them how to do what they needed to in order to get out of their beautiful, homely, loving town.

And now, the woman who had taught all of them such important lessons, the woman who had never failed to send them birthday cards no matter where they were scattered around the country, the woman they’d call in addition to their moms on Mother’s Day, she was gone.

Or the one where OT5 are back together in their small hometown for just one day and maybe that's the perfect time for Harry and Louis to do more than just reminisce.

Will Love Be There (14k)

Louis didn’t care who he had to pay or how much, but he was pretty sure he would give his entire life’s savings and a year’s salary if it meant that whatever was causing someone’s fucking phone to ring would stop.

The person calling must have gone to voicemail, because it stopped ringing and vibrating, but it started up again almost immediately.

“Make it stop,” Louis whined. He lifted his head enough to pull the pillow out from beneath it and smothered his head to dull the sound. “Oh shit, I think I’m gonna puke.”

“Just be sure to get out of bed first, please,” a deep, gravelly voice said from right beside Louis.

“Holy fucking shit!” Louis cried in surprise as he shot up in bed.

Or the one where Louis attends a Steve Aoki concert and accidentally ends up with a husband.

With You In Your Dreams (5k)

“And how are you boys doing?” Professor Trelawney asked as she came to their table. Her wide eyes blinked at the two of them before peeking into the cup. “Ooh, a heart! How interesting…”

Harry’s eyes widened and he looked at Louis. Louis was just looking into the cup in interest. “Should I note that as well, then?”

“Absolutely, Tomlinson. What others do you have?” Trelawney looked at his scroll and she let out an overdramatic gasp. “Oh my my. It looks like someone definitely has love in their future! Those signs all stand for love, marriage, stability, togetherness, and when combined like this predominantly new love! Very interesting reading you’ve done there, Mr. Styles.”

She gave a wink at Harry and then whisked herself off to the next table.

Or the one where Professor Trelawney plays a very unlikely matchmaker.

Couldn't See Past Me, Till I Saw You (13k)

“Look at us, living the dream,” Louis said softly. “But Harry, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to finish my last semester with the baby. I don’t know how far along I am or anything. And what about my internship and all of that?”

Harry shook his head emphatically and pulled back once more from Louis, this time placing his large, strong hands on Louis’ shoulders and squeezing them tight.

“We’ll make this work, Louis. I’ll help take care of you and your little one and I know you’ll help me make it through whatever happens with this. We’re always there for each other, right? Just like we promised when we were in middle school.”

Louis laughed a bit and smiled through his tears that finally seem to have left. Again. Hopefully they stayed away a little longer this time.

“We’ll figure it out, yeah?” Harry asked again.

“Yeah. We always do.”

Or the one where Harry and Louis have been best friends since they could remember and their friendship has withstood it all...but an unexpected pregnancy might change everything.

All I Want Is To Be Free (11k)

“Uh, you saw photos? Of me wearing the shirt?”

The guy nodded eagerly while he pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Yeah! I took a picture of the photo I saw so I could remember to look it up. Hold on.”

The guy scrolled through his phone and made a happy sound when he found it. “Here!”

Louis grabbed his phone to look at the picture. Yep. That confirmed it. He was going crazy.

The photo he was looking at was definitely one of him wearing his beloved shirt, but there was a taller man standing beside him, looking at him and laughing as Louis had his hand resting possessively on the guy’s hip. Louis had absolutely no recollection of this ever happening.

Or the one where Louis keeps finding photos around campus of him with a man he's never met before, and the only logical explanation must be he's going crazy.

One Taste And He Want It (10k)

Stan: Yeah, dude. Listen to Steve and Oli, as much as I hate to say it.

Perrie: Well I’m supportive. If you two actually got together, it would be super cute. Perrie: Jesy says she stans you and supports your marriage

Stan: Shut up, Perrie. He doesn’t need more fuel for this. Stan: For real, Louis, I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Louis: Too late. I’m captain, which means my vote counts more than yours, and my mind’s already made up. I’m gonna woo him and learn about his team and we’re gonna kick their asses.

Or the one where Harry and Louis are the captains of the two Frisbee Battles teams in the finals, and Louis has to find a way for his team to win. Seduction is, naturally, the only option.

Better Walk That (Pap) Walk, Baby (25k) - Co-Written with @suddenclarityharry 

Harry sat and stared at the print in front of his eyes where the names Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles looked to be in neon lights. It made him think back to those early days when all they’d dreamt of was seeing their names lit up on the signs for popular venues. Back then, things had seemed so black and white. Their love had grown as their popularity had, fast and intense and overwhelming. Maybe that was part of the problem. They’d never anticipated having to weave their way through a love so all encompassing at that age, much less at the same time as navigating brand new careers they’d been lucky enough to be a part of.

Harry stared at the papers as if it wasn’t him who had just signed them. He could do this. He could. He could pretend he was still as in love with Louis Tomlinson as he had been all those years ago no problem. He was now an actor in addition to a musician for fuck’s sake, he could make this work.

Or the one where, after years filled with the anger and pain that accompany a bad breakup, Harry and Louis have to try to put it all behind them, at least for the cameras.

Love So Soft (5k)

“Harry?” Louis called out. It was light out and a Sunday. Harry was probably in the kitchen.

Right then, Harry came walking back into the room with some scrambled eggs and toast on two plates. He froze about three steps in though, and looked up at Louis, his brows furrowed.

“I made breakfast, but...you…” Harry stopped and cleared his throat. “Uhm, your scent changed? Just since I got up to make breakfast. You okay?”

Louis bit his lip and shook his head. “I think my heat is coming early.”

Or the one where Harry and Louis have been friends since they were kids, but when Louis' heat comes early, that balance that always existed between them suddenly changes.

Got This Feeling In Our Souls (8k)

Louis sat up, awoken by something he couldn’t quite put a finger on. He scrubbed at his eyes, unsure if he was actually still dreaming or if he was awake. He didn’t dream often, but when he did they were always vivid like this. Louis opened his eyes and squinted through the darkness before jumping back, his heart racing.

Dream or not, there was a person sitting in the chair in the corner of the room. The chair that usually was only used by Charlie while Louis slept.

“Who the fuck are you and how did you get in my apartment?” Louis asked, voice a bit more squeaky than he’d like to admit. Suddenly there were two flashes of green, and the world went black again.

We're Both Stubborn (Two Hearts in One Home) (13k)

The crickets that somehow were still chirping in the chilly October air suddenly sounded louder after Louis went quiet. Harry wasn’t sure what to say in response though, so he let their song remain unbroken.

“I guess I’m just scared ‘cause I don’t know what I’m doing after this,” Louis confessed with a whisper. “Some days, with the way my mom and dad are fighting, the only thing I’m sure of is you.”

Harry wrapped his arms tightly around Louis’ torso and turned into him, ignoring the night sky they were supposed to be observing.

“Doesn’t matter what else is going on, Lou. You’ll always have me. Always.”

Louis nodded and Harry could feel the movement from where he was, and that was enough.

Or the one where Harry and Louis stumble their way through life and their relationship, but at least they've got each other.

Before I Knew That I Had Begun (3k)

Louis closed his eyes and carefully rolled over so he could wrap his arms around Harry as well. Things were permissible at night that he wouldn’t allow himself otherwise, and snuggling up to Harry, breathing in his scent like this, was definitely one of those scenarios that was only allowed in the dark. Once light broke, they pulled apart again and didn’t speak of the way their bodies fit together so perfectly or the way they always ended up with awkward morning wood that needed to be taken care of separately. The blue haze that filled Louis’ dorm room and the snores from Logan in the bottom bunk afforded them a soft safety net where the impossible seemed possible and where, just for a few hours, Louis could let down his guard and not worry about why his body was so drawn to the curly haired boy sharing his bed.

A Real Work of Art (12k)

“I don’t understand,” Liam said for probably the fiftieth time in ten minutes. “You have to explain again how this is a bad thing.”

“Leeeeyummm,” Harry whined into the phone as he leaned his head onto his desk. “I felt like this year was my year for getting his attention, you know? That senior year I would finally get Logan Thompson to realize I exist! But he’s in almost every single one of my classes, Li. How am I supposed to survive that?”

“Easily,” Liam answered, with the same matter of fact tone his voice always took when Harry was in one of his fits. “He doesn’t know you exist, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Right?”

Or the one where Harry calls on an old friend, the super popular Louis Tomlinson, to help him change his look to capture the heart of Logan. Things only mostly go as planned.

You Can't Blame Me For Tryin' (5k)

Reason # 38 - Because He Is From One of the Countries You Haven't Had Sex With a Person From Yet.

Louis had been accepted into the study abroad program through his uni back home and therefore got to spend a year in rural Minnesota, of all places, but he wasn’t going to complain. It was still a pretty cool experience, even if it was far different from what he had been expecting. And besides, if he’d been sent to literally any other university, he’d never have met Harry.

Christmas at the Holly Lodge (17k)

Harry made his way to the back of the lodge and saw a building that looked like it used to be a barn, that had obviously had some renovations done. The lights were on and it looked a little like Santa’s workshop. As Harry walked closer, he saw that one of the windows was cracked open and through it came the tune of Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You. Dancing along was the most beautiful man Harry had ever seen.

The guy was really going to town, too. It looked like he was organizing boxes of ornaments or something, but he had taken time to pause and hold up...was that a hot glue gun?...to sing into so he was belting right along with Mariah.

Harry covered his mouth with his gloved hand to hold back the giggles, and continued walking. He didn’t want to disturb the guy and embarrass him by letting him know he’d been seen. It was adorable and Harry needed to make sure he had a better first impression than that. He could already tell this visit was going to be interesting.

Or the one where Louis is the owner of the Holly Lodge, Harry is an investment advisor, and maybe Christmas miracles really do exist.

You've Got My Heart (2k)

Harry and Louis are celebrating being together for fifty years, but they can't seem to agree about who initiated the first step of the journey.

[obsidianarchives]

The Importance of Creating Worlds for Young Black Readers

**This piece contains SPOILERS for Children of Virtue and Vengeance and Daughters of Nri.

The field of fantasy in the fiction world has predominantly been comprised of white writers. While many authors, like Kai Ashante Wilson and N.K. Jemisin, worked hard to break down that barrier, we're just starting to see an increase in the number of diverse authors coming into the field and bringing their African roots with them. This transition is essential in our modern society to provide more representation not just for Black people but also for our traditions and rich history. From Lagos to Wakanda, a fusion of the past and newly created stories has merged into an explosion of love, launching a journey of rediscovery for Black people. 

Authors like Tomi Adeyemi (Legacy of Orisha trilogy) and Reni K. Amayo (Daughters of Nri), have successfully introduced Nigerian heritage in their writing; Adeyemi honours the Yorùbá tribe, while Amayo pays homage to the Igbo tribe, thus allowing our culture to exist and thrive within the fantasy realm. While we can't ignore our history and the excruciating ordeals of our ancestors, slavery has become the depiction of the African Diaspora, and unfortunately, portrays the absence of excellence which is reductive to our accomplishments. Books like Brown Girl Dreaming celebrate the eloquent poetry of Jacqueline Woodson and her interpretation of the Civil Rights movement era. A great example of how fiction allows us to retain our past and provides a platform for writers to create new worlds young Black readers want to exist in. 

Adeyemi's debut novel Children of Blood and Bone features a character named Amari, a princess in the mythical kingdom of Orïsha, where her father’s tyrannical rule plagues their land. In the first book of the trilogy, Zélie, the protagonist, was my favourite, however after reading the second in the series, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, I found myself rooting for Amari, her best friend, more. I was very invested in her character development throughout the story, as she transitioned from a timid girl into a warrior with newly discovered magical powers. 

As the story develops, Amari struggles with her father's legacy as she tries to do what's best for Orïsha. She strives to put the kingdom’s needs before her own, struggling to forge a new path as she fights to become queen. Readers begin to notice how her father's teachings and brutal training affect her decision making, inadvertently putting the people she's closest to at risk. Born a noble, Amari found it hard to empathise with Iyika — the maji resistance group — due to her tunnel-visioned approach to defeating their rivals in battle. In an attempt to gain loyalty and respect from them, she challenges an elder in the camp, and although she wins, they still refused to acknowledge her.

Over time Amari reflects on the tough decisions her father had to make as King, leading her to deviate from her original plan. Eventually, she chooses to sacrifice the lives of residents at a nearby village in a ploy to defeat her family, thus putting a further strain on her friendship with Zélie. The cause of the divide stems from Amari's desire to rule Orïsha as a better queen, after the manifestation of her magical powers in the ritual that concluded the previous book.

As she emerges as a tîtán — nobles with magic ancestry — Amari is keen to use her magic for good, but her new abilities come without a manual, and so she lacks the knowledge of the Yorùbá tradition required to harness and control it. We later discover that majis and tîtáns differ in the way they use their magic; while majis rely on spells to activate their powers, tîtáns are not bound by them since they possess blood magic in their veins. Moreover, having this unlimited access to these powers causes Amari to unintentionally hurt others when driven by rage, something she and other tîtáns had to work on when training with chants recited by the maji. She relied heavily on her instincts and advice from maji clan leaders in her quest to become queen.

Likewise, in the Return of the Earth Mother series, Amayo focuses on the self-discovery and journey of twin sisters separated at birth for their protection. Both born with magical powers unknown to them, Naala and Sinai encounter several obstacles that prompt them to question their existence and the rules plaguing their communities. I liked that although the main protagonists are twins, Amayo wrote each character with distinctive personalities in a complementing way that allows both individuals to learn from each other.

The ruler of their kingdom, Eze, has hunted down sets of twins over time to prevent a prophecy foreshadowing that his reign would be ended by one. In the Igbo spiritual realm, Chukwu is the supreme spirit that created the universe and creator of the Mother, birthing life on earth. The Eze is now in possession of the Mother’s crystal that gives him unlimited access to unimaginable power, but only a type of being can access it. So, an onus falls on the girls to use their magic as demi-gods to defeat him.

In the early chapters of the story we meet Naala, due to get married in an hour. Still wearing her bridal gown, she hesitates and ponders what life would look like outside the village. Naala, raised on the outskirts of Nri is the more courageous and feisty twin, constantly questions the decisions and customs of the villagers, consequently resulting in punishment for her defiance. Her lack of discipline in decision-making is also mirrored in her magical abilities as she struggles to control her powers. Initially, her magic is sparked accidentally and is often triggered when her mind is in a chaotic state, so, though it frightened her initially, it almost acts as an anchor to keep her internally grounded.

As the story unfolds, we learn that though Naala has lived in the village all her life, she never belonged there. She sensed that a part of her was missing and following an attack against her people, she makes the brave decision to run away, and embarks on a journey with her companions, as she attempts survival outside her comfort zone. Likewise, her sister Sinai learns more about the complexity of nobles and their way of life before fleeing the royal city on a quest for survival, not knowing how her life is about change. 

Unlike Naala, Sinai lives in the city of Nri, several miles from the village. She displays a certain naivety to the actions of nobles within the palace and shies away from attention. Over time she learns that to prevail in her trials she has to completely surrender to her purpose, and being her authentic self informs her decisions.

This story of survival incorporates the values and experiences many young women face today because as we get older, we make more difficult choices in life. Inspiring stories like these can help us get through them. We need more magical books that present real models to inspire, inform and empower the younger generation in a world where they may have to try twice as hard to excel. For younger kids, in particular, our history needs to be presented in a digestible form and not so full of struggle and pain to the extent of trauma, so a fictional version is required. When certain characters in the story encounter problems, readers get to experience this journey with them and, as such, learn how they approach it rather than reading about them as facts and figures. Powerful young women like Naala and Sinai and Amari and Zélie encourage other young Black people through their stories and teach them to reach for the stars and realise their potential. 

It's here, and it's working. But we need more of it!

[classyfoxdestiny]

Plan to beat ‘pingdemic’ branded shambles as firms report frustration trying to register staff #ٹاپسٹوریز

New Post has been published on https://mediabox.pk/plan-to-beat-pingdemic-branded-shambles-as-firms-report-frustration-trying-to-register-staff/

Plan to beat ‘pingdemic’ branded shambles as firms report frustration trying to register staff

A government scheme to beat the “pingdemic” by exempting essential workers from self-isolation has been denounced as a shambles, as small businesses warned they were facing frustration and delays in trying to sign up staff.

Ministers last week announced 800 daily testing sites would be set up around the country to allow double-vaccinated workers in the food industry and emergency services to show they are safe to work, and a further 1,200 were announced on Monday as the scheme was expanded to include jobs including binmen, prison warders and energy workers.

Some 500 are supposed to be operational by the end of this week, with only a few dozen thought to be up and running now.

But representatives of small businesses said they had struggled to find lists of venues for workers to take PCR tests, and the Department of Health was unable to provide The Independent with a figure for how many have so far been set up.

The national chair of the Federation of Small Businesses, Mike Cherry, said that when the daily testing scheme was announced last week, many firms hoped it would end problems caused by staff being identified as contacts of Covid-positive people and told to stay home ahead of the 16 August date for all double-jabbed adults to be exempted from self-isolation.

But he said they had been “disappointed” by the bureaucratic burden of applying for exemptions and the limited number of workers who appear to be eligible. And he warned that “countless” businesses could be put at risk as a result.

“The increasing list of those allowed to take a PCR test after being pinged does not include the vast majority of small business workplaces,” said Mr Cherry. “Those that hope that they do fall into scope are finding out that they do not.

“For a small business without a big HR or legal department, that does not have an account manager within a government department like a large business does to ask and manage the process, the exemption application process is demanding and hard to navigate.

“A fundamental question is, how are we defining ‘essential’? One of the many lessons of the pandemic has been how interconnected our economy is – it’s no good getting food and essential supplies to remote convenience stores if those stores are shut because all the staff have been pinged and they’re not classed as essential.

“Unless these issues are sorted, and sorted rapidly, we risk undoing provisional progress towards recovery, putting the ‘staycation summer’ at risk, while endangering countless businesses.”

Road Haulage Association managing director for policy and public affairs Rod McKenzie told The Independent: “It’s a shambles.

“What hauliers are telling us is that it is too complicated, it’s too hard to understand what you have to do and work out whether you are exempt or not.”

Mr McKenzie said government had been “secretive” about the number of testing sites which have been set up and where they can be found.

With just three weeks to go until the 16 August date for lifting the threat of self-isolation for the double-vaccinated, he said many truckers viewed the time and effort required to register for exemption as more trouble than it was worth.

“Our members find it confusing and bureaucratic and a lot of them are just not bothering to apply,” he said. “These guys were essential workers before, they are essential now. We’re seeing empty shelves in supermarkets which are used to two or three deliveries a day and are maybe only getting one. If they are double-jabbed and they’re testing negative, why not let them work?”

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27 July 2021

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25 July 2021

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20 July 2021

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19 July 2021

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18 July 2021

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17 July 2021

Cyclists ride over the Hammersmith Bridge in London. The bridge was closed last year after cracks in it worsened during a heatwave

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16 July 2021

The sun rises behind the Sefton Park Palm House, in Sefton Park, Liverpool

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15 July 2021

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14 July 2021

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13 July 2021

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12 July 2021

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11 July 2021

England’s Bukayo Saka with manager Gareth Southgate after the match

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10 July 2021

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9 July 2021

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8 July 2021

Karolina Pliskova celebrates after defeating Aryna Sabalenka during the women’s singles semifinals match on day ten of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London

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7 July 2021

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6 July 2021

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5 July 2021

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4 July 2021

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3 July 2021

England’s Jordan Henderson celebrates after scoring his first international goal, his side’s fourth against Ukraine during the Euro 2020 quarter final match at the Olympic stadium in Rome

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2 July 2021

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1 July 2021

Prince William, left and Prince Harry unveil a statue they commissioned of their mother Princess Diana, on what would have been her 60th birthday, in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace, London

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30 June 2021

Dancers from the Billingham Festival and Balbir Singh Dance Company, during a preview for the The Two Fridas, UK Summer tour, presented by Billingham International Folklore Festival of World Dance in collaboration with Balbir Singh Dance Company, inspired by the life and times of female artists Frida Kahlo and Amrita Sher-Gil , which opens on July 10 at Ushaw Historic House, Chapel and Gardens in Durham

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29 June 2021

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28 June 2021

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27 June 2021

People walk along Regent Street in central London during a #FreedomToDance march organised by Save Our Scene, in protest against the government’s perceived disregard for the live music industry throughout the coronavirus pandemic

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26 June 2021

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25 June 2021

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24 June 2021

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23 June 2021

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22 June 2021

Actor Isaac Hampstead Wright sits on the newly unveiled Game of Throne’s “Iron Throne” statue, in Leicester Square, in London, Tuesday, June 22, 2021. The statue is the tenth to join the trail and commemorates 10 years since the TV show first aired, as well as in anticipation for HBO’s release of House of the Dragon set to be released in 2022

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21 June 2021

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon receives her second dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine

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20 June 2021

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19 June 2021

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18 June 2021

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17 June 2021

Members of the Tootsie Rollers jazz band pose on the third day of the Royal Ascot horse racing meet

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16 June 2021

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15 June 2021

Hydrotherapists with Dixie, a seven-year-old Dachshund who is being treated for back problems common with the breed, in the hydrotherapy pool during a facility at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home’s in Battersea, London, to view their new hydrotherapy centre

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14 June 2021

Scotland’s David Marshall in the net after Czech Republic’s Patrik Schick scored their second goal at Hampden Park

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13 June 2021

Raheem Sterling celebrates with Harry Kane after scoring England’s first goal of the Euro 2021 tournament in a match against Croatia at Wembley

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12 June 2021

Oxfam campaigners wearing costumes depicting G7 leaders pose for photographers on Swanpool Beach near Falmouth, Cornwall

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11 June 2021

Members of the Vaxinol team, who are commercial, industrial and residential cleaners specialising in disinfection and decontamination, use electrostatic spray systems to deep clean the Only Fools Bar in Liverpool

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10 June 2021

A woman walks her dogs as the incoming tide begins to wash away the heads of G7 leaders drawn in the sand by activists on the beach at Newquay, Cornwall

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9 June 2021

Adam Chamberlain, 45, general manager of Big Tree pub in Sheffield, has put up over 500 flags, taking 36 hours, in preparation for Euro 2020, which kicks off this weekend

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8 June 2021

REUTERS

Food wholesalers Birchall Foodservice of Burnley, which supplies care homes, hospices, hospitals, schools and colleges as well as restaurant, said they were “completely in the dark” about how to access teh exemption scheme for their staff.

HR manager Krissy Fremont told Radio 4’s Today: “There’s still a total lack of detail. We were told yesterday the government would directly contact wholesale food service providers that were going to be on the list, and we haven’t been contacted.

“We were given an email to contact and ask if we were on the list. I did that yesterday and got an automated response saying ‘We’re receiving a high volume of emails, we’ll get back to you’. So we’re as much in the dark as we were.”

Ms Fremont said that she and other office workers had been out in vans making deliveries to ensure that customers did not miss out because drivers were absent after being pinged.

“Our care sector can be anything from a care home to a hospice or some levels of hospital, so these are vulnerable people who need their food deliveries,” she said. “We support holiday hunger campaigns for children receiving free school meals and without our deliveries those children aren’t going to get those meals.”

The Department for Transport did not respond to The Independent’s request for a comment on suggestions the scheme was a “shambles” and there was no immediate reply to requests for details of the number and location of testing sites.

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[youngsoldiers]

❧ quip fast — ( try NOT to ) die young ❧

VIVIENNE CHANG really is the spitting image of CHLOE BENNET, right? For someone only TWENTY-ONE years old, VIVI has been forced to endure so much. Yeah, that HALFBLOOD has been scraping by at the sanctuary for ONE MONTH now, working as a WEAPONS RUNNER in the DIVISION OF FORAGE. SHE identifies as CIS-FEMALE and is known to be RECKLESS and IMPATIENT but also DARING and UNSTOPPABLE. Best of luck surviving through this. ⊰ JANE, TWENTY-ONE, NZT, SHE/HER ⊱

her pinterest ( same deal as the others’ ! )

ABOUT A STORM.

       before the outbreak !

okay so this is vivienne! mostly goes by vivi or viv-—her name is entirely the fault of her mother, who always liked pretty things

her father, weisheng, was cho’s elder brother, and her mother, ella, was a muggle—-lighthearted, but a bit flighty

her mother wanted fun, and adventure, and to see the lights of the world, and the stars, and while she loved her daughter, she didn’t want her lifestyle to change

weisheng was better at it than ella, mostly in that he was cognisant of the divide between taking care of their daughter and the lifestyle they had led together up until that point, but he loved discovering new places and new things too

this wasn’t inherently a problem: many families bring up their children in travelling homes, full of new locations and experiences, and it works perfectly well

it was just, their world was made up of exciting exploring of historical finds during the day, and champagne and roaming the city at night, and both of those were difficult with a three year old tagging along ( at least, when you didn’t want to inconvenience yourself to accommodate her )

and so, they started leaving her behind with her aunt and uncle and cousin TBD, because, her parents figured, they have roots down, they’re already taking care of a child—-what’s one more?

she’d still get to go with them sometimes, but they started leaving her behind on their smaller, jauntier ones, and as she got a bit older ( but not quite old enough ), they started leaving her behind on the bigger ones too. she’s had entire years where she hasn’t seen them once, and when she does see them, it’s never for very long, and it’s never very meaningful. it’s sort of that feeling you get when an aunt you haven’t seen in a couple of years comes to visit for a week and brings you presents and marvels at how big you’ve gotten—-except her father was always better at that sort of observation than her mother, and anyway, you weren’t meant to have that feeling about your parents, right?

part of it was just about how attentive cho was to TBD. not that she wasn’t attentive to vivienne—-she was, definitely, but it was different. for one, vivienne didn’t really give her that much to be attentive about. she didn’t want things as readily as TBD, and wouldn’t really have felt comfortable asking, anyway—-cho was more of a mother to her than ella was, but that didn’t mean vivienne was her daughter, and she’d already been raising vivienne for most of her life; that was asking enough, surely.

she’d inherited her parents’ love of adventure, which made it all the more frustrating to receive their postcards and occasional letters from all of these fun things they did with their life, and no invitations to join them

there was one year, the year before she turned eleven, where they took her around with them. it’s the one year she felt really close to her parents—-but then, they deposited her back with cho for her eleventh birthday ( except they were off, by three days, which vivienne thinks is a silly thing to feel stung about, but she’s never quite forgotten it ), and vivienne didn’t really think about why, not until she saw the hogwarts letter on the table that had been waiting for her for three days. she thought her parents might stick around, see their only daughter off to school, or at least help her get her stuff, but nah. she heard cho having a row about it with them, but honestly, she didn’t think it was worth it. like, if cho was mad about having to have dealt with her for all those years, then sure, be her guest, definitely call them out. but if it was about their bad parenting of vivi, well. she just didn’t think it was worth the argument. she’d known for a long time how her parents’ priorities shook out: fun, adventure, each other, new experiences, and then her. she’d accepted it. she loved her parents, and she always would, but that didn’t mean she always liked them very much, and it definitely didn’t mean she respected them. she was okay with that.

growing up, having not really wanted to ask for much, she’d spent most of her time trying to get her pent up energy out by running wild and playing with gracie when she wanted to, but otherwise, causing trouble by herself. the day she found cho’s old broom was the best. who cared if her mother was jetting across the world without her? vivienne could fly. she liked playing both beater and chaser, really enjoying the outlet which hitting things—predominantly a ball that cho had enchanted to chase her around—provided, but also loving the speed and intensity of the chasers’ job. the first time she watched a quidditch match, she was hooked on the chasers, not only with how fast they moved, but how in tandem they were. while she still appreciates the outlet which a beater’s bat can provide, she found herself a chaser on the gryffindor team during her hogwarts years, and she loved it, and the team.

she respected her aunt and uncle a lot, but she didn’t have much patience for authority figures in general, and she got in trouble a bunch, both growing up and in hogwarts. when she was younger. she’s pretty upfront, and she’s gotten a bit better with the recalcitrance issues (marginally), but she will still absolutely fight you if you insult cho chang or muggles to her. her aunt and uncle are the best fucking people in the world, aight

you know that pin/image that’s like “bye gotta study so i can be better than everybody i hate”?? very viv. she’s never been intrinsically motivated, but like? competition? that she can do. never cared about her grades until some time in first year when this kid was being a knob and she was like “i have to beat him at everything he cares about” and then the older she got, the more the list of people she wanted to show up grew LMAO her life was a mix of quidditch, detention, and working for academic success ( and parties lmao, just not really any clubs except the duelling club )

       the outbreak !

viv, in her last year of hogwarts, was pretty torn about what she wanted to do. she considered working with dragons, or magizoology in general, or even working within the ministry in departments involving creatures ( she rejected that pretty quickly though; she didn’t have the temperament ) and, eventually, decided on curse breaking, which she has been training with and doing for the last few years

she had been in brighton with a few colleagues when the wards broke, sent by gringotts on her way back from rotterdam ( where there had been an actual discovery, and she had gone in to assess the situation and was meant to return to gringotts to give a preliminary report ) because a wix who hadn’t paid back her loan claimed it was because the gold was cursed and she couldn’t touch it. part of her wasn’t surprised: the ministry had fallen, after all, so it stood that eventually their world would too, but it was still like a punch to the gut.

the only one who’d gone to deal with the wix, viv spent several days trying to track down her colleagues, but only found one, soon to become prey to an inferius. she killed it with a broken chair and a well-judged thrust. soon after, she and pádraig went on the run. they didn’t really know where they were going—-they just knew they had to get out of there. they kept trying to find their families: pádraig, his wife and little girl; viv, her cousin grace.

viv took to picking up weapons, cycling through them and stealing a backpack from an abandoned store to keep some of the useful ones in. her wand was always there, and she was very skilled with it—she had to be, for her job—but she wasn’t always sure what magic would work on these ( she knew that some things did, but she wasn’t about to go through all of her repertoire to eliminate her options ), and there was something much more reassuring about having a beater’s bat—nicked from an abandoned home in a wizarding neighbourhood in Wiltshire—in her hand or spiked gloves on her fists

about four and a half months in, pádraig started acting strange. they were sort of travelling with a few others, but had been primarily sticking together. he’d been off on a weapons run, and he was just… not right when he came back. she didn’t get it, though, not until one of the girls screamed it at her: THEY GOT HIM. she didn’t want to believe it, not when he was there, looking at her, not when he was her friend, but it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone would lie about, and so she grabbed her bat and went for him.

parental death tw // she is so, so angry about this whole situation. augustus rookwood is a piece of shit, and because of him and his fucking cronies and their shitty beliefs, there is a kid out there without a dad, if rory’s even still alive. there are thousands of kids in that situation, and parents, and siblings, and innocent people who are stuck in hell because of that colossal bastard // end parental death tw

she heard about hogwarts somewhere along the way, and eventually figured—-that’s where her family would have gone, if they were around. cho had always gone back when called, and she knew cho’d take tristan there too. she hoped TBD was there.

she finally made it about a month ago, and it’s still sort of jarring. hogwarts was always a good home, but it wasn’t meant to have to be a permanent sort of sanctuary. she has absolutely no idea where her parents are, but she’s trying not to think about it. weisheng’s at least competent at magic, and could probably take care of ella, but—-survival was never their strengths, just living the luxurious and flighty life, and vivienne can’t think about them too much because she doesn’t want to reach one of the likelier conclusions

she’s always been fast, and she has a good eye for weapons—and a very adept method for breaking into Ridiculous Paranoid Wealthy Purebloods’ former houses, because of course some of them would leave their curses up in a zombie outbreak—which is why she’s useful as a weapons runner, but the other divisions she spends a lot of time in are protection, because of her previous profession and her experience with the such, and research, because a lot of her work had to do with the nature of spells and she’s seen historical and ancient magical locations from all around the world, which might be able to provide some insight, she’s not sure

       misc !

very ride or die

not a cat or bird fan —- in fact, other than magical creatures, dogs are the only common animal she really likes?

once outraced a bludger until the beater could come and then they did and fucking smASHED IT like a badass ( maybe @ val or alex ? quiDDITCH )

loves her quidditch squad

scottish

swearing in a scottish accent is an act of patriotism minerva

rly good at arithmancy

never been stung by a bee or a wasp ever

needs to be better at healing magic

wishes she could play the drums

can’t do herbology for jack

bad at controlling her facial expressions

was totally on jane’s side during the scorpius tattoo situation from the chat LMAO

watch her and al be study buddies w/ a side of quidditch bants

idk y’all feel free to throw connections @ me!!! i’ll one day make a connections page but it is not today

reminder @ self to write a wanted connection for her cousin

[middlecountries]

Quiet Heroes (1 of 2)

What gets written about the quiet heroes? Where are the stories of the toiling, unpraised few who don’t seek glory for themselves but live contentedly helping others? Who are they who heal wounds they neither caused nor suffer from directly? Who is Kevin DiFiore? Who is Mark Hodgson? Who are Alana Parisi, Alex Lambert, Paul McKeown, and Uzair Amir? 

...Who is Zenek Krowcyk-Lewedowski?  

-

Zenek Krowcyk-Lewendowski was born in Warsaw to Wojtek Lewendowski and Angelika Krowcyk. Wojtek was an artist and Angelika a nurse. They separated when Zenek was four and his sister Ewelina was one. The cause of the separation was complicated. Angelika desired a better quality of life than Wojtek could afford as an artist and Wojtek, in retaliation to his wife’s dissatisfaction, cheated on her. Angelika was so enraged when she found Wojtek in bed with another woman one afternoon when she got home early from work that she told him to take the children and leave. She loved Zenek and Ewelina deeply but she wanted Wojtek to feel the pressure of being the chief breadwinner for a family. Wojtek lived in a fantasy land of pretty, swirling colours while she got abused by drunken patients and conceited doctors. She wanted Wojtek to learn what responsibility felt like however much she would miss her children.  

Angelika was so stubborn and set on her plan that when Wojtek said he was taking the children to live in Canada where he thought his paintings would sell better, she didn’t try to stop him. She figured he would come running back to Warsaw after a few months he was so naïve to the expense and energy it took to look after small children. 

So Wojtek, Zenek and Ewelina packed up and moved a half continent and ocean away. Zenek missed his mother greatly but was soon distracted and excited by his new surroundings. He and his dad and sister moved into a sleepy West-end neighbourhood of Toronto where there was a large Polish expatriate community including one of Wojtek’s friends from art school. Within weeks of arriving in Toronto, Zenek and Ewelina had friends on their street and Wojtek was being introduced to artists and gallerists all around the city. Things got even more comfortable for them when Wojtek met Mika. Mika was a sculptor and she and Wojtek were instantly attracted to one another. Mika was undaunted by Wojtek’s family situation and she moved in with him and Zenek and Ewelina after less than six months of them dating. 

Mika took to Zenek and Ewelina without hesitation and the children in turn, welcomed her into their lives. Zenek’s childhood progressed relatively free of stress or difficulty for some time after. He was briefly embarrassed at school for not speaking English but he soon picked up the language and integrated easily with his Canadian-born classmates. Once a year his mom would come visit him and his sister or they would go to Poland to see her. Zenek liked his mom’s visits or trips to Poland a lot. Angelika took them up the CN Tower, to Niagara Falls and other tourist attractions around Toronto and south-central Ontario. In Warsaw they’d visit relatives who showered Zenek and his sister with gifts and affection. But the, just before Zenek turned thirteen, at the end of Angelika’s visit to Toronto, his mom started to sob when they went to say goodbye to each other. In a way that had become characteristic of him, Zenek asked, ‘What’s the matter, Mom? Why are you crying?’

Angelika hugged him as they stood on the porch to his dad’s house. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I made such a terrible mistake letting you move away from me. I’ve missed you terribly. I’m a horrible mother.’

Zenek pushed himself back so he could see look his mother in the eye. The two were now at eye level with one another so he looked straight ahead at her. ‘Mom,’ he said. ‘I love my life here. You’re the best mother in the world.’ Angelika sobbed again and kissed and hugged her son. After a few minutes she turned and walked off the porch and back to Poland.

-

Zenek grew into a happy, well-adjusted teenager. He had many friends and his grades were excellent. He was quieter than most of his Canadian friends but he didn’t think anything wrong with this. His favourite things to do were look after his sister and solve math problems. These things gave him much greater peace of mind and tranquility than drinking and getting stoned did, activities that were becoming favoured by his friends.

Zenek’s love of math inspired him to apply to the computer science department at the University of Toronto for his bachelor’s degree. He was accepted and lived at home while he studied. His life was quiet and uncomplicated. The only possible complaint he had was that he couldn’t easily met girls living at home. His classmates were predominantly male and he felt self-conscious about asking out girls he met at parties back to his dad and Mika’s house. All in all it wasn’t a serious problem. He got a great deal of female attention and companionship from his sister and stepmom albeit not of a romantic variety.

After undergrad Zenek took a job with IMB in their manufacturing products department. It was well paying and decently interesting work. He liked many of his colleagues and was generally happy with his direction in life. Around the same time he moved into an apartment in Parkdale with a few of his friends from high school in the hopes of jumpstarting his romantic life. Unfortunately, despite the opportunity he now had to invite women home after parties or dates, he remained single for nearly two years. 

Then in late 2009, at a party he and his friends were throwing for Halloween, Zenek met a girl who captured his interest and seemed to return it. Her name was Margaret and she was a painter. They had a few friends in common and she was in the midst of creating a website to promote her artwork. She and Zenek talked enthusiastically about art and website design for almost an hour at the party. But just as Zenek was gathering the nerve to ask her for her phone number, a man walked up to her who she immediately turned to and kissed. Turning back to Zenek, Margaret said, ‘Zenek, this is my boyfriend, Daniel.’ Zenek’s heart sank and he could barely gather the strength to clasp Daniel’s outstretched hand. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. He looked over his shoulder then down at the floor. ‘I’m going to the kitchen for a drink. Do either of you want anything?’  

Daniel shook his head and Margaret did the same. Then, changing her mind, Margaret said, ‘Actually, sure. Get me one of whatever you’re having.’ ‘No problem.’  On his way to the kitchen Zenek tried to put the idea of any of union between him and Margaret out of his head. 

-

Margaret friend-requested Zenek the day after the Halloween party and they started messaging each other about Margaret’s website. Zenek was happy to answer her questions about coding. He was an art lover and he’d reached a level of competency at his job that he was starting to have a good deal of free time on his hands. He and Margaret soon started meeting in person to discuss Margaret’s website. Margaret told him from the outset that she couldn’t pay him except in a piece of art and Zenek assured her that that was fine, that he was glad to help make the world more beautiful and support an artist. 

After three months the website was done to a level that satisfied both Zenek and Margaret. In the interim the two had grown very fond of each other. Zenek liked Margaret’s emotional exuberance and active imagination. He couldn’t help feeling his original attraction to her return when he visited her one time at her studio and she was covered in paint wearing nothing but cut-off jean shorts and a tank top. For Margaret’s part, she liked Zenek’s stoicism and unfailing moral compass. At various times she’d told him about hers and Daniel’s sexual problems of late and she didn’t notice a change in his demeanour whatsoever. Instead praying on Margaret’s vulnerability and trying to get her into bed, he repeatedly assured her that she and Daniel would work things out. 

The painting Margaret made for Zenek in compensation for his help creating her website was one of her favourites ever. It was a four by five canvass of layered green and yellow paint with designs and impressions scrapped out of it using different pallet knives. It was a technique she’d worked at considerably but had only felt mildly successful at doing up until then. Most of the scrapings and cut-outs in her previous pieces were of fairly predictable patterns whereas Zenek’s piece was the first in which she’d tried using more organic shapes and lines. The overall effect of the piece was of something controlled and deliberate yet spontaneous and messy. 

Margaret brought Zenek his piece at 8:00 one evening in mid-January. When she presented it to him he looked at it quizzically for a least a minute. Finally, when he took his eyes off it, she noticed they were moist if not wet. ‘Thank you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘It’s very beautiful.’

Margaret had never seen anyone so moved by her art. This, coupled with the physical neglect she was experiencing from her boyfriend, caused her to take a half-step closer to him. ‘I’m glad you like it,’ she said and glanced at his lips. Zenek felt his breath speed up and his heart beat in his chest. He completed the remaining distance between them and kissed her. A minute later they went to his bedroom.

The premise of Zenek and Margaret’s affair was strictly physical. Margaret loved Daniel but his inability or unwillingness to please her sexually left her feeling very lonely. She felt tremendous guilt at abusing Daniel’s trust but what else could she do. They’d tried to talk about their intimacy issues but Daniel was unwavering in his belief that he could have a heart attack if he made love to her. He suffered from severe anxiety yet refused to see a therapist or take any medication for it out fear it would interfere with his work as a filmmaker. 

Zenek felt bad about sleeping with Margaret too. He’d met Daniel several times and really liked him. He was always friendly and appreciative towards him for the work he’d done for Margaret’s website. Less trusting men would have been suspicious or jealous of someone who spent so much time with his girlfriend. (It turned out he had reason to be.) 

Nevertheless the sex was great and Margaret was lovely. Zenek let her decide the times and lengths of their encounters and was careful not to kiss him on the mouth more than a few times per meeting. Mostly they met at Margaret’s studio on weeknights to avoid his roommates catching them. (Daniel and Margaret lived together so her place was out of the question.) The air mattress Margaret bought from Wal-Mart for them to have sex on in her studio was a bit tawdry but she managed to make a joke about it that put Zenek more at ease.  (She said it was a dystopic, late-stage capitalist canvas.)

Gratifying though it was, the affair couldn’t go one forever. Guilt over Daniel’s would-be feelings was mounting in Margaret and Zenek’s need for a fuller relationship was starting to show. When he brought a new sheet set for the air mattress one night in late March, Margaret felt it was time to stop. Glancing at the sheets in Zenek’s hand, she sat down on the mattress. ‘I think this might be starting to get out hand,’ she said. 

Zenek sat down beside her. ‘Yeah, I guess. What do you want to do?’

‘Let’s pretend we never met, that this was just a beautiful painting hanging in a gallery we each glanced at but never saw again.’

‘Sure,’ said Zenek, lowering his eyes. ‘A beautiful painting.’ He got up slowly. ‘Goodbye, Margaret.’

He kissed her on the cheek and left.

-

That spring was a depressing one for Zenek. However incomplete his relationship was with Margaret, it was better than nothing and he missed her a great deal. He tried to occupy himself by taking up rock-climbing and the activity helped somewhat. By the time the first consistently good weather of the year arrived in June he was virtually free of longing for his former lover. 

Yet there was more missing from Zenek’s life than romance and companionship. His job no longer brought him the peace of mind and detachment he remembered falling in love with in math class so many years ago. He couldn’t stop his attention from drifting to bigger pictures, to what his daily efforts were going towards. He thought about the possibility of advancement within IBM or moving to another company. He could become a project coordinator, a manager and perhaps with a lot of work, a VP. But all of these roles, while better paying, required him to over-see other people and this responsibility went against his sensitive and non-judgmental nature. He thought about going back to school to do a master’s; the prospect certainly appealed to him intellectually. He’d like nothing more than to immerse himself in the most challenging theoretical and conceptual problems computer science had to offer. The drawback to this direction was money. He’d just managed to pay off his student debt from his bachelor’s degree and graduate school tuition was twice as much as undergrad. And besides, what was the end game with a master’s, A PhD? He couldn’t see himself working strictly in research or academia. No, a master’s in computer science wasn’t a solution to his vocational ennui. At best it would be a temporary fix. 

One day in mid-July 2010 Zenek saw a poster for a lecture on the applications of information technology to environmental issues on the bulletin board at his rock-climbing gym. He went to the lecture and learned about a concept developed by an American economist called ‘distributed systems’. According to the economist the concept and its principles were already at work in the communications, political and cultural arenas. The prototypical distributed system was the Internet, a decentralized and non-hierarchical system of organization and distribution of goods. According to the economist – and the lecturer cribbing him – distributed energy systems wherein individual homes could produce green energy was the only way out of the world’s addiction to fossil fuels and eminent global environmental ruin. 

Zenek was inspired by the lecture and immediately started researching schools and programs where computer science and sustainability were being taught together. His research led him to the University of Edinburgh’s master’s in environmental design and sustainability program. He liked the idea of returning to Europe in addition to the program itself. He looked at the admission requirements, saw that he met most of them, and set about applying.

-

Zenek was accepted to the 2011 master’s program in environmental design and sustainability at the University of Edinburgh. He found out he’d gotten in during the middle of the winter after his and Margaret’s affair and was really excited. He had lots of time to prepare to move and he didn’t even own much furniture or things he couldn’t easily pack up and take with him. Anything he had that was excessively heavy or bulky he could leave at his dad and stepmom’s house until he came back – if he came back. 

After learning of his acceptance and getting organized to move, Zenek found his attention again drifting back to his romantic void. He thought about Margaret and whether he’d ever find another woman like her. They’d bumped into each other occasionally at parties since their affair and the experience always depressed him. She seemed to have resolved her issues with Daniel, the two of them always hanging off of each other like teenaged love-birds. 

Thankfully that summer arrived and left quickly. For his departure, Zenek’s friends organized a big farewell party at his Parkdale apartment. His dad and stepmom and sister came. Ewelina cried at several points in the evening over, but Zenek assured her he’d be home for Christmas and every other chance he got. The rest of the party was filled with raucous drinking and laughter. 

Zenek flew to Edinburgh airport the day after his farewell party carrying a sizable hangover along with all his luggage. He managed to sleep on the plane and woke up an hour before landing in foggy, damp Scotland. The first thing he noticed as the plane dipped beneath the cloud-line was the emerald green colour of all the plants and fields below. It seemed like a very appropriate place to study ‘green’ technology. 

Zenek went through customs and got the bus to the city centre. Edinburgh was much smaller than Toronto and he arrived just outside Waverly Station in less than half an hour. Along the way, he gazed out the bus window at the buildings and scenery of Scotland’s capital. Nearly everything was built in moss-covered stone and nothing was taller than five or seven storeys. The architectural feel gave a sense of history, modesty and authenticity. 

Zenek passed Edinburgh Castle and Princes Street Gardens and the bus came to a stop. At that point he found his bus to the university and boarded it. It was difficult managing all his bags but Edinburghers were very polite and yielded to him as he got on and off the buses with all his things. 

He arrived at his stop on campus and made his way to the student housing complex where he was renting a room in an apartment along with two other students in his program that he’d met online. He was the first of the three of them to arrive and when he opened the front door to the flat, he dropped his bags and went straight to the couch to collapse.

[falkenscreen]

Jojo Rabbit

The problem with ‘Jojo Rabbit’ isn’t that it’s offensive. It isn’t offensive, it’s just that it’s not especially good.

Taiki Waititi’s self-styled ‘anti-hate satire,’ as has been widely-publicised, casts the Polynesian-Jewish actor as the titular Jojo’s (newcomer Roman Griffin Davis) imaginary best-friend Hitler. A grotesque, fumbling and fitting mockery, Waititi’s portrayal is more akin to Family Guy’s Fuhrer iteration than, say, any of Mel Brooks attempts; more on this later.

Scarlett Johansson fulfils the role of Jojo’s mother Rosie in Waititi’s second very deliberate piece of casting. The actress, in her portrayal evoking the imagery of the propagandistic Aryan myth, like Waititi is of course Jewish. The Ghost in the Shell star is well-known for her outspoken views on the appropriateness of her casting specifically yet not exclusively as regards criticisms that have been made relating her perceived racial background. Her decision to take up the part in this skewering of racism, conversely necessitating an actress who is anything but white playing a figure of archetypal whiteness who too expresses an antithesis to hatred herein, is no doubt a subtle riposte to many of her detractors. 

Unfortunately, the film sparingly works on anything close to this level.

The exceptions are Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson as Jojo’s instructors, with the humour inherent in Wilson’s portrayal in particular underlining both the malevolence and absurdity of rampant extremism while not neglecting to emphasise it’s devastating effects. Repeated protestations that children sacrifice themselves for the cause while she remains at a distance strike the balance and searing real-life resonance that Jojo Rabbit pursues throughout, with the film otherwise often absent necessary grounding in real-life consequence.

Sure, there are allusions to the Shoah (Holocaust) for example, which is overwhelmingly related through the experience of Elsa, a young Jewish girl who is hiding in the walls of Jojo’s house, played by Leave No Trace star Thomasin McKenzie in yet another star-making turn. The film wants to relate a broader historical context, and certainly there are many examples of features, as early as the likes of Casablanca, that have done so absent graphic imagery and within the confines of a smaller narrative.  

Conversely, Jojo Rabbit presumes an audience knowledge of the extent of the Nazi’s atrocities (irrespective of the victims’ backgrounds). No there is not a single film or text that can adequately account for these events yet many, from Schindler’s List to varied adaptations of Anne Frank’s story to X-Men have found ways to elaborate on, significantly, the scale of events and the breadth of their impact.

Audiences are not ill-informed nor should such a presumption be made; viewers will likely have varying understandings of the historical events surrounding Jojo Rabbit. Yet to the extent that the film either seeks to inform on the breadth of hate’s consequence and relative to this underline how the horrific mentalities depicted throughout bear broader consequence through crucial reference to wider historical context, it falls short.

Naysayers of such a view will likely bring up Brooks’ deservedly beloved classic and still raucous hallmark of far-right lampooning The Producers, among this author’s very favourite films, and musicals; excepting of course the terrible 2005 adaptation. Yet there’s a crucial distinction to be drawn here. Brooks, statedly, will gleefully mock the Nazis but fell short of conveying the Shoah as the basis for any comedy; famously criticising Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful.

This author does not share the view that anything should necessarily be off limits for creatives and that there can be catharsis (if managed effectively and as seen in respects of Waititi’s latest) in sourcing humour in even the most dire of circumstances. Benigni, in what was the third and weakest of three acts, nonetheless accounted for a necessarily reckonable extent of the scale of his subject, a matter significantly confined to being explored this time around through McKenzie’s character.

If you’re going to take the piss out of Nazis that’s great and you’ve got a lot to work with, you just have to be funny and to resonate not neglect to ground or effectively relate the humour to its less than fictional ramifications, something for instance the very overrated ‘Allo ‘Allo! didn’t always muster. Waititi achieves such in some of the jumbled approaches to comedy, yet most ably manages same in the asides divorced from typical slapstick humour which could just as well have been transplanted to many a more dramatic picture.

If you’re going to broach the Shoah with comedy however, there’s a necessity to relate and ground the breadth of it’s reach and consequence to extents feasible in film if simply for the humour to be effective and to resonate for any regardless of their level of knowledge of the occurrences or lack thereof; with Jojo Rabbit we don’t quite get there.

On the matter of audiences ‘getting it,’ much of the dialogue between Elsa and Jojo is replete with ‘gotcha’ moments and platitudes; in their simplicity undermining what could have been more palpable, realistic encounters for those watching and intended by the creators to be either affirmed or swayed in their views. The arc of Rockwell’s character and the most interesting herein, broadly comparable to Jojo’s as he too begins to see the faults in the Nazis’ extremism, is comparably better handled. With both characters quite literally scarred and consequentially soon rejected by their contemporaries, the subplot centring on Rockwell’s Klenzendorf, too highlighting the persecution suffered by disabled and queer persons at the hands of the Third Reich, deploys an illiteral, viscerally impacting subtleness notably absent from less effective stretches.

To be clear, this author is not of the view that any filmmaker has a responsibility to educate, however serious the subject, rather than entertain. It’s just that you need to contextualise some subjects if their skewering is to resonate, regardless of how clued-in your audience might be, and imparting none of this is helped if you too blatantly spell out your point at various junctures.

Now; Waititi’s Hitler. Littered throughout, there’s a grand total of two scenes where it’s effective. The first; largely for its then novelty, and the last, for trying something different and uniquely dark. The rest of the appearances wreak of sketch comedy (the concept itself being ripe for a briefer run) stretched unnecessarily over two hours ala What We Do in the Shadows. Waititi’s performance isn’t bad, it’s simply that after the initial impact it becomes (with the exception of the final scene) one-note and non-essential, much like Roman Griffin Davis’ own turn which, while serviceable, is overshadowed by a conveyer belt of performers running rings around him.

Foremost among them is the very underrated Johansson, stealing the film in its easily best scene involving a brutish impersonation of an off-screen figure. A narrow second-best and likewise impacting sequence too involves Johansson, and a pair of shoes.

It is these moments, as good as they are, which underline the main problem above and beyond all else with Jojo Rabbit in that there are three different tones running interchangeably within. There’s Rockwell and Wilson doing their shticks (alongside a likewise excellent Stephen Merchant as a gangly gestapo), Waititi who is operating at a wholly different comic register and everything else which over and above comedy predominantly pursues drama.

Some of these dramatic moments are the film’s very best and could have been resplendent in many a more tonally-orientated picture irrespective of the genre(s) pursued, yet falter amidst refrains to varied comic tonalities which themselves don’t always land. For all the film’s faults there is regardless a simple and undeniable joy in seeing Nazis so belittled and moreover at the behest of those in a sustained effort of self-actualisation and catharsis to which many a viewer will relate.

There’s nothing wrong with pursuing the subjects this film does and those times one does get it wrong it doesn’t mean the flick is necessarily offensive nor is this one, but don’t expect everyone to queue up.

‘Jojo Rabbit,’ which premiered at the Jewish International Film Festival, is in cinemas from Boxing Day

on Film Fight Club

on Festevez

[youngsoldiers]

❧ quip fast — ( try NOT to ) die young ❧

VIVIENNE CHANG really is the spitting image of CHLOE BENNET, right? For someone only TWENTY-ONE years old, VIVI has been forced to endure so much. Yeah, that HALFBLOOD has been scraping by at the sanctuary for ONE MONTH now, working as a WEAPONS RUNNER in the DIVISION OF FORAGE. SHE identifies as CIS-FEMALE and is known to be RECKLESS and IMPATIENT but also DARING and UNSTOPPABLE. Best of luck surviving through this. ⊰ JANE, TWENTY-ONE, NZT, SHE/HER ⊱ [ note: vivienne is gracelyn’s cousin/foster sister & niece to cho chang ]

her pinterest ( pretty new though! )

ABOUT A STORM.

        before the outbreak !

okay so this is vivienne! mostly goes by vivi or viv-—her name is entirely the fault of her mother, who always liked pretty things

her father, weisheng, was cho’s elder brother, and her mother, ella, was a muggle—-lighthearted, but a bit flighty

her mother wanted fun, and adventure, and to see the lights of the world, and the stars, and while she loved her daughter, she didn’t want her lifestyle to change

weisheng was better at it than ella, mostly in that he was cognisant of the divide between taking care of their daughter and the lifestyle they had led together up until that point, but he loved discovering new places and new things too

this wasn’t inherently a problem: many families bring up their children in travelling homes, full of new locations and experiences, and it works perfectly well

it was just, their world was made up of exciting exploring of historical finds during the day, and champagne and roaming the city at night, and both of those were difficult with a three year old tagging along ( at least, when you didn’t want to inconvenience yourself to accommodate her )

and so, they started leaving her behind with her aunt and uncle and cousin grace, because, her parents figured, they have roots down, they’re already taking care of a child—-what’s one more?

she’d still get to go with them sometimes, but they started leaving her behind on their smaller, jauntier ones, and as she got a bit older ( but not quite old enough ), they started leaving her behind on the bigger ones too. she’s had entire years where she hasn’t seen them once, and when she does see them, it’s never for very long, and it’s never very meaningful. it’s sort of that feeling you get when an aunt you haven’t seen in a couple of years comes to visit for a week and brings you presents and marvels at how big you’ve gotten—-except her father was always better at that sort of observation than her mother, and anyway, you weren’t meant to have that feeling about your parents, right?

part of it was just about how attentive cho was to grace. not that she wasn’t attentive to vivienne—-she was, definitely, but it was different. for one, vivienne didn’t really give her that much to be attentive about. she didn’t want things as readily as grace, and wouldn’t really have felt comfortable asking, anyway—-cho was more of a mother to her than ella was, but that didn’t mean vivienne was her daughter, and she’d already been raising vivienne for most of her life; that was asking enough, surely.

she’d inherited her parents’ love of adventure, which made it all the more frustrating to receive their postcards and occasional letters from all of these fun things they did with their life, and no invitations to join them

there was one year, the year before she turned eleven, where they took her around with them. it’s the one year she felt really close to her parents—-but then, they deposited her back with cho for her eleventh birthday ( except they were off, by three days, which vivienne thinks is a silly thing to feel stung about, but she’s never quite forgotten it ), and vivienne didn’t really think about why, not until she saw the hogwarts letter on the table that had been waiting for her for three days. she thought her parents might stick around, see their only daughter off to school, or at least help her get her stuff, but nah. she heard cho having a row about it with them, but honestly, she didn’t think it was worth it. like, if cho was mad about having to have dealt with her for all those years, then sure, be her guest, definitely call them out. but if it was about their bad parenting of vivi, well. she just didn’t think it was worth the argument. she’d known for a long time how her parents’ priorities shook out: fun, adventure, each other, new experiences, and then her. she’d accepted it. she loved her parents, and she always would, but that didn’t mean she always liked them very much, and it definitely didn’t mean she respected them. she was okay with that.

growing up, having not really wanted to ask for much, she’d spent most of her time trying to get her pent up energy out by running wild and playing with gracie when she wanted to, but otherwise, causing trouble by herself. the day she found cho’s old broom was the best. who cared if her mother was jetting across the world without her? vivienne could fly. she liked playing both beater and chaser, really enjoying the outlet which hitting things—predominantly a ball that cho had enchanted to chase her around—provided, but also loving the speed and intensity of the chasers’ job. the first time she watched a quidditch match, she was hooked on the chasers, not only with how fast they moved, but how in tandem they were. while she still appreciates the outlet which a beater’s bat can provide, she found herself a chaser on the gryffindor team during her hogwarts years, and she loved it, and the team.

she respected her aunt and uncle a lot, but she didn’t have much patience for authority figures in general, and she got in trouble a bunch, both growing up and in hogwarts. when she was younger. she’s pretty upfront, and she’s gotten a bit better with the recalcitrance issues (marginally), but she will still absolutely fight you if you insult cho chang or muggles to her. her aunt and uncle are the best fucking people in the world, aight

you know that pin/image that’s like “bye gotta study so i can be better than everybody i hate”?? very viv. she’s never been intrinsically motivated, but like? competition? that she can do. never cared about her grades until some time in first year when this kid was being a knob and she was like “i have to beat him at everything he cares about” and then the older she got, the more the list of people she wanted to show up grew LMAO her life was a mix of quidditch, detention, and working for academic success ( and parties lmao, just not really any clubs except the duelling club )

        the outbreak !

viv, in her last year of hogwarts, was pretty torn about what she wanted to do. she considered working with dragons, or magizoology in general, or even working within the ministry in departments involving creatures ( she rejected that pretty quickly though; she didn’t have the temperament ) and, eventually, decided on curse breaking, which she has been training with and doing for the last few years

she had been in brighton with a few colleagues when the wards broke, sent by gringotts on her way back from rotterdam ( where there had been an actual discovery, and she had gone in to assess the situation and was meant to return to gringotts to give a preliminary report ) because a wix who hadn’t paid back her loan claimed it was because the gold was cursed and she couldn’t touch it. part of her wasn’t surprised: the ministry had fallen, after all, so it stood that eventually their world would too, but it was still like a punch to the gut.

the only one who’d gone to deal with the wix, viv spent several days trying to track down her colleagues, but only found one, soon to become prey to an inferius. she killed it with a broken chair and a well-judged thrust. soon after, she and pádraig went on the run. they didn’t really know where they were going—-they just knew they had to get out of there. they kept trying to find their families: pádraig, his wife and little girl; viv, her cousin grace. 

viv took to picking up weapons, cycling through them and stealing a backpack from an abandoned store to keep some of the useful ones in. her wand was always there, and she was very skilled with it—she had to be, for her job—but she wasn’t always sure what magic would work on these ( she knew that some things did, but she wasn’t about to go through all of her repertoire to eliminate her options ), and there was something much more reassuring about having a beater’s bat—nicked from an abandoned home in a wizarding neighbourhood in Wiltshire—in her hand or spiked gloves on her fists

about four and a half months in, pádraig started acting strange. they were sort of travelling with a few others, but had been primarily sticking together. he’d been off on a weapons run, and he was just… not right when he came back. she didn’t get it, though, not until one of the girls screamed it at her: THEY GOT HIM. she didn’t want to believe it, not when he was there, looking at her, not when he was her friend, but it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone would lie about, and so she grabbed her bat and went for him.

parental death tw // she is so, so angry about this whole situation. augustus rookwood is a piece of shit, and because of him and his fucking cronies and their shitty beliefs, there is a kid out there without a dad, if rory’s even still alive. there are thousands of kids in that situation, and parents, and siblings, and innocent people who are stuck in hell because of that colossal bastard // end parental death tw

she heard about hogwarts somewhere along the way, and eventually figured—-that’s where her family would have gone, if they were around. cho had always gone back when called, and she knew cho’d take tristan there too. she hoped grace was there.

she finally made it about a month ago, and it’s still sort of jarring. hogwarts was always a good home, but it wasn’t meant to have to be a permanent sort of sanctuary. she has absolutely no idea where her parents are, but she’s trying not to think about it. weisheng’s at least competent at magic, and could probably take care of ella, but—-survival was never their strengths, just living the luxurious and flighty life, and vivienne can’t think about them too much because she doesn’t want to reach one of the likelier conclusions

she’s always been fast, and she has a good eye for weapons—and a very adept method for breaking into Ridiculous Paranoid Wealthy Purebloods’ former houses, because of course some of them would leave their curses up in a zombie outbreak—which is why she’s useful as a weapons runner, but the other divisions she spends a lot of time in are protection, because of her previous profession and her experience with the such, and research, because a lot of her work had to do with the nature of spells and she’s seen historical and ancient magical locations from all around the world, which might be able to provide some insight, she’s not sure

        misc !

very ride or die

not a cat or bird fan —- in fact, other than magical creatures, dogs are the only common animal she really likes?

once outraced a bludger until the beater could come and then they did and fucking smASHED IT like a badass ( maybe @ val or alex ? quiDDITCH )

loves her quidditch squad

scottish

swearing in a scottish accent is an act of patriotism minerva

rly good at arithmancy

never been stung by a bee or a wasp ever

needs to be better at healing magic

wishes she could play the drums

can’t do herbology for jack

bad at controlling her facial expressions