#i am literally the only person on earth for whom this would be an appropriate use of it

[skullamity]

@mrskayathefrog I cannot stress enough that this is true for the rest of you, but OP is my irl wife. I reserve the right to roast my wife with any tags or additions I make to her posts, and none of you can stop me because I am too powerful.

I agree that it would not be appropriate for any of you to make this addition, because none of you were present with me on the couch, experiencing the same conditions under which I was made to read this post, illustrated below:

I had zero way to know that this would be seen by more than ten people when I added the meme, and if I could have predicted it would breach containment, I would have probably decided against it just so that I wouldn't have multiple people telling me I don't know how this meme works every single week since she posted it.

For real, no hard feelings! But I'm adding an image to this reblog so maybe people will see this version and decide to chill about this (and also low key to underline what pronouns my wife uses for anyone accidentally misgendering her in tags and reblogs).

Many years ago, I was wandering around downtown Ottawa with my best friend. We ran into a friend of his who offered us some hash (it sucked), then said there was a really good house party nearby if we wanted to go. We were like, yeah, sure. So that’s how we ended up at some completely fucking random person’s house.

I look around to ask if my friend knows anyone here and he’s simply gone, as is his friend. And this isn’t some red solo cup hangout; this is a party. There’s people counting out pills on the kitchen counter. I am clearly neither as cool nor as drug-savvy as the kitchen people, so I back away and instead wander aimlessly into the living room, which seems to give off more of a chill vibe.

A bunch of people are seated in a circle on the floor. One of them is fiddling with a big wad of newspaper or something. A really cute grunge girl with piercings and tattoos scoots aside to make room for me, so I sit down.

“What’s that,” I ask her, gesturing at the newspaper wad.

She gets a really big smile on her face. You know the smile. It’s the I’m About To Watch This Innocent Soul Get High As Fuck smile. “You’ve never smoked a tulip?”

“What’s a tulip?” I ask.

“It’s like if a joint was also a bong,” she replies. “You gotta try it.”

“Alright,” I reply, a little uncertainly. This will not be my first encounter with weed. I am more comfortable with the janky newspaper bong than I am with whatever the fuck is going on in the kitchen. Besides, this girl is really cute and I would like to have a friend here now that my existing friend has turned into vapor or been transported to the Upside-Down or whatever the hell happened to him.

I watch as one person holds the newspaper joint-bong upright and holds a lighter over the top while another gets beneath it, tilting their head back to take a puff. Apparently smoking this Cheech & Chong monstrosity is a two-person job.

“Oh,” I say, looking at the fist-sized knob at the top of the wonky newspaper joint. “Yeah, it does kinda look like a tulip.” Grunge girl smiles at me.

I watch as the tulip is passed around the circle, along with the lighter, and hits are cooperatively taken. It reaches grunge girl, who takes a huge puff and holds it for an extended moment before exhaling an impressive blast of smoke. She smiles expectantly and holds the tulip up for me, preparing to spark the gigantic meteor of dank that makes up its tip. By this point I have completely forgotten about my missing friend. I only care about making a good impression on grunge girl. I tilt my head back and hit the tulip like a smokestack.

It is the following morning. I am sleeping between a couch and a wall. I’m not positive that this is the same house I was just in. My memories are gone. Someone is yelling at me: “dude! Dude! Wake up, dude!”

I sit up. My mouth tastes like cigarettes. I do not smoke cigarettes. “Wha,” I ask the yelling man, who I am quite confident I have never met before in my life.

“We’re going on a quest,” he tells me, gravely. “You have to come with us.”

I look around. Neither my friend nor his friend are anywhere in sight. I also do not see grunge girl anywhere. I shrug helplessly. “Okay.”

We embark from this house. I learn that the destination of this quest is Tim Horton’s. This is a relief to me, as coffee and a donut sounds really fucking good right now. Somehow, the route to Tim Horton’s takes us past the Governor-General’s residence, which everyone else in the group loudly heckles on the way past. I do not know what the Governor-General has done to raise their ire, nor do I particularly care. I trudge along with my hands in my pockets, pleased to note that I still have my wallet, phone, and keys. I fervently wish that I could remember anything about last night. Maybe I talked to grunge girl. Maybe she’s why my mouth tastes like cigarettes. The tulip tasted nothing like cigarettes.

I am asked about my politics. I voice my frustrations with corporate corruption, the pay-to-win electoral system, the lack of transparency and accountability. This is met with great approval. The guy who was yelling at me claps me on the back. I get the impression that we became friends last night. I don’t recognize his face. I do not know his name and he definitely does not know mine. I behave as though we’re friends anyway. We are comrades on a quest.

By the time we make it to Tim Hortons, the gaggle of stoners I’m walking with have all run out of energy and/or attention span. People order snacks and break away in pairs or solo, to call for rides or plan the day’s events or just vegetate and wait for the drugs to leave their systems. I look around and find that my nameless friend has also gone to the Upside-Down. As I wash the cigarette taste out of my mouth with coffee, I unsuccessfully try to remember whether I saw grunge girl smoking tobacco at any point. I remember nothing. That tulip was so fucking powerful that it instantly sent me a whole day forward in time.

Alone in the city, I try to call my best friend and get no answer. I walk to the nearest bus stop, catch a bus most of the way home, and call up my parents to ask for a ride back. They ask where my friend is. I tell them that I have no idea; we went to a house party and I don’t remember anything else.

When they pick me up from the bus station, they ask me some very safe, nonspecific questions, and seem to relax when I describe what little I can remember. It isn’t until years later that I realize they were probably terrified I’d gotten rufied or something, and were so relieved to learn otherwise that they didn’t even bother chiding me for smoking myself unconscious in an effort to impress a strange woman. In any case, they were probably happy to find out that I did, in fact, like girls; I suspect they had been privately wondering whether I was gay.

After getting home, I finally manage to get my best friend to answer his phone. I discover that he tried the kitchen pills, spent most of the night crossing the entire city on foot, and crashed at his cousin’s house. He sounds like shit. I tell him that he should have tried the tulip, instead. He fervently agrees with me.

I never see grunge girl again.

That’s okay, though. She got to see a clueless stranger get fucked the entire way up on some ungodly strain of giga-weed, and I got smiled at by a cute girl, and then I got to go on a quest. Wherever grunge girl is, I hope she’s happy. I hope she’s smoking the fattest fucking blunt and smiling as some kid passes out behind a couch.

[supercantaloupe]

okay yeah actually, i’ll bite. i’ve got some of my own thoughts about the unsleeping city and cultural representation and i’m gonna make a post about them now, i guess. i’ll put it under a cut though because this post is gonna be long.

i wanna start by saying i love dimension 20 and i really really enjoy the unsleeping city. i look forward to watching new episodes every week, and getting hooked on d20 as a whole last summer really helped pull me out of a pandemic depression, and i’m grateful to have this cool show to be excited about and interested in and to have met so many cool people to talk about it with.

that being said, however, i think there is a risk run in representing any group of people/their culture when you have the kind of setting that tuc has. by which i mean, tuc is set in a real world with real people and real human cultures in it. unlike fantasy high or a crown of candy where everything is made up (even if rooted in real-world cultures), tuc is explicitly rooted in reality, and all of its diversity -- both the ups and downs that go with it. and especially set in new york of all places, one of the most densely, diversely populated cities on earth. the cast is 7 people; it’s great that those 7 people come from a variety of backgrounds and identities and all bring their own unique perspectives to the table, and it’s great that those people and the entire crew are generally conscious of themselves and desire to tell stories/represent perspectives ethically. but you simply cannot authentically represent every culture or every perspective in the world (or even just in a city) when your cast is 7 people. it’s an impossible task. this is inherent to the setting, and acknowledged by the cast, and by brennan especially, who has been on record saying how one of the exciting aspects of doing a campaign set in nyc is its diversity, the fact that no two new yorkers have the same perspective of new york. i think that’s a good thing -- but it does have its challenges too, clearly.

i’m not going to go into detail on the question of whether or not tuc’s presentation of asian and asian american culture is appropriative/offensive or not. first of all, i don’t feel like it’s 100% fair to judge the show completely yet, since it’s a prerecorded season and currently airing midseason, so i don’t yet know how things wrap up. secondly, i’m not asian or asian american. i can have my own opinions on that content in the show, but i think it’s worth more to hear actual asian and asian american voices on this specific aspect of the show. having an asian american cast member doesn’t automatically absolve the show of any criticisms with regard to asian american cultural representation/appropriation, whether those criticisms are made by dozens of viewers or only a handful of them. regardless, i don’t think it’s my place as someone who is not asian to speak with any authority on that issue, and i know for a fact that there are asian american viewers sharing their own opinions. their thoughts in this instance hold more water than mine, i think.

what i will comment on in more depth, though, is a personal frustration with tuc. i’m jewish; i’ve never really been shy about that fact on my page here. i’m not from new york, but i visit a few times a year (or i did before covid anyway, lol), and i have some family from nyc. nyc, to me, is a jewish city. and for good reason, since it’s home to one of the largest jewish populations of the country, and even the world, and aspects of jewish culture (including culinary, like bagels and pastrami, and linguistic, like the common use of yiddish words and phrases in english colloquial speech) are prevalent and celebrated among jews and goyim alike. when i think of nyc, i think of a jewish city; that’s not everybody’s new york, but that’s my new york, and thats plenty of other people’s new york too. so i do find myself slightly disappointed or frustrated in tuc for its, in my opinion, rather stark lack of jewish representation.

now, i’m not saying that one of the PCs should have been jewish, full stop. i love to headcanon iga as jewish even though canon does not support that interpretation, and i’m fine with that. she’s not my character. it’s possible that simply no one thought of playing a jewish character, i dunno. but also, and i can’t be sure about this, i’m willing to bet that none of the players really wanted to play a jewish character because they didn’t want to play a character of a marginalized culture they dont belong to in the interest of avoiding stereotyping or offensive representation/cultural appropriation. (i don’t know if any of the cast members are jewish, but i’m assuming not.) and the concern there is certainly appreciated; there’s not a ton of mainstream jewish rep out there, and often what we get is either “unlikeable overly conservative hassidic jew” or “jokes about their bar mitzvah/one-off joke about hanukkah and then their jewishness is never mentioned ever again,” which sucks. it would be really cool to see some more good casual jewish rep in a well-rounded, three-dimensional character in the main cast of a show! even if there are a couple of stumbles along the way -- nobody is perfect and no two jews have the same level of knowledge, dedication, and adherence to their culture.

but at the same time, i look at characters like iga and i really do long for a jewish character to be there. siobhan isn’t polish, yet she’s playing a characters whose identity as a polish immigrant to new york is very central to her story and arc. and part of me wonders why we can’t have the same for a jewish character. if not a PC, then why not an NPC? again, i’m jewish, and i am not native, but in my opinion i think the inclusion of jj is wonderful -- i think there are even fewer native main characters in mainstream media than there are jewish ones, and it’s great to see a native character who is both in touch with their culture as well as not being defined solely by their native-ness. to what extent does it count as ‘appropriative’ because brennan is a white dude? i dunno, but i’m like 99% sure they talked to sensitivity consultants to make sure the representation was as ethical as they could get it, and anyway, i can’t personally see and glaring missteps so far. but again, i’m not native, and if there are native viewers with their own opinions on jj, i’d be really interested in hearing them.

but getting back to the relative lack of jewish representation. it just...disappoints me that jewishness in new york is hardly ever even really mentioned? again, i know we’re only just over halfway through season 2, but also, we had a whole first season too. and it’s definitely not all bad. for example: willy! gd, i love willy so much. him being a golem of williamsburg makes me really really happy -- a jewish mythological creature animated from clay/mud (in this case bricks) to protect a jewish community (like that of williamsburg, a center for many of nyc’s jews) from threat. golem have so often been taken out of their original context and turned into evil monsters in fantasy settings, especially including dnd. (even within other seasons of d20! crush in fh being referred to as a “pavement golem” always rubbed me the wrong way, and i had hoped they’d learned better after tuc but in acoc they refer to another monster as a “corn golem” which just disappointed me all over again.) so the fact that tuc gets golems right makes my jewish heart very happy.

and yet...he doesn’t show up that much? sure, in s1, he’s very helpful when he does, but in s2 so far he shows up once and really does not say or do much of anything. he speaks with a lot more yiddish-influenced language than other characters, but if you didn’t know those words were specifically yiddish/jewish, you might not be able to otherwise clock the fact that willy is jewish. and while willy is a jewish mythological creature who is jewish in canon, he isn’t human. there are no other direct references to judaism, jewish characters, or jewish culture in the unsleeping city beyond him.

there are, in fact, two other canon jewish characters in tuc. but...here’s where i feel the most frustration, i think. the two canon jewish humans in tuc are stephen sondheim and robert moses. both of whom are real actual people, so it’s not like we can just pick and choose what their cultural backgrounds are. as much as i love stephen sondheim, i think there are inherent issues with including real world people as characters in a fictional setting, especially if they are from living/recent memory (sondheim is literally still alive), but anyway, sondheim and moses are both actual jewish people. from watching tuc alone you probably would not be able to guess that sondheim is jewish -- nothing from his character except name suggests it, and i wouldn’t even fault you for not thinking ‘sondheim’ is a jewish-sounding surname (and i dislike the idea/attitude/belief that you can tell who is or isn’t jewish by the sound of their name). and yeah, i’m not going to sit here and be like “brennan should have made sondheim more visibly jewish in canon!” because, like, he’s a real human being and it’s fucking weird to portray him in a way that isn’t as close to how he publicly presents himself, which is not in fact very identifiably jewish? i don’t know, this is what i mean by it’s inherently weird and arguably problematic to portray real living people as characters in a fictional setting, but i digress. sondheim’s jewish, even if you wouldn’t know it; not exactly a representation win.

and then there’s bob moses. you might be able to guess that he’s jewish from canon, actually. there’s the name, of course. but more insidious to me are the specifics of his villainy. greedy and powerhungry, a moneyman, a lich whose power is stored in a phylactery...it does kind of all add up to a Yikes from me. (in the stock market fight there’s a one-off line asking if he has green skin; it’s never really directly acknowledged or answered, but it made me really uncomfortable to hear at first and it’s stuck with me since viewing for the first time.) the issue for me here is that the most obviously jewish human character is the season’s bbeg, and his villainy is rooted in very antisemitic tropes and stereotypes.

i know this isn’t all brennan’s fault -- robert moses was a real ass person and he was in fact jewish, a powerhungry and greedy moneyman, a big giant racist asshole, etc. i’m not saying that jewish characters can’t be evil, and i’m not saying brennan should have tried to be like “this is my NPC robert christian he’s just like bob moses but instead he’s a goy so it’s okay” because...that would be fuckin weird bro. and bob moses was a real person who was jewish and really did do some heinous shit with his municipal power. i’m not necessarily saying brennan should have picked/created a different character to be the villain. i’m not even saying that he shouldn’t have made bob moses a lich (although, again, it doesn’t 100% sit right with me). but my point here is that bob moses is one of a grand total of three canon jewish characters in tuc, of which only two humans, of whom he is the one you’d most easily guess would be jewish and is the most influenced by antisemitic stereotypes/tropes. had there been more jewish representation in the show at all, even just some neutral jewish NPCs, this would not be as much of a problem as it is to me. but halfway through season 2, so far, this is literally all we get. and that bums me out.

listen, i really like tuc. i love d20. but the fact that it is set in a real world place with real world people does inherently raise challenges when it comes to ethical cultural representation. especially when the medium of the show is a game whose creatures, lore, and mechanics have been historically rooted in some questionable racial/cultural views. and dnd is making progress to correct some of those misguided views of older sourcebooks by updating them to more equitably reflect real world racial/cultural sensitivities; that’s a good thing! but these seasons, of course, were recorded before that. the game itself has some questionable cultural stuff baked into it, and that is (almost necessarily) going to be brought to the table in a campaign set in a real-world place filled with real-world people of diverse real-world cultures. the cast can have sensitivity consultants and empathy and the best intentions in the world, and they’ll still fuck up from time to time, that’s okay. your mileage may vary on whether or not it’s still worth sticking around with the show (or the fandom) through that. for me, it does not yet outweigh all the things i like about the show, and i’m gonna continue watching it. but it’s still very worth acknowledging that the cast is 7 people who cannot possibly hope to authentically or gracefully represent every culture in nyc. it’s an unfortunate limitation of the medium. yet it’s also still worthwhile to acknowledge and discuss the cultural representation as it is in the show -- both the goods and the bads, the ethically solid and the questionably appropriative -- and even to hold the creators accountable. (decently, though. i’m definitely not advocating anybody cyberbully brennan on twitter or whatever.) the show and its representation is far from perfect, but i also don’t think it ever could be. still, though, it could always be better, and there’s a worthwhile discussion to be had in the wheres, hows, and whys of that.

[panharmonium]

you know what?

no.  absolutely not.

i already did part 1 of this post here.  i’m back again with part 2, because unfortunately the awfulness factor doesn’t stop with arthur, and as much as i adore hunith generally, this entire sequence is a MESS.

and yes, i am aware that pretty much nobody else thinks so.  every time i see this scene referenced in fandom, it is always framed as a fun, cutesy, sing-songy moment of “oooo, hunith ships merthur!”  literally every time.  

which, you know, like i always say about everything fandom-related - that’s fine.  everybody is going to enjoy things differently; you do you, and keep on having fun!  but here on my own blog, in my own space, i am gonna do me, and in this case ‘me’ involves yelling about how much i can’t stand that particular read, and how angry the end of 1.10 makes me.

disclaimer, to help folks curate their own fandom experiences: i am going to be Very Cranky for the rest of this post.  if you love this particular scene in the way i just mentioned, you will probably want to scroll on by, because this piece of meta most likely won’t be your jam.  as always, these are my personal thoughts and nobody is obligated to share them, so please do not hesitate to simply skip this post if we are on different wavelengths - instead, keep enjoying fandom in whatever way is most fun for you!

fair warning now given, off i go on a long, frustrated tirade.

i already wrote about the first half of this scene, where arthur decides that the appropriate thing to do at this particular moment is to give merlin a scolding about the evils of sorcery, despite the fact that the only reason arthur is even alive to deliver this lecture in the first place is because merlin’s ‘sorcerer’ best friend just DIED saving arthur’s life.  but sure, you know what, let’s use said best friend’s funeral to chastise merlin about how “dangerous” sorcerers are.  let’s just make that completely dickheaded decision.  

and, moving on to the second half of this scene - here’s the thing.  hunith overhears this entire conversation.  she overhears arthur telling merlin off about sorcery, in front of the burning corpse of merlin’s best friend, who is, as far as arthur knows, the ‘sorcerer’ who died saving arthur’s life.  

and yet, for some inexplicable reason, hunith still cannot get off the arthur pendragon train for two damn seconds.  

she has known arthur for less than a week.  by contrast, she has known will for his entire life.  but the instant arthur walks away, hunith sidles up next to merlin and says, “you’d better be going” - like.  okay, my god, can you try to hustle him away from his best friend’s in-progress funeral any faster?????  how about we maybe give him a second?  the pyre hasn’t even burnt down yet, and merlin hasn’t had a single second to himself since this sequence started.  he’s had to stand there and listen to arthur insult the dude who everyone is supposed to be memorializing, and then hunith - who overheard the entire thing - zips right over and tries to chivvy merlin on his way.  you’d better be going.

HELLO?!  the pyre is still roaring.  how about, instead of hassling merlin and hustling him offstage, everybody just sits down and waits for a minute.  how about they all just leave merlin alone for three everloving seconds.  

honestly, just - every time i think about this scene i get angrier.

i love hunith, and i know she’s well-intentioned.  but everything she gives merlin in this scene is the exact opposite of what he needs.  he doesn’t need to be hurried off the village green like there’s some reason he can’t stay there for the entirety of his friend’s funeral.  he doesn’t need to be pushed into going back to camelot when he is clearly struggling with the idea of leaving ealdor again.  and he absolutely does not need to be told how much someone else “needs” him right now, when he himself is the one who is having a fucking crisis and who needs someone to take care of him.

i cannot emphasize that last point enough.  it is just - beyond upsetting to me that hunith literally watches arthur shitting on merlin’s dead best friend (and, by proxy, merlin himself, since merlin is the actual sorcerer) and she still somehow thinks the right thing to do is walk over and start telling merlin how great arthur is and how arthur “needs” him and how merlin “belongs at arthur’s side.”  

i can’t stand that.  it makes me so angry.  it’s not right.  it’s not fair.  it’s damaging.  it’s the same shitty messaging that destroys merlin’s life in later seasons, this idea that he exists for someone else’s sake, the complete disregard for what he himself might want at any given moment, for what he himself might need, for the reservations he might have about this plan that other people have formulated for his life.

he is UNCOMFORTABLE when she says these things to him!  he doesn’t look at her; he shifts his gaze to arthur and the camelot squad with this grim, unconvinced expression on his face, and then he averts his eyes from her.

everything hunith tells merlin in this scene is the exact opposite of what he needs to hear.  he does not need someone to tell him how badly his services are “needed” by a man who hates the person merlin truly is, not when the only friend who ever accepted merlin’s true self has just been killed.  he does not need to be told that arthur, who is alive solely because will is dead and who only seconds ago expressed exactly zero gratitude for that sacrifice, is the person to whom merlin owes his undying loyalty.  he does not need to be shuffled off to camelot as quickly as possible, as if it would be better for him to just rush forward and forget what happened here, as if what happened here didn’t matter.  

because what happened here did matter, whether hunith and arthur find it convenient to acknowledge or not.  i have to lay this out again, because what happened to merlin in ealdor is so much more important than anybody ever seems to realize - and i do understand that, i really do (because yes, it was just one episode for us) - but we have to look at it from merlin’s perspective, not the audience’s.

will wasn’t ‘one episode’ for merlin.  

i can’t say this enough times.  i cannot say this loudly enough.

merlin, at the beginning of this show, has only ever had ONE FRIEND.

most of us can’t even imagine something like that.  

but try.  TRY.  

merlin has only ever had one friend.  he’s only ever had one friend to love him.  he only had one friend for the first two decades of his life.  he’s only been in camelot for a couple of months; he’s only known these camelot people for a couple of months, and they don’t know his real self anyhow.  and now his ONLY FRIEND, the person he’s known all his life, the only friend he ever had who knew him for who he truly was, was just violently cut down before his very eyes, whilst saving a guy who can legally have merlin murdered for just existing.  and even though merlin and will spend the entirety of 1.10 having a painful, complicated argument, will still uses his last moments on earth to tell the biggest fucking whopper of his life, in order to shield merlin from harm, taking all of the danger and infamy and condemnation upon himself.  he dies with a lie on his lips.  he dies with merlin’s hand in his hair.  

and all the while, merlin knows that this would not have happened if he had just been willing to use his magic in the first place, instead of letting his fear of discovery prompt him into allowing his neighbors to offer themselves up for the slaughter in his place.

the avalanching double-whammy of grief and guilt that merlin is suddenly slammed with at the end of this episode is almost incomprehensible in scale.

i’ve talked about this before, but again, i think it’s something we don’t generally remember: losing will is the first time merlin has ever experienced personal bereavement.  and he doesn’t get to start out with a warm-up; he goes straight to the big leagues.  this is not some trifling thing.  this is a total implosion of merlin’s world as he knows it.  

when we think about the mark this episode leaves on merlin’s life, i don’t think most of us consider the magnitude of this event deeply enough.  losing will in this way is not some one-off thing that merlin just...gets over.  this is the most earth-shattering thing that has ever happened to him, at this point in time.  it is still one of the worst things that has ever happened to him, period, even years later.  the guilt never goes away.  

and the thing that’s unique about this particular trauma is that merlin has to manage it alone.  there are other tragedies in his life where we witness him receiving support/comfort from others - freya, lancelot, balinor (though of course there are aspects to these miseries that merlin has to keep secret from other people, as well) - but with will, merlin has to do everything on his own.  he can’t get one single moment of peace at will’s funeral.  his own mother, the only person who knows what really happened, can’t help him without making everything about arthur.  and merlin can’t tell anyone else what happened, not the truth of it, because doing so would squander the gift he’s been given - will’s lie is still protecting him, years later, from arthur and morgana both.  

merlin, at the end of 1.10, is forced to navigate this grief completely alone, in the silent secrecy of his own heart.  arthur is actively making it worse.  hunith is out here singing arthur’s praises.  and will is just like - he’s suddenly not part of the conversation anymore.  he doesn’t even register on anyone’s radar.

it truly is...incredible, for me, to watch hunith overhear arthur being legitimately terrible to both merlin and the guy who just died saving merlin AND arthur’s lives, and then to see her come over and start talking about how merlin belongs at arthur’s side, how much merlin needs to be there for him, how they’re two sides of the same coin.  meanwhile, the guy who literally just lied his life away to protect merlin’s secret and who NEVER made merlin feel like he had to hide who he was and who never had any problem with magic in the first place and never made merlin feel unsafe and never treated merlin like he was less of a human being just for existing -

- he’s just burning to ash there, and hunith doesn’t even acknowledge that, despite the fact that merlin is so visibly, intently, single-mindedly focused on that funeral pyre, and so clearly in distress and in pain and NEEDING somebody.  all she can talk about is merlin’s responsibility to arthur.  

the dissonance here is baffling.  hunith has known will forever.  she met arthur less than a week ago.  she barely knows him, and what she does know is that he thinks magic-users are dangerous/evil.  she saw him being a dick to her kid.  she knows her son is having the worst day of his life.  and she still doesn’t offer a single comforting word in reference to the person who just died protecting merlin’s secret, instead choosing to wax poetic about a man whose bigotry is what merlin needed protecting from in the first place.

that...is a hot mess.  the merlin-hunith-will dynamic is one of the few things in this show that reflects less-than-stellarly on hunith’s character, however much i love her.  and even though it all stems from an overwhelming desire to keep her son safe, it doesn’t make her choices any less damaging.  she sends merlin away specifically because she finds out that will knows about his secret.  she spends 1.10 analyzing and encouraging and dissecting merlin’s relationship with arthur, when merlin’s relationship with will is the one that desperately needs attention.  she’s proven wrong about will’s trustworthiness in the most stunning, powerful way possible, and then she never even acknowledges him, instead choosing to laud the dude who literally forces merlin to live in fear of execution.

she’s merlin’s mother.  she’s the only person in his life who knows anything about what will actually meant to him.  she is his only possible resource as he tries to weather a kind of devastation that defies description.  

and she, like arthur, just barrels right on ahead and makes everything about someone else.

the cinematography choices in this scene matter.  whenever arthur or hunith tries to talk to merlin, the camera is placed on the opposite side of the fire from them, meaning the flames are always in the foreground of the frame.  they are something we are required to see and look past before we can get to anything else in the scene.  and in terms of directorial/acting decisions - merlin doesn’t take his eyes off the pyre until the end of his conversation with hunith.  not once while talking to arthur does he look away from it.

the funeral pyre is always in the foreground of the shot, because it’s in the forefront of merlin’s mind.  that is where his focus is right now.  that is what is taking up all of his attention.  that is what is edging into the frame, eating up our entire field of view.  that is what he needs help with.

but he doesn’t get any such support.  the entire sequence ends up revolving around arthur.  will’s entire funeral is about arthur fucking pendragon.  arthur inserts himself so he can talk to merlin about how evil magic is, and then hunith inserts herself so she can talk to merlin about how great arthur is.  nobody ever stops to think that maybe merlin doesn’t want to talk to anybody right this second.  merlin’s entire ‘farewell’ to the only true friend he ever had in his life is completely swallowed up by the prince of camelot, and if that isn’t a metaphor for the rest of merlin’s life, then i don’t know what is.  

i know nobody needs to hear this, because very few people are invested in this kid at the same level of embarrassing detail as me, but here it is, anyway.  

yes, will is prickly.  he’s hard to get on with.  he’s angry.  he’s bitter and snappy and uncharitable, sometimes.

but you know what?  he has every reason to be like that.  

this kid has nobody.  his own best friend’s mother - who has known him all his life - doesn’t trust him and doesn’t respect him.  she is too afraid for her own son’s safety to give will any credit.  she sends merlin away to camelot, the most violently anti-magic place in the world, because apparently, will knowing about merlin’s secret would be even more dangerous than uther pendragon’s genocidal reign.

think about how that would feel.  to hear something like that about yourself.  to be somebody who is already so goddamn alone in the world, and to have your only friend vanish without so much as a ‘see you later,’ and then to be made to feel, however indirectly, like this is somehow your fault, like you’re the liability, like you’re the untrustworthy element here.  as if you, somehow, are more dangerous than a king who literally pays to have sorcerers trafficked to him in cages.

will has every right to be upset, all the time.  he has every reason to be angry, and bitter, and hurt, all the time.  to be thought so poorly of - to be held in such low esteem - when he hasn’t done anything wrong, when he hasn’t ever done anything to earn that kind of mistrust - and to have that same misplaced suspicion used to justify separating him from the only person in the world who gives a damn about him - if it were me, i would be constantly on the verge of screaming, all the time.

will has always been on merlin’s side, and he has never done anything to endanger him, and in the end he gives up everything to make sure merlin can stay safe and hidden and unhunted.  he shouldn’t have needed to prove his goodness, his constancy, his worth; not when he’s already kept merlin’s secret for who knows how many years, but even after he does do so, it doesn’t even matter.  arthur acknowledges him only to disparage sorcery.  hunith passes him over completely in favor of praising arthur, with no acknowledgment of the misjudgment she made.

i have said before that merlin tends to befriend people who have nobody, people who’ve been left behind by the rest of the world, people who’ve been made to feel that they aren’t worthy of love.  and will, merlin’s oldest friend, was the first of those many characters, and it is so heartbreaking to me that in this instance, the same kind of disinterested and careless attitude towards his worth that dogged him all his life is perpetuated and affirmed after his death.  ‘people are used to ignoring him,’ merlin tells arthur, and merlin is right - even when will is dead and burning, arthur only sees sorcery.  hunith, who we would expect to be more sympathetic, only sees arthur.

merlin is the only one who knows better.  merlin has always known better, and he loves will so much, but he is the only one, apparently, and honestly, after will dies?  nobody else even tries to understand.

to sum up:

hunith and arthur, for all that i love them, are both way out of line at the end of this episode.  

the legacy of this experience, for merlin, is that he spends the rest of his life processing this particular trauma alone.  and that is why i always, always have to keep will and ealdor in the back of my mind when i write for merlin in any capacity - because this event isn’t some simple stumbling block for him; it changes him forever.  it teaches him what he can and can’t expect from the people around him, and it solidifies how irrelevant his own needs are when viewed in comparison with arthur’s, even to people who barely even KNOW arthur; people who are supposed to put merlin first over everything.  it teaches merlin to bury his sorrow, and to wrestle with personal suffering in secret, because if things aren’t ultimately about arthur, then they aren’t important enough to be granted any significant amount of time for merlin to deal with.  merlin’s own grief, even at his best friend’s funeral, takes too long to resolve.  arthur walks away from the pyre, and it’s time for merlin to leave, too.  you’d better be going.

bottom line: i don’t care if other people think this whole ‘ooo, everybody wants merlin to be with arthur’ thing is wonderful or beautiful or dreamily romantic.  it isn’t.  it’s ugly, and it’s cruel, and it stripped merlin of his present identity and his future potential, one stolen moment at a time.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

you seem nice and are being polite so i am going to attempt to return the same energy: there is just no universe in which i think it is the case that the language i used, talking explicitly about myself, on my blog, qualifies as harm that i need to be morally responsible for because someone else saw it and made a series of unwarranted assumptions about me. none whatsoever. this is a principle that i hold deeply, and one i extend to you as well and to anyone reading this and to the person i blocked: everyone on earth is allowed to talk about themselves however they see fit in their own spaces. i believe we all deserve that. i believe in being mindful to some degree when we are speaking in the semi-public space that is a personal blog on the internet, and i am in fact generally quite deliberate about using first-person language, as i did in that post, partly because i know that sloppy generalizations can cause people to take posts personally in ways that can be pretty painful, and although frankly i also think many people could stand to get better at keeping it chill when a 3-line post from someone they don’t know who was probably not expecting it to go viral doesn’t encompass their personal situation, i do generally strive to avoid posting in a manner that might cause such friction. but that’s not what this was. i said “here’s what i’m doing,” and someone said, in effect, “fuck you for telling me what to do.” i simply cannot be held responsible in any way for someone wildly distorting the reality of what i said, and i am under no obligation to make any kind of space for someone whose only interaction with me literally ever is to be rude, obnoxious, and annoying directly at me. because that’s what happened here, to be clear: yelling at me about something i quite literally did not say while seeming to make a million unwarranted assumptions about me (a stranger) is a rude thing to do. it is bad behavior in no way justified by the trauma of seeing a personal post about how a stranger on the internet is thinking about the election. absolutely no one is obligated to put up with that shit. if someone wants to take the high road on the matter, that’s very nice. but that’s a favor. it’s not a requirement. if you’re going to be a dick at people - literally at me, like, if they had screenshotted my post to yell at me on their own blog not in a million years would i have responded even if somehow i found out because they would not be doing it literally to my virtual face - you have forfeited the right to expect anyone to respond to you without matching your energy.

it is so, so, so obnoxious to see a stranger talking about themselves and decide it’s appropriate behavior to get in their face and yell at them that they’re doing emotions wrong. i don’t see this as an understandable overreaction after the thousandth paper cut. i just don’t. i see it as someone behaving without any consideration for the fact that other people have interiority. and i don’t think there’s ever a situation in which we are required to greet that particular form of myopic entitlement with gentleness. there are times where that kind of thing may be at some point met with forgiveness, for, like, a person in my actual life and community, although i’d like to state for the record that my friends are almost exclusively people carrying a fuckload of shit and literally not one of them has ever engaged in this kind of behavior, because it’s actually really easy to not be an asshole on the internet. but i just can’t get behind the idea that any of us owe shit to someone whose literal only interaction with us is ever was making up a guy in their head to get mad at and being a dick to us. i don’t believe it is prosocial or good for everyone to endorse the norm that if someone takes the time to behave badly towards you, a stranger whom they don’t know from adam, the only correct thing to do is shrug it off or accept that actually it’s reasonable of them to have gotten mad at you for something you didn’t do. i believe that thinking that way does nobody any favors. i think it’s bad for everyone.

my other grounding technique is remembering that the earliest abolitionists & the earliest suffragists had no proof that the world would ever make possible what they fought for and indeed many of them did not live to see it come to pass. and yet they did not succumb to despair so it would be disrespectful to their memory to let it overtake me

[babysprouseisart]

It is abnormal to create a filthy dump of needless insults and mockery of human nature

Nowadays, people are more and more forgetting about humanity and simple respect for each other.

This is not surprising, there is always a place and people who fall out of the normality of society, representing nothing more than insignificance.

One of the most rotten places, with the exception of some of its smallest ‘islands’, where a bunch of rats gather and spread various gossip and exclamations, is the long-suspected and identified Twitter.

It would seem for a second, since the personification of Twitter is a blue bird, proudly spreading its wings, that this place is about something bright and great, noble, because this very bird declared in the label, is presumably about to start its beautiful melodious singing, and so will continue from day to day.

However, this is just a stupid deception that draws people into this ugly world, whose personification can only be described as a dump, a large pile of manure with flies around and maggots in it.

And each of us simply has to decide for himself who he wants to be: a gentle and affectionate bird or a dung fly.

After all, it depends on each of us, on our behavior and conversations, posts, and so on, whether this place can become something better, transform itself so that it is going to be pleasant for everyone and the harmony to reign between the inhabitants.

Unfortunately, it is easier for many subjects to take the side of filth and evil than on the side of nobility and good.

It is much easier to pour buckets of dirt into this place, insult others, humiliate them, act low, than to tell compliments, support people, keep all the bile in yourself and direct all the negative energy in the right direction.

And one of these representatives of such garbage is the example below:

I am more than sure, and I'm very concerned about how the Earth is even holding this creature, because it can not be called a person, or even more so a personality, because it lacks any morally significant qualities, has almost completely atrophied.

Just look at how he forms his opinion, how he repeats and literally cracks all over just to judge, be so disgusting and hurt someone, and in this case, his potential victim is an actor, everyone's favorite performer of the role of Jughead Jones  - Cole Sprouse.

That's disgusting, isn't it?

But that lousy worm apparently doesn't think so.

Or maybe there are those who agree with him?

If there are such, then I strongly advise you not to continue, do not torment your eye sockets, unfollow me and go fuck yourself, sit wanking in your dung pit.

And for those who stand in solidarity with me, we continue the court of contempt and shame.

We all know, at least real fans of Cole or just mentally healthy people, how much he had to suffer this summer and spring.

Cancellation trend, death threats, address leaks, heavy breakup, and so on, along with bullying like this, which again spilled out of this stinking place - Twitter.

Maybe it's time to end this?

Maybe it's not okay to insult and humiliate a person who is nothing more than a stranger to you? Maybe it is enough and deciding for others how they would be better off should be over? Perhaps we should not accuse another of imperfection, when nobody is perfect?

Don't say anything, because I know that those who continue to read this are full of common sense and are people, not soulless creatures.

I just want to say and perhaps announce the common opinion that no person, being a representative of the human race, for anything in the world, under any circumstances, does not deserve such a vile insult and equating with an animal or inanimate things. Although even animals in their diversity do not deserve discrimination and disrespect. And each of the living being is destined for something in life.

Speaking of us as representatives of the human kind, we are neither dogs, cats, or elephants or, nor a ball, a glass or something else. We are people and we, by we I mean each of us, where Cole is no exception, regardless of how popular we are, what is the kind and type of our activity and national affiliation, deserve human treatment.

To equate someone with a dog and a breed of dog, to compare parts of the body or organ, such as teeth, with those of a dog, is humiliating and so disgusting that I can only imagine what a person might feel.

This is not normal. This is very different, incomparable, and a person is therefore a person, he differs from animals in all the aspects studied in social science .

People, think about how you would feel in the place of the person whom you insulted? Imagine that your mother, little sister or brother is called obscenely, comparing to a monster or some kind of Chupacabra, that looks not pleasant. It's not funny and even stupid. This is a kind of humiliation of dignity. Downplaying the role of a man and literally equating it with less developed organisms, I'm not saying that they are not developed at all, but in fact, they do not have what has developed in the process of evolution in humans, which is contradictory.

Yes, I understand you may not like this particular man, we all we have different opinions, how many people - so many opinions, but to nuzzle the man in the features of the physique, face shape and other qualities like an animal in the own shit is bad and unhealthy.

It is especially unbearable when a person has a feature, and some people turn it into a disadvantage and shame. Like, what?

As, for example, in the case of Cole. Yes, he has an uneven tooth. So what? God forbid you will never encounter such a problem, but please look at yourself in the mirror or under the microscope and you will definitely find your own features or disadvantages, it doesn’t matter how you call it.

That’s why this is no reason to insult him for what nature has given him.

And he doesn't need to fix it for the sake of scum like these trolls on Twitter, because he's not ashamed of it, it's a feature of him, not a shameful flaw.

He is handsome with this tooth in his own way, different from other people and, by the way, having a charming smile, no matter what. As handsome with his special features as each of us with our uniqueness, objectively. Maybe for some he is more handsome than a certain other, for some - less, whatever, but it still should not cross the line appropriateness.

I sincerely do not understand people who are bullying or making attempts to mock this person, instead of emphasizing the important, beautiful qualities of him as a person.

That is why I appeal to everyone who understands at least a little what I'm talking about, with a request - think and reconsider your life positions.

Do not be a dung beetle that oozes bile out of hatred and envy for another, be the same bird or butterfly that brings respect and respect to another, so that the place, like Twitter, where you live, act, or whatever becomes better and flourishes. Thank you to everyone who read this, and everyone who didn't, because you don't need this, and I hope you will draw your own conclusions. The end.

[sojourner-between-worlds]

Why the Idea of Disabled Jesus is Heretical

(Or, at best, a gross misinterpretation of Scripture. But really, it's heresy.)

@aspiringautistic asked on this post from my side blog: "what would be so harmful if there were people who perceived jesus as disabled?" and I am happy to oblige in expanding on those thoughts (though since the answer has little to do with autism and everything to do with Christianity in general, I thought it more appropriate to answer here on main). In case you hadn't prior seen the linked post and don't feel like clicking through, the short of it is this: the Gospel Coalition recently published an article in which the author, Andrew Abernethy, argued that Jesus was disabled. I'm here to tell you where he went wrong.

Hold on to your hats, folks. This is a long post.

(All Scripture quotations taken from the ESV translation.)

1. Disabilities are a result of the Fall. Before I get into anything else, I need to make this point abundantly clear. While being disabled does not dictate worth and it is not an indication of personal sin, it is still not how we are meant to be. Adam and Eve were created in the likeness of God, and were, therefore, created without sin or any of the things that came with sin. They were perfect -- at least until they disobeyed (Genesis 2-3). Sometimes people ask "if there is a God, why do bad things happen?" and the answer is because we live in a sin-cursed world. Disabilities, illness, and death itself exist because Adam and Eve sinned. (Romans 5:12: "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.")

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2. Old Testament laws regarding sacrifices. The Old Testament Law is very specific when talking about what makes an acceptable sacrifice. There are a lot of different types (everything from bulls to grain), but the relevant ones to this discussion are sacrifices made for the atonement of sins. 

There are two categories of sacrifices made for sin: sin offerings made for unintentional sins, and burnt offerings made for sin in general. Burnt offerings and sin offerings both ranged from bulls to doves (or flour for the latter, if nothing else could be afforded) and sin offerings varied depending on both the person and the sin as well (Leviticus 1, 4-5). But all of the animals sacrificed had two instructions about them in common: that they be "without blemish", and that the sinner must place their hand on the head of the animal. The difference between the two was that a sin offering was required as an act of repentance and a burnt offering was voluntary. In the case of burnt offerings, the requirements for bulls and sheep or goats are laid out very plainly: "a male without blemish" (1:3, 10). 

In addition to all of this, once a year, on the Day of Atonement, one bull and two male goats would be sacrificed for the people to remove their sins (Leviticus 16; only one goat was killed; the other was sent away, symbolizing the removal of sin). Again, these animals had to be without blemish, just as all the others. The person offering the sacrifice was to place their hand on the head of the animal. The action of placing their hand was symbolic: it was a way of showing that the person's sin was being "transferred" to the animal so that the animal could take the person's place and receive the punishment for sin instead. "Without blemish" meant that it couldn't be sickly or diseased or crippled in any way. It had to be as close to perfect as was possible in a sin-cursed world because anything less than perfect had to die for its own imperfections. 

Because these sacrifices could never be truly perfect, they had to be repeated, but all of this was pointing to the time when Jesus would come as the final sacrifice made for the sins of the world.

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3. Jesus as the final sacrifice. If you know anything about the Christian faith, you know that this is at the heart of everything we believe. Without Jesus, there is no gospel. So here's why that matters to this discussion: 

"But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by the means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God" (Hebrews 9:11-14, emphasis mine). 

This passage in Hebrews (as well as verses preceding and following) are all about how Christ made atonement for us with His death, and how His voluntary sacrifice of Himself is superior to the OT sacrifices. 

So allow me to direct your attention to the bolded phrase above: “offered himself without blemish”. If this sounds familiar, it should, since I talked extensively about this in the point above. “Without blemish” in Leviticus meant to be not crippled or disfigured or ill in any way. If this same phrase is also applied to Christ, then the same must be true. If the OT sacrifices were required to be so, why would the same not apply to the Final Sacrifice that ended the need for sacrifices to be made? It wouldn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. Not when the OT sacrifices were pointing towards Jesus; not when we have a God Who created order and purpose. Jesus had to be perfect to take our places -- and that includes being free of deformities that are a result of a sin-cursed world.

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4. Isaiah 53, misinterpreted at best. This was one of Mr Abernethy’s main points, and it’s one he got disastrously wrong by reading what he wanted into Scripture (eisegesis) rather than letting Scripture say what it says (exegesis). See, the thing about interpreting prophecy is that you have to be careful how you do it, and, just like all Scripture, make sure it’s within the proper context. 

In the case of this chapter of Isaiah, the wider context is that it’s a prediction of Jesus’ suffering on earth and His death. One of the verses he tries to pass off about Jesus being ugly or deformed is the second part of verse 3: “and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” The problem is, this verse and one directly after it are not about his physical appearance at all. They are about emotions and grief: “He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteem him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted” (vs. 3-4, emphasis mine). This is about Him bearing our burdens and our rejection of Him anyway. This is a parallel that continues as the chapter moves forward. 

There is only one physical description in this passage that is not related to His death, and it’s the second part of verse 2: “he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.” And this is the only point that Mr Abernethy got correct: Jesus wasn’t the Hollywood definition of drop-dead gorgeous. He looked like your average Joe. In order to not be conventionally beautiful/handsome, that does not dictate that a person must be deformed or “ugly” in any way. The only thing this verse means is that he didn’t stand out from the crowd with His looks. He didn’t look the way they thought their Savior should. That’s it. That’s all it means.

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5. Tradition isn't truth (no matter how much anyone wants it to be). I have to admit, adding in a section about a so-called “tradition” that’s nigh on impossible to find anything about was brilliant. The average person wouldn’t even bother looking in the first place, and most people who would look, would give up after five or ten minutes of searching. I spent an hour and found exactly nothing on this “tradition” of Jesus being a leper. So you just... have to take Abernethy’s word for it. 

Aside from not being able to find anything on it myself, the argument he uses is faulty anyway. Because tradition doesn’t equal truth, in the first place, especially a tradition that didn’t pop up until the 16th century. There’s no basis for something that apparently wasn’t known until 1400 years after His death. 

Aside from that, he calls on Jerome’s Latin translation of Isaiah 53:4 that translates a phrase as “he was like a leper.” First of all, “like a leper” does not mean He actually was a leper. C’mon, man. Any fifth grader in America could tell you that similes are used for comparisons and aren’t literal. 

Second of all, if you’d like to make a point, it’s a much better idea to go back to the Hebrew manuscripts rather than to any one translation. Now, I don’t know Hebrew myself, but I do have access to a little thing called the Internet, where you can find a plethora of commentaries from people who do know Hebrew. For this particular problem, I went to Albert Barne’s Notes on the Whole Bible. I’m not going to put his whole notes here (because there’s a lot), but if you’d like to read all of his notes, you can search the verse on studylight.org and use the ‘jump to’ feature under the verse to find him, but the bottom line of his notes on it are this: Jesus wasn’t literally being rightfully punished like the Jews would incorrectly think; leprosy was used here as an example because it was seen as a divine punishment for sin. It has nothing to do with literal leprosy at all. 

And to top off this cake of incorrectness... well, has he even read the New Testament? If Jesus had had leprosy, He: a. wouldn’t have been allowed in temples or synagogues, b. wouldn’t have been allowed in towns period, and c. wouldn’t have been nailed to a cross because no one would have risked touching Him in order to do so. Abernethy shouldn’t have even brought this up in his argument, it’s so far off base, and no artist in the 16th century should have painted a painting of a leprous Jesus nailed to the cross because, quite simply, it never would have happened.

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6. Jesus relates to us -- but not in the ways Mr Abernethy says. While he never cites any Scripture on this, I’m pretty sure I know where this idea came from. In his article, he states that in order for Jesus to have related to the disabled, He had to be disabled Himself. Since He relates to us, then He must have been disabled. 

First of all, the logical fallacy of this statement is this: if He must be disabled to relate to the disabled, then can the abled still relate to Him? The answer to that, of course, would be no, because if He wasn’t abled then He can’t relate to the abled in the same way that Abernethy asserts that He can’t relate to the disabled without being disabled. It’s one of those things where you can’t have it both ways. Another example of how this logic falls short is pregnancy. Can Jesus not relate to pregnant people because He Himself was never in such a state? And the rabbit hole just gets deeper from there: Can He relate specifically to the blind when He was never blind? How about the deaf or hard of hearing? Or people missing limbs, either from birth or through amputation? All disabilities are different, and experiencing one doesn’t mean you understand them all, so by Abernethy’s logic, Jesus had to experience all of them. Do you see how ridiculous Abernethy’s logic here is yet? 

Second of all, Abernethy is, once again, taking Scripture entirely out of context -- if, indeed, he got this idea from Scripture at all. Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” The problem with trying to use this verse as proof is, obviously, that it’s talking about temptations (Matthew 4:1-11), not lived experiences. If he was, again, referencing Isaiah 53 -- well, that doesn’t work either, because, again, that is in reference to His death and the sins He bore for us on the cross. The fact of the matter is, there are no Scriptures to back up the idea that He had to personally experience everything we do in order for Him to understand our pain and suffering. 

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The source of this heresy is the same as many heresies, actually: People want to make Jesus into something He's not. I listened to a podcast recently where the host was talking about a couple of heretics, and while I don't remember the heretic's name, he said that to him, Jesus was Latinx because he himself is Latinx. Except that, ya know, Jesus was a Middle-Eastern Jew. It's the same fallacy to say that Jesus was disabled. Everyone wants Jesus -- and God, for that matter -- to be something He's not, rather than for Him to be what Scripture tells us He is, but you can't force God into the box you've carved for Him. He is who He is, no matter how much you want Him to be something different.

There's no getting around it: to make Him out to be anything other than what Scripture tells us He is -- especially when it contradicts Scripture, is heresy.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #395

“suicide? i’ve already died  /  it’s just the funeral i’ve been waiting for”

Have you ever met a famous political figure? No. Have you slept for longer than usual today? Ugh, no. I officially have my APAP mask for my sleep apnea, and I chose the one that covers my nose and mouth considering it varies which I breathe from when I sleep depending on congestion. It is very hard to get used to. When is the last time that you experienced rejection–literal or imagined? Hm. Is there an artist or celebrity whom you admire for their craft but take issue with their personality or politics? Yeah, such as Marilyn Manson. He's a pretty gross person but by god do I love his music. What’s the last thing you made out of clay? An anatomically correct heart. Do you like bacon bits on your salad? Yes. What do you do to celebrate Earth Day? Nothing. :/ I wish I could think of something to do for it. Have you ever had someone try to intentionally bully you to suicide? Bro what the actual fuck. No. Who are your favorite kids that you’ve babysat? My nephew Ryder. Would you feel funny if you kissed somebody of the same sex? I've kissed a girl and it felt pretty great, so. Name three things in your room that others probably don’t have in theirs: 1.) a snake; 2.) a huge meerkat collection; and 3.) an APAP machine. Besides furniture, what’s the biggest thing in your bedroom? My snake, I think. Describe your feet: Ugh, the worst. My feet are horribly callused from when I used to walk all the time. I have small toes. What’s a pretty bird? Peacocks. Besides sleeping, what do you do in bed? Just about everything. .-. How do you like your hoodies? Loose/oversized. Can grills be sexy on a guy? They're hideous, if you want my honest opinion. Have you ever been in a Catholic confessional? Yes. How fucked up are those, honestly... I really hate the concept of teaching children that they have to tell some random guy things they feel bad about and let him ask God to forgive you or else you're going to Hell. What color was the hair of the last person you kissed? Brown. Can you do a backflip? No. Where are the last three places you went? The TMS office, a gas station, and my sister's house. Do you consider yourself a flirt? No. How old is the oldest person you’ve dated? I actually don't know, but at least close to 30 now for sure. I just know we were both in high school, but he failed I think two years. What’s something that makes you feel more creative? Music. Who has the best personality on YouTube? Guess who, lmao. Which YouTuber seems uber-confident? Mark is a very confident person. I envy 'im for that. What is the funniest YouTube video you have ever seen? I watch YouTube like... constantly, so I've seen thousands upon thousands by now. I really don't know. Have you ever been inside a Victorian mansion? No, but that's like a dream marriage venue for me. What was the most boring field trip you ever want on? I don't think I ever had a boring one. Man, I miss those. Do you enjoy watching videos of babies being born? NO FUCKING THANK YOU. Does ANYBODY? Are you a hoarder? No. If you were rich, what things would you get done cosmetically? I would say liposuction, but I honestly want to lose the weight myself. If/when I lose the weight I want to, I am 110% getting loose skin removal at LEAST on my stomach because I feel hideous with it. Also if I achieve my weight loss goals, I want to get a breast lift. Weight loss-related things aside, I'm pretty serious about getting laser hair removal on my legs because I HATE shaving and my legs are VERY hairy, and the hair is dark, so I'm extremely self-conscious about it. Are you the type of person who asks a lot of questions? It depends on who I'm asking. With some people, I'm afraid to look stupid if I ask too many. How many states have you visited in your lifetime? If you're excluding the ones I've merely driven through as well as lived in (which is only one), I've visited Ohio, New York, Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, and Illinois, so six. I MAY have been to Michigan as a baby, but I don't remember. What is your biggest fear for the future? Ending up homeless after Mom passes. I'm scared my family will give up on me, which is completely unrealistic, but I'm terrified of living on the streets. Do you like seafood, or not so much? I only like shrimp. Have you ever cried from being so nervous? Oh, certainly. What is your favorite book series, if you have one? Hm... of all series I've ever read, probably the Shiloh trilogy. I adored the books and the movies. Have you ever had a parasite before? NO NO NO NO NO, DON'T MAKE ME IMAGINE THIS. I am PETRIFIED of parasites. Do you have a big heart when it comes to animals? Absolutely! Have you ever put your pets in a kennel for a while? I actually don't remember? It's possible when we've gone on an extended vacation, but I'm unsure. Whenever we've gone somewhere, friends have normally taken care of our animals. Where is your favorite place to buy clothing? Hot Topic or Rebel's Market. Do you enjoy listening to older music? I love classic rock and metal. What do you think is the most stupid song out there right now? "WAP" for fucking sure. I haven't even heard the whole thing, and I don't EVER want to. As a child, did you ever want to become a mermaid? Nah. Ariel was my favorite princess, but I wasn't obsessed with mermaids or anything. Can you compose sentences in any other language than your own? Some German, yes. Mainly just the basics. Have you ever met someone who was really racist before? Yes, many. -_- Do you have any celebrity autographs? No. If you could be a Disney character for a day, who would you be? Maybe Kiara from TLK. What is your favorite color of clothing to wear? Black. Did you ever build furniture forts as a child? Oh yeah, lots of times! I sometimes even pretended they were burrows and I was a meerkat, ha ha. What kind of dog is your favorite? I have a beagle bias. Do you prefer water or land? Land. Have you ever had a seizure? No. Do you plan on losing weight any time soon? Hunny, I've been trying to since 2016. -_- I lost like 70-ish pounds through 2017-2018, but recently I've gained almost like... all the weight back and it is upsetting beyond words. Have you ever been in a heated pool? Uh, a hot tub? Yes. Are you looking forward to anything? Getting Venus' terrarium, finishing TMS so I can maybe get a job, visiting Sara again... What was your GPA in high school? Over 4.0. Do you require a lot of private time? OH yes. What do you plan on doing with the rest of your life? I hope achieving a sense of accomplishment and becoming content with my hopeful career, marrying a fantastic partner, and having a family of lovely pets. If you have a favorite television show, who’s your favorite character? I'll go through the very few I deeply enjoy: 1.) Mozart in Meerkat Manor; 2.) probably Hyde from That '70s Show; 3.) perhaps Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist; 4.) Jerome from Ginga Densetsu Weed; and 5.) Shiro from Deadman Wonderland. Did you use to watch Blue's Clues? OH yes. I loved that show as a kid. Do you stutter when you get nervous? BADLY. Your lunch consisted of...? What DID I have... uhhh OH leftover pizza. What is your favorite kind of chips? Hot, crunchy Cheetos. What is the best way to tell someone that they stink? I wouldn't. Do you have any embarrassing usernames? Some from the past, yeah. Do you have a backpack in a shape of an animal? No. I found a meerkat one once, but it was way too small for me to use in school. :( I was so disappointed. Have you ever waxed your legs? No. I've waxed my upper lip and eyebrows, but especially with how long and thick my leg hair is, I think waxing there would be excruciating, so no thanks. Do you own any shirts with a peace symbol on it? No, but I would if it had a cool design. Have you ever taught a little kid to flick people off? No, and I wouldn't. Children generally don't have a strong enough grasp on when profanity is appropriate and not. Have you ever itched yourself until your skin was raw? This is VERY common. Like right now, my right arm is the Sahara with how dry and raw it is. Do you always clear your history after using the computer? Nah, got no reason to. Have you ever eaten a Big Mac? No, because I know I wouldn't like it; I don't like lettuce on my burgers. Do you feel like you’re judged for your looks? For my weight, yes. Name one world issue that upsets you. Just one? Poverty is high on the list. Just... no one should have to live like that. Do you like Wendy’s frosties? After they thaw a little bit, oh yeah. It's physically impossible to drink them for a good few minutes because they're so damn thick.

[elyvorg]

Kaito Momota: Even Better In English

Here’s a noteworthy topic involving Kaito that I’ve never really talked about before on here, not even in my ridiculously lengthy commentary of the entirety of V3: his localisation differences from the original Japanese. Specifically, the fact that he’s a better-written character in the English localisation. Only very slightly, but in a way that I’m pretty sure was done deliberately by his localiser. And it’s not even that he’s different, as in the localiser having made up something entirely new about him that didn’t exist in the original – it’s just that they took what was already there in his character and tightened things up just a little to make it come across more clearly and make more sense. Admittedly I’m still pretty new to my interest in original/localisation differences in media, so I don’t have a huge host of examples to draw from, but this is something I imagine doesn’t happen very often at all.

(Disclaimer: I am not fluent in Japanese and have therefore not played through the entire game in its original Japanese form. I just have enough grasp of the language to be able to more or less understand things with the help of a dictionary, and I’ve used this to check out the Japanese versions of various bits I was interested in, which, because it’s me, included a lot of Kaito. So my knowledge of this is definitely incomplete – if I’m wrong or missing something big, do let me know! Regardless, I still think the parts I do know about are interesting enough to be worth discussing.)

Maybe let’s not have him sound like an asshole?

The first and most general thing of note is that, in Japanese, Kaito’s speech pattern is really rough and rude-sounding. Like, delinquent-street-thug, almost-makes-Mondo-sound-polite levels of rude. Granted, I’m not an expert in this as I’m not fluent, but one thing that does stand out to me as significantly worse than your average rough-teenage-male-Japanese is the word Kaito consistently uses for “you”.

Most characters with this sort of speech pattern use omae, or perhaps omee, a more slurred equivalent of it, which comes across as kind of impolite, but only in a sense that the speaker is an informal and impolite person in general, not that they’re trying to be specifically rude towards the person they’re using it for, which is usually just everyone. But rather than omae, Kaito almost always uses an even ruder variant, temee, which in my (admittedly limited) experience is only ever used when you’re actively trying to insult the person you’re using it on. It can be pretty reasonably translated as not just “you”, but more like “you jerk” or “you bastard”. And Kaito uses this for everyone. Even Shuichi and Maki, his best friends whom he literally dies for.

It’s really bizarre. Rough speech full of contractions and slurring alone would probably be fine in that it wouldn’t change how Kaito appears to treat others. But the fact that he chooses to address everybody else this way makes it come across like Kaito is an arrogant, hostile asshole who doesn’t care about anyone except himself and sees others as beneath him, which could not be further from who he is, what the actual hell.

English doesn’t have such a wide variety of speech patterns and ways to address people as Japanese, such that it’s not quite possible to translate this kind of thing directly. But what English does have that Japanese doesn’t is a much greater variety of swear-word intensities, so one way that localisation often gets across this kind of nuance in speech patterns is by making characters use an appropriate amount of swear words to match the original level of roughness. If Kaito had been localised completely faithfully, his speech would sound a lot like someone such as Mondo or Miu, full of F-bombs and other high-intensity swear words, which would give him a much more unnecessarily hostile tone. (And while Mondo is actually a decent person who cares about others in spite of the way he talks, him sounding hostile on the surface is part of the point with him, whereas it really shouldn’t be for Kaito.)

So, happily, the localiser decided not to faithfully localise Kaito’s speech pattern, because they evidently realised it was unnecessarily hindering the way he comes across in terms of the kind of person he is. As it is, Kaito’s English speech is still very casual, but his coarse language only extends to the level of lots of “damn”s and “hell”s and only a few very choice instances of “bastard” towards Monokuma, with almost nothing stronger than that. He’s still not exactly polite at all, but, unlike in Japanese, it also doesn’t sound like he’s actively trying to be rude. Which is only appropriate, considering that one of the most important things about Kaito as a person is how much he cares and is always trying to help the people around him and encourage co-operation, and that he values communication as something that’ll let him do that. Being unnecessarily rude isn’t going to help, and you’d think he should understand that!

It must be a really odd experience for someone fluent in Japanese to play through the original version of the game and have to slowly come to the realisation that Kaito’s a hell of a lot nicer than he sounds based on how he talks. Turns out actually all the “you bastard”-ing is just a weird quirk of his speech that somehow doesn’t even remotely mean he doesn’t care about the people he’s referring to like that. I also can’t help but worry that a lot of Japanese players might therefore never actually realise just how good of a person Kaito is because of this. (Which, geez, there’s already enough of a problem in English of people somehow not managing to pick up on how one of Kaito’s most defining character traits is his selflessness and desire to help everyone, and that’s with his improved speech pattern. Imagine that but worse.)

…There is one possible reason I can see for why Kaito’s Japanese speech pattern is so at odds with the kind of person he is. It could be that this is meant to be a remnant of pregame Kaito, who was an asshole who really didn’t give a fuck about anybody except himself and whom I can definitely imagine casually referring to literally everyone with temee. It seems that the Flashback Lights that created everyone’s characters somehow weren’t quite able to alter their original speech patterns, despite rewriting everything else about them to the point that, for all meaningful intents and purposes, they’re completely different people and their original selves are effectively dead. So our Ultimate Astronaut Kaito just casually accepts his speech pattern as normal for him without having ever consciously questioned why on earth he calls everyone, even his closest friends, “you bastard”.

But while I can appreciate that being there as a hint to the twist, if that is indeed the reason it’s a thing, I still think it’s a lot more worthwhile to make sure that Kaito doesn’t implicitly come across as a hostile asshole every time he opens his mouth. So I still think the localiser made a good call to change this.

Luminary of the Stars! and its less-shiny (but louder) equivalent

Let’s move on to some more specific words and phrases unique to Kaito’s character. His most iconic catchphrase, even more so than the impossible being possible, is him calling himself the Luminary of the Stars. So what was this in Japanese? Something equally impressive-sounding, right? Well… only kind of. In Japanese, he calls himself “uchuu ni todoroku Momota Kaito”. Uchuu ni todoroku literally means “to be famous in space”, so to translate that as directly as possible while having it sound right in English, I’d probably go for something like “the universe-famous Kaito Momota”.

The first thing about this is that, while it seems to fit Kaito at a glance, I’m really not sure he actually cares that much about being famous. Sure, ideally he’d like loads of people to know about him, but I don’t think that’s quite the point for him. It’s less that he wants a lot of people to superficially know who he is and more that he wants to have an influence on people and to have inspired them and changed them in some way. I really believe he would much rather have a meaningful influence on just a small handful of people than to be only superficially known by thousands or millions without any of them really caring. So “famous” isn’t quite the right word for what Kaito really wants to be.

(Hmm, though it seems I’m overlooking a double meaning in that todoroku can also mean “to roar/reverberate”, which I guess gives it a bit more of a sense of him having an impact than it would in English, even though that meaning would sound kind of odd on its own. (The French localisation of his title apparently went entirely with this meaning and translated it as something to the effect of “Kaito Momota, the roar from space!”, which… I’m kind of losing my mind trying to picture Kaito actually doing that.))

The other issue with the Japanese title, though, is that it’s just provably not true. As a mere astronaut trainee, Kaito isn’t even world-famous yet, much as he might (potentially?) like to be. And even if he was, the only way in which that would equate to him being universe-famous is if aliens don’t exist at all and so the Earth is the only part of the universe in which being famous mattered. Otherwise, if aliens do exist (and Kaito very much hopes they do!), they have undeniably not heard of him, so he isn’t famous throughout space at all. He never will be; no matter how many space missions he might go on in his future, a human lifetime just isn’t long enough to actually meet, well, probably any of the aliens that are out there, but even more definitely not all of them.

So Kaito making a repeated point of calling himself “universe-famous” in Japanese just kind of comes across like… empty boasting. Which is not remotely how Kaito actually is – yes, he talks big about his intentions, but he always wants to follow up his words and is genuinely trying to do so even if he can’t always quite manage to live up to them as much as he’d like to. By that token, he shouldn’t want to make grand claims that he knows are already completely impossible for him to ever live up to. And, sure, he always says the impossible is possible – but the thing about that catchphrase is that he’s never actually talking about things that are literally impossible, just things that might seem impossible, in order to inspire people to believe they’re not and that they can make it happen if they try.

Kaito calling himself something that he knows full well is literally never possible for him to actually be only really works as a fiction that he’s putting on: something he knows isn’t true and everyone else knows isn’t true, but maybe they’ll choose to buy into it and pretend it’s true anyway because it’s fun and maybe a little inspiring just to imagine it. It’s similar to the ridiculous stories of his childhood “adventures” he told in his FTEs that were very obviously just make-believe even though he acted like they were real – and it’s also kind of like how Himiko insistently calls herself a mage. And, well, I suppose that works well enough for Kaito’s character in and of itself.

It would have totally been an option to just directly translate this as “universe-famous” and leave things at that. That sounds perfectly fine in English, after all, and it’s less silly than the French take on it. But Kaito’s localiser apparently decided that, no, they could do better by Kaito than that. They could do much better.

“Luminary” can mean, as far as I’m aware, three different things. One is some kind of esteemed, respected figure in an academic field. So that’s sort of a match to the “famous” part, but that’s definitely the least relevant meaning here. The second and far more important meaning of “luminary” is someone who inspires and influences others. That’s exactly what Kaito is, so much, to Shuichi and Maki and even to everyone else! That’s what he cares the most about being to people – far more than he cares about being superficially “famous”. And then the third meaning is “an object which emits light”, usually specifically in terms of celestial bodies like the sun or stars. Which isn’t literally what Kaito is, but isn’t that just wonderfully fitting with his space theme and the “of the Stars” part of his title? (And it also means that any metaphors about him being “bright” or “shining” or something to that effect are especially appropriate.)

In the localisation, then, while it may sound like an overblown ridiculous fiction, Kaito’s self-proclaimed title of Luminary of the Stars is actually completely true and accurate. Nobody can deny that he’s someone who inspires and influences others! And while the “of the stars” part could be taken as an untrue exaggeration that he’s also a luminary to aliens all across the cosmos, it doesn’t have to mean that. It can simply mean that he’s associated with the stars in some way, which he is, since he’s an astronaut. If Kaito wants to call himself the Luminary of the Stars, why the hell shouldn’t he? It’s not wrong.

So I love that Kaito’s “title” was changed to this in the localisation, not only because I like being able to use the word “luminary” as a neat shorthand for the way he inspires people, or because I like to use light-based metaphors about him being inspiring like that, but also because I love how it’s more than just a fiction, even if it may seem like one at first glance. Kaito calls himself the Luminary of the Stars not just as an idealised image of him that other people can maybe buy into and be inspired by, but also as something that he’s actually trying to be. Because he wants it to be true. Because he’s trying to make it true. And because, in the end, it is more true about him than Kaito himself really believes it to be deep down.

[Edit: turns out that maybe actually the “roaring” meaning I briefly mentioned above is in fact the primary meaning a Japanese-speaker would be getting from Kaito’s original title, and with that in mind I wrote some extra thoughts about this.]

There wasn’t anything better to call you, bro

There is one notable part of how Kaito is localised that worked better and was more nuanced in the original Japanese, namely the part where Kaito begins to call Shuichi “bro” sometimes once they’ve started training together. In Japanese, while everyone usually addresses each other by their surnames since that’s normal for Japanese high school peers even if they’re pretty good friends, this part is instead Kaito beginning to call Shuichi by his given name with no honorifics, which is a sign of extremely close friendship. It’s a lot more of a big deal and a meaningful gesture than simply the English “bro”.

However, losing that nuance isn’t the localiser’s fault, because the connotations of the names and honorifics people use for each other are completely different between English and Japanese and this could never translate directly. The localiser had to do the best they could, so while “bro” doesn’t quite have the same intensity as the given-name-with-no-honorifics, it does at least come across as a sign of close friendship and trust.

Because the localiser didn’t want to make Kaito sound as ridiculously over-the-top with this as Mondo and Taka do with their whole “bro” thing, they only had Kaito call Shuichi “bro” sometimes, and he still uses Shuichi’s name a lot of the time. Which is a sensible choice, but it sadly means that a bit more nuance from the Japanese was unavoidably lost. One delightful part of the Japanese that I wish could have been replicated in English is how, at the end of trial 4 when Kaito coughs up blood in front of everyone and pushes away Shuichi’s offer of help as he leaves, he reverts to calling him “Saihara” for the first time in two and a half chapters, making that moment even more painful than it already was. In English, since Kaito only calls Shuichi “bro” sometimes, there’s nothing meaningful about him not doing so on one specific occasion and so this just can’t work.

Then during their conversation through the hangar window in chapter 5 (after half a chapter of not talking to him at all and therefore not using either name), Japanese-Kaito pointedly calls him “Shuichi” again as soon as Shuichi tries to bring up Gonta’s trial. It’s the perfect way for him to make it immediately clear that things are okay between them and they’re still friends. This even causes Shuichi to think, “Thank you for calling me by that name again”, which is just adorable – he really appreciated having someone who cared about him enough to address him that way and didn’t want to lose that! (This line was replaced in English simply by “Thank you for being my friend”, which is admittedly also adorable but somewhat misses the point the original line was making about Shuichi being glad they’ve made up and are still friends.)

Heroes and sidekicks and… small businesses?

Back to things that the localisation improved on, it’s time for the most interesting part of all this, and possibly the most bewildering thing about the Japanese (if you can believe that things could get more bewildering than casually calling your closest friends “you bastard”).

In English, Shuichi and Maki are Kaito’s “sidekicks”, and in that context, Kaito refers to himself as the “hero”. While this makes it sound like Kaito sees himself as greater than them and that they only exist to make him look good, that’s actually the exact opposite of what Kaito means by this. Kaito only makes someone his “sidekick” when he believes in their potential to be amazing – perhaps even greater than him – and his role as the “hero” in this arrangement is actually to give them as much support and guidance and inspiration to help them reach that potential as he possibly can.

Obviously, Kaito’s personal definitions of the words “hero” and “sidekick” in this context are very different to the usual ones. But there is at least some sense behind him using these words. Kaito is training his sidekicks to grow stronger and reach their full potential, so one could say he’s training them to become heroes themselves. In the regular definition of the word, sidekicks don’t only exist to back up the hero and make him look good; they’re also essentially junior heroes who are working under the main hero’s guidance to eventually one day become just as good as him. So while Kaito’s own definition of “sidekick” only partially overlaps with the usual definition of it, it’s not the worst word he could have chosen for this.

So what does Kaito call his sidekicks in Japanese? Just the English loanword saidokikku, since he’s fluent in English and would know exactly what that means? A Japanese word that means basically the same kind of thing? No – it’s “assistant”. (This is joshu, and it’s the same word that Sayaka used in DR1 when she declared herself to be Makoto’s “assistant”, so it seems to have exactly the kind of connotations you’d expect.) And rather than a “hero”, Kaito calls himself… their “boss”. (This is the English loanword bosu, the connotations of which I’m not sure about at all. For these purposes I’ll be assuming it’s equivalent to the English word, but there may be something I’m missing here.)

Which… just makes things sound very bizarrely like Kaito is running some kind of small business here. (“Boss” alone may not necessarily imply a business context, but next to “assistant”, it totally does, unless I’m missing something in the Japanese connotations.) The words Kaito used for this in English may have been a somewhat misleading representation of what he actually means by them, but it’s way worse in Japanese. Assistants only exist to help the boss out with his jobs and follow his instructions. This makes it sound not only like Kaito is greater than them and they exist to make him look good, but also that all Kaito wants to do is boss them around and have them do exactly as he says, which is even more completely not the point of what’s actually going on here. From the word “assistant” alone, there’s absolutely no connotations that they’re junior bosses, bosses-in-training who are going to learn the ropes of “business” from him and eventually graduate to bossing other people around themselves. And even if they were, being a “boss” isn’t something they would want to aspire to be that would be achieving their full potential anywhere near as much as being a “hero” is. This whole thing is so much more bewilderingly removed from the actual point of Kaito’s training and guidance that I find it difficult to buy that even someone as ridiculous as him would have ever thought these words made sense to use.

…I will give these terms one thing over the English ones, and that’s the implication that the boss can’t be a boss on his own. Heroes can be heroes even if they don’t have sidekicks, at least in the usual definition and not Kaito’s – yet one of Kaito’s problems is that he’s afraid he’s not really a hero if his sidekicks don’t actually need him. And, well, a boss can’t be called a “boss” any more if he doesn’t have anybody to boss around.

(Okay, at this point I’m going to have to stop and point you towards my lengthy post about Kaito’s hero issues, because I’m starting to get deep into said issues and rather than repeating a lot of what I said in that post I’m going to somewhat assume people already know what I’m talking about.)

So, consider Kaito’s Harmonious Heart event and it’s key line, “I can’t show weakness in front of my sidekick”. Obviously, he’s wrong, and he should be able to feel safe showing weakness to his sidekicks and know that doing so doesn’t constitute failing them or make him any less of a hero. Part of why sidekicks are there – in the regular definition of the word – is so that they can help the hero out with things he’s not strong enough to handle on his own! Helping the hero when he needs it is supposed to be one of the points of a sidekick!

But, while it’s painful that Kaito manages to miss the point here so badly, it makes sense that he does, given the fact that he’s seeing himself as a hero. The core of Kaito’s issues is that he has an extremely childlike view on heroes and believes he needs to be completely invincible and perfect in order to truly be a hero who can inspire people. He has no grasp of the concept that the most inspiring heroes are really the ones who struggle and suffer but manage to win in the end despite it all, and therefore that having weaknesses doesn’t stop him from being a hero at all.

In Japanese, this scene has nothing to do with heroes; this line is instead something to the effect of “a boss can’t show weakness in front of his assistant”. And… this entire concept of Kaito’s issues doesn’t work nearly as well when put in this bizarre context of a small business that his Japanese choice of words brings to mind. Strength and weakness aren’t nearly as much the point in a business setting. Technically, a boss can show as much weakness to his assistants as he likes, because they work for him and so he can do whatever he wants. If anything, it should be the assistants who are afraid of showing weakness to their boss in case he decides to fire them for not being good enough. Obviously none of this applies to Kaito’s definition of “boss”, but then it’s just very difficult to grasp where he even got the misguided idea that he in particular can’t show weakness (even though it’s fine if others do), because it sure as hell wasn’t from that word. And it should be even more obvious to Kaito that his “assistants” are allowed to help him when that’s literally meant to be the point of an assistant. It’s right there in the word! They’re there to assist him! (And it’s equally right there in the word in Japanese; the first kanji in joshu is the kanji for “help”.)

So, yes, Kaito being completely misguidedly convinced that he’s not allowed to show weakness to Shuichi is the whole point of his issues, but it makes so much less sense that he would actually misunderstand this so badly in Japanese when he frames things using such bizarre terms. It only makes so much sense in English because he’s making it about heroes in his head.

I remember way back, when I was still figuring out Kaito’s issues, that for a while I was stuck at “it’s so tragic that he believes heroes can’t ever show weakness to their sidekicks or they’d be a failure; what kind of hero stories has he been reading to make him think that?” and assuming that was basically a rhetorical question with no real answer – until I realised that, wait, there was evidence of him actually buying into these sorts of too-simplistic hero stories and that this was the entire point. But if I’d seen the Japanese version of the game instead, I’d have just got stuck on the unanswerable question of “why the hell does he think bosses can’t show weakness to their assistants?????” and I’d probably never have figured out Kaito’s issues any further than that at all. Which would be a crying shame.

And, see, these terms of “boss” and “assistant” could just have been translated directly. They have direct enough English equivalents, so there’d have been nothing actively wrong with leaving things like that. But rather than just settling for that, evidently Kaito’s localiser looked at this, realised what the intended point was, and decided that they could get that point across much better using different terms, so they did.

More heroes and not-quite-heroes

There’s more to this hero thing than just bosses and assistants, though, because there’s a couple of other contexts outside of the sidekick thing in which Kaito talks about heroes in English.

Perhaps the one most pointedly relevant to Kaito’s issues is the part where he’s talking about how he looked up to Ryoma because of his own passion for tennis. He describes Ryoma as a “hero”, which is a word choice that’s absolutely vital for understanding why Kaito was so harsh on Ryoma’s weakness and never even realised he could maybe help with it until it was too late. Because that’s exactly the same unrealistically perfect standard for heroes that Kaito holds himself to: heroes aren’t allowed to be weak, ever, or they’re a failure to anyone who ever looked up to them. And in Japanese, Kaito’s line about Ryoma also calls him a “hero” (literally the English loanword hiiro). But the connection to Kaito’s own issues is a lot less clear, since the notion of Kaito not being allowed to show any weakness in order to keep inspiring people is instead framed with the word “boss”.

Yet I’m so certain that this connection, this ridiculously high standard that Kaito only holds himself and Ryoma and nobody else to, is still the point and something very much intended by the original writers. Kaito needed a very, very good reason to not be willing to help Ryoma with his obvious weakness when he usually always tries to help anyone weak and suffering – because if Kaito had reached out to him, Ryoma would probably not have died. And tennis is not the most obvious choice for Kaito’s favourite sport, since it’s not a team sport focusing on communication and co-operation. So the only sensible reason for the out-universe writers to have made tennis be his favourite sport anyway has to be that they wanted Kaito to be uncharacteristically harsh on Ryoma and only Ryoma, and the way to do that with Kaito is to make it so that he used to look up to him. On the surface this would seem like an entirely counterintuitive way to make someone want to help a particular person less than normal – but not if it’s Kaito, because of his issues about heroes. The writers had to have known what they were doing.

So it’s bewildering to me that the writers didn’t then realise that they should make this connection more apparent by having Kaito use the same word for both himself and Ryoma in this context. Obviously it makes no sense for him to think of Ryoma as a “boss” – but instead, surely, this would make the writers think that Kaito referring to himself as a “boss”, in the “can’t show weakness in order to inspire people” sense, is completely ridiculous, and maybe actually “hero” is a better word for it, just like he used for Ryoma.

(And it’s absolutely wonderful to me that, despite that the original writers who consciously wrote Kaito this way somehow missed the obvious thing to do here, his localiser got it and fixed things to be the way they always should have been.)

Another time Kaito talks about heroes is that he describes himself as a hero when he’s announcing his Brilliant Plan to help everyone escape in chapter 5 (the plan that’s really him desperately trying to prove himself to Shuichi after the mess that was trial 4). And this is also “hero” in Japanese, for once – the only time Kaito calls himself a “hero” and not a “boss”.

There might be some logic behind this. In that analysis post about Kaito’s hero issues I linked, at one point I talked about how there’s essentially two different kinds of hero Kaito’s thinking of – the luminary kind of hero who inspires people through words, and the action kind of hero who Gets Shit Done. In English, Kaito makes no lexical distinction between these two types of heroes, even though there’s almost certainly a meaningful distinction in his mind, since he looks up to Shuichi for being an action hero and feels like his own luminary brand of heroism doesn’t match up to that (even though it totally does; give yourself and your strengths more credit, Kaito!). In Japanese, these are two different concepts in Kaito’s head – the luminary kind is a “boss”, while the action kind is a “hero”, aka the thing Kaito is trying really hard to finally be when he comes up with his totally-not-haphazard-and-aimless escape plan.

But even so, I feel like using two different words for this is the wrong call. If we do that, we lose out on all the fun implications of Kaito questioning whether Shuichi is really his sidekick during trial 4. Said implications are that Kaito is afraid Shuichi isn’t really a sidekick because he’s already a hero and doesn’t need Kaito at all. In Japanese, Kaito still questions whether or not Shuichi is really his “assistant”, which he still actually means in his own Planet-Kaito definition of “someone who needs my support” – but because of the word he’s using, that doesn’t then come with the implication that actually Shuichi’s already a… “boss”? Because the inspiring type of person that the word “boss” equates to in Kaito’s head is not the same thing as the person-who-gets-shit-done that Shuichi is undeniably being during this trial – the notion that Shuichi’s the real “hero” here seems like it has a lot less to do with this whole “boss” and “assistant” thing that Kaito is questioning.

(So the localiser realising what’s going on with Kaito in trial 4 and changing his boss-and-assistant thing to actually be about heroes in order to better tie everything together and get that across was, again, the best call.)

The last context in which Kaito talks about heroes in English is when he’s talking about stories: telling Shuichi and Maki in chapter 3, shortly after calling himself a hero, “Each of you are the heroes of your own stories! So act more like it!”, and saying in the chapter 5 hangar conversation, referring to himself, “It’d be a crappy story if the hero gave up so easily!”. On these occasions, in Japanese, he uses the term “main character” (shujinkou) instead of “hero”. Which is appropriate given the context about stories, I suppose – but then again, the word “hero” also equally brings to mind the idea of fiction, and, since heroes are usually main characters, can be taken to mean basically the same thing in the contexts Kaito’s saying it here.

And since it’s the word “hero” in English, that means these lines can also be linked into Kaito’s hero thing in ways that they can’t quite in Japanese. By saying that Shuichi and Maki are the heroes of their own stories, he’s essentially telling them – just like I described when talking about the connotations of “sidekick” earlier – that they’re heroes-in-training who will reach their potential and become full-fledged heroes one day! Which doesn’t connect at all in Japanese when they’re just his “assistants” who are also “main characters”. Not only that, but the fact that Kaito’s already referring to them as heroes carries with it the slight implication that maybe they don’t really need support from him as his “sidekicks” and can already manage on their own without him. That is indeed one of Kaito’s biggest worries going forward, at least with regards to Shuichi, which has already very vaguely begun to surface there in early chapter 3. And that doesn’t work in Japanese either, because that’d be him worrying that Shuichi’s already a “boss” or something; see my point about trial 4 above.

Meanwhile, Kaito continuing to describe himself as a hero in late chapter 5, despite the utter mess that was his “heroic” escape plan earlier that chapter, is a rather lovely moment because it shows that he’s still willing to give himself a chance as a hero and hasn’t given up on his ability to make a difference despite everything. It could even be taken to be relevant to his standards for heroes, since he’s talking about what makes a hero story good – and all he’s saying is that heroes need to not give up, not necessarily that they need to not have weaknesses at all. So this could maybe be a sign of some very important growth from him on that front! This line has an impact in English that just isn’t quite there as much in Japanese when he’s only calling himself a “main character”, rather than a “hero”… or a “boss”, I guess, since that’s the one where he’s not supposed to have weaknesses and would make absolutely no sense in this context about stories, geez.

My overall point for this section being: in Japanese, Kaito uses three different words in different contexts for what he simply calls a “hero” every time in English. While there’s some kind of logic behind his choice of a different word each time, it still feels like the Japanese writers seriously missed a trick by not realising they could tie all these things together. Having him use the exact same word for it in English every time just makes the core point of Kaito’s issues so much more cohesive, even though they’re still exactly the same issues that he has in Japanese. I absolutely love that his localiser realised this and made these changes even though they really didn’t have to.

In conclusion: how even.

With the number of times I’ve gleefully used the word “luminary” to describe Kaito being inspirational, or talked about his standards for heroes in a way that is deeply connected to how he behaves in front of his sidekicks, it is so, so strange to me that none of that is even possible when talking about him in Japanese. Kaito is still the same character in Japanese; nothing meaningful about his personality or his actions or his beliefs are different (well, as far as I know from my limited knowledge) – but talking about him and the way he is just makes so much more sense in English.

Let me describe it like this. If you’d somehow shown me both the Japanese and the English versions of Kaito’s story without any prior context and asked me to guess which one was the original and which one was a localised adaptation (assuming I was fluent in Japanese, and also assuming the characters being Japanese wasn’t a pretty big hint)… I would have been dead certain that the English was the original, and then it was localised into Japanese afterwards. It reads exactly like some Japanese localiser saw the English version, didn’t quite pick up on all the nuance of Kaito’s hero thing and how vital that was, and so when they localised it into Japanese they changed a few things without really realising that that’d dilute the point and make it less cohesive – not exactly out of bad intent, but simply because they didn’t understand it well enough to know better, since they’re not the original writers.

It’s utterly incredible to me that the truth is the exact opposite of that. It’s incredible that the original Japanese writers somehow wrote this whole thing about Kaito’s issues regarding heroes (and I really am like 99% certain they knew exactly what they were doing here and it’s not me just reading too much into it) but somehow didn’t realise that actually having him use the word “hero” in more contexts, including the most important one, would help that along and tie it together more.

But not only that, it’s also incredible to me that this managed to get fixed in the localisation. I think it’s amazing that Kaito’s localiser was able to look at everything about him in the original version of the story, understand what the main point was even though it’s a lot less clear in that version and they’re not the person who wrote it, and then decide, “You know what? This is already really good, but I’m going to tighten it up and make it just a tiny bit even better.”

Mad, mad props to whoever that person is – I’m so glad that they and not one of the other localisers who worked on the game happened to get assigned to Kaito. If someone less perceptive than them had been given the job, everything would have remained the still-good-but-not-quite-so-cohesive jumble that it is in Japanese, and ultimately, I’d understand and appreciate Kaito’s character significantly less than I do today.

[sawyernathan1991]

How To Reiki For Cats Astounding Unique Ideas

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Reiki Master Victoria Bc

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[koiandjelly]

So Fila’s actual past isn’t very detailed, because she’s not a main OC, and I haven’t spent a ton of time actually thinking about her as a character lol. 98% of my Creativity goes to my original content characters, cuz someday when I finish actually crafting my worlds, I’m gonna write a book. I’m aiming for the lofty goals of making a full, fleshed out, intricate— just fuckin’... a whole ass Multiverse system comparable to the Lore content of Tolkien’s works, or The Elder Scrolls— gah fuck y’know what, I’m changing this post from being about my Fantasy Life OC to being about my creation baby, the effort of about 6 years (I am 20 years old, and although I didn’t know it at the time I started, I was 14 when I made the shitty Fire Emblem Manakete rip-off race that I’m gonna actually now talk about, because holy fuck this ain’t gonna fit in a parenthesis “btw have some info” bubble)

A’ight so I have a hard time keeping track of time, especially in a large scale across years. Apparently it’s related to being severely depressed without medication (communication error on my part, my parents are very lovely and helped me ASAP when I spilled the beans) while also having moderate to severe ADD. So, ya know, keep in mind that I was yet another terribly depressed 8th grader when I talk about my creation’s early days. I wouldn’t experience that time of my life for any sort of payment ever. It was goddamn miserable, because when I was midway through the age of 14, not only did the aforementioned depression spring up, but I also realized I was bisexual (And I live in the infamous state of Alabama, for reference. Don’t fear for me though, I was too unnoticeable to be bullied if anyone did know, and my wonderful mother, whom I love and cherish with all of my heart, is one of the few Christians that actually... like... do what their own God tells em to. That is, Jesus. I’m an atheist and have a general discomfort about the idea of super powerful entities actually existing irl, but I do agree with the stuff I’ve heard and remember from a decade ago in Church about Jesus. Good guy. But yeah my mom not only accepted me and reassured me when I came out, but she’s gone even further and is of the opinion/fact that lgbt folks are, really, good and normal and that God created them, so she really genuinely just... loves and accepts me. There’s no “I love you despite of this” in the equation and I am so grateful. But again. I digress)

Pause after that sidetrack, to recap, all of my medical issues began to emerge about 6 months before I turned 15. Including what I hate most, the emergence of my Fibromyalgia and Sjogren’s Syndrome, and for an added kick to the flesh, an undifferentiated connective tissue disorder. Meaning, as what I understand it to be, a nameless chimaera of many symptoms in a way that the disorder either is it’s own thing, or just can’t easily be recognized as any one disorder. And I had anxiety. If I recall correctly on *that*, forgive me cuz it’s been a while since it’s been diagnosed/brought up in a significant way, I have or had either general anxiety *and* social anxiety, or just lightweight versions of both, or something, but at the time I was horribly shy and I couldn’t even talk to the teacher after class about schoolwork, even though I tried rationalizing it to hell and back that I shouldn’t be scared— as you’ll guess, shit didn’t work out til I got medicine for it, because no amount of logic and rational thought will change the fact that I was struggling because of a literal disorder, an error of the brain, and as with that walking with two shattered femurs ain’t gonna work, trying to talk when the talk machine broke... ain’t going to goddamn work.

God. I am rambling a lot. But anyway, shit fucking sucked as a teen for me, because I got that wombo combo, prepare for trouble, make it double, precision strike at my existence as a person during fucking already difficult puberty— I am rambling. It’s 4:55am as of this sentence lmao. I had a nasty cocktail of both mental illness and physical disorders pop up once puberty hit me, so I, through many events starting from loving to draw as a toddler, to play pretend stories of heartbreak, betrayal, and death as best an 8 year old could understand via playing with Polly Pockets, and all the creative power I inherited from my Dad, plus the motivation borne through a need to escape, I started making my own characters.

So, to return to the present state of my creations, which will now be referred to as Bounding Beyond the Stars, or BBtS, I’m gonna get some things out of the way. Just to clarify, yeah? I have created my worlds in a way that is specifically meant to stand apart from the irl universe as we know it. I’m certainly not a knowledgeable researcher with any level of comprehension on Spacial law and quantum physics and shit like that. So hey, if something ever seems... like, off, or wrong? Unless it’s pretty obviously wrong in the “hey you just googled how a thing works, and misunderstood it, and made a detail based on a failure to understand stuff and that’s dumb in a catastrophic way that even a high school level viewer would notice...” kind of mistake, then hey, shoot me a message. But if some sort of universal rule seems fucky in the way that it doesn’t make sense, but isn’t a catastrophic structural error... well, Imma use that sentence to start a better one. For an example of a catastrophic error, perhaps... this: “This planet has no seasons cuz of its shape and axis! And it is also like twice as big as Earth!” That would be catastrophic alone because anyone with a grasp on planetary gravity or something, may go and think “if it’s that big, gravity’s gonna be way more intense”. And you’d be right! Which is why I usually account for those things with... *Magic*.

Before I split this post for Length reasons, and I’m sorry the majority of this was me rambling about how my general experience with life sucked from ages 14-17, I’mma state something very important about all my creations.

Magic, which will be explained in depth at a later point, is a fundamental, essential, and omnipresent force of not just any one universe in my Multiversal Trio. It is a key piece of Reality itself, as magic is the flow of many multiples of millions of unique and mysterious energies, concepts, and laws existing anywhere that Is.

To end this post, I’m going to put a quick summary and explanation why I’m rambling about any of this: The rant about my age and circumstances at the start are relevant because it’s necessary context for the tone and type of writing my creations are built upon. The foundations of BBtS are borne from a sometimes angsty, sometimes genuinely upset 14 year old who found escape in the art of Creation. There have been many, many, many heavy edits, rewrites, scrapped info and ideas, and even more info built upon it. It used to be pretty pointlessly edgy in a lot of ways, and redundant in grimdark, morphing into *grimderp* plot devices and character traits. The way it’s written today, I like to think the lore of my many high fantasy-alien societies, and all its denizens and creators and whatever else, are still written to be dark, be dangerous, even angsty... but more skillfully so, with the sort of nuance a 14 year old wouldn’t really even begin to understand. Cuz I still like high stakes stories with real consequences and character deaths when appropriate. And I enjoy characters who have tragic pasts, but now that I’m older and I’ve seen and read about and done so much more— I can write that stuff *better*. And more over, what I’m most satisfied with, is that I’m more in touch with myself as a person, and I’ve evolved many of my personal beliefs and ideals and all the things of the world I can have opinions on. But most of all, I’ve reached a point where I have consumed enough content from others to where I have figured out how to write something that should be interesting, and maybe a bit new, because I put a looot of Damn focus on identifying, and understanding, writing structure, cliches, plot holes to avoid, character traits to handle differently, and just generally making something that’ll appeal to both me, and my audience, should I get that far.

[weartirondad]

Could u write a thing about Tony getting more personal interns and Peter gets jealous? Maybe he feels like Tony's replacing him or going to act as a father figure for all of them too, so Peter wouldn't be special or get as much time with him? 💙💙💙💜💜💜💜💜I love ur blog so so much!!

FF.net I ao3

It was funat first.

MisterStark moving more of his work to the actual R&D labs meant Peter got tohang out with all the other crazy smart kids with an actual internship at StarkIndustries which had him thriving. He loved science and he loved tinkering withTony in his personal lab but out here? There were people who wanted to be hisfriend apart from Ned, not because he knew the Tony Stark but because theythought he, Peter Parker, was cool.

Screwing aroundwith bots and manufacturing some strong chemical glue for medical purposes(that may or may not have been inspired by his own webbing) was considered coolhere which, honestly, that was a first.

Peter hadnever once in his life been considered cool by anyone other than Ned and thathad always been enough. It would always be enough, too. It’s just - he had morethan one friend, his aunt and an eccentric superhero billionaire mentor in hiscorner now and that feeling of belonging somewhere was incredible.

Untilsuddenly it wasn’t.

Peterhadn’t quite realized that Mister Stark sharing his lab also meant, well,sharing Mister Stark.

They hadtheir desks next to each other, of course, and Peter was officially hispersonal intern (and unofficially so much more) but they weren’t really aloneanymore.

That meantsignificantly less physical contact (it was him who begged Mister Stark not toembarrass him in front of everyone else so that was on him, really) and no privatetalks.

After workwas a different story altogether when they would ride up the elevator to thepenthouse and Mister Stark ruffled his hair and they’d both collapse onto thecouch to watch a movie together. None of the other interns got to have that andPeter wasn’t too shy to admit to himself that he was a little smug about it.

So, it wasfine that his mentor wasn’t as openly affectionate when they were in R&D.Totally fine.

But thenone day a guy, just three years older than Peter called Marc, made him hissmoothie because Peter was running late after school and when he got in theywere conversing easily and Mister Stark was sipping his drink that was in adifferent cup than the Spider-Man themed one Peter usually chose for him and helooked happy and content and only interrupted his talk briefly to greet himwith a hair ruffle.

No “How was your day, squirt?”, no “I’vebeen wondering when you’d get here”, no nothing. It was fine, though,because he got that soft smile that was reserved for him and Mister Starkwasn’t obligated to give him this full attention all the time anyway. He was afree man and of course he would want to talk to the people in his lab. He was afuturist, a visionary and, above all, a team player who valued other’s input.

Only whenLizzie figured out a new update for the Stark Phone Mister Stark grinned at herand high fived her with a “Great job, kid.” And that was Peter’s title.

It wasridiculous.

He alwaystold the man how much he hated being called kid and now he had appropriated itas his title? Laughable, ludicrous even. To Mister Stark they were all kids, sowhat right did Peter have to monopolize a random three letter word?

It was justembarrassing, that was all, looking up every time he heard the nickname andseeing it, coupled with a proud grin, directed at someone else.

But Peterwasn’t a malicious boy. He really wasn’t. He knew how much the genius’ praisemeant to every single one of them because he’d been in their shoes and gettingacknowledged by their idol was fantastic. They deserved it. He was happy forthem, he was.

Just….

Sometimes the nagging voices in his head wouldn’t stop. They would tellhim how he wasn’t anything special, how Mister Stark could’ve taken anyone ofthem in had they been Spider-Man and then they’d be hanging out in hispenthouse and they’d get to cuddle up to him during movie nights. Someone elsewould’ve gotten matching science pun t-shirts and the soothing calls when hewoke up from nightmares yet again.

He was Spider-Man - that was all the difference between him and everyoneelse in the lab and it sucked a little bit to see the man who he had startedseeing as more than a mentor and idol and superhero. The man who was fillingthat empty space in Peter’s heart where the loss of first his dad and then hisuncle had sat ever since he could remember. To see that man act encouraging andproud and soft and undeniably parental to other people as well.

Mister Stark liked taking care of people, he liked shaping the futureand helping smart guys achieve their goals. It was fine. He just had to keeptelling himself that.

It was fine. Finefinefinefi –

“Wanna tell me what’s gotten your panties in a twist, kid?”

That word again. That endearment that wasn’t his anymore. The traitor.

He glared, resentment bubbling over. “Don’t call me that.”

Mister Stark raised an eyebrow at him, head cocked to the side as if toanalyze him, to gaze right into Peter’s soul.

He didn’t want that.                            

“What?” hesnapped then sighed because acting like a petulant child certainly wasn’t theway to go to show his mentor he was worth mentoring. “Sorry. I’m just. I don’tknow – weird.”

At hiswords Tony’s whole posture seemed to melt. Where he had been scrutinizingunderstanding dawned and a softness covered his features that most peoplewouldn’t associate with Ironman.

Not Peter,though. For him this was familiar. This was the Tony he knew would always bethere to catch him, literally as well as metaphorically. The person who, justlike May and Ned, always had an open ear and a free shoulder to cry on wheneverhe came barreling in with too many emotions in his heart to keep them in.

And he hadbeen an idiot and an asshole for the better part of two weeks, all because ofhis own stupid insecurities and he knew his deflecting of inside jokes andphysical contact had hurt the man and he never wanted to hurt Mister Stark. Hehad promised himself he wouldn’t ever hurt him and -

Only whenTony scooted closer, put an arm around his shoulder and pulled him into hisside did he realize he was shaking and he gave way to the burning in his eyesthe second his face was buried into the soft fabric of Tony’s shirt and hisnose was filled with the calming scent of his mentor.

“Shh,” theman whispered, “it’s alright, you’re alright. I’ve got you.” All the while hishand kept rubbing circles into Peter’s back with just the right amount ofpressure to ground him in the moment.

He hatedbeing so weak, hated being so dependent on someone else to tell him it wouldall be okay but damn him if it didn’t feel good.

“Promise?”he sniffled when the body shaking sobs had died down and he could finallybreathe again and embarrassment hadn’t quite settled into his bones yet.

“Always.”

He soundedso certain, so sure beyond the shadow of a doubt that it would be okay andPeter couldn’t help but believe him.

“Now,” Tonycleared his throat, hand traveling up to cup the teenager’s neck ever sogently, “want to tell me what’s gotten you so on edge? I might be able tohelp.”

“No,” Petershook his head and buried deeper into the embrace, “it’s stupid anyway. And it’sfine, really, just my own overthinking and stuff.”

Figuredthat that wouldn’t be enough to soothe the man for whom the term overprotectivehad been invented.

“Is itabout the other interns? Is someone bothering you?”

“No,” hesqueaked then tried to keep his voice even as he repeated, “no. Like I said,it’s stupid.”

Tony hummedand that was never a good sign because it meant he was thinking and contrary topopular belief Tony Stark’s emotional intelligence was perceptive enough topick up on the smallest things when he really put his mind to it. Or maybe thatwas just in relation to Peter.

“Is itabout moving the lab to R&D?”

He sighed,knowing that he was fighting a lost battle but not quite ready to give up yetso he shrugged.

Someone,May probably, had apparently taught the billionaire that a shrug usually meant“yes, but I’d really rather it didn’t” because it didn’t take him much longerto piece together Peter’s deepest fear.

“You’rescared I’m replacing you with some of the other interns and you’re wonderingwhat on earth makes you so special.”

There was apause in which Peter could’ve denied or confessed it all but he did neither. Hestayed quiet and at some point Tony broke the silence again.

“The thingis, buddy-”

Peter’sheart both soared and broke at the conscious use of a different nickname.

“The thingis that I don’t care how smart everyone else is or how many new things theyinvent. That’s great, they’re happy and that’s good for SI and I’m happy theyget to find themselves in science and that I could help them by providing theresources. It’s beneficial for both sides, convenient.”

“But you?You’re my kid. And the whole superheroing and sciencing might’ve been whatbrought us together in the first place but if you were to take an interest inany other field then I’d move heaven and hell to give you everything I can toachieve your goals no matter how far out of my wheelhouse I am. You’re notconvenient, Peter. You’re not supposed to be, I don’t want you to be. I wantyou to figure out what and who you want to become. I want to be there everystep of the way, cheering you on from the sidelines and picking you up shouldyou ever fall.”

“But why-why me?” he asked, voice small and scared.

There was apause that almost felt heavy, like they breathed out more emotions with everyexhale, making the air thick with them. It wasn’t an uncomfortable feeling. Itwas familiar, revelatory even.

“Do youbelieve in fate, Pete? Because I do. I might not like the circumstances thatbrought us together but I’m forever going to be grateful that they did. When Iwent to Queens to pick up a superhero I didn’t imagine I’d get to meet such abright eyed, pure intentioned person. Someone who challenged the way I see theworld from the very first day. Someone inherently good and perfect. What dothey say? Came for Spider-Man, stayed for Peter Parker.”

Despiteeverything he let out a huff at the attempt of a joke, reveling in the wayMister Stark’s body moved when his did. Like they were one heart, supposed toact as a single unit.

“What’sspecial about you, Peter, is everything. From the animate way you watch movies,over the ridiculous amount of time you spend dissecting your food and yoursmarts down to your views and beliefs and kindness.”

“I loveyou, kid. Nothing anyone is ever going to do will be able to measure up tothat.”

[alphacenturian4]

Catholics destroying Statues: Hypocrites or Theological Sound Activist                         Or On Christian Freedom, the Liberation from Cultural Taboos, and The Unrightful Judge

                                  By: Ramon Aguilar IV

           So, on Oct 4th, Pope Francis witnessed an indigenous performance at a tree planting ceremony in the Vatican gardens. The presentation was performed by Amazonian people holding hands and dancing in a circle around a wooden statue of a nude pregnant indigenous woman, said to represent the Virgin Mary. Participants sang in honor of the Feast of St. Francis and danced in manner similar to traditional South American Mother Earth festival rites. Pope Francis remained seated in a chair away from the ceremony bored, not amused, and not paying attention throughout most of the performance. The ceremony included bowls that held dirt from different places around the world, representing different ecological issues. The people set up a net on the ground that held pictures of martyrs for Catholicism and Christianity in the Amazon, mostly women and priests who have died to bring the faith to an otherwise polytheistic nature worshiping culture. Most scandalous was what appeared to be an old wise woman, which is coded language for medicine woman or witch, who approached the pope and presented him with a black ring, and seemed to gesture her own blessing. The black ring is a popular symbol in Brazil and Latin America of Liberation Theology, a movement that tried to marry Catholicism to Socialism. A movement many, North American & US, Catholics consider heretical.

The event was organized by outside parties including the Ford Group. The woman referred to the statue as "Our Lady of the Amazon." And the Pope seemed to bless it. The Pope then prayed an Our Father, and skipped his prepared remarks like any good politician would do when he realized a photo op went sideways. Then he left the performance without comment after the tree was planted.

           The bigger scandal is how Catholics then acted following this event, especially American and Canadian based youtubers and twitter users who claim to be Catholic. At first sounding like Savonarola at the Bonfire of the vanities, and then like fundamental Protestants railing against idols in the Church, and then finally like Muslim fundamentalist screaming for their religion, here Catholicism, to be the Prime religion of the world and calling for an end to religious freedom. The reaction made us look worse than the event which was already egg in the face for a church that has been rocked by one too many scandals in recent years, including unforced controversies concerning backlash from Ultra-Traditionist Catholics, people who literally want to bring Latin back into vogue, against Pope Francis whom they see as too liberal.

           Now, after watching the ceremony a few times and doing some research I’ve come to some conclusions. First, the supposed pagan ritual doesn’t seem to be one. I’ve done a fair bit of study on Pagan and Neo-Pagan rite and rituals and that was not one. Though it did seem to be stealing back or appropriating elements of native Amazonian rituals. Which is something the Church does allow, as some tribal African Catholic Churches do have dancing and rhythmic chants as elements in their celebration of Mass. And this is something I am familiar with as a Hispanic and someone of Native American decent. As we allow Mariachis, clapping, and hand holding at Spanish Mass. In fact, this performance looks very reminiscent of folklórico dances that might be performed around a religious theme such as the Virgin Mary whom is very popular among Hispanic and Latin American Catholics. While some might smear this as Folk Catholicism, the Catechism of the Catholic Church does give license for the Church to incorporate the customs of the cultures it assimilates.

           But there is one other aspect to this event that I am leaving out, that is the conspiratorial accusation that these statues were not of the Virgin Mary as Vatican official claim, nor even of a generic non-divine “mother earth” as some liberal apologist defend, but were actual pagan idols of the goddess Pachamama of the Andes Mountains and Incan civilizations; which would be odd but not impossible for Amazonians who have their own pantheon to be worshiping. Let alone self-professed Catholics, including a Franciscan brother, who would know better. And if it was a pagan rite dedicated to Pachamma it was done horrible incorrectly as her religion still exists and videos of her ceremonies can be watched on YouTube dating back to 2011. Her rites use a collection of fallen leaves, sacred fire, and a collection of stones. None of which was part of the performance at the Vatican.  

           Regardless of the legitimacy of the accusation, this led to some supposed Catholics, and two men in particular, to enter the Church of Santa Maria in Traspontina on Oct 21st, and steal the wooden figurines and then throw them into the Tiber River to “destroy’ them. Showing us Catholics to be reactionary, impatient, and petulant; if not simply short sighted to the precedent we are now establishing of it being acceptable for people to enter a Catholic Church and remove items that offend them by the example we are showing to the world who is watching. As the video of this crime (trespassing, theft, and destruction of Church property) has 60,244 views as of this writing.

           But my opinion aside, I decided to see what the bible, and what more specifically St Paul, had to say on this issue. So, I looked at what to me were the most relevant passages. Those being in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, chapter 5, & chapter 6. I have read these epistles many times over the years, and every time I do I find them eye opening, this time was no different as it changed my position and stance on this topic.

To understand this following interpretation of Paul’s writings we must remember that we are interpreting the bible spiritually, allegorically, morally, and analogically. Not strictly literal or historical, but instead metaphysical and theological, and for me personally with a philosophical lens. Now let’s continue.

So, let’s start off by looking at the performance and the gifting of the ring, and let’s say for arguments sake that it was a pagan ritual performed within the Vatican garden. What then?

1 Corinthians 10 verses 6-15 says this: “These things happened as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil things, as they did. And do not become idolaters, as some of them did, as it is written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel." Let us not indulge in immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell within a single day. Let us not test Christ as some of them did, and suffered death by serpents. Do not grumble as some of them did, and suffered death by the destroyer. These things happened to them as an example, and they have been written down as a warning to us, upon whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore, whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall. No trial has come to you but what is human. God is faithful and will not let you be tried beyond your strength; but with the trial he will also provide a way out, so that you may be able to bear it. Therefore, my beloved, avoid idolatry. I am speaking as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I am saying.”

These verses serve as a warning that we are not above temptation and that we too can fall if we are unwise and not carful. But it also shows that all worship is sacramental; even false worship. St Paul also confirm the point, that an idol is nothing, as we can see more clearly in the verse that follow.

For then at verses 19-22 the theme continues with: “So, what am I saying? That meat sacrificed to idols is anything? Or that an idol is anything? No, I mean that what they sacrifice, (they sacrifice) to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to become participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and also the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons. Or are we provoking the Lord to jealous anger? Are we stronger than he?”

This passage makes several strong but quick and glossy statements. It reaffirms that God created everything, thus everything is clean, only sin perverts it. It is only the offending of sensibilities and the confusion it can and does cause that is the problem. For a person can no more change God than move a mountain with our bare hands or change the direction of a hurricane with the wave of a finger. And while we do have rights as humans which were endowed by our Creator these inalienable rights ought not to alienate us from the other. This is a caution against over confidence.

But I will take umbrage with a plan and simple reading here. For then we get to the mystical and metaphysical concept of demons. But I will take a conceit from Saint Augustine and assume that idols being of demons, or a gate way to them, has more to it than just the literal meaning. I think here the word, or threat of, demons seems to be a warning to the bronze age audience against the nondivine realities of sin, that there are temporal corporeal consequences and not just the moral, ethical, or metaphysical consequences we think of and seem to concentrate on as spiritual and religious people. So, the principle Paul sets up here is that you, that is we, must operate in regard to others, we must avoid what might cause scandal and confusion to others who do not know what we know and who do not understand what we understand and instead we ought to prefer what is beneficial and edifying to that which we may find tolerable, enticing, or entertaining. In that way we seek the good and wellbeing of the other person and not just the good of ourselves.

Through this we can acknowledge that idols of any kind are at best neutral representations, at worse a temptation to error for the uninformed, ignorant, unenlightened and fools among us. The strong should consider the weak. For, if idols can provoke God to wrath and passion; how can we mere mortals claim to be immune to their effects or presence. But the problem here becomes what we define as an Idol. As Catholic Churches are full of statues of the Virgin Mary and many other saints and even of art that contains devils, demons, and even Satan (even if they are of those evil spirits being cast out, defeated by our saints and angles). And again, I will steal from St Augustine and other Church fathers. Evil desire is the root of idolatry, not man-made things (that is the work of human hands). For the goal of a good Christian and well catechized Catholic is always to maintain koinonia that is “fellowship” and that fellowship, or unity, is more important than expressing already attained liberty. It also shows that God always provides a way to reject polytheistic rituals. For me, this was done, at the situation we look at today. When the pope said the “Our Father’ instead of his prepared statement.

           But this passage also looks at the other side of the coin on this issue.

For at verses 23-33 we read “"Everything is lawful," but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is lawful," but not everything builds up. No one should seek his own advantage, but that of his neighbor. Eat anything sold in the market, without raising questions on grounds of conscience, for "the earth and its fullness are the Lord's." If an unbeliever invites you and you want to go, eat whatever is placed before you, without raising questions on grounds of conscience. But if someone says to you, "This was offered in sacrifice," do not eat it on account of the one who called attention to it and on account of conscience; I mean not your own conscience, but the other's. For why should my freedom be determined by someone else's conscience? If I partake thankfully, why am I reviled for that over which I give thanks? So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God. Avoid giving offense, whether to Jews or Greeks or the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in every way, not seeking my own benefit but that of the many, that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”

Here we get to the nitty gritty of the issue. Liberty is not an end in itself, but a condition that must be maintained against the condition of slavery. St Paul and indeed the Bible itself calls on us to be faithful in difficult times; especially after being liberated from superstition and irrationality. Which for St Paul, superstition and irrationality, are a type of slavery to sin. On the other hand, he also acknowledges that narrowminded scruples are shackles for those who internalize others’ weaknesses, that internalizing of another’s folly is in itself an inclination to the temptation to sin. And here I agree with St Paul whole heartedly, as I think this applies to the situation both during and surrounding the ceremonial performance, its objects, and the gifts given to the Pope by its participants. But some might say that allowing such things is a violation of old testament law and precepts. And I, and St Paul would retort, but there is only one “Law” for Christians, that is Christ, that is the law of Pure True Love.

And here is where the Ultra-Traditionalist and Conservative Catholics get all relied up and call me a liberal. But St. Paul wrote a letter to respond to this inclination for outrage and indignation as well.

In 1 Corinthians 5 at verses 9-13, he writes: “I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people, not at all referring to the immoral of this world or the greedy and robbers or idolaters; for you would then have to leave the world. But I now write to you not to associate with anyone named a brother, if he is immoral, greedy, an idolater, a slanderer, a drunkard, or a robber, not even to eat with such a person. For why should I be judging outsiders? Is it not your business to judge those within? God will judge those outside. [Therefore] "Purge the evil person from your midst."

Here we get the command not sit with the immoral people within the church, that is fellow Christians who are immoral, that does not mean that you must remove yourself from the world that you live in. For: nonbelievers are not expected to be saints; non-Catholics are not expected to live by Catholic Dogma; and non-Christians are not expected to behave as Christians. In fact, Christians have an obligation to reach out, interact with, and be an example of a good person to a nonbeliever.

I would think that it could go without saying that this principle should also apply to the newly converted as they transition from pagan-heathen-polytheism, to Christian-Catholicism, for as that happens and the synthesis that has occurred with all other Christian communities occurs for them, we must tolerate the folk Catholicism that arises at the fringes of conversion as our expands in region or communities that do not understand our sensibilities and when they get it wrong this is our opportunity gently correct and instruct with temperance and patients. This how Christmas gets placed on the 25th of December, the date of the winter a solstice a holiday dating back long before the advent of Christianity, and this is how Halloween gets placed on Samhain.

As someone who likes a Christmas-trees on Christmas, I have no problem that they have their origin tied in with Zeus’s Oak or Thor’s Tree, and I don’t have a problem having All Souls day take on some pre-Christian Gaelic influence and traditions.

           As for the rest, as it relates to pagans, heathen, polytheist, and nonbelievers. It is the baptized Christian who should refrain from the scandalous sins inherent of mortal human nature. Scandal being the key word here. For it is impossible to avoid contact with sinners and thus avoidance of sinners should not be a goal nor should contact with sinners be feared by rightly formed Christians. But instead the goal should be to maintain inner purity within the Christian community. This is a warning against the perception of impiety, from the outside looking in, a warning not to look as if you are condoning sin.

           And it is here that my view on the actions taken by those two Catholics who stole and threw out those figurines changed slightly. While I do not agree with the fanfare and celebration by other Catholics at this action, for that in itself is scandalous and looks unchristian, the act of removing a temptation to sin from within a church, even if you know it is not a temptation for you, when others do not understand its nature and could be scandalized by it, as many many Catholics clearly were. Then yes getting rid of those two images, regardless of rather they were representation of the Virgin Mary that many Catholics found offensive because it went against their sensibilities or if they were actual idols of some mythical and very frictional mother goddess then yes they should have been removed from within the physical Church.

           But, what about the people who participated in the ceremony and performance at the Vatican garden, well St Paul writes in this too. He wrote in 1 Corinthians 6 at verses 7-12

“Now indeed (then) it is, in any case, a failure on your part that you have lawsuits against one another. Why not rather put up with injustice? Why not rather let yourselves be cheated? Instead, you inflict injustice and cheat, and this to brothers. Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor . . . prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. That is what some of you used to be; but now you have had yourselves [baptized], you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. "Everything is lawful for me," but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is lawful for me," but I will not let myself be dominated by anything.”

This is a warning that teaches that the love of litigation is the love of greed, while love of persecution is the love of arrogance and self-pride. This teaches that litigation and persecution of a fellow Christian are forms of retaliation not justice. Instead, Christians should possess generosity, mercy, and forgiveness toward the sinner and toward themselves. Turn the other check, after all. For it is faith and grace that saves us from the very worst of our own sins. While, self-persecution and the persecution of fellow Christians is something that St. Paul was indignant against and was loath to do. Better to be wronged or sinned against, than to do the wrong and sin against another.

[painted-cherries]

lingering

pairing: mark tuan x reader

warnings: mention of a gun and drugs, but no use and no death or shooting.

genre: fluff, slight angst but purely for the sake of plot I swear

words: 2.4k +

request: “ Can I have mark tuan soulmate au where he's a workaholic cop,and doesn't believe in soulmates, but then falls for her when he sees her? Please and thank you. Hope this makes sense :) “

a/n: yes! I am a fool for a good soulmate prompt, especially with Mark, he has the perfect image for this. I may or may not have projected my love for B99 in this fic as well... I am still accepting requests! You can drop one in my inbox if you click here.

March had passed, spitting out the few last cold fronts and mini snowfalls it could before April would take its place. Spring was on the verge of spilling to full bloom; what better time to find your soulmate than when the earth is renewing herself with luscious evergreen and flowers? The search for one;s soulmate is always random, but typically when someone would least expect it. There had been stories of people finding their respective partner in little moments like needing to borrow change in line at the cafe, or even sharing a seat on the bus. Every situation was very unique to each couple, and it was hard to anticipate when or where they’ll meet- sometimes in not very graceful situations. Spring time meant that there would be a plethora of new soulmates discovering each other; spring was a popular season, as well as that small period of time where fall slowly freezes into the coming winter. Many of these couples could be found around every corner and on every curb, hand-in-hand grateful to finally find comfort in someone’s arms. The soulmate system is a work of wonders for everyone right?

In the spring, Mark could be found working overtime at the station, catching up on potential hours he missed in the winter, when he had left to visit family for the holidays. He dreaded those visits, despite being able to see his family, the extended was always hounding him about not seeking out his soulmate more actively, He was well into his mid-twenties now, and was still without a girlfriend, let alone a wife. The truth was, Mark was already committed. He worked every day at the station, and not unwillingly. He practically begged other for the shifts that they didn’t want, and the chief himself had to limit him in his overtime that he worked so often. Mark Tuan was married to his job, and that’s how he preferred to live his life. His job gave him a type of natural high. Car chases, and drug busts exhilarated him. to no end. He was constantly working new cases and excelled so high that other detectives were practically begging him to assist them on their cases. 

He would go on and on for hours about a new murder or robbery that was filed to anyone who would listen- if he even had time in the first place- but love was not up for discussion. He had never trusted the link between soulmates- he thought it was madness that two people could be destined to be together for the rest of their lives without knowing or choosing to be with said person from the get go. He didn’t believe in predetermined destinies; he had grown up on his own accord with the ideology that we create our own fates, that we choose what we do and who we love- if we want to love at all.

The controversial animosity he felt for the soulmate idea was something he would never express to anyone- not his parents-who were happily put together by through their souls- or especially his friends, whom most of them had already fallen victim to the link. He had witnessed it everywhere and anywhere, yet he still refused to believe that there was another person out there who was destined to be his forever, before they were even old enough to know what love was. 

The day was young, and on this fine Monday, Mark Tuan was unsurprisingly working yet another shift at the Los Angeles Police Department. He walked with a spring in his step and clocked in. Mark’s daily routine never changed. Sometimes his hours shifted, but that was the most change he had seen since he became so invested in his work. Every day he would wake up and take a shower to wake himself up since he wasn’t naturally very upbeat in the morning. After that, he would eat exactly one bagel with as much cream cheese as he desired, and a banana as he walked out the door on his way to work. That was how he lived; he ate the same thing, combed his hair the same way, and worked the same shifts. It was monotonous, but Mark wouldn’t prefer it any other way. He didn’t need anything different because he obtained his thrill in car chases and drug busts, making arrests and receiving praise for his work.  

Today he was going to follow up on a lead that he had found the day before. Recently the department had finally discovered some lower level criminals that could bring them right to the door of their most wanted: a man who ran all of the drug deals throughout LA, a man that only referred to himself as The King... Not humble or subtle. His real name was Jackson Wang, and he wasn’t even on the down low. This man flaunted his success, but his ability to slip away from the LAPD is what kept him out of a cell to this day.

Mark sat at his desk skimming through files and prepping for the endeavor; he and his partner, Jinyoung, were planning to have an undercover meeting with one of The King’s best dealers, hoping that his arrest could help them locate where every single one of Wang’s hide outs were so that he could no longer slip through the department’s fingers, or more specifically Mark’s. He had been working the case tirelessly for the past three months, and he was tired of letting him get the best of him. Today was going to be a big day, he could feel it in his bones.

He was deep into the case file when Jinyoung walked up, and sat a chocolate muffin on his desk next the open manila folder. 

“Okay what time did you want to head out for the rendezvous spot?” 

Mark looked up from the paperwork and tore a piece of the muffin top off and popped it into his mouth.

“Well I was thinking,” he said with a mouth full of muffin. “that maybe we should go early and scout potential spots that he could escape in case he knows it’s a set up.”

“Okay, okay. Do you want me to see if Officer Kim and his partner could provide some back up?”

Mark rolled his eyes. “No ask Sarge if he’ll cover us. Those two aren’t bad cops but this bust could really lead to a big break in our careers.”

Jinyoung let out a sigh of relief and nodded his head in agreement. Yugyeom and Bam, as he liked to be called, always managed to get on Jinyoung’s nerves. They excelled at policing minor things like busting large college parties at night shift, or giving tickets to people who jay walk downtown. This was a large scale deal that Mark didn’t have time to play around with, and Sargent Lim Jaebum would be great for the job. He was refined, and took things seriously. He helped the captain keep things in order but was still a great friend to get a drink with. He was able to appropriately set a boundry between the workplace and friendship, and Mark knew that he was reliable no matter what the circumstances.

“Okay Tuan, you ready to head out?” Jinyoung called out. 

“Let’s go make an arrest fellas,” Mark replied as he excitedly stood from his chair, and walked out the door with his gun and badge in hand. 

The ride there consisted of a comfortable silence, and JB followed the two in his own car. After scouting for spots that the other two could maintain in case of a chase, Jinyoung dropped Mark off a block from the empty, blocked off parking garage that they were using as a meeting point, and drove off to remain inconspicuous. 

Mark took out his phone and started so scroll through meaningless social media so that he could remain undercover. He was always very hyper aware of his surroundings, as a detective should be. He thought about how warm the air was, just now realizing that the weather was finally changing. He thought about how it was practically yesterday when the weather would barely go above 50 degrees, and it hit him how quickly life was moving by. It literally hit him. Mark had the air knocked out of him when he felt himself collide with another person that was walking in the opposite direction. He landed hard on his back, and the person that caused it came tumbling down with him. 

“Oh shit I am so so sorry,” the person said in a hurry. He opened his eyes to see a young woman being to scramble off of him, and stand. She offered a hand to him, and the moment he took it, he felt a warm sensation spread throughout the cavity of his chest. He could barely get a good look at her before he realized that he was minutes from being late to meeting Wang’s dealer, and took off, muttering a ‘thanks’ under his breath. The girl stood there stunned, shocked by the sudden pull towards the strange man, and confused that he hadn’t stopped to acknowledge the obvious link between them. She wasn’t sure of the reason he ran off so quickly, but she decided that if that was her soulmate then she needed to know who he was, and proceeded to follow him.

Mark couldn’t stop seeing the small glimpses of her face after he ran off. He couldn’t stop thinking about the warmth that has taken over his better judgement, even as he comes face to face with what could be his big break in busting this underground drug ring. His mind was so preoccupied that he couldn’t help but flinch when the dealer slammed the grams of coke on the table between them. 

“Three grams of coke like discussed. Now where’s my payment, pretty boy?” the man spat at Mark.

“I-I have it right here just a moment,” and he pretended to fumble for his wallet. On cue he counted 5 seconds from when the man asked for money, and pulled out his PD badge exclaiming “LA PD”, just as Jinyoung busted into the building as they planned.

“Oh shit,” the guy grunted to himself, and not wanting to take an inventory loss, he grabbed the goods and started to run out what had appeared to be a blocked off exit, but opened for the man with ease.

“Jinyoung! Let JB know they’re taking the southwest exit now!” Mark said as he sprinted after the man. 

This dealer had obviously been trained to avoid being caught at all costs; he was using every resource available to keep Mark four steps behind him at all times. He dumped over crates, threw things carelessly behind him, and ran up the stairs from the lower levels nearly three steps at a time. Now more than ever, Mark cursed his short legs. Once the two reached ground level, the man narrowly slipped past Jinyoung after attempting to knock him to the ground. Mark ran past his partner and was so hyper focused on the perp in front of him, he didn’t notice the woman who was approaching him, oblivious to the chase happening before her. For the second time that day, Mark Tuan landed flat on the ground alongside a mystery woman with an unforgettable gaze.

Mark blinked and could hear the sarge yell from a distance, “LET’S GO TUAN, PICK IT UP.”

He began to recollect himself from the ground, this time he was up on his feet  before the girl in front of him. He offered his hand to her like she did the time before, almost like fate was trying to rewrite their meeting herself. The woman took his hand, and stood before him, brushing her disheveled hair from her face. This time around, Mark got a proper look at her face. He felt his pulse nearly pop from his veins, and his heart fell to his feet and remained there on the sidewalk, stunned. He knew in that moment that this was it, he was becoming what he would categorize as a victim to the soulmate link. But in this moment it didn’t feel like he was a victim. He felt light. There was sunshine pouring from his soul, shinning bright from the hollow behind his eyes and his rough touch on her small hand was weightless. 

‘Who are you?” was all he could ask.

She felt his aura engulf her. This time he lingered long enough for her to notice his more than handsome features. His jawline was strong, tense because she knew this wasn’t an experience he had ever anticipated, especially at this timing. His features were solid and defined, almost as if he had been a model in a past life. But that didn’t matter because he was meant to be hers in this lifetime, until the sun’s light burnt out and the tides stopped crashing for the moon. She placed a hand on his face and grazed it softly, dragging her thumb over his lip ever so slightly. The silence was broken when JB’s voice claiming that he and Jinyoung had caught the dealer, rang out loud over the earpiece he wore for undercover operations such as this one.

“My name is Mark. Ask for me at the LA PD,” he said to her quickly before taking off to help his friends with the arrest. 

As Mark ran, he couldn’t help but think about the woman now clearly identified as his soulmate. He was no longer worried about the countless days he would endure working to bring himself a peace of mind that he couldn’t obtain alone. He thought about the radiance in her eyes, and how even standing together made him feel something whole rather than apart and scattered. He felt her touch linger on his lip and cheek. He continued to feel her ghost touch as he handcuffed the man, and even after arriving back at the station, floating around on a high that wasn’t from booking a criminal for once. He no longer felt it lingering after he saw her waiting at the front door of the department, and walked straight up to her, pressing their lips together then and there before she could even utter a ‘hello’ to him. He pulled back and looked at her with a smile that he had never produced before.

“I’m y/n,” she said with a grin.

Mark no longer felt like a man with a blind fate, but a man who had a new blind faith in a love he didn’t know he was waiting for.

[theaceace]

I call this - what if Aziraphale hadn’t managed to find a body in time for the apocalypse, AKA I wanted an excuse to make Crowley sad and drunk. There is a happy ending, which I will get around to writing soon. Ish.

Thank you to @i-swear-this-is-for-homework for listening to me ramble. At some point I’ll clean this up and put it on AO3, but today is not that day, it’s already late enough.

Follows book continuity closer than the series. 

Enjoy?

Aziraphale had been discorporated before, of course. One didn’t have a physical form for six thousand years without accumulating a little wear-and-tear1, or scratches in the paint, so to speak. It had, however, been a remarkably long time since his last jaunt through the metaphysical. Only ninety short years2 after he had turned his back on the Garden of Eden for the last time, Aziraphale had rather unfortunately found himself on the wrong end of an extremely unpleasant man with an extremely sharp dagger. Not yet knowing what would happen to him, he hadn’t thought to counter the attack, or even so much as move out of the way; after all, this was no weapon of divine or infernal design.

 So he had been in for a rather nasty shock when he found himself face-to-face with Heaven’s quartermaster and the prospect of filling out innumerable forms3 and joining a thankfully short waiting list before he could be assigned a new body.

 It had been enough to put him off the whole experience, and as such, he had endeavoured to avoid it at all costs in subsequent years.

 He had done a commendable job of it, all told. There had been a couple of instances that had required a little last-minute intervention of demonic origin, but he tried not to dwell on those too much. Not, to be clear, because he felt it was a sign of personal failure, but rather because the memory tended to give him the ethereal equivalent of heart palpitations.

 This instance had been somewhat different – for a start, the only violence had been in the form of a remarkably irate witchfinder bellowing nonsense and waving his finger around. For another, though Aziraphale had found himself unexpectedly flung from his physical form, there had been no real harm done to it4 which made for a nice change. That had been several hours and four continents ago. Now, Aziraphale was starting to feel really quite exhausted.

 It ought not to have been possible, he thought glumly to himself. After all, exhaustion was, by definition, something that happened on the material plane. Cells didn’t have enough energy or something – he’d never bothered himself with the particulars, as he’d never considered any scenario that it might apply to him. Really it should have been impossible for angels to get tired. They were fonts of divine energy, beings that existed on an utterly separate level from the concept of exhaustion.

 And yet, here he was, wherever that may be now. Exhausted. Incorporeal. No idea how much time had passed since he’d stepped into the circle, and therefore no idea just how long the world had left before it all went a bit explodey.

 As a matter of fact, though he didn’t know it at that precise moment, the world had been due some explosions approximately twelve minutes earlier, right around the time he had decided to do the metaphysical equivalent of tucking up his feet on the sofa and dozing in front of Springwatch with a cup of tea tilting precariously in his hand. He had hoped that this would go some way to restoring him to the point that he could continue looking for a suitable body to inhabit that was both receptive and at least in the same country as the antichrist.

 So far it didn’t appear to be making much of a difference, but Aziraphale was persevering nonetheless.

 He was persevering so hard, in fact, that it took him what may have been a small eternity – but was probably closer to a few seconds – to notice that he was no longer alone in the space between dimensions.

 Being that the other entity also lacked a body, and didn’t appear to be an angel, demon, or Crowley, Aziraphale was rather thrown by this.

 “Um. Hello,” he said5 finally. He didn’t really know what else to do.

 “Hullo,” said the being, in what might have been a curious voice if he had a voice, and Aziraphale had ears capable of discerning a curious tone. “What are you doing stuck all the way out here then?”

 “Ah,” said Aziraphale, in a pale imitation of his usual bluster. He found himself wishing rather desperately that he had hands with which to fuss shirt cuffs, and a throat to clear. “Well you see, that’s a rather long story, and I’m afraid we may be on something of a tight schedule – at least, I think we are, it’s rather hard to tell, but I would hope that even like this I might have noticed if things had, er, got under way.”

 “No, it’s okay, we’ve got time,” said the being. “But I think I probably know most of it already, and it’s just boring if you hafta hear the same story twice so close together. Are you Aziraphale then? ‘Cause if you’re not then I really think you should just tell me now. I’ve already got a lotta work to do, and I really do need to find this Aziraphale person. Angel. Angel-person – sorry, that’s not rude, is it?”

 “I – well, no, I don’t believe so,” Aziraphale said. He contemplated lying to the being for just a moment, but some deeply-held instinct told him just what a bad idea that would be. “And yes, I am Aziraphale.”

 “Oh, good,” this time, Aziraphale was swamped with an impression of relief. “It really would’a been a pain if I’d ‘ad to go ‘round looking for you everywhere and when.”

 “Um,” Aziraphale said blankly. He tried to take a moment to rally himself, and failed miserably. “To, to whom am I speaking?”

 “’m Adam Young,” said the voice, apparently oblivious to the tailspin this sent Aziraphale’s poor, racing mind into. “And I think you’re last on my list of things to get sorted out. First I thought I could just put you back the way you was and that’d be jus’ fine, but then I reckon’d I should probably come get you sorted m’self. ‘s tricky trying to get someone back in a body that dun’t exist when they’re not even in the right place for bodies to be.”

 “I see,” Aziraphale said faintly; he was suddenly, acutely aware of the fact that he was speaking currently to the antichrist, a being that could theoretically wipe him from this and every other plane of existence6.

 “An’ then I thought it’d be rude if I just went and stuck you back in the same body as you had, an’ din’t even ask if that body was okay for you,” Adam continued, and he somehow managed to give the impression of a wide-eyed, if not entirely earnest, stare. This was impressive given that he had no body, no eyes to widen, and no actual voice to give any sort of inflection. Aziraphale would no doubt spend a great deal of time later being appropriately impressed, when he was no longer trying to metaphysically hyperventilate.

 “Yes, yes I was rather fond of it,” Aziraphale managed. In that precise moment, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you if that was the truth or not7. He only knew that he really didn’t want to be putting in any special requests for a new body to the antichrist, who had, as far as he was able to tell, not made the world go all explodey.

 “Oh,” said Adam in something like relief. “Tha’s good. Easy, I mean. I’ll hafta drop you off where you were, though. Jus’ gimme a sec, I’ll get you all fixed up proper.”

 And it was so.

 Aziraphale opened his eyes and took a deep, unnecessary breath. He patted his hands over his coat, and tried to twist himself around to see that everything was present and correct. He thought that perhaps his coat was a little longer, his sweater a little more fitted, but it was really quite hard to tell in a body that was still relearning what synapses were.

 He turned slowly, but there was no sign of Adam – not even a lingering hint of ozone to suggest he had ever been there. He then continued turning, struck by the sudden realisation that he had no idea where on God’s green Earth he was.

 “Oh,” he said, followed swiftly by a word that may have been inappropriate in polite company – but, if there is no polite company to hear an inappropriate word fall in a forest, who’s to say if it made a sound?8

 *****

1 – In that particular instance, it had been rather more tear than wear

2 – Give or take. Functioning calendars had only existed for sixty of those years

3 – Literally – humans hadn’t invented numbers that could count that high yet

4 – Aside from the unfortunate dissembling down to the molecular level

5 – He did not speak as you or I might speak, as he lacked the mouth necessary to do so. He did not even speak as you or I might imagine a formless denizen of Heaven would speak. To properly explain how he spoke would require a number of PhDs that don’t exist on Earth and an in-depth understanding of the wavelengths that angels generally occupy outside the range of human perception, of which this author has neither

6 – He was also rapidly coming to terms with the fact that he had listed ‘child murder’ as one of the possible solutions to the problems the day had presented. Very low down the list, mind you, but still certainly present

7 – It was

8 – It did

 *****

The world had been restored for thirteen hours, and a lone demon had been drinking solidly for twelve of them. The first hour had been dedicated to transporting himself back to London, or it would have been a solid thirteen.

 Crowley couldn’t remember the last time he had been this drunk. It might have been in what would later become Croatia, in 1132 BC. It may have been just after the Library of Alexandria – ahem – was destroyed. It might have been sometime in the First World War1.

 Certainly, he thought, staring at the empty bottle in his hand with something a little like betrayal, he had never been this drunk on his own.

 And really, that was the crux of the problem, wasn’t it?

 He let his head fall back against the plush pile of the rug beneath him. It didn’t make quite the satisfying thunk he’d been hoping for – more of a dull whoomf, really – so he waved unsteady fingers through the air to miracle up the delayed sound himself. That, he thought, was much better suited to his current mood.

 The bottle in his other hand had once contained a rather fine 1947 Cheval Blanc that he hadn’t tasted a single mouthful of, and now contained little more than dregs. He hadn’t bothered to get himself more bottles – only continued refilling this one every time it got too light. He’d just tried to do so again, and managed nothing more than a faint headache, so for the moment he’d abandoned the attempt.

 Crowley blinked blearily up at the ceiling, and lamented his inability to fall into a drunken coma.

 Oh, he could sleep well enough – Crowley was a champion sleeper. He was also quite proficient in naps, snoozes, dozes, and the sort of lazy Sunday afternoon in which you are sure that you were awake, yet somehow cannot produce a single piece of evidence to prove it. All of that was, unfortunately, very different from a drunken coma. They all involved being able to keep his blessed mind quiet for longer than two consecutive minutes.

 Aziraphale had been keeping this bottle back – not for any sort of special occasion, but just because it hadn’t, he’d said, felt like the right time to drink it. Aziraphale was very big on listening to those odd little feelings of his. It had been exactly where it had been kept since Aziraphale first bought it in 1948, still perfectly preserved, and Crowley’s hand shook a little when he had picked it up.

 There had been a part of him – small, but far too loud to completely ignore – that had hoped to hear the angel’s huff behind him. To have the bottle snatched away because it still isn’t time for this one, my dear, really.

 Of course, it had been only him, the bottle, and the books. He’d almost tried spilling a little wine over the first-edition Dante, but hadn’t been able to bring himself to, in the end. As satisfying as it might have been, it still seemed like a step too far. Besides, he thought to himself. Besides. It had been bad enough being allowed to drink the wine. He didn’t know what he’d do if there was no-one to stop him ruining the books2.

 Crowley’s wandering mind found itself pondering if Adam had recreated the holy sigil that Aziraphale had hidden beneath this very rug. He could find out, he supposed, then groaned as even the thought of standing made his head swim. It was harmless to him inactive, but he still didn’t like the thought of sitting atop a direct line to the big guys Upstairs.

 Even if he did have a few choice words for them.

 But then again, there was always the chance it wasn’t Heaven at all. The Metatron had looked terribly confused3 when he’d cornered them about Aziraphale on the airfield. Maybe they really hadn’t had anything to do with it. Maybe they really didn’t know what had happened.

 Which only left Downstairs, something that Crowley felt only marginally more equipped to deal with. Beyond that, there really wasn’t a terribly long list of suspects.

 Only the divine or the infernal were capable of true smiting. And if Adam hadn’t brought Aziraphale back, then that meant there was nothing left of him to bring back. It was a fairly simple progression of logic that managed to completely stall Crowley about halfway through. Six thousand years he thought bitterly. Just enough time to get used to having someone around.

 He lifted to bottle to his lips again, grimacing as he remembered his last attempt to refill it. Well, there was no rush. He had time. It wasn’t the end of the world.

 Pity, that.

 Well, no. That wasn’t fair. After all, this world had always been more or less decent to them – him. And he had just spent the last eleven years trying to make sure it could continue being decent. It would have been a terrible shame if, after all that effort, it had just gone and ended anyway.

 It was just that. That. That Crowley had always trusted in the universe to look out for him, one way or another. And he’d never quite realised that, in all of his optimism, he’d somehow included Aziraphale in that assumption. That if there was something out there in the universe watching his back – be it God, Satan, someone else, or just the natural forces of cosmic entropy – then it only made sense that it would be watching out for the angel as well.

 Crowley had been wrong about a lot of things – one of the perils of having been around since the Beginning.

 He didn’t think he’d ever been as wrong about anything as he was about this.

 “Bugger thissss,” he said, trying to sit himself back up for just a moment, before abandoning the attempt when all it did was offer him a better view of the empty room, a mug of congealed cocoa still sat on the desk, and the tartan throw on the back of the sofa that Crowley had foolishly miracled up as a joke and Aziraphale had loved without the slightest hint of shame or irony.

 “Sssshould the burn the placccce back down! ‘d sssserve you right, Zira! Leaving me to deal with the apocap – apolac – Armageddon all by mysssself! Going and getting yoursssself all, all ssssmoted!”

 Crowley waved his hand towards the general vicinity of the rest of the shop in a gesture that he thought was appropriately menacing.

 “I will! I’ll sssset fire to every one of your biblessss! You’ll, you’ll have to thwart me!”

 And nothing happened. The books didn’t catch fire. Crowley did not feel thwarted, so it was probably just that he was in no fit state to be setting fire to anything. He was too busy, he realised in a distant sort of way, making an awful keening wail as he scrunched his eyes shut as tight as he could.

 It was probably a good thing he’d been in some sort of shock on the drive back. If he’d felt anything like this, he likely would have hit multiple other road users, and then Aziraphale, from wherever he was or wasn’t, would have been exceptionally disappointed. Well, there was every chance Aziraphale was exceptionally disappointed with Crowley right now, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. If the angel wanted to judge him, he could come right on back to life and do it to Crowley’s face.

 “Why?” He moaned, from somewhere low in his throat. “What did he ever do? He wasn’t the one who, who invented original sin. He wasn’t the one who mucked up the Plan. What did he do to desssserve thissss?”

 Unless – unless that was the point. Punishment wasn’t really punishment is you didn’t exist to suffer through it. Maybe it wasn’t about Aziraphale.

 After all, Crowley was the only one suffering now.

 Both Heaven and Hell, while unimaginative, were both very keen on the ironic sorts of punishments. And while Crowley would have liked to think that a benevolent God wouldn’t approve of this sort of thing, he knew enough about the Creator – and all the things that had been going on since free will really took off – to know that God wouldn’t really care. At least, not enough to interfere.

 Ineffable, as the bloody angel would have said. Except he wasn’t here to say it now, and Crowley certainly wasn’t going to stoop so low.

 Begging on the other hand, was a low he had stooped to before, and would no doubt stoop to again.

 “Jusssst,” he started, and tried to get the hissing under control. It probably wasn’t a very polite way to address the Almighty, especially not for one of the fallen. “Jussst, please, ssend him back. He should get to ssee that hiss books are all okay, and that the world isss ssstill sssspinning. He’ssss done enough good for that. Thwarted enough wilessss. And all the onessss he didn’t were my fault, really. Ssssso bring him – jussst bring him back. I know we haven’t spoke in a really long time, and I know we aren’t on good termsss, but pleassse. For, for Zira’s ssssake, pleassse, he’sss all I’ve got left, he’sss the only good thing I still have from Heaven, pleassse-”

 His voice cracked and gave up, but Crowley didn’t notice. He kept up his pleas silently, mouth working awkwardly around a tongue just a little too long and forked to pass for human. His ears were ringing unpleasantly – either a product of the wine, or the fact that praying was always more than a little bit painful for demons.

 But the ringing in his ears just grew louder for a brief, horrible instant, before cutting out entirely.

 Had Crowley been even slightly less of a drunken, mumbling mess, he may well have realised that the ringing was actually the doorbell of the shop. He may have heard the click as the door was unlocked, or the shuffling of fine leather shoes over the mat. He may not have, of course, but we will never know for certain. The reality was, he was that drunk, and he didn’t hear any of those things. The very next thing he heard, in fact, was an aggrieved sigh, and a rather put upon tsk. Crowley didn’t have the willpower at that precise moment to lift an eyelid; but then, he didn’t have to. He was very well acquainted with that put upon tsk. His mouth stretched into something that may have resembled a smile if it hadn’t wobbled quite so much.

 “Ssssstill wassssn’t time for it then? Angel?” He asked, waving the bottle haphazardly around. A couple of drops splashed on his face, and more than a couple onto his shirt. He gestured to miracle them away, but didn’t bother to look and see if it had worked.

 “My dear, I’ve never seen you in such a state,” said a familiar voice to his left. Crowley’s grasp on the bottle slackened, and he felt it fall from between his fingers. It must have landed on the thick, soft rug somewhere beside him, because he didn’t hear it hit the floor.

 Crowley loved that rug. He could write sonnets devoted to that rug. That rug and him had been through something real over the last twelve hours.

 “I’ll take this, Crowley,” said the voice that Crowley knew better than any sound in the world, a little nonsensically.

 It wasn’t Aziraphale. Crowley knew that – had several very good arguments for it, in fact4.

 He didn’t open his eyes to check.

 There was a sensation like fingers – soft, warm, and a little bit heavenly – running over his hair. Crowley tilted his face up towards it. He may not look so much like a serpent these days, but he’d never quite managed to shake the habit of seeking out warmth. If Crowley really concentrated, he could almost muster up the familiar scent of bergamot and dust that always seemed to cling to Aziraphale’s overcoat.

 “Oh, my dear boy, what happened?” Asked Hallucination Aziraphale. “I was only gone a day.”

 “Yesssss!” Crowley hissed despite himself. “A whole – a whole blesssssed day! The firsssst day of, of, of the resssst of my life!”

 He hiccupped.

 It wasn’t a sob. Crowley didn’t sob.

 He did, however, drunkenly hiccup several times in a row, hard enough to make his chest ache and his eyes water. He swiped furiously at his face and tried to curl himself into as small a ball as possible – had he been sober enough, he might have even shrunk himself down into a little snake to curl up even smaller and tighter. Snakes didn’t have treacherous tear ducts. Snakes didn’t drunkenly imagine their dead partner gently lifting their head into a soft lap. Clearly, snakes were the superior beings, and it had only taken him six thousand years, one heartbreak, and one stage of grief to notice.

 “Well now,” the voice was somehow both kind and exasperated, a combination that Aziraphale had mastered several millennia ago, and that Crowley had clearly thought worth committing to memory. “Whatever is the matter? The world is safe, my books are all here, and don’t think I didn’t see your car outside. Anything else can be dealt with, hm?”

 Crowley shook his head wordlessly, but didn’t trust himself to open his mouth. He’d only end up hiccupping again.

 “Crowley? Can you sober up, dear?” Crowley shook his head again, but this time managed a sullen little,

 “Don’t want to be sssssober.”

 “Dare I ask why not?” Crowley had long known he was the only demon with something even approaching an imagination, but even he hadn’t realised just how good it was. He was quite certain he’d managed to get Aziraphale’s stuffy, put-upon eye-rolling spot on.

 It seemed perfectly obvious to Crowley why he should never like to be sober again, and as a hallucination of his, it should be perfectly clear to Aziraphale too. He opened one suspicious eye just a crack; just enough to see a vague outline that may have been angel-shaped with none of the defining characteristics.

 “You’ll go away if I’m ssssober,” he said wretchedly. The lap under his head jolted slightly, which was really rather rude for a hallucinatory pillow, in Crowley’s opinion.

 “I most certainly will not!” Ah, yes, the bluster. Crowley always did like tempting that out. “For a start, we’re in my shop! And if you will insist on staying drunk, I should at least like to know why on Earth you thought it was a good idea to pass out on my nice rug!”

 “Din’t pass out,” Crowley muttered sullenly, and didn’t point out that it wasn’t for a lack of trying. His brain and any products thereof would already know that, so it would be rather pointless.

 “Crowley,” said the angel warningly.

 Crowley found himself overtaken by another sudden bought of hiccups.

 “They killed my best friend,” he said, and didn’t hiss at all. The hand that had been moving gently through his hair all this time, almost unnoticed, stopped for a second and shook, before starting again.

 “Oh. I – well. I’m terribly sorry to hear that, dearest,” Aziraphale said, and there was no hint of temper in his voice. Just something a little shaky that Crowley couldn’t quite put his finger on.

 “Have you,” there was hesitance now, where there hadn’t been before. Crowley tried to reach up, in the vague direction he thought the angel’s face might be, to pat at it reassuringly. Aziraphale was de – gone. He had nothing to be hesitant about, and Crowley tried to tell him that with a few clumsy swipes of his hand against what may have been a cheek. It felt like Aziraphale was smiling, but his voice was still sad when he spoke. “Have you tried asking Adam about it? He’s really a terribly nice boy, under all of the Hellish powers.”

 Crowley managed a despondent shake of his head.

 “Silly angel,” he said, and it was fond now. He had decided, rather abruptly, that he could be as fond as he wanted. As fond as he had been for six thousand year, under it all. “Can’t bring back something that dun’t even exisssst anymore. He already fixed everythin’ elsssse.” He leaned up a little, and whispered, like it was some great secret,

 “I even assssked Death.” He spoke over Aziraphale’s squawk of you what? “And y’know what he ssssaid? That it wassssn’t hissss jurissssdiction anymore!”

 It had seemed something of a win-win at the time. Either Death could do something about it, or he would be annoyed enough by Crowley’s asking to do something else – at that point, Crowley hadn’t been too picky. But it seemed his luck had run out – his optimistic streak had carried him as far as it was able, and not an inch further.

 “Would you tell me about them?” Aziraphale asked after a long moment of silence. His voice small, and tight, and something about it struck Crowley as wrong, but his brain was far too slippery to grasp what it was. “They must have been something truly special, to go to all that trouble. It might – help. Help you, I mean.” Crowley thought this through hazily, before nodding. He wasn’t sure if it really made sense or not, but he was willing to trust that Aziraphale would know more about this sort of thing than him.

 “Known ‘m since – sssince – forever. Before time was a thing,” Crowley said. “Could alwaysss count on him. And we din’t have a lot in common, but we had all the important bitsss! And bessssides, you get used to people being around that long.”

 Aziraphale laughed, a little uncomfortably.

 “Well now, you don’t need to tell me that, my dear,” he said.

 “But I do!” This, suddenly, seemed extremely important. Crowley pushed himself into a popstion that could be described as upright, if one were feeling particularly generous5, and peered unsteadily into the hallucination’s eyes for the first time. They looked exactly like Aziraphale’s, complete with the little golden flecks that always caught the light no matter which way he turned. Bless it but Crowley was good.

 “I never told you when you were alive, and now you’ve gone and got yourself smited, so I’ll never get to tell you again!”

 He had the singular pleasure of watching Aziraphale’s eyes widen, and a flood of colour rush up his cheeks, but didn’t pause to appreciate the sight, steamrolling over any of Aziraphale’s attempts to talk.

 “You were -! You were -! Huffy, and you had terrible taste in clothes, and I don’t underssssstand what’ssss so great about Classic FM that you thought it had to be the only blessed channel you can get all over the country no matter how bad the ssssignal is, and sssometimes I hiss my words just because I know it makessss you smile, and I’ve never unkilled a duck for anyone else, and none of it mattersss because Heaven or Hell or ssssomeone decided to off you, and now I’m sssstuck here on my own waiting for the next go-around!”

 It was quiet for a long time. Long enough for Crowley to slump back into the hallucination’s lap and close his eyes again. They really were so heavy, and sore after the hiccups made them water so much.

 “I really do think,” Aziraphale said finally, “that you ought to sober up.”

 Crowley didn’t dignify that with a response beyond tightening his grip on the angel’s calf.

 “It would be in both our best interests?”

 Still not worth a reply.

 “For me?”

 That made him pause a little, before shaking his head definitively no.

 “Oh, for the love of – someone.” The next thing Crowley knew, he was up on his feet, through no effort or will of his own. There were a pair of arms wrapped rather solidly around his shoulders, and his feet didn’t want to move separately, apparently rather stuck on the idea that they used to be a tail. His face was pressed heavily against a soft shoulder though, so Crowley didn’t complain, even when the wool tickled at his nose. He had the vague feeling that he was being led somewhere, but he’d be redeemed if he could figure out where.

 “Here we are,” Aziraphale muttered, right before he dropped Crowley onto what felt like a bed – just the right side of springy, with a thread count that was honestly sinful. Crowley appreciated it for an all-too-brief second before he found himself gripped by panic.

 He surged up, and halfway off the bed before Aziraphale caught him again.

 “Nuh – no!” If Crowley lay down in a bed, then he would go to sleep. If Crowley went to sleep, then he would wake up sober. If he woke up sober, then Aziraphale would be gone. “Nonono.”

 “Yes,” Aziraphale’s voice was firm, though his hands were soft as anything where they were untangling Crowley’s from his lapels. “You need a good night’s sleep my dear, and to face the morning with a clear head. I promise you it’ll all seem much brighter.”

 Crowley shook his head where it was mashed against the side of Aziraphale’s neck. The neck in question moved a little as Aziraphale sighed.

 “Would it help if I stayed with you?” He asked.

 That… gave Crowley pause. He hadn’t thought of that. If the hallucination stayed with him while he slept, and Crowley held on tightly enough – well, he was pretty solid now. As long as Crowley didn’t move a single muscle as he slept6 then it should be fine.

 There was something amiss with that logic, but exhaustion had crept up on him like a snake in the grass, and Crowley found himself being lowered back to the bed once more, this time unresistingly.

 “There you are,” was the last thing Crowley heard as he slipped off to sleep. He had just enough time to congratulate himself on miracling up such a comfortable bed – he’d even managed to permeate the pillows with Aziraphale’s scent, which he desperately pressed his nose into now – before he was swept away7.

 *****

1 – In fact it was none of these, for the simple reason that Crowley had never been this drunk before in his very long existence

2 – Well, no, that’s not entirely accurate. He did know what he would do. He was just trying very hard not to think on it too long, when he knew that Aziraphale would disapprove most vehemently

3 – Insofar as a being with no face made of holy fire can look confused

4 – The arguments went as follows:

·        Aziraphale had been smited. Smote? Smiten?

·        Aziraphale would never approve of Crowley’s deep love for this rug

·        Aziraphale had never, in six thousand years, sounded quite so fondly exasperated, and he wouldn’t have started now

·        Aziraphale was dead

·        Aziraphale hadn’t started nagging him about the wine

·        Aziraphale hadn’t mentioned the new books that Crowley had noticed Adam stocked

·        Aziraphale wasn’t coming back

5 – As well as a little hazy on the meaning of the word ‘upright’

6 – Which was, fortunately, how he naturally slept anyway

7 – Had he stayed awake any longer, he would have realised that not even he would have miracle up such a hideous quilt cover. He also would have felt the careful, cleansing touch of a kiss against his forehead to keep away bad dreams – though demons have no other kind. But he did not stay awake, and so he noticed nothing.

[just-breathe-fight-cf]

Mermish

‘What is Mermish?’

   The Language of the Merfolk, often called either Aquan or Mermish, is both complex and simple all at once. It is incredibly subtle, and to the observer, seems limited and simplistic in its nature. To human ears, our language sounds like waves of the shore, dolphins chirruping and even whale sounds. The truth of old Mermish is that it is an expressive language that goes beyond the Mer palate and lungs. The language is of rhythm and song. Verse and poem. Spoken to illuminate anyone who hears it to seek and join our peoples while washing away the egos and creating a new Mer-Soul through trill.

‘Literacy through History’

   Because we possess a dual breathing system, those that permit both the flow of air and of water can speak True Mermish. And because of the nature of the medium we live in, out vocal range and volume far surpasses anything that would be heard on land. The language is reflective of that; heavily tonal, with much of the meaning conveyed in the sound rather that the word itself. To understand this, True Mermish isn’t about words, it is about the meaning of song and joining in the harmony.

   About 1000 years ago, Humans began to cross the seas and brought with them their own songs and language and we tried to communicate our songs to them with devastating results! Those who listened eventually transformed into Merhuman or simplistic as Merman and the women, Mermaid. They joined our people and lived along side of us…but sadness caused them to seek out their own kind and we learned to silence the song and develop a written language alongside of a verbal one which was as powerful as Old Mermish. We lived close to the surface of the water, near actively literate communities…in major harbors and ports of call. We listened and written medium for all of merfolk society to learn. We preferred picture to word and preferred songs to pictures…nevertheless, we drew what we could understand and were dedicated to understand Humans and merge with them and bring them into our society.

   The Merfolk related to symbology and merged True Mermish to Second Order Mermish to create Third Order Mermish that we use to talk to humans on their ships at sea and to their ports and streams. We sang our songs as gifts to them and created a whole new species in the process…humans were frighten of the sea, but our songs made them move to it, swim in it and live in it…and love it! Not a human on Earth is not affected by the sound of rolling waves, or the melody of falling rain or the ebbs of the current’s pulse. They all have become in-between, slowly changing not of the body, but of the mind and the spiritual plane.

   Mermish sentences tend to be vague when spoken and the same word used may not be used again if it does not carry the appropriate emotional power. When speaking in terms of direction, me must always point. When speaking of the present, past, or future, we can only refer to the phases of the current moon, and seem to have no memory of the past further than that. We have no concept of money, morals or logic in our language. Mermish has no individual ‘I’ either as Mers are a family (Pod) and always refer to themselves as ‘We’ or ‘Us’. Things simply are and opinion of others don’t phase them.

True Mermish

   True, Old or Genuine Mermish, is a primarily-whistled and sung language which carries for long distances underwater and is almost un-reproducible in the human mouth. However, merfolk being the curious mimics which they are, have taken up many human words and integrated them for speech with the sailors, fishermen and beach-walker whom they often encounter during gatherings, transformations and adding to the Collective. Merfolk use long whistling melodic phrases which can be represented in human’s transliteration by hyphenated sentences, the hyphen (drawn as a wave form to signify the Mermish Tongue) is placed between separate words where they can be distinguished as individual comments.

   True Mermish is sometimes difficult to separate from emotion and behavior of the speaker as they are blended into the song the Mer sings. For example, a Mer speaking in True Mermish might give a sharp dual cough (Uk~Uk) and this could mean ‘No’ as in a command or as a feeling depending on the amount of trilling they do in-between.

   To learn how to speak True Mermish is pretty simple as long as you don’t over complicate the process. Using the knowledge of the human alphabet that the Mer’s adopted (as art is there way of words, but difficult to make universal around the world) they only spoke in vowels and melodic sounds:

BEHAVIOR VOWELS: A = aa, E = ee I = ii O =oo U and Y

EMOTION SOUNDS: Ih = ih, Ae =ae, Uu = uu, Sh = sh

MERMISH SONG: Pa, Whoosh, Ba, Ooww, Drr-drr, Www-ooo, Hummm

   These were the common roots of True Mermish when they spoke, with the Vowels being behavior and the Sounds being the trill emotion that connects the behavior into a melodic song.

When pronouncing the Vowels:

‘aa’ sounds like ‘~ah~’,

‘ee’ sound like ‘~eh~’,

‘ii’ sounds like ‘~ee~’

‘oo’ sounds like ‘~ooh~’

‘u’ sounds like ‘~ou~’

‘y’ sounds like ‘~eee~’

When pronouncing the Sounds:

‘ih’ sounds like ‘~uh~’

‘ae’ sounds like ‘~aye~’

‘uu’ sounds like ‘~you~’

‘sh’ sound like ‘~shhh~’

When pronouncing the Song:

‘pa’ sounding like ‘~pah~’ (Dripping Water And Light Rain)

‘whoosh’ sounding like ‘~wa~shhh~’ (Sound Of The Waves)

‘ba’ sounds like ‘~baaa~’ (Sound Of Underwater Bubbles)

‘Ooww’ sounds like ‘~oou~’ (Sound Of Whales)

‘Drr-drr’ sound like two clicks (Drips and Dolphin Talk)

‘Www-ooo’ sound like a descending high pitch whistle (Dolphin Talk)

‘Hummm’ sound like high pitch humming (Mermaid Talk)

Second & Third Order Mermish

   Trying to communicate, Mers would linger close to the boats and sea towns to see what words humans used to describe who they were, what am item was and their environment they lived in. Mer’s broke up the language in drawings and letters as they began to write in human tongue with Mermish trills. True Mermish only relied on the song, but people above water could not hear it underwater unless extra letters began to carry the notes in the range of 20,000 hertz that Human’s could hear and elevated the tones higher to mix with their auras creating ‘Siren Song’ that sailors feared.

   As seen in True Mermish, the Second Order of Mermish still contains many words for feeling and emotions they have for water. Listening too long to these words will cause other Mers and Humans to grow sympathetic for water and fall in the harmony of fluid. To understand, water is life, water is home, water is everywhere and epitomizes the daily life of the Mer.

   We as Mers are keen observers of sensation and emotion alike and appear to have therefore a wide variety of adjectives for all types of colors, sounds, textures, touch, temperatures and taste…many of which have been forgotten over time. Merfolk emotions change rapidly like the sea, and it is hard to quickly document the wide range we go through; especially since some resonate on levels we do not comprehend. Often body language accompanies the translation for easier interpretation of a Mer’s behavior.

   Those that live above the sea need to remember that we can only relate well to things beneath the sea. If we speak of things, it is usually from that perspective. For example, a Mer might finds it confusing if someone asks whether they mean ’above’ or ’below’ the surface, and can only point when asked about other directions. However, they do have words for ‘up’, ‘down’, and ‘ahead’, used in swimming and fin positioning, but not for cardinal direction.

Below is a list of known Second Order Mermish:

Ahead (Swimming Command) - Chi (Chai)

Alcohol - Kiini-beeah

Alive - Hnguloo

Amused (Calmness) - Daahuu

Anger (Describing Behavior/Emotion) - Gahfooruu

Are - Bi

Bad (Ancient Mer’s Struggle With This Word) - Bett

Beneath (Below - Submerge) - Ghaajii

Bored (Restless) Affehoo (Ah-feh-oo)

Bright (Very Hot) - Kiini

Bubble - Baabah

Change - Mhaawhoo

Cheerful (Similar to ‘ffewuu’, but calm) - Hwuu

City - Paaepooh-paash

Confidence (Describing Behavior/Emotions Of Sureness) - Dehooffa

Cold - Jiiii

Cold (True Mermish) - Yeeni

Color - Koohur

Coral (Dead) - Meessuk

Coral (Living) - Messuloo

Crab - Kraah

Dancer (With Tail or Legs) - Daashu

Dead - Hngukk

Depression - Huumuu

Desert - Toh-chii

Determination - Heehii

Dolphin - Ffeechuvo

Dolphin Mermaid - Ukuk-ffeechuvo

Down - Mmawtt

Dragon - Deeragoh

Dried Up - Uuniigo

Earth - Vvundra

Excited - Ffuuhii

Family - Faaraarii

Fear (Behavior/Emotion) - Uuriigo

Feeling (Emotion - Attitude) - Llii

Female (Woman - She - Her -Hers) - Lla

Fin - Feen

Fish - Fees

Fish Eggs (To Spawn - Caviar - Mate) - Bllusu

Food (Edible Plant Or Lower Life Form) - Yyt (yeet)

Forest (Tree - Kelp) - Aah-teeree (Ahh-ter-ree)

Freshwater (Ancient Mer’s Could Not Tolerate For Long) - Bett-wuutaah

Freshwater (True Mermish) - P’chaaoo

Froth (Sea Foam - Small Bubbles) - Apupua

Frustration (Behavioral/Emotional) - Shaahii

Goddess Of The Sea (High Spirit) - Bavverissi Baveras

Good (Ancient Mers Don’t Understand This Word) - Ghood

Good Bye - Jai-quay’

Happy (Playful - Fidgety) - Ffewuu

Hard - Haarduuh

Has - Bi

Have - Bi

Healthy (Well) - Haaih (hay-uh) (Sounds like a sigh)

Heart - Hhu-hng

Hello - O-kee’-ya

Hot (Temperature) - Hhu-huu (Pronounced as two sharp pants of breath)

Hot (Taste) - Jeech

Human - Hyuuman

Hungry (For Food) - Hnn-kii

Hunger (Lust - Hunting) - Chuun

Hungry (Wanting Food - Wanting Sex - Wanting Attention) - Oowii

Hurts (Ouch) - Ah-ee (Ahh-ee)

Ice - Ttheeni

In (Covered - Surrounded By - To Be Inside) - Woolbul

Is (To Be - To Have - To Be With) - Bi

Is Not (Without Existence) - Oosoyyo

It - Lle (lay)

It (Pronoun For Any Inanimate Object Or Thing) - Uhff

It & Its (Person) - Llo

Jealousy (Describing Behavior/Emotion) - Gahooraa

Knowing Not (Don’t Know - Don’t Have - Isn’t) - Oosoyyo

Land - Lleehada

Love (Similar to ‘paaffoo’, but more intense) - Taafoowii

Male (Man - He -Him - His) - Lli (lee)

Many - Ss (Sounds like a hiss)

Many (True Mermish - Typically added to Nouns and Pronouns) - Uk-uk

Merfolk (Merperson) - Baovveche

Moon - Ttheeni

Nervousness (Flailing of Limbs and Tail In Water) - Fffeechii

No - Toh

No (True Mermish) - Ungh (quick grunt)

Our (Ours) - Ffa

Oyster - Mchuuk

Person (Mermaids) - Ffuegane

People (Humans) - Paaepoohss

Playful (Jumping - Twirling - Splashing) - Chahho

Rage (Describing Behavior/Emotion) - Gahuuii

Rain (Heavy) - Aagiaag (Ahh-jaag)

Rain (Drops) - Aagii (Ahh-ga)

Reflection - Kiinaagii

Ripple - Ffuen

Roar - Rroo-er

Rock (Platform) - Ciipaa

Rock (Stone) - Hurriff

Rock Shelf Underwater - Wwiigoo

Rocky (Irregular Seafloor) - Ghoontuh

Sad - Dehffoo

Sand (Grains) - Saahd

Sandy (Smooth Seafloor) - Ffehpaah

Sandy (Lots of Sea-weed) - Haarii

Scale - Scaahoo

Sea - Chii (Chee)

Sea-Dragon - Feenhoom

Sea-Horse - Chuu-ffeenii

Sea-Weed - Cheehuuii

Seal - Cheeoo

Shallows - Kiinaa

Ship - Ssheep

Sick - Huu-iik (Sound of vomiting)

Silver - Shaavoh

Somber (Lazy - Blank Expression - Seclusion) - Haanii

Storm - Ssturm

Sulkiness (Refuse To Swim) - Sshuurii

Sun (Fire) - Echrassa

Surprise (Describing Behavior/Emotions) - Liiffoo

Thirsty - Hss-tii

Tide - Taahi

Tide (The Movement - Sound - Smell - Sight of the Tide) - Cuua

Tired (Slow) - Sshiiji

Touching (Playfulness - Staring) - Paaffoo

Transgender - Llo

Unknown (Describing Behavior/Emotions Of Anger) - Dehiifaa

Up - Hekk

Us - Ffa

Volcano - Echundra

Water (Evenly Cool in Temperature - Atlantic) - Ruutaroo

Water (Evenly Warm - Tropical) - Meetamaa

Water (Good To Breed In) - Caatuu

Water (Hard Currents - Disturbed or Troubled by Weather) - Chaachiioh

Water (Optimum For Mers) - Saahem

Water (Polluted) - Assuuh (Ahh-sue)

Water (Pretty or Attractive (Also used to label a mermaid)) - Maakeeffaa

Water (Rich In Fish) - Eenii

Water (Surface Cool, Colder Beneath, Barely Tolerable - Arctic) - Sooroo

Water (Surface Cool, Luke-Warm Currents - South Pacific) - Ruunii

Water (Too Cold) - Fuuacho

Water (Traveling Depth) - Tehmoo

Water (Troubled or Churned by Fish) - Feenwaa

Water (Warm on the Surface, Cool Beneath - Lake Water) - Maaroo

Water (Warm on the Surface, Ice Cold Beneath - North Pacific) - Maasoo

Water (Wave - Home - Fluid) - Alassi (Ah-la-see)

Wave (Curl or Tunnel) - Ccuuoo

Wave (Sharp Peaked Wave That Collapses In The Ocean Before Shore) - Sshuuka

Wave (Single Breaker Of Water) - Huuaae

We (Also Used For I) - Ffa

Whale (Mers Refuse To Name Them Although) - Huaool

Whirlpool - Llinoo

Without (Not Existing - Not Having - Not Knowing) - Oosoyyo

Wind - Hhoole

With (Together - Possessing) - Bi

Yes - Eeas

Yes (True Mer) - Heh (quick grunt)

1900 Altered Words For 3rd Order Mermish

Beachcomber - Anit (AH-neet)

Want - Antorum (AHN-toe-rume)

You - Dal (DOLL)

Am/Is/Are - Em (EM)

Low Tide - Fan (FAHN)

High Tide - Fimra dom (FEEM-rah-DOME)

Help - Fimra tre (FEEM-rah-TRAY)

Male - Fre (FRAY)

Swim - Hredenu (HRED-eh-noo)

Was/Were - Hron (HRONE)

Female - Ifen (EE-fen)

Many - Kesseni (KESS-seh-ni)

Here - Kila (KEE-lah)

Far Away - Li (LEE)

See - Luron (LOO-rone)

Someone Who Would Fail To See A Mermaid Right In Front Of His Face -Lusa (LOO-sah)

Love - Mortum (MOR-tume)

Storm - Nulma (NOOL-mah)

There - Ohora (O-ho-rah)

Mermaid - Olo (O-lo)

Friends Of Mermaids - Sessa (SESS-sah)

Human - Sesmuna (SESS-moo-nah)

Curious But Harmless Person - Setanim (SEH-tah-neem)

Curious And Dangerous Person - Setannor (SEH-tahn-nor)

Sailor - Setantreya (SEH-tahn-TRAY-yah)

Wave - Setsur (SET-soor)

Hello - Suron (SOO-rone)

I - Tala (TAH-lah)

Beach - To (TOE)

Ship - Torm (TORM)

I Mean No Harm-I Am A Friend - Tritse (TREET-say)

I Am In Love With A Human - To hisna rendi-to fan sesmuna

I Am In Love With A Mermaid - To fan in nulma with a setanim

Fourth Order Mermish

   Almost 2000 years later, in the decade of 2000, the Fourth Order of Mermish was devise by Kristin when she was under the spell of Mermish that gave her the full abilities of the Mermish language and used those abilities to elevate her lover, Katara to becoming Mermish like herself. Frightened, she and Katara left Spirit Lake and tried to ignore the song that was calling them back to the water. Kristin spoke Second Order Mermish to Steven, Bobby and Ryan at Holiday and altered their brains with the song as they crazed to hear more of it. With a glimpse into the future, Kristin saw the death of everyone if she did not give in to the song and made the sacrifice by writing all the words of Second and Third Order Mermish for the camp to learn…this opened her brain to True Mermish as it began to take over her brain as she was having identity issues.

   Loowit saved her from her fate and gave her the ability to control the energy however, that brief exposure to True Mermish was enough to damage Kristin’s identity as she struggles with a few basic human words and self identity, speaking in the terms of we or us and her sense of direction unusable to others besides herself. She blocked out the Mermish for a few days until the combine emotional energy release made the song unbearable and she was knocked out and was conditioned like the rest of the campers.

   Days later, Kristin began to write the rules of the Fourth Order of Mermish and how to write and speak the language that would become to capstone of speaking while underwater; however, having evolved beyond True Mermish, she can speak telepathically in normal English without the limitations Mermish gave to her.

RULE ONE - 4th Order Mermish is any Human word with the Mermish tongue trilling all the vowels in a fluid rhythm.

RULE TWO - All vowels are double except for words that begin with a vowel and will be written with an extended trill.

Example: ENGLISH ‘My Love Is The Sea’ translated into MERMISH ‘My Loovee Iiis Thee Seeaa.’ The only vowels that do not double are the letters: U & Y.

RULE THREE - Speaking Mermish in the 4th Order while underwater with the same sentence is to remove all 20,000 hertz letters leaving only the vowels. We add hyphen’s to the sentence to carry out the words in rhythm:

ENGLISH ‘My Love Is The Sea’ translated into 4th ORDER MERMISH ‘My Loovee Iiis Thee Seeaa’ translated into MERMISH ‘y~ooee~iii~ee~eeaa’.

RULE FOUR - Speaking Mermish in the 4th Order while underwater with the same sentence, removing all 20,000 hertz letters leaving only the vowels and adding emotion sounds. The emotional trills are (ih, ae, uu, sh) and are connected to the matching letters before a trill.

For example: ‘y~ooee~iii~ee~eeaa’ would turn into ‘y~ooee~(IH)’iii’(IH)~ee~eeaa’(AE)(SH) with the letters SH always at the end.

ENGLISH ‘My Love Is The Sea’ translated into 4th ORDER MERMISH ‘My Loovee Iiis Thee Seeaa’ translated into MERMISH ‘y~ooee~iii~ee~eeaa’ translated into EMOTIONAL MERMISH ‘y~ooee~ih’iii’ih~ee~eeaa’aesh’

RULE FIVE - Speaking Mermish in the 4th Order while underwater with the sane sentence, removing all 20,000 hertz letters leaving only the vowels, adding emotion sounds and now song sounds. This is the hardest part of Mermish to learn and equally hard to speak! We work with the most common song letters (Pa, Whoosh, Ba, Ooww, Drr-drr, Www-ooo, Hummm) and typically only one song is picked per conversation in regard to the oceans conditions or with there are other Mers around. Typically when Kristin sings, her trade sounds that identify her is huming…the easiest a Mer can do. All of hyphenated ares are filled with trill and would look like this: ‘hmm’y’hmm’ooee’hmm’ih’iii’ih’hmm’ee’hum’eeaa’aesh’hmm’ and can repeat over and over until her message is delivered. If another Mer joins the song, Kristin would drop Rule 1 through 4 and just trill with alternating ‘hums’.

It isn’t uncommon if the message is long to change the song to signify a break in the sentence. And example of this would be:

‘hmm’y’hmm’ooee’hmm’ih’iii’ih’hmm’ee’hum’eeaa’aesh’hmm’hmm’hum’ooww’y’ooww’ooee’ooww’ih’iii’ih’ooww’ee’ooww’eeaa’aesh’ooww’

   And if you have a whole pod of Mers all signing, you can have an idea of the solo turning into a harmony. This is why Mer’s prefer to keep their conversations to a minimum.

(Had To Re-up This Post Due To Being Flagged For Image Due To New Rules)

[kinetic-elaboration]

The 100 Ask Game

Tagged by @thelittlefanpire --thank you! This looks like fun.

Soooo okay, first, full disclosure: I haven’t watched S5. I stopped watching toward the end of S4 for Reasons. So there might be a little bit of salt and/or confusion in some of my answers. But only a little; this blog is still a positive space and it is, of course, Show Night: a big fandom night regardless of my personal participation.

1. What Station on the Ark would you be from?

Hmm. Well I have farmers and factory workers in my family but I don't know which end of a wrench is up myself. I guess I'd probably be from one of the stations we know nothing about like Hydro or Tesla. It would be cool to be from Mecha but I'm not a mechanical person in the slightest lol.

2. What would you get arrested for on the Ark?

Probably theft. I'm not a thief in real life but I do like eating and comfort and I'm p. sure the only way to get anything above subsistence-level rations on the Ark is to do some law-breaking.

3. Would you take off your wristband when you landed on the ground?

I'm too much of a rule-follower to do it on my own but I would definitely be a sucker for Bellamy's "take off your wrist band as payment for some delicious puma meat" plan. To heck with this silly piece of metal, I want to eat.

4. What would the necklace Finn would make for you look like? (Clarke: deer/Raven: a raven duh..)

Some sort of large cat. Or small cat, not picky.

5. If you could resurrect any MINOR character who would it be?

If Wells counts as a minor character, then Wells. Otherwise...perhaps M'Benge. He looked like a promising delinquent.

6. Create a squad of 5 characters to go on missions with. Who are they?

Bellamy, Clarke, Raven, Jasper, and Monty. This is partly practical--I do think they're the smartest/most capable members of the group--but also partly about the Narrative. They're my favorites.

7. What Grounder Clan would you belong to you?

I guess Trikru based on where I live? Or again, some clan we know nothing about. I don't know anything about Trikru's non-warriors so perhaps I could be one of them.

8. What would your name be in Trigedasleng? (example: Octavia=Okteivia…just make it up!)

Skipping this one because I don't give my real name or any variants online, sorry.

9. Thoughts on Finn? Some people hate him, and others love him, so I’m curious

Okay. My general thought on Finn is that he had an appropriately sized role in the narrative--which is more than I can say about a lot of other characters, many of whom, imo, were either killed too early, or too late/not at all when they should have been, or who take up way too much screen time, or are given way too little for their worth. But Finn contributed decently well to the first season--sometimes oddly, in that, once he outlived his usefulness as a love interest, he was shoe-horned into a Peacemaker role that probably should have been Wells's. But at least he was contributing a needed and consistent POV. And while I go back and forth a bit on how realistic I find his season 2 breakdown... I think it is more realistic than not, at least narratively. He seems like the sort who would have a breakdown after a battle, and the short timespan of 2A makes it more likely, not less, to me, that he would spiral quickly into something so atrocious: no time to cool down, to get perspective, to heal. Also, he had a completely unique story, which is also pretty rare on a show that likes to reuse its plot points. (Sorry! It does though.) I can also honestly say that Finn's death and funeral still ranks as one of the most resonant and heartbreaking moments of the series, for me. I have a hard time with any sort of capital punishment story line usually but I really felt for this one and I think it was very well done.

So basically what I'm saying is that I think Finn was decently well used as a character--like B+ narrative role, docked for the random interest in peace and the occasionally annoying nature of his personality. Because he could be annoying. He and Clarke didn't have much chemistry and he and Raven had surprisingly little, too, given how important they allegedly were to each other. And one of the good aspects of his death was that, not only was the event itself well-constructed and moving, but he wasn't exactly missed, by me or by the story, after he was gone. He served his purpose. I'm glad he wasn't on the show longer. (Except for that post speculating on a Finn/Murphy redemption arc/love story, which I would have watched and cheered on for sure.)

I don't hate him, though, and it does annoy me a little that he almost always shows up in fic as the 2d villain, the shitty ex/boyfriend, the annoyance. I mean, I get the appeal of having a readily available character like that (ngl I've used him that way at least once myself) but like.... it's not my fave trope, let's put it that way.

10. Be honest. How willing would you have been to take the chip without knowing all the horrible things it does?

I've thought about this some, not so much as it pertains to me, but in comparison to some other Failed Utopia plots in other fiction, and because my sleeping beauty au involves Clarke taking the chip, and it was very hard for me to bring her to a place where I felt like she could realistically, and in an in-character way, make that choice. But it's also been a while since I watched S3 and it's difficult for me to remember at what point different aspects of the CoL became obvious to the characters. Certainly, I can see the appeal. I think anyone can. It's an interesting concept and one I actually wished had gotten more time in the show... I think anything that obviously perfect (live forever in a wonderful city, away from pain and death and hardship!) should immediately cause warning bells: what's the catch here? Taking the chip without knowing the answer to that question is an assumption of the risk sort of situation, except you can't predict what the risk is, and the stakes are enormously high. Not exactly smart, and I like to think I am smart. I also have a great fear of AI and VR, which would make me wary.

On the other hand, I'd do poorly in the impoverished landscape of the post-apocalypse, which might make the chip more tempting. Also, if ALIE and friends tortured me or someone I loved, I would take the chip like that. No question, I am weak.

11. What character do you relate to most?

I relate to the intensity of Jasper's feelings, and to Monty's method of shutting down emotionally as a survival mechanism.

Generally I wouldn't say I have much in common with any of the characters, though, and I don't really watch because I 'relate' to anyone, personally.

12. What character do you like the least?

My first instinct is to say I dislike a lot of the characters, which is true but... I also spend almost no time thinking about the ones I dislike. My fandom experience at this point is very much about retreating into the aspects of the show/canon/fanon I like, and ignoring everything else. That said... probably M/di and J/rdan because the whole concept of a Next Generation down from the delinquents offends me, and also because they're both so universally loved that it's quite hard to avoid them. Also b/c J's name corresponding to that of my fave character makes blacklisting really obnoxious lol.

13. Describe your delinquent outfit. (Would you wear something like Murphy’s jacket with the spikey red shoulder patch or have a trademark like Jasper’s goggles? Be creative, yet practical)

Mmm, something comfortable. A nice jacket, like Clarke or Bellamy's S1 jackets, or Jasper's pilot jacket. Nothing with weird patches like Murphy's S1 or Jasper's S3 jackets. A shirt with something interesting written on it like Jasper's Earth Day shirt. Big boots. A nice heirloom necklace. Multiple layers. Knitted wristlets like Clarke has in early S1. A sweater with thumb holes like Monty has in S4.

14. Favorite type of mutant animal?

All the mutants! I really feel like the show missed some good opportunities in the irradiated-animal department. Take some $$$ from the explosion budget, or the Boring Side Character payroll, and invest in some more two-headed beasts. But if I had to pick one, I'd say Lincoln's two-faced horse, because the image of him saving Clarke and Finn in late S1 is so underrated but so iconic.

15. What would your job be on the Ark?

I don't think I have many useful Ark skills. Archivist, perhaps? Member of their proto-justice system? Probably that, though I don't know what sort of jobs, specifically, make up that unit. Though I have some ideas; see: a fic I haven't yet actually written.

16. Would you have willingly pumped Ontari’s heart if Abby asked?

Gross. But probably if I had to, I'd force myself to.

17. If Lexa wasn’t Heda, but she was still alive then who would have made the best commander?

I gotta tell you, I literally do not care, nor have I have ever cared, about the commander or Grounder leadership in the slightest. They all seem pretty incompetent. They should cede their power to the Sky People, who are marginally less terrible at running things.

18. How would you act if you ate the hallucinogenic nuts like Jasper and Monty?

You'd never know from my obsession with alternate states but I have never been high, nor intoxicated in any way, so I really can't say. Hopefully calm and happy like M'Benge in the broom closet. But probably miserable and confused and afraid of my inability to corral my thoughts.

19. How would you have dealt with Charlotte’s crime? A more John Murphy approach or Bellamy Blake approach?

Interesting question. I actually think the Charlotte story line was one of the best of S1, probably the show as a whole, and I kind of wish it had played out more long term, instead of just being, in retrospect, more of an excuse for some drama. I mean that is one of the central dilemmas of a new society, as the dropship camp was starting to be at that time: what do you do with people who break the rules and/or are dangerous? They had roughly three options: execute the wrongdoer (which eliminates the problem pretty efficiently, if brutally); ignore the issue entirely through immediate forgiveness; or apply some punishment in between, like imprisonment. This situation in particular was more complicated because, first, technically, they had 'no rules' at the time (killing is just, uh, obviously wrong), second, the actual perpetrator was a child, and third, she was so obviously unstable as to seem a likely continued threat. And in addition to all THAT, Bellamy and Clarke were such tenuous leaders (Clarke wasn't really a leader at all, so really I should say Bellamy was a tenuous leader) that any option that didn't go along with the will of the majority could cause a complete break in legitimacy. So it's really a delicate scenario. One I can't say I have an answer to.

I will say I think banishment is literally the worst thing they could have done, for either Murphy or Charlotte, if she had lived, and I think the narrative bears this out. It looks like a good compromise but it's cruel and it's dangerous. Cruel because they have to assume the banished person would die in the wilderness, and if you believe he deserves death, shouldn't you just execute him? Have the courage of your convictions? Take on the full moral weight of your decisions? A hanging death is probably less awful than slow starvation or being eaten by a wild animal. And dangerous because if he doesn't die, he's an obvious target for...who's that? Your enemies in the woods? Which is exactly what happened? They brought that whole bio-weapon story line on themselves, tbh. I think it was an in-character decision for a couple of dumbass kids, but that's not the same thing as saying it was smart.

I like to think I would have sided with Bellamy early on, in being careful about what information goes out to the camp as a whole. I mean, it's not perhaps the most moral decision, but it's practical--and certainly inciting a riot, as Clarke ended up doing, is neither practical nor moral, so there's that. If the actual perpetrator had been found before Murphy was caught up in the mess... I guess some sort of middle-ground punishment is the best you can do. Imprisonment, shitty work shifts. Showing consequences for bad actions and trying to keep the group safe. Hopefully if there was enough tact in the beginning of the process, the crowd could be convinced to go along with it. I don't know, though. It's tough.

20. Who should have been the Chancellor, if anyone?

Bellamy.

Bellamy, Bellamy, Bellamy.

Honestly, watch the first season, or even, arguably, the first three, and tell me that ultimately becoming Chancellor wouldn't be a neat, logical, and emotionally satisfying conclusion for Bellamy's arc.

Obviously, it would take him some time to get there. Before then... I don't know. If I had to pick among one of the former Chancellors, I'd go with Abby I suppose.

21. Would you have been on Pike’s side like Bellamy or on Kane’s side? Or Clarke in Polis?

Oh gosh they're all terrible lol. I guess I'd pick Kane as the least of the three evils. He certainly was in the right once Pike's anti-Grounder agenda went into play, but I don't exactly think he had the ear of the people prior to the election, which is why I'm not enthusiastic. But, still. You gotta get through the Dark Times to get to Chancellor Bellamy, I guess.

22. Mount Weather had a lot of modern commodities. (example: Maya’s Ipod) What is the one thing you would snatch while there?

I'd grab up some interesting books. Possibly a stuffed animal because I like soft things. A nice piece of art.

23. What would your Grounder tattoos look like? Hairstyle? War paint?

Lol I don't care what universe we're in, I'm never getting a tattoo. Hair: probably something simple and loose. War paint: pass, as I wouldn't be a warrior.

24. Favorite quote?

I suppose Jasper's quote about wounds needing to heal before they become scars.

25. If all of the characters were in the Hunger Games, who would have the best shot at winning?

I've never read or watched the Hunger Games but I'm nevertheless going to say Raven. She's just been the deus ex machina too many times.

26. Least favorite ship? Favorite canon ship? Favorite non canon ship? NOT INCLUDING CL OR BC OR BE

Least favorite: M/rper

Favorite canon: ummmmm idk not excited by most canon ships tbh. Probably Jasper/Maya, maybe Mackson or Briller.

Favorite non-canon: Jonty

27. A song that should be included in the next season? If there had to be another guest star like Shawn Mendes on the show, who would you want to make a cameo?

HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLF DURAN DURAN

Lol, Idk. Something poppy and 80s would amuse me, though. In part because the show needs to take itself at least 75% less seriously.

I don't have any opinions on cameos.

28. What would you do if you were stuck in the bunker with Murphy for all that time?

Hopefully make friends with Murphy.

29. You're an extra that gets killed off. How do you die?

Something painless and quick?? I don't know. Poison?? Nice dramatic non-bloody death?

30. A character you’d like to learn more about and get flashbacks of?

JASPER. OBVIOUSLY.

...Lol I think this question is really about plausible character flashbacks and if so.... well first off ANY flashback about the Ark is 100% my thing, and flashbacks about almost any delinquent would be great. We're still not in the realm of the plausible, though, imo.

Raven, perhaps? Always want more Raven.

31. A character you’d bang?

Raven. Even though she'd intimidate me a lot.

Monty (as an adult, ofc).

A lot of the characters are bangable tbh. Might be faster to name those I wouldn't...

32. Would you stay in the Bunker? Go up to Space? Or live on your own in Eden?

Uhhhh none of the above??

I suppose the bunker. (This answer is based on the concepts of bunker/space/alone on Earth, not what actually happened in S5.)

33. In the Bunker, would you follow Octavia? What would you do to pass the time underground?

Read a lot and make friends. Idk if I'd follow Octavia since I just don't have enough data on the season... but from my understanding of her recent arc, probably not.

34. What crime would you commit in the Bunker that lands you in the fighting pits?

???

35. Up in Space, who would you bond with first? Who would be the most difficult for you to get along with?

I wouldn't last a year in space with such a small group of people but hopefully Raven and I would hook up before I spontaneously expired.

36. How long do you think you would last on Earth by yourself?

Definitely less than a year.

37. When the Eligius ship lands what do you do?

Eligius ship? I don't know her.

38. Favorite Eligius character? Least favorite?

???

39. Would you Spacewalk?

No. But actually. Probably yes. I'd totally freak out about the idea, swear a million times I'd never do it, then get cajoled into trying by my beautiful girlfriend Raven, and I'd love it so much I'd immediately want to do it again.

40. Would you prefer to eat Windshield Bugs, Space Algae, or Bunker Meat?

Algae?

41. Would you start a war for the last spot of green on earth? What would your solution be to avoid it?

There's no way I'd make it this far in the narrative in real life. I didn't even get there in fictional life.

42. Would you rather dig out flesh-eating worms or stick thumb drives into bullet holes?

I guess the thumb drive thing sounds less disgusting.

43. Are you willing to poison your sister for the Traitor Who You Love? What would you do to stop Octavia?

I don't have any siblings (well, no siblings with whom I have a real sibling relationship) so, yeah, sure, why not lol?

44. Would you go to sleep in cryo or stay awake like M/rper?

Leave my body behind on Earth, please, where it belongs.

45. Who are you waking up first to explore the new planet?

New planet? I dunno what that means lol.