#i had the idea for this and managed to bulldoze through drawing it all without losing motivation halfway through

[journey-to-the-attic]

one thing about ik is that she will always reach out

[rhysismydaddy]

Unholy Matrimony Pt. 5 (Nessian)

Damnation Series

Parts 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 

____________________________________________________________

~Cassian~

A week later, I’m exceptionally proud to say I haven’t given in yet. No matter how much I want to.

Tensions the past seven days have been... high, to say the least.

Both of us are doing our absolute best to drive the other insane.

She’s doing it so I either sign the deed and give in or turn to someone else, both which would give her Sera back.

I’m doing it because if I have to suffer, she can bet her pretty ass she does, too.

Ironically, tonight’s our engagement party. A celebration of our undying love and an announcement to the world the Russians and Italians of New York should no longer hate and murder each other.  

They’re allowed to be sexually frustrated as hell, but no, they can’t kill each other.

I’m waiting for the little minx who’s spent the week making me regret ever even asking for the club, drinking bourbon so I’m too drunk to even be tempted by her--which is likely enough to kill me--when she finally deigns to grace me with her presence.

I take one look at her, starting at the high blonde ponytail that would wrap around my fist at least twice and ending at the very high, very red shoes I immediately want by my shoulders.

“Fuck.”

Obviously the reaction she was looking for, she smiles.

Her dress is a cream color thing that clings to her curves and is short enough to showcase her long legs. It’s somehow classy, while low enough to draw my eyes to her breasts as she comes down the stairs towards me.

Nesta stops right before me, close enough I smell the jasmine and vanilla of her skin, and looks at me through her lashes.

I turn my gaze to the ceiling, vowing to keep it there until I trust myself to not do something stupid like tell her she’s the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen.

“I’m so fucked,” I mutter hopelessly.

If possible, she comes closer, sliding all the interesting, female parts of her against me. “You would be if you just gave me back my shit.”

I glare down at her. “I don’t like to lose.”

“Would you really be losing?”

I keep my mouth shut, because the answer to that question is a big fat no. God, she’s good.

“Tell me again why you refuse to put us out of our misery?” I ask in return, trying to remind myself who the fuck I am.

Even though I wonder if it is our misery. I can’t read her, can’t tell if this is affecting her like it is me.

She gives me a cold look. “What do you see happening after we get married, exactly? You think you’ll work a few hours at the club I spent three years building from the ground up, come home and eat a home cooked meal, then fuck your complacent little wife however you want?”

I have no idea what to say, because when she puts it like that, I sound like the biggest douche in the world.

Nesta sees the hesitation in my eyes and rolls hers. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I allow you to disrespect me like that, stronzo.”

“I respect you,” I say immediately, meaning the words.

“Just not enough to value my career.”

“Nesta-”

“Deal with it. If you somehow keep the board from voting you out in the next two weeks and manage to not sleep with me--which is unlikely, considering the way you look at me--the club will be yours.” She takes a step back, steeling her spin. “But I will not.”

I’m conflicted as hell, torn between wondering if she’s just playing me or being sincere.

Apparently done with the verbal smackdown, Nesta spins towards the door.

Hand on the handle, she turns back around and cocks her head. And then she answers the questions I hadn’t realized I’d been too scared to ask.

“No and yes.”

My brows raise. “What?”

“No, it hasn’t all been just me trying to mess with you. Yes, I want you as much as you want me. But I respect myself too much to allow someone who blazes into my life and steals something from me without a care or even a real negotiation to have my body, too.”

She walks out the door, leaving me standing in the living room stunned.

I eventually follower her down to the garage and we leave for the party Rhys is hosting for us downtown. But even though I go through the motions once we arrive, my mind is on the woman next to me the entire night.

I hate admitting it, but she’s right.

I took something that belonged to her, didn’t even question talking to her first, then acted like she was in the wrong for doing whatever she could to get it back.

I’ve said I like how strong and independent she is, but I tried to take that independence and turn her into something else. I bulldozed my way into her life, then acted like I was the one inconvenienced by it.

And seriously, why am I even fighting for this place? Yeah, I like it and think it’s unique, but the place is above board. Which to me translates as boring.

The past two weeks, I’ve had to go to investment meetings, deal with sending out the nightly invitations for entrance, and plan events for upcoming holidays. Things I never do with my other properties.

I hate managing things--I hire people to do that kind of thing for me. But I know I can’t hire someone, because who the hell besides my fiancé would do the job right?

No one.

I realize that on the drive home, and it gets me thinking. By the time we’re inside the apartment, I’m already mentally finalizing the details.

I tell her I have to take care of something, go to my office, and close the door.

Then I pull up the marriage contract, along with the deed to Sera, and hit print.

~Nesta~

A week after our engagement party, I realized I’ve started to lose hope.

Cassian’s managed to wrangle or bribe or threaten the board into not voting him out, and the employees have stopped calling me to ask when I’m coming back. He hasn’t touched me or tried to seduce me in six days--probably a record for him--and I start to feel like I’ve lost.

My club will be his in a week, and after we’re married, only him signing the deed over will get it back. Something that will never happen, considering it’d be a serious hit to his pride to do something as weak as give me what’s rightfully mine.

My club will be his, but like I said, I won’t.

Which honestly is just as upsetting.

Even though he’s a stubborn, boneheaded stronzo with a big enough ego for us both, it’s hard for me to overlook the moments of the past three weeks that haven’t revolved around Sera.

Little moments that have made it harder for me to pull away from him.

He’s made me laugh more than anyone I’ve ever met, whether with his foul sense of humor or stories about his violent, wild childhood. He stopped leaving the toilet seat up when I pointed it out. He hasn’t said a word about me ordering take-out all the time or working in bed while he tries to sleep.

He even dealt with one of Alexei’s buyers for me when they tried to renegotiate the price originally agreed upon.

And he hasn’t really pressed the celibacy thing. Sure, he’s complained about it enough for me to want to smack him, but I don’t know any other Made Men, Russian or Italian, that would’ve respected my wish after how much I’ve teased him.

If he would just-

I cut that train of thought off and focus on the report in front of me, because at this point, it’s obvious he won’t.

I sip my wine, which is starting to grow on me, and look over shipment records from one of Alexei’s yards, flagging crates that need to be smuggled instead of brought in through the main channels. Repressing a groan at the thought, I realize I’ll have to go down one night this week and make sure they arrive without problem.

I take another long pull from my glass.

“Drinking to forget?” Cassian asks, leaning in the doorway of the bedroom and looking me over.

I shrug, not much in the mood for banter.

“I got you something.”

Sighing, I reply, “Yeah, me too. It’s on the nightstand.”

His brow furrows as he walks over and picks up the ring box, opening it to look at the titanium band inside.

Just another symbol of our lifelong, happy, sexless marriage.

He puts the ring back in the box and extends a hand. “It isn’t a ring.”

“What is it?”

“Get your ass out of bed and find out.”

I would, except I don’t want to. And I don’t really want whatever stupid, materialistic thing he’s bought me-

He closes my laptop and pulls the cover back, ducking when I swing a fist towards his head. “Violent little wolf,” he teases.

“Stop calling me that,” I demand, trying in vain to keep the blanket on me so he can’t tell I’m not wearing anything underneath the t-shirt I stole from him.

He pauses, sighs, and scoops me up, blanket and all. “I love watching you fight how much you love me calling you that.”

“I don’t have to fight anything except he overwhelming urge to smack you.”

Cassian just huffs, walking us out of the room, through the living room, and into his office. Then he puts me down, smacks my butt to get me moving, and grunts when I elbow him in the ribs.

“Maybe this will fix your bad mood,” he mutters, flipping the light switch on and bathing the office in golden light.

I take an involuntary step forward, eyebrows going high on my forehead.

I’ve only been in here once before, just long enough to notice the obnoxiously big desk and wall of windows behind it. I’d taken in the black leather couch and wing-backed chairs, determined it was a typical male office for a typical male, and vowed to work somewhere else.

But that was a while ago, and it’s obvious he’s done some home improvement.

There are decidedly now two desks in the corners near the windows, angled in to the middle of the room where two cream-colored leather chairs sit. The desks are identical, mahogany and classic without being ostentatious.

A rug covers the hardwood floors, a deep maroon color that matches small details throughout the room.

It’s beautiful.

Cassian leads me with his hands on my shoulders to one of the desks, and I let him guide me around to the chair and push me down in the soft leather.

I look up to ask him what this is about, but he jerks his chin to the desk where to two papers lie.

One is the deed to Sera.

A rush of surprise goes through me as I see he’s transferred the building back over to me, even going so far as to deem the process irreversible. It’s signed and dated a week ago, the night of our engagement party.

My eyes are shiny as I look at the other document and read through it.

“What is this?”

“A partnership, of sorts,” Cassian explains, leaning a hip on the- my desk like he did in his Capo’s office. “You’re now a partner at my businesses, and if you sign, I’ll be yours.”

My eyes find his, and I see that he’s serious but still choke out, “What?”

He smiles and shrugs, like signing over half of your life’s work is easy. “You had me pegged when you first saw me and figured out I’m a fighter. I hate everything about running a business except the in-person negotiating and knitty gritty shit. It’s boring to me, and while I can do it, I’m not nearly as good at it as you are.”

“Cassian-”

“So run them both. I’ll do the day to day shit I know you hate, and you’ll do the rest.”

I can’t hardly process what he’s saying.

“What if we disagree?” It’s a valid question, considering we’ve basically been fighting the entire time we’ve been engaged.

“We talk about it and try to figure it out. And if we can’t, the original owner has the final call and veto power in all situations.” His eyes say he knows how important it is to me as he says, “You’ll still be in control of your property, and I’ll still be in control of mine.”

I don’t know why I’m still asking questions, because it sounds great, but there’s one more thing I want to know.

“Why?”

He sighs, sitting on the desk fully and looking down at me with open, honest eyes. “Because I’m tired of doing this shit alone. I’m tired of going to work and dealing with every single thing and then coming home and having no one who understands.”

He looks out the window, shoulders tight. “I thought you’d be like my friends’ wives, which is why I was such an ass. I thought you’d be just another thing for me to take care of, and I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to realize you could be my partner, not just my wife.”

His eyes are back on mine, the heat in them making my heart pound. “I’m sorry, Nesta. I’m sorry I stole Sera in the first place, then refused to hear you out and give it back. I have a tendency to be a little stubborn.”

My lips twitch, and his eyes soften at the sight.

“But what you said about respecting yourself stuck. I don’t want you to feel like I don’t respect you, because I do. You’re smarter than me, cool when I’m rash, and have the mind for business I never have.” He smiles softly. “I know you’re just as alone as me, and just as tired of it. So say yes.”

I feel a smile on my face as I get to my feet, moving to stand between his thighs. “Are you just doing this so I’ll sleep with you?”

He sighs, dropping his head in shame to rest against my chest. “You caught me.”

My arms wrap around his shoulders, his going around my waist, and I use the opportunity to play in his hair. It’s so soft and curly, and he makes a content sound as I run my hands through it.

“Are you saying yes, little wolf?” he murmurs against my collarbone, dropping his head to rub his face across my breasts.

I roll and tug his hair to keep the randy bastard away. “Yes, pervert, I’m saying yes.”

Cassian smiles a big, goofy smile so ridiculously charming I lean in and kiss him.

His hands lock at my waist, resting on the curve of my back, and for a moment, he just lets me kiss him.

It isn’t our first kiss by any means, but it’s the first one where neither of us have ulterior motives, so I take my time.

I kiss his top lip, his bottom lip. Find I like them both equally.

My hands work across his shoulders, the thick muscles contracting under my hands, and I sigh his name.

Cassian’s hands fist in the fabric of my pajamas--which happen to still be his shirt--and draws me closer. He kisses my neck, inhaling deeply.

“You smell so fucking good,” he mutters, biting down softly and making me gasp. “It drives me crazy.”

His hands slip to the back of my thighs, then I’m on his lap, knees on the desk next to his hips. “You drive me crazy,” he clarifies.

He kisses me again, hands sliding up my thighs to my ass to grind me against him. Callouses scrape against my skin as he sweeps the shirt off and tosses it behind me.

“Shit,” he murmurs, eyes dropping to take me in.

The fact that he’s still fully dressed while I’m in nothing but my underwear makes me feel even more exposed, doing strange things to my mind. I start unbuttoning his shirt while he kisses down my chest.

He teases one with his hand while he takes the other in his mouth, swirling his tongue around the peak. I squirm, pressing my hips more fully against is, but he holds me still, kissing and teasing me until I can’t take it anymore.

“Cassian,” I murmur, tugging his hair to pull his gaze to mine. “Thank you for the desk. I love it.”

His brows furrow, and I can see him start to think about how much I’ve teased him, but before he can worry that’s what I’m doing, I whisper, “Now fuck me on it. Please.”

A muscle in his jaw flickers, and his fingers dig into the flesh of my hips.

Before I can say another word, he stands and spins us around, sliding me on the desk. He holds my thighs around his hips, and then an idea seems to dawn.

“Wait right here.”

“Seriously?” I ask, even though he’s already half-way out of the room.

“Don’t you dare fucking move!” is the shouted response.

I roll my eyes, but he’s back quickly, holding the red stilettos I wore to our engagement party. I howl with laughter, and a faint blush colors his cheeks, but he stays firm in his desire and puts them on the floor beside my feet.

Then he leans against the window and watches while I slip them on.

His golden eyes blaze as I lean back on my elbows and slowly spread my thighs, in nothing but lace panties and heels.

“I’ll buy you all the desks you want, if you sit on them like that.”

Laughter bubbles out of me, and he’s suddenly on me, leaning over me to kiss me in a frenzy.

I rip his shirt open, and he doesn’t even break the kiss as he throws it to the floor. I hear the telltale clink of a belt, and then he stands up to slide my panties down, grab my legs, and guide them up.

I feel him brush over the center of me, instinctively lifting my hips to give him a better angle.

But he doesn’t give me what I want.

Cassian just stands there, gaze gliding from the hells on his shoulders to the apex of my thighs.

“Hold that thought,” he mutters, dropping to his knees and putting his mouth on me before I can even blink.

My back leaves the desk, a gasp escaping me.

“Cassian.”

“I want you to come on my tongue, then you get to come on my cock.”

“Cassian.”

He hums, the sensation sending shivers down my spin. He kisses me like he’s doing it for him, not me, mouth on every part of me it can reach.

I can see the lines of his tattoos on his shoulders, the top of his curly hair. It’s too much to handle, so I just lay back down on the desk and throw my hands above my head to hold on to the edge of the desk.

The only time he stops is to tell me things that apparently can’t wait five minutes, but I don’t even care because every word out of that sinful mouth makes me burn hotter.

“Come for me,” he demands breathlessly a few minutes later.

“Don’t boss me around,” I groan, even as I do exactly what he wants.

He lets me ride it out, dropping kisses to my thighs and stomach and hips.

As soon as I catch my breath, he’s on his feet, putting me in the exact position I was in earlier.

And then he’s pushing inside me, and I honestly almost come again from the feel alone. “Thank God,” I groan, the past three reminding me of the misery teasing him put me through.

“Fucking hell, you’re perfect.”

Hands on my thighs, he holds me in place as he starts to move. But as he picks up speed, going harder with each thrust, his hands have to slip to my thighs to keep me still.

I say his name, sounding like I’m begging him for something, and he groans. His head’s thrown back, bare skin shining and making him look likesome sort of beautiful devil.

“Hurry up, little wolf,” he almost pleads.

The sound of that stupid fucking nickname does me in, and I come with a loud moan. I would’ve kicked him in the head if he hadn’t immediately dropped down on top of me to kiss me without abandon.

His hips still but he keeps kissing me until he has to break for air.

I’m boneless and limp beneath him, and he looks me over with male satisfaction.

Then his mouth drops open, betrayal in his eyes, and he says, “I just realized you didn’t speak even French! All these weeks of me fucking fantasizing about that... well, I guess we’ll just have to do it again.”

“Accorde moi un instant,” I pant in French, asking for a moment.

He grins down at me. “Take your time. We have a lifetime.”

My lips twitch, and I don’t stifle the urge to smile.

I’m about to say something, but then his expression turns serious. “You realize I have to fuck you on my desk now. Equality and whatnot.”

I laugh and pull his mouth to mine. “As long as you know I’m still not giving you my side of the bed.”

He tugs on my bottom lip with his teeth. “We can share.”

~

We get married seven days later, surrounded by a crowd of family, dirty politicians, thieves, drug and arms dealers, and friends.

In the past week, we’ve solidified our business model to a thing of perfection. I handle public relations, real estate and development, and negotiations for the shipping business. Cassian handles both the Bratva and Cosa Nostra soldiers in New York, training new recruits, drug distribution, and negotiations for the arms business.

Basically, I do what I’m good at, and he does what he’s good at.

I know it’s ridiculous to trust someone with half my business after only a month of knowing them, but like Cassian said, I was tired of doing this shit alone.

I’d been dreading the future, dreading taking over and doing everything myself. And now I don’t have to.

I have him to lean on, him to trust.

Looking up, I notice him watching me as we dance, not at all paying attention to the crowd. “What are you thinking about, little wolf?”

“I’m thinking how I thought of this marriage as nothing but an alliance at first. I guess it still is that, but... it’s also more.” He spins us around to the music, watching me with a knowing expression. “You’re more to me than that. And I’m... I’m happy. Working with you and the thought of our future makes me happy.”

He smiles. 

“You love me,” he states with quiet confidence. 

My heart starts pounding, because I’ve never told a living person that before. 

But it’s never been true before, and it is now, so I respond steadily, “I do.”

“I love you, too, Nesta Orlov. Have since the moment I saw you.” He sounds so relaxed about it, the words falling from his lips so easily.

“Doesn’t it scare you?” I ask, not understanding how he’s the calm one all of a sudden. 

“Anything you love something, there’s the risk you could lose it or it could hurt you.” Cassian brushes a thumb over my cheek. “But I could never be scared to love you.”

I shake my head and start to say something, but he cuts me off. 

“Every morning, when you wake up, there’s this little moment where you look around, confused. And then you look at me, and that hesitation in your eyes just... melts.” He dips me, wrapping his arms tight around me. “You look at me like you trust me, and love me, and want me.”

He presses a soft kiss to my lips. “That look is worth every risk and hardship and whatever else loving someone entails.”

I kiss him back as he brings us to standing. “Italians are such saps.”

He shows off the smile I’ve realized he only gives me, and I say the words I know he needs to hear just as badly as I did. “I love you, Cassian. You’re worth the risk, too.”

______________________________________________________

THANK U FOR READINGGG soft ending for the win

[weaverofthreads]

On the process of writing a novel...

Ok, so this began as a DM to a very dear friend who had said they were super excited to work on a novel of theirs that they'd abandoned for years, but they felt a bit lost when looking at the project again. They had "too many characters, too many intrigues" and they didn't "know how to create order" for all their ideas. They didn't know "what to keep, what to remove, what to change" and wanted to know if I had any tips.  

I began to reply in messages and then realised I needed to make a whole post out of it, so here it is! All 3k words of it. This is for you, darling! I hope it helps.

Things I found extremely helpful when planning my novel for NaNoWriMo this year, after also taking some time off from it.  

Most of this comes from Alicia Lidwina’s Four-Part article on her NaNoWriMo prep process, and setting up a writer’s notebook, for 2018. You can find the link to the first part here and I highly recommend you check out the whole series of articles for a more in-depth read. 

Content of this ‘essay’: 

Preparation, Groundwork, and Materials

Project 'Stats' & Overview  

Mood, Moodboards, and Key Imagery

Things to Consider, and Important Bullet Points

Get to Know Your Characters  

Chronological Order

Tangential and Preceding Events

Basic Premise, Plot Definition, Sub Plot Ideas  

List of Locations

Scenes

Chapter Outline

NaNo Plan

Additional Notes and Tips for Writing

Ok. Let's begin.  

First of all, I'm not saying that this is the only way to write or organise a novel. It can be tackled in as many ways as there are writers in the universe. This is just the method I used to get my ideas crystallised and organised. 

Preparation, Groundwork, and Materials.  

Take your preparation seriously. I bought a cheap but still nice A4 sketchbook with blank paper for maybe £2 at the local hobby store, and used it solely for the purposes of being my Novel Notebook. It doesn’t have to be a pretty, perfect, Aesthetic(TM) journal at all. Its function is to act as a route-guide through the process.  

I bought a cute sticker from Etsy and used it as the front cover design so that I liked the book and that it felt a little bit special, without being too intimidating to put a mark in. Then I left the very first page blank, and opened it to the first double page. On the left, I wrote ‘Contents’ and then moved on to the right and wrote ‘Project Stats and Overview’.  

I used a pen that was comfortable to write with, which for me was important. I’m a very tactile person, and having nice paper and pens (not necessarily fancy), made the process feel good.

Project Stats and Overview

This is the bare bones of the book, and includes details such as:

Project Working Title: (in my case it’s Weaver of Threads)

Targeted Wordcount: (to give yourself an idea of the scope, but it’s not necessary. For me it’s 50-100k)

Genre: (for me, fantasy)

Series: (will it be one book or more? For me, probably more than one, and at least two).  

Inspiration: (here you can jot down all sorts of things which inspire your world and your writing, and it can be anything. In my case, I began with “density and lore, and feeling of being grounded in a real world from LOTR and Tolkien.” And I went on to include other writers and novels in the fantasy genre, as well as elements from our own world, such as Mongolian herding communities and way of life, the history of the Persian Empire, and Renaissance Florence!).  

Project Timeline: Give yourself a structure, and be realistic. If you know you’re a slow writer who’s prone to distractions, be generous, but if you’re someone who responds well to short deadlines, tighten the time frame up a bit. I said “November 2020 - November 2021 for the whole manuscript” because I know I’m a procrastinator who gets dejected if they shoot past intense deadlines….

Editing Deadline: December 2021-January 2022. I know I can edit fairly quickly, so I made this one much shorter.  

Main Requirements Prior to Starting: What do you need to get sorted before you can get going? It could be purchasing a laptop or figuring out a magic system. In my case, it was the latter.  

What Happens in your novel?: This is not ‘what do your characters do?’, but what, in one sentence, actually happens in the book. For Fellowship of the Ring, you could say ‘a diverse group of people assemble and set off together with the goal of destroying the Ring’. LOADS more stuff actually takes place, obviously, but that’s probably the key thing that happens in that book. So, write the same thing for yours. I’m not going to tell you what happens in mine, because that would spoil it :).  

That took up the first A4 page of my writer’s notebook, and after that, I moved on to Mood and Key Imagery. 

Mood, Moodboards, and Key Imagery

On the left hand side of the page, I wrote down the words and concepts that sprang to mind when I thought of the novel itself. These were in no particular order or placement — just a random cloud of ideas in a rough column on the left hand side of the page — and they included: history, mystery, love, friendship, betrayal, nostalgic, homesick, sense of belonging, sense of place, searching, closeness, secrets… etc. etc.

Then on the right hand side, I wrote down five key words that I wanted to associate with the novel. These would form the ‘visual aesthetic’ in the background of my mind, and could be very easily expressed with a moodboard.

This same process (writing down words and creating a moodboard) could be achieved on a website like Pinterest. Take your time with it, find the right visual clues that really match the essence of your story, and create a final mood board with a limited number of panels that will be your novel’s ‘true north’ when it comes to feelings. If you're artistically inclined too, you could draw sketches of things relevant to your world too.  

While this stage is really important for solidifying the feeling and mood of the novel, don’t get stuck here and spend forever procrastinating on Pinterest or whatever. Once you’ve crystallised that ambiance, it’s time to move on. It’s also perfectly fine to come back to this at a later stage if you find yourself running out of inspiration or drifting a bit. Daydreaming, drawing, mood-board-ing are all great ways to work on your novel on days when you don’t feel like writing.

Things to Consider:

Alicia Lidwina asked herself some questions which helped me get past the ‘block’ that I’d created when thinking about the novel, and those were:

What scares me about this story? (in my case it was the scope of it - it was easy for me to get lost in over-thinking tiny details and get too overwhelmed to handle the big picture)

What will readers take away from it? (in my case, I hoped that it was a sense of friendship, people from desperate cultures finding common ground, and a sense of being grounded in a real, tangible world.

What is its selling point? (essentially, why would an agent/publisher choose yours over the next one in the pile?). Don’t be bashful about this. This is your notebook, so if you’re proud of a feature or aspect of the story, write it down. In my case, there is no ‘Big Bad come to destroy the world’, no Chosen One who is the only one who can stop it. There is an antagonist, but it’s on a personal scale, and that’s the selling point. It’s about two people going on a personal journey to uncover a lost piece of knowledge that’s arguably not all that world-changing on its own, but which means the world to them.  

What will be the three biggest issues in writing the first draft? Identify the three biggest roadblocks, and then take a bulldozer to them. For me, it was time management, getting mentally stuck, and the sheer darned effort of it becoming overwhelming!

Important Bullet Points  

These are five key facts about your novel, distilled from the sections above. They include: What’s at the heart of the story? How long is the story? What’s the narrative focus of the story? What are the maximum number of main characters? And the maximum number of supporting characters (this obviously doesn’t mean you can’t have other, less important characters too!)?  

Relationship between the two main characters is forefront

50-100k words

The novel’s focus is on the characters’ main goal (had to be more vague here so I didn't give it away)

2 main characters

3 supporting characters  

If you find you’ve got too many main characters (not necessarily a bad thing to have a lot of characters - look at A Song of Ice and Fire after all!), then figure out whose story you want to tell here. You can always write another story with other characters in a connected novel, or a sequel. You don’t have to tell everything all at the same time.  

Speaking of characters… 

…Get to Know Your Main Characters:  

Here you can write character sheets for each of your main characters and cast. There are hundreds of these templates available on the internet, asking questions like ‘how would your character react to [insert event]?’ etc. to get to know your character. If this isn’t your thing (it isn’t mine) then at least write down some useful information about them. Rough height and weight, hair, eye and skin colour, general temperament, and any other defining physical or mental traits. 

Next came the Chronological Order

This does not have to represent the final order of the novel’s structure, nor the order in which you write the manuscript, but you need to know what happened within the timeline, and when, in order to be really clear when you’re telling the story. You can write the manuscript out of order, and you can tell the story with flashbacks or in a different order, but you need to have the underlying chronology securely in place so that your writing makes sense and so that you don’t confuse yourself or the readers in the process.  

Preceding and Tangential Events

These don’t need to be in the novel itself, but it may be important to define the sequence of events that also led up to the moment where we pick up your story, and what is happening elsewhere so that you can be sure of these too. In my case, I defined the events that concerned one of the supporting characters’ lives so that I knew how and why they were at the point they are in the story. It relates directly to - and heavily influences - the events of the novel, so I needed to have this person’s history nailed down as well, even though I don't tell it all explicitly in the book (because that would be unnecessary and a bit dull).  

Basic Premise, Plot Definition, and Sub-Plot Ideas (plus writing a synopsis)

Alicia Lidwina defined the story premise helpfully with the following formula:

Story Premise = Main Character + Desire + Obstacle

Pick a different colour for each of these components, and write a short paragraph to explain them in the context of the novel. Alicia Lidwina used the following:

[Main Character] “Harry, an orphan who didn’t know that he’s a wizard, [Desire] got invited into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and wanted to live his school life to its fullest, [Obstacle] but a certain Dark Lord who killed his parents is trying to rise into powers again and kill him in revenge.

Do this for your novel, and keep it really short.  

Plot Definition: This is even shorter than that! It’s a single sentence!! It’s most closely tied to the desire of the character, and lies at the heart of the story. It’s most likely a distilled version of the ‘what happens in the story’ from the Project Stats page, so check that to see what you wrote there.  

Sub Plot Ideas  

Five bullet points (no more) for things that are happening concurrently and which are related in some way to the main story. For me, Kae and Tomas are doing their research, so that’s the main theme, but beneath that there are a few other related incidents.

Writing a Synopsis - developed out of the points in this section, and includes:

Who the main character is

What the stakes are (the story premise is your guideline)

What the main plot line is

How the MC resolves the problem in the main plot line

How the book ends.

List of Locations  

Start with the main ones and add to it as you go on. Write a little bit of information about them so that you have something to refer back to. I also drew a big old map which I found very helpful and also really fun to do.

List of Scenes

It’s very important to map out every single scene that happens in the novel. Use your timeline to help with this, but remember a scene is not necessarily a chapter. You can have more than one scene within a chapter, but try not to have too many.  

I used small post-it notes (sticky notes) and wrote down things like “M joins K’s clan at the fire and K learns about magic” and “K studies at Citadel, intro to Citadel, magic, and characters” as separate scenes. Once you’ve written down everything that is going to happen (this will take some time! Get a drink and some snacks ready, and go slow), you can stick them into your notebook in the order you’d like to tell the story. Some chapters may have just one scene, while others may have two or three. I didn’t have more than two in any of my chapters, and actually ended up splitting some scenes that I’d made too vague in this section into more chapters. It doesn’t have to be set in stone, but it will form a road map.  

Additions and Notes:  

I left a section of the Scene Outline bit of the notebook blank for things to add in as I went along. I haven’t used it yet, but I might.  

Chapter Outline

I arranged the scenes into the chapters already by sticking them in order, but you could do a chapter outline separately after this. It’s up to you. 

NaNoWriMo plan:  

I did this back in October, and wrote down the main goal for nanoprep, which was to finish the background info. Breaking that down further, I listed - magic (how does it work exactly), geography, and politics. 

After that, it was just a case of writing the 1667 words a day. *spoilers, I got distracted and didn’t do NaNo this year* . What I should have done, was break it up into chunks and write down my goals so that I had something tangible to use as a road map, and I will be doing that now for the novel as I take it up again outside of NaNo. Having check boxes and manageable goals really works for me. Find what will work for you, and if it turns out not to, adapt!

Some final pointers and tips:

Set regular goals for yourself. Whether you work by saying ‘I’ll write 1000 words a day’ or ‘I’ll write something every day’, make a structure for yourself. If you slip and miss a day, week, or month (I didn’t meet NaNo this year because I chose to work on another project instead *slaps forehead*), don’t beat yourself up. Writing is a craft and it takes a long time and a lot of discipline to master a craft.  

Your first draft does not have to be good. At all. Your first draft is just words on paper. A first draft is the block of marble taken from the quarry, and subsequent edits and reworking is the process of carving the sculpture itself. The editing that is done by the publisher or the professional you employ to edit it for you later, is the final polishing. Don’t be demoralised if the block of marble seems very rough when it first lands in your studio. That’s ok!  

Take regular breaks. Writing is hard work, and most people can’t concentrate on something successfully for longer than 55 min's, and if you’re doing that, you’re already doing really well. Personally, I’m at 15-20 on a good day. Write in little sprints of ten minutes or so, and then get up and stretch, look out the window, maybe leave the room, come back in with a fresh approach.  

Stretch your hands, and wear wrist braces when you work. Seriously. I gave myself tendinitis on my first major project, and couldn’t use either hand properly for weeks. The ones I have are these, and they allow me to work safely for much longer.  

Keep hydrated. Have a bottle of water on the desk in front of you between your arms as you type and sip it, otherwise you’ll forget. 2 litres a day is usually recommended, but know your body and drink accordingly.  

Treat yourself. Whether that’s something as simple as a decadent hot chocolate after your first chapter/chunk/sprint is done, or a new notebook or a pen or that sticker set you wanted on Etsy or literally anything nice, reward yourself for the hard work you’ve put in, with tangible things you can look at or experience and say ‘I have that because I did the work’. It’ll help with your sense of achievement, especially if the project is a long one.  

Join a local writer’s group for feedback. With the current Covid-19 chaos, this is probably not possible right now, but getting constructive feedback on your work from someone who hasn’t been cocooned in the project in the way you are, but who respects you as a writer and wants to help you grow, will be invaluable. It’s too easy to exist in a little isolated bubble and think you’re doing ok, when in reality you could be creating bad habits which will be difficult to break later. By these, I mean things like ‘filler words’ you don’t realise you use, or other pit-falls it’s easy to tumble into when you can’t see the wood for the trees…It’s intimidating, and it might take some courage to work up and do, but I promise it’ll help you grow. You don’t have to do what the people suggest, but it’s great to get outside opinions all the same.

Submit work to writing competitions. This will help with showing agents and publishers later down the line that you’re not only committed, but hopefully talented, and will help you to push yourself. Use the world of your novel for the setting, and get to know it by writing short stories on the competition’s theme set there.  

Read. Read the writers you admire, and read them ‘actively’ - figure out exactly what it is about ‘that’ sentence that made you shiver, and use the same techniques in your own work (don’t plagiarise, obviously, but if it was alliteration that made the sentence work so well, use it yourself! Perhaps it was the metre of the line? Great, now you know a rhythm that will drive a sentence forward or slow it down etc.)

Enjoy it. If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, it’ll show in the work. Take a step back if you start floundering, and ‘interview’ yourself about why it’s not fun any more. Refer back to the sections in the notebook that helped to clarify the plot/process, and see if you’ve wandered away from them. Make yourself answer questions like: ‘What is the main reason I don’t want to do this?’ ‘What is the character’s motivation?’ ‘Should I scrap this section?’ (don’t delete it, but cut and paste it into another ‘scraps’ document, and then start afresh from the last place you were happy with. Nothing is wasted - it all goes into building the world and getting to know the characters, even if it doesn’t get explicitly told in the finished product, so don’t be afraid to do that last bit).  

Good luck!

I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions or things you’d like to add to this, please feel free to send me an ask here on Tumblr.

If you’re a new writer hoping to get an agent or publisher, you might also find this post on ‘talking to a published author’ helpful or interesting.

If you would like to keep up to date with my own novel’s progress, you can follow me here on Tumblr, as well as on my writing Instagram @rnpeacock

[ghostofstudentspast]

Obligatory (part 3)

Series masterlist

Warnings: a panic attack in the first half.

I am BACK! I finished this baby up this morning and while I won’t be posting as frequently anymore because of college I’ll still be posting/finishing up all my wips!

For the first time in your life, you would have given anything to stay at Hogwarts during the Holidays. Your house had lost its warmth and instead every shadow started to look like a ghost to you. Your father only left his study for dinner, where the three of you sat in uncomfortable silence as knives and forks scraped fine china. Your mother seemed light years away. She could often be found cleaning things unnecessarily, staring off into the distance and only ever casting you soft smiles that didn’t reach her eyes.

You could feel how the weight had shifted in the Pureblood community. Everyone was on edge and keeping secrets from each other. Christmas was a lackluster event in your house this year. Your mother had insisted on a tree and family dinner, but things felt strained. Not at all like the laughter filled Christmases you remembered growing up. Your mother had purchased an absurd number of expensive gifts, as if that would make up for the lack of holiday spirit. Clothes and jewelry and expensive quills littered the dresser in your bedroom and you didn’t want to touch a single item.

“Darling?” Your mother’s voice broke through your absent thoughts. “We’re expected at Malfoy manor in thirty, are you ready?”

You were perched on the edge of your bed, hands clasped in your lap to stop them from picking at the dark red material of your dress. You were vaguely aware of your mother coming to sit next to you on the bed and taking your hand in her own. Her fingers were warm and helped pull you back down to earth.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I didn’t think-“she took a breath and didn’t continue.

All you could do was nod numbly as her thumb stroked the back of your hand. You hadn’t noticed your hand had been shaking until now. Raising your head to meet your mother’s gaze you saw how red her eyes were, how the purple bags were still prominent despite the makeup covering them, how she had faint tear tracks running down her cheeks.

“I know.” Your voice cracked as you nodded again, this time stronger.

“He’s going to be there tonight.” There was no need to say much more, her eyes betraying the fear that could never be voiced out loud.

“I’ll be good,” you offered her a lifeless smile, “I promise.”

The terrifying thought of seeing the Dark Lord in person hung over you all the way to Malfoy Manor. Stepping into the cold atmosphere of the ballroom did nothing to loosen the knot in your chest. Where once the parties thrown here had been lively, full of music and wine and chatter, now it was filled with hushed whispers and something stronger than wine.

“Can we talk?” Draco had appeared at your side like a shadow.

“No.” You didn’t meet his eyes and made to step away from him when a hush fell over the room.

There he stood, dark robes and snake slithering around his feet. The Dark Lord.

“My children,” his voice was high and sharp, “I’m so happy to see so many of you here tonight, proving once again who is loyal to our cause.” you doubted he had ever been happy in his existence.

As if he’d heard you speak his eyes locked on yours. A horrendous red colour, eyes like a snake, bored into your very existence. Your skin crawled and you felt like you might throw up at any moment.

“And our lovely bride and groom to be,” a smile creeped its way onto his face. It was less a smile and more a grimace. “The first in the new generation to follow in their parents’ footsteps. Wise.”

His eyes bored into yours and you could feel his magic pouring into your head. Pushing through your thoughts forcefully. Your heart rate sped up and your breathing hitched. The only thing that reminded you where you were was Draco’s hand resting on your lower back. You pushed all of your thoughts towards the back of your mind and focused on his finger tapping ever so slightly against you. You shot a glance at him and thought you saw his head shake the tiniest bit.

Legillimency, you could feel the Dark Lord prying at your memories. You knew he couldn’t go there, couldn’t know how disgusted he made you feel. You clenched your teeth and thought about the contract, you thought about marrying Draco, pushed the idea of loyalty forward with bile rising in your stomach.

“Continue with your festivities,” he finally broke eye contact and turned his eerie smile to the other guests as your shoulders drooped.

You felt exhausted. Like someone had just ran a bulldozer over your brain. He’d walked through your mind, through your thoughts. You’d never felt more exposed then at that moment.

“Excuse me,” you muttered to Malfoy and turned on your heel to slip away through the crowd of people.

Walking faster than normal you tried not to break into a run as your breathing became unsteady and panicked. You threw yourself into the large bathroom down the hall and threw the door shut before sliding onto the floor and letting out a painful sob.

Tears were streaming from your eyes as you desperately tried to control your breathing. He’d violated your mind. What if he’d seen something dangerous, you’d be endangering not only yourself but your family and friends. You sobbed pathetically, drawing your knees up to your chest and moving into the farthest corner of the room, away from the door. A soft knock at the door only added to the panic filling your veins. You shook your head and covered your ears, unable to breathe. Unable to tell them to leave you alone. Not even your sobs were audible anymore as you fought with your thoughts.

“Hey, hey, you’re okay, he’s gone.” the voice was soft and kind and broke through your thoughts. You shook your head and kept your eyes squeezed shut. “Breathe Y/N. In through your nose, out through your mouth.” the voice repeated until you did what it said. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth.

Your breathing was shaky and didn’t quite fill your lungs but slowly you managed to control your air flow. Tears still running down your face and falling into your lap you uncovered your ears and opened your eyes. Across from you sat the last person you would want to see you like this.

“You’re okay.” Draco spoke softer than you’d ever heard him speak. You nodded, and he offered you a sympathetic smile. It wasn’t pity, instead it held understanding. “I get them too.” He confided without meeting your eyes.

“It’s new for me,” your voice was hoarse and sounded foreign to your ears. He nodded in understanding as you closed your eyes again, rubbing them with the palm of your hands, makeup smudged across your cheeks.

When you opened your eyes again Draco was gone just as quickly as he’d came in. The bathroom floor felt just a bit colder as you dropped your head back against the wall.

When you arrived back at Hogwarts the following week Draco made sure to give you space. You were grateful he hadn’t brought up the Christmas incident again and from the lack of pity in his friend’s eyes, you didn’t think he’d told them either. You did notice that he spent more time looking at you these days. He always wore an unreadable expression and his eyes still held a sharp calculating look but this time he was observing you.

It took a few days of him watching you for you to get fed up and resolve to talk to him. This is why you were currently following him out of the potions classroom and down the hall farther into the dungeons. He stopped about halfway to the Slytherin common room and rounded on you, arms cross and one blond eyebrow raised.

“Stalking me Y/L/N?” his lips almost quirked up into a smirk.

“Christmas, you said you wanted to talk to me,” you raised your chin, so you could look down your nose at him, “so talk.” If you kept up your snooty pureblood persona around him, it was easier to pretend he hadn’t seen the most vulnerable side of you.

“Right,” he let out a short laugh and shook his head, “I was going to tell you that I found something interesting in the Manor library over the break. It’s definitely not something we want to try as a first option but if you’re this desperate,” he dug through his bag and fished out an old leather-bound spell book.

“You found something to break the contract?” Your demeanor perked up and your eyes zeroed in on the book in his hands.

“Maybe,” his voice held an unspoken warning, “again, this is very much a desperate man’s last resort. Or in this case desperate woman.” He added seeing you fidget with your sleeves as he held out the book. “Don’t try anything without me.”

“Yeah, no of course not.” You snatched the book from his hand and immediately opened it to where Draco had folded the corner of a page. Skimming the title quickly you found your stomach rolling in unease, “This is blood magic.” You looked up at him with a frown.

“Yeah, which is why I don’t have high hopes for two underage wizards working it out safely.” He grimaced, “read it for yourself.” He motioned towards the book and turned to keep walking to the common room.

“No wait, Malfoy,” you chased him, still holding the book open to the folded page.

“I have bigger fish to fry Y/L/N,” he kept walking, his long strides taking him much faster than yours, “if you’re desperate enough to try blood magic, you know where to find me.” He sighed and left you standing by yourself clutching the book between your hands like your life depended on it.

Finding a free spot on a windowsill near the common room you began to read. The cold frost on the window had your wrapping your robed around you tightly as your eyes flicked between the pages. Blood sacrifice for magical contracts. No. Blood bonds and magical contracts. Also no. Breaking magical contracts with blood. Ah, that’s the one.

Magical contracts are rarely breakable. The witches and wizards who enter in a magic bound contract will be tied by said contract for the remainder of their lives. The only way to exit out of such a vow is for either party to pass on (ghosts cannot be held to a magical contract).

“I don’t want to kill him,” you rolled your eyes and kept reading.

It is therefore possible to trick the magic bond by imitating death. First, one or both parties must provide a vile of blood to be spilled on the original document. Second, one or both parties must take a dose of Draught of Living Death (instructions on pg. 66) and a half dose of calming draught (instructions on pg. 80) note; the users blood must be infused with both potions. These two potions will bring the user into a two-day long death-like state. This along with spilled blood on paper will render the contract useless as ‘one party will have passed on’ very briefly.

WARNING: taking too much of these potions or using too much blood can result in irreversible damage including but not limited to; loss of memory, narcolepsy, weakened magic, blood clots, death, etc.

You closed the book and stared at the cover as you tried to process what you’d just read. Basically, there was a very slim chance that you’d be able to pull this off and a very large shot at accidentally inflicting lifelong damage. Or death.Unfortunately, in all of your time spent researching, this was the only viable option you had come across.

How much are you willing to risk to break this contract?

Series Taglist: @xkonpinkx @detroitobsessed @follow-me-down-to-wonderland @pointlesscoconut @irlkell @thehumanistsdiary @mo-onstarrs @summer-writes @aplaintart @jjjmaybank

[natromanxoff]

Queen live at Colston Hall in Bristol, UK - November 18, 1975

x

The photos could be from either night.

This article from the November 29 issue of Sounds chronicles the second night in Bristol.

Queen triumphant

QUEEN ARE the type of group that make a man want to abandon rock writing. They pose questions and never provide answers. They exist in their own space-time continuum, visible and audible but keeping their secrets to themselves.

On the surface they couldn't be a nicer bunch of people, but they carry English reticence to an epitome. It isn't, as Geoff Barton said two weeks ago, that they're boring, it's just that they're reserved. Or in writer parlance, they don't automatically provide colourful copy. All my instincts as a writer tell me that there is a great story in that band, but after two nights with them I'm hardly any the wiser.

Skin tight

That their insularity has a lot to do with them being one of the most amazing heavy-metal and/or rock bands in Britain - with all the signs that they'll end up monsters on the order of Zep - is fairly obvious, but just how much bearing it has on the matter is hard to say. The enigmas they might pose mightn't even have answers.

Is there any logical reason why they present an image and persona straight out of the Beatles school of interlocking chemistry?

John is reserved, almost nonchalant on stage, as if it's all in a small, personal joke. When asked how he saw himself within the framework of the band he replied, with a small smile, "I'm the bassist".

Roger is his opposite, the cheeky sidekick in a Clint Eastwood movie, and attracting a lot of cheesecake attention in America and Japan.

Freddie is an original - one of the most dynamic singers to tread the boards in quite a few years. His attraction is obvious.

Brian is perhaps the biggest enigma of all. What is this seemingly frail, gaunt astronomer doing on that stage, striding purposefully and blasting diamond-hard rock? They're all equally strong personalities - like the Beatles there's no one major focal point. Ask four fans who their dream Queen is and you'll get four different answers.

Queen have been busy lads these past few months. Having disassociated themselves from their former management and joined with John Reid, the fourth album was seen to. Reid decided that a tight schedule wouldn't cause them undue harm, and figured on two months to record before embarking on this current tour.

Only Queen are driven to better each previous album - which at this stage of the game is obviously producing some excellent results - and 'A Night At The Opera' turned into a saga - culminating in 36-hour mixing sessions in an effort to allow at least a few days for rehearsal. In the end they managed three and a half days at Elstree with four hours off to videotape the promotional film for 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.

Their first few dates had not been without errors and the quartet were still not feeling totally comfortable their second night in Bristol, fourth night of the tour. You'd never know it, though.

Like all other aspects of the group, the stage is sophisticated. A black scrim provides a backdrop bounded by a proscenium of lights both front and rear. At each side the p.a. rises like a mutant marriage of Mammon and Robby the Robot. Amp power is readily evident but the most extraordinary is Brian May's subtle set up: nine Vox boxes stepping back in rows of three. The only packing crate visible is holding a tray of drinks, and you may rest assured that no roadie will rush, crawl or lurk across the stage while the show is in progress unless it's to rescue Freddie's mike from the clawing crowd.

As the auditorium darkens the sound of an orchestra tuning up is heard over the p.a. The conductor taps his baton on the music stand and a slightly effete voice welcomes the audience to A Night At The Opera. The Gilbert & Sullivan portion of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' follows, a brief glimpse of Freddie is allowed, and then in a blast of flares and white smoke the blitzkrieg begins.

Roger is barely visible behind his kit, just his eyes and tousled locks. John is wearing a white suit and playing the-man-who-must-stand-still-or-it-will-all-blow-away. Brian is slightly medieval in his green and white Zandra Rhodes top, while Freddie is...

Around his ankles his satin white pants flare like wings - fleet footed Hermes. Everything north of the knee is skin tight - tighter than skin tight - with a zip-up front open to AA rating. But further south, definitely in X territory, lurks a bulge not unlike the Sunday Telegraph.

There have been sex objects and sex bombs, superstar potency and the arrogant presentation of this all-important area, but never has a man's weaponry been so flagrantly showcased. Fred could jump up on the drum stand and shake his cute arse, leap about and perform all manner of amazing acrobatics, but there it was, this rope in repose, barely leashed tumescence, the Queen's sceptre. Oh to be that hot costume, writhing across the mighty Fred!

Phallic

Freddie is not pretty in the conventional sense of the word; like Mick Jagger of '64, he is his own convention. Also like the Jagger of the time, his stage persona and action is unlike anything else. Although it borrows - like most of the group's plagiarisms - slightly from Zeppelin, in tandem with Freddie's supreme assurance and belief in himself - he always refers to himself as a star - it explodes into something that is a constant delight to watch.

He reacts to his audience almost like an over-emotional actress - Gloria Swanson, say, or perhaps Holly Woodlawn playing Bette Davis. At the climax of the second night in Bristol he paused at the top of the drum stand, looked back over the crowd and with complete, heartfelt emotion placed his delicate fingers to lips and blew a kiss. Any person who can consume themselves so completely in such a clichéd showbiz contrivance deserves to be called a star.

Freddie's real talent, though, is with his mike stand. No Rod Stewart mike stand callisthenics here, just a shortee stick that doubles as a cock, machine gun, ambiguous phallic symbol, and for a fleeting moment an imaginary guitar. He has a neat trick of standing quite still in particularly frantic moments and holding the stand vertically from his crotch up, draw a fragile finger along its length, ever closer to the taunting eyes that survey his audience.

Their show contains lots of bombs and smoke, lots of lights, lots of noise. They fulfil the function of supremely good heavy metal - i.e. you don't get a second to think about what's going on. When they do let up for a few minutes, it's only so you can focus in on the bright blue electric charge crackling between your ears.

Bulldozer

Dominating the sound is Roger's drumming, a bulldozer echo that bounces like an elastic membrane, meshing with your solar plexus so that your body pulses in synch with the thunder. Tuned into that, everything else is just supremely nice icing.

For three days rehearsal, after eight months off the road Bristol was extremely impressive. In speculative mood I quizzed people on how long they thought it would take to headline Madison Square Garden. I was thought a radical at a year and a half. John Reid smilingly assured me it would take a year.

That Queen should end up with John Reid is an entirely logical proceeding. Everything about Queen demands that the world eventually kowtows at their feet in complete acquiescence - so big that bodyguards have to accompany them at every step. Well, no - they found that an annoyance in Japan, but, you know, huge.

Such status demands a Reid or a Peter Grant, and whatever the causes for their leaving Jack Nelson and Trident, an elegant group like Queen is going to look for a man with class. Reid found the idea of managing a group interesting, and having to deal with four strong personalities a challenge. He only concerns himself with their business and ensuring that the year ahead is mapped out. In January they begin a jaunt through the Orient, Australia and America, by which time it's March and they begin preparations for the next album.

Reid's prediction of a year was proven highly credible the next evening in Cardiff. The band had still not paused from the rush up to the tour and spent most of the day relaxing and sleeping - no doubt a factor in their near recumbent profile. Also, unlike most groups, they were keeping their dissatisfaction with the show to themselves.

They stopped off at Harlech TV on the way to see a cassette of the video for 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. The general consensus was quite good for four hours, with much laughter during the operetta. Brian finds film of the group educational - the first time he saw himself was a Mike Mansfield opus for 'Keep Yourself Alive' - "It was 'All right fellows, give it everything you've got but don't move off that spot.' It was terrible." You don't like Mansfield, eh? "Oh, I hate him - we all do... I was horrified when I saw it - I couldn't believe we looked that bad. I looked very static - seeing myself has taught me a lot about stage movement. Some of the things I do are planned for effect, but it's mostly just feeling the audience and communicating that back to them."

Arriving at the motel - several miles out of town - Freddie immediately fell asleep, John held court of a sort, joined later by Brian, while Roger went jogging, a daily event when touring. Tuning in to rock via Bill Haley and Tommy Steele, he became a drummer because he was better at it than guitar. All through school he was in bands; he only went to dental school out of "middle class conditioning, and it was a good way to stay in London without having to work". His mother thought it a bit strange when he opted for a career as a rock star, but she doesn't worry too much now.

The concert starts in much the same manner as the previous night, but there are signs that tonight is work, with posing an afterthought. The endings to most of their songs are magnificent and majestic, especially 'Flick Of The Wrist' and the rapid harmonies of 'Bad Boy Leroy Brown'.

Maniacal

The audience, seeing their faces in town for the first time, are vociferous in their appreciation. Guys know all the words to every song, yelling enthusiastically at every effect and solo. The band picks up, Freddie receiving the crowd beneficently, telling them they’re beautiful.

As the show builds it is obvious that things are gelling more. The previous night Brian had seemed totally out of place, not moving too much, taking solos with the weirdest half blank half possessed stare, talking to himself; cocking ear towards guitar. He was the proverbial stranger in a strange land, one step removed from the plane inhabited by you and me.

Tonight he moves fluidly, the gonzo lead guitarist of a gonzo band. His expressions are just as maniacal, but it only makes him look more demonic. His solo in 'Brighton Rock', an exposition in riffing and echo, is a treat because of his physical response to both music and audience, complete with ham acting. Freddie gets into the same game on 'The Prophet's Song', where he conducts an acapella madrigal with himself. It's a pretty commanding moment.

It’s soon after this that Madison Square seems reasonable. About a minute into 'Stone Cold Crazy' it becomes very obvious that Queen have suddenly Plugged In. Found the metal music machine and Connected. Freddie's movements explode in perfect unison with the music, the lights and surroundings go crazy, and the audience goes berserk.

Freddie asks for requests and receives a roar out of which one can vaguely make 'Liar'. Fred walks along the stage, nodding, agreeing he will do this one and that one while the kids roar on. "I'll tell you what - we'll do them all!"

'Doing Alright' opens slow and portentously. Queen's variation of light and shade is one of the major factors in their popularity, but even so the quiet sections frequently find the audience's mind wandering. One kid starts getting a joint together, totally forgetting it when everything blasts off again; guys talk among themselves, only to instantly leap to their feet, fists flying to the beat.

'Doing Alright' changes into a cha-cha beat, Freddie snapping his fingers, the coolest hipster in town, and then instantly drops into faster-than-light drive - the whole row next to me leaps to their feet as a man, rocking back and forth as Brian roars into a blinding solo.

Two songs later, in 'Seven Seas of Rye', the kids break - very fast - and in five seconds half the audience is a seething mass in front of the stage, climbing on each other in pyramids, sudden openings appearing as a splintering seat sends a few bodies to the floor.

The rest of the show is equally intense, especially for a couple of minutes during 'Liar; where Fred and Brian merge into a tight little triangle with Roger while John stands in front of the bass drum, staring out with his small smile.

Freddie has treated his encores - 'Big Spender' and 'Jailhouse Rock' - differently on successive nights, once appearing in a kimono and in Bristol with rather rude tight white shorts, giving the song title new emphasis. In Cardiff, though, he doesn't bother to change at all. Later it transpired that Brian had twisted his ankle during 'Liar'. While he’s attended to, kids out front pick up chair slivers to keep as mementos.

On the bus back to the hotel Brian sits quietly at the back, chatting with two girls. John sits at the front, as always. Freddie stares out of the window, lost in his own world. Roger bounces around, starts a pillow fight with Brian - which stops as soon as Brian scores a direct hit to the face - then discovers an eight track of 'Sheer Heart Attack', punching it through the channels as he conducts the group. The two hours towards which they have channelled the day's energies are spent.

Ambition

That Queen have become a top attraction through a fair degree of plagiarism is amusing. Stealing is nothing new in rock (or any art for that matter) and mostly Queen use the borrowed material better than the originals. That they would be big I don't think anybody really doubted. All four have immense desire to be successful, and that kind of ambition will keep them slogging until they achieve it.

But there are popular heavy metal bands and there are popular h-m bands. From watching Queen's audience it is apparent that Queen speak for them in a way that bands such as the Who and the Stones and the Beatles spoke (and continue to speak) to their audience. Uriah Heep may be great at what they do, but five years after their demise who'll remember them? Creedence Clearwater Revival demonstrate the same thing - who remembers them? And yet five years ago they were the largest band in the world.

Queen will probably always be remembered, because as their tour is beginning to demonstrate, they have the ability to actualise and encompass the outer limits of their sense of self-importance. Queen and their music, presentation, production - everything about them says that they are more important than any other band you've every heard, and who has there been, so far, who has objected? Certainly not the 150,000 people (plus 20,000 a day) who bought 'Bohemian Rhapsody' in the first 20 days of its release. Certainly not me.

See you at Madison Square Garden.

[text © J. Ingham 2007; photos © Kate Simon]

~ You can see the photos which was mentioned on the article, from the link on the title. ~

[miracul0us-multishipper]

Welcome to the back (Part 16)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Shoutout to @loosescrewslefty for coming up with a wonderful name for Cat!Felix! It sounds great!

- - -

Felix’ heart was racing as they ran down the abandoned corridors. Everyone else must have escaped already, or at least found a safe place to hide because they hadn’t seen a soul on the entire floor. It was dead silent, except for their exhausted panting and the distant rattle of chains.

“In here!”, Marinette commanded and threw open the door to a janitors closet. With her other hand, she ripped off one of her flats and threw it down the hallway. Before he could ask what the hell she was thinking, she pushed him into the small room and closed the door behind her. The rattling of metal links came closer and they held their breaths. There were small slits on the bottom of the door, to let the air circulate. Felix dropped to the floor, trying to see what was going on.

Cathexis shadow was visible first, followed by its caster. His chains carried him through the hallway like servants their prince, their clatter and the creaking of his armor far too loud in Felix’ ears. Was it his imagination or were there... less chains than before? Some looked shorter than the others, for sure.

The Akuma looked around.

“Marinette~!”, he called in a playful singsong. “Come on, show yourself!”

The metal snakes swirled through the air, ready to pounce at the slightest movement.

“I’m not mad, I promise!”, the delusional boy continued. “You won’t be in trouble if you come out now.”

One chain came particularly close to the door and he could feel Marinette tense. His own heart seemed to hammer in his chest, so loud he wondered how Cathexis didn’t hear it. If he found them now... they were lost.

Luckily, it was this moment that Cathexis noticed the shoe further down the hall. Immediately, he went to investigate.

“Aw, did the princess lose her shoe? I should bring it back to her, don’t I?”

With that, he disappeared around a corner. They sighed, the pressure on his lungs lifting like fog. They were safe, for now.

“Clever.”, he commented as they walked out of the closet. “The shoe trick, I mean.”

“Thanks.”, she replied, looking around the corner to make sure he was gone. “He’s obsessed with his fairy tale happy ending, so I figured drawing on popular tropes might distract him.”

She took his hand - he was grateful for that, even though he wouldn’t admit it - and guided him towards the stairs.

“We need to get out of here. Maybe we should split up-“

“Absolutely not! I won’t let you out of my sight until Ladybug arrives.”

Marinette twitched, but didn’t fight him. He could’ve sworn he heard her muttering “Oh boy” under her breath, but right now, he didn’t care. There was No Way he’d leave this reckless mess of selflessness to herself!

“This way.”, she directed him to a glass door. The elevators were obviously a bad idea - trapped in a small space during an akuma attack? No thank you! - so the stairs were there only option.

“I don’t get it. Why Cathexis?”, she murmured to herself. “I mean, it’s probably a Cat-pun, but the rest is nonsense. And why chains? Is Hawkmoth running out of ideas?”

He shrugged, remembering all the books about Psychology he’d read before starting school. For once, his encyclopedic knowledge of random topics seemed to be useful.

“Cathexis is a fancy word for neurotic hyperfixations.”, he explained. “Freud’s original term was “Besetzung”, Possession in English. It describes the investment of emotional or mental energy in a person or object.”

He remembered what Cathexis had done with his glowing chain, and how Lila had looked after being infused with his light.

“Maybe that’s what he did to Rossi. He did call it an investment, didn’t he?”

“It might also be a pun.”, Marinette mused. “Cat-hex-is, because he... well, hexed her.”

“Now I’m kind of jealous.”, he murmured grumpily. “Hawkmoth gave him a deep, psychological phenomena as inspiration, and with me? He named me Sentiquill and called it a day! Favoritism at its finest.”

Marinette giggled.

“If it makes you happy, I liked your costume more. Black suits you.”

Her eyes sparkled mysteriously at that, as if she knew something he didn’t. He would’ve asked if he hadn’t been so busy hiding his red cheeks.

“Let’s hurry up.”, he said to distract her. “We still have twenty floors to go, and-“

“Wait!”, she hissed and he froze. There were footsteps audible from further down, lighter than Cathexis’s and without the metallic sound that always accompanied him. He held onto Marinette a little tighter when the person leaned over the railing of the stairs to look up at them.

“Chloé?”, Marinette asked and relaxed immediately, sighing in relief. “You’re okay! I thought Cathexis caught you.”

The blonde girl grinned untypically widely and Felix tensed.

“Marinette!”, she chirped and raised her hands to her mouth. “There you are.”

She took a deep breath, then started to shout.

“I FOUND HER!”, Chloé yelled loud enough to shake the doors, making Felix jump.

“She’s under his control!”, he realized. “That’s why there were less chains than before!”

The one he’d used on Lila had disappeared as well! He startled when a door two floors above them flew open. Cathexis maniacal cackling echoed through the staircase.

“Run!”

Marinette didn’t need to be told twice. She ripped open the door closest to them and raced through, Felix followed suit. They dashed down the corridors and halls, Cathexis laughter close behind them. Every second Felix expected to be knocked off his feet, every step made him fear it might be his last. But Marinette seemed to know where she was going, and Cathexis wasn’t as familiar with the building as she was. Soon, the rattle of chains grew farther and farther, until they finally collapsed behind a corner.

“We need a Plan B!”, he stated the obvious, his breath erratic and panting. “We’ll never make it out of here without him intercepting us.”

Marinette, just as exhausted as he was, looked on the verge of panic.

“Chloé’s out of commission!”, she whispered in shock. “And if she is, then so are Alya and Nino!”

Pulling at her hair, she groaned.

“My plan has failed before it even begun! That’s so typical for me.”

He shook his head, confused.

“What are you talking about?”

Slowly, she let go of her Pigtails and straightened. When she looked at him, it was almost apologetic.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”, she said calmly. “This time, I wanted it to be different. No pressure or emergency, just... different.”

She shook her head, eerily serious as she took out the pendant she wore around her neck.

“We don’t have time for explanations, I have to go.”, she stated with no room for discussion. Her hand was steady when she placed the pendant in his hand, closing his fingers around it. “You need to keep this safe for me, okay?”

He blinked, not understanding what she was up to. But she stood up before he could ask a single question.

“You don’t have to use it.”, she announced and looked a bit sheepish for a moment. “I don’t even have a fancy box for it, and I have no speech prepared either. But... you are smart, and loyal, and exactly what I need. Trust me.”

She inhaled slowly.

“You... you are perfect. I can feel it.”

Her smile was so fond, so convinced and trusting he had to gulp before speaking.

“Marinette, What-“

A crash interrupted him. Cathexis was closing in, judging by the sound of his chains, and Marinette looked up.

“Go and hide.”, she ordered him with an authority he’d never expected of her. “This isn’t destiny or fate or something, okay? It’s a choice. You decide whether to accept or decline, and I won’t push you to do anything. But now that Adrien knows I have it, I can’t keep it on me anymore. Just... keep it safe.”

She smiled.

“I’ll be fine, I promise.”

Wait. Why did this sound like a goodbye?!

“Marinette,” he whispered, fear stifling his voice, “don’t you dare-“

Once again, he didn’t get to finish. Cathexis came crashing through the wall behind them like a bulldozer, his chains breaking through with ease.

“Marinette!”, Felix screamed, but a wave of debris tore him away from her and onto the ground. With one last look at him, she turned around and ran.

“Come and catch me if you can!”, he heard her taunt as she dodged the swipe of a chain, then disappeared into the next corridor.

Cathexis didn’t waste a second with Felix. Growling, he started his hunt and followed Marinette, leaving him behind.

Felix’ head was spinning from his fall and he barely managed to get up, let alone follow them.

“No...”, he wailed, horrified. Crashes and shouts came from the direction they had run off to, and this time, Marinette was alone with the Akuma. “No, no, no!”

He got to his feet, accidentally dropping what Marinette had given him. The clear, clanging sound of something light rolling over the ground made him pause. He looked down, picking the thing up.

It was the Chat-Noir-merchandise Marinette had shown him, but now that he could take a closer look... it was warm in his fingers. It felt heavier than it looked, and he could swear he heard a pulse.

His blood drained from his face and he went pale. It... It couldn’t be, right? Where should Marinette have acquired the real Miraculous of Destruction?! And why would she wear it on a string of goddamn yarn instead of... of... putting it in a safe or something? Or using it? Unless she... she already had...?

Another crash made him start. They weren’t far from him, if he hurried, he could reach them.

But what was he supposed to do? Throw pens at the akuma?! Make a knot in his chains? He was just a teenager, he wouldn’t be of any help. His gaze fell back to the ring in his hands. The warm, heavy, pulsing and authentic looking ring.

Oh, goddamn it!

Without further analysis, he slipped it on his ring finger. For a second, nothing happened and he chastised himself for thinking something this ridiculous. Then an otherworldly glow covered the metal and he stumbled back. Sparks flew around his hand and a green light shot out of the ring, turning it silver and circling him before fading into a tiny, black creature. It had triangular ears and a feline tail that waved through the air.

Felix was frozen in shock as the... the thing yawned.

“Oh geez, that was quick.”, it complained in a high, nasal voice. “They can never give me time to nap, can they?”

It’s inhumanly green eyes turned to him and it grinned, revealing sharp, white fangs.

“Hey, it’s the cold blondie!”, it - he? - cheered. “Not ideal, but better than mean or dense blondie. I can work with that.”

”Who are you?”, Felix finally regained his voice. The floating cat flicked its tail and combed back its fur.

“Plagg’s the name, rookie. I’m a Kwami! Incredibly powerful, good looking, and - as Tikki would say - “high maintenance”. Got any cheese?”

“A Kwami?”, Felix asked, ignoring the last part. “What’s that supposed to be?”

Another crash came from a distance and he shook his head, reminding himself of Marinette.

“Okay, scratch that. Do something so I can help Marinette!”

Plagg sighed deeply.

“Oh geez, another loverboy.”, he grumbled. “Fine! Say “Plagg, claws out!” and you’ll get cataclysmic superpowers, and a much needed make-over.”

He glared at Felix’ clothes.

“Is that a tie?! What are you, an insurance lackey?!”

“It’s called style, you- Argh, I don’t have time for this.”, he snarled, raising his hand. It didn’t matter where she had gotten this from, or why she wasn’t using it herself. She had given it to him for a reason, and he wouldn’t disappoint her.

“Plagg, claws out!”

-

Transforming had been easier than thought. She’d simply slipped around a corner, said the magic words and waited until Cathexis followed her to punch him into the ceiling. She’d caught him by surprise, and so it wasn’t hard to deliver a kick hard enough to send him into the wall behind him. He groaned and shook his head as she scanned him. Where was the akuma, where was the akuma, where was- his bracelet! It’s shape looked just like her lucky charm, though bleached beyond recognition. He pulled his arm away when she tried to grab it, his chains hurling her away from him and down the hallway.

“My Lady!”, he cooed happily, already forgetting he’d been chasing Marinette. Hyperfixation, she remembered Felix’ words. He could only ever concentrate on one thing at the same time. “There you are!”

She had landed on her feet - practice made perfect - and adopted her fighting stance.

“Let’s make this quick!”, she hissed and Cathexis pouted.

“Oh, My Lady! Don’t you recognize me? Your loyal partner?”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Loyal?”

He had the decency to look ashamed. Nervous, he scratched his head.

“You are... still mad at me, aren’t you?”

“For what? Sacrificing Rose, abandoning me or attempting to kill me?”

He raised his hands in defense.

“It was an accident! You know I could never hurt you, don’t you? I love you!”

He sunk on one knee, stretching out his hand as if pleading.

“Allow me to prove it to you, Ladybug! You’ll see, we’re meant for each other.”

She was so tired of this. Without a warning, her yo-yo wrapped around his outstretched hand.

“You can prove it by giving me that bracelet!”, she suggested and pulled. He lost his balance and fell over, but his chains caught him easily. They wrapped around her yo-yo to prevent her from escaping, but she didn’t intent to. With a battle cry, she launched herself at him. He didn’t see her coming, and before he could fully straighten himself, she slammed him into the wall again. But she had underestimated the speed of his chains. Just when she wanted to take the possessed object, one of them wrapped around her waist and threw her to the floor. She grinned in pain and tried to dodge, but now they were coming from every angle. Her yo-yo was carelessly dropped to the side when Cathexis stood up, wrapping the chain holding her around his wrist to pull her in.

“Why won’t you even give me a chance?!”, he raged. “I asked you so nicely, and you just attacked me! How could you?!”

“It’s my job, idiot!”, she snarled and tried to wriggle out of her restraints. “And it used to be your job as well! We beat up and purify Akuma’s, remember?”

She laughed bitterly, eyes burning into his.

“Or, that’s what I did at least. To you, this was only ever some kind of game, wasn’t it?”

He hissed.

“Just ‘cause I’m not as stuck-up as you doesn’t mean I’m not a good superhero! We won every time, didn’t we?”

“Because I had to save the day! How often were you even conscious and yourself for the final battle? Most of the time, I had to save you as well!”

“Argh!”, he roared. “Only because I sacrificed myself for you! Without me, you would’ve lost a long time ago!”

She bared her teeth and growled.

“Without you, I wouldn’t have had to worry that every battle might be my last, just because you decided to ditch me in a flashy attempt at self-promotion! You weren’t heroic, you were reckless! And unpredictable!”

He opened his mouth to shout back, but the purple butterfly outline returned to his face and distracted him. When it disappeared, Cathexis simply huffed and crossed his arms.

“You’ll see it my way soon enough.”, he said and wrapped the chain around his wrist once more, to get a better grip. “Soon, you’ll see everything my way.”

The root of the chain began to fill with his cold white light and Ladybug started to panic. Her yo-yo was out of reach, no way to summon a Lucky Charm. She couldn’t move, the chain was too tight. Her toes slid over the floor without finding foothold and her arms were pressed to her sides uselessly as the light came closer and closer and-

“Cataclysm!”

Both she and Cathexis startled when a black-gloved hand grabbed the chain. Rust spread over the links, dissolving them and eating its way towards Cathexis’ wrist - towards his bracelet!

The akuma gasped and shook his hand, getting rid of the chain and detaching it from its armor just before it could infect his bracelet. It coiled in on itself as it disintegrated, setting her free. Immediately, she grabbed her weapon, jumped back and landed at a safe distance with her savior next to her.

“Thanks!”, she grinned at him as she checked out his new suit. Felix nodded stiffly. Doubtlessly wondering why Ladybug was here all of a sudden, and Marinette wasn’t. If he’d put one and one together, he didn’t say anything.

“You’re welcome.”, he replied and took out his batons. He kept them separated and crossed on his back, which wasn’t the only difference from his predecessor. His hair was longer, wilder, and his iris was more blueish than green. The bell was missing from his collar, and he had an additional, smaller belt on that was equipped with trackers and other gadgets. His tail was longer, but seemed to move on its own accord. And his boots made no sound when he changed his stance to face Cathexis, which might come in handy for stealth. Overall, his costume was less... shiny. Less reflective, more of a spandex-like fabric than leather.

“No...”, Cathexis whispered, eyes wide with horror. “No! NO! I’m Chat Noir, not you! You’re just a cheap replacement!”

Felix blinked in surprise - he hadn’t known Chat’s identity, she remembered - but recovered quickly.

“Actually,” the new black cat hummed. “I don’t think I’ll go by Chat Noir anyway. Too many bad connotations, thanks to you.”

He grinned and raised his chin.

“You can call me Chatvalier instead. Because unlike you” - he raised his baton - “I won’t run from a fight.”

Cathexis roared with wrath.

“This can’t be- You can’t be- GIVE ME THE RING!”

His voice was erratic and his expression completely unhinged when he charged at them, chains wildly striking through the air. Their movements were devoid of their previous elegance and precision, it was all instinct and anger and hurt.

“You can still back out, you know?”, she asked her newly dubbed Chatvalier. “It’s a heavy duty, and you’re not forced by any cosmic will or something. If you don’t want this, I can handle him by myself.”

Her partner looked at her with narrowed eyes, as if reminded of something. Then he smiled.

“I don’t doubt that.”

He readied his claws and gave her a look so soft she felt her heart flutter.

“But... it can be nice to know someone has your back.”

He smirked.

“Remember?”

Oh yes, she did. When she faced Cathexis storming towards them, her smile was confident and unwavering. They were in this together.

“Ready?”

Her yo-yo swung through the air and he laughed.

“Guess we’re about to find out.”

- - -

If you don’t know what to make of this last “have your back” exchange, you might want to take another look at chapter 4 (their first real conversation). I love giving phrases more meaning than they should have, because DRAMA!

[radio-nano]

A Riot At The Opera: Queen Triumphant by Jonh Ingham with my favorites parts in bold.

QUEEN ARE the type of group that make a man want to abandon rock writing. They pose questions and never provide answers. They exist in their own space-time continuum, visible and audible but keeping their secrets to themselves.

On the surface they couldn't be a nicer bunch of people, but they carry English reticence to an epitome. It isn't, as Geoff Barton said two weeks ago, that they're boring, it's just that they're reserved. Or in writer parlance, they don't automatically provide colourful copy. All my instincts as a writer tell me that there is a great story in that band, but after two nights with them I'm hardly any the wiser.

Skin tight

That their insularity has a lot to do with them being one of the most amazing heavy-metal and/or rock bands in Britain - with all the signs that they'll end up monsters on the order of Zep - is fairly obvious, but just how much bearing it has on the matter is hard to say. The enigmas they might pose mightn't even have answers.

Is there any logical reason why they present an image and persona straight out of the Beatles school of interlocking chemistry?

John is reserved, almost nonchalant on stage, as if it's all in a small, personal joke. When asked how he saw himself within the framework of the band he replied, with a small smile, "I'm the bassist".

Roger is his opposite, the cheeky sidekick in a Clint Eastwood movie, and attracting a lot of cheesecake attention in America and Japan.

Freddie is an original - one of the most dynamic singers to tread the boards in quite a few years. His attraction is obvious.

Brian is perhaps the biggest enigma of all. What is this seemingly frail, gaunt astronomer doing on that stage, striding purposefully and blasting diamond-hard rock? They're all equally strong personalities - like the Beatles there's no one major focal point. Ask four fans who their dream Queen is and you'll get four different answers.

Queen have been busy lads these past few months. Having disassociated themselves from their former management and joined with John Reid, the fourth album was seen to. Reid decided that a tight schedule wouldn't cause them undue harm, and figured on two months to record before embarking on this current tour. Only Queen are driven to better each previous album - which at this stage of the game is obviously producing some excellent results - and A Night At The Opera turned into a saga - culminating in 36-hour mixing sessions in an effort to allow at least a few days for rehearsal. In the end they managed three and a half days at Elstree with four hours off to videotape the promotional film for 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.

Their first few dates had not been without errors and the quartet were still not feeling totally comfortable their second night in Bristol, fourth night of the tour. You'd never know it, though.

Like all other aspects of the group, the stage is sophisticated. A black scrim provides a backdrop bounded by a proscenium of lights both front and rear. At each side the p.a. rises like a mutant marriage of Mammon and Robby the Robot. Amp power is readily evident but the most extraordinary is Brian May's subtle set up: nine Vox boxes stepping back in rows of three. The only packing crate visible is holding a tray of drinks, and you may rest assured that no roadie will rush, crawl or lurk across the stage while the show is in progress unless it's to rescue Freddie's mike from the clawing crowd.

As the auditorium darkens the sound of an orchestra tuning up is heard over the p.a. The conductor taps his baton on the music stand and a slightly effete voice welcomes the audience to "A Night At The Opera". The Gilbert & Sullivan portion of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' follows, a brief glimpse of Freddie is allowed, and then in a blast of flares and white smoke the blitzkrieg begins.

Roger is barely visible behind his kit, just his eyes and tousled locks. John is wearing a white suit and playing the-man-who-must-stand-still-or-it-will-all-blow-away. Brian is slightly medieval in his green and white Zandra Rhodes top, while Freddie is...

Around his ankles his satin white pants flare like wings - fleet footed Hermes. Everything north of the knee is skin tight - tighter than skin tight - with a zip-up front open to AA rating. But further south, definitely in X territory, lurks a bulge not unlike the Sunday Telegraph . There have been sex objects and sex bombs, superstar potency and the arrogant presentation of this all-important area, but never has a man's weaponry been so flagrantly showcased. Fred could jump up on the drum stand and SHAKE HIS CUTE ARSE, leap about and perform all manner of amazing acrobatics, but there it was, this rope in repose, barely leashed tumescence, the Queen's sceptre. Oh to be that hot costume, writhing across the mighty Fred!

Phallic

Freddie is not pretty in the conventional sense of the word; like Mick Jagger of '64, he is his own convention. Also like the Jagger of that time, his stage persona and action is unlike anything else. Although it borrows - like most of the group's plagiarisms - slightly from Zeppelin, in tandem with Freddie's supreme assurance and belief in himself - he always refers to himself as a star - it explodes into something that is a constant delight to watch.

He reacts to his audience almost like an over-emotional actress - Gloria Swanson, say, or perhaps Holly Woodlawn playing Bette Davis. At the climax of the second night in Bristol he paused at the top of the drum stand, looked back over the crowd and with complete, heartfelt emotion placed his delicate fingers to lips and blew a kiss. Any person who can consume themselves so completely in such a clichéd showbiz contrivance deserves to be called a star.

Freddie's real talent, though, is with his mike stand. No Rod Stewart mike stand callisthenics here, just a shortee stick that doubles as a cock, machine gun, ambiguous phallic symbol, and for a fleeting moment an imaginary guitar. He has a neat trick of standing quite still in particularly frantic moments and holding the stand vertically from his crotch up, draw a fragile finger along its length, ever closer to the taunting eyes that survey his audience.

Their show contains lots of bombs and smoke, lots of lights, lots of noise. They fulfil the function of supremely good heavy metal - i.e. you don't get a second to think about what's going on. When they do let up for a few minutes, it's only so you can focus in on the bright blue electric charge crackling between your ears.

Bulldozer

Dominating the sound is Roger's drumming, a bulldozer echo that bounces like an elastic membrane, meshing with your solar plexus so that your body pulses in synch with the thunder. Tuned into that, everything else is just supremely nice icing.

For three days rehearsal, after eight months off the road Bristol was extremely impressive. In speculative mood I quizzed people on how long they thought it would take to headline Madison Square Garden. I was thought a radical at a year and a half. John Reid smilingly assured me it would take a year.

That Queen should end up with John Reid is an entirely logical proceeding. Everything about Queen demands that the world eventually kow-tows at their feet in complete acquiescence - so big that bodyguards have to accompany them at every step. Well, no - they found that an annoyance in Japan, but, you know, huge.

Such status demands a Reid or a Peter Grant, and whatever the causes for their leaving Jack Nelson and Trident, an elegant group like Queen is going to look for a man with class. Reid found the idea of managing a group interesting, and having to deal with four strong personalities a challenge. He only concerns himself with their business and ensuring that the year ahead is mapped out. In January they begin a jaunt through the Orient, Australia and America, by which time it's March and they begin preparations for the next album.

Reid's prediction of a year was proven highly credible the next evening in Cardiff. The band had still not paused from the rush up to the tour and spent most of the day relaxing and sleeping - no doubt a factor in their near recumbent profile. Also, unlike most groups, they were keeping their dissatisfaction with the show to themselves.

They stopped off at Harlech TV on the way to see a cassette of the video for 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. The general consensus was quite good for four hours, with much laughter during the operetta. Brian finds film of the group educational - the first time he saw himself was a Mike Mansfield opus for 'Keep Yourself Alive' - "It was 'All right fellows, give it everything you've got but don't move off that spot.' It was terrible." You don't like Mansfield, eh? "Oh, I hate him - we all do... I was horrified when I saw it - I couldn't believe we looked that bad. I looked very static - seeing myself has taught me a lot about stage movement. Some of the things I do are planned for effect, but it's mostly just feeling the audience and communicating that back to them."

Arriving at the motel - several miles out of town - Freddie immediately fell asleep, John held court of a sort, joined later by Brian, while Roger went jogging, a daily event when touring. Tuning in to rock via Bill Haley and Tommy Steele, he became a drummer because he was better at it than guitar. All through school he was in bands; he only went to dental school out of "middle class conditioning, and it was a good way to stay in London without having to work". His mother thought it a bit strange when he opted for a career as a rock star, but she doesn't worry too much now.

The concert starts in much the same manner as the previous night, but there are signs that tonight is work, with posing an afterthought. The endings to most of their songs are magnificent and majestic, especially 'Flick Of The Wrist' and the rapid harmonies of 'Bad Boy Leroy Brown'.

Maniacal

The audience, seeing their faces in town for the first time, are vociferous in their appreciation. Guys know all the words to every song, yelling enthusiastically at every effect and solo. The band picks up, Freddie receiving the crowd beneficently, telling them they’re beautiful.

As the show builds it is obvious that things are gelling more. The previous night Brian had seemed totally out of place, not moving too much, taking solos with the weirdest half blank half possessed stare, talking to himself; cocking ear towards guitar. He was the proverbial stranger in a strange land, one step removed from the plane inhabited by you and me.

Tonight he moves fluidly, the gonzo lead guitarist of a gonzo band. His expressions are just as maniacal, but it only makes him look more demonic. His solo in 'Brighton Rock', an exposition in riffing and echo, is a treat because of his physical response to both music and audience, complete with ham acting. Freddie gets into the same game on 'The Prophet's Song', where he conducts an a capella madrigal with himself. It's a pretty commanding moment.

It’s soon after this that Madison Square seems reasonable. About a minute into 'Stone Cold Crazy' it becomes very obvious that Queen have suddenly Plugged In. Found the metal music machine and Connected. Freddie's movements explode in perfect unison with the music, the lights and surroundings go crazy, and the audience goes berserk.

Freddie asks for requests and receives a roar out of which one can vaguely make 'Liar'. Fred walks along the stage, nodding, agreeing he will do this one and that one while the kids roar on. "I'll tell you what - we'll do them all!"

'Doing Alright' opens slow and portentously. Queen's variation of light and shade is one of the major factors in their popularity, but even so the quiet sections frequently find the audience's mind wandering. One kid starts getting a joint together, totally forgetting it when everything blasts off again; guys talk among themselves, only to instantly leap to their feet, fists flying to the beat.

'Doing Alright' changes into a cha-cha beat, Freddie snapping his fingers, the coolest hipster in town, and then instantly drops into faster-than-light drive - the whole row next to me leaps to their feet as a man, rocking back and forth as Brian roars into a blinding solo.

Two songs later, in 'Seven Seas of Rye', the kids break - very fast - and in five seconds half the audience is a seething mass in front of the stage, climbing on each other in pyramids, sudden openings appearing as a splintering seat sends a few bodies to the floor.

The rest of the show is equally intense, especially for a couple of minutes during 'Liar; where Fred and Brian merge into a tight little triangle with Roger while John stands in front of the bass drum, staring out with his small smile.

Freddie has treated his encores - 'Big Spender' and 'Jailhouse Rock' - differently on successive nights, once appearing in a kimono and in Bristol with rather rude tight white shorts, giving the song title new emphasis. In Cardiff, though, he doesn't bother to change at all. Later it transpired that Brian had twisted his ankle during 'Liar'. While he’s attended to, kids out front pick up chair slivers to keep as mementos.

On the bus back to the hotel Brian sits quietly at the back, chatting with two girls. John sits at the front, as always. Freddie stares out of the window, lost in his own world. Roger bounces around, starts a pillow fight with Brian - which stops as soon as Brian scores a direct hit to the face - then discovers an eight track of Sheer Heart Attack, punching it through the channels as he conducts the group. The two hours towards which they have channelled the day's energies are spent.

Ambition

That Queen have become a top attraction through a fair degree of plagiarism is amusing. Stealing is nothing new in rock (or any art for that matter) and mostly Queen use the borrowed material better than the originals. That they would be big I don't think anybody really doubted. All four have immense desire to be successful, and that kind of ambition will keep them slogging until they achieve it.

But there are popular heavy metal bands and there are popular HM bands. From watching Queen's audience it is apparent that Queen speak for them in a way that bands such as the Who and the Stones and the Beatles spoke (and continue to speak) to their audience. Uriah Heep may be great at what they do, but five years after their demise who'll remember them? Creedence Clearwater Revival demonstrate the same thing - who remembers them? And yet five years ago they were the largest band in the world.

Queen will probably always be remembered, because as their tour is beginning to demonstrate, they have the ability to actualise and encompass the outer limits of their sense of self-importance.

Queen and their music, presentation, production - everything about them says that they are more important than any other band you've every heard, and who has there been, so far, who has objected? Certainly not the 150,000 people (plus 20,000 a day) who bought 'Bohemian Rhapsody' in the first 20 days of its release. Certainly not me.

See you at Madison Square Garden.

And Freddie in an interview a few later after this article:

He has been talking almost an hour and from the rapid increase in body twitches it's obvious he now wants to leave. He gets up to go but then thinks of something else.

A few weeks before I had written a story that adored in detail the tightness of Freddie's costume and the obvious bulge it contained. The Editor had not missed the opportunity to use an obvious headline.

"You know, your 'Cock Opera' piece has done me more harm than good. It was a wonderful piece, but My God, I've got to live up to it now. The insinuations of hosepipes and things, it's gotten really amazing. My God! A day hasn't passed when someone hasn't made a comment on it."

I was reminded of critic Lillian Roxon interviewing Tom Jones and wanting to poke her pencil there to see if it was all Tom. I guess only Fred's tailor knows for sure.

[lost-in-theoldrepublic]

Juma Juice please!

I still remember the day I got back home to find the strange parcel waiting for me right outside my door. Growing up in a rather rough neighbourhood in Nar Shaddaa had given me reason to suspect that something could be off about the whole thing. But then again, those were dark days so if someone had rigged a permacrete detonator to go off when I opened the parcel, I wouldn’t have been particularly displeased about having pieces of me being found on Nal Hutta. I knew who had sent it, of course. There was really no guessing involved. I was surprised, however, to find something else moving around inside the parcel. That was unusual. I certainly didn’t think I’d find her once prized possession in there. I remember thinking then that I wished it had actually been a permacrete detonator after all, for the thought of losing a dear friend was just as unbearable as dying. I suppose you might think I am being deliberately secretive, and in some part, I couldn’t care less, but some part of me wants to tell you what this all means. I owe it to her. 

******************************* 1 *******************************

It was just another day out there in the world, trying to make a living and trying to not get squashed under the automaton that is the hustle and bustle of Nar Shaddaa. I succeeded spectacularly well on the second count, usually at the expense of a friend or two. 

That particular day a friend of mine had offered to take me on for a scheme she had planned out for me at the Casino. A couple of hours into the task and I was still unsure of what she was doing and more importantly, what I needed to do. Rather frustrated, she then suggested I take some time off to head to the local cantina in the lower promenade area. I suspected she’d just been fed up with my figuring her business out. (Confidence draws in people and makes our job a lot easier, she tried to tell me.) I was a bit hesitant at first, but exhausted, so I agreed with her and bade her farewell. I was pretty sure she wasn’t about to call me on my holocom anytime soon. I imagine I was just deadweight to a hustler and that I was actually hurting her business.

I made my way away from her location to avoid hurting her business any more. My mind wasn’t actively pursuing any thoughts. Well, there were the usual ones. Is it just our lot to be born into a wonderful time where it was possible to travel from one star system to another and to just squander our lives away running some scheme or the other to get by to put some food in front of us. It seemed a waste of our time and curiosity to spend our lives worried about mundane pursuits, you know? Maybe you have it good and you’re not toiling away just to not starve when you could be reaching for the stars. Mulling over these thoughts, I strolled down the promenade to the cantina and managed to bump into only one irritable traveller (or just a well-dressed local going nowhere with a few choice Huttese words for me). In fairness, I wasn’t particularly going to defend my having bumped into them. I arrived at the cantina, snapped rudely out of my reverie by the bright lights in front of me. Drawing a deep breath and steeling myself for far more delectable Huttese words, I walked into the cantina.

The cantina itself was fairly crowded, as was to be expected. Nar Shaddaa is known for its vices and cantinas seem to be where the seekers tend to find what they come to Nar Shaddaa to look for. Either that or there were just way too many people who had nowhere to be, like me. I suppose I can’t feel too special. Not on this glorious jewel of a rock. The decks of dancers lined the east and west walls of the cantina, alive with the swaying movements of a few dancers trying to make it big in Nar Shaddaa - their ardent fans cheering them on. Loudly… A local band performed some nameless tune that somehow managed not to aggravate any of the patrons, which was remarkable considering the diversity of the crowd. I weaved my way from the through some rather inebriated Weequays who were trying to pick a fight with anyone who looked their way and past the indifferent patrons trying to catch up with their friends rather unenthusiastically. After walking all the way to the other side of the cantina, the nondescript melody of the band was replaced by the cacophony of drunken creatures chatting loudly in their little groups. The bar itself was packed with patrons waiting impatiently for their orders as an overworked server was quickly dispatching order after order. It had been sometime since I last ate, but I wasn’t confident of getting my order any time soon, so I decided to stick to a simple order of juma juice. Sure enough, the server had just about enough time to take my order before whizzing back to some swaying human on the other side of the bar from me. While I waited, I looked around me to take in the whole cantina. This was obviously not allowed as I soon heard the server shout “Juma Juice!” somewhere near me. By the time I turned to see them, there was just a glass of juice standing on the bar. 

“If you don’t take that, I just might!” I heard someone close to me say. 

I grabbed the juice instinctively and looked at the speaker, a twi’lek who was about as tall as me. I looked into her red eyes and immediately felt a warmth look back at me. She smiled disarmingly and added, “I wasn’t actually going to, you know.”

“Oh! No, that’s not it! Well, if you want it, you can take it!” I said as I offered the glass clumsily towards her. She smiled again and said that she just had a month’s worth of juma juice the previous night.

“That’s a shame!”, I said, “I was looking for a friend to drink with last night!” Daft. So daft.

“Well, give me a couple of days and I’ll join you!” Maybe not so daft?

���Sure thing! And do I come here to look for you?” Back to daft.

She laughed heartily. No, I’m not just saying that to use that adverb. She actually tilted her head back and her lekku fell onto her back as she laughed. 

“You could do that! Or you could call me on my holocom. You know, whatever’s easier for you...” She said with a mock frown and drawing her lekku in front of her shoulders.

“You know what, I’m no bounty hunter - a holocom might just work. When you do receive a call, it’ll be from Nartt, calling...?”

“Yor-Ema.” She smiled that smile of hers that could have a battle droid shut down. She sent me her holocom details with a brief swipe on her device.

“I’m sorry, Nartt, but I need to get going now. I promised a friend I’d meet them at the spaceport and my parcel has arrived.” She sounded genuinely apologetic,

“Well, Yor-Ema, I shall see you soon, then!” I waved to her. She smiled once more and headed out of the cantina with a small parcel of food in hand. She managed effortlessly to move through the crowd. 

I’m no droid, but the odds of meeting a friendly person in Nar Shaddaa were slim at best, and certainly smaller during the war. You’d have better luck successfully teaching a rancor table etiquette. I downed my juma juice in one gulp and wondered when I’d meet her next. 

Although, to this day I don’t know when she ordered and picked up her parcel at the cantina because I saw no movement at all and she didn’t have anything in her hand when I first saw her. I suppose I’ll never know now. I do know that I was pretty excited to meet her again the following week, though.

******************************* 2  ******************************* 

I suppose for the sake of your understanding, you’ll need to know that over the course of a few months, Yor-Ema and I met frequently with almost fixed periodicity. In fact, each time I met her I had taken up a new venture (all of which, with equal periodicity, failed) with my friend, most of them involving the Casino. Yor believed I just went there because I fancied my luck at winning some credits. Everytime we met we’d grab a juma juice and talk about our brilliant, fantastical plans for various enterprises in Nar Shaddaa and across the galaxy. You know, the kind of talk that helps you get by in the monotony of an otherwise uneventful life with no inherent purpose. 

It was only six weeks after our initial meeting that I asked her what someone as refined as her was doing in a slime-pit like Nar Shaddaa. 

She fell unnaturally silent and brushed her lekku to fall on her back, something I’d come to understand was her way to collect her thoughts. (The last time this happened, a belligerent Nikto tried to bulldoze her out of his way at the cantina and while I knew she wasn’t the kind to snap at someone, she calmly talked the brute down into waiting his turn - that’s not something I’d ordinarily try - let alone succeed at!) 

“What do you think your story is?” she asked me in return.

“My... story?” What was that supposed to mean?

“Yes. In the sense of a great tale, what is your story about?” She asked again. 

“Well,” I started, “I suppose it would be about trying to find a way... to live... and not hurt another?” I stumbled. I think by now you’d see why I could barely keep a job. 

“Hmmm, so it’s about finding out the path that’s best for you that doesn’t involve crossing into the path of another without any adverse impact?”

“That sounds almost noble, but that’s kind of what I’d imagine my story would be about.” I have no idea- I didn’t lose sleep trying to figure out what my story was about, you know? I mean, do you know what yours is? I digress.

“It is noble, Nartt,” she said as she put on a tired smile. It was one of the few times I saw her in some kind of pain. It crushed me. 

“It’s just everyday life,” I insisted. You don’t get special points for doing the ordinary. Right?

“If only those who are heralded as wise would be as humble as you.” She sighed and slowly her smile faded.

I panicked. I didn’t want to add to her sorrow by asking her to dwell on this thing that obviously caused her pain, but I also felt that it would have been callous to just skip over that.

“Yor,” I said gently, “do you want to talk about what’s bothering you?” 

She smiled drily and answered, “We’ll be here long after the stars in the galaxy burn out if I start.”

“At least it would have been a life well spent, listening to you...” I tried to nudge her, now that I knew she did want to talk about it.

“Well, alright, but we need more Juma. You up for a walk to the cantina?”

“Of course.”

There are certain moments in life that transform the pace and scale of your understanding of the Universe. If you are hurtling along in life and not aware of rushing through life, a simple realisation could bring your entire world to a standstill. You feel the rest of your mind stretch out at the same hurried pace but your core consciousness is halted in its tracks and soon the mind snaps back elastically and you’re entirely still. In those moments you glimpse at the greater automaton of the Universe and see just how vast the Universe really is. When you realise that there’s a beauty to the chaos after all, and what you thought was chaos was just another form of beauty that your mind masked with absurd little adjectives. In those moments, your very Universe grows bigger and you realise your own transient role. And you know these moments when you experience them. And just about anything could trigger this change of pace. Something you’ve done everyday of your life, like stepping into the same building in which you work to earn a living, or waking up one day, or watching something terrible happen before your eyes, or watching a holovid of a certain scene from your favourite drama or talking to a companion.

I knew the moment Yor started talking that her tale was one such moment. 

 ******************************* 3 ******************************* 

I suppose my tale begins like any other. I never really got to know my parents. No, this isn’t some hero origin story.

I was inducted into a religious order by the time I was four. I don’t really remember much of my home planet. I don’t remember much of what my community was, either. I guess we can paint that entire segment of my life as a huge “unknown”. It has little bearing on the rest of my life in any case. In fact, why don’t we just skip to where the story gets interesting? (I nodded.)

Like many of the folks in the order, I was constantly faced with many choices – the kind that are meant to make or break your path and the mundane ones as well. We grow up thinking it’s the great big choices, not the little ones, that change the fate of the galaxy and that’s largely true. I’ll bet you thought I was going somewhere else with that sentence, heh. Jokes aside, the small choices, they matter too, you know. But they’re not the same. You need to be able to walk to the Cantina, walk back via a provision store, pick up food for the week so that you can go to work (I wasn’t sure she’d ever worked a day in her life, but this me! But, again, I nodded.) and go about your everyday life. These choices matter because they carry you through your life and that’s ultimately what moves the galaxy. The big decisions – getting a new job, living in with someone- they move your life in some new direction in big jerks and weirdly enough, they move the galaxy too. I guess what I’m trying to say is, all our choices move the galaxy- the idea of big decisions and small decisions are just with our own perspective. They’re not the same, but they have largely similar effects. I suppose they’re about the same as you choosing to have juma juice or playing a game of pazaak. The galaxy is altered either way. Yeah, I think that makes sense doesn’t it? (Cue nod.) I grew up thinking the decisions are the same and should be treated as such. So, I, being a good little acolyte, played along. I tried to view all decisions as equal and not to be swept up in the romantic idea of big decisions changing the fate of the galaxy. And over time that kind of attitude breeds a sense of disinterest in the choices one makes because everything, every choice, starts to feel the same. The worst part is I thought I was finally reaching the epitome of being a good acolyte.

Anyway, about three years ago there was quite a buzz in our Order on account of the Mandalorian threat.  Many of us in the Order were swept up in the excitement – this much is common knowledge. In the core worlds, the threat was less of a worry and more of a faint buzz, like when a dream starts to dissipate some five minutes after you wake up. We all knew of the few who disobeyed the caution of the Masters in the Outer Rim – you know, Revan, Malak and the rest of the Renegade Brigade- and went head-on into the battle. With my understanding of choices and viewing things as being the same, I decided to wait on the counsel of the Masters – again, thinking this was my path to being a good little acolyte receiving a pat on the head. The rushing into battle was viewed with scorn by Masters in the Outer Rim and Core worlds alike. Time passed, we went about our everyday choices – the ones that moved the galaxy in a different way. In a couple of years, the choice was made for our Order. We had to go into battle because many acolytes who followed Revan or started late in that direction, had been filled with new direction from a new teaching – you must be familiar with the Jedi Civil War (I nodded half-heartedly– like most civilians in the galaxy, the “Civil War” was as confusing as two Hutts fighting over a bet in a swoop race that no one was really paying attention to.) – and by then we had to move ourselves into action to contain the threat. I was sent to some far-flung planet in the Outer Rim.

The masters were the ones who went to face the “fallen Jedi” (her lekku twitched as she said this). We were sent on relief and rescue missions. When you see the devastation that was caused by the Mandalorians, oh my. The amount of destruction that those people in the Outer Rim had to face. Homes destroyed, communities decimated and whole patches of planets annihilated. I’m ordinarily very stoic about this sort of thing, but it’s a whole other thing when you feel it, you know? You see the carbon scoring on the buildings, the flames in forests that can’t be put out. You know what I saw out there, Nartt? I saw…. Suffering. I saw the suffering of peoples who were just in the wrong quadrant of the galaxy when a bad-tempered race set their world on fire and the so called protectors, no doubt through good will, continued the rampage of war by turning their home into a battlefield. The peoples of that planet can’t tell Mandalorian carbon-scoring from Republic carbon-scoring. That’s all the same. The Republic’s choice to turn their home world into a war zone is no different from the Mandalorians raiding their planet.

I get that the Mandalorians started it, of course. I’m not so misguided as to think the Republic is just as bad as them, but the choice taken by the Generals in the Republic Fleet to bomb whole cities that were occupied by Mandalorians to turn the tide of battle, that choice is looked upon now with the wisdom of hindsight as being victorious. But that choice, grandiose though it may appear, is something that involved and affected the lives of more than just the Republic Fleet and the Mandalorian raiders. You can’t equate the actions of both parties but both of them disregarded the lives of those on the planet. (Wait, if the Mandalorians had already landed on the planet, what choice did the Republic have but to take the battle to the ground? I’m no patriot to the Republic, but come on. You must be thinking it too!)

I suppose you must not know of all the battles of Revan, Nartt. Revan was a brilliant war strategist. Let me…. Elaborate. You must be aware of the conundrum I’m about to describe. If you happen to intercept a message from the opposing side that says there will be an impending attack in five days on one of your cities but a weakness in their defence that will subsequently be made apparent ten days later where you can strike at their heart, would you rush to solidify the defences of the city immediately, thereby alerting the enemy of your having intercepted a message, but save many lives, or possibly even the city itself, or would you wait it out and give it all you’ve got in the attack on the enemy ten days later, possibly driving them away? It’s one of those battles that Revan earned considerable fame and recognition for. They waited it out, allowed the Mandalorians to ravage the capital city but within a few days, they decimated a significant number of Mandalorian warriors and ships. It was a decisive blow to the Mandalorians and they retreated from that planet with haste. Revan went on to fight many other such battles. It is possible to argue that that action had saved countless lives in the long run because of the number of Mandalorians killed that day. But from another point of view, the avoidable had been allowed to pass and lives were lost needlessly. Either way – many lives were lost on both sides in a short span. But that’s what wars do. They take away lives. (A big gulp of Juma Juice here.)

So down there, on the ground, the people couldn’t care less about the Civil War because to them, the war had already destroyed much of their home. The evacuation wasn’t really a palatable option since they viewed the Republic with as much distaste as they viewed the Mandalorians. Understandably. To them, they viewed the choice to stall the attack to be as if the Republic Fleet had condemned them to die. A choice that killed many of their family members.

Our relief activities, already met with apprehension from the natives, was further impeded when battalions of Sith troopers landed on the surface a few weeks after we reached. The metallic resources on the planet was possibly the reason for their visit, we gathered. Our job became a lot trickier. We were running out of resources to continue to sustain the refugees and with every passing day, the possibility of evacuating the population dwindled as the Sith were gaining ground and were prepared to blast us out of the sky. We couldn’t just leave the people behind. The choice was placed before a few of us from the Order: Fight, evacuate the people against their wish or to cease rescue activities. As Jedi we shunned the idea of abandoning the people, so that really only left us with two choices. I didn’t really know how to feel and couldn’t bear to take on the responsibility of such magnitude where my choice would have a large impact on the people of a planet. We convened multiple times to chip away at the problem before us. Finally, a consensus was reached. We were to fight the Sith. How glorious! Even away from the heart of the battle we were now a part of the War! For the republic! (An entire glass of Juma Juice downed here.)

We conducted our recon and found out the location of a particular outpost where the Commanding Officer of the Sith was going to be stationed for two days and where the defences would be lowest and the accompanying guard could be easily tackled by five of us. It was the best shot we had. Once we had everything planned out, we were informed that the Premier of the People of the planet wished to speak to us. We marched into that room and told her about our plan. She urged us to reconsider the course of violent action and asked us if we could assist if diplomacy was still on the table. We assured her that the Sith were not ones to bargain without a blaster and to assume otherwise, in a warzone, would have been delusional. She was not pleased and spent much of an entire day trying to cover alternate ways. We agonised over the plan through her eyes and confirmed that even though we were peace keepers, we couldn’t work miracles. Our final say was that in times of war, we sometimes have no other choice but to take a few lives. It wasn’t necessarily a choice I was entirely pleased with, but it was the consensus. To deviate would have caused us all more time and I didn’t particularly feel strong about a diplomatic course either. We had signed up for this war to protect the republic and the interests of its citizens solely to handle the difficult choices. Her final words to us that day was a polite request for us to leave her planet and to never bring war back again. She could not be made to see reason.

When the day finally came, we went ahead with our plan. Against the wishes of the people. Clearly both choices we had originally were going to anger the wishes of the people. Oh well, sometimes we have to do the right thing even if we won’t be liked for it, right?

We moved with haste to the location as planned and waited till the Sith CO turned up, with the guard, as predicted. We waited precisely for the optimal moment to strike and went ahead, silent as an amateur sabacc player with a terrible hand. My task was to go straight for the CO as my companions were to take care of the guard. We launched ourselves onto the building itself and split off, ready to execute our own bit of the plan. I headed directly for the spot above where the CO would be. I plunged my green lightsaber blade into the ceiling and attempted to cut out a hole. All around me I heard the sounds of the struggle: blaster-fire met with the hum of a spinning lightsaber and some thunking and collapsing. I could only hope things were going as planned. It was too late to change plans, in any case, so I had nothing else to do but to drop into the building. The CO was not present. Curious. They could have been alerted, of course. So I ran around the inside for a little while, hoping to find a safe room or some hidden room where the CO would have been hidden away.

I reached out with the Force to find out where the CO was. It was a little sketchy at first, then I managed to find a faint whisper – a little panic. I tuned into that voice to find out where the CO was and located the exact room. I tuned in my holocom to tell my companions to pull away and await my signal and they agreed. I waited for their signal to say they had pulled away before confronting the CO.

The CO was in the room, sure enough – a larder. She turned towards the door and saw me. I think she knew what I was there for. It wasn’t exactly a matter of winning a sabacc championship: in comes Jedi with lightsaber ablaze to confront a Sith officer. I told her that I was willing to talk things out.

-          Are you mad? You’ve killed my entire troop and decide to talk now?

-          Well, do you want to talk or not?

-          You’re not serious. I don’t believe this.

-          Look, we don’t have to do this. We have other choices.

-          You Jedi are too repressed, sitting away in your asylums, hiding away your bloodlust.

I thought about what she said. Was it true? Was that all I was doing? Hiding behind an illusion of being a peace keeper because it was the right choice to make when I wanted something different? I knew that killing was wrong because I had seen the suffering caused by the war, but was I rushing to war because it allowed me to look for a place where my choice to kill someone, even inadvertently, wouldn’t be looked upon with severe judgement? Did I seek war so that I could be given a blank slate to kill and not have to torment myself with the guilt of having taken a life. I had the choice to finish this CO off as an act of war to prevent more deaths for the people of the planet. I also had the choice to reason with her. I chose to power down my lightsaber.

Anyway, as I spent those moments doing the most intense soul searching I had ever done, I saw that her hand that was reaching for a blaster was slowly relaxing. Then in the blink of an eye, she pulled her blaster and aimed it right at me. The blaster bolt left the barrel right as my lightsaber powered up and deflected the bolt right back at her abdomen towards the left. She clutched her abdomen and collapsed on her side. Once again, I powered down my lightsaber.

Maybe it was a manifestation of my own guilt or maybe these things were meant to happen. I got a call on my holocom telling me that the Premier’s transport was docking at the outpost.

The Sith CO was sputtering and holding on to a shelf in the larder, bleeding before my eyes. I tried to tell her that I was going to help her up. Naturally, I was met with some strong verbal resistance. I couldn’t blame her. I had given off, admittedly, mixed signals. After some fussing, I managed to convince her that I was going to carry her to a more comfortable part of the facility. Asking her to press down on the wound with some tunic fabric, I carried her up and to where she told me to go, the meeting room.

In walked the Premier, right at that moment. She was startled to see me, shall we say?

-          What in blazes are you doing here?

-          I came here to well… it’s complicated.

-          Why is she wounded?! What have you done?

That. That’s what keeps me up at night, Nartt. Not “What are you going to do?” not “What are you doing?” but “what have you done?”. The indication that what I had done was final and done with. And to be honest, it was done with. I couldn’t undo the wound any more than the Mandalorians could undo the siege on the planet. I had added more suffering to an already suffering planet. In the war strategy rooms there’s always the possibility to mask this little suffering against the suffering that already exists but that’s not how it is. The fact was, I had contributed to the suffering of the planet. A peace keeper continuing the war by adding one more fragment of suffering.

-          I didn’t mean to.

-          Intentions, my Jedi friend, do not count. You made a choice to wound this officer and that’s what has happened.

Fearing the worst, we turned to the Sith CO and checked on her status. She was not doing well. The Premier tended to her wounds as best she could.

-          Saranna, I’m sorry you got caught up in this fight.

-          I take it they weren’t sent by you?

-          No, they acted of their own accord and against my expressed wishes. In fact, their being here is in violation of my wishes.

-          I find that hard to believe. Why should I believe that you didn’t just tell them about the meeting?

-          I beg of you, please listen to me. I did not sanction this action and I am deeply sorry. We will find a means of compensating for this folly as best we can.

I decided to pitch in and confirm that we were not, in fact, sent in by the Premier.

-          So (cough), our transaction may have to be carried out with haste. I don’t see myself really lasting very long.

-          We can take you to our medical facility.

-          No, you don’t understand. I have already undergone some beating during this war. That blaster shot just hit the worst part in my system.

-          Blaster, so… not? Lightsaber?

-          No, this one didn’t chop me up with her blade. I fired at her and her Jedi reflexes kicked in, no doubt. I guess, in a way, my choice to rush into battle has caught up with me. I don’t have time to feel guilty though.

-          Oh, right. We have the shipment, as requested.

While Saranna drank some potion that the Premier offered, I asked the Premier what the transaction was about. She explained that the Sith who landed on her planet were defectors, running away from the war. The nearest planet they could find was this one and seeing as they didn’t have any other choice but to risk being mistaken for brining the war, they landed there, fearing being tried or courtmartialed for their act of desertion if they went to any Sith controlled planet, if they could travel that far. They had reached out to the nearby outpost in an emergency broadcast, requesting for supplies. This request was never raised to us, but I suppose if it had been, we would have brushed it off as a ruse. We really are predictable in our behaviour, it would appear. The Premier had made the decision to share the equipment that they used as much of the equipment on the planet was no longer functional. A deal that was conducted outside of our counsel though she had mentioned the possibility and we saw it in our infinitely greater wisdom to disregard it altogether. Now, thanks to the generosity of the Premier, the Sith defectors would not starve to death on an alien planet that had provided them asylum when all they hoped for was a break from the war. The Premier had been more of a Jedi than we had. Whatever that means. As if the Jedi own all acts of righteousness. Saranna was not doing too good even after an application of bacta. We all knew it. She looked at me and spoke as she pulled out a little device from her pocket.

-          Jedi, I need you to carry a message.

-          Yes?

-          I have a son and a daughter hidden away from the Empire. I need you to take this holorecording to them.

-          Where are they?

-          I don’t know. Hutt space. That’s the best place I could suggest for them to hide after I defected.

-          Alright. What are their names?

-          Let’s not get too friendly. (She laughed feebly)

-          Um

-          It’s on the recording. The first three words are their names.

-          Cool.

-          Thank you.

I wanted to thank her too. She could have easily said a lightsaber killed her – why wouldn’t she? It’s not like she’d have lost anything to do so. Maybe she did it because she was gifted with the ability to be objective? Maybe she’s just seen too much and saw no point in compounding troubles? Maybe it was a combination of those things and I’d never be able to understand her choice. You never can understand the choices another person makes until you see them. And even then you can never understand why. I took the device and stashed it away in my robe.

I realised I was running of time to really do anything of use for her, so I chose to do the one thing I knew I wanted to, not just because I thought I had to. I looked at her and said as clearly as I could:.

“I’m sorry.”

Saranna chose to ignore me and held onto her side. The bacta wasn’t working.

We carried her to a bed in the dorm section and sat by her side. I was called by my companions to ask if I was alright. I completely forgot about them! I told them to head back to the village we were based in and await further updates once I got there.

The Premier and I sat by the bedside of the dying Sith Officer in silence.

By morning, she was one with the Force. We made arrangements for the Sith soldiers to take her body and those of her guard and, as compensation, some of the supplies we brought to the planet and the offer to stay with the rest of the villagers. The Sith, fearing animosity from the villagers, chose to stay away from the villagers.

I apologised sincerely for the entire tragedy to the Premier and informed her that my companions would be there to take on the responsibility of extending the relief efforts for some time longer. I had to find Saranna’s kids in Hutt space.

I left that planet a changed individual. I never chose to be in the Jedi Order but I did choose to become a Jedi. I chose to walk the path of the Consular; I chose to listen to the Council’s advice when they cautioned against rushing off to war with Revan. I chose to do as I was told because I believed I was doing the right thing. I chose to do things thinking it was the right thing to do for the longest time thinking that was the same thing as choosing the right thing to do. In the end, I had chosen to carry out an act of aggression before exhausting all possible courses of diplomacy. I chose to enter a warzone thinking I would be absolved of the guilt of killing people along the way. I chose to attack a Sith Officer and had increased the suffering on a planet that was already suffering from the after-effects of a devastating war. I chose to act in a way that disregarded the wellbeing of those on the planet, thinking my choice to be more important or wise than theirs. I chose to leave behind my Jedi life when I left the atmosphere. It’s not that I felt undeserving of the mantle or anything, but because I wanted to choose to do things on my terms and not because I was trying to do right.

That, Nartt, is the reason why I don’t wear my robe anymore. Don’t worry, I took the holorecording out of the robe before I folded them away for good. And that rather long account is also what my story is.

******************************* 4 ******************************* 

           “Wow,” I said. What else could I say?

           “That’s a lot, I know. But I did warn you, you know?”

           “So, did you….”

           “Did I? Find the kids…?”

           “No. Leave the Order?”

           “Am I a rogue Jedi?” She chuckled at this.

           “Well, are you?”

           “It depends. I feel in some ways like I’m more of a Jedi now than I ever was when I wore the robes.”

           “So you’ve handed in your lightsaber?”

           “Shhhh…. I haven’t.” She had a twinkle in her eyes.

           “Oh? That’s convenient.”

           “I haven’t made contact with my masters since I first asked them for their blessing on our plan to attack the outpost. Oddly enough, they were all too eager to sanction that. Once they threw caution to the wind, they really tossed it out, I guess! I have decided to not contact them just to tell them the long story. I doubt any of them would have the patience to sit with me and order some Juma Juices while I narrate all of that, you know?”

           “So you are rogue.”

           “Why, yes, I suppose you could say that.”

           “Did you find the kids yet?”

           “I have a lead.”

           “Is that why you’ve been coming to this Cantina everyday?”

           “No!! I’ve really been enjoying our chats, Nartt, don’t be absurd!”

           “So… what is your lead?”

           “I’m afraid I can’t say.”

           “Erm.”

           “Don’t worry. It’s just if things go south… A story for another day.”            “How many of these do you carry around?” I asked her with a wry smile.

           “My fair share.”

           “I know better than to not believe you.”

           “So, who’s paying for all those Juma Juices?”

           “I am, don’t worry. I did ask for your entire memoir.”

           “Aren’t you the sweetest scamster.”

           I called the bartender’s attention to settle the bill. Yor excused herself – I guess it was just too much Juma Juice. It took some time for the bar tender to come through. On her way back to our seat, Yor stopped to talk to someone seated in a booth. In all the times I’d met her, I’d never seen Yor talk to anyone else in the Cantina.

           She headed back and smiled brightly at me as I gathered up my things and we pushed our way out of the Cantina.

           “I understand there’s a bounty out on Jedi here in Nar Shaddaa…” she began.

           “Nasty business…. Wait. You don’t think?”

           “I don’t think what?”

           “I’m not going to turn you in, Yor!” I exclaimed, a little louder than I hoped to.

           “No, I didn’t think that.” She said and her thoughts wandered a little after that.

           “Okay. I’m not sure I can guess what you’re thinking of.”

           “That’s good.” She said with a mischievous smile. “Say, Nartt. Would you mind giving me a ride?”

           “Uh, sure! Where to?”

           “The casino on your way back home.”

           “Sure. You’re the most fun Jedi I know.”

           “Ex-Jedi”, she corrected me.

           We hopped into my cruiser and made small talk about the state of affairs in Nar Shaddaa and how we could make things better. The usual stuff we talked about.

           As I approached the Casino I looked to her to confirm if this was the place and she nodded to confirm.

           I pulled up in the docking bay and she hopped out, graceful and with ease.

           “Thanks for the ride, Nartt!”

           “Anytime, Rogue.” I could easily see myself calling her that from now on.

           Her lekku twitched when I called her that. She laughed her hearty laugh and waved to me.

           “Thank you for listening to my story.”

           “Thank you for listening to mine!”

           “May the Force be with you, Nartt. You’re my favourite friend.” She smiled and waved to me. Why did it feel like goodbye?

           “Hey Yor, this isn’t goodbye, is it?”

           “As if you’d get off that easy!” She threw her hands up in mock exasperation. “You will get to buy me a Juma Juice when we say goodbye.”

           I was a little reassured with that. Once satisfied, I pulled up and headed back to my humble, dingy abode.

           I didn’t see Yor for a week.

           And then another week passed.

           And another.

           I didn’t get to say goodbye to my friend. I was angry with her. She promised me it wasn’t goodbye. Why would she? What had she planned? What had she gotten herself into? Did this have anything to do with the person she spoke to at the Cantina? It really was risky for a Jedi, even an ex-Jedi, to wander around Nar Shaddaa when the Exchange was so interested in collecting them.

           I asked the bartender if he knew anything about her whereabouts. There was never any positive response. I even asked if they knew anything about the person she spoke to.

           I tried going back to the usual gigs and tricks to get some credits to get by. My friend at the Casino was rather happy to have me back and with full cooperation this time.

           I wasn’t any better at any of the tricks, though and my friend was always annoyed when I struggled to get the hang of some scam.

           We weren’t too unsuccessful in our endeavours though and managed to turn over some credits as the weeks rolled by.

           That’s when I received the parcel.

I had no other choice but to imagine the worst and to move on.

******************************* 5 ******************************* 

           One day, a particularly good day, I went for some drinks with my friend after work. We had managed a pretty nifty score.

           The drinks were really flowing that night and we managed to let loose with the wild music playing in the Cantina. It was altogether a good evening and I guess I needed that after Yor’s disappearance.

           Somewhere close to last order, when we were still stacking up the empty glasses on our table, my friend leaned over and said.

           “Hey, Nartt. You wanna hear something interesting?”

           “Always.”

           “Well. This is kinda hush-hush, alright?”

           “My lips are sealed.”

           “Here goes.”

           “I’m all ears.”

           “You know how my brother is a bounty hunter?”

           “No.” There’s a sentence you don’t normally expect a co-worker to say, even if you’re on Nar Shaddaa.

           “He is. Keep up.”

           I nodded.

           “So he was tipped off by this one Cantina regular that there’s a Jedi here on Nar Shaddaa. Can you believe it?”

           I feigned surprise. “No, really?”

           “I know, right?! Well, anyway, this guy comes up to my brother and tells him about the Jedi. Some female Twi’lek Jedi.”

           “Oh?”

           “Yeah, but the really weird thing is, the guy said that the Jedi approached him. As if to turn herself in.”

           “That’s odd.”

           “As selfless as they pretend to be, what Jedi would turn themselves in? To a bounty hunter? In Nar Shaddaa? It’s the sleaziest place to be. I’ll bet Hunters elsewhere conduct themselves with some decorum at least, you know?”

           “Um…”

           “My brother’s different. We’re not actually from here… Well. I moved here ages ago when I ran away from home. He came by only a couple of years ago.”

           “Oh?” I guess you’ve got it now, too.

           “So, my brother is no fool. He knew something bizarre was a-foot. He told me about it and we figured we’d hold off on handing this one over to the Exchange. So, my brother set up a meeting of sorts that was really a trap and in she fell, completely ensnared but…. Willingly!” I could see this visibly affected her.

           “What was the trap?” I asked.

           “Well, the Jedi knew that once she’d tipped the guy off at the Cantina he’d alert one of the Bounty Hunters. He told her to head to the Casino, where we usually conducted our racket those few weeks ago, where I was to spot her and relay the message onto my brother. I saw her, sent the message to my brother and then went up to her. I told her to come back to the Casino the following day at noon and then walked her right up to my brother’s cruiser in the docking pad – he was dressed up as a tourist guide. She was restrained and well, that was it. She was captured!”

           “Smooth. Captured though?”

           “Yeah, turns out she had meant to be captured all along.”

           “That’s so bizarre!” I added as she paused to take a swig of the last glass of juice.

           “Yeah, so he gets to talking to this Jedi and you won’t believe how this pans out.”

           “Do tell.” I mean, come on, there was enough building up, you know.

           “So, it turns out this Jedi wanted to be captured after all. She was chatty on the ride, my brother said. (I had to resist a smile here.) Apparently, she had a message for us. That was the reason why she had approached us in the first place.”

           “Hey Sis,” said a voice belonging to a body that was approaching our table. I gathered this was the Bounty Hunter Brother.

           “Zyro! I was just talking about you!”

           “What has she said? Has she been drinking a lot?”

           I couldn’t really respond in time.

           “Hann, please don’t tell me you’ve been talking about delicate things?”

           “More delicate than your ego?” She burst out laughing.

           “Oh dear…”

           “Relax, I was just talking about your latest capture, if you can call it that.”

           “That’s still sensitive, Hann. We can’t just go about telling random people off the street about that!”, and then, looking at me, “No offence.”

           I don’t get it. You can’t just tack that on and expect everything to be smooth as a Kaminoan’s scalp, you know? Instead, I just nodded my head to indicate that no offence had been taken. Very much a lie, of course.

           “Relax!! Nartt’s crew.”

           “Hi Nartt! I’m Zyro” He extended his hand, very un-Sith like and very un-Bounty Hunter. Or maybe politeness is really meant to be practised by all.

           “Hi, Zyro!”

           “So what has she been telling you?”

           “I just reached the part of the story where things got interesting! He sat through the boring bits. I owe it to him to finish.”

           “I’ll take it from here,” said Zyro and flashed a mischievous grin at his sister.

           “Nope.”

           “Fine, continue.”

           I sat through all this waiting for someone to till me about my beloved friend.

           “So anyway, this Jedi is really chatty and starts talking to Zyro about a message she’s carrying. Zyro asks what message she’s talking about and then she says, ‘it’s from your mother’. Weird, right? So he halts, right there, middle of Nar Shaddaa traffic, to talk to his passenger. Any other planet and they’d have been had. So then she starts talking about how she met our mother and that she was responsible for her mother’s death. Zyro was devastated because he left home only a couple of years ago – me, I knew my mom was out in dangerous waters so I was shaken, but not too horrified, you know?”

           “Sorry, dangerous waters? What does that mean?” I had to pretend like I didn’t know the story, you know?

           “Oh right, so. I’m running scams out on Nar Shaddaa and my brother is a Bounty Hunter. This is nowhere near what we were raised into. You see… well, I know you’re cool and you can handle this. My, our, mother is an officer with the Sith fleet. She was with the Republic but turned when Revan returned. She had been there in the war with Revan and saw fit to follow him. I don’t know. I don’t really see eye to eye with her and it had been years since we had communicated. I don’t hate her because as I’ve grown older I’ve come to understand that loyalties and positions and values are constantly shifting things so I can’t hold something against her, just because I wouldn’t necessarily make the same choices. It’s one of those things that comes as you grow older, I guess, heh.”

           “I understand…” It’s been years since I’ve seen my own family.

           “So yeah, she says that our mother’s dead but had a message to be sent to us.”

           “Naturally once she said this I had to call Hann and tell her about it. I didn’t know how to process all of this and I still had to deal with the Jedi in my cruiser!”

           “It was the hardest decision for us. On the one hand, yes, she was killed, but then, she signed up for the war. In that moment I realised how devastating it must have also been for the countless other families who may or may not be given messages of their loved ones having perished in a war they may or may not have signed up for. It was not something I can describe, Nartt.

           “Even if someone signs up for a war to fight in, it’s not ever their own fight. This whole Civil War affair was just something that none of us really believed in. It’s the only way to drive the masses to sign up, of course, but it’s hard to convince families to send their fathers, mothers and siblings to die for a battle on a planet that is parsecs away just because of some skirmish from a group of raiders. And then to twist the Civil War into something about patriotism when none of us knew what the Republic was about anymore.

           “Our mother rushed in to sign up for the Mandalorian war. Our home-world was attacked in the early stages and she wanted to do something about it. She was in Revan’s ship when it attacked the planet she would later die on. She was a part of the team that had led the Fleet to victory despite severe losses on the ground.

           “Anyway, Zyro wanted to kill her first but then I talked him out of it. She sounded genuinely apologetic and didn’t mean to kill our mother. From what she said, she deflected her blaster bolt. She could have been lying of course – Jedi are no saints- but what difference would it make? Zyro brought her back to me and we talked it out. I was sick and tired of the violence in the Outer Rim and from what she said, so was our mother. She delivered the message and a device. I asked her what she’d be up to as an ex-Jedi. She said something vague about helping people for real.

           “That was the last we ever heard from her. She just took a taxi and headed off somewhere, no doubt off-planet to avoid other Bounty Hunters on this blasted rock. Shame, I kind of liked her. I mean, a Jedi, even an ex-Jedi, is plenty interesting company you know? And she was pretty interesting to talk to. Even Zyro found her company enjoyable once the murderous cloud moved away from his mind.”

           “How do you both feel about your mother’s passing?”

           “To be honest,” began Zyro, “it was quite a blow. She had sent me away to Nal Hutta after the Mandalorian threat had been crushed and she remained with Revan. I guess she knew that this wouldn’t have gone down well with a lot of people and I could be held for ransom or something. I wish I could have been there to say goodbye, but I’m glad I have the holorecording.”

           “Yeah, goodbyes always suck and they’re pointless if you never really were on good terms before the final push – fake, almost. I don’t hate her now for her choices – I’m sure she made her choices based on what she thought was necessary for herself and for us. It’s hard to sit thousands of planets away and criticise someone for their choices, you know? I wish I could have spoken to her and told her I don’t hate her for going to war. But I guess the only way I can communicate that now to her is to live in a way in which she’d have been happy for us. I guess that might be a stretch, considering I’m running scams but, hey! I’m only targeting wealthy marks! That’s gotta count, right?”

           “How do you feel about the Jedi, and what she did?”

           “Like I said, even if we decided to go the revenge route and Zyro fired off his blaster, what would that have solved? The horrors and murders that are a part of war are atrocious but the quicker we leave them behind, the better. If we carry that on, we’d be ensuring its perpetual control over us. Killing the Jedi may have helped heal, but it would have added suffering to an already ransacked Universe. I guess I feel better for having forgiven her. She came here because for some reason, my mother had forgiven her for deflecting that bolt back at her and chose to ask her to bring the message. I didn’t feel like I forced that choice: I just forgave her because it was what I wanted to do.”

           There was a pause here.

           “I know you must be thinking, ‘hey, you’re a bounty hunter but you’re out forgiving Jedi, what’s that all about?’ and to be honest, I don’t know how to process that divide. I don’t know how to reconcile the two sides. I don’t kill anyone, but I do take them to people who do kill them or something. I only have so much control over it because someone has to pay for the apartment and food!”

           “Have you tried other avenues of employment?” I asked. I’ve been employed by Hann for quite a while now.

           “Well, Hann doesn’t really want me around her work,” he said as he hung his head in shame.

            “Yeah! You panick too quickly! Scares them right off.”

           “Hey, Hann! That was me, too!” I kinda liked this kid.

           “You were atrocious, too. Still are….”

           “Hey!”

           “I feel that you’d do so much better with finding people who are meant to be found, Zyro. There’s a whole galaxy of broken families because of this war. People need to be found, reunited.”

           “I do like the sound of that. Where do I start though?”

           “I’m sure you’d find some work down at the refugee sector.”

           I nodded to signal my approval.

           “Awesome.”

           “Anyway, thanks, Nartt for listening to my troubles.”

           We paid the bill and headed out. I bade them farewell and set off for my home.

           It was time for me to open the package.

 ******************************* 6 ******************************* 

           I returned to my apartment and sat down in the solitary chair in my house.

I guess you must be wondering how things fit into place. How did Saranna come back to the planet she allowed for the destruction of during the war? Did she know or did that just happen by accident? Why did she forgive the Jedi so readily and entrust something so important as handing over a message to her children to this stranger who caused her death? Did the Premier know that Saranna was the one who stood by as her planet was besieged? Was she aware of how far-reaching her act of kindness had been?

Most importantly, right now, I needed to know: Where was Yor?

I found in the parcel a datapad with a document written by Yor and her lightsaber.

Not really keen on amputating myself with my remarkably unskilled hands, I picked up the datapad.

Hi Nartt,

           I’m sorry I couldn’t come back to see you. It’ll be a while before I can come back to the surface and our Cantina.

           Long story short, I found the kids and delivered the message. Unfortunately, the twerp who led me to them decided to take things into his own hands and thought he’d make good on the Bounty on my head. I had to get out of my apartment and lie low to not be captured.

           I guess it’s pretty selfish of me to have thought about myself, but how can I help mend the galaxy if I’m broken? So I decided to make myself useful by finding out where help is most needed.

           The thought of leaving the planet did strike me, of course, but ever since I met those kids, who are terrific by the way, I liked the idea of bringing people back messages from their families, torn apart by the war. I had the fortune to reunite one family, in a manner of speaking, and I knew there were many others out there who needed help.

           I couldn’t help anyone sitting cloistered away in an Academy when suffering lay all about. I didn’t have to go very far to find souls to help either because the miserable ways of our worlds are such that there’s help required far closer to home always if we’re willing to listen.

           If you do choose to find me, we can have that glass of Juma Juice and I can apologise in person and hey, if you never want to see me again, I did say I’d buy the round!

Yor-Ema.

Well, that settled it, didn’t it? I had to go find her. I stashed the lightsaber away and stuffed the datapad into a pocket.

I called Zyro on my holocom to tell him I’d be heading down to the Refugee Sector the next day and he apologised as he was already down there and that I’d have to find my own ride.

It was no bother. I knew I couldn’t take my own cruiser, so I took a taxi down to the Cantina to fill up a flask and headed down to the Refugee Sector.

I brought with me some of my old clothes and bought some new ones as well for kids of different species. I realised that it doesn’t hurt to be kind. You never know where that kindness will stretch. Sometimes a kindness towards an enemy on an unnamed planet in the middle of a war can lead to children finding peace with the death of their mother in a war halfway across the galaxy, who then carry on that kindness, as do all the people who are hear about it. Kindness can span the galaxy just as easily as war does and it’s far more desirable.

I looked around for Yor all through the day but couldn’t find her. I had a quick lunch with Zyro who was much more delighted with his new role of healing families than he was being a Bounty Hunter. He asked me about what brought me to the Refugee Sector and I said I had no interesting story of my own – I merely heard many stories about how there was help needed. I didn’t have to have a story of my own to really be of use.

He had to leave to take some messages to the surface to the relatives of some people in the Refugee Sector and excused himself.

Towards the end of the day I was exhausted. It is one thing to be academically opposed to war and another thing to come face-to-face with the disasters it brings to all who participate. I sat in one of the container homes that housed their limited inventory of apparel and asked them what they needed the next day. I was just about done noting down their request when a voice from outside caught my attention.

“I hope you brought something in that flask, Nartt.”

“Oh, is that so? What would you like?”

“Juma Juice please!”

[mandibierly]

Manhunt Unabomber Discovery Ted Kaczynski Sam Worthington

On Aug. 1, Discovery premieres its gripping eight-episode anthology series Manhunt: UNABOMBER, starring Avatar‘s Sam Worthington as Jim “Fitz” Fitzgerald, the FBI agent and criminal profiler whose pioneering use of forensic linguistics helped identify and capture Ted Kaczynski (A Beautiful Mind‘s Paul Bettany), the domestic terrorist who killed three people and injured 23 with mail bombs over a 17-year period, in 1996.

The fact that many people don’t know Fitz’s name — he’s not even mentioned on Kaczynski’s Wikipedia page at the moment — is why Worthington signed on. “When I started reading the script and doing some research, you discover that 99% of this story has never been told. That was what made it exciting,” he says. “When you dig into the story, the main thing was like, ‘Why have we not heard about him?'”

What also hooked Worthington (and Bettany) was that the story, as told by writer Andrew Sodroski and director/showrunner Greg Yaitanes (Quarry, Banshee), draws a parallel between the two men, who both struggle to be heard and accepted for their ideas. For Kaczynski, it’s the anti-technology worldview expressed in his 56-page manifesto, and for Fitzgerald, the newest member of the Unabom Task Force (UTF), it’s the insistence that he can build an accurate profile from someone’s writing: What kind of person would format a document like that? What do the words and phrases used — or not used — tell you about where and when he grew up?

“I always thought that the Ted Kaczynski character is using physical bombs, and then Fitz’s character has emotional bombs, in the sense of he is destroying his world around him in order just to keep passionately pursuing his firm way of thinking and his own ideals,” Worthington says. “It’s not necessarily the capture of the Unabomber that I think interested Fitz; I think it was also the fact that he created a whole new system and a whole new way of looking at crime, and that acceptance is what kept him pushing himself. The guy was just a beat cop — that’s all he was in the past. He was always trying to push himself, and even today, I think that kind of attitude, always wanting to be heard, would make people turn around to you and say, ‘Hey, look, can you just get out of my face a bit?’ That kind of plays into the fact of why he went unknown for years. If you’re longing for that recognition, sometimes you got to calm down rather than just pushing it into people’s faces.”

YAHOO TV: Jim Fitzgerald is a consulting producer on the series. What kind of insight did you get from him? SAM WORTHINGTON: I held off on talking to Jim for a long time, because if I ask you how you were 20 years ago, you’re going to give me your filtered version of yourself — you’re not going to give me the absolute truth. So I read books, couldn’t find anything about him, and it was like, “I don’t understand.” I still didn’t know why he got hidden. And then I came across all this stuff that around that time everybody was taking credit for the Unabomber. Even the guys that pointed them in the direction of the shack were saying, “I caught the Unabomber.” Someone said there were bumper stickers out at the time saying, “I caught the Unabomber, too,” you know? I think because he was such a prolific terrorist, who had gone uncaptured for years, everyone felt a sense of relief and wanted to be involved and part of it. That is what I got from all my research.

Eventually I managed to locate some transcripts that Jim had done for interviews, and it started to then all come through. I looked at a lot of transcripts of him talking to the writers and the director. I watched a lot of YouTube videos of him, because he’s had quite a prolific career after the FBI, in books and consulting. I gave him a questionnaire, because I wanted the negatives as well as the positives, because that’s what interested me. I thought if I’m sitting in a room with the guy, he’s a profiler, so he’s going to be playing games with me, and then I’m profiling a profiler, so we’re never going to get anywhere and it’s never going to be truthful. Giving him the questionnaire gave me a bit of distance and then he’s just looking at the words and literally giving me something from himself without actually trying to trip me up or figure me out. He didn’t shy away from the personal stuff. He didn’t shy away from anything, and I really respect that, because it gave me a way in. When you accumulate all that material, you can find a pattern of what the essence of this man is and what his drive may be. Once I met him, we were already filming, and I could kind of see if my way of going into the part matched him, and it certainly did. I had the drive right on, but that drive may be a negative thing that Fitz can’t see. You have to kind of try to find another way in without sometimes going to the actual source, because they can actually lead you down a false path.

Sam Worthington as real-life FBI profiler Jim Fitzgerald in ‘Manhunt: UNABOMBER’ (Credit: Discovery)

One of the best moments in the two-hour premiere (as seen in the video above) is when Fitz is fighting his bosses for access to the Unabomber’s 35,000-word manifesto, which they don’t feel an urgency to give him until after forensics has finished with it. To show them what he was able to glean from a one-page letter, Fitz writes words on the whiteboard — the first letters of which spell out USUCK. Did that really happen? No, I made it up. Originally, the scene was just a speech where you go, “Oh, he’s a good profiler.” Then I woke up one day and I went, “I wonder if I could find words that match the speech?” The “USUCK” was something that I thought, “Well, that matches, because he can do puzzles.” I remember my wife woke up at about 7 a.m. before I went to work. I said, “Check this out.” She thought I’d lost my mind. She goes, “Tell me what’s going on here. This is very weird. You shouldn’t be dreaming about this.” Then I took it in, and I was so nervous to show people, but I said, “It’ll make the scene better. It doesn’t just have to be about the profiling speech — it shows you the mechanics of how his brain operates. I think I’ve got something that’s pretty darn cool.” I showed Greg and the writer and they went, “Oh, we’ll take credit for that. Thank you very much.” [Laughs] But yeah, that was just something that I came up with because I thought it was funny. I had other words, too, but we had to watch our rating. [Laughs]

It was a case of here’s a show that is about language, and it’s about dialog and dialect and idiolect and axioms and variant spellings — that on the surface sounds like a very boring show. I kept saying to Greg, “How do we make each scene kind of jump a bit, or bring a bit more?” All the stuff like [Fitz tossing a football while thinking], that was stuff that we came up with on the fly. I said, “It should just feel exciting. These guys get excited by reading. They get excited by language, and if we’re excited by it, then an audience will be excited by it.” So the more we found it fun and playful and amazing, the more hopefully an audience does, too.

There’s also an interesting physicality to the way you play Fitz. When he’s getting belittled by his bosses, we can see him wince or shrink for a second. If someone’s trying so hard all the time and not rocking the boat, by trying that hard they’re always rocking the boat. [Laughs] It’s almost like when kids go to school for the first time: they don’t know how to fit in and they’re scared to speak up, and when they get attacked they go into their little crab shell. I wanted a lot of that energy. I wanted it to feel like a bomb that could explode any time, just through his own passion and desperation to be heard. So he’s always got movement. He’s always just about to speak and someone interrupts him. It’s a totally different energy than my own, so I was kind of wound tight for the whole of filming. In the arguments you’re having with the director, I kept saying to him, “We’ll be best mates after this, because I’m not like this energy. I’m not this Molotov. I’m not this wound up.” [Laughs] But I looked at it as though he’s his own worst enemy. He’s his own bulldozing bomb. And the same thing when he’s attacked, finding something to pick at and shy away, and that kind of insecurity in a crowd, that kind of insecurity with yourself when you’re actually on the right track.

Sam Worthington as Jim Fitzgerald and Paul Bettany as Ted Kaczynski (Credit: Discovery)

It was important to Paul Bettany that Manhunt tell Ted’s backstory, too —  which is the heart of episode 6 — so that the conversation can extend beyond “this man is a monster” and into his beliefs and the events that bred them. Great storytelling always does that, but it still feels brave to show any empathy toward a bomber who caused this much damage. Because you don’t want to glorify the Unabomber. In episode eight, you hear the actors act out the transcripts of what the victims said at the court cases, and that’s when it really struck me: this did happen. This guy is a murderer and deserves to be locked away, because the suffering continues — the families that got affected 20 years ago are still being affected now. You have to always handle that with some level of delicacy, but for good storytelling, showing the empathy with how this young kid got twisted and turned to become this sociopath and psychopath, that’s intriguing. And in turn, you can then play on the dark side of Fitz. You can push him and show how destructive his passion could be by losing and dismantling his own family and kind of not having a care for anything else, becoming myopic in the pursuit of his passion to catch this guy.

How do you think the issues raised in the series are relevant today? Seeing the kind of hate that can build in someone when they feel so ostracized, for instance, feels timely. I’ve read the manifesto many, many times now, and I actually do believe in what Ted Kaczynski was saying and emphasizing. I do not believe in how he wanted to get his words out there. I think that is just terrorism full-stop. But if you go back to what he’s saying about us becoming slaves to these systems and technologies that we created to help us, that is happening. Whether we like it or not, when the phone rings, people do jump. One other thing Greg promised me from the beginning was that we’re going to pose a lot of questions about technology and society, the secrets that people have on their computers and the reliance that we have on this technology, and the fact that we are kind of moving away from each other and the environment and secluding ourselves at the same time as thinking that we’re having more connectivity. I believe we are doing that, and I think that if you took away how the man tried to get his voice out there, he was onto something. I think that’s hopefully what makes this a bit more relevant as well.

The two-hour premiere of Manhunt: UNABOMBER airs Aug. 1 at 9 p.m. on Discovery. Watch the first hour now below.

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[thevulturesquadron]

wondermumbles 

replied to your post

“dwead-piwate-meggers I have questions about Sloane Kelly… Keep reading…”

Fascinating. I appreciate this post. One question: “Her one priority has always been and, one way or another, will always be the civilians. The lives of many - her many.” …protection fees?

Hey there! Thanks a lot for reading my ramblings about the character. It was a really long post - I doubted people had the patience to read through it. And you make a really good point.

Since last post I mostly talked about her in a good light (of sorts) I guess I could develop more here on some of the things that make her problematic. (sorry for the long post ahead, I just really don’t know how to stop words.) 

Nothing from what I previously said makes her less of a tyrant when you first meet her in Kadara. The protection fees are one thing, but her people also get openly beaten on the streets. She is ruling Kadara with an iron fist. This didn’t however happen over night. And all of it is actually rooted in the path she chooses to take at the end of the book. She gave up on reason. She gave up on ‘the bright promised future’. Without giving spoilers to the book, she became responsible for a group of people that were demoralized by fear and despair. They were sent out to their deaths in the most cruel way. Sloane realizes that she doesn’t have the means to inspire them. Idealism and hopes had actually brought them to that horrible outcome. So if she can’t inspire the wish for survival, she’ll force it. She shows stability and determination, things she always knew how to use in her military career. She needed these people to man up even if she has to shake them up. And if they wanted to survive, they had to earn it. 

And that really did the trick, I bet everything went well - finding Kadara, fighting off the Kett. But what came after was not something she knew how to deal with - build and control a social center. She kept doing it by using force. She mistakenly simplifies it to everyone has to earn their lives and contribute. She learnt the hard way that the lack of food and means to satisfy basic needs can create a disaster so she continues to make use of force to make sure people don’t get any ideas. But they do. You clearly see that they start comparing what she’s doing to what Nexus did to them. They call her ‘no better’. And they are not wrong. Because as I mentioned, down the road purpose dethroned morality.  And her control over the situation is slowly slipping. I actually believe that The Charlatan is just taking advantage of it and fast-forwarding the process. Aggravated, her solutions to keep things under control get more desperate and drastic: people end up being beaten in the streets, she allows the use of Oblivion so that they don’t revolt. These are signs of the situation getting out of hand. One of her big flaws is that she’s short-sighted. She’s going down one road and she’s like a bulldozer - only one way, ahead, even if it leads to downfall.  

I absolutely love how her VA, Indira Varma, delivers one essential line: “But the Initiative was just another empty promise. The only person I could count on to change things is me.” The way she says the last part is amazing because it both shows the obvious fact that she was let down by The Initiative and she needed to do something, but the tone also tells you how far-gone and how self-entitled she believes herself to be to take all these Machiavellian decisions. I am convinced she ends up believing she has the right to draw those lines because these people are alive thanks to her. 

The thing is that you are right, the way she manages things is just damaging. Living in fear is not really living, it’s just surviving. Because that’s what she sees herself doing there on Kadara. Surviving. If she survives, her people survive. The planet is toxic, the Angara need to be kept satisfied so that her colonialism is not obvious and questioned (the execution of Vehn Terev is critical to her so that she can show the Angara she can bring them justice), the Kett can strike at any time which is why she’s always on the look out (that’s how you actually meet her). She knows her people are in a delicate spot since Kadara wasn’t theirs to start with. The survival of her people is her priority, not the living conditions. In her mind, these are a luxury at this point. There is no denying that she has already too many things on her plate. If you side with her you’ll see many of these drastic measures change - no more beating in the streets, but instead security is tightened. No more violent punishments, no more excess of power. Opinions around Kadara are mixed. Colonialism is still the biggest of issues (this one remains regardless of whom you pick), but she’s willing to listen to reason. 

Also, if you were referring to the protection fee she demands from Ryder, that is completely in character as well. She doesn’t care that the outpost is filled with Milky Way population. Initiative people are not her people so she cares about them as much as she cares about the Angara. And her rule still stays: you want an outpost here on Kadara, you have to earn it. Not in the sense that you did something nice once, in the sense that your outpost is here to last. You have to bring a contribution like everyone else. Openly trading with The Initiative would only read as betrayal to her people. Betrayal to everything they had to suffer because of Nexus. Openly trading with the Initiative would seem as if she’s selling them all back to the people that sentenced them to death. Kadara doesn’t forget, and forgiveness won’t happen anytime soon.  

And on a more general note, when I was talking about her priority always being the civilians I was speaking on a bigger scale, in the context of being a leader as a final purpose vs. being leader as a means to keep people safe. The problem here is that survival doesn’t equal quality of life. What really got to me - and I have to fully admit it’s probably part of the reason why I defend Sloane so much and I still see room for development - is her line on Meridian. When everyone is declaring their support, whilst Reyes says ‘Always up for the adventure, or whatever this is’, Sloane puts it simple and clear ‘Kadara is here too. Remember that.’  This line speaks volumes about the character. It’s not ‘I’, but rather ‘I am not here to represent myself or as a personal favor. My presence here is not a joke. I am here for Kadara. And you better remember that’. The safety of the people is bigger than her hate for the Initiative. This is a situation so similar to the Krogans. They have been the outcasts of the Milky Way, looked down upon, and left to die. But maybe, for once, someone would remember their aid and not sweep them under the carpet once they are no longer needed. This is also true for Sloane and the exiles from Kadara. It really put Sloane in a different light for me. 

Huh boy, I bet there’s more in this post than you initially asked. I really hope I didn’t miss the point of your question. Looking back at what I wrote it seems a bit messy, but I’ll just leave it like this because for some reason I just don’t have the mojo to come up with the right words this week. I am aware that I probably missed some aspects in this post, but that’s why I always love a debate on characters. It makes you see things in a different perspective and you can put everything together. I know Sloane is a character less liked in the fandom and I don’t aim to change people’s opinions or to make her look better. She is undoubtedly an antagonist in Mass Effect Andromeda and I actually believe her remaining issues set her apart from certain tropes. 

[robotnik-mun]

Robotnik Retrospective Part Three: I, Robotnik.

Hello again boys and girls, and welcome to another thrilling intallment of the Robotnik Retrospective! Last time around we covered the design of the Big Round Guy, as well as the somewhat crazy history of how he managed to become the guy we know and despise. Now that that shallow but neccessary bit of exposition is done with, we can get into the real meat of things- the character of the doc himself. 

In this segment we will examine the doctor himself- his personality, what his actions and statements reveal about him as a person, and how the nature of his goals reflect upon him. Through this, I hope to paint a portrait of the man, provide some insight into him, and hopefully enlighten you as to how that all contributes to my enjoyment of the guy. 

Better grab a sandwich for this one, folks, because you’re in for a loooooong haul. 

In fiction, how a character enters the scene is incredibly crucial, because more often then not this is the moment where we establish the kind of person they are (or what the writer/director/head honcho WANTS you to think) and inform something significant about their character in the process, setting the stage for things to later play out. This holds true for Robotnik, and to his great advantage, HIS establihing character moment comes within moments of the show’s opening theme.

The scene begins with Sonic breaking through the sound barrier and rushing to a clean, idyllic city before stopping and pointing to the skies, catching the attention of the other Mobians as they look up in shock and fear. A massive airship, a hideous, bloated monstrosity of grime laden metal, covers the city in darkness, and it is here that we are granted a first glimpse of the man responsible.

This single shot, and the sequence that follows it, tells you everything you need to know about Robotnik, who he is and what he does. Scowling down disdainfully at the scene before him, his ship passes over the city, obscuring it from sight momentarily before moving on. Underneath, we are shown what has become of the pristine and beautiful city of Mobotropolis- it has been changed, corrupted and twisted into a grim, mechanical factory-city, and up close we are given a terrifying answer as to what’s happened to the unfortunate inhabitants, as we are treated to the first view of what will come to be known in the fandom as a ‘Robian’.

This entire sequence, then, is Robotnik in a nutshell- a looming, horrifying menace in command of tremendous technology, out to conquer, enslave and actively despoil the world around, until there is nothing left but smoke-choked skies and lifeless, mechanized cities devoted only to creating more machines, the former inhabitants forcibly converted into machines themselves and forced to labor endlessly as their minds and souls are entrapped in metal, forever enslaved to the will of Robotnik.

That however, is just a nutshell. So hey, rather than limiting things to the nut, why don’t we explore the great and terrible oak that grew from it?

Hot DAMN that is a corny analogy.

Alright, where to begin.. ah, I know. Before we start, an acknowledgment is needed- one of the biggest parts of Robotnik’s appeal as a character is due to the absolutely wonderful performance by his voice actor, Jim Cummings. 

Giving Robotnik a deep, refined sounding voice that could waver between cool calm and abject frothing rage seamless, enhanced by a metallic echo that only enhanced the sinister aura carried by him. Sadly, that particular effect was phased out in season 2, but even without it Cummings performance was stellar, giving Robotnik a *very* credibly menacing voice to go along with his demeanor. In particular, the hissing undertone of sheer relish given to Robotnik in certain scenes makes it clear just how much he loves what he does. I’m not sure if the guy would nearly be as memorable as he is if not for Cummings’ performance.

Incidentally, Cummings also voiced Winnie the Pooh. Wrap your mind around THAT one.

Now then, getting into Robotnik himself... to start with, the very nature of Robotnik’s evil is one that I find fascinating, and forms a huge part of the character’s appeal from where I stand due to what it reflects about him, and nothing does that better than Robotropolis itself.

Robotropolis is a grimy, polluted mechanical hellhole of a city, designed not for the habitation of people but to create machines and extract resources from the planet itself. Laced with factories and refineries and generators and spewing out and endless robots, this ‘city of the future’ is a lifeless, blighted cancer that is slowly spreading and consuming all of Mobius. There is nothing beautiful about this place- it’s harsh and brutal and forcibly converted towards a single function, and towering over it all is Robotnik’s citadel, where Robotnik himself commands and oversees every single aspect of what happens in Robotropolis from the comfort of his control room. There are no other people other than Snively, and in the end Snively is no better off than the legions of machines that patrol and labor in Robotropolis. Probably worse off, given that he is a thinking creature of emotional capacity capable of feeling physical and emotional pain, and is trapped with his sadistic psychopath of an uncle.

The robots of Robotropolis are no better than the foul city that made them.

Reflecting Robotnik’s desire for mechanical perfection in their utilitarian, functionality minded designs and menacing, faceless molds- there is nothing here that could be familiar or comfortable to people save for a basic shape. Intimidating, emotionless and pitiless, these things more than advertise their roll as Robotnik’s chosen tools of oppression. Encountering any of these is bad news for a Freedom Fighter not named Sonic, and even Sonic cannot bulldoze his way through any of these without a lot of effort on his part. Without the advantage of the power rings, Sonic’s fight against these mechanical monsters would be that much more difficult, to say nothing of the sinister "Spy Eyes” that allow Robotnik to see everything that goes on in his city and beyond.

Yeah, it’s safe to say that the machines Robotnik utilizes are every bit as sinister and grim as Robotropolis itself, a harsh testament to machine efficiency and logic and-

... well to be fair, they ARE kind of creepy looking. Eh-heh. I prefer to think this lot were a bunch of throwaway robots that Robotnik made in his spare time and were exiled to the Sky Spy for the purposes of disposal. 

Anyway!

The idea that a place like this, filled with machines like that, is what Robotnik would regard as perfection is horrifying, and it says a lot about the kind of man that he is. Robotnik doesn’t want subjects. Robotnik doesn’t even want slaves. He wants machines- machines that can be programmed, machines that will never falter in their task or betray him, machines that can be abused or sacrificed on a whim. It is not the roar of the masses calling his name that appeals to him, not their adulation or their respect or even their fear that he desires- it is obedience, control, absolute and all consuming. This is a world where all people, all cultures and all minds are erased, where all actions and all movements are directed by one mind, one drive, one will- Robotnik’s own.

Robotnik is a control freak to end all control freaks. He doesn’t want what normal conquerers and dictators desire. His vision of perfection is a lifeless world where he is ultimately the only true source of intelligence, and it becomes clear that one of the reasons he does this is because he despises the world and the creatures within it. Robotnik is shown to revel in the destruction his industries causes, and is utterly ruthless in his pursuit of his monomaniacal goal of control. He’s perfectly fine with hurting Tails, a child, in the hopes that his cries would draw out Sonic. He cheerfully informs a captive Freedom Fighter that he has will be subjected to ‘wonderful machines’ if he doesn’t give him the location of Knothole, and expresses irritation upon realizing that the wolves weren’t completely eradicated as he had initially believed.

That contempt for the world  isn’t merely expressed in his exploitation of its creatures either. His treatment of the environment is just as much a statement of his loathing as it is a casual exploitation of natural resources. While some would dismiss this as a ‘Captain Planet’ thing, it doesn’t really wholly dominate his character or decision making as it would an Eco Villain. The number of times where he seems to relish pollution amounts to two, and both times are fairly justified in a ‘smells like victory’ kind of way. No, he’s not a wanton polluter- that’s just a means to an end, and that end is making the rest of the planet inhospitable for organic lifeforms. In one episode he explicitly weaponizes acid rain, and at a first glance it seems corny... until you recall that his main enemies are hidden in a massive forest, and suddenly the whole thing is less an expression of 90s style environmental aesops, but a calculated act of destruction designed to make life just a little harder for his enemies... okay, it’s still a 90s environmental preaching bit, but it does a lot to enhance his character in the process and illustrate who he is.

And if there is anything that best shows all this? It’s the Roboticizer.

Robotnik may not have been the inventor of the Roboticizer, but I will maintain that the fact that he was able to modify it towards the ends that he did is still pretty ingenious in of itself, taking a device meant for medicine and healing and transforming it into a tool of enslavement and conquest. This device is one of the most hellish things devised in any bit of Sonic media, taking the ‘turns animals into robots’ concept of the games to the most twisted end imaginable- a machine that transforms living creatures into robots, enslaving them to Robotnik’s will. Worse yet, it is revealed that all those who are Roboticized are perfectly aware of what’s happening around them, and they have no way to fight it. No way to escape. It’s a waking nightmare, and Robotnik cheerfully, cheerfully inflicts this upon people, gleefully so.

The Roboticizer itself is a pretty thorough example of Robotnik’s sheer, hideous ingenuity and cunning. Besides the practical use for creating perfectly obedient and tireless slaves, it is an impressive tool of psychological warfare- everyone he has under his control is someone’s friend, someone’s family member, twisted and warped into a metal mockery of their normal selves. Those who would resist Robotnik would know this, and it makes fighting him all the more difficult because it means risking their loved ones to do so, yet perversely, the existence of the Robians also hints at the idea that maybe there’s a way to reverse the process and regain all those that were lost. So not only are Robians efficient workers and sentries, they are also collectively a very effective form of living shield against harsher reprisals from Freedom Fighters and any other forms of resistance out there- this isn’t just a matter of collateral damage, this is having to make yourself kill your *actual* friends and family, who do what they do because they literally cannot do anything else, and cannot be rescued conventionally. The whole thing is just incredibly twisted on a number of levels, going beyond even the already horrific premise of a machine that turns people into robots. It’s a cornucopia of disturbing, and Robotnik does this without so much as skipping a beat.

All of this is fascinating to me because while Robotnik does what he does for the practical reasons of needing resources, it is clear that he thoroughly enjoys his work. This man really does get a kick out of the pain he causes and the suffering he inflicts, but that in itself is never really the means- that is just a side benefit. It is his vision of the world in particular that intrigues me- the grim totality of what he is trying to achieve by dominating the world and wiping everything away until nothing but metal remains, a world of no love, dreams or hope. Where everyone and everything answers to him and him alone, a place where you will either be a cog in the great machine that runs on whim, or crushed to nothingness between the gears. It’s a bleak, pitiless vision of perfection, and everything about it is just so horrible that I have to wonder what could have happened in this man’s life that would make him see things in such a light. To make him so hellbent on making the world as ugly, dead and lifeless as Robotropolis- a blighted, tumorous reflection of the void that is his own soul.

Because the most terrifying thing about Robotnik isn’t that he revels in his own cruelty- it’s the fact that he does so, while being completely aware of the goodness in others.

Oh yes. For all that I’ve described of him so far you’d think he’d be one of those sorts who doesn’t really understand the more positive traits of people, projecting his own selfish and misanthropic view of the world on everyone around him. He doesn’t. He is perfectly capable of recognizing goodness and selflessness in others- in “Sonic and Sally” he is able to identify that Sonic and Sally love one another even if he’s being sardonic about it, and in “Hooked On Sonics” he seems legitimately confused as to why Antoine would seemingly betray his friends. Heck, in “Sonic Racer”, he doesn’t really seem to consider that Sonic would risk himself or others in a race until Snively suggests it to him, a rare occasion where a villain actually overestimates the moral fortitude of a hero.

For all that he does, Robotnik does not regard himself as evil- there is exactly one moment where he ever refers to himself as such, and in that context it is explicitly done because doing so gets him something that he wants. Given the man’s utterly sadistic egomania and desire for control, you would think there’d be no room for him to understand others this way. This is a man whose view of the world is so bleak and cyncial that he once said that dreams are things that are MEANT to be broken, yet he does not discount the more worthwhile traits of others. The fact that he is capable of acknowledging better things in people and still do what he does makes him all the more evil for it, because it becomes clear that he possesses an understanding of his actions and their impact in a way that someone totally blind to these things would not. He knows there is good in people, and that does nothing at all to impede his actions or his vision of the world. He’s sane enough to understand what he’s doing, and crazy enough to just not care.

What else can I really say? This is what intrigues me most about Robotnik and what I find the most fascinating and horrific about him as a character- the idea that behind all that egomania and hate and in the face of all the evil he inflicts upon everyone and everything around him in the name of his nightmarish vision of the world, there is some part of him that is not blind to the better traits of others. For me, it makes him all the more horrible and despicable for doing what he does, and it makes me enjoy him all the more.

It’s easy in general to think that Robotnik was just born bad, along with every other incarnation of Eggman/Robotnik out there (notable exception being Fleetway Robotnik), and in all likelihood that’s where they would have gone with it if they’d bothered to expand upon that aspect of his life. I however am not entirely convinced this Robotnik started out that way- I think at one point he was indeed a normal man, until events helped to shape and mold him into the monster that he is. I do this not because I need him to have a sympathetic reason for what he does- there is no tragedy in the world that could cause anyone in their right mind to legitimately sympathize with this person or his actions or his goals, and I would deeply, deeply resent any attempt to frame such things as justifications for his actions. Rather, I do this because it resonates with me that even the most god awful of people didn’t start out that way, just as in real life, and I feel the same holds true for this Robotnik. It’s a small thing to go off on, but you know, sometimes small details can reveal a lot.

There is more that I like to Robotnik than his raw evil and the terror of the world that he’s trying to create though.

Robotnik’s entire demeanor is fairly enjoyable to me. More often than not Robotnik is a very cool and confident individual, whose facade of control rarely breaks beyond the occasional relish that he demonstrates when winning. His humor is dry and observational and sardonic, occasionally venturing into the morbid, yet at a first glance Robotnik is otherwise very much an in-control individual, something that you would expect from a man that rules the world. Yet behind that facade of control there lurks a horrible and explosive temper, a frothing rage that is all too eager to claw its way out. If I were to compare Robotnik to anything in nature, then Robotnik is an arctic volcano- a great and massive mountain of ice and stone that only just barely contains a burning, destructive rage just waiting to be unleashed and destroy everything in it’s path.

Similarly, the way Robotnik carries himself and rules his empire does well to establish the fact that he is, in fact, very much in charge of everything. The image of him sitting within his control rooms and the massive computer monitor that is one of the most compelling images in the series, perfectly illustrating that he really does have the world in the palm of his hand. 

That Robotnik is able to direct many of his schemes from here and has come so close to defeating Sonic and the Freedom Fighters without ever having to leave the comfort and security of his throne room really tells you a lot about just how in control the guy really is of everything.

Some tend to scream about this or call him ‘lazy’ for it, but really- Robotnik runs the world. He WANTS to run the world. What sense would it make for him to conquer an entire planet if he’s not willing to actually rule it (or at least ‘direct’ it- rulership would imply that there were people involved in this equation, and you can’t really ‘rule’ machines so much as control and direct their actions)? Besides that, it’s still a rather innaccurate characterization of the man given the number of times he DOES actually head out-to oversee important projects or to personally go after something important things- he braves Lazaar’s fortress to get to his spell-computer, he personally investigates the Void managing to re-open despite his terror of Naugus, and even leaves Robotropolis to personally crush a Freedom Fighter uprising in the North. While he does spend most of his time within Robotropolis, he’s hardly there exclusively, and frankly it makes far more sense for him to be there given that it’s the heart of his empire, and furthermore the place where he can most likely find and kill his enemies.

Similarly, it does well to enhance the idea that he is in control of the world and makes him fairly unique compared to his counterparts as they existed at the time, giving him a manipulative, above-the-fray tactical intelligence. Let’s talk about that intelligence for a moment. Eggman and all of his counterparts are mechanical geniuses, and that really goes without saying- it’s the fundamental trait of the character that they’re a scientific and engineering genius, and it’s always on full display whatever the incarnation. However, the SatAM incarnation of Robotnik in particular has a lot of emphasis placed on his abilities as a planner, schemer and a tactician, and it tends to show quite handily.

His plans, when they directly involve the Freedom Fighters, tend to be very thorough and more often than not come *dangerously* close to killing them. In “Sonic and Sally”, it is only through sheer luck that Sally is able to escape Roboticization and that Knothole is not discovered the moment that her duplicate steps into Knothole, and even that inconvenience doesn’t deter Robotnik from trying to decipher the location by other means. The Spy Eye Satelite plan would have gone off without a hitch if not for one of the rockets launching the satellite landing close to Knothole, not only alerting them to the satellite’s existence but also giving them a means to reach it and destroy it. Multiple times throughout the series he is able to make tactical insights that escape Snively, who himself is hardly an idiot, and more than a few times he is able to predict the diversions and movements of the Freedom Fighters, as well as instantly pick up on the fact that Robotropolis has a spy in its midsts when the Freedom Fighters start becoming a little TOO successful, and comes horribly close to gaining the location of Knothole when he manages to capture Uncle Chuck.

Another wonderful example of his tactical cunning and planning is this simple fact- Robotnik actually managed to turn Sonic’s own speed against him and make it a danger to him. In ‘Hooked on Sonics’, through the use of a power ring to boost it, Robotnik’s ‘Sonic Radar’ is not only able to detect Sonic’s movements, but project an energy blast that is actually capable of striking him. It presents Sonic with a horrible set of choices- he can either use his speed and risk being blown to pieces, or try to proceed with rescuing Antoine on foot and most likely up his chances of getting captured or killed in Robotropolis. Either way, Robotnik finds a way to kill him. It’s a lovely example of the man’s cunning, for while other Robotniks have either negated Sonic’s speed or used machines to match it (including this one!), this Robotnik remains the only one to actually make Sonic’s greatest strength into something lethally hazardous for him.

Naturally being the villain of the show, none of this works out as well for him as it could, but that’s not really a strike against him given the nature of the show and the wider franchise. I just appreciate that he makes the heroes work so hard for their victories against him.

One of the things that really helps with his effectiveness though is the fact that for the most part? He doesn’t screw around. When the opportunity presents itself to kill Sonic, he tends to take it. He makes it clear at one point that while he’d LIKE to Roboticize Sonic, he’s perfectly happy with just killing him where he stands. It’s not just a one off thing either- several times within the series Robotnik tries his damndest to just *shoot* Sonic and be done with it. Not that he succeeds, but again, there wouldn’t be a show if it did, and I like the fact that he’s so willing to just go with the direct approach. Even in the episode ‘Game Guy’, wherein Robotnik FINALLY indulges in a true ‘Bond Villain’ moment by trapping Sonic in a pinball machine themed deathtrap so that he can ‘savor the moment’, shades of this pragmatism still exist- notably, once Sonic gets his hand on a power ring and uses it to destroy the arena, Robotnik gleefully declares that play time is over and sets the entire thing to be sucked into the Void, explicitly because Sonic had used up the power ring and now had less of a chance to escape. Even when playing with his food, he still seizes the opportunity to go for the kill once he’s had his fun... and really, after umpteen times of trying the direct approach, why NOT indulge that sadism a little?

Even his actions in ‘Doomsday’ make a good deal of sense given the context- Sonic’s escape from the Roboticizer happens due to him pulling out an unprecedented three power rings for use, something never done before, and the later escapades with the Deep Power Stones occur only because Robotnik was convinced one of them was destroyed. His actions are indeed arrogant, but from where he stood, everything was accounted for- it took an earlier deception and a massive trump card for them to get out alive, and even then the use of the Deep Power Stones was a *dangerous* gambit. Before then though? Even with Robotnik getting overconfident, the Freedom Fighters’ plan failed utterly, and Mobius faced near total destruction. The Doomsday Project itself is pretty good illustration of this Robotnik’s hideous pragmatism though- rather than waste time and resources trying to capture and convert the planet, he pretty much decides he’s happy with what he’s got, and sets forth to simply eradicate everything else. It’s a perfect example of Robotnik’s goals- he will control everything, and anything that cannot be controlled will be crushed. In the end, it wasn’t even Doomsday going kablooey that did Robotnik in- Robotnik would have managed to escape the destruction, if not for Naugus managing to open the Void and pulling him in before he could go anywhere, as outlined by the creators for what they intended in the never made 3rd season.

Another way his intelligence manifests it in the show, in a way that doesn’t involve scheming or robots, is a small but very interesting scene from the episode “Drood Henge”. 

In that episode, Robotnik is investigating the location of the Deep Power Stones, artifacts of legendary power that he hopes to exploit (naturally). While he sends out Snively to investigate Drood Henge, Robotnik busies himself reading an ancient tome- and just by reading it, he manages to decipher the language, and uses that advantage to find the first of the Deep Power Stones. It’s not the most dramatic example of his intelligence on the show, but it’s a fun little detail all the same.

One other small, but interesting detail about this Robotnik though is the way that his egomania and vanity operates. Now make no mistake- this guy has an ego, ooooh boy, has he got an ego. He’s the ruler of the friggin’ planet, so of course he has an ego- it’s pretty clear that he thinks of himself as the most perfect thing in creation. “Robotropolis” is as much an homage to himself as it is a statement of what kind of city Robotropolis is. Yet for all of that, his egotism doesn’t really manifest in the same way that it usually does with Robotniks and Eggmen- he doesn’t see fit to plaster his image everywhere and on everything. There are approximately three examples in the entire series of him doing this- firstly there is a statue of him in Robotropolis, which I read as having been previously the location of King Acorn’s statue and as much a ‘fuck you’ to the guy as it was an object of self flattery. Second time it was the Pinball Fortress, and to this day I’m fairly convinced that one was pretty much him just deciding to splurge for a day. Finally, within his bedchamber, he keeps a number of statues and pieces of art dedicated to himself- but being kept in his bedroom, they are things only he can really appreciate. As such, while Robotnik *is* very vain and self-important (like every other incarnation of Eggman out there), he’s a lot less public about it than his various counterparts out there. I like to think that the reason for this is that, much like how he doesn’t care for the adulation of living things, Robotnik feels only he is worthy of being able to appreciate HIS magnificence. It’s perfectly in alignment with the all consuming black hole that is this Robotnik’s egomania- only Robotnik has the brains and taste to truly appreciate Robotnik!

It is here now that we reach the final aspect of this Robotnik that I appreciate and am intrigued by- his past. As tends to be the case with Robotniks and Eggmen abound, Robotnik’s exact backstory isn’t all that detailed. What details that ARE available though, are very interesting. You see, once upon a time, Robotnik was a high ranking an official in the Kingdom of Acorn- the head of the military as a matter of fact, with the title of ‘Warlord’, and known by the name of Julian. 

Now this alone is fascinating because, despite being a scientist and known for his scientific expertise, Robotnik first rose to prominence as a military figure. It’s a unique detail to his past and forms a distinct contrast to his profession as a scientist and an engineer. Even more intriguing though, he is known as ‘The Man Who Won The Great War’, and called a hero by the King. This is the most interesting part, because it presents a parallel between Robotnik and Sonic- Robotnik was once a hero himself, in a war of his own, much like Sonic is now a hero in the war against Robotnik. Was it possible that Robotnik himself was once in it for the right reasons, before the war twisted his perception and led him down the path he now walks? And is it possible that before everything is over, the same might happen to Sonic?

Probably not, but again- interpretation and overthinking are the fun parts of being a fan, and as I said, I don’t think this Robotnik was born evil. I’d like to think that maybe, once upon a long time ago, he was a genuine hero... until something or the other started to twist him into the creature we know him as.  

Furthermore, we are given hints as to how he was able to worm his way into the king’s confidence and do the damage that he did. It’s only for a scene, but when talking to the king, Robotnik is able to make himself sound far more humble and kindly, acting very deferential and genial around the king. Some have asked how he could fool anybody given his appearance, but take that into account how he talks and behaves around the king, it’s easier to understand- particularly given the likelihood that they’ve known eachother for a while, and Julian had more than proven his loyalty by winning the man a war. The prosthetics might make him look creepy, but it’s pretty likely that people knew him before he got them- would YOU judge someone based on their appearance like that, if they had medical devices that might make them come off that way?

I’d hope not.

Less detailed then that is his brief, painful partnership with Naugus. This one is interesting because it shows Robotnik in a position of subordination, but it also demonstrates just how far he is willing to go to see his plans through. He deliberately allows himself to assist Naugus and forces himself to put up with Naugus’ lousy treatment and tortures, deferring to him until Naugus makes a fatal mistake and opens himself up to be eliminated. It gives an insight into just how dedicated Robotnik is to carrying out his schemes and the kind of discomfort he’ll endure to see them through- and perhaps gives us an idea of how long he might have been planning the overthrow of Mobotropolis. If he was willing to put up with Naugus’ tortures if it meant forwarding his goals, then serving King Acorn would’ve been a cakewalk by comparison. It’s another point for just how damn insidious the guy is, that he could put so much time and effort into his plans and put himself through such things so long as he is able to achieve the ends that he wishes. 

And with that, we draw this section of the retrospective to a close. I hope that I have illustrated my perception of Robotnik and his actions as provided by the show with skill and detail enough to convey to you why I enjoy this guy so much. You may have noticed a fairly glaring ommission when listing the various aspects of Robotnik’s character- namely his relationship with Sonic and the way his hatred for the Hedgehog drives him.

It’s no ommission folks- it’s a part of the next Retrospective, where we detail Robotnik’s relationships with others and how they are strengthened as characters by it and how, in turn, Robotnik himself is strengthened as a character.

Tune in next time, same time, same place, as we delve into the next part of the retrospective! Hope you enjoy it, and enjoyed this, and feel free to leave comments or asks! I want to engage you, folks!

[lsmithart]

Research: Book - H2O and the Waters of Forgetfullness by Ivan Illich

Relevant notes taken from the book - my comments are written in italics..

Page 6: Gaston Bachelard - “There is a fundaemntal contrast between two mutually constitutive aspects of imagination: a formal one and a material one. The form and matter of our imagining cannot be understood separately because one cannot exist without the other.” - can things be understood without prior knowledge or understanding of that thing? Our perception is held by out imagination - links to existing understanding’s are made through this.

Page 8 - “Space is a social creation which results from the all-embracing asymmetrical complementarity enshrined in each culture. “Living” and “dwelling” have traditionally implied one another; one stresses the temporal, the other the spatial aspect of being. To dwell means to inhabit the traces left by one’s own living, by which one always retraces the lives on one’s ancestors.” - to exist within a ‘family unit’, where states of dwelling are passed through the generations and evolve naturally. 

Page 9 - “Dwelling means living insofar as each moment shapes a community’s own kind of space.” - Houses that are ‘mass built’ to the same standard - does this make them more susceptible to “throw away cuture”?

Page 10 - “Animals are born with the instinct which dictates their behaviour. The nest or the web, the den or the hole are created by the animal in the harness of its genes.” - Humans on the other hand, use or consume their “housing”.

“The traces people manage to leave in the course of living are perceived as dirt that must be removed, as wear and tear that calls for repair, as the devaluation of a considerable investment. Children grow up and die without ever having had a chance to experience living-as-dwelling.” - living and growing within roots, the ability to grow continuously in a familiar space.

Page 11 - Those that dwell “live on their own dirt.” The recognition that there is a new gulf between “living” and “dwelling” has made them into separate activities, leading to a lost “wholeness”.

“The imagination is not the faculty of forming one’s images of realist. It is rather the faculty of forming images of the invisible.” - a longing and yearning for what we do not have / does not exist within our immediate lives.

Page 17 - Timaeous on the mother: “the nurse of all things that are generated, the receptacle... that we may liken to a mother.” “Mother” in Greek (older forms of English) is synonymous with “womb”, not with “woman”. “Receptacle and nurse of all generation, we have only this dreamlike sense, being unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about it because it exists only as an ever-fleeting shadow.” - the mother as a trace of existing as what we understand should be true. Receptacle definition: a hollow object used to contain something - the mother as a hollow object.

Page 21 - “the exterior and interior are just two locations within one kind of space. E.g. home and abroad, dwelling and wilderness. - interior and exterior of my body as a space, when these cannot exist in harmony it pertains to the experience of being between dwellings. Conscious and unconscious living - dreams and epiphany?

Page 22 - “In this bulldozed space (of limbo between interior and exterior, people can be located and given an address, but they cannot dwell. Their desire to dwell is a nightmare.” 

“Space is nothing but a horrible outside-inside.” - Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space)

Page 25 - “In Maori myth, the creation starts in the womb, in which the waters fuse. The firstborn wedges himself between mother and father, whom he thereby separates from each other; from the blood the separation draws out of the womb the world is made.” - in personal/individual terms, the world (person) is made from creation as their own being separate from their creation?

Page 27-28 - Purity and cleanliness: “The power of water to clean to detach what sticks to people, to their clothes or their streets.” “The purity that water restores or confers has a special connotation of freshness and transparency that transforms the innermost being and so it is often associated with re-birth,” -  the bathtub with its water connotations as a symbol for rebirth, the process as an act of ridding impurities from within.

Page 28 - Purity refers to a quality of being. It is perceived as the manifestation of something deep inside. Its beauty can be lost only through a corruption at the being’s core. The loss can be expressed only with a negative compound: we cannot help but say ”impure”. - Could trauma and abandonment contribute to this? Would I be considered an impure being? An understanding that the corruption is not always self inflicted.

Page 30 - Cleansing as ritual: “Only bodies so washed will not stay glued to their environment.” -  the absence of water and presence of hardening material (i.e. the plaster) poses the opposite effect. Gluing myself to my environment and being in order to capture the presence and absence of memories past and existence present.

“Once the dead man has been washed, he can set out on a journey. At the end of the journey, they reach a body of water. This water separates two worlds: it divides the present from the past. The water has the power to strip those who cross it of memories that attach them to life.” - the re-birth, allowing for memories to be frozen in time and left behind?

Page 33 - “Memory turns water into a shard.” - the process of plaster transforming from liquid to solid, leaving a remnant of myself, forcing presence and absence into an artefact.

A truly revealing an interesting read. So strange how the ideas resemble my own ideas for this piece and what can be connoted from symbolistic representations of water and its relatives. Appraising myself of these contextual understandings has helped me to feel much more confident in my output for this piece; thus aiding my ability to explain its purpose to the beholder.

REFERENCES:

Ivan, I. (1986). H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. Marion Boyars Publishers.