#i have Issues to sort out but. ultimately engaging with people is the first step

[raspberry-vinaigrette]

not tonight btw but tomorrow im gonna be making more of an effort to talk to folks and be around online. not in a "im chronically online" way its in a "i'm realizing ive been mentally unwell in a way that would be very much fixed by me talking to people and engaging with my friends rather than isolating myself in favor of work" way. not to get too tmi on it and if u really wanna know details i can message but Something Happened today and it's kinda made me realize that the source of my low energy is at least in part that. i've been unintentionally isolating myself from most fun activities including Socializing As A Whole. so. i am going to get better with jack kennedy posting as my shield

[granulesofsand]

If this ask is too upsetting then you can leave it alone for a while. Bodily we are an adult. We do not want to intrude in the space of RAMCOA survivors but this has been on our mind for a few months. TWS: Sexual, physical and emotional abuse, BDSM, lots of kinks. We've been abused by two different people in our life, both were minors around our age at the time. The first one was coercive for sure but we don't think he had any sort of complex plan. He would hit and insult us in front of friends, and flashed us a few times when we were alone. Second abuser was our ex, had more access to us due to us dating. They didn't know we have DID and we didn't know at the time either. This is where we suspect possible programming happened; even though they weren't aware of our condition there was a lot of focus on control and different roles. Even before we were officially together they "introduced" us to a lot of BDSM concepts, mainly through writing smut with us. When we started dating, they started actually acting on those concepts though. Almost always they were the "dom/top" while we were the "sub/bottom". Some of us tried to fight back and were punished while others gave in entirely. Which led to us developing a lot of alters dedicated to specific sexual "tasks", so many that I believe we've just barely scratched the surface on member count. The list of stuff they made us do (aside from "traditional" lesbian sex) included breath play, pet play, impact play, and watersports. Just to maintain some privacy I won't say how long this went on for, but we were both (older) minor teens and it lasted long enough to be a clearly established pattern. The persecutors will randomly re-enact trauma, both inwardly and outwardly. Even if we try to resist at first there is NO way out of it. The reenactments will happen and we just have to weather the storm. tldr; Abusive ex used BDSM as a means on control, questioning if we were programmed or mind controlled somehow.

Thanks. -🐊

Bare-Bones Programming

Always important to say that we are not experts on your experience, and the information we provide is ultimately for your decision.

🗝️🏷️ RAMCOA, SA, programming and deprogramming

Programming has two basic requirements:

The perpetrator(s) intend to control you

By creating self-states or conditioning self-states to cues

The second situation you described sounds like it aligns pretty neatly with that. It’s not as extensive as what a group or a practiced programmer might produce, but there are bits of advice aimed towards survivors that might help you.

Members who have ‘jobs’ or ‘tasks’ or similar are a fair indication of Mind Control, and it might serve to ask who assigned them this task, even if you already have an inkling. Their responses will determine whether they feel the obligation to the perp or themselves.

What to Do

The first step towards decreasing reenactment is guidelines. Establish for every member a set of standards, most negotiable and some required. Maybe y’all agree to clean up your own messes (negotiated and with exceptions) and understand that no member engages sexually before discussion (required).

This sets a clear precedent for what is expected and what members agree to when they interact with one another and the world. Sometimes it’s a matter of not knowing, and with practice the issue is no longer. It’s not likely everything is solved like this, but better to start early.

Next is demonstrating healthy interactions. Many collectives prefer to start outside, to gain experience they don’t already have. A friend is a good goal, someone y’all trust or a few people certain members confide in.

If it’s not too big a trigger, look into consensual BDSM. Start with reading, maybe novels or SFW explanatory websites to avoid too much resemblance to trauma.

Not every collective feels secure enough with each other to do this, but consider having two members with matching preferences to try a safer encounter. One member could also practice on their own if that’s preferable, or with a predetermined safe outside person.

Experiencing more non-abusive (or less abusive, but file that away until you’ve failed with other methods) BDSM— and plain sexuality— provides more data to work off of in the future. A truly healthy scenario may take time, but even lots of breaks and slow-going is better than remaining where you are.

None of these are required, but sexual reenactment is not fun. You could always start with something like sharing (or not sharing) food or belongings to get in some basis of consent without including relationships or sex.

With that or as an alternative, work on shame and disgust. Shame is what you feel for yourself, disgust is what you feel towards another. This could look like positive affirmations, telling or writing down stories you haven’t yet, getting to know members without judgement.

I don’t remember who said it, but there’s a phrase: “Hating having others doesn’t have to mean hating the others”. Not every collective has the phobia of other members, but it is well-documented and a necessity to overcome for teamwork.

Later

There are methods of working through memories and integrating them, maybe to remove barriers between members or fuse them. It helps take steam out of flashbacks and urges, putting a memory together.

It takes trust, though, and a willingness to work with and support other members. Once you make progress with those, you can decide together how to proceed.

You can find resources on the Legion System’s TikTok LinkTree, no account required to get there on a web browser.

Some are pushy for fusion or integration, and there is a theme of brokenness. We found Safe Passage to Healing and Becoming Yourself helpful. They do have good information, but take breaks and skip what you have to.

I hope that helped, even if it was maybe one paragraph of the question you actually asked.

[morally-grey-girlbosses]

Nana Daiba Propaganda Post

Okay this got so very long so tl;dr: Local girl decides to engage on overprotective bs for an entire franchise, and goes from causing a bunch of time loops in the base series, trying to destroy a whole play in the game and both beating all of her friends in combat to lead them to their symbolic deaths so that they can symbolically be reborn also trying to get her roommate to be symbolically dead without that second step. Also she has two swords so she's automatically a girlboss.

Okay so this is going entirely off my knowledge of the anime, mobile game/ReLIVE and movie. If she did anything silly in the stageplays I do not know about it. So Nana is a funny little girl with so many issues. If you like anime girls in time loops, you'll love her, because she chose her time loop herself. She has abandonment issues like no other and she's so scared of her friends all growing up and going their separate ways that she decided to keep winning the auditions (/a series of funny little stage battles. Also there's swords. She has two of them which I think qualities her as a girlboss because lesbians with two swords are inherently cool) and choosing to repeat the same year and few months over and over. She kept doing this for decades, winning against even the top stars of her class, people more visibly talented than her, over and over. She did it partially because she wanted to protect everybody but also she was the only one with her fears so it was ultimately super selfish on her part. Not that she actually grew up or learned anything other that period of time, because so much of her character relates to how she's largely a tall child who did not consider letting go once. Eventually the childhood friends to lovers trope (Hikari and Karen) made it impossible for her to keep going with this, since they both beat her in the auditions.

Anyways now that we're done with that overprotective nonsense, let's move onto ReLIVE, where she does it again in a different form. This is the storyline to both introduce students from other schools and the Arcana Arcadia arc, which I'll be talking about now. So in this arc, what was known as Play A was causing all of the students to reach for the Unknown Lead. The problem was that this was fucking up peoples dynamics with each other, but in a way which was the pathway to change and growth. Nana is very anti-change when she sees it as harmful so of course she's back to her shenanigans. Aside from a brief talk with Junna early on, her first big appearance in the arc is when she's having a chat with Mahiru, and the hill Nana decides to die on is that there's not really any point in a lead role if anybody will have to be hurt at all by trying to get it. Mahiru points out that getting hurt is something they're all prepared for, and that was all of their choice. Almost like denying her friends and everybody she loves the choice or chance to face Nana's own fears/get hurt in any way is becoming a theme. Anyways, they have a revue over this, and Nana wins. After this, Nana ends up switching her attention from protesting the idea of plays having lead roles (as one done) to destroying this play as a whole, resolving to take everybody down and free them from what she sees as the madness the play has driven them all into, when they're all just passionate about a role and not really under a spell or being held captive like Nana says in her little monologue. Anyways, this is a bit short lived, because in her next appearance an act later, Maya, a fellow classmate and the top star Nana took down each time she began another reproduction/time loop, decided to invade her stage to fight against Nana. Nana takes this as a chance to talk about how much she thinks the play is hurting everybody, and reaffirms her viewpoint of the play being a source of madness. Maya points out how flawed Nana's viewpoint is, since she's once again selfishly denying everybody the chance to face any sort of hardship and grouping them all together as one thing she needs to protect. Then Nana says something strongly hinting at her reproductions and Maya simply decides not to unpack the implications there in favor of stepping on every moral which was driving Nana and leaving her with the realization that she messed up anyways.

And here's the movie. For context, at the end of the recap movie, which was the anime from Nana's POV, the symbolic deaths of the cast were strongly hinted at, and Nana knew about this. So naturally the next step was for her to beat all of her buddies in a 6v1 and restart the revues so that they could all reach their symbolic rebirths. Except Junna, her roommate/friend/the character she's usually paired with, was, in her eyes, incapable of recapturing her spark, so she ended up offering Junna an opportunity to choose her own end with one of Nana's weapons instead of trying to be symbolically reborn and just dying out pathetically as a result. Junna naturally was not really approving of this, so she ended up taking her sword to instead fight against her while making the point that her stage wasn't something Nana could make for her. And she won and the two of them promised to reunite but all of my emotions about that (which are very positive but are also just painted screaming) don't give her more morally gray or girlboss points while the rest of the revue at least gives her that first variety.

Anyways this girl keeps doing overprotective but very selfish things and also has two swords and the ability to use them so she is my funny little morally questionable girlboss. she also has girlflop traits but that coexists with the girlboss part because she is just a silly girl who has beaten 6 (maybe 5 technically) in combat singlehandedly

[ponysoprano]

Mermaid IS cool as hell. She's student council president, does ballet, and loves the ocean.

IDK about the perfume tbh, it probably does smell but magically isn't overpowering. I don't think it's actual perfume in the toys though.

There are only proper 5 duos who need each other to transform, including MaCherie and Amour (although it actually was the initial premise of the franchise). Other than that there are a bunch of cures who are basically duos who may have special dual attacks and/or are particularly close to each other, but they aren't technically duos. You can usually tell which are true duos because because transformation sequences will have them interacting with each other instead of just having individual sequences spliced together. (Heartcatch and Suite are exceptions). Yes, true duos are screwed if separated. Sometimes the villains try to use this against them, though not often. It usually doesn't work out for the villain's who try, but it does result in some of my favorite moments in all of precure.

Cure Cosmo is a shapeshifting alien phantom thief cat from Planet Rainbow who also disguises herself as an idol to steal back the riches stolen from her people after an incident only she survived.

It depends on the season how much the fairies matter. On one end is Kururun from tropical rouge who is just the queen's pet and is there to be cute and marketable. On the other end, some fairies are full fledged team members. Sometimes a guide or mentor. Sometimes the fairies are god babies the cures have to raise. In some the fairies are the girls transformation devices. Often some sort of combination of the above.

I think with Happiness Charge it basically comes down to the fact that its one of the few seasons that has a focus on romance, a very large one at that in a franchise where the main appeal is usually on the relationships between girls, and the romance drama, like the plot, isn't really appealing. Partially because the plot basically is entirely predicated on one pathetic man who can't handle his own relationship drama. Unfortunately that man is also god and is the one recruiting precure to fix it. I don't exactly like that god of earth in HCh is basically a hot guy in his 20s who can't get his shit together and instead recruits teen girls, never explained why only teen girls, to wage war (many are imprisoned) and also he projects his relationship issues onto them by forbidding them from getting into relationships while they fight for him. Like yes the villains do target civilians so Precure fight for their sake, but its still ultimately his fault. Some people call him a creep, which I don't think is quite fair (he never goes after underaged girls, they just crush on him). But then again nothing he does really makes you care about him, respect him as a god worth worshiping, or understand why our main protag is crushing on him so hard. It also very clearly purposefully is meant to call back to super successful Heartcatch but generally speaking just does some of the best aspects of heartcatch poorly. Throw in an underdeveloped yellow, a pink whose actually engaging plot motivation is awkwardly dropped, baffling worldbuilding, and international cures who weren't designed tastefully... I could go on... and you've got one of the most disliked seasons of Precure. Seiji's pretty cool though and was the first step towards the first main male character 9 years later. Yuko may be underdeveloped but she's goofy. Hime's can be endearing and relatable. It's not completely without merit and it does have its fans but I only recommend it to people who like romantic drama, or Precure completionists.

Thank you anon!!! I am learning so much (also Cure Cosmo is an alien ?? I love her more with each passing moment)

[mrmrswales]

Exclusive: the ‘profoundly powerful’ moments that shaped Duchess of Cambridge’s children’s charity work by Camilla Tominey

It all started with secret visits the public never got to see. Newly married, and with the world’s press chronicling her every move – down to the details of her designer dresses – the Duchess of Cambridge resolved to go "below radar".

Acting as Prince William’s "plus one", rather than a fully fledged solo royal in those early days, the newest addition to the Royal family knew that she wanted to find a cause she could champion as impactfully as Diana, the Princess of Wales’s landmine campaign; it was simply a question of where to find it.

Having already announced her first patronage of Action on Addiction, a charity working with people with drug and alcohol problems, Hope House, a women-only rehabilitation centre in Clapham, south London, seemed as good a place as any to start.

It was October 2011 when the then 29-year-old Duchess paid the first of several, incognito visits in a bid to find out what had sent its clients on a downward spiral of self-destruction.

According to Rebecca Priestley, who accompanied the Duchess on the visit and would go on to spend five years as her private secretary, it played a pivotal role in her decision to put childhood at the heart of her philanthropic endeavours.

Speaking on the record for the first time, Mrs Priestley, who is now an executive coach, recalled:  "I remember going up to Anglesey, where they were living after the wedding, to have a conversation with the Duchess about her royal life."

At that point, she had the philanthropic world at her feet. She could have done anything she wanted in the charitable arena. Typically, she had put a lot of thought into it already. Addiction was an issue she was instinctively thinking about – but she was also genuinely interested in understanding what support was there and what role that played in the bigger picture of mainstream societal issues."

With the Duke having flown to the Falklands for a six–week tour of duty with his RAF search and rescue squadron, Mrs Priestley put a programme together to support the Duchess’s desire to "listen and learn"."A lot of it was behind the scenes, just talking to people and hearing where it was that they needed more help.  The one thing that united all of the women at Hope House was that the derailing had started so early on. They could trace the problems in their adult lives back to childhood."

A subsequent private visit in February 2012 to Clouds House, a treatment centre in East Knoyle in Wiltshire, served as further confirmation that the early years should be a key area of focus. But it was during a later meeting with female inmates at a detox unit at Send Prison in Woking when the penny well and truly dropped.

"It was a profoundly powerful moment,” recalled Mrs Priestley. "You go in there with this preconceived idea that these women have done things wrong, that it was their fault. Then one woman started speaking to the Duchess about her earliest memories of seeing needles on the floor of her home."

She had always thought addiction was a misunderstood issue, but after this, she became concerned that there was a pre-destiny about those affected – an inevitability about it. These women were born into it and there was very little chance of escape."

The experience set in train a sequence of events that will next week culminate in the Duchess, 39, stepping up her ambition in driving awareness and action on the impact that early childhood can have on society at large.

She will launch a new initiative through the couple’s Royal Foundation to further explore the science around early childhood, raise awareness of the issue and foster collaboration and partnerships across relevant groups.

According to Lord Hague, who became chairman of the Royal Foundation last September, the "ambitious" new project will be equal in stature to William’s £50 million Earthshot Prize, launched last year with Sir David Attenborough to find workable solutions to climate change and environmental problems.

"The Duchess truly believes this is one of the great issues of our time," said the former Tory leader. "This is the central plank of her work in the way conservation issues are for the Duke. It’s a hugely significant moment."

While politicians are often in a rush to make a difference during the comparatively short time they have in office, royals are there for life, which perhaps explains why Kate has taken 10 years to get to this point.Having been instrumental in launching the Heads Together campaign with William and Prince Harry in 2016, designed at tackling the stigma and changing the conversation on mental health, it was not until 2018 that she convened a steering group of experts to look at how cross-sector collaboration could bring about lasting change.

In January, she delivered a landmark speech after her Five Big Questions on the Under Fives survey garnered over 500,000 responses.

"People often ask why I care so passionately about the early years," the mother-of-three said.

"Many mistakenly believe that my interest stems from having children of my own. While of course I care hugely about their start in life, this ultimately sells the issue short. If we only expect people to take an interest in the early years when they have children, we are not only too late for them, we are underestimating the huge role others can play in shaping our most formative years, too."

Pointing out that the social cost of late intervention has been estimated to be over £17 billion a year, she added: "The early years are therefore not simply just about how we raise our children. They are in fact about how we raise the next generation of adults. They are about the society we will become."

According to Eamon McCrory, Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology at University College London, the Duchess "has a vision of how she can help transform how we as a society view and invest in the early years for the benefit of society".

Describing her interest in "the role the brain shapes our early experiences and how that sets us on a path to adult life", he explained: "When you look at very young babies and infants, on the surface they don’t appear to be engaging in complex emotions so there's a tendency to underestimate the millions of synapses that are being formed every minute. But science is telling us we have to look under the bonnet.

"There’s no question that for the Duchess, this is a lifetime piece of work. The last five years laid the foundations, now we are entering a more proactive phase.” Described by one source as “thoughtful, professional and determined to do a good job,” there is a sense that Kate has never been in it for the early wins, but the long haul.

As one well-placed insider put it: "She took the job very seriously right from the very beginning. She continues to want to get it right and do her very best - for the institution, for William and the importance of the work she’s doing.

"She doesn't just want to rock up for a picture opportunity, which is why she used to get quite frustrated with all the early focus on what she was wearing. She really cares about this stuff."

Another source said she was "much more fun" than people give her credit for, pointing out how she has grown in confidence having found a cause that she is not only passionate about - but also well informed.

As Lord Hague put it: "She’s been reading the books and had trustees reading the books. People assume her interest in the early years is because she has children – actually it comes from all the adults she’s met." The other key influence has been Kate’s own idyllic childhood.

Brought up in leafy Bucklebury in West Berkshire by her entrepreneur parents Michael and Carole Middleton, pictured below with the royal family, the Duchess has never made any secret of how fortunate she has been to be brought up in a loving and supportive family.

"She always recognised that she benefited from such a great start in life," added Mrs Priestley.

"That’s why sport and the outdoors has always been a key theme for her. She was always asking how those sorts of experiences could be made accessible to others."

For Dame Benny Refson, president of the children’s mental health charity Place2Be, where the Duchess has been patron since 2013, Kate’s grounded upbringing has proved an asset.

“The Duchess listens and people feel heard and valued. It’s nothing to do with privilege. The groups she meets in challenging areas in London don't look at what she's wearing. What makes a difference is that an important person has shown a genuine interest in them. She can relate without passing judgement, which is so important."

Having started out as a reticent public speaker, the Duchess has finally found her voice – and next week she will have a lot more to say.

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: Isfj. Recently found out that a colleague is anti vax & doesn't believe in sci. I feel rlly conflicted now. I like her, she's not rlly harming anyone + if I step in her shoes I can sorta get why she thinks like that. But every time she's anti research/sci, I get v irritated. I don't like superstitions & dislike when things aren't based on facts. She has a lot of privilege and implies that she's victimized & oppressed over sth she herself chose.

I and my social circle have also always been anti anti-vaxx. I guess I realized I made it my identity to be 'liberal', open-minded, critical thinking, accepting (which ironically includes being anti anti-vaxx). But turns out I'm a lot more judgmental and black and white than I thought. And ok I guess I judge her for her privilege. But I have a lot of privilege too. Idk. Everything I judge her for, I have a counter point for too. My thoughts are a mess. Advice?

-------------------

I don't think you fully understand what it means to be judgmental. You seem to be confusing "critical thinking" and "critical judgmentalness". The two are not the same. It's good that you're sensing a problem here, as that produces an opportunity to learn and grow.

- Critical thinking involves respecting factual information, weighing information objectively, and making decisions impartially. If you are the kind of person who values the truth and acting in accordance with the truth, then you will take on the duty to clarify the facts, be fair-minded in your evaluations, and correct bad decisions that were biased or prejudiced in some way. Does this duty extend to others? Only in cases where harm is being done, and you would certainly need to justify that the moral harm is severe enough to warrant interfering with someone else's autonomy and agency.

- Judgmentalness involves being critical for egotistical reasons, meaning that the criticism is usually unwarranted, excessive, or ultimately pointless. Usually, judgmentalness is a means to cover up a psychological problem such as an inferiority complex, helplessness, or chronic resentment. Being judgmental means you cherry-pick "facts", you manipulate information to suit a narrative of your liking, and you make decisions that favor yourself at the expense of others. If you are a judgmental person, you don't value truth as a high ideal, rather, you only value your own version of the truth and ignore everything else. The main goal is to ensure that you don't have to confront the truth of your underlying psychological problem.

Full disclosure, I'm on your side of this issue, so I can sympathize. However, it's important to acknowledge that controversial issues are confusing because there's a lot going on that needs sorting out, which makes them open for debate. If you were in possession of the "Absolute Final Truth", shouldn't you and everyone automatically bow down to the power of it, because there would be no grounds whatsoever to object to it? But that's not the case, because the issue is not as clear cut as you believe.

In other words, when it comes to debating, both sides usually have some important points to make, regardless of how poorly the participants are communicating them. This is not to say that you must relent, submit, or be friends with people you disagree with. It means that the only way forward is to acknowledge that there might be some merit in what they're saying, even as you disagree with their approach or their final conclusions.

In your situation, you are coming from the standpoint of someone who respects critical thinking and the truth… at first. However, whenever you meet someone you strongly disagree with, you easily spiral into judgmentalness, and then start engaging in social status games. Why? Because you, yourself, equate your beliefs with your identity. This reveals something about your ego development.

This habit of identifying with beliefs creates the problem of being unable to address false beliefs without feeling personally attacked and/or using personal attacks during what should be a calm and reasonable debate. It makes communication very difficult. Being wrong is not the same as being bad, so you can call out falsity without attacking people personally, can't you? Is it not possible to separate a person from their beliefs or behaviors?

Stepping back to be objective isn't easy, because we each have an ego that wants what it wants and leads us to obfuscate the truth. But objectivity is necessary for developing the ability to influence and persuade people in the right way. Additionally, lack of objectivity often reveals a lack of humility that enables arrogance in your own beliefs. Walking around thinking that your beliefs are superior, you'll often find yourself locked into resentments, warfare, or stalemates, with lots of hard feelings to go around. It's not great for your Fe development, is it?

[idontwanttospoiltheparty]

can you speak more to that re johns insecurities over their friendship. idk, maybe it could be johns close proximity to the relationship and not being able to see from a birds eyed view but i feel there were so many instances where paul really showcased his loyalty to john and their bond. ie being there and defending him during the Jesus affair, actually trying to understand his and yoko’s relationship (albeit not enthusiastically, but none of them truly did in the beginning, however you have Paul in the let it be tapes discussing trying to understand John & Yokos relationship and explaining it’s importance to John to the rest of the gang). paul going with j&y to sir John lockwood’s office when two virgins was going to be released and providing his support. Paul letting j&y live with him for a while. even on the white album, paul being there while john plays julia, providing encouragement over the intercom on such a personal topic for john. I don’t think paul is fully innocent or anything in the band dynamics (i think the way he especially treated George during the beatle years really should have been better), but in terms of john, idk I feel he really tried to make an effort at least? i take the point that heroin obviously play a part, but John was already doubting before H was ever in the picture (e.g. family way). i really wonder why.

Hi anon!

I think this is a very difficult topic, to be honest, which doesn't have a very straightforward answer. I think there are multiple things that factor into this.

1) First off, there's the fact that John probably wanted some sort of sexual relationship from Paul. Maybe Paul and he even engaged in SOME kind of sexual thing at some point — though I don't tend to believe that — but I'd say it's pretty clear that whatever they had going on, John wanted more commitment, as can be attested by this quote:

The only thing ever lacking in working with another artist and they were usually male – whether it was Stuart Sutcliffe (my art school friend) or Paul McCartney (my musical friend) – is that the relationship only goes as far as the front door and after that you are alone in bed. It's a plus not a minus. The plus is that your best friend can also hold you. (x)

There's a few other quotes where John seems to imply that, to him, romantic/sexual love is the natural next step beyond friendship.

((I actually find it interesting how in In My Life, he compares the subject to both friends and lovers, but that's sort of veering off-topic))

My main point here is that I think John interpreted Paul's unwillingness to commit to him more as being a result of a lack of "sufficient" love, not incompatibility or other factors.

2) John pretty clearly had very deep-seated, life-long abandonment issues, which don't go away just because your friend is nice to you. Ultimately, his insecurity was due to his own unhealthy outlook on life and/or mental health problems, not primarily due to how Paul treated him.

3) I do think though, that Paul just is a kind of emotionally closed off person who also doesn't tend to express his feelings with words. John was probably a "Words of Affirmation" kind of guy. I get the impression from that dialogue where John is saying "Do you hate me? I'm crazy, you know?" that he's heavily baiting Paul to contradict and thereby reassure him. It's both an indirect way to get external help to alleviate your insecurities and, with people who don't really "think" of saying nice things, it can give them the idea to go out of their way to express their affection.

Also don't necessarily see Paul as an apologetic person who sought reconciliation after he'd messed up, which several people have attested John actually was. This would definitely be frustrating and contribute to insecurities.

4) I think it's quite likely that some part of John wanted Paul to push back against Yoko and "claim" John for himself, but Paul tended to take what John said at face value and instead tried to support JohnandYoko, which John may've interpreted as Paul simply not caring about who John was with. John seems to have kind of had a habit of saying one thing to Paul and hoping he guessed that he actually meant the opposite, like with The Family Way. It comes across as some twisted idea of what it means to be a friend, that true friends are mindreaders. Where he got this idea from, I'm honestly not sure, but I can fully believe that before the end of touring they were more on each other's wavelength generally, because they spent so much time together, and maybe John missed that later on.

5) LSD: I think John probably felt some kind of hurt from the fact that Paul wouldn't take the leap and drop acid with him for months. This probably made him somewhat doubt Paul's overall loyalty.

6) Heroin: From what I can tell, the biggest issue within their relationship that H contributed was making it generally harder for John to relate to the world outside his bubble and severely dampening his communication skills, which worsened some of the above points.

7) John might've felt like their friendship was built on John being the dominant leader, who set the pace, and if Paul was starting to be more in control, this could mean that John would one day no longer be necessary, which would've flared up his abandonment issues.

I think that's all my theories, others are free to add factors they think are relevant!

[incorrectbandofbrothersquotes]

You Better, You Better, You Bet - Chapter 8

She Makes Me

Ron Speirs x Juliet Fletcher

Summary: Juliet Fletcher reaches a breaking point in her life. When she is at her absolute lowest, she meets Ron Speirs, and something happens between them that neither of them will ever forget.

Word Count: 3.8k

Tag List: @vintagelavenderskies​ @how-are-those-nuts-sarge​ @iilovemusic12us​ @hesbuckcompton-baby​ @tvserie-s-world​ @whovian45810​ @50svibes​ @cagzzz107​​ If you’d like to be added, let me know!

A/N: Hope you guys enjoy this update!

Warning(s): None :)

Chapter 1  Chapter 2  Chapter 3  Chapter 4  Chapter 5  Chapter 6  Chapter 7

AO3 link

Chapter 8 let’s go!!!

LONDON HEIR WEDS UP AND COMING LADY

Arthur William Burns, 33, of London has married Miss Elaine Spencer, 20, of Birmingham. The couple celebrated their union on February 14, 1944 at the chapel on his uncle Edward’s estate in Suffolk. The intimate ceremony was followed by a small reception of the couple’s closest friends and family. The new Mrs. Burns was thoughtful about her war-time wedding, taking extra steps to avoid unnecessary costs or supplies. She updated her mother’s wedding dress instead of buying new, and after the wedding, generously donated the gown to the Army. Her engagement ring was an heirloom of Mr. Burns’ family, but it didn’t stop there - 

The article didn’t stop there, but Juliet did. She couldn’t read another word about Arthur’s wedding. In fact, she slammed the paper down on her desk. It rattled the teacup in its saucer to the side, but miraculously, nothing spilled. Huffing, and her article forgotten, Juliet folded her arms across her chest and stewed. 

She couldn’t really say why it bothered her so much. She had moved on the same as him, but getting married? It hadn’t been that long. What could Arthur possibly know about this girl? For a girl she was at the tender age of twenty. Was that what irked her? That the girl was so young? No, it was fairly normal for an age gap like that, especially among their class. 

Perhaps it was the class issue that was grating on her. Elaine Spencer was - to the Burns family - everything Juliet was not. Young, rich, well-behaved, and (though only Arthur knew this difference) able to bear children. Seeing their announcement, and the kind of wedding they could afford, was a rather harsh reminder of all that. But even that should not have been this upsetting. 

Deep down, Juliet knew what was bothering her was that she was bothered at all. She was happy with Ron. So why did she care about her ex? Why did this feel like such a blow to her pride? Why did she feel as if Arthur had just terminated their engagement all over again? Wasn’t it enough to have Ron in her life, a man she truly respected and cared about? 

That was something else to consider. Juliet realized she had wasted far too much time on someone who wasn’t half the man Ron was. And yet, Arthur had rejected her. If what she thought about him was true - that he was a coward and totally undeserving of her - shouldn’t it have been the other way around? She knew she felt shame for how much she had loved Arthur when she didn’t receive that love in return. Was that what got on her nerves about this? 

She certainly was not jealous of the girl. Elaine. Juliet knew she absolutely did not want to be married to Arthur. In the long run, they could never make each other happy. Especially now that Juliet had experienced Ron, who truly appreciated what she had to give. She had to keep reminding herself of him or Arthur’s dumb face next to Elaine’s stunning smile would drive her crazy. And yet, she couldn’t stop looking at that picture. They looked so perfect. 

Her door opened and she jumped a little bit out of her seat with a gasp. It was Ron, but that oddly made her more nervous. She perked up. 

“Hi, honey!” she greeted brightly. 

His brown knit together over his eyes. “Honey?” 

“Yes, dear?” she returned. 

“Seriously,” he frowned. “Why are you calling me that?” 

“I haven’t before?” 

“Obviously not.” 

“You don’t like it?” 

“Obviously not,” he repeated. “What’s going on?” 

“Nothing!” she insisted. Then it was her turn to frown. “What endearments am I allowed?” 

“Why do you need them, when my name works just fine?” he replied. 

“Oh come on,” she said. “Not even darling?” 

“Darling is meaningless here, you people call everyone darling,” he said. 

She considered that. “Alright. ‘Love’, then?”

“No, thanks.” 

“Baby?” 

“No.” 

“Dear?” 

“No.” 

“Sugar?”

“No.” 

“Sweetheart?” 

“No.” 

She bit back a giggle for the last one. “Daddy?” 

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.” 

“My heart belongs to Daddy,” she began to sing as she got to her feet and approached him. “So I simply couldn’t be bad -”

“That’s a little bit sick, coming from you,” he cut across her as he shrugged off his jacket.

She ignored him. “Yes, my heart belongs to Daddy! Da da da da -” 

This time, he interrupted with a kiss. Juliet giggled into his mouth, but he was successful in stopping the song entirely. When they parted, she had a goofy grin on her lips. 

“Are you absolutely certain we should disregard the genius of Cole Porter?” she teased. 

“Let it go,” he returned. 

“What are you gonna do?” she challenged, making her voice dramatically husky. “Spank me?” 

He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.” 

She blinked, taken aback by his casual reaction to such a suggestion, but she was also a little curious, so she decided to push the envelope. “You wouldn’t.”

“What’s the matter?” he questioned. “Afraid you’ll like it?” 

Her mouth fell slightly agape. How had he managed to so drastically turn the tables on her? She was supposed to be teasing him and somehow, she ended up being the one flustered and red-faced. She cleared her throat and shook her head to remove the rather graphic images that had popped up inside it. All thoughts of Arthur were certainly out the window. 

“I did not anticipate this backfiring,” she admitted. 

“And yet, here you are,” he said. 

“How tired are you from training?” she asked. 

“Not too tired to make love to you, if that’s what you’re asking,” he answered. 

“That’s the perfect amount,” she said. 

With that, she tugged off her cardigan and pulled him in for another kiss, deep and deliberate, with a nip at his bottom lip to get him riled up. He lifted her into his arms and they fell on the bed together - her pinned beneath him as their lips remained locked. 

Afterwards, as they dressed to get some dinner and Juliet was in the bathroom fixing her hair, Ron spotted the article. Suddenly, her behavior when he first walked in made sense. She’d distracted him with the endearments conversation, and he hoped he had distracted her from what she’d read. But his gut told him there was something more. He’d walked through that door every day without surprising her. There was a reason she had started and panicked this time. He picked up the newspaper, and looked hard at the photo - at the man who had humiliated Juliet, but ultimately paved the way for Ron’s own happiness with her. 

Arthur was not much to look at, which was both surprising and expected. Surprising because well, Ron found Juliet to be very beautiful, and he knew she could do better. Expected because Juliet was not the sort of person to base a relationship on looks alone. Although she had certainly noticed Ron’s. But for the first time, that made him doubt. She told him once she was more upset by the indignity of what Arthur had done, but she must have really seen something in him to have agreed to marry him. And she talked so much about Ron’s looks, he started to wonder if that was all she saw in him. 

He quickly dismissed that thought. She had been incredibly vulnerable with him and shared parts of her life he was certain she had shared with few others, perhaps not anyone. But something was holding her back from addressing this with him, and he wanted to know what. 

“I reckon we can just pop downstairs and have something quick,” she said as she emerged from the bathroom and picked up her cardigan. “That way we won’t get too cold before we - y’know - warm back up again.” 

He faced her, and caught the surprised look in her eye at his expression. Her smile drooped and faded as she realized what he held in his hand. 

“Jules,” he said, voice heavy. “I want you to do something for me.” 

“Sure,” she looked nervously between the paper and his face. “Anything, Ron, just -” 

“Without one fucking joke, I want you tell me why you’re upset about this,” he said, indicating the paper, though she understood perfectly well what he meant. 

She sighed. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” 

“Yes,” he said. 

She waited for him to explain, but he didn’t. But he was not sacrificing his control of the conversation, he was solidifying it. She was going to explain herself to him. 

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m annoyed at myself for letting it upset me at all,” she said. She met his gaze, searching his face for a reaction, but he didn’t give one. “I mean, yes, it’s a wound to my ego that by all rights that announcement should be about me and him. Although, I never would have gotten married on Valentine’s Day. Seriously, of all the cheesy -” 

“No jokes,” he cut across her. 

“That wasn’t a joke, it was a disparaging remark,” she returned. 

“Juliet.” 

“Sorry.” 

She bit her lip, carefully forming how she wanted to say what was on her mind. But, it turned out he wasn’t giving her that either. 

“Don’t think, just talk,” he instructed. 

“I care about you so much,” she blurted out. “You make me happy in a way I hardly thought possible until I knew you. But seeing that announcement made me ache. It’s difficult to pin down why exactly since there are a number of things that bother me about it, but mostly it’s that it shouldn’t matter. I’ve moved on, haven’t I? But if that still hurts me, I’m worried that perhaps I haven’t, and that’s not fair to you or to me. And if that’s the case then perhaps I should let you go, but the thought of that makes me want to hurl myself out of a window. Then that makes me worried that no one will ever be enough for me. Which is ridiculous because you’re more than enough. You’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever met in your own weird way. So, that means there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with me.” 

She stopped to take a deep breath and paused. She considered saying more, that was really the sum of her feelings. Ron stood there calmly. 

“Can you talk now please?” she requested. 

A hint of smirk tugged at one side of his mouth, but he stopped it. 

“It’d bother me more if you didn’t care about this,” he replied, which made her brow wrinkle. “It’s okay to have feelings about someone you were involved with. Doesn’t mean you still have feelings for them.” 

“You don’t think it’s a reflection of my feelings for you?” she asked hesitantly. 

“No,” he said with a shrug. 

She bit her lip. “I just...I just don’t think it would get to him if he saw my wedding announcement in the paper.”

“It would,” he replied. 

She rolled her eyes. “You can’t know that, you didn’t know him.” 

“I know you,” he said. “That’s enough to understand that there’s no way you didn’t have an impact on him.” 

“That’s -” she began to argue but stopped herself as she absorbed it fully. “Well...that’s actually a lovely thing to say, thank you.” 

He set the paper down and walked over to her, gathering her up in his arms so he could kiss her forehead. 

“Don’t hide behind distractions when there’s something serious,” he said gently. “And don’t hurl yourself out a window, I had enough trouble with you on the bridge.” 

She looked up at him and smiled. “You’ve lifted your moratorium on jokes, I see.”

He pecked her on the lips. “Nope, just for me.”

She repaid him with a light jab to his ribs with her pointer and middle fingers. “Shut up.” 

On that note, they headed down to the bar for dinner and drinks. Though Juliet had mentioned wanting to return to her room quickly, they ended up lingering. Talking like they had when they first met. Juliet talked a little more about Arthur, and Ron gave her the space to do so. It didn’t last long. Slowly, he faded from the conversation and they moved on. Ron challenged her to a darts game, and Juliet readily accepted. 

“I’ve never played before,” she confessed. “Well, actually, I almost did when I was seven or so. Dad took Billy and I to the pub with him and left us to our own devices.” 

“I don’t like where this is going,” Ron said. 

She pressed on anyway. “We weren’t tall enough to reach the board, so Billy drew one on the wall we could use. The owner got upset and started shouting at him.” 

“I really don’t like where this is going,” he said again. 

“So, I stabbed him in the thigh with the dart,” she finished. 

“Billy?” 

“The pub guy.” 

“Just checking.” 

“Anyway, he starts screaming -”

“Billy?” 

“Nope, still the pub guy,” she said. “He grabs me by my hair and starts dragging me out. That didn’t sit right with Billy, so he leaps onto the man’s back and starts punching him. Mind you, Billy was only about nine at the time, so he wasn’t the most effective.” 

“I imagine not.” 

“But of course Billy doesn’t care, he’s just looking out for me,” she continued. “So the guy lets go of me, and I grab him round the legs and trip him. Then Billy and I ran out of there as fast as we could, terrified about what Dad would do to us if he realized we’d caused the commotion. Luckily, he never found out.” 

He blinked at her. “Honestly, I’m just impressed you stabbed a guy.” 

“He yelled at my brother!” she returned. “What was I supposed to do?” 

“Stab him, of course,” he said. 

“That!” she cried. “Right there! That’s why we work so well together!” 

She giggled into his mouth as he kissed her in agreement. 

“C’mon, let’s play,” he said. 

He showed her where to stand, how to hold the dart, and some tricks he used to get better aim. She was attentive to his coaching, and it certainly paid off. Each throw got her closer and closer to the bullseye. So much so, he considered tripping her on her last turn. He didn’t, since that would put her dart in rather close proximity to his thigh, and he was in no mood to get stabbed himself. 

She took her shot, and to the surprise of Ron and a few onlookers, she hit the center of the dartboard. She punched the air with excitement and let out an enthusiastic scream before turning to face him, beaming with triumph. 

“That’s right!” she bragged to anyone listening. “Juliet Fletcher is the darts champion!” 

For a moment, Ron genuinely feared she was going to try and chest bump him, and he wasn’t sure there could be romance after that. To his relief, she did not. She did something far more embarrassing. In movements that could only be described as lost and awkward, she...danced. If one could even call it that. Her limbs jerked, her hips lacked any semblance of rhythm, and her feet sort of scraped across the floor. He watched in disbelief as she went about her celebration, completely unabashed. 

“What’s the matter, Speirs?” she taunted. “Upset you lost to a girl?” 

He wanted to laugh, but he was so disturbed it came out more of a grimace. “What...what are you doing?” 

“Victory dance,” she returned simply. “Like footballers do.” 

“No one has ever done anything like what you’re doing,” he said. 

She came to a slow stop, a smirk on her face. “I told you I can’t dance.” 

“I thought you meant the foxtrot.” 

“Well, I can’t do that either.” 

“I’d expect not.” 

“Are you embarrassed?” she wondered. 

“Aren’t you?” he shot back, though judging by her expression, she wasn’t. 

“Nope,” she shook her head. 

“Should be,” he said under his breath. 

She ignored that little remark. “Life’s too short to stifle the joy of kicking your boyfriend’s ass in a game of darts.” 

He rolled his eyes. “I’d hardly call that an ass kicking.” 

“You wanna go again?” she dared him. 

“God, no,” he replied quickly. “If you win, you’ll start dancing again.” 

“So you admit it?” 

“What?” 

“You’re afraid I’ll win.” 

“Yeah, but not for the reason you want.” 

“Whatever,” she giggled. “I’m gonna get another drink, d’you want one?” 

“Sure,” he said. 

With a nod, she headed for the bar. She established fairly early on in their relationship that she was not the sort who wanted to be doted on. She had no problem sharing the responsibility of buying drinks or fetching said drinks. Ron rarely even pulled out her chair for her. Opening doors was different, as Juliet usually had a bag or something, but she never so much as suggested that Ron carry it for her. He once offered, but she told him she’d only allow it if she could tip him, which promptly ended the conversation. 

“Hi, Juliet,” Emily, the bartender, said as she approached. “‘Nother round of whiskeys for you and Lieutenant Speirs?” 

“Yes, please,” Juliet replied. 

“Just a moment, I’ve got to bring some beers to the lads back there,” Emily said, pointing to the other end of the pub. “I’ll be right back.”

“Take your time,” Juliet assured her. 

While she waited for Emily, a man approached the bar. A dark haired, tall, but mousy looking man Juliet had seen at the Blue Boar only a handful of times. He was usually alone and stayed for only one drink before leaving. She got the impression he was not solitary by choice - he was clearly unpopular. The other officers always gave the table a wide berth. 

“Hi,” he said timidly. 

It took her a moment to register he was speaking to her. “Oh! Hello, there.” She stole a glance at his rank and then his name. Sobel. She decided against trying to say it to avoid the risk of mispronouncing. Plus, she didn’t want him to think she was interested. 

“My name’s Herbert,” he said. “Herbert Sobel.” 

She studied his face for a moment. “Herbert, huh?” 

He blinked, surprised. “Um. Yes.” 

“Oh, yeah, Herbert absolutely suits you,” she said. 

He was taken aback again. “I’m sorry, what?” 

“Never mind,” she shook her head. “How can I help you, Herbert?” 

“You could start with your name,” he replied. 

She wrinkled her nose. “Eh. No, thanks.” 

“What?” 

“I’d rather not give you my name,” she said. “Because I’m afraid the follow up is going to be your asking for my phone number or offering to buy me a drink. So I reckon we’re better off if I get the ‘no’ out of the way now. Save us all some time.” 

He sputtered for a moment before she went on. 

“I know this must seem like contempt prior to investigation,” she said. “But even if I wanted to - which I don’t, mind you - I am involved with someone.” 

“Wha - who?” he wondered. 

“Lieutenant Speirs,” she said, and pointed him out for good measure. 

Sobel glanced over just as Emily returned and began pouring the whiskeys. 

“Well, isn’t Speirs lucky,” Sobel murmured. 

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Juliet said, taking their drinks. “I really am a horrid bitch, you wouldn’t like me anyway.” She held back a laugh as his eyes went wide. Emily covered her mouth to stifle her own giggle. “Cheers, Herb. And thanks, Emily.” 

Emily asked a stricken Sobel what he wanted to drink while Juliet left. She returned to her seat next to Ron and delivered his whiskey. He wore a deep frown which told her he’d been watching her interaction with Sobel. 

“What’d Captain Sobel want?” he asked, just a hint of bitterness to his voice. 

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, I shot him down,” she replied. 

“He hit on you?” he questioned, but his shoulders relaxed a little. “Must not have seen you dance.” 

“Shut up!” she laughed, elbowing him. 

He didn’t say anything in return, he only put his hand on her thigh, giving it a little squeeze. Something about it thrilled Juliet. It was...intensely macho. Possessive even. Normally things like that disgusted her, but Ron made it sexy. Only, she had to question it. 

“Are you serious?” she said. 

“About what?” he returned. 

“You’re not bothered by my talking about my ex-fiancé, but a strange man offering to buy me a drink has you marking your territory?” she asked. 

“I can’t help who you were with before we met,” he said. “I can do something about anyone getting ideas now.” 

“What would you have done then?” she questioned playfully. 

“Stab him with a dart,” he replied, without missing a beat. 

She giggled before she sipped her drink. “You’re ridiculous.” 

She wasn’t able to remain in Ron’s grasp long. Emily approached and told her there was a phone call for her. Juliet excused herself, but not before kissing Ron deeply. 

“So the other girls don’t get any ideas either,” she teased. 

“Fine by me,” he said. 

With one more peck, she followed Emily behind the bar. She picked up the receiver and held it to her ear. 

“Juliet Fletcher,” she said. 

“Juliet, it’s Otis,” said the voice on the other end of the line. 

“Oh, hello, Otis, how are you?” she replied politely. She got along with the investigator most out of all the people involved in Peggy Lee’s case. 

“Quite well, thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry to call you so late, but I’ve just gotten the news that Meredith Fisher’s trial has been moved up. We begin on the fifteenth of March.” 

“Crikey, that’s quick,” Juliet said. 

“I know, but the prosecution is confident enough,” he told her. 

Juliet was tempted to let him know they were absolutely right in their confidence with the way Meredith Fisher’s lawyer was going about things, but she held her tongue. 

“That’s good,” she said. “I’ll be sure I’m there for the trial.” 

“I’ll see you then,” he returned. “Good night, Juliet.” 

“Good night,” she replied before hanging up. 

She returned to Ron, who shot her a curious look. 

“A trial date has been set for Meredith Fisher,” she said. “In just a couple weeks.” 

“Are you ready?” he asked. 

“Damn right I am,” she said. 

“That’s my girl.”

[transgenderteensurvivalguide]

So I looked through a detransition blog just out of curiosity, since it was one you reblogged, but now I’m super... freaked out? I have a top surgery consultation in April but now I have this weird fear that I’m faking it or that I’ll regret it afterwards. I’ve identified as somewhere along non-binary and trans (he/they!) for over a year, and I’ve known I’m not a girl for even longer, but now I’m just so afraid that maybe I don’t know myself at all. Do you have any advice on what this is?

Lee says:

Discussing your feelings with a therapist can sometimes help you untangle the anxiety from everything else. It’s reasonable to have some apprehension about a major surgery that can have a big impact on your life because it is a big change- and like any other surgery, it also has medical risk and can result in complications. 

And reading about other people’s feelings about their surgeries can be helpful! I do recommend reading things from people who were happy with the outcome and reading things from people who weren't to get a better perspective on the range of experiences that can exist. Only reading the negative or the positive doesn’t provide a balanced view!

But even if you read other people’s stories, and talk to them about why they feel the way they do about their choices and bodies, nobody else can tell you what you should do for yourself. Even a therapist can’t know for sure if you will regret surgery (or anything else that you choose to do) because nobody can see into the future, see into your heart, and see into mind simultaneously to and determine for certain what it is that you need. 

As soon as I came out as non-binary when I was 15, I started saving money for top surgery. I was someone who ran towards top surgery at full tilt and I didn’t give myself any space for doubt about whether it was the right choice for me because I felt it was the only choice I had-- forwards or nothing. I was pretty severely depressed at the time and had a brief hospitalization the month before I turned 18, and I was sort of pinning all my hopes on top surgery reducing my dysphoria and booting out my depression. So I scheduled my consultation as soon as I turned 18 and was legally an adult and could do so without parental permission. I immediately scheduled my surgery for the soonest available date, and had inverted-T incision top surgery about 3 months after I turned 18.

Now I’m 21 years old, and I’m 3 years and 5 months post-op from my top surgery. 

In retrospect, top surgery was 110% the right choice for me. If I could do it all over again, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Top surgery really did reduce my dysphoria by a significant amount, and that made it easier for me to cope with my depression and other mental health issues. I was proudly parading around the house shirtless as soon as I was able to stop using post-op compression, before my incisions had even healed into scars.

I don’t have any dysphoria about my chest anymore, especially now that I’ve gotten tattoos to cover my scars. I finally feel like I look like how I always knew I was meant to look.

I don’t post pictures of my chest anymore because I have distinguishing tattoos but I’ve posted a few before/after pictures when I was 3 years post-op and I think things have only gotten better now.

I was lucky to not have any complications; I don’t have any nerve pain, and hypertrophic or keloid scarring, and I didn’t need any revisions. But there are some things that are non-ideal compared to if I had just been born with a typical cis-guy flat chest. My nips are a little wonky in color and shape, and I plan on getting medical tattoos at some point to even the edges out. I also have slightly muted sensation in my chest now, so everything is like slightly number than it was before.

When I was pre-op, I did enjoy having nipple sensation that was pleasurable; even though I had inverted t-incision top surgery which preserved the nipple stalk, I still only have tactile, temperature, and pain sensations in my chest. If you put an ice cube on my nipple and my eyes were closed, I’d know it was cold. If you poked me while I was looking away, I’d still feel it. And if you squeezed me, it would hurt. But somehow it doesn’t feel good anymore like it used to. 

I don’t know how much of that loss in erotic sensation is a mental thing and how much is a physical change caused by scar tissue build up around the nerve. But regardless, it is a real loss. 

For me, that loss is well worth it. While I might have been physically capable of experiencing erotic nipple/chest sensation before, I rarely actually did have that experience because it made me too dysphoric and I didn’t like to take my shirt off during sex. Now I feel more fully present and comfortable in my own body and it makes me more engaged so I can focus on my partner and on the other feelings I’m having and how I look isn’t something that is detracting from the experience. 

In general, top surgery has made my life better in a million ways. I love running shirtless with my college cross country team, I like going swimming at the beach with no shirt, and I like the way I look now when I see myself in a mirror after stepping out of the shower. 

When I get dressed in the morning, my day starts off on a neutral note because it’s just me putting on clothes. Sometimes I pause to think about how I can just put on a shirt and feel good about it and move on. Before, I used to be upset every morning because the first thing I’d be reminded of when I woke up was that my chest was there and I didn’t want it to be. I’m Autistic, and binding was Not comfortable for me sensory-wise, so not having to bind was also nice.

I would choose to get top surgery again, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the right choice for each and every person. I am sure it was the right choice for me, and I have no regrets at all, I never want to have breasts again. But someone else might think that not having erotic nipple sensation is a dealbreaker, or they might not be comfortable with scars if they tend to heal with more visible raised scars that are harder to cover with a tattoo like I did mine.

So I can tell you that top surgery has made my life better and I’m glad I got it and I don’t think that there would have been any way for me to be as happy as I am now if I had not gotten it. Top surgery is life saving and life-changing for some people, and I am one of those people. I might be more inclined to tell people that if you think you need surgery you should get it because my surgery went so well and because I’m still identifying as genderqueer, transmasculine, and non-binary, just like I was when I was 15, so my identity is pretty static there.

Some other post-op people may tell you that they regret their surgery, that they wish they hadn’t done it, and they would make a different decision if they could go back in time. They might want to help warn other people to not make the same mistake that they did.  Detransitioned folks often (but not always) have a different perspective than folks who persisted in being transgender and that’s okay- it isn’t a better perspective or a worse one, just a different one. But both trans and reidentified people can feel this way, even though it’s usually more common for de-trans folks to regret surgical procedures that it is for trans folks.

I semi-rushed into surgery for both emotional and logistical reasons but I knew it was right for me. But that isn’t the best choice for everyone and if you aren’t 100% sure that it is what you want and need then there’s nothing wrong with having the consultation with the surgeon to learn more and then thinking things over before you schedule a surgery date (or don’t), you don’t need to immediately schedule a surgery date after the consult. Think of it as an interview and as an information gathering session.

Neither of us can tell you what you should do because neither of us are “right” or “wrong” about top surgery. It’s just a different experience and a different perspective. We all have biases based on our own way of seeing things, and that can inform our advice.

If you know what the risks are, and you’ve given it careful thought and can provide an informed consent, then whether you should get surgery is your decision. I won’t tell you “go get it!” or “don’t go get it!” and I don’t think that any blogger should be telling anons what medical procedures to get or not get. 

Worrying that you’re faking it, that you don’t know who you are, and worrying about regret is something that can be pretty scary and frustrating, but you don’t need to figure it out on your own, and it’s okay to take a little longer to come to a decision and talk it over with a therapist if you think it’s necessary to help you cope with that anxiety.

But yeah, I believe that ultimately you have to trust your gut feelings on what you know to be right for you.

Top surgery 101 links

Finding a therapist

Side note: While we do our best to avoid reblogs from obvious TERFs/truscum/transphobes/racists/sexists/ableists/etc to avoid exposing people to triggering content by boosting the blog’s visibility, and we do appreciate getting heads up asks about reblogs from a problematic OP, if we reblog a post from someone we do not necessarily endorse all of the content in every post they’ve made, and we don’t necessarily agree with all of the blogger’s opinions either. We reblog a specific post if we think seeing that post might be helpful for some of our followers.

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep15 [FINALE]

For better or worse I think Ryukishi achieved exactly what he set out to do with this series, and I guess everyone’s just gonna be forced to reckon with how they feel about his own perspective on this franchise versus how they feel about it, lol.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut, plus Umineko spoilers.

I’m not entirely sure where to even start with this, but I guess the TL;DR is that I honestly think Gou/Sotsu was ultimately just fine despite it’s issues, and part me of can’t help but be like ‘I told you so, lol’ about how this really did end with this episode, and also committed pretty hard to the Umineko prequel elements.

It’s not like all of my theories were correct in the end, but I at least think I was pretty spot on in my prediction last week that this would end with the miracle of them side-stepping the sword issue entirely and choosing the third option of forgiveness and reconciliation. And also them ending it with an epilogue where we go back to the Matsuribayashi timeline and get a happy ending for Rika and Satoko that provides a ‘non-magical interpretation’ for the story while also giving us an idea of how Bern and Lambda formally split off into their own entities and start the relationship we see in Umineko.

I didn’t quite expect them to go down the route of having them agree to just spend a few years apart and accept that they don’t need to literally always be together, but I think that was a really good way to wrap things up between them. It’s pretty much the healthiest compromise to their conflict that doesn’t come across like it completely invalidates one of their dreams. I get why it feels too anti-climactic and convenient for people, but when you pull at that thread you get into wider topics of what the entire story is about, since this was always going to end with Satoko being redeemed and forgiven. People might not have taken him seriously, but Ryukishi was 100% genuine about his regrets about Matsuribayashi’s ending, and how part of why he came up with this new story was to create a better ending, while also doing more with Satoko as a character.

Basically I think a lot of the fandom negativity towards this boils down to people fundamentally disagreeing with the idea that Matsuribayashi was even ‘flawed’ in this sort of way to begin with, or that Satoko was badly written. It’s valid to disagree on this stuff, but at the very least we all have to grapple with how Ryukishi has his own specific relationship with this series.

People like to focus on how he’s a troll who likes to mess with people, but I feel like this is a bit of a wake-up call for people about how he’s actually extremely sincere, almost to a fault, and he likes to use his stories as a vehicle for expressing his personal philosophies and ideals. 

This whole story is also a good example of how he just sees this as ultimately being a fictional story about fictional characters, and not literally a matter of real people who need to be sentenced for their crimes or whatever. As early as the original VN he was almost being outright preachy about the message that nobody is irredeemable, and that philosophy carries through to this. But to be more specific, nobody *in this story* is irredeemable. He’s pretty open about the fact that in practice you can’t apply this sort of ideal to real life, but fictional stories are their own separate matter.

I think this whole issue of how he views this as a story first and foremost is also the central reason why this ended in a way that comes across as Satoko being let off too easy for her crimes. One way or another, Ryukishi’s made it clear that he sees this as being no different to how other characters had arcs where they committed crimes but still got forgiven, or how Takano is basically a straight up war criminal who also got forgiven for her crimes.

Anyway, this episode at least committed to the Umineko stuff, so that was satisfying. Sure there’s people that still want to deny it, but at this point I think a lot of people are just being stubborn, so it’s not like anything would have really convinced them, lol. I’m also genuinely not sure what people even would have expected them to do beyond what we saw her, aside from having the two of them literally put on their gothic lolita outfits and turn to the camera and go ‘we are literally Bernkastel and Lambdadelta from the video game series Umineko When They Cry’. I almost feel like there’s some kind of misunderstanding from people who aren’t familiar with Umineko when it comes to the idea of what it even means for this to be ‘an Umineko prequel’, or ‘a Bern/Lambda origin story’. I mean, this is quite literally exactly what I expected and hoped for in that regard. It’s not like I was expecting them to incorporate anything related to, like, Beatrice or the Ushiromiya family.

I think this is also one of those things where you just have to decide for yourself whether or not you want to earnestly engage with the story that’s being told, or if you want to assume that there’s some level of malice or trickery going on.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting them to literally have Rika and Satoko recite part of Bern and Lambda’s final conversation with each other word for word, lmao. Combined with the scene at the end where ‘Witch Satoko’ talks to herself about how she’s going to give her body back to Satoko while she goes chasing after Rika, it was literally just the exact origin story of their relationship as it’s depicted in Umineko.

I still feel like this would all only really be ‘worth it’ if we actually get something like a full on anime remake for Umineko, but at this point I can’t help but feel satisfied with this part of it all.

It’s not like I think Gou/Sotsu as a whole is perfect or anything, though. I don’t hate it as much as basically everyone else does, but I think Ryukishi’s the sort of VN writer who really struggles with the shift to writing for an anime. I think a big part of the frustration people have is just from how this is formatted as a weekly anime series spread across basically an entire year, instead of being something like a stand-alone VN chapter that you can read at whatever pace you want, even if it ultimately takes the same amount of time to read as it would to watch all of Gou/Sotsu.

There’s also the whole issue of this being a sort-of-remake, which snowballed into a whole list of structural problems. They absolutely tried too hard to have their cake and eat it too, and they should have just committed to it being made for old fans only, instead of trying to sincerely incorporate elements from the VN that old fans don’t care about anymore because they’ve gone over it already.

And as I’ve said several times before, it was a major issue for them to decide to put Nekodamashi in the middle of Gou and then spend like 20 episodes on flashback answer arcs until finally getting back to that cliffhanger. I’ve been waiting until this all ended to decide exactly how I feel about that, and now that it’s all over I still think it was a really bad idea. I don’t think it was an issue for them to reveal that Satoko’s the culprit that early, but having the gun cliffhanger specifically happen that early just gave people misguided expectations and tainted the answer arcs because people were just impatient to get back to the cliffhanger. And then the cliffhanger itself ended up being somewhat anti-climactic, which is what I’d been fearing would happen. It would have worked fine if they shuffled it around so that the cliffhanger happened right before Kagurashi and was followed up in the very next episode, or if this was a VN where you could binge your way through the flashback stuff, but spending like half of an entire real-life year to get back to that point only to have the resolution be ‘Satoko just shoots Rika and the death loops keep going’ just didn’t really work properly.

I’m a lot more generous towards the Akashi arcs than most people are, since I think they really over-estimate how much re-used content there is there, but they still suffer from the central issue of the show trying to be accessible for new fans. It could have been heavily condensed otherwise, without losing anything in terms of Satoko’s whole character arc.

On the other hand I think the first half of Kagurashi was awful specifically because it highlighted how bad of an idea it was to put Nekodamashi so early in the story. They still ended up having to go back to that arc and repeat it anyway, in the most 1:1 recap-y way in the whole show, but that wouldn’t have even been an issue in the first place if that was instead the first time that arc happened in the show.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I would rearrange the story to make it flow better while still following Ryukishi’s intentions, and I think they could have condensed it into a 2-cour season with this sort of structure if they did something like this:

-First arc where Rika gets thrown back into the loop and quickly figures out that somebody intentionally caused this to happen, and it’s not Takano because at least in this idea of mine she’d try and investigate her only to find out that this version of Takano regrets everything and is planning to flee the village with Tomitake.

Basically I think this could tie into the idea of Satoko initially wanting to just concoct an idea world for Rika so that she won’t want to leave this time, but sort of like what I think happens in Saikoroshi, Rika would still reject it, and this time around there’d be the additional layer of her knowing that somebody did this to her for an unknown reason. Maybe they could even initially market it as a new adaptation or a remake of Saikoroshi, and then reveal that it’s a sequel, to keep that whole element to the series. Either way I think this would end with everything going to shit when Rika rejects that fragment and wants to go back to St. Lucia’s, and Satoko basically snaps and kills her, and that way the audience can find out about her being the culprit without Rika finding out about it yet.

Maybe there could even be some dramatic irony where Rika’s attempts to meddle with certain ‘trigger events’, and her displaying her looper side, inadvertently triggers people around her to get paranoid, and the whole fragment would start to spiral into tragedy from there. I think they could at least use the whole conflict in Tatariakashi about Teppei actually being good this time as a starting point for that sorta thing.

-Second arc, rounding out the first cour, which is basically just Satokowashi. I don’t think there’s much that you’d need to change here, but like I said above I like the idea of her initially trying to just invent a perfect world for Rika and her to live in, instead of jumping straight to murder. But maybe instead of her literally just watching Rika’s loops, she could instead just be stuck using her looping powers to try and figure out how to create that ‘perfect world’ in the first place, by personally investigating all of the different tragedies and how to prevent them.

-Staring the second cour, a third arc where we basically just get to see those loops Satoko goes through, and her whole process of solving the tragedies and ‘purifying’ characters like Teppei and Takano, until we eventually see her perspective on the first arc, and how she reacts to Rika ultimately rejecting the world she tried to make for her.

-A fourth and final arc which is basically just Nekodamashi + Kagurashi, where she just totally snaps and tries to just torture Rika into never wanting to leave the village again, and eventually Satoko gets exposed and they have their direct confrontation with each other.

With that sorta story structure, you’d keep all the relevant bits of Gou/Sotsu as it is now, while being more focused on Rika and Satoko instead of doing kinda half-assed reruns of the Rena and Shion arcs. It’d also push the big cliffhanger between them until near the end of the show, while still revealing to the audience relatively early on that Satoko’s the culprit.

I’d also like them to do more with Satoshi and Shion, so maybe like with how Teppei gets redeemed and Satoko almost gets to have a happy life with him in Tatariakashi, the central question arc of this hypothetical story could also involve Satoko making sure that Satoshi wakes up from his coma, and Shion also gets to have a good relationship with all of them. You could probably do something interesting with the idea of Satoshi and Shion being in the camp of not trusting Teppei and his whole redemption arc.

Honestly I could spend a long time talking about how I would have done things differently, lol. For one thing, I think the Akashi arcs would have been much better if they just changed it so that Satoko used psychological tactics to make people paranoid, and we completely cut out the whole syringe plot device. I get how it fits with Satoko’s whole certainty gimmick, but it made those arcs way too predictable. Even if we knew the outcome, it’d at least be entertaining to see exactly how Satoko might go out of her way to set up the different tragedies. We kinda got glimpses of that sorta plot point in Wataakashi when things seemed to go outside of her control, but they didn’t really do much with it.

Anyway, this is a whole lot of words to say that I think that in spite of the serious structural issues going on, I think Gou/Sotsu as a whole is fine, and was at least working with a lot of perfectly good ideas that could have been executed much better.

Also, on a side note, that one scene during their fist-fight at the start where the art-style changes a bit was kinda weird, but I really liked how it looked, and part of me almost wishes the whole show looked like that, lol. I like Akio Watanabe’s character designs, but I feel like that sort of stylized, almost TWEWY-ish art style would have been really fitting for this series, especially in the horror/action parts.

Oh, and the new rendition of You was so good it almost felt emotionally manipulative, lol.

[hyperbali]

Agatha Harkness Was Right, And Here’s Why

Alright. Finally had to sit down and write my way out of this quiet, internal temper tantrum, and a few people were interested in seeing what I had to say, so I present to you:

Agatha Harkness Was Right, And Here’s Why

Disclaimer: MASSIVE spoilers for the entirety of WandaVision, and I am not nice about it.

I’ll start off by saying that, for all its foibles, WandaVision was genuinely a good example of a property within the MCU/Disney umbrella that stepped out of the usual ‘good guys fight bad guys action extravaganza’ in a way that pushed the envelope. The pseudo-horror aspect of the first few episodes is something I would really love to see engaged with on a more thoughtful basis in future projects.

I would say that it proved to be more than a vehicle to promote toys, but… well…

Yeah. Anyway.

I’ll assume that you watched WandaVision if you’re reading this, but quick recap: In the aftermath of ‘the Blip,’ Wanda is left broken and alone with no one in her corner. Her biggest mentor willingly abandoned his team to get his own ‘happy’ ending (do not get me started on Steve, that’s a document in and of itself), her other biggest mentor is probably off enjoying his family while ignoring the incredibly racist killing spree he’s been on for the past five years, and her lover is dead. When she goes to claim the body, she’s told nuh-uh, that’s government property, please leave.

So she goes to a plot of land in the middle of some nowhere town in New Jersey, which Vision apparently bought despite the fact they were living a pretty decently comfortable life in Scotland, where she looks at the deed that Vision drew a heart on and wrote ‘To Grow Old In’. Very sweet. Kind of weird, considering nothing of this caliber had ever been suggested for either of their characters and they’d been actively running from specifically the U.S. authorities? But sweet.

She has a breakdown and, in her grief, contains the entire town of Westview and all 3,892 of the people in it in her own personal paradise, where nothing bad ever happens beyond sitcom hijinks, no one dies, and every problem is tied up and neatly dealt with by the end of an ‘episode’. Except we learn that this is only paradise to Wanda, who apparently shares the aspect of having to relate everything to her favourite pop culture with Tony, because everyone else in Westview is more or less being psychologically tortured by the incredible amount of pain she’s in, forced to be puppeted actors to make her happy.

Bear in mind, Westview might have been bigger at some point - we have no idea how many people survived the Blip, or how many have been brought back to life within the past few weeks of the current setting. Either way, this is a town that has already dealt with a lot of trauma being dragged into yet another awful, much more specific kind of emotional damage, thanks to ‘the heroes’. Nice.

Agatha Harkness, a witch who’s been up to who-knows-what in the 340 years since she drained the coven that tried to kill her for getting a little too ambitious into jerky, feels the massive expenditure of magical power and decides to investigate. All the while, she carefully uses her own magic to try and peek into Wanda’s psyche, her motivations, all while keeping up appearances and not letting slip that anything is amiss.

I’ll point out that she’s no saint here, either - she specifically keeps one Westview resident at her mercy, and knows what’s happening to the rest of them, but doesn’t attempt to stop it. I’ll chalk that up to her pragmatism; their ‘sacrifice’ was fine to her as long as she could figure out how Wanda could have done something so unheard of in terms of power.

What we come to learn over the course of the show is that, given everything that happened, Wanda didn’t mean to take over an entire town and tool it into her own personal slice of heaven. She very quickly became aware of it; we know that she knows it’s her own personal bubble as soon as episode three, when she’s confronting Monica about how the latter could possibly know about Ultron. Wanda is made further aware of how much damage this is inflicting on others in episode five, when Vision himself tells her that these people are scared. But still, she has everything handled! It’s okay! The outside world is worse, trust her!

Her handling of the question, ‘where are all the children of Westview,’ is one that bears some thinking - and, y’know, kind of more than a little concern. They’re allowed to walk around as part of the ‘Halloween special,’ but as Vision walks further and further out towards the edges of town where Wanda doesn’t have as much full control, people are just frozen in place, or conducting the same few seconds of action over and over. And fully aware of being trapped.

How are they being sustained? Eating, sleeping? If someone isn’t part of her storyline, is she just locking them down into a coma? What made Wanda decide that keeping the children ‘out of the way’ was somehow kinder than involving them, especially given her later argument that she’s been trying to keep the entire town safe and happy?

The fact of the matter is, she only actually starts to feel remorse for any of this after she’s confronted with the fact that, after weeks of being at her mercy, the townspeople of Westview would rather be dead than endure another moment of having to play nice for her enjoyment. She finally opens the ‘bubble’ to let them out - which leads to the ‘epic’ finale of three different entities trying to take down Wanda and her happy family: the S.W.O.R.D. military led by Hayward, the White Vision, and Agatha.

Winding back to how we got here: after Agatha uses her own trapped resident, Ralph Bohner (who, given his casting and the props in place during the last episode, I’m willing to bet is actually the missing witness protection person Jimmy was looking for) in an attempt to lure out Wanda’s reasoning - and fails - she’s pretty much done pretending. She tricks Wanda into her basement, nullifies her powers, and makes her face her own past to get to the truth of the matter.

Not going to lie, favourite moment of the show. Kathryn Hahn killed Agatha’s slightly-amused-slightly-irritated observations about Wanda’s coping mechanisms, and the whole arrangement was extremely meta. I would have paid real money dollars to see her do the same thing to the likes of Tony, Strange, and Loki. Hell, even just having her meet the rest of the Avengers? Augh. If wishes were fishes.

When Agatha comes to the conclusion that Wanda is the vaunted, nigh-indestructible force of nature that she’s literally spent her entire life reading about is the ultimate source of chaos magic and will likely bring about the end of the world, she’s pretty understandably taken aback. To that matter, the fact that Wanda… has very little control over any of it, and is using what she does understand to play housemaker? After how long Agatha has spent learning control, hiding in plain sight, just to be child’s play compared to what Wanda has at her fingertips? I’d be pretty pissed off, too!

The way that WandaVision handled both of the major ‘fights’ - Vision versus White Vision ending in philosophy, and Wanda ending up beating Agatha at her own game of deception - is excellent. A little grating that they had to go with the beat down angle before they got there, but this is MCU; punches and thrown cars had to get shoved in somewhere. And, given that this series very much played with the idea of grey morality, I was sort of hopeful that Agatha would end up in a not-quite stalemate arrangement with Wanda. She’s not as powerful as the Scarlet Witch, but she has the know-how that Wanda sorely lacks; in recompense for her own deeds, she would be able to teach what she knows while also kind of scheming on her own time.

Y’know, like what they did with rehabilitating Loki?

Except that Wanda, who has just gone through the entire rigamarole of coming to terms with the fact that she trapped thousands of people into a nightmare scenario against their will, rendering them helpless to her mercy… traps Agatha into a nightmare scenario against her will, rendering her helpless to Wanda’s mercy.

That moment actually shook me. Oh, my god. We’re supposed to still look at Wanda as a good guy after this?

This isn’t even covering the incredibly awful confrontation with her and Vision where she tries to gaslight him into believing that everything is A-OK, or the fact that the person she gets most violent with (apart from Agatha) is Monica Rambeau, a black woman who spends most of the show bending over backwards trying to say that what Wanda is doing is understandable, justified, and just needs a gentle touch to be dealt with.

That could be its own document, too - how Monica, much as she’s incredible and definitely looks to be a really exciting addition to the MCU roster, more or less gets used as the Good One to absolve and enable Wanda’s actions. One of her last lines to Wanda, after seeing how the people of Westview (rightfully) look at Wanda like she’s monstrous, is “they’ll never know what you sacrificed.”

Sacrificed what? The fake husband and fake kids she made out of her own compulsion to pretend that everything is okay? None of that would have existed if she’d been given the proper resources to actually cope with how much loss she’s had to deal with. None of that would have existed if she hadn’t caused this problem in the first place.

In the end, Wanda flies off in her fancy new gear before the FBI shows up, avoiding any real consequences to her actions - which has pretty much been the running theme of her character ever since she was introduced to the MCU in Age of Ultron. The worst kind of direct consequence she’s ever gotten was being grounded to her room for a while, then kept in the Raft for, like, maybe a day - and both times, she was broken out post-haste.

Meanwhile, she worsened the issues in Sokovia (which, I will say upfront, was Tony’s fault to begin with), unleashed the Hulk on Johannesburg, got a pretty significant amount of civilians killed as bystanders in Lagos (hey, how come Wanda keeps turning a lot of black people into casualties?), and stood back in Wakanda to let their people try to fight off Thanos from getting to Vision until it was clear that there was no other option than for her to get involved.

Great Power Comes With No Responsibility At All, Actually.

Wanda, in the several years she has maintained her identity as an Avenger, has proven time and time again that she takes on innumerable risks without any full understanding of what they mean, allows others to take on the brunt of the fallout for her, and looks sad until she’s forgiven and moves on to the next problem. She has no business casually throwing around the kind of power that being the Scarlet Witch entails, not until she’s actually made any kind of headway into making reparations for what she’s done and tried, really tried, to get a handle on what she’s capable of.

Which she’s apparently doing in the last post-credits scene, astral reading the literal Book of the Damned on her lonesome in the mountains, but… without anyone to guide her, or give her any kind of boundary?

[I ran out of images I could post, but you know exactly what image I am referring to here]

Agatha Harkness was right. And that should terrify everybody that has to deal with Wanda in the future.

(P.S. Do we know if she actually even killed that dog? We never see her holding anything but a blanket, and characters go in and out of that show all the time. Granted, she wasn’t great with the cicada-turned-bird... hmm.)

Additional Notes:

“Well, you’re a Tony Stan, of course you think Wanda’s a villain”

I like Tony because he’s such an awful mess, and the narrative isn’t exactly kind about telling him what a piece of shit he can be! He reaped a lot of problems, created practically half the villains in the MCU, and ended up dying a martyred hero. Thanks to being the tent pole by which this franchise hoisted itself into a cultural powerhouse, he will always be their golden savior. If you want to read about how he’s the true villain of this entire affair, feel free to look up any number of takedown pieces about him that are out there. He’s a dick. I will never “uwu sad baby who did nothing wrong ever 🥺” him the way people do about Wanda.

“Why are you so pressed about this”

Because something as good in concept as WandaVision could and should have been about anyone other than the whitewashed, antisemitic take on Wanda Maximoff that MCU brought upon us. They put crucifixes on her wall in Civil War, for fuck’s sake!

“Weren’t you mad about them not including Aaron Taylor-Johnson”

At this point, I am almost kind of relieved the real Pietro wasn’t resurrected for this, because god knows they probably would have killed him all over again just to inflict that much more pain on his sister.

“Anything else you’d like to tell us, turbo nerd”

This was literally itching at me all weekend to write, so it’s more or less just to get it off my chest. If you powered your way through it, uh… thanks? Sorry if I yucked your yums, but I tried to be as clear with the disclaimer as I could. 🤷‍♂️

[liahswriting]

You got BLAM-BOOZLED!

Relationship(s): Mirage/Original Female Character (platonic)

Words: 3,176

Warnings: None

Summary: So I have a few small motor tics and I wanted to write something based off of Mirage's "you got blam-boozled" voice line because something similar happened to me when the meme "Alexa, play Despacito" was a thing thanks to echolalia (the repetition of someone else's words)

She and Mirage almost never fought each other on the battlefield. According to her calculations, approximately seven-point-five Games out of ten unfold in a certain sequence of events that prevent the two from ever engaging on each other. Usually it's because one got eliminated early on. Other times it's because there are simply too many people on the battlefield that the odds were so slim that the two would come face to face.

Mirage was a big personality for the Apex Games. Hell, he was practically the face of it all. And of course he liked the attention that got him. His ever so famous quotes were always somewhere to be found: on merch, booming through an advertisement, or even coming from his own lips. His stutter was almost always present in these quotes as well because, god damn, his lips moved before his brain did. But she had to admit that his stutters were endearing. It was actually kind of cute if she was being honest. She's told him so many times before, and every time he'd stutter some more in either embarrassment or admiration.

It wasn't always easy going for the two of them, however. She had a stutter tic that presented itself every now and again. When she first came into the Games, no one knew anything about her. So when she ticked for the first time and it came out as a stutter, Elliott got offended and yelled at her. She spent many a days after that convincing him that it wasn't on purpose and definitely not meant to be offensive. But he came around eventually and apologized for his outburst. After that they sort of became friends. Their trademark speech impediments tied them at the hip as it became their bond. They were often teased how they were cut from the same cloth -they could pass for siblings, some have said. And maybe it was true. They got along like siblings did, and at the blink of an eye they could be at war with each other like siblings did.

Take now, for instance. This morning they were chipper as chipper could be. They ate breakfast together, laughing it up at something or other. The two of them even made plans to go out after the Game later in the day. But then right before the Game started, as they were preparing themselves in the drop ship, she snapped on him.

"You stepped on my foot!" she cried out.

"Sorry sorry!" he apologized.

"You're always stepping on my feet!"

"I don't do it on purpose!"

"Well maybe if you paid attention to where you're walking you wouldn't step on people!"

It just spiraled downhill from there. Dr. Somers tried to be the voice of reason and break up the fight before it started, but the drop ship had reached its destination on Olympus and everyone had to jump before the issue could be resolved. So she dropped with an anger in her that told her to take her revenge out on him on the battlefield.

It was the first time she actively tried to seek him out. Thankfully she was able to find him before either one of them got eliminated. She paved a way to him -death boxes of newbies following in her wake. When Mirage spotted her approaching at full speed, he did the first thing that came to mind -which was activate his ultimate. Call it a panic reaction.

A slew of decoy Mirages ran in every which direction. She knew that if she just paid a little bit of attention to detail that she could spot which image was the real him, but her anger prevented all coherent thought and she went wild with her Prowler. She shot at any and every Mirage that she laid her eyes on. Each time, the decoy would fizzle out in a ray of holo-lights, a chipper "you got bam-boozled!" on their voice box. The distraction worked like a charm for Mirage, allowing him to take her out without much of an effort. And just as she was about to be eliminated, he grinned his cheeky grin at her and said, "you got BLAM-boozled!" and then she was back on the drop ship being flash healed in the healing chambers on board.

"You got blam-boozled." she said aloud, which made her shake her head in surprise. That was unexpected, she said to herself. Whatever.

Later that night, the gang all got together in the lounge as they usually did. Everyone was taking it easy as some of them sustained serious injury this time around. No one was up for a wild party. But drinks were definitely involved. It was tradition after all.

It was her turn to supply the drinks this time, so she made sure to get to the lounge early and put them on ice so they were nice and cold for when everyone showed up. The Legends all filtered in one by one, greeting her as they arrived.

"Aye!" Ajay smiled and approached her, grabbing the drink in her hand that she was about to put in the ice. "Renee and I were gon' go see a movie tomorrow night. Ya wanna come with?"

"What movie?" she asked back, her neck spazzing for a moment.

"We were gon' go see that Apex knockoff one and make fun of it!" she laughed. In response to the medic, she made a popping sound with her lips.

"Last time you wanted to go see a movie just to make fun of it, we almost got kicked out for being a disturbance."

"It's not muh fault the movies are so shit!" defended Ajay. The both of them laughed.

"Fine," she started, but popped her lips again. "I'll go but if we get yelled at again it'll be the last time."

"Yeah yeah."

"What's this about a movie?" came the voice of Ramya as she approached the two women. She, just like Ajay did, grabbed a drink from her hand that she was about to put on ice. A sarcastic "you're welcome" was on her lips.

"Us plus Renee. Gonna go see the Apex knockoff movie and laugh at it."

"You really wanna see that load of garbage?" the modder quirked an eyebrow. "If ya wanna see a shitty battle, just watch a highlight real of the newbies competing in their first qualifier."

The three of them continued on with their conversation, only breaking off once more and more people showed up. Eventually it was only Elliott who hadn't arrived yet. The others were already settled and well into their drinks now, not really waiting for the whole gang. But, speak of the Devil, he showed up and made his usual annoying entrance as he did.

"Don't worry, the life of the party is here now!" he announced himself, making most roll their eyes. Out of nowhere, breaking all conversation, she loudly said:

"You got BLAM-boozled!"

Everyone looked to her.

"Awe, are you still upset that I ann-annih-anna..... destroyed you?" he mocked, pinching at her cheeks.

"No! I'm still mad at for you stepping on my feet, again." she rebutted.

"I told you I didn't mean to do it!" he once again defended. And it was like the argument never got interrupted. The two of them were at each other's throats all night over this stupid accident.

The next day, she, Ajay, and Renee all met up as promised and went to go see the movie. And, yeah, it was horseshit. Every couple of seconds, at least one of them were making some sort of comment underneath their breath at how bad the movie was. It wasn't a direct ripoff of the Games, but you could definitely tell that the characters were intended to be the original eight. Maybe this movie was supposed to be some sort of origin story? Hell if she knew -she didn't read the damn synopsis.

When the character that was obviously meant to be Mirage came on screen for the first time, she yelled out "you got BLAM-boozled!" in the theatre, making everyone angrily turn to her and forcing her to shrink under their gaze.

"What the hell was that?" Ajay chuckled lowly to her.

"Couldn't help it."

"Sounds like ya coming for his brand."

After the movie, the women decided to get an early dinner. And, what the hell, they treated themselves to dessert as well. Feeling a little embarrassed at the way she's been treating Elliott over an accident, she decided to bring him home a dessert as well as some sort of peace offering. She knew he didn't truly mean to step on her feet. He just had a habit of not knowing how much space he takes up.

Once they were all back to their new Syndicate housing on Psamathe, she immediately took the elevator up to Elliott's floor where she knocked on his door -dessert in hand. He didn't answer at first, so she knocked again. Still, no answer. Hm. Was he in the lounge maybe? It wasn't an unusual place to assume. So she headed there. As predicted, he was. And so was Dr. Somers, Natalie, Makoa, and Octavio.

When she entered the lounge, Elliott was the one to greet her.

"Hey, loser!" he said happily.

"You got BLAM-boozled!" was her response, followed by a neck spasm and a pop of her lips.

"Seriously, are you mocking me because I stepped on your feet?" he questioned honestly.

"I'm sorry! I don't know why I'm ticking like that. I did it at the movies too."

"Is it a new tic?"

"I don't know. It's kind of annoying. I yelled it out as loud as possible and the whole theatre got angry at me."

"Don't people with ticking disorders copy things other people say and do?" asked Octavio from the other side of the lounge.

"Yeah, some times. But that doesn't usually happen with me. And if it does, it's a one-off."

"Okay, so you adopted a new tic. It's not the end of the world." said Makoa as if it were that simple.

"I'd rather not have to deal with another tic added to the list. The neck spasms and the lip popping are one thing, but to yell things? It's just embarrassing and overall tiring." she explained.

"Okay, but really, how bad could it be? Maybe this one will die out eventually." suggested Elliott.

"Hopefully. So far it only seems to happen when I see you. Your damn decoys smirking at me as they repeat it over and over again got it stuck in my head."

Elliott grinned sheepishly at her and apologetically shrugged his shoulders. A simple "sorry, didn't do it on purpose" following his actions. She didn't blame him. It's not like he knew it was going to happen. The only thing she could do now was just deal with it for the time being. If this tic was like her other spoken tics, it would stop soon. And that was the best-case scenario.

It didn't help that she and Elliott continued to spend time together. What? Was she just supposed to cut him out of her life in hopes that the tic would go away? Listen, she can get angry with him a lot, but he hasn't done anything worth ditching for. So she lived life as if the tic wasn't real; she and Elliott hung out whenever possible and talked almost every day. And then she'd say the tic every time she saw him, and she was reminded that it was, in fact, real. "You got blam-boozled" was starting to become her trademark catchphrase now, especially after it was caught on video by the press after the next Game. And the Game after that. And the Game after that.

It was all over the internet -her saying it unintentionally. Compilation videos were starting to pop up and forums were posted dissecting the tic. "OMG, is she mocking Mirage?!" seemed to be the most common thread within the discussions. Thankfully the fans that knew of her disorder were quick to shut it down and explain what echolalia is before Elliott's fangirl mob started an all-out war.

The end of the season was coming up soon. The last few Games were approaching quick, so everyone was heavily focused on boosting their stats. The extra training everyone piled onto their schedules meant that she and Elliott were spending less time together. It happened every season; the parties were fewer and further between, no one really got together on the weekends, everyone was hoarding the training arena time. She was no exception. She practiced her ass off so she could gain just a few more points before the season ended. If she was lucky, she'd beat her record from last season.

And then, finally, the dreaded Last Game came. She was first on the drop ship, wanting to take as much time as possible to hype herself up before she dropped. Season finale games were always the biggest; all of the newbies that passed their qualifiers were thrown into the fray against the Legends as their final test to see who would be in the next season. This meant the battlefield was full of a hundred or so newbies that were willing to do anything to pass this final test. She had to be ready for it. It's just totally embarrassing to be eliminated within the first round to a newbie of all people.

A few Legends got to the drop ship shortly after her, and then another group followed behind them. Elliott was last to arrive. When he did, the drop ship had taken off towards Olympus. A few "good luck, guys" were thrown around, but mostly everyone was focusing hardcore. And then they all dropped.

She decided to not land hot for once. See back to point A for why. Instead, she landed behind the hot zone and looted up as much as she could. The fire fight in Hammond Labs was so loud that she could hear it over the turbine propellers. Once she had looted all she could, she made her way to the lab building to finish off whoever she could. It was mostly newbies blockading the perimeter, but she could see Fuse, Lifeline, and Pathfinder mixed in amongst the crowd. No one spotted her entering in from the east-side door. Two frag grenades took out a group of newbies no problem. A full clip of her 301 took out another newbie. A couple taps with her Peacekeeper killed yet another.

As suspected, the Legends did cleanup duty in Hammond Labs. None of the newbies survived. Pathfinder was quick to exit the building with his grapple as Lifeline chased after him. Must be almost dead if she was willing to completely ignore Fuse on her heals just to chase after the robot.

She took the distraction as an opportunity to thin out the competition. She reloaded her R301 and shot Fuse into the back until he fell. Lifeline heard the shots behind her and started panicking. Unsure of who to fight, and now unfortunately sandwiched between two people, she didn't stand a chance. Both she and Pathfinder shot at the medic and then she, too, was eliminated. Pathfinder then ran off. She didn't bother chasing. The gun shots would bring other people to the area and she didn't feel like being eliminated by a newbie with a rifle as she ran across the open terrain.

Instead, she went to the Estates to fight whoever was other there. There were less people running around, so she let them all fight it out and decided to finish off whoever came out on top. And then suddenly there were footsteps running behind her. She turned and came face to face with Mirage who seemed just as surprised as she was to see her. Both went trigger-happy with their weapons in a moment of panic -both of them missing almost every single bullet. And a few curse words yelled at each other as well.

Mirage threw out a bunch of decoys, once again confusing her. Not sure which Mirage was the right one, she just shot at whichever one came closest to her. Of course they all happened to be decoys that fizzled out with a snarky "you got bam boozled" tossed back in their final breaths.

Mirage snuck up behind her, scaring her once again, and then knocked her to the ground. She was eliminated.

"God damn it!" she screamed from inside the healing chambers. She fucking blew it.

Her final stats weren't released until after the Game had finished. Bloodhound came out on top to absolutely no one's surprise. And her? She didn't improve at all from last season.

In Apex customary tradition, a giant congratulatory party was thrown for the Champion. There were press releases, lots of fancy food and drinks, and outfits to match. Everyone gave their congratulations to Bloodhound as he was thrown about from reporter to reporter.

"Hey! Kid!" Elliott's voice boomed from beside her. "You did good out there. Sorry I killed your stats though. Scared the shit out of me too! I thought I was gonna lose that fight."

"Your decoys are the only reason you beat me, Elliott, and you know it."

"Alright alright." he held up his hands in defense. "Whatever helps you sleep at night."

"Ha ha, very funny."

"But, hey, I meant to say something earlier but I got stuck in the medbay; I didn't notice you ticking at all today."

"Really?"

"Yeah, didn't hear you say "blam-boozle" once. Unless I'm just deaf." he chuckled. She thought hard back on the day. Truthfully, she didn't pay much attention to any of her tics simply because they were a part of her daily life.

"You know what? I think you're right." she finally responded to him. "Or at the very least, I didn't say it when you just walked up to me."

"You think the tic is over with now?" he questioned back.

"I think so. If I've gone all day without saying it, then that usually means it's gone."

"Good, because we haven't hung out in awhile and we need to before next season starts."

"Agreed." she said.

They'd make plans later. Right now, they were busy with the party. Poor Bloodhound: he always hated these things. She couldn't help but laugh as she picked apart his obviously irritated body language. It's his own fault for winning not only the Last Game but also being the overall Champion of the season. Eh, he'd get over it once the party ends.

[mrs-nate-humphrey]

how do u think dan and blair's relationship would be during derena's loveless marriage? do you think that they would have a affair (even if it is not a physical one) or that dan would still be in love with her, for example?

this was such a fun qn! (answer's a bit depressing, as all post-canon stuff tends to be.) under the cut :D

it depends entirely on those 5 years, i feel. it's really easy (& fun!) to be like 'ah yes dan never stopped loving blair' (& it's not that unlikely, either) but five years is plenty of time to get over someone, too, so i think it's super ambiguous. when s6 ends, before the time skip, dan and blair loathe each other - and understandably so!! they both betrayed each other's trust in a really big way, so that would need to be fixed in some way.

my brain being mine, i am always pushing the dan in my head towards the nate in my head, because i really do think once we're post-canon, anything can happen! but yeah, i love post-canon dan/blair too for the reason of like... canon being the way it is, i don't think dan OR blair would be happy/satisfied in their marriage.

we see how chuck treats blair so much in canon. he prioritises his business over her, and that never changes, it's that way even in s6 which was supposed to be a chair fix-it of some sort, i guess. and at times he is violent and controlling and possessive of her. none of this is good, obviously. and i think in some ways, it would make sense for blair to gravitate towards dan, because dan has been a source of stability and help for her before, when her life was crumbling around her, he was her safe space ("i would never have survived the last month without you"). dan has seen her at her worst and still believed in her (despicable b, anyone?) so i do think just by the way derena/chair marriages work out, dan and blair would have ample opportunity to gravitate towards each other - especially given they run in the same social circles now or whatever, blair and serena are best friends, serena and chuck are step-siblings (everyone and their mother knows how i feel about that).

potential doesn't necessarily mean it would actually happen, though, especially given how things ended for them last time. dan could very well be like 'blair i'm not doing this for you again' or whatever - though it's very unlikely, just given his character, and how easily he forgives people he cares about (case in point, vanessa, when she returns in 1x06). dan and blair ultimately get each other on a wavelength nobody else gets them - which is what is so fun about them as a friendship or a relationship. they both have similar taste in art/movies, have engaging conversations, intellectually stimulate each other, and all that. i could see them both missing that, even when they're like "that relationship was a total flop i could never do it again", even then, they would be like "yeah but that museum we visited together..... the points that were made in that conversation...."

like i think they would miss each other, a lot. as people MORE than as romantic partners. dan would miss his friend blair, and blair would miss her friend dan. but they're BOTH incredibly stubborn, and they both also hurt the other REALLY badly. so that would need to be worked through at some point (maybe during the 5 year flash forward) then i think a dair affair is actually really likely. they've always been good at denial and warped logic, after all; i could see them falling into each other out of mutual dissatisfaction and loneliness in their own marriages and that eventually grows into love.

but my personal favourite dan headcanon is that he wouldn't really be in love with blair during his married life. like i don't see him really pining over her. i see him feeling completely wrung out and emptied and dried, where love is concerned. dan and blair both love with all their heart, and for dan, i think after blair, he would feel like he could never love anyone again (yeah, not even blair) because of how shattering that heartbreak is (and how little he really got to heal, to be honest.) i think that'd explain the derena wedding, even, because if he's never going to get the sparkly romance feel, why not go for a pale imitation of it with the one person who's in the same boat, the one person who's seen all his bullshit and seen him at his most cruel and somehow still loves him?

blair, on the other hand, is married to chuck. who is a black hole when it comes to blair's big heart. chuck likes the fact that blair loves so wholly and completely and with so much of herself, and he wants all of blair's love, and all of blair. i don't think blair would end up with the same issue as dan, of 'how can i love', i think she'd know that she has a big heart, but she'd feel caged in by it perhaps. in a very 'chuck is the only person i haven't scared away; maybe i am Too Much for anyone else.'

if dan & blair's loathing/resentment for each other and the hurt they feel has been resolved, i think it is possible they could, despite trying so hard to avoid it, despite doing their BEST not to become dan-and-blair again, despite ALL that, they could end up falling in love. and it would be different from the first time, because they know what the worst thing they could do to each other is; because they've already done the worst thing they could do to the other. in that sense if they are able to get together now, they'd probably communicate better and be more realistic and be extremely stable. perhaps they would leave their marriages for each other.

but i think it's equally likely for dan to go, 'blair, i can't do this again, i am not enough of a person to help you, i have my own problems and i just cannot be your support system or rock anymore,' and maybe blair would go, 'i can help you too, dan,' but i don't see dan accepting her help, or even believing she could help him. something i think about a lot is dan's entire thing with losing milo, and the parallel that exists with blair's miscarriage. it could've been so easy for blair to use that parallel to form a connection with dan, for her to actively talk about milo or let him know that she gets it. instead, we don't get that at any point. the only mention of blair knowing about milo that we get which i remember is her 'look, it's georgina's baby!' at w - which is really mean, actually! dan doesn't take it to heart because he's all 'blair waldorf, whatever' but it's a depressing line because it shows that blair knew he had been hurt in that way and yet never came back to it. i'm bringing this up because i think that could probably play a role into like, dan wondering if blair has ever actually seen him in a bad place where he's really hurt and feels totally lost, and dan wondering if blair knows how to navigate that. because, well... serena has!! serena & dan are very much always holding hands when one of them hits rock bottom (whatever else they don't have, this is something they always did.)

i mean. i do think blair's a natural caretaker, but i think it's extremely possible dan wouldn't let her take care of him, you know? so yeah. my answer remains: depends on those 5 years of flash forward, entirely!! 50/50 either way.

[theonceandfutureking6481]

BBC's Merlin Season 1 Episode 3: The Mark of Nimue Analysis

*SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE SHOW*

First off I always look fondly on this episode, mainly for Morgana being hilarious and epic, I mean she has the best line in the whole episode:

Arthur: You could get hurt

Morgana: So could you.... if you don't get out of my way

This episode is also fun and interesting from the perspectives of plot, characters and themes. Sorry, this is extremely long, I have a lot of opinions about Merlin.

Gwen and Merlin

This episode is in many ways about Gwen and Merlin's friendship, it is the driving force behind all of Merlin's actions within this episode and is the stepping stone for this show considering how to find a balance between acting for the greater good without suggesting that the ends justify the means.

Merlin and Gwen are first off just very sweet, their friendship is really characteristic of this show's representation of friendship overall, just genuine love and consideration for others. It is also self-sacrificing, that's one thing about the relationships in this show they are so self-sacrificing.

When Merlin says to Gwen "I didn't like to see you upset." It reveals a wonderful fact of Merlin's characterisation that I would argue stays consistent for the whole show. His motivation is always grounded in how much he cares for the people around him. He cares deeply about his friends and they are largely his reason for doing the things he does. This line is a wonderful parallel to in season 3 when Merlin decides to let Morgana die (after he accidentally trips her down the stairs), but then in the end he heals her because he couldn't watch everyone's grief. Merlin cannot separate his actions from the people he's doing them for, and he can't stand to see people hurt when he has the power to fix it because the people he loves are his motivation, they are the reason he wants a better world. This show does establish (as I'll discuss further down) that what seems immediately right (healing Gwen's father etc) isn't necessarily the right decision to make for the greater good. This is some ways always questions the validity of Merlin's motivations and his actions, but I'd argue it more seeks to find a balance. Besides a Merlin who didn't act motivated by his love for others is not a Merlin that could have helped Arthur build Camelot.

Medievalism: duty and social obligation

Quick disclaimer cause I'm touching on a more scholarly issue here that I have limited knowledge of, so I will undoubtedly make mistakes and this is my opinion. Everything I write is my opinion, but that's more obvious when I'm commenting on the themes of a fictional world rather than making a comment on actual fields of study which is what I'm doing here.

BBC's Merlin is an example of medievalism, it is an engagement with the medieval era (or ideas/images associated with it) for modern times. I honestly don't know that much about medievalism, or the medieval era, certainly not enough to make an extensive commentary on its representation in Merlin. One thing I would argue is that Merlin's representation of friendship has its roots in idealised views of the virtues of the medieval era. For many people the Middle Ages represents a time of duty and social obligation, this on one hand does lead to a stringent class divide but it also finds its idealisation in the sort of friendship represented by Merlin. The premise in most societies that place great value on social obligation is that the needs of the community outweigh the needs of the individual, that people should sacrifice themselves for the community as a whole. Every society places emphasis on this in different ways and to greater or lesser extents and our view of it as being prevalent in the medieval era is largely an idealisation based in some historical reality but also our own desires about what this era represents. There is a kind of social responsibility in the relationships in Merlin, there is a great emphasis on loyalty which is part of this idealisation. However, Merlin makes it more personal than is often depicted. We idealise social responsibility and obligation, it is often tied into the social roles of people such as loyalty to a king, or paying back debts of honour which is a form of social obligation. Merlin is more about friendship, it takes our idealisation of medieval social obligation and makes it the obligation and loyalty we owe to people who love us and who we love. I will always say that fundamentally Merlin as a show is about love, and it emphasises what we owe to people in our lives in a way I believe echoes idealisation of medieval loyalty.

This idea can also be seen in Arthur's fundamental trust of others, his fundamental assumption that everyone around him is not seeking to harm him, and that people are generally good. This ties a bit into the idea of social obligation. Arthur's idealised world is one in which people have bonds of social obligation towards each other, that people are seeking to act in the interests of the community. It's an idealisation, both of the medieval era but also an idealisation in Arthur's own head of the world he lives in.

Morgana and Gwen

Their relationship is somewhat expanded on in this episode, and they are just so sweet. Gwen gives Morgana flowers to cheer her up and its just lovely. They have a very genuine and close relationship. Morgana also has great respect for Gwen, for the work she does, and she treats her with respect.

Morgana: "If she was a sorceress, why would she kneel on the cold stone floor every morning if she could make these things happen with a snap of her fingers, like an idle king."

Aside from being one of Morgana's many quality burns towards Uther, this also illustrates one of her greatest characteristics, her empathy and genuine respect and admiration for what Gwen does everyday. She doesn't see the class divide in the same way Uther sees it or Arthur pretends to see it.

Also interesting note I heard in a Merlin podcast (I can't remember which episode), it could have been the episode about this episode. It's called Destiny and Chicken (you can listen to it on Spotify and anywhere else you find podcasts- they even did an interview of Bradley James who plays Arthur at one point), and its very good. But, they said something interesting about the paralleling between the relationship between Merlin and Arthur and the relationship between Morgana and Gwen. Both are fundamentally important and genuinely caring relationships for the character. However, for Morgana and Gwen (unlike Merlin and Arthur) the class divide remains much more in place, Gwen treats Morgana like her friend but she also treats her like her mistress in a way Merlin just doesn't with Arthur (especially not so early in the show when he's not so admiring of Arthur). This isn't to say their relationship is bad or has problems, its just different whilst still acting as a parallel. I'm not sure exactly the extent to which I agree or what this says overall in themes but its definitely interesting to think about.

Uther: "A Good and Terrible King."

This episode shows Uther at both his best and his worst which is always fun because Uther is a genuinely interesting character. I got the line from my favourite Merlin fanfiction Coronation by rageprufrock, which you should definitely read, I'll link it down the bottom, it's not too long so you can read it in half an hour. It's a character study of Arthur more than anything else and its amazing, wonderful and deeply poetic. Uther is not a huge part of this fanfic, its about Arthur's character and his relationship with Merlin and his kingdom, I'm not even sure he actually appears. This line though perfectly tapped into how I always felt about Uther so it connected:

"He's been a good and terrible father, a good and terrible king."

I often think in characterising Uther we do tend to villainise him to an extent which I personally don't find accurate. This is obviously just my opinion, and I have a tendency to think the best of people so more intensely negative views of Uther are very jarring for me. He did terrible things and I truly believe he is the ultimate villain of the show but he is very human and he could be a good king and he loved his children more than anything else. We cheapen Merlin's point if we cast Uther as pure evil, everyone is capable of evil just as much as goodness. Uther is the tragedy (like Morgana) of a person who could have been good or at least halfway decent corrupted and destroyed by his own hate and ignorance. That's the point of the parallels between Uther and Morgana, we love Morgana and she was capable of so much good, but she corrupted herself with hate.

Onto this episode, Uther shows both his capability and goodness as a king in this episode as well as his hatred and ignorance. Uther's initial reaction to the fact that the plague is caused by magic is a concern about his own authority, which isn't entirely unfounded, but does reveal a huge priority of his which is control. He fears not being able to control, that's were his cruelty as a father comes from and to some extent his opposition to magic. This does not show Uther in the best light, but his actions later in regards to dealing with the plague show a decent king who cares about his people. This scene in which he tells Arthur to shut off the lower town perfectly illustrates this:

Arthur: But what about the people who live there

Uther: Don't you think I haven't considered it? What else can I do? I have to protect the rest of the city

In this situation Uther is right, there is very little other choice, he's making a hard call but it's one he has to make, and he seems genuinely distressed at having to make it. He does care about his people's well being, and he feels the burden of their protection, he can be a good King. Much of Arthur's story is in breaking away from the legacy of Uther, and rightly so, but Uther also taught him many things and one of those things is the duty Arthur has towards his people, it's a duty he takes even more seriously than Uther, but nonetheless he learnt it from him.

This however, as I've hinted, is not the whole story of this episode, Uther is also shown at his worst, and his worst is his ignorance and prejudice towards magic. He is willing to sacrifice justice and even sacrifices logical thought to his blind persistence that magic is evil.

Arthur: She's right Father. You hear the word magic you no longer listen.

Uther: You saw it for yourself, she used enchantments.

Arthur: Yes, maybe. To save her dying father, that doesn't make her guilty of creating a plague. One's the act of kindness, of love, the other of evil. I don't believe evil's in this girl's heart

Aside from what this says about Arthur. Arthur's comment about Uther hits right to the point of things "you hear the word magic you no longer listen". You no longer listen implies its a choice, and it is. Uther has made the choice for the last 20 years to choose to go on a dogmatic campaign of hate against magic because its easier than considering the alternative, that he was complicit in his wife's death. What Uther says immediately after "there are dark forces threatening this kingdom." is the argument used by so many people throughout history, used to justify so much hate. That there is an evil out there threatening the stability of life, that the world must be controlled and people have to live a certain way or risk destroying their own lives. It's an argument that justifies campaigns of hate and makes them personal to ordinary people who usually wouldn't care, and it is always a lie, that's not how the world works.

This episode thus shows Uther at his best and his worst, both a dutiful king and a stubborn tyrant. It's a tragedy of what he could of been, and shows how twisted up people can become when they justify their decisions with hate and fear.

Arthur

This is the first episode where Arthur really opposes Uther, he directly questions Uther's indiscriminate hatred of magic, and an episode where he realises to an extent he perhaps hadn't before some of the ways in which Uther has failed as a king. He also consciously acts in deception of Uther, because he can see Uther can't see sense. Arthur shows far more nuance of view than Uther does, understanding (even whilst still accepting as he will for a long time that magic is dangerous and it corrupts) that using magic doesn't make you automatically evil. To see the world the way Uther does is a conscious choice, you have to choose to be blind to the virtues of every apparent magic user you come across, you have to believe harmless spells are the signs of greater evil. Arthur is not someone who lets his own cowardice blind himself to reality, and so his worldview can see far more nuance than Uther can.

"One's the act of kindness, of love, the other of evil. I don't believe evil's in this girl's heart."

He further has a very positive view of others, Arthur will always see the good in people and that is a great strength in my view. In a lot of versions of the story Arthur's not just inspiring because he's good but because he assumes others are good too, he trusts people to do the right thing and I do believe that, that can inspire people to do the right thing. It's funny in Merlin Arthur's trust gets betrayed so many times but it never really hardens his heart, he continues to trust people no matter how many times he gets betrayed. This can be seen in his perception of Guinevere here, he will not assume she is evil because she has made a mistake, he can see the virtue in her actions, and he will assume goodness until proven otherwise. Innocent until proven guilty, in other words. It's its own form of justice, a justice Uther is forgetting, its a tenant of many legal systems and its a tenant Arthur clearly supports.

Arthur is also seeing his role as the king of Camelot in creating a Camelot that he would like to live in.

"Yes I am yet to be king, and I don't know what type of king I will be. But I do have a sense of the type of Camelot I would wish to live in. It would be where the punishment fits the crime."

It's not the Camelot he would wish to rule, its the Camelot he would wish to live in. Arthur wants to live in a just world, he wants his people to be treated with justice just as he would like to be treated with justice. This further illustrates that unlike Uther he is not letting anger or ignorance blind him to reality, he wants the world he lives in to be fair without exception.

Finding the Balance between The Greater Good and The Immediate Good

The Greater Good is a tricky concept, you can justify any amount of cruelty if it will lead to good later on, but do the ends justify the means? It's not really a question its ever possible to provide a definitive answer for. It's easy to say that they don't, that you should just do the right thing, the nice thing, the good thing in the moment but actions have consequences and doing the good thing all the time (especially in a position where thousands of lives depend on you) is not usually possible. Merlin tackles this theme, I believe, quite well, trying to find a balance between acting for the greater good and acting with what is immediately good, and this episode is a good example.

In a just and fair world you would be able to do good all the time, but this is not the case for everything, though you should never use the worlds not fair as an argument for not doing good things but I digress. Merlin's decision to save Gwen's father ultimately backfires on Gwen because the world is not fair, the world Uther has created mean even these acts of love are punishable with death. Because, for Uther, magic is magic, and magic is evil. Gaius was, in this situation, ultimately right, Merlin can't always do what is easy and what feels right because the consequences may not be good. In other matters like closing off the lower town, Arthur's initial response is concern for the people who live their, but Uther's right he has to make this one tough decision because otherwise he risks the whole city.

However, Uther's attitude to Gwen (aside from revealing his own stubbornness and prejudice) is an example of the greater good taken too far. He has absolutely no evidence that killing Gwen will stop this plague, but he's making that sacrifice anyway because it might, that is not justice or fair or anything resembling goodness. And he justifies his decisions with what I've already said is an age old argument- "These decisions must be made. There are dark forces threatening this kingdom." This is just another version of any easy choice, acting without regard to the greater good is an easy choice but so is ignoring what is immediately right in pursuit of some ambiguous goodness. He's confusing his own weakness and ignorance for strength.

The point Merlin is, I believe trying to make is that there must be a balance. Sometimes you have to pursue the greater good, but the ends don't really justify the means.

There is a reason Arthur and Merlin will create the Camelot of legend and Uther and Gaius don't, Merlin and Arthur aren't going to sacrifice their own goodness for the sake of the greater good. Merlin for one ensures Arthur never has to, its sad but Merlin in many ways makes the harsh and cruel decisions that Arthur never has to make. However, he also often doesn't make those decisions. He reaches a point where he wants to let people die, but he never actively attempts to kill Morgana or Mordred by himself unless it is an absolute in the moment choice between them and Arthur, and even though there is plenty of moral ambiguity about that and plenty of debates you can have about that. Fundamentally the point remains, Uther would have killed them and that's why he could never be the king Arthur would be or the influence for decency Merlin would be, the ends don't ever entirely justify the means. Besides if Merlin had thought that and killed Mordred and Morgana for their possible futures he would not have been the decent person he was and he could not have helped Arthur build a good Camelot, Camelot would not have existed if Merlin had acted entirely with the greater good in mind to ensure Camelot's future.

Other Stuff

Gwen's scene in the cell is so terribly sad, she's trying to be brave and her final request to Merlin is just so sad, "Remember me." She's so young and its the injustice and cruelty of Uther's kingdom that's condemning her, his own blindness to anything involving magic. We all want to be remembered don't we, especially when you die so young that you've barely had the chance to live. -----Also Guinevere will be remembered, she is a legend so there's something very bittersweet in this. She is not forgotten, then or ever

It's funny watching back to season 1, Merlin spends a lot of the time complaining about how Arthur will never recognise him for who he is. He wants recognition. But by the end of the show, yes of course he'd like recognition but he's learnt to just put up with never getting it. His priorities have changed so much.

There's this thing that happens a lot in season 1 and 2 (and I think a bit in season 3 but its less funny then) where Morgana persuades Arthur to do things by insulting him and its the funniest thing ever, and the first instance of it is here. I like to call these her 'epic sibling powers' cause they are just such siblings and its hilarious every time

"You are one side of the coin, Arthur is the other."- Kilgaharrah--> Just, yes.

Also when Arthur gets Merlin out of when Merlin confesses to being a sorcerer—> he's obviously making stuff up on the spot—> like he might sort of believe it (the stuff about Gwen) but fundamentally he's just trying to protect him without really knowing for sure why Merlin's lying

"One day people won't believe what an idiot you were."- Gaius--> Fun little nod to the audience who know Merlin of legend (as nothing like the BBC Merlin)

Also at this point we don't know why Uther really banned magic so there is an element of moral greyness to it all. We know magic's not evil, we know Uther went too far but at this point there is still a question about 'how too far' did he go?

Coronation by Rageprufrock (seriously read it. It's amazing): https://archiveofourown.org/works/5749

[zutaralesbian]

Lucifer/Eve > Chloe/Pierce

I've seen people say that there are double standards between how people react to Lucifer/Eve vs Chloe/Pierce and I just wanna say something as someone who actually prefers Chloe as a character over Lucifer.

On paper, I didn't mind the Chloe/Pierce plot in S3 too much. Lucifer had been acting like a dick and kind of taking her for granted at the time so it was sort of satisfying to see him jealous and in pain over her for a little while. The problem though is how Chloe/Pierce were written. I didn’t understand why Chloe even liked him, let alone enough to accept a marriage proposal from him after they had only been dating for a short time. (Which was extremely ooc imo, and extra grating since we were barely granted Chloe POV throughout S3). I also don't really buy or understand when Pierce fell in love with Chloe outside of wanting the semblance of humanity that he saw Lucifer getting via his relationship with Chloe. I know Chloe ended up backing out of the engagement and that she later said the Lucifer was the reason she accepted the proposal in the first place AND the reason she backed out of it, but it was still very poorly executed imo.

Lucifer/Eve on the other hand, I understood. Lucifer was going through turmoil in S4 because of Chloe knowing about his true identity as the devil and being unable to accept it. Enter Eve, one of his past lovers who fully accepts his devil side, and you kind of understand why he would be tempted to move on from Chloe and be with her. There were obvious issues with Lucifer and Eve's relationship too ofc. While Eve accepted his devil side she seemed pretty reluctant to accept the human side he had developed since forming relationships in the mortal world, claiming that he was pretending to be someone he wasn't. And that's ultimately why their relationship wasn't going to work out in the long run. But I still understand why that relationship was appealing to Lucifer at the time.

Along with all that, even while Lucifer was with Eve, it was always pretty clear to me that he was still firmly in love with Chloe and was only with Eve because he thought he couldn't have Chloe. Whereas with Chloe/Pierce, there were a few times where I honestly questioned the writers' intentions with them.

Basically, Chloe/Pierce was poorly written and only created to cause contrived drama. Lucifer/Eve was better written and was clearly used as a narrative stepping stone to Deckerstar. (Also Eve, unlike Pierce, was actually very likable as a character. So there's that too lol).

[poirott]

This is the 2nd part of the "Riddle of the Spinx" interview with Death on the Nile cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos for British Cinematographer November 2020 issue (part 1 transcribed here). The full interview has now been released on the British Cinematographer website. I've included some of the text below!

In Part 2 Zambarloukos talks about shooting with the cast on location in Egypt and doing a particularly complex single shot of them on set, how they did the opening b&w sequence of young Poirot as a soldier, and built sets of Abu Simbel and the pyramids, the use of realtime footage projected on LED screens to make the studio sets look more realistic, what part of the Murder on the Orient Express set they recycled for Nile, etc.

Q: This was shot like Murder on the Orient Express at Longcross Studios with plates filmed on location in Egypt. Was it ever a possibility to shoot entirely on location?

Haris Zambarloukos: The issue is that 1934 Egypt barely exists today. For example, in the 1960s they moved the Abu Simbel temple 300 metres away so that the Aswan Dam wouldn't flood it. So, we built the entire four-storey high Abu Simbel at Longcross, complete with banks of water. The same with Giza and the Sphinx. In the 1930s the Nile went up to the feet of the Sphinx. Now all you see is the concrete expanse of Cairo.

Secondly, it's difficult to shoot complex shoots on a river while floating, taking all the cast down there and scheduling them, on top of ensuring everyone's safety on such a high-profile project.

Our whole design and research went into creating a set. We wanted to build a life-size boat inside and out; not to break it down into small sets but to shoot it as if we were on a boat. That’s a huge undertaking. Jim Clay built an amazing set to scale for the Karnak. It was so big we needed to build a temporary sound stage around it. We also wanted to use some real daylight when we got great sunlight in Longcross and use a little bit of water to basically film the boats carrying guests to the Karnak.

We recycled the railway from Orient and built the boat on that so we could wheel it in from outdoors to indoors. We built a very elaborate lighting rig that you could pull back and see the entire boat in one shot. You could step onto the boat and walk through all the rooms which were all lit for an analogue film f-stop. It was complicated and took most of our planning but I personally don't think you can tell the difference when we cut - even from a shot filmed outside in real sunlight juxtaposed with one in apparent sunlight on our sound stage. It's seamless because we took such great care and a detailed approach to our rig and construction.

In Orient you created some stylish direct overheads of the train carriage. You've told us of the Steadicam dance sequence in Nile. Were there other stylistic flourishes?

Inside the sound stage we went twice round the Karnak with the entire cast all choreographed for this one great reveal of a murder. It was really hard work to do. I understand why it was cut in the edit although they have kept a lot of other single long takes and there are lots of places where you see the whole cast in a single shot.

However difficult you might think setting up a long single is in terms of lighting and operating, it is equally, if not more difficult, to block a scene with multiple actors, keep the audience engaged and choreograph it in a way that is exciting and at the same time reveals things gradually. There's a lot of pressure on a lot of people in shots like that. Everyone's got to be on top of their game. Because we're all so interdependent, it's a domino effect in that the further you go in the take, the bigger the responsibility is for not getting it wrong whether that's the operator, focus puller, the actor saying the final line, the gaffer lighting a corner at just the right time. We always get excited about those shots but also very nervous.

You augmented the studio work with plates photographed on location in Egypt. Tell us about that.

We filmed on the Nile from a boat with a 14 8K Red camera array. We had a 360-degree bubble on top of the boat and two three-camera arrays pointing forwards and backwards as we travelled up and down. We specifically chose areas where modernity wasn’t present (or where it was, we removed it in post) and we also shot plates from the point of view of passengers onboard the Karnak.

VFX supervisor George Murphy edited the footage and stitched the plates together into an essentially very, very advanced virtual reality rig in which I could pan my camera. We did that before principal photography, so we never had to guess a month or so later what to put there. That’s a big help. Most shoots do their plate photography afterwards. It meant I could pretty much place the camera on any deck of the Karnak for any scene and know what the background would be.

As with Orient, did you play back footage realtime on LED screens outside the boat set?

I'd love to have done it live but on Orient we were only dealing with one wagon's windows at a time. It was still the biggest LED set-up ever done to that point, but the Karnak set is 20 time bigger than that. There aren't enough LED screens available – plus it would have been prohibitively expensive.

Instead, I went for a much larger version of a technique I'd used on Mamma Mia which was to hang back projection screens all around the boat – 200m in circumference, 15m high. We used Arri SkyPanels at a distance to create a sky or a part of the background. It could also be converted into a blue screen when we needed to. It meant that if I had a shot looking above the horizon line into the sky then it could be done in camera.

How confident were you of retaining colour and contrast from set to post?

I took stills on the recce and we used those to the create colours with this back projection for our skies. I take prints (not digital stills) so there is no misinterpretation. A still is a piece of paper that you can see. Once something is emailed across and seen by someone watching on another screen the information can get lost.

At the same time there were a lot more checks and balances put in place. We had a projector at Longcross and I watched dailies with (dailies colourist) Sam Spurgeon every lunchtime. With Kodak and Digital Orchard we have a very quick process to convert analogue filmmaking into digital by the next morning. Film is processed at night, they scan at 4am and by mid-morning those digital images are transferred to our dailies suite at Longcross. At lunch we’d watch it digitally projected, having been processed, scanned and graded at 2K.

I check that first and give notes to Sam and those get transferred onto our dailies which is what Ken, the editorial team, VFX and studio team sees. That's a major check. It's me with someone in a room, rather than me talking over the phone which is a big difference. I have a very good relationship with Goldcrest and (DI colourist) Rob Pizzey who also sees things along the way. I supervise the grade at the end. So, there's no need for anyone to interpret anything. It’s a collaboration in which we all look at the same images.

Did you shoot black and white for the opening scene or convert?

We shot colour for a couple of reasons. Although Kodak could manufacture BW 65, there is no lab in the world to processes it. Plus, there’s a certain skill to grading BW using colour negative and the added benefits are that that you can place a grey tone to a colour. For example, you could take red and decide it will look a very dark grey or a light grey, so you get very detailed tones. Ultimately, I get much more control in the DI this way. They were very monochromatic battlefield sets and costumes so it was quite limited in this case. The Germans wore grey and the Belgians wore dark blue and it’s a dark sooty gas-filled battlefield but you could manipulate the blue in the sky a little bit more and certainly manipulate the intensity of people’s eyes - especially if they had blue eyes (which Branagh does).

How did you handle sound sync?

To do sound sync work on Orient we used sound cameras that are twice as heavy as high-speed cameras, so I wanted to develop soundproof housing (blimp) for our camera on Nile. I took the problem to Stuart Heath at BGI Supplies at Longcross. They've made all sorts of props for us before, from Cinderella’s carriage to the furniture on Nile. I told him that I needed it really quickly. All my other attempts had failed. Stuart suggested using a material that they soundproof the interior of helicopters with. He brought a draper in who basically measured the camera as if making a dinner suit for it and quickly made a couple of versions for us. It was very effective and really opened up the Steadicam possibility for us. All from just wandering onto a workshop on the lot and asking a friend if he had any ideas about how to achieve something. In the old days that’s what everyone did – the answer was somewhere on the lot.

Finally, after six films and 14 years working with Ken Branagh, could you tell us what makes your relationship tick?

It is a fantastic friendship. To begin with you must be able to maintain a professional friendship with any cast and crew which is all about doing your very best and understanding where you have common aesthetics and shared thoughts about humanity. Ask what kind of world you want this to be, because that will come through in your filmmaking.

As you say, I've spent years working in close proximity to Ken and we have a mutual affection and admiration for each other otherwise we wouldn't be doing it for so long. He is relentless in pursuit of perfection and in his advancement of storytelling and is inspiring to work with. It means you have to be as relentless in your area of craft.

I think we both like making the same kinds of films. I'm a Greek Cypriot who grew up with Greek myth and tragedy. Ken's love of Shakespeare is legendary. You can easily see the lineage between Aeschylus (the ancient Greek creator of tragedy) that goes all the way to Shakespeare. Perhaps that appreciation for the human condition in its best and worst forms is the tie that binds.

Photo credit: Rob Youngson

Source: britishcinematographer.co.uk - February 4 2021