#i have the books / articles names if anyones interested

[spiltichor]

—   TYPES OF GHOSTS ( ft. my literature textbooks discussions of types of ghosts in narratives.)

[sophieinwonderland]

The Plurality of... Bill Cipher (The Book of Bill)

Spoiler Warning for Gravity Falls, The Book of Bill, and the nature of reality as you know it

Hello dear reader.

I recently found in my possession a strange book with no explanation as to how it got there. A bizarre tome known only as The Book of Bill.

I recognized the name and imagery from someone else's memories. Bill Cipher, a character from Alex Hirsch's hit series Gravity Falls.

It honestly seemed too perfect. I've been doing this "Plurality of..." series where I look at plurality in media. And an important part of Bill's shtick was possession.

It seemed simple enough. I can read the book, learn a bit about Bill and his possession, and then write an article about his plurality. But the reality was anything by simple, with far more than I bargained for.

And by the end of this post, this book will have driven me to break a fundamental rule I've held sacred through my "Plurality Of..." series.

What is Plurality?

Before we begin, I should explain what plurality is for anyone new here. Plurality is a term for being multiple in one body in some way.

We call the body's occupants "headmates". These can be anything from alters in dissociative disorders to spirit guides bound to a mortal, to... yes... even literal demonic possession.

Yeah, even being possessed by a demonic triangle from a 2-dimensional universe is a type of plurality. If there are multiple self-conscious agents of some kind there, it's plural!

Time To Get Weird!

(Art by magentasnail)

Let's catch you up on the basics real quick. Again, there will be huge Gravity Falls spoilers.

In Gravity Falls, Bill Cipher is a yellow a 2-dimensional triangle demon bent on causing chaos.

Through the series, Bill makes deals with multiple characters to possess their bodies. This includes both gaining full control over the body of protagonist Dipper Pines for an episode, and more interestingly, sharing control over the body of Stanford Pines for an extended period of time.

Bill's possession of Dipper left Dipper outside his body like a ghost. But his deal with Stanford is much more plural in nature, where they shared control, with Bill only controlling the body in his sleep.

Obviously real plural systems don't have headmates controlling their body while they sleep like this, but the experience can be seen as analogous to dissociative identity disorder, where it's common to experience blackouts and "wake up" in situations unsure how you got there.

That's all you really need to know about Bill for the time being.

With that out of the way, it's time get weird and dive straight into the Book of Bill!

The Book of Bills

As I begin reading the Book of Bill, I'm given a warning from Stanford Pines that the book will rewrite itself based on the mind of the reader. This seems silly, and I of course dismiss the idea out of hand. Surely there's no way a book could change itself based on who's reading it.

As I venture further into this tome, I find the occasional point of interest. References to Bill living in people's brain, him being an idea, etc.

I stop briefly to ponder that. Why does Bill refer to himself as an idea? Isn't he canonically a being from a physical 2-dimensional world? Him being described as an idea is peculiar, but something I tuck away for the future.

The first thing I find that really piques my interest in regards to plurality is the multiple times that it's just referenced that there are multiple Bills in Bill's head. Such as when Bill refers to "the voices in his head" teaming up.

In the plural community, there's a concept known as median system.

A median system is typically a system which has separate parts that are less distinct from each other. There's a pretty solid case that Bill, having a bunch of Bills in his head, could be considered a median system on his own.

In fact, the book itself actually depicts communication between multiple Bills, in the form of an interview.

And throughout the interview, there are times where the Prime Bill seemingly gets annoyed at the interviewer's questions. As if they are actually different people. While this could be Bill simply duplicating himself and pretending for comedic effect, it could just as easily be that both Bills are headmates in Bill's system.

Bill being a median system is a pretty interesting direction.

As I read on though, the book dragged me down yet another rabbit hole, and raised an important question.

Does Bill Have A Dissociative Disorder???

Let's talk about dissociative identity disorder. There are two main criteria for DID. Criterion A is the presence of two or more distinct personality states. You know, like those Bills in Bill's head.

The second is memory loss.

Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events.

This is what was on my mind when Bill was describing how he was uniquely gifted with the ability to see into the third dimension, and wanted to teach others this same skill.

But when he tries to recount it... this happened...

To me, this sounds exactly what was described in criterion B. This is also called dissociative amnesia.

And it's not just this one-off example. Bill actually references later that he dissociates (his words) and "wakes up" later after a conquest.

With everything we know, it seems incredibly likely that Bill has DID, or at least a related disorder.

Bill is what he eats

Okay... wait...

So Bill can ALSO imprison the souls of those he eats inside himself, and they can apparently take over Bill's body too???

What actually is going on here? Is this one of Bill's powers? He can just eat entire universes and then whatever he consumes becomes a part of him? Or maybe it's something else...

Maybe if we looked at this less literally and consider the previous hints of Bill having a dissociative disorder then perhaps what is going on is that Bill is introjecting these people.

Maybe whenever he enters somebody's mind, some piece of them remains...

I would love to speculate more on this... But this is the only mention of it in the entire book!

At this point, I begin to reflect on the words at the beginning. Maybe it was true that the book was changing itself to give me what I wanted. Little hints of plurality to keep me reading, to ensnare me in its vicious trap and ultimately drive me to madness.

And the worst part was, I was falling into it anyway. Because I had to know, even if this was a trap, I was in it to the very end. My thirst for knowledge and understanding unquenchable.

Even if I knew I should stop here, there was no going back.

Stanford Pines, Bill's Perfect Host

At last, beyond all of the misdirects that were put in my way, I arrived at the reason that I started on this journey.

Stanford Pines.

I need to say that when I started this journey, planning to delve into what the plurality of Bill and Ford might be like, I never imagined that it would be handled so... Beautifully.

I mean that genuinely!

I love the relationship of these two characters in the book!

They are both very out of place in their own ways. Both are aware of things in their world that are denied by others, leaving them ridiculed and ostracized for it. They manage to form a genuine friendship. Even if Bill was using Stanford the whole time to achieve his Weirdmageddon.

The two compliment each other surprisingly well. Bill provides Stanford with a friend who can get him out of his comfort zone, which is something that I think Stanford really needed.

There's a really fun part of the book where Bill just gets Stanford mind-drunk, which is apparently something he can do.

Bill fills a role in Stanford's life that nobody had since he lost contact with his brother. While Stanford had friend in with Fiddleford, his lab partner, and we do get to see parts of that friendship in the book, they are more like work acquaintances.

Alas, it wasn't meant to be. Because in the end, Bill is still an evil demon who was bent on bringing about the Weirdmageddon and was manipulating Ford the whole time.

And when Stanford found out, he tried to shut Bill out. This led to Bill trying to communicate through sticky notes to get Ford to stop ignoring him. He would front in the body at night while Ford slept, and they carried on a conversation through these sticky notes.

Wait... Sticky notes?

This is such an interesting choice for the character! Especially after so many hints of Bill Cipher having some sort of dissociative disorder.

Why?

Because sticky notes are an actual method that real DID systems use to communicate with their alters, as seen in this post from the NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) website.

It's fascinating how, if you were to try to depict how headmates with strong dissociative barriers might communicate, this is one of the ways you would want to do that!

Is this coincidental? Maybe. But the talk of dissociation earlier suggests the author also has at least some basic knowledge of dissociation and how it works. And, perhaps, plurality as well?

Overall, this whole section with Bill and Ford was fantastic, and it was well-worth the read for that on its own.

The End?

I suppose this is the end. I found what I wanted. I got the content I was after. A cool plural story of a guy and his headmate from another dimension who wants to take over the world.

Through all the strange distractions and hints of Bill himself having headmates that seemingly went nowhere, I got more plurality in the book than I expected.

And yet, as I turn the final page of the book, I feel unsatisfied. Unsettled.

"Is that it?" I think to myself.

This is Gravity Falls, a show built on mysteries, and looking deeper than the surface. Surely there has to be more. Right?

What if... all the plurality in this book, is obscuring something deeper? Or maybe hinting at something deeper...

And then... I see it!

After the final page, I come to the About the Author section.

Which means it's time to talk about...

The Plurality of... Bill Cipher Alex Hirsch

Yes, I am going there!

In the beginning, I promised that this post will require me to break a rule I've held sacred through these posts.

That rule... is to never speculate on the plurality of the author.

But, Alex Hirsch, at least in a fictional sense, hasn't exactly shied away from the idea of being "possessed" by Bill. This dates back at least a decade, with him making Tweets like this one.

"Bill Cipher" even did an AMA on Reddit through Alex, playing it off as Bill possessing Hirsch while he slept.

It's a pretty open secret in the Gravity Falls community that Alex Hirsch is "possessed" by Bill. At least in some meta-fiction way that may not be canon to Gravity Falls but isn't quite real either.

And were my analysis to stop here, I wouldn't really be saying anything new or valuable. A lot of this was covered by MatPat on Film Theory.

But there's something I want to go back to that confuses me in this book.

That Bill Cipher... is an idea?

Let's bring this full circle, back to the beginning of the book where Bill mentions that he's imaginary and describes himself as an idea.

These are such weird lines because Bill didn't seem to have originated from people's minds within the narrative of Gravity Falls.

His story is of being a being from a literal flat world. So why then, does he describe himself as an idea? Why does he describe himself as imaginary???

Bill Cipher as Alex Hirsch's Tulpa

While Bill being an idea doesn't make sense if he's speaking as a being from a 2-dimensional world that's real to him, it does make sense if we consider that the Bill talking to us, who wrote the Book of Bill, is a tulpa sharing the body of its creator.

Before going on though, we need to answer an important question. What is a tulpa? The r/tulpas subreddit gives its own answer to this in its FAQ.

The simplest way to describe a tulpa is simply another person who was created intentionally/unintentionally through repeated interaction and shares a body and mind with their creator. A more complicated definition can go as follows: A tulpa is believed to be an autonomous consciousness coinhabiting a brain with their creator, often with a form of their creator's initial choice and design. A tulpa is entirely sentient and in control of their opinions, feelings, form and movement. They are willingly created via a number of techniques to act as companions, muses, and advisers. Tulpa forms can either be visualized in the mind's eye, or, with practice, seen as a hallucinatory figure using a technique called imposition.

And let's stop there on the line about being created as muses, because this is something that's found repeated throughout both The Book of Bill and Journal 3, with Stanford referring to Bill as his "muse."

It's a curious term that doesn't appear in the show, but was added to the lore in these two supplemental books.

The FAQ goes on to explain that while tulpas are often considered to be intentionally created, there are also accidental tulpas that can arise through imaginary friends or from writing characters.

Is it possible to accidentally make a tulpa? Yes - many people join the community after realizing they have had tulpas all their lives, but without knowing what they were called. These "accidental" tulpas often arise from imaginary friends and writing/roleplay characters.

On the point of roleplay characters, something I also haven't mentioned yet is that Alex Hirsch didn't just write the character of Bill Cipher. He WAS Bill Cipher. In the show, Bill is one of the characters Hirsch voices along with Grunkle Stan and Soos.

Writing tulpas and how they come about are discussed a bit more below:

Is this a new phenomena? No, it's a practice that goes back in recorded history at least as far as the Greek philosophers. The present name of the phenomenon is derived from the word used by Tibetan monks in the early 20th century. There's also evidence to suggest dedicated prayer can lead to the development of 'religious tulpas' in the minds of the particularly devout, and on the secular end, writing techniques similar to tulpa development techniques can and have resulted in writers creating accidental tulpas from their characters. Having a tulpa is nothing new, although it's gone by many names throughout the course of history and does so even today. However, we believe we are one of the first groups to address this practice as a psychological phenomena rather than a magical, occult or divine experience.

Tulpamancy and Attention

There was another passage from the book that I found noteworthy.

At the end, Stanford describes what truly sustains Bill isn't power, but attention, which Stanford describes as Bill's "lifeblood."

It's even underlined for emphasis.

Why is this important? Well first, this line goes back to the weird lines earlier suggesting Bill is an idea.

But more importantly, feeding on attention is something which is actually a pretty popular philosophy in tulpamancy. That tulpas feed on and are sustained by the attention of their hosts.

How do I give my tulpa energy? Tulpas are sustained by attention, and energy is a convenient metaphor for this. So, you can give your tulpa energy by interacting with them. It is also possible, through no shortage of work and time on the part of host and tulpa alike, for a tulpa to grow beyond this need and to learn how to sustain themselves.

How much attention/energy/interaction does my tulpa need? During the creation process you should aim to interact with your tulpa daily, anywhere from a few minutes up to a few hours, and narrating to them as and when you can. After they're fully vocal and active, the bare minimum is just acknowledging their existence, but spending time talking to them and interacting with them is very much the point of bringing them into existence. Just don't ignore them, and you'll both be fine.

On Parallels in Writing

Adding another layer, it's likely that Stanford Pines is at least partially based on Alex Hirsch himself.

One point of trivia is that Alex Hirsch has a twin sister, and Gravity Falls was inspired by vacations they would take as children. Dipper and Mabel being based on Alex and his sister is pretty well-known. But towards the end of season 2, it's revealed that their Grunkle Stan is a twin himself, with his brother being Stanford Pines, the author of the journals.

During this part of the story, it starts creating a parallel between the relationships of the younger and older twins, with Dipper (who is based on Alex) bonding with Stanford over how much they have in common. Both are nerds who are into writing and science and uncovering the mysteries of the world. Both are a bit socially awkward as well.

And while not much attention is drawn to this particular connection, both had experiences of making deals with Bill that let Bill takeover their bodies at different points.

Based on the parallels between Dipper and Stanford, one might speculate that Alex based Dipper on his younger self, while Stanford was loosely based on himself as an adult.

The personalities of these two characters are also the most likely to create a tulpa based on the psychological profiles of most tulpamancers.

In 2016, Dr. Samuel Veissiere, a psychiatry professor at McGill University, found the following in his study of tulpamancers:

From coding of qualitative interviews collected in large surveys, the most common tulpamancer profile to emerge is one of a highly cerebral, imaginative, highly articulate, upper-middle class, formally educated person with many consistently pursued interests, talents, and hobbies, but limited channels of physical social interaction. Typical tulpamancers are confident about their talents, but are quite modest and socially shy. They possess – or have cultivated – a high propensity for concentration, absorption, hypnotisability, and non-psychotic sensory hallucinations.

The psychological profile of tulpamancers fits both Dipper and Stanford to a t. And many of these same traits could just as easily be true for Alex Hirsch if these characters were meant to be stand-ins for himself.

Is Alex Hirsch trying to tell us that he's plural?

In the end, this is just a theory. And it's one that I feel nervous making because plurality is so deep and personal. That's why I've avoided speculating on the plurality authors in the past. Even when the writing feels so true to the plural experience that it's hard to imagine that someone who isn't plural wrote it.

So why am I making an exception with this one?

Well, in this particular case, I think that the breadcrumbs are being left intentionally, and if he is plural, then he expects somebody to follow them. I'm not worried that I would be outing somebody who didn't want others to find out.

With Alex Hirsch's love of codes and clues and mysteries, if he were plural, I have to imagine that the hints weren't accidental and he would be wondering if anybody would follow them.

And if I am completely off base and he's not plural, I think that he would still appreciate the theorizing anyway. 🤷‍♀️

But if these are intentional clues that were left behind to hint at a real life plurality, one might ask why.

Why would he want people to know about it, and hint at it in this way?

Well, I think the Book of Bill might have an answer to that too.

Shame is a powerful emotion. But it grows in the dark. The more I've tried to hide my past with Bill, the more hold it's had over me.

Perhaps this line is meant to reflect Alex Hirsch's own feelings. Because many plural systems have felt this same way about their plurality, having hide their relationships to their headmates.

The actual end now

Finally, we come to the real ending of this.

This is, again, just a theory. I don't want anyone taking it as fact. I admit that I could be completely wrong about everything that I've said here.

But if nothing else, it's at least fun to imagine that Alex Hirsch does have a Bill Cipher tulpa in his head that has been acting as his muse this whole time. And it would give a new meaning to the gag of the Weirdmageddon intro saying Gravity Falls was "created by Bill Cipher" all those years ago.

Thanks for reading, and if you have your own muse that you think might be more than a simple muse, be sure to read my guide on how to know if your imaginary friend is sentient.

And if you like this post and want to see more like it, you may want to check out The Plurality of… Avatar: The Last Airbender or The Plurality of… IF

[aedesluminis]

Resources on Prieur de la Côte-d'Or

I decided it was about time to compile a convenient list with all the information and resources I could find about Claude-Antoine Prieur, also known as Prieur de la Côte-d'Or.

It's very much a work in progress: some posts, those without a link, are yet to be written. The list will be updated and edited with time.

♢ Biographies

Full books

Paul Gaffarel - Prieur de la Côte-d'Or, Librairie Noury, Dijon (1900).

Georges Bouchard - Prieur de la Côte-d'Or, un organisateur de la victoire, Librairie Historique R. Claveruil, Paris (1946).

(Not only I plan to transcribe both of them in a lighter, more readable format, but also to write a post comparing the two, though this should wait until I finish reading them fully. For now, from what I could see, none of the two could be considered a definitive Prieur biography: Paul Gaffarel didn't have access to Prieur's personal papers, resulting in a very incomplete work and inaccuracies; as far as Bouchard is concerned, he was no historian but a chemist and it shows both in his very superficial interpretation of the historical period in which Prieur lived and in the uncritical way in which he analyses primary accounts and sources about the latter.

For anyone interested in Prieur's life, I would recommend you to start from the 1946 one: despite the many criticism I personally have towards it, it's more complete, since Bouchard was granted access to Claude-Antoine's papers.)

Summaries

Timeline for Prieur's life

"Profile card" by @saintjustitude.

Translation of Gainot's entry on Prieur mentioned in Dictionnaire des membres du Comité de Salut Public

♢ Primary Sources

Correspondence and personal writings

Prieur's letter to Louis XVI on the importance of having a unified metric system in France

Prieur's letter to Guyton dated 10 Thermidor an II (28 July 1794)

Prieur's speech of 3 Germinal an III

Prieur's last written letter (to Simonne Frilley)

C.A. Prieur - Révelations sur le Comité de Salut Public (I plan to translate them all into English eventually)

Modern transcription of Prieur's first work on the metric system: Mémoire sur la nécessité et les moyens de rendre uniformes, dans le royaume, toutes les mesures d’étendue et de pesanteur

PNG Vector of Prieur's signature (by @senechalum)

Some excerpts from Prieur's first work on the metric system: 1. On the benefit of using the decimal scale 2. Conclusion of the memoir (summary of Prieur’s proposal)

Prieur's speech on the occasion of his admission to Dijon's Academy of Science

CSP decrees written and/or signed by him

Copy of the Letter of the Committee of Public Safety to the Directory of the District of Valence dated 19 Pluviôse [Year II]

♢ Secondary Sources

Camille Richard - Le Comité de Salut Public et les fabrications de guerre sous la Terreur, Rieder Ed., Paris, (1922) (A very interesting book on the warfare during the Terror (93-94), explaining Prieur, Carnot and Lindet's duties and contributions.)

Bertrand Barère on Prieur

Paul Arbelet on Prieur

Paul Arbelet - La jeunesse de Prieur de la Côte-d'Or, Revue du dix-huitième siècle (1916)

Bulletin de la Sabix - n°8 (décembre 1991) (it's a small journal written in French with some articles about the founding of the Polytechnic School and Prieur's role in it)

♢ Posts

Prieur's personality: an introduction by @saintjustitude

Various portraits

Quotes (by him and on him)

Prieur's baptism certificate

Prieur's family crest

On Prieur's family

On Prieur's daughter (some additions by @nesiacha)

On Prieur's disability

Charles Bossut on Prieur's school perfomance at the École de Mézières

On Carnot and Prieur’s friendship (1, 2, 3, 4)

Prieur was never named Compte de l'Empire by Napoléon

On the mutual dislike between Prieur and Bonaparte

Historical inaccuracies in Arte's documentary Un mètre pour mesurer le monde

Prieur's contributions to the establishment of a new unified metric system

How Prieur and Carnot were elected members of the Committee of Public safety

Prieur's duties and contributions as member of the CSP

Prieur's contributions in the foundation and political defense of the École Polytechnique

Prieur's attendance at the CSP

Prieur's depiction in media

The bizarre legend about Prieur knowing that Louis-Charles Capet was freed from the Temple and substituted with another child

[spitdrunken]

relationships: robin x reader, sunday & robin, sunday & reader

notes: ambiguous relationships, implied mind control (not with robin/reader)

Robin is pretty particular about the people she wants to date, and has a certain modus operandi. Due to her cross-galaxy fame, it’s pretty much impossible for her to go on dating apps, at least via the usual channels. But she doesn’t want to limit her dating pool to just fellow celebrities, either. Masterful at disguises as she is, during first contact and first dates she has a tendency to hide her real identity, though she would never wait long before revealing herself. Even prior to how famous she is now, she has been burnt in the past by people being interested in who they think she is, rather than who she actually is as a person.

She has a special fondness for romance novels, and spends quite a bit of time discussing them on online forums. Online is one of the places she does not have to worry about how she presents herself, and she can gush in anonymity like anyone else. Thinking of a meet-cute is one of the few unrealistic dreams Robin allows herself, but perhaps she meets you through prolonged chatting online. Starting from your shared interests and underneath fake aliases, before spreading out to subject such as your actual lives and the people around you. Your friend is rather secretive, not giving out her exact name or showing pictures, but you assume it’s just in the name of privacy, until…

You: no waaaaaayyyyy You: where’s the /j?? birdie i swear lmao You: you’re kidding right You: or are you actually being serious?? wait wait ok You: ok if you’re serious. ily girl and no offense but like. send me a picture of you and a note with my username on it or smth? cuz im sure you can imagine it’s kinda hard to believe you’re THAT Robin

And she does! She sends you multiple pictures in fact, in multiple poses, to reassure you that the images aren’t A.I.-generated. When she apologises to you for hiding who she really is, she does it through a voice message, and you can hear one of the most envied voices in the galaxy speak just to you. It’s… Kind of overwhelming? But at the same time, it doesn’t change all that much.

She’s still your friend, who you’ve talked about to your struggles and gushed about your interests to, who always listens and always has a nice word to say. Who, if she has any faults, is always too hard to herself, never seeming to cut herself a break. Who always seems to be asleep at different times, and can disappear for days at a time. You thought she just had a horrifically wrecked sleep schedule, but this would explain that! Maybe it helps that, though you’re definitely familiar with Robin, you wouldn’t call yourself a fan or stan of hers.

When she confesses her feelings for you, it’s over the phone, a rare trembling enter his voice as she carefully considers her words.

“I’ve thought… A lot of times about how to put this. I still don’t really know how,” she says, laughing lightly. “I don’t want to lose what we have now. In my life, you’re one of the few people I can always turn to— Who I can show… Other sides of myself. I’ll just say it. It’s not really as romantic as the books we’ve read, but, I’ve fallen for you. Would you care to meet, sometime? And go on a date? I don’t want to pressure you, or feel like you have to do this. If you’re not interested, I still really, really would like to be your friend.”

There are a lot of conversations to be had when you begin to date Robin. It’s not going to be exactly easy. Not only do you need to be prepared to be put on blast on social media and feature in gossip articles, you’ll have to deal with the fact that she’ll be away on travel most of the time. Including to dangerous places, such as active warfronts.

This is something that, regardless of their love for you or anyone else, is integral to Robin’s life, and one thing she’ll never change. If that is something you cannot come to terms with and this reveals itself during your conversations, you’d be better off remaining friends. You can accompany Robin on certain travels, maybe even all of them, depending on the kind of person you are, but for a long while at least, Robin won’t settle anywhere permanently.

But if you manage to get through all of this, Robin is a wonderful girlfriend. She writes you letters and sends you gifts no matter where she goes, and makes time to call you at least once a day whenever she can. In interviews, she’ll bring you up as one of the people who give her strength, and her face lights up when she speaks of you. At events, she’d enjoy helping you dress up in whatever style you want, and constantly keeping your arms interlinked as you walk around.

While she isn’t all that touchy in public, she’d be clingy whenever it’s just the two of you. Making up for lost time together. Another thing she would enjoy is putting the both of you in increasingly elaborate disguises for public outings together! She has to make the fact she’s nearly always followed around by paparazzi fun somehow.

One of the largest ‘hurdles’ when dating Robin is, funnily enough, meeting her older brother Sunday. She speaks of him with nothing but affection and the occasional tinge of worry (though, when you tell her that she has the exact same kind of habits towards overworking herself, it’s suddenly not so bad after all).

Robin herself seems to have no fears that you won’t meet her brother’s standards, but you have your doubts, really. If your glances over the letters he’s written her are anything to go by, he loves Robin just as much as she loves him, if not even more so. While his approval is important to her, you’re certain that she would never break up with you over it, or anything of the sort. Still… You can’t help but feeling nervous.

Your worries aren’t unfounded. Over a dinner in Penacony’s Dreamscape, Sunday seems to scrutinise you, gaze boring into your forehead. All the time, there is nothing but a gentle smile on his face. Yet, you’ve never felt to be under such a strong spotlight, not even at events accompanied by Robin, walking across massive stages. Your head hurts, but you’re guessing it’s just from the general stress that you’re feeling.

As Robin laughs about the type of meal manifested on her brother’s plate (“An Alfalfa Salad for yourself? I really thought you would’ve gone for something sweeter, brother!”), you shift on your seat in discomfort and attempt to keep small talk conversations going.

Perhaps it’s your mind being tricks on you, perhaps you are ‘spiraling in on yourself’, as Robin sometimes calls it, but you really do believe that this man does not like you whatsoever. When you can’t take it anymore, you move your chair. Its loud scraping breaks up any conversation.

The smile on your face is wobbly. “I’m just going to go to the bathroom for a second. Excuse me.”

Robin puts her hand on your arm. “I can show you where it is? The mansion’s layout can be a bit confusing at times, even though I’ve been here plenty of times myself.”

Sunday, across the table, shakes his head and gets up. “Please stay seated, sister. As the host, it is my duty to guide your… Partner, to wherever they may need to go. Allow me to guide you.”

Somehow, your attempted escape has become a new trap in and of itself. It’s practically impossible to deny to go with him now, though, so you straighten your shoulders, nod, and follow Sunday further into his home. The clacking of his shoes on the marble floor is the only noise keeping you two company as you walk a step behind him. He stops. There is no bathroom, here. Only a giant paint of Robin situated on the wall. She’s smiling. Sunday turns half a circle around and stares at it, hands folded together behind his back.

“You…” he speaks slowly. “Do you think you can make her happy?”

Your head throbs. Your head hangs a little to the side, as you stare at the painting. “I think… When I met Robin, she was already happy. In a sense. She has a purpose. A goal she’ll always keep striving for— No matter what. Chasing that, I think it makes her feel more fulfilled than many people… Like me.”

You slowly shake your head. “So, no, I don’t think just myself could make her happy. But as things are now, she is. I do add something to her life, but… I don’t think the rest could be taken away.”

You stare at Sunday. If there is a thought that hits you now, in the painfully placid nature of his expression, in the manner he has watched you all evening, it is not merely protectiveness that fuels him. In part, it is jealousy, too.

You sway a little on your feet.

“You act as if Robin does not care for you,” you smile wistfully, turning to the painting in turn. “You don’t know how she talks about you, if you aren’t around. I think about it, sometimes. If you and I… Were hanging off of a precipice, and she could only save one of us— I can’t say for certain who she would pick. But if I’m honest with myself, as much as it would pain her, and how much it hurts me to think, I really do believe she would save you.”

You squeeze your eyes shut as the corners of your vision turn blurry. “I— I don’t know why I’m saying any of this.” You press your hand to the side of your head, and drag it down your cheek. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m feeling very well.”

“Is that really the truth?” Sunday asks.

“To me it is, I guess.” You mumble. “If you asked Robin, she would answer… That she would find a way to save both of us. No matter the cost. Because that is the kind of person she is. But I can’t seem to think that would be a reality.”

Sunday hums, then turns around you. When he nods, your nausea dissipates, you straighten your back, and whatever stupor you had found yourself in leaves your mind. All at once, shame crashes into you. What the hell have you been babbling on and on about for the past five minutes? When he looks at you now, his gaze is not quite as oppressive as before, though you are not entirely sure how to feel about him.

He lowers his head a tad, ears fluttering. “Thank you for allowing me to understand you better,” Sunday tells you. “You are a different type of person than I imagined you to be— Perhaps you and I are more similar than I believed. Due to my personal feelings, it seems I led my thoughts stray into disharmony. Will you forgive me?” Though the ice has left his tone, it is now as if he has shaved off every edge, covering it all in fabric. It is almost condescending.

But you, honestly, still kind of need to piss. And you’re over all of this, really. “I— Yeah. Yeah, sure. Spirit of harmony, and all that.”

Sunday smiles. “Well, then I believe a reintroduction is in order.” He extends his hand towards you, and you hesitate only a moment before taking it. “I suppose we are family now, too. Know that, whenever life’s troubles seem to be consuming you, Penacony will always opens its arms to you.”

[fairuzfan]

Hello! rly appreciating your posts, in particular the ones about GLAM... it made me curious if you or your followers happen to have any resources/literature to recommend on 2 areas of interest?:

1. Relating salvage anthropology to modern day ideas of trauma porn

2. Palestinian-led museums/archives/oral history projects/other collections or exhibitions of note. (Or if not literature, any names involved besides the few I know of like POHA/the nakba archive/the arab resource center for popular arts; the palestine museum; librarians & archivists with Palestine; activestills; forever our land; and art for gaza)

Anyway, again, thanks for all the time/work you’re putting into analysis and info dissemination <3

hello, thanks for sending this in. sooo i have like. no idea about the first one haha but i have so many for the second one.

The Institute for Palestine Studies has a bunch of scholarly articles and anaylsis about Palestine

Librarians and Archivists for Palestine is not completely Palestinian led but it's one that I'm a part of and really like, even though you already mention it.

The Palestine Museum Digital Archive is an AMAZING resource led by Palestinians in Palestine. I recommend scrolling through their intifada posters, downloading them, printing them, and hanging them around town.

The Palestinian Oral History Archive project in case people were wondering what POHA is.

The Museum of the Palestinian People in DC is really great and has a lot of digitized features.

The Palestine Museum US has a lot of books as well, based on Turtle Island.

The Arab American National Museum is not Palestinian led but I can vouch that they're a great group.

The Met has a lot of Palestinian clothing BUT.... warning in that it is very colonial in its arrangement and description and we dont super know how people got the material they have. If you want to look at the content feel free, though. Will say that Wafa Ghnaim, one of the leading experts on Tatreez in Turtle Island is working on recataloguing the Palestinian collection.

Visualizing Palestine is an infographic organization that might interest you.

The Nakba Archive for people wanting to check it out.

The Library of Congress is. Honestly it's pretty racist but it does have content if you wanna look at it.

Tirazain is a tatreez pattern library that's really cool.

There might be more that I'm forgetting but here are some just from me sitting here thinking for the past few minutes. If anyone else has any recommendations, feel free to add.

[carylmeanslove]

Luke's Floral Message

I had some requests to do a floral meaning for Nicola's Harper's Bazaar Woman of the year photo and I do intend on doing that one soon. I have been quite busy in RL so haven't been in the right head space. I do believe I am coming out of that now and will be able to get to doing that analysis soon.

This one is a quick and easier one seeing as it's one flower. Luke is holding two light pink shades of roses in his People's Sexiest Man Alive 2024 issue photoshoot.

I for some reason am not able to highlight right now. Agh! So I will add the portions that apply below the screen capture.

Joy

✅ Joy and Happiness makes sense for Luke. I mean we can see how he is whenever he is with Nicola. In the 'This or That' that comes along with this article spread he is smiling and looks happy. So that is a yes.

✅ The beginning of a new relationship. I take that to mean a new commitment level in an established relationship. One of the further meanings backs that up. More on that one in a bit.

Tenderness

✅ A love that is tender and enduring. The way Luke always describes Nicola shows how Tender she is to him and he is to her. It's also lasting and enduring. Through all the baseless rumors of them beefing these two never gave up on each other. Nicola stood up for him multiple times and they both still showed they were in contact throughout the time of the rumored "beefing" period. Reminder to people, online interaction isn't the be all and end all of relationships. Nicola and Luke have proved in the past that they talk/text on the phone (Luke was so wanting to say they talk everyday even, but Nicola had to backtrack on that les the cat be let out of the bag about their relationship) and they hang out (They went to the play A Streetcar Named Desire and Hamilton together. She also went to his play The Shape of Things opening night then out to eat afterwards. We also got evidence of her being at his place for the Cinnamon Roll social.) Point is they are part of each other's lives outside of Bridgerton. People who want to not believe that then they are being willfully blind. All that to say that their relationship is enduring and lasting. No loud minority of fans can or will change that. No adjacents (agh I hate that word too) that they very highly likely hired to help them have privacy during a very life-changing time can or will change what they have.

✅ Suitable for long-term relationships. See long-term relationships. Luke and Nicola have known each other for 5 years. Due to some crumbs that Nicola and Luke have been giving us. They are most likely in a very serious, long term committed relationship now.

Femininty

✅ Gentleness. I wonder if Nicola helped him pick out the flower he used in this photo? She has been using flowers a lot lately in sending messages. She is very gentle to him. But he is gentle to her as well.

✅ Love. Biggest duh ever right? They love each other. Our in love pair.

New Beginnings

✅ New beginnings. Yep, their commitment rose to a new level. Deeper commitment.

✅ Purity and Innocence. They have a healthy relationship. A good and wholesome beginning. I truly believe friends to lovers is the most healthy, pure and Innocent beginning for any romantic relationship.

✅ Emotional Interest. Has anyone seen this boy looking at Nicola? He is definitely emotionally interested in her.

I'm manifesting a Nicola photoshoot by Rachell Smith and an article that will go hand and hand with this one. That it will give some more clarity. Much needed for a certain portion of this fandom.

Anyway...there you go. I thank Luke for taking a leaf from his wife's book and sending us these messages in the language of flowers. As well as all the delicious bread crumbs throughout the whole article spread, photoshoot and videos. We love you Luke! Tell Nic Hi for us and that we love her too.

[publius-library]

Hamilton: The Energetic Founder by R.B. Bernstein- A Book Review by a Teenage Know-It-All

In general, when an author refers to the Founding Fathers as "The Founding Guys" in the dedication page of his novel, my hopes are set pretty high from the get-go. I found this book while taking shelter in the Harvard Bookstore after a particularly distressing bus ride with my mother, so my judgment could have been clouded, but I actually don't regret this purchase.

Bernstein's book is short, concise, and comprehensive. While you may not be bored to death with every available anecdote about Alexander Hamilton as some authors (who will remain nameless until later) would want you to be, someone with limited knowledge of the bastard founder would be substantially educated after reading this easy 100 page read (not including the preface or epilogue).

Preface and Acknowledgments

You could not pay me to read anyone's preface or acknowledgments unless it is under 20 words. Bernstein's was not, so it won't be included in my review or in my household.

Chapter 1: Life

Early Life

I hate to say it, and you hate to hear it, but Bernstein's novel has very minimal footnotes (not at the bottom of the page, can't slip that past me), only being used for direct citations. So, there is no telling where he got the birthyear of 1758 for Hamilton because it's not cited. However, to his credit, he refers to an ambiguous "latest major biographer", and I admire anyone who does not invoke the name of the devil.

When it comes to the argument about Hamilton's birth year/age, it depends largely on which sources you believe are more credible, as well as which explanation for the discrepancy between them that you believe is most viable. It also depends on whether or not you believe Hamilton, who continuously used the 1757 year that has been considered truth by many. However, this was only used by Hamilton after his college years, and that is an important distinction.

On April 6, 1771, a teenage Alexander Hamilton submitted a poem to the Royal Danish American Gazette and, wanting to seem just a little older than he was, he summarized himself as "...a youth about seventeen..." Doing some simple math with an overqualified calculator and the knowledge that Hamilton was an insecure 16 year old, we can calculate from those numbers that Hamilton was born in 1755.

Source: Founders Online, Alexander Hamilton Papers: Alexander Hamilton to Royal Danish American Gazette, 6 April 1771. This document also includes Hamilton's first recorded poem, which is very interesting and a worthwhile read to understand his developmental years.

When Hamilton arrived in the continental British colonies in 1773, the age he gave in the above letter would put him in Boston Harbor at the age of 18- far to old for college in this time period. The exact age of entry and graduation is not precise, but it can be estimated that students would enter in their early teens (around 13-14) and graduate before they turned 17. That makes an 18 year old Hamilton far behind his would-be graduating class.

Source: University of Pennsylvania, Penn Libraries, "Penn in the 18th Century: Student Life". I thoroughly enjoyed this article, and it answered some more questions about what exactly college entailed in the 1700s, which is far different to the modern system as there was very little organized educational systems outside of these colleges and universities.

The running theory among recent historians is that Hamilton aged himself down two years (changing his birth year from 1755 to 1757) in order to apply to the College of New Jersey (modern day Princeton), which was the obvious path for him given that he was living in New Jersey and had several alumnus as mentors. Of course, we all know the story of him being denied access to Princeton after requesting an advanced curriculum*, so this detail of the age-change could fit into this attempt to get into the school on his terms. Since 1757 was now his documented birth year, it makes sense that he would continue to use that year throughout his life, as to not confuse his family, friends, and colleagues.

*According to Hercules Mulligan, Hamilton wanted to advance through the standard curriculum "with as much rapidity as his exertions would enable him to do. Dr. Witherspoon [President of the College of New Jersey] listened with great attention to so unusual a proposition from so young a person and replied that he had not the sole power to determine that but he would submit the request to the trustees who would decide." (Source: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow; The William and Mary Quarterly, April 1947). Hamilton remedied this by applying to King's College (modern Columbia) and was enrolled as a special student who was tutored privately and audited necessary lectures as according to the president, Dr. Miles Cooper.

Despite all this, I have never come across 1758 as a possible birth year for Hamilton- nor have I 1754 or 1756. The issue is decidedly between 1755 or 1757, and Bernstein's lack of citations does not wholly reflect badly on his credibility, but it is disappointing because it just leaves me wondering where he got those numbers from.

The American Revolutionary War

The book does generally suffer from this lack of citation/elaboration for the sake of clarity, particularly in instances like on page 5, where Bernstein writes, "After months of organizing and training his artillery company, which he financed with the remainder of the funds meant to pay for his college education..." I have not seen any other documentation that Hamilton financed his artillery company with his educational funds, so knowing where this statement comes from would be greatly beneficial, but any citation that might elaborate on this does not exist.

There are also issues with Bernstein's timeline, along with a few dates being off (such as claiming Hamilton was invited to Washington's military staff in March 1777, when that was actually when he appeared on the payroll, and had actually been invited after the Battle of Princeton in January 1777), but it is especially noticeable when there seems to be some overlap in his novel between Hamilton's service as an artillery captain and as an aide-de-camp.

The HMS Asia was a British warship that blockaded the port of New York Harbor in August 1775, and fired upon the city. At the time, Hamilton and his friend Hercules Mulligan were serving in a makeshift militia company composed of college students called the Hearts of Oak. The following account details Hamilton's involvement in this event, which I consider the beginning of his military aspirations:

"The Asia fired upon the city, and I recollect well that Mr. Hamilton was there, for I was engaged in hauling off one of the cannon when Mr. H. came up and gave me his musket to hold and he took hold of the rope...I told him where I had left [the musket] and he went for it notwithstanding [that] the firing continued, with as much unconcern as if the vessel had not been there." -Hercules Mulligan on the Attack of the HMS Asia

Source: Hercules Mulligan: Confidential Correspondent of General George Washington - A Son of Liberty in the American War of Independence by Michael J. O'Brien

Through his connection to Alexander McDougall, who was forming a New York regiment to resist the British army, Hamilton was able to be recommended on February 23 to the New York Provincial Congress as a "...Capt. of a Company of Artillery." Hamilton received the formal assignment to this position on March 14, 1776, and maintained that post until he was offered a spot on George Washington's staff on January 20, 1777, and the appointment was confirmed on March 1, 1777.

Source: Alexander Hamilton: Youth to Maturity 1755-1788 by Broadus Mitchell

The job requirements of one of Washington's aides-de-camp were extensive, and included nearly every administrative duty that went along with running an army- from writing out orders to delivering them, from monitoring troops to rallying them in battle, the aides were official extensions of the Commander-in-Chief. Very often, skilled riders with military experience (as well as exceptional nagging ability) such as Hamilton were sent on small raiding missions, given a few men under their command to destroy or pillage supply stores. However, this does not constitute actually commanding a detachment, so Hamilton did not do this as Bernstein claims. The only time he did while under Washington's direct command was during the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, but by that time, he had long since quit Washington's office due to frustrations with the man in charge.

Source George Washington's Indispensable Men by Arthur S. Lefkowitz

This discrepancy is not a major flaw in Bernstein's retelling by any means, but it is one example of how the overall timeline of chapter one is a little muddled, which may confuse someone who does not have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of Alexander Hamilton's life like some of you weirdos on the internet (not me, obviously).

Political Career

Moving out of the war and into the Constitutional Era (1786-89), Bernstein includes the almost mandatory anecdote of Hamilton's infamous six hour speech* during the Constitutional Convention (though he claims it was between three and six hours, though all sources I've seen have said it was six). Bernstein describes the speech as such:

"Taking the floor, he gave a speech between three and six hours in length. He mocked the Articles of Confederation and the delegates' plans to fix them. Instead, he described his own plan for a truly national government that would have reduced the states to administrative districts and vested the general government with sweeping national powers. Unfortunately for Hamilton, his proposal remained only a proposal. He could only declaim and argue, for Yates and Lansing would not support his proposal on behalf of New York, nor would anybody else in the Convention, not even Madison," (Bernstein 11).

And all of this is absolutely correct- however, it misses the point. Hamilton's plan, which was everything Bernstein said it was, was so distinctly Hamilton that even the man himself was well aware that he was not likeable enough for it to pass. Though Hamilton put effort into his plan and had faith that it would be successful, it was far too close to a monarchy to appease the Convention (especially with whisperings of uprisings blowing across the Atlantic from Paris by this time).

Instead, Hamilton continued to give his speech delivering his proposal in order to push the radicals behind the New Jersey Plan to consider the moderate nature of the Virginia Plan, which Hamilton and his comrade Madison favored. The Virginia Plan was essentially a modified version of the British government model, which is distinctly Hamiltonian, even though Madison claims the credit. Hamilton had his reservations about the final draft- but so did Madison. They were teammates at this point, as contrasting to their later relationship that might be. Hamilton would not propose a contrary plan if he genuinely believed it could succeed; he had temporary lapses in political judgment frequently, but this was one of those golden moments where he seemed quite intelligent.

*Hamilton's speech was given about half a month after the Virginia Plan was first proposed, and three days after the New Jersey Plan. So although it was not especially late in the game, that changes when you consider that Hamilton had not spoken in support of either of the plans at all. Hamilton did criticize the Virginia plan ("And what even is the Virginia Plan, but democracy checked by democracy, or pork with a little change of the sauce?" Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787 by Catherine Drinker Bowen), so there is an argument that he was offering an alternative plan, but it's overall effect was to lend support to the Virginia Plan, as well as damaging Hamilton's reputation by igniting rumors of British sympathies.

There is very little to critique with Bernstein's retelling of the Washington administration, aside from a few strange descriptions and excessive brevity, but this era in American history is so excessive, and not everyone can write a King James Bible sized treatise on just Federalist 1-5.

This, however, does benefit benefit Bernstein when he discusses the Reynolds Affair. It is the sort of subject you want to dedicate time and words to, exploring the multiple perspectives and dynamics, if you're going to go in depth on it at all. Bernstein's retelling is simple, delicate, and careful, respecting all parties, especially the women.*

*Unlike some less comprehendible authors, Bernstein is not aggressively sexist against the women in Hamilton's life- starting with Rachael Fawcett (his spelling, again, not cited; Rachel's name has many spellings and variations so this is not especially egregious). He speaks of her respectfully and factually, which I shouldn't be happy about, but that's what we've come to here. I'll get into the larger consequences of brevity in a similar area later in the review, but you should know that I don't entirely approve of how much he skips over Hamilton's relationships with women, but to be fair, that would probably taken 100 pages on its own.

The Last Few Years

Again, there isn't too much to say here except for a few notes and interpretation differences between Bernstein and I. Firstly, on the issue of Washington's death, Bernstein writes of Hamilton's response to the sad news, "It does suggest, however, that Hamilton was so moved by Washington's death, which ended a close personal and political partnership spanning nearly twenty-five years, that he did not heed his own choice of words, a tendency that affected him throughout 1800," (24).

The instance where Hamilton "did not heed his own choice of words" was when Hamilton wrote to Tobias Lear, "Perhaps no man in this community has equal cause with myself to deplore the loss [of Washington]."

I think Bernstein's interpretation of this is a little dramatic; the expression that someone's feelings were the most intense or profound was a common saying in the 18th century western society, and can be seen in many letters regarding friends or extended family, where the person writing is definitely not the most affected by the loss. It is the deep expression of grief, not a legitimate claim that Hamilton's grief supersedes all others'. I only think this worth mentioning because it slightly misconstrues Hamilton's character, and it's important to avoid that.

Source: Founders Online, Hamilton Papers: Alexander Hamilton to Tobias Lear, 2 January 1800

The Duel

Overall, there are few portrayals of the 1804 Hamilton/Burr Duel that don't horribly disfigure the intentions of one of the parties involved. In his book, Bernstein picks Burr as the scapegoat, and chooses the route of claiming that Burr was simply looking for anyone he could point his pistol at, shouting unreasonable demands at Hamilton who respectfully raised a hand to silence him and gloriously took to the field.

Of course, the duel is an especially complex issue, which Bernstein dedicates a chapter to, so I will reserve my interpretation until then, but it's clear that his biography is strictly anti-Burr, which taking sides is not the most accurate way to approach the matter of a duel- or anything in historical politics, if I'm being fully honest with you.

Chapter 2: Revolution and Politics and Chapter 3: Law and Constitutionalism

As the heading implies, chapter two focuses on the two revolutions during Hamilton's lifetime (American and French, chronologically) and the impact they had on his politics. Now, while reading this, I admit I was increasingly frustrated that details about Hamilton's life that would have helped the brevity issues in chapter one were found in the following chapters, I can see the vision, and will accept it. The author's retellings of these events are very well, so I have little to disagree with, so I'll be discussing what I do disagree with, and what I thought he handled well.

Of course, as the champion of not giving Hamilton too much credit, I'm going to critique Bernstein for referring to Hamilton as "Washington's principle aide" on page 34. I fought Chernow on this, so I'll be fighting Bernstein on this. Hamilton, while a very valuable asset in Washington's staff, was not literally or figuratively his "principle" aide-de-camp.

The literal title goes to Washington's military secretaries, which, during most of Hamilton's tenure on his staff, was Robert Hanson Harrison. The figurative title falls to Tench Tilghman, who served for longer than Hamilton in, arguably, more capacities. Hamilton's skills were in politics and organization, as well as military maneuvers, so he was most often picked for interactions with congressmen and foreign representatives, as well as raids, foraging parties, and bookkeeping. Tilghman, however, filled in wherever was necessary from 1776 to 1781. The philosophy of "credit where credit is due" dictates that these men be given the title of "principle" aide before Hamilton, who only has the advantage of being louder and more famous.

Source: George Washington's Indispensable Men by Arthur S. Lefkowitz

One thing I think could have warranted a mention was Hamilton's paranoia towards mob rule. Of course, Hamilton's political theory of preventing both majority and minority rule are necessary to mention, as they are interwoven in both The Federalist and the Constitution itself, which can be pinned down as the best models for (most of) Hamilton's political philosophies.

However, Hamilton's fear of the mob dates back to before the French Revolution, where it really kicked up and paired well with Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts. These are major historical events that Bernstein does not neglect, however he could have gone a little deeper on this. Hamilton's fear of the mob can be traced back to his childhood in the Caribbean, where the fear of slave uprisings was implanted in every citizen's head, especially if they were raised in the area. This fear motivated Hamilton's actions in the aforementioned Dr. Miles Cooper incident, regardless of how you spell Miles/Myles, which was before both major revolutions, so it is a topic worth exploring.

There was a third revolution that Bernstein does not discuss: the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The results of this revolution was the founding of the country of Haiti, and the liberation of the island's enslaved people, who went on to govern the new country. This was, as you can imagine, every white person's nightmare at the time, especially if they were up to date on the recent occurrences in France, where the violence was increasing by the day. Hamilton's only references throughout his correspondence (that I could find) were in regards to a French fleet arriving in what is now Haiti, and "...the late disturbances in those Islands..." so unfortunately, we do not know his exact thought on that event. However, there is much to be speculated and discussed, given that this revolution occurred so close to his birthplace, and I think that the mention of this could have given this chapter of Bernstein's novel a new perspective that we don't normally see in a Hamilton biography.

Source: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow; Founders Online, Alexander Hamilton Papers: Alexander Hamilton’s Final Version of the Report on the Subject of Manufactures, 5 December 1791, Alexander Hamilton to George Washington, 5 November 1796

One continuous pattern throughout the book is the idea that Hamilton had a fully "American" or "federal" perspective; that his priorities were dedicated to the entire country's interests, rather than to one particular state or region, (Bernstein 42, 66). This is, unlike most things in this novel, wholly untrue. Hamilton, although he would very much appreciate this statement, was very often biased towards the interests of New York as well as that of the upper merchant class of that state. Though he was not scheming to convert the whole American economy to being run by bankers and merchants like Jefferson claimed, he did still lean towards the class which he belonged until he was unable to maintain that position. In general, Bernstein is very kind to Hamilton, which is charitable, but inaccurate at times.

Bernstein is very talented at summarizing Hamilton's political philosophies, specifically when he describes Hamilton's four basic principles as being "...popular sovereignty, energetic government, checks and balances, and federalism," (Bernstein 40). These are themes that are abundant in Hamilton's political actions, and are espoused in The Federalist and other major publications of his, as well as the Constitution- because they mimic the foundations of the British government. Bernstein is clearly an incredible academic and historian who is greatly worthy of respect and a wonderful source for descriptions such as these.

Note: I included these two chapters in with each other since they're largely interlinked and I didn't have anything noteworthy to say about chapter three that I didn't already say about chapter two. That isn't to say that chapter three isn't noteworthy, but it stands on its own, in my opinion.

Chapter 4: Political Economy and Public Administration

For the two areas where we can see Hamilton's greatest accomplishments, Bernstein does an exceptional job at discussing his actions and motivations, as well as his conflicts with political rivals. My favorite sentence in particular can be found on page 74:

"Even at those times when most Americans have turned to worship at the ideological shrine of Thomas Jefferson, students of public administration have devoted close, admiring attention to Hamilton's thought and work." -Bernstein

I just really like it.

Another thing I really like was Bernstein's categorizing of the factors that went into Hamilton's view on the national economy, as well as his explanation (Bernstein 75-76). I'll include a summary here so those who do not have the means to buy his book can still appreciate his genius here.

Unity: authority organized from top down; keeping all government officials on the same page to execute orders from the top dog exactly as they were meant to be executed

Duration: the system in place would have to remain in place for an extended period of time in order to be properly incorporated, but the time period must also be short enough to ensure the efficiency of government

Adequacy: the government must have enough power to be able to actually execute the policies it puts in place, but cannot have too much that it infringes on the states' or individuals government given or fundamental rights

Responsibility: every official was responsible to the department and nation when executing policy, and must conduct themselves in a manner consistent with the overall public administration

This categorization is effective in that it does not leave anything wanting- the reader is able to fully understand what went into Hamilton's thinking- but it is also concise enough that it does not bore you with 100 pages of doing over every. single. Federalist. paper. So, I appreciate Bernstein's mercy.

Chapter 5: War and Peace and Chapter 6: Honor and Dueling

Note: For chapter 5, I again had nothing to say, though I did write notes; however, they were only my typical complaints about having to read about my favorite subject in the world. That being said, there is more to chapter 6.

Bernstein categorizes (once more) the men of this generation into two groups: gentlemen of extreme politeness and gentlemen of the sword. These classifications are based on a man's response to a conflict or insult. Gentlemen of extreme politeness, like Jefferson or Madison, who, when in the face of conflict, do whatever they can to avoid open warfare with diplomatic responses according to an unwritten code of the Enlightenment Era. Gentlemen of the sword, however, shoot each other.

I would not say that 18th century western gentlemen were quite so black and white as this description, but I'll roll with it. So, we have gentlemen of extreme politeness (Jefferson, Madison, the Randolphs, the Livingstons) and then the gentlemen of the sword (Hamilton, Burr, Monroe...) Who else? I don't know, because Bernstein does not mention this name once:

John Laurens.

I made a post mentioning "Laurens erasure" in July, and I swore off arguing whether or not historical figures were queer a long time ago, but the entire exclusion of John Laurens from a Hamilton biography feels sinful, so I cannot let it stand. Even if he is a footnote, he deserves to be mentioned in Hamilton's life story, not only for the personal relationship they had, but for the role he played in the development of Hamilton's view of class distinctions.

John Laurens came from an extremely prestigious family of South Carolina, a colony founded for the purpose of making money for the British Empire. Alexander Hamilton's background contrasts this, as he was raised a poor bastard on an island where there were only the very rich and the severely impoverished, no in-between. This seems to have caused tension between Laurens and Hamilton at various points, but by the end of the relationship, Hamilton had joined the bourgeoisie that Laurens was born into, and this marks a significant shift in his attitudes towards various social issues.

Source: Founders Online, Hamilton Papers: Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens, 8 January 1780

More specifically to the topic at hand, John Laurens provided Hamilton with his first personal exposure to dueling (aside from the duels that occurred in his Caribbean childhood*), when Laurens dueled Major General Charles Lee in 1778, and Hamilton acted as his second. You'd think that this would warrant a footnote, but, as we've established, Bernstein does not believe in those unless it is a direct citation.

Source: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (pg. 18*) ; John Laurens and the American Revolution by Gregory D. Massey

Laurens and the honor culture we're discussing are inherently intertwined, and he's even further intertwined with Hamilton (usually in a military cot, I presume). It was the 18th century concept of "honor" that motivated Laurens to join the army, duel, and die in battle. It was honor that united Hamilton and Laurens, and it was Laurens who taught Hamilton the ins and outs of being an Enlightened, American gentleman with honor. Without John Laurens, Alexander would not have been Hamilton.

Now that I've said why Laurens should be mentioned, why shouldn't he? Brevity is one reason, and we've established that's very important to Bernstein, however I don't think it's good enough. Laurens would have prompted another question that Bernstein either didn't have time for or didn't have the answers for: were they gay? Well, I have the answers, but not the time, so we'll save that for another day. For now, tsk tsk, Bernstein.

Of course, Bernstein discusses the 1804 duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Bernstein doesn't say anything particularly extraordinary about this event, and neither will I, because everything has already been said about it that could have been said (probably, if you can find something original, please grace my ears with it). However, the particular narrative that Bernstein leans into is problematic in one particular way, and that is demonstrated in this excerpt:

"There are a few salient points about how this honor dispute escalated- or deteriorated- into a duel. First, what if Burr had gone first to cooper to ask what Hamilton's "despicable opinion" had been... Second, Burr's choice to confront Hamilton rather than [Reverend Charles] Cooper suggests how ready he was to accept a duel as the only way to resolve his dispute with Hamilton and vindicate his honor. Third had Burr been that ready to risk a duel, Hamilton could not have avoided it," (96).

For some context, Burr cited his reason for challenging Hamilton as being a letter between Reverend Charles Cooper and General Philip Schuyler that was published in the Albany Argus in which Cooper wrote, "I could detail to you a still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton has expressed of Mister Burr."

This is problematic in that it entirely pins the blame on Burr, and poses Hamilton as the victim. This is something fairly common, and the most common bias among historians, but it is simply not possible. There is never one complete villain, and Burr certainly wasn't someone who could be described as such. Not even Hamilton thought that, which says something.

To address Bernstein's first point, I don't see how reaching out to Cooper would have benefitted either Burr or Hamilton. If he had, and the "more despicable opinion" had been as bad as implied, the fault still would have lied with Hamilton. There would be no reason for Burr to fault Cooper for this, as Cooper did not say that he agreed with Hamilton's opinion of Burr; it was entirely attributed to Hamilton. (Even if it was implied that Cooper did agree, he could more easily frame it to Burr that this wasn't the case).

Additionally, the reason why Burr was concerned with this "more despicable opinion" is due to several rumors going around about him, some that were objectively vile, such as him having an incestuous relationship with his daughter. The specific instance cited by Cooper was something Hamilton said at the city tavern, discouraging others from voting for Burr. It is a common misconception that this is what motivated Burr to challenge Hamilton, but in actuality, it is the implication, and Hamilton's failure to deny, that Hamilton was guilty of spreading such horrible, false rumors against Burr.

Source: Founders Online, "Enclosure: Charles D. Cooper to Philip Schuyler", 23 April 1804; "The two men were often invited to dinner parties hosted by leading New York politicians, businessmen and even each other. During those years, Burr was widowed and lived with his daughter and husband. Hamilton reportedly suggested Burr committed incest with his daughter. Enraged, the Vice President challenged the Treasury Secretary to a duel in Weehawken, N.J. Hamilton was mortally wounded, dying a day later. Hamilton’s death destroyed Burr’s political career," North Coast Current, "Historically Speaking: The Forgotten Man- Aaron Burr"

The lack of acknowledgment of Burr's perspective contributes to this larger perspective that Burr was a malicious, conniving person, and it lacks empathy and understanding, while also showing poor critical thinking skills. Historians are human, and therefore can never be entirely unbiased, but there is a responsibility in this field to be open to all sides, and to provide the reader with enough information to take a different side than the one given by the author. I feel this was lacking in Bernstein's analysis of the duel, but he is absolutely not unique in this. This is partly why I dislike discussing the duel so much because when this occurs in a more opinionated work, such as Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, it is simply frustrating. But, I digress.

Conclusion

Overall, I'd highly recommend this biography for someone seeking to start their investigation of Hamilton's life. Bernstein does a very good job of providing a simple, succinct resource that makes the factual evidence of Hamilton's life very easily accessible due to his book's brevity, but this feature does also limit the perspective you get from giving this book. In reality, this isn't very different from any other history book, at least in my perspective. I believe that this is a genre of literature that should be cross-referenced, and you should keep reading to seek what the whole truth is. The best thing about it is that that "whole truth" is not attainable by one person, and that makes history an inherently social art; you need to work with other people to fully understand. Read other people's work, question other people's opinions, have a discussion. In conclusion, keep reading.

[kamenstranger]

A review(?) of Dandadan

Starting these reviews off is always the hardest part, but it often comes to me after some time filling out the rest of the article. Dandadan has been stubborn in that regard, so much so I've been trying to figure out where to start with this series since it first came out.

I began reading DDD before tankōbon's were being printed, hell before it even made it to NA digitally (There were translations in Europe which got them early iirc.) Then batches starting coming out, and I still have those original single chapters from Sept. 5 '21

I became captivated, but, like its namesake, describing why I enjoy DDD is daunting in how esoteric it all is.

The general plot is straightforward on its own: Momo Ayase, the granddaughter of a spirit medium, though circumstance meets with an occult obsessed otaku, Ken Takakura, and, yes, he's named after exactly who you think, which drives the Takakura obsessed Momo nuts. She calls him Okarun, which I will also be doing for the rest of this.

Okarun's big obsession is UFOs and aliens, which he believes in, but not ghosts. You see where this is going. Hi-jinks ensue, both go to hot spots for each others interest and what do you know, Momo gets abducted by Aliens and Okarun is possessed by a geriatric genital biting speed demon.

Feel free to re-read that last part a few times.

Suffice to say, Dandadan gets fucking nuts almost as soon as the first chapter, but we're not even close to how off the rails this series gets.

I'll save you the details of how they deal with the Turbo Granny, but I will say the mythos and rules surrounding the various spirits, urban legends, cryptids and aliens is handled with a shocking amount of intricate care. If you're like me, you grew up surrounded by a plethora of Unsolved Mysteries, caught UFO Files as it was airing, maybe you even had some of those Forbidden World books laying around from the 80s before getting into stuff like Yokai. Even though I don't really engage with that sorta thing outside Weird NJ nowadays (It stops being fun when people in public office are into conspiracies-- particularly of the nazi variety like lizard men and flat earth)

The narrative and aesthetic appeal of them has stuck with me.

Anyone that's read my Kamen Rider reviews would know how much of a sucker I am for that quintessential cryptid look, which Dandadan has plenty of along with just being absurdly unhinged and hilarious.

The first two volumes do a fantastic job setting up the limitations and powers of spirits in particular, eventually resulting in part of Turbo Granny's soul being trapped in a Meneki Neko and leaving her speed abilities with Okarun. Unfortunately, Okarun only got 1/3 of his bits back.

So now have two super powered protagonists touched by the supernatural and the unearthly on the search for…missing nuts. Or I guess testicles that look like magic golden orbs of power. That's seriously how we're kicking this off.

And yes, there is a basis for that in mythology called Kintama. If you're familiar with Gintama you probably knew that.

But beyond that basic set up… where the fuck do I even go from there? The series is far more than OTT action and good monster lore, but it's also hard to delve into the how and why of its overall qualities. Sure The supernatural and sci-fi bits are fantastic, and the comedy is wonderful, but it's a by product of the real core of Dandadan: the interpersonal relationships of the characters. Surprise.

Which yeah, if it wasn't clear from the get go, DDD has a romantic angle between Okarun and Momo.

Under the monsters, dick jokes, and the completely unhinged nature of everyone and everything is an oddly captivating and flat out adorable love story between our two leads, one that slowly unfolds but is challenged by the various shake ups from monsters, invaders and cast additions that occur to hinder that development; or in some cases push it further by bringing the two closer.

Okarun in particular very well might be one of my favorite interpretations of the Otaku with a heart of gold. He's a legitimately sweet person, cares for people, he trains his ass off to earn mastery over his powers to make things easier on Momo and to keep up with the ever increasing threats they face. In a sea of otaku power fantasy characters, it's nice to be reminded that characters with limitations and weaknesses to be overcome or dealt with are still showing up.

He's also just a total sweetheart to Momo.

And it's pretty clear even early on that the feeling is mutual. Momo is easily flustered whenever a cute girl gets a little too chummy with Okarun, or strings him along. She even retaliates in some cases.

Momo is also about as dorky as Okarun (As seen above) just in different ways, which makes the two complement one another while also contrasting in how much of a hot head Momo can be.

For a series that gets as bonkers as DDD, Momo's grade A shit talking "too stubborn to admit her feelings" gruff Gyaru personality helps ground the series with a rather realistic portrayal of a girl her age-- albeit one with psychic abilities and goes through some extreme struggles much later in the series.

In fact one of the more overlooked aspects whenever I read about Dandadan is how surprisingly dark the chapters start to get in the 80s onward. Because despite the major kick off involving Okarun having his balls stolen, the series is capable of being very sardonic.

For all the absurd fun like giant enemy crabs or the Flatwoods monster as a Sumowrestler, and even a daikaiju way later, you also have things like human sacrifices and tragic ghost stories which are treated with a heavy tone that is never undermined by that off-kilter comedy. You even see tones of that with Turbo Granny of all things, involving the trapped spirits of butchered girls.

Don't misunderstand, however, the series is first and foremost a romcom with horror elements, but sometimes the horror shines through in surprising ways. That nuance is also seen in the rest of the cast, which I've yet to talk about much because one of the biggest challenges of this whole thing is figuring out how.

Talking about Dandadan beyond the very bare basics of the opening chapters is difficult without spoiling something, it's part why I was hesitant to review it back when I first started reading, despite how enamored I was. For one thing, focusing on any one aspect would be a gross oversimplification, doing a disservice to how each angle of the series is handled. Conversely, delving into Dandadan as whole would mean recapping the story arcs and events because Dandadan has some of the most tightly woven threads I have seen in some time. I can barely graze the surface of why character dynamics work or are unique before inevitably getting into a full blown synopsis and spoiling character arcs and entire narrative structures, which is… frustrating, to say the least.

For example, I can't really give you a good look at Aira Shiratori without getting deep into how she's a schoolmate of Momo and Okarun, gets into a rivalry with Momo because Aira thinks she's a demon while viewing herself as "The special one"; a delusion made stronger when she gains her own demonic powers which is basically Sedusa. But over time she forms a bizarre friendship with the two over their trial and tribulations, while also dealing with the massive weight of guilt over cruel rumors she spread about Momo. But that really doesn't even begin to tell you how much of an absolute fucking perfect little bitch she is, and yet what an enjoyable dork she becomes. To do so would be to just tell you everything that happens in her story, which, while not complicated, is tied heavily into the narrative.

It's a similar scenario with Jin "JiJi" Enjoji, Momo's first crush, which you can imagine the upset that causes; one that's pretty goddamn funny because the dude, while handsome, athletically fit and arguably the strongest of the entire cast, has the personality of a goddamn muppet. So Okarun's getting all strung up on a guy even more goofy than him.

In a nice subversion, his relationship with Okarun develops into something surprisingly positive pretty quickly, if not without complications due to a fairly dark story with his character, which pushes Okarun even further in his training after Jin gets his own possession. And it also makes it all the more hilarious that the chipper muppet baby has a secondary Shadow the Hedgehog cracked to 11 persona that's a legit threat.

Then there's Kinta "Kinny" Sakata who is basically if Okarun was even more socially inept and a dipshit Gunpla addict who tried really hard to be a Jojo. His strengths is a vast knowledge of sci-fi tech and a chuuni like ability to imagine entire fantastical constructs; quite handy when mind reading alien nano machines enter the picture. It also helps break up the monotony of everyone else having or developing some sorta supernatural power.

And then we have Vamola, a character I literally cannot say a single thing about without giving away massive plot points. I can't even show a photo because her design itself contains spoilers. Just know that her story is when shit really hits the fan and will be a gut wrenching read while also having the most Battle Manga goodness.

What I can at least tell you is that for as much as Momo and Okarun are the main protagonists, Jin and Aira get damn good focus and are fully formed characters in their own right, they're not just a monkey-wrench thrown into the fray. I mean, they are also that, but they add to those elements while being more than a foil to our main heroes developing relationship, making the story much more varied and expansive than a supernatural will/won't they. Vamola especially in that area.

If there's one takeaway from this it's that Yukinobu Tatsu is capable of creating a great, varied cast full of humor and impeccable chemistry. (not to mention a lot of cheescake that shouldn't work as often as it does.) I'm constantly surprised with how masterful all the different pieces come together to create a compelling dynamic in this deranged Sci-Fi, Supernatural comedy mishmash. Hopefully I can convey a little bit of that Dada-esque appeal despite my spoiler aversion.

What's a lot easier for me to get across without spoilers, however, is the drop-dead gorgeous artwork. Good god is this series beautiful to look at.

Tatsu has a backround in, uh, backgrounds, and it shows on just about every page. Any one side panel has more detail than most double-page fight spreads in other books, and when they do a splash page it is breathtaking.

The fact this is a Weekly series is goddamn insane and… honestly kinda makes me a lowkey worried about their work ethic. But a lot of panels feature just the character on simple stark backgrounds (And some pages feel a little heavy on the reference material, if you get my meaning.) But even so, it's hardly a sacrifice for the impressive amount of work that goes into each chapter and how just about every other page has at least one impressive environment to gawk at.

Not only is the detail impeccable, but the layout, timing and expressions are goddamn phenomenal and a big part of making the series legitimately funny. That same talent translates seamlessly to high energy fights and impactful creepy moments.

This truly is one of the most compelling reasons to read the manga. At the time of this writing we're 5 episodes in the Science Saru anime and I want to make clear I'm enjoying it and do highly suggest watching it. I think their high octane stylistic approach is, in many ways, perfect for the series. There's clearly a lot of love put into translating page to screen best they can. Realistically, I know there's no way you could completely capture Tatsu's style 1:1, especially with what the industry is nowadays. The budget and man power it would take for that wouldn't be worth it.

But that sense of scope, scale, the depth, shading and a ton of small eccentricities is something unique to the manga and a big part of why it works. If you only know the anime then I think you're missing out. Plus you've got 8 volumes to read up on.

But also still watch the anime, I'd love a season 2. Hopefully with a bigger budget. Frankly, they're gonna need it.

That said, while I have praised and gassed up Dandadan, I should mention it has a number of trappings that by all means should not fly with me. As previously stated, there's a lot of cheesecake, and I like cheesecake, but it can bog down stories like this and they're a dime a dozen in the manga and anime world. At first glance DDD can look like that from the outside. There are so many instances of things that are annoying in other works, schlocky things (derogatory) that are sell themselves only on the limp-dicked exploitive elements like Fan service. Make no mistake, Dandadan is schlocky (complimentary) but it's also incredibly endearing not only outside those aspects, but in them. At least for the most part. I have to imagine it's aware of the more stupid indulgent elements but wisely plays them straight while at the same time employing a cleverness many other series fail to have.

For example, the characters are comically stripped very frequently, even (and usually) during otherwise semi-serious moments like battles (although not if the stakes are dire.)

But the cheescake is always balanced out by the other qualities. Hell, the cheesecake is often imbued a certain charm that is funny in itself or oddly sweet, which certainly becomes more true in the later chapters. Think more Cutie Honey and less Highschool of the Dead in terms of how it's handled.

A big hand in that is they're not afraid to get silly with all the characters, especially the girls, so it typically feels more tee-hee fun. They're almost if not equally goofy in their own ways and that does a lot in keeping it from being obnoxious. And ya know, they also have real developed personalities and relationships outside just having their clothes blasted off, which also happens to Okarun if that wasn't clear. Actually it's worse because he usually loses everything, and the same is also true for Jin.

It's so audacious in every aspect that I simply can't fault it. I mean, I also wouldn't fault anyone not gelling with it, but I just sorta expect it and roll with it for a series this absurd. I'm a critic, not a goddamn puritan. I know exactly what it is, and it's doing it far better than most. It is, at worst, background noise.

That's not to say the series handles all of its exploitative elements well. Rather infamously the first chapter has an almost not quite sexual assault for Momo. It's… not as bad as it sounds-- in part because it doesn't happen and also the situation is so absurd. Honestly I think there's been a bit much blown out of proportion with it. Still, the over the top nature of an Alien with a metal syringe dick getting his comeuppance by having it bitten off by a granny speed-demon can only mitigate the general grossness of the implication so much and I still wince at it. It's the only part of Dandadan that dips into a level a cheapness it otherwise sidesteps in most other endeavors. Thankfully, it happens early on, but it also isn't a great first impression, especially if you didn't have more chapters or episodes to view at the time, leaving you to wonder just what the hell kinda story this is.

It's worth noting some of the other early chapters have bumps here and there, but nothing quite on the level of chapter 1, and those parts are ironed out overtime to be a lot more palatable. Compare how chapter 3 handles T&A to chapter 26 and you'll know what I mean.

Aside from that, however, there is at least one semi major stigma I have against Dadadan's otherwise enjoyable self indulgent nature, which is that a lot of the monster designs are painfully derivative. And I mean DERIVATIVE. Just about every alien creature in this series is an Ultra Kaiju.

Oh Shin Godzilla in the case of Nessie.

And, look, I get homaging stuff you like. Dr. Slump has loads of references, Patlabor has references to Ultraseven, depending on which version of Urusei Yatsura you're looking at it's loaded with them, Project A-KO has them, Eva is a love letter to Jissouji Ultra (along with flat out copying a few fights from various 70s mecha anime) and even something like Bocchi The Rock is at least a quarter references. References are not the problem. Well, maybe a little, but I'm not gonna get Orson Wells on you here.

Regardless, its hard not to think that maybe they could've dialed it back a little bit.

The Z'gok in Gundam is based on Alien Zarabe but it's doesn't look like a knock-off version of it. But the Dover Demon in Dandadan looks like "original the character" Kanegon that turns into Baltan. Because it is.

Like come on, man. Even the Space Pirates in Metroid aren't this blatant.

Why this sticks out to much is because the art is so damn impressive but the design aspect is lacking in certain areas. I'm willing to give leeway for some designs if they're based on folklore elements like Ghosts, Yokai, and crypids. You want to make them recognizable, but can still work in cute references or original ideas without being as glaring as "we have Ultra Seijin at home." For what it's worth, I guess Dada knockoffs with Pegassa eyes are better than generic greys. But while it's cute at first, I felt it got irksome by the time I saw Shin Godzilla… and then Hipporit as a subterranean shows up. Then a tail-less xenomorph. And Alien Guts, and a Metal Gear, and Elecking, even an Alien Zarabe.

A lot of those do end up as cannon fodder so I can understand not wanting to put a lot of work into stuff that ends up being one offs. I can't deny the art looks incredible and hype as fuck. But man, it gets distracting sometimes, especially when Gomora shows up at one point with the body of Red King and later on they end up making that a major deity in an alien culture. It's not played as a joke at all. It is one of the most dead serious chapters… But it's still just an Ultra Kaiju. Sometimes I'm reading Dandadan and I'm having a great time and I'm getting all the referential designs, and I don't *hate* this, but in the back of my head all I can think of is that line in Akibaranger.

And on some level I do get how that borderline level of infringement adds to the absurdity, how the near mono focus of a singular love for Tsuburaya is charming. Hell, it's even refreshing in some ways considering how that hasn't really been a thing in Japan since the 80s. But it does still get a bit much from the sheer volume.

I think on some level Tatsu knows this because in the more recent chapters the Serpo Aliens are primarily depicted in their disguised forms and the fake Gomora gets a slight redesign in later appearances that's a lot more generic. I sort of get the impression things that were maybe meant to be one off gags ended up becoming reoccurring elements, but given the tone and humor of the series that's really hard to tell, for better or worse.

Although kudos to Science Saru saying fuck it and making the opening to the anime one big Ultraman reference. They know what they're doing.

All that said... I don't really know where to lead off from here. Dandadan is still ongoing, currently at about 170 chapters in Japan, while the anime is still currently airing the first season. So I can't really give a full review of either. Likewise, for all I know the series could go completely off the rails at some point-- in a bad way, I mean.

As it stands I'm still finding enjoyment out of this series and now seems good a time as any to suggest everyone check it out. There's multiple manga out, it's easily available digitally, there's the anime across multiple platforms in NA, we've got figuarts coming out. It's good to see.

I was long over due for look since first reading those Glitter screen-grabs some years back.

Funny enough, this late August I visited my Girlfriend in Illinois and got to see 8 volumes of Dandadan on the shelf in a comic shop, that was a nice surreal experience for something that wasn't even available digitally in NA when I first started reading it.

What I didn't realize at the time was when I took a photo of them on the shelf, it was September 5, three years to the day I got the first few chapters. So yeah, it was time for this to happen.

Given the on going status of DDD, I'll certainly be revisiting the series for a future look at and proper review. Until then, I encourage you to read the manga and see if you see what I see. It might not be some super deep narrative, but it is most certainly unique and well worth your time.

As always, thanks for reading.

[horizon-verizon]

I read this thread that I found quite interesting if you want to check it out

https://x.com/darksvster/status/1817785978708480244

Rhaenyra is in a way turning into a cult leader a la Paul Atreides, believing herself to be the prince who was promised, recruiting smallfolk who have nothing to lose and sending them to their deaths to fight in her name, its a very prevalent theme actually. The dragon keepers being appalled by the massacre this will cause but her insisting on it, its a descent into self glory and obsession. The more she gets closer to the Iron Throne the more it corrupts her which is why I’m absolutely sure they will include her getting cut as soon as she sits on it. Let’s face it, as much as I hate to admit it, misogyny isn’t a main theme in HOTD.

When I heard Ryan described this scene as cult behaviour and Rhaenyra acting as a “pastor”, my mind went straight to the Shepherd (a strong follower of the Faith of the Seven), they’d be the different sides of the same coin, Rhaenyra brought down these gods, here they slaughtered the smallfolk but at the Storming of Dragonpit, it’s the smallfolk destroying them.

And if you take into consideration that the prophecy was proven false in GOT and how HOTD is trying to hammer down the idea that monarchies and especially Targaryen ones are terrible, it leads you to the idea that anyone who thinks them selves as the savior is a false prophet. Viserys told her about the prophecy to make her pursuit of the throne more legitimate and peaceful, however it ended up making her more unhinged because she now believes herself a prophet when its all a farce, neither she nor her descendants will be the saviors IN SHOW LORE (please don’t misunderstand me, I know that in the books, the prince that was promised and Azor Ahai are Daenerys and no one else).

Didn't watch the episode, so this is pretty helpful and explains a lot why I kept seeing Rhaenys-cult leader in my Twitter timeline. How interesting...

Always remember that Condal came from a Catholic school (I also did but you don't see me trying to make a canonically family/woman who never really had much enthusiasm for religion religiously cultish...)

Rhaenyra never tried to build any sort of cult around herself or dragons

dragons always choose their own rider, so the dragonkeepers protesting Rhaenyra having lowborns have access to dragons is more classism than religiousness still wouldn't make any sense besides bc 1) they'd be going against their dragon-gods' wishes/authority 2) there's no proof of them even coming from Valyrian families... unlike in the orig lore, in the show they seem to be randos who can speak Old Valyrian and have ritualistic practices concerning dragons as literal gods/reps of gods

Old Valyrian dragonlords were never particularly religiously "devoted" or defined themselves through gods even with them having their own gods as they had a multireligious state in Old Valyria....at least comparatively to other peoples, inlcu the andals, who are actually the ones who you'd say were religiously cultish with their carving Seven symbols in their foreheads and later talking something close to Manifest destiny to explain how/why the fled Essos (when it was more liekly bc of the Valyrians)

the dragonkeepers have never in all of history been in the authority to deny a Targ anything based on any sort of separate and independent authority OR religious beliefs bc their role was just to guard dragons/their eggs/their lairs

AND

that he's mainly trying to create a story he's always wanted to see as a fan of GRRM's work (BigThink article):

So, yeah, all this matters for the exact direction you predict and I dislike this concept.

[goodluckclove]

Finding Banned Books Online: Actual Resources

Hey, it's me - a version of Clove who is now able to access their anger through means I am not going to delve into on a public space. Hello!

I have continued to get myself very upset over the people who tear apart anyone who makes the vaguest attempt to support, or even provide mixed opinions on the IA lending library. They insist there are so many ways to do this already through resources provided by libraries, but don't actually say any of those solutions.

Because Google is free, right? It's free and definitely still a viable way to easily access information. We all agree Google is normal and reliable, and that people these days actually know how to manipulate search terms in a way that effectively provides information. That's why it's such a great thing to say when people ask questions instead of actually providing information that could easily solve the problem in your favor. Great!

Anyways, I went ahead and did research so I can offer an actual guide to people looking to access - in this case specifically banned books - without the aid of piracy or the Internet Archive. These are programs created by libraries, fully legal, though admittedly not always the easiest to access.

The Palace Project: Banned Books Club

This seems to be the best option I was able to find. It's an app created by the Digital Public Library of America where you can access a variety of digital library archives, including the Banned Books Club. You don't need address or proof of ID - you don't even need your legal name.

You get a digital barcode you can use to access books for about 20 days at a time. They have a vast collection of e-books and audiobooks, as well as a bevy of fiction and nonfiction. Cool!

Brooklyn Public Library: Books UnBanned

If you're a young person in the United States who has their apps monitored, this is another alternative. The Brooklyn Public Library waives out-of-state e-card fees for youth that last a year (You might be able to reapply).

They cover you from 13-21, assuming you can work up the nerve to apply directly by emailing them, or messaging them on their youth-led Instagram account (@bklynfuture).

The Uncensored Library

Are you outside the United States? Do you have a computer that runs Minecraft? This is not technically a way to read Ulysses or The Hate You Give, but The Uncensored Library is a massive world seed dedicated to preserving (I think mainly) journalistic articles covering news in countries where censorship is way more prominent. This is an outlier to my point but it kicks ass and I think it has a place on this list.

There are other options out there like Hoopla, but it looks like a lot of them require an existing library card number. Libby has a nice UI thing that guides you towards the options in making an online library card for a local branch, assuming that's something you are able to do.

This is what I was able to find through about 45 minutes of searching. If someone else has an additional insight I would LOVE to add it. Libraries are working so, so hard to provide as much of a reach as they can, but unfortunately it's difficult to spread awareness without Spreading Awareness, if you know what I mean.

At the same time, if you're a person who is just spouting that these resources exist without either naming what they are and/or acknowledging that there are a small small small handful of options - it definitely seems like you're less interested in sharing information to encourage a positive change, and more invested in looking right and informed.

I spent almost an hour to find two actual sources to share. If I wanted to read a book I didn't have access to, it would be infinitely easier to give up. It is so fucking easy not to make the effort to read a book that could potentially change your life. It's so fucking easy just to not read! So hopefully this helps someone expand their horizons in a meaningful way, or just have better access to a library system that they might not otherwise have!

[csuitebitches]

New Side Blog

I have lots of goals for this year. Reading and learning new things is always a priority for me, especially because I’m a naturally curious person. I made a side blog for all the things I read, watch and keep on top of. This could be things to stay informed, leisure reading, documentaries or films that made me think in a different manner.

I do want to ensure that my media consumption is essentially quality > quantity. At the same time, I want to track articles, books, authors, films I truly enjoyed because I have a terrible memory when it comes to names and recalling where I got that information from.

It’s called @kibblesforyourbrain, if anyone is interested.

[piqtescue]

If your watching "Under The Bridge" or planning to, here's a PSA from someone born & raised in that city. Oh, and Kelly's personal info and location bc she deserves absolutely no peace✨😊

((if you dont know this series, or who im talking about, I swear to god I do not do reveal personal information lightly and take revealing someone else's very seriously- but Kelly is a cold blooded psychopath and I urge you to google what she did))

I couldn't believe it when I heard the worst crime that has ever happened in my city was going to be made into a fucking hulu drama... I used to be so intrigued by true crime renditions, but this has made me rethink it all. The murder of Reena is something that makes us as locals sick to our stomachs, is still a very open wound to our city and her family and every day so many of us are forced to drive over the Craigflower Bridge, the place where she was brutally murdered. She was 14.

I never plan to watch "Under The Bridge" on Hulu as I really don't need it replayed back to me in a miniseries, but just need to give some PSA's here + gonna give you some recent photos of Kelly/Kerry and her location because she doesn't deserve the luxury of people forgetting what she fucking did:

To start, I'm not throwing shade to anyone watching the show- I know this doesn't affect everyone the same. Just want to make sure this bitch's face & the real story is plastered in your mind so you can publicly shame her if you wish, and realize this isn't just a miniseries- this actually happened.

Though the author who wrote the book this was based on was in search for their "humanity"- there is zilch in that sector for Kelly Ellard. None. See, Kelly was a teen when she lead the brutal murder of Reena and you might be pointing "upbringing and trauma/mental health" to blame- but don't even go there for a second. Warren is 100% holding the same sin for what they did but displayed actual guilt and talked to her parents. He knows what he did wrong and will live for it the rest of his life.

Kelly, a privileged psychopath from birth, is a disgusting, soulless slime who deserves nothing but to suffer for the rest of her days. Go read up on her parole hearings and realize in no way is she remorseful and in no way does she deserve to walk free or be a mother. She doesn't deserve to fucking breathe. Though if you read her most recent parole hearing, you will hear her speak of this series being "disrespectful to Reena's family": I want you to know she has finally learned to say what they want her to say after all these years; she doesn't give any fucks about Reena's family, all she cares about is leaving the past behind her but jokes on her- she will never get that luxury because we as residents won't let her.

✨Here's her new name/photos/insta account/location, ect✨

-She goes by Kerry Marie Sim now

✨Photos of what she looks like presently: here, and here and here.

✨Instagram: kehrisima007

Fun fact! In the second link I provided, she uses the hashtag "legally kidnapping our children" in relation to the Ministry of Child and Family Development's (canadian version of DCFS) involvement in her life. That was posted in 2021. Her day parole was then continued in 2022 & 2024, and it's unknown if she still lives with her children, but lets hope to god not.

✨Location:

Going by this article, she might be serving her sentence in the Fraser Valley Institution for Women, or might just have had her parole hearings there. But apart from the prison she's in, she is most definitely doing her day parole in the lower mainland of BC, from the looks of her instagram she hangs around Surrey and Langley.

----------

To end this PSA, if you ever do visit our city and are intrigued by this case as a true crime story enthusiast, I urge you to not come to the Gorge where Reena lost her life at in interest/excitement, but come with the intention of paying your respects and give a thought on just how far teen bullying can go, and how you yourself can advocate for it not to get to that point. Whether it be awareness, talking to your kids about speaking up or advocating for public discussion.

And if Kerry ever sees this: we will never let you have peace. You get no peace for your acts, and we will never. fucking. forget.

[gogandmagog]

Guys! Yesterday I had a book-shaped piece of mail, and inside of it was my copy of Children and Childhoods in L.M. Montgomery: Continuing Conversations being returned, from another very dear user here! I bring this up only because some-months-ago I promised to copy out a particular article from this book, for yet another user here, who was interested! Interested because it’s on the the subject of a Fan Favourite thing... fan fiction. And better still because some of our (basically famous) mutuals here are mentioned by name! If you’ve ever wondered if the Montgomery scholarship is reading your fan fiction... the answer is yes, they are! They totally are. More than that, they also have some thoughts to share… as well as recommendations of their faves too! This article even covers the F/F and M/M fan fiction presented by fans in LMM’s universe, and I’m personally super excited to be able to begin reading these works, as soon as I can find them all. I’ve done my best to link what I could immediately find, but some of the mentioned stories were unavailable... potentially due to changes in usernames? (That said... if anyone knows of the works indicated here, that I haven’t provided a link for, please do share!)   This article, by the way, was written recently... in 2020! It’s very current, and it covers a few stories that were still being actively updated during the pandemic. The focus of this article is less so on canon (or really just the Anne/Gilbert pairing), though, and seems to prefer demonstrating the versatility of mixing relationships (Anne and Emily, for one!) and the wider more general universe-building aspects (the entanglements of future generations/Anne’s grandchildren) that fans have been expounding on for nothing less than decades. 

Okay, here we go! xx

Continuing Stories: L.M. Montgomery and Fanfiction in the Digital Era by Balaka Basu

Fanfiction – the recreational (re)writing of texts – is a literary genre of rapidly growing significance. Abigail Derecho in her brief history of fanfiction identifies it as “a genre that has a long history of appealing to women and minorities, minorities, individuals on the cultural margins who used archontic writing as a means to express not only their narrative creativity, but their criticisms of social and political inequities as well.”

Insightfully defined by Francesca Coppa and Mary Ellen Curtin as “speculative fiction about character,” fanfiction can be even more precisely understood as fantasies about the diegetic positioning of characters in the context of various settings, communities, relationships both textual and paratextual, and eventually all manner of cultural mythologies.

Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson describe the production of fanfiction as “part collaboration and part response to not only the source text, but also the cultural context within and outside the fannish community in which it is produced.”

They point out that the shift in the method of dissemination of fanfiction from newsletters and zines to internet archives means that “ever-younger fans who previously would not have had access to the fannish culture except through their parents can now enter the fan space effortlessly; financial resources have become less of a concern because access to a computer is the only prerequisite; and national boundaries and time zones have ceased to limit fannish interaction.”

The nature of fanfiction allows participants to cross-generational and socio-economic boundaries in an ongoing exchange of responses to a source text with which they share a fascination, developing new texts that in turn elicit their own responses. While the creation of fanfiction is evidence of an affective, loving, communal relationship with the source text, this genre of writing is still dismissed in many quarters as overly emotional, purely erotic, and even perverse, a type of amateur and immature engagement with popular texts that produces writing necessarily divorced from literary significance. Produced in staggeringly vast quantities by subcultures with complex vocabularies and traditions that can intimidate the casual reader, fanfiction is perceived by many to be more of a cultural practice than a literary genre, variously denigrated for its pornographic potential and its lack of originality. However, close examination reveals that fan writers are able to create a critical dialogue with the originating author in acts of communal storytelling that incorporate allusions and reference points to which other dedicated fan readers and writers may respond.

In this chapter, after examining how L.M. Montgomery and her writer heroine Emily themselves engage in practices now associated with fanfiction, I survey four forms of fanfiction that remove Montgomery’s novels from her seemingly idyllic and timeless island settings, contextualizing her characters and plots within history and other genres: the sequel set during the Second World War, the modern AU (alternate universe), the gap-filler, and the slash fic, all of which allow the young readers who grow up with her novels to engage in dialogue with the stories they love, a type of literary conversation that Montgomery herself models within her texts. Emily’s reading, which is active rather than passive, resembles twenty-first-century fans’ ownership of the texts they love, provoking creative responses. For instance, after reading works by Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Matthew Arnold, Emily writes, “Teddy lent me 3 books of poetry. One of them was Tennyson and I have learned The Bugle Song off by heart so I will always have it. One was Mrs. Browning. She is lovely. I would like to meet her. I suppose I will when I die but that may be a long time away. The other was just one poem called Sohrab and Rustum. After I went to bed I cried over it. Aunt Elizabeth said ‘what are you sniffling about?’ I wasn’t sniffling – I was weeping sore … I couldn’t go to sleep until I had thought out a different end for it – a happy one.”

The reactions Emily catalogues are those of the fan; they are viscerally felt in the body and attempt to dissolve the boundary between author and reader, producer and consumer. She inscribes Tennyson within her heart in order to possess the poem she loves; she creates a relationship between Barrett Browning and herself; and, most significantly, she interjects her own desired happy ending into Arnold’s tragic narrative, a corrective desire that is at the core of many works of fanfiction. Emily’s diaries and her story reflect Montgomery’s own experiences from childhood to adulthood as reader, writer, and reader-turned-writer discussed in the introduction to this volume. Depicting Emily as a voracious reader and a life-writer like herself, Montgomery places the child Emily’s voice in conversation with that of the narrator through Emily’s letters to her dead father in Emily of New Moon and through her diary entries in Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest, creating a form of joint authorship that is referenced explicitly in “Salad Days,” the second chapter of Emily Climbs: “book is not going to be wholly, or even mainly, made up of extracts from Emily’s diary; but, by way of linking up matters unimportant enough for a chapter in themselves, and yet necessary for a proper understanding of her personality and environment, I am going to include some more of them. Besides, when one has material ready to hand, why not use it?”

The narrator’s willingness to use the “material” that is “ready to hand” reflects Montgomery’s and Emily’s practices, and also validates other writers’ use of the material Montgomery places at their disposal. As with many fans, Emily’s reading frequently makes itself felt within her writing.

Like Montgomery, Emily learns her trade through mimicry, from her first poem in blank verse inspired by James Thomson’s Seasons to her unwitting imitation of Kipling that is pointed out by her teacher, Mr Carpenter, in his review of her work. Like Sara Stanley of The Story Girl, whose compelling and fascinating stories are rarely if ever original, Emily is a fan of the oral traditions of her community, incorporating and building upon them in her own writing, transforming and recreating, for instance, the story of “The Woman Who Spanked the King” in Emily Climbs.

The retelling and versioning that Emily practises signal her immense admiration for the source texts she adapts, just as the creation of fanfiction does for Montgomery’s readership and fans. The possibilities inherent in versioning and adaptation are illustrated in Emily’s Quest. When Montgomery depicts Emily undertaking the reworking of someone else’s narrative, she is adapting an episode from her own experience while working for The Echo in Halifax, which she records in her journal. Montgomery, like Emily, was asked to create an ending for a serialized story, “A Royal Betrothal,” after compositors had misplaced the original text.

Like Emily, she claims that her “knowledge of royal love affairs [was] limited,” and that she was unaccustomed “to write with flippant levity of kings and queens.” Nevertheless, Montgomery manages to create a conclusion that passes muster, since “as yet nobody has guessed where the ‘seam’ comes in.” She is, however, curious about the original author’s reaction to her unauthorized adaptation, and while she never discovers this in real life, she does imagine it in her fiction when she introduces Mark Greaves, who is horrified by Emily’s new ending for the story but enchanted by its author. Neither Montgomery nor Emily engages in this sort of writing from a place of fandom; they have no previous attachment to “A Royal Betrothal,” and both are writing professionally. Nevertheless, the ability to solve the puzzle of the story and the weaving of their work into an already extant text are the very project of fanfiction: ludic narrative composition that recalls the way children play make-believe with the narratives they love, reworking and extending them. It is telling that Montgomery uses the metaphor of the “seam” to describe this particular craft. Jane Dawkins, writing about her fanfiction, which is inspired by Jane Austen, describes her fan novel Letters from Pemberley as “an old-fashioned patchwork quilt, where in place of the scraps of fabric reminding one of the favorite frocks or shirts whence they came, there is a line or a phrase or a sentence from one of [the original] books or letters stitched alongside the lesser scraps of my own manufacture.”

Montgomery’s final book, framed by the two world wars, is just such a patchwork sequel, albeit providing only brief glimpses of the characters that readers met as children and who have now grown older. When a version of the book was published in 1974 as The Road to Yesterday, these glimpses, lacking the interstitial materials, became even briefer, mirroring the more forced insertion of beloved characters that the two earlier collections, Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea, display. Only two of Anne’s grandchildren – Gilbert Ford and Walter Blythe – are obliquely referred to, in the story “A Commonplace Woman,” where an unpleasant young doctor reflects on both of them as potential rivals for the affection of a beautiful girl he himself hopes to pursue.

However, the full novel, The Blythes Are Quoted, published in 2009 and comprised of short stories about the people in Glen St Mary and over the harbour, is interspersed with poetry by both a young Walter and an adult Anne. The poems are cut with tiny slices of dialogue that suggest the continuing lives of fans’ favourite characters and how they might have developed. In “‘Dragged at Anne’s Chariot Wheels’: L.M. Montgomery and the Sequels to Anne of Green Gables,” Carole Gerson notes the mixture of feelings from pleasure to frustration that Montgomery records in her journals as she prepares to write her first sequel.

While Montgomery wrote the first installments of her various series out of inspiration, she was certainly aware of what her market desired from subsequent installments. She often regretted the necessity of marrying off her characters, but was aware that her fans demanded this conventional outcome for the characters they had come to love; these traditionally romantic endings, when not offered by Montgomery herself at the instigation of her publishers, are regularly deployed by contemporary fanfiction authors building on the source texts.

Indeed, long before the original structure of The Blythes Are Quoted was revealed to readers in Benjamin Lefebvre’s afterword, fanfiction writers were spinning off lengthy narratives that included a third generation of young Blythes, Fords, and Merediths dealing with the onslaught of the Second World War. While earlier installments in the Anne series – such as Anne of Green Gables and Anne’s House of Dreams – depict the deaths of Matthew, Anne and Gilbert’s first daughter (Joyce), and Captain Jim, Walter’s death in Rilla of Ingleside is somehow more striking. Unlike Matthew and Captain Jim, he has not yet had time to grow old; unlike Joyce, readers have had opportunities to get to know him as a child in Rainbow Valley and as he grows into young adulthood in Rilla of Ingleside. His death is unnatural and, therefore, all the more horrifying. These two aspects of Rilla of Ingleside – the evocation of history by a nostalgic fictional world that is still tied to real time and the use of high drama, tragedy, and romance – provide fanfiction authors with a model they can use to appeal to the emotions of those readers who are immersed in the next generation of Montgomery characters.

The Second World War, then, provides an entry point into the series for fanfiction authors, who can deploy real history coupled with beloved characters to create a tale that feels absolutely authentic. One example of this is a short story, “The Pen and the Sword,” written in 2007 by MarnaNightingale. Here, mimicking the style of Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Wimsey Papers (a series of Spectator articles published between 1939 and 1940, which interestingly also continue the story of First World War–era characters during the Second World War), MarnaNightingale employs epistolary excerpts and newspaper articles to tell the story of a family going through the horrors of war for a second time. Grounding her fragmented story – like The Blythes Are Quoted, a mixture of genres – in the accounts of novelist Mollie Panter-Downes (1939) and war correspondents Ernie Pyle (1940) and Ross Munro of the Canadian Press (1941), whose articles are attributed to Kenneth Ford, she offers a story that, like Rilla of Ingleside, is anchored to the historical moment, while also nostalgically focusing on the character development that comes from Gilbert Ford’s death, Rilla’s and Faith’s reactions to the war, and the lives of their children. Here war also serves as an opportunity for new experiences, particularly for women and children: Rilla takes a factory job as a machinist, liking it better than working in Carter Flagg’s store; one of Anne’s grandchildren, Susan, plans to be a doctor; and Faith, who worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in the First World War, mentions how she can sympathize. As well, the daily tidbits that flavour the pages of Rilla of Ingleside are there: one article, attributed to Anne, includes the recipe for Susan Baker’s war bread, reminding readers of the problems of wartime rationing, even in the Americas. Real life events – like the Canadian forces trying (and failing) to make a beachhead at Dieppe – arouse the passions of the reader. Unlike Austen – who also famously wrote of three or four families in a country town, but kept the Napoleonic wars firmly in the shadows – Montgomery brings the passions and high drama of the world stage into the sleepy villages of Prince Edward Island, which inspire fanfiction spinoffs.

The long novel Cecilia of Red Apple Farm, by a fan author who posts under the pseudonym ruby gillis, also directly reworks passages and scenes from the whole range of Anne books, set in the late-nineteenth century, to The Blythes Are Quoted, set in the early years of the Second World War, to highlight the similarity between her new generation of characters and their ancestors. Cecilia is the daughter of Una Meredith and Shirley Blythe (characters often married off in fanfiction). Like MarnaNightingale, ruby gillis provides period flavouring in the styles of dresses and behaviour and in references to 1940s popular films and songs. Simultaneously, this setting offers new opportunities to her female character: Cecilia wants to be a doctor, and rather than staying in Canada, she joins up to be a nurse in England. She has a series of romances – one with Sid Gardiner (before he marries May Binnie), and one with her cousin Blythe Meredith, who is this generation’s poet – before finally ending up with Marshall Douglas (the son of Mary Vance). Just as Anne initially refuses Gilbert Blythe in favour of Roy Gardner’s resemblance to her ideal man in Anne of the Island, ruby gillis’s Cecilia is fooled by the allure of Sid and Blythe as Roy Gardner–like romantic heroes into believing that she does not truly love her fun, practical, “Gilbert-esque” friend. Published in 2004, Cecilia of Red Apple Farm further illustrates the opportunities presented by reusing and reworking a body of texts through its incorporation of Montgomery’s poem “I Wish You” as the work of Blythe Meredith. Montgomery includes this poem and attributes it to Anne in The Blythes Are Quoted, although ruby gillis could not have known this when writing. The repetition of names and circumstances might seem derivative, but for readers who have read and reread the original books so many times, the extension of the story world is prized, even if – perhaps even because of – its callbacks to the original text. Due to the tendency of fans to fixate on “the good bits” in a reread, these parts can be taken for the whole.

Austen fanfiction demonstrates this aptly. Indeed, Helen Fielding’s second Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones and the Edge of Reason (1999), illustrates just such a reading of Pride and Prejudice: she shows Bridget, a fan, watching the scene from the 1995 mini-series in which Darcy, dripping in a wet see-through shirt, exits the lake, and then rewinding and rewatching the scene multiple times. How many times might a similar fan reread Walter’s letter from Courcelette? This repeated reviewing of selected portions can replace the amplitude of the original novel. With this delimited focus, narrative is no longer seen as a progression, but as a single moment of pleasure, sustained as long as possible. Reading the Second World War as a repetitive sequel to the First World War further highlights this possibility.

Even Montgomery seems to do so, as demonstrated in The Blythes Are Quoted, with its new generation of characters confusingly named after the old: Walter, Jem, Rilla, Di, Anne, and Gilbert. A variation on Marah Gubar’s kinship model, this kind of continuation highlights the blurred boundaries between child and adult characters who are literally related to one another and whose adventures mimic one another.

In a third example of fanfiction set during the Second World War, Weeping May Tarry, a long novel by ElouiseBates, Meggie, the heroine, is Shirley’s daughter (and also, surprisingly, Paul Irving’s granddaughter). In this story, which like Cecilia of Red Apple Farm is an installment of a longer series, Meggie is sent off to a conservatory of music to study singing, aptly combining the traditions of the nostalgic boarding-school novel with “Girl’s Own” wartime fiction. Following the tradition of Magic for Marigold, which explicitly suggests in its second chapter that the Murrays of Blair Water and the Lesleys of Cloud of Spruce exist in the same universe, @e-louise-bates (like many other fanfiction authors, including ruby gillis) suggests that all of Montgomery’s characters exist in a single universe: Meggie partners briefly with the grandson of Sara Stanley (The Story Girl and The Golden Road) and is close friends with Jane Stuart (Jane of Lantern Hill).

Going even further, @e-louise-bates introduces the grandchildren of the What Katy Did series as friends for Meggie and includes Betsy from Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy as Bruce Meredith’s wife, creating a world where all the characters of early-twentieth-century girls’ fiction seem to have truly lived, where their descendants must cope with victory gardens and dances with soldiers at the Exhibition Grounds, and where kisses are much more commonplace than they once were.

These particular continuers of Montgomery are also desirous of membership in the community of her fans, seeing their literary endeavours as productive of approval from a fellow readership. Likewise, the novels are notable for their sociality – they seem to offer the reader not only a fantasy friendship with the characters themselves but also the very real society of fellow readers of the works. Thus, these fan authors attempt to diversify their stories so that they represent contemporary beliefs regarding multiculturalism; ruby gillis, for instance, introduces into the family by way of marriage a French girl who has had to flee the Nazis due to being Jewish, a situation Montgomery and her contemporaries might have had some difficulty accepting, considering early-twentieth-century attitudes toward interreligious marriage and Montgomery’s othering of the German-Jewish peddler who sells Anne green hair dye.

The Second World War thus offers writers of Montgomery fanfiction the loom on which to weave new, more diverse stories, even as The Blythes Are Quoted, which also traces the characters’ reactions to this new war, demonstrates how these readers-turned-writers followed Montgomery’s own trajectory, not knowing that they were doing so. On the subject of fanfiction, young-adult author Patricia C. Wrede writes: “The thing that fascinates me about fanfiction, though, is the way that it models the decision tree that writers go through (whether consciously or unconsciously) to get to their final product. For those of us who do this part mostly unconsciously, it can be interesting and instructing to see the multitude of alternate paths that a story could have taken, all laid out more-or-less neatly in different authors’ fanfics [… taking a slightly different fork in the road] resulting in the plot veering in a completely new direction. Friends become enemies; enemies become friends; goals and objectives and results shift and change.” Within these pieces of fanfiction, then, fan writers are able to follow these decision trees with subsequent generations of characters as well.

Another avenue of access occurs when fan authors transpose historical narratives into the contemporary moment. Perhaps the best-known example of this modern alternate universe [AU] conversion is the television program Sherlock, which takes Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian detective into the twenty-first century. While new cultural contexts appear, the essence of character is meant to be retained. Just as Sherlock uses text messages and blogs to substitute for telegraphs and handwritten journals, fans of Montgomery reimagine the relationships between her characters as if they were taking place online.

For instance, “Work in Progress” (2012) by verity postulates a friendship between Montgomery’s most famous heroines, Anne and Emily. In this piece of fanfiction, Emily circumvents Aunt Elizabeth’s injunction against fiction during her time at Shrewsbury High by becoming a blogger who is restricted to the “truth.” The story’s online summary, a part of which reads “Anne rolls her eyes. ‘Is your aunt really going to know if you cheat on your nonfiction with some hot prose on the side?’” shows how the story preserves the character qualities that Montgomery laid out, complete with references to the Murray pride and Anne’s orphanhood. Mr Carpenter’s admonitions are spelled out at the beginning of the story:

“Emily Byrd Starr has a sticky note on her desktop. It reads:

ITALICS

CAPITALS

!!!!!

“just”

“really”

CTRL+F!

It is almost like having Mr Carpenter in the room with her.”

Verity creates humour through the juxtaposition of contemporary social media and allusions to Montgomery’s source text. Another story by verity detailing Rilla’s romance with Ken Ford and her friendship with Una Meredith, “Rilla of Toronto,” takes place mainly through instant messages. In this story, Rilla reflects on her life from eighteen to twenty-five, tracing a continuum from her child self to her new adulthood, underscored by verity’s translation of Montgomery’s work into contemporary millennial language.

A third type of fanfiction narrative, the gap-filler, focuses on and expands the implications of the source texts. Moira Walley-Beckett’s Netflix/CBC series Anne with an “E,” as Laura Robinson shows in chapter 12 of this volume, is somewhat fanfictional in and of itself: as Robinson points out, the show fills gaps by bringing to the fore the darker currents that have always been beneath the seemingly untroubled waters of Anne of Green Gables, including Anne’s potential post-traumatic stress disorder from the disturbing life she led before coming to Green Gables. This kind of versioning and adaptation tacitly permits fan authors to feel that their versions are just as valid as those produced by professionals. Gap-fillers frequently expand on romantic pairings and in fandom are often referred to by portmanteaux of characters’ names that perpetuate some inside joke or work as puns. “Shirbert” – a moniker for Anne and Gilbert – is the latter, and demonstrates how fans posting on sites like Archive of Our Own (Ao3), Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad (this last generally populated by younger fans) develop their own language to identify their stories within the community for which they write.

One such story, “You caught me staring, but I caught you staring back,” by Anuka, clearly inspired more by the television series than the novels, begins with an author’s note that reads, “I decided to write some fluff for these two, because I need more Shirbert moments, and season 2 is so far away. I added gifs to make it more vivid.” Here, the romance between Anne and Gilbert as depicted by Montgomery and Walley-Beckett is not sufficient for the reader-turned-writer. Anuka wants the gaps in the narrative to be more fully explored than they are on either page or screen and to be made more “vivid” by the inclusion of images that help make the story come alive.

Similarly, “Rilla Blythe’s Wedding: A Not Entirely Comprehensive Account” by Scylla also fills a gap: Rilla and Ken’s wedding day, a scene that Montgomery leaves to the reader’s imagination at the end of Rilla of Ingleside. Modelled upon other accounts of weddings within Montgomery’s fiction, the story also suggests that accounts of Walter’s death have been gravely exaggerated, as he makes a stunning appearance at his sister’s wedding. In order to align her work with Montgomery’s novel, Scylla ensures that Little Dog Monday’s awareness of Walter’s death remains, but makes it only a technicality, writing, “His heart had stopped for a full ten seconds – long enough for his Captain to feel for his empty pulse and for Dog Monday to be jolted with the fullness of his death. Little dogs, after all, can only have tender dogs’ hearts. Grief to Dog Monday was an all-consuming thing, and when Walter’s heart began to beat once more, he was deaf to its spark of joy.” After meeting with his eldest sister, Joyce, in heaven – which is, as he had always hoped, Rainbow Valley, Walter is returned to life so that he may write of peace as well as war (as he did when he was a boy), marry Una, and repair the broken hearts of readers who did not want to lose him.

While heterosexual pairings are the most prevalent in Montgomery fandom, there is room for queer imaginings as well.

This very popular genre of fanfiction, known as “slash,” is generally defined as stories that centre on samesex romances between characters, particularly between men. Montgomery slash fiction usually stars Walter Blythe.

One slash story, “but i don’t know who you are” by @freyafrida, imagines a bisexual Walter. Told in an enduringly popular sub-genre of fanfiction often referred to as Five Things Plus One (which involves a series of thematically linked but not necessarily chronological scenes), the story is summarized by @freyafrida as “Five people Walter thought he wanted, and one person he didn’t notice until it was too late.”

This last person is original to Montgomery’s text: Una, whose apparently unreturned attraction to Walter is woven through Rilla of Ingleside. The other five potential partners are all alluded to as Walter’s close friends, beginning in childhood with Alice Parker from Anne of Ingleside and Pat Brewster from The Blythes Are Quoted and then carrying on through adolescence and young adulthood with Faith Meredith, Ken Ford, and finally Paul Irving from Anne of Avonlea. While his feelings for Faith and Ken are clearly unrequited, Alice, Pat, and Paul all express their own desire for Walter. The inclusion of the famous poet and Walter’s “model” uncle, Paul Irving, in particular, particular, illustrates how traits of sensitivity and aesthetic appreciation that challenge traditional ideas about masculinity are frequently interpreted as queer by fan readers and writers.

In another slash fiction, cero_ate’s “The Moving Finger Writes, and Having Writ Moves On,” Walter discovers his homosexuality while fighting in Europe:

He wrote half truths and lies once more, when he wrote his Rilla that he could not form poems of the depths of the war. For who could write his sister of the phallic love he had found? He had found his reason in a tow-headed American boy. He meant so much more to Walter than mere friendship could explain. He wanted to write, as sweethearts write, of the tempest of joy in the darkest night. But how would they understand? How would they even try to understand he sought not the Dark Lady of Shakespeare but the youth, fair and Wilde? When he was presented with Una’s faithful heart, he spurned it. When his tow-headed darling presented his own, Walter took it, greedy for him. His grecian style love, the boy who’s [sic] eyes danced, even in the darkest of days. He would do anything to keep him safe. But he could not present him to his family, for their scorn or pity. War had broken him, but made him as well.

While male/male pairings are generally the most popular stories in fandoms, Montgomery’s novels, peopled as they are by communities of girls and women, require that readers who want to queer the text must explore what is called femslash (that is, slash fiction featuring two female characters).

Such relationships have been explored within the academic setting. For instance, Laura Robinson remarks in “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire and the Anne Books,” that the relationship between Anne and Diana uses “the language that readers associate with adult romantic love rather than girlhood affections,” even as it is expressed through the heterosexual paradigm of marriage.

One fanfiction author, ArcticLava21, makes it clear that such fan written stories are not speculation but instead address key issues of representation. The author’s note to ArcticLava21’s short Anne/Diana story, “Nature,” reads, “Hello everybody! Hope your [sic] having a wonderful day. Before anyone yells at me for ‘sexualizing platonic friendships’ please note that this is for all those queer kids who grew up pretending. Pretending that he ended up with him instead of her, or desperately wanted representation. Are we good? <3 Enjoy yourselves lovely people.” The intended audience of the story, “queer kids who grew up,” again establishes the transgenerational kinship between Montgomery’s child and adult fans.

All fan fiction, shared on the Internet, exist in dialogue not just with Montgomery’s fiction but with the author herself, and between the fans who read the novels as children and adolescents and the adults that these readers become.

Whether fan writers extend the narrative or fill gaps, transpose chronology or to queer the text, these pieces of fanfiction allow fans not only to insert themselves into the narrative, but also simultaneously to revivify the original novels, published a century ago. In performing interventions to the text, Montgomery’s young fans grow up to reply to the discussions that she began long ago in the pages of her journals and stories, ensuring that all three – author, reader, and text – are continually reborn into a conversation that will never end.

[fairuzfan]

You talking about the hunger games in relation to palestine reminded me of an absolutely deranged thinkpiece I stumbled upon a couple years back, so I went looking for it. It's by 'the jewish (zionist) chronicle', and they are talking about the movie, and if the premise of it is mocking isr*el. It's funny that they can see the resemblance between the capitol and their illegitimate country, while still seeing no fault in themselves. And when I say funny, I mean 100% expected. I'm attaching a link if you're interested at all, but be warned it's worded in the typical anti-arab way.

https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/is-the-hunger-games-inadvertently-mocking-israel-p3w00co6

Ok this article is absolutely ridiculous LMAO. Literally proves my point about how Palestine and the Districts are the same.

What's really funny is that for years I've been trying to figure out Suzanne Collins' (the writer) political opinions because The Hunger Games is just so obviously a metaphor to me for Palestine but I've found like less than nothing about her. She said she got the idea from watching the Iraq War with bits of reality television interspersed so I think I can kinda tell where her politics lie a bit (although at this point, I don't think I can make assumptions).

In all honesty, I haven't watched the movies lol because the casting and set design really messed up how I imagined the story while reading. Plus I heard that the movie does exactly what the books mock (making a spectacle of war for consumption) so that automatically turned me off. I wanted to see this new movie though because I wanted to see the songs come to life but now I'm like completely uninterested since the director (Francis Lawrence) signed the no hostage letter (click) that Amy Schumer wrote. If you're willing to align your name with Amy Schumer at this point with how incredibly racist she is, I have no interest in any content you want to make.

Back to the article, I would say it's actually more "anti-Palestinian" than "anti-arab" because it homogenizes all of Palestine otherwise, but yes this is like. An incredibly racist article lol. Here's an excerpt that I thought was actually super funny.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY WOULDN'T SHOW A MOVIE WHERE MEN AND WOMEN KISS. Legit one of the funniest assertions I've seen in a while. Remember guys, Palestinians CANNOT handle romance, it will explode their brains.

Also it's really funny how they're like "yeah the bow and arrow reminds me of the slingshots Palestinians use but remember, KHAMAS, like Katniss' resistance, has rockets!!!!! Israelis hide in fear in bomb shelters!!! KHAMAS only has tunnels for attacking! Nevermind the use of the tunnels for countering relentless siege on the people of Gaza! We, the people in the Capitol that I see myself in, are the victims!"

Also look at how they end the article:

"Man, Snow really reminds me of Israel. Won't examine that at all, even though I know it's important to. Anyways I feel so bad :( It ruined my evening."

And to that I say: Suck it, bro! Get Palestiniated!

I really underestimated how wild this would be. Here's the article if anyone wants to read it:

[senashenta]

What Foxes Like

Title: What Foxes Like

Pairing: Sterek

Rating: G

Warnings: None

Summary: Stiles and Derek have been in a relationship for over a year and still none of their friends know about it. Because reasons.

Notes: Written for Poe, originally. This is actually the sequel to a fic I haven't finished yet. I fail. I tried to make sure it made sense anyway. Also, surprise Steve Rogers and Jaskier Pankratz cameos! (I just spoiled the surprise.) You can also read it HERE on AO3.

WHAT FOXES LIKE By Senashenta

“they take their shots, but we're bulletproof I know places (Hide) and you know for me, it's always you I know places (I) in the dead of night, your eyes so green I know places (Hide) and I know for you, it's always me I know places” - I Know Places by Taylor Swift

Derek had moved in with him several months ago and there were logistical problems right from day one. Not that Stiles didn’t love having him there, but the apartment was very small, probably too small to be hiding a wanted fugitive, and whenever he had people over Derek had to hide away in the bedroom for fear of being seen.

Their friends wouldn’t turn Derek in, of course, but they hadn’t been exactly… open. About their relationship, up until this point. They had been together for almost two years and still no one knew about it.

It wasn’t like Stiles to keep secrets, especially from Scott, and in general he was terrible at it anyway. But it was really hard to tell your best friend you were in a steady, loving relationship with the man of your dreams when he was still pining for the girl he had tragically lost a handful of years before.

Besides which, the fox in Stiles privately liked that he had something special to keep to himself, no matter how inconvenient it was in reality. It was the part of himself that urged him to squirrel things away for himself, to keep all the precious things in his life close and safe. He was still getting used to those instincts, even years after the Nogitsune had left him with a bit of fox behind (okay a lot of fox behind.)

But also… there was a little bit of fear there, raw and animalistic, at the thought of being discovered. Something that he couldn’t explain or really even understand, but which was there nonetheless, and it was stupid . God, even Jackson was out! But Stiles had never actually told anyone he was bisexual before (aside from Derek, obviously) and the thought just… yeah. Yikes.

On top of that, his last relationship had been with Lydia, and after that had ended (badly), he just kind of… guarded his heart. What he had with Derek was good and going public was a risk he just wasn’t sure he was ready to take.

“You’re doing that thing where you stare at the ceiling like it’s got all the answers of the universe again.”

“Huh?” Stiles blinked out of his thoughts and turned his head to look at Derek, who was seated cross-legged next to him on the bed, hunched over his laptop, illuminated by the screen, working on either his newest article or his book. 

For obvious reasons Derek couldn’t hold down a regular job, so he wrote articles for publication online and was working on a novel in his spare time, all under the pseudonym “Tyler Shaw”, since he couldn’t use his real name. It didn’t bring much money in, but between that and Stiles’ job at the bakery cafe they managed to scrape by. (The FBI Academy? Well that… just hadn’t been a “good fit”, as his Dad liked to say. Apparently it was frowned upon for trainees to be as… insubordinate as he tended to be. The upshot of going , though, even if just for two semesters, was that he had met some of the most interesting people, a few of which Stiles figured he would be friends with for life.)

“Still staring, but now at me. And we both know I don’t have all the answers of the universe.”

“I– sorry.” Stiles shook his head, “just thinking.”

Derek grinned. “That’s always trouble.”

Stiles shot him a look with a frown, “not always .” (But often, definitely often.) “I was just thinking ,” he continued, ignoring the amused look in Derek’s eyes, “that I might invite Steve and Jaskier to come visit sometime soon. Just for a few days… I mean, if they can sneak away from the Academy for that long.”

“Mmhm.” Derek rumbled, and set his computer aside to ease himself up against Stiles’ side, one hand coming to rest against the younger man’s sternum, just feeling the rise and fall of his breath. “And where are we going to put them? This place is barely big enough for the two of us, never mind four .”

“They can sleep on the couch, it pulls out!” Stiles groused, “and besides, Jaskier has no concept of personal space.” Though he supposed Steve did , in all fairness. “Look,” a touch frustrated, he frowned up at Derek where he was leaning over him, “I know your werewolf possessiveness would love for me to just stay here alone with you all the time, but I…”

Trailing off, Stiles lifted his left arm and turned it over to show the pair of concentric circles that were tattooed on his inner wrist. The symbol of Scott’s pack– of his pack.

“You need more than that.” Derek finished for him, a tiny smile tugging at his lips.

Stiles looked up at him and, after a moment, let his True Eyes shine through, bright, almost glowing green. Derek responded by allowing his own eyes to shine, beautiful, luminescent blue, and then leaning down to kiss him firmly, decisively. “Invite your friends. We’ll squeeze them in somehow. But if they rat me out to the FBI, you’re the one that’s going to have to clean up the mess, deal?”

Stiles grinned and dragged him back down for another kiss. “Deal.”

~*~*~

Markets weren’t really Stiles’… thing. Farmers’ markets, crafters’ markets, seasonal markets, whatever. He found them innately boring (even if they were a good place to procure seasonal fruits and vegetables.) But Derek loved them and it was the time of year when they were popping up everywhere so Stiles relented and went to a few, just to make his boyfriend happy. And it did – make Derek happy, that is. He wandered around the markets they went to with a little, content smile on his face that could only make Stiles smile, too, and… okay. Maybe markets weren’t so bad after all.

It was funny, how things had kind of slowly progressed to Happy Derek over the course of their relationship. When they had first gotten together, he had been his usual grumpy self, and that had continued on, with a few short glints of lightheartedness here-and-there, for the months that they had been dating while Stiles had still been living in the dorms at the FBI Academy.

Then, when Stiles had eventually called it a day and moved back to Beacon Hills, Derek seemed to brighten and brighten until they were living together and he was just… happy. He smiled. He laughed. He genuinely seemed to enjoy life, and while Stiles was all for Happy Derek it was also somewhat befuddling at times. He wanted to ask, but every time he was about to he chickened out because he wasn’t entirely sure what the answer would be.

Now, though, Derek was looking through an assortment of decorative candles– some of which Stiles was pretty sure were made to look like zombie unicorns – with that little, contented smile on his face, probably browsing for Christmas presents (if Derek got him a zombie unicorn candle for Christmas Stiles thought he might scream.) and Stiles just. Watched him. Probably with the same tiny, happy smile on his own face.

Derek was humming and hawing over a particular candle– this time a cat with three eyes– and Stiles finally reached to catch his free hand, tangling their fingers together and tugging gently. “Hey.”

“Hm?” Derek blinked back to the present to look at him, and Stiles smiled, a real smile, and just leaned up to kiss him gently. Derek made a pleased little noise because Stiles was staunchly against PDA as a general rule, then tilted his head to kiss back with a hum.

Which was when Stiles felt eyes on him.

His hackles up, he pulled away quickly to look around the room–

–only to spot Scott and his mother two aisles down and one over. And Scott was staring at them hard , eyes wide while his Mom was completely oblivious to the entire exchange. Stiles’ eyes darted away, then back, then away again before he grabbed the candle Derek was holding and slammed it back on the table, and followed that up by tightening his grip on the older man’s hand and dragging him out of the vendor’s hall in all but a flat-out run.

“Wha– Stiles! ”

He didn’t even know if the startled voice calling his name came from Derek or Scott.

That was why Stiles didn’t do PDA.

~*~*~

“Did you at least apologize?” Steve seemed sympathetic, a few days later when he and Jaskier were crammed into Stiles’ and Derek’s tiny apartment, seated on the couch while Stiles lamented his story. Jaskier had no sympathy, instead grinning and giggling to himself because– well, because that was how Jaskier was, he supposed.

“He did.” Derek called from the kitchen where he had been working on dinner and incidentally eavesdropping, “apologize, that is. And we made up.”

Stiles had to grin at that. “ Vigorously .”

Jaskier snickered and Steve rolled his eyes and shoved at Stiles’ shoulder. Then he hesitated before asking, “okay, but not like, here , right, on the pull-out?”

“Who are you kidding, Stevie?” Jaskier laughed, “they’ve fucked on every surface of this apartment and you know it.”

Stiles just shrugged.

“Ew.” Steve commented, before adding, “and don’t call me that, Jask.”

“Ah, right, I almost forgot that dearest Agent Barnes is the only one permitted to call you that.” A grin, and Jaskier continued with, “how sad is it that all three of us have a passionate thing for older men?” Then, with a tiny pout; “and how tragic that you two have managed to snag yours, while I appear destined to pine away forever~?”

That got a quick look between Stiles and Steve because, to them , at least, it was incredibly obvious that Agent Rivia was interested. Jaskier just wasn’t seeing the signs, and neither of them knew how to tell him beyond literally smacking him up the back of the head. At this point it was kind of an unspoken thing between Stiles and Steve that they would keep their noses out of things and let Jaskier and Rivia work it out for themselves. (After all, everything had worked out for them , right?)

From the kitchen, Derek cleared his throat and interjected, “you could always start sending him random, weird gifts from the Internet in the mail.”

Jaskier and Steve both rolled their eyes, but Stiles grinned. “Worked for me!”

“I still have that shirt, too.”

“I know, you wore it last time I was mad at you.”

“Worked like a charm.”

Stiles found himself smiling fondly over toward the kitchen until Steve swatted his arm to catch his attention again. “Anyway,” The blond sighed, “what are you going to do about the whole…” Trailing off for a second, he gestured vaguely between Stiles and Derek before finishing, “I mean, you can’t keep it a secret forever… right?”

Stiles bristled for the briefest second. Then he sighed and looked down, picking absently at his jeans as he tried to come up with an answer that would satisfy his friends and not upset Derek at the same time.

“I’ve been thinking about that.”

Brown eyes lifted from the worn jean almost sheepishly. “Hm?”

Derek came out into the living room, wiping his hands on a towel as he did, to stand and look down at Stiles, expression worried and contemplative. “I’ve figured out by now that you’re not comfortable with other people knowing we’re together.” A pause, then; “except these assholes, for some reason?” He chuckled along when everyone else laughed. “But it’s been over a year since I moved in here with you, and we were dating– sort of– for months before that, too.”

Stiles wasn’t a hundred percent sure he liked where this was going, but he just nodded along anyway.

A sigh and Derek gave Steve and Jaskier an apologetic smile. “Could you guys give us some privacy for a couple minutes?”

Steve and Jaskier exchanged a glance– and then Jaskier popped to his feet and hauled Steve up with him. “No problem, we can go for a walk!” Dragging Steve over to the door, he added over his shoulder, “but we’ll be like, fifteen minutes, max, so we’d better not walk back in on anything gross!”

Steve squawked and barely managed to call out “We’ll knock!” before the door shut behind them.

And without them there, Stiles felt trapped. They were about to have a conversation that he had been avoiding for the better part of two years and he wasn’t sure he was particularly prepared for it now.

Luckily, Derek made it short and painful. He sat down next to Stiles and leaned to kiss by the younger man’s jaw gently. “The werewolf in me might want to keep you in my own pack,” he informed, and damn him for using Stiles’ own words against him; “but I also want to be able to show you off. You’re my mate, for all intents and purposes, and I want people to know that. I’m proud of it.”

Stiles stared at him, flabbergasted. When he finally found his words it was to blurt out “but I’m a fox !”

Derek snorted. “I’d noticed. But I knew that before we ever got together and it didn’t stop me. Also I scent mark you constantly ,” to make his point he leaned in to rub his jaw along Stiles’ with a rumble, “did you never wonder why I did that?”

“‘Cause you’re a weirdo.” Stiles grumbled petulantly. And then; “I didn’t say stop.”

Another little snort. Derek nibbled along his jaw and then buried his face in the crook of Stiles’ neck. “I’m possessive and I want people to know you’re mine. And Scott and the others, they won’t mind , you know that…”

“Do I know that? I’ve always been so into girls, like intensely into girls , at least as far as everyone else is concerned.” Stiles brought one hand up to card his fingers through Derek’s hair and the wolf practically purred at his touch, “not even Scott knows I’m bi.” Then, after a beat, “until a few days ago. I guess.”

Not that he thought Scott would run around telling everyone what he saw but it still made nerves squirm in his stomach at the thought.

“I think we should stop hiding.” Derek’s voice was muffled against Stiles’ shirt, “you know Lydia’s Christmas Party that we’re all invited to? I think we should go together, as a couple.”

Stiles stomach straight-up flipped upside down, but… Derek had a point. It would be nice to be out of hiding. And telling all of their friends at the same time would be convenient, at least. The party was a good idea.

“I guess… okay.” Stiles allowed after a moment’s thought, still playing with Derek’s hair, “but if it goes bad, it’s on you.”

He could feel Derek smile against the crook of his neck. “If it goes bad I’ll wear that shirt for you again.”

Stiles laughed . “Okay, deal.”

~*~*~

“Faith and Renfri are pissed they didn’t get to come.” Jaskier laughed without looking up from his phone as he texted back and forth between the two women in question. He was standing by the front door with his backpack slung over one arm, waiting for Steve to finish throwing his stuff in his own back so they could catch the next bus to Quantico.

“They can come next time.” Stiles bargained, “we can have a girls’ weekend.”

Jaskier feigned offense, “without me? ”

“Without~ you~!” Stiles singsonged, even as he was giving Steve one last hug goodbye and ushering them both out the door.

“Good luck!” Steve called over his shoulder.

Stiles smiled and waved. Yeah he was going to need it.

~*~*~

The night of the party Stiles honestly thought he was going to hyperventilate until he passed out and Derek had to calm him down on two separate occasions, once wrapping him up in a tight hug and the other staring into his eyes until the blue soaked right through him and eased him back to normal.

Eventually he did manage to get dressed and out the door, though the walk to Lydia’s place just amped his nerves up again until, by the time they arrived, he was nervous and twitchy– so basically his normal self. Derek took his hand, threaded their fingers together tightly, and tugged him along inside. 

When Lydia answered the door her eyes darted between the two of them, then down to their clasped hands– and then she just smiled widely and ushered them inside where–

–oh shit that was literally everyone, wasn’t it.

The party kind of ground to a halt for a second as everyone turned to look at them and Stiles began to panic, until Derek released his hand and slid an arm around him instead, his hand coming to rest on Stiles’ hip as they stood in the doorway and Stiles tried not to make eye contact with anyone. He resisted the urge to huddle into Derek’s side and looked around until he found– there. Scott. Scott smiling . Oh thank God. Okay.

And then from somewhere in the back of the room, Jackson’s voice called out “I FUCKIN’ CALLED IT! ”

“JACKSON!” Lydia protested loudly, “YOU DON’T GET TO TALK!”

And just like that, the tension melted away from Stiles and he did lean into Derek, just a little, before looking up at him with a smile. “Let’s go in.”

Derek leaned down to kiss him. “Yeah,” he agreed, “let’s go in.”

[pub-lius]

its intriguing to me how you know so much so instead of asking a question about said knowledge im gonna ask how u know all this?-?/?-

oh hey!! the simple answer is autism but i'll give more specifics

so i've always been a nonfiction guy, and i first started doing historical research when i was really young on the history of New Orleans from my school library, which was abundant since I'm only about 40 minutes outside the city. every week we could check out two books so i'd check out two history books (or books on ghosts, dogs, or greek mythology, i'm kind of a jack of all trades) and just. read them for fun.

later on, i started writing essays in my free time about the things i was reading about to summarize what i was learning (this blog is just a digital version of that). from this point until, well, now, i was taught how to do research online in school and also kinda figured it out on my own and this extended to my other interests which, at the time, was psychology (i still study psychology but just for school).

its not a shock to anyone that my research on the american revolution and american history in general began when i listened to hamilton, and i started researching information about the events portrayed in the musical online. i read yk the online articles about the lives of the characters, then the relatives and friends of those characters. then i found the government archives and started reading through hamilton's letters. then i started giving all my money to bookshops and now i have a library of fully annotated history books, bookmark folders full of secondary and primary sources, and exactly $1.88 to my name (not exactly but its funnier to say that).

i am very privileged to be able to pay for books and have transportation to libraries and bookshops and the archives and whatnot, and i take full advantage of it!! i was actually kinda called out by my law teacher today because he said that usually people get addicted to things that are fun and not tedious while looking right at me. so. that's a fun thing that happened today.

knowledge is just a collection of facts, and intelligence is the accumulation of skills, and so i do my best to get both. so really any knowledge i have is just enough free time to accumulate enough facts to keep me yapping 24/7/365 and enough skills to make it seem that i vaguely know what im talking about!