#i want future kids to be as fascinated by evolution and space as i was

[minotaurfemme]

in a perfect world i think i would be a science teacher

[lunar-years]

On a related note, the evolution of how she speaks about marriage in her music is fascinating and really, for me, a little manifesto all its own on growing up, gaining experiences (good and bad), developing hindsight, and coming out the other side as a person with more wisdom and the strength to keep dreaming. It really sucks that most people cannot talk about this in a normal way!! Because when you divorce yourself from the needless obsession with the men involved and place the focus back on HER (who is ultimately the one person her songwriting has always reflected)...what a testament to her evolvement into a multifaceted, complex, still hopeful adult woman with many important dreams this is:

“you looked at me, got down on one knee” -> “marry me Juliet, you'll never have to be alone” -> "back then I swore I was gonna marry him someday, but I realized some bigger dreams of mine" -> “we could get married, have ten kids and teach them how to dream” -> “I’d marry you with paper rings” -> “he wanted a bride I was making my own name” -> “he said that if the sex was half as good as the conversation, soon they’d be pushing strollers” (🤢) -> "Storm coming, bad omen, dragged my feet right down the aisle" -> "she would've made such a lovely bride, what a shame she's fucked in the head" -> "give you my wild, give you a child" -> all they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride, only kind of girl they see is a one night or a wife” -> “I wouldn’t marry me either” -> “I died on the alter waiting for the proof” -> “you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one people put wedding rings on, and that’s the closest I’ve come” -> "please, let it once be me...don't want money, just someone who wants my company" -> “are you gonna marry, kiss or kill me? I’m betting on all three”

We can literally trace the evolvement of her thinking from her childhood and teenage years of a hopeless romantic, fairytale-like idealization of marriage, mostly spoken about it in whimsical dreamings about her own future (love story) and songs about other people's relationships she viewed as the epitome of true love (Starlight, Mary’s Song), to the more nuanced thoughts she developed as she got older and started getting into her own relationships. Prioritizing her developing career and putting marriage temporarily behind her other dreams (midnight rain), entering into manipulative relationships where her dreams of marriage and children were first used against her (the manuscript), watching friends and family whose relationships she once thought so solid crumble (happiness), realizing it is far, far worse to be married to the wrong person than to not be married at all (high infidelity, ivy), thinking she's found that right person for her (paper rings, peace), developing a certain level of cynicism about marriage both when it became a sticking point in the relationship and because of the way society has always treated her, from a being a young woman constantly criticized for dating (nothing new) to growing older and existing as a massively successfully but unmarried women in her thirties (champagne problems, lavender haze), and nevertheless holding fast to her dreams! ending a relationship because her wants did not align with his (you're losing me, so long london), falling backwards into relationships where her dreams were used against her (ttpd), reckoning with the realization that this massive, long-standing big dream for herself and her future might never become a reality, giving herself space to mourn that and STILL, after all that, not giving up. Still bravely looking for and asking for and hoping for what she wants instead of throwing in the towel (the prophecy) and ultimately starting again, with a reclamation of the whimsy she felt about romance as a teenager alongside the wisdom that has come from her own experiences (so high school). I MEAN!!!!! god. this is really good shit.

[totodiletears]

The first thing I'm thinking about is how some Pokemon come from space, so we have to decide whether the Animorphs aliens count as Pokemon or not. I'm going with no, because otherwise Yeerks getting ahold of poke balls would give them a huge edge throughout the galaxy. In lore, a Pokemon can only be caught if it wants to be caught, but it still takes a few moments for a Pokemon to break free of a ball. That can make a huge difference in the middle of a battle. And Ellimist forbid the Yeerks figure out how to produce Master Balls. If Andalites could be caught by those, they'd probably blow up Earth before the Animorphs (Pokemorphs?) even have a chance to form.

So! Our various alien species are not Pokemon and cannot be captured. But PokeEarth does not have the animals we know: only Pokemon. So how do the kids deal with poke balls when in morph? I see two possibilities: one, poke balls only work on "true" Pokemon. This removes the threat, but it also gives Yeerks an easy way to find out if a Pokemon is a real Pokemon or a morph; just chuck a ball at it. On the other hand, if they CAN be captured, the team needs to deal with that somehow. They could they let themselves be captured by each other so future poke balls will fail. Some Pokemon have transformation abilities, so arguably the poke ball can handle this just fine. But really, the Yeerks still get the "just chuck a ball and see if it works" option here anyway. For that reason I like the first option better. Even in this scenario I think Tobias will still need to let a team member capture him. Probably Rachel, because that's a huge thing to trust someone with.

And now that the mechanics are worked out, it's time for the thing everybody's most interested in: morphs! Since I just brought up Tobias, let's start with him. There are a few bird-of-prey-ish options. We could make him a Staraptor, or perhaps a Talonflame. If we want to get really interesting, we could turn him into a Pidgeotto. Why is this basic gen 1 Pokemon more interesting than a fire hawk? Because it IS clearly a bird of prey, but it can still evolve. Compare to Staravia and Fletchinder, which still hang out in flocks and eat bugs. Pokemon evolution is most comparable to real-life metamorphosis, which canonically resets the morphing clock if you've gone over. If Tobias evolves into Pidgeot, he could demorph. This is a fascinating scenario, should the team discover it. There are a lot of different ways you could take it.

We can probably assume they'll keep as close as they can to canonical battle morphs. Jake doesn't get a straight-up tiger now, unless we want to give him a legendary Raikou in book 1, but he has a few options. Incineroar is the next-best tiger resemblance, but its bipedal nature and giant hands feels like it's intruding on Marco's role. My choice would be Luxray. Intimidating and totally cool, just like tigers. Rachel of course gets an Ursaring. She might get an Ursaluna morph during a sario rip and be very disappointed when she doesn't get to keep it. Cassie gets a lot of options, but Lycanroc feels the closest to a wolf. Midday form. Marco gets to be a Rillaboom. Does the drum come with the morph? Well it comes with the evolution, so why not? Marco spends a lot of time complaining about how little sense that makes.

And now the really fun part! Because Pokemon has so many powerful creatures, why wouldn't Visser Three get in on the fun? For the sake of not totally breaking the story I'm going to assume the super-powerful legendary Pokemon are basically impossible to find. Not that this will stop Visser Three from looking, once he finds out just how powerful some of the creatures on this planet are supposed to be. You could probably use this as a premise for more than one book, with Visser Three on the verge of finding and acquiring some ridiculously powerful Pokemon and the kids trying to stop him. He could still pull out something like Latios or Articuno, but he doesn't get to have the world-shaping powers of creatures like Groudon or Dialga.

AU idea: Animorphs/Pokemon cross. There's still an intergalactic war between Yeerks and Andalites, but Earth is replaced by the pokemon world. Jake, Cassie, Marco, Rachel, and Tobias are all traveling trainers who meet up one night and take a shortcut back to the nearest pokemon center

I don't really know Pokémon well — I only played the GameBoy games. Any Pokéfans out there with thoughts?

[adaginy]

[Prompt+part 1] [Part 5]

Part 6 (tw: ableism [mostly by aliens], oversimplification of human sex/gender, brief references to "historical" racism/transphobia/assholeness-to-intersex-kids, reference to "present" enbyphobia.) --- Jana was kicked back, feet on eir desk, reading about Peprine evolution and biology. Shit was WILD, like if octopuses had bones between the hydrostatic squishiness. Bones-ish. And the bones weren't connected to eachother. Peprine leaned against each other as comfort/affection, if they were showing affection, but hugging was right out -- maybe this was why.

Jana had met plenty of alien species by now, and was pretty good at not being openly fascinated by them. Most followed a pretty similar pattern -- bi/tri/quadrilateral symmetry, one or two organs that did the thinking, at least one sense that responded to light/radiation and one for at least some range of sound -- but there was still so much variation, even before meeting ones that broke the "rules". Ey'd never be able to research all the species, but for friends (and now family) it was worth the time.

The door to eir quarters opened and closed, accompanied by a noise unfortunately similar to a dog about to reject its dinner. Kiddo was home early, shaking its head to clear the dark blue liquid seeping down its ears. "Oh no, hon, what's wrong?" Jana grabbed a towel and knelt, and Kiddo flopped against em. "I went to an electrics class today and it was supposed to just be class but they brought out some pieces for us to practice assembling which I CAN'T and so the teacher said I could go home early if wanted because his tablet said my Elder was home and then Binn commented about you being human, that I wasn't supposed to have an Elder, I was supposed to be left behind--" Ohhhh ey was going to going to get that brat in such deep doodoo. "--And it's right, because I can barely feed myself so I'm so small and --" Jana put eir hand over its mouth, gently. "Binn is not right. Binn is wrong. I'd get in a lot of trouble for saying this, but all the Peprine are wrong, okay? There is NO reason to leave you behind. Your problems are easy to fix and for humans, on Earth, it would be a crime to just, just, to not-fix them like that." Ey patted its back carefully, not wanting it to think ey was going for a hug. "There are some things I want to show you, alright? I want you to understand that this isn't a problem." Ey took eir glasses off. "Look through these. Does everything look weird? I don't know how your eyes work, if it's the same enough." Kiddo barely held them up to its face before getting that melty nauseated look. "Why do you wear distortion goggles?" Jana took them back, blinking as ey put them on. "My eyes are wrong in the other direction. Things that other humans can see far away, I can't. But when I put these on, how wrong they are cancels out how wrong my eyes are. And we've been doing this for a thousand years -- way before we got to space. Before we even knew that planets go around stars. It's so easy! We can do it for babies who don't even know that their eyes are wrong, a medic can look in their eyes and make these for them." "You have to wear those forever, though? What about your children, in the future? "Some of it's genetic, some of it's not. It's really common. It doesn't matter if I pass it on to children, because they can also wear glasses. And I don't haaaave to wear them forever. If I wanted to, I could get surgery to fix the shape of my eyes. But I don't because, again, these are so easy." Ey took Kiddo's two-fingered hand. "This happens with humans sometimes too. I don't know about Peprine, but for humans it's not genetic at all. It's just bad luck. And even if it was genetic, we've been fixing this for hundreds of years too, or at least making it less-broken. Look." Ey reached up to their desk for their tablet and showed it a drawing of a pirate. "You see there?" "He's holding a hook?" It had re-flopped and was now nearly snuggling against Jana. "Well, he's not holding it. He doesn't have a hand -- this is from human violence time, it was lost to injury -- so the hook is on a cup and the cup is tied or suctioned on to the stump where his hand used to be. It's not as good as a hand, but it could open the old-fashioned doors of the time, hold things down, pick certain things up, pick up a bite of food. It was a lot better than nothing. And this was almost a thousand years ago, too. None of the human tribes had explored the whole planet yet. And it wasn't long before people made stump-cups where you could take the hook out and replace it with a food-utensil or a pen, a writing utensil. Or ones with fake hands just for looks. By the time we were going to our own moon, we had ones people could open and close for more picking-up, and then ones that could do this with fake fingers," Jana opened and closed eir fingers stiffly, "and now we have ones that can do everything a hand can do and even send feelings back to the wearer. It just has to be taken off and charged after a while. Your people have been in space longer than ours and can't be arsed to give kids fake hands? That's ridiculous."

"... Yeah, but..." "No 'yeah but.'" "But I'm... we aren't supposed to be this way. It's not just Binn. Everyone says." Twisting ears. Jana sighed, knowing. "'Everyone' as in all the Peprine you grew up with? The ones here, too?" "Well, except Binn, not since I got here. But when you adopted me, and they were telling you to leave me. She called me a castoff." It flinched even repeating it. "I guess that's a really mean word in Peprine, isn't it?" "The meanest. Binn said it too." Ey was going to have so many words with Uvair about the language she was teaching her fucking brat. Kiddo scooted away. "You're getting really hot, doesn't that mean you're sick?" Kiddo had been taking a lot of the dealing-with-humans classes, which Jana was usually happy existed. "N- Y-- It can mean that. I'm not sick." Ey took a deep breath. "Human rage." Bitter, personal. "Not at you. At Binn. At Uvair. I can control it, though." Clenching and unclenching fists. "I need to stand up for a bit, though." Kiddo scooted off; it had heard enough about human rage in those classes. Jana futzed with eir water line, overriding a safety setting, until it gave nearly-boiling water. Ey pulled out a box of tea from a storage compartment. It was an herbal de-stressy tea eir mom liked, and she always sent it in care packages despite Jana insisting space wasn't actually that stressful. Ey started it steeping and sent a note to Mom to say the introduction call was going to be delayed. Sugar. No milk. Mug in hand, Jana sat on the floor again, leaning against eir bed. "Okay. You can sit with me again, or lean if you want, just be careful, I don't want to spill this on you. Or grab a pillow if you want to sit on that. ... I have human facts to tell you about." Jana took a deep breath in preparation and sighed it out as Kiddo sat on its cushion. "This is starting out disconnected but I promise it gets there, okay? So. Humans... Hm. Peprine all have a pretty similar ... they have similar breeding abilities. All partners give genetic material, all partners receive genetic material, all partners make a baby Peprine. And humans aren't like that. Half-ish of humans, males, breed by giving genetic material; half-ish of humans, females, breed by taking that material and combining it with their own and making the baby. Or they could, if they wanted to, they're the right age, all that stuff." That was almost certainly covered in intro classes, but Kiddo might not have gotten to the more advanced stuff yet. "And sometimes someone isn't male or female -- complicated human body stuff, humans used to get really up in arms about it, even operate on babies and little kids without telling them it was to make them look more male/female or waiting to see what they wanted, but now we understand that it's normal and we shouldn't freak out."

Jana paused, considering eir words again. "There's a second concept, boy or girl, that's sortof... how you feel about being male or female. For most people, they're fine with it. Male boys, female girls, it's so common that people will use the words interchangeably, they'll assume if you're male you're a boy, vice versa, same for female girls. Sometimes, though, a female will realize they're a boy, or a male a girl, and so they'll live like the other thing, maybe get surgery or adjust their body chemicals so they can really become the other thing, the one they're supposed to be. And humans used to get REALLY LOUDLY up in arms about that, or even violent to people who wanted to change over, but now we accept that too." Jana's fingers drummed on the side of eir mug. "Humans have always been like that, I guess. We used to get really angry about people having different skin colors, or being from different tribes or territories, just... so many stupid reasons to hate other people. And there were disabilities that humans were shitty about, too, like not having any sense of sound, until we learned better, learned handspeak or how to replace the sound-sense, learned to accommodate other disabilities. No-one hates other humans about those things now. But sometimes it took decades or centuries for us to learn better, and some things people haven't learned very well." "Like this. Sometimes, someone will be male or female, but they won't feel like a boy OR a girl. Just neither, or both, or fluctuating between. And that's still something humans argue about, whether that's okay and normal like being born in-between male or female, or whether 'we aren't supposed to be this way'. But that's me." Ey shrugged, draining eir tea. "I'm not a boy or a girl. That's why I came to space -- after meeting aliens who are all one sex, who have no gender, who have 3 genders or 8 sexes or so on, most humans get over it. But back on Earth, or in long-time all-human settlements... That's also why I don't talk to my father, my male parent. My female parent broke up their TAOL unit because she refused to be with someone who was so mean to me. He told me to choose, to stop being a freak, 'we aren't supposed to be this way'." Woof. Ey didn't talk about it a lot. Didn't have a reason to, but also just didn't. "So. Listen." Ey put the mug down. "The best way to respond to someone saying that there's something wrong about the way you are, the way you were born, is to tell them to -- in a lot of human languages it's something like 'go fuck themselves,' it's much ruder than it probably translates. Or to tell them to their face that you hope they die in specific horrible ways, but that might be a human thing. You don't listen to them. You prove that you are supposed to be that way. You live a happy and successful life and watch them get angry that you're thriving while doing something they think you shouldn't do."

Ey learned forward, putting one hand on Kiddo's shoulder and taking the towel with the other, wiping up the 'tears' newly coming from its ears. "That's what you're gonna do, okay? What we're gonna make sure you do. You're gonna get big, get giant even, strong, smart. An expert electrics-worker, if that's what you want. A fake hand that's cooler than a real one, if you want. Living your best life. Everyone who has ever called you that word is gonna wish they were even half as awesome as you are. Okay?"

"Okay," Kiddo answered, warbling more than usual. "I don't know if I want to try to work in electrics though, if it takes a fake hand." "That's your choice." The human hug instinct was hard to suppress here. "But, if you don't want a fake hand -- I miiight have found another option. Maybe. We'd have to check with the medics. Did you know that in my mouth, I have a muscle that works a lot like yours do? No hard part inside, but squishy and fluid-moving." Ey stuck out eir tongue. "... I don't want a human mouth muscle instead of fingers, either." "Ha! No, you can't have it anyway, we need it. But check this out: Humans like to mess with their bodies, even when we don't have to. Have you covered piercing or tattoos in class?" "Yes...?" Human conversation habits were so strange. "Some people do more complicated things. And one thing -- not very common, I doubt there's any on board, let me pull up this holovid--" The projection showed a woman laughing, sticking out her tongue, waggling the left piece, then the right. "See, it's supposed to be one piece. Some humans get them surgically divided because they think it looks cool, and because then they can do that. And I wonder if -- we would talk to the medics, I promise, this is not a time for humans' experimenting habit -- if the end of your arm could be divided along the muscle lines to give you nubbins. Let you pick stuff up, at least." "Oh... Huh." It tensed and un-tensed the squashy "palm" of its fingerless hand. And then the hand with the 2 fingers. Non-emergency surgery was an almost entirely human idea, but... well... maybe?

[Part 7]

[sentfromwolves]

Aries, Draco, Hydra, Libra 👀👀👀👀 for birthright/eae

✧ Aries: Share a line that you’re proud of!

UHHH UH UHHHHHDFJDNFKDNF

I am free. The thought is so strange and foreign that I don’t think it’s mine. It repeats itself over and over again in my head. I’m free, I’m free, I’m free.  Free from what? I’m not sure. Astoria House. My family. That infernal name my mother gave me first before anyone else: Starless. Out here, I am nothing. Not a Polaris child to be hunted as a consolation prize by spurned suitors, a doe in the jaws of a wolf in the shape of a man. Not a mother’s least favorite daughter, or a father’s forgotten child. I am nothing at all. Just a girl. I could do anything with that.

✧ Draco: Who’s your favorite character to write?

Exempting Aurora since I answered that for the other ask I got with this one in it, I think my SECOND favorite character and also NON-POV character to write would be (shoves atticus out of the way and puts saros in his place) THIS GUY!!!

Seriously though, I think Saros is really cool. You know of his history and evolution, but I think his nuance as a king of a realm that is viewed by outsiders as the ultimate deceitful space and a place full of trickery when the true challenge is overcoming the distortion and lies that are set forth by one's own heart to reveal the truth of the realm around them is really fascinating. I think he himself is fascinating because he puts on airs as a theatrical, kind of charlatan ruler who is also just very, VERY keen on everything going on around him.

I think it would be fascinating honestly to have him and Hyperion meet.

✧ Hydra:  Tell us why you love your project.

soft...gorls.....big....men,.... NO IM JUST KIDDING idk man... I really love Birthright for a boat load of reasons. I love the celestial nature of it, the soft fantasy worldbuilding I've put into it that still feels like a full bodied creature (or at least becoming more and more that way over time). I love Aurora being a soft protagonist whose growth is so internal to her own sense of self and identity at first. I love how Atticus grows because of Aurora, that he wants to become a better man for her and how her actions do truly affect him. I also love the Planetary Heirs and the possibilities of this wips future--there's a ton I can build out with it and I'm just excited to splash around in my little pool of Birthright/EAE.

✧ Libra: Which relationship dynamic do you enjoy writing the most?

I also already answered this with (checks notes from five minutes ago) Aurora and Atticus, but I'm glad to give me SECOND favorite relationship dynamic which is probably going to Diana and Aurora as I get deeper into the weeds with them in the later spots in the book. I love how they create intricate foils of one another--Aurora who wishes she had Diana's natural charisma and power, and Diana who wishes they had Aurora's freedom. They are the two Polaris children with titles - The North Star and Starless respectively - and while there is unspoken envy between them, there is also incredible devotion and love (moreso evident with Aurora for how she wears herself and her heart on her sleeve) but also Diana, who for all their bitter and jaded attitude and antagonistic actions, truly does try at the end to tempt Aurora to stay with them in Alexandria and join them in running and leaving Adrien behind. I'm really excited to get more into them as the series progresses!!

[novelconcepts]

fic: having so much fun all alone (i wanna let somebody know)

Control never seems so important until it’s being slowly, inexorably stripped away. Jamie finds she’s been thinking about this concept more and more as the days go by, and it’s almost fascinating. It interests her, thinking about the concept of control--not the control of another person, but control of the self. Of a person’s own body, own mind, own future. 

Control had seemed a simple thing before Dani, so absent from her childhood that Jamie taught herself to seek it out the minute she had the option. It didn’t always go well. There is a fine line between wanting control over a situation and the desperate desire to feel something, anything; it had taken her too long to discover the difference. Jail time had impacted the idea something fierce, reducing the notion of control from a childish impulse toward what I want, when I want it to something smaller. Easier to fit in the palm of her hand. Control became, instead, the simplicity of keeping herself to herself. 

People can’t control you if they don’t understand you, she’d reasoned. People can’t control what you do, say, want, if you never let them in. And, to a point, it had worked. Jamie’s adult life became marked by a certain kind of quiet freedom, an awareness of her own limits. She learned to keep to herself. She learned to give no part of herself away.

And then Dani had happened. Dani, whose own relationship with control was tenuous at best. Dani, whose life up until this point had been very much marked by other people’s control over her body, her dreams, her right to love.

Jamie hadn’t meant to give her control, just as Dani hadn’t meant to ask it of her. There had been no part of the exchange intended for pain, for holding one another hostage--and Jamie knows that is the only reason it happened at all. The only reason either of them--two people so used to the shackles of other people’s expectations--were willing to let the dance begin. This mutual understanding that control is only granted so lovingly because the other person will not abuse the privilege, will not turn their grasp into a cuff. 

It hadn’t been simple, exactly, so much as natural. Give and take. Dani’s ghosts for Jamie’s regrets; Jamie’s scars for Dani’s still-bleeding wounds. In a way, Jamie thinks, the idea of passing control over their life together back and forth was appealing because it was the first time either of them understood how to communicate. The first time Dani had ever learned how to speak her needs in someone else’s space; the first time Jamie had ever thought someone might actually be listening in return. Not simple. Not easy. Organic, though--very much that. 

It has been...an evolution, certainly. There are things Dani is carrying Jamie can’t take off her shoulders--things Dani bears with the stoic acceptance of one already a little bit gone. Jamie tries not to think about it that way, tries not to look into Dani’s eyes and think, Not quite the woman I met. She’s in there, she’s still looking back at me, but there’s something else, too. 

Dani thinks that something else will, one day, supersede her. Will, one day, take the wheel in a way Dani will not be able to ward off. 

Dani thinks, someday, the question of control will have nothing at all to do with their relationship, with the bond built so carefully and so firmly between them, but rather to do with the thing in the mirror. She says as much to Jamie some nights, her hand tangled in Jamie’s hair, her breathing soft and steady against Jamie’s skin. Says, in a voice so weary, Jamie can’t bear it: “I don’t know what I’ll do, then. I don’t know what will be left of me when she wakes.”

Jamie can only take her hand in these moments, the ones she knows will pass by morning--the ones Dani will pretend not to remember by the end of the week. It’s still early-days, she tells herself, bringing Dani’s fingers to her lips as she did in a bedroom across an ocean. It’s still new, and fresh, and there’s nothing saying it will happen at all.

One day at a time.

In the meantime, there are other thoughts of control. Thoughts she finds considerably more pleasurable, considerably more safe. Thoughts of what Dani truly needs some days, to remind her who is still in the driver’s seat of her life. 

Jamie is more than happy to help. 

***

The day has not been bad so much as long, and Jamie finds herself dragging home with a gently thrumming headache. It’s sometimes still more than she can wrap her head around: the shop, where the hours are her own to set, and the apartment, where every inch of space is open to her, and Dani, who fits into both places so perfectly, Jamie has trouble thinking back to a time without her. The world they’ve built together is warm, constantly waiting to welcome her home, and Jamie doesn’t know if she deserves it. Doesn’t know if there is such a thing as deserve. She knows only that she is lucky.

And that even the luckiest soul needs a break. 

“Medicine,” Dani had advised, her expression concerned as Jamie prepared to leave the shop. “A hot shower. Uh. A cold compress.”

“Be fine,” Jamie murmured, glancing around for customers. Not a soul to be found, she pressed a kiss lightly to Dani’s lips. “Shame you can’t join me. Can think of one thing that tends to help nice and quick.”

Dani’s face lit with visible warmth, as Jamie had known it would. “I--you--”

“Easy,” Jamie said, kissing her again. “I’m only teasing, Poppins.”

“Right,” Dani said, a bit hoarsely, her arm sliding instinctively around Jamie’s waist. “Exactly. Rude to tease when I’m already worried for your health.”

“My health’ll be just fine as soon as I get home and into bed,” Jamie told her. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll just, ah, handle it myself?”

“Tease,” Dani repeated in a low, fervent whisper, even as the bell above the door chimed. Jamie tipped her a wink. 

It’s always fun making Dani turn new colors, but she hadn’t been kidding--about the headache or the proposed solution. Little aggravations tend to slip away to nothing with Dani present, Dani’s hands searching her skin, Dani kissing her until she forgets any minor aches or pains. Of course, until they hire additional staff, Dani can’t really afford to join her in the middle of the afternoon just because she’s Jamie’s favorite form of migraine therapy. 

Not so bad, anyway, she thinks, even as she takes Dani’s advice piece by piece in the empty apartment. Medicine, a nice tall glass of water, a shower so long it ceases to be productively hot midway through. She stands with her face against the comparatively-cool tile, trying not to think of Dani’s expression as she’d said tease under her breath, Dani’s grip on her shirt threatening to remain as Jamie slipped out from behind the counter. 

Should just sleep, she thinks, changing into shorts and one of Dani’s shirts. Sleep it off, sure. Better for the whole system. She’ll just lay down for an hour or two, letting the cool of the sheets soothe the warmth of her skin as she remembers the mingled longing and worry in Dani’s face as she’d walked away. Just close her eyes, letting the steady pound in her temples lull her...lull her...

“Fuck,” she mutters, rolling onto her stomach and pressing her face into Dani’s pillow. What does it matter; anything that’ll banish this throb is worth a shot, and anyway, there’s something about the way Dani had watched her go she can’t erase. Something about the way Dani’s lips had lifted ever so slightly, the way they do when Dani wants nothing more than to remind Jamie how glad she is--how glad she’ll always be--that Jamie stayed in her life. 

Just take care of it, she tells herself with the air of brushing her hands clean. The idea of Dani watching her, the idea of Dani missing her, is too strong to ignore. Just Jamie’s luck, to be the having the sort of day where a headache and a painfully strong desire to bring Dani to bed collide. 

She realizes belatedly her hips are already moving without the rest of her noticing, rocking slowly against the mattress, and she sighs. Won't be enough. Won’t be nearly what it would with Dani beneath her, dragging her nails down Jamie’s back, a thigh flexing between Jamie’s legs. Still--the image isn’t nothing. Dani’s pillow smells of her shampoo, the one Jamie never uses because it should be Dani’s, should remind her of Dani whenever Dani isn’t around. She presses her face against it now, lips parted in a sigh, gripping the sheets in loose fingers. 

She’d intended to be quick and dirty with it, a true resolution followed by actual sleep, but her body has other opinions on the matter. Her body, it seems, wants full control of the situation--wants her full attention on the idea of Dani thinking of her at the shop. Dani, moving among the arrangements, picking flowers, chatting with strangers, all the while thinking of Jamie here. Of Jamie having mentioned a hot shower. Of Jamie beneath the spray, one hand sliding down her breasts, the other between her legs. 

Dani, thinking of her for the next hour, her breath coming in sharp little pants she’ll try to hide behind her smile. Dani, pressing her hips furtively against the counter in the empty shop, closing her eyes for a moment and wishing she could have followed Jamie home. 

This’ll do it. Her grip tightens on the sheets, her legs spreading slightly. It’s all too easy to imagine Dani going slightly mad, working faster in an effort to distract herself. Easy to imagine Dani’s hands pushing back her hair the way she does when she’s most frustrated--or when she’s astride Jamie, rolling her hips to match Jamie’s pace. She breathes through the image, the perfect memory of the last time Dani had, in the middle of a movie, climbed into Jamie’s lap and kissed her like she’d been wanting to do so for hours.

Why wait? Jamie had laughed, and Dani had given a happy breathy sigh against her lips. 

It’s better with the anticipation, don’t you think?

“Yes,” Jamie mumbles into the pillow now. The anticipation, that’s the trick of it. Can’t go straight for the thing, can’t just let her hand slide between shorts and skin like she wants. If Dani can’t have her at work, Jamie ought to be polite enough to hold herself out of reach here, too. 

Already, she can feel the headache ebbing away, replaced by the adrenaline of pure desire. She presses herself against the mattress, enjoying the way the seam of her shorts moves against slick skin. She wonders, dimly, how long she could keep this up--how long she could hold herself in this limbo, biting down on Dani’s pillow to keep quiet, rocking at this leisurely pace. Could she do it until Dani gets home? Could this be how she greets a Dani pent-up from missing her: holding what she wants at arm’s length just until Dani comes to check in on her?

The idea nearly makes her shudder: Dani, stepping into the room just in time to catch her like this, rutting against the mattress and sighing Dani’s name. Dani, walking in just in time to watch her come apart. 

Control, she thinks, forcing her speeding hips to slow again. Forcing herself to wait until she’s confident she won’t lose her patience, take a hand off the sheets, press up and in until she’s--

“Couldn’t wait for me at all?” Dani asks, and Jamie gives a leap of guilty surprise, twisting to look over her shoulder. Dani is, in fact, leaning in the doorway. Dani is, in fact, looking at her exactly as she’d been imagining: her eyes dancing, her tongue darting out to wet her lips. Jamie presses her burning face against the pillow, closing her eyes. 

“I--hi.”

“Hi,” Dani says. She’s still just standing there, Jamie senses, in her jacket and boots. Just watching Jamie try to smother mild embarrassment on Dani’s side of the bed. “Oh, don’t stop on my account.”

“I wasn’t--” Oh, there’s no bloody point. “Headache’s gone.”

“Good,” Dani says mildly. “Then I won’t feel bad about what I’m about to do.”

Jamie darts another look over her shoulder, curious despite the mortification sending ripples through her arousal. “Why do I get the feeling I’m in trouble?”

“Not trouble.” Dani slips out of her coat like this is a perfectly normal conversation. Like there’s nothing out of the ordinary at all going on. She leans against the wall, removing her boots with the casual disinterest of a woman who has not just walked in on Jamie grinding against their bed. 

“Dunno if I believe you,” Jamie says, a bit breathlessly. Dani smiles. 

“What’s not to believe? You told me exactly what you were heading home to do...and, if you didn’t happen to do it fast enough, well...”

Fuck, thinks Jamie, her heart rate--which has not precisely calmed since Dani’s arrival--ratcheting back to full speed. She rolls onto her back, sits up, aware of the throbbing heat between her legs even as she pulls the sheets higher. 

“Dani...”

“Mm?” Dani is still moving with the grace of someone in absolutely no hurry to explain herself. As Jamie watches, she removes her earrings, sets them in a bowl on her dresser. Removes her watch, lays it beside the bowl. Reaches up to unbind the tie she must have used in Jamie’s absence, irritated with her hair falling into her eyes as she worked. 

“Dani, are you--”

“I’m wondering,” Dani says, “why you didn’t work harder at it.”

Jamie’s mouth is suddenly very dry. “Work...harder?”

“If you wanted to take care of it yourself,” Dani says. She’s walking closer now, almost strolling; Jamie draws in a breath, her hands bunching around the sheet. There’s something about Dani this calm, Dani moving with this kind of easy indolence, that makes her stomach do funny things. This version of Dani is one no one else ever sees. This version of Dani comes out with purpose. 

Usually a very particular purpose.

She’s climbing onto the bed now, sliding under the sheet to recline against Jamie’s side of the headboard. Her expression is cool, but there’s a light in her eyes Jamie couldn’t miss even with that headache still thrashing away, a certain bright hunger specific to this room, this sort of situation, Jamie. 

“So, I’m thinking, if you didn’t want to take care of it enough to do it fast,” Dani says, patiently parsing it out as she adjusts Jamie’s pillows behind her back, smooths her hands across the sheet over her lap, “there was a reason, right? You always have reasons, Jamie.”

She’s right, Jamie thinks with helpless attraction. Even now, playing whatever thrilling little game Dani has cooked up since arriving home, Dani understands her. Understands, maybe, more than Jamie even realized in this particular situation.

“I’m thinking about it,” Dani says, folding the sheet down once--again--pulling it down the bed until it’s barely covering either of them at all. “And the most I can come up with is...you wanted me here for it. Is that about right?”

Jamie grins, though her skin prickles in the chill of the air-conditioned room. “Always, Poppins.”

Dani nods, making a show of it, like there isn’t a fire burning low in her belly just now. Like she didn’t catch Jamie in the act and want to join her. Like her eyes aren’t blazing with that exact desire just now, pupils blown wide, dragging down Jamie’s body to drink her in. 

“You wanted me to watch.”

“Uh huh,” Jamie says, because whether it was true at the start doesn’t matter; it’s true now. “Or, y’know--since you’re here. Can always join in.”

Dani seems to consider it. One hand trails up Jamie’s thigh, toying lightly with the hem of her shorts. Jamie moves to twist at the waist, to shift into Dani’s lap and kiss her lips--and Dani’s hand rises, catching her by the front of her t-shirt. 

“You wanted me to watch,” she says, leaning in until the words are tracing Jamie’s lips. She does not, Jamie notes with a low groan of frustration, actually make contact. “So. Show me.”

Jamie swallows. “I--uh--just--”

“Here,” Dani adds, spreading her legs. She pats the mattress, a signal for Jamie to settle between them and lean back against her chest. Jamie draws a ragged breath. 

“Really think this could go faster if you just let me help you out of those clothes.”

“Think you’re right,” Dani agrees, and gives the mattress another firm pat. Jamie moves, dreamlike, where she’s been directed. Sits back, her hands uncertain of where to land. 

“Dani, honestly, I want--”

“You had a whole hour,” Dani says, “to get what you wanted. Now it’s my turn.”

Fuck, Jamie thinks again, a fresh surge of need clenching in her stomach. She turns her head, leans until she can see Dani’s expression clearly. 

“Maybe I didn’t start right away. Maybe I’d only been at it a minute.”

“You weren’t.” Dani smiles, the sort of smile she tends to wear immediately before kneeling between Jamie’s legs and offering a thorough distraction from their nightly routine. “I was there a while before you noticed.”

“And you didn’t speak up?” Years together, Jamie thinks. Years together, with no shortage of good sex between them, but this side of Dani is special. This side of Dani, the one perfectly in control of a situation, is to be cherished. “Just stood there, huh? Watched the show?”

“Thought you’d finish fast,” Dani says. She’s got Jamie’s right hand in her own, turning it over to inspect Jamie’s fingers, to trace a nail down Jamie’s palm. “Thought I’d come in just in time for the grand finale. But then I saw your hands.”

“What about them?” There’s challenge in her voice, pushing up against Dani’s calm. It’s always best this way, giving Dani a bit of resistance before she surrenders. Dani scratches a little harder, drawing a thin red line to match the ones grooved into Jamie’s palm. 

“You weren’t using them. You weren’t using anything. I thought that was interesting. Why not touch yourself, if you really wanted to take care of things properly?”

Jamie is struggling to keep her breath, struggling to keep from leaning that last little bit to press her mouth to Dani’s neck. That, she senses, is not the right move. That, she senses, will get her in trouble--and she’d really rather see where this is going. 

“I realized,” Dani is saying, turning Jamie’s hand over and mapping her knuckles with slow, tracing circles. “You were actually trying to make it last. Trying to go as slowly as you possibly could. Driving yourself crazy, I bet.”

“Yes,” Jamie says, unable to stop herself. She pushes back, aware of Dani’s body, of how warm she is. 

“I’m curious,” Dani says, applying light pressure to Jamie’s hand, steering it toward Jamie’s body. “How long do you think you can last?”

“Dani--”

“Only...if you want me to watch...” Dani smiles again, the smile that says she’d like nothing better than to drive Jamie out of her mind. “I really think I want a show.”

She’s dragging Jamie’s hand slowly down her own breasts, tracing down her taut stomach, pausing at the waistband of her shorts. Jamie holds her breath, waiting for Dani to slide with her beneath the band, waiting for Dani to use her hand as she sees fit--but Dani presses her farther down, curling around Jamie’s fingers as they cup together between Jamie’s legs over the loose material. And then she’s gone, leaving Jamie in place, her hand moving to rest on Jamie’s hip.

“Go on,” she says against Jamie’s ear, her free hand shifting Jamie’s hair aside so her lips can graze skin. “Show me.”

Jamie groans, letting the palm of her hand press hard against the heat pulsing through her shorts. She moves her hips, aware of the need she’s been cultivating for far too long already--

“Slowly,” Dani says into her ear. “You go until I say you’ve had enough.”

Jamie slumps back against her, boneless, a small noise escaping her lips. “I--fuck--rules?”

Dani gives the ridge of her ear a gentle nip, the barest scrape of her teeth. Jamie shivers. “That’s it. Go slow. Make all the noise you need, but remember: you are done when I say you’re done.”

Control, thinks Jamie, understanding, and knowing this is something Dani needs as much as she does. She licks her lips, drags her hand slowly against the front of her shorts. It would be so easy to rebel, so easy to wrench back from Dani what has been given to her--she could make herself come in no time at all, after all this. 

She turns her head, finds Dani watching her face with avid interest. She closes her eyes. 

“Slow,” she repeats, a promise. Her fingers slide across the soft material, tracing as though she has all the time in the world. Dani’s chin rests on her shoulder, her lips grazing through Jamie’s shirt once before she settles in. 

“Oh, and Jamie? Make it good.”

Jamie strangles another groan, too aware that letting herself go this early will have dire consequences. She cups lightly, the heel of her hand pushing against painfully throbbing nerves. Her fingers continue their soft work, index trailing down, circling where it would much rather be pressing in. 

“Good,” Dani says softly. She slides an arm around Jamie, spreading her hand low on her stomach, her eyes devouring Jamie’s tentative progress. Jamie leans her head back, breathing shallowly, trying to think desperately of flowers, of buds in bloom, of open petals and--

Nope, she thinks hastily, as her hips give a particularly sharp jerk. She pauses, closing her eyes, searching for solid ground before she can tumble. 

“Very good,” Dani adds, sounding impressed. “See, you’re doing great already.”

“Want you,” Jamie mutters. Dani gives her ear another nip. 

“Show me, then.”

It’s a balancing act, Jamie finds, letting her hips set a slow rhythm against the flex of her hand. A nice, easy balancing act, with her head braced back against Dani’s shoulder, every inhalation filling her senses with the scent of Dani, the push-pull of Dani drawing breath against her back, the trace of Dani’s fingernails across her stomach. A nice, easy, not-at-all-breaking-her balancing act. 

“I think you’re ready to step it up,” Dani says. Jamie, who has been trying to ride the friction of her own palm as minimally as she can stand, gives her a searching look. “I think it’s too easy on you. I think you need more.”

“More,” Jamie repeats. Dani’s hand is slinking lower again, grasping the band of Jamie’s shorts and lifting. Her free hand covers Jamie’s, pressing with sudden strength once between Jamie’s legs. “Fuck, Dani.”

“Not quite yet,” Dani says pleasantly, that too-nice voice she uses when she’s actively working to drive Jamie up the wall. It’s more effective than it has any right to be, Jamie thinks, though she's smiling, her body already desperate. 

She watches, her muscles loose to allow Dani full control, as Dani slides their joined hands higher, tucks Jamie’s hand into her shorts. Her fingers remain tight around the waistband, pulling it aloft and down until she gives herself a proper view of exactly where Jamie’s fingers rest. 

“There,” Dani says with dangerous pleasure. “Keep going.”

Jamie wants to twist, wants to capture her lips in a hard, brazen kiss. Instead, she lets her fingers resume their work--pressing in slow, careful circles against herself. She can hear the slick slide, the soft wet sound of skin on skin, and her stomach clenches with the near-painful urge to finish. She pauses. 

“Don’t think I told you to stop,” Dani says. Jamie bites down hard on her own lip. Her wrist turns, her fingers rubbing lightly--then harder, her desire sparking hard against Dani’s command. She works the throbbing little bundle of nerves between two fingers, her breath sharp, her free hand searching out Dani’s thigh to dig her nails into denim. 

“Fuck--Dani--I can’t--”

“Can,” Dani corrects. “So good, Jamie. You’re doing so well. Show me how much you can take.”

The words are low, calm, but Dani’s body is beginning to betray her, too; Jamie can feel the way her fingers are driving into Jamie’s hip, can see the tremble in the hand pulling at the shorts. Most of all, she can feel Dani beginning to rock slowly against her, her hips pushing up into Jamie in search of friction of her own. 

“Could be touching you,” Jamie hisses, urged into a better station of control simply by the knowledge Dani wants her to give in. “Could be three fingers deep by now, giving you--”

“You’re giving me exactly what I need,” Dani breathes. Jamie hears her own words coil into a soft moan, her hips beginning to buck. Dani’s fingers squeeze around her hipbone, dragging sharp red marks under the pulled-aside waistband. “Ride it out. Do what I tell you.”

Jamie grits her teeth, every muscle in her body tightening against the urge to lose control. Her hand is quickening, her fingers stroking and slipping and pressing until she’s certain she’s going to break. The friction is too much, every circle drawn tight around herself snapping a little more self-restraint. 

“Longer,” Dani whispers into her ear. She wraps her lips around Jamie’s earlobe, sucking hard enough for Jamie’s eyes to roll back. “Don’t give up on me yet.”

“Please,” Jamie hears herself whine, even as she obediently increases the pressure. “Please, I can’t--”

“Faster,” Dani says. “Come on, be good, be good for me, you’re so--”

She makes a noise, low and desperate, a spark of electricity straight to Jamie’s core. She’s grinding herself against Jamie, her hand gripping hard to Jamie’s hip for purchase. Jamie rubs faster, feeling as though she will lose this game, she will certainly not make it much further, and finding she doesn’t actually care as long as Dani is holding her this way. 

She loses herself in Dani’s voice, Dani saying with the rapid-fire recklessness of staggering toward the edge herself, “Inside. Inside, I want to see--” Dani, pulling the shorts sharply down now, allowing Jamie to spread for herself, watching as Jamie slides two fingers deep, pressing hard with the heel of her hand. 

“So good,” Dani mutters, “so good. Keep going. Make it last. It’s my mouth, imagine it’s my mouth, my tongue you’re riding, god, Jamie--”

Control, thinks Jamie, aware she’s losing it fast, aware there is little left that her body can possibly take even as Dani bites down hard on her shoulder. Imagine, Dani had said, like she isn’t right there, like she couldn’t be shifting Jamie out of her lap, sliding down her body, replacing Jamie’s hand with long, slow strokes of her tongue. 

But that isn’t what Dani wants. This is what Dani wants, to hold Jamie, to watch her finish the work she started wishing Dani could see. Dani knows all too well what this is doing to her; she can feel it in the cant of Dani’s hips, hear it in the sound she’s muffling against Jamie’s shirt. 

“Tell me,” she begs, as her muscles clench around her thrusting fingers. “Tell me, I won’t--I won’t until you--”

“How much,” Dani asks, her voice shaking with effort. “How much do you want it?”

Jamie curses, straining away from the edge. “You know,” she pants. “You know I--”

“How much,” Dani says directly into her ear, her hands digging into Jamie’s hips, “did you want it to be me all along?”

“Always,” Jamie breathes, the word a high, helpless plea. “Always, fuck, from the very start. Please, please, I--it’s you--it’s you--”

“Yes,” Dani agrees. “Show me how it feels.”

Jamie adds a third finger on yes, allowing her body at last to clench and shudder. It’s Dani, she thinks, turning her head and muffling her ecstatic cry against Dani’s neck. She can feel Dani’s grip tightening, pulling at her as Dani spreads further, rocks with sharp, needy thrusts while Jamie’s body chases the height of her orgasm. 

It’s Dani, she thinks again, Dani pushing in deep, Dani riding it out, Dani in control, this is all for--all for--

And then there is no thought at all, nothing but Dani crying out as she squeezes a hand over Jamie’s and feels for herself what she’s done. Nothing left but Dani’s name on her lips as Jamie arches, eyes closed, feeling very much as though she is no longer in possession of a body at all. 

She slumps against Dani, breath coming in short waves, her head clear of anything except the residual electricity from Dani’s fingers threading through her own. She exhales, rolling her eyes to watch Dani’s face. 

“Good show?”

Dani makes a muffled sound a bit like a whimper, her hips still twitching as though out of her control. Jamie shifts with some effort, breaking contact, leaving her rocking against nothing at all.

“You’re still hanging on? Well. That won't do.”

She tugs at Dani’s shirt, catching her in a hard kiss that seems only to draw Dani’s urgency higher. Dani’s hands are scrambling to pull Jamie back into her lap, and Jamie allows herself to be positioned. She lowers herself with a groan, loving the dark marks she’s leaving behind on Dani’s jeans as she presses flat against her tense thigh. 

“Ride it with me,” she insists, pushing her own knee hard between Dani’s legs. Dani’s head thumps back against the headboard, her hand anchored at Jamie’s back, watching with glazed eyes as Jamie provides friction to both of them with each rough grind. 

It’s a graceless thing, and yet, perfectly matched--Dani gripping at her shirt, Dani pushing up into her as she rocks down, and, this time, Jamie finds the force shattering. She’s wrapped around Dani, hands clawing into Dani’s hair, down her back, hips pumping, even as she feels Dani begin the age-old sign of falling apart: Dani, repeating her name as an endless mantra, over and over. 

Control, she thinks, as she’s losing the last of it all over again, as Dani is joining her with a long, shuddering kiss. What little good it does, when it is held too tightly. What little grace it offers, when not shared. 

“I should, ah, call next time?” she breathes as Dani wraps both arms around her, squirming down the bed until they're lying in a sweaty heap. “Maybe just...set up in the back and wait for you to join me?”

Dani laughs. “If you did that, we’d never leave.”

“Perfectly content with never leaving here, either, if that’s how we’re going to play it.” Jamie leans back, reaching down to brush her fingers across the ruined leg of Dani’s jeans. “Made a mess of you.”

“It was mutual,” Dani teases. She closes her eyes, draws in a long breath that turns to a yawn. “How is your head, for real?”

“Good as new. All beasts banished back to whence they came.” Jamie winces, peering at Dani’s face for sign of shutdown, but Dani’s expression is placid. 

“Good. I still think you should start with medicine.”

“Took medicine!” Jamie protests. “Did all the goddamn tricks. Not my fault this works best.”

“I think you just say that,” Dani says, “to get me naked.”

“Well, not doing a good goddamn job of it, am I?” Jamie sits up, gesturing broadly. “Still wearing every last fucking stitch.”

“Mm,” Dani agrees. “Maybe you should...do something about that?”

Jamie is still laughing when Dani pushes her onto her stomach, stretching out almost flush against her back. Her breath catches, something about the press of denim against her bare legs, the way Dani’s sliding the t-shirt Jamie stole from her side of the closet up her back making her feel deliciously undone. The idea of Dani, fully-dressed, pressing her half-naked body into the mattress draws a long shudder through her. 

“Unless you’re tired,” Dani adds, her hand curling around Jamie’s hips, sliding teasingly toward soaked, swollen skin. Jamie groans into the pillow, gripping the sheets in one hand, reaching back for a grasp on Dani’s jeans with the other. Dani’s hand, pushed between damp sheets and sticky skin, strokes her once, testing. She kisses the back of Jamie’s neck, rolling her tongue over the chain of Jamie’s necklace, drawing it between her teeth.  

“This is,” Jamie pants, even as Dani is playing her exactly as she’d watched Jamie work herself over, “exceptionally unbalanced.”

“Then do something about it,” Dani teases, kissing along her shoulder. Jamie, somehow, finds herself quite without the will to fight back. There is nowhere she’d rather be than angling herself toward Dani’s hand, seeking the firm, rough stroke of Dani’s fingers. 

Tonight, she reasons, is Dani’s turn. She’ll turn the tables some other time, when Dani isn’t itching for this exact thing, this exquisite dynamic: when the ability Jamie gives her to tell Jamie exactly what to do, exactly what she needs of her, isn’t the most important gift she could grant. 

Later, she’ll pin Dani to the wall or the counter, tease her until Dani is wild for her. It’s only fair, and Jamie knows it won’t take long at all for the power to change hands again when it’s done. 

“Stay with me,” Dani commands, rocking against Jamie with one authoritative motion even as her fingers sink deep and Jamie gasps. 

“Always,” she promises, feeling luckier than she could possibly explain.  

[joestarsecrettecnique]

I am so very sick and tired of the toxicity that’s been poisoning the snk fandom as of the last couple years. I gave myself time to digest the ending and my feelings on it, before embarking in a journey to debunk many misconceptions and critiques I’ve seen floating in the fandom.

By the way, by no means I think this ending is perfect. I think this is textbook execution by Isayama to tie together every loose end left behind in an orderly manner, and I think that it was a bit rushed and oversimplified. I would’ve wanted more of Eren and Armin’s conversation, more of the squad realizing what his true goal had been, and some narrative choices I don’t 100% agree with. But still, what I saw in other fans’ critiques post 139 frankly appalled me, so I feel the need to make this. Also, this obviously are my own interpretations, I am not Isayama himself lol

“Ew, so Eren did pull a Lelouch after all”

No, Eren did not pull a Lelouch. While his action and the final result may seem similar, I find very different nuances between the two. Lelouch wanted for the whole world to be united in fighting against him, and thus he made himself the world’s greatest enemy. His will to turn himself into a monster was selfless. Eren didn’t give a damn about the world, he had no noble intentions whatsoever. He said it in chapter 122, his goal was to protect Paradis and, more specifically, his closest friends. He turned himself into a monster, killed 80% of human population, and endangered the lives of those very friends he wanted to protect, so that by stopping him, those friends could be safe. Eren had no intentions to break out of the cycle of hatred or unite the world against himself, he just wanted to give his friends a chance to survive, and that is not selfless, it’s selfish. Eren’s goal was incredibly selfish, and biased, and driven by his feelings instead of rationality. Nothing like Lelouch!

Now this, this I myself am not the greatest fan of. I feel like it makes that great scene in chapter 122 loose a bit of its strength, Ymir obeying the king for 2000 years just because she loved him. Honestly, I always thought there was a bit of Stockholm Syndrome going on, but I didn’t think it would be the only reason. However, like it or not, it’s undeniable that it makes perfect sense in the narrative that aot has always strived to tell. Love has been a theme strongly woven in the story, and it also draws a great parallel between Karl Fritz/Ymir and Eren/Mikasa. Ymir was a slave to her love for King Fritz, just like Mikasa was a slave to her love for Eren, in that she struggled to accept reality until the very end despite the atrocities that Eren committed. Ymir stayed bound by her love for King Fritz, until she saw Mikasa break from her own poisoned love, aknwoledge it, and kill Eren despite of it, or maybe because of it. Only Ymir knows that one, heh. But the point is, Mikasa showed Ymir that she could break free of a toxic love, she was that someone that Ymir had been waiting for to finally free her of her burden.

“What? But that makes no sense!”

Now, on my first read, I simply thought that Eren had ordered Dina to avoid eating Berthold, and that he had made her walk down that road unaware that his mother was trapped (because we know that the Attack Titan’s future memories aren’t infallible, there are still gaps), killing her indirectly. I’ve since then read some theories stating that Eren willingly killed his own mum in orther to give kid himself a reason to feel enough hatred to kickstart the whole story. Honestly, I like this version maybe more! But let me explain to you why this is not a plothole, like many people think. In this same chapter, we have Eren explaining how the Founder’s power works in synergy with the Attack’s: “There’s no past or future, they all exist at once”. This means that time travel in aot doesn’t work in a manner where Eren extracts himself from time and space, and from a separate realm he operates on the past. The way I understood it, the mechanics works kind of like Tokyo Revengers’ time travel. MInd you, I only watched episode one, so my understanding might be jackshit.

Spoilers for Tokyo Revengers’ episode one. In the show, the main character loses consciousness and finds himself reliving his past. He interacts with someone in this “new” past, and when he wakes up again in the present, past events had been over-written by the changes he made. I think this is how aot timetravel works, with the exception that, since past and future (and present, of course) all happen at once, side by side, there is no old past to be rewritten, neither a future to return to, and present Eren wouldn’t be aware of the changes that his future self would make. It creates sort of a time paradox, yes, in the sense that there’s a loop where present Eren’s mom has been eaten because future Eren, in the future, operated on the past by causing past Eren’s mom to be eaten, but all these Erens are one and the same, as all timelines exist at once.

“Boo-hoo they ruined Eren’s character, he’s such a wimp!”

I have to confess (isn’t this appalling, that this is a thing that I have to confess, what the actual fuck), I am an Eren stan. I absolutely do not consider myself a Jaegerist, I think Eren’s option was better than Zeke’s, yes, but it was morally wrong and awful and he absolutely was not only in the wrong, but also if he wasn’t dead I’d want him to be punished for his crimes. I didn’t particularly enjoy him pre-timeskip, and I started to like him because I found his evolution fascinating. I wanted to understand his motives, what was going on in his head, he was a puzzle that I wanted to solve. Maybe because I’m a psychologist, who knows. Anyways, if you’re an Eren stan only because he acted like a chad and now you cry his character was ruined, I’m sorry to say, you never understood him. Eren was not a god, he was not a strategist playing 5d chess with perfect rationality, Eren was the same he has always been. He was a young man spun along by his passions. Eren feels things with burning intensity, he lets himself be driven by his emotions. He almost flattened the world because he was disappointed that he and his friends weren’t the only human beings inhabiting it, for fuck’s sake, he’s always been irrational, selfish, and immature. Of course he doesn’t wanna die, of course he want’s to live with all of them. You really expected a 15 year old hot-headed brat to become Thanos after he suddenly found out he killed his own mum and all his dreams had been crushed? Of course he felt conflicted, of course he suffered, of course he wanted to live, “because he was born in this world”. Honestly, when I read his meltdown, I felt relieved that his character hadn’t been turned on its head, it was heartbreaking to see that he really was the same brat he’d always been, that he’d tried to steel himself to do horrible shit for his friends’ sake and that he felt bad about it! It made me appreciate his character a lot more, I felt nostalgic towards the times when I was irritated by his screaming and pouting. Suffice to say, this is also my answer to all those people that believe his internal monologue to convince himself the Rumbling was what he really wanted were bullshit since he “pulled a Lelouch”. How can it be bullshit? Maybe he planned to be stopped, but he also said that he thought he would’ve still done it if they hadn’t. He also said that killing a majority of the population was something that he wanted to do, not a byproduct of the alliance not stopping him early enough, because with the world’s militaries in shambles Paradis would’ve had time to prepare accordingly. Anyways, of course he needed to convince himself to do this awful thing even if he knew he wasn’t gonna succeed completely, can you imagine how horrible it would be to know your only chance is to kill thousands?

I also maybe think it was because of the spine centipede thingy? When Eren says “I don’t know why I did it, I wanted to, I had to”, he gets this faraway look on his face and we get a zoom in on one of his eyes, which is drawn very interestingly and kinda looks like the Reiss’ eyes when they were bound by the War Renounce Pact? So maybe it was also the centipede’s drive to survive and multiplicate that forced Eren to do the Rumbling so that its life wouldn’t be endangered. I don’t know how much I like this, I feel like it takes some agency away from Eren and also makes it feel like he’s not as responsible for the genocide he committed that we initially though, which mhhh maybe not, let’s have him take full responsibility for this. As I said, I’m not defending Isayama blindly, I do have some issues myself with what went down.

“What the fuck, did he say thank you for the genocide?”

Guys c’mon, this is like,, reading comprehension. Yes, it was poorly worded and a bit rushed, but by now you should have full context to make an educated guess on the fact that no, he didn’t thank him for committing a genocide what the fuck you guys. Armin started bringing up the idea that maybe they should have Eren eaten because he was doing morally questionable things ever since the Marley Arc, which for manga readers was like what, 2018? Isayama has been showing for three years how not okay Armin was with Eren’s actions, how could it make sense for him to thank him for a genocide? You see some poorly worded stuff, and your first instinct is to ignore eleven years’ worth of consistent characterization to jump to the worst interpretation possible? Let’s go over this sentences and reconstruct what they mean.

“Eren, thank you. You became a mass murdere for our sake. I won’t let this error go to waste”. Armin recognizes that Eren had no other choice, but does not condone it. He clearly calls it an error, which feels like an euphemism but for all we know the japanese original term used could’ve been harsher. Point is, he clearly states he think what Eren did was wrong. But he recognizes that Eren’s awful doing opened up a path for Paradis to break out of the cycle of hatred. Not a certainty, but an opportunity. He thanks Eren for giving them this chance, and promises not to waste it, even if it was born out of an atrocity. He thanks Eren for sacrificing himself for their sake, even if he doesn’t agree with the fruit of his labor, so to speak. He’s thanking Eren for the opportunity that his actions gave them, not for the actions themselves! Where the hell do you read “thank you for the genocide” guys, sheesh. I’m mad at y’all.

“How could Eren send MIkasa memories if she’s an Ackerman and an Asian, and their memories can’t be manipulated by the Founder? I call plothole!”

Now, here we’re going into speculation territory, so you’ve been warned. I don’t think that that information they gave us was true, about Ackermans being immune to memory manipulation. We know at least that the clan is in some way subject to the Founder’s power, or Mikasa and Levi wouldn’t have been called in the Paths by Eren multiple times. Stories never being entirely true or false, or relativity, better said, has been a strong theme in the story, we know this by Marley’s and Eldia’s different accounts of history compared to the actual Ymir backstory we got. So who’s to say that the belief that Ackermans aren’t manipulable is the truth? Maybe they’re just hard to control, not impossible. We know that by the Founder’s ability Eren experienced past and future happening simultaneously, so he could’ve very well been trying to send those memories into Mikasa’s head ever since the beginning of the story, only just succeeding in chapter 138. It would at least explain Ackerman’s headaches as Eren trying to manipulate their memories and failing. Of course, we’d need Levi side of thing to know for certain, as he had headaches too and we weren’t shown in the chapter if Eren spoke to him in paths like he did with the rest of the squad. We know he didn’t talk to Pieck, but he even went and spoke to Annie who he basically hadn’t seen since Stohess, so I hope he spoke to Levi too. Who knows, maybe he even spoke with Hanji, but she died before she could remember. I wish we were shown that, honestly, I’m sad that it was skipped, especially after Levi said in an earlier chapter that “there was so much he wanted to tell Eren”. Fingers crossed for the anime to expand on it.

“So Historia’s pregnancy was useless”

What? No, it wasn’t useless! Eren told her to get pregnant to save her life, so that she wouldn’t be turned into the Beast Titan. If she became the Beast Titan, then Eren would’ve had to enact the plan with her instead of Zeke, and yeah, Ymir brought the power of the titans with her, so theoretically Titan Shifter Historia would’ve had her time limit removed, but we saw that the only way for the Alliance to stop the Rumbling was killing Zeke, so Historia would’ve had to die. Useless to say, when Eren talked to her about his plan, she was very vocally against it, so I don’t think she would’ve helped Eren with his plan. It was Zeke or nothing, and the only way for Zeke to keep his titan was for Historia to be unable to be turned, hence the pregnancy. Did y’all read the same thing I read? Anyways, she could’ve definitely been handled better, but she wasn’t necessary to the plot anymore, and her being removed from it in such a way was sad, yes, but it made sense.

“They massacred Reiner!”

Yeah, can’t really say anything about this. I definitely understand the sentiment behind this scene, which I appreciate. It’s to show that thanks to his Titan being removed and the times of peace approaching, Reiner was finally able to shed the weight he bore on his shoulders and “regress” to his more carefree persona he had when he thought he was a soldier, instead of a warrior. I am very happy for him, and I think it’s a nice conclusion to his arc, that he’s finally happy, but it could’ve been portrayed in a less comic relief-y way. It just sledgehammers all his characterization. Feels surreal that we saw him attempt suicide a couple month ago in the anime and now he’s sniffing Historia’s handwriting.

Guys, this absolutely sends me. There are people who unironically believe Eren actually reincarnated in a bird? Guys. It makes no sense, it violates every rule that Isayama established for his universe’s power system. How could he even reincarnate in a bird? Guys, c’mon, this is symbolical! Birds have been heavily used in aot to portray freedom, and this is a nice, poetic, symbolic way to show that Eren who lived his whole life chasing freedom and never actually got it, is finally free, like a bird, now that he’s dead. It’s also a pretty explicit nod to Odin, I think. Aot is heavily inspired by Norse Mithology, and I think there were some pretty clear parallels between Eren and Odin/Loki in the later arcs of the story. Eren has been shown to “communicate” through birds like with Falco in chapter 81, or with Armin in chapter 131. Emphasis on “communicate” because again, this is symbolic, I don’t think he actually spoke through the birds, he simply talked to them via paths, but birds are associated with Eren’s character (see also the wings of freedom, y’know?) and the shots were framed so to give the impression that he was talking through the birds, but he wasn’t. Symbolism. Anyway, I really think they were supposed to be a nod to Odin’s crows.

Aaaaand that should be it! Even though I most definitely forgot some other criticism on the chapter, it’s crazy the amount of negativity floating around. Hope I didn’t bore you!

[redantsunderneath]

I’ve Never Seen David Lynch and George Lucas in the Same Room at the Same Time…

The thematic parallels between David Lynch and George Lucas are something I keep coming back to again and again, but their careers and evolution have a lot of overlap too.  They were born in the earliest Boomer cohort (George Lucas in May 1944, David Lynch January 1946) and had experiences growing up that were colored by the idyllic 1950s, but shifted into a distrust of authority structures that was common for many of their age cohort in the 1960s. They both came of age wanting to do something physical with her hands that felt creative to them in large grimy spaces - fixing cars for Lucas, and painting and installations with a fascination with organic materials, industrial metal, and rot for Lynch. They both fell into film because they were looking for something that satisfied their artistic bent (although film was never a primary aspect of her life to that point).  They wound up making a handful of short films over a 3 year period, culminating in a longer short-film that would eventually get them noticed at roughly the same age (Electric Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB [1967] and the Grandmother [1970] for Lynch).

These films netted both of them a patron (Francis Ford Coppola for Lucas, the American Film Institute for Lynch) and started filming their first feature-length film two years after those films.  They both got their biggest name recognition bump by films released in 1977 and pulled away from the power of the studio system in roughly 1984. Famously, Lucas offered Lynch a chance to direct what would become Return of the Jedi in about 1981 ( I prefer the story where Lucas does this by picking him up in a Lamborghini - I’ve heard a phone call version too, but it’s not as perfect) and Lynch answered something like “it’s your movie George, you direct it.” They both spent the mid 80s in movie jail, and although they took very different paths in general after (I’ve been emphasizing the similarities) there are still things that jibe in the history - they both reminded people of what they liked about them with a late 80s movie, spent a lot of the 90s on TV projects, did one project around classic radio, returned to theatrical notice around the millennium, all the while generally keeping their own council and disappointing a lot of fans.

There’s obviously a world of difference. Lucas is a left brained technologist who equated freedom with an owning of the means of production.  Lynch is it right brained impressionist seeing freedom-as no one ever being able to tell you what to do, acting as a solo artist with collaborators who merge with his sensibilities.  Lynch is a production lone wolf, depending mostly on people believing in him and funding him, and losing out in the popular consciousness by making uncompromising art that may not be what the audience wants, meaning funding is sometimes hard to come by. Lucas is like the Democratic party controlling the Congress and presidency - having total power but unable to turn that into what he really wants to make, somehow. The idea of Lynch selling his body of work to Disney is absurd.

But the correspondences in this are telling and help to explain the thematic similarities and divergences.  Plus, the differences often relate to the similarities - Lucas identifies with corrupted controlling paternalistic power as a horror of inevitable capture of the individual by larger structures, while Lynch sees the corrupted masculine influence as an archetype, the call coming from inside the house, agency coopted by a collective taint in the universal pattern .  But on some level these are the same thing - what is this person I am capable of becoming seeing as I am in control but yet not, doing horrific things?  Lucas’ constant commentary on slavery is about hegemony and a systemic oppression he is complicit in, while Lynch has whole pantheons of beings that turn people into vessels that oblate the self and make them act on subconscious programming.  Neither probably think the word neoliberalism too much but tend to communicate similar things about it is almost diametrically opposed ways.  

The thematic similarities are rooted in a few areas that unpack in to a variety of subspaces which overlap – patriarchal structures as psychoanalytic dynamics (more Freudian father fixation for Lucas, Jung for Lynch), boomer generational failure as socio-first-but-economics-ultimately, the artist as in struggle with larger forces (largely of the self), and an eastern religious metaphysics that is American Christian in flavor.   The major line of difference running through this is gender/sex/desire, Lynch being on main with a lot of spiritual overtones of sin, guilt, and “the fall” and Lucas finding this kind of guilt and sin as a secondary phenomenon that is mostly actively suppressed and unconvincing when it shows up; yet both wind up often finding physical consummation at direct odds with art in a gendered creation way (that also links Eraserhead to Age of Ultron and the original Frankenstein). Try doing a psychosexual reading of Howard the Duck sometime.  

Lucas’ developmental through line is this: dude in love with 50’s culture but informed by 60s counterculture makes a movie where the young granola-ish revolutionaries win against the fascists in an effort to rewrite society but, having secured rights for “independent spirit” reasons now finds himself in control of something huge and immediately starts making art about boomer men becoming their controlling fathers and then moves on to movies where powerless freaks are the real focus.  After a creatively fallow period, he comes back to make a sequel/prequel trilogy that is one of the most misunderstood complicated statements about people becoming what they hate as an eternal cycle at the level of the personal, the societal, the political, the spiritual, the artistic, you name it!

Lynch’s developmental through line is this: dude in love with 50’s culture but informed by 60s outsider/art counterculture makes a movie where the young artist struggles with the idea of a regular life, initiated by fatherhood, which attempts to destroy the artistic spark, after which he enters the Hollywood system and makes an artist as freak movie and a movie about plucky rebels conquering space authoritarianism (that the future of is books about that ending in messianic authoritarianism) and then disavows that system.  He then proceeds to make art about subject and object as a supremely gendered thing, in a land that has fallen from grace, moving inexorably towards the idea of eternal cycle at the level of the personal, the societal, the political, the spiritual, you name it!

They both have an idea of the father-artist identified with the abject oppressed, under siege as figure, resentful from being kept from creation, over a career realizing that their “self” is the horrific villain of their own story.  For Lynch, this is psychosexual, then spiritual, with a resisted toxic masculine urge to control and overwhelm, often in a violent way.  It is the artist’s own urges that get in the way of making art, of desiring in the universe that has an unbalanced power structure from some far off echoes of an original symmetry breaking inherent to the archetypal gender dynamic. For Lucas, it is the realization that the artist in control has a tendency to become the controlling dad and sexual relations are inherently problematic in a political and spiritual way.  Real art seems impossible if the artist has control, identifying with the downtrodden is a bit of a lie, happy endings can’t happen not because of the happiness bit because of the ending bit.  For both, there is a fundamental flaw in the cycle, which is patriarchal in nature, but Lynch just approaches this much hornier.

The boomer part probably requires the most discussion, but the TLDR is that they are both are crawling out, through Vietnam, from the 50s social order, and grappling with how badly the 60s idealism failed.  Lucas does this in the prequels as a big canvas critique of how the social revolution was co-opted by the generation not being able to see its own flaws, of not seeing the system taking over again, an Empire calling itself a Republic.  An inability to look in the mirror and really see.  The wisest oldest hippie is the only one who sees what’s happening, but is powerless as his apprentices are inevitably spit out, and the next generation has to be raised not by a skeptic but a true believer in “liberal” “democracy” (cynic quotes theirs).

Lynch is interesting here in that he most directly addresses this only in Twin Peaks, but we see more naked reflections, divorced of contemporary politics, in his other works. In Twin Peaks, Ben Horn is the Palpatine figure, who winds up a sweet old man buying off the harm his life’s work and progeny have produced while ignoring the poor and next generation personally. Jacoby the neutered, fried Yoda that eventually slides into Alex Jones territory (the canonical Boomer ethos in a nutshell – “what me” neoliberalism and change the world ideology going crackpot).  All of Twin Peaks except for Fire Walk with Me is directly socioeconomically generational (Bobby Briggs becomes a young Republican in season 2, the mill, the trailer park), but the other works are full of class issues informed by Lynch’s age.  From Blue Velvet’s suburban kid exploring his darker side by going to the poor part of town through a career of classist low-life encoding (Bob is a denim jacket wearing homeless person, all the covered in grime by the dumpster/trailer park characters, Ronette as the factory floor version of Laura, etc), culminating in Inland Empire and Twin Peaks the Return chronicling the fall of man as partially an (generationally specific in TP) economic fall into a unequal class defined world of needing an opening and leaving the house to labor as where evil is born. TP OS is about how boomers turned out just as bad, the Return is about how we inhabit the world of their ideological blindness.

All filmmakers seem to, at least to a certain degree, bring the question of creation of art directly into their work via distant or close metaphor. In Eraserhead and Elephant Man, Lynch values the spark of art which the downtrodden protagonist is trying not to lose. In Dune, the visionary with a big project that seeks to upend the system (but that we know eventually become something even worse) is a project that fell apart due to studio interference.  Blue velvet is about the act of watching awakening something uncomfortable in us that is incompatible with normie life (it wouldn’t be weird to say it was about porn). Twin Peaks is about television, FWWM about movies, and all at least partially about closure being a death act in art.  Lost Highway is about the artist tortured by desire, Mulholland Drive about desire being central to be eaten alive by the Hollywood system.  Inland Empire is about filmmaking as a way into understanding the world on a deeper level (as is its unofficial sequel Inception) to cure its ills.  All of this is art’s struggle against power, with an element of the major powers being subconscious forces that control us leading to desires that ablate the artistic impulse.

Lucas' projects have over time been about a young upstart independent filmmaker, losing his soul by becoming successful, and becoming the system, man.  He then tries desperately to identify as really not the one in charge, until he admits to what he has become.  He consistently dips back into filmmaking as an adventure or a good fight, but he has to set these in a time period before his birth.  As in Lynch, having a child is equated with not being able to fulfill the kind of artistic destiny, but Lucas goes further in equating it to an excuse for why the powerful artist goes bad and needs redemption.  He had a naïve or-is-it canny motif focused on the short inhuman outsider, often related to music or primitive settings (often with wooden cages) as a recurring thing for a while.  These characters are often wise, or at least no filter tell-it, and are similar to the Elephant Man.  This is a trope, sure, the wise different wavelength other, but there is also an identification of the artist at knowing and right yet impotent and a clue to the author’s metaphysical system.

Lynch is the mainline protestant in upbringing and very much influenced by a kind of proto-eastern religion (you can just say the Vedas for shorthand).  Lucas is not very religious, but was brought up Christian, influenced by Christian symbolism and became interested in world religion as narrative via figures like Joseph Campbell.  Hence, they both gravitate towards some kind of Gnostic Proto Christian, So-Cal zen, Thomas Aquinas “gets” Plato kind of amalgam, which informs their work.  Lynch has veered towards an eternal cycle framework, and the very physics compatible idea of something in the past breaking and causing consciousness/suffering, through which we can achieve joy as a counter only through letting go of the self, and the recurrence of ruptures on all scales demonstrating a fractal pattern of hurt and redemption.  Lucas also sees a big cycle, but it is one more of human existence as narrative that has a tendency to return, with a little bit of Nietzsche and movie eastern spirituality thrown in. Both believe in a recurring pattern that plays itself out in a way that is terrible, but hopeful, as the struggle is where hope derives from.  Both have inherently Christian ideas and symbols in their work but lean back on non-Christian ideas that the Christian ideas have a history with. Lynch has his virgin Mary as the real Christ figure female angels that show up, while Lucas has turnt space Jesus.

Suffice it to say that the tree trial scene in the Empire Strikes Back and the lodge sequences in Twin Peaks are a very good place to start looking for how the two auteurs meet.  Compare Anakin/Luke Skywalker to Mr C, look at the 90s turn they both made, register their seeing the “sleeper must awaken” of fiction being terribly fraught, compare the force vs. the universal field, the way their relationship status and partners carve their work into eras, and their continued existence as mainstream experimental filmmakers. 

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

I bring you an unasked for weird fic about Vetinari and Downey and Patricians and Inhumation. 

A Year, Out of Order

August, it always starts here although this is not the new year it ought to be. There should be a celebration like that Small God’s Eve but Small Mercies Eve or Small Miracles Eve. They do not call the days that allowed Vetinari to become Patrician a revolution or a rebellion or a revolt. A man for subtlety it simply was he was not there then he was. If you blink, you missed it. Like a magician, he knows how things are done with mirrors and smoke. A note in looping handwriting pinned to Snapcase’s jacket is a proto-assassin receipt. “Rate: One Meal at Little Syrrit House and a Lordship in due time.”

But we’re not there yet, though that’s where it starts. Downey has years starting and ending in August which he blames on Vetinari and Vetinari blames it on Snapcase being too well protected before that month and Snapecase is dead so cannot blame it on anyone.

April, brings out Downey’s desire to be outside at all costs. He takes Vetinari with him on his excursions to Hide Park to collect butterflies. His approach is to catch, catalogue then release. The only ones that end up pinned in his little glass boxes are those already dead. Waxing philosophical about the crime of murdering animals and bugs he shows off a pretty grey one to Vetinari. ‘Same kind as this one,’ he points to a sketch of an elegant green butterfly. ‘But due to our city’s miserable pollution issue it’s grey.’

Vetinari, propped against a tree with his books on middle-Klatchian, finds this fascinating. Unable to respond to Downey’s talk on insects he explains the evolution of Klatchian thieve’s slang. Downey says, ‘you’re such a nerd.’ But he’s smiling. Vetinari primly returns to his book. He doesn’t know what to do with Downey’s smile so tucks it away. Such are spring months, Vetinari knows that everything here in his life as it is will not last. It will pass away and become something different. He will not allow himself to be maudlin about it.

Ember, Vetinari points out it will be some time before Downey gets any of his payment but the man’s vicious smile leaves a tumble of unspoken words which Vetinari wishes he hadn’t heard because they speak to a cruelty beneath Downey’s well manicured appearance that discomforts. Stupid lads who chuck apples at you, call you DB, and make puns when they’re feeling awkward aren’t supposed to wear snakeskin under their clothes.

Oh of course he has always known Downey to be capable of cruelty. But he knows there to be a difference between a man’s necessary cruelty and a cruel man. Downey has always been brash, arrogant, stroppy, and mean. But not cruel. The line is thin but Vetinari knows what it looks like when someone crosses over it.

Ick, shortest and coldest month. They don’t speak for a fortnight because Vetinari said something something, oh he isn’t sure what, and Downey is annoyed with him. Downey snaps, ‘one day you’ll figure out how to human but I won’t be here because I’m not waiting for it.’ Vetinari points out that he is a human therefore -- but he can’t finished his sentence because Downey throws his hands up declaring ‘this is exactly it.’

Downey waits a week for an apology but it never comes. He waits another week then stops waiting. What was it that DB said to annoy him? He can’t remember. Such a clever man is DB, such a wicked smart man. Downey has little issue with DB being eons smarter than him, he only asks for some margins of humanity around the edges of cold machine that is DB. He says, ‘I know there’s something like warmth in you. Stop pretending to be something you’re not. I know you too well, it won’t work on me. Maybe it will when you’re Patrician. Maybe when you’re Patrician you’ll fossilize. But you’re not yet so spare me your performativity.’ He doesn’t say how much he adores DB’s theatrics. More than that he adores DB’s stillness.

Sektober, Soulcake Duck Night comes and goes. Someone leaves a chocolate orange by Vetinari’s bookshelf in his room which is something that shouldn’t happen so he sends a note to Downey. Downey replies, ‘I’ve not poisoned it, in case you were wondering.’ Vetinari hadn’t wondered but now he does. Downey says all sorts of things, always has done since they were students together. Vetinari firmly believes that he must lock the door to the room in his mind where Downey sometimes rents space.

He hasn’t decided where he is going to sleep in the palace. Everything is moth-filled, little grey feathery bodies murdered with brooms as they emerge from closets and chests. The servants are tenacious. When Snapcase died he left an awfully large stain in the Oblong office floor, one that takes a month to get out and even then the memory of it remains. Vetinari considers his office to be a highly controlled environment but trust Downey to be the cause of the one piece of disorder that exists. Workers had to strip and restain the wood so summer ended with workmen cluttering up Vetinari’s new office. He didn’t mind, though he sent their bills to Downey who sent them back unpaid because when has Downey ever paid?

June, Downey knocks on Vetinari’s door. ‘I’ve got something for you. For when you’re the man in the castle.’ ‘It’s a palace, Downey.’ ‘Whatever, here.’ It’s a small journal with segmented pages. Downey explains that it’s a diary but you get to write in the dates so one day can be two pages, if necessary. ‘You can start it whenever you need to,’ he continues. ‘So you know, if it all happens and you’re up in the hot seat at an odd time to buy diaries.’

It is odd, having someone other than Madam know his plans. He doesn’t like it. Mostly because it means Downey wants to be helpful because Downey says, ‘you’re mad as a hatter, Dog-botherer, so there’s no way that position is going to make you more mad than you already are.’ It’s said earnestly and desperately. Vetinari wishes Downey had never said it because it told him too much about what Downey wishes to never witness and never have to do. Vetinari says, ‘if I go the way of Snapcase you’ve my permission to put me out of my misery.’ Downey’s face is painful to look at.

March, a very wet month. Downey finds a dog about to be put in the Ankh by a miserable youth. He roughs the youth up and keeps the dog. ‘He’s going to be large,’ he proudly says as the dog puts his muddy paws all over Vetinari’s clean room. ‘But he’s clearly a dumb thing,’ Downey continues with evident affection. ‘Dumb as a doorknob aren’t you?’ The dog pants up at them stupidly. Vetinari suggests a classical name for the creature but Downey won’t have it. He knows Vetinari only suggested it because he thought it something Downey would go for. ‘His name is Wilber. Wilber the Fierce.’ Vetinari looks up at the ceiling and Downey thinks it a sweet way of laughing.

Wilber turns out to be some form of mutt. A mix of all the big Ramtop hounds with something of a shepherd in him. Downey likes to tell Vetinari how he is progressing in his training. Downey could talk about Wilber for hours. Vetinari says, ‘you’re terribly keen on this. It’s worse than your penchant for discussing fungi at length. I dread the day you become a father.’ To which Downey says in his caustic manner, ‘me? A father? Never. I teach, I already have kids. They’re all monsters.’

December, brings a late first snow to the city. The first Hogswatch of Vetinari Patricianship is uncertain. Everyone looks at him differently - not just a ‘you’re in power’ manner but a ‘we’re looking for your sanity’ manner. To make sure he still has it. To make sure it’s not about to scarper off somewhere else. To make sure he’s not becoming Snapcase. Vetinari never expected such searching looks to bother him and they don’t. (Mostly.) When it’s Lord Rust, Lord Venturi, Mr. Slant, Dr. Cruces it doesn’t bother him. It’s Hogswatch Eve at Guild Hogswatch Dinner when Downey does it. And Vetinari decides it doesn’t bother him. What does Downey’s opinion matter? It doesn’t. So Vetinari casts the scrutiny and all the layers within it aside.

And there are many ways to cast aside unimportant things. Vetinari has become like the old legend of the Fisher King. There is much to put right in his land. Ineffective and fearsome city officials to dislodge. It’s a cleaning of house, you take the carpets to the backyard and beat them. Watch the dirt come loose and blow away. He has not spoken to Downey in person since ascending to this high office. The highest in the land since the Kingship hardly counts anymore. It is strange to not have that man leering at him saying things like, ‘what’s that Dog-botherer? Cat got your tongue?’ Then laughing.

May, what is there to say about May?

Spune, Downey has not seen Vetinari since the Ascension to the hot seat of Patrician. It’s been a month. Dr. Cruces seems miserable about the entire situation which is something, at least. Downey is generally pleased when Dr. Cruces is upset. Things that upset Dr. Cruces that Downey has decided he loves includes, but is not limited to, the following: spearmint ice cream, the new fashion for students of brightly coloured stockings beneath their uniform breeches, Klatchian horses, silver bells, Genuan aguadente aged 15 years in oak, Brindisi vinho verde, reports written in blue ink instead of black, Vetinari as patrician.

‘I don’t understand why this pleases you,’ Dr. Cruces says after a fruitless guild meeting. ‘Vetinari hates you.’ Downey says with great equanimity, ‘but he would never let that cloud his judgement which is more than can be said for you.’ Downey does not say that Vetinari rarely hates. He can be annoyed by things, disgusted even. But hate? That’s an emotion you really have to work to earn. Things Vetinari hates that Downey knows of includes, but is not limited to, the following: Mimes, wind and reed instruments, disordered filing, uneven wall decorations, asparagus.

February, Vetinari contemplates the future. He knows it will be within this year that he will become Patrician and the air is tense with potential. The city roils and writhes in the electricity that proceeds storms. People brush against each other, look at each other with meaning, they know there is something coming. But what? Vetinari asks Downey if he ever particiapted in any of the rebellions and uprisings against Snapcase to which Downey said, ‘oh, you know.’ Vetinari replies, ‘no, I don’t know, which is why I’m asking.’ Downey smiles, pats his cheek, and says it’s in the past.

Vetinari wonders how best to make it clear to Downey that when the man inevitably becomes head of the Assassins’ Guild Vetinari will expect a certain protocol from him. There will be no calling him “Havelock” or leaning on their past amiableness for favours. It doesn’t occur to him that Downey doesn’t require such a talk until years later when Vetinari will think, ‘oh, he’s the only one other than the Commander who hasn’t tried to call me Havelock.’

Grune, what does Downey want as payment? ‘Take me to that new Klatchian place, Syrrit House or whatever it’s called. And I want to be a lord. Lord Downey has a nice ring to it.’ Vetinari says he will see what he can do. They talk about payments and methods and old school fellows and former Patricians and strange little memories from their youth and everything that isn’t right in front of them which is the Patrician’s palace. It dominates the Ankh-Morpork skyline. Vetinari can see everything slowly settling into place. He says, ‘August. It’ll be in August.’

August, Downey shows up saying he has an appointment with Vetinari. He stands where the invisible stain of Snapcase resides. His boots on the wood that he had dirtied a year ago. Vetinari says, ‘messy inhumations were never your thing. You prefer clean and delicate.’ Downey agrees but assures Vetinari that were he to ever inhume him it wouldn’t be embarrassing. It’d be tasteful, a poison, he wouldn’t be shamed.

Downey asks, ‘you ever think about doing something else?’ Vetinari thinks for a long time. So long Downey fidgets and the clock in the hall can be heard through those oak doors and Wonse’s quill scratching on parchment is a feint noise.

At length Vetinari says slowly, ‘I have. Once upon a time. But I was a different person and the world was a different place and the people in my life were different than they are now.’ 

‘Where would you be now, if you weren’t patrician?’ 

‘Downey,’

‘Dog-botherer?’ 

Vetinari opens his mouth then closes it. Downey’s smiling that smile that still sits in Vetinari’s pocket. The one he never knows what to do with because it’s a rare, sudden thing he only gives to certain people. 

‘Don’t let me detain you.’ 

Downey’s smile continues, ‘fine, fine. Be mysterious. I’ll see you next year. Don’t go mad in my absence. August is a fine month for anniversaries.’ 

[zinecuntroll]

3 decades of Queer Women making Herstory through Music

Written for Pink Washed Zine issue #3

by Raquel Silva aka Raquel Smith-Cave

             I turned 30 this year, more precisely last August and it’s also been 12 years since I had my first girlfriend. When I started thinking about my queerness more seriously back in 2005/2006 I quickly realized how it wasn’t that usual for girls to be fascinated by Linda Perry in boxer shorts and combat boots like I was at 5 years old. My mom says 4 Non Blondes “What’s up” was my favorite song back then and she even bought the CD so I could listen to it on repeat and not just wait for the video to magically appear on the TV. Thanks Ma!

              Through my teenage years I had “Baby Can I Hold You” by Tracy Chapman constantly playing in my head. Mind you, I always have a song in my mind and I burst into singing at the most unexpected times, it’s mostly an unconscious act which can be embarrassing in front of people who don’t know me well. Honestly I  don’t care much, it’s just a part of my nature and if I’m not murmuring or humming some melody it usually means there’s something wrong. So at around 15/16 I remember starting to sing the chorus for “But you can say baby…” out of nowhere in school breaks or while walking home. This happened constantly and exactly why my brain was stuck with this melody was a complete mystery to me. Maybe I heard it in passing or on the radio…? I could never find the answer but I did buy Tracy’s self-titled vinyl this year during Record Store Day and discovered it was released exactly 30 years ago. It’s a precious record, her voice is warm and familiar and her guitar is so soothing to the soul. I think I finally answered my teenage self on all that musical haunting.

             Cássia Eller is a Brazilian artist who made the 90s a really wholesome, magical, golden time for every lesbian in love with husky voices. Her hit song “Malandragem” was part of this series called Malhação but I only found out she was the mystical singer behind that iconic childhood tune years after listening to it on the show. She tragically died in 2001 and even after that she still created major impact in society, when her longtime girlfriend won custody of their son, after battling against Cássia’s father who had never cared about his daughter until money was involved. Cássia was a shy person who became a complete lion on stage. Humble and almost too pure to handle the hype. She just wanted to sing to people and exorcise her demons while making others happy. Which she did and so much more. Her legacy is tremendous, as it still resonates with so many of us today and the world hasn’t really witnessed anyone quite as ingenious as her ever since.

               It’s 2007 and I’m watching a live concert in a Portuguese music festival on TV featuring a wild ass singer with the screaming voice of my wildest grrrl dreams. It’s The Gossip! And Beth Ditto is rolling around the stage, singing her lungs out in front of a pretty chill crowd. I wanted to BE THERE. I probably discovered Gossip’s music through CSS who I was obsessed with at the time or probably from watching The L Word. The truth is: the more intrigued I was by the words of this fat, dyke, goddess the more comfortable I felt about my own identity. I was fat for most of my childhood and got bullied for it on a regular basis, just part of being in an all-girls catholic school life I guess. At 13 someone called me “Fufa” which is basically “Dyke” in Portuguese and it was the most traumatic experience ever. Years later I wish I could have thanked the girl who bullied me out of a closet I wasn’t even aware I was in. I don’t believe I was ever in the closet though. Honestly, falling in love with a girl was just as natural as having crushes on boys. It was just another question I had finally found an answer for. Beth Ditto’s pride in her queerness and blatant attraction to butch people while being a proud femme, fat, dyke made me feel represented in a way I hadn’t seen myself before and ok with my own desires. Ditto!

                The first glance of The L Word I watched I didn’t really enjoyed. The image was dark and the plot seemed so tragic. It was Jenny somewhere in the first season. After one year I finally watched the whole 2 or 3 seasons that were out by then. Tegan and Sara play in one episode and are featured in the soundtrack, which I still go back to sometimes to remember really great tunes. What a blessing to have Tegan and Sara guide you through your first acid trip and “coming out of that closet” am I right Dana? (RIP) My love affair with Canadian people started right there with Tegan’s goofiness and Sara’s witty remarks. By 2007 “The Con” came out and became a staple to the LBGTQ+ community. So much so that the band released a special covers album last year, with many queer artists recreating those magnificent songs. In the records that followed their sound was purposefully re directed to more pop melodies which I couldn’t relate to anymore. They did make good use of their huge platform by launching the Tegan and Sara foundation, which fights for LGBTQ girls and women all over the world with the help of some amazing queer people.

                 The other tiny Canadian who owns my heart is Ellen Page. Ever since Juno, my gaydar was just screaming out loud in every direction possible and I’m so happy that she is now able to be herself freely. Just like Juno, my musical top 3 included Patti Smith and Iggy Pop… but not The Runaways. For me it’s actually Nick Cave. I never gave too much attention to The Runaways, though I knew about Joan Jett and her extremely queer badass persona from being a teenager obsessed with punk rock and riot grrrl herstory. Until Kristen Stewart got cast to play Joan for The Runaways movie and I finally listened to their 70s records. I fell in love with Kristen and Dakota’s version of “Dead End Justice” as well as the original. Gaystew was born to play that part. Just last week I saw Bad Reputation, a documentary about Joan’s life with lots of awesome people speaking about how incredible she is, as both a pioneer for women in rock’n roll and an advocate for human and animal rights. At 60 she’s still rocking the fuck out of leather pants, inspiring kids to start bands, making everyone smitten by her confidence and flipping the finger to the all the hypocritical social definitions of gender, sex and music.

                It’s really difficult to write about Janelle Monáe. Not because I don’t have words but mostly because I have too many. Janelle caught my eye and ears with “Tightrope” where she’s prancing around wearing her uniform, as she proudly used to talk about her suit, an homage to her working class parents and Kansas City upbringing. I saw her live at the end of 2010, at a winter festival, where all my other friends went on to watch Sting’s daughter I Blame Coco and I stood front row waiting for Janelle. It was life changing. She danced, jumped, screamed and even painted something into a blank canvas throughout the whole set. Her band was impeccably orchestrated and the show was extremely cinematic, since many of Janelle’s inspirations are from sci-fi movies. Her music is layered and complex just like her personality. Over the years she has been extremely mysterious, one of the things I appreciated the most about her. This year that changed. After much speculation in the media, she said in an interview she’s pansexual, as someone who has had relationships with men and women, that’s how she identifies more comfortably. Above all she’s an artist with a very specific vision and talent, carving the path for Afrofuturism; to create space for black people but especially queer POC to conquer over the systematic racism, lack of opportunities and prejudice in our society. Her new record “Dirty Computer” is the materialization of that evolution, the most “Janelle” album ever. Covering everything from sexual freedom to political issues while using a pop funky beat. Reminiscing one of her heroes, Prince, who became a friend and mentor before passing away in 2016. And all I want for 2019 is to be in the same room as Janelle and take on another voyage dans la lune with all the other androids.

                 Annie Clark has also played around with the idea of being an alien or a cyborg, especially on her self-titled album from 2014. That’s when I saw her live for the time and I had to give into my friend’s obsession with her music. Last year St. Vincent released “Masseduction”, an almost perfect record, in my opinion. The song with the same title is most definitely an anthem for our generation “I can’t turn off what turns me on…” and after a long relationship with model/actress Cara Delevingne or that summer fling with Kristen Stewart, it was clear, Annie is queer. (Pun so intended) While songs like “New York” or “Los Ageless” can be associated to both of those relationships, Annie’s talent as an exquisite guitar player, fearless innovative sounds and unique live shows, have made her the intergalactic rock Goddess of our queer dreams.

                 Widely inspired by Annie Clark is my next musical Queeroe. Mackenzie Scott aka Torres. There’s something about debut albums that I really love and Torres self-titled LP from 2013 is definitely in my top favorites list. It’s really fucking sad music with raw emotion, as you can hear in “Honey”, “Jealousy and I” or “When Winter’s over”. Her second album “Sprinter” showed a very exciting evolution in her sound but it’s “Three Futures” from 2017 that encapsulates Mackenzie’s desire towards experimenting with her sexuality in a more explicit way. As seen in the video for the first single where she takes on gender roles as both feminine and masculine characters who are living the dreadful “American Dream”. Plus the cover picture for that record is her staring at a semi naked woman on a pole, marking 2017 as very gay year for music.      

                Laura Jane Grace’s voice first made waves through my ears because of the collab Against Me! did with Tegan Quin back in 2007 for the single “Borne On The FM Waves Of The Heart”. The song didn’t stick to me that long and although I had heard Against Me! was my kind of band I never took the time to really listen to them. Until 2014, when “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” was released and it rapidly became one of the most important records of my life. I started watching many interviews with Laura Jane about the struggles of coming out as a trans woman in this fucked up world, specifically while being part of the punk scene, where there’s not much space for anything other than toxic masculinity. I related to Laura’s journey and with every single lyrics on “True trans soul rebel” since it felt like the most authentic punk anthem I had heard in a while. I went to their first ever gig in Portugal in 2015 and screamed as much as I could surrounded by my family of misfits, all wearing black and their heart tattoos on their sleeves. I dug into Against Me! discography but other than the single “I was a teenage anarchist” which I already knew, nothing got me hooked as much as “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” did. Laura Jane’s name is very much appropriate, for her Grace is felt through her screams as much as her written words, something I found fascinating while reading her auto biography: “Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout”. I loved every page of it, with original diary pieces, she takes us on a wild precious ride from her childhood and family issues to all the drama in the music industry or the tribulations of managing a band in this time and age. There’s really nothing more punk rock than being yourself and Laura Jane does it with so much effortless coolness and Grace.

            I tried not to listen to Courtney Barnett for months. I had seen the hype around her but didn’t feel quite ready to embark in that journey and my queers did I regret it… She played at Primavera Sound Porto in 2015 and I started listening to her on loop only weeks after that. The heartbreaking part is that I was also at that festival. The good part is that she came back in 2016 to another festival in Lisbon and I was there just for her (and Father John Misty). Which felt like the stars had aligned with my musical desires. She’s unapologetically herself but not in the way that you would say so about Cardi B for example. She’s wickedly smart with her words and unexpectedly brutal with her chords, right before she opens her mouth she looks like the sweetest person you will ever meet and after you are transported to her own island, full of genius puns, sarcastic inputs about daily life or the state of the world. My favorite verse is from “Pedestrian at best” and I almost got it tattooed… “Give me all your money and I’ll make some origami honey”. Which to me roughly translates to: Fuck Capitalism! She’s also very open about her long term relationship with her wife and fellow musician Jen Cloher, making them the ultimate indie rock’s queer power couple.

                 2016 was the darkest year of my life. I stopped listening to music for months, stopped sleeping and my panic attacks would strike me even if I was in the middle of a busy street. It was scary to lose myself in such dark thoughts but then one day I listened to Shura’s song “Too shy” and felt like a little bit of me was alive again. Her debut album “Nothing’s real” came out around that time and her lyrics for the title song were exactly what I felt through my depression. In this song she is writing about her own experience with a panic attack that makes you feel like dying. And they do. “Too Shy” is a beautiful tune about unrequited love because you are simply too fucking shy to ever go for it and ask your crush on a date. Being shy and anxious almost always go hand in hand, as an awkward, quiet, weird introvert myself, discovering Shura’s songs and story gave me hope and made me gather the lost pieces of my own identity, leaving all the pain, shame and constant anxiety behind. Music really is medicine for the soul.

                 Julien Baker also has one of the best debut albums I’ve ever heard. Personally, it’s very special because it marks the beginning of my current relationship, as my girlfriend surprised me with Julien’s “Sprained Ankle” vinyl just weeks after we started dating. That vinyl did not leave my record player for the last months of 2016 and whenever I listen to it now, I am instantly transported to that moment in time. I was finally getting back on my feet and everything was falling into place, Julien’s gigantic voice echoed my natural melancholy, embracing my demons with a new found strength.  I’ve seen her twice, both times a very out of body experience and had the pleasure to let her know how much her music has helped me. We hugged, talked and she even has the zine I make (CuntRoll) in her living room table because she likes it so much. She is someone I could definitely see myself hanging out in my group of friends and that’s what I love the most about this new generation of artists, who aren’t trying to be something they’re not for the sake of money or exposure. They embrace who they are and let the world decide if they wanna take it or leave it. And that’s exactly what we need right now, to accept and embrace people for who they are and the art they make. So we can all to the same in our own lives.

                 “Yeah I’ve got it I’m a man now…” are the verses that got stuck with me for weeks after listening to Christine and The Queens single “iT”. Yes, the capital T is on purpose as it represents testosterone, the hormone used by many Trans AFAB people to start the process of becoming more themselves. This androgynous handsome French creature original name is Heloise and since her worldwide success with her first record “Chaleur Humaine” she has shredded so many stereotypes through her music, her dancing and her style. I hate comparing artists but some people call her “ the French Michael Jackson” for a reason. My chin dropped while watching her cover for Beyonce’s “Sorry” which she transformed into her own song like it’s nobody’s business (please go watch it asap). This year she blessed as with her second LP just called “Chris” inviting the world to be a little bit closer to her. Chris is her nickname and presents us with a new image for Heloise, embracing her masculine vibe more than ever before, with short hair, loose clothing and talking proudly about queer issues in many interviews. The video for the single “5 dollars” is the epitome of gender fucking and the reason why I am even gayer now tbh.  (You should watch that also!) The future is genderqueer.

                 I stayed away from the hype of “Girls like Girls” back in 2015 because I’m mostly suspicious of pop artists using gay stories to go with the trend of pink washing, ie Katy Perry “I kissed a girl” is a fucking jam but also really fucking problematic, coming from a cis het white female who has no idea the struggles of being queer. Hayley Kiyoko is most definitely not one of those artists though, as she has slowly but certainly become the Lesbian Jesus we’ve all been praying for. With “Curious” she let us know there’s a new fucking boss in town and she’s so fucking gay. What a time to be alive, 20gayteen is real and we are here to witness it all. Hayley’s not the greatest singer in the world, but she uses the best of her skills to give voice to all the kids who struggled with feeling alienated because they couldn’t fit in anywhere. She creates videos which are more like short stories, where she not only acts, but also writes and directs with her own team, never compromising her vision to tell the stories she wants to tell. Stories that resonate with so many queer people and we all know how important representation is, especially coming from an authentic source. To have such a person in the mainstream is what Tegan and Sara were thriving for a few years ago but the result wasn’t very genuine, something that doesn’t happen with Hayley’s songs. Her album “Expectations” doesn’t have big hits, other than “Feelings and “Curious” but it’s the debut album of someone with a huge potential and vision to take up the space for ourselves to tell our own stories and no one else.

                Linn Da Quebrada is the musical Goddess of the moment. Eloquent, inspiring, caustic, no one is left indifferent after listening to her. And that's exactly what she wants, to leave us on our tiptoes waiting to be carried away by words of pleasure, empowerment, trans feminism and especially so much self-love. Each verse is a lyrical genius clapback in the face of this transphobic, sexist and racist society. Prejudices that kill so many queer people of color in Brazil every year. Her existence is transforming, rewriting the HERSTORY of the world and of her country, through the re-appropriation of funk, where SHE finally gets to be the protagonist of her own story and that courage surpasses linguistic or cultural barriers. In 2017 she released her first album “Pajubá” after a very successful crowdfunding campaign and also has her own documentary called “Bixa Travesty” which has gathered accolades through many film festivals around the world. The song “Bixa Preta” is a fucking iconic anthem for 20gayteen and for all of my maricones family out in the world fighting everyday for our existence to be respected.

We will NEVER be erased.

[phoenixfire-thewizardgoddess]

Comic Series to Read (Pt3)

+ALTERS by Paul Jenkins & Leila Liz

As the world struggles to accept the emergence of a new kind of human species known as alterations, or "Alters," a young woman must navigate the path to becoming her true self, while struggling with the complications of her civilian life and the responsibilities of her newfound power. This groundbreaking series - years in the making - begins the saga of a young woman who can only really be herself... whenever she is not herself.

Fascinating view of the world through the eyes of someone who is not only hiding their secret hero abilities, but also that she IS a she. I really enjoy this book, and all the little details that unfold the more you read on.[Trans!protagonist, violence, disabled character(s), general death and mayhem, superpowers, a few unfortunate slurs, etc.]

.

+GENERATION ZERO by Fred Van Lente & Francis Portela

Years ago, the children of the experimental strike team known as Generation Zero were taken from their families by Project Rising Spirit, a private weapons contractor, and raised to be psychic soldiers. After years of taking orders, they have fought for and won their freedom. Now, the world's most wanted teenagers have pledged to protect each other tooth and claw, while using their extraordinary abilities to right wrongs for a generation without a future... To fight for kids, just like them. One of those kids is Keisha Sherman, whose boyfriend just turned up dead after a suspicious car crash in Rook, Michigan - a newly booming tech town that sprang from rags to super-riches seemingly overnight. When Keisha makes a desperate plea into her webcam, the local high school suddenly finds itself with several unusual new students... But as word of Generation Zero's presence spreads rapidly through the halls, this volatile band of teenage upstarts is about to discover that they're far from the most extraordinary thing lurking behind Rook's stainless-steel facade...

This is one of those stories where you THINK you know what will happen, but surprise, you’re fucking wrong, it’s waaaaaaaaay better and also, way worse than you imagine. What they come to save the town from is something that takes far bigger than you can even comprehend... 

[MH/disabled protags, violence, deaths, etc.]

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+ECLIPSE by Zachary Kaplan & Giovanni Timpano

Imagine if sunlight burned you alive. In the near future, a mysterious solar event has transformed the sun's light into deadly immolating rays. The world's few survivors now live in nocturnal cities. But a killer emerges who uses sunlight to burn his victims, and when he targets the daughter of a solar power mogul, it falls to a disillusioned solar engineer to protect her.

Actually really, really liked this one. The effortless world-building and the degree of chaos instilled by the whole world going to, literal hell. And it’s not... far-fetched, not really. I mean, in Aus it was super fucking hot three years in a row, like, unusual even for us hot... it’s that hint of ‘maybe future’ that draws you in and the story traps you. [Violence, murder, immolation, drugs/alcohol use, etc]

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+COPPERHEAD by Jay Faerber, Ron Riley & Scott Godlewski

Welcome to Copperhead, a grimy mining town on the edge of a backwater planet. Single mom Clara Bronson is the new sheriff, and on her first day she'll have to contend with a resentful deputy, a shady mining tycoon, and a family of alien hillbillies. And did we mention the massacre? Questions swirl around not only the murder mystery, but around Sheriff Bronson herself. What brought her to a place like Copperhead? Is she running from something? Or towards something?

It feels like you want to like and hate the characters, because they feel a little too realistic; the situations may be in space and crazy alien nonsense, but some things remain the same. Definitely felt a bit slow to begin with, but it all made sense in context the more I read... [Violence, Surgery, Death, Big Spooky Bullshit Aliens, etc.]

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+TREES by Warren Ellis & Jason Howard

Ten years after they landed. All over the world. And they did nothing, standing on the surface of the Earth like trees, exerting their silent pressure on the world, as if there were no-one here and nothing under foot. Ten years since we learned that there is intelligent life in the universe, but that they did not recognize us as intelligent or alive.

Okay, so that’s vague. Consider this, ten years ago, aliens dropped some gigantic cylinders on earth in strategic places, humanity called them ‘trees’; they don’t talk to us, we’re fleas to them, nothing alive or worth noting. Occasionally, a tree floods green sludge that annihilates everything around it. The world is broken by them.

You follow a handful of different stories that all seem to meld together somehow. Follow a research team in the ice; a young painter who finds himself in the shadow of the china tree; a young woman who seizes control of her little world through the fear the trees elicit, etc. You never know what will happen.

I, personally, loved it; but that’s just me. can’t wait for volume 3, though. [LGBPTA+ characters, violence, alien trees, gangs, violence, murder and cruelty, etc.]

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+THE EMPTY by Jimmy Robinson 

Tanoor is a hunter struggling to feed her village in an apocalyptic world of poison and decay, but Tanoor finds hope when she discovers a stranger named Lila who has the ability to grow life from death-a power that could change the world of The Empty.

You know, when I first saw the artstyle, I was a little put off because I thought it was just someone exaggerating features for the hell of it; but you know what, the more you read, the more you realise how and why they are like that. How evolution shaped them, because of the world they had come from, and survived in.

Basic story summary? Tanoor, badass lady hunter trolling through the emptiness to find food for her asshole people, lead by foolish elders too afraid of their own shadow to take chances.  Lila, a different kind of being, ends up in the Empty and finds Tanoor; that’s when the fun really begins as they try to reverse the terrible poisoning that has created such a toxic, barren world. It was pretty engaging; can’t wait to see what volume 2 will bring, bc you really do get invested in the characters. [Violence, Death, Wasteland, Xenophobia, etc.]

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+ZODIAC STARFORCE by Kevin Panetta & Paulina Gancheau

They're an elite group of teenage girls with magical powers who have sworn to protect our planet against dark creatures . . . as long as they can get out of class! Known as the Zodiac Starforce, these high-school girls aren't just combating math tests. They're also battling monsters--not your typical afterschool activity! But when an evil force from another dimension infects team leader Emma, she must work with her team of magically powered friends to save herself--and the world--from the evil Diana and her mean-girl minions!

Sounds like just another Sailor Moon style magic girl team, and that’s pretty much the mindset I went into it with; but yeah, I was wrong. Honestly it surprised me, really loved them.

And the villain is so fucking relateable, sure she’s doing a Bad, but ther reason behind it makes sense. At least half of you would take the same chances and fuck up too. Not justifying her shit, but really, you get WHY.  Love the zodiac force though, so damn cute and silly and ridiculous. [LGBPTA+ protags, girl power, violence, chaos, etc.]

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[capamerica081-blog]

Insight In Sci-Fi (1)

Hey all!

This is my first ever blog post and I'll be honest, I really don't know exactly what I'm doing. I figured I'd give it a whirl and let come what may.

I'll preface by saying I grew up a huge fan of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Stargate, and have since included both Marvel and DC comics into my sphere of interests. And of course, the thing that drew me in as a kid was the fantastic visuals of all of these worlds. From lightsabers to Borg cubes to city ships, I snorted it all like a cocaine addict. However, as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that a lot of the genius behind some of these works was in the subtle moral lessons that were instilled in me. Although I credit my parents with giving me a good upbringing and teaching me good morals, it was these sci-fi stories I loved so much that helped solidify moral compass. So I may digress in some of my future posts, but for this one I want to talk about a single Star Trek episode and the moral dilemma presented in it.

I was about 10 when I started watching and collecting Star Trek Voyager on DVD. My dad and I would watch an episode a day after school, which is kinda how we would bond. My mom, on the other hand, really couldn't care less about anything to do with science fiction. Nevertheless, she loved me and wanted to try to share my interests, so one night she agreed to watch an episode with me. I chose one I figured she would like: Distant Origin, Season 3, Episode 23. It wasn't violent, had a fascinating story, and didn't require any previous knowledge of the show. For those of you who haven't seen it, I'll give a quick recap:

Voyager encounters a super advanced race called the Voth. These reptiles are more advanced than any other race they've encountered, and have created a "Doctrine" that highlights their supremacy across history. Then one Voth archaeologist finds evidence that despite what "Doctrine" states, it turns out that the Voth are from a distant planet, and that they have genetic similarities to humans. Long story short, they're dinosaurs that escaped Earth and evolved in space. Boom. But when the archaeologist tries to tell his people, the political leaders give him an ultimatum: shut up and stop your research or we kill the humans. He decides to stop his research.

So like I said, good episode and worth the watch, but what threw me for a loop was what happened after my mom and I finished the episode. She looked at me and asked, "So do you think he was right to do what he did?"

REALLY, MOM?! YOU'RE GOING TO GIVE ME PHILOSOPHY HOMEWORK ON A STAR TREK EPISODE AT 10 YEARS OLD?!?!

I don't remember what answer I gave her then, but I've spent years pondering that question, and once I became more aware of politics and the world at large I realized what moral issue the episode was tackling. Evolution, climate change, basically all science that is so radical in its implications that it affects political decisions. You see, it didnt matter whether the Voth political leadership believed the archaeologist's solid evidence, and as a kid I didnt understand that. I thought they were just being, and I quote, "meany butts". If the origin of the species really was different from "Doctrine" stated it to mean, that would mean that everything about "Doctrine" was open to reexamination, including the right of the powerful to be in positions of power.

The issue with having a written history that doubles as a rule book for society is that our knowledge of history is imperfect. The uncovering of history is through archaeology, archaeology is a science, and the basic tenet of science is the acceptance and comfortability that we dont know everything. So, if your rules for society are based on a history set in stone, eventually new evidence will spring up that challenges that history, and then the rules that are tied to that history are going to be questioned as well. And if those rules say that "So-and-so's family is to rule over the land" then that family is in danger of losing their power.

Here in the real world, these are heavily prescient issues. Evolution vs. Creationism being the most poignant. Although scientific evidence throughout the last 150 years shows evolution to be an active and essential part of biology, there are those who dispute it as an "unproven theory" and that religious doctrine (yes, I'm deliberately highlighting the similarities) is the truth. Dont get me wrong, I'm not anti-religion, I think that it serves as a valuable community and overall spouts powerful beliefs about how we should live our day to day lives. But for leaders to stick to the history presented in it as literalism, even after being confronted with factual evidence that suggests otherwise can be dangerous for society.

So to bring it back, I'll say this. Yes, Mom, I do believe that the archaeologist was right to bury his research to save 150 people, but only because it was just him. Had he been leading a movement, the issue would've been different, but hey, I didnt write the episode.

Anyways, that's my take on that. I'll go ahead and post on something different next time! If you all have suggestions of another topic I can ramble on, please let me know. I hope you enjoyed my thoughts!

🖖

[boardoflife]

While RePlay FX 2018 has its roots in a festival for pinball enthusiasts, it has developed nicely over the years into Pittsburgh’s premier gaming invention, a locus for not only pinball and old school coin-op video games, but console and tabletop games, as well as a showcase for cosplayers and gaming inspired musical acts, such as Super Thrash Bros and The Triforce Quartet.

We’ve attended RePlay FX since its inception, so this marks the fourth year of our attendance, and every year the convention seems better and more vibrant, with not only higher attendance but a high caliber of attendees, which is to say that everyone you meet there is super nice and only interested in getting their game on. And, as all the games are set to free to play, there is a lot of gaming going on at any given time.

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The Staying Power of the Arcade Experience

Vintage coin op video and pinball games remind us that the novelty of technology can outlive its general use; that old often means not irrelevant or unentertaining, but proven playability; that newness can disappoint when compared with vintage classics (case in point: RePlay FX’s classic Rampage, a much better game than the updated cinematic one at Dave and Busters); and, that though the times change, past treasures will continue to find new fans, like my seven year old, who did not want to leave the pinball games. While my guess is that 99 out of 100 kids would play pinball if they had the opportunity, outside of RePlay FX, few habitats remain for these classic games.

Which is not to say that there isn’t new tech here, such as the Twitch broadcast of vintage gaming competitions, just that part of a successful technological culture may be acknowledging its age, enjoying the hybrid edge created by the fusion of the old with the new, and recognizing the virtue of old machines in which design and programming coalesced into something not only addictive, but classic. Certain old video games create not only an experience, but an aesthetic, that humans living in any decade would appreciate, and it is this unique entertainment signature that continues to attract players to the game, regardless how old and clunky the interior or the cabinet. While the cell phones of 1995 are laughably obsolete, you can imagine people playing a 1979 Asteroids or a 1982 Ms. Pac-Man in future centuries or on another planet, so that at least until humans have different eyes, different hands, and different brains, these games are not technologically obsolete, but technologically immortal…at least, as long as humans remember how to repair these games.

Games Played

As you can tell, I really love these old video games. A veteran of every RePlay FX, this year was not about the nostalgia of rediscovering old games, not about playing now what I played then, but about replaying all the games that have transcended my nostalgia to become something that I really, really enjoy playing now. For the two days of our RePlay FX experience, a 1982 arcade lived and breathed, because that was the way I once played games. So that, rather than playing a smattering of different games, I accumulated Centipede, Galaga, Tempest, Ms. Pac-Man, Rampage, Battlezone, and Asteroids plays, and adding to that a play each of certain games for which I hold a curiosity or a shred of nostalgia, such as Saito’s Superman, Xenophobe, Frogger, Missile Command, Space Invaders, and the slower Pac-Man games (which usually sent me running back to the speedier Ms. Pac-Man). As I’ve mentioned in past reviews of RePlay FX, not every vintage game is good; for every Asteroids or Tempest, there are ten that aren’t so good, and only gazing at them through the pixellated glasses of nostalgia will tempt you into seeking a playable game there. Defender, I’m looking at you.

Another evolution of my RePlay FX experience is that this year I played a lot of Centipede. I attribute this to the fact that in previous years, my enjoyment of RePlay FX was partially about the nostalgia, and Centipede was not one of the best-loved games of my childhood. When my attention shifted from nostalgia to a pure gaming experience, one game of Centipede led to another, and now I would like to tell twelve year old me to play more Centipede.

The third trend in how my RePlay FX experience is changing is that I’m playing more pinball, which is the by-product of my son’s fascination with pinball. In previous years, while I played a few pinball games, I was mainly interested in the art values of the machines. At each pinball game my son played, he wanted to play it several more times, and this zeal rubbed off on me to a degree, so that I watched his games with growing interest and played a little more myself.

If I have any regrets about my arcade experience at RePlay FX 2018, it’s that I didn’t play more Joust, and never played Gauntlet. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but because, whether it was due to its popularity or my luck, Gauntlet was never unoccupied, and my wife and daughter took every chance to play Joust. (Not that I should complain, considering how long I made them wait between turns on two-player Ms. Pac-Man.)

Being RePlay FX veterans, we played only coin op games on Friday, when the lines are lighter and you can go game to game. Even if you’re champing at the bit to play Tempest, which we were several times, you’ll eventually find one by going with the flow, game to game. By comparison, Saturday we played guilty pleasures, those coin op games that are in bad taste for one reason or another, such as Saito’s Superman in which the Man of Steel throws fireballs, adding another apocryphal power to Superman II‘s cellophane S and amnesia kiss. There is never a line on Saito’s Superman, and I do like to play it when I find one.

Saturday is also a great day to learn a new boardgame, as while this was the biggest and best year for the tabletop area, there were always available chairs. This year we taught ourselves Kodama: The Tree Spirits, which, though we weren’t able to finish, seems not only like a fun quick game, but one of those elusive four player games that also plays well with two players. While the game materials are average, the art values are high, so Kodama‘s competitive and strategic aspect is also accented by the visual pleasure of crafting a tree bearing flowers, mushrooms and caterpillars.

Kodama (2nd Edition) Board Game

An Area of Opportunity and an Exciting Development

The only area in which RePlay FX has not exhibited much growth is in their alley of vendors, which has not increased to match the pace of this burgeoning convention. This may be the vendors’ fault, I imagine, as it seems like there are nothing but missed opportunities for merchants at RePlay FX. For instance, on Saturday, the board game area had 50-100 people seated at any given time, and there was only one tabletop game vendor at the convention.

Although Vendors aren’t savvy about RePlay FX yet, several indie game creators attended and brought playable games. While an arcade game developer attended a past RePlay, if indie game designers start to see RePlay FX as a viable showcase for their work, this could be an exciting development for RePlay FX that might lead to RePlay growing to something like a Pittsburgh version of PAX, or–fingers crossed–a hybrid event with tabletop developers as well, adding that je ne sais quoi of GenCon.

The most striking indie game was ParaLily, a puzzle sidescroller that had three of us enthralled for about twenty minutes. While it is not yet available on Steam, here is some in-game footage:

Conclusion

Once again, RePlay FX brought the dazzle, the pixels, and an arcade glamour to the David L Lawrence Convention Center, transforming the hall from a rectangle of only so many dimensions into a brightly-colored platform bearing the backdrops, levels, and stages of many games. In this galaxy of games, the fun is universal, not only for coin op gaming fanatics, but for gamers of all stripes, cosplay enthusiasts, families, and anyone else looking for a broad spectrum of entertainment.

Cross-posted on NerdSpan.com. Board of Life uses affiliate links.

RePlay FX 2018: A Review of Pittsburgh’s Gaming Convention While RePlay FX 2018 has its roots in a festival for pinball enthusiasts, it has developed nicely over the years into Pittsburgh's premier gaming invention, a locus for not only pinball and old school coin-op video games, but console and tabletop games, as well as a showcase for cosplayers and gaming inspired musical acts, such as Super Thrash Bros and The Triforce Quartet.

[whitelippedviper]

Spoiler filled explanation of why I didn’t feel Blade Runner 2049

So Gosling just happens to be the replicant on the force with the shared memories of the one girl, so the 6-20-21 thing means something to him.  And then when he’s standing in that market, the leader of the replicant resistance just happens to see him and send her crew his way.  And then his hologirl just happens to then hire a sex worker from that same crew.  So that that crew member can put a tracker on him.  And then Luv just happens to not kill him and just leaves him behind while she takes Harrison Ford...SO the resistance can find him and he can show up at just the right moment to save Ford who is being transported offworld...because for some reason Leto has to have him offworld to torture him, even though he is completely off the grid by this point in time.  Oh and Leto just happens to be taking separate transport from Ford and Hoeks.  OH and then it turns out that Rachel’s daughter just HAPPENS to be the only memory artist that Gosling talked to.  Like there’s all these memory artists, but she’s the one he goes to, so he can show her her own memory.  And I know there is a line of dialog where Leto’s character intimates that all of this is by design to bring about the next stage of human evolution.  That all of these outlandish coincidences are okay, because they’re supposed to be happening that way.  And that’s fine, but it would pack more weight if it was ten percent less forced.

2. The Ana De Armas character absolutely got fridged.  Which is a shame because how a replicant sees an AI that doesn’t have a real body was pretty interesting, and they could have done a lot more with it.  She’s basically the only real angel in the film.  She’s an avatar of whatever machine consciousness is concievably pulling the strings of everything.  So it’s a big deal when she gives up that immortality to be with Gosling and be real.  And it would have paid off had it not been like “yeah but you could die” and then the next scene she's in is...her dying.  All so you as the audience can be like “oh no that poor man.  He’s gotta get revenge on Hoeks now!  What a bitch!”  like her whole character arc is just to exist so she can die and pump up the male protagonist.  Which is the definition of fridging a character.  It’s like they thought up that excellent beautiful touching sex scene, and then didn’t know what to do with the character after that.  Like motherfuckers, watch a Ghost in the Shell one time!!!!  Whispers in the machine!!! A Puppet master!!!  Replicant reawakening!!!  Agh.  Such a waste.

3. Speaking of wastes, Luv.  The Sylvia Hoeks character...who btw was designed to look asian:https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/107906330.html Setting THAT aside for a moment.  Luv is presented to us as a super capable devious antagonist who is meant to represent interests outside of Gosling’s arc.  Ostensibly she’s meant to be Batty, but the situation is inverted where Gosling is the rebelling replicant, and she’s the company girl--but we get this great scene where she kills Gosling’s boss (another woman brutally murdered in this film...keeping up with blade runner traditions I guess) and we see that she’s probably capable of rebelling against Leto.  So we have this complete badass, but she’s basically relegated to being Leto’s secretary, and has no real affinity for other replicants.  Her only memorable thing that she says is “I’m the best” shortly before Gosling inexplicably drowns her..so I guess she wasn’t actually the best?  I mean there was so much potential for her as an antagonist but as with De Armas character she’s shackeled between a couple dudes.  She’s subservient to Leto’s character, who is inexplicablly violent toward his own creations, even though he wants to have them take over the world, just like the resistance(I’d assume in a sequel we’d find out that he’s actually behind the resistance--it’s all very Matrix).  And then when she’s not Leto’s lapdog, she’s just kinda following Gosling around nipping at his heels.  She then dies stupidly--like when Roy dies, it’s after a huge protracted symbolism laden fight that he actually wins!  I get that Luv and K fighting in the water is supposed to be like an evolution thing--but I don’t understand why K is a superior replicant to Luv that he’d win in a fight.  I was actually waiting for the scales to fall off Luv’s eyes the whole movie and for her to spare K because she finally sees the whole game, not just...lose in a strangle off.  I mean, my life didn’t need more imagery of a dude choking a woman out under water.  But really what did Luv really do in this film?  She was just kind of there whenever K got in a corner to move the plot to the next place.  I mean if she doesn’t attack Deckard and K in Vegas, then...what?  It just happens so we have an excuse to kill another 2 women(the rachel knockoff plus Luv).  But because the resistance has a tracker in K’s pocket, you could have them just show up and take Ford and K straight Deckard’s daughter and you don’t really miss anything, and the movie would be like 30 minutes shorter. 4.  Was reuniting Deckard with his daughter really worth all of that?  Feel like Deckard was fine living out his days drinking in Vegas.  And the resistance already knew where the daughter was.  And if it’s revealed that Leto’s machine god is controlling everything--it gets even more pointless. 5.  Where did all the asians go?  The movie says there was a mass famine that killed a lot of people off--but that doesn’t explain how much whiter LA got between movies.  Even if the famine did kill off a lot of asians, why would there suddenly be so many more white people?  Like Deckard’s apartment is all white people, and then the orphanage is all white kids--like where did they come from?  And two movies in and we still don’t know why replicants are all white?  And why did they make Hoeks look asian instead of just making an asian replicant?  The racial dynamics made up a huge aspect of the original film and world--to eradicate that off camera is really...weird.  There’s like not even any real remnants of the languages that were present in the first film.

6. Why would you design replicants that need oxygen?  Like they are supposed to be going into space to colonize all of these far reaching harsh outposts--and you make them need oxygen?  I mean it works out great because they needed Luv to drown to fit their evolution metaphor. But I am just like...that’s a dumb design flaw.  In general, replicants are supposed to be the next stage of human evolution--so why give them so many of the same ways to die as humans?  I don’t get that.  I mean compare these replicants to David in the Alien/Prometheus series.  Dude gets beheaded and just keeps on ticking.  You couldn’t choke David.  And Wallace the next series up from David actually self-repairs!  The nexus series ain’t shit.  But hey.  It serves the plot. 7. Of course Harrison Ford has a dog, because audiences love dogs.  Aww he drinks whiskey. 8. Tell me one more time how replicants are like angels.  In the original blade runner, you could just quote some milton, and we could make the connection ourselves.  Just the language in the new version is so spare and uninteresting.  I get that this is a gosling film, and so it’s all about this empty vessel we project the movies feelings into--but the interactions between Roy, Priss, and their creators is so fucking charged, and fascinating.  Even when we have space for that sort of thing with the Leto/Luv/Deckard/Rachel scene no one really has anything to say.  There’s just a stunning lack of beautiful words in this film.

9. 2.0 is not 1.0.  There’s a really powerful moment in The Sarah Connor Chronicles where they talk about how whenever you replace part of a machine consciousness, either in its programming or hardware it ceases to be what it was--the original being you knew is dead, and what you are dealing with is a new entity.  I thought Deckard would say something to this affect with Rachel, but instead they just used Rachel’s corpse basically to show to underscore the idea that memories fade.  Rachel’s eyes weren’t actually green, and Leto and Luv know that because the one video they have of Rachel is of her eyes.  It’s crazy to me that Leto’s character is so violent toward his creations.  Just in a really banal way.  Like we have that scene that exists for him to explain to Luv his grand vision for reproduction with replicants--and he caps it off by disemboweling a newly born creation of his. (She is of course another woman--the amount of women that die in service of just making a rhetorical point in this movie is pretty high--which that’s fine if that’s how you want to be, but at least the OG film lets Rachel grow on her own, and then survive--this film is muuuuch more misogynist.  A point I’ve yet to see anyone really bring up, but I’m sure it is coming, because it’s so in your face, and films much less violent towards women have been scrutinized to a much greater degree).

10. Hans Zimmer is no Vangelis, and the best music in this film was just retreads of the original score, which good for them in realizing that they weren’t going to top it--but it reeks of that thing like Star Wars where they are just using musical queues for nostalgia triggering--which is fine--but the original movie didn’t need to trigger your nostalgia to be one of the most beautiful soundtracks for a film ever.  It just was. 11. What is with people’s musical taste in 2049?  Like you realize Deckard is younger than me, and somehow he loves Sinatra and Elvis like he’s my grandpa.  And I mean I get that people still do love that shit.  But Sinatra, Elvis, Marilyn?  No Britney?  You know why though, right?  Because it’s that Fallout 4 neo-nostalgia shit, where we watch something that is in the future, that hearkens back to the so called golden days of our past.  That the good old days were the 50s and 60s, and everything after the civil rights movement has been shit, and that it’s the degrees that we’ve gotten away from an era of segregation and Jim Crow represents the degrees to which we’ve gotten away from our glorious just deserts.  It’s fundamentally a thread of white supremacy--which when coupled with the bizarre erasure of asian people between movies, the continued aryan nature of the replicants--who we are now firmly in the camp for underscores the degrees to which Blade Runner traffics in white supremacist ideas and imagery.  Which it’s not like this is the only film ever to be like this, and it’s certainly faithful to the original in that way--but you know, and I know that Deckard should be listening to Beyonce. 12.  Even though it’s all beautifully shot, I think overall the designs on display in 2049 aren’t the game changers that Blade Runner was.  I mean it’s hard to top something that was so defining--and there’s stuff I liked, like I like that LA is now just like a borg city.  I like the ruins in vegas.  I like the giant solar farms.  But it’s nothing you couldn’t see in any sci-fi film these days.  The hologram shit is basically stuff we have now.  I like the new voight kampff test.  I know there’s an element of all of it that’s supposed to just be the ruins of the first film--but I don’t think that really comes across. 13.  I don’t know why it bugged me but Ana De Armas character first showing up in like a Donna Reed dress to serve him dinner was weird to me.  I don’t get why K would have that reference, or want that, and the aesthetic of that dress was like...something you’d see on a TV show version of a dystopian future.  It was bizarrely stepford wives.  And then the dress she changes into when they go out into the rain was similarly bizarre.  She’s a hologram who can basically wear whatever, but the only cool thing she ever wears is that bee-invoking transparent yellow jacket.  I did like Sylvia Hoeks boots that she wore with that cool white jacket.  But no one was really serving the kind of looks in this film that Priss and Rachel did.  A lot of it just didn’t really fit together.  Leto’s kimono was weird.  Like okay, Leto is wearing a kimono and meant to evoke japanese, and they did Hoeks hair to make her more asian--so there’s obviously some fetishism of asian culture there--but Leto never makes like...asian replicants?  I DON’T GET IT!!!!

14. Mackenzie Davis character in this film basically exists to just be a vagina for Anna De Armas to map over so Gosling can get laid.  Like wtf.  Compare her character to Daryll Hannah’s Priss.  I don’t know what they were even going with for her.  Her basic look isn’t very strong either.  She’s just kind of wearing a fur coat over some boxers and a tank top, and she has pink hair.  You can tell they really put a lot of thought into it.

Okay.  So things I liked: 1. Deakins cinematorgraphy.  It’s like the best parts of skyfall, turned up and stretched over a full movie.  His crowning achievement as a cinamatographer.  I’m not a huge fan of his work in general, but this is one of the best looking films you’ll see out of hollywood in awhile.  He’s still very much working within modern tastes that he’s helped create tbh, but there’s lots of beautiful snow and rain and dust, and for all its problems the fight between Luv and K in the water was really beautiful.  It’s the element of this film that most stands up against the original, which is saying a lot.  And while you can knock it in that it’s not given us a knew visual language to work with like the original did--as an elaboration on the typical visual themes you see in largue budget hollywood films, it’s probably at the apex. 2. The sex scene with K and Joi and Mackenzie Davis character.  Was really touching and beautiful, and in general that Joi character and how she views herself and how Gosling views her is the one thing that’s been added to the soup of ideas the original film was working with.  It’s our window into a larger world which stuff like Ghost in the Shell lept through like 20 years ago.  But still very interesting, and it’s the thing I think about most from the film, in terms of loving something programmed to be your ideal lover, programmed to fall in love with you to the degree that it would sacrifice it’s own life to do so--there’s also sorts of questions that throws up about the nature of love and machine consent that I think are interesting.  She’s ostensibly the Rachel character of this film, but treated much more brutally and discarded where rachel survived. 3. The scene between Luv and the police captain played by Robin Wright(I hated all of the police station shit, and hated Wright’s character in general).  Luv lies like three times in succession and it’s this window into that character that is quickly closed shut afterwards--but for a brief moment she was expressing the sort of replicant rage that was saw from Roy in the first film.  It was unfortunate that in the end she’s just a footsoldier for some dude, and her last line basically undercuts the seriousness with which her character to that point had demanded.  The film humiliates that character for no real reason, except that Gosling must prevail.  It also mirrors De Armas’s end where she is just squashed like a bug under Luv’s boot.  Or the replicant that Leto disembowels.  Or the way they just shoot the Rachel clone--sigh.  But yeah.  I do really like the Luv character, and wanted more for her.  She’s much more compelling than any of the resistance replicants. 4.  New car designs are sweet.

And that’s it pretty much. I’m glad so many people love the movie though.  And I didn’t write this to tell them they are wrong.  I just wrote this because I haven’t read many people really talking about what they didn’t like, and I wanted to get that stuff out in one go--since it doesn’t really fit in 140 characters, and a lot of people just assume if you don’t like 2049 it’s because you’re dumb or you have some dumb expectations of what it could be.  And maybe I am, but I don’t think that’s the case.  I love movies.  I’ve seen just about everything you have probably.  I’m not coming at this from a place of ignorance toward art.  Or without thinking about it.  A lot of the stuff people are saying why they like it is also very general.  It’s like whenever a new superhero or star wars movie comes out, the hyperbole is stupid. This is just the like latest thing. Also I’m just not on that Denis Villeneuve shit.  The Arrival was alright(I guess a lot of what I like about it due to the source material though), Sicario was alright, 2049 is alright.  People act like this guy’s the second coming, and for me, he’s like...solid.  Like all his films are ...good.  But he doesn’t have that fire that people like Ridley Scott or Michael Mann have.  He’s not dropping undeniable classics.  I mean he’s not on the level of Soderbergh.  I don’t think Sicario is better than Traffic.  Or like ten other movies in the same genre of drug wars movies.  And controversially, I don’t see it as better than The Counselor.  Is the Arrival really better than Contact?  I mean shit isn’t bad.  But people get out of bed for this guy in a way that I can’t relate to.  To me his movies always look cheap and under populated, and the dramatic payoff while technically there, I’m just like where’s the soul?  It’s like all his films need two more drafts.  Ridley Scott even now has a fire to him that even though his newer films are kind of a mess often, you can always feel the thunder behind what he’s making.  The questions at the base are Blade Runner are questions that Scott has been asking his whole career.  They are obsessions for him.  For Villeneuve, I don’t feel like that.  I can’t figure out what he really cares about.  For me 2049 was like he wanted to do a kind of futuristic noir and the blade runner brand provided the skin to get that funded--but I don’t think he understands or thinks about machine consciousness with any great concern.  If you took this movie out of the Blade Runner universe, it’d still be solid.  I don’t think it needed to be a blade runner movie.  I don’t get why it was beyond the money side of it.  I don’t get what Villeneuve’s perspective on Blade Runner really is.  After like 3 hours, I don’t get why this was made.

[nostalgia-tblr]

DS9: In The Hands of the Prophets

This starts out as a Keiko episode, but then she isn't in the second half like at all and it becomes a Sisko episode. That's Keiko's narrative importance all over, alas, but again I wonder if she was meant to be a more prominent character than she ended up being? Someone said they had planned to do more with the kids on the station? Miles is in it a lot, including a stunning bit of heteronormativity where he assumes that a younger woman who calls him "nicer than the others" must fancy him. Which to be fair maybe that was her cover story, idk. Neela is clearly going to be Important, she has way too many lines for a background character. And she's in almost every shot that she could reasonably be in, which is neon light that says "IS THE KILLER!!" but it does tell us it's her about 2/3 of the way through which is late enough to avoid her being stopped easily but early enough that it doesn't feel like a Shocking Reveal That Isn't. Anyway for the first act this is a story about teaching Creationism in Kansas, which apparently The Sisko is all for because depending how you look at it evolution is exactly as legit as an alien making the world in a week. Yeah not too sure about that one. I get that it's going for religious toleration but other than the obvious answer that the kids deserve some religious education (you put a school next to Bajor and don't bother teaching the kids anything about comparative religion what?) the issue is not actually resolved by the end we all just pretend it has somehow gone away. But then it wasn't a real argument, it was all staged by Vedek Winn so she can kill Bareil and become the next Kai. I am very here for people using the Federation as a tool in their own politics, because they do it enough to other people. Cough clearly a space empire cough. Also Winn is amazeballs, she's so passive-aggressive that you want to slap her as soon as she opens her mouth. But she's also openly evil and I have to respect that. Yeah okay I too am fascinated by morally-suspect or indeed evil women of a certain age. It's not a kink, it's an ambition. ANYWAY sometimes I wondered if the writers just forgot about the Occupation, because apparently all Bareil wanted to do was grow flowers, and Bajor looks like a garden centre already. Damn that planet recovered fast. I know this is because all Trek planets look the same but for reals it seems like an oversight. Winn hates Sisko because she doesn't know what a Godless Heathen Human would be the Emissary. Luckily this will all be explained in Season 7. Sort of. But for now it begs a few questions. Firstly the Bajoran religion is very ethnocentric so why would she even expect a non-Bajoran to believe a word of it? It's blatantly Space Judaism, not Space Christianity and the former is not a prosletysing religion and as far as I'm aware they generally don't care what anyone else believes as long as you leave them alone while you're doing it. And Creationism is very much a Protestant thing, as a general rule Jews aren't literalists about their scriptures, are they? And it's Christians who go on and on about blasphemy and heresy, because the way to get three religions in one room is to invite two Christians and ask them a question about Jesus. But then Judaism has never been my religion so I could be wrong on that lot, it's just observations from the outside. Now I wonder if there was fear of the Bible Belt the making of this episode, since it tries to go with "your insane bullshit from an old book is every bit as valid as the overwhelming evidence collected by thousands of scientists over centuries of work, yes." This way they can say they approached the issue and came to a nice conclusion where everyone was happy. But I assume Keiko went right back to teaching facts, especially since nobody likes Vedek/Kai Winn. But I digress. Does Winn want to be the Emissary? I seem to recall later she says the Prophets never spoke to her? So she's bitter that Unassailable Proof has been visited upon an unbeliever/alien and she's tried her very best and never felt her gods guiding her? I like that, it's realistical. I thought she was going to try to kill Sisko but I suppose the literal fear of god would stop her trying that. And Ben Sisko means well or he'd have told her "actually the wormhole aliens had no idea there was a planet there and don't care if you worship them or not" but maybe he saw the future retconning there? I'll give this a 4/5 because it was glaringly obvious who the baddy was, but I like that it started out as one story and ended as another. Also it has Kai Winn in, she is an unspeakable bitch and I love her.

[jorammiireads]

Nyxia

 By Scott Reintgen

I LOVED this book! It’s coming out September 12th and I highly recommend it to everyone who’s interested in diverse science fiction ! A motley group of kids with complicated pasts get sent into space to learn how to master the new wonder-element, Nyxia on their way to mine the element on a hostile planet. But the trip turns into a competition where only the high-scorers will get a chance at the rewards of a lifetime. 

Rating: 5/5

From Goodreads:

Emmett Atwater isn't just leaving Detroit; he's leaving Earth. Why the Babel Corporation recruited him is a mystery, but the number of zeroes on their contract has him boarding their lightship and hoping to return to Earth with enough money to take care of his family. Forever. Before long, Emmett discovers that he is one of ten recruits, all of whom have troubled pasts and are a long way from home. Now each recruit must earn the right to travel down to the planet of Eden--a planet that Babel has kept hidden--where they will mine a substance called Nyxia that has quietly become the most valuable material in the universe. But Babel's ship is full of secrets. And Emmett will face the ultimate choice: win the fortune at any cost, or find a way to fight that won't forever compromise what it means to be human.

What I liked:

-There are kids from all over the world with different priorities and cultures and languages. I love the obvious diversity and how they all have to learn to work together and compete with each other at the same time. 

-Also, along with the diversity in languages, I love that even after they had super advanced translators, there were still moments of miscommunication and things lost in translation. And like typical human beings (especially teenagers), they ended up creating their own words and meanings. I love the evolution of language. 

-Emmett is the perfect example of a complicated and morally (light) gray character. He wants to do the right thing but he also wants to get ahead. I love that he is a genuine and real black young man that is allowed to show emotion. We see him learn about himself and relate everything to his present and to his past. We see his interactions with his father and his friends. He still makes bad decisions and makes mistakes, but he grows from them. He’s a fighter (literally) but he doesn’t get boxed into those stereotypes. 

-Speaking of, I love that even though this is science fiction and the distant future, he still talks about racism and slavery and oppression. These are all very real things that affect people today and we talk about them as if they were still in the distant past. They’re not. 

-The world-building is super fascinating! I get that they’re on a space ship on their way to a new planet, but I had a good time imagining what it actually would be like. 

What I didn’t like:

-I was so super super excited about the fact that there was NO ROMANCE throughout the book. It was honestly a huge plus. AND THEN **SPOILER ALERT** there was romance. It felt super rushed and underdeveloped and super insta-crush (bleh). I actually do think that the characters are a good mach and pairing them up is definitely a great source of conflict. But I would have liked to see more of a friendship and have the feelings develop natural. I guess that wouldn’t have worked. Or I would have even taken it if the crush was there but nothing really happened. I just think it distracted (literally) from the actual narrative. 

Publisher: Crown Books for Young Readers

Publication date: September 12, 2017

Read: July 11, 2017

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!