#irrevocably change the trajectory of each other’s lives

[my-coven-is-claudia]

me going insane over jayce and jinx parallels and the impact they had on one another’s lives despite never meeting each other:

[originemesis]

@deathinfeathers xxx

Yeah, he'd made it easy to forget the kind of damage he could do with that vitriolic, venom sodden tongue of his. The last handful of months they'd spent together had been relatively friction free, as far as their personal relations went anyhow. Textbook honeymoon bliss, she supposes. And it's funny, actually, because nothing really changed to warrant such a peaceable lull. They'd lived their lives like conjoined twins for hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of years. They shared a profound familiarity, the kind that allowed them to communicate from two different ends of a room full of people without ever mouthing a word. She could gauge his state of mind at any given moment by the tempo of his breathing, the lilt of his voice, the trajectory of his gaze. They lived together, slept, ate, bathed, laughed, cried and screamed together and They'd plumbed the niches and the hollows of each other's bodies so thoroughly there did not exist a square inch of his flesh that she had not pampered, with her hands, her lips, her tongue.

And yet, in spite of this, there was an uncertainty which hung over them like a suffocating mist. Maybe it was because nothing in this world had ever belonged to her and the things that had belonged to him were always swept away by the tide of time, or the whims of cruel creators. All it took was a promise. Nothing really changed—but it did. She felt secure. Perhaps for the first time in her life.

All it took was a lie.

And now she has to decide how much that lie devalues their promise.

"Why even scratch at it at all? Are you fucking serious right now, Adam? You're dreaming if you think I'm going to let you sweep this shit under the rug!? I have turned a blind eye to a great many of your irresponsible, half-baked antics throughout the centuries but this is where I draw the line! If what we had was anything more than a masturbatory endeavor on your part to balm the aches of your GARGANTUAN goddamned inferiority complex you are going to wrangle your head out of your ass right this fucking second and explain to me—"

The tirade peters out in the face of this sudden and quite frankly alarming surge of aggression. Aggression which twists his warped but still familiar features into something barely recognizable. She knows what he is trying to do, of course. A year in his absence has not made him any less predictable. He wants her gone so that he won't have to face the repercussions of his actions, so that he can keep wallowing and gorging himself on fleeting divertisments to keep himself good and numb to the reality of his situation. They have sung this song and danced this dance a thousand times over. If he thinks that he can intimidate her into submission, he's got another thing coming.

Another thing taking the form of a deeply unimpressed glower.

"...I'm looking."

There is grief there, too. Veiled thinly behind the umbrage.

There is grief there, too. Veiled thinly behind the umbrage.

"I see you."

"Always have."

The good. The bad. The ugly. It didn't change a thing. She was so irrevocably his.

Is this what she wants?

Yes, in fact.

This is the only thing she has ever wanted. For him to stop trying so desperately to convince her that he is something he is not. To let himself be unabashedly flawed and let her adore him all the same.

She might have looked back on the past six months of their ongoing 'situationship turned possessive' and thought nothing warranted the shift from cackling about how many chicks or dicks she took home and railed as opposed to his outstanding first man record, but it wasn't like she was aware of all his dirty, unaired secrets. Heaven had hurt him, sure. Strung him along like the puppet for humanity he was destined to be. Promised carrots - delivered sticks, and cared little for the brash bleat of a black sheep settled among its flock if only because it would serve a purpose. The sheep - to draw predators from the desired livestock. Him? To posture perfection in the picturesque image of the Creator. An image hidden under mask and robes to convince a choir that his crass demeanor was only surface deep and designated to the design he chose.

It stung to see her now- gaze fixed upon him like his own half lidded glare cocked skyward...wondering what all of it was worth in the end. He'd wanted so badly to turn his resentment towards the divine vortex he was caught within at heaven themselves. To show them that he wasn't just a token for breeding them new souls to torture and nothing else. And yet in his haste to do so, he'd become exactly what they determined him to be. Exactly what he strove to struggle against. The Exorcists were tools- a means to an end for him to feel some level of eminence among supposed peers he could never sidle the same pew height with. But he'd grown to care for them... in that stupidly human way that convinced him they were more than heaven's anti virus. In that way that knowing her touch was what he needed to wake up to every morning - guaranteed perfection from heaven be damned...he knew that he'd been what he'd opposed all along. Using them...using her like heaven had used him. Only heaven couldn't come to care for him like he had his girls-...even if he could sense hints of the concern in the corners of the high seraphim's gaze.

It's the pain of realizing he was what he fought all along that helps edge him over. Her vicious remarks don't help- however founded they are. "Then fucking LOOK!" He snarls, agitation whipping with the tempo of his feathered tail as he eyes her down with the dripping menace of a demon discovered against its will. "Look at what I fucking did! I filled hell with my SPAWN- countless centuries. To kill them again - all my mistakes... to feel like I wasn't just some trophy soul to display FOR NO FUCKING REASON while my family BURNED - ! " Despite the increase in his size, he felt small. Looking down at her - trembling with a rage that could decimate all that he applied it to if only it weren't her staring him down.

Despite it all- she knew him. Every gritty corner. Because she was him in a way - facing heaven now with all its expectations of her worth...while knowing it to be a lie. And now she knows - she's looking.

His canines nearly crack with the pressure he grits down on them, lip trembling. He'd shown her the inner most ugly part of him, and yet - ... his gaze clouded. And yet that wasn't the finished product -...the finale. All of what he was and would always be-... Adam.

An harsh snuffle interrupts the intensity between locked gazes. The off golden yolk of a spoiled egg wells in the corners of his eyes as he flashes her his teeth in a last ditch effort to remain relevant. It doesn't work. A wet set of snuffles escapes- his shoulders shuddering with their tempo. This was who he really was...

Adam.

"A-am I... pretty??"

[reidmarieprentiss]

Right Where You Left Me (Short Steddie one-shot)

In the late 1980s, in the small town of Hawkins, Indiana, two young men, Eddie and Steve, found themselves entangled in a love that would forever change their lives. As the world around them moved on with its usual pace, they discovered an extraordinary connection that went beyond friendship.

Eddie was a dreamer, a gentle soul who poured his heart into music. Steve, on the other hand, was charismatic and popular, excelling in sports and academics. Though their personalities seemed worlds apart, they found solace in each other's arms, sharing secret glances and whispered promises.

But amidst the idyllic moments they cherished, fear loomed in the background. Steve was haunted by the harsh reality of the late 1980s, a time when society wasn't as accepting as it is today. The thought of revealing their love to the world scared him, and he worried about how people would react.

One fateful day, consumed by his fears, Steve made the painful decision to leave Eddie behind. He felt he had no choice but to sever their bond, protecting himself from the judgmental eyes of their small town. It was a decision that shattered both their hearts, leaving Eddie bewildered and heartbroken.

As time went on, their lives took different trajectories. Eddie continued to pursue his love for music, pouring his emotions into heartfelt songs that reflected his pain and longing. Meanwhile, Steve tried to suppress the memories of their love, immersing himself in work and focusing on building a life that fit society's expectations.

Years passed, and their paths seemed irrevocably diverged. Eddie's music career took him far from Hawkins, while Steve stayed rooted in their hometown, haunted by the ghost of the love he had left behind.

One evening, as the restaurant's dim light flickered in the autumn breeze, Steve found himself drawn back to the place where it all began. He had heard one of Eddie's songs on the radio, a haunting melody that tugged at his heartstrings. The lyrics echoed in his mind, reminding him of the love he had lost.

With a deep breath, Steve mustered the courage to return to the spot where they had spent countless hours together. There, he found Eddie, looking older but still carrying the same spark in his eyes. The years melted away as they locked eyes, and it was as if time had stood still.

As they sat across from each other, a flood of emotions washed over them both. The pain of the past and the longing for what could have been mingled with the joy of being reunited. They talked about the years that had passed, the wounds that had yet to heal, and the love that had never truly faded.

In that moment, they realized that their love had never truly ended; it had merely been hidden away, waiting for the right time to resurface. Steve confessed his fears and regrets, apologizing for the pain he had caused Eddie. And Eddie, with a forgiving heart, understood the weight of Steve's burden and the difficulties they had faced.

The restaurant fell silent as they sat cross-legged, the dim light casting a warm glow upon their faces. They knew that life had changed them, but their love had remained constant, frozen in time like a forgotten melody.

With tears in their eyes, they took each other's hands, promising not to let fear control their hearts any longer. They knew they might face challenges and judgments from the world, but they were determined to face them together.

And so, Eddie and Steve, two men who had once been in love, found their way back to each other, ready to rewrite their story and embrace the love they had always cherished. As they left the restaurant hand in hand, they knew that their love was stronger than any fear, and they were finally free to be themselves, unapologetically, forevermore.

[gayspock]

omgg speaking of

ive seen a few ppl - in forums, on tumblr posts, blog stuff, etc. - talk abt how they dont like the how the more interpersonal drama is done in farscape and its like everybaddyyy is entitled to their own opinion BUT..... also makes me Sad bc its like. YES i agree some stuff is overdone- BUT many criticisms, of the stuff ive seen so far.... the thing is, it feels sooo much more realistic for growth to not be linear & for these characters to have such fraught relationships with one another considering who they are to each other.... like im SO sick of shows that wrap each "relationship" up into a neat and tidy narrative, wherein it ends with some big conclusion at the end of an episode arc, and its always a straight line between dont trust > we trust each other now which like... thats not how it works! thats not how any of it works! ever in the history of the worrrld! there is no logical, oh "well they trust each other, now, look at this so why are they still upset" in realittyyyy like- thats not how relationships work!!!!!!

and especially like... like are we forgetttinnggg... base facts here. aeryn was indoctrinated into a fascist regime from a young age like AND half the damn crew were horrifically tortured, had the trajectory of their lives changed irrevocably, and lost everything by that same regime.... and they were awfully. thrown into this situation, forced to put up with each other and desperate 2 get home after being through hell ... again at the BEGINNING of the show... like yeah man ... even if they do grow together- they are sdtill the same people from the beginning. of course theyre going to flip flop on one another. of... fucking course!!!!! help.... theyre going to have complex as hell feelings both to one another, AND with themselves like... the entire crew has been like horrifically tortured in SOME way thus far. every single one of them.... like .... of course theyregoing to have interpersonal problems

&its again. SORRY TO BE THAT CUNT BC I KNOWWW ITS NOT ALWAYS MEANT LIKE THAT. but again why i feel just a bitterness at the way some ppl use the term ""found family"" to describe everything under the sun, bc half the reason it can be so irritating is bc its like.... half the time its a sanitisation . it irons out every single nuanced fucking dynamic in a thing and the messier parts to package it up into something sooo wholesome and its like. YES YES YES i realise tht half the time its not intended-intended like that, like its just a shorthand to dilute "oh these characters grow close together" but MAN like . the incorrigible overuse & bastardisation of it just like every other fandom-adjacent "trope description" AHRGH.A CK. stop saying ohhh this show is so found familyyy when reccing stuff to ppl [beats your head in with a rock] its a NOTHING statement its NOTHING words .................. and its such a brainrotting expectation to have of things...

[thequibblah]

⭐

anon: omg hi I think I sent in a ~free choice~ directors cut a while back but if you can't think of anything you wanna talk about I would LOVE to hear more about the way you write the Snape/Lily relationship and and the way it breaks apart, and even specific scenes related to it because in this house we are Anti S/nily

i hope this person was you but if not HAHA i will take this opportunity to answer their prompt as a "free choice" if you don't mind!

so. good old.... severus. ahhh.

writing interactions between snape and lily is like, one of the most rewarding challenges of this fic. now.... pitchforks away, my lovelies.... it's such an interesting emotional space to explore on her end, to me. personally i've never had a friendship end over something big and irrevocable, so it's really brand-new water to tread.

what makes it even more fascinating is that because of the setup of CT — starting after the lake incident — snape is less a presence in her life and more an absence she's working around. if i can get boring and pretentious for a sec, this was something i worked on a lot in college creative writing classes — writing about a thing in the past by avoiding it, or touching upon it and flinching away, or approaching it sideways.

now. we none of us have the patience of serious literary fiction readers in our fic HAHAHHA so this is a lot more dialled-back (dialled-forward??). but that was basically the approach to begin with, with these two. and then it was a matter of exploring the trajectory of it — how when the wound is rawest, lily is actually most forgiving and generous towards him, as she's had less time and space away from him/their friendship, and is busy making excuses for him.

(aside: i didn't realise until actually confronted by it that so much of her attitude towards him comes from her attitude towards petunia, a relationship in which she got used to receiving barbs before she gave them back, but the blood tie keeps her from a clean break. with snape there's no blood relation, obviously, but there's a shared sense of history, of childhood, that kind of lives in the same part of lily's brain/heart. so... really, two people who loathe each other overlap quite significantly in lily's emotional landscape.)

re: lily's excuse-making — it doesn't help that the only person who pushes her on snape is james. (her friends all have learned to avoid the subject, as you do when your friend is friends with someone you don't like but you can't say anything until after they're finished, and then you're like omg thank GOD i hated them from the start!!! but of course in this case they couldn't go overboard with that sentiment, lest it come off as "you should've known better/we knew better and you didn't") thanks to the circumstances of the lake incident, some of those messy feelings towards snape are entangled in messy feelings towards james (early on in the story especially), so the resulting conflict is.... bad....

She half-stumbled backwards, as if she’d been slapped. “I don’t need you to remind me,” she hissed. To her embarrassment, tears of frustration sprang to her eyes. But if she’d thought that would make him back off, she was wrong. “Yeah, except you do need the reminder,” said James. “Because you don’t get it yet. He chose them. Not you.” Lily was shaking. “I believe in second chances,” she said, fighting to keep her voice level. “But you really, really test my faith, James.” And without waiting for him to answer, she stormed up the girls’ staircase, wiping at her cheeks.

bad.

lily's true blind spot is, of course, that she's more willing to forgive snape's missteps with her. and of course james has to go and point that out :/

“Let me put it this way. If Sni — if Snape were Mary’s friend and he’d said that to her, wouldn’t you tell Mary she ought to never speak to him again?” Lily shifted uneasily. “Well, sure, but I’ve known him since—” “—you were children, whatever. Say Mary did too. Would that change anything for her?”

so the first time lily is like wait actually fuck this!!! it's because he reminds her, in an argument, about how callous he can be — a callousness which i think she's never liked, but it's easier to forgive sharpness when it's your friend poking fun at people you don't like, and less easy when...

“Yes, do let’s talk about Potter,” she said, dangerously calm now. “Let’s talk about how your mate Mulciber used an Unforgivable Curse on him—” To her absolute shock, Severus scoffed. “It was three bloody seconds—” “Shut up,” Lily said, too stunned to think of something better to say. “Shut up, you don’t seriously think that — that because the two of you have a childish rivalry, he deserves torture?” “That’s not what I said,” he replied, looking mutinous. “I just meant, everyone’s acting like he’s some big survivor — always playing for attention—”

...well, when that.

best/worst impulses aside, lily knows that the true measure of someone is how they treat the people they dislike, not their friends, and in a sense his attitude towards james (and generally other people) in this scene makes her realise what she'd read as inconsideration or insensitivity is in fact...

"...You’re weak-willed and pathetic and you’re — you’re not a good person.”

...so there's that.

as anyone who's read lily's current petunia drama will know, she's got a bit of a problem with letting go. but after her mother's death (and the attached stick to your sister she's all you've got), she manages a weirdly good break from cokeworth — because a lot of her childhood was wrapped up in hogwarts, and in snape (whom she hasn't spent vacation time with in over a year at that point). with neither at hand, she hardly has time to process it/feel homesickness.

but note this, at the start of 7th year:

“Was last year nothing to you?” Her voice had sharpened. “I wasn’t freezing you out to punish you, Severus. I was treating you how I plan on treating you from now on.”

of course lily's just making a point here, but when i wrote that i was like wow she (and i lol) are kind of onto something — snape totally does think this is like, a temporary purgatory period after which she really will come around. and through months of her getting visibly closer to his nemesis, he holds onto that belief — despite what she says. (funnily enough, childhood rose-tinted glasses make them both see what they want to see in each other, in very different ways)

that's why when he hears her say what she says to una in that hogsmeade trip, he immediately comes to his own conclusions. that was another important, interesting thing for me — for other slytherins, "loose ends" are opportunities for cruelty, for punishment, to finish what they've started. (not so for regulus, who's grown up with sadism and is frankly repulsed by the idea of pain for a flimsy cause — best believe there was absolutely a point to him orchestrating an attack on the teacher getting close to his brother. but that's another story.)

not for severus either — his loose end, in his own mind, will always be lily. he senses that something's broken, but he has absolutely no self-awareness about what it is, and his extending an olive branch was more about her coming to his level than him going to hers (aka the way apologies ought to work). he realises, over a year out, that it's up to him to fix it, but it's too late — lily's quite moved on at that point, and her residual emotions towards him are indifference and pity.

if only snape had known to leave it there!

looping full circle back to the lake incident, then, the argument in 41 is once again very personal — but rather than him pushing her away, it's him trying to get her close again. and now, stressed about all the bs in the world but also with all the petunia-related learn-to-let-go stuff fresh in her mind, lily is absolutely in the right state of mind to recognise when she's wrongly judged someone. this calls for scorched earth, she realises, or she'll never be able to shake him and move on for good.

and so what started with severus telling her that she's special, that there's a place in a new world for her, ends sort of the same way.... and the break that began with his casual, almost unintentional cruelty, ends with her very deliberate cruelty. as a bonus, she's ready now to use the one thing he's always wielded like a shield in their arguments — james, how the marauders are, etc. etc. — against him, and genuinely mean it.

(she might regret that soon. but not the way you'd think!)

[itsybitsylemonsqueezy]

Hey, it’s me again! ^_^ I hope I don’t bother you too much with my requests, but your posts are so cool I just can’t help it. Upon completing Yakuza 4 I’ve had a lot of thoughts and feels about Daigo and how his character was handled across the series. To be honest, at first I didn’t like him much, because he seemed pretty bland (and his screen time leaves much to be desired), but soon enough he’s really grown on me. What is your opinion on him if you don’t mind me asking?

I definitely do not mind requests! Meta is my bread and butter c: I’ve just been busy for a few days, sorry ^^; And... my opinions on Daigo are not going to be as mindblowing or exciting as my opinions on Kiryu, I’ll be real ^^; And there’s a big advantage in Kiryu being the protag, All of the content is about him ^^; I do love Daigo, I think he’s a super interesting character, but his tragedy is just what you pointed out, he’s underutilized. And he isn’t set up very well to have the position he holds. 

But, so saying, let’s get into my essay on Daigo ^^; 

So, we meet Daigo properly in game 2. There’s little side stories with baby Daigo in Zero which helps build Daigo’s and Kiryu’s relationship and set up for what would later happen, but we don’t really know him until game 2. And game 2 is a LOT about Daigo and his arc and what he’s meant to be! There’s a tumblr text post meme somewhere with a pic of Daigo depressed in his little puffy white coat that says “And I’ll probably become the next chairman of the Tojo Clan. Things like that just happens to guys like me.” and that is totally accurate! Like, it’s a funny thing to complain about, but that’s obviously the struggle Daigo’s having, understanding from a young age that it was obviously his destiny to succeed Sohei, the only problem is uh... well... Kiryu. 

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Dojima Sohei never became chairman of the Tojo Clan. And that’s really wild thinking back to Zero and how powerful he was, he was all but a shoo in for chairman. But then, uh... Kiryu. Kiryu happened. Kiryu, and Majima I should say, are the reason Sera becomes chairman, not Sohei. Forever upsetting the wheels of fate. Given where we see Sohei next, I can’t imagine that he ever really recovered from that upset ^^; And I’m SURE it made him bitter towards Kiryu the rest of his life. And considering, again, where we see him next, I think the canon supports this ^^; 

So what becomes of Daigo’s destiny then? His father had victory snatched away, destiny denied, and everything he had slowly crumbles over time, leaving his son with less and less to inherit, but still with the ideology that he should take this over. That’s an awkward position to be in. 

And then Sera dies. Ooh, golly, I wonder who the next chairman’s gonna- it’s Kiryu. Of course it’s fucking Kiryu, how could it not be? It OBVIOUSLY should be Kiryu. He’s the strongest, the bravest, and who inspires the most loyalty. It doesn’t matter that Kiryu’s never been in leadership before, he TURNS people. Kiryu could get anyone on his side through sheer force of personality, which is hilarious to say about a guy with maybe 3 facial expressions. But tell me I’m wrong. I cannot count the number of part-time antagonists who turned on a dime because Kiryu beat their ass. And anyone who can do that can rule the world. Kiryu was absolutely the best pick for chairman and I will fight the world on this.

(Abbreviated for length, this is a LONG post)

But... then Kiryu makes the stupidest decision of his entire fucking life and renounces the chairmanship. And he has his reasons, feeling unworthy, traumatized from the events of Kiwami 1, unsure if he even wants to stay in the yakuza or if there’s maybe something else he wants to do with his life... he’s going through a lot of intense self-reflection and self-doubt and, I hate to harp on it, but fucking trauma. His brother blew himself up in front of him in a bid for redemption after all but telling Kiryu that all of his mistakes are Kiryu’s fault. Yeah, no, I’m sure Kiryu’s doing FINE with that. So, like, I can see why Kiryu said no, but it was still... fucking nuts. And it irrevocably changed the trajectory of everyone in this universe. Which Kiwami 2 goes out of its way to explore. Kiryu’s leaving? Majima fucking retires, Terada’s suspect, there aren’t any old, loyal hands left to lead the families, and we see how vulnerable the Tojo clan is on every side because Kiryu just up and fucked off. 

(I have A LOT of feelings about Kiryu being chairman and someday I will have the strength to write the AU we all deserve where Kiryu stays as chairman)

So... the wheel of fate turns and oh yeah remember Daigo? Dojima Sohei’s son Daigo? The kid who’s been raised his whole life to take over the clan only to be denied at every turn? How’s he doing? Not great! It turns out, not great! Kiryu, his father figure, killed his ACTUAL father, but didn’t really, took the blame for some other weird guy, leaving Daigo with one badass mother and very little direction in life. Daigo’s been brought up thinking he’ll take over a great kingdom but all that’s left now is a broken wreck about to be demolished and picked apart by scavengers. Great, yeah, just what any kid wants to inherit. And he wasn’t trained to fix this, it’s kinda shitty to saddle him with destiny and then not train him for the thing that actually has to be done and then do it anyway. It’s real shitty actually. And not many people help Daigo. 

Daigo couldn’t have taken the chairmanship directly from Sera, he was still just a teenager then. But it probably would have been nice if Kiryu checked in with him even fucking once since getting out of jail. But no, we never explain on screen to Daigo what happened as far as I can remember. Which, I feel, is a pretty fucking big oversight. How the fuck is Daigo supposed to trust you Kiryu? Or we’re supposed to believe he just figured it out off screen and holds no grudges? Like, I’m sure knowing Kiryu didn’t kill Sohei helps, but he couldn’t fucking tell you that himself? He couldn’t trust you with that information or that conversation? Fuck this. Very understandably, Daigo has his own crisis of faith about the yakuza, very much in parallel to Kiryu’s. Why the fuck SHOULD he go to bat for a crumbling organization that has only proven itself to be a dog chasing its own tail, willing to devour itself at the slightest provocation? It took his father, both his fathers, and he didn’t really get either of them back. Why the fuck should he try to fix that? 

And to its credit, Kiwami 2 does a decent job of articulating Daigo’s motivations there. I could have done with even more, but I think they do him credit in showing him as disenfranchised and lost. And I think it’s refreshing to see someone have to confront the consequences of what’s happened since Kiryu left. Because the games don’t do a good job of showing that this is Kiryu’s direct fault. They never like to make Kiryu’s decisions have consequence, which is poor use of a protag. Rightly or wrongly, their decisions ALWAYS have consequence, or they’re not the protag. You can’t have it both ways. If this person is going to matter then, guess what, their consequences matter. Kiryu turned away. Rightly or wrongly, he did that. Daigo will never get that opportunity. Child of destiny. Not only was he bred and raised for this, he doesn’t know how to do anything else either. He doesn’t have other options the way Kiryu does. And we’re in a terrible vacuum of power. Terada’s namely in charge, but no one’s loyal to him. Even if he wasn’t deliberately fostering this, the Tojo Clan can’t survive without faith in their leader. Daigo, by fact of being his fathers’ son, can bind what’s left. And he has to because Kiryu won’t. Which is... really shitty. So either Daigo does this, or we all hang. And we never quite articulate that this is on Kiryu’s say so. Kiryu could still take over now and fix it he just... won’t.

And on top of this already comfortably stressful situation... we set Daigo up to come into a stable situation of power, where his transition would be smooth. We didn’t give him the tools to know how to salvage. He’s not practiced negotiating with hostile entities or even just people who will resent him because he’s young. And he’s lost a lot of faith, without even charisma and willpower on his side, this is a massively uphill battle. If he doesn’t believe, who else will believe him? Daigo knows this. And we watch that struggle go on, all while Kiryu just cheerleads. He hasn’t decided yet if he’s gonna stay in the yakuza either and he’s lowkey depressed after Kiwami 1. Lowkey he’s just suffering depression and can’t do as much as he normally would. Not an excuse, but I think an important way to read how tired and reluctant he is. Some therapy would really fucking help. 

Anyway, we manage to get through Kiwami 2 and install Daigo as chairman, at which point Kiryu fucks off for good. Now, he kinda/sorta leaves some supports for Daigo, in Majima specifically, but also in Kashiwagi and I wanna believe in Daigo’s mom too. She was so cool and then we just... never talked about her again ^^; Laaaame *sigh* So, I guess, Kiryu did try to fulfill his remaining responsibilities as Daigo’s living father, but mostly it was just an excuse for him to leave and not feel guilty. Mostly it was him foisting off his duties onto someone else. He didn’t stay to teach Daigo everything he knew about the people Daigo would have to control. He didn’t teach Daigo and Majima how to talk to each other, a thing which REPEATEDLY comes back to bite us in the ass. He’s not there for Daigo to ask advice and help. Kiryu is full of confidence for Daigo, he’s not TRYING to make him fail, but Kiryu’s so caught up in his own need to leave, he neglects to people who need him. 

And Daigo, to his everlasting credit, does his best to get by without Kiryu’s help. As much as possible, he never calls to ask Kiryu for help. And he does grow into a quite competent chairman! He does successfully rehabilitate the Tojo Clan, he makes them profitable again, he insists on respect and people don’t run amok under him. He does it, he salvages a dying organization. And he may not even really believe in it, but he has such a sense of responsibility, he does it anyway. He knows there’s no one else. He knows if he goes to Kiryu and says I don’t want this, Kiryu won’t help him. Kiryu didn’t mean for it to happen this way, he didn’t mean to be selfish and put others in a bad position. But he wasn’t there to listen. And I think Kiryu eventually comes to rue that. 

The very unfortunate thing about Kiryu is... he is a dragon. Even though he is kind and generous and not greedy in a conventional sense, he is greedy. As much as Kiryu is a powerhouse because come hell or high water, he does what he thinks is right... this also makes him extremely selfish. He can be blind to other people’s needs and refused to be tied down. Again, for the best of reasons, because he’s trying to raise a family, because this environment is triggering for him, but he just hauls off and does things instead of talking to anyone which... makes him impossible to have a working relationship with. He has to learn to talk and to listen and that he can’t make all of the decisions by himself. The great irony being, Kiryu never wants to, but he doesn’t know how to ask for help. He’s so used to have everything put on him, he doesn’t realize it doesn’t have to be that way... but anyway, I’m getting caught up ^^; The point is, he thinks because he ditched the Tojo Clan they no longer care about him. Which is... naive at best. Of course people still care about you dumbass. Which makes Kiryu a massive vulnerability to the Tojo. In 3 and 4, Daigo makes stupid calls trying to protect Kiryu and trying to protect his interests. And because Kiryu hasn’t left open an avenue for them to talk, Daigo has to make these decisions on his own with bad information and he does his fucking best. But... he doesn’t know how to make the best of what he has, not like Kiryu would, and he fucks up sometimes. 

I really, really love game 4 for that reason. Daigo’s fuck up is SO understandable, SO reasonable. It sounded like a good idea, it sounded like peace and harmony. And he was left without a leg to stand on before he knew it. In many ways, it wasn’t his fault. Kiryu himself says as much. And I may never forgive the end of 4 for letting Kiryu REALIZE he defaulted on his responsibilities but then, instead of changing his behavior in any way, he fucks off back to Okinawa. God... *siiiigh* ANYWAY. 

And this struggle, this lack of communication, but unstated loyalty, comes full circle in game 5. When Daigo is literally drowning, literally knows he’s going to fail this time and there’s nothing he can do, and even when he’s with Kiryu, he can’t bring himself to ask for help. He knows Kiryu won’t or can’t. Instead he asks for absolution. He tries to tell his dad he’s just been doing his best and... he’s sorry for the terrible things that are about to happen. How gutting that Daigo can only see himself as a failure because... he’s not Kiryu. No one’s Kiryu. Even Kiryu refuses to be Kiryu. But Daigo knows if he was just Kiryu, things would be better. He’s not a legend. He’s not a god. He’s not all-powerful or crazy or impossible. He’s just a guy, doing his best because he had to. Because there was no one else. And some days Daigo does great, but a lot of days, he doesn’t measure up. And that eats at Daigo like mold. Kiryu would NEVER look at Daigo this way. Heck, most people at that point would never compare them. It’s in Daigo’s head, but it still hurts. He’s still, even now, looking up to Kiryu and he’ll just... never quite get there. 

This is the only good thing I will ever say about game 6, and it was still 2 or 3 games too late, but Kiryu finally acknowledging Daigo as his son was good. Kiryu saying he was proud and saying he was grateful was good. Again, several games late, but... it still mattered. It still mattered that, in the end, Kiryu recognized his legacy in Daigo. That he understood so much of what Daigo did and does and is and was is for him. That mattered. 

Daigo is a great chairman who takes care of his clan. But he was robbed of his relationship with his father. The games never work on the relationships that exist, strong relationships, for reasons I will never understand. Games 3, 4, and 5 would have been SO much more interesting if we had just like Kiryu talk to his fucking friends. Two would have been SO much easier if Kiryu had just been fucking chairman like he was fucking supposed to be and the transition of power to Daigo came later and smoother, with Kiryu helping to make it. Daigo tries his hardest every day and he’s an incredible negotiator and savior after all the shit he’s had to pull the Tojo Clan through, kicking and screaming and fighting to tear itself apart every damn day. The generation above him is all legends, Majima and Saejima and Kiryu. Daigo isn’t one of them. But he’s better because he was here and because he tries and because he succeeds. We need Daigo. We deserve him. 

[villanevest]

"I Can Help You": the Build-Up to & Significance of 2x07's Villaneve Sex[ish] Scene

of COURSE i am going to write about this. before we get started though, i wanted to tell you all that while @villainever is still running, i will be mostly posting from my brand-new primary, @villanevest (this blog). so follow me for the same stupid memes, and check the "villanevest writes" tag if you're interested in more of these essays :D alright. now let's get going. killing eve is an extremely versatile show, and that's absolutely a credit to the writers being willing to follow the characters and their relationships, which allows the narrative to develop in a simultaneously organic and deeply compelling way. the greatest complexity of the series is also its primary draw: the dynamic between villanelle and eve, and its evolution. in this mini-essay, we're going to step through why -- I believe -- the construction of the sex scene as two separate but synchronised encounters is the best choice for killing eve right now, and how they've accelerated towards it since the pilot. from the beginning, villanelle and eve have been all about parallels. the first time we see villanelle in the ice-cream shop, she's spaced-out, bored, a vacant observer. the first time we see eve, she's asleep. these scenes are very deliberately presented to us, one after another: here, we have two women who feel displaced and alienated. neither of them is lonely, not exactly; they have people in their lives. what they lack is real, significant passion, something beyond the routine -- for villanelle, that "routine" is a lot more dramatic, certainly, but nonetheless, they're both numbed out, but until they meet each other, they're not really aware of that.

and then we have that moment in the hospital bathroom. it's not a coincidence that they're standing in front of a mirror, confronted with each other, and themselves. the composition of this visual directly implies that villanelle and eve are not just alike, but inherently complementary. in many ways, eve is a reflection of villanelle, and villanelle is a reflection of eve -- that is, opposite, but also identical. it's not until later that they really understand the importance of this two-second conversation, but  it's the first breath of an obsession that will span continents and become literally life and death. 

eve and villanelle discover each others' real identities at the same time, in a montage that draws focus again to these similarities between them and their experiences. but this is when their respective trajectories towards each other begin to progress separately and distinctly. the reason for this is that while villanelle is unquestionably the "cat" in this cat-and-mouse equation, at this point, she is also the one being chased, and eve is in pursuit. for most of the first season, villanelle has more information about and power over eve than vice-versa. for eve, who still has niko, she is seduced into the thrill of villanelle through that prescribed pursuit, and for a little while, that's enough for her. but villanelle doesn’t have such a set structure, and -- once she knows eve's name and eve's face -- almost immediately begins seeking out copies.

the first copy she constructs is herself, signing in as "eve polastri" while working in berlin. this is mostly a stunt to get eve's attention -- the first of many (amsterdam, anyone?) -- but it compounds on 1x01's thematic suggestion of their compatibility. the second copy, however, is perhaps the most blatant example of this: the woman from the tour group who sleeps with villanelle in 2x03. villanelle tells her she "loves her [American] accent", and gets her to take her hair down, and then goes on to actually call her eve.

villanelle's interest in superficially recreating eve fades fairly early, after eve gets out of the car to confront villanelle when villanelle is absolutely armed and definitely dangerous, for no apparent reason other than she wants to. villanelle scares her off with a warning shot (even though she could've very easily killed her at this point), but then doubles back the next episode, with the kitchen sequence from 1x05. villanelle says she "just wants to have dinner with [eve]", but i think this evening really exceeds her expectations. prior to this, she was very interested in eve, obviously, but after it, villanelle's infatuation becomes both more significant and more mature, and so does eve's. they've got chemistry when they're together, not just in the tension of being apart. BUT. so, so much of their story is spent apart. season one is a blur of glimpsed profiles and silhouettes, with only the bathroom, the kitchen, and finally villanelle's apartment providing them sites to briefly interact. at the end of 1x08, villanelle tells eve, "i masturbate about you a lot", but eve denies doing the same, which is probably true, in the sense that eve still believes she doesn’t (actively, at least) consider villanelle in a sexual way. then season two picks up, and they're apart again. only they're less apart than they were before. villanelle is right when she assures gabriel that eve stabbed her to "show [her] how much she cares about [her]". while it was barely premediated, and i don't think eve necessarily viewed it as a confession, it absolutely is; a confession of who she really is, and that that person is irrevocably linked to villanelle. in stabbing villanelle, eve puts the first truly irreversible crack in her façade of normality; she can't go back now, not all the way. the show doesn't really linger on this, though, because it's so obvious that eve doesn't WANT to go back. as reticent as i am to quote shakespeare, i will make an exception for this case, and take utterly out of context the line, "these violent delights have violent ends". for eve and villanelle, they need the violent delights and violent ends alike; sex and destruction and obsession and pain are integral to their characters. why? because i think such extreme emotions and acts break through that nothingness, that fugue villanelle talks about in 2x06. 

and so the stab wound -- which villanelle proudly shows off to niko in 2x05 -- becomes something of a pact between them. to eve, it means villanelle affects her strongly enough to push her out of herself (except really, into herself), and to villanelle, it means eve can exist in her world, can challenge and surprise her, can interrupt the boredom with these bright spots of total involvement and utter fascination. and since we’ll be talking about parallels later -- in 2x02, villanelle caressing her wound in the bathtub is juxtaposed with eve tracing the heart carved into the train table. i think a “carved heart” is pretty much the wound is, too. from the pilot, villanelle and eve's relationship is an intricate dance of towards/away, together/apart. over the story, over each direct and indirect crossing of their paths, they become more towards, less away; more together, less apart. after season one, particularly 1x08, they have this permanent and indelible connection. but they're still consistently positioned as unable to reach one another. villanelle calls MI6, but they won't send her through to eve. eve arrives, but misses villanelle, and villanelle watches through the transparent but very real barrier of the car window, literally passing her by. then we have them separated by only a door in 2x03, and so many other instances of close-but-not quite.

it's worth bringing up at this juncture that while the villaneve plotline is happening, villanelle and eve each have their own individual character arcs, so while they keep glancing off each other and being torn apart in practice, they are steadily gravitating to a middle ground mentally and emotionally. i'll come back to this idea. in 2x05, we have yet another mirror/reflection, as the kitchen scene is revisited. having this reunion in the same setting as their first foregrounds how their relationship has changed. eve isn't anxious or fearful or on the back foot. she's the one who brings villanelle to her home, not the other way around, as it was last time. she reaches out to villanelle, she's confident enough to take the pills, and she doesn't hesitate before saying "yes" when villanelle asks if eve will give her everything she wants. the "yes" is easy, because whether eve is quite ready to admit it or not, what villanelle wants is what eve wants. 

then villanelle helps eve with the ghost, and going forward, they're able to regularly collaborate, in their own off-beat fashion. so after 2x05, villanelle and eve are more or less settled as fixtures in their respective lives. there's still the dance, but there's no real chase. they've drawn abreast of one another. they've caught up. and this is where we circle back to the idea of copies. like i said, ever since eve has been real to villanelle, copies have been insufficient. but she still can't have eve, not entirely, and not exactly how she wants, so she escalates to proxies. in 2x06, villanelle mouths, "ready?" to eve, right before pushing amber's bodyguard in front of the truck. i'm not trying to imply that villanelle wants to push eve in front of a truck -- but as i said earlier, villanelle and eve intersect at this overlap of violent delights/violent ends. sex and death. she asks her Copy Eve in 2x03 "ready?" in just the same way. villanelle is demonstrating her faith in the depth of their connection in the extremity of her actions. she's proving to eve that they're for-better-or-worse now. she's not afraid that killing someone right in front of eve will drive her away; she knows it'll suck her in. 

so what's the significance of the shift from copies to proxies? the copies were for villanelle -- a stand-in so that she could act out her desires. it's much more reflective of the "i / it": if someone looked like eve, then it was almost as if she had the real thing, right? but her affection for eve mutates into something much harder for her to manage, and "it" very quickly becomes "eve", and she can't produce a facsimile that can hold a candle to "me / eve". but the proxies aren't for villanelle, they're for eve. if villanelle's not allowed to touch eve yet, then she's using the proxies to say, "this is how much i care. this is how much i want you." and on a subliminal level at least, if not a conscious one, i think eve interprets it that as such. then, finally, we get to 2x07. we have a repetition of the phone call from 2x02, and just as carolyn played eve the recording of villanelle's MI6 call, villanelle listens to eve's voicemails. in this instance, they haven't missed each other. they're already together. the "9 missed calls, 3 voicemails" are an overture across space, but not across distance. this is about breaching an emotional gap, not a physical one. eve and villanelle are around each other often now, but it takes their being apart again to highlight just how much that proximity has allowed them to evolve.

in the restaurant in rome, we again have the visual of eve reaching out, villanelle catching her hand, and them meeting in the middle. which brings us to The Scene. it follows villanelle's crucial conversation with aaron (which I wrote about here), and that gives her a last little push. note: we have to remember that the bug that eve is listening through is only one way. while this might seem like a let-down, in that villanelle couldn't hear eve, i think it's actually really significant. because it shows how well villanelle knows eve, how much effort she puts into understanding her, and how easily she remembers things about her. in 2x06, eve was interjecting via the comms throughout almost the entirety of the aaron-villanelle-amber dinner conversation. that and the voicemails exemplify eve's involvement and propensity to hover, which is a result of her natural controlling tendencies, and how consumed she is with villanelle. so even though villanelle had no way of knowing that eve was listening, she knew anyway. she was sure with no feedback or guarantee. i love how they set this eve/hugo encounter up during previous episodes. it's something of a checkov's gun situation -- that is, the principle that if you introduce an idea (e.g. hugo's sexual interest in eve), then you need to bring it to fruition. what the writers did so well, though, is that we thought hugo had already served his purpose as a romantic/sexual option -- when he leans in to kiss eve in 2x04 and she doesn't lean away, we have evidence of how little commitment she still has to her marriage. but now he becomes eve's proxy.

so why have eve hookup with hugo, and not villanelle? well, there are a lot of reasons. firstly, eve and villanelle having sex, or even kissing, would be a very significant development for the show, and have massive implications for the narrative. as a result, it would need a lot of build-up. the circumstances would need to be perfect. while eve is no longer shying from her attraction to villanelle, i think a mixture of adrenaline and tension would have to reach terminal velocity (probably by introducing an external stressor, like a fight or escape) for eve to actually step over that line. i don't think that, at this point, it's something she'd do with a perfectly clear head. she's too aware of how precarious the current balance is, and probably (quietly) also too afraid that giving in would mean villanelle's obsession would have closure, and thus die off. the episode just didn't have the minutes to generate that situation, and the plot didn't give an avenue for it.

secondly, it gives the writers a lot more room to play with the respective aftermaths. this way, they get to bring in 

1) a fallout of some kind between hugo and eve. hugo's been very laissez-faire all season about sex, about boredom, etc., going on about how he understands why eve took the job at MI6, and her interest in villanelle. but until this point, it's been pretty much all fun and games, all james bond for hugo. and then he's going to have this moment where he realises he and eve AREN'T alike. he's a good-time guy, a bit selfish, and smart enough to need an entertaining career to keep stimulated. eve? it goes SO much further than that for eve. she really is on that sociopathy/psychopathy spectrum, and she needs this to feel awake, to feel anything. in their sex scene, their dynamic flickered into an "i / it" for eve, because hugo as a person didn't really matter at all. he's going to see the exact scope and depth of eve's obsession, and he'll realise she's gone beyond where he can follow. first niko, then hugo -- they're both ferrymen who tag along for a piece of eve's journey, but ultimately stay behind. they give an important reference point for the audience; they act as thresholds we see eve pass -- here, something niko can't condone; now, something hugo won't do.

2) the no-morning-after for villaneve. this doesn't relieve any of the sexual tension, it ratchets it up. like the stab wound, this connects them, but it doesn't resolve anything. the writers now have so many options: maybe a little awkwardness from eve (unlikely), intensifying chemistry (very likely), perhaps denial, or a desperation to get alone and take things to the next level. this didn't close a door, it opened several. they'll be able to draw villaneve out even more, and they'll neatly sidestep both audience expectation and television tradition. it's their game now.

here, hugo also has metaphorical signifiance -- he's the human cost of villaneve. over the course of the show, bodies, careers, and relationships have all imploded to get villaneve even just close enough to touch. villanelle and eve are using hugo directly just as they've indirectly used many others. note: symbolically, as well, villanelle is in eve's head. this feeds into the notion of obsession -- since the pilot, villanelle has consumed eve's thoughts, and now she's actually there. finally, above all, i believe this encounter perfectly fits the current phase of their relationship, and its evolution. it's the culmination of copies and proxies and distance. like i said, that apartness is just as critical to villaneve as the togetherness. they are as made of their negative space as they are of their lines and colours. and here they are: after pretending different people are each other, after being pressed together but stepping away again, after using others as mediums to express themselves, after being chased and caught, lost and found. here they are: together and apart at once. 

not only is this thematic, it's romantic, in its own twisted way. fifteen episodes later, they are even sharper reflections of each other than they were when they met. they're in sync even with such little communication, and that stands in contrast to their additional relationships. niko and eve could be in the same room, talking directly, and be less connected. and that's kind of tragic -- that eve went through so much of her life NOT wide awake, that niko spent years with someone who wasn't really WITH him. villanelle and eve are all hot and cold, entirely comprised of extremes, because that's what they NEED to feel alive. villanelle says in 2x06, "like us, you mean". and that's exactly it: fundamentally, villanelle and eve are the same kind, and that's why they are so good together. it's how they stay so good apart.

will these violent delights have violent ends? unquestionably. but those ends will be new beginnings. eve won't go back to sleep. villanelle could never cope with being bored again. they'll push and pull, fight and fuck, get mad and get in deeper, inextricable. they'll keep chasing the delights and weathering the consequences, getting wilder and wilder until something happens that they can't shake off or walk away from. but that's how they are, that's how they're happy, and that's the only way they can be. 

i hope all this held together! I had a lot of thoughts and it was hard to compress into one short essay, so I know it seems like a lot of disconnected threads rip. as always, reply/ask/message me with ideas/requests if you have something you want me to talk about! thank you to everyone who has commented nice things on my previous posts; it makes me want to write more and it’s nice to know someone’s reading :D

[funnydove-blog]

The Greatest Show on Earth: Decision-Making Processes

If you’ve ever visited the circus when it came to town, or if you’ve seen a circus tent, you’ll remember the shape of it: its large canvas sheets are supported by tentpoles— round pillars that hold up the covering and give it form and structure. The more sturdy and well-placed the tentpoles, the more secure the circus tent.

Let’s look at your life as a circus tent. We’ll look at the ‘tentpoles’ and define those as option points or big choices that define how the canvas of your life takes shape and turns out. While every woman’s journey is unique in the smaller events, challenges, and choices she faces, these tentpoles are major moments many women experience. The choices that accompany them have a large and often permanent impact. They can determine how sturdy and secure the canvas of your life is.

Refer now to your ‘18 to 85’ chart.

Your First Tentpole will probably occur around the age of 18, when you graduate from high school and have the choice to continue your education in college or other institution of higher learning.

Your Second Tentpole will probably occur around the age of 30, when you decide whether or not you’re going to have children and be a parent.

Your Third Tentpole will probably occur around the age of 45, when you’ve established yourself in your career and have choices about what you can do with your resources such as experience, expertise, financial independence, influence, and time.

Your Fourth Tentpole will probably occur around the age of 65, when you have the opportunity to retire, continue working, or transition to some different kind of endeavor.

Note: you will have many decisions to make in life. These are just a few of the big ones. The ‘ages’ of 18, 30, 45, and 65 that I’ve assigned to these options are, of course, variable from woman to woman. I’ve selected these, not at random, but because they are common approximate chronological markers for these tentpoles. Let’s take a look at them in more detail.

YOUR FIRST TENTPOLE

This tentpole occurs around the age of 18. This may be the first time in your life that you make a big decision about your life. Your choices at this point can be to continue your formal education or end it with a high school diploma. You can choose to get the best job you can with the education you have, maybe as a waitress or file clerk, or you can choose to enroll in an institution of higher learning. Choose wisely.

It’s important to acknowledge that you’ve probably spent most of your childhood and adolescence financially and emotionally dependent on someone else. You’ve been growing up and learning about life, in school and from your environment. On the day you turn 18, you are legally an adult, but you’ve spent 95% of your life as a child. Unless you’ve had an extraordinary childhood, you aren’t really equipped to make big decisions consistently well.

Terminating your education, going into the workforce, or getting married and/or getting pregnant at this age are big steps. You can be an employee or parent at the age of 18, or even younger. The real question is: do you have the emotional, vocational, and financial resources to do those two things well over the long haul?

As a job applicant and future employee, your job prospects for the present and the future may be limited with only a high school education. There may be opportunities to learn on the job as you work and progress, but other candidates with more education will be competing for those promotions as well.

If you decide to begin a family immediately, you become responsible for yourself and a child. You also become involved with other adults (the father of the child, for example) for the rest of your life. If you don’t have any long-term experience being responsible for yourself, is it wise to introduce another responsibility—a lifetime one, at that—right now?

It is also important to consider what happens if you postpone a decision at this point in your life. If you postpone starting to work or starting a family, you can always make a decision to do that later. If you postpone your education, you may never get back to it, especially if you start a family.

Furthermore, it’s important to consider what happens if you make a mistake at this point. If you make a mistake about starting a family, it is one you live with for the rest of your life. If you make a mistake about, let’s say, the college you choose to attend, you can always change your mind and transfer to another college. You can make a decision—and a mistake—about both of these. Only one will be an irrevocable decision that permanently changes the trajectory of your life.

Note: many people want to get married. Not everybody is prepared to be married. Many people want to have a baby. Not everyone is prepared to be a parent. Babies are cute. Children are work.

I suggest you continue your education. Even if you may not know what you want to do with your life, getting an education will help you as you move toward making that decision. It will introduce you to possibilities and give you resources and exposure to take advantage of those possibilities.

Make this investment in yourself, to mature as a person and to develop a skill set and social network you can use in your chosen profession. It may be a two-year technical college, a four-year university, or six or eight years that include postgraduate studies.

Whatever form it takes, it’s important to see a college education as a transformational journey. You start it as an 18 year old adolescent, at the mercy of economic conditions and confined by a limited worldview. You complete it as a twenty-something young adult with core knowledge, social and vocational skills, selfdiscipline, and some exposure to a larger world under your belt.

Know that your education, in any sense of the word, has just begun. At the age of 18, you’ve learned to read, write, and understand basic math and science. You have a general understanding about history and the world around you.

That’s not a large reservoir to draw upon if you want to max out this personal opportunity—your life. I encourage you to get the best education you can. You will learn facts and skills, but, more importantly, you will learn how to improve and refine your decision-making processes. The implications and impact of education cannot be overstated, as it informs and enriches each tentpole that follows.

Note: Old Money Gals prioritize education. It is an experience that ‘rounds them out’ as young women. It introduces them to a new world (a college campus), to new people (professors and fellow students), and to new ideas (found in the textbooks, lectures, and conversations). It is invaluable.

‘Never be too big to ask questions. Never know too much to learn something new.’ —OG MANDINGO

[gingersnappish]

ASSORTED KYLUX RECS

I’ve been sorting and organizing my AO3 bookmarks and I thought I’d throw together a list of some of those I deemed worth keeping (or even a second read) for my own edification. A lot of this has probably been mentioned in one place or another before, so I apologize if it’s old news to others! 

I’m not copy/pasting warnings or ratings, so please please please read the tags and warnings on the actual fics themselves before you dive in!

***for all-time favs

TFA/Post-TFA   

***build a war on your assistance by grue

General Hux is busy picking up the pieces of his career after the implosion of Starkiller, but he makes the time to accept the cut off bits of corpses that Kylo Ren brings to him as courting gifts.

 Dawn Is Coming, Open Your Eyes, Look Into the Sun as the New Days Rise by MellytheHun

General Hux makes several mistakes; his first, existing on the same plane of reality as Kylo Ren. His second; saving Kylo Ren from certain death. His third; striking a deal with the beauty-marked, raven-haired devil himself. 

Last Order by Ayame_no_kimi

Hux is fed up with Snoke. Kylo Ren is having a series of bad days. Not everything goes according to plan. This picks up right where TFA left off.

A Flicker of Brilliance by deluxekyluxtrashcan (rhoen)

In the wake of the destruction of Starkiller Base, things start to change for both Kylo and Hux. Their futures are now uncertain, and the uneasy tolerance of each other that they shared has been altered too. As they struggle to understand and maintain their place in the world they thought they knew, both men are forced to reevaluate more than just their loyalty to Snoke, and to the Order, and find it leads to something they never even thought an option.

Wake Up, Sleeper by penpenhooray

It would seem odd that the Resistance should always seem to get their information just a bit faster than the First Order. Of course, General Leia Organa knows the risks her mole is taking by sending her life saving information. Luke was confident in his padawan's ability to infiltrate the First Order to destroy it from the inside, and he trusted his pupil's instincts. And Hux? Well, he's spent over a decade as a sleeper agent within the bowels of the First Order when he feels an awakening in the Force, and he's decided it's time to begin the destruction of the First Order. And he's going to bring Ben back to the Light if it's the last thing he does.

Bear by saltandrockets

Captured by the Resistance, Hux lies about being pregnant to avoid immediate execution. There's only one problem: It turns out not to be a lie.

Life Sentence, No Cellmate by hollycomb

Hux follows orders and loses his way. 

***First in a massive multi-part verse that is well worth the read and (I think) on just about every rec list out there for Kylux.

***Beyond the Storm by kaeda

Five years after the defeat of the First Order, a mostly-redeemed Jedi runs into a grouchy fugitive war criminal on a planet far from Republic space. Together, they fight crimethe dark side.

 Hux  AUs/Ben Solo AUs  

Escape Velocity by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)

Brendol Hux Jr., only son of a former First Order commandant who sold out to the New Republic, struggles to find a means of advancement in a political world that rejects his Imperial pedigree at every turn.Then he meets Ben “Call me Kylo” Solo, Jedi school dropout, and the trajectory of both their spiralling lives cannot be but irrevocably altered.

The Enemy Ahead by codenametargeter

To get away from the influence of his father, Hux defected from the First Order when he was 17 years old. Now, years later and a Major in the New Republic Fleet, he still can't outrun his First Order past. Fed up with the New Republic's unwillingness to act, Senator Leia Organa and General Tycho Celchu have given him a secret mission to find indisputable proof that the First Order is out there waiting to strike. The only problem? They're also sending Jedi Knight Ben Organa Solo.

***Ex Machina by sual

An AU inspired by Ex Machina where Ben Solo never became Kylo Ren, General Hux is a droid that used to be human, and they might just be what the other needs.

Earth-Based AUs

***Family Values by SpookMouse (carinacove)

“Alone on Thanksgiving? Mad at your dad?

I am a 28 year old felon with no high school degree, and a dirty old van one year younger than me painted like Eddie Van Halen’s guitar. I can play anywhere between the ages of 20 and 29 depending on if I shave. I’m a line cook and work late nights at a bar. If you’d like to have me as your strictly platonic date for Thanksgiving, but have me pretend to be in a very long or serious relationship with you, to torment your family, I’m game.” Or, Hux brings Kylo home for the holidays.

I want to F*cking Tear You Apart by Megsense

Somewhere in the 2000s. Hux is just a little misanthrope. Sure, he might carry a scalpel in his satchel and day dream of death, but he lives mostly in his head. He's not dangerous, right? Kylo is a scene queen, hiding behind a mask of make up, labels and on-line popularity. He lives loudly, he's bold! He's unique! He's just a little precocious. How could any of that ever be a bad thing? Myspace AU inspired Fanfic. Not nearly as innocent as it sounds.

Blue Milk by zamwessell

Kylo Ren's teen angst bullshit has a body count. A new high school brings with it a new start, an unlikely friend, and a new chance to screw everything up.

[wordsonpages1-blog]

"Person A is walking down the hallway at school/work and Person B walks up behind them and pulls on their bag to get their attention. Person A flips out into self defense mode and this is really awkward because I’ve pinned you against the wall with my elbow in your throat and our faces are inches from each others and we are ~just friends~ but holy fuck do you look hot when you’re mad and you just pinned me against a wall and there is a lot of possible sexual tension here lord help."

Up Close and Personal 

here you go my love! I hope this is kinda what you wanted! I’ve left it open at the end so if anyone’s interested I may continue. 

Enjoy xx

@gellbellshead

It was Monday morning and Betty Cooper was running late. Herconverse squeaked slightly as she rushed down the hallway, her hands hastilypinning a stray hair back into place as the curls of her pony tail bounced withthe hurried movements.

“Shit, shit, shit!” she mumbled as she noted the lack ofstudents in the halls, checking her watch and letting out a groan with therealisation that homeroom had already begun.

Her hands clenched into fists, her nails grazing the skin ofher palms she willed the pressure in her chest to dissipate. Her breathing wasshallow and her stomach was in knots as her anxiety spiked.

Locker first. No homeroom first. But you’re already late. Wait which is closer.

Her eyes darted around the hallway, when suddenly theylanded on a dark figure turning the corner up ahead. She strained her gazebefore her green orbs widened with realisation. She knew that dark figure. Itwas the beanie that gave him away, the same grey knitted cap he had worn eversince they met as children.

Suddenly the anxiety left her body, the impending panicattack halting as shock took its place. Her feet fused to the ground as herlimbs seized with surprise.

Mere months ago his presence in the halls of Riverdale Highwouldn’t have drawn such a reaction from her. But now as she took in hisbrooding demeanour, hands stuffed in his pockets, the black leather jacket shehad become accustomed to seeing him in as of late switched out for an old denimone; she couldn’t help but stare. His brooding demeanour was the same asalways, though his shoulders held a new tension.

Jughead Jones.

Why had no one told her he was coming back today? She knewit was something she would not have forgotten.

A few months ago, after his dad’s arrest Jughead had movedin with a foster family on the Southside of town. His mum had already packed upand left a year before that, taking Jughead’s little sister with her andleaving her son to welt. The change of living arrangements had meant he had totransfer schools to Southside High.

It was a change that had shaken their group, the dynamic ofthe usual threesome- Betty, Archie and Jughead- irrevocably altered. The threeof them had been best friends since childhood, always together.

Until they weren’t. Until Jughead was taken away and fellfurther into the throes of Southside life. The serpent’s had taken him undertheir wing, offered protection in the ever growing hostility of the town andthe dark haired boy had started shutting himself off.

They still caught up for milkshakes at Pop’s and sometimeshung out at Archie’s house but it wasn’t the same. He had become more reserved,darkness shrouding his person in a way that it had always threatened to butnever succeeded in until this year. He would show up in leather instead ofplaid, converse gone and combat boots in their place, sometimes with errantbruises and cuts. His jaw was set in a new hard line, blue eyes taking on aharsher tint. He didn’t talk about his life- his real life- anymore, and onlyindulged them with medial details about school and his foster parents.

Betty hated it. She hated the changes and the fact she washelpless to fix them.

But then by some miracle, Fred Andrew’s after much tryinghad managed to get in contact with Jughead’s mum- something not even Jughead hadbeen able to achieve- and convinced her to sign custody of her son over to him.He had moved in with the Andrews on the weekend, at least that’s what Archiehad told her. But no one had mentioned his return to school.

Betty couldn’t help the wide grin that suddenly spreaditself across her face the realisation that he was really there before hereyes, and that he was back, really back; things were finally retreating backinto some semblance of normalcy and her heart felt a little lighter.

Her feet were moving again, the goal of catching him givingher a clear trajectory for her movements.

His slow, lethargic movements allowed her to catch up easilyand Betty rolled her eyes at his laziness. Her hand reached out tugging on hissleeve as soon as she was within a step.

“Jug- ah!” Her greeting was immediately cut off andmanufactured into a gasp by his quick movements, his body spinning quickly andmaking her dizzy as his hands turned her around and had her pushed up against alocker within seconds. One of his hands was curled into a fist, pressingagainst the metal just above her shoulder, while his other one was splayed outon the delicate skin of her throat, his grip strong enough to send trickles offear running through her blood, but not tight enough to choke her. His darkfeatures were twisted in a snarl and his breaths were coming out in pants. Hisbody was pressed up against hers and the space between them was non-existent.

Betty couldn’t breathe for an entirely different reason now.  

They had never been this close before. The air was stuck inher lungs, refusing to make it way out. With the way he was pinning her againstthe locker with his body she could feel the hard planes of muscle he hid sowell under his layers, contrasting perfectly with the soft curves of her ownand sending warmth spreading throughout her veins. In the close proximity hehad forced them into she found herself looking directly into his stormy blueeyes, his gaze dark and dangerous, far off and dazed. It sent sparks she had neverexperienced tripping down her spine, making her swallow nervously. Her everynerve was alight and she had the sudden urge to be closer.

The hand against her throat was enticing the darkness withinher; exciting and unknown. It was a feeling she keened toward, yearning to getlost in the power trip, to give up control. Godhow had she never noticed how strong he was? She wanted to submit.  The sharp angle of his jaw was striking andthe way the light hit his face let her see the perfect symmetry of his darkfeatures. How had she never realised howhandsome and well hot he was? Her thighs clenched unconscionably.

Suddenly Jughead pulled away slightly, seeming to realisehimself and the intimate position they were in. His eyes widened in surprise ashe removed the hand that was splayed against her pale throat and placed it onthe other side of her against the locker. His head dropped for a moment, straydark curl falling over his eyes when he looked up again; and god did it do things to her- wicked things. Bettygulped again as he let out a loud exhale, his cool breath fanning her face andmaking her eyelids flutter closed briefly.

“Fuck, sorry Betts,” he apologised, sheepish grin on hisface. Betty still couldn’t quite remember how to breathe merely nodding at hiswords, willing her heart beat to slow down. Whatwas happening to her? This was Jughead.Jughead who she had baths with when she was four, Jughead who used to tug herpony tail in the sand pit. Jughead who was her best friend.

Exceptsuddenly he was Jughead who was invading her personal space and hadeffortlessly pinned her against the locker. He was Jughead who had grown up hot. He was Jughead who was aSerpent. He was Jughead who she wanted to pull her hair for a completelydifferent reason.

Thethought made her flush.

“Areyou okay?” His deep voice broke her reverie as she awkwardly shuffled on thespot, trying to relieve the sudden tension she was feeling all over. How was henot fazed by this? Because Elizabeth he’sclearly not having an excessive hormone trip that would make porn stars blushright now, unlike some people.

“Uhhuh,” she mumbled, trying to not to visibly cringe at the breathy, tinge hervoice had adopted.

Heeyed her suspiciously, clearly not believing her. But before she could panic,and begin to think his brilliant mind had connected the dots and realised thereason for her dazed behaviour he spoke again.

“Noreally, I’m sorry if I scared you it’s just, being me and being here witheverything going on in this town I have to watch my back,” he explained andBetty’s eyes widened with horror at the understanding. She felt guilt gnaw ather insides as he revealed something personal to her for what felt like thefirst time in forever, meanwhile all she could think about was whether she wasmore frustrated that people would actually try and attack him in the hallwaysof a high school or the fact that he thought she was scared.

Findinga confidence within her that she was totally unaware she was capable ofpossessing, Betty steeled her nerve. The darkening of her green eyes not missedby Jughead in their close proximity. He swallowed in anticipation as a look ofdetermination settled on her face; the same one that had been the epitome ofinnocence moments ago -flushed cheeks, wide eyes.

“I’mnot scared of you Jughead,” she breathed, her voice low and his body becamealight by her words. He would never have guessed girl next door, sweet BettyCooper was capable of dictating such a sultry tone and the evidence made hisstomach coil in excitement, his blue eyes darkening further. The meaning wasnot lost on him. The way she ever so slightly leaned toward him, still trappedin between the heat of his body and the cool metal of the lockers, confusingand further stimulating her sensitive skin.

Bettyinhaled sharply as his gaze fell to her lips. Her breath bated in anticipation.Never in a million years had she thought she would be so desperate for someoneto kiss her and especially not Jughead Jones of all people. But here she waspressed against a locker, trapped between his arms, dizzy and light headed fromthe faint smell of cigarettes and cologne that radiated from him, her fingerssomehow ending up gripping the hem of his black t-shirt ever so slightly.

“Maybeyou should be Elizabeth,” His tonelow and sinful as his breath tickled her lips. She didn’t miss the way his eyesflashed briefly in a torturous show of self-deprecation, but not even a secondlater it was gone and he was back to the arousing, enigmatic picture.

Shelet out a whimper that would surely make her blush profusely later with theembarrassment of how wantonly, desperate she sounded; desperate for her bestfriend. He looked at her hard for another moment, almost searching before heseemed to find what he wanted. And then slowly, ever so slowly his lips presseddown to hers- a simple brush, light and teasing. Her heart stutterederratically in her chest at the contact, her skin burning as if being set onfire by his touch.

Hergasp propelled him forward. His mouth pressed more deliberately and firmlyagainst hers. Betty groaned, her hands forming tighter fists in the hem of hisshirt as her body arched toward his. Jughead’s tongue pried her lips openbefore slipping inside the warm cavern of her mouth, stroking Betty’s own musclesensually. Her breath hitched, and her eyelashes fluttered against her cheeks.One of his hands came down from against the locker to settle on her hip as hestepped into her, pressing his body flush against her own as he pinned her morefirmly to the structure behind them.

Theirmouths opened wider, to accommodate the sinful tangling of tongues. It was hotand heavy attacking each other’s mouths ferociously. Lips swelling as teethclashed. Her thighs clenched again as he sucked on her bottom lip, eliciting alow groan from her throat. Jughead revelled in the sound, his hips rolling intohers, as his teeth nipped lightly at that same luscious bottom lip. Betty threwher head back against the locker panting, her own hips jutting forward to findfriction. God he was a good kisser. Shefelt drunk, dizzy and disorientated and she loved it.

Butall too soon the moment was broken. The shrill ring of the bell shattered thespell of sexual tension, their blissful haze fading away just as his lips hadbegun to trail down the column of her neck.

“Fuck,”he swore right near her delicate ear at the interruption; the expletive on hislips in such a moment making her hips buck a little into his. Jughead let out abreathy chuckle as he detangled himself from her body. He stepped back and shesuddenly felt cold and empty. It was disconcerting how much she craved histouch and she had only just had it, only just discovered it. He was like adrug, addictive and enlivening. She was high on him, but she wanted more.

Jugheadlet out a breathy chuckle at her dishevelled state. He leant down to their feetpicking up her backpack. He handed it back to her, smirking at the frown set onher face in confusion; she took a few moments inspecting the bag before itclicked that it was hers, and why he had placed it in her hands.

Kidsbegan flooding the halls and the sounds of teenagers talking and moving aroundin mundane routine muffled into white noise.

“Tobe continued,” he said, looking her directly in the eye, gaze heady and full ofpromise before he disappeared.

Bettylet out a heavy breath, her limbs feeling shaky and her entire world feelingoff kilter. Her head fell back against the metal again with a thud, her eyesfalling shut as she scrubbed her face with her hands.

She hadjust gotten herself in big trouble. Because damn that boy could do talentedthings with his tongue and damn didshe really want to continue to see what else he could do.

[deathinfeathers-a]

Yeah, he'd made it easy to forget the kind of damage he could do with that vitriolic, venom sodden tongue of his. The last handful of months they'd spent together had been relatively friction free, as far as their personal relations went anyhow. Textbook honeymoon bliss, she supposes. And it's funny, actually, because nothing really changed to warrant such a peaceable lull. They'd lived their lives like conjoined twins for hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of years. They shared a profound familiarity, the kind that allowed them to communicate from two different ends of a room full of people without ever mouthing a word. She could gauge his state of mind at any given moment by the tempo of his breathing, the lilt of his voice, the trajectory of his gaze. They lived together, slept, ate, bathed, laughed, cried and screamed together and They'd plumbed the niches and the hollows of each other's bodies so thoroughly there did not exist a square inch of his flesh that she had not pampered, with her hands, her lips, her tongue.

And yet, in spite of this, there was an uncertainty which hung over them like a suffocating mist. Maybe it was because nothing in this world had ever belonged to her and the things that had belonged to him were always swept away by the tide of time, or the whims of cruel creators. All it took was a promise. Nothing really changed—but it did. She felt secure. Perhaps for the first time in her life.

All it took was a lie.

And now she has to decide how much that lie devalues their promise.

"Why even scratch at it at all? Are you fucking serious right now, Adam? You're dreaming if you think I'm going to let you sweep this shit under the rug!? I have turned a blind eye to a great many of your irresponsible, half-baked antics throughout the centuries but this is where I draw the line! If what we had was anything more than a masturbatory endeavor on your part to balm the aches of your GARGANTUAN goddamned inferiority complex you are going to wrangle your head out of your ass right this fucking second and explain to me—"

The tirade peters out in the face of this sudden and quite frankly alarming surge of aggression. Aggression which twists his warped but still familiar features into something barely recognizable. She knows what he is trying to do, of course. A year in his absence has not made him any less predictable. He wants her gone so that he won't have to face the repercussions of his actions, so that he can keep wallowing and gorging himself on fleeting divertisments to keep himself good and numb to the reality of his situation. They have sung this song and danced this dance a thousand times over. If he thinks that he can intimidate her into submission, he's got another thing coming.

Another thing taking the form of a deeply unimpressed glower.

"...I'm looking."

There is grief there, too. Veiled thinly behind the umbrage.

"I see you."

"Always have."

The good. The bad. The ugly. It didn't change a thing. She was so irrevocably his.

Is this what she wants?

Yes, in fact.

This is the only thing she has ever wanted. For him to stop trying so desperately to convince her that he is something he is not. To let himself be unabashedly flawed and let her adore him all the same.

@deathinfeathers xxx

If at any point she had been tempted to lay her hands on him in anger it would be in this exact, singular, isolated instant. Isolated because she cannot feasibly begin to conceptualize what he could possibly do to ever raise her hackles any higher than he has with this bullshit retort. That he has the unbridled gall, not only to give her lip; as if this were some average Saturday evening lover's quarrel centered around something as inconsequential as who threw a wrench into tonight's dinner plans by failing to take the cutlets out of the freezer, but to get choked up while he's at it. Did you forget who I am? He says, as if she should have known better. As if she should have...what? Taken his serenade in the garden as some type of premonition? A foreshadowing? She knew he was a disaster. From the moment she was dropped into his arms with a ribbon and a blank where a name should be like a puppy on Christmas morning, she knew. And she was fine with it. Never has there been a moment where she let herself assume that he had his shit together—God knows he made it impossible to fall prey to such a misbelief. But, again, it was fine. It was always fine. More than fine, even. There was an odd sense of catharsis to be found in the chaos that he sowed. She enjoyed watching the bureaucrats squirm and clutch their rosaries whenever he walked into a room, that he was the word disruption given corporeal shape to their simple, sanitized lives in the same manner that she herself was. It was fine, because at the end of the day, no matter how he was spurned for his provocative ways and how she was abhorred for her grizzly nature, they had each other.

"That wasn't a rhetorical question." Words flow like ice water past the tapered crests of the pearly glaciers between her lips. She cannot query him on what the fuck he was thinking at the time—or what the fuck he's been thinking for the past four hundred and something years until he starts giving it to her straight. And by Sera's immaculately polished taint, he will—even if she has to sit here and autopsy him with her eyes for another godforsaken century, he will. "time to rip the band-aid off, don't you think? I mean, ideally you would have begun picking at it at the very least, a few hundred years ago. Better late than never, though, hmm?" She's sure the proximity is suffocating to him, fingers still lingering against his skin like surgeon's scalpels. A free hand rises to capture a lock of his hair between the pads of two digits. Loosely twisting. There's no warmth in her ministrations, just a reminder that she is here and she will not be escaped.

Sure, he'd been far sweeter to her than in the past in the months leading up to their final extermination together. Perhaps not so much during the battle itself when Lucifer's brat dared to show up for a confrontation that was never hers to intervene in and ruin the restrictions of his contract with her whore mother by looking so chokeable. Such was his temper every year when faced with the scuttling and skittering shadows that filled hell and excited his avian urge to trap wriggling beasts beneath talons- to tear and rip until all was right in the garden of his mind again. Anyone that got in his way was subject to the innate ire he's carried ever since the world's first betrayal- even her. A space rock shared between them was sweet and all, but it was hardly a muzzle.

It had been easier for him to ignore the real reasons why they entered hell together every year. They'd done it so often that it had finally started to feel like something that just was and would always be- a purpose...a reason for being. Ultimately a reason for them being together, for what was a commander without his lieutenant in the grand scheme of a seraphim's plan to keep heaven safe? Only when heaven was safe, it meant there was no reason for him to be there anymore since it was clear that no one had a reason for him being there to begin with. He would not fade into obscurity again...he would not be left behind again. He'd make sure no one would ever abandon him. How could she if her only purpose was tied to his? Lie that it was. They could never be apart in the end, even if he thought she could find her own place without him now with her at the head of his so called legacy.

"You're fucking rhetorical." He hisses through clenched teeth, finding it hard to fall beneath her scrutiny now- unmasked in more ways than simply being without his helmet. "There's nothing you'll ever be able to tell me about what I've done that I don't already fucking know. Why even scratch at it at all?!" But even if he hadn't, something was starting to bleed through his guise - rather the lack of one now that he was growing into the features that were always under the surface and yet struggled to break through no matter how much his bullish behaviors disrupted the heavens that tolerated him for so long.

The soft pads of her fingers twisting at his hair was no longer the sweet gesture he might stir awaken to and press into to remind himself that despite everything - she was there and would stay with him... now it was some effort on her part to determine what sort of animal he was. Better to show her now so she'd stop torturing him under her thinly veiled judgement.

"You want to see me so bad, babe...? You want something REAL?"

With a sharp twist of his neck, he butted the stubby end of a horn nub against her persistent pinching, a growl growing in his throat until it thundered out. The reverberations distorted him- or rather revealed what had been there all along. Tipped ears punctured with the metal of a melted down halo disappeared behind a couple of golden feather tufts while flesh darkened to a shade of a starless universe save for the two pinpricks of gold that signaled he still had sight despite it being reduced to singular grains of sand. A forked tongue fell free all the way past his chin where it could curl underneath and comfort the curve of the lump in his throat after issuing her a warning snarl.

"LOOK- AT ME THEN!" Claws curled in and flexed against his palms as the ends of his elbows sprouted more feathers forming a fan between them and up the bottom of his forearms that wrapped tightly around his ribs as he grew in place with a lurch above the talons that erupted out of his feet and dug into the ground- chicken feet, or some prehistoric rendition of them keeping him perched at the tips of their talons with a fanned tail lashing behind him for balance. He'd stuff it all back down in a moment- mask it under the strength it took to keep the disgusting display under wraps, but first...he needed to drive her away- and this time, maybe she'd stay gone.

"Is THIS what you want?!" This was real.

[mastcomm]

Edo 2020: ‘No particular person or political celebration is greater than the State’

Iyoha John Darlington

Right here on this interview, Edo State gubernatorial contender on the platform of the Peoples Get together of Nigeria (PPN), Iyoha John Darlington, speaks about Edo politics and others components that impede the progress being made by the incumbent administration beneath Governor Godwin Obaseki.

Excerpts:

Sir, just lately we stumbled onto an article within the Each day Belief of February 25, 2020 titled “Edo 2020: My fact-finding go to to Authorities Home”. What prompted you to embark on this go to?

I did matter-of-fact make that go to on invitation by His Excellency, Rt. Hon Philip Shiabu, the Deputy Governor of Edo State. Certain by a robust conviction the invitation was prolonged to me in good religion, I unavoidably needed to honour it on February 19th this 12 months.

Our State, if you happen to want reminding, is bigger than any particular person or political factions and seeing that the state was degenerating at a breakneck velocity right into a theatre of battle made up of belligerents throughout the ruling celebration amidst accusations and counter-accusations, I deemed honouring the invitation to the Authorities Home completely obligatory, for starters, being a governorship contender myself having patiently and anxiously watched from afar the deadly actions of the political gladiators which in my very own conviction was able to triggering off a series of escalating incidents and unmitigated disasters.

My rivalry is that there must be a State – I imply a civil division with out weapons and violence. Political teams whose sole intent is to take over the reins of energy can solely flourish in the long run in a peaceable setting which was a far cry in our State as of when that go to was made.

However what do you make of an clearly unhappy state of affairs when the lifeblood of our State was recklessly laid on the road? What actually do you make of an clearly unhappy state of affairs, I ask but once more, when the State you might be aspiring to rule is torn to shreds through actions akin to bloody insurgency?

Apprehensive, I wanted to see the lads on the helm; that, as a matter of truth, more and more grew to become very heavy in my spirit and that invitation grew to become a welcome reduction which I had no possibility however to money in on.

Such is what it was like on the interval beneath evaluate. There isn’t a gainsaying the truth that every part was at sixes and sevens which was an pointless distraction to the incumbent administration. I want to say right here with out ambiguity that our state was in dire want of an ethical compass to navigate her out of the stormy waters. This essentially knowledgeable my curiosity and want for that go to.

Not way back, violence erupted in Edo State. This was adduced to the battle between Governor Obaseki and the APC Nationwide Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole. Are you able to proffer options for a peaceable settlement?

You see, oftentimes I’m stunned on the bushman politics at play on this a part of the globe. Within the Previous World on the north of the Mediterranean, to be exact, the place I’ve sojourned in for over two and a half a long time, to compel one to succumb to the whims and caprices of a confederacy of overlords, fraternities and godfathers is alien to the political actors within the civilized world and subsequently seemed upon as an irredeemable mortal ‘sin’ sufficient to tug you down out of your Olympian peak. This speaks volumes in no small measure for the accelerated progress and improvement we see in that area of the world. Wait a minute! Did I hear you say battle between Governor Obaseki and the Nationwide Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Adams Oshiomhole?

With due respect, I’d have you ever rephrase that sentence as a result of there isn’t a foundation in any way for any battle or conflict of pursuits within the first place between Oshiomhole and Governor Obaseki.

It is just correct for the previous to work in sync with the latter to result in peace and improvement of our State.

Is there any private improvement plan template put in place by the previous whereas Governor that impacted positively on the lives of our individuals defend away from? So why the battle? And what’s the battle all about? Does it have something to do with the well-being of our individuals?

What was left behind in 2016, if one might recall from dim reminiscence, was a State saddled with large debt burden and a sickly development trajectory that has lowered our State to an financial backwater.

Governor Obaseki is in cost and subsequently wants all of the encouragement and help to revitalize the clearly decadent paralysis.

The latter did his bid and left with out distraction and pointless interference by his predecessor, Chief John Odigie Oyegun who coincidentally treaded the identical path with Oshiomhole as a former governor of the state and the nationwide chairman of the ruling celebration.

That’s to say Oshiomhole had no distraction from the above-named whereas on the helm. That’s an workplace I’m aspiring for whose sanctity I respect and the current occupier must be revered with out undue interference from any quarter as a result of a home, as they are saying, that’s divided in opposition to itself can not stand. In his capability because the Nationwide Chairman of the ruling celebration it’s incumbent upon Oshiomhole to work in sync with the governor not as a robotic hand-picked successor. He’s the Govt Governor of the state and must be handled and revered as such.

What I frown upon is assuming the air of a Machiavellian overlord which is diametrically and essentially against what obtains in civilized climes. Our democracy should be allowed to develop and flourish. It should not be stunted by private aggrandizement to pave the best way for peace and improvement. That is the main focus of my humble evaluation.

You’re the Edo State PPN governorship candidate however you appear to be in help of the current governor who’s an APC member. What’s the correlation?

You see, Edo State comes first and the well-being of the generality of our individuals supersedes any private pursuits. That is the place I irrevocably stand. I can’t and will by no means be a part of any iniquitous association that may encourage or endorse the menace of tyranny and odious equipment of neo-Nazi rule in our state.

I, for one, detest private aggrandizement and subsequently out of sync with my want to hitch the governorship race. Frankly, it’s not what it’s predicated on. Could Heavens bear me witness at the present time!

I need to see an Edo State that may attain nice heights through good governance which she has been denied of by successive governments.

I feel it’s excessive time our individuals noticed the essence of getting a authorities in a state – a authorities that completely cares by making provisions for the generality of its individuals. I’ve moved throughout continents and interfaced with the natives and noticed these beliefs in power.

It actually doesn’t matter to me who holds the reins of or wields political energy; what issues to me is how this energy is employed to affect positively on individuals’s lives. We discover these non-existent in Nigeria.

The duo of Obaseki and Shuiab seem refined gents par excellence whose powers are sadly being circumscribed by naysayers and detractors who desire a reversion to the established order ante. This, I dare say, will solely return us to the proverbial viscous circle which I condemn this within the strongest phrases.

I’ve been a participant observer within the unfolding democratic course of. I’ve been watching mouth agape with incredulity why some spent brains would need to dominate our political area and have your complete citizenry lowered to senseless robots.

What’s in rivalry right here is the wellbeing of your complete Edo individuals and this makes me a governorship contender.

Now the query is: Is Obaseki toeing this line? Sure, he’s doing it however solely trudging alongside due to distractions by naysayers and overlords inside his celebration. I feel it’s time to be part of forces with him to take away no matter clog it’s that has been in our wheel of progress. Obaseki if allowed to rule with out interference just isn’t a foul administrator in any case.

Nigerian politics is seen by many as a do-or-die affair and godfatherism an integral half. What do it’s a must to say about these?

Public workplace in Nigeria should, as a matter of urgency, be made much less enticing. There must also be a laws in opposition to granting unrestricted entry to the treasury. Nigerian politicians reside within the laps of luxurious with proceeds from official corruption in contrast to their counterparts in different components of the world.

They reside a lifetime of glittering opulence whereas the citizens on whose ladder they climbed thrive on dust and soiled environment. That’s the reason you typically see all means are employed to amass political energy together with armed thuggery.

At this time, there isn’t a trustworthy politician in Nigeria, if you happen to ask me, who sees the decision to obligation as an ethical dedication and it is a far cry from what obtains within the civilized world the place public workplace is made much less enticing.

This should be discouraged as a result of no prior to they’re transmuted by constitutional wizardry into the execution of their workplace than they change into demi-gods with the state’s devices of coercion at their disposal which in flip reduces the electorates to the dregs of society. This, I dare say, ought to not be in any case!

Politics as a do-or-die affair in Nigeria is healthier blamed on the lure of energy, fame and cash – which is commonly stolen from the general public until to enhance their outrageously fabulous salaries and allowances.

Thus, to hitch the management membership in Nigeria both by appointment or election, just isn’t straightforward with out patronizing or retaining the providers of godfathers. These are a tribe of people that wield affect, energy to find out who will get nominated to contest and win elections, and thereafter assemble a conduit pipe by their godson so elected to the treasury.

This leads to incapacity to carry out nicely whereas in workplace. Oftentimes, elected public officers are hamstrung by lack of funds to carry out. That is the agonizing net and predicament I reliably gathered Governor Obaseki was caught wherein he had no possibility however to withstand that pitched him in opposition to his predecessor.

Poverty and ignorance are twin evil that led to the emergence of godfatherism. The problem of godfatherism is worst in Nigeria. It’s no information nonetheless that our nation has been declared the poverty capital of the world by supranational monetary establishments and this constitutes a stranglehold on the nation.

Ignorance on the a part of the citizens is one other issue that gave rise to godfatherism in Nigeria which regularly breeds corruption through falsification of election outcomes by bribery, maiming, generally by arson, abduction and the like.

If the electorates unite with sincerity of function in opposition to this social illness, I defend this assertion with unprecedented firmness and utmost conviction, it will likely be extirpated from the Nigerian body-politic and finally render the so-called godfathers redundant whereas aspiring to political workplaces.

Alas, this ignoble custom has set us again in so some ways and actually {one of the} hydra-headed issues that impedes our socio-politico, financial and cultural improvement. This lends credence to Patrick Lumuba’s well-known quote, “These with concepts should not in energy, whereas these in energy don’t have any concepts”. That’s what godfatherism has, in reality, lowered us to at the moment!

What’s your evaluation of the Obaseki/Shaibu administration?

To talk in poor health of the duo beneath the present circumstances would quantity to creating them a idiot for his or her pains contemplating the time and vitality they’ve exerted on cleansing the proverbial Augean Stables left behind by their predecessors.

The above-named imply so many issues to so many individuals and these different opinions counsel that Obaseki-Shaibu central paradox is that, regardless of efficient policy-making, they did not obtain credit score for his or her many achievements ensuing from the actions of sponsored naysayers who say he’s not a party-builder. The Obaseki-Shaibu group might higher be described as radical reformists that detest the extremely retrogressive previous order which has dragged our state to abysmal depths.

The indefatigable duo would do extra if re-elected and given a free hand to function however that’s more and more changing into a skinny hope ensuing from the actions of a bunch of people that have ganged up on the above-named and are additional bent on foisting their diabolic whims and caprices on our individuals within the forthcoming dispensation.

Whereas an unbiased participant-observer may give their insurance policies excessive marks, naysayers would seemingly flunk them. What can’t be argued right here, nonetheless, is that they completed a substantial quantity over the past 4 years and equally going unmeasured are various the duo’s intangible or oblique accomplishments.

Within the space of sports activities, an indelible mark has been made. Edo State has regained its misplaced glory.

When Obaseki took over, Edo economic system was in a free-fall and unemployment figures rose sharply in reality spiking to double digits and different sectors tethered on the point of collapse. However all that has modified now for the higher ensuing from the private improvement plan template put in place previously 4 years. This should be allowed to develop for optimum outcomes.

What’s your response to the information making the rounds concerning the imminent dumping of Obaseki by 5 commissioners in his cupboard?

Grapevine sources discuss that ill-conceived plan and whether it is something to go by it is going to solely be very unlucky.

This takes us again to my reactions to query primary. Frankly, I actually can not converse on that now as a result of it has not occurred and it’s what I truthfully don’t anticipate. Therefore it will likely be improper for now to launch diatribes or react to trifles and rumour.

All in all, it’s excessive time the Riot Act was learn to all gubernatorial contenders that the spendthrifts’ stars have set in Edo political firmament and are subsequently not wanted on Dennis Osadebe Avenue.

How is your celebration the PPN making ready for the forthcoming Edo State governorship election?

Our buildings are well-grounded and truly in place. You see, there isn’t a denying the truth that our individuals need to establish with a 3rd power amid the continued lethal punches being thrown throughout the ruling celebration that has brought on the incumbent administration a number of distractions which redound on the citizenry.

Our profitable technique will repay in the long term if the vox populi, in any case, might be allowed to rely.

We’re a extremely decided group armed with each missile in our arsenal to money in on the continued volte-face to run a populist marketing campaign. It wants no gainsaying nonetheless that the confederacy of stereotypical leprechauns who’ve made life hellish for our individuals over time might be jettisoned within the forthcoming dispensation. I’m certain as eggs is eggs.

Having interfaced with totally different political stakeholders, neighborhood leaders, commerce associations’ leaders in the middle of my state-wide consultations, I’ve little question now we have completed a lot work and ultimately succeeded in taking the wind out of their sails.

Gents of the press, what’s the rationale behind permitting political energy to stay advert infinitum within the merciless fingers of a tribe of prima uomini and prima donnas who’re bent on returning our state and Nigeria by extension to the proverbial vicious circle whereas different states proceed to gallop forward of us within the race to annex and hoist the flag of victory within the proverbial misplaced metropolis of El Dorado?

How does your emergence because the Governor of the state hope to make an considerable distinction that may positively affect on the lives of the individuals?

My love for my individuals and state -one of the sub-national items that make up the Federation of Nigeria is aware of no bounds. This knowledgeable my curiosity and want to hitch the governorship race.

Nigeria is my nation likely; I don’t love her much less both regardless of my prolonged sojourn abroad. My integrity and patriotism, subsequently, stay unquestionable, if you happen to want reminding.

Pushed by this patriotic zeal, I made a decision to hitch the governorship race within the hope of righting the wrongs which have plunged us into abysmal depths.

I’ve at all times been patiently and anxiously watching behind the scenes till a harrowing incident that occurred within the final quarter of 2018 that left a scar of misery on my coronary heart.

It’s none aside from the every day episode of Mediterranean deaths. No fewer than 96 Nigerians of Edo State extraction perished within the Mediterranean which made information headlines internationally. Goodness is aware of if the information was ever syndicated by the Nigerian media.

This incident paved the best way for inquiries and an avalanche of questions that gave rise to the 2018 Turin Convention & Declaration in Mediterranean nation of Italy which attracted delegates of Edo State extraction from throughout the European Union.

On this convention joint resolutions had been adopted, {one of the} resolutions is for our state to endure a speedy transformation to {one of the} industrial heartlands within the euro-zone to discourage the continued mass exodus abroad.

This once more gave rise to a deluge of questions from the throng as to the operational feasibility contemplating the “feeding bottle” sort of federalism that subsists in Nigeria.

At this juncture, it was determined that we embark on aggressive Inside Income Era through recourse to untapped sectors from the place the majority of the cash would come from to develop our state God keen if voted to energy.

We needed to retain the providers of extremely competent technocrats to pursue and implement our beliefs. This is able to in earnest quantity to a neo-colonisation of our state as a result of our group of technocrats have labored and lived an integral a part of their lives as directors within the EU and past and a retired Choose on the Crown Court docket in Manchester was nominated and appointed to move the group.

Frankly, we’re set to make an considerable distinction having seen, identified and loved the merchandise of excellent governance in our respective international locations of residence in that a part of the Previous World. These are what we’re poised to copy in Edo State to higher the plenty of our individuals.

We have now no intention to steal from the general public until that will convey a few dearth or paucity of funds to finance and execute key capital tasks. That’s as certain as destiny. Once more, could Heavens bear me witness at the present time!

I say but once more, and want to be reminded sometime that Edo State beneath our management shall scale back lures of the cities within the unique East to glorified city slums.

Our thoughts is irrevocably made as much as resolutely pursue and implement these beliefs, the actions of naysayers and detractors however. “O fidelity be sturdy upon ‘our’ facet. Set an enormous mountain ‘between ‘our’ hearts and tongues, if I could borrow a rephrased hackneyed citation from Shakespeare.

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[biofunmy]

‘Marriage Story’ Review: Dance Me to the End of Love

Traditionally, a story that ends in matrimony is classified as a comedy. But what about a story that begins with the end of a marriage? Noah Baumbach’s tender and stinging new film, “Marriage Story,” doesn’t quite answer the question. It’s funny and sad, sometimes within a single scene, and it weaves a plot out of the messy collapse of a shared reality, trying to make music out of disharmony. The melody is full of heartbreak, loss and regret, but the song is too beautiful to be entirely melancholy.

Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) are an artistic couple living in Brooklyn with their 8-year-old son, Henry (the wonderful, deadpan Azhy Robertson). Both parents work in the theater: Nicole, a former teenage movie star (and a child of Hollywood), is a leading performer in the experimental stage company that Charlie, himself a sometime actor, directs. What we know of their life together is conveyed in an opening montage in which each partner, in turn, lists the things they love about the other. They’ve compiled these catalogs at the urging of the mediator hired to help them through their separation.

What follows — as an amicable split becomes a shattering rupture, lurching from awkwardness to rage in search of a new equilibrium — is a reversal of Tolstoy’s sturdy observation about happy and unhappy families. Happiness is unique, inexpressible, a state that exists outside of narrative. Misery is what makes you just like everyone else.

This is certainly the perspective of the divorce lawyers who soon replace that hapless mediator. Nicole, who has a role on a television pilot, takes Henry to Los Angeles, where her sister (Merritt Wever), their mother (Julie Hagerty) and Henry’s cousins live. This move, which Charlie insists is temporary — “we’re a New York family,” he says to anyone who will listen — becomes a point of contention between the spouses and their attorneys. Papers are served. Voices are raised. Henry, whose well-being is supposedly everyone’s chief concern, is pulled back and forth, his life wrenched out of sync.

Nicole and Charlie, onetime creative collaborators, become characters in a drama neither one controls. “We need to tell your story,” says Nora (Laura Dern), Nicole’s lawyer. Charlie visits two — a rumpled mensch (Alan Alda) and a shark in a suit (Ray Liotta) — and one of them urges him to “change the narrative.” For both parties (as they are called once their experiences are translated into legalese), this means rewriting a happy-couple past into a history of struggle.

The most painful parts of “Marriage Story” act out that revisionism, as idiosyncrasies are made to look pathological and mistakes are treated as potential crimes. The German social critic Theodor W. Adorno wrote that “divorce, even between good-natured, amiable, educated people, is apt to stir up a dust-cloud that covers and discolors all it touches,” an insight that Baumbach illustrates with vivid precision. He shows how “the sphere of intimacy” (to continue with Adorno) “is transformed into a malignant poison as soon as the relationship in which it flourished is broken off.”

The intimacy doesn’t just vanish. At their moment of most intense conflict — when the thin line between love and hate seems to have been irrevocably crossed — Nicole still calls Charlie “honey.” There is still a residue of sweetness between them, which offers hope, not necessarily for reconciliation but for a limit to the damage each will inflict and sustain.

What is happening is catastrophic, ridiculous and also — as the lawyers know — perfectly ordinary. Baumbach, exploiting and extending the tremendous talents of his cast, refuses to exaggerate. There are spasms of farce and throbs of melodrama, but they arise within the rhythms of everyday behavior. Which is not to say that Nicole and Charlie are confined to the shabby, somber stagecraft that so often passes for realism. They are large, complicated personalities with professional and emotional lives that fill their days, and the screen, with anxiety, surprise and occasional delight.

Baumbach works to be fair to both of them, and the effort shows. Like his other movies, perhaps even more so, this one feels personal. I don’t just mean autobiographical. In a few minutes on Google you can find out about his marriage, his parents, his in-laws and whatever else you want to know. That information only confirms what you have already intuited if you’ve seen “The Squid and the Whale,” “Margot at the Wedding,” “While We’re Young” or “The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected”: He draws from his own life.

But you shouldn’t expect the picture to be perfectly objective or symmetrical. In some ways, “Marriage Story” is harder on Charlie than on Nicole, underlining his self-absorbed, self-pitying tendencies, but he also occupies the film’s sympathetic center of gravity. It understands him better, even as Nicole has plenty of chances to explain herself. She seems to be the one who precipitated the breakup, whose expectations and feelings changed in ways that Charlie struggles to comprehend. He is blind to some of the consequences of his own behavior, which includes cheating on Nicole with a member of the theater company.

The infidelity is treated as a sidebar, which isn’t entirely convincing. And while “Marriage Story” delves into the tangled thickets of its characters’ feelings, it is coy — or maybe just tactful — about their sexual lives, together and apart. Nicole has a moment of lust (following a moment of fury), but Charlie is, libidinally speaking, a closed book.

The complexity of the film’s perspective — what Baumbach reveals and what he withholds, how he keeps up with characters whose circumstances are changing rapidly even as they feel like they’re stuck — places enormous demands on Driver and Johansson, who are simply extraordinary. They are perfectly matched, which is to say interestingly mismatched, given the trajectory of the story. Each one has a charisma that’s a little mysterious, a hint of Cubism in their faces, an undertone of irony in their voices. How could they ever have expected to know each other?

One of the morals of this story, chastening but also oddly encouraging, is that we don’t ever really know one another, but we’re nonetheless obligated to try. Lawyers do it their way, insisting on simple answers to difficult questions. This is the place to note that Alda, Liotta and Dern collectively come close to stealing the movie, in part because they are playing performers fully in their element in ways that Charlie and Nicole are not.

We sometimes see those two at work — there are some delicious tidbits of backstage comedy, in both New York and Los Angeles — but rarely onstage. There are two important exceptions, moments of theater that use borrowed words and self-conscious artifice to deliver strong doses of unadorned feeling. Both involve songs from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company”: “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” a jaunty complaint about falling for a charming narcissist; and “Being Alive,” a heartfelt lament about being one. That number, sung by Driver near the end of “Marriage Story,” is an anthem of need, building to the shattering realization that “alone is alone, not alive.”

That is a bleak conclusion, and it’s one that this meticulous and messy movie both acknowledges and resists. Bouncing between two large, opinionated American cities, Charlie and Nicole discover that other people are impossible and indispensable: children, colleagues, in-laws, exes, even sworn officers of the matrimonial bar. Alive is alive, not alone.

Marriage Story

Rated R. Sometimes mommies and daddies have feelings. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes.

Sahred From Source link Arts

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[cashcounts]

Will Surgery and Anesthesia Harm Your Memory?

Dr. H. had a struggling heart and a consequential decision to make. He needed an operation to fix a faulty valve but postponed it, afraid that the surgery and anesthesia would irrevocably damage his brain. The man made this decision more than a decade ago based on a phenomenon that was reported in an alarming article all the way back in 1955—one that many doctors still see first hand—of older patients who deteriorate cognitively after surgery.

“When patients are asked, ‘what is the thing that you fear the most?’ it’s being disabled,” says Mervyn Maze, an anesthesiologist and researcher at the University of San Francisco. “It’s not dying. It’s living with a cognitive disability. And that becomes even more scary the older that you get.”

PET scans show profound changes in the brain’s immune response three months after major abdominal surgery.

The author of the 1955 The Lancet article was a surgeon and consulting physician in England who reviewed thousands of charts and zeroed in on 18 “extreme” cases of people who appeared to be cognitively normal before the operation but became severely demented afterwards. He concluded that “operations on elderly people should be confined to unequivocally necessary cases.”

It was a bold statement, and one that likely overstated the risk. Today, you would be unlikely to find a surgeon who would advise against surgery that could significantly improve your quality of life. But the potential for damage remains. Dallas Seitz is a young geriatric psychiatrist at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, who says his colleagues are familiar with memory or cognitive problems after surgery, what’s been known as postoperative cognitive dysfunction, or POCD. “I would be hard pressed to find a colleague who said I’ve never heard of it or I don’t think that that exists,” he says, though he’s quick to acknowledge that such anecdotes are not scientific evidence. “It’s not an experimental study. But I think we can’t discount what our patients tell us and what our experience tells us as well.”

A patient undergoes cardiac surgery.

Because some 60,000 people a year undergo surgery in the U.S., and the numbers continue to climb, quantifying the risk is essential. It hasn’t helped that the term “POCD” is vague. “We’re talking about things that happen immediately after operations, like delirium, to things that happen perhaps a decade after an operation like dementia or Alzheimer’s,” notes Roderic Eckenhoff, an anesthesiologist and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. New, more precise terms will soon be announced, and even though the picture is muddled, there is hope that the tools of modern science—from animal models to well-designed clinical trials—will bring more clarity.

Delirium is the most likely complication of surgery in older adults, with a risk as high as 60%. Patients with delirium are in a temporary and sometimes fluctuating type of acute brain failure: they can be confused, sometimes hallucinatory, aggressive, agitated, or sleepy and passive. Some small subset have mild cognitive impairment that can last for months before they recover. Their memory is not as clear and they describe themselves as being in a fog. They are generally less competent at planning or making decisions. And, worryingly, some remain permanently impaired or even descend into dementia, with studies suggesting that this outcome is more likely in patients who experience delirium compared to those who don’t.

But it turns out that many older people were already on the road to dementia before their surgery. “It’s a standard sort of thing that we hear, that we are contacted by people who say, ‘you know, Mom was perfectly fine or Dad was perfectly fine until they had their knee replacement,’ says Lis Evered, an anesthesiologist and researcher at St. Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne in Australia. “But when you drill down on the ‘perfectly fine,’ they weren’t perfectly fine. It’s just that they were coping. And people develop strategies that can cover a decline quite markedly.”

Between 10–34% percent of people over the age of 65 are already in a state of mental decline ranging from mild cognitive impairment—problems that go beyond what you would expect in normal aging—to dementia, including the most common form, Alzheimer’s disease. Evaluating someone’s mental status can be tricky, and not just because they’ve developed coping strategies. A visit to the surgeon before the operation occurs at a particular moment in time, but patients have good and bad days, and cognitive decline doesn’t always follow a smooth trajectory. It’s only after surgery that an underlying vulnerability may be unmasked. A recent study published in The Neurobiology of Aging showed that in apparently normal adults undergoing elective surgery with general anesthesia, a particular brain signature associated with the development of Alzheimer’s disease was tied to how severe the postoperative delirium was.

Go behind the scenes of major clinical drug trials in the documentary, “Can Alzheimer’s Be Stopped?“

“Patients are saying, ‘look this is my husband, he has cognitive impairment, and I’m really worried about conversion to Alzheimer’s,’” says Dr. Charles Brown, a cardiac anesthesiologist and researcher at Johns Hopkins University, “‘How does this particular procedure affect that? Should I get it? Should I not? If I do get it, how are you going to manage me differently?’ “

Quantifying the Risk

“It’s very important to really be careful about what we know, about what we don’t know, and what we anticipate or hypothesize,” cautions Lars Eriksson, an anesthesiologist and clinical researcher at Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden. Many studies have significant weaknesses, adds Michael Avidan, an anesthesiologist and researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, and that includes overlooking shared risk factors.

“If you have a cohort of people who have a disease that is known to be associated with cognitive decline,” Avidan says, “like hypertension, people who are heavy smokers, who are obese, who have diabetes, who have peripheral vascular disease, who have arthritis—whether or not they undergo surgery I can predict that those people are going to decline cognitively more than people who are marathon runners who are fit and all the rest of it.” Moreover, hospitalization itself, with or without surgery, has been shown to be a risk factor for cognitive decline, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Avidan believes the evidence for the idea that anesthesia and surgery cause long term cognitive decline is “incredibly flimsy,” and points to a 2013 randomized controlled clinical trial published in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery as strong support for the idea that the risk is overblown, or perhaps even non-existent. The study found that patients who had open heart coronary artery bypass surgery with general anesthesia were better off cognitively 7.5 years after surgery than those who were treated with a less invasive non-surgical procedure that used only regional anesthesia. (Because regional or local anesthesia does not enter the brain, it’s assumed that it has no impact on brain function.)

In contrast, a 2017 study in Alzheimer Disease and Associated Disorders reached the opposite conclusion, finding an association between coronary artery bypass graft surgery and long-term dementia risk. The researchers controlled for many typical risk factors but was not randomized.

These are just two studies out of hundreds of others published over the past decade, each with different groups of patients or types of operations. That makes it difficult to reach a definitive conclusion on whether surgery and anesthesia cause permanent cognitive decline.

Managing the Immune Response

Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising that some elderly patients experience profound changes to their mental capacities after an operation. Surgery is a violent assault on the whole body, of which the brain is a part. Anesthesiologists administer drugs that push the brain into a reversible state of amnesia, immobility, loss of consciousness, and freedom from pain. Surgeons cut open bodies, stop hearts, replace hips or knees with titanium, and stitch stomachs smaller and tighter. In response, the traumatized tissues release substances that engage the immune system, activating a host of key cells and proteins that encourage healing. A mere 12 hours after surgery, signs of inflammation can also be detected in the cerebrospinal fluid. This is actually a good thing.

“There is a signal within the body after peripheral injury that’s purposeful, that reaches the brain,” Eriksson says. “And that contributes to a condition that you could call sickness behavior, or the injured phenotype. It’s time to rest—to not be out hunting for food—and to heal. But, of course, when the injury becomes so large and big and it goes over the top, the situation can be different.”

An immune response that doesn’t know when to quit is likely to be dangerous. In the elderly, the blood brain barrier is weaker, giving immune cells easier access to the brain. In aged rodents, scientists have found inflammatory molecules crossing the blood brain barrier and setting up shop in areas that are essential for learning and memory, such as the hippocampus. In human patients, researchers also found amyloid beta and tau—two proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease—went from normal levels before cardiac surgery to levels associated with mild cognitive impairment six months after the operation. Other studies have shown similar changes as soon as 48 hours after surgery.

This year, an international study by Eriksson and his colleagues pulled off a pioneering feat—using PET scans to image the immune response in patients before surgery, three to four days afterwards, and again at three months. In four of the eight patients, they saw profound and global changes in the brain’s immune system three months after surgery, long after the patients were home and going about their daily lives.“There was an association between the amount of immune activity and the decline in cognitive capacity,” Ericsson says. “The more unregulated your immune system was at three months, the worse was the cognitive function.”

But finding a way to safely and effectively intervene in the immune response is notoriously difficult. In the case of surgical patients, extinguishing the initial inflammation could disrupt important processes like wound healing. “I suppose until we actually understand the mechanisms that are occurring in the perioperative period, trying to address what interventions might have an impact is very difficult,” says Evered, the Melbourne-based anesthesiologist. Many experts underscore the importance of using animal models to suggest possible mechanisms for the disease process so as to develop treatments. But a key interim step is to make sure that that same mechanism translates in humans. This is what makes Eriksson’s recent PET imaging study so important—it makes the connection between what we see in rodent models and what we see in us.

Optimizing Anesthesia

Regardless of the actual mechanism, doctors and researchers are hard at work to find anesthetics and postoperative practices that will minimize the risk of any sort of cognitive decline. “If you are going to have a procedure, what are the ways that we can protect the brain the most?” asks Dr. Brown, who is investigating whether optimizing blood flow to the brain during surgery can make a difference. “Maybe you’re someone with mild cognitive impairment—and that is such a strong predictor of further cognitive decline—maybe you need to take that into account a lot more.”

Optimizing anesthesia could be one way to mitigate risk. Anesthesia was the original leading contender for cognitive decline, but while studies in rodents have shown toxic effects, the data for human trials has not. In a 2014 study of more than 12,000 patients, Dallas Seitz from Ontario found that the risk of dementia in patients who had an operation under general anesthesia versus regional, or local pain control, was “almost identical in the two groups. There was no statistical difference.” This is but one of many studies that lead anesthesiologists like Eckenhoff to believe that “the anesthetic is a minor player.”

This anesthesia monitor combines EEG brain wave monitoring with other measurements such as heart rate.

While we don’t know if anesthesia can hurt the human brain, what if certain types of anesthetic drugs could help protect it? Until recently, investigating this idea has been hamstrung by the simple fact that it would be unethical to perform surgery—whether on people or lab animals—without any anesthesia. But a discovery by Maze and colleagues provided a neat workaround. They showed that a protein called HMGB1, which launches the immune response to trauma, can simulate the inflammatory effect of surgery. “We now don’t have to do surgery to cause the surgical effect,” Maze says. “We can just provide an injection of HMGB1 and start the process that way.” Maze is a co-founder of a start-up company called NeuroproteXeon that is in a phase 3 clinical trial of xenon. Xenon is not the only drug or class of drugs being investigated for neuroprotective qualities. For example, in small clinical trials, the anesthetic agent ketamine has been shown to reduce postoperative cognitive impairments, perhaps by modulating the immune response.

Another way to optimize anesthesia could be to fine-tune the amount a patient receives. Typically anesthesiologists track heart rate and blood pressure as their guide for deciding whether the patient has the right amount of drugs on board. But Avidan and others are investigating whether monitoring brain waves during surgery using an EEG can identify a “goldilocks” amount of general anesthesia that could decrease the risk of delirium. It’s easy to give more drugs than necessary, particularly in the elderly. “We’re trying to prevent or to avoid a pattern called EEG suppression during general anesthesia, where the EEG looks like it’s flatlined, and to see if that decreases postoperative delirium,” says Avidan.

Optimizing Patient Care

Other measures could include making sure sleep and nutrition are optimal and that patients are given the right antibiotics at the right time to decrease the likelihood of surgical wound infections.

And then there’s a decidedly low-tech approach: reorienting patients quickly. This includes having friends or family nearby as soon as possible after the operation, giving back their glasses, dentures, and hearing aids, or putting clocks and calendars on the wall. While it’s unproven whether this reduces delirium, “there’s no downside to doing these things,” Avidan says. “And it’s kind. If nothing else it’s respecting people’s humanity and dignity, and making their surgery experience more pleasant. So you have enough reason to do that regardless of whether or not you think it’ll improve short or long term outcomes.“

None of these approaches are likely to tackle the problem on their own, though. Robert Whittington, an anesthesiologist and researcher at Columbia University Medical Center, addressed this question at the 2017 meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, pointing out that given the complexity of the brain, rather than trying to find the magic bullet therapy, there should be a multi-pronged approach similar to treatment strategies for HIV.

As with many medical procedures, and as with Dr. H., who chose not to get heart surgery, making tough decisions goes back to looking at risk and benefit. Surgery is a powerful stress test that can unmask underlying cognitive problems. But by the same token, surgeries that repair your heart or your hip, that allow you to exercise, or that reduce pain can improve your cognition.

Older people should be aware that their brains may still be healing long after they go home. But there is still an unanswered question: can surgery and anesthesia accelerate or even cause a permanent cognitive decline, even if the surgery and aftercare are optimal? On top of all the vulnerabilities that elderly patients may enter the operating room with—from previous risk factors for cognitive decline, to leaky blood brain barriers, to the mere fact of being in a hospital—is there a specific surgical vulnerability for permanent cognitive decline that has yet to be nailed down?

“There can be a little subgroup, perhaps not very big, that has a very unfavorable outcome,” says Eriksson. “And if you don’t do standard studies, using standard designs, those people may go undetected. The biological signal might be very small. There might be vulnerable individuals out there where a particular trigger—in this case surgery—where the pathways are very important. We might not be able to detect them. There could be vulnerability out there that we need to define.”

[a-t-old]

Kaleidoscope (The Illustrated Man): Some of my favourite lines, and ideas.

‘They fell. They fell as pebbles fall down wells. They were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw. And now instead of men there were only voices- all kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation.’

I can imagine this line as the astronauts names woven together- scribbles overlapping, changing shape and disintegrating into nothing. Motion, chaos, confusion, space.

‘But without the force units snapped to their shoulders they were meteors, senseless, each going to a separate and irrevocable fate.’

‘A period...’ ‘...elapsed while the first terror died and a metallic calm took it’s place. Space began to weave its strange voices in and out, in a great dark loom, crossing, recrossing, making a final pattern.’

‘It’s Earth for me. Back to old Mother Earth at ten thousand miles per hour. I’ll burn like a match.’

‘The others were silent, thinking of the destiny that had bought them to this, falling, falling, and nothing they could do to change it. Even the captain was quiet, for there was no command or plan he knew that could put things back together again.’

‘Falling, falling down space Hollis and the rest of them went in the long, endless dropping and whirling of silence.’

I feel like describes both their situation and how they must feel like drifting in space, really well.

‘...the other men chatted.’ ‘On and on; while they all fell. Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death.’

‘It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these voices vibrating in the centre of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion.’

’That isn’t important.’ said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of a bright film, an instant on the screen, all of it’s prejudices and passions condensed ad illuminated for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, ‘There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,’ the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.'

'Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?’

'I'm not jealous of you any more, because it's as over for you as it is for me, and right now it's like it never was.'

'When anything's over, it's just like it never happened. Where's you life any better than mine, now? Now is what counts. Is it any better? Is it?'

'Yes, it's better!'

'How?'

'Because I got my thoughts, I remember!' cried Lespere,'

'Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He only had dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.'

'But aren't we equal? he wondered. Lespere and I? Here, now? If a thing's over, it's done, and what good is it? You die anyway. But he knew he was rationalizing, for it was trying to tell the difference between a live man and a corpse. There was a spark in one, and not in the other- and aura, a mysterious element.'

'They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were kinds of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety,'

''I've got myself into a meteor swarm, some little asteroids.'

'Meteors?'

'I think it's the Myrmidone cluster that goes out past Mars and in toward Earth every five years. I'm right in the middle. It's like a big kaleidoscope. You get all kinds of colours and shapes and sizes. God, it's beautiful, all that metal.'

Silence.

'I'm going with them.' said Stone. 'They're taking me off with them. I'll be damned.' He laughed.

Hollis looked to see but saw nothing. There were only the great diamonds and sapphire and emerald mists and velvet inks of space,'

I like this line because it helps you imagine how the astronauts must be in space- all of them falling in different directions, surrounded by explosions of colour, weaving through such a vast, 'empty' space.

'There was a kind of wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the Meteor swarm, out past Mars for years and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet's Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the kaleidoscope colours when you were a child and held the tube to the sun and gave it a twirl.

'So long, Hollis,' Stone's voice, very faint now. 'So long.'

'Good luck,' shouted Hollis across thirty thousand miles.

'Don't be funny,' said Stone, and was gone.

'Now all the voices were fading, each on his own trajectory, some to Mars, others into farthest space.'

'The many good-byes. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart.'

'And as the body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying.'

'Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body,'

'They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes'

'There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor storm, there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart.'

The line above is my favourite from the story. To me (and together with the lines on the same page just before it) I think it represents the relationship of the astronauts to each other so well. It shows how they worked together and what they meant to each other. It compares them to systems ceasing to function- no longer having meaning- when such vital components are missing. It captures the essence of these men's relationships, and what it means now that they're separated in death.

'When I hit the atmosphere, I'll burn like a meteor. 'I wonder,' he said, 'if anyone'll see me?'

The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed . 'Look, Mom, look! A falling star!'

The blazing white start fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois.

'Make a wish,' said his mother. 'Make a wish.'

On the last page of the story, Hollis is dying, heading for Earth. His thoughts are still on the life he had but never really lived. He thinks about anything he could do in his remaining moments to make up for that life, any good at all. He feels nothing as he hurtles towards his final destination, but his last thoughts are of dying without being able to do something, even for himself to know of in those last moments, and wonders if anyone will even see him hitting earth as a burning meteor.