#it perpetuates itself it insists upon itself . but yes i know i make it hard to get to know me and like me

[bredforloyalty]

just remembered i am 21 and this is the prime of my life

[bluejayblueskies]

ludus

n. playful or uncommitted love; love that is focused on flirtation, infatuation, and laughter 

Words: 2.0k

Fandom: The Magnus Archives

Relationships: Jonathan Sims & Gerry Keay, Jonathan Sims & Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Tim Stoker

Characters: Jonathan Sims, Gerry Keay, Martin Blackwood, Tim Stoker, Sasha James

Additional Tags: AU - University, AU - Everyone Lives/No One Dies, Fluff and Humor, Drinking, Alcohol, Queerplatonic Partnership, Aromantic Character, Asexual Character

Summary:

Gerry generally doesn’t frequent pubs like this one, where the wooden table in front of him is sticky enough that his glass pulls slightly against his grip as he lifts it before it unsticks with a wet ripping noise. The pub is a small, dirty thing, aptly named The Rusty Bucket, and apparently, it’s the venue for trivia night every Thursday, of which Jon and his friends are regulars.

Gerry’s never met Jon’s friends. But he supposes there’s a first time for everything.

Read on Ao3

Or, read below (more content warnings below the cut):

cw: - implied drug use - teasing - assumption that an aro character is allo (corrected and apologized for)

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Gerry’s never really been one for drinking. For one, he thinks beer is gross (and that a much better use for wheat and yeast is bread, which he very much enjoys and happens to be quite skilled at making), and for two, he’s never quite been able to shake that ingrained notion that drinking is always a precursor to something else.

 Sometimes, that something else is simply being drunk. Sometimes, it’s to loosen up, to make time with friends that much lighter and freer. But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes, it’s buying a stranger a drink and punching your number into their phone with fingers made unsteady by liquor. Sometimes, it’s wine on a date, with lips stained a deep red and cheeks flushed only in part due to the alcohol.

 Sometimes, it’s more. And Gerry doesn’t like taking risks that he doesn’t have to. So he generally doesn’t frequent pubs like this one, where the wooden table in front of him is sticky enough that his glass pulls slightly against his grip as he lifts it before it unsticks with a wet ripping noise.

 Gross.

 “You don’t have to come,” Jon had said for what had to have been the fifteenth time, even as they’d caught sight of the pub that sat just a few blocks from campus. It was a small, dirty thing, aptly named The Rusty Bucket, and apparently, it was the venue for trivia night every Thursday, of which Jon and his friends were regulars.

 Right. Jon’s friends. It wasn’t necessarily anyone’s fault that Gerry had yet to meet everyone else who’d left a mark on Jon’s life (though if asked, Gerry would insist that it was his, probably; he wasn’t known for being overly social). It was just different walks of life, different cobblestone paths that happened to intersect in a five-foot-four skinny Pakistani man with wire-rimmed glasses and a perpetual line between his eyes that fell just as easily into a smile as it did a scowl. But now that he had the chance, he found that he wanted to meet them. Maybe it was because Jon had seemed so excited, in his own way, to introduce them to Gerry. Or maybe it was just because Gerry wanted to get to know every part of Jon, to peel back every layer of the man who had wriggled underneath his skin and refused to budge no matter how hard Gerry tried.

 Jon’s friends were one such layer, painted in lovely sunset hues that cast fondness and exasperation across Jon’s face in equal measure whenever he spoke of them. So Gerry wanted to meet them.

 Hell, maybe he’d like them. Jon liked them. And that was one hell of a stamp of approval.

 “I know,” Gerry said. “But I’m here, aren’t I?”

 And the look Jon gave him at that—something profoundly grateful and even more profoundly enamored—shot through Gerry like liquid cocaine. Though if Gertrude ever asks, Gerry certainly has no such metric to know what that would feel like.

 Jon’s presence next to him in the booth is a grounding one, even as Gerry feels himself getting lost in the conversation ebbing and swelling around him like white-crested waves on a sandy shore, like he’s a seashell that’s only kept from washing away by a deft hand that snatches it from the sand and holds it close. Most of the ebb and swell seems to be coming from Tim and Sasha, who bicker like they’ve been married for years but who, according to Jon, have already passed through their will-they-won’t-they stage and have settled quite firmly on won’t-they.

 “Sasha’s aro too,” Jon had said, almost too-casually, as he put away a plate he’d been drying. “And Tim’s ace. A- a bit different than me, though, with regards to…”

 Jon made a vague motion with his hand that Gerry recognized as his sex hand wave, and the giggle that slipped from him unbidden earned him a sharp glare.

 “Sorry, sorry,” Gerry said, his eyes still twinkling with mirth. Then, because he couldn’t quite help himself: “Are you just- just collecting aspec friends? Or is it some sort of magnetic pull? Because I’d like to know if I’m a trophy friend or a hapless victim of your non-sexual magnetism.”

 The wet sponge Jon threw at him was certainly warranted. It did nothing to wipe the smile from Gerry’s face.

 So there’s Tim and Sasha, carrying ninety-five percent of the conversational weight. Martin sits tucked away in a corner, his hands closed around a glass of cola and his mouth curled into a small smile as he watches Tim and Sasha bicker.

 (“I don’t drink,” Martin had explained quickly when Gerry’s eyes had found his glass the first time, throwing the words between them like some sort of barricade. Like it was any of Gerry’s business what Martin did or didn’t drink.

 It certainly made Gerry’s virgin piña colada a lot less humiliating, though it did nothing to diminish the curling embarrassment he’d felt upon ordering it. So Gerry tipped his head toward his own drink and said, “Me either. Virgin in more ways than one.”

 Which was probably not the right thing to say. Oh well.

 Martin’s face had gone cherry red, and the laugh that escaped his lips seemed to take him entirely by surprise. “Oh,” he said, sounding slightly strangled. “I- congratulations?”

 It certainly wasn’t the most awkward exchange Gerry had ever had. But it was up there.

 Gerry took a small sip of his drink and decided that he quite liked Martin Blackwood.)

 Gerry sets his drink back down with a grimace and says, quiet enough that only Jon will hear him, “When is the trivia bit meant to start? I’m dying to put my near-encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century prose to use.”

 “Need I remind you,” Jon says without taking his eyes away from Tim and Sasha, “that we are both English majors?”

 Gerry knocks his knee against Jon’s under the table. “Guess we’ll just have to see who remembers Dr. Nimeiri’s class better then.”

 Jon groans. “I thought we agreed to never speak about that again.”

 Gerry gives Jon his best shit-eating grin. “And forget the place where we met and our lives were forever changed? Oh, I would never.”

 “One,” Jon says, holding up a finger and finally turning to face Gerry. “One B, Gerry. And it was that fucking class.”

 “Jon, nobody got an A in that class. Nobody. I barely passed.”

 “Yes, well—”

 Gerry raises an eyebrow. Jon’s mouth snaps shut and dips into what Gerry could only describe as a pout. After a moment, where Jon clearly recalls every other version of this conversation they’ve had and the myriad of insensitive things that Jon has said in quick succession, Jon finally sighs and says, “Fine. Trivia’s in thirty minutes, I believe.”

 “Thank you.”

 “Oh, there’s no need to look so smug.”

 It’s about halfway between then and trivia when the conversation finally, inevitably, and quite unfortunately lands squarely on Gerry’s leather-clad shoulders.  

 “So,” Tim says, leaning his elbows on the liquor-sticky table and flashing Gerry a conspiratorial grin. “I think it’s high past time we hear all the sordid details of how Jon managed to convince you to give him the time of day.”

 “Hey,” Jon snaps, giving Tim an impressive glare that bounces harmlessly off Tim’s million-dollar smile.

 “Not much to tell,” Gerry says with a shrug. “Switched majors, took a shitty class, and got a very critical peer review on my first draft paper. Had quite an illuminating conversation with said peer reviewer after class that day, actually. Can’t imagine how that evolved into getting coffee.”

 “You asked me,” Jon says in a sullen voice, looking very much like he’d like to melt into the woodgrains of the seatback behind him.

 “That I did,” Gerry concedes. “What can I say, I’ve got a thing for angry red pen and put-upon posh accents.”

 “For the last time, it is not put upon!”

 Tim’s laughter makes Jon’s lips fold into a pout, and Gerry presses his knee firmly against Jon’s underneath the table. He feels Jon melt against him, just a bit, like a bristling cat brought back to itself by a gentle hand between its ears.

 “So, then,” Sasha asks, pushing into Tim’s space as she leans closer to them with an inquisitive glint to her eyes. “Are you two dating?”

 “Sasha!” Martin squeaks, his eyes wide as saucers as he looks at her like she’d just suggested they all strip down to their socks or something. If Gerry weren’t so used to the question—albeit not directed at him and Jon before—he might have had a similar expression on his face.

 “What?” Sasha says defensively, leaning back slightly and crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s just a question! And a perfectly innocent one at that!”

 “Nothing with you is ever perfectly innocent,” Tim mutters under his breath, which earns him an elbow in the ribs.

 Gerry sighs in something close to resignation. He’d been expecting the question, really; Gerry hated the idea of his identity being spread behind his back like some sort of rumor, so he’d asked Jon to keep it private until he got the chance to disclose it himself. It had gotten a bit more complicated when they’d become queerplatonic partners but only because apparently Jon had a chronic inability to do anything halfway, and that included his relationships. Needless to say, Jon had admitted several hours before they’d arrived at the pub that his friends were all convinced that they were dating and that Jon couldn’t figure out how to correct them without explaining their situation in full.

 So, then. Gerry’s never been the biggest fan of speaking openly about his romantic preferences—or lack thereof, he supposes—but then Jon’s hand is brushing against his arm, the touch feather-light yet grounding all the same, and Gerry finds that the weight on his chest is all but gone.

 “No,” Gerry says. The word doesn’t burn on the way out like he feared it would. “Er. Not romantically, at least.”

 It’s less awkward than he thought it might be—putting the threads that run from Jon’s hands to his into words, skirting around textbook definitions for a bit before finally just biting the bullet and rattling them off rapid-fire, even though he hates how impersonal it all sounds and would much rather focus on how he feels when he sees Jon across the quad or how Jon’s fingers feel against his scalp when he brushes his hair or how Jon snores ever so slightly when he sleeps.

 In the end, Tim just makes some joke about friendship premium subscription, Sasha sheepishly apologizes for having made assumptions, and the conversation is blissfully cut short by the announcement that trivia will be starting in two minutes.

 Gerry’s hand finds Jon’s under the table and squeezes it tightly, just once. A silent thank you. The best I love you that Gerry can think to give right now. Jon’s shoulder knocks against Gerry’s in response, and Gerry thinks, just for a moment, about how fucking lucky he is.

 They end up losing trivia night—1967 is the correct date, Jon kept insisting, even when Tim finally pulled the book up on his phone and informed Jon that he was, in fact, off by a year and was therefore wrong—to Jon’s utter dismay and distress. But the sentiment still stands.

 And when Tim grins at Gerry and says, See you soon!, and Sasha follows up with, Next Thursday for trivia?, and Martin pitches in with a quiet, It was very nice to meet you, Gerry, Gerry doesn’t hate the warm, fuzzy feeling that spreads through him at the knowledge that Jon’s friends like him.

 Two cobblestone paths merge into one, the rocks threading together as easily as Jon’s fingers with Gerry’s, and the road ahead looks like nothing but wide-open sky and glittering stars.

[danganronpa-21]

Naegiri Week Day 3: Stars

So one of my favourite things to do for Naegiri Week when I receive a prompt... is to find my own weird little way to twist it. Today’s prompt is one of those times. I don’t really have any general warnings to give, apart from the fact that this piece features body image issues.

I hope you enjoy!

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“Kyoko Kirigiri was more attractive before she had kids.”

A stupid statement. A rude, stupid statement. Some tabloid writer said it, or rather, wrote it. She knew it was a hook to get readers. Almost everyone said she shouldn’t take it personally. In the grand scheme of things, the words of one tabloid writer meant nothing, they claimed. He was just some idiot who measured her worth as a person by the way she looked; his words were no proof of how everyone else felt about her. No matter what awful things he said about her and her body; the comments he made about her having “too much fat on her stomach” and “hips that only accentuate her obvious weight gain” were that of a loser. Everyone told her that he was an idiot, and that she should just ignore him. He wasn’t worth it.

And rightfully, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe she should have ignored it.

But it was hard to feel like that asshole didn’t have a point when she met herself in the mirror.

Truth be told, she’d been having problems with body image long before the article had been published in that magazine. It wasn’t exactly like it was unusual for people to comment on her body. Prior to this writer, there had been hundreds of others who made comments. At first, most people made generic comments. Simple stuff about her being hot, having a nice rear, and her husband being the one lucky guy who got to have sex with her. Seeing celebrities on television over the years, she grew to expect that. No matter how strong and intelligent she was, people would focus most on her beauty. She knew she couldn’t defeat the culture that valued beauty over brains, or perpetuated the idea that women couldn’t be both brainy and beautiful. So she just ignored it. It never meant anything to her. However, as time went on, and Kyoko’s little family grew, the dynamic of these writers changed. More and more of them started to turn for the worse, mocking her postpartum state after her first two kids.

Still, she’d tried not to care. She adored her kids. She’d been more than confident enough in that to tell multiple magazines that she valued her son and her daughter more than being conventionally attractive. And to some degree, it was true. She really did love her kids, and the pair of them made her so much happier than the idealized body ever could. 

Deep down though, somewhere within her heart, a seed of fear planted itself. A fear that maybe, just maybe, these tabloid people had some kind of point. That she really wasn’t as pretty as she used to be. That maybe the people most dear to her would start seeing it, and want to leave. Kyoko didn’t think she could take it if someone tried to leave. At the time, she’d been lucky enough to find that not a soul budged, even in spite of the comments, but… after the third baby, and the comments of that stupid tabloid writer… the worries had come bubbling back up again. 

Saying hello to those worries again, at age thirty-four, is how she found herself standing in front of her bedroom mirror. Every detail under her own critical scrutiny.

Staring at herself in the mirror like this, she wondered how she should think of her body now. Her hair was shorter and thinner, to stay out of the reach of tugging baby hands. Some chub clung to her belly, still hanging about after six months of vigorous workout sessions. Her hips wider than they used to be, even when Hiroko had insisted that they probably wouldn’t change drastically. And the stretch marks… she couldn’t forget the stretch marks, and the way they spanned across her belly. Each child insisted upon bringing multitudes of new stripes with them, as if they liked creating more work for her. She spent years using creams and formulas to fade the marks, and now that she’d had a third, she knew she’d have to start trying again. Just looking at all of the progress, in constant reverse due to her pregnancies, it made her sigh. Kyoko couldn’t help but doubt that Makoto found her as sexy as he did when she was twenty-two.

If she was being honest, that was really the only thing she cared about. The only thing she was really fearful of. Whether others found her to be beautiful or liked the way her body looked was something she’d deemed irrelevant. All that mattered to her was that Makoto still found her appealing. 

She felt sorry for herself, given that the sight of herself in the mirror caused her to sigh. Her charred fingers pinched her stomach sadly, wondering how she was ever going to reverse all of this baby weight.

“I can’t believe I actually used to wear this outfit,” She groaned, twisting to examine her figure further. She noticed new stretch marks start to reveal themselves on her belly, and she groaned. It made her never want to wear a sports bra or crop top again. “It’s amazing to think I ever looked good in this.”

She could remember those days. She’d been in her early twenties then; the perfect age to wear something so flashy. Back then, she could pull off this little workout outfit. A hot pink sports-bra and short shorts combination, built for sweat resistance and husband-catching. She recalled wearing it for every one of her home workouts, for the sake of granting herself Makoto’s attention. She could still draw up his expression in her mind; the face that told her that he was trying not to stare but couldn’t help himself. The memory of it made her giggle. How she longed for the days where he could barely keep his eyes off her.

Looking at herself in the present, wearing that outfit, she desired only to avert her gaze. Gone was the tiny waist, the strong hair, the flat tummy, the perky breasts. Replaced now with a shadow of those things; an ideal that seemed to elude the detective’s grasp. She’d been left with little more than a body that she struggled to feel comfortable in.

“So much for the days of looking sexy, I guess.” She muttered to herself, stealing one last glance in the mirror. She wasn’t sure what she hated more, when she saw herself — the state of her body, or the sadness etched into her expression. There was a haunting quality to the arms that were wrapped around her tummy, trying to shield her body from herself. Bowing her head, she drew herself away from the mirror, trying not to think about it. She would rather just rip the clothes off her body and move on with her day. At least she could do that comfortably. It wasn’t like she had any big plans to be intimate with Makoto that night; they were still parents to three kids after all. So long as she changed and tossed the outfit in the family’s outgoing donation box, no one would have to know. Her insecurity could be her little secret.

At least, that had been her plan, but a familiar voice from behind her was a little too determined to contradict it.

“Whoa!” 

Makoto. She cursed mentally. How could she have forgotten that it would soon be time for the baby’s mid-afternoon snack? He must’ve come upstairs to give her her bottle. Leave it to him to be irritatingly on top of things. She could have kicked herself for having forgotten. Heat began to prick at her face, coating her nose and chin with shame and humiliation. How could she have been so naive? This was the last thing she wanted to see. Her shame felt so great that she couldn’t even bring herself to look at him.

“Hello, Makoto…” 

Her voice came out weakly, contaminated by the slight tremors of total embarrassment. If he noticed the difference, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he just kept chatting away merrily, like he didn’t just walk in on his wife in something she didn’t look good in.

“Hey, sweetheart.” He answered, slight amusement in his voice. This only spurred her embarrassment on further. Was he laughing at her? The thought made her want to melt into the floor. God, he wasn’t so cruel as to laugh at her, was he? “Found some old clothes you wanted to try on again?”

She tried to play along. Surely he was going to joke, wasn’t he? Just like everyone else did. Pushing out the fakest laugh she could muster, she turned towards him. Maybe she could play it off as a joke, too, and spare herself the humiliation. “Yes, I wanted to make sure these didn’t look good anymore, so I could get rid of them.” She placed a hand on her hip, trying desperately to look nonchalant. “I look quite atrocious, don’t I? The years haven’t exactly been kind to me.”

“What?” Makoto exclaimed, shaking his head in disagreement. “Come on, don’t even joke about that.” 

Beads of sweat slipped down her forehead. Had she misinterpreted what he wanted to convey?

“Joke about what?”

“Your body! I mean, come on, Kyoko, look at you! You’re beautiful!”

Beautiful? If she couldn’t see the thick rims of them on his face, she would ask if he was wearing his glasses. Partial blindness was the only way he could have found her beautiful, or at least, that’s what the voice in her head said.

“Makoto…” She answered breathlessly, unsure of how to tell him the truth. She had hoped that the whole thing was just a joke to him, but he was making it increasingly clear that his intentions were serious. So serious that Kyoko found herself fidgeting uncomfortably; what could she possibly say? 

Her silence made his concern pounce onto her anyway. His face fell; his cute smile flipped into a frown. Before she knew it, he slipped into the room. Oh god, she thought, now he really means business.

“Kyoko?” His gaze was pitying when he stared at her. She loathed it. He knew how much she hated being pitied, but at the same time… she knew sometimes she had to let that go. Of course it was unappealing, yet sometimes she knew it to be necessary. Sometimes it was just what needed to happen. In cases that involved Makoto, this was often how he would help her work towards a solution.

Brushing a strand of purple hair away from her face, she swallowed. The words seemed to catch in her throat, and she wondered if she might even be able to say them. In front of his worried eyes, she felt so small and fragile. Like one of the ceramic ballerinas her grandfather kept in their old mansion. Saying the words made her feel like she was going to fall and smash. “I… Do you honestly still think I’m beautiful?”

Her husband’s eyes went wide with shock. Evidently that was a ridiculous question to him. So ridiculous that he went flying to her side; eager to provide affection for his downtrodden spouse. “Of course I do!”

His hand found its way to her cheek, and he began stroking it softly with his thumb. It was a technique he used frequently, should she become overwhelmed. In a way, she supposed it sort of helped her to push the words out. “Do you promise your words aren’t empty?”

He nodded frantically. “Of course. What made you think otherwise?” His eyes searched her face for a moment. She could see that he hoped for an answer. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the opportunity to give one. Anger flickered across his face suddenly, like the lighting of a flame, catching her before she could tell her truth. “Was it that tabloid writer?”

She shook her head sadly; her shoulders slumping. “It’s not just him,” She confessed, “I’ve sort of felt this way for awhile. Like I might not be as attractive to you as I used to be.” 

“What gave you that idea?”

“I don’t know… I guess I just… got insecure. My body is so different than it used to be. When you married me, I could have been a model, but now… I guess I kind of have a mom body.” 

“And what’s wrong with having a mom body?” 

Kyoko rolled her eyes. “This coming from the guy who failed to gain ten pounds when the doctor said it would be good for his health.” 

“There is nothing wrong with having a mom body.” Makoto stated firmly, determination in his voice. “Do you have extra weight on you? Sure. Are your hips wider? Yes. Are you covered in stretch marks? Of course. But you know what? You’re still drop dead gorgeous. There’s nothing prettier than a mom body. It makes you look like the night sky.”

She blinked at him, not quite understanding what that analogy was supposed to mean. “The night sky?” She raised an eyebrow at him. Whatever he meant by that, she wasn’t sure anyone would have known. But in Makoto speak, it probably meant something sugary sweet.

“Don’t you think your stretch marks are like little constellations?” 

No, she thought, I don’t. I’ve never looked at them that way… Was that really how he looked at them?

“I… suppose? I fail to see how this proves the idea of a mother’s body being alike the night sky.”

He reached over to tuck some of her hair behind her ear, laughing gently. “Alright, think of it this way: your body's like the night. It’s full and beautiful, for it’s held so much. You’ve given birth to three beautiful beings; tiny planets that grew within you.”

“... and my stretch marks are constellations.” 

He nodded, his expression thoughtful. “Exactly. Having a mom body makes you just like the night sky, and you’re just as beautiful. You’re just as beautiful as a sky full of stars.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a gush of air. Such an analogy being used to describe her, it made her speechless. After years of inappropriate comments from others, and these deeply-rooted worries that he might not love her if she wasn’t so pretty anymore… a little idea he had lifted all the weight from her shoulders. There was nothing she could say that would thank him well enough for that; the only thing that came close enough was his name as she flung herself into his arms. 

She made him stumble; her body crashing into his. She lucked out in him being able to retain his balance, nearly grabbing onto the edge of their bed with his free arm to ensure that would happen. His other arm wrapped tightly around her waist, and she couldn’t help but smile at the feeling of it. She hadn’t realized just how long it had been since she’d really allowed him to touch her torso. 

“Kyoko…” He murmured, his lips to close to her ear that she felt as if she might shiver. “I want you to know that no matter what happens, or how you change… You’re always going to be beautiful to me.”

She laughed softly, pulling him in even tighter. “I’ll always be your night sky full of stars.”

[notbang]

burning up again

R/N. Set in some vague overlapping future universe of this, this and this, but requiring prior knowledge of none to understand.

(read on ao3)

“You know, this place sounded a lot more whimsical and fun when I was reading about it in letters.”

“I don’t think I was ever speaking specifically about the accommodations,” he says, wry, “so much as the symbolic act of coming here itself.”

“I know,” she shoots back, almost sulkily, and wriggles up the mattress to better rest her head in the crook of his arm. He stretches, and the fingers of her left hand cakewalk idly up his chest in her contemplation until he catches them and traps them in his own. “If anyone’s guilty of romanticising mediocrity, it’s me. I’m aware.”

“Well,” is all Nathaniel says, the smug twist of his mouth intended to tease, more than anything else.

Rebecca’s restless, perpetually in motion with an energy he doesn’t share. He’s been jungle-dwelling long enough that the humidity doesn’t bother him so much anymore, but there’s a difference between being able to sleep beneath a sheet in a sticky room and having to accommodate someone else’s body heat as well as your own. Still, the tightly-wound demeanour that had always felt like second nature to him has never really had a place here, and despite the queasy anticipation that has been slowly fraying his nerves all week in the lead-up to her arrival, having her sprawled out alongside him now, Nathaniel feels nothing but a sleepy sense of calm.

Even if her insisted-upon sleeping arrangements leave a little to be desired.

“This bed isn’t exactly built for two people,” he tells her when she starts to squirm, his eyebrows creeping upwards with a familiar cocktail of fondness and exasperation.

“You’re telling me. It’s not even built for one people, if the people is you.” Rebecca grunts, shifting again, trying to get comfortable and elbowing him sharply in the gut in the process. “You should really speak to someone about the quality of the facilities.”

“The facilities you were provided with are perfectly fine. You’re the one that was determined to play stowaway in mine.”

“Mm, yeah, but your room is so cosy and romantic, with the canopy, and the candles.”

He raises his eyebrows, dubious. “The mosquito net and the citronella coils?”

She waves him off, nearly clocking him in the face. “Okay, so the smell isn’t particularly enticing, but it’s fun, right? Being a little sneaky. Having a sleepover. Hmm?”

“It’d be a lot more fun in less than ninety percent humidity.” She pouts up at him, and he appeases her with a warm press of his palm to the small of her undeniably damp back. His lips graze across her forehead on his way to nosing into the cloud of her humidity-frizzed hair. “But yes—practically every defining detail aside, this is… nice.”

Rebecca sighs her agreement as she inches up his side, a greasy koala on a eucalyptus oil-slick tree. It should definitely be more off-putting, the mix of perspiration, pungent insect repellant and the remnants of lotion that only barely saved her shoulders. Instead he drinks in the sun kissed bridge of her nose, the pinking of her cheekbones and the abundance of freckles dusted across her face like constellations that can only be seen in clarity out of the city limits. It’s a hundred times better than any piece of paper, and every possible protest dies as a result on the tip of his tongue.

“I can’t believe you live like this,” she says eventually. At his frown she hastens to add, “I’m not passing judgement. Emphasis on the ‘you’, not the… ‘this’. You’ve always been so…” She trails off, gesturing vaguely at the length of him, and he huffs out a laugh.

“I know. It astounds me most days, too.”

“Was it hard? Getting used to everything?”

He considers that for a moment, knowing for a fact he’d spent a good number of days unavoidably rankled by his new circumstances, but unable to put his finger on the true moment of transition.

“I guess. But… hard in a good way. Hard in a way I was looking for, to wake me up. As embarrassingly cheesy as it sounds, even when I hated it, it felt… good, and important, to be following my heart for once, instead of something my father drilled into my head.”

She takes the hand not tangled in his and presses her open palm to his chest, fingers splayed out across his sternum, radiating warmth. “I mean, on some twisted level it makes sense. If you were a Planeteer, you’d definitely be the heart power,” she says, then to his confused look elaborates, “Apparently it means you can talk to monkeys.”

“I see. And you would be…?”

“Fire. For obvious reasons.” She tilts her head, considering. “Or maybe wind. For other, also probably obvious, equally unflattering reasons.”

He winces, and shakes his head as if to will the insinuation away. For all their overwhelming similarities, there’s still a lot of things they don’t have in common, and Rebecca’s penchant for toilet humour is one of them.

Her tone turns suddenly coy. “Speaking of saving the planet, here’s a thought on our current predicament with global warming. What if we shower—together, obviously, gotta think of the earth—and then just… don’t bother towelling dry?”

“Mm, that’d probably feel good for about thirty seconds, tops. Then: sticky. Also—and while I’m not sure that’s what you’re implying, it’s usually a pretty safe bet with you—you are not going to want to do anything sexy once you step foot in that shower. Believe me.”

“Believe you because you’ve tried?” she asks, eyes narrowed, frowning her suspicion.

“Believe me because I know what my shower stall looks like.”

She hums, apparently too skeptical to be truly appeased. “So the shower’s out. But we have prior experience. We’re intelligent. We’re innovative. We can find a position with minimal contact points and maximum air flow.”

There’s no question of what she’s implying now, even if her tone is still currently set to teasing, and his stomach tightens in acknowledgement. He’d been too cautious to take it as a given that her trip was intended as a romantic one, even if it was difficult to read between the lines of her intentions and find them to be anything else. Just because his most recent trip back to West Covina had led to them falling back into bed together didn’t mean anything concrete—their letters since have been as carefully choreographed as always, deftly walking the tightrope between tentative flirtation and outright propositioning without either of them being bold enough to quantify the true nature of their long distance relationship.

If the hug she accosted him with upon her arrival and all the excuses she’s found to touch him throughout the day haven’t adequately telegraphed her intent, though, surely her presence now in his tiny standard issue sanctuary housing cot has well and truly dashed any illusions that the purposes of her visit are purely platonic.

The woman in question pulls him from his musings with a drawn-out, nasally whine. “God, I just have to…”

The rest of her sentence is lost in the fabric of her t-shirt as she squirms to get it up and over her head, and sure, he has to actively tamp down on the impulse to jerk away when her moist skin hits his, but then certain parts of his anatomy waste no time in sounding the alarm that for the first time in longer than he can currently properly recall, Rebecca Bunch’s scantily clad body is in unmistakable, maddening proximity, and his breath leaves him in a shaky huff. Despite the fact they’ve been engaged in banter around the topic for the last ten minutes at least and in fact, most of the day, it’s a very particular jolt calling attention to the impending physical reality of it now, running through him like electromagnetic muscle memory.

“Oh,” she says quietly, as if sharing the exact same revelation, eyes dropping down and to his mouth.

They shift minutely against one another until he takes her by the waist and twists, orienting her so she can feel the the fan on her face. His fingers smooth through the resulting restless waves of her hair.

Just like that it’s back at full force again—the stubborn twist of heat that exists between them, both impeded and exacerbated by the suffocating jungle humidity, like an itch you couldn’t stop yourself from scratching, if only you had the energy to move.

It’s unnerving as it’s always been, the ways in which she tames him and makes him wild.

“Hello,” he says, going for suave but falling somewhere a lot closer to shaky.

Rebecca lets out a soft giggle and bends at the knee, toes leading the way to twist her leg between his.

“Hi,” she breathes into his mouth, the cartilage of her nose crushing against his own.

Apparently, that far-from-sophisticated call and response is all the encouragement they need before they’re crashing back into each other’s orbits, an alignment of single-minded satellites colliding for the thousandth time.

It’s not as needy as their last kiss, instead whittled down into languidity by the slow burn of whatever it is they’ve been allowing to rekindle between them over months of correspondence and an overnight temperature that lends itself to a leisurely pace. I’ve missed you, she tells him in no uncertain terms, and he feels unhurried in his efforts to lay out his supporting arguments of every way he intends to miss her back.

Her nails drag across his scalp and he groans, fingertips hinting at the band of her bra.

“Nope, I can’t,” she blurts suddenly after another enthusiastic minute of making out, pushing back at him and scrunching up her face. The disappointment doesn’t even have time to sour in his stomach before she’s rushing to make the grounds of her rejection clear. “I’m sorry. It’s just so sticky. Like, disgustingly sticky. An I-can’t-expend-the-energy-that-would-only-make-us-stickier sticky.”

He obediently withdraws, rolling off of her and back towards his side of the bed, as much as their cramped shared space currently allows and what ultimately ends up being much the same arrangement as before, albeit with his body being the one caged by hers against the mattress as she holds herself away in something reminiscent of a reluctant push-up. “Absurdly,” he agrees, unable to deny himself the skin-to-skin contact of combing her matted hair back behind her ear.

“Like, I can’t tell where my body ends and yours begins, and not in a… well, it is in a hot way, technically, but not in a sexy-hot way? More in the way that I’m just melting into you until we form some kind of amorphous, perspiring blob.”

“Charming,” he says lightly.

He takes some satisfaction that he’s not alone in the dull throb of his frustration, judging by the way she shifts to squeeze her thighs together.

“Can we maybe just, I don’t know, sleep on the floor? With a companionable inch of breathing space between us as we gaze wantonly into each others’ eyes? That concrete looks cool and I mean, heat rises, right?”

“Sure, if you want to hang with the scorpions.”

Her upper body, which had been in the process of relaxing back towards his, slingshots back up off of him at that, eyes going disproportionately wide to the rest of her face. “Dude. You get scorpions in your room?”

“Sometimes. Also: lizards.”

“That’s it—I’m taking the next flight home.”

His palm skirts her shoulder blades, coaxing her back down. “Uh-huh.”

Amused as he is by her theatrics, there’s another more obvious option, one that he would have offered hours ago if only she’d given him the chance, stubborn as she’d insisted on being in response to his attempts to organise her transport back into town. He absently wonders what their chances of getting a taxi are at this time of night.

“Nathaniel?” she ventures tentatively, her voice small amongst the encroaching outside chorus of cicadas.

“Mmm?”

“Do you want to sneak into my hotel room with me? I’m pretty sure it has air conditioning.”

His smile stretches wider as he pats her encouragingly on the back. “There you go.”

She carefully peels herself off of him, and he lets her drag him, good-natured, from the bed.

[scarletgardensrpg]

UNDEAD ♦ TWENTY-SIX ♦ NEUTRAL

EVANDER BUCHANAN is the Gravekeeper of the Oude Kerk. While Evander does not uphold most traditional priestly duties, such as Sunday sermons and rituals, he offers Undead baptisms, wherein the newly rehabilitated are “purified” as a means of initiation into Amsterdam—a common practice for nearly all Undead citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation. He was killed and transformed into a rotbeest at the age of twenty-six by Cecile, then resurrected in the Carpathian Mountains by Julian in 2045. 

BIOGRAPHY

tw: alcohol and drug abuse, death

“Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck.” Julian, on the other end of the line, sounded tinny and unimpressed. Thank you for that, good morning to you as well. Now if you'll be more specific... “Okay, um. I’m still at the beach.” A long silence. “I took Papa’s Porsche.” An even longer silence. “It’s, like, not in great condition. Anymore.” This last stretch of silence went on for so long, Evander pulled his phone back from his ear to make sure the call hadn’t disconnected. “Julian.” Is it still driveable? “Yeah, I think so. Maybe. I dunno, the wheels look fine?” That’s not—okay. Drive it to the nearest collision center. Now, it was Evander’s turn to be silent. For the first time, in a long time, he felt something akin to shame. He was nineteen, and still trying—failing—to make his brother proud. “I’m, uh, still kind of drunk. Sorry. Do you think you could—” Yes. I’ll be there soon. Click. Evander swore under his breath and shoved his phone back into his pocket. His eyes hurt, there was sand in the depths of his ass crack, and Ce was going to mock him for a week. 

- ❀ -

Spare the rod and spoil the child. He came last: after Julian had been born and deemed favorite and heir, after Cecile had been born and deemed illegitimate and unwanted. Evander, then, found himself with nothing to prove and nothing to endure: it was all roses. Handsome, good grades, star of the football team; he’d spend his youth living out some iteration of the American fantasy: a young prince without a care in the world, idling indulgently by an emerald infinity pool—the very picture of privilege. But, of course, as with all things that seemed too good to be true, there was the untarnished gleam of good appearances and saved face—and then, there was the truth. The Buchanans, for all their money’s worth, were a study in psychopathy: generations of well-dressed bastards who had lied and cheated their way up to Heaven, and scaled up the ladder of power using their claws and teeth. A thousand ruined lives could be put to Papa’s name—his own children’s being chief among them. It was a beautiful life, filled with exotic vacations and designer clothes, more money than he’d ever need, enough to fill entire rooms with—and it was an ugly life, marred by screaming matches, broken furniture, and five perpetually unoccupied seats at the dinner table. 

In the end, it was enough to drive Julian to heartlessness, Cecile to madness, and Evander to debauchery. He, especially, wanted no part in any of it all. His siblings were formidable and hungry: the boldest and brightest of the Buchanan clan, with enough conviction to set the world aflame and enough ambition to swallow it whole. What candle could he have held to those big people, those big dreams? He had no interest in trying. Instead, at Dartmouth, he would retreat into his expensive amusements and vices: liquor and wine, lines of cocaine, a quarter-million dollars blown on a bad bet in the casino, yes-men all around him. You’re so pathetic, Cecile would say disdainfully each morning she found him passed out in the foyer—and this, Evander knew, was the one thing she and Julian could agree on. He didn’t mind. That meant there was one less thing he had to listen to them fight about. He loved them, dearly and inexplicably—and he had thought they loved him, too. Wasn’t it enough that they had one another? The answer was, printed in neat clinical letters atop a stack of biochemical consent forms: No. He had underestimated both of them. Julian’s love and Julian’s ambition were two breeds of the same beast. Cecile’s wrath and her ambition were two strains of the same poison.

So: he would die by the hands of his siblings. At this point, it was so trite to talk about: six years of experimentation, Cecile shouldering the brunt of it—not out of concern for Evander, but a twisted need for it to fucking work, already before it got to Julian. When at last it did, and Cecile came out of the bloody waters a dead woman with gleaming eyes, she’d make plans to raise hell, as was so typical of her—but this time, intended Evander to partake in the chaos, too. He had bled to death at her feet, cheek pressed to the filthy basement floor, more afraid than ever. When his mind sank away from him at last, Cecile let him up and swung the door open. It’s me, Ce, she cooed. You always liked to have fun. We’re going to have some fun. And was it fun? In the moment, it might’ve been. Evander couldn’t say. He would come to in three years, in the mountains with Julian’s blood in his mouth and no recollection of what had occurred in the time between the night he’d died and now. His brother looked older, icier than ever. Cecile was nowhere to be found. There’s no need to save her, Evander had spat into the snow. She saved herself. 

At least I’ve saved you, Julian said. To that, Evander could only laugh and laugh, until the incredulity wore off, and there was only grief.

CONNECTIONS

IVONNE – PESKY WOMAN. Evander understands she is his counterpart of sorts—a Priestess to the living in the same way he is a Gravekeeper for the dead. Evander doesn’t understand how this, alone, is sufficient justification in Ivonne’s eyes to enter and leave his church as she pleases (“Evander, this is public property. Your attitude is un-priestly.” “I’m not a priest!”) with armfuls of baked goods, insisting matter-of-factly that he doesn’t eat enough, among a myriad of other baseless declarations she makes to him, about him. They are, in Evander's opinion, vastly different people: where he had happened upon the abandoned Oude Kerk and, in seeing no better option, made a reluctant home for himself there, Ivonne is a zealous New Worlder type. She is a peculiar woman in general: for all her power and popularity, it doesn’t seem she has many friends, nor particularly wants them. In some ways, Evander thinks she’s even lonelier than him. Despite this, he remains quick to brush her off—sometimes aggressively, the hurt of having someone to look after him after so many years both sharp and jarring, and other times begrudgingly, between bitefuls of (admittedly delicious) lemon meringue. She is not exactly motherly, per se—Ivonne acts more like a disapproving corporate manager, or a disinterested therapist—but her attentiveness for Evander is both overwhelming and...neither appreciated, nor unappreciated. He’s conflicted. You know, I can take care of myself, he told her once. Ivonne had lifted a single, elegant brow. Yes, I know. I wonder all the time why you don’t.

JULIAN & CECILE – TWO KNIVES IN HIS BACK. It’s hard—no, impossible—for him to reconcile that Julian, who read him to sleep after nightmares and took a welt to the cheek for Evander after he’d crashed the Porsche, had also watched impassively from across the expanse of an infinite table while Evander signed his life away—and that Cecile, who cried in the bathroom when nobody came to her recital, and accepted expulsion from six successive schools for the simple want of being loved, had been the same woman to draw Evander calmly into her arms, only to kill him between teethfuls of flesh and blood. Once, Evander thought his older brother and sister hung the moon. Cecile never was able to accept Julian’s kindnesses—ones she called debts, mouth wrapped sourly around the word—but Evander would have been content to bask in that kindness forever: diamonds and Jaguars, exotic beaches, lovers in every city—and above all other luxuries, the one of knowing the three of them would be together, always. That hope of his has come true, he supposes, in the most twisted of ways. True, he has Cecile to thank for not abandoning him in a basement in Palestrina—but she’d left him three years later instead in Poland. And he has Julian to thank for resurrecting him—but Julian was the pronouncer of his death sentence to begin with; and what’s more, he’s carried him out of one Hell, only to drag him into another. They were never a happy family, but they were a family. Now, whatever it is that’s keeping them together—science, death, and that ugly word, debts—Evander wishes it wouldn’t.

KISARA & OKSANA – THE LOVERS. He really, really, wishes they would stop making out in his cemetery. Well—they are not exactly kissing, but by the way they spar and wrestle, eyes gleaming bright with the closest thing to feeling alive : it might as well be kissing. Kisara is an old friend—someone he used to visit at the Moulin Rouge when he’d first arrived in Amsterdam, having defaulted back to sex and gambling to quell his misery. The two of them had once gone to depraved depths with one another, lost their minds eating seeds, tumbled about in satin sheets— Eventually, he turned his back on all of it once and for all, but Kisara stuck around. According to her, Oksana is new meat. I’m showing her around, she says, feinting disinterest as she goes to examine her perfect, shiny red nails. Evander snorts. Yeah, showing her around your bed. When Kisara jabs him in the rib with a snarl, he has to roll on the ground and make exaggerated sounds of pain for like, a while, before she finally laughs and forgives him. Kisara and Oksana have been coming around more often—De Wallen is cramped and unsightly, while Centraal Station tends to overrun itself with creepy 200 junkies when it gets late enough. The Oude Kerk, decrepit and, exempting Evander himself, void of people, is an admittedly good place to have some privacy. In truth, Evander doesn’t really mind. Kisara is welcome to come whenever she’d like, and he likes Oksana enough: she’s witty, abrasive, and reminds him a lot of Cecile. But perhaps it’s that very resemblance to his conniving sister that makes him uneasy about her. Kisara, too wrapped up in whatever it is they have going on, doesn’t seem to see the way Oksana holds herself: calmly and calculatively, showing just enough teeth to pass off as fully feral. Evander knows her kind. He’s not inclined to trust her.

OPEN ♦ FC: SEAN O'PRY

[bigskydreaming]

Batfandom’s favorite word to use is “adopted.” And I don’t mean that in a good way, but in a ‘nah, this is actually kinda obnoxious’ way?

Like, 90% of fics and headcanons in Batfandom flat out refuse to use the words ‘father,’ ‘brother(s),’ ‘sister’ or ‘son(s),’ without the qualifier ‘adopted’ always, always, ALWAYS attached to the front of said words. Like, endlessly. Over and over. Not just once, early on, to establish the specific nature of the family relationships, but like....this sledgehammer insistence on bringing that point home. Each. And. Every. Time. A. Familial. Relationship. Is. Described. Ever.

Sorry to be cranky about it, I know people don’t mean any harm by it, and like, I’m not saying its offensive. That’s not the right word IMO, but its definitely....grating? And just to be clear, I don’t pretend I’m speaking for everyone who’s adopted or from adopted families, I’m sure plenty of people who fit that description have different takes on this than me. BUUUUT I also know for a fact that I am not the only person this bugs in a big way. I’ve had this convo over the years with a lot of other fans I know who are adopted. And its not just Batfandom either, its every fandom with central adoptive relationships, like Thor and Loki, etc. Its just especially jarring in Batfandom because there’s so many different adoptive relationships front and center, so this pops up like...EVERYWHERE.

Idk, like....I’d just ask that writers please consider WHY they feel the qualifier ‘adopted/adoptive’ is a necessary addition every time the label of father/son/brother is used in a fic. What they think it adds, what they feel it describes about the relationship that’s different from any other father/son/brother relationship. Because I do think that most people (at least those not from adopted families themselves) do it without thinking about it. It seems just like another descriptor, like its addition is just a level of specificity that’s like, slightly more accurate than JUST father/son/brother......its just. In my experience, and that of most other adopted kids/relatives of adopted kids I’ve spoken with personally....that’s not really how it works?

Its about context, is the thing. How a thing is framed. When used just initially, like when establishing the exact nature of family dynamics, sure, in that sense its an accurate descriptor that lends an additional level of specificity to family relationships. It describes how this particular family formed, how it came to be. But AFTER that’s been established....that qualifier of adopted tacked onto every family label....its no longer establishing anything further. Instead, now its just perpetuating the idea that the nature of the family relationship itself is inherently different, BECAUSE of how it was formed.

Its a subtle distinction, but its very much a real and definite distinction. When first used, ‘adopted’ describes a family origin. Used over and over, ‘adopted’ describes a family that’s somehow wholly different from non-adopted families, BECAUSE that specific family origin is seen as superseding and overlaying every other aspect of the family and its inter-dynamics. You see what I’m saying? And its that latter part that grates, because...no? That’s not....that’s not nearly the omnipresent thing that I think a lot of people seem to take for granted it is?

Again, maybe its different for other adopted families, but like.....okay. So, in my case, my mom’s technically my adopted mom, I have a different bio mom that I haven’t seen since I was ten, my older sister has the same bio parents as me and my two younger siblings are adopted with no biological relation to each other or to anyone else in our family, though unlike me and my sister were adopted at birth. For as long as my mom’s been my mom....I barely ever referred to my mom as anything other than my mom. It usually didn’t occur to me to use qualifiers when describing her, because like, she was who I saw as my mom. I mean, she’s literally my mom. That’s literally what that word adopted in front of the label ‘mother’ means. Whether you include it or not, the mother part remains true. 

And in fact, describing her as my adopted mom wasn’t even like, an establishing qualifier I always included when first talking about my family to someone who didn’t know our history. It was usually more kinda....a tenth conversation kind of clarification because it was more an afterthought than anything else? Like kinda a belated realization when they looked at me confused at something I just said, like...’oh yeah, see technically my mom is my adopted mom, and when I said ‘my mom’ there just now I was actually talking about my bio mom, totally different thing. Like technically I have two, but only one really matters most of the time so its not worth mentioning to like, everyone I meet, you know?’ That sort of thing. If anything, I was more likely to use the qualifier in regards to my birth mom, the one I didn’t live with. Like I’d say, this is my mom when talking about my mom, as in my adopted mom, and I’d refer to my birth mom as just that, as my birth mom or my bio mom.

And my siblings and I tended to describe ourselves as adopted siblings more upfront, at least when introducing ourselves and our familial relationship to someone new...but that was less about us seeing us our sibling relationship as being different from non-adopted families, and more just like...a necessary avoidance of bullshit? LOL, because I mean, its kinda obvious that my siblings and I aren’t biologically related. I’m white, my little sister is Vietnamese, my little brother’s indigenous Mexican. We tended to lead with “this is my sister/brother, we’re adopted’, but mostly because like.....full offense, but people are kinda dumb? *Shrugs* If we just said ‘this is my sister and this is my brother’ and just left it at that, people would nine out of ten times like....stutter and get all squinty-eyed and confused and be all...what...how...because lol, idk, apparently its a hugely hard leap to figure out oh hey, maybe adoption is a thing here? 

(And also just FYI in general, it was always just annoying because like, even if you don’t ‘get’ HOW two seemingly unrelated people can be related and all they say when introducing themselves is ‘we’re brother and sister’, like.....you’re not actually owed an in depth explanation as to omg how did this strange phenomenon come to be. And the entitlement so many people we encountered growing up, where like....they felt they were owed our life stories upon meeting us just once, simply because they Didn’t Understand and somehow this equated to But They NEEDED To Understand, because...Reasons....like, no. You don’t actually need to understand how two people are related if they don’t feel like providing you with the full context. Either take them at face value or don’t, you don’t get to be a dick and demand a full accounting of their legal and symbolic relationships just so you can like....validate this and be all okay yeah, that checks out, I’ll allow it. LOL. No? Your validation of our relationship is not required, nor is your understanding of it, get over yourselves. So just. Like. Don’t be Those Guys. If you meet people who introduce themselves as family and the exact nature of that family relationship isn’t immediately obvious or seems somewhat confusing like....just...deal? They’ll tell you more if they want you to know more, and if they don’t tell you more they probably feel you know everything you need to know and that’s literally their call to make, so....yeah).

Idk. Like, due to the age differences in our family, my little sister and I were the only ones who overlapped in attending the same schools at the same time, just different grade levels. And we used to have this bit where any time someone new stumbled while grasping the fact that we were brother and sister, and they did that Brain Malfunction, Processing Error glitch face while they tried to compute Asian sister, white brother, how does that even work....so like, at some point we just started doing this thing where any time we saw that Look, my little sister would launch into this painfully earnest explanation of how so, “okay, our dad’s Vietnamese and our mom’s white, and I got all the Vietnamese genes and my brother here got all the white genes,” and I would just keep a totally straight face and nod along, backing her up, and you could literally see them falling for it for a good minute or so before they realized oh hey, they’re totally just bullshitting me. And then eventually we got told to cut it out because teachers were complaining about looking dumb in front of other students when we did that, which, well duh that’s cuz you were, dumbasses BUT I DIGRESS.

But point is.....I honestly do not know many (if any) adopted families who go around making a point to emphasize the adopted part of their family relationships any and every time they come up, the way most fiction tends to depict adopted characters doing? Once we established to a person that yes, we’re adopted, we didn’t ever feel a need to re-emphasize that or re-establish that same point any time after that. If they idk, forgot or got confused again or whatever, I mean...not our problem, you know? You get one explanation, if you still don’t get it after that, you’re probably not gonna get it anyway because its not like....rocket science. Was pretty much our stance.

And so okay, full disclosure, since anyone who’s followed me for some time has heard me talk about not really having a relationship with my family anymore....like yeah, its true, but because of a whole host of reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s adoption status. I mean, I basically hate my parents’ guts and have for a long time, but they’re still my parents, biological and adopted ones alike. And I love my siblings, we’re just unfortunately not close anymore because of all kinds of baggage that got heaped on us that there was really no way to deal with gracefully, look there are reasons I project on the Batfam and identify with that source material, lmao. 

Again though, my point is.....even at the best of times, my family was crazy dysfunctional, much like the Batfamily is.....but even at the worst of times, literally nobody in my family was ever going around insisting on making a distinction about most of us not being biologically related, you know? That’s just....not a thing, IME. Like, family’s kinda all or nothing. You’re either family, or you’re not. The how of it only really matters if you’re hashing out something where that’s specifically relevant, otherwise, not so much because I mean....if it was that easy to make a distinction about how your family is only kinda technically sorta your family, it’d be a hell of a lot easier to just...walk away, you know? Like, even when you flat out hate members of your family, there’s not really a lot of confusion on whether or not you actually consider them family. As complicated as your family dynamic might be, people aren’t usually looking for places to add in that additional complication of ‘mmm but are we reeeeeeally even family, technically?’

So all of that plays into why its so jarring to see writers so insistently and repeatedly emphasize the ‘adopted’ part of Batfamily relationships, as though its like the most important aspect of their entire family dynamic...the be all and end all, the thing EVERYTHING inevitably traces back to, in every fight, in every dynamic, etc. And yeah, I do think people who aren’t adopted or from blended families themselves should maybe put a little more thought into what’s going through their head when they emphasize the adopted part of a family dynamic, like why they fixate on it as the most defining aspect or criteria of it. Because its really not nearly as reflective of reality as the sheer overwhelming SAMENESS of how often its written that way would suggest. Again, just speaking in my experience and that of those I’ve had this fandom conversation with, over the years.

Like, any way you write them, the Batfamily is dysfunctional as hell and always will be. But bottom line, there are some not that great implications underlying the....default assumption, that this dysfunctionality all stems from or inevitably traces back to that ‘adoptive’ qualifier. Have Dick or Jason or Tim or Damian flat out hating each other’s guts at times, there’s certainly canon to support it, and sure, insecurity as to their individual places in their family is always going to be at least a PART of it, but like....being insecure about your place in your family isn’t exactly an experience unique to adopted members of families, you know? But the way the Batfamily is usually written certainly seems to treat that as the takeaway, and again, I’m not sure offensive is the way I’d describe that, but it most definitely is grating. And it never fails to pull me right out of a story and like, moan dramatically at the heavens “oh my god, whyyyyyy, why do so many writers think we’re all just...totally unaware that these kids are all adopted and need to remind themselves and each other and us of that every other paragraph’. 

Mostly because I’m dramatic like that, but also because its annoying too. Like....we get it, dudes. This is not brand new information. Its okay. You can refer to Bruce as just ‘their father’ or to their brothers or Cass as just ‘their brothers and sister’. You will not have like...lied, or anything.

Anyway. Those are my 6 am thoughts on the Batfam, fandom in general, and how you really only need to use the word ‘adopted’ like...once per relationship per fic. That’s really all it takes? The additional 674 mentions of adoption are kinda....gratuitous.

[fapangel]

So you finally watched The Last Jedi. Thoughts?

It is worse than I could have possibly imagined.Sit down and buckle up, because this one’s a doozy. (Spoilersabound.)

AsI’ve previously detailed, it was clear the movie was a trainwreckeven before I watched it due to simple structural issues with thebasic plot, much of it inherited from The Force Awakens (which I didsee.) To wit, the movie is a sequel to the original trilogy, butcompletely ignores everything that happenedin the original trilogy. Having seen The Last Jedi, it’s nowblatantly clear thatthe new trilogy  was intended as a reboot - but that’s impossible todo when it’s shamelessly mining the OT for characters, concepts, andinformation. I’m not talking about the shameless density of nostalgiareferences and even aped plots in The Force Awakens, either - I’mtalking about The Last Jedi considered in a vacuum. (Just one exampleis Leia’s use of force power to pull herself back into her ship,which makes no sense without the original trilogy context.) Giventhe high praise some of my friends had paid the show, I’d been opento the possibility of it having merit as a movie, ifnot as a Star Wars sequel, butits inability toescape the structural/sequel critique presaged its complete and utterfailures in writing.

Thisis a point I must make explicit: TheLast Jedi is such a horribly written movie that it transcends merefailure; it is actively harmful and offensive, “problematic” inthe sense that the much-maligned “SJWs” use the term. Thisis the unassailable core of the offense that The Last Jedi (“TLJ”)offers. Much of what I’m about to bitch about, especially anythingto do with pre-established Star Wars canon, could have been glossedover, or even forgiven, if the core storytelling was solid enough. Ifit looks flashy and cool, adheres to rules that the audience knowsfrom prior films, oreven rules the film itself laid down earlier, anyaction sequence or detail of spaceships and tech can be made to work.Star Wars is classic Space Opera centered on Space Wizards; youcan get away with a lotifyou’re making one big concession to enable the plot and not justjerking the audience around every five minutes. But TLJ not only doesthat, it also has no story worth making concessions to enable. Theinescapably lethal flaw of TLJ is that none of the characters areworth a damn, and their arcs simply do not work.

That’sit. Without that, you have no story, period. Withthat,any number of flaws, errors, and plot holes might be forgiven, if thecore story is strong enough. Even if the core story isn’tstrongenough, one could at least acknowledge that the movie wasn’t a totaldisaster, it was just dragged down by too many errors, a death of athousand cuts. TLJ manages to have allof the ancillary problems, andno character story at all to make it worth a flying fuck.

Thiswon’t be a comprehensive dismantling of TLJ, as there’s more thanenough out there - I suggest seeing MauLer’sreviews, either the 30 minute “Unbridled Rage” or thethree-part,multi-hourtakedown for a truly exhaustive treatment. This is mostly Planefag’sPerspective (becuase people like it when I say the funny fuqq wordsapparently,) an explanation to my writer friends (which they’ll  findinteresting, as it’s rare for our opinions on works of fiction todiverge so strongly), and presentation of what seems to be aheretofore unmade argument - that TLJ is morally reprehensible bydint of the biases, prejudices and twisted ideas it perpetuates.

Yes,it is that fuckingbad. ButI’m saving the best for last. In order of magnitude, why TLJ is apile of steaming, utter shit:

NOT ONE SINGLEFUCKING CHARACTER ARC WORKS AT ALL.

Thisis the core, unforgivable failing - the complete absence of anyfucking story. This isespecially notable with Rey and Kylo, the lead characters of themovie around which everything else revolves. WhenRey and Kylo first spoke to each other across lightyears, I stood upand shouted “THE FORCEIS NOT A FUCKING SKYPE CALL!” Iwould’ve forgiven the Space Wizard liberties had the interactionsworked, but my wrathproved sadly prescient, as Kylo and Rey’s every interactionthereafter seemed like two teenagers awkwardly flirting over Skype…except they had far lesschemistry than that. As I write this, I find it difficult to evenrecall what they fucking talked about- the first time was Kylo surprised it was happening and Rey callinghim an evil murdering prick (for good reason,) the second time sherang him up when he had his shirt off and he told her to “let go ofthe past, kill it if you must,” and the third time she told him shesensed conflict in him, they touched hands through The Force, and she“saw his future” through this, because Rey Is Very Good At TheForce.

Onthe basis of these three interactions, Reygoes from Kylo Ren’s sworn enemy to moist and thirsty for histhrobbing red lightsaber. I shit you fucking negative. Uponthese three brief conversations,the central character story of the entire movie rides- and they come nowhere close topulling it off. There’s so many reasons for this that it’s hard tosummarize them. Rey’s shown to be pining for her family again(despite having moved past this in her character arc in The ForceAwakens, but Rian Johnson can’t keep shit consistent in his ownmovie, much less thesame fucking trilogy.) She’s angry at Kylo for killing his father,Han, whom she was adopting as a father figure herself (their firstchat takes place after Luke asks after Han and Rey accuses Kylo ofit, so this is expressly brought forward into TLJ.) So when Kylo ripsinto Rey over her parents; pointing out that they were white trashthat sold her into servitude for drinking money and never cared abouther, before telling her to kill her past, he’sonly reminding her that he had something she never did and alwayswanted (a loving family,) and that he fucking murdered saidfamily. There’s no wayRey could empathize with Kylo over this.

Butwe’re supposed to ignore this, and believe that Rey now feels someempathy for Kylo because she 1. saw him with his shirt off and 2.touched his hand and Sensed The Good In Him Through The Force.

Whata load of complete and utter fucking horseshit.

Thereare other arcs, and they all fall flat on their fucking faces aswell. For starters, Luke.Luke’s arc, especially, cannotbe insulated from continuity criticisms because he’s the mainfucking character of the Original Trilogy, andTLJ leans heavily onthat lineage for its setup. The climax of Luke’s character arc wasachieving the seemingly impossible - redeeminghis father, Darth Vader, who had fallen to evil decades ago andcommitted untold numbers of atrocities. Andin TLJ, Luke actually contemplates CHOPPINGHIS OWN NEPHEW’S FUCKING HEAD OFF becausehe “sees darkness in him.” The man who’s crowning, definingachievement was redeeming his Father from the dark side isconsidering NEPOTICIDEbecause the kid mightfall.

Evenif you ignore that, why Luke’sinsists that“the Jedi should end” is never explained, as he never says itoutright and never finishes a single lesson with Rey which issupposed to teach her why.Why does he extrapolate hisfailure to mean the entire galaxy isbetter off without them? His interactions with Rey accomplishnothing; he basically tells her to fuck off for a while, decides to“teach her,” promptly tells her she’s supor haxx0rz powerful likeKylo, watches her master lightsaber-ing because she knows how toswing a metal quarterstaff, and is then told by Yoda himself thatthere’s nothing in the ancient Jedi tomes Rey needs, because she’s sofucking special she knows it all already. Yoda fucking torchesthe ancient temple-tree-library to make his point that Luke’s always“staring at the horizon instead of at what’s in front of him” andthat he needs to focus on the here and now; implicitly saying thatRey was right, and he shouldhump his ass out there to “face down the First Order with a lasersword”…

…but instead of doing that, he literally phonesit in from half a galaxy away with The Force, puttinghimself in (almost) no danger, but fucking dies anyways,meaning he died as he lived; agrouchy old coward who never did face down his own apprentice andanswer for his mistakes. Luke’sarc makes no fucking sense, achievesnothing, and goes fucking nowhere.

Finnand Rose was portrayed as a budding relationship, except there wasn’ta single fucking hint of it being romantic till she kissed him at theend of the show after a pat speech about “saving what we love.”In the beginning of the movieshe tazes Finn (yes, the black man got tazed) for trying to skip townin an escape pod, which she found personally offensive because hersister had just died in the opening battle to defend The Resistance.At the end of the movie, Finn is willing to sacrifice his life todefend that same Resistance, his character having actually grown -and Rose rams him off-course before he can do so, despitehaving tazed him earlier in the movie for dishonoring hersister’s sacrifice to defend the exact same cause. Atbest, this means shewas only truly concerned with her personal loss, which would make hera self-centered, selfish cunt, willing to sacrifice the lives of manyothers (and potentially the freedom of the entire Galaxy) for her ownemotional needs. But it’s not portrayed as a selfish decision - it’sportrayed as the right one,which taps into an entire larger problem of its own I’ll touch onlater. It’s the same problemthat’s entirely responsible for crippling Poe’s character arc. Finnand Rose were simply dealt the coup de grace by it, as theirpreceding scenes together were sparse; involving them coming up witha plan to save the rebel fleet (seconds after Rose had tazed him,bro, and had no reason to do a 180 and start trusting him without anexplanation that he never did give,) a monologue about how shitRose’s life was and How Capitalism Is Bad on the casino planet, and abrief “well we’re fucked and by extension THE ENTIRE GALAXY but westuck it to the man, how cool,” and Rose has a moment where shesets an animal free and says that was superior to making baddieshurt, setting up her closing line later.

Andthat’s it. That’s fucking it. Comparethis to Princess Leia in the original trilogy. Her response to aStormtrooper walking into her cell - someone who she has every reasonto assume is there to take her to a torture session (as she wasclearly shown being tortured some minutes earlier in the movie,) isto comment wryly on his height. Andseconds after breaking out of the jail cell, she’s shouting orders atpeople, spraying the air with energy from a stolen blaster rifle, andin fact leading themout of the immediate danger (“Someone’s got to get us out ofhere!”) And during this entire sequence herrepartee and rivalry with Han Solo is already being established, the“excuse me Princess” cranked to the max. The friction that beginstheir relationship is Han butting heads with her before witnessingthat she’s dangerous,composed, and competent in emergency and combat situations. Notonly is their relationship developed during actionsequences of real consequence, as well as down-time chats, but italso takes three entire moviesto build to a climax. Comparedto that writing, Rey jumping on Kylo’s dick after three Skype callsand Rose giving one rusty fuckabout Finn are egregiously bad.If you criticize the OT andthink TLJ is superior, you have a lot toanswer for, right there.

However,Finn himself had potential - if only because his character was theleast tampered with, so one could assume his character developmentfrom TFA was intact, and TLJ’s script hinted gently in support of itand never against it. He started TFA just wanting to run like abitch, and by the end had come to care, at least, about defendingRey. He was trying to hare off after Rey in the beginning of TLJ, andby the end had committed fully to a cause, the opposite cause of theone he’d abandoned at the opening of TFA. It’snever really covered why hegrows like this - at the very beginning he goes from wanting to legit to forming a plan with Rose to save the fleet instantly. He wastalking his way out of being shoved in the brig at the time, but henever takes a subsequent option to duck out; in the space of a fewseconds he’s committed himself to a dangerous recon mission that willend with infiltrating an enemy capital ship withapparently no qualms whatsoever. If this was ever covered indialogue, it was so brief I completely missed it - and this isprobably why his arc “worked” the best; it wasn’t the focus, so Ididn’t care much about how it happened… plus, by the end, Finn isthe only halfway relatable character at all, beating Rose by alandslide because we have awhole movie of development for him (TFA) as opposed to one briefboo-hoo monologue from Rose (oh and her sister died boohoo.) He’s nota fucking Mary Sue like Rey, he’s not entirely certain about his rolein things, and so at the end, when he makes the decision tosuicide-run the Very Big Gun, there’s actually some investment andaudience-character empathy there. Finn,alone, is the only character we can empathizewith.

Andthen fucking Rose putson a stellar display of Asian Driving Skills and robshim of his moment,because-

EVERYBODY WITHA PENIS IN THIS MOVIE IS ALWAYS WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING ALWAYS,BECAUSE FUCK MEN

Thisis not an exaggeration. In my priorcomments I mentioned that just because everyone saidthis was the case didn’t mean Ibelieved it, because I’ve seen the CHUDs hurl the same complaints atobjectively excellent movies (the latest Mad Max, forinstance,) and that’s before theGamer/pol/Gate crowd made counter-bitching at the SJW bitching apastimefor casual amusement. I wasexpecting some token casting, some throwaway GRRL POWER lines, etc.

Instead,I got the most misandrist movie I have ever seen.

It’snot just a matter ofwriting every male character to be stupid and every female characterto be smart - the laws of probability themselves bendover backwards to make everything a woman does the right choice, andeverything a man does the wrong one… except even when the Universedoesn’t do that, theman gets his ass chewed out anyways for making the rightcall.

Butthat came later. My first exposure to the misandry came in the formof Admiral Holdo, a purple-haired, ballgown-clad fleet Admiral wholooked like she walked out of Tumblr SJW Central Casting. But despiteThe Internet having named this character as egregiously bad manytimes, nothing, nothing prepared me for the actualperformance.

LauraDern deliberately portrays Holdo as a venomous, imperiousbully.

Onehas to actually see the performance to appreciate howdeliberate and well-done it is. Laura Dern crosses her arms, doesn’tface the person she’s addressing, literally looks down her nose whenshe does, and even does that particular kind of sneer whereone bites their lower lip and looks at someone like they’re dogshit.Laura Dern’s delivery perfectly matches the scripted lines - sheresponds to a straightforward request for information from Daemon Poeby insulting him, then attacking him- “My plan? Like yourplan which destroyed all our bombers?” She then proceeds to attackhis manhood, calling him a stupid little gung-ho flyboy, and advisinghim to “stick to his post and follow my orders” with the exactsneering tone of someone saying “sit down and be a good littleboy.” The soft-spoken volume of the delivery just drives it home -it’s the “oh, honey” condescending shitpost meme made manifestand played entirely straight.

Theworst part of this performance is that Hold is supposed tobe an Admiral, a military officer. Poe eve drops a line about herbeing the hero of such and such battle to establish that she’ssupposedly respected and famous - and then she proceeds to shredthat impression by acting like anything but a militaryofficer. Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager wasn’t verynice - in fact, she could be an outright rude asshole - but shealways sounded like a Captain when Kate Mulgrew delivered herlines. She didn’t deliberately humiliate or insult people by saying“sit down like a good little boy;” she’d say “I’m the Captain,get the fuck off my bridge before I brig your ass forinsubordination.” That’s how the military works; there is achain of command, and those who challenge it are reminded thatthey’re pissing on God’s leg, and God does not fuck around. Todeliberately portray Holdo as literal stereotype of a “nastywoman” suggests that Rian Johnson actually thinks this is what a“strong woman” should look like. And in fact, Laura Dern saidthis explicitly:

Speaking about her character’sstylish-yet-firm leadership, Dern told VanityFair: “[Rian is] saying something that’s been atrue challenge in feminism. Are we going to lead and be who we are aswomen in our femininity? Or are we going to dress up in a boy’sclothes to do the boy’s job? I think we’re waking up to what wewant feminism to look like.”

So apparently CaptainJaneway wasn’t a real woman, because women simply can’t beauthoritative and direct, and if they are, they’re just playing asthose toxic men. From the director’s point of view, a “strongwoman” is a viscous, venomous bully who replies to peoplerequesting information by insulting, mocking, humiliating andsneering at them instead of firmly asserting their lawful authorityand citing their own reputation for competence.

Rian Johnson bothdirected and wrote the movie, so in this one scene, everythinghe believes is coming out - the epitome of an entire plot ruledby the iron fist of misandrist horseshit. The scene itself isan example. The movie opens with the Resistance evacuating a planetas the First Order fleet (led by a massive dreadnought with an“autocannon”) closes in. Poe Dameron, the aforementioned “flyboy”attacks and destroys the dreadnought, against Leia’s orders, just asit is explicitly shown to be locking its Big Scary Gun ontoLeia’s command cruiser (there’s even a cut to Leia’s face toemphasize the point.) There’s nothing to suggest that Leia’s cruiserwould’ve gone to lightspeed before then if not for Poe’s attack;despite him landing in a hurry, we know X-Wings arehyperspace-capable themselves (within this movie, in fact, as we’reshown an X-Wing underwater on Luke’s island; presumably his ridethere,) and as a Captain and, apparently, the Resistance’s fieldcommander, Poe would know the rally point the Resistance isevacuating to.

The movie itselfshows that Poe saved the command cruiser, and with it, the entirecommand staff of the Resistance - and for this he is first demoted byLeia for disobeying orders, and then viciously insulted by Holdo whenhe simply asks her for information. When the First Order follow theResistance through hyperspace with some newly-invented trackingdevice, Kylo Ren and his fellow Spess Fighters zoom in and blow upthe cruiser’s launch bay with torpedo-like missiles… and are thenimmediately ordered to retreat because the capital ships “can’tcover them that far away.” This makes absolutely no fuckingsense, as in the battle scene immediately prior, Poe attackedthe dreadnought to take out its “surface cannons” to clear theway for the Resistance’s bomber ships to attack, and the captain ofsaid ship explicitly says that those guns can’t hit fightersand that they should have their own fighters out there - “fiveminutes ago,” no less, as if lampshading the plot convenientincompetence makes it okay. And since two torpedo-like missilesutterly destroy the command cruiser’s launch bay, you can surmise theFirst Order doesn’t require huge, plodding, and stupidly vulnerable“bombers” as the Resistance used to take out the dreadnought.Said dreadnought didn’t have any visible shield protection during thefirst battle; (especially obvious because we’re later shown capitalship fire hitting the shielding of the command cruiser with verydistinctive special effects,) and in fact the command cruiserexplicitly “focuses its shields aft” to fend off thepursuers capital-class weaponry, just to create the opening for Kyloto nuke the hangar bay (and blast Leia into space as well.) Thereis absolutely no fucking reason the First Order fighter-bomberscouldn’t have finished off the command cruiser right then and there,but we’re simply shown Kylo’swingmen being shot down (by what, we never see,) as he’s told “theycan’t cover him out there” as an excuse. The movieviolates its own rules just to take away Poe’s X-Wing and put Holdoin charge.

Andthis is just the fucking beginningof the Universe itselfbending over backwards to invalidate everythinganyone with a penisdoes. Poe is the one that authorizes Finn and Rose’s sidequest tofind a “master codebreaker” at the Gold Saucer (to sneak on thebad guy’s ship to disable their tracker so the fleet can escape,) buttheir plan fails because Fuck Anyone With A Penis. But that’s not theoffensive part. Earlier, Poe sees Holdo’s fueling the transports, andangrily points out that said transports will be sitting ducks for theenemy’s guns. He asks Holdo againfor a plan, and shefeeds him some fucking bullshit non-answer about “hope being aspark that lights a fire.” With the entireResistance Fleet nowdown to one cruiser (outof three starting ships), Poe intelligently determines that Holdo isfucking useless and stages a mutiny so he can see his own planthrough. Holdo defeats her captors by not getting shot the moment shetwitches and winning a point-blank firefight with much younger combattroops because fuck you. Nowback in command, she sees off Leia (just awake after her impromptuspace-walk) and on thetransports, Leia tells Poe that “Holdo knows the First Order won’tbe scanning for small ships like this.”

Yes.That’s the explanation. Poe Dameron - the fleet’s combat commanderand fighter pilot, someone who’s fucking job isto understand the capabilities of the ships in their fleet - didn’tknow this, but Admiral Holdo did because she has a vagina andtherefore is perfect. They’re boarding the transports to “slipaway” to another planet - visiblethrough the fucking window - andyet the First Order - WHOWATCHED THESE PEOPLE EVACUATE THE LAST PLANET ON THESE TRANSPORTS -“won’t know to lookfor small ships like these.”

Butwait - it gets worse. Finn and Rose’s mission failed, not becausethey were simply caught by security or because they were attemptingsomething that Ben Kenobi, an experienced Jedi knight had to give hislife to accomplish in Ep. 4 whenthe enemy was letting them go, butbecause a traitor betrayed them, who also, conveniently, tells thefirst order about the transports, so they’re revealed by a“decloaking scan” (which implies the transports have cloakingdevices; i.e. an inherent designed ability of the vessels, not just asmaller sensor signature inherent to their size, ergo something POEDEFINITELY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN ABOUT.) TheFirst Order starts blasting transports out of the sky, and of coursethis is all Poe’s fault.

Andthen there’s the Robbing of Finn. Admiral Holdo kamikazes the commandcruiser into the First Order fleet with the hyperdrive (itself afucking massive, retarded plot hole to end all plot holes), thussacrificing herself to Save The Resistance. And yet when Finnattempts to do THE EXACT SAME FUCKING THING not20 minutes later in the movie; a kamikaze self-sacrifice to save theentire Resistance, Rose rams into him to stop because “we shouldsave what we love instead of destroy what we hate.” This line isdelivered as the Big Gun blows up the base’s doors, thus sealing theResistance’s Fate… but wait! They all escape through a back doorbecause Rey shows up just in time to use her never-trained,never-practiced Force powers to clear a rockslide for them. Rose hadno way of knowing this would happen; meaning her ramming of Finn was,as far as she knew, condemning everyoneto death and her andFinn, at best, tocapture and execution by the First Order. But as usual, the Plotitself bends over backwards to make her choice the correct one, andFinns the wrong one.

Shortlyafter this, Poe “completes his character arc” by acting on whatLeia told him (“you have to run not fight sometimes”) andparroting that fucking arrogant bully bitch Holdo’s fortune-cookieAesop about sparks lighting fires, finally acknowledging the WisdomOf The Females, despite everychoice he made in this movie beingthe objectively correct ones, given the knowledge that he as acharacter possessed.

Andwe haven’t even talked about Rey yet.

Ohmy fucking god, Rey.

Reyis the biggest fucking Mary Sue I have ever seen. This,like every other blunt statement in this piece, is not anexaggeration, as much as it saddens me. Rey can fail at nothingshe attempts. Rey has towork for absolutely nothing she gains. Rey has as much raw power asKylo, at least (by Luke’s own judgment,)and she is moreskilled than he is at lightsaber fighting as evidenced by her savingKylo afew times during the throne room fight. This,despite having notraining in the weapon(which has no mass and can lop off her limbs easily, unlike the metalquarterstaff she’s experienced with) compared to Kylo, who trainedunder Luke himself foryears before moving on to whoever the fuck Snoke was supposed to be.Rey can just touch Kylo’shand and “see his future” isn’t all dark, when the much moreexperienced Luke did the same and only saw darkness. Rey can temptKylo to betray his master and move towards the light after threefucking awkward Skype calls. WhenLuke ignored his master and left in the middle of his training torescue his friends, he got his fucking ass kicked, his handcut off, and his lightsaber lost. WhenRey does the exact same thing, SHE BEATS LUKE MOTHERFUCKINGSKYWALKER IN A MELEE FIGHT, FLIES OFF INTO SPACE, AND SUCCEEDS ATTURNING EDGELORD MCSITHBOI AT LEAST HALFWAY AND SAVES THE ENTIRERESISTANCE BY LEVITATING A WHOLE FUCKING ROCKSLIDE WITH NO TRAINING,WHEN LUKE, WHO WAS ACTIVELY BEING TRAINED, STRUGGLED TO MERELY STACKONE ROCK ON ANOTHER AND COULDN’T HOIST AN X-WING THAT WEIGHED LESSTHAN THAT WHOLE ROCKSLIDE PUT TOGETHER.

Reyis a stupid boring nothing, who’s emotions and struggles I can’t finda single fuck to give about because she’s never in any realdanger, never has to work for anything she gets, and never developsas a person at all. I didn’t criticize her character arc because shenot only lacks one, she’s arguably not even a character at all -there’s seemingly no limit to her abilities, no flaws or pitfalls forher character, since everything she does turns out to be the rightcall (sound familiar?) and only the barest suggestion of whatpersonal goals she seeks (and those aren’t sold one fucking bit bythe story development.) For all effects and purposes Rey is a walkingavatar of the Plot itself, or as Rian seems to call it, The Force.

FuckRey and the bantha she rode in on.

THE PLOT IS THE MOSTNONSENSICAL, LAZY PILE OF FUCKING SHIT EVER PUT TO PAPER BY MORTALMAN

Muchof the plot’s problems originate from what I described above; thevery rules of the universe bending over backwards to serve RianJohnson’s twisted misandrist worldview. But they don’t stop there,by a fucking long shot.

Muchhate has been thrown at those “bombers” in the movie’s opening,but as I said before, TLJ cannot stand on its own even in relationto itself. Ignoring all of pre-existing Star Wars canon, eventhings belonging to the “new movies” like Rogue One, within TLJitself, fighter-bombers are shown delivering grievous damage to acapital ship when Kylo’s wingmen blow the shit out of Leia’s bridge,using torpedo-like missiles that can strike at a distance, launchedfrom fast, maneuverable craft. Said cruiser’s bridge was explicitlyunshielded at the time, since its shields were “focused aft” tofend off turbolaser fire - something that’s shown with distinctivespecial effects that were totally absent when Poe was blasting lasercannons off the First Order Dreadnought in the beginning (ergo, itwas unshielded for some reason.) So the movie itself has shownthat unshielded targets can get the shit blown out of them byfighter-bombers firing torpedoes and that the dreadnaught wasunshielded.

Ionly mention this because it really pissed me off personally, andbecause it showcases Rian Johnson’s dogshit sense of drama andaesthetics, as he had a hardon for “WWII bombers” and apparentlythought it’d make for a better, tenser combat scene than Y-Wingsweaving and dodging through AA fire and enemy fighters like VT-8making their courageous, doomed run at the Kido Butai atMidway. The actual plot itself doesn’t have “holes,” asthat implies an otherwise cohesive structure with missing bits. Theplot is 90% holes and 10% substance, a sieve trying to hold meaning.

Theentire movie’s plot is set up by a “low speed chase,” theResistance fleet fleeing from the First Order’s fleet at sublightvelocities, because the First Order is using a “hyperspace tracker”that’ll allow them to chase the Resistance at FTL anyways. TheResistance’s cruisers are faster, which allows them to pull out oflethal range of their enemies, but - as a First Order officer says -“they’re faster and lighter but they can’t get away from us.”

Thismakes no fucking sense. If they’re faster - even by a smidgen -they’re faster. If they can pull out of laser cannon range tostart with, they can keep pulling out of range. They mightsimply maintain range once clear, to save fuel (because ships needfuel and they’re low, of course - something never, ever mentionedbefore in any Star Wars film ever,) but this makes no sense when youconsider that the objective of Admiral Holdo (which she won’t tell tofucking anyone) is to reach a planet with an old Rebel base with atransmitter powerful enough to “contact our allies in the Outer Rimand call for help.” In which case it’d make sense to haul ass forsaid planet, so they have some time to call for help and wait for itsarrival without the First Order launching a ground assault almost assoon as they land, right?

Butwait! Rey delivers herself to the First Order’s flagship via zippingin from Hyperspace with the Millennium Falcon, very close - beggingthe question of why the First Order (apparently not low on fuel)can’t use Hyperspace themselves to zip ahead of the Resistance fleet(even if they’ve got to bounce to a neighboring system due tominimum-range reasons) and cut them off, or just do a direct jump tocatch up. Worse, Finn and Rey take a hyperspace-capable shuttle toCasino World to execute their convoluted plan, which begs thequestion - why didn’t Holdo order an engineering team onto theshuttle and send it ahead to the old Rebel base? HOW MANY FUCKINGPEOPLE DOES IT TAKE TO WARM UP A REACTOR, BLOW THE DUST OFF A CONSOLEAND PLACE A FUCKING COLLECT CALL?

Thesecomplete failures of intellect - yes, even the infinitely stupidhyperspace kamikaze thing - all have one thing in common: they orientaround plans and facts that aren’t revealed to us till the lastminute, so we won’t notice these problems. It’s also because RianJohnson only cared about “subverting expectations” and provingthat his super special women were so clever and right all along, sohe clearly pulled plot elements out of his ass as he deemed themconvenient.

Ifyou’re one of my Twitter followers who usually tunes in for my vagueranting about defense-related matters, some necessary context isneeded: I’ve written literally thousands of pages worth of “quest”fiction; where I write anywhere from a few paragraphs to a few pagesof fiction, then have my audience vote on what the main characterdoes next - and the content itself is anime fanfiction. And Iam dead serious when I say that, at my worst, when Iwas pulling shit out of my ass on the spot, writing almost inreal-time and posting updates without stopping to proofread or editat all, I never did anything this fucking lazy. At myworst - writing that was so awful I wouldn’t wipe Assad’sass with it - I put more effort into my plot and consistency thanRian Johnson did with his titanic budget and multi-billion dollarstewardship of a beloved brand and franchise.

Andthat’s why I don’t find the hyperspace kamikaze moment offensive onits own merits. It’s horrific, yes - it invalidates space combat inthe entire setting, as well as begging questions specific to themovie (why didn’t Holdo use it outright, for instance?) but thesearen’t any worse than the numerous other stupidities that belabor theplot. What makes the hyperspace thing stand out to me is the attemptto excuse it - two throwaway exchanges. A First Order bridgeofficer notes that Holdo’s cruiser is spinning up its FTL drive, andthe commander dismisses it as an attempted diversion to lead themaway from the transports they’re potting like ducks. This isapparently the excuse for why Holdo didn’t do it earlier - she neededa distraction to allow time to turn. Nevermind that the other twoships with them - that ran out of fuel and were destroyed, afterevacuating their crew to the command cruiser - could’ve providedthis option hours earlier. The two lines make it clear that RianJohnson was aware of this plot hole, and he tries to paper it overwith two brief dialogue lines, as if that’ll excuse everything.

Theentire fucking movie is riddled with lines like this; barebreaths that have to carry the entire movie’s fucking plot setup. Reymentions to Luke that the First Order will “control all the majorsystems within weeks” at the beginning. The Order officer’s singleline that explains the Low Speed Chase the entire movie revolvesaround. Leia’s offhand mention of the old base with the Transmitterof Sufficient Power to reach Their Allies In The Outer Rim. Etc. TLCis demonstrably lacking “downtime” as a movie - think Luke, Hanand Leia chatting in the base on Hoth (“laugh it up, furball,”)the briefing in Episode 4 laying out the Death Star attack, etc.Fiction writing calls it pacing, and scriptwriting calls this “storybeats;” you need the right tempo of fast and slow to properly pacea movie. TLJ never slows down long enough to fucking explainitself, compared to the earlier movies - and the OT didn’t domuch of that to begin with! But it did more than enough to ground theentire story in a larger framework of what the situation was, andwhy the character’s actions mattered. We don’t get that in TLJ.Even the fucking opening scroll narration is inferior in termsof information density. It’s almost like there isn’t a plotworth a damn, just whatever horseshit excuse Rian Johnson squeezesout of his anus next, and if the movie stops cramming glossy CGI andaction figure product placement down your throat for five fuckingseconds, you’ll probably catch on.

Thekorn kernel atop this turd sundae was the ending - with the entirefucking Resistance reduced to maybe a dozen or so personnel - andnone of the command staff, save Leia - on board the MillenniumFalcon, which is only a light freighter, capacity-wise. The “outerrim allies” never show, so this is the entirety of the Resistanceforces. They have no combat fleet, no combat personnel, nobases, no resources, no guns, no ammo, no snub fighters, nothing buta single light freighter and their own limp dicks.

Butthe end of the movie shows them flying around handing out secretResistance rings to force-sensitive kids, as if cereal-box decoderrings are enough to overthrow a vast evil galactic empire. Your AR-15can’t stop a government with tanks and fighter planes, but RianJohnson expects us to believe that the ability to levitate rocks andplace intergalactic Skype calls without paying ComStar can overthrowSpace Nazis.

RianJohnson couldn’t write his way out of a Naruto fan forum.

THIS MOVIE IS AMORALLY REPREHENSIBLE SHITPILE THAT NORMALIZES LIES ABOUT ABUSIVEBEHAVIOR BY MALES TOWARDS FEMALES IN ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS

That’sright. I said it.

Thismovie is actively harmful and insulting to women and girls.

Theblatant misandry is bad enough, but the messages it teaches girls areeven worse, the chief one being the normalization of Kylo Ren,the mass-murderer and fratricide “bad boy,” as someone who’s“good, deep down,” If Only The Right Woman Could Cure Him. Thisis a misguided fantasy that dates back to Wuthering Heights, and wasrecently resurrected by Twilight, the fantasy of “saving” a manwho’s violent, misogynistic and cruel. Fantasies aren’t realistic bydefinition, and they all feature in fiction because they’ve an appealto a certain audience - what makes them good or bad is the damagethey do to readers in real life who don’t discern the differencebetween fiction and reality until their misunderstanding leads theminto serious harm. The classic “beauty and the beast” theme of“taming” a  “bad boy” stands chief among the offenders inthis category - but don’t ask me, just sample what countless others have written on the topic. Rey going from angry, grief-stricken accusations ofKylo the Fratricide to longing for his lightsaber after three briefskype calls, a look at his Rock Hard Abs and touching his hand once?It’s textbook Beauty And The Beast bullshit, and apoorly-written example, at that.

Thisis in addition to Rian’s explicit view that - as elucidated byHoldo’s own actress - a venomous, sneering bully is what aStrong Female Leader looks like; reinforcedby how the plot bends over backwards to portray Holdo as a hero. Inretrospect, the liberties taken to put Leia into a coma for most ofthe movie was probably done because Carrie Fisher just couldn’t actthe role of a bullying bitch, and that’s the character Rian Johnsonwanted to showcase as a feminist icon. Again, quoting Holdo’sactress, “[Rian is] saying something that’s been atrue challenge in feminism. Are we going to lead and be who we are aswomen in our femininity? Or are we going to dress up in a boy’sclothes to do the boy’s job?” The message here isn’t that girlscan be hot-shot fighter pilots or gunslinging heroes too - it’s thatmales are toxic, testosterone-driven fools and Real Women are “womenin their femininity.” Not “youcan be anything you want to be” but “feminimity is good andmasculinity is smelly dumb mansplaining scum.” Thisis fucked in the head, andI challenge anyone- especiallythose who recommended I watch this movie - to deny the charge Ijust leveled.

Andfinally, there’s the actions of Rian Johnson himself, the misandristfuckhead who wrote this pile of shit. He was building off the workand script of JJ Abrams, including all the character development that went into it - and now we can see what he decided to do with it.Rian didn’t just fail to make a movie - he actively threw away anopportunity to write a script with realprogressivesensibilities, substituted cheap “subversions” instead, and thenjerked off on Twitter about how fucking woke and progressive he is toget all the fawning accolades anyways.

RIAN JOHNSONPISSED AWAY THE MUCH BETTER STORY SET UP BY JJ ABRAMS IN THE FORCEAWAKENS, AND STILL HAS THE FUCKING GALL TO ACT LIKE HE DIDN’T

I’vebeen told - in various articles and in person - that TLJ achievesbrilliant subversion of expectations and fights against tired oldtropes that reinforce social status norms by bucking the Chosen Onewith Significant Bloodlines thing, most notably with Rey’s parentagerevealed to be of no consequence and Kylo’s focus on “killing thepast” and rejecting moral binaries to forge his own path.

So,on that note, let’s talk about Finn.

Finnwas a brilliant character in concept, the kind I often try to write -a common man, a faceless member of the rank-and-file who finds thecourage to step out of line, think for himself, and eventuallybecomes a hero in his own right. The opening of TFA, with the bloodyhandprint on Finn’s helmet serving to identify him and give a “faceto the faceless,” was a brilliant bit of visual storytelling, andFinn himself has a difficult and dangerous journey as a character.He’s limited in his abilities - he can’t pilot a ship, for instance -and for the longest time his only desire is to run as far away fromthe First Order as he possibly can, to live his own life in peace. Bythe end of TFA, he’s grievously wounded fighting an opponent he knowsdamn well outmatches him, all to defend the life of his new - andonly - friend, Rey. Goinginto TLJ, Finn is poised both as Rey’s most probable love interestand as a walkingrefutation of the Chosen Heroes trope; having gone from randomfaceless goon to the man who was responsible for destroying the DeathST- I mean Starkiller Base. Heknew the way into and out ofsaid base because he used to be on the sanitation detail, aquirk that makes perfect sense andemphasizes how the “little people” in inglamorousjobs often know cruciallittle details like that (like the back door the smokers use.)

Andwhat did Rian Johnson do with this setup?

Finnwakes up and is immediately used for comic relief, smacking his headon the medical scanner, then staggering around in a bacta suitleaking fluid everywhere. Thenhe tries to hare off after Rey, only to get tazed for trying to steala vehicle. Then he’squickly shuffled off to the side with Rose while Rey is suddenly, andwith very poor setup and justification, set up with Kylo and hisneon-white abs as her love interest.

Is now a goodtime to remind you that Finn is black? Yes,the black man gets 1. played for comic relief, 2. don’t tazeme bro, 3. shuffled offscreen while Rey is set up with a white boy toavoid any possibility of an interracial romance. Andall that’s in additiontoFinn’s noble sacrifice being portrayed as bad and wrong, while MightyWhitey Kami-Kaze Holdo is made out as a huge hero for the exactsame act.

Comparewhat Rian Johnson did with what he couldhave done, and thentry to tell me thismovie had any redeemingthemes, arcs, or execution. I fucking dareyou.

AVALON HAS FUCKINGFALLEN

TheLast Jedi is a towering monument to the rot at the heart of ourartistic society. The Force Awakens was a shameless regurgitationdesigned by a soulless corporation to bilk our nostalgic childhoodmemories for every penny we were worth, but at least it had acompetent writer/director at the helm that had some pride in hiswork. By contrast, The Last Jedi had that same greedy, scum-suckingcorporate machine at the helm and a writer-director thatepitomizes the creature that now infests Hollywood:  an arrogant, self-congratulatory prick concerned onlywith vigorously stroking off his fellow wealthy cultural elites, sothey may take smug satisfaction in their moral superiority over theproles. Therecent spate ofself-described “male feminists” who’vebeen revealed to use their professed politics as cover to prey onwomen illustrate the forces at work here - if one utters theApproved Doctrine, everything else can be overlooked and forgiven.Portray Women as Good, Men as Bad and with a few cheap shots atCapitalism in the middle, and you can get away with not writing aplot at all, lazy and poorly-storyboarded CGI scenes that pushmerchandise, and even reducing a black man to comedic relief. This iswhat our corporate-run entertainment industry now rewards - to thetune of tens of millions of dollars - and what countlessleft-wing culture-war publications vigorously and viciously defendwith endless column inches of simpering praise and even asinineconspiracy theories about the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy “gaming”Rotten Tomatoes user review scores to cover up how much audienceshated this fucking trash.

Asa writer, I happen to believe that Art means something. It matters.It nourishes the soul and teaches us lessons about why to liveour lives, not just how. Mankind has been telling stories forthousands of years before anyone figured out how to write them down,much less make a profit off them. As a species we are wired to thinknarratively, which is why stories have power - never a righteouskingdom nor a vile dictatorship has existed that didn’t invest greateffort in fashioning myths and legends to justify and strengthen itslegitimacy with the people. Stories can help, and they can even harm.

Storiesare serious fucking business. And Rian Johnson’s betrayal anddesecration of his art and craft is emblematic of what the very, verybig, wealthy and powerful entertainment business thinks isacceptable. The business of multimillionare serial rapists that arealso major political donors, the business of complicit yes-men actorsthat routinely use their fame, wealth, and cultural influence to tipthe scales of our national political debate - that business.

Ifyou’re like me; if you dream of telling stories that matter,stories that change peoples lives and give them hope as other’sstories have done for you - prepare for dark times ahead. It’s clearnow that Avalon has fallen; that the existing establishment is toothoroughly corrupted to serve society any useful purpose. We’ll haveto use the internet, vanity presses and small websites - as long asAmazon, Google, and the other West-coast headquartered monopoliesallow us them, that is - and do the best we can. Whatever Hollywoodin particular and the entertainment industry in general is puttingout anymore, it sure as hell isn’t art, in any sense ofthe word you might imagine. The real artists will have to starve,scrape, beg, and struggle - but what they make will be worthwatching, instead of an affront to common sense and common decency.Call them Rebels, or perhaps the Resistance - just don’t callthem surprising, because I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO.

[nerdanel01]

For DWC! Will you do dad Solas? Please do dad Solas! If not, then Solavellan is great! Ecstasiate: to go into an ecstasy; to cause to become ecstatic

Thank you for the prompt! Sorry this took so long! I saw the prompt in my inbox and got SO EXCITED, but I have no children of my own (yet) nor any young children in my family and I fairly quickly realized how little I knew about how kids behave, etc. Was also terrified to accidentally write something that was horrible parenting as I know nothing about that…. but hopefully this is not too far off.

for @dadrunkwriting 

The Pups of Fen’HarelSolas/F!Lavellan, Papa Solas, Post-post-Trespasser

The pace of his steady breathing was like a single strand of bright, white light: a rope in the darkness. He held it gently, followed it deeper into mindfulness, grounded by the rhythm of his lungs, expanding and contracting, and the beat of his heart.

(The beat of three hearts, he reminded himself; despite his discipline, the years he had spent in meditation and contemplation, he could not stifle the grin that lifted the corners of his mouth at that thought. A gentle breeze tickled him, but he pushed the sensation away, out of mind, clearing the way for—)

“Papae? Papae? Father!”

Solas opened his eyes, turned his head to the insistent voice behind him. For a boy of only ten years, Nehnis had such presence, always commanding the attention of those around him. Thanduwen said this was typical in first-born children, but it never failed to astound him (all the more when it sometimes wearied him): even among strangers the child was so confident in his charm and wit, wielding both with far more precision than Solas would have thought possible.

(When he was older—and here Solas had to fight back another smile, both out of pride and surrender—when he reached his adolescence, Nehnis would be just like Solas himself had been: cocky and hot-blooded, chasing romance and adrenaline. It was a future he looked towards with curiosity and amusement—and no small measure of dread.)

“What is it, Nehnis?” he asked, unfolding his hands from where they had been cupped together in front of his navel, bringing his palms to rest on his knees.

“The woods here are very lovely, aren’t they, Papae?”

Solas raised an eyebrow at his son, the smile still lingering about his lips. “They are indeed, my son. Now focus on your breathing.”

Solas closed his eyes again, trying to submerge himself back into that serene place, counting his breaths, drawing them out—

Beside him, Nehnis gave an exaggerated sigh. “But don’t you hear all the birds, Papae? Do you think there are any hawks here? Or ravens, like in Mamae’s stories?”

“Hush, Nehnis!” a small voice said. “Papae is meditating! You are bothering him!”

Solas grinned again, both at the chastisement his younger son gave to his elder, and at the raspberry that Nehnis blew in response. He cracked open his eyes and peered back at his sons.

Nehnis had abandoned his meditative stance, and was lying splayed on the ground beside him, face turned up towards the canopy of trees above them. Past him, he could see his youngest son, Eolas, with a scowl still lingering on his features. He looked absurd: his tiny child-like features, pinched, set in an expression far too serious for his age.

Nehnis and Eolas: like night and day. Where Nehnis was bold and adventurous, Eolas was cautious, measured; easily the more well-behaved of the two of them, until he got a question in his head he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around.

He loved them both almost more than he could bear; and even now, with Nehnis misbehaving, he felt his love for them swelling in his chest as if it was threatening to escape from him, overwhelm him. It was entirely uncalled for. Solas tried (often, failed) to bring his sons to meditate with him every morning, and they were no more or less precious and precocious on this particular day than on any other. But it had been the same way when their mother was pregnant with Eolas. Now, as she entered the last few months of her third pregnancy, he felt that same sentimentality returning to him.

The baby would change everything. He knew this. And most of that change, he knew, would be good. But some of it would be difficult—mostly, he suspected, for his sons, who (inevitably) he would be able to spend less time with, lavish less attention upon, once the third child came into their family.

It was making him soft; lenient, when he should have insisted Nehnis finish the meditation, even if he only sat in silence, contemplating the birds and (maybe, if Solas guided him) paying some measure of attention to his breathing.

“Nehnis,” Solas said, his voice full of practiced patience. “Would you like to go look for birds?”

Immediately Nehnis sat up, planting his hands on the ground and leaning towards his father, giving him his most charming face: full of unbridled excitement. “Oh, Papae, can I?”

“Yes. But take your brother with you.”

Nehnis gave another exaggerated sigh, before acquiescing. “Fine. Come on, Eolas.”

Eolas was still sitting in his meditative stance, his back perfectly straight, his knees folded beneath him. He gave his father one of those looks: as though he had betrayed him by the suggestion that he should go play with his older brother.

Their mother kept hoping that as time went on, they would become closer. She still cherished the close bond she shared with her own brother. But five years, at that age, was a long time. Occasionally, Solas regretted waiting so long to have their second child; he wished he had given Nehnis a sibling closer in age. But when Nehnis had been young they had been so stunned by him, enraptured by him, and Solas had been reluctant to bring another child into their lives. He knew it was silly, now, but at the time he had loved his first born so dearly he had been frightened he would not be able to love their second with the same depth.

(He had been staggeringly, stupendously wrong; but it certainly wasn’t the first time that had happened.)

“Go on,” Solas said, gently. “I will find you in a little while.” Then, as Eolas stood up in a huff to follow his brother, “Wait!”

Eolas turned back, Solas beckoned him closer until the small child was standing beside him. Solas placed his hand on the back of his son’s neck, gently guided his head closer and kissed him gently on his brow.

“Ar lath ma, da’vun,” Solas said, quietly.

“Eolas! Come on!” came the impatient cry of his brother behind him in the woods.

Solas shook his head. Then he looked up into Eolas’ face. “Be careful,” he said, sternly. “Look after your brother.”

“I will,” Eolas said, dutifully. There wasn’t a chance in hell that Nehnis would listen to him, but if Eolas thought he was being sent along to supervise, he’d participate more willingly in the bird-watching (or stone collecting, or whatever fancy that took Nehnis at the time).

Solas listened to their young voices fade into the distance until even his perceptive hearing could make out their voices. Then, sighing gently and without opening his eyes, “You can come out, now, Vigilance.”

Without the slightest hesitation, the spirit rose from the bush in which it had been concealing itself. Vigilance shimmered blue in the early morning air; it was hard to say if the spirit was disappointed, or pleased at being discovered. As if the sudden appearance were nothing, he said in a deferential tone, “On dheam, ha’hren.”

The spirit had followed them across the continent for the past few months, appearing not long after they had left their seasonal stay with Clan Lavellan. All of the spirits, of course, knew of Fen’Harel, and his Lady who had thwarted him, but few had become quite so attached to his offspring as Vigilance.

(Nehnis, once, had escaped Vigilance’s attention and paraded off into the woods without his parents knowing. The boy was found quickly, but Vigilance had been so surprised and ashamed that he’d lost track of him that he’d taken it upon himself to shadow Nehnis almost perpetually, as if daring the boy to escape his watchful gaze again. His wife was still not completely convinced that having a spirit of Vigilance mind the children was the best idea, but when they had stayed with Clan Lavellan, Nehnis and Eolas had much more freedom: with a whole Clan to watch them, they were permitted more independence. Now that their family had begun their seasonal sojourn on their own, even she had to admit that it was comforting to have someone else around to mind the children, even if they were a noncorporeal entity.)

“Will you keep an eye on them?” Solas asked Vigilance, his eyes still closed as he tried to sink back into mindfulness.

“Sathem lasa halani, ha’hren. You know how I adore your little puplings,” Vigilance responded. He could feel the energy of the spirit pass him, following the direction in which his sons had run off. “No harm will come to the litter of Fen’Harel on my watch, many though the pups may be… their number increasing with each season…”

“Vigilance,” Solas said in a sharp tone.

“San, ha’hren. I guard over the puplings until ha’hren has finished his morning exercises. I will not permit them to wander far.”

Ar lath ma, da’vun. | I love you, little sun. On dheam, ha’hren. | Good morning, ha’hren.Sathem lasa halani, ha’hren. |  Pleased to help, ha’hren.