#it's not its full of life and love and it's not bleak and horrific

[rise-my-angel]

hii mimi!! how are you?? how is everything? also!! what did you think of the most recent ep of tlou?? i love hearing your thoughts about shows!! ☺️☺️

I actually really love the small pockets of a somewhat normal life. First two episodes had what we know as a normal life but drenched in a looming dread of whats to be lossed. But then we get two main peeks of what is now. Under cut cus i talk so goddamn much:

Bill and Frank found harmony in their isolation and shows that the world is healing on its own already. Their lives and end had nothing to do with the world around them.

And I actually really liked Ellie at FEDRA. We barely know them, and have only seen one officer who even despite what he did l, wasn't just a bad guy. And I like Ellie's conversation with at the school. That these people are just like the fireflies. They believe they have the answer as to how to keep things together and their sacrifices are necessary. His talk with Ellie wasn't full of propaganda or manipulation. Just a man who thinks he's doing right by the world and wants to guide others. They do bad things, but so do the rebel groups and neither of them are totally in the right or wrong.

I do love how they didn't feel tempted to go for horror or shock snd show Riley's inevitable. Just like not showing Bill and Frank even just together. We know the ending for her because Ellie's in Marlenes hold not Riley. Its more tragic that we see her whole and never again.

I also, like episode 3 love how it shows that life still can be normal. That behind the walls or in them, people still find love and live a life that feels like before. The fact that so much of them was just pure goofiness in the mall was perfect. We saw normal can exist in Bill and Frank, that you can find it in Tommy and Maria, and now we see that Ellie already knows its possible. She grew up to be mostly normal and has experienced what love can feel like and now shes seen it out there, twice.

We never saw that with Joel after he left to go bail Tommy out of jail. Normal didn't exist for him but Ellie has seen and experienced it, she knows its possible and despite everything the person she wants to show that to the most is Joel. Its why she asks what theyre going to do with their lives after they reach the fireflies and not whats going to happen there. She knows what love feels like and now she wants Joel to remember how that feels.

Also, I love our two awkward as fuck little idiot lesbians. Two complete morons who perfectly capture "how romantic does this shit need to get before you dingbags are on the same level". On the carousel would have been picture perfect but they just don't know and they move on. I also love how Ellie also merciless bullies Riley, like she does Joel. Her love language is making fun of you and its the funniest thing.

Interesting I saw people say Ellies post bite reaction made them think Joels looked like that. But I don't think so. Ellie wasn't losing just Riley she was losing herself too. She KNEW (👀) she was at her end. Ellie reacted with upset and anger that finally spilt into tears when she accepted their fates. Joel's anger festered and grew. Spurred on by the people they surrounded eachother with who insisted they were indeed not good people.

I think Joel was numb for a while. So devastated his own soul had nothing left to give until other people ensured he could fill it with anger. Ellie's anger was instant and not really anger but helplessness. Its why her meeting Joel so soon after this is important.

She didn't have a chance to feel numb. She met Joel before that could kick in, and she recognizes someone who could be her. They're alike and I think Ellie picked up on it fast, and by reaching out to someone she felt could be her if she let herself forget the good she has seen and felt.

Its important they met so soon after, because while part died with Riley, her soul reached out to Joel before it could die too. They're the only people who could make that emptiness feel whole again for one another.

Also. Ellie is actually me excitedly asking if she was getting tacos.

[michellesargentinianlitblog]

10 interesting novels

The danger of smoking in bed by Mariana Enriquez

“The Dangers of Smoking in Bed" is a spine-chilling collection of modern gothic short stories. These tales focus around ghosts and hauntings, cults and witches, curses and cursed places.”

Things we lost in fire by Mariana Enriquez 

“The titular story, Things We Lost in the Fire, is a soul-shuddering feminist tale, full of shock and bite. It begins with a young woman who has been horrifically burned; her face is unfixable, lipless and deformed.”

The adventures of china iron by Gabriela Cabezon Camara 

“In Argentine tradition and literature, the gaucho – ranchers and horsemen – were, and still are, romanticized in much the same way that the cowboys are in modern US folklore and stories.”

The Wind That Lays Waste

“With The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada has crafted a story of heroes and villains, with a setting and pace reminiscent of Waiting for Godot, and biting, cutting, rhythmic dialogue that keeps the momentum strong from page one to its almighty conclusion.”

Dead girls by Selva Almada 

“Dead Girls is a piece of “journalistic fiction”, narrated by Almada herself, which chronicles the lives and deaths of three young women who were brutally murdered in 1980s Argentina.”

Tender is the flesh by Agustina Bazterrica 

“Tender is the Flesh is a critique of our present and a warning against a possible future. Though it’s worth emphasizing right now that it is a bleak, gruesome, stomach-churning one from beginning to end.”

A perfect cemetery by Federico Falco 

“The first (and shortest) story opens with a man known as the king of hares, who prowls the forests hunting for prey. It’s a gorgeous painting that’s pictured, but we slowly learn who he is (or was) and the more grounded reality of his current state.”

All my goodbyes by Mariana Dimopulos 

“They will meet and fall in love with, or grow to intimately hate, a menagerie of human people, and either empathize with or at least grow to understand the difficult human need to take flight in whatever way possible.”

Mouthful of birds by Samanta schweblin

“There are many ways to approach creating a book of short stories: you can focus on a theme and explore it from different angles, you can write about a single location – a city or a country, or you can simply write what comes to mind.”

Die, my love by Ariana Harwicz 

“This Argentinian novel set in the French countryside brings to light the darker aspects of motherhood, from the feeling of being trapped by a life you created, to the gradual loss of identity.”

[ryttu3k]

ULTRAKILL is... Such a strange game to me.

Under the bright flashiness, showy violence, and bizarre and surreal humor, it's a genuinely compelling narrative about the cycle of violence, endless war, religious trauma, explores the idea of what it means to live, deconstructs the idea of Hell by pondering why a place of endless torment would be necessary if God is truly as kind and loving as He is depicted as, and depicts Hell itself as a wholly sapient and horrifically sadistic living superorganism who takes immense pleasure from agony and endless suffering.

It also has official buttplug support and its online store sells body pillows of its characters-one of which is the Archangel Gabriel; furthermore, one of the artists was hired because he drew art of the player character (V1) pegging the aforementioned archangel. (Yes, really.)

And that's why ULTRAKILL game fascinates me so: the surreal humor and inherent horniness are intertwined with the much darker, bleaker themes of the story. You cannot separate them without the game losing its identity, and it fascinates me so much.

(As an example... The Lust Circle's bonus level, seemingly based on a dating sim, instead quickly devolves into an existential crisis about existence and death and the meaning of life, only to abruptly shift into Optimistic Nihilism before it ends. Meanwhile, the bonus level in the Violence circle, the darkest part of the game so far where all the humor falls away to reveal an uncompromising and bleak look at the horrors of War and the Cycle of Violence, has a bonus level based on Powerwash Simulator and Viscera Cleanup Detail.)

ULTRAKILL isn't done yet: it's only gone through seven of the Nine circles of Hell, and Violence only released this year. Fraud and Treachery are still to release But if even an incomplete game can get such a reaction out of people, if it can make me rotate it in my head as I try to draw meaning and analysis from every aspect of it, and even write a poem about my thoughts on the end of the game... I think it's something really special.

(All that said, I also want to see Gabriel getting absolutely reamed by V1 in Treachery. Preferably in front of the frozen Satan.)

Anon I'm gonna be square with you I still haven't played it and probably won't because I'm full up on hyperfixations for now, but it does sound fascinating, for anyone else on my dash who may be interested!

[flameswallower]

Normally I don't review magazines and anthologies in which I have a story, due to bias/conflict of interest. However, this is really an excellent anthology, and it's not getting a ton of buzz or anything, so I'm making an exception.

I truly enjoyed every other story in the collection-- there were no losers, nothing I felt was weak in comparison to the surrounding material, nothing that gave me that feeling of "I'm not sure if this isn't very good, or if I just don't understand what the author is going for", nothing that I could recognize as a well-crafted piece of fiction but still struggled to get through or disliked. Moreover, the stories are very harmonious. While each is quite distinct in style, there are overarching similarities of tone and theme, and certain motifs that seem to echo from story to story, that pull them together as a coherent whole.

I enjoyed all the stories, but I still had some standout favorites. I'll quickly go over them here:

Jaime Corbacho's "Honeymoon" is gorgeously written, with prose that’s emotive & full of sensory detail without coming across as purple or baroque. The writing isn’t challenging to read, it doesn’t call a ton of attention to itself, but it’s really well done. Corbacho writes about wild/feral animals in a way that conveys personality and evokes real awe-- she seems to have a clear-eyed love and respect for the natural world, in all its bloodiness and entanglement with human civilization. The real disturbing element here is that civilized world, the worlds of wealth and privilege within it, how the protagonist's family quietly, politely contorts itself to indulge & accommodate its abusive matriarch.

Sofia Samatar's "Contact Light" is on one hand, a pretty straightforward story about what if there was a prison colony on the moon. But it is also a quasi-surreal stream of consciousness character study written in simple, but dense, poetic, and often challenging language. One becomes disoriented along with the protagonist. The lunar setting is used extremely well as both a metaphor for the bleak conditions & ejection/quarantine from society experienced by prisoners in real life, & as a literal speculative fiction conceit. This might be the saddest and most emotionally moving story in the anthology, at least in my opinion.

Elwin Cotman's "The Debauch" is off the rails in all the best ways. This guy is having a total blast writing-- he swings for the fences with maximalist, excitable, intentionally purple prose that hearkens back equally to the Decadents and, like, Poppy Z. Brite. As you might expect, "The Debauch" tells the tale of a bisexual orgy that goes very wrong. Somehow, Cotman makes a gem-encrusted zombie unhinging its jaw to swallow a man’s head whole and the dirty kitchen of a pair of college girls equally hyperreal, grotesque, and emotionally weighted. The story becomes so fantastical, seemingly out of nowhere, in its climax that I can imagine some readers complaining of "randomness" or of not being sure what exactly is supposed to have happened. Personally, I didn't give a fuck! This rocks!! Heavy metal!!!!!! \m/

Sasha Geffen's "Pastiche" is one of those stories that’s simultaneously very dark and very warm/sweet; it’s a tough dual mode to pull off without watering down the darkness or making the sweetness seem sour and insincere, but Geffen sticks the landing. Some great matter-of-fact body horror here, too. & one of my favorite devices— a central premise that’s both an obvious metaphor (for at least one thing; likely for several, pulling at least triple-duty with its three-bodied protagonist) and a literal fact of life within the story that’s explored in its practical, everyday ramifications (from the comical to the horrific).

Meghan Lamb's "Mirror Translation" feels like a close cousin to “The Debauch” in some ways-- both are stories of strangers in strange lands, both have bisexual protagonists whose desire for a member of the same sex drives the plot, both deal prominently with feelings of alienation and ennui--, but where the latter is histrionic & flamboyant, the former is cool and restrained, evoking an atmosphere of loneliness, desperation, & ever-present menace long before anything crazy or weird happens. "Mirror Translation" also follows a more conventional/parseable narrative arc than "The Debauch", which may be a point in its favor or not depending on where you stand. Arguably, it’s “just” a vampire story— in the classic "vampire seduces vulnerable victim" mode of Carmilla-- but aspects of the execution are certainly unique! I like vampire stories, anyway.

Adam Golaski’s “Distant Signals” is…okay, bear with me…it’s a creepypasta, right? Like I’ve read several stories about "lost" or mysterious media on r/ nosleep with effectively the same premise/plot. The thing is, this time it’s extremely well-written & well-paced! Even once you know where this one’s going— & for me, that was pretty early— it’s tense, eerie, unsettling, and totally magnetic. Golaski knows exactly when to go into detail and when to hold back for the maximum shudder effect. This, more than maybe anything else in the collection, made me think “I have GOT to read more work by this guy”. Y’all! What if creepypastas were good!!! Calling Channel Zero fans!

Janalyn Guo's "Night Fragrance" has body horror, creepy flowers and fungi, ambiguous/ambivalent transformation, teen friendship, & the anxieties attendant on growing up with a mild physical disability. It’s very up my alley/in my wheelhouse, in other words. Although it uses some horror tropes, the mood is a lot more elegiac than eerie or disturbing, and I appreciated that, too. As with "Pastiche" there's real sweetness here, although Guo is more focused on the ways strange, threatening people and processes might be unexpectedly sympathetic or benevolent than Geffen, whose story hinges on the opposite phenomenon: an act of immense violence and betrayal by a person one has come to love and trust. The darkness of Geffen's story comes from the shadow cast by this betrayal, by the fact that it may be ameliorated but can never be erased or truly made right again. The darkness in Guo's comes from the sadness and uncertainty in all of life's transitional phases: each choice cuts us off from possible futures, each choice is a leap of faith into a place we cannot know until we arrive there, we will inevitably grow apart from some of our friends & become unable to understand them anymore, and there's no going back.

HEY!

The Mooncalves anthology, which I have a story in, is now available to order in hardback. The hardback is expensive, so I strongly encourage you to buy it if you have a bunch of disposable income. If you don't have a bunch of disposable income, I strongly advise you to wait a bit; there will be a much more affordable ebook edition.

Other authors featured in this anthology include Lisa Tuttle, Steve Rasnic Tem, Glen Hirshberg, Brian Evenson, Sofia Samatar, and Daniel Lavery. All the stories in the anthology are original to the anthology, and I'm really looking forward to reading the ones I didn't write!

[bullworthdrabbles]

Women in Bullworth: Zoe Taylor

TW: discussions of sexual abuse, trauma, CSA, Mr. Burton's ped* bullshit, self-harm, and other not-great stuff.

This one is super long and full of hard stuff to talk about don't read if you are not in the right headspace.

Oh boy, this one is going to be one of the hardest to write for me because I love Zoe and I know so many who love her as well. Then, there’s also a lot of triggering content in her story that needs to be discussed but hits me very close to my chest. This will likely be very long and particularly scathing due to just how frustrating Zoe’s story (or lack thereof) is to me. As a victim of CSA, this particular post is going to be very hard for me to discuss and will take me a long time to fully articulate. I’m sorry for how long it has taken me to write this, but I needed many breaks and to rant to several friends in order not to type all of this in all caps and through various curses.

Before I really discuss the tropes and stereotypes like I usually do I need to discuss the fact that as I write this series I’m seeing the unfortunate pattern arise of Rockstar sloppily using sexual violence against women in their stories without doing their research, taking the time to consider the consequence that happening would have in someone’s life, and just what message they are sending with how they tackle these kinds of stories. Sexual abuse and teachers using their power to take advantage of teens and minors is an unfortunate reality that does happen in high schools. I can understand the idea of wanting to discuss this issue when your game is set in high school where these things can happen, but this type of story is horrific and to do it justice requires a sensitivity Rockstar simply didn’t deliver.

The bully wiki and the game itself states that Zoe was expelled from the school for reporting Mr. Burton's sexual harassment and based on the previous missions involving this disgusting man we know Zoe isn’t the only victim. Does he ever get held accountable? Does he face any sort of punishment despite Jimmy quite literally being a witness and having evidence thumbtacked to his wall of Mr. Burton's disgusting behavior that he made Jimmy also take part in? No, not really, he only gets “fired” at the end of the game, and by “fired” I mean you still see him walking around the school like nothing happened, still saying the same shit and having access to underage girls. If it was just the lack of accountability I could interpret this as Rockstar taking a very bleak but realistic look at the situation. I could maybe think they were trying to show the disgusting truth that victims are almost never believed even with a mountain of evidence stacked against the perpetrator. They could be showing that it takes so much traumatizing bullshit just to try to get justice only for nothing to happen.

However, they messed up this story almost comically which makes me think it was just a cheap way to get her out of the school because they clearly didn't think about how abuse and a violation of someone’s bodily autonomy would impact an actual victim. I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t simply flip a portapotty onto the person who harassed and violated my bodily autonomy. I'm not a generally violent person, but I do think about harming my abuser in incredibly violent ways because of how much bullshit he has put me through. Rockstar never has her dealing with the side-effects and real mental toll this kind of abuse does to a person unless it’s time to make it a funny mission. Turning real horrific trauma into nothing more than a motive for a prank. Then there’s the dialogue of her talking about liking older guys, which I want desperately to believe is Rockstar trying to insinuate that Zoe is coping with her trauma via hypersexuality. Hypersexuality is a common unhealthy coping mechanism for survivors of sexual trauma, they purposely seek out sexual encounters as a way of reclaiming power and bodily autonomy sexually. It can also be seen as self-harm behavior if the survivor is having lots of purposely unprotected sex. But Rockstar clearly didn’t do enough research into sexual trauma responses, much less the basic realities of surviving sexual trauma, so I highly doubt that they even considered this when writing these lines.

Unfortunately, Rockstar was just trying to make her a “not like other girls” stereotype, I bet you thought I wasn’t going to bring it up but sadly I am. Zoe is one of the better-written female characters, but that isn’t really saying much when all the other girls are just cardboard cheap conflict and plot devices. We actually know a lot more about her background than we do the other girls, does it really change that she doesn’t serve much of a plot-significant role? Nope. Does this change the fact that Rockstar once again used sexual trauma as a cheap mission fodder? Nope? Is she allowed to be more than just a health pack, quest giver, and reward? If you think her being the “girl the protagonist gets with at the end” counts maybe, but to me, nope.

This was hard for me to say as it was a hard pill for me to swallow, but literally, all of her traits that separate her from the other girls are just so they could make her a “Tom-boy” and “not like other girls” stereotype. They don’t make her a fully formed unique person where her past, experiences, and traumas actually impact who she is as a person. No, they needed a final love interest for their protagonist so they just took his character traits and story and made some similar dialogue as the dialogue for Gary ( we can all admit there was something going on before the betrayal between those two) then slapped it onto another ginger, now with boobs. The funny thing is she doesn’t even seem that interested with Jimmy until the very end, their whole relationship seems forced and rushed so Rockstar fucked even that up. They clearly had a lot of ideas they wanted to touch on but because of their own unwillingness to take the time to flesh her out instead, we got...well everything I said before.

I’ve said it a thousand times and I will say it again, a lot of these problems could have been avoided. Rockstar could have taken their female characters seriously, could have written them well if that was one of their focuses, but it wasn’t. I love this game and I love a lot of these characters but I feel that even if this game provided me years' worth of comfort and entertainment, it should still be called out for its issues and how it mishandles very serious and sensitive issues. I hope this series and my thoughts on these characters made you think about your own writing and works you see making similar mistakes. I can tell that none of these errors came from a place of malice, but deep ignorance and works that perpetuate said ignorance can send harmful messages to people. I hope by shedding light on this I may make you re-examine the messages you see surrounding female characters in media and their stereotypes. Thank you for reading my incredibly long rants.

[betweentheracks]

Heyo! Not to be too nosy here but you mentioned you're in bad health and recovering, and I just wondered what happened? Also how would it impact your career since, from how you've made it all seem thus far, it's a highly active and demanding job?

Hope you take care and get well! You appear quite strong and not like you'd take whatever has happened just lying down, so here's to you!! 🙏💓

No sweat and no worries here, I dont find this particularly invasive. If anything, I'm flattered you care to ask after me lol. 😁

A few weeks back I met a friend I hadn't seen in some time for lunch. This was against my better sense of caution that I've held firmly to throughout the pandemic, but I would feel regretful and dismissive if I didnt agree to see her while I had the chance. I should've listened my gut and stayed safely at work because this "friend" failed to mention she had tested positive (she knew already by the time of our lunch date, she has since admitted) and had figured since she had no symptoms there was no harm in being in public.

FF only a few days later and I was feeling a little unwell but had put it off as an effect of the winter blast that had just hit where I live. I'd spent half a day out in the cold and snow for a photoshoot only the day before and thought it was probably due to that since I'm susceptible to weather influenced head colds and bronchitis. Fortunately, my job mandates a rigid COVID-19 screening twice a week due to our high profile clientele and as an assurance of health and safety for us all. Mine read back with a positive and with the way I had been feeling I was immediately sent home and the company closed its doors while the building was sterilized and our clients notified.

Thankfully I managed not to infect anyone I work with nor my son. Regrettably, I did infect my best friend since we're horrifically incapable of maintaining personal space and have weak shit immune systems. We both agree it is a wonder we made it this far into plague times without it catching us.

So I went and got looked over and sent on my way with my prescription of potent anti-virals and steroids. I was well prepared to abide the quarantine guidelines and had sent my son to my mother's home for the duration so that he was out of the danger zone. It was fine, I was kinda cool and keen on getting a few days to myself to rest up and all that jazz. But it wasn't meant to last and I found trouble in the form of being unable to remain conscious much at all and would pass out constantly. After a few times of this I gave my brother (he's a doctor and vaccinated) a ring and told him that my fatigue was no joke dude and needed him to come give me a better once over than the one I'd gotten before bc I was sure I was not meant to feel this badly. He found me unconscious in the shower that night, my head battered from crashing to the basin.

After ensuring I wasn't concussed and jokes on what a hard head I have to take such a beating and show no signs of registering it beyond bruising (a joke between us due to him having once accidentally put a golf club into my forehead and fracturing my skull but that's a different story) he told me to call him regularly so that he can review how I feel and the progression of my symptoms and left. By the morning I had already had two more instances of sudden fatigue and collapsing in on myself. I had been posting on my main blog here about how I was doing and due to this I caught the concern of @peekbackstage and upon their suggestion to have my O2 levels tested it was revealed that I was having issues with my blood not circulating oxygen as it should and nearing hypoxia.

Here's the rub. I have a heart condition that is already very dangerous and bleak which limits my heart's capability of delivering blood through my body as it should. Cardiomyopathy or, as it seems better known, congestive heart failure. I've had surgery for it and it has been a while since it caused me any real issues as long as I stick to my routine of care and manage my health, but when COVID-19 infiltrated my body it immediately snagged upon this weak heart of mine and sank its fangs in.

Within a day of being admitted to the hospital I had a grand mal seizure due to the constant fluctuations of oxygen in my blood and the way my body was working double time to supplement for it. And only 2 days after that and when my nervous system had finally quieted down, I went into full cardiac arrest with a heart attack at my young age.

My next weeks were spent connected to machines doing more for me than my own body could. I developed pneumonia in my lungs, acute though it was it was still another complication that my wrecked body had to overcome as it made my already ragged breathing even worse. I was steadily shedding muscle tone and definition due to a lack of mobility and the fact that my body felt like a deadweight I could hardly take command of, and generally very weakened. My heart, the horrible thing, was inflamed and trying too hard by beating too fast, too hard.

FF some more and I was doing fairly well and treatments were showing some improvement. My heart was still being an ugly and gnarled beast in my chest and throwing weird spikes on the monitor that raised alarms. The pneumonia was retreating and I had no further seizures. It was the dawning light of my first signs that I was recovering!

It took a while more and so fucking many tests day in and day out for me get cleared for release. I tested negative for COVID-19 and was ashamed that I actually forgot that that was why I was even in the hospital to begin with, given all that happened. I have to undergo physical therapy and counseling; PT for heart happy exercises as well as to manage to my depleted muscles, counseling bc I was rocked mentally from all the almost dying and the depressive haze of being holed up in the hospital and surrounded by people who, like me, came in with COVID-19 but unlike me did not come out of it.

I'm home now. I had to have a pacemaker implanted and must stay vigilant for any showing that my heart is not performing as it should. I still have some severe inflammation and chest restriction in my airways as well as my blood vessels but nothing too daunting. I also have a full battalion of prescriptions, most for my heart, and a nebulizer to ease any breathing issues. The worst is honestly that I still am very weak and have severely limited reserves of energy.

My job is required to make me take 12 weeks of leave for rest and recuperation. This is very upsetting since I had been requested by name to be an assistant stylist at the Grammys this year which is truly a dream (especially with BTS in the mix 😩😩) and also bc I'm just a workaholic by nature and love my job. When I return I am expected to learn how to properly delegate tasks that do not directly require me to handle and slow down the pacing of my projects. My boss terminated a contract with a client that was nearing the scheduled end of our agreement and was also incredibly problematic to help lighten my workload. It's imperative that I reign in my stress levels or my heart will not last until the next surgery I'll need, so I'm gritting my teeth and letting my job be picked apart to reduce my responsibilities.

My post awaits my return but I will not be returning to full activity for a while after, which means no rifling through the racks for hours alongside the archivists in search of the perfect piece. I'll be welcome to meet with my clients and oversee the glam teams, will still be the command tower for final verdicts on which styles to use. But I will not be running around showrooms nor personally handling matters any competent trainee could be tasked with like I've always done. I will no longer be able to fly out anywhere for destination shoots or fashion shows.

If, after my next surgery, things are better and my heart stable to the point that they are hopeful of things will be reevaluated. While it is difficult beyond measure for me to relinquish the reigns of my career and be restricted in what I can do now, I am very thankful to be alive and upright when that wasn't a certainty just a little while ago. This is such a humbling experience to have survived when my stats kept dropping every day. I've been told to expect that I will never make a full 100% recovery and to expect to stall out around the 70%-90% range, with 70% being the most realistic.

My best friend (the one I gave the plague to) will be moving in with me so that I am never on my own if things go tits up and to assist in wrangling a toddler since I am currently without the energy to do so as my child is, sincerely, a crazy gremlin spawn with limitless battery life. Slowly, my life will regain some normalcy 💖

[superfanficnatural]

You Say

Pairing: Dean Winchester x Female!Reader

Summary: Based on the song, You Say by Lauren Daigle. 

A/N: This is one of my few attempts at angst, as always, I hope you enjoy!

Warnings: Angst.

Word Count: 1,308

Gif is not mine

Ever since he left, he took a piece of you and it felt like you were never going to get it back. The funny thing about the heart is that once it’s opened, it’s damn near impossible to close it once again. Unless, something so horrific had happened to the point where it forces itself closed to protect its life force. That’s what it felt like when he had left. Your heart, it had stopped beating for a second, then a minute, then an hour. Everything in your life had been disrupted, including the beating of your heart. What had once pumped you full of life, had eventually rotted and turned to a withering shrivel. 

I keep fighting voices in my mind that say I’m not enough

He had left with no warning, no note. You had found out by simply waking up, a strong feeling of iron settling over your chest telling you that something was wrong. His room was empty, cleared out of his belongings when you had opened the door. You remember laying atop his bed, desperately attempting to feel his warm embrace one last time. Only to find the bed cold, his warmth nowhere to be found. 

Every single lie that tells me I will never measure up

The crushing feeling of not being enough was the only thing you had felt in that moment, what you had felt your entire life until you had met Dean. You had an inkling of where he had gone, but your heart, as withered as it was, couldn’t take the confirmation of those thoughts. You remember the first few days, waking up to what used to be a Bunker full of heart and happiness, turned to a bleak and empty void.  

Remind me once again just who I am, because I need to know

You had stopped hunting, stopped eating, stopped sleeping. Everything that was once normal for you, an impossible task that no matter how hard you tried, was simply unachievable. You had lost yourself to the empty, unable to do anything to pull yourself out from the barren wasteland. The pain was so immense that it eventually became a dull ache, a pain that no longer bothered you, a pain that would never go away. It was as if your body was dissociating with your mind, finding yourself on autopilot sometimes and unable to even use your motor functions at other times. At some points, you questioned whether it was even worth living, what was the point if you couldn’t even make yourself a meal? Everything was falling in around you, the world, your emotions, it felt as if you couldn’t even breathe. Wanting the world to swallow you whole, you succumbed to the desolate. The only thing that you wanted before allowing yourself to become completely lost, was closure. You needed to hear him say the words.

It was mentioned briefly in a conversation before, but you knew where you needed to go. Driving to the address you had burned into your memory after he had left, you parked your car on the side of the road, getting out and hesitantly walking towards the house that had stolen your life from you. The window in the living room was wide open, allowing you to peer inside of the house. A woman, beautiful, much more so than you found yourself, sitting at the dining table with a child, the man sitting across from her threatening to make your crumble to your feet on the cold, hard pavement. The sobs were falling from your lips uncontrollably, the only thing you were able to do was quiet them so they wouldn’t notice. He looked so... happy. More than you had ever seen him when he was with you. 

You say I am loved when I can’t feel a thing

It was all a lie, he had never loved you. You were only the easiest thing he had access to. You were standing there for so long, incapable of tearing your eyes from the scene in front of you that you had even watched them clean the table, the woman and the child ascending the stairs as the man you thought had loved you sat on the couch in the living room. He looked just like he did before he left, handsome as ever, eyes still as green as they were. The thing that brought a fresh wave of tears was how relaxed his face looked, there were no signs of his crinkles around his forehead, no conflict dancing across his eyes. You had tried for years, desperately attempting to wipe that look off of his face, and this woman did it in less than a few months. 

You say I am strong when I think I am weak

Nothing he had ever said was true, only a ruse to keep you under his spell. How could you have been so stupid? Of course he didn’t love you, he was Dean Winchester, the man who deserved all the happiness in the world. 

Gathering up enough strength, you picked yourself up off of the ground and slowly picked up your feet in the direction of the front door. When you raised your hand to knock, you found it shaking, along with your entire body. Am I scared to hear it? Even though I know it’s true, why am I unable to do this?

Your thoughts were interrupted by the front door opening, Dean’s surprised face looking at your fearful one.

“Y-Y/N?” he stuttered, looking around behind you and back inside to make sure that the woman from before didn’t see you.

He ushered you out and closed the door behind him, “What are you doing here?”

You were frozen in place. This was the first time you heard his voice since he had left, let alone be this close to him. Your feelings for him were emerging from their slumber and you found yourself having difficulty choosing what to say.

“You say I am loved when I can’t feel a thing,” you choked out. “You say I am strong when I think I am weak,” his face contorted in an internal struggle. “And You say I am held when I am falling short,” your feelings were beginning to pour out of your heart and you found yourself powerless to stop. “When I don’t belong, oh, You say I am Yours.”

“Y/N-” he started, his face telling you everything you needed. Unfortunately for you, your heart, as weak as it was, was revitalizing and dominating your thoughts and actions.

“Please,” your voice cracked, “just tell me, tell me that I’m yours,” you pleaded.

The confliction written across his features were beginning to dwell your hopes, “I’m sorry, but you’re not. You never were.”

And I believe, oh, I believe

What You say of me

You choked on a silent sob, incapable of even releasing noise, the lump in your throat constricting your air. Dean looked at you with pity, asking you to leave before ‘Lisa’ found out you were there, walking back inside and closing the door behind him. What you had wanted for so long, you had finally gotten, the deciding factor in your fate. After crying out every single droplet of tear you had in your entire body, you picked yourself up off of the porch and walked away, the emptiness inside of you projecting from your eyes. 

Dean had settled in bed, turning the light off and curling into the one who had shared his bed, and what seemed like his heart. His eyes closing as the noise of a loud bang echoed throughout the neighborhood. Grave silence following afterward until the flashing of blue and red lights had illuminated the street. That was when Dean knew, he was responsible, just like he was for Sam.

Forevers Tag List: @magssteenkamp​ @shadowsinger11​ @donnaintx​ @flamencodiva​ @impala-1979​ @talesmaniac89​

Dean/Jensen Forevers Tag List: @akshi8278​ @jensengirl83​ @lyarr24​

Female Reader Tag List: @punof-agun​ @emoryhemsworth​

[grigori77]

2020 in Movies - My Top 30 Fave Movies (Part 1)

30.  BODY CAM – in the face of the ongoing pandemic, viral outbreak cinema has become worryingly prescient of late, but as COVID led to civil unrest in some quarters there were a couple of 2020 films that REALLY seemed to put their finger on the pulse of another particularly shitty zeitgeist.  Admittedly this first one highlights a problem that’s been around for a while now, but it came along at just the right time to gain particularly strong resonance, filtering its message into the most reliable form of allegorical social commentary – horror.  The vengeful ghost trope has become pretty familiar since the Millennium, but by marrying it with the corrupt cop thriller veteran horror screenwriter Nicholas McCarthy (The Pact) has given it a nice fresh spin, and the end result is a real winner.  Mary J. Blige plays troubled LAPD cop Renee Lomito-Smith, back on the beat after an extended hiatus following a particularly harrowing incident, just as fellow officers from her own precinct begin to die violent deaths under mysterious circumstances, and the only clues are weird, haunting camera footage that only Renee and her new partner, rookie Danny Holledge (Paper Towns and Death Note’s Nat Wolff), manage to see before it inexplicable wipes itself.  Something supernatural is stalking the City of Angels at night, and it’s got a serious grudge against local cops as the increasingly disturbing investigation slowly brings an act of horrific police brutality to light, until Renee no longer knows who in her department she can trust.  This is one of the most insidious scare-fests I enjoyed this past year, sophomore director Malik Vitthal (Imperial Dreams) weaving an effective atmosphere of pregnant dread and wire-taut suspense while delivering some impressively hair-raising shocks (the stunning minimart sequence is the film’s undeniable highlight), while the ghostly threat is cleverly thought-out and skilfully brought to “life”.  Blige delivers another top-drawer performance, giving Renee a winning combination of wounded fragility and steely resolve that makes for a particularly compelling hero, while Wolff invests Danny with skittish uncertainty and vulnerability in one of his strongest performances to date, and Dexter star David Zayas brings interesting moral complexity to the role of their put-upon superior, Sergeant Kesper.  In these times of heightened social awareness, when the police’s star has become particularly tarnished as unnecessary force, racial profiling and cover-ups have become major hot-button topics, the power and relevance of this particular slice of horror cinema cannot be denied.

29.  BLOOD QUANTUM – 2020 certainly was a great year for horror (even if most of the high profile stuff did get shunted into 2021), and this compellingly fresh take on the zombie outbreak genre was a strong standout with a killer hook.  Canadian writer-director Jeff Barnaby (Rhymes for Young Ghouls) has always clung close to his Native American roots, and he brings strong social relevance to the intriguing early 80s Canadian setting as a really nasty zombie virus wreaks havoc in the Red Crow Indian Reservation and its neighbouring town.  It soon becomes clear, however, that members of the local tribe are immune to the infection, a revelation with far-reaching consequences as the outbreak rages unchecked and society begins to crumble.  Barnaby pulls off some impressive world-building and creates a compellingly grungy post-apocalyptic vibe as the story progresses, while the zombies themselves are a visceral, scuzzy bunch, and there’s plenty of cracking set-pieces and suitably full-blooded kills to keep the gore-hounds happy, while the horror has real intelligence behind it, the script posing interesting questions and delivering some uncomfortable answers.  The characters, meanwhile, are a well-drawn, complex bunch, no black-and-white saviours among them, any one of them capable of some pretty inhuman horrors when the chips are down, and the cast, an interesting mix of seasoned talent and unknowns, all excel in their roles – Michael Greyeyes (Fear the Walking Dead) and Forrest Goodluck (The Revenant) are the closest things the film has to real heroes, the former a fallible everyman as Traylor, the small-town sheriff who’s just trying to do right by his family, the latter unsure of himself as his son, put-upon teenage father-to-be Joseph; Olivia Scriven, meanwhile is tough but vulnerable as his pregnant white girlfriend Charlie, Stonehorse Lone Goeman is a grizzled badass as tough-as-nails tribal elder Gisigu, and Kiowa Gordon (probably best known for playing a werewolf in the Twilight movies) really goes to the dark side as Joseph’s delinquent half-brother Lysol, while there’s another memorably subtle turn from Dead Man’s Gary Farmer as unpredictable loner Moon.  This was definitely one of the year’s darkest films – largely playing the horror straight, it tightens the screws as the situation grows steadily worse, and almost makes a virtue of wallowing in its hopeless tone – but there’s a fatalistic charm to all the bleakness, even in the downbeat yet tentatively hopeful climax, while it’s hard to deny the ruthless efficiency of the violence on display.  This definitely isn’t a horror movie for everyone, but those with a strong stomach and relatively hard heart will find much to enjoy here.  Jeff Barnaby is definitely gonna be one to watch in the future …

28.  THE MIDNIGHT SKY – Netflix’ big release for the festive season is a surprisingly understated and leisurely affair, a science fiction drama of big ideas which nonetheless doesn’t feel the need to shout about it.  The latest feature in the decidedly eclectic directorial career of actor George Clooney, this adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight, the debut novel of up-and-coming author Lily Brooks-Dalton, favours characterisation and emotion over big thrills and flashy sequences, but it’s certainly not lacking in spectacle, delivering a pleasingly ergonomically-designed view of the near future of space exploration that shares some DNA with The Martian but makes things far more sleek and user-friendly in the process.  Aether, a NASA mission to explore K-23, a newly-discovered, potentially habitable moon of Jupiter, is on its return journey, but is experiencing baffling total communications blackouts from Earth.  This is because a catastrophic global event has rendered life on the planet’s surface all but impossible, killing most of the population and driving the few survivors underground.  K-23’s discoverer, professor Augustine Lofthouse (Clooney), is now alone at a small research post in the extreme cold of the Arctic, one of the only zones left that have not yet been fully effected by the cataclysm, refusing to leave his post after having discovered he’s dying from a serious illness, but before he goes he’s determined to contact the crew of Aether so he can warn them of the conditions down on Earth.  Despite the ticking clock of the plot, Clooney has reigned the pace right in, allowing the story to unspool slowly as we’re introduced to the players who calmly unpack their troubles and work over the various individual crises with calm professionalism – that said, there are a few notable moments of sudden, fretful urgency, and these are executed with a palpable sense of chaotic tension that create interesting and exciting punctuation to the film’s usually stately momentum, reminding us that things could go suddenly, catastrophically wrong for these people at any moment.  Clooney delivers a gloriously understated performance that perfectly grounds the film, while there are equally strong, frequently DAMN POWERFUL turns from a uniformly excellent cast, notably Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo as pregnant astronaut Dr. “Sully” Sullivan and her partner, mission Commander Adewole, and a surprisingly subtle, nuanced performance from newcomer Caoilinn Springall as Iris, a young girl mistakenly left behind at the outpost during the hasty evacuation, with whom Lofthouse develops a deeply affecting bond.  The film has been criticised for its slowness, but I think in this age of BIGGER, LOUDER, MORE this is a refreshingly low-key escape from all the noise, and there’s a beautiful trade-off in the script’s palpable intelligence, strong character work and world-building (then again, the adaptation was by Mark L. Smith, who co-wrote The Revenant), while this is a visually stunning film, Clooney and cinematographer Martin Ruhe (Control, The Keeping Room) weaving an evocative visual tapestry that rewards the soul as much as the eye.  Unapologetically smart, engrossingly played and overflowing with raw, emotional power, this is science fiction cinema at its most cerebral, and another top mark for a somewhat overlooked filmmaking talent which deserves to be considered alongside career highs such as Good Night & Good Luck and The Ides of March.

27.  PALM SPRINGS – the summer’s comedy highlight kind of snuck in under the radar, becoming something of an on-demand secret weapon with all the cinemas closed, and it definitely deserves its swiftly growing cult status.  You certainly can’t believe it’s the feature debut of director Max Barbakow, who shows the kind of sharp-witted, steady-handed control of his craft that’s usually the province of far more experienced talents … then again, much of the credit must surely go to seasoned TV comedy writer Andy Siara (Lodge 49), for whom this has been a real labour of love he’s been tending since his film student days.  Certainly all that care, nurture and attention to detail is up there on the screen, the exceptional script singing its irresistible siren song from the start and providing fertile ground for its promising new director to spread his own creative wings.  The premise may be instantly familiar – playing like a latter-day Saturday Night Live take on Groundhog Day (Siara admits it was a major influence), it follows the misadventures of Sarah (How I Met Your Mother’s Cristin Miliota), the black sheep maid of honour at her sweet little sister Tala’s (Riverdale’s Camila Mendes) wedding to seemingly perfect hunk Abe (the Arrowverse’s Superman, Tyler Hoechlin), as she finds herself repeating the same high-stress day over and over again after becoming trapped in a mysterious cosmic time-loop along with slacker misanthrope Nyles (Brooklyn Nine Nine megastar Andy Samberg), who’s been stuck in this same situation for MUCH longer – but in Barbakow and Siara’s hands it feels fresh and intriguing, and goes in some surprising new directions before the well-worn central premise can outstay its welcome. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the cast are all excellent – Miliota is certainly the pounding emotional heart of the film, effortlessly lovable as she flounders against her lot, then learns to accept the unique possibilities it presents, before finally resolving to find a way out, while Samberg has rarely been THIS GOOD, truly endearing in his sardonic apathy as it becomes clear he’s been here for CENTURIES, and they make an enjoyably fiery couple with snipey chemistry to burn; meanwhile there’s top-notch support from Mendes and Hoechlin, The OC’s Peter Gallagher as Sarah and Tala’s straight-laced father, the ever-reliable Dale Dickey, a thoroughly adorable turn from Jena Freidman and, most notably, a full-blooded scene-stealing performance from the mighty J.K. Simmonds as Roy, Nyles’ nemesis, who he inadvertently trapped in the loop before Sarah and is, understandably, none too happy about it. This really is an absolute laugh-riot, today’s more post-modern sense of humour allowing the central pair (and their occasional enemy) to indulge in far more extreme consequence-free craziness than Bill Murray ever got away with back in the day, but like all the best comedies there’s also a strong emotional foundation under the humour, leading us to really care about these people and what happens to them, while the story throws moments of true heartfelt power at us, particularly in the deeply cathartic climax.  Ultimately this was one of the year’s biggest surprises, a solid gold gem that I can’t recommend enough.

26.  THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME – Body Cam’s fellow heavyweight Zeitgeist fondler is a deeply satirical chunk of speculative dystopian sci-fi clearly intended as a cinematic indictment of Trump’s broken America, but it became far more potent and prescient in these … ahem … troubled times.  Adapted by screenwriter Karl Gadjusek (Oblivion, Stranger Things, The King’s Man) from the graphic novel by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini for underrated schlock-action cinema director Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3, Colombiana, the last two Taken films), this Netflix original feature seemed like a fun way to kill a cinema-deprived Saturday night in the middle of the First Lockdown, but ultimately proved to have a lot more substance than expected.  It’s powered by an intriguing premise – in a nearly lawless 2024, the US government is one week away from implementing a nationwide synaptic blocker signal called the API (American Peace Initiative) which will prevent the public from being able to commit any kind of crime – and focuses on a strikingly colourful bunch of outlaw antiheroes with an audacious agenda – prodigious Detroit bank robber Bricke (Édgar Ramiréz) is enlisted by Kevin Cash (Funny Games and Hannibal’s Michael Carmen Pitt), a wayward scion of local crime family the Dumois, and his hacker fiancée Shelby Dupree (Material Girl’s Anna Brewster) to pull off what’s destined to be the last great crime in American history, a daring raid on the first night of the signal to steal over a billion dollars from the Motor City’s “money factory” and then escape across the border into Canada.  From this deceptively simple premise a sprawling action epic was born, carried along by a razor sharp, twisty script and Megaton’s typically hyperbolic, showy auteur directing style and significant skill at crafting thrillingly explosive set-pieces, while the cast consistently deliver quality performances.  Ever since Domino, Ramiréz has long been one of those actors I really love to watch, a gruff, quietly intense alpha male whose subtle understatement hides deep reserves of emotional intensity, while Dupree takes a character who could have been a thinly-drawn femme fetale and invests her with strong personal drive and steely resolve, and there’s strong support from Neil Blomkampf regulars Sharlto Copley and Brandon Auret as, respectively, emasculated beat cop Sawyer and brutal Mob enforcer Lonnie French, as well as a nearly unrecognisable Patrick Bergin as local kingpin (and Kevin’s father) Rossi Dumois; the film is roundly stolen, however, by Pitt, a phenomenal actor I’ve always thought we just don’t see enough of, here portraying a spectacularly sleazy, unpredictable force of nature who clearly has his own dark agenda, but whom we ultimately can’t help rooting for even as he stabs us in the back.  This is a cracking film, a dark and dangerous thriller of rare style and compulsive verve that I happily consider to be Megaton’s best film to date BY FAR – needless to say it was a major hit for Netflix when it dropped, clearly resonating with its audience given what’s STILL going on in the real world, and while it may have been roundly panned in reviews I think, like some of the platform’s other glossier Original hits (Bright springs to mind), it’s destined for a major critical reappraisal and inevitable cult status before too long …

25.  BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC – one of the year’s biggest surprise hits for me was also one I was really nervous about – the original Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its just-as-good sequel Bogus Journey have been personal favourites for years, pretty much part of my geeky developmental DNA during my youth, two gleefully dorky indulgences that have, against the odds, aged like fine wine for me over the years.  I love Bill and Ted SO MUCH, so like many of the fans I’ve always wanted a third film, but I knew full well how easy it would have been for it to turn out to be a turd (second sequels can be tricky things, and we’ve seen SO MANY fail over the years).  God bless Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves for never giving up on the possibilities, then, and for the original screenwriters, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, for writing something that does true justice and pays proper respect to what came before while fully realising how much times have changed in the TWENTY-NINE YEARS that have passed since Wyld Stallyns last graced our screens.  Certainly times have moved on for our irrepressible pair – in spite of their convictions, driven by news from the distant future that their music would unite the world and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, Bill and Ted have spectacularly failed to achieve what was expected of them, and they’ve grown despondent even though they’re still happily married to the Princesses and now the fathers of two wonderful girls, Billie and Thea (Atypical’s Brigette Lundy-Paine and Ready Or Not’s Samara weaving).  Then an emissary from the future arrives to inform them that if they don’t write the song that unites the world TODAY, the whole of reality will cease to exist.  No pressure, then … it may have been almost three decades, but our boys are BACK in a riotous comedy adventure that delivers on all the promises the franchise ever made before.  Winter and particularly Reeves may have both gone onto other things since, but they step back into their roles with such ease it’s like Bill and Ted have never been away, perfectly realising not only their characters today but also various future incarnations as they resolve to go forward in time to take the song from themselves AFTER they’ve already written it (a most triumphant and fool-proof plan, surely); Lundy-Paine and Weaving, meanwhile, are both absolutely FANTASTIC throughout, creating a pair of wonderfully oddball, eccentric and thoroughly adorable characters who would be PERFECT to carry the franchise forward in the future, while it’s an absolute joy to see William Sadler return as Bogus Journey’s fantastically neurotic incarnation of Death himself, and there are quality supporting turns from Flight of the Conchords’ Kristen Schaal, Anthony Carrigan, Holland Taylor and of course Hal Landon Jr., once again returning as Ted’s grouchy cop father Captain Logan.  The plot is thoroughly bonkers and of course makes no logical sense, but then they’re never meant to in these movies – the whole point is just to have fun and GO WITH IT, and it’s unbelievably easy when the comedy hit rate is THIS HIGH – turns out third time really is the charm for Matheson and Solomon, who genuinely managed a hat trick with the whole trilogy, while there was no better choice of director to usher this into existence than Dean Parisot, the man who brought us Galaxy Quest.  This is the perfect climax to a trilogy we’ve been waiting YEARS to see finally completed, but it’s also shown a perfect way to forge ahead in new and interesting ways with the next generation – altogether, then, this is another most excellent adventure …

24.  TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG – Justin Kurzel has been on my directors-to-watch list for a while now, each of his offerings impressing me more than the last (his home-grown Aussie debut, Snowtown, was a low key wallow in Outback nastiness, while his follow up, Macbeth, quickly became one of my favourite Shakespeare flicks, and I seem to be one of the frustrated few who actually genuinely loved his adaptation of Assassin’s Creed, considering it to be one the very best video game movies out there), and his latest is no exception – returning to his native Australia, he’s brought his trademark punky grit and fever-dream edginess to bear in his quest to bring his country’s most famous outlaw to the big screen in a biopic truly worthy of his name. Two actors bring infamous 19th Century bushranger Ned Kelly to life here, and they’re both exceptional – the first half of the film sees newcomer Orlando Schwerdt explode onto the screen as the child Ned, all righteous indignation and fiery stubbornness as he rails against the positions his family’s poverty continually put him in, then George MacKay (Sunshine On Leith, Captain Fantastic) delivers the best performance of his career in the second half, a barely restrained beast as Ned grown, his mercurial turn bringing the man’s inherent unpredictability to the fore.  The Babadook’s Essie Davis, meanwhile, frequently steals the film from both of them as Ellen, the fearsome matriarch of the Kelly clan, and Nicholas Hoult is similarly impressive as Constable Fitzpatrick, Ned’s slimily duplicitous friend/nemesis, while there are quality supporting turns from Charlie Hunnam and Russell Crowe as two of the most important men of Ned’s formative years. In Kurzel’s hands, this account of Australia’s greatest true-life crime saga becomes one of the ultimate marmite movies – its glacial pace, grubby intensity and frequent brutality will turn some viewers off, but fans of more “alternative” cinema will find much to enjoy here.  There’s a blasted beauty to its imagery (this is BY FAR the bleakest the Outback’s ever looked on film), while the screenplay from relative unknown Shaun Grant (adapting Peter Carey’s bestselling novel) is STRONG, delivering rich character development and sublime dialogue, and Kurzel delivers some brilliantly offbeat and inventive action beats in the latter half that are well worth the wait.  Evocative, intense and undeniable, this has just the kind of irreverent punk aesthetic that I’m sure the real life Ned Kelly would have approved of …

23.  MUST MERCY – more true-life cinema, this time presenting an altogether classier account of two idealists’ struggle to overturn horrific racial injustices in Alabama. Writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12, The Glass Castle) brings heart, passion and honest nobility to the story of fresh-faced young lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) and his personal crusade to free Walter “Johnny D” McMillan (Jamie Foxx), an African-American man wrongfully sentenced to death for the murder of a white woman.  His only ally is altruistic young paralegal Eva Ansley (Cretton’s regular screen muse Brie Larson), while the opposition arrayed against them is MAMMOTH – not only do they face the cruelly racist might of the Alabama legal system circa 1989, but a corrupt local police force determined to circumvent his efforts at every turn and a thoroughly disinterested prosecutor, Tommy Chapman (Rafe Spall), who’s far too concerned with his own personal political ambitions to be any help.  The cast are uniformly excellent, Jordan and Foxx particularly impressing with career best performances that sear themselves deep into the memory, while there’s a truly harrowing supporting turn from Rob Morgan as Johnny D’s fellow Death Row inmate Herbert, whose own execution date is fast approaching.  This is courtroom drama at its most gripping, Cretton keeping the inherent tension cranked up tight while tugging hard on our heartstrings for maximum effect, and the result is a timely, racially-charged throat-lumper of considerable power and emotional heft that guarantees there won’t be a single dry eye in the house by the time the credits roll.  Further proof, then, that Destin Daniel Cretton is one of those rare talents of his generation – next up is his tour of duty in the MCU with Shang-Chi & the Legend of the Ten Rings, and while this seems like a strange leftfield turn given his previous track record, I nevertheless have the utmost confidence in him after seeing this …

22.  UNDERWATER – at first glance, this probably seems like a strange choice for the year’s Top 30 – a much-maligned, commercially underperforming glorified B-movie creature-feature headlined by the former star of the Twilight franchise, there’s no way that could POSSIBLY be any good, surely? Well hold your horses, folks, because not only is this very much worth your time and a comprehensive suspension of your low expectations, but I can’t even consider this a guilty pleasure – as far as I’m concerned this is a GENUINELY GREAT FILM, without reservation. The man behind the camera is William Eubank, a director whose career I’ve been following with great interest since his feature debut Love (a decidedly odd but strangely beautiful little space movie) and its more high profile but still unapologetically INDIE follow-up The Signal, and this is the one where he finally delivers wholeheartedly on all that wonderful sci-fi potential.  The plot is deceptively simple – an industrial conglomerate has established an instillation drilling right down to the very bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest point in our Earth’s oceans, only for an unknown disaster to leave six survivors from the operation’s permanent crew stranded miles below the surface with very few escape options left – but Eubank and writers Brian Duffield (Spontaneous, Love & Monsters, Jane Got a Gun, Insurgent) and Adam Cozad (The Legend of Tarzan) wring all the possible suspense and fraught, claustrophobic terror out of the premise to deliver a piano wire-tense horror thriller that grips from its sudden start to a wonderfully cathartic climax.  The small but potent cast are all on top form, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick (Netflix’ Iron Fist) and John Gallagher Jr. (Hush, 10 Cloverfield Lane) particularly impressing, and even the decidedly hit-and-miss T.J. Miller delivers a surprisingly likeable turn here, but it’s that Twilight alumnus who REALLY sticks in your memory here – Kristen Stewart’s been doing a pretty good job lately distancing herself from the role that, unfortunately, both made her name and turned her into an object of (very unfair) derision for many years, but in my opinion THIS is the performance that REALLY separates her from Bella effing-Swan.  Mechanical engineer Norah Price is tough, ingenious and fiercely determined, but with the right amount of vulnerability that we really root for her, and Stewart acts her little heart out in a turn sure to win over her strongest detractors.  The creature effects are impressive too, the ultimate threat proving some of the nastiest, most repulsively icky creations I’ve seen committed to film, and the inspired design work and strong visual effects easily belie the film’s B-movie leanings.  Those made uneasy by deep, dark open water or tight, enclosed spaces should take heed that this can be a tough watch, but anyone who likes being scared should find plenty to enjoy here.  Altogether a MUCH better film than its mediocre Rotten Tomatoes rating makes it out to be …

21.  PENINSULA – back in 2016, Korean director Yeon Sang-ho and writer Park Joo-suk took the tired old zombie outbreak trope and created something surprisingly fresh with their darkly satirical action horror Train to Busan.  The film was, deservedly, a massive international smash hit and a major shot in the arm for the sub-genre on the big screen, so a sequel was inevitable, but when the time came for them to follow it up they did the smart thing and went in a very different direction.  Jettisoning much of the humour to create something much darker and more intense, they also ramped the action quotient right up to eleven, creating a nightmarish post-apocalyptic version of Korea which has been quarantined from the rest of the world for the last four years, where the few uninfected survivors eke out a dangerous day-to-day existence amidst the burgeoning undead hordes, and the value of human life has plummeted dramatically.  Into this hell-on-earth must venture a small band of Korean refugees, sent by a Hong Kong crime boss to retrieve a multi-million dollar payday in stolen loot that got left behind in the evacuation, led by former ROK Marine Corps Captain Jung-seok (Secret Reunion’s Gang Don-won), a man with a tragic past he has to make up for.  Needless to say, nothing goes according to plan … Train to Busan was an unexpected masterpiece of the genre, but I was even more bowled over by this, particularly since I got to see this on the big screen on Halloween night itself, just before the UK cinemas closed down again for the Second Lockdown. This certainly is a film that NEEDS to be seen first on the big screen – the fully-realised hellscape of undead-overrun Seoul is spectacularly immersive, the perfect cinematic playground for the film’s most impressive set-pieces, two astounding, protracted high-speed chases with searchlight-and-flair-lit all-terrain vehicles racing through the dark streets pursued by tidal waves of feral zombies. Sure, the plot is predictable and the tone gets a little overblown and maudlin at times, while some of the characters are drawn in decidedly broad strokes, but the breathless pace rarely lets up throughout, and there are moments of genuine fiendish genius on offer here, particularly in a truly disturbing centrepiece sequence in which desperate human captives are set against slavering undead in a makeshift amphitheatre for sport, as well as a particularly ingenious use for radio-controlled cars.  And the cast are brilliant, with Don-won providing a suitably robust but also pleasingly fallible, wounded hero, while Hope’s Lee Re and newcomer Lee Ye-won are irrepressibly feisty and thoroughly adorable as the young girls who rescue him from certain death among the ruins.  Altogether, this is horror cinema writ large, played more for thrills than scares but knuckle-whitening and brutally effective nonetheless, and in a year where outbreak horror became all too real for us anyway it was nice to be able to enjoy something a little more escapist anyway – given the strength of its competition in 2020, this top-notch sequel to a true genre gem did very well indeed to place this high.  I’ll admit, I wouldn’t say no to thirds …

[lunaroceanic]

(Wanted to make this its own post because it’s the first piece of “writing” I’ve done in forever; originally written as a fix-it to this post addressing the fact that Sam is never shown to recognize the fact that he’s only been able to be selfish all his life because of Dean’s selflessness in raising him)

God. You know what they fucking should have done with Sam in the finale instead of putting him in ugly old man makeup and making him be sad about dean until he died? Have him be the one to spearhead the effort to bring Cas back from the empty.

Like, when all the dust has settled and they’ve beaten god, he and Dean and Jack (because Jack doesn’t become god in this version bc he’s fucking three years old) are kinda just sitting around the bunker, none of them wanting to be the first one to acknowledge the vast, Cas-shaped hole that was left in the fabric of their lives. And he looks at Dean, and the horrific injustice of it all hits him like a brick to the face. Sam got Eileen back, he got his freedom from God’s story, he has his brother and his sort-of son. He’s free to write his own happy ending. And sure, he and Jack both lost Cas, but for Dean...

It’s different. And it’s not fair. Dean, who when he was barely tall enough to use the stove gave Sam the larger portion of every meal, who was there to whisper reassurances to a scared Sam that he himself never got to hear from his own father, who can’t help but care with his whole heart even when it hurts him, deserves a happy ending too. But Cas is gone, and Sam may not know all the gory details, but he does know that for Dean, an ending without Cas is never going to be a good one.

For his whole life, Dean had given every part of himself to being exactly what Sam needed, whenever he needed it. And Sam realizes now just how little he’s given dean in return. It’s only because dean always pushed Sam so hard to keep fighting, to keep living for the cause of others, that Sam survived to become the person he is today. And who he is is somebody his college-age self never would have recognized. He no longer defines himself in relation and opposition to his father’s wishes. He’s no longer solely driven by the selfish, deep-seated urge to rebel against the hunting life for the sake of rebellion. He’s found who he is in hunting, in leading, in creating the hunter network like a safety net for those who find themselves thrown into the life by tragedy outside their control, so much like himself it makes his heart ache. But most importantly, in this scenario, he’s found himself in learning magic.

Most importantly because, while Dean wants Cas back so badly that his grief permeates the air he breathes, he can’t find it in himself to hope for Cas to return. Not without any higher entities pulling at anybody’s strings, not without the blood of a nephilim sired by the angel he wants to summon from the empty. He’s staring down the barrel of a bleak, loveless future.

But Sam? He knows the full extent of the capabilities of magic. Rowena had created from scratch the spell he used to bring the love of his life back. He can do the same for Dean. He can give this new part of himself over to Dean’s cause. It’s the least he owes him.

He reaches out to the hunter network for research and supply gathering. He’s unsurprised when Claire throws herself wholly into the efforts. He stays up late night after night, makes sure Dean is getting more rest than him by pretending to go to sleep at the same time Dean does before sneaking back into the library for a few more hours. He goes to Rowena herself, and becomes well-versed in ways to work around the rules written into the fabric of reality. Finding loopholes comes easily to him—he was pre-law, after all.

In the end, he designs a spell to nullify the claim the Empty has over a being’s consciousness. Like all of Rowena’s most potent spells, the ingredients are simple, but powerful; each party, the rescuer and the rescu-ee, must sacrifice a part of themselves to put to rest in the Empty in the angel’s (or demon’s, he supposes) stead.

And when Dean and Cas appear in a flash of light, kneeling on the bunker floor, Cas bleeding from a shallow cut at the base of his throat and Dean beaming and drinking in the sight of Cas more openly and shamelessly and selfishly than sam had ever seen dean allow himself to, Sam knows exactly what parts of themselves they had left behind in the empty.

He and Jack and Eileen and Jody and Donna and the girls—and everyone else who had come to support Dean before he had set off into the empty alone—erupt into cheers and dogpile onto the two of them. Sam finds himself in the center of the chaos with Cas, Jack and Dean. Dean lets go of Cas for a precious few moments to crush Sam into a hug. His voice is rough when he utters a shaky, “Thanks, Sammy.”

Sam can do nothing but laugh and draw his family into his long-armed embrace.

[worryinglyinnocent]

Fic: Days to Change a Lifetime

AU-gust Day Six: Hospital AU Fandom: Once Upon A Time Pairing: Rumbelle

Rated: T

Content Warning: Cancer, character death, terminal illness.

Summary: Mr Gold has a chance encounter with Belle French in the palliative ward, and they get to know each other over the last few days of her life.

Note: As you can probably tell from the summary, this does not have a happy ending.

Days to Change a Lifetime

Gold had always hated hospitals, and he could not for the life of him figure out how his chosen profession had led him to spend so much time in them. When he had decided to become a lawyer, he had reckoned on spending his entire working life in an office. He had not anticipated so many hospital visits. He had definitely not envisaged spending quite so much time in hospice units and palliative care wards.

He was a victim of his own success in a way, having gained a reputation for being good at handling cases involving wills, living wills and medical power of attorney, which was why, on this particular fateful Friday afternoon, he had found himself once more in a palliative care ward. That was how he met her. 

Belle.

He wasn’t sure that he would have noticed her if she had not been looking directly at him and he hadn’t seen that she had the most brilliant blue eyes he’d ever witnessed. Despite her pallor and the dark circles under her eyes, and the gauntness of her face where her illness had taken its toll, her eyes were still bright and mesmerising. 

The second thing that he noticed about her was that she was so comparatively young. Death didn’t discriminate, he knew that, but the patients he met on this type of ward in these types of grim circumstances tended to be a little older.

The third thing that he noticed was that she was alone. Most people had someone by their side during these final days, but she was on her own, and there was no evidence that she had ever had visitors. There were no personal touches in her room, no signs of the life that she’d led. She seemed so desolate, lying there in an impersonal room with no company, and that was what kept him arrested in her doorway, both of them looking at each other and both of them waiting for the next step to be taken. 

“Hi,” he said eventually. 

She smiled. “Hi.”

“Do you…” God, he was making a fool of himself and he’d probably have a nurse telling him to move along and stop disturbing the patients in a minute. “Would you like some company for a bit?”

“That would be lovely, thank you.” She paused. “Don’t you have your own family here though?”

Gold shook his head. “No, I’m a lawyer. I have a client here, but the meeting is over now.” He came into the room and sat down in the chair beside the bed, feeling more awkward now than he had done when he had been hovering outside. It had been a spur of the moment offer and now he had no idea what they were supposed to talk about. How did one go about starting a casual conversation with a dying woman?

“My name’s Belle.”

“Everyone calls me Gold.”

“Nice to meet you, Gold. It’s bone cancer, by the way. It’s in my spine and inoperable. Just thought I’d get that out there to save you wondering but not wanting to ask personal questions. You look like a gentleman like that.”

“Right. Thank you.” They sat in silence for a few minutes as Gold digested this, no knowing whether it had made things more or less awkward. The silence was companionable at least, and there was no huge rush to fill it. Perhaps, for Belle, knowing that she wasn’t alone was enough.

Presently she spoke. “So, you’re not from round here either?”

“Pardon?”

“Your accent. Scotland, right?”

Gold nodded. “Yes, although I haven’t lived there for over forty years.”

“It’s impressive that you’ve managed to keep your accent all this time. I’ve only been here eight years and I’m already picking up a twang.” 

Belle laughed, and it was good to hear it in such oppressive settings. Sometimes Gold felt that laughter was almost forbidden in these places, as if laughing and making the best and happiest time of the bleak situation was somehow not taking it seriously enough. Belle’s laugh was genuine and musical, and it was the most cheerful thing that Gold had heard in this area of the hospital on all his recent visits. 

“You’re from Australia originally, yes?”

“Right on the money. I grew up in Melbourne. I decided that I wanted to see the world, but then I fell in love with Boston and I ended up staying here. What about you? If you’ve been here for so long then I take it you didn’t have much choice in coming to America.”

“No, I came with my father. I was seven.”

“Do you ever want to go back?” There was a wistful tone in Belle’s voice, a yearning for a home that was now unreachable however much she might not have missed it before. 

“Not really. I was so young when I left, and I have no family there. My entire life is here in Boston. What about you? You must have more ties there.”

He didn’t want to ask about her family, not when she clearly didn’t have anyone here in Boston with her right now. 

Belle sighed. “It’s not so much the people I miss as the places. All the memories from my childhood, places where I used to get ice cream and stuff. I guess you just sort of get nostalgic sometimes, especially when it’s out of reach.”

Gold definitely wasn’t going to ask about her family now, and he wondered where to turn the conversation. Luckily, Belle seemed more than happy for him to talk about himself.

“How did you get into law? And specifically, law that takes you into palliative wards?”

He told her the story of how he had got into his particular line almost by accident, and he was amazed by how animatedly she listened, taking everything in and showing a genuine interest in something that most conversation partners decried as horrifically dull. 

“What about you?” he said eventually. “What do you do?”

It was strange to use the present tense when she clearly wasn’t doing anything and wouldn’t be doing it again in the future, but framing it as if everything was already over seemed callous, rubbing it in her face that her life was nearing its end and far before its time. As much as he did not like spending time in hospitals, and as much as his non-medical clients and colleagues might accuse him of harshness, he had picked up a lot in terms of tact. 

“I’m a librarian. I’ve always loved books. I think I love them more than people sometimes. Honestly, that’s been one of the things that’s annoyed me most about being in here. I can’t concentrate to read; the drugs make the words swim. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that the drugs take away the pain, but I’d really like to be able to read.”

Gold looked at the book resting on the nightstand. 

“Her Handsome Hero. I’ve never read it, what’s it about?”

“Oh, it’s my absolute favourite. You’d probably hate it, it’s full of romance and melodrama, but it’s a good adventure story too. There’s this young boy named Gideon, who discovers that he’s part of a prophecy and destined to be a great hero who’ll save the trapped princess.”

It certainly didn’t sound like Gold’s type of book, but it was good to see Belle so excited about it.

“I could read to you if you like.” Where was this offer coming from? He’d only just met the woman and she was going to think he was completely weird if he carried on in this vein. 

“Would you?” She took the book and held it out to him. “You probably think it’s silly, I mean, I’ve read it so many times that I can probably recite it word for word, but it never fails to transport me.”

Gold opened the first page of the book and began to read. He had no appointments for the rest of the afternoon; he could stay here until the nurses kicked him out if Belle wanted him to, and he found that he didn’t mind that prospect at all. 

He had read through the first chapter and was getting quite invested in the story when he looked up and saw that Belle had dropped off to sleep. Quietly, Gold closed the book and placed it on the nightstand, making to move away and leave her in peace. He was at the doorway when she spoke, her voice soft and sleepy.

“Will you come again?” she asked. “It’s really nice to have company.”

Gold nodded, although Belle’s eyes were still closed. “Of course.”

X

“They’re beautiful, thank you!”

Gold only realised once he had entered the room that he had nowhere to put down the large bunch of sunflowers that he had brought with him, and he stood there holding them awkwardly for a while until a passing nurse took pity on him and went to fetch a vase. 

“Well, everyone else has them, and I didn’t want you to be the odd one out. I thought that they might give you something a bit more interesting to look at.”

Belle nodded. “Yeah, I have to say that I’m not thrilled with the colour scheme in here.” She looked around at the teal walls. “Why is it always teal? Did a paint manufacturer overdo an order once and all the hospitals in the country decided to take advantage?”

“Definitely.” Gold sat down in the chair beside the bed, and he was surprised when Belle reached out and squeezed his hand. Her fingers were bony and there was not a lot of strength in her grip, but he squeezed back, being gifted with Belle’s wonderful smile in return. When she smiled, it was easy to forget just how ill she was. 

She stayed holding his hand for a long time whilst they talked, until she finally let go and Gold felt almost bereft. Belle picked up the book. 

“Would you read another chapter, please? I really like listening to your voice; you read aloud well.”

Gold took the book from her. “It would be my pleasure.”

They got into a routine over the next week or so. Gold would visit Belle in an afternoon and read to her until she fell asleep. Sometimes that took longer than others; there were occasions where he’d barely got a page or two in before she was back in an exhausted slumber, but sometimes they made it through a couple of chapters. It was one of Belle’s better afternoons when it happened. 

Gold didn’t know what had made him stop reading in the middle of a sentence, other than the look in Belle’s eyes. She was watching him, rather than staring off into the middle distance as she did so many times, imagining the events of the story unfolding in front of her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Belle shook her head with a smile. “Nothing. I think you like this book a lot more than you let on, you know.”

“Well, I don’t dislike it. It’s really not my style, but it’s not bad.”

“You say that every day.”

“It’s still true every day.”

Belle laughed, although there was a lot less power in it than there had been at the beginning of their acquaintance. Gold’s stomach churned; he didn’t want to think about that. 

“You know, I think it will grow on you.”

They fell into silence for a moment, just watching each other. Belle’s tongue darted out to lick her dry lips, and Gold found himself leaning in a little closer. She gave a little nod of encouragement, and he pressed his lips against hers. It was a soft kiss, dry and chaste, but it was given and received in something a little more than just friendship. 

Belle smiled as he broke away, a tired but happy smile. 

“Maybe no more for today,” she said, glancing at the book. “Tomorrow?”

Gold nodded. “Till tomorrow.”

X

Although Gold had known to expect it from the moment that he had first met Belle, and although he’d been feeling a deep sense of foreboding ever since their kiss, it did not stop him being completely unprepared for walking into the hospital that next afternoon and finding Belle’s room empty. 

“Mr Gold?”

He turned, ashen and unable to speak, to find the nurse who took care of Belle most often hovering behind him. Her Handsome Hero was clutched against her chest, and she held it out. 

“She wanted you to have this.”

They’d only got halfway through the story, and even though he’d admitted several times that it was definitely not his type of book, Gold wanted to know how it ended. He took it from the nurse, picking up the note that fell out. 

Dear Gold,

Astrid is writing this for me as my hands are shaking too much. I hope you enjoy the rest of the story, despite your reservations about the romance. 

Thank you so much for being here these last few days. You made me remember what it is to feel alive. Please don’t lose sight of that.

All my love and best wishes,

Belle

[eponymous-rose]

I’ve also further progressed in my Vorkosigan re-read! Memory was as wonderful as I remembered (Illyan and Miles going fishing via improvised hand grenade out of boredom is always a highlight). 

I love the way Bujold structures her books---I talked about that a bunch with Mirror Dance---but Memory is just brilliantly laid out. Miles is spiraling, Miles fucks up, Miles gets fired (the closest pop-culture parallel I can think of is a superhero having to permanently revert to their mundane secret identity), Miles’s friends manage to yank him out of the mire, and then... surprise bizarre out-of-sequence murder mystery! The victim’s not dead! Miles keeps finding clues out of sequence and realizing he was meant to be framed! And god, you’re so sure it’s Haroche right at the start and then you have that moment of “oh well shit of course he thinks Miles might have it in for the boss that just eviscerated his identity” and so you’re still surprised when that first instinct was right! And then he offers Miles his life as Naismith back. Even Cordelia placed a bet on Miles giving up his life as Vorkosigan. And... he doesn’t. Mirror Dance was about Mark fracturing himself to survive. Memory is about Miles dragging himself back together to live.

I love how Illyan takes the loss of his memory chip---it’s fundamentally a piece of him gone, but it’s also freedom from thirty years of being a tool of his emperor (and then of Aral), and his embracing this destruction of his identity and learning to move forward is such a great foil/foreshadowing for Miles’s revelation. Everything in this story is about moving forward, not without regrets, but moving forward. It’s so fitting that the romance story going on in the background is Alys and Illyan, two 60-somethings, falling in love (and god, I love the scene where Miles wanders in on them in the morning and thinks something like “huh that dress is more of an evening style isn’t it?” and then like ten hours later the penny drops).

And god, Miles and Elli. I love how this was done, how it’s made apparent that you can love someone, and they can love you, and you can be very good for each other in a lot of ways, but your circumstances can still be such that marriage will annihilate one or both of you. It’s nobody’s fault, but the inevitability and recognition of it means it’s not always a devastation: “He could feel the letting-go in them, with the easing of the tension and the terror, with the slowing of every pulse of their blood. Not pain, or not so much pain, but only a just sadness, a due measure of melancholy, quiet and right.” Even when they’re quite bizarre relationships, the relationships in these books are very mature and well-thought-out from a narrative point of view, and this is a wonderful example.

Just a really, really lovely book:

No wonder he was laughing. He wasn’t mourning a death. He was celebrating an escape.

“I’m not dead. I’m here.” He touched his scarred chest in wonder.

[...]

Harra Csurik had been almost right. It wasn’t your life again you found, going on. It was your life anew.

Aaaand on to Komarr! God! I love this book! The most Miles possible meet-cute for his future wife: board at the home of her family on an investigation, have combat flashbacks on a shopping trip with her, and wind up watching her husband die horrifically while chained to a rail on a planet with a toxic atmosphere, knowing if he reacts too strongly he’s likely to have a seizure that’ll dislodge his own breathing mask, killing him in the same terrible way. You know. Rom-com stuff.

Speaking of relationships portrayed well, Ekaterin and Tien’s disaster of a marriage is extremely chilling in its realism. Even as you absolutely detest Tien, you can see how Ekaterin got yanked into that orbit, and it’s all all all so tied in with the very same aspects of Barrayaran culture that we’ve seen Miles face: Tien destroys everything because of his perception of what the response would be to his illness (where Miles, for better or worse, never had the option of hiding it), and because of his shitty insecurities about Ekaterin’s fidelity (echoes of a young Aral come to mind). We’re given explanations (his brother’s literally impossible-to-live-up-to example) but are never expected to see them as excuses, which is a very fine line to walk. The end result is a believably fucked-up relationship that draws on parallels with every single time you’ve ever thought to yourself about a friend, “Oh god sweetie you can do so much better than him”.

And Ekaterin’s thoughts about being bound to this marriage are right along the lines of the most stick-in-the-mud traditional Barrayaran loyalties we’ve seen Miles exhibit, all tangled up in language about honor. And even though it very shortly (and mortally) becomes a moot point, I love that she gets the chance to decide to leave Tien in spite of that. 

I also love the scene between Tien and Miles, talking about Nikki’s jumpship obsession, partly because of the obvious contrast between the two of them, but mostly because it illustrates how much of Tien’s awfulness is because he’s just... fundamentally a bitter coward with no imagination.

"Well, every boy goes through that phase, I suppose. We all outgrow it. Pick up all that mess, Nikki.”

Nikki’s eyes were downcast, but narrowed in brief resentment at this, Miles could see from his angle of view. The boy bent to scoop up the last of his miniature fleet.

“Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them,” Miles murmured.

“That depends on whether your dreams are reasonable,” said Vorsoisson, his lips twitching in rather bleak amusement. Ah, yes. Vorsoisson must be fully aware of the secret medical bar between Nikki and his ambition.

“No, it doesn’t.” Miles smiled slightly. “It depends on how hard you grow.”

The alternating POVs between Miles and Ekaterin are charming because we get to see Miles from an external (non-hostile) point of view and get all excited about each small revelation, and then we get to see Ekaterin both from Miles’s point of view and from the point of view of her own very active inner monologue, giving us insights we would otherwise have missed since she, as Miles says in the understatement of the century, has a tendency to underreact.

Their relationship is built up very carefully: there’s an obvious mutual interest practically from the first, but they both have reason to be cautious. There are those moments of genuine rapport early on, and then the shopping trip! It’s such a clever revelation, and so layered!

Miles was traumatized at Dagoola IV by watching Beatrice fall from the shuttle in front of him: he reached out to try to catch her, and just missed, and she died. And then we have this perfectly safe little parallel, with himself and Ekaterin falling off a water feature in a shopping district, and he manages to catch her, this time... and they both go over. It’s cute and oddly triumphant...

...and then he realizes exactly what it means. If he’d caught Beatrice, he’d have gone over with her. They’d both be dead, and that revelation hits right after he’s had a whole book to figure out just how badly he wants to live. And to Ekaterin, it’s a very quick summary of what and who Miles is: he’s the man who would not let go. BUT Ekaterin ALSO frames her leaving Tien in that context: she’s not just watching him fall, but purposefully releasing her hands. It’s so twisted and so complicated and such a weird little microcosm of their respective states of mind. And while part of it is Ekaterin giving Miles the little push he needed to properly process that trauma, fundamentally and on a larger timescale it places Miles as the “I’ve been in this hole before and I know the way out” path to Ekaterin’s healing. It’s so well done.

There’s also a hell of a parallel in the physical aspect of Miles’s seizures coming on unexpectedly in moments of great stress versus the psychological aspect of Ekaterin’s whole coping mechanism being built on trying desperately not to flinch or show strong emotion.

(And I don’t know where else to put this but special shout-out to the running gag of Vorkosigan House getting gradually overrun with cats, to the point where Miles starts, apropos of nothing and on a totally different planet, asking strangers if they’d like a kitten.)

These kids! Will they make it work? I may be only halfway through the book, but I have a funny feeling things might work out...

Also, here’s the “rescue” scene in full, because it delights me so:

The root-compacted soil of the edge sagged under her weight, and she began to slide precipitously forward. She yelped; pushing backward fragmented her support totally. One wildly back-grappling arm was caught suddenly in a viselike grip, but the rest of her body turned as the soil gave way beneath her, and she found herself dangling absurdly feet-down over the pond. Her other arm, swinging around, was caught, too, and she looked up into Vorkosigan’s face above her. He was lying prone on the slope, one hand locked around each of her wrists. His teeth were clenched and grinning, his gray eyes alight.

“Let go, you idiot!” she cried.

The look on his face was weirdly, wildly exultant. “Never,” he gasped, “again--”

His half-boots were locked around... nothing, she realized, as he began to slide inexorably over the edge after her. But his death-grip never slackened. The exalted look on his face melted to sudden horrified realization. The laws of physics took precedence over heroic intent for the next couple of seconds; dirt, pebbles, vegetation, and two Barrayaran bodies all hit the chilly water more or less simultaneously.

The water, it turned out, was a bit over a meter deep. The bottom was soft with muck. She wallowed upright onto her feet, one shoe gone who knew where, sputtering and dragging her hair from her eyes and looking around frantically for Vorkosigan. Lord Vorkosigan. The water came to her waist, it ought not to be over his head---no half-booted feet were sticking up like waving stumps anywhere---could he swim?

He popped up beside her, and blew muddy water out of his mouth, and dashed it from his eyes to clear his vision. His beautiful suit was sodden, and a water-plant dangled over one ear. He clawed it away, and located her, his hand going toward her and then stopping.

“Oh,” said Ekaterin faintly. “Drat.”

There was a meditative pause before Lord Vorkosigan spoke. “Madame Vorsoisson,” he said mildly at last, “has it ever occurred to you that you may be just a touch oversocialized?”

[tyrantisterror]

TT’S GONNA RECOMMEND SOME SELF-PUBLISHED KAIJU FICTION

Because the mood struck me

(and also because I’ve been meaning to give these a full fledged reviews for a RIDICULOUSLY LONG TIME and I’m kind of embarrassed how long it’s been taking so I figure if I do some quickies I’ll feel less bad about myself as a person ok LET’S GO)

I’m gonna start with the Daikaiju Yuki series by Raffael Coronelli, because its first entry was also the first self published kaiju novel I read.  This series is fun and fast paced, with wonderful characters and dynamic storylines in a highly unique setting: a post-post apocaylptic world, where humanity has rebuilt civilization after a kaiju war hundreds of years ago destroyed the old one (i.e. ours).  The protagonist of the series, Yuki, partners up with one of the few kaiju who decided to defend humanity back in the kaiju war, a grouchy old bipedal lion named Narajin, and the two essentially fuse to fight various threats to their world with the other remaining members of the Pantheon Colossi (i.e. the protector kaiju).

(Our heroes, Yuki and Narajin, ready to conquer your kaiju-fan heart)

For newbies, this series covers a lot of kaiju tropes in an engaging and unique way that actually serves as a pretty decent primer for how this genre stands out from other monster fiction.  For experienced kaiju fans, the new twists author Raffael Coronelli has put on the old tropes and the innovations he’s added solely of his own invention make for a take on the genre that is astoundingly fresh, managing the difficult task of paying homage to what came before while crafting something very new and distinct from it.

I also can’t stress enough how fun these books are.  The characters grow on you very quickly, and the stories move at a lively pace that makes the books very easy to digest while still having a lot of substance.  Also there’s a LOT of content to consume here, so if you find you like the first book, you’re in luck - because not only is there a lot more of what you liked in the other entries, but Coronelli’s writing has gotten even better with each installment.

Buy them here:

Daikaiju Yuki

Yuki Conquers the World

Yuki vs. Fleshworld

Mokwa: The Lifesblood of the Earth (a spinoff focusing on another member of the Pantheon Colossi - also has the best villain of the whole series IMO)

Scythian Frost (short story anthology in the same universe as Daikaiju Yuki)

Pharoah of Eels (novella in the same universe as Daikaiju Yuki)

BONUS: I’m gonna link Coronelli’s Big Egg here because while it’s arguably more of a Weird West story than a kaiju story and not part of the Daikaiju Yuki series, it’s nonetheless VERY GOOD and kaiju-adjacent enough to feel relevant.

If you love it when kaiju stories go dark and experiment with body horror - and I know a good chunk of my followers here do, both from the posts you make and from the sheer number of body horror-riffic entries you’ve submitted to my Create a Kaiju Contests in the past - you owe it to yourself to read All Your Ruins by Alex Gayhart.  It is a bleak kaiju story that leans as far into the horror as kaiju stories can, while still retaining many of a kaiju story’s hallmarks.  You’ve got experimental robots, you’ve got a big lizard who shoots lasers from his mouth and has a few suprisingly poignant and tragic moments of pathos, you’ve got scenes of massive property damage - and you’ve also got scenes of people being torn apart by swarms of giant bugs, poisoned by toxic kaiju blood, assimilated into piles of fungus, and all other sorts of horrifying demises.  If you want a kaiju story to send chills down your spine, this is your book.

I’m emphasizing the grim aspects of this story, but I also want to note that it avoids one of the pitfalls a lot of modern horror falls into, in that it balances all the horrific shit by having characters in it that you actually care about.  It’s a tragedy, you know from the start things won’t end well, but some of the people involved in the conflict are so lovable and try so hard to survive that you root for them despite the prevailing sense of dread.  It’s a gloomy story, but it’s not the sort that makes everyone relentlessly awful - more George Romero Day of the Dead in tone than, say, the all consuming bleakness of The Walking Dead.

Also it’s got some killer illustrations.  The main monster even takes the “bipedal lizard with dorsal spikes” visual in a direction so unique that it actually stands out against the progenitor of that design concept.  That’s not the say the book depends on those illustrations, mind you - Gayhart’s prose isn’t afraid of laying it on thick every now and then to paint an appropriately distinct and horrific image with words.  That might not be for all tastes, but as a person who’s read a LOT of classic horror literature, I personally appreciate it - a dash of melodrama in the description of the horrific, when used well, can make it very effective, and Gayhart put just enough in there to work very well for my tastes.

Buy it here:

All Your Ruins

BONUS: I’m going to recommend the two books in author Alex Gayhart’s Black Star Saga here as well.  I haven’t actually fully read them yet - I bought the initial release where the two volumes were bundled together as one, and got sidetracked by LIFE BULLSHIT shortly after I started it (this happens to me too often while reading - I still need to finish Stephen King’s It and Marie Kondo’s books too), but I liked what I read, and from what I’ve heard the more recent editions made some big improvements to the story’s pacing.  It’s the same quality of writing as Gayhart’s All Your Ruins, but with a less grim tone - more Ultraman and less Shin Godzilla.

The Black Star Saga Volume 1: 2525

The Black Star Saga Volume 2: Moonage Daydream

A lot of classic kaiju movies bring up the threat of giant monsters destroying all of civilization if they aren’t stopped, but almost none have shown them carry that threat through.  In the Shadow of Extinction let’s that threat actually play out - you see the kaiju apocalypse begin and civilization as we know it end in the first third of the book.  The remaining two thirds focuses on survivors picking up the pieces in a world now ruled by giants.  It’s the kind of story you’d think there’d be more of in our genre, but outside of All Your Ruins and, uh, the Godzilla anime trilogy, there really aren’t that other takes out there.

While Gayhart’s All Your Ruins focuses on the horror aspect of a kaiju apocalypse, Kyle Warner’s In the Shadow of Extinction focuses on a political/crisis management angle.  It’s like if Shin Godzilla had a baby with George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and that baby had the “bureaucratic failings of big governments in the wake of national disasters” elements of the former and the “multiple different perspectives via a large cast of characters” format of the later.  There’s no one protagonist in this one - you follow a large and diverse cast of characters from around the world and from pretty much all walks of life as they try to navigate a disaster that destroys society as it once was.

Once the civilization effectively ends in the first third of the novel, In the Shadow of Extinction transition from “disaster movie” to “post apocalyptic thriller,” like The Stand, Day of the Triffids, 28 Days Later, or, I dunno, a toned down version of Mad Max (but, y’know, with giant monsters, so I guess not THAT toned down).  I bring this up because the content of the last two thirds takes after the tropes of post apocalyptic thrillers as much if not more so than kaiju stories - that is to say, there is some Triggering Content in this one.  That’s not something to dissuade you - the characters and story remains very solid and unique for the kaiju genre - but it is something I feel you should be aware of, and if you want a more explicit description of what kind of Triggers I mean here, shoot me a message.  Suffice to say, kaiju aren’t the only monsters when civilization breaks down here.

But Kaiju do remain prominent in the book nonetheless - it is ultimately a kaiju story more than anything else, and it’s impressive how the book manages to incorporate all those other influences as well as a heaping dose of political commentary without ever diminishing the presence of its monster stars.

Buy it here:

In the Shadow of Extinction

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to do what I should have done years ago and write some damn Amazon reviews for these so the authors can have a boost in Amazon’s search algorithms.

[gunterfan1992]

Episode Review: ‘BMO’ (Distant Lands, Ep. 1)

Airdate: June 25, 2020

Story by: Anthony Burch, Adam Muto, Hanna K. Nyström, Jack Pendarvis, and Kate Tsang

Storyboarded by: Hanna K Nyström, Iggy Craig, Laura Knetzger, Anna Syvertsson, & Adam Muto

Directed by: Miki Brewster (supervising), Sandra Lee (art)

I just watched a new episode of Adventure Time...

That, dear readers, is a sentence that—after the airing of “Come Along with Me”—I never thought I’d get to write again! And believe me, it feels great to be proved wrong in this instance.

In October of last year, we were all treated to the news that four new Adventure Time specials—collectively identified as Distant Lands—would be airing in the next year or so. For months, the Adventure Time fandom has waited with bated breath for these specials to drop. Would these episodes be good? Would they live up to the series that came before? Would they undo the emotional satisfaction of the Adventure Time finale? These were the questions. And now, the first special—entitled “BMO”—is here. Does it live up to expectations, proving that Adventure Time always bounces back? Or is it toast-bread for sure? Read on to hear my thoughts!

Beginning in media res, "BMO" opens with the titular character on its way to Mars to terraform Mars. After running into an errant service droid named Olive, BMO is transported to a fantastical space station known as the "Drift." It is here that BMO becomes acquainted with a humanoid rabbit named Y5, and together, the two help reveal the insidious plotting of the station's capitalist overlord, Hugo, and his henchman Mr. M (who, it must be noted, is almost certainly Finn’s father, Martin, up to one of his many schemes). After much mayhem, hilarity, and poignancy, the special ends with BMO traveling back to Earth and meeting up with Finn and Jake for the first time—revealing that this entire special was a prequel to the main series, explaining how BMO first met up with his good friends in Ooo.

The first thing I'd like to comment on is the fact that many of the show's former crew members returned to work on this special. In addition to Adam Muto (Adventure Time's hard-working executive producer), this special saw the return of: storyboard artists Hanna K Nyström, Laura Knetzger, and Anna Syvertsson; storyline writer Jack Pendarvis; character designers Andy Ristaino and Benjamin Anders; art director Sandra Lee; and composer Tim Kiefer. I was actually quite surprised (and delighted!) that so many of the show's old guard returned to help out. And while this special also saw several new creative voices helping out (including folks like former OK KO! storyboard artist Iggy Craig, former Steven Universe board artist Miki Brewster, and writer Kate Tsang), the overall product was recognizably Adventure Time. I must admit, this was my biggest worry going into Distant Lands; without folks like Tom Herpich, Kent Osborne, or Cole Sanchez, would this feel like the show I know and love? I’m happy to say that the answer is yes!

BMO really is in fine form in this episode—from their singing the "Potatoes (More Exciting Than Tomatoes)" ditty in space all the way to their hitching a ride to Earth on a space lard. (Indeed, the sheer number of humorous remarks the little robot gets makes me think that many of the shows writers were saving up goofy one-liners following the show’s cancellation, just in case.) I’m quite pleased with how the episode handled the character, and, in truth, somewhat relieved. Initially, I was worried whether the character would be able to coherently anchor an hour long special, given BMO’s unpredictable and somewhat unreliable nature (see: “Ketchup”). Would 45 minutes of BMO’s seemingly boundless goofiness work? Thankfully, the other characters in this special do an excellent job counterpoising the lovable robot’s more, shall we say, unorthodox personality features (Y5 perhaps said it best when she noted that BMO tends to “expend energy for no apparent purpose”). The end result feels remarkably balanced, with BMO’s chaotic, goofball energy complimenting the very real plight of the Drift’s residents.

Speaking of other characters, Y5 served as a workable straight man, whose half-heartedly pragmatic personality contrasts nicely with BMO’s boundless and wacky optimism. I must give the writers and producers credit: it was extremely risky for them to feature a brand new character as one of the main players (rather than one of the show’s many beloved side characters), but for the most part, they stuck the landing. I think much of this success is due to Y5’s voice actress, Glory Curda, whose performance really breathes live into the character, giving her an earnest believability. That said, the fast-paced nature of this special precluded me from developing the strongest emotional connection to the character, and as such, Y5′s “my parents don’t appreciate me” subplot did not resonate with me as strongly as, say, “It Came from the Nightosphere” did. (But then again, not every character can be Marceline!)

Strictly in terms of story structure, "BMO" is not exactly groundbreaking, and the special follows the standard "buddy movie" formula fairly closely (You know, the structure that goes: "Two individuals from different walks of life are forced to work together. Despite a rocky start, they begin to function as a team. Alas, they are split up, but reunite just in the nick of time to save the world"). But unlike Grace Z. Li of Vulture, who wrote that the special plays out "expectedly" and as such "is simply unimaginative in its structure," I cannot say that the standard plot structure torpedoes "BMO"—it simply gives the special a solid story frame that supports the characters while also providing an opportunity for the show to drop some timely social commentary.

Adventure Time has never been one to shy away from such commentary, but I do not know if it has ever been more overt than in “BMO.” As Alexander Sowa of CBR puts it, Hugo—the alien-human overlord of the Drift—is a “futurist reminiscent of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk” who long ago used a spaceship to escape Earth during the final days of the Mushroom War. After “biohacking” his DNA with the genetic material of the grey aliens who flit around the Oooniverse’s infinite cosmos, Hugo and his ilk founded an Amazon-esque empire in the Drift, inculcating its inhabitants with a love for rampant commercialism. As a villain, Hugo really is the wombo combo: a selfish capitalist hell-bent on stealing riches, colonizing new lands, exploiting conquered peoples, and then leaving when the situation looks bleak. It is not hard to see Hugo and his followers as stand-ins for the leaders of today, who refuse to acknowledge the reality of thinks like climate change or income inequality—problems that, if left unchecked, will lead to cataclysmic societal collapse. It is a bleak topic for Adventure Time to meditate on, but at least the episode ends on a positive note, with BMO's actions proving that with the right leader(s) and enough people working together, otherwise powerless individuals can topple oppressive regimes and begin to right the wrongs that have been made by the bourgeoisie (if you’ll allow me to invoke the ol’ Marxist term). Now, "BMO" admits that such reformation is one that will require many sacrifices, but nevertheless, the special does emphatically assert that it is possible. And in the hellscape that is 2020, this is a message of hope that so many need to hear.

In addition to social depth, there's quite a bit of existential nuance to this episode, too. Perhaps the most striking scene in the entire special is the scene wherein BMO is torn apart and—for all intents and purposes—dies. It is a chilling scene made all the more haunting by the return of BMO's rainbow personae (last seen in season seven's "The More You Moe, the Moe You Know"), who urge BMO to accept death ("Now your job is to be dead") and recognize that the robot has failed in its mission to be a true hero. (As pointed out to me on Reddit, the scene stylistically echoes an eerie bit of dialogue from Portal 2, wherein GLaDOS tells you: “I have a sort of black-box quick-save feature: In the event of a catastrophic failure, the last two minutes of my life are preserved for analysis. I was ... forced ... to relive you killing me. Again and again. Forever." Talk about horrific!) Thankfully—in the spirit of the hero's journey—BMO bounces back from the brink of oblivion, proving that even in the bleakest of moments, all of us can be heroes.

Or something like that.

All in all, “BMO” was an enjoyable romp that dropped us back into a magical world we all love. While I wouldn’t say that the special was mind-blowing, it succeeded in its mission of telling a new story in a new place, while focusing on a character whom Adventure Time fans care deeply about.

Here’s looking to “Obsidian!”

Mushroom War Evidence: When it comes to the Mushroom War mythos, this episode was full of a lot of little details. CGO’s monologue reveals that, indeed, Earth was ravage by numerous nuclear weapons; what is more, it seems that some sort of doomsday weapon vaporized part of the Earth, leaving that gaping scar in the planet that has for so long fascinated the show’s mythology-junkies. It is also explicitly state that Hugo and his ilk were humans who fled Earth during the Mushroom War to escape certain destruction.

Final Grade:

Also, while I have your attention: Book update! As some of you might already know, over the last year and a half, I’ve been working on a book all about the history and production of Adventure Time! It’s been an absolute blast, and I’ve been lucky enough to talk to quite a few of the folks who worked on the show (including people like Tom Herpich, Jack Pendarvis, Pat McHale, and Rebecca Sugar). I’m in the final stages of type-setting, and should hopefully have the book ready to go within the next few weeks. Here’s a sneak peek of cover (please ignore the faint InDesign lines; they won’t be in the finished product):

Originally, I was going to publish this work through McFarland and Company, but then Cartoon Network got all pissy (long story short: I reached out to Rebecca Sugar and Adam Muto, got in contact with both of ‘em, and asked some questions about Bubbline. Rebecca responded and and confirmed that Bubbline was intended to be canon when she boarded “What Was Missing” but structural homophobia prevented it from being explicitly declared as such. This revelation made CN PR reeeeeaaally uncomfortable and they threatened to sic the lawyers), so I’m now going to be publishing through the University of Kansas Libraries. The good news is that the work will be free to download, and easily accessible! Yay! That said, if you want a hard copy of the book, I’ll post details about that in a bit. Anyway, keep your eyes peeled!

[reginaldvonspiffington]

The Curse of Creativity by Richard V Kelly Jr

(disclaimer: This piece is edited by the author’s daughter posthumously. No new words were added, only passages deleted or rearranged)

1. The Wrong Kind Of Creativity

At the advanced age of 59 I found myself in a hospital psychiatric ward full of dejected people. I had reached the point of near catatonia, almost unable to interact with the world, unable to sleep, barely able to speak, spending all day in bed staring at the ceiling. My diagnosis was “Major depression with psychotic expressions”. 

Before this, I had composed symphonies and film scores. I had written textbooks, short stories, magazine articles, and half a dozen novels. I had sculpted in wood. I had written the code to create educational and artistic Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence applications. I had helped design a new school for creative kids. I had made educational films, created animations to teach Chinese, and written courses in every subject from neural networks to cryptography to architecture. 

Most of my existence had been spent in a world of ideas and imagination. My mind had been a sparkler, shooting off scintillas in every direction: fragments of music, lines of lyrical poetry, drawings, sculptures, computer programs, virtual worlds. But that life was gone. And here I was lying in bed fixated on the light of a bulb leaking in from an air vent.

I was still inventive at this point, but it was the wrong kind of inventiveness, the frightening unacceptable form. I had broken the membrane that separates playful imagination from gibbering lunacy. I still made up stories in my head, but they were all dark, bleak, lugubrious tales. The vent I was staring at obviously led to a parallel world where “they” were watching my every movement. I could feel the heat emanating from the wall, a form of thermal ray designed to cook my brain and mold my behavior. I had progressed beyond the creative person's liberation-from-the-mundane to the disturbed person's liberation-from-the-real.

There was no sense in moving from the hospital bed. Movement didn't matter. Nothing mattered. There was no future. And all the things I had created in the past seemed like a colossal waste of time. What was I thinking writing books no one would ever read and composing music no one would ever listen to? What was the point of that? Or anything else?

* 

The disease I was suffering from, depression, is astonishingly common. Almost 10% of Americans are taking anti-depressants right now. In fact, anti-depressants are the most prescribed drug in America. Almost 20% of women between the ages of 40 and 60 take them. And one in five people will eventually experience depression. So, pretty much everyone knows someone who has suffered from this illness.

But there is a level even deeper than the bottomless well of depression. 20% of people diagnosed with major depression (“major” in this case signifies acute, rather than chronic) also develop paranoia or other symptoms of psychosis including delusions and hallucinations. I was one of those people. I was terrified by my diagnosis, not because of the word “depression” – I knew there were treatments available - but because of the word “psychotic”. This was a term I had often used to describe crazy violent people for whom there was no cure. I pondered my possible future life as a babbling derelict. 

The new psychiatric resident assured me that the psychosis of depression and the psychosis of schizophrenia “are completely different disease processes originating in different parts of the brain”. And I knew intellectually that paranoia was misuse of my imagination. It was the dark side of the creativity that had sustained me my entire life. It was creativity as self-torture. But, even though I understood that my internal chemistry was creating false stories to misguide my thinking, I still felt hopeless, dejected, and persecuted. 

Staring through the fog of delusion, I realized that I had finally reached my secret goal of living in a world entirely of my own creation, but not in the way I had intended. I had hoped to spend every day reading my own novels, watching my own movies, laughing at my own animations, and listening to my own music, comforted by a sensible lyrical self-made universe. Instead, I was enwrapt in a vivid nightmare. My own creative thoughts were tormenting me. I couldn't wake up to escape them, and I couldn't sleep to avoid them.

*

The onset of depression is a slow process. One day I stopped reading. The flavor had gone from my favorite activity, so I dropped it. Then I stopped listening to music; it no longer provoked any feelings. I couldn't write anymore; creating worlds had lost its joy. I stopped watching TV and movies; they were pointless and unfulfilling. Everything I loved doing slipped away. I felt like crying all the time. The future turned black. I stopped working. And I hardly slept, so I became sleepy enough at the wheel of the car that I stopped driving for fear of hurting someone. This led to a shut-in's existence. I became what the Japanese call hikikomori – someone so tired of the world or sensitive to its vileness that they have pulled themselves inward and withdrawn from all contact, often never leaving their room.

Paranoia crept in. I thought the backyard garden was somehow being tended at night by persons unknown who were fertilizing and weeding it while I slept. I thought the morning bird calls were synthetically generated. I thought black and white cars were following me. I avoided my computer because I assumed it had been hacked by a malevolent villain who presented bad news to me in order to blame me for something I didn't entirely understand. And I all but stopped eating because I imagined that each food had a particular meaning, incriminating me in some crime. After 3 months I'd lost 30 pounds. 

As the disease progressed, I spent hours at a time in a swimmy somnambulance, as if I'd been drugged. Think of this predicament for a moment. Imagine being unable to read, write, exercise, work, garden, fix things around the house, chat with spouse or friends, eat, sleep, play cards, surf the net, or watch TV or movies. What would you do? Try it for a day. Eventually, I was reduced to pacing the living room, sitting for hours lost in rumination, or trying to sleep and being unable to. I had always thought of a person's mind as their only defense against a hostile world. Now that my mind had abandoned me, the hostile world came pouring in.

I began to develop severe cramps in my abdomen that curled me up like a baby at night. I felt as if I was giving birth. I developed headaches – a malady I'd never been bothered with before. And I became preoccupied with delusions. I imagined my wife had somehow been divided into different people: a 54 year old, a 40 year old, a 30 year old, and a 20 year old. I spent many nights awake, staring at her as she slept, waiting to see if she would switch to a different version of herself.

By summer's end, my existence consisted of getting out of bed, passing like a weary ghost through each day, void of joy or even interest, enveloped in rumination, miserable at the prospect of another excruciating night featuring nothing but heat, pain, and wakefulness. And it all felt as if it was being done to me. Eventually, I ended up just lying in bed staring at the ceiling.

I knew what was in store for me because my wife's brother had died by his own hand after a similar bout of depression. But, through the miasma of pain and woe, I insisted all was well. My family tried intervening to get me to a doctor, but I refused. And, eventually, my wife, conspiring with my doctor, cried as she urged me to go to the hospital for “just an evaluation”, which I assumed consisted of a casual chat in the emergency room followed by a prescription. I ended up in a locked ward in a hospital bed for a week having horrific nightmares as the medicine kicked in while listening to patients cry out at night for help.

I learned that there are three different psych wards in a large hospital: one for schizophrenics, one for depressives, and one for Alzheimer's/dementia patients. Because there were no spots open in the depression ward, they put me in the dementia ward with people twenty years my senior who had much bigger problems than I had. One woman had no family to look after her outside the hospital: no husband, no siblings, no kids, no living relatives, only a friend. Many people had lost all that was important to them in their lives, and were now losing the memories of their own life stories. The place was frightening, humbling, fascinating, and one enormous eye-opening lesson in appreciation for the wife, family, and friends who came to visit me every day or called me on the phone.

By studying the subject of depression, I learned that the trigger can be many years ahead of the expression, so I may never find out what provoked my downward spiral. Genetics probably had something to do with it. A difficult childhood was certainly a factor. But my guess is that trying to be a creative person in a world that consistently crushes or exploits creative people had the most to do with it.

Depression is like being anesthetized then dropped into a bathtub that slowly fills. The water rises to your back, then your sides, then your chin, then your eyes, then over your head, until all you can do is look at the surface above and blink. 

Depression is like having life peeled away from you layer by layer until nothing is left. Wake up one day and there is no literature. The next day music is gone. Then movies disappear, then working, then moving, then talking, until only breathing remains, slow, mechanical breathing.

Depression is like being overcome by an illness, as if a degenerative virus has taken control and sapped the strength of your muscles, then infected your bones, then infiltrated your nerves, and finally seeped into your head so that every part of you is diseased. 

Depression is like becoming a statue. A running animated active body slows down and finally stops. Arms, legs, and mind freeze up. The inner armature stiffens. Movement ceases. A shell forms and hardens until only an effigy remains that is gradually overgrown by vines and bramble. It starts with a slow numbing to the world, a withdrawal, a closing off to pleasure until the mind turns to marble, motion stops, the last spark of optimism is snuffed out, reason is suspended, rigid misery sets in.

Depression is like being a sun that slowly burns itself out, gradually losing the coronal fires, the heat diminishing, the plasma churning less and less every day, cooling to a smoldering ember, the flames snuffing themselves into smoke, and becoming quiet until all that is left is a burnt brown rock that gives no light or warmth, a cold stone floating in limitless space. 

It took time to recover. After the hospital, I went to a two-week out-patient group with other folks also recovering from anxiety or depression. And, a few months after the hospital visit, I was feeling much better. The two drugs they gave me – one for depression, one for psychosis - worked miraculously. The medicine and the realization that I was actually surrounded by people who cared about my welfare set me back on the road to health. The paranoia dissipated. I gained 14 pounds in two weeks. I started reading again. 

I came away with the impression that this could happen to anyone. There's nothing that separates me from the homeless people in the street except a simple exceeded threshold of neurochemicals.

And I received two great gifts from the experience. The obvious one was the realization that I had a wonderful wife, family, and friends who would help me, people I had formerly taken for granted. But the unexpected gift was the experience – because of the anti-psychosis medicine - of becoming a non-creative person for the first time in my life. That encounter with the non-creative worldview was as interesting an experience as the depression and paranoia had been. 

2. My Non-Creative Life

Within a month after starting treatment I had risen from a waking death. I was talking to people, reading, and watching movies again. But the chemical I was ingesting to stave off paranoia had the effect of preventing me from writing stories, composing music, scrawling art, scribbling computer code, building animations, or even thinking creatively. I could ingest the world again while taking the medicine – through books, movies, music, podcasts – but I could not actually produce anything. The portcullis gate had come crashing down. Access to the creative part of my mind had been blocked.

The disease of depression was about closing off inputs. I couldn't read, watch, or listen when depressed. The cure was about re-opening inputs, but closing off outputs. I could take in the world again, but I couldn't write, film, draw, program, or compose. Under the depression, I couldn't take in anything new, but I could still confabulate. Under the cure, I could absorb the world, but I couldn't create any new worlds in my head.

The mechanisms of the brain that allow someone to make up stories in order to become paranoid are the same mechanisms that allow someone to make up stories to write fiction. So, the medicament I took, designed to eliminate the alarming connections of paranoia inside my skull, also eliminated the lyrical connections of story-telling. For the first time in my life I got to feel what it was like to be non-creative.

No more five-new-ideas-before-breakfast. No need to keep a pen and an adding machine scroll of  paper beside the bed to jot down nocturnal inspirations. No more getting up in the middle of the night to write a paragraph that had evolved during the murky half-asleep state. No more days spent in animation development. No more running to the keyboard with a new melody in mind. I stopped composing music. I put aside my novels. I stopped thinking in the way a creator thinks. It was as if half of my mind had been carved away. It was as if I were grounded in the material world for the first time. I began to adopt what I imagine the life experience of most people to be. It was fascinating.

*

I've heard people say, “I don't have a creative bone in my body.” My response to that statement had always been mystification and a shocked wonder at what that must feel like. I thought turning off creativity would be like turning off hunger, joy, or reason. I had experienced exactly that - turning off hunger, joy, and reason - during the depression. But I was still creative then. With depression, I couldn't take in anything new, but I could still confabulate. With treatment, I could absorb the world again, but I couldn't create any new worlds in my head.

This was rather astonishing to me. Ordinarily, I'm only thinly connected to the palpable realm. I live so much inside my own head that the physical world is all but meaningless to me. I eat when I'm hungry. I get cold in the winter. It hurts when I step on sharp rocks in bare feet. But, beyond those links to the realm of atoms and sensation, I don't have much of a relationship to the tangible plain. All of my time is spent with ideas, words, interpretations, interconnections, the embrace of novelty, the prosody of life, everything that is above “the stuff” of existence. I usually live a sort of meta life – in the world, but not of it. For the first time, because of the medicine, I could experience only existence, only “the stuff”.

For a year, I woke up, washed, ate, evacuated, watched movies, chatted with people, watched more movies, poked around in the garden, and slept. Then I got up again the next day and did the same. I had no original thoughts. I wrote nothing. I composed nothing. I invented nothing. I began to wonder if I ever would again. I just walked through life, taking it in, but not putting the pieces together to produce anything new. I responded to the world around me as life happened, but I did nothing more than respond. I thought, “So, this is how other people feel? This is what it's like to not have a creative bone in your body?”

I figured my brain needed time to heal, so I let it heal. And I appreciated experiencing the mental life of an ordinary person. I would not want to live that way forever. But it was restful to live without layers of meaning. Everything was only what it was. I could pick up an orange and think only “orange”. There were no associations, no mental rambling, no blaze of connections, no desire to interpret experience, no wish  to create something new, only the requirement to react to what already existed.

Before I knew it, a year had gone by. I began to taper off the paranoia medicine. And then, one day, I stopped it altogether. The day after stopping, my creative mind switched back on. I returned to my usual state of entertaining 40 ideas at once, all jostling for space in a crowded little wet bone box. 

I'd pick up an orange and review in my head the discovery of sweet oranges in the New World as opposed to the sour oranges from India that Europeans had always known. I'd ponder the differences in the etymology of the word “orange” across all the European languages (many countries refer to it as a Chinese Apple). I'd consider the place the color orange fills on the visible light spectrum, the fact that cats and dogs don't eat the fruit – and don't see the color - because their bodies make their own vitamin C, the use of the peel in cleaning products, the vesicles holding liquid in pouches divided into segments to encourage sloths and mammoths to eat them in Pleistocene America. I'd dwell on the toxic coloring sprayed on the rind by growers who want all the fruit to appear ripe, the carnauba wax coating to seal out air and preserve freshness, our past family experiments with planting the seeds to grow indoor orange trees. And then thoughts would flow to kumquats and other indoor citrus plants we'd grown that were invaded by rancher ants that carried in aphids to suck the sap so the ants could drink their sweet excrement, to the plum curculios attacking the Asian pear trees outside, to the use of chickens to clean the ground of curculios, to ...

It was no longer just “orange” in my head. It was endless layer upon layer of simultaneous meaning. The word itself led in a hundred directions. The idea of the fruit led in a hundred more. The color led to yet another hundred. Everything intertwined. And I could see all the interlacing between the items. It was like looking at fabric that stretched to the horizon: the tapestry of past experiences, the rococo filigree of facts, the warp and woof of book learning, ideas knitted together by other languages, the mesh of mental images, braided databases filled with concepts. And there were countless sheets of this fabric, one of top of the other, each one interwoven with all the others.

With the medicine, an orange was a unitary experience. A thing was only a thing. An idea referred only to itself. A word had one meaning and no connection to any other words. Life was stark and simple.

Without the medicine, it was all a multi-colored rain of associations that poured, spat, gushed, spurt, surged, and inundated the landscape, tumbled, turned into braided streams, cascaded off cliffs, fed tributaries, swelled into rivers, and emptied into an ocean of sensation, memory, abstraction, fact, and imagination. And each raindrop was itself a kaleidoscope, a shifting hologram that held its own image in its separate pieces and recursed back onto itself and then out into the vastness.

Sooner or later, I'm going to long for the simplicity of “orange”. But when the medicine stopped, I leapt aboard ship and began sailing again on a sea of associations. The waves splashed me. I linked together the drops and began inventing things again, spinning stories, tying together melodies, inventing characters and worlds, re-immersing myself in the act of creation. 

Being non-creative meant holding only one thought in my head at a time. Being creative meant having an uncountable number of thoughts and tying them all together to make new thoughts that no one had ever come up with before.

Being non-creative was like listening to one radio station all day. Being creative was like listening to sixty radios at once and making up new songs by dipping into the individual songs being played and selecting out pieces that went together in new compositions.

Being non-creative was like being a lumberjack. I would wake up, see the trees, and cut them down. Being creative was like being both the gardener who plants the acorns and the furniture maker who uses the harvested wood.

Being non-creative meant engaging with the quotidian world on its terms. Being creative meant devising a new world on my own terms.

Being non-creative was like eating and sleeping. Being creative was like having children.

3. The Creative Life

Ride the bus to school and watch the kid drawing manga characters in his notebook. Visit a  grandmother's house and watch her sew a dress for her granddaughter. Observe the people who write stories their whole lives – for no other reason than to write stories. Watch the musicians alone in their rooms experimenting with new guitar riffs, new violins arpeggios, new piano chords, new vocal arrangements. Study the people who, unwilling to wait for a real-world teacher, learn from the internet how to make films, video games, and electronic art.

There are people who dance in their rooms at night, trying out new moves in the mirror. There are people who practice story-telling among friends. There are media artists who can't keep their hands off a new technology, who need to twist it to some artistic purpose as soon as they get their hands on it. There are people who make their own furniture to feel the lines of something that came from their own hands. There are people who blow and spin enough glass ornaments to fill the houses of their relatives. There are people who write the screenplays for the movies they want to act in. Creative people are everywhere. But most of us are invisible to the rest of the world.

*

I am one of millions of people who insert their art forms into the cracks of their daily life. They design and sew their own clothing at night. They compose songs to express their feelings. They draw comics and animations to make the mundane fantastical or the fantastical ordinary. They write books without any audience in mind just to create new worlds. They manipulate photographs because they have the urge to bend reality in a different direction. They fill their closets with water colors because no one will take any more of their paintings. They write fan fiction, invent electronic gadgets, build miniatures, construct robots, act in community theatres, slave over computer programs, and carve decoys, not because they see their obsession as the surest way to get rich, become famous, or entice sexual partners, but because they find a kind of joy and satisfaction in the act of creating that nothing else provides.

I am one of these people – someone who has sat at his sequencer, composing music on a Friday night after work, watching the sun set, dabbling at the keyboard, feeling joy, concentrating, and then looking up to see the sun rising again – so focused on the ecstasy of creation that no memory of time passing remains.

I am one of the people who, while getting paid to write software for financial applications at the state treasury, wrote miniature novels in the comments sections of the computer programs. I would adopt different voices – the cowboy, the cheerleader, the astronaut, the 1940s gangster – and write instructions to fellow programmers in those personae. 

I am one of the people who made up stories for his kids every night – a different story each night,  composed on the fly, weaving details of ordinary life into tales of talking animals and villains who always got their come-uppance.

I am one of the people who carved a wooden Christmas creche using penguins as models instead of people. I am one of the people who made enough money in the stock market one year to quit work and then spent his free time making animations, writing stories, and composing nocturnal jazz until the money ran out. I am one of the people who spent a lifetime choosing jobs, not for the money they brought in, but because they featured a creative element that could be explored. I'm also one of the people who got fired from jobs for being creative instead of political.

I am not famous. You have never heard of me. To the world at large I am invisible. But I am creative. In fact, the vast majority of creative people are invisible. And it's not because they are less talented or less dedicated to their craft than the famous people.

The famous people will certainly claim that talent, hard work, and persistence got them where they are, but there is an enormous amount of serendipity involved in becoming famous that no one talks about. For every famous creative person there are thousands of others with more talent and more dedication who are invisible. They are less pretty than the famous people. They are the wrong color, gender, persuasion, size, age. They live in the wrong place, in cultures that don't value their art, or among non-creatives who are mystified by anyone who spends their time having ideas or perfecting skills that do not lead to money, power, or sexual partners. Does that stop the no-names from being creative? Of course not.

These people are creative in ways that society does not value. But so what? Creativity is its own reward.

[dotthings]

Okay SPN 15.04, here we go, where I feel weirdly self-conscious about posting a meta post about an ep that had so much meta on itself and now I’m going to write meta about it, so it’s meta on meta on meta, while I’m having my feelings.

THAT COLD OPEN HOLY CRAP DIRECTOR JENSEN. As a director Jensen always pulls out warm performances from actors and he’s a really kinetic director too. That opening fight sequence I held my breath for a lot of it. 

BENNY OH NOES IT’S BENNY (this must be the character Jensen said was one of his favorites and the actor came back to set for one day to do it). “I’ll see you on the other side, brother.” Thanks so MUCH, spn, I thought I was over this and then you come in and reopen that and now I’ve got feelings gdi. Benny was a good friend to Dean. My heart hurts. 

Ohshitohshitohshitohshit demon blood Sam. Noooooo. And he kills Dean. I can never erase these images from my mind, thanks a LOT spn. 

Just a nightmare of Sam’s except no probably not given Sam’s god-wound, so wow this maybe happens on one of Chuck’s other worlds, that’s fine, oh that’s okay I’m fiiiiine, it’s fine. *covers face*

So we have a flip on early S14 here where Dean was turtling to cope with his trauma which is a healthy thing to do but hiding from the world wasn’t going to fix anything so Sam coaxes him out with a hunt. Dean coaxes Sam out with a hunt only I don’t think hunting works for Sam the same way, it’s not Sam’s mental comfort food the way it is for Dean, but still I appreciate the mirroring there.

Sam’s struggling with Rowena’s death and I think those horrific AU nightmare visions aren’t helping much either, but it’s clear he’s feeling the loss. Her loss, all the recent losses.

Dean trolls Sam with real bacon, which seems like Dean is maybe trying to cheer Sam up by pranking him and trying to cheer himself up via food pranks. Dean has quite the case of the munchies in this ep. 

I noticed almost every scene Dean is snacking or drinking from his flask. How’s that whole “Cas walked out and left apparently for good” working out for you Dean, wow, you’re suspiciously chipper while stuffing your face and drinking and Not Talking About It. Did Sam and Dean talk about where’s Cas? Who knows, the ep didn’t mention it, hey SPN you needed a Cas mention, OH WAIT THE EP IS GOING TO CALL ME OUT FOR SAYING THAT.

Seriously though, this is very Dean MO, and I have thoughts about his mood in this ep and how Cas’s absence was felt, and what it means, I’ll get to that later, but even before the last scene Impala talk, I was thinking Cas is a reminder of pain--and no it’s not all about Dean’s anger at Cas, it’s not because Dean is angry at Cas. Cas is a reminder of some things Dean just isn’t coping with very well and part of the problem is Dean cares so much. 

So Dean’s snacking and drinking and Sam is feeling the weight of them knowing all the scary things out there while people go on obliviously with their lives and I’m not sure if Sam is envying them or Sam is feeling some existential angst about the state of the world, how people can go about their lives unaware there are real monsters ready to pounce and tear their lives to shreds. And feeling the weight of the job they do in every bone of his body. Sam’s in a dark headspace.

Ok I admit I was not thrilled to see Becky again given her previous episodes and role. SPN’s later in-canon fan characters were much more nuanced and successful and respectful depictions of fans. But as with many other things, this era of SPN is revisiting some things to move them forward in a different way than before, and subvert some things that needed subverting and Becky has had--wait for it--character development. How about that.

Yes, Becky, run, you do not want anything to do with Chuck. Run, Becky run. I’m rooting for her now. RUNNNN.

Along with finding a more constructive way of channeling her interest in the Winchesters’ lives, and having a satisfying fandom creative life and a full life of her own, Becky has funko pops of Sam, Dean, and Cas. LOL. I see you spn. 

Dean, still with the case of the munchies. So this is like the eating a whole pint of ice-cream after a break-up, only Dean does it with junk food while hunting vampires.

I enjoyed this conversation between Becky and Chuck about writing immensely. Becky is actually right. Speaking myself as someone who’s suffered from writers block for a while, it’s miserable, and not writing just perpetuates the cycle. You feel cut off from an important part of yourself. And--oh here we go getting meta within meta--I find writing meta on SPN a positive outlet. 

“Writing is writing.” Damn Becky’s takedown of Chuck’s derisiveness about fanfic was sizzling and oh excuse me Chuck, what is it you think you were doing with those Supernatural books about your favorite story. Even though he’s the creator, I know. But still. Also seems to be a sly comment on how male-authored “fanfic” based on someone else’s characters or historical characters gets to be professionally published novels and nobody wants to admit it’s fanfic but it is, but women write fanfic and women write novels based on someone else’s characters or historical figures and it gets derided. 

Did not expect commentary celebrating the creativity and validity of fanwork of women in particular an episode of SPN, especially not with Becky of all people, but here we are. 

Uhhhh is Chuck writing this episode, as it happens? I am seriously uneasy now. What is going on. What is real. Which is what I think Dean is going through because of Chuck and OUCH the Winchesters think they’re free but they’re not but also they are their own people and Chuck isn’t controlling them but it’s like he’s still making the framework?? Or would this case just be happening on his own and Perez is just messing with our heads in this script right now.

Oh damn because this ep wasn’t sadness enough now here we go with the Jack parallels. “I can’t control this.” “I’m a monster.” “I killed someone I love.” Parents doing anything to save their out of control teenage kid or does he need to be killed, so the parents are Cas, while Sam and Dean are Dean. 

Interesting that Dean lowered the gun and didn’t kill Jack, but tells Sam they would do that for Jack if it was necessary. You didn’t, though, Dean. You couldn’t go through with it any more than those distressed parents of the vampire teen.

Becky is voicing various non-dire fan complaints here, every lane of the fandom is being gently called out right now. Hahaha including lack of Cas mentions in an ep that pointedly is not!Mentioning Cas because it’s not a mistake there’s actually reasons for that which is just lampshading how much Dean is pointedly Not Going to Talk About Cas. 

“Where they sit around doing laundry and talk” -- again every lane of the fandom should feel very called out right now. Seriously, fandom lanes that hate each other’s guts all have that common factor of craving more domesticity, and would like to see the laundry ep of SPN and for many, it has better include Cas, or we’re working through our need for this via fanfics or fanart. Even Jared and Jensen have expressed interest in a “Winchesters do the laundry” kind of episode. 

But here’s the thing--here’s the thing about SPN...it depicts domesticity. In small bits of pieces. Even in this ep there’s domesticity. SO HA. It’s not that SPN is against depictions of domesticity, it’s definitely in the toolset of its storytelling, to give the characters more layers, to make their lives seem more real, but there needs to be mostly an action plot because that’s the genre so they mostly kill monsters and we only get nibbles of domesticity.

Becky and Chuck arguing about Chuck’s incredibly dark story ending, after Becky criticized him for the story not having enough bite, was so interesting. While the episode’s dark story ending was actually quite well done IMO and not overdone and yes it’s bleak but it’s supposed to be. So it’s not that sad is always terrible writing, no. It isn’t. But its overuse has been a raging hot topic in spn fandom for years and SPN is a hopeful narrative as well as a bleak one. Overuse of loss of hope and misery can hurt the story, causes a number of fans to become desensitized and lose their emotional engagement for it (which has happened to be at a couple of points in SPN’s long run). So that conversation interested me a great deal, yes it did.

So.....SPN had its current biggest of the biggest of ultimate big bads, the ultimate power God himself, the author, and made him the enthusiast for overuse of the misery pr0n like that’s the only smart way to tell a story. The season’s big bad villain is a misery porn enthusiast.

I’m just gonna....sit here and absorb that for a moment.

Oh and this while all the PR for the show keeps warning us about how sad this story is and how bleak the ending will be, not a happy ending show. Are they warning us? Are they trolling us and misdirecting? Because they made their villain a misery pr0n fanboy and this intelligent, self-aware positive depiction of Becky the fan taking him to task for it. 

I feel like could be headed for every story needs its darkness and its light, you need the darkness to appreciate the light, and you need some light or the story is less meaningful. We’ll see.

“I’m a writer,” says Chuck and then takes away everyone Becky loves and then unmakes Becky. This is a purposeful depiction of a writer creator as a sadist. It’s a diabolical reversal on the Stephen King’s Misery scenario. Becky played the deranged fangirl in the past, who kidnaps an object of obsession, now she’s the victim of the deranged sadistic writer who breaks into her home, destroys her life, and then effectively kills her because of his own obsession with making Sam and Dean wretchedly miserable because he thinks that’s the only way to make the story exciting.

*blinks*

In the last scene, oh thanks Sam, for vocalizing the Jack connection. 

Hey Dean, that’s really a nice speech and yes Sam did give you a great pep talk but Sam wasn’t the only one who told you what you did still has meaning. This is like 15.01 where Dean is pointedly erasing Cas again despite Cas very obviously having done something Dean refuses to acknowledge. In 15.01 it was Dean leaving Cas out of his us vs the forces of evil speech to Sam, despite Cas having spent most of the ep shooting ghosts in the face and saving Sam’s life twice. Sam and Cas both have given Dean pep talks about the meaning of what they do but only Sam pulled Dean out of it...uhhh yeah that’s not writer error or canon ignoring Cas. That’s Dean trying to push Cas out of his mind. Something there hurts so much Dean isn’t dealing with it right now.

As I said, as I’ve been saying, it’s not so much that Dean is that angry at Cas. It’s not just about Mary. Or about Cas keeping things from him. Although those are all valid reasons for Dean’s hurt and anger. Dean seems to be afraid or hurt over more than that. And his love for Cas, IMO, is part of why this is weighing so heavily. What does he fear. I think it’s connected to the whole existential crisis about Chuck. What if none of this is real. I’ve talked about that in other posts, if none of this is real, if Dean still doubts, then what if what’s between him and Cas isn’t real, what if Cas doesn’t really care about him because none of it real. 

Dean valiantly puts a brave face on things here, they keep going, they keep fighting for the sake of those they lost, no matter what, “keep putting one foot in front of the other.” Which makes sense. That’s how you honor those you’ve lost. It’s just that I don’t think Dean has really reached that. He is Not Dealing with an awful lot of stuff here. And we have seen again and again how hard Dean reels from losing loved ones.  So what’s going on with Dean here. This is a healthy concept, but not if Dean is just whistling past the graveyard again. This might look like character development except look at what’s been going on with Dean. How deeply losing Mary, losing Jack affected him. The impact of those losses needs to be acknowledged and dealt with in order to truly move on and move forward. It’s like Dean is voicing a healthy outlook but isn’t actually experiencing it. I think Dean is posturing because if he lets all the hurt it right now, it will devour him.

There’s also the part where Sam and Dean have in the past displayed a lack of ability to just keep on keeping on if they lose each other, so they used to sell their souls, or violate the other one’s wishes and autonomy, or let the darkness free, but we’ve also seen them let each other go, and “keep putting one foot in front of the other.” Sam and Dean have done both ways with each other. Dean didn’t exactly just keep on keeping on no problem when Cas died at the end of S12.

Sam voices the other side of things, he can’t just move on right now. He’s feeling all the losses. They’ve piled up and piled up and it’s crushing him. Sam says he "can’t breathe” at times. He brings up Jessica, a loss he suffered 14 years ago. 

So Sam and Dean are airing the two aspects of loss and grief on SPN. One the one hand, you don’t just give up and quit because of loss. Honor who you’ve lost and keep on fighting. But losses are deeply felt, and it’s not all okay either. Sam and Dean don’t just shrug off these losses because they have each other. That’s not how this works. They need more than just each other and SPN is increasingly having more and more open dialogue about all of this.

S15 so far has been so much about the impact losing people they love has on Sam and Dean, and why their isolation isn’t a good thing. 

And there’s Chuck, the big bad, typing away to add more misery. Because Chuck gets off on giving them loved ones and taking them away, over and over and this isn’t presented as a good thing or a satisfying thing or a desirable thing or a celebration of anything. 

[ghostmartyr]

How do you think the story Will end? I read comments from Reddit and other sources that some fans want Eren to succeed to destroy the rest of the world ( if that's his actual goal), but I wonder. Would that contradict the themes of the story and send a very bad message considering the WW2 parallels.

It is quite the conundrum.

I don’t think you can unring this bell.

The manga has made it very apparent that genocide is bad.

The manga has made it very apparent that genocide is not a deterrent to more genocide.

Paradis being the last island standing, bringing the story back to these humans being the only ones left alive, carries no promise of a better world. All it means is that this is the group that had the biggest stick last.

The story can go for that, if that’s what it wants, but calling that a downer is being soft. It would be retaining the status quo in a series where the protagonists are consistently the ones who disrupt the status quo and its complacency. It continues the cycle of human beings growing accustomed to their evils until enough people are upset enough that they try to fight those evils –

Only in a world that has already made it clear that those people lose. Its thesis would become, yes, there are always people who will rise up and fight oppression. They’re just as powerless against it as the people who got used to it.

You can technically do that, but spending over a decade explaining that inaction and action are both pointless against the written-in-stone fate of humanity being awful is, uh. Dumb? Of course they couldn’t win, the author said they couldn’t? That’s not a story, that’s someone beating up their OCs for giggles and entrenched emo feelings.

Which. Valid, if you want to do that. I guess. But tricking me into being in the room for it seems rude.

More importantly, that’s just not what the story has ever been about. It has always been about the opposite of what all that just described. And how to change the world, you need to actually change things, and not just commit genocide until an outcome you find livable crops up.

So with the starting point of genocide being bad, the manga very loudly shouting how genocide is bad and will continue even after Eren, the protagonist, commits a genocide, where are we?

Stopping Eren.

Okay, cool.

Ignoring how for right now, what then?

The rest of the world just forgets how this power exists, and before Eren started using it they all voted the island off the island? After a hundred years of hating Paradis for no reason, they change their views now that they’ve been presented with an active reason? After a hundred years of persecuting Eldians in the name of a dead empire, they start being nicer to them after an Eldian tries his damnedest to create a new one?

Because what, nice Eldians exist? It was all the fault of the big bad Eren that gigantic man-eating monsters tried to destroy the world? This will have no influence over our racial prejudices whatsoever because we all know that Eren was just being a dick?

Probably not.

What else we got?

Well, we have Eren.

Who is either having the world’s most dramatic meltdown, or has a plan.

Considering he’s the one with the turn on the reality-bending superpowers right now, let’s say he has a plan, and we’re not going to reduce the plot magic to end all plot magic to a bunch of giants stomping things. Plus a decent radio.

So we have our protagonist with plot magic.

Which someone certainly needs in order to make any of this work out, because in other news, our protagonist has fucked everything up so badly that no one else can fix it at this point.

Isayama has taken too realistic a view of how people are capable of being complete bastards for this to end with Eren’s villainy uniting the world. It’s not united. It’s more angry and afraid than ever, save for the old island people Eren hated shrugging and going about their new daily life.

Again we find ourselves turning to magic for a solution.

We just honestly don’t have anything else.

So, since Code Geass is too blindingly, appallingly whatever the hell it is to be the option anymore, we turn to Eren going full Madoka.

Note how the Zero Requiem option at least had the decency of sort of explaining what the hell Eren thinks he’s doing. The Madoka option sort of shrugs aimlessly at the camera and tells you to be happy it’s better now.

Then we get into wild theorizing, and as for me, I think that Eren is going to use Paths in some way to contact the original Thing that OG Ymir met, and then force the ability to turn into a titan on every single human being on the planet.

Cue magic radio powers and Eren telling them that they’re all cursed now, and isn’t this fun.

Then he just keeps everyone on the planet a titan for a few dozen years until he’s decided that they’ll all just be grateful to be sentient when he turns them back, and that should put an end to Paradis being in so much danger.

What I’m getting at is that I have no fucking clue what’s going to happen.

Here’s what I have as the relevant canon facts to Eren’s Super Secret Plan:

He’s doing everything he can to piss everyone off, including people like Zeke, who nearly ended up getting what he wanted because Eren is so fucking bad at this.

He left Floch in charge.

To review, “everything” includes Floch, and “everyone” includes the entire world.

Literally no one is happy with him except the people voted most likely to commit the next genocide, and the one true thing Eren has said recently is that he’s putting an end to that fuckery.

He’s doing a very bad job.

-hands him his gold star-

Who knows what he’s doing but he’s inarguably trying very hard to do whatever it is.

With occasional crying over it.

Someone in his memories has contact with the little refugee boy.

Someone in his memories remembers a scene with Historia that we have not seen.

To summarize a little better, Eren is doing everything he can to infuriate everyone, and he has two unexplained memory shards in the unbiased narrative portrayal of his mental interior.

I would argue that the moment with the little kid is unexplained because it’s a central moment, and the only time we see Eren specifically around the kid, it’s at the party.

Patch together whatever you can from that information.

He has the power of a god, and so far he’s using it to having a bunch of toys stomp the ground loudly and threateningly while he makes everyone who ever cared for him furious and hurt and throws everyone who hadn’t heard of him before Paths Radio into some form of extremism.

Even if you argue there’s a logic to it, his grand plan results in him getting his head shot off.

This train is not guided by logic, it’s guided by desperation, and that’s even less helpful as far as a reliable predictor of behavior.

...Getting back to the actual ask, I think the story will end brightly. Maybe the characters we love won’t be around to see it, but I honestly believe that we’re getting a thematically happy ending.

And I only inject “thematically” in there because I suspect people find my ceaseless optimism annoying when it’s left untempered.

This story is not as dark as its reputation and horrific moments would have you believe. It’s about tiny, weak humans trying to be better.

Eren might end this world, but if he does, I don’t see it happening without a renewal. An actual renewal, not just Floch giggling atop a castle because he’s king of the mountain.

Because this manga has one very plain take on genocide:

No.

The story can’t have a bleak ending without demolishing its themes.

I have no idea how it gets to any other kind of ending, but I’m betting on it.

Thanks for the ask.