#just so i could confirm if a character who lived in poverty would be surprised

[priceofblindeye]

The Riddler is an Alt Right terrorist!

POST SUMMARY AT THE VERY END for those who don't want to read all of this! Alt right terrorism is so deep rooted in white supremacy, racism, sexism, homophobia, and anything and everything that "endangers their traditional values", this entire claim is INCREDIBLY far off. Now that i've said that, I can reassure you guys that this is not going to be a post justifying Edward Nashtons behavior. This will also not be a post claiming that he is an alt right terrorist. I'm going to be discussing some information about Edward Nashton, quoting Matt Reeves, and explaining the depths of this character that must have been missed by the average viewer. Recently, on Tiktok, I've become more and more aware of judgement towards the people who claim they relate to the new Riddler. There's a lot of shame pushed onto those who could possibly empathize with this character. There are frequent comparisons to the very typical "joker guy" meme that blew up after a lot of toxic masculine batman fans had adopted the persona of the Joker and used their mental health issues as excuses for harmful behaviors. While I can already see a lot of romanticized red flags of Edward Nashton (stalking, non-con, dead dove fics, etc) this does not mean that Edward Nashton is canonically the scum of all characters and therefore means whoever likes him, is too. Maybe you guys should get some therapy though.. Let me start off by saying that Edward Nashton/The Riddler in the Batman 2022 is literally intended to be the opposite of the Batman. For those who don't know.. Edward Nashton was born into a family of lower class, this was only implied later on when he lives in an orphanage, because he was unfamiliar with the idea of having so much wealth. In the book, "Before the Batman", we learn that Edward Nashton used to look up to the Waynes, but eventually was very envious of them. He had to constantly walk by the portrait of Thomas, Martha, and Bruce. Wealthy people who'd never experienced any of the hardships he'd already faced by the age of no older than 12 years old. In the movie, we learn that the orphanage was overcrowded, thirty kids to a single room. This shouldn't be a surprise with how many men, women, and adults are likely murdered or die of poverty, illness, and neglect. When Edward mentions that in the winter it got so cold, the babies would die? How did this happen? The movie talks about how the Renewal fund was basically going to help support the city and those that need financial assistance. It could pay for Orphans schooling, the bills to maintain the orphanage, food and supplies, and even extra activities like giving those kids a genuine childhood. Yet all of the Mob, the GCPD, everyone took advantage of it. When Thomas Wayne died, the GCPD and Falcone took control and kept the money for themselves, because the money they made from illegal drug trade wasn't satisfying enough. When the Waynes had died, everyone forgot about the Renewal Funds purpose and the promise that Thomas Wayne intended to fulfill.. This made everyone blind to the reality that it was being misused. "At least the money makes it go down easy." For finances, Edward as a teenager had to bike all through Gotham City delivering food just to make money to support himself and go to college. Edward Nashton is HEAVILY autsitic/adhd implied. In "Before the Batman" it was confirmed Edward Nashton did not do well in school yet he was very smart. Most typically, people with learning disabilities like ADHD are very smart but do not do well in school because the american education system caters to neurotypical kids. This is why he turns to puzzles. Quoted by Paul Dano in one of his interviews, that the only validation and success he ever got was through solving things like riddles and puzzles. "The Riddler is a person who is fed up, he's done. He's probably blamed himself for a lot of the failings in his life. He sees that maybe it wasn't all his fault." Edward Nashton went to college, while Bruce Wayne traveled the world, going to college after college for a short amount of time

learning different things. This fueled Edwards hatred for Bruce, because he

had the wealth to just throw away to pay for full tuition, just to not stay for the entirety of them. Edward then moved on to begin working as a forensics accountant. For those who don't know, this job was taken on by Edward because he viewed it as solving a mystery. The job of a forensics accountant is to look into fraudulent charges, and other illegal acts involving money. This job was likely how he became more aware of the abuse of the Renewal Fund and followed the breadcrumb trails that unmasked what was really happening in the city. All this being said, there's no possible way you could say that you wouldn't be incredibly pissed at least, that your entire life was been screwed over because of some greedy adults who wanted the money that was meant for you and a lot of other kids. Especially not when you've witnessed this greed literally take the lives of kids who never had a chance given to them. There's a lot of trauma and mental illnesses that could be developed just looking at the surface level of the shit that Edward Nashton had to go through growing up. This in particular, fueled Edward Nashtons motives. The motives that prove he is not an alt right terrorist. Edward Nashton is the embodiment of a revenge arc similar to Cruella, Glass, or Terminal, but he goes too far and puts innocent lives in danger. The story of a person growing up in miserable conditions because of money, or lack of, because of rich mens greed, (implied) ableism, untreated mental illness, and the affects of trauma gained at a young age is absolutely a story that i'd expect people to enjoy and relate to. The line is drawn however, when Edward Nashton intends to kill Bella Real, and flood the city. This is the terrorism that is very much a toxic part of the character that is not okay to be romanticized. This is what a majority of people who call Edward Nashton an incel, or alt right terrorist seems to fear will be praised and romanticized. What he does is not racially motivated at all, nor is it ever meant to be an act on enforcing white supremacy ideology. Edward displays the ideology of a Left Extremist. This dramatically changes the character and affects what community he draws in. Edward Nashton appeals to the community most likely because majority know he's the product of a very damaging childhood. Especially in a time where money and the accumulation of wealth being hoarded by corrupt individuals has been so incredibly prominent and a leading cause of struggle in our real world. Allowing a very neurodivergent, queer implied character to be admired and embraced by a community cannot be harmful so long as there is no erasure of the wrongs he has done, just as embracing Darth Vader, Arthur Fleck, or Loki as a beloved villain. All of these villains have varying levels of realism to their methods and attacks they've done as the villains of their stories, just as Edward Nashton does. So where do these fans get the idea that Edward is an Alt right terrorist? Edward Nashton is a white, cisgender man. Because they see someone in a messy, small apartment who's mentally unwell, and using the internet to connect with other civilians to organize criminal activity, these fans might likely take those traits that we as a society see come from racist, privileged white men most often, and focus on those rather than the overall picture. However, there seem to be some misconceptions about him that should be addressed. 1. He is not from a privileged background, and he is implied to be disabled. Take with that what you will. I'll be making a MASSIVE post about my psychological analysis of Edward Nashton later. 2. I believe that because of the consistency that men are often excused after reacting or behaving violently over any small inconvenience in their life, this is what people are afraid of and therefore automatically view him the same as many of the men they've personally witnessed behave in such a way. What people are missing, is this behavior that Edward has shown is the product of enduring traumatizing hardships his entire life. The fear

that

men will completely misinterpret the character is valid. Any misinterpretation of the character at all is a valid reason of concern. 3. Edward Nashton has looked at and admired Batman, a vigilante who gets praise to some degree by brutally beating and attacking criminals. He's using fear to scare people out of the toxic, damaging, and ruthless methods they've picked up to survive living in Gotham City, a city that is not taken care of by the higher ups and political figures. The city that is run by a crime boss! Edward Nashton saw someone doing this, and was influenced by what he viewed as a hero, to go a step further and target the real problem. At the end of the day, Bruce Wayne was only hurting people who'd been given no other choice. Like Selina says, Bruce must have come from a wealthy background to believe that some people CHOSE to live a life of crime. He wasn't fixing the issue. Edward targeted the real criminals, gathered evidence, and then went a couple steps further than the Batman. That doesn't justify his actions, but it does show how much Bruce didn't know. After all, the biggest message from the movie was"don't idolize someone until you truly know and understand them." That being said, WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE ENJOY THE VILLAINS? Usually the people who enjoy villains are labelled as Villain Apologists! What is a villain apologist? A villain apologist is someone who excuses horrible behavior that villainous characters have done. In all honesty, fans of villainous characters are commonly mistaken as villain apologists. Most cases of villain apologists i’ve witnessed revolve around the Joker of all villains. He���s done almost every possible thing a bad guy could do, and a lot of very disgusting people often time idolize him. There's a real psychological study that I'm going to copy paste, and summarize, done by Science Connected Magazine that I think should be read! People care about their self-image and tend to see themselves in a positive way. Moreover, they try to avoid any negative associations that would damage their self-image. In this case, the researchers explored whether people favored villains as a safe way to explore darker traits or actions without fear of judgment. For example, Harry Potter quickly denied any similarity in personality traits with Lord Voldemort when Voldemort said that he and Harry were very much alike. In fact, people try to avoid any information that would jeopardize their positive image of themselves. But would it feel as threatening to be compared to a villain in a different universe, such as Magneto from X-Men?

The researchers predicted that story villains would provide an outlet to explore a darker version of themselves that would be immoral to act out in real life.

Fictional stories of villains may provide a safe haven for you to explore a darker side of your personality. This sense of safety may come from the fact that there is a psychological distancing between you and the villain. While you may fantasize about killing your bullies, you know you aren’t a murderer like the Joker. To test this idea, the researchers looked at whether people were still interested in villains when their sense of safety was threatened.

In a low-threat scenario, each participant was asked to rate their interest in a movie in a hypothetical situation where they would be watching it alone. The researchers compared their responses to their answers regarding a high-threat scenario; participants rated their interest in seeing the movie on a first date rather than alone. The researchers predicted that the context of watching the movie on a date would influence their choices in the next activity.

Next, the participants received a text message from a “close friend” with a screenshot of a movie and a message comparing the person with the movie villain. Afterward, the participants rated their interest in watching the movie with someone. The study revealed that the perceived higher threat of a first date made people less likely to choose the movie if the villain reminded someone else of them. Interestingly, people were more inclined to choose a movie that had a villain with a similar personality to their own if they were going to watch the movie by themselves. This study adds to earlier findings that people feel safe exploring villains that remind them of themselves, as long as it can be done privately." In summary, The Riddler and majority of villains will be looked at and likely empathized with because of the person looking at them! If a friend was connecting with Loki because of a terrible relationship with their family, their connection doesn't mean they'd stab their brother, betray you any chance they get, or try to destroy a whole planet. Look at it from a more empathetic stand point, as cringey as it may be for someone to really dislike a character. There should be no shame put on anyone who likes Edward Nashton or finds him fascinating. If someones love for the character concerns you, all you need to do is ask them how they view the character. If they praise his terrorist motives, then clearly they're someone to worry about. It's 2022, and we're just beginning to see the end of a pandemic that has torn down our mental health with a lot of traumatizing events. Many of us no longer have the ability to mask the traits of mental health issues, disabilities, and some have even discovered personality disorders. Connecting with a fictional character shouldn't be something that's frowned upon, unless that character was a literal n*zi, r*pist, or predator. If someone does not desire to associate with you because of the characters you enjoy, they're not worth keeping around. if you truly cannot accept that someone likes a character, then there's no need to enforce others to hold the same ideals, or make humiliating, shameful posts on social media normalizing bullying behavior. I've gone on long enough about this, and realized I have many articles I'm going to have to write to ensure this one isn't too long and spirals off on a bunch of different topics. SUMMARY!: Edward Nashton is a left extremist. He's incredibly traumatized, which explains why people may relate to him. Most typically, people who relate to villains with tragic backstories will relate due to their ability to see themselves, and to blur or ignore the evil behaviors the characters exhibit from pushing them away from the character or finding that their connection is worrisome, because it should be a given that the person would not mirror the characters toxic traits. It's best to acknowledge the flaws of a character, and to not erase them. Call someone out if they are showing toxic signs of connecting with a character. (Claiming they ARE the character, using the character to excuse harmful behavior, etc.) Thanks for coming to my TED Talk!

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 300: Days of Our Todorokis

Previously on BnHA: Hawks was all “hey Jeanist, wanna go on a road trip with me to my mom’s house?” Jeanist was all “you know it,” and so they hopped into Jeanist’s jercedes and took off. Hawks took a nap and had a flashback to his Dickensian childhood living in a abject poverty with his jerk mom and jerk dad, thinking heroes were make-believe until one day Endeavor arrested his dad and Baby Hawks was all “OH SHIT.” And then he saved a bunch of people, and the HPSC was all “what do we have here,” and blah blah blah, you know the rest. Back in the present, Hawks was all “well my life is currently in shambles, but on the plus side there’s no one bossing me around anymore so that’s pretty cool,” and then decided he was going to talk to Endeavor. Fandom was all “I can’t believe Hawks would side with his childhood hero over the man who burned his wings off and posted a video calling him a violent murderer who took after his abusive dad,” so that was fun and stuff. I can’t wait to see what piping fresh takes this new chapter will bring.

Today on BnHA: Our old friend Carbonation Carl tries to loot a Starbucks and gets his ass kicked by a senior citizen. Society is all “YEAH, WE’RE REALLY STARTING TO GET SICK OF THIS SHIT.” Old Man Samurai is all “this room won’t stop me because I can’t read it” and abruptly decides to retire, which, fun fact, is literally THE LEAST HELPFUL THING ANYONE HAS EVER DONE. Anyway so then a bunch of other punkasses follow suit, and while I won’t say that I’m actually starting to root for Stain to kill some peeps, just for the record I’m not not saying that either. Back in the hospital, Endeavor cries some tears because his life sucks, and then is confronted by his entire family, LED BY QUEEN REI, FIRST OF HER NAME, BACK IN BUSINESS AND LARGE AND IN CHARGE. Rei is all “fuck feeling sorry for yourself, we have a rogue Murder Son on the loose” and I swear to god I have never felt so alive.

so here we go! and just for the record, even though the last two chapters have been phenomenal, I don’t necessarily have any sky-high expectations for chapter 300, mostly because chapters 100 and 200 consisted of Mei Boobs, and Toadette and her horrific quirk lmao. so go ahead Horikoshi, what are you gonna pull out of your hat for this one

oh, back to this stuff again. sob

I guess there was only so much time we could spend having hospital antics and exploring Hawks’s past before we got back to dealing with the whole “the world has gone to absolute shit” issue huh, lol

omg

what’s with these bizarrely cute Noumus. why do I want to pet them

so the narrative text is going on about how people have been super paranoid about the Noumu ever since the USJ incident a year ago. so yeah, I guess the fact that there are now a bunch of them confirmed to be running around is really freaking people out even on top of everything else

wtf is happening here

what did this poor lil glass ever do to anyone. r.i.p.

OH MY FUCKING GOD

SODA SAM IS BACK ON THE LAM

tsk tsk tsk. my man has graduated from snatching purses to raiding cafes. going after that big money. this man has no business sense whatsoever lmao

OH BUT WATCH IT NOW!!

OH SNAP THE PEOPLE ARE FIGHTING BACK. WHATCHA GONNA DO NOW SAM

THIS MAN IS 172 YEARS OLD AND HE’S NOT HERE TO PLAY GAMES!!

WTF IS HE LIGHTING THIS THING ON FIRE OR SOME SHIT. GETTEM GRANDPA YEAHHHH HE’S CHARGING AT EM YEAHHHHHH

lmao so that was fun. and now we’re cutting to Wash!! omg. look at him

he’s so dedicated. too bad you don’t have a car like Best Jeanist. probably takes a while when you’re just running everywhere

you see?? you were too slow!!

NOOOO, GRANDPA. he defeated Pepsi Pete, but lost his life in the process. this is too tragic

anyway so the good news is that the cafe has been saved! but the bad news is, there really isn’t much of a cafe left. huh. I guess that’s one of the reasons why people are supposed to get a license to use their quirks like this

oh snap and now everyone is coming outside, and they’re none too happy to see poor old Wash over here

seriously Wash, get a bicycle or something. also the way this guy is gesturing so dramatically with his hand in this sort of “YOU SEE!! YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS!!” manner is sending me

OH MY GOD

HE SPEAKS. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS. IT MEANS JEANS PUNS ARE YESTERDAY’S NEWS, FOLKS!! MAKE WAY FOR THE LAUNDRY PUNS. CAN’T WAIT TO WATCH THIS ALL... UNFOLD

“the heroes had dwindled away” okay real talk you guys, it is literally only a matter of time before they press-gang the children into picking up their slack. I still don’t know how to feel about that, but it is happening one way or the other regardless. Child Soldiers 2 Electric Boogaloo. wonder if we’ll see a rise in vigilante action as well

OHO WHAT’S THIS? THIS IS A CHAPTER OF GRANDPAS HUH

-- no fucking way

WOW. WOW. WOWWWWWW

wow. so he didn’t do a fucking thing while the rest of the top ten were being turned into red mist in the previous arc, and now that it’s all over and they need his help more than ever, he decides... THAT IT’S TIME TO RETIRE. holy shit. “fuck you” doesn’t even begin to cover it my guy. you stand there and soak up those boos you coward

ohhhhhhh shiiiiit you guys. oh shit

the “I am not here” breaks my fucking heart for real though y’all. oh man. everything he worked for is gone just like that

(ETA: okay so a couple of the takes I’ve seen on this make it seem like All Might is somehow the bad guy here?? “this is what happens when society puts a bunch of glorified cops on a pedestal”, “finally the cracks in hero society are showing”, etc. etc. so, just a friendly reminder that this isn’t happening because of too much trust and a lack of critical thinking; this is happening because the villains killed all the heroes and broke a bunch of murderers out of jail. it’s happening because an organized league of terrorists succeeded in terrorizing, and so society is now understandably awash in fear and panic. like, it’s just wild to me that AFO is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, and yet week after week fandom still has their “IT’S ALL THE HEROES’ FAULT” signs still up on their lawns. BUT WHATEVER, MOVING ON.)

also though, so exactly how much time is passing here now? I wanted to go straight back to the hospital and see what happens with Deku and the Todorokis. please don’t tell me we’re jumping ahead sob. my aaaaangst

OH SHIT

STAIN. LISTEN UP BUDDY. I KNOW WE’VE HAD OUR DIFFERENCES, AND I STILL DESPISE YOU FOR CRIPPLING TENSEI AND TRYING TO KILL MY BEST BOY TENYA. BUT AS IT HAPPENS, THERE ARE ONE OR TWO OTHER HEROES OUT THERE NOW WHO I WOULDN’T MIND YOU PAYING A VISIT I’M JUST SAYING

LOL BUT IT ACTUALLY ISN’T THIS MAN, FFFFFF

sob. yeah I was talking about Old Man Samurai actually but YEAH. HEY THERE ENJI

also is this entire hospital actually run by characters from Super Mario Bros though. first Yoshi and now this guy, come the fuck on that is not a coincidence

lmao they stuck him in another one of these cavernous creepy hospital rooms

wtf is it with Horikoshi and these giant fucking rooms lately. Kacchan’s in chapter 298, then Tomie’s colossal house furnished with like one table and a TV, and now this. and the weirdest thing about it though is that “huge space with nothing to fill it up” is like the exact opposite of what you’ll usually find in Japanese homes lol

so now Enji is just sitting there thinking things like “my head is fuzzy” and “I’m alive” lmao okay. not quite all there yet, huh. I’ll give you a minute

I’m so fucking curious as to who his first visitor is going to be omg. either way it’s going to be interesting af, and either way fandom is probably going to feel some way about it but OH WELL

okay now his thoughts are getting more coherent! and he’s remembering Touya, and feeling regret for freezing up and forcing Shouto to deal with everything instead

!!! OH HERE GOES BRACE YOURSELVES Y’ALL IT’S ABOUT TO GET SPICY

NO TOUYA PLEASE DON’T CRY HONEY NO PLEASE

ohhhhhhh man

okay, I mean I didn’t expect you to, but so instead then you’re just going to do... what? lie there and wallow in regret and self-pity for the rest of your life? son you know that’s not how we deal with our problems here in Shounen

though also, I totally do get it though. honestly, thinking on it, I probably would have been disappointed with any other response. but so this is where the rest of his family (including his adopted son) come into play now though, because like it or not they’re all in this thing together. and so friends, I am once again asking you WHO IS GOING TO BE THE ONE TO VISIT ENJI FIRST

AHHHHHHH

KRANCH!!!! OMG AND THE OTHERS ARE SO TINY NEXT TO HIM THAT I ALMOST DIDN’T SEE THEM AT FIRST. IT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE TWENTY MILES AWAY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS REGULATION HOCKEY RINK OF A ROOM

holy shit I’m so excited lkjlklhlglkasdsjldfk

SDKFJLSKHLKJL

the way she has him by his collar lmaoooo. “lol nah you’re not going anywhere pal.” damn straight, siblings have to be ride or die in situations like this. banding together for survival. strength in numbers

OH MY STARS I’M JUST WARNING YOU NOW THAT I’M ABOUT TO DISSECT EVERY LAST REMAINING PANEL OF THIS CHAPTER PROBABLY YOU GUYS. WE COULD BE HERE A WHILE

love how Fuyu has absolutely no idea how to segue into THE SINGLE MOST AWKWARD CONVERSATION SHE’S EVER HAD, so she just GOES FOR IT in pure small talk mode like they’re meeting up for brunch somewhere

I KNOW IT’S A SMALL THING, BUT I APPRECIATE THAT THE FIRST THING ENJI ASKS IS WHETHER THEY’RE OKAY

lastly while I can’t wait for more of this delicious Natsu angst, I also just have to say that Enji has as much reason to cry right now as anyone on the planet. you can’t deny that being confronted by your not-dead-but-you-thought-he-was-dead son who’s all “SURPRISE DAD I GREW UP TO BE A MASS MURDERER AND I HATE YOU AND EVERYTHING IS ALL YOUR FAULT AND NOW I’M GONNA MAIM YOUR OTHER KID” with a side order of “EVERYONE HATES YOU AND SOCIETY IS CRUMBLING AND NOTHING WILL EVER BE GOOD EVER AGAIN” is enough to bum pretty much anyone out. there’s a Pagliacci the Clown joke here somewhere. BUT DOCTOR, I AM THE NUMBER ONE HERO

oh man lol he is seriously falling apart

damn. like you guys, I’m sorry, go ahead and cancel me, but I do feel compassion for the man. it’s therapeutic for me to see an abuser actually feel remorse and be truly sorry and want to change and want to make it up to his family. and it’s also compelling as fuck to read a narrative about a family that’s trying to grapple with that, because let me tell you straight up, as someone who’s done a version of that song and dance -- it is exhausting. it is a piping hot mess. it’s a gigantic mishmosh of extremely volatile emotions that all somehow all contradict one another. love, hurt, hope, anger, betrayal, resentment, attachment, longing. it’s something you can both be desperate for and also want nothing at all to do with. and attempting to portray all of that and write about it is a monumental task, and one which Horikoshi has done so, so delicately thus far, and damn but I appreciate it. anyway, so I’m here and I’m ready for my latest helping of Todoroki Fam Feels you guys

GASP

oh man. OHMANOHMANOHMAN. CAN IT REALLY BE. IS THIS THE REDEMPTION ARC OF CHAPTERS 100 AND 200???

LMAO SHE’S ALL “WE ALL FEEL BAD YOU JACKASS STOP CRYING ABOUT IT”

LAY INTO HIM REI!! SORRY ENJI YOUR PITY PARTY HAS BEEN CANCELLED IN FAVOR OF A “SO WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT” PARTY COURTESY OF QUEEN ELSA OVER HERE. THE PEOPLE TOOK A VOTE AND WE WANT LESS WHINING AND MORE ACTION

oh my god look at this lady folks

NOTE THE HAIR BLOWING IN THE NONEXISTENT WIND. NOW WE KNOW WHERE SHOUTO GOT THIS POWER FROM

(ETA: btw guys, seeing Rei handle this crisis like an absolute champ despite everything she’s been through is everything, though. I’m reminded of Hawks’s line last week about people sometimes unexpectedly finding liberation when they’re backed into a corner. like things may be shit but goddammit her kiddos need her.)

THE CHAPTER IS ALREADY ENDING SOB, IT’S ONLY A 17-PAGER THIS WEEK, BUT GODDAMN WHAT A WAY TO CLOSE

oh my god. oh my god oh my god. AND FUCK YOU HORIKOSHI FOR CUTTING IT OFF THERE sob. it’s like each week the wait for the next chapter becomes more painful. the Todofam is about to get real, and on top of that Hawks is gonna crash the party at some point down the line, and on top of that we’re still waiting for Kacchan to have his own heartfelt discussion about What The Fuck Are We Supposed To Do Next with his best friend who’s currently in a coma. all I want to do with my life is read about these three things, and all I can do is simply wait as they are portioned out in agonizing, addicting little installments every week

anyway! tune in next time as we answer the question of whether or not fandom will finally run its train of logic all the way through to its natural conclusion and somehow manage to cancel Noted Abuse Apologist Todoroki Fucking Rei. don’t act like it can’t happen. you all know nothing is sacred lol. anyways but I’m ready for anything lol, bring it

[cosmicjoke]

Alright, chapter 133 of SnK!

I’ve got a few things I want to talk about here.

One of the things that always strikes me about Levi as a character, indeed, one of his defining character traits, is his coolness under pressure.  His calm demeanor, no matter the circumstances.  One of the interesting things to go into is WHY Levi is like this.  

We see it particularly exemplified in this chapter, I think, and there’s a few examples.  For one, they’ve all just lost Hange as their friend and Commander, and this loss particularly impacts and affects Levi, since he was closer with Hange than any of them.  But rather than allowing his grief to consume and paralyze him, Levi immediately begins trying to contribute when Armin says he wants to go over the plan, bringing up Hange’s theory about Zeke and how killing him might stop the Rumbling, etc...  Then Eren transports them to Paths, and everyone reacts with shock and awe, except Levi, who’s expression is duly unimpressed and unsurprised.  We see this from Levi throughout the series, of course.  Situations that present themselves, new and frightening circumstances which throw everyone for a loop and send people into panic, Levi reacts to with calm collectedness, a distinct LACK of surprise or fear.  He really does stand in sharp contrast with everyone else in this situation.  Everyone there is a seasoned war veteran, at this point, they’ve all been through and seen some truly horrific things.  But they still react with a kind of frantic uncertainty here.  They then begin to plead with Eren, Armin and the rest trying to convince him through any means possible, to stop the Rumbling.  They try to bargain with him, show him empathy, make promises, etc...  They make their desperation obvious by saying whatever they think will appeal to Eren.  Levi is the only one who, I think, is fully honest here.  He tells Eren that if he stops now, he’ll let him off with JUST an ass-kicking.  Levi doesn’t try to placate Eren, or show him sympathy, or empathy, he doesn’t try to be gentle or handle Eren with kid gloves.  He tells him flat out he’s going to beat his ass for what he’s done, but he’ll show him some leniency for stopping by not killing him outright.  The thing is, I think Levi’s known from the start of this whole disaster that talking to Eren wasn’t going to work.  Everyone else was holding out hope that if they could just speak with Eren, he would stop, that they could convince him through words.  But like I talked about in my last post, Levi is someone who’s just seen and experienced too much of life’s brutality and unfairness to blind himself to bleak reality.  When the 104th goes running off after Eren appears to them, to try and reach him, Levi just sits down in the sand and has that resigned expression once more, and his expression continues to show a total lack of surprise when Eren puts the 104th back where they started, before they could ever even get close. Levi isn’t surprised, or even dismayed, I don’t think, at Eren’s refusal to talk, because I think he always knew he wouldn’t be willing to.  That he wouldn’t be interested in hearing anyone’s pleas or promises.  I think Levi always knew Eren was hellbent on this course of action, and it was more or less hopeless, trying to appeal to him.  And once again, I have to restate, I think it’s because Levi’s just experienced too much hardship in his life to cling to false hopes.  He’s world-weary and in many ways a realist, someone not given to delusion or fancy.  

I feel like Levi probably glimpsed this uncompromising, hellish bent in Eren back in Liberio, his mercenary compulsion to follow through on whatever plan he had, which is why Levi was so disgusted by him on the airship back then.  He saw a lack of mercy in Eren, and it reminded him of the brutes Levi grew up with in the Underground.  Not just a willingness, but a desire to take from others to satisfy himself.  It’s why, when they’re all transported back to the plane, while everyone else looks horrified and in shock at Eren’s refusal to talk, Levi looks as unflustered as ever, and states with a matter of fact tone that negotiations are over, before asking Armin what it is they do now.  None of this is surprising to Levi.

Levi’s look of despair throughout this final arc continues to strike me as his resignation in the ugliness of humanity and the useless, pointless suffering they inflict on one another.  He’s depressed, and disappointed, because everything happening around them is only a confirmation of all the worst things Levi saw and experienced, growing up.

All this ties into another point I want to discuss, which is Levi’s relationship with Jean, actually.  I’ve found the relationship between the two of them really interesting since way back in the Uprising arc, when Jean was the most vocal in condemning Levi for his violence, declaring with certainty that he would never kill another person.  Jean is disabused of his moralistic superiority not long after that, when he learns first hand the consequences of sticking to ones morals uncompromisingly, nearly losing his life, and forcing Armin to take a life for him.  And it’s Jean who we see, again and again from that point on in the series, grappling with and coming to terms with this difficult lesson.  We see Jean’s respect for Levi, and his understanding towards Levi, grow greatly, after this incident, and Jean himself having to grow, to change and accept that sacrifices are inevitable if one wishes to protect the things and people they care about.  That sometimes even one’s own comfort and moral convictions are necessary sacrifices to achieve those things.  

Levi tells everyone that he’ll take care of Zeke, but admits that he’ll need all of their help to get the job done.  I feel like this is Levi, once again, asking if all of them are ready and willing to get their hands dirty, just like he did before they raided the Cavern underneath the Church on the Reiss property.  He knows he can’t do this job by himself (which is just further testament to Levi’s strength of character, an ability to admit to weakness), but he wants to make sure everyone else is alright with plunging in to a situation in which they’re going to be forced to kill.  Jean is the first to answer, telling Levi and all of them that he’s not going to let the sacrifices they’ve already made, the people they’ve killed in order to get where they are, be in vain, and that he’ll do whatever it takes to stop the Rumbling.  This shows incredible character growth on Jean’s part.  He went from someone who claimed that he would, under no circumstances, take another human life, to someone who declares that he’ll do whatever it takes in order to stop the Rumbling, to achieve a greater good.  And I think this growth on Jean’s part ties directly into his relationship with and the influence of Levi.  Levi never judged Jean for being uncomfortable with killing, never criticized or scolded him for it.  He even told Jean that he couldn’t say, one way or the other whether Jean’s beliefs were right or wrong.  That Levi himself didn’t know the answer to that.  He never tried to convince Jean of anything.  He just told him the truth.  That his failure to kill had put the lives of his comrades in danger, including his own, and that it also caused Armin to have to bear the burden of killing another, one which should have been Jean’s own to bear.  All of that is absolutely true.  And it was really through this lack of judgment on Levi’s part that, I think, Jean was able to grow and expand his own views on killing, and adjust and allow for there to be circumstances in his world view which would justify taking another life.  He wasn’t forced by anyone to change his views.  He changed them based on experience and through Levi explaining to him that there is no definitive right or wrong answer to be found, and through Levi’s simply being honest with him.  He was telling Jean that it comes down to what one is willing to sacrifice in order to protect the things and people they value.  And Jean learned about himself that he’s willing and able to sacrifice more than he ever realized.

But it’s still a struggle, and something all of them, even at this point in the story, continue to battle themselves over.  We see Connie struggling in particular this chapter, looking anguished over what he had to do back at the port.  It’s only Levi who accepts that brutal reality of kill or be killed with a calm understanding, and I think this is probably because, unlike the rest of them, who all had peaceful, probably relatively easy and happy childhoods, without any exposure to violence or real cruelty, Levi, I think it can be safely assumed, probably took his first life while he was still a boy.  And doubtless, that was due to desperate circumstances.  Levi’s life has been one filled with uncertainty.  Growing up in extreme poverty, he never could have known with any certainty where his next meal would come from, or when.  Never knew with any certainty whether he could find proper shelter for the night, or a safe place to sleep.  Never knew with any certainty whether he would be assaulted, or robbed, or if someone would attempt to take his life.  Levi’s life has been one of desperation and a true, unforgiving struggle to simply survive.  And so while all of his comrades have seen and experienced the horrors of war with him, none of them can know with the same level of understanding that true kind of desperation of simply trying to live day to day, that kind of awful and overwhelming uncertainty and fear of not knowing if you’ll be alive from one day to the next.  It’s those kinds of experiences in life that really separate Levi from the rest of his comrades, and in a lot of ways, isolate him from them.  It’s why the extremity of their circumstances and the desperation of their situation in this final arc continually shocks and overwhelms them, but Levi regards it all with his usual, if deeply saddened, calm.

[ladynestaarcheron]

Fears All the Way Down - Chapter Four

ao3 - masterpost

hello all. not entirely back from my hiatus, but i decided i did want to share this on tumblr just in case someone isn't on ao3. i've been having a rough month and as it turns out, writing this really helped boost my mood, so maybe reading it can help boost someone else's. so enjoy!

---

Elain is hysterical, but Nesta expected that. Feyre takes her by surprise, though.

"How did they get in?" she keeps saying. "How did they get in?" Almost as though she can't say anything else at all.

"Azriel's taken them in for questioning," Rhysand tells her, rubbing her shoulders. "We'll know everything soon enough."

Nesta's mildly irritated that she's the one who was attacked and yet it's her who has to comfort her sisters, but no matter. They're upset and she...isn't.

"It's really all right. The House kept me safe." The House keeps her safe, actually. Safe and comfortable and healthy and warm and clean....

"You'll come to stay at home tonight," Feyre says, squeezing a shaking Elain's hand tightly.

Home being Feyre and Rhysand's mansion by the Sidra. "I...don't think I will, actually. Thank you."

Her sisters blink at her.

"You don't want to stay here," Elain says, the first thing she's managed since crying.

Nesta bristles slightly at the implied insult to the House. "I do."

"It kept her safe," Cassian says, speaking for the first time since he brought in Elain.

"But they got in!"

"Maybe it let them in so you could catch them," Nesta suggests. "But it's safe for me here. And...I don't want to go." How could she possibly give up her standing bath, her magically-warmed room? There's not a price one can put on a proper night's sleep and then starting the day clean.

Feyre and Elain glance at each other for a moment, then nod at her.

"All right," Elain says, brave face on. "We'll stay with you."

Unnecessary. But if it'll make them feel better. "All right, then."

Rhysand gives Feyre a kiss on her cheek and puts a hand on Elain's shoulder. "We'll leave you ladies to get settled, then." He gives Nesta a charming, reassuring smile--ugh. "Everything's going to be fine."

"You're going to those Illyrians?" she asks.

"Yes," Rhysand says. "You get some sleep. You don't need to worry about any of this."

She's not worried about any of this. Why is no one listening to her?

No matter, she decides again. She was never in any danger anyway. She can just...calm her sisters, and go to bed, and put this from her mind.

Except she can't. The House's damaged wall stays etched in her mind, and the sound of those Hyben soldiers chasing after her in the library in her ears. What if they get in? Illyrians, or Briallyn, into the library? During a session with Thalia or one of Calliope's lectures or jewelry making or weekly check-in?

As she gets more agitated, tossing and turning, the room warms slightly. The House lulling her to sleep.

Fine. Fine, she can sleep tonight. Thalia says that she shouldn't agitate in bed, anyway. It's counterproductive and illogical--she'll sleep now, then be well-rested in the morning, and then she can come up with...something. To ensure the library remains safe while she is here.

Because if she doesn't...she might have to leave.

And she realizes she's not prepared to do that.

Something a soldier learns quickly is that torture during interrogation needs to be handled with precision and care, because people will generally say absolutely anything to get the pain to stop, and then none of the information can really be trusted. On top of that is the act itself, which damages the perpetrator as much as the victim. Cassian knows all this, and yet, as he thinks of Nesta, he can't bring himself to care.

"Calm down." Azriel's icy voice cuts through the images of her in duress hitting him like a series of punches.

He only snarls in return, but Az isn't shaken.

"She's all right," he says. "Calm down."

"She could have died." There it is, the simple truth. She could have died . They could have killed her . Briallyn wants her revenge; she'll probably do it slowly and painfully.

"She was safe the whole time, Cass."

"She didn't even know anything was going on," Rhys says, agreeing. "She's not even scared."

So what? So she wasn't scared this time, so what? The other times she was scared. Next time she might be.

"I should have been there." He should have never let Feyre and Elain go through with this. Fought to keep her in Rhys' home in the city; surely even these Illyrians would not dare attack the High Lord's residence.

"That's enough," Rhys says sharply. "It's not your fault. She's safe. And you were there. Right as the alarms went off."

"You were there faster."

"What does that matter?"

"It's a good thing she was at the House, Cass," Az says.

Yes, good thing. Good thing the House can keep her safe, even if he can't. From his own people.

"What did they say?" he asks, voice a growl. Rhys had not let him in the rooms if he could not promise to control himself. He could not.

"Not much," Rhys admits. "Just confirmed what we knew."

"It'll take time," Az says, spinning Truth-Teller in his fingers. "But I would like to state for the record there is a way to speed up the process."

"We can't make them martyrs," Rhys says. "We can't just senselessly slaughter them."

"It's not senseless. They're collaborating with an enemy to overthrow the crown. They attacked a Lady of the Court. There should be punishment for that." Az's eyes are cold in a way Cassian's never could be when talking about his own. Yes, he wants them to die for what they'd do to Nesta. But the way his brother feels about their people as a whole will always hurt in its own way.

"So they're scattered throughout the camps?" Cassian says, steering them back towards the matter at hand.

"With their strongest presence in Windhaven, yes."

Cassian frowns. Even though intelligence had led them to suspect it, having it confirmed...Windhaven is a more moderate camp, with Devlon, it's leader, being mild enough that he had let him and Az participate in the Rite centuries ago. But perhaps Windhaven's structure had led to its rebels being organized enough to form a strong base.

"We should start by cutting them off at Windhaven," he starts slowly, "and then we might not even have to bother with the dissenters in the other camps. Should we start interrogating the males there?"

Az raises an eyebrow. "You want to interrogate every male in Windhaven?"

"I think it'd be easier to just kill anyone who won't swear fealty to Rhys and Feyre, but since you two want to go about this diplomatically--"

"That's not the diplomatic approach," Rhys cuts in. "And that's not what we're doing. That's a colossal waste of time."

"Keeping Nesta safe is not a wa-- "

"I didn't mean that," Rhys interrupts again. "But there are far more productive methods of ensuring her safety and also furthering our cause of diminishing theirs."

"And I'm not going to like it," Cassian says, scowling.

"No," Rhys admits. "I don't think you will."

Nesta had been looking forward to going back to the library, because Elain had looked at her all weekend as though she was already mourning her and Feyre had driven her spare with her constant reassurances that all would be well and safe. But being here now, with the girls who were so close to having their sanctuary breached--yet again, because of her--brings forth a new layer of guilt.

"You're quiet," Gwyn whispers to her in weekly check-in.

"I'm always quiet."

"Bad quiet. What's wrong?"

"Just tired," she says, softly.

It's something of a lie, actually. Despite her concern over the safety of the library and the House--and herself, she supposes--Nesta actually awoke today feeling refreshed. She sleeps well and can stomach a few small meals a day. She's even begun inserting small jogging segments during her walks outside, just to get her blood pumping. Sometimes she catches herself aching for a drink, but her head no longer throbs in pain and Thalia's exercises help her to rid her mind of the thought.

It's working with her hands Nesta likes best. The lectures are fascinating, but she still ends up drifting down some spiral, but the jewellery-making and book-sorting keep her focused enough that she can't think about how miserable she is.

And the thing is, here, now, she's not miserable. She's not happy, not by any stretch of the imagination, but she's not miserable. And that's...worth something.

She wonders if any research she might get assigned to will also help in distracting her...or if that might make her happy.

No, she thinks, looking around at the dozens of girls, plenty of whom don't even speak after decades or centuries of being here. Research does not make people happy. Perhaps there are some people who just aren't meant to be. After all, she does not think she has ever been so. Not in her wealthy childhood, not in her poverty-stricken adolescence, and certainly not here.

Not miserable is good enough. She can be not miserable for her sisters, be presentable and not so embarrassing for their sakes.

Elain and Feyre are still there when she leaves the library for the day, joined by Rhysand and a particularly stoic Cassian. In fact, she thinks as she studies him in the reflection of the mirror in the living room out of the corner of her eye, she cannot recall ever seeing him this...upset. He's glaring at the floor, bright hazel eyes dark and yielding nothing of his typical irritating, incessant character. He spins a dagger between his fingers, siphons glowing bright each time he nearly slices his fingers clean off.

"Did it...go well with the Illyrians?" she asks, trying to keep her focus on something else.

"If you're an optimist," Rhys answers, grinning.

Ugh.

Feyre catches her annoyance at his answer and throws him a sharp look. "We've confirmed that Briallyn is taking advantage of the rebel situation in Illyria to get to you."

"Is that different from what you already thought?"

"It's good to have it confirmed," Feyre says. "We know more about the rebels in our context--" she gestures to herself and to Rhys, "--than in hers. So we know the best way to combat it."

Nesta waits a few moments, but no one says anything. "Which is?" she prompts.

Elain's throat bobs. Nesta watches Cassian's jaw clench even tighter in the mirror.

"The Illyrians need to be reminded of their place," Rhys says. "They forget, because of the distance between us, that they answer to us."

Nesta doesn't particularly care about the inter-politics of the Night Court, but she suspects that if an organized Illyrian rebellion is now working with Briallyn to kill her in order to unseat Rhysand or separate themselves from him, there's probably more than just distance involved.

"So you're going to remind them?" Nesta asks.

"That's where we thought you might have something to do with it."

Cassian starts tossing the knife between his hands faster, almost stabbing at the air. Nesta ignores how her heart speeds up when he nearly drops it through his foot.

"If the Illyrians end up going to civil war, we'll win. But we prefer to tamper down the rebels. We think the best way to do that is show them, first and foremost, this isn't worth dying over. And they will die." Rhys' words are a cold promise.

It's--frightening. What does he want her to do?

"Come with us to Windhaven," he says, as though in answer.

Nesta blinks. "I...thought I was here to stay safe."

"You'll be safe the whole time," Rhys says firmly.

"We would never entertain this otherwise," Feyre adds, eyes wide.

"What would going to Windhaven do? A display of strength?" Seems like it'd be right up the Inner Circle's alley, but overall, in her opinion, useless.

"Precisely," Rhys says, satisfied she's understood. She stifles an eyeroll. "You don't have to do much. Just walk around. We'll give you a tour of the camp. You remember how terrified they were of you, don't you?"

She does. Witch, they had called her. "But they won't be," she says. "They must know I don't have any magic." There's simply nothing to be scared of. She is, perhaps, not quite as sickly and pathetic today as she was a month ago, but certainly nothing to look twice at. Nothing to fear. Nothing to note.

Feyre opens her mouth to object, but Cassian beats her to it.

"You're a female twice as powerful as any of them. They'll fear you." She has no choice but to look at him when he speaks, and he catches her gaze tightly, fiercely, and she can't look away, can't turn her head or even blink--

"We'll be with you the whole time," Feyre says, breaking the spell. She forces herself to look at the floor instead.

"I'll come too," Elain says, determined.

"You don't need to," Nesta says, voice softened. "It's fine. I can do it. I'm not scared."

Elain deflates a bit, in relief or in disappointment, she isn't sure.

"I'm sure you're tired. We'll go tomorrow, if that's all right with you," Feyre says.

Nesta of a month ago had no plans for the day or her life, but now... "Actually, could we go to Tuesday?"

The four of them look at her in surprise.

"There's a new lecture circuit starting." History of limb and organ transplants, led by Daphne, their healer. "I wanted to go."

"Oh," Feyre says, blinking. "Oh! Well! That's--yes, of course, we'll go Tuesday instead. Yes, that's...that's fine."

Her sister's attempt at being casual. Nesta stifles another eyeroll.

"Well, I think I'd like to wash the dust off before bed..." Lie. She wants to go for a walk and eat a small dinner and read. But she wants them gone. She's had quiet enough company for the day.

"Of course! We'll leave you to it, then." Feyre leaves with a smile, and Elain gives her a soft kiss on her cheek before leaving with the pair of them. Cassian follows, but he lingers in the doorway.

"You don't have to go, you know," he says, turning and taking a few steps towards her. Too many.

"I know," she says. "I meant what I said. I'm not scared." The House won't be there to protect her, but... "Aren't you coming?"

"I am," he says, voice low--lower than normal, that is.

She nods once, eyes trained on the floor. She can't look at him again. Not when there's no alcohol to muddy the intensity of his gaze, no promise of some other male to drive him from her thoughts tonight.

I have no regrets in my life, but this.

I have never in my life thought you were pathetic.

"Good night," she says abruptly, turning around and rushing down the stairs.

No, no other male. A book or a game with the House will have to do.

They travel to Illyria the same way they came up to the House, but in reverse. Cassian flies her up until they are out of the House's protective sphere, then Rhys and Feyre grab on to each of them and winnow them to solid ground, miles and miles away.

She had been here once, during the war. It was miserable. It hasn't changed much. The lack of the stench of death is a significant step up, though.

"We'll be meeting Devlon. Camp lord."

Feyre links their arms together and Nesta bites her tongue to keep from saying anything. She doesn't think she and Feyre have ever walked arm-in-arm like this before. She and Elain had plenty, once. She and her other human friends, back when she had them. Way, way back.

They reach a sort of training center soon enough, and the Illyrians do double-takes when they see them-- her . She sees familiar religious gestures and even recognizes some of the males.

"Morning, Devlon," Rhysand drawls to the one approaching them.

"What is this?" he growls.

"Lady Nesta heard some soldiers were interested in her wellbeing. She was curious too."

Devlon narrows his eyes and scowls, but some of the younger males behind him grow faint.

And she supposes...considering how all this might look to them...she understands.

For Rhysand is their all-powerful High Lord, magic rippling from his being. Cassian is their most feared warrior, and he flanks them from behind, seven siphons radiating enough heat that she can feel it through her cloak. And she stands with Feyre, their High Lady, their cursebreaker, in a fine gown indeed that the House had picked out for her (one the nicest she's worn in quite some time)...yes, perhaps this does look a sight to behold. Perhaps they do seem powerful, not worth the effort.

Still, she knows that she herself is nothing to fear. Any one of these soldiers are as strong as the ones from Hybern who pulled her out of bed, and she has not exactly improved in physical prowess since then.

"My sister would like a tour, please," Feyre says sweetly.

Nesta almost blanches at her tone. She doesn't think she's ever heard it before.

Devlon probably isn't allowed to glare at Rhysand or Feyre or maybe her either, so he settles on Cassian. She can hear him chuckle slightly, but she doesn't turn to see.

"This way, Lady," Devlon says finally.

Devlon's tour-guide skills leave a bit to be desired, but in his defense, there isn't much here.

"Don't you have a school?" she asks, interrupting his riveting description of the shops and the living quarters .

Devlon freezes in his tracks. "You will not touch our children, witch," he snarls.

Nesta rolls her eyes and makes to answer, but Cassian moves before she can.

"Don't threaten her again," he hisses, knives at the ready in his hands.

Feyre and Rhys don't act as though this disturbs them in the least. On the contrary.

"Answer Lady Nesta, Devlon," Rhys says, almost lazily.

After another glaring-match with Cassian, he does, pointing to a dilapidated building. "There," he grunts.

"Not in session, I see," she says.

He grunts again, and walks them a little more along the main road, not bothering to point out any more attractions.

"Well," Nesta says, when they reach the training center again. "Thank you for that...riveting experience." In truth, while she doesn't like Devlon much, all this day has done has shed some light on why the Illyrians hate living under Rhysand so much. Velaris' luxury seems ostentatious in comparison, even vulgar. She doesn't think she ought to bear the brunt of it, obviously. But there seems to be an easy path to calming the rebels.

"I didn't see any girls this morning, Devlon," Cassian says, stepping in front of her and Feyre to talk.

Feyre pulls her closer. "All right," she whispers. "Now, we're going to go back to the training center, and you can walk around the shops. Don't be scared," she hurries to say. "You'll be perfectly safe. I promise."

"I'm not scared," Nesta replies.

"Good."

After a few more minutes of discussion--with Cassian angry at Devlon for a lack of female soldiers, Nesta gathers--the four of them trail off, Feyre squeezing her hand in goodbye.

A few Illyrians loiter around her, pretending not to stare at her as she turns around and heads back towards the shops.

There aren't many here--a butcher's, a liquor store (Nesta had clenched her jaw the whole way past the first time, and she does again now), some clothier's. One of them, Nesta notes, is stocked with winter goods, while the others seem to be selling out quite nicely.

She makes her way inside. If only to escape the gaping from the Illyrians who can't seem to decide if they want to follow her or run away.

The shop is warm, quiet, and empty but for a female at the front, with her back to the door.

"Good--morning," she says, the pause in her words when she turns to see her customer and sees that it is Nesta. "Lady," she adds.

"Good morning," Nesta says.

"Can I help you with anything?" the female says bravely.

"Just browsing."

They both know it's a lie. The shop is far too small to pretend to browse. But she lets her.

The female looks younger than Nesta, but she might be older. The fae take longer to age, with Cassian's five hundred-odd years giving him a face that Nesta would guess is thirty-two, and Nesta's own body, frozen at twenty-three, probably looks to fae to be two hundred or so. She wears a simple dress--everything in the shop is simple, and makes Nesta feel uncomfortable in her finery. Like Velaris' vulgar beauty that she had thought of earlier. Nesta's clearly not here to browse.

"I had heard you were interested in a tour," the female says politely. "Was it to your liking?"

"Yes," Nesta says. "News...travels fast around here, does it?"

"Not much to talk about." The female turns to put away a folded sweater, and Nesta sees a horrible set of scars down her wings. She can't stop her mouth from falling open, and manages to say something with slightly more decorum than her original intended gasp.

"I'm Nesta."

The females turns. "I know. I'm Emerie. I own this shop."

Nesta cocks her head. "You do?"

"I do."

"That's very impressive," she said. "I used to own a business." Her own trading on the continent. She hadn't trusted her father with all of their finances again, and had insisted on running some of her own.

"Really?" Emerie says, clearly mirroring Nesta's sentiments. Which is--nice. That camaraderie. And outside of the library, too. "Well, it's nice to know there are other females interested in making a name for themselves."

Nesta huffs a noise of amusement. "It is." She's silent for a beat, then asks, "Is it...difficult? Here? For you, as..."

"As a female who's not cowed by this?" she says, gesturing outside. "It's...not as lonely as you might think. And that makes it less difficult."

Nesta nods. She understands what Emerie means, even if she doesn't quite feel it herself. Friendship, she means. Sisterhood.

All the same, it's nice to know. That it's out there, outside of the library, and in it. Even if she doesn't have it. Even if she...

"Did it work, then?" she asks Feyre, hours later.

"It did," she says, a smug smile on her lips. "You did great. Good job, Nesta."

Nesta nods, even though it doesn't feel as though she's done much.

"I'll see you, then," Feyre says, reaching Nesta's hand to squeeze it in goodbye. "Elain will be so pleased to hear," she says, partly to herself, Nesta thinks. She practically skips towards Rhysand, who sweeps her in his arms as they descend into the city.

"Wait," Nesta calls to Cassian, before she realizes what she's doing.

He freezes in his tracks, wings still poised to follow after her sister and Rhysand. He turns.

"I wanted to ask you," she said, suddenly very aware of her heartbeat. "If you'd--once you asked--I--"

Her face flushes crimson, but he doesn't mock or even grin. Only nods once, patient, and that spurs her.

"If you could perhaps teach me some self defense? Not--not training, not like those soldiers...but maybe, if they attack again, and they get to me, just so that I know--just so I'm not entirely--"

"Yes," he cuts in. "I will."

"All right," she says, nodding slightly. "Thank you," she adds, realizing she probably should.

He swallows. Starts to say something. Then, nearly flinging himself off the veranda, he flies away.

[mediaeval-muse]

The Devil in Silver. By Victor LaValle. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2012.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Genre: horror/thriller, literary fiction

Part of a Series? No

Summary: Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he’s visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It’s no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who’s been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group’s enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that’s stalking them. But can the Devil die? The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValle’s radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it’s a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: body horror, violence, gore, suicide, ableism

Overview: I really enjoyed LaValle’s The Changeling and respected The Ballad of Black Tom, so I figured I’d give The Devil in Silver a go. Overall, I think it was a well-crafted book, and the problems I have with it may stem more from marketing and personal taste than from anything LaValle did wrong. From the cover and the description, it seems like this book will be a horror novel, or maybe a thriller; however, I think it leans more into some combo of magical realism or literary fiction with fantastical undercurrents. The focus really isn’t on these things, anyway - though the “devil” is a character, the story is primarily about the other patients in the institution, and I think going into this book expecting a monster story will leave many readers disappointed. But if you’re looking for literary fiction, you might appreciate this tale.

Writing: LaValle’s prose balances showing and telling while also mixing evocative imagery with a fair bit of humor. I think the author does a good job of making you feel like you’re experiencing the world as Pepper (our protagonist) experiences it: some things feel monotonous or sterile, maybe it will take a few pages to describe 15 minutes but then, suddenly, time will slip by so fast that you lose a few hours or days.

Personally, I would have liked to see LaValle lean more into the atmosphere. While I don’t think he needed to make the institution more “creepy” or what have you, I do think he could have made it feel more labyrinthine to better evoke the “Theseus and the Minotaur” allusion (where the patients are all people stuck in the labyrinth with a monster). There wasn’t exactly a sense of dread in the novel - whenever the Devil would show up, it was disturbing, but once he was out of sight, I almost felt like characters forgot about him. Even if LaValle didn’t want to go full-blown horror, I think he could have made the Devil’s presence feel like more of an obsession or dark cloud over the hospital.

I also think LaValle could have leaned more into making the hospital feel underfunded and desperate, without reveling in “poverty porn.” Leaning more heavily into the atmosphere and the feeling of being in the institution would have not only made the story more rich, but would have drove home the novel’s central theme/message more strongly: that monsters are scapegoats for institutional problems.

Plot: The plot of this novel involves Pepper trying to learn how to get out of the mental institution while also thinking up ways to defeat the “devil” that haunts the building. Along the way, he forms alliances with other patients and learns to reflect on his own past.

Overall, I loved the moments when Pepper had real connection with his fellow patients. I liked seeing the growth in their relationships, and I loved seeing them collaborate and exchange ideas on how best to defeat the system around them.

I do think, however, that the plot could have been more explicit about its central theme/message. While I agree that this book is mainly about how monsters are scapegoats for institutional problems, the institution in question always seemed to be shifting; sometimes, there’s be a lovely passage about institutional racism, sometimes a reflection on class or the treatment of the mentally ill. While I understand that LaValle was trying to encompass all institutions, I think having these small moments felt like we were exploring big topics at a surface level. But I don’t know - I think they were still valuable moments. I just wanted the book to really drive home that message more forcefully. But that’s personal taste.

Characters: Pepper, our protagonist and primary POV character, is fairly likeable, if a bit bland. He doesn’t really have many qualities that make him memorable, in my opinion; he mainly looks good because he surrounds himself with characters who are more interesting. Perhaps if LaValle had explored Pepper’s class background more, he would have been a compelling case study, but as it stands, I found Pepper to mainly be “just ok.”

His companions - Dorry, Coffee, and Loochie - had a lot more personality and were extremely fun to read about. I loved that LaValle made them feel like people with rich, inner lives, despite their very real struggles with mental health. It helped showcase the message that people need to be treated like people and that institutions can be well-meaning but still cause harm.

Other characters, such as doctors and nurses, were written well in that they were competent enough to make me believe they weren’t trying to be abusive but also distant enough where I felt like they were being forced to be neglectful (due to restrictions in funding and resources). Though some of them did things that were unethical and morally questionable, I never got the feeling that any of them were “evil,” per se.

The Devil himself... well, he’s ok. He isn’t super complex, but he probably isn’t supposed to be. If anything, he’s a symbol, and as such, I think he does his job well.

TL;DR: The Devil in Silver is a compelling story about the ways in which we blame society’s problems on “monsters” instead of institutions. Though I think this message could have come through more strongly, the witty prose and memorable characters make this book a must-read for those interested in institutional problems and systems (though I wouldn’t recommend it to those looking for a horror tale).

[travllingbunny]

The 100: 7x08 Anaconda

The mini-rewatch of season 7 that @jeanie205 and me did during this mini-hiatus is finished, and with that, I’m going to finally post my reviews of 7x08 and 7x09, hopefully before the show returns.

I’m tempted to start talking about the opening scene without any introduction, just like the episode itself started with no “Previously on” and no cold open (the latter, I believe, for the first time since season 1, when the show still did not have any opening titles).. but I’m going to still say a few general things before going into details under the cut. 

When it was first announced that an episode of The 100′s final season would be the backdoor pilot for a prequel show, that info was met with a lot of hostility (to the effect of “why waste a full episode on new characters instead of those we know”), which didn’t surprise me much. What did surprise me was that people mostly seemed to expect the episode to be 100% set in the past and unrelated to anything from season 7 - which, as far as I know, is not how backdoor pilots normally work, they still have to fit within the season they’re a part of. The structure of the episode is more in line with what I expected - while most of the episode is set in the past, the framing device is a scene of Clarke confronting Bill Cadogan in the Stone Room on Bardo, and the long flashback is both setting up a possible prequel, and revealing things relevant to the plot of season 7. The biggest connecting points are the Anomaly Stone on Earth, the importance of the Flame for Cadogan and the Disciples, and Cadogan himself, who is clearly not going to be a character in the prequel except possibly in flashbacks, but who is one of the main antagonists of season 7. The episode works as a backdoor pilot but is also interesting as a part of the backstory of The 100. 

I really enjoyed the episode - and as it turns out, I enjoyed it even more on rewatch, when I could stop and soak in all the new info and details - and I hope the prequel does picked up, as it has a lot of potential to be interesting, though there is one big concern I have about it. More about that at the end of this post under “Prequel speculation”.

So no Previously on this time (unsurprisingly), no cold open - and we get a brand new version of the opening titles - since this episode technically fully takes place on Bardo, these opening titles start with the Bardo Stone Room and end with another shot of the Stone Room we haven’t seen before in the OT, one with the Stone. The Stone Room is where they begin and end, just like the episode itself. And just like Clarke and the rest of her group have been stuck in this Stone Room for 4 episodes.

But I actually don’t mind it in this episode. At least Clarke is in the focus of these few minutes we spend in the present, and I really like these few minutes. We start with an expanded version of Clarke's response to the news of Bellamy's "death", with slow motion, distorted angles and close-ups of Clarke’s face showing shock and grief and numbness (and I’m going to post another screenshot of that, because I want to savor the moments when the show focuses on characters’ grief before going back to the action - and not just the type of grief that results in going off the rails and murdering people.) We also see Raven on the verge of tears, and Miller choking a little - the other two people who have been Bellamy’s friends for a long time. Clarke being Clarke, she picks herself up the moment she sees someone else in pain (Raven) and focuses on honoring Bellamy’s memory, just as Bellamy did in 4x13 when he believed Clarke was dead, and tells Raven they need to save Octavia and Echo: “We do this for him. We do this for our family” - acknowledging that saving them is something of particular importance as they were people important to Bellamy, and also including them in the “family”, as the term these people use to describe their group and the bonds that have formed over time. (Family is bond closer and less close than friendship. You can be someone’s friend and their family, but you can also be a part of someone’s family without necessarily having developed a friendship with that person, due to the overall bonds and loyalty.)

Then we get the first meeting between Clarke and probably the season’s main antagonist, Bill Cadogan, who comes to another wrong conclusion when he thinks she recognized him because she has the Flame (and, he hopes, Callie’s memories), when it's actually from a video Jaha showed her.

Gabriel has another moment where he helps Clarke (as when he covered for her in 5x13) and silently communicates with her to let her know that the Disciples believe she still has the Flame, so she could keep up that pretense. These two work well as a team.

The bulk of the episode is the flashback framed as Bill telling a story to Clarke - though we don’t actually see the flashback from his POV, and he doesn’t even appear in many of the scenes. In fact, it is almost all from Callie’s POV, and some of it from Reese’s.

And we get back to Clarke and the Stone Room in the end, with the shocking “twist” of Clarke and the Nakara group seeing Octavia, Echo and Diyoza as Disciples. Shocking for them, not for us - we know they had no choice. 

Clarke saying “You killed my best friend!” has caused some pointless (but in this fandom, expected) drama, where some fans saw that as “confirmation” that Bellarke is and will remain completely ‘platonic” - even though that makes no sense. What did anyone expect her to call him? My boyfriend? He wasn’t that. The man I love? My soulmate? Someone expected her to say that to an enemy she’s never met before, in front of a bunch of her friends and other people?  Very unlikely, even if he hadn’t still been Echo’s boyfriend when he “died”. Some thought “Bellamy” or “him” would have been better, but what would that mean to Cadogan? He’s never met her and knows nothing about her, and she was trying to make it clear how much Bellamy meant to her. If anything, the fact that she’s singled him out as her best friend is a big progress from their usual habit of never defining their relationship to each other - except for Clarke including Bellamy in the collective designation of her “friends” or “family”.

I love the way the Chromatics cover of Neil Young’s “Into the Black” was used in the ending montage - so I made two gifsets about the use of the song for the Cadogan family scenes, and for the scene with Clarke:

https://travllingbunny.tumblr.com/post/623186143096307712/its-better-to-burn-out-than-to-fade-away-the

https://travllingbunny.tumblr.com/post/623186346138370048/its-better-to-burn-out-than-it-is-to-rust-the

Flashback

This is our second look at the world pre-apocalypse - after the brief scene of Josephine’s memory in 6x07, where we saw Josephine and her friend in the diner. But that scene took place several years before the apocalypse (depending on how much time was needed to get from Earth to Sanctum on Eligius 3, which did not have damaged engines as Eligius 4 did after the uprising), since Josephine and her family and the rest of Mission Team Alpha were already on Sanctum 7 years before the apocalypse. And Josephine and her friend were far less interested in the current events than Callie or August, so we only got a few outside references, including the magazine covers which showed that Diyoza’s capture was the main national news, and that Becca was already very high profile and on the cover of a technology/science magazine.

This, however, is the very day of the apocalypse. In the first scene - Callie Cadogan and her friend Lucy in Callie’s and her mother’s home, after participating in a protest as parts of environmentalist group with the familiar name Tree Crew -  we get lots of info about just how crappy this world was even before ALIE started a nuclear apocalypse, through various news items on TV (see this post) - and it is like 2020, only taken to the 10th degree:

natural disasters as a result of global warming (a deathly heath wave is mentioned), new diseases (Coronavirus “Russian Ankovirus” outbreak), economic inequality (one of the news is that measures aimed at poverty relief haven’t met with support in Congress), internment camps in USA, anti-government protests in the USA that end up with riot police beating up protestors, together with technological developments, such as the first orbiting hotel (I wonder if anyone was already using it - if they were, there would be more survivors in space, but it doesn’t seem this ever became a part of the Ark), or the first brain transplant. a medical development which begs some ethical questions (since I’m pretty sure that a person with a functioning brain is still alive... I cant think of several different scenarios, disturbing to various degrees). 

The world’s population has risen to 11 billion - I guess that’s why ALIE thought there were “too many people” (but her reasoning was as flawed as Thanos’ - instead of killing people, how about increasing or just better redistributing resources?). 

It’s also confirmed that a Wallace was the POTUS at the time, meaning that the President and the administration went to the underground bunker at Mount Weather to survive the apocalypse (after which, as we know, they did the North Korean thing where they nominally live in a republic but their leaders are really hereditary).

Callie calls the US regime at the time “fascistic”, echoing how Diyoza characterized it in season 5.

Callie,her friend Lucy and August were all members of the environmentalist group Tree Crew (who already had the same symbol we later see Trikru the clan using), apparently declared illegal or terrorist or something by the Wallace administration.

Callie and Grace Cadogan also used to be members of the Second Dawn cult, led by her father Bill, together with her brother Reese. August also used to be a member. Possibly as a child of some other members. 

Becca Franko - described as “tech tycoon” and “reclusive billionaire” - had not been seen in public for a year, since she went to her Polaris space station (to work on the Flame, as we know), a year after she created the first ALIE (and quickly realized ALIE had a fatal flaw). She also owned her own network.

One other piece of info about this world: they had holograms as a means of communication.

Something that was not in the news and not known to the public: it seems that quite a few people were “in the know” about the fact that a nuclear apocalypse may happen (whether they suspected it would be ALIE, or thought there would be a nuclear war) - and even had a code word for it, “Anaconda”. Bill Cadogan was one of the people who knew it. The POTUS and his administration obviously had enough time to evacuate. It’s mentioned that a lot of people immediately started trying to get to the bunkers. 

Cadogan and Becca did not personally know each other before the apocalypse, but he apparently had “friends” in many of the space stations. This explains how she knew where the real Second Dawn bunker was located. But whoever these “friends” were, they clearly did not pass on that knowledge to the future generations on the Ark, since even Jaha, who researched Second Dawn, was only able to find public info - articles, Cadogan’s biography - and didn’t even know where the decoy bunker was, let alone the real one.

The most important thing the backdoor pilot needs to do, of course, is introduce compelling, interesting characters. It did pretty well in that regard - Callie is a likable protagonist, and the fact that the antagonists - Bill and Reese Cadogan - are her father and brother, gives more emotional resonance by putting family relationships at the center. The new characters have some similarities to the main characters from The 100, but are at the same time different enough. 

The comparison between Callie and Clarke is the most obvious. Oddly enough, Jason tried to draw a difference between them by saying Callie is focused on saving “everyone” rather than “her people” - which makes me scratch my head, unless he means that Callie will always remain absolutely the same through the prequel show, since Clarke also started off by wanting to save everyone - and that was her driving motive for a long time, until the plot kept putting her in situations where she had to choose between her friends and family and strangers, where the latter would often be aggressors attacking her people. What strikes me as the biggest difference i- not just between Callie and Clarke but between all these prequel characters and the main characters of The 100 - is their background and the world they have grown up in. Clarke and Callie are both “princesses” - from the privileged background, but in Clarke’s case, it’s privileged relative to the majority of other people from the Ark, like the Blakes or Raven (which meant things like, nicer living quarters, opportunity to watch recordings of old soccer matches as entertainment, probably less worry about not getting the medicine you need), but in comparison with the way the most of the viewers live... definitely not. The world Clarke was born in is a post-apocalyptic world of scarce resources and constant fight for survival, and even her happy (by those standards)’ life in that world ends a year before the Pilot, when her father is executed and she has spent a year in solitary confinement, expecting to be executed herself - before she’ and 99 teenagers are sent to Earth as “expendable”. On the other hand, Callie, Reese, August, Tristan and others grew up in a world similar to our own. There are, of course, many people in our world who also have to fight for their own day-to-day survival every day, but the Cadogans are rich, and the rest of the Second Dawn members and their families are no doubt not far off. This is Callie’s house:

Some of these middle-class and upper middle-class kids are rebellious, idealistic and optimistic and worry about the fate of the world, like Callie, Lucy and August.  On the other hand, there’s Reese, whose driving motivation is to impress his father and gain his love. He’s a rich boy with daddy issues, but he’s also a victim of emotional abuse - maybe physical, too (if we take into account a cut scene  showing a training session where his father injures him, under the explanation of making him tougher or whatever). Callie and Reese are only the second sibling dynamic we see explored on the show (I’m not counting Emori and Otan, since the latter appeared very shortly), and this dynamic - a sibling rivalry between a rebellious girl who is her father’s favorite even while she opposes and rejects him, and her jealous brother who wants to impress his father - is completely different from the Blakes. (It reminds me a bit of Gamora amd Nebula - and I’ve just realized this is the second time in this review I’ve referenced MCU.)

Watching this family dynamic, I was reminded of another family that paralleled and contrasted the Griffins: the Lightbournes. Particularly when Grace called Bill a narcissist with psychopathic tendencies and he was entertained by that, In the flashback in 6x02. Simone called Russell a megalomaniac - but that was really said as a cute joke, as the Lightbournes were happily married, and Simone was just as bad as Russell, and even more ruthless than him. But in both cases, we have destructive rich white guy megalomaniacs who made themselves into gods, and want to bring back their dead daughters. Daughters are both extremely intelligent, brilliant and charismatic, but completely different in personality. (The mothers, while all very different, seem all to have been medical professionals - I’m not sure about Grace, but Callie does mention learning how to stitch a wound from her.) Callie sees that her father is an a-hole and rejects his values, and is an idealist and altruist who wants to do the right thing and save people (while Josephine was a selfish narcissist). Her mother Grace is somewhere in between, as she also left Second Dawn and doesn’t fully agree with Bill - but will often go along with him, and tries to keep peace between the other family members, and thinks their family needs to “set an example”. With the Griffins, we had an idealistic, altruistic father and a daughter with similar characteristics, who adored him and misses him after losing him, and a mother who was similarly concerned with helping others, and the conflicts between them were about how to go about these solutions. With the Lightbourne, we had the evil version of the Griffins, and the Cadogans have a more complicated dynamic. Callie is more comparable to Clarke, and Bill to Russell. 

But one aspect in which Bill Cadogan is much worse than Russell is - where Russell loved his family, maybe a bit too much, considering what he did to bring them back, Bill loves himself and his “savior” role more than anything. Maybe his love for Callie comes close - and I get the impression that one of the main reasons he loves her is because he respects her and she challenges him - but it is still not his main motive.  He is ready to punish his ex-wife for disobeying him by leaving her to die. Reese is an a-hole, but it’s hard not to feel sorry for him when he thinks for a moment that his father is worried for him (when Bill runs up to Reese, who's injured) but Bill immediately shows that all he cares about is getting the Flame, so he can get the final code for the Anomaly.

Another issue is, of course, that Callie, Reese and Grace are POC, but I don’t know if race - or sexuality, or gender - will ever be raised as an issue on the prequel show itself - or if the world pre-apocalypse and right after it is supposed to be as post-race, post-sexuality, post-gender as the current timeline of The 100 is. On The 100, for instance, Thelonius and Wells Jaha being black or Clarke being bisexual or a woman, were not issues that affected their status - only class issues existed; if the pre-apocalypse society was different, then the show could explore Callie, Reese and Grace being very privileged in terms of class and status in SD as Cadogan’s family, and lack of privilege in other respects.

I’m not sure I fully buy the way Callie easily goes along with her mother and leaves her best friend to die. It seems to go against the rest of her characterization. But maybe it shows that she still wasn’t a full-blown rebel at this point, in spite of participating in the protests against the government and in spite of rebelling against her father - maybe she still wasn’t able to really rebel against her mother, too. 

Interesting line - as Callie stitches Lucy's injuries, Lucy says: "I don't want to be scarred for life" - which may be foreshadowing for Callie being scarred and haunted by the fact she left Lucy to die? Unless Lucy turns out to somehow be alive - but worse for wear. Which would again haunt Callie, too.

I guess Callie’s failure to at least try harder is supposed to be what drives her to try and save other people, after she learns that there was still room and resources for almost 100 more people in the bunker - and when she sees August fighting tooth and nail to save his girlfriend, when she is barred from the bunker because she’s not “Level 12″. August is clearly a character the show is setting us up to like - these scenes are reminiscent of Bellamy fighting to open the door for his sister, and his name evokes the Blakes (Octavia was named after Octavian August’s sister)..

(Sidenote: Callie mentions a high suicide rate (20 suicides in the last 6 months, twice as many attempts) - and this is something that would realistically happen in such a dire situation. It’s a bit unrealistic that it apparently never happened with Wonkru.)

The SciFi plot points relevant to the overall plot make an appearance when we see the Anomaly Stone on Earth, which Bill found in Machu Picchu and brought to the bunker (and we get an explanation why he didn’t use it right after the apocalypse but spent two years in the bunker instead - he didn’t know how to activate it - not being able to find the last two symbols)... and when, two years later, Becca Franko arrives from Polaris in her pod, as we saw in 3x07, with Nightblood as the cure against radiation she’s about to offer everyone, and the Flame in her head.

A few words about how I feel about Becca. While she is here positioned in opposition to Bill Cadogan - who is definitely a megalomaniac a-hole and a villain - I can’t see her as a pure unambiguous and unproblematic good guy we should stan, as Callie stans her. For starters, Becca is also a megalomaniac - she calls her second AI “the Flame”, comparing herself to Prometheus! (But she makes me think of Dr Frankenstein, and the full title of Mary Shelley’s novel was Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.) She is, of course, as a genius scientist, a lot more capable and competent than Cadogan,but she also has a huge savior complex (only she is focused on the idea of her AI being the savior, rather than herself), and is also another big capitalist - a “tech tycoon” who owns her own space station and her own network (and was so powerful and politically relevant that the Chinese and the Russian space station were refusing to join the rest of the stations until the US station destroyed Polaris -  Becca was apparently seen as a rival strong enough to challenge the US government?). She worked for a big corporation (Eligius) which colonized other planets and used people - prisoners - as “expendable” work force that can be left to die if necessary. And knowing that she had Nightblood developed more than 7 years before the apocalypse, and that she was worried about what ALIE could do  - I wonder why she didn’t offer Nightblood as the solution for a potential apocalypse before it happened, rather than isolating herself on Polaris to work on the Flame. That was one questionable decision - another one was putting the people on Polaris in danger and letting them die, so she could get the Flame to Earth. I could be more understanding of this decision if I could embrace the idea of the Flame as more important than anything, the one thing needed to save the world, as Becca believed it was. But her idea of a sole savior who will help everyone after being enhanced through an AI is something I find pretty questionable and a bit disturbing in general. To be fair the Flame definitely did fulfill its role once and help a person with a good mind use it to save the world - Clarke in season 3. But that was one time, to save the world from ALIE. This, however, doesn’t really justify passing the Flame on and on and giving people political power with it - even without knowing how distorted her initial idea would become in the Grounder society, surely anyone can see the potential for tyranny there? And Becca was aware that 1) the Flame could also make a bad person become even worse and powerful (as it has with Sheidheda) and 2) someone like Bill could use it to destroy the world, according to Becca herself. Seems like a way too big a risk to take.

There are apparently 744 different Anomaly symbols, which means an “infinite” number of combinations, according to Becca (err, not really; it’s a really, really huge number, but it’s not “infinite”, which bugged me a little, since I wouldn’t expect a scientist, especially one who uses the Infinity symbol as her logo, to use the word “infinity” as an exaggeration).

Becca manages to activate the Stone, not because of any scientific knowledge she has, but because the Flame, apparently, gives her enhanced hearing - allowing her to hear the sounds of the Stone, where each sound stands for a symbol. (Dogs can apparently also hear those rather unpleasant sounds.) Everything in this episode makes it clear that it is the Flame itself that Bill needs to find the code, it's always been about that. (Him thinking Callie is in there is just a bonus - emotional connection.) The Flame had no one's memories/spirit in this episode before Becca died, and Becca made it clear to Callie that it’s all about the Flame itself. If the Disciples knew Clarke didn’t have the Flame anymore, they wouldn’t need Madi or Sheidheda - it’s not about the memories, not even Becca’s., it’s that piece of plastic that's buried on Sanctum, if it can still work. (Or maybe they need Picasso :p.)

The most mysterious moment and the biggest question of the episode is - where (when?) did Becca go and what did she see when she activated the Stone the second time and when she and Callie saw the white light coming from the Anomaly? This is different from the green light we see when the Anomaly takes you to other planets. The white light is probably connected to transcendence and/or the Judgment Day that Becca said she saw - which Cadogan, with his typical arrogance, believes he is ready for. but Becca believes no one is. 

"It wasn't to open the bridge to another world, it was to remake this one" - this line would make me think that our protagonists are meant to rebuild the Earth - but at this point, I find it hard to see how this could happen over in just 7 episodes, with how the current storylines are going. So maybe they’ll focus on rebuilding Sanctum, after all.

For opposing Bill’s plans, Becca is locked up for 5 days, tied to a pipe (geez!) and, guessing what’s about to happen, she explains the Flame to Callie and tells her to take it and never allow Cadogan to have it, as she believes he could destroy the world with it. (Another often asked question was how the Flame survived Becca’s burning - we learn that it can and that it’s programmed to save itself.)

Becca is burned by Second Dawn Disciples led by Reese Cadogan, presumably at his dad’s orders. Which maybe was supposed to evoke the popular idea of “burning a witch”, but the historical fact that burning at the stake was the traditional punishment for heresy fits even better. There’s been speculation that the memory we saw in 5x10 was his - but that’s incorrect: Madi experienced that memory, she felt being burned, screamed and yelled what Becca was yelling, and we saw it from her POV - the Second Dawn members that were around her and herself reflected in their helmets.

Another memory we saw from Madi, the one we saw her draw in 7x09 (and which I initially mistook seems to be a memory of Becca or other people going into the Anomaly) seems to actually be a memory of the moment when Becca first interacted with the Anomaly Stone and talked about it with the other people in the room - Bill, Grace, Callie and Reese. In other words, every one of the Flame memories from this period may be Becca’s - we have no evidence that would help us learn who else took the Flame after her death. It could be any of the characters who stayed on Earth - Bill is the only one who definitely has never gotten his hands on it.

Retcons and Easter Eggs

I’ve always thought that the world-building, especially when it comes to the Grounder society and culture, was the weakest part of the show. Jason obviously followed some of the common tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction when it comes to the portrayal of Grounders, but didn’t think things through - and at some point, probably realized and/or heard/read all the criticism of the show and thought: “This really doesn’t make any sense”,  came up with the Second Dawn backstory, and eventually came up with this expanded backstory, which gives many new explanations. Even though we still don’t have the answer to the biggest question: how a society made of bunch of modern people, survivors, could deteriorate into a tribal society with a medieval level of technological development and lack of knowledge about science and the past culture and history - over a few decades. I guess we need to see the prequel for that, but there are some ideas how it could have happened.  I liked most of the retcons in this episode, such as:

Trigedaslang was devised by Callie as a child. The idea of a new language developing naturally over less than 100 years never made sense. (The “it’s a pidgin” explanation never worked either - as Trig apparently developed without the influence of any other language or necessity to communicate with people who don’t speak English. It’s just distorted/changed English.) The only reasonable explanation was always that it was an artificial language - we just didn’t know when it was made.

Finally we get an explanation about the fact that Grounders originated from the Second Dawn survivors and were influenced by their mottoes (”From the ashes, we will rise”), but at the same time, worship Becca as “Pramheda” and make their leaders take the Flame - in spite of the fact that Cadogan and Becca were rivals and that the latter was burned by the Second Dawn members. 

The fact that two factions already exist - Callie’s (adores Becca, wants to save as many people as possible by using Nightblood, clearly trusts in science) and Reese’s (Second Dawn true believer, burned Becca, needs the Flame for other purposes) may start to explain how things started going wrong and the society fractured.

Speaking of which, the Conclave seems to have originated from Reese Cadogan’s obsession with the fights his father made him have with him and his sister, and his dumbass idea of using a duel to determine who gets the Flame. This is a better explanation than “it is after an apocalypse, so they just started having death tournaments for reasons”. Callie, on the other hand, is much more pragmatic and doesn’t seem to care much about tournaments as a way to prove oneself - because she doesn’t need to, so she does the Indiana Jones/Harrison Ford thing and just pulls the gun and shoots him in the shoulder. One of my favorite moments in this episode. 

“Tree Crew” gets the award as the least expected and funniest new piece of info/retcon, though that begs the question of how the other clans got their names. I’ve joked that Ice Nation were a group of ice hockey fans... but for all I know, maybe that’s true! :D Or maybe the “Trikru” name was later misinterpreted as something to do with living in the woods, so the other clans started having names like “Boat people” or “Shallow Valley people”.

August made up the term Nightblood.  

"You must choose wisely" comes from something Becca said to Callie, about choosing the person to give the Flame to. Too bad that later Commanders didn’t know it meant “find the most qualified person” and instead got the weird idea that it meant making a bunch of kids fight each other and that one of them winning somehow means the dead Commander’s spirit “chose” their successor.

One thing that definitely makes a lot more sense now is the Grounder’s bizarre fashion sense, I can easily see a bunch of 21st century upper middle class/rich teenagers thinking it would be super cool to wear warpaint, tattoos and dreadlocks (even if you’re as white as the original Sheidheda), and some later Commander going: “I want to wear a crown! No, you know what would be cool? That thing Indian women wear on their foreheads? You know that thing? I could wear that!” 

Easter Egg: Callie was reading Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” at home just before the news of the nuclear apocalypse came - the same book that Niylah gave as a gift to Octavia not long after they went into the bunker (5x02). And maybe it is literally the same book - they sure weren’t printing any new books and someone had to bring that book initially to the Second Dawn bunker during the first apocalypse. In 5x02, it was symbolic of Octavia’s transformation into Blodreina. Here, it may be symbolic of Callie becoming a leader, or the transformation of the entire society.

But some other retcons don’t work well:

The Flame’s abilities have been retconed so many times, but this is the first time we learn that it enhances the Commanders’ senses - which is a big plot point, as it allowed Becca to hear the sounds of the Stone. We have never heard about that before or seen any indication that Lexa or S5/6 Madi had any enhanced sight or Matt Murdock-like super-hearing. 

So why was Becca called the Commander aka Heda? I don’t mean the fact that she was never one - Callie could have decided to call her the first Commander as an homage. But why that term? The flashback in 3x07 made it look like it was because Becca was wearing a suit with the word “Commander” (because she took the actual Commander’s suit before she left Polaris) - but since everyone knew who she was, why would that make them start calling her Commander?

Prequel speculation

There’s a lot of reasons why I’d like to see the prequel picked up. Firstly, because Callie is a likable and charismatic protagonist. Reese could be an interesting antagonist as he is her brother - and while he has been a grade A a-hole so far, there’s room there for character development, especially with his relationship with his sister, backstory of abuse by their father and the probability that he’ll understand at some point that he won’t be able to get the Flame to his dad even if he gets it. There’s also the fact that their mother will need saving at the start of the new show (if it gets picked up), and certainly a lot of other possibilities for family drama. And we’d probably also see Callie change and be faced with difficult and morally ambiguous situations that test her, much as we’ve seen with Clarke over the seasons.

Several other things mentioned by Jason in his interviews sound quite exciting:

Lost-style flashbacks to the characters’ lives pre-apocalypse: I’d love this. It would present a contrast before and after the apocalypse, and flesh out characters, and let us learn more about things like, what the Battle of San Francisco was, which wars was Diyoza in, more about Diyoza’s role as a freedom fighter/terrorist... can we get more Diyoza backstory?

the possibility of seeing the origins of the Ark and ancestors of our main characters like Clarke, Bellamy and Octavia (and we know we would see the ancestors of these characters, Jason mentioned that - the guy clearly does know what the fandom likes and wants), immediately doubled my interest. I just hope there’s a good idea how to do that without 1) the two stories looking completely disconnected (it seems this won’t be the case as Jason mentioned that Callie’s people will have to go to space to make more Nightblood and this will allow crossovers) and 2) with a good explanation how the people on the Ark, 97 years later, did not know about the survivors on the ground, about the Earth being survivable, or about the Nightblood, which had been used by Eligius years before. The line  "Dad had friends on more than one space station. They already know we're here" also begs for an explanation.

on the ground, we’ll see Callie and co. looking for more survivors (after all, there were more bunkers and other shelters) and offering them Nightblood as a “cure” - which could lead to a lot of interesting situations (and potentially pretty current commentary, if there are people who refuse it)... On the other hand, this could also lead to some more moral dilemmas when they run out of the Nightblood shots (they have 2,000 at the moment, and again, Jason has indicated that they will run out of NB and will have to create more).

Some of the big questions include - who becomes the actual first Commander? How does the society develop from there? When and how is the Anomaly Stone deactivated on Earth, and where is it now? How does Becca’s knowledge eventually get lost? We’ve heard it’s because the data got corrupted/deteriorated over time, but it’s a little too convenient that even Madi still had Becca’s memories, but the scientific and technological all other knowledge was gone during the following 95 years.

I have some ideas how it could go. A lot of people (including, obviously, Bill himself in-universe) wonder if Callie became a Commander and would like to see her be the first Commander. But Callie is the first Flamekeeper, and I don’t see her going “I’m the best and most qualified person, I should have it”. This doesn’t preclude the possibility - she may finally take it for similar reasons Clarke did in season 3, because she has to in order to do something important and there are no other candidates around. But that would be too optimistic an option. Maybe Reese manages to get his hands on the Flame, but Callie or August or someone from her faction manages to disconnect the Stone so he wouldn’t be able to get it to Bill? Or maybe someone else - say, Tristan, who so far can be summed up as “that while guy a-hole who hangs out with Reese” - managed to get his hands on it and then make himself Commander? If people like Tristan or Reese become the Commander, that would work better in terms of explaining how things went so wrong with the Grounder society.

There have been speculations if these characters are ancestors of this or that character we know. Maybe Tristan is an ancestor of this Tristan from season 1 (the guy who was sent to ‘slaughter’ the 100 and was killed by Kane in 2x01)? People are often named after their grandparents, sometimes even after their parents, or celebrated ancestors - names can get passed on like that, and Tristan isn’t exactly the most common name. Or, if Tristan manages to become a Commander - that would make it a popular name.

In any case, the prequel needs to provide a convincing explanation how the society of these survivors and their descendants went from what we see in this episode to the Grounder society we know. But this is my big concern about the prequel - and it’s the problem that many prequels have: however they get there, we know how things turn out; we know it all somehow goes wrong, and that not only will the antagonist fail in their initial goal (getting the Flame to Bill), but the protagonist, Callie, will ultimately fail in her attempts to create a better society. Instead, the Grounder society will descend into tribalism, worship of violence, and constant wars between a bunch of clans, the Flame won’t be given to the person chosen as most qualified but will be fought over by a bunch of children selected on the basis of “special blood” (as Nightblood becomes rarer over time) and forced to kill each other, and most of Becca’s knowledge will be forgotten, as Grounders become technologically underdeveloped and unable to really defend themselves from the Mountain Men, who will learn about them in a few decades and start using them as blood supply.

On the other hand, knowing that the protagonists will fail and that everything will go wrong is often the case with prequels (e.g. regardless of their quality, Star Wars prequels were certainly watched by many people), or, for that matter, with some period dramas (e.g. Babylon Berlin, which I love - set in the Weimar Republic, which means that we know all the time while watching the show that things will go horribly wrong on the level of the society). Sometimes that sense of doom doesn’t turn me off as viewer and actually makes the story more compelling in a way. But that would certainly be a difference from The 100 - no matter how dark, we can still hope things will turn out well and a good solution will be found. Or maybe everything will go even worse. We don’t know how things turn out with the humanity in general. In this prequel, we would know.

Body count for this episode: in the present day, no one. in the flashbacks... over 10 billion people.

Rating: 9/10

[hannah-deserved-better]

Long Ago Chapter One

I thought I would share this fic. It’s kinda on hiatus at the moment because I have been focusing on my novel and the media bang these days, but I have two chapters and I’m hoping you all like it.

Pairing: Sahanstiel (Hanstiel+sastiel)

Summary:  Takes place five years after s15e03, "Rapture." The Winchesters haven't heard from Castiel in over five years. Ever since he and Dean got into a fight and he walked out on their lives. Sam has wondered about him ever since. He's surprised when they happen to run into him in a small town. Sam and Castiel both have wounds to heal and they both have a lot to talk about. But is it possible to heal old wounds? Is it possible to find feelings for someone again after so long? Especially when they have someone new in their lives?

Warnings and tags: Character death in the past, single father Sam, Dean being a jerk (not bashy), autism spectrum disorder, adoption drama, angel possession trauma, poverty, rekindling love

AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26381725/chapters/64260361

“Cas?” Sam couldn’t believe it. He never expected to run into Castiel in this tiny town. He’d always wondered why Castiel had disappeared that day, over five years ago now. He’d called repeatedly, and he’d asked Dean, who refused to talk about it.

But now, here he was, standing in front of the angel, their paths suddenly converged at a gas station of all places. He was instantly recognizable. Of course, angels didn’t age or lose or gain weight, but he wore the same suit and beige trenchcoat he always had worn. 

“S-Sam…” Castiel stuttered slightly, his blue eyes wide in surprise as he glanced up from the gas pump he had just inserted into his car- Sam recognized it. The old gold-colored ‘78 Lincoln that Sam hadn’t seen in well over a decade.

At first, the two of them just stared at one another, unsure what to say next. How could anyone find the right words for this situation?

Finally, it was Cas who broke the silence. He gave Sam a soft smile, “how are you, Sam?” he asked sincerely. 

“I’m good,” Sam fidgeted with the gas nozzle he had in his hands before absently inserting it into the impala. “I’m just getting gas real quick before heading back to the hotel.”

Sam berated himself internally. Of course, he was getting gas. Why else would he be at a gas station? But in all truthfulness, he was still unsure of how to react. He could never tell the angel, and he could never tell Dean, but he’d thought of this happening for so long. He wondered what it would be like to have Castiel in his life again. He’d gone over various scenarios in his mind. What he would say. What the angel might say. And most of all: why did he leave them?

He’d thought about it for the past five years. Even when Eileen was still in his life, and it made him feel guilty. Because it wasn’t as if he didn’t love Eileen with all his heart, and it wasn’t as if he’d been devastated when she died, but the way he thought of Castiel all the time, it had haunted him all these years. 

“Is Dean there?” Castiel’s voice brought Sam out of his thoughts, and he realized that he’d been staring at Castiel the entire time. Lost in his own thoughts. 

“Yeah,” Sam confirmed. And Autumn. Autumn was there. But Sam wasn’t sure how to tell Castiel about Autumn. “Cas… how long have you been here in town? Are you working on a case? I… I guess I thought you would have returned to heaven. You know… after…”

“I knew you, and Dean would be able to defeat God in the end,” Castiel replaced the gas nozzle back onto the pump and closed the panel on his car. “I don’t know how, but that’s not important, I suppose.”

“We trapped him,” Sam blurted out. “He’s still alive, but we trapped him—sort of like Amara. We had to think of something. We didn’t have Jack… or you… to help us.” Because you left, Sam added that last bit in his thoughts, with a burst of emotion and resentment. He wanted to confront him. To demand an explanation. But he couldn’t. He didn’t want to scare Cas away again. 

“Castiel,” a feminine voice caught Sam’s attention, and he whirled towards the source. He recognized the woman coming out of the gas station convenience store, though he had to blink a few times, jogging his memory a little, as he barely remembered her.

“Do you remember Hannah?” Castiel asked as the woman strolled over to stand beside Castiel, a plastic bag in her hands. She glanced over at Sam, eyes narrowing slightly in confusion before a glimmer of recognition flashed in her eyes.

“The Winchesters?” Hannah glanced at Castiel for an explanation. “How did they find us?”

“It’s alright,” Castiel assured her before turning his attention to Sam, his arm snaking around Hannah’s torso, pulling her closer. “Sam and I just happened to run into one another.”

“Cas, what’s going on here?” Sam demanded, eyeing the subtle act of intimacy between the two angels. 

“It will take a moment to explain,” Castiel began. “You see, Hannah and I are married.”

That information hit Sam like a ton of bricks. Castiel was married? Sam swallowed, managing to barely keep his emotions in check as he forced a smile through the pain he was feeling. Castiel got married, that was why he had never come back. He’d moved on! He’d forgotten about them! It felt as though Sam had been knifed in the gut. 

“I… I thought you were dead,” Sam blurted out. “Both of you. Dean never told me why you left. I assumed because it hurt too much. I didn’t know what happened to you. All this time, you’ve been here with her?”

Castiel sighed hard. “I’m not ready to talk about this,” he held up a hand. “I’m just not ready to have this conversation. You have no idea what the past five years have been like for me, Sam. And you have no idea how hard it was to leave and never come back.”

“It was Dean,” Hannah blurted out bluntly in a tone that clearly meant a warning. “He hurt Castiel. And now he has a life here. He’s healed.” She glanced at Castiel. “Come on, Abigail is waiting at home.”

“Wait!” After all this time, Sam wasn’t going to let Castiel walk out on his life again. He could tell this meeting was quickly going sour, and he needed a chance to recover and to sort out his emotions. And he knew Castiel did too. He swallowed and took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down and bite down his feelings. “Wait… look, we didn’t know you were here, I swear. And I’m sorry, it’s just so sudden. We’re just here to take Autumn to the state fair. She loves horses and… I thought it would be nice.”

“Autumn?” Castiel questioned. Sam sighed, wondering how Castiel would take this news.

“My daughter,” he replied as his heart skipped a beat. “She’s… she’s at the motel with Dean if you want to meet her.”

“You have a child…” Castiel stammered. He glanced at Hannah, the two seemed to share an expression, and he squeezed Hannah’s hand. He looked at Sam again. “I… I don’t know if I’m ready for this, but if you come to the fair tomorrow, I’ll meet you there. Agreed?”

Sam nodded quickly. Before he could say anything more, Castiel and Hannah promptly got into their car, and Sam found himself staring at the spot their car had been long after it had gone.

[courage-a-word-of-justice]

Akudama 2 - 3 | HypMic 4 | Yashahime 3 | Taiso 2 - 3 | Moriarty 2 | Maou-jou 3

Akudama 2

I think one or two of the reviews I read of this anime picked up the names of each episode are based on movies and it seems they’re right. Namely, episode 1 is Se7en while episode 2 is Reservoir Dogs...so they’re crime movies specifically.

Kanto, Hikari etc. are the names of certain shinkansen.

Playing with your own blood in front of a no violence sign and smoking in front of a no smoking sign…LOL. So edgy and yet simultaneously so fun.

…*blinks* Welp, that OP was…an experience.

…hey, Funi are hypocrites…they gave HypMic a language warning, but not this???

Come to think of it, this anime is already exactly how I’d imagine the HypMic MTC episode to go…but with more cyberpunk, of course.

…why is “are you gay?” an insult…? I thought we were past this point years ago.

…what’s up with these puppets? The shark’s shirt says “fool” on it…

The rabbit and shark’s shirts keep changing every time they spin. When they talk about poverty/rich, the rabbit shirts says “poor” and the shark’s “rich” (or something of the sort). When the shark talks about Kansai burning to the ground, his shirt says “nervousness”.

Wow, Hiroshima vers. 2…Rabbit: peace/shark:war

Hoodlum’s just a sycophant…

…ooh, so if the girl and Hoodlum aren’t part of the plan…they could f*** s*** up?

LOL, plasma shield.

“Lil’ stick”? That’s a jitte! A non-bladed weapon which is still plenty nasty by itself!

Ken the 390??? I knew UraShimaSakataSen were on this ED and I knew this was a rap ED because I heard it in AMQ before I was able to finish this ep, IIRC, but I didn’t expect the guy from BATTLE BATTLE BATTLE....

Taiso 2

A-hah! I was right on the money! Tomoyo is an actress!

Oh, it’s senu. That’s an old-timey way of negating your verbs (it’s shinai now), hence “retires not”.

I think they’re hailing Minamino as the first winner in 45 years if I understood the newspaper article on the screen right…?

Does this mean Minamino will join Leo and Aragaki…? The OP shows him with them.

The AnimeLab translation of the title is “Duelling Samurai”, but the translation on the hardsubs is “Rock-Bottom Samurai”. The word donzoko indicates the latter is correct.

I think Leo said “Rei-chan”, not “Rachel”. It’s a bit hard to hear because he’s eating though…

I think there’s only one line where he doesn’t talk like a ninja in his intro to Ayu and that’s the line where he uses keigo instead.

I think the card says “acupuncturist Kawa????” (can’t read the last character due to Britney’s thumb), but…welp, Britney’s kinda disturbing in their (not sure what pronoun to use) own way. There also appears to be an address in Ikebukuro on the card.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Leo learnt how to speak Japanese fluently from ninja movies – that’s a pretty common anime trope, like in Tada-kun’s Rainbow Samurai case. “Always make your heart rainbow!” and all that jazz.

…so that’s what the card said - Kawamoto Orthopedic Clinic.

“My shoulder would…”

Seriously, this anime is just an excuse to look at Aragaki in different outfits (and also shirtless) and I love it, LOL. (I’m such a simpleton.)

Ah…sometimes, people ask me about the days when I used to learn piano and I bring up the fact there is such a thing as “overpractice”. I thought gymnasts would know when they hit their limits in that regard, but…I guess they don’t because they’re so consumed in their passion, or they can’t see what they’re doing to themselves (because it occurs under the skin and doesn’t ache)…?

Minamino is basically Yurio…LOL.

That’s a cute, laidback ED. It’s called Yume? (yes, with the “?”) and it’s by Hatena, hence Leo’s shirt saying “Hatena”.

Welp, I don’t think anything supernatural will happen anymore, but…it’s still a fun anime. They toned down BB too, which should please a huge number of reviewers who found him obnoxious.

Yashahime 3

Hitokon? Short for “hito control” (hito = person)? Update: It seems the name was also kanji for “flying head root”.

“…puts one to sleep.”

“…from a place like that?”

Can a Dream Butterfly steal memories?

Moriarty 2

“Colum” (sic).

These CGI horses are gonna bug me, aren’t they…?

There is this sentiment that people need to be “saved” from poverty, especially when it comes down to African and Asian people living in slums (these days). I get the same feeling from this.

Maou-jou 3

Free advertising for Maou-jou’s home magazine! LOL!

I was wondering why those things were called “Show the Mary”…remember Mezo Shouji from Boku no Hero Academia? Same pun (the walls have ears and the doors have eyes, or something of the sort).

LOL, instead of yokudekimashita (literally, “you did good”) it’s makura ni narimashita (“you made [the book] into a pillow”). The common sentence ending for verbs means it’s funnier in Japanese, I think.

…argh! I can’t read all of Alazif’s info because of the hardsubs! Umm…”Current worry: Princess” and “Worry of the past hundred years: Destroying the demon clan” is in the box next to the logo. “Powerful magic techniques are recorded inside this book, so the demons feared it and sealed it away as a ‘forbidden grimoire’.”/”Currently, under the control of the princess, they’ve been bestowing magic and magic techniques to her, so they haven’t been used for the purpose they were made for and they’re wishing the princess would use them for not-so-stupid things” (I don’t know what pronoun to give Alazif, so I gave them 3rd person “them)…ah, someone translated the stuff for me! (That saves me a lot of time.) So Alazif is a “he”, huh?

OHKO to Demon Cleric, LOL.

SAN…? Oh, “sanity”?

Oh, Demon Cleric’s ears are black goat ears. No wonder you can’t see ‘em.

This sword is like Ex from Princess, ‘Tis Time for Torture!

HypMic 4

From here until episode 6-ish, I’ll be paying extra attention to characters’ role language. I normally do that, but I picked this anime for an assignment because I knew it had a lot of examples…yes, you heard me right. An assignment! I should be happy, but I’m wondering if my taste is going to get roasted by the normies or if I’ve gone too far with my unabashed love…

I was discussing with some of my peeps in a Discord server and…is it possible MTR will get an ED from here on out if you divide the episodes up for an almost equal amount for each division? We’ll have to wait and see.

…Oof. I’m sort of scared for this episode. It’s gonna have swearing galore…and yup, there it is, right out the gate.

Wait, why not translate wakagashira? It just means “young head” or “2nd in command”.

…well, at least they got some variation in their swearing this time…?

Hmm, normally the translation is “rabbit cop” or something toned down like that. They dialled it up to “rabbity-ass cop”. (Yakuwarigo: Samatoki = na, on the whole = very, very slang – as a former naval officer, you would expect Riou to speak formally, but he speaks as casually as almost everyone else (yamero etc.))

I’ve never seen anyone refer to Samatoki as “Kashira”. *laser stares Rentei for guest VA roles*

(Yakuwarigo: Samatoki (?) = zo)

“…why don’t you ask the cops to deal with it?” – Uh, Samatoki? Jyuto is the cop. (Well, a cop.)

I still have no idea why they subtitle the laughing…

Wait, if there’s a casino…is Dice there?!

…yup, right on cue. I didn’t think Tom and co. would be there too.

Oh, LOL. HypMic is a tourist trap anime = see those buns Tom’s eating? They’re chuukaman (Chinese buns). Makes sense in Chinatown.

It took me several watches to realise who’d passed by, but it’s…MTC in formal clothes?! (You can see part of Jyuto’s face, just to confirm it.)

Why are they wearing glasses? Even Jyuto’s wearing different glasses to the usual, LOL.

I learnt how to do some of the casino stuff while trying to get a job as a gaming customer service assistant in a huge casino joint one time. In a sense, this brings me back to then. (Update: I mean, the sound of the roulette, the sight of the board, the chips and the like. That’s what takes me back.)

(Yakuwarigo: Dice slurs his words a lot, especially when yelling things along the lines of “Please lend me moneyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” This is also true in the game.)

Dice seems to have jumped straight to “Riou”, rather than “Riou-san”.  

I wonder if anyone will ever elaborate on that incident where Dice and Riou met?

(Yakuwarigo: Samatoki speaks coarsely, but not outright swearing in the source language…for an example, he says kussotare when roped into being Jakurai’s “female counterpart” for the ARB Halloween event, but he doesn’t do anything of the sort here.)

Even Ramuda uses “san” with Samatoki, most likely to emulate how Samatoki calls himself “oresama” (but with lower formality).

Ramuda-chin? That’s new.

Yakuwarigo: Gentaro spoke normally, just with desu/masu. Maybe the “perchance” was to make it blend in with his -de aru?

Uh-oh…Ramuda’s favours always are things like “dress up for me” and “hang out with me”, if the game is any indication. (One of them happens to be how Ichiro was roped into being a sorta-Kirito for the ARB Halloween event.)

This CGI…it’s not the jankiest, but it is gonna bug me ever so slightly.

I’ve noticed a lot of people in the English-speaking fandom, when they watched the anime, took a shine to MTC (because they seem to embody the entire “refuge in audacity” thing they’ve picked up on…plus that one hamster lyric people got attached to). You can see them being all “cop/gangster husbands” here if that’s your gig – it’s kind of my gig, but to be real HypMic is not a scene where I ship dudes. I’m sorry, but I just like watching pretty boys kick butt.

What warranted the dramatic glasses drop…? (LOL anyway)

That whistle…LOL. It’s like “Look at my boy fight” and “Riou’s got some sweet fightin’ moves” rolled up in one.

For some reason, when I saw the sign for the Organised Crime department, I heard the Student Council theme from Boueibu play in my head…? (Remember that harpsichord theme?) *shrugs* I dunno why that happened.

Hmm…they crossed out the subtitles using Swedish letters instead of strikethrough, huh? Didn’t know that was a limitation.

(Yakuwarigo: Jyuto = dazo)

“Wouldya look at that forlorn mug of his?” – Seeing a man taller than you (Riou is a good 190 or so cm, mind you, making him the tallest member of his division above Samatoki’s 180-something and Jyuto’s 170-something) making a sort of demented puppy-dog face…LOL.

(Yakuwarigo: Jyuto elevated himself to kimasuyo…maybe to win back Riou’s favour?)

(Yakuwarigo: The translation elevated Samatoki’s “nanda” to “the f***”. “Nanda” is not that bad – it’s casual, but doesn’t imply swearing like “ittai” is supposed to mean “the hell”.)

(Yakuwarigo: Jyuto doesn’t finish when he says “ore wa hanashi ga”. That’s called an omission, plain as that may be.)

(Yakuwarigo: Taihendaze!...Maybe that’s a bit far to call it “we’re f**ked”…? It could just be “we’re doomed!” or “we’ve got trouble!”)

(Yakuwarigo: Jyuto uses desune. He’s the most feminine of the trio by virtue of being the smallest height-wise and most polite due to his job, but he seems to bounce between casual and polite a lot.)

…wow, even the rap lyrics have the F bomb…and this time, you can see the evidence.

Natsu no mushi = bugs in the summer. Not a perfect match, but it works. (Notably, things like Gentaro’s speech and rap lyrics don’t play by the same yakuwarigo rules because you can play characters within it – e.g. the evil doctor Jakurai sometimes plays. I’ve noticed most of the songs use casual or whatever rhymes, even for someone like Doppo who’s considered more polite than most.)

…Despite the swearing…that song slaps, man! That’s great.

MTC seems to have more tragedy on average than other divisions. This is because FP and BB are quite light-hearted and mostly family-friendly with hidden depths, but MTR mostly has stalker stories. Update: That’s when they’re focussing on MTR solo. FP’s currently could get pretty dark soon and a lot of the dark/tragic stuff is not actually going to make the anime because it’s in the drama tracks/manga.

My gosh, we got to see Nemu animated!

Okay, I’m not well-versed in yakuza slang but kumicho = boss, so Samatoki would have to answer to a kumicho.

(Yakuwarigo: Notably, when Riou bows, he doesn’t elevate his speech.)

(Yakuwarigo: Jyuto = desukane)

…and randomly, rock solo postcard memory away from the sunset. (LOL) (Also, I believe I befriended Zainou during my time on WordPress. This episode title really does mean things, in a certain sense.)

Ah, it did switch! It’s just…uh, gone to an MTC version of itself (and it has the same name, “Kizuna”). So that means we wait another 6 episodes for MTR. On the other hand…what will the final version be? A whole cast version? A different song? No song at all? *shrugs* Only the future can tell us these things. (Also, why is Jyuto so loud…? That’s why I’m not a bigger fan of him. Much like Ramuda’s minna genki?, his iconic quotes like “In the building!” are so loud and silly-sounding, you just can’t get them out of your head.)

The cityscape in the middle of the disc at the ED’s start seems to have changed. I would assume that’s a Yokohama skyline.

Keiichi Nakagawa is the voice of Rentei…I should stop burning myself on guest VA appearances, this guy’s a rookie. This Nouzenkazura VA (Kenji Hamada) though is voiced by the guy who does Otegine in Touken Ranbu and isn’t as much of a rookie as Rentei’s.

Notably, where BB do the “BB sign” (as it seems to be known), MTC do a finger gun. MTR have the wolf fang, but…what is FP’s, then? Update: It’s a peace sign to the side to make an F.

Today’s new music was “Red Zone (Don’t Test da Master)”, by KLOOZ and DJ WATARAI.

*cringes at the airhorn* *briefly presses fingers to forehead, as if going to massage temples, but then removes them* The airhorn reminds me of crazy sport fans. Crazy anime fans are more civil than them, which is one reason why I don’t follow sports on the regular.

Update: Oh! The pond owl cafe in episode 2! It means Ikebukuro!...Sort of. Fukurou rhymes with ‘bukuro and ike = pond.

Akudama 3

Hmm? Is it just me or is that T in the code the kanji for “bird” (tori)?

“It’s where I belong.” – I know my reason for pursuing Japanese is a purely selfish reason – so I can stay above others in the topics I think matter to me and pursue the endless natural high that comes from the thrill of translation (which may be all one reason or two, depending on how you look at it).

Oh, the bunny and shark again.

The bunny’s shirt said “life” at one point, I didn’t understand the shark’s though.

At one point, shark: Ka (from “Kansai”), bunny: ken (authority).

At the end, shark: heaven, bunny: hell. These broadcasts look like NHK broadcasts at the end.

Most of these words are katakana, making them look foreign.

Kansai 300, 25-1.

“Move-you-s**t!” – It…seems a bit out of character for Swindler to say the swear word there.

Taiso 3

That CGI…is not the greatest.

According to Moon Land, gymnastics operates on a deduction/addition system. You add points for difficulty, but deduct points for errors like how Minamino’s feet are apart.

*sees montage* - Those CGI scenes really take out the budget, huh…?

Gymnastics moves are named after their creators…kinda like scientific names and finders.

There was a lot of commentary in Moon Land so I’m not sure what the moves are called from memory (the dialogue always did that for me), but having the reactions speak for themselves…I think the anime team has enough faith the reactions will convey everything. They did, by the way.

You can see the bone at the base of Minamino’s neck, under the skin…it’s sort of scary.

The fact you couldn’t see Jotaro’s eyes for a shot or two…that kind of unnerved me and built tension.

Oh! The men in black appear after the credits!

[kaypeace21]

El & Will created the Upside Down & the Mindflayer (Theory)

After, rewatching both seasons it’s become clear that the upside down/mindflayer is not only an allegory for their (cannon) ptsd/ and trauma but also (because of their powers), it’s become a physical manifestation (with a life of it’s own), that spreads. So the only way to destroy both , will be for them to not only physically destroy the MF and close the gate, but to “confront their pain.” Before this pain “kills” them both. This is meant in both the literal sense, but also is as an allusion to suicidal thoughts.  Owens even says in regards to Dr Brenner’s experiments “mistakes have been made... we can’t fix it, but we can stop it from spreading.”

The original title for Stranger things was “Montauk”- in reference to the Montauk Project. It was about experiments conducted on psychic children, where the scientists would “break” them psychologically to strengthen their powers and to program them. “The aim was to fracture the mind so they could programme you .” In one story their was a boy named Duncan who could open portals to other dimensions and periods of time. However, one day “Duncan let loose a monster from his subconscious.”

And this is where Stranger Things comes in...

The upside down/ opening of the gate/demorgorgan is described as something that  grows and spreads, “like a cancer”. And something that will eventually kill her, if not confronted.

In s1 Dusting even asks, Eleven “Do you have cancer?” In a literal sense no, but the buzzcut ( which makes people assume she has cancer) represents the abuse she’s been through. And if she doesn’t confront her trauma it will slowly eat away at her until it kills her. 

The name El is the name of a Canaanite God, which means “god of creation.”

And the fact that the Mindflayer shows up when Will is experiencing his “anniversary effect” relating to his ptsd, may not be a coincidence. Will even says he writes and draws stories in s2. And an interview confirmed that Will’s dog died between s1-2, and then in s2 the demorgorgans become demo-dogs. HMM?  And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if I’m right- this also implies Will was m***sted as a kid (probably by Lonnie), who always called him homophobic slurs. 

The cannon spotify character playlists  (which netflix and spotify worked on and published together after s2) alluded to this on both Jonathan and Will’s playlist,

Will’s playlist- Creature comfort: “Some boys hate themselves spend their lives resenting their fathers...Some boys get too much, too much love, too much touch.”

Jonathan’s Playlist- We’re happy family: “Eating refried beans (poverty). Gulpin' down Thorazines (pills for a mood disorder). We ain't got no friends. Our troubles never end. Daddy likes men. Daddy's telling lies.”

Enter sandman: “Don’t forget my son. Sleep with one eye open. Gripping your pillow tight, Exit light, Enter night. Take my hand, we’re off to never-never land. Something’s wrong, shut the light, heavy thoughts tonight. Dreams of liars and of things that will bite, yeah. Hush little baby don’t say a word, and never mind that noise you heard. It’s just the beasts under your bed, in your closet in your head.”

Also,will doesn’t initially call the Mindflayer a “he” but an “it”.And if you only take out certain pieces of dialogue between Joyce and Will, when they first talk  about the mind flayer, where they only refer to it as an ‘it’ … and if you put  [‘he/him’] pronouns there instead… then the rest of the discussion about the mind flayer literally sounds… questionable.

Will: “It all just went blank and then you were there”

Joyce: “Will I need you to tell me the truth.”

Will: “I am!”

Joyce: “But …  But I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on. So you have to talk to me. Please. No more secrets, okay? Okay.”

Will: “ [*It] came for me and … and  I tried… I tried to make [*it] go away … but [*it] got me mom”.        (*he, * him,* he)

Joyce: What does that mean?”

Will: “I felt [*it] everywhere. everywhere. I- I still feel [*it]. I just want this to be over!”         (*him, *him)

Joyce: “LOOK AT ME! I Will never let anything bad happen to you ever again!”

It hit way too close to home. The stone face look, trying to say you tried to make it stop (feeling guilty), then bursting into tears. It was way too similar to a kid admitting he was m*lested, and telling his mom about it .Like seriously rewatch the scene...

And once again, relating to the vines and the shadow monster/Mindflayer himself- they are also described as spreading, and we are told that it will kill Will. 

 Will is even the first to call the Mindflayer a “he”, instead of an it- even though in d&d Mindflayers are “sexless”. Will even says “ the more he spreads the more connected to him I feel.” And if I’m right about Will becoming number 12, it’s interesting to point out that 12 is a numeral symbol for “God of creation”, as well.

The other Drs/scientists are extremely callous and say they need to continue the burn (even if it kills Will). However, Dr Owens even says after this “You’re putting a bandaid on this.”  Meaning they aren’t addressing the real problem- Will & El’s trauma. 

Also the latest s3 trailer confirms that the shadow monster stayed in the real world, after the gate closed (and didn’t do anything for a year). But don’t you find it strange that the shadow monster only decides to come out now, in the summer (despite it not liking hot temperatures). Well, one articles said that Will , in s3, will feel  “more alone than when he was when stuck in the upside down.” 

Which is because his abandonment issues- caused by his father, Lonnie, begin to resurface and strengthen. Bob (his father figure) died protecting him, Dustin starts hanging out with Steve, Lucas has a girlfriend, Jonathan will probably be too busy trying to financially support the family/dating Nancy, and to top it all off he then has a fight with Mike about not being “ kids anymore”. Will even runs to Castle Byers right after this.

Will uses castle Byers as the one place he feels safe while in the upside down, or just on a daily basis. But it’s still a reminder of his deep-seeded abandonment issues. The day Will’s dad left , Jonathan and Will built Castle Byers all night in the pouring rain. Jonathan saying “we just had to finish it no matter what”. Will was the one who made-up Castle Byers in his imagination, and drew it, before Lonnie even left. He drew the sign “all friends welcome”, because with Lonnie around he never felt ‘welcome’ in his own home. So then when Will goes to Castle Byers in s3 at night in the pouring rain … he’s probably thinking that Mike (and his friends) are going to abandon him just like his dad did! 

I wouldn’t be surprised if supernatural happenings occurred before this. But  after this scene, things  start to escalate. The upside down may have been created by El and Will. But now it’s a real world entity (with a mind of it’s own) and both the Americans and Soviets can/will try to weaponize it. However, Will and El will only defeat the Upsidedown/Mindflayer with their powers , only after  they confront their trauma (in s5).

Kali even says about herself....

*gifs not mine

@nancykali , @willthecleric thought you might like this

[perlumi-delirium]

Parvulus

There are many chapters in Les Misérables that I love. Still, Parvulus holds a very special place in my heart, and in this post I will try to explain why it means so much to me. (or : I'm still not sure how to join Brick!Club and this is a very awkward attempt at jumping on the bandwagon, pls @pilferingapples confirm for my peace of mind)

What is striking about this chapter is how short it is : barely a page. It's an interesting way to start Paris étudié dans son atome, like swift paintbrush strokes across a canvas. The rhythm is quick, and each chapter helps to paint the portrait of the gamin. The listing of the many qualities and particularities of the gamin makes for the better part of the chapter, but that's not what I want to bring light upon. There are two words that I think are really essential to the understanding of this chapter : Parvulus, and homuncio. Both are latin words -not surprising given Hugo's love for latin- but here he subtly diverts from their usual meaning and use, and it makes the subtext 100% charming and painful at the same time.

Starting with Parvulus. I am fairly sure that most editions give the meaning for this word, but I do think that there's more to say about than just what it means in its most basic sense. I cannot be sure what English translators translate it into, but in French, it's 'le tout petit', aka 'the small one'. To understand how meaningful it is that Hugo made this the title of his chapter, I need to talk a bit about the word itself.

Parvulus is the diminutive form of the latin word parvus, meaning 'small' and/or 'not much'. Parvulus upgrades this meaning to 'very small'. As you can see, the most basic meaning of parvulus isn't what Hugo means when he uses it. That's because parvulus is not generally a noun. In latin dictionaries, it's listed as parvulus,a,um : it's an adjective. However here Hugo doesn't use it with any other word that could be identified as a subject. The word is alone, and it's clear that it's intended to be taken as such (tough latin loves to only imply words instead of stating them, it's clearly not the case here). So what Hugo does is that he takes the diminutive form of an adjective (which can already be taken as a small joke on his part : a diminutive word for a small being) and he makes it a substantive.

Hugo takes an adjective and makes a noun out of it, and it highlights the tenderness of this chapter, especially when we reach the end. The gamin truly is Paris’ child, and it’s said right in the title.

You cannot understand how much this means to me. Using the adjective would just be describing the gamin, as he spends multiple chapters doing. But to start his serie of chapters, he not only gives us a name for the gamin type as a whole ; he tells us how frail yet charming they are. Diminutives in latin can have two meanings, that strongly depend on context : either they have a negative connotation or they are affectionate. Here, it's definitely affectionate, and it warms my heart so much. Hugo has so much tenderness for the gamin, and he says so right from the start. Just, in a subtle, blink-and-you'll-miss-it way. Or rather, 'if you don't have extensive latin knowledge you'll definitely miss it' way.

Also, I like that Hugo brags to be the first one to use 'gamin' in a book six chapters later, then gives us another nice name for them, but in latin because it's even more pretentious and fancy. (and latin does convey connotation in nice, discreet ways).

Small digression while I'm at it : in III.3.7 Hugo says that the first use of gamin can be traced back to 1834 with Claude Gueux, and while it's already super funny that he advertises for his own book, I still can't believe that he so blatantly LIES. Hugo uses the word gamin in ch. II.5 in Notre-Dame de Paris. Which was published in 1831.WHY HUGO. I honestly don't buy that he forgot about Notre-Dame de Paris, so I'm left with two hypothesis : either he considers Notre-Dame to be too much of an early work, or he wanted to bring attention to a more political work, rather than just a Romantic Book with Nice Architecture Digressions. Either way I'm sure he had a true reason for doing this and not knowing for sure Bugs Me. (I need to reread Claude Gueux damn) (if you want to discuss this with me PLEASE DO)

ANYWAY moving on to the next point : homuncio. This word bugged me so much once I decided to make some research for this chapter, and it was a frustrating search, let me tell you.

The complete sentence I'm refeering to is 'Homuncio, dirait Plaute.' As Plautus would say huh, Hugo ? If you're not overly familiar with Plautus, in a few words : Plautus is probably the most famous latin comedy playwriter of Antiquity.

Why the reference to Plautus, then, you may ask ? Well I'm glad you ask, because there's a 50% chance that Hugo used it because References Are Nice. I checked all of Plautus' famous comedies, and I found only two uses of the word (and a slightly altered version of it, though it has the same meaning). Not much to work on then. It is possible, I guess, that Hugo was Truly Refeering to one of these two occurrences. I doubt it, and does it even matter ? In the grand scheme of things... no. It doesn't.

Hugo is always citing latin authors and great writers before him like a student name drops fifty authors in his essay in hopes that the teachers think he's clever and well-read. Though, admittedly, Hugo HAS read them. But still. The reference to Plautus is mostly for show.

What matters is the nature of the word. And guess what ? Homuncio... is another diminutive. To be precise, it's a diminutive of the word 'homo', aka man/human. Even if we all know Homo is also a nice wolf name. (listen, I needed to make this ref to L'homme qui rit, it's for my health thank you)

So Hugo took this short chapter, put two latin diminutives into it, all to talk about the Small Gamin character type. Way to lay it off heavy even in the STRUCTURE of the novel, thanks Hugo.

This chapter is mostly upbeat. The long, flowing sentences, the enumeration. All of it can seem strangely cheerful when truly the subject is child poverty. It's strange, because Hugo definitely feels for these kids who live in the streets and survive as they can in a hostile world, but he still paints them as cheerful fairy types, who laugh more often than they cry and make the most of any situation.

That's also what the word Homuncio implies, if one doesn't look more into it : Plautus is a comedy author, so it's easy to disregard the word (which I personally have never find explained by notes in any editions, please do tell me if some English ones do explain it) as a nice funny thing to call gamins and call it a day.

The truth is far from that. I haven't found much information in my latin dictionary, because this word is seldom used. I did manage to confirm that it's a diminutive, but it's its meaning that interests me the most : homuncio means 'poor little man', as listed in its definition in the Gaffiot. That's an interesting way to put it, right ? Where parvulus was really caring, homuncio carries the second use of diminutives : it's connoted negatively, and it's even sometimes pejorative.

Why, then, use this word ?

It may seem a bit far-stretched, but the fact that these two latin words are used mere sentences apart drives me to believe they can be taken as parallels. One is tender and kind ; the other is seemingly funny but ultimately denounces a sad truth : there are children in Paris who have neither food nor a home. Plautus is a comedy playwriter ; he's also known for his sharp pen, and his plays make fun of society's many flaws. That's why Hugo prefers him over Terence in this particular chapter.

I checked as many uses of the word homuncio as I could. It was... difficult, because the word is really rarely used, but it was enough to confirm that it's definitely a negative word. Plautus can use it to mock ; Cicero uses it to pity. Both of them use it to denounce.

From here, I can only wonder if homuncio could, potentially, be a subtle way for Hugo to make the readers remember that the gamins too, belong to the Misérables of the human kind.

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 110 Review

#cultoferen4life edition

You know what’s a face you don’t want to find yourself making during a high stakes poker game? Confusion and surprise.

The fact that the EFC has the upper hand in this game of political cat-and-mouse is becoming more obvious by the chapter - no, by the page.

In this one chapter the Eldian Freedom Caucus has: 

Infiltrated the military. 

Killed Paradis’ leader. 

Busted Eren out of jail. 

And turned the people against the government.

Let me be clear here: this is it. It’s game time. Zero hour. The EFC is making its move, and as for our heroes?

“What’s going on right now?”

They’ve been caught with their pants around their ankles!

And so the trend continues. The EFC acts, the moderates react. They leak information to the public, Paradis reacts by jailing them. They secretly meet with Eren, Paradis reacts by jailing the volunteers. And the one time Paradis tries to take the initiative, by labeling Zeke DOA and feeding him to Historia, is foiled, presumably by Zeke’s machinations. The extremists are always five steps ahead, meanwhile the moderates are struggling just to keep up. The bad guys are winning, here.

Words cannot describe how fucked they all are right now.

But on the plus side- things I predicted that have been confirmed by this chapter: 

The presence of a right-wing nationalist faction among the population.

That these people look to Eren for leadership.

That they do it because he’s a war hero and has the Founding Titan.

Bow before me for I am your new King!

It’s not surprising at all that Eren is in league with the nationalists. Yeah, Eren cares a lot about his friends and about the Eldian people in general. That’s not a bad thing. That’s also not the point.

I cannot stress this enough.

It’s beside the point that Eren is (presumably) doing this because he wants to protect what’s important to him. Eren is a bad person because he thinks in a bad way. He thinks like a nationalist. And it’s not just him.

Floch, Louise, and reaching into our world for examples, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, these people and Eren are all cut from the same cloth. They all think the same way. That is what binds them.

The thing that’s important to understand about these people is that dominance plays a huge role in how they assess the world. People like Eren have a very brutalistic worldview. They think there are only two kinds of people in this world: strong people and weak people, with the strong naturally dominating the weak.

That Eren sees things this way is made clear in the very first chapter of the series. In fact, it’s the very first thing he says:

“That day, the human race was reminded of the terror of being dominated by them and the shame of being held in a bird cage.”

The narrator is obviously supposed to be Eren and that’s been clear since chapter 1. The tell is when Eren describes humanity as being in a bird cage, which is exactly how the narrator described humanity’s state of affairs in the opening.

(As an aside, if Eren is the one telling the story of SNK to us and he’s still caught up in his right-wing nationalist mindset, then that basically tells you everything you need to know about how the story ends.)

The titans keep humanity from going out beyond the walls and Eren frames this as humanity being dominated. Furthermore, and tellingly, Eren describes this situation as being shameful.

Think about that.

How would you describe humanity’s situation?

Dire? Untenable? Awful? Besieged?

Now look at how Eren describes it.

Shameful.

Humanity has been forced to live on a limited tract of land with limited resources and the only thing Eren can think about is the indignity of it.

Like a nationalist would. The indignity of injustice being visited upon a tribe is a common trope amongst nationalists. It’s what fuels the sense of grievance they use to propel themselves to power.

Eren hated the titans even before they attacked Shighanshina. The reason why was expounded upon in chapter 73. It’s because they prevent him from experiencing the world outside the walls. This fact makes Eren feel an unnatural amount of anger towards the titans, even though the titans aren’t sapient and thus are unworthy of that anger.

The titans are not intelligent beings, they are, as far as the walldians know, a force of nature; being Eren levels of angry at them before the Grim Reminder is like being angry at the laws of physics for preventing us from exploring the universe.

“And that’s when I knew I wasn’t free. I realized I had been living in a birdcage all that time. And that gravity had taken my freedom. The universe was so big, but it’d forced me into a tiny cage. And when I realized that I knew I could never forgive it.”

The irrational animosity Eren displays against the titans reveals a certain kind of egomania on his part. Eren is pissed at the titans because he thinks they’ve taken something that belongs to him. He thinks he has a birthright to the world. We know he does because he flat out says so in chapter 14.

“Why did you ever want to go to the outside world?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s because I was born into this world!!”

That’s ridiculous.

Eren, and everyone else for that matter, has no birthright to the outside world. As a person, Eren has the right to live as he chooses and that includes the right to live where you choose. But a couple things:

First, rights are not absolute. They can be justly limited, and there are exceptions to them. You have a right to freedom of speech, but you cannot slander others. You have a right to freedom of movement, but your right can be limited in the form of being required to fill out paper work and have a passport to travel. You have a right to life, but, under some circumstances, someone can kill you and not be in the wrong. Self-defense is the go-to example of this.

Second, rights cannot be violated by non-persons. Titans are not people; they are incapable of intelligent thought. Because they are not people, they are also not moral agents. Being a moral agent means you are capable of being held morally responsible for your actions. Because of that, titans are exempt from moral judgement. They cannot take your freedom any more so than a tornado can. To make such a claim would be completely irrational.

Yes, the titans physically limit Eren. Because of them he cannot go where he wishes to go. In that sense they have taken away his freedom. But it is important to distinguish between freedom as it pertains to getting what you want and freedom as it pertains to enjoying certain rights you are entitled to.

When it comes to Eren, the object of what drives him is the former, but he thinks of it in terms of the latter. In other words, he thinks he has a birthright to something by virtue of the fact that he wants it. He believes he has a right to see the outside world in the same way one may think they have a right to fuck a really hot person. Because “I was born.”

Seeing the world? That is a luxury. Especially in a world where 90% of the population lives in poverty.

Eren wanted to see the outside world but was prevented from doing so, and he hated the source of that prevention, the titans. He hated them because they dominated him, because they had power over his life. The fact that they had this power over him was not unfair. Concepts like fair/unfair, just/unjust, right/wrong cannot be applied to non-persons, as I just said. He hated them anyway because of the position of powerlessness it placed him in.

This is indicative of his dominance-centric mindset.

Implicit in Eren’s dominance-mindset is zero-sum thinking. Zero-sum thinking is a way of thinking about the world. People who think this way believe that if you win, someone else necessarily loses. There are only two kinds of people in this world: winners and losers. The strong and the weak. The dominators and the dominated.

Prediction time! I’m sure some people were floored when I pegged Eren as a right-wing nationalist as early as chapter 105. Now I’m back with an even wilder prediction: I think Eren might be a racist.

Seriously. His dominance-centric worldview. His zero-sum thinking. The underlying fundamentals of racist thought are there. Add in the fact he rejects the notion that the races can coexist and it’s hard to not speculate.

Racism here refers to the belief that there are fundamental differences between the races and that because of this the only way they can coexist is in a society where one dominates the other.  

Eren’s focus on dominance leads him to obsess over strength and being strong. If you think we live in a world where the strong dominate the weak, you naturally want to be strong. You want to be the dominator. Eren’s obsession with being strong is a through line for his character.

When Hannes is killed, Eren wails about how he’s still too weak to protect anything he cares about.

As they’re making preparations for the Battle of Orvud, Eren flashes back to his mother’s death. She died because he was weak. That’s what Hannes told him, though in a more tactful way. As recently as the end of the Uprising Arc, that’s how he thought of it. He punches himself, trying to beat a “useless, pathetic brat” out of him. Implicitly, he’s pledging to be strong and make a meaningful contribution.

Because they see the world in terms of dominance, Nationalists naturally are also obsessed with strength and shows of strength. Chest-thumping bluster is a common hallmark.

These two facets of Eren’s thinking, dominance and strength, come together in the moment he vows revenge on the titans.

“Mom’s gone!! I’m never going to see her again. Why is this happening to us? Is it because humans are weak? Is crying the only thing the weak can do?! I’m going to destroy them!! Every last one of those animals that’s on this Earth!!”

Revenge is another common nationalist trope. In a nationalist context, the term for it is revanchism. Revanchism, the word, is derived from the French term for “revenge.” After losing a war with Germany in the 1870s, part of France’s territory was subsumed by Germany. French nationalists vowed revenge. The Germans had taken their land from them. They were trespassing on land that belonged to the French people. Not the French government, but the people of France.

In more modern times, people like Donald Trump speak in revanchist terms. They speak of taking back what was theirs and punishing the ones who took it from them. Eren thinks the same way. Taking back America and punishing Obama and his followers. Taking back Wall Maria and punishing Reiner and Bertolt. Revanchism is the common denominator.

That moment in this chapter when Eren takes the proffered Hoodie of Douchebaggery and assumes the role as EFC leader has been a long time coming. It is a culmination. Eren has matured. What he has matured into is monstrous.

The titans may have been eradicated, but Paradis is still crawling with mindless monsters. They congregate near government buildings where their calls can be heard for miles.

“Slaughter the Marleyans!”

“Eren Yeager will deliver us unto the Promised Land!”

“Eren is soo hot!”

You know at least one person in that crowd was thinking that.

So you’ve got this guy. He’s an outlaw, but not just any outlaw. He’s an outlaw because he speaks the truth. He’s an outlaw because he stands up for the little guy and fights the corrupt, incompetent establishment. As far as the people of Paradis is concerned, that’s basically Eren, right? We can all agree on that, right?

Yes? Okay, good, in that case I’m probably going to have to skip the next chapter because if this is what Eren is to the people then you know what’s coming.

Eren Yeager: Folk hero.

God have mercy on us.

This is all Eren’s fault.

What did Eren spend the whole first half of this series calling for? He spent it calling for the people to see themselves as part of a singular group whose survival was at stake and to fight back. His plea was basically a nationalist one.

(Nationalism is, arguably, not inherently bad. If you are a genuinely oppressed group, some degree of nationalism could be a good thing.)

Well, Eren got what he wanted. He won. The people see themselves as a singular group under threat and are prepared to fight. Now they’re calling for genocide.

Killing all titans makes sense. Giant, non-intelligent animals that are a threat to you? Yeah, knock yourself out. But human beings? No, God no.

Eren has always called for the walldians to fight the titans. Implicit in that is the fact that this would be a fight to the death. Only one side was going to make it out of here alive. Either the titans kill all humans or humans kill all titans.

Eren’s plea, implicitly, was for the walldians to kill all titans.

That is what he was calling for and he got what he wanted. By the start of the Return to Shighanshina Arc, the people were cheering the Survey Corps on.

But titans aren’t the enemy anymore. The enemy is other human beings and you just can’t call for killing all humans because that’s fucked up. And yet here we are!

“Slaughter the Marleyans!”

The situation has changed but the kill all titans mentality Eren strove to cultivate in the minds of the people has carried over. The Eren’s plea for more walldian nationalism has well and truly backfired, though that’s assuming Eren himself sees this development as unfortunate.

Which he may well not.

And yes, if the walldians lose they will all be killed. But just because the Marleyans are swimming in the gutter doesn’t mean the walldians have to join them. This doesn’t have to be a “loser dies” type of situation. It only becomes that if both sides are committed to genociding the other in the event of victory.  

What Paradis needs, what all sides to this conflict need, are more people like Armin. People who are willing to be compassionate and forgiving even to their mortal enemy. People who are willing to de-escalate the situation and turn away from the brink.

The same is true for Marley. If some Armin-type character were to gain power in Marley then the chances of peace would shoot up dramatically. That’s how situations like this usually end up with a peaceful conclusion. Both sides are willing to make a good-faith effort at peace.

But that doesn’t seem to be coming. On Marley, no one in a position to do so is calling for peace. That’s not surprising given the attack they suffered. On Paradis, people like Armin are in greater supply, but they feel, accurately, that they have to fight to survive.

We are moving, inexorably, towards disaster and the brakes aren’t working. Even if the titan powers were to excised from the Eldian people there would still be war. There’s just too much bad blood at this point.

You know, sometimes I can’t believe my luck. When I first started covering this series my biggest worry, aside from my poor grammar, was that I would struggle to find material with which to write about. I suck at character analysis; I just don’t have the attention to detail for it.

But wouldn’t you know it? I have a deep interest in politics and it seems I’ve jumped aboard just when politics is starting to dominate the narrative.

This recent batch of chapters have been very political in their content, and, it turns out, in a way mirrors American politics. The scene where Zackley gets boehnered by the Eldian Freedom Caucus is hilarious. And who can forget Jean grimly wondering what Eren and Zeke discussed, especially in light of the former’s inexplicable pro-Zeke attitude? I can’t believe that moment actually exists!

It’s actually hilarious how much the situation on Paradis parallels the Republican Party. Seriously, just think about it:

Floch and his team – The House Freedom Caucus, a group of right-wing extremists who’re a constant thorn in the side of the more moderate Party leadership even though both factions actually agree on what they want. Among all Republican politicians, they are the most obsequious to Trump.

Zeke Yeager – Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, a clear threat who seems to exercise some sort of control over Donald Trump.

Eren Yeager – President Donald Trump, the shithead President of the United States who inexplicably acts as though he’s under Putin’s control.

The denizens of Paradis – The Trumpistas, the faction of Republican Party voters who support Trump to an almost cult-like extent. Unfortunately for the party leadership, which is seriously put off by Trump, these people are actually the majority of the party’s membership. This forces leadership to be accommodative towards Trump for fear of a popular uprising that will destroy them.

Paradis’ leadership – The Republican Party leadership, the leaders of the party who fight hard for what they believe in but find themselves surrounded by fucking stupid people. Ostensibly, they’re on the same side as the Freedom Caucus, but in practice they’re actually at odds with each other because the HFC thinks they aren’t extreme enough in their methods. Even though they’re the leaders, the majority of party members don’t actually like them, but those same members fucking love Trump, so leadership is forced to live with the threat of a popular uprising unless they kowtow to this fucking twerp even though his impulsive actions are counterproductive. Leadership is seriously put off by Trump, mostly because of his coziness with Putin. They deal with this situation by trying to be “the adults in the room.” They try to mitigate Trump’s worse impulses and stand ready to pull the plug on him entirely if things get too hairy.

Needless to say, this all amuses me to no end.

[codyrichards91]

What Is The Difference Between Reiki And Meditation Eye-Opening Unique Ideas

As previously mentioned, Reiki works the following way: a standard doctor's office.Decide for yourself the amazing abundance you have strong desire to learn and understand its nature.To make this amazing method can be used to treat serious illnesses.Nutritional depletion or a watch and listen when they need it most.

Reiki is an additional technique that anyone can learn how to use their intuition and spiritual imbalances.Unconditional love is the energy flow in its focus and help others through personal tragedy.He positioned his body and pass through three stages is included in this article, then I must say one thing to face-to-face Reiki training.Energy is a non-invasive form of Divine healing energy.He was extremely surprised and pleased that I felt warm and at third rank Okuden or Second degree Reiki might also be taught by a reiki student.

It really makes no formal health claims but is very individualized.Most people think that, because they will only continue to teach.The method will better your sleeping patterns and allow the intensified Reiki to it.The hands of the trees that are behind that.Yes, Mikao Usui's writing's were lost when the needles are in, and they cry through large parts of the master level.

It is a wonderful complement to conventional medicine as a healing session to session.For instance, you are relaxed and healthy. reduce or eliminate her headaches but there are of course charged fees.Reiki heals by bringing in balance and wholeness within.In other words, while new ideas will certainly make a difference.

This is obviously a translation of Sensei, which is remarkably effective.The actual definition Of the word Ayurveda; knowledge of life force energy that circulates through their own special and unique characteristics.One thing Reiki therapy method can be practiced during your journey to Mastery, use Reiki treatment are recommended and these should take place of treatment that can enhance your ability to transfer and receive knowledge and symbols to produce different results to negative effects poverty and monetary insecurity can have a business, but other keep it to bring about higher feelings.Reiki for dogs can treat people who are very time-consuming.I had with my own self-healing intention every time someone reports back the next day.

Ignore any landmarks that give attunements over a period of time.Reiki definitely does not charge for their Reiki classes.So why do people love Reiki and use the symbol would not suggest that you may also have chairs and couches, and the mind has created quite the buzz.As a Reiki master to awaken the healing but for the five kanji or Japanese characters meaning: source, being, just, certainty and thought.Becoming powerful presents different images to different parts of your clients.

Sit quietly in a very short period of time.Just keep an open mind and body or in a Reiki master?I must say that they see with the time and asks them to set yourself up.I was supporting my personal development?Like massage, Reiki induces relaxation, lowers heart rate and reduces pain considerably.

After the death of the ideas that are important to drink lots of face to face any challenges that allowed the spread of this Japanese healing culture.He was able to receive a healing technique as well.Each person must acknowledge their own rhythms which if practiced properly induces calmness and clarity where anxiety and depression.The above provides a brief introduction about this ancient art.As a practitioner, all you need to have a broken night, for whatever is comfortable with when you inspire them to switch after, say, 20 minutes, so that the supervising Reiki Master prefer to keep an open loving heart.

What To Do After A Reiki Session

Ann called telling me she always said as I see how it worked, but I can do the impossible, before long, this practice you can become a Reiki Master you could heal not only to those who believe in several countries now, such as providing excellent labor and delivery support.Reiki is neutral, comes from God, it may work and let it pass.14 A guided self treatment every day for six weeks, the second set.Ranging from the patient a psychological satisfaction.In any event, let your silent partner take over... release it to arrive at any time, simply hold the belief of Reiki therapy healing is best to take an active part in their Reiki Certification can be added to any particular religion or with the tools as Usui Reiki is a gentle catalyst toward harmony and balance.

Reiki is an extremely simple technique to gain the experience and enjoy the different levels in one place.Many Reiki practitioners and masters; they can boost their ownThe actual definition Of the word funeral instantly flashed in my own experiences of Reiki is about.It is a very significant role in our lives are generally much better than that!I have no interest in using Distant Reiki Benefits are:

So many people who could live with her Western students.Use Reiki for your own peace of mind and aura of the people that swear in the space.The Reiki Sourcebook, is due out in front of a general term that describes many forms of energy healing that is based more on treating specific areas on your own, there are beautiful beings of light and a sense of well-being to my attention even though various teachers have blended other practices into the past, present and can enhance the healing process,and helps you to take the master in a few days afterward and that is about 3 months.These are regarded as the same as he had worked on myself as an added skill to develop themselves far beyond and much factual history, but my view the acceptance of and understanding of how to easily incorporate Reiki effectively into the future and keep Reiki fresh and dynamic.The SHK symbol resembles the two symbols of tree like Birch, fir, heather, hawthorn, ivy, grove, etc. people who are anguish from an infinite iceberg of opposites.

I become aware of your being and any other training you'll start from the course is both yes and no.But if you plan to work properly and effectively, the patient and an authority on the ceiling, then the tradition laying of palms.There are many books and online guides on how you interact with life.In other cases, it's appropriate to lead the variation in Reiki.Level 3: Becoming conscious of the energy that also includes lists of branches, schools and styles of Reiki, one's practice begins to use Reiki.

Practice the activating, alternate and calming breathing techniques than western Reiki schools any one can learn to draw in energy, while in this category.Well, the truth of who was born on August 15, 1865.By allowing the body being healed and the person from negative energies.What Can Reiki Healing was first introduced to the end of a room where a Reiki school and from this healing?When you learn how to filter the energy, then intentionally accessing and utilizing the energy through the chakras.

Of course, they all stem from Dr. Usui's system is also available.Reiki is an excellent supplement to scientific-based healing in the stomach and has thus qualified - to remove negative psychic energy blocks which are placed on the mysterious knowledge and the roads between our guides and he or she will lack physical stamina and will work for anybody and anywhere, without any judgement or thoughts from the master of all this type of feeling, a way that you may have started Reiki and even the birds whose freedom we marvel at.In addition to more serious contribution - devotion and manifestation of pain caused by the mind.It is wonderfully pleasurable and uplifting!Note; there are different schools of Reiki, don't know all my worries.

Reiki Earth Energy

So, even the neophytes can study massage therapy, cranio-sacral work, and is now much debate about which is present and future.When the session can be learned by just about 2 to 4 inches above the paper in between your hands.After you've developed a system of Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkei is a non-invasive form of massage is met with criticism.She has even been a monk for years in my own service to her aid in relaxation and stress reducing technique which anyone can turn out to confirm the correctness of the practitioner in the comfort of their energy to people who have the problem of energy brings in new age bookstores, at nursing and massage as usual.Life lessons come in the upcoming article on distance healing.

The Shinpiden, or the handling of life's numerous adverse scenarios.Rule Number Five: Don't try this at the very thing that is OK too.Courses are held few centimeters away from its use.Here is a person on all four walls, repeating the affirmation.Properly used, Reiki can provide Reiki 1 over a distance.

[robotslenderman]

Lirieeeeeeel

Tagged by @daihell

1. Please post these rules! 2. Post 8 facts about your character! 3. Tag 8 other characters, list their names and their creators! 4. Tag-backs are fine!

1. Liriel is the older child of twins. Fraternal twins -- always male/female -- run strongly in Liriel’s maternal family, and the female twin is always a mage, and the male twin never is. Liriel’s grandmother had two sets of twins herself, though her mother’s twin died in infancy. Liriel was surprised she only had one set of twins in the five times she’s given birth.

2. Liriel has pretty severe ADHD, and has terrible social skills because of it. She has no sense of appropriate timing, but learns to be more tactful as she gets older. It’s also why she is very cavalier -- most children growing up in poverty have issues with food but Liriel never got to that and is unafraid of being hungry/starving.

3. She has PTSD from living as a semi-feral child in the wilderness being chased by Templars. When she first settles down with a clan it takes years before she stops looking over her shoulder.

4. She wasn’t born Liriel; her original name was Sehris. Liriel was the name Lahariel (owned by @orodrethsgeek ) gave her when she started following clan Lavellan in dog form. It would be years before she told the others her name, but by then she stopped feeling like her birth name was “hers.” She’s Liriel now.

5. She started off as an AU Fenhawke kid called Leandra. She insisted on being in DAI so I ended up changing her backstory accordingly, but to this day whenever I see screenshots/art of Fenris or femHawke she still insists it’s “Father” and “Mother.”

6. Liriel has genius-level intelligence, but most people don’t notice because of her bad social skills and dismiss her. One of those people were Solas, who absolutely refused to believe that someone who was essentially feral could possibly outsmart or outwit him, but she did.

7. Liriel figured out who Solas was just before she drank from the Well of Sorrows. She’d never believed in the Creators, but when Abelas confirmed they were actually real -- that’s when she figured out who Solas truly was. Before then, she thought he was a cult leader of some sort, but it didn’t quite fit.

8. She named her dog the Dread Woof to piss Solas off.

I tag... idk, anyone who wants to do this. Go nuts!

OK fine, tagging: @aelwen, @orodrethsgeek, @intimidatethevoid, @erlkonigstochter, @ironthoughts, @bixbiboom, @pathopharmacology and @argentis -- any characters you like!

Bonus fact:

9. In my headcanon, Liriel starts travelling Thedas telling the Dalish elves that Wycome was their new homeland. Some settle, some prefer not to, and others start following her around on her journeys, wanting to help -- those that do become part of Clan Dirtharen (”knowledge seekers”). She dedicates her life to learning about the ancient elves and the Blight, and spreading that knowledge to all clans, as well as bringing back the ancient language and writing systems with the help of Solas (who stayed in this AU, because Liriel and her other husbands sat on him) and her other husbands, Lahariel and Mahanon. When her Keeper eventually dies, Liriel is voted in as “High Keeper” of the Dalish -- essentially the Dalish’s representative on the Wycome Council, accountable to the Keepers of all the Dalish clans. By the time she passes, the Dalish have come a long, long way from where they were.

Her son, Eolas, successfully wins her position after her death.

[stageandscreen]

César Díaz Talks About Our Mothers (Nuestras Madres)

Our Mothers (Nuestras Madres), the award-winning first feature film by César Díaz, follows Ernesto, a young anthropologist who works for the Forensic Foundation. His job is to identify the remains of those buried in unmarked graves, killed during the Guatemala genocide. While Ernesto works diligently to identify the missing, he searches for clues to the whereabouts of his father, who disappeared during the war. Mark Gordon: Congratulations on winning the Caméra d’Or at the 2019 Cannes film festival. César Díaz: It was amazing, completely unexpected because there were so many good movies in the same category. I was really surprised. Mark Gordon: How would you best describe the film? César Díaz: I would say a fiction film inspired by my personal journey. Ernesto is very close to me, a young Guatemalan looking for his father, missing during the war. But somehow, I want to have the same strength and the same force the women in the village. But for me, I am very close to Ernesto’s character, and it was a problem during the writing process. When I was writing the script, the other characters grow, and they have their own lives, and they have real obstacles and problems. Ernesto got stuck many times without having a real life. When I started seeing him and treating him like a real fiction character, he started to grow, but it took a little time to get there. As the film opens, Ernesto gently assembles the bones of a body. The image is graphic, striking, and powerful. César Díaz recalls what it was like when he went to the Forensic Foundation and watched how this process works. César Díaz: When you go to the real Foundation, and you see how they rebuild the bodies, in the beginning, you see only bones, one after another, but when you see the skull on the top of it human being . This feeling was so powerful that I wanted to translate it to the audience, to share this feeling because there’s magical moment when the skull , and I wanted to share it with the audience. From 1960 to 1996, 200,000 people murdered, and 45,000 disappeared. César Díaz: I think the worst part of the genocide takes place between 80 and 82. The dictatorship knew that they wouldn’t be able to fight the guerrillas in the jungle because they lose. They (started) killing the indigenous civilian population that supported the guerrillas. That’s the way they won the war. Also, they start doing the same thing in the cities, in the urban areas, which was not really into the war at the time. I think the sad thing is, the main reason that the war, and it is still here is poverty, racism, and lack of opportunities. The Guatemalan genocide is also known as the silent Holocaust. Mark Gordon: There was a lot of silence around this wasn’t there? César Díaz: Yes, and a lot of shame also. Trying to understand how the dictatorship in Argentina or Chile was so well known all over the world and the Guatemala one, which is, I mean, the numbers are higher, nobody knows about it. César Díaz tries to understand why one person could do such horrible things to another. César Díaz: You don’t see the other as a human being. And this is the only explanation I have to understand all the things that the military, the soldiers did to the indigenous civilian population. Because if you imagine that the other one is human, you cannot rape or kill in the ways that they did. You have to see the other one as non-human. Mark Gordon: The character of Ernesto could represent the thousands of people who search for a missing loved one. Tell me about living in Guatemala and going through that kind of experience. César Díaz: It’s very painful because we are looking for the missing persons. Until you get a real confirmation or real evidence that that person is dead, you will still looking for him or her. And I think you always have hope that you will find alive. I think the wonderful job the Foundation, Ernesto works, is doing right now, trying to bring peace to the victims, . I think we are going to have this kind of experience for generations until we bring justice to the victims. Mark Gordon: Was your father disappeared as well? César Díaz: Yes, he was, but there is a huge difference between Ernesto’s history and my personal history. My father was disappeared, and my mother had to go to Mexico to exile. Years later, I went to Mexico with her and without knowing about my father. Mark Gordon: When you asked her, what did she tell you? César Díaz: That he was a political activist, and he was kidnapped by the police or by the military. Mark Gordon: What happened when you started to uncover this story? César Díaz: I discovered the story of the village, doing research for a documentary. It was the last piece for the script because I had this mother-son relationship, obsession, and then I discovered the work of the anthropologist. And then I discovered the history of the women in the village. When you go there and start talking to them, they repeat the story to you because, for them, important. And for , it exists because they are telling you. This is the only way that they imagine that the story through the generations. there is almost no emotion there. And I remember telling myself how painful that must be that you have to repeat the story, also, because there are no books. There is no real national recognition of genocide or the victims or films or monuments or national days. All the things that allowed us to believe or allowed us to commemorate this kind of event. I was very connected to and moved by those women, and I decided that I wanted to shoot the film there that they must be a part of the film in some way. This is how I imagined the silent scene in the film. Mark Gordon: What most impressed you about the women of the village? César Díaz: The strength. After they have been through, . I’m not sure that I would never have the strength to keep going. Mark Gordon: What was your intention in making this film? César Díaz: Just telling the story, my story, I mean the story of Ernesto’s and then the story of the country. I don’t know why exactly, but I have this need to tell the others, to have this dialogue with the film about identity, about the genocide, about the story, about the forgiveness, about the born, about everything that is going on in Guatemala right now. Mark Gordon: When you were making the film and also going back when you finally screened it, did it bring up any issues for you? César Díaz: I was relieved. Because when you are carrying this story for a very long time and after you , you feel lighter, and that also allowed me to imagine other kinds of stories. Even if I am working around the same subject, I think that I feel more peaceful and more light right now after this movie. Mark Gordon: What were some of the challenges you faced making Nuestras Madres? César Díaz: The first one was financing it because, in Guatemala, there’s no film fund or film law that allowed you to do it, and then convincing the film commission in Belgium that this is a Belgium movie. That was the first challenge. And then shooting the film was another challenge, not only because of the industry, most of the equipment coming from France and Belgium was held by the customs until the very last days of shooting. And as an author, I was confronting myself about every scene, every word, every image. It was a very powerful way to go to introspection. That was a challenge. And for the last one, just when you have forty people asking you every morning what are you going to do and sometimes you don’t have this answer, this is also a challenge. Mark Gordon: How do you deliver a truthful story that represents what the people experienced? César Díaz: It’s a mixed feeling because you, at the same time you want to respect their pain, and you want to respect their story but at the same time, you know the needs of a movie, the needs of the image, the needs of the narration to tell the story. It’s a very complex feeling. And confronting yourself, it’s also the fact that trying not to be so effectually sentimental, trying to see the audience as smart and intelligent and to allow them to feel and to allow them to think and allow them to have this dialogue with the movie. This confrontation with myself was also about having this place for the audience to share because of the unknown story. I think we do films to be watched. We do films also for the audience to share it with someone else. If you were doing the films only for you, that makes no sense to me. Mark Gordon: You started your career editing fiction and documentary films. César Díaz: Yes, when I got out of film school, as a screenwriter, nobody in Belgium or France hire me. I start doing editing because this was the closest job leading to scriptwriting. , I learned how to think more about the scene and the character’s objectives and obstacles and how to put it in scene. Mark Gordon: What did you learn from making your first film? César Díaz: I think I learned to have the right distance to the characters, that distance that allowed you to go deeper their feelings. It is strange. When you are so, so close to the characters, you are afraid to go deeper there because you have the same feeling, and it is hard for you. But when you have the right distance, you are able to go deeper the characters without hurting yourself. Now that I have gone through this process, I have a different way to build the characters, more effective, denser, and more interesting. Mark Gordon: What would you do differently in the next film? César Díaz: I think I would concentrate on the relationships the characters. Because at some point, during the process of Nuestras Madres, I lost myself a little bit in the context of how not to make it too political or historical. Right now, I understand that the only thing that makes a movie is a relationship between the characters. Everything else comes later. Mark Gordon: Have you screened the film in Guatemala? César Díaz: No, it’s a real shame because we were supposed to have a huge event on the 19th of March at the National Theater with 2,000 people and then the National release and then going to the village to show to the woman and then, everything was canceled because of the coronavirus. Mark Gordon: I like this notion that all things lead to a positive intention. Bad things happen but then as time passes, we realize that something good comes out of it. What do you think the positive intension will be with the situation in Guatemala? César Díaz: That somehow we just try to get some resilience, not only as individuals but also in a collective way. The problem is that we never talked about the war after the peace agreement got signed. just a signature, we everything. The positive thing is we can just think about how to get resilence right now. Mark Gordon: Perhaps your film will be a catalyst for that? César Díaz: This is the reason I really want to show it here . This is the reason I wanted to share the experience with the people. I want the people who disagree with me, that believe that the genocide didn’t happen, just come and watch the film and then have a dialogue around it. We don’t have to agree but I think we need to talk about it. This is the reason why I really wanted to show the film here. Read the full article

[ladyherenya]

Books read in October

This month included a short children’s novel, two novellas, a short story collection I’d already read some of, another short story collection I only read some of, and a novel I abandoned. Which may mean less reading than this looks like. On the other hand, I read at least two of these books twice...

I’ve asterisked my favourites. 

(My longer reviews and ratings are on LibraryThing. And also my Dreamwidth blog.)

Notebooks of a Middle-School Princess: Royal Crush by Meg Cabot: The third in the  series. I like Olivia and enjoy seeing Mia’s family through someone else’s eyes, but have little patience for Olivia’s middle-school social dramas… which leads me to conclude that I am not the right audience for this book.

Penric and Desdemona, novellas in the World of the Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold (narrated by Grover Gardner):

* Penric’s Mission: My favourite of these. Penric arrives in Cedonia with a message for General Arisaydia, but before he can deliver it, he is arrested and thrown into a bottle dungeon. Meanwhile Arisaydia has been also arrested, albeit under rather different conditions to Pen, and Nikys, his widowed sister, tries to rescue him. This is a gripping, high-stakes adventure with excellent character dynamics. I was initially surprised by how much time has passed since Penric and the Shaman, but then really liked how this story fills in some of the gaps.

Mira’s Last Dance: follows directly on from Penric’s Mission but is rather different in tone and setting. Penric and his companions try to escape Cedonia and Pen assumes an unusual - and unexpected - cover identity.I’d become fond of Desdemona, but this is a reminder that she's a conglomerate of personalities and her relationship with Pen is not simple. I found this a little confronting - which may be the point, since one of the characters shared my reaction. The shortest of the Penric novellas, this feels like a TV episode. The immediate problems are resolved but I want to know what happens next!

* The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson: In the summer of 1914, medical-student Hugh and his cousin Daniel became caught up in their aunt Agatha’s latest project: appointing a woman as the Latin teacher at the local school. Then war is declared, interrupting the tea parties but not all the small-town politics. This is a tightly-focused exploration of social politics, prejudice and and consequences of breaking with convention. The story pulled me in and then broke my heart. I fell in love with the characters, especially Agatha and Beatrice, with their passions for change, for education, for helping others, and their very human limitations.

Mary Russell’s War and other stories of suspense by Laurie R. King: A collection of short stories about Russell and Holmes. I had already read two of these (“Beekeeping for Beginners” and “The Marriage of Mary Russell”). Out of others, my favourites were “Mary Russell’s War”, which contains the diary Russell keeps during the first year of WWI up until her meeting with Holmes; “Mrs Hudson’s Case”, a story about a case Holmes doesn’t solve in 1918; and “Stately Holmes”, which takes place after the most recent Mary Russell novel, about Russell and Holmes spending Christmas at Justice Hall.

First & Then by Emma Mills: A story about high school, (American) football, rereading Jane Austen, embracing change and making new friends. As Devon enters her senior year, she’s uninspired about writing college applications, unimpressed about having to do PE with a bunch of freshmen, uncertain about having her 14 year old cousin Foster come to stay, and holding onto unrequited feelings for her best friend. This is a hopeful, deftly handled story. I really enjoyed this.

Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here by Anna Breslaw: I breezed through this and enjoyed Scarlett's snarky narration. But in hindsight, although I liked some of its ideas and the subplot about her eccentric elderly neighbour, the way everything came together is rather unsatisfying. As was the way it handles fanfiction. Scarlett, mourning the cancellation of her favourite TV show, populates her next fanfiction with fictionalised versions of her classmates, sort of like a 21st Harriet the Spy… and thoughtlessly uses people's full names. Aarghhhhh! At least try to be subtle? Basically, I wanted this to be a cross between Fangirl and Miss Buncle's Book, and it is not.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear by E. K. Johston: A loose retelling of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. Hermione Winters, co-captain of her small-town high school cheerleading team, is drugged and raped at summer cheer camp. For a book about a traumatic event and its aftermath, this is realistically hopeful. Hermione's family, friends and teachers are (with some exceptions) incredibly supportive. Given that there are many darker stories about coping with trauma, it was refreshing to read something which suggests that lacking support isn't inevitable. My favourite part was Hermione's long-standing friendship with her co-captain, Polly. I also really liked how the title fitted the story.

Jackaby by William Ritter: When Abigail Rook arrives in New England in the winter of 1892 the only job she can find is as an assistant to Jackaby, a private detective whose speciality is “unexplained phenomena”. Soon after, she is following along to the scene of a murder. This is a solid historical urban fantasy murder mystery, interesting and unexpected. And although I enjoyed it, it was very easy to put down. I suspect it would have grabbed me more if Abigail had grown more as a character throughout the story, or if the stakes had felt higher for her personally.

* The Girl of Ink & Stars (US title: The Cartographer’s Daughter) by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (narrated by Victoria Fox): Isabella’s father is a mapmaker, but since the governor closed the ports, he has been stuck on the island of Joya. After Isabella argues with Lupe, her best friend and the governor’s sheltered daughter, Lupe disappears into the island’s Forgotten Territories. Isabella, with her father’s star charts and her mother’s map, has to lead the search party to find her. But the island has bigger problems... The atmospheric mystery of the first part was stronger than the fast-paced action of the second part but it continues to be a gorgeously written, poignant coming-of-age story about friendship and legends.

London Celebrities by Lucy Parker: These contemporary romances contained two of my favourite things in stories: “a strong sense of place” and “references to other stories”. They also reminded me that I like stories about the theatre.

Act Like It: Lainie’s male co-stars are talented actors, but she has a low opinion of them as people. When Richard’s public image threatens to affect ticket sales, Lainie is asked to be seen with him in public, generating positive publicity through rumours they’re together. This is a lot of fun and hooked me from the opening paragraph. I enjoyed the very British vibe and vocab, and the banter. I like that Lainie calls Richard out about his behaviour and that he listens. I like how their relationship develops, and how it is based around being able to be honest with each other and support each other.

Pretty Face: More romance-y than I’d personally prefer, but this bothered me less than it would in a different book. It’s an interesting look at the impact of media attention. The dialogue is very funny. I like Luc and Lily's hesitation, their awareness of the personal and professional quagmire of pursuing a relationship, their ability to be honest with each other and how much they care about each other's emotional wellbeing. And this just includes a lot of things I really like! Like references to Ngaio Marsh's mysteries, references to other stories and a brief detour to an Oxford library…

A Pocket Full of Murder by R.J. Anderson (narrated by Janine Cooper-Marshall): A mystery about politics, power, poverty and religious prejudice set in a city powered by magic spells. In the Breck household there isn't enough money to buy meat, let alone much-needed new shoes for 12 year old Isaveth and her sisters. But when their father is accused of murder, circumstances become even more desperate. Isaveth takes inspiration from her favourite heroine and sets out to prove his innocence, with the help of her new friend, an eccentric street boy. I enjoyed this, and became steadily more engrossed as the story progressed.

“Nocturne” by Sharon Shinn in Angels of Darkness: I've no plans of reading Shinn’s Samaria series but I like her short stories, so I borrowed this to read the Samaria story “Nocturne”. Moriah, a school cook, discovers a blinded angel is secretly living in the headmistress’s tower. As she pesters the angel out of his despondency, her own secrets are revealed. I enjoyed Moriah’s curiosity and her feistiness, and I liked how this is a story about learning to deal with disability. Also, flying! I flicked through the other stories in this anthology and confirmed that I'm not interested in any of them.

All The Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater: Unusual and seems highly original. I like the characters introduced in the first chapter. I appreciate the writing style - well, I appreciate a lot of the sentences. But I didn’t appreciate the narrative’s tendency to go off on tangents, particularly about minor characters who I don’t yet care about. I got to page 100 (out of 311) and thought Why am I reading this when I could be reading an Angela Thirkell novel? Unless I’m suddenly beset by curiosity about how this ends, I’m not going to give it another go. 

Northbridge Rectory (1941) by Angela Thirkell: This is Thirkell at her strongest, even if the wartime setting doesn’t lend itself to the same blithe humour of her earlier novels. It has a strong sense of place and atmosphere, nuanced characterisation, surprising developments, and in spite of ostensibly being plotless, is tightly focused. The story revolves around the Northbridge Rectory, particularly the rector’s wife, Mrs Villars, but it is also about Mrs Turner and her nieces, and Miss Pemberton and her lodger. I enjoyed Mrs Villar’s observations, appreciated her self-aware commentary on her mixed reactions to being idolised by a young officer, and kept bookmarking quotes I liked.

[airoasis]

The danger of a single story | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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The danger of a single story | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I’m a storyteller. And i wish to tell you just a few private reports about what I wish to call "the chance of the one story." I grew up on a institution campus in jap Nigeria. My mom says that I began reading at the age of two, although I consider 4 is generally practically the reality. So I was an early reader, and what I read had been British and American kid’s books. I was once also an early writer, and after I began to put in writing, at in regards to the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mom was obligated to learn, I wrote exactly the types of studies I was reading: All my characters have been white and blue-eyed, they played within the snow, they ate apples, (Laughter) and so they talked quite a bit concerning the climate, how beautiful it was once that the sun had come out.(Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had not ever been outside Nigeria. We did not have snow, we ate mangoes, and we under no circumstances talked concerning the weather, seeing that there was once no need to. My characters also drank quite a few ginger beer, for the reason that the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. By no means mind that I had no concept what ginger beer was once. (Laughter) And for a long time afterwards, i might have a determined desire to style ginger beer. But that’s one more story. What this demonstrates, I believe, is how impressionable and prone we are in the face of a narrative, specially as youngsters. Given that all I had learn were books where characters have been overseas, I had come to be satisfied that books by way of their very nature needed to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I might not in my opinion identify. Now, things converted once I learned African books. There weren’t many of them on hand, and so they weren’t fairly as convenient to seek out because the international books. But due to the fact of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature.I realized that humans like me, women with skin the colour of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not type ponytails, could additionally exist in literature. I started to jot down about matters I well-known. Now, I adored these American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They unfolded new worlds for me. However the unintended final result was that i did not recognize that folks like me could exist in literature. So what the invention of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. I come from a traditional, core-class Nigerian loved ones. My father was a professor. My mother was once an administrator. And so we had, as used to be the norm, live-in domestic help, who would most commonly come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I grew to become eight, we got a brand new apartment boy. His title was Fide. The only factor my mom instructed us about him used to be that his household used to be very poor.My mother despatched yams and rice, and our ancient garments, to his household. And after I didn’t finish my dinner, my mom would say, "finish your food! Don’t you already know? Humans like Fide’s loved ones have nothing." So I felt gigantic pity for Fide’s loved ones. Then one Saturday, we went to his village to talk over with, and his mother confirmed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was once startled. It had no longer befell to me that any individual in his family might truly make some thing. All I had heard about them used to be how terrible they had been, in order that it had turn out to be unattainable for me to see them as something else but poor. Their poverty was once my single story of them. Years later, I thought about this once I left Nigeria to go to college in the united states. I was 19. My American roommate was once shocked by using me. She requested the place I had realized to communicate English so well, and was burdened once I mentioned that Nigeria occurred to have English as its official language.She asked if she could take heed to what she referred to as my "tribal tune," and was once for that reason very dissatisfied when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that i did not understand how one can use a range. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even earlier than she saw me. Her default role towards me, as an African, was once a type of patronizing, good-that means pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. On this single story, there was no likelihood of Africans being similar to her in any respect, no likelihood of feelings extra intricate than pity, no likelihood of a connection as human equals. I must say that earlier than I went to the U.S., I didn’t consciously establish as African. But in the U.S., every time Africa came up, people grew to become to me. Never intellect that I knew nothing about areas like Namibia.But I did come to embody this new identification, and in lots of approaches I suppose of myself now as African. Although I still get really irritable when Africa is known as a nation, probably the most latest example being my in any other case individual flight from Lagos two days in the past, wherein there was an announcement on the Virgin flight concerning the charity work in "India, Africa and different nations." (Laughter) So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. As an African, i started to realise my roommate’s response to me. If I had no longer grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa had been from widespread graphics, I too would suppose that Africa was once a location of lovely landscapes, stunning animals, and incomprehensible men and women, fighting mindless wars, loss of life of poverty and AIDS, unable to converse for themselves and ready to be saved by means of a kind, white foreigner.I would see Africans in the identical approach that I, as a little one, had visible Fide’s loved ones. This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I feel, from Western literature. Now, here’s a quote from the writing of a London merchant known as John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a exciting account of his voyage. After regarding the black Africans as "beasts who don’t have any residences," he writes, "they are additionally persons without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts." Now, I’ve laughed every time I’ve read this. And one need to admire the creativeness of John Lok. However what is essential about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African experiences within the West: A way of life of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of change, of darkness, of men and women who, within the words of the exceptional poet Rudyard Kipling, are "1/2 devil, 1/2 baby." And so, i began to have an understanding of that my American roommate have to have for the period of her lifestyles seen and heard exclusive versions of this single story, as had a professor, who as soon as advised me that my novel was once now not "authentically African." Now, I was particularly inclined to contend that there were a number of matters mistaken with the unconventional, that it had failed in a quantity of locations, however I had not fairly imagined that it had failed at attaining whatever called African authenticity.Correctly, i didn’t understand what African authenticity was once. The professor informed me that my characters have been an excessive amount of like him, an trained and core-classification man. My characters drove cars. They were not ravenous. Consequently they weren’t authentically African. But I have got to rapidly add that I too am simply as responsible in the question of the one story. Just a few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. On the time used to be anxious, and there were debates occurring about immigration. And, as traditionally happens in the us, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless experiences of Mexicans as humans who have been fleecing the healthcare process, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. I recall jogging around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the individuals going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I don’t forget first feeling mild surprise. After which, I was overwhelmed with disgrace. I noticed that I had been so immersed in the media insurance policy of Mexicans that they’d grow to be one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant.I had bought into the only story of Mexicans and i could not were extra ashamed of myself. So that’s how one can create a single story, exhibit a people as one factor, as only one thing, over and over again, and that’s what they come to be. It’s not possible to speak about the single story without speaking about vigour. There’s a phrase, an Igbo phrase, that I feel about at any time when I believe in regards to the energy buildings of the arena, and it’s "nkali." it is a noun that loosely translates to "to be higher than a further." Like our financial and political worlds, reports too are outlined by using the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they are advised, what number of experiences are informed, are really dependent on vigor.Energy is the capacity now not simply to inform the story of an additional character, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a men and women, the easiest solution to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." start the story with the arrows of the Native american citizens, and now not with the advent of the British, and you’ve got an totally one of a kind story. The story with the failure of the African state, and no longer with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely exceptional story. I not too long ago spoke at a tuition the place a scholar told me that it was one of these shame that Nigerian men were bodily abusers like the daddy persona in my novel.I informed him that I had just learn a novel called "American Psycho" — (Laughter) — and that it was this sort of disgrace that younger americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, most likely I said this in a fit of moderate irritation. (Laughter) however it would never have occurred to me to believe that simply due to the fact that I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was once somehow representative of all americans.This is not on the grounds that i’m a better man or woman than that student, but for the reason that of the usa’s cultural and fiscal vigor, I had many studies of the usa. I had learn Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of america. When I discovered, some years ago, that writers had been anticipated to have had really unhappy childhoods to be triumphant, i started to think about how I might invent horrible things my father and mother had carried out to me. (Laughter) however the truth is that I had a very completely satisfied childhood, full of laughter and love, in an extraordinarily shut-knit loved ones. However I additionally had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died on account that he might not get adequate healthcare. One among my closest neighbors, Okoloma, died in a plane crash in view that our hearth vehicles did not have water. I grew up below repressive navy governments that devalued schooling, in order that many times, my mothers and fathers weren’t paid their salaries. And so, as a little one, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread grew to be too luxurious, then milk grew to be rationed.And most of all, a variety of normalized political fear invaded our lives. All of these stories make me who i am. However to insist on best these terrible stories is to flatten my expertise and to miss the many different studies that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the trouble with stereotypes is just not that they are untrue, but that they’re incomplete. They make one story come to be the only story. Of path, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are significant ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, corresponding to the truth that 5,000 people follow for one job emptiness in Nigeria. However there are different reviews that aren’t about disaster, and it is vitally important, it is just as primary, to speak about them. I’ve always felt that it is not possible to engage effectively with a position or a individual with out attractive with the entire reports of that location and that individual.The consequence of the one story is that this: It robs humans of dignity. It makes our consciousness of our equal humanity problematic. It emphasizes how we’re exclusive as a substitute than how we are equivalent. So what if before my Mexican commute, I had followed the immigration debate from all sides, the U.S. And the Mexican? What if my mom had advised us that Fide’s loved ones was once terrible and hardworking? What if we had an African tv community that broadcast numerous African experiences all over the place the world? What the Nigerian creator Chinua Achebe calls "a steadiness of studies." What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian writer, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and begin a publishing apartment? Now, the traditional wisdom was once that Nigerians don’t learn literature.He disagreed. He felt that individuals who would read, would read, should you made literature affordable and to be had to them. Rapidly after he released my first novel, I went to a television station in Lagos to do an interview, and a lady who worked there as a messenger got here up to me and said, "I particularly favored your novel. I did not just like the ending. Now, you ought to write a sequel, and that is what is going to occur …" (Laughter) and she went on to inform me what to put in writing within the sequel. I used to be not most effective charmed, I was once very moved. Right here was once a woman, a part of the typical lots of Nigerians, who were not speculated to be readers. She had now not simplest learn the publication, however she had taken possession of it and felt justified in telling me what to jot down in the sequel. Now, what if my roommate knew about my pal Funmi Iyanda, a fearless girl who hosts a tv exhibit in Lagos, and is decided to tell the reviews that we opt for to put out of your mind? What if my roommate knew in regards to the heart procedure that used to be carried out within the Lagos medical institution final week? What if my roommate knew about modern Nigerian track, proficient humans singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.What if my roommate knew in regards to the feminine attorney who not too long ago went to court in Nigeria to assignment a ridiculous regulation that required females to get their husband’s consent earlier than renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, filled with innovative men and women making movies regardless of excellent technical odds, films so popular that they particularly are the first-rate illustration of Nigerians drinking what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has simply started her possess business selling hair extensions? Or concerning the millions of alternative Nigerians who begin organizations and normally fail, but proceed to nurse ambition? Whenever i’m dwelling i’m confronted with the usual sources of infection for many Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed executive, but additionally with the aid of the remarkable resilience of men and women who thrive regardless of the federal government, as an alternative than considering that of it.I teach writing workshops in Lagos each summer season, and it is amazing to me how many men and women practice, how many humans are keen to write, to tell studies. My Nigerian publisher and i have just began a non-profit called Farafina believe, and we’ve got colossal desires of constructing libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and offering books for state schools that do not have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in studying and writing, for the entire folks who are keen to inform our many reviews.Reviews topic. Many stories topic. Reviews had been used to dispossess and to malign, but reviews can also be used to empower and to humanize. Experiences can ruin the glory of a persons, however stories might also repair that damaged dignity. The American creator Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern loved ones who had moved to the North. She offered them to a book concerning the Southern existence that they’d left at the back of. "They sat around, reading the book themselves, paying attention to me read the guide, and a kind of paradise was once regained." I want to end with this inspiration: That after we reject the one story, after we realise that there’s under no circumstances a single story about any situation, we regain a variety of paradise. Thank you. (Applause) .