#kendall and jo are humans because why not

[ithinkyouhealedmyheart]

Borders Closed

Characters: Arthur Griffin, Lucy Stone, Camille Roberts, Jo Taylor, Kendall Knight, James Diamond, Logan Mitchell, Carlos Garcia, Veronica Clark oc, TJ Miller oc, Callie Anderson oc, Addison Tate oc

Pairings: Kendall Knight/Female Original Character, Jo Taylor/Male Original Character, Female Original Character/Female Original Character, Kendall Knight & James Diamond & Logan Mitchell & Carlos Garcia

A/N: the Halloweentown franchise has a sincere place in my heart, and I will always watch the movies every October. But I'm not a big fan of Return to Halloweentown. This is heavily inspired by Halloweentown High, mainly just how the teens wear human suits.

"These are the people you call your friends! They're freaks! Monsters!" Arthur snickered and gestured to the students standing between him and the angry mob of mortals.

James caught Lucy when she fell. The warlock had taken her and her brother's magic per their agreement about a week ago.

"How could you do this? We trusted you!"

Arthur Griffin was the CEO of RCM-CBT and a council member for Halloweentown. And unfortunately, he could keep his fellow council members in his pocket. Reinforcing the idea that mortals were afraid of monsters. That mortals hated them. He wasn't keen on letting children from Halloweentown attend a mortal high school but allowed Lucy and the Stone family to at least try.

But all he wanted was their magic, and she gave him an easy way.

The angry mob formed after the Halloween festival's calamity was confused and shocked. The people they had known and befriended were apparently creatures from another dimension. They stood at a standstill.

"Yeah, that's right. We're monsters." TJ unzipped his human suit and shook like a dog. His dark fur puffed up, and he kicked the suit to the side.

His eyes scanned for Jo in the crowd. She was wearing a fairy costume. The blonde girl stared at him as though enraptured by the sight before her. Although he was covered in fur from head to toe, he was the same person she ate lunch with. He was the same guy who helped her with her French classes.

A weight was lifted off his shoulders when she didn't scream or run for the hills.

"Finally! We don't have to hide!" Carlos cheered as he shook off his human suit.

The girl in the leather catsuit that he brought on a date shrieked when he pulled the bolts out of his neck and removed his head. She actually fainted. Carlos popped his head back on and accidentally switched the bolts in his neck, causing a jolt of electricity to zap Griffin.

Kendall looked to Ronnie, who ducked behind James. She felt guilty for lying to him, but she didn't want him to view her any differently just because she was a monster.

"Now, this door shouldn't have been opened in the first place," Arthur grimaced as he stepped back into the glowing orange doorway. The gateway between our worlds will be permanently closed... forever."

"What? But we have to go home to see our families!" Ben, with the help of their principal, stood up.

"I'm sorry, that's not under my jurisdiction." Arthur faked a pout. White limestone bricks filled the doorway, and soon it was sealed.

"No!" Carlos slammed his fists against the wall. "I wanted to show my dad our haunted house!" he screamed, banging his fists against the limestone. His bolts zapped bright, hot electricity in his hair, making the short strands stand on end.

"No. No! This isn't fair! I did what they wanted!" Lucy snapped, and she joined Carlos, slamming his fists against the brick wall. "You tricked me! You tricked my brother! Give me my magic back!"

The angry mortal mob fell silent. There was nothing else for them to rage about. Instead, they were looking at monsters who were like them. Teenagers who needed their families and who wanted to forge their own identities.

Ronnie squeaked when James gently pushed her toward Kendall. He flashed a toothy smile and waggled his eyebrows. The words were caught in her throat as she looked up at him. Her face bloomed a reddish color, and she wrung her hands together.

"I haven't... Exactly been honest with you..." She mumbled and grabbed the zipper of her human suit.

Kendall stared at her wordlessly. He had no idea what she would look like when she tugged it off, but he had always been curious about how clumsy she was. Sometimes, it was as if she had never walked on two legs. Her heart thrummed in her ears, and she seemingly forgot that she didn't have human legs, unlike how mermaids could change between aquatic and land.

Kendall caught her before she fell, and Ronnie squeaked, hiding her face in her hands. Her webbed ears flapped frantically. He was entranced with the scales that littered her body. It was like he was looking at the moon.

"Well, I mean, if everyone is taking off these damned things." Callie shrugged and took off her human suit as well. Her translucent body wavering in the air, glitching like static on a television screen.

"No way." Addison gasped. Her eyes were wide like saucers.

"Sorry, sweetheart. There isn't anything tangible to hold onto..."

"This is so cool!" Addison squealed in glee.

"I'm a ghost. You can't touch me."

"You're still beautiful," Addison giggled, making the ghost girl blush, her body taking on a pink color. "Woah..." Addison took a step back.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Jo gently touched TJ's arm, and he jumped and whirled around to face her.

"I'm sorry, I was scared. I couldn't- I thought you wouldn't like me... If I was covered in fur."

"Are you crazy?" Jo quirked a brow. "I could hardly care about your fur." She shook her head with a laugh. "All that means is I have a personal heater."

TJ's tail started wagging, giving him away. He let out a pitiful whine and scooped her up into a hug.

"See?" Lucy called to the brick wall. "Mortals have changed!" She kicked the wall and instantly regretted it, hopping in place as she held her foot.

"Stupid chairman..."

"You were right, Ben. This ring never fit me." Their principal threw away his ring, and it clattered to the ground like tin. He was renouncing the Knights of the Iron Dagger once and for all.

Ben's eyes sparkled. And hope swelled in his chest.

Even if the gateway was closed indefinitely, that didn't mean the people here hated them. Of course, it was all Griffin's plan. He was a brilliant mastermind but would never have a chance against Lucy and her brother.

Then the bricks illuminated with an orange glow, and Carlos pulled Lucy back.

Maybe Griffin didn't win after all.

[flock-of-cassowaries]

It raises a really interesting question about whether or not Teddy Kennedy exists in the Succession universe.

Cause… like, I know people say that the way Kennedy left campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne to drown was why he never became president, but he certainly wasn’t locked out of power and privilege.

He was a senator for decades, even after he pled guilty to ‘leaving the scene of an accident causing injury’ (at which point, he got a two-month suspended sentence); even though he did not report the accident until the next day, presumably, so that he could give himself a chance to sober up first.

So like… does Teddy Kennedy not exist in Kendall’s reality as a reference point?

Or does he exist, and Kendall knows that the Chappaquick incident prevented Teddy from achieving his highest ambition (the presidency), and… well; Kendall just can’t swallow the idea of possibly not getting absolutely everything he wants (just because he let another human being drown).

I just noticed that in Season one finale when Logan tells Kendall "This could be a defining moment of your life. It'd eat everything. A rich kid kills a boy. You'd never be anything else." after Kendall tells him about the accident it's like a prophecy for Kendall. And just like in any tragedy, when hero's attempt at avoiding the prophecy only serves to fulfill it, same way Kendall's whole arc from then on is to avoid his father's prophecy. But in the series finale, he still ends up with nothing. He's just a rich kid who killed a boy and he'll never be anything else. And it's not about world knowing this, it's about Kendall finally realizing that this is the truth about him. That's all he is.

[cinema-tv-etc]

How Designing Women Addressed AIDS 30 Years Ago

This '80s sitcom spoke up about the disease when hardly anyone else would.

By Matt Baume - December 04 2017

December 1 is World AIDS Day — a time to educate and raise awareness around HIV. Thirty years ago, when the day was established, humanity was facing a health crisis, and the leader of the free world was afraid to talk about it. So where could Americans turn for the frank truth about their very survival? Designing Women.

Yes, the late-'80s sitcom Designing Women, one of the first scripted shows to address gay men, and condoms, and AIDS, all in one episode! Seven years into his term, President Reagan had only made one speech about the epidemic, which is why the job of educating the nation had to fall to Delta Burke and Janine from Ghostbusters.

This 1987 episode of the show, titled "Killing All the Right People," does triple duty. It's educational, it is incredibly compassionate, and it gives Julia Sugarbaker an opportunity to really lay into some hypocrites.

The story of the episode is that 24-year-old Kendall has hired the ladies to design the decor for his upcoming funeral.

Kendall embodies multiple heartbreaking stories about AIDS — stories that thousands of real people were going through at the time. He's young. His family rejected him for being gay. He's seen people with no one to turn to. He's getting substandard care. And of course he gets the "very special episode" music.

Also of note is just how much education the show packs into 22 minutes.

The delivery doesn't always come across as totally natural, but in the space between ads for Doublemint Gum, this show manages to provide more useful information about AIDS than the U.S. government had for the initial years of the epidemic. Plus some very solid mugging by Annie Potts.

Also, Julia Sugarbaker gets a chance to tear someone's head off when another client gets super duper evil about Kendall. 

And of course, this chilling line, "This disease has one thing going for it. It's killing all the right people."

These statements would seem cartoonishly evil, except the killing line was an actual thing that was said, in real life, in front of writer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, while she was in the hospital caring for her mother, who got HIV from a blood transfusion. So it must have been a bit cathartic for her to write this speech for Julia.

Chastened, the client vanishes in a beige cloud. Meanwhile, there's a separate story in which Mary Jo has to debate whether public schools should provide condoms. Because this is the '80s, her opponent is an evil uptight busybody with gigantic hair.

The busybody has a brilliant solution for preventing teen pregnancy: Simply tell the teenagers to stop having so much darn sex.

Because if anything can hold back the raging sexual hormones of a teenager, it's abstinence-only education from a stock prude character in search of a Rodney Dangerfield to disapprove of.

Fortunately Mary Jo is a realist, and also a bridge between the A plot and the B plot.

Still debating indeed! The Trump administration recently cut $200 million from safe sex education but dumped $10 million into abstinence programs that produce no-sex-before-marriage PSAs like this one featuring the unquenchably fecund Palin family. Bristol Palin was paid a quarter-million dollars to appear in that ad, and went on to have a second child out of wedlock a few years later.

And hey, remember how Mary Jo mentioned that 5,000 Americans have died? Guess where that number is now: 675,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And around the world: 35 million.

Thirty-five million people dead while we're still debating.

It's crazy that in 1987, Designing Women was one of the country's best sources of medical information about HIV and safe sex. But it's even more crazy that three decades later, in some places, that's still the case. The abstinence education fantasy just refuses to go away. What the villains of this episode were saying is that people who have sex need to be punished, and that sex should lead to consequences.

And that's the same position as today's abstinence-only crowd. No contraception, no information, no harm reduction. If you have sex, you might die, and that's the way it should be. Because you'll have died of something that's killing "all the right people."

Head over to WorldAIDSDay.org for information about events happening near you, to educate yourself about HIV, and to join the red ribbon campaign. We've been fighting HIV ignorance and stigma for over 30 years — now let's end it.

https://www.hivplusmag.com/entertainment/2017/12/04/how-designing-women-addressed-aids-30-years-ago..

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