#lillian's lack of a love life

[realitycanbewhateveridesire]

ABOUT MY ARCANE DR <3

ngl, talking about my dr feels so embarassing

In this reality, I am the second Kiramman daughter and younger sister of Caitlyn Kirmman by 3 years. Due to me being kidnapped as a toddler and...shenanigans happening I guess, I spent a big portion of my childhood in the Undercity/Zaun living with Vander as part of his makeshift family. I haven't thought much about my place in the story, but I am supplying the Firelights with info and tech from Topside and trying to help as much as I can while living in Piltover (and kinda under the watchful gaze of my parents). There's also the part, where I basically died in my CR and got isekai'ed into Arcane-verse.

To be honest, I am just dropping myself into the story with only a barebones backstory and no idea what I wanna do.

☆ MY BACKSTORY

i am just gonna directly drop what's currently in my script here

(also please, just keep in mind that i based my backstory kinda on a fanfic and also am horrible at writing stuff. and i apologize for it being kinda long and goofy...and frankly, not making sense in some parts. i'm sorry vera leigh, please forgive me.)

In my first life (my CR life), I was a mediocre girl-woman-child. One, dissatisfied with her life. Age-wise, I barely made it out of the girlhood. Still yet, I lacked the maturity of an adult and desparately clung to my fleeting childhood years. I clung to childish daydreams and fantasies. Dreaming of life filled with wonder, comfort and magic. I was spoiled and ungrateful for all the things others have done for me. That life ended rather pathetically. At the age of nineteen, being hit by a truck after trying to cross the road.

I was floating in the vast nothingness. At ease, almost unfeeling, unthinking. Numb. It was the strangest feeling. I felt…almost glad. Satisfied.

That peace did not last, it seemed, as I was pulled, torn, from it and made to wake up anew.

I was born again on a late morning/near noon of February 28th 973 AN, a second child and daughter to Cassandra Kiramman and Tobias Kiramman. As Lillian Kiramman. Sister of Caitlyn Kiramman.

I had no recollection of my past life. Not yet, at least. It would only come to me later on.

I was a difficult and needy child. Unaware of it at the time, I was born with the ability to “dream”. Not prophetic visions of future, but visions of the present. Those mental images came to me in bursts, sometimes threatening to tear at my sanity bit by bit. The resulting outbursts went far beyond that of a normal infant/small child. It made me wail and cry, and scream for hours on end, without a sign of stopping. Day and night. Hitting my head with my tiny hands in distress, until a maid or nanny would come to pry them away from it. Little could calm me, aside from the calming touch and proximity of one of my parents. Especially, my mother. Yet even then, it didn’t seem enough. My suffering tore their hearts, as they tried to find anything to help me, to fix it. Fix me. They had various doctors check my health, spoke with scholars and psychologists, etc. But nothing helped as they still couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. Between the helplessness and exhaustion, the situation overwhelmed them. Even as they loved me fiercely, they couldn’t help to sometimes wish for an “easier” child.

Those thoughts would come back to haunt them, after I was kidnapped as a mere toddler.

With the violent and cutthroat nature of the Undercity’s/Zaun’s criminal underbelly, it didn’t take long for my captors to be eliminated by their rivals. Following the chaos that ensued, I fell through the cracks. Ending up in the streets, before being taken to be a part of experiments conducted by a chem-baron. I was rescued by Vander, who took me in.

I spent the next years living with him and my adopted siblings: Vi/Violet, Powder, Mylo and Claggor.

At the age of around 13 years old, I took part in my siblings’ attempted heist on the Kiramman workshop/Jayce Talis’s apartment. The one ending up in the explosion caused by the hextech crystals. After that, we tried to lay low. Until we couldn’t.

And when Vander was kidnapped and my older siblings went on to rescue him, I was left behind in the Last Drop alongside Powder. And snuck out along with her, wanting to help/save my siblings.

In the end, we failed. I failed. Left unconscious among the rubble, miraculously without any lethal injuries. It was Ekko, who pulled me out of there.

And when once again, I was back on my feet even if barely, injured and running from Silco’s people as they hunted me down. I fell into the hands of enforcers.

After the Sheriff Grayson’s death, the enforcers were in disarray. My arrest case ended up getting mixed up with another case, leading to them taking a DNA sample from me. And accidentally discovering that I was the lost Kiramman child.

Marcus took this as yet another opportunity to give himself credit. As the one who arrested me, he would take all the glory. He fabricated an entire story about Vander, the Hound of the Underground possibly being my kidnapper. Of him brainwashing me into thinking of him as my family. A tale he presented to my family, in case I decided to run my mouth about his involvement in Sheriff Grayson’s death.

I was “returned home” to my biological family in Piltover.

As expected, I didn’t take well at all to this new development. I might have been a Kiramman by blood, yet I grew up as a Zaunite. My heart belonged largely in the Undercity. Furthermore, I was envelopped in grief surrounding the deaths of my adopted siblings and adoptive father. As my parents tried their best to undo the brainwashing, they assumed I was under.

To add salt to the injury, it was only by the age of fourteen, that the memories of my prievious life and my reincarnation returned to me. Only then, I became aware that I was reincarnated into the world of that distant past self’s favorite story.

It was already too late to prevent the tragedy, which split the two sisters apart. But I knew the trajectory of what would happen in years following.

I focused on getting stronger. I’ve honed my skills with the firearms. Picked up martial arts.

From young age, I exhibited a keen intellect, curiosity and thirst for knowledge that surpassed my years.

I’ve devoured any piece of knowledge I could. I collected knowledge from anything I could get my hands on and devoured books on various subjects amd topics. I educated myself about Runeterra as much as I could.

Throughout my childhood in the Undercity, I flirted with the idea of exploring my powers. The people performing experiments on me, were also quite interested by my ability to “dream”.

At the age of fourteen, I found it could prove a useful tool for my plans. I delved into my visions, almost sacrificing my sanity as I memorized all that could prove useful. I tried to get my hands on books about occult and magic tomes. Hoping they would give me the answer, one that I was looking for.

In the end, I achieved partial control over my “sight”, alongside awakening some other powers. The visions still came to me in my sleep. But most times, I was able to control it. Control myself in my dreams as I travelled wherever I wanted, separated from my physical body. In my dreams, I walked through the Undercity’s streets, burning every shortcut, nook and cranny that I’ve never seen before, into my memory. I’ve seen the inside of Noxian warrooms, the farmlands of Demacia, the ice-covered lands of Freljord, the beauty of the Ionian archipelago, the Bilgewater ports, the jungles of Ixtal, the sands of Shurima. And much more. Yet, my attention remained mostly on Piltover and Zaun. And the people, I once saw only upon a screen. Those, I knew in this life.

I observed Powder as she evolved into Jinx, under the aegis of Silco. I observed Vi, in the Stillwater’s Hold prison. I had observed Viktor and Jayce, as they developed Hextech. I had observed Ekko, as he persevered and with the help of others, created the Firelights.

The Kirammans were Jayce’s patrons. And he was somewhat of a family friend and an older brother figure to Caitlyn. It was inevitable for us to interact and become acquinted with one another. And while we never became as close, as him and Caitlyn, we somewhat got along.

It is through Jayce, that I met Viktor. With my parents trying to control who I interacted with and him being the first Zaunite living in Piltover that I met and the only Zaunite I was (begrudingly) allowed to interact with, he instantly became my friend. That and his sarcastic nature, which instantly made me like him.

Ekko was already a close childhood friend of mine. Despite my parents’ watchful gaze and them guarding me from anything Undercity-related, I was accustomed to sneaking around in the shadows and hiding secrets. Courtesy of having grown up as a Fissure-native. Ekko tracked me down. I tracked him too. We had a reunion, had a talk. About everything we’ve been up to, everything that has happened to us. Ekko brought me up to date in regards to the Undercity (I knew of some developments already through my powers). He told me about the Firelights. In the end, I became a secret informant and ally of the Firelights. Supplying them with info and tech from Topside.

...

(and that's basically it for now lol. i'll admit my backstory's unfinished. i'm just inserting myself to shift sometime close before the act 1 of season 1 events and letting stuff happen from there.)

In terms of powers and fighting, I gave myself basic things like combat skills, flexibility and speed to avoid getting killed. I haven't even fully specified in my mind what my "sight" ability is but it's sorta a cross between prophetic dreams and astral projection. I'm also probably gonna give myself airbending or waterbending. Simply because I can.

....

And...I guess that's all I have for now.

If you managed to get through that wall of text, then thank you <3

[curiousb]

The Tilney Family Album: Volume XVII

Time to meet the nooboo!

As it happened, Eleanor was already pregnant when the alien menace whisked her away, and the baby boy is Esther's, with her deep blue eyes. They name the new arrival Ellis.

(I confess I was a little disappointed by the lack of alien progeny, but I guess there’s still time!)

What more could Esther want from life? She has just married the love of her life, and now she's a mother too!

The new parents take it in turns to stay at home with their young son. One afternoon - shortly after Eleanor has put Ellis down for his nap - the family has an unexpected visitor. Lillian - the fiancée of Eleanor's cousin Nathan - drops in while mysteriously in character.

She's not really known to the family, but it seems that Lillian just happened to be in that part of town, and decided to take the opportunity to introduce herself. And wake up the baby.

Being the curious soul that she is, Eleanor can't help wanting to know just how much Lillian identifies with her llama persona?

Lillian tries to explain that it's not so much about being a llama, as channelling the ineffable spirit of llamaness into everyday life. Well, it's certainly an interesting philosophy.

Lillian has fortuitously coincided her visit with Ellis's first birthday.

No, it's not just Ellis's stinky nappy that is causing Eleanor's nausea...

There's another unexpected arrival, and this time it's a new baby sister for Ellis - welcome to the family, Esme!

He's quite happy to have a new sibling, but can't wait for her to grow up a bit, so that they can play together properly.

~ Gemini 5 / 5 / 4 / 3 / 9

~ Friendly / Slob

~ OTH: Games

Perhaps as a result of being exposed to Lillian's extravagant headgear at such a young age, he also won't do anything or go anywhere without his green monster hat.

[thoughtfulfangirling]

2024 Reads

Another human invented marker of time has passed moving us from one year to the next. It's a good reason to start over my lists right?! XD 2023's list can be found here! 2024 starts below!

You Made a Fool out of Death with Your Beauty - Awaeke Emezi

Pussypedia: A Comprehensive Guide^ - Zoe Mendelson & Maria Conejo

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek -Kim Michele Richardson

Meru - S.B. Divya

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South^ by Radley Balko & Tucker Carrington

Watching the Tree: A Chinese Daughter Reflects on Happiness, Tradition, and Spiritual Wisdom^ - Adeline Yen Mah

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg^ - Helen Rappaport]

Pride and Prejudice* - Jane Austen

Fresh Girl - Jaida Placide

Butts: A Backstory^ - Heather Radke

The Girl Who Chased the Moon - Sarah Addison Allen

The Silent Patient - Alex Michaelides

The Blue Sword - Robin McKinley

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex^ - Nathaniel Philbrick

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico^ - Amy S. Greenberg

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible^ - Charles E. Cobb Jr.

This Is Your Mind on Plants^ - Michael Pollan

The Silent Patient*~ - Alex Michaelides

Finding Me^ - Viola Davis

Wuthering Heights# - Emily Bronte

Exit Strategy~ - Martha Wells

The Girls Who Went Away:^ The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe V. Wade - Ann Fessler

Bowling Alone:^ The Collapse and Revival of American Community - Robert D. Putnam

Fugitive Telemetry%~ - Martha Wells

The History of Wales^*% - History Nerds

The War on Everyone^% ~- Robert Evans

Searching for Black Confederates:^ The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth - Kevin M. Levin

The Great Influenza:* The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History [2004] by John M. Barry

Network Effect~ - Martha Wells

Zelda Popkin:^ The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer - Jeremy D Popkin

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon

Medical Apartheid:^ The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present - Harriet A Washington

The Assassination of Fred Hampton:^ How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther - Jeffrey Haas

The Death of Vivek Oji - Awaeke Emezi

Mutual Aid:^% Building Solidarity in This Crisis (And the Next) - Dean Spade

Passin' Through - Luis L'Amour

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store - James McBride

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

Histories of the Transgender Child^ - Jules Gill-Peterson

Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curiosu Man^ - Mark Kurlansky

When I Fell from the Sky:^ The True Story of One Woman's Miraculous Survival - Juliane Koepcke

Dear Senthuran:^ A Black Spirit Memoir - Akwaeke Emezi

Emma* by Jane Austen

Lud-in-the-Mist - Hope Mirrlees

Woman:^ The American History of an Idea - Lillian Faderman

System Collapse - Martha Wells

A Dark and Starless Forest - Sarah Hollawell

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love^% - Bell Hooks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks^ - Rebecca Skloot

Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America^ -Rachel Hope Cleves

The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle^ - Lillian Faderman

The Woman in Me^ - Brittany Spears

Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America^ - Gregory Smithers

Being Huemann: An Unrepentant Memoir of Disability Rights Activist^ - Judith Huemann

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When a Disaster Strikes and Why^ - Amanda Ripley

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone^ - Edward Dolnick

Utopia for Realists:^ How We Can Build the Ideal World - Rutger Bregman

The Echo Wife - Sarah Gailey

To Believe in Women:^ What Lesbians Have Done for America - Lillian Faderman

Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon

Tribe:^% On Homecoming and Belonging - Sebastian Junger

Freedom^% - Sebastian Junger

Our Wives Under the Sea - Julia Armfield

Nonviolence: 25 Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea% - Mark Kurlansky

Bridehead Revisited# - Evelyn Waugh

The Witch Elm - Tana Frencyh

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

HumanKind: A Hopeful History - Rutger Bregman^

Autumn at the Willow River Guesthouse - C.P Ward

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World Find the Good Death^ - Caitlin Doughty

A Study in Drowning - Ava Reid

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

Gideon the Ninth* - Tamsyn Muir

See What I Have Done - Sarah Schmidt

Plain Bad Heroines* - Emily M Danforth

Tell Me I'm Worthless - Alison Rumfitt

On Killing:^ The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society - Dave Grossman

Camp Damascus - Chuck Tingle

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror - Daneil M. Lavery

The Night Gardener - Jonathan Auxier

The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals^ - Aaron Mahnke

The Willows% - Algernon Blackwood

Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones% - Alvin Schwartz

The Motion of Puppets - Keith Donohue

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow% - Washington Irving

Wisconsin's Ghosts^ - Sherry Strub

Trauma and Recovery^: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror - Judith Lewis Herman

An Enchangment of Ravens - Margaret Rogerson

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell* - Susanna Clark

Portrait of a Thief - Grace D. Li

The Five^: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper - Hallie Rubenhold

Countrymen: The Untold Story of How Denamrk's Jews Escaped the Nazis, of the Courage of their Fellow Danes^ - and the Extrondinary Role of the SS - Bo Lidegaard

The Road to Jonestown^: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple - Jeff Guinn

The Scary Book of Christmas Lore^ - Tim Rayborn

On Tyranny^: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - Timothy Snyder

The Old Magic of Christmas:^ Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year - Linda Raedisch

Harrow the Ninth~* - Tamsyn Muir

The Hogfather - Terry Pratchett

12 Days at Bleakly Manor - Michelle Greip

Christmas Truce: The Western Front December 1914^ - Malcolm Brown & Shirley Seaton

Midnight Never Come* - Marie Brennan

Behind the Scenes:^ Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House - Elizabethy Keckley

Key: * = Reread ^ = Nonfiction ~ = Read with Empty % = Novella #= Doc book club

My goal for 2024 is for 40% of my reads to be nonfiction. I've had two years within the recent past where I managed 20% of my reads to be nonfiction, so I'm aiming to double that.

Okay, below the cut I'm putting the nonfiction books on my tbr, most of which I have the lovely people of Tumblr to thank for the recommendations!

1968: The Year that Rocked the World

The Age of Wood; Our Most Useful Material...

The Assassination of Fred Hampton

Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the...

Being Human

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shelf

Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

Bowling Alone

Brave the Wild: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped...

Butts: A Backstory / Evermore Recommended

The Cadaver Kin and the Country Dentist / Automatuck9

Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse...

Dear Senthuran

DisneyWar

Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with...

Finding Me (Viola Davis)

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed...

The Food of a Younger Land

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women...

The Glass Universe

The Great Hunger: The Story of the Famine...

The Great Influenza

Helping Her Get Free: A Guide for Families and Friends of an Abused Woman

The History of Ireland

The History of Scotland

The History of Wales

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Indifferent Stars Above

In the Heart of the Sea / ecouterbien

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death...

The Last Days of the Romanovs / Automatuck9

Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical...

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During the Crisis...

A New World Begins

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous...

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get you Killed / Empty

Radium Girls

The Road to Jonestown

Paper: Paging through History

Pussypedia / Bookstagram Rec

Salt: A World History

Say Nothing

Sea Biscuit: An American legend

Searching for Black Confederates

This is Your Mind on Plants

Unmasking Autism

The Unthinkable: Who Survives when Disaster Strikes - And Why

Watching the Tree / found all by my little self

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow we Will be Killed...

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the.. / Rose

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta...

[jor-elsemissary]

Want

—————————

Martha Kent.

She was perhaps the most singular thing in his world that he could not acquire with wealth and power, or manipulate with words and charm. It wasn’t because of a lack of trying, no, she was simply something he did not want to ruin with his touch.

His presence was a poison that became more toxic the longer you stood beside him. A word from him could turn the most innocent person into a desperate man willing to kill. A few thousand Washingtons could buy him the time of day. A whisper in the shadows would ruin a man.

But Martha Kent?

She seemed immune to him. His charm and wit had only amused her. She was cautious with him, like she knew he was a viper waiting in the tall grass to strike. This farmer’s wife had a way to get past his ruthlessness and draw out a deep desire to impress her by any means.

In all his years, not even with Lillian, has he ever felt like offering his life for another. And yet that is what he had tried to do when Lincoln Cole had held them captive.

He knew then and there that he was in love with Martha Kent.

He would die for her.

“Martha…” her name was a reverence to be whispered lest some evil would hear and ruin all that made her who she was.

Her hand on his arm was like fire to his ice. It burned and melted away the armor he had crafted and wore for himself, leaving him feeling bare for her to see. He knew she sees through his flirtations and visits for what they really are and yet she does not ever send him away like some rejected suitor.

He comes back every time in the hopes that this time it would be different. This time she would invite him to stay. This time she would give him a kiss if only to greet him or say goodbye. But he leaves every time feeling hope for them and disappointed all the same.

He wanted her.

Not just simply to take to bed like he would have in the past. A conquest to mark like the many other women and girls. No. She wasnt something to conquer. She wasn’t a trophy to collect and add to his exotic collection.

Martha Kent was to be cherished and loved, and if he had to do that at arms length, he was willing to play the role of platonic lover.

He wanted her.

He wanted her smiles, the way it would crinkle the corners of her eyes and telling him how genuine and happy she was. He wanted her laughter, the sound of it like one of his piano sonatas he so liked to play. He wanted her gratitude for something he did that she approved. He wanted her approval like some abused school boy seeking validation.

He wanted her love above all else.

Because the love Martha Kent gave was real. It would not be born out of an arranged marriage so he could have her money. It would not be manipulated into her so that she would never think of a time when she did not love him.

No. Martha Kent needed to genuinely love him. He needed to hear her say those words with true meaning and affection. The one time she had said how much he had meant to her, it had sent him soaring so high he didn’t know what to say or do.

Her love, he knew, would have him riding cloud nine.

God, Martha Kent being just out of his reach was just enough to drive him to madness.

“Lionel?” his name on her lips always drew his attention away from whatever it was he was doing or thinking. “Are you alright?”

“I’m… sorry?” Why was she asking him that?

“You seemed… lost in thought back there?” Back there? Back where? Oh. Who had they been talking to before his thoughts drifted to about her?

“I… I’m fine. I just, was.” Lionel Luthor never got tongue tied around anyone before. But Martha had that way with him. She had the knack to cut short whatever thought he was going to express, pause, and rethink his life choices before saying something she wanted or approved. “I was just thinking about you.”

“That bored you have to use me to entertain yourself?” she gently teased and he wanted nothing more than to take her from this political event and tell her (and show her) exactly what he had been thinking about.

“Shall we exit stage left then?” he offered. “We’ve been here long enough to impress the right people and worry the rest.”

“Please.” Her arm linked through his and he guided them through the various guests of the party. “Even though I have been going to these for years now, I still haven’t gotten use to it. I suppose it’s all the false platitudes and promises that get to me.”

No matter how much he guides her through his world, he knows he will never get the farm out of her. Martha Kent is and always will be that Kansas farmer that he has come to cherish and love, and these people here have no idea whom they have amongst them.

“You never really get use to it,” he confesses, a smile on his lips as he admires her. “But you have come a long way and those people know that.”

Martha rested her head against his shoulder once they were outside and waiting for his limousine to arrive. He could feel her trust and affection in just that gesture alone. It was the small things like that which kept him going and hoping for more.

He wanted Martha Kent and he was determined to do things right with her.

[frostcorpsclub]

Name: January Priscilla Lillian Frost

Nickname(s): Prissy Lily (by James she hates it so much), Champ, The General, Little Fish, Warlord Mermaid Princess (all by her Daddy)

Main Ability: Ice Healing- The user can heal themselves or others by using ice, absorbing frozen energies and using them to freeze molecules, renewing damaged cells, causing them to stop bleeding. Ice can also provide energy to close up wounds, and allowing optimal health. (Source: Superpower wiki)

Personality:

January can be described as the second in command when it comes to keeping her siblings in check but she’s the commander and leader of her own destiny. Even amongst her own family she’s almost like a creature of folklore, quiet, calculating, a tiny bit feral. Ever since she was old enough to walk and throw a punch her father conditioned her to be his little solider and this was a role she absolutely excelled at, growing into it like a snug hand me down. Some people say she can smell weakness and fear. Her small stature makes it easy for her to crawl up the walls and descend from where she’s least expected. This, and her girly sense of style, also makes it easy for people to underestimate her. January could not care less about what other people think of her. This is not out of a studied confidence but an indifference and a lack of understanding of social cues. There are things that are logical, like attack strategies, social hierarchies, and the words of her parents. Even if information appears to be conflicting. Those things matter. Getting January to change her mind is a futile endeavor but she’s inexplicably talented at getting others to do so. She has somewhat of a flat affect and a minimal range of expressions but she’s incredibly passionate. When she does speak she is a natural leader, with an incredible self assuredness she never wavers in leading other towards her cause, she just seems as though she knows what is best. Being the quiet one means she absorbs a lot of information, she may not be the best at neurotypical niceties but she knows what makes a person tick and what they might fight for. In addition to her ardor for honor and competition, the third and least known emotion that defines her is hopeless romanticism. She longs for adventure, to be the knight in the fairy tale but also to be the princess. January looks up to her parents relationship very much and finds the hierarchy of it very comforting, she seeks a relationship just like it where she can do her part to protect and care for her family and be treasured at the end of the day. Despite being very open about her more sappy interests, much like her father, January isn’t exactly aware of the fact that people consider her to be sensitive. She won’t let herself be soft a moment before she meets the person she feels will provide that for her. January enjoys wearing a minimal palette as it can be difficult for her to concentrate if her brain is bombarded with too many colors and patterns. Her biggest weakness is the struggle of coping with “irregular emotions,” she gets insanely jealous especially when it comes to the attention of the person or people that she loves. When she gets overstimulated she can't just sit down because the grass and the wetness of outside irritates her, so Jack will take her inside and he'll sit in her room with her and let her take over what they do. Her stims are so physical when she's overwhelmed she can hurt herself and sometimes break her stim toys which only makes it worse. Some would say that she’s stubborn but she would say that funneling her anger towards the things she can’t control in to the decorum and prowess of a solider is in fact very healthy.

Future Spouse: Antione Hill

Future Children: Tiara

Trivia

Her favorite movie is The Little Mermaid and she refers to it with metaphor when she finds herself unable to communicate her feelings.

Also a HUGE my little pony fan, Goddess Warrior Queen Celestia stan for life.

She has autism, if you couldn’t tell lmao

She will often disappear for days at at a time, just to go out and swim and explore. She’s proven she can more than take care of herself so her parents aren’t worried.

While she enjoys a good hunt she isn’t too crazy about the taste of human flesh, she’s a seafood girl!

She spends more time under water than any winter being, she even floats around under there as she sleeps like a seal.

[black-klok-youth-pastor]

[OC Profile] Cordelia Lillian Offdensen

Because I am now contractually obligated to infodump about her now. Some parts might have been influenced by other fan fics ,but I either have permission and/or at least gave them enough of my own twist that I'm copying other people's homework too much Spoiler warning for all of Metalolcaypse so far (this is all pre-movie so if my predictions are wrong, oh well). Also content warnings for: pregnancy-related death, child neglect, sexual harassment, alcoholism, and parental death, as well as bits of canon typical dark humor.

Born May 13th, 1945

Died October 3rd, 1993 (...probably, I'll explain in a bit)

Voice Claim: Rachel Bloom/Laraine Newman (if we have to follow the pattern of the other Dethklok moms)

Face Claim: This lady from Writersklok

Personality: A well-intended and kind, but very troubled woman that has trouble being taken seriously despite being rather intelligent and ambitious leading her to unhealthy coping mechanisms such as drinking and casual sex.

Character Inspirations: Cutie Cutie Cupcake (BoJack Horseman), Meredith Quill (Guardians of the Galaxy), Paula Small (Home Movies), Paula Proctor (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Misato Katsuragi (Evangelion), Annie Hughes (The Iron Giant), Peggy Olson (Mad Men), Halley (The Florida Project), Mina Harker (Bram Stroker's Dracula)

Music Tastes: The Amazelingtons, Blue Oyster Cult, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Electric Light Orchestra, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Elton John, Nina Simone, Fleetwood Mac

Bonus playlist

Backstory

She was Salacia’s consort in a past life, unfortunately, she was slain in a siege alongside their unborn child. He tried to resurrect her using a certain kind of purple magic...it did not end well. Cordelia would sometimes have past life nightmares about this with zero context as to what was happening.

She and Salacia met by chance in 1965, back then being a mere law school student; while Salacia was happy to see his beloved wife again...this time he had more ulterior motives convinced that it was part of the Prophecy (if still having to create the Sal persona for obvious reasons). Which he was right, but for the wrong reasons since Charles was an accidental pregnancy so she had to drop out of school and the two had to elope. Her parents were pissed of course and they did not see Cordelia or Charles until he abandoned the family some five or six years later.

Even though Salacia can technically be in two places at once it's pretty taxing (as well as worries that his other self was starting to develop a personality and will of his own) and eventually just to started to realize the more practical problems of his facade such as...oh yeah and his presence having bits of the plague that cause sickness if not death in some people to the point where people assumed for years that Charles was chronically ill. He might've been an asshole for abandoning them, but financially supported them in secret and had them under surveillance by marking them as "people of interest". Although even if he didn't have high hope for him, he had quite a few other children on standby.

Mysterious checks from the government she didn't question aside it was a bit difficult being a single mother in the 1970s albeit was able to get work as a paralegal at the slightly dubious Ensiferum & Associates. So because of this, she was pretty much what you think of when "Gen X mom" comes to mind, with Charles being very much a latchkey kid who more or less raised himself at points. Not for lack of trying since she was capable of being a very loving mother, but was severely overworked and self-medicated with alcohol to cope with the stress of working as an unmarried woman during Mad Men times and general untreated mental health issues. In fact, it was to the point where Charles feeling the need to take care of other people's needs above his own partially explains why he's slightly messed up as an adult. And yet she's among one of the more competent employees at the firm when sober (gee why does that sound familiar?).

Was generally supportive of Charles's goals, but was terrified of him abandoning her much like his father so she definitely didn't take Charles heading off to boarding school well (although she at least had the decency to not say it out loud) and was enough of a mess to require intervention so she at least mellowed out in her final years before peacefully passing in 1993, her lifespan cut tragically short due to a combination of the Salacia plague still affecting her body years later and alcohol abuse.

...which is the version I usually go with in my fics, but personally, I think it's funnier and opens more story potential if she survives to the series' present day, but is just locked out of the loop of the whole "son being the manager of the world's largest band/economic force and later a cult leader" thing. Like I'd probably figured she get along with most of the Dethklok moms (except for maybe Molly but even then because the latter is a massive hypocrite), and Dethklok for themselves for that matter, especially Toki, which Charles would be a bit conflicted about the latter even if she is trying to make up for her previous faults as a mother. I guess for now it's sort of diverging paths, but at least until the movie comes out "dead mom" is the main timeline for my fics.

Overall Charles has a...complicated view of his mother, on one hand, her neglectful parenting did cause a fair amount of emotional scarring that hasn't healed even decades later and severely affected his interpersonal relationships even as an adult, but on the other hand, was at least aware of her struggles with the benefit of hindsight and wouldn't be half the man he was today without her influence.

[anyaalrich]

I had a dream last night that I was having an affair with Jason Bateman. Not gonna lie, I crushed on him and Ricky Schroder when they were in Silver Spoons, but most people who would end up reading this would be more likely to recognize him from Arrested Development or as Marty from Ozark.

He had an actual self driving car.. not like what we know but fUlly self functioning.

And not only was he the sweetest, most attentive partner possible but holy shit, the sex was fantastic. (Amanda, I am so sorry. You're amazing)

He was head of household to a home filled with kids of all ages who had what seemed like autism but all to the point that they basically had ...."superpowers" ~ for lack of a better word.... If Professor X participated in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program on a scale of massive financial proportions. He took me to meet them all and we hung out around a pool table. Everyone was showing off their skills and talking about how they met him and why they chose to go live there. One girl knew that my real name is Christina, not Lillian. That was weird.

We went to his room to lie down for a bit and we talked about life while he ran his fingers through my hair until I fell asleep. Then I woke up to Michael's alarm. I giggled about that for at least half an hour before I fell asleep again.

Like... what the hell? Why Jason Bateman??? He's sincerely great, but it's not like I have any reason for him to be in my head. And I was in absolute love with him. Or at least in awe.

This was 100 times better than the bizarre erotic dream I had about Elon Musk. That was disturbing lmao.

[byronicherobracket]

The Byronic Hero Bracket: Qualifying Round Batch G #2

Mitchell from Ready Jet Go! Vs. Daeran Arendae from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

Reasons under the cut (spoilers for both)

(All sources from TV Tropes)

Mitchell:

Ready Jet Go!: Mitchell is antisocial and sometimes mean to others because he's hurting inside to his lack of social skills. What Mitchell doesn't realize is that he is loved. Cody is loyal to him, his parents love him, and Jet, Sean, Sydney, Mindy, and Lillian would love to be his friend if he could just lighten up. Shyness and poor social skills are very relatable to many viewers, especially in the target demographic of preschoolers. Eventually, Mitchell does soften up and becomes a worthy ally to the main characters by the end of the show.

Daeran Arendae:

Daeran Arendae from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is a passionate, attractive male with limited integrity, intelligent and perceptive, self-centered, cynical, and disrespectful towards rank and privilege despite holding them himself. His emotionally sensitive side is more subtle (since he tries to drive people away), but as you get to know him it's clear he feels strongly about personal freedom and has been much more deeply affected by his tragic life than he lets on.

[byneddiedingo]

Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916)

Cast: Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Fred Turner, Miriam Cooper, Walter Long, Margery Wilson, Eugene Pallette, Spottiswoode Aitken, Ruth Handforth, Allan Sears, Constance Talmadge, Elmer Clifton, Alfred Paget, Seena Owen, Tully Marshall, Howard Gaye, Lilian Langdon, Bessie Love, George Walsh. Screenplay: D.W. Griffith, Anita Loos. Cinematography: G.W. Bitzer. Production design: D.W. Griffith. Film editing: D.W. Griffith, James Smith, Rose Smith.

Audiences in 1916 were unready for D.W. Griffith's narrative innovations in Intolerance. Griffith told four stories in his film, each set in a different era, and constantly cut between each of them. We're used to that way of finding unity in multiple stories, but Griffith's attempt at it caused the hugely ambitious and expensive film to lose money. The constant cutting from story to story is often frustrating and annoying, but mainly because half of the stories are not well-told. The scenes from the life of Jesus are too familiar and too scattershot to sustain any narrative drive or carry the emotional weight they're designed for, and the part that deals with the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre is muddled by a lack of involvement with the characters. The Babylonian sequence and the "modern" story work better, the former because of its wild spectacle, centering on probably the most famous set ever built for a movie. Constance Talmadge overdoes the striding about that's meant to suggest the Mountain Girl is a liberated woman, the equal of any man, but she's fun to watch. The modern sequence is the only one with developed and interesting characters, even if some of the acting takes time to get used to. Mae Marsh jumps around goofily to suggest the Dear One's joie de vivre, but when she settles down and starts suffering, she becomes quite touching as the woman whose husband (Robert Harron) is wrongly imprisoned and who loses her baby to well-meaning but puritanical do-gooders. Miriam Cooper gives the film's best performance -- that is to say, the one that looks most natural to contemporary eyes -- as the Friendless One. Still, the star of the show is Griffith himself, demonstrating his mastery at building suspense with the intertwined conclusions of the French, Babylonian, and modern sequences. We can laugh at the final scene of the heavenly host bringing peace to a war-torn world, but it must have had a different effect on audiences in the midst of World War I.

[calypso-finale]

Hundred Two. Part 2

I dont care that he hit Wyge, but I care on where he did it because he did it where everyone was looking, he did it so public that’s everyone just saw. Of course he was going to be snitched on and now he’s at the police station, Wadz said we don’t snitch but that is beside the point, he did it and now he’s arrested for it. Wyge isn’t fucking worth the hassle, so I am mad with him about it all but now he’s arrested I just got to wait it out “you are both dumb, this is over nothing. Nobody cares who you want to dip your dick in” Wadz said, he is annoyed and so am I, this didn’t need to happen “he punched me, but I don’t want him locked up. I declined to comment, I don’t want that” side eyeing Wyge “well go to the station and change that up, get him out then” I said “I shouldn’t have said it, I know that. But you did my boy dirty, I don’t know why he even stuck on you like that” he turned it on me “I just love how this is all turned on me when this all issue is about you two, she is pregnant by you but this is a Rylee and Oakley show, belittle us to make you both seem good, I don’t give a fuck, don’t watch what we are doing check on her, talking about did my boy dirty, this is our issue not yours or hers ok. It’s funny how it’s turned onto us, how was it even his fault you was fucking in his place! You for one shouldn’t have said it, mad with him telling me but you was keeping him quiet by talking about me to him, I don’t care anymore Wyge, get him out and then do what you like” this all turned on us for their cheating “come on now, leave it” YB said to Wyge “let’s go to the station, we will bring him back” he said to me, I just nodded my head. I am so mad with it all, I am mad that he got dragged into it, that really wasn’t needed at all, and I feel bad. I get they felt their back up against the wall, but they did not need to do what they did and attack us “and he better be back, I think it’s so wrong what happened and how he got dragged into it, I was speaking to Halle and she dragged Wyge and then you both dragged Oakley into it, he told me yes but you both should have been real, now she is pregnant. Her and Colin have been together for years, like this is a mess” Wyge is quiet because what can he say, he was so wrong for that “I think you should go home after though” I added, Oakley won’t want him around anyways. Halle is still around too, I don’t think this has ended, she has so much more to say to me and I don’t mind it, we can go at it, it’s everyone’s else fault besides hers clearly, she is attacking me.

Lillian is so shocked, I know she doesn’t know what to say because we are all friends, including Colin. I am mad she did that to him for what “all this could have been avoided” Lillian broke the silence “Oakley should have stayed out of it” Halle added “no, hold on now. How you saying he should stay out of it when you openly fucking in his home? The lack of respect, I get you want to throw it to him because he told but you being disrespectful now” Lillian pointed, she didn’t want me to say anything “he should have come to me instead” Lillian kissed her teeth “he went to Wyge, now it isn’t his fault the man you fucking isn’t telling you. You need to stop throwing it to him, you use his home to fuck too and threw it all on him, you the one in shit baby. Colin is a good guy, what I say about being with Rylee jet hopping” I swallowed hard “she was born into that life so it doesn’t faze her,but you been on some shit, I told you that you been acting out badly, I haven’t been liking it. Now!” She spat “we need to stop; we are all girls. We all need to stop this beef; I want you to apologise to Rylee. You became defensive and hollered as soon as she asked. You defensive because you know it’s wrong Halle, wake up” she put her head down “I don’t want to hurt Colin though” now Halle is crying “he is a good guy but like, I feel we have run our course. I mean shit is so, normal. I just feel everything isn’t new with him, it’s always the same. We been together too long, and he’s got complacent, I just feel bad and I’m pregnant. And ever since we been together he couldn’t get me pregnant, he has a low sperm count” pressing my lips into a hard thin line “we been trying and it hasn’t happened, I want one. And he can’t give that, he knows that. He probably won’t be shocked” well I didn’t know that “so did this breakdown when you found that out?” I asked “well I just felt he was useless” I cringed “that is wrong, Halle. You been with him for years, there is ways you could have. You really are stupid, so now what? Happily ever after with this?” She shook her head “I am getting rid of it” she is on some shit “so what do you want? Like are you wanting Colin still? But you wanted a baby so what the fuck” Halle shrugged “you know what Halle, just please relax. You need to think this all through properly” looking down at my phone, Ti is also putting out an SOS, I wonder what has happened at home now.

Lilian and Halle walked off, Halle needs a moment and she can have that moment but she needs to apologise at some point really “YB” I answered my phone “we are at the station, they won’t let us see him but they have taken Wyge in about it so see what happens” I sighed “please bring him back with you, I just want him back” I want YB to bring him back to me “I will just thought I would let you know, speak soon” disconnecting the call and then Ti is calling straight away “hi sis” I answered “hey, don’t lie to me but are you engaged” I pulled a face “why would you think that now?” I am so confused “because the date was too amazing Rylee, how are you and him now? Keeping it all low-key” I sighed out “oh we are, we decided to keep to us and that I’m just the baby mother publicly, I mean I am just that still, but we are ok I guess. Just slow, but we had sex so like I don’t know, maybe I jumped. I can’t help it, like it’s just there, but we are well” Ti is laughing, she knows it’s nothing new with me “as long as you’re ok, I wanted to ask. I think Taylan could be playing away” letting out an oh “really!? In what sense? What happened?” Now what is this girl thinking “just like he’s been distant with me, I need you to investigate a girl for me. Just seems like she is in the same vicinity has him, like I just feel it. You know when you know, I just don’t want to get at him with no proof” I wasn’t expecting this “Ti, I have made a lot of mistakes. Big ones too, I really think you should be not me” I laughed “listen to me just go to him and ask him, you both been together too long now, it may be because you have been too busy for him also, make an effort. Go to him” look at me being mature “what if he is cheating? And I’m alone, I don’t want that too. Come with me” I groaned out “Ti, I just left New York” is she crazy “please, meet me in New York” why did I put myself forward for this, she doesn’t really ask for much from me “ok; but I have something I need to sort out, Oakley has been arrested. Once he’s out, but I don’t think he is, I told you that being too busy isn’t it, men suffer. Look how dad did, this project of yours” I have told her already, but I feel he isn’t “don’t tell dad, he has heart eyes for Oakley and hate with Taylan. I see his fake smiles. If dad could carry Oakley he would” I snorted laughing “I think he’s in love with him, I feel it’s because he sees himself in him, but Taylan I feel isn’t cheating. But send me details I’ll look either way” Ti is worrying for nothing; I’ll be there for no reason now.

Staring at Aziel as the ice cream fell onto him, he looked at me and then just cried “I told you to hold the cone properly didn’t I” I knew it would happen and look at that, he is crying because now he has no ice cream “I will get him” Grace rushed over “thank you” Halle is still here, and I think Oakley will be back soon “I will apologise to you, but Oakley I refuse because he should have come to me! He’s gossiping like a woman” I sighed out “Halle, I think you need to have a break. Think about what you want. But please don’t come at Oakley” I said “I’ll be good home” she walked off; I shook my head. I really wish she wouldn’t be this way; I feel she is just lashing out because she got caught “you better treat my fucking girl right!” She barked, I got up so quickly and rushed over “you back” I smiled “fuck the police” he laughed, he walked into me and hugged me “Lillian are you going too?” I asked, she nodded her head “I have too, she needs to be babysat” she has a point “Ignore that” Oakley said and picked me up “have a good time” Lillian smiled at me, I hate all this drama “thank you, I will call you girls” I waved at them as Oakley carried me back into the hotel “I think you need to leave” YB said to Halle, I am just going to stay out of it, until she is calm and has gotten over this little hate for Oakley, then we can talk “you back though” I said placing my hands over Oakley’ face “yeah, light work. Who cares, fuck them and fuck Wyge. I am done with that shit; I am too nice for all that because how the hell am I the bad guy? It’s just stupid” he has a point “where is Aziel?” he put me down “he dropped ice cream on himself and then he cried about it, so Grace is cleaning him” Oakley chuckled “I am not shocked at that little brat” pressing a kiss to his cheek.

Why is everyone wanting to talk to Oakley, I need to talk to him. I am just sat here while every man here is speaking to him “but bro where did that power come from? Wyge isn’t some little man now, you knocked his ass out, like he was gone bro. You was mad, mad. That was wild, I watched it on repeat and just seeing you one punch, he gone” Rimz said to him “I am going to bed” I announced “alright, I will come soon” Oakley said, I eyeballed him “what?” I scoffed “we playing football now though” rolling my eyes “I don’t want him to go bed, I just want to say something to him. Can I speak to you then you both can talk about a punch” I got up “ooohhhh, someone doesn’t like us talking about fun things” Wadz laughed, hitting his head as I walked off “hater” I don’t even want him to go bed, but I just wanted to speak to him “I was coming?” he said “no, just wanted to ask you something. Erm, are you ok to have Aziel for a few days, I have to go back to New York for my sister” he sat atop of the bar “why?” he questioned “for support on something, just a few days. I will be back, just I don’t want him to just have Grace all the time. He will love being on tour with you, I can leave Grace with you” he shook his head “it’s fine, I can take him. I don’t need Grace, are you going before or after my date?” I cooed out “you want me there” he shook his head laughing “you don’t make a difference” that was rude “then no” I walked off “I am joking” he caught my arm “better be there, go after then” I knew he wanted me there.

My girls were supposed to be here for the concert date but they went which sucks for me, I like to have that female energy around me because the way the boys get annoying for me, I let Grace go home because he will stay with his dad now “mommy” Aziel lifted his arms up “come here” picking him up “you’re a big boy now, especially for all of this” placing him on my hip “my dad” he held his pass at me “I know” walking to the side of the stage, he isn’t on yet but I like to scope out the place “family” Dave is here “oh man, ayo” he pinched Aziel cheek “I thought you would have been in London show?” I assumed so “I thought I would support him for a few” he hugged me “big guy now” he pointed, turning around “that is the new bodyguard, he is rather huge. See you later though” I said to him, he will be backstage after anyways. There is a lot of girls here and then I see Rimz recruiting these girls like it’s nothing, I side eyed him. They are screaming and all excited about this shit, like that ain’t cool at all “move!” the bodyguard said to the girls, walking around the barrier to go the back where I can stand at the platform there, I am going to remain silent but this collection of girls these boys are getting, that ain’t cool at all “don’t touch my son” I said pushing someone hand away and the way Oakley bodyguard grabbed the girl and threw her, I gasped “move out the fucking way!” he shouted, oh this man means business alright.

[queerlilchinchin]

Travis Confesses His Love (Newest Uni)

Word Count: 1,227 Genre: Romance//Roleplay Characters: Travis & Jasmine

Disclaimer: only Jasmine is my character; Travis is my friend's.

Click below to read the scene.

She beamed. "Friends and good views," she agreed, clinking her bottle with his, watching him as she took a sip from hers. Just as she took her first sip, she heard her phone go off and apologized as she glanced at it and pocketed it immediately without replying. "Sorry, that was my friend, Lawrence. He was asking how long you're going to be in town." She paused, glancing at him with her head tilted. "How long do I get to have you for?" She asked, not thinking about how she worded the question.

He had been taking a long drink when the message came in, and a flash of... something shot through him.

"Just a few days." He admitted, "I have to  go back to get fitted for a new leg. And then Monica asked me to watch Lillian."

"That's too bad," she said with a little smile. "It sucks being away from everyone." She took a bite of her sandwich, looking distant for a moment before her phone buzzed in her pocket again. She pulled it out to put it on silent fully and then ate her sandwich more.

"I bet." He agreed, "it's weird not seeing you and Claire together all the time, these days." He took another bite of his sandwich, glancing to her phone, "So is Lawrence... just a friend?"

"With benefits," she answered casually, sprawling her legs out to the side of the blanket and taking another deep drink from her bottle, completely oblivious to his reactions to the phone. It lit up with another message as she glanced at him, head tilted. "You have any new friends back home?" She asked curiously.

He hid his reaction by taking a long drink from his bottle, "Nah. Stick with my usual people. Less headaches." He said with a shrug.

She smiled. "Ain't that the truth," she agreed as her dog started barking and wrestling with Ghost, wagging her tail profusely. Jas' eyes slowly made their way away from Travis to watch the dogs and she called hers, telling her to get off of Ghost. When she obeyed, Jasmine glanced back at Travis.

"New friends can be scary, but it's healthy." She smiled and groaned, laying on her back and gazing up at the sky, taking another bite of her sandwich. "When are you gonna start dating again? It's been a while since you've had a girl in your life."

He snorted as Ghost trotted back over, plopping down with a yawn, "Lazy ass dog." He muttered, then glanced to Jas, "not for lack of trying in that area, but not many girls interested in dating an amputee veteran. At least, that don't already have someone." It wasn't entirely true. There were girls interested in him. He just... didn't want them, so he stuck to the occasional one night stand.

She hummed at that, and took another bite. "They're fools," she said, again tone casual. She waved her hand in the air and stared at the clouds above her head. "You're very dateable, so if they don't see it, they're idiots."

"Hm." He hummed, finishing his sandwich, then his beer, watching her. "None of them felt right anyhow. Doubt they'd stick around long, even if they didn't mind. Definitely wouldn’t have been there during the healing process."

She snorted, annoyed at that. "You'd have to be selfish to leave someone while they're going through what you've had to deal with," she said, shaking her head and taking the last bite of the sandwich, still completely oblivious. It had been so long, she figured they would always be friends, if something was going to happen, it would have by now. She figured it was healthier to accept that and just be the best friend she could be.

"One day you'll meet a girl that accepts you like I do, and she'll set your heart aflame. You deserve it." She smiled to herself and took a sip of her beer.

He was quiet for a moment, considering his options. Were these comments too subtle? Fucking hell, Ghost (the human) was probably laughing at him struggling. He shouldn't be listening to Monica's advice, obviously.

"I doubt there's another girl like you, Jas." He said, trying one last time, "you're... one of a kind."

Jas sat up at that, staring at him for a second, face flushed. "Well... of course... no one's me. I'm me," she said slowly, trying to gauge how he'd meant that. "But uh... just because I'm willing to be there for you, doesn't mean... no one else will..." she added, eyes narrowing, trying not to let herself hope. There was no way... after all this time.

Oh for fucks sake, Travis groaned mentally, "I like you, Jas." He said bluntly finally, "I am attracted to you, of course no other girl is going to measure up. You're a goddamn wonder."

Jas' mouth dropped at that, a small sound of surprise escaping her while her brain short circuited and she struggled to grasp what he just said. "I um..." she started stuttering when she finally was able to speak again. "I-I mean... of course you like me, friends should always like their friends," she stammered, still refusing to believe that after all this time, he was telling her [exactly what he was telling her].

"Jesus Christ." He muttered, moving some things so he could shift his weight onto his good knee and stretched forward, pressing their lips together in a kiss that hopefully left no room for questions.

Jasmine's eyes shot wide at the kiss and she froze, shocked. Her face turned bright red as she slowly seemed to come to realize what was happening; however, she was still too shocked to kiss back, brain frozen in place.

He pulled away after a moment, adjusting to sit comfortably once more and cleared his throat, "Maybe now with Lawrence you aren't... I was blind, all these years. I knew you liked me. I hadn't thought much of it until after my discharge. You were... so fucking good to me. I was miserable. But you..." he trailed off, suddenly wishing he had cigarettes. He wasn't a regular smoker, but every now and then... It was a good stress relief. A reminder of his times in the front lines with his boys.

When he pulled away, Jas stared at him, face beet red and struggling to get her brain back to full functioning. "I... I can't..." she stammered, struggling to get a full sentence formed in her shock. "Is... is this a prank? Did your sister put you up to this? Marcus?" She finally asked.

"I'm... I'm sorry, I just..." she began, biting her lip and staring at him one more second, leaning closer and letting her hand fall on his chest. "after all this time, I figured..." she tried again, though she couldn't form a full thought quite yet. She wanted this so long, it almost felt like a dream it was finally... he finally…

"Like I said, it took time. Separating Claire's friend and the girl who makes me really fucking happy." He sighed.

[darklingichor]

Secrets Typed in Blood; Murder Crossed Her Mind, by Stephen Spotswood

I love this series and will be pre ordering the next one!

Secrets Typed in Blood sees Pentecost and Parker hired by a writer who has a "fan" taking her murder mystery fiction and making them real. Holly Quick is a nerotic chain smoking writer submitting to various detective magazines under various pen names. She wants help stopping the crazy person who is bringing her imagination to life by killing people. But she also puts limits on our duo because under no circumstance does she want the police to know about her.

In matters of murder, Lillian Pentecost doesn't work against the police, so this is a challenge. Holly and Will do not get along at first with Will hating that the client is hobbling the investigation. It eventually becomes clear that Holly Quick has more than a few reasons to want to remain out of the public eye.

I liked this one a lot. I fell for one of the red herrings, sure it was the bad guy, but I was really happy with the resolution.

Murder Crossed Her Mind combines an old lady with an eidetic memory, her friend the defense attorney, the FBI, and old nazis.

When well known defense attorney comes to our detectives, it's because his friend, an 80 year old former secretary with a photographic memory and a hording problem is missing. This case quickly turns into something pretty damned big, with links to operations that happened during WWII. This one has prominent side plots with Will trying to solve a case of her own without Ms. Pentecost knowing about it, a weird rich guy with an obsession with murder memorabilia fucking with Lillian, Will also being a little bit lovesick and not really knowing what to do about it.

This one wasn't bad, it lacked focus to me, but that might have been because I was more interested in the side plots. I wanted Will to figure out her case, I wanted Lillian to help throw the book at the oily, rich murder freak, and also get more of her back story that was hinted at. Hell, I wanted to know more about the wound tight FBI agent that seems only able to speak to Will through gritted teeth. Yeah, I wanted to know the resolution to the main mystery. Where is the old lady? Who made her disappear, and why? But all of these other plots were so interesting, I found my mind wandering to them. Add to it this one ends on a cliff hanger that promises that the next one will delve into one of these plots!

These books are awesome, and they get more nuanced as they go. There is a good amount of commentary here, about the place of women in this period, about how the queer community had to navigate things. It's clear that Ms. Pentecost gets away with being a woman PI only because she's damn good. She makes it impossible to dismiss her based on gender because she has proven her worth. Unspoken, of course is the fact that, if she were a guy she wouldn't have to be be nearly as amazing to have the same amount of respect. Will gets away with a lot of stuff because she's under Lillian's wing, and also because of her circus background. The fact that she is bisexual is an open secret with those closest to her and a tightly guarded one with everyone else. But she is able to play a little with gender norms because of the popularity of stars like Marlene Dietrich. Though there are times people acknowledge her sexuality with a blush and a nod, by the end of Murder Crossed Her Mind, the danger is much more present.

I am really enjoying this series!

[tomorrowedblog]

Friday Releases for May 31

Friday is the busiest day of the week for new releases, so we've decided to collect them all in one place. Friday Releases for May 31 include The Dead Don’t Hurt, Robot Dreams, Selaco, and more.

The Dead Don’t Hurt

The Dead Don’t Hurt, the new movie from Viggo Mortensen, is out today.

The Dead Don’t Hurt is a story of star-crossed lovers on the western U.S. frontier in the 1860s. Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) is a fiercely independent woman who embarks on a relationship with Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen). After meeting Olsen in San Francisco, she agrees to travel with him to his home near the quiet town of Elk Flats, Nevada, where they start a life together. The outbreak of the civil war separates them when Olsen makes a fateful decision to fight for the Union. This leaves Vivienne to fend for herself in a place controlled by corrupt Mayor Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston) and his unscrupulous business partner, powerful rancher Alfred Jeffries (Garrett Dillahunt). Alfred’s violent, wayward son Weston (Solly McLeod) aggressively pursues Vivienne, who is determined to resist his unwanted advances. When Olsen returns from the war, he and Vivienne must confront and make peace with the person each has become.

Robot Dreams

Robot Dreams, the new movie from Pablo Berger, is out today.

Dog lives in Manhattan and he’s tired of being alone. One day he decides to build himself a robot, a companion. Their friendship blossoms, until they become inseparable, to the rhythm of 80’s NYC. One summer night, DOG, with great sadness, is forced to abandon ROBOT at the beach. Will they ever meet again?

Backspot

Backspot, the new movie from D.W. Waterson, is out today.

Riley (Devery Jacobs) is the formidable backspot on her mid-level cheerleading squad until professional coach Eileen McNamara (Evan Rachel Wood) gives her an opportunity to join the Thunderhawks, a high performance All Star team. Young, ambitious, and fiercely in love with her girlfriend Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo), Riley would be on top of the world if only she could get her crippling anxiety under control. Desperate to be heard and appreciated, two qualities her home life severely lacks, Riley will do anything to ingratiate herself to her new coach. Overwhelmed, obsessive and with a competition looming, this young, queer athlete must decipher her own voice from the women around her, and form a healthier relationship to the sport that she loves.

Ezra

Ezra, the new movie from Tony Goldwyn, is out today.

EZRA follows Max Bernal (Bobby Cannavale), a stand-up comedian living with his father (Robert De Niro), while struggling to co-parent his autistic son Ezra (introducing William Fitzgerald) with his ex-wife (Rose Byrne). When forced to confront difficult decisions about their son’s future, Max and Ezra embark on a cross-country road trip that has a transcendent impact on both their lives.

Handling The Undead

Handling The Undead, the new movie from Thea Hvistendahl, is out today.

On a hot summer day in Oslo, the dead mysteriously awaken, and three families are thrown into chaos when their deceased loved ones come back to them. Who are they, and what do they want? A family is faced with the mother’s reawakening before they have even mourned her death after a car accident; an elderly woman gets the love of her life back the same day she has buried her; a grandfather rescues his grandchild from the gravesite in a desperate attempt to get his daughter out of her depression. Handling the Undead is a drama with elements of horror about three families, a story about grief and loss, but also about hope and understanding of what we can’t comprehend or control.

In A Violent Nature

In A Violent Nature, the new movie from Chris Nash, is out today.

The enigmatic resurrection, rampage, and retribution of an undead monster in a remote wilderness unleashes an iconic new killer.

The Great Lillian Hall

The Great Lillian Hall, the new movie from Michael Cristofer, is out today.

The performance of a lifetime: Jessica Lange is The Great Lillian Hall.

What You Wish For

What You Wish For, the new movie from Nicholas Tomnay, is out today.

Ryan (Nick Stahl) is a talented, down-on-his-luck chef with crushing gambling problems. Circumstances being what they are, he leaves town in a hurry for the safe haven of an unnamed Latin American country where his friend Jack (Brian Groh), a more prestigious chef with his own unique troubles, welcomes him into his home. Ryan has no idea how Jack’s able to afford his extravagant lifestyle cooking for the elite in paradise; he doesn’t want to feel envious, yet he can’t help but want this life for himself as well. Soon, a grim twist of fate will give that to him. Ryan assumes his friend’s identity and soon discovers just what Jack’s been doing to maintain the lifestyle he so desperately craved.

Young Woman and the Sea

Young Woman and the Sea, the new movie from Joachim Rønning, is out today.

Daisy Ridley stars as the accomplished swimmer who was born to immigrant parents in New York City in 1905. Through the steadfast support of her older sister and supportive trainers, she overcame adversity and the animosity of a patriarchal society to rise through the ranks of the Olympic swimming team and complete the staggering achievement – a 21-mile trek from France to England.

Frog and Toad S2

The second season of Frog and Toad, the TV series from Rob Hoegee, is out today.

Frog is a frog. Toad is a toad. They have a lot in common… but they are also very different. Frog and Toad are best friends who know that the true secret to friendship is not only enjoying the things you have in common, but embracing the things that make you different. Since our differences are what makes us special, Frog and Toad celebrate what makes them unique!

The Outlaws S3

The third season of The Outlaws, the TV series from Elgin James and Stephen Merchant, is out today.

With crime boss The Dean, behind bars awaiting trial, the Outlaws are moving on with their lives—until one of their own returns with a deadly secret, hurling them back into mortal danger. As a murder manhunt closes in on the gang, can they prove their innocence before The Dean’s case collapses, and he comes looking for revenge?

Selaco

Selaco, the new game from Altered Orbit Studios, is out today.

Selaco is a brand new original shooter running on GZDoom, featuring thrilling action set pieces, destructibility, smart enemies and a fleshed out story taking place within an immersive game world.

[kamreadsandrecs]

It would be easy, if you were a person who read women often but spoke to them rarely, to imagine that contemporary women hate men. Scholars write books and essays about how tragic heterosexuality is; queer writers in and out of the academy pity straight girls, who, in turn, bemoan their fate on social media or in personal essays that go viral there.1 Some go so far as to suggest that no women genuinely enjoy heterosexual sex, but most confine themselves to the idea, or the performance of the idea, that heterosexual love is second-rate and doomed. Fiction isn’t immune. In recent literary novels like Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service or Katherine Lin’s You Can’t Stay Here Forever, good sex between men and women abounds, but a good man is hard to find. In a March New York Times piece on the revival of Norman Rush’s 1991 novel Mating, Marie Solis wrote that the book’s fans “have noted that a largely positive portrayal of love relationships in general, and heterosexual relationships in particular, is a rarity in fiction.” (Rush’s fans, evidently, are not reading romance.)

It would also be easy, if you had read about the writer Rachel Ingalls’s work but never opened one of her electrically strange short books, to see her as an early adopter of today’s men-are-trash-ism, which the writer Asa Seresin has referred to as “heteropessimism.”2 Ingalls is certainly a bard of what John Updike, describing her 1983 novel Mrs. Caliban, called “a deep female sadness that makes us stare,” yet the madcap spirit that suffuses her writing keeps it from being fatalistic. She gravitates toward the odd aside, the baffling phenomenon, the bloody ending. But she never betrays what’s happening next in her stories—foreshadowing is unthinkable. This unpredictability is her aesthetic and philosophical hallmark.

It is true that the single strongest current running through Ingalls’s fiction is the boundary-shattering energy of female desire, which, whether satisfied or denied, she depicts as both a life-giving force and a destroyer of worlds. And when Ingalls writes about denied desire, the culprit is generally a negligent husband. Marriage is not an appealing prospect in her fiction. Consider In the Act (1987), recently reissued in the UK as part of No Love Lost, a collection of eight of her novellas,and in the US as a slim standalone. It opens with a man named Edgar telling his wife, Helen, that she’s being unreasonable. “Of course I am. I’m a woman,” Helen shoots back. “You’ve already explained that to me.”

Edgar is a great explainer. Ingalls, who is masterful at skewering her characters, writes that he wins arguments by explaining his side in a tone that is “knowing, didactic, often sarcastic or hectoring. Whenever he used it outside the house, it made him disliked.” Whether he’s liked in the house is unclear. Helen mainly seems exasperated with her husband at the beginning of In the Act, but Ingalls does let the reader know that, when he so chooses, he’s good enough in bed that Helen is both “satisfied [and] surprised.” Mainly, though, Edgar uses sex to pacify Helen so she’ll stay out of his attic lab, on which he has placed a Bluebeard-esque prohibition. When she enters anyway, she discovers that he’s been building an animatronic sex doll.

Though Edgar’s doll is highly realistic, in an idealized, pornographic way—“Pubic hair and nipples everywhere you look,” Helen sputters, describing her—Edgar betrays his fundamental lack of imagination by dressing her in the flouncy, childish clothes an expensive doll would wear and naming her Dolly. Although Edgar is a good inventor, he is, like many Ingalls husbands, a fool. However, that doesn’t mean all her men are.

Ingalls’s female protagonists share an instinctive faith that, no matter how disappointing their men are, better ones are out there. For them, men are often a dream, a repository and symbol of hope that goes far beyond the sexual. Crucially, that hope is often met, though rarely in the way one would expect (or, in some cases, want). Patricia Lockwood writes in her foreword to No Love Lost that the word “man” “shines in her writing the way the word ‘shop’ does: a place to walk into, spin around till your skirt flares and at last get everything you want.” Lockwood’s description captures the 1950s tenor of Ingalls’s work, but the truth is, nobody in an Ingalls story is longing for stuff. For her women, getting everything you want is an emotional prospect. They long for pure and sustained male attention paid equally to their bodies and their minds. When they get it, it brings them back to life.

Ingalls herself lived, as far as anyone knows, a peaceful life: she was not one for interviews or press. She was born in Massachusetts in 1940; her father was a Harvard Sanskrit professor, and her mother, like so many of Ingalls’s protagonists, stayed home. After graduating from Radcliffe in 1964, Ingalls moved to England, where she wrote in relative obscurity until 1986, when the British Book Marketing Council surprised readers by naming her Mrs. Caliban one of the twenty best postwar novels by American writers.

Mrs. Caliban is very short—hardly long enough to qualify as a novel rather than a novella—and, like many of Ingalls’s works, feels distinctly American despite her expatriation: it is set in an unspecified suburb that feels Southern Californian, a place where cars, malls, and chitchat rule. At the book’s start, a lonely housewife named Dorothy is grieving the death of her son, Scotty, years ago, as well as a subsequent miscarriage; then her poor little dog, Bingo, was killed by a car, leaving Dorothy feeling that “everything near her died…. It was a wonder the grass on the front lawn didn’t turn around and sink back into the earth.” Her husband, Fred, a callous jerk at the best of times, withdraws from her grief. Dorothy’s misery is so flattening and absolute that she is, as she tells her friend Estelle, “too unhappy to get a divorce.” She is not, however, too morose to start a steamy affair with a giant humanoid frog.

Larry, Mrs. Caliban’s frog-man, turns up at Dorothy’s house in need of shelter. He’s on the run, having killed a pair of sadistic scientists who captured him in the Gulf of Mexico and performed experiments on him. Dorothy takes Larry in without a second thought. Before long, she’s teaching him how to sleep with a human woman, which seems uncomplicated, since his body is “exactly like [that of] a man—a well-built large man—except that he was a dark spotted green-brown in colour.” Larry and Dorothy fall in love, about which the novel leaves no room for doubt: this is a good thing, and readers should root for it. Yes, Larry has webbed hands and feet and his true home is under the ocean, but his species is far less important than his effect on Dorothy. Once she and Larry get together, she lights up almost instantly. She’s sneaking around the suburbs with him at night, sewing gigantic wigs for him by day to disguise his green head when he goes out. She’s having a great time, and it’s lucky for both her and Larry that Fred is too oblivious to notice.

Ingalls writes Mrs. Caliban with a breezy matter-of-factness that chimes with Dorothy’s desire for Fred to keep looking away from her new happiness, from their guest room where Larry is staying, from the sacks of avocados—Larry’s pricey favorite snack—that she’s suddenly buying. The novella’s tone all but shouts, “Nothing to see here!” Her writing does not invite readers to slow down. But her sentences reward anyone who has the willpower to pause. In one of the very few moments when Dorothy herself stops moving, she sits on the beach, waiting for Larry to surface from a night swim in the ocean:

But down there it would be dark now, and not the lovely lighted aquarium she imagined it to be during the daylight hours, eddying with schools of tiny, delicate animals floating and dancing slowly to their own serene currents and creating the look of a living painting. That was wrong, in any case. The ocean was different from an aquarium, which was an artificial environment.

In these three sentences, beauty and fantasy give way abruptly to Dorothy’s understanding that she’s fallen for a wild creature. She can keep Larry in her guest room, but not forever. No matter how much she enjoys floating on the current of love that runs between them, he’s going to go back to the ocean someday.

Love and wildness collide again in Binstead’s Safari (1983). Millie Binstead, ignored for years by her anthropologist spouse, Stan, comes roaring into her own after starting a hot safari-town romance with a hunter and lion expert named Henry “Simba” Lewis who promises to marry her once she gets rid of her husband. Stan, a stereotypical academic, is almost constitutionally incapable of noticing things, but he realizes rapidly that Millie has made contact with a new and powerful side of herself. Mainly what he sees is the sexual wildness Lewis has awakened in her, though he recognizes it only in the form of his own sudden desperation to sleep with her after years of disinterest. He gets even hornier once she asks for a divorce. “I don’t know what you think you’re proving,” he grouses after she turns him down one morning. “I’m having wet dreams now.” Millie, whose prince is finally coming, couldn’t care less.

Binstead’s Safari is Ingalls’s longest novel, and its length allows her to contrast Millie’s relationships with both Stan and Lewis with slower forms of love that rarely appear in her shorter works. Ian, the Binsteads’ main guide, has a steady, calm relationship with his wife, Pippa; his younger colleague Nicholas, meanwhile, is quietly frantic over his wife, Jill, whose recent nervous breakdown has left her unable to care for their children. Nicholas has to keep earning but plainly longs for her. Every letter she writes sends him into a spiral of misery that Millie, herself longing for Lewis, talks him through. In one of her arguments with Stan, she holds Nicholas up as an example, saying, “Everybody thinks Jill is in a mess—at least Nicholas is on her side. What I’m trying to say is that for some reason, it made you feel good every time I failed at something.”

Millie and Lewis don’t get as far as marriage, and it’s safe to assume that, if they did, it wouldn’t be a union like either Ian and Pippa’s or Nicholas and Jill’s. Depending on how you interpret the end of Binstead’s Safari, Lewis may be a lion-god in human guise (I think he is), and myths across cultures tell us that gods and women rarely have long relationships rooted in empathy. Ingalls herself presumably agrees: in Mrs. Caliban Dorothy knows that the fact that Larry’s a frog-man means they have no long-term future. But the long term isn’t absent from Ingalls’s writing. In the Act is very much about a woman who wants an Ian-and-Pippa-style marriage. What Helen wants—what she yearns for—is sustained love, sexual connection, and affection from a real human man. She wants them so badly she’d do just about anything.

In the Act seems initially to be about artificiality, not wildness. Helen is, after all, in marital competition with a sex robot—except that the competition, once discovered, lasts less than an afternoon. Within moments of finding Dolly in her husband’s attic lab, Helen has hauled her off to a train-station storage locker, from which she will soon be stolen by a lunk named Ron (more on him later).

Helen’s fury makes her both decisive and powerful. It also releases her own wildness, though not in quite the same way the lion-god and lizard-man relationships in Binstead’s Safari and Mrs. Caliban do. Dorothy and Millie need to reencounter pleasure in a way Helen does not. She’s fully in touch with her sexuality, though anger gives it a new edge. Ingalls takes advantage of the novella form’s brevity to convey the 0-to-100 intensity of Helen’s intertwined emotions without having to tease them out. She describes Helen’s initial confrontation with Edgar about Dolly in the language of a high-quality orgasm:

She thought she might begin to rise from the floor with the rush of excitement, the wonderful elation: dizzying, intoxicating, triumphant…. It was as if she’d been grabbed by something out of the sky, and pulled up; she was going higher and higher.

In that state, Helen tells Edgar he’s getting Dolly back only if he makes a “real stud” for her.

It’s deeply satisfying to watch Helen assert herself over Edgar, but Ingalls—here and throughout her work—does not rest on that satisfaction. She seems to delight in dipping into the minds of the awful husbands she writes. In the Act visits Edgar’s as he works night and day on sex robot #2, fuming all the while about Helen’s bad moods, her lackluster cooking, her tendency to “wear really dumpy clothes that he didn’t like.” It offends him to “be so hard at work, wasting the strength of his body and brain on the creation of a thing intended to give her pleasure.” But it offends him even more when, after a weekend with her doll, Helen informs him that she’s bored. In bed, the male robot, whom she names Automatico—Auto for short—is “without subtlety, charm, surprise, or even much variety. She didn’t believe that her husband had tried to shortchange her; he simply hadn’t had the ingenuity to program a better model.”

Helen asks Edgar to improve Auto, but after days back in the lab, the doll still fails to impress. “Perhaps no alterations would make any difference,” Ingalls writes. “Maybe [Helen] just wanted him to be real, even if he was boring. Edgar evidently felt the other way…. The element of fantasy stimulated him.” It speaks to Ingalls’s attitudes about both gender and imagination that the former doesn’t enter the equation here. Helen doesn’t argue to herself that men need fantasy, women reality. It would hardly be consistent with Ingalls’s broader body of work if she did. Dorothy, for example, falls for Larry not just because she needs attention but because she needs the mental escape offered by letting herself love a being others wouldn’t even believe in. More importantly, though, Ingalls is not a generalizer—which is perhaps how she manages, despite the terribleness of the husbands she writes about, to remain so committed to male possibility.

In the Act’s symbol of that possibility is Ron, a musclebound petty criminal. He’s the one who steals Dolly from the train-station locker where Helen stashes her, hoping for something to sell. Instead, he gets his true love. Ron yearns for Dolly to be real. He sees her robot nature as a tragic, irremediable flaw, which he nevertheless tries to overcome. He buys her casual clothes and L.L.Bean duck boots (a rare moment of proper-noun Americana in Ingalls’s work) to replace the absurdly frilly outfit Edgar chose. He takes her on the bus, to his sister’s house, and to hang out with his gym buddies, but none of these outings succeeds in making her seem more human. Only Ron, in the privacy of his imagination, can do that.

When Helen comes into contact with Ron, she recognizes him not as a kindred spirit, but as the best sexual option on offer, bringing hope to the despair into which Auto’s failure to satisfy has plunged her. Ron is not the person Helen wants to be with, but she still instantly clocks him as “more the kind of thing I had in mind…to wind up and go to bed with.” She’s objectifying him here, of course—it’s not exactly respectful to call someone “the kind of thing I had in mind”—but what she’s attracted to is his rough humanity. Looking at him reminds her of what she wants, and what she believes she can have: sex with a human man who projects physical power, and who wants a woman rather than a doll.

In the Act doesn’t quite have a happy ending. Helen leaves the story with much more strength and self-knowledge than she has at the start, but when she realizes that she would prefer a boring real man to an inexhaustible sex robot (who, post modification, can also teach her Italian and gourmet cooking), it’s at the same moment that she accepts that her husband finds reality a turn-off. Up to a point, having a happy long-term relationship, whether it’s a marriage or not, requires wanting a real person—which, in turn, requires accepting some boredom. It is impossible to be intimate with someone over time without coming to understand them, to know their habits, to be able to predict some of what they will do and say next. Edgar and Helen both know this, but Edgar doesn’t know anything else. Helen, in contrast, recognizes the other side of the equation: with intimacy, and being known, comes the pleasure of receiving someone’s deep attention, and of paying deep attention to someone else. Martin Buber called this the I–Thou relationship; most of us just call it love.

In I See a Long Journey, one of the other novellas in No Love Lost, Ingalls writes a variation of the love story Helen dreams of. Its heroine, Flora, marries a wealthy man named James when she’s very young and grows paranoid as a result of her new economic status. James does not understand this at first, but by the time the story’s main action starts, he’s figured Flora’s anxiety out enough to both take her on vacation as a distraction and to bring along his driver, Michael, as an unofficial bodyguard, knowing the other man’s presence will enable Flora to relax. Flora’s faith in Michael’s protective abilities facilitates intimacy, physical and emotional, between Flora and James, while also ripening into its own kind of love.

Early in the vacation, before things go sideways—this is, after all, a Rachel Ingalls story—Flora and James sit at breakfast, with Michael

seated alone at a table for two several yards beyond them. Flora had them both in view, Michael and James. She felt her face beginning to smile. At that moment she couldn’t imagine herself returning from the trip.

Such contentment is nowhere in In the Act, but Helen knows she wants it. In Binstead’s Safari and Mrs. Caliban, Millie and Dorothy get flickers of it from Simba and Larry. It would be going too far to say that Flora’s off-kilter marital satisfaction is the goal toward which Ingalls’s heroines move, but it is certainly one they believe in. Her women are optimists. Romantics, too.

It may well be the case that Ingalls’s work is gaining in popularity both because female romantics are so rare in contemporary literary fiction and because her romantics are so odd. After years of two-steps-forward-one-step-back feminist progress in the United States, epitomized most recently by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it can be tough to swallow unquestioned female longing for men in fiction, at least if you’re the sort of woman who questions your own desire. Ingalls puts interrogated longing on the page in ways both supernatural and mundane. Her style makes the former seem no stranger than the latter. Ingalls reminds her readers that desire is weird, surprising, uncontrollable, likely to end badly—and worth pursuing nonetheless.

[project1939]

Day 28- Film: Belles on Their Toes 

Release date: May 2nd, 1952.

Studio: 20th Century Fox 

Genre: Comedy 

Director: Henry Levin 

Producer: Samuel G. Engel 

Actors: Myrna Loy, Jeanne Crain, Debra Paget, Jeffrey Hunter, Edward Arnold 

Plot Summary: This is sequel to 1950’s Cheaper by the Dozen, about an eccentric family in the 1920s with 12 children. Now that the family patriarch has died, Mrs. Gilbreth must support the entire family herself, but not many people will consider hiring a woman with a PhD in engineering. 

My Rating (out of five stars): *** 

I was really looking forward to seeing this today. Not because I’ve seen the film this is a sequel to, because I haven’t, but because I love Myrna Loy so much. (She was one half of the coolest married couple in Hollywood film history, as Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies. And that’s just one thing!) 

Sadly, this movie didn’t really thrill me that much. It was basically just a bit of family fluff. I’m sure if I had seen the first film, I would have found it more enjoyable. I didn’t dislike it, but I just don’t think it stands up very well on its own. 

The Good: 

Myrna Loy’s character. As the mom of the family, trying to support 12 kids on her own, she was not a “typical” Hollywood mom. Lillian Gilbreth was a talented engineer with a PhD! That would be remarkable in 1952, but the real character was living in the 1920s! She had to put up with serious sexism in the movie, but I’m sure it was way worse in real life. 

The cute random little bits of singing throughout the movie. It’s really not a musical, but there were several times where something akin to an informal musical number happened. 

There was definitely a sweetness to it, but it never really went off the deep end into sticky sentimentality. 

Doctor Bob Grayson, the romance for Jeanne Crain. He wasn’t the greatest actor in the world, but he was exquisite blue-eyed eye candy! 

The Bad: 

The plot was barely a plot. It was more like a series of vignettes with the throughline of- “Will the family find a way to stay together given their financial woes?” 

With 12 children, none of them were really developed much as characters. I only learned the names Frank, Anne, Janey, and Ernestine. The other eight? No idea. 

Please let me say it again- I adore Myrna Loy, but it kind of felt like she just phoned this one in. The usual sparkle I find in her wasn’t often there. Granted, the script didn’t give her a ton to work with. 

Why did they do such an awful job with Myrna Loy’s makeup? I like that they didn’t glam her up into Mildred Pierce, but would it have been so hard to give her some color? The utter lack of makeup was not only unflattering, but it was distracting because her face was just a monolithic beige. 

[kammartinez]

It would be easy, if you were a person who read women often but spoke to them rarely, to imagine that contemporary women hate men. Scholars write books and essays about how tragic heterosexuality is; queer writers in and out of the academy pity straight girls, who, in turn, bemoan their fate on social media or in personal essays that go viral there.1 Some go so far as to suggest that no women genuinely enjoy heterosexual sex, but most confine themselves to the idea, or the performance of the idea, that heterosexual love is second-rate and doomed. Fiction isn’t immune. In recent literary novels like Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service or Katherine Lin’s You Can’t Stay Here Forever, good sex between men and women abounds, but a good man is hard to find. In a March New York Times piece on the revival of Norman Rush’s 1991 novel Mating, Marie Solis wrote that the book’s fans “have noted that a largely positive portrayal of love relationships in general, and heterosexual relationships in particular, is a rarity in fiction.” (Rush’s fans, evidently, are not reading romance.)

It would also be easy, if you had read about the writer Rachel Ingalls’s work but never opened one of her electrically strange short books, to see her as an early adopter of today’s men-are-trash-ism, which the writer Asa Seresin has referred to as “heteropessimism.”2 Ingalls is certainly a bard of what John Updike, describing her 1983 novel Mrs. Caliban, called “a deep female sadness that makes us stare,” yet the madcap spirit that suffuses her writing keeps it from being fatalistic. She gravitates toward the odd aside, the baffling phenomenon, the bloody ending. But she never betrays what’s happening next in her stories—foreshadowing is unthinkable. This unpredictability is her aesthetic and philosophical hallmark.

It is true that the single strongest current running through Ingalls’s fiction is the boundary-shattering energy of female desire, which, whether satisfied or denied, she depicts as both a life-giving force and a destroyer of worlds. And when Ingalls writes about denied desire, the culprit is generally a negligent husband. Marriage is not an appealing prospect in her fiction. Consider In the Act (1987), recently reissued in the UK as part of No Love Lost, a collection of eight of her novellas,and in the US as a slim standalone. It opens with a man named Edgar telling his wife, Helen, that she’s being unreasonable. “Of course I am. I’m a woman,” Helen shoots back. “You’ve already explained that to me.”

Edgar is a great explainer. Ingalls, who is masterful at skewering her characters, writes that he wins arguments by explaining his side in a tone that is “knowing, didactic, often sarcastic or hectoring. Whenever he used it outside the house, it made him disliked.” Whether he’s liked in the house is unclear. Helen mainly seems exasperated with her husband at the beginning of In the Act, but Ingalls does let the reader know that, when he so chooses, he’s good enough in bed that Helen is both “satisfied [and] surprised.” Mainly, though, Edgar uses sex to pacify Helen so she’ll stay out of his attic lab, on which he has placed a Bluebeard-esque prohibition. When she enters anyway, she discovers that he’s been building an animatronic sex doll.

Though Edgar’s doll is highly realistic, in an idealized, pornographic way—“Pubic hair and nipples everywhere you look,” Helen sputters, describing her—Edgar betrays his fundamental lack of imagination by dressing her in the flouncy, childish clothes an expensive doll would wear and naming her Dolly. Although Edgar is a good inventor, he is, like many Ingalls husbands, a fool. However, that doesn’t mean all her men are.

Ingalls’s female protagonists share an instinctive faith that, no matter how disappointing their men are, better ones are out there. For them, men are often a dream, a repository and symbol of hope that goes far beyond the sexual. Crucially, that hope is often met, though rarely in the way one would expect (or, in some cases, want). Patricia Lockwood writes in her foreword to No Love Lost that the word “man” “shines in her writing the way the word ‘shop’ does: a place to walk into, spin around till your skirt flares and at last get everything you want.” Lockwood’s description captures the 1950s tenor of Ingalls’s work, but the truth is, nobody in an Ingalls story is longing for stuff. For her women, getting everything you want is an emotional prospect. They long for pure and sustained male attention paid equally to their bodies and their minds. When they get it, it brings them back to life.

Ingalls herself lived, as far as anyone knows, a peaceful life: she was not one for interviews or press. She was born in Massachusetts in 1940; her father was a Harvard Sanskrit professor, and her mother, like so many of Ingalls’s protagonists, stayed home. After graduating from Radcliffe in 1964, Ingalls moved to England, where she wrote in relative obscurity until 1986, when the British Book Marketing Council surprised readers by naming her Mrs. Caliban one of the twenty best postwar novels by American writers.

Mrs. Caliban is very short—hardly long enough to qualify as a novel rather than a novella—and, like many of Ingalls’s works, feels distinctly American despite her expatriation: it is set in an unspecified suburb that feels Southern Californian, a place where cars, malls, and chitchat rule. At the book’s start, a lonely housewife named Dorothy is grieving the death of her son, Scotty, years ago, as well as a subsequent miscarriage; then her poor little dog, Bingo, was killed by a car, leaving Dorothy feeling that “everything near her died…. It was a wonder the grass on the front lawn didn’t turn around and sink back into the earth.” Her husband, Fred, a callous jerk at the best of times, withdraws from her grief. Dorothy’s misery is so flattening and absolute that she is, as she tells her friend Estelle, “too unhappy to get a divorce.” She is not, however, too morose to start a steamy affair with a giant humanoid frog.

Larry, Mrs. Caliban’s frog-man, turns up at Dorothy’s house in need of shelter. He’s on the run, having killed a pair of sadistic scientists who captured him in the Gulf of Mexico and performed experiments on him. Dorothy takes Larry in without a second thought. Before long, she’s teaching him how to sleep with a human woman, which seems uncomplicated, since his body is “exactly like [that of] a man—a well-built large man—except that he was a dark spotted green-brown in colour.” Larry and Dorothy fall in love, about which the novel leaves no room for doubt: this is a good thing, and readers should root for it. Yes, Larry has webbed hands and feet and his true home is under the ocean, but his species is far less important than his effect on Dorothy. Once she and Larry get together, she lights up almost instantly. She’s sneaking around the suburbs with him at night, sewing gigantic wigs for him by day to disguise his green head when he goes out. She’s having a great time, and it’s lucky for both her and Larry that Fred is too oblivious to notice.

Ingalls writes Mrs. Caliban with a breezy matter-of-factness that chimes with Dorothy’s desire for Fred to keep looking away from her new happiness, from their guest room where Larry is staying, from the sacks of avocados—Larry’s pricey favorite snack—that she’s suddenly buying. The novella’s tone all but shouts, “Nothing to see here!” Her writing does not invite readers to slow down. But her sentences reward anyone who has the willpower to pause. In one of the very few moments when Dorothy herself stops moving, she sits on the beach, waiting for Larry to surface from a night swim in the ocean:

But down there it would be dark now, and not the lovely lighted aquarium she imagined it to be during the daylight hours, eddying with schools of tiny, delicate animals floating and dancing slowly to their own serene currents and creating the look of a living painting. That was wrong, in any case. The ocean was different from an aquarium, which was an artificial environment.

In these three sentences, beauty and fantasy give way abruptly to Dorothy’s understanding that she’s fallen for a wild creature. She can keep Larry in her guest room, but not forever. No matter how much she enjoys floating on the current of love that runs between them, he’s going to go back to the ocean someday.

Love and wildness collide again in Binstead’s Safari (1983). Millie Binstead, ignored for years by her anthropologist spouse, Stan, comes roaring into her own after starting a hot safari-town romance with a hunter and lion expert named Henry “Simba” Lewis who promises to marry her once she gets rid of her husband. Stan, a stereotypical academic, is almost constitutionally incapable of noticing things, but he realizes rapidly that Millie has made contact with a new and powerful side of herself. Mainly what he sees is the sexual wildness Lewis has awakened in her, though he recognizes it only in the form of his own sudden desperation to sleep with her after years of disinterest. He gets even hornier once she asks for a divorce. “I don’t know what you think you’re proving,” he grouses after she turns him down one morning. “I’m having wet dreams now.” Millie, whose prince is finally coming, couldn’t care less.

Binstead’s Safari is Ingalls’s longest novel, and its length allows her to contrast Millie’s relationships with both Stan and Lewis with slower forms of love that rarely appear in her shorter works. Ian, the Binsteads’ main guide, has a steady, calm relationship with his wife, Pippa; his younger colleague Nicholas, meanwhile, is quietly frantic over his wife, Jill, whose recent nervous breakdown has left her unable to care for their children. Nicholas has to keep earning but plainly longs for her. Every letter she writes sends him into a spiral of misery that Millie, herself longing for Lewis, talks him through. In one of her arguments with Stan, she holds Nicholas up as an example, saying, “Everybody thinks Jill is in a mess—at least Nicholas is on her side. What I’m trying to say is that for some reason, it made you feel good every time I failed at something.”

Millie and Lewis don’t get as far as marriage, and it’s safe to assume that, if they did, it wouldn’t be a union like either Ian and Pippa’s or Nicholas and Jill’s. Depending on how you interpret the end of Binstead’s Safari, Lewis may be a lion-god in human guise (I think he is), and myths across cultures tell us that gods and women rarely have long relationships rooted in empathy. Ingalls herself presumably agrees: in Mrs. Caliban Dorothy knows that the fact that Larry’s a frog-man means they have no long-term future. But the long term isn’t absent from Ingalls’s writing. In the Act is very much about a woman who wants an Ian-and-Pippa-style marriage. What Helen wants—what she yearns for—is sustained love, sexual connection, and affection from a real human man. She wants them so badly she’d do just about anything.

In the Act seems initially to be about artificiality, not wildness. Helen is, after all, in marital competition with a sex robot—except that the competition, once discovered, lasts less than an afternoon. Within moments of finding Dolly in her husband’s attic lab, Helen has hauled her off to a train-station storage locker, from which she will soon be stolen by a lunk named Ron (more on him later).

Helen’s fury makes her both decisive and powerful. It also releases her own wildness, though not in quite the same way the lion-god and lizard-man relationships in Binstead’s Safari and Mrs. Caliban do. Dorothy and Millie need to reencounter pleasure in a way Helen does not. She’s fully in touch with her sexuality, though anger gives it a new edge. Ingalls takes advantage of the novella form’s brevity to convey the 0-to-100 intensity of Helen’s intertwined emotions without having to tease them out. She describes Helen’s initial confrontation with Edgar about Dolly in the language of a high-quality orgasm:

She thought she might begin to rise from the floor with the rush of excitement, the wonderful elation: dizzying, intoxicating, triumphant…. It was as if she’d been grabbed by something out of the sky, and pulled up; she was going higher and higher.

In that state, Helen tells Edgar he’s getting Dolly back only if he makes a “real stud” for her.

It’s deeply satisfying to watch Helen assert herself over Edgar, but Ingalls—here and throughout her work—does not rest on that satisfaction. She seems to delight in dipping into the minds of the awful husbands she writes. In the Act visits Edgar’s as he works night and day on sex robot #2, fuming all the while about Helen’s bad moods, her lackluster cooking, her tendency to “wear really dumpy clothes that he didn’t like.” It offends him to “be so hard at work, wasting the strength of his body and brain on the creation of a thing intended to give her pleasure.” But it offends him even more when, after a weekend with her doll, Helen informs him that she’s bored. In bed, the male robot, whom she names Automatico—Auto for short—is “without subtlety, charm, surprise, or even much variety. She didn’t believe that her husband had tried to shortchange her; he simply hadn’t had the ingenuity to program a better model.”

Helen asks Edgar to improve Auto, but after days back in the lab, the doll still fails to impress. “Perhaps no alterations would make any difference,” Ingalls writes. “Maybe [Helen] just wanted him to be real, even if he was boring. Edgar evidently felt the other way…. The element of fantasy stimulated him.” It speaks to Ingalls’s attitudes about both gender and imagination that the former doesn’t enter the equation here. Helen doesn’t argue to herself that men need fantasy, women reality. It would hardly be consistent with Ingalls’s broader body of work if she did. Dorothy, for example, falls for Larry not just because she needs attention but because she needs the mental escape offered by letting herself love a being others wouldn’t even believe in. More importantly, though, Ingalls is not a generalizer—which is perhaps how she manages, despite the terribleness of the husbands she writes about, to remain so committed to male possibility.

In the Act’s symbol of that possibility is Ron, a musclebound petty criminal. He’s the one who steals Dolly from the train-station locker where Helen stashes her, hoping for something to sell. Instead, he gets his true love. Ron yearns for Dolly to be real. He sees her robot nature as a tragic, irremediable flaw, which he nevertheless tries to overcome. He buys her casual clothes and L.L.Bean duck boots (a rare moment of proper-noun Americana in Ingalls’s work) to replace the absurdly frilly outfit Edgar chose. He takes her on the bus, to his sister’s house, and to hang out with his gym buddies, but none of these outings succeeds in making her seem more human. Only Ron, in the privacy of his imagination, can do that.

When Helen comes into contact with Ron, she recognizes him not as a kindred spirit, but as the best sexual option on offer, bringing hope to the despair into which Auto’s failure to satisfy has plunged her. Ron is not the person Helen wants to be with, but she still instantly clocks him as “more the kind of thing I had in mind…to wind up and go to bed with.” She’s objectifying him here, of course—it’s not exactly respectful to call someone “the kind of thing I had in mind”—but what she’s attracted to is his rough humanity. Looking at him reminds her of what she wants, and what she believes she can have: sex with a human man who projects physical power, and who wants a woman rather than a doll.

In the Act doesn’t quite have a happy ending. Helen leaves the story with much more strength and self-knowledge than she has at the start, but when she realizes that she would prefer a boring real man to an inexhaustible sex robot (who, post modification, can also teach her Italian and gourmet cooking), it’s at the same moment that she accepts that her husband finds reality a turn-off. Up to a point, having a happy long-term relationship, whether it’s a marriage or not, requires wanting a real person—which, in turn, requires accepting some boredom. It is impossible to be intimate with someone over time without coming to understand them, to know their habits, to be able to predict some of what they will do and say next. Edgar and Helen both know this, but Edgar doesn’t know anything else. Helen, in contrast, recognizes the other side of the equation: with intimacy, and being known, comes the pleasure of receiving someone’s deep attention, and of paying deep attention to someone else. Martin Buber called this the I–Thou relationship; most of us just call it love.

In I See a Long Journey, one of the other novellas in No Love Lost, Ingalls writes a variation of the love story Helen dreams of. Its heroine, Flora, marries a wealthy man named James when she’s very young and grows paranoid as a result of her new economic status. James does not understand this at first, but by the time the story’s main action starts, he’s figured Flora’s anxiety out enough to both take her on vacation as a distraction and to bring along his driver, Michael, as an unofficial bodyguard, knowing the other man’s presence will enable Flora to relax. Flora’s faith in Michael’s protective abilities facilitates intimacy, physical and emotional, between Flora and James, while also ripening into its own kind of love.

Early in the vacation, before things go sideways—this is, after all, a Rachel Ingalls story—Flora and James sit at breakfast, with Michael

seated alone at a table for two several yards beyond them. Flora had them both in view, Michael and James. She felt her face beginning to smile. At that moment she couldn’t imagine herself returning from the trip.

Such contentment is nowhere in In the Act, but Helen knows she wants it. In Binstead’s Safari and Mrs. Caliban, Millie and Dorothy get flickers of it from Simba and Larry. It would be going too far to say that Flora’s off-kilter marital satisfaction is the goal toward which Ingalls’s heroines move, but it is certainly one they believe in. Her women are optimists. Romantics, too.

It may well be the case that Ingalls’s work is gaining in popularity both because female romantics are so rare in contemporary literary fiction and because her romantics are so odd. After years of two-steps-forward-one-step-back feminist progress in the United States, epitomized most recently by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it can be tough to swallow unquestioned female longing for men in fiction, at least if you’re the sort of woman who questions your own desire. Ingalls puts interrogated longing on the page in ways both supernatural and mundane. Her style makes the former seem no stranger than the latter. Ingalls reminds her readers that desire is weird, surprising, uncontrollable, likely to end badly—and worth pursuing nonetheless.