#living vicariously through the men who get to be involved in politics

[honeywithrose]

listen i love a brutus genderbend as much as anyone else but y’all are sleeping on genderbent cassius

[onesemesterfilmstudentta]

Film #11: Cruel Story of Youth

I was speechless after the movie purely because of the ending but I DID have coherent thoughts on its themes I swear.

The movie's themes seem to be the expression of romance and freedom (mostly sexual but also financial and physical freedom).

Touching on the expression of romance first, the movie deals heavily with the idea of the past and present customs for dating/marrying. Makoto's older sister, Yuki, had to deal with the incredibly strict customs of the past that prevented her from freely choosing her lover and instead having to settle for an older man who probably never loved her but was supposed to be reliable. The scene where she speaks to Akimoto after Makoto's abortion speaks to a desire to return to the past where the two were passionately in love before she had to choose that older man. We see echoes of Oharu and Okin's story in her life. On the other hand, Makoto is supposedly more free to spend her nights outside the household and choose her lover for life because there are more opportunities for her to buy her own freedom. Her family's survival does not rely on her virginity or partner but that does not mean they support her any more than the parents of the past. She is still just as much under their thumb because she needs their support and under the thumb of the men in her life that see her as a sexual object for their pleasure or income. From the father who appears but is absent in Makoto's life to the gangsters who seek her out as a prostitute just to line their pockets, even her own boyfriend uses Makoto as an outlet for his anger and her body as a source of income. Makoto exists as a tool or she does not exist at all. The two sisters are very similar and this includes how limited their freedoms are too.

As an aside, it was interesting how much Yuri (I think that is the older sister's name? Google gives different results) insulted Makoto's efforts to live and love freely but in the end wanted just as much to see her succeed and live vicariously through her. She even began wanting to live a passionate romance with Akimoto and to live either as his partner or his assistant in the hospital. Like Yukie sought to appease both her romantic feelings and political aspirations in a marriage with Noge, Yuki was looing for the same reprieve. Well, both failed. Her hopes died with Akimoto's arrest but it also died with Makoto and Kiyoshi.

Speaking of Kiyoshi, doesn't he share the same name with Kiyoshi in Late Chrysanthemums? Tamae had warned her son not to get involved with a mistress and maybe we see why when complications arise from Cruel's Kiyoshi being involved with multiple women. Kiyoshi probably did honestly love Makoto but all his past and present relationships made staying with her difficult. He was prostituting himself as much as he made Makoto prostitute herself. Anyways, to end on the expression of romance, it seems like Kiyoshi was unable to express his sincere feelings without being physical in some way. Having sex with her that first time, slapping her face any time he is angry (and even when he is angry because she cheated on him and he felt betrayed), even just touching her face while she is asleep are the most common ways we see him show "affection" for her. This is contrasted to Horio's own sympathetic and sincere relationship with Makoto where he asks about her day and her feeling or softly takes her hand (before releasing it). This is also contrasted with Makoto's insistent on asking whether he truly likes her (because his actions never show it) and her own soft ways of touching his body in return. Kiyoshi's expressions of romance (and other men really) are so easily confused with his expressions of anger, confusion, and fear. Sex is supposed to be done with wholesome and sincere feelings but almost every sexual encounter is violent and nonconsensual in that violence.

The message I take away is that confusing the past and present customs, women and men do not know how to properly express their sincere emotions and receive others' emotions without violence being involved.

This also applies to sexual freedom as Makoto almost never has full grasp over her own sexual power. Again, Kiyoshi and the gangsters seek to sell her off, Yuri tells her off for getting a boyfriend without permission and the family promptly abandon her, and the university interrogates her for mere rumors. The only time she might take control of her sexual freedom is the night spent with Horio but even then Horio said that she had cried that night. She had a grasp but she was not empowered in that moment.

The university curbing her sexual freedom suggests that she might be expelled if she does not stop her romance with Kiyoshi. For that reason, her educational freedom is being limited and her physical freedom with it. Education is necessary in order to gain a stable income. I wonder if this is why Makoto and Kiyoshi were both forced to prostitute themselves since they are both university students. To be honest, it seemed strange that they did not try (or we the audience did not get to see) earning a part-time job legitimately. I might be lacking context

Anyways, before this gets too long, the couple were limited by their lack of income and were forced to sacrifice or endanger their other freedoms as a result. The world never taught them how to properly express their emotions or find a legitimate way to make an income and punished them for it. In other words. the world subjected them to horror and then killed them.

[laryna6]

The central conflict of the Jeeves and Wooster stories is ‘Bertie Wooster vs. Sexism’ or ‘how sexism against women fucks over men too.’

Bertie Wooster describes himself as a useless, dumb, upper class fop, but he’s actually got incredible musical talent. Is he allowed to pursue it, though? No.

Because the only success allowed to women in that era is dynastic success/living through their husbands. His Aunt Agatha, the de facto head of the family, is trying to force him to enter politics as per his upper class status, despite Bertie’s awareness that he’s not smart and shouldn’t be making those decisions. Does she care? No. She tells him that who cares what he wants, and that her ambition is to marry him to a smart woman who will control, mold, and manipulate him into prime minister, and his dumb won’t matter bc his wife will rule from the shadows.

And Bertie goes ‘yeah, when smart ambitious women see my dumb self, they instantly go ‘marriage material’ even though clearly they don’t actually want my dumb bc they immediately start forcing me to read ‘improving books’ etc. There’s always a woman who wants to Make Something of him, while completely ignoring who Bertie is and the genius that’s actually there.

These women don’t want Bertie, they want political power. Why don’t they just go into politics themselves instead of puppeting/vicariously living through a man? Sexism!

The woman in Bertie’s life who is actually willing to let HIM decide what he wants to do with his life is Aunt Dahlia. Because she runs a business - a magazine. She’s allowed to actually DO something, have control over something herself, and so her husband instead of being henpecked like Agatha’s is allowed to just focus on his collection and be happy.

However, as a WOMAN, and an upper class one, society prohibits Aunt Dahlia’s business from actually making money. It would bring shame on her husband ‘can’t he support her himself?’ so he would be forced to force her to shut her business down if she turned a profit.

So whenever she talks about her magazine, it’s always ‘oh we got this brilliant author and yet SOMEHOW we keep losing so much money, have I told you I’m definitely not turning a profit, it would be weird if a WOMAN was good at business, btw did I tell you about this exclusive article series?’

So Bertie’s involvement with Dahlia is plots about how to keep her magazine solvent despite sexism requiring it to constantly be in the red. Jeeves goes ‘do you want me to get you out of helping your aunt?’ and Bertie is ‘are you stupid? She’s got tons of energy and ambition to control and organize! She’s a born leader! If she doesn’t have a business then she’ll have nothing to DO with all that but plot familial success like society dictates women should, and I don’t need two Aunt Agathas!’

BERTIE, because he is a man, is constantly forced to fight off people wanting to force him into positions of power he makes very clear he is totally unfit for. Yet the series is full of brilliant women, born leaders, who sexism doesn’t allow to go into politics themselves or pursue their own ambitions or get a life outside of a man.

The only woman who has managed to get an actual life is Dahlia, and it’s a constant struggle for her to keep it because society DOES NOT PERMIT women of power, she can only achieve her dream via loophole abuse and constant struggle... while her husband just putters around with his collection of antique silver bc he’s a man and they don’t have to work as hard as women do to be rich and successful.

[whatifxwereyou]

The Oncoming Storm Part 27: Untangling

Liu Kang x Reader and Kung Lao x Reader (gonna do both, two paths!)

Relaxing(?) with Chen and taking some time for yourself... and things are uh... interesting, to say the least.

The choice is like 3-4 posts away- and I just wanted to give you a heads up that it won't be an overt "i choose so and so" choice. It will be a... seemingly monotonous choice that will lead you, dear reader, down a path to end up with one or the other! Do you guys want me to label which choice goes where? I mean it'll be obvious after the next parts are up which one is which SO I guess it doesn't matter?? Just figured I'd ask! Smooches.

Part 26 Part 28 Chapter Index

You left Kung Lao to rest and decided afterward to relax in the hot springs. Your body was sore, even more so after having gone toe to toe with a second monster. At least the second monster hadn’t tossed you around like a ragdoll the way the first one had. Still, you were sore. You made your way to the springs, rinsed off in the changing room, found a towel, and then walked inside. It was peaceful and there were only a handful of other people there.

You explored the pools a bit further back in hopes of finding some peace and quiet. Thankfully, your time in the springs in Huangshan hadn’t ruined this for you. They were so drastically different.

Peace and quiet were exactly what you’d been granted for a time.

Resting your head back against the natural stone formations, you let your sore body bask in the warmth of the water. It was enough to clear your thoughts of the word ‘monster’ being so frequent in your vocabulary and both the men that you’d left with fevers in their respective rooms.

It was no wonder that you drifted to sleep so quickly. Your sleep wasn’t restful though. You kept seeing flashes of the nightmare you’d had before you’d crawled into Liu’s bed that night. Then you saw the man with the horns, his white eyes staring into yours, and you felt the pain of his hand in your chest.

There was a splash next to you and you sat upright quickly, fists clenched at the ready for a fight. Chen was looking at you in surprise. You sighed with relief and relaxed. Chen and a few of the other women from the infirmary, as well as two of the cooks that you’d met a handful of times were getting into the water alongside you. You had tried to get to know the people you interacted with every day if not just a little bit. They worked hard and you wanted them to feel appreciated.

“It’s good to see you back, Y/N!” One of the younger girls chimed in and then went about chatting to the woman next to her animatedly. You greeted them politely and then rested your head back against the stone. Chen sat close to you. So much for peace. Even so, you smiled. Chen pestered you sure, but she was also a delight to talk to. Your smile faded quickly as you remembered the last conversation you had.

“How are you feeling?” Chen asked discreetly. You sat upright and covered your bruised neck as Chen made to poke at it. It was still sore. “I’m guessing that’s not from anything fun, huh?”

“Definitely not something fun.” You sunk down so that your neck was in the water, to hide, and Chen giggled. “I’m fine, by the way. Just tired. I haven’t been sleeping well the past few nights.” You hadn’t, you supposed. There had been nightmares and then you and Kung Lao had gotten about four hours of sleep before you’d had to roll out of bed to go and meet Raiden. The women stared at you with rapt attention as if expecting an exciting reason for you to have not been sleeping.

“Because…?” Chen urged you onward hopefully and you splashed at them.

“I am so not in the mood, Chen.”

Chen and the other women laughed. “It’s all in good fun, Y/N. I know that things were crazy for you in Japan. I’ve heard you had quite the adventure.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah! One of Raiden’s scribes overheard Kung Lao recounting your adventure with that tar thing.”

“Are you all gossips?”

“Look, it can be really boring here sometimes while those with the marks are off going on adventures and protecting the world. We’re here to protect you so I feel like in return we get to live vicariously through you. Is that so much to ask?” Chen had her chest puffed out proudly and you bowed your head and gestured toward her friends.

“My apologies, gossip away.”

“I was promised more information after you’d ditched Liu Kang. Define complicated please.”

The eyes of the other monks were on you, as curious but less forward than Chen. You bet it was so they could all update their little betting pool appropriately and you narrowed your eyes at them. “I will no gossip about myself. Especially not in front of everyone. No offense, guys.”

“Boo! You’re no fun, Y/N! There must be something steamy you’re not sharing with me. I swear that I interrupted something that morning with Liu Kang. I’ve thought about it on repeat since you left.” Chen poked your shoulder and the other women agreed with her, so you held your face in your hands to hide your embarrassment. Your skin was officially hotter than the spring water. They were whispering about what Chen had seen and it was much more dramatic than what had actually happened.

If they only knew that Chen hadn’t been completely wrong with her assumptions. Liu had asked you to stay in bed with him. Ugh, you wished that you had.

“Oh, stop picking on Y/N, guys. We have plenty to gossip about and she deserves to relax. She’s all bruised up, look at her.” One of the younger girls came to your defense and you were relieved.

They seemed eager to talk about whatever other gossip they’d picked up in the temple. You tuned most of it out as much as you could. You’d always struggled with gossip. Most of your life you’d been gossiped about, and it had never been in a good way. You didn’t like making other people feel like they were being talked about behind their back. You supposed it made you bottle everything inside which wasn’t exactly healthy either. No one was perfect. The kind of gossip that these monks were involved in didn’t bother you as much. It seemed harmless. No one’s feelings were getting hurt.

You listened to the hum of conversation. Apparently, one of the groups of monks who had gone into the closest town to pick up goods had gotten themselves into a bit of trouble with one of the women there. The story was ridiculous, and you wondered if this was how they talked about you when you weren’t around. It probably sounded just as absurd. It was funny. At least the gossip seemed distant from the truth. Unless this was the truth and, in that case, you felt terribly sorry for the woman and the monk who had gotten into trouble with her husband.

They were terrible monks.

The group drifted in the water until they were out of earshot, and you were grateful for the peace. You almost managed to fall asleep again but instead you felt Chen lifting your arm out of the water to check your pulse. You peeked one eye open and found Chen smiling at you.

“Still feeling okay? You’re pretty pale.”

“You can relax, Chen. You don’t always have to be on call. I’m fine. Really.”

“I work extra hard to make up for all the gossip.”

“I’m really okay. Just tired. I’m probably going to go back to my room and sleep soon. Less risk of drowning if I pass out there.” Only marginally less, you thought. You’d almost drowned yourself in ink the other night.

“Aww, not going to regale me with any stories of danger and romance?”

“I don’t know if I’m emotionally up to discussing the danger and romance, as you call it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s… a lot. It’s escalated in complication. I’m mixed up right now. I think my discussion needs to be more… mental.” You realized, suddenly, that Chen had weaseled you into talking about it.

“Oh? Going to make a decision soon?”

“You’re such a sneak. You know that, right?”

“Do go on.” Chen batted her eyelashes happily, resting her elbow against the stone.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s time to make a choice. I’ve got to… sort it out. I have to talk to them about it or just… make an honest move. It scared me for a while, but it needs to happen. No matter what happens next? I have to stop kissing both of them but there’s so much conflict in my heart…”

“Oh, hold on, excuse me? You’ve kissed them both? Y/N! You have been holding out on me!”

“Could you please lower your voice.” You sat up higher in alarm. “You’re completely missing the point that I was making.” You scooted further back from the other monks and Chen followed you. Your face was on fire again and the water was too hot.

“I need details immediately.” Chen’s eyes were filled with glee. “Which one of them kisses better? Are they good kisses? When did this happen? Has this happened more than once? Was there tongue? Did you do more than kissing?”

“Oh, for the love of all that you believe in, please stop!” You laughed and held your hands out in a panic to try and silence Chen. “I’m begging you to lower your voice.”

Chen cackled with laughter and pointed at your red face in amusement. You waited for Chen to get herself together. It took an awkwardly long amount of time. Chen cleared her throat and then straightened her posture as if she had to prepare herself to have a conversation. “Okay. Sorry. Yes, continue. That was delightful. What is it that has you so mixed up?” Besides the fact that they were both gorgeous? Besides the fact that their kisses and their touches literally took your breath away? That they both filled you with a deep and desperate longing that made you want to rip your insides out and offer them as sacrifice?

Liu Kang was the proverbial spark. You’d never once been drawn to another human being the way that you were drawn to him. It was like your bodies called to one another and as silly as you felt for thinking it, it was also true. Kung Lao, however, was your childhood love, but all grown up and while he was a complete mess, he was also romantic as hell. It wasn’t the same attraction you shared with Liu, but your attraction was different and just as wonderful.

“You’re just going to make fun of me.”

“You were quiet for a long time there. Getting lost in memories of kisses?”

“See?”

“Of course I’m going to make fun of you, Y/N, but I will also try to be a good friend.”

“You’re also going to just tell everyone else about it.”

“…true.”

“Ugh.”

“You could still tell me. I promise I’ll twist it enough that no one will quite believe me.”

“I’m… I just…” You sighed in frustration, mussed your hair, and then decided to just go for it. It would make Chen happy to get something of substance from you and maybe putting it out into the universe would offer you some reflection. Chen was hanging on your every word. “I have this crazy attraction to Liu. Plus, he’s so sweet and funny and smart. He holds me in such reverence and it’s going to sound so crazy cheesy but he’s made of fire in just about every way and… ugh he calls me beautiful and…” You whined and leaned your head back against the stone and felt your insides tighten up just at the thought. This hadn’t helped.

Chen was fanning herself.

“Hard to beat that. When was this steamy, fiery kiss…?”

“You are fishing for more information than I’m willing to give you.”

“You can’t blame me for trying. So, what’s the hang up with Lao then? I’ve seen you with Liu. You two are natural together.”

“Like I said, it’s complicated. I… ugh, I am bad at this. I hate this, Chen. I hate talking about it.”

“I know. It’s the worst. I wish you were drunk. You’d go on about it.”

“I kind of wish I was drunk too.”

“Raiden said no liquor for now.” Chen was disappointed. “Focus. Lao. Tell me.”

“We… it’s complicated, okay? We butt heads but he’s so damn nostalgic and surprisingly sweet when he’s not… trying to be. It’s hard to explain why I’m hung up on it because it’s… emotional? When he kissed me? The world disappeared. It makes me think that maybe if we hadn’t lost touch, if he hadn’t disappeared, then we probably would have been together from the beginning. It’s not any less magnetic, just different. Lao and I are very alike. Liu balances me out.” You sighed and briefly forgot that you were talking to the biggest gossip that you had ever met. “I care deeply for them both. I don’t want to hurt either of them, but I can’t take the emotional turmoil of bouncing back and forth between them anymore. And it’s not fair to any of us.”

“Wow, this is actually eating you up inside. I thought you were just being ridiculous to avoid telling me dirty details.” Chen seemed impressed and you turned your attention to her in surprise. Of course, it was eating you up inside! How could it not? “You’re really not going to just get them super drunk and then get spit roasted by both and have a wild night none of you will remember?”

You choked on your own spit and then coughed, leaning out of the water and onto the stone to escape the heat of the springs. Chen patted you on the back but laughed. “I have to look at and talk to them every day, Chen!”

“Have fun picturing that for the rest of your life.”

“Oh, I hate you right now.” You laughed, but the mental image was there, and Chen was right. It would live in your brain rent free for the rest of your life.

“You’ll be fine, Y/N. Just follow your heart and please get laid. Then get drunk and give me all those dirty details.”

“I’m so glad that I’m asking you for advice.” You managed to clear your windpipe, finally. “That was sarcasm. Sorry, choked up.” You shook the mental image away again. Your morning with Liu Kang hadn’t helped that mental image at all. “I’ll figure it out. I’m at a point where I’m ready to figure it out. But I think you’ve teased me enough. I’m going upstairs to get some rest because I am hotter than the springs now.”

“Good. Rest. You’re still pale when you’re not as red as I made you.”

“I plan too.”

“I hope you run into one of them and you can’t shake the mental image!” Chen called to you as you started out of the water, and you nearly slipped and fell back in.

“Goodbye, Chen.” You waved back to her and then bowed to the other monks before returning to the changing room, getting back into your clothes, and heading back to your room. Thankfully, you didn’t run into Liu Kang or Kung Lao. You hoped that they were still resting.

You threw yourself into bed and laid face down for a while, contemplating your options. It was kind of nice to think of how it might wind up. What were you complaining about? There were two incredibly attractive men chasing after your heart. Even so, it filled your stomach with anxiety and dread. You didn’t want to hurt either of them. You wished there were a reality where you could have them both but knew that would end messy too.

After changing into a nightshirt, you went to bed. You really were exhausted but your sleep wasn’t restful. You tossed and turned throughout the night, plagued with nightmares. When you opened your eyes, there was a silhouette of a horned man standing at the side of your bed. You struggled to move, to blink, but you were paralyzed by fear. Breathing was difficult and he leaned over you and reached for your throat. His face was shadow with the exception of a wicked white smile. You felt like he held you down, pinned to your bed, pushing you further into it.

Your body ached.

You were seeing spots, unable to breathe. No matter how you tried, you couldn’t fight it. It was like sleep paralysis. You’d read about it, but it also felt real. He was closer to you, inches from your face, and his clawed hand rested over your cheek.

Then suddenly you were free of the grip that held you prisoner, that had trapped you in bed. You were alone and gasped for struggled breaths. Panicked, you crawled out of bed, collapsing onto the floor and bursting into sobs. Ink spilled from your hands, staining the floor. You struggled to stop shaking and push yourself up, catching your breath.

Then you froze in horror.

Strands of ink were spread across your room from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, creating an elaborate and dangerous web.

What the actual hell?

What had you done?

How had you done it?

Reaching out with a shaky hand, you brushed your fingers over the thick web of ink and pulled your hand back immediately. It had been solid and sharp, slicing the tip of your finger.

You trembled with fear and leaned as far against the bed as you could press your body. You tried to get up, to will yourself to move, but instead it felt like your lungs were being squeezed by invisible hands. Your fingers were curling up and you pulled them close to your chest. Closing your eyes, you tried to take deep breaths to calm down but you could barely exhale.

You’d filled your room with ink in your sleep.

That had to have been a vision, but it hadn’t been the future or the past. It had been of that thing in your room with you, hovering over you. What, was this some Catholic-style possession? Maybe finding the artifacts had been a mistake.

You laid on the floor, stretching out into child’s pose to try and help yourself calm down, to breathe. This moment mattered. Not the nightmare. Not the vision. Not the fear.

Just the moment.

You would be okay.

After an agonizingly long time, you felt your heart finally slowing down. Your fingers uncurled and you were able to sit upright. Your head was spinning but you could at least think without the screaming adrenaline of panic.

You couldn’t get out of your room with the ink like this.

The strands were too closely knit together. Pushing your hair back, still shaking, you held it away from your face and tried to think. You’d trapped yourself in the room. But you’d made the ink so maybe you could unmake it too. Holding your palm close to the nearest strand of ink, you closed your eyes and focused. It wouldn’t move and your whole body was shaking.

Your brain was buzzing with panic still. You tried again and were thrown back against the bed, but the ink was gone in a blink. Your hands were aching like you’d been punched right in the palms. They were dark and bruised. But you’d done it. The ink was gone.

Wrapping your arms around your knees, you pressed yourself against the bed.

You had to get a hold of yourself.

What the fuck had just happened?

There was a knock at your door, and you whined, buried your face against your knees, and then took a deep breath. You felt like you could vomit but you managed to get yourself up, vomit free, and made your way to the door. Shaky on your feet, you recognized the monk on the other side. He kept guard outside of Raiden’s chambers. He bowed to you politely as the monks often did.

“Lord Raiden requests your presence.”

“I-I’ll be there in a few… few minutes. I just… I need to get dressed.” You tried not to sound like you had been hysterically sobbing only a few minutes ago. The monk didn’t seem to notice. He bowed and walked away to deliver your message. You leaned against the door after he’d left, taking shaky breaths. You had to calm down.

Liu Kang would have had you meditate so you decided to do just that. You sat on your prayer mat and closed your eyes. Deep breaths. Grounding exercises. You could hear his comforting voice in your head, guiding you along.

In truth, you just wanted to be held.

[elledrake]

Tell Me More: Part 1 (Sam Drake x Female Reader)

A/N: Okay, so please go easy on me. This is my first attempt at writing fanfiction. I love to write and I love Sam, so I thought, why not? Ideally, this is just the beginning, but we’ll see how it goes.

Summary: After years of weekly phone calls, you are finally reunited with your longtime friend and fellow journalist, Elena Fisher. You’ve always been deeply fascinated by the stories she’s told you about her life with her husband, Nathan Drake. For the first time, you are introduced to her family, finally meeting those you’ve heard so much about.

Warnings: None!

Word Count: 1,888

Part 2 | Part 3

You couldn’t believe how close you were to the ocean. You’d always pictured what it would be like, standing in front of this vast body of water, your feet sinking in the stand with each step you took. But no photograph, no image from a movie, and certainly no daydream could replicate the feeling in your chest as you stood, at what felt like, the end of the earth. Or, perhaps, the beginning.

You shook your head, taking one last look at the never-ending stretch of beach behind you and hurried up the steps. With your suitcase in hand, you stood in front of the most delightful beach house that rivaled those you saw on those island home hunting shows. You were here to meet your longtime friend and fellow journalist, Elena Fisher. It had been a while since you’d last seen her in person, though you two had kept in touch over the past few years with weekly phone calls. She was by far, the most fascinating friend you had, though there wasn’t much competition. Her stories always left you slack-jawed, gasping, and begging for every last detail, clinging to the phone for hours. Most, if not all, of her stories involved her now husband, Nathan Drake. While she would describe how each adventure unfolded, you could hear the smile in her voice whenever she mentioned Nate. You could practically see the roll of her eyes as she’d get to the part where, in her words, “Nate would make the worst decisions possible”. Occasionally, you would hear Nate yell across the room and into the phone, either apologizing or trying to provide additional input, more for his sake than your own. You loved catching up with Elena, as your life couldn’t hold a candle to hers. You lived vicariously through her words, hoping one day you’d find yourself in the midst of an epic adventure.

You knew the chances of that were unlikely. You lived alone in the city, most days the stacks of books that overwhelmed your apartment were the only things keeping you company. You got along just fine, you told yourself, unwittingly resigned to this lifestyle. Though you were a journalist, you wanted to veer away from the trivial pieces your editor required of you; local politics, land development, annual spelling bees and the like. Elena’s mentions of pirates and long-lost treasure, ignited something in you. If you were never meant to explore a sinking ship firsthand, you at least had the ability to write about it; make your own stories, experience them through your imagination.

Your heart beat quickly, as you lightly knocked on the door. Not a second later, Elena opened the door, Nate trailing behind her.

“Y/N!” Elena squealed delightedly. You smiled and leaned in to hug her, so happy to finally see your friend in the flesh. “Come on in!”

Nate held out his hand to you, a huge smile on his face. “It’s great to finally meet you. We’re so happy you could finally make it out here.”

“How have you been?” Elena offered you a drink as you dropped your bag next to the door.

“Oh, I’ve been doing fine. Mostly working, hoping to get started on a new project soon.” You smiled tightly, taking a sip of your drink, embarrassed to admit exactly how inspired you were by Elena’s life. “Thank you so much for inviting me out here, this place is absolutely amazing.” You followed Elena and Nate into the house. Your eyes wandered from one furniture piece to the next, layers of bright orange and green fabrics, antique tables inlayed with elaborate patterns, photos of the two of them in foreign cities, and dozens of artifacts displayed on every available surface. Your mind was reeling, a thousand questions popping into your mind about the history each piece held.

“Thank you. It’s taken a while, but this place is definitely home.” Elena smiled, turning to look at her husband.

“And what’s home without family?” Nate beamed back at his wife, then turned to face you. “Actually, my brother and our friend Sully are coming for the weekend. They called last minute, so it’s gonna be a full house. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Oh, not at all.” You smiled; a prickle of excitement ran through you. You knew of Sully from Elena’s stories, as well as Nate’s brother, Sam. You were looking forward to putting faces to the names you’ve heard so much about. It felt strange, like you were being reunited with old friends, though you had never met them before.

For the next few hours you sat with Nate and Elena as they told you about their most recent projects, occasionally reflecting on their adventures from the past. You told them about life in the city and the last few pieces you’ve written, as well as the string of eventful dates you’d been on in the past few months. You cringed while telling the story of the man who had brought you home, only to end up meeting his rambunctious, yet very illegal, pet chimpanzee. You explained how you learned to change its diaper that night and how you had to throw your dress away afterwards.

As the sun started to set, you heard a car pull up to the house, the engine rumbling loudly. A moment later, the door flew open. Easy laugher suddenly filled the room, as Sam and Sully emerged, finishing up a conversation. They both looked a bit worn and a tad sweaty, but the grins on both their faces made it clear that they were nothing but content and relieved to be home.

“Well, look who it is.” Nate walked over to the two men, clapping a hand on Sully’s back, nodding at his brother at the same time. “Glad to see you both in one piece.”

“Yeah, well barely, no thanks to this guy.” Sully shook his head, looking at Sam out of the corner of his eye. Sam chuckled and lifted his hands innocently in response. Elena stood up, waving for you to follow her.

“Well, hello gentlemen. You two showed up just in time, we happen to have a guest over for the weekend.” Elena gave them both a quick hug, then turned to you. “Boys, this is Y/N. We’ve known each other for ages and are finally having a chance to properly catch up.” You approached the group, finally taking in the scene before you.

“Victor Sullivan. You can call me Sully, if you’d like. Any friend of Elena’s is certainly a friend of mine.” He smiled warmly, as he shook your hand. “How are you my dear?”

You tried to focus on older gentleman in front of you, but your eyes drifted immediately towards Sam. Elena had shown you a picture of the boys when they were young, both smiling adorably in silly hats. But you weren’t quite prepared for the image standing in front of you. You wanted to laugh at yourself, for the only three words that echoed into your mind were tall, dark, and handsome. Sam’s eyes easily met yours, a smirk playing on his lips. His dark hair was pushed back, showing off soft curls at the nape of his neck. You could see the markings of a tattoo but were too far away to make out what it was. Through his thin brown t-shirt, you could see how defined his chest was, how much strength his arms held, and how his large his hands were as they rested on his hips. Before your eyes could wander any lower, you realized Sully had asked you a question and was waiting for a response. You perked your head up at the realization.

“I-I’m doing well, thank you,” you stammered. “It, uh, it’s great to finally meet you. Elena’s told me so much about you.” You smiled, a nervous energy forming in the pit of your stomach.

“Uh-oh, do I want to know what she said ‘bout me?” Sam spoke for the first time, meeting your eyes again, and extending his hand. You could hear Elena chuckle, while you tried to come up with a response. You shook his hand quickly, trying not to focus on, once again, how massive his hands were.

“Hi.” You could only manage one word and felt like a complete idiot for it. Sam smiled, clearly amused at your skittishness. Thankfully, Nate then offered drinks to Sam and Sully, ushering everyone back into the living room.

The rest of the evening was spent listening to Sam talk about the job he and Sully had just returned from. Elena explained a bit more about you and your friendship, while Sully often asked you questions about your life. Occasionally, Sam would ask you a question and you’d do your best to keep your voice even and answer in complete sentences. Maybe he didn’t think you were a freak after all. At least, not completely.

When it got close to midnight, Elena showed you to the guest room and helped you get settled in. She hugged you once again, expressing how happy she was that you were here. It was clear she spent the majority of her time surrounded by men, so it must have been a breath of fresh air to have another woman around.

As you settled into bed, your mind went over the most recent story Elena had told you, the one about Libertalia. You knew how those events changed everything for them. You knew that it was decades in the making, starting when Nate and Sam were young. You knew about Sam and what he had gone through to get to this point. Even today, you were able to hear parts of the story retold by Nate himself. You knew the story of the Drake brothers so well, that meeting them today felt surreal. Like characters from a story come to life, inviting you into their home.

You felt your mind slowly give way to sleep, but just before sleep could overcome you, your mind went back to Sam one last time. You weren’t expecting to have such a strong reaction to him. You were honest enough with yourself to admit that you found him very attractive, so much so that you could feel yourself staring at him throughout the night, indulging in a look whenever you thought he was distracted.

You knew your reaction wasn’t all physical. Because of your knowledge about his life, you felt like you knew him or at least a part of him. Your heart ached for him, for his past, for all the time he lost. Your heart also warmed at the love he’d given his brother throughout the years, at the determination he had for honoring his mother’s work, for overcoming so much.

Even knowing about his past, he was still a stranger to you. You felt silly for having such strong emotions towards a man you met only a few hours ago. Besides the familiarity you had gained through knowing his sister-in-law, did you two even have anything in common? You highly doubted so. You exhaled, hugging yourself beneath the covers, your mind finally relaxing. As you felt your body grow heavy for the last time, one final image unwittingly flittered through your mind: those man’s damn hands.

[doubleca5t]

What Your Favorite Fire Emblem Ship Says About You

Big thanks to DivineNoodles for writing this one for me

Transcription below the cut

Sylvix (Sylvain/Felix): You used to be really into Voltron 

Chrolivia (Chrom/Olivia): You believe that with one lap dance you can get a man to marry you five minutes after you’ve met him.

Chrobin (M) (Chrom/M!Robin): Your ideal relationship dynamic is verified himbo/certified morosexual.

Leoniles (Leo/Niles): Your ideal relationship dynamic is sitcom boss/sitcom employee.

Casphardt (Caspar/Linhardt): Your ideal relationship dynamic is that meme that’s like 'where do you work out?' 'The library'

Robcina (Robin/Lucina): Your love for Lucina outweighs your commitment to the Bro Code.

Tharbin (Tharja/Robin): You just want a big tiddie goth gf OR you want to date Yuno Gasai.

Claudeleth (M) (Claude/M!Byleth): You spend your afternoons posted up outside the IntSys office panhandling for canon gay men

Chrobin (F) (Chrom/F!Robin): Your ideal date involves getting carried off into the sunset by a buff man who drinks nothing but respect women juice

Lissabelle (Lissa/Maribelle): Your ideal date is a sapphic tea party

Lucisev (Lucina/Severa): Your ideal date involves living vicariously through your children

Kamuzero (M!Corrin/Niles): Your ideal date involves cock and ball torture

Xanlow (Xander/Laslow): You just want good things for Laslow. And really, who wouldn’t?

Ryoumarx (Ryoma/Xander): You like older brothers so much that one day you were like “hey, you know what’s better than one onii-san? two onii-sans!”

Azurrin (Azura/Corrin): You either completely ignored the Revelation route or overfocused on it to the point of obsession. 

Corriander (F!Corrin/Xander): You’re so enamored by the fact that Xander has it all - charms, looks, strength, dignity - that you can overlook the whole… uh… [what are you DOING stepBRO?]

Cormilla (Corrin/Camilla): You loved Tharja, but then you were like “Hey, you know what would make this better, if she was my sister”

Dimileth (F) (Dimitri/F-Byleth): You're always a slut for angsty boys who have trouble talking about their trauma... probably because you think you can "fix" them

Dimileth (M) (Dimitri/M-Byleth): You’re always a slut for angsty boys who have trouble talking about their trauma… probably because you want them to rail you

Claudeleth (F) (Claude/F!Byleth): You’re always a slut for MEN GETTING PEGGED

Chromia (Chrom/Sumia): You have gotten into at least three heated internet arguments over whether this ship is canon or not

Edeleth (Edelgard/F!Byleth): You have gotten into at least five heated internet arguments with people who think Edelgard is a fascist

Ferdibert (Ferdinand/Hubert): You have written at least five Victorian Vampire AUs, at least one of which was for a series starring Tom Hiddleston.

Leokumi (Leo/Takumi): Your new favorite meme is that exchange that’s like “Go fuck yourself.” “Fuck me yourself you coward”

Dimilix (Dimitri/Felix): You believe there’s nothing hotter than thinly veiled hostility and resentment.

Claumitri (Claude/Dimitri): You love angsty boys so much that one day you were like “hey, you know what’s better than one angsty boy? Two angsty boys.”

Hildanne (Hilda/Marianne): You thought the only thing that could have made Beauty and the Beast better is if they were lesbians

Dimidue (Dimitri/Dedue): You just want good things for Dedue, also, you probably have like a 24 page thesis on the racial politics of Three Houses

[gynandromorph]

don’t fucking reblog this but okay so first of all i’m not sure how comfortable i am comparing the objectification of butch women by gay/bi/queer femmes to the oppression of women by straight men. and by not sure how comfortable i am i mean i am very deeply uncomfortable with that sentiment in every way.

second of all i’ve mentioned that i have been objectified by quite a few butches. i think this might just partially be my inclination towards other butches but it’s also because like you don’t have to be a part of a specific group to objectify a marginalized group, although you’re more likely to if you wield power over them. this is most obvious in the fact that women of any sexuality objectify themselves and start to identify with the objectification all the time. butches have ideas of what their ideal butch is and other butches can help them reach that goal by being vessels to live through vicariously OR to be the stepping stone/trophy that proves their own masculinity. i’m not disagreeing in ANY WAY that femmes do objectify butches but idk, i don’t think this is a thing specific to them as much as lateral aggression in the community. most of my experiences with like Butchphobia TM from femmes has actually leaned more closely to transphobia and involved revulsion or respectability politics more often than objectification.

third, and this is the most important part, omg why would a femme need to fucking ask that question lmfao. you understand how to not objectify women who aren’t butch so like what isn’t translating here ma’am? where are we losing you? there’s literally no succinct method or list you will be able to follow to make sure you don’t objectify a butch. objectification (sexualization + dehumanization + exploitation) is a lifelong wound that continues to bleed. everyone is wounded in their own way from their own experiences. some butches will feel thrilled by things other butches find objectifying. by trying to make it into like something you’re never going to have to confront, you’re never going to have to just risk your dignity a bit to find out on an individual basis for these vulnerable lesbians, that is literally a form of objectification honestly. it’s still treating butches like they aren’t people with unique complex feelings individual to them. still like, lists like that are useful. i just don’t get what was going on in that anon’s head like as if she is not attracted to exclusively individuals who are objectified at large butch or not

[tepkunset]

The Disrespectful Death of Rahne Sinclair

[NOTE: I am stepping outside of my comfort zone in writing this, because it’s something that I feel needs to be said. Please feel free to like/reblog/add your own comments however you wish, but I am not looking to personally partake in any more discussion in this.]

Characters die all the time in comics. They die, sometimes they come back, sometimes they then die again. There are a lot of good stories involving the death of a character. So when I say that I am angry about Rahne Sinclair getting killed off, most of that anger is about how they did it. I am angry about the lack of respect given to her and a serious societal problem.

Uncanny X-Men Vol 5 #16 starts with Rahne saying that she’s done being a part of the X-Men, and wants to try living a normal life for a while--which you really can’t blame her for. She’s tried it in the past without success, but hey, even if she gets a little break of happiness, that’s the kind of exit I like to see for a character who deserves it, after being through trauma. (And like most of the New Mutant women, she sure has been through a lot.) 

The issue ends just a few hours later with Dani falling to the ground, crying that Rahne has died.

They really killed her off panel, for a cliffhanger.

Because it happened off panel, I denied believing she was really dead. It would hardly be the first time an issue ends with the supposed death of a character, only for the next one to reveal that not to be the case. Even with #17 opening with the characters preparing for her funeral, still I refused to believe she was really dead. I waited for some ploy to be revealed, that this was all a trick of some kind for some reason, because none of the characters would talk about what even happened. 

But then we do find out what happened, in a flashback. A flashback in the form of a telepathic vision in Wolverine’s head.

Wolverine orders Kwannon to read the minds of Rahne’s killers and show him what happened. We see how he sees how the man refuses to leave Rahne alone, despite her repeated polite and direct requests. That his harassment ends up triggering her to slightly transform. That the men call her a dog as they beat her to death. And it’s all for Wolverine to get angry over. To get his macho revenge against the men who killed her.

Rosenberg wrote Rahne being violently murdered in a hate crime, off panel, for the purpose of male angst and to give Logan and Scott something new to fight over.

This story takes place in the States, where the number of women killed by homicide increased by 21% in 2016, and the same year hate crimes increased by 12%. (Huh, that sure is an interesting year to see such large stat increases. I wonder what big thing happened in 2016 that might encourage this.) The stats have risen yet again since. The fact is, it is a very dangerous time to be a minority right now.

Rosenberg has also made it quite clear that his intentions are to play back into the Mutant Metaphor, which makes the connotations of this event not a coincidence but an active choice, to tell a story with the obvious parallels it has. And the way this story is being told is extremely disrespectful to Rahne, the victim here, and vicariously the actual, real victims of such crimes.

I’m happy that Dani and Xi’an are no longer robot-zombies. I’m very happy that after so many years, Dani finally has her powers back. But I wish my happiness over these things was not accompanied by the way Rahne’s death was handled.

[prolapsarian]

The Language of Boris: Part 2

“Prison spaces”

Boris Johnson chose to announce his flagship “law and order” policies in the Mail on Sunday, a paper in which comment tends from “lock them up and throw away the key” to “bring back hanging”, with every brutal fantasy of corporal punishment getting a frequent airing too. Johnson made a promise of an extra “10,000 spaces in our prisons”. This curious euphemism is meant to highlight funding going towards a half-crumbling, half-privatised prison estate, within which prisoners are subject to all manner of abuse, violence, neglect, and overcrowding. “10,000 spaces in our prisons” sounds like the rare pleasure of being able to afford a house with a spare room. But the political calculation is otherwise: that Johnson can make himself popular with several million people by promising to send tens of thousands of other people to prison. Only, to promise of future incarceration of so many people, who have not yet committed any crimes, looks a little too much like promising some ritual sacrifice to ward off the evils of the present. As though the goat will appreciate a new shiny altar as it’s led to its death.

“The Public”

Alongside a programme of expanded mass incarceration, he announced the extension of stop and search powers across over 40 cities in an attempt to soothe the public’s worries about increases in knife crime. There he wrote,

“I want the criminals to be afraid – not the public.”

The division is stark. “Criminals” and “the public” are held firmly apart. Separation is the entire logic of this juridical strategy: criminals must be distanced from the public not only rhetorically but in reality too. It is a carceral logic, one that wagers on punishment over remedy, while knowing that the most severe punishment - the most gratifying punishment it can offer to those who yearn for “law and order” - is excommunication from the body politic.

Such a sentence also contains three dubious implications: firstly that on committing a crime you can expect not to be considered a member of the public, and that politicians no longer have any duty to serve you; secondly, only those who are not criminals themselves can be expected to be protected from crime, or to have their fears addressed by the state; and thirdly that those subject to the force and violence of these expanded tactics are already “criminals”. The last of these suggestions is particularly spurious given that the powers being offered to police officers allow stopping and searching a person “whether or not he has any grounds for suspecting that the person or vehicle is carrying weapons or articles of that kind.”

Policies such as this are not about making the public less afraid, but more afraid. Throughout his campaign to become Prime Minister, Boris falsely proclaimed knife crime as the core violence in our society. The effect was to make middle class rural and suburban white people afraid of young black urban boys and men. He reinvented the “folk devil” of black urban youth, in order to terrify people who live miles away from any urban centre, and who have little understanding of the everyday lives of people who inhabit them - lives as much full of joy as hardship, as full of striving as of difficulty, as full of fruitful collectivity and solidarity as they are subject to forces of division and competition. It’s the same as how, during the Brexit referendum, fear of immigrants was whipped up in those places where no immigrants live.

Yet victims of knife crime are not middle class white suburban Daily Mail readers, but instead predominantly young urban boys and men, most of them people of colour, poor, deprived, brutalised by society and the state, living in a world in which any aid and support has been cut away. Far from protecting young black urban boys, who are truly the victims of knife crime, far from making their lives safer, this policy will embolden racist police officers and institutionally racist police forces to attack them. Precisely those who need protecting are cast through presupposition as “the criminals” and not “the public.” All the while those middle class white folk will feel a little safer. But they don’t feel safer because they are less afraid: they feel safer because they are more afraid, and can now proclaim that something is being done about it. Never mind if that something is arbitrary violence, surveillance, harassment and criminalisation of racialised sections of the public, who are already the true victims of the violence whose fear they adopt. Never before has vicarious feeling been so craven. Like the old image of a person looking from safety out of their window at the violence of a storm, Boris’s exercise in bourgeois sublimity aims not to alleviate fear but to politicise it.

And this is without mentioning that as a police tactic “stop and search” not only does not work, but has a monumentally chequered history. These powers have long been used by racist police officers and institutionally racist police forces to target and harass young black people. The section 60 powers that are to be used more frequently were (apparently) designed as a response to violent crimes involving weapons, but 97% of stops made under the act result in no prosecution for charges involving violent crimes or weapons. By far the most arrests after a search are for minor non-violent crimes, and even more stops and searches result in no action at all. At present black people in England and Wales are 40 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people are.

The expansion of Section 60 powers has its own dubious history. The act has slippery wording in which its powers can be enforced in “any locality” in which violence has occurred or is likely to occur: during the riots in 2011, caused by the arbitrary police killing of a young black man in Tottenham, a section 60 was put in place across the whole of London (the largest area over which such an order has been put in place.) Expand the definition of “locality” enough and you can always map an area in which some violence has taken place. Then bring out the white hordes, holding brooms aloft triumphant, and say to the police, “go forth and brutalise.”

[petergrantkavinsky]

Victoria Aveyard - Dymocks Books Event in Sydney, Australia | April 26, 2018

- “I’m doing short stories in the RED QUEEN world to come out next year. That will involve whoever makes it out of WAR STORM. (audience laughs) We’ll tell you who. We’re gonna have some fun new stuff, including actual stories with characters we know, an original story with characters we don’t know set in the same world at the same time. I’m really excited to sort of weave around to pieces and have people who are hearing about what’s going on and the way they are misinterpreted. I think it will be really fun for me, doing more worldbuilding information, some maps—I love doing maps—so it will be fun to get that together.”

- [on writing Mare] “I think most writers draw on things they see in the real world, things they see in themselves, things they want themselves to be, things they don’t want themselves to be. It was really amazing to write a character like Mare and have things that I want to be but also have tons of things or have her make decisions that I would never make either because I’m not strong enough or not stupid enough. (audience laughs) It was very cool. It's almost like vicarious living through her situation and make mistakes and be messy and sometimes go down the wrong path. I was really happy to write a flawed female heroine, although it’s almost funny when you have to talk about ‘flawed women,’ when you say ‘flawed’ you just mean ‘real.’ We never really talk about our flawed men that way.”

- [on being politically vocal] “I think the main reason I have become more vocal politically—at least on my own social media—is because however small my platform is, I have a platform, and I’m not happy about the way things are going in the United States, in and out of the world, so I feel like I should be able to talk about it if I want to. It’s really interesting to get pushed back, ‘stick to your books,’ ‘stick to writing fantasy,’ ‘take the politics out [of your books].’ Every work of art is political in some way. If you missed it, that’s not my problem. I was speaking about this earlier, fantasy in politics and people criticizing that nowadays. And I get a lot of ‘you put too much current politics and current events’ in the last book of the RED QUEEN series, KING’S CAGE. I wrote that book before the 2016 election, and if you are reading certain politicians in this book, that’s not my fault, that’s your fault, and I’m sorry that you are reading your guy in this evil character. (audience laughs) So what does that say about this person? It’s interesting to just trying to write in this climate. I know a lot of authors, a lot of us struggled in those first few months in 2016 as well because it was just so difficult to get back on track because we felt like maybe we aren’t doing enough and do we need to do more? But then, it’s also like our creating these worlds and creating these books especially for people of color or of different marginalizations, it is an act of political progression. We choose to do that. And it’s really important to keep doing our jobs and keep moving forward and keep insulating ourselves so that we can still keep talking, and it’s nice that people listen sometimes.”

- [on throwing obstacles for her characters] “One of the best writing tactics—and it helps even if you’re not thinking about it, even if you’re not thinking this is the way I need this character to change—is throwing obstacles on their way, just making things as difficult for them as humanly possible. A lot of people ask ‘why did she kill off this certain character?,’ and I’m like because removing him would make things more difficult physically and emotionally. And the same with another character, removing her made things more difficult physically and emotionally for another character. I’m trying to avoid spoilers, just in case. But yeah, it is about that. And hopefully, you know a character well enough from the beginning that once you start throwing obstacles in the way, they start reacting organically in the way that that person would.”

- Q: At the end of KING’S CAGE, we’ve got Cal has kind of lost everything; we’ve got Maven has everything his mother wanted but not anything he wanted for himself; and Evangeline is desperate to see the undoing of all the plans that could get her what she originally wanted the most. Whose resolution was the most difficult for you?

VA: “They are all difficult in their own way because there is a point where you care about these people in some way, and you understand them; even the worst of your characters, you have to understand their motivations. They can’t just be evil for the sake of being evil, or you’ll never be able to write them. You do understand at their core not necessarily something good but something you could relate to. So for all of them, in some way I wanted a resolution that was good, but then at the same time, I wanted a resolution that was not necessarily good as well. I wanted something that was going to work for the story because at the end of the day, especially in books like this—there’s war, there’s rebellion, there’s oppression, there’s a price to be paid—it might feel great to finish and have the characters be married and have a baby on the way, and everything’s happy. But sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes that works because it’s been so dramatized that you need that moment and you need that closure that they came out of this okay. And I think for other books it doesn’t necessarily work. There has to be a price somewhere, and it’s interesting figuring out what that price is and how much I can do and still have an audience feel like they’re satisfied. I get a lot of questions ‘Will I be upset?,’ ‘Will I be happy at the end of this?’ Number one, I don’t know what you want, so I don’t know if you’ll be happy. But I know, based on the ending, physically because there can only be one ending, and a lot of people want one, or they want another. It can only be one of the two. I know that some people might be upset, some people might be happy, but hopefully, no one will be bored. That’s my number one thing. I never ever wanna bore you. I am an entertainer, first and foremost, so I want to give you a good time. My job is to strap you into the roller coaster and send you on your way. Hopefully, that’s what happens.”

- [on writing WAR STORM] “That was really fun to write, the splintering of alliances and the forming of new alliances. It was really cool. One of the first things I did before I wrote WAR STORM was I wrote down all the factions and all the different alliances and characters, and I drew lines between all of them. Who was allied with who? Who was gonna betray who? Who was actually allied with this person? It was really fun and also confusing.”

- [on writing her super dramatic climax] “I am a child of HARRY POTTER. I was nine when I read the first book; I was 17 when the last one came out. I was a little bit abused by waiting for those books every two or three years, and I just wanted to inflict that pain on someone else. (audience laughs) Luckily, you guys get it once a year. Also, A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, GAME OF THRONES books. I remember reading those and throwing them, covering the end of chapters as I was reading. So I’ve been trying to sort of do that to my readers and make every chapter kind of end on something and then each book end on something. That’s a great way to trick you guys into reading the next one. I gotcha. I get a lot of reader responses about ‘Oh my God, there’s like 30 pages left, and this thing is not getting resolved. What the heck,’ or ‘Everything’s happy now, but there’s 200 pages left. I’m very scared.’ (audience laughs) It’s a fake-out. I love to mess with you guys.” 

- [on ending WAR STORM] “One of the key points of story—this is in film as well and television, as well as books—is escalation. You always want to be outdoing yourself. There are definitely set pieces or moments that I had in the back of my mind and thought to myself ‘I cannot use that until the fourth book.’ And then there were things where you introduce something and say ‘this has to happen.’ For example, in the third book, there is a battle between two characters because one of them is being mind-controlled to fight the other one. And I knew as soon as soon mind control was introduced in the first book, that was eventually going to happen because that’s what you inherently want to happen. You want to see these two characters go at it hammer and tongs, but you have to figure a way to do that. It’s just really fun to have certain moments where you’re like ‘this has to happen,’ and ‘How do I get it to happen?’ and ‘Where can it go so that it won’t outdo whatever’s coming after?’ WAR STORM was interesting, trying to escalate all that has already been done, and hopefully, it did it. […] I really love the final set piece in [WAR STORM] because it has big, big, big moments and really small really high-stake moments. Staging is something we learn [in school/university]. What can I do to make this scene more interesting? Add a rainstorm. What can you do to make this scene where they’re just talking to each other—how do we make that more interesting? Oh, have one of them be in a bathtub.” 

- Q: Where did Maven come from?

VA: “The complexity of Maven, like that big twist in the first book, that was in my head from the very, very beginning. That was one of the reasons why I even finished writing that book is because I was so excited to get to that scene. (audience laughs) When the book was just in manuscript, I fantasized people reading that and just getting angry at me. Because that plot was coming, I had to sort of backfilled a character who would do that. I figured out what his complexes were and where he ain’t gone wrong essentially and where others had wronged him to make that person exist, and then from there, I had this person constructed. And later on, it was really cool to make him stand on his own. I knew early on I had to remove some people from his life so that he was the big man. And now, later on in the book, it’s been really interesting to have him fighting with his own nature and sometimes accepting his own nature. We’ll see what goes on.”   

FULL VIDEO

[dippedanddripped]

For centuries, dress codes have been used to maintain specific social roles and hierarchies. But fashion and style have also traditionally served another purpose: to express new ideals of individual liberty, rationality and equality, according to new research by Stanford legal scholar Richard Thompson Ford.

Video by Farrin Abbott

A new book by Stanford Law Professor Richard Thompson Ford examines the societal and political significance of dress codes over time.

Civil rights activists in 1960s America wore their “Sunday Best” at protests to demonstrate they were worthy of dignity and respect as they challenged the institutions that kept Black people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Centuries earlier, during the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, a pared-down business suit symbolized a departure from the status-based opulence of previous aristocratic regimes. Wearing the same clothes as everyone else, regardless of one’s social status, was a way of espousing the period’s new values, such as sensibility, rationality and even equality, said Ford.

These are just two of the many examples Ford has chronicled in his new book, Dress Code: How the Laws of Fashion Made History (Simon & Schuster, 2021), in which he argues that people have used dress codes to assert political control and social hierarchies throughout history. Sartorial style can also be wielded to challenge those norms and offer new political ideals in their stead. For example, the Black Panther movement rejected the “Sunday Best” that their civil rights predecessors wore to establish a new kind of resistance.

“It’s worth noting that the Black Panthers had a Minister of Culture, so they saw very clearly the importance of aesthetics in changing politics,” Ford said. “That developed into the ‘Black is beautiful movement’ which focused quite explicitly on the political dimensions of racial aesthetics and changed dominant norms of beauty in order to incorporate and reflect the norms of the black community.”

Here, Ford talks about some of this research with Stanford News Service. Ford is the George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In your research, you argue that running parallel to a history of fashion is a history of liberal individualism. Can you explain that further?

In the modern sense, fashion involves clothing that is highly expressive; it can be a sign of individual personality. This kind of clothing emerged around the same time as the ideal of individualism began to emerge in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Clothing reflected new social and political ideals: the importance of the individual as opposed to the group-based statuses of aristocratic class and religious affinity. Fashion in this sense developed alongside other changes in the arts, philosophy and science: literature began to focus on individual psychology more than grand classical epics, prefiguring the transformation from epic to the novel. Philosophy and science put humans at the center of the cosmos, displacing a religious sensibility that subordinated human and earthly concerns to the divine and supernatural. Portraiture became expressive of individual personality. These changes in aesthetic sensibility eventually became part of liberal political ideology, that put the individual before the monarch or the church.

Fashion not only reflected these changes – it also may have helped to shape them by conditioning people to think of themselves first and foremost as unique individuals. In a sense, fashion lets people not only express their individuality but also experience it on their bodies.

Can you offer an example of how fashion reveals the politics of an era?

One example is the development of the business suit. As late as the early 1700s, the typical clothing for someone of high status in most of European society was opulent and adorned with things like brocade and jewels – this was true for men and women. This type of clothing signified status and aristocratic rank and a high place in society.

But as early as in the 17th century, things were beginning to change. In England, this involved the execution of King Charles I, who styled himself as an absolute monarch, and the rise of the Commonwealth. After the Commonwealth ended, the monarchy was restored but the old absolutist ambitions of the monarch didn’t come back. Instead, what emerged was a new kind of aristocracy in which the aristocrats – the people with a high place in society – dressed in a more toned down, subtle and utilitarian fashion.

There was a transformation during this period, which the psychologist John Carl Flügel later described as “the great masculine renunciation.” This was a renunciation of all of the opulence, jewels and brocade that defined the showy clothing of the past era. A new, pared-down aesthetic became the beginnings of the business suit which over time became a symbol of liberal individualism. At the time, people made the connection between the sparer, toned down suit and the ideals of human rights.

Another thing that the business suit accomplished was it created a kind of egalitarian uniform in which people of a variety of social statuses wore, more or less, the same clothing – this was new. Now, everyone from the most powerful heads of state to bank clerks wear business suits. That social leveling of attire symbolized and went along with – and even inspired and helped people to act out – the political ideal of formal equality before the law.

So that was for men. What about for women?

The story for women is longer and more complicated. During the same period [that saw the evolution of the business suit], menswear and womenswear diverged. As menswear got more streamlined with fewer extravagant details, womenswear got more opulent. In a sense, women almost compensated for the lack of opulent display by getting more of that for themselves. One might even say that men still engaged in opulent fashion vicariously through women.

Womenswear doesn’t participate in an evolution toward egalitarian norms until much, much later. And indeed, one of the stories I tell in the book is the way that this emergence of liberal egalitarianism goes hand in hand, and in some ways, deepens gender hierarchies, that in terms of clothing and attire, lasted well into the 20th century.

To give one example, while European men abandoned draped attire, which was the attire (characteristic of the ancient world) in the 14th and 15th centuries, women remained draped below the waist until the early 20th century. In the early 1900s, a woman wearing trousers might be subject to arrest for public indecency. For a long time in history, adventurous women would mimic parts of masculine style to express or assert their right to enjoy masculine prerogatives, whether it was masculine freedoms or masculine assertion of power. So, a woman wearing some element of menswear was a provocation and adopted by women on the avant-garde.

How is fashion intertwined with activism?

Fashion has played an important role in social activism for centuries. Sometimes that role has been as explicit: a social activist fighting against the power structure. Other times, it is more subtle. In the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance people resisted what were called “sumptuary laws,” which were designed to assign people in society a particular type of clothing that would express their social status.

They did so not so much as a direct political challenge to the power structure, but certainly as an indirect one. When a wealthy merchant or tradesperson adopted high-status attire, they weren’t necessarily trying to usurp the position of the nobility or bring down social hierarchies, but it was a way of saying “We deserve the same degree of social prestige and respect as the aristocracy and nobility. We are asserting our own status in society.” This was a new idea and one that turned out to be very challenging to the power structure and the status quo. Although those people may not have thought of themselves as activists, they were engaging in a form of activism.

During the racial justice movement in the 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists went to protest at lunch counters or to conduct public marches, there was a dress code. People were expected to wear their “Sunday Best” in order to demonstrate that they deserved dignity and respect. But importantly, it was also a direct challenge to a white supremacist power structure that endeavored to keep black people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. There were laws in the United States at times that required Black people and slaves to dress in clothing that was considered appropriate to their status – which was the lowest status. For Black people to dress in a manner that was elegant and refined was a challenge to that type of power structure and that’s also part of what was going on with the Sunday best attire in the civil rights struggle.

Later, a new generation of civil rights activists rejected “Sunday Best” attire as the politics of respectability. They adopted new styles that were suited to a new style of activism. Black Panthers wore black leather jackets and turtlenecks, berets and sunglasses. It was quasi-military but also it was a new visual statement designed to express a different kind of resistance to the status quo and a different type of racial pride – one that didn’t borrow from the symbols of the white bourgeoisie but instead constructed a new black aesthetic.

How do you see dress codes changing, given the new world we are currently living in?

These things can always be somewhat hard to predict, but one area where I’m fairly confident we’re going to see changes in dress codes is around norms of gender. We’re already seeing such dramatic changes in terms of the recognition of the transgender community and people who are gender non-binary. That’s a remarkable challenge to a centuries-old set of conventions in which men’s and women’s clothing diverged and were considered to be symbolic opposites. I think that is going to be fascinating to watch develop and I’m not sure exactly whether it will develop into something of a more unisex style of clothing or whether it will simply be a remixing and reconfiguring of the gender binary.

Another interesting area is post pandemic and what happens to the norms of workplace attire in the era of the Zoom call. First, there was the idea of the “Zoom shirt” that hangs at the back of their chair and is put on right before the meeting and presumably, for the rest of the day they’re wearing sweatpants, pajamas, or something like that because we’re all stuck at home.

But interestingly, another thing that developed was a kind of subtle new dress code that involved, not the clothing itself, but what was behind you in the room and how one should style the background of their Zoom call in order to communicate messages. That is very much like a different kind of dress code but your kitchen, dining room or living room are part of that public persona.

What inspired this research?

I teach employment discrimination and civil rights law and a surprising number of legal disputes have involved people challenging a dress code of some kind. For instance, women challenging workplace dress codes that required high heels or makeup or people of color challenging dress codes that outlawed preferred hairstyles that are suitable to the texture of their hair, like braids or locks.

Another thing that was very striking to me about these complaints was the intensity with which people fought the dress codes. People were willing to lose their jobs disputing workplace dress code and meanwhile, employers were willing to lose a valued employee trying to impose such a dress code. I wanted to understand why people felt so strongly about clothing, fashion and self-presentation.

The second reason is more personal. I grew up interested in fashion based on the influence of my father who actually trained as a tailor. This was at a time when African Americans often learned both a profession and a trade – the idea was they would have a trade to fall back on in case racial exclusion kept them from the profession of their choice. He never actually worked as a tailor but he learned the craft and he understood the importance of high-quality clothing. He also deeply internalized the importance of self-presentation, which was especially important for a black man growing up during the era of Jim Crow and in the era just after our civil rights laws were passed, where overt racial prejudice was still common and racial stereotypes everywhere. I saw for him how important it was to present himself in a manner that was dignified, refined and reflected his own sense of self, but also what he needed in order to negotiate a still fairly hostile society.

Image attributions in the banner: Civil rights march on Washington, D.C. from the Library of Congress; Men In Tailored Clothes, England, 1920s from The New York Public Library; Posing Louis XIV, Sun King, XXL from Getty Images; Fashion photographs for Vogue magazine from the Library of Congress, Trousers dress from Paris from the Library of Congress, Free Huey rally, DeFremery Park 1968. Reies Tijerina speaking & Brown Beret security from Bob Fitch; Man teleworking wearing a shirt, tie and pajama pants from Getty Images; Actress wearing a costume with ruffled blouse and trousers, from the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Public Domain; A 1903 engraving of Joan of Arc by Albert Lynch featured in the Figaro Illustre magazine from WikiMedia Commons; Vanity fair on the avenue, from Library of Congress.

[brettaresco]

The End of Open Secrets

NOTE: I initially wrote this column in March of this year, when the Michael Jackson documentary was released and Patriots owner Robert Kraft was arrested. In finally publishing, I’ve updated with minor changes and an addendum concerning another poster boy for this phenomenon, Jeffrey Epstein.

“I’m shocked to find that there is gambling going on in here.”

-Captain Renault, Casablanca

If, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said (while paraphrasing abolitionist minister Theodore Parker), “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” most would say we are in the long part. It has become fashionable amongst the eloquent, the empathetic, and the erudite to say that our world is in peril. I won’t wholly discount this assertion, especially while John Barron is the president, but bear with me as I briefly consider the positive aspects of our confounding timeline.

In many ways, we live in a golden age. Not only are we experiencing a time of relative prosperity, peace, and liberty in much of the world, but many of us enjoy an existence in which information (and, thus, some measure of power) is ubiquitous. Sure, we have our issues – the United States’ abdication of its place as moral and geopolitical leader of the world, for starters – and the information we consume is not always of the utmost veracity. But even still… the march of non-fake news has spurred uprisings to overthrow corrupt regimes, liberated marginalized groups, and shed light on some of the most troubling and immediate issues of our time.

Which leads me to the subject of this column: open secrets.

I am an actor. I run in some acting circles that can, at times, form Venn diagrams with larger, more famous circles. I know people who know people, I know people who become people, and I know people who are people. In talking to many of these people, for as long as I can remember, they all maintained one thing:

Kevin Spacey was a pervert.

Though I never knew the extent of his perversions, it was always whispered that he liked to take advantage of other actors. He liked his boys young, some said, and he wasn’t afraid to use his position to get what he wanted. The important matter wasn’t that he was gay – that was an open secret of an entirely benign nature – but that he was very likely a predator.

Despite these rumors, it was not until the #metoo movement unshackled thousands of brave women (and men) from the forced secrecy of past indignities that Kevin Spacey was formally accused and, to an extent, confronted with the consequences of his actions. His hit show was canceled, he was effectively blacklisted from Hollywood, and he was investigated by various authorities. His open secret became an open door through which he could be dragged, kicking and screaming, to justice.

Though Spacey’s downfall commenced just last year, it feels like it happened much longer ago, amidst a raft of other scandals involving such high-profile figures as Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, and, well, our current president. Aside from the fact that the latter still operates with impunity… why bring all this up again now?

Because Spacey’s is the case that first leaps to mind when I think of a growing, overdue, and enormously important trend- a trend more recently personified by the fates of three other powerful men: Robert Kraft, Michael Jackson, and Jeffrey Epstein.

Earlier this year, as you’ll no doubt remember, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was arrested and charged with two counts of solicitation for frequenting a Florida massage parlor where trafficked women were coerced into performing sex acts for money (or, in common parlance, “giving happy endings”).

Who among us has not heard of (or – dare I ask? – received) a happy ending? It’s been joked about in popular culture for years, and it has become so ingrained in our collective consciousness that massage parlors with curtains over the windows and secretive back rooms are almost always assumed – rightly or wrongly – to provide other “services.” A few years ago, when I won a fantasy sports league, someone joked that I should spend my winnings at an establishment that online reviewers have deemed one of the best “rub & tug” places in New York City. If the person suggesting it had ever been I will not here speculate, but I’m sure he thought it less an honest suggestion than an innocent joke. As distasteful as the suggestion was, he was playing on a widely-known (and seemingly harmless) open secret.

But is it harmless? As is finally being scrutinized in the wake of the Robert Kraft debacle, through which several other high-profile men in finance (and even the boyfriend of an LPGA golfer) were exposed, a large element of this massage parlor subculture centers on human trafficking. Quite often, the women brought to these “businesses” from other countries have their movements controlled, their lives monitored, and their jobs bound to unpayable debts that keep them servicing wealthy Johns like Kraft for the rest of their lives. It’s a horrible, dehumanizing existence… but one about which many superficially know and joke. Whether they choose to look the other way or not is their business – luckily, there are many diligent human trafficking task forces that make arrests like those in this sweeping Florida sting – but for years this practice has persisted as an open secret. It was not widely exposed until one of the most powerful men in America brushed up against it… and even now, in our focus-starved culture, it may yet recede once again into the background. (Sure enough, as I update this just four months later, it already has).

Whether or not the case of the “rub & tug” maintains its capacity for public outrage, it has again exposed a through line in many of the open secrets that we as a society choose not to confront: powerful people getting away with horrible things. Shortly after Kraft’s arrest, of course, came the release of a revealing and controversial documentary about a man nicknamed (rightly, for his music at least) “The King of Pop.”

Has there been any greater modern example of an open secret than Michael Jackson’s propensity to, at the very least, spend an unsettling amount of time with children? The debate has raged on and on for years: was this a man who simply didn’t have a normal childhood and wanted to live vicariously through his young “friends,” or was this a mentally and sexually disturbed pedophile who lured innocent tykes to a literal Neverland where he could do with them as he pleased?

Certainly, with the release of said documentary, the pendulum appears to swing more towards the latter. There have now been myriad credible accusations about Jackson, and a newly resurfaced tape of his sister LaToya (from all the way back in 1993) shows her denouncing “his crimes against small, innocent children” (though she later recanted the statements).

While Jackson was alive, how many of us gave serious thought to whether he was acting inappropriately? Yes, he settled a case out of court in the 90s and was brought up on charges once (as was our friend Jeffrey Epstein, whom I’ll address shortly), but he skated. We, the public, continued to listen to his music and disregard his behavior. Certainly no one dared to raise this open secret to the level of moral outrage for many years… but, in so doing, what did we enable?

In not examining these open secrets in the court of public opinion and demanding full investigations, what else have we allowed to happen? As #metoo has shown us, we’ve permitted workplace sexual harassment and assault for generations. We’ve enabled human trafficking by reducing it to a joke. We’ve allowed powerful people – usually men – to live lives free from consequence, and even bestowed upon them a certain fear-based gravitas; no one dared cross Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves, lest their careers be torpedoed, despite the fact that (at least in the case of the former) his culture of intimidation and abuse was a Hollywood-sized open secret.

You’ve probably noticed that all of the open secrets mentioned so far concern sex. I believe this is because sex itself has always been something of an open secret in America. We have spent decades trying to shake our puritan past, and many are still uncomfortable with a frank, open, and honest discussion of sexual health and preferences. Abstinence-only education is “stressed” in 27 states. The debate about abortion, together with the political might of the Evangelical right, can (and do) obscure any nuanced debate about contraception or premarital relations. It’s something we’re slowly confronting, but it will take time. And calling people to the carpet for using sex to gain power or hurt others is – however uncomfortable – part of that confrontation.

If it isn’t already, allow me to make plain the fundamental purpose of this column: Think about your open secrets- our open secrets. Think, as I have tried to do after the above instances have exploded into national discussions, about those things that we all know to be true but that nobody ever talks about. I’m not advocating for “witch hunts” – there’s been quite enough talk of those lately – but of mere explorations of the obvious. I can think of several as-yet unexamined cases off the top of my head. The first, to shift from the from the titillating to the mundane, is the problem of tax havens. Does anybody still talk about the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers? Or about how a journalist who helped to uncover them was mysteriously killed by a car bomb in Malta? I actually heard someone make the argument recently that if the United States raises tax rates on the wealthy, our modern-day robber barons will simply hide more money offshore. That’s the same fundamental (and asinine) assertion as, “We can’t have tighter gun restrictions, because criminals will still find a way to get them.” The solution, to people who advance these viewpoints, is inaction. They are content living, as we have for years, with our open secrets. They imagine that the above instances (the easy reducibility of gun violence being its own open secret) do not affect them. But what if their family members were killed with legal guns? Or if they were deprived of necessary social services because of haven-driven deficits? Would they be so quick to brush these important issues under the rug, pretending they don’t know what they know that they know?

For most people, the rate at which our planet is warming is the biggest, smelliest, most egregious open secret… on the planet. Thankfully, the debate over whether or not climate change is occurring (and man-made) seems to be evaporating, as more of those who’ve stuck their heads in the hot, hot sand pass away. But the question of how best to take action remains. For all her foibles, it was not until Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used her considerable platform to advance a Green New Deal that Americans actually started considering the sweeping, necessary policy changes that might help alleviate some of the inevitable suffering we are poised to face in the coming years. Even those who distrust the Green New Deal’s ambitious aims of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 know that they need to support something. We all need to support something… or else we’ll keep our biggest elephant in the room well-fed, kicking the can down the road until some major Kraft-like climate event occurs… and by then it might be too late.

Doping in cycling, Hollywood accounting,  soda, the Washington Redskins (and Cleveland Indians), college admissions, Scientology, Donald Trump’s mental health… these and many other subjects qualify for official Open Secret status. What do they all have in common? They have had moments of exposure, here and there, but remain – in some cases, dangerously – unresolved.

What will it take for us as a nation (and a world) to shed enough sunlight on these matters to melt them away? Two things: courage and awareness. One follows the other- it takes courage to be aware enough to confront these behaviors and the circumstances that allow them to thrive, and yet another level to hold those in power accountable. First, however, we must confront our own complicity. In this increasingly Orwellian world, we would do well to remember the author’s iconic words from 1984: “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

ADDENDUM: Concerning Epstein

As a millennial, I had always heard the name Jeffrey Epstein. Often, it was used as either a political bludgeon or evidence of the Illuminati. When I wrote this column back in March, I had little hope that Epstein would finally be brought up on charges relating to his systematic predatory behavior against scores of young women, and that those charges would (possibly) open the door for many more against those who may have aided, abetted, and willingly joined in his behavior. Epstein’s case fits the mold perfectly: A wealthy man who thinks he’s above the law, surely because he has been. Much has been made about the sweetheart deal former Trump cabinet member Alex Acosta gave Epstein in 2008, and with good reason. Epstein’s predilections were long known, as the following excerpt makes plain, and yet… and yet. No one, especially those in a position to expose his behavior, dared do so. It is in these circumstances where, yet again, the public is duty bound to step in. I know we have a lot to worry about – climate change, income inequality, superbugs – but none of that is going away. Cases like Kraft’s, Jackson’s, and Epstein’s are the easy ones. In a world of increasing abstraction, where things seem increasingly complicated, we must see the simple for what it is, and act accordingly.

From New York Magazine’s How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight:

How could this have gone on and on? Why so much silence for so many years? Why did no one tip off the authorities or issue any but what must have been the most whispery warnings to close personal friends about Epstein’s pyramid-scheme approach to abusing an apparently infinite number of teenage girls? That Bill Clinton and Trump might play dumb is understandable, if reprehensible. But Larry Summers? Alan Dershowitz? Leslie Wexner, Bill Barr, Ken Starr (!); journalists Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos; Eva Andersson-Dubin, who founded Mount Sinai’s breast-cancer center? Not to mention their spouses and partners and the people who manage their calendars and the Harvard finance men and women accepting his millions? The whistle-blowers in the Epstein case have not been the high and mighty who can afford to hire lawyers and publicists but the victims themselves, and their families, evoking nothing more than the Catholic Church sex-abuse cases, in which grandmas and aunts spent decades writing letters and knocking fruitlessly on bishops’ doors. “What is so amazing to me is how his entire social circle knew about this and just blithely overlooked it,” says Vicki Ward, the reporter whose 2003 discovery of Epstein’s abuses she alleges were scrubbed by Vanity Fair’s then editor, Graydon Carter. Everyone who knew Epstein mentioned “the girls,” Ward told the New York Times, “but as an aside.”

[asbestosmouth]

If you still do prompts- can you write me some Beric/Ramsay Halloween fluff? Please please please? (bonus points for Sansan or Lannistarth)

Author: AsbestosMouthShip(s): Beric/Ramsay, background SanSanTrigger Warning(s) if applicable: Fluffy Modern AU but with Ramsay. Not his own warning, for once.Brief Summary: Beric is new to Winterfell, and has never experienced a Hallow’een like it. It’s fun, and exhausting, but when a weird leather-clad bloke, accompanying a tiny little boy dressed as Darth Vader, turns up on his doorstep, the night get far more interesting.

A continuation of the Circle Time Universe. Thanks, Nonny, for the Beric/Ramsay prompt :D

Every year the town of Winterfell embraces Hallowe’en with an enthusiasm that southrons find adorable at best and slightly creepy at worst. It seems every house displays carved pumpkins, every owner putting on some sort of costume, every child visiting every door with a hopeful expression and the cry of ‘trick or treat!’ on their lips.

Beric has lived in Winterfell for almost eleven months. He moved up from the Storm Lands during the latest banking crisis, being ‘let go’ from his stressful and high-powered financial job for whistle blowing the whole rotten house of cards into international disrepute. The press still call him Robin Hood, still ask hopefully for interviews, but he politely shuts down every call and email and settles into this new life in the North.

He likes the North.

Winterfell was never an obvious choice, but when the shit hit the fan, it offered a thousand miles and more between him and the steaming pile of faeces of his past. Vague memories of visiting the North when he was a child, running through snowy dales and eating solid hearty food, still nestled in his head. Garlan, a friend from his army days, from before Beric ended up honorably discharged after the head injury that finished his promising career, recommended Dorne. Apparently his brother lives there, curates some museum, always needing someone trustworthy to help with ancient artifacts and, well, as Lieutenant - as he was way back when, he’s a Colonel now, and it is very well deserved - Tyrell said, who is more honest than a man who destroys a whole institution because he despises the crookedness inherent in the system?

Dorne. Too warm. Beric likes rain, and winter chill. He’s very much a child of the Storm Lands, even if he grew up near the Dornish border. Anyway, a complete break meant throwing off all ties, getting the hells out of Dodge as the cowboy films put it, and moving somewhere unknown.

He loves Winterfell.

It’s a pretty town, of grey granite and slate, narrow cobbled streets, the fortress giving the place its name lowering darkly over all. The North is massive skies. Endless walks. Nature study. Waterfalls. Basalt tors, and honestly grim people who warm up to you when you become ‘one of them.’ Providing enough amenities for never having to go anywhere larger unless very much needed, and, anyway, isn’t that what the internet is for? Winterfell is, in Beric’s opinion, pretty much perfect. He has friends. He has a community. He has a reputation for being quite eccentric, and since he doesn’t had to really work because of the pay out given by his employers for his quite illegal sacking, he’s become the wealthy oddball with a posh southern accent who gets involved with local people, and projects, and charities.

Clegane turns up with a pumpkin in hand, his small daughter in tow.

“Carve this,” he says unceremoniously as he dumps the orange vegetable - or are they fruit? Beric can never remember. He does have certain blips in his memory these days - onto the front step. “Hallowe’en’s bloody big around here, so dress up and shit.”

Sandor swears when Lyanna can’t see his mouth moving. The little girl bounces on her toes, pink-cheeked and beaming. She’s almost seven now, about to move up to junior school, and is frighteningly intelligent. Beric adores her, but then in general Beric adores kids. He’d like one of his own, one day, but he’s unsure how his single status and homosexuality would affect adopting. He lives slightly vicariously through Lyanna, who he’s learned sign language for, and the other little ones of Winterfell who turn up at the library he volunteers at on a weekly basis.

That is how he met Sansa, and then Sandor, and got himself a best friend. Not that the big oaf knows that, and their insults are very fond, but compared to the anonymity of the south, the North encourages closer relationships.

What are you wearing? Lyanna signs, small fingers like lightning. Today’s fingerless gloves, and they are as always knitted with love by Sansa, are pink and black stripes.

“I’m not sure yet, Little Bear. I’ll have a look in my wardrobe and see what I can find. If I struggle, can I come and see you, and you can help me decide?” Lyanna’s mother was a Mormont.

Daddy never dresses up because he says his face is scary. Sansa has a pretty witch dress. I am going to be a bear. Grrr. She spells the last part in letters, grey eyes so bright. Lyanna is all Sandor, though the other Mormonts they know are also dark-haired. For a man born in the Westerlands, Clegane is very Northern-looking, but then his mother came from White Harbour.

“Daddy is silly, because we both know he’s the most handsome man in Winterfell.” Beric gently flirts, because that’s what he does. He gently flirts with most people, and some inanimate objects, hence being known as that odd ginger southron with the really bloody nice cottage.

“Fuck off, you bastard.” But Sandor smiles, a glimmer of teeth, a faint redness to his unscarred side.

Sansa says they have a bromance.

Beric agrees.

In the end he doesn’t need to go and beg an almost seven year old for help. Beric drags on black jeans, a black dress shirt from his banking days, digs out his ceremonial sword and the eyepatch from when he got shot in the head, ties his hair back, and goes mad with a make up pallette from when he did amateur dramatics in military academy.

Sandor Lyanna wants a photo of what you’re wearing. Sending you one of her. Fuck. I’m not. Sansa will. Can’t work this bastard phone.

Sansa, who is more technologically aware than her fiance, does and Lyanna’s picture makes his heart tug deep in his chest. Little furry round ears, and an Ewok costume that’s been cunningly resewn by the even more cunning Sansa into a perfect little bear outfit. They’ve even painted a cute black nose and whiskers on her, and she is the most adorable child that Beric’s ever seen in his entire damned life.

He takes a quick mirror selfie of his zombie pirate effort, sends it off, and decants sweets into various bowls. Perhaps there are a few too many, but Beric will polish off the rest if any are left over.

Eight thirty, and the madness finally dies down. Any hope of leftover chocolate goes by the wayside as Beric makes an emergency shop run twice, and he’s still almost out of treats. At one point he began giving out his prized gingerbread men, to the delight of everyone, but now he’s down to a handful of Haribo packets, one gingerbread man, and three fun sized Mars Bars.

The door goes.

Beric opens it.

“I am the Zombie Pirate of Winterfell, and those who knock on my do-”

A very short and very pale man stares at him balefully.

“Oh. Hello. I thought-”“Domeric, for fuck’s sake. Say it.”

“…scary,” whimpers a tiny voice. Beric looks down even more. The pale man, and to be honest he’s never seen anyone dressed in so much black leather since that night at military academy, holds the hand of a very small child. Not that he’s particularly young, the boy, but Beric, presuming that the short leather wearing and quite sexy - he’s quite sexy with that intense pale-eyed glare and all that leather, that square-jawed face and stocky build - man is the child’s Dad, he’s not surprised that the height runs in the family.

“He’s a bloke who’s dressed up. I could kill him easily. He’s not scary.”“So tall,” the child squeaks, pressing closer to his unfairly well built and attractive Dad.

“I’d kneecap him, kick him in the balls, then rip his heart out if he tried anything,” the man says easily enough. “We can do flaying lessons on his corpse.” A pause, then the hand that isn’t being clutched at by a terrified five year old reaches out and caresses the pommel of Beric’s sword. “Real?”“Yes.”“Nice. Thought it was some stage shit, but that’s a passing-out sword.” Sexy Daddy squints - he isn’t dressed up, because to be perfectly frank he’s the sort of person who is quite terrifying to the majority - and taps the enamelling. “Sandhurst?”“For my sins. I’m Beric.”

“Ramsay.”Oh. That Ramsay.

Aware that he shouldn’t be thinking about the legendary local psychopath naked, Beric hunkers before Domeric, smiles, and holds out the bowl of sweets. “Your Dad is very sc-”“He’s not my Daddy. He’s my big brother!” Reducing the massive height difference seems to have helped the child’s confidence a little, though he still crams tight to Ramsay’s side. He’s dressed as Darth Vader, but the helmet dangles around his neck on a piece of cord.

Sexy Brother snickers at the awkwardness.

“If you’re Darth Vader, who is Ramsay?”Domeric glances up the not so considerable distance between himself and his brother. “He’s scary. He doesn’t need to dress up. Everyone’s scared of him. He’s cool!” Adoration radiates from the boy, boring into Ramsay, who shifts his weight in an oddly bashful gesture.“One day you’ll be as terrifying as me, Dom, and we’ll murder our way through the galaxy. You with a lightsabre and me with a flaying knife.”

Beric puts handfuls of sweets into the helmet, which acts as a bag, contemplates the last of the gingerbread men and then offers it up to Ramsay. The young man takes it, bites the head off with a murmur of pleasure; those pale eyes half-close and he licks crumbs off his frankly quite disturbingly nice lips.

“What d’you say, Dom?”

“Thank you. May the Force be with you. Our Blades Are Sharp.”

A nod, a gleaming evil sort of pride in Ramsay’s weird eyes, before he grins as sharp and white as any slavering hellhound. “Good look on you, by the way.”“Zombie?” They’re flirting. This is flirting. This isn’t just one-way between him and a random friend or colleague, but with someone actually responding.

“On your knees.”

Ten o’clock comes, and the doorstep has been quiet for the last hour. Unbuckling the sword, taking off the eyepatch, Beric settles down to have a beer and watch some random comedy panel show he’s taped off the telly weeks before but never got round to viewing. He’s almost at the first set of adverts when the doorbell goes.

“Bugger.”

He’s out of everything that might be construed as a treat in the entire house. Dammit.

“I am the evil Winterfell Zombie pi-”

Ramsay pretty much comes up to his nipples given the height difference and the few inches between the interior of the house and the outside ground level.

“Aren’t you going to let me in?”

“Is this like in Dany the Grumpkin Slayer, and if I willingly invite you into my house I’ll end up sucked and drained?”

Square fingers slide from thigh to throat, wrapping lightly around Beric’s neck. “Other way around, bitch, but I’m sure you’ll love it.”

The first kiss, while they’re frantically trying to strip off and Ramsay gets overexcited about the sheer scale of Beric’s scars, body, and everything else, tastes of gingerbread, beer, and something else that can’t quite be explained but is utterly, devastatingly, addictive.

The small boy with the pale eyes sits next to the small girl with the long dark hair and the forest green fingerless gloves. They’re on their bench in the playground, under the shelter. The snow drifts gently through the air, and it’s so pretty. January snow is the prettiest, definitely! They never have snow days here, because everyone is used to the snow. Later he and Lyanna are going to make a snowman with Sandor and Sansa, and Domeric’s going to have something to eat there, and then Mum’s going to come and get him, and then Ramsay’s taking him to see the new Star Wars film again because they both like it. Darth Vader is in it, and he loves Darth Vader, but Ramsay prefers Emperor Palpatine because he’s evil.

Ramsay likes evil things. Sometimes though, when no one’s around, he’ll sit and help Domeric with his schoolwork, or play, so even though everyone thinks his brother is really frightening, he can be nice. He’s just sworn to secrecy that he’s not allowed to tell anyone, on pain of flaying.

Domeric thinks Lyanna is so cool. Not cool like Ramsay, but not scary like him. She’s a bit scary because she can be grumpy like her Dad, and he’s so tall! Lyanna’s little, like him, and he likes that. She’s a year older, and is going up to big school next year, and he’ll miss her so much.

“Ramsay has a boyfriend, like Sandor has Sansa,” he says. He makes sure Lyanna can see his mouth, and understand, because he’s not good at signing yet. When they get married, when they’re bigger, he’s going to make sure he can talk to her with his hands. “He’s nice. He’s the nice man from the library, with the red hair.”

Beric is really nice. He is my friend.

The two children smile at how weird grown ups are, and Domeric, who is far more his mother’s child than his father’s, blushes. Mum blushes a lot, especially when Dad is near. Everyone says his parents are in love, and it’s so sad they can’t have another child as they’ve only got him, but they’ve got Ramsay, too! He isn’t Mum’s child, because Ramsay’s older than her, but she looks after him like he is. When Ramsay was younger, apparently he was not very nice, and had to go and live in a special school for quite a long time so he got better, but Mum said he should come home when she married Dad, and so he did.

Mum loves Ramsay, but sometimes she’s scared of him. Everyone is, apart from Domeric and Beric - even Dad! Beric makes sure Ramsay takes his tablets, and keeps him calm. They’re talking about moving into that nice house Beric lives in, and Domeric’s scared that he’ll miss his brother, but Beric told him that there will be a room for him, if he’d like to go for sleep overs, and they can paint it in whatever colour Dom wants, so he’s said yellow, because it reminds him of Mum, and sunshine, and daffodils, and spring.

Are they going to get married? Like Daddy and Sansa?

“Beric would look silly in a dress!”

He giggles, and Lyanna clamps her hands over her mouth, eyes dancing with amusement.

“When we’re big enough, can we get married? It’ll be fun! We can have a pet bear, and a dog, and we can eat loads of chocolate when we want, and go to sleep when we want, and watch telly all the time.”

Lyanna tilts her head, looking very much like her Dad, and then grins, nodding.

[theconservativebrief]

The boy meets the girl, just like he always does. He falls in love with her, and after a brief and frenzied courtship, she falls in love with him too. There are setbacks and hardships, but the story is headed where you expect: toward bliss. Toward an easy, uncomplicated love. Toward marriage and family, even.

This is the framework for a million, million stories, throughout human history. It is also the framework for Lifetime’s new drama You, based on the novel by Caroline Kepnes and adapted for TV by Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti. The brilliance of You (my favorite new series of the fall) comes from how relentlessly it grounds you, the viewer, in the age-old story you already know, in order to tell you a different but related one that has been happening all around you for ages, maybe without you even noticing it.

The boy who meets the girl in You is Joe, played by Penn Badgley; the girl is Beck, played by Elizabeth Lail. And even their casting is primed to help you understand what the show is attempting to subvert. Badgley is well-known to TV fans for his six seasons on Gossip Girl (his character Dan was eventually revealed, believe it or not, to be the titular character). Lail, meanwhile, isn’t exactly a newcomer — she had a stint on Once Upon a Time — but she’s not the face you recognize in the cast, not the person Lifetime built the ad campaign around.

The resulting disparity in who we instinctively trust, as viewers, is part of what makes You so devilish and terrific. Joe reveals himself (to the audience, at least) as a stalker at his earliest opportunity, first invading Beck’s life to find out what she wants in a guy and then turning himself into that very guy. And if he can slowly isolate her from the rest of her support network at the same time, well, that too could serve his purpose.

Again and again, You demonstrates the monstrousness of Joe’s reasonable nature. He cannot understand Beck as anything other than an adjunct to his story, because stories where men are the focus and women mostly exist to support them are the stories he’s been told his whole life. And because You situates us firmly in Joe’s point of view, via narration and other tricks, it leaves us no real exit from that perspective.

Joe wants so badly to make Beck’s life perfect and to make himself perfect for her that he fails to recognize that even her bad choices are her choices, her questionable taste is her taste, her two-faced friends are still her friends. He tries to rob her of the luxury of making her own mistakes, of the ability to have a story that is not his.

By the time we finally get to see this story through Beck’s point of view, we’re so desperate to escape Joe’s toxicity that it’s almost a relief — but we can still feel his poisonous attraction all the same. He’s right there, and he smiles so kindly. What could go wrong?

I’ve thought about Joe a lot these past few weeks.

The angry behavior of Les Moonves (left) and Brett Kavanaugh made headlines over the last several weeks. Getty Images

Outwardly, former CBS head Les Moonves and newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh don’t have all that much in common. Kavanaugh is a prep school alumnus and an Ivy Leaguer and a die-hard conservative jurist. Moonves attended the small Pennsylvania college Bucknell University and later became a massively powerful entertainment executive who occasionally gave money to Democratic political candidates. They operated in entirely different worlds, at least superficially.

But what links Kavanaugh and Moonves, for me, is their belligerence, their obvious inability to understand what it means that others have accused them of terrible things. The accusations of sexual misconduct leveled against Kavanaugh have been national news for the past several weeks, while those made against Moonves are already slipping into our collective memories. But the acts that men both have been accused of — and which both men have roundly denied — involve women and sexual misconduct and an abuse of privilege and power. This is America, 2018. You already know the rest of the story.

But I’m not here to adjudicate what these men might have done all those years ago. Instead, what I’m interested in is the similar fury that both men displayed upon having to deal with an adversity they hadn’t expected. Moonves angrily denounced the investigations into him, saying that the numerous accusations of sexual misconduct against him, reported in the pages of the New Yorker, simply didn’t happen. Kavanaugh effectively threw a temper tantrum in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as the whole country watched.

Both men were used to thinking of themselves as protagonists, not just of their own stories but of the stories involving everyone else they came in contact with. They had such tremendous power and privilege that they could ruin lives in a fit of pique — and they were part of entire systems that were set up not only to protect them by default, but to reward them for having done it.

This inability of rich, usually white, usually straight men to see that there are stories beyond their own has been at the center of the #MeToo movement more broadly. Rather than seeing the world as a series of interlocking tales that occasionally feature them in a major role but mostly feature them as extras (if at all), they are primed to see it as a series of stories about them, moving forward through their lives, attaining their goals, crushing those who would oppose them. #MeToo has complicated that narrative for at least some men, but one needs only to read news reports of Louis C.K.’s comeback standup sets to understand that many of these figures will come to see the revelation of their misconduct as a minor adversity to overcome, not something that shattered their entire lives.

Straight white men in America are taught that they are the protagonist of the story from birth. Their number includes me — I’ve always intuitively understood myself as the protagonist too. And this mindset has only become more ingrained in the past 20 years. Under Moonves, CBS became America’s most powerful network, but also went from broadcasting shows like Murphy Brown and Designing Women to mostly being a place where women were corpses, whose murders were solved largely by steely, determined men, with occasional help from quippy female sidekicks.

What is the fallout of this? What does it mean to have an entire class of people, already clothed in power and privilege, understand themselves primarily as the center of every story? How much of the turmoil of the past 10 years can be understood through this lens — from men who get furious at the thought of having women generals in their video games to a president who openly brags about committing sexual assault?

We have problems with power and privilege in America, 2018 — that’s to be sure. But we also have problems with our protagonists.

The cast of Criminal Minds awaits its summer TCA press tour session in 2005. Frederick Brown/Getty Images

In July 2005, journalists who attended the Television Critics Association summer press tour had one major, pressing question for the producers of that year’s new fall dramas: What was with all the violence against women?

It was an odd moment for TV drama, split between three major movements. The first, represented by ABC’s Lost and Desperate Housewives (which were then at the end of their first seasons), suggested that what viewers wanted were buzzy serialized shows about colorful characters in unusual situations. The second, represented by pretty much everything on CBS at the time, suggested that viewers wanted grim, “realistic” crime dramas. And the third, represented by HBO’s The Sopranos and FX’s The Shield, suggested that viewers wanted dark stories about antiheroes who indulged viewers’ vicarious appetites for horrible deeds performed with ruthless efficiency.

None of these trends was the “correct” one; TV audiences have always wanted shows that break new ground, but not too much of it. Yet of the three, the one that broadcast networks could most easily grasp was the one that suggested gritty crime procedurals, often with violence directed toward women, was what viewers were most drawn to. And looking at the hits of the era — which included the CSI franchise and Law & Order: SVU (still on the air today) — it’s pretty easy to see why they drew that conclusion.

Things came to a head at the press tour, however, as multiple reporters kept asking why so many of the networks’ new shows featured graphic scenes of women being tortured and abused, often right alongside the objectification of nubile bodies. The worst offender was Fox’s Killer Instinct, which featured a woman being paralyzed by spider poison and then raped by an intruder before the poison finally killed her. The show was ultimately canceled after just nine episodes.

But another new show that critics pointed to at that 2005 press tour as an example of this dark trend is still on the air today, and entering its 14th season: CBS’s Criminal Minds, whose pilot saw a woman get abducted and imprisoned in a cage, then raped and murdered. Journalists wanted to know: Why?

In response, the show’s producers and creator Jeff Davis mostly hemmed and hawed about how the story was based on a real case, and how the most horrifying thing viewers actually saw in the episode involved the woman’s fingernails being clipped. But instead of meaningfully answering the question, executive producer Mark Gordon offered a sarcastic quip that felt like an irritating brush-off in 2005 and feels slightly more telling today.

“There was actually a mandate from the network saying we want only shows that perpetrate violence against women. We’re just trying to get on the air. We’re doing the best we can,” Gordon snarked at the press conference. (Reporters pushed back on his comment, saying the topic wasn’t a joke to them, but Gordon’s response was the best anyone was going to get.)

I’m not dredging up this old quote this to attack Gordon. He’s just one of those producers who looks at what’s popular and develops programming accordingly. But I do think it’s notable that Criminal Minds aired on a network built by Les Moonves, who saw how popular CSI became and then filled his lineup with near carbon copies, consistently pushing the darkness and violence — especially against women — to further and further limits.

Viewers eventually got tired of the darkest of these shows, gravitating instead to slightly lighter fare like NCIS. But even then, popular CBS series like Blue Bloods were advancing a stalwart belief in the primacy and supremacy of white cops when it came to matters of police brutality, as Laura Hudson (now of Vox sister site The Verge) pointed out at Slate in 2014. And it wasn’t as if NCIS was free of stories that positioned women primarily as victims, and where at best, a woman could be the second or third lead, backing up a stoic, stalwart man who was brave and bold enough to stare into the face of darkness until it blinked.

How much of this programming was driven by what viewers wanted to watch in the wake of 9/11, when television took a darker turn in general? And how much of it was driven by what executives like Moonves cynically believed the audience wanted?

To be fair, there’s a cyclical element here — CSI was a surprise hit, after all, and surprise hits almost always get copied across the dial. But to become a surprise hit, you first have to make it to the air. And over the past 20 years, no network has had a worse record of telling stories centered on characters who aren’t straight white men than CBS, a trend the network has only finally broken this fall. What does it say about a culture when by far its most popular television network is dominated by shows where women serve primarily as support systems, quirky comic relief, and victims?

The specter of Tony Soprano looms large. HBO

All of the above is an indictment of how much of America’s recent pop culture has been rooted in the behavior of toxic men. Whether you want to point to the numerous Oscar-winning movies produced by Harvey Weinstein, or the TV series that Les Moonves greenlit, or the toxic attitudes toward women that Kevin Spacey made seem almost reasonable in American Beauty, you’ll find ample evidence that it’s a prevailing theme.

But it’s not like American culture’s fascination with toxic men is new. Indeed, it dates back to the inception of the nation, though it really took root in the 20th century and later. Many of our finest novels are about white male asshole protagonists, and most of the great films of the 1970s — often thought of as the single best decade for American moviemaking — are about troubled white men in tight spots, who fight their way out of those spots.

Some of those films are about the complicated relationship of assorted white ethnic groups to the larger American mainstream (The Godfather being the most obvious example), while others are notably troubled by their male characters’ dark and violent tendencies (Taxi Driver, for instance). But taken together, they presented an unmistakable trend toward grim violence being more “realistic.”

Even in cases where they offered nuanced takes on these tricky topics, it’s not as though they haven’t been stripped of context and filtered throughout the culture as something else entirely. Think, for instance, of how the one thing most people know about Taxi Driver is the “You talking to me?” scene, which is presented as a kind of lonely ritual in the film itself and has mostly become something vaguely “cool” since being removed of its context by the culture at large. (Critic Amy Nicholson and Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader reflected on the ways that film has warped and changed in this 2018 interview.)

But what I keep coming back to again and again as I think about what our most popular art says about our culture is TV’s antihero era, which began in earnest with 1999’s The Sopranos. It featured lots and lots of stories of white guys who took what they wanted, at any cost, with very little thought for how others might react to their all-consuming appetites.

These series are among the best in TV history. They include shows like The Sopranos and The Shield and Breaking Bad and Mad Men. They marked a shift in the cultural conversation, where TV came to occupy the prestigious position that film had once enjoyed, where television seemed to have surpassed movies in its ability to tell compelling stories aimed at adults. My life as a TV viewer would be vastly poorer if they didn’t exist.

And yet since the election of President Donald Trump, I can’t look at them without thinking of him.

This is an incredibly difficult topic to discuss, because of course The Sopranos didn’t create Donald Trump any more than Criminal Minds did. The HBO series, rich and evocative, was always at least partially about how much Tony Soprano’s appetites and behaviors were causing the ruination of his very soul.

The best antihero dramas of the early 2000s, like the best great films of the ’70s, were cautionary tales, deeply moral stories about how, in some ways, the men at the center of them stood in for an America — or at least a white male America — that couldn’t stop gobbling up everything it saw. The shows suggested, always, that even if their protagonists didn’t get their comeuppance onscreen, it was coming, unless they could change their ways. Only a handful of those protagonists, most notably Mad Men’s Don Draper, eventually came close to doing so.

But even now, these shows leave open the question of just how we’re supposed to grapple with the idea that many viewers will always see them as instruction manuals, or as validation of dangerous ideals. What are the takeaways for an audience that doesn’t want to dig into the moral and ethical nuance of The Sopranos and just wants to see Tony whack more enemies, or that believes Skyler White is the true villain of Breaking Bad?

This divide is not unique to our era — it’s as old as any art that depicts protagonists who don’t always do the right thing, which is to say it’s as old as fiction itself. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’ve capped an era full of white male antihero protagonists with a president who feels like he might as well be the main character of an antihero drama in some other universe, where viewers thrill at how he always dances one step ahead of the forces that would bring him down, cheered on by toadies and sycophants who eagerly abandon principle in the face of finally grasping power.

This is also a delicate dynamic to talk about because the surest path toward boring, bland art is to insist that it be morally, ethically, socially, and politically palatable. We need shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad to help us ponder the darkness within humanity, and within ourselves as individuals. To insist that art conform to some code of righteousness is a shortcut to making art that’s not worth thinking about.

Plus, I should note that as a critic, I’m part of a community that has been hugely responsible for the rise of white male antihero dramas — praising them to excess, hailing them as bold storytelling, building up an idea that a “good” TV show too often features a damaged guy who makes tough, dark choices and somehow escapes the consequences.

But at the same time, there’s been a bland sameness to so many of these shows for a decade now. Few of them still actively try to tell stories about what it means to give in to the darkness, to embrace the most selfish aspects of one’s inner being at the expense of others. And yet they keep getting made, and some of them even become minor hits (like Showtime’s Ray Donovan).

They continue to code what’s desirable in life as accumulating more things, more money, more enemies ruined, rather than trying to build something sustainable. They are stories of late capitalism — of a nation, an economic system, and a world unmoored. They reflect our culture’s shriveled soul, sure, but in consuming them, we also start to reflect them. They tell us who the protagonists are, and we’re only too happy to accept what they say, even when those protagonists keep wrecking everything.

When HBO picked up The Sopranos in 1997, it chose between that series and another, created by My So-Called Life creator Winnie Holzman, that centered on a woman business executive (as recounted in Alan Sepinwall’s history of the era, The Revolution Was Televised). And I note that here because the major executive in charge of making the final call on that decision was Chris Albrecht, now of Starz, who exited HBO in 2007.

He was asked to resign from the company after he was arrested for domestic violence.

Better Call Saul might show a better way forward. AMC

I’m not connecting these dots to suggest that any of our current culture is a conscious creation on the part of the TV industry, or pop culture, or the country. I’m also not suggesting that you should stop enjoying The Sopranos or Criminal Minds or any other dark dramas. (If I were saying that, I’d be a hypocrite; the complete series Blu-ray of The Sopranos is a centerpiece of my personal collection.)

What I am suggesting is that advocating for representation on TV and in films is not merely about painting an accurate, inclusive picture of the world we live in. Yes, we need more women antiheroes, more antiheroes of color, and so on — but we also need to think about how the stories we tell create long grooves in our culture, grooves that eventually crystallize into reflexive beliefs about who gets to be the protagonist and how they go about being that protagonist.

When the sorts of prestige TV shows and movies celebrated in our culture are, 99 times out of 100, stories of white male protagonists and accumulation, rather than stories of more varied protagonists and connection, it’s no great effort to see how they might set us on a path toward living those same stories ourselves.

The situation is not hopeless. Cheesy as it is, NBC’s This Is Us is a huge hit, and it’s all about building connections. The same goes for something like the 2016 Best Picture winner Moonlight, a film about what happens when you let the tough facade slip just a little to embrace the vulnerability underneath. Ditto for TV shows as disparate as AMC’s Better Call Saul, NBC’s The Good Place, and AMC’s The Terror.

And through its own protagonist, Lifetime’s You forces the audience to question why the stories we tell so often center on the viewpoints they position as the most important ones. Joe is both an avatar for our era and someone his TV show actively questions, over and over again, in its text and in its subtext. His mere existence forces viewers to rethink everything from the heroes of romantic comedies to the frequent depiction of women as helpless victims.

But we also have to ask why we aren’t telling more stories that don’t reflect this value system, that actively challenge capitalist greed, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, and other prejudices without becoming preachy and didactic. What would it look like to tackle these systems forthrightly, rather than with a sidelong wink? What would be the effect of presenting reality not as it is but as how it could be?

Utopias are always harder to tell stories about than dystopias, because dystopias can be fought against while utopias invite us to sink into their comforting excesses. But we’ve paid so much attention to stories where the greatest enemy is ourselves that it’s time to step beyond that framework, and to write new stories where the greatest enemy is a long history of systems designed to let those who have all the power maintain it at all costs.

As a critic and as a storyteller, I don’t pretend to know the answers, but these questions are worth struggling with, now and on into the future. If we’re going to make the world a better place, we have to imagine what that better place looks like. We have to imagine what it looks like when systems crumble, when connections and community come first, when we’re all aware that anybody, at any time, is the protagonist of their own story, not just riding alongside our own.

Original Source -> The Protagonists

via The Conservative Brief

[wulfsark]

On Vicariousness

Vicarious; adjective, experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person.

"this catalogue brings vicarious pleasure in luxury living"

               Vicarious, to experience something through someone else. Second hand experience of a sort, originally referring to the act of the Christ in Christian mythos to mean ‘substitute’, and taken from our clergical term ‘vicar’ (a deputy replacing a higher clerk) and the latin ‘vic’, to mean change or turn.

               When you watch sports, you’re experiencing sports vicariously.

               When you watch porn, you’re experiencing sex vicariously.

               When you play violent games, you’re experiencing violence vicariously.

               All of these things characterised in their stimulation by being risky and difficult; in a word ‘scary’. We circumvent the terror of risk and gambles and real loss by substituting ourselves for some man or woman on a screen or in a stadium a thousand miles from us. Through their transcendence and ecstasy we exude some filtered form of their pleasure, from the howling hordes in pubs cheering each goal to the blank stare of a teenager at their phone to the false testosterone rush of a man experiencing the sorrow of the battle of Mogadishu. We’re perfectly safe, projecting our experience onto some abstract experience without context that we truly desire to experience but are kept from by whatever madness life has thrust upon us.

               People are addicted to vicar, addicted to the low risk regular hit of victory and achievement without the risk of getting there themselves. We’re surrounded by children addicted to games, unable to understand how to deal with loss or damage or pain. We as a culture are spoon fed little doses of dopamine by our surrounding screens, kept docile and contented by our alignments to sports teams, having violence bred out of us by easy, victimless killing and becoming apathetic and asexual whilst blowing our loads over a plastic icon from Hollywood. The idea of experiencing things directly and actively experiencing things that have risk or pain involved is being removed from us.

               If you need examples we need look no further than the domesticated middle class, glued to fifty inch televisions hooked up to the latest TV streaming so they can travel, to the latest games console to hone their self defence, and to pornhub so they can see their significant other. Their children grow up with sedentary and confused parents, learning morals through soap operas and comedy through the canned laughter of the latest sitcom. Obesity is everywhere, children are being prescribed therapists for trying to learn how to act in moral ways and violence is universally warded against and understood only as a taboo relegated to those ‘who must’.

               Slowly and systematically we as a culture or species are forgetting how to live in the real world.

               In the past those civilisations that once great and strong became fat and distended as the difficulty and required skill of their lives diminished slowly moved away from warrior thought and transcendent strife, toward appreciating pleasures of the flesh and vicious politics more than the values that made their tribe great in the first place. Other tribes, forced to harsh living by the ascendance of the now overfat culture would have been fighting for survival, hard times making the members strong and powerful individuals to carve out their paths amongst the unwanted land of the area. To these smaller, ruder tribes uncultured in fine wines and sedentary lifestyles we have seen even roman marble trodden under the sole of a coarsely made, but functional boot.

               To throw off the shackles of forced docility I predict will be the toughest part of any man returning to the path of his ancestors from this vast desert we have wandered into of late. For modern men to turn from the glossy covers and bright lights back to the forest and wood axe seems impossible, and yet many of us are characterised and admired purely for our forsaking of this vicarious life.

               No progress can be made in ourselves through the deeds of another. In order to improve ourselves, our standing, our bodies, our intelligence, our wisdom, our learning (I could go on) we must endure the risk and pain and strife ourselves. Without sacrifice to ourselves in the form of comfort, safety and happiness we cannot reap the rewards that we seek. It doesn’t take long in the winter to realise that watching your neighbour chop firewood does not heat our own homes.

               In the Havamal we see Odin hang himself from the tree of knowledge and pierce himself with his own spear in order to learn how to know the runes; representing the primordial truths. To many this may seem like nonsense, why would we stab ourselves to learn to read? But the symbolism is clear. Odin hangs himself from the tree, surrendering himself, removing his ego in his attempt to learn. He pierces himself with his own weapon, sacrificing himself. In the next part we see the verse ‘I trow I hung on that windy Tree, nine whole days and nights, stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin, myself to mine own self given, high on that Tree of which none hath heard, from what roots it rises to heaven.’ He has sacrificed himself to himself. He suffered for himself.

               He sacrificed, caused himself pain and hardship alone, refusing food and water, that he might learn more about the way the world works. When we learn we are and must do the same, we sacrifice our old understanding, our time and our old safety of assumption in order to learn greater truths beyond the frail and failing body of thought we had before. We must slay our own misconceptions, weaknesses, pains, by striking inward with the same weapons we solve outward problems.

               Through rejection of the vicarious and the hollow we can regain some of the nobility that we have lost in this age of mass nonsense.

               To quote from Paul Waggener; ‘We live in an age of constant distraction- the thousand lights of illusion that never turn off, all vying and competing for our attention, everything infinitely more convenient and “now” and pleasurable than everything else. Entertainment is a god of the modern world and so is Ease, sometimes called Luxury or Comfort – that insidious convenience of everything “on tap.”’

               The more I tear from these feeds and cables feeding my domesticated brain with the sludge of meaninglessness the more strength I find in my limbs to tear from the remaining connections. Each conduit of easy living and contentment I find truly to be chains upon their removal. Through hardship and self sacrifice we can -and should- become more. We can live real lives, experience the rush of a fight, experience the love of a beautiful woman, experience the triumph of understanding something previously nonsensical to you.

               Vicarious pleasure is a trap.

               We must reverse the conditioning of our brains to be satisfied with watching others take the prizes we truly wish for ourselves.

               Dylan

[iwannabearomancewriter]

Chapter 1:

Five years later…

“Here he comes!” I hear frantic whispers from outside my sad excuse of an office behind my circulation desk. I rolled my eyes to myself. I can hear all of the yoga pant wearing stay at home moms shuffling over to the window that faces the park and the playground. I chuckle remembering one of the younger volunteers sharing a joke with me last week about how the yoga pants were sad because they'd never be used for their intended purpose. I am wearing my most professional librarIan apparel of black pants, form-fitting white button down with black cardigan, and sensible black Mary Janes. Yes, it was the typical uniform of the mourning, but I wore it with style. I had lost my married weight over the years, so I now wear fitted women's shirts with pride. I pushed the tips of my shocking red bangs off my face for what seemed like the thousandth time today. In a moment of weakness last year, I decided to chop off my flowing waist-length locks only to chicken out after the stylist slashed only my bangs. So, now instead of looking classic and stylish, I looked like a recovering lobotomy patient. This afternoon I am hiding in my office trying to avoid the well-meaning moms who feel the need to find me my next husband. I've told them I will never remarry, but they think if I just meet the “right one” I’ll change my mind. I haven't told my library moms with their 2.5 kids about my gay ex-husband, so they think my attitude is unjustified. Ha! As if. My ninja skills are severely lacking because I can see through the window that someone has discovered my super secret hiding place. My assistant leans in the doorway with the biggest grin on his face.

“No playground for His Hotness today, Olivia! He's got a bag on his shoulder and he's headed this way!” Mark has a glimmer in his eye. He’s drunk the soccer mom, delusion-inducing Kool-Aid right along with the rest of them. These people think a middle aged librarian with no man and no prospects needs saving. Not bloody likely. I'm not British, I just like that phrase.

“Ladies... And gentleman.” I clear my throat to give all of the moms a chance to face me. Every week. It's like after they gave birth their hormones could not be stopped by logic or librarians. “It appears as if our bi-weekly entertainment is heading our way. Quickly return to your seats and buckle your smirks and sighs until the DILF has left the premises.” I kid you not, this spectacle I am witnessing happens twice a week. Mr. Hot Dad brings his daughter to the park twice a week. Of those two days, one of them includes a special visit to the public library to exchange his daughter’s books. The moms and Mark make quick work of looking like they weren't totally drooling over the man-candy now walking through the door. Their conversations start in the middle of sentences like they’ve been talking his entire time. Damn. They are good! In walks a man sent from the gods of some Latin country where men are steeped in the fine art of machismo… In a good way. Manliness just envelops him. You get too close, you could burn right through your panties. Papí struts back to the children’s section looking straight at me with an expression on his face that could be interpreted as “I am the man of your wettest dreams” or “Did I leave the iron on?”. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that this incredible specimen of man-candy does not iron.

I try to look as cool and calm as possible. I hate having to talk to the man when all of the hens in the henhouse are listening and watching. I and my total awkwardness around this man are their favorite form of entertainment.

Don't get me wrong, I love these ladies and their kids. Most of them are wealthy families who, upon discovering the Little Missus would be bringing forth their progeny, made sure to read every parenting book. Good, upper middle-class, hard working families who want to give their kids a head start in life. Their fervor for their children drives them to teach little Gertrude how to read by the age of three. Their children are smart, hardworking, and well rounded by all of their books and extracurriculars. Plus, I love my regulars. My stay-at-home moms who are just looking for something to fill the time until their darlings are ready to be driven to soccer, swimming, gymnastics, chess club; you get the idea. But through me they get to live vicariously. And they think this is a good thing! Little do they really know.

Forget that I'm a professional with an advanced degree attempting to teach their kids to have a lifelong love of reading. Forget that I've spent the past five years getting divorced, getting my Masters, and getting a real job and a comfortable enough existence after my husband left me… For Steve. God. Can this be over now? They all think this married guy is great practice for getting my confidence back. I just can't bring myself to tell them that the good lovin’ days are gone. Or more accurately, never were to begin with.

“Excuse me? Are you the librarian?” the extra tall panty melter with the broad shoulders and the hella deep baritone asks assertively.

I straighten my shoulders and walk out of my office with a forced smile on my face. I extend my hand politely, “Olivia Hastings. Yes, I'm the librarian.” I look him in the eye trying to convey that this is my domain and you will not fuck with me, but as soon as our eyes meet, that's when time stops. Happens. Every. Single. Time.

His eyes. I am such a sucker for brown eyes, but these are such a deep brown that I can't tell where his irises stop and pupils begin. I have never seen such lush eyes in my life. His eyelashes are so long that women across the planet are crying at the unfairness of it all.

He’s still shaking my hand... I think.

Is it warm in here? Or have I finally entered menopause? Sure I'm only thirty nine, but it could happen. It ain't like I'm getting any younger.

The heat radiating from my reproductive organs has been kick started after at least five years of neglect. Definitely not menopause. Good to know.

I drop my hand like it's on fire. On fire from the hotness standing in front of me. Gah! Get it together Olivia! He's a dad. He's a married dad! Dad, dad, dad, dad… DAD!

I lower my eyes to floor hoping to all things holy that he did not just hear my internal dialogue.

“Sebastian Arroyo. Pleasure to meet you.” I can almost hear a faint smile along with a very faint accent in his voice. Dios mio! Mr. Hot Dad shall henceforth be known as Señor Papí Calienté. Spicy! No. Picanté! Muy bien. Yep, he heard you. Stop it.

I look up at him again attempting a genuine smile, and I can feel my skin blush from the top of my head all the way to my girly parts. And when redheads blush? There's no hiding it. Nope. He knows exactly what I'm thinking or he's the most clueless DILF in North America. I see a mirthful light dance in his darkest gaze. I lower my eyes to the floor again.

“Is there something I can do for you, sir?” Or to you? Stop now!

“Yes. Mrs. Hastings…”

“Ms.” That wasn't obvious or anything. I cough to clear my head more than my throat. “Ms. Hastings.”

“My apologies. Ms. Hastings” he tilts his head forward just a bit, like he’s bowing his apologies. Nice. “I just finished talking to my daughter, and she reported to me that she has lost one of the books we borrowed months ago,” he states.

Oh yes. His daughter, Alexis. That poor girl. She loses everything she touches. With a dad that well put together, you'd think some of that Type A would have rubbed off on her, but, alas, no. Clueless would be a polite term for Alexis. And mom? She brings little Alexis by the library, too. However, she doesn't pay nearly as much attention to her daughter as Señor Papí does. Plus, the little missus might have been pretty once, but now there's so much plastic involved in her features, it's hard to tell what is her classic beauty and what is manufactured tripe. And you know that it's poisoned her brain as well. Ditzy as the day is long. What he sees in that god-awful woman I can only guess. And my guess? Papi here fell in love with whatever freaky shit she did with that pussy, and girlfriend fell in love with his cash. A marriage made in heaven. Insert eye roll here.

“Yes. I know Alexis,” I smile as sincerely as possible and direct my gaze to his ear. “Very sweet girl. I love her to pieces. But, she does have quite a difficult time keeping track of her library books,” and her brain.

Olivia, behave. It’s not like you're anyone to talk. How many times have you lost your keys today? Four and it’s not even noon. Pot? Meet kettle.

I attempt to look him in the eye again, but I just can't seem to do it. The stupid things flitting across my thoughts will blurt out if I don't keep my wits about me. The brief look I get of his face has me quickly turning away from him. Oh, look! My computer! I can use that for looking up books… And… Stuff. Go there, Olivia. The computer is your friend.

Mr. Arroyo follows me to my desk and speaks again, “Yes. This past year has been difficult for Alexis. Her mother and I,” he looks around the library as if to make sure he's not overheard. “We separated back in January. She has taken it very hard. Also, the custody arrangement is not ideal. I am not there to help her stay organized, and her mother, how can I say politely?… The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Holy. Shit. Señor Calienté is Señor divorciado Calienté! So he does see that his ex-wife is a plasticized ho. I gain a little respect for him in that moment, and I do a little dance inside my head. Right, Olivia. Like you've got a shot with this guy. The last man who got a piece of that is gay, remember, sexy lady? Okay, it's not like you turned him gay, that's not how it works and you know it. Still. You have less than a zero percent shot with Papi here, so keep it real, babe. Now, act like you know your business, and let the nice man-candy go on his merry way.

Reality throat fucks dicks in hell.

“Well, looking at her record, I can see that the book she lost is only a $4.00 paperback. I'm happy to just waive the cost, now that I know what's going on at home,” I reply with as much concern, gravitas, and not-glee in my voice as I can muster.

“Oh, no. That is not acceptable,” Sebastian replies forcefully. My eyes drift to the floor again. Would you look at that awesome industrial carpet? Oooh! A dime! I bend over to pick it up from the floor, and now I have something else to keep my attention. Score.

“Of course I will pay for the book,” Mi Papí continues. “I just wanted to make you aware of Alexis’s predicament. Divorce is hardest on the children, wouldn't you agree, Ms. Hastings?” He lowers his head to try to look into my eyes again, and his tone holds something I can't put my finger on. Our eyes connect, and it's like he can read me like a flashing sign on the strip in Vegas. I would almost wager that I can hear a tad of something lustful in his voice, and it's not just my overactive imagination. I swear!

“Well, speaking from experience, sir, I think divorce is hard on everyone involved,” I reply softly. I cannot believe I just said that. I said those words, and I looked through my lashes as I said them. I am flirting with him. I don't flirt with anybody. I gave up that dream a long, long time ago. What thirty nine year old divorcée librarian would dare flirt with a man so obviously out of her league? And seeing as most men that I find attractive are out my league? This is why I don't flirt. It's bad form for someone like me. We stand for several beats holding each other in our eyes. I could be mistaken, by all rights I'm sure I am, but I really think I see a little flirt action coming off of him, too.

No. Way. No way does Señor Calienté flirt with Olivia the Spinster LibrarIan. In no universe does that happen. Ever.

“Please,” he says, “Call me Sebastian.”

“Oh. Of course, sir,” I reply hastily blushing all the way. “Sebastian. Sir. I'm sorry. Good manners were drilled into me since birth,” I continue blushing wildly and rushing my words. I flip the dime over my fingers like I'm attempting a magic trick.

“And may I call you Olivia?” he asks so sweetly. I raise my eyes thinking, Honey, you can call me anything your little heart desires.

“Yes. By all means, please. Olivia… Yes… Sir… Sebastian,” my words just sort of stutter and putter until I run out of steam. You are so the epitome of smooth. Wow, a baby’s butt has nothing on your smoothness.

Sebastian pulls out his wallet and removes a ten dollar bill. “Oh,” I say shaking my head, “Please. On the house. I insist,” I move to push the money back towards him, but I stop short knowing if I actually touch him, I will most probably spontaneously combust.

He gets it, I think, because a small smile and that light in his eyes returns as my eyes quickly return to the beautiful industrial carpet.

“And, Ms. Hastings? Olivia?” He pauses. I would bet a million dollars he's doing that bending down thing to get me to look up again.

Why is he pausing? Why is he… Oh. Oh god, no. Nuh-uh. He wants me to look at him again. Please no. I can't. I hear a small cough. Shit. Piss. Fuck.

I look up reluctantly. The smile has given way to a stern, serious line of gorgeous lips.

“Thank you,” he says straightening his back as my eyes return to his. Cha-ching! One million dollars for the lucky, lucky lady! I see he's holding a card out to me. “Make sure to contact me in the future when you need anything to improve...,” and I swear he pauses. Pauses! “... The library you work so diligently to maintain.” It's not a request. The severe look on his face and the authoritative tone of his voice leave no doubt his words were most definitely not a request. They were a command. A command to call him when I need anything to improve… The library. With a pregnant pause. That pause was purposely left wide open for me to fill in with my pervy commentary. He just commanded you to call him. No. Olivia. Yo clueless? You have got to cut back on the alpha-male romances. That man did not command you. He's a lovely gentleman just looking out for his daughter and the library he supports. Señor Sexypants wouldn't flirt with some lowly libraran unless he was just doing it to make you feel better about your lot in life. Take your pittance, use him for your fantasies, and move the ever loving fuck on with your life.

I reach to take the card from him, and Señor Smoothness grabs, raises, and turns my hand over. The fire of passion blazes in the in dark centers of his eyes. I can feel the warmth of his exhale as he places the softest kiss on the inside of my wrist. White heat inflames my nethers. Guh. Ladies and gentlemen, all logic and reasoning have left the building. And the wetness in my panties could save California right about now.

“Thank you, again. Olivia.” He makes sure to enunciate every syllable of my name. He places the card and the ten dollars in my palm, folds my fingers around them, and gently releases my hand. Sebastian quite pointedly sears through my inhibitions with his dark, lush stare. Then, he smirks, turns, and walks out of the library.

What in the holy mother of hell was that?