#made her a very long time ago . jr high. was trying to draw in the mortis ghost style snd i drew madotsuki

[wormgrrl]

some beasts from my brain ♡

[curlsofsagesmoke]

TMNT (2012) characters as dysfunctional family roles

here I go again analyzing a kids show that ended four years ago. anyway, I saw a tiktok by user doinbigthink where they gave a quick overview of the six kinds of dysfunctional family roles, and I immediately thought of tmnt bc it’s my current hyperfixation. so I spent almost an hour doing research and writing up this analysis, as one does.

as a preface: dysfunction in a family can be caused by anything from someone struggling with addiction to a parent being abusive or unavailable/neglectful to someone having narcissistic personality disorder (npd) etc. etc. Usually there is one person who is the root cause of this (very deep seated) dysfunction and the others in the family (often the kids) fall into these roles in order to cope.

Leo: The Hero

The Hero is often the oldest child. They cope with the dysfunction in the family by being high achievers or perfectionists, and they need a sense of control in order to feel safe within the family. They are seen as very well-adjusted, balanced, and high-functional and are often used as an example of how well the family as a whole is doing. They may allow this misconception to continue (whether consciously or unconsciously) in order to hide the family’s problems. They may be parentified as children (that is, forced to take on a parental role for their younger siblings) and usually feel a lot of pressure to solve the family’s issues. With Leo in particular, you see these two behaviors in the way he approaches leading his brothers as well as the way he obsessed over bringing Karai into the family for Splinter’s sake after discovering her true identity. As an adult, the Hero is often drawn toward romantic partners who are emotionally unavailable (again, see Leo’s crush on Karai) and tend to throw themselves into their work (Leo’s obsession with ninjutsu)

Leo: The Golden Child

The Golden Child is not a dysfunctional family role but instead describes a relationship that develops between a parent/guardian with npd and one of the children in the family. In these cases, the parent tends to favor the Golden Child because the Golden Child exhibits all the traits the parent loves in themselves. In Splinter and Leo’s case, these characteristics are their devotion to ninjutsu, their general temperaments, and their more spiritual/mystic natures. There are MANY examples of this favoritism in TMNT canon; for example, Splinter teaching Leo his reiki technique (the healing hands) in “the deadly venom” because everyone things Leo is the most capable of learning such an advanced technique (in the episode, Donnie says that he doesn’t think anyone else on the team could’ve done what Leo did, i.e. using the healing hands on himself and saving the others from karai). The parent has a volatile relationship with the Golden Child and often their love is conditional (that is, the parent will favor the Golden Child as long as the Golden Child continues to act like the parent). Because of this, the Golden Child often has trouble establishing an independent identity (see: Raph calling Leo “Splinter Jr.”, though I can’t remember if this happens in 2012 or just in the 2003 version). The Golden Child may also participate in the narcissistic parent’s abuse against the other children in order to protect themself (this is less explicit in canon, but I think that Leo’s leadership style fits this bill)

Raph: The Scapegoat

The Scapegoat is often the second child. As the name suggests, they are often blamed for things that go wrong in the family regardless of whether it was actually their fault or not. Scapegoats are often very aware of their position in the family and as a result they may feel rejected, isolated, and unlovable. I think a good example of Raph feeling like this is the fact that, early in the show, he only openly expresses his emotions to Spike. Scapegoats learn that negative attention is better than no attention (especially from a parent/guardian) and they often engage in high risk behaviors such as sex, drugs, etc. (in Raph’s case, his reckless fighting style and the way he seeks out fights, and this also explains his temper and overall angry demeanor). Because of this, they tend to get into a lot of trouble and are often singled out as the child who needs individual help (aka therapy) even though the root problems lie with the family as a unit. In cases where the parent has npd the Scapegoat is often pitted against the Golden Child. This is called splitting and it is another way to distract from the family’s deeper issues. I feel like I don’t need to explain the way that Leo and Raph are pitted against each other.

Donnie: The Lost Child

The Lost Child, as the name implies, often fades into the background. Usually this is on purpose in an effort to keep themself safe, as they might be scared to draw attention to themself or rock the boat, especially in an abusive household. They may often feel ignored or neglected and are often described as loners who have difficulty developing social skills or self-esteem. Like the Hero, the Lost Child is often used as an example of the family’s stability and success because they aren’t causing trouble. They tend to struggle when forming friendships/romantic relationships, and they are usually praised for not needing a lot of attention/being independent. Because of this, they feel safer when they’re by themselves. Although Donnie does cause trouble sometimes (see: all the times he’s blown some shit up in the lab, the Mutagen man thing, etc.), he’s not seen as the troublemaker. Raph (and Mikey, to a certain extent) definitely takes that title. Donnie is often alone in his lab---working, admittedly, but he still tends to isolate himself, and he is often seen as the most socially awkward of the brothers (see: his relationship with April). There’s also this very interesting exchange from the episode “Enemy of My Enemy” when they’re in the Shellraiser and Leo is about to take the stealth bike to help Karai:

Raph: Hey, the stealth bike’s my thing. Leo: Now your thing is sucking it up. Donnie: Hey! That’s my thing!

Mikey: The Mascot

The Mascot is often the youngest child. They use humor and goofiness to diffuse tension and distract the family from their issues, though when this works, they feel increased pressure to continue to step in when things become tense or volatile. The Mascot acts from a place of anxiety and trauma, and they may have bouts of depression. They also tend to feel as though they cannot express their negative emotions (because they often see themselves as responsible for their family’s happiness). They tend to bend over backwards for people with little regard for their own safety/comfort, and they are drawn to intense and dysfunctional relationships (whether romantic or platonic) where they will be called upon to diffuse tension. This can be seen in the way Mikey approached his friendships with both Bradford (pre-mutation) and Leatherhead. Mikey is also very rarely shown as being sad, angry, or depressed the way that the other three are, and it’s only in times of extreme emotional distress (like the season two finale) where he drops his humor. Even in the midst of tough battles or tough situations, Mikey tends to insert himself into the middle of the tension and is almost constantly cracking jokes or trying to keep things lighthearted. When he does show more negative emotions, it’s in (mostly) one of two ways. One, giving comfort or seeking comfort, usually from Raph (again see the season two finale, where he hugs Raph to calm him down after Splinter “dies” and seeks comfort from Raph in the Party Wagon as they’re driving away from the city). Two, acting combative with Donnie.

Note: Mikey and Donnie acting combative

This second one in particular is really interesting to me because both Donnie and Mikey exhibit a level of comfort/feeling safe with each other that they don’t display with the other two. Mikey only ever gets physical with Donnie (their little slap fight in “Turtle Temper” or attacking him at the end of “The Creeping Doom”), while Donnie only ever purposefully antagonizes Mikey to get a reaction (slapping him in “Turtle Temper”, which prompts the slap fight, or teasingly insulting him at the end of “The Creeping Doom”, which prompts Mikey to attack him). Mikey likes to get under Raph’s skin, but he never retaliates when Raph gets physical with him. Donnie does occasionally argue with Raph and Leo, but usually backs down after Raph threatens him with violence (see “New Girl in Town”), and with Leo it never escalates past a verbal fight (see the season two finale, “the fourfold trap”). Actually, it seems that in Mikey’s and Donnie’s relationship, they take on the roles that you usually see in Raph’s and Mikey’s relationship. Mikey antagonizes Raph and Raph retaliates; similarly, Donnie antagonizes Mikey and Mikey retaliates, but neither of them would act this way toward their other two brothers.

Splinter: The Root of the Dysfunction

I’ve made a lot of allusions by now to Splinter having npd, or at least some narcissistic tendencies. There are many times where he shows favoritism toward Leo or acts in a very stubborn or even self-absorbed manner. In the season one finale, for example, he refuses to help the turtles fight and only leaves the lair after april is kidnapped by the shredder. In “the pulverizer returns”, he makes the turtles switch weapons (for literally no good reason), they almost die in a fight and switch back, and as punishment, he takes their weapons away entirely; this isn’t addressed in the episode, but i do believe that if they’d had their weapons, they could’ve prevented timothy from being mutated in this episode. (Admittedly there are times when he apologizes, admits he’s wrong, and changes his mind, which is why I hesitate to say he exhibits fully narcissistic behaviors). There’s also the physical aspect of their relationship. He’s teaching the turtles ninjutsu, so you can expect a very physical relationship in the form of training, but there are times when he causes the turtles pain for the sake of pain as punishment (e.g. randori, which we see a few times, or when he goes for their pressure points, or when he trips mikey in the episode “monkey brains”, or when he stabs raph with his cane in the episode “turtle temper”, and these are just the examples i can think of off the top of my head). There has been discourse in the fandom about whether these characters (splinter and raph in particular) are abusive, and i don’t want to get into that. However, i think it’s undeniable that splinter raised his kids with the intent to turn them into child soldiers, and also i fully believe that this (plus his parenting style) is the root of the dysfunction in the hamato family.

[hapuriainen]

Hapuriainen's Animation & Comics & Games of 2020

It is again time for the annual compilation!

Manga:

Attack on Titan

I'm so sad this is so close to end... It's been my main thing for a few years now. Eren definitely didn't take the route I expected but I still find this consistent with his character and a bold and interesting move from the author.

(My notes say I also finished the jr high spin-off manga but it's not worth talking about)

Awards given: Best Side Girl (I still like Gabi, haters gonna hate), Best Boy (ditto Eren)

One Piece, My Hero Academia My interest in OP is still at an all-time low and I'm just waiting for the arc to end. There are so many characters and I have little idea what their deal is, Carrot hasn't been interesting in ages and currently Yamato is the only character I care for. Same for HeroAca; at least the excruciatingly long action scene is finally over.

Undead Unluck New Jump series! I think the main duo have a really good dynamic, but they're pretty much the only thing I care about and I'm very lost with what the plot is actually supposed to be about.

Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro

I like detective stories so here's one from the Assassination Classroom creator! The detective stuff itself could get rather nonsensical and as the story progressed more and more fantasy elements were added, but the titular character was entertaining enough to keep me interested. The viewpoint character was refreshingly (for a Jump series) a girl and her dynamic with Neuro (an ordinary schoolgirl and an arrogant amoral troll demon) was great.

Awards given: Best non-romantic relationship (Neuro & Yako)

Spy x Family

Super fun and the characters are cute!  The main couple has such great chemistry and in general I enjoy following characters who are really competent at their job. Not surprised that this has become hugely popular.

Awards given: Best romance (it is rare to get me to ship anything but the main couple here is just so cute)

Delicious in Dungeon

This manga has amazing character design and the author clearly loves to play around with it, like by drawing each character as each other's races, or making clones of everyone but each clone is a little different so you can guess which is the real one with the characters, and there's so much thought put to the outfits too. And then there's of course all the worldbuilding around how an RPG dungeon and the creatures in it could work, but it's presented simply enough that the story is still easy to follow. I also like the upbeat atmosphere; maybe I could get a bit more emotionally involved if there was more drama, but I still really like this as it is.

Awards given: Best character designs

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou

Reread one of my favourite manga ever and it's still just as good. I love how the manga still has a positive vibe to it, under it there is the quiet melancholy of a world that is close to ending. And it's wonderful how uninterested the story is answering any of the worldbuilding questions it sets up.

Beastars

This was incredibly interesting in how it presented an animal society where the carnivore-herbivore differences couldn't be just explained away with "the differences don't really exist", and the story looks at this from so many different angles. Pairs really well with Zootopia for a completely different approach. Louis was a really interesting character with how he publicly managed to appear as if he was a good candidate to be the next ambassador for the peace between the animals but was actually very cold and broken inside, and I really liked his breakdown moment. The ending was pretty meh though.

Awards given: Best Side Boy (Louis)

Kannagi

This one has really cute character designs but apart from that it's a pretty generic harem story. Except for the twist that the main girl already had been involved with a boy which caused otaku to shred their manga or whatever. I believe I would have enjoyed this more if it finished back when it went to hiatus since at this point it didn't do much for me.

Witch Hat Atelier

The main girl is the kind of heroic, friendly, plucky goody-two-shoes protagonist I really don't like but apart from that this is a great manga. I love the art, and the way the magic works is really well set up but also easy to understand. Great outfits too!

Anime:

This year I learned that in order to clear stuff from your anime watch list you need to actually watch anime. So unexpectedly I think I watched a lot more different series than usual.

Attack on Titan

It was my plan to watch seasons 1-3 before jumping on board with the last one, and of course I dragged my feet for the entire year and had to marathon the whole thing in autumn. I still prefer the manga, but the anime does have great colours, soundtrack and voice acting and some of the action scenes were amazing. But I really hate what they did to Historia in season 3... The final season has been excellent so far and I can't wait for the big scene in the next episode.

Awards given: Best OP (all the Linked Horizon ones)

Ouran High School Host Club

Haruhi continues to be one of the best girls in the anime and manga industry ever with her confident and no-nonsense attitude, and Tamaki's oblivious and overflowing friendliness makes for a great counterpart to her. And the opening theme is so darn catchy.

Awards given: Best Girl (Haruhi)

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Finally managed to watch this. I love the iconic character designs and all the chaotic energy. Kamina for best bro. I've never cared for mecha, the girls were nice but the writing around them sucked and the second half wasn't as strong as the first one, but still a good package overall.

Awards given: Best ED (don't care for the song that much but Simon looks somehow really cool in the second ending)

Haibane Renmei

Another one that had been on the watch list for years. A lovely quiet and contemplative show. Visuals were rather dull though but maybe it's better for a show like this that the characters didn't have bubblegum pink hair.

Digimon Adventure 2020

This started promising but has since lost steam. I really like how different the story is from the original Digimon Adventure, and compared to Precure it's super nice how not every episode has the exact same structure, and the cast has different roles and regularly gets split up instead of shoehorning everyone into every conflict. But on the other hand the characters feel way more samey and flat, and the original "kids want to return to their home from the Digital World" plot was a lot more personal than the current one about global crises and prophecy jargon. And some of the action scenes last way too long.

Awards given: Worst side boy (Agumon and his evolutions, it is of course expected that he'd get a lot of screen time but I'm so over how much he's constantly pushed in your face in the franchise)

Shuumatsu Nani Shitemasu ka? Isogashii Desu ka? Sukutte Moratte Ii Desu ka?

This wasn't afwul but still left me kind of cold. I think the character designs were a problem here, in general I'm used to brightly coloured anime characters but this was trying to be a very serious story about child soldiers who know they're going to die young. But when they were colour-coded and always wore the same clothes (and mostly had pretty generic animu girl personalities) they felt so artificial which made it harder to get into the drama. Nice OP song.

Yashahime

Inuyasha was my first show after really getting into anime so I was super hyped for any kind of new content. So far this has unfortunately been rather dull since I'm not particularly interested in either of Sesshoumaru's daughters, and the way the show treats the absence of the old cast is annoying. Just either show them or make it clear we're not supposed to care about them, now it's just annoying how their disappearance is treated as a mystery but the three heroines know barely anything about their heritage and don't even seem interested in learning either. But I'll watch this to the end for Moroha.

Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angels, Twin Angel Break, Pretear, Happy Seven, Healin' Good Precure

Watched a lot of magical girl stuff this year too, these being shows that play the tropes straight. The Twin Angel seasons had different flaws but were otherwise watchable aside from the awful Twin Angel Break heroine. Pretear had surprisingly nice character writing and I feel I would really have liked this if I saw it at an earlier part of my anime hobby experience but now it doesn't feel so special any more. Healin' Good Precure has been rather dull.

I also watched a bunch of Precure movies, out of which only the Star Twinkle Precure one was actually good, and the Spring Carnival crossover movie was also good in an absurd way, while the rest ranged from awful to somewhat decent.

Awards given: Worst girl (Meguru - Twin Angel Break), Biggest WTF (Happy Seven suddenly going from monster of the week shenaningans to alien mass destruction weapons)

Concrete Revolutio, Myriad Colors Phantom World, Re:Creators

Also some anime where the magical girl was a side character. Concrete Revolutio was an unpleasant mess with nice visuals, Myriad Colors was a pretty boring otaku high school harem thing and the magical girl episode was also rather bland, and Re:Creators had a lot of potential with the "anime characters come to our world" setting but the result was somewhat uneven. Re:Creators had the best magical girl out of these three.

Awards given: Worst non-romantic relationship, Worst side girl (Setsuna from Re:creators, with the main boy) not really an awful character on her own, but the writing around her was pretty bad, let's also give Worst Boy for the said main boy

Nausicaa

I watched the first half of the movie over a decade ago and didn't manage to finish until now. After seeing so many other Ghibli movies this didn't do much for me, but the animation and nature were still beautiful.

Western:

Most Popular Girls in School

The newer seasons didn't reach the heights of the earlier ones but there's still something entertaining about a very raunchy Barbie doll stop motion show. Also pairs well with the Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse for a fun but more child friendly Barbie experience.

Frozen 2

I'm wondering if these really are the only Western piece of media I consumed this year? I certainly didn't go to movies after March. Anyway, like the previous film I had major problems with the plot and characters (I don't think Elsa's story was set up properly, Kristoff's sub-plot feels like an afterthought when he doesn't factor to Anna's sub-plot at all, Olaf is annoying, too much Lore) but ultimately I still had a good time. I like the costume design, the idea for Elsa's arc is fine, the songs are great and there were plenty of good scenes too, and the lullaby was beautiful. I'd say that like the original Frozen this was patched together from perfectly serviceable pieces that didn't quite work combined.

Awards given: Worst romance (not the pairing itself but the way Kristoff x Anna was written)

Games:

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp

Early this year I just decided not to open this app for the daily money-grubbing grind and haven't touched it since. I'm free!

Animal Crossing New Horizons

However the daily grind continues here! It's been way more enjoyable, primarily due to lacking the microtransactions/limited time item angle and also for being so much more customisable. And the nature is so pretty... But I've reached a point where even this has started to feel kind of stale.

Super Mario Odyssey

My first Mario game since Super Mario World so of course I'm blown away by everything. I like how colourful and welcoming the worlds were, Cappy was a surprisingly enjoyable sidekick/mascot and also the game was easy enough and had a simple linear plot so it was far easier to approach than Zelda BotW which is still on hold.

Plans for 2021

Actually play Zelda BotW

Maybe finally Evangelion?

Finally finish the mostly disappointing Digimon Adventure tri

Various magical girl sequels and remakes

[davidmann95]

Superman & Lois Pilot Script Review

I’ve been reliably informed that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and indeed as my laptop and everything on it have been unusable for a couple months after a mishap, I went from ‘maybe I’ll write something on the pilot script for Superman & Lois’ to ‘as soon as I can get my hands back on that thing I’m writing something up’. I’m actually surprised none of you folks asked about it when I’ve mentioned several times that I read it; I was initially hesitant, but I’ve seen folks discussing plot details on Twitter and their reactions on here, so I guess WB isn’t making much of a thing out of it. Entire pilots have leaked before and they just rolled with it, so I suppose that isn’t surprising. Anyway, the show’s been pushed back to next year, and also the world is literally sick and metaphorically (and also a little literally) on fire, so I thought this might be fun if anyone needs a break from abject horror. 

(Speaking of the world being on fire: while trying to offer a diversion amidst said blaze, still gonna pause for the moment to add to the chorus that if opening your wallet is a thing you can do, now most especially is a time to do it. I chipped in myself to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and even a casual look around here or Twitter will show people listing plenty of other organizations that need support.)

What I saw floating around was, if not a first draft, certainly not the final one given Elizabeth Tulloch later shared a photo of the cover for the final script crediting Lee Toland Krieger as the director rather than a TBD, but the shape of things is clearly in place. I’m going for a relative minimum of spoilers, though I’ll discuss a bit of the basic status quo the show sets up and vaguely touch on a few plot points, but if you want a simple response without risk of any story details: it’s very, very good. Clunky in the way the CW DC shows typically are, and some aspects I’m not going to be able to judge until the story plays out further, but it’s engaging, satisfying, and moreover feels like it Gets It more broadly than any other mass-media Superman adaptation to date.

The Good

* The big one, the pillar on which all else rests: this understands Lois and it really understands Clark. Lois isn’t at the center of the pilot’s arc, but she’s everything you want to see that character be - incisive, caring, and refusing to operate at less than 110% intensity with whatever she’s dealing with at any given time, the objections of others be damned. Clark meanwhile is a good-natured, good-humored dude who you can see in both the cape and the glasses even as those identities remain distinct, who’s still wrestling with his feelings of alienation and duty and how those now reflect his relationships with his children. The title characters both feel fully-formed and true to what historically tends to work best with them from day one here in ways I can’t especially say for any other movie or show they’ve starred in.

* While the suit takes a back seat for this particular episode, when Superman does show up in the opening and climax it absolutely knows how to get us to cheer for him; there’s more than one ‘hell yeah, it’s SUPERMAN, that guy’s the best!’ moment, and they pop.

* While the superheroics aren’t the biggest focus here, when they do arrive, the plan seems to be that they’ll be operating on an entirely different scale than the rest of the Arrowverse lineup. Maybe they scripted the ideal and’ll be pared-down come time for actual filming and effects work, or maybe they’re going all-out for the pilot, but the initial vision involves a massive super-rescue and a widescreen brawl that goes way, way bigger in scope than any I’m aware of on the likes of Supergirl. I heard in passing on Twitter from someone claiming to be in the know that the plan for Superman & Lois is that it’ll be fewer episodes with a higher budget, more in line with the DC Universe stuff if not exactly HBO Max ‘prestige TV’, and whether it’s true or not (I think it’s plausible, the potential ratings here are exponentially higher than anything else on the network so they’d want to put their best foot forward) they seem to be writing it as if that’s the idea.

* This balances its tones and ambitions excellently: it’s a Kent-Lane family drama, it’s Lois digging in with some investigative reporting to set up a major subplot, it’s Superman saving Metropolis and battling a powerful high-concept villain, and none of it feels like it’s banging up at awkward angles with the rest. There are a pair of throwaway lines in here so grim I can’t believe they were put in a script for a Superman TV show even if they don’t make it to air, and they in no way undermine the exhilaration once he puts on the cape or the warmth that pervades much of it. This feels as if it’s laying the groundwork for a Superman show that can tackle just about any sort of story with the character rather than planing its feet in one corner and declaring a niche, and so far it looks like it has the juice to pull it off.

* While the pilot doesn’t focus on him in the same way as the new kid, Jonathan Kent fits well enough for my tastes with the broad strokes of his personality from the comics, albeit if he had made it to 14 rather than 10 without learning about his dad being Superman. A pleasant, kinda dopey, well-meaning Superman Jr. - the biggest deviation, one I approve of, is that he can also kinda be a gleeful little shit when dealing with his brother in ways that remind you that this is very much also Lois Lane’s boy.

* We don’t know much about the season villain as of yet, but it’s an incredibly cool idea that I’m shocked that they’re going for right away, and I absolutely want to see how they play out as a character and how they’ll bounce off all the other major players.

* The way this seems to be framing itself in relation to the Superman movies and shows before it feels inspired to me: there are homages and shout-outs to and bits of conceptual scaffolding from Lois & Clark, Smallville, Donner, and more, but they’re all shown in ways that make it clear that those stories are part of his past rather than indicators of the baseline he’s currently operating off of. We get a retrospective of his and Lois’s history right off the bat with most of what you’d expect, and combined with those references the message is clear: this is a Superman who’s been through all the vague memories that you, prospective casual viewer, have of the other stuff you saw him in once upon a time, but this series begins the next phase of his life after what that general cultural impression of him to date covers. It strikes me as a good way of carrying over the goodwill of that nostalgia and iconography, while building in that this is a show with room to grow him beyond that into something more nuanced (and for that matter true to the character as the comics at their best have depicted him) than they tended towards. Where Superman Returns attempted to recapture the lightning in a bottle of an earlier vision of him in full, and Man of Steel tried to turn its back on anything that smelled of Old and Busted and Uncool entirely, perhaps this splitting of the difference - engaging with his pop culture history and visibly taking what appealed from some of those well-known takes, while also drawing a clear line in the sand between those as the past and this as the future - is what will finally engage audiences.

The Bad

* This is the sort of thing you have to roll with for a CW superhero show, and that lives and dies by the performances, but: the dialogue varies heavily. There are some really poignant moments, but elsewhere this is where it shows its early-draftiness; a decent amount is typical Whedon-poisoned quippiness or achingly blunt, and some of the ‘hey, we’re down with the kids!’ material for Jon, Jor, and Lana’s kid Sarah is outright agonizing. I suspect a lot of it will be fixed in minor edits, actor delivery, and hopefully the younger performers taking a brutal red pen to some of their material - this was written last January and the show’s now not debuting until next January, they’ve got plenty of time for cleanup - but if this sort of the thing has been a barrier to entry for you in the past with the likes of The Flash, this probably won’t be what changes your mind.

* There are a few charming shout-outs to other shows, but much moreso, Superman & Lois actually builds in a big way out of Crisis. Which is a-okay with me, except that what exactly that was is rather poorly conveyed given that lots of people will be giving this a spin with no familiarity with that. Fixable with a line or two, but important enough to be worth noting.

Have to wait and see how it plays out

* The series’ new kid, Jordan Kent, is so far promising with potential to veer badly off-course. He’s explicitly dealing with mental illness, and not on great terms with Clark at the beginning in spite of the latter’s best efforts, the notion of which I’m sure will immediately put some off. Ultimately the commonalities between father and son become clear, and he’s not written as a caricature in this opening but as a kid with some problems who’s still visibly his parents’ boy, but obviously the ball could be fumbled here in the long term.

* Lois’s dad is portrayed almost completely differently here than in the past in spite of technically still being her military dad who has some disagreements with her husband. There are some nice moments and interesting new angles but it seems possible that the groudwork is being laid for him to be Clark’s guy in the chair, and not only does he not need that he most DEFINITELY doesn’t need that to be a member of the U.S. Military, especially when one of the first and best decisions Supergirl made when introducing him was to make clear he had stopped working with the government any more than necessary years ago. Maybe it can be stretched if his dad-in-law occasionally calls him up to let him know about a new threat he’s learned about, and maybe they’ll even do something really interesting with that push-and-pull, but if Superman’s going to be even tacitly functioning as an extension of the military that’s going to be a foundational sin.

* As I was nervous about, Superman & Lois has some political flavor, but much to my delighted surprise, there’s no grossly out of touch hedge-betting in the way I understand Supergirl has gone for at times. As of the pilot, this is an explicitly leftie show, with the overarching threat of the season as established for Lois and Clark as reporters being how corporate America has stripmined towns like Smallville and manipulated blue collar workers into selling out their own best interests. Could that go wrong? Totally, there’s already an effort to establish a particular prominent right-wing asshole as capable of decency - without as of yet downplaying that he’s a genuinely shitty dude - and vague hints that some of the towns’ woes might be rooted more in Superman-type problems than Lois and Clark problems. But that they’re going for it this directly in the first place leaves me hopeful that the show won’t completely chicken out even if there’ll probably be a monster in the mix pulling a string or two; Greg Pak and Aaron Kuder’s Action Comics may justify Superman punching a cop by having him turn out to be a shadow monster so as to get past editorial, but it’s still a story about how sometimes Superman’s gotta punch a cop, and hopefully this can carry on in that spirit of using what wiggle room it has to the best of its ability.

So, so far so good. Could it end up a show with severe problems carried on the backs of Hoechlin and Tulloch’s performances? Absolutely. But thus far, the ingredients are there for all its potential problems to be either fixed, subverted, or dodged alright, and even when it surely fumbles the ball at junctures, I earnestly believe this is setting itself up to be the most fleshed-out, nuanced, engaging live-action take on these characters to date. And god willing, if so, the first real stepping stone in decades to proper rehab on Superman’s image and place in pop culture.

[herohawks]

I just wanted to let you know that I just saw the tattoo artist/actor AU and I’m now following you. I need more of this content please and thank you. I’m excited for reveal if Dabi past/family whenever that happens. I’m also very curious about Dabi relationship with his siblings in this.

part 0 / part 1 / part 2 / part 3

I went ahead and wrote what I headcanon Natsuo and Touya/Dabi’s relationship would be like in this AU. Will definitely get to Fuyumi and Shouto, too! Just too sleepy rn...

It’s long, so I put it under the cut <3

Natsuo: As the second eldest Todoroki sibling, Natsuo is able to witness first-hand the rise and fall of Todoroki Touya. Growing up, Natsuo had initially been jealous of Touya. His older brother commanded all of their parents’ attention: Enji and Touya would be gone weeks at time, no doubt enjoying all the father-son activities Natsuo isn’t privy to. In the rare instances that Touya is home, their mom would dote on him - any request, big or small, would be granted. Mochi for lunch? Sure. Video games past curfew? Why not. 

Whenever Touya is home, he almost always locks himself in his bedroom, snapping at Natsuo to go away when he asks if he wants to play. Natsuo hears Touya crying a lot, through the door. Crybaby Touya is the nickname Natsuo secretly gives his older brother. It must be a hard life, being the favorite. 

Sometimes, though, Touya will agree to play with him. Natsuo learns very early on that Touya hates to play-pretend, so he makes sure to steer clear of those kinds of games. Touya likes quieter activities, like coloring and drawing. They play soccer sometimes, but they have to be secret about it because their dad doesn’t like it when they roughhouse. 

As they grow older, the chasm between them yawns wider. Touya, who’d always been reserved in comparison to Natsuo’s boundless energy, becomes even more withdrawn, snapping and snarling at everyone and everything. He picks fights with Natsuo about petty things, scoffing and making snide remarks. It’s like walking on eggshells being in the same room as Touya. He still cries a lot, usually when he’s arguing and his frustrated tears spill over. Natsuo starts calling him Crybaby Touya to his face, usually leading to the two of them scuffling on the ground until Fuyumi cries to their mom to break their fight up.

By the time they’re in Jr. High, it’d be a stretch to call their relationship “close”. Touya doesn’t go to school like Natsuo does; he has a private tutor because he’s special. Touya used to ask Natsuo about school a lot, what it’s like. Natsuo had told him about class, how he’s made so many friends, how nice his teacher was, the things he’s learned - he tells Touya everything and anything because despite it all, a part of him still likes having his older brother pay attention to him. It’s the only time they can interact without it dissolving into a fight. Touya always seems a little sadder after their conversations though. 

It’s around the time that Touya is entering high school that their relationship slips  like sand between his fingers. It’s like a flip has been switched and Touya actively tries to become the worst version of himself. Fuyumi is naive and Natsuo shields her from the worst of it, but he knows their older brother is hurdling full-throttle on a self-destructive path. 

It’s always Natsuo who finds Touya splayed out in the hallway, reeking of cheap booze and stale sweat. He shakes and mutters nonsense when Natsuo hefts him up, dragging him to the bathroom or bedroom with an arm slung across his shoulders. Depending on the damage, Natsuo may wipe him down with a cool washcloth to clean the worst of it, helps Touya strip into cleaner clothes if he’s coherent enough. 

He sees the baggies, the pricked skin of his inner elbow and legs and wonders why Touya? Touya has everything: dad’s attention, the looks, the fame. It’s the life many can only dream of. Why is he so set in ruining it? Natsuo tells himself This is the last time I’ll help him. Let Mom or Fuyumi find him next time. But everytime he hears the telltale sound of uncoordinated limbs trying and failing to sneak down the hall, Natsuo is up and halfway to his own bedroom door, bracing himself for what he’ll find when he opens it. 

Then, the Todoroki Touya Scandal hits. 

Suddenly, the media focuses on the Todoroki family. Micro-analyzing every little thing they do or say. Natsuo isn’t prepared for the onslaught of sudden attention from strangers and peers alike, bombarding him with questions he doesn’t know the answer to. He doesn’t know why Touya did that. He doesn’t know if it was consensual. He doesn’t know anything. Natsuo’s relatively private life is abruptly put on display and Natsuo has no idea how Touya has survived this long under all the pressure. The things Touya has said and done for years are starting to make more sense. 

After that, it’s like Touya takes this as explicit permission to dig himself an even deeper hole. With a force that surprises even Natsuo, Touya throws himself headfirst into scandal after scandal. The tabloids begin running out of witty one-liners for their headlines - that’s how much Touya’s destructive behavior becomes the norm. It’s like he’s trying to prove something but Natsuo doesn’t understand it, can’t even begin to try. 

And just as the scandals reach their peak, Touya vanishes. Natsuo has no idea where he’s gone and doesn’t have the first clue of where to look. Touya has always been an intensely private person but Natsuo comes to the startling realization that he doesn’t really know his brother at all.

Fuyumi holds onto the hope that Touya’s out there, living some happy, secret life. Natsuo is more pessimistic, but keeps his opinions to himself. He’d blame Touya at first, for leaving. But with their father at home more now, focusing on Shouto and grooming him to become a better version of Touya, Natsuo knows the only one to blame for Touya’s demise is Todoroki Enji. 

So for about five years, there’s absolute radio silence. Then out of the blue, Touya calls him. A simple: “Sup, little brother.” And Natsuo promptly hangs up, thinking it’s a sick joke. Fuyumi calls him later, crying, and says that she and Touya talked. That he’s changed a lot and Natsuo should call him. 

Natsuo does not call him. He texts him instead, tells Touya how fucked up it was that he up and left with no warning, how hurt Fuyumi was, how scared and confused Shouto had become, and how heart-broken it left mom. Out of all the Todoroki siblings, Natsuo has the hardest time forgiving Touya. Mostly because he had thought he knew Touya the most, only to have the truth blindside him. 

The problem is this: Natsuo is stubborn and hard-headed, just like their old man. When Touya reaches out, Natsuo is quick to shut it down, not trusting that Touya won’t disappear again. He doesn’t think he can forgive Touya so easily like Fuyumi, or Shouto who doesn’t really remember Touya much at all. 

The second problem is this: Touya wants to mend his relationship with his siblings so much that the task seems almost insurmountable. When Natsuo pushes him away, Touya (well, Dabi now), accepts it, doesn’t think he’s worth forgiving anyway. It’s actually Hawks who points out that it’s because Dabi loves and cares so much that he can’t bring himself to bridge that gap, to push harder for the result he wants. 

It takes a long time for them to build a relationship again, but once they overcome the hurdle of actually talking, they start to repair their relationship as brothers.  Natsuo is probably the most skeptical when he hears that Dabi-Touya is dating Hawks, of all people. For a guy who hated the acting industry so much to leave it behind, it’s ironic that he’s dating one of the most well-known A-Listers right now. But, when he meets Hawks, it’s hard not to like the guy. The guy’s the polar opposite of Dabi which is hilarious. Hawks is chatty and genuinely kind; he really wins brownie points with Natsuo when he offers to give Shouto a ride to & from school when Fuyumi can’t. 

It’s through Hawks that Natsuo sees Dabi has become truly comfortable with who he is, and can finally forgive Touya for leaving them all those years ago.

[datura-tea]

hey so im just going to ramble a bit abt moz and ulysses during lonesome road, don’t mind me

also have this really old drawing i made of them years ago

ulysses piqued moz’s curiosity right from the start -- and tbh once moz gets interested in something and/or someone she becomes the very definition of nosy -- so she trawled through the divide on the lookout for clues the man behind the fascinating voice may have left. and she got it, through his holotapes and their talks through ed-e and the little flag markers he made (for himself, but also for her, apparently?? (“left the colors to mark my way, like always, case someone finds them, learns the pattern - the courier might.”)) 

all the talk just made moz more and more curious, especially once she got a glimpse of him on the sunstone roof. seeing him watching her, checking up on her -- now why would he do that, if he hated her as much as he claimed that he did? everything she knew about him contradicted each other, and the need for answers burned brighter, hotter, than ever before. all these left her listening to his holotapes over and over, trying to know what he went through, trying to understand.  

when they finally met, the expectations they had for each other were sky high -- they both had an image of the other in their mind that was brought down the moment they actually talked face to face. ulysses was expecting a fight to the death, an epic, cathartic showdown with the courier that he’s built up in his mind; moz was hoping to have an honest talk with him, pull away the metaphors and mystery and speak to the hurting man hiding behind all the fanfare. 

the resulting discussion was long and tense and illuminating, and in the end it led to a genuine connection that moz was more than happy to continue on their way out of the middle of the divide. 

if only ulysses hadn’t rigged the whole place to blow up and fill with marked men. they fought together, yes, and found that they made a pretty good team, but still it became up to moz to stop the shit that ulysses had set in motion, which unfortunately entailed ed-e jr sacrificing himself to stop the bombs. moz felt the weight of everything she had gone through to get there and while she was deciding if blowing ed-e jr up was the right thing to do, she heard ulysses talking about meeting up somewhere -- she couldn’t stop herself from rounding on him, telling him to stay and be accountable for the shit that he pulled, the same way he wanted her to. and he did. ed-e jr exploded, the rest of the bombs exploded, and they ran to the doors, moz looking back at the wrecked eyebot lying on the floor.

the walk back to hopeville was quieter than moz (and ulysses) had hoped it would be. both of them were mulling over what had happened, with moz still a little angry at stunt with the bombs. she left with nothing but a “see you around, ulysses.”

she returned a few weeks later, after listening and listening to the final holotape he had made for her. up to that point, she wasn’t sure what to do for the dam - she was friendly with ncr and house, and had yes man waiting for her every time she went to the strip - and that holotape, his words, helped nudge her into her final decision. she went back to thank him, and it was a rocky start but then they started talking again. at first the talks would be mostly politics and moz asking about the legion, then it would turn philosophical, then personal. they’d talk for hours, long into the night, until moz would have to sleep over. she’d visit about twice a month? at least? with the visits becoming more and more frequent the more she found herself missing him whenever she’d been away too long. 

her last visit before going headfirst into the battle at the dam, they talked for a while, with lots of moz going over her battle plans and ulysses telling her how lanius would counter it, stuff like that, and then, as she was about to go, ulysses put a hand on her shoulder. moz gave him a hug. she left and fought and won, but didn’t return until after two months, after her injuries have healed and the resulting chaos from the battle was more or less handled.

they only started getting romantic abt half a year after the entire divide debacle - there’s too much to unpack before a romantic relationship should even be possible, imo. 

[miamistax]

Read this. Someone you know has lived these same experiences. This must end now.

David Gamble, Jr.

I grew up in Reno, Nevada.

In third grade a boy confidently tells me and my brother that his mom said black people cannot swim because our muscles are different than those of white people.

In middle school, standing among a group of white classmates talking video games, I am the only black child. One classmate expresses surprise that my family has enough money to afford a PlayStation.

In high school, I am the only black kid among a group of friends. When sharing drinks in my presence they frequently tell each other not to “niggerlip” the bottles. Even though I object, they continue to use the phrase.

In high school, my brother is at a teen house party that gets broken up by police, a common occurrence. The kids at the party scatter, also a common occurrence. My brother, the only black child in attendance, is the only one on whom a police officer draws a firearm to get him to stop running away. He is 14.

In high school, a group of my white friends frequently sneak on to the outdoor basketball courts at an athletic club to play. They can usually play for hours, including with club members. On the two occasions I attend, club members complain and we are ejected from the club within minutes.

In high school, I am excited about black history month and am talking to a friend about black inventors. My friend snorts and says, “Black people have never invented anything.”

In high school, as graduation approaches, many of my white friends tell me that I am lucky. They tell me that due to my skin color, I will get into any college I want.

I remain in Reno for college.

During college an employer keeps food for employees in the break room refrigerator. One morning I decided to have microwaveable chicken wings for breakfast. The employer tells me I might not want to eat that for breakfast with my skin color. The employer immediately apologizes.

In college I am standing in a group of white friends on campus. A white acquaintance of one of my friends approaches to chat. The acquaintance tells a story about something that frustrated him and then reels off a series of expletives ending with the word, “nigger.” None of my friends corrects him.

In college I visit an antique shop in Auburn, California with my girlfriend, who is white, and her parents. The shopkeeper follows me around the store whistling loudly as I browse, until we leave.

I move to San Diego, California for law school.

In law school, during a discussion in my criminal law class, a white classmate suggests that police officers should take a suspect’s race into account when determining whether there is reasonable suspicion to believe that an individual is committing a crime.

The weekend of my law school graduation my family comes to San Diego. I go to the mall with my brother and sister and visit the Burberry store. Two different employees follow us around the store – never speaking to us – until we leave.

After law school, I return to Reno.

A co-worker jokingly calls me “King David” upon seeing me each day. I joke that I’m not treated like a king. The co-worker then begins to call me “Slave David” each time we encounter one another. When I ask the co-worker to stop because it is hurtful, I am told by my co-worker that this is a problem that I have in my head.

I attend a pub crawl with friends. We end up at a party in a hotel suite in downtown Reno. I am greeted by a white man at the door who loudly expresses surprise that I am an “educated negro” upon hearing me speak.

I walk a friend who is a white woman from a restaurant to her car because it is night time. As we stand by the car chatting, a police officer pulls up and shines a light on us, asking if everything is okay. Once my friend confirms, the officer drives away. I tell her that he was worried about her, she teasingly says, “Oh yeah, because you’re so scary.” Later, I tell another white friend I felt racially profiled by the officer. My friend shrugs and says, “I don’t know man, that’s a stretch.”

A white friend tells me that white voters have become upset at black people because of black people’s liberal use of food welfare benefits. When I point out that more whites than blacks receive welfare benefits in the U.S., my friend expresses confusion at how that could be the case.

I leave a downtown restaurant with my wife. As we walk along the river a homeless man appears to be having a schizophrenic episode, engaging auditory hallucinations. Upon seeing me, he becomes lucid and begins to shout the word “nigger” over and over.

I discover that one of my clients does not want me to represent him as his Public Defender because he does not want a black attorney. I am given the option to withdraw as counsel. I do not.

Last year, I am at a barbecue chatting with a white acquaintance who asks if I have ever experienced racism. When I say it is a nearly daily occurrence, the acquaintance retorts, without missing a beat, “Bullshit.”

Two months ago. I am driving to lunch with the black teen I mentor. At a red light a white woman crosses the street. As I begin to drive, she turns around and screams at us, “F**k you f****ing nigger!”

Before any of these instances, my family of origin moved to Reno, Nevada from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1984.

My mother recently told me that when I was a very young child my parents hired a company to remove a tree from our front lawn. Two white men showed up and removed the tree. One of them carved a swastika into the stump. My father had to confront him and ask him to remove it.

Before that, my now 93 -year-old grandfather served in the Army National Guard and was stationed in the U.S. south. Despite being active duty, he was not allowed to eat in restaurants due to “whites only” signage. He had to wait for fellow Guardsmen to bring him food outside.

Not long before that, my family were slaves, owned by Americans of English and Irish descent, which is why – despite being primarily of African descent – I have an English last name.

This is my experience of being black in America. To be black in America is to be told over and over that you are not good enough, that you do not belong, that you are genetically unfit, that your physical presence is undesirable, and that everything about you – right down to your lips – is wrong. It is absolutely true that everyone experiences hardships in life, but the psychological weight of being told both explicitly and implicitly, on a daily basis, that your very existence is objectionable can at times feel unbearable.

And despite this experience, I still love my country, my state, and my city. Despite my experience, I would not choose to be anything other than a black American. The history of black people in this country is one of struggle and triumph. Our people were brought to this country as slaves and against all odds, in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, have made our mark. Through slavery, poll taxes, literacy tests, redlining, and black codes we have persevered. Through the unspeakable horrors of mass lynchings; the Tuskegee syphilis experiments; and the massacres at Tulsa and Rosewood, we have persevered.

Bass Reeves, Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Sarah Boone, Oscar Micheaux, Shirley Chisholm, Dorie Miller, Susie King Taylor, Georgia Gilmore, Octavius Catto, Jack Johnson, Garrett Morgan, James W.C. Pennington. These are just a handful of extraordinary and oft forgotten black Americans who helped to mold and preserve the American Dream. These individuals and their accomplishments should not be regarded as “black history,” but rather as American history.

I am an American of privilege, which makes me an African American of great privilege. I am an attorney. I live in a safe neighborhood. My children do not worry about their next meal. I can afford child care. My family can afford personal vehicles. If my children become sick, I can take them to the doctor. If I am this privileged, and these have been my experiences, primarily in my own hometown, often with friends and acquaintances who are fond of me, and of whom I remain fond even now; just imagine what daily life must be like for a black person in this country who does not enjoy my level of privilege.

The protests in the streets of America are certainly about the killing of George Floyd, but not just about George Floyd. They are about countless black men, women, and children for whom the punishment did not fit the crime – if indeed there was a crime at all. We live in a country where, in order to recall what life under Jim Crow felt like, many white Americans must pick up a history book. Meanwhile, many black Americans need only pick up a telephone, and call their parents.

When we as people of color share our experiences, we are not doing so to score political points, “play the race card,” get sympathy, assign blame, or to make you feel bad about yourself. We are asking you for help. We are asking you to join us in the ongoing fight against racism in our country, because we cannot do it alone. It will take Americans of every stripe to eradicate racism from American society.

I am now asking for your help. Please seek truth and knowledge. When sharing information, please check your sources and make sure that they are reliable. Try to place what is happening today into a historical context. Read about systemic racism and anti-racism. When your friends of color tell you that racism is real and affecting their lives, believe them and then, if you can, do something about it.

My children are likely to attend the same middle school and high school that I did. It is my great hope for them that those around them have the knowledge, compassion, and guidance to know better than to daily deluge them with words that make them doubt their intelligence, their beauty, and their worth as human beings based only on the color of their skin; and instead judge them by the content of their character.

It is for all of the above reasons, and so many more that we proudly say #blacklivesmatter

[gimmeyoon]

You’ve Become My Favorite Sin [8]

     ✷ Pairing: Jimin x reader | feat. Jungkook x reader and Yoongi x reader

     ✷ Setting: Angels and Demons au

     ✷ Ratings/Warnings: M for Mature, HEAVY religious themes in this chapter, mentions of sex, language, violence

     ✷ Word Count: 4.2 k

     ✷ Song: Call Me Devil by Friends in Tokyo, Heaven by Julia Michaels, Heaven Wasn’t Made for Me by Terror Jr, Young God by Halsey, I Did Something Bad by Taylor Swift

     ✷ Summary: When Jimin started questioning his place in the world as an angel, you took it upon yourself to show him the darker side of life. Suddenly, falling from grace doesn’t seem so bad.

Previous | Next

Sometime towards the beginning of eternity

     Your days were filled with color. Your dominion had been tasked with planting the flowers in the Garden, and every day your power brought something new to this world. Secretly you named them, the purple ones you called Yispamire, the yellow you called Palladine, and the light blue you called Azazel.

     Azazel. You sighed as you looked at the small foliage in front of you, thoughts of the angel you named them after flooding your mind. 

     You had met him a decade ago, having only just been assigned to your dominion at that time, you were excited about the future God had told you all about. About the world he would create, the people who would live there. Azazel had sat on the council behind God. He was an Angel of dominion, but not of the one you had been assigned to. 

     God’s ways were perfect, so you didn’t question why you hadn’t been placed in his dominion. He was a distraction; you were sure God realized this. Even when he wasn’t near you, you could barely get any work down.

     No, you named flowers after him, despite being told that the humans would be the ones to name your creations. You tried to ignore the little seed in your heart that envied them for this. That felt angry that no one would call these flowers Azazel. Whatever they named them would never be as beautiful.

     This was how you spent your days, planting flowers and dreaming of an angel that you only saw every fortnight. 

     Azazel’s dominion was tasked with crafting the stars that would provide light to the humans throughout the night and guide them in the darkness. Sometimes you let yourself think about the fact that those stars shown in his eyes when you spoke to him. You wondered if that was where God had gotten the inspiration. 

     That night as you walked back with some angels from your dominion, you passed by another group, the robes they wore all of different colors, showing that they were not of the same position. You paused to see what was happening, the group leaving you behind as you listened to what the angel at the front was saying. 

      You recognized him; he was on the council. Lucifer. He held a high rank, so you didn’t find it unusual that angels had gathered to listen to him. It was what was being said that caught your attention. He was asking the crowd questions: why did God give the humans this world, why was he having us build it?

     You stepped forward, drawn in by the fervor in which the angels replied. They were angry you thought. You had never seen so many angels angry. 

     It was a hand on your arm that pulled you back to your senses, and when you turned, he was there. 

     “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, as he pulled your arm slightly, moving you away from the group.

     You walked in silence, ashamed that Azazel had seen you with those angels. You felt like he had scolded you, like he believed that you would question God like that. Perhaps you would, but never so publicly. You would just like to name one flower.

     “Lucifer is starting something,” Azazel finally spoke up, not turning to look at you, but continuing to walk back to your house.

     “I didn’t mean to listen; I was just confused.”

     “I know,” he replied, “but you can’t let people see you around him. Angels will not lie when God asks who was with Lucifer.”

     You weren’t sure that angels could lie, you had never known one to.

     “Did you understand what he was saying?”

     “Yes.”

     “Do you agree with him?”      “I don’t know,” you admitted, looking down at your feet as you did so.

     You could feel his eyes on you. “You don’t know?”

     “Sometimes I ask questions, when I’m working,” you sighed. “I name the flowers even though I shouldn’t.”

     When you turned to look at Azazel he was smiling. “And what do you name them?”

     “It doesn’t matter, the humans will name them in the end,” you tried to conceal the heat of embarrassment that ran through your body at his question.

     He nodded his head at this, as you stopped in front of your house.

     “I’m sorry I was there, Azazel. I won’t stop next time.” I don’t want to disappoint you, you added in your head.

     “It’s okay, Rosiel. It’s natural to be curious when you hear new things like that. I just want you to be safe.”

     You nodded your head at this, happy to know that he was concerned about you.

     “Go inside and eat something. You need your strength to get back to naming flowers tomorrow.”

     You frowned at this as he reached out to rustle your hair.

     “I won’t tell anyone, flower namer. Your secret is safe with me.”

     “Thank you.”

     “Of course, Rosiel,” he smiled and pointed to your front door. “Name a flower after me and we’ll call it even.”

     Your eyes grew wide at his words, and a laugh tumbled from his lips. You quickly moved inside, your heart pounding. Maybe one day you would show him Azazel, but for now you were too mortified to even think about it. Maybe he already knew what you had done.

     It was a few years later when all of the angels gathered to watch Lucifer and his followers fall from grace. One of the females in your dominion gripped at your arm, tears falling from her eyes, as Lucifer stood on trial before God. You dared not look down at her, for fear that you would begin to cry to. 

     You barely listened to what was being said, thinking only of how Azazel had saved you that day. Maybe if you had stayed there a moment longer you would be standing up there as well.

     Lucifer had already been found guilty by the time you feel his comforting hand on your arm again. You turn to look at him, and he looks back you with a firm gaze. He doesn’t have to say anything; you know that he is thinking about that day as well. He knew this would happen.

    Over the years, you and Azazel have grown closer, bonded by the secret you told him that day. Occasionally he asked if you had ever named that flower after him, and every time you grew red with embarrassment, and refused to answer him.  

     You stand firm next to him, though the proceedings do wear down on your will. You don’t know any of the angels personally, but you know what they must be feeling. You can see it on their tear-soaked faces. All except Lucifer. He stands strong in the crowd, his gaze powerful. You think he looks a bit like the king he wants to be.

     It’s when the final angel is sentenced and they are turned around, that you feel the weight of the day fall on you. The female angel next to you has long been removed from the crowd, having cried herself weak halfway through the trial, and so you stand alone as the powers angels line up behind the guilty, ready to tear their wings from their bodies. Two powers angels stand behind Lucifer, and as his first wing is ripped from his flesh, you turn into Azazel’s body, unable to watch the horror before you. 

     He wraps his arms around you, his hand stroking your hair as he whispers comforting words in your ear.

     You can hear the screams, hear the pain of the fallen angels, and you shake as you think that it could have been you. Your draw your wings tight into your body as if to avoid anyone taking them from you.

      As if sensing this, Azazel’s grip on you tightens when he says, “You are safe, you have done nothing wrong, this is your home.”

     And, though you know he is right, you can’t stop the tears that fall from your eyes. You can’t stop the fear that clouds your brain, and as you begin to sob out in phantom pain, Azazel leads you out of the crowd and back to your house. 

     Azazel finds you after work the next day, saying that he needs to show you something. He takes your hand in his as he leads you in the opposite direction of your home. You find yourself in a meadow when he drops your hand and motions for you to look over the edge with him. You do, looking down at the Earth you both helped to create. You look to see if any Azazel have been planted in this area but find none. You think this might be for the best, because you’re still not ready to tell him about his flowers.

    The only Azazel is standing next to you, but on Earth there are three humans. Men, they call themselves. They’re working the Earth; they’ve been doing that since they were kicked out of the garden. You were so angry when your angel of dominion relayed the news to you. You thought it was the worst thing anyone had ever done to God. You think maybe Lucifer managed to do something worse.

     “What do you think of humans?” Azazel finally spoke up.

     “I think they hurt our Lord.”

     “Do you ever wonder why they did it?”

     “No, I try not to think about those things. Not since -”

     Azazel nods his head, knowing the day you are referring to. “I like them.” He admits.

     “Humans?”

     “They’re resilient,” he shrugs. “Lucifer tricked them, and now they continually apologize to God. They’re curious,” he smiles. “A bit like you in that way.”

     “They are not very good at naming flowers,” you grumbled. They had named Yispamire ‘lavender.’ You hated that name.

     Azazel laughed at this. “They’re trying their best.”

     “Why did you bring me here?” you asked as you turned to look at him.

     “Would you help me with something?”

     “Anything,” you said, a bit too enthusiastically. You meant it though, you would help Azazel with whatever he asked of you. Not only because you owed him that for saving you from that horrible fate, but because of what he meant to you. You cared about him in a way you weren’t sure angels could.

     “Good,” he smiled. “I’m still figuring it all out, but I’m glad to have you on my team.”

     You nodded at this, fighting the urge to dance in excitement. Azazel was glad to have you. You were a team.

     “Do you ever think about the future?” Azazel asked, as the two of you walked hand and hand to the meadow. You did this every day after work since the first day you went here. Every time Azazel and you talked more about the world you lived in, he asked you questions, some that you didn’t have answers to, but he never made you feel small for that. No, he would smile and say that he wasn’t sure either. You didn’t know if he was just being nice or not. It didn’t matter to you either way. You just wanted to spend all of your time talking to him.

     “Yes,” you breathed, looking down at his hand in yours. You thought about your future with Azazel all of the time. You thought about what it would be like to call yourself his. To admit your feelings to him. To do the things that only humans did.

     Angels weren’t supposed to feel like this.

     “Me too,” he smiled. “I wonder what we’re supposed to do for eternity sometimes.”

     You nod your head, too afraid to tell him the things that you wanted to do for eternity. The things you wanted to do with him. To do to him.

     “I think there has to be more to this, than what we currently have,” he looks over the edge, down to Earth. “I asked to be a guardian angel, you know?”

     You shook your head. You didn’t know, and it hurt your heart to think about Azazel being down on Earth without you. Without you telling him how you felt.

     “I was denied. Too invested in the human’s lives.”

     “I’m sorry,” you said, though you weren’t. You were selfish and glad that he stayed here with you. The humans didn’t deserve him.

     Azazel shook his head. “I don’t think I’m made for eternity. I see their lives, I watch them end, and I think there is something great in that. Every day something new happens to them and they never know when they will run out of time. They get to live,” he turned to look at you. “Do you envy them as well?”

     “Yes,” you admit, because it’s true. You envy the way they are with each other. You remember the first time you saw a man with a woman and wished that you could be that way with Azazel. The first time you wanted in that way. In the way that you hadn’t stopped since.

     “In what way?”      You feel ashamed at his question, so you avert your gaze, but Azazel lightly places his hand under your chin, and turns you back to look at him.

    “You have nothing to hide from me, Rosiel. Me and you are the same, I can feel it.”

    It’s the stars in his eyes that weaken the lock on your mouth and cause the words to stumble from your mouth. “Love.”

    “Love,” he echoes back, his eyes going wide. “Do we not have love in Heaven?”

    You shake your head, embarrassment creeping up your neck. “Not like they do.”

    He nods his head at this. “You are right about that.”

     “I feel lonely when I see them together,” you do not admit that you feel lonely when you cannot show him how you feel about him.

     “You are not alone.”

     “No?”

     “I already told you, we are the same,” he said, as he rubbed his thumb over the back of your hand. “You said you would help me,” he started, looking up from your hand at you. “Can I help you, flower namer?”

     You nod your head, your throat constricting as you dare not ruin this moment. You feel warmth all over your body as he leans in towards you, and for a moment you think maybe this is all a test to see if you are a sinful creature like Lucifer, but then his lips meet yours in the way you have watched humans, and you feel yourself melt into his frame. 

    Your hands find his hair quickly, and he smiles against your lips, as if he cannot believe that his flower namer was filled with such want.

    You feel dizzy the longer he kisses you, and when his lips find your neck, you think this is what it feels to be alive and you understand what Azazel meant about eternity. If this is the price of mortality, then it is the fairest trade you can think of.

    He’s gentle when he lays you down on the grass, and his eyes find yours as he pulls away from kissing you. He’s smiling so widely, and you can feel your own delirious happiness echoed on your own face. 

     “Rosiel,” he breathes. “I fear there is no turning back after this.”

     “I don’t want to go back. I want to be with you, no matter where.”

     And as he raised your robe and his hands found your untouched core, you know the severity of what you have said. You know that you will face the same fate as Lucifer. A wicked creature has no place in heaven, but as the knot in your core tightens at Azazel’s ministrations you do not care. And as you are filled with a euphoria you did not know was possible, you cry out his name as if he is your god, because he is. He has been since you saw him, you know that now. You would gladly fall at his side just as those angels fell with Lucifer. 

     Azazel was your king, and as the two of you connected and became one, you knew that he was why you were created. You fit together perfectly. He was your destiny. And as he called out your name, you let yourself believe that he saw you as his.

     The next day you and Azazel went to Earth and taught the humans about weapons and cosmetics. That was what he had been planning, to give them a way to protect themselves and a new method of art. They women marveled at how you made up your face everyday and wondered aloud why God had not allowed humans the same method of expression. 

     Michael was waiting for you and Azazel when you got back.

    Now three weeks later you stood on trial in the same space that you had watched Lucifer. They had taken your halo away long ago, so you couldn’t speak to Azazel without the whole kingdom hearing. You felt so alone in the silence left behind. 

     You didn’t listen to the charges against you, knowing they were true. You wanted to reach out and hold Azazel’s hand, but they had kept you bound too far apart to do so. You tried to meet his gaze, but he stood firm in the way Lucifer had all that time ago. So, you did the same, because you knew what the other angels didn’t know. You knew about love, you knew what it felt to belong to someone else, and you didn’t regret it. 

     Azazel was right when he said that you were the same, because this place wasn’t meant for either of you. This place could not hold you; you could never be happy here. You could only be happy with him, and the rules forbid it. So, you would happily let them take your wings and push you over the edge. And as you fell to Earth you would smile, because you would be with Azazel. 

    You only registered that you had been found guilty when the powers angel turned you around so that he could access your wings. You looked over at Azazel and this time he looked back at you. There was fear on his face, something you had not seen all of the time that you had known him and for a moment you wondered if your own confidence was unfounded.

    You cried out in pain as you watched them gouge his right wing from his body. You couldn’t bear to watch them hurt him, but you dare not break eye contact because you needed him to know that you were with him. That you were still a team.

    Azazel lost consciousness as the second wing was torn from his body, and your vision blurred as you cried at the sight of black blood flowing from his body.

    They said the smoke that surrounds the wounds was sin, but you thought that whoever would hurt Azazel like this was the bigger sinner. He looked so small as the blood pooled around him, and just as you thought to turn to the crowd and ask them how they could stand by and watch their friend be hurt like this, the powers demon removed your own wing.

     The pain was even worse than you had imagined, feeling the ache far into your chest, as if your heart was shattering at the removal. You couldn’t hear yourself screaming, though you knew by the ache in your throat that you were. Your back was slick with blood and you prayed that you would be given the same release of unconsciousness that had been gifted to Azazel, but your request was met with the same empty silence you had felt for weeks. There was nothing on the other end of that prayer and as your partner lay as if he was dead, you had never felt more abandoned. You somehow withstood the pain, and you were still awake when the boot of the powers angel met your back and kicked you over the edge of heaven.

     The fall did not wake Azazel, and as you watched your home fade from view you wondered if he truly was dead. You were still crying when your body collided with Earth and you only stopped when Azazel crawled to your side.

     “You are safe now,” he whispered as he pulled you into his chest. “You are home now.” 

     Lucifer reached out to you and Azazel two days after your fall. You had tended to his wounds and he to yours, before trying to find a place to rest your heads for the night. 

     Azazel and you had decided not to join him, wanting to stay to yourselves on Earth. You hadn’t fallen with him and you weren’t ready to bow to anyone other than Azazel. He was all you had in this world, in the past, and in the future.

     You had been welcomed into the village you had given the weapons and cosmetics to. You worked alongside the women in the fields, and you tried not to feel jealous when they spoke of Azazel’s beauty as if you weren’t there. 

     Your muscles ached every night when you lay beside Azazel in the small house you had built together, and every night Azazel muttered that he would fix that as he ran his hands over every inch of your body.

     Every day when you left each other for your different jobs, you told him that you loved him. And even as your back continued to scream with pain, you had never been happier. 

     You were doing the laundry at the river together, when you first noticed that something was wrong. Azazel kept getting distracted, looking down the bank at some of the humans. You had asked him what was wrong, but he insisted everything was fine.

    That night your body ached all over, but Azazel stayed far away from it.

    Sometime later he insisted that you needed human names, but you resisted. You were not a human and you had no interest in pretending you were. You were a Nephilim. You both were Nephilim. This connected you.

     He didn’t force you to take a human name, but he adopted his own. It felt foreign on your tongue every time you were forced to call him by his new name.

     Yoongi. 

     A human girl had helped him pick the name. She said it suited him. You tried to ignore the blush on his cheeks when he told you this story. You tried to forget that he hadn’t touched you in weeks. You tried not to notice that he only smiled when you said that you loved him.

     When you had fallen from heaven your chest had ached with emptiness.

     When you found Azazel in bed with that human girl your entire body felt as if it had been set on fire. It was your hell; you had not needed to take Lucifer up on his offer to be damned. Azazel kicked you from heaven the second he fell in love with that human girl and you did not feel remorse when you unleashed your power from your body and fought him.  

     You did not cry when the strength of two Nephilim colliding destroyed the village you had called home. You did not let him break you any further when you stood on his throat and watched as he choked beneath you.

     You only relented when he passed out. 

     You were gone before he came to, but you made sure to spit at the human girl as she crawled to your lover.

     Lucifer smiled when you asked one of his demons to take you to him. And then he laughed.

     He laughed and he laughed and then he asked you to beg.

     You did. You begged him to make you a demon, you begged him for his protection, you pledged your life to him.

    And he took pity on you. He thought your story was pitiful.

    But he could not forget that you had fallen because of Azazel and not because of him. He was angry with you for that. So, while the rest of the Nephilim were the princes and princesses of Hell or Seraphim, you could not be given the same authority. No, you had to work for him, had to earn your keep. 

     And he thought that a fallen angel with such a pitiful story would be perfect as his new demon of lust. The one before you had come to an unfortunate demise, though you later learned he was killed by Lucifer later that day so that he could continue torturing you with this job.

     It was a cruel joke, he wanted you to remember why you had left heaven for the rest of your life. Though you didn’t need to tempt men and women to fall in love to remember Azazel. You thought of him every day. For centuries you hated him, and then you felt nothing. You felt no joy; you felt no anger. When you thought of Azazel you felt empty.

     You never loved again. Demons didn’t love anything.

     You learned that he became mortal for that girl when he died and found himself in Hell. You almost asked for his location, but you worried that the other demons would see him as your weakness and use him against you. You had no doubt it would work. 

    So, you tricked that human girl into selling her soul to you and tortured her for part of eternity. It never made you feel any better. 

     Sometimes you wondered if Azazel ever learned that you had taken a human name too. If he knew that you hated the idea of anyone calling you Rosiel if it wasn’t him. 

     You stopped torturing the human girl after she forced a broken word through her lips. “Rose,” she spat blood as the word left her mouth. “He named them after you. Roses.”

     You traded her to Kalgrath’s dominion long ago.

     And then you met Jimin, and you started to feel something where that emptiness once was. You tried to deny it, but you felt like you were alive again. When he pushed you and claimed that you didn’t know what it was like to be an angel, you wanted so badly to tell him how wrong you felt in Heaven. You wanted to hold his hand and to tell him how you fell in love, even when God said not to. Not so that he could know who you were, Rosiel the angel was long gone, but so that he could see that whatever he felt was normal. So that he would know it was the system that was broken, not him. And when he whispered your true name, you didn’t recoil in discuss. 

    Your heart felt whole for the first time in nearly an eternity. 

© gimmeyoon — all rights reserved. reposting, modifying, or translation onto other sites even with proper credit given is not permitted.

[cinderacequeen]

Okay but: imagine Héctor pretty much telling his beloved nieta Victoria, "The greatest honor... is having you for a granddaughter." You know, like that scene in Mulan.

The feels are still as strong since the first time I read this, especially since I just watched Mulan awhile ago!

Victoria is the first Rivera to have grown up with the infamous music ban, so even after it’s restored and her grandfather moves in with her family, she can’t help but feel aloof for awhile, trying to get used to this abrupt and unfamiliar change.

Victoria feels bad when she finds herself avoiding her Papá Héctor, who only wants a chance to bond with her. She’s not being cold, she’s just trying to get used to him being around and feels like she needs the space until then, though she really wants to start a bond with him as well.

Her abuelita has scolded her many times for this, which just makes Victoria feel guiltier.

When she goes out into the garden to figure out exactly how she’s going to start a conversation with him, Papá Héctor joins her and quietly sits on the bench, apart enough to give her as much space as possible. He understands Victoria’s quietness and just starts some idle chit-chat about the wild alebrije foxes playing in the courtyard to how beautiful the Land of the Dead’s sunsets are.

Then he tells Victoria that she is far more beautiful than all the sunsets he’s watched combined and she’s just floored. She gawks at him with a slightly slack jaw and he just responds back with a soft gaze and smile.

This man was practically a stranger to her and yet he was giving her a high compliment that she was immensely flattered by.

“After how I’ve been treating you, you’re still being nice to me?”

“Por supuesto!” Héctor exclaimed. “I know you’re not being malicious or mistrusting. You’re just…cautious. I just dropped into your life one day, disrupting any order and balance you knew, and you’re not quite sure how to deal with it it just yet. We never had the chance to know each other in life…”

Héctor’s eyes darkened and narrowed as he looked towards the ground, a tight-lipped frown on his face. His hands clenched into shaking fists. “Ernesto ruined any chance of that. He made me miss so much and I’ll never forgive him for it or everything else he’s done…almost did.”

Héctor inhaled a shaky breath, shaking himself bodily before straightening and returning his softening gaze back to his granddaughter. “But that doesn’t matter now. That’s in the past. What matters is now. I have the chance to make up for everything and I’ve been working so hard to do so. But so far…you’re the only one who I haven’t had the chance to get to really know.”

“I’m sorry,” Victoria whispered, gripping her right arm and looking away. “You’re right. I have been cautious. I was just trying to understand how to accept this change. I felt…scared by it. I don’t like change, and this is a pretty big one. My whole life I was told you were my runaway, good-for-nothing grandfather, that I was to hate you forever.

It took Miguel getting cursed, almost dying, and you being nearly forgotten for us to understand that we were all horribly wrong. If we had been told to begin with…if we had looked further into it, your afterlife wouldn’t have been as miserable as it had been. I can’t help but feel especially guilty.”

Héctor looked at her as if she had grown an extra head. “For what?”

Victoria sighed in frustration, taking off her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose, as if a headache was building-had she been alive one would have been. Stress or incredible guilt did that to her. “I take after Mamá Imelda so much. I’ve been told multiple times that I’m like her twin. Most of my mannerisms and character comes from her. I blindly follow her orders and way of life for so long, I have no personality of my own.”

Héctor opened his mouth to voice his protests but Victoria holding up a hand silenced him, telling him that she wasn’t done speaking. Fidgeting with the right knee of his sewn pants and biting the anxiousness down, he gave Victoria his full attention.

“People have been mocking me, calling me Imelda Jr. It should have been a compliment, seeing as how much Elena idolized her, but it was an insult. It just reminded me that I could have been my own person but was afraid to break out of the persona created for me.

Perhaps if I had done so earlier, I would have been able to tell that the lies passed down to us contradicted Mamá’s stories she secretly told to Elena and me when we were very young. Of course, abuelita found out and told us that Mamá was young herself and didn’t understand the severity of the situation. She and abuelita would get into heated arguments and Elena and I were forced to choose who to believe.

Naturally Elena took abuelita’s side. I wanted to take Mamá’s, but I…I was so intimidated that I…” Victoria broke off, rubbing at her eyes as tears flooded her eyes. Héctor instantly scooted over and wrapped his arms around Victoria’s shoulders, tugging her close, and cradled her head into the crook of his neck. 

He was surprised how she didn’t fight him, instead practically melting into his hold.

It was apparent that she had been holding her feelings back for so long and really needed the comfort.

“Mija,” he spoke in his deep, soothing tone. He rubbing Victoria’s back. “I do not blame you for choosing Imelda’s side over Coco’s; though it’s a shame that you had been unfairly forced to choose a side at such a tender age. It’s something no child should ever have to go through.

I know you would have helped your Mamá keep my memory alive if you could. And even if you took after your Mamá Imelda, I still see so much of Victoria.”

Victoria pushed herself back, staring at him quizzically.

Héctor smirked lopsidedly, brushing a strand of hair from her forehead, kissing it. “You’re incredibly book smart; Julio told me that you could share just about any sort of knowledge about anything that was asked, that you loved sharing anything you found out about.

 He also said you had a hidden, creative talent. I saw one of the sketchbooks he’s kept after your passing. Mija, you’re a muy fantástico artist. Had you not been a shoemaker, I’m certain you would have made quite a name for yourself, maybe even went to Paris or somewhere else to study art.”

“So I’m smart and artistic, nothing special,” Victoria snarled, pursing her lips and brushing the tears away.

“Viquita,” Héctor said, taking her hand between his, squeezing it reassuringly. “You are special, even if you don’t feel like you are. You hold so much insecurity about yourself, most likely brought on by the venom of those idiotas who made you feel such a way, that you refuse to think that there’s nothing great about you. You’re wrong, and I hope this will be the only time I have to tell you that. You just haven’t had the chance to rediscover yourself. Now that I’m here, I will be more than happy to help you do so.

I want to see the Victoria that Julio and Coco were so proud of, and still are, and see you do the things you enjoyed to do in life. Heck, you can “draw me like one of your French girls”,” Hector added with a cheesy, broad grin and a terrible British accent complete with a brow wiggle.

This made Victoria burst into loud laughter. Hector broke his impression and joined her.

“Papá Héctor, that movie came out years after your time. How did you come across that reference?”

“Oh, there were a number of fans of it in Shantytown, and that was one of the most iconic lines that I often heard be tossed around. Of course, the movie version probably wasn’t as funny as they made it sound and apparently kids today have made it into a…me-me?”

Victoria guffawed. “It’s pronounced meme, abuelito!”

Héctor held out his arms, grinning goofily. “How was I supposed to know that? It seems like new words are just made up for the heck of it!”

The two laughed some more before falling into a comfortable silence. Victoria leaned against Héctor and he wrapped an arm around her shoulder, resting his head against hers.

“Victoria…just know that I will always love you, no matter who you are or what you do.”

“I love you, too, abuelito. I look forward to getting to know you more.”

“As do I…though there is one thing I am certain of.”

“And what would that be?”

“The greatest honor…is having you for a granddaughter.”

Victoria snorted. “You referencing movies is ruining the moment, tonto.”

“Who said it was just a reference?”

And from that moment forward, Victoria truly felt like her old self and enjoyed every second she and her obnoxious, wonderful grandfather shared together.

[bountyofbeads]

It Might Be Unethical or Even Illegal, but Not if You’re the President https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/us/politics/trump-g7-ethics.html

As Inquiry Widens, McConnell Is Said to See Impeachment Trial as Inevitable

By Carl Hulse | Published Oct. 18, 2019 Updated 9:31 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 18, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — It was only a few weeks ago that the top Senate Republican was hinting that his chamber would make short work of impeachment.

But this week, Senator Mitch McConnell sat his colleagues down over lunch in the Capitol and warned them to prepare for an extended impeachment trial of President Trump.

According to people who were there, he came equipped with a PowerPoint presentation, complete with quotes from the Constitution, as he schooled fellow senators on the intricacies of a process he portrayed as all but inevitable.

Few Republicans are inclined to convict Mr. Trump on charges that he abused his power to enlist Ukraine in an effort to smear his political rivals. Instead, Mr. McConnell sees the proceedings as necessary to protect a half a dozen moderates in states like Maine, Colorado and North Carolina who face re-election next year and must show voters they are giving the House impeachment charges a serious review.

It’s people like Senator Susan Collins of Maine who will be under immense political pressure as they decide the president’s fate.

“To overturn an election, to decide whether or not to convict a president is about as serious as it gets,” Ms. Collins said.

Mr. McConnell is walking a careful line of his own in managing the fast-moving impeachment process. On Friday, the senator wrote a scathing op-ed criticizing the president’s decision to pull back troops from northern Syria, calling it a “grave strategic mistake.” But Mr. McConnell views it as his role to protect a president of his own party from impeachment and in a recent fund-raising video, he vowed to stop it.

The mood among Republicans on Capitol Hill has shifted from indignant to anxious as a parade of administration witnesses has submitted to closed-door questioning by impeachment investigators and corroborated central elements of the whistle-blower complaint that sparked the inquiry.

They grew more worried still on Thursday, after Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, undercut the president’s defense by saying that Mr. Trump had indeed withheld security aid from Ukraine in order to spur an investigation of his political rivals. Mr. Mulvaney later backtracked, but the damage was done.

“I couldn’t believe it — I was very surprised that he said that,” said Representative Francis Rooney, Republican of Florida, who mocked Mr. Mulvaney’s attempts to take back comments that had been broadcast live from the White House briefing room.

“It’s not an Etch A Sketch,” Mr. Rooney said, miming the tipping movement that erases the toy drawing board. “There were a lot of Republicans looking at that headline yesterday when it came up, I certainly was.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski — an Alaskan Republican who is seen as potentially open to removing Mr. Trump from office — told reporters that a president should never engage in the kinds of actions that Mr. Mulvaney appeared to acknowledge.

“You don’t hold up foreign aid that we had previously appropriated for a political initiative,” she said. “Period.”

Still, Republicans said they did not detect a significant shift that would pose a serious threat to the president in the Senate. It would require 20 Republicans to side with Democrats in convicting Mr. Trump, and few observers believe that will happen.

Mr. McConnell, his allies said, regards the impeachment fight in much the same way as he did the struggle last year to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, in which he was primarily concerned with protecting his Senate majority by insulating vulnerable incumbents. Then, as now, they said, Mr. McConnell is focused on keeping Republicans as united as possible, while allowing those with reservations about Mr. Trump’s conduct and their own political considerations to justify their decision to their constituents.

“I think he will play it straight,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a close McConnell ally, who noted his party’s narrow voting margin. “I don’t think he has any alternative. When you are operating with 53 you have thin margins and you can’t jam anybody or you end up with undesirable consequences.”

Mr. McConnell has told colleagues he expects the House to impeach Mr. Trump quickly, possibly by Thanksgiving, an educated hunch based on the pace of the inquiry so far and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to keep the inquiry narrowly focused on Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. He plans to move swiftly too, he told colleagues, using the approach of Christmas to force the Senate to complete its work before the beginning of 2020.

Yet an impeachment trial is a spectacle that is by its nature unpredictable, and most of the senators who will act as jurors were not around for the last one, of Bill Clinton in 1999. Mr. McConnell reminded senators that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. would preside over the trial, and would have wide latitude in handling motions that might be made, including any motion to dismiss the charges that Republicans might try to put forward to short circuit the process.

Mr. McConnell’s declaration that the Senate would move forward was in part designed to show he had no choice, an effort to deflect criticism from conservatives outraged that the Senate would even consider impeachment.

On Wednesday, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, pushed for Senate Republicans to write a letter to Ms. Pelosi declaring that they would not remove the president. But some senators raised objections, worrying that some of their colleagues would not want to sign on, a result that would expose disunity among Republicans. Mr. Graham’s colleagues said they believe they staved off the letter, which they viewed as a mistake.

Mr. McConnell has made it clear that he plans to sit down with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, to see if they can find a mutually acceptable way to move forward as Democrats and Republicans did in 1999 when they unanimously agreed on the framework for the impeachment trial. The Senate is much more polarized now, though Mr. Schumer this week held out hope.

“We have to do this trial in a fair and bipartisan way and I hope that Leader McConnell would obey those strictures,” Mr. Schumer said. In the battle for Senate control, Democrats have their own political risks to consider since impeachment could prompt a backlash against some of their candidates if enough voters conclude that the president was pursued unfairly.

Just 15 senators remain in office from the time Mr. Clinton was put on trial. Mr. McConnell warned them of the weight of the trial, where they can be required to be on the floor all afternoon six days a week without speaking — a major challenge for senators who relish their chances to be heard.

“It will mean day after day sitting in chamber, listening to the two sides, writing questions for them to answer that go through the chief justice,” said Ms. Collins, one of the Republicans who voted to acquit Mr. Clinton 20 years ago. “Members who have not been through this before will find it is a great deal of work.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

*********

The Crisis of the Republican Party

The G.O.P. will not be able to postpone a reckoning on Donald Trump’s presidency for much longer.

By The Editorial Board | Published October 18, 2019 | New York Times | Posted October 18, 2019 |

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

In the summer of 1950, outraged by Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist inquisition, Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican senator from Maine, stood to warn her party that its own behavior was threatening the integrity of the American republic. “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear,” she said. “I doubt if the Republican Party could — simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely, we Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory.”

Senator Smith surely knew her “Declaration of Conscience” would not carry the day. Her appeal to the better angels of her party was not made in the expectation of an immediate change; sometimes the point is just to get people to look up. In the end, four more years passed before the bulk of the Republican Party looked up and turned on Senator McCarthy — four years of public show trials and thought policing that pushed the country so hard to the right that the effects lasted decades. The problem with politicians who abuse power isn’t that they don’t get results. It’s that the results come at a high cost to the Republic — and to the reputations of those who lack the courage or wisdom to resist.

The Republican Party is again confronting a crisis of conscience, one that has been gathering force ever since Donald Trump captured the party’s nomination in 2016. Afraid of his political influence, and delighted with his largely conservative agenda, party leaders have compromised again and again, swallowing their criticisms and tacitly if not openly endorsing presidential behavior they would have excoriated in a Democrat. Compromise by compromise, Donald Trump has hammered away at what Republicans once saw as foundational virtues: decency, honesty, responsibility. He has asked them to substitute loyalty to him for their patriotism itself.

Mr. Trump privately pressed Ukraine to serve his political interests by investigating a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, as well as by looking into a long-debunked conspiracy theory about Democratic National Committee emails that were stolen by the Russians. Mr. Trump publicly made a similar request of China. His chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said publicly on Thursday that the administration threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine if it did not help “find” the D.N.C. servers.

These attempts to enlist foreign interference in American electoral democracy are an assault not only on our system of government but also on the integrity of the Republican Party. Republicans need to emulate the moral clarity of Margaret Chase Smith and recognize that they have a particular responsibility to condemn the president’s behavior and to reject his tactics.

Some have already done so. On Friday, John Kasich, the former Ohio governor, said that Mr. Mulvaney’s comments convinced him that the impeachment inquiry should move forward. Representative Justin Amash of Michigan had already called for impeachment, though he felt it necessary to leave the party as a consequence.

There was a time when Republicans like Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said that soliciting foreign election assistance would be improper. But most congressional Republicans have taken to avoiding such questions as the evidence against Mr. Trump has piled up. Mr. Trump still feels so well-protected by his party that he has just named his own golf resort as the site for the next Group of 7 summit in 2020, a brazen act of self-dealing.

Yet Republicans will not be able to postpone a reckoning with Trumpism for much longer. The investigation by House Democrats appears likely to result in a vote for impeachment, despite efforts by the White House to obstruct the inquiry. That will force Senate Republicans to choose. Will they commit themselves and their party wholly to Mr. Trump, embracing even his most anti-democratic actions, or will they take the first step toward separating themselves from him and restoring confidence in the rule of law?

Thus far in office, Mr. Trump has acted against the national interest by maintaining his financial interests in his company and using the presidential podium to promote it; obstructed legitimate investigations into his conduct by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and Congress; attacked the free press; given encouragement to white nationalists; established a de facto religious test for immigrants; undermined foreign alliances and emboldened American rivals; demanded personal loyalty from subordinates sworn to do their duty to the Constitution; and sent his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, around the world to conduct what could most charitably be described as shadow foreign policy with Mr. Trump’s personal benefit as its lodestar.

Some Republicans have clearly believed that they could control the president by staying close to him and talking him out of his worst ideas. Ask Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who has spent the last two years prostrating himself before Mr. Trump in the hope of achieving his political goals, including protecting the Kurds — how that worked out. Mr. Graham isn’t alone, of course; there is a long list of politicians who have debased themselves to please Mr. Trump, only to be abandoned by him like a sack of rotten fruit in the end. That’s the way of all autocrats; they eventually turn on everyone save perhaps their own relatives, because no one can live up to their demands for fealty.

The Constitution’s framers envisioned America’s political leaders as bound by a devotion to country above all else. That’s why all elected officials take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. By protecting Donald Trump at all costs from all consequences, the Republicans risk violating that sacred oath.

Senator Smith’s question once again hangs over the Republican Party: Surely they are not so desperate for short-term victory as to tolerate this behavior? We’ll soon find out.

*********

Mulvaney, as Clouseau, Solves Mystery!

The acting chief of staff’s admission changes everything.

By Bret Stephen's, Opinion Columnist | Published Oct. 18, 2019, 8:45 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 18, 2019 |

John Maynard Keynes may not have been the one who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” But the line, often attributed to him, remains a good one. And it captures my shifting view of the impeachment inquiry.

That view shifted again this week with Mick Mulvaney’s hallucinatory press conference on Thursday, in which he appeared to admit a version of the quid pro quo the president and his minions have spent the past few weeks fervently denying. “Did he also mention to me in passing the corruption related to the D.N.C. server?” the acting chief of staff said of the president. “Absolutely. No question about that.”

He added: “That’s why we held up the money.”

Mulvaney clarified his comments — which is to say, contradicted himself — a few hours later, insisting in a carefully scripted statement, “There never was any condition on the flow of the aid related to the matter of the D.N.C. server.” For this, he offered as proof “the fact that the aid money was delivered without any action on the part of the Ukrainians regarding the server.”

True. Except, as everyone knows, the money was released only after several infuriated lawmakers, including Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, pushed the administration to deliver the aid without ever being told the real story of why it had been delayed in the first place.

In other words, a White House that initially insisted it had nothing to hide was, in fact, hiding something. It then claimed that it didn’t intend to do what it clearly intended to do, based on the fact that it didn’t get away with doing it. Next, it compounded the prevarication by admitting to its intentions, and insisting there was nothing wrong with them. And, finally, it reverted to denying those intentions altogether.

What kind of fool is Mulvaney, to take the rest of us for such fools?

Mulvaney’s Inspector Clouseau routine follows a week of disclosures about the extent to which U.S. policy toward Ukraine became the province of Rudy Giuliani to the exclusion of the State Department and National Security Council. Giuliani, in turn, was paid $500,000 by the company of a shady business associate who was helping him dig for political dirt in Ukraine. That associate and his partner were recently pulled from a flight on one-way tickets and arrested on charges of campaign-finance violations connected to the ouster of the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. No wonder John Bolton described this shadow foreign policy as a “drug deal.”

Donald Trump’s inveterate defenders insist that the president is entitled to conduct foreign policy any way he wants, and delegate authority to whomever he pleases. That just isn’t true.

No president has the right, ever, to use the powers of his office to enrich himself, which is what Trump appears to be doing by designating his Florida golf resort as the site of the next G7 meeting. No president has the automatic right to impound congressionally appropriated funds, above all for nakedly political ends. No president may delegate foreign policy to anyone who abuses that trust for personal profit. No president should derail the career of a foreign-service officer because she would not violate the trust of her office to enable his political vendettas.

And no president should lie so wantonly about his public conduct or enlist the officers of government in the concealment of that conduct. This has been the story of the Trump administration from its first day.

For Democrats, the question is whether impeachment is the right response to indisputably outrageous acts. I’ve previously been skeptical for several reasons, not least that a party-line vote in the House would simultaneously diminish the stigma of impeachment while boosting the president’s re-election chances. And I was particularly skeptical if the entire case against Trump rested on that one phone call.

Now it’s clear that it doesn’t. Whatever the political calculus, the impeachment inquiry needs to press on, aggressively.

As for Republicans, a question they might usefully ask themselves is whether the standard of behavior they now either accept or embrace in this president is one they are prepared to condone in a Democratic administration. All of their casuistry in Trump’s defense today may, and probably will, be used against them in the future. The wretched bargain that partisans inevitably make with demagogues on their side is that they inspire, and license, the demagoguery of the other.

A suggestion for Nancy Pelosi: Offer the House a vote on censure, neither as a substitute for the impeachment inquiry nor for impeachment itself, but as an opportunity for members to go on record as to how they judge the president. It would give at least a few Republicans, for whom an impeachment vote is a political bridge too far, an opportunity to save a piece of their souls. History will judge the rest.

*********

It Might Be Unethical or Even Illegal, but Not if You’re the President

By Eric Lipton | Published Oct. 18, 2019, 8:14 PM ET | New York Times |

WASHINGTON — The rules are clear for nearly everyone who works in the executive branch: Officials are prohibited from playing even a minor role in a decision that directly creates a financial benefit for the employee or the employee’s immediate family.

But those rules do not apply to the president and vice president, the only executive branch officials who are exempt from a criminal statute and a separate ethics regulation that govern conflicts of interest.

That exemption is the reason President Trump could legally play a role in the selection of the Trump National Doral resort near Miami as the site of next year’s summit meeting of the Group of 7. If anyone in the executive branch other than Mr. Trump or Vice President Mike Pence tried the same thing, they would likely have been blocked by government lawyers, faced an ethics investigation and perhaps become the subject of a criminal inquiry, federal ethics lawyers from both parties said Friday.

Violating the law, which dates to 1962, is a felony punishable with a prison sentence of up to five years.

”Suggesting that your own business be used for an expensive government event over which you have control would violate the prohibitions,” said Trevor Potter, a Republican and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.

Steven L. Schooner, who served as the administrator for procurement law in the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, said Mr. Trump’s actions — if he were not exempt — would have “at least lead to a referral to the Justice Department.”

Besides this conflict-of-interest law, picking the 643-room Doral resort near Miami for an event that will generate hotel room reservations and other related sales worth millions of dollars raises questions about whether other constraints might apply to the situation, the legal experts said. Those include federal competitive bidding requirements and provisions in the Constitution that ban even the president from taking certain kinds of payments from foreign governments and the federal government.

It also highlights how Mr. Trump has often swept aside the ethical standard he set for himself as he was preparing to take office in early 2017.

Nine days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, one of his lawyers, Sheri A. Dillon, released a document detailing how Mr. Trump would avoid conflicts of interest after he was sworn in, even if he was not prohibited under law from taking actions that would benefit his family financially.

“President-Elect Trump, as well as Don, Eric, and Alan are committed to ensuring that the activities of The Trump Organization are beyond reproach, and that the Organization avoids even the appearance of a conflict of interest, including through any advantage derived from the Office of the Presidency,” Ms. Dillon wrote in the six-page document, referring to Mr. Trump’s two oldest sons and Alan Garten, the chief legal officer at Trump Organization.

But that same day, Mr. Trump made clear he was aware that he had a legal exemption that provided him considerable flexibility to decide for himself what would be permissible.

“I have a no-conflict-of-interest provision as president,” Mr. Trump said. “It was many, many years old, this is for presidents. Because they don’t want presidents getting — I understand they don’t want presidents getting tangled up in minutia; they want a president to run the country. So I could actually run my business, I could actually run my business and run government at the same time.”

Bobby R. Burchfield, a lawyer who serves a the ethics adviser to the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust — which technically owns the family hotels and other properties that are now managed by his sons — said on Friday he is examining the matter.

“We are looking at the situation” he said. “The President, the Trump Organization and I are committed to ensuring that this is done in compliance with the ethics standards.”

Mr. Trump himself, in late August, at the end of the G7 summit in France, first confirmed publicly that the Trump family resort in Doral, Fla., was being considered for the June 2020 gathering.

“Having it at that particular place, because of the way it’s set up, each country can have their own villa, or their own bungalow,” Mr. Trump said in August, before continuing later in his remarks that “I think it just works out well.”

The acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said on Thursday that Mr. Trump was the first to recommend the Doral resort as a site for the G7.

“We were back in the dining room and I was going over it with a couple of our advance team,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “We had the list, and he goes, ‘What about Doral?’ And it was like, ‘That’s not the craziest idea. It makes perfect sense.’ “

These statements alone would likely be enough to create a conflict-of-interest problem for Mr. Trump if he were not president, ethics and procurement lawyers said.

“If this was the secretary of commerce who had the power to decide where an event like this would be held and he or she decides it should be held at a property he or she owns, and would generate income, that probably would be a conflict of interest” said Jan W. Baran, who served during President George Bush’s tenure on a presidential commission that studied federal ethics laws, and also previously served as general counsel at the Republican National Committee.

It is a violation of the law if an executive branch employee “participates personally,” in a “decision, approval, disapproval, recommendation, the rendering of advice, investigation, or otherwise,” in a matter that directly financially impacts a company owned by that employee’s spouse, children “or an organization that he is serving as officer, director, trustee, general partner,” the statue says.

A separate federal Standards of Conduct regulation issued by the Office of Government Ethics in 1992 says that ”employees shall not use public office for private gain,” although again these rules do not apply to the president.

The president and vice president are exempt, Mr. Baran said, because Congress generally cannot pass restrictions that apply to them as the president cannot be forced to recuse himself and delegate his constitutional powers to someone else.

Every president over the past four decades — with the exception of Mr. Trump — has placed his personal investments and assets in a blind trust while in the White House, or has sold everything and held cash equivalents, to avoid any potential conflicts, even though there has been no requirement to do this under the law.

Mr. Mulvaney on Thursday defended the approach the White House took in selecting the Doral, saying that a dozen locations were evaluated, which suggests that federal contracting rules might have been honored. But Mr. Mulvaney would not disclose the other locations or the process used to evaluate them.

He said the Doral would be the least expensive, because the Trump family will offer the hotel “at cost,” meaning it will not profit from the event.

Separately, the Trump Organization has vowed to “identify and donate profits derived from foreign government patrons” to the Treasury.

But a Trump Organization spokesman on Friday declined to explain how the company is going to determine what “at cost” means or how it will calculate what part of a hotel bill paid by a foreign government official is considered profit.

Mr. Schooner said the Doral, during the off-season in June when it is hot and muggy in Florida, has a low vacancy rate. So even if otherwise empty rooms are sold at a discount, it is still a major financial benefit to the company, as would be the global publicity from an event like the G7 meeting.

“The leaders of the free world walking around in someone’s resort: That is priceless advertising,” he said.

At least three different lawsuits are pending in federal court that are testing if Mr. Trump is violating the Constitution’s emoluments clauses by continuing to own, through a trust, the collection of hotels, golf courses and resorts that at times are taking payments from foreign government officials and the United States government.

After a series of decisions both for and against the president, a case brought by the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia will be heard by the full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. It alleges that the Trump International Hotel in Washington has illegally siphoned off business from hotels and convention centers in which the local governments have a financial interest.

Democrats in Congress who filed one of these cases will now revise the lawsuit to include the plan by Mr. Trump to have the G7 meeting at the Doral.

“He is certainly digging deeper in his failing defense by violating the Constitution in plain sight, in real time,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that involves more than 200 House and Senate Democrats. “It is really absolutely striking.”

Steve Eder contributed reporting from New York

*********

[sunsetbeachsoap]

Interview: Life's a Sunset Beach

She was going to be the next Elizabeth Taylor. These days Lesley- Anne Down takes work where she finds it - right now, it's in the best daytime soap opera since `Crossroads'.

Deborah Ross @deborahross

Monday 30 November 1998 01:02

So, here she is, then, Lesley-Anne Down, once "Britain's Most Beautiful Teenager" and once, of course, the flighty, ravishing, utterly captivating Miss Georgina Worsley in Upstairs, Downstairs. I can still see her now, in her little sparkling bugle dress, with those big sparkling eyes, flirting outrageously with someone jolly handsome in the Eaton Place drawing room, while, downstairs, Mrs Bridges was bellowing: "RUBY! ROO- BEEEEE! YOU COME AND HELP ME WITH THIS MILK PUDDING NOW, MY GIRL!" The part quickly transformed her into the nation's, and the tabloids', absolute darling. She may even have been Elizabeth Hurley before there was any Elizabeth Hurley. The prototype, if you like. And very, very big things were predicted for her. "The next Elizabeth Taylor," declared the Daily Mail in 1973. But today? Today she is not a great big movie star. Instead, she is Olivia Richards in the American daytime soap Sunset Beach.

Now, let's see, how best to give you a little thumbnail-sketch of Olivia? OK. Here goes. Olivia used to have a drink problem, and also used to be married to Gregory Richards, played by a cracking actor who can do lines, and facial expressions, but singularly fails to ever tie the two in together. Olivia has a baby son, Tres, unbeknown to her grown-up daughter, Caitlin, who is a graduate (cum laude) of The American School of Dramatic Hair Tossing - they are all, actually, very good at tossing, but Caitlin's the best - and who thinks Tres came from a prostitute. Caitlin certainly doesn't think Tres could be her brother, or might even be her half-brother, because Olivia once had an affair with Cole, who suffers under the weight of a great deal of hair gel and thus looks permanently perplexed, and who is now married to Caitlin, while Gregory is now married to Annie, who has lips like dinghies and who drugged Olivia and stole Tres in the first place before Olivia found out and Gregory divorced her, because he thought Tres died as a result of her drinking. And that's about it. I think. Tragically, Sunset Beach is only on here at 10.20am on Channel 5 which means that, for a busy, professional, go-getting high-brow like me, I only ever get to see it daily.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: "Look what Lesley- Anne has come to!" And: "Where did it all go pear-shaped!"Well, if that's the case, and I suspect it is, then I can only say you are mad. Sunset Beach is, almost certainly, the best thing on telly at the moment. Indeed, for anyone who has had, say, a Crossroads-shaped hole in their lives ever since Crossroads was axed, then Sunset Beach is just the ticket, and possibly more so. The plots are ludicrous, the acting is appalling and, as for the dialogue! Well, take Olivia to her ex, Gregory, while they are stuck in a lift, and he's coming on to her, because he's unknowingly been doped with Viagra, and she finds herself succumbing: "LOVE [breath] ME [breath] GREGORY [long breath]. LOVE [breath] ME!" It's all you could ever hope for, frankly, and no Benny in his silly bobble hat, which has to be a plus.

I say all this to Lesley-Anne. She is not offended in the least. She has, she says, never considered herself an artiste in any way. Do you think you can act, even? "God, no. Absolutely not. But if someone pays me to do something, I will do it to the best of my ability, and on Mars if necessary." How would you describe what you do in Sunset Beach? "Technique. Just full-blown technique! Although it's very hard work, darling. We average four scenes an hour. We don't rehearse. It's brush your hair, then boom- boom-boom, you're doing it." So, in short, it's a matter of trying not to fall over the props, then waiting for the truck to come round with your wages? "It is certainly much better paid than Upstairs, Downstairs ever was!" She says she now takes her jobs where she can find them. She once did a season in Dallas as PR Stephanie Rogers. "Why? Because they offered me a quarter of a million dollars for seven days' work over 10 weeks. What do you think I am, darling? STUPID?" Still, she agrees that "Who shot JR?" might be up there with "Is Amy Turtle a Russian spy?" as one of the greatest soap storylines ever. "Was she a Russian spy?" she asks. I say she got off in the end, but frankly, I always had my doubts. There always looked like room for a kalashnikov under her pinny, to me. "I see," says Lesley-Anne. "Hmmm."

Although she now lives in the very Hello! territory that is Malibu - "Jane Seymour lives round the corner. Her kids came trick or treating the other night" - she is over here for a few days, so we meet in her London hotel suite. We are joined, at various times, by Lesley-Anne's younger sister, Angela, Lesley-Anne's husband, Donnie, and her and Donnie's eight-month-old son, George, who seems to have black teeth ("We think the housekeeper is feeding him juice"), plus a succession of chambermaids who knock then come in to say: "Hiya, Olivia. I just wanted to say hiya, and maybe I could have a photo, Olivia?" "Maybe a little later, sweetie," says Lesley-Anne, who isn't even very good at acting friendly sometimes. Later, she complains: "This has been going on endlessly. In fact, when I first arrived here a few days ago, I went out in the evening. I was knackered, I looked awful, I wore a big hat - but still everyone in the street was shouting, `Ohhhh, Olivia'. And `Ohhh, Sunset Beach'. I don't understand it. It is such a silly little show."

Nonsense, I protest. It's a terrific show. In particular, I love the strange kind of time warp that goes on, so that a character knocks on a door, then 139 episodes later someone finally answers it. I like the fact that there are only ever two camera angles. I like the fact it makes Santa Barbara look slick. I like... "Oh, stop," pleads Lesley-Anne. Her sister Angela interrupts to say she thinks Lesley-Anne is a better actress than she thinks she is. "You were very good in Hanover Street with Harrison Ford," she insists.

"But that was such romantic drivel, darling!" Lesley-Anne cries.

"Trouble is, that film didn't know whether it wanted to be a war story or a love story," says Donnie.

"Ag-ga-ga-ga-goo," goes George, through his spooky, rotten teeth.

I say that, aside from anything else, she did do truly great cleavage in the American mini-series North and South. She can at least feel proud of that. She says: "That wasn't cleavage! That was my spare tyre being pushed up!" Lesley-Anne is possibly rather bonkers. But, still, she can be quite bright and funny at times.

She is now 44, but is still very fine looking, with the huge green, sparkling eyes, and great bones and everything, although she might be a bit over- made-up. You know, lots of black round the eyes and lashes so mascara- ed they look crunchy. She has so far resisted plastic surgery, "but only because Donnie won't let me". "Roy Orbison died on the table getting a face-lift," retorts Donnie. "It is a life-threatening operation."

Donnie, her third husband, is a cameraman whom she met on the set of North and South. Lesley-Anne seems to have spent much of her life going from one bloke to another, actually. First it was Bruce Robinson, the actor who turned writer (The Killing Fields) then writer-director (Withnail and I, How to Get Ahead in Advertising) and with whom she lived with for 10 years from the age of 15. Next it was an Argentine, Henrique Gabriel, an assistant director whom she met in Egypt on a film set, and whom she married on a whim, but left after 18 months for William Friedkin. She married Friedkin, the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, and together they had a son, Jack. But when Jack was two, Lesley-Anne met Don, and upped it again. Lesley-Anne and Friedkin then fought a custody battle for Jack in a case which even her own lawyer, Marvin Mitchelson, described as "the nastiest, most vicious, custody case this town has ever seen". Friedkin said Lesley-Anne was an alcoholic, promiscuous coke fiend. She said he had threatened to kill her on more than one occasion, and had used a stun gun in front of Jack. After spending a million dollars each, they eventually agreed to a pre-trial settlement and joint custody, but only after Lesley-Anne had been vetted by a team of shrinks.

She says the shrinks ultimately declared her "a super-intelligent woman" which, she adds, "was very funny, because I lied to them every step of the way. They did these Rorschach tests on me. You know, the ink-blots. And they'd say, what does this one look like? I wasn't about to say it looks like two women having it off, was I? So I said, `Ohhh, it's a beautiful butterfly."' What did they conclude about you emotionally? "That I'm a complete hysteric!" And she might be, although perhaps not dangerously so. Certainly, she doesn't seem entirely whole somehow. I think she is intelligent, yes, but am not sure she's entirely all there.

She was born in Wandsworth, south London. Her father, James, apparently a very dashing-looking man, was caretaker of the local Territorial Army Centre. Her mother, Isobel, stayed at home to bring up the two girls, although did a bit of cleaning on the side when things got tight. Lesley- Anne, however, craved a more colourful life. "I had these cousins in LA, who'd send us care packages of clothes they'd grown out of - the most amazingly beautiful dresses that were totally alien to, say, going to Clark's for another pair of lace-ups in black, black or black. So I always had this desire, and image of myself, leading this fantasy life."

She started modelling at 10, was drinking gin and orange and clubbing at 12, started appearing nude in films at 14, and was living with Bruce at 15. I ask her if she thinks her childhood finished too early. She says. "I don't think it ever started!" What do you mean? "I just never felt like a child. I always had this desire to be a grown-up. I never had friends. I never felt I belonged. I was always happiest on my own, inventing things, finding secret places. If I'd also mutilated small animals, I think I'd have the perfect psychological profile of a serial killer." Did you ever, for example, have birthday parties? "Perhaps once. Although, then again, I might just be jealously appropriating someone else's." Did you like school? "Hated it. In particular, I hated Miss Harden, the maths teacher, who had hairy armpits and never wore long sleeves."

The trouble with Lesley-Anne, perhaps, is that she focused for so long on achieving things outwardly, via her own admittedly fabulous looks, that something within her just shrivelled and died. When, later, I ask her what attracted her to Friedkin, she says: "Money, talent, power." And you find those things attractive? "I did then. I'd met men with one or other of those things but, until Bill, I'd never met a man with all three." And the combination was lethal? "Lethal is the right word. That man was MERCURY IN MY BLOOD!" She can seem quite hysterical at times, yes.

Her first modelling assignment was for school uniforms, then it was bonnets, then it was a commercial in Barbados for an American soap powder - "and I thought, this is the life". She hooked up with Bruce at a party thrown by Ava Gardner. "He walked into the room in a white coat. I was in love. I didn't have a comb, so I ran into the lavatory and used Ava's toothbrush on my hair and lashes." He assumed she was at least 18. He, nearly 30 then, wasn't best pleased to find out she was only 15. "He called up all his friends, and said: `What am I going to do?' He went though a difficult time. My parents called him all sorts of names. Bruce would pack my bags and send me back to mum and dad. `I want to be with you,' I would scream. "

He proposed to her just the once, when she was 16. "But I said no. I didn't believe in marriage then." He never proposed again, although they stayed together until she was 24. She doesn't see him now. "He's become such a hermit, hasn't he? He lives in place near Wales that begins with H." Hereford? "Yes, that's it. He has so much to play for, but just tucks himself away." Perhaps he just doesn't want the whole LA shebang? "Oh. yes. Perhaps."

She says she is happy now, with Donnie and George. She doesn't mind that she never really achieved anything after Upstairs, Downstairs apart from a number of lacklustre films culminating in Death Wish V with Charles Bronson. "I'm happy to have survived, to still be here," she says. She has, yes, had her run-ins with drink and drugs but never, she insists, excessively so, and certainly not now. She adds that it's now time for her afternoon nap. "I'm very tired, darling." Bye, Olivia, I say. And I hope you get out of that stuck elevator shortly. "Oh stop!" she pleads again.

[yourjughead]

Lockers

Requested from Prompt list: 91 and 100 - Sweet Pea x reader.

Thanks for the request dolly!

A/N: Lot of dialogue and time hops in this, hope its not too difficult to follow. this is also quite long so i couldn't separate the dialogue like i usually do, my apologies.

-----------------------------------------------------

Riverdale High had become like a cattle market. The school was at maximum capacity and it was felt easily in the overflowing halls and louder than usual common room. It was suffocating and with the lack of space came sacrifices elsewhere such as motorbikes littering the car park, crowded common rooms and sharing lockers. The latter was what affected you the most.

“Im telling you Fangs, Jones is losing it, it's his fault we're in these uniforms” the two sauntered down the hall before arriving outside locker 216, next to the janitors closet. He crumpled up the paper with the combination and threw it at Fangs, just missing. Students flowed passed the two of them as Sweet Pea fought the lock. Fangs said his goodbyes before leaving the spot you quickly replaced.

“Emm can I help you?” Sweet Pea rolled his eyes before turning to the sound of your blatantly irritated voice about to snap back. His eyes widened and his mouth went dry at the sight of you looking at him like he grew an extra head. He just continued staring before gliding out of your way to the locker. You just gave him a confused smile before tossing some books in on top of the few he had managed to get in.

“Emm Yeah you can take your crap out of my locker” he found his voice again after watching you before handing you back your books.

“its my locker” you threw the book back in, the two of you locking eyes and thus, the love hate relationship began

2 Weeks later.

“Seriously Sweet Pea, stop leaving half-eaten food in my locker, you'll draw mice!” You threw the half eaten burrito in a brown paper bag into his chest.The other Serpent's ooohing at you asserting yourself.

“Firstly, OUR locker, secondly its MY locker I'll do what I want” he was clearly putting it on in front of his friends as he tossed you back the burrito. You purposely let it fall to your feet before exhaling sharply and storming off, Sweet Pea hot on your heels, the Serpents making whip sounds and hollering.

“Wait I'm sorry yn, I'll try and stop doing that I promise”

“Yeah you better you jerk!” you hit him into the chest before retrieving your books from the locker. “Maybe we should just get a mini fridge”

“Or you could get a clue" you rolled your eyes before sauntering off, knowing his eyes were fixed on you.

A week later.

“YN!!!!! WHERE IS IT!?” Sweet Pea shouted at you from the front steps before almost running to you as you got out of your car.

“wheres what Sweet Pea, I don't know what you're talking about” you tried to be as nonchalant as possible but he dragged you by the arm to the side of the school.

“WHERE IS MY JACKET! My Serpent one! I know you took it!” you bit your lip before finally giving in, sighing and retrieving it from your school bag.  

“Okay okay sorry, i was cold after cheer-leading last night, I didn't think you’d care”

“Oh...emm...well I do” he wasn't entirely unsure of himself and couldn't settle on how that made him feel. He took the jacket from you looking down at its worn leather.

“Well I have to wear it to a thing tonight but-but umm I’ll leave it in my locker after if you need to wear it again” he slid his arms inside his second skin, caught slightly off guard the slight smell of your perfume on the collar. The two of you idled to the locker in silence.

1 week later.

“Sweet Pea I thought I told you that you have to ask me before you borrow my books” “Sorry, I had a test earlier and I needed your notes” “What you need is to learn to make your own” you dug through the locker as he had his back thrown against another alongside yours.

“Will you help me? I just want to do okay here yanno? Don't want to be stuck here with you forever” “Oh wow stop with the flattery ill get a big head” you stood smiling, locking the locker again.

“Whatever can you just-” “Aww look, Sweet Pea has made a friend” Fangs interrupted swinging his arm around Sweet Pea.

“Hey wait you're that girl ive seen in the Serpent jacket” he moved from Sweet Pea and seemed to almost square up to you, other serpents gathering.

“Yeah Sweet Pea said I could wear it” you were not even slightly phased by his attempt to intimidate you, you were close friends with Cheryl Blossom, Fangs wouldn't be a problem. Fangs looked to Sweet Pea like he had 3 heads, the group doing the same.

“Emm no I didn't yn” it was your turn to look at him like he'd grown a few extra heads. He felt guilty for lying and making you look bad in front of his friends, he just didn't want them to know he was falling for you.

“See, Sweet Pea wouldn't associated with the enemy. You should really be getting to cheer Northsider, don't trip on your privilege as you go” you scoffed at fangs, grabbing your gear bag and bumping Sweet Peas shoulder as you went.

1 week later

You hadn't spoken to Sweet Pea since, you didn't like the way he changed around his friends. He had tried to make contact with you every day including leaving you notes and doodles in all of your notebooks. He then opened an almost empty locker, the last bell on a Friday sounding off behind him. You passed as if on cue behind him, laughing with Cheryl on your way to cheer.

“Yn what the hell? where's your stuff?” he reached out catching your forearm, Cheryl almost snapping his neck on contact.

“Take a hike urchin boy, she doesn't want to speak to you” you looked at the floor allowing Cheryl to bite back, Sweet Pea biting his tongue as not to offend you further by mouthing off to your friend.

“Okay well could you tell yn that I’m sorry and i really want to talk to her” he look directly at you but spoke to Cheryl, she rolled her eyes before going to speak again, you cutting her off.

“Its okay Cherry, go start training the juniors, I'll catch up” she assured you meant it before scowling in a way only she could and then leaving you both outside the locker you once shared.

“So, emm where's your stuff gone?” he waited until the red headed bombshell was gone before speaking again.

“My car, i was sick of having my stuff vandalized” “Okay okay fair point...but maybe you could put it back and I'll promise i won't draw all over it...as much” he grinned at the little smile you gave, happy to be finally breaking you down.

“I thought you wouldn't want to associate with the enemy”

“Well I mean you piss me off but id do anything for you...even associate with you”

“Yeah well-” “Shit!” Sweet Pea suddenly caught you by the forearms and dragged you back and into the janitors closet then releasing an arm, closing the door and pulling down the little blind.

“WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU!” “Shhhh shhh sorry please be quiet they'll hear you!” “Who?!” you whispered slightly separating the blind slightly from the glass to see some Junior Serpents joking around in the hallway.

“You have to be fucking kidding me Sweet Pea!” you went to unlatch the door but he pulled you back again, standing in front of it.

“I know I know but I just want them to leave us alone” “We’re not an us! We just share lockers, i wasn't even talking to you two minutes ago!” “Why are you so difficult?!” “Why am i still in this closet should be the real question?!” “UGH!” he caught your shoulders and hauled you forward to meet him. Your bodies were flush against each other as his lips met yours furiously. Your own arms wrapped around his sides and the two of you seemed to melt into each other. He backed you gently against the shelf, moving his hands to your face, connecting his lips to your neck.

“Wait wait Sweet Pea what the hell are we doing?!”

“I-I don't know but I'd very much like to keep doing it” you laughed agreeing before he kissed you again. Suddenly light flooded the closet and you both turned to the now open door, Fangs standing there reaching for something.

“Sweet Pea?! YN?! What the hell is happening?!”. “N-nothing Fangs” Sweet Pea almost left his body with the fright, you deciding you had had enough. “Go away Fangs kinda busy”

“No dude what the hell?! A Northsider?! What about the pact?! No Northsiders!” “Yeah well that was before I left a burrito in my locker!...Well it's been nice seeing you, come back soon!” he closed the door again before Fangs reopened it.“No dude seriously what the hell?!” “No dude seriously what the hell?!” you spoke again more bitterly and Fangs glared before Sweet Pea tried to close the door again, fangs stopping the door with his foot.“Sweet Pea, what, what is going on between you two?”

“We-we don't know right now but I'd really rather stay here Fangs-” he glanced back at you “id really really rather keep doing it-” his voice lowered then “please Fangs” fangs seemed to grumble before stepping back, upset but he hadn't seen his friend like this before. Deciding to deal with him later, fangs moved his foot, the door finally closing. “Don't worry about him yn...ummm but what are we doing…” Sweet Pea finally spoke again once he sure Fangs was gone, allowing a little of his insecurity show. “I dont know, Im not really sure”

“Well maybe we should figure that out, i don't want to mess things up with you, you're difficult enough already” “WELL THEN LET ME SLEEP IN  YOUR STUPID T SHIRTS AND HOLD YOUR DUMB HAND, YOU PIECE OF SHIT”

“WELL THEN OKAY THAT SOUNDS GOOD TO ME!”  you dragged him back into you meeting furiously again.

“Oh and please, please always wear my jacket, its ridiculously hot...especially with that tight little uniform….the only thing that would make that uniform even hotter would be if it was on my bedroom floor” his face darkened and you smirked hard. “Well maybe we should- OH MY GOD I HAVE PRACTICE! CHERRY IS GOING TO KILL ME I LEFT HER WITH THOSE UNCOORDINATED JRS!” you burst out threw the door, Sweet Pea laughing hard at you panicked before you took off out the double doors. Sweet Pea returned to the locker, grabbing some books and then locking it again for the weekend.

-----------------------------------------------------

[sometimesfrancis]

30 days of DID system asks: Day One

Describe your system.

My system is medium-sized.  The core group is a group of six, three married couples.  Nora to Francis, Gilda to Harvey, and Grace to Richard.  Then there’s the whole internal family system, bearing in mind that all three couples have acted in a parenting (or sibling, in the case of Duella and Nora and Francis, because Duella is older) role to all the children in the internal family system, there are also littles of Nora and Francis, called Boom and Little Francis. Lord Ryan is their son, he’s ten. Gilda and Harvey have Duella,  I’m not sure how old she is. but I do know she’s like a sister to me.  Then Grace and Richard have Francis as an adopted son.  Francis is 25 this fall.  I’m not sure how old Grace and Gilda are, you know what they say about a lady and her age.  Richard is eighteen-- I know it’s weird that Francis is Richard’s son even though Francis is older than Richard.   To explain this, Richard imaginably fought in world war two, but for some reason he stayed eighteen.  Harvey is the second oldest, at 125, and Hanora is 319.  Harvey, as a changeling man, has some vampiric abilities, but using them costs him his life experience, and Hanora is part gnome.  Among other racial qualities, she has very sensitive pointy ears, and songs can get stuck in her head for days at a time.  When I keep hearing the tune (that is to me a schizophrenic hallucination,) we say that they’re hearing it “In the gnome caverns”.  Luckily for me, this means that Hanora has her own body in a place she personally believes in, so she never argues with me about haircuts/hormones or clothes.  She just dresses up her gnome doll however she wants to, and in return I’m not allowed to say that the gnome caverns are part of a “headspace.”  They are a fairy tale, and personally Hanora believes in them.

While I don’t have many great historical memories from three-hundred years ago, Hanora has friends who have come to help me for no reason other than my being Hanora’s son, like Thomas Blue, who taught me everything he knew about becoming a lawyer, which permitted me to put the Joker on trial when he came to my apartment asking for help.  Hanora has been married several times, first to Victor Fries, a long long time ago, when I was in high-school, then, when I was in college, she married an introject of my high school friend and crush Charlie O’Connel (I hope he sees this.) I turned 23.  Harvey had been out of his coma for a year and five months. We met a man at Alchoholics Anonymous who invited us out for non-alchoholic beers and pool and pinball at a local bar.  His name was Henry.  One night, walking home from the beach, I introduce myself to him as the name “Harv,” and tell him I’m a multiple personality.  He takes it all pretty well.  We talk about getting married.  I’ve used my vampiric abilitties since then so I don’t have the same timeline I had when I was dating Henry, but I wanted us to be gay lovers.  

Back to my mother Hanora’s love life:  She broke up with Henry when his schizophrenia got out of control.  I was put away in a nursing home, where there was an implied familial relationship between Harvey, Duella, Francis, Richard, and Nora. Nora got married to Richard when we thought he was on his deathbed and she didn’t want him to die alone, then to a factive of Michael Fassbender (a marriage which lasted only one night before we had to admit Michael to the asylum,) then to a factive of Nick D’Agnostico from Gotham, who has his own alternate personality of Harvey.  She was married to a factive of Aaron Ekhardt for one night, who similarly has a Harvey introject.  Lucky for me my introject of Charlie is still in my life, and he’s always very respectful.  Sometimes they roleplay a game-of-thrones era fantasy where Nora is a shy noble lady and Charlie is her knight.  Her last marriage was to a factive of Brandon Flowers, who is also part gnome, but he looks like Owen from Torchwood for some reason.  Sorry, the last man is a gnomish man, I know that for sure, and I don’t always understand gnome customs.  Suffice to say, she calls him Brandon, but he looks like Owen.  Finally, she’s been escorted home several times by John Barrowman (another factive obviously) who honors his role as army captain from the doctor who universe.  And my mother’s introject is dating Nathan Filion, making him a father-in-law type figure.  His factive helped set her up with Nick D’Agnostico.

Speaking of the Doctor Who universe, I once wrote a very immersive episode of doctor who fanfiction called “Adam and Fate,” and in it the eleventh Doctor gets admitted to the psyche ward I was in at the time, well he formed an introject, surprise surprise, and although he was dressed like the eleventh doctor he wanted me to call him Matt Smith.  To help pass the hours I would daydream silents behind every door, and this was the same hospital stay where my Robert Downey Jr. Factive went out for a game of cards, he’s in love with Aaron, who was very akward with me at the time, because I once said “Joker’s Daughter!” and punched him in the balls.  

This was around the time a very malevolent introject of my oldest brother appeared and tried to take Francis into his headspace permanently, I remember Francis throwing water over himself, one of his defence mechanisms, and I remember Aaron:  He asked for an apology for my  holding a hot zippo lighter to my face to feel the burning so we put some lotion on.  Aaron and Robert are in love, and he’s on again off again with Maggie Gyllinhall , who acts like a big sister to me.  At the time he was still convinced that I was brain-dead from my death at the end of the Dark Knight era in my life, which is actually from when I was eight years old and fell down a flight of stairs, but I recreated my trauma in a shared dream-space and it translated to getting thrown off a building.  I was actually put to work in a daydream factory, and my subconcious submitted certain scenes to the Dark Knight. I don’t want to believe that completely but here’s another perspective  I will ask for my father-in-law Victor to help me rather than Francis:  

According to Victor I have a trauma that could be categorized, a blow to the back of the head, and I didn’t make the dark knight but I came from it because there’s an applicable cause of death involved.  

Thank you Victor.  Let’s get on with describing the system.  In my job at the daydream factory that’s where I first met The Scars of the Architect, who takes on the appearance of the Joker from the Dark Knight.  They plugged me in to a modern machine:  A PC, and architectural drawings appeared on the screen.  This is part of how the Joker got his scars.  Then there’s another Joker, his full name is Jackson P. Fitzgerald and he looks like a Joker-colored version of Michael Jackson. The Joker isn’t the only black villain in my system, there’s also Dr. Ivy Green AKA Poison Ivy who looks like a young Whoopie Goldberg, but I never claim to be trans racial or anything like that the alters know that they are only an influence on me and I’m glad they help me include races other than white bread in my stories.  But there is a lot of white bread coming right up:

THE ASYLUM

In my headspace I live in a version of Arkham Asylum that has gone through a period of mental health reform.  My first alter from the asylum was Dr. Jonathan Crane Sr, and I saw him experimenting on his children out in the backwater countryside south of Gotham.  This all happens in Gotham City Indiana, by the way, which is on the map where Gary, Indianapolis, and Michigan City are so they’re north of some swamplands which turn into farmlands and south of the lake the city is very much a part of my system and my first introduction to it was Johnathan Crane’s old shack out in the country where(TW  BONDAGE) he strapped his kids down to a chair in the garage and injected them with fear toxin  and made them watch horrific videos, these are the Benson siblings, Elizabeth, Crowley, and Johnathan Jr.  They all have wide white eyes except for Jr, whose eyes are very soulful and dark, and they all have SI scars again except for Jr. who is the black sheep Crowley has cuts on his arms from a carpenter knife and he chews fear weed while Elizabeth smokes it in her cigarettes and she has burns on her hands.

I follow the action one night, old lady Benson is worried about Crowley always cutting his arms so she takes him to the asylum in their rusty pick-up truck, well he spooks in the parking lot he grabs a shotgun from the back of the truck and escapes into the woods.  Where the ambulance driver says “Don’t worry, Batman will catch him.”

BATMAN

Yes, I have an alter of Batman in my system.  He started as a foil for me to fist-fight in a bar he sliced up my face pretty good I wake up with blood on the pillow.  I go through plots trying to bring Batman the psychiatric help he needs, enacting a similar plot on my best friend Bruce Wayne, who is like Batman by day, similarly rageful, similar sizes and face shapes too but Batman is obviously funded by the military and Bruce isn’t smart enough to sneak out every night dressed in black leather without getting caught by his butler, but these are my two friends Batman and Bruce.  I’ll talk about Batman first, I get a gang together one of these days I put some plastic explosives in an elevator shaft and I threaten to take the building down if Batman doesn’t go in for treatment and Jim Gordon intercedes saying we both need help well that bastard Batman jumps off the roof and vanishes into the night, but I go down the driveway to Arkham Asylum in Jim Gordon’s car he drops me off at the gate he says it’s up to me so I throw my coin into the woods and I’m walking one way or the other when an ambulance stops me and the driver manhandles me I punch him until he stops moving the Joker climbs out of the back and says “So you pulled off your first plot. What do you want the newspapers to call you?”  And the scarred side of my face smiles and says “Two-Face.”  I’m thinking Acid-Face or Coin-Voice but this is what the scarred side of my face says to the Joker and the Joker says “Two-Face it is!”  and he climbs in the driver’s seat and he crashes the ambulance into the gates with the driver unconscious  behind the wheel and meanwhile in the back I find my friend Bruce and he says “CALL ME BATMAN” so great Bruce Wayne thinks he’s Batman that’ll be the day.  

RICHARD

I’m in the asylum when  I realize I have a brother, adopted by the same old lady, Gertrude Dent.  His name is Richard and he’s vegetative from the lobotomies.  This is when the story really starts to cook.  We get kidnapped from our cells one night by Harleen Qunzell posing as a nurse she takes us away to the parklands surrounding the asylum and says we’re in Poison Ivy’s Garden now.  I’m Harvey AKA Lillian Valley, my brother’s are Francis aka Hawthorne, Creeping Charlie AKA Morning Glory, Poison Oak, and Patrick Isley we’re all a tribe out there in the park I rarely get into trouble but I get into trouble rarely I’m given a motel room to sleep in after a certain therapeutic period among the plants.  Arkham Outpatient Treatment:  Lodgings Included.  

This next memory is from Francis, we do share some memories.  I overheard a lady bullying her teddy bear in the bed next to mine back when I was in the nursing home and someone woke up he said “I’ll steal that bear!” and Francis said “Calm Down, Harv.”  He’s easy to recognize with the scars from stress on his face and then a Harvey woke up and said “What did he say just now?”  And Francis says wow youre keeping him on a pretty tight leash well it wasn’t long after that he woke up in one of poison ivy’s green-houses and she said something like “What are you doing coming back to life?”   And he turned out to be called Richard.  Richard Richardson is the name he wrote on the ARkham Asylum intake forms.  

HARLEEN

So Harleen comes into my room and asks if I’d like to be part of an experiment like I said kidnapped so they put a mitten on my burned hand and moss in my head to regrow the brain matter that got damaged in my massive back of the head concussion and the subsequent ECT that happened only in Gotham City which is like we all know imaginary but so was the moss and I’m a better man for it and as I came round to reality I realized I had a roommate they had put me with this other man Dent-- Richard Dent, criminal turned whore, WWII veteran and semi-immortal like me, I don’t know the details of his age but he’s one of Jupiter's sons and for all the time he’s spent in prison he’s only eighteen years old to this day.  Sorry twenty-two he aged up a bit earlier this year when he took his wife Grace home their anniversary is July 25th I’d better remember that

So Poison Ivy really cleaned up the asylum with Harleen working under her and Johnathan Crane doing anything to get his license restored they made a pretty ship shape asylum the doors are unlocked the walls are white and the uniforms are grey. I remember Harleen’s first experiment with me she said there was a fifty-fifty chance I would revert back to my old personality and she gave me my coin back and I threw it in a lake. This is a recurring theme with me the coin represents my reliance on the god Janus to make decisions and with every major step toward rehabilitation I have to leave the coin behind so I started over in jail with Jonathan Crane observing me I told him I was a changeling and if I didn’t get twice as much food then my twin brother would starve so he gave me double portions and I’ve always been indebted to the man.

[asterinjapan]

Red is the color

Good evening again!

It’s starting to cool down a little here in the Kansai region, which in practice means that we’re almost considering 35 C ‘cool’ now, pff. Apparently today is predicted to be actually worse in the Netherlands though, so good luck with that!

A slightly different report today, as my friend and I split ways in Kyoto.

I purposefully made that sound really dramatic, because it really wasn’t, haha. Here we go for a two-sided walk in Kyoto!

You see, my friend had decided to visit the famous Fushimi Inari Taisha before she was even sure she’d go to Japan this summer. It is very popular, after all: it was named the best trip in Japan for several years in a row, or something or another that they proudly proclaimed on a banner. So obviously, she couldn’t miss out on this on her first trip to Japan! And it truly is worth a visit. 

So first, we took the train to Kyoto. Theoretically you can take the JR Kyoto train or something, but why do that when you have a JR pass and take the shinkansen to be there in 15 minutes? Exactly. So, we hopped on the Kodama shinkansen (meaning ‘echo’) and zoomed over to Kyoto, where we had to transfer to the local Nara line. Luckily it had just arrived for us, so two stops later, we arrived at our destination: Inari station.

The station itself is already appropriately themed, in case you were still wondering why all those tourists were taking a local train through the outskirts of Kyoto: all the bars are red. The station itself is tiny, so there was quite a queue to leave it, but once outside, you’re immediately confronted with the biggest draw here. A giant red torii gate shimmering across the road, marking the entrance to the Grand Shrine of Fushimi Inari. It’s one of many, many of those gates, and I bet that if you ever saw a commercial for holidays in Japan, it’s one of the images they’ve used to lure you in. Inari is the name of the mountain as well as of the god of rice and business, and a miles long trail of red gates leads you all the way to the top. Those gates are bought by companies, families or private persons and inscribed with their names and the year of donation, which gets pretty funny when you start spotting very modern names like, Panasonic or something.

Obviously we first took a lot of pictures posing with the gates, although we also inevitably had pictures of fifty other people attempting the same. We followed the trail leading up through the forest, and then paused for a little to have some melon pan we’d bought beforehand. (Melon pan means melon bread, named so for its shape and not its taste. It’s pretty sweet bread, so naturally I’d convinced my friend this was something she absolutely had to try.) At this point though, I was looking up and saw the tons and tons of stairs that led all the way to the top of the mountain, whereas before it had only been an uphill road. I knew that was a tad too ambitious for me this week, so this is where my friend and I parted ways. She was going to make her way to the top of the mountain, while I was trailing back to take the train a few stops further ahead. We agreed to meet up at the entrance of the shrine by 2:30 and went our separate ways.

(Oh, and before you call me a weakling – I’ve already walked the entire trail twice before, so I can definitely do it, haha.)

As said, I walked back to the station, where the train arrived just as I reached the platform, so that was nice! I rode it for a whole 7 minutes to make my way to Momoyama station. It’s a tiny station, and there was no-one at the manned gate, which meant that I couldn’t show my JR pass to get out of the station. I had to ring a bell and then show my pass to a camera, pff.

Anyway, I got to go through and made my way to my new destination – Fushimi-Momoyama Castle! Yep, another castle. I actually didn’t know this one existed until a couple of months ago, when I’d downloaded an app to keep track of Japanese castles (because of course I had an app for that). I was browsing the Kyoto area to find a castle I’d never heard of before. That would be Fushimi Castle, or Fushimi-Momoyama Castle.

I’m not the only one who hadn’t heard of it before, because there was barely any signage, and the parking lot was so deserted I was starting to wonder if the area was even open. I saw some people walking in the distance, so I shrugged and walked on.

As it turns out, there’s a baseball field in this park as well, which gave me slight paranoia as our hotel got invaded last night by a huge group of baseball players. This morning, we had to wait out 4 elevators because all of them were full of said baseball players, so I was getting kinda twitchy at the mention of the sport, haha. (Turns out there’s a high school championship going on at the Koshien stadium in the next prefecture over, so maybe they’re just here for that and I can spot them on TV. There’s a lot of baseball on TV this week, so…)

No matter the baseball though, because a huge entrance gate suddenly showed up in between the trees. The castle grounds were open, although the castle itself is closed and there are warning signs that you shouldn’t get too close in case of falling debris. You see, Fushimi Castle has a bit of an unfortunate history. The current construction dates back to the 1960s: the original castle was intended to be the retirement home for Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a famous war lord and one of the unifiers of Japan. Fushimi Castle was furnished beautifully unlike other castles, since it was supposed to be a home instead of a defensive structure, and it was famous for its golden tea room. Alas, within two years an earthquake destroyed the castle. It was rebuilt, but it played a pivotal role in what turned out to be decisive battle in Japanese history, after which it quickly got dismantled again. Parts of the castle were then used in temples around Kyoto. (Fun fact: these temples used the floor boards of Fushimi Castle as their ceilings. A big group of samurai had committed ritual suicide after the last battle and their blood stains (including a bloody hand print) can still be seen on those ceilings even now. Sweet dreams tonight! Hey, I did say red is the color for today…)

Anyway, the former site of the castle is now sacred ground as the tomb of Emperor Meiji rests here and cannot be entered. The castle itself was rebuilt a little further ahead as a museum in the 1960s and served as a part of a theme park called ‘Castle Land’, but it was closed in 2003. The castle remains closed to this day, but the area is accessible and so you can just wander around in the park like area and take a bunch of photos as you please. And it’s super quiet! It’s a stark contrast to Fushimi Inari Taisha, as I spent quite a while here and saw maybe 10 other people in total, tops, including a father and a son who seemed more preoccupied catching bugs than looking at the castle, haha.

The skies turned blue after a while, allowing me to take some very nice shots. The castle probably looked better in the past: one of the giant fish on top was missing, and some roof tiles were sliding off, so I can imagine it can be dangerous to get too close.

Still, though, I really liked this detour. I actually planned on seeing the original site for as much as possible, but I got distracted by a plate for a different tomb/mausoleum: that of Emperor Kanmu, who ruled at the end of the 8th century and was the one who moved the capital city to Kyoto (Heian back in the days), where it would remain for over a thousand years until the capital eventually moved to Tokyo in 1868.

Although the first few dozen of emperors of Japan cannot be proven, Kanmu has been verified to have actually existed, so I was pretty excited to be this close to such an old part of history. Even if all there was to see was a stone torii gate in the distance, marking the entrance to the tomb. Sacred grounds, you see…

I didn’t stick around for very long, but it was an interesting little side step. Actually I met an older couple here, coming over from Osaka, who seemed very excited to find me here of all places and speaking Japanese to boot, haha. So that was a nice chance to practice my Japanese a little, which is not as atrocious as I was fearing, even if my vocabulary leaves a lot to be desired.

On my way back, I stumbled upon the Nogi Shrine, dedicated to general Nogi who took his own life after the funeral of Emperor Meiji in an ultimate gesture of loyalty. What a fun visit so far, huh… Anyway, it definitely felt like a much more modern shrine, with horse statues and some brick parts. I didn’t spend long here, but the shrine buildings were a nice change of pace during my return to Momoyama station. (I also stumbled upon a plaque warning for Japanese giant hornets, so after that I jumped out of my skin every time something even remotely resembling a flying insect came across me, haha.)  

As it turned out, my friend had returned from the mountain victorious as she’d made it to the top, and we arrived at almost exactly the same time at our meeting place. We browsed the souvenir stalls a bit before deciding to call it a day and headed back to Kyoto, where we exchanged our respective stories over drinks and took the shinkansen back to Shin-Osaka.

When we went out for dinner (omu rice! Rice covered in omelet, haha), it was 28 C outside! Gasp! That honestly felt cold to the touch, it’s incredible. Weather forecasts are consistently predicting 33-35 C for the upcoming week, which is still hot, but much more doable than 38+ C.

So we made plans for tomorrow and then went to our rooms, from which I’m typing this blog right now, haha.

Keeping tomorrow a surprise, but there won’t be any castles for once, wow! See you~

[jjjseed]

Meet jjjseeds deputies, Rayssa and Szymon!

[ Deputy Rayssa “Ray” Kubacki ]

Nickname: Ray Age: 31 She/Her Height: 5’4” (165cm) Orientation: Bisexual Job: Junior Deputy + Artist (sculptor/photographer) Love interest: Joseph Seed Personality: Quiet, shy, motivated, calm Likes: Art, quietness, the outdoors Hates: spiders, bicycles, flying Lives in: Missoula (Moved recently from Atlanta)

Friends:

Sharky Boshaw

Hurk Jr Drubman

John Duncan/Seed

Outfit:

Sherpa Jacket

Geometric Jumper

Timberlands (goddamn)

Blue shirt

Glasses / Aviators that are Josephs

Outfit Board

History:

Born and raised in Atlanta, Ray lived a pretty artistic life, she grew under the wing of art curators. Being always surrounded by art turned her into a creative and artistic person, she often works with sculpture and photography.  At school, everyone claimed she was a fantastic artist and was often always found drawing something on papers. In high school, she was failing almost all of her classes due to the time she spent sculpting or photographing. She often spent her time in the art room/dark room during breaks and after school working on new pieces. 

At College, she studied fine art for a bit before realising art was going to get her no where. Her parents were against her decision to become an officer of the law and desperately wanted her to become a professional artist, but she disregarded their wishes and continued with her own goals. Even though she trained as an officer, in her spare time she was still doing art. It seemed like a part of her she couldn’t let go of.

When she finally finished, she ended up working in Rome, Georgia. She was often called in to deal with fights that broke out at the homeless shelters. In her days off, Ray would often be found sculpting in her studio or out in the streets of Atlanta taking photographs. However, Ray became rather bored of the busy-ness of Rome/Atlanta and requested a move up to Montana where she could also continue working on her art in an environment that was more her thing.

Relationships:

Szymon Basara: Ray and Szymon met due to the Missoula Police Force, he was tasked with teaching her about the cultists in Hope County and how he’d moved here to Missoula. Their friendship is super strong, but his outgoing personality towers over her quietness and whenever he wants to go out for fun, she just wants to stay at home and work. Ray feels as though Szymon is like a big brother to her. They’re always up for doing stuff together and for important and formal events, they like to “match” outfits.  

John Duncan/Seed: She’s known John for practically all her life, but she had no idea he’d become one of the Heralds of Eden’s Gate. They first met at elementary school, where they became best friends. Half way through elementary, she realised he had been beaten by his foster family, but he shrugged it off all the time and refused any help she offered him. Towards the end of middle school, John begun to distance himself from her, to the point he was ignoring her entirely. When they started at high school, John was an entirely different person, women were swooning over him and he became one of the popular kids. He abandoned Ray entirely, never looked at her when they passed each other in the corridors. The last time they ever spoke, John had requested he took some photos of him for work and mentioned that he trusted her artistic decisions. While he may have forgotten her existence entirely, she clings onto the moments she once spent with him and the friendship they had. Even though she was cut out of his life, he very much was a part of hers.

She doesn’t know he’s part of the Project At Eden’s Gate, until they meet again at Josephs arrest.

Sharky Boshaw + Hurk Jr. Drubman: A rebellion member summoned Ray to go check out the explosions happening in Henbane River and she found the cause to be Sharky and Hurk playing around with explosives. She sat with them and talked to them about their actions, but they took none of it on board and continued to play with the explosives. She continued trying to talk sense into them but when they handed the control over to her, she found herself laughing and having fun too. Their friendships developed over setting off explosives and setting fire to things.

—————

[ Deputy Szymon “Sze” Basara ] Nickname: Sze Age: 39 He/Him Height: 5’9” (182cm) Orientation: Gay Job: Deputy  Love interest: Jacob Seed Personality: Smart, sweet, partier, way too caring,  Likes: Games, exercise, modelling/fashion Hates: Animals, war, drugs Lives in: Missoula (moved from Hope County)

Friends:

Earl Whitehorse

Jerome Jefferies

Nick Rye

Outfit board 

History:

Born and raised Hope County, Sze loved the outdoors and the environment in which he lived. He was a sweet and intelligent man who absolutely cherished the time he had playing video games, as it acted like an escape from his home life. His father passed away in a fatal crash in the Whitetail Mountain region and his mother, devastated about his passing, succumb to drugs and alcohol. She barely ever communicated with him and he was constantly trying to support them both from a young age. When he turned of age, he applied to the local police academy in order to become an officer.

He was placed in the Hope County police force and he became one of their best officers. This job he’d taken up fully assisted in supporting his mother and her crippling addiction. He cared so much for her, even though she seemed to have been lost into a void a long time ago. He made sure he did everything he could to ensure that she was safe and happy.

However, as the cult took over Hope County, the police force slowly begun to become corrupt with the cult and he knew the only thing he could do is move himself and his mother to a neighbouring city/county. When he headed home, he found no sign of his mother, just a note left by Joseph that said: “Your mother is with us, she is riddled with sin and we are cleansing her, just like your police department. She will reach Eden’s Gate with us as her new family. She will become our Faith”

Relationships:

Rayssa Kubacki: Sze wasn’t too sure about Ray when they first met, but he’s taken a liking to her. He wasn’t sure about coming out to her until she talked about an old ex girlfriend she had. He tries to take her out to parties n stuff so that she can expand her relationships around Missoula, but he soon realises she just prefers the quietness/peace. At times he’d collapse in a heap of sadness, she’d come running to help him out, even if it was him having a meltdown at 4am in his apartment. 

Earl Whitehorse: Sze met Earl Whitehorse when he fled from Hope County and filled him on all the details of what was happening to the police force there. Whitehorse vowed from that day to ensure that the cult will be taken down however possible. With little experience from being in Missoula, Whitehorse made sure that Sze was comfortable and settled into his new hometown. He took him to super good food joints and showed him shortcuts to get him from Point A to B quicker and where all the good gyms were.

Jerome Jefferies: As the police force slowly corrupted, Sze was called out to settle an argument in Fall’s End by Jerome. When he arrived, Joseph and John were standing at the church talking to Jerome. They’d been arguing about taking over the church and Jerome was thoroughly refusing every offer they’d given him. John was fuming at him and Joseph remained calm and civilised. Sze broke up the talk and Joseph took John away saying “We’ll settle it another day”. Jerome became super thankful of Sze being one of the last few “non-corrupt” officers, and said he’d willingly help him in any way he could.

Nick Rye: Nick and Sze knew each other from when they were young, they often would play in the fields and pretend they were both pilots. When Nick had learned to fly, he offered to teach Sze and he took that offer up instantly. When Sze decided to leave Hope County to join the Missoula Police Force, Nick offered to fly him over instead of trying to take on the cultists monitoring the roads. Sze took up that offer. In return, offered to take Kim and him to Missoula to keep them safe, but they were both so determined to keep Johns hands off of their airfield that they declined the offer. Sze still keeps that offer open to them both.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #471

(from yesterday)

Is there an ice-cream flavor that you strongly dislike? Which one? Strawberry, for one. Have you met somebody that you want to spend the rest of your life with? I could see it happening, but it's way too early to determine something like that. Who was the last male you talked to? Does he have facial hair? My boyfriend, and a very little bit. Name a band you like, that starts with the 2nd letter of your name. Rammstein. Have you ever dressed up as a Disney character? Which one? Not to my recollection. Have you ever played chess? If so, are you good at it? No. Name an alcoholic beverage that you dislike. Wine. Is there anyone who sends you messages to say good morning/night? Girt does most days. :') Is there anyone you interact with often on social media but not in person? Yeah. Do you own any adult coloring books? What kind(s) do you like? Yeah. Ones with animals. Which of your friends do you confide in the most? Sara. Is there anything you haven’t done lately, that you’d like to do soon? Draw, especially a larger project. How long is your driveway? Not long at all. Are there any TV shows you keep up with religiously? No. Would you ever meet someone in person that you met online? I've already done that and would again. Not just anyone, of course, but there are a good number of friends I would absolutely take up the opportunity to meet irl. What are your neighbours like? I don't know either of them. What accent is your favorite? British. If your Facebook status doesn’t get any likes/comments, does it bother you? Nah. What was your most recent reason for smiling? :) Girt called me a cutiepie. ;;____;; <3 Name one person you’d take a bullet for: The first person to come to mind is my mom. Do you get the feeling something good will happen in your life soon? I don't know, man. What’s your crush’s/boyfriend's/husband’s name? Donald Jr. is his real name, but I don't call him that. Also, not everyone dates boys, shocking as that may be. And their occupation? He works at a tire company that I won't name. Are your teeth naturally straight? I had braces, so obviously not. Did you go to the beach this year? No, which I'm content with. Have you been to McDonald’s in the past month? Yeah. Have you ever slept over at your best friend’s house? Yep. Ever sang someone to sleep? No. If you had to study something for the next year, what would you study? My initial reaction was to think "photography," which I guess I realistically would go for, but I'm still unsure. I don't know how much longer I can cling to the photography dream, so, y'know. If you were a fantasy character, would you be a warrior, a mage, or a rogue? Mage, I guess. Who is your favourite movie villain? Red Pyramid Thing/Pyramid Head. He has different names in the games and movie universe, so take your pick. Have you ever calculated whether you get enough minerals and vitamins in your diet? No. When you buy/receive new clothes, do you instantly wear them or wash first? I wash them first. Do you hate using public restrooms? Does ANYBODY like using them? I avoid them as best I possibly can. Did any characters from TV shows scare you as a kid? Which one(s)? Motherfuckin' King Ramses from Courage the Cowardly Dog aklsdfkaljdsfka like I had nightmares y'all What’s the saddest thing you’ve heard on the news recently? The drone strike on Afghanistan killing citizens (children included) versus terrorists. I could write ten pages worth of why this whole thing pisses me the fuck off, but I'll avoid getting that political. Do you believe that acupuncture works? No. How long does it take before you trust a person? It varies person to person. Do you know anyone with a lisp? Not off the top of my head, anyway. If you were to break a Guinness Record, which one would you try and beat? I dunno. Are you scared of clowns? No. Are you listening to music currently? "Scum of the Earth" by Rob Zombie is on currently. Did your last kiss mean anything? It meant a lot. Have you ever been sung to personally? Some of the song, yes. If so, what song did they sing? "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin. Do you think you’re brave? Eh, it depends on what I'm facing. Do you like Paramore? Yeah. Were you afraid of heights as a child? No, but I am as an adult. What’s your favorite movie battle scene? I dunno. I guess the very brief one between Nala and Simba because T E E T H. Have you ever been to a same-sex wedding? No. What’s the most difficult experience you and a significant other have gone through together? Distance when we really needed each other's company was definitely difficult. What’s your favorite recipe you’ve come up with? I don’t have any. Have you ever attempted to pick a lock? Did you succeed? No. How many times have you donated blood? Once. How many times have you had surgery? Twice. When was the last time you were at the beach? What did you do there? Years ago when Colleen and I were still friends. I swam a lot because the water felt FANTASTIC, then I also just chilled with Colleen, her husband, and their young son with snacks and stuff under their tent. It was fun, save for getting horrible sun poisoning... Who was the last person you spoke to online? How do you know this person? Girt and I have been using Discord to message each other. We met in high school. Who was the last person to visit your house? What were they there for? Also Girt. We were just hangin'. If you could change one thing about your appearance, what would it be and why? I wish I had a fit stomach because I feel hideous with mine. How do you feel about dreads on women? I don't care. Do whatever you want with your own hair. Do you feel like your life is moving forward? Very, very, VERY slowly, and only in certain contexts. Would you let your kid smoke weed? Seeing as it's illegal in my state, there's no way because I'd be terrified of them facing jail. If it was legal though and it was for medical purposes, I would be okay with it. I'd be nervous about my kid smoking anything with the risk of lung cancer, but. If they were at least 18 I'd say, I wouldn't force them to do as I say in regards to this topic. Do you feel like you connect more with animals or other people? Animals, for sure. Can you swear in a different language? Of course I would know "shit" and "fuck" in German lmaoooo Have you ever been banned from anywhere? No. Have you ever had a UTI? Many times, actually, because I don't and never have drank enough water. Have you ever intentionally trolled? No. Do you know anyone with a serious anger management problem? No. Who last held your hand? Girt. Do you know anyone who plays heaps of sports? Possibly? When was the last time you had chocolate? Yesterday. Girt, Mom, and I made s'mores together. Do you have any pets other than dogs or cats? Yeah, I have a snake. What is your favorite type of seashell? Idk the names of different kinds of seashells. Do you love 3-D movies? Yeah. When’s the last time you had a hamburger? Last night, actually. That was dinner. Are there any fake tattoos on you? No. Do you own a fish tank? No. Do you own a feather boa? No. What do you usually drink at meals? It varies. Did you pull any pranks on April Fool’s day, or vice versa? I never do. I don't really like the idea of the "holiday." Have you ever seen the last person you hugged naked? No. Where did you get your favorite shirt? Cloak is an online business. How would you react if your mom got a lip piercing? I'd find it metal af tbh, ha ha. Have you ever suspected that your last ex was cheating? Why? Not at all. When’s the last time you used the microwave? Yesterday, to make a dinner bowl from the freezer. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done? Oh GOD, I don't want to even try to imagine. I'll save myself the embarrassment. What do you do when you’re sad? It's pretty common I'll sleep if I'm extremely sad, sometimes I'll cry it out, or listen to music... Are you excited for anything? What? I'm REALLY hype for Halloween. I mentioned in another survey that I wanna make some awesome plans with Girt, and I realized Halloween is on a Sunday this year, which he should have off from work, so I'd say it's likely!!! Do you have playlists on your iPod? I do, for varying moods. I pretty much never ever use them, though.