#major caveat it might not even be a real account but if it is he clearly just appreciates fanart 😭 and it’s all from years ago pls breathe

[starbylers]

Re: Pinterest (but also just generally speaking). I don’t get why people think the writers view ships the same way fans do. They are writing a cohesive intentional story, they aren’t setting out to write “plot + ships”. Relationships are a cog in the machine of the story for them. They are not fans. They don’t ship their own show, as Finn put it. No Duffer or otherwise is giggling and kicking their feet over M*leven fanart 💀 but M*leven dating was a big part of s3. If people are creating art based off of where the story was at at the time, as a creator of course you’re going to appreciate that love for your work?

The writers obviously don’t hate M*leven, that would be weird and again, shipper behaviour 😭 Mike and El were sweet kids, they’re puppy love if you will. Those young teen first relationship antics is what their s3 arc was meant to embody. It’s nostalgic and endearing for many, yes it’s also childish and immature and not built to last but that’s the point? It’s multifaceted and realistic. The Duffers see them as what they are: kids. Kids who are growing up and all the joy and confusion and ups and downs that come along with that. ST is about coming of age and s3 especially about coming into adolescence. This idea that Mike and El has to have been secretly intended as this completely fake, empty or even toxic dynamic with no nuance the entire time is just not in line with reality imo and isn’t necessary in order for Byler to be the end point. Mike can even realise he’s gay and those experiences with El still be formative and a meaningful part of his story, and his conception of romance at that point in his life.

TLDR the writers are not shippers, they don’t share our perspective nor the perspective of M*levens. I don’t think they see things as one-sidedly as the fandom does. They’re not writing ship fic they’re writing a complex story. That story at one point included Mike and El dating for the first time. It’s okay for them to acknowledge that and appreciate fan works it inspired at the time! That doesn’t take away from everything that has happened in canon post s3 and the direction they chose to take the story 👍 also if you want to laugh here’s one of the fanarts:

Super romantic. And of the post s4 arts there’s not a single M*leven in sight (but there is Byler holding hands 🙂). Also please read my original tags if you’re seeing this 🙏

[thenightfolknetwork]

Thisss is a bit of an odd question, I think but...

I want to get into the 'dating sphere', but I'm stuck with a few caveats:

-I receive rather decent work in the village closest to me (it's remote enough I had to send in the post to a friend to transcribe) so I can't find myself moving to someplace too much more populated, but also my next point:

-I'm a very anxious person on account of the reaction most people have to me. I'm one of the more ophidian genuses which definitely shows in the face, a bit tall for a lady, and my tail tends to be a bit...adventurous. Most people that ask for my spellwork don't stay long after getting their product. I can see the fear or worry in their faces. It leaves me rather self-conscious to the point I have to put a homo-sapien disguise to gather supplies in-town.

that leads into my final problem. There is somebody who's shown interest in me. Rather he's interested in the disguise I wear in town. He's rather handsome and its hard not to fantasize being more than acquaintances, but...I'm scared of getting my hopes up if I ever reveal to him that I'm not really what I show on the surface. That I'll be back at square one.

Do I try actively seeking out folks who enjoy my real form, at the cost of maybe having to move? or is there a way I can navigate this one right here without him thinking I'm leading him on or tricking him?

I'm so sorry you've been subjected to such unkindness, reader. The difficulties faced by liminal folk in rural and otherwise isolated communities are all too often overlooked, or dismissed by urban nightfolk who suggest their rural counterparts simply move away – as if there is anything simple or reasonable in such a suggestion.

It is entirely right that you should not only hope but expect to be treated with kindness and respect in your local community, no matter how isolated that community may be. But in order to get that support, you first need to show your community that you need it.

Presenting as sapio when you go into town may be more comfortable, but comfort must sometimes give way to necessary, healthy vulnerability. I worry that by habitually hiding your liminal nature, you may be compounding your self-consciousness rather than alleviating it.

You have nothing to hide, reader. There is nothing wrong with having an adventurous tail or being all “for a lady” (a lady of what genus, might I ask?) Other people's discomfort with you is their problem to deal with, not yours.

Besides, the world is very different for the community today than it was just a few years ago. Thanks to major advancements in both communication technology and liminal liberation, your neighbours are used to seeing people of different genuses in the media, and very likely will have experience with nightfolk in their places of work or even among their friends and family.

I encourage you to set aside your romantic concerns for the time being and work on building up your confidence to be yourself in public. You don't have to cast off your disguise all at once, but it is well worth exploring spaces and times where you feel able to venture forth in sapio society without pretending to be one of them.

Some people will not respond well. This is sadly to be expected, but again – not your fault and not your issue to solve. But I feel sure that you will be pleasantly surprised, and that your community will, by and large, rise to the challenge. And, with any luck, this “rather handsome” somebody will be among them.

[For more creaturely advice, check out Monstrous Agonies on your podcast platform of choice, or visit monstrousproductions.org for more info]

[everything-withered]

Despite what other people might think, literature major Kurosaki Ichigo and law student Kuchiki Rukia were not dating . . . or were they? -- prompt: ichiruki through the eyes of nosy college classmates.

Okay. So. I tried to write them as students. But. They ended up being professors (in Ichigo's case) instead? Yikes. Outsider POV is really not my wheelhouse and I found it really hard to make college students care about each other's drama so I hope this is alright.

When classes have to be shifted online, students around the country who've witnessed their professors struggle with power point on a daily basis, collectively shudder.

But those under the tutelage of Professor Kurosaki are spared the dismay for his classes.

Professor Kurosaki Ichigo is not like other lecturers. He's young, he's good looking, and thank every god above, Professor Kurosaki is also good with technology.

With him, classes aren't all that different to real life lectures which is a relief, but some students bemoan the lack of his physical presence. Though that has less to do with the quality of education as much as it does the purveyor himself.

Professor Kurosaki has a bit of a reputation.

He's one of the youngest educators on campus, and practically inhuman given his meteoric rise to academic stardom especially since, as the rumors go, Professor Kurosaki isn't some prodigy, he's simply a workhorse who's too stubborn to quit.

It's a work ethic he pushes onto his students, and they shoulder it admirably.

Though, not for nothing.

Besides being the youngest professor, he also happens to be the most good looking, a feat that isn't just attributed to youth but also to pure magnetism. There's something very. Attractive. About Professor Kurosaki.

It's obvious even through a pixelated screen.

He's confident, but quiet about it. Serious, and sharp. He's always direct and doesn't dance around a topic, and he has a way of making you feel important when his attention is on you -- which is perhaps one of the best things about having lectures through a screen, it feels like you are.

Until, of course, you realize you aren't.

That day is today: pausing for a moment to take a sip of water, Professor Kurosaki glances just above the camera and smiles.

And the private group chat collectively loses its mind, and it spills out into the group chat accompanying the stream for the lecture itself.

Pausing to glance down at the screen again, Professor Kurosaki's eyes narrow, his expression shifting to his more familiar scowl as he dismissed the deluge of question marks (and some braver "What are you smiling at??") with "That's enough, you know better by now than to ask about my personal life."

Which is perhaps, the only caveat to Professor Kurosaki: him being intensely private that the only thing anyone in the student body knows about him that isn't shrouded in rumor is what's on his profile on the university website. The bare bones. The minimum. It's agonizing.

Not even the most advanced of internet stalkers among them can get anything more than that, and if not for an incredibly locked down Instagram account, they'd think their beloved professor simply appeared one day fully formed from the ether.

As it stands Professor Kurosaki is standing before the camera looking unimpressed, and the class' curiousity is punished with another load of essays due.

This doesn't stop the more persistent of the class from trying to gather intel from wherever they can get it: starting with what can be gleaned from Professor Kurosaki's home. While he usually shares his screen when he lectures, there's the in between moments when he's just sitting before the camera or pacing in front of it as he talks, or simply setting up or shutting down the stream. It's a goldmine of moments.

One person in the private group chat reports framed photographs on the shelf. The light always hits the glass so they can't make out the faces, but they're sure a later or earlier lecture could yield results if someone looks. It's on the left corner, is the instruction . If you've got a morning or late afternoon lecture, keep an eye out!

Another says, "I saw some kind of pet bed in the corner once too, when he was still setting up. Does Prof have a dog??"

Then, "I saw a lady's shoes on the ground when he was still setting up. Did you see them?? AM lecture yesterday??? Is Prof married???" which is followed by vehement denies because of course not and we would've noticed a ring by now and then, "women in the photographs are his sisters, maybe one of them is staying with him during quarantine?" And yes. Yes, that's feasible.

Except the next time, thanks to a student who'd read the time wrong and arrived too early to the stream, spends it listening to Professor Kurosaki set up for the lecture with the screen tilted onto the keys; they catch snatches of conversation between the professor and someone who very clearly isn't one of his sisters:

"You look tired."

"Thanks, that's exactly what a woman wants to hear," a female voice says, sarcastic and fond. And while there isn't much of a view, lacking in faces for one, the student can see the two bodies standing close enough to touch without actually doing any touching, a gravitational pull that's being resisted by sheer force of will. Then, voice softer than they've heard it ever, Professor Kurosaki tells her, "Go back to bed, the court documents can wait."

"My name's on the door," is the response that sounds like a whine which makes Professor Kurosaki chuckle. "It's Byakuya's too, he can sort it out. I'll make you breakfast when I'm done with class."

There's a sigh, dramatic and long suffering. "Promises, promises, Ichigo."

By then, there's more people in the stream logged in and listening, the private group chat is a mess of epic proportions: Professor Kurosaki has a woman in his life. He cooks her breakfast. She works with court documents, is she a lawyer? Who's Byakuya? We need answers people!

Whoever Byakuya is ends up being the key, though this is only realized later because the class is side tracked by the momentary affection on Professor Kurosaki's face, a tenderness so breathtaking no one says anything for awhile. Which is all well and good because Professor Kurosaki is not pleased with the direction of the conversation in the steam's chat. To the questions of "is that your wife?" He scowls and says, "That's none of your business."

And in his defense, it's not.

Until it is.

The quarantine is getting to everyone, Professor Kurosaki included. The woman doesn't appear again, though there have been reports of a woman's shoes in the background and a cardigan that looks too small to be Professor Kurosaki's, and if his class is disappointed, so must he. Except, "They must be in quarantine together...did they have a fight?"

Which thus begins the great advice giving of May 2020 wherein everyone throws in some casual dating wisdom about apologizing for whatever dumb thing you did, and how to compromise, and what to do to get out of the dog house and stop sleeping on your couch.

Professor Kurosaki must think it's some kind of late April fool's joke or something because he's kind of pissed about it for awhile.

Right until he forgets to end the stream, and few stragglers witness him resting his head on his arms and moaning as he mutters, "What the fuck is wrong with me?"

The audio picks up a growl, and Professor Kurosaki dismisses this with a, "I know, Kon, I know."

When he starts to bang his head on his desk, the students still on the stream start to worry, though thankfully the woman appears.

No one had really known what to expect, but it certainly wasn't her.

Where Professor Kurosaki has cut a famous figure in his jeans and a leather jacket, this woman is soft as a watercolour painting: she is a sunrise in a sweet, misty yellow sundress, what remains of the night sky clinging to her black hair and space blue eyes. Her voice is alarmed, but grounding, "Ichigo, what the hell?"

Professor Kurosaki is so startled he vaults up from his seat behind the desk, completely missing that the livestream is still on his screen. "What? No, I'm fine."

There's a scoff. "You've been acting weird for days, don't lie to me."

"Rukia..."

"Is this because of Saturday?" Is the question. "We were drunk, and ridiculous, and."

"Rukia -"

"Other people sleep together all the time" she says affecting a calm tone though there's a hint of desperation beneath it, "It doesn't have to mean anything."

The private group chat buzzes. The chat on the stream stays mercifully silent.

"We're not other people, at least not to each other," he finally says.

A sigh. "No, we're not."

Almost like a reflex, Professor Kurosaki absently reaches out to his laptop screen, and says quietly, just before they're all shut out, "And I want it to mean something so. What now, Rukia?"

The search for who Rukia is ends twenty minutes later: Kuchiki Rukia, lawyer, philanthropist and university alumni; she's the shining star of Sereitei's highest social circles, the only daughter of the Kuchiki family and the proud dog mom to a pitbull named Kon.

The intrigue continues.

By the time classes resume in person, Professor Kurosaki has revealed nothing. Rukia does not appear in the following streams.

There's a temptation to ask, but there's no doubt the professor will deny it.

Which is why when a student spots Rukia on campus, the group chat lights up.

A student still in Professor Kurosaki's lecture hall slows in packing away their things as Rukia enters, and it feels like Professor Kurosaki's entire class is holding their breathes.

Rukia and Professor Kurosaki, however, don't notice, and with an exchanged kiss in greeting as natural as a breath exhaled, the group chat lights up again.

The student is sufficiently embarrassed when, called forth by Professor Kurosaki about what they think they're doing, and show me your phone if it's nothing, then the last message insists: pics or it didn't happen!

Rukia laughs so hard, her happiness all but lights her up, and oh, the student can see how Professor Kurosaki could be in love. And from his expression to the one Rukia returns to him, amused and fond and tender in one, the student wonders why no one's seen it before at all.

[pjstafford]

Contemplations on “negative or weak” emotions

When I was young my father’s advice was to not cry so frequently. He said that I was “giving them what they wanted”. I don’t remember the circumstance. Were my older siblings picking on me or were my grievances something larger? Who were the them? I can think of multiple times when my father made me cry. Is that what he wanted? If so, I would gladly shared all my tears to save him any pain he experienced. As I remember this now I could be remembering it poorly. Was it upon the announcement of my parents’ divorce? Did he bring us together to give us advice before he left the house? No, it doesn’t sound like him. Still I remember it as being advice about the future and for my grown up self. Today I know I have interacted with people for whom the ability to make me cry, sad, angry was a power on which they thrived. My father was afraid for my softness. He was basically telling me to toughen up. His negative emotions were bottled up until they came out as rage. My father’s advice was wrong and right. I have trusted the wrong people. I have been lonely and desperate. I have been taken advantage of by people who saw me as an easy mark. If I had been tougher and more worldly wise my life would have been different. My tears though kept me from breaking. The ability to “cry it out” doesn’t mean you don’t have the pain any longer, but it is a release. You are going to feel the physical impact of emotional pain. You might feel it in your gut or your muscles or in the fist you punched through the wall or when you’ve hurt someone you love. Tears seem the better way to me.

An ex once told me I was too public. I understood it from his perspective. When you have convinced three separate women that they are the love of your life and you are deeply committed to each of them in a monogamous relationship, it is useful if none of the women are too “public”. Still, in this occasion I had cried while packing belongings in a car. I gave the neighbors something to talk about. At sixty years old I can say I slapped someone twice (two different people decades apart the extent of my physical “fighting”) risen my voice in anger loud enough for the neighbors to hear possibly six times. I can remember twice and so I will multiply if by three to be safe. I have cried in public settings even professionally more than all of that combined. I guess we all define what is a show of strength differently.

In my twenties and thirties, I was a fairly open and trusting human. These days not so much. I have arranged my life to protect myself from feelings I don’t want to experience. The worst feelings are those of hating myself for being stupid enough to believe or trust someone whose intention was to harm or take advantage. I should know better than that by now. Yet, truly I don’t how to differentiate people who are nice to you because they want to get to know you and people who are nice to you with intention to cause you harm. It’s hard for me to distinguish. I know, then, that I close myself off to feelings I want to have. I am often lonely. You can’t have the love without the risk, but ecstasy and rage are opposing face coins of madness.

Yet, my ex was right about being public in terms of I am who I am. Trying to pretend to be someone else and wearing masks doesn’t work for me. However, I do contain multitudes. I can on any given day be competent or a mess, articulate or quiet, active or lazy. My personal life and my professional life are separate. I am more competent at one than another. So I wear many faces but each one is an authentic face to the time and circumstance. Pretension is too exhausting. I tell the story of me pretty freely. I engage in public social media as a way to tell my stories of me. Is there any body interested? I don’t know. Are we all too public in this age? Maybe, but, maybe, not enough. Not authentically.

When I have a post traumatic stress “event”; I spiral. I have a flight response. I hate myself and assume everyone hates me. I try to actively disassociate with everyone I care about. I want to be small, like Alice hiding in a teacup, if no one can see me no one can hurt me. Only afterwards must I add the caveat but myself and realize I have done just that. My memories of my surroundings, the shapes of doorways and rooms, change in my memories even if it is a room with which I am real familiar. These incidents are few and far between. Whatever my PTS was from my childhood, it has become layered by additional trauma as an adult. Despite being extremely resilient to life circumstances I am not resilient to new trauma. Processing through my trauma through therapy and self reflection has only brought them to the surface and made it easier to be triggered. Is it healthier in the long run? I do not know. I do not want to try EMDR. I want to stay healthy through being in healthy situations and environments.

While I live a day to day life of some fear, due to PTS, I have, in my life, had five major incidents where I’ve experienced PTS. The first time was simply that seeing something caused me to remember something. Three times I was triggered because I was, in fact either in physical danger at the moment or in other danger by being in some sort of relationship where I was being taken advantage of or mistreated. I could have handled the situations differently without the reaction, but I might not have left or kept myself safe and so....in retrospect, PTS might not be a bad thing always.

I am still trying to understand my response from last week which was one of the most challenging and long spirals I have ever experienced and the first without any major provocation. I am going to put some of the blame on the year, the pandemic, the stress I, and all of us, have so bravely tried to face pretending we are all ok. With a vaccination scheduled and everything opening up, was that a trigger of emotions I kept bottled up too long? Did I have to “ respond” to the pandemic before I could move on? The last week was a a sign that I have become very dependent on social media in the last year for my interactions and socialization. I know social media is not a safe place. There are predators and fakes. Yet another Bob Dylan fake account messaged me today. I guess I don’t think of separating social media from real life. They are all real life. There are dangers and joy to be had and little corners of contentment to find. I do know last week my happy place felt dangerous but it had been coming for a while before. I had already begun to try and make myself smaller for protection. The mean girls of tumblr are exactly who my father meant when he said they want to see you cry. Having said that, and knowing I don’t want to amplify their voices, I, also, don’t want to “give in”. I don’t want to leave social media. Surely I have the right to tell the story of me, don’t I, and clarify on my account when my viewpoints are misrepresented? There are real dangers, though, to real human beings when there are zero checks on accounts from the people who run social media platforms. Away from tumblr and back to Twitter, I know, in my spiral I misread things others said the way I sometime experience a room differently in the midst of an event. I might have hurt innocent others by my attempts to flee, to make myself smaller, by my beliefs that the only way to protect myself was to hurt myself by excising those with whom I am the closest and most vulnerable.

So here I am telling the story of me. Does it have merit? Does it in some way help someone to understand more the human condition? I can’t say for sure. I can only say it is an authentic tale.

[makeyourownmyth]

best seen in 2020.

My usual caveats from previous years are still applicable here: I don’t watch most of the major nominations the years they come out, and I’m usually not much for theaters and/or current TV. However, due to the pandemic, we watched a loooooooot of content. Here’s just a list of movies that I watched or rewatched this year, that were neither terrible, nor great, but I want to make note of:

Toy Story 4, The Brothers Bloom, Happiest Season, The Peanut Butter Falcon, Moana, Mr. Right, Moulin Rouge, Ocean’s Eleven, Spring Breakers, X-Men: Dark Phoenix (this might have been the worst movie I watched this year?), Widows, Gattaca, Black Klansman, Primer, It 2, Shazam (this maybe should have gone on the Honorable Mentions - it was fun), Training Day, Parasite (OK, now I have to update my Honorable Mentions), The Green Book, Strange Days, Elf, Love & Basketball, Above the Rim, Coach Carter.

That being said, there was some bad stuff, and I try not to shit on any artist’s creations too much, because I know no one sets out to make something bad, but these didn’t work for me. 

Anti

Uncut Gems - It’s not that it was BAD, it was just too stressful for me to enjoy.

Brick - It wasn’t even close to enjoyable on a rewatch that I encouraged my partner to take on for the first time. I felt bad. 

Hereditary - Neither a scary movie, nor a good movie.  

The Witch - Same, but maybe better made?

Under The Skin - Jesus, this was terrible. Maybe I’m not artsy enough to get it?

Now, however, let’s get to the good stuff. 

Honorable Mention TV

Avatar - I can’t legitimately put it on the Best Of list, because I’m not done yet, but I’m on Book 3, after finally actually getting started. I think I tried to start this in 2016, and i know all my nerd friends have been yelling at me for a long time because I haven’t gotten to it yet, and as someone who’s almost done, I can say: they were right! It’s great. 

Ozark - S1 was great. It fell off a fucking CLIFF after that. Ignore people who tell you that you HAVE to watch this. They’re wrong. It’s fine. 

The Last Dance - I know the world is obsessed with Michael Jordan, and I’m glad it came out when it did, but really, all it did for me was confirm that he’s an asshole who was very fortunate to play when he did. And also that the Bulls were fucking phenomenal. 

His Dark Materials - Neither as bad as some of my friends think, nor nearly as good as the books (obviously) but also not good enough that I’ve even started S2 yet, so....I guess it’s fine? 

The Mandalorian S2 - I think they know what they’re doing, and it’s super enjoyable, and I loved the ending, but I’m also curious as to where they’re going now. 

Fargo S3 - Given how good the rest of the series is (other than my distaste for S2, dealt with below, and out of step with pop culture) I thought this one was a misstep, 

Orphan Black - I cannot believe how late I was to this, and how good it still was. It really fell apart toward the end, but the acting was incredible, and the fact that they got to tell the story they wanted to was amazing. 

Best TV

7. All the Smoke with Kobe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R3KIyEgCgc) - Maybe it was just his death, but it hits hard, and I miss him. Does this even count as TV? 

6. Looking for Alaska - It felt like gratuitous masochism to watch this and enjoy it, being 20 years older than when I fell for it, and feeling ashamed of the young person I was, but even knowing what was coming, I was weeping when it happened. Even knowing that they were ultimately going on a fruitless search and yelling at the TV while the Colonel and Pudge were searching for “signs” and hating them for it, I remember feeling like everything HAD to happen for a reason when I was this young... So yeah. It’s pure nostalgia for me. I’d be super interesting in hearing how kids responded to it. 

5. Locke and Key - I get that some people feel like they don’t need old shit in a new medium, but for me, I’m always up to try it out. If it’s fun, I’ll stick with it. And this is. It’s fun, it’s got some of the old shit, it’s got some new shit, and it’s a treat to see my favorite comic of the last decade in a new medium. Haters need a new bit. 

Fargo s1 and s4 (I didn’t love S3) - I know that I’m in the minority here, but I think 1 and 4 are the best and 2 was good, and 3 was fine. I literally watched all of this show this year, though, so I didn’t have the same time to digest as others. But I think that’s a benefit in some regards? 

4. Magicians s5 - One of the saddest conversations of the last year to two was when a nerd friend of mine said he didn’t like The Magicians because all of the characters were whiny and self-indulgent. For me, that was almost literally the point: they shoved Q into the corner and told the story of the others (at least one episode quite self-referentially so) and it was so much better for that. I wish it hadn’t ended, but I’m glad they left it where they did, because it was so good.  

3. Devs esp. The beginning of e5 - Jesus. The show of the year? Except for the fact that Watchmen came out at the tail end of last year, and I didn’t have it on my 2019 list? I mean, honestly, is there a show more tailored to me? I’m not gonna get into any spoilers, but it’s a quick watch, and it’s fucking fantastic. Watch it, have your mind blown by the concept, especially in the beginning sequence of E5, and then stick around for the subpar ending where basically all of the threads are resolved in the least good way. 

2. Watchmen - This deserves multiple re-watches and all the praise that people heaped upon it. 

1. The Good Place - I know, objectively, that Watchmen was a better show than The Good Place. But this is my list, and I’ll be damned if anything overtakes my favorite sitcom (maybe of all time?) for best of the year. I know it barely just ended this year, and there’s plenty of acclaim to go around for this show, but honestly, every time I talk to anyone about it, it feels like they kind of laugh it off. This show is not only worth your time, but should almost be considered must-watch material. If more people watched this show, we wouldn’t need the insult “sophomoric” to describe people who’ve just had their minds blown by Philosophy 101, and we’d be better off as a species. 

Honorable Mention Movies

In this order, and you can take the comedies and make them the only honorable mentions, if you’d like to make a nice, even top 10. (Until I saw Tenet the night before I posted this.( (And then I looked back at the playing cards that we use to randomly choose movies and I found that I needed to modify the Honorable Mentions and the Best Of lists.) 

21 and 22 Jump Street - In general, I’m not a fan of comedies. So I’m happy I watched these, thanks to Nathan Zed, and they’re funny. Good work guys. 

Palm Springs - Apparently there’s now backlash against Groundhog Day? I dunno, man, it was fun, and all the actors seemed like they were having a good time, and I was down for it. 

Parasite - I can’t add anything to this that hasn’t already been shouted from the rooftops, so let me just briefly say that I thought it was great, but it didn’t quite make the list of best. The combo of genres was great, the cast was fantastic, but what I loved the most about it was how quiet it was.

Best Movies

10. Blinded by the Light - Way more resonant than I thought it’d be from the previews, and I already thought it was gonna be stellar. I didn’t take into account TIME along with place, and that made a hell of a difference for this movie. 

9. Shoplifters - Yeesh. What a tough watch, but so good, and so necessary. For me, I think we watched it back to back to back with Parasite and I, Tonya, and this one just stood out so much more. The storyline was softer all the way through, but really had gravitas simultaneously. 

8. Tenet - It was fucking fun! I don’t get the hate! I liked it, I’ll like it more next time I see it, and I wish I’d seen it on the big screen, but I’m super glad I could see it on my TV! 

7. I, Tonya - Geez, what a powerhouse of acting. Not only did they get me to feel good about the villain of my childhood, they got me to feel good about Margot Robbie, who I’d only thought of as a hot lady before. Superb acting from everyone else, too, and what a great pick up to be like, yeah, this is the story we’re gonna tell. 

6. I Am Not Your Negro - I avoided watching it for so long because I was already depressed this year, and I didn’t think I needed any more of that, but it turns out I did, and I always do, from Baldwin. He’s a master for a reason. 

5. Hamilton - I know there was some backlash with the time difference, and I’m sure it was better to see it pre-2016 in the theater, where it’s meant to be seen, but I’m not a billionaire New Yorker, and I was plenty happy to see it when and where I could. 

4. Won’t You Be My Neighbor - I mean...what do you think? It’s so much exactly what you’re thinking it is, but then it’s even better, because it’s the real deal, and he was so good, and it’s so pure. Watch it. 

3. Her Smell - Elizabeth Moss has already gotten all the acclaim, but to play this different of a role, in a movie that felt as stressful as Uncut Gems, but pulled off an actual plot so much more successfully? I can’t believe this one didn’t get more pub, but then again, yes I can: it’s a movie about a girl band that rages against the machine, and she’s got severe issues. Small surprise that the people didn’t react well. Seek this one out! 

2. Arrival - Yes, I am going to totally cheat and put a movie that’s appeared on my list (sooooo long ago) as the #2 entry this year. You know why? Cuz fuck 2020, and this is a great movie, and it’s the movie that made me feel second best this year. It’s incredible, and I know people appreciated it in its time, but I feel like they should appreciate it even more. 

1. Moonlight - It’s not a shock, nor am I trying to appease anyone with anything. It’s just that I finally watched it, and it’s the best movie I saw this year. I don’t think I could possibly add anything to the authentic critics who have already heaped praise upon it, but I do have to say that it’s all due, and so much more. The acting obviously stands out, but the direction, from the color palettes, to the choice of when and where (and how) to break it up, are all masterful choices.  

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

In January, Philip McHarris was driving from New Haven to Boston to visit a friend when he saw a familiar sight in his rearview mirror — flashing police lights. It was late at night, and McHarris pulled into a gas station and waited, as he had done many times before, for the state trooper to approach his window. The problem, the trooper said, was the way McHarris had pulled off at an exit. Then he said that the highway where McHarris had been driving was a drug trafficking route, and asked if he could search the car for drugs.

McHarris explained that he was a Ph.D. student in sociology and African American Studies at Yale who had just left campus for the weekend. But while the officer walked away to his car, McHarris quickly took a video of himself and sent it to his mother and sisters. “I said, ‘This cop thinks I’m trafficking in drugs,’” McHarris said. “‘I just wanted to let you know that I tried and I love you. I really tried.’”

Eventually, the officer let McHarris go with a warning. It didn’t spiral into one of the deadly encounters that make the front pages of newspapers, where a Black man is killed at the hands of a police officer. The officer had even been relatively courteous, assuring McHarris that the stop wasn’t the result of racial profiling. But that just reinforced for McHarris how poorly the officer understood the racial dynamics of the interaction — much less the fear he felt throughout the encounter, and couldn’t shake even after he drove away. “What good is it if a cop is being nice to me while asking to search the car?” he said. “What I care about is that I got pulled over in the first place, and I’m sitting here thinking maybe this random gas station is the last thing I’ll see.”

Years ago, McHarris came to the conclusion that because of interactions like this, department-level policing reforms aren’t enough. And as a scholar who studies policing and works alongside the Movement for Black Lives, McHarris is part of a small network of activists who have also spent years working to defund police departments, redistribute the money to other parts of the social safety net, like housing, education and transportation, and create new systems for ensuring public safety. But now their work is suddenly everywhere. After the police killing of George Floyd, the Minneapolis City Council voted to dismantle its police department amid growing calls from protesters to “defund the police.” And it’s not just Minneapolis — officials in Los Angeles, Denver and Portland, Ore., are mulling similar ideas.

The exact meaning of the slogan varies a lot depending on who you ask. Even the Minneapolis city council members who voted to disband say their move comes with qualifications. But broadly, it involves a seismic shift in the way we think about public safety — and who is being kept safe. Some critics of the defunding movement have argued that getting rid of the police would be counterproductive — in their absence, who would keep the streets safe? But McHarris said it’s time to stop tinkering around the edges of a system that many people in heavily policed communities say is causing more harm than good. “These police reforms are implemented over and over again and Black people are still being brutalized and murdered,” he said. “Nobody is saying we can’t have mechanisms to promote safety. It just won’t look like the police.”

Defunding the police is a big departure from the reforms we’ve seen before. But although there are disagreements between activists and researchers about how sweeping change should be, pretty much everyone we spoke with agrees that the system is broken, efforts to measure it are highly flawed, and now is the moment to think big about how to fix it. In many ways, the movement to defund the police is exposing gaping holes in how we measure what good police work really is, and how we gauge a reform’s success. Because after decades of research on policing and police reform, we still don’t know that much about what police are doing, how their presence actually affects the people who experience police violence, and what people in those communities want from reform.

On its surface, large majorities of Americans support “police reform.” But “reform” is vague and gets complicated fast. For one thing, the police aren’t a single entity. There are more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies scattered throughout the U.S., which means that any change has to be piecemeal. And it’s also hard to figure out what departments are actually doing, or how to compare them. Within a single metro area, multiple departments could be operating under different rules or different standards of rule enforcement, and even using different definitions of particular buzzword-heavy reforms like “community policing.”

That lack of uniformity makes it difficult to compare police departments that have implemented similar policies. “To understand if a police reform is actually working the way you want, you need to be able to see what officers do in the field and figure out whether the reform you’re looking at changed that,” said Emily Owens, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine. “We don’t really have the data or the studies right now for me to say with confidence, ‘We know that these reforms work and these don’t.’”

What’s more, the data that exists is full of holes — and bias. Even when researchers try to document whether the police are doing a good job or how departments might improve, they’re often conducting those studies using metrics that help tell only part of the story. Policing data is imperfect. Due to a lack of systematic or reliable data on police misconduct, the fact that the data we do have is mostly from police departments themselves, and an emphasis on crime and police presence, it’s liable to miss important variables such as nature of police interactions with the public, or the fact that plenty of illegal or violent behavior happens in places and populations where police aren’t looking for it.

Case in point: The practice of hot spot policing. This is one of the best researched policing techniques and — after some 40-odd randomized controlled trials, by one expert’s count — also the one with the most evidence supporting its effectiveness. The basic idea is that crime is clustered throughout a city or neighborhood, so police should target those areas that see higher levels of crime.

But there are still a lot of unavoidable caveats. For instance, when scientists identify hot spots and measure whether policing in those locations has been effective, what they’re really looking at is crime statistics, said Cody Telep, a criminology professor at Arizona State University. That isn’t necessarily the same thing as measuring safety (real or perceived) in a community, he told us. After all, about half of all violent crimes are never reported to the police at all. So the appearance of a hot spot in the data doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where the most dangerous criminal activity is actually happening — something Telep’s team saw firsthand when it compared the locations of drug-related calls to police in Seattle with drug-related calls to the emergency medical services in the same city. It turns out there was a lot of drug activity the police were missing entirely.

Crime, then, and particularly crimes reported to police, are not a great metric by which to judge where the most crime in a city is happening and how dangerous that area feels to the people who live there. Nor is a reduction in crime the end-all, be-all metric to tell you whether police are doing good work. “Certainly reducing crime is a good metric, but I would add to that, at what cost?” said Rod Brunson, a professor at Northeastern University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

These statistics also don’t tell researchers anything about what police should be doing in a hot spot — or what police do in communities every day. Researchers have established that it’s effective to spend more time in certain parts of town … but, Telep said, have offered little guidance on what police should do once they’re there.

And even if police were given guidelines on what they should be doing, nobody currently keeps track of metrics that would show what those officers were actually doing. That’s about to change, at least partially — under an executive order issued by President Trump last week, the Department of Justice will begin maintaining an anonymized database of police misconduct. But there’s still a catch: The only time we find out about what police do in their day-to-day work is when someone complains or files a report about it, said Wesley Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University. That means there’s no incentive toward good behavior — even though some research suggests that positive interactions with police can improve public attitudes toward them. “The fact about policing is it’s two people in a car, in the night. What we know about what they do is when they choose to fill out a form,” Skogan said.

But even in the situations where it is possible to get good data on real-world police behavior, whether a reform has been successful depends a lot on your perspective. In general, research tends to focus on metrics that are easy to quantify: Did a reform lead to fewer police killings? Fewer civilian complaints? More fired officers? But those measures don’t really account for the human and social cost of police violence, and they don’t tell us much about whether people in overpoliced communities are actually feeling safer.

Part of the problem is that we don’t have a good way to measure or track the effects of dealing with the police on an everyday basis. But qualitative research can give us a window into how a heavy police presence can stoke feelings of deep mistrust. In a study of young people in Baltimore conducted shortly after the killing of Freddie Gray, Yale sociologist and law professor Monica Bell concluded that although the people she was studying were very concerned about violence in their communities, they didn’t see police as protectors. “It’s not just that people are being brutally beaten or shot and killed by police, it’s the routine, daily messaging of — they are going to be watching you in your neighborhood, they’re going to mace you at your school,” she said. “People will even report that a police officer behaved in the ‘correct’ manner but they still walk away with a deep sense that they’ve experienced a broader racism, a broader sense of exclusion that quantitative measures can’t easily capture.”

Analysis of conversations with people in heavily policed communities by a group of political scientists found a similar result: To the people in the study, the police seemed like they were everywhere — except when their help was actually needed. The deep-rooted perception that the police are there to monitor you, not protect you, is hard both to measure and undo. “There’s a very strong perception that the police are there to protect and serve the white community on the other side of the city or the suburbs,” said Gwen Prowse, a Ph.D. candidate in political science and African American studies at Yale and one of the study authors. “The idea is — if you only see me as a criminal and you don’t see me as a full member of this society, how can you protect me?”

And without input from the people who actually experience police violence, attempts to evaluate police reforms can end up reflecting what the researchers — and not the people who are affected — think is important. “There’s this weird business where people think data can solve everything, but data without thoughtful engagement with the community is actually part of the problem,” said Bocar Ba, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who studies economics and crime.

Use of force is one such example — just as police departments have different definitions of what constitutes “excessive force,” so can researchers. For instance, the idea that there is an “optimal” or “reasonable” use of force may prompt researchers or policymakers to ignore or discount lower-level incidents that were still quite traumatic for the person involved. “Who are the people deciding what an ‘optimal’ use of force is?” said Ba. “Are they the people who are experiencing brutality themselves? In almost all cases, no.”

Meanwhile, researchers are just starting to scratch the surface of how an uneasy and often violent relationship with police shapes other aspects of people’s lives. A recent study of students in an urban Southwest school district found that proximity to police shootings harmed high school students’ performance. That’s in line with other research indicating that having police in schools may actually decrease high school graduation rates. But these types of social costs aren’t easily priced in when researchers evaluate whether a reform succeeded or failed.

It’s becoming increasingly clear, too, that the reforms we’ve already tried are running headlong into other difficult to measure, difficult to fix forces, like police culture. Encounters between police and civilians are often violent because police officers are taught to think of themselves as always being in danger, according to research by sociologist Michael Sierra-Arévalo of the University of Texas. At the same time, Skogan said, police culture tends to discount things people at community meetings say they are actually interested in — like controlling traffic or reducing public drinking — as boring.

These are the kinds of problems that make activists like Arissa Hall, the director of National Bail Out, argue that simply reducing contact between police and civilians, and replacing the police with other community resources, is a much better way to address police violence. There might not be many precedents for disbanding police departments, but the positive effect of reducing police presence and investing in housing and education can already be seen in other places. “Abolishing police departments might seem impractical, but there aren’t police officers on every street corner in affluent white neighborhoods,” she said. “We have actual models and examples of what it means to decenter the police and invest in people’s quality of life.”

There’s a lot of research to support the idea that putting more money into resources that improve people’s lives — like health care, housing and education — can reduce crime. The more nebulous question is how removing funding for police departments will affect public safety. But Jennifer Doleac, an economics professor at Texas A&M University who studies crime, suggested policymakers and researchers should prioritize listening to the experiences of people who are interacting with police and make sure those are taken into account when deciding which policies are implemented and how to evaluate their success.

“Clearly, the system that we have now isn’t working for a lot of people,” Doleac said. “So can I see risks to significantly rolling back funding for police departments? Sure. But there’s also a big, big risk in doing too little right now.”

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Imagine that you were put in charge of a modern, high-budget, well-written Animorphs TV series. What changes to the plot/characters/world would you make while adapting it? (Books that you'd skip, arcs that you'd rearrange, things you would add or outright alter...)

[Important caveat: I have ZERO experience in set design, directing, editing, camerawork, or any other processes involved in TV production, unless we’re going to be super generous and count the bit of scriptwriting and stage-acting I did in high school.  Ergo, these ideas might make no sense in practice.]

Animate it.  I would much much prefer to see an anime-style show to a live-action one for a handful of different reasons:

Battle scenes, morph sequences, and alien appearances wouldn’t be constrained by budget realities.  Although we’ve come a long way from AniTV’s practical effects, in 2019 Runaways still minimizes Old Lace (the sentient dinosaur) and struggles with her somewhat less-than-convincing appearance while she’s onscreen.  I’d like to see real-looking battles between exotic animals and highly unusual aliens.  I’d like to see Ax portrayed as a deer-scorpion-centaur with no mouth who also has complex facial expressions.  I’d like taxxons and hork-bajir that match their descriptions in the books.  CGI for a moderate-budget TV show can’t do that yet.

The characters’ appearances could match their descriptions in the books.  I don’t really care about AniTV’s Jake having blue eyes or Marco having short hair.  I do care about the fact that Cassie is described as short, chubby, dark-skinned, natural-haired, and androgynous in self-presentation… whereas AniTV’s Nadia-Leigh Nascimento is (through no fault of her own and 100% the fault of Nickelodeon) none of those things.  I’d like to see all of the characters drawn in a way that matches their canon racial heritage, and voiced with actors of those ethnicities as well.  For bullshit marketing reasons of bullshit, that’s not as likely to happen in a live-action show.

I’d want the show to convey the frequent mismatches between characters’ physicality and their personalities.  It’s an important motif of the books.  It’s part of the reason that Tobias has been claimed by the trans* community.  It’s a major plot point, lest new viewers think that the vice principal of the school is actually trying to kill his own students.  It doesn’t come off in AniTV, for all that I commend them for even trying (casting Shawn Ashmore’s twin as controller-Jake, portraying Chapman as straight out of Stepford), just because the nature of controller-ness and nothlitization are difficult to convey literally.  Animation has a lot of tricks, from deliberately distorted drawings to screensaver-like “mental space,” that can actually convey concepts like mind control or body dysmorphia pretty well — Alphonse in Fullmetal Alchemist and Aang in Avatar the Last Airbender great examples of body-mind mismatch and multiple consciousnesses in one body, respectively.

Use a cold open for every episode.  I am a sucker for Batman cold opens or any other opening scenes that pick up in the middle of the characters’ everyday lives, because they work so well to convey that there is a crapton of life happening outside of the plot of any given episode.  Several Animorphs books (#9, #14, #35, #41, #51) open this way, to great effect, and I love the way that it gives us slices of life we might not otherwise see (morphing to cheat on science homework, completing entire offscreen missions, having dinner with the family) and help build these characters’ worlds outside of individual episode plots.

Introduce James sooner (and have better disability narratives).  There are several aspects of Animorphs’ social justice consciousness that age okay (Rachel shutting down Marco’s constant flirting) or not well at all (Mertil and Galfinian).  One important way the series could update Animorphs is through having canon disabled characters like James, Mertil, and Loren have bigger roles and not resorting to kill-or-cure narratives.  Maybe James could come in sooner and form a Teen Titans West-esque team with the other Auximorphs so that he and Collette and the others could be recurring supporting characters with unique plotlines.  Maybe Loren could still gain morphing power, but remain blind and brain-damaged so that the hork-bajir need to work with her to figure out accommodations while sleeping rough.

Modify Jake’s and Cassie’s parents to account for the contemporary setting.  The fact that the kids so often disappear all afternoon or even overnight without anyone worrying just wouldn’t translate to a contemporary reimagining of Animorphs.  Tobias and Ax are each other’s only family on the planet whereas Marco’s dad and Rachel’s mom are both overworked single parents.  Jake’s family, however, and Cassie’s…

Cassie’s parents are so freaking cool in canon that they would definitely start to worry if Cassie went for an entire “weekend at Rachel’s” without answering any texts or calls.  Maybe there could be some scenes with them talking about how they have this super-mature responsible daughter whom they can trust not to get into trouble even if she does hate cell phones, but oh well because they’re not big on technology either.

Jake’s parents are… less cool, but they still try their best.  The show might explain their lack of concern about either of their disappearing kids through upping the hippie factor from his mom, maybe until she practices Free-Range Parenting.  (Why yes, it is true that Jake’s family would have the necessary privileges to get away with free-range crap while Cassie’s family would not, because yes it is the case that black families have been arrested for leaving kids alone for 10 minutes while white families are allowed more passes under the law.  Yes, that is a steaming pile of racist bullshit.)  The other way it could go is by having Jake’s parents completely checked out, which could get in the way of plots like #31 that hinge on them genuinely caring about their kids, but could also introduce an interesting dynamic if it partially parentifies Tom.

Include at least one Rashomon plot.  The TV series would by necessity lose the first-person narration, with all its brilliantly subtle shades of bias and misinterpretation.  One way to try and bring that back in would be to convey the same events from multiple points of view with subtle differences in the way that each person perceives what happened.  This could happen somewhere in the Visser One plot, with Rachel interpreting the scene as a straight Animorphs-vs-yeerks battle, while Visser One interprets it as Visser Three incompetently sabotaging her as Animorphs ruin her life, while Marco interprets it as a struggle to protect his mom and also save his friends, while Visser Three interprets it as the andalite bandits flagrantly plotting with Visser One, while Jake interprets it as Marco going off the rails from stress… and the only witness who has a sense of what actually happened is Eva.  Other possibilities abound.

Start with a plan to make one episode per book… and modify as necessary.  There are areas of the series I’d like to see expanded (#50 - #54 covers a lot of ground in relatively little space) and areas that I think could afford to be compacted (#39 - #44 feature a whole lotta nothin’).  But instead of adding or discarding an entire book, I think you could spread out many of the plots by simple virtue of TV shows not being constrained by first-person narration.

Certain books just wouldn’t get straight-translated today anyway (#40, most notably). I don’t think any books are so bad or useless that they couldn’t be modified into decent television episodes.

The ramping-up that leads to open war happens mostly in the background of #44 - #51, but a bunch of scenes with just controllers talking to each other could go into that process in a lot more detail.  This content could help fill out plots like #44 and #48 that frankly don’t have a lot else going on.

The entire plot of Visser happens over a nonspecific period of time between #30 and #45, so instead of getting one book we could get an entire running Yeerk Empire subplot with major consequences for the main plotline.

Similarly, the andalites’ decisions happen mostly offscreen but have major consequences for the Animorphs.  The consequences for the Electorate after the events of #38 could also run for a whole subplot that sets up their decision to nuke Earth in #52.

The biggest absence from the last couple books is Rachel.  Her last book is a friggin’ dream sequence, she acts out of character in #52 especially, and the narration order cuts off directly before giving her one last book.  It wouldn’t be necessary to add an entire episode just to rectify this oversight, when #51 could still be Marco-centric but also show her and Jake on their sabotage mission, and #52 could have the same rough plot but with a few scenes between her and Tobias thrown in for good measure.

Anyway, maybe the various Chronicles could be a handful of Doctor-lite episodes where the Animorphs themselves are incidental and Elfangor or Aldrea has the helm.  Maybe the events of the Chronicles could come out organically over the course of the show, for instance by expanding the memory-dumps Tobias gets in #1 and #33 or having Jara tell Dak’s story in #13 or #23.  The Megamorphses, on the other hand, could pretty easily just occur as regular-series episodes, albeit possibly as two- or three-parters.

Lean into the comic-book aesthetic.  Animorphs is written very much in the style of a graphic novel, from its “teens with superpowers save the world from aliens” plot to its heavy use of onomatopoeia.  Even the use of hypertext symbols around thought-speak hearkens back to the comic book convention of using pointed brackets around alien languages to convey translation.  The show could homage this motif through having dramatic transformation sequences, “uniforms” of multicolored spandex the kids use to morph, an opening credits sequence that emphasizes the power of each animal, and other superhero-comic elements throughout.

Have the violence be consequential.  To keep the examples from earlier: in Fullmetal Alchemist, as well as in Avatar, characters that get hurt stay hurt.  A character getting shot or stabbed is portrayed as a potentially life-changing event.  Characters’ injuries do not disappear between episodes, and even alchemy and waterbending are not portrayed as total fixes.  Characters scar, they become disabled, they spend entire episodes in recovery, they accrue trauma, and they do not shrug off life-ending injuries.  Animorphs helps to justify the idea that six kids could (mostly) survive (most of) an entire war against a friggin empire through making the protagonists nigh-unkillable thanks to their healing abilities, but it nevertheless shows that shooting someone will result in that person bleeding and screaming and possibly dying.  Having a sci-fi or action show meant for children isn’t actually a valid excuse for portraying violence as cool or funny or inconsequential the way that (Avengers Assemble, Teen Titans, Kim Possible, Dragonball Z, Pokemon, etc.) too many children’s sci-fi/action shows opt to do.

[drsilverfish]

Re-Fridging Mary Winchester? The Ouroboros Narrative Swallows its Origin Story (14x18)

This is the last time we see Mary Winchester alive (14x17 Game Night). Her last words are, “Jack, please, listen to me!” and her last shot is this shaky close-up, straight to camera. 

(Image credit Wayward Winchester https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIbBibdvsaM )

Doesn’t it look as if she’s directly addressing the audience here, as if to say, “Hey, folks, pay close attention!”?

The “real” Mary is, like the title of the episode (Absence) absent in 14x18. 

Rowena says, after doing her locator spell, that Mary, “...is not on this earth.” We see ash that is supposedly hers, as Jack tries desperately to “resurrect” her. We learn Castiel has seen her soul in Heaven, but we do not see her, only the apparent door to her Heaven:

And the “body” Jack raises using Rowena’s necromancy spell? It is not Mary:

(Image credit Wayward Winchester:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny7tLZC3nto )

Sam is very explicit about that. He says, “I talked to Rowena. She said she thinks that what Jack brought back, he just brought back a shell, a body, y’know, that it was empty, just a... replica, incapable of holding life.”

A replica, like... a doppleganger, a mirror-image?

The shot above, of her sons holding this shell, this replica-double, is laid out at a boundary, between grass and ash, between life and death, almost as if between one world and another (separated, perhaps, by a portal?).

You might have seen my posts already about 14x17 Game Night and 14x18 Absence, wherein I am suspicious (for various reasons) as to whether that is really the last we will see of Mary Winchester on the show.  Just as I am suspicious about Jack’s “Hallucifer” really just being a part of his own mind, because likewise, I highly doubt we have seen the last of Lucifer on the show:

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/183968888069/lucifer-rides-again-games-within-games

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/184140015899/14x18-absence-the-games-continue

So, my consideration of the re-fridging of Mary Winchester in the S14 SPN narrative is caveated by the fact that I have a sense that this re-fridging may be contingent rather than final. 

It is also caveated by the fact that Mary’s second (apparent) fridging was handled by Berens in a way which subverts it, because, as outlined above, Mary herself is absent from the mise-en-scène of her re-fridging. She has noped out of it! 

But, if my suspicions concerning another twist to this narrative are incorrect (and I hope they’re not) then, deft or not, Mary is still dead again to further our male protagonists’ narratives. 

I think we’re probably all familiar with the term, “fridging”....

 The term originates with Gail Simone, a comic book writer who created the website Women in Refrigerators in 1999 (twenty years ago now, wow). 

This is the link to the website (still live) and this is an excerpt of what she said:

“This is a list I made when it occurred to me that it's not that healthy to be a female character in comics. I'm curious to find out if this list seems somewhat disproportionate, and if so, what it means, really.

These are superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. I know I missed a bunch. Some have been revived, even improved -- although the question remains as to why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place.”

http://lby3.com/wir/ 

The trope, “fridging”, has now taken on an established life of its own in pop-culture criticism. 

Here is some more discussion of it in an article by Maria Norris “ Comics and Human Rights: A Change is Gonna Come. Women in the Superhero Genre” (2015).

“The trope Simone describes is now widely acknowledged, and the practice it describes has come to commonly known as ‘fridging’. The superhero genre typically depicts interactions and relationships between male and female characters that lack consequence, emotional resonance, permanence and accountability. Often, these fictional relationships stagnate, or end tragically. Too often, women in superhero comics become pawns in schemes meant to develop male characters or give them motivation to act.”

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/80285/1/Comics%20and%20Human%20Rights_%20A%20Change%20is%20Gonna%20Come.pdf

So, we can define fridging, from these sources as - the often gruesome or shocking death of a female character, for the primary purpose of driving male character motivation or development. 

Whilst the trope may have been defined in the 1990s, it is much older in literature. We could argue that Oedipus’ mother, Jocasta, was fridged, for instance, because who she is (Oedipus’ birth mother) and her suicide, are framed as being all about Oedipus and the impact on Oedipus. We could even argue that Shakespeare fridged Ophelia, whose tragic suicide is driven by Hamlet’s cruelty (and his murder of her father) and whose death, in the play, is primarily designed to impact her menfolk - Hamlet (her beloved) and her brother Laertes. 

Essentially, what we mean by the “fridging” of a female character is that in stories (usually by men) where men are the protagonists and the heroes (or tragic heroes or anti-heroes) sometimes (by no means always) women are written as primarily existing in relation to those men, so that their own deaths are not about themselves, but are used principally to explore the emotional landscapes of the hero-protagonists to whom they mattered and who live on after they are gone.  

Mary Winchester’s original fridging, her gruesome burning on the ceiling, which we the audience see in 1x01 Pilot, provides the origin story for Supernatural. 

Mary is fridged because she is dead the moment we meet her. 

We don’t have time to get to know who she is, or what her death means as part of her own journey. She is killed gruesomely and that death provides major character motivation and development for her husband John Winchester and for her sons Sam and Dean. She is, originally, defined primarily by her relationships to them; as a dead wife and a dead mother.

Mary Winchester is fridged by fire and her menfolk are thus “birthed” into narrative. Over her silenced and torched corpse, they become words and action.  Their narrative journey begins because hers ends. 

That fridging is, in the very same pilot episode, repeated for Sam’s girlfriend Jess:

Supernatural, it is thus swiftly established (by a double fridging at the outset) is, overtly, a story of heterosexual men (John and Sam being so established by their relationships to Mary and Jess) without familial women. Men who have been initiated into a world of violence and grief, powerfully driven by revenge, because their women-folk have been slaughtered. 

(Dean, however, has been queer-coded from the beginning, but that’s another story.)

In the established patriarchal order of the SPN universe (in which stories about men are central and stories about women are peripheral) heightened masculine emotion (which lies at the heart of Supernatural) is thus created and legitimised, by the death of women.

When Bobby becomes the Winchesters gruff substitute father-figure (with a gooey,  although masked, heart-of-gold centre) his own back-story repeats the pattern. We learn Bobby had to kill his own wife, Karen, whilst she was possessed by a demon (see 3x10 Dream a Little Dream of Me, 5x15 Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and 7x10 Death’s Door). In Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Karen is raised as a zombie by Death, and Bobby is forced to kill her all over again, thus, once more, reinforcing the death of familial women as the origin point for the centrality of masculine emotion in the narrative. Karen, in the SPN narrative, does not really exist as her own person, only as Bobby’s tragic wife, framed, rather tellingly, as a home-maker and help-meet in this shot from 5x15:

Familial women, associated with the core male characters in Supernatural are thus, initially, strongly framed as occupying the domestic space, the hearth-fire, whilst hunting and the open road belongs to their (bereaved) menfolk. 

For Mary Winchester, however, things become a little more complicated than that. Because, thanks to the time-travel abilities of the angels, she is “resurrected” in 4x03 In the Beginning and 5x13 The Song Remains the Same and her sons get to meet a living, younger, version of her. Mary becomes a person, raised as a hunter in her own right, rebellious, brave, independent, determined, a fighter. We see her having something of her own agency, although to a limited extent, in that she remains “trapped” by the angel breeding programme and the fate the angels have laid out for her - to marry John and to bear angel-vessel sons. She cannot therefore, escape her primary framing as a wife and mother, as in this shot from 5x13:

So, when Dabb inaugurated his era as showrunner, and his Ouroboros narrative structure, by taking us back to the start of Superantural and re-working the story by unnfridging Mary Winchester (11x23 Alpha and Omega):

(Image credit: http://timetraveldean.tumblr.com/post/144939142393 )

it was such a brilliant “un-zipping” of the original SPN narrative architecture. The Ur “woman in white” was back from the dead; Supernatural was going meta-narrative on its own ass in a big way. By having Mary brought back to life from Heaven by the feminine God-principle in the universe, Amara, who had previously been unjustly locked away by her brother, God, SPN was critiquing its own patriarchal origin story. 

Yay! 

Which is why Mary’s re-fridging in 14x18, IF the writers’ room is playing it straight (and, as above, I have my strong doubts about that) would be so disappointing.

Sure, on one level, from Dabb’s Ouroboros narrative perspective, it makes impactful and symmetrical sense.

Jack was always paralleled to Azazel, as well as to Dean and Sam, at his birth - see this meta of mine on 12x23 All Along the Watchtower:

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/160876601179/all-along-the-watchtower-12x23-and-12x22-and

A yellow-eyed supernatural being in a nursery, a baby, and a mother who dies. The ingredients are the same (1x01 and 12x23) - the recombination is different, as part of the narrative journey.  

Mary’s first death inaugurated Dean as substitute-parent to Sam. 

Jack’s mother, Kelly Kline’s death, inaugurated the Winchesters as substitute parents to Jack. And oh boy, did the narrative not treat Kelly Kline well. Kelly Kline was stealth-raped by Lucifer and died giving birth to Jack (her body mystically ripped apart by the birth). Kelly was fridged for Jack’s nascent emotional journey, because, once again, the show’s core depends on the absence of familial women. 

Kelly Kline dies giving birth to Jack (12x23)

Jack’s birth and Sam and Dean’s parental responsibility for him also coincided with Castiel’s death, thus (in subtext) the narrative also mirrored Dean’s grief at losing Cas to his father John Winchester’s grief at losing Mary.

In a patriarchal culture where male feeling is repressed, which is definitely the in-show world of Supernatural (mirroring aspects of IRL US culture) the stakes, apparently, “have to” be bloody, they “have to” be high, in order for the narrative to “permit” the levels of traumatic emotion which Dean and Sam (and now Jack) continually cycle through, whilst maintaining their ostensibly “tough” hunter hero status.

The bedrock of that “permission”, i.e. permission to be a show about male sentiment? With Kelly Kline’s death, it continued to be predicated on the violent death of familial women - at the very moment the Winchesters themselves became fathers.

Dabb used the same (tired) trope in 9x20 Bloodlines (Ennis lost his girfriend to a werewolf attack, and was thus deeply emotionally wounded and bent on revenge).

Female familial death is the narrative “excuse” for the homo-social world of SPN, and it also works to contain the homoerotic subtext of SPN. Women are ostensibly, only absent from these men’s lives because they keep traumatically losing them, not because they, in fact, prefer the company of other men.

Two grown brothers and a male-embodied angel who live together, have adopted a son together, and who spend all their time in states of incredible emotional angst?

Hollywood culture (and the mainstream audience it imagines it is speaking to) still (for the most part - although let’s acknowledge Tapert’s Spartacus for Starz, 2010-2013) cannot compute how to experience that kind of set-up as both “queer” AND “manly” (which is why Troy [2004] eviscerates the homo-romantic from Achilles/ Patroclus) so the violent death of familial women in Supernatural is used as an excuse for their absence

Mary’s ostensible death in 14x18 seems, once again, to re-affirm this patriarchal order, even though, in her time back on earth, from 11x23 to now, Mary has been written and portrayed as a flawed, real person; her apple-pie baking, perfect Mom, childhood mirage (Dean’s dream of her idealised memory) thoroughly deconstructed. And I have lived for that. 

To have her re-fridged, for her sons’  man-pain (i.e. for the narrative “permission” to cycle through grief and angst and growth again) after all that, just sits wrong with me.

And, despite the beauty of Beren’s structure, despite his respectful treatment of her, make no mistake, Mary is (if we read this as played straight) re-fridged, because her death, is not about her or her own journey, rather, narratively, it now deliberately leaves her sons in the place of their father. 

A yellow-eyed “demon” (their adopted Nephilim son Jack, whom they fear has lost his soul) has killed Mary Winchester, again. Will the Winchesters follow in the footsteps of John Winchester’s revenge quest, or will they find another way? 

I really hope Mary comes back from the AU world she’s been un-wittingly blasted to by Jack to kick some sense into her sons’ asses and, oh yeah, punch Lucifer in the face all over again:

Mary punching Lucifer in 13x22 Exodus. 

[vinylexams]

A very special fireside interview with XUXA SANTAMARIA

Check Insta for our thoughts on this landmark album from Oakland duo XUXA SANTAMARIA. Stay right where you are to read a really fun interview I scored with the band this week. They’ve just released Chancletas D’Oro on Ratskin Records out of Oakland and Michael blessed me with my very own copy. It was so good I knew I needed to tell you all about it and I wanted to pick their brains a little bit, too. Without further ado, please enjoy:

//INTERVIEW

You’re still breaking into indie world at large, but you’ve already got a huge following back in California and your home-base in Oakland. What has it been like to be featured in major outlets like The Fader?

SC: We are a funny project; we ebb and flow from being total hermits to having periods of relatively high visibility (relative to aforementioned hermit state). I wouldn’t say we have a huuuge following in CA but I do think that the ‘fandom’ we’ve developed here is really genuine because we don’t play shows out of an obligation to remain visible but instead do so because we feel super passionate about the work and the audience and I think people respond to that energy. I for one, and perhaps this is because of my background in performance, have a hard time performing the same stuff over and over without change which accounts for us being selective with our playing live. That’s also why videos are such an important part of what we’re about. The piece in The Fader was important to the launch of this album because it established some of the themes and, to an extent, the aesthetics of this album in a way that can be experienced outside of a live setting. None of this is to say we don’t like playing live, in fact we love it, we just like to make our sets pleasurable to ourselves and to our audience by constantly reworking it. We strike a weird balance for sure but we’ve made peace with it. If we ever ‘make it’ (lol) it’ll be on these terms.

Chancletas D'Oro is a pretty incredible record and while it reminds me of a few bands here or there, it’s got a really fresh and unique style that merges dance with all sorts of flavors. How would you describe your music to someone who is curious to listen?

MGK: Haha, we generally struggle to describe our music in a short, neat way (not because we make some kind of impossible-to-categorize music, but just because it’s the synthesis of a ton of different influences and it’s hard for US to perceive clearly). But with that caveat in mind - IDK, bilingual art-punk influenced dance/electronic music?

SC: Thank you for saying so, we’re pretty into it :) Like Matt says, we struggle to pin it down which I think is in part to what he says – our particular taste being all over the place, from Drexciya to The Kinks to Hector Lavoe- but I think this slipperiness has a relationship to our concept making and world building. As creative people we make and intake culture like sharks, always moving, never staying in one place too long. Maybe it’s because we’re both so severely ADHD (a boon in this instance tbh) that we don’t sit still in terms of what we consume and I think naturally that results in an output that is similarly traveling. Point is, the instance a set of words - ‘electronic’, ‘dance’, ‘punk’- feel right for the music is the same instance they are not sufficient. I propose something like: the sound of a rainforest on the edge of a city, breathy but bombastic, music made by machines to dance to, pleasurably, while also feeling some of the sensual pathos of late capitalism as seen from the bottom of the hill.

The internet tells me you’ve been making music as Xuxa Santamaria for a decade now. What has the evolution and development of your songwriting been like over those ten years?

MGK: Well, when we first started out as a band we were so new to making electronic music (Sofia’s background was in the art world and mine was in more guitar-based ‘indie rock’ I guess - lots of smoking weed and making 4 track tapes haha), so we legit forgot to put bass parts on like half the songs on our first album LOL. We’ve learned a lot since then! But in seriousness, we’ve definitely gotten better at bouncing ideas back and forth, at putting in a ton of different parts and then pulling stuff back, and the process is really dynamic and entertaining for both of us.

SC: This project started out somewhat unusually: I was in graduate school and beginning what would become a performance practice. I had hit a creative roadblock working with photography - the medium I was in school to develop- and after reading Frank Kogan’s Real Punks Don’t Wear Black felt this urge to make music as a document of experience following Kogan’s excellent essay on how punk and disco served as spatial receptacles for a wealth of experiences not present in the mainstream of the time. I extrapolated from this notion the idea that popular dance genres like Salsa, early Hip Hop, and Latin Freestyle among many others, had served a similar purpose for protagonists of a myriad Caribbean diasporas. These genres in turn served as sonic spaces to record, even if indirectly, the lived experiences of the coming and going from one’s native island to the mainland US wherein new colonial identities are placed upon you. From this I decided to create an alter ego (ChuCha Santamaria, where our band name originally stems from) to narrate a fantastical version of the history of Puerto Rico post 1492 via dance music. We had absolutely no idea what we were doing but I look back on that album (ChuCha Santamaria y Usted - on vinyl from Young Cubs Records) fondly. It’s rough and strange and we’ve come so far from that sound but it’s a key part of our trajectory. Though my songwriting has evolved to move beyond the subjective scope of this first album - I want to be more inclusive of other marginalized spaces- , it was key that we cut our teeth making it. We are proud to be in the grand tradition of making an album with limited resources and no experience :P

We’re a big community of vinyl enthusiasts and record collectors so first and foremost, thanks for making this available on vinyl. What does the vinyl medium mean to you as individuals and/or as a band?

MGK: I think for us, it’s the combination of the following: A. The experience of listening in a more considered way, a side at a time. B. Tons of real estate for graphics and design and details. C. The sound, duh!

SC: In addition to Matt’s list, I would just say that I approach making an album that will exist in record form as though we were honing a talisman. Its objecthood is very important. It contains a lot of possibility and energy meant to zap you the moment you see it/ hold it. I imagine the encounter with it as having a sequence: first, the graphics - given ample space unlike any other musical medium/substrate- begin to tell a story, vaguely at first. Then, the experience of the music being segmented into Side A and Side B dictate a use of time that is impervious to - at the risk of sounding like an oldie - our contemporary habit of hitting ‘shuffle’ or ‘skip’. Sequencing is thus super important to us (this album has very distinct dynamics at play between sides a/b ). We rarely work outside of a concept so while I take no issue with the current mode of music dissemination, that of prioritizing singles, it doesn’t really work for how we write music.

MGK: We definitely both remain in love with the ‘album as art object/cohesive work’ ideal, so I would say definitely - we care a lot about track sequencing, always think in terms of “Side A/Side B” (each one should be a distinct experience), and details like album art/inserts/LP labels etc matter a lot to us.

What records or albums were most important to you growing up? Which ones do you feel influenced your music the most?

SC: I know they’re canceled cus of that one guy but I listened to Ace of Base’s The Sign a lot as a kid and I think that sorta stuff has a way of sticking with you. I always point to the slippery role language plays in them being a Swedish band singing in English being consumed by a not-yet-English speaking Sofía in Puerto Rico in the mid 90s. Other influences from childhood include Garbage, Spice Girls, Brandy + Monica’s The Boy is Mine, Aaliyah, Gloria Trevi, Olga Tañon etc etc. In terms of who influences me now, that’s a moving target but I’d say for this album I thought a lot about the sound and style of Kate Bush, Technotronic, Black Box, Steely Dan, ‘Ray of Light’-era Madonna plus a million things I’m forgetting.

MGK: Idk, probably a mix of 70-80s art rock/punk/postpunk (Stooges, Roxy Music, John Cale, Eno, Kate Bush, Talking Heads, Wire, Buzzcocks, etc etc), disco/post-disco R&B and dance music (Prince, George Clinton, Chic, Kid Creole), 90s pop + R&B + hip hop (Missy & Timbaland, Outkast/Dungeon Family production-wise are obviously awe-inspiring, So So Def comps, Jock Jams comps, Garbage & Hole & Massive Attack & so on), and unloved pop trash of all eras and styles.

Do you have any “white whale” records that you’ve yet to find?

MGK: Ha - the truth is that we’re both much more of a “what weird shit that we’ve never heard of can we find in the bargain bin” type of record buyer than “I have a custom list of $50 plus records on my discogs account that I lust over”.

SC: Not really, I’m wary of collectorship. That sort of ownership might have an appeal in the hunt, once you have it do you really use it, enjoy it? Funnily, I have a massive collection of salsa records that has entries a lot of music nerds would cry over (though they’re far from good condition, the spines were destroyed by my Abuela’s cat, Misita lol, but some are first pressings in small runs). For me its value however, comes from its link to family, as documents from another time and as an amazing capsule of some of the best music out of the Caribbean. I’m glad I am their guardian (a lot of this stuff is hard to find elsewhere, even digitally) but I live with those records, they’re not hidden away in archival sleeves, in fact, I use some of that music in my other work. Other than that, the records I covet are either those of friends or copies of albums that hold significance but which are likely readily available, Kate Bush’s The Dreaming or Love’s Forever Changes, or The Byrds Sweetheart of The Rodeo as random examples

Finally, is there a piece of interesting band trivia you’ve never shared in another interview?

SC: haha, not really? Maybe that we just had a baby together?

//

Congrats on your new baby, and also for this wonderful new album. It was a pleasure chatting with you and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for you and your music!

[lhs3020b]

Some notes on recent polling developments (long, fairly depressing)...

The YouGov MRP figures came out last night. This is notable because in 2017, the multilevel-regression approach was the sole one that spotted the possibility of a hung parliament. We all ridiculed it at the time - I'll confess that I side-eyed it too. And then - well, we all know what happened to Theresa May, don't we? So, the MRP thing deserves to be taken seriously. And unfortunately, this year, it's looking grim for us. Briefly, the MRP is forecasting a Tory majority. They're also predicting that all opposition parties (bar the SNP, who only stand in Scotland) will lose seats. Labour in particular look in the danger-zone for a collapse, and contrary to their bullish predictions, the Liberal Democrats are also forecast to lose seats. (Note that this is with respect to their current strength - technically, the MRP result gives them a gain of 2 seats on where they were on the 9th of June. They currently have 19, due to defections from various other parties.)

I'll admit that I don't want to believe the MRP results, but this has never been a data-denialist blog, and I don't intend to start on that road today.

One caveat is that the reporting on the MRP results has ben remarkably-bad. The actual YouGov page is here: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/yougov-mrp-conservatives-359-labour-211-snp-43-ld- Buried a long way down the page, they say this: "Taking into account the margins of error, our model puts the number of Conservative seats at between 328 and 385, meaning that while we can be confident that the Conservatives would currently get a majority, it could range from a modest one to a landslide." As far as I can tell, the "majority of 68" figure is derived by treating 317 as a working majority and assuming that the Tory vote lands right at the upper end of their confidence-interval. This is poor statistical practice for a variety of reasons. It's also a bit questionable in terms of parliamentary arithmetic - the "working majority" thing depends on how many Sinn Fein MPs Northern Ireland elects (they don't take their seats, so count toward neither Government nor Opposition tallies). And we won't necessarily know how many that is until, well, December the 13th.

(Also, a further health-warning is that apparently the model isn't able to fully-represent some local phenomena, such as independent candidates, and the effect of the Brexit Party's partial stand-down is also apparently somewhat-unclear. The last caveat is that the analysis assumes data that has already been collected - that is, if public opinion changes between now and polling day, then obviously existing projections could become obsolete. This will still be a possible source of error even if the MRP sample is statistically-unbiased and the underlying theory/analysis is all sound.)

However, even the best-case scenario for us gives the Tories 328 seats, which is both a working and a (very small) absolute majority.

Obviously, this is not a good situation for us.

While not quite a landslide, nonetheless an inflated Tory majority will be devastating for this country. The stuff they'll do will be awful. Brexit will happen. There'll be a bus crash late next year, when the transition period ends. (No, they will have no plan for this - they won't feel they need one, as they'll be secure in power until 2024.) There'll be a Windrush for resident EU citizens. They'll trash the economy. They'll probably crash the NHS - the only question there is whether they do it through accidental negligence or through deliberate malice (say, an ideologically-driven trade "deal" that gives President Trump everything he wants on a silver platter). Nothing will be done about the country’s escalating housing crisis. They'll double down on all the maddest of the madcap "law-n-order" stuff - expect an explosion in jailable offences, accompanied by lengthy minimum-sentence tariffs and further restrictions on legal aid. They'll also resuscitate their plans to manipulate the parliamentary boundaries, and change electoral laws in their favour. The media? Expect no surprises from them. The newspapers are largely already Conservative Pravdas. The BBC - nervous about its precious Royal Charter - seems to be in the process of declaring itself for the Tories too.

Bluntly, if the Tories get re-elected this year, they'll gerrymander things so you have little chance of getting rid of them in 2024.

Perhaps this is the key thing to understand about Boris Johnson: really, he's less Britain's Trump, and more Britain's Victor Orban. He'll leave just enough vestigial democracy intact to make what he's doing plausibly-deniable, but he'll busily rearrange the furniture to favour himself and his friends. If he gets re-elected this December, you can expect to be seeing his face into the 2030s. The only reason I put the cut-off as early as that is that I expect the coming climate-crisis will wreak havoc with the Tories' internal coalition. (Oh you've built all your luxury millionaire mansions by the seaside? How nice for you, especially now that the sea is literally in your parlour. Umm, whoops.)

What can be done? Well, the first thing is to reiterate some discussions I've seen on Twitter recently. The TL;DR of them is that hope doesn't have to be something you feel - it can be something you do. (And that's just as well, because I'll admit that 2019 has destroyed what traces of social optimism I was clinging to. I'm dreading the bad end that's coming to us next month, but I also fully-expect it.)

So, my advice remains as it has been: on December the 12th, turn up, and vote for whoever you judge most likely to beat the Tory.

Remember, the MRP approach is fallible. "Mortal, finite, temporary" is absolutely in play here; no model is any better than the data that went into it. Or, indeed, the date when it was calculated. And at the end of the day, the only poll that genuinely-matters is the one on December the 12th, and that hasn't actually happened yet. (Though admittedly, given the storm-surge of pre-emptive grief that's flooding Twitter today, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.)

As for the horrible mess that are our opposition parties, I'll repeat what I said in 2017: it's OK to vote for a least-worst option. You're not perjuring yourself or committing any moral sin, rather you're trying to be a grown-up. Part of the package of being an adult is making the best of bad situations.

It absolutely does suck - believe me, this is one of the most soul-destroying election campaigns I've ever seen. Every single party has clown-show'd itself. All of them have done things that are ridiculous, inept or otherwise ghastly. (Well, maybe not the Greens - I haven't heard of any specific scandals surrounding them - but their cardinal sin is that they have no plausible prospect of winning the election.) But even then, the barrel we're going to have to stare down is going and voting for them anyway.

(As a related case-in-point, one factor that seems to have helped the Tories win their unexpected 2015 majority was that a contingent of left-wing voters simply stayed at home on the day. While it's hard to find concrete statistics on, nonetheless anecdotally, this absolutely was a thing. A lot of people were demotivated by Labour's confused and incoherent campaign, left cold by all the bothering about fiscal rules, and alienated by things like the mug with "controls on immigration" on it. All of those are 100% valid criticisms. Except, except, except ... it helped an even worse party back into office. The theory of "if the choices are bad, sit it out" has been tested to destruction. It turns out that looking the other way is also a choice, and not necessarily the best one.)

I would add that there are also real questions to be asked about the utter vacuum of political strategy of people nominally on the anti-Tory side - it seems the Opposition spent the summer fixated on the minutiae of House procedures, while never stopping to ask why they were on this battlefield to begin with. Meanwhile the Tories largely-ignored Commons process, and instead sent a political appeal straight to Leave voters. It lost them a lot of individual legislative battles (and I'm not minimising their defeats - they were important!), but it put them in a good strategic place to win an election. And in the long run, it turns out that was what mattered.

It's hard not to feel bitter while thinking about the events of spring and summer. Perhaps if Jo Swinson had been less blinkered about Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps if Labour could have had the minimum sense to call a Vote of No Confidence when BoJo was vulnerable, perhaps if the collective Opposition had been able to recognise the huge wave of unharnessed political energy washing through the country during the petition back in March, perhaps if Change UK had managed to be something other than an unfunny joke, maybe if Corbyn had taken the anti-semitism problem seriously in 2018 and had actually done something instead of sitting on his hands and letting it metastasize to the point where it derailed his election campaign ... but, no. That's for some other, better timeline, not the one we live in. We seem to live in the world that resolutely and firmly chooses the wrong fork in every road. I don't know whether our timeline quite qualifies as the Bad Place, but it's certainly a place full of bad choices.

In a weird sort of way, though, this brings us back to the key theme. Whatever you might think of what's happening in this election - and goodness knows I'm as appalled as anyone else - nonetheless, your vote matters. Use it. As we're seeing, this is the ultimate limitation on their power, and the one chance we have of stopping them.

So once more, let me reiterate: turn up. Vote against the Tory. Do it as a hopeful action, even if you don't feel hopeful. If nothing else, do it so that when the bad things happen, at least you can say you tried to stop it. I wish I had something less bleak to offer here, but this is where we are.

[redorblue]

White Chrysanthemum, by Mary Lynn Bracht

I saw a few posts going around recently about how books and movies and shows who are all about suffering and pain and general awfulness only get it half right - how there should be light somewhere in the story so that it doesn’t drift off into “everything sucks anyway, so why bother” territories - and I think I just found the perfect example of how it’s supposed to work. It’s this book. Don’t get me wrong, it gets very dark (and if rape, child abuse, violence against women, animal cruelty, dead children and related matters trigger you, please be careful with this book). But as surprising as that sounds after this caveat, it’s an amazing book that tells an important story and doesn’t end nearly as grim as it would seem for the most part of the book.

Plus, on a concretely unrelated matter, there’s a very sweet f/f relationship that is very loving and mature and supportive, but also refreshingly no big deal - not even in the eyes of one of the women’s 80-year-old mother who just found out that her fifty-something daughter is a lesbian. So even if the ending is still too bittersweet for you to count as a proper ray of light in this dark story, there’s that.

(major spoilers, but believe me, it’s better that way)

There are two separate storylines: One set in 2011, on the day of the 1000th Wednesday demonstration to demand justice for the so-called comfort women that were taken by Japan to be sex slaves for their soldiers in WWII; and another in 1943 that tells the story of one such comfort woman (or rather girl, she’s 16 at the time). The 1943 storyline takes up the bigger part of the book. It starts with the day when Hana, who is part of a centuries-old tradition of women divers on the Korean island of Jeju, lets herself be abducted by a Japanese soldier in order to save her younger sister from the same fate. She’s transported to Manchuria and kept prisoner at a brothel alongside a few other women. Over time, the soldier who abducted her develops an obsession with her and ultimately helps her break out of the brothel - but not to set her free, but to have her all to himself. He deserts and leaves her with a Mongolian family that he’s acquainted with in order to set up their new lives. At first, Hana is immensely scared of the male members of the family, but over time, their unassuming kindness allows her to lower her walls somewhat. It’s also them who ultimately save her from the obsessed soldier and the Soviet army who catches them both, at great cost to themselves, and ultimately take her in permanently. The 2011 storyline is told from the perspective of Hana’s sister Emi who goes looking for traces of her at the Wednesday demonstrations while suffering flashbacks to her own life as a forcibly married orphan in civil war Korea. She doesn’t find her personally, but the comfort women memorial that is unveiled that day bears her sister’s face, which is close enough. She dies at the end of the book (she’s old at that point, as you might guess), but she does so peacefully because she has found a connection to her long-lost sister and she finally opened up to her children about her life before their arrival.

So yeah, it’s definitely heavy stuff. I’m an emotional iceberg, and even I was close to tears a few times, and itchy to beat the soldier to death a few times more (seriously, when Hana planned to cut his throat? I crumpled my bookmark into a little ball because I needed to grip something and I didn‘t have a knife at hand - fortunately). Part of the emotional punch is due to the writing. It’s mostly pretty sober and descriptive, which I‘m grateful for because it’s the only thing that makes the rape scenes at all bearable, but I think it works all the better because of that. It doesn’t flood you with details and excruciating interior monologues, but leaves the story space to breathe. Some of the scenes in this book are horrifying enough as is, and I’ve found that excessive detail sometimes even cheapens things after a while - it has a desensitizing effect, which is not what you want if you tell a story such as this, about something so terrible that has happened to so many women. Instead, it finds a good balance between descriptions and blank spaces that (in my opinion) manages to do the topic justice.

Now I’ve also lingered with the dark stuff for so long, but my point is, that’s not how the book ends. From a realist perspective, it would make perfect sense if Hana had died alone somewhere along the road and Emi had taken her trauma to her grave, without ever talking about it and without any clue of what happened to her sister. Some pseudo sophisticated critics might even claim that it should have ended that way because *male voice* life’s not a picnic, darling, that’s just how the world works!!  And that might be true for many cases, but... This is fiction, or a fictionalized account of a real-life event that has made more than enough people suffer already, so why not let it end on a lighter note that doesn’t in any way devalue what came before? Humans tell stories because they teach us lessons, they inspire us and ultimately give us hope. That’s what they’re for - plus entertainment value, but anyone who finds stories where everyone suffers and then dies a gruesome death entertaining should think long and hard about why that’s the case. So even if an ending like that might be unrealistic, statistically speaking, I’m still glad that the author chose to go that way. Because that’s what turns this story into an inspirational one, and because grimdark nihilism is just plain uncreative.

[krinsbez]

Original Urban Fantasy Concept: Watching the Watchers, an Introduction

So, I’ve wanted to do this for awhile, and at long last, I have permission from my collaborator to post one of my favorite worldbuilding projects on Tumblr for your perusal.

But first, an explanation of the project. It began in 2011, when I finally got around to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. Having plunged into a new fandom, I of course wanted to talk about it, and began posting threads about it on the Spacebattles Forums. In one thread, we began discussing the Watcher’s Council, and specifically trying to come up with a Watsonian reason for their being blithering incompetents.

Poster Carandol proposed the following:

The structure of the current council makes reasonable sense for something established in the 1700s, with smaller numbers than it now has. Back then, travel times where much longer - by the time the council learnt the new slayer had been called in India, and sent a team to help her, a year or more might have passed, and the new slayer be dead. Under those circumstances, they'd have to rely on the forces on the spot, but they were too few to station significant forces near every potential slayer. It probably wasn't the optimal organisation, even for that time, but human organisations rarely are.   Suppose then, the council was effectively founded a generation or two before this time, 1650-1670. As a young and vigorous organisation, it was flexible, smoothly adapting as needs changed, and because of this it prospered, establishing world-wide dominance on the back of the European colonial expansion. As it grew in size and power, the people at the centre predictably became remote from the front line. Sub-committees proliferated, ad hoc improvisations ossified into unquestionable traditions, and the council began to fall behind the times. They did not, for example, contemplate allocating greater resources to the potential slayers because it was against all precedent; never mind that those who set the precedents had filled the minutes of their meetings with endless laments that they lacked the money and manpower to give each potential slayer the team a slayer ought to have. The council coasted on like this for a couple of centuries, strong enough on the surface, but rotting away within, until by 1950-1970 it was an hollow facade, going through the motions, which is the state in which we saw it. In the normal course of history, without the mass calling of slayers, someone (possibly the Scoobies, possibly a rebel faction of young watchers, possibly a group completely new) would eventually found a new council, under a different name, determined to give slayers the support they needed. They'd spurn all the ridiculous  traditions of their predecessors, and set up an organisation fit for the early 21st century, just as the early watchers had done three centuries before. In time, the new council would grow just as ossified as the old watchers, sticking to 21st century methods even in the 24th century, eventually being replaced in its turn, in an age old cycle. Of course, galloping bureaucracy isn't the only reason a watcher's council might collapse, just the case for the one we saw. Internal strife, and major  external crisis can also bring them down. The English watcher's council was probably the first to be world wide in scope.  Before that, there would have  been a Europe-based council, which fell apart during the reformation, one in India, likely absorbed during the English expansion, and one in China, which might have collapsed with the Chinese Empire, around 1900.  In Europe, going further back, the black death and the fall of the western Roman Empire are both plausible points to put the collapse of a watcher's council. However, while individual councils rise and fall, seldom lasting more than a few centuries, they don't start from scratch. One of the first things any new expanding  council does is get hold of all the occult lore they can lay their hands on, including the archives kept by their predecessors. Some information will be lost each time, but enough will be preserved that the modern council can have patchy records from Rome at its peak, and spells written in Babylon 2000 years earlier. Once they become tradition-bound, they start exaggerating the extent of this continuity. This pattern implies there will be times with no functioning council, which are not good times to be a slayer. If the only source of advice she has on her enemies is cryptic slayer dreams, she's not likely to live long. The best time to be a slayer is when the council is established enough to give her real support, but young enough to still be in touch with the times, its members all committed to the cause, not their own self-aggrandizement.

Followed by...

Expanding on what I said above, there may have been times when reform factions within a watcher council won the day, sweeping away some of the traditions and modernising some of the practices, enough to keep it viable for another century or two. At other times, watchers may have resurrected customs from predecessor councils, simply because they were old, but with only old texts to go on, have got them badly wrong. Such might be the case with the crucimentum, for instance; some idiots decided to revive what they thought was the practice of their medieval forbears, not realising that the account was incomplete.

Another thing, any successful watcher council would need strong internal security. They collect information about demons and apocalypses, If any watcher goes bad, that's enough to make them dangerous, as Ms Post demonstrated. However, the kind of iron discipline needed to detect that, especially with people on the front lines, out of sight of headquarters, is very easily turned on other 'heretic' factions, such as anyone who wants to modernise the organisation. I'd say one reason the current council could coast for two centuries was that its internal discipline remained strong, suppressing internal conflicts and corruption. That discipline didn't start to crumble until Giles's generation or a little before.

This prompted a wave of responses in the following vein:

The problem is that, for me at least, you've just made the Watchers' Council a hell of a lot more interesting than the Slayer. Now I want a series entirely about the Watchers. You could say I want to... watch the watchers.

This inspired me to begin a collaborative project to build an original Urban Fantasy story in an original setting inspired by this concept. The thread was quite successful, with one notable caveat; while we (by which I mean mostly me and Carandol, though other people also contributed) did quite a bit of plotting, no one ever got around to actually writing the story, me because I lack the talent/patience/time/confidence to write such a thing, and Carandol because he was busy with other stuff. Instead, it became about worldbuilding; more specifically, me tossing ideas or questions at Carandol and Carandol making them awesome.

Eventually we got a little bored and agreed to let the project lie. But I’m still very pleased and proud of it. So, I’m gonna try to post something from it every day. I cannot promise that this will be in any coherent order, because there’s a lot of stuff and I’m lazy, but hopefully it will be coherent enough for folks to enjoy.

[amusewithaview]

How would you rank the Dragon Age Inquisition companions and council in order of hugging ability?

This is the single best question ever and I love you for asking it of me. Gonna list them off from worst to best with some caveats. Also please note most of them are EXCELLENT huggers and also that if you’re romancing them ALL BETS ARE OFF and the hugging levels up immeasurably.

Sera - you never know what she’s gonna have in her pockets and there’s always a chance she might stick something to your back or dump something over your head. Plus there’s the creeping sense of paranoia: if she initiated the hug then is it an apology for something you haven’t yet uncovered? Is it to cover for some prank she’s in the process of setting up? Sera’s hugs are a little too tight, a little too long, and you always wonder if you’ve been had.

Cole - he tries, he tries SO HARD, but he’s still getting used to having a physical presence and judging pressure, length, squeeze, is all so NEW to him. By Trespasser he will have Leveled Up his hugging ability (especially if you made him more human) but for the majority of DA:I he’s just...the most pathetic hugger. Like when someone really doesn’t know how to shake hands, but it’s his whole body.

Vivienne - unless you catch her in her boudoir (which brings up a whole host of other dangers), you’d really just better not. The problem with her hugs is that all her clothing is pointy. There’s embroidery and metal accents, because even when she’s not about to cut a bitch she’s ALWAYS in armor. Walking arm-in-arm whilst sharing salacious gossip is her preference, and you’d be wise to accept.

Cassandra - similar issues to Vivienne, but she’s more likely to take off her armor if you ask (and give a good reason). She makes up for her lack of hugs with a lot of backslaps and friendly jostling. She’s more of a side-hugger, when the situation calls for it.

The Iron Bull - it’s not that he’s bad at it, per se, it’s just. He’s always shirtless and he has a preference for picking people up and really giving it to them and then you’ve got a face full of pillowy man bosoms and your only real choices are suffocate or motorboat. Luckily for you, he will usually put you down somewhere soft to recover if you pick the former, and he’s just gonna laugh if you pick the latter.

Solas - do you have any idea how long it’s been since he hugged someone? Millennia. If you can get him to participate, be prepared to stick it out for some time, he’s got centuries worth of hugging to make up for before that tank is refilled, so to speak. Not a bad hugger, but he’s all lean muscle and wiry intensity. Have pillows handy and maybe try to transition him to a cuddle after the first hour or so.

Blackwall - large, always wears soft-looking clothing, smells of horse and wood shavings, really the only downside here is that he doesn’t feel worthy of hugs so it’ll take some time to coax him to participate. He’s a champion hugger, but another who’s out of practice. More likely to appeal to country folk than city kids (on account of the smell).

Cullen - THE RUFF THING! His hugs are a little softer than Blackwall’s, and a trifle more awkward than Dorian or Varric’s, especially at first. Will sway you from side to side in a soothing manner. Will hum some half-remembered ditty from his childhood. Will ask if you’re feeling better afterwards and if the answer is “no,” will just start all over again.

Dorian - always up for a quick snuggle, very warm, smells faintly musty on account of the books and wine. May try to tempt you into a debate, will certainly play with your hair.

Varric - sole detractor is the height, but he will literally always be up for a hug. If you can navigate it (might take practice) his hugs have the side benefit of almost always coming with a distracting anecdote or quip from his adventures with Hawke. May end up slightly ink stained if you have interrupted him writing. He will likely try to feed you or coax you into getting a drink and sharing some stories of your own.

Leliana - trained in giving hugs, and it shows. Very affirming, very gentle, will certainly pet your hair and will almost definitely sing or hum something soothing. You know she has weapons on her but just like you can’t see them, you also can’t feel them. Unless you’ve done something to piss her off or end the world, this may just be the safest you’ve felt in years. Only downside is she’s often busy, but her hugs are worth waiting for.

Josephine - also trained in giving hugs, infinitely softer and more welcoming though because she’s trained in that. May end in a slumber party (in which case Leliana, Cassandra, and Vivienne are also likely to show up), will certainly at the least end in a small sustaining snack. Will share funny stories about diplomats, will probably brush your hair and fix your clothes, will also give you a handlerchief “just in case.”

[bixgirl1]

I think I saw you say somewhere that have a squick of self harming in fan fictions and that's what you don't like right? Do you have other ones and what do you like ?

Hi nonnie!  Yep, a squick is something that, when reading, a person tends to avoid. It can be an outright trigger or simply something that makes the reader crinkle their nose and shake their head before closing out. It’s a fairly universal term in fandom that helps to explain why you won’t/can’t/don’t like reading something, and the beauty of it is that, once the word is used, no further explanation is (or should be) required — because sometimes there is no further explanation, you know? Sometimes you just… don’t like something. 

As for my personal squicks/likes/and dislikes, that requires a longer answer, so I’m going to put it under a cut.

The short answer is yes and no. Self-harm can be a squick of mine — but it very much depends on how it’s handled, and its context. It’s something I’ll usually avoid reading if I see it in the tags and am not familiar enough with the author to feel safe reading it, which is something I take into account. If I see a story posted by an author that I’ve liked but have never read anything from them approaching that tag, I’ll probably wait to see if they’ll post a fic with similar but more gentle tags/content to see if their style/thought processes on the subject line up with my own. Other writers, whose work I’ve consumed to the point where I feel comfortable enough with their headspace, I’ll dive right in.

That being said, honestly, these days I have very few hardline squicks —  scat-play and/or vomit-play are two, and suicide and self-harm edge very close as well (with the caveat from above). When I was less familiar with fandom, more untried, I had — or thought I had — a lot. lol. That can happen, I think; it can be really terrifying to edge out of your comfort zone. But then you read absolutely every long, plotty drarry a writer offers, every short, hot bit of smut, and there are these other ones lingering with tags like incest or dub/non-con or major character death or infidelity, and think “hmmm.” All of those are still listed in my ‘know the author first’ file, but I’ve learned I can love some stories with those tags. But that’s me. Not everyone will want to venture out of their comfort zones, and that’s fine. Great, even! Fanfic allows us a lot of wonderful things, and one of those can be escapism. So never let anyone make you feel bad about sticking to the things you like; this is all just relevant to my personal fic tastes.

And regarding those, in answer to your other question — I know I’ve got a list somewhere, lj or dw maybe, with a pretty full list of my likes and dislikes and squicks, but I haven’t updated it in a long time, so:

(I’m applying these to Harry/Draco, but I’ll read a bunch of other pairings too. Harry/Teddy, Draco/Albus, some Jeddy and Scorbus, Harry/Sirius, a bit of Wolfstar, James Sirius/Albus Severus, Romione, and Pansmione are probably my faves)

Squicks and/or squick-ish content (ie, stuff my friends would never put in a gift fic for me. lol) I’ll only read if I know the writer very well and trust them (asterisks next to the ones I’m more rigid about):

-Suicide**

-Self-harm (especially cutting)**

-Vomit/scat play***

-Major character death

-Unhappily ambiguous endings

-Character bashing*** (to be fair, if a writer does this, I don’t usually like a lot of their stuff)

-Endings (happy or unhappy) where my preferred couple doesn’t end up together**

That’s it. And I make exceptions.

General fic dislikes that I’ll “psh” if I’ve read a couple of the writers things and like them, but that still have the ability to turn me off of a story real quick:

-Non-con

-Massive deviations from canon characterization. (Meaning: Draco is incredibly flamboyant and there’s no explanation or hints as to why/how he’d become so; Harry hates Ron; Ron is stupid; Hermione is a perky prop, etc. I’m perfectly fine reading most things if I understand why they’re that way.)

-Infidelity

-Also, when mental health issues are addressed (I tend to write about them a lot), I dislike grandstanding about them as much as I dislike them being glossed over, if that makes any sense. If I want to read detailed explanations about mental illness, I’ve got about two dozen textbooks I can refer to; alternately, if trauma is brought up in the fic, there needs to be (for me), some exploration of it.

-Permanent disability fics

-Fisting

-Muggle AU’s

-Mpreg — very rarely (usually just because I’m not often in the mood for it)

-Schmoopy fluff. (I don’t mind the sweet, but I don’t want to get cavities)

-Bloodplay

Now, for the fun ones!

Fic likes:

-Tropes. I’m a trope whore, I admit it. I love so many of them they should probably get a subcatagory of my favorites. lol.

-Forced Proximity

-Bed-Sharing

-Eighth Year

-Auror Partners

-Powerful!Harry

-Controlled!Draco (magically, for both; I like ‘em skilled as hell)

-Wandlore

-Master of Death lore

-Aristocratic Draco (or bad boy Draco, or fucked up Draco…I like Draco a lot, okay?)

-Flirting

-UST

-Pining

-Banter and snark

-Friends to lovers

-Lovers to friends to more

-Dub-con where they both enjoy it

-Sex Pollen

-Antagonism

-Veela/Creature Fic

-Smart Harry (let’s give the boy some credit, can we???)

-Harry, Ron, and Hermione staying close

-Rescuing/being protective (I don’t care who rescues and who does the rescuing, though I tend to think of Harry as the rescuer more often than not. But I like when there’s an exchange.)

-Life debts

-Legilimency

-Accidental (or, hell, intentional) bonding

-Humor

-Angst with a happy ending

-Harry’s and Draco’s hair/eyes being described as they are in the books

-The first time they call each other by their first names being significant

-Fics that focus as much (or more) on characterization and relationship development as they do on outside plot

And a bunch more of these too.

Sex and sexual kinks:

-Draco. God yes. Put him in robes or a sharp suit or torn jeans and mmmmmmsfdhdfhlgjhuihghlhd. I like Draco being noticed. (*whispers* Objectified, even, especially if Harry doesn’t realize he’s doing it.)

-Vice versa Harry.

-Rimming

-Spanking

-Rentboys

-Sexual power plays

-One of them being experienced, the other not so experienced.

-Both of them being hella experienced

-Topping from the bottom (and also the top).

-Bottoming from the top (and also the bottom lol)

-Dirty talk

-Trust games (blindfolds, tying someone up)

-Fingering

-Post-sex fingering

-Flaccid cocks getting played with; proprietary touches.

-First times

-Dom/sub dynamics (with clear boundaries and safewords)

-Gentle sex

-Extended foreplay

-Semi-public sex

-Magical sex objects

-Cleaning spells (thank fuck for the magical world, amiright?)

-Messy blowjobs

-Kissing. Lots of kissing.

-Angry sex that turns into more

-Frantic sex

-Partially-clothed sex

-Frotting/grinding

-Teasing

-I might have a bit of a foot kink? lol

-Confidence

-Timidity/nerves

-Coming untouched

-Handjobs

-Shower/bath

Aaannnd most other sexual kinks you don’t see listed under my squicks or dislikes.

So there you go. A non-comprehensive guide to what I like and look for in a fic. Like I said, I’m not too picky about my dislikes these days (if I was, I wouldn’t be reading puppy play or consensual non-con or double penetration, and there are fics with those contents that have blown me the fuck away), but it’s really a personal thing. Kink tomato, and Fic Tomato (which idk if the latter is a thing, but I hope everyone gets what I mean. lol).

Thanks so much for the ask, nonnie!  It was a bit of a treat to stop and really consider how my fic likes and dislikes have changed over the last couple of years. Highly recommend you making your own list — and never letting anyone make you feel bad about it! ;D

[therumbellehappyendingaward-blog]

Summary: Ten-year-old Gideon Gold is not happy: the kids at school think Rumple and Belle aren’t his real parents, and Robin Mills is the ringleader. When the Golds set out to prove the rumors are wrong, their adventures take a surprising twist. Or do they?

Chapter 1 writer: @jackabelle73

PROMPT: BASTARD

AO3: HERE

The sound of the front door slamming reverberated through the house, followed by rapid footsteps on the staircase. Another door slammed upstairs.

Rumplestiltskin emerged from his study and frowned up the steps, wondering what had upset Gideon. At ten, he was old enough to walk himself home from school each day, and normally would enter the house quietly, hang up his coat, and seek out whichever parent was home that afternoon to beg for an afterschool treat.

Rumple walked upstairs and knocked on his son’s closed door.

“Gideon? Everything all right?”

“Fine!” came the response, in a tone of voice that said he was anything but fine.

“I thought we’d bake some cookies this afternoon, if you want,” Rumple offered.

There was a pause, long enough for him to think the bribe had worked, till Gideon responded.

“No, thank you.”

Whatever was bothering Gideon, it must be significant for him to refuse cookies. Rumple turned the doorknob and found to his consternation that it was locked.

“Gideon, open this door right now. You’re not in trouble yet, but you will be if I have to use magic to open the door.”

There was a shuffling sound before the lock clicked. When Rumple tried the door again, it opened to reveal Gideon, the considerable length of him stretched diagonally across his bed, face buried in a pillow and turned away from the door. Rumple sighed and perched on the edge of the bed, patting his son’s jeans-clad calf.

“What’s got you upset? Maybe I can help.”

There was a long pause, broken by a sniffle, which only worried Rumple more. Gideon was a happy and carefree child for the most part, which was a relief to his parents. They’d feared that the dark and brooding personality of his grown self would carry over to his second childhood, but the uninhibited giggles of their infant son had soon set them at ease. As Gideon grew, he wanted for nothing that magic or money could obtain, and as an only child, was equally rich in love and attention from his doting parents.

For the past few years, their major fear had been that he was becoming too spoiled, and they’d adjusted their parenting style in hopes that they would not raise an ungrateful tyrant. Gideon had chores at home, and also helped his parents in the pawn shop and library. In addition, Rumple was starting to teach him a few simple magic spells, but they’d established a rule from the beginning of his magical lessons… whenever a task could be accomplished without magic, Gideon was taught both methods. They wanted him to learn to control the powerful magical ability they assumed he would develop at some point, but not be reliant on it. Their son would learn to live in both the magical and non-magical worlds.

Their approach seemed to be working. Gideon was happy and secure, but also aware of the advantages he had in life. Therefore, incidents that truly tested his easy-going personality were rare. Rumple needed to find out what had caused his son to cry. He tried a different approach.

“Should I call Ms. Blanchard? Maybe she’ll tell me what happened today.”

“Don’t!” Gideon exclaimed, sitting up quickly. His face was blotchy from crying. “She can’t tell you anyway, she wasn’t even there!”

“Wasn’t there for what?”

Gideon looked down, sullen. “Nothing.”

“Son… come here.” Rumple held out an arm, and Gideon scooted under and nestled against his father’s side. “Why won’t you tell me?”

“Maybe… maybe it would be better if I wait and talk to Mum.” His voice was muffled against Rumple’s suit, but his words carried clearly enough.

Rumple made himself wait a moment before replying; there were several topics that Gideon preferred to discuss with Belle. However, none of them typically reduced him to tears.

“May I ask why you can tell your mother, and not me?” he asked.

“Cause Mum won’t go all Azkaban when she finds out what Robin said!” Gideon exclaimed, before his eyes went wide and he sucked in a breath. He hadn’t meant to speak the name, that was clear.

“And what did Robin Mills say to you?” The boy opened his mouth, hesitated, and closed it again. “Gideon. Tell me now, what she said.”

“Her mom told her that… that I’m a bastard,” he mumbled, looking down.  

He took a moment to squash the fury that the word caused to flare up in him. When he thought he had it under control, he asked, “And do you know what that means?”

“Yeah. It means that you and Mum aren’t my real parents. But I know you are, and I told Robin that!”

“And you’re right. We’re your parents, and we love you more than anything.”

He hugged his son close, silently cursing Zelena Mills. He didn’t blame Robin, who was only a little older than Gideon. Robin was a child and couldn’t be held responsible for the awful lessons her mother taught her. Zelena, though… if not for the grief it would cause her daughter, Rumple would indeed be tempted to ‘go Azakaban’ on the green witch.

“I told Robin we use blood magic all the time, and magic doesn’t lie,” Gideon said, snuggling close to him again. “The spells wouldn’t work if I weren’t your son. And she said she believed me, because she knows how magic works. She sneaks in her mum’s bedroom all the time and opens things that Ms. Mills locked up with blood magic.”

“Does she?” Rumple murmured, amused by the idea of Zelena’s daughter defying her. “So if she believes you, what’s the problem?”

“She said she believed me, but other kids heard her say I’m a bastard, and now they won’t stop saying it!”

“Won’t stop saying what?” Belle’s voice came from the doorway.

“Mum!” Gideon went to her immediately, wrapping his arms around her and resting his head on her shoulder. If he kept growing at his current rate, he’d soon have to bend down to hug her like that.

“The kids at school are calling me names,” he told her.

“Oh, sweetheart… I’m sorry. Kids can be mean, you know that.” Belle stroked his hair, sending a look over his shoulder to Rumple.

“They keep calling me a bastard and saying you can’t be my real parents, because I’m going to be so tall and you two aren’t tall, and--”

“Whoa, Gideon, slow down. What do our heights have to do with anything?” Rumple asked. “Come here, son. Sit down, and tell us everything.”

With Gideon seated between them on the edge of his bed, Belle repeated the question. “Why do our heights matter, Gideon?”

“Because it’s genetic,” he explained, looking put out that he had to explain this. “We’re learning about genetics and which traits are passed down from parents to children. Both of you are short, so I should be too, but I’m going to be tall.”

“And how would your classmates know how tall you’re going to be?” Rumple asked.

Gideon rolled his eyes. “Everyone knows that, Papa. All their parents told them how I showed up a week after I was born, and I was this freaky tall grown-up and tried to kill the Savior, and then I went back to being a baby again. It’s not really a secret.”

“Right… because stories like that count as normal in Storybrooke,” Belle said. “But Gideon sweetheart, your classmates are right that physical traits like height get passed down, but what they’re failing to account for, is that genetics are incredibly unpredictable. Traits can skip generations, or show up out of the blue even if no one else in the family have them.”

“So… were your parents tall?” Gideon asked, turning to Rumple.

“Ahh… no. Neither of them were much taller than me. I never met my grandparents, but I don’t think you got your height from my side.”

He turned to Belle with a hopeful look.

“I know Grandpa Moe is kind of tall… well, taller than you two, anyway. What about your mom? Or your grandparents?”

“My mother was a little taller than me, and her parents were about the same, as best I can remember. They both died when I was pretty young. But I think you’re on to something with your Grandpa Moe; he might be taller than I remember your adult self being. I think it’s his side of the family that you get your height from.”

“Oh.” Gideon thought for a moment, then brightened. “So it just skipped you, like you said!”

Rumple never thought he’d be grateful for the existence of Maurice French, but that’s exactly the emotion he felt right now. He’d always had mixed feelings about Gideon having any sort of relationship with his maternal grandfather, but had allowed it because Belle wanted it… with the caveat that they monitored that relationship closely, and would put an end to it if Maurice was being a bad influence on his grandson.

Maurice had behaved himself thus far. They’d never seen any signs that he was trying to turn Gideon against his father, which had been Rumple’s biggest concern. Moe’s good behavior may have had something to do with the two visits he received from Rumple and Belle – separately, with neither of them aware of the other’s actions till later – warning him that if he wanted a relationship with his only grandchild, he would refrain from negative comments about Gideon’s parents, their relationship, or their parenting choices.

“Yes, that’s it.” Belle was hugging Gideon with a relieved smile. “You get your height from your Grandpa Moe. So you can tell all your classmates to cease and desist, hmm?”

“But they’re not going to just take my word for it,” Gideon pointed out. “Can we do a magical blood test? If we get one of Grandpa’s hairs, and use one of mine, we can do the test and prove it with magic!”

“You shouldn’t have to prove anything to anyone, Son.”

Gideon rolled his eyes again, unimpressed with his father’s naivete. “Of course I have to prove it, Papa. It’s elementary school. If they don’t see it for themselves, it never happened.”

“But they’ll believe the story about you being a tall adult and then coming back as a baby, even though they were all babies themselves at the time and can’t possibly remember it?”

Gideon threw his hands up. “Okay, so they believe what they want to! I don’t make the rules! But can we do the blood test, please? So I don’t have to listen to the entire school call me a bastard for the next three months, or however long it takes for something else to distract them?”

“Alright, Gideon, we’ll do it,” Belle soothed, rubbing his back. Rumple shot her a look over Gideon’s head. He didn’t like the idea that his son felt compelled to prove his parentage, just to satisfy the undisciplined brats he had as classmates. Belle shot him a look back, saying pointedly to Gideon, “If it will put your mind at ease, we’ll do it.”

Resigned, Rumple nodded his agreement. Anything for their son.

“Great! Can we go right now, and ask him for the hair?”

“Ahh… well.” Belle hesitated, groping for an excuse, and Rumple came up with one smoothly.

“You can’t go, because it’s our night to cook dinner. You and me. You’re going to learn to make salmon and asparagus tonight, remember?”

“Do I have to?” Gideon whined.

“Yes,” Rumple said firmly. “You know the rules. I’ll teach you how to do things with magic, but you’re also going to learn to do things without magic. And that includes cooking. Your mum can go see your grandpa while we’re working on dinner.”

“That sounds like a great solution,” Belle beamed.

“Come along, Gideon. We should get started in the kitchen.”

Rumple ushered him out, sharing one last look with Belle as she followed him. Thank goodness they’d improved their communication from the early days of their relationship. They didn’t need to discuss it, to agree that it would be better if Gideon were not present when Maurice French was asked to help prove Gideon’s parentage. The man had restrained himself for ten years, but there was always the possibility that his deep loathing of Rumple would come out, and hurt their son.

“I’ll be right back!” Belle called from the door, and it closed behind her. Rumple urged his reluctant son into the kitchen.

“So Gideon, which do you think we should do first? Season the salmon, or trim the asparagus?”

The boy thought for a minute. “Are we going to be cooking anything in the oven?”

“As a matter of fact, we are,” Rumple answered, pleased that Gideon’s cooking lessons were starting to show results.

“So the first thing we do is turn on the oven, so it can be heating while we prep,” Gideon said, proud that he’d remembered.

“Excellent.”

They worked together, trimming the ends of the tender green asparagus and coating the salmon with olive oil, spices, and lemon juice. They decided to make dessert as well, as Gideon had been paying attention when his father asked earlier, and hadn’t forgotten the mention of cookies.

The counter was covered with baking ingredients and Rumple was adding the flour into the mixing bowl slowly as Gideon stirred it in, when he felt the tingle from his Dark One senses, telling him that he was being summoned. That hadn’t happened for a long time. What was even odder, was that his senses told him it was Belle summoning him, and she was right outside the door.

“You keep adding that flour in, a little at a time, and mixing it. I’ll be right back.”

Gideon nodded, intent on his task. Rumple wiped his hands on a kitchen towel, and slipped out the front door quietly. Belle stood on the top step, back to him, and he could tell right away something was wrong. Her shoulders were hunched, her arms wrapped around herself. She turned when he said her name and threw herself at him.

He drew her close and rubbed her back. “What’s wrong?” He held her away enough to see her face, and it was obvious she’d been crying. “What did your father say?” He would make that man pay for causing Belle to cry like this.

“He said… that the blood test wouldn’t work for Gideon, because he’s not my father,” Belle said, her voice shaking.

It took Rumple a moment to absorb her words. “Belle, I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

Belle sniffled as she spoke. “Gideon isn’t the bastard. I am.”

[theliberaltony]

via FiveThirtyEight

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination is good news for liberal policy activists. And that’s whether she wins the nomination or not. The Massachusetts senator appears poised to serve as a progressive policy anchor in the 2020 Democratic field, pushing the field — and the eventual nominee — toward aggressively liberal policy stands.

How might Warren have such influence? Because the Massachusetts senator is planning to release detailed and decidedly liberal policy proposals on issue after issue. Her rivals, if past primary campaigns are any guide, will feel pressure to either “match” her on policy by coming up with their own proposals, say that they agree with Warren, or convince the party’s increasingly left-leaning electorate that Warren’s proposals are too liberal. And remember that presidential winners usually try to implement their promises — so an idea put out by Warren in March could be in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s platform in August and be signed into law by a President Gillibrand in 2021.

Here’s an example of how this works, from a past Democratic primary. Early in the 2008 campaign, John Edwards released a comprehensive plan to provide health care for millions of Americans. A few months later, then-Sen. Barack Obama, looking to compete with Edwards among liberal voters and activists, put out a similar proposal, which was the basic outline for the Affordable Care Act he signed into law as president.

In the 2020 Democratic nomination process, I expect that other candidates will also have lots of policy proposals. And Bernie Sanders in particular is likely to join Warren in pushing the Democratic primary debate to the left. But Warren is likely to be at the forefront of the “policy primary,”– the one-time Harvard professor is perhaps the wonkiest person in the field. And Warren knows how to push her ideas onto the national agenda quite well. Before she was elected to the Senate, Warren convinced congressional Democrats and President Obama to create the agency now known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren campaign aides told me that unveiling major policy proposals will be a big part of her candidacy, with the ideas intended to reinforce Warren’s broader message that the country needs “big, structural change,” not just incremental tweaks.

“I’ve been working on one central question for 30 years,” Warren told me in brief interview after a campaign event in Greenville, South Carolina, on Saturday, “‘what’s going wrong with working families across this country, why is America’s middle class getting hallowed out?’ I never thought I would come into politics, not in a million years, but that was my chance to fight bigger, back in 2012, when I went to the Senate.”1

“Getting into the presidential race means I can talk about the kinds of big, systemic changes we need to make,” she added.

“Warren is an unusually wonkish, policy-focused figure, not just attached to some concerns … but very specific and knowledgeable about them,” said David Karol, a University of Maryland political science professor and expert on the presidential nominations process, in an e-mail message.

Karol said that Warren’s potential effect on the 2020 race is analogous to four years ago, when Sanders seemed to push Hillary Clinton to take more leftward stances than she might have otherwise. If Clinton had been elected president, she would have felt pressure to implement some of those liberal campaign promises, which would have made Sanders’s 2016 run particularly important in shaping U.S. public policy. But Karol argued that Warren is somewhat distinct from Sanders, because in his estimation, she is more attuned to the finer details of legislation. So Warren might push the rest of the Democratic field to the left and force Sanders, who is already very liberal, to be more specific in explaining how his proposals will work.

“[Warren] has a deep mastery of policy, a staunchly progressive voting record,” said New York-based liberal political activist Sean McElwee, best known for advocating for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in an e-mail message. “She’ll be a real contender and will force every other candidate to get smart on policy and push the boundaries of what it means to be a progressive.”

So what are Warren’s ideas? It’s worth separating them into two general categories: ones that she is one of the principal authors of and those where she has embraced someone else’s proposal. The latter is important too — Warren taking up an idea while running for president can bring attention to obscure proposals written by backbenchers on Capitol Hill.

Here are some major Warren-authored policies:

A 2 percent annual tax on household net worth between $50 million and $1 billion, and an additional 1 percent tax on household net worth above $1 billion.

Bans on members of Congress and other top officials in Washington from owning individual stocks while in office and doing any kind of lobbying after they leave office.

Postal banking, a requirement that all U.S. post offices offer checking and saving accounts to Americans who want to sign up for them.

Federal manufacturing of generic prescription drugs.

The removal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

A reduction in the overall Department of Defense budget.

Federal funds to help first-time homeowners make the down payment on homes if they buy in neighborhoods that suffered in the past from redlining.

A requirement that large corporations reserve 40 percent of the seats on their boards for board members selected by workers at the company.

A ban on the U.S. using nuclear weapons first in a military conflict with another country.

A $146 billion “Marshall Plan” for Puerto Rico.

Here are a couple of proposals written by others that Warren has embraced:

Medicare-for-all;

The “Green New Deal,” a proposal championed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey to limit fossil fuel use in the U.S. in order to address climate change..

There are two caveats to this analysis. First, Warren’s influence on policy rests on her remaining a viable candidate, appearing in the debates, regularly visiting the early primary states and not, say, dropping out in May of this year. Second, I think Warren will particularly affect candidates, like Sanders, who are competing with her for support among liberal Democratic primary voters and activists like McElwee who comprise the party’s left wing. So Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who appears to be targeting more moderate Democrats, may not feel that she has to match Warren policy-for-policy.

That said, even more centrist candidates are likely to feel Warren’s pull on the race. Journalists and activists are going to ask candidates like Klobuchar if they support single-payer or Medicare-for-all. That will create pressure on those candidates to address Warren’s proposals, even if in the end they call for a less liberal variant — some kind of Medicare option for people between ages 50 and 64 instead of Medicare-for-all, for example. And Warren is likely to come up with ideas on issues that disproportionately affect blacks, Latinos, and young voters, three other key electoral blocs in the party. More moderate candidates can’t concede those voting blocs, so Warren’s proposals on issues that affect those voting blocs will likely influence all of the candidates.

So watch for Warren’s ideas — in some ways separately from Warren. A week after Warren unveiled her wealth tax, Sanders put out a plan to vastly increase the estate tax. I’m not saying Sanders proposed that idea only because of Warren’s move, but he might have proposed it so early in the presidential race (even before he officially announced his candidacy) because he felt pressured to match Warren. I would assume many Democratic candidates will put out proposals to vastly increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans — even if they aren’t as aggressive as Warren’s proposals. And his opposition to Warren’s wealth tax seems to be one of the primary reasons ex-Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, a one-time Democrat, is considering an independent presidential run.

So while Warren’s poll numbers put her behind some of her rivals right now, she’s already having an outsized influence on the race — and I would expect that to continue.