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beardedmrbean · 9 months ago

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Oh dear, forgive me another rant

https://x.com/drakevagabond/status/1782283929556566338?s=46

Hmm, oh let me use the autistic one because oh boy I love the surface levels shit

You picking up the sarcasm?

Oooh writers, we are autistic people varies cause by cause. Are you doing the low function autistic (the stand ideals muted ones that middle age/class wine moms exploit) or are you doing higher functing autistic like me?

Because there are several factors as a lot of high functioning autistic people like me have adhd. No seriously I’m surprised how common the two are together. Did Mother Nature say “this bitch is too boring!” and add adhd into the womb

I was also diagnosed under the Asperger Syndrome until the change due to it Nazi connections. But let force taxpayers to pay for planned parenthood 🙄

But writers, high functioning autistic people can adapt. Yes I have difficulty look into people eyes, and make a schedule in my mind. But I can get sarcasm, I can function and talk to people. I can use Ubers and go to the movies by myself. Oh and big one, I DO have a sex drive

Sorry I heard there was a tik toker saying it gross that autistic people sexualize themselves because technically they have the mentality of children.

…I’m going to finish this anon with why I point out the CSA issues out in the open vs the codes and whispers.

But that bitch would have a heart attack to huge sexualization inner cities kids are often expose to.

Ugh I’m not on Epstein list I just have autism

But like I saw a clip of the good doctor where the Mc have p la a panic attack over using hand dryers…which had mass production since the 90’s no? Not to mention he a surgeon in modern times

Okay I got diagnosed at 11, but a autistic person who what to be surgeon (you know a field where you can often have the fate of another human life in your hands) would have been filtered out OR they would have given ways to deal with their autism in a extremely high pressure environment.

If my presumptions are right

But I heard abc good doctor is actually a western adaptation of k drama focusing on an autistic pediatrician….havent seen it but I heard he executed a hell of a lot better than his American counterpart and have a obsession towards super sentai

But one issues I have with the positive “representation” of autism these days especially in kids media it treated as a SUPERPOWER and often only SURFACE LEVEL

Even though a lot of autistic people on here show the huge difference between gender and race that play a role in our identity too

And these guides, tbh I think a lot of modern writers (who are often nepo babies and diversity hires) try to hide the fact they grew up in gates and isolate communities and didn’t meet someone different to them on the same levels until college or the workforce

But there are a difference between a white upper middle class woman who live in California and drunk the critical theory kool aid. Vs my ass who live in Chicago area and dealt with leftists bigotry

*cough almost Hollywood tried to hide that for decades with their abuse of child actors cough*

So I been noticing that with a lot of black people and I’m not a only one as I saw a presentation where a black guy did point out the adultifaction of black boys when it comes to sexual abused and many black boys were coriecrd to do oral activites to older females or raped like Tyler Perry was a child by one of his friends mom.

And I saw black women LAUGHING at a admit who revealed he was raped at 5

Hey black community, let remember that black boys are still BOYS before getting shot by the police?

Yes that an issues all over especially with the genderfird rape laws.

It gets very annoying

Ya this is just going to do the reverse of what it's intended to do for lots of people, which I consider good, be politically incorrect.

I was also diagnosed under the Asperger Syndrome until the change due to it Nazi connections. But let force taxpayers to pay for planned parenthood 🙄

people don't seem to quite understand why the word "spectrum" is in there at times, which is weird since a lot of them are the same ones that will berate you for not going with their idea of a gender spectrum

Sorry I heard there was a tik toker saying it gross that autistic people sexualize themselves because technically they have the mentality of children.

It's amazing all the things people will adapt the concept of 'white man's burden' to in order to feed their superiority complex while looking like they actually give a shit to people that don't know better.

That and the things they'll excuse for the same reason, they don't know any better than to act like barbarian savages so we can't judge them for that.....

never seen the show, but that feels like a big yikes ya.

But one issues I have with the positive “representation” of autism these days especially in kids media it treated as a SUPERPOWER and often only SURFACE LEVEL

Not entirely new, Rain Man comes to mind. You want quality positive rep do like they did with Corky on 'Life Goes On" had down syndrome and it was shown to be a burden but also shown he had a mostly normal life and he even went to regular school and everything.

And yes it was made in the late 80's early 90's because I know you're already wondering that or had guessed it.

It's how we got people like shaun "talcum-X/Thurgood Marshmallow" (take your pick) king and taylor lorenz among many others, authors musicians and influencers and such.

That and people like brooklyn dad on twitter who gets paid by some dem committee, several of those too.

Also why I pointed out the CSA issues omg the black community is explicitly. Actually due to the whole pedo teacher scandal and the fact that a lot of CSA survivors often have extreme libido so they sleep around a lot *cough almost Hollywood tried to hide that for decades with their abuse of child actors cough*

Saw a thing with Mayim Bialik she was saying the whole "Quiet on the Set" series was barely the tip of the iceberg, which she'd know, and also it's sad that they didn't kick this all off with Corey Feldman doing his thing, but he has the wrong parts and pointed at the wrong thing, notice how even after this one it's still crickets.

That one is wild to me too since people are going hard after Dan Schneider for admittedly bad taste and inappropriate jokes as well as that foot thing, but by everything I've heard about it he never touched anyone inappropriately, I may have missed it, so far though I haven't seen anything about that.

I haven't seen much about Brian Peck the guy that was actually accused of sexual assault, which is odd and honestly not totally unexpected.

And I saw black women LAUGHING at a admit who revealed he was raped at 5 Hey black community, let remember that black boys are still BOYS before getting shot by the police?

Ya they don't care about boys, not when it has the potential to make women look bad at least or if caring about the boys might take attention away from women.

If you remember this one

I am not trying to minimize this tragedy in the slightest, it's just a great one to make a point about how males are disposable with.

The girls kidnapped in Chibok in 2014 are only a small percentage of the total number of people abducted by Boko Haram. Amnesty International estimated in 2015 that at least 2,000 women and girls had been abducted by the group since 2014, many of whom had been forced into sexual slavery.

Again, tragedy big tragedy. But did you know

And then we get the girls down at the bottom there as a prominent mention in a search about boys.

Hey black community, let remember that black boys are still BOYS before getting shot by the police? Yes that an issues all over especially with the genderfird rape laws. It gets very annoying

Duluth model is a pain in the ass too, presumes the male is guilty if nobody has any marks on them.

UK, Israel, India, several other countries have a "forced to penetrate" line in their rape laws that make it nearly impossible to convict a woman of rape even if she held a gun to the guys head, they would have to forcibly penetrate the guy for it to be rape.

Which is depressing and backwards

#zoomer huey anon

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mxtantrights · 4 years ago

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past lives | 4

a/n: the response this fic has gotten has made me so happy thank you guys so much!! I really couldn't have expected it. anyways happing reading and just know you can always send in stuff about the story <3

“Big meeting! BIG! Conference room seven, five minutes do not be late!” your boss Erwin said.

So you finished the sentence you were revising and shut your laptop. You got out of your chair and brought along with you a notebook and a sweater. Conference room seven sucked when it came to insulation. It was like practice for Antartica. You hated it.

You pulled the knitted cardigan over you as you walked to the room. When you opened the door you saw one seat saved, the one closest to the door. You took it and set out your notebook.

Pens were passed around before you finally looked up at the person conducing the meeting. You eyes didn’t budge out of your head this time. And you think that was because you had been in the same room before. Even though this was far different.

Bruce frickin Wayne cleared his throat to start the meeting. And you were sat across from him. Maybe you would’ve felt weird - or more weird- if you hadn’t been in the same room with him a couple of nights ago. Completing a mission for the league.

As you’re waiting at your table for Fallon to get your last drinks of the night, the waiter with the scar passes by. It’s so quick and no normal person would pick it up. He had flung the drive into your interlaced hands. With swiftness you caught it, opened your bag and put it in while pulling out your phone.

You unlock your phone and send a quick reply.

package received

Fallon makes their way over to you with the drinks. They pass you yours, a fancy sounding cocktail thing. The menu was hard to decipher as all you ever relate cared for in a drink was a high alcohol volume.

“What’s in this?” you ask.

They look over at your drink, “I swore I saw something clear in there so I think it’ll do you good.”

You smile. Taking a sip of the drink you taste the vodka instantly. It was mixed in between other kinds of flavors but not potent enough to drown the vodka. Which was good in your opinion.

“Say if I didn’t know any better I would say a certain Wayne is coming over here.” they say.

You look up with the straw still in your mouth and it’s Jason. He’s shed the jacket and he looks really good. Or maybe you were drunk. Maybe both. Still he looked good.

He reaches your table and plasters a grin on his lips.

“So maybe I can be your gala groupie?” he asks point blank.

Fallon almost chokes on their drink. You drop the straw back into the drink.

“Hmm, kind of presumptive of you to think I’d want a groupie.” you say.

He leans his face in closer, “I could be good I promise.”

“I’m- gonna go and order our rideshare, unless you wanna...” Fallon trailed off.

“Give me five minutes.” he says.

You eye him closely. He’s like a wolf. Showing you his pretty teeth, and you’re supposed to think he’s smiling. But really he’s showing you the canines, the things that will tear into you later on.

You’re not sure if that’s sexual or not.

“Two minutes, Fallon’s shoes are uncomfortable.”

“I bet I can make you blush in less than that.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

You notice Fallon snicker to themself as they back away from what’s going on. This just give you more incentive to lean into his personal space. Something you didn’t think you’d do on the balcony. But this guy in front of you is just intriguing. Something about him seems deeper.

That’s not really the right word but you don't care.

“If you want-”

He is cut off by a bussing noise. You know it’s not your phone because you can’t feel the vibration coming form your bag. Sure enough he pulls out his own from his left pant pocket.

His eyes read over something and he sighs.

“uh-oh. I think your time is up Mr.Todd.” you tease.

He puts his phone back in his pocket and smirks ar you. You return the gesture. He sends you a wink.

“To be continued.” he says, and walks away.

You watch him shuffle though the crowd until he’s gone. It doesn’t take long for Fallon to make their way back to you. And when they do you take your straw into your mouth again.

“So sex with a Wayne is not a go?”

You finish off you drink and put it down on the table.

“Fallon, if I didn’t know any better I would think you were trying to get rid of me.”

“Good thing you don’t know any better. Come on, let’s go to coat check and get out of here.”

You snapped out of the flashback to the gala. Daniel had finished talking about some of the new funded projects. Courtesy of Wayne industries. You thought to yourself how exactly this deal was made but then you thought against it. This is the richest man in Gotham, he doesn't just stay in one place.

You watched as Daniel pointed over to you. That was when you decided to pay close attention.

“We’re also going to have our Deputy writer produce a spread on the Wayne family. Obviously not too much but just enough to satisfy the public that they keep coming back for more.” He said.

Your eyes flickered to the man himself. He was already looking at you. What you couldn’t understand was, why did the Wayne family need an article or op-ed about them? Was there some bad rumor floating around? Are they trying to get ahead of something?

“You have a question?” Bruce Wayne- which is kinda weird and cool to you at the same time- asked.

“Sorry, I have the worst poker face. I’m just wondering why you and your family need a piece- or want it. But now I’m thinking that can be saved for the piece itself.” You said.

You added a smile after, out of manners.

He nodded his head. Then he thanked you by your first name. It felt weird too. Like he had wanted to say your name on purpose and this was his excuse. You tried to swallow down that feeling.

You pulled the sleeves of your sweater over your hands.

“Speaking of Ron is giving you full control over the piece. So no need to clear anything by him, he trusts your instincts and vision.” Daniel added.

You nodded a bit surprised. It’s not the first time that Ron, your boss, had given you total control. But those had been pieces or columns about things or places. Not people. Especially not a spread about the most important person in Gotham and his family.

Daniel called the meeting over not long after and everyone began to leave. You grabbed your notebook but were stopped. Bruce Wayne had called you by name again and asked you hang back.

The words ‘hang back’ coming out of a billionaire’s mouth was weird, because it was addressed to you. Nonetheless you stayed after everyone, including Daniel, left.

When the door closed behind Daniel you turned to the only man in the room.

“Hi Mr. Wayne.”

He put his hand up, “Oh you can call me Bruce.”

“You’ll probably have to correct me so that I can remember. What can I do for you?” you asked.

“Seeing as this is a family piece, I wanted to let you know that the whole family will be available this coming Friday night.” he said.

“Great, did you have a place in mind?”

“Would my place do?”

You stopped all your efforts to gulp. His frickin masion- manor it’s called the manor. Oh wow, you were really smoozing with rich people. At least the Wayne’s didn't seem to be the snobby or bratty type.

You won in that respect.

So you nodded along, “That’d be good.”

“I’ll send for a car,” he said and then he took out his business card, “Just get in contact and it’ll all be arranged.”

“Right.” you said.

You took the card. Which you thought meant the conversation was over. Yet Bruce Wayne did not bulge from his spot. You thought, maybe you should appear more nervous to move things along.

Turned out you didn’t have to. He excused himself and left the room. It was almost as if he wasn’t there in the first place. The only piece of evidence that contradicted that was the business card in your hand.

It was way to cold to be running errands this late. And without material covering your legs. Your outfit and the trench coat Fallon let you borrow was only equipped for balcony breezes. Not harbor ones.

Still, you will make do. The sign coming up above your head read Gotham Harbor which wasn’t a port of any kind. It was a bookshop on the Harbor. The number 45 the building number.

Was that a trick too?

The lights were still on, even though the close sign is turned. You push open the door and it gives way. This is the right place. You make sure to close the door softly. From the back you can hear movement.

You walk up to the counter where the bell is. Without a second thought you take the flash drive out of your bag and place it next to it. Then you ring it. You do not wait for the person in the back to come out front.

Instead you leave the way you came. Softly you end up back on the street and begin your walk a couple of blocks up. It was best to catch a cab a distance away as to not be easily traced.

As you were walking, a black SUV pulled up next to you. You were walking with traffic, and there was practically no other cars on the block. You knew exactly who it was.

The window rolls down.

“Raʼs al Ghul, what a surprise.” you say.

“You passed.” he answers.

“Great. Any details you wanna share?”

“In time, Nyssa says hello.”

“Don’t.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

#dc x reader #Bruce Wayne x reader #Jason Todd x reader #redhood x reader #batman x reader #batfam x reader #PAST LIVES #dc fic

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 years ago

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Ever since I've started to read more books about the Catholic Filthy Churches involving sex abuse cases and how they hid their pedophile priests by transferring them to another parish and I live in a country which is most predominantly catholic where there are more churches in almost every corner of the streets and I'm having a hard time accepting religious people bringing their children to a church for whatever reason are not aware of the fact that despite not have any shred of evidence regarding to who's the real predator among priests that hasn't been caught or exposed since I learned that the clerics don't report them to the authorities or even publish their faces or names in public for "security reasons", there actually might be some priests that could be an actual predator or more and possibly abuse some of the innocent children and get away with it. It scares the shit out of me that I can't do anything about it while at the same time I know that I can't do anything since I'm not a parent and I hold no authority over others but I can't help it with the knowledge that there are pedophiles out there hiding in plain sight. How do I deal with this?

That's some weighty concern there.

My first recommendation is to put the books down for a bit. Seriously.

It reminds me of a tweet Helen Pluckrose posted about consuming a ton of Critical Race Theory literature and papers for some of the work she was doing, and how it screwed up her perceptions.

If you submerge yourself in this stuff, it will mess with your mind and drown you. This is not to say that you ignore it, but you can't lose yourself in this specific world. You won't be able to do any good at all if you're drowning in anxiety. It's like the air safety video where they tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before you help someone else with theirs, such as your child. You can't help anyone if you drive yourself crazy. Put the books down for a bit and engage with the world outside of them for a bit, or at least do something else.

It's also important to remember that not every priest is a danger - not all priests are abusers, and not all abusers are priests. It's entirely possible that the child is safer with the priest than they are with their own mother or teacher, for example. But if you go around assuming every adult is a predator, you'll drive yourself crazy. The overwhelming majority of kids are safe, and more so than in the past. Most of what we're hearing about is historical, and there is much more awareness and visibility and ability to talk about it now than there used to be.

The problem is that the Church has facilitated and provided cover for abusers, where that facilitation and cover doesn't generally exist elsewhere (although that still needs work).

No institution or organization will ever be free of incidences of wrongdoing, because institutions and organizations are composed of people. People can hide their true agenda, exploit others, take opportunities. They can also be altruistic, generous and principled. The problem is that the Church has sought to preserve its own moral high-horse by choosing to throw victims of abuse under the bus, rather than actually doing the right thing. It's important how an institution or organization handles these cases, and particularly its transparency, to make it clear that they will not facilitate or provide cover for anyone who thinks they can get away with it.

This must also take into account due process - lives can be ruined for false accusations, so publishing names and faces is not necessarily appropriate if an investigation is ongoing. We have the presumption of innocent until guilty, and that must remain a cornerstone of how matter are dealt with, even if it's imperfect. Non-believers don't accept a default assumption of guilt about our moral character from Xians, and we can't be inconsistent here either.

You also have to remember that you cannot be - make yourself, or hold yourself - responsible for other people. You cannot stop a parent taking their child to church or otherwise participate in the absurdities of the superstitious dogma. They already believe stupid things based on nothing but faith, but we have to let them practice that belief in those stupid things (freedom of religion) in order to preserve our right to not (freedom from religion). You can't harangue them into doing what you want; it'll be interpreted as an attack on their faith, and they'll double down on the faith to defend their choices.

The responsibility ultimately lies with the Church. They need to be responsible for what happens in their organization, not you.

So, seriously, put the books down for a bit. You're not abandoning the victims, nor turning a blind eye to what happened. You're making sure you're not also a victim of the Church.

Consider finding practical ways to help. Find organizations in your area that are advocating for victims as well as for policy changes and laws that require mandatory reporting or put in place other protections or mechanisms. Write letters in support of these laws - it's not unusual for people who agree with them to sort of presume that they don't need defence, and responses may end up primarily being objections. If no reforms or laws are being proposed, constact your representative. Use what you've learned to post, without apology to anyone's hurt feelings or calls for religious "respect," about the subject to make sure people are aware of what's going on.

Above all, find a balance. Don't let the Church destroy you too.

#ask #catholic church #catholicism #catholic molesters #catholic #roman catholic #child molesters #molestation coverup #child molestation #religion #religion is a mental illness

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

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The zombie economy and digital arm-breakers

It's a zombie economy. For 40 years, we've eroded the wages of workers and transfered their share of profit and productivity to owners of capital. This is a problem, because people need money to buy things, and if they run out of money, they stop buying and profits vanish.

Time and again, capitalism has kicked any reckoning over this down the road. First came the great liquidation: pension cashouts, raided savings, reverse mortgages. Then came consumer borrowing, a tidal wave of unrepayable debt.

That's the zombie part: all the unpayable debt, which has been turned into bonds that enrich debt-holders. As Michael Hudson has told us again and again, debt that can't be paid, won't be paid. Our debt-based economy is the walking dead, a zombie.

We can either stabilize the economy (by forgiving debts, so that producers can pay for necessities and go on producing); or we can stabilize finance (by coercing debtors into destroying their lives in order to keep up on payments):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Think of the loan-shark's arm-breaker: he wants to collect on debt, so he threatens to break your arm. You steal your kid's college fund. You secretly mortgage the house. You sell your wedding-ring. You end up divorced and homeless. You still owe. So he breaks your arm.

Now you're divorced, homeless, and you've lost your ability to earn, and you've got medical bills. He threatens to break your other arm. You start breaking into cars to steal the toll money in the ashtrays. You go to jail. Finally the arm-breaker and his boss are out of luck.

Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid. But as loan-sharks know, fortunes can be collected by applying the right incentives.

Give debtors the choice of immediate ruin from nonpayment, and making a payment today and ruining their lives tomorrow, and they're pay.

They'll pay...until they can't. Because debts that can't be paid, won't be paid.

The zombie economy is the subprime economy. "Subprime" came into collective consciousness thanks to the great financial crisis, where banks tricked poor homebuyers into predatory loans.

The banks knew that the loans couldn't be repaid - they had "balloon" clauses that jacked up payments beyond the borrowers' ability to repay a few years into the mortgage - but they also knew that threats of homelessness are powerful motivators.

The inscrutable equations used to "guarantee" subprime bonds all shared an unspoken assumption: people who face homelessness will go to extraordinary lengths to pay their mortgages. Behind every subprime loan is an arm-breaker.

The zombie economy shambles on. Obama's loan-shark bailout and the eviction crisis let the architects of subprime buy up whole towns' worth of homes and turn them into hugely profitable slums: high-rent, low-quality deathtraps.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-housing-invitation/

Wall St landlords package rents from subprime rentals into bonds, backed by the loan-shark's guarantee: arm-breakers will evict the shit out of anyone who stops paying.

America-a land where eviction was once a rarity-now faces an eviction epidemic.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out

The foreclosure crisis was only possible because Wall St and the courts collaborated to streamline the historically complicated and time-consuming process of taking away someone's home. Same goes for the eviction epidemic.

It's a simple equation: the more loan-sharks spend on arm-breakers, the lower the expected profits.

Improvements to arm-breaking processes - cost-savings on traditional coercion or innovative new forms of terror - are powerful engines for unlocking new debt markets.

When innovation calls, tech answers. Our devices are increasingly "smart," and inside every smart device is a potential arm-breaker. Digital arm-breakers have been around since the first DRM systems, but they really took off in 2008.

That's when subprime car loans boomed. People who lost everything in the GFC still needed to get to work, and thanks to chronic US underinvestment in transit, that means owning a car. So loan-sharks and tech teamed up to deliver a new lost-cost, high-efficiency arm-breaker.

They leveraged the nation's mature wireless network to install cellular killswitches in cars. You could extend an unrepayable loan to a desperate person, and use an unmutable second stereo system to bombard them with earsplitting overdue notices.

https://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/04/17/aa.bills.shut.engine.down/index.html

If they didn't pay, you could remotely cut off the ignition and send a precise location to your repo man.

Smart killswitches let you impose fine-grained control over debtors - say, enforcing a rule against driving over the county line.

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

Within a decade, the bond-market for payments from subprime car drivers was edging up on $1T; not because borrowers didn't default, but because they defaulted later, and the car could be easily re-leased to another desperate person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

The zombie economy shambled on. Tech built undeletable, always-on kill-switches, lo-jacks, and spyware into an ever-expanding constellation of devices, like laptops.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/rental-company-control/478365/

Rent-to-own subprime laptops were tepicenter of innovation in digital arm-breaking. Laptops shipped with spyware for covert operation of cameras and mic and access ot files.

That went beyond repoing a laptop! Lenders could make and share covert sex-tapes of their customers!

They spied on children, plundered MP3 collections, stole passwords, read email. It was beyond the wildest dreams of analog loan-sharks.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/09/ftc-halts-computer-spying

To make a good digital arm-breaker, you need always-on network connectivity, a device that people really depend on, and a strong presumption that the device has core software that its owner is never allowed to remove.

Basically, a smartphone.

Mobile carriers were early to this party. They collaborated with device manufacturers to create a "subsidized phone" market. They would "give" you a phone in exchange for a long-term, abusive contract, and then repo it by terminating service if you missed payments.

This was only possible because the manufacturers helped, creating phones that could be locked to a single network, so you couldn't un-repo your phone by sliding in someone else's phone.

They relied on the "anti-circumvention" laws that the music industry lobbied for in the late 90s (like Section 1201 of the DMCA) to make it a felony to unlock these phones. Arm-breaking is a lot easier if it's a felony to evade the arm-breaker.

The smarter the phones got, the more subprime opportunities there were. Remember, there's a new market in every arm-breaking innovation and in every arm-breaking efficiency.

Which brings me to India.

India has a huge subprime market. As one of the world's inequality capitals, whose national government runs on performative culture war bullshit and giveaways to the super-rich, it's a land ripe for subprime innovation.

Phone manufacturers like Samsung are key to India's vast collateralized subprime smartphone market: first-time buyers get their phones on the installment plans at predatory interest rates so high that most will default

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Remember: subprime isn't about debts being repaid in full. It's about making borrowers so desperate that they ruin their lives to make payments before they default.

Samsung's uninstallable arm-breaker app allows lenders to brick a smartphone without help from a carrier.

Writing for Rest of World, Nilesh Christopher describes an "escalating series of annoyances" culminating with a full lockout for failure to repay:

* audiovisual prompts in regional languages as reminders

* changing the wallpaper on their cellphones

That escalates to coercion based on analysis of the users' device activity:

* For "a prolific selfie-taker," notifications every time the camera is invoked

* frequently used messaging and social apps like Facebook or Instagram are progressively blocked

One step at a time, the phone is made progressively less usable, until it is fully bricked.

It's a fully automated, self-configuring arm-breaker, one that substitutes a thug's unscientific ladder of mounting terror with bloodless, statistical science.

This is probably a good point to mention the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve: any disciplinary technology is tried out on powerless people first, and gradually works its way up the privilege gradient to encompass the whole world.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Debt, after all, is consuming all of us except for the lucky few at the very top of the wealth distribution who have not faced wage stagnation and forced liquidations.

The covid crisis pushed whole countries into subprime status. Pfizer has told poor countries that they can only get access to vaccines if they stake their sovereign assets as collateral to settle claims related to its products:

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-23/held-to-ransom-pfizer-demands-governments-gamble-with-state-assets-to-secure-vaccine-deal

And the shitty-tech adoption curve is putting arm-breaking tech into every kind of device, spreading with alarming speed from the bottom of the social order to its apex.

Miss your Tesla payments and your car will lock itself, summon a repo man, back itself out of the parking lot, honk its horn, and unlock its doors for the repo man.

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

As subprime climbs the shitty tech adoption curve, it gets a new name: "software as a service." In a SaaS world, you cannot own the tools of your profession. Adobe Photoshop becomes Adobe Creative Cloud, and any designer who stops monthly payments becomes economic roadkill.

What's more, software is the ghost in the shell, the animating spirit within physical devices. Remove software from a smart device and you don't have a dumb device, you have a brick.

This lets the arm-breakers exert pressure over larger, more powerful entities...like Hoboken, NJ. Hoboken had a payment dispute with the software vendor for its robotic parking garage, so the vendor bricked the garage and took all the cars hostage.

https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71554-0.html

The strange mutations of arm-breaker tech bodes ill, especially in light of Chekhov's Law: "A phaser on the bulkhead in Act One will go off by Act Three."

The universal spread of devices *designed* to be remotely repoed - bricked, downgraded, turned into surveillance tools - means that oppressive governments that coerce manufacturers will have the power to reach into our homes, cars and pockets to attack us.

Same goes for unscrupulous insiders - like the subprime laptop jokers making nonconsensual sex-tapes with their customers' webcams - and criminals who can pressure insiders into acting on their behalf.

Nevertheless, subprime arm-breaking is bound to spread, and spread, and spread. Covid forced millions to liquidate everything, left them in precarious, sub-minimum-wage gig work, and there's the millions of evictions waiting for the moratorium to end.

Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid. And yet, people must participate in the zombie economy: they're not going to dig a hole, climb in, and pull the dirt in on top of themselves. There is strong demand for credit on any terms. Any.

Arm-breaker tech unlocks new markets by delaying defaults on unpayable debts. The zombie economy shambles on.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

Sachab (modified): https://www.flickr.com/photos/sachab/1422847855/

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Kat Northern Lights Man (modified): https://www.flickr.com/photos/orangegreenblue/11375767914/

CC BY-NC: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

#pluralistic

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hello-nichya-here · 4 years ago

Text

Why Ozula Makes Sense & Why It Should Be Canonized

Note: Massive Trigger Warning

Note: Yes, I already know's Nichya's opinion on Ozula. But I want to see her specific thoughts in regards to my post.

In a fan base filled with split opinions, two of the few universally held truths are that Ozai is a horrible parent and that Azula has a lot of issues. But there is a lack of consensus on whether Ozai even abused Azula and even more of a lack of consensus on the nature of his abuse if he did abuse her.

And for the record, I personally believe that at bare minimum Ozai did emotionally abuse Azula (“Trust is for fools, fear is the only reliable way” did not come out of nowhere). Not to mention turning Azula into a child soldier is obviously abuse.

But is what we see, or what is heavily implied, enough to explain everything about the Ozai-Azula relationship?

In other words, does the abuse we see, or is heavily implied, enough to explain why Azula was utterly loyal to Ozai to the point she would gleefully risk her life for him while he sat in a bunk, despite Azula being utterly pragmatic in the other aspects of her life?

Does it truly explain why Azula utterly broke after he left to burn the Earth Kingdom despite being made Fire Lord and becoming the presumptive heir to the Phoenix throne?

Moreover, where did Azula learn to flirt and/or why does she come off as sexually charged with nearly everyone she encounters (ex. Ty Lee, Sokka, Zuko) when it is canon that she has no life experience outside of being a soldier or a princess in court?

Other people have come up with headcanons and theories involving, among other things, historical context and meta-textual evidence to explain the questions that I brought up, but what if there was a more sinister answer to all of them?

What if Ozula was a thing?

Yes, I know, there is very little evidence or subtext to support this but I think that if it did occur in canon, it would not only explain a lot about Azula’s character and/or issues, but also shed some much needed light on the Ozai-Azula relationship and even Ozai himself. Especially since, despite all the extended universe material we have gotten in the decade plus since ATLA the show ended, we still don’t know that much about their relationship, or Ozai himself.

So, what is my personal take on how a canon version of Ozula?

I think that Ozai sexually abused Azula in part to replace Ursa once he “had” to banish Ursa and also in part to prepare her to produce super powerful heirs like herself in addition to using as a tool to keep her under his thumb by making her more attached to him than before he started coming on to her.

In regards to the first reason, Azula is a dead ringer for Ursa and most people would agree Ursa is one of the attractive women in the ATLA-verse. Thus, considering Ozai’s canonical entitlement issues, it must have been hard to no longer rape have sex with Ursa...that is unless he copulates with Ursa’s mini-me.

This ties into the second reason, which is the desire to produce more superpowered heirs.

Thanks to The Search, we know that Ozai married Ursa in order to fulfill a prophecy that said would have produced exceptionally powerful benders. And that prophecy was mostly proven right since Azula is the GOAT Firebender as of current canon and Zuko has surpassed, or is close to surpassing, his father while still in his late teens or very early twenties.

For most people, being the father to such prodigies would make them content in life, proud that they could call themselves father to such talented people.

But Ozai isn’t like most people for, as Ursa aptly put it, Ozai is a small man trying to appear bigger than he is, which is obviously proven by Ozai’s ambitions and desires over the years.

It was not enough that he was a prince of the most powerful nation in the world, so he must become Fire Lord at all costs. And once he achieves that by ripping his family apart and traumatizing the remaining members was enough that he was Firelord?

No! He must become the Phoenix King and build his new empire on the ashes of The Earth Kingdom despite already having it under his rule.

And it was not enough that he had a cult of personality, for Ozai commissioned larger than life statues with his package being accentuated to the point of absurdity.

So is it crazy to believe that he believes that not only is he entitled to the most beautiful woman he knows of (and if he can’t have her then he’ll have the closest thing to her even if it is his own daughter) but the most powerful heirs he could possibly have? Especially considering Ozai is a narcissist who made Azula his golden child because of his daddy issues caused by being the unfavored son of Azulon.

In other words, would it have been out of character for Ozai to fuck "himself" aka the person he thinks he would have been if Azulon recognized his “superiority” over Iroh? Especially when he can make more prodigies like himself Azula?

And in regards to the third reason, did you see how needy Azula was in regards to Ozai when they had their short little talk before Ozai crowned him as the Phoenix King?

I think Ozai, more than anyone, realized that Azula would soon quickly surpass everyone who was not a fully realized Avatar and wanted to ensure that Azula wouldn’t do the pragmatic thing and off him once she realized that she didn’t need daddy anymore. Especially after he offered his own father and betrayed his brother to take the throne.

For if he was paranoid enough to banish Ursa for her ability to make that OP poison, what makes you think he never had similar paranoid thoughts about either of his children? Especially Azula considering how strongly she takes after him and how he has been molding her in his image and ideologies ever since it was apparent she was a prodigy?

So by sleeping with her, and therefore bonding with her, he would ensure that Azula would have no motive to ever overthrow him.

And how would this work in practice?

The same way he praised her for her firebending and ruthlessness. He would likely tell that he needed her; that she was a much better (pseudo) Fire Lady than Ursa could ever be (the old nick site said Azula was renowned in court and it is plausible that she did the duties that Ursa would have done as Fire Lady); that it was one more thing that Zuko could never do better than Azula and more proof that she deserved to be his perfect tool by his side; etc.

And for the most part I think that Azula “responded” really well to Ozai’s false praise by further latching on to him, convinced more than ever that Ozai does love her and would never leave her. Especially since Ursa is gone, Iroh and Zuko are both gone at this point due to Zuko’s banishment, and Mai and Ty Lee are also already gone, or going to leave soon, leaving Azula with only Ozai as the only family and/or friend who hasn’t “abandoned” her.

Ok, so I know what you guys are going to ask next; “cool theory but how does it explain anything other than your sick fetish?”

Well, I think canon Ozula would explain a lot of things about Azula’s and Ozai’s behavior that really isn’t explained by canon or is, currently, only lightly implied.

For example, why did Ozai never remarry or produce more heirs in the five years he ruled despite putting his real heir, Azula, in constant mortal danger and spending most of that time either disowning Zuko or hunting him down as a traitor? Especially considering that he was only able to ascend since his brother was a dumbass and only had one kid himself? Not to mention the fact that Ozai is likely has a very high sex drive (have you seen his body?) yet we never see any concubines in the palace.

Well because he wanted to produce heirs with Azula and so waited until she was of age to marry her and then have his new heirs.

Why did Azula collapsed after being told to say behind despite getting the title she always desired, Ozai having a logical reason to leave her behind (people would try to invade the Fire Nation..which is what happened with Zuko and Katara), and Azula eventually getting to inherit the Phoenix Empire?

Well, Ozai leaving her behind shows that Ozai thinks all Azula is worth after her numerous failures is producing heirs, making Azula realize that his bedroom talk was all lies and that he never loved her, only saw her as a tool. Moreover, all his words about her being a better Fire Lady than Ursa are lies since they both ended up in the same spot in life; only existing as Ozai’s (unwilling) broodmares.

Why does Azula hate and hallucinate Ursa despite Ursa being by all accounts a loving mother? And why does Azula avoid and hate reflective surfaces?

Well, because Azula’s subconscious wishes that Ursa was there to protect her from the abuse and also subconsciously reckoning with the long buried knowledge that part of the reason why Ozai came onto her is because she looks like a clone of her very beautiful mother.

Moreover, it would explain why Azula thinks Ursa thought of Azula as a monster when Ursa never said anything like that or gave any indications of seeing Azula like that.

For Azula would likely think, subconsciously, why would my mother leave me with a monster unless I am a monster?

It would also explain, partially, why Azula goes from someone who is a bully, but loves & plays with her bro at 8, to someone who smiles when Zuko is burned at 13.

This is because Azula would think that all Zuko has to do to be in Ozai’s good graces is be a good firebender, a ruthless leader, and follow Ozai commands perfectly & without any hesitation.

Yet Zuko can’t even do any of that while she, in addition to previous requirements, has to give her mind, body, and soul to Ozai.

It would also explain why Azula is so frantically loyal to Ozai (and even loves him) even when it is obvious to everyone that Ozai only cares for himself (he literally groomed her); why someone could be so fucked up and go insane at the age of 14 (victims of child sex abuse end up suffering from mental illness thanks to their trauma; and also explain why Azula has such sexual mannerisms (ex. her interaction with Sokka on DoBs) and voice acting while also being the only main female character to constantly wear makeup that is quite similar to her mother’s (she is trying to appear much older than she is while also trying to “replace” her mother for her father’s sake and maybe even for her own sake as well).

Finally, it would contextualize that infamous bedroom scene, or more generally the subtle incest vibe between her and Zuko, by explaining her behavior towards him as attempt to unnerve him and/or an attempt to pass on her abuse to another person (which is very common).

So the next thing you guys are likely going to say,” Ok then. Maybe Ozula might explain a lot of things but how would you explain the fact that Azula has never shown any indication that her father touched her like that? Moreover, what would be the benefit of introducing such a dark topic into the franchise.”

Well to the first question, Azula would never bring it up because of some combo of: it is shameful as hell, she doesn't think it is wrong because it is all she knows, she still loves Ozai deep down, and/or thinks it her fault just like it was Zuko's fault for getting burned by Ozai and banished for talking out in the war council and/or not fighting back at the Agni Kai.

And as to the second question, well there would be a lot of benefits.

For example, imagine the lore/story potential we could get out of a canon Ozula, as outlined in the headcanon down below?

One of the reasons why the places like Yu Duo became quickly filled with mixed families was due to a mix of sex slaves and families selling their daughters to their wealthy colonziers.

Also the Fire Nation had an extensive sex trackiffing network to service wealthy nobles and the Firelord; Ozai was in charge of this network and was able to blackmail people like Mai's father into supporting him in court and eventually his regime, especially in the early days when it looked like Iroh might challenge Ozai.

The reason why Zhao kept getting promotions despite his incompetence was because he was the best at capturing girls/women to keep the supply running high and Ozai had to keep him happy or else Zhao would spill the beans.

The reason why Ukano supported the NOS despite Zuko offering him a job and most likely becoming his father-in-law is because he was part of the network and it was a matter of time before Zuko found out and exposed him.

Azula helped procure women for Ozai during the 3 years Zuko/Iroh were away and this is part of the reason why Ty Lee and Mai distanced themselves from her (they thought they were next even though Azula would never do that to them) & why they followed her despite loathing her until someone they cared about was going to die (they thought Azula would punish them by making them into sex slaves though Azula “cares” about them too much to ever do that to them).

Azula was also abused by Ozai in those 3 years as raping women and girls weren't enough for him anymore and needed a new kink, incest, especially since Azula looks like her mom, who is one of the most attractive women in ATLA and Ursa was long gone.

And even disregarding the lore potential, there is the potential (positive) real world impact a seriously written Ozula could have.

For it one of the best things about the Avatar franchise is its ability to deal with complex & sensitive topics such as child & spousal abuse (The Fire Nation Royal Family; Yakone’s family; Toph’s family), abusive/toxic friendships (The Dangerous Ladies), sexism (S1 Sokka & Pakku), PTSD (Korra), genocide (Airbender genocide & Southern Water Bender Genocide), propaganda/brainwashing (The Fire Nation schools & the Dai Li), and imperialism (Post-Sozin to the start of FL Zuko’s reign Fire Nation) with the respect they deserve while making it palpable to kids.

And considering the post-MeToo world we live in, what better dark and taboo topic to tackle than sexual abuse?

Especially considering that most people aren’t really aware that most victims of sexual abuse where abused by someone close to them, that most people don’t seem to recognize when such grooming occurs or that it is a bad thing until it is too late (ex. Drake Bell, Kyle Massey, Drake (The Rapper), R. Kelly, etc.), and most victims don’t react to their abuse the way most people think they should (ex. Fight back or tell others).

Thus, couldn’t Ozula be used to educate people on the signs of such grooming and/or abuse and how to properly help such victims?

I also think that seeing Azula overcome the effects of a canon Ozula could also provide healing for someone who played a pivotal role in bringing Azula to life: Grey DeLise.

It was a shock for me to find out, but Grey DeLise has repeatedly said that she got abused by people her mother let into their home and that her mother did nothing despite obviously knowing what was going on.

Considering that DeLise heavily projects onto Azula (including Azula’s relationship with Ursa), has a history of sexualizing Azula (she explicitly said she voiced the bedroom scene with Zucest in mind), and went to really dark place to record Azula’s breakdown, is it crazy to say that DeLise had Ozula as her one of personal headcanons and that it affected her Azula performance?

That is why, in combination with everything else I have said, I think Ozula has the potential to have a real impact how sexual abuse victims are treated and viewed.

Imagine Ozai plotting to remove Ursa, Azulon, Iroh, and Zuko from the palace so he could "play" with Azula unimpeded after almost being caught several different times while also taking things to the next “level”?

Imagine the goading of Azulon/Ursa's banishment and Zuko's burning/banishment all part of this plot?

Imagine Azula making inappropriate jokes about fathers breaking in their daughters to Mai & Ty Lee, causing them to be unnerved while Azula wonders what was wrong with her apt description of father-daughter relationships?

Imagine Ozai spending the next three years molding Azula to not only be his perfect pet weapon but also his future consort once she is of age.?

Imagine his anger when Azula comes home with her childhood friends and Zuko, cutting down on their alone time?

Imagine his horror when he finds out that Azula non-ironically enjoys her time with them more than him despite the fact Ozai had groomed her from a young age to only love him?

Imagine his happiness when Zuko leaves and Mai and Ty Lee are later jailed, allowing him unlimited time with Azula again, despite the hardships Azula’s lapses in judgment regarding her friends & brother. Not to mention Ozai thinking that he once again gets to be the sole attention of Azula's affections?

Imagine Ozai finding out Azula non-ironically misses her brother and friends and so he leaves her behind during Sozin's Comet as punishment for her conflicted emotions & past failures?

Imagine Ozai defeated coming home to see Azula chained, physically and mentally broken, screaming for her bitch of a mother. Only then realizing, for a fleeting moment, the damage he did to his daughter, only to go back to feeling rage at her humiliating loss & even more humiliating loss of sanity?

Imagine Ozai patiently waiting to be reunited with his pet heir and once they meet in his jail cell, convincing Azula that they can be together again if Azula can get a hold of that accursed letter and kill Ursa, the only person who could possibly refute it?

Imagine Ozai hearing that Azula failed in her mission due to being unable to kill her mother despite having Ursa literally in her hands, marking the first time Azula ever disobeyed him? Moreover, imagine his rage once he hears how she disowned him and basically dismantled from within an organization trying to reinstate him on the throne?

Imagine Ozai confronting Ursa, Iroh, and Zuko once they find out about his abuse of Azula, thinking he has once again found a way to manipulate them? Only to find out that they are through with him for good and that they will help Azula heal from his abuse.

Imagine Azula finally going through a healing arc, where with the help of well-trained healers and her mother (who she bonds with over both being victims of Ozai), she learns that what Ozai did to her was wrong, how healthy relationships actually work, & how her abuse never justified her abuse of others?

Imagine Azula then undergoing an atonement arc, where, among other things, she becomes a leading advocate for mental health issues and sexual abuse victims, eventually working with Zuko & Aang to to create shelters & a proto-CPS in addition to radically changing the Fire Nations views on sex & consent?

Imagine Azula eventually finding a loving partner and engaging in a mutually loving relationship, eventually having her own child who she raises in the exact opposite fashion that Ozai raised her while also being a loving aunt to Izumi?

Imagine Ozai thinking that Azula will one day return to him, thinking that he has irreversibly molded her to need him the same way a baby needs its pacifier. Only for him to die never being visited by Azula again, who has long stopped caring for Ozai and hasn’t spared him a thought for a long time & will never do so again?

Therefore, in sum, Ozula has the potential to do to victims of sexual abuse what the depiction of the Ozai-Zuko relationship, and Zuko eventually realizing his father is abusive & disowning, did for victims of abuse while also maybe giving DeLise some form of catharsis.

Thus, in the long list of bad things Ozai did (abuse his wife/son/daughter, kill his father/ruler, illegally urusp his bro, attempt a genocide of a continent, attempt to kill a 12 year old, turn Azula into a child solider/general, etc.) is molesting Azula the worst thing he could have done?

Or I am crazy with a need to go to a therapist for my many unresolved issues?

More Notes:

https://youtu.be/UjLzX1xPW1U?t=316

Grey: they're like 'why are you sexualizing everything?" because i do that in my whole life, my whole life is sexualized Olivia: same. that’s why Grey and I get along Grey: we've... got... abusive childhoods Olivia: uhhh Grey: uh... well I do Olivia: I don't, I just like sex! Grey: depending on who i'm doing it with... then yeah. Olivia: visibly uncomfortable Grey: I've not liked it a lot as much as I've liked it. Olivia: 0_0 Brad is like what... the hell.. is happening

Grey also talks about her abuse in an interview with Mental Illness Happy Hour where she details how her mother abandoned her to people she knew were raping her. And Grey has repeated her story in multiple interviews over the years.

----

Looooong-ass post ahead! You're not crazy, and there is subtext for Ozula... just like there is for Maizula, something I actually like but that I personally believe didn't happen - and if anyone reading this has not yet seen my first answer to why I don't think Ozai sexually abused Azula, I recommend you do so: https://hello-nichya-here.tumblr.com/post/650918965929000960/trigger-warning-i-know-you-talk-a-lot-about-how

While I see the merit of any good story, and I have read good stories that interpret Ozai and Azula's relationship as having involved sexual assault at some point, it is far more likely that in the actual canon (be it just in the show or also taking into account the comics) that simply neved happened, and I'll explain why.

About Ozai never remarrying

It would be very strange for Ozai to never try to have more heirs, and constantly endanger the ones he does have... until we remember that the only noble family in Avatar that has more than two kids is Ty Lee's, and that there are people like Kyoshi who literally over two centuries old when she died. Avatar is a very mature kid's show, but it is still a kid's show, with characters who control the elements and don't get a single scratch on them in situations that would severely injure or kill a normal human being, and the writers likely didn't want to add more characters to an already complicated, political plot like the Fire Nation Royal Family - which is why Iroh never remarried, Azulon's wife was already dead, there were no Lu Ten flashbacks, etc. If they went to such lengths to avoid creating too many characters, it makes sense that Zuko and Azula have no step-mother and no half-siblings in the show. Furthermore, the show clearly wanted to push Azula and Zuko's rivalry - adding another sibling would force their attention (and ours) to shift to said sibling, which is why Kiyi only was created in the comics that were focusing on the royal family, after Zuko became Fire Lord, and even then she is Ursa's daughter but not Ozai's, meaning Azula is still the only real "rival" Zuko has.

Ozai's supposed obsession with Ursa

Despite the radical change in the story of their marriage, I'd say that Ozai was NOT obsessed with Ursa, be it in the show where she consented to marry him, or in the comics where she kidnapped and raped. Princes were expected to marry and have heirs, and the war meant they'd need to have powerful heirs. He married Ursa (against her will or otherwise depending on the version of the story), had two kids with her (the standard in their universe), and encouraged said kids to be ruthless, punishing them when didn't meet his expectations (the Agni Kai and Zuko's banishment were cruel, but they were the type of behavior the Fire Nation rewarded). We need to remember that Ozai's only real problem with the hierarchy and expectations of his nation was when he had to see his brother be Fire Lord instead of him, because Ozai's only real obsession was the crown.

Yet he didn't kill his father until Ursa came up with a plan to do it so she could save Zuko, didn't kill Iroh, smiled in disdain when Zuko said he would help the Avatar defeat him, and constantly endangered Zuko and Azula despite having no other heirs. That behavior might seem strange, until you realize Ozai did truly respect the autority of Fire Lord at one point, but after he managed to steal the crown, he felt like he won absolutely everything - and to prove that he became the Phoenix King, showing he was above even that. He didn't need Ursa, Azula, or any other woman to give strong heirs, because Azula was already filling that role. There is no evidence he was obsessed with Ursa because he only married her because it was the norm (same logic applies to the possible sexual abuse she suffered - she was supposed to give her husband heirs, so Ozai forcing himself on her could easily just be him doing what was expected of him), and then once she was no longer needed and he would actually be in a more favorable position if she disappeared he CHOSE to banish her - the law said he had to punish her for killing Azulon, but the law also said he shouldn't have let her kill his father in the first place. And in the comics he threated to kill both their kids if she came back. If he was obsessed with her, he would have used their kid's lives to force her to stay and never say a word about what happened to his father. But didn't do that, because he didn't want Ursa around.

Could he be obsessed with Azula herself instead of thinking of her as a replacement for Ursa?

I personally don't think so, mostly because of his actions towards both his kids and because of the intentions the writers had. During The Beach, Ozai sends Azula away for a little while with Zuko, Mai and Ty Lee. On the meeting before the eclipse, he had Zuko at his right hand. On their last scene together, Ozai looks annoyed that Azula is around, stabs her in the back, lies to her face, and then leaves her. Finally, when he is last seen on screen, he doesn't ask Zuko what happened to her, if she is in prison, if she lost her bending too, if she is dead... nothing.

Ozai's behavior towards Azula is much more similar to his treatment of Zuko than most people realize. He shuts them both down when try to be anything other useful weapons - be it when they are showing "weakness", failing on their missions, trying to betray him, or trying to be equals to him. His reaction to Zuko's "All I ever wanted was for you to love me" was basically the same he had to Azula's "I thought we were going to do this together/This was my idea/I deserve to be by your side/You can't treat me like Zuko". He instantly told them both to shut the fuck up. He has no affection for them - for Azula - be it a normal one or a twisted one. They might as well not exist when they're not winning him battles.

On top of all that, comics!Ozai full on said he'd kill Zuko and Azula if Ursa didn't stay away, and considering how little regard he showed to anyone and how easy it would be for him to find a new wife if he had to, it is very clear he meant it. And a plot-line that was originally going to happen in book 3 but was cut (likely due to there not being enough time to explore it) had Ozai planning an arranged marriage for Azula - if he wanted her for himself, why was he more than ready to give her away to some rando the second she was old enough to marry?

Intention of the writers VS Intention of the actors

Assuming Grey did want there to have, at the very least, subtext for Ozula, we still run into a different problem: her intention goes against what is presented in canon. With something like Zucest or Tyzula, it is easier to make it work despite the pairings not being canon - they are meant to be complicated, unhealthy dynamics in which the characters involved have both negative and positive feelings for each other. So you could say Zuko and Azula were attracted to each other AND were still rivals. You could say Azula was in love with Ty Lee, and the feeling was mutual, but Ty Lee still chose to save Mai at the boiling rock regardless because it was the right thing to do for her friend.

With Ozula, however, it'd lead to a Zutara-esque situation (again, assuming Grey really did want that subtext to exist, since she didn't specify if that was what she meant when she said she went into a dark place while acting Azula's scenes in the finale). Dante Basco, aka Zuko, is the capitain of the Zutara ship, so any scene between Zuko and Katara gets at least a bit of subtext (and Zutara actually had full on ship-bait moments)... but the show also made it clear that the characters were NOT interested in each other like that, and they both ended up with different people. That means Zutara has some base for it, but it is still NOT CANON. Ozula is on even less solid ground since the overwhelming majority of the text activelly goes against it - again, Ozai seemed uniterested in both his wife and his daugheter, and activelly tried to distance himself from them.

How Azula flirts VS how she acts around Ozai

If we assume all of Azula's behaviors towards people like Zuko and Sokka was indeed intentional, we need to ask ourselves: was it really flirting or an attempt to unnerve them?

With that assumption in mind, I mostly see her actions towards Sokka as having been based on a display of power instead of flirting, but I can understand if people disagree. I fully believe she was attracted to Zuko and wanted both to intimidate him and flirt with him, and even discussed it at length on the link bellow (and offered another possible explanation of why she might not have been interested in Sokka after all) https://hello-nichya-here.tumblr.com/post/654197363889635328/zucest-is-it-really-flirting

When we take that behavior into account, regardless of motivation, and then compare it to her actually trying to flirt with Chan, we see that Azula has different styles of flirting, both of which are based on warpped perceptions of how normal interactions work - one having a predator/prey vibe with open ridicule, and the other with awkward/false flattery that is accidentally insulting and/or scary.

However, if we look at how she acts with Ozai, we see that she acts like a completely different person. She is very respectful and very distant - sort of how servants and guards act around her. That shows that despite her love for her father being actual canon (unlike any attraction she possibly felt for any character) their relationship is VERY formal. Azula doesn't take any liberties with her father, making it very unlikely that she learned her more "inapropriate" behaviors from him.

Azula's trauma

Azula was neglected by her mother and turned into a child soldier by her father. In Zuko Alone, we see Ursa spending a lot of time with Zuko but not with Azula, harshly reprimanding her without trying to understand her motives (like when she asked Zuko why he hurt the turtle-ducks), and even asking "What is wrong with that child?". Add in the over the top neglect she faced in the comics, the obvious guilt Azula was starting to feel for her actions in book 3, as well as the fact that a parent suddenly leaving like Ursa did can severely affect their child's mental health (which was likely to have been fragile in the first place considering Azula's more distressing behavior as a kid, as well as the psychological torment and hallucinations she dealt with in the finale) it makes perfect sense for Azula to believe her mother saw her as monster. Her claim that their mother liked Zuko more and her reaction to Mai's "I love Zuko more than I fear you" shows that her problems with her mother come believing she was not loved while her brother was - could she have also wanted Ursa to be there to protect her from sexual abuse? Sure. She could have simply wanted her mother to procted her from literally anything, or just be by her side and be proud of her.

This trauma also explains her freaking out as Ozai left her in the finale. She had recently lost Zuko, Ty Lee and Mai - the later of the three having accidentally touched an old, open wound of hers. Ozai was all she had left, and he turned his back on her after all she did for him. That was the last straw, and finally broke. You can add sexual assault or literally any kind of abuse to the story to explore a new theme/possibility, but it not existing in canon is not a plot-hole because the story works perfectly without it.

Imagine...

"Imagine Ozai killed Azulon and banished Ursa and Zuko so he could have Azula to himself, abused her, and then was mad when she brought Zuko home, with Mai and Ty Lee coming along"

I can imagine it. What I cannot is remember it. It can be a good, important, cathartic story, but is not the story we saw in the show. In the show we saw Ursa planning Azulon's death, not Ozai. We saw how his abuse was 99% purely psychological. We saw Ozai banish Zuko years after he supposedly got rid of the other two impediments of his abuse to Azula. We saw him not giving a damn about Mai and Ty Lee being around, welcoming Zuko home and rewarding him for "killing the Avatar", and then making Azula leave with them. And above all, we saw him shut Azula down the second she tried to have any kind of relationship with him that involved being anything more than a killing-machine.

Ozula can be an interesting plot, but said plot exists solely in theory and fanfics, not in the actual canon.

#submission #azula #ozai #azula meta #ozula #abuse #rape #ursa #long post #ridiculously long post

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beatriceeagle · 5 years ago

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I'm more of a fantasy than sci-fi person, but consider my interest piqued. Why should I watch farscape?

Okay, the thing is, every Farscape fan’s pitch on Why You, Yes You, Should Watch Farscape ends up sounding very similar, and that’s because Farscape is a black hole that sucks you in and does things to your brain, and after you’ve watched it you are never, ever the same, which incidentally is basically the plot of Farscape.

I would summarize the basic plot for you, but that’s work, and luckily, the show’s credits sequence includes a handy summary that I will provide instead of doing that work: “My name is John Crichton, an astronaut. A radiation wave hit, and I got shot through a wormhole. Now I’m lost in some distant part of the universe on a ship, a living ship, full of strange alien life forms. Help me. Listen, please. Is there anybody out there who can hear me? I’m being hunted by an insane military commander. Doing everything I can. I’m just looking for a way home.“

So let me break down that monologue into its component reasons you should watch Farscape.

1) Some of the strange alien life forms are Muppets.

Farscape a co-production with the Jim Henson Company, and while there are many aliens played by humans in make-up, there are also a considerable number (including two of the regular crew) who are Muppets. By which I do not mean Kermit. I mean really gorgeous, elaborate works of art.

Also, even a lot of the humans-in-makeup aliens just look cool, and incredibly weird. Here’s an alien who appears in a single episode of season 1:

Not that there aren’t, you know, occasional Star Trek-style “these guys are just humans with weird hair,” or whatever, but in general, the aliens on Farscape look really alien. And that’s more than an aesthetic choice; it’s Farscape’s driving narrative principle. The aliens look alien, they act alien, they have alien values.

You know how a lot of sci-fi shows will have a stand-in for “fuck,” like Battlestar Galactica has “frak”? Well, Farscape has “frell.” And also “dren.” And yotz, hezmana, mivonks, loomas, tralk, snurch, eema, drannit, dench, biznak, arn, drad, fahrbot, narl. Some of those are swear words, but some of them are just words, never explicitly translated, that the alien characters will pepper into their speech, because, well, why should translator microbes be able to completely translate all the nuances of an alien culture? You’ll pick it up from context. One time, in passing, a character mentions that he’s familiar with the concept of suicide, but there’s no word for it in his language. I cannot emphasize to you enough how fleeting this moment is; the episode is not about suicide, we’re not having a great exchange of cultural ideas—at the time, the characters are running down a corridor in a crisis, as they are about 70 percent of the time—it’s just that the subject got brought up, and this character needed to talk around the fact that he literally didn’t have a word, in that moment. Things like that happen all the time, on Farscape.

Because more than anything else, Farscape is a show about culture shock. John Crichton is this straight, white Southern guy, at the top of his game—he’s an astronaut! he’s incredibly high status!—and then he ends up on the other side of the galaxy, where none of his cultural markers of privilege hold any meaning, where he doesn’t know the rules, where he literally can’t even open the doors. And he has to unlearn the idea that humanity is central, that he is the norm.

2) John Crichton, an astronaut, is pretty great.

A show that’s about a straight white guy with high status having to learn that he’s not the center of the universe could easily be centered around a really insufferable person, but one of the subtle things that makes Farscape so wonderful is that Crichton is, for the most part, pretty excellent. He has a lot of presumptions to unlearn because almost anyone in his cultural position would, but he’s also just a stand-up guy: compassionate, intelligent, open-minded, decent, forgiving, brave, hopeful.

And the galaxy tries to kick a whole lot of that out of him. It doesn’t succeed, mostly, but if Farscape is about anything other than culture shock, it’s about the lasting effects of trauma. How you can go through a wormhole one person, and experience things that turn you into someone you don’t recognize.

That’s kind of grim-sounding, but ultimately, what I’m trying to say is that Farscape is almost fanatically devoted to character work. Crichton is not the only character who sounds like he should be one thing and ends up being another. All of the characters—all of them, all of them, even the annoying ones—are complicated wonders. And you don’t have to wonder whether the events of the episode you’re watching are going to matter. They will. Everything that happens to the characters leaves a mark. Everything leaves them forever changed. Whether it’s mentioned explicitly or not—and often enough, it’s not explicit—the characters remember what has happened to them.

3) The living ship houses a lot of excellent women, among them the ship itself.

Ah, the women of Farscape, thou art the loves of my fucking life.

There’s Aeryn Sun, former Peacekeeper (that’s the military that the “insane military commander” hails from) now fugitive, currently learning the meaning of the word “compassion” (literally). She will break your fingers and also your heart. John/Aeryn is the main canon romantic ship.

There’s Pa’u Zhoto Zhaan, a priestess of the ninth level, current pacifist, former anarchist. Sorry, leading anarchist. She orgasms in bright light! (Oh my god, Farscape.)

There’s Chiana, my fucking bestie, a teenage(ish? ages in Farscape are weird) fugitive on the run from a repressive authoritarian state. Chiana is like a seductress con artist grifter thief who mostly just wants to survive so that she can have fun, damn it. Characters on Farscape do not really discuss sexualities (sex, yes, sexualities, no) and it would be fair to say that several of them do not fall along human sexuality lines generally, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that Chiana is canonically not straight.

Then there’s Moya, the ship herself, and it’s hard to get a straight read on Moya’s personality, since she mostly can’t speak. But she definitely has opinions, and things and people she cares about. And she moves the plot, though that gets into spoiler territory.

Past first season, further excellent women show up: Jool (controversial, but I like her), Sikozu (I once saw a Tumblr meme where someone had marked down that Sikozu would lose her shit when someone pronounced “gif” wrong, and that’s absolutely correct, and it’s why I love her), and Noranti (who is incredibly weird, and incredibly hard to summarize, but man, you gotta love her willingness to just show up and do her thing). Plus, there’s a recurring female villain, Grayza, who I could write probably multiple essays about. (I don’t know how you will feel about Grayza, as not everyone loves her, but I think she’s fucking fascinating, especially because she’s not actually the only recurring female villain. We also get Ahkna!)

(Side note: I should mention, here, that the cast of Farscape is really, really white. There is one cast member of color, Lani Tupu, but he pretty much represents the entirety of even, like, incidental diversity in casting for the series.)

Anyway, Farscape is full of awesome women, and also awesome and unexpected men, and it really enjoys playing with audience expectations of gender roles, generally. Literal entire books have been written about the way that Farscape fucks around with sex, sexuality, and gender. It’s a little weird because it was the late 90s/early 2000s, and sometimes that does come through, but Farscape’s guiding principle was always to try not to present American culture of the time as the norm, so like. It is not.

(An aside on Farscape and sex: Literally every character on Farscape has sexual tension with every other character. If you are a shipper, this is a Good Show, because no matter who you ship, there will not only be subtext, you will get a Moment of some kind. Multiple characters kiss the Muppet. Farscape is dedicated to getting into the nitty-gritty of the galaxy—I like to think of it as showing the guts of the universe—so a lot of the show is kind of squishy. They live on a biomechanoid ship, instead of androids there are “bioloids,” there’s a lot of focus on strange alien biologies, and lots of weird glowing fluids and things. I think the sex thing is kind of part and parcel of the larger biology focus: Farscape is really fascinated with how we all eat and evolve and live and die and, well, fuck. Which is in turn, kind of part of its focus on making everything really alien.)

4) Other stuff you should know.

Farscape as a whole is excellent, but it was kind of the product of creative anarchy—an Australian/American coproduction (oh yeah, everyone except Crichton speaks with an Australian accent) that was also partnered with the Henson company, whose showrunners were based in America but whose actual production all took place in Australia, and who was just constantly trying new things. So individual episodes can vary wildly in quality. It really takes off in the back half of season one, but no season is without a few off episodes.

It is extraordinarily funny, and I really think I haven’t stressed that enough. It’s one of the shows I want to quote the most in my daily life, but almost all of its humor is really context-dependent, and if you just wander around going, “Hey Stark? What’s black and white, and black and white, and black and white?” people look at you really funny.

It’s very conversant with pop culture generally (although obviously sci-fi specifically, and Star Trek most specifically of all) and really enjoys deconstructing tropes, often to the effect of, “Well, Crichton really does not know what to do here, does he?” but sometimes just to be interesting.

There are also a lot of themes about science, and its uses and misuses.

The whole thing is fucking epic, and if you get invested at all, will take you on an emotional ride.

This show is weird. I know that that’s probably come across by now, but I think it’s worth reiterating as its own point: Farscape is so weird. Like, proudly, unabashedly, trying its hardest, weird. An amazing kind of weird.

If you’re into fantasy, you should know that there’s a recurring villain who’s just a wizard. Like, they don’t bother to explain it any more than that, he’s just a fucking wizard.

In summary: You should watch Farscape because it is a weird, wild, emotional, epic romance/drama/action/allegory full of Muppets and leather and one-liners and emotional gut punches and love, and if you let it, it will worm its way into you and never let go, which, now that I think of it, is another Farscape plot.

Send me meta prompts to distract me from my migraine!

#farscape #meta

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1921designs · 4 years ago

Text

Smuggler

“Then what are you complaining about?”

“About hypocrisy. About lies. About misrepresentation. About that smuggler’s behavior to which you drive the uranist.”

—André Gide, Corydon, Fourth Dialogue

I REMEMBER MY first kiss with absolute clarity. I was reading on a black chaise longue, upholstered with shiny velour, and it was right after dinner, the hour of freedom before I was obliged to begin my homework. I was sixteen.

It must have been early autumn or late spring, because I know I was in school at the time, and the sun was still out. I was shocked and thrilled by it, and reading that passage, from a novel by Hermann Hesse, made the book feel intensely real, fusing Hesse’s imaginary world with the physical object I was holding in my hands. I looked down at it, and back at the words on the page, and then around the room, which was empty, and I felt a keen and deep sense of discovery and shame. Something new had entered my life, undetected by anyone else, delivered safely and surreptitiously to me alone. To borrow an idea from André Gide, I had become a smuggler.

It wasn’t, of course, the first kiss I had encountered in a book. But this was the first kiss between two boys, characters in Beneath the Wheel, a short, sad novel about a sensitive student who gains admission to an elite school but then fails, quickly and inexorably, after he becomes entwined in friendship with a reckless, poetic classmate. I was stunned by their encounter—which most readers, and almost certainly Hesse himself, would have assigned to that liminal stage of adolescence before boys turn definitively to heterosexual interests. For me, however, it was the first evidence that I wasn’t entirely alone in my own desires. It made my loneliness seem more present to me, more intelligible and tangible, and something that could be named. Even more shocking was the innocence with which Hesse presented it:

An adult witnessing this little scene might have derived a quiet joy from it, from the tenderly inept shyness and the earnestness of these two narrow faces, both of them handsome, promising, boyish yet marked half with childish grace and half with shy yet attractive adolescent defiance.

Certainly no adult I knew would have derived anything like joy from this little scene—far from it. Where I grew up, a decaying Rust Belt city in upstate New York, there was no tradition of schoolboy romance, at least none that had made it to my public high school, where the hierarchies were rigid, the social categories inviolable, the avenues for sexual expression strictly and collectively policed by adults and youth alike. These were the early days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when recent gains in visibility and political legitimacy for gay rights were being vigorously countered by a newly resurgent cultural conservatism. The adults in my world, had they witnessed two lonely young boys reach out to each other in passionate friendship, would have thrashed them before committing them to the counsel of religion or psychiatry.

But the discovery of that kiss changed me. Reading, which had seemed a retreat from the world, was suddenly more vital, dangerous, and necessary. If before I had read haphazardly, bouncing from adventure to history to novels and the classics, now I read with focus and determination. For the next five years, I sought to expand and open the tiny fissure that had been created by that kiss. Suddenly, after years of feeling almost entirely disconnected from the sexual world, my reading was finally spurred both by curiosity and Eros.

From an oppressive theological academy in southern Germany, where students struggled to learn Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, to the rooftops of Paris during the final days of Adolf Hitler’s occupation, I sought in books the company of poets and scholars, hoodlums and thieves, tormented aristocrats bouncing around the spas and casinos of Europe, expat Americans slumming it in the City of Light, an introspective Roman emperor lamenting a lost boyfriend, and a middle-aged author at the height of his powers and the brink of exhaustion. These were the worlds, and the men, presented by Gide, Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, James Baldwin, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil, to name only those whose writing has lingered with me. Some of these authors were linked by ties of friendship. Some of them were themselves more or less openly homosexual, others ambiguous or fluid in their desires, and others, by all evidence, bisexual or primarily heterosexual. It would be too much to say their work formed a canon of gay literature—but for those who sought such a canon, their work was about all one could find.

And yet, in retrospect, and after rereading many of those books more than thirty years later, I’m astonished by how sad, furtive, and destructive an image of sexuality they presented. Today we have an insipid idea of literature as selfdiscovery, and a reflexive conviction that young people—especially those struggling with identity or prejudice—need role models. But these books contained no role models at all, and they depicted self-discovery as a cataclysmic severance from society. The price of survival, for the self-aware homosexual, was a complete inversion of values, dislocation, wandering, and rebellion. One of the few traditions you were allowed to keep was misogyny. And most of the men represented in these books were not willing to pay the heavy price of rebellion and were, to appropriate Hesse’s phrase, ground beneath the wheel.

The value of these books wasn’t anything wholesome they contained, or any moral instruction they offered. Rather, it was the process of finding them, the thrill of reading them, the way the books themselves, like the men they depicted, detached you from the familiar moral landscape. They gave a name to the palpable, physical loneliness of sexual solitude, but they also greatly increased your intellectual and emotional solitude. Until very recently, the canon of literature for a gay kid was discovered entirely alone, by threads of connection that linked authors from intertwined demimondes. It was smuggling, but also scavenging. There was no Internet, no “customers who bought this item also bought,” no helpful librarians steeped in the discourse of tolerance and diversity, and certainly no one in the adult world who could be trusted to give advice and advance the project of limning this still mostly forbidden body of work.

The pleasure of finding new access to these worlds was almost always punctured by the bleakness of the books themselves. One of the two boys who kissed in that Hesse novel eventually came apart at the seams, lapsed into nervous exhaustion, and then one afternoon, after too much beer, he stumbled or willingly slid into a slow-moving river, where his body was found, like Ophelia’s, floating serenely and beautiful in the chilly waters. Hesse would blame poor Hans’s collapse on the severity of his education and a lamentable disconnection from nature, friendship, and congenial social structures. But surely that kiss, and that friendship with a wayward poet, had something to do with it. As Hans is broken to pieces, he remembers that kiss, a sign that at some level Hesse felt it must be punished.

Hans was relatively lucky, dispensed with chaste, poetic discretion, like the lover in a song cycle by Franz Schubert or Robert Schumann. Other boys who found themselves enmeshed in the milieu of homoerotic desire were raped, bullied, or killed, or lapsed into madness, disease, or criminality. They were disposable or interchangeable, the objects of pederastic fixation or the instrumental playthings of adult characters going through aesthetic, moral, or existential crises. Even the survivors face, at the end of these novels, the bleakest existential crises. Even the survivors face, at the end of these novels, the bleakest of futures: isolation, wandering, and a perverse form of aging in which the loss of youth is never compensated with wisdom.

One doesn’t expect novelists to give us happy endings. But looking back on many of the books I read during my age of smuggling, I’m profoundly disturbed by what I now recognize as their deeply entrenched homophobia. I wonder if it took a toll on me, if what seemed a process of self-liberation was inseparable from infection with the insecurities, evasions, and hypocrisy stamped into gay identity during the painful, formative decades of its nascence in the last century. I wonder how these books will survive, and in what form: historical documents, symptoms of an ugly era, cris de coeur of men (mostly men) who had made it only a few steps along the long road to true equality? Will we condescend to them, and treat their anguish with polite, clinical detachment? I hesitate to say that these books formed me, because that suggests too simplistic a connection between literature and character. But I can’t be the only gay man in middle age who now wonders if what seemed a gift at the time—the discovery of a literature of same-sex desire just respectable enough to circulate without suspicion—was in fact more toxic than a youth of that era could ever have anticipated.

Before the mid-1990s, when the Internet began to collapse the distinction between cities, suburbs, and everywhere else, books were the most reliable access to the larger world, and the only access to books was the bookstore or the library. The physical fact of a book was both a curse and a blessing. It made reading a potentially dangerous act if you were reading the wrong things, and of course one had to physically find and possess the book. But the mere fact of being a book, the fact that someone had published the words and they were circulating in the world, gave a book the presumption of respectability, especially if it was deemed “literature.” There were, of course, bad or dangerous books in the world—and self-appointed guardians who sought to suppress and destroy them—but decent people assumed that these were safely contained within universities.

I borrowed my copy of Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel from the library, so I can’t be sure whether it contained any of the small clues that led to other like-minded books. At least one copy I have found in a used bookstore does have an invaluable signpost on the back cover: “Along with Heinrich Mann’s The Blue Angel, Emil Strauss’s Friend Death, and Robert Musil’s Young Törless, all of which came out in the same period, it belongs to the genre of school novels.” Perhaps that’s what prompted me to read Musil’s far more complicated, beautifully written, and excruciating schoolboy saga. Hans, shy, studious, and trusting, led me to Törless, a bolder, meaner, more dangerous boy.

Other threads of connection came from the introductions, afterwords, footnotes, and the solicitations to buy other books found just inside the back cover. When I first started reading independently of classroom assignments and the usual boy’s diet of Rudyard Kipling, Jonathan Swift, Alexandre Dumas, and Jules Verne—reading without guidance and with all the odd detours and byways of an autodidact—I devised a three-part test for choosing a new volume: first, a book had to have a black or orange spine, then the colors of Penguin Classics, which someone had assured me was a reliable brand; second, I had to be able to finish the book within a few days, lest I waste the opportunity of my weekly visit to the bookstore; and third, I had to be hooked by the narrative within one or two pages. That is certainly what led me, by chance, to Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, a rather slight and pretentious novel of incestuous infatuation, gender slippage, homoerotic desire, and surreal distortions of time and space. I knew nothing of Cocteau but was intrigued by one of his line drawings on the cover, which showed two androgynous teenagers, and a summary which assured it was about a boy named Paul, who worshipped a fellow student.

I still have that copy of Cocteau. In the back there was yet more treasure, a whole page devoted to advertising the novels of Gide (The Immoralist is described as “the story of man’s rebellion against social and sexual conformity”) and another to Genet (The Thief’s Journal is “a voyage of discovery beyond all moral laws; the expression of a philosophy of perverted vice, the working out of an aesthetic degradation”). These little précis were themselves a guide to the coded language—“illicit, corruption, hedonism”—that often, though not infallibly, led to other enticing books. And yet one might follow these little broken twigs and crushed leaves only to end up in the frustrating world of mere decadence, Wagnerian salons, undirected voluptuousness, the enervating eccentricities of Joris-Karl Huysmans or the chaste, coy allusions to vice in Wilde.

Finally, there were a handful of narratives that had successfully transitioned into open and public respectability, even if always slightly tainted by scandal. If the local theater company still performed Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, who could fault a boy for reading The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Conveniently, a 1982 Bantam Classics edition contained both, and also the play Salomé. Wilde’s novel was a skein of brilliant banter stretched over a rather silly, Gothic tale, and the hiding-in-plain-sight of its homoeroticism was deeply unfulfilling. Even then, too scared to openly acknowledge my own feelings, I found Wilde’s obfuscations embarrassing. More powerful than anything in the highly contrived and overwrought games of Dorian was a passing moment in Salomé when the Page of Herodias obliquely confesses his love for the Young Syrian, who has committed suicide in disgust at Salomé’s licentious display. “He has killed himself,” the boy laments, “the man who was my friend! I gave him a little box of perfumes and earrings wrought in silver, and now he has killed himself.” It was these moments that slipped through, sudden intimations of honest feeling, which made plowing through Wilde’s self-indulgence worth the effort.

Then there was the most holy and terrifying of all the publicly respectable representations of homosexual desire, Mann’s Death in Venice, which might even be found in one’s parents’ library, the danger of its sexuality safely ossified inside the imposing façade of its reputation. A boy who read Death in Venice wasn’t slavering over a beautiful Polish adolescent in a sailor’s suit, he was climbing a mountain of sorts, proving his devotion to culture.

But a boy who read Death in Venicewas receiving a very strange moral and sentimental education. Great love was somehow linked to intellectual crisis, a symptom of mental exhaustion. It was entirely inward and unrequited, and it was likely triggered by some dislocation of the self from familiar surroundings, to travel, new sights and smells, and hot climates. It was unsettling and isolating, and drove one to humiliating vanities and abject voyeurism. Like so much of what one found in Wilde (perfumed and swaddled in cant), Gide (transplanted to the colonial realms of North Africa, where bourgeois morality was suspended), or Genet (floating freely in the postwar wreckage and flotsam of values, ideals, and norms), Death in Venice also required a young reader to locate himself somewhere on the inexorable axis of pederastic desire.

In retrospect I understand that this fixation on older men who suddenly have their worlds shattered by the brilliant beauty of a young man or adolescent was an intentional, even ironic repurposing of the classical approbation of Platonic pederasty. It allowed the “uranist”—to use the pejorative Victorian term for a homosexual—to broach, tentatively and under the cover of a venerable and respected literary tradition, the broader subject of same-sex desire. While for some, especially Gide, pederasty was the ideal, for others it may have been a gateway to discussing desire among men of relatively equal age and status, what we now think of as being gay. But as an eighteen-year-old reader, I had no interest in being on the receiving end of the attentions of older men; and as a middle-aged man, no interest in children.

The dynamics of the pederastic dyad—like so many narratives of colonialism —also meant that in most cases the boy was silent, seemingly without an intellectual or moral life. He was pure object, pure receptivity, unprotesting, perfect and perfectly silent in his beauty. When Benjamin Britten composed his last opera, based on Mann’s novella, the youth is portrayed by a dancer, voiceless in a world of singing, present only as an ideal body moving in space. In Gide’s Immoralist, the boys of Algeria (and Italy and France) are interchangeable, lost in the torrents of monologue from the narrator, Michel, who wants us to believe that they are mere instruments in his long, agonizing process of self-discovery and liberation. In Genet’s Funeral Rites, a frequently pornographic novel of sexual violence among the partisans and collaborators of Paris during the liberation, the narrator/author even attempts to make a virtue of the interchangeability of his young objects of desire: “The characters in my books all resemble each other,” he says. He’s right, and he amplifies their sameness by suppressing or eliding their personalities, dropping identifying names or pronouns as he shifts between their individual stories, often reducing them to anonymous body parts.

By reducing boys and young men to ciphers, the narrative space becomes open for untrammeled displays of solipsism, narcissism, self-pity, and of course self-justification. These books, written over a period of decades, by authors of vastly different temperaments and sexualities, are surprisingly alike in this claustrophobia of desire and subjugation of the other. Indeed, the psychological violence done to the male object of desire is often worse in authors who didn’t manifest any particular personal interest in same-sex desire. For example, in Musil’s Confusions of Young Törless, a gentle and slightly effeminate boy named Basini becomes a tool for the social, intellectual, and emotional advancement of three classmates who are all, presumably, destined to get married and lead entirely heterosexual lives. One student uses Basini to learn how to exercise power and manipulate people in preparation for a life of public accomplishment; another tortures him to test his confused spiritual theories, a stew of supposedly Eastern mysticism; and Törless turns to him, and turns on him, simply to feel something, to sense his presence and power in the world, to add to the stockroom of his mind and soul.

We are led to believe that this last form of manipulation is, in its effect on poor Basini, the cruelest. Later in the book, when Musil offers us the classic irony of the bildungsroman—the guarantee that everything that has happened was just a phase, a way station on the path of authorial evolution—he explains why Törless “never felt remorse” for what he did to Basini:

For the only real interest [that “aesthetically inclined intellectuals” like the older Törless] feel is concentrated on the growth of their own soul, or personality, or whatever one may call the thing within us that every now and then increases by the addition of some idea picked up between the lines of a book, or which speaks to us in the silent language of a painting[,] the thing that every now and then awakens when some solitary, wayward tune floats past us and away, away into the distance, whence with alien movements tugs at the thin scarlet thread of our blood —the thing that is never there when we are writing minutes, building machines, going to the circus, or following any of the hundreds of other similar occupations.

The conquest of beautiful boys, whether a hallowed tradition of all-male schools or the vestigial remnant of classical poetry, is simply another way to add to one’s fund of poetic and emotional knowledge, like going to the symphony. Today we might be blunter: to refine his aesthetic sensibility, Törless participated in the rape, torture, humiliation, and emotional abuse of a gay kid.

And he did it in a confined space. It is a recurring theme (and perhaps cliché) of many of these novels that homoerotic desire must be bounded within narrow spaces, dark rooms, private attics, as if the breach in conventional morality opened by same-sex desire demands careful, diligent, and architectural containment. The boys who beat and sodomize Basini do it in a secret space in the attic above their prep school. Throughout much of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, two siblings inhabit a darkly enchanted room, bickering and berating each other as they attempt to displace unrequited or forbidden desires onto acceptable alternatives. Cocteau helpfully gives us a sketch of this room—a few wispy lines that suggest something that Henri Matisse might have painted—with two beds, parallel to each other, as if in a hospital ward. Sickness, of course, is ever-present throughout almost all of these novels as well: the cholera that kills Aschenbach in Death in Venice, the tuberculosis which Michel overcomes and to which his hapless wife succumbs in The Immoralist, and the pallor, ennui, listlessness, and fevers of Cocteau. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, a later, more deeply ambivalent contribution to this canon of illness and enclosure, takes its name from the cramped, cluttered chambre de bonne that contains this desire, with the narrator keenly aware that if what happens there—a passionate relationship between a young American man in Paris and his Italian boyfriend— escapes that space, the world of possibilities for gay men would explode. But floods of booze, perhaps alcoholism, and an almost suicidal emotional frailty haunt this space, too.

Often it is the author’s relation to these dark spaces that gives us our only reliable sense of how he envisioned the historical trajectory of being gay. In Cocteau’s novel, the room becomes a ship, or a portal, transporting the youth Cocteau’s novel, the room becomes a ship, or a portal, transporting the youth into the larger world of adult desires. The lines are fluid, but there is a possibility of connection between the perfervid world of contained sexuality and the larger universe of sanctioned desires. In Baldwin, the young Italian proposes the two men keep their room as a space apart, a refuge for secret assignations, even as his American lover prepares to reunite with his fiancée and return to a life of normative sexuality. They could continue their relationship privately, on the side, a quiet compromise between two sexual realms. But Musil’s attic, essentially a torture chamber, is a much more desperate space, a permanent ghetto for illicit desire.

Even those among these books that were self-consciously written to advance the cause of gay men, to make their anguish more comprehensible to a reflexively hostile straight audience, leave almost no room—no space—for many openly gay readers. The parallels with colonial discourse are troubling: the colonized “other,” the homosexual making his appeal to straight society, must in turn pass on the violence and colonize and suppress yet weaker or more marginal figures on the spectrum of sexuality. Thus in the last of Gide’s daring dialogues in defense of homosexuality, first published piecemeal, then together commercially as Corydon in 1924—a tedious book full of pseudoscience and speculative extensions of Darwinian theory—the narrator contemptuously dismisses the unmanly homosexual: “If you please, we’ll leave the inverts aside for now. The trouble is that ill-informed people confuse them with normal homosexuals. And you understand, I hope, what I mean by ‘inverts.’ After all, heterosexuality too includes certain degenerates, people who are sick and obsessed.”

Along with the effeminate, the old and the aging are also beneath contempt. The casual scorn in Mann’s novella for an older man whom Aschenbach encounters on his passage to Venice is almost as horrifying as the sexual abuse and mental torture of young Basini in Musil’s novel. Among gay men, Mann’s painted clown is one of the most unsettling figures in literature, a “young-old man” whom Mann calls a “repulsive sight.” He apes the manners and dress of youth but has false teeth and bad makeup, luridly colored clothing, and a rakish hat, and is desperately trying to run with a younger crowd of men: “He was an old man, beyond a doubt, with wrinkles and crow’s feet round eyes and mouth; the dull carmine of the cheeks was rouge, the brown hair a wig.” Mann’s writing rises to a suspiciously incandescent brilliance in his descriptions of this supposedly loathsome figure. For reasons entirely unnecessary to the plot or development of his central characters, Baldwin resurrects Mann’s grotesquerie, in a phantasmagorical scene that describes an encounter between his young

American protagonist and a nameless old “queen” who approaches him in a bar:

The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream; it stank of powder and a gardenia-like perfume. The shirt, open coquettishly to the navel, revealed a hairless chest and a silver crucifix; the shirt was covered with paper-thin wafers, red and green and orange and yellow and blue, which stormed in the light and made one feel that the mummy might, at any moment, disappear in flame.

This is the future to which the narrator—and by extension the reader if he is a gay man—is condemned. Unless, of course, he succumbs to disease or addiction. At best there is a retreat from society, perhaps to someplace where the economic differential between the Western pederast and the colonized boy makes an endless string of anonymous liaisons economically feasible. Violent death is the worst of the escapes. Not content with merely parodying older gay men, Baldwin must also murder them. In a scene that does gratuitous violence to the basic voice and continuity of the book, the narrator imagines in intimate detail events he has not actually witnessed: the murder of a flamboyant bar owner who sexually harasses and extorts the young Giovanni (by this point betrayed, abandoned, and reduced to what is, in effect, prostitution). The murder happens behind closed doors, safely contained in a room filled with “silks, colors, perfumes.”

If I remember with absolute clarity the first same-sex kiss I encountered in literature, I don’t remember very well when my interest in specifically homoerotic narrative began to wane. But again, thanks to the physicality of the book, I have an archaeology more reliable than memory. As a young reader, I was in the habit of writing the date when I finished a book on the inside front cover, and so I know that sometime shortly before I turned twenty-one, my passion for dark tales of unrequited desire, sexual manipulation, and destructive Nietzschean paroxysms of self-transcendence peaked, then flagged. That was also the same time that I came out to friends and family, which was prompted by the complete loss of hope that a long and unrequited love for a classmate might be returned. Logic suggests that these events were related, that the collapse of romantic illusions and the subsequent initiation of an actual erotic life with real, living people dulled the allure of Wilde, Gide, Mann, and the other authors who were loosely in their various orbits.

were loosely in their various orbits.

It happened this way: For several years I had been drawn to a young man who seemed to me curiously like Hans from Hesse’s novel. Physically, at least, they were alike: “Deep-set, uneasy eyes glowed dimly in his handsome and delicate face; fine wrinkles, signs of troubled thinking, twitched on his forehead, and his thin, emaciated arms and hands hung at his side with the weary gracefulness reminiscent of a figure by Botticelli.” But in every other way my beloved was an invention. I projected onto him an elaborate but entirely imaginary psychology, which I now suspect was cobbled together from bits and pieces of the books I had been reading. He was sad, silent, and doomed, like Hans, but also cold, remote, and severe, like Törless, cruelly beautiful like all the interchangeable sailors and hoodlums in Genet, but also intellectual, suffering, and mystically connected to dark truths from which I was excluded. When I recklessly confessed my love to him—how long I had nurtured it and how complex, beautiful, and poetic it was—he responded not with anger or disgust but impatience: “You can’t put all this on me.”

He was right. It took me only a few days to realize it intellectually, a few weeks to begin accepting it emotionally, and a few years not to feel fear and shame in his presence. He had recognized in an instant that what I had felt for years, rather like Swann for Odette, had nothing to do with him. It wasn’t even love, properly speaking. I can’t claim that it was all clear to me at the time, that I was conscious of any connection between what I had read and the excruciating dead end of my own fantasy life. I make these connections in retrospect. But the realization that I would never be with him because he didn’t in fact exist—not in the way I imagined him—must have soured me on the literature of longing, torment, and convoluted desire. And the challenge and excitement of negotiating a genuine erotic life rendered so much of what I had found in these books painfully dated and irrelevant.

I want to be rigorously honest about my feelings for this literature, whether it distorted my sense of self and even, perhaps, corrupted my imagination. The safe thing to say is that I can’t possibly find an answer to that, not simply because memory is unreliable, but because we never know whether books implant things in us or merely confirm what is already there. In Young Törless, Musil proposes the idea that the great literature of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and William Shakespeare is essentially a transitional crutch for young minds, a mental prosthesis or substitute identity during the formlessness of adolescence: “These associations originating outside, and these borrowed emotions, carry young people over the dangerously soft spiritual ground of the years in which they need to be of some significance to themselves and nevertheless are still too incomplete to have any real significance.”

It’s important to divorce the question of how these books may have influenced me from the malicious accusations of corruption that have dogged gay fiction from the beginning. In the course of our reading lives, we will devour dozens, perhaps hundreds, of crude, scabrous, violent books, with no discernible impact on our moral constitution. And homosexual writers certainly didn’t invent the general connection between sexuality and illness, or the thin line between passion and violence, or sadism and masochism, or the sexual exploitation of the young or defenseless. And the mere mention of same-sex desire is still seen in too many places around the world today as inherently destructive to young minds. Gide’s Corydon decried the illogic of this a century ago: “And if, in spite of advice, invitations, provocations of all kinds, he should manifest a homosexual tendency, you immediately blame his reading or some other influence (and you argue in the same way for an entire nation, an entire people); it has to be an acquired taste, you insist; he must have been taught it; you refuse to admit that he might have invented it all by himself.”

And I want to register an important caveat about the literature of same-sex desire: it is not limited to the books I read, the authors I encountered, or the tropes that now seem to me so sad and destructive. In 1928, E. M. Forster wrote a short story called “Arthur Snatchfold” that wasn’t published until 1972, two years after the author’s death. In it, an older man, Sir Richard Conway, respectable in all ways, visits the country estate of a business acquaintance, where he has a quick, early-morning sexual encounter with a young deliveryman in a field near the house. Later, as Sir Richard chats with his host at their club in London, he learns that the liaison was seen by a policeman, the young man was arrested, and the authorities sent him to prison. To his great relief, Sir Richard also learns that he himself is safe from discovery, that the “other man” was never identified, and despite great pressure on the working-class man to incriminate his upper-class partner, he refused to do so.

“He [the deliveryman] was instantly removed from the court and as he went he shouted back at us—you’ll never credit this—that if he and the old grandfather didn’t mind it why should anyone else,” says Sir Richard’s host, fatuously indignant about the whole affair. Sir Richard, ashamed and sad but trapped in the armor of his social position, does the only thing he can: “Taking a notebook from his pocket, he wrote down the name of his lover, yes, his lover who was going to prison to save him, in order that he might not forget it.” It isn’t a great story, but it is an important moment in the evolution of an idea of loyalty and honor within the emerging category of homosexual identity. I didn’t

discover it until years after it might have done me some good.

Forster’s story is exceptional because only one man is punished, and he is given a voice—and a final, clear, unequivocal protest against the injustice. The other man escapes, but into shame, guilt, and self-recrimination. And yet it is the escapee who takes up the pen and begins to write. We might say of Sir Richard what we often say of our parents as we come to peace with them: he did the best he could. And for all the internalized homophobia of the authors I began reading more than thirty years ago, I would say the same thing. They did the best they could. They certainly did far more than privately inscribe a name in a book. I can’t honestly say that I would have had even Sir Richard’s limited courage in 1928.

But Forster’s story, which he didn’t dare publish while he was alive, is the exception, not the rule. It is painful to read the bulk of this early canon, and it will only become more and more painful, as gay subcultures dissolve and the bourgeois respectability that so many of these authors abandoned yet craved becomes the norm. In Genet, marriage between two men was the ultimate profanation, one of the strongest inversions of value the author could muster to scandalize his audience and delight his rebellious readers. The image of samesex marriage was purely explosive, a strategy for blasting apart the hypocrisy and pretentions of traditional morality. Today it is becoming commonplace.

I wonder if these books will survive like the literature of abolition, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—marginal, dated, remembered as important for its earnest, sentimental ambition but also a catalogue of stereotypes. Or if they will be mostly forgotten, like the nineteenth-century literature of aesthetic perversity and decadence that many of these authors so deeply admired. Will Gide and Genet be as obscure to readers as Huysmans and the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse)?

I hope not, and not least because they mattered to me, and helped forge a common language of reference among many gay men of my generation. I hope they survive for the many poignant epitaphs they contain, grave markers for the men who were used, abused, and banished from their pages. Let me write them down in my notebook, so I don’t forget their names: Hans, who loved Hermann; Basini, who loved Törless; the Page of Herodias, who loved the Young Syrian; Giovanni, who loved David; and all the rest, unnamed, often with no voice, but not forgotten.

TIM KREIDER

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fanficimagery · 6 years ago

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Imagine being the one person the group turns to when Damon goes into a rage.

Damon X Reader

Stefan ducked out the front door, cringing when yet another glass was shattered. Damon had been throwing a tantrum for the last half hour all because some she-wolf played him. And if that wasn't bad enough, the wolf had the audacity to name drop Katherine and mention he was more fun than she had anticipated. While the compliment would have normally inflated his ego, he couldn't help the anger that came knowing full well the she-wolf was an old acquaintance of that bitch Katherine.

Climbing into his car and starting the engine, Stefan then pulled out his phone and skimmed through his contacts. Finding the one he was looking for, he tapped on it before putting the phone on speaker and settling it in his lap while driving away from the boarding house.

"Come on, Y/N. Pick up," he mutters as the phone rings and rings.

"Hey, sorry I couldn't pick up your call. I'm not even sure why you're calling to begin with. Who still calls? Text, people. Text!" *Beep!*

"Answer your phone, Y/N. Apparently you're an unreliable texter and an unreliable person who answers their phone! Call me as soon as you get this. I need help with Damon." Stefan ends the call and tosses his phone into the passenger seat, he then focusing his attention on the road. He's not sure where he's going, but he has a few pretty good ideas of where to start looking.

The Mystic Grill is empty of who he's looking for, as is Town Square, Bonnie's house, and Elena's house. Funnily enough, none of the girls of their particular friend group could be found at any of those places either which left Caroline's house as his last hope. Fortunately for Stefan, he can hear all four girls talking and laughing the moment he cuts the engine to his car outside Caroline’s house and listens in.

As he walks up to the front door of Caroline's home, he can easily see through the large door window. Then knocking on the door, he patiently waits until someone answers. Something heavy thunks, the girls cackle, and then a disheveled Elena appears around the corner as she hurries to answer the door once she sees who it is.

"Stefan! Hey, Stefan," she greets a little too cheery. "What's going on?"

"I'm, uh, I'm looking for Y/N," he says, eyes narrowing at her glassy gaze. "Are you drunk?"

Elena giggles. "Ohhh, it's the fun police," she teases as she reaches forward and pokes him in the chest. "Come on, Stefan, it's a celebration! Y/N dumped that loser she was dating and we decided to have some fun."

He sighs. "That's nice and all, but I really need Y/N’s help. Damon's throwing a tantrum."

Elena seems to slightly sober at his words, she knowing full well in her inebriated state that Damon throwing a tantrum was not a good thing. "Oh. Well why didn't you start with that? Come on, lets go get Y/N."

In the other room, you and Bonnie are swiping through the photos on your phones to see which ones you're going to post all over social media, and giggling over the stupid ones that seem to have been captured.

"Which ones-"

"All of them," you interrupt the witch, snorting at one picture of Caroline who was picking her teeth in the mirror. The phone is suddenly swiped from your hand and you whirl around. "Hey!"

"Don't hey me, missy," Caroline says. "You are not posting every single picture to your Facebook. We are not immature high school children anymore who think it's cool to show everyone how blasted you are."

"Speak for yourself, Care-Bear. We might not be teenagers anymore, but I am prone to immaturity every now and then."

"To being immature! Woo!" Bonnie whoops.

"You didn't tell me it was this bad," someone suddenly muses.

Your eyes light up as you see who's speaking. "Hero hair!"

"God you really are my brother's best friend."

"Damon? Damon's here!"

"No." Stefan's gaze darts up and down your form. "What are- what are you wearing?" He chuckles.

Glancing down, you smooth your hands over the blue and purple material of your outfit. "It's an adult onesie. I’m Sully from Monster's Inc."

A white sock suddenly hits Stefan in the chest and Caroline groans. "Not again."

"23-19. We have a 23-19!" You shout as you and Bonnie erupt in hysterical giggles.

Elena, too, is caught up in the humor of the act, so Caroline turns her attention on Stefan. "They've been doing this since the buzz hit."

"Where did Bonnie even produce the sock from?" He asks, doing his best to keep from laughing and encouraging the girls’ antics.

Caroline shakes her head. "I have no idea. She just keeps pulling them out from all over the place. I have a strong suspicion she and Y/N stashed them all over my house after the onesie came out."

"As amusing as this is, I need to get Y/N to the boarding house asap. Damon's tearing up the house."

The blonde vampire inhales sharply. "Okay. You take Y/N and I'll keep the other two here. Y/N is the only one who Damon will listen to and while he'll probably find drunk!Y/N hilarious, he'll be annoyed with the other two and it’ll only make his mood worse."

The mood between Caroline and Stefan is somber, but a sock suddenly hits Caroline on the side of the head. Stefan’s lips twitch.

"23-19!"

Caroline smiles tightly, eyes narrowing on Stefan as his eyes glitter in amusement. "Take her before I crush all her dreams and rip that damn onesie to pieces."

Sitting in the passenger seat of Stefan's car, you're kept quiet by the nuggets and fries you made him purchase you. He was under the presumption that food would do you some good, but he hadn't counted on you exchanging your soda out for more alcohol when he stopped by to fill up his car's gas tank. You knew he had a strong suspicion of what you did, but he happily let your slurp away as long as you didn't bother him.

Getting to the boarding house, you happily climb out and rush towards the front door. Stefan sighs as he follows after you.

"Damon!" You shout as soon as you enter the house. "Damon, get your tantrum-throwing ass out here. Front and center, Dracula!" Before you can exit the foyer, the air around you shifts and Damon is suddenly standing a few feet in front of you. Even in your inebriated state you can tell he's pissed off, his tells being the set of his jaw and coldness of his eyes.

His gaze narrows on you before sweeping up and down, and when he meets your gaze again it turns into a staring contest. His head tilts to the side and your lips twitch, you then having to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from smiling. When you see the black veins beneath his eyes slither momentarily, you lose your battle with your laughter and break down into giggles.

Damon sighs and then rolls his eyes, his lips faintly pulling into a smile of his own. "What the hell are you wearing?"

"Don't ask-" But a sock hits Damon in the face and this time it's Stefan's turn to sigh as he trails off.

"23-19!"

"Who the hell gave her alcohol?" Damon then growls.

You beam at your friend, skipping over to him and hooking your arm through his. "Uh-oh. The fun police is in town."

Damon frowns. "I am not the fun police."

"Says Mr. Vampire with a stick stuck up his butt all because his latest conquest name dropped a dead skank's name." Damon pouts and you drag him towards the living room to plop him down on the sofa next to you. "Seriously, man, get over it already."

"I don't like you when you're drunk. You're too blunt."

"But I thought you liked blunt?"

"Yeah, but not when I’m the one being addressed over my bullshit." As Damon stares at you, you take the chance to poke him in his cheek, giggling all the while.

"So are we good here?" Stefan drawls from the doorway. "You're not going to go murder innocent bystanders?"

Damon rolls his eyes as he swats at your hand, he then glancing at his brother. "I was never going to go on a murder spree. I just needed to let off a little steam."

"Mhm. Well Y/N is here now. Talk about.. whatever it is you guys talk about. Apparently Y/N broke up with her boyfriend and the girls were celebrating. I need to go help Caroline with the other two."

As Stefan leaves, Damon glances towards you. "Seriously? You finally ditched that dick?"

"Yep. I actually don't know why I stayed with him for so long. He didn't even like my friends. Especially you. I think he was threatened."

Damon's eyes glitter. "Of course he was. Have you seen me?"

You slowly smirk as you eye him up and down, your eyes then widening as you gasp. "Damon! Lets take pictures in very compromising positions and post them on Facebook. The ex who shall not be named will hate it!"

"Not dressed like that."

Gasping in mock outrage, you point a finger in his face. "Don't harsh on my onesie, Salvatore."

"Yeah, yeah. Lets go up to my room and you can put on one of my shirts. We'll sex you up and sit you in my lap. That should piss off the ex."

From scowling to elated, you jump up and pull Damon to his feet. "This is why you're my best friend! Hurry up, Day. Move your ass!"

He groans as he follows after you. "I forgot how hot you are when you're bossy."

"Mhm. Flirt when I'm sober. You won't make any progress in the current state I'm in."

"Fair enough."

#fanficimagery #damon salvatore #damon x reader #damon salvatore imagine #the vampire diaries imagine #tvd imagine #stefan salvatore #elena gilbert #bonnie bennett #caroline forbes #imagine

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khaleesirin · 6 years ago

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Your favorite jonerys parallel?

(Sorry for sleeping on this ask for too long!)

This actually may sound unconventional but here’s what I love the most about these two. Here is Jon Snow who grew up a bastard not knowing that he is the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark and may be the last legitimate heir to the Iron Throne. On the other side of the world is Daenerys Targaryen who grew up being taught that she is the last scion of House Targaryen whose main goal in life is to bring their house back to its former glory. You would think the parallel is only between someone who grew up thinking he isn’t entitled to anything and the other being taught that she should be entitled for something. But no, that’s not what’s interesting about the whole thing!

Jon, while a bastard, grew up in a relatively safe environment; he was given proper education, he was given food, given clothing, given good bed, just like a lord’s son. Even with his status, he still lived a relatively privileged life. It’s something he recognized while being part of the Night’s Watch. Dany, while growing up around folks who never stopped reminding her that she is a princess, a queen, lived in an unsafe environment. She was constantly begging, her storyline is about running, not having enough food, no shelter, no place to call home.

Remember in ACOK when Jon, Sam, Dolorous Edd etc, went out to investigate the abandoned wildling village called Whitetree? And this is the same time Dany and the rest of Drogo’s khalasar ended up finding Vaes Tolorro, the ruined city in the red waste?

Jon had this reaction while surveying the houses in the village:

There were no furnishings, no sign that people had lived here but for some ashes beneath the smoke hole in the roof. “What a dismal place to live,”he said.

And here we have Dolorous Edd disagreeing with him:

“I was born in a house much like this,” declared Dolorous Edd. “Those were my enchanted years. Later I fell on hard times.” A nest of dry straw bedding filled one corner of the room. Edd looked at it with longing. “I’d give all the gold in Casterly Rock to sleep in a bed again.”

And the immediate reaction of Jon:

“You call that a bed?”

Vaes Tolorro is similarly a dismal place,

…but the white walls, so beautiful from afar, were cracked and crumbling when seen up close. Inside was a maze of narrow crooked alleys. The buildings pressed close, their facades blank, chalky, windowless. Everything was white, as if the people who lived here had known nothing of color.

And in this city, in its ruin, they found fruit, water and shelter, which Dany was so thoroughly thankful of, despite her people getting “spooked” because of human bones, talking about ghosts and all.

Fruit and water and shade,“ Dany said, her cheeks sticky with peach juice. “The gods were good to bring us to this place.”

Let me tell you, Jon II ACOK and Daenerys I ACOK are filled with parallels (and foils) that we can discuss, but what stood out to me the most is how opposite their reaction are to essentially the same place. Whitetree is Vaes Tolorro. Both looked like ruins and will only look like ruins if you’ve only been to a better place, and if you always have that reassurance that you have a better place to go back to. Jon’s reaction is from someone who, in personal level, can’t empathize with Dolorous because he was never in a position that he was. He was never a beggar, he was never poor, and he always has Winterfell to go back to.

So despite the fact that Whitetree is a relatively good communal place with house, a well, and sheephold, and may suggest that there is a reason why the wildlings made it their home, that didn’t register to Jon. For him, there’s nothing good to see in this ruins.

And then you have Dany who, because they are on the edge of dying, whose main driving force is to survive, found oasis in this desolate place. It’s not because it has fruits and water, but because they went our their way to find something good about the place.

I believe these chapters if read as a single chapter, served as a signal from GRRM to reevaluate our heroes not only in terms of the trope they seem to follow but how actual experiences deny that trope. Between the two of them, Jon is the one who received the lesson on humility, on thinking about the perspective of others. He had been the one to show negative judgment about “the less honorable” people he met in the Night’s Watch. His first reaction was dismay over the fact that they were not like his Uncle Ben. It’s a sort of criticism regarding how we should be defining honor. His journey also doesn’t follow the "hidden prince” trope that straightforwardly. Yes, he is treated unfairly by Catelyn, but he didn’t live an ordinary life bereft of home that the prince-after-all will eventually get at the end of their journey as a reward. Again, as GRRM highlighted from AGOT to ACOK, Jon actually lived in a relatively privileged life while carrying those presumptions people placed in higher social class usually share. (Saying, for example, that Jaime is how King should be like).

It was Dany who was given half of the journey of the “hidden prince” trope. She was chased away from her “home” at birth (so in this case, she was the one bereft of true place to call home), she was sold as a sex slave, and suffered from truly horrible things, just like the journey of the hidden prince in Elizabeth Moon’s In Oath of Gold. She has assassins chasing after her, much like Krestel in The Lark and the Wren, the hidden prince of Birnam. And I believe, because of this, she will be the one to get rewarded for that HOME hidden princes get at the end of their journey.

As an aside, we often talk about how Daenerys Targaryen is GRRM’s response to Tolkien’s Aragorn story. So who is GRRM responding to with Jon Snow? I think it’s quite obviously Pratchett’s Carrot Ironfoundersson, the hidden prince in Discworld who guess what, refuses to take the crown. Both joined the Night’s Watch, both were dismayed by how dishonorable the people they are supposed to be working with. Carrot’s high sense of honestly and honor, his refusal to be cynical were supposedly his strength. Both are considered stupid (”you know nothing, Jon Snow) because of their honesty and their “law abiding” nature. But here is this missing piece in Carrot’s character arc that GRRM tries to fill in much like in Aragorn’s rulership: Jon Snow’s honor may be blinding and may be a flaw not because he refuses to bend the law, but that in this blindness they forget to see the world in the perspective of the “dishonorable,” the “criminals,” the “wilds.” The thing with Carrot’s storyline is that he was backed by the narrative that washes off a sense of reality to make him fit in. If I were to be honest, in his sense of honesty and honor, Carrot also tends to show lack of empathy in terms of locating why people break rules, which is something GRRM wants Jon to know as early as possible in his own journey.

#jon snow #daenerys targaryen #jonerys parallel #just also to clarify I am not hating on Carrot here I'm just saying it may be a part of his character arc that GRRM is trying to criticize #this answer really jumped around #this is what happens when i drink too much coffee

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mugglescantseethisname · 5 years ago

Text

What is a Normal Sex Life?

The measurements I am utilizing are from the October 2008 SEX UNCOVERED review led by The Observer paper. This review can't truth of sexual action in Britain however it is a helpful path in to discuss basic inquiries that I get posed.

SEXUAL EXPERIENCE - what number of sexual accomplices have you had?

The average individual has had 9 sexual accomplices, despite the fact that averages are truly inane figures in themselves. Additional fascinating is the way that solitary 20% of the populace have had in excess of 10 sexual accomplices. Individuals frequently disclose to me that their absence of experience causes them to feel sexually unadventurous and this encroaches upon their certainty. There is by all accounts a presumption that the more accomplices you have, the better darling you are or the more 'sexual' you are as an individual. Neither of these is valid and a great many people envision that others have far a bigger number of accomplices than they really do. Quality tallies, not amount. I don't think it is hard to develop an entirely enormous number of accomplices. Substantially more precarious to really concentrate on having a commonly enjoyable sexual experience.

SEXUAL CONFIDENCE - how might you rate your sexual exhibition?

Something that undermines individuals' confidence in the inheherent 'rightness' of their own sexuality is expecting that others are more talented and preferred sweethearts over we are . 24% rate their sexual presentation as generally excellent . This implies seventy five percent of us imagine that we are, best case scenario great and even from a pessimistic standpoint, poor in bed. Numerous individuals are restless about sex, overlooking that the character of our accomplice impacts upon sexual execution. Execution is actually about certainty and having an accomplice who bolsters your confidence in your allure makes you a decent darling with that individual. Sex shouldn't be a presentation. On the off chance that it is, your convictions about sex could profit by some self-reflection and assessment. Concentrating on your own presentation makes you need to satisfy your accomplice so as to maintain your own confidence as opposed to needing to give pleasure for it.

SEXUAL SATISFACTION - would you say you are at present happy with your sex life?

76% said indeed, 24% said no. A fourth of individuals can't figure out how to make the sort of sexual associations and encounters that they might want to have. This outcome is unordinary as normally most studies report over half disappointment rates. Those aged 65 and over were more fulfilled than those aged 16-24. Individuals in long haul connections/marriage are more fulfilled than single individuals, albeit single individuals report having intercourse all the more frequently. Once more, recurrence is no assurance of good sex. Nor is youth and magnificence. Obviously, we don't have a clue what fulfilled intends to the individuals who responded to the inquiries. No sex can be palatable for certain individuals. Actually , 36% of 16-multi year olds accept that it is conceivable to have a glad relationship/marriage without sex.

SEXUAL FREQUENCY - how regularly do you engage in sexual relations?

I think this is THE most widely recognized stress that individuals have. Am I engaging in sexual relations frequently enough? Is my degree of want typical? 25% don't have any sex in an average month . Not every person is having a great deal of sex and almost certainly, a significant number of those are splendidly content with their circumstance. Another 25% have intercourse between 6-10 times each month. A great many people don't, with the exception of possibly toward the start of a relationship, have tremendous measures of sex constantly. Many individuals accept that everybody has more sex than they do. Also, they stress over this. Recurrence should be taken a gander at according to fulfillment before individuals begin getting worried about how much or how little they engage in sexual relations. In the event that you're cheerful and your accomplice is fulfilled, at that point you're fortunate - paying little mind to nearly nothing or frequently you are really engaging in sexual relations.

SEXUAL DESIRE - how would you rate your sex drive?

Levels of want is another region that individuals get hung up about. Individuals stress, would it be a good idea for me to need to have intercourse more than I really do? In the review 32% rate their sex drive as average , 24% portray their libido as low or low. A great many people don't consider themselves to be having a high sex drive. Just 1 out of 5 rate their sex drive as exceptionally high. Want back and forth movements and this is ordinary and not out of the ordinary.

Sexual genuineness and profound discussion about sex with a scope of individuals can't that a large number of us are sufficiently fortunate to encounter. We depend on our presumptions, frailties and fears to 'envision' that others' sexual encounters are progressively visit, enjoyable and brave than our own. While overviews give us averages and the customary, they can likewise uncover that sexuality is differing and ordinariness is troublesome - and rather inconsequential - to characterize.

WHO WANTS TO BE NORMAL?

What makes us so reluctant to stand up and stand apart with regards to our sexuality? A great many people play safe thus don't empower their sexual potential to be investigated and achieved. The critical inquiry to pose to yourself is:

On the off chance that I am NOT sexually ordinary, I don't get it's meaning?

Every one of us will have our own reasons regarding what it implies on the off chance that we feel that our sexual wants, tastes and encounters are not equivalent to most other people's. We are allowed to pick what our sexuality implies and not to be directed to by social measures of worthiness. One size doesn't fit all with regards to the brilliant assortment of inclinations, needs, wants, convictions and sentiments that we hold.

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haliendal · 2 years ago

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Transcript:

PROFILES

A GENTLEMAN SLEUTH

In the world of high society crime, a dying breed.

BY JEREMY WOODWARD

It's not exactly the worst smell ever, rolling across Mississippi River, but certainly an unusual and unnerving one. Loud in the nostrils, with sharp acidity of a chicken processing plant, and fruity bottom notes of cow flatulence. It's been plaguing the residents of this small city for months, and with mid-level foreman at the chemical plant turning up dead in their beds one by one month after month, the low heavy odor seems either to be an omen or a punishment.

"There would've been more enjoyable cases for a ride along, I am certain." observes Benoit Blanc with a tiny smile. He hopped off the small launch, and strode up to a gaggle of chemical workers huddled together, steaming cups of coffee swallowed up in heavy, calloused hands, at 4:30 in the morning. No one wanted to be seen talking with an out-of-town private eye, so a meeting at a not-yet-dead supervisor's fishing cabin had been arranged. Interesting though, is that Blanc, looking for all the world like a rumpled, athletic Classics professor, so quickly found his way in among the men and began talking easily with them offering a sharp appraisal of a sticker on a hardhat, speculating about a particularly fine scar trailing the length of a man's hand.

Before this case would be over, nine executives at the Benedict White Chemical Company would be indicted for conspiracy, racketeering, wire fraud, embezzlement, attempted sex trafficking, and murder. Blanc pried open this case with a calm efficiency and speed that astonished David Schlesinger, the district attorney of the State of Mississippi. "He had everything. Financial records, travel documents, photographs, audiotape, and oh yeah, two signed confessions of a sitting United States senator and his Chief of Staff. And he got it all done in six weeks! I've had entire departments of career prosecutors that couldn't get anywhere on this for years. I don't know when he did it! Every time I saw him he was playing chess! And he even beat me at that!" Blanc hadn't even stopped his weekly bridge game, driving the three hours back to New Orleans to play, even once during the deposition of a County Court judge.

"I suppose it's the quality of being an unknown helps the most." purrs Blanc (it seems somehow impolite to call him Benoit, and there's the internal struggle over how to pronounce the first name; rhyme with Detroit like a native speaker of American, or take the leap, and go the full Ben-Wah) as he hovers over a small plate of roughage, poking it with a fork. "It's the presumption that there is something there behind the questions, this drives them to answer. They seek to explain themselves in an attempt to know me, and that way the known is offered to purchase a peek at the unknown. But of course," [he says,] as he picks up his coffee, "there is nothing to know."

"Of course," he adds, "this article will probably change all of that and I'll have to find a new way to do my job." If he's right, that there is nothing to know, it is astonishingly hard to prove him wrong. So little is known about one of [the] country's most sought-after private investigators, you could write it on [the] front of a postage stamp and still have room [to] play a game of tic-tac-toe, and dash off a shopping list for tonight's dinner. His courtly demeanor, his lilting, soft, dry voice, and his style of dress certainly points to roots along the gulf coast, but whether his family was landed English, or swamp Cajun, or freshly landed from Mars is not known by anyone I spoke to in the nine months I researched this article. No one had ever heard him speak of his family, describe his home, mention his past, or even take a personal phone call. "I don't even know what he likes to eat!" Schlesinger says, leaning back at his desk, feet up on yesterday's crime stats, "I've been to lunch with him something like a dozen times, I don't even remember seeing him order! The food just shows up! I have no idea what he likes, what he thinks, anything! Except coffee. He does prefer black coffee. But that's it. That's all I know. I gotta go." Schlesinger stands up. Papers slosh off the desk. "Guy drives me crazy," he mutters, leaving the room. "..six weeks!"

It seems to me that Benoit Blanc will always be shrouded in the dark despite his name meaning white and light. It is hard to nab down and profile one of the most elusive men in the world.

To uncover the man who uncovers others, I requested to shadow on a stakeout. He took some prodding but Blanc finally allowed me to accompany him on a mid-level search. After watching all the seasons of Get Smart, I was prepared and brought my own binoculars. While private investigating seems enthralling and exciting, a lot of it is sitting and waiting. It is a lot of man hours to just tail someone and watch their every move. It is another to anticipate it. I was excited to be able to see Blanc in action! However, there isn't much physical action to speak of. Blanc is playing a cerebral game. It is chess come to life.

I sat in on some interviews with Blanc and another detective. Always calm and collected, Blanc hides and the shadows and waits. You feel as if you have heard the same stories the entire time. There are no tips or tricks to be learned. He is a very observant man and sees things that others cannot. I must have listened to an arguing couples differing tales a thou- sand times and could not figure out the real plot at hand.

After spending countless hours alone privately with Blanc and observing him work, I cannot say that I know anymore about him than I did before. He is a suave and charming man but not the easiest to learn about. He shares very little if anything about himself. Like Schlesinger, I too challenged Benoit to a game of chess to see his mind work on the board. I am no amateur by any means but the game ended faster than I would like to report.

Benoit is a self-employed worker. However, unless your pockets are deep you probably won't have the chance of meeting him yourself. He is typically employed by the super rich for being able to crack complicated cases with very little struggle.

"The number of other private investigators who can do what he does, reliably, year by year, is zero." says Crank.

I was perusing the web yesterday, looking for cool stuff to post, and when I came across these, I went absolutely berserk!

*Insert happy fangirl noises*

#benoit blanc #the newyorker article #newspaper

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missmagooglie · 7 years ago

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I’m about to get kinda emotional rn, fair warning.

So today, I woke up with a hankering to re-read one of my favorite fics of fandoms past (does anyone else have that, like, one story that they go back to even years after they’ve left a fandom? Cuz I have several across many fandoms)

And as I was reading it, I realized that it felt weirdly dated. The thing about fics that are 15, 20 years old, is that the presumption of general opinion has changed so much. Slash ships, which as I type it out I’m realizing is in itself fading in prevalence, were seen as inherently subversive when I was a baby queer discovering fanfiction over a dial up connection on the family desktop computer.

And that showed up as a theme in a lot of fic. The fic I went back to today (which is Speranza’s amazing With Six You Get Eggroll dS Fraser/RayK) has a moment of conflict rooted in two hetero characters struggling to wrap their heads around the mlm relationship between Fraser and RayK. The fic has all these moments of awkwardness, hesitance, and discomfort that are all rooted in the basic premise that finding out two of your friends aren’t as straight as you previously assumed is going to be awkward and rife with judgement.

Today, I don’t see nearly as much of that trope. Yes, coming out is still a strong theme, but it’s more focused on coming out to family or to yourself. I feel like there’s a lot less of an assumption that disapproval is the default reaction to finding out someone’s gay (or queer in general, but we’re still kinda getting over the “I don’t get it/that’s not a real thing” hump on all the stuff that isn’t as clear cut as “gay” and “straight”)

I was sixteen in February of 2004 when I took a school trip to San Francisco on the very same week that the city took matters into their own hands and made same-sex marriage legal for a month. We landed on Valentines Day, and driving past city hall remains to this day one of the most emotional moments of my life.

I was 28 in June of 2015 when the Supreme Court ruled same sex marriage to be a right nationwide. I was giddy when I found out, and couldn’t wait to talk to every single person I met about it.

Today, I watched the first season of Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher’s show Take My Wife. It’s been on my list for a while, and I finally just bit the bullet and paid for it instead of praying it would show up on Netflix or Hulu. And it’s making me so appreciative of how far we’ve come since I was a kid, when I barely knew what being gay was until I got dragged into my schools GSA freshmen year of high school (because queer kids flock together even before they know they’re queer).

Like, not only do we actually have representation, we also have the ability to demand more and better and nuanced representation. We have celebrities and show runners who fully stand behind their queer characters, we have networks that allow those characters to be on television. Brands are more likely to lose business for being AGAINST gay rights than for it. And yes we can be as cynical as we need to be about major corporations leveraging gay rights as a marketing tool, but HOLY SHIT, just having that conversation was freaking unimaginable less than 20 years ago. Like, gay rights having enough public support that fucking Nike and McDonalds use it as a cheap marketing ploy? We are mainstream as FUCK. And sometimes it’s hard to remember that it hasn’t been that way for very long. Some days it feels like we are being beaten by right wing conservatism, and that people championing greed and hate are winning over people fighting for inclusion and acceptance.

Don’t get me wrong, those motherfuckers are trying. And we still need to fight to make the world better. But if progress is a mountain we’re climbing, sometimes it’s good to take a break from looking uphill at how far we have to go, and look back and appreciate how far we’ve come.

#sappy nonsense #the bisexual experience #lgbt

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fairymoved · 7 years ago

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Okay, so I won’t be posting these in order, but here’s a small part of chapter one of “The Witch Report”, introducing one of my characters, Anna Joan Lewis.

Contains mentions of religion and sex.

word estimate: 1,872

“A touch hasty, but alright.” Anna pulled up her jeans, grabbed her wedges from beneath the bed and made her way out of them room. Miranda didn’t stand up from her bed to escort Anna out, let alone making sure the door ensuring the safety of her apartment was locked. This neighborhood seems dangerous, Anna thought as she walked down a metal staircase. She caught the attention of an older man taking his dog out to relieve itself who seemed surprised to see such a formally dressed woman in this part of town. Or maybe it was-Anna quickly looked behind her.

Good, it was just her outfit this time. Not that she blamed the man for staring, the only bra on her person was being gripped by the straps in her left hand alongside her shoes, leaving her small but perky breasts loose under her thin top and feet bare to the dirt of the outside.

The dog doesn’t care, continuing to idly shit under a bush with tongue hanging out of its mouth as Anna slipped into her car and drove off, feeling the man’s eyes on her as she turned out of the driveway and on to the street. A part of her was insisting she turn back and at least get the man’s name, but another part remembered his oily skin reacting to the harsh morning sunlight like vinegar in a frying pan and eyes that would always look tired no matter how many naps he took to pad a day of unemployment. She’d gladly pass.

Of course, it’s only now that she chose to have standards. She could have used standards when she fucked that guy with far too many chins possible for there to be a neck under it inside a fast food restroom and when she gave that lady at the crossing walk cunnilingus behind a tree so good that the children who passed by afterschool thought she had forgotten her adult diaper that day.

But that was years ago, back when Anna was still adjusting to the fragility of this small, fleshy, sweaty, hairy thing she and many others morphed themselves into. Anna reached the first red light leading out of the apartment complex, catching herself between a growing line of other cars in the process, and caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror.

When assuming her human form, she had to be highly selective over what bits and pieces she wanted and could do without. She’d think after years of observing humanity that she’d find a template she found worthy of her visage, and yet she had gone through multiple iterations in the past fifty years. This one (number eighty seven) was one she had stuck with for a little over a month and was getting more used to considering her true human persona.

This was the face of Anna Joan Lewis, a woman of lightly tanned skin and green eyes and closely cut hair that fell somewhere on the amber side of the red spectrum in good lighting.

Anna is small and thin, a type of figure that highly contrasts with the looming, gangly body that is her true form. Her true form was a lot of things, one of which being something that shouldn’t be revealed on a Monday morning in high humidity and bad traffic. Anna may be reckless, though her limits started to pile up at the mere mention of shredding open her car and shredding the fragile psyches of multiple humans with as much ease.

No, she’d seen it happen before. Couldn’t risk it just for the sake of feigning off her boredom.

Her car inched forward just enough to see a mere fragment of the road up ahead.

She gritted her teeth.

Even as a human, she can still feel the heat. And it’s not just the warmth of today’s climate touching her skin and baking the inside of her car-the sun’s rays could only hope to compare-but the constant roaring of fire starting from her back, coaxing her spine, and filling her lungs and chest. It was a kind of heat that didn’t hurt, more rested in the confides of her form as if politely asking her suddenly acquired rib cage and muscle tissue to move aside.

Anna straightened herself in such a way that her back was fully submerged into her seat, hoping to ignore her body’s instincts just long enough to keep driving forward. She was going to miss her wings, all six of them, though she supposed being able to see how nice her freshly manicured feet looked as they rested uneasily on the gas pedal. Actually, being able to see in general was a luxury she never thought she’d appreciate this much.

“Where were you?”

“Getting coffee,” Anna replied, placing down two carboard containers still hot with fresh lattes. “We all need fuel for the day, right?”

“I already had my coffee,” Samuel said, picking up one of the styrofoam cups from the table. “But if it’s on your dime…”

“They’re already selling drinks for the fall. Talk about eager.” Samuel nodded in between sips. “I’m always in the mood for pumpkin spice. You gonna have one or are you sticking to your almond milk?”

“You know I don’t do coffee,” Anna said. “Besides, I felt like treating the staff before they bite my head off for being late again.”

“Can’t you just grow it back if they did?”

“It’s a trick I haven’t tried yet.”

“And if you haven’t noticed…” Sam did a quick gesture around the room that Anna had only now processed as being empty, the acoustics of the three-story building enunciating his voice. “Everyone is a little busy at the moment. Well, accept for the receptionist. Hey, Delia! Want a drink?”

Anna took this as her cue to head to her office, escaping behind the door to slip her bra on and straighten out her hair on her desk mirror. Through the thin walls she can still overhear Sam talking with Delia over the coffee, their conversation soon being reduced to everyday chatter about their pets and plans for the rest of the day. Sam is cordial as ever, letting the elderly receptionist go on and on about her newest puppy rescued from the shelter.

Samuel Reiner had been working at Serendipity Counseling for about one and a half months now, his summer job of choice despite his abysmal testing scores in college level psychology. He and Anna hit it off immediately, having met each other on roughly his third day of work when they locked eyes in between the water fountain and display of self-help pamphlets.

Sam not so discretely ogled the friction between her thighs and skirt and Anna took a long look at the lean physique, dark hair, and big, dark eyes that made him radiant with a certain boyish charm she hadn’t had a taste of for a solid two weeks. They had only exchanged a few words until disappearing into the nearest storage closest and were friends ever since.

Sam had taken the news about Anna being an angel with a certain nonchalant acceptance. Granted, it was her own fault to leave the door to her office ajar while she killed a fly via pressing it into the wood of her desk with a thumb hot with burning embers, her halo partially visible in that way that looked like a blazing half circle against the late sunlight pouring through the window. No one at Serendipity, including both patients and employees, seemed to care an awful lot about Anna’s angelhood.

One of her clients, a recently divorced harpy woman, seemed to take solace in having an inhuman therapist. Another client, a human man fresh from rehab, was advised to get closer to God to truly complete his recovery and found Anna’s origins in heaven to be just the middle ground he was looking for.

“Better than just reading the damn thing, am I right?” He had said once, referring to a leather-bound bible his wife had thrown into his satchel before his appointment. It didn’t seem like much of humanity ever truly cared about Anna’s actual species, just a touch surprised that behind her clever disguise was a being far beyond their comprehension.

Oddities would always insist that the two of them were on common ground, many of them insisting Anna reveal her true self to them in privacy. Humans were quick to remind her about how long they’ve been Christians and/or Catholics, as if anticipating Anna to strike down on them for wasting her time.

The only reason Anna ever withheld information about being an angel was less to do with the threat of unveiling forbidden truths and more over the audacity of mortals to always redirect the conversations to Him. And talking about Him almost always became about them and their relationship with Him.

Talking about Him so casually went directly into the forbidden truths folder and Anna would often have to bite her tongue to keep His private life private. Anna was only ever allowed to say a handful of slogans that normally kept things in the green:

“Yes, He does love you.” “Yes, He does forgive you.” “Yes, He does hear all of your prayers.” “Yes, He doesn’t wear shoes.” “I don’t know why He did that, actually. Ask Him for me, okay?”

But of course, that always sparked an entirely different series of questions. Only then do they ask specially about her and what she does, or used to do. The thing was that going into detail about which angel did what required a lot of lengthy explanations of hierarchy’s and the nine choirs the presided in heaven.

And once the fact was in someone’s head that Anna was a significant part of that hierarchy and could provide a much more through Wikipedia page on the topic than anyone else they knew, they’d keep prying for more. Nothing against them, humans were always eager to know all they could about the world.

Knowledge was power on earth and those who had some sort of entail on the secrets of the universe got to live in confidence that they knew something someone else didn’t, eagerly awaiting the day that their once useless trivia would perhaps save a doomed planet.

These hero complexes weren’t too uncommon, while others seemed to assume victim roles instead. Many people became a touch eager at the presumption of having an angel speaking to them, immediately falling on the conclusion that He had sent an angel specifically for their protection for some incoming threat, or perhaps from themselves.

Others took it as a sign of danger, growing concerned at knowing a higher being was walking among the common folk in secret. Some people would snakingly ask if they were dead this whole time.

To this Anna was always taken aback before calmly explaining that the angels were here because they had to be here. Because heaven was broken and God has been stressed out lately and…

Anna recalled from the comfort of her empty office exactly why she had chosen to work here. Once the sessions started, no one expected her to do the talking.

#nanowrimo #prima writes #prima ponders #original fiction #supernatural horror

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brittanyyoungblog · 5 years ago

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Pornography is Dangerous for Teens? Chill Out, The Kids are Going to be (Mostly) Alright

Americans have become increasingly fond of calling pornography a “public health crisis.” Those who claim this frequently cite adolescents’ “rampant access to pornography” as a central concern. Parents are encouraged to panic because “[p]orn is radically undermining the healthy development of children and youth, and contributing to increasing levels of sexual inequality, dysfunction, and violence.” Of critical importance to this view is that the internet has allowed children to access pornography at increasingly younger ages and youth are especially vulnerable to its harmful effects.

Is all of this panic justified, though? Is pornography really as dangerous as some claim?

In early 2018, I was invited to join a group of hard-working sociologists in the Republic of Croatia to help them examine and publish data they had been collecting about adolescents’ pornography use. This was my first serious foray into the academic literature concerning teen porn use, but I tackled the work with gusto. I’ve since been reading and publishing as much as I can about this topic in academic channels; however, I’ve said very little about it in more public forums, where my take on this issue will likely be unsettling to many people because it conflicts with the popular narrative about the damaging effects of porn. When it comes to pornography, I genuinely think that the kids are going to be (mostly) alright.

If you look beyond the rhetoric and take the time to read the actual research, it is very difficult to conclude that adolescents are in a state of crisis because of pornography. Whether we’re talking about pornography’s influence on sexual health, mental / psychological well-being, or rape-supportive attitudes and behaviors, there’s really not a whole lot going on. Sure, there’s tons of research one could cite to make the case that pornography is destroying adolescents, but much this work relies on overly simplified theoretical ideas and poor research practices designed to confirm morally-inspired presumptions about the harms of such materials. Critical analysis and reflection is often absent from this literature and inconsistent findings are typically ignored.

It turns out that the effects of pornography, to the extent that they actually exist at all, are very subtle. So subtle in fact, that when it comes to real-world issues of societal import, like safer-sex, the effects are not consistently detected across studies. A quick review of the literature, for example, indicates that three studies find that pornography-using teens report less consistent condom use than teens who don’t use porn (Luder et al., 2011; Wingood et al., 2001; Wright, Tokunaga, & Kraus, 2016). Further reading, however, indicates that another three studies find no association between pornography consumption and condom use (Braun-Courville & Rojas, 2009; Lim, Agius, Carrotte, Vella, & Hellard, 2017; Sinković et al., 2013). Moreover, recent Croatian research that I was involved in found no evidence that pornography use was associated with decreases in subsequent condom use in two groups of adolescents who were followed over time (Koletić, Štulhofer, & Kohut, 2019).

When it comes to risky sex beyond condom use, the story is essentially the same. Whether we’re talking about condom use, age of first intercourse, or number of sexual partners, we really do not have firm evidence that pornography is clearly or strongly influencing sexual risk behaviors.

Given the modest—at best—and conflicting findings, it shouldn’t be surprising that post-internet adolescents are actually doing better on many markers of sexual risk taking than pre-internet teens. Condom use and age of first intercourse have both increased, while rates of unintended pregnancies and abortions have decreased among teens in the age of unrestricted access to explicit models of risky sexual behaviors. If there are negative impacts on pornography on the sexual health of adolescents, they are clearly not strong enough to counteract these societal trends.

With respect to sexual health (and many other presumed “harms”), porn has become a boogeyman. If you are legitimately worried about the sexual health of teens (and you should be, given the notably high level of STIs in this population), pointing the finger at porn is really a distraction from bigger issues. Research tells us that factors like recreational substance use, “abstinence only” sexual education, over-reliance on hormonal methods of birth control (which only protect against unintended pregnancy and not STIs), and the general lack of parental communication about safer sex, should all be much more concerning to you than teens’ access to online porn.

Now, I often get the impression that people think of me as a porn apologist. I like to think that I’m not, or at least that I try not to be. In this spirit, I am going to suggest an important caveat about my conclusions. Scholars like me, that is, those in fields like psychology, communication science, or sociology, rely heavily on research practices that can only speak to what pornography might be doing “on average,” and can’t really speak to what porn might be doing for any given individual, in any given circumstance.

With this point in mind, while I feel quite comfortable concluding that pornography is relatively harmless for teens “on average,” that doesn’t mean that pornography can’t have harmful impacts for specific people in specific circumstances. Just who those people and what those circumstances are, however, remain largely unanswered questions.

One important circumstance might be the typical lack of comprehensive sexuality education. A point on which we can probably all agree is that pornography should not be the sole or primary source of information about sexuality for kids. Porn is a fictionalized drama, and while many adolescents recognize this, some do not. In a social context of poor sexual education, both within the home and within schools, teens—and adults—who strongly believe that pornography offers an idealized template for sexual interactions are in for a world of problems.

Let me leave you with a metaphor that I use in my human sexuality classes: Imagine if we lived in a world where Driver’s Education was more like your typical Sex Education class, replete with incomprehensible diagrams of the combustion engine and full of curious details like “pistons,” “crank-shafts,” and “exhaust manifolds.” Such complicated and incomprehensible instruction would almost always be accompanied by exposure to explicit visual reminders of the personal and social harms of unsafe driving.

If you were a “lucky” student, a public health nurse might teach you how to properly apply your seatbelt across an oversized stuffed banana that roughly approximates the size and shape of the human body. Most importantly, at no time would you be allowed to look at, handle, or get into a car before you reach a magical and arbitrary age. Even then, you would only be allowed to do so once you’ve made a life-long commitment to a single car, and it would be expected that you would only use it for its intended purpose: to get you off somewhere.

If this was the world in which we lived, illicit movies like Fast and Furious 8—which glorify the glistening curves of the automobile, the ecstatic cries of their engines, and the outright exhilaration of reckless and promiscuous (if a little unrealistic) driving—would give many of us cause for concern. In such a scenario, which of the following do you think best serves the public good: preventing teenagers from seeing a movie intended for adultsorgiving them frank, comprehensive, and effective Driver’s Education?

Thanks to Dr. Taylor Kohut for this guest post! Follow Taylor’s work here.

Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology? Click here for previous articles or follow the blog on Facebook (facebook.com/psychologyofsex), Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit (reddit.com/r/psychologyofsex) to receive updates. You can also follow Dr. Lehmiller on YouTube and Instagram.

Image Credits: 123RF/Stas Vulkanov

Check out these other interviews with authors:

How Porn Changes The Way Teens Think About Sex, And Why We Need Porn Literacy

Porn Ed: What Happens When Porn Replaces Sex Education?

How Is Porn Use Linked To Relationship Satisfaction? It’s Complicated

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#IFTTT #Meet Positives SMFeed 8

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