#meanwhile parents get separated from their children every day by ice

[singlethread]

The media trying to make me feel sympathetic towards Anna delvey, like besties it’s not gonna work

[bbangsoonie]

teach me about love

member: kevin genre: fluff (preschool teacher!kevin au) word count: 2,120 synopsis: when your brother asks you to pick up your nieces from school, you find a teacher that you find to be cuter than the toddlers there.

a/n: happy birthday to our moonlight boy, kevin 🌙

You didn’t really like kids. They were adorable, of course, but they were snotty walking embodiments of germs and you had no idea how to entertain them. They were absolutely precious when sleeping but their tantrums terrified you.

Whenever they came up to you with those bright expectant eyes, you didn’t know what to do except pet their head. Everyone around you would scold you saying that they were children, not dogs. But in your defense, they didn’t seem to mind.

To be honest, you preferred dogs over kids. They were cute all the time.

Nonetheless, you still adored your nieces. The older one, Ahyoung, reminded you of your own past self. She was shy and reserved but sought out love and attention. She constantly needed assurance to fight early signs of anxiety. The younger one, Soyoung, was the complete opposite; she was loud and outgoing. She easily made friends with everyone and adjusted well to new environments.

So when your brother asked you for a last minute favor, you were more than happy to pick them up at their preschool. Unfortunately, however, you were terrible with directions and ended up 20 minutes late.

Apologizing profusely to the staff and teachers, you made your way throughout the building to find their classroom. That was another struggle of its own.

“Auntie Y/n!” you heard two familiar voices screech. You laughed as they ran up to you and hugged your legs.

“Sorry I’m late girls,” you pouted as you squished their cheeks.

“It’s okay, Auntie! Teacher Kevin was playing house with us,” Ahyoung beamed.

“Teacher Kevin was our dog!” Soyoung giggled.

You looked up to see a male teacher sheepishly escape from the tiny playhouse. You held back a laugh, pitying him for what the girls put him through.

“I’m sorry about that,” you chuckled.

“No worries,” he smiled. “It’s my job and I love kids. I had fun playing with them too.”

“I’m Y/n,” you introduced as you held out a hand. “I’m Ahyoung and Soyoung’s aunt. I came to pick them up since my brother got caught up in a work emergency.”

“It’s nice to meet you. My name is Kevin,” he said as he shook your hand. You knew it was unprofessional to think this but he was cute. Like, really cute.

Trying to leave before your smiling cheeks could reveal your thoughts, you quickly collected the girls’ bags and helped them put their jackets on. You bid their cute teacher goodbye and happily suggested an aunt-niece ice cream date. They cheered at the idea of sweets and raced to your car.

The next week, your brother asked if you could pick the girls up from school again. Apparently they had been bugging him to have their favorite aunt come every day.

You weren’t sure if it was his flattery or if it was their sneaky plan for ice cream but you didn’t mind. As a freelancer, you had a flexible schedule. You were glad to spend time with your nieces and catch another glimpse of their teacher.

This time, you made sure to leave your house early. You ended up arriving before dismissal and watched as the kids ran around in the playground. Something about seeing Kevin’s eyes sparkle in front of them made you soft. He seemed so genuinely happy and looked at each student with honey dripping from his eyes.

Soyoung squealed as she chased after a boy who tapped her free in a game of freeze tag. She was a little confused about the rules but the effort was there.

While still keeping an eye on the children, Kevin approached you and asked if you wanted a juice box. You kindly declined, thanking him for the offer.

“You’re really good with the little ones,” you complimented.

“Ah, no, they’re the ones who are good with me,” he shyly shook his head. “I’m thankful that they see me as a fun and respectable teacher.”

“I find young kids to be difficult,” you confessed. “I don’t know how to match their level.”

“I get you. It’s definitely not easy to figure out what they want and try to communicate with them with their still-developing language skills. I’m still not great at it. I just try to improve a little more every day,” he said humbly.

He was a lot better than you who was quick to give up and run away. His words made you reflect and feel slightly guilty.

The bell chimed, making the students rush to line up in front of the door. Kevin left your side to gather everyone together and take them back inside to gather their belongings.

By now, a handful of parents had arrived and were waiting for their children. One by one, the students walked out with their matching yellow chick backpacks, excitedly running up to their guardian.

Your nieces greeted you in that high pitched shriek you loved, body slamming into your open arms. With them in your embrace, you gave them a tight squeeze before getting up and holding their hands to take them to the car.

“Wait!” you heard Kevin call out. Turning around, you were surprised to see him running towards you. When he caught up to you, he held out a book. Taking it, you read the title.

“The Body Language of Toddlers”

“I thought you might find this book useful,” his hands fumbled awkwardly, not knowing where to go. His gesture brought you a warm feeling.

“Thank you, Kevin. I’ll be sure to give it a read,” you smiled.

“Ooooh,” Ahyoung wiggled her eyebrows, making both you and Kevin blush. You ruffled her hair and ushered her towards your vehicle.

Picking the girls up from school became a biweekly thing for you. Every Monday and Friday, you would arrive ten minutes early to chat with Kevin as he told you funny stories that happened throughout the day. And when you worked with a bunch of preschoolers, there were a lot of those types of stories.

You listened as he went on about how a little boy woke up from a nap thinking he had an argument with his friend because of a nightmare he had. Kevin had to convince him that it was all a dream and that his friend did not actually steal his gummy worms and lie about it.

The way he spoke about his students was endearing. He made them sound like lovely angels even when they were cranky and misbehaving.

“We’re looking for chaperones for the upcoming field trip if you’re interested,” he cautiously brought up. “We only had a few parents sign up so we’d really appreciate any extra helping hands.”

Panicking, you stuttered about how you didn’t have the confidence to keep rowdy kids in check at a public space. He assured you that your only responsibility would be to make sure no one ran off and to accompany kids to the bathroom if they had to separate from the group.

He was a smooth talker. He somehow persuaded you into agreeing and you couldn’t believe you left the school that day after signing the form.

“Auntie, do you like Teacher Kevin?” Ahyoung asked you in the car ride back home.

“Sure, Teacher Kevin is nice,” you hummed.

“No, she means do you like like him?” Soyoung pressed.

You feigned innocence and pretended not to understand what they were talking about. They grilled you about how often you talked with him and even pointed out that he didn’t talk to other parents like that. They sure were smart-witted for their age.

On the day of the field trip, you spent a long time deciding on what to wear. You had no idea how casual you were supposed to dress as a chaperone.

You ended up choosing a simple outfit and rushed out the door to avoid being late. You had to say you were excited. It had been ages since you last visited an aquarium. And maybe the extra butterflies in your stomach were because of a certain someone you were looking forward to seeing.

Meeting Kevin outside of the school felt different. He stood out in the crowd of tiny humans. Even more so once you entered the place and you noticed that most of the visitors were families, students, or couples.

You softly smiled as you watched the kids fawn over colorful fish and gawk at sharks. It felt like you were returning to your own childhood innocence. You followed Ahyoung, who was pulling at your sleeve, to the jellyfish section where she asked you to take a picture of her with the transparent creature.

The photos came out so incredibly that you had to immediately send them to your brother. He texted back almost instantly and you scoffed when you read his message.

“Heck yeah I made that. Those are my genes right there.”

Rolling your eyes, the corners of your lips twitched up as you put the device away. You guided Ahyoung back to the rest of the group and ran into Kevin who was coming back from the bathroom with another student.

“How are you enjoying the trip so far?” he asked.

“It’s nice. Honestly not as chaotic as I thought it’d be,” you admitted.

“Oh don’t jinx it. Lunch time will be hectic,” he warned.

He was right. Between picky kids and the kimbap packed by their parents, the unwanted vegetables were flown around the picnic table. You barely managed to avoid the carrot that was flung in your direction. Unluckily, you were unable to dodge the spinach that was now tangled in your hair.

Kevin laughed as he tried to help you take it out, cracking a joke about it looking like seaweed and you looking like a mermaid dragged out of the ocean.

“He means you’re pretty, Auntie!!” Soyoung eagerly translated on his behalf. “Mermaids are super super pretty. Like Ariel, the princess!”

This raised a teasing crowd of “ooh”s from the group of preschoolers.

“Teacher Kevin and Auntie Y/n sitting in a tree,” a boy began chanting, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

His friend made a face and screamed “ew,” making him laugh uncontrollably. Meanwhile, Kevin was trying his best to cover his burning ears. He pulled the beanie over his ears, not wanting to expose his embarrassment.

“My daddy said no boy is good enough for Auntie but I’ll tell him nice things about you, Teacher Kevin. Just specially for you,” Ahyoung proudly announced.

Awkwardly coughing, you stuffed her cheeks with another roll of kimbap. Her muffled cries of resistance were appeased with a juice box shoved into her mouth. The sweet drink diverted her attention away from you and back to her lunch.

You two were now officially shipped by all of Kevin’s students. Even the other teachers giggled as they passed by you.

By the end of the field trip, you were one of the last ones to leave. After all the other students and teachers departed from the aquarium, Kevin escorted you to the car with a sleeping Ahyoung in his arms and a sleeping Soyoung in yours.

You both carefully placed them in their car seats and closed the door after buckling their seat belts. Now that you were alone with him, you didn’t know what to say. Despite the silence, it wasn’t necessarily uncomfortable.

“So have you warmed up to the idea of kids yet?” he finally asked after clearing his throat.

“The book you gave me definitely taught me a lot of things,” you nodded. “Now I’m not completely terrified of them. And seeing you handle kids comforts me.”

“Really? How so?”

“I don’t know. It’s just… you so effortlessly take care of them and I can see how much you cherish each and every one of your students. I envy that.”

“Trust me, it’s not as easy as you think it is,” he chuckled.

Silence fell between you again but you simply enjoyed his presence. You turned your head to see him already staring at you. With your eyes, you wordlessly asked if there was something he wanted to say.

“So uh tomorrow’s Saturday,” he suddenly mentioned. He was fiddling with a loose thread on his sweater and hesitated to speak up again.

“Do you have any plans for the weekend?” he blurted. You couldn’t stop the smile that crept up on your face.

“Nope.”

“Would you like to um grab dinner with me tomorrow then?”

He anxiously held his breath as he waited for your response. Biting his lips, he wondered if he had ruined things by going too fast.

“Sure. How’s 6?” you finally answered.

“6 is great. 6 is lovely. Wonderful. Perfect,” he replied with a huge grin.

a/n: calling all kevin enthusiasts aka @reverienostalgia

i also may or may not have kinda wrote my little cousins into this fic.. 👉🏻👈🏻

[everlarkbirthdaygifts]

Happy Birthday, mega-aulover!

Happy Birthday, @mega-aulover​! We hope you’ve had a wonderful day so far, and that you got exactly the presents you were hoping for! To keep your party going a little while longer, the lovely @endlessnightlock​ has written a story just for you!

Happy birthday @mega-aulover! Here’s something a little spicy, a little sweet for your day. Soul-mark Everlark. Rated M for non-explicit sexual content.

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The first time I remember talking to Peeta, we were five, and it was a fall day, much like today- cool and windy, a welcome cool down from the heat of summer. He was standing at the bakery’s back door with his father, his little round cheeks pink from the heat emanating from the ovens. The heat was so intense from the kitchen you could feel it out on the step, and his eyes were the bluest things I’d ever seen. I think I fell a little bit in love with him then.

We were there that morning because my father took me along with him to trade with the businesses in town. It was a day of a lot of firsts: not only did I meet Peeta, but I also had my first Mellark’s fall apple muffin- I’d never tasted anything so delicious in my life. Since that day, I’ve had lots of baked goods from Mellark’s, and while my favorite is probably the cheese buns Peeta makes especially for me, I’ll never forget those apple muffins- they were like magic.

That day also marked the first chance I had to spend the morning in the woods with my father, tagging along behind him as he hunted and checked his traps. Prim was just a baby back then, and in my hazy memory of the day, I think she was teething, and Mother needed to sleep; that’s why I got to spend the day with Father. It was such a good day, and meeting Peeta was the icing on the cake.

My father is a hunter-gatherer, and we live in a small house in the woods close to where the fence used to run, separating it from the district boundary. It isn't far from town because my mother is one of the district healers, and there was school in town that my sister and I needed to attend, of course. It’s been a wonderful place to grow up, straddling that line between wilderness and civilization. My family is a happy one.

According to my parents, our life looks entirely different from how things were even five years ago now that our country is the New Republic of Panem. 

When my parents were teenagers, the Great War erupted, and the districts, with the military backing of newly rediscovered Thirteen, rose together and defeated the Capitol’s heavy hand of oppression. They’d taken everything away from the districts for so long- food, freedom, hope in addition to the two children a year, forced to fight to their deaths in the Hunger Games. 

After the war that ended in the rebel’s victory, citizens of Panem were free in ways they’d never been: free to travel, free to pursue higher education, and in Twelve, they were free not to work in the mines for a pittance until they died an early death from miner’s lung or cancer. The possibilities to choose the path of your own life? They’re endless now compared to what they used to be. 

The only place where we are not so free is marriage, which wasn’t the Capitol’s doing. That’s because of the soul marks. 

A soul mark is a pattern that emerges on your body through your teen years, eventually pairing you with your soulmate when you reach adulthood. If you’re going to get one (not everyone does), the beginnings of it show up around puberty, and the pattern typically doesn’t fill in entirely until you reach the age of eighteen. Once you hit your eighteenth birthday, you are considered ready for marriage as soon as you find the person with the other half of your soul mark. There’s a ceremony during the first day of the Harvest Festival where the eighteen-year-olds participate; it’s when the couples typically pair off. 

We’re all told from an early age about the force that draws you to your mate; the older couples in the district are continually telling us younger ones there will be no doubt who your soulmate is when your time to meet comes.

I have a soul mark- it looks like a series of lines on my right hand in the space between my thumb and pointer finger; it’s a long line, with a series of eight identical hash marks that meet it vertically, leaving me with a soul mark that forms what I think must be the bottom half of a barcode. I’m not entirely sure that’s what the mark represents or what it is supposed to be.

Some of my friends have the marks; some don’t. Delly has one on her thigh, and Madge has one on her back. Peeta, my closest friend, and the person I have so many confusing feelings for, has a soul mark; when I asked him where it was, he flushed six different shades and told me he couldn’t let me see it.

I don’t think Peeta knows this, but I got a good look at what had formed of his soul mark when we were fifteen. That summer, a group of us hiked to the lake hidden in the woods to swim. Madge and Delly and I wore our darkest bras and underwear, we’d been before and knew what the water would do, while Peeta and Gale wore their boxer shorts. Peeta wore a pair of boxers that were unknown to him, transparent from behind when wet. 

That’s pretty much when all the confusing thoughts I have about him began. I’ll never forget how dry-mouthed and hot I felt looking at him that way- I could hardly take my eyes off him. Peeta’s frame wasn’t as large then as it is now, and he wasn’t so muscular either, but it was still wholly overwhelming. He was all thick legs and broad shoulders even then, with the thin, wet material of his boxers leaving little of his backside to the imagination. 

I’ve spent a lot of time alone in my bed at night thinking about that day, not just because of the way he looked and the way it made my body tingle (of course, that was part of it), but because of his soul mark. On one side of Peeta’s, err, butt, I guess you’d call it, were a few curving lines I could just make out through the thin material, which I kept sneaking glances at when no one was paying attention to me. 

Like mine, I couldn’t determine yet what Peeta’s mark was supposed to be, but the curving lines reminded me of a loose sketch of clouds I’d watched him sketch once. Clouds and barcodes? Those two things were as unrelated to each other as doorknobs and jackrabbits. And it made me sad, realizing that his mark and mine were so different because that meant we were both destined to be married to someone else. 

I don’t know why I felt like that- I didn’t even know if I wanted to get married; it was just that if I were, Peeta was the only boy I could picture myself spending the rest of my life with. He’s my best friend- he makes me laugh and makes me feel comfortable just being myself, and lately, I find myself thinking a lot about what it would feel like to kiss him, among other things I’m too embarrassed to mention.

The fact that I’ll never have any of the answers seems impossible to stomach, and today is the day- Match Day, the first day of the Harvest Festival. I’m so scared of what it’s going to bring: both who I’ll end up matched with and who I’ll watch Peeta walk away from the square with. Both are reason enough to make me want to run.

In the square with the other girls, I’m here, waiting with Madge and Delly for Mayor Undersee to stand on the stage and give out instructions for finding your mate in the crowd; if your mate is of age. If you couldn’t find your mate today, you keep coming back every year until you met the person with the matching soul mark. Twelve isn’t a large district, so there aren’t many young men and women here, maybe fifty. I’d say a quarter of them are a few years older, like Gale, who hasn’t paired up yet.

I scan the crowd, and my eyes briefly catch Peeta’s. He stares at me intently, something in his eyes I can’t name. It doesn’t look like the fear that I’m sure mine hold. I don’t know what he’s thinking, so I look away from him quickly, my stomach sinking at the reminder that he will never be mine, not the way I wanted. 

Why couldn’t it have just been him? Why did we have to have these stupid marks on our skin anyway? I stare ahead at the stage, not looking to the left or right after escaping the razorlike sharpness of Peeta’s gaze on me. 

And then, it’s time. Mayor Undersee appears on the small stage erected in the square just for this occasion. He stands in front of the groups of young men and women gathered near the front while curious onlookers and family of the soon-to-be-matched stay towards the back. Mayor Undersee looks out, smiling benevolently at us all.  “Welcome to the matching ceremony!” 

I feel like I’m going to be sick. I think panic might be setting in. Because I’m so nervous, I can’t concentrate on what the Mayor is saying; every noise around me sounds like buzzing and droning. Words bounce around inside my head, but very few of them form a coherent thought. 

Meanwhile, my only real thought is- 

I can’t do this. I can’t do this-

And so, as Mayor Undersee is wrapping up, as I’m panicking, as I realize that I’d be just as happy living alone in the woods for the rest of my life as I would be married to anyone other than Peeta, I come to a decision. As unobtrusively as possible because I don’t relish the idea of making a scene, I turn around and, ducking my head, elbow my way to the back of the crowd. When I get to the end of the girls’ group, I take off running without looking back. 

Getting further and further away from the crowd, I hear someone call out my name, but I don’t stop.

I run for the first place I can think of, the bakery. The business is closed for the matching ceremony since Peeta is running it now; he has been since we graduated in the spring. At the time, Mr. Mellark moved into his new wife’s home. He still works at the bakery, but he wanted to make way for Peeta to have a place to bring his new wife. 

Surely Peeta won’t come back here right away with his match? He’ll have to meet with her family and make plans for their wedding first. I know I should go somewhere else, I tell myself as I run up the back stairs that lead to his living quarters above the business, but I want the comfort of being here one last time before I lose him forever.

Letting myself into his kitchen, my favorite room in this space because it reminds me of time spent here with him, I drag myself over to his table; it’s old, it’s wood worn smooth and soft over time. Pulling a chair out, I slump down into the seat and let my arms drop to the tabletop, laying my head there.

Eventually, I hear heavy footsteps coming up the steps. When they stop, I look up to see Peeta standing in the doorway. “Are you alright?” he asks, sounding out of breath as he approaches me.

I laugh derisively. “What are you doing here? You should have stayed. You’re going to miss your match,” I tell him, although I’m glad he’s here, secretly, even though I know it’s just going to delay the inevitable. Peeta’s still going to match to a girl who isn’t me- someone who’s soul mark matches his.

“What happened?” He asks gently, ignoring my words. He pulls out the other chair and sits, scooting his chair close to me.

Instead of looking at him, I stare down at my hands; the breath caught in my throat. I’ve never been hesitant with Peeta, but my heart is thumping oddly inside my chest, and warmth is spreading through me. What I’m experiencing is similar to how I always feel in his vicinity, but greatly intensified. I sense Peeta watching me, waiting for an answer. When I glance over at him, he’s staring at my mouth. His tongue darts out, and he licks his lips; it makes my whole body feel tight.

“I can’t do it,” I say, tearing my glance away from his mouth, “I can’t marry some random man from the district. Not when, if things were different, it could’ve been-” 

I’m trying to say it, trying to tell Peeta why I can’t go through with the soul marks match, but my words trail off when he moves into me. What I soon discover are his impossibly soft lips are on mine quicker than I would’ve thought possible, and oh, the feeling. At the first touch of his mouth on mine, heat spreads through me. It travels down to the tips of my toes and fingers, snaking its way through every fiber of my being. Peeta wraps his arms around my waist, pulling me down to the floor. We’re kneeling together when he pulls me against him again. I go without any hesitation; I want to keep kissing and touching him so badly.

“We can’t- we can’t do this,” I say, finally fighting against my wants as I attempt to pull away from him. I’m so weak, though, giving in to him when he chases me with his lips. Everything feels so good; I feel more alive, more right than I have ever been.

“Why not?” Peeta asks softly. His hands are everywhere, and I don’t want him to stop. I want to climb on top of him; it’s an overwhelming, powerful need. “Katniss, I love you-”

I give in because he loves me too, throwing myself at him with such force, I knock Peeta off balance. We tumble to the floor, landing side by side with our arms entwined around each other. “You shouldn’t say that,” I tell Peeta as my mouth drops to his neck. It feels like my brain and my body are directing two completely different courses of action, and I can’t seem to stop either one of them. 

“Why?” Peeta moans as I suck on his skin. 

“Our marks don’t match.”

“Do you want me, though?” he asks, sounding serious as he pulls away. We’re both harshly breathing as we stare at each other. “Do you want to be with me?” he repeats.

“Yes,” I whisper, searching his eyes, “Of course I do, but-“

He interrupts me, impatient with my reasons. “How do you know we don’t match? You’ve never seen my mark.” Peeta quickly sits up, rising on his knees. His hands drop, and I watch him tear frantically at the button and zipper of his pants. It’s surreal, lying on the floor beside him. My body is buzzing in a way that feels amplified times a thousand as I watch him unbutton his pants and pull down the zipper. 

I know I should look away, but I can’t- for the first time in my life, I let him see that I’m looking at him, that I’m fascinated by him, and I want to know all his secrets. As he pushes his pants down to his knees, the tails of his shirt drop, obscuring his front so that all I can see are his muscular legs. 

I don’t know what to do- Peeta is naked under that shirt, and I just-

He shifts a little, moving the bottom of his shirt to reveal one side of his behind, and I finally have a good look at him. I’m instantly distracted.

Wow, he’s got a great-looking behind. Gorgeous, really; in fact, I have a crazy urge to sink my fingers into it. 

I tell myself to snap out of it because it makes things a little weird with me lying on the floor next to Peeta, staring up at the side of his butt. So I sit up; when I’m upright, I move the portion of Peeta’s shirt away that’s obscuring my view since I still couldn’t see his soul mark.

Peeta shivers when my fingers brush against him, exposing his bottom while I remain silent. I stare at the sight that greets my eyes, and he glances over his shoulder at me expectantly with eyebrows raised. 

All I can do is drop his shirt, concealing his bottom again before covering my face with both hands, trying to keep the happy laughter escaping me from crossing over into hysteria. 

I absolutely cannot believe this.

“Don’t laugh!” Peeta says, but he’s smirking himself. “I know my mark looks ridiculous, but I told you we matched.”

I sit back on my heels- my body shaking with the effort of trying to hold my laughter in. I cannot believe this- I’m thrilled. I’m getting everything I want. 

Peeta turns to face me. He’s still on his knees, and his pants are still in a puddle around his legs, but he doesn’t hesitate to put his arms around me, pulling me close to him. “I love you,” he says as I get my laughter under control. I can feel him smile against my scalp.

“I love you, too,” I mumble, happy tears streaking down my face and wetting his cotton shirt. I’m probably getting snot on him by now, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

Peeta pulls away, looking down at me. He uses one hand to wipe my eyes, and I take the opportunity to wipe my nose on the sleeve of my dress. I know it’s gross, but I guess some excess body fluids aren’t much to consider- he and I will be married soon. The corners of his mouth turn up in a smile as he watches at me. “You love me- for real?”

“Real,” I say, wiping my face with my sleeve again, just to be sure I got it all. “I love you.”

When my face is dry, I kiss him again, eagerly. I’m so happy, and I want him to know the way I feel. I love Peeta so much, and I want him so much. 

We’re kissing intently, and I’m urging Peeta to lay on top of me again as he slowly undoes the buttons of my dress, when I have an epiphany. What’s happening between us right now, this all-consuming hunger must’ve been what the older soul-matched couples referred to when they (rather knowingly now that I think about it) told soul-marked teens they’d know their mate when the time came. 

Apparently, in Peeta and I’s case, at least, “knowing when the time came” meant a quickly-awakened, unbridled desire for each other. Not that it took much for us when the love between us was already there, fully formed. I know this would’ve happened anyway.

It doesn’t take long for things to become even more heated between us. Before I know it, I’m lining up Peeta’s soul mark with mine when I reach behind him, grasping a handful of his delicious rump. My forwardness must surprise him, catching him off-guard in the middle of kissing a line down my neck and into the valley between my breasts, because when I do it, he grunts. HIs pleased noise makes my pulse race, so I do it to him again.

As for our marks? Of all things, Peeta’s is the top of an apple muffin, while mine is the bottom half. His curved lines and my rigid ones- they’re a lot like him and myself. Together we’re delicious. Although him on top and me on the bottom doesn’t last very long, just until he rolls us over and pulls my dress up and over my head, telling me he wants to look at me.

A while later, when the back of his head thunks against the wooden floor in bliss, I realize that maybe those apple muffins were pretty magical.

[tabloidtoc]

National Enquirer, May 10

You can buy a brand new copy of this issue without the mailing label for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Prince Charles orders Prince Harry to divorce Meghan Markle

Page 2: In a sniveling fit of pique, scorned Alex Rodriguez has trashed former fiancee Jennifer Lopez as a dud in the sack and A-Rod is moaning J. Lo drove him to chase excitement elsewhere because she couldn't keep up with his sex demands and Alex is defending his piggish behavior by saying Jennifer pushed him into it and their spark died long ago, and they were barely intimate for the best part of a year before calling it quits -- Jennifer would pack on the PDA for the cameras, but the moment they were in private she pushed Alex away and even made him sleep in a separate bedroom and he says it was like dating an ice queen and pities the next guy she ropes in -- Jennifer thought she and Alex had a pretty good connection during their happier times, even though she'd likely admit things really petered out toward the end when the lack of trust set in so it will sting her that he's trashing her skills in the bedroom

Page 4: Robert De Niro is getting pummeled by estranged wife Grace Hightower's free-spending ways and his bitter spouse is intent on taking the aging legend for every penny as their nasty divorce drags on -- Robert's lawyers argued in court that greedy Grace's extravagant lifestyle has forced him to take every job he can snag, causing the 77-year-old to toil 12-hour days, six days a week and what's more, Robert's Nobu restaurant business has hit hard times and his tax bills to Uncle Sam are piling up but he is reportedly worth a whopping $500 million, and Grace's lawyers have countered he's pleading poverty but regularly charters a helicopter to Sunday brunch, a charge denied by his lawyer and her attorneys also claimed Robert frequently flies to Florida on a private plane and spends millions and millions on himself -- meanwhile, Robert's relationship with 66-year-old Grace has taken such a nosedive, she's spending frivolously just to punish him and she's walked into a shop a spent $80,000 in 15 minutes and she will go on vacations to the Bahamas, stop at the duty-free store and pay four times the price of what things usually cost and she has more wigs than Imelda Marcos had shoes -- Robert met Grace in 1987 when she was working as a waitress in London, and they married a decade later but they split in 1999 then reconciled and renewed their vows in 2004 before finally calling it quits in 2018 -- De Niro has forked over as much as $375,000 a month to his spouse since their split and the financially squeezed star may resort to doing product endorsements just to pay the bills -- under the terms of the couple's prenuptial agreement, once Grace and Robert are finally divorced, she's allowed a $6 million home, $500,000 cash and $1 million in annual alimony, but her lawyers have argued she should be entitled to half his fortune

* Nearly two years after Hayden Panettiere accused ex-boyfriend Brian Hickerson of brutally attacking her, the bully was sentenced to serve time in Los Angeles after he pleaded no contest to two felony counts of injuring a spouse or girlfriend, and the remaining charges of battery, assault with a deadly weapon and dissuading a witness were dismissed and he was hit with 45 days behind bars and four years' probation but he'll get credit for 12 days served -- he's done his own damage and will pay a permanent price for it -- meanwhile, Hayden is now in a great place in her life

Page 5: Danny Masterson has dragged Leah Remini into his rape case, claiming her docuseries Scientology and Its Aftermath influenced his alleged victims to file police reports against him -- former Scientologist Leah offered the women inducements and benefits to report Masterson to cops, his lawyer Tom Mesereau told a L.A. criminal court -- Danny, a 45-year-old Scientologist and That '70s Show alum, has pleaded not guilty to charges he raped three women in separate incidents between 2001 and 2003 -- Mesereau also called an LAPD detective who worked a second job as security for Leah a double agent and questioned how a 2000 police report made by one alleged victim went missing, but Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller dismissed Mesereau's double agent claims as hyperbole and said the defense got a copy of the missing report and Mesereau's request to push back Masterson's preliminary hearing, a Scientology delay tactic, was also rejected

Page 6: Kelly Osbourne's shocking relapse after nearly four years of sobriety occurred amid intense family drama for the former reality show clan -- Kelly's mom Sharon Osbourne's exit from The Talk amid racism claims by co-hosts and dad Ozzy Osbourne's struggles with crippling Parkinson's disease and excruciating nerve damage frazzled her and she confessed she relapsed and she's not proud of it, but she's back on track and she's truly learned that it is just one day at a time -- her parents' problems weighed heavily on 36-year-old Kelly, who first struggled with substance abuse in her teens, and there's no doubt her mother's scandalous exit from The Talk played a big role as Kelly was crushed over the beating Sharon took in the press and retired rocker Ozzy's relentless suffering also pains Kelly and throw in brother Jack Osbourne's progressive MS and she's dealing with a lot

Page 7: Distressed Dolly Parton is ready to stage an all-star country intervention for her party-hearty goddaughter Miley Cyrus after recent photos of the troubled wild child swilling booze triggered alarm bells for Miley's family members and inner circle, including Dolly who has acted as a mentor to Miley and Dolly has always fussed over Miley like a mother hen and she's worried Miley is going to throw away her career and her life -- 75-year-old Dolly is so concerned about 28-year-old Miley that she's talked about reaching out to other country icons to arrange a meeting with the former Disney child star and help her consider her options and Dolly wants to enlist women she knows Miley truly admires, like Reba McEntire and Loretta Lynn, and organize a sit-down and Dolly knows if Miley hears from legends who achieved so much in the music industry, she's likely to understand any mistakes she makes now can affect her life forever -- every time Dolly thinks Miley's got her demons beat, she hears of another slip-up, so she feels like it's time to take action and Miley's parents Billy Ray Cyrus and Tish Cyrus, who are good pals of Dolly, are thankful for Dolly's concern because Billy Ray and Tish have tried talking to Miley, but she tunes her parents out and they agree their daughter is more likely to respond to Dolly and her legendary friends

* Angelina Jolie blamed her ugly divorce with Brad Pitt for dashing her dreams to direct movies -- she and Brad split in 2016 and the two have been locked in a mudslinging legal slugfest ever since -- Angie says she love directing, but she had a change in her family situation that's not made it possible for her to direct for a few years and Angie, who last directed 2017's First They Killed My Father, said she needed to just do shorter jobs and be home more, so she kind of went back to doing a few acting jobs

Page 8: Shamed sleaze Matt Lauer has been snubbed by his old Hamptons crowd, and it's got the scandal-scarred scumbag down in the dumps and the super-rich who live and socialize in the fashionable high-society playground won't forget how Lauer was axed from his longtime Today gig over bombshell allegations of sexual misconduct and Matt's done everything he can to regain his place in the community, from hanging out in the village to splashing money around and tipping too well and he's convinced he can make a comeback, but snooty residents turn their noses up and it must be difficult for him because it's tough for anyone who wants to get in with this crowd but for Matt it's become almost impossible -- with scandal raging, Lauer's marriage to Annette Roque collapsed and they divorced in 2019 after a two-year separation and they share three children, daughter Romy, 17, and sons Jack, 19, and Thijs, 14, and Lauer has denied any wrongdoing and insisted his reputation was wrongly smeared in a media feeding frenzy intent on destroying him -- after his divorce, Matt hooked up with public relations guru Shamin Abas and the two have reportedly been pals for years and were first linked when Matt took her to his New Zealand home in December 2019 and Matt's friends are saying he's talking about a big Hamptons wedding when he and Shamin make things official, but it would be a failure if no one attends but Shamin has a lot of connections, so maybe that will help in time -- Matt's obviously an embarrassment in the area and he's not getting much joy at the swanky country clubs he likes to frequent either and it's clear to see that doors from many A-listers, like Martha Stewart, Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johansson, who have had ample time to put out the welcome mat and Matt won't be getting invites to their homes anytime soon

Page 9: Kourtney Kardashian is packing on the PDA with new boyfriend Travis Barker and insiders said her desperate bid to compete with her sisters has gone way over the top and ever since Kourtney and Travis first went public, the oldest Kardashian sibling has made it a point to post the couple's passionate romps in racy pics and videos on social media and people in her circle feel it's beneath her to advertise her personal moments like this and even her family thinks it's unflattering, but she's getting a kick out of showing off her wild side and Kourtney has been desperate to raise her profile to keep up with internet-savvy sisters Kim Kardashian and Khloe Kardashian, who promote themselves by posting incessantly and Kourtney was always more low-key, but now she thinks she needs to be outrageous to keep up but her friends and family say it's not who she is, and she should put a lid on the steam

Page 10: Hot Shots -- Alison Brie helped tend to newly planted trees in Malibu, Chris Rock tuned out the world with a set of headphones while walking in Miami, Dylan McDermott plays a bad guy on Law & Order: Organized Crime, Dancing with the Stars pro Sasha Farber buzzed around L.A. on an electric bike, Margot Robbie skating in Malibu

Page 11: Paula Abdul is filling in for Luke Bryan on American Idol, but she's gone crazy with fillers and Botox to the point where she can barely move her face -- 58-year-old Paula, one of the show's original three judges who left before the ninth season, jumped at the chance after Luke tested positive for COVID-19, but when she showed up for work, she was far from the familiar face everyone was expecting and she must have given her co-hosts quite a fright because her face is blown up like a balloon and her forehead has no lines and her eyes have no crinkling at the corners that you would normally expect on someone who's pushing 60 and people are saying she never did know when to quit and this time she's really gone overboard and it was a shame, since it's no secret she'd love to make a comeback on the show and she's still in fantastic shape, but it's kind of sad to see her fall victim to these Hollywood trends as she's a lovely lady and should leave well enough alone -- her heart-shaped face may predispose her to a slower aging process than longer facial shapes

* Jessica Simpson has plumped up her kisser, but one expert thinks her new inflated piehole would look better on a fish because she's gone overboard with filler in her lips and the end result is an unnatural and very unattractive look because the M-shape of the middle upper lip is distorted, creating a fishy appearance she surely wasn't going for

Page 12: Straight Shuter gossip column -- James Bond will be gunning for Top Gun: Maverick on movie screens in November, and Tom Cruise isn't happy -- moving the Top Gun sequel from July to November has left Tom shaken and stirred and no one is more competitive than Tom and going up against the new 007 film starring Daniel Craig has put the fear of God into him because Tom likes to win and coming in second is not an option so get ready for an all-out box office war between Tom and James Bond and this is going to get ugly

* Just out-of-the-closet Colton Underwood has been invited back to his old stomping grounds on The Bachelor but he won't be the new Gay Bachelor, but there's been talk about him returning to help contestants through the process -- he'll literally play the gay best friend who helps the straight contestants find love

* Bridgerton stud Rege-Jean Page won't be back for season 2, but crossing the show's powerful producer Shonda Rhimes was not smart because Shonda is not used to being told no, especially by an actor no one had heard of before she cast him -- Rege-Jean was naive about the business of Hollywood, but he's learning fast but saying no to Shonda is a move he's now thinking twice about

* Irina Shayk had her hands full during a photo shoot in NYC (picture)

Page 13: Racy reality series The Bachelorette has so disgusted some American viewers, they've flooded the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with complaints and calls to yank the sexy show from TV -- according to documents, a season 16 dodgeball game that turned into a stripping competition among Clare Crawley's suitors in 2020 especially fueled viewers' rage, even though the aired footage was blacked out to protect the men's privates but the game was not over until one team was fully naked

* Matchmaker Olivia Newton-John is itching to play Cupid for longtime pal John Travolta as her Grease co-star approaches the one-year anniversary of the death of his beloved wife Kelly Preston and Oliva would like nothing more than to bring some joy and happiness back into John's life and she has lots of beautiful, fun-filled lady friends from the U.S. and Australia she could set John up with but he may not be ready for a new romance, and John himself has admitted mourning is individual and experiencing your own journey is what can lead to healing and John still hasn't gotten over Kelly's death yet and it feels like yesterday to him

Page 15: Tiger Woods' former mistress Jamie Jungers is dishing about her doomed 18-month affair with the then-married golf great and the fallout that triggered her harrowing spiral into drug addiction in a juicy new tell-all -- Jamie, 38, said she met the skirt-chasing links legend, now recovering from a shattered right leg after a February car crash, during her stint as a party host in Sin City and she claimed they kicked off a fling behind the back of his wife Elin Nordegren and Tiger would often fly his new squeeze to his L.A. home for their secret trysts and Jamie said she even once signed for a package at the newlyweds' pad that turned out to be wedding photos of Tiger and his bride, who divorced the sex addict in 2010 -- but it was not too hard for Jamie to convince herself the couple's marriage was on the skids because Elin spent so much time in her native Sweden and Jamie confessed she loved Tiger in a way but knew they'd never have a real relationship -- things came to a screeching halt when the tightwad millionaire refused to help her find new digs and Jamie kept her lips zipped about the hush-hush affair for three years, but she claimed her ensuing media appearances, in which she was dubbed Mistress No. 4, left her feeling humiliated, triggering a $500 a day pill habit that led to her getting hooked on heroin and meth and homeless Jamie endured failed stints in rehab, went through detox while behind bars and hit rock bottom before getting clean in 2018 and now sober, she said of her former flame she's not in love with him anymore

Page 16: Picky parents Alec Baldwin and Hilaria Baldwin have found one thing that's even tougher than raising six kids: finding the right nanny -- Alec and Hilaria have high expectations for prospective carers and exacting demands when it comes to their duties and Hilaria is so involved with the kids, so she's especially vigilant and has the final say when it comes to hiring and firing though Alec definitely has his checklist on what makes a good nanny and try as they might, they realize they can't do everything themselves and need help, lots of it, but it's been a logistical nightmare getting a team of nannies organized as Alec and Hilaria are tough on them and firm and long hours and multitasking are a must and of course they must be quick on their toes and know what to do with a cranky set of children without losing their cool and a good disposition, a clean and tidy appearance and the ability to step in last minute when needed are all prerequisites to be a Baldwin nanny -- Hilaria and Alec feel guilty about using more help than they initially thought they'd need and typically have at least two nannies on duty and they're doing their best to keep their home from becoming a nuthouse and stay sane and even when Hilaria and Alec are both home at the same time, they still need help changing diapers and doing endless loads of laundry, preparing meals and snacks and assisting homeschooling for the older ones and making sure they all get plenty of exercise and playtime -- it's been a challenge and they won't settle for anything but the most skilled nannies, and their friends can see the efforts are paying off

Page 17: Britney Spears has taken to social media to insist she's OK, but there are increasing concerns over the singer's state of mind -- Britney, 39, has shared bizarre Instagram posts showing her maniacally dancing and also bellyached that she's trying to learn how to use technology in this technology-driven generation, but to be totally honest she can't stand it -- the wacky videos followed the documentary Framing Britney Spears, which cast an unflattering spotlight on her troubled history amid her fight to have her conservator dad Jamie Spears removed from overseeing her personal and financial affairs and Britney, who has not had control over her own cash or major life decisions since her notorious 2008 breakdown, said the documentary's portrayal embarrassed her and brought her to tears and she cried for two weeks -- still, Britney reassured fans she's totally fine and she's extremely happy, she has a beautiful home, beautiful children, referring to her sons Sean, 15, and Jayden, 14, and although Britney, who's been coupled up with 27-year-old personal trainer Sam Asghari since 2016, insisted she's enjoying herself, she was caught on camera in Malibu appearing out of sorts and she looked a total mess and she looked like she hadn't brushed her hair in days and the truth is she's wracked with anxiety and she doesn't trust anyone in her orbit except her boyfriend

Page 18: American Life -- Like many dads, J.B. Handley couldn't understand his teenage son, but in this case, 18-year-old Jamison Handley is autistic and has not spoken a word since he was born -- using a breakthrough strategy called Spelling to Communicate (STC), J.B. discovered his son was hyper-intelligent and now Jamison is graduating from high school and will go to college to study neuroscience in 2022

Page 19: Newly single Kanye West is in the market for someone to cuddle with now that Kim Kardashian is out of the picture and the National Enquirer has decided to help him in his quest: Amanda Gorman, Bjork, Quay Dash, Marina Abramovic, Maria Cristerna

* While Kanye West is looking for a new lady to be his creative muse, his estranged wife Kim Kardashian sees the dating pool as the source of her next career move -- Kim has not been romantically linked to anyone since she filed for divorce in February and she's not dating anyone because, if she were, it would be a career move and Kim can't date quietly; she doesn't even understand what that would be like

Page 22: Katie Holmes and her boytoy beau Emilio Vitolo Jr. haven't been photographed together in more than a month, leaving people to wonder if the once snap-happy couple's romance is cooling off -- after being constantly caught on camera packing on the PDAs, the coosome twosome's vanishing act has sources suspecting work stress is taking a toll -- they're still together but things aren't anything like they were, and Katie seems pretty down and Emilio has been working long hours at his dad's restaurant, which was hit hard during the pandemic and that's meant less time for him and Katie to hang out and their romance may have gone from full boil to simmer

* Hollywood Hookups -- Danica Patrick and Carter Comstock dating, Zac Efron and Vanessa Valladares split, Madison LeCroy is dating a mystery man

Page 23: Lizzo stripped nude on social media for an unedited selfie to promote body positivity in all its glory and the 32-year-old defied the haters by bravely going makeup-free and wearing only her birthday suit -- she said she's letting it all hang out to encourage girls struggling with their self-image and self-confidence to embrace their natural beauty

* Bethenny Frankel plans to spend a whopping $10 million on her upcoming wedding -- she is set to wed Paul Bernon after she was spotted flashing a ginormous sparkler reportedly worth over $400,000 and movie producer Paul, 43, has given Bethenny, 50, carte blanche to spend whatever she wants so she's thinking 50,000 roses, champagne, gilt-edged glasses, a garden setting with fountains, dancers and a choir and Bethenny wants it to be perfect and she expects the best of everything

* Julianna Margulies has admitted things were hot on the set of ER, and it was because she and co-star George Clooney had a crush on each other and the chemistry on the beloved TV series between Julianna, now 54, and George, 60, was organic, she gushed in her upcoming memoir -- she also said when you create an environment that people feel safe in, then you do your best work and George taught her that and she felt so safe with him

Page 25: Troubled Tori Spelling is convinced having a sixth baby is the only way to bring her rocky 15-year marriage to Dean McDermott back from the brink -- Tori, 47, and Dean, 54, have been living separate lives for months and she has frequently been seen in public without her wedding ring and lately they've been more like brother and sister than husband and wife, but Tori is under the impression that another baby will give them a fresh start -- Dean has tried to repair their romance by taking on more dad duties and he even pushed for a recent family getaway to Palm Springs, where Tori socked her husband with the ultimatum to give her another baby or hit the highway and it's true they got along a lot happier when she was pregnant, but a lot of people think she's being delusional since they still have a lot of issues to work through and having another kid isn't going to be a magic fix and in fact, it may even add to their problems

Page 26: Cover Story -- Prince Harry's desperate bid to make peace with his estranged royal family exploded spectacularly when his father Prince Charles gave him an ultimatum to divorce Meghan Markle or you're out forever -- the secret showdown came after the funeral for his grandfather Prince Philip that forced family members to reunite for the first time following a year of bitterness and shocking allegations and any hope Harry had of mending fences and being welcomed back went out the window when he broke Queen Elizabeth's heart by snubbing her 95th birthday right after the funeral because he flew back to California the day before her birthday and it was the last straw for Charles, who was furious and he was stunned his son couldn't wait just 24 hours more to show respect for his grandmother and felt compelled to rush back to his pregnant wife Meghan and it would have meant so much for Her Majesty, who was still mourning her husband and needs all the comfort she can get but instead Harry headed back to his ritzy $14 mansion and Hollywood lifestyle, callously leaving his grieving grandmother on what should have been her big day -- the word is Meghan ordered him back as he'd been gone 10 days, their longest separation since they wed, and she didn't want his family playing mind tricks on him, trying to convince him he should return to the U.K. -- Charles confronted his younger son about snubbing Her Majesty during a phone call from his country getaway in Wales, where Charles was grieving his father Prince Philip and considering the future of the monarchy and Charles didn't mince words and he called Harry selfish and blamed Meghan for ripping the family apart and he bluntly admitted he and other royals, including the queen herself, were deeply disappointed and very angry by what the couple said in an explosive tell-all TV special and he couldn't believe Harry would agree to such a devastating interview without pressure from his publicity-obsessed wife or her advisors and Charles told Harry he was ashamed of him for turning his back on his family and breaking his grandmother's heart and Charles said he didn't believe Harry's marriage can survive long-term and suggested that Meghan was so ambitious, she'd dump Harry when something, or someone, better came along then he shockingly told his son he would only be welcomed back if he divorced that American actress and Charles insisted divorce was the only way to save the royal family and Harry himself -- Harry faced a great deal of frostiness from other members of the family after he arrived for Philip's funeral: Princess Anne, Prince Edward, his wife Sophie and other relatives didn't even look at Harry, they are so angry with him and Meghan, and Prince William and his wife Duchess Kate tried to put on a united front, speaking to Harry as they walked away from the service, but it was all for show as the queen had ordered a truce in the feud to avoid another public scandal, but family feelings are running very deep against Harry and Meghan for quitting royal duties and trashing the royals in their interview and the truth is if Harry doesn't divorce Meghan, this rift will never be mended

Page 36: Ellen DeGeneres confessed she'd swilled three cannabis-laced drinks and popped two snooze-inducing pills before driving wife Portia de Rossi to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy -- during an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Ellen said she'd downed a commercial beverage containing the weed compounds THC and CBD and admitted she didn't feel anything and then she drank three, and she also took two melatonin sleep pills and she's lying in bed and realizes Portia is not in bed -- after finding Portia on all fours and in pain, Ellen claimed her adrenaline kicked in and she rushed Portia to the hospital

Page 38: Gwyneth Paltrow knows at least one person who is not a fan of her catalog of sex toys: her mom Blythe Danner -- while Gwynnie loves to bang the drum for frisky female fun by hawking vibrators, whips, handcuffs, genital-themed jewelry and even a candle called This Smells Like My Orgasm, her 78-year-old mother is always shocked by her raunchy online inventory and is very proper, but Gwyneth said even proper ladies have sexuality too -- although her mom is not lining up to purchase the BDSM starter kit or the $15,000 gold-plated dildo, Gwyneth remains committed to tackling taboos related to female pleasure, saying she thinks that our sexuality is such an important part of who we are and one of the things they really believe in at Goop is eliminating shame from these topics

* The Entourage crew might get back together, with Charlie Sheen joining the gang -- the creator of the bro show and 2015 spinoff movie said he may bring the boys back with his buddy Charlie in the reboot and Doug Elin says whether he would ever be in Entourage as Charlie Sheen or whether he would create a character for him, he would be all for it -- Charlie hasn't been seen on the big screen since a 2018 guest spot on Saturday Night Live

Page 42: Red Carpet -- Sofia Vergara

[moonlightchess]

The Winter Wolves (1)

Eirik and Eija Sturmborn are twins, born to a long local tradition in northernmost Minnesota, of winter wolves and pack wars and family bonds as deep as they are destructive. Things are changing as of late, and worse, not changing at all - they’re adults now, and they have yet to shift into the wolf-skin their wild-bred parents should have passed on to them long ago. Wholly human they remain, albeit strong and hardy and ready to die fighting back the howling rival packs threaded throughout their family’s Gray woods as rumors spread that the Sturmborn twins are never going to make the final change and now is the time to strike, to wipe out the Sturmborn pack entirely so that their dwindling bloodline will finally cease to be a threat in the inevitable statewide pack war that has been simmering for years. 

There’s also the death of their lost brother Sven, years ago, killed in an alpha fight during a wolf run with their parents when the twins were children - as the story goes, anyway. Details are emerging, cults are stirring, and the twins can’t stop dreaming of ravens and death. The Danish Larsen witches to the south who claim Eija’s dearest friend and heart’s desire Sara have no idea that she’s been using her magic to aid the twins in uncovering what really happened to Sven and holding off the Karlsen and Jorgunsson packs for as long as possible. Meanwhile Eirik’s continued clumsy attempts to woo the elegant violinist, the newcomer to Angle Inlet Julian Hassan, are not going well at all. The brutal tragedy and burgeoning madness stirring in their land and their blood are nothing compared to the battlefield of human longing, a truth more evident every day.

“All religion is only ever a desperate search for the freedom and relief of not being held accountable for your own life, your own future, your own actions,” Eirik told his sister once, huffing the words into a cloud of sawdust as he’d hunched over his current project - a kitchen table for upstairs. “The trick is finding the right god to apply to your personal aesthetic, the right doctrine to inspire your vanity and ego. You have to find the god that’s willing to tell you what you want to hear, who looks the way you think god should look. Once you do, of course you’ll die for them. The mass appeal of Christianity lies in how malleable and forgiving it is, and churches and cults alike all feed on growth. That’s why the Buddhists are so welcoming to any ignorant white college student with a “namaste” bath rug, they’ve figured it out. It’s the same reason romance novels with empty, undefined characters always sell the best. People like to see themselves in things, I revere the old gods as much as anyone, but I’m not stupid. We are nothing if not our own egos. It’s the invite-only religions that you ought to keep an eye on.”

Eija had laughed, the inhalation of a lungful of sawdust of no concern to her. They were woodworkers and potters by trade, the Sturmborns. Her own palm was slowly working out a thick pine splinter from a week ago. “So now my brother is a philosopher,” she’d observed, stealing his iron beer stein for a healthy gulp. At eighteen apiece - twins, they - technically the state laws of Minnesota frowned upon such indulgences. But the town of Angle Inlet was also acutely aware of the elective and social power of its enormously Scandinavian population, who poured beer and honey wine out at winter gatherings for everyone present, including their young. Such was their culture, and they’d been raised into responsible sorts. The ale of tonight was a heady, oaky blend with a thick head of caramel foam, heavily scented of smoked apples.

“Hardly, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about.” Eirik lapsed into a comfortable silence without further elaboration, another habit to which they were prone. She eventually retrieved some homework from under their longest work bench, history tonight, and settled cross-legged on the basement’s gritty stone floor while her brother worked. He was sanding the chair smooth by the time she looked up again, rising to his considerable height - both of them quite tall and sturdy like their parents - to tap her on the top of her head. Her nearly-buzzed snow-blonde hair scraped his fingertips like velcro, and she lifted her head without comment. His own was much longer, down just past his shoulders in thick wheat-blond waves. “It’s getting late.” He handed her the last of the beer stein to finish, which she did, bringing it upstairs to wash later.

The house was quiet, still. They hadn’t seen their parents in weeks, which was not unusual. The wolves had come calling in September, as they were wont to do, and Kaspar and Emma Sturmborn had bolted from the house one night at last, howling and wild and tearing at their clothes. They’d returned once or twice before the autumn chill had cracked the damp haze of summer, naked and soaked in blood, flesh scored raw with gore and gashes that healed in a day or two. On the last night of September though, their mother had been snappish and restless at dinner. Their father’s profoundly sexual longing for her had oozed through his attempts at polite conversation, the occasional baring of teeth suggesting that marital relations weren’t the only carnal craving he was experiencing just then. The blood moon had come.

The howling, the clicking of claws on their porch, the soft whuffing and whimpering of the pack had kept the twins up that night, and in the morning their parents had been gone, lost to the woods with the front door swinging open in the slight breeze. Every year the pack came, and every year they stayed away a little longer. But Eija and Eirik knew hunting, knew canning, fermenting, cooking and cleaning. They knew how to make and repair furniture, ceramics, clothes. They knew how to maintain embers in the wood stove to keep the house warm, and they knew how to play chess to keep each other entertained. Every year they were fine whenever their parents returned, and this bred a sense of confident abandonment in Kaspar and Emma. No questions were ever asked, no details ever offered.

The matter of Sven though, was troubling.

Sven had been their brother, once. He’d been tall and thick like them, pale and blond with a strong jaw and ice-colored eyes so light and glittering they were nearly colorless mirrors. He’d turned with their parents early, tumbling around the woods as a pup and laughing at the way his body had shifted so fluidly from yipping gray wolf to boy and back again. Sven had never stopped laughing, in fact - he’d been funny, loud and bright. He hid Eija’s shoes and teased Eirik into putting his hand into a box full of shaving cream to find out the “secret.” His hugs had always been warm and tight, and one day he’d bounded out the door with his parents and the pack to chase the blood moon and he’d never come back.

There had been a hunt, their parents had explained. A fight, an accident, Sven’s blood splashed dark across the trees and snow. He’d never come back from the woods, and they’d never spoken of him again. Eija though, she kept his sweaters at the back of her closet and would occasionally put one on, for bad nights. She still had Eirik at least, who was steady and intelligent without any of Sven’s lively humor but all of his sturdy support and dependability. Their parents would not speak his name, as if to acknowledge that he had once been would invoke some darkness, violate some pact. Still, on the night of the Friggablot every May, after honoring their mother with dinner and gifts, the twins would slip into the wolf-woods to light a sacred fire for their lost Sven. He never found it, no matter where they camped.

Eirik’s nighttime routine was a quiet one, as was Eija’s. They shared a dinner of beef stew and bread, and Eirik brewed them warm root tea as the sun sank. Wordlessly, they washed the dishes side by side with Eija scrubbing and her brother drying, and he pressed his lips to her temple before they separated for the night. “Drom sott,” were his only words, and she smiled faintly, squeezed his hand. Hausblot had already passed and the nights were going brisk and chilly, but their northern blood was ready and she didn’t bother leaving the woodstove lit. Instead, she waited for Eirik to finish his bath before taking command of the upstairs bathroom herself, the scent of his wood-and-mint soap lingering soothingly. 

She’d cleaned and laid out the old furs for her bed the month before, in preparation for northern Minnesota’s half-year deep freeze, but even snuggling down under at least ten pounds of fur and fabric couldn’t lull her to sleep. Normally this was not an issue for her, but a buzz filled her brain that wouldn’t be silenced even as the night wore on. It was around midnight that she finally abandoned all pretense and let her mind find Eirik, who was not in his bed. He was in fact, directly over her head.

The roof of their log home was flat to the east side and angled to the south, with a lip of log rising up around the perimeter that acted as a sufficient barrier to prevent one from rolling off in their sleep. This had led to some years of the twins sleeping on the roof when there was no rain predicted, and she found him up there several minutes later via the ladder hooked to her bedroom window that only asked for a little swinging and dexterity to get there. The air was sharp and cool, the sky swirling dark, the milk-dense moon casting the world in a pearl glow. An icy, pine-sharp breeze bit through her soft pajamas, and she shivered, tiptoeing across weathered roofing to him.

He’d laid out all of his own thick bedding, his pillow, and in his flannel pajama pants and long-sleeved black henley he looked as comfortable as anything indoors. Eija tossed her own pillow, managing to land it just beside his head so that he didn’t stir, but when she crawled into their now-shared nest of furs and blankets he silently slid an arm around her shoulders to draw her close. His heartbeat steadied under her cheek when she rested her head on his chest, the cool air sweeping out toward the woods unable to cut into the warmth of them, and finally she slept.

A cold, gray-soft dawn had broken when she next opened her eyes, the loss of Eirik’s soothing heat abruptly jarring. He was sitting upright beside her, leaning forward a little and peering out toward the woods. She opened her mouth, but before a breath escaped her he silenced her with a raised hand and pointed. “Look.” His voice was a whisper, strange considering that they were at least ten miles from their closest neighbor. The word floated away from his lips on a cloud of steam as it met the frigid air, his breath dissipating even as she obeyed.

The tree line of the woods surrounding their house began after roughly half an acre of wild growth that served as something of a kitchen garden - their parents had taught them how to grow potatoes, carrots, turnips and herbs to sustain them when trips into town became a snow-packed luxury in the winter months. Eirik’s pale eyes were fixed upon the space now, and after a moment of bleary adjustment, Eija came to understand why. A small collection of people were emerging into the burgeoning light, spilling out from the woods like a tiny swarm of rolling bugs out from under a lifted rock. They were all in dark hooded robes obscuring their faces, but their heights suggested men, women, maybe even children.

“What were they doing in our woods?” Eirik’s hand tightened around her forearm, where it had fallen moments before, and he shook his head to silence her. No one had noticed them yet, they were likely too far away. There were at least ten of them, and the way they moved together felt familiar. A rival pack then, maybe the ones who had challenged their father for his alpha position and killed Sven - laughing Sven -years ago. Eija’s teeth bared themselves and she tensed all over, but Eirik was only alert, watching. The group slowly broke apart, crossing their land on silent feet in the earliest possible morning, several heading west toward the Lost River, others east into town. It wasn’t until the last of them was no longer visible that Eirik seemed to exhale, lifting his hand from Eija’s arm.

Something about what they’d seen felt profoundly wrong, despite the robed figures having done nothing particularly threatening. “It wasn’t a blot,” Eirik said quietly. “Hausblot’s done, they’re quite late if they’re observing out there at this point.”

“Erik the Red’s day?”

“Couple of days too early. Maybe. I don’t know.”

They rolled their bedding in silence and carried the piles back into the house through her bedroom window, where Eirik laid them neatly back across their beds. He slept below Eija’s attic room, down the hall from their parents’ empty bedroom. She realized as she was inhaling deeply of the cold forest scents still clinging to her furs that part of her had hoped their parents would be among the strange hooded figures, on their way home from a few months with the pack. But none had crossed the kitchen garden to enter their house, and some natural instinct had held her back from calling out to the group to ask for them.

[dogbearinggifts]

“Dad Sent Me to the Moon” vs. “Because Dad Made Me”

How Luther and Vanya Talk About Trauma, Part One

In this fandom, I’ve heard a lot about Luther and Vanya. 

Most of the things I’ve heard about Luther are negative. He constantly whines about his time on the Moon. He won’t shut up about how he had it worse than everyone else. He invalidates his siblings’ trauma. Meanwhile, Vanya is spoken of as if she’s his polar opposite: a kind, timid woman who genuinely did have it worse than everyone else but suffers nobly in silence while quietly ensuring her siblings are okay. I wanted to see if these perceptions were accurate, so I decided to take an empirical approach. During my sixth rewatch, I noted every time Luther mentions the Moon or Vanya mentions her exclusion, as well as how each of them responds to hearing of someone else’s trauma.

I want to stress that I am not out to throw one character under the bus. I’m not out to prove that Vanya is the actual worst and that Luther is the literal best, or that Vanya is amazing and Luther is awful. I’ve just heard a lot about both characters from within the fandom and I want to see how strongly the show itself supports the fandom’s perceptions. I won’t be examining every quote they have, and I won’t be looking at every scene they’re in. A deep study of both characters would certainly be fun, but for now, I’m only interested in how they address their own trauma and how they respond to the trauma of others. 

Note: I’ve chosen not to include Vanya’s book as a mention of her trauma. While her book does indeed bring it up and examine it in detail, I wasn’t sure how to quantify it for my own purposes. Do I count it as a single mention, because she only wrote it down once, and thus risk underestimating its impact? Do I count each sale as a separate mention, guesstimate the number based on how many copies sold it takes to reach bestseller status, and therefore grossly inflate her numbers? Because the book is impossible to quantify with any sort of accuracy, I’ve chosen to leave it aside. Rather, I will keep my trauma counts limited to what Luther and Vanya say to friends or family members. This also means I won’t include her voice-over while we see her writing her book, or the moments where she reads excerpts aloud. 

I’ve also chosen to write down the exact quote each time Luther or Vanya mentions their respective trauma or respond to someone else’s trauma. I’ll share my analysis, but I also want to give you all the chance to see each quote for yourselves and make your own judgments. You’re welcome to disagree with my conclusions and take or leave them as you see fit.  However, because these analyses will become lengthy in places, I plan to do only a few episodes at a time.

Episode 1: We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals

No explicit mentions of trauma from either Luther or Vanya. It’s established that Luther lived on the Moon for a while and that Vanya was raised to believe she had no powers and excluded from the family dynamic as a result, but neither one addresses what they went through. 

Episode 2: Run Boy Run

Following the episode opener—a flashback to the day Five time-traveled and accidentally got stuck in the apocalypse—we hear Five share the harrowing details of his time there. Eating cockroaches, subsisting on scavenged food, learning the hard way that Twinkies do in fact expire—it’s pretty awful stuff. After Vanya takes it in stunned silence, we have this exchange: 

Five: You think I’m crazy.  Vanya: No, it’s just…it’s a lot to take in.  Five: Exactly what don’t you understand?  Vanya: Why didn’t you just time-travel back?  Five: Gee, wish I’d thought of that. Time-travel is a crapshoot. I went into the ice and never acorn-ed. You think I didn’t try everything to get back to my family?  Vanya: If you grew old there, you know, in the apocalypse, then how come you still look like a kid?  Five: I told you already. I must have got the equations wrong.  Vanya: I mean, Dad always used to say that time-travel could mess up your mind. Maybe that’s what’s happening? 

This is our first onscreen mention of trauma, and Vanya invalidates it. However, there are some factors to consider: 

Five’s story is pretty bizarre. “Yeah, after I ran away from home and time-traveled, I got stuck in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, lived there for 40 years or so, ate cockroaches and bad Twinkies, and then I jumped right back here but because math failed me almost as much as Dad failed at parenting I still look just like I did the day I left. You got any booze?” 

There is no evidence to corroborate his story. He looks exactly the way he did when he left, and he has no way to prove he visited the future at all. The most logical conclusion here is that he spent a year at most figuring out how to return and wound up jumping ahead to 17 years after his disappearance.

As we see in the flashback, Five has always been arrogant and headstrong, growing angry when corrected. His anger and impatience toward Vanya’s insinuations that he’s lost his mind are not a reliable indication that he’s telling the truth; if anything, Vanya is well within reason to assume she’s edging too close to a truth he’s not ready to face. 

Reginald Hargreeves was a terrible parent. But he was also a very smart man who knew more about his children’s powers than they themselves did. When he said that time-travel could mess up one’s mind, Vanya had every reason to assume he knew what he was talking about. 

Reginald often used “YOU CHILDREN MUST ONE DAY SAVE THE WORLD FROM AN IGNOMINIOUS END” to scare his kids into doing the dishes. Not only has Vanya probably had enough of that talk to make her decide the world is going to die a natural death billions of years after hers, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable for her to assume Five’s time-travel-addled mind latched onto those doomsday threats and twisted them into something truly strange. 

So, yes, Vanya does invalidate Five’s trauma, suggesting it’s all in his head. But when your choices of explanation are “my brother time-traveled before he was ready and it messed up his mind” or “my brother time-traveled to an apocalypse that’s going to happen in 8 days, lived there for 40 years without ever trying to get back, and now looks like a 13-year-old kid because he got the math wrong,” the former is easier to believe than the latter. 

Additionally, we see she genuinely cares for Five. His sudden reappearance, his talk of an impending apocalypse, his story that to her has holes large enough to drive a Volkswagen through—all of that has got to be terrifying. It’s clear she’s not invalidating his trauma out of any sense of malice, but rather concern. If he’s a victim of time-travel messing up his mind, she wants him to get the help he needs (as evidenced by her recommending a therapist later). Her invalidation of his trauma isn’t right, but it’s also a human response that comes from a place of genuine concern and good intentions. 

It’s also worth noting that, the very next day, she returns to the Academy to apologize for how she responded to his story. She does recommend a therapist, but only when Five says “Maybe you were right, maybe it was all in my head.”

A few scenes later, we get Vanya’s first mention of her trauma. 

Allison: No offense, Vanya, if I wanted advice, it wouldn’t be from you.  Vanya: What’s that supposed to mean?  Allison: You don’t have a child. You’ve never even been in a relationship.  Vanya: That’s not true.  Allison: So you know what it’s like to love someone like this? Like, when you’re apart from her, you can’t breathe? Like you would die—and I mean, actually die, to know she’s okay and happy? I mean, you separate yourself from everything and everyone, you always have.  Vanya: Because Dad made me.  Allison: Did Dad make you write that book about us, too? Pause You’re an adult now, Vanya. You don’t get to blame your problems on anyone but yourself. 

The first thing to note about this exchange is that, although it’s Vanya’s first mention of her own trauma, it’s Allison who brings it up first. The second is that when she brings up her trauma, it’s as an explanation for her behavior: I separate myself from everything and everyone because Dad made me. 

Vanya is definitely sympathetic here. I’m not going to argue she isn’t. She tries to be nice to her sister, catches her when she’s distressed, and gets reamed out for the attempt. That’s a shitty thing for Allison to do, which she later acknowledges. 

However, there’s also their history to consider: Allison is a movie star. As I’m sure we all know by now, image is everything to the rich and famous. I don’t mean that as a jab at their vanity (although vanity is certainly involved, more often than not) but as a fact: They are the product, and their image is part of the advertising. Everything they do in public (and much of what they do in private) is pounced on by the paparazzi and spun into the next big story. And this isn’t always fair to them; a single misspoken word can set off rumors that come back to bite them in the ass. 

And Vanya wrote a tell-all book about how Allison treated her as a child. 

As we see from the intro sequence in Episode 1, it seems Vanya’s autobiography hasn’t kept Allison off the red carpet. But it would have certainly hurt her public image. While it’s true we don’t know everything Vanya put in her autobiography, we do know Vanya harbors a lot of bitterness and resentment toward her family. We know she sees her siblings as near-strangers who had an easier time of it than she did at best, superpowered copycats of their father at worst. From the reactions we see later on—Diego taping Vanya’s author photo to a punching bag, Ben saying “I can’t believe she said that!” as Klaus shushes him—it’s safe to assume she did not say kind things about her siblings in that book. 

If the things Vanya said about Allison matched the things Allison later says about herself—that she used her power to get everything she wanted as a kid, that she grew up spoiled because of it—then that would not have done any favors for her public image. And the paparazzi would have gone apeshit for it. Yes, Allison is an incredibly popular actor, but that doesn’t mean the press wouldn’t have turned on her the second they got a juicy morsel about her past. I imagine her having to field many uncomfortable questions from trashy reporters while out for lunch with friends, having an interview about her upcoming film suddenly turn tense when the interviewer said “Now, Allison, your sister—who none of us even knew existed up to this point—wrote about you in her book, and I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say I want to know more about….” There’s even a chance Vanya’s autobiography contributed to Patrick’s continuing antagonism toward her, since reading a book detailing Allison’s childhood power abuse could have convinced him his wife had always been bad, right from the cradle. (Or it could have fostered suspicion toward his wife and led him to keep a closer eye on her and therefore is the reason why he was close to Claire’s bedroom the night he saw Allison Rumor her, but that’s another theory for another time.) 

You might say she deserved it. You might say she’d set herself up to fall and that all Vanya did was push that first domino over. You could even say her house of cards needed to topple, since part of her perfect life involved running roughshod over her own daughter’s free will, and possibly even Rumoring her husband into falling in love with her. Those arguments are absolutely fair, but they’re not my point. My point is, Allison’s harsh words to Vanya in this scene don’t come on her out of the blue. There’s a painful history there—painful for the both of them—and Allison harbors a lot of unresolved anger toward her sister for what she wrote in her book. And I don’t think that anger is unfounded, just as I don’t think Vanya’s resentment toward Allison is unwarranted. What Allison does in this scene is shitty, but Vanya has already done something shitty to her, in retaliation for shit she went through as a kid, and on and on the chain of pain goes. Vanya is far from guiltless in their relationship, but that does not make Allison’s lashing out at her okay. 

And this is getting pretty long, so I’ll cut things short here. I’m going to list the count for trauma mentions/reactions below—and since I’ve seen this show multiple times over, I know it’s going to change; so don’t take the fact Vanya’s count is higher than Luther’s as an indictment of her. It’s just where we are at the end of Episode 2. 

Own Trauma: Vanya 1, Luther 0 Trauma of Others:  Vanya 1, Luther 0

Enjoying this series? Read on to Part Two. 

[supremegreendragon]

Sing Sweetly

Len sat at the edge of the bed and contemplated life. It wasn’t like there was anything else he could do at Iron Heights. He frowned as he glanced out the window. People would be celebrating Christmas Eve tonight. He shuddered to think of being subjected to their caroling. Everyone he had ever heard sang so offkey.

 “Up on the housetop, reindeer pause. Out jumps good old Santa Claus.”

 ….And speaking of offkey.

 Len smiled despite himself. That was Barry’s voice. He knew Barry would be nice enough to visit for the holidays. Even though they were known to the public as enemies, truthfully, Len really liked the guy.

 Barry came in front of his cell, dressed in his tight red superhero suit. He grinned from ear to ear. Len stood up to face him, opening up his arms as if to welcome the hero to his own house.

 “Scarlet! Now what can I do for you?”

 Before Barry could answer, the guard came running to catch up to the hero. He glared at Barry, shaking his head.

 “You weren’t supposed to go on without me.”

 “Don’t worry, officer. I can handle anything this guy throws at me,” Barry smiled.

 Len arched a brow and asked, “Is that so?”

 Barry’s attention was back on him. Not that Len was complaining about that or anything, “Sure. I can subdue you easily.”

 “You wouldn’t be saying that if I had my gun. I could freeze you into a block of ice.”

 “Gee, thanks. Merry Christmas to you too.”

 Len walked closer to him, “You never answered my question. What are you doing here?”

 “Well…..I had an idea.”

 “That’s scary,” Len retorted. Barry paid no mind to the insult.

 “See, I wanted to go caroling in Central City Park. I…sort of promise a bunch of kids the Flash would do it.”

 Len smiled, amused but confused.

 “How is that my problem?” although his words were mean, they were a normality. It was a banter that he and Barry had developed over their time of knowing each other. Len would be snarky and Barry would respond with a giddy grin.

 “A few of the kids wanted Flash to have a duet with one of the villains. So, I thought who better to come than Captain Cold.”

 Barry’s words send Len through a loop. Len felt like he needed Barry to repeat himself to make sure he heard right.

 “You’re telling me,” he said, “That you trust me enough to go caroling with you? In front of children?”

 “Not exactly,” the guard frowned, “You’d be accompanied by a police force, be separated from the public by glass, and you’d have to be close to the Flash at all times.”

 Barry’s smile was strained now. Even he must’ve realized how sour the deal sounded to Len.

 “Nah. I’m good.”

 “Oh, come on, Len!” Barry pleaded. His eyes grew wide in an adorable way that made Len feel flustered.

 “I’m not singing in front of an audience. They’ll think Captain Cold is no longer a threat.”

 Barry held onto the bars as his eyes begged Len to reconsider.

 “But what if we tell like….the adults that you’re an actor? Then will you do it.”

 “Why, Flash. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re willing to not only let a criminal sing for kids, but also lie about it.”

 “I know you,” Barry had such a serious look that all of Len’s humor drop, “You wouldn’t hurt kids. Please, Len. Please do it. It’s Christmas Eve.”

 Oh no. He was using the puppy eyes. Len had only seen them once before, but he already knew they were impossible to resist. When Len saw them, he knew he wouldn’t be able to say no.

  “Down through the chimney with lots of toys. All for the little ones, Christmas joys,” Len sang along with Barry, who was beside him. Barry was still singing off key. However, he looked to be on cloud nine as he sung. And Len supposed that was the whole point.

 He had been placed in a glass prison to separate himself from the crowd. Even with the Flash right beside him, the police wanted to use extra precaution. Len wondered what the parents thought about all this protection. If they truly thought he was an actor, wouldn’t they think this was a bit excessive?

 Or maybe Barry told them it would look more authentic this way. He had a knack for thinking ahead when it came to this stuff.

 There were….a lot of kids here. It was as if they were all in line for a carnival ride, instead of two men singing. Granted, it was a duet between the Flash and ‘Captain Cold.’ The kids really couldn’t resist their favorite hero, could they? Len smiled at the thought.

 “Up on the housetop, click click click! Down through the chimney with good Saint Nick.”

 When they were done with the final song, the kids laughed and cheered. Barry gave each of them a signed autograph using his super speed. The kids didn’t want to leave, but their tired parents wanted to get wink of sleep before Christmas Day.

 Barry waved each and every one goodnight. It took at least an hour after the songs were done, but everyone finally left. Len breathed a sigh of relief. That was a little more anxiety inducing than he thought. Guess even Captain Cold could get stage-fright. Not that anyone noticed, because Len was good at keeping his cool, even when he was worried.

 Barry turned to him and grinned, “You were great! I had no idea you could sing like that.”

 Len was about to respond, but Barry was too quick. In a blink of an eye, the Flash was in the glass container with him. Barry wrapped his arms around Len and pulled him close. Meanwhile, the guards sprung to their feet.

 “Hey! You’re not supposed to be in there!” one shouted.

 “Give me a minute,” Barry yelled, a little sour. His voice sweetened when he spoke to Len, “You should consider going full time.”

 Len recovered from his initial shock. He yearned to hug Flash back but was too shy to do so in front of the guards. He whispered so only Barry could hear.

 “Pop Diva Cold. I don’t like the sound of that, Bar.”

 Barry whispered back, “Oh come on. You’d love it. Why didn’t you tell me you could sing?”

 “Never really came up. I was too busy trying to freeze your butt.”

 “Glad you didn’t. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to sing together.”

 Blushing, Len scratched the back of his head sheepishly. He would admit that it was a nice experience to be with Barry and not fight for once. Maybe they could even do this next year?

 “Merry Christmas, Barry.”

[tifarobles]

Examples of Anxiety in Disney & PIXAR films

I’ve been talking a lot about the importance of mental health awareness. Along with this comes the importance of education, especially for the next generation. Disney and PIXAR have helped by showing realistic depictions of mental health issues in ways that kids can easily learn, understand, and relate to.

I feel like it’s very important to teach our children how to talk about their emotions at a young age. They are capable of feeling sadness and we should help them be able to express these feelings, talk about bad feelings, and understand how sadness, anger, and fear affect them. This includes not always forcing them to act happy.

Today, I’m going to explore how Disney and PIXAR do a fantastic job depicting anxiety. For each example, I am choosing one character in the story to focus on. Most of these movies do a great job of displaying other types of mental health issues too. These movies have and will continue to help me teach X what emotions are and how to communicate what he is feeling in a healthy, productive way.

Inside Out - Riley:

Being a pre-teen girl is hard. Moving across the country to a new place where you don’t know anybody is scary. Combine these two things for a truly trying time. We see Riley go through these emotions in a very real way. Joy tried to keep sadness from interfering with Riley’s life. Joy was channeling Riley’s anxiety, wanting to be happy. Riley was afraid to worry her parents and just wanted to keep feeling happy, so Joy tried to force happiness by keeping sadness and all the depressing feelings in the back of her mind (literally). This response isn’t healthy and doesn’t work to relieve the issues of depression causing sad feelings of helplessness and anxiety that makes your body freeze. Riley needed to discuss her feelings in order to get any better. She needed to face her sadness head on and let Sadness take the wheel.

Riley believed that being joyful was equal to being happy. She didn’t understand that happiness and joy are different. Think about how “happiness” is represented on social media, television shows, and in movies. You don’t see a lot of the realities of life that are hard to face. The truth is, you won’t always feel happy, and that’s okay.

You can still be happy when you are feeling sad. Other times you need to feel sadness in order to get help. Sadness is a mechanism that kicks in to push us to ask for help from loved ones and friends who can support us. Riley needed the support from her parents, but was anxious about telling them. This anxiety is relatable for many people. The idea of leaving home, not wanting to worry your parents, wanting to run away from your problems, fear of not fitting in. All of these topics can cause great anxiety for many people and showing Riley in a relatable, stressful time for children makes the feeling of anxiety recognizable.

If children can learn to understand their emotions that early on, imagine how soon they can start learning coping mechanisms that work for them if they do struggle with anxiety, depression, or PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

Finding Nemo - Marlin:

Marlin clearly suffers from anxiety and PTSD, with a side of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). He won’t even let Nemo leave the house without doing a ritual. Marlin also has separation anxiety. As soon as Nemo is out of his sight, Marlin’s anxiety makes him believe that the worst will happen.  Meanwhile, his PTSD makes him relive the worst thing that ever happened to him. At this point, his anxiety makes Marlin believe that Nemo is in danger and could die. Marlin’s body kicks into fight or flight mode, ready to do anything for his son, even facing his fears.

Throughout the movie, we see Marlin’s anxiety come into play. He is anxious about open spaces due to his PTSD. I can relate to this, having anxiety in cars after multiple car accidents. However, Marlin’s anxiety is so bad that it keeps him from leaving his home to venture out into the world. It keeps him from letting Nemo grow up with some independence. Marlin’s anxiety runs his entire life.

Marlin also has a hard time letting go of control and listening to Dory. He shows this many times as well, not believing she can read, not believing she can speak whale, and not trusting her when she says they need to go through the cavern below the jellyfish. His anxiety and fear of the unknown keeps Marlin from letting Dory help. This story arc shows how bad anxiety can affect your life and that you need to face your fears in order to enjoy life, trusting your friends to guide you.

Frozen - Elsa:

Conceal, don’t feel - not exactly a motto I’d recommend living by. (“What’s a motto?” “What’s a motto with you?” Thanks, Lion King). Elsa’s parents taught her to control her emotions by not feeling them in order to control and repress her powers. First of all, controlling your emotions doesn’t look the same as not feeling emotions.

Hiding your emotions can lead to depression, anxiety, repression, and more as it bottles up, unresolved and waiting to explode. Instead of exploding, Elsa isolated herself for years, fearful that she could hurt someone with her out of control powers. Not facing her fears only made them worse, which made it harder to relax, breathe, and focus on her feelings, which she needed to do in order to deal with them.

Much like Riley, Elsa needed to face her fears (emotions/powers in this case) in order to learn what she was capable of. Elsa’s anxiety led to years of isolation through a formative time of her life, which led to depression. This depression took away any motivation Elsa had for getting better. She kept these struggles secret from her sister out of fear of the unknown. Depression made Elsa think that it was easier to live alone.

Elsa learns how to take care of herself and manage her anxiety before she is capable of helping someone else. This is an important lesson we all have to learn. Elsa and Anna are both on similar paths to learning how to be independent in very different ways. Anna is afraid of being alone and channels that into romance (a different topic for discussion), while Elsa is learning how to live without anxiety being the only emotion she can feel.

Showing Elsa being true to herself by embracing her powers teaches children not to be afraid of something inside themselves that is different, even if it is scary. Elsa accepted her powers, as we should all embrace and celebrate our differences. The ending shows that love can help conquer depression and anxiety. In this case, love melts away the eternal ice, but in real life, love can help you to heal. Elsa needed to stop being afraid of letting Anna in to help her. Anna was the help Elsa needed all along.

Toy Story - Jessie:

Jessie has an intense fear of isolation, abandonment, and claustrophobia due to her PTSD. Her PTSD gives her uncontrollable anxiety. Any time Jessie thinks she is going into a box, she has a panic attack. The viewer sees her rapid breathing, her desire to curl up into a ball, and her flight response kick in as she wants nothing more than to get away from the situation. The way anxiety is showed is so powerful that it makes it easy to explain to a child what anxiety looks and feels like.

In Toy Story of Terror (on Netflix), Jessie’s anxiety is the main focal point of the story. In the end, you see her overcoming these fears to help someone she cares about. Jessie has to overcome a panic attack in a very realistic way. It isn’t easy, but with encouragement from friends, she is able to do it. This shows that anxiety can be addressed, but that it takes effort and support.

Tangled - Rapunzel:

Rapunzel’s anxiety is a different beast. Rapunzel has a very happy attitude, perhaps too happy given that she has been locked in a tower for 18 years with no connection to the outside world. Throughout the movie, the viewer experiences Rapunzel coming to terms with her life by finally getting to interact with people and realizing that she is the lost princess with two loving parents waiting for her to come home.

Her anxiety comes from valid fears - she has no idea what to expect. We watch her have a breakdown that mixes these anxious feelings with mania for finally being outside, paired with feelings of guilt for betraying the only human she has any connection with. We see the back and forth struggle. As someone with experience with bipolar disorder, I appreciated this realistic depiction of mania. Mania is rarely explored and when it is, you often don’t see the positive sides of mania. Mania makes you feel happy and often leads to people with bipolar disorder not seeking help because they don’t want to lose that happiness. Mania can also lead to rash, dangerous decisions.

Side note: Bipolar disorder to vastly misunderstood as someone with mood swings, when that isn’t the case. Someone with bipolar disorder generally has months of manic episodes and then months of depression. It doesn’t happen back and forth on the same day. Mood swings in bipolar disorder are more likely caused by the anxiety that accompanies mania and depression.

Rapunzel’s anxiety is attempting to save her from her mania, but her mania pushes her forward to follow her dreams. With time and treatment, Rapunzel will likely live a mostly normal, happy life, but she will need to learn how to cope with the PTSD of her childhood and learn how to manage her mania and anxiety in healthy ways.

These are the examples that I can relate to the most when it comes to anxiety in Disney and PIXAR films. There are MANY mental disorders that could be explored from this lens for (maybe?) every Disney and PIXAR film. What important depictions do you enjoy seeing in children’s movies?

[my-pocket-universe]

1, 6, 23, 24, and 30 for wondertrev please!!!!!!!

Wondertrev headcanons!

Omg @justpond–eringtheuniverse thank you so much for doing this OTP question meme with me. You have no idea how stoked I am. I love Wondertrev so much my heart could implode and I have so much to say about them! Please bear with me as this is going to be one hell of a long post and I apologise in advance for the overwhelming length.The following answers are based on my head-canon, in which Steve somehow was resurrected and returned to Diana as an immortal (perhaps as a gift from the powers that be), soon after the explosion and defeat of Ares in 1918, and they have been living blissfully ever after.I must emphasise the fact that I love fanfics that have Steve resurrected and become immortal in the 21st century as much as the next Wondertrev shipper, given the interesting role reversal and the fish-out-of-water situations that have Steve attempt to adjust to modern technology, but my heart aches whenever I try to imagine how excruciating and disheartening it must have been for Diana to live through a century without Steve. Alas, here we go:

1. Who is the most affectionate?They are both passionate about each other but their upbringings make them manifest their love and passion very differently. She may seem reserved to others (with the exception of her original friends like Etta and the guys) but Diana is never one to hide her emotions and perpetually deep affection for Steve, in private or in public - she speaks her mind and put her words and thoughts into action, praising, complimenting, kissing, hugging, caressing and touching him whenever possible. Canonically speaking, in the movie, Diana was the one to hold his hand first and she made it clear that she wanted him to stay in her room in the inn in Veld and she even initiated the kiss. She is unfazed by the societal expectations, norms, customs and traditions of Man’s world which were holding Steve back occasionally. I like to think he is just as affectionate (and he certainly loves her as much) but he was also brought up as a gentleman and born in 1880s after all. At first he wasn’t too accustomed to public display of affection beyond hand holding, cupping Diana’s face, touching her hair and light kisses on her forehead or cheeks but eventually he became bolder and more relaxed in public with her, as they cherished every opportunity to be affectionate to their other half, especially after almost losing each other forever that night in the airfield in Belgium in 1918 and the societal standards changed gradually over the century they have been living in as a couple. It also had something to do with how Diana was rubbing off on him with her Amazonian ways. Steve is also the one to shower Diana with surprises whenever possible and mostly something non-materialistic as he knows well enough the preferences of his goddess. At home or in private they are very on par and in sync in terms of affection, although Diana would be more verbal about everything and Steve tries his best to catch up. They just love each other with every fiber of their being.

6. What is their favourite feature of their partner’s?Diana’s favourite feature(s) of Steve would definitely be his mesmerising and bright cerulean eyes which remind her of the tranquillising blue waters of Themyscira. A close second would be his ash blonde hair (and he’s been keeping the same haircut from 1918 to 2018, as it never goes out of style), followed by his physique. She is just so pleased with his well above-average overall physical appearance and vigour and there is nothing she would find undesirable. To Steve, Diana is his angel (and actual goddess and salvation) and his love for her is a combination of utmost respect, devotion, admiration, affection, adoration and romantic attraction, thus to him she is simply perfect in every sense and it may be hard to pinpoint a feature but if one must ask he would say her eyes can reach one’s soul and her lips hold all the truths in the universe and he would never get tired of savouring her ethereal beauty.

23. Who comes up with cheesy pickup lines?Gotta hand this one to Steve. His dry and sometimes cheesy humour is incredibly endearing to Diana and when the pickup lines are embarrassing he blushes so hard and Diana would first chuckle and then kiss him. Every now and then she turns the table on him and be the one to say them and for him it is always part hilarious and part enticing. Both of them can be goofy at times and they always end up laughing at the lines together lightheartedly.

24. Who whispers inappropriate things in the other’s ear during inappropriate times?Both, although Diana instigated this. In the beginning, she didn’t even realise these things and circumstances are inappropriate because they seemed normal on Themyscira. It certainly had him very flustered and made it difficult for him to keep his composure when she first did that. Eventually Steve was emboldened and she knew he could handle this and they frequently do this to each other.

30. One headcanon about this OTP that mends itThis is by far the best question and I could talk about it all day. And if I were a better writer I would turn this into a fic (I actually tried and am still too ashamed to publish it, seeing there are so many brilliant pieces already, or perhaps I will, when I finally have mustered up enough courage to do so). Humour me, yeah?

Essentially, the major headcanon - shortly after blowing up the German bomber plane with himself in it, in Belgium, 1918, Steve was resurrected and returned to Diana as an immortal and they have been living blissfully ever after - encapsulates numerous minor headcanons:

1918 to 1940s:

a month into their reunion, Steve proposed to Diana and she immediately said yes; marriage might have been a foreign concept to her at first but after having been through so much in terms of life and death, they couldn’t and wouldn’t be separated again, and matrimony became very justified ; they wanted to hold, cherish and love each other more than anything and they intended to spend the rest of their eternal(!) lives together

Diana and Steve had a simple yet blissful wedding ceremony at the City Hall, attended by Steve’s only and elder sister Tracy, Etta, Charlie, Sameer and the Chief and their family members (Steve’s parents passed away before he joined the US Army)

Steve was in his US Army military uniform and he was stunned by the breathtaking sight of Diana when she entered the room, escorted by Etta and Tracy; she wore an airy sleeveless and low-cut white silk wedding gown that made her resemble the Greek marble statues and he was lovesick and his eyes glistened with joyful tears and he grinned so hard his cheeks stiffened, meanwhile she was blushing and smiling like he was the most precious being in the universe

They were now Steve and Diana Prince-Trevor; Diana thought she liked the sound of Mrs Trevor, there was a nice ring to it, however, out of respect, Steve said it was up to her to keep the surname he crafted for her, and they decided on hyphenating them

British Intelligence learnt of Steve’s immortality and his profile became top secret; due to his physical advantage over other officers and criminals, he was assigned special ops and high-risk rescue missions, much to Diana’s dismay (”Steve, you are not invincible, you could still get hurt,” sighed Diana), but Steve wanted to help more people, so he assured her that he would take proper care of himself and if she wanted to help him he was more than content to have her by his side; British Intelligence obviously knew about Diana and her identity as Wonder Woman by now and they condoned this

Diana received a degree in ancient art history and archeology from Oxford, completing the courses in less than 3 years, which wasn’t surprising to Steve at all; she speaks hundreds of languages and has an eidetic memory, for starters, and she went on to become a curator of the British Museum

1940s to 1970s:

They fought side by side during WWII and helped the allies tremendously in liberating concentration camps, pushing the frontlines and gathering  strategic intel

After the war, Steve resumed his secret missions for British Intelligence and Diana also joined SIS, as her colleagues at the British Museum began to show concern for, if not suspect, her apparent lack of aging; the SIS continued to provide them with identifications that could avoid suspicion pertaining to their condition

They visited Tracy and her family every now and then; she kept the questions about his peculiarly youthful appearance to herself and Steve was more than grateful for her understanding and she passed on at the age of 70; her children were curious about their uncle’s secret too but knew better not to ask

They maintained their close friendships with Etta, Sameer, Charlie and the Chief over the years, up until their passing, either due to old age or illness; afterwards, Diana and Steve had a sabbatical and travelled the world for several years, their wealth accumulated over the years kept them comfortable

1980s to present:

After their sabbatical, they parted with British Intelligence to relocate to the US, and there they joined the CIA (the Agency knew about Steve and Diana and their work from top-secret joint missions with the SIS); they were living in the States only every now and then as their operations required frequent worldwide travels; a decade or so later Steve requested a transfer to a command and strategic position based in the US as Diana became a curator for the Smithsonian Institution

Another decade later, Justice League was formed, and Steve has been leading US government’s ARGUS since; Diana is Head of Antiquities at Louvre when she isn’t busy saving the world as Wonder Woman

100 years later Diana and Steve are still living happily ever after and saving the world together

Throughout the years:

They tried out various flavours and types of ice cream in countries they visited but Diana’s favourite is always the homemade ones Steve concocts for her

So is breakfast, they certainly sampled numerous and miscellaneous kinds during their globetrotting travels, yet she always favours the Trevor special, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, hashbrown, baked beans and toast always all cooked just right and impeccable, prepared before she wakes up and served in a tray to be enjoyed in bed, and always followed by cuddling

Steve’s missions always require him to pilot airplanes; despite knowing he is immortal, Diana still gets worried (but she doesn’t make a fuss about it and Steve really appreciates that)

Diana and Steve didn’t always just work for the government, they make their best effort to save people outside of the bureaus’ jurisdictions whenever possible

Steve’s father’s watch is kept in a safe for preservation; Steve and Diana have been wearing matching watches (besides always wearing matching couple outfits, much to the amusement of their friends and acquaintances)

They rarely argue, let alone fight, and if they did they reconcile soon after (Steve is always patient and understanding and Diana is very compassionate and caring)

Diana is amused when she realised Steve actually needs glasses (despite his excellent marksmanship) and she chose pairs of them for him; although Steve started wearing contact lens once they were commercialised, he still wears glasses from time to time (think Chris Pine wearing glasses, *wink wink*)

Steve is polylingual (English, French, German, Dutch, Danish and Swedish) and Diana is always there to teach him other languages, either for professional or personal/recreational purposes

They always make time for vacation

They visit Themyscira every 3 years (except during WWII)

When they are at home they always find time to sway to some slow and soothing music

[preservationandruin]

Moods of Reading Oathbringer

Collected from me and @murderandcoffee screaming throughout the course of the book. Completely separate from my actually intelligent screaming in the liveblogs/

Gavilar I was willing to like you and then you went and trashed it in your literal first real scene

LET! SYL! SAY! FUCK!

Kal is Too Perfect and its Not Fair

MY PARENTS ARE  M A R R I E D

LIRIN CALLED KALADIN HIS LITTLE BOY

KALADIN! PUNCHED! ROSHONE! FUCK YES!

I trust DALINAR just not his OPINIONS OF PEOPLE

on this episode of Stormlight Archives: Syl tells Kaladin he needs to get laid

I love my dad but I hate my dad's past self

NO!!!! DALINAR! DOES! NOT! NEED! KING! TARAVANGIAN! ANYWHERE! NEAR! HIM! FUCK!!!!!!

SHALLAN AND ADOLIN'S DYNAMIC IS SO GOOD

I love my current dad but sometimes in flashbacks I m 500000% willing to fistfight the Blackthorn with my bare hands

DALINAR! REMEMBERS! HIS! WIFE!

AMARAM AND JASNAH ARE IN THE SAME SCENE AND SHE IS ROASTING HIM ALIVE GOD FUCKING BLESS

WHERE THE FUCK IS URITHIRU'S WATER COMING FROM

me, hugging Renarin and Adolin: MY TWO SPECIAL BOYS

IALAI! IS! GIVING! THE! SADEAS! TITLE! TO! AMARAM! I'M! GOING! TO! SHIT!

JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK  JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK  JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK  JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK JASNAH'S BACK

KALADIN IS DOING MORNING PUSH-UPS I HATE THIS MAN

@ Brandon what have you done to me

Lift??? just told Dalinar he has a nice, "tight" butt?????? I'm fucking shitting?????????????????

sometimes I forget that Elhokar has been lectured by Lopen's mom and then I remember and my day gets so much better

Elhokar is a Gryffindor but one with an identity crisis and the world's worst impulse control

Shallan is the human embodiment of that "good luck I'm behind 7 proxies" meme

oh dear jesus dalinar (in the present) is trying to pick a fight why is he like this

midwife: hands newborn Adolin to Dalinar Dalinar: LION KING POSE, HAPPY YELLING

christ, young Dalinar did not deserve Evi

THESE DRAMATIC KHOLIN MEN WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME

HIGHMARSHAL AZURE JUST SAID “LIKE WHITE ON BLACK”

I didn’t expect Wit and Shallan to have the relationship they do, but I really appreciate it.

Adolin cares so much about things like people and spren and horses and swords and I love him

Dalinar better have fucking apologized to Renarin. A hundred times. I honestly do want to go back and fistfight young Dalinar

also, Adolin just gave Kaladin the Bridge Four salute I LOVE THESE BOYS

ok so I forgot that Nightblood would be there in Szeth chapters now and holy shit I love my shitty magic sword child

GOD DAMN IT MOASH

HOW DARE HE GIVE THE FUCKING BRIDGE FOUR SALUTE TO KALADIN

I WANTED A MOASH REDEMPTION ARC BUT FUCKING HELL THIS IS WHAT I GOT

don't think about elhokar and shallan being the weirdest lightweaving buddies. also don't think about elhokar making a disguise so he can sneak out and actually just be a normal person for a while

I want to date SO MANY OF THESE CHARACTERS

hey uhhhhhhhhhhhhh FUCK Taravangian

half of the cast has a type and that type is "kaladin" 

I feel like with the Kaladin-Adolin-Shallan trio of people, whenever two of them are fine and stable, the other is bound to be launching themselves headfirst into Drama

I! LOVE! RYSN!

fucking motherfucker Brandon putting nine viewpoints in this part like an ASSHOLE

how does Brandon manage a setup like this EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN BOOK

FUCK! MOASH!

I AM SHITTINGMYSELF OHMYHDOOHMYGODMOHMYDHODHKSKSK

okay okay okay okay I Adore Shallan

Cultivation: god fucking dammit honor you DIE AND LEAVE ME TO DEAL WITH YOUR WEIRD KISMESSESSITUDE CHILDREN

I'm gonna cry, all of these characters have come so far and I'm so proud of them

JASNAH IS SUMMONING HER SHARDBLADE NOO NO NO NO NO

of fuckin course Odium has to appear as a gold and white parshman god forbid he look like a normal fuckin parshman this pretentious asshole

fucking Moash asshole I BELIEVED IN HIM

FUCK ME THE TITLE OF THE NEXT ONE  IS CHAMPION WITH NINE SHADOWS

Dalinar hauling The Way of Kings around for this whole battle is way too funny

I trust nothing and no one in this world

IM GONNA SHIT GOD DAMMIT KALADIN

Meanwhile,  Kaladin is apparently drowning in beads, of fucking course God forbid this trio keep their shit together for more than three seconds

Wyndle has to deal with So Much

SZETH!!!!!! RENARIN!!!!!! KALADIN!!!!!!! D A D

DON'T TOUCH MY DAD!!!

HOLY SHIT, NAVANI, I SEE WHERE JASNAH GETS HER STONE-COLD DETERMINATION FROM

is amaram about to eat a fucking rock

DALINAR FUCKING STAPLED ALL THREE REALMS TOGETHER AND REOPENED HONOR'S PERPENDUCULARITY

amaram vored a magic rock to fight kaladin better. great.

LET! NIGHTBLOOD! SAY! FUCK!

SHE TOLD HIM HER NAME. MAYALARAN

AMARAM IS LITERALLY HALF-CRUSTACEAN AND GLOWING WITH VOIDLIGHT AND HE'S STILL TALKING ABOUT HONOR

ADOLIN TRIED TO STEP BACK TO "LET KALADIN HAVE SHALLAN" ASFONSDOFINAOFEDGVKSKJDNG:KB

WHAT THE FUCK MOASH

LOPEN ACCIDENTALLY SWORE THE SECOND IDEAL AND PUT OUT ALL THE LIGHTS IN THE SURGEON"S TENT FUCK

LET! RUA! SAY! FUCK!

oh my god Veil and Adolin are DRINKING BUDDIES

THAT'S WHO VYRE IS. FUCK

some tiny part of me is so happy that Dalinar's having pronoun problems when trying to write about himself because WHAT A NONBINARY RELATEABLE FEEL

Kholin women are ice-cold competent ladies and Shallan is joining a proud tradition of women who seem like nerds and are revealed to be stone-cold pragmatists with their backs against the wall

JASNAH AND DALINAR'S RELATIONSHIP MEANS SO MUCH TO ME

Adolin needs to get control of his fucking illiteracy

Adolin and Gavinor are the only two illiterate Kholins now and Gavinor has the excuse of being THREE

Venli is 'bout to be running the longest fucking scam on Odium

[animalsarepeople2]

Could you make a master post of all your fics? You're awesome Ani!

Sure! And thanks, you’re awesome, too!! XD

…

HICCSTRID

Axestrid: One day on Berk, Astrid comes to the forge to get her axe fixed. Hiccup, to bashful to speak to her, watches and notices how much she loves her weapon. So he creates a nickname for her. But what will happen when Hiccup slips up and Astrid finds out what exactly he’s been calling her? One-shot.

Sincerely, Alone: Modern AU. Neglected ‘Hiccup’ Haddock finds comfort in a distant penpal- cool girl Astrid Hofferson. Hiccstrid. One-shot.

You’re Not Alone: Set before Shell Shocked: Part 1. The night before the big battle, Hiccup can’t sleep and goes outside to clear his mind. Little does he know that Astrid has the same dilemma.

Right Here If You Need Me: Set in RoB. Hiccup is still getting used to his prosthetic while balancing the academy and sudden changes in between. Astrid catches him at his weakest moment.

Don’t You Dare Die On Me: When Hiccup is injured in battle, Astrid frets for his life.

For the Dancing and the Dreaming: To celebrate their betrothal, Hiccup asks Astrid to perform a dance his own parents did, many years ago…

Three’s A Crowd: Everyone, it seems, knows about Hiccstrid. Everyone, that is, except Toothless. Every time Astrid and Hiccup try to share a moment, an unaware Toothless intervenes. Set shortly after RttE S4.

So… Do You Like Him?: Astrid and Heather have a girl talk about the Hiccstrid relationship. Meanwhile, a certain someone just happens to be walking by and hears the entire conversation…

Strategic Battle Planning: “Um… I think they need to discuss some final strategy. Alone.“ In the middle of Shell-Shocked Part 2, Astrid and Hiccup try and review the plan for the battle, but are obviously just enjoying the alone time together.

I’ve Got You- A Hiccstrid poem.

I’ll Take Care of You: Four times Hiccup got hurt and Astrid took care of him, and one time Hiccup got hurt and Astrid didn’t take care of him.

It’s Okay to Cry: Post HTTYD 2. Astrid walks in on Hiccup mourning the loss of his father, and comforts him with gentle and loving words only Hiccup can bring out of her.

The New Thing: What if, at the end of Shell Shocked Part 2, the Riders hadn’t seen the Hiccstrid kiss? Each find out separately and react in different ways, some better than others… 

Home Is Where the Heart Is: A homesick Astrid goes back to Berk for a visit with her parents, but she soon realizes that home isn’t where you live- it’s who you’re with. And that’s with a certain brunette.

The Only One For Me: Astrid tries to help Hiccup with one of his inventions in the forge but they can’t focus. Hiccup has a more pressing matter… one involved with suitors, Stoick, and a birthday.

Warm Toes, Warmer Hearts: When Hiccup and Astrid are (once again) trapped in the remains of an avalanche, they must do the unthinkable to survive. Set in RTTE S3.

Bruises: When Hiccup accidentally agrees to an ice-skating competition with Snotlout, he finds himself in a tough spot. How can he skate with only one leg? But when Astrid offers to help him out, maybe things won’t go too badly after all.

Stay: After the events of Blindsided, Astrid is left with a fear of lightning due to her temporary blindness. When another storm strikes the Edge, Hiccup has his suspicions.

It Starts With Friendship: Every day, Astrid goes to train with her axe in the woods - but when Hiccup starts coming, too, she’s annoyed. However, with their new times together, she slowly finds out that Hiccup may not be as useless and odd as the village says.

Fear and Hope: An encounter with a secret phobia reveals that “Fearless” Astrid Hofferson may not be so unflinching. But years later, when the phobia endangers the life of Hiccup, the boy who’s now so much more than a friend, Astrid must face it to save him, because she now realizes she has a new worst fear...

All I Want for Snoggletog (Is You): Spending Snoggletog Eve snowed in the forge with Astrid definitely isn’t the holiday Hiccup was expecting, but maybe this could be an opportunity to connect with his crush. Maybe.

Reckless: After Astrid blows up to a comment Hiccup makes, her overreaction has unexpected consequences.

FATHER/SON

I’’ll Keep You Safe: Father’s Day special. “Hiccup… I’ll keep you safe… I won’t let anything happen to you… Promise. I will never leave you…” Since the moment Hiccup was born, Stoick promises that he will protect his little Hiccup with everything in him. Each Father’s Day since, he remembers. One-shot.

Stoick the Soprano: When one year-old Hiccup demands a lullaby, his father is not so sure that he can comply. One-shot.

The Haddock Family: Set a few months after HTTYD 2. Hiccup misses his father, but he finds out that even in death, Stoick is still there. And he’s left a legacy for his son. One-shot.

To Dance Alone: When there’s a town dance in Berk between the children and their moms, Hiccup doesn’t know what to do. But Stoick will always be there for his son. One-shot.

Vikings Don’t Cry: “I’ll be back… Probably.” Hiccup has heard these words before. Most times they are spoken by his father. He shouldn’t take much mind to them. But this time, it’s different. “Please, Daddy…” “Vikings, don’t cry.” And so that’s what Hiccup tells himself. Every trying time, he recites those words to himself, trying to find strength within… until he can’t. Angsty one-shot.  *NEW*

HICCTOOTH

Tailfin: Toothless is still a growing boy. When he hits a large growth spurt, his tailfin doesn’t fit him anymore. However, the new alpha dragon doesn’t want to throw away the only connection he has to the happy past, so he refuses a new prosthetic. In consequence, his rider pays the price. Set shortly after HTTYD 2. One-shot.

The Last Flight: ‘Hiccup pressed his palm against Toothless’s forehead and allowed a tired smile. I’ll see you in Valhalla, buddy.”’ Hiccup is old and very sick… he’s losing hope. Toothless has a plan… but will it save his rider in the end? One-shot.

MULTI-CHAPTER FICS

A Day Without Dragons: After Hiccup realizes how dependent the Riders are on their dragons, he suggests the two groups separate for a day. Who knew how much the Riders actually relied on their ferocious friends?

Camp Dragons: Camp/Modern AU. When Hiccup is sent to summer camp, he can’t expect life to get much worse. He’s picked on for being the weakest and practically forgotten by his father. However, things change when Hiccup shoots down a mysterious black creature in the woods. Meanwhile, a beast nicknamed the “Red Death” lurks in the cliffs of Camp Dragons, threatening the camp’s very survival…

Eye of the Storm: Hiccup wasn’t joking when he said that rain tormented Berk nine months of the year. A hurricane rolls in just as Snoggletog is approaching and the Riders have returned to Berk for the holidays. And things spiral down when Stoick’s life is threatened and Hiccup sets off to save him, putting himself in danger in the process. Set in RTTE S2.

Always: After falling into a mild depression, Chief Hiccup decides he needs to get away from Berk for a bit to have time to accept Stoick’s death, and he and Toothless leave for a week-long trip. But when an injured Toothless returns to Berk without his rider, Hiccup’s friends must race to find their beloved chief before he is lost forever. Hiccstrid. Hiccup!whump.

Voltage: What-if for RTTE S6: Guardians of Vanaheim. After being struck by lightning, an injured Hiccup is left trapped with Astrid and Snotlout, who struggle to fight off attacking Dragon Flyers. Meanwhile, Johann and Krogan just need the last Dragon Eye lens to complete their puzzle... and an incapacitated Hiccup just might be the answer to that dilemma.

COUSIN BONDING

Cousin to Cousin: When Hiccup falls ill on a flight back to Berk with Snotlout, his cousin must put aside his rivalry and take care of the Dragon Conqueror. But can Snotlout really forget his everlasting feud and save Hiccup in time? Or will his obstinate pride get in the way?

Hero: *Dedicated to the brave soldiers who gave their lives for what they believed in. Thank you.* Post HTTYD 2. Drago Bludvist returns with a threat that could hurt all of Berk… a promise to kill Chief Hiccup. Snotlout wants to save them all from destruction. One-shot.

HUMOR/OTHER

Guy Talk: Astrid and Heather have frequent girl talks about Hiccup and Fishlegs… Meanwhile, Hiccup and Fishlegs have a guy talk… about Astrid and Heather. One-shot.

The Quest to Find Hiccup’s Leg: When Hiccup's prosthetic goes missing, everyone on Berk pitches in to help look for it. EVERYONE. Crazy one-shot. RoB time-zone.

Eternity: In Valhalla, Hiccup waits. He waits for his family. He waits for his friends. He waits for his dragon. One-shot.

My FF.net profile link…

animalsarepeopletoo

Phew, done! Hope you guys like ‘em. :-)

[dontshootmespence]

Becoming Real: Two for One

In this installment of Becoming Real, the team and their families finish up their vacation in Vermont. At the end, both boys, Michael and Hank, want to take Diana out. Who will she choose? @coveofmemories @the-slytherin-ice-queen @cosmicjennifer @mxolh @ultrarebelheart @remember-me-forever-silent-angel @tinyplanet-explorers @burnbrightdoll

                                                              ----

The rest of the week flew by in the blink of eye. Nearly every day started with tubing, which the kids finally got their parents to try by the end. They enjoyed it so much that the adults tended to tube for longer than the kids. 

By the end, the twins were working on the blue courses by themselves, while Diana, Hank, Michael and Henry were able to try some of the easier black diamond courses. The entire group of them, adults included, fell on their asses more times then they could possibly count, and drank more hot cocoa than their bodies could actually maintain, but it was all worth it. Despite the time apart, they all melded together so easily. Blood wasn’t always thicker than water.

Today was their last day. Although they’d be going home to celebrate Christmas at home, which was always nice, Diana had had such a great time that she didn’t want to leave. She’d have to make the most of today. Everyone else felt the same, so alarms were set for 6 AM, leaving them all enough time to get ready and eat at the resort restaurant before heading to the slopes. “Hey,” Henry said, jabbing Michael in the arm as they walked down to breakfast a fair few paces behind Diana. “What’s going on between you two?”

“Nothing,” Michael said. Henry could tell his brother still had feelings for the woman he considered one of his best and oldest friends, and he wanted to see his brother happy.

“Well, I can tell you want it to be something. I know you only broke up with Angelica recently, but she sucks and I would hate to see you miss out on something with Diana.” Henry was so happy with Alaina, he hated to see Michael so miserable; God, he hated Angelica.

Michael shrugged. He’d just been so burned, he didn’t want to risk it again so soon. “I know what you mean, but I don’t know if I can right now. I don’t want to work through things while I’m with someone else, you know? It wouldn’t be fair to her.”

“True,” Henry said, “And I’m not saying you get into a full-fledged relationship right now, but I sense someone else has an interest in Diana, and if you wait too long...” He trailed off, carefully craning his head to where Hank was walking with his sisters. Michael looked ahead, wondering if his brother was right. Maybe he’d say something - although he honestly wasn’t sure what to say yet.

Meanwhile, Amara and Penelope had been having a similar conversation with Hank. “Are you gonna ask Diana out?” Penelope giggled quietly. She was very much the gossip, like her godmother and namesake. 

Hank liked her - a lot. There was no denying that. She was beautiful, ridiculously intelligent, nice, funny, but he also was just starting college, so he wasn’t sure if he wanted to tie himself down just yet. “I don’t know. Possibly,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just see if she wants to date right now, and put off the whole relationship thing, because I’m not sure about that right now.”

“Well, Diana is amazing,” Amaya whispered, “so if you think you want to, I’d do it quickly before someone else snaps her up.”

After breakfast, everyone went tubing, which Spencer and Luke particularly enjoyed because Spencer’s lanky ass body would frequently fly out of the tube placing him on top of his husband. Morgan key making fake gagging noises when they started kissing. “And we’re the children?!” Amaya laughed. “You’re all dorks.”

“We’ve earned the right,” Morgan laughed. “We’re old now.”

“Speak for yourself,” Spencer said. “I’m the kid, remember Old Man?”

“I should smack you.”

While the adults continued their tubing extravaganza, the kids decided they wanted to go skiing. Since it was the last day, the twins decided to try their hands at one of the black diamond runs. And the rest of them wavered between two different black diamonds. 

Diana couldn’t help but notice that the entire consisted of Michael and Hank trying to outdo one another, and she had a feeling she knew why. A knowing smile was exchanged between her and Henry at one point. He knew it too. After  upping each other to the point of ‘they would kill themselves next,’ Hank looked toward a double black diamond course. “I’m gonna try that one. I’ll be back in a few.” Henry could see Michael looking toward Diana, so once Hank turned one way, he went down a separate path, leaving the two alone.

“Having fun?” Diana asked. “It sucks that this is our last day.”

“Yea,” he said, “But I am having fun. This has been great. Look...Di...” Diana smirked out of his line of view. “I’ve been thinking. I’m not ready for a full-on relationship all things considering, but would you wanna maybe go on a date again? Before I go back to school? See if something might be there?”

“Are you sure?” she asked. Although she liked Michael and could picture a relationship working between the two, she wasn’t sure if right now was the best time for him.

He nodded as they made there way down the hill together. “Yea, again, I wouldn’t want to get into a full-on relationship yet. I need to work through some issues myself before I do that, because it wouldn’t be fair to you. But maybe a couple dates, see if that first date was a fluke or not?”

“I’d like that,” she replied, leaning in to kiss him on the cheek. They got to the bottom of the hill with ease and took the ski lift back up, waiting for Henry and Hank to return. 

Michael was glad he said something. He had to thank Henry. When they got  back up, Henry and Michael went down a path, now leaving Hank and Diana alone. “I don’t wanna leave,” he said. “That means I’ll have to go back to class soon.”

“We have another three weeks for that,” Diana huffed. “Don’t wish my vacation away.” Playfully, she smacked him in the arm, as they started their way down the hill she’d run with Michael just moments earlier. 

Hank flashed his beautifully brilliant smile, a perfect combination inherited from both his parents, in Diana’s direction. “So Diana, I’ve got a question for you.” She made a note to ask her dads to keep her head on straight later, because right now, she was feeling pretty good. At first, she had just been joking about having Hank and Michael interested in her at the same time, but apparently she wasn’t far off the mark.”

“What is it?”

“I was wondering if you might want to go out with me at some point. Now that I’m going to be in the same state.”

“You the type for settling down?” Diana asked, a glint in her eye.

Hank laughed, but played along. “You the type that wants to settle down right now? You are only 17 after all.”

Diana snorted, nearly tripping over a bump but managing to outmaneuver it. “Not right now, but I also don’t want to be played with, Mr. Hank Morgan. Your reputation precedes you.”

He smiled. At 18, he had developed a reputation for dating around - it was just that there were so many beautiful ladies around him. “Well, I can’t say that I’m looking for exclusivity right now or anything, definitely not into a serious relationship at the moment, but seeing if we’re even compatible, with a couple dates, I think that I could do.”

Diana’s Christmas break was going to be very, very interesting. “So, you’re cool with not being exclusive? I go on dates with other people and you do the same?”

“Yea, Di,” he said. “That’s cool by me. Let’s feel it out first.”

She was going to be going on a lot of dates in the next few weeks. 

Finally, the day was coming to a close and everyone needed to start the drive home. Everyone would be stopping at a motel at some point, considering the drive was a bit too long to go straight through the night, but they all said goodbye, promising that they’d do this big trip together again sometime. Although Derek, Spencer, Luke and JJ would all be in the same city now, Morgan was retired, and the rest were constantly working, so they didn’t get to see each other as much as they wanted. “So,” Spencer said as they pulled on the highway to go home, “How’d your vacation go? We were apart most of the time.”

As they drove, she told them all about her new skiing prowess, the amazing quantities of hot cocoa she ingested, and the newfound love for tubing. She asked them if they enjoyed their vacation too. Both of them had needed it, especially after her grandma’s death, and both her Dad and Daddy had had bigger smiles on their faces this past week than they had in a while. “But I haven’t told you the best part,” she laughed.

“What would that be?” Luke asked.

“Well, you know how I said that I would have Michael and Hank battling for my affections? I was kidding about that, but apparently they are both into me, so over the next few weeks I will be going out with the both.”

Spencer smiled from the front seat. “They both know that?”

“Yea,” she said. “She’d told Michael, she would also be seeing Hank and vice versa. “They are both cool with it for now.”

“Make sure you’re careful kiddo,” Luke said. “But I can’t blame them for both having it bad for you.”

Spencer looked back to where Diana was smiling down at her phone. She was still listening, but she was obviously texting one of them. “I mean, why wouldn’t they?” Spencer said. “We do have the best daughter in the world.”

“Oh, Daddy,” she said. “Stop, you’ll give me a big head.”

“A big one?” Luke laughed.

“Okay, a bigger one. Shut up!”

[democratsunited-blog]

Abolish ICE? Trump defends agency as campaign picks up steam

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=5406

Abolish ICE? Trump defends agency as campaign picks up steam

Vice President Mike Pence said the Trump administration is “100 percent” behind ICE as more Democrats call for the agency to be abolished.

Leah Millis/Reuters

The White House is ramping up its defense of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency known as ICE, amid burgeoning calls from some Democrats for the agency to abolished.

“Just when you thought the Democrats couldn’t move farther to the left, leading members of the Democratic Party, including candidates for higher office, are actually openly advocating for the abolition of ICE, an agency that protects the American people and our communities every single day,” Vice President Mike Pence said during a trip to ICE headquarters on Friday.

Citing calls for ICE to be abolished from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Pence said that while “the American people have a right to their opinions, but these spurious attacks on ICE by our political leaders must stop.”

Pence said the calls for ICE to be abolished were “irresponsible” and said the Trump administration is with the agency “100%.”

Immigration was already poised to be a key issue in this year’s midterm elections, but ICE has been pushed to the center of that debate as the Trump administration faces criticism over its “zero tolerance” immigration policy and the separation of migrant families at the border. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week found that immigration was the top concern for voters ahead of the midterms.

ICE, which has roughly 20,000 employees, is not directly responsible for enforcing the “zero tolerance” policy that’s seen thousands of migrant children separated from their parents or guardians as Customs and Border Protection is responsible for the policing of the country’s borders.

But the agency, which is responsible for arresting, detaining, and deporting unauthorized immigrants already within the US, has been accused of rampant abuses and critics feel its approach to immigration enforcement is far too aggressive. Along these lines, Democrats have characterized ICE as a “deportation force.”

In addition to Warren, Gillibrand, and de Blasio, several Democratic members of the House have also called for ICE to be abolished.

Meanwhile, rising Democratic superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won a shocking victory in the New York Democratic party congressional primary in June, is also among those who’ve called for the agency’s abolishment. Pence also criticized New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, who has made abolishing the agency a centerpiece of her Democratic primary campaign against Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“ICE’s mere existence causes many New Yorkers to live in daily fear that they will lose their family,” Nixon said in a statement afterward. “I can think of no better description than to call ICE a terrorist organization, and I will wear any criticism from Mike Pence as a badge of honor.”

Some commentators, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have suggested Ocasio-Cortez’s shocking win is pushing establishment Democrats further to the left on the issue, likely leading to more top members of the party calling for ICE to be abolished in the near future.

Like Pence, the rest of the Trump administration is taking a fervently pro-ICE stance — especially President Donald Trump.

“We’re not abandoning ICE and we’re not abandoning our law enforcement,” Trump said at a dinner in West Virginia on Tuesday.

The Trump administration has claimed getting rid of ICE would cause a drastic rise in illegal immigration and, in turn, crime.

But critics argue ICE is a draconian entity and point to the fact it’s still quite a young agency (it was established in 2003 after the September 11 terror attacks) in contending its elimination wouldn’t change things dramatically.

Moreover, research shows the Trump administration’s frequent association between immigration and crime is hyperbolic. Immigration populations in the US have grown in the past several decades, while the national rate of violent crime has declined significantly since 1980, for example.

Read full story here

[socialjusticeartshare]

Seeking refuge in US, children fleeing danger are expelled

HOUSTON (AP) — When officers led them out of a detention facility near the U.S.-Mexico border and onto a bus last month, the 12-year-old from Honduras and his 9-year-old sister believed they were going to a shelter so they could be reunited with their mother in the Midwest. 

They had been told to sign a paper they thought would tell the shelter they didn’t have the coronavirus, the boy said. The form was in English, a language he and his sister don’t speak. The only thing he recognized was the letters “COVID.”

Instead, the bus drove five hours to an airport where the children were told to board a plane.

“They lied to us,” he said. “They didn’t tell us we were going back to Honduras.”

More than 2,000 unaccompanied children have been expelled since Marchunder an emergency declaration enacted by the Trump administration, which has cited the coronavirus in refusing to provide them protections under federal anti-trafficking and asylum laws. Lawyers and advocates have sharply criticized the administration for using the global pandemic as a pretext to deport children to places of danger. 

No U.S. agents looked at the video the boy had saved on his cellphone showing a hooded man holding a rifle, saying his name, and threatening to kill him and his sister, weeks after the uncle caring for them was shot dead in June. And even though they were expelled under an emergency declaration citing the virus, they were never tested for COVID-19, the boy said.

Three weeks after their uncle was killed, the children fled Honduras, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone. Under the normal process set out by U.S. law, they would have been referred to a government facility for youth and eventually placed with their mother. Instead, they were expelled on July 24 after three days in U.S. detention and now live in Honduras with another uncle who is looking to leave the country himself. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined multiple requests for comment on the boy’s story, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also declined, saying the children had been in Border Patrol custody until they boarded a deportation flight operated by ICE. 

Spokesmen for both agencies have refused to answer most questions about how they treat roughly 70,000 adults and children expelled under the emergency declaration issued in March. They have refused to say how they decide whether to expel children or where to detain them before expulsion, including in hotels where at least 150 unaccompanied children as young as 1 year old have been held. 

Much of what’s known about expulsions has come from the accounts of children like the 12-year-old boy, who recounted his experience to The Associated Press last week with a recall of details that makes him seem older. 

The AP is not identifying the boy, his sister, their mother or where their mother lives in the U.S. because of fears the children are still targeted by the people who killed their uncle. 

Dr. Amy Cohen, executive director of the advocacy group Every Last One, interviewed the boy several times and said she found him credible based on her conversations with hundreds of other immigrant children.

“When he has an opportunity to exaggerate or embroider his story, he absolutely does not,” Cohen said. “And he is consistent with everyone he has talked to. There’s no sense that the story is rehearsed.”

Six children have died since 2018 after being detained by the Border Patrol, several in conditions that raised questions about how the agency treats children. The agency says it has instituted new medical checks and takes anyone determined to need additional care to a hospital. 

Mark Morgan, the acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said Thursday that expulsions conducted under a section of U.S. public health law known as Title 42 were necessary to protect his agents. Morgan said 10 CBP employees have died after contracting COVID-19.

“There’s no doubt that Title 42 has prevented more tragic loss among our own workforce,” he said.

In court, meanwhile, the Trump administration has argued children it is seeking to expel are not entitled to protections under the Flores settlement, a 2-decade-old court agreement that sets standards for the detention of immigrant children. 

The children’s uncle took them in three years ago after their mother fled with their older sister due to gang threats, according to the family. 

It’s not clear who killed the uncle. But the boy said he remembers family members deciding not to have his uncle taken to the hospital because they feared they wouldn’t be able to afford to get his body out of the morgue. 

The killing frightened the family. According to the boy, he was left alone in his uncle’s home with his sister to fend for themselves. The boy said he cooked meals for them with the beans and eggs left in the house.

Then, one day, he said, a man approached him outside the house, asked to see his phone and gave it back with a video saved on it. In the video, viewed by the AP, a masked man said the siblings’ names and warned: “You either join us and start working with us,” or end up like your uncle. The same day, someone left a note outside their home threatening them, he said.

“It reminded me of my uncle’s death,” he said. “I felt a lot of fear.”

They joined a large group of migrants leaving Honduras in hopes of reaching the U.S, he said. After the group split up in Guatemala, a man took him and his sister through Mexico and to the border.

Experts say MS-13 and other gangs often deliver death threats verbally, and migrant groups and routes through Mexico and Central America are known to be controlled by human smugglers who charge thousands of dollars per person. The boy’s mother says she doesn’t believe her son or any other relative paid a smuggler. 

The siblings crossed the border around July 21 and were apprehended by Border Patrol agents, the boy said. Based on his description, it appears he and his sister were detained at the Border Patrol’s central processing center in McAllen, Texas, where children and adults are separated into large cages of chain-link fencing. Opened during the Obama administration, the same processing center was used two years ago to detain hundreds of parents and children separated by the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy.

The boy said he was held in a cage with about 20 other boys his age and older. He was separated from his sister but could see her from a distance in another enclosure. 

Once a day, someone took their temperatures, but the boy says he was never given a medical exam or a test to see if he had the virus. He said he wore a mask he brought with him from Honduras. 

He was able to call his mother from custody once before he and his sister were expelled. The phone call she received was from a number in McAllen.

The next call the mother received was from an official in Honduras, a few days later, asking her to send a relative to pick her kids up from a shelter for deported children. That was how she learned they had been expelled, she said.

She sat recently in the trailer where she lives with family, including her elder daughter, now 16. 

“I wanted something to be done and to be able to be calm, to know that my children are safe with me,” she said, crying. “No part of Honduras is safe.”

Article Source

[nancygduarteus]

The White Flight From Football

Shantavia Jackson signed her three sons up for football to keep them out of trouble. As a single mother who works the night shift at a Home Depot warehouse 50 minutes away from her house, Jackson relies on the sport to shield the boys from gang activity in her rural Georgia county. They began in a local league five years ago when they were still little, their helmets like bobbleheads on their shoulders. Now 11, 12, and 14, they play in games across the region. Jackson says she passed up a daytime shift at Home Depot so that she can drive them to games and cheer them on.

Over time, the boys’ coaches have become mentors, making sure their athletes get good grades and stay off the streets. They take the boys on field trips to the beach and to Busch Gardens. Jackson’s eldest son, Marqwayvian McCoy—or Qway, as she calls him—has particularly thrived. Jackson says Qway has been diagnosed with schizoaffective bipolar disorder, which sometimes manifests in bursts of anger and an inability to focus at school. Now his teammates help him when he gets stuck in his studies and look up to him for his prowess on the field. They’ve nicknamed him Live Wire because he can hit so hard.

Jackson dreams that Qway will soon make it out of their home in Colquitt County, a place marked by fields of crops and cotton bales the size of Mack trucks. Football could help him do that. As a middle schooler, he’s already been asked to practice with the high-school team, the Colquitt County Packers, a national powerhouse that in 2016 sent two dozen boys to college with full scholarships. Qway knows his mother doesn’t have the money to send him to college, so he studies websites that track top high-school-football athletes and watches all the football he can online, hoping to get better at the game.

Marqwayvian McCoy at home in his jersey (Dustin Chambers)

As Qway throws himself into football, the sport is facing a highly publicized reckoning more serious than any it has confronted since the Pop Warner youth-football program was established in 1929. Research suggests that tackle football can cause long-term brain injury, and as a result, many parents are telling their kids they can’t play. In the 2017–18 school year, 6.6 percent fewer high-school athletes participated in 11-player tackle football than in the 2008–09 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Yet not all parents are holding back their kids from tackle football at equal rates, which is creating a troubling racial divide. Kids in mostly white upper-income communities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West are leaving football for other sports such as lacrosse or baseball. But black kids in lower-income communities without a lot of other sports available are still flocking to football. In keeping with America’s general racial demographics, white boys continue to make up the majority of youth-tackle-football players, according to data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. But proportionally, the scales appear to be shifting. A recent survey of 50,000 eighth-, tenth-, and 12th-grade students found that around 44 percent of black boys play tackle football, compared with 29 percent of white boys, as analyzed by the University of Michigan sociologist Philip Veliz. Football at the high-school level is growing in popularity in states with the highest shares of black people, while it’s declining in majority-white states. Other recent studies suggest that more black adults support youth tackle football than white adults.

This trend has become particularly visible as majority-white towns such as Ridgefield, New Jersey, and Healdsburg, California, have dropped their varsity-football programs due to a lack of interest. Meanwhile, in Lee County, Georgia, a majority-black area near where the Jacksons live, a coach recently started a new travel football team for kids to provide them with guidance and mentorship. These racial divides show up in the football that America watches: Today black athletes make up nearly half of all Division I college-football players, up from 39 percent in 2000. White athletes make up 37 percent, down from 51 percent.

This divergence paints a troubling picture of how economic opportunity—or a lack thereof—governs which boys are incentivized to put their body and brain at risk to play. Depending on where families live, and what other options are available to them, they see either a game that is too violent to consider or one that is necessary and important, if risky. Millions of Americans still watch football; NFL ratings were up this season. That a distinct portion of families won’t let their children play creates a disturbing future for the country’s most popular game.

Sam and Megan Taggard’s colonial-style home in West Simsbury, Connecticut, has no shortage of sporting equipment. The couple’s four children stack bikes in the garage and clutter the wooden living-room floor with footballs and tennis balls. On the day I visited them last October, the Taggards’ 13-year-old son had two hockey games and their 7-year-old daughter had a basketball game. The family’s two younger sons horsed around a hockey goal in the living room.

Tackle football, however, was not on the agenda. “My kiddos aren’t playing,” Sam Taggard told me. Taggard played football years ago at Babson College, and he says his 44-year-old body is still bearing the damage: He had back surgery two years ago and is slow to get out of bed in the morning. He also did a clinical doctorate in physical therapy and has seen how debilitating head and neck injuries can be. Football requires kids to endanger their brain every single game, he said: “In football, you’re literally trying to decimate the person in front of you. If you’re not, you’re not playing well.”

Sam Taggard played football in college and had to have back surgery later in life. (Monica Jorge)

The Taggards aren’t the only family in their neighborhood pulling their boys from tackle football. At one of the day’s hockey games, I chatted with five other parents—all of whom were white—in the frigid stands of an ice-hockey rink on a private-school campus as their sons skated past. Four told me they wouldn’t let their son play. The fifth, a mother named Sharon Walsh, said she had objected, but her husband and son overruled her. She hated signing the waiver saying that she understood her child might die. Thankfully, she said, her son recently decided to give up football on his own.

Ron Perry, another hockey parent, echoed the sentiment that he wouldn’t let his son play tackle football, because of concerns about concussions and head injuries. A friend of his coaches a rec-football team and is always looking for players, Perry told me. But he wouldn’t recommend his son. “There’s just constant hitting,” he said. (Hockey, it should be noted, can also lead to head injuries. USA Hockey, which oversees high-school and club hockey in America, has been relatively proactive about safety, deciding in 2011 to ban bodychecking in games until age 13.)

A huge amount of evidence shows that football poses a risk to developing brains. Athletes who begin playing tackle football before the age of 12 have twice as much of a risk of behavioral problems later in life and three times as much of a risk of clinical depression as athletes who begin playing after 12, according to a 2017 Boston University study. A separate study from Wake Forest University found that boys who played just one season of tackle football between the ages of 8 and 13 had diminished functions in part of their brain.

One of the biggest risks of repeated head injuries is that players could develop CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that occurs when a protein called tau spreads through the brain, killing brain cells. CTE is linked with behavioral and personality changes, memory loss, and speech problems. Conversations about CTE tend to focus on the dangers of concussions, but brains can also be damaged by frequent hits to the head. A February 2018 study found that mice with repeated traumatic brain injuries, regardless of concussive symptoms, still had CTE. The condition has been found in the brains of many high-profile football players who committed suicide in recent years, including Junior Seau, Andre Waters, and Terry Long. One 2017 study of the brains of 111 former NFL players found that 110 of them had CTE.

Because of this research, a growing number of elite-level football players are trying to get kids to wait until high school to start playing tackle. By then, kids’ bodies are developed enough that head trauma may not be as detrimental, and the kids can better understand proper tackling procedures and control their body to follow them.

[Read: The future of detecting brain damage in football]

Even if kids wait until they’re in high school to play tackle football, though, they’ll need something else to do in the meantime. And that’s where Sam Taggard’s kids have an advantage over Shantavia Jackson’s. Throughout the country, affluent school districts offer more extracurricular activities than poorer districts, and upper-income parents can pay for more activities outside of school. On top of hockey, the Taggard’s oldest son, Jack, plays trombone in the band, volunteers to teach music to disabled kids, and participates in the chess and ski clubs. Jack expects to go to college whether or not he excels at sports. Both his parents did, and his father has a master’s in business administration. Shantavia Jackson is still working on getting her GED.

As brain-damage fears have grown, upper-income boys have started decamping to sports such as golf or lacrosse, which are less available in poorer communities. The kids are influenced by adults who have their own biases about the safety of football. Just 37 percent of white respondents told researchers that they would encourage kids to play the sport, while 57 percent of black respondents said they would, according to a working paper by the sociologists Andrew Lindner of Skidmore College and Daniel Hawkins of the University of Nebraska.

The Taggard family outside their home in Simsbury, Connecticut (Monica Jorge)

Now getting white kids just to play flag football can be a tough sell. Jim Schwantz, the mayor of Palatine, Illinois, and a former linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers, tried to start a flag-football league as an alternative for families in his area worried about concussions. Despite a strong start in 2012, interest fell each year in the mostly white suburbs where the league operated, because parents saw the sport as a gateway to tackle football. Schwantz decided to scrap the league in 2017.

Meanwhile, in Colquitt County, where the Jacksons live, football remains the biggest thing around. The county’s population is just 45,000, but it’s not unusual for the 10,000-seat high-school stadium to be full of local fans for Friday-night games. Timmy Barnes, a former player who later traveled with the football team as a police officer, has called Colquitt County “a community who only has football.” He wrote that after Rush Propst, the high-school coach, was nearly suspended after head-butting a player but saved when he apologized and the community rallied around him.

On a fall afternoon, I sat with Shantavia Jackson on the metal bleachers of a high-school stadium in Thomasville, Georgia, a town in a neighboring county near the Florida border, as successive teams of boys came to play in a tournament branded “The Battle of the Babies.” Jackson was there from the start. She wore a gray long-sleeved Colquitt County Cowboys T-shirt to support her youngest son, Chance, whose Pop Warner team played in an early game. She cheered for him while keeping her 12-year-old, Jyqwayvin, entertained in the stands. Qway’s undefeated team was playing a team from Atlanta in the last game of the day, so the family’s day was dominated by football.

The stands were mostly empty when the 6- and 7-year-olds played around noon under a scorching Georgia sun, but they began to fill up as games featured older boys, who could run, jump, and hit harder than the little kids. Amid the sounds of the tournament—the cowbells and hollering from the parents, a DJ blasting Drake from the end zone, the referee’s whistles and the grunts of adolescent boys counting jumping jacks behind the stands—no one seemed bothered by the thuds of the hits. These happened constantly: when the 6- and 7-year-olds ran smack into one another trying to get a fumbled football, when a 9-year-old caught a pass and got leveled by a boy twice his size, and when an 11-year-old got yanked around the neck and tackled by another 11-year-old.

[Read: How students’ brains are in danger on the field]

“Get him, come on!” a grandmother yelled at her grandson, a tiny 61-pound 9-year-old named Zain who was flattened by a boy 40 pounds heavier. Zain came off the field crying and his mother went to stroke his head. With the exception of Zain and his family, nearly every other player and family in the stands was black.

By the time Qway’s game rolled around, the stands were packed and the sun had set, turning the sky a purplish blue. The game was a rout; the team from Atlanta was faster, bigger, and more organized than Qway’s team, and so the boys started getting violent in frustration, tackling one another after the whistle, grabbing at necks to pull one another down. Parents yelled at the referees for what they perceived as missed penalties, and then turned on one another. “We’re in the sticks now!” one Atlanta parent yelled, taunting. Qway got hit in the groin, and Jackson stood at the bottom of the bleachers, her hand by her mouth, waiting to make sure he was okay.

Shantavia Jackson (Dustin Chambers)

Jackson knows football is dangerous. Her father broke his neck playing football when he was in high school; he was in the hospital for weeks and had to get screws in his spine. But she has a fatalistic attitude about injuries. Her boys could get injured in a car accident or a drive-by shooting. They could get injured if they joined gangs. “If it’s meant to happen, it’s going to happen. We can’t stop it,” she said. “You can get injured in any sport.” All she can do, she told me, is hug her boys and tell them she loves them before each game.

Other parents in the stands said similar things. One mother: “Boys will be boys. They need a little roughness.” Another: “You have to keep your child busy so they don’t have time to get in trouble.” One woman, Hope Moore, started her son in football when he was 6. At first he wasn’t interested in playing sports, Moore said, but she wanted to get him off the couch and away from video games. He fell in love with football from the moment he started playing. Moore used to worry about the hits, pulling him from games if she thought he was getting hurt. But the coaches told her that her son needed to learn to make mistakes, and how to get hit, she told me. Now he’s getting invited to live in other school districts so he can be on their teams. “It’s going to help him in college,” Moore said.

Even as the dangers associated with tackle football become more evident, the sport is growing more lucrative. Universities can make money from football on ticket revenue, broadcasting fees, licensing opportunities, and sponsorships through bowl games. Some of the biggest schools have doubled what they make from football over the past decade, according to Forbes. The football program at Texas A&M University, one of the nation’s top teams, brings in $148 million annually.

Seeing the revenue opportunities, many schools have expanded their football program and started offering more scholarships. Since 1988, the NCAA has added 62 Division I schools that are eligible to offer full-ride football scholarships, representing about 3,000 more scholarships available. By contrast, 31 fewer schools offer NCAA Division I scholarships for men’s swimming and diving than in 1988. “If [universities] started giving boys the same amount of scholarships in swimming, you’d see a whole bunch of poor kids jumping in the pool,” Robert W. Turner II, a professor at George Washington University who briefly played in the NFL, told me.

In communities like Colquitt County, many families see high-school seniors get full-ride football scholarships and aspire to something similar. Jackson’s boys, for instance, look up to Ty Lee, a former Colquitt County football player who was recruited to Middle Tennessee State University. They visit him when he’s home from school. Around 78 percent of black male athletes in the lowest income quintile expect to qualify for financial aid through an athletic scholarship, compared with 45 percent of white males in the same income bracket, according to a forthcoming paper by the Portland State University sociologists CJ Appleton and Dara Shifrer.

[Read: Football has always been a battleground in the culture war]

College recruiting can happen as early as middle school, which means kids can feel pressure to start playing sooner to hone their skills. If parents in Colquitt County were to prevent their kids from playing until they’re 14, their kids’ athleticism and knowledge of the game would be far behind that of boys who have been playing for years. Chad Mascoe Sr., who played football at the University of Central Florida and in the Arena Football League, and who now lives in Thomasville, Georgia, told me that his 14-year-old son, Chad Mascoe Jr., had three recruiting offers before he got into high school. Now, as a star freshman, Chad has 13 offers, according to his father. He was recently recruited to transfer to an elite boarding and sports-training school in Florida later this year.

The NFL starts marketing to children when they’re young, which has attracted criticism from groups who say the league’s material portrays football as safe and healthy, even as research shows that it is not. The league runs a website and app for kids that has 3 million registered users, and it has funded NFL-branded fitness and healthy-eating programs in more than 73,000 schools. A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the short-term health of students improved more in participating schools than in those not enrolled. In Colquitt County, schools got a visit from an Atlanta Falcons player through one of those programs in 2014. (The NFL declined to comment for this story.)

Even without the NFL’s presence, though, Colquitt County prioritizes football. In 2016, Colquitt County voters approved a ballot question that allowed the school board to use some proceeds of a sales tax for education funding to build a $3.7 million, 73,000-square-foot indoor multipurpose space that allows the football team to practice even in the heat of a Georgia summer. Propst, the high-school coach, made $141,000 last year, according to Open Georgia, which provides salary information for state and local employees. Most teachers at Colquitt County High School make less than half of what Propst does.

Colquitt County High School (Dustin Chambers)

Without football, the options for boys in Colquitt County are limited. Only 80 percent of incoming freshmen at Colquitt County high schools end up graduating. Of those who do, just 29 percent go on to four-year colleges. For those who stay, job options are bleak: More than two-thirds of households in Colquitt County make less than $50,000 a year. That’s less than half the median household income in Connecticut’s Hartford County, where the Taggards live.

The people who do seem to be pulling their kids from football in Colquitt County are the ones who can afford other opportunities. I talked to Todd Taylor, who is white and lives in Moultrie, Georgia, a few miles from Shantavia Jackson’s hometown of Norman Park. He played football and baseball at Colquitt County High, and his family has season tickets to Colquitt County Packers football games. But his wife really doesn’t want their 8-year-old son, Jud, to play, because of concussion dangers. Instead, Jud plays baseball and dives at Moss Farms Diving, a powerhouse facility in Moultrie that has trained dozens of divers who get college scholarships. Moss Farms offers training tuition-free to those who need it, but diving remains an expensive sport in America, requiring pool time and lots of travel. Sixteen percent of the Moss Farms roster is made up of people of color.

The divide on the football field makes it hard not to see how inequality in America is worsening health disparities and raising the specter of another, darker era of American history. In the early part of the 20th century, black Americans were prevented from buying homes in well-off neighborhoods by racially restrictive covenants, excluded from trade unions and the jobs they guaranteed, and paid less than their white counterparts. The segregation that resulted has long had health implications. Today simply the fact of being black can be hazardous to one’s health. Low-income black boys are more likely than low-income white boys to live in neighborhoods with persistent poverty, violence, and trauma. These neighborhoods also have little access to healthy foods.

Despite the benefits football can provide, it may also be worsening these health disparities. The medical care accessible to low-income families in poor neighborhoods may be helping to obscure the dangers of brain injuries. Low-income black communities have less access to good medical services and information that would emphasize the downsides of playing football, says Harry Edwards, a civil-rights activist and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. “Nobody advises them as to the long-term medical risks,” he told me. “They are out of the loop.” Black people who said they had followed news about concussions were less likely to encourage children to play football than others who hadn’t been following the news, according to Lindner and Hawkin’s study.

[Read: The worst part about recovering from a concussion]

When black boys from low-income families look for examples of men who have come from similar backgrounds and succeeded, they don’t have as many positive role models outside of sports and music. Black NFL players who came from poverty are featured in commercials selling products, sitting behind desks at halftime in tailored suits, holding up trophies. They’re in newspaper stories and TV specials in which they talk about growing up poor in the South, raised by a single mother, and making it big in the NFL. “The media serves up encouraging stories for black kids to consume,” says John Hoberman, the author of Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Low-income black boys do not see the hundreds of athletes suffering in silence as their brain deteriorates, who ache when they get out of bed every morning, who damaged their body playing in high school or college but who didn’t even make it to the NFL.

While black boys are disproportionately getting channeled into a violent sport, white people are making the most money off of it. Seventy percent of NFL players are black, but only 9.9 percent of managers in the league office are. The NFL was just 52 percent black in 1985. Only two people of color are majority owners of NFL franchises: Shahid Khan, the Pakistani American owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Kim Pegula, a Korean American businesswoman who is a partial owner of the Buffalo Bills. “If you’re going to avoid 21st-century gladiator circumstances in terms of football, the teams have to look something like the demographic representation of this nation,” Edwards told me.

Last year, the NFL expanded its Rooney Rule, which was first implemented in 2003 and seeks to diversify teams’ coaching and front-office staff. Still, the gladiatorial overtones are hard to overlook. Players who want to get recruited by NFL teams must attend the NFL Scouting Combine, a week-long showcase in which they perform mental and physical tests. Athletes’ hand size, arm length, and wingspan are measured during this event, and players are asked to stand naked but for their workout shorts so that team recruiters can see how they are built, according to Edwards, who also works as a consultant with the San Francisco 49ers. NFL and team executives, mostly white men, are evaluating the bodies of black players, deciding whether to make an investment.

Even as broadcast networks lost viewers generally, NFL ratings were up in 2018. Americans still appear to have a growing fascination with the sport, even if a majority-white segment of the population doesn’t want their children to play it.

Without a reversal in economic fortunes for poor communities across the country, football could one day become a sport played almost exclusively by black athletes, while still enjoyed by everyone. Black athletes—who already make up the majority of players in the most dangerous on-field positions—would continue to suffer from long-term brain damage, their life cut short by dementia and the scourge of CTE. Black boys would continue to be drawn to a sport that could make their life painful and short. Everyone else would sit back and watch.

Efforts are under way to try to make football safer. Youth leagues are implementing concussion protocols, lessening the amount of hitting players do in practice, and even distributing helmets with special sensors that analyze whether an athlete has gotten a concussion. Dartmouth College eliminated live tackling in all practices in 2010; other Ivy League schools adopted similar rules in 2016. The NFL has made some changes, too, adding a concussion protocol in 2009 and altering kickoff and tackling rules to lower the risk of injury. The 2018 NFL season saw a 28 percent decrease in concussions, compared with the previous year.

Still, the league can’t do much about the fact that football, more than any other sport, requires players to run into one another over and over again and fall to the ground. “Football at the elite level is about as close as you can get to war and still stay civil,” Edwards said. Concussion protocols can’t erase the research that suggests that primarily brain trauma, not concussions, leads to CTE.

The Colquitt County Packers practice field (Dustin Chambers)

Some lawmakers want the government to get involved by prohibiting kids from tackling in football before high school, or by banning youth tackle football entirely. Bills introduced in five states to restrict tackle football have faced backlash. “To demonize just this sport is unfair. It’s illogical, and frankly, it’s downright un-American,” Mike Wagner, the executive commissioner of Pop Warner’s Southern California conference, said in reaction to the Safe Youth Football Act, a failed California bill introduced last year that would have set a minimum age for organized tackle-football leagues.

The disappearance of tackle football could be a real blow to some communities, unless something changes so that those places offer more opportunity and less peril for low-income black boys. If tackle football were banned, for instance, Shantavia Jackson’s boys would lose the coaches who look out for them. Without football, they wouldn’t have something to look forward to on weekends, or as big of a community of teammates. They might not have a dream they can pursue that’s quite as tangible and achievable as playing college football.

Before she had kids, Jackson wanted to leave Colquitt County, but she ended up staying in the same town where her father and grandmother still live. The stakes are higher for her sons, she says, especially for Qway, whose mental-health condition sometimes sets him apart. He needs to be somewhere bigger, with more people like him, she told me. “There’s really nothing much here for him,” she said.

White parents may be doing the best thing for their sons by pulling them from tackle football. But parents of black boys in the rural South are facing a different reality, Jackson says. She believes that she is being a good parent if she gets her sons excited about tackle football. Their opportunities grow if they learn how to hit and tackle and run—how to be as much of a live wire—as well as they possibly can.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/football-white-flight-racial-divide/581623/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

The White Flight From Football

Shantavia Jackson signed her three sons up for football to keep them out of trouble. As a single mother who works the night shift at a Home Depot warehouse 50 minutes away from her house, Jackson relies on the sport to shield the boys from gang activity in her rural Georgia county. They began in a local league five years ago when they were still little, their helmets like bobbleheads on their shoulders. Now 11, 12, and 14, they play in games across the region. Jackson says she passed up a daytime shift at Home Depot so that she can drive them to games and cheer them on.

Over time, the boys’ coaches have become mentors, making sure their athletes get good grades and stay off the streets. They take the boys on field trips to the beach and to Busch Gardens. Jackson’s eldest son, Marqwayvian McCoy—or Qway, as she calls him—has particularly thrived. Jackson says Qway has been diagnosed with schizoaffective bipolar disorder, which sometimes manifests in bursts of anger and an inability to focus at school. Now his teammates help him when he gets stuck in his studies and look up to him for his prowess on the field. They’ve nicknamed him Live Wire because he can hit so hard.

Jackson dreams that Qway will soon make it out of their home in Colquitt County, a place marked by fields of crops and cotton bales the size of Mack trucks. Football could help him do that. As a middle schooler, he’s already been asked to practice with the high-school team, the Colquitt County Packers, a national powerhouse that in 2016 sent two dozen boys to college with full scholarships. Qway knows his mother doesn’t have the money to send him to college, so he studies websites that track top high-school-football athletes and watches all the football he can online, hoping to get better at the game.

Marqwayvian McCoy at home in his jersey (Dustin Chambers)

As Qway throws himself into football, the sport is facing a highly publicized reckoning more serious than any it has confronted since the Pop Warner youth-football program was established in 1929. Research suggests that tackle football can cause long-term brain injury, and as a result, many parents are telling their kids they can’t play. In the 2017–18 school year, 6.6 percent fewer high-school athletes participated in 11-player tackle football than in the 2008–09 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Yet not all parents are holding back their kids from tackle football at equal rates, which is creating a troubling racial divide. Kids in mostly white upper-income communities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West are leaving football for other sports such as lacrosse or baseball. But black kids in lower-income communities without a lot of other sports available are still flocking to football. In keeping with America’s general racial demographics, white boys continue to make up the majority of youth-tackle-football players, according to data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. But proportionally, the scales appear to be shifting. A recent survey of 50,000 eighth-, tenth-, and 12th-grade students found that around 44 percent of black boys play tackle football, compared with 29 percent of white boys, as analyzed by the University of Michigan sociologist Philip Veliz. Football at the high-school level is growing in popularity in states with the highest shares of black people, while it’s declining in majority-white states. Other recent studies suggest that more black adults support youth tackle football than white adults.

This trend has become particularly visible as majority-white towns such as Ridgefield, New Jersey, and Healdsburg, California, have dropped their varsity-football programs due to a lack of interest. Meanwhile, in Lee County, Georgia, a majority-black area near where the Jacksons live, a coach recently started a new travel football team for kids to provide them with guidance and mentorship. These racial divides show up in the football that America watches: Today black athletes make up nearly half of all Division I college-football players, up from 39 percent in 2000. White athletes make up 37 percent, down from 51 percent.

This divergence paints a troubling picture of how economic opportunity—or a lack thereof—governs which boys are incentivized to put their body and brain at risk to play. Depending on where families live, and what other options are available to them, they see either a game that is too violent to consider or one that is necessary and important, if risky. Millions of Americans still watch football; NFL ratings were up this season. That a distinct portion of families won’t let their children play creates a disturbing future for the country’s most popular game.

Sam and Megan Taggard’s colonial-style home in West Simsbury, Connecticut, has no shortage of sporting equipment. The couple’s four children stack bikes in the garage and clutter the wooden living-room floor with footballs and tennis balls. On the day I visited them last October, the Taggards’ 13-year-old son had two hockey games and their 7-year-old daughter had a basketball game. The family’s two younger sons horsed around a hockey goal in the living room.

Tackle football, however, was not on the agenda. “My kiddos aren’t playing,” Sam Taggard told me. Taggard played football years ago at Babson College, and he says his 44-year-old body is still bearing the damage: He had back surgery two years ago and is slow to get out of bed in the morning. He also did a clinical doctorate in physical therapy and has seen how debilitating head and neck injuries can be. Football requires kids to endanger their brain every single game, he said: “In football, you’re literally trying to decimate the person in front of you. If you’re not, you’re not playing well.”

Sam Taggard played football in college and had to have back surgery later in life. (Monica Jorge)

The Taggards aren’t the only family in their neighborhood pulling their boys from tackle football. At one of the day’s hockey games, I chatted with five other parents—all of whom were white—in the frigid stands of an ice-hockey rink on a private-school campus as their sons skated past. Four told me they wouldn’t let their son play. The fifth, a mother named Sharon Walsh, said she had objected, but her husband and son overruled her. She hated signing the waiver saying that she understood her child might die. Thankfully, she said, her son recently decided to give up football on his own.

Ron Perry, another hockey parent, echoed the sentiment that he wouldn’t let his son play tackle football, because of concerns about concussions and head injuries. A friend of his coaches a rec-football team and is always looking for players, Perry told me. But he wouldn’t recommend his son. “There’s just constant hitting,” he said. (Hockey, it should be noted, can also lead to head injuries. USA Hockey, which oversees high-school and club hockey in America, has been relatively proactive about safety, deciding in 2011 to ban bodychecking in games until age 13.)

A huge amount of evidence shows that football poses a risk to developing brains. Athletes who begin playing tackle football before the age of 12 have twice as much of a risk of behavioral problems later in life and three times as much of a risk of clinical depression as athletes who begin playing after 12, according to a 2017 Boston University study. A separate study from Wake Forest University found that boys who played just one season of tackle football between the ages of 8 and 13 had diminished functions in part of their brain.

One of the biggest risks of repeated head injuries is that players could develop CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that occurs when a protein called tau spreads through the brain, killing brain cells. CTE is linked with behavioral and personality changes, memory loss, and speech problems. Conversations about CTE tend to focus on the dangers of concussions, but brains can also be damaged by frequent hits to the head. A February 2018 study found that mice with repeated traumatic brain injuries, regardless of concussive symptoms, still had CTE. The condition has been found in the brains of many high-profile football players who committed suicide in recent years, including Junior Seau, Andre Waters, and Terry Long. One 2017 study of the brains of 111 former NFL players found that 110 of them had CTE.

Because of this research, a growing number of elite-level football players are trying to get kids to wait until high school to start playing tackle. By then, kids’ bodies are developed enough that head trauma may not be as detrimental, and the kids can better understand proper tackling procedures and control their body to follow them.

[Read: The future of detecting brain damage in football]

Even if kids wait until they’re in high school to play tackle football, though, they’ll need something else to do in the meantime. And that’s where Sam Taggard’s kids have an advantage over Shantavia Jackson’s. Throughout the country, affluent school districts offer more extracurricular activities than poorer districts, and upper-income parents can pay for more activities outside of school. On top of hockey, the Taggard’s oldest son, Jack, plays trombone in the band, volunteers to teach music to disabled kids, and participates in the chess and ski clubs. Jack expects to go to college whether or not he excels at sports. Both his parents did, and his father has a master’s in business administration. Shantavia Jackson is still working on getting her GED.

As brain-damage fears have grown, upper-income boys have started decamping to sports such as golf or lacrosse, which are less available in poorer communities. The kids are influenced by adults who have their own biases about the safety of football. Just 37 percent of white respondents told researchers that they would encourage kids to play the sport, while 57 percent of black respondents said they would, according to a working paper by the sociologists Andrew Lindner of Skidmore College and Daniel Hawkins of the University of Nebraska.

The Taggard family outside their home in Simsbury, Connecticut (Monica Jorge)

Now getting white kids just to play flag football can be a tough sell. Jim Schwantz, the mayor of Palatine, Illinois, and a former linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers, tried to start a flag-football league as an alternative for families in his area worried about concussions. Despite a strong start in 2012, interest fell each year in the mostly white suburbs where the league operated, because parents saw the sport as a gateway to tackle football. Schwantz decided to scrap the league in 2017.

Meanwhile, in Colquitt County, where the Jacksons live, football remains the biggest thing around. The county’s population is just 45,000, but it’s not unusual for the 10,000-seat high-school stadium to be full of local fans for Friday-night games. Timmy Barnes, a former player who later traveled with the football team as a police officer, has called Colquitt County “a community who only has football.” He wrote that after Rush Propst, the high-school coach, was nearly suspended after head-butting a player but saved when he apologized and the community rallied around him.

On a fall afternoon, I sat with Shantavia Jackson on the metal bleachers of a high-school stadium in Thomasville, Georgia, a town in a neighboring county near the Florida border, as successive teams of boys came to play in a tournament branded “The Battle of the Babies.” Jackson was there from the start. She wore a gray long-sleeved Colquitt County Cowboys T-shirt to support her youngest son, Chance, whose Pop Warner team played in an early game. She cheered for him while keeping her 12-year-old, Jyqwayvin, entertained in the stands. Qway’s undefeated team was playing a team from Atlanta in the last game of the day, so the family’s day was dominated by football.

The stands were mostly empty when the 6- and 7-year-olds played around noon under a scorching Georgia sun, but they began to fill up as games featured older boys, who could run, jump, and hit harder than the little kids. Amid the sounds of the tournament—the cowbells and hollering from the parents, a DJ blasting Drake from the end zone, the referee’s whistles and the grunts of adolescent boys counting jumping jacks behind the stands—no one seemed bothered by the thuds of the hits. These happened constantly: when the 6- and 7-year-olds ran smack into one another trying to get a fumbled football, when a 9-year-old caught a pass and got leveled by a boy twice his size, and when an 11-year-old got yanked around the neck and tackled by another 11-year-old.

[Read: How students’ brains are in danger on the field]

“Get him, come on!” a grandmother yelled at her grandson, a tiny 61-pound 9-year-old named Zain who was flattened by a boy 40 pounds heavier. Zain came off the field crying and his mother went to stroke his head. With the exception of Zain and his family, nearly every other player and family in the stands was black.

By the time Qway’s game rolled around, the stands were packed and the sun had set, turning the sky a purplish blue. The game was a rout; the team from Atlanta was faster, bigger, and more organized than Qway’s team, and so the boys started getting violent in frustration, tackling one another after the whistle, grabbing at necks to pull one another down. Parents yelled at the referees for what they perceived as missed penalties, and then turned on one another. “We’re in the sticks now!” one Atlanta parent yelled, taunting. Qway got hit in the groin, and Jackson stood at the bottom of the bleachers, her hand by her mouth, waiting to make sure he was okay.

Shantavia Jackson (Dustin Chambers)

Jackson knows football is dangerous. Her father broke his neck playing football when he was in high school; he was in the hospital for weeks and had to get screws in his spine. But she has a fatalistic attitude about injuries. Her boys could get injured in a car accident or a drive-by shooting. They could get injured if they joined gangs. “If it’s meant to happen, it’s going to happen. We can’t stop it,” she said. “You can get injured in any sport.” All she can do, she told me, is hug her boys and tell them she loves them before each game.

Other parents in the stands said similar things. One mother: “Boys will be boys. They need a little roughness.” Another: “You have to keep your child busy so they don’t have time to get in trouble.” One woman, Hope Moore, started her son in football when he was 6. At first he wasn’t interested in playing sports, Moore said, but she wanted to get him off the couch and away from video games. He fell in love with football from the moment he started playing. Moore used to worry about the hits, pulling him from games if she thought he was getting hurt. But the coaches told her that her son needed to learn to make mistakes, and how to get hit, she told me. Now he’s getting invited to live in other school districts so he can be on their teams. “It’s going to help him in college,” Moore said.

Even as the dangers associated with tackle football become more evident, the sport is growing more lucrative. Universities can make money from football on ticket revenue, broadcasting fees, licensing opportunities, and sponsorships through bowl games. Some of the biggest schools have doubled what they make from football over the past decade, according to Forbes. The football program at Texas A&M University, one of the nation’s top teams, brings in $148 million annually.

Seeing the revenue opportunities, many schools have expanded their football program and started offering more scholarships. Since 1988, the NCAA has added 62 Division I schools that are eligible to offer full-ride football scholarships, representing about 3,000 more scholarships available. By contrast, 31 fewer schools offer NCAA Division I scholarships for men’s swimming and diving than in 1988. “If [universities] started giving boys the same amount of scholarships in swimming, you’d see a whole bunch of poor kids jumping in the pool,” Robert W. Turner II, a professor at George Washington University who briefly played in the NFL, told me.

In communities like Colquitt County, many families see high-school seniors get full-ride football scholarships and aspire to something similar. Jackson’s boys, for instance, look up to Ty Lee, a former Colquitt County football player who was recruited to Middle Tennessee State University. They visit him when he’s home from school. Around 78 percent of black male athletes in the lowest income quintile expect to qualify for financial aid through an athletic scholarship, compared with 45 percent of white males in the same income bracket, according to a forthcoming paper by the Portland State University sociologists CJ Appleton and Dara Shifrer.

[Read: Football has always been a battleground in the culture war]

College recruiting can happen as early as middle school, which means kids can feel pressure to start playing sooner to hone their skills. If parents in Colquitt County were to prevent their kids from playing until they’re 14, their kids’ athleticism and knowledge of the game would be far behind that of boys who have been playing for years. Chad Mascoe Sr., who played football at the University of Central Florida and in the Arena Football League, and who now lives in Thomasville, Georgia, told me that his 14-year-old son, Chad Mascoe Jr., had three recruiting offers before he got into high school. Now, as a star freshman, Chad has 13 offers, according to his father. He was recently recruited to transfer to an elite boarding and sports-training school in Florida later this year.

The NFL starts marketing to children when they’re young, which has attracted criticism from groups who say the league’s material portrays football as safe and healthy, even as research shows that it is not. The league runs a website and app for kids that has 3 million registered users, and it has funded NFL-branded fitness and healthy-eating programs in more than 73,000 schools. A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the short-term health of students improved more in participating schools than in those not enrolled. In Colquitt County, schools got a visit from an Atlanta Falcons player through one of those programs in 2014. (The NFL declined to comment for this story.)

Even without the NFL’s presence, though, Colquitt County prioritizes football. In 2016, Colquitt County voters approved a ballot question that allowed the school board to use some proceeds of a sales tax for education funding to build a $3.7 million, 73,000-square-foot indoor multipurpose space that allows the football team to practice even in the heat of a Georgia summer. Propst, the high-school coach, made $141,000 last year, according to Open Georgia, which provides salary information for state and local employees. Most teachers at Colquitt County High School make less than half of what Propst does.

Colquitt County High School (Dustin Chambers)

Without football, the options for boys in Colquitt County are limited. Only 80 percent of incoming freshmen at Colquitt County high schools end up graduating. Of those who do, just 29 percent go on to four-year colleges. For those who stay, job options are bleak: More than two-thirds of households in Colquitt County make less than $50,000 a year. That’s less than half the median household income in Connecticut’s Hartford County, where the Taggards live.

The people who do seem to be pulling their kids from football in Colquitt County are the ones who can afford other opportunities. I talked to Todd Taylor, who is white and lives in Moultrie, Georgia, a few miles from Shantavia Jackson’s hometown of Norman Park. He played football and baseball at Colquitt County High, and his family has season tickets to Colquitt County Packers football games. But his wife really doesn’t want their 8-year-old son, Jud, to play, because of concussion dangers. Instead, Jud plays baseball and dives at Moss Farms Diving, a powerhouse facility in Moultrie that has trained dozens of divers who get college scholarships. Moss Farms offers training tuition-free to those who need it, but diving remains an expensive sport in America, requiring pool time and lots of travel. Sixteen percent of the Moss Farms roster is made up of people of color.

The divide on the football field makes it hard not to see how inequality in America is worsening health disparities and raising the specter of another, darker era of American history. In the early part of the 20th century, black Americans were prevented from buying homes in well-off neighborhoods by racially restrictive covenants, excluded from trade unions and the jobs they guaranteed, and paid less than their white counterparts. The segregation that resulted has long had health implications. Today simply the fact of being black can be hazardous to one’s health. Low-income black boys are more likely than low-income white boys to live in neighborhoods with persistent poverty, violence, and trauma. These neighborhoods also have little access to healthy foods.

Despite the benefits football can provide, it may also be worsening these health disparities. The medical care accessible to low-income families in poor neighborhoods may be helping to obscure the dangers of brain injuries. Low-income black communities have less access to good medical services and information that would emphasize the downsides of playing football, says Harry Edwards, a civil-rights activist and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. “Nobody advises them as to the long-term medical risks,” he told me. “They are out of the loop.” Black people who said they had followed news about concussions were less likely to encourage children to play football than others who hadn’t been following the news, according to Lindner and Hawkin’s study.

[Read: The worst part about recovering from a concussion]

When black boys from low-income families look for examples of men who have come from similar backgrounds and succeeded, they don’t have as many positive role models outside of sports and music. Black NFL players who came from poverty are featured in commercials selling products, sitting behind desks at halftime in tailored suits, holding up trophies. They’re in newspaper stories and TV specials in which they talk about growing up poor in the South, raised by a single mother, and making it big in the NFL. “The media serves up encouraging stories for black kids to consume,” says John Hoberman, the author of Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Low-income black boys do not see the hundreds of athletes suffering in silence as their brain deteriorates, who ache when they get out of bed every morning, who damaged their body playing in high school or college but who didn’t even make it to the NFL.

While black boys are disproportionately getting channeled into a violent sport, white people are making the most money off of it. Seventy percent of NFL players are black, but only 9.9 percent of managers in the league office are. The NFL was just 52 percent black in 1985. Only two people of color are majority owners of NFL franchises: Shahid Khan, the Pakistani American owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Kim Pegula, a Korean American businesswoman who is a partial owner of the Buffalo Bills. “If you’re going to avoid 21st-century gladiator circumstances in terms of football, the teams have to look something like the demographic representation of this nation,” Edwards told me.

Last year, the NFL expanded its Rooney Rule, which was first implemented in 2003 and seeks to diversify teams’ coaching and front-office staff. Still, the gladiatorial overtones are hard to overlook. Players who want to get recruited by NFL teams must attend the NFL Scouting Combine, a week-long showcase in which they perform mental and physical tests. Athletes’ hand size, arm length, and wingspan are measured during this event, and players are asked to stand naked but for their workout shorts so that team recruiters can see how they are built, according to Edwards, who also works as a consultant with the San Francisco 49ers. NFL and team executives, mostly white men, are evaluating the bodies of black players, deciding whether to make an investment.

Even as broadcast networks lost viewers generally, NFL ratings were up in 2018. Americans still appear to have a growing fascination with the sport, even if a majority-white segment of the population doesn’t want their children to play it.

Without a reversal in economic fortunes for poor communities across the country, football could one day become a sport played almost exclusively by black athletes, while still enjoyed by everyone. Black athletes—who already make up the majority of players in the most dangerous on-field positions—would continue to suffer from long-term brain damage, their life cut short by dementia and the scourge of CTE. Black boys would continue to be drawn to a sport that could make their life painful and short. Everyone else would sit back and watch.

Efforts are under way to try to make football safer. Youth leagues are implementing concussion protocols, lessening the amount of hitting players do in practice, and even distributing helmets with special sensors that analyze whether an athlete has gotten a concussion. Dartmouth College eliminated live tackling in all practices in 2010; other Ivy League schools adopted similar rules in 2016. The NFL has made some changes, too, adding a concussion protocol in 2009 and altering kickoff and tackling rules to lower the risk of injury. The 2018 NFL season saw a 28 percent decrease in concussions, compared with the previous year.

Still, the league can’t do much about the fact that football, more than any other sport, requires players to run into one another over and over again and fall to the ground. “Football at the elite level is about as close as you can get to war and still stay civil,” Edwards said. Concussion protocols can’t erase the research that suggests that primarily brain trauma, not concussions, leads to CTE.

The Colquitt County Packers practice field (Dustin Chambers)

Some lawmakers want the government to get involved by prohibiting kids from tackling in football before high school, or by banning youth tackle football entirely. Bills introduced in five states to restrict tackle football have faced backlash. “To demonize just this sport is unfair. It’s illogical, and frankly, it’s downright un-American,” Mike Wagner, the executive commissioner of Pop Warner’s Southern California conference, said in reaction to the Safe Youth Football Act, a failed California bill introduced last year that would have set a minimum age for organized tackle-football leagues.

The disappearance of tackle football could be a real blow to some communities, unless something changes so that those places offer more opportunity and less peril for low-income black boys. If tackle football were banned, for instance, Shantavia Jackson’s boys would lose the coaches who look out for them. Without football, they wouldn’t have something to look forward to on weekends, or as big of a community of teammates. They might not have a dream they can pursue that’s quite as tangible and achievable as playing college football.

Before she had kids, Jackson wanted to leave Colquitt County, but she ended up staying in the same town where her father and grandmother still live. The stakes are higher for her sons, she says, especially for Qway, whose mental-health condition sometimes sets him apart. He needs to be somewhere bigger, with more people like him, she told me. “There’s really nothing much here for him,” she said.

White parents may be doing the best thing for their sons by pulling them from tackle football. But parents of black boys in the rural South are facing a different reality, Jackson says. She believes that she is being a good parent if she gets her sons excited about tackle football. Their opportunities grow if they learn how to hit and tackle and run—how to be as much of a live wire—as well as they possibly can.

Article source here:The Atlantic