#my parents are middle class and on the poorer side of the middle but since i was a child i noticed old rich people liked me

[thehoneybus]

I worked so hard on my old rich people's favorite young person persona, I cannot go back anymore...

[antheshewro]

AOT headcanon — (My) personal analysis on Paradis

I previously wrote my own headcanon about Levi's sexuality, based on the official content we have about him. I saw that it was appreciated (23 notes for me are like a hundred so thank you!), which led me to share more headcanons of Attack on Titan. This time, in particular, I'll focus on Paradis as a nation—culture, moral values, etc.

First thing first, Paradis is a country that was secluded and was denied a technological development. Not having the knowledge that there is a whole world outside the walls and beyond the sea, they got to the point where their own development benefitted the military (think about the equipment the soldiers use, which is not really aligned with the middle ages setting). That leads me to believe that the progress in terms of morality got affected by this.

I can see their society being conservative; very "old school" type of approach when it comes to dating, for example. Men had to show up at their women's door to ask for their hands in marriage to their parents, wanting their daughters to be virgins when they got married, expecting them to settle and pop out a few kids. Men were expected to be the heads of their families, having a certain control over their wives. I would mention misogyny as consistent: when a Marleyan called Sasha a 'whore' completely unprovoked; when the Military Police's soldiers were discussing about Historia getting impregnated; the entire ordeal with Mikasa and her mom, about their heritage and the fact that they were targeted to be sold to the black market. It's useless to mention how much prostitutes were hated.

Hookup culture was surely a thing, and in my opinion, a lot of soldiers resorted to it. The Scouts are the branch that has the lowest survival rate, and having a committed relationship meant each time they would leave for their monthly expeditions, they always had the fear of not seeing their wives, husband or children ever again. Erwin, to me, agreed not to date Marie not only to focus on his duty, but also because he couldn't bear to think about her grieving if he died. Because of that, the Scouts either dated between each other or resorted in hook-ups with women who were drooling over soldiers—I can picture only men having those 'adventures'.

The Garrison, until the fall of Wall Maria, were as lazy and drunkards as ever. They only had to protect the civilians from the titans, which gave them a higher survival rate (though we could see how incompetent they were when Shigashina was attacked). That meant they surely had more opportunities to marry and settle; Pixis had a wife, for example. This, however, doesn't exclude the fact that men still hooked up with women, mostly to have someone to warm their beds.

The Military Police had it simple: their job was fairly easier and safer. Women would settle with them because their paychecks were higher; if men had one night stands, it was because they used their own ranks or job as MP officers to be entitled to women's attention. In this case, we know that Nile Dok had the possibility to marry Marie and also be a father, a privilege since he didn't constantly risk his life.

The fact that women were allowed to join the military was surely something that was allowed after ages. Yet, we can see the military where the percentage of male soldiers was surely way higher. The reason why no women became Commanders. When Hange got promoted, I could see tons of Scouts being against it, because of their gender. There's a bit of confusion since they use she/her with Hange sometimes, especially in the anime, but whatever the case is, they aren't male. And therefore, a Commander who's not male was surely a big no-no for a lot of people.

Paradis surely is a country where discrimination is rampant, and some people would turn their heads to the side whenever there was someone being targeted. Classism was very much normalized; the government completely ignored the poorer and lower classes. They never cared about the Underground, and when the fall of Wall Maria happened, with Shiganshina that welcomed most, if not all lower classes, it could be seen when their residents got sent to Wall Rose after evacuating. The government also sent the lower classes outside the walls to "work" when the food supplies weren't enough, and as Armin stated, the situation got a bit better. It wasn't surprising that they were all people who lived in Shiganshina.

I do see the richer classes being reluctant to lend a hand to the homeless, for example, whether it is giving them a few coins or engaging with volunteering. If they can, they avoid it. They're greedy, and if they can exploit the poor, they don't back away from it.

In terms of racism, it wasn't a thing until the discovery of Marley. From that moment, with the entire 'Eldian race' type of stuff, it surely flared up and mostly in the Scouts, because of the Jaegerists. It wouldn't surprise me that once Onyankopon began to help the Survey Corps, a lot of them (especially Floch) resorted to prejudices and blatant snarky remarks about his skin color, and of course, his home country—there was indeed a scene where he got cornered.

Homosexuality... I'm a bit conflicted about it. On one hand, I could see Paradis having several people believing that women had to only date men to assure that the Paradisians wouldn't be extinct one day. On the other hand, history tells us that homosexuality always existed and was a trait shared even in the Middle Ages. The only hint that Paradis had certain religious beliefs is the "cult of the walls"; though, the presence of pastors or some sort or alternate version of Catholicism or anything along those lines, which included the cult of the walls, was surely a thing. There, sodomy was a sin. A lot of homosexual encounters were perhaps shared in private places, or designated ones. In AOT, however, no one had anything to say about Historia and Ymir; everyone understood they weren't surely best friends. And since the barracks were divided into male and female ones (Isabel Magnolia was stunned by it once she joined the Scouts), we can't deny that there were gay cadets, or gay couples/officers among the ranking in each Regiment.

Finally, gender identity. If we push aside the entire "church and conservatives didn't approve that" thing, I can think of transvestites, mostly men. Hange is the only character that's canonically not a man nor a woman. When they joined the Corps, people surely questioned it; some were appalled, others were reluctant. Not out of malice, or better, not all of them, but I would say out of a lack of knowledge. When they saw that Hange was a valid member and Squad Leader, the Scouts realized that they couldn't care less about how Hange defined themselves: gender identity is the last thing you should care about when you're constantly a step away from being chewed like a chewing gum.

This post is ungodly long and I'm aware of it. If you would like me to share more headcanons or if you want me to write about a specific one, my ask box is open ⭐

[hanibalistic]

#507A9E | HWANG HYUNJIN.

genre | fluff, high school au, faint mutual pining, implied rich kid au

word count | 2190

warning | fighting, mentions of injuries

tag | @fluffyskzclub​

note | i miss hyunjin pt.2 // maybe a universe?

the first thing that popped into your head when you saw students running toward the school courtyard, whispering and chanting about a fight that had broken out, was that the person better not be hyunjin.

you knew hyunjin ever since middle school but you two only recently introduced yourselves to each other when your homeroom teacher made it your responsibility, as the class president, to keep track of him—both his poor grades and his even poorer conduct.

you two never had to chance to speak to each other before the beginning of your tutoring sessions. surely, even if you had the chance to talk to him, you would not have taken it with his rebellious reputation contrasting so stronger your clean-slate one. most of your encounters were of you frowning and sneering at him whenever you saw him get taken away to the principal's office, or when he and his friends create a ruckus during school assemblies.

your poor impression of him stayed long even after you began tutoring him in the corner of the school library, afraid that you would be seen together. he was always late, sometimes with a hazy attitude and sometimes with bruises and cuts on his face. he was always late to the sessions, but he was also always present.

on his third failed calculus test hyunjin came around.

you never knew why but he suddenly did a 360-degree turn and he came around. he started to pay attention in class and he paid attention to you, he did his homework and the additional questions you assigned him, he jotted down notes and read them during his free time. with the third failed test, he decided he would work hard for some reason.

he was still late to the tutoring sessions, though.

but! with his newfound motivation, you, too, came around and began seeing him in a much friendlier light. you greeted him in the halls, you talked to him outside of the library and about topics other than academics (like his adorable puppy kkami, who you adore more than hyunjin, not that adore the boy or anything), you two moved from the corner to the main study center of the library, and you learned to treat his wounds whenever he has them.

hyunjin became a good friend of yours, and he only listened to you, which you realized after a friend mentioned it to you. you thought it was preposterous, but the thought of it made your stomach flutter with faint romantic delight anyway, the knot in your throat refusing to admit out loud that you might just find him the smallest bit attractive.

like when he would smile confidently at his practice test as he hands it to you, only for it to turn into a cute frown when he watches you add cross after cross on his answers. or when he would arch one brow at you in acknowledgment, a boyish smirk playing on his lips, after you accidentally catch his eyes in the classroom during a long lecture. or when his solid, pressuring gaze lays itself on you as you tend to his wounds outside in the school garden, his eyes holding the gentlest of affection as he looks to you as the only person to have ever existed on this earth.

no, you are not attracted to him. not at all.

"excuse me–i'm sorry, excuse me!" you said as you pushed yourself through the overly excited crowd.

once you made your way to the front, your jaw clenched and your brows furrowed. there hyunjin was, hands clutching a poor student's wrinkled collar, and the scar under his eye reopened. it was him who got in a fight! you did not know why you hoped for an alternative.

there was a glint in hyunjin's eyes—something akin to happiness, a thrilling excitement, perhaps, like the freeing of his soul being trashed into the depths of his easy insults and clenched fists. there was no anger in him, not an ounce. you knew what his anger looked like when it was directed to another, and this was not it.

this was free will. he was fighting because his body could and he yearned for the temporary excitement of it.

you felt your heart sink a little. out of everything that could make his face light up like this, fighting people has to take the crown? you wanted hyunjin to be happy but not with such a method! you also don't want to completely strip the entertainment away from him either!

if you wanted him to stop, the best way would be to find something else that can make him feel as excited as he does now, but what could it be?

"hwang hyunjin!" you hollered when you saw him throw a punch at the other student, your thoughts vanishing immediately.

stomping forward, you grabbed onto the back of his shirt and yanked him behind you. you pushed the other student away, glaring at him to run away before you turned to hyunjin. you tilted your head then, looking at him carefully, then you walked toward him.

"oh, come on, [name]," he whined, preparing to move around you. "don't ruin the fun!"

"hyunjin–hyunjin, look at me," you said, putting your hands on his shoulders and stopping him from side-stepping you. when he focused on you, his eyes turning soft, you smiled. "stop."

he stayed silent for a second before he sneered. he tried to shove you aside. "move away–"

"hyunjin," you sighed, feeling the longing for movement in his body. "do you understand you did something bad."

"if you are trying to talk me out of fighting–"

"you understand," you interrupted him, "that you did something bad."

you could hear voices in the background criticizing you. you were unsure of what, exactly. it was either of you stopping the fight or of you assuming you could stop the fight by talking. you ignored the background noises and focused on hyunjin, looking at him expectantly. you just needed him to tell you he understands.

"jesus, yes! now move away–"

"great. then i'm so sorry about this."

hyunjin was about to side-step you again, adding force into his hands as he pushed you aside to search for the kid who ran off, but you removed your grip on him and took a step back to get into position. his confusion worked in your favor when you anchored your weight on your feet, and with a strong swing, you punched him square in the face, knocking him down.

you grimaced at the pain that reverberates through your knuckles, while hyunjin laid on the floor with his face covered by his hands.

"what the fuck!" he yelled into his hands, his head pressed against the grass field with a pained look.

you scoffed at him as you rubbed your hands together. you felt worried for a second, but then it cooled down when you came to terms that he has got to have experienced worse. it was not the impact of the punch that made him dramatize his reaction (although, surely it did hurt his pretty face) but the unpredictableness of the punch that did so.

he would be fine. he always was.

you looked around you, glaring at everyone who came looking for a show, and you waited for them to disperse before you return your attention to hyunjin.

"come on, let's go to the nurse's office," you said as you moved closer to him, knelt, and took his hands from his face.

not a single stain of your punch. it was all just the invisible pain and his tendency to exaggerate.

"you look fine."

"i'm not fine!" he retorted with a whiny shout, snatching his hands away from yours and sitting up. he placed his hand on one propped-up knee and turned to you, annoyed. "you punched me!"

"talking clearly wasn't doing the job, so i did what i had to do!"

"punching me is what you had to do? not call a teacher or something?" he exclaimed incredulously, eyes widening at you in disbelief.

you closed your mouth. you had not wanted to get him in trouble so you resulted in dealing with it on your own. he has a week-long clean streak of not messing with the teacher, you wanted to keep it that way. even though you failed to consider if anybody present would snitch on him, or you, or maybe even the both of you.

"yes...?" you squeaked as you ducked your head, then you slightly eyed up, grimacing at him apologetically. "i didn't want to get you in trouble."

hyunjin watched you through the silk of his long black hair. he took in your words; the way you said it so bashfully, and how you shrunk under the thought of you making a mistake on his behalf. he understood that it was ultimately your good intentions looking out for his own good. your contrasting naivety shone into his eyes, and he wanted to cradle your face in his hands and be gentle with you.

heaving a sigh, he leaned on his hand that supported his torso up. licking his lower lip, he shared a knowing look with you and asked, "you know how to throw a punch."

you scowled lightly then, playing with your fingers as you sat on the grass field. "yeah, my mom had me learn how to fight ever since i was young."

"that makes sense. self-defense is good."

"yeah," you breathed out a laugh, "a little more than that."

"hmm?"

"my mother has a very odd job."

hyunjin smiled questioningly but he didn't ask. he merely took a look behind you at the grand structure of the school he stumbled upon after his parent's death and he nodded in acceptance.

he was never supposed to enter an elite school like this, where every student seems to have some dark family secrets down their sleeves. dark secrets not as in family feuds and estrangements (although those were certainly present as well) but dark secrets as in blood money and corrupt authorities.

rich people problems, but make it guns and roses.

he would not be surprised if your family had some weird history hidden in the closet. what he was wondering about was how you got stuck in a normal middle school with him.

"is your nose okay?" you asked timidly, facing forward at him.

your expression made him recall the time he found you wiping tears from your eyes at the library, glaring at his failed calculus test as if it had been your own, and he realized that you did care and you weren’t doing this because you were asked to.

it made him remember how most things he has done—studying, paying attention, staring at you, not getting into trouble—have been for you.

he just could not control his habits sometimes and he hoped you wouldn’t get too upset with him today for missing the tutoring session.

hyunjin hummed. it was fine, the pain subsided long ago, but he would be damned to not take your concern to an advantage. pouting quickly, he twisted his torso and let himself fall on your lap. he could feel you panic above him and he giggled lowly to himself, his eyes closed.

"i feel dizzy, you might have given me a concussion," he said.

you gasped a little, then you denied, "no way, that can't be possible."

"don't invalidate my concussion," hyunjin said. "it is what i feel."

you sucked in a breath.

there is no point treading through that territory with him, there is no point treading through that territory with anyone.

sensing your silence, hyunjin dared to open one eye to peek up at you. you were staring down at him, eyes ablaze with curiosity as you waited for him to speak.

the sunlight fell like gold sand and split when it reached your head, casting sparks over you. almost a spitting image of an angel, if he knew what an angel looked like. 

your innocence was as gentle as his mother once was, and your determination a faint recall of his father's brightness. but your face was entirely your own; your eyes, nose, cheeks, lips. a kind face, a calm face, a face of someone he has come to fall catastrophically in love with.

hyunjin felt his eyes waver, he felt the warm watery dust his in eyes waver like flashes of lights seeping through gaps of leaves on a tree. his fingers itched to reach up to your face, to cradle you, to be kind to you, but he pressed them to his sides and only allowed himself a smile at your direction.

"i'm going to rest my face," he said.

you frowned, but the guilt of punching him asked you to stay with him, so you nodded. "okay."

hyunjin relaxed on the ground. his eyes were closed, but if they weren't, you would have seen—the thrill in his eyes of being able to be with you, the excitement of being close to you.

it would not be something akin to happiness, it would be happiness.

[bixbythemartian]

I’m just gonna ramble about work for a bit if y’all don’t mind

one of the interesting artifacts of delivering pizza right now is how much more it is obvious that people never use their front doors

this is one of those things that has always been true of delivering pizza, for me (I’ve been in this industry off and on since 2004)

you’ll get to someone’s house and it’s super clear that they always come in and out through the garage because of one or more of the following

their porch is covered in cobwebs

their porch has been taken over by a feral cat colony (probably with some encouragement/feeding by the people who live here, but not necessarily)

the sidewalk from driveway to door is completely overgrown by bushes (it is common courtesy to try not to walk on people’s lawns, because some people get Deeply Weird about that and I want a good tip, but sometimes you gotta because there’s a rosebush that’s out for blood)

their porch is like piled with stuff because it’s mostly used for storage

their porch is like piled with stuff because they think it looks cute but they don’t realize how difficult the stuff makes it to get to the door

It didn’t used to be like SUPER common

in my delivery area it used to be almost entirely middle to upper middle class housing that suffered from this.

really wealthy people pay yard guys to handle the whole thing, so their hedge rows are fine, and really wealthy people tend towards being minimal with any kind of porch decoration- a seasonal wreath and maybe a couple of chairs nobody sits in and a table nobody uses to one side or the other

poorer folks don’t have houses with garages, and if they do have garages they probably don’t have automatic openers. also those were more likely to be rentals and they’d be out smoking on the porch and stuff, they actually use their front porch is my point.

so it’s people who have enough money to have a house with an automatic garage door opener, and who aren’t afraid of being seen as extreme with their porch decorations, that tend towards this particular circumstance

(and like I genuinely love weird porch decorations, the weirder the better, but I do need to be able to reach your door, that’s kinda part of my job)

I generally have worked in the kind of places that have cheap pizzas that college kids and high people eat, so this was like ‘2-3 times a week’ sort of deal. I spent a lot more of my time at the dorms and cheap apartments than I did at nicer houses.

it has changed a lot though, I rarely have a night where I don’t see this kind of thing at least once, here’s my thoughts on why

Pandemic means less people having people over, so nobody is there to say ‘ooh hedge rows are making it hard to get up the walk’ or ‘the cute gnome statue on the porch is at just the right height to whack me in the shins when I come up the stairs, maybe think about moving it back a few inches? I almost broke the damn thing’

the pandemic also means contactless delivery has become more the norm, and so even when you might have in the past had an interaction with a delivery driver who’s like ‘oh by the way, your rosebush attempted to eat me just fyi and I think there’s a spider the size of a housecat living in it’, that doesn’t happen hardly at all anymore

previous management lost us a lot of regulars because they were absolute dickholes and thought customer service was for weenies, but new management took over before the pandemic and so we... like, don’t call customers horrible names when they complain about stuff anymore, and we were one of two places open after 10 pm for a while, so we got back a lot of the townies, and it’s not just college kids and broke folks who order from us anymore (though that’s still one of our main demographics)

the older neighborhood with poorer housing that used to be largely like my parent’s generation or their parent’s generation (boomers and up) is now being bought up by developers and house flippers who are trying to rent to hip young couples and college kids, and they’re slapping paint on houses and throwing in an automatic garage door opener and raising the price like 20%

(this is super infuriating actually because now there’s basically nowhere to live that’s reasonably cheap and kinda shitty in town, it’s all upscale apartments for college students that’s barely occupied, very shitty apartments that are charging way too much, or houses being sold for 20 grand more than they are actually worth, this is why I no longer live in the same town I work)

another interesting thing about pandemic delivery is that my tip average is generally WAY up. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this.

I suspect that when the whole country went to ordering a lot more delivery there was a lot more attention paid to drivers and it’s seemingly resulted in a permanent upswing in tip percentages. generally a lot closer to the 4-5 dollar per delivery range than the 2-3 dollar per delivery range I used to expect.

(not that you can tell that from TONIGHT because I had a miserable tip night, but that’s just luck of the draw sometimes)

[cowperviolet]

A Guide to Medieval Childhood

Our popular imaginings and depictions of medieval childhood tend to be somehow both scarce and bleak. It’s often supposed that childhood as a category didn’t really exist until the twentieth century, and that even the highborn children before that blessed time were regarded as basically inconvenient mini-adults until they were old enough to fight or marry, respectively.

The sources we have tend to favour the royal families and the high aristocracy with some wealthy merchants thrown in the mix, so, unfortunately, the information below would mostly be concerned with these groups - although I’m going to do my best to include some facts about the lives of children from lower social strata, too.

Infantia, or infancy

As Maria von Trapp used to sing in technicolor meadows, let’s start at the very beginning - it is, after all, a very good place to start.  

A mother rarely gave birth unattended - and I’m not talking about medical professionals; more often than not, these would be represented by a sole midwife. However, having a close friend or a relative with you as you are waiting for the baby to arrive was a practice well-established by the early fourteenth century even among royal women, whose births, marriages and deaths alike were always ruled by strict ceremony.

In their case, as in the case of all great families of the land, the practice also had a purely pragmatic side - additional companions mean additional witnesses who would be able to swear, should a scandal arise, that the little heir really arrived in the lawful way and had not been, say, smuggled into the bedroom in a pan. (In the case of the British royal family this precaution eventually led to the Home Secretary being obliged to attend all royal births, and was only done away with in 1930, when the late Princess Margaret was born).

Of course, for all the companionable support, the birth was not without its risks - for the child even more so than for the mother. It was for that reason that, uniquely, the Church allowed the midwives to baptize newborn - or unborn - babies in case they don’t survive by the time the sacrament in question could be performed properly by a priest.

If everything went well, it was the time to prepare the child for an ‘official’ baptism in the local church, which was going to not only save his soul for the world to come, but to help his standing in this one - after all, being baptized in a particular church meant being integrated into the larger community of the parish. The mother could rest - she was not required to attend the christening (or, rather, she couldn’t, as she would only be able to enter a place of worship again after being purified via a brief ‘churching’ ceremony on the fortieth day after giving birth). The child’s godparents would have been there to stand in her stead.

In fact, many contemporaries considered that a woman needs at least a month to properly recover after birth. Nor was it supposed to be a time of solitude - receiving female visitors was both allowed and encouraged.

Meanwhile, the child would be transferred into the care of a wet-nurse. Breastfeeding your baby yourself usually signified that you simply cannot afford wet-nurse of good character. The good character part of the job description concerned itself both with the purely physical characteristics - the wet-nurse had to be a little below thirty, to have white teeth, sweet breath, and a child of her own not above eight months of age, otherwise her milk could be considered stale - and the moral ones. It was believed that virtues and vices both could be transmitted through milk, and thus it was imperative to choose a wet-nurse both sensible and respectable.

Once hired, she rarely left the baby’s side - contemporary writers acknowledged that leaving an infant to cry is harmful for the child’s health, both mental and physical, and therefore a nurse should always be at hand with either her breast or a lullaby. In the highest households of the land, such as that of the royal children of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, one or two women were also employed as specifically the child’s rockers, tasked with, well, rocking their little charge to sleep - though not too quickly or too harshly, ‘for fear of making the milk float in [her] stomach’.

Every medieval baby, regardless of his family’s income, was swaddled from birth and until he was about eight or nine months of age: not only would he be kept warm, the parents judged, but it’s also going to help his limbs grow straight. A ‘breechcloth’ – essentially, a premodern nappy - was a piece of easily-washable linen, doubled over and then fastened into place with pins. Then a linen shirt would be gently placed over the infant’s body, after which the swaddling bands proper – sometimes three yards long – would come out. They were long, narrow pieces of – you guessed it - linen.

This swaddling part was universal for everyone; however, even here, before the child could partake in any fashion proper, the class divides came out to play. Babies from wealthier families could sport crimson mantles and bands decorated with gold embroidery (sometimes coordinated with that on their mothers’ outfits, like on the famous Cholmondeley Ladies painting at the top of this post).

Another – perhaps, more familiar to us – sphere of baby-related conspicuous consumption was the cradle. When, in 1494, the son of Beatrice d’Este and Ludovico Sforza was born in Milan, the proud father presented his guests a four-poster cradle covered in white satin, where the little heir now lay. When Lucrezia Borgia gave the d’Este family an heir, she splashed out on the cradle for the little Ercole even more. According to contemporary witnesses, the cradle was located under tent-like Moorish-style silk draperies done in the Este colors. It was on a platform encased in a great carved and gilded canopy, six feet long and five feet wide. The cradle proper was curtained in white satin, with the sleeping baby covered with cloth-of-gold.

The weaning tended to come, by our standards, rather late: some contemporary arguments recommended three years for boys and two years for girls (the former, after all, were expected to lead more active lives, and thus needed their mother’s nutritious milk more). Even then, hard food was to be introduced gradually – starting, for instance, with a chicken leg the child could chew on.

Once out of swaddling, the boys were dressed in smocks, and the girls in gowns – not that there was much visual difference between the two, mind. Regardless of their parents’ social standing, they all also wore tight linen caps that bore the charmingly hobbit-y name of biggins.

Naturally, the higher one stood upon the social scale, the more ornamental these gowns and smocks tended to be. The toddler Princess Elizabeth, who was the daughter of Henry VII and thus the aunt of her much more famous namesake, was dressed on separate occasions in a green velvet gown edged with purple tinsel and lined with black buckram, a dress of black velvet edged with crimson, or a kirtle of tawny damask and black satin. Admittedly, these were mostly for ceremonial occasions, and in the privacy of her yellow ochre-coloured chambers even the princess probably tended to wear something more comfortable. In winter, she was kept warm with furred robes fastened with silver buttons and caps trimmed with peacock feathers, and, regardless of the time of the year, indulged with sweets made from sugars flavoured with rose and violet, as well as with fruits from sunnier climes like pomegranates, quinces, and almonds.

Royal families were never noted for modesty of consumption in any era, but even the middling merchants of Florence were often criticized for spoiling their children with fine clothes. Fra Dominici wrote scathingly about parents who dress their children in ‘fancy garments, stamped shoes, short waist-coats, tight and fine-knit hose’. Neither did he approve of toys like “little wooden horses, attractive cymbals, imitation birds, [and] gilded drums,” recommending instead more virtuous playthings like “a little altar or two, … little vestments … little candles … [and] little bells,”, so that the children could pretend they were acolytes or priests. Three guesses no prizes as to which category ended up being the more popular one.

Some types of toys would have been surprisingly familiar to us – for example, doll furniture. In Germany one could find whole doll kitchens with dishes, meat plates, cutlery and furniture since the 1550s at the latest. Wealthier girls were also bought so-called fashion dolls that showcased, you guessed it, the latest fashions in the land.

Of course, poorer children had to make do with dolls stuffed with straw, and play with such props as animal knucklebones or wooden wheels.  However, it doesn’t mean that their lives were completely devoid of fun. Contemporary paintings, such as Peter Brueghel’ Children’s Games (1560), show children playing blind man’s bluff, ‘paper, scissors, stone’, roll hoops and rock barrels.

Pueritia, or childhood

A child’s education started with learning his (or, rarer, her) letters. A rather charming contemporary advice recommends the parents to do it by carving each letter on a piece of fruit, and reward the child with the fruit in question if the letter is correctly identified. These kinds of basics could be learned at home (though, if you decided to choose the method above, better do it specifically in the kitchen) – however, once the rudimentary parts were done with, the paths of learning could branch wildly.

The wealthiest families hired tutors for their children, and these posts, prestigious and coveted as they were, could sometimes become subjects of competition. For example, when the future Elizabeth I grew old enough for her first lessons, it was assumed that these are going to be provided by her aunt and godmother, Lady Troy. However, the less highborn, but more ambitious Katherine Champernowne had other ideas; Henry VIII ended up being impressed by reports of her as a woman of good education, and appointed her to be his daughter’s governess in 1536. She held that post until 1544, when her precocious charge overgrew the standard highborn lady’s curriculum that consisted of reading, embroidery, music, riding, falconry, and chess. After that, the scholar William Grindal became the princess’ tutor, introducing her to classical authors such as Plato.

Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek literature was not exclusively the preserve of the upper-class education. The cathedral school of St. Paul’s, for instance, taught children from middling walks of life - such as one Geoffrey Chaucer, the son of a wine merchant - and placed a great emphasis on the learning of Latin. The recitation of the Latin alphabet started with the sign of the cross and ended with ‘Amen’: quite a sign of respect, coming from a religious institution. The school’s library was full of books on logic, law and medicine, as well as such still-popular classical hits as Aesop’s Fables.

The boys (unlike in the more flexible world of private education, school pupils were invariably male) also owned some books of their own: contrary to a common misconception, even before the invention of printing press books were not necessarily objects of luxury. For example, when in 1337 John Cobbledick left twenty-nine books to Oriel College, each of them was priced at about 6 shillings. Two centuries later, when William Chatsworth sent his beloved wife Bess of Hardwick gifts during his sojourn in London, he included some learning materials for their children: three French grammars, a copy of Cosmografie de Levant, and psalms in French.

Charitable institutions could sometimes take care of the education of poorer children: for instance, in 1542, the Alderman William Dauntsey of London directed in his will that his executors should build a charity school of eight chambers (one of them for the schoolmaster) in West Lavington, Wiltshire.

Boys who could boast some musical talent had an unusual route for both education and promotion: chapel choirs. Many noblemen - and noblewomen such as Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII - engaged in cultural patronage, supporting at times dozens of choristers. Margaret herself had hired a composer, Robert Cooper, who was entrusted with finding gifted boys for her chapel from ‘London, Wynesore and in the west country'. She also made sure that, apart from musical education, the boys in her choir received tuition in Latin: in January 1506 the same Cooper was responsible for purchasing five 'gramer bokes ... for the chyldryn of the chapell', costing 4s 3d. Their education ensured that, after growing out of their roles in the choir, the boys would be able to continue academic studies. One Thomas Freston left Margaret’s chapel at the age of 13 to attend Winchester College, while the 1460 statute of Tattershall College specified provision for ‘four poor boys’ who were 'teachable in song and reading, to help the choristers, each of whom is to have commons and clothing and all else that the choristers do'.

Girls could be educated in convent schools; some, though by no means all, later chose to enter these nunneries as actual novices (they couldn’t legally make such a decision until the age of twelve, however, just as they couldn’t legally consent to marriage). Within the convent walls, as outside them, their comforts depended a lot on their parents’ standing - if their entry fee was generous enough, the girls, whether they came as pupils or little novices, could count on having a bedroom to themselves, a generous provision of wood to burn in their fireplace, and rare foodstuffs for their tables. When Edward I’s daughter Mary entered the convent of Amesbury as a novice in 1285, at unusual (and frankly illegal) age of seven, her lifelong allowance included an annual provision of twenty tuns of wine from the Bordeaux claret merchants and forty oaks as kindling for her fireplace.

Convents were supposed to foster the life of prayer and quiet contemplation, which was even harder to get used to for her teenage novices than it were for the secular boarders, who weren’t,  after all, handled as strictly. However, even in a nunnery, there was a certain softening of the rules when it came to young girls. For example, at the Feast of St Nicholas, the patron saint of children, the youngest novice was named the Girl Abbess and allowed to lead the community in dancing and revelry.

Adolescentia, or adolescence

This stage of life was thought to start at about fourteen and end in one’s early twenties. Highborn children of both sexes were usually sent to foster at the homes of friends or relatives of equal standing, both to finish their education and to establish useful connections. When the teenage Jan of Brabant was sent for foster at the English court, he devoted his years there to perfecting the arts of jousting and hunting with falcons, as well as the less official, but nonetheless useful skills of party planning, people-charming, and careful gambling. His future bride Margaret of England, meanwhile, was improving on her feminine arts of weaving and embroidery, often spending substantial sums on gold thread and silks of different colours.

The machinery of altar diplomacy was already in full swing by the time they reached that age, even though marriage proper - with the consummation implied - was usually still a few years in the future. The fate of Margaret Beaufort, who gave birth to her first husband’s son at age thirteen, was considered grotesque and frankly unsafe; after all, it’s no coincidence that she could have no children after. For instance, Thomas Aquinas cautioned in his Mirror for Princes that consummation should be delayed until the woman had reached the age of eighteen, and the man twenty-one.   

The complicated diplomatic and legal negotiation process behind such agreements was left to the heads of the families and their respective employees, without the involvement of the betrothed ones themselves. After all, it included such charming tasks as drawing a complete summary of all villages, farms, rents, forests, and windmills belonging to the future groom’s family which would be able to provide the income for the bride’s dower, or widow portion, in case she outlives him - a pretty significant possibility, considering.

Lower down the social scale, marriage arrangements were not so pressing a concern - urban artisans, male or female, often married only in their mid-twenties. When their children reached adolescence, they usually worried about arranging an apprenticeship for them rather than a betrothal.

A child could be apprenticed to a master who practiced one of the trades regulated by the guilds of the town. These included mercers, grocers, fishmongers, drapers, tailors and even artists. The training usually took seven years, during which the master in question was obliged not only to educate the apprentice, but also to feed and clothe them and generally treat them like a member of their family (which usually also meant having them help around the house). This way, the future artisans spent their adolescence in a situation of indenture and completed their training in their early twenties. The ultimate dream after that was becoming a master in their own right and acquiring one’s own workshop; but, like people in their early twenties everywhere, most were too broke for that, and ended up working as journeymen in their master’s workshop for some more years - or sometimes for the rest of their lives.

Although the most prestigious trades, such as those of mercers or goldsmiths, only admitted men, others - the tailors, the bakers, the printers, the bakers, sometimes the painters - were open to apprentices of both sexes. Female artisans often ended up marrying their colleagues from the same guilds, and then keeping workshop together, but sometimes they kept their trade and conducted their business separately.

At this point, gaining the trappings of trade and marriage, they progressed into the adulthood, and thus beyond the scope of this post.

Sources:

Devices and Desires: Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England by Kate Hubbard

Daughters of Chivalry by Katie Wilson-Lee

The Lives of Tudor Women by Elizabeth Norton

Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner

Kisby, Fiona. “A Mirror of Monarchy: Music and Musicians in the Household Chapel of the Lady Margaret Beaufort, Mother of Henry VII.” Early Music History, vol. 16, 1997, pp. 203–234

The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400–1700: Objects, Spaces, Domesticities by Erin J. Campbell et al.

[punkofsunshine]

The (Informal) Miniature Anarcho-Solarpunk Manifesto

The integration of communalism into a classless system away from the main caste-esque system of hierarchy around the world is very costly when viewed from a consumer lens, but is essential in the degradation of the overbearing hierarchy that the main populace is subjected to and thusly become numb to the pressures placed upon them from an early age, spiral into endlessly consuming for a sense of being in a world that doesn’t care if you’re alive, to them you’re just a replaceable cog in the profit machine. The goal of the communalist, socialist, solarpunk, etc. should not be to live in their own bubble, but to expand their influence exponentially through participation with the outside world, turn a commune into a city as it were. Less people in a place that has dictated control by the state and the consumers within, the less control the state and capital have over people. A migration of people increases quality of life and food consumption, luckily food growth can be optimized to accommodate many people when given according to need as opposed to given to whomever has the money to afford produce. One must also keep in mind, the debt accrued is now a community responsibility, so the members will do everything in their power to keep people functioning in the community, that must include people paying off debts. Who are you if you let a fellow worker suffer on their own? Who are you to let a human such as yourself be subjected to the violence of the state in its many forms? Pushing back against such oppression is why we ascribe to this ideology, so we can taste freedom and save the earth from ourselves.

No individual is solely responsible for the pollution and poverty. Multiple corporations and their figureheads are. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault, Qin Yinglin & family, Michael Bloomberg, The Koch family, Jim Simons, Alaian & Gerard Wertheimer, Mark Zuckerburg, Amancio Ortega, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, the Walton Family, Steve Ballmer, Carlos Slim Helu & family, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Francoise Bittencourt Meyers & family, Jack Ma, Ma Huateng, Mukesh Ambani, Mackenzie Scott, Beate Heister & Karl Albrecht Jr., David Thomson & family, Phil Knight & family, Lee Shau Kee, François Pinault & family. Sheldon Alelson, The Mars family, Elon Musk, Giovanni Ferrero, Michael Dell, Hui Ka Yan, Li Ka-Shing, He Xiangjian, Yang Huiyan & family, Joseph Safra, Dieter Schwarz, Vladimir Potanin, Tadashi Yanai & family, Vladamir Lisin, Ray Dalio, Takemitsu Takizaki, Leonid Mikhelson, etc. (Forbes) The list could go on, but I’m not about to list four-hundred people, the people have to change what the ruling class refuses to, hijacking corporate manufacturing and removing police of their power is essential. The police are targets due to the fact they protect corporate interests and stunt progressive growth, all of the people listed above refuse to let power be taken from them, there are too few people willing to make attempts to go after them because what would happen to their favourite source of consumption if that happened? What would happen to convenience? It would disappear, they don’t want to have to make things themselves, such is the first world’s entitlement. Doing without the convenience to save the environment should be a priority, things aren’t going to just get better on their own just because you installed solar panels and an eco-friendly water filtration system. The extent of the work that needs to be done is tremendous and must be organized efficiently and with regard to equivalency of power.

The world is in the process of ending due to all the turmoil we put it through, but the fact we’re more worried about comfort and convenience is very telling of what kind of culture western society has, instead of trying to fight those who destroy the environment and oppress us, we’re eager to mimic them. Why? Because they have and we have not. Such is the downfall of the consumerist mind. A majority of Americans think like consumers, not citizens, which is very telling because the anti-communist culture moted it be after the second world war. (Vox) There’s no telling where the zeitgeist is headed, but there’s political radicalization on both sides of the spectrum, sadly the other side of the spectrum is what we fought against, fascism, nazism, and authoritarianism. 2016 through 2020 were the worst years in terms of hate crimes committed on minority groups since the 60’s which is really saying something, neo-nazi groups sprung up and made themselves the focus, where there are fascists, there will always be anti-fascists or to be informal, antifa. I, the author am a background informant for the loose collective known as antifa, our job is simply to let people know where rallies are going down, we use pseudonyms and VPNs so we cannot be tracked. So why am I telling you this? Isn’t this supposed to be about what we can do to rebel against the systems that oppress us? Yes, and I’m getting there. There’s a reason I’m talking about fascism, and that is the fact fascism and capitalism are linked together.

Fascism/imperialism has been described as “capitalism in decay” by Vladimir Lenin due to the fact that neoliberalism is capitalism functioning as normal, communism post-capitalism, and fascism is capitalism going away slowly. It is an unjust and evil way of looking at the world, but once capitalists sense danger to their power, they fund fascism just so they can keep their power for longer. Anti-fascist action is also anti-capitalist action, for every nazi destroyed, we are one step closer to freedom. For every capitalist institution raided and demolished, we are one step closer to freedom. The city isn’t made of buildings that you can buy from, it’s made of the people who live there, so when the BLM protests occurred and stores were “looted” and burned, that was a form of praxis that hasn’t happened in years it was truly inspiring to see the people of Oregon (among other places) fight the police, fight back the alt-right, give capitalists the middle finger, create autonomous zones, and keep people from getting evicted during the pandemic. That is what communalism is partly about, supporting each other in the face of adversity no matter the cost of personal wellbeing, it’s the pinnacle of mutual aid.

Revolutionary action is one-hundred percent essential in securing future freedoms for not only generation Y, but generation Z and subsequent generations. As a member of generation Z, I feel fear, anger, and dread when it comes to climate change and the fact our generation will have to clean up the messes of the former generations when it comes to pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, unsustainable farming practices, soil health degradation, deforestation, the melting of polar habitats, natural disasters, etc. The weight of the world falls upon our shoulders and we realize this as a truth or we reject reality and follow in our parent’s footsteps and do nothing about it, it’s up to us, the most depressed and angry generation in the U.S.’s rather short history to right the wrongs made by former generations when most of us can’t even find motivation to get out of bed in the morning. I am writing this manifesto in my bed as I have been for the past week when I remember to write it down. It’s not enough to just write a theory however, put practice in it and it becomes more than just a talking point. It becomes a movement, how far you want to take it depends on you, but I do not condone violence against any of the people in the list above for strictly legal reasons. It is not absurd to think that we don’t have a snowball's chance in hell to stop the impending climate disaster that is about to fall onto us, because that assumption is correct. The best we can do is rebuild afterwards then hope and pray the next generation continues our work to restore the planet and maybe move outside our solar system, god willing.

I’ve tried writing a short solarpunk novel, I realized that the fiction may be important for outreach, but I was trying to add personal political theory to a narrative that’s supposed to be about a character’s internal conflicts as opposed to what I’m doing now, informal political theory, which is why I’m addressing you, the reader. I’ve read and listened to political theory in the past, and it’s incredibly dry and hard to pay attention to, don’t get me wrong, it’s important when you’re a part of various movements such as eco-socialism, communalist-anarchism, and anarcho-solarpunk, but I think it’s more important to connect with a reader or listener to make sure they understand the message before saying “do some praxis.” That is the goal here, not to be the leftist, humane version Ayne Rand, but instead instill in people a hope for the future that learns to do without mass manufacturing, that learns to make their own food sustainably, that learns that we all have a right to food, clean water, housing, medical treatment, and clean air without having to pay for all of those things. I may not be a part of the bottom percentage of people, but if I were my point would still stand strong, the notion that you have to work to get basic necessities is immoral on many levels, but in “free market” economies that’s the standard and I was as blind to it as most people before I found solarpunk, it started out by liking the aesthetic, but I started thinking about what we do to our planet and realized this isn’t just a bunch of pretty pictures, this is an idea for a utopian future entrenched in equality, sustainability, environmentalism, and anti-corpocracy.

Many people say that socialism has never worked, they give reasoning such as “Income inequality expands under socialism.” Which is just capitalist projection, during the 2020 pandemic, which is still ongoing at the time or writing, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. “. . . in the months since the virus reached the United States, many of the nation’s wealthiest citizens have actually profited handsomely. Over a roughly seven-month period starting in mid-March – a week after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency – America’s 614 billionaires grew their net worth by a collective $931 billion.” (USA Today) The middle class, which skyrocketed post-feudalism/post-monarchy has been getting erased by the ruling class, which is the goal of capitalism. Capitalism is rooted in the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie and was created to have control over the masses without having a direct economic power structure overhead. Things may have gotten better for the growing middle class and the poor marginally, then the industrial revolution kicked in and everything went downhill from there. Pollution began with burning coal, the car came along, now it’s coal and oil, and so on until today where we have access to truly world-altering technologies, but what’s holding us back are the people who continue to exploit non-renewable resources for profit and solely profit. The betterment of mankind isn’t on the mind of the capitalist, they can avoid global catastrophe, they aren’t the peasants, they’re the monarchs. Why do you think billionaires fund space travel and cryogenics research? It’s not to better the rest of the world, it’s to get the hell out of dodge after global warming takes its toll and they have no more workers willing to fill their pockets by letting their labor be exploited. As I said above, it’s up to my generation to fix the mess they made. Maybe we’ll learn a lesson, or maybe we’ll die in the process, either way the situation is dire and action needs to be taken.

Who will take action? Well, if you made it this far into the manifesto without falling asleep or getting angry at the things I have to say, it’s you, me, and everyone else who cares, is tired of selling their soul, and wants freedom. Freedom, not via the dollar, but via being human. It matters not your ethnicity, skin colour, religion (or lack thereof), sexuality, gender, or anything else; you matter, the world matters, and it takes all of us to save it.

-A manifesto by Aeron Fae Greenwood

[lostmoonbunny]

Greetings from a Panini World

Yes, I did call this a "panini". I'm hesitant to use the word "pandemic" as I feel many of us have a knee jerk reaction to hide from everything once hearing or seeing that word. However that's the current stat of events. The year? 2021 Where I am located its very much so post quarantine and society has attempted to "return to normal" but its impossible. Between the anti- maskers, anti-vaxxers, and everything else it truly is impossible. "What do you mean?" you ask, well allow me to take you on a journey of a human that has gone through this "history in the making" and share what its been like since January 2020 to September 2021 from the eyes of someone that lived it. -I will preface this with saying, there will be gaps, I have trouble with object permanence, concept of time, and I have memory issues due to past concussions so bear with me as we stumble through the memories of my experiences.

So here we go... Let's travel back to January 2020.

2020..Ahhh the big year of "Clear vision".. HA! No, not today. What I remember was being concerned about this horrible virus but didn't think it would make its way to where I lived.. ( I would be unsurprisingly corrected shortly after this.) I worked, had my birthday, and it was quickly February. The virus was quickly spreading and making its way downtown walking fast faces past.. oops..sorry I got sidetracked, it was making its way down throughout the nation. We celebrated my partner's birthday, and soon after the month was over. February always flies by. March...ahh March, this is where everything started changing for me. Many states were shutting down around us fairly quickly too. ( I have opinions about how the US should've shut down sooner, but we're not here for politics...but yes it should've happened sooner.) My partner, younger brother and I made a last minute trip to the next state for a day trip. Which was fun don't get me wrong but the places we went to shut down for the state's quarantine the next day. My state would follow barely a week later. I was furloughed. That..that was an experience. All of us received the same message as it was a group message. It stated that we were all effectively unemployed ( so we could apply for benefits if we chose to) and that if and when we reopen that they hoped we could come back. I immediately messaged my boss and the boss that messaged us all and double checked learning that I was on the "short list" for rehires. That made me fee a bit better but I was still sad. My partner was considered "an Essential worker" so they worked through the entire lockdown. I swear Animal Crossing New Horizons is one of the only things that got me through that.. from this all the days blended together till June. Not don't get me wrong, plenty of things happened on a personal growth side that was beneficial like I started going to therapy, got even closer to my cousin that lives on the west coast, I played with my cats and dogs more, I caught up on sleep, all sorts of things but the way it had to happen sucked. Also in this time period, my favorite uncle contracts the virus and is put in the ICU on a ventilator. I don't remember how long he was in there but he made it. He is now healthy and survived the virus. So lets fast forward to June. My place of work reopened under specific guidelines. Now I don't know if I've ever mentioned this but I live in the southeast. The southeast, in summer is AWFUL. Its hot, its humid, and then if it DOES rain that humidity just goes up and it gets worse. To give you an idea while the temperature might say its 84 degrees F but the real feel might be 95F. I don't know why they don't just say 95F but that's how it is the southeast... So imagine if you will mid June, being reopened with special rules, masks required for everyone 5 years old and older, and no buildings but restrooms open to the public. The amount of rude, hateful, uncaring people almost made me lose my complete faith in humanity, and its not very high to begin with. Also for context, I work in retail. I feel that says enough there. These rules extend till the end of the year and into part of 2021. While all of this is happening the US is having their presidential elections and everyone has crawled out of the woodwork that you had hoped would stay there. At this point I'm hoping for the best because we really need a paradigm shift in society. We need to truly need to change as a society and in many way, catch up to the rest of the world. I finally gave in a got to tiktok and realize that it is very much a time devourer. I've realized that I feel as if the term "Cassflux" fits how I feel about my gender best, and fully accepted my journey on the path of being a witch.

Lets move in to October, October I ( and my partner) travel to Texas (cautiously) for my cousin's socially distant wedding and our anniversary. That was amazing and the slight escape from reality was truly needed. On our way back we made a stop in NOLA and it was a fun visit, but I realized my baby witch self hadn't veiled or warded myself nearly enough and it got all of "spidey senses" all out of wack. knowing now what I should've done, I do want to go back. The rest of the year went by both incredibly slow and yet in a flash. The US elected a new president, I was working as hard a possible to avoid the virus as much as possible and my partner had gotten a new job with a different company that was making them more happy. So this brings us to 2021. This is the year that I feel that I am truly coming into my own despite living in the middle of a global Panda Express. January brings my turning a landmark age and celebrating it with a new hair style, new outlook on life, progress made in therapy, more self acceptance, and just overall more happiness. The world is still the same, better, but also worse. The vaccine is being produced, distributed, and made accessible. February brings another birthday with my partner's birthday. March rolls around and we jokingly celebrate our work's closing a year prior and then continue to work. The vaccine is made available to retail and food workers so I go and get the first round of the "Dolly Parton" vaccine with my co workers. (If you were wondering its Moderna) We go and receive the second dose later at the correct time. April and May kind of blend together for me because that the ramp up for the busy season at work. June & July are busy but everything is moving forwards. I finally take a step more into the current era of technology and upgrade my phone and computer. ( After several years of going back and forth of not wanting current gen tech or not, because that stuff be expensive!) I reconnect with an old friend and we have a much healthier friendship.

August....hecking August.. We are short staffed at work, busy as heck! My partner is also hecking busy by being called in for almost every problem. The world is deffo changing. The US is in a state of nah nah a boo boo with vaccinating vs not, virus outbreaks having an uptick, universities starting back, Texas deciding that the government gets a say in a woman's reproductive rights... sorry I'll try to not get political. My ( like many others) using tiktok as a means of escape from this reality.. I'm so beyond mentally exhausted by everything that I just want to be somewhere that I can breathe a bit more easy... Its deffo not the southeastern US. September: I. am. exhausted. Working a bunch. Dealing with people doubting the virus, the usual Karens and Richards, counting down my days to vacation. My partner is beyond exhaustion. They've worked more in the past six weeks that they have in two years. The 20th year of 9/11 comes and goes. Not to sound like a country song, but remembering where I was at the moment the planes hit is something that has stuck with me...despite my concussions. I was in my English class and its was between classes and they had the tvs on. So many parents were coming and calling their kids out the school got to the point they weren't going to let kids leave.. ( if the parents complained enough they did.. I was a poorer kid in a more affluent school) My parents weren't going to take me out of school so I finished the day out in a state of confusion, not understanding the gravitas of what was going on, and not understanding was the emotions I was feeling watching the crashes were. I don't claim to even comprehend the emotions of this date to people who lost loved ones in the crashes, or in the oncoming days of the country going to war, I just know how it felt as a child to see something so major happening. I feel its like the kids now living through this panic at the disco. [[If you read this and you lost someone due to either of these horrific events please know that I in no way am invalidating or belittling your feelings or experiences. I merely am trying to describe all of how I feel throughout 2020- roughly current day 2021 and these are the things I was thinking and feeling on this particular day.]]

The days start to blend again as I attempt to countdown the days till my short vacation. Once that starts I get to finally relax as does my partner. The amount of sleep my partner has gotten is incredible and they deserve it dang it! This brings us to today, The last day of September 2021. This are changing at work and I'm not wholly sure of how I feel but I know it will be an interesting discussion for me to have with my therapist coming up. That's all I've got for now.. Hopefully I'll pop back in sooner to give more perspective on what its like living through all of this chaos. Just keep moving forward.

[mysaldate]

if you're up for it, could you please write Kamanue headcanons? general or past life, fluff or angst or comfort, i don't really mind, whatever strikes your fancy most~

Ok so writing this for the second time since Tumblr decided it would be oh-so-funny to delete the whole thing smh…

That’s a broad scale so I’ll try to fit in as much as I can but I can’t promise much since we didn’t exactly see much of him. I’ll try to overanalyse whatever we DID get tho!

General Kamanue headcanons

As I already said in the previous request (the personality one), he hasn’t been among the Lower Moons for long when Muzan decided to dismantle them. He might not even be Kyogai’s direct successor based on how quickly Muzan claims they’re usually killed off and replaced. And also like I already mentioned, he’s not exactly too keen on changes so such a huge one probably left him confused as to why and how it happened.

He strikes me as a bit less conflict-loving than some other demons. If he crossed onto another demon’s territory, he’d probably first try to intimidate them with his rank before even considering fighting them. And all of that happens only if the other demon finds him of their own initiative, he won’t go looking for them on his own.

If he was given the chance to get comfortable in his new position, I feel like he might try really hard to fulfill Muzan’s expectations. He may not agree with everything Muzan says and find some of his demands ridiculously difficult but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t try to fulfill them anyway. Note that he complains that it’s easy for Muzan to want them not to be scared but doesn’t think anything about it being impossible or completely beyond their reach. He’s just not strong enough for it yet but he will be one day (or not).

Connected with the previous headcanon, if he was given the chance to meet with Douma, and if Douma shared the knowledge of girls being more nutritious with him, they would probably start making up most of his diet. After all, they have many more advantages than just that – they taste better, they have softer flesh and they usually tend to have less physical strength than guys so they put up less of a fight.

He carries some amount of respect to those who have been demons for longer than him. That is not to say he won’t talk back if he can get away with it but in general, he’s more likely to watch his mouth at least a little when around older demons, regardless of whether or not are they more powerful than him.

Naturally, Muzan terrifies him. But he also looks up to him a lot and has deep respect to him. Again, not only because of his power but also his years of wisdom. Of course though, the impressive extend of Muzan’s demonic abilities amazes him to no end as well. If only there wasn’t the constant death threat whenever you get near him…

He also isn’t the type to pursue or give chase to the Demon Slayer Corps’ members who choose to flee rather than to fight him. So long as they leave him alone, he’s pretty cool with them walking around as they please as well. It’s really kind of a mystery why Muzan picked him for the position, even to him.

A fluff (or crack?) headcanon I have for him is that he once met Murata and they almost fought. And by that I mean, they got into position while each of them tried to find their way out at the same time. Murata was already tired from his last mission, Kamanue was feshly appointed Lower Moon, still kind of shaken after having his eyeball engraved and wanted nothing more than to rest up a bit as well. They ended up sitting down together and complaining about their scary superiors and then the dawn broke them off. Neither of them ever spoke of it again of course.

Kamanue backstory headcanons

Kamanue was born into a middle class family, though on the poorer side still. My main basis for this claim is the fact that, aside from Rui, he is the only one of the Lower Moons who walks barefoot. And a lot of each demon’s backstory can usually be seen in their appearance (such as Douma’s cult clothing, Akaza’s open clothes revealing his muscles and tattooes, Kokushibo’s kimono and sword etc.).

He had a lot of siblings and age-wise was somewhere in the middle. Due to this, he often felt overlooked or ignored. His eldest brother/sister was the one their parents relied on and his younger siblings always got more attention (or was it just his feeling that they did?) but his relationship with his family was overall normal.

This is where his snarky side comes from. It was sort of a coping mechanism for him, being mildly rude to his siblings to make up for the attention he felt he wasn’t getting. He didn’t mean it in a bad way though and they knew it so nobody minded it too much. He sometimes got a little loose-lipped in front of people outside of his family though which got him the reputation of a rude child.

Something happened. Maybe a heavy rain washed away their crops, maybe his father and older brother/s had to go fight for the landlord, maybe a wild animal killed his father or ate their food. Either way, Kamanue was either forced to or decided to go look for a job to help his family at least a little.

Looking at his design again and googling a bit (that’s why Tumblr crashed on me the first time), his outfit carries certain amount of similarity to 19th/early 20th century nurse outfits (specifically the white button-up, belt and shape of his pants) and it’s also just a little similar to Yushiro’s so I believe he became the servant/assistant of a local doctor.

Naturally, he needed to tone his snarkiness down in there, both towards his employer and the customers. I would imagine he wasn’t treated too fairly, seeing as he came from a rather poor family. But since he couldn’t say anything, he let the bitterness stay inside of him.

It was after one of his siblings died because the doctor refused to treat since they didn’t have enough money that Kamanue finally exploded. All the pent-up anger was finally let loose and he ended up killing the doctor. That’s where Muzan comes in, picking him up and turning him into a demon.

His haori is stitched together from two pieces. The main part, white, is from his job there. The yellow sleeves and pockets are makeshift from the haori of his dead sibling (y’know, the common theme with KNY).

I originally planned to expand more on his life as a demon before he became one of the Moons but I realized I didn’t really have anything much to say there so hope this will be enough!

[seasonofthegeek]

No Other Choice, Part 2

For @miraculouspaon and @cheeseeatingtrashmonster <3

Parts 1, 2:

They walked towards the bus in silence and rode to the storage unit in a similar fashion. Felix was making a small pile in the middle of the room as Nino leaned against the open door when he finally spoke.

“I told Adrien it was you.”

Nino straightened and felt his cheeks warm. “Oh?”

“He’s the only other person who knows and I swore him to secrecy.” Felix paused in placing a picture frame of him and his brother in a box. “He said he was really happy for me, for us. I think he actually meant it. He cares for you a lot so somehow it felt like it meant more.”

“Adrien usually means what he says,” Nino agreed, an unfamiliar nervous sensation beginning in his gut. “It makes being his friend easy.”

Felix half-turned towards Nino and hesitantly met his eyes. “Do you really think we can make this work?”

Nino thought about what his mother had once told him about meeting his father for the first time. She said she was nervous and upset and an anxious mess and then he looked at her as if for the first time someone was really seeing her for the person she was, and everything fell into place. Maybe some soulmates weren’t completely accidental in assignment. Maybe…

Nino took in Felix’s anxious expression and flipped it in what he hoped was a calm one on his own face. “Yeah, I really do.”

As if his answer was too much to handle, Felix returned his attention to his work. “I don’t understand how you can be so casual about this.”

“I don’t feel very casual right now. I did just ask a relative stranger to join me in my very small living space.”

“I suppose that’s true. I don’t think I’m a stranger though. You’ve known me as long as you’ve known Adrien.”

Nino shifted away from the doorway and moved to one of the stacks of boxes. “Yeah, but Adrien and I have hung out for years and learned stuff about each other. You and I never had that kind of relationship.” He caught the tension radiating off the other man and quickly continued. “But this will give us time to get to know each other.”

“It’s not too late to simply sign the papers,” Felix reminded him without turning around.

“Would it help you if I went through some of these boxes or do you need to do them all on your own?” Nino ignored his comment and moved to a box labeled “kitchen”. “Since we’ll be living above a restaurant and I already get all the secondhand stuff, I don’t think you’ll need anything from here unless there’s something you really want.”

“There’s nothing of importance to me, no. I’m not very good with cooking, so you’re aware.”

“You’re in luck then because I am.” Nino took his answer as permission to keep moving along the labels. “I have bedding, of course, and one extra set of sheets, but if you like yours more, we can bring them with us and change them out.”

Felix half-turned in his crouched position. “The sheets are practically new and a high thread count. They’re king sized.”

“Your bedding it is then. Uh, I only have the one bed. It’s a queen so…I mean, there is a couch but it’s kind of old and I’m not sure…” Nino struggled to get his point across and kept his back to Felix. He knew he was blushing but couldn’t seem to stop. He hadn’t fully considered what bringing Felix into his small apartment meant.

“How much closet space am I going to have?”

Nino winced but was grateful not to have to concentrate on the sleeping situation for the moment. “There isn’t a closet really, but I use a makeshift wardrobe thing I bought for a decent price at a thrift store. We could probably find another one similar to it. I can make some room in mine until we find one though.”

“I see.”

“I told you it wasn’t much.”

Felix finally looked back at Nino. “Sorry. I do appreciate this gesture since you’re being so stubborn about signing the papers.”

“Somehow you’re the homeless one and it still sounds like you’re the one doing me a favor by waiting on nulling our soulmate agreement.”

“An agreement is something the people involved actually agree on,” Felix corrected. “This is a decree that was made without input from either of us.”

“Yeah, yeah. Do you need any of these boxes of books?”

“Yes.”

“Which ones?” When he didn’t receive an answer, Nino turned back to look at Felix and was surprised to see a slightly panicked look in his eyes. “All of them?” he prodded.

“If there’s room…”

“There isn’t.”

“Ah.”

His resolve crumbled. “But we can take them with us a few at a time and fit them where we can.”

Felix ducked his head shyly. “Thank you. That’s very…nice.”

“I’m a nice guy.”

“Hmmm.” ___

Felix walked around the small apartment and wasn’t sure how to feel. A third of the area was filled with neatly stacked shelves and boxes of supplies for the restaurant below. A messy bed was pushed against one wall with an ancient nightstand and lamp by one side. The couch looked as if its springs would stab anyone brave enough to sit on it and the kitchenette was small and dated. There was a desk shoved against the one window and held a laptop and various bits of speakers and recording equipment. It was obvious what any of Nino’s extra money went towards.

They’d been stopped on their last trip up the stairs by a large man Felix assumed was Nino’s father. They traded introductions and he saw the pained look in the man’s eyes when Nino explained that Felix was his soulmate. He’d probably wished for better for his son but hadn’t been able to pay for it, while Gabriel had used his money to do the opposite. Once they’d finished bringing the boxes in, Nino disappeared back down the stairs to talk to his parents. Felix was relieved he wasn’t asked to join them.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and it sank only slightly under his weight. Perhaps he was thinking about this all wrong. Nino was taking him in because he was a good person after all and surely he would give in and sign the papers once he saw Felix up and on his feet. Maybe he could find a decent job and start looking for his own place soon after. Nino wouldn’t feel guilted into asking him to stay around and he would sign the papers and they’d both be better off.

He was startled from his thoughts when the apartment door opened, and Nino appeared with a casserole dish. “I hope you’re hungry,” he announced in greeting. “Mom made too much of the special today so she told me to go ahead and bring this up for our dinner.”

“That’s very kind.”

“You say that now because you haven’t eaten this same dish every Thursday for your entire life,” Nino laughed. He busied himself with pulling down plates and gathering utensils. “It’s good but can be a little monotonous.”

“But at least it’s food.”

“At least that,” Nino agreed. He gestured to the tiny two-seater table Felix had missed on his first look around and Felix graciously took one of the rickety chairs. “I did warn you the place isn’t much.” He spooned out a large section of casserole onto a plate and offered it to his guest.

“It’s your own space though. That’s really nice.”

Nino looked relieved. “Yeah, it is. I love my family, but I needed this, especially since my mom is pregnant again.”

“Really? Aren’t there three of you already?”

“Yeah. It, uh, it wasn’t exactly planned.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

An awkward silence fell over the table and Felix cleared his throat. “Are your parents in trouble?”

“They don’t know yet. Mom refused an abortion when the county rep came to visit after her doctor’s appointment. She was able to claim religious right for me and my younger brother but I think that’s not going to fly anymore. They were already only supposed to have my older brother and my dad was forced to have a vasectomy after Chris came along, but apparently it didn’t take completely.”

“This is such a fucked-up world,” Felix muttered and stabbed the casserole with his fork. “The government shouldn’t be able to make people have surgeries and determine how big families can be and control who you end up with.”

“It’s supposed to be for the better,” Nino answered quietly.

“Do you believe it is?”

He took a long moment to consider his answer. “No.”

“So you agree with me.”  

“That doesn’t mean I’m signing the papers right now.”

“But I bet you’re a little tempted to.”

Nino didn’t respond and the rest of the dinner was spent in awkward silence. Nino cleared the table without a word and moved onto the sink to take care of the dishes. Unsure of how to react, Felix went to the one box of books he’d been able to bring with him and dragged it over to the couch. He warily sat down and found it worn in and comfortable and not at all what he was expecting. He tried to force himself to concentrate on the lawbook he’d been studying more recently but his focus kept straying as Nino began to hum while he moved around the kitchen.

Felix found himself watching the other man’s back while he washed their dishes. His humming was low and melodic and once he was finished at the sink, he wiped his hands and forearms and grabbed his messenger bag from the place by the door where he’d dropped it at arrival. Apparently, he was ignoring Felix but Felix found it didn’t bother him. It gave him a chance to watch Nino, to learn more about him.

Nino went to the cluttered desk and moved a few things around so he could pull out a tablet. He woke his computer up and after a moment, a thumping but soft tune flowed out of the speakers. Nino sat back in his chair until it creaked and then began to read on his tablet. Felix assumed he was doing homework for one of his classes, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. His eyes kept flicking from his book to the profile view he had of Nino and he found his mind wandering.

Here was a poorer family who loved each other, and they could be in trouble for adding another member. A little over a century ago, people were free to marry or not and bear as many or as few children as they pleased. And while there were parents who had too many children they didn’t care for, that wasn’t the majority, was it? How had things changed in such a short time period? Why had they? He could find no event that prompted it.

And while Felix preferred the company of other men if he had to be around anyone else at all, that wouldn’t have changed if his father had paid for his soulmate to be a woman. Gabriel wasn’t even aware of his son’s preferences. How many more people were out there just like him, forced into roles they didn’t want and weren’t prepared for? He was the older mate and was meant to be caring for Nino and here he was, sitting on his soulmate’s couch with his things in boxes because he had nothing to his name but his possessions and a small trust fund that would be all but drained in a few months.

It wasn’t fair and he wasn’t the only one hurting from it, he couldn’t be.

“I’ve been selfish.”

Nino’s chair squeaked as he turned to face Felix. “What?”

Felix lifted the law book. “I’ve been so worried about my situation but I’m not the only one dealing with this.”

“I’m still not following, man.”

“Your family shouldn’t be in trouble and you and I shouldn’t be forced together and there have to be hundreds, no, thousands, of others just like us.”

“You’re going to be some kind of revolutionary hero now, is that it?”

The wind left Felix’s sails and he sagged slightly. “It’s a thought.”

“There are protestors all the time. They usually go to jail.”

“But we could figure out a better way, a more efficient way, to make things change.”

Nino eyed him warily. “I think maybe we should both get some sleep. It’s been a long day.” He stood and stretched. “The bathroom is that door over there if you need it. I’m going to get changed.” He didn’t wait for a response as he went over to the bed and lifted a pair of lounge pants out of the mass of twisted sheets.

Feeling out of his element, Felix dropped his book to the couch and escaped to the bathroom. He wasted time snooping in the cabinets and noted how clean the shower was despite its obvious age. When he finally thought the coast was clear, he crept out of the bathroom and used the dim light from the oven hood to go back to the couch. Once he’d gotten his phone to use as a flashlight, he turned out the hood light and halted between the couch and the bed. Nino was on one side with the covers pulled up to his middle. It would’ve been easy enough to slide in on the other side, but Felix felt his stomach bubble with anxiety and he went to the couch and curled up since he was too tall to sleep on it any other way.

Perhaps tomorrow he could look for another place to stay and spend the rest of the year trying to perfect Nino’s signature for a forgery. This wasn’t going to work.

Buy me a cherry coke?

[possiblypeachy]

tea & schemes. (4)

―; summary: Jacob visits Florence for the first time. Florence is left with far too many emotions.

―; pairing: jacob frye x ofc

―; word count: 4.9k (its a big boy, babey)

―; warnings: light swearing. anxiety-esque feelings towards the end (Florence gets overwhelmed ): )

―; A/N: i love Florence muchly at this point and, trust me, i already want to write cute little fluffy smoochy things but there’s a bit of time before that still. society has a lot to say about how a woman should be at this time and it really has begun to wear on Florrie, as demonstrated at the end of this chapter.

don’t worry though!!! she’s just babie and will work past it soon. the heart wants what the heart wants, after all.

―; part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

― ❊ ―

Freddy and Florence had spent the next few days having tense conversations between their self-isolation to their own bedrooms. There was a sense of regret that hung in the air but neither siblings seemed to want to speak of it. Florence, nerves too high to even stay in the same room as him for a while and worried that he would further draw attention to her mortal flaws, kept herself to reading. Freddy busied himself with paperwork and patrols until the late evening. That is until Lissie, fed up with their pride, sat them both down and commanded that they talk to one another, lest the cook quit and leave them to fend for themselves.

Oh, if she had a shilling for every time she’d had to do this since working for the Abberline’s, she’d have enough money to finally buy that necklace she’d always ogled on the way to the market. It was the way of siblings, she supposed: they always had to prove they were superior to the other in one way or another.

They had reconciled after a few moments of silence then them both leaning forward and mumbling an “I’m sorry” at the same time. Frederick admitted that perhaps his leash on her was too tight. Florence said that she understood that he was just trying to protect her. Her brother sighed tiredly, thankful that this was all over, and joked that at least she didn’t have to write about their bickering now in her letter to their parents. When she laughed, everyone could feel a weight lift off of the household.

All was well with the Abberline’s once again.

That afternoon, after Freddy had left for work with a smile on his face for the first time in days, Florence had retired to her room, finally content enough with life that she could write a sufficient letter to her parents. Edward and Hannah Abberline were kind parents and especially lenient with their children, much to the dismay of other mothers and fathers of their rank. Their only condition for Florence to move into Freddie’s house in London was that she wrote regularly and that she at least try to find a nice man to marry. She was more than happy to uphold those terms.

The brunette was lucky that, when three knocks came to her bedroom window, her dip pen was away from the paper; with the way that she jolted in her seat, it surely would’ve ruined the page she had been writing on. A string of meowing began from her bed, her cat obviously peeved at the disruption to his sleep. When her gaze finally dragged to the window, half-expecting to see an insistent bird, she met eyes with Jacob, who’s grin told her that he found her surprise amusing.

Florence stood and slid the window up, letting Jacob haul himself inside. “The window is usually open; you didn’t have to knock.”

He dusted himself off, readjusting his coat. Before he could speak, the tabby cat to his left honked at him. Shocked, Jacob looked about before meeting the stare of perhaps the most tired-looking (and sounding) feline he’d ever seen. The cat yelled at him again and he gave Florence a look.

Florence scooped the cat up into her arms, much to its displeasure. “Don’t worry about Duncan. He likes to tell people off for disturbing him.”

Jacob chuckled. “He’s called Duncan?” He reached a hand out and Duncan sniffed it cautiously.

“An urchin gave him to me a year or so ago. The poor child said that she wanted him to live a nice life with a nice lady. She said his name was Duncan.” Florence looked fondly down at the cat, who seemed to have now forgiven Jacob and was gently purring. When Jacob drew away, Duncan meowed and clawed his way up to balance on his owner’s shoulder, sniffing the air. Florence looked inconvenienced but decided to allow it, continuing to speak with Jacob. “What brings you here?”

“Adventure, dear Flor.” He had begun to peruse through her belongings, eyes scanning the letter she had been writing and the cat figurine on her desk. “You, me, the great city of London: are you up for it?”

Florence tutted, leaning to let Duncan hop down onto the bed from her shoulder, and shuffled Jacob away from her desk. “That’s not particularly specific. You could be planning on taking me somewhere nefarious like a…” She paused to think, during which Jacob was practically challenging her to say something terrible, “... brothel in Whitechapel.”

Jacob grimaced but huffed out a laugh. “Nothing of the sort. I don’t even know what that is, Miss Abberline.”

Florence nodded mockingly. “Of course, Jacob.”

“Anyway, before I let you poison my mind with thoughts of brothels,” He gave her a pointed look, reaching down to scratch behind Duncan’s ear, and Florence grinned, “I thought that I could introduce you to a slice of my world.”

Florence cooed, clapping her hands together, though her movements dripped of sarcasm. “Ooh! Are we going to derail a train together?”

His smile said ‘you cheeky mare’ but he continued before she had the chance to berate him further. “No, I was going to take you to a newly liberated stronghold. Evie and I run a gang, you know? Well, it’s more me than Evie but--”

“Where?”

Jacob thought for a moment, like he’d forgotten its location entirely, before breaking out into a terrible smile. “Whitechapel.”

Florence sighed but couldn’t hide the glint of excitement burning in her eyes. Gangs? A stronghold? Goodness, it sounded like a piece from a gritty book or perhaps a play. How delightful!

“I’ll come along but if I get pickpocketed you’re getting my money back, Jacob.”

“Certainly, dear lady.” He made a sweeping gesture to her bedroom door. “Shall we?”

--

Florence hadn’t been expecting to venture into Whitechapel again for a good few months. Catching her brother and meeting the twins there a few days prior had been enough for her. Now, she never looked down upon the poorer; before her father had opened that little shop of his and gained a seat on the town’s council, their family of seven all squished into two rooms and lived off of scrimping. Rather, she felt terribly bad for wandering around perhaps the most impoverished area of London in full health with a warm meal being cooked for her at home. Of course, she didn’t feel sorry for the thugs on the streets that ruffed up those who already had nothing and simply saw them as even more of a reason to visit as little as possible.

When Jacob began to lead her down a dingy alleyway, he seemed unfazed by the drunk man passed out on the floor and… was that his vomit beside him? Florence unconsciously began to walk closer to Jacob, a hand coming up to adjust her hat-- almost hoping that, if she moved it in a certain way, the shadow cast over her fast would hide it. “Are you certain we’re going the right way? Or, are you just leading me down here to test my resolve?”

He chuckled, giving a brief nod to a tall, bald man in a green jacket. “Why can’t it be both?” He stopped walking to let her go in front of him, gesturing for her to do exactly that with a sweep of his hand.

Florence hummed, dissatisfied, but walked ahead of him anyway. She could feel that he was close behind, almost like he was making it painfully obvious that the well-dressed, middle-class lady was with him and not available to be robbed today. It brought her a small degree of comfort, though she couldn’t help but think of her brother’s disapproving glare.

“Oh.” He muttered from behind her. She would’ve turned to look but she decided against it, not wanting to risk accidentally bumping into anyone strung about the narrow pathway. “I almost forgot. Here.” Jacob’s arm appeared at her side, palm upturned and holding the bird figurine from the market. Much to his delight, Florence made what sounded like a pleased little coo and took the sculpture from him, inspecting it with a collector’s eyes. “I went back to the market the other day and bought it; I thought you deserved a gift after the work you did.”

It was a sweet gesture and Florence couldn’t deny the happiness felt in her chest or the smile that immediately cracked her anxious demeanour. “That’s… quite kind of you, Jacob.” She ran a thumb over the intricately carved feathers then, in an effort to keep her newfound treasure safe, she pulled it closer to her body without much thought.

Jacob, however, grinned at this, seeing the amusing resemblance between her and a creature that hoards-- like a magpie or a squirrel. “You collect them, don’t you?”

Florence huffed out a laugh, allowing herself a brief glance over her shoulder to meet his eyes. “Yes, I do. They’re always beautifully crafted and they make a lovely addition to a mantlepiece or desk.” She paused for a moment, pondering. Then, she sighed. “I also collect coins, though they are a lot harder to come by and… I have a book in my desk drawer filled with stamps.”

“Stamps?” He repeated, intrigued. Florence could hear amusement in his tone.

“Stamps.” She confirmed. Wanting anything but having to assess whether or not Jacob thought less of her for this, her sight stayed firmly on the path ahead.

With a simple “I’ll keep an eye out, then” Florence felt altogether better about the situation. It wasn’t often that people simply left her be with her ridiculous collecting habits. She simply enjoyed the… satisfaction that came with the task; she was not a madwoman.

Jacob was becoming more likeable by the minute.

More and more people clad in green began to appear, all regarding Jacob with considerable amounts of respect and admiration. A few made comments about her, telling him that this was “no place to bring a bird like that”, to which, from the corner of her eyes, she could see him throw up two fingers at them. A half-smile tugged at her lips, though she made no audible observations.

They finally got to a small square behind four buildings. A few urchins ran about the place but most were men and women, dressed in green and chatting with one another or having what seemed to be playful brawls. A curious gaze dragged across the surroundings, slowly piecing the puzzle together. Flags of the same shade of green flew and, if she looked closely enough, she noticed that a symbol had been painted onto them: a bird holding a chess piece.

A rook holding a knight.

“You and Miss Frye are the ones that rallied the Clinkers?” She spun around to look at him, face etched with awe. Florence gestured wildly to their surroundings. “I expected a little gathering of rogues and crooks not… this. From what I’ve heard, your new Rooks have been taking down Blighter territory left and right.” Jacob’s eyes were wide but he said nothing, unsure if she was excited to be here or more frightened. A few seconds passed, then Florence broke out into a grin, pointing a finger at him. “I’m impressed.”

The tightness in his shoulders left and he visibly relaxed, mirroring her expression. “Oh, it’s nothing, really. Not compared to what I usually do.”

A nearby gang member-- a rook-- booed at him, though it was through a laugh. The man to her side shook his head, breathing out a chuckle through his nose. It was nice to see that there was such a strong sense of camaraderie between them all, despite them being up against huge and (until now) unbeaten opposition. Florence supposed that being united under two people so outwardly courageous and rallying for change that it would make any group be reinstilled with a sense of hope.

She tutted at him, chiding him for trying to take all the glory, but the smile that twisted at her lips told that she didn’t take him too seriously. “Don’t be a prick, Jacob; I didn’t venture here for you to take all the fame from your men.” He feigned offence, holding a hand to his chest. Clearly having just arrived at a stop on her train of thought, Florence tilted her head slightly, “Speaking of which, why did you bring me here? If you hope to enlist me, I’m afraid my days are all taken up with reading and looking for a husband-- you know, the usual.” She gave him a tight-lipped smile and a sarcastic dip of her head.

Jacob kissed his teeth. “A shame, really. Could’ve used a woman with your skill in…” he searched for something to fill the gap. Florence stared at him, a challenging light dancing in her eyes, “... making men feel small.”

She threw her head back, a glimpse of her signature, ridiculous laugh gracing the world. One of her fingers pointed at him and she nodded, “Not bad, Frye. Not bad. But,” Her giggling quietened down and she threw her arms up, as if to gesture to the square and its people, “besides making me feel all-powerful, why exactly have you decided to bring me here?”

“Well,” he began, moving toward a small alcove. There were a few sacks held up on sticks, littered with holes and slices. A crate beside them had a few practice weapons, though she was almost certain that, if she were to be hit over the head with that… wooden stick it would hurt. A lot. “I thought that, what with the mishap--” His eyes flickered to the fading bruise on her cheek, now a sickly yellow colour, and she grimaced, “-- the last time we were together, I might introduce you to extra forms of protection.” Jacob pulled a throwing knife so swiftly from his person that Florence had no idea where it actually came from. He turned it in his hand, fingers carefully holding the bladed end while the grip pointed toward her. “Protection besides a good kick to the bollocks, that is.”

Florence huffed out a laugh and took the knife from him, weighing it cautiously in her hand. “Freddy would go insane if he saw me holding this.”

“Through fear or anger?”

“I’d take a stab at both.” There was a twinkle in her eyes, begging him to pick up on her pun.

He had indeed and gave a “ha, ha, ha” in response, to which Florence shot him an over-exaggerated frown.

Jacob moved to stand beside her, his position forcing her to turn and face the mounted sacks. He pulled another knife out and her gaze flickered towards it. Florence seemed appropriately wary of the weapon and, without knowing, had begun to lean away from Jacob while he held it. His lips curled into a discreet smile upon noticing this but he said nothing; it’s better that she feels in control and comfortable when trying things like this.

“The key to throwing one of this is the power in the wrist.” He rotated the knife around, letting the bladed end almost rest near his wrist. His thumb and first two fingers were at the grip, supporting it, though she could see how loose the hold was-- presumably to make it easier to throw the knife. Jacob looked to her and gestured with his head for her to copy his position. Florence pursed her lips, unsure if she was willing to risk accidentally cutting herself and facing her brother’s wrath, but, after a few moments of quiet deliberation, she did it anyway; she didn’t come all this way just to waste her and Jacob’s time.

He gave her a smile so reassuring and kind that something skipped or bloomed or… something in Florence’s chest and she had to look away.

No. We won’t be having any of that, Florence Abberline.

“Then, once you’ve got a good hold on it, you use the flick of your wrist to--” Jacob threw the knife and, to her amazement, it landed in the centre of the sack, “-- throw it. It can be difficult to get the power right but, once you’re as good as me, you won’t have to think much.”

Florence gave him a harsh side glance. “You continue to gloat even when I’m holding a knife? You’re a foolish, foolish man, Jacob Frye.”

He gave her a sly grin. “It appears you just make me lose all sense, dear Flor.”

Their eyes stayed locked for just a second too long and, in an attempt to distract them both, she threw the knife. Its trajectory was wobbly and the side hit the sack rather than the sharp end but, all in all, he had to admit that it wasn’t too bad; he’d seen some of the Rook initiates throw them worse than that.

Jacob’s lips curled into one of those ‘not bad’ frowns, brows darting skywards. Florence glowered at the fallen knife, never one to enjoy a loss. “Trying to make sense of one of these is ridiculous.” She sighed, pointing to the weapon in the dirt. “Can I not just use one of those as a… normal weapon?”

“It is a normal weapon.”

“Shut up-- you know what I mean.”

As he went to collect the knife, he gave a chuckle. “I suppose you can but only as a last resort; it’s not made for close-range combat.”

Florence huffed. “Well,” A light grew in her eyes, gaze flickering to Jacob. When he turned to face her again, he could tell that a thought was brewing; she had that same look when they first met, “if I were to ever fight someone further away from me, I would much prefer to use a gun.” She glanced down to his hips-- at the straps and holster that held his pistol.

Jacob shook his head, clicking his fingers to draw her attention. “My eyes are up here.”

She grinned, the dimple a deep crease in her cheek. There came a playful wink and a “What can I say? I like a man with who can handle his pistol well”. Innuendo dripped from her tone and he threw his head back to laugh.

“Are you only using me for my gun, dear Flor?” Despite his words, he still pulled the weapon from its holster, checking the cylinder to see how many bullets were inside. He removed all but one.

“If I am, you’re making it terribly easy.” A hand was on her hip when he handed the gun over to her, an impish smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “No resistance, Jacob? You seem like the type to treasure his weaponry.” Florence raised a brow, eyes raking over the pistol in her hand.

He shrugged as she held it up toward the sacks, moving to lean beside a nearby wall to stay clear of… whatever might happen when she shot it. “When a pretty lady offers to play with your gun,” Jacob scrunched his face up, pitch heightening, “you don’t tend to turn her down.”

Florence cackled, leaning over herself to allow her shoulders to shake for a few moments. “You’re terrible.”

“I do try.” He grinned. Then, one of his hands came out to gesture to the training area. “Right. Are you gonna shoot that or n-- pass it back to me.”

“What? Why--”

Jacob took a few urgent steps forward, leaning toward her with his palm open, “Pass it back--” She heard him quietly curse under his breath and stand up straight-- almost too abruptly. He was facing the opposite direction to her now and, as she turned to see who was there, he uttered a devastating: “Hello, Evie.”

Impending doom had appeared in the form of Evie Frye.

Florence could tell that Jacob was caught in between a rock and a hard place with how his brain appeared to have dripped out of both of his ears and he was stood beside her, completely absent. Evie looked between the both of them. Florence hoped that her hat obscured some measure of her face but she also knew that Evie wasn’t an idiot.

“Miss Abberline,” Fuck, “I didn’t expect to see you here of all places. Don’t tell me that my brother dragged you here.” Evie already knew what was happening and that made it triply worse when Florence decided that the best thing to do in the situation was to lie.

Pure desperation coursing through her veins, she grabbed the rook closest to her-- a skinny man in his mid-twenties-- and hooked her arm around his, shuffling herself so they looked like a couple. He didn’t look particularly convincing. “I was actually here to visit…” Florence looked into the bloke’s eyes, her lips drawn into a thin line and her expression panicked. He said nothing and she quietly kissed her teeth, “... Paul. He’s enchanting and I can barely keep myself away--”

“My name is Terrence.”

Beside her, Jacob’s hand flew up to his forehead and he turned away from the pair of them, breathing out a heavy sigh. Evie still stared at Florence, who had frozen in the face of her badly made lie falling apart.

In one last attempt to redeem herself, Florence slapped Paul’s-- Terrence’s-- arm in the same way a wife would when she has to laugh at her husband’s joke. “Don’t be so silly, my love.” She gave Evie a smile, to which the assassin returned but it seemed impatient and altogether unconvinced-- like she was simply trying to speed up her breaking point.

“Good old Paul likes to mess about to try to get Miss Abberline all flustered. He says that her blush is beautiful, isn’t that right Paul?” Jacob joined the fight again, though there was a dimness to his hazel eyes that told Florence that he already knew his sister had won.

Paul frowned. “I just said my name is Terrence. And, why is this woman holding onto my arm?” Florence and Jacob cursed in unison. A smile twisted at the gangly man’s lips, however, when he finally gave Florence a proper look over. “Actually, I wouldn’t mind having a go on a posh bird. You got any plans for tonight, love?”

Disgusted, Florence yanked herself away from him and crossed her arms below her chest. Jacob grimaced beside her and, with a flick of his hand, gestured for Terrence to leave. The man in question went into a sulk and began to kick dirt up as he disappeared around the corner.

“Are you finished?” Evie glanced between them. The pair said and did nothing, which Evie took as a ‘yes’. She pointed a finger to Jacob. “I need to speak with you about something important so you should--”

“Is it about the gang war, Miss Evie?” One of the rooks piped up from a few feet away, having just strolled into the middle of the chaos-filled alcove.

Jacob perked up at Florence’s side. “The what?”

Before Evie could ask the rook to be quiet, they had already started to speak again, “Kaylock has agreed to a fight over Whitechapel. Whoever wins owns the borough.”

He grinned, practically vibrating with excitement. “That sounds perfect.” Hazel eyes flickered between Florence and his sister. Both women seemed to anticipate his departure before it even began. “Sorry ladies but I have a borough to become king of.” He looked to the rook, who gestured loosely in the fight’s direction. Jacob nodded and was off on his way, musing “King Jacob: sounds good, doesn’t it?” as he passed the girls by, pinching the gun back from Florence.

Florence, finding the whole thing quite amusing, began to laugh quietly, while Evie at her left simply gave a sigh. Blue eyes dragged over to the smaller woman and she raised a brow, gesturing to the direction he left in. “One of the many reasons why anyone should just stay at home if Jacob invites them out.”

“I think his passion is inspiring.”

“Not when you’ve lived with it your whole life.” Evie gave her a solemn look.

Florence breathed out a chuckle, shaking her head. “You and Freddy would get along well.”

Evie, all things considered, didn’t regard Miss Abberline in a negative light; her apparent desire for adventure and little escapades through London didn’t work to destabilise something greater-- like the reckless decisions Jacob had the tendency to make. She only worried that having her brother form some kind of hopeless attachment to Florence would hinder any progress that he might make and keep him perpetually senseless.

A softer look gracing her features now, Evie gestured for Florence to walk with her. “I think, now that my brother has abandoned you, we should get you home, Miss Abberline. Will Sergeant Abberline be back by the time you arrive?”

Florence pondered then her answer came by way of an inconvenienced frown. “If he’s on his break, maybe. Knowing my luck, he will be.”

They finally reached the main street and Evie seemed to search for a carriage. Briefly, she turned to regard Florence, an eyebrow raised. “I heard that Sergeant Abberline didn’t seem particularly happy when you returned home last Tuesday. Has it passed?”

“This morning, actually.” Florence confirmed. “Lissie made us reconcile; she threatened to leave if not.”

“Your sister?” Evie asked, nodding her head toward a carriage parked on the other side of the road.

Florence followed after her, allowing a light laugh. “No. If anything, she’s more like an over-enthusiastic aunt. Lissie is our live-in cook. She tends to help me like a handmaid, though.”

For the first time, Florence heard Evie’s genuine laugh. Her grin formed in the same way that Jacob’s did but wasn’t given out as freely as he tended to. Reaching the carriage, she gave Florence a hand to help her up onto it before clambering into the driver’s seat herself. “Well, this Lissie sounds like a good woman.”

“Ah,” Florence smiled, huffing out a giggle, “only sometimes. I think she enjoyed when I moved in with Freddy; it gave her someone more lively to gossip with.”

Evie hummed, amused, then silence fell over them both for a small while, leaving Florence to gaze out at the changing boroughs of London and let her thoughts run loose. No matter what her mind tried to focus on-- the book she had been reading, the play her and Freddy were due to attend at the end of the week, the dress she so desperately wanted to buy-- all lines seemed to lead back to Jacob and the (albeit limited) actions they’d had throughout the past few days. It was ridiculous to have suddenly become fixated on this one man. He knew nothing about her and she knew just as little about him. Yet, the thought of him persisted.

Was it him? Or the adventure that came from him?

She began to chew on the inside of her lip, thumbs playing with one another in her lap.

Liking and love were not for Florence. She had tried love once and declared that that would be her last time. A life without that burden was liberating, she’d always told herself. It’s why she despises the idea of getting married and having someone always able to hold onto her reins. It was a useless endeavour and would not serve her in any way that she would like. It would suffocate and surround her. That’s what she’ll always tell herself.

She liked the adventure he caused.

“Miss Abberline?” Evie called over her shoulder and Florence straightened up again but her head was still spinning. The hum she gave would’ve been a voice break. “I think…” Evie gave a sigh, “I think it would be in everyone’s best interests if you don’t indulge my brother. He’s-- he needs to focus on our plans in London. We are working for the better of the people and being close to him-- us-- could put you in a delicate position.”

Of course.

"It's obvious that he enjoys the time spent with you and already counts you among one of his friends but I just..." Evie sucked a breath in through her teeth, leading the horses neatly around a corner, "He hasn't yet realised the gravity of our situation. He just needs to focus."

Of course. Of course. Of course.

It was really beginning to grate on Florence: the fact that everyone wanted her to leave something or another alone. Freddy wants her to stop her business in helping him. Her parents want her to stop messing around and find a husband. Now, Miss Frye wants her to stop interfering with herself and Jacob’s plans. It was only ever ‘stop’ and never a push-- an encouragement to ‘go’.

Frustration rioted in her blood. Her hands were shaking. They held each other tighter.

Maybe they were right. Perhaps it would be easier for everyone if she stopped doing and simply let herself be. Freddy only wanted her to be safe and sane. Evie was saying this to protect her and keep London’s best future on the cards. It wasn’t selfish of them to ask; it was selfish of her to disregard.

It was considerate, the part of her mind that wasn’t fire and brimstone thought-- soothed.

“That sounds fine, Miss Frye.”

It’s for the best, the growing calm of her thoughts said in an effort to pacify.

“You have a fair reason for asking.”

All will be well and fine, her mind-- now having ceased its chattering-- assured.

“I’ll let him down gently.”

[bells-of-black-sunday]

The seraphic fold master post

Updtaed as of: 6/16/2020

So, the old master post isn’t good at all it’s mostly just Luci, Az, Gabriel, Michael, and Mary facts as opposed to how the fold works and functions, the caste system, social dynamics, etc. I will also be providing and updated list of all the angels that I write that live there along with the date it was updated.

Quick introduction to angels as a species and the fold itself, angels and demons are the same thing, no fall mechanic required. With how the seraphic fold and Burning planes are two neighboring realms that nearly completely overlap, the Seraphic fold is more like a gated community that rejects the idea of being as “low and grimy” as their “savage” cousins. They’re the living embodiment of “you can’t sit with us”.

The burning planes was created and is written by my friend so I will not be making a post on it ehrwh

I. The caste system and social dynamics

The caste system is simple, but the class divides are quite literal with huge guarded walls and gates separating each area. Angelic society is separated into spheres with a ruling class above everyone else. It goes as follows:

The council

First sphere

Second Sphere

Third sphere

The council are the ruling class of angelic society, but they don’t have one ruler. The seraphic fold is infinitely spreading making room for those that are born or reincarnated within’ it’s pristine walls. Each member of the council governs a small portion of the fold making general laws vary quite greatly aside from the constants that were decided when the fold was first manifested, but for the most part the fold is governed by strict social expectations.

1. Murder is prohibited unless you’re challenging the throne, failure to comply will result in execution 

and 

2. The murder and assault of death angels will result in either permanent exile or execution 

The council make their own laws as they see fit for their society, but despite there been quite literally billions of council members only a handful are well known and govern the most populated areas of the fold.  Azrael, Michael, Mary, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Sealtiel, Jehudiel, Barachiel, Samuel, and formerly Lucifer. Lucifer was and still is the most prominent council member in the folds history, he conquered nearly half of the fold before being exiled shortly after the storming of heaven. 

His section of the fold was broken up and given to the members of his council that didn’t take his side during the event, but rulers aren’t elected nor are they born into power. The thrones are constantly being fought over by those looking to get ahead in the first sphere, those that rule have proven themselves as both powerful in battle and worthy of respect.

The first sphere is home to wealthy politicians, the royal guard, merchants, soul collectors, high class chefs, gladiators and the like. It’s high class society is the strictest out of any of the spheres as everyone’s looking for a way to get rid of competition. Political assassins and body guards are a huge portion of the jobs offered in the back alleys, not to mention the dark underbelly of the “servant” trade where many angels are kidnapped from the third sphere to be “house keeps” and “servants” for the upper class. The first sphere is so full of pride and prejudice to the point where if you’re any bit sympathetic towards those below you or interact below you, you will face harsh scrutiny and possible assault. 

But it’s not all bad, the first class has the highest quality of living out of any of the spheres with running water, lighting, an abundance of food, etc. Not to mention the access to various delicacy’s made by soul collectors. Soul collectors are angels that collect the souls of the dead and turn them into fine alcohols, candies, tapestries, silks, cigars, weapons, and jewelry. Just like you’ll see in other sphere’s, there’s a wealth gradient. The further you get to the second sphere the poorer and worse the sphere becomes.

The second sphere is middle to low class, it carries over traits from the first and third sphere, but this is generally where you’re “peasant” jobs are. A lot of them are farmers or handy workers, but there are tailors and cooks here. Food shortages and poverty gets worse and worse as you get back towards the third sphere. These are generally average people who don’t have any extreme magical ability and their ability to collect and see souls isn’t the greatest. They’re just average people trying to make ends meet, it is possible to pull out of this sphere and into the first, but it takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s even easier to fall into the third.

The third sphere is where all those that are exiled and rejected by society end up. There is little possibility of pulling yourself out of here and generally laws don’t apply to those that society has forgotten and/or rejected leaving this section to be guarded by militias. Life in the third sphere is a lot more relaxed and free spirited ruled by rebellion and rejecting social standards despite the huge starvation problem, life has thrived here. But as time passes social unrest grows within’ this sphere making the sign of Lucifer and the removal of wings a sign of rebelling the society they’re oppressed and forgotten by.

Death angels are a huge part of angelic society, they’re angels that carry out Death’s will and thus are considered the highest of angel society and specially protected under Angelic law and thus are always either a part of the council or living within’ the first sphere.

Fashion is a huge part of angelic society it reveals wealth, social status, and job position, thus I will give a quick run down of it.

The council:  Long silks, armor, tight fitting clothing all are common place. The face is usually covered by a mask or hood, wings have been enlarged to give an imposing silhouette. Intimidation is key here as many council members face opponents rather regularly. Black and gold is extremely common place within’ fashion here. Many council members adorn their horns in jewelry. Generally fashions rules are much looser here than most of the other spheres. The lack of wings is an extreme taboo along with the lack of horns.

The first sphere:  Extremely extravagant clothing that often takes appearance over functionality. Masks are common place here along with long feather’s and more than one pair of wings placement varies to being framing the head, middle of the back, shoulder blades, etc. A lot of teal and gold is used in clothing within’ this sphere, the usage of black is reserved strictly for mourning. Jewelry is a must here to flaunt your wealth, wealth is often displayed and flaunted by how much gold and jewels a person wears as they’re quite expensive. The lack of wings is an extreme taboo along with lack of jewelry, clothing, silks, and masks.

The third sphere: The third sphere is often categorized by rebellion and rejecting the social standards of the fold. The removal of wings, horns, hooves, etc. in an effort to look more human is extremely common place, but they never look fully human. Any angels that still have their wings are social outcasts within’ this sphere as they desperately try to fit in with their peers, but they’re also more likely to leave the sphere. Clothing in the third sphere is extremely varied, others might wear only white, other’s black, or vibrant colors, but one thing that’s generally not used is gold. Very rarely is gold used and it’s usually stolen.  Wings, anything that would flaunt wealth is an extreme taboo within’ this sphere.

II. Housing and general aesthetic of the fold

The fold consists of whites, teals, blacks and golds to contrast the bright red veins angels get when angered. Angelic housing is basically like ancient Greek houses, but made out of smooth white marble and extravagant details galore, you get up into mansions as you get into the more wealthy sphere. A lot more gold and black marble or carpet is used in these palaces while common housing tends to either get white marble, wood flooring, or straw. Wealthy people tend to be able to live alone, while as you get further down it’s not uncommon to see multiple families sharing one home or one area of land. Housing isn’t hard to come by, but since the fold is a series of floating islands, it tends to be compact, reaching upward instead of outward.

III. Links + misc facts

Extra links to more info:

Dimensional clusters

Why don’t angels want to look human?

Angel diet kinda

Angels as parents

Angel gentialia (nsfw)

How angels change their body

Gender and pronouns usage

High priests and Apollyon

Nomadic ground dwelling angels

Angels don’t refer to who they’re married to as their spouse, they call them their mate and polyamory is not at all uncommon especially in wealthier sections of the fold where you might want to pool your money together. Divorce also isn’t seen as taboo or uncommon

Angels do reproduce sexually, yes, but since angels can shape aspects of their appearance however they want, gender isn’t seen as anything that’s worth talking about, everyone can have children if they choose to so even what’s in your pants doesn’t matter

Societal pressure tends to keep angels having the same appearance in everything but the third sphere, lack of facial features aside from the occasional shown eyes, horns, hooves, claws, and tails. 

Every angel is born with one set of wings, but while angels can choose to grow more, once they’re torn from their sockets the tissues too scarred to grown another pair leaving them permanently grounded.

Angels reach sexual maturity at one hundred years of age, but they have been known to leave home earlier than that.

Angels are immortal in the sense that they don’t die from old age, but disease, famine, etc. can all kill them

People do reincarnate in the fold and it’s basically a toss of the dice where they’ll end up when they do

IIII. Angel master list 

aka angels I write on this blog or if people make angels and want to be added to the list I’ll add them and link their blog/whatever

last updated 6/16/2020

Abaddon

Azrael

Lucifer

Mary

Michael

Rose

Apollyon

Lilith

[arcticdementor]

When I saw him, he was outside Payne Whitney. Nothing about the tall, gray façade suggests it is the university gym, unless there is a new trend of contractors housing athletics departments in Gothic cathedrals. You wouldn’t guess by looking at the frosted glass panes and arches that the third floor hosts the world’s largest suspended indoor swimming pool. It is a work of art, like the rest of Yale’s buildings.

Marcus was smoking by a bench, his face jaundiced from three packs that day. This is atypical for Yale students—most abstain from smoking. There was no reason for him to smoke so much, just as there was no reason for me to ride around campus on a blue Razor scooter. But Yale students tend to have such quirks. His suit-jacket was dusty and smelled of sweat—he didn’t mind lifting weights in a dress shirt and trousers if that meant more time to read Nietzsche alone at the bar.

When I hugged him, he felt skeletal. I asked if he had eaten today. He assured me that his earthly requirements were limited—no need for anything other than alcohol and cigarettes. “I can buy you a sandwich.” He refused. I insisted. A nice one. Bacon and egg. Or steak and cheese. I was testy now. “GHeav is right there. I’ll be back in six minutes.”

He turned his face towards me, warm with friendliness—and with one sentence, he changed our relationship forever.

“You know I’m rich, right?”

“What?”

“You know I have a trust fund, right? I can buy my own sandwich if I wanted it.”

This is the moment when after three years of friendship, Marcus sat down and told me his life story. His cottages in Norway. Sneaking into the family study. Learning about the cost of hardwoods and hearing his boorish, critical father sulk in 5-star hotel rooms.

Marcus did not act this way out of anxiety, grief, stress, or because he had nobody to tell him his habits will kill him. He lived as a starving writer not out of necessity, but for the aesthetic. Out of some desire to imitate the Bohemian 19th century writers. Out of artistry. Style. Intentional choice.

…

This is a story about an institution and an elite that have lost themselves.

…

Over the past decade, elite colleges have been staging grounds for what Matthew Yglesias has termed the Great Awokening. Dozens of scandals have illustrated a stifling new ideological orthodoxy that is trickling down into the rest of society through HR departments, corporations, churches, foundations, and activist organizations. The nation is becoming polarized and its parts disconnected. The right is evil, and the left is stupid. Or is it the other way around?

The campus “free speech” debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about “diversity” and “inclusion.” The real problems run much deeper. The real problems start with Marcus and me, and the masks we wear for each other.

…

Based on statistics from the class of 2013, approximately 2% of students hailed from the lowest income quintile, while 69% came from the top 20%. How did those poor students fare after graduation? Around 2% of students at Yale move from the bottom to the top quintile. In other words, nearly all of them. You show up poor, and you leave rich. Going to an Ivy League school may be the fastest way to join the upper class.

But this low number of 2% surprised me because when I was at Yale, everybody kept talking about how broke they were.

…

Poor people—actually poor people—don’t talk this way. They tend to stay under the radar because they don’t know the rules of the game. But I bought it—at least when I was a freshman. If they were constantly announcing how broke they were, my assumption was that they must have even less money than I do.

This turned out to be wrong. The reality was that they were invariably from the upper-middle and upper classes. I know this because they eventually told me, like Marcus did. But there were tells. These students didn’t act the way my friends and I did growing up. They didn’t know how much pens or flights or cars were supposed to cost. They couldn’t tell when a restaurant was a good deal.

Pretending to be poor is a lot easier than pretending to be rich—just because there are so many different ways to be poor. But there are still small quirks you have to get right. Social class doesn’t just influence how you walk and talk; it influences how you interact with others. The stereotype is that poor people are improper—but sometimes it is the opposite. They try to do things as they think they are meant to be done. Spending a hundred hours building bat wings for a Halloween costume. Renting a limo for their child’s prom.

But lying about anything is tricky—you risk being found out—so what were these people trying to accomplish by acting broke? And this raises the broader question: why pretend to be of a social class you are not?

…

What about the regular rich? Not the children of billionaires, but the children of millionaires. The common impulse is to emulate the people one or two levels above you—so they might also act poorer than they are. But whereas the super-rich learned purposeful discretion from their parents at weekly dinner table meetings, the regular rich did not. They learned it through mimicry—and with varying degrees of success. The less sophisticated copycats end up brazenly proclaiming that they are “broke” and “upper-middle class.”

For some people, this isn’t an act; they actually believe this. After all, they do seem poor when compared to the hyper-rich. They can’t afford spontaneous Spring Break trips to private Bali islands. They see their prep-school classmates’ Facebook photos and realize that they are one, or maybe two, pegs down from that, and so they use the term “upper-middle class” without really knowing what this term refers to. They have no idea how the actual upper-middle class, the middle class, or the poor really live. Those students never went to their prep school, so for all intents and purposes, they do not exist. Like Krasnoyarsk, Siberia—we know it exists. We can find it on a map. But we don’t need to concern ourselves with it. Often, this is what the real poor are to rich people—they are a theoretical construct that exist somewhere else.

…

In another instance, I was privately discussing with a professor the pros and cons of a Food Stamp reform proposal. After some analysis, I commented on my own experience with the program. His response was complete shock. “You don’t really mean you were on welfare. You just mean you were supported by your parents, right?”

In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to convey the truth.

And this is how I ended up offering a sandwich to a man with hundreds of millions in a foreign bank account.

…

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with haphazard and sometimes warped class signaling. But if you put on a façade for long enough, you end up forgetting that it is a façade. The rich and powerful actually start believing that they are neither of those things. They actually start believing that there is not much difference in status and resources between themselves and the upper-middle class, the middle class—and eventually, between themselves and the actual poor. They forget that they have certain privileges and duties that others do not. They forget that the inside joke was just a joke all along.

…

When these kids grow up, they end up at conferences where everybody lifts their champagne glasses to speeches about how we all need to “tear down the Man!” How we need to usurp conventional power structures.

You hear about these events. They sound good. It’s important to think about how to improve the world. But when you look around at the men and women in their suits and dresses, with their happy, hopeful expressions, you notice that these are the exact same people with the power—they are the Man supposedly causing all those problems that they are giving feel-good speeches about. They are the kids from Harvard-Westlake who never realized they were themselves the elite. They are the people with power who fail to comprehend the meaning of that power. They are abdicating responsibility, and they don’t even know it.

…

There is another reason why people might pretend to be poor. This reason is much more serious than fitting in or avoiding hitmen. The rich and powerful are expected to take responsibility for things, and blamed when they go wrong.

“Check your privilege.” Just about every college student has heard this phrase since 2013. What it means is evasive. But like most memes that strike a chord with people—there is some point to it. The rich have privileges. They therefore also have responsibilities. The responsibilities are not always so fun.

…

Would you want to be the strongest man in the village right at the moment when you failed to use that strength properly and the village is dying and rivals are out for blood? Or would you rather be the average person, eating the normal amount of food, without being hated?

But that was just a thought experiment. Those are people in crises—in a hunter-gatherer village at war. We live in America. Certainly things are different during a stable, prosperous period, in a technologically advanced society. Would you want to be exceptional then?

Not necessarily. The elite are faced with certain hard burdens.

The elite are expected—by everyone else, and by each other—to use their power to make sure society works properly. That is, they are expected to rule benevolently. The reason they are expected to do this is that if they don’t, nobody else can or will. The middle class and the poor do not have the powers and privileges that the rich and elite do, and cannot afford the necessary personal risks. But without active correction towards health and order, society fails.

…

In times of political uncertainty, when things are not going well, elites face more scrutiny, and more internal pressure to find people to blame—whether rightly, or as scapegoats. It becomes a bigger liability to be openly elite.

Further, such times are themselves caused by political dysfunction among the elite, when elite institutions forget how to listen to reason (or have decided not to) and forget how to coordinate towards benevolent rule.

At elite conferences, they wonder how to regain trust, or otherwise deal with the rising atmosphere of populist discontent. They acknowledge that something is deeply wrong. But they dare not lay the blame at their own feet, caused by their own overreaches and dysfunction. Anyone who did would immediately be under suspicion. No longer one of us, but one of them. So, those who might otherwise lead the difficult but necessary elite self-critique instead keep their mouths shut, or they say the wrong thing without ideological, psychological, and social preparation for the consequences and get cast out. Only the true believers incapable of self-critique, the incompetent, and the cynics, remain as voices in the public forum. They talk in circles, never quite able to correct course and come to any new conclusions, except the need to double down on current ideological practices.

…

They say that the recent scandals at Yale had to do with racial and social justice. I don’t think that’s what it was really about. When looking at one or two scandals, it’s easy to buy the story that it is just students organizing and using their rights of free speech and assembly to protest what they see as injustices perpetrated by the university. But when looking at all of the scandals together, another narrative starts to emerge.

And that narrative is much closer to this: members of the ruling class are not sure what to do with themselves—and they are not even sure they want to rule.

…

When people think of universities, they think of their local state school, or else Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. And when they think about Yale, it is often when they are reading about a president, a Supreme Court justice, or the editor of The New Yorker. That’s because Yale graduates play no small part in running the world. It is the school the elite want to send their kids to. It is the school the lower classes assume their kids will never go to.

…

What happens when a school with this position is embarrassed about its role as an international trendsetter? What if instead of doing the hard work to set the tone for responsible rule, it abdicates that responsibility?

…

But the appearance of bottom-up protest politics is always a bit of a false narrative.  It would be one thing if the students were polled and a majority said they wanted the name changed, or some other process was used. At least the university could say that it was making decisions based on some objective democratic process, and wasn’t just being pushed around. But this is not what happened. No polls were taken. There was no authoritative process. The school said no for a few months, then caved. If the school were actually confident in its position to resist, it could have easily pushed back on the protests. Instead, it folded on demands from a small number of students willing to make noise. Either the university administrators are spectacularly spineless, or the protests just provided a convenient impetus and excuse to do something they already wanted. We can look at several more incidents and notice a similar trend.

…

What do all of these events have in common? Some had student support. Some did not. Some started as public outrage taken to the street. Some were completely internal. What they had in common was an administration and student body coordinated around an ideology that continually mutated to ensure moral entrepreneurship and a continued supply of purges, as new forms of human behavior or commonplace descriptors became off-limits. Some of this energy was genuine, some cynical.

These were not kids protesting the Vietnam war, or graduate students mobilizing for better pay and medical care. Nobody would have had a gun shoved into their arms and sent across the world if Yale had not fired the professors. Nobody would have lost money if they did not change “Master.” In fact—Yale lost money on these changes in the form of alumni donations and administrative time. Meetings, committees, redone paperwork, and brand new “head of college” plaques. These changes were neither meant to save lives, nor to save money.

But what was the point of it all?

…

Thousands of hours of human effort and labor. And for what? What was it for?

If you ask supporters, they will tell you the cost does not matter so much, because this is about creating an ideal world. Of course the professor should be fired—how dare she stand against the minority student organizations? Of course it’s okay that the Yelp reviews were published—she should never have written them. Of course names should be changed if they hint at or honor the wrong ideology. What does preserving history matter if history is racist? The university is handling things according to its proper ideals of empathy and inclusion.

In short, their point was that this was all to help poor people. Immigrants. People whose parents are from distant, impoverished lands. People of color. Changing “Master,” firing the dean, and firing professors was all for this.

Except this did so little to actually help any of these people that this could not possibly have been the main motivation.

None of this was actually to their benefit, except for the few activists willing to invest time and energy into the game. It is not easy to stay up-to-date with the new, ever-more complex rules about what you are allowed to say to qualify as the bare minimum of sociable and sane. It is cognitively and socially demanding. I had to not just study psychology and computer science, but I had to stay up-to-date with the latest PhD-level critical theory just to have conversations.

…

If words like “Master” are deemed offensive based on questionable linguistic or historical standards, then this means other words and phrases can become offensive at a moment’s notice. Under these rules, only people in the upper ranks who receive constant updates can learn what is acceptable. Everybody else will be left behind.

The people best positioned for this are professors at elite universities. They are ingrained in the culture that makes up these social rules. They get weekly or even daily updates, but even they cannot keep up.

…

A cynical observer might conclude that this is all just revolution as usual; a small clique of agitators seizing more and more power, and purging their enemies by virtue of their superior internal solidarity, a bold and demanding ideology, lukewarm popular moral support, and no real organized opposition. In some ways, that is what’s going on. They have the bold ideology, the ambient support, and no real opposition.

But importantly, they don’t have internal coordination by any means other than adherence to the ideology itself. Even members of the clique are never really safe. Anyone who contradicts the latest consensus version of the constantly mutating ideology, even if they have worked to its benefit or are otherwise obviously on side, gets purged. If you don’t keep up, you get purged.

It doesn’t matter that the ideology is abusive to its own constituents and allies, or that it doesn’t really even serve its formal beneficiaries. All that matters is this: for everyone who gets purged for a slight infraction, there are dozens who learn from this example never to stand up to the ideology, dozens who learn that they can attack with impunity if they use the ideology to do it, and dozens who are vaguely convinced by its rhetoric to be supportive of the next purge. So, on it goes.

This is the nature of coordination via ideology. If you’re organizing out of some common interest, you can have lively debates about what to do, how things work, who’s right and wrong, and even core aspects of your intellectual paradigm. But if your only standard for membership in your power coalition is detailed adherence to your ideology, as is increasingly true for membership in elite circles, then it becomes very hard to correct mistakes, or switch to a different paradigm.

And this helps explain much of the quagmire American elites are stuck in: being unable to speak outside of the current ideology, the only choice is to double down on a failing paradigm. These failures lead to lower elite morale, resulting in the class identity crisis which afflicts so many at Yale. Ironically, the result is an expression of that ideology which is increasingly rigid on ever more minute points of belief and conduct.

…

What is the point of this new ideology? This ideology is filled with inconsistencies and contradictions, because it is not really about ideological rigor. Among other things, it is an elaborate containment system for the theoretical and practical discontent generated by the failures of the system, an absolution from guilt, and a new form of class signaling. Before, to signal you were in the fashionable and powerful crowd, you would show off your country club membership, refined manners, or Gucci handbags. Now, you show how woke you are. To reinforce their new form of structural power, people dismiss the idea that they even have the older, more legible forms of status. They find any reverse-privilege points they can, and if they are cis-white-men, they pose as allies. On an institutional level, the old ways of legitimizing power are gone, and the new motto is this: diversity is legitimacy.

There is a deep comedy to this sort of signaling. Only around 2% of the student body was in the bottom 20% of American society, and yet extremely wealthy Singaporean students who had spent just a few years in America marched in the street and referred to themselves as “people of color.” People’s experiences were ignored when they volunteered information that countered the main narrative, because the surface-level debate wasn’t the point. The point was to signal that you were with the program. Only a select and secret group of student “leaders”—who were already savvy enough to engage comfortably with hierarchy—were invited in to chat with administrators.

Shouting from the rooftops that “They aren’t doing enough!” is much easier than following any traditional system of elite social norms and duties, let alone carefully re-engineering that system to reestablish order in a time of growing crisis.

…

But there is more to selling out that nobody talks about. These jobs are the dream jobs of the middle class. They’re not supposed to be jobs for the sons and daughters of millionaires and billionaires—these kids don’t actually need the money. They want independence from their parents and proof that they can make it on their own—and prestigious work experience—but they have wealth acquired through generations that they can always fall back on. These people are generally as harmless as the middle class—which is to say completely harmless. They keep to themselves. They quietly grow their bank accounts and their 401ks. And just like the real middle class, they don’t want to risk their next promotion through being too outspoken. They have virtually no political power. This mindset is best encapsulated by: “I’ll go with the program. Please leave me alone to be comfortable and quietly make money.”

They effectively become middle class, because there is no longer any socially esteemed notion of upper class. They have a base of power, of f-you money, that they could use to become something greater than just another office worker or businessperson. But there is no script for that, no institutional or ideological support. What would it even mean to be an esteemed, blue-blooded aristocrat in 2019? So they take the easy and safe way.

How else do Yale students give up their responsibility?

They go in the other direction. These are the people who call themselves idealists and say they want to save the world. They feel the weight of responsibility from their social status—but they don’t know how to process and integrate this responsibility into their lives properly. Traditionally, structurally well-organized elite institutions would absorb and direct this benevolent impulse to useful purpose. But our traditional institutions have decayed and lost their credibility, so these idealists start looking for alternatives, and start signalling dissociation from those now-disreputable class markers.

…

Who is winning? This question is an important one. Yale administrators had lofty goals. In an attempt to placate their own biases, the administrators and faculty forgot that they are the ones who are supposed to be teaching. Instead of expelling or suspending the small number of people actively undermining the student body and university as a whole, the university does nothing, or actively accelerates the process. The professors are the ones who leave. The radical clique feels emboldened.

Now we can begin to understand the real problem at Yale. It is not free speech—and it is not non-inclusivity. The standards of reality, and the standards of morality not based solely on being woke, are ousted. That’s because the conventional standards of elite morality, based on responsible use of power—actually responsible, not just a convenient feeling of doing good—are much harder, and based on the very self-consciousness that everyone is trying to avoid.

…

The result is an institution increasingly unable to carry out its own mission, as tuition rises to pay for more administrators, and ideological drama makes it harder and harder to actually teach. And now we are back at the original question. What was the point of Yale? What was the point of going to Yale? What is the point of elite institutions?

Is the point of Yale to promote the humanities and knowledge of the West that is hard to learn anywhere else? This is not the full mission. Donald Kagan and Lee Bass’s year-long history of the West program was cut, due to faculty protesting that it was not multicultural enough, despite having large interest and $20 million in funding.

Is Yale’s vision a futuristic, technocratic university? Is the university divesting from the liberal arts for the purpose of committing to the technology of the future? This isn’t the case, either. Computer science enrollment has increased significantly in the past decade. But Yale’s computer science department is lagging behind other schools. The university has taken steps towards improving the department, but in general shows no signs of a visionary commitment to expanding tech or significantly expanding professorships.

…

Maybe the university has lost every purpose other than giving students a social environment in which to party. If the students aren’t educated or visionary, at least they’re networking and hedonically satisfied.

Except they’re not. It would be one thing if they were happy—but even this is not true. They don’t know what is expected of them, or what they should aspire to be. The lack of expectations creates nihilistic tendencies and existential crises. In 2018, around one quarter of Yale undergraduates said they sought mental health counseling. One quarter of Yale students took the “Happiness and the Good Life” course in 2018 in an attempt to find answers. Students are demanding more mental health resources. A new wellness space was created with bean-bag chairs and colored walls. But the real sources of unhappiness are more systemic. They are rooted in uncertainty about the future.

If Yale students are uncertain about the future and their role in it, what does that say about the rest of society?

…

So what if Yale, and Yale students, are abdicating responsibility? We can all just send our kids to Harvard, or MIT, or move to California and go to a state school. I heard UC Berkeley is pretty good.

But the problems present at Yale are present at every other university, and schools outside of the United States look to elite American universities as role models. If things are broken at elite universities, things are broken, period.

…

Yale is supposed to be using its power and reputation to set standards for excellence, but instead it is abandoning its responsibilities and getting embroiled in controversy after controversy. Yale is not special in this regard—other colleges are also often embroiled in controversies. But the controversies of top colleges matter most because they determine what is acceptable for everybody else.

And what’s happening at Yale reflects a crisis in America’s broader governing class. Unable to effectively respond to the challenges facing them, they instead try to bail out of their own class. The result is an ideology which acts as an escape raft, allowing some of the most privileged young people in the country to present themselves as devoid of power. Institutions like Yale, once meant to direct people in how to use their position for the greater good, are systematically undermined—a vicious cycle which ultimately erodes the country as a whole.

Segments of this class engage in risk-averse managerialism, while others take advantage of the glut to disrupt things and expand personal power. The broader population becomes caught up in these conflicts as these actors attempt to build power bases and mobilize against each other. And like Yale, it seems a safe bet that things will continue and even accelerate until some new vision and stable, non-ideological set of coordination mechanisms are able to establish hegemony and become a new ground for real cooperation.

[thinkingaboutyoungroyals]

Tyrus Month: Wedding

Renewal Of Vows (AO3)

A/N: This is the last of the prompts for Tyrus Month and I just want to say how much fun it was to participate! I know I didn't do all of the prompts due to my own busy life schedule but I'm so thankful to everyone who took the time to read and enjoy what I've put out!I'm looking forward to what else this show has in store for us!

It was a warm sunny day. The sun was shining. The birds were singing. The kids were out playing. And Cyrus and TJ were on the playground swinging.

The two friends talked about everything and nothing, at the same time.

TJ talked about his summer math tutoring. Cyrus relayed ideas for his future screenplays. TJ narrated stories about the kids at work. Cyrus shared his anxiety about the upcoming school year, as he was finally entering high school.

“High school is a completely different territory from middle school,” Cyrus ranted as he kicked his legs in the air to gain a little more height (just a little). “The halls are probably more crowded and the classes are harder and the social status quo is stricter! I don’t know if I’ll survive!”

On the swing next to him, TJ let out a chuckle. “I can definitely attest to the crowded hallways. There are a lot of tall seniors and they’ll just push past you to get to class. If you need a bodyguard, I’ll volunteer.”

Cyrus blushed. In the two years he had known TJ, the older boy always seemed to say the sappiest things. Considering he was, at one time, a scary-basketball-guy to Cyrus, the younger couldn’t seem to get used to his flirtatiousness. He often wondered if the athlete’s words meant more than simple playfulness.

Sometimes, he even allowed himself to hope that his feelings for the older boy were reciprocated.

“Oh, look at that,” TJ’s voice broke through his thoughts.

Cyrus slowed his swinging and shifted his head in the direction the other boy was pointing at.

A group of kids were gathered around a little girl and a little boy standing side-by-side, their arms linked. They were standing by the sandbox and little girl was holding a bunch of flowers they probably pulled from one of the beds around the playground. In front of them was another little boy, holding a book upside down.

“Awww, they’re having a playground wedding,” Cyrus realized, a smile on his face. “I remember having one of those.”

At that, TJ chuckled again. “You married someone on a playground?” he asked, genuinely amused.

Up ahead of them, the two kids exchanged candy rings.

“Yeah.” Cyrus began to reminisce. “It was back in kindergarten. I was the new kid and I didn’t really have any friends yet. But there was this one kid who played with me and one day, he asked me to marry him on the playground." He let out a soft chuckle. "That should have clued me in that I was gay when I didn’t see anything wrong with it and said ‘yes’.”

“Awww, that’s cute,” TJ said, his lips quirked into an amused smile as he kept swinging. “Who was it?”

The memory of a blonde-haired kid with pretty blue eyes and played dinosaurs with him on the sandbox floated in Cyrus' memory. The other boy had proposed with a blueberry ring pop and another kid married them in front of all their plastic dinosaur toys.

“His name was Tyler," Cyrus narrated. "He was so cool. But, a week later, he moved and I never saw him again.”

He remembered being so upset when Tyler didn’t show up to school after that and then his teacher told him that he had moved. That was probably his first time experiencing heartbreak yet he didn��t even realize.

Meanwhile, beside him, TJ had dragged his feet on the ground as his head swiveled to Cyrus. His eyes were wide with shock and disbelief.

Cyrus furrowed his brows. “What?”

“Where did you go to kindergarten?”

Odd question but okay. “Maple Heights Nursery and Kindergarten. Why?”

TJ swallowed. “I went there too. When I was 6, my dad got a new job and we moved. Then, when I was 9, he lost his job and we had to move back here.”

Cyrus smiled, excitedly. “Really? Wow! Maybe we were in the same class!”

The older boy managed a smile. “Before we moved, though, I also married this kid on the playground. But I can’t remember his name. I felt so guilty for not telling him I was moving. But, I remember that I really liked him ‘cause he was fun to play with. And, he had a mole on his cheek… like you.”

It took Cyrus a moment for TJ’s words to sink in. And when they did, his eyes were wide and his words were caught in his throat.

“Do you know my full name, Underdog?” TJ asked.

Cyrus swallowed and shook his head.

“Tyler Joseph Kippen. People didn’t start calling me TJ until the first grade because there were three Tylers in my class and it just stuck.”

Cyrus’ breath hitched. “T-Tyler? Y-You're... Tyler?”

TJ smiled. “Hi, husband.”

His heart fluttered. “B-But… your hair… and your eyes… they’re different.”

TJ shrugged. “Hair got darker. Eyes changed color, I guess.”

Cyrus’ mind was blank at that point and all he could seem to do was look at TJ. As in, really look at him, trying to find glimpses of his kindergarten husband. Granted, his memory of the time was hazy since he was only 5 back then and TJ had changed a lot. He still felt skeptical.

TJ must have sensed his skepticism as he added, “I proposed to you with a blueberry ring pop and I kissed your nose. And I told you that when we grew up, I would marry you for real and we will have a house with a giant swimming pool and-.”

“And a dolphin named Flipper,” Cyrus finished, bits of the memory coming back.

TJ smiled. “We still have a lot of growing up to do but I don’t think we can have that dolphin.”

Cyrus felt himself glare. “You left me.”

TJ’s smile dropped. “I’m sorry.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t remember my name! Or me!”

“I remembered you! I just suck at names!”

Cyrus huffed. “What kind of husband just leaves his husband without saying goodbye?! You should make it up to me!”

“Okay, I will. Anything you want.”

“Good. You should marry me again,” Cyrus said, absentmindedly before his words registered and the horror sunk in. “No, wait, that’s not what I-.”

“Okay.”

Cyrus blinked. “Okay?”

TJ was grinning as he got on his feet and walked in front of Cyrus’ swing. “Where do you want it? Here in the swings or over by the sandbox like old times?”

“TJ, I was kidding.”

“I’m not. Because I like you, Cyrus.”

Cyrus blinked again. And again. And again.

He heard the words. He could comprehend the words. But those words only existed in his dreams. Surely, no way in real life did TJ just confess his feelings to him… right?

His silence made TJ’s smile falter. “If… If you don’t feel the same way, then you can forget what I said. I can buy you baby taters and a milkshake if you want.”

But, he did. Cyrus liked TJ. He liked him a lot.

“H-Here,” he managed.

It was TJ’s turn to blink and stare, blankly.

“I-I… want the wedding here,” Cyrus continued. “And… I like you too, TJ. I like you a lot.”

That was all it took for TJ to take Cyrus’ hand and pull him off the swing and into a tight hug. Cyrus’ heart was beating faster than ever and he felt his head swirling with so many emotions that he couldn’t say another word.

Because not only was TJ ended up being Tyler, his childhood husband, he also liked Cyrus back.

He liked Cyrus back!

“So… about that wedding…”

Cyrus briefly pulled away from the hug and beamed. “Don’t you worry. I have it all planned.”

The wedding march blared out of Andi’s smartphone and she was kind of glad that they had chosen a late afternoon when most kids and their parents were not around to witness this or else they would be getting so many strange looks.

She couldn’t believe that she actually agreed to spend one of her summer days at the swing set of the children’s playground, a small notebook in her hands, and watching Cyrus and TJ walk down a pretend aisle towards her, their “minister”.

Buffy was next to her, acting as witness and ring bearer. She had not stopped rolling her eyes since the “ceremony” began.

“Is this really for real?” her athletic friend whispered. “So they found out they were each other’s kindergarten husbands. Do they have to get married again?”

Andi chuckled. “It’s a renewal of their vows since they found each other again.”

“But…” Buffy trailed off when the two reached them.

Cyrus was practically vibrating with excitement and TJ had the softest look on his face that the two girls had never seen before. How their friend managed to get the normally cool and serious jock to agree to this, was a total mystery. The two's entire relationship was still a bizarre mystery to them, but at this point, they knew Cyrus was happy. Who were they to get in the way of that?

Andi cleared her throat as she opened the notebook that Cyrus had prepared for her and began to read. “Friends and… well, friends, we are gathered here today to witness the renewal of vows between Cyrus Goodman and… Tyler Joseph Kippen?”

She looked up at the two boys in confusion but both nodded so she continued. “Do you, Cyrus Goodman, take Tyler Joseph Kippen, as your playground husband, again, to have and to hold, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health? Wait, where’s the ‘til death do you part?”

“That’s a little too morbid for a playground wedding so I got rid of it,” Cyrus answered. “And, yes, I do.”

Andi pursed her lips. “Okay then. And do you, Tyler Joseph Kippen-.”

“Yeah, I do,” interrupted the older boy.

Andi flashed him a glare for the interruption and was surprised at herself for actually taking her position as minister, seriously. “Okay then.” She quickly scanned the next part of the instructions, raising her eyebrow at the ridiculousness of it. “Buffy? The rings, please.”

With a resigned sigh, Buffy stepped forward and handed her two packs of ring pops.

“Which flavors do either of you want?” Andi asked the two boys. “There’s blueberry and green apple.”

“I’ll take the blueberry,” Cyrus said with a knowing smile at TJ.

“Green apple for me then.”

So, Andi gave the blueberry to TJ and the green apple to Cyrus. She and Buffy watched as the two opened the packs and slipped the candy into each other’s fingers.

“By the power vested in me by… well, Cyrus,” Andi continued and she couldn’t help her smile at the next line. “I now pronounce you playground husbands, again. You may now kiss.”

Grinning, Cyrus closed his eyes. TJ leaned down and pecked his nose.

Andi resisted the urge to squeal because no matter how absurd this pretend wedding was and they were getting way too old for these games, it was still so darn cute.

Cyrus opened his eyes, beaming at his new boyfriend slash husband.

“I… kinda want our first kiss to be a little less… public,” TJ said, side-eyeing Andi and Buffy who were still watching them closely.

The younger boy let out a giggle before reaching into his pocket and throwing a plastic bottle on the ground before stepping on it.

“I’d step on glass but it’s a hazard to the children and I don’t want to clean it up,” he stated at everyone’s questioning faces before picking up the plastic bottle again. “It’s the symbolism that counts. So… Reception at The Spoon?”

“Finally!” Buffy exclaimed. “You two are so weird but… congrats.” She sent a glare at TJ. “Don’t hurt him, Kippen.”

The older boy chuckled. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Driscoll.”

Hand-in-hand, the two led the way to the diner, their intertwined hands swinging between them.

Meanwhile, Andi and Buffy were still standing together, staring at them and unable to believe that they actually just did that.

“Well… that was a lovely ceremony,” Andi stated.

“He better not hurt Cyrus or I'll hurt him,” Buffy said with a secret fond smile.

“Come on, we both know TJ wouldn’t do that to Cyrus. His crush was so obvious! Can’t believe it took him remembering Cyrus in kindergarten for him to make a move.”

Buffy sighed. “I guess. Anyway, they promised us free taters and milkshakes. So, let’s go!”

Arm-in-arm, the two girls followed after the happy new couple.

[mithliya]

my gf directing that term at a blog harassing me is apparently the same as a man calling women cunts. 

um. 505 BD is not the average. thats the starting salary, even less so than the average starting salary. the average bahraini makes far more than 500 bd per month. the poor families i know tend to live off a salary of 600 bd per month (with one working person). my parents have been working for over 30 years and both of them work. so theyd obviously not be at the starting salary of 600 BD. and no im not ‘claiming poverty’, even you said right there that i said that im middle class. at least be consistent about ur claims.

so the average pay per month is at least 1000 BD per month which is 2500 dollars. now redo your entire calculations, and use the right average numbers and information this time. keep in mind my mother is an auditor and my father is an engineer. 

my parents saving money was when i was little. having a three storey house isnt anywhere close to special in bahrain, nor is having a maid. having a pool isnt rare either, though it isnt particularly common as well.  

 + did you check if bahrain even has income tax? obviously not 

ok so u posted proof that bahrain is around 20% cheaper than the US... and somehow you wanna claim im lying about lower standards of living and cheaper housing? consider the fact that bahrain only recently started implementing taxes, and the taxes implemented were on goods specifically..+ the free healthcare and cheaper cost of food and higher average income, 20% makes a pretty big difference lol.

this is probably the stupidest thing you couldve said. the labour is cheap because the labour is brought from outside countries with far lower standards of living. the maids, drivers, builders, etc in bahrain are almost completely from south asia and south east asia. their average pay is far less than the bahraini’s average pay, with it being around 100-150 BD. now, if the average household makes somewhere from 1000-1700 BD per month, how much would 100-150 BD be? not much. and ‘the people who work as maids don’t have maids!’ yeah no shit they don’t, how would they be able to afford their own maids when they make the same exact as what theyd be expected to pay the maids? and what would they need a maid for when they normally live in household they work in? thats such a weird point to make anyways.

i didnt say ‘everybody has a maid’, i said most have a maid. when i say that, i thought it was obvious i was not including foreigners (which make up a huge portion of bahrain’s population) but was rather talking about bahrainis. the fact that you think everyone i know is middle class is just an assumption on your part, as i said i live in a cheap & poorer neighbourhood so a lot of the people i know are lower class, and my father’s side is mostly lower class, too (they tend to be larger families and/or have less education than my dad). they still often have maids, and if they don’t its because the woman in the household is a housewife, making a maid unnecessary. 

i think my actual statement was that having a pool isnt that rare or unique. the fact that you found 3 different houses in my neighbourhood, which i stated is a cheaper & poorer neighbourhood, and a village, is actually not particularly surprising. 

and this is the most disgusting of all. out of your 3 pictures of ~my village~: one is in IRAN, a completely different country than bahrain. one is in RIFFA, a completely different town separate from my village. and one is a highway on the way to my village, not my village itself. 

you called the images of a ‘riot’.. thats fucking disgusting. these weren’t riots and a lot of the images were just people peacefully protesting being attacked by the police. the images i used were the only existing images of my neighbourhood that i could find. i suppose the fact that you failed to use a single picture of my village ‘besides the riot/protest picture’ (again, not a fucking riot nor were the pictures depicting one event either) is great in a way since it proves my point about it being hard to find an image of my village outside of the protests. ive shown several poorer neighbourhoods in bahrain. all have larger houses but are visibly different from richer neighbourhoods. as a Totally Honest Receipts blog, tho, ofc that was ignored. as was me calling out menalez-receipts being a blatant racist & UScentric idiot by using pictures of fucking iran and claiming its my village

literally when will u stop talking out ur ass about bahrain lmfao 

[grs-the-neighborhood]

Lauren Lee

  Age: 13

  Gender: Female

  Sexuality: Demi-sexual

  Birthday(Zodiac): September 12; Virgo

  Species: Human

  Ethnicity: ½ African, ½ Japanese

  Alignment: Civilian

  Powers/Abilities:

                Has strong knowledge of:

    Zoology and Astronomy

                Skateboarding

  Relatives: Sheldon Lee (father), Trixie Carter (mother),

Benji Crust (paternal half brother)

  Background:

            Thanks to the birth of Benji, Sheldon finally got over his womanizing ways and was able to settle down with Lauren’s mom, Trixie became a one of the world’s most renown surgeons. Even though most people would never have thought the two would be together, but when they met for a science convention the two just clicked. Sheldon loved hearing the stories that Trixie would “come up with” about mythical creatures and Trixie was fascinated by what Sheldon was able to create—and the fact that he was a big hot shot inventor made her even more interested in him. The two started dating and Trixie became pregnant with Lauren.

                Both Trixie and Sheldon loved their baby girl and always hoped that she would follow in either or their footsteps and wound up being surprised when Lauren showed more interest in astronomy and zoology more than robotics or human medicine.

  Personality Type: Logistician_Assertive (ISTJ-A)

Personality:

                Lauren has a personality like her mother, while she has the geekiness of her father. She has that sassy and tomboyish persona that leads guys to think of her as “one of the boys” which tends to annoy her—especially if the guy happens to be the person she has a crush on.

                She is labeled as a “nerd” in her school because of her obsession to get good grades and study. This has led her to be isolated and excluded from some teen activities. This in turn has led to her having moments where she is either ignorant or awkward during social situations. To people that don’t know her, she comes off as “cold” or “indifferent” because in all honesty—she is. The only people that she opens up to is her family and those rare people that she calls “friend”.

                When she is hanging out with Erin she acts like a goofball and shares new discoveries that she has found while researching zoology and astronomy. It is because Erin is her best friend that she lets out the secret side of her that she keeps hidden from everyone else.

                One of the things that she is most prideful about is being blasian, she finds it as something that makes her different and unique from everybody else she knows. 

  Appearance: She has wavy black hair, eyes like her fathers, her mother’s nose, and likes to wear clothes that are less fashionable and more comfortable.

  Relationships:

                She loves both of her parents, but she doesn’t get a lot of time with either of them because of their busy jobs. Though she may get frustrated with their absences, she enjoys the quiet she gets at home while they are away. It is during that time that she studies for her classes, does her homework, and researches her two favorite sciences. Sheldon, whenever he is around Lauren and her friends, embarrasses her with his goofy personality. Trixie, of course, is the “cool parent” where Lauren gets most of her personality… though she feels like she’s closer to her father than her mother.

Benji: The two get along as any brother and sister would. They do argue when it comes to sense of fashion; Lauren doesn’t care about what she wears and gets angry when Benji lectures about how she needs to care about her appearance.

                Lauren’s best friend is Erin. With all the craziness in the world with robots, mythological creatures, villains, and heroes… Lauren appreciates that she has a friend who doesn’t want to be involved with any of it! Erin is the girl Lauren always goes to when she wants peace and quiet or to have someone normal to hang out with.  Her creator, @shorty-tori, update Lauren her relationship with Erin would change to her developing feelings for her best friend) Benji helps consult her on her feelings for her friend, and gives her tips on how she can ask her out.

                Everybody knows that even though Sheldon had grown out of his crush on Jenny and is now in love with Trixie, he still has a weird fetish for robotic women. And one day he met another robotic inventor who had similar fetishes, and their daughters became acquaintances. That’s right, even though Chloe and Lauren have very little in common, they like to complain to each other how weird their fathers are. Also, Chloe likes to show off her outfits to her poorer and least stylish friend, to try to bug her about why she doesn’t dress up like a girl.

                  Trivia:

    ·         Lauren’s creator wishes for people not to judge the way she drew her fist… she is REALLY bad at drawing hands and dreads every moment when she has to do so

    ·         Character’s name is similar to creator’s middle name

    ·         Her personality is based off a lot of the creator

    ·         Favorite colors: Beige, blue, and violet

    ·         Knows about mythological creatures, just doesn’t have time to go on adventures

    ·         Straight A student—school is what she focuses on most of the time

    ·         No relation to Suzie Lee     *        Father is from My Teenage Robot Life and mother is from Jake Long: American Dragon

  Quotes:

--

Not caring or worrying about what her father could possibly be doing, Lauren walked into his study. There she caught him with magazines of robotic women on his desk while he skyped his same-obsessed friend Jack Spicer. “Don’t tell me you two are talking about sex robots again!” she yelled as she glared at her father. He stammered as he picked up the magazines and hid them in a drawer. Walking out of the room, pulling at her hair she yelled to herself, “Why do you have to be so weird!”

--

“Yeah girl, I caught them at it again! There has to be something seriously wrong with those two,” Lauren was on the phone with Chloe, complaining about their father’s having their ‘usual’ talks. Though for the two girls’ talks it went how it usually went; going from talking about their fathers to Chloe talking about Lauren’s fashion sense. “No, Chloe, I do like wearing pink. I don’t even have anything pink!... nah, I don’t need a pink dress…” even though Lauren loved the relief of getting her stress off her shoulders about her dad, she could do less with the long fashion rants over the phone.

--

  Story: You Are My Normal

      “EERRRIIIINNN!” Lauren yelled out as she ran towards her best friend, “did you hear about that battle between those heroes and villains groups? I heard it got MESSY!” Erin just nodded, being her quiet, usual self. “I remember that the hero group is called ‘Vanguard League’, because it sounds so fancy, but I forget what the villain group is called… ‘The Young Blood Gang’? Is that it?”

                “It’s ‘Young Blood Alliance’, remember ‘YBA’ as the acronym,” Erin answered in a quiet voice.

                “That’s right! Nice idea Erin,” the girl hiding her eyes blushed, “I’ll be sure to remember that. You’re so smart!” Lauren was always happier when she spent time with Erin before school started. It gave her time to let go and just be herself. Before her shields come up while she is in class and will only focus on what the teacher is instructing.

                “Didn’t you say you know someone in the Youn—” Before Erin could finish asking her question, Lauren covered her mouth.

                “Shhhhhh! What are ya doin’? You can’t be asking that out loud! I don’t want someone hearing that I do,” she held her hands over her bestie’s mouth, making sure that no noise could come out that could let those around know that she knew Chloe Spicer, member of the Young Blood Alliance.

                Well, she covered her mouth until Erin bit her hand. Yelping in pain Lauren jumped back and shook her hand, as if to shake off the pain. “Have I told you recently how awkward you are?” Erin turned around and began walking towards the building, “And why? Why me? Why did you decide to chose me above everyone else in this entire school?”

                For a moment Lauren stopped and thought that herself, why Erin? With everyone in the entire school she became friends with Erin and had clung to her since. “Hey, crazy! You going to quicken up your space and walk with me?” Erin blushed as she pouted at her friend, having stopped to wait for her.

                That was all the reminder that Lauren needed. Erin was the best friend anyone could ask for. She may be quiet, and she may find a lot of things annoying. But she’s loyal, and smart, and funny. She was the right person to be friends with. She was the only person who made her feel… normal.

Belong to @shorty-tori 

[whileiamdying]

MOVIES: A Separation

Make it your New Year’s resolution to go see this sad, funny, suspenseful Iranian drama.

BY DANA STEVENS DEC 30, 2011 ⦿ 2:44 PM

Leila Hatami and Peyman Maadi in A Separation © Sony Pictures Classics.

It’s fitting that its release comes in the midst of the end-of-year frenzy for rating and ranking and listing, because the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation serves as a quiet reminder of how good it’s possible for movies to be. You don’t always have to sacrifice complexity for suspense, or formal sophistication for visceral power. It’s possible, if rare, to come across a movie that has it all.

A Separation is a domestic drama in the strict sense: It takes place mainly inside the apartment of one family, a middle-class couple named Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Maadi) who have a 10-year-old daughter named Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). Simin is in the process of beginning divorce proceedings against her husband: She’s obtained an exit visa and wants to leave Iran with their daughter and settle in the West. But Nader refuses to consider leaving behind his father, an Alzheimer’s sufferer who’s come to live with the family and requires round-the-clock care. “He doesn’t even know you’re his son!” protests Simin. “I know he is my father,” Nader responds.

At their divorce hearing, Simin and Nader are sent home by a patronizing off-screen judge: “My finding is that your problem is a small problem,” we hear him tell a furious Simin, refusing to grant the divorce until the couple can come to a mutual agreement to separate. But this family’s problems are about to get a lot bigger. When Simin moves out to live with her parents, Nader hires a caretaker, Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to look after his father during the day. This devout young mother is soon overwhelmed by the task of attending to a man who can no longer speak, dress, or wash himself. One afternoon, for reasons that aren’t clear at first, she leaves the old man alone while she runs an errand. The consequences of that act—and of Nader’s outburst when he comes home to find his father unattended—will eventually spiral into personal and legal disaster for both families, Nader’s and Razieh’s.

As plot summaries go, that’s a sketchy one, but I’ll leave it there, since one of A Separation’s great strengths is the way it gradually reveals the complicated half-truths and strategic evasions in each party’s version of the story. In a way, this is also a legal procedural, but one in which the truth becomes less and less clear-cut as the film goes on. As the battle between the two families escalates—with Simin taking the side of her estranged husband, and Razieh’s hotheaded husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) forcefully intervening on behalf of his terrified wife—we get a sense of the complex web of social forces determining these characters’ choices. The better-off couple is secular and cosmopolitan, dismissive of the poorer family’s traditional Islamic values. But whatever their class or education level, the women—even the fiercely independent, plain-spoken Simin—are subject to the ever-present constraints of institutionalized sexism and social shame. When the judge who’s just forbidden Simin to divorce without her husband’s permission questions why an Iranian mother might aspire to bring up her daughter elsewhere, Simin’s sidelong glare says it all.

A Separation isn’t worth watching only as a precise sociological analysis or a political critique of contemporary Iran—those qualities would be cold comfort indeed if they didn’t exist in the context of a sad, funny, suspenseful story about love, grief, and the search for justice. The ensemble cast—especially Maadi as the harried, short-tempered, ethically conflicted Nader—is extraordinary. As has become a tradition in Iranian cinema, the child characters are not just props but essential participants in the story, and both young actresses—Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter, as the wise-beyond-her-years Termeh and Kimia Hosseini as the caretaker’s observant, saucer-eyed little girl—deliver impeccable naturalistic performances.

Despite some conflict between Farhadi and government censors while the film was being made, A Separation has now been released to acclaim within Iran and named the country’s official entry for the foreign-language Oscar. This is a dense, complex film that demands close attention from its audience (and richly rewards a second viewing). With one of Iran’s major living filmmakers, Jafar Panahi, currently in prison for his support of the opposition movement, and another, Abbas Kiarostami, now working abroad (this year’s Certified Copy is finally getting him the wider recognition he’s long deserved here), it’s a joy to see that there are still films of this caliber being made in that curiously cinematic country. It’s my New Year’s wish that even viewers who’ve never bought a ticket to a subtitled film in Farsi will give A Separation a chance.