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animeomegas · 4 years ago

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Who is the most needy while in heat?

I decided to write for a few characters for different categories: Clingiest, Horniest, Territorial and Requires Support. Enjoy~

Who is the clingiest:

1. Itachi – Itachi has only ever had soft heats in his life(heats that are not sexually, but instead emotionally charged). He didn’t have his first heat until he was already part of the Akatsuki and didn’t feel safe enough for a proper heat. His health also isn’t the best, so his body knows to have soft heats rather than normal heats. Because he only has these types of heats, they are very strong. He feels a constant urge to be by your side, ideally with you touching him at all times. He can’t take suppressants because they mess with his illness, so he can’t minimise the effects. He spends the two days holed up in his room, the door locked and sealed shut. He won’t let you leave his nest much, growling and whining if you try. His instincts are screaming at him that he has to protect you and that you have to protect him. He can get a little addled and confused because the impulses are too strong. He’s extremely clingy in heat and he hates it. He always feels embarrassed afterwards.

2. Izuku – Izuku is prone to crying and feeling very rejected if you neglect him during his preheat or heat. He feels the sting of rejection very strongly and feeling abandoned during a heat is… not good for omegas to put it lightly. It can make them sick if it’s serious enough. So, Izuku will definitely try and keep you in his nest as much as possible, asking wordlessly to be carried with you if you need to leave for a moment. Going to work or leaving the house during his heats (even when he’s on suppressants) is a no-no for him. He will do anything to get you to stay with him, including but not limited to hiding your keys, seducing you, and begging.

3. Mammon – From the second he’s in preheat, he literally will not leave you alone. He’s very attention starved, but his slight tsundere tendencies keep him from acting on his need for affection. His heat and preheat remove the tsundere tendencies and make him even more desperate for attention. He’s hanging off of his Alpha constantly, following them around and sleeping in their room. He enjoys laying on top of them while they stroke his hair or rub his back. Will growl away anyone who tries to take you from him. If the growling doesn’t work, he’ll whine at you to stay with him because he knows you can’t refuse him when he’s like that.

4. Kaoru – He doesn’t like how clingy he is, but it’s very uncomfortable for an omega to ignore their heat urges, so he doesn’t bother trying to resist it. He’s very prone to loneliness when he’s in heat or preheat, so he likes it if you’re with him as much as possible. He will spend most the time sitting on your lap, innocently and not so innocently.

5. L – He isn’t particularly fussed about constant physical affection, but he wants you to be in the same room as him at all times. He constantly turns away from his work to make sure you’re still sitting in the room with him, and in the evenings, he likes if he can sit on your lap while he works. His heats are reduced from suppressants, and his libido is very low generally, but he still likes to make sure his alpha is safe and with him during his heat and be surrounded by his alpha’s scent.

Who is the most territorial during heat:

1. Sasuke – Will straight up growl at anyone who gets too close to you both, and it won’t end well if someone shows up at his house when he’s in heat. Sasuke immediately views whoever it is as a threat and would likely try and attack them, especially if they were a stranger or someone he didn’t like. He is a lot less stressed during this time if you both just hole up at home for his preheat and heat. One of the reasons he makes his nest in a walk in wardrobe is because it’s an easily defendable place.

2. Shikamaru – He has to have an arm around you or vice versa at all times. He makes sure you always smell like him during his preheats, just as a warning to other omegas. In heat, he gets very intense and caught up in the feelings, so interruptions from outsiders will be jarring and he’s likely to react aggressively.

3. Shinsou – Is very paranoid when in heat and preheat. He gets nervous about people coming to try and hurt him and his mate while he’s weak, so he doesn’t like anyone he doesn’t know around you or him. Shinsou is fiercely protective of his family and his alpha. When he’s actually in heat, he would probably try to attack anyone who got too close.

4. Belphie – Likes to just lay down and sleep with you when he’s in preheat, and whenever any of his brothers (or anyone else) try and get you to move, he growls them away, wrapping his arms around your chest to stop you from going anywhere. Would definitely bite someone if they were brave enough to try and remove him from you by force. When he’s in heat, he uses compulsion charms to keep people away from the attic where he likes to spend his heat with you.

5. Diavolo – He can’t keep his hands or lips off of his alpha during preheat, but not just in a horny way, mainly in a ‘they’re mine’ kind of way. He likes to show off his relationship to others as a warning to stay away. He is delightfully smug if you return the treatment.

6. Kusuo – He pretends he isn’t being territorial when he’s in preheat, but whenever you end up in conversation with someone, Kusuo is just suddenly standing next to you, I wonder how that happened? He also makes a way greater effort to ditch anyone who might interrupt his alone time with you. He turns his friends away if they show up at his door when he’s in preheat. When in heat, he gets off on the ‘you’re mine and I’m yours’ aspect.

7. Light – This boy in greedy for your attention when he’s in preheat, and very bitter if he doesn’t get enough of it. He directs most of his anger at anyone who he perceives as taking you away from him. He will lie and manipulate others away from you both during this time with zero hesitation or regret. Would be possessive if you gave too much attention to a book while he’s in heat.

Who needs the most support:

1. Alois – I headcanon that Alois has some specific heat related trauma, that I’m not going to get into right now, that impacts him greatly. His alpha is his protection. He only feels safe during his heat if you’re there with him. If you leave him alone, even just for a minute, he will panic, fear mixing with his already heat addled brain. For that reason, he needs a great deal of support, he needs a gentle touch and a constant presence.

2. Shouto – His father paid to have him on illegal grade suppressant without him knowing just after Shouto’s quirk came in. Endeavour got the quirk he wanted, but not the dynamic he wanted, so he tried to change that. He experiences similar heats to Neji when he first comes off of suppressants. He’s so sensitive everywhere that it hurts. He wants to be touched so badly, but it hurts him. His alpha needs to work with him slowly to help him overcome the sensitivity.

3. Neji – I mentioned before that due to the suppressant abuse that was inflicted on Neji as a child, his heats can be very painful, especially at first, much like Shouto. For a more in-depth analysis, I have headcanons on Neji’s suppressant abuse listed on my pinned masterlist.

4. Keigo (Hawks) – He suffers from really bad paranoia during his heats. At first, it’s unclear what’s triggering the paranoia, but eventually it becomes clear that his treatment in the hands of the Commission have left him some nasty mental scars. When Keigo is in heat, he needs to have the door locked and bolted, the windows lock and covered with thick curtains and blinds, he needs to be rid of all technology or anything a person could use to contact him, and he needs all supplies to be in his nest with him so that neither you nor him have to leave that one room. It’s why the room he nests in must have an ensuite. He tends to have soft heats (emotionally charge rather than sexually charged) because his paranoia makes his body think he’s in too much danger to have a proper heat. It’s lucky that his heats normally only last for a day.

(N-sfw under cut~)

Who is the horniest:

1. Sebastian – He barely manages to keep it together during the day when he has to serve Ciel, but at night? You better be fucking him so well that he can’t stay coherent. He needs a full eight hours of sex before the heat withdraws enough for him to focus. A demon’s heat is very intensive after all.

2. Kakashi – Every little thing sets him off when he’s in heat. Maybe you knotted him and the heat is subsiding a little, but then you bit your lip or stretch in a certain way, and immediately he’s consumed by his heat again. He struggles to keep it in his trousers long enough to hydrate and sleep. Sometimes he needs to cockwarm his alpha just to be able to calm his instincts enough to sleep.

3. Tamaki A – He gets so horny at the peaks of his heat that any and all nervousness completely vanishes. He will beg his alpha shamelessly to get what he needs. He cannot control his voice at all, so you better hope your neighbours are forgiving, because Amajiki shouts some filthy things when he feels really good.

4. Asmo – No one is surprised that he is completely and overwhelmingly horny for his entire heat. Most omegas have down moments for resting and hydrating while their heat isn’t so bad. Not Asmo. His heat lasts for three days (a maximum amount) and is intense for all of it. You have to make him to eat and drink something while he begs and writhes on your lap for you to fuck him.

5. Kiba – Has a very high sex drive in general, even when he’s not in heat, so it’s no surprise that he’s basically insatiable when he’s in heat. He jumps his alpha five times a day when he’s in preheat, and every hour when he’s in heat. If you can’t provide for him as often as he needs, he will absolutely buy a knotted dildo and use it while he’s on top of you. Most of the time that convinces his alpha to help him get off.

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celisea · 4 years ago

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i am obsessed with master of the knights kaeya and even more obsessed with kaeya who serves khaenri’ah PLEASE elaborate more on your worms if you feel obliged

!!! AAA I’m glad you liked the designs hehe, YES SURE I CAN ELABORATE!! I thought about these 2 designs like the 2 futures Kaeya could have. A future with the knights and Mond or with Khaenri’ah and whatever is happening over there. This may get a bit long but ill try to explain my brainworms in a coherent way. Also, English is not my first language, so if there is any confusion please tell me and I can try to tell it in another way.

So, first, I think the 5-star version of Kaeya MUST have both eyes uncovered. This is because I think if we ever DO get it, it will be like an ascension of sorts. Kaeya has the recurring theme that he hides a lot of things from everyone. He hides his true feelings, his thoughts and his true personality behind layers and LAYERS of lies. The only time he ever showed his true self his brother tried to kill him, he even looks at his vision as a reminder to never try to do it again. So, my point is that if he does get a 5-star version it will be when he accepts every part of himself and shows his true self to everyone. Therefore, I think he would be without his eyepatch. The loss of it represents the loss of his mask, both figuratively and literally.

Another thing to note is that Kaeya’s constellation is a peacock. There are a lot of different meanings to this but one that stuck out to me is this:

“Hindu motifs expose the peacock as a symbol of the unconscious; for, what is in one’s subconscious can be illuminated by the consciousness, starting the emergence of one’s true individuality.”

This adds to what I first said about the loss of his eyepatch. What I want to get from this is that in Kaeya’s case, the peacock could mean his struggles with his identity and how he expresses and views himself. So, his ascension to a 5-star could be his decision to be true to himself and chose to support the nation that he wants, be it Mondstadt or Khaenri’ah without regrets or second thoughts. In his vision story its mentioned how coming clean about his lies was the first time he felt like himself, like he was not holding back who he truly was. So, I believe Kaeya will not be able to be a 5-star or, in-story become stronger, until he comes clean to everyone about who he truly is.

Because of all of this, I thought about making two designs instead of just one, since I feel like either choice could represent himself coming out of his shell and showing his individuality.

So, now that I explained my reasoning as to why I made 2 designs, here is my thought process for each one!

Mondstadt

My first design thought for a 5-star Kaeya is that he would wear his vision on his heart. For me this is him showing that he does not see his vision as a reminder to always live a life full of lies, but as a reminder to stay true to himself and live in a way that he feels happy with. It also, of course, represents his loyalty to Mondstadt, the land that gave him said vision.

He also gets to keep his lovelock! This hairstyle is said to “show devotion to a loved one”, in this case the loved one would be Mondstadt and its people. And I also feel like it could be a nod to Crepus, his late adoptive father. We know that Kaeya loved Crepus and is part of the reason he had such complex feelings about who to side with since he adopted him and showed him love in a land he had never been to and probably didn’t want to go as a child. So, I thought it would be nice that his lovelock could also represent his love for his family.

Another thing I thought about was that a 5-star Kaeya would probably be introduced in the late game, so this means that in the future, Jean will probably be Grand Master of the knights. This is because I think it is foreshadowed by Mona on her voiceline about Jean:

“You mean the Acting Grand Master of the Knights of Favonius? Her constellation is Leo Minor, which represents strength and responsibility shouldered too young... Though the lioness has been separated from her pride for a long time, she grows from strength to strength, and the day will come when she is ready to return as its glorious leader.”

If its true that Jean will become Grand Master, then Kaeya would probably follow her and become Master of the Knights since he is her right-hand-man and Jean respects him a lot. This would also go well with the theme that Kaeya would act like his true self. Throughout his whole life, Kaeya has been a character that always acts in the background/shadows. He works and goes to assignments more than anybody else and does a lot of things, while only being supposedly the Cavalry Captain. This also happened when he was young and Diluc was still in the Knights. He worked in the shadows so Diluc could pass through any circumstance without any problems. What I want to get with this, is that Kaeya works a job that is not at face-value recognized. So, him being the Master of the Knights, a well respected and recognized title, seems fitting. Also, I just really like the idea of Jean and Kaeya climbing the ladder together and being a power team hehe.

Because of this, I think that Kaeya would borrow elements of Jean’s design like her corset thingy, her gloves, and finally the Knights official symbol. Since in this design his loyalty is to Mondstadt, he now feels free to put elements of the city on how he dresses!

One final thought about the Mond design (this doesn’t have anything to do with the design) is that I like to thing that in the endgame when Jean and Kaeya are Grand Master and Master, Diluc would look at them and say to them that he doesn’t think the Knights are incompetent anymore ;u; kind of like, “I’m proud of you two” moment.

Khaenri’ah

Oof so now to the angstier route, Kaeya chooses Khaenri’ah over Mondstadt and joins Dainsleif and co. on the quest to challenge the gods. The first thing I feel he would do is cut his lovelock. The lovelock hairstyle comes originally from Europe and Mondstadt is a Germany-based nation, so the cutting of it symbolizes his separation from Mondstadt and his adoptive family. His sense of duty meaning more to him than the love he received from the city, the knights, and his family.

His vision is kept on the side like in his original design. In his voicelines, he mentions that a vision is a mere tool to control the elements. It has no other meaning; in this route he does not give it any meaning at all since Khaenri’ah hates the gods, the vision is nothing more than a tool to complete his nation’s goals. Instead, what is on his heart is a star, a symbol representative of Khaenri’ah.

His outfit on this design resembles more Dainsleif’s and has a lot of star-shaped elements. His peacock cape is replaced by one more reminiscent of Dainsleif’s and he keeps some elements of his original design like the gloves and the cuffs of his sleeves. I kind of wanted to give the vibe of a royal. Peacocks also can represent royalty, so in this design his confidence and individuality stems from his duty to protect his homeland from the gods. I believe Kaeya does have royal blood from the Blacksun dynasty and it’s represented by all the gold elements and his shawl thingy.

I get a little sad thinking about this design because I feel like Jean and Diluc would just be… absolutely heartbroken by this decision. Imagining a battle between the three really breaks my heart lmao. I feel like it would be worse than the fight Diluc and Kaeya had when they were young. This battle would be complex on both sides. Jean and Diluc would see their former friend and brother working against the city that brought him so much happiness. Kaeya would be heartbroken too, having to attack his brother and his close friend. If Mihoyo does have Kaeya choose Khaenri’ah, and they decide to attack Mondstadt. Man™ its going to be REALLY sad. In this route I 100% believe that one of the three will die.

Anyways! That got REALLY LONG HOLY SHIT… I’m sorry lmao this kind of turned into a character analysis of Kaeya hehe. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!!! Thank you for the ask. As you can see, the Kaeya brainrot is real….

#ask #asks #text #kh2prologue #kaeya #jean #diluc #kaeya alberich #diluc ragnvindr #jean gunnhildr #genshin impact

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utenaposter · 3 years ago

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utena episode 29 juri episode my brain has turned into mush and its all just filled with rage about ruka and thoughts about juriori

oiugjgjjfj first things first guys the fucking car conversation this episode. juri's reluctance. ruka just continously pushing her. the scene in the chair room. im gonna die!!! this episode killed me the first time its killing me the third time!!! i dont think i have the brain capacity to form coherent thought but let me try because ooiuguuhh ive been drawing juriori all day too and its all i have on my mind help

anyways like the amount of symbolism in this episode i can kinda get why the english VAs didnt understand that juri was a lesbian at first, but like if youre smart and gay like me you get it immediately and ohhh my god the Look that ruka gives juri in the chair scene after he forcibly kisses her and takes her locket and is about to break it? literally makes me so angry. he understands that juri will never love him and he knows exactly who's in that locket. especially after her reaction.

juri's way of trying not to let her feelings show but doing literally anything to keep the locket and try to keep shiori safe, both the locket picture and actual shiori, its just too much for me to think about its too much!! too much!!!! just her choosing to throw her dignity aside by throwing herself to the ground to save the locket, her choosing again to let her convictions of not fighting anymore go away just for a chance to save shiori, her choosing again to stop the duel when she realizes its pointless because shes lost shiori by losing her locket and realizing that its holding her back. idk man. i feel things.

and then the final scene of shiori running up to juri as theyre leaving school? help man. HELP!!!!

this isnt an analysis post this is me slowly losing my brain by thinking too much about lesbians

i love juri as a character so much. this post made no sense. ill write more abt them later i think because i cant go one day without thinking of juriori.... have these sketches of them i did today and dont look at the hands or youre homophobic

#rgu #revolutionary girl utena #sku #utena #me thoughts...#shoujo kakumei utena #my art

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fresh-prince-of-denmark · 4 years ago

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Cyberpunk 2077 Literary Analysis Pt 7: Leave me Alone, Hemingway, You’re Supposed to be Dead

Surprise bitch I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me.

Cyberpunk spoilers ahead!

Cyberpunk meta literary analysis masterpost here

Okay, so I thought I would be done with this, but it kinda feels like Hemingway has me by the left asscheek and won’t let me go as of late. So here we are: Cyberpunk literature meta-analysis part 7: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway comes up a few times in Cyberpunk, too many times to ignore. It’s not surprising, really. We know that Johnny is actually a pretty well-read guy from some of his passing comments, and if I had to guess, he’d probably really connect to Hemingway. In fact, if you play Johnny’s ending with Rogue, the final quest is called “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (which is also cool since it keeps the theme of all the missions being song titles, as this is also a Metallica song). But for once, this analysis isn’t entirely about Johnny or V. Hopefully this rings a bell (pun intended), as we’re very explicitly told who else really connected to Hemingway.

Jackie Wells.

During the quest Heroes, Mama Wells will ask you to go through Jackie’s garage to find something for the ofrenda. One option is a book, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Earnest Hemingway. Misty will comment that he used to read it before a big job, and that it was important to him. If you choose to bring the book for the ofrenda, V will “read from the book” (I put this in quotes because the passage they read has actually been misattributed, it is a Hemingway quote, but not from FWTBT, rather from another of his works titled “Men at War”):

“When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.”

The majority of our main characters start out as The Fool, naive and feeling like they’re on top of the world, the kind of hubris that can only come with youth. Yet, like Hemingway says, it takes a bullet to give one a dose of reality.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a story of war. Our protagonist, Robert Jordan (I’d be really interested to know if Johnny’s birth name, Robert John Linder, was inspired by this), leaves his cushy job as a college instructor in the United States to join the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Robert begins the novel fairly bland; he has no real friends, no real family, and he feels completely disconnected from the world. In all honesty, he’s boring. Like, if wet cardboard were a person. He doesn’t really care if he lives or dies, not because he’s a badass, but because he really doesn’t have anything to lose. No passion, no connections, nothing he loves that ties him to this earth despite the fact that he is a man of such strong convictions that he willingly joins this war. Robert is tasked with destroying a bridge, meeting comrades of varying philosophies along the way, who become a kind of found family to him. Despite going out of his way to avoid making connections, he falls in love, not just with the love interest Maria, but with his friends, finally giving him something worth fighting for, something connecting him to this life. The novel concludes as the group finally blow up the bridge (a task done in vain, since the Republican side has ultimately sustained more losses than the Fascists), and Robert is injured. He convinces the others to leave him behind so he can buy them time to escape. The novel ends just as it begins; our protagonist lying in wait in a forest, gun in hand, “heart to the ground,” on a bed of pine needles. (For more on cycles/mirrors/reflections, see here).

While there’s a much larger political message here that could parallel the themes of Cyberpunk, I want to focus more on the philosophical side, as it ties in with my previous analysis much more coherently. The biggest theme of this novel is about how interpersonal relationships are what matter most in this life, which is summarized very nicely by the poem by John Donne which not only lends the novel it’s name, but serves as it’s opening epitaph:

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

This poem and the overall meaning of the book work on two levels. The most obvious is that we all die one day, that mortality is fleeting. But on another level, No man is an island. Our identity is tied within our communities, those that love us, and those we live for. “Therefore, send not to know/For whom the bell tolls/It tolls for thee.” Each time a person dies, a piece of all those who loved them dies with them. Funerals are not just for the deceased, but for us, a chance to bury the pieces of ourselves that died with them. “Each is a piece of the continent/Apart of the main/If a clod be washed away by the sea/Europe is the less.”

Johnny is incredibly similar to Robert Jordan. Despite knowing a lot of people and having a lot of connections, Johnny is not particularly loved, and that feeling is mutual. He even tells V that they are the only person who knows him that that doesn’t hate his guts. Both Robert and Johnny are men who base their morals and identity solely on principal and ideals; standing up for what is right, fighting against oppression, rebellion, but that passion is not borne from interpersonal relationships and connections. It is made of hate of the world, not love of their fellow man. This leads to one of Johnny’s fatal flaws; he did not fear death, because he did not feel as if he had anything to lose. He was consumed and driven by hate, not love, leading to all of his failed relationships. Had Johnny something to lose, he may not have taken all of the stupid the risks he did, acting as if he did not care about his own life.

V, in many ways, parallels Maria, Robert’s love interest in the novel. While Robert salvation lies in the love he has for all of his newfound friends, the main focus is on the love interest, Maria. Here’s an interesting bit of dialogue between Maria and Robert:

"Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And I love thee, oh, I love thee so. Are you not truly one? Canst thou not feel it?"

"Yes," he said, "it is true."

"And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine."

"Nor any other legs, nor feet, nor of the body."

"But we are different," she said. "I would have us exactly the same."

"You do not mean that." (20.66-71)

In this moment, Robert and Maria are talking about how they feel as if they have fused into the same person, as if they share a body. Yet there is a key difference in how they view their relationship: Maria wishes that they were exactly the same, while Robert states that she doesn’t mean that. Similarly, while Johnny seems to enjoy the growth he and V provide one another, his greatest fear is V/himself being changed into something they are not. Hmmmm….

Johnny and V are very different people by the end of Cyberpunk, finding meaning in relationships just as Robert has. For V, this means Judy, River, Panem, Kerry, Misty, Vik, etc. And for Johnny, this means V, and by extension, all of the people who make up V’s identity through their love and friendship. Despite dying and rising again as lines of code, V is able to finally show Johnny what it means to be human. His journey, I believe, can be accurate summed up by this quote from the novel:

“This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work.”

In addition, Robert’s final conversation with Maria as he is convincing the others to leave him behind so he can buy them time to escape is nearly identical to Johnny and V’s final conversation:

"Listen to this well, rabbit," he said. He knew there was a great hurry and he was sweating very much, but this had to be said and understood. "Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us. Do you understand?" (43.319)

Here, Robert is telling Maria that because they are the same, only one of them needs to survive in order for them both to live. Compare that to what Johnny tells V:

V: For fucks sake, defend yourself! You’re not even trying!

Johnny: Hmm…sounds kind of familiar. We know that attitude. See, V? Stayin’ with you whether you like it or not.”

This scene is further paralleled by the fact that V crosses a bridge to reach Mikoshi, which is set to be destroyed, just as Robert was tasked with destroying the bridge. Furthermore, in the Suicide ending, the overall theme is about how V “never realized just how many friends they had.” Friends who, in all other endings, were willing to die for V, as losing them meant a piece of themselves dying with them. Similarly, Robert considers killing himself as his friends escape, as the pain of his injury becomes too much to bear. However, he is comforted knowing that his sacrifice will mean that they live, telling himself, "I don't mind this at all now they are away.” Despite now having something to live for, like Johnny, they are still able to brave their deaths as now they have been given meaning. And not just any meaning; love. No longer hate, or rage, or blind idealism. Love.

This is the overall message of Cyberpunk: maybe you won’t change the world. Maybe you won’t win the war. Maybe your sacrifice isn’t going to change history. Maybe, in the grand scheme of the universe, you don’t matter, and you won’t ever be a legend. But you do matter to the people in your life. No man is an island. We were made to be in each other’s lives, to love one another, to change one another for the better. And that’s what life is all about.

#finally an author im familiar with even if it was against my will #like it’s the misogyny for me but god damn it’s some tasty misogyny #cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk2077 #cyberpunk 2077 v #cyberpunk spoilers #cyberpunk meta #cyberpunk 2077 meta #johnny silverhand #v #v cyberpunk #my posts #hemingway #cp2077 #cp2077 spoilers #cp77 #cp project red #jackie wells

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corvixa · 3 years ago

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I am alive! Long, rambly post ahead.

So. I did a thing. After 2 or 3 years on a waiting list of therapy, I got it. Good right? Ahuh...

A weekly appointment at 10.30 am is apparently my kryptonite.

It was fine at first, but I got utterly sidelined with the cumulative effect and the fact I wasn't able to reset my energy. But, I was determined like, I'd breakthrough.

Uh. That did not happen. All I could do was attend that appointment. For the first time since I started writing again post house explosion, I couldn't even write. I managed to not some ideas down. Carry on a few plots in my head. Still, even with my insomnia, I was stuck with my facemask on, desperately trying to get enough energy to eat, and occasionally failing even that.

After I had to take a break for a few weeks running for dental appointments and Covid Vaccines, I gained enough energy back to do that look around and reflect thing.

Hell, I might not have been perfect before this, but I enjoyed things. I chatted with friends. I lurked in the Stark Tower discord plotting new ideas. I got to write. I got to do real-world hobbies. I got to spend time awake with my partners!

So, after my vaccine and several days with a very high fever, I kind of decided. Fuck it. This isn't worth it. I have clawed my little part of this world out, and I am not going to lose it.

Sometimes you have to weigh up the cost-benefit analysis. What good may come from these 16 appointments was utterly stopper by the bomb dropped on my life. So I came out of my fever cave of blankets, had an incredibly hot bath and decided this wasn't working.

The early appointment alone was killing me; I am crepuscular by nature. Not being sarcastic there; this is how I have dealt with severe levels of insomnia since age 12. I tried being an average human that wakes up in the morning and goes to bed at night for decades, and it didn't work. I am most active after 11 pm, and I nap during the day. It's not a perfect fix; if it were, the Gold series would literally not exist as that is my Insomnia in a cape. However, sleeping at least once in a 24 hour period nearly every day is THE WIN. Being not awake at 10.30 am, but already at an appointment, where I was expected to be coherent? Weekly? With no variable illnesses? Even the stint in hospital I had was around me making these appointments... Not getting better from fall.

Honestly, I have no idea what past me was thinking, but after they went to 2 or 3 appointments and didn't feel too bad, they committed hard to this course of action. That was a mistake that I thought I had learned a long time ago, that assessing the work-life balance is critical. This might not be work, but it was the same thing.

So, How am I doing? Better. Not aces, but the Covid fever of doom made me miss last weeks appointment. The week before, it was the Covid.2 Jab and today I had the dentist.

And this morning, before my dental appointment, I started writing. My partners were over the moon. I am not back on full capacitor yet, but I am clawing my way back. Heck, I felt alive enough to prat about in the garden as my partner wanted to take a few pics of me given my pairing of BRIGHT TOXIC GREEN tights and lace trousers. I realised I hadn't set foot in the garden since this therapy thing started. My dog, Loki, was bouncing around like a loon bringing me every stashed ball he could find.

If anything gives you clarity, it's the excitement of a collie confronted with man balls, your partner's joy at you starting something you love again and actually feeling like a human being.

Ness is calling the therapy people when she gets the social confidence points required to deal with bombing me out of this whilst being my stalwart wall, so I don't get bullied onto the phone (hello, Hemiplegic Migraine) or guilted back into just trying a few more sessions.

It's not like my therapist was bad. He was cool. He dealt with this ADHD, Autistic, Severe Insomniac, Asexual weirdo and never once questioned any of these identifiers. I just don't have the energy to do anything back to back, week after week, at 10.30 am—even fun things.

So, I am probably going to sleep a lot. I am not back to my previous form yet; my Hubs is saying I made it out of the cave, but I still have Palladium Poisoning because apparently, I have infected his brain to think of things in Iron Man metaphors.

This is a bit all over, but I felt like I wanted to get it down. Especially for anyone worried about my sudden absence.

TLDR, the road to hell is lined with good intentions; sometimes the good thing becomes the bad thing, sometimes you lose yourself trying to do things the right way, and everything ends up wrong. Sometimes the right thing is the thing people see as wrong. All I know is that I wrote something for the first time this morning because of insomnia, and I couldn't be happier. My mind is starting to pick up speed again, this dense dog of confusion, exhaustion and pain is clearing, and I have goals.

Which I think is what really matters, right?

Oh, side note, some things did get done whilst I was busy being a zombie. After nearly 3 decades of waiting, at 33 (yeah, I've wanted to change my name a long ass time.) I got my name changed! So I can sign this off in a way that makes me smile. I dropped my old first name, and took my first middle name as my new forname. (I was, and still am, one of those ginormous name people.) I also went back in history and timestoned my surname. (So, I was named utterly after my dad. Literally, I have the female version of his name >.< but I wanted to keep that connection to my genealogy whilst not having my dads name.) Boom.

Enjoy the earlier mentioned pictures of me pratting about in the garden. I am a photographer. I do not know how to pose. What you are seeing is sarcasm 😅. (If you want to know where the fabulous tights came from, Google Snag Tights. They are truly a miracle and a gift from the Gods. They have actual sizes and don't tear after one wear, even if you are more leg than human. So you stretch and destroy tights by walking.)

- Morgan / M-Mac-C

#easily excitable autistic woman #i am so tired #therapy #life kicked my ass #sleeping all the time is lonely as feck #name change #MMacC is the new me

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cassyapper · 4 years ago

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jotaro kujo song analysis: “eight” by sleeping at last

i could not figure out what the fuck to title this for a long time. please forgive me ik it’s awkward but it’s the best i got

anyway the song “eight” by sleeping at last made me mentally ill so let’s get into why <3

here’s a link to the song: https://youtu.be/obi4KCh6eHQ

here’s a link to the lyrics i referenced: https://genius.com/Sleeping-at-last-eight-lyrics

be warned there are part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6 spoilers in this

with that let’s begin.

“I remember the minute;/it was like a switch was flipped --/i was just a kid who grew up strong enough/to pick this armor up,/and suddenly it fit” Lengthy first line to start this on i know but cutting it up didn’t make sense so please forgive me… Alright let’s get to the meat of this hm? This line is about when jotaro first manifested star platinum. “I remember the minute, it was like a switch was flipped” fits perfectly with how suddenly and obviously star platinum became known to its user, as jotaro first manifests it when he’s in the middle of a fight, a fight star platinum ends very quickly and brutally. The “i was just a kid who grew up strong enough to pick this armor up” is about jotaro having the willpower to control a stand such as star platinum and not get ill over it. He “grew up strong enough to pick this armor up”, this armor being star platinum (which, yes, star platinum is armor more than a weapon because its strength is used to protect. This is stated explicitly in the jin hashimoto song “star platinum” which was written specifically with jotaro/star platinum in mind, as the title suggests). It also shows how young jotaro was re the “kid” description; he was only 17, the youngest jojo up to that point. the “and suddenly it fit” also mixes with how suddenly star platinum manifested, particularly how jotaro gained passable control over it very quickly

“God, that was so long ago, long ago, long ago…/I was little, I was weak, I was perfectly naive,/and I grew up too quick.” Another long line im sorry it just doesnt make sense to cut it up 😭 Anyway this is part 6 jotaro reflecting on his past self, PARTICULARLY part 3 jotaro, which explains the “god, that was so long ago, long ago, long ago…” segment “I was little, i was weak, i was perfectly naive” is kinda gold coming from part 6 jotaro cause end of part 3 jotaro is canonically when he’s at his strongest but i dont think part 6 jotaro is talking about star platinum in this line. He’s talking about jotaro being tactless and rude and pushing away his loved aways in a disillusioned attempt to keep them safe. By part 6, jotaro has to have known his coping mechanism of self-imposed isolation wasnt fair to his loved ones/himself and it clearly didnt WORK as evidenced by jolyne’s situation, so he’s cursing his younger self for it here. Hence, the calling of part 3 jotaro “little, weak, perfectly naive.” part 3 jotaro starts making the bed that part 6 jotaro ends up having to lay in and he hates him for it. The “and I grew up too quick” part is jotaro acknowledging his trauma. Even before part 3 started jotaro clearly had issues and they just kept building and building and building from part 3 and on. Combined with his self-imposed isolation, jotaro had to grow up quick to survive, and this line is part 6 jotaro reflecting on that

“Now you won’t see all that i have to lose,/all i’ve lost in the fight to protect it.” Remember the self-imposed isolation i mentioned in the last line? This line is about why jotaro does that. He hates being vulnerable. He hates relying on others. We only see him comfortable trusting others to take care of things ONCE the entire series, during the steely dan arc, when he believes in kakyoin’s abilities to keep joseph safe and get the lovers out of him safely. ONCE out of the four parts he’s featured in, out of the three he’s prominent in. jotaro does this, as i previously mentioned, out of a disillusioned attempt to keep those he loves safe, hence the “now you won’t see all that i have to lose” line. This behavior is solidified in jotaro at the end of stardust crusaders, when the two final times he tried to trust that others would handle it resulted in the deaths of over of half those he cared the most about (he may have gotten joseph back, but don’t forget that joseph did actually die). Thus, this decisive night ties into the “all i’ve lost in the fight to protect it” line. He’s lost loved ones but he won’t lose them again, not in the same way at least. Ironically, the self-imposed isolation only puts his loved ones and himself in danger, but i can get into that later.

“I won’t let you in, i swore never again --/i can’t afford, no, i refuse to be rejected” This line kinda ties back with what i was mentioning in the last line, but it hones it a bit more on jotaro’s complete denial of being vulnerable rather than how he acts to ensure he isnt such. “I wont let you in, i swore never again” is a direct tie-in for how jotaro feels after stardust crusaders; he is never going to get as close to anyone or anything the way he was close to the crusaders ever again. Nothing is ever going to matter to him the same way and he is going to make sure of that, as the “swore never again” implies, because he is certain, at least at first, that this will keep others safe. The “i can’t afford, no, i refuse to be rejected” part goes into how selfish and arrogant jotaro’s mentality is. Don’t get me wrong, jotaro’s self-imposed isolation can be seen as selfless, especially because the main driving force behind it is to keep others safe -- but it’s not the only force driving it. Like i said, jotaro doesn’t want to be vulnerable, and to be sure he doesnt feel that way, he needs to ensure he won’t be hurt. Can’t be sad when people die if you were never close to them, right? So as much as it is to protect others, he also is protecting himself by closing off from others. It’s also arrogant of jotaro to assume he is the deciding factor of who lives and dies, that he gets to choose/manipulate the cycle of life and death by deciding on if he opens up to others. Jotaro had this mentality of being a “deciding factor” shoved into his head during the journey to egypt, and that kinda warps his worldview as a result; everything must be his fault. Things go bad surely because he let them somehow. And it’s not jotaro’s fault he’s ill in the head like this but it is still arrogant, and the “i can’t afford, no, i refuse to be rejected” line attests to this.

“I want to break these bones until theyre better/i want to break them right and feel alive” Oh jotaro you have the shittiest fuckign coping mechanisms Alright. “I want to break these bones until theyre better” ties into jotaro throwing himself into dangerous situations alone. He’s just so so damn convinced he can handle everything himself -- bc again, he is led to believe he is the deciding factor of life and death -- he just has to try. If things go wrong, it’s bc he didn’t try hard enough, hence the “break these bones until theyre better”; jotaro will hurt himself and will be convinced he deserved it until he “learns” how to be perfect like he’s “supposed” to be. But being perfect isnt something you can learn, you mentally ill motherfucker jotaro. anyway “I want to break them right and feel alive” ties into the fact jotaro would rather break his body over and over and over rather than tell his loved ones he cares. The only right way to be hurt to him is taking a hit that was meant for those he loves. Jotaro is very much a man of action rather than a man of word, and this line is about his rather unique way of acting (that is, getting beat the fuck up over and over) Basically jotaro can’t tell the people he loves that he, well, loves them, unless he is literally dying. Examples of what i mean: jotaro preferred going on a perilous, 50-day journey to just telling holly he loved her; jotaro preferred getting beat over the head with a rock in the lovers arc rather than risk hurting joseph; jotaro preferred to literally get blown up by sheer heart attack rather than tell koichi to his face he is a good kid; jotaro stepped knowingly into a trap for jolyne and had to literally believe he was in fact saying his last words before he uttered “i’ve always cherished you.”

“You were wrong, you were wrong, you were wrong --/my healing needed more than time” Oh my GODDDddDDDdcdd im sobbing as i type jotaro your head is so so damn ill Okay so i see him spitting this line towards joseph. Let me explain Joseph would no doubt pick up on jotaro’s ptsd and he’ll do his best to console jotaro over the deaths of their friends. But see joseph is ALSO an ill in the head idiot whose idea of therapy is electroshock and who calls ptsd “shell shock”. So all he can offer to jotaro is “youll feel better in time” because that was kinda true for him; he managed to move on in time. What joseph fails to realize is what made him feel better was not time, but the support of those remaining in his life (lisa lisa, suziq, erina, smokey). But jotaro listens and tries to give it time but the thing with jotaro is he just gets worse and worse as time wears on because he deliberately cut himself off from anyone who could console him (as well as got continually traumatized throughout his life), so time never helped but actually made things worse. Thus jotaro spitting “you were wrong, you were wrong, you were wrong, my healing needed more than time”. In terms of timeline, probably happens right after part 5 jotaro stares longingly at the crusaders picture

“When i see fragile things, helpless things, broken things/i see the familiar” Im sorry every new line i start to analyze i begin crying so im just letting you all know incase the coherency takes a dip (as if this was coherent in the first place lmfao) Anyway so this line in relation to Jotaro is about how he projects HARD on the new generation. We see this w his interactions w josuke and koichi, the “fragile things” (there is no way he didnt see koichi as a filler for kakyoin im sorry. Also he just wants josuke safe with his friends like how he wished he was safe with his own friends as a teenager), how he was wary of giorno, “the helpless things” (jotaro is scared he’ll be similar to his dad, just like jotaro is similar enough to dio to share the same stand power…), and his interactions w jolyne, “the broken things” (angry teen in a prison? Come now).

“I was little, i was weak, i was perfect too/now i’m a broken mirror” Throwback to the second line. Once again part 6 jotaro is reflecting but the difference here is that part 3 was when jotaro was last unashamedly happy, but more than that, part 3 jotaro was on his way to healing before everything went to shit. like i mentioned earlier, jotaro only relies on someone else completely once, and that happens in part 3. Jotaro is finally able to trust in someone else’s capabilities, which is what he needed to do before he could allow anyone to help him with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Hence, why part 6 jotaro would describe him as “perfect”; because he would’ve been perfect enough if he could just trust in others like that again But as the line suggests, that went wrong. Jotaro is now a “broken mirror,” which alludes to the fact that while he projects onto the kids, the kids (the ones that know him at least) project onto him as well, especially jolyne, because in part 6 she finally figures out her dad’s thought processes, as she is experiencing those patterns of thinking too. Jotaro is a role model for them in the sense of “see him? Do the opposite of what he did” KJ;DNJ;DN;SN

“But i can’t let you see all that i have to lose/all that i’ve lost in the fight to protect it” Same meaning as before mostly but the repetition is important me thinks because it mimics jotaro like frantically trying to remind himself why he must be distant when all he wanted to do was go home to jolyne and be her father

“I can’t let you in --/ i swore never again,/ i can’t afford to let myself be blindsided” This means roughly the same thing as the previous line that’s similar to this, but the “i can’t afford to let myself be blindsided” is less about jotaro’s selfishness/arrogance and more about how he believes enemies will use his loved ones against him and how goddamn, it would work, it would work so well because jotaro loves so, so damn much It’s a shame distancing himself didn’t work the way he wanted it to and ended up making his loved ones even more vulnerable than they would have been otherwise

“I’m standing guard,/i’m falling apart/and all i want to do is to trust you” (Begins screaming and doesn’t stop) okay so this line is about jotaro and jolyne during the beginning of stone ocean “Im standing guard” alludes to the fact that jotaro is still desperately trying to appear distant and uninterested even as he attempts to break his fucking daughter out of prison “I’m falling apart” ties into jotaro failing miserably at remaining cold towards jolyne, how he eventually caves in and tells her he loves her in addition to taking a literal bullet for her, using time stop to ensure he can make it to her to do so. and also this line ties into how he is literally physically shot and how his memories and stand are taken from him “And all i want to do is to trust you” is directed towards jolyne of course. God his whole “i’ve always cherished you” ties in with this line; like i mentioned earlier, jotaro by part 6 knows his self-imposed isolation is useless, but old habits die hard and also he was in very deep by the time he accepted there was no reason to go in the first place at all. So he doesn’t know how to change, he doesn’t know how to trust jolyne, it’d been 20ish years since he last trusted someone completely, but god he wants to. He wants to trust her. It’s all he wants to do hence this line

“Show me how to lay my sword down/for long enough to let you through” So continuing from the last line, jotaro just wants to let jolyne in. he wants to learn how to do that. I think this line is actually directed towards his younger self; 17 year old jotaro managed to let in a person once, after all (more than one person in fact, but all the crusaders). This would also make more sense w my interpretation of how part 6 jotaro calls part 3 jotaro “perfect” in this regard Essentially it’s jotaro thumbing through his memories to figure out how his past self gathered the security to trust in someone else wholeheartedly...which makes the fact that pucci steals his memories particularly fucked up in this context

“Here i am, pry me open/what do you want to know?” Another line directed toward jolyne. “Here i am, pry me open” refers to how after jotaro tells jolyne he cherishes her, all cards are on the table. He’s shown vulnerability, might as well go full throttle. So, he’s willing to talk to jolyne for the first time ever, especially because she’s a stand user now “What do you want to know?” ties into jotaro being willing to open up, but also the fact that jolyne doesnt really know her dad ):

“I’m just a kid who grew up scared enough/to hold the door shut/and bury my innocence” Hhnghg begins wailing this line is again about post-egypt jotaro. A lot of jotaro’s like...emotional maturation (and even some physical) occurred during the trip to egypt and immediately afterward. he’s in pain and desperately trying to rationalize a way he can be in control of never letting something like what happened in egypt happen again, hence the “im just a kid who grew up scared enough” “To hold the door shut” refers to how jotaro cut off other people, even the people who used to know him very well, like joseph and polnareff and holly “And bury my innocence” i mentioned this in another line but this bit also refers to how jotaro had to grow up quickly to survive, considering his self-imposed isolation and his life path of chasing down dio’s remnants

“But here’s a map, here’s a shovel/here’s my Achilles’ heel” This line is SUPPOSED to be directed toward jolyne but inadvertently it is also directed toward pucci. When jotaro says fuck it and gives up on his pretense of disinterest in jolyne, finally letting her know he loves her, he’s finally building the frame of a bridge to jolyne; he’s ready to do what he’s wanted to for so long, no matter how vulnerable it makes him, and that is to be jolyne’s father. However, pucci takes note of this; he knows to aim for jolyne in the final battle because of jotaro’s earlier actions when he tries breaking jolyne out of prison. It really is a shame how the narrative keeps fucking enforcing jotaro’s shitty self-imposed isolation

“I’m all in, palms out, i’m at your mercy now and i’m ready to begin/i am strong, i am strong, i am strong enough to let you in” Hmm i imagine this line being when jotaro meets back up with jolyne after he gets his memory disk back. The first thing he does is hug her and cradle her close to him, showing off to the world, right in front of pucci, how much his daughter means to him. But jotaro, at least for the moment, is not scared to be vulnerable anymore. Ever since he decided to give up his cold facade, he was ready to let jolyne in, and he finally has the chance to do that at least a little right before the final battle, which is what this line is about

“I’ll shake the ground with all my might/i will pull my whole heart up to the surface” Final battle in stone ocean,,, What the “i’ll shake the ground will all my might” line refers to is jotaro’s willingness to use star platinum the world during the battle. He’s ready to go all in to save the world, and most importantly, save jolyne, even if he has to use the source of his greatest trauma to do it. Jotaro’s a key player and he knows it, has known it for a long time, and this time he’s going to use that for his happy ending. And well, as i mentioned in the last line, jotaro’s done with the self-isolation and throws himself into the role of jolyne’s father, at least as much as he has the right to throw himself into. This is mostly what the “i will pull my whole heart up to the surface” line refers to

“For the innocent, for the vulnerable/i’ll show up to the frontlines with a purpose” More stone ocean final battle. The “innocent and vulnerable” jotaro is showing up for are jolyne, namely, but also hermes and emporio, and beyond that, the world. Jotaro understands how serious this is and he’s always been a force meant for protection, so he is here to do just that, which is what the “i’ll show up to the frontlines with a purpose” line refers to. Jotaro doesnt believe he’s a good person -- and he might not be, in the grand scheme of things -- but he does fight for what he believes is right, he always has, he mentions this way back in stardust crusaders during his fight with kakyoin. He’s never going to let injustice stand, especially not when he knows he’s such a key player

“And i’ll give all i have, i’ll give my blood, give my sweat --/an ocean of tears will spill for what is broken” This line actually applies to all the “final battles” jotaro has been involved in; part 3, part 4, and part 6. Jotaro, as i mentioned in the last line, has a strong sense of justice and is a force that first and foremost tries to protect, which the “i’ll give all i have, i’’l give my blood, give my sweat” part of this line refers to. Jotaro gives his all, has given his all, to rid the world of dio’s influence, he ruined his entire fucking life to do so, and this line gives credence to that. “An ocean of tears will spill for what is broken” refers to jotaro mourning all the what-ifs in his life, which are all tied with how the outcomes of these final battles go. If part 3 didnt end the way it did, jotaro would know how to trust still, he wouldve been happy even, maybe he wouldnt have had to sacrifice the rest of his life to dio; if part 4 didn’t end the way it did, maybe jotaro couldve gone home to his daughter, maybe he couldve been a bit of a better dad (this is because kids were involved in part 4 even if they didn’t try to because stand users attract stand users, and jotaro couldnt risk doing that to his daughter, so he ends up never coming home); and now for part 6, jotaro hopes that if it ends just a little better than the previous two, jotaro could at least died a satisfying death of sacrificing himself for jolyne, or maybe even got a chance to try mending his relationship with jolyne if they both survive

“I’m shattered porcelain, glued back together again” So this line speaks to both physical and emotional states Jotaro was physically “shattered porcelain” when he lost his stand and memory and also was shot, and he was “glued back together again” when he got medical attention and jolyne got back his disks Jotaro was emotionally “shattered porcelain” due to the fact he couldnt trust anyone completely since he was 17 goddamn years old but he’s “glued back together again” in the sense he’s ready to finally, finally try and be vulnerable in order to save his relationship with jolyne

“Invincible like i’ve never been” This line hurts so fucking much because i believe jotaro was optimistic, all things considered, at the beginning of the final fight in stone ocean. After all, he knows he’s an important figure in all this, he has his stand disk and memories back, he and jolyne and the others have a plan, and he has a future he wants to fight for in addition to the world’s continued functioning So he feels “invincible” like he’s never felt before because not even during the part 3 final battle with dio did he have the hope for the future he has now. But then. Then pucci brings out the knives. And the man who could control time never had enough in the end. He dies and cant even save jolyne with his death. The world ends. He failed. I think this is perfectly represented with how suddenly the song ends. It just perfectly encapsulates the tragedy that is jotaro kujo and i cant stop fucking thinking about it

thanks for reading all this if you did. jotaro kujo makes me feel mentally ill

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mcmactictac · 3 years ago

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Always Gold by Radical Face is a c! crime boys song please let me elaborate.

First of all, Welcome home son by radical face is a c! Tommy and c! Techno song. So as an sbi enthusiast I think it’s fun to give them songs by the same artist who have very similar vibes. Radical face has a wonderful job of calmly showing intense emotion. When you listen to the words in a lot of their songs it’s very emotional, but you can also tune out and just listen to the music. I’m working my way through their discography but they just radiate fanon sbi vibes. Same energy as a piece of fanart I saw a long time ago with Tommy sleeping on Wilburs lap as techno leans against them. Just that calm and relaxed sense of love and belonging.

Anyways analysis time woo let’s crank out some lyrics. Honestly the lyrics are so perfect throughout I’m basically going to include most of the song oops.

“We were tight knit boys, Brothers in more than name. You would kill for me And knew that I'd do the same”

Already off to a good start. I mean the tight knit part is obvious, like they’re both incredibly close with each other, especially at the beginning. Brothers in more than name?? Canonically Wilbur and Tommy aren’t siblings but they still SHARE that brotherly bond they still think of each other of family after everything. “You would kill for me and knew that I’d do the same” at the start? When they’re protecting their country together?? Yeah because they’re FAMILY they care about each other so much.

“And it cut me sharp, Hearing you'd gone away. But everything goes away, Yeah everything goes away”

Do I need to explain this one. I’m taking gone away as a reference to death here, like he’s up and left Tommy, and suddenly he’s just. Gone. Also the everything goes away is a great way to show the beginning of c! Tommys trauma, how he always feels like good things are going to be taken away from him. No matter what he has, his friends, his country, his discs, it’s all going to be gone eventually. Good things never seem to last for him.

“But I'm going to be here until I'm nothing but bones in the ground. And I was there, when you grew restless”

Wilbur talking about lmanberg as “here”. He knows he’s never going to leave it, the country he built. He lived there and that’s where he’ll die. The captain always goes down with his ship. The restless line reminds me of pogtopia, like Tommy watching as Wilbur started to lose it, started to grow more and more unstable. He was there for everything, the good and the bad even as he watched his brother descend into this downwards spiral and not being able to help him.

“Left in the dead of night. And I was there, when three months later. You were standing in the door all beat and tired and I stepped aside”

Now there’s two ways we could take this one. We could take a brief tour to sbi land and make this about Tommys exile, like he left exile at night after dream blew it all up, and he ended up at technos. And when Techno finally found him there it’s still that same kid he knew before who is just tired and needing someone, and so he lets him in. OR we could make this in reference to Wilburs revival. The three months later would be a reference to the time passed before Wilbur was revived. Now I could make this soft or I could make this angsty so I provide multiple options. 1. Tommy steps aside so Wilbur can see the sunrise, see the works that he’s missed and truly enjoy it again (not canon but shh) 2. I stepped aside but it’s Tommy moving away from Wilbur. Going no, you hurt me and I’m sorry that you’re suffering but I can’t be here for you anymore. 3. Or we got that nice metaphorical door of Tommys life and tommy seeing the brother he lost and choosing to let him “inside”, back into his life despite everything.

“We were opposites at birth I was steady as a hammer, No one worried cause they knew just where I'd be. And they said you were the crooked kind, And that you'd never have no worth But you were always gold to me”

Tommy is steady! Tommy wants the same things, he wants to protect his country, his friends and his discs. Everyone always knew what Tommy wanted and he was very open about what he cared about so everyone knew what was going on with him. Referring to Wilbur as the crooked one, the one who causes problems by creating a drug van, starting a war, blowing up his country. He had no worth because he thought so little of himself that he had to replace his personality with his actions. But tommy still sees him for who he is and up to Pogtopia that’s his big brother. That’s the man he would follow anywhere and trusts his whole world with. Wilbur was always special to tommy, even when he wasn’t to others.

“And back when we were kids, We swore we knew the future. And our words would take us half way 'round the world. But I never left this town and you never saw New York”

My main focus here is on the “but I never left this town” Wilbur always stayed in L’manberg, till the very end. He could never go anywhere else, and he didn’t. This also relates back to another song on my crimeboys list, two birds by Regina Spektor. Wilbur is never going to let go of L’manberg. It’s a part of who he is and he’s never going to be able to “leave” it. The you never saw New York line could be tommy because who knows Tommys plans before l’manberg. Then he got so wrapped up in this country he built that it became his everything, and he never got a chance to do anything else because of the effect it had on him. (I know this is stretching canon bear with me I like angst)

“And we ain't ever cross the sea. But I am fine with where I am now, This home is home, and all that I need. But for you, this place is shame. But you can blame me when there's no one left to blame. Oh I don't mind”

So many thoughts I don’t even know if I can make this coherent. For you this place is shame for Wilbur ESPECIALLY. It’s a reminder of the explosion he created, the hurt he caused the people who’s lives he ruined. He wants it to stand for all it was before, but he has to think about how it’s a source of hurt for so many people and how he sees that as his fault. I don’t think I can form coherent thoughts on the rest of this, enjoy

“All my life i’ve never known where you've been. There were holes in you, The kind that I could not mend. And I heard you say Right when you left that day, Does everything go away? Yeah, everything goes away. But I'm going to be here till forever, So just call when you're around.”

Final paragraph folks!! Ive never known where you’ve been! Tommy can never get a read on Wilbur and his emotions because he internalizes and hides them! He’s never going to be able to know and understand because Wilbur won’t let him! Holes in you the kind that I could not mend? YES. Wilbur is mentally ill and tommy cannot fix that, and he shouldn’t have to be the one responsible for helping Wilbur. Right when you left that day, the 16th, the day he left for the last time. Another reminder to tommy that everything leaves, nothing is guaranteed. L’manberg is gone and so is Wilbur. If we look at this pre revival, I’m gonna be here til forever could be Wilbur at L’manberg. He died there, and that’s where he’s always going to stay. He might be gone, and L’manberg might be gone but they’ll still always be there in spirit (get it spirit. Ghost. Ghostbur building L’manberg? Anyways...)

Mhm that was longer than I meant it to be I am working on multiple more dsmp playlists and I will share once I’m done and maybe do some more of these cause I find them fun. I also did not edit this at all so sorry if this is incoherent

#c! wilbur #Wilbur soot #dream smp Wilbur #dsmp Wilbur #dream smp #tommy and Wilbur #crimeboys #always gold #radical face #crimeboys songs #crimeboys music #Wilbur song #tommy song #c! crimeboys songs #lmanberg #l’manberg #lmanburg #fanon crimeboys

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incorrect-ikevamp-quotes · 4 years ago

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hey i love your in depth analysis’s you’re super smart and comte deserves everything and that’s on period but i’ve always wondered what is actually comte’s net worth? like how much money does he really have and like how?! i know he’s a noble but for real something’s up lol💀 also if you were to guess how rich would he be in the 21st century in mc’s time? sorry ik that’s a lot of questions but i just need to know lmao

Ah, thank you friend! 💕💕💕

As to answering your curiosity, I must admit I don’t know anything for certain when it comes to Comte’s sizable fortune. That being said, I can offer what I understand to be the source of his conceivably endless wealth.

Mild Comte rt spoilers below the cut

There are two factors that I think contribute a great deal to his material prosperity. The first being his pureblood status. Remember that to be a pureblood means that you must have been raised by two vampires who were also purebloods. As such, we can understand that le Comte receives potentially centuries’ worth of an inheritance from the moment he is born (and we get no indication of siblings with whom he must share). Where this money comes from I can’t say for certain, but there is reasonable evidence to assume that his parents probably amassed their wealth over a very long period of time. Though he speaks of it in passing, Comte mentions that he only recently took up his family legacy. As such, we can understand that he had been avoiding his noble lineage/title and amassed endowment for almost four hundred years, give or take. Knowing this it can be reasonable to assume that some of the money grew as a product of time’s passing, and probably profitable management of the family’s relics/more expensive resources. I know little about financial management, but I have no doubt his starting point was probably staggering in accordance with this context.

The second are his lifelong journeys around the world. I very much doubt he wouldn’t amass a sizable fortune of his own and collection of priceless artifacts over four hundred years of life. Even without his inheritance, he probably had plenty of money that he just didn’t have much use for. (Remember, purebloods are fairly sturdy; they have no great need to eat human food on a regular basis or need much by way of medical care. The most he probably spent was on alcohol or maybe gambling in his wilder days lmfao. Okay but now I need a fic of him scamming casinos and wealthier nobles for shits and giggles just because he enjoys watching bastards balk/squirm...). Expanding on that, I don’t think Comte engaged in any kind of financial pursuit that meant exploiting the weak and vulnerable. I say that only because the game has shown us a man that is highly principled; if he deems it against his personal values (which tend to be decidedly egalitarian) he will never do it. He is a very easygoing man, but that’s not to be mistaken for careless or without an obstinate bone in his body. Make no mistake, if he disagrees with somebody or disapproves of a course of action, indications of his displeasure will be clear.

To those that would offer unscrupulous designs, the only way I could really see that happening is if it was a much younger, perhaps more naive Comte. And even so, I don’t think he would keep whatever benefits he wrought in such an exchange; I imagine he would be much more interested in restoring the dignity of the offended parties. In his own route he says outright that he operates on the principle of Noblesse Oblige (”nobility obligates”), and we see him act on it time and time again. For those who have never heard of the phrase, it is a French expression meant to convey the sense that with any kind of excessive privilege comes a dual responsibility to look after those without the same resources. It was a concept very much hammered home by the women writers of the late 1800s--such as Elizabeth Gaskell--who were less than pleased to see flagrant displays of wealth while people where languishing in poverty. They often took it a step further, saying that intervention shouldn’t be something that poor people should be expected to beg for to deserve. Rather, the wealthy were obligated to pay attention and make an effort, no matter how thankless. Given what I understand about Comte, I think he is very much in agreement with that sentiment. He won’t give what he can’t offer, but anything he has in excess--or even in good measure--he will give without any trepidation or ill feeling.

For those that might argue foul play in regards to preserving his reputation, I can’t really see him engaging in industries that are exploitative even if it meant upholding social contacts. We have seen him often speak to the questionable nature of other nobles and their actions, and he does not excuse them or seem to agree with them at all. He may offer pleasantries and pretenses, but I don’t think he truly befriends or chooses to work with people like that. At best, he tolerates their existence and offers them placating smiles/letters. His title means absolute shit to him if it means he has to watch a person (especially one that he can help) suffer in absolute silence. I’ve said it before, but it’s literally the only reason Leonardo tolerates his noble status. Leonardo has been unequivocal about his sheer disdain for the ruling class, and while Comte does not expound to the same degree--I’d wager his feelings are similar. The difference, I think, is that Comte tends to believe in both the vile and redeeming qualities people can offer. He sees people entirely for their potential; he only removes people from his life when they prove to have no ability to improve/change or care about others. Leonardo, perhaps, is devoid of this longstanding patience by comparison. (He is in many ways a radical; believes hierarchies are entirely vile constructs intended to deprive people of basic necessities and intimacy, and must fundamentally be abolished). If people seem shallow or interested in things he does not deem important, he zones right out/ignores them and considers helping them a waste of time, a hopeless endeavor. Comte seems to be more capable of sympathizing with other people’s perspectives, and even enjoys supporting them if given the chance. He may dislike hierarchies, but he’s a realist by comparison--he sees that hierarchies are how the world manages to operate with some coherence, and he weaves his way through and around these systems to improve the living conditions of people who need it. The exchange here is that Comte is comparatively brittle when compared to Leonardo; the second he sees someone (especially an innocent) getting hurt or excessive displays of force, he gets so furious/terrified that he begins to lose control.

As to Comte’s modern financial status, I’m really not sure if I’d be able to predict that. But given that most of the people in the world who began with sizable fortunes have been able to preserve and expand them exponentially, I could see him landing comfortable in the millions at least. (I offer that because to be in the billions usually means wholescale theft, and I doubt he’d get to that point with his careful, historic accumulation of money). I’d wager he would donate whatever he didn’t need if he wasn’t still taking care of the men, but otherwise he’d probably use his resources to spoil his boyos and loved ones.

#asks #ikevamp #ikemen vampire #ikevamp comte #ikevamp saint germain #ikevamp leonardo #ikevamp meta #ikevamp mild spoilers #i really cant imagine comte as anything other than a sincere benefactor ¯\_(ツ)_/¯#i mean people are free to interpret him as shady or sketchy #but i think that's more because he keeps his cards very close to his chest #people tend to be uncomfortable when a person has no discernible weakness to exploit or obvious shortcoming #its the same reason people prefer flawed characters/heroes in stories a lot #but i just think he's neat in his constant effort to be mindful of the people around him and wish to bring them joy #sometimes it isnt any deeper than that #and it makes me livid when people like arthur try to misconstrue his intentions #sure people can have bad motivations but that doesnt mean you should seek foul play from every single person you meet #say it with me kids! 'blind cynicism will make friends look like enemies.'#at least jeanne has the grace to admit he was wrong #i mean was i suspicious of comte at first? yeah ofc #ive met maybe three people like him in my entire life #but it's called: using your judgement to determine if a person is a reasonable threat to you #anywho that's all i have to say on the matter #i hope this helped to answer your questions!#rambles

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kaiunkaiku · 5 years ago

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I return from the grave with a fic! I swear I wasn’t meaning to publish this on April 1st but what can you do, I’m beyond done with this particular piece and it’s finally ready. Fuck it.

Fandom: D.Gray-man

Warnings: Illness, delirious narrator at times, attempted and botched character analysis

@i-am-too-sick it’s finally here!

Kanda is shaking.

Lavi has been aware of this fact for a while, now.

Kanda has been shaking for a while, now.

Lavi would like to do something about it, since Kanda is obviously feeling like utter hell, but his last attempt to approach ended with Mugen’s hilt against his throat, so he isn’t about to try that again any time soon. His biggest accomplishment is his jacket acting as Kanda’s pillow.

But Kanda does look horribly pale, the dark of his hair only contrasting it further in the dim lights of the train cabin. Lavi wonders how high his fever currently is, but he has no way of checking. Kanda is, in general, very strict about his personal space, but right now it seems to be even worse. Lavi has tried asking, several times, but the responses have consisted of one-syllable answers, muttered grumbling and murderous glares, and he isn’t a big fan of being the target of Kanda-level bloodlust.

Lavi just hopes he’ll manage to keep his head until Marie and General Tiedoll join them at the next station in a few hours.

The few hours pass and Kanda’s condition shows no signs of improving – rather, it almost looks like he’s getting worse. The shaking is more obvious now, and he’s sweating. His hair is plastered to his face that has taken a quite worrying ashy hue. The worst is his ragged breathing that he seems to be trying to control with no success at all. Lavi is fairly sure Kanda’s body is just trying to get rid of whatever is wrong, but because this is Kanda, it’s doing it at a horribly accelerated pace. Kanda is probably trying to fight it, because Lavi can’t even imagine how awful it must be for something that’s supposed to last presumably over a week, because if he’s correct Kanda has some nasty variant of the flu, to cram itself in all its misery into a day or two.

XxX

Generally, Kanda doesn’t have anything in particular against trains. They’re certainly faster than walking, and he’s willing to stand irritating company, as long as the company is silent, if it means he can sit down and maybe nap (he prefers walking with Allen, because the fucking bean sprout cannot shut the fuck up, which means walking far enough ahead of him is the only way to get away from the incessant yapping).

Right now, though, the train cabin feels like a rattling death trap. He’s only vaguely aware of Lavi’s concerned stare, and somehow he feels like he’s both burning and freezing in his own skin. He’s fairly sure his hands are shaking too badly to even hold Mugen anymore, so if Lavi decides to try and come closer again, he’s not really sure what’s going to happen. He’ll probably hurl.

Kanda’s body feels like he’s been fighting for a week straight, and his head feels like it’s simultaneously being crushed and melding itself back together. Both are even on their own enough to make him scream on a bad day, and if he knew with any certainty that screaming would make the pain stop, he’d do it in a heartbeat. He has, however, come to the conclusion that even the slightest of sounds makes it exponentially worse, so he remains silent and grits his teeth. The rattling of the train is awful enough, even if Lavi’s uniform jacket does soften it ever so slightly.

Lavi is saying something, Kanda thinks, and it sets little explosions off in his head and he wants to scream again, but he can’t take a deep enough breath to make that much noise anyway. If he didn’t know better, he’d say he’s currently working with maybe half a lung instead of two. Kanda opens his eyes to send a menacing glare in Lavi’s direction, but his vision is so blurry he can barely make out where the damn rabbit is at the moment.

He can still see the lotus, though. Clear and sharp. Everywhere.

It takes him a moment to realize that the train isn’t moving. Stringing together a coherent train of thought is far more difficult than it should be, and it isn’t until he sees a flash of familiar dark fabric that he realizes they’re probably at a station.

And then the General shouts, “Yuu-kun!” or at least Kanda is fairly sure he does, and Kanda feels all of his muscles lock up in protest to the sudden noise. There’s a choked gasp that probably came from his own mouth, and then a hand on his face and it’s both awful and a blessing because the hand is cool against his burning skin but his skin also feels like it’s burning off and the contact makes it worse and suddenly Kanda has no idea which way he’s lying down, where’s up where’s down is he moving is he not moving why does someone keep screaming his name why is his heart trying to beat itself out of his chest why is his throat being shred to pieces

what the hell is happening.

XxX

Kanda is shaking.

He was shaking before, too, but that was more on the side of shivering. Right now, he’s nearly convulsing, and Lavi just prays he’s not going to have a seizure, because he’s not a doctor, Marie is not a doctor and General Tiedoll is not a doctor, and the cabin is on the smaller side. They have another cabin booked for them, presumably similar to this one, so they don’t have to spend the remaining trip all in the same small space, and Lavi has no idea why the hell he’s thinking about that right now, because there’s something very, very wrong with Kanda.

Marie is standing at the door, although he looks like he’d rather scoop Kanda up from where he’s lying, curled up to himself around Mugen, and carry him out and to the nearest inn. If Lavi is being honest, Kanda kind of looks like that would be good for him.

General Tiedoll has his hand on Kanda’s cheek and a concerned frown on his own face. Kanda himself is simultaneously trying to breathe and cough his lungs out, and Lavi is afraid Kanda is really going to pass out soon, if not from anything else then from lack of oxygen. The General is trying to talk to him, or at least to get his attention somehow, but Kanda doesn’t look like he’s even hearing, let alone responding.

And then, Kanda stops. Suddenly all the movement and noise ceases and his eyes widen for a fraction of a second. “Yuu-kun?” the General asks, voice just as concerned as his face. A horrible whimper, barely audible, escapes Kanda’s lips, and Lavi decidedly never, never wants to hear anything so awful ever again, and his eyes roll back. Kanda goes limp and both Marie and Lavi surge forward, even though General Tiedoll is already turning his pupil over on his back. He swiftly hands Mugen to Lavi, who nearly drops it.

Kanda looks disturbingly peaceful unconscious, Lavi thinks. His breathing is still messed up, but his face is slack and void of any irritation or discomfort, as if it hasn’t been ten seconds since he was in excruciating pain and shaking badly enough for it to be heard.

XxX

Waking up is… weird. Everything is a little fuzzy, everything is a lot painful and nothing feels quite right. There’s something cool on his face, covering his eyes, which is okay because he’s fairly sure he doesn’t want to see anything right now, and he’s freezing.

There’s a hand in his hair and something under his head.

The fingers on his scalp nearly make Kanda sit up and flinch back, but before his reflexes can kick in, he recognizes the familiar feeling.

Marie.

That’s good, Marie is good. Marie is constant, Marie is safe, and although Kanda isn’t quite sure how he ended up in this situation, he feels horrible enough to let Marie run his fingers through his hair. He remembers feeling sick earlier, too, vaguely before he and Lavi boarded the train, and then progressively worse after that. He remembers Lavi prodding him, remembers Lavi offering him his jacket at some point and not even bothering to refuse.

After that, most things are just pain and haze. He can kind of recall pointing Mugen, hilted, at the damn rabbit’s throat, but that’s a usual occurrence and he could be remembering a totally different time.

“You’re awake?”

Kanda can’t help but flinch at the sudden voice. It’s quiet and low, and doesn’t aggravate his head as badly as it probably could. Marie’s fingers stop moving for a moment before continuing their journey along his scalp. Kanda offers a low hum in a belated response. He thinks, at least. He can’t seem to distinguish between seconds and minutes.

“You gave us quite a scare,” Marie continues, and while both his presence and voice are familiar and safe and comforting, just concentrating on the words feels exhausting. “How do you feel?”

“Like my body is trying to stitch itself together while being shred to pieces,” Kanda mutters in response, through a raw throat. He isn’t sure how much sense that sentence made, but he can’t seem to be sure of anything right now. There’s a weird pressure in his head that’s distorting everything, or maybe it’s the constant, dizzying rush of blood in his ears. Marie’s voice sounds oddly distant, almost like an echo.

The train lurches in some direction, Kanda isn’t sure which because he’s not sure which way he himself is except that he’s on his back and he thinks his head is on Marie’s lap, and there’s a crash and some cursing coming from somewhere and the whatever was on his face slides off. There’s a hand on his waist and he doesn’t know how long it’s been there and suddenly everything is spinning even though he has his eyes closed, no he doesn’t when did he open his eyes, there are flowers at the edges of his vision, he thinks, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t feel like himself and he just wants things to stay still and he can’t breathe—

And then there’s red in his vision, a touch on his shoulder and all he can hear is white noise but Lavi’s lips are moving and the world tilts, there’s a hand on his back and he feels vaguely like he’s going to throw up. Swallows thickly. The hands on him are doing something, pushing him somewhere and he wants them off, off, he doesn’t know whether he’s burning or freezing again because maybe it’s both. It kind of feels like the time the Science Section freaks accidentally set him on fire and then dunked him in ice cold water because it was November, except that this is his entire body burning and not just his arm.

Huh. He still hasn’t murdered Reever for that.

XxX

Kanda is shaking.

It’s more on the shivering side again, which Lavi supposes is good, but he’s also borderline delirious. He’s barely reacting to anything, even though according to Marie he was still responsive just moments ago. Sudden movements, Lavi assumes, are doing him no favors.

The more pressing issue, however, is the fact that Kanda’s face is clammy with sweat and positively burning. His pupils are dilated so far Lavi can barely see the blue of Kanda’s eyes around them, and keeping calm is becoming increasingly difficult.

The fact is, though, that currently Lavi is the person with most medical knowledge present, so he just has to suck it up.

“Marie,” he starts, directing his words to the older Exorcist, hands still on Kanda’s shoulders. “We need to get his fever down. He’s burning up.” Marie nods and starts unbuttoning Kanda’s uniform jacket. It hurts Lavi’s heart, because Kanda obviously feels like he’s freezing, but getting his body temperature down is more important than comfort right now.

General Tiedoll is still negotiating with the train staff about a bigger cabin with an actual bed, which shouldn’t be so difficult because they’re the Black Order, but apparently some civilians can be more of a pain in the ass than an Akuma or three.

It doesn’t matter, Lavi tells himself as he moves to open the cabin’s window. Marie is in the process of taking off Kanda’s shirt, a process made difficult by the fact that Kanda has no idea what’s going on and probably just wants to stay warm. Marie is talking to him in a low voice, trying to make him relax enough to let him get the shirt off, because Kanda has his arms locked around himself.

Lavi needs water. He also needs ice, but he’s not sure he can find that on the train. They have two stations left until the final one, and from there they’re supposed to make their way to London. Though, Lavi suspects they might have to stay in France a bit longer than expected, because he’s not hauling Kanda across the English Channel in this condition. That means more expenses for the Order, of course, but Komui will probably understand.

No, Komui will definitely understand, Lavi decides, because despite the fact that the man is a total whackjob, he also cares deeply for all his subordinates. If it wasn’t for his workload and tendency to get seasick, Lavi wouldn’t be surprised to see Komui drag himself across the Channel just to check on Kanda. One or two nights in Calais for four Exorcists isn’t going to destroy the Order’s budget.

And now, he needs that water. He trusts Marie to take care of Kanda – he’s been an Exorcist long enough to know actual, proper first-aid (one would expect any person to know first-aid when they frequently fight against killer machines, but Kanda absolutely sucks at that), and more importantly, Kanda trusts him.

XxX

Marie is worried, there’s no other way to express it. He trusts Lavi to know what he’s doing, but with the way Kanda’s skin is burning or heart is beating or breathing is sounding, all of his concerns can’t be put to rest with trust alone. Kanda is shivering against him already, and having to take off his shirt is next level of horrible.

He’s not quite sure whether Kanda’s rapid pulse is because of the sickness or the fact that he’s just very agitated, or maybe both, but trying to calm him down is doing absolutely nothing. Marie doesn’t know if Kanda is even registering anything that’s happening around him, except for the fact that he’s cold and miserable.

What he does know is that Kanda would probably rather be wrapped in all the available jackets and blankets and lying down. That, however, isn’t going to happen, so Marie settles for trying to soothe away the worst of Kanda’s mental discomfort until Lavi arrives with the water.

He’s been running his hands through Kanda’s messy hair for a few moments when he hears something in Kanda’s chest hitch, and his fellow pupil jerks away from him violently. At first it almost sounds like he can’t draw breath at all, but the coughing fit that follows is almost worse.

If he couldn’t breathe at all, Marie could do something about it. Now, however, he can merely rub Kanda’s back behind his lungs and hope it helps, and make sure Kanda doesn’t fall over and to the floor. Kanda’s hands are grasping at whatever they can get a hold of until the other one finds Marie’s wrist and latches there.

Marie both feels and hears the rattling from Kanda’s lungs, and it’s one of those moments when he’s glad he doesn’t have to see but also wishing he didn’t have to hear.

Kanda’s fingers feel like ice against Marie’s wrist, which is disconcerting, as both his back and chest are far, far too warm. Marie doesn’t recall Kanda being sick ever before, just injured or exhausted, and he’s known his fellow pupil for nine years. Of course there have been months in between, missions with other people and assignments on the opposite sides of the world, but Kanda has always known of his injuries beforehand when they’ve met up again, without him telling him, so Marie finds it reasonable to assume that he would have been informed had Kanda ever been ill. He has long since stopped listening to stories of Kanda’s injuries, because Kanda tends to rely on his regenerative abilities and approximately every third story is got blasted through the chest or had his stomach blown up or something equally fatal for anyone who isn’t Kanda.

Now, as Kanda is trembling in his arms, Marie finds it impossible to believe that something as fragile as this kid could ever survive anything like being clawed through. He knows Kanda is strong, it’s an undeniable fact, but right now he also seems very, very human.

XxX

Kanda is shaking.

Lavi nudges the door of the cabin open with his foot, both hands holding buckets of water and General Tiedoll right behind him with an armful of rags and towels. It comes as a surprise that both Kanda and Marie are on the floor, but the shaking is something Lavi has almost come to expect. It’s worse again, not as bad as it was earlier when he passed out but definitely more than shivering. There’s probably a word for that particular state, Lavi thinks, at least in some language he knows, but now is not the time to think about vocabulary.

The sound that’s supposedly Kanda’s breathing is absolutely horrible. It’s wheezing and sounds like it’s going through a clogged filter. Kanda is on his knees, his weight supported by Marie and his back heaving, and his hair hangs around his face limply. Marie is also on his knees, both arms fully dedicated to preventing Kanda from toppling over and looking far more concerned than what Lavi would like to see. Kanda has a death grip on Marie’s arm – Lavi can see the muscles in his forearm straining from the strength of it, and it must hurt like hell for Marie.

Lavi sets the buckets down and hopes the movement of the train won’t knock them over. Kanda’s face is just as pale as it has been for the entirety of the journey, washed of all color, but the delirious, vacant look is gone – he looks more like the Kanda Yuu Lavi knows with a frown on his face, even if it is pained. Lavi isn’t sure whether that’s a good sign or not, but it gives him some hope. Hell, maybe he’ll get a response at some point.

Apparently General Tiedoll has similar ideas – he’s already at Kanda’s side when Lavi has just made sure that the buckets stay still. The General lifts a hand to Kanda’s cheek, touch tender and eyes soft, and Lavi feels more like an outsider than he usually does. Those three are a family (a family of four, they’re supposed to be, and Daisya’s absence is still a gaping wound in the space to Kanda’s right), and Lavi feels like he’s intruding on something private he shouldn’t even be seeing.

Lavi settles himself carefully to Kanda’s left with a damp towel he drapes on Kanda’s shoulders. A shudder works itself up Kanda’s spine, and Lavi watches it travel through his shoulders to his fingertips that loosen a little around Marie’s wrist. It’s going to bruise, Lavi can see that, and Kanda is going to feel bad and guilty about it later and have no idea what to do about those feelings, and Lavi is going to have to try and talk him through that. Sure, it’s nice that Kanda is having normal human emotions these days, instead of just anger, annoyance and frustration, but it’s a work in progress.

Kanda lets out a huff that could almost be a whimper, and tries to curl further up to himself and into Marie. It’s almost pitiful, almost, but mostly it’s as close to heartbreaking as Lavi is likely to ever find anything.

That’s a thought he files neatly in a box that he tries to throw away but ends up not being able to.

Together they gather Kanda from the floor and Marie settles them into the position they were in earlier, Kanda lying down with his head on Marie’s lap and still gripping Marie’s uniform – his hand has moved to clutch the fabric of Marie’s sleeve, but a deathgrip is a deathgrip. General Tiedoll carefully takes Kanda’s free hand and murmurs something Lavi deliberately doesn’t pay attention to.

He steps out to find someone he can chew out for still not having that larger cabin.

XxX

Once Kanda settles down and they manage to maneuver him into a position where his breathing doesn’t sound like he’s going to asphyxiate in the immediate future, General Tiedoll stands up from the floor he’s been crouching down to provide his young apprentice some comfort. He wets a rag, wrings it out and sets it on Kanda’s forehead, and Kanda’s breath pauses momentarily but doesn’t hitch. The rattle in his lungs is still there, but it sounds more contained and less likely to explode at any given moment; Marie resists the urge to sigh in relief.

The General takes Kanda’s hand again, and starts to quietly talk about their last assignment. He omits everything worse than the run-of-the-mill destruction level ones cause, and instead talks about the children, the food, the generosity of the villagers, the birds that sang in the trees at the lake’s shoreline. He doesn’t mention the six-year-old girl who lost her leg and entire family in an Akuma attack, or the fourteen-year-old boy who died saving her – instead, he mentions the blind child who was elated to meet Marie. The teenager who sang her voice raw at the front of a half-destroyed town hall where the people gathered to draw strength from each other. The group of elderly ladies who put their ingredients together and spent two days cooking and baking so everyone had food.

By the time Lavi comes back, Kanda’s breath has evened out as much as it’s likely to do right now, and he’s at least dozed off if not outright fallen asleep. There’s an aura of irritation around Lavi that tells Marie the train staff is still being difficult before he even opens his mouth.

“Now they’re saying that if we still want to switch cabins we can, but there’s also barely an hour until we reach Calais,” Lavi says, one hand thoughtfully rubbing at his neck. “What do you think, is it worth to move him?”

Marie considers this for a moment, brushing his fingers through Kanda’s tangled hair. “I don’t think so, no,” he replies after a brief pause.

“He finally calmed down, so moving him now would only make it worse,” General Tiedoll continues for him. Marie nods in agreement.

Lavi sighs heavily, but the near-palpable aura around him dissipates somewhat.

XxX

For the first time in hours, Kanda isn’t shaking. There’s an occasional frown that passes on his still-far-too-pale face, and Lavi doesn’t know if it’s just general discomfort or nightmares, but all in all he looks much better now.

Now don’t get him wrong, Kanda still looks absolutely miserable, but he’s no longer shaking uncontrollably, and he looks like he’s actually asleep rather than unconscious. Lavi considers this a victory.

He’s still feverish, but it’s not spiking anymore, so as they steadily approach the final stop they start dressing Kanda back up. Kanda is semi-awake for it and actually tries to help in the process, but he seems spent and exhausted. He keeps tugging at his loose hair like it’s distracting him, so after a while Lavi switches places with Marie so he can sit next to Kanda instead.

“Yuu, I’m going to tie your hair up, yeah? That okay with you?” Lavi asks even though he so often doesn’t, usually just going for it while Kanda sleeps. Kanda considers this for a moment, before slowly nodding and turning so his back is fully facing Lavi and he can lean his head on the wall to their right. His breath has picked up pace again now that he’s sitting up, so Lavi does quick work with the loose braid starting at the base of Kanda’s neck.

It’s not the most beautiful braid he’s ever done, but it effectively stops Kanda’s hair from tangling up further and getting in the way of everything. He ties it up just as the announcement that they’ll be arriving shortly sounds, and Kanda immediately perks up. Lavi lets go of his hair as Kanda reaches for his uniform jacket.

“When’s the next ferry leaving?” Kanda asks, tugging his jacket on. His voice is hoarse, barely there, and he sways as he stands up. Lavi could swear he goes another shade whiter.

“We’ll be staying the night,” Marie answers before Lavi can. Kanda frowns.

“Why?” he demands, trying for a menacing glare. In any other circumstances Lavi would be comparing him to a wet cat right now, because this could be incredibly funny, but Kanda’s hands are shaking as he tries to button up his jacket.

The train lurches and Kanda’s knees buckle.

Lavi reaches for him and yanks him back on the seat before he can go down, and then gets to hold him up as Kanda almost slides down anyway. His breathing is back to sounding like a nightmare. Lavi raises a hand to Kanda’s face to find it clammy with cold sweat, and softly swears to himself.

“Yuu,” he starts firmly. Kanda doesn’t react at all. “Yuu, do not pass out on me now. You hear me?” He taps at Kanda’s cheek lightly, and watches as he swallows convulsively through the ragged breathing. “Yuu, eyes on me. Nothing else matters. Look at me.”

From the corner of his eye he notices General Tiedoll approaching them, but he quickly settles back when Lavi quickly shakes his head at him. He can understand the General wanting to do something, but Kanda needs one thing to focus on right now and it’ll be easier if it’s Lavi. Kanda’s gaze looks hazy and Lavi is genuinely concerned he might pass out. It’s vaguely terrifying. He squashes that feeling down.

It takes a lot of prodding until Kanda’s eyes finally zero in on him. He still looks dizzy, but focus is good. Focus means Lavi can talk to him.

“Good, that’s good. Just keep looking at me, okay.” He decides to risk angering Kanda again, because really, he has to. “You really wanna cross the Channel like this, Yuu?” He expects a sudden reaction, anger, but all he gets is Kanda closing his eyes and clicking his tongue in a display of annoyance. Thought so.

Kanda tries to walk out once the train stops, he really does. It’s kind of sad to watch. He keeps glaring at Lavi and Marie and the General in that miserable wet cat kind of way until he finally gives in to either his own body or General Tiedoll who keeps insisting he let Marie carry him.

There’s a nice little inn almost right next to the station that they decide suits their needs. Lavi stays at the station to make a call to Komui while the others go ahead.

Komui is, unsurprisingly, not pleased to hear what he has to say, but as expected he’s more worried about Kanda than he is about the Order’s budget. He briefly questions Lavi about the mission he and Kanda were on for the past week, but he’s really more interested in Lavi’s observations about Kanda’s abilities than anything else about it.

Well, that and Kanda’s general wellbeing.

They keep the call short, because Lavi can hear Reever crying in the background and while Komui has no interest in paperwork, he does want Lavi to check on Kanda as soon as possible.

The young lady clearing tables at the inn instructs him to the rooms General Tiedoll reserved for them. Two rooms; though all of them want to stay with Kanda, the rooms aren’t large enough for four people, so the general consensus ends up being that as the person with the most amount of medical knowledge despite being Kanda’s least favorite person of the group, Lavi will be rooming with him.

Kanda is already asleep, barely out of his jacket and boots and once again curled around Mugen. Lavi sets his travel bag on the bed and sits down next to it. Kanda looks almost peaceful, now. He hasn’t taken out the braid, Lavi notes with a light air of satisfaction.

It’s still only late afternoon and the window is letting in a nice amount of light, so he takes out his writing equipment and starts chronicling.

#my writing #fanfiction #sickfic #dgm

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skaiatemple · 4 years ago

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July 23rd is the Festival of Heart!

If you follow as a practitioner of Pop Culture Paganism, a user of Homestuck inspired Chaos Magic, or just want to use your favorite series to inspire you throughout the year, Skaia Temple is your resource center!

Whether you want to just celebrate it on the day, use it as a date for empowered energy, integrate it into your more mundane celebrations, or just appreciate your favorite characters and concepts this month, we have suggestions for whatever path you want to take with us!

Read below the cut for a condensed idea & resource list for this month of Heart!

Aspect Centered

Celebrate the Aspect in all its glory if you��re all about on celebrating the Festivals for exactly what they represent: The Aspect and all the traits associated with it.

“Forging an identity is extremely important to the Heart-bound, and every decision and action goes toward building a coherent narrative of their own story.”

Heart is about the Self, the Soul. If Life is about self care, Heart is about caring for the self. It’s often discouraged to be selfish about our own needs, but sometimes its just what we might need or deserve. If Blood is about community, Heart is about finding out who you are in it.

Sometimes the strongest weapon we can have is being ourselves completely unabashedly. Whether this means holding your own in conflict, or keeping yourself steady when nothing else is so. We need to be able to have a grasp on ourselves to truly understand how and why we need to grow.

Maybe there’s some facets of your personality you suppress for some reason that you need to learn to let loose, maybe you can find a new or more genuine way to express yourself, or maybe all you need to do is let those around you know that its you who knows yourself best.

This month is for being yourself.

Magical Inspiration

If you want to use Homestuck concepts more abstractly and need some ideas for what brands of magic would work best for the season, if you have an Aspect or character-themed spell, feel free to send it in so it can be added to this section!

Shadow work during Doom was more about making peace with yourself, but doing it during Heart season would be more about wielding it like a sword. Or shitty katana- Another side of it could be glamour magic, both for confidence or just when you need someone to see a specific facet of yourself for any reason. The main idea for now is to make sure your inside feelings match your outside actions.

Love and Romance also arent out of place for something about self-nourishment. Here is a Nepeta themed Romantic Luck spell for the occasion as well!

Integration Route

For people in the broom closet who are too timid or anxious to celebrate the Festivals openly- you can always integrate the Aspects traits to fit in with the more common trends and holidays of the month. Not even Hussie is is Homestuck God, no one will mind!

Appropriately, there are no major traditional holidays in this season, at least not in America. Maybe you could look up some minor holidays and find some that resonate with you and set forth celebrating them unabashedly and with full force- or maybe you could just make it a month where you celebrate You. Make the whole Heart season your Unbirthday Month. (In the event that your birthday is within this season, Happy Birthday! And I hope you have a even happier Unbirthday pt2)

The start of August marks Lammas, celebrating summer harvests, specifically grains- doesn't baking heartshaped bread sound pawsitively adorapurr?

Fandom Driven

For if you’re not all about spirituality or routine and just want to enjoy going all-out with a beloved story & characters, you can honor the ones of this month by driving full-throttle on the fandom bandwagon.

Heart is the Aspect for the Leijons. Some very underappreciated girls who never seem to catch a break. They’re strong beautiful ladies whose voices often go unheard through fear, manipulation, or ill timing to be able to speak out in all of their unique, creative, colorful glory. They show all the best parts of the Heart Aspect, pure timid selves who need only the chance and support to be able to shine brightly light everyone deserves to get to. Look at them and keep in mind that you deserve to express yourself in every way you want to.

It’s also the Aspect for the infamous Dirk Strider, and however you feel about whatever iteration of this walking identity crisis, he too embodies his Aspect strongly. He’s on a constant search to find his self and purpose, and so shows us the darker side of when we might try to change everyone else around us to better fit the picture we’ve painstakingly made to justify who we’re trying to be. Be it admiration, pity, or mouth frothing rage, look at Dirk and remember that whatever path we walk, we should be able to find one that allows us to walk in pace with everyone else that we so care about, and that has to be done with empathy, not anxiety and micromanaging. Stan Dirk.

Draw art, write fic, post analysis’ and/or callout posts for these big bright (inwardly and/or outwardly) characters this season!

We hope you got some ideas for activities you can do with your friends or otherwise use to inspire and better yourself this month. Everyone plays the game of life differently, and everyones beliefs are their own. Celebrate yourself as you see fit, and Thanks for Playing with Us.

~Mod Bee

#festivals #heart guide #heart aspect

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phroyd · 5 years ago

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By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president — and the coronavirus the enemy — the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed collectively in U.S. history — banning incoming travelers from two continents, bringing commerce to a near-halt, enlisting industry to make emergency medical gear, and confining 230 million Americans to their homes in a desperate bid to survive an attack by an unseen adversary.

Despite these and other extreme steps, the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.

It did not have to happen this way. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, resources, plans and epidemiological experience than dozens of countries that ultimately fared far better in fending off the virus.

The failure has echoes of the period leading up to 9/11: Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.

The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief.

And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.

33 times Trump downplayed the coronavirus

Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.

“While the media would rather speculate about outrageous claims of palace intrigue, President Trump and this Administration remain completely focused on the health and safety of the American people with around the clock work to slow the spread of the virus, expand testing, and expedite vaccine development," said Judd Deere, a spokesman for the president. "Because of the President’s leadership we will emerge from this challenge healthy, stronger, and with a prosperous and growing economy.”

The president’s behavior and combative statements were merely a visible layer on top of deeper levels of dysfunction.

The most consequential failure involved a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the United States, enabling agencies to map early outbreaks of the disease, and impose quarantine measure to contain them. At one point, a Food and Drug Administration official tore into lab officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling them their lapses in protocol, including concerns that the lab did not meet the criteria for sterile conditions, were so serious that the FDA would “shut you down” if the CDC were a commercial, rather than government, entity.

Other failures cascaded through the system. The administration often seemed weeks behind the curve in reacting to the viral spread, closing doors that were already contaminated. Protracted arguments between the White House and public health agencies over funding, combined with a meager existing stockpile of emergency supplies, left vast stretches of the country’s health-care system without protective gear until the outbreak had become a pandemic. Infighting, turf wars and abrupt leadership changes hobbled the work of the coronavirus task force.

It may never be known how many thousands of deaths, or millions of infections, might have been prevented with a response that was more coherent, urgent and effective. But even now, there are many indications that the administration’s handling of the crisis had potentially devastating consequences.

Even the president’s base has begun to confront this reality. In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself a wartime president and belatedly urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data that suggested Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat.

The poll showed that far more Republicans than Democrats were being influenced by Trump’s dismissive depictions of the virus and the comparably scornful coverage on Fox News and other conservative networks. As a result, Republicans were in distressingly large numbers refusing to change travel plans, follow “social distancing” guidelines, stock up on supplies or otherwise take the coronavirus threat seriously.

“Denial is not likely to be a successful strategy for survival,” GOP pollster Neil Newhouse concluded in a document that was shared with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill and discussed widely at the White House. Trump’s most ardent supporters, it said, were “putting themselves and their loved ones in danger.”

Trump’s message was changing as the report swept through the GOP’s senior ranks. In recent days, Trump has bristled at reminders that he had once claimed the caseload would soon be “down to zero.”

More than 7,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States so far, with about 240,000 cases reported. But Trump has acknowledged that new models suggest that the eventual national death toll could be between 100,000 and 240,000.

Beyond the suffering in store for thousands of victims and their families, the outcome has altered the international standing of the United States, damaging and diminishing its reputation as a global leader in times of extraordinary adversity.

“This has been a real blow to the sense that America was competent,” said Gregory F. Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the government’s senior-most provider of intelligence analysis. He stepped down from the NIC in January 2017 and now teaches at the University of Southern California. “That was part of our global role. Traditional friends and allies looked to us because they thought we could be competently called upon to work with them in a crisis. This has been the opposite of that.”

This article, which retraces the failures over the first 70 days of the coronavirus crisis, is based on 47 interviews with administration officials, public health experts, intelligence officers and others involved in fighting the pandemic. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and decisions.

Scanning the horizon

Public health authorities are part of a special breed of public servant — along with counterterrorism officials, military planners, aviation authorities and others — whose careers are consumed with contemplating worst-case scenarios.

The arsenal they wield against viral invaders is powerful, capable of smothering a new pathogen while scrambling for a cure, but easily overwhelmed if not mobilized in time. As a result, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC and other agencies spend their days scanning the horizon for emerging dangers.

The CDC learned of a cluster of cases in China on Dec. 31 and began developing reports for HHS on Jan. 1. But the most unambiguous warning that U.S. officials received about the coronavirus came Jan. 3, when Robert Redfield, the CDC director, received a call from a counterpart in China. The official told Redfield that a mysterious respiratory illness was spreading in Wuhan, a congested commercial city of 11 million people in the communist country’s interior.

Redfield quickly relayed the disturbing news to Alex Azar, the secretary of HHS, the agency that oversees the CDC and other public health entities. Azar, in turn, ensured that the White House was notified, instructing his chief of staff to share the Chinese report with the National Security Council.

From that moment, the administration and the virus were locked in a race against a ticking clock, a competition for the upper hand between pathogen and prevention that would dictate the scale of the outbreak when it reached American shores, and determine how many would get sick or die.

The initial response was promising, but officials also immediately encountered obstacles.

On Jan. 6, Redfield sent a letter to the Chinese offering to send help, including a team of CDC scientists. China rebuffed the offer for weeks, turning away assistance and depriving U.S. authorities of an early chance to get a sample of the virus, critical for developing diagnostic tests and any potential vaccine.

China impeded the U.S. response in other ways, including by withholding accurate information about the outbreak. Beijing had a long track record of downplaying illnesses that emerged within its borders, an impulse that U.S. officials attribute to a desire by the country’s leaders to avoid embarrassment and accountability with China’s 1.3 billion people and other countries that find themselves in the pathogen’s path.

China stuck to this costly script in the case of the coronavirus, reporting Jan. 14 that it had seen “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” U.S. officials treated the claim with skepticism that intensified when the first case surfaced outside China with a reported infection in Thailand.

A week earlier, senior officials at HHS had begun convening an intra-agency task force including Redfield, Azar and Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The following week, there were also scattered meetings at the White House with officials from the National Security Council and State Department, focused mainly on when and whether to bring back government employees in China.

U.S. officials began taking preliminary steps to counter a potential outbreak. By mid-January, Robert Kadlec, an Air Force officer and physician who serves as assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, had instructed subordinates to draw up contingency plans for enforcing the Defense Production Act, a measure that enables the government to compel private companies to produce equipment or devices critical to the country’s security. Aides were bitterly divided over whether to implement the act, and nothing happened for many weeks.

On Jan. 14, Kadlec scribbled a single word in a notebook he carries: “Coronavirus!!!”

Despite the flurry of activity at lower levels of his administration, Trump was not substantially briefed by health officials about the coronavirus until Jan.18, when, while spending the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, he took a call from Azar.

Even before the heath secretary could get a word in about the virus, Trump cut him off and began criticizing Azar for his handling of an aborted federal ban on vaping products, a matter that vexed the president.

At the time, Trump was in the throes of an impeachment battle over his alleged attempt to coerce political favors from the leader of Ukraine. Acquittal seemed certain by the GOP-controlled Senate, but Trump was preoccupied with the trial, calling lawmakers late at night to rant, and making lists of perceived enemies he would seek to punish when the case against him concluded.

In hindsight, officials said, Azar could have been more forceful in urging Trump to turn at least some of his attention to a threat that would soon pose an even graver test to his presidency, a crisis that would cost American lives and consume the final year of Trump’s first term.

But the secretary, who had a strained relationship with Trump and many others in the administration, assured the president that those responsible were working on and monitoring the issue. Azar told several associates that the president believed he was “alarmist” and Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the issue, even asking one confidant for advice.

Within days, there were new causes for alarm.

On Jan. 21, a Seattle man who had recently traveled to Wuhan tested positive for the coronavirus, becoming the first known infection on U.S. soil. Then, two days later, Chinese authorities took the drastic step of shutting down Wuhan, turning the teeming metropolis into a ghost city of empty highways and shuttered skyscrapers, with millions of people marooned in their homes.

“That was like, whoa,” said a senior U.S. official involved in White House meetings on the crisis. “That was when the Richter scale hit 8.”

It was also when U.S. officials began to confront the failings of their own efforts to respond.

Azar, who had served in senior positions at HHS through crises including the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the outbreak of bird flu in 2005, was intimately familiar with the playbook for crisis management.

He instructed subordinates to move rapidly to establish a nationwide surveillance system to track the spread of the coronavirus — a stepped-up version of what the CDC does every year to monitor new strains of the ordinary flu.

But doing so would require assets that would elude U.S. officials for months — a diagnostic test that could accurately identify those infected with the new virus and be produced on a mass scale for rapid deployment across the United States, and money to implement the system.

Azar’s team also hit another obstacle. The Chinese were still refusing to share the viral samples they had collected and were using to develop their own tests. In frustration, U.S. officials looked for other possible routes.

A biocontainment lab at the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston had a research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Kadlec, who knew the Galveston lab director, hoped scientists could arrange a transaction on their own without government interference. At first, the lab in Wuhan agreed, but officials in Beijing intervened Jan. 24 and blocked any lab-to-lab transfer.

There is no indication that officials sought to escalate the matter or enlist Trump to intervene. In fact, Trump has consistently praised Chinese President Xi Jinping despite warnings from U.S. intelligence and health officials that Beijing was concealing the true scale of the outbreak and impeding cooperation on key fronts.

The CDC had issued its first public alert about the coronavirus Jan. 8, and by the 17th was monitoring major airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, where large numbers of passengers arrived each day from China.

In other ways, though, the situation was already spinning out of control, with multiplying cases in Seattle, intransigence by the Chinese, mounting questions from the public, and nothing in place to stop infected travelers from arriving from abroad.

Trump was out of the country for this critical stretch, taking part in the annual global economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. He was accompanied by a contingent of top officials including national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who took a trans-Atlantic call from an anxious Azar.

Azar told O’Brien that it was “mayhem” at the White House, with HHS officials being pressed to provide nearly identical briefings to three audiences on the same day.

Azar urged O’Brien to have the NSC assert control over a matter with potential implications for air travel, immigration authorities, the State Department and the Pentagon. O’Brien seemed to grasp the urgency, and put his deputy, Matthew Pottinger, who had worked in China as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, in charge of coordinating the still-nascent U.S. response.

But the rising anxiety within the administration appeared not to register with the president. On Jan. 22, Trump received his first question about the coronavirus in an interview on CNBC while in Davos. Asked whether he was worried about a potential pandemic, Trump said, “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. . . . It’s going to be just fine.”

Mick Mulvaney, then acting White House chief of staff, and national security adviser Robert O'Brien talk with Trump aboard Marine One on the president's return from Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Spreading uncontrollably

The move by the NSC to seize control of the response marked an opportunity to reorient U.S. strategy around containing the virus where possible and procuring resources that hospitals would need in any U.S. outbreak, including such basic equipment as protective masks and ventilators.

But instead of mobilizing for what was coming, U.S. officials seemed more preoccupied with logistical problems, including how to evacuate Americans from China.

In Washington, then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Pottinger began convening meetings at the White House with senior officials from HHS, the CDC and the State Department.

The group, which included Azar, Pottinger and Fauci, as well as nine others across the administration, formed the core of what would become the administration’s coronavirus task force. But it primarily focused on efforts to keep infected people in China from traveling to the United States even while evacuating thousands of U.S. citizens. The meetings did not seriously focus on testing or supplies, which have since become the administration’s most challenging problems.

The task force was formally announced on Jan. 29.

“The genesis of this group was around border control and repatriation,” said a senior official involved in the meetings. “It wasn’t a comprehensive, whole-of-government group to run everything.”

The State Department agenda dominated those early discussions, according to participants. Officials began making plans to charter aircraft to evacuate 6,000 Americans stranded in Wuhan. They also debated language for travel advisories that State could issue to discourage other travel in and out of China.

On Jan. 29, Mulvaney chaired a meeting in the White House Situation Room in which officials debated moving travel restrictions to “Level 4,” meaning a “do not travel” advisory from the State Department. Then, the next day, China took the draconian step of locking down the entire Hubei province, which encompasses Wuhan.

Hand sanitizer is available at each gate in Terminal B at Oakland International Airport in California on March 4 in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

That move by Beijing finally prompted a commensurate action by the Trump administration. On Jan. 31, Azar announced restrictions barring any non-U.S. citizen who had been in China during the preceding two weeks from entering the United States.

Trump has, with some justification, pointed to the China-related restriction as evidence that he had responded aggressively and early to the outbreak. It was among the few intervention options throughout the crisis that played to the instincts of the president, who often seems fixated on erecting borders and keeping foreigners out of the country.

But by that point, 300,000 people had come into the United States from China over the previous month. There were only 7,818 confirmed cases around the world at the end of January, according to figures released by the World Health Organization — but it is now clear that the virus was spreading uncontrollably.

Pottinger was by then pushing for another travel ban, this time restricting the flow of travelers from Italy and other nations in the European Union that were rapidly emerging as major new nodes of the outbreak. Pottinger’s proposal was endorsed by key health-care officials, including Fauci, who argued that it was critical to close off any path the virus might take into the country.

This time, the plan met with resistance from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and others who worried about the impact on the U.S. economy. It was an early sign of tension in an area that would split the administration, pitting those who prioritized public health against those determined to avoid any disruption in an election year to the run of expansion and employment growth.

Those backing the economy prevailed with the president. And it was more than a month before the administration issued a belated and confusing ban on flights into the United States from Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people crossed the Atlantic during that interval.

A wall of resistance

While fights over air travel played out in the White House, public health officials began to panic over a startling shortage of critical medical equipment including protective masks for doctors and nurses, as well as a rapidly shrinking pool of money needed to pay for such things.

By early February, the administration was quickly draining a $105 million congressional fund to respond to infectious disease outbreaks. The coronavirus threat to the United States still seemed distant if not entirely hypothetical to much of the public. But to health officials charged with stockpiling supplies for worst-case-scenarios, disaster appeared increasingly inevitable.

A national stockpile of N95 protective masks, gowns, gloves and other supplies was already woefully inadequate after years of underfunding. The prospects for replenishing that store were suddenly threatened by the unfolding crisis in China, which disrupted offshore supply chains.

Much of the manufacturing of such equipment had long since migrated to China, where factories were now shuttered because workers were on order to stay in their households. At the same time, China was buying up masks and other gear to gird for its own coronavirus outbreak, driving up costs and monopolizing supplies.

In late January and early February, leaders at HHS sent two letters to the White House Office of Management and Budget asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. Azar and his aides also began raising the need for a multibillion-dollar supplemental budget request to send to Congress.

Yet White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.

Joe Grogan, head of the Domestic Policy Council, clashed with health officials over preparedness. He mistrusted how the money would be used and questioned how health officials had used previous preparedness funds.

Azar then spoke to Russell Vought, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, during Trump’s State of the Union speech on Feb. 4. Vought seemed amenable, and told Azar to submit a proposal.

Azar did so the next day, drafting a supplemental request for more than $4 billion, a sum that OMB officials and others at the White House greeted as an outrage. Azar arrived at the White House that day for a tense meeting in the Situation Room that erupted in a shouting match, according to three people familiar with the incident.

A deputy in the budget office accused Azar of preemptively lobbying Congress for a gigantic sum that White House officials had no interest in granting. Azar bristled at the criticism and defended the need for an emergency infusion. But his standing with White House officials, already shaky before the coronavirus crisis began, was damaged further.

White House officials relented to a degree weeks later as the feared coronavirus surge in the United States began to materialize. The OMB team whittled Azar’s demands down to $2.5 billion, money that would be available only in the current fiscal year. Congress ignored that figure, approving an $8 billion supplemental bill that Trump signed into law March 7.

Trump on his 'natural ability' for medical science: 'I really get it'

But again, delays proved costly. The disputes meant that the United States missed a narrow window to stockpile ventilators, masks and other protective gear before the administration was bidding against many other desperate nations, and state officials fed up with federal failures began scouring for supplies themselves.

In late March, the administration ordered 10,000 ventilators — far short of what public health officials and governors said was needed. And many will not arrive until the summer or fall, when models expect the pandemic to be receding.

“It’s actually kind of a joke,” said one administration official involved in deliberations about the belated purchase.

Inconclusive tests

Although viruses travel unseen, public health officials have developed elaborate ways of mapping and tracking their movements. Stemming an outbreak or slowing a pandemic in many ways comes down to the ability to quickly divide the population into those who are infected and those who are not.

Doing so, however, hinges on having an accurate test to diagnose patients and deploy it rapidly to labs across the country. The time it took to accomplish that in the United States may have been more costly to American efforts than any other failing.

“If you had the testing, you could say, ‘Oh my god, there’s circulating virus in Seattle, let’s jump on it. There’s circulating virus in Chicago, let’s jump on it,’ ” said a senior administration official involved in battling the outbreak. “We didn’t have that visibility.”

The first setback came when China refused to share samples of the virus, depriving U.S. researchers of supplies to bombard with drugs and therapies in a search for ways to defeat it. But even when samples had been procured, the U.S. effort was hampered by systemic problems and institutional hubris.

Among the costliest errors was a misplaced assessment by top health officials that the outbreak would probably be limited in scale inside the United States — as had been the case with every other infection for decades — and that the CDC could be trusted on its own to develop a coronavirus diagnostic test.

The CDC, launched in the 1940s to contain an outbreak of malaria in the southern United States, had taken the lead on the development of diagnostic tests in major outbreaks including Ebola, zika and H1N1. But the CDC was not built to mass-produce tests.

The CDC’s success had fostered an institutional arrogance, a sense that even in the face of a potential crisis there was no pressing need to involve private labs, academic institutions, hospitals and global health organizations also capable of developing tests.

Yet some were concerned that the CDC test would not be enough. Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner, sought authority in early February to begin calling private diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies to enlist their help.

But when senior FDA officials consulted leaders at HHS, Hahn, who had led the agency for about two months, was told to stand down. There were concerns about him personally contacting companies regulated by his agency.

At that point, Azar, the HHS secretary, seemed committed to a plan he was pursuing that would keep his agency at the center of the response effort: securing a test from the CDC and then building a national coronavirus surveillance system by relying on an existing network of labs used to track the ordinary flu.

In task force meetings, Azar and Redfield pushed for $100 million to fund the plan, but were shot down because of the cost, according to a document outlining the testing strategy obtained by The Washington Post.

Relying so heavily on the CDC would have been problematic even if it had succeeded in quickly developing an effective test that could be distributed across the country. The scale of the epidemic, and the need for mass testing far beyond the capabilities of the flu network, would have overwhelmed the plan, which didn’t envision engaging commercial lab companies for up to six months.

The effort collapsed when the CDC failed its basic assignment to create a working test and the task force rejected Azar’s plan.

On Feb. 6, when the World Health Organization reported that it was shipping 250,000 test kits to labs around the world, the CDC began distributing 90 kits to a smattering of state-run health labs.

Almost immediately, the state facilities encountered problems. The results were inconclusive in trial runs at more than half the labs, meaning they couldn’t be relied upon to diagnose actual patients. The CDC issued a stopgap measure, instructing labs to send tests to its headquarters in Atlanta, a practice that would delay results for days.

The scarcity of effective tests led officials to impose constraints on when and how to use them, and delayed surveillance testing. Initial guidelines were so restrictive that states were discouraged from testing patients exhibiting symptoms unless they had traveled to China and come into contact with a confirmed case, when the pathogen had by that point almost certainly spread more broadly into the general population.

The limits left top officials largely blind to the true dimensions of the outbreak.

In a meeting in the Situation Room in mid-February, Fauci and Redfield told White House officials that there was no evidence yet of worrisome person-to-person transmission in the United States. In hindsight, it appears almost certain that the virus was taking hold in communities at that point. But even the country’s top experts had little meaningful data about the domestic dimensions of the threat. Fauci later conceded that as they learned more their views changed.

At the same time, the president’s subordinates were growing increasingly alarmed, Trump continued to exhibit little concern. On Feb. 10, he held a political rally in New Hampshire attended by thousands where he declared that “by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

The New Hampshire rally was one of eight that Trump held after he had been told by Azar about the coronavirus, a period when he also went to his golf courses six times.

A day earlier, on Feb. 9, a group of governors in town for a black-tie gala at the White House secured a private meeting with Fauci and Redfield. The briefing rattled many of the governors, bearing little resemblance to the words of the president. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.

That month, federal medical and public health officials were emailing increasingly dire forecasts among themselves, with one Veterans Affairs medical adviser warning, ‘We are flying blind,’” according to emails obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight.

Later in February, U.S. officials discovered indications that the CDC laboratory was failing to meet basic quality-control standards. On a Feb. 27 conference call with a range of health officials, a senior FDA official lashed out at the CDC for its repeated lapses.

Jeffrey Shuren, the FDA’s director for devices and radiological health, told the CDC that if it were subjected to the same scrutiny as a privately run lab, “I would shut you down.”

On Feb. 29, a Washington state man became the first American to die of a coronavirus infection. That same day, the FDA released guidance, signaling that private labs were free to proceed in developing their own diagnostics.

Another four-week stretch had been squandered

Life and death

One week later, on March 6, Trump toured the facilities at the CDC wearing a red “Keep America Great” hat. He boasted that the CDC tests were nearly perfect and that “anybody who wants a test will get a test,” a promise that nearly a month later remains unmet.

He also professed to have a keen medical mind. “I like this stuff. I really get it,” he said. “People here are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ ”

In reality, many of the failures to stem the coronavirus outbreak in the United States were either a result of, or exacerbated by, his leadership.

For weeks, he had barely uttered a word about the crisis that didn’t downplay its severity or propagate demonstrably false information. He dismissed the warnings of intelligence officials and top public health officials in his administration.

At times, he voiced far more authentic concern about the trajectory of the stock market than the spread of the virus in the United States, railing at the chairman of the Federal Reserve and others with an intensity that he never seemed to exhibit about the possible human toll of the outbreak.

In March, as state after state imposed sweeping new restrictions on their citizens’ daily lives to protect them — triggering severe shudders in the economy — Trump second-guessed the lockdowns.

The common flu kills tens of thousands each year and “nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on,” he tweeted March 9. A day later, he pledged that the virus would “go away. Just stay calm.”

Two days later, Trump finally ordered the halt to incoming travel from Europe that his deputy national security adviser had been advocating for weeks. But Trump botched the Oval Office announcement so badly that White House officials spent days trying to correct erroneous statements that triggered a stampede by U.S. citizens overseas to get home.

“There was some coming to grips with the problem and the true nature of it — the 13th of March is when I saw him really turn the corner. It took a while to realize you’re at war,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said. ��That’s when he took decisive action that set in motion some real payoffs.”

Trump spent many weeks shuffling responsibility for leading his administration’s response to the crisis, putting Azar in charge of the task force at first, relying on Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, for brief periods, before finally putting Vice President Pence in the role toward the end of February.

Other officials have emerged during the crisis to help right the United States’ course, and at times, the statements of the president. But even as Fauci, Azar and others sought to assert themselves, Trump was behind the scenes turning to others with no credentials, experience or discernible insight in navigating a pandemic.

Foremost among them was his adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. A team reporting to Kushner commandeered space on the seventh floor of the HHS building to pursue a series of inchoate initiatives.

One plan involved having Google create a website to direct those with symptoms to testing facilities that were supposed to spring up in Walmart parking lots across the country, but which never materialized. Another centered an idea advanced by Oracle chairman Larry Ellison to use software to monitor the unproven use of anti-malaria drugs against the coronavirus pathogen.

So far, the plans have failed to come close to delivering on the promises made when they were touted in White House news conferences. The Kushner initiatives have, however, often interrupted the work of those under immense pressure to manage the U.S. response.

Current and former officials said that Kadlec, Fauci, Redfield and others have repeatedly had to divert their attentions from core operations to contend with ill-conceived requests from the White House they don’t believe they can ignore. And Azar, who once ran the response, has since been sidelined, with his agency disempowered in decision-making and his performance pilloried by a range of White House officials, including Kushner.

“Right now Fauci is trying to roll out the most ambitious clinical trial ever implemented” to hasten the development of a vaccine, said a former senior administration official in frequent touch with former colleagues. And yet, the nation’s top health officials “are getting calls from the White House or Jared’s team asking, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to do this with Oracle?’ ”

If the coronavirus has exposed the country’s misplaced confidence in its ability to handle a crisis, it also has cast harsh light on the limits of Trump’s approach to the presidency — his disdain for facts, science and experience.

He has survived other challenges to his presidency — including the Russia investigation and impeachment — by fiercely contesting the facts arrayed against him and trying to control the public’s understanding of events with streams of falsehoods.

The coronavirus may be the first crisis Trump has faced in office where the facts — the thousands of mounting deaths and infections — are so devastatingly evident that they defy these tactics.

After months of dismissing the severity of the coronavirus, resisting calls for austere measures to contain it, and recasting himself as a wartime president, Trump seemed finally to succumb to the coronavirus reality. In a meeting with a Republican ally in the Oval Office last month, the president said his campaign no longer mattered because his reelection would hinge on his coronavirus response.

“It’s absolutely critical for the American people to follow the guidelines for the next 30 days,” he said at his March 31 news conference. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

A medical professional works inside a refrigerated container truck functioning as a makeshift morgue at Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York on March 31. (John Minchillo/AP)

Julie Tate and Shane Harris contributed to this report.

Phroyd

#trump #covid #failure

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misscrawfords · 5 years ago

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The Rise of Skywalker: Part One

I have lots of thoughts and feelings about TROS. Most of them negative. For three days I’ve been alternating between raging and crying. Finally, I’ve felt able to start writing.

This is a negative review. If you loved the film then this might not be the post for you. I am very sensitive to what happened after TLJ. And I want to reassure anyone reading that I would never turn criticism for a film (which is absolutely a valid response to seeing something that you disliked and are trying to understand) into personal attacks against the actors or creators involved or, worse still, fans who liked it. If you liked TROS, can’t bear to hear any criticism of it, and still choose to read my posts about it, then that is on you. (I really shouldn’t have to say this but this is a hellsite.)

This post contains spoilers for TROS... and Jumanji 2. Go figure.

Things I liked:

· C-3PO and everything he did. This droid is the character I identify with most in the entire SW series (which probably says some uncomfortable things about me but this is not the time!) and he had such a big and important role and his quips were genuinely great and funny and I loved everything he did. Apart from – but more on that later.

· Ben Solo. Uh, other people have talked about his little shrug and his “ow” and his smile – oh god, his smile. Ben Solo is amazing. It’s a shame that – but more on that later.

· I didn’t hate Rey Palpatine. I mean, I literally wrote this story when I was 13 when I made Hermione Voldemort’s daughter as a way of explaining her inner darkness and had her team up with Harry (with whom she had a telepathic bond) to destroy him. (You can read the story here if you really want to.) So it would be pretty hypocritical of me to hate this plotline. I enjoyed seeing angry, feral Rey on screen, I enjoyed seeing a female hero confronting her capacity for destruction and darkness. I was okay with the idea of a final face-off between a Palpatine and a Skywalker and how this is a way of bringing final balance to the Force. This was pretty interesting and I’d be up for this. I much prefer Rey Nobody but as a concept I’m not actually against it. Unfortunately the execution – but more on that later.

· I really enjoyed more of Finn and Poe. I love both of them as characters. I mean I can’t think of a single bit of dialogue that was meaningful between them or what they accomplished in particular for they had some fun moments.

· Finn and Jannah’s conversation about being ex-stormtroopers was a lovely scene, a moment of much-needed quiet and reflection and bonding in a film that was far too hectic and crowded. Shame it went nowhere.

· Reylo kiss? I mean, that was cool.

· Unironically, I loved Hux. He was snarky and his revelation of being the spy because he just hated Kylo that much got the biggest reaction in the cinema of the entire showing. Admittedly it was derisive laughter as we all realised what a clusterfuck of bad writing this film was, but still. It crossed over into so-bad-it’s-good territory. Hux gave me considerable pleasure in a film that otherwise made me very angry.

· My favourite scene in the film was when Rey and Kylo fought on Pasaana over the transport ship with Chewie (apparently) on and Rey blows it up. The cinematography was amazing, it was a visual representation of both balance and building on the lightsaber breaking scene in TLJ while upping the stakes considerably and Rey’s reaction of visceral horror when she realised what she had done was truly shocking and unexpected. To have Chewie killed off so suddenly like this for no reason except that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and the stakes are high and this is a desperate war with casualties – genius. A perfect way to make Rey and Ben even more similar – both having killed father figures – and have Rey confront her dark side as she wrestles with what she has done and the consequences of having a non-unified relationship with Ben while also being in a position to truly empathise with him – this was exactly the content I had signed up for. But it was the moment that it was revealed that Chewie was still alive that I realised what I’d only suspected before then: that this film was terrible and I would not be able to trust any emotion it was inviting me to feel.

Fundamentally, I think that this film is incredibly poorly written and emotionally dishonest. It is telling that I saw Jumanji 2 earlier in the day and out of the two films, the only point at which I cried was when Milo decided to stay in Jumanji as a horse. Why did I cry? Because Milo and Grandpa’s relationship had been gradually built up over the course of a film that was not afraid of quiet moments and building a narrative of a relationship that revealed what it needed over the course of several meaningful scenes. It allowed Milo’s decision to stay to be both a tragic loss but also a happy ending for him. Truly bittersweet and in a way that everyone can relate to. The loss of a dear friend to illness is a horrible but human thing to contemplate. To be able to set this friend free through a metaphor of a beautiful death and afterlife is genuinely moving and hopeful. Unfortunately TROS did not manage to give me any such emotions or elicit a single tear.

At least not till afterwards. I’ve subsequently cried a lot, some of it over the tragedy of Ben and Rey in a film that promised hope, but mainly for myself and the other (mainly) young female fans who have poured all their knowledge and intelligence into analysis of TFA and TLJ and who seemed to understand the story that was being told and who had been promised more of this story in the interviews and trailers released prior to this film – and who are now feeling like absolute garbage as this film throws out its own mythology for an incoherent, self-serving mess that in many ways defies analysis. The only thing I feel really capable of analysing is how much it doesn’t work, as opposed to what the film is trying to do. Where is the symbolism? Where is the metaphor? Where is the hero’s journey? Where is the heroine’s journey? Where is nuance? Where is everything that was set up in both TFA and TLJ? IDK, I can’t see it. It’s a kick in the teeth.

So, no matter how many individual things I was able to enjoy at the time when watching TROS, they end up being meaningless because the entire film was so bad. I can’t feel pleasure thinking about the good bits because they were mired in context (or lack of it). I can’t feel genuine sorrow about the fate of Rey and Ben because the execution of that fate was so poorly done. I don’t even mind that Ben died. It was always an option and the story of redemption followed by death is a very common story, a very Christian story. Though the death of Christ to save us from our sins, is crucially followed by resurrection. I mean, literally everyone can and does die. That doesn’t make you special. If you’re going for a Christ metaphor, you kind of need resurrection too. But I’m not sure that was exactly what they were going for with it; it was a mess and the execution made little internal consistency.

It may be that if I watched the film again, my problems would be lessened and I would see new things in them and they would make sense. I’ve read some twitter threads of people who are making connections and finding explanations on a second or third viewing. But the problem is that I shouldn’t need to see a film more than once to fundamentally understand it. I don’t mean picking up on new and interesting features and subtext which a good film, like a good book, rewards you with on multiple viewings. TLJ does that. But you should be able to follow what the ultimate meaning of a film is when you see it first.

If that is the case, then the ultimate meaning of TROS is that the good are good, the bad are bad, change is rewarded with death, a character who was once alone ends up alone again, plot coherency is sacrificed for whatever explosion or cool backwards-reference is needed at the time, death is not the end except when it is, there is no cosistency and consequently no emotional impact. And apparently it is a happy and hopeful ending? The tonal disconnect with the story being told and the way it was shot and the music being played and the clear intention of the people making the film is utterly jarring.

To famously quote Macbeth:

It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

This post is already too long so I will go into my criticisms in more detail in a further post. Stay tuned!

Read Part Two here.

#tros #tros spoilers #star wars #the rise of skywalker #anti-tros

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aliceslantern · 5 years ago

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Beyond this Existence: New Life, short 22--Listless

Recovery is a tedious, nonlinear process. Demyx, Ienzo, and the others living in Radiant Garden's castle have to learn to come to terms with their pasts and their memories, learn to grow, and begin to understand what, exactly, it means to be human. While there is unexpected joy in this, there is also unexpected sorrow. A series of oneshots set after Beyond this Existence.

Current short: “Listless.” Ienzo isn’t okay.

Read it on FF.net/ on AO3

---

Something wasn’t right.

Ienzo stared deeply into his plans, spread across the worktable and anchored by his research. He bit his lip. It had all been revised and engineered within an inch of its life; yet something was off, wrong. Was it the angles of the joints of the walls?

Maybe it had nothing to do with its creation, and all to do with its creator.

He had a vicious headache. Ienzo took off his glasses and rested his face in his hand for a moment, trying to rub away the pain. Ever since his confrontation with Even, and in the light of Ansem’s overwhelming depression, Ienzo was feeling increasingly shaken, and increasingly anxious. Sleeping was getting more and more difficult again.

Demyx didn’t seem to be doing well either.

It was clear that the poisoning had shaken him. For a few weeks after it happened, Demyx remained mostly in their apartment. He slept a lot, picked at Arpeggio aimlessly, songs that made no coherent sense to Ienzo. Ienzo first attributed this exhaustion to the aftereffects of the poison, but it seemed to go on longer than it should. This must have traumatized him; he was self-conscious enough when it came to his competency, and he could have taken this as a sign he was unwanted in the community. Ienzo was able to analyze Demyx’s mental state with ease; but he himself was too tired to be of any real help. He felt as though he were constantly carrying another dozen or so kilos.

Ienzo, too, just wanted to rest. The early winter day was cold. He would go home, he decided. He would take a bath and make himself some tea and he would read a perfectly awful book, and he would wait for this to blow over.

Would it?

The anxiety threatened to pull him into a spiral. What if this happiness they’d had had been temporary? His growth and healing falsified? He should have known better than to believe they would have a happy ending, or any ending for that matter.

Was this illogical?

He unlocked the apartment door. There Demyx was, curled under the covers. His gummiphone was on the bed beside him, but he didn’t look at it. He barely moved when Ienzo came into the room. Ienzo took off his shoes and slacks and crawled under the blankets as well. He pulled him close, a gesture that sought more to take comfort than to give it.

Demyx turned, and for a moment they faced each other, wordlessly.

“Are you alright?” Ienzo asked.

“No. You?”

“No.” At least he’d come this far, to be able to admit it. “The world lately has felt so very heavy.” He could feel the pinch in his throat, of oncoming tears, and tried to fight it. “I know you’re hurting, and I want to help, but I--”

“It’s okay,” Demyx said. “I know you’re dealing with a lot. You can’t take care of people when you’re drowning.”

“I used to.”

“Then is not now.” He looked so exhausted, his hair flat, circles under his eyes. “I’m not… going anywhere. I just need some rest.”

“I can’t help but wonder…” It was warm under the covers, but still he shook. “What if this is all temporary, you know?”

“I know. God, do I know.”

“I know this is merely a relapse, of sorts. That these are conditions I have to manage and live with for the rest of my life. But they’re so close to convincing me this is how I’ll always be. I’m not that person. I’m logical, I reason. It feels so draining.”

His face crumpled a little. “I know. They… they triggered you. You have to deal with it. Repressing that pain makes it so much worse.” A sob caught in his throat.

“I’m truly sorry,” Ienzo said. “You’re reeling from this trauma, and I--”

“I’ve been talking through it with Aerith.” He looked ashamed to admit it. “She gave me some pills, to help manage things… they make me so tired.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You had enough on your plate. Besides, I should be… better in a week or two. When the chemicals in my head stabilize. Or whatever.” He didn’t make eye contact.

Ienzo knew that it wasn’t that simple. “Demyx…”

“I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”

Ienzo touched Demyx’s face. He hadn’t shaved in a few days; the pale stubble was scratchy. “There has to be something I can do.”

“You can. You can take care of yourself.”

He inhaled. “You’ll tell me, if things get much worse?”

“Of course.”

Ienzo wanted to believe him. Yet it was so much easier to worry about Demyx than his own increasing instability.

“I mean it, Ienzo. I’m not done with you.”

The smile seemed to take some effort. “Okay.”

---

He tried to get some rest.

He pulled himself away from the memorial, away from the internal. He assisted Even with some simple chemical experiments, had lunch with Ansem, went on a few rounds with Aeleus. Anything to keep his hands and body occupied. Idle hands make the devil’s work. He understood.

Ienzo was determined not to overwork, just to get his mind off of heavier things until he could unravel them a bit more cleanly. Maybe if he let it percolate a bit more, it would grow clearer.

On one of these rounds with Aeleus, they discovered what had evidently been a mother cat’s nest; there were several rodent skeletons, along with damp red stains of birth. But the mother and her kits were gone; aside from a small, wriggling lump in the makeshift scraps of fabric.

“Oh, poor thing,” Ienzo whispered. It was tiny, possibly the runt; its white and brown fur slightly matted. He was shocked to see it was still breathing, but hesitantly so; who knew how long it had been sitting here without its mother. He took the kitten into his hands, to try and warm it up a little bit. Its eyes were crusted over, possibly infected, and it trembled a little.

“It must be sick,” Aeleus said. “Perhaps we should… end its suffering.” It pained him to say this, his blue eyes glinting. “Mothers don’t usually abandon their young unless they feel it’s a lost cause.”

Ienzo stared at the kitten. So small. Yet, the thought of stamping out its life repulsed him. “Well, I certainly wasn’t,” he said. “Perhaps… I want to at least try to nurse it.” He felt like a child. Oh please, oh please can I keep it? “Demyx might be able to help me.”

Aeleus nodded, a shade of relief gracing his otherwise stoic face. “We could use a mouser.”

---

The first few days he was certain the kitten wouldn’t make it, and any attempts to treat its myriad illnesses felt like Ienzo was just prolonging its suffering. Demyx was only able to help so much--he knew humans, not cats--and for several hours Ienzo dripped milk and antibiotics intermittently into its small mouth. At least it was swallowing, and breathing. He kept as constant of an eye on it as he could, rubbing its small belly to stimulate digestion, wiping the pus from its eyes. He didn’t let it out of his sight and held it as much as he could, because it was so so tiny and so cold. Even the incubation lamp he was able to borrow from Even didn’t seem to do much good.

“You’re going to cause yourself more hurt,” Even said gently. “I can… I can put it to rest painlessly, without violence.”

“I think she wants to live. She’s eating.”

Even shook his head. “If this is how you wish to spend your time. You can probably adopt a healthy cat at the market.”

It took about a week of this, of trying different medicines and drops for its tiny eyes, before the kitten seemed to turn the corner. Its breaths were less labored, it was eating even more; it seemed to gain a few grams every day. Then the pus stopped weeping from its eyes and it gave a tiny, scratchy mew. And for some reason this unraveled him; Demyx found him bawling over the kitten and assumed it had died. Before long, its eyes opened--a temporary blue--to a startling new world.

Ienzo wasn’t sure what this whole ordeal had revealed about himself. The symbolism of it wasn’t lost on him. This uncomplicated kindness was a relief.

She lived.

She went from being on the verge of death to being constantly underfoot, or climbing all over things, up to and including the curtains. She found a particular interest in Demyx’s sitar, trying to crawl over the frets. “Well,” Demyx said, “At least she’s not a critic.”

As she got bigger, she slept on (and in) the bed. She seemed to sense their nightmares; more than once Ienzo woke up to her purring next to his cheek, even as he woke in a cold sweat.

The cat was a comfort to them both. But it still took weeks to name her. Demyx suggested silly names like Jat or Rocks, Ienzo found himself thinking about it entirely too hard, going so far as to look into nomenclature before finally Demyx said, “You know it’s a cat, right?”

One morning Demyx woke up with her paws on his face. All he said was “Beans.”

And Ienzo groaned, because he knew in his heart that the cat’s name was Beans. As stupid as it was. He tried to shorten it to Bea, or Bebe, but the cat didn’t respond to that. She, great comforter of anxiety, was now named after the legume family.

So it goes.

But she did help shake him out of that horrible spiral, and for that she was worth her weight in, well, beans. He could work near her, scratch the soft spot behind her ears, and get back to clear and concise thinking. It was grounding. He wondered how much of his childhood suffering would have been nullified if he’d just had a pet. It was something to look forward to, a concrete reason to exist; Beans needed him. As complex as he tried to be, really simple comforts meant more than intense psychological analysis.

Gradually, the sense of heaviness that had been plaguing him began to fade, and he felt again hopeful. In a small way he would always resent how much control his emotions had over him, how they would muddy thoughts that had once been so easy to grasp. But this was part of humanity, and there was no going back.

#beyond this existence: new life #ienzo #demyx #even (kingdom hearts)#zemyx #aeleus #beyond this existence

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