#pragmatic programming

[pragmaticfinancese]

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[luludeluluramblings]

Neglected!Pregnant!Reader x Yandere!Bat Family Part Four

Part One ☁️ Part Two ☁️ Part Three ☁️ Part Five

Warnings: Pregnancy, Yandere themes, Fem!Reader, and one more that I will not say just be prepared at the end.

You knew Bruce would find out eventually. As much as you liked to pretend he wouldn't you knew. It was only a matter of time until he had noticed what was going on under his roof. You also knew he'd have a bad reaction to it. You just hadn't realized how bad until the day came.

The attic of Wayne manor became your new domain. Surprisingly, it wasn't as dark and gloomy as the rest of the manor.

The light from the dormers filled the space with warm light that was rare to see in a place like Gotham. The old vintage things stored about made it feel like a timeless, but lived in space. No faces of strangers from portraits or the one's you'd pass in the halls in sight. Boxes of photo's and some historical relics were all over the sprawling space.

It truly felt like lives had been lived from the items you found and not just names you where somehow related too.

You primarily came up here search for things for your future nursery. There was a town home in the more stable side of Gotham that you had been eyeing. A charming little place that could use some time, love, and care. But, it had two bedrooms and you could buy it with cash.

Sure, you had wanted to get out of Gotham. Run off back to the childhood home you'd been left to inherit. But, traveling by plane with your constant nausea seemed daunting.

It was probably the worry eating at you. The new parent jitters. Traveling with a baby right after birth? Sounds difficult. Traveling with a toddler? Even worse.

You had to fight the overwhelming feeling of becoming a parent often. To stubborn to give in or give up. Now, your battle with your hormones? That fight was easily lost. Tears were annoying, but you didn't care how much you cried as long as you got what you wanted. Which was your baby boy in your arms and some peace for the both of you.

You had wanted to get out of Gotham. Go back where there was grass and less insanity. But, you mostly wanted stability and a familiar space. Even if you had to make it on your own for a bit.

Though, what you wanted most at the current moment was to stop sneezing. The dust that caught the light from the window and gave the attic an enchanting look was also agitating your nostrils like hell. It was already sensitive as is from pregnancy. However, now each time you sneezed you felt as if your were going to piss your self.

"A-choo! Urgh, so much damn dust…" You grumble to your self as you dig though the delicate vintage model airplanes. You'll have to get Jason you haul this stuff down to your room until you can hire some movers. You plan on holding the cake and the cornbread over his head for a good long while.

As the old saying goes, when you sneeze it usually means someone's thinking about you. Though that thought didn't cross your mind as you kept having to cross your legs and pray every time your nose itched.

Down below in the cave system beneath the manor, someone was listening into on you. Or trying to. He had to be still pretend to be interested in what Tim was showing him.

"We implemented a new system in the BatComputer that Tim programmed. It allows us to detect alien DNA with the sensor range. Including Kryptonian." Bruce was explaining to Clark while Tim tapped away at the keyboard. Less interested in showing off his creation and more suspicious of while Conner was acting so distracted, for lack of a better word.

"So, you're saying we could use this to see if there are other Kryptonians out in space?" Jon asked curiously, looking at the screen with mild interest from where he's lounging next to Damian.

"Possibly one day. But, this is mostly so we can have a better understanding on how much of Earth’s population is actually human." Comes Bruce's pragmatic answer as he stand stoic still, though with a the ever slightest twitch of his lips.

"Another one of your contingency plans incase we’re all slowly replaced with lizard people?" Clark's joking causing a few chuckles that echo mildly in the cave.

"It always tickles me that you guys watch alien sci-fi movies." Dick commented from where he stood, looking like Bruce's second in command, but with better humor and a better smile. Causing another round of chuckles to echo. Though Conner wouldn't include himself in that. Too busy listening to you sneeze from the attic and detecting another noise in the general vicinity. Something that he has to fight narrowing his eyes at while he tires to figure it out.

"I’m assuming you want to run a test with it." With an unsurprised look and years of working the man, Clark turns partially towards Bruce with an almost knowing smirk on his face. By now understanding this was the man's way of showing off his children's accomplishments.

"Being that we’re the only aliens you regularly tolerate." Jon tacks on for good measure

"Tolerate is a strong word." Damian responds with impressive deadpan, not even a twitch of muscle in his face. Though, judging by the mirthful look in his eyes, he only halfway meant it. Tim himself smirked at Damian's comment before turning all his focus on to the BatComputer and running the Biological Program he'd spent months developing.

"We might also have a bet going on how many aliens are in— What the hell?"

"What?"

"There’s four signatures in the manor."

"What do you mean there’s four signatures. We’re testing for Kryptonians."

"Yeah," Tim says sarcastically while he's already moving to locate the extra trace of life. "I'm still counting four. It says right here that there’s four Kryptonians!'

"Pull up the cameras. Now." BY the time the order has left Bruce's mouth all of the manor's live security footage is being pulled up on screen for him to scan with his own eyes.

Nothing seems out of the ordinary. No unusual shadows. No misplaced of moving objects. He see's you in the attic, which feels him with fear. Your alone up there and so far away with an unknown anomaly in his home. A home you were suppose to be safe in. "Where’s the signature coming from?"

"… The attic…" Tim says seeing you sneeze on the screen, complete oblivious to the danger and fear everyone was experiencing.

Conner didn’t hesitate. With an unknown signature in the manor your safety was his priority. He didn't even care is Clark or Jon where faster. At that moment, he was just the first to move and the first to react.

No one in the family objected to it either.

Rushing towards the attic with his ears peeled for where the extra signature could have come from, you're in his arms before you could blink. One of the vintage plane models still in your hand as you were rushed form the dust and gentle sunlight of the attic to the cold dark cave below. A shiver running down your spine and as the change in temperature caused your skin to prickle. Already you felt a wave of vertigo hit from the sudden rush of moment.

Causing you to drop the little vintage plan and press a hand against the muscled chest holding you while you took gasping breathes. It was nothing serious, but the sudden shift in altitude and climate had your ears ringing and you eyes struggling to adjust to the shadows and artificial light.

You could feel another, much softer hand touching you in comparison to the strong figure holding you, a slightly soothing noise being made as voices echoed in the room. Or at least you thought is was a room until you realized it was the Bat Cave.

It was very very rare you came down here. You could count on one hand with missing fingers how often you’d been down here.

You’re eyes taking a moment to adjust to the shadows and artificial light as you make out nearly everyone looking at the Bat Computer monitor. Including Bruce's guest.

It's Stephanie that's touching you, her hand just barely having been becoming familiar to you over the past few weeks.

“Thank god, there’s an intruder in the manor. We’re trying to figure out where or who or, hell, even what it is.” She explains, which was nice. You deserved an explanation.

But, more importantly, you glance up to see who was holding you in their arms. Noting with mild surprise that it was Conner. You can’t help giving him a bit of wiry smile. The sudden rush of speed and the strength you could feel made sense. “You can put me down, you know. I ain’t gonna break.”

“No can do. Not after you just gave me a heart attack.” He gives you a shaky smile, completely forgetting the fact that he didn't include any one else in that statement. Just him. You were still to dizzy to catch the specific word yourself as you can faintly hear the discussion of the unknown intruder.

“I can hear an extra heartbeat, but where did the signature go. It vanished as soon as Conner grabbed—“

“The hell is going on?" You can't help asking. Having not been informed of any test as you tried to climb out of Conner's arms. He, however, seemed to have his arms locked tight and they may as well have been steel bars holding you in the air.

You turn towards Clark just as he looks at you with furrowed brows that being to rise almost as fast as he can fly. With a few context clues you piece together what he realized and gave him a narrow look daring to speak.

"Uh… I know where that extra heartbeat is coming from, Bruce. It's doesn't explain the signature. Why would of be Kryptonian…" And, then his eyes go wide as he trails off. It's almost comical to see Superman of all people and creatures with eyes growing to the size of dinner plates as realization hits him. But, you yourself are confused. Surely you being pregnant wasn't that big a deal?

You glance around the room from where your held in Conner's arms. Looking at Stephanie first before the others that knew and the rest that were starting to realize.

An extra heartbeat would make sense. The little bugger that's been fluttering in your abdomen for the past few days with his powerful little kicks would be the reason for that. But, why would--

It's not until you feel yourself being squeezed and everyone turns to look at who is holding you that the slow, slightly rusted gears in your head shift. And, your head moves so fast to look up at the awestruck Conner still holding your ass midair like a crashing airplane carrying precious cargo that you feel another wave of dizziness hit.

"So, it was you! You're the motherfuck--"

"We need to get rid of it." Bruce's voice made you words die in your throat with a choke. All complaints gone as you felt something rush down your spine.

This time it wasn't a chill.

This time it wasn't fear. It's was a good thing Conner was built tough, because the hand you had resting on his chest clawed up as you felt violence bubble in your gut next to your son's gentle fluttering. Faintly you can hear it stutter under neither your palm, but you're not questioning it. You're not even questioning the way his arms seems to curl even more around you are the air leaves your lungs for a different reason this time.

This time you slowly turned towards the man who fucked your mother once and face him with a look that promised you'd tear him apart with your teeth. Even if it killed you.

Taglist Below:

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A/N: Yeah, sorry to end it on the cliff hanger and unexpectedly like that. I just wanted to convey the anger and the outrage Bruce's reaction caused reader. I struggled with this chapter y'all. Struggled. I rewrote it entirely and changed major plot points, but this has all been flying by the seat of my pants. When I do the AU BatBoys x Pregnant!Reader that will have a lot more planning.

A/N: I made a ko-fi. But, feel free to ignore that. I just wanted Diet Coke. My true vice.

A/N: Don't know when Part Five will come out, but that will be Conner feels and the family's reaction to Reader moving out. I have that roughly drafted.

[honourablejester]

I’m watching bit compilations of the Fantasy High campaign(s) for Dimension 20 at the minute, and I’m watching one for Junior Year ep 16, and I love …

There’s a bit where some of Kipperlilly’s motivations for hating the party are revealed, and it’s revealed that she’s jealous that Riz’s father was killed, because she wants a cool and tragic backstory and thinks that her lack of it has kept her back at the adventuring academy while they had an advantage. And Siobhan, as Adaine, without batting an eye:

“And her response to that was to be mad at us, and not to kill her parents?”

To which the others respond … Okay, Adaine, that’s the sociopath test! And just general slightly spooked humour.

And I just love that … You can really see the girl who on her first day at school had a fight break out on top of her and wound up killing a lunch lady with a ladle. You can see the girl who did have to kill her abusive father after he casually murdered her sister. This is all coming from trauma, but she puts such a casual … Like, girl, get with the program on it. There’s such disdain for Kipperlilly whining about it instead of actually doing something.

I love that it is genuinely mostly a joke, she’s not seriously advocating for murder here, but it also does say quite a bit about Adaine. About her trauma and her pragmatism and her lingering perfectionism and her rather enforced nonchalance about the potential necessity of parent murder and her distinct attitude that if a problem presents itself, then you fix it, doing whatever you have to do in the process.

There’s just a sense that, you know, if Kipperlilly has decided to be evil and has decided that she’s fine with killing people, which we have proof she has, why is she not going with the logical solution to her problem? If you have decided that you’re fine with murdering people and that morality is no longer a stumbling block, why are you not doing the most efficient thing to solve your stated problem? If you’re going to be evil, be better at it.

Adaine would be an absolutely terrifying bad guy. And also probably needs more counselling.

[amateurvoltaire]

Usually when an English speaker is getting into the history of the French Revolution and wants to go beyond Wikipedia, they stumble on The Twelve Who Ruled. It’s inevitable. Since 1941 it has been a staple of lecture halls and history aficionados alike.

For me it was one of the first things I read, many years ago, and it shaped, to some extent, how I approached the period. I read it again last year, expecting to see it differently. I didn’t. It’s an old book. But still, by the standards of 21st-century historiography, largely accurate.

So since it’s a book a lot of beginners encounter, and since I’ve had half a mind to review some of the dozens of books on the French Revolution I own, I thought it would be a good place to start.

I will be assessing this book (and all others I review) on a scale from 1 to 5 in eight categories:

Before we start, remember two things:

This is my review, which means it is, by definition, biased. I try to stay as neutral as possible, but no one is fully objective.

You should never take anything as fact. I research things. I enjoy researching things. I spend far too much time researching things. But I’m human, and that means I make mistakes. Challenge everything you read, including this.

Twelve Who Ruled: An In-depth Review

Historical Accuracy

For a book published in the 1940s, Twelve Who Ruled is remarkable in how much of it remains uncontested, especially given that archival access in France was impossible during the war. Using only the printed sources available to him, Palmer built a richly detailed narrative of Year II. He avoided major factual errors and did not indulge in the lurid exaggerations or mythologising that often plagued earlier accounts of the Revolution.

On the contrary, Palmer’s portraits of key figures and events have stood the test of time. His depiction of Robespierre, for example, was unmatched in its balance, nuance and restraint when the book was published. Subsequent scholarship has generally confirmed Palmer’s factual claims. Indeed, many of his interpretations have been validated by later evidence: for instance, he is one of the first to advance the argument that the Terror’s policies were reactive responses to severe crises, rather than a premeditated program of mass violence, and that Robespierre never exercised dictatorial authority.

Eighty years later, Twelve Who Ruled still holds up as a factually sound work. Far from perpetuating discredited myths, Palmer steered a middle course, avoiding both Thermidorian clichés about a “blood-mad” Committee and hagiographic Jacobin legends.

Historiographical Position

When situating The Twelve Who Ruled within the landscape of French Revolution historiography, it is important to remember that Palmer was writing in 1941, before most of the major scholarly camps had fully taken shape. His work does not fit neatly into the classic categories of Marxist, Revisionist, or post-Revisionist schools (1), though it engaged with and later influenced those debates.

Palmer’s approach was essentially a liberal narrative of the Revolution’s most turbulent phase. He focused on the pragmatic demands of governance during an existential crisis, rather than on class struggle or ideological abstraction. This already set him apart from the Marxist tradition. His attention remained squarely on the actions and dilemmas of the twelve men on the Committee of Public Safety, and on the political and military pressures that shaped their decisions.

He also diverged from what would later become the Revisionist school. While Palmer shared their scepticism of class determinism, he did not embrace their emphasis on ideology as the primary driver. His account treats the Terror less as a product of revolutionary rhetoric than as a contingent response to internal collapse and foreign invasion. He was wary of overly ideological explanations.

In short, The Twelve Who Ruled occupies a distinctive historiographical position. As the first serious monograph on the Committee of Public Safety, it predates the Cold War polarities that shaped later scholarship. In my opinion, Palmer might best be described as a pragmatic liberal historian of the French Revolution. He did not write in the Marxist tradition of Lefebvre or Soboul (though he admired Lefebvre enough to translate his work), nor did he share the iconoclastic edge of later revisionists like Cobban or Furet (2).

Use of Primary Sources

Writing during World War II from the United States, Palmer relied entirely on published primary sources available in America. These included a wide range of printed materials: the proceedings and debates of the National Convention, official documents and reports of the Committee of Public Safety, as well as memoirs, letters, and revolutionary newspapers.

This breadth of material allowed him to reconstruct the Committee’s decisions and actions almost day by day, giving his narrative credibility. Crucially, Palmer did not confine himself to Paris. Because he was interested in the representatives on mission and provincial enforcement of the Terror, he also consulted sources on events in Lyon, Alsace, and Brittany. For its time, the study had a notably wide geographic scope.

Even so, Palmer’s research was limited to what was in print. He lacked access to unpublished archives, local records, or police files that later historians would use to deepen the field of social history. His source base is political and governmental. It reflects the perspective of the revolutionary authorities, not that of ordinary people.

In short, Palmer worked almost entirely with documents written by the deputies and officials (all men) who “ruled.” As a result, the book pays less attention to marginal voices (3). The result is a body of sources broad in political scope, if limited in social depth.

Palmer’s use of sources is generally careful and even-handed. He provides context for the material he cites and avoids cherry-picking. His work relies on French-language sources, as expected for the subject (4). While not archive-based in the modern sense, the research was solid enough that the book’s factual foundation has remained largely intact even after eighy years of further research.

Methodological Rigor

The Twelve who Ruled is not overtly theoretical; its strength lies in a coherent narrative framework and a clear analytical focus. In an era when many academic historians were often abandoning narrative and turning to structural or conceptual models, Palmer resisted the trend. He showed that storytelling, when anchored in analysis, could still carry serious weight. He did not invoke grand theories (Marxist class theory, Tocquevillian social theory, etc.), nor did he fill the text with historiographical jargon. Instead, he focused on applying a steady interpretive lens to the events of 1793–1794.

The idea that the Revolution’s survival hinged on creating a unified, legitimate, and forceful authority during the crisis is the leitmotif of the book. Every chapter, whether addressing the war effort, economic controls, or factional purges, returns to this analytical core. In methodological terms, Palmer’s approach can be described as problem-driven narrative.He identifies the central issue (governing amid chaos) and examines how various factors (personalities, ideologies, circumstances) shaped the response attempted by the Committee of Public Safety. The result is a tightly focused analysis. Despite covering a tumultuous year, the reader always understands why events unfold as they do: because the revolutionaries were trying, with varying degrees of success and virtue, to resolve the Republic’s existential crisis.

In discussing key concepts such as “revolution,” “terror,” and “virtue,” Palmer adopts sensible, if traditional, definitions. He uses the term “Terror” in his title and narrative because it was (and remains) the conventional label for the period, but he is careful to unpack what it meant in practice. He does not treat “The Terror” as a monolithic or abstract force. Instead, he breaks it down into specific policies and events (the Law of Suspects, the Revolutionary Tribunal’s activities, pressure from the sans-culottes etc.) to show how violence was implemented pragmatically, not philosophically.

Notably, Palmer did not anachronistically impose the term “Reign of Terror” on everything, he knew that the term gained currency mainly after Robespierre’s fall. His narrative implies, in line with modern findings, that the revolutionary government itself did not treat “Terror” as a coherent policy slogan (5). Palmer’s treatment of terror as a concept is methodological. He presents it as an emergency government and analyses the mechanics and morality of state violence without becoming entangled in a semantic argument.

His treatment of “revolution” and “virtue” follows the same logic. He presents the Revolution as a struggle to preserve the Republic against its enemies, even at the cost of violating some of its founding principles. He regularly cites the ideals of liberty and equality, and the 1789 Constitution, not to celebrate them but to underline the irony of their suspension “until the peace.” The term “virtue” appears mainly in the context of revolutionary rhetoric, particularly Robespierre’s vision of republican virtue. Palmer does not deliver a philosophical essay on the term. He lets Robespierre and Saint-Just speak for themselves, then examines the consequences. His analysis makes it clear that he understands Jacobin virtue as a kind of austere civic morality, which he implicitly weighs against liberal values.

Methodologically, Palmer is rigorous and consistent. He poses an implicit question: how did twelve men govern a revolution in crisis?—and answers it through a chronological but analytical narrative. His framework is free of glaring contradictions. He weaves political, military, and economic history into a single, unified argument.

The clarity of Palmer’s conceptual handling is evident in how easily the argument can be distilled. Readers never wonder what Palmer thinks the Terror was. He sees it as a revolutionary dictatorship, a term he uses without apology. It was, in some respects, effective (securing military victory), in others, creative (experimenting with democratic forms and state control), and in many, morally troubling.

Narrative Style

This is a subjective category, but one of Palmer’s greatest strengths lies in his narrative style, which is both clear and engaging. Unlike some academic history books, Twelve Who Ruled reads almost like a story, albeit a richly documented one, of a dramatic year in French history. Palmer’s prose is accessible and relatively free of jargon. He was writing for an educated audience, but not exclusively for specialists, and this shows in the readability of the text.

The story is driven by the vivid personalities of the twelve Committee members and the high-stakes drama they lived through. At times, Palmer almost novelistically follows individual members into the provinces or captures the atmosphere in the Convention, which helps the reader visualise events. This blend of narrative colour and historical evidence keeps the text grounded.

That said, the book does not read like a novel throughout. Twelve Who Ruled is densely detailed, and Palmer does not simplify the complexity of Year II. Some sections, for example those on the organisation of war production or the Committee’s internal bureaucracy, are dry and require the reader to absorb a large amount of technical information. However, these are consistently interwoven with more dramatic material such as battles, trials, and political confrontations. The balance keeps the pacing steady across the text.

Palmer is particularly effective in his character sketches. Each of the twelve becomes memorable (Carnot the stern military organiser, Barère the silver-tongued pragmatist, Saint-Just the youthful ideologue etc.) without collapsing into cliché. These almost literary portraits make the reader more invested in the unfolding story.

Perhaps most striking is the absence of pretension in Palmer’s style.His prose has a classic literary quality: measured, erudite, but never self-important. Compared to many writers of historical research, Palmer’s style is disciplined. He doesn’t try to prove his intelligence with a flood of ornate language. He simply writes well.

Originality and Contribution

Upon publication, Twelve Who Ruled was an innovative and ground-breaking contribution to French Revolutionary studies. R. R. Palmer effectively pioneered the focused study of the Committee of Public Safety, a subject that, surprisingly, had never before been treated in a comprehensive monograph. In 1941, historiography on the French Revolution was rich in general narratives and class analyses of 1789 or the broader revolutionary period, but the intense year of the Terror and its governing body had received no sustained study. Palmer filled that gap brilliantly.

By focusing on the twelve men of the Committee and examining their rule as a collective, Palmer offered a new angle. Rather than writing a biography of Robespierre or a general history of the Revolution, he did something original: a group portrait of a revolutionary government in action. This approach yielded fresh insights by highlighting the role of less-famous figures like Billaud-Varene, Lindet, the two Prieur(s) or Saint-André in winning the war and running the country.

At the time, interpretations of the Terror tended to fall into polemical extremes, either apologetic or scathing. Palmer’s contribution was to demystify the Terror. He did not glorify it or denounce it in moral absolutes. He analysed it as a political and historical reality. That stance was unusual in 1941, especially for an American historian. His work managed to synthesise insights from competing schools: it acknowledged the Terror’s necessity in context, a point later taken up by leftist historians, while also recognising its moral and strategic failures, a view more often stressed by revisionists.

This balance gave the book lasting academic value. This synthesis gave the book a lasting academic impact, as it could be read profitably by people on different sides of the interpretive spectrum.

Authorial Bias and Political Agenda

Palmer’s personal values and context inevitably informed his work, yet Twelve Who Ruled is notably measured and fair-minded, without a heavy-handed political agenda. R. R. Palmer was a liberal-democratic American intellectual, and someone who valued the ideals of the Enlightenment and constitutional government. That perspective quietly shapes the book. Palmer clearly admires certain principles of 1789 and he often reminds the reader of what was lost when the Terror regime suspended civil liberties and elections. His sympathy for liberal democracy leads him to approach the Committee of Public Safety with a critical eye, especially regarding their use of coercion and violence. He does not defend the guillotine or the repression of dissent. On the contrary, he treats those as regrettable, if at times understandable, choices.

Crucially, Palmer’s liberalism does not reduce his book to a simple anti-revolutionary stance. If anything, there is a degree of admiration for the Committee’s sense of duty and purpose, even as he remains aware of the compromises they made. He describes the Committee’s rule as a “dictatorship,” but one born of necessity, reflecting a liberal’s reluctant concession that extreme times may call for extreme measures. His relief when the Terror ends is unmistakable. The tone around Thermidor suggests a welcome return to politics as usual, though he does not spare the Thermidorians from criticism either.

Throughout, Palmer shows a clear preference for moderation. He tends to praise figures like Barère or Carnot when they show pragmatism or hesitation toward the use of violence. Barère is labelled, for instance, a “reluctant terrorist,” someone who chose expediency over fanaticism. In contrast, Palmer is more critical of those he sees as driven by ideology. Figures such as Billaud-Varenne or Collot d’Herbois are portrayed less sympathetically, as hardliners whose insistence on revolutionary purity helped drive repression too far.

Even here, Palmer does not resort to caricature. He places the actions of extremists in context, explaining their behaviour as a product of pressure rather than inherent cruelty. His bias, to the extent that it appears, leans toward moderate, pragmatic politics. He gives implicit approval when the Committee acts with competence and restraint. He shows clear discomfort when ideological rigidity overrides practical judgment.

If anything, the book carries a mild Whiggish tone (6). Palmer seems to view the Terror as a detour from the path of democratic progress, a necessary detour but a detour nonetheless. This aligns with a classical liberal reading of the Revolution, where 1789 and 1793 are seen not as a permanent rupture, but as part of the long and painful emergence of liberal democracy. In the final chapters, Palmer’s relief at the Republic’s military victories and the subsiding of emergency measures feels almost celebratory, implying a return to the Revolution’s original liberal course. Yet, he also soberly concludes with the personal tragedies of the twelve, showing that history’s verdict is complicated.

It is also worth noting what Palmer does not do. Namely, propaganda.

Twelve Who Ruled is not a cautionary tale or propaganda tract. Given that it was written in 1941, with fascism on the rise, one might expect an American liberal to use the French Terror to denounce totalitarianism. But Palmer avoids crude analogies. He lets readers draw their own conclusions. A reader in 1941 might well think of Hitler or Stalin while reading about the dangers of concentrated power, but Palmer does not push that comparison. His portrait of the Committee, a dictatorial body that nevertheless saved France, complicates any simple moral about dictatorship. The lesson is not imposed.

Suitability for Teaching or Further Research

Over the years, Twelve Who Ruled has proven highly effective for teaching the French Revolution and remains a reliable point of entry for further research. Its structured narrative and wide scope make it a strong introduction for students and general readers, while its analytical precision offers more experienced readers material for reflection and debate. Within Anglophone historiography, few works cover Year II with the same aplomb.

The book’s focus on individual leaders and specific crises helps anchor the chronology of 1793 to 1794 in something tangible and humane. Because Palmer explains context as he goes, for example by giving background on the Vendée revolt, the Federalist insurrections, and the food shortages, it allows even newcomers to the topic to grasp the wider dynamics of the period.

Its limitations are those of its time. Now more than eighty years old, the book does not reflect more recent developments in the field. Questions of gender, global context, symbolic culture, and the experience of ordinary people are not part of Palmer’s framework.

Most importantly, the book is so well-written that even someone unaccustomed to reading non-fiction will find it engaging. It does not demand specialist knowledge, but it never talks down to the reader. As an introduction to the French Revolution, it is hard to beat. Few works manage to be this serious, this readable, and this enduring at the same time. It remains a book worth reading, not just for what it says about 1793, but for how well it says it.

Notes

(1) This is worth a post of its own, but in short—and this is an extremely simplified summary—the historiography of the French Revolution can be broadly outlined as follows:

Conservative reaction (1790s to 1890s): Sees the Revolution as a catastrophe that overturned legitimate order. Authors: Edmund Burke, Hippolyte Taine, Louis de Bonald.

Liberal narrative (1820s to 1910s): Praises the moderate reforms of 1789, condemns later extremism, and stresses continuity with the Old Regime. Authors: Adolphe Thiers, Alexis de Tocqueville, François Guizot.

Radical republican and proto-socialist (1840s to 1930s): Celebrates popular egalitarianism and defends Jacobin democracy. Authors: Jules Michelet, Louis Blanc, Jean Jaurès.

Marxist classical social school (1920s to mid-1960s): Frames the Revolution as a bourgeois class struggle that abolished feudalism and views the Terror as a necessary defence. Authors: Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul, Michel Vovelle.

Revisionist critique (mid-1960s to late 1980s): Rejects the class model, emphasises political contingency and the culture of violence. Authors: Alfred Cobban, William Doyle, François Furet, Simon Schama, Patrice Gueniffey.

Post-revisionist and cultural turn (late 1980s to 2000s): Combines political and social analysis, focuses on language, symbols, and local experiences. Authors: Lynn Hunt, Timothy Tackett, Jean-Clément Martin, Mona Ozouf, Roger Chartier, Peter McPhee, Hervé Leuwers.

There are also several other areas of research like Gender History and Colonial Perspectives which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.

(2) It goes without saying that recent post-revisionist trends, including cultural and gender-focused approaches, lie outside Palmer’s scope. These methodologies only emerged decades after 1941. Palmer does not, for example, examine revolutionary festivals, political symbols, or the “culture of citizenship” as later cultural historians would.

(3) This is not unique to Palmer. Most scholarship of his time ignores marginalised groups, including women, the poor, enslaved people, and colonial subjects.

(4) PSA: if you are reading a history book on a specific country or event, and most of its sources are not in that country’s language, stop reading.

(5) Palmer does recount the demand of 5 September 1793 to make terror “the order of the day,” but he treats it as a historical moment rather than an ideological programme.

(6) Whiggish refers to a teleological view of history, typically associated with 19th-century liberal thought. It sees the past as a steady march toward progress, constitutional government, and political liberty. A “Whiggish” historian tends to interpret events as steps on the road to modern democracy, even when those steps include violent detours.

[hannie-dul-set]

the ethics of belief — [p.sh].

SYNOPSIS. you’ve been noticing some signs that park sunghoon seems to have a problem with you, and you’re resolute to getting a straight confirmation or denial from him rather than taking the signs as they are and believing in the worst. it’s less troublesome that way. you’d much rather believe what he’d say than spend the remaining two and half-years mulling over something that doesn’t even matter. 

meanwhile, park sunghoon also harbors his own unvoiced beliefs about you and your person. the issue arises when that belief starts to fester under the seams of certainty and doubt— a firm credence denied from the opportunity of validation. 

and that’s when the belief of oneself usually starts to fall apart.

PAIRING. park sunghoon x female! reader. GENRE. college! au, classmates! au, strangers to one-sided enemies/academic rivals to friends to lovers to exes to [redacted], romance, angst, hurt/comfort, humor, drama, inspired by my nth reread of the manhwa “cheese in the trap.”  WARNINGS. swearing, an initial unhealthy dynamic that gets better with time, misogyny, daddy issues LMAO, dishonesty, ulterior motives HUAHA, self-sabotage, talks of insecurities, so much academic dumps and word vomits, the mc’s are political science students that enough deserves a warning, more tba. WORD COUNT. est. 15-20k. preview 2.5k.

TAGLIST. i will be completely transparent and say that i may or may not even get to finish this HAHAHAH nevertheless, if you’re interested, just shoot an ask/dm/reply!

NOTE. i am.....up to something yet again HHAHAHHAHA. was really inspired to write something like this after rereading cheese in the trap!!! it took me while to decide which kpop boy i should subject to my whims this time, and idk why i even bothered mulling it over when hoon was literally the perfect fit for this perfectionist, passionate, paranoid male lead 😔😔. quite different tone than the fics i usually write (quarter life crisis time). anyhow, i hope this piques your interest! enjoy!

preview under the cut.

“YOU’RE SITTING ON THE COUCH, WHEN YOU HEAR A KNOCK. The police have arrived to arrest your spouse— for murder. This accusation comes as a total shock, but their fingerprints were found on the murder weapon. Your spouse insists they’re innocent. Should you believe your spouse, even though the evidence against them looks damning? This, class, is a classic example of an ethical dilemma.”

There is a guy from your major that you’ve recently come to notice.

“Discussed by Alex Worsnip, this question covers the ethics of belief through various lenses, including evidentialism and pragmatism—”

Well. It’s not as if you’ve never noticed him before.

“It was W.K. Clifford who coined the term the ethics of belief in his 1876 book under the same name. He forwarded the evidentialist view of belief in determining the correct, or moral, way of viewing a situation or problem— that is, by believing things based on the evidence at hand. However, this is not the only perspective we can use to anchor our respective belief systems.”

It’s just that for the past two months you’ve known him, you’ve noticed that his behavior around you has been quite…odd, in comparison to the rest of your peers.

“Now, let us go back to the problem I’ve presented earlier. Hmm. Let’s see the attendance list—”

He was the first person you were introduced to during the pre-academic-year-get-together when you came back after spending the previous semester in a government sponsored exchange program to the U.S. In fact, it was very hard not to notice him, considering that the moment you arrived at the event— late, because you had to spend the entire day unpacking your studio the hours prior— he was a new face surrounded by a notable amount of people from your year.

And your first impression of him was simple.

“—is Park Sunghoon present?

(“This is Sunghoon! Park Sunghoon! C’mon, say hi!”

A tall, good-looking, well-off, popular guy who apparently also has a great personality. Sim Jaehyun’s introduction of Park Sunghoon seems to have maxed out on adjectives. He apparently also transferred to this program— Bachelor of Arts in Political Science— at the same time you left for your exchange program. He, after one once-over amidst the crowded scene, is someone you’ve concluded that you’re better off simply retaining as an acquaintance and a classmate because of the very adjectives Jaeyun described him with.

Popular, after only a semester of being here. Carries with him a crowd of people. That’s far too troublesome for you to voluntarily deal with.

So, for your own benefit, the smart decision is simply to never go further beyond being on polite terms with Park Sunghoon.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Ah. Yes, hi.”

“Now, don’t be awkward! Everyone already knows each other except for the both of you. You two should put in the effort to get closer.”

There’s a slight lag to Park Sunghoon’s smile. You smile back, scanning the rented venue for Kim Yeondu— closest friend since first semester and is trying to recruit you into the Strava cult— else you’d be a few minutes, few tequila shots too late from saving her from embarrassing herself on the first unofficial day of the semester. Nam Deokhwan seems to have already gotten the ball rolling and passing around drinks. Choi Nari is yelling at you three to come join for a group photo.

An exhale from you, you tighten your smile and flicker your gaze back to your new acquaintance, who looks like he’s also ready to get this awkward introduction over with. Jaeyun is the only soul in this three-person liminal space that’s even somewhat enthusiastic. 

At last, Park Sunghoon extends out a hand for a shake. “Let’s get along,” he says.

“Sure,” you politely reply.)

“Present, sir.”

Your eyes trail off from your notes, all the way to the other side of the lecture hall, several seats away from you to look at the only individual standing amidst the sea of seated students. “Your spouse has been accused of murder with damning evidence.” Prof Yoon flickers the slide back to the previous one, the question printed on the projector screen. “Should you believe them or not?”

There’s a polite smile on his face— an easygoing yet comfortable air. His posture is as straight as it can get. His profile is something artists would want to transfer onto canvas. “I would believe the evidence presented against my spouse’s testimony, Professor Yoon.”

You click the end of your pen, pointing the inked tip towards the paper with a hum.

“Care to expound?”

Sitting next to you in the hall is Yeondu, who has her eyes locked straight onto Park Sunghoon as he begins his answer. “The phrasing of ‘should you believe’ them rather than would implies a moral obligation of belief. In this scenario, what I’d want to believe does not matter. Even if my spouse had been, for example, loving and kind throughout the course of our relationship, the existence of police-discovered evidence that they had committed the crime of murder would overpower any emotionally-driven feelings of belief that I’d have.” You hear her sigh a little. Dreamily even, with her elbows propped up on the table and palms cupping her cheeks. “Evidence points us towards the direction of the truth, therefore there is no question but to believe in it.”

“Jesus, I have not registered a single word he said, but fuck, he sure sounds hot as hell when he talks smart.”

You laugh a little. You’re not one to deny that Park Sunghoon is indeed smart, handsome, and has the voice of an angel. But none of those are the sources of his difference in his behavior towards you. At least, you don’t think it is.

“Very good, Sunghoon. Your take is a clear evidentialist perspective towards the dilemma.”

A prompt from your professor, Park Sunghoon nods and returns to his seat, eliciting some murmurs from everyone else around. You set down your pen. You straighten your back.

“I’d like to hear if anyone has a different answer.”

You raise a hand.

“Yes?”

All eyes are on you—

“Thank you, sir. While the evidentialist point of view might seem the most rational, I’d like to argue otherwise.” 

—including Park Sunghoon’s

“I do not disagree with the moral burden of who I should believe. And in this case, I should believe my spouse. Not because of love or the fact that we are in a relationship. Regardless of the individual, the principle that everyone is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond rest still stands.” You begin. You direct your attention towards Professor Yoon as you continue speaking. However, your peripheral notices something interesting. “Given that the situation is provided that the evidence is simply presented in testimony by a police officer outside the court, it is still yet to be verified and judged by the court of law. The same goes with my spouse. Therefore, until the law declares them guilty or otherwise for the crime of murder, I would choose to believe my spouse over anything.”

Park Sunghoon had been preparing to raise his hand. And he does. “May I ask her a question?” he asks. Professor Yoon nods at him to go ahead, and— when Park Sunghoon turns his head to direct his attention towards you— it fails to slip under your notice.

That annoyed look in his eyes. Bothered. Discomforted.

“Do you argue that we have the ability to choose what we believe?”

That’s the very reason why you can’t help but notice him more than you’d like.

“We have no control over the beliefs we carry. If we have that ability, then the concept of doubt would not exist, and this dilemma would not exist, either.”

Another round of murmurs arise. You nod and smile. “That’s a good point. However, I still stand with my argument.” What is up with that look of irritation? What is his problem? “We may not be able to control our beliefs at will, but our belief systems are shaped by our principles, morals, and experiences, are they not? My principles of justice alongside the experiences of a healthy and loving relationship would lead me towards believing him above anything else. This is not an argument based on emotion. Upon marriage, a moral obligation towards your spouse is conceived.”

You see him flinch. His brows furrow, a counter-argument already brewing in his mind.

“Should the time come that your spouse is indeed proven innocent, and your belief stood against them, then I’d say that you have failed your moral obligation.”

Unfortunately, the opportunity to fire it is stripped away the moment he opens his mouth. “That is a very good argument. I believe Mr Park Sunghoon has more to say, but unfortunately, we don’t have enough time to discuss things further. You two may take your seats.”

It seems like both you and Park Sunghoon get the similar idea to give each other one last glance before sitting back down. You, offering a smile and a nod of acknowledgement after sharing a fruitful discussion. Him, masking that previous expression of annoyance by mirroring yours, followed by an immediate turn around— head snapping back in front as if he couldn’t bear to look at you any longer.

Seriously. What’s up with him?

Yeondu scratches something onto your abandoned sheet of paper the moment you release a breath and sink back into your seat. Whoa, that was an intense exchange, she wrote. Pay attention, you scribble back with a soft hum. Though, you’re not exactly one to talk because although you’re looking at Professor Yoon and trying your best to listen to her talk, the recently concluded exchange with the man in front has gotten your mind wandering.

“As much as I’d like to hear discussions of other common ethical dilemmas such as the trolley problem, it seems like we only have around five minutes left for today’s class. However, this isn’t our only opportunity for discourse.”

All evidence points towards the idea that Park Sunghoon has a problem with you.

“Next week is the College Field Day, so we won’t be meeting. The week after that, we will be having a debate.”

But you’re not one to jump to conclusions. So until you get a confirmation from Park Sunghoon personally—

“Please see the screen for your groups. I will be posting the guidelines and propositions on our MIS immediately after this class, so please be guided. Once you’ve checked your groups, you may be dismissed. Thank you.”

—you’d much rather hold your suspicions at bay for the time being.

“Ah, fuck me, I’m with Deokhwan! What about you, where’s your— oh! There you are. You’re grouped with Jaeyun and—” It seems like there’s a magnet constantly pulling your vision towards one side of the lecture hall today. Park Sunghoon seems to have read the list at the same time as you did, registered the names listed, and looked over to you at the same time as you did. “Sunghoon! God damn, did Prof Yoon even randomize this? This is crazy. Thank god we’re not fighting against your group.”

At the same time as Professor Yoon takes her leave, the rest of your classmates also slowly trickle out of the lecture hall, while some have opted to remain inside. Park Sunghoon and the rest of the people surrounding him seem to have opted to leave. He already has his bag slung over his shoulder, chatting alongside Jaeyun and Nari and Jongseong and a few others.

You’re still unsure if you’re simply being sensitive, or if he does indeed have an issue with you. Quickly, you gather your things as well. Yeondu shoves her ethics book into her tote bag and locks arms with you. “Anyway, where should we eat? Jiyeon said there’s pork cutlet on the menu today.”

Uncertainties are troublesome. It gets your brain churning more often than you’d like, expending energy more inefficiently than you’d like.

“Do you mind waiting for a second?”

And you’re not very fond of troublesome things.

“I’ll go meet with my group mates first.”

So wouldn’t it make the most sense to just ask him directly?

Yeondu tells you to take it easy, but lets you off with a wave. You march up to the group moving towards the middle aisle dividing two sides of the lecture hall seating. They walk down the pitched flooring, on the way to the bottom of the hall. You cut off that opening. Park Sunghoon’s steps stutter mid-speech at your sudden appearance. Jaeyun releases a surprised whoa. “Park Sunghoon,” you greet. He blinks his widened eyes in response. “Jaeyun, too. Sorry for the interruption. Are you guys heading out for lunch? I was hoping to schedule a meeting time for us first so we could start researching for the debate.”

The initial surprise subsides in the air. Jaeyun breaks the awkward silence with a laugh. “Whoa. You’re way too diligent, dude! Prof Yoon hasn’t even posted the propositions yet.” He nudges his friend for some backup. However, Sunghoon— seeming to only have shaken off his stupor a few moments ago— agrees with you, instead.

“She’s right, Jake,” he says, nudging back his friend, and Park Sunghoon’s eyes trail away from his friend to you, a practiced, polite smile covering his face. “How about we meet later after class at the campus cafe? That way, we’d have more time to sit down for a discussion.”

“Hey, you guys can talk this out later! I’m starving!”

You notice Sunghoon’s smile stiffening for a second. Only for a brief second and you look over to the scene behind his shoulder— a group of evidently impatient and irritated friends, mostly emanating from Nari, who’s leering right at you. You ignore them. You respond to Sunghoon with an expression mirroring his own. “Sure, that’s fine with me,” you say. “My classes end at four.”

“We both finish by four-thirty!” Jayun shutters in, throwing an arm around Sunghoon’s neck, grinning widely with the conversation finally coming to an end. His gaze is already glued to the door. “Alright, we’ll see you later. C’mon, guys. Lunch, lunch, lunch!”

Jaeyun passes you by with a friendly pat on the shoulder. Jongseong nods at you and walks ahead. Among the rest of the group walking past you, you feel one of them bumping into your shoulder, by accident or otherwise, yet even that falls far under your notice in comparison to the first person that passed you by.

It was from the corner of your eye, but you’re sure that Park Sunghoon’s smile disappeared with the roll of his eyes the moment he took the step down and walked past your sight-line.

You caught that. Without a doubt.

“You done? C’mon, let’s go eat!”

Yeondu skips over to you after your mini-meeting, tugging you by the arm out the door, but your mind remains on the two levels of the lecture floor aisle. In spite of the evidence pointing towards Park Sunghoon’s masked distaste towards your person, your personality, your existence— whatever, it’s not the time to ask him about it yet.

Until then, you’ll have to table your judgements and how you intend on dealing with him.

the ethics of belief. © hannie-dul-set, 2025.

[fear-is-truth]

❛ THE 5 LOVE LANGUAGES ❜ - K. ANDERSON.

ⓘ love language : a person's characteristic means of expressing and experiencing love

꣑ৎ ‎ :‎ masterlist﹒request / chat w me ! ﹒꒱ note. got a lil carried away, but i can yap about my man for days on end

words of affirmation ➛ ˗ˏˋ this might seem like it would be kai’s love language—after all, he is a gifted speaker. persuasive, emotionally intelligent. but here’s the thing: he doesn’t believe a word of it. because kai knows the power of bullshitting too well to ever take it at face value—one doesn’t trust a sharp blade simply because one is good at swinging it.

so when you tell him you love him? if you told him you loved him ten times a day, he’d take it as his due (because it fuels his ego and he needs validation.) maybe even say “love you too,” if he’s in a generous mood. but he’s already analysing: why did you say that now? what are you trying to reassure him of? kai just can’t switch off the paranoid part of his brain that parses sincerity like code. he wants to believe you; he wants it to be simple. but nothing is. not for him.

sometimes kai thinks about how easily you could lie. how easily he lies. and he hates that his own doubt chokes the love he tries to feel cleanly. you’ve witnessed him spin lies with so much passion that it felt like gospel. seen him unearth confessions from trembling lips and interlocked pinkies. you know the voice he uses when he wants something. and kai knows you hear that same voice when he says “i love you.” even when he genuinely means it. ˊˎ-

────୨ৎ────

acts of service ➛ ˗ˏˋ kai doesn’t believe in love that doesn’t do something. words mean very little to him unless they’re paired with action—people lie; they say what they think you want to hear (he’s an virtuoso in this aspect.)

you could tell him you adore him every day and it wouldn’t land the way something practical would: plug in his dead phone, fixing his tie, remember his preference for food, not letting anyone insult his ideology in front of you—even when defending him feels like a betrayal of your values and dignity—and doing it anyway... now that’s real dedication. he’ll often show love by doing things for you in return because that’s his metric for affection—if he didn’t care, he wouldn’t bother. ˊˎ-

────୨ৎ────

quality time ➛ ˗ˏˋ quality time is, unequivocally, kai’s primary love language, the clearest, cleanest line that can be drawn between love and order. he doesn’t need any of that performative bullshit society has programmed into people’s idea of romance. his idea of intimacy is pragmatic—two people aligned in purpose, parallel activity.

if he’s going out, you’re coming too. there won’t be any explanation, just a curt “get in,” or leave the door open long enough for you to follow. he needs someone to bounce ideas off of or just exist next to in the car. you don’t even have to talk (in fact, he prefers when you don’t.) your presence just help him think better.

kai builds closeness through utility, and this is proven by the way he keeps you near in mundane ways. he likes when you do chores around him—not just because of his regressive ideas about gender roles (though those are there) but it satisfies both his need for control and his attachment issues.

if you’re not around, he gets irritable and agitated. paces around, second-guesses himself. will try and act like it’s business as usual but he’s waiting for you to come back. ˊˎ-

────୨ৎ────

physical touch ➛ ˗ˏˋ this one’s complicated. not in theory—he enjoys physical touch—but he’s more comfortable only he’s the one initiating it. sex is the easiest form to navigate, and like any competent cult leader, kai knows how to manipulate with proximity. the old in-out in-out is easy, but what’s harder is affection for its own sake. his personality preference for touch is the kind that affirms possession. the hand closing lightly around your throat, fingers under your chin, tilting your face up.

kai doesn’t like being touched by surprise. if you reach for him unannounced, he might tense up or even flinch—but he’ll let you, because you’re the only one allowed. his followers already know you’re his, but he can’t let them see just how much he’s yours. being seen as smitten would chip away at his authority, and the divine ruler can’t afford to be seen as weak. so if you get too affectionate in front of the others, he’ll shove you off with a snide comment.

it goes without saying that he doesn’t do PDA. public is performance; private is truth. you are his truth. that said, he lets things slide in private—your legs draped over his lap on the couch. him resting a hand at your lower back when you both walk into a room.

but behind closed doors? he doesn’t bother to hide how wants you. all the fucking time. not even in the sexual sense, (though that too.) he lets things slide. your legs thrown over his lap on the couch. your fingers slipping into his hair while he reads. his hand resting instinctively at the small of your back when you pass behind him. kai can be strangely clingy, too. he likes when you stand between his legs and hug him, his face pressed into your chest. fingers toying with the ends of your hair when he’s thinking.

of course, he will never admit it (he’s too proud for that) but there’s a difference between tolerating and needing. and he needs you. ˊˎ-

────୨ৎ────

receiving gifts ➛ ˗ˏˋ gifts are low on his list, he didn’t grow up scraping by (his family was more than well off) but even then, kai never saw the point in material things beyond their function. now he’s got investments and crypto doing well, he’s sitting on more than most people. but that hasn’t changed his attitude. he’s not stingy, but sentimentality attached to objects feels juvenile to him.

he’ll hand you a generous stack of cash at the beginning of the month for “groceries, bills, whatever”—and the rest? all yours. he won’t keep tabs on where it goes. your comfort is his responsibility. if you needed him to spell that out, he wouldn’t be your boyfriend. when he does give gifts, they’re practical. a copy of a book he just read and thinks you’d like too, because intellectual conversations matter. or a gadget you mentioned in passing: a fitbit, airpods, noise-cancelling headphones…whatever would make your life run more efficiently. that’s what matters to him. he doesn’t do flowers. what’s the point? they die at the end of the week.

birthdays or milestones are an exception. not because he suddenly believes in sentiment of course, but because he understands optics and appearances. and, in a quieter sense, he understands you. in order to impress him, you often pretend you’re above such frivolities, that you don’t care about that stuff, but he knows that you do. and in your case, his sexist instincts aren’t totally off-base. ˊˎ-

 fear-is-truth 2025 — all rights reserved. do not modify, repost, translate, or plagiarise my content.

[cerealiii]

Screwtio brain rot in which Screwllum creates a simulated universe to house the memories of his life with one Veritas Ratio. For inorganic creatures the definition of "life" is perhaps one of their most defining struggles as some would question if they are in fact even alive, but what of Death? Does death mean the same thing to the inorganic as it does to short lived organic life?

I haven't seen much exploration of the inevitability of Ratio's passing. I don't think either would be foolish enough to walk the path of abundance. I think Veritas would be very pragmatic about his death, in fact I think he'd be the one to gift himself and his memories to Screwllum for...science (and maybe a bit out of love).

Side brain rot: simulated Ratio escapes from SU as a new “life”, a ghost in the shell that jumps between programs and networks and appears before Screwllum when he least expects it -- on an errant screen, a voice in the radio, a whisper in his ear... It's simply Aha fucking with Nous, to take one of their path striders, one devout but ignored by their aeon and setting them free along another path. Simulated Ratio knows exactly what he and how he was created...

--- Cerealiii

(back dated to match twitter) 240216

[mostbelovedqueer]

They should have been queer Tournament - Round 3

Disclaimer: This tournament is based on submissions! Please respect all identities, characters and fandoms! Hate will get you blocked instantly!

Why Kirk should have been queer: He’s soooo bi/pan

Why Steve should have been queer: Bisexual because he has female and male love interests

Additional submission message:

I have written a counterpart to this with Bucky Barnes, but Steve should have been bisexual. (Gay is fine too, this is just my take.) As I said in the other one, the first two movies are centered around their relationship. None of the story works or means anything without their love and loyalty. I'll copy some of that below, and then expand on the Steve side of things:

Bucky plays the role of his love interest in both TFA and TWS: The person Steve enlists for, the person Steve actually gets off his ass and becomes a superhero for, the person whose death reveals a darkness and need for vengeance in Steve, and the person whose loss cuts him so deeply he decides not to try to escape the crashing plane even though he's borderline indestructible and can probably swim in the icy water. Let me reiterate: Steve's girlfriend is begging him to stay alive any way he can, and he doesn't even try. Because his beloved Bucky is dead.

In The Winter Soldier, Bucky's role as love interest is even clearer: Steve tells Natasha directly at the beginning of the movie that he doesn't want to date because he doesn't know how to find anyone with shared life experience. Then, almost immediately, while a LOVE SONG ABOUT YOUR BEAU RETURNING FROM WW2 IS PLAYING, he encounters Bucky. Bucky, who, like Steve, has gone from a normal young man to a weapon, who has lost everything that mattered to him, who has found himself in a new world decades later, who has lost time due to being frozen.

Bucky, with whom Steven spent most of his childhood and young adult life, who has been through nearly everything with Steve, including all the things he doesn't feel he can share with his new friends. Okay, this is becoming a queer Steve manifesto too (and I'll give him one), but I can't explain how the movie presents Bucky as Steve's lover without that.

Then the tropes begin! Amnesia! Fighting on opposite sides! Bucky as abuse victim, needing to be rescued. A fight to the death, Steve dying for Bucky, and breaking him out of the amnesia spell by reminding him of a tender moment they shared, a promise they made that sounds like a wedding vow. "'Til the end of the line." 'Til death do us part.

And it would have been beautiful for Steve to die in 1945 and wake up to a world where he could marry a man in five states and DC. Put it on his little notebook list. "Berlin Wall, JFK, Trouble Man, Stonewall, gay marriage?!!"

Steve is a bigger character than Bucky, so they do more with him. He has two women love interests, who are unfortunately related to each other. It feels like they were trying to replace his affection for Peggy with Sharon, her NIECE, but neither of them are compatible with the Steve we know, values-wise.

Peggy is a pragmatic secret agent. She is shown to be willing to work with Arnim Zola, whom she knows tortured Bucky and murdered a number of, at the least, American soldiers. Operation Paperclip was a real program, and Americans did indeed work with former Nazi scientists, so this could be a complex topic to tackle, if they didn't shy away from the full implications. That's a compelling thing to do with Peggy: a woman agent who has to fight for respect…is still working with shady government agencies. A shady government agency that Steve Rogers KNOWS will very easily be convinced to support a program that will attempt to slaughter twenty million people at once. Steve immediately clocked the spy program as evil when Nick Fury called it protective. The Steve of TWS wouldn't tolerate for a second Peggy's grey moral zone.

Sharon may not knowingly work with Nazis, but she spied on Steve for months while pretending to be a friendly neighbor. That's her job, that's interesting, but Steve didn't like it and the movies offered no reason for me to believe he was interested in her after that until they randomly sucked face while Sam and Bucky smiled painfully.

I don't say this to suggest Steve shouldn't have any relationships with them, or women at all. That's fine. What I do mean by it is that the character of Steve, who has a very intense moral code, might break it for Bucky, but usually he doesn't even have to. Whereas, they don't even suggest he would have to contort himself to be with these women he hasn't even spent much time with, BUT HE WOULD. Heterosexuality infects these movies so deeply that it makes more sense to the writers (or execs, or whoever) for Steve to go back in time to a decade he DOESN'T EVEN LIKE to marry a woman he SAW working with his BEST FRIEND'S NAZI TORTURER than for him to, I don't know, get a house with Bucky? Who really needs him right now?

I don't think most people got really queerbaited by the MCU. They weren't gonna make their second flagship character gay or bi officially like that. But after spending 3+ movies saying that this relationship is the most important thing in the world, splitting them up by seventy years was a rug pull. It made the story worse, it aggressively retconned multiple arcs, and it felt like someone at Disney got nervous about how popular the ship was in the mainstream. I don't know, probably we'll never know what exactly happened, but it sure felt like a middle finger. Steve should have been bisexual.

[0hcicero]

To be clear up top, I really love Worlds Beyond Number, and I love the stories and the authenticity and groundedness of it. But listening to this last episode and then the fireside was doubly difficult because:

- I come from a military family that is not officer class (aka my fam would have been imperial infantry and not wizards)

- I grew up rural around lots of farmers and hunters

And some of the statements around both rural people and rank and file military (while likely very true in the story and in this world) in the fireside rubbed me the wrong way. I love Brennan and his mind and worldbuilding, and I understand the purpose of this episode was to lean into the tensions in Ame’s worldview and the truth of Eursolon’s backstory, but damn. The whole ‘these people are stupid and ignorant’ thing sucks, because yeah, there are stupid and ignorant people for sure that are rank and file and rural, but also the perspective feels quite privileged. We got to see good wizards AND bad wizards, but we only get to see shitty and dumb lower ranks. And that’s not the truth I knew growing up military, at all. We got to see very kind but stupid farmers, and while the kindness was a bonus the stupidity across the bar sucked, because some of the smartest people I ever met didn’t make it through grade school.

There was talk in the fireside about xenophobia, and it just felt kinda bad that this person I see as a very clever smart and educated person couldn’t see some of the hypocrisy in that.

So to counter some of what I heard, I want to put out some of my experiences.

Military

- there are xenophobic idiots in the lower ranks, that’s for sure, but there are also a lot of people who are much more involved in the ‘boots on the ground’ field work, especially in peace-keeping, in the lower ranks. This includes cultural exchange and engaging and helping the populace. They often see more and know more, speak the language, and learn proper customs.

- Promotion is supposed to be a meritocracy, but often it is not. If you buck against the system and call out its errors, you won’t be promoted, much like my mother, who was a woman, a corporal, and got the wing commander’s commendation more times than most officers in her squadron, started a mediation program, and was an outspoken feminist who was constantly pushing for justice and fairness.

- typical, lower ranks consider anyone above a seargent fairly ‘out of touch’ with reality, and may have to do their best to work around bad orders, because often, officers are seen as ‘not getting their hands dirty/knowing the truth of a situation’.

- typically higher ranking officers are arrogant and rude and have an elitist mentality, thinking they are better than the lower ranks. In my experience, this is often not the case, as higher-ranking officers typically pay their way for their rank (can afford officer training) which is typically not something available to they generally poor and lower class rank and file.

- sometimes people in lower ranks think very simplistically, and are not good people, but that’s a general outlier in the same way that it is for other groups of people. The bell curve applies to pretty much everything.

- many people in lower ranks join up because they are poor and need money, and the military pays for schooling and is an opportunity to travel. They typically don’t join up because they’re stupid, crude, crass fuckos who like to hurt people. The military is predatory and it feeds on the poor and lower-class citizens who don’t have much social mobility. They’re often not stupid, but they are typically pragmatic, and yeah, the language can be crass, but speaking crassly speaks to culture not goodness.

Rural

- intelligence is, in my opinion, situational. I might be able to quote Shakespeare and get into a deep philosophical debate but that’s not doing me any good when I need to help a cow that’s scared and in pain give birth to a breeched calf. But this very cool farmer I knew could talk down this cow and know just where to position his hands to turn a calf inside the womb. Show me a typical master’s student who can do that.

- I knew people who could read weather sign, bird sign, tree sign, and bear sign, who could read the woods and the trails like a picture book. They might not be able to speak much about the science of climate change, but they damn sure know it from a micro level by being able to spot the size of tree buds in the winter to know spring’s coming earlier, and that’s bad for a lot of plants and animals and the ecosystem that sustains itself, which they are intimately aware of.

- I also knew farmers and rural folks who were highly educated and moved out to the country to enjoy the wide open spaces and privacy, who had big libraries and talked about history with me, who fed my curiosity and helped me stay humble and ask questions.

- I knew rural folks so poor they lived in a shack and ate squirrel, and I also knew how everyone in the community took care to give their kids’ piano lessons because it was the only money coming into that household, and took care to just have accidentally bought a little more than what they needed of this or that and ran it down to that family.

- I also know we were so poor sometimes that I went without a winter coat in northern Alberta for 3 years, but that I was always given lots of hats and scarves and mittens and sweaters by the neighbours.

- I also knew lots of shitty, stupid, sexist and racist people who were essentially brainwashed by a cult and who were never taught to think critically or encouraged to do so. I know that they are afraid of the world because that’s what they’ve been taught. And yes, it’s on them for never getting out and being way more comfy in their bubble than outside of it, but that’s what being in a cult does, it stacks the deck against your own intelligence and curiosity.

- I knew too, many of rural folks who would have been extraordinarily embarrassed to be impolite and refer to a trans woman as a man, or vice-versa, because manners and politeness matter a whole lot in a small community. At the same time, there was definitely the opposite as well, and I knew kids who gotten beaten up regularly for being 2SLGBTQIA+.

It’s complicated, complex, and nuanced everywhere. No group is a monolith, even if it feels justified and easy in the world we live in to lump all ‘like’ people together. I just really hope in the next few episodes we see some nuance in the infantry and the officers, as well as with any rural folk they engage with too. They’re all usually so good with a nuanced take, and I really really hope this was just one episode and an off-the-cuff, didn’t-really-think-about-what-he-was-saying discussion.

And I get it. To my knowledge, Brennan grew up in New York (or at least a city?) and may have not had a ton of experiences living rural outside of the summer camp he was a counsellor at, so he may not have had a lot of time or opportunity to engage with rural people at a true community level. I don’t know his engagement with the military community either, and my experience is with Canadian and not American military, so there’s likely some difference and nuance too.

I dunno. I have a lot of hope and faith in this very cool group of storytellers, and they have not disappointed me in the story thus far, so I believe we’ll see some great nuance to come. Just had to put it out there.

[st-just]

🔥Space programs

Not to go all 'every subculture is basically a religion' but the way a certain tendency of science nerds (or several related ones, really) treat the colonization of other planets and expansion across the stars as the self-evident telos of humanity is kind of fascinatingly, like, cultic? (There are hymns, saints, mythology!). Surprising number of engineering types whose self-image is very no-nonsense and pragmatic treat some peripheral association with it like a medieval mason treasuring the bit of work he did on Notre Dame.

I'm not even wholly unsympathetic, I get the romantic appeal and cosmic curiosity is absolutely one of humanity's more appealing virtues. But like, still. The exaltation of space exploration as a terminal good in and of itself for which practical or terrestrial justifications are clearly come up with after the fact to argue for funding is just interesting?

[mariacallous]

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib had a cold the first time that I reached him on the phone at his home in Pacifica, California, in June. It was the unwanted souvenir of a hectic travel schedule, as amid the war in Gaza, the 34-year-old Palestinian American—who spent much of his childhood there—has emerged as a compelling voice for peace.

Alkhatib’s vision, both pragmatic and humane, as well as his personal story, has made him an in-demand voice in the U.S. and Israeli media. While he is sought out by those looking for an antidote to despair, he is no Pollyannaish peacenik.

“I feel absolutely fucking horrendous,” he said between coughs, approximately 30 seconds into our first phone conversation.

Alkhatib’s rise to prominence began in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, when he began tweeting and writing with an awareness that he had the safety and security to say things that Palestinians living in Gaza or the West Bank could not.

“Ahmed is unique because he does speak out, and he takes a lot of shit for it,” said Gershon Baskin, an Israeli hostage negotiator and longtime ally of Alkhatib’s. “He’s a very clear, sound voice for peace, reason, and logic.”

In outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and the Times of Israel, as well as appearances on CNN, ABC, and NPR, Alkhatib has outlined positions that would seem self-evident if the discourse weren’t otherwise so profoundly broken.

Hamas, he believes, is nothing but bad news for his people, and he has condemned the group with such ferocity that it has at times earned him a security detail. He has also spoken out about the unsparing nature of Israel’s military campaign while underscoring the need for empathy for both Israeli and Palestinian victims.

“This off-the-shelf messaging came down” in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks, Alkhatib told me. “There was no space, whatsoever, to call for the release of hostages. I was equally horrified by the dehumanization of all Gazans as terrorists.”

Alkhatib describes himself as proudly pro-Palestinian, once spearheading a project to establish a humanitarian airport in Gaza. At the same time, he is a trusted broker among progressive Jewish and Israeli circles. Most extraordinary of all, he retains this clarity even though 31 members of his family have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza since the war began.

“He recognizes something that a lot of policymakers don’t recognize,” said Jasmine El-Gamal, a former official at the U.S. Defense Department who now runs a consulting firm focused on empathy in foreign policy. “You won’t have that genuine sustainable peace if people on both sides don’t see the other as human. You’re just not going to have it.”

Alkhatib first came by himself to the United States in 2005, as part of a post-9/11 State Department program that brought young people from the Muslim world to study at U.S. high schools.

At 15, he was placed by the program in Pacifica, a small town on the Pacific Ocean located just south of San Francisco. His host mother, Delia McGrath, was a prominent peace activist in the area who preached the importance of nonviolence.

“That really got through to him and entered his DNA,” said Paul Totah, a Palestinian American from Pacifica who has known Alkhatib since he arrived in the area. “Despite the fact that 31 of his relatives were blown to bits by Israel,” Totah added, “he is firm in his belief that the bullet does not outweigh the word.”

McGrath, a former Catholic nun who later turned to Buddhism, participated in a Jewish-Palestinian dialogue group in the Bay Area. Alkhatib immediately wanted to join. It was in California that he had his first sustained encounters with Israelis and Jews, who until then he had only seen from afar at checkpoints in Gaza.

“We were told that’s anathema to our struggle—we don’t talk to them, we don’t normalize them, and we don’t embrace them,” he recalled.

There were moments of tension as the dialogue group struggled to bridge the largely historic trauma of the American Jewish participants and the ongoing ordeal experienced by the Palestinians.

But over time, hearing from descendants of Holocaust survivors as well as Israelis who had lived through the terror of the Second Intifada—a violent Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule that was marked by widespread protests and attacks that killed more than 1,000 Israelis—Alkhatib had an epiphany.

“This is where I learned early on that trauma and suffering don’t have to be an oppression Olympics,” he said. “Their suffering isn’t less valid just because they didn’t grow up in Gaza or didn’t live under checkpoints in the West Bank.”

Talk of intercommunal dialogue can feel flimsy considering the bloodshed of the past 14 months. But it’s equally difficult to see how a sustainable peace can be achieved without it.

“We need multilateralism as part of the top-down political solution,” Alkhatib said, adding that for peace and coexistence, “we need Palestinians and Israelis to bilaterally work together.”

Scott Fitzgerald is credited with saying that the test of a first-rate intelligence is a person’s ability to hold two opposed ideas in their head at the same time and still retain the ability to function. It is a test that many fail when it comes to the Middle East. Palpably frustrated with the zero-sum debate, Alkhatib brings to mind the American novelist’s maxim and talks frequently about the need to hold multiple truths at the same time.

Irritated by some of Palestine’s supporters in the United States who have advocated for boycotts of businesses with few ties to the conflict, he also has little time for participants in university campus protests who appeared to justify and glorify the Oct. 7 attacks as legitimate acts of resistance.

“We have fucking horrible allies,” Alkhatib said. “I want a vibrant, strong, pro-Palestine movement. I want a movement that’s based on empathy and humanity. That calls out the injustices of the occupation and the settlements, but that acknowledges that Israel is a fait accompli.”

Baskin, the Israeli hostage negotiator, said that Alkhatib has something rare: “He knows how to speak to Jewish audiences, which is a unique ability for a Palestinian.”

I saw Alkhatib do exactly this at a screening in July of Screams Before Silence, a documentary championed by former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg about sexual violence carried out by the Hamas-led attackers.

Allegations of rape and sexual assault on Oct. 7 have become a lightning rod for some of Israel’s critics, particularly on the U.S. left, some of whom have sought to downplay and even deny claims that have been supported by the United Nations and the testimonies of survivors and first responders.

In light of efforts to minimize these accounts, Alkhatib felt it was important to accept an invitation to appear on a panel following a screening at Los Angeles’s Saban Theatre, which is owned by a local Jewish congregation.

“I can feel empathy for Israeli women; I can feel sadness and horror; I can talk to Israeli hostage families as I have,” he told the audience from the stage of the art deco theater, where he spoke alongside other Muslim American and Jewish peace advocates. “I am also critical of the war and the killing of my family members, children as young as 3 and 4 months old shredded to pieces.”

In opening remarks, the panel’s moderator said, inaccurately, that Alkhatib’s entire family had been killed in the war.

As a child, Alkhatib hoped to one day become a politician or diplomat; his parents were perplexed by his early interest in the news and his preference for sitting with the adults. Today, he is every bit the jovial uncle who loves to talk about politics at the dinner table, barrel-chested with a warm smile and shaved head.

That discursive side of Alkhatib was on show when we met for lunch at a Mediterranean restaurant on Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard the day after the screening. Over a mezze platter of Middle Eastern staples, he unspooled the life story that led him to eating hummus, tahini, and an errant dish of guacamole in sunny California—including his childhood in Gaza, where he became a master kite builder, and his journey to study in the United States, where he received political asylum as Hamas violently seized control of the territory in 2007.

He paused briefly during the conversation to flag down the server. “The salad, chopped-up little side salad,” Alkhatib asked, attempting to order a dish while deliberately avoiding its commonly used name.

“Israeli salad?” the waitress asked.

“That one,” he said.

Alkhatib counts many Israelis as friends and allies in his work and recognizes the country as here to stay. But he draws a line at their claim to a salad that is eaten across the Middle East.

“We literally ate this 24/7,” he said in a rare moment of obstinance.

Alkhatib was born in 1990 in the mountainous Asir region of Saudi Arabia, where his father, Fouad Alkhatib, worked as a doctor. The family vacationed in Gaza every summer and spent two years there in the late 1990s before moving back to the area permanently in 2000.

Alkhatib’s father used the money that he earned in Saudi Arabia to build a multistory family home in Gaza City’s al-Yarmouk neighborhood. Each unit of the family—including grandparents and uncles—had its own floor.

“It’s like Thanksgiving and Christmas every day,” Alkhatib said. His mother’s family, the Shehadas, lived in a similar multifamily home in Rafah’s Brazil neighborhood, which takes its name from the barracks of Brazilian U.N. peacekeepers who were once stationed in the area.

One of Alkhatib’s earliest memories is of sitting in the large yard of the Shehada family home. His grandmother, Maryam, had lined the garden with olive, fig, and guava trees, which fed the family year-round.

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Maryam’s family fled Hamama, an agricultural village to the north of the present-day Gaza border, ending up in a refugee camp in Rafah. After her husband died, Maryam grew vegetables and sold ducks and chickens to support herself and her six children. Out of habit, she continued to breed them well into her retirement. Lovely but tough with a rural “felahi” accent, she was a living connection to a bygone era in the family’s history.

Alkhatib was 10 when his family returned to Gaza permanently, four months before the Second Intifada began in September 2000. Some 3,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel’s response to the uprising.

Alkhatib vividly remembers Hamas members coming to his school, banging on the windows, and urging the children to come out and protest or go to the border fence to throw rocks at Israeli checkpoints.

“Sometimes there would be buses that would take students to the borders,” he said.

As the intifada raged, Israel responded with airstrikes across the territory. The sound of loitering Apache attack helicopters menaced Gaza City as they homed in on their targets. Fighter jets came with little warning.

On the afternoon of Dec. 4, 2001, Alkhatib was walking home from school in the Sheikh Radwan district of Gaza City when an Israeli airstrike hit a nearby Palestinian Authority building. He ran toward the flames and billowing clouds of dust to see if his friends, Mohammed, Rajab, and Ali—who had been dragging their heels behind him—were OK. Then a second strike hit. The blast wave jolted his young body, causing permanent hearing damage in his left ear.

Confused and covered in ash, Alkhatib ran home, leaping over a passed-out bystander along the way. It was only the next day that he learned that two of his friends, Mohammed and Rajab, had been killed.

Life in Gaza wasn’t easy, but Alkhatib’s memories of the period are also infused with happy childhood staples: summer days spent on the beach and playing video games with his cousins late into the night, which he credits with improving his English.

“I have some fucking amazing memories in Gaza,” he said.

An extended family that ran to well over 100 people served as the bedrock of his social world.

His aunt Zainab, the family matriarch, would regularly host the family for large gatherings at the Shehada home. The smell of her cooking wafted through the air when one reached the front door, Alkhatib remembered, as inside she prepared vast quantities of fragrant chicken and rice in large pressure cookers that shot off steam.

“You never entered her house and left hungry,” he said.

In the wake of Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza in late 2023, Zainab Shehada and her brother-in-law—Abdullah Shehada, a 69-year-old retired surgeon and the former director of Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah—opened up the house to those seeking shelter as Israeli forces pushed down through the Gaza Strip, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Rafah, its southernmost city, was thought to be safe.

Abdullah was well known in Gaza for his efforts to save lives during the Israeli response to the Second Intifada, once using his own thumb in a desperate bid to plug a bullet wound in the chest of a teenager.

Dozens of people were sheltering in the Shehada family home and its backyard when it was hit in an Israel airstrike on Dec. 14, 2023, completely destroying the three-story house.

Alkhatib’s brother Mohammed and cousin Yousef spent days digging bodies out from under the rubble. At least 31 bodies were recovered from the scene, including nine children—the youngest of whom, Alkhatib’s cousin Ella, was just 3 months old.

Five of Alkhatib’s aunts and uncles were among the dead, including Abdullah and Zainab.

“She came out headless,” he said.

The strike on the Shehada family home was examined by Amnesty International as part of an investigation published in early December in which the organization, for the first time, accused Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza. The investigation found “no evidence of a military objective” behind the strike.

Foreign Policy submitted an inquiry to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with coordinates, dates, and times of the three airstrikes that killed Alkhatib’s relatives, including the one on the house in Rafah. An IDF spokesperson said, “The IDF’s strikes on military targets are subject to relevant provisions of international law, including the taking of feasible precautions and after an assessment that the expected incidental damage to civilians and civilian property is not excessive in relation to the expected military advantage from the attack.”

Talking about the deaths of his relatives, Alkhatib started to slow down and lose his train of thought.

“What was I saying?” he said at one point during our lunch in Los Angeles, staring blankly into the distance for the first and only time. “I don’t like to do the fucking personal shit.”

He feels conflicted speaking about the strike publicly, not wanting to be seen as using his relatives’ deaths for clout. But there is also another reason. He cited a quote, often attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.

“When the fucking number is that high,” he said, referring to his loss of 31 family members, “it’s hard for people to comprehend and understand and connect with.”

Alkhatib estimates that on Oct. 7, 2023, he had maybe three followers on X (formerly Twitter).

“I lived a good, quiet life that I very much miss,” he said. He had just finished graduate school and was in the process of applying for a job at the U.S. State Department.

He had done a little bit of writing before, publishing with Israel’s left-wing newspaper Haaretz and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank, but he had held back on becoming too public out of concern for the well-being of his family in Gaza.

In September, Alkhatib moved to Washington, D.C., from California to take up a new position as a senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Center. He talks about policy with a passion that others might have talking about a love interest.

Policy is “what actually changes things on the ground,” he said during one of our first conversations.

Alkhatib sees a fleeting opportunity to galvanize global outrage to push for a Palestinian state. Last year, Ireland, Norway, Spain, and Slovenia recognized Palestinian statehood, joining more than 140 other countries that had already done so. But if the moment isn’t seized now, he fears it could be gone for good.

Efforts to broker a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas that would also secure the release of some 100 hostages held by the militant group have dragged out for months, despite intense diplomatic efforts.

The conflict, Alkhatib believes, is approaching an inflection point. If the war ends now, he still sees the potential to rebuild a better future Gaza. The territory’s most precious resource, he said, is its people and their resilience.

The alternative scenario of a drawn-out conflict and grinding insurgency risks expending that resource entirely.

“Then I’m irrelevant,” he said. “A population with no hope for life—no hope for a better future—is an immensely dangerous population.”

[spectralpixelsredone]

Leadership Reactions: Mr. Compress, Kyudai Garaki, and Kurogiri

Mr. Compress (Atsuhiro Sako)

Reaction: Mr. Compress, as a pragmatic and loyal member of the League, would likely view AFO and Shigaraki’s deaths as both a loss and an opportunity. His loyalty to the League as a family (Page 123) would drive him to step up as the Grand Commander, despite his self-perception as a “background character” (Page 41). The loss of Shigaraki’s unifying vision and AFO’s resources would force him to rely on his cunning and theatrical flair to maintain group cohesion and redefine the League’s purpose.

Challenges: Without Shigaraki’s charisma or AFO’s overwhelming power, Mr. Compress would struggle to control volatile members like Muscular or Toga. His lack of raw power (Page 101) and physical limitations (e.g., losing an arm to Overhaul, Page 40) could undermine his authority, especially when dealing with ambitious recruits like Valdo or Overhaul.

Actions: He would pivot the League toward survival and subversion, focusing on covert operations and propaganda to expose hero society’s flaws, leveraging his heritage as a descendant of Oji Harima (Page 104). His charisma would be key in rallying the group and recruiting disillusioned villains from groups like the MLA or Humarise.

Kyudai Garaki (Daruma Ujiko)

Reaction: Garaki, fiercely loyal to AFO (Page 76), would be devastated by his mentor’s death, viewing it as a personal and professional blow. Shigaraki’s death would further destabilize him, as his Nomu program was tied to AFO’s vision and Shigaraki’s role as a successor (Page 60). However, his pragmatism and obsession with his “children” (Nomu) would push him to continue his experiments, seeing the League as a means to preserve AFO’s legacy.

Challenges: Garaki’s clinical detachment (Page 72) could alienate emotional members like Toga or Twice, who value camaraderie. Without AFO’s guidance, he might struggle to align his Nomu-focused agenda with the League’s broader goals, potentially prioritizing experiments over group unity.

Actions: As Scientific Director, Garaki would double down on Nomu production and Quirk enhancements, targeting recruits like Geten, Sidero, or Moonfish for experimentation. He’d seek to maintain the League’s technological edge, using resources to compensate for the loss of AFO’s financial backing.

Kurogiri

Reaction: As a Nomu programmed to protect Shigaraki (Page 92), Kurogiri would face an existential crisis with his “protectee” gone. His loyalty to the League (Page 95) and calm demeanor would keep him functional, but his lack of autonomy could lead to hesitation or confusion until Garaki reprograms him to serve the new leadership.

Challenges: Kurogiri’s limited autonomy and reliance on programming (Page 92) might cause delays in decision-making, especially without a clear leader like Shigaraki. His latent Oboro Shirakumo personality could resurface if heroes like Aizawa or Present Mic intervene, potentially leading to a redemption arc or betrayal (Page 92).

Actions: As Operational Coordinator, Kurogiri would focus on logistics, using his Warp Gate Quirk to facilitate rapid recruitment, escapes, and surprise attacks. His stabilizing presence would mediate conflicts between volatile members and ensure mission execution.

Lieutenant Reactions: Vanguard Action Squad

Himiko Toga

Reaction: Toga, driven by her emotional attachment to the League as a family (Page 170) and her desire to live authentically (Page 147), would be deeply shaken by Shigaraki’s death, as his acceptance of her chaotic nature gave her purpose. AFO’s death would matter less to her, as her loyalty was more personal than ideological. She might channel her grief into reckless behavior, seeking validation through chaos or personal vendettas.

Challenges: Toga’s volatility (Page 159) and suicidal tendencies (Page 6) could destabilize the League, especially under Mr. Compress’s less authoritative leadership. Her fixation on love (Pages 128-129) might lead her to target heroes like Izuku or Ochaco, clashing with the League’s strategic goals.

Actions: As lieutenant of the Infiltration Regiment, Toga would excel in espionage, using her Transform Quirk to mimic heroes and disrupt their operations. Mr. Compress would encourage her chaotic tendencies for strategic gain, while Kurogiri’s portals would enhance her mobility. Her arc could swing toward tragedy (mirroring her canon sacrifice, Page 165) or redemption if she bonds with heroes like Ochaco.

Twice (Jin Bubaigawara)

Reaction: Twice’s loyalty to the League as his “family” (Page 199) would make Shigaraki’s death a profound loss, exacerbating his emotional fragility (Page 179). AFO’s death would have less impact, as Twice’s commitment was tied to his bonds with Toga, Shigaraki, and others. He might cope by throwing himself into missions, using his clones to fill the void left by Shigaraki.

Challenges: Twice’s mental instability (Page 179) could worsen without Shigaraki’s stabilizing influence, risking catastrophic errors (e.g., creating uncontrollable clones, Page 180). His identity crisis (Page 194) might resurface, especially if Garaki pushes for Quirk enhancements.

Actions: As lieutenant of the Support Regiment, Twice would be the League’s powerhouse, creating clone armies to overwhelm enemies. Garaki’s enhancements and Kurogiri’s portals would amplify his effectiveness, making him a global threat. His arc might focus on overcoming trauma or culminating in a tragic mistake, echoing his canon death (Page 200).

Mustard

Reaction: As a younger, pragmatic member, Mustard would likely see Shigaraki’s death as a disruption but not a personal loss, given his focus on striking at the right moment (Page 205). AFO’s death would concern him less, as his resentment toward hero society (Page 207) drives his loyalty more than ideological ties. He might view the new leadership as an opportunity to prove himself.

Challenges: Mustard’s arrogance (Page 205) and disdain for Toga’s impracticality (Page 209) could cause friction, particularly with emotional members like Toga or Twice. His youth makes him vulnerable to manipulation by Garaki or Mr. Compress but also open to redemption.

Actions: As a support operative in the Intelligence Regiment, Mustard would use his Gas Quirk for battlefield control, enhanced by Garaki’s experiments to create more potent toxins. Kurogiri’s portals would spread his gas widely, making him a strategic asset. His arc might explore redemption, especially if he questions the League’s direction without Shigaraki.

Broader League Reactions

Muscular

Reaction: Muscular, a self-serving psychopath (Page 48), would be indifferent to AFO and Shigaraki’s deaths, as his loyalty was driven by opportunities to kill rather than ideology. He might see the power vacuum as a chance to act unchecked, challenging Mr. Compress’s authority.

Actions: As lieutenant of the Combat Regiment, Muscular would be a blunt instrument, deployed for brute force missions. Garaki might enhance his Muscle Augmentation Quirk or turn him into a High-End Nomu, amplifying his destructive potential. His lack of loyalty could lead to defection if the League’s goals don’t align with his bloodlust.

Spinner

Reaction: Spinner, initially inspired by Stain but loyal to Shigaraki (Page 27), would be devastated by Shigaraki’s death, as it gave him purpose and camaraderie (Page 123). AFO’s death would matter less, but the loss of Shigaraki’s vision might push him to redefine his role, focusing on heteromorph discrimination (Page 28).

Actions: As a frontline fighter, Spinner’s enhanced Scalemail Quirk (Page 25) would make him formidable, supported by Garaki’s augmentations and Kurogiri’s portals. He’d rally outcasts, expanding the League’s influence. His moral conflict could lead to a splinter faction or negotiations with heroes like Shoji.

Magne

Reaction: If Magne survives in this AU, her level-headedness (Page 43) would make her a stabilizing force amid the chaos of Shigaraki’s death. AFO’s death would concern her less, as her loyalty was to the League’s camaraderie. She’d likely support Mr. Compress’s leadership to maintain group unity.

Actions: As an enforcer, Magne’s Magnetism Quirk would be used for creative battle strategies, enhanced by Garaki and supported by Kurogiri. Her presence would counter Toga and Muscular’s chaos, bolstering the League’s stability.

Moonfish

Reaction: Moonfish, a chaotic loner (Page 51), would be unaffected by AFO or Shigaraki’s deaths, as his loyalty was minimal. He’d remain a loose cannon, tolerated only for his combat prowess.

Actions: As a terror asset or potential Nomu, Moonfish’s Blade-Tooth Quirk would sow panic, amplified by Kurogiri’s portals. His instability could lead to internal conflicts or abandonment if not managed.

New Recruits’ Reactions

Meta Liberation Army (MLA)

Geten: As a loyal MLA member (Page 26), Geten would initially resist joining the League, but AFO and Shigaraki’s deaths could destabilize the MLA’s rivalry, making defection possible if Re-Destro’s leadership falters. He’d join for Quirk enhancement and a platform to showcase his power, aligning with Garaki’s experiments.

Skeptic: Pragmatic and strategic (Page 31), Skeptic would see the League as a new power base if the MLA stalls. AFO and Shigaraki’s deaths would reduce the League’s threat in his eyes, making integration feasible under Mr. Compress’s cunning leadership.

Trumpet: As a politician (Page 29), Trumpet might view the League as a means to maintain influence post-MLA decline. Shigaraki’s absence would make the League less ideologically rigid, appealing to his charisma and ambition.

Humarise

Beros: If she survives, Beros’s fanaticism (Page 210) would make her seek a new cause. AFO and Shigaraki’s deaths would frame the League as a viable anti-hero platform, though her anti-Quirk stance could clash with the League’s approach.

Sidero: His mercenary nature (Page 212) would make him indifferent to AFO and Shigaraki’s deaths, joining the League for power and wealth. Garaki’s enhancements would appeal to his desire for strength.

Valdo’s Giollini Crime Family

Valdo: As a cunning crime lord, Valdo would see AFO and Shigaraki’s deaths as an opportunity to expand his influence, potentially joining the League to maintain power post-collapse. His ambition could challenge Mr. Compress.

Lower-Ranking Members: These enforcers would join for survival, unbothered by AFO or Shigaraki’s deaths, drawn by Garaki’s enhancements and Mr. Compress’s promises of wealth.

Smaller Groups

Creature Rejection Clan (CRC): Their fanaticism would make them indifferent to AFO and Shigaraki, joining for revenge against heroes. Their anti-heteromorph stance could clash with Spinner.

Volcano Thieves: Maguma, Konako, and Tsumuji would join for survival and profit, unaffected by the deaths, aligning with Mr. Compress’s cunning and Garaki’s enhancements.

Wild Villains: Curator, Zookeeper, and Bearhead would see the League as a new alliance post-AFO and Shigaraki, drawn by strategic and power-based incentives.

Nine’s Crew: Slice, Chimera, and Mummy would join to continue Nine’s vision, viewing the League as a successor after AFO and Shigaraki’s deaths weaken other factions.

Other Recruits

Overhaul: If freed from Tartarus, Overhaul would see AFO and Shigaraki’s deaths as a chance to reclaim power. His hatred for heroes aligns with the League, but his arrogance (Page 145) could spark conflicts.

Gentle Criminal: His non-violent nature (Page 230) would make him hesitant, but Mr. Compress’s theatrical leadership could sway him, especially if he seeks fame post-AFO and Shigaraki.

Hero Society’s Reactions

Heroes: The deaths of AFO and Shigaraki would initially be seen as a victory, particularly for All Might (pre-retirement) or Endeavor (post-Kamino). However, the League’s persistence under new leadership would shift their focus to a decentralized, guerrilla threat. Heroes like Aizawa and Present Mic might target Kurogiri to exploit his Nomu programming (Page 92), while Endeavor and Hawks would confront Garaki’s Nomu uprising.

U.A. Students: Class 1-A, especially Izuku, Ochaco, and Bakugo, would face heightened personal stakes. Toga’s fixation on Izuku and Ochaco (Pages 172-173) would intensify, while Muscular’s vendetta (Page 48) would target Izuku. Bakugo’s potential capture (Page 107) could trigger a rescue arc, testing Class 1-A’s unity.

Public Perception: AFO and Shigaraki’s deaths would temporarily boost public confidence in heroes, but the League’s continued attacks—via Toga’s infiltrations, Twice’s clones, and Mustard’s gas—would erode trust. Skeptic’s propaganda and Trumpet’s Incite would amplify fear, forcing heroes to adopt aggressive strategies.

Rival Villain Groups’ Reactions

Meta Liberation Army (MLA): Without Shigaraki’s victory over Re-Destro, the MLA would remain a rival, viewing the League as weakened but dangerous. Geten, Skeptic, and Trumpet’s potential defection would depend on the MLA’s internal stability, with AFO and Shigaraki’s absence reducing the League’s immediate threat.

Humarise: The disbanded cult would see the League as a new platform for anti-hero actions, though their anti-Quirk ideology would require reframing by Mr. Compress to align with the League’s goals.

Valdo’s Giollini Crime Family: Valdo would exploit the power vacuum to expand his underworld influence, potentially aligning with the League if his family collapses. Lower-ranking members would join for survival.

Smaller Groups: The CRC, Volcano Thieves, Wild Villains, and Nine’s Crew would see the League as a viable ally or threat, with their reactions depending on their own survival needs and ideological alignment.

Story Implications

League’s New Direction: Without AFO’s grand vision or Shigaraki’s nihilism, the League would adopt a survival-oriented, subversive approach, focusing on guerrilla tactics, Nomu deployment, and outcast recruitment. This would make them a persistent but less apocalyptic threat.

Internal Strife: The lack of a unifying leader would exacerbate tensions, with Muscular’s self-interest, Toga’s volatility, and Valdo/Overhaul’s ambitions threatening cohesion. Mr. Compress’s charisma, Garaki’s resources, and Kurogiri’s mediation would be critical to holding the group together.

Hero Society’s Evolution: The League’s focus on exposing corruption and rallying outcasts would force heroes to confront societal flaws, such as Quirk discrimination. Characters like Shoji and Ochaco might lead reforms, influenced by encounters with Spinner and Toga.

Moral Ambiguity: The League’s personal grievances—Spinner’s discrimination, Toga’s need for acceptance, Twice’s loyalty—would blur moral lines, making their conflict with heroes more complex. Izuku’s empathy (Page 49) could lead to attempts to save villains, echoing his canon approach to Shigaraki.

Conclusion

The deaths of AFO and Shigaraki would fracture the League’s unity but also catalyze its reinvention under Mr. Compress, Garaki, and Kurogiri. The leadership trio would struggle to fill the void, with Mr. Compress leaning on cunning, Garaki on Nomu, and Kurogiri on logistics. Lieutenants like Toga, Twice, and Mustard would grapple with personal losses and shifting roles, driving the League toward a more fragmented, morally ambiguous conflict. The broader villain community would see opportunities and threats in the League’s new form, while hero society would face a persistent, insidious challenge, forcing evolution and introspection. The story would explore themes of survival, identity, and redemption, with the League’s fate hinging on its ability to unify its diverse, volatile roster.

[twilightkitkat]

What does Logan think of his claws? Does he like them? Does he hate them? Or are they just a part of him like the tail of a dog? Do they remind him of the violence he had lived through? Of how he used them to kill? Does he ever think of them in a positive way? How he uses them to defend the ones he loves? To climb trees and cut through high grass when he's in the woods? How they are a part of his skeleton? Or how they set him apart from the others? Do they make him more human or more animal?

Logan would have very ambivalent feelings toward his claws.

At first, he was scared of them. Scared of himself. Scared of the consequences of being a mutant. Scared of what he could do with them, to kill a man so easily.

(Scared of the implications. Was he human or not? Was he still a person? Did he still have a chance at a future?)

Eventually, he'd get used to using them in fights. As Logan and Victor fought together in tge wars, he started to view them more pragmatically. They were weapons, just like the guns other soldiers held. Nothing more, nothing less. He was just another soldier who had an extra card up his sleeve.

Logan didn't let himself see the claws as a part of himself at first, not like Victor. His first impression was killing his own father with those claws and watching him bleed out. He hid them away most of the time, opted for military weapons, and was forced to use them only in dire situations.

They were an escape plan. A last resort. Something he tried to hide to pass off as "normal." He felt disconnected from them, almost like they were separate from him.

And then he joined the Weapon X program. Which was full of mutants just like him. Where he was expected to actively use his claws inside of hide them.

And he adapted. He leaned into the instincts he'd long suppressed and passed off as adrenaline. He became familiar with the feeling of slashing and climbing and opening cans and using his claws for more than just a quick kill. He became acclimated with them, comfortable.

He never really liked his claws, not really. But he got used to them. He stopped fearing them as much and started to view them as an actual part of himself. (Even if that part of himself was directly tied to being used as a weapon. To being a human tool.)

And then came the X-men. And so he had to confront his internal conflict between being The Wolverine, an animal, and Logan, the human. It was easy to ignore when he was treated solely like a weapon. But now people expected him to care, to empathize, to be human when all people have wanted from him before was to use his animal side.

It was then that he really started thinking about his feelings on his claws. How they distinctly marked him as an animal, how they represented why he couldn't assimilate into society. How they hurt every time he unsheathed him, contorting in a way that human bones could never handle. They were a reminder, visible proof that he'd never fit in with society. That even when all he wanted was to be human and assimilate into their family, there was still a barrier. He'd lived for so long as The Wolverine that he forgot how to be Logan. (Let alone James.)

And then they were gone.

And in came Wade. And Wade didn't pressure him to be human and relearn all of his "animalistic" habits, nor did he demand he use his tendencies as a weapon. He just let him be.

And that's the thing. Logan's claws were never really Logan's. They were Victor's ally, Weapon X's tool, the X men's protector, but never his. They may be a part of him, but they weren't really his. Not in the ways that mattered.

And now... he gets to choose. Whether he uses his claws for violence. Who he uses them on, where, and why. Whether he wants to use them to open a bottle of beer or screw a nail into the wall.

It's freeing. Liberating.

It's the first time he felt his claws were really his. Like he had the final choice in his life. It's the first time he really appreciated them, now that he finally got to reap the benefits.

[thewinter-eden]

Blood Sugar Virus (19)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Genre: Horror, zombies, strangers to lovers, angst, suspense Pairing: Kang Yeosang x female!reader Warnings: based on the Wanteez Zombie episode, ages are based on current Ateez rather than the time at which the actual episode was filmed, zombies, language, discussion of parasites, gore, angst, really terrible ideas (don't try this at home)

Story Summary: You (stage name Sugar) are the co-captain of a horror acting group. You and your guys are the ones the companies hire when they want to stage a zombie, ghost, or any vaguely horrific and dystopian episode. So when you get hired by Ateez to develop a zombie program, it's just another routine that you've done a million times. Everything's going exactly according to script--until suddenly it isn't, and it starts getting a little too real.

🏆 Esteemed Moot: @ramadiiiisme

⭐️ Reader Spotlight: @mrsminseochoi

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Author’s note: AED machines are defibrillators designed for use by non-medical-professionals. Modern ones will take vitals of the patient and determine whether or not the patient needs a jolt, and administer it only if the person is unresponsive and needs it. For the sake of this story, we’re pretending that isn’t the case. Also, don’t ever try this. :)

“You can’t be serious.” Jimin’s staring at you. “You’re not serious. Right? Those things are for dead people.”

“For unresponsive people.” You correct, but you don’t look at him. You’re looking at anybody else, anybody who will tell you you’re not completely out of your mind and about to kill your best friend. “Like a bug zapper, you know? If we send a charge through his system, it will kill the parasites. Right?”

Seonghwa pulls the AED off the wall and pops it open, scanning through the instruction booklet. “It’s not that high voltage, relatively speaking. I think bug zappers are like five times as powerful as this.”

“Do you have another idea?” You snap. “One that doesn’t involve Jimin turning into a zombie?”

“We could cut his leg off, there’s probably an emergency axe in here somewhere.” Wooyoung suggests.

“Fuck no, I’d rather be electrocuted.” Jimin squeaks.

“And we don’t know if the parasites have made it past his leg yet.” Yunho adds pragmatically. “Technically, I think this is actually our best shot. But, Sugar—“ he pauses when both you and Jimin glare at him. “Just forget about the killing me thing for a second, okay? If you use that thing on him while he’s still…fully functional…you could damage his heart. Or his brain. Or any of his limbs. This could seriously hurt him.”

“I’m speaking strictly for myself and my own interests here, but I would rather him be a fucking paraplegic than a zombie.” You return sharply. “This could work. Right? And it won’t kill him?”

“It probably won’t kill him.” Seonghwa says with apprehensive caution. “Probably. But Yunho’s right. Just saying.”

You can’t look at Jimin yet. He’s hearing everything, but you don’t have the courage to look him in the eyes and tell him what you want to do to him yet. You only trust two people in this room to tell you not to do this, and one of them is keeping you from falling off of your jelly legs.

Yeosang is quiet, thoughtful, terrified. He searches your face, and then looks over your head at Jimin.

You wait.

If Jimin’s dead anyway, you have nothing to lose.

But you wait.

Because you’ve already traded someone else’s life for yours, and if Yeosang tells you that you’re about to murder your best friend, you think you might just listen to him.

Finally, after what could have been a thousand years, he meets your eyes again. He knows you want his input; you’ve been staring at him too desperately to be wanting anything else. “I would want to try.” He says at last, so quietly you almost don’t hear him. He clears his throat. “I would try it.”

He lets you go, even though all you want to do is throw your arms around him.

Barely breathing, you face Jimin. “Tell me not to do it.”

His face is pained, one of his hands gripping his upper thigh, and you know you’re running out of time.

You drop to your knees, finding his other hand again. “Chim.” You watch him go pale, his mouth twisting with fear. He’s scared, hurting, crying. “Chim, tell me you don’t want this.”

He swallows harshly and his hand trembles in yours. “I don’t want to turn into those things.” He whispers. “I don’t…”

It’s the first time he shows you how frightened he is, and it’s only firming your resolve to stick those contacts to his chest and electrocute the shit out of those parasites.

Jimin swallows again. “Even if the shock kills me or breaks something in me, I don’t want to turn into one of those things.”

“Okay.” You move to get up, but he grips you harder, keeping you down.

“Not you.” He says. “I don’t want you to do it.”

You tug at his hand. “I have to.”

“Not you.” He snaps. “Sugar. Not you.”

“I’ll do it.” Yunho takes the AED from Seonghwa and brings it to Jimin, kneeling next to him.

Jimin doesn’t even look at him. He’s still pinning you with that awful stare, squeezing your fingers so tightly you think they might fall off.

“Fuck no, I’m doing this.” You try to grab the machine, but Jimin snatches your other hand, cringing as he lets go of his leg.

“You already hate me.” Yunho gives a low laugh. “I’ve got this. I’ll do it.”

“Let him.” Jimin tells you. “I want him to do it.”

You’re shaking your head, trying to get yourself loose, but he won’t let you. You know why it’s happening this way, why he wants Yunho instead of you, but you refuse to accept it. “No. I have to do it.”

“You don’t.” Yunho tells you gently. “Let me.” He’s unpackaging the device, reading through the instructions, working quickly and calmly.

They won’t let you be the one to do it.

They won’t let you place those charges and push the button.

“You have to let go.” Seonghwa says, kneeling next to Yunho. “You can’t be touching him.”

You feel Yeosang crouch next to you, ready to drag you away, but you’re already relaxing your grip.

Jimin smiles at you, shaky and weak, but he smiles. He lets you go. “It’ll just take a second, Sugar Baby.”

His hands fall from yours, but you can’t move.

Yeosang’s holding your arms, ready just in case you’re about to fling yourself at your best friend, but you just sit there, helpless.

“Let’s take your shirt off.” Seonghwa helps Jimin out of his top while Yunho peels the backs off the contact stickers.

Jimin keeps his eyes on you, like he can’t bear to acknowledge the device that’s about to do what it was never designed to do, and you see his chest pumping as his breathing quickens.

He’s fucking terrified, and there’s nothing you can do to help him.

“It’ll be okay.” You force a grin. This is your idea. This is your fault. This is your stupid plan. “You’re gonna be okay, Chim. I’ll be right here.”

He blinks, and a flood of tears cascades down his dirty cheeks.

Yunho secures the contacts to his chest. The device makes a beeping noise, powering on and readying a charge.

“Here, you’ll want to bite down.” Wooyoung, god bless Wooyoung, rushes in then with San’s clean towel. He helps Jimin wad an end of it in his mouth, and then crawls back out of the way.

San’s next to you then, too, one hand on your knee.

They’re with you.

They’re with Jimin.

No matter what happens, this isn’t just you.

“Now or never, guys.” Seonghwa says softly. “Nobody touch him.”

Jimin braces himself against the wall, and a sob breaks past the towel in his mouth. His entire body is convulsing with terrified tremors, and you think yours is too.

Yeosang squeezes your arms, and you hear him say something to you, but you can’t process. You can’t hear or see anything but the look on Jimin’s face.

You want to close your eyes. You want to hide yourself from what’s about to happen, but you can’t. This was your idea. This is your fault.

Yunho presses the button.

Jimin’s body jerks, a gut wrenching cry exploding from his throat, and his eyes roll back.

You cry with him, your body lurching for him on instinct.

Yeosang catches you, pulling you back. His arms are around your waist now, holding you to him, murmuring comfort into your deaf ears.

“He’s just unconscious.” Seonghwa’s fingers are on the pulse point of Jimin’s wrist. “Is that all? We shouldn’t do it again, right?”

“I don’t want to hurt him.” Yunho peels the contacts off of his chest. “If one jolt doesn’t take care of this, I think we’re out of luck. I don’t want to hit him again.”

You don’t want him too either. Now that Jimin is lying in front of you, unresponsive, you can’t believe what you’ve done. Sending another jolt through his body feels like murder.

This time, when you try to crawl forward, Yeosang lets you go. You pull the towel from Jimin’s mouth, taking his face into your hands.

“Chim?” Your voice is a whimper. “Chim? Jimin?” His head lolls in your palms. His skin is hot and you feel blood pumping beneath your fingers, but he looks so dead that you just can’t think anything else. “Oh my god, Jimin, please,”

“Give him a minute.” San tells you. “Just give him a minute.”

“He probably won’t be able to walk, especially with that leg. We’re gonna have to help him downstairs.” Seonghwa says. He turns to you, touching your shoulder. “We’re giving this a shot, okay? We’ll bring him with us, and if it didn’t work, we’ll deal with that then. Okay?”

You nod, sniffling, unable to tear yourself away.

“Okay. Yunho and I will help him downstairs. Sugar and Yeosang will lead the way to the office, San and Wooyoung will follow behind. Somebody grab the files, we’re bringing those too.”

Behind you, Yeosang and Wooyoung get up to gather up the papers and shove them back into one of the file boxes.

Yunho pushes the AED box away and turns to you. “I really hope that worked.” He tells you quietly. “I really do hope he’s okay.”

You believe him. You know why he did it, you know why he insisted. He didn’t have to do that for you, for Jimin, and he knew what responsibility he was placing on his own shoulders. If you understand nothing else, you understand that. “I know.” You meet his eyes. “Thank you, Yunho.”

“Not yet.” He gives you a grimace that was probably supposed to be a smile. “Not until we know it worked. You’re still allowed to hate me.” He gives your arm a squeeze and then gets up and leaves you with Jimin.

Time moves in slow motion.

The others are busy behind you, gathering up materials and documents in preparation to leave the safety of the control room.

You hear them speaking quietly, discussing plans for getting back down to the office with the least amount of risk.

Jimin twitches beneath you, but he doesn’t wake.

You have to do something. You can’t just sit here and wait. So you pull up his pant leg, checking the path of deterioration. The muscle damage has extended to his thigh, but based on the way he was gripping it earlier, you’re sure it hasn’t happened since the shock was administered.

Even still, you wonder if he’ll ever be able to recover the leg.

If the muscle is gone, it’s gone, right?

Damage like that doesn’t heal, or grow back, right?

God, you just electrocuted your best friend.

You just put him through something the human body was never designed to withstand.

You electrocuted his pumping heart and functioning brain.

What if he never comes back?

He says your name. It’s broken, hoarse, barely a whisper, but it’s your name and his voice.

“Oh my god, Jimin.” You’re on him in a second, eyes brimming with tears all over again. “How do you feel? Are you okay?”

His legs shift, his arms twitch. The tiniest smile curls his lips. “Tingly.”

You laugh. You can’t help it.

The sound draws the attention of the others, and suddenly they’re around you again, crowding in close to Jimin.

“God, that hurt like a bitch.” He croaks. “Please don’t do that again.”

Wooyoung is laughing. San is laughing.

Maybe they’re crying.

You don’t know, you don’t care.

“Dude, that was fucking scary.” Seonghwa crouches and grabs one of Jimin’s arms. “We’re helping you out of here, okay? You ready?”

He nods, weakly lifting his arms so Yunho and Seonghwa can position themselves to take his weight, hoisting him to his feet.

Jimin groans, his bad leg buckling, and his face goes sickly pale. “I don’t think I can walk.”

“We know, we’ve got you.” Seonghwa promises. “We got you.”

While they adjust their hold on him, fixing him securely between them, Jimin flashes you a waning grin. “Let’s do this. Yeah?” He’s barely functioning, practically convulsing, but he’s putting on a brave face.

Suddenly, you can’t look at him. He’s too broken, too scared, too hurt, and it’s all your fault. You turn away and find Yeosang where he’s fastening the lid to one of the file boxes. “Are you ready to go?”

He looks up at you, surprised. Straightening to his full height, he brings the box up with him and glances at Jimin. “Yeah. Is he good?”

“He’s good.” You say firmly. “It’s time to go.”

For a second, he just looks at you. Eventually deciding that there’s no point in pushing you for any kind of reaction, he nods. “Alright. I’m ready.”

San is already at the door, cautiously pushing it open and checking the hall. He looks back at your group. “We’re clear. Let’s go.”

You and Yeosang take the lead as instructed, Seonghwa and Yunho bringing Jimin next, and then Wooyoung and San taking up the rear.

As you make your way down the hall, towards the stairs that Wooyoung and San had emerged from, Yeosang shifts his hold on the box and glances at you. “It probably worked.” He whispers. “I don’t see how those things could have survived it, especially as babies.”

You can’t hope. You can’t even pray. “We’ll find out.”

“I’m really sorry.” He continues. “I know he’s…I’m really sorry, I’m sure he’ll be okay.”

When you don’t answer, he takes a few minutes to focus on the path ahead. You hear the shuffling of dormant zombies in the distance, but as long as you get to the stairwell, you won’t reach them.

“Why didn’t you mention him? In your, you know��perfect day? I mean, he’s your—“ when his confused whisper breaks off, you realize what he’s thinking.

It’s understandable, considering the way you and Jimin interact with each other, but it’s not like that. “We’re not dating.” You return simply.

Yeosang carefully pulls the stairwell door open, and when you’re sure it’s clear, you both step through. Once everyone is inside, you head down the steps.

“He calls you Sugar Baby.” He breathes softly. “And you guys—“

“It’s a joke.” You would actually rather be having this conversation than any one regarding his possible imminent death. “A joke on my nickname. I went through a pretty bad breakup a few years ago, and when I didn’t have an apartment anymore, he let me crash with him. The ex had been one of my colleagues back before I started working with this company, so I was out of a job, too. Jimin supported me. He started calling me Sugar Baby since he was footing all of my expenses until I got this gig. He’s my best friend, but he’s…we’re just friends.”

“Yeah, she owes me like a million dollars.” Jimin’s voice pipes up behind you. “If I die, she’s in the clear.”

“Shut up, Jimin,” you hiss back at him. “I swear to god, that’s not funny.”

There’s a quiet snicker that’s half a gasp for breath and half a mockery at your expense, but he doesn’t follow up with anything else.

“Can we stop talking?” San whispers from the back. “It’s making me nervous.”

The seven of you descend to the first floor in careful silence, pulling up to the exit door at long last. Before he tries to open it, Yeosang turns and passes the file box back to Wooyoung. Now prepared to face whatever’s on the other side, he grips the handle and gives it a push.

The door creaks open on shrieking hinges, and five zombies on the other side turn wildly, staring right at you.

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[thyfleshc0nsumed]

does sympathy for hatred work into your belief? loaded question, i'm sorry. i know you have enough empathy to go around. it was an unkind question with unkind feelings behind it. i hurt. but i don't know what i'm are supposed to do with pedo-rapists that will never stop haunting us. daddy's in prison for the next 15 years and mommy wishes i had died. i feel so lonely. feel like my terror makes me a centrist or something. i feel so stupid.

You are not stupid, nor are you wrong for feeling how you feel. It is not a failure of any kind to feel the ways that you do. In fact, feeling these things is part of the process, at least within my process.

I don't think where I have currently landed as it comes to forgiveness is above or below anyone else. It's not a moral question whatsoever. In many ways, it's fueled by pure pragmatism and self-interest. It's the only way I personally have found to move forward with my life. And to me, that says nothing about anyone else or their path. It is only what I have found has helped me.

I will speak on my story because that is all I can speak on--this is not an attempt to 'diagnose' you or where you are at within your process; when I say 'I,' I authentically mean I, myself.

For a long time I was not ready to move forward. I was angry. I had been hurt badly by so many, in ways that were not merely the unavoidable forms of harm that being a human in relationship with other humans brings about. And I was not ready to let that go.

That is a neutral fact. Healing is not an imperative, and suffering is part of the process. It was not wrong for me to be angry, or to feel hate for those who hurt me, or to not be ready to move beyond those experiences. If i still felt that way today, or in a decade, or till the end of my life, it would not be wrong. If I died still with those feelings, there would be no shame in that.

For a very long time, I truly did not believe there was any other option. Perhaps there were no other options for me with the spot I was at in life, maybe there was no other way it could have been. This acceptance of what 'was' is useful in looking back, but not helpful for projecting onto the future. For a long time, I did project this fatalism into the future. I believed the story of my life was already told, and I just had to watch. But slowly, over the course of a number of years, my conviction in that belief weakened and alongside it, something else sprouted.

I met Anat at a partial hospitalization program for my eating disorder in 2021. She was early 30s. We were the only two smokers in the group, so we got to know each other quickly and well. She kicked dope when she was about my age at the time and had been sober ever since.

I used for a lot of reasons, to boil it down to some singular, cohesive, narratively-fulfilling motivation neglects the truth of the matter.

I used because drugs are fun, and I like them. I used because they passed the time. I used because I felt unfulfilled and they were a distraction. And I used because all I wanted was to not exist anymore so I could stop hurting, and getting fucked up felt easier than killing myself.

Before meeting Anat, I genuinely did not believe that recovery--by which I mean more than simple abstinence--was possible for me. Of course, cognitively, I knew there were addicts who stopped, stayed stopped, and got better, but I didn't know any, or at least none like me. And Anat was like me, I could tell. I wanted to stop, I had every reason to stop, I faced consequence after consequence for not having stopped, and still, I kept going. But here in front of me was evidence that it was possible. I was still not yet ready. I was stringing a week or less together at a time, miserable for every second of it. I was not ready to let go of what was keeping me there.

Anat was murdered a month after I met her. When I found out, I downed gin till i was unconscious. I was angry, I was lost, I was hurt, and I wished I never met her because meeting her changed something in me: I started to believe that something--anything!--else was possible from life besides endless hurt.

The funny thing about belief is that, well, we can't believe what we don't believe. And I didn't believe what I used to anymore, or at least not as unshakably. There was a seed of doubt: maybe something else is possible. I did not yet believe it, but I had been forced to become the tiniest bit open to the idea. Maybe I am wrong; maybe this is not all that there is.

And that's all it takes to get the ball rolling.

"Do you believe, or are you willing to believe?"

I don't remember the next year of my life very well, but i know it was very, very, very bad. I kept using, and it only got worse. I continued getting raped again and again. I got evicted. But the one thing I had was the morsel of hope growing inside of me.

And I hated it. Hope means I feel that I owe it to myself to try. Cynicism has a comfort to it: sure, things may suck, but at least I know they'll suck. Hope lacks that. Hope requires me to open myself up to disappointment. Hope had always been folly to me.

But slowly, I stopped wanting to hurt. That sliver of belief that the hurt could maybe stop turned into a desire. To fulfill the desire, the only option was to try. If hurt is assured through one path, and only a possibility in the other, I must choose the second, even though it is very possible I do not avoid the hurt.

It is not wrong to not be ready to move forward. If your process has not led you to want what I have come to want, that is not a failure. It does not make you deficient. I was not wrong to be where I was 4 years ago and I am not right for being where I am today. Maybe your process leads you elsewhere. Maybe your life worth living is very different than mine. None of these things are anything besides 'is.'

I heard a call from within myself that I had never heard before, and I felt compelled to answer it: act only out of goodwill and love for others and myself. Simple, but not easy.

I am myself and myself alone. The only life I get to live is my own. It is not for me to say what anyone else should do, because I am not anyone else and I do not know what anyone else should do. Maybe you got the same call as me, maybe you feel differently about it, maybe you didn't get it at all, maybe you never will, maybe you get a different call. Maybe your process is different. I am not you, I have neither ability nor desire to judge you or anyone else. All I can do is what i can and hope that others are happy and fulfilled, no matter what.

[mostbelovedqueer]

They should have been queer Tournament - Round 1

Disclaimer: This tournament is based on submissions! Please respect all identities, characters and fandoms! Hate will get you blocked instantly!

Why Steve should have been queer: Bisexual because he has female and male love interests

Additional submission message:

I have written a counterpart to this with Bucky Barnes, but Steve should have been bisexual. (Gay is fine too, this is just my take.) As I said in the other one, the first two movies are centered around their relationship. None of the story works or means anything without their love and loyalty. I'll copy some of that below, and then expand on the Steve side of things:

Bucky plays the role of his love interest in both TFA and TWS: The person Steve enlists for, the person Steve actually gets off his ass and becomes a superhero for, the person whose death reveals a darkness and need for vengeance in Steve, and the person whose loss cuts him so deeply he decides not to try to escape the crashing plane even though he's borderline indestructible and can probably swim in the icy water. Let me reiterate: Steve's girlfriend is begging him to stay alive any way he can, and he doesn't even try. Because his beloved Bucky is dead.

In The Winter Soldier, Bucky's role as love interest is even clearer: Steve tells Natasha directly at the beginning of the movie that he doesn't want to date because he doesn't know how to find anyone with shared life experience. Then, almost immediately, while a LOVE SONG ABOUT YOUR BEAU RETURNING FROM WW2 IS PLAYING, he encounters Bucky. Bucky, who, like Steve, has gone from a normal young man to a weapon, who has lost everything that mattered to him, who has found himself in a new world decades later, who has lost time due to being frozen.

Bucky, with whom Steven spent most of his childhood and young adult life, who has been through nearly everything with Steve, including all the things he doesn't feel he can share with his new friends. Okay, this is becoming a queer Steve manifesto too (and I'll give him one), but I can't explain how the movie presents Bucky as Steve's lover without that.

Then the tropes begin! Amnesia! Fighting on opposite sides! Bucky as abuse victim, needing to be rescued. A fight to the death, Steve dying for Bucky, and breaking him out of the amnesia spell by reminding him of a tender moment they shared, a promise they made that sounds like a wedding vow. "'Til the end of the line." 'Til death do us part.

And it would have been beautiful for Steve to die in 1945 and wake up to a world where he could marry a man in five states and DC. Put it on his little notebook list. "Berlin Wall, JFK, Trouble Man, Stonewall, gay marriage?!!"

Steve is a bigger character than Bucky, so they do more with him. He has two women love interests, who are unfortunately related to each other. It feels like they were trying to replace his affection for Peggy with Sharon, her NIECE, but neither of them are compatible with the Steve we know, values-wise.

Peggy is a pragmatic secret agent. She is shown to be willing to work with Arnim Zola, whom she knows tortured Bucky and murdered a number of, at the least, American soldiers. Operation Paperclip was a real program, and Americans did indeed work with former Nazi scientists, so this could be a complex topic to tackle, if they didn't shy away from the full implications. That's a compelling thing to do with Peggy: a woman agent who has to fight for respect…is still working with shady government agencies. A shady government agency that Steve Rogers KNOWS will very easily be convinced to support a program that will attempt to slaughter twenty million people at once. Steve immediately clocked the spy program as evil when Nick Fury called it protective. The Steve of TWS wouldn't tolerate for a second Peggy's grey moral zone.

Sharon may not knowingly work with Nazis, but she spied on Steve for months while pretending to be a friendly neighbor. That's her job, that's interesting, but Steve didn't like it and the movies offered no reason for me to believe he was interested in her after that until they randomly sucked face while Sam and Bucky smiled painfully.

I don't say this to suggest Steve shouldn't have any relationships with them, or women at all. That's fine. What I do mean by it is that the character of Steve, who has a very intense moral code, might break it for Bucky, but usually he doesn't even have to. Whereas, they don't even suggest he would have to contort himself to be with these women he hasn't even spent much time with, BUT HE WOULD. Heterosexuality infects these movies so deeply that it makes more sense to the writers (or execs, or whoever) for Steve to go back in time to a decade he DOESN'T EVEN LIKE to marry a woman he SAW working with his BEST FRIEND'S NAZI TORTURER than for him to, I don't know, get a house with Bucky? Who really needs him right now?

I don't think most people got really queerbaited by the MCU. They weren't gonna make their second flagship character gay or bi officially like that. But after spending 3+ movies saying that this relationship is the most important thing in the world, splitting them up by seventy years was a rug pull. It made the story worse, it aggressively retconned multiple arcs, and it felt like someone at Disney got nervous about how popular the ship was in the mainstream. I don't know, probably we'll never know what exactly happened, but it sure felt like a middle finger. Steve should have been bisexual.

Why Max should have been queer:

He talks about women sexually, but there's nothing there in his interactions with them. His only serious relationships with women are his landlord, sister, and lesbian friend. There's some vague structural implications that Max is gay in the movie, and it's totally possible they wanted to do that but, as the cast mentioned, they had enough trouble convincing execs to let Prudence be a lesbian. Regardless, the gorgeous triumph that is Julie Taymor's Across the Universe can only be improved by making Max's story gayer. Follow me on this journey.

Max meets a stowaway, Jude, who sneaked into the country and has nothing, and immediately adopts him into his college clan. Shows him the sighs, takes him everywhere, introduces him to American pot. Then he ditches all his other dude friends to move to New York with this cute guy. He gets a bit bummed when Jude and his sister Lucy start dating, but he's a loving brother, so he lets it go. Now let's do a little edit of the bowling alley scene with officially Gay Max. He sings along with "I've Just Seen a Face" normally. His lines are "Yes he is falling," referring to Jude falling for Lucy. But at the end of the song, he gets to add "Falling, yes I am falling…" and trails off. Wistful, pining, gut wrenching, beautiful.

We then meet our beloved lesbian cast member Prudence, who in the movie falls for hot, older Sadie almost instantly, and platonically hits it off with Max pretty quick as well. But I propose that Max and Prudence duet "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" here. (I thought about "It's Only Love" and there may be time for that, but I think the former has more gay pain in it.) Please imagine Joe Anderson's (Max) American accent and his voice cracking on the line "Gather 'round all you clowns." GOOD, right?

Max gets drafted. He goes to the draft office and claims to be a homosexual in order to get out of the draft (this is in the movie, he says it out loud, along with anything else that might get him a 4F). The officer snarks, "As long as you don't have flat feet," and stamps his card. He now has worse things to worry about than the object of his affection dating his sister.

Prudence gets really bummed, though, especially after Max gets drafted, and she bemoans that she will never have Sadie. She hides in the closet and they all sing "Dear Prudence" to her. This scene can be easily upgraded by Max joining her in the closet for the last bit, and then bringing her out to the open air with him so they're BOTH coming out of the closet together. That's solidarity, that's love.

Prudence leaves in search of better things, and the rest of the gang joins a big acid-fueled fest/party/event that includes Bono as an amalgamation of Leary and Kesey as well as an analogue of the Merry Prankster's bus Furthur (which is called Beyond in the film). In real life, the bus Furthur was driven by Neal Cassady, AKA famous bisexual hookup king Dean Moriarty. While Jude and Lucy are having trippy cuddling seshes, I don't see why Max couldn't get a seduction of his own by whatever Neal Cassady analogue they came up with.

Ultimately the story of Across the Universe doesn't quite sit right with me, because I think the end fails the rest of the story. When Max is dragged to Vietnam to fight a war that is wildly immoral and is likely to kill him, Jude and Lucy comfort each other. Until they don't. They're not on the same page. They're both hurting, but Lucy is a fighter who needs to do something. She joins an anti-war protest group. Jude can't handle his own fear and hurt, so he comes up with a bullshit reason to pick a fight with Lucy over her work. He doesn't respect it, and he doesn't respect or trust her to handle her own shit and stay loyal. He gets a bit controlling, because he's afraid of losing both of the people he loves the most. She dumps him, and in the mess that follows, he gets deported back to Liverpool.

That's a good story, but what it also shows is that not every relationship works. That's okay! It's a good story to show a relationship that fundamentally is incompatible. The soundtrack does a lot of work there too. The Jude/Lucy songs are mostly all basic romantic songs, whereas the Max and Jude songs are showing the story, showing their place in the world, their relationship in other ways, etc. It's just more compelling. And Lucy deserves better than returning to a man that disrespected her agency and values that way, even though, yes, he was in a lot of pain and frightened for her.

Max sustains a head injury and returns home. Lucy visits him in the hospital. He's deeply traumatized and the carefree boy who never liked violence before wishes he had a gun. He's lonely. He's damaged. He misses his best friend. Everything's changed but that. He still loves Jude.

When Jude returns to America, it's Max that comes to greet him and jumps into his arms in what might be the cutest scene in the movie. (Of course it's while he's singing the screaming part of "Hey Jude," what else?) They go to see their friends (Sadie, Jo-Jo, and Prudence), who are doing an illegal rooftop concert, and to surprise Lucy. And that's how the movie ends, with Jude singing "All You Need is Love" while Lucy watches from the opposite rooftop.

Absolutely no discussion. Nothing. I don't know why he came back to her. I know why he came back to Max. I know why Max pounced on him instantly. I think this movie could be vastly improved by Jude coming back for his circle of friends, and maybe even for Max specifically, one way or another. The implication that Jude and Lucy will be lovers again just doesn't jibe with what I've just watched. She doesn't even get to speak an opinion here, just stand there while Jude makes a big gesture. They should be friends again, but not romantically involved.

I could fix this. Before Jude returns, let Max and Lucy TALK about him. Get them high or drunk. Or both! "Would you want him back?" "Maybe as a friend. I don't think we could make it work." "Well that's cool…I saw him first anyway." "What, haha, you want him?" (absolutely toasted off his ass) "Yeah, no, yeah, yeah…can I go for it?" "…What?" "Oh shit." "You're…serious?" "Oh fuck. Don't tell Mom and Dad."

Then when she sings "Blackbird" for him, it means even more.

That's just me throwing something down, we can improve that scene, obviously. Then when Jude and Max are on the phone, Max can be like, "Hey, we all miss you like crazy. BTW Lucy is uh, pretty moved on. I hope you'll come home anyway."

And he does because that's the important part of the movie! Not the romance. The friendships, the circle, finding your people, finding yourself.

Max AND Lucy meet Jude at the docks. We can keep the pouncing bit, Max still sings most of "Hey Jude," and the Jude and Lucy reunion is slightly awkward. It's clear that the love is there, but the romance is not. The trio goes to the rooftop concert and "All You Need is Love" is fully about the whole circle: Jude, Max, Lucy, Prudence, Sadie, Jo-Jo, and maybe even Rita if she's there. Maybe Max watches Jude all wistful. Maybe Jude even returns the gaze, if we're feeling brave.

And yeah then they make out sloppy style behind an amp or whatever. Obviously.

I love Across the Universe, but Max should've been gay. It would've elevated this beautiful movie so much.