#spying on my handwriting analysis

[gonzodangerfeels]

*overhears two women having a conversation*

"I never thought there would be so much sex in our ex-wives club"

"I never thought I would fit his big cock in me*

*gets hard*

[xxscarletxrosexx]

A Linguistic Analysis: Manga Translation (EN/JP/TWN) Comparison of Chapter 90.1 | Part 3

This is written in response to @connoisseursdecomfort's post Comparing Versions of Short Mission 11

((I realized that I should have just made this into a post because my response would be lost as a reblog. And it did... OTL

Also, this is an updated version with more insight/details))

Consider this is as a part 3 of my Linguistic Analysis posts on Spy x Family's Ch. 90.1 or Short Mission 11.

Part 1: A Linguistic Analysis of the Spelling "Ania" and "Anya"...

Part 2: "Ania" is the closest to an identity reveal

This analysis contains spoilers from Chapter 90.1 / Short Mission 11!

What's so interesting about the discourse analysis amongst Japanese, Taiwanese, and English translations is the hedging (word choices that lessen the directness of a dialogue) langauge that Loid uses. It is more clear in the Japanese ("by the way") and Taiwanese ("it came to mind") translations. Whereas, English's hedging is found in "...right?" What the three of them do share in common is that Loid's discourse is pointing to active voice by stating "your name is spelled A-N-Y-A". Apply all of these translations below:

(ENG) Your name is spelled A-N-Y-A, right?

(JP) By the way, your name is spelled A-N-Y-A.

(TW) It came to mind, your name is spelled A-N-Y-A.

It is consistent that Loid's tone is holding authority by demonstrating his knowledge on Ostanian orthography based off the transcriptions he's seen of Anya's name registered as "A-N-Y-A" which was spelled by her previous Ostanian adopted parents. So Twilight feels confident that the spelling of her name MUST be "Anya."

Another thing I wanted to add on to @connoisseursdecomfort's observation is catching loss of translation, which is so unfortunately common. English translation omits translations mainly because some expressions or dialogue that are common in a language (Japanese and Taiwanese) would be perceive differently in English-speaking countries (USA, UK, AUS, CAN, etc.). This is called cultural discount.

It's the reason why Squid Game English dub missed out on many jokes that are play on words in the Korean dub. It is also the reason why a lot of American jokes are not understood by non-English speakers OTL

But this is a general phenomenon because English native consumers would find the expression strange simply because we do not have this style reflected in our discourse. The best example is when @_mika60 translated the omitted text "Anya's heart stirred at the mention of her own name."

To an American (possibly English natives in general, but I can't really speak on behalf of British, Canadians, nor Australians beause their English may be slightly different in terms of cultural lifestyle/upbringing), this expression can be perceived as corny/purple-prosey. Because American discourse don't generally have this emotionally-charged reflective discourse. Hence, omitted. Which is unfortunate because it says so much about how Loid's spelling affected Anya's feelings. So this is a perfect example of cultural discount.

An example of loss in translation is the omission of Anya's text which explains why she can't carve out her name is due to feeling insecure about her bad handwriting. (Again, this is character analysis that English-reading consumers missed out on! Because anything written in the manga is deemed canon.) Whereas English, we completely omit that detail because English native speakers don't need that extra dialogue. The English discourse is typically straight to the point and English native consumers draw inferences from icons (images/illustrations).

Based off my explanation, this is how I see the above picture as an American consumer (using a think-aloud method):

Anya says, "I can't do it right..." and she looks frustrated as illustrated by the swirl above her head.

Her brows are furrowed which supports that she's annoyed/frustrated/angry.

Her cheeks... are they blushes? Is she embarrassed? I can't really tell.

She's also a 4 y/o or was it 5 y/o child (she lied being 6, right?) so it's obvious she probably might be annoyed because she can't draw straight lines.

Because she's an infant, I'm sure she doesn't have the strength to draw clean lines.

Based off my thought process above, do I think OR am I convinced that Anya feels insecure? No.

Can it be argued that she's insecure? Yes, absolutely.

If I were to talk to someone who posits Anya may be insecure because of his/her knowledge of children behavior and/or mannerism, then I would be convinced. However, I would arrive to this assimilation through negotiating observations and exchanging knowledge of children behavioral mannerism. However, this would become more of headcanon if it wasn't explicitly stated in the manga (keep it mind that the Japanese translation DOES explicitly state that she's insecure because of her bad handwriting, so yes, it is canon that Anya is insecure of her bad handwriting).

Anyways...

I love translation comparisons mainly because you get to experience cultural exchange if you are fortunate enough to understand or have access to a translator (*cough* @connoisseursdecomfort *cough*) who enjoys comparing multiple languages. Thank you for doing God's work @connoisseursdecomfort <3

[ollieoliveoboelo22]

Music of TURN

Round 16

Don't forget round 15

Read 'Em John

1.05: Epiphany

There is a surprising lack of research done on this song. It incorporates a lot of musical traditions found in various African communities that were brought to the Americas in the slave trade. They merged with Western European music to what eventually became work songs, field hollers, shouts, and spirituals.

I've covered a lot of this in my jazz history class, but I am no expert and am just using my existing knowledge to give background an analysis for this song.

Read 'Em John incorporates a lot of this, especially shouts and call and response. I'm going to put in a quote from a proper analysis of the lyrics and story told.

"[John] Refers to John the Revelator, doing what the slave was not allowed to do--reading. But not just reading, but reading with an authority that no one else could match of the doom of his masters and the end of the wicked world they had created and ascent of the persecuted and good into heaven."

https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2013/04/carolina-chocolate-drops-read-em-john.html

It's worked beautifully into the scene when Cicero reads the attainder for Strong Manor that declared all slaves to be free. (not really since the men were instead sent to New York to join the Black Pioneers and Abigail to John Andre to be a house servent. And we have no idea what happened to the other enslaved women shown earlier in the season)

Turpin Hero

1.01: Pilot

This ballad is about the famous English Highwayman, Dick Turpin, (1705 - 1739) whose exploits of theft were romanticised following his execution. The song is believed (or has been claimed) to have been written before his execution.

After accidentally killing fellow highway robber Tom King on accident. Turpin went under the alias John Palmer and fled. He was arrested (as Palmer) about a year later for shooting another man's rooster and then threatening to shoot the man. His identity as Turpin was revealed while imprisoned by his former teacher who recognized his handwriting.

It's very fitting that the song's used as Abe goes to smuggle on the London Trade. An act that eventually brings him to Caleb and eventual formation of the Culper Ring. And just like horse theft (and murder) was punishable by death in the case of Turpin, spying was too for Abe.

[teacupfulofstarshine]

LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP CHAPTER 10

PLEASE HEED THE CONTENT WARNINGS!!! this chapter features Evil Scientist Lady and her Fucked Up WorldView a LOT, and there are also some Major Plot Events that involve Violence. i will put a summary in the end notes if you decide at any point that this particular chapter is too much - that's super valid! i will also mention here that no main characters are going to die in this story and no one dies in this chapter either.

huge huge thanks to @flamingfawkes for beta’ing!

CW: extreme disregard for human life, mentioned human and animal cruelty, toxic workplace environment, violence (both imagined and actual, mildly graphic), gun mention, minor blood, death threats, extremely unethical character, unethical science, stalking

chapter 1 // chapter 2 // chapter 3 // chapter 4 // chapter 5 // chapter 6 // chapter 7 // chapter 8 // chapter 9 // read it on ao3!

“This is the same result we’ve gotten the last twenty times -”

“I don’t care, Steven, run it again!”

Steven sighs, punching at the keyboard to run the statistical analysis sequence again. “This is ridiculous! I’ve run this sequence so many times it feels like my eyes are going to bleed. Why can’t we just turn in the results we have and -”

“Because she’ll behead us,” James snaps, “and then she’ll destroy our reputations and our families and they’ll get no severance. I have three young children at home, Steven, I need this money.” Steven softens a little, fingers running smoothly over the keys as he combs the data again. Next to him, James has a computer screen full of frame-by-frame stills of what little data they recovered from the probe before it was destroyed; Penny across the room is surrounded by ancient texts a mile high and at least three laptops.

“Why is she so interested in this, anyway?”

“It’s beyond me. Since when do we question the whims of what we’re told to do?”

Steven squints at the screen, pushing his chair back and rubbing at his eyes. “If I have to stare at these numbers for one more second, my brain is going to explode. I feel like my eyeballs are going to melt out of my skull. I wanna scream.”

James pulls up another image, staring at the blurry image of the merman before him. Steven pushes away from his own screen and squints at James’s. The merman in the photo looks young, not much older than his kid brother, but they don’t know anything about the lifespan of these creatures. He looks confused, squinting at the camera. As James flicks through the stills, the merman transitions from confused to angry to enraged, and then he attacks.

“He’s not happy about the camera.”

“Would you be happy about someone spying on you and your family?” James says, switching to the next still.

“I wouldn’t be happy if I thought someone was doing anything we do in this lab to me or my family.” James elbows Steven, but luckily no one else seems to have heard.

“This lab isn’t the most ethical place I’ve ever worked, but it pays the bills,” James mutters. “And we’re not even in the experimentation lab. We just do data analysis. We’re removed from the situation.”

Are we? Steven wonders. He sees James reach out and touch the framed picture of his daughters, and keeps his mouth shut. He turns back to his computer, watching the little spinning color wheel of his mouse as the program calculates the same numbers again and again. The results come up identical to the previous ones, and Steven clicks “Run Program” again wordlessly.

They work in silence for a while, the three of them, broken only by James’s muttering and the occasional thud of one of Penny’s books and the clicks of keyboards and mice. If they weren’t so reliant on technology, Steven thinks, there would be an enormous corkboard spanning three of the four walls, covered in pushpins and handwriting and red string connecting images. He debates actually building one, if only to increase the levity in the room, but decides against it.

He’s seen people punished or fired or who-knows-what-else for far less, after all.

Instead, after his program tells him for the twenty-third time that his results are the same (and didn’t someone say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?), Steven scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms and opens the data entry window. Maybe the problem with the results has to do with the entry of the data; did he input something wrong? It’s possible . . .

Here he goes again, he supposes. He stands up, stretches, and leans back to crack some vertebrae. “I’m gonna grab a coffee, take a short screen break, and go back to the beginning. Maybe there’s something in the input that I missed. You want anything?”

James groans, thunking his head against the desk. “I want something with enough caffeine to kill three elephants, please.” Steven nods, looking over at Penny. She shakes her head, and he heads for the shitty coffee machine a few doors down.

Several floors below, a young woman pulls her lab goggles up to rest on top of her head with her perfectly-pinned protocol-compliant bun. “The latest round of tests is completely done, ma’am. I think you’ll find the efficacy . . . striking.”

She takes the clipboard, glossy perfectly-painted nails pinching the sheets of thin paper and flicking between them. “I’m afraid I don’t do so well with the scientific side of things - Kathleen, was it? Explain this to me, would you?”

“Certainly, ma’am. As you know, the kill time for the most effective neurotoxin currently available, tetrodotoxin, varies from thirty minutes to four hours. Average time for symptoms to manifest is seventeen minutes, and from there the symptoms progress through tingling of the lips and tongue, headache, vomiting, muscle weakness, ataxia, et cetera. Death occurs as a result of respiratory or heart failure, and the poison is nearly undetectable if you do not specifically test for it.”

“The untraceability is a plus, but that is far too wide a range of times, and too slow a time even at its fastest.”

“Of course, ma’am, but as far as naturally-occurring marine poisons go - actually, as far as naturally-occurring poisons go, full stop - it is the most effective. Until now, that is.”

“Oh? What are your findings?”

“Which trials would you like to start with, ma’am?”

“The human trials, Kathleen. The only ones that matter. I hardly intend to go around killing mice and hoping that no one traces their deaths to a novel neurotoxin.” She laughs airily, and Kathleen nods along.

“Certainly, ma’am. The most recent data points indicate an average efficacy time of thirteen minutes for our compound neurotoxin, with a full range between nine and seventeen minutes passing before subject death. Subjects began to show symptoms around five minutes, give or take twenty-five seconds.”

“And those symptoms were?”

Kathleen flips through the document. “Seizures, vital organ failure, blindness, painful muscle spasms, suffocation from the inside out.”

She hums, tapping a manicured finger against the report. “Well, Kathleen, that is certainly impressive, especially for a preliminary human subject trial. These results . . . I must say, they are not nearly as disappointing as I anticipated when I came down here.”

“Ma’am?”

“How long have you worked for this company, Kathleen?”

“Almost five years, ma’am, but I’ve always been an assistant. This is my first time as lead researcher and biochemist on a project, ever since you . . . laid off the previous lead researcher.”

“Kathleen, let me be frank. These results are not what I hoped for. The efficacy time and symptom onset times are both far too long for my liking, and the range of efficacy time is too broad. By all accounts, I should consider this a failure.” Kathleen swallows, but remains poised. “However, you’ve managed to shave off a considerable amount of time from the tetrodotoxin readings. The range of symptom onset time is an acceptable breadth, and your results are far beyond anything your predecessor ever accomplished for me. This is truly impressive, all things considered.”

“Thank you, ma’am. How should I proceed?”

“I want the efficacy doubled - tripled - I want it upped by anywhere between four and five hundred percent. I want the pain increased, too. Feel free to increase your requests for test subjects, but get me the results I want. You said the original tetrodotoxin was untraceable?”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

“Can you keep that feature intact?”

“As of right now, it is intact, ma’am. I will endeavor to keep it so in future experiments.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Welcome to your new position as head of this research division. Don’t let me down.” She holds out a slender hand, and Kathleen takes it, trying not to seem too eager.

“I won’t, ma’am.”

“How soon can you start this experiment up again?”

“The cleaners should be finished by tomorrow morning, ma’am, and I can tweak chemical formulas until then.”

“Excellent.” Her watch beeps, and she lifts it, pursing her bright lips as she examines the message she’s just received. “If you’ll excuse me, I have another matter to attend to. Someone will drop off your master access key for Lab Three within the hour.”

She steps into the elevator and lifts her watch up to her face, swiping through the messages from her secretary. One finger reaches out to press the button for the digital analysis labs floor, and the other taps away at her watch.

When she steps off the elevator, her secretary is waiting. “Ma’am.”

“What do they have for me?”

“Unclear. They said it was something they wanted to report directly to you and you alone, but it seems to be something big.”

“Hopefully it’s a big step in the right direction, or they’ll be taking a big step out of a job.” She relishes in the way the employees she passes all unfailingly flinch and then snap to perfect attention when they hear the sharp echo of her heels against the floor. She lifts her head and walks faster, striking the tiles with her heels like a gavel, sharp and precise against a judge’s desk.

The computer labs are disorganized when she enters, but there is a string of promising-looking numbers on the main display monitor. There is a woman surrounded by books and a man pulling up photos on his computer, and there is a third man standing in front of her like a toy soldier. She focuses on that one.

“I hear you have news for me? Make it swift, and make it good.”

He swallows, hard, and her eyes idly trace the line of his throat. If he disappoints her, perhaps she will drive her heel through it, to make an example of him. That would be far too messy; perhaps his dominant hand will do.

“I have narrowed down the location of the missing net, ma’am. I believe it to have washed up somewhere around these general GPS coordinates.” He fiddles with a remote in his hand, and the image on the screen changes. It shows an aerial satellite view of a secluded strip of beach, framed by rocky cliffs with larger rocks studded out into the open water. “It should have washed up somewhere in this one-point-three-seven-mile strip of beach. The whole area is property of one Doctor Thomas Sanders.”

She snarls. “That man. He won’t let us on that beach willingly until hell freezes over.”

The other man, the one scanning through photo stills and video footage, jumps up, knocking his chair backwards. “I found something!”

She turns towards him, and his excitement freezes and sputters into something much more controlled and terrified. “Show me.” He clicks something and pulls up video footage from one of their surveillance drones, zooming in on a particular patch of ocean along the stretch of Sanders’ beach. Her eyes widen when she sees what he’d noticed - a hump of red-and-white tail arcing above the waves before a pattern of ripples streaks off towards the cliff. He pauses the footage, rewinds it, uses a laser pointer to show an opening concealed in the cliff face.

“There’s some kind of grotto in there, hidden by the cliff. It’s on Sanders’ property, he has to know it’s there. And it looks like the merman from the destroyed drone knows it’s there too. Which means -”

“That must be where he’s keeping them.” Something burns in her chest, brilliant and terrifying and all-encapsulating, like wildfire. “We’ve found them, at long last.”

“What would you have me do?” her secretary asks. “I can arrange for a recovery squad at your earliest possible convenience, ma’am.”

“Assemble the squad, but do not have them move out. They will wait for my orders. When they go, you are to go with them.” Her secretary nods, once, sharp and sure. “Dispatch a crew to Lab One and clear it out. I want it prepped for containment, vivisection, chemical tests - the works. Get at least three tanks set up and one strap-down human table.”

“A human table, ma’am?”

“Yes. We have to deal with Sanders once and for all to ensure that he does not ruin any future experiments.”

“Will we be taking him as well?”

She hums thoughtfully. “No. Pull up the file we have on his known associate?”

A few swift clicks and flicks and a photo appears on the large screen: a young man with brown-and-purple hair, sleeves rolled up, carefully lowering a perfectly viable specimen into the ocean and letting it go, like some kind of fool. “His doctoral student, ma’am. The longest one he’s ever kept - this one has been with him a few years.”

“Excellent. When you raid the lab, take him.”

“Should we kill Sanders?”

“No. Rough him up a little, but leave him alive. Taking his protégé and leaving him alone, helpless to rescue him, will be the highest form of torture for such an insufferable person. The agony will eat him alive until his dying day.”

Her secretary nods, taking the notes down dutifully. The other employees look vaguely horrified, but she pays them no mind. No sacrifice is too great to be made in the name of progress, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a weakling who will never get anywhere in life.

She refuses to be one of those weaklings.

*~*~*~*~*

Logan wakes up confused.

He’s warm, warmer than he thinks he’s ever been in his whole life. When he stirs, he moves farther than he meant to - he must not be underwater. That’s enough to send a jolt of concern through his sleep-addled brain. Why isn’t he underwater? Why was he sleeping if he was above the surface? There’s no way his dad is here, and Roman hates surfacing, where are they? Where is he? But he’s so comfortable . . .

Someone shifts beside him, an arm draping across his waist, and Logan forces his eyes open. He shifts his lower half, confused when two things move instead of one, and there are layers upon layers of thin, flat, soft things wrapping around him. What is happening?

Slowly, slowly, his mind clears, and he remembers the events of last night. He grew legs - he was a human, once, before he was mer - he couldn’t sleep underwater with Dad and Roman - Virgil was teaching him to walk - Virgil put “clothes” on him - Virgil was embarrassed that he didn’t have those “clothes” on him - Virgil took him out of the lab to sleep - Virgil agreed to cuddle him since his pod couldn’t -

Logan feels the strange burning in his face again as he shifts. He can’t see well in this new human form, but when things are close enough to his face they’re relatively clear. And Virgil, still sleeping, is close enough that Logan can smell him - he smells like salt water mixed with something sharp and something sweet and something else that Logan can’t quite identify but finds addicting nonetheless. Sunlight streams in and pools around Virgil’s face, illuminating the tangled mess of hair spread around him and flopping into his face, the small puddle of water leaking out from his open mouth onto the soft thing he’s resting his head on, the way his chest moves slowly with every breath. His arm is wrapped around Logan, pulling him close. Logan thinks he might explode if he focuses on this any more, so he rolls from his side to his back as carefully as he can, not wanting to wake Virgil. Virgil tightens his arm around Logan and mutters something indecipherable in his sleep, but he doesn’t wake.

Rather than focusing on his very confusing feelings for the very pretty man next to him, Logan focuses on what he can see of the room around him. He makes a list in his mind of things that he plans to ask Virgil about later today, including:

1: There are many draws attached to the small, smooth cliffs surrounding them. How do they stay there?

2: There are lots of “clothes” scattered all around the floor, and there were several on the bed, too. Is that normal for humans?

3: Last night, Virgil did something that made the room light up with trapped sunlight! How did he do that?

4: How did Virgil get ice to stay in those big frozen sheets in such a warm place to let the sunlight in?

5: How did Virgil make ice into that weird shape that he filled with water and drank last night?

6: How did Virgil get the water to come into this place?

7: Do all humans have a specific area set aside for sleeping? Logan and his pod usually just sleep wherever they can, but Virgil seems to have this soft slab set aside with all of these soft things to be comfortable and sleep in every night. Is this a Human Thing or strictly a Virgil Thing?

Logan looks out through the sheet of ice that protects Virgil’s area from the outside and gasps. He can’t see well, but there’s a glittering expanse of blue that shifts and moves and oh, is that the ocean?

He’s spent his whole life (well, his whole remembered life, anyways) in the ocean, and he’s seen some truly wondrous things. He travels around the world with his pod, he knows the ocean is big, but seeing it spread out like this is . . . awe-inspiring. Logan has never seen the ocean like this, and now that he has he doesn’t think he can ever not see it like this again. It’s like a perfect sheet of sea-glass, rippling and unbroken but dynamic in a way that he never really gets a sense of when he’s beneath it.

He knows that there are waves, of course. There are smaller swells out on the open ocean, and larger ones when the Second Goddess dips her fingers down from the Upper Ocean and swirls the storms to a thundering burst. There are waves along the shoreline, ones that he frolics in with Roman and batter him against the shoreline. There are waves created when he or his pod members surface. But watching the movement of the ocean from up here is . . .

Even with his imperfect vision, he is completely at a loss for words as he stares at the ocean.

Eventually, Virgil stirs next to him, and Logan turns away from the ocean to stare at him. Virgil is close to him, arms wrapped tightly around him, face pressed against him. Logan’s eyesight is not great, but Virgil is close enough that he can pick out little details of his face. There are brown face scales scattered all over him, but they seem to cluster on his nose and his cheeks. Logan has wanted to touch them for a substantial amount of time, and he can’t stop himself from gently settling the tips of his fingers over Virgil’s cheek.

His face doesn’t feel like Logan was expecting. The scales don’t give texture to his face the way that Logan’s do; the skin is smooth and flat. There are little bumps all over, but the brown scales aren’t raised off the skin like Logan expected. He lets his fingers trail along Virgil’s face. His bone structure seems to be exceedingly similar to Logan’s, at least in regards to his head. Logan’s finger rests gently on the curve of bone under Virgil’s eye, and Virgil exhales warm breath onto his palm.

Logan wonders what it would be like to have this for longer than just his recovery period. He wonders what it would be like to wake up next to Virgil all the time, to get to run his hands over Virgil’s face and arms and chest and examine the differences between their anatomy. He wonders what it would be like to learn to walk without falling over, and he feels a sharp, unexpected twinge in his chest as he realizes that getting better at walking means no more closeness to Virgil.

His chest feels strange, like there’s a school of small fish swarming around and tickling his insides and making him feel all foamy, like the froth churned up by a windswept sea. He feels like he does when he’s underwater - free, weightless, mobile, limited by nothing except his own imagination. He feels unstoppable.

Virgil makes a sudden, sharp inhale, blinking his eyes open slowly. Logan thinks that, perhaps, he might not appreciate being studied unknowingly - he hadn’t appreciated Virgil doing it, before he understood what was happening, when all he knew was the loss of his pod aching like a scraped-out seashell. As Virgil wakes up, Logan shifts, turning his gaze to the rest of the room.

Virgil makes a sleepy grumbling noise, opening one eye. Logan chances another quick glance at him, and when his eye slides open Logan is struck by its beauty. He doesn’t get much of a chance to admire it, however, before Virgil is jolting backwards like Logan’s struck him with lightning. Logan is confused, reaching out and gently touching his shoulder. “Virgil?”

“Wassat?! Wait . . . L’gan?”

“It is me,” Logan says softly. “Are - are you upset with me?”

Virgil yawns, jaw dropping to his chest, revealing a flash of teeth and a soft pink tongue. (Logan wants to lick it. Why does Logan want to lick it? Why is Logan thinking about Virgil’s tongue licking his tongue - why is Logan thinking about Virgil - what in the Seven Oceans is happening to him.) “Wh - no, no, ‘m okay, I just - woke up, forgot I had you with me, got confused about another person in my bed.” Before Logan can start to feel bad, Virgil adds, “S’okay if it’s you, though,” and the foamy, floaty feeling is back.

“Did you sleep well?”

Virgil laughs, low and rumbling, and Logan can feel it in his fingers where he touches Virgil’s skin. “I never sleep well.” He sits up, and the fabric of his pajamas shifts to let Logan see stretches of soft, supple skin that he usually doesn’t. Logan wants to touch it. He very determinedly keeps his hand on Virgil’s shoulder. “Gotta admit, though, last night was . . . better than usual.”

This appears to be the point where Virgil first notices their position - pressed together, arm slung over Logan, basically cuddling the way that Logan normally would with his pod. (No tangle with his pod has ever felt this . . . electric, this charged, this important to Logan before.) His face flares a brilliant red, and he shifts like he wants to move away but -

“I’m sorry,” Virgil says. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“No!” Logan blurts out. Virgil blinks at him a little, and maybe he was a little overly enthusiastic, but - “I sleep in a tangle with Dad and Roman all the time. I have extreme difficulty sleeping without contact with someone else. It . . . helped me greatly.”

“Oh,” Virgil says, face turning redder still, smiling shyly. “That - makes me feel better. Thanks, Lo.”

Logan smiles, and Virgil smiles too, reaching up to gently move a piece of hair away from his face. Logan thinks that, as far as deaths go, his chest exploding (which seems to be getting more and more likely every fifteen seconds he spends in Virgil’s presence, only accelerated by all this skin-on-skin contact they’re having right now) seems to be the most pleasurable.

Virgil opens his mouth to say something, but whatever it was is interrupted by a Ping! noise from across the room. “What is that?” Logan asks. Virgil, sadly, untangles himself from Logan and the blankets, sliding out of bed and heading over to one of the other structures in the room (what did he call it last night? Dex?) and picking up a flat glowing rectangle.

“Is everything alright?”

“What? Yeah, yeah, I - Thomas sent me a text, it’s a little weird.”

“What is a text?”

“It’s a kind of human messaging system, it allows us to communicate when we’re far away from each other.”

“Like a pod call?” “Kind of? I’ll explain more later, I promise, I just - I gotta go down to the lab real quick.”

“I’ll come with -”

“No!” Virgil snaps. Logan flinches, and Virgil softens, crossing the room and gently touching his shoulder. “Hey, no, Logan, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I just - this message, there’s something off. I think something might be wrong, and I don’t want to put you in any unnecessary danger. Just - wait here, okay? Wait in my room, where it’s safe. It’s probably nothing, he’s probably fine, but on the off chance that he’s not, I want you to stay hidden safely up here.”

Logan isn’t sure why this makes his face heat up slightly, but it does. “Okay. I accept your apology, and I . . . trust you.”

Virgil smiles, soft and heartwarming, and Logan is beginning to give more credence to his “chest explosion is fine, actually” theory. “Wait for me here, okay? I’ll be right back. I promise.”

He leaves, shutting the door firmly behind him, and the foamy feeling in Logan’s chest dissipates a little. He can’t quite put his finger on it, but there’s something . . . off. If Logan didn’t know better, he’d think that he was sensing a predator approaching.

But that can’t be right, he isn’t underwater. His danger senses are likely just overreacting to his disappointment at Virgil’s absence.

. . . Right?

*~*~*~*~*

Thomas is beginning to regret letting Roman and Patton (specifically, Roman) out of the large tank before finishing his first coffee of the morning.

“I want some!” Roman complains.

“Do you even know what it is?” Thomas says. Roman pouts sulkily at him.

“. . . No,” he mutters, rolling his eyes. Thomas gives him the deadpan, no-nonsense, I-am-your-direct-superior-take-the-damn-samples-Virgil stare that he has perfected over the past few years. Roman wilts a little more, and Thomas feels slightly bad.

“It’s called coffee,” he says. “It’s a hot drink that lots of people have in the morning. Some people drink it plain, and some people add things to it to change the way it tastes. It helps me wake up more and get focused to start my day, and sometimes I drink it late at night to help keep me awake.”

Roman looks less like a kicked puppy and more like Logan, eyes wide and curious. “I want some!”

Thomas, taking a sip of his own two-seconds-of-cream-five-cubes-of-sugar coffee, nearly spits it out. He looks at Roman, eyes the very sharp, very detachable, very toxic spines covering his body, and says, “No.”

Roman’s demeanor changes entirely, switching from “curious toddler” to “toddler about to throw a temper tantrum” in a heartbeat. “Why not?!”

“Because when people drink coffee without being used to it, sometimes it makes them a little crazy.”

“I’m not crazy!”

“Do I need to recount to you how many times you’ve threatened me and my assistant since we met you?” Thomas says, raising an eyebrow. “I’m not giving you coffee until I know I can trust you not to stab me with your poisonous spines that cover your entire body and can be fired at people.”

Roman pouts more, dropping under the water and letting out a gratingly harmonious string of mer that Thomas is pretty sure translates to Roman bitching about the coffee situation to his dad. Based on the pattern of Patton’s response, he’s pretty sure Patton is laughing at Roman.

More sulky chalkboard-violin music, and then Roman resurfaces grumpily. “Dad agrees with you and says no consuming strange human foods.”

“Did he laugh at you?”

Roman squints suspiciously at him. “You can’t speak our language.”

“Yeah, but I know what it sounds like when a dad laughs at his kid.” Roman, continuing to pout, sinks back into the tank, presumably to sulk some more. Thomas takes another very long sip of coffee that is definitely too hot for his mouth and turns back to his desk.

Virgil should definitely be awake and in the lab at this point. The samples he’s supposed to be analyzing are sitting in their little tubes, each neatly labelled with locations and dates and times and what, specifically, Virgil is supposed to be looking for. Thomas considers going upstairs and waking up Virgil, who’s almost never been late for work in this way, but he decides against it. Virgil is upstairs with Logan, and Thomas knows that there’s something building between them. He’s not sure how advisable that something is, but he trusts Virgil to make his own decisions.

Besides, he could probably use some practice. His water sample analysis skills are pretty rusty, he’s had Virgil doing them for years. “Virgil, you owe me big time for what I’m doing for you.” He carefully shifts the samples over to his own desk, slides his earbuds in, picks up a pipette, and gets to work analyzing the bacterial and algal concentrations for any abnormalities.

Thomas accomplishes about forty-five minutes’ worth of work before Roman interrupts him by flicking water at him and soaking the back of his neck. “Hey!”

“I tried your name, but your little ear bug things were keeping you from hearing me,” Roman says smugly. Thomas, not for the first time, considers retreating to the closet and throwing beakers until he feels better.

“Can I help you?”

“Dad wants to go hunting and bring back breakfast, but we can’t leave without you.”

“Are you not going hunting?”

“I’m going to stay here and observe you,” Roman says.

Thomas blinks. “Do I . . . need observing?”

“How do I know you won’t sell us out to your little human friends the second you get a chance? If I’m here, I can stop you. Plus, what if you do something to Logan while we’re not here to protect him? No, no, I’m staying right where I am and you can’t make me leave.” His spines ripple; Thomas steps closer to a whiteboard in case he needs to duck.

“I’m not going to do that, and I don’t want you to stab me.”

“Still! I’m staying here! Also, Dad’s bigger than me, and he’s a better hunter cause he’s faster and he’s been hunting longer.

“Does he need something to help him carry all those fish?” Thomas asks. Roman opens his mouth like he’s going to say something snarky, pauses, and stops.

“I . . . usually we just eat what we catch when we catch it. We make a pile of prey and take turns guarding it while the other two hunt. Then we make a sacrifice to the Seven Mother Goddesses and eat what’s left.”

After some debate, Thomas is able to fashion a sling of sorts from some waterproof tarps and leftover anchor rope to tie around Patton’s body. “You can put the fish in this pouch and carry them back here. Will you be able to navigate your way back to the grotto?”

“He will,” Roman says. “Dad knows more about the ocean than any human possibly could.” Another discordant song from the tank, chastising, and Roman huffs. “Dad wants me to reassure you that he’ll be fine.”

Patton settles into the mobile tank easily, and Thomas gets him down to the grotto leading towards the sea. “When you come back, let out one of your pod calls and Virgil or I will come and collect you and your catch. Take as much time as you need, okay?”

Patton reaches up and gently pats Thomas’s arm with one large, damp hand, and Thomas takes that to mean an agreement. “Alright, off you go.” There’s a whoosh and a rush of water as it flows from the tank into the grotto in a clean arc, carrying Patton with it. Thomas waits for a moment, letting Patton disappear into the open ocean, before returning to the laboratory.

Roman, for the most part, ignores Thomas. He asks the occasional question, which Thomas tries to answer in a way that he’ll understand, and leans over the edge of his touch tank, eyes guarded. Every time Thomas sneaks a glance, when he thinks Roman isn’t looking, his expression is wide-eyed and wondrous, like Logan’s usually are, but the moment he realizes Thomas is watching him his entire face closes up like a clamshell.

Thomas wonders what it’ll take to get Roman to trust him, trust Virgil, trust any human. Granted, he doesn’t know Roman’s history with humans, but he and Patton are both fairly scarred, and Thomas might not know the whole story but he’d bet a not-insignificant amount of his monthly income that the giant starburst scar taking up the majority of Patton’s chest isn’t the result of a clash with a marine creature.

He works quietly, fielding the occasional question, keeping one ear on the grotto tunnel for Patton’s return. He’s not sure how long he expected Patton to be gone, but he hears movement in the grotto tunnel far sooner than he’d expected.

“Thomas, what’s -”

“Shhhh,” Thomas says. He stands up, pushing away from his desk, but before he can say anything else, there’s a flood of movement coming from the tunnel. Bodies pour into the lab, swift and strong and carrying weapons that they immediately train on Thomas and Roman.

“What is this?” Roman snaps, bristling. He sounds betrayed, like he thinks Thomas is behind this. Thomas picks up a heavy glass beaker, fully prepared to shatter it upside someone’s skull if necessary, but something heavy and hard strikes the back of his skull and he feels his knees crumple. Roman cries out, and Thomas struggles to push himself up. A hand fists itself in his hair and yanks him upright, sharply. Thomas exhales sharply through his teeth, but before he can start struggling, something cool and round rests against the back of his neck, shutting him up and shutting his brain down.

Roman is puffed up like a hedgehog, apparently fully prepared to defend Thomas despite his strong and inherent mistrust. Before he can begin to attack, Thomas hears the click-click-click of shoes on the hard stone floor. Whoever’s holding his head yanks him back again, and he is forced to watch as a woman walks into his laboratory.

(It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke - a sick, horrible, twisted joke.)

She has black heels, black tights, a black pencil skirt, a black blazer, and a blood-red blouse. Her hair is scraped back into a tight bun, pulled so taut it must hurt, and is held in place with a pitch black stick. She carries a - clipboard? tablet? Unclear - held against her chest, and there’s a sleek silver weapon in her right hand.

“The one from the video?” she asks.

“Affirmative, ma’am,” says the person holding Thomas’s head. The woman nods, lifting her weapon, and fires at Roman. Thomas tries to scream a warning, earning himself another painful yank from his captor, but the projectile lodges itself in Roman’s shoulder anyway.

It isn’t a bullet, but something that looks like a small syringe. Roman swats it out of his shoulder, swaying a little, but it doesn’t stop him from swiping at the - mercenary, they must be - who tries to grab him with his elbow spines. The woman frowns, lifts the weapon - some kind of tranquilizer gun? - and fires again.

Roman screams, inhuman and animal, and tears the newest dart from his arm, throwing himself out of his tank and clinging to the nearest mercenary. His teeth tear into the man’s shoulder, spines piercing through his camouflage clothing and flooding him with neurotoxin. The man collapses against the concrete, alive but unconscious, and Roman snarls at the next man as though daring him to approach. He sways, weakened but awake, and bares his teeth.

“Of course,” the woman says, tapping something on her tablet. “His naturally produced neurotoxin must be providing him with some level of natural resistance. Unexpected, but not a limitation.”

It takes three more tranquilizer darts before Roman finally slumps down into his tank, unconscious. The mercenaries look hesitant to approach him, but the woman reaches for her tablet and they scramble to action at once.

“No - no, stop, let him go, he’s not an animal for you to cart off to your lab -” Thomas starts. The man holding him knees him sharply in the back and he cries out, coughing.

They wrap Roman in thick leather bands, roughly shoving his spines flat and binding them against his skin so that he can’t attack them again. The woman nods, once, short and sharp, and they drag Roman away, letting his head bang mercilessly on the ground. Thomas catches a glimpse of a logo - emblazoned on the back of the jackets, on the back of the woman’s tablet, on the side of her tranquilizer gun - and commits it to memory. He’s going to need it, if he gets out of here alive.

“- your phone,” the woman says, and oh, when did she get in front of him.

“My what?”

His mouth runs dry as she places the tranquilizer gun under his chin, barrel pressing against his throat, and tips his chin up. “I said, give me your phone.”

Thomas blinks. “My - the desk. It’s on the desk.”

She sets her tablet down, picks up his phone, and shoves it in his face. “Open it.”

“I - wh -”

“Unlock your phone, Dr. Sanders. Must I repeat myself a third time?” She rolls her eyes. “Doctorates are wasted on people like you.”

Thomas numbly punches in his passcode, and she swipes through to his messages app, frowning before turning the screen towards his face to reveal a message thread with Virgil. “Is this your assistant?”

Thomas glares at her, he’s not going to give her what she wants, he’s not going to just give her Virgil but then the - gun, it must be a gun, what else would they be holding against his neck like this - pushes into him harder, and it’s probably bruising, and he can’t get himself killed here because then he definitely won’t be able to take care of Virgil and -

“Yes,” Thomas says, hating himself for giving in so easily. “What do you -”

She turns away from him, nails clicking against his phone screen as she sends a text message - to Virgil, presumably, and that makes his heart sink like a stone - before dropping it on the floor and stepping on it to shatter it. “I have a message for you.”

“A - what?”

“Did they really hit you that hard, or were you this stupid before we came here?” she says coldly, picking up the tablet again and tapping at the screen. Thomas groans as the man yanks him to his feet, shoving him onto his chair and pulling a roll of duct tape out of one of his multiple pants pockets. He tapes Thomas’s wrists and ankles to the chair, keeping his weapon trained on Thomas’s temple at all times, before pressing it roughly against his head and gripping his hair again.

The woman sets the tablet on his lab table, and the screen flickers to life, and then there’s a woman in front of a dark black backdrop, smiling at him like a cat who’s caught a canary. “Thomas Sanders. How long I’ve waited for this day.”

Thomas recognizes her. He knows he recognizes her. She used to be his classmate, before . . .

His head hurts, so badly that he can barely keep his eyes open, and the memory slips away. “You . . . why are you doing this?”

“Why? Because I am a real scientist, unlike you. You refuse to do what is necessary, what must be done for the progression of the species. The sacrifice of some worthless animals is necessary for humanity to reach its zenith. You would really hinder the entire human race for the preservation of lower life forms?”

“Wh - I -”

“You think that ‘preserving the ecosystem’ and ‘keeping animals alive’ makes you a good scientist, but it makes you weak. You are weak, Thomas Sanders, and if the world was left in the hands of people like you, the human race as we know it would die out in a few centuries. Fortunately, there are people like me, who understand what must be done.”

“Caring about other people and things - it doesn’t - it doesn’t make you weak,” Thomas says, chest heaving, and the woman just laughs.

“One of many logical fallacies to which you subscribe, Thomas. They really gave you a doctorate? Of course caring makes you weak. All emotions make you weak. They corrupt your data and make your experiments worthless. You must be ruthless. You must be willing to do whatever it takes to pursue your goals and achieve the height of success. But no.” She rolls her eyes, face hardening, twirling a pen in her fingers. “You insist on ethics and principles and letting emotions cloud your judgement, and that makes you a failure as a scientist. It makes you weak. Your attachments will be your downfall.”

Thomas’s eyes slide shut, head pounding, and the man behind him yanks at his hair so sharply that he knows some has been ripped out. He forces his eyes open in time to see a smile slide across the woman’s face like a knife, teeth gleaming white as sun-bleached bone.

“You won’t - get away with this,” Thomas manages. He grinds his teeth together and curls his hands into fists, digging his nails into his palms to keep himself awake. “If you leave me alive -” Thomas, stop talking, why are you reminding her that she has the option to fucking kill you “- I will not rest until I find you. I’ll - you can’t -”

“You’ll what, Thomas? If you call the police, you’ll expose those creatures you’re so intent on protecting to the world. Are you really willing to take that chance?” Before Thomas can even begin formulating a response, she steamrolls him. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you were, I’m going to take some . . . insurance, shall we say.”

“Why not just kill me?” Thomas spits. Excellent idea, Doc, poke the murderous lady with a stick like a god damn hornet’s nest, the tiny Virgil in his brain hisses. Her smile, somehow, only widens, and that’s . . . that can’t be good, can it? Smiles are supposed to be good! They’re supposed to make you happy, but all Thomas feels is creeping dread and pain, so much pain, and -

Yeah. He’s . . . pretty sure he has a concussion.

“Because if I kill you, you get to take the easy way out. Your suffering will end. But unlike you, I don’t put limits on my science. I know how to cause you the maximum amount of pain.”

Thomas eyes the toxin gun, but the on-screen woman just laughs. “Not yet, Thomas. We need something from you, first.”

“You already took Roman,” Thomas says. “What more can you possibly take from me?”

“You named it? You’re even weaker than I thought.”

“He told me his name, he’s not an it, he’s not a thing for you to play with and - and I -”

There’s a strange sinking feeling in Thomas’s chest as the woman onscreen laughs. “I knew you were emotional, Thomas, but I can’t believe this! It looks like I’ll have more hanging over your head than you thought.”

“You -”

“Say, Tommy-boy, have you heard from your precious little assistant recently?”

Thomas’s entire body flushes ice-cold and then white-hot, immediately struggling against his duct tape bindings despite the man tearing at his hair and shoving the gun into his neck and snapping at him to shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up before I do something we’re both gonna regret -

“Don’t you touch him!” Thomas snaps. “If you hurt him, I swear to God -”

“You’re not in a position to be making demands, and if you don’t calm down, I’ll paint your boring little lab bright red.” Thomas freezes, holding his entire body tensed like electricity is running through his blood.

There are footsteps on the stairs. “Doc? I got your text, what’s -”

“Virgil, run!” Thomas chokes. Virgil comes around the corner, holding his phone, staring at the screen in confusion. He looks up, eyes widening in horror as he takes in the scene.

“You know what to do,” the woman onscreen says. The other woman lifts her tranquilizer gun, and Thomas is sure that he’s screaming, his mouth is open and sound is coming out but his blood is rushing through his ears and his heart is pounding like waves against a boat in rough sea and he can’t - he can’t -

Virgil turns to run, but the tranquilizer dart hits in him the back of the neck and he collapses like a sack of bricks. The woman lowers her gun and jerks her head at the two remaining conscious, unoccupied mercenaries, who step forward and grab Virgil.

“Let him go!” Thomas screams, and his throat feels raw and his chest feels raw and his wrists are rubbed raw and his soul feels hollow and raw, like he’s been scraped out with a jagged piece of metal and only an empty shell remains. Virgil’s head lolls against his chest as they drag him down the grotto tunnel, and Thomas struggles and screams and stares after them until Virgil is out of sight.

His face is damp, and his eyes are burning, and he isn’t sure if it’s blood from his head wound or tears or some strange, morbid mixture of both.

“The greatest torture of which I can conceive,” the woman onscreen says, and it takes him a moment to realize that oh, she’s talking to me, “is to leave you alive, knowing that your precious little protégé is with me, and that there is nothing you can do about it.” She leans forward, and any trace of a smile is gone. “If you try to come after me, I will kill him. If you call the authorities, I will kill him. I already found you, Thomas. Don’t think I’m not watching. If I catch so much as a whiff of you planning something, his blood will be on your hands. Do you understand me?”

Thomas, numb and shocked, can’t even respond. “Knock him out and bring the specimens back to me,” the woman onscreen says.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He doesn’t even feel the tranquilizer dart hit his neck, but he welcomes the sweeping darkness.

(Summary: Evil Scientist Lady has been spying on Thomas and she finds the entrance to the grotto where our mer friends have been hiding. She sends her assistant and several armed thugs to invade the lab, they drug Roman with tranquilizers and kidnap him. Thomas gets knocked around a lot and is mocked for being an ethical scientist and caring about people by Evil Scientist Lady and she gloats at him through Evil Facetime before kidnapping Virgil in the same way they did Roman, knocking Thomas unconscious, and leaving him tied to his lab chair. During this whole scene, Patton is out in the open ocean hunting and Logan is safely hidden in Virgil's room.)

[rosalind-of-arden]

Sword and Pen Reread, chapter 9

It’s Dario time!

It’s really rather fun to watch the ex-Archivist’s habits of double-dealing and manipulation come back to haunt him in the ephemera. Here’s Callum Brightwell telling the bastard to go fuck himself. You know you’ve sunk low when Callum fucking Brightwell holds even the slightest bit of moral high ground over you.

How badly do I want to see @thegreatlibraryfangirl dissect all this Dario stuff? So. Fucking. Much.

Dario has a “favorite shop for little cakes.” Someone please write Dario buying little cakes for Khalila between Ink and Bone and Paper and Fire. It would be the cutest, fluffiest, sweetest thing ever.

Santi has soldiers following Dario. Lord Commander Santi is hedging his bets in case Dario isn’t so loyal after all. Dad Santi is worried about his baby.

“Even the normally predictable Niccolo Santi” is hard for Dario to predict right now. I think this is Dario’s less than 100% honest way of acknowledging to himself that he can’t actually fully understand Santi. Jess flat out admits to himself that he misunderstood Wolfe at first; Dario’s reaching similar conclusions about the adults, but thinking of it differently.

“But generations of Spanish diplomats had used his particular code, and as far as Dario knew it had never been cracked.” I’ll leave the Dario backstory analysis to Maz here. What I’m going to note is that we see later in the chapter that he shared this code with Santi. It was created by an anti-Library rebel. It’s been a Spanish secret for generations. And Dario gave it to Nic. That’s how loyal he is to the Library now. Or that’s how much he trusts Santi. Or that’s how weak his emotional ties are to Spain. Or some combination thereof.

“The only thing that had protected the ancient city was the legend, the glittering facade that covered rotten timbers.” This sounds so much like what Santi says to Wolfe in Stormcrow. Parallels between Santi and Dario. I’m really starting to want canon gap fic exploring how that relationship develops. Must consider ideas.

“Whatever others might think of him in the end.” “Boody, terrible, cruel work.” “Someone had to do it.” “Cowardly to avoid one’s duty.” Dario’s self image is very interesting to consider. He thinks of what he’s doing as necessary but terrible, and he expects others to hate him for it. 

Dario is also very honest about his vices.  Yes, he’s vain. No, he’s not sorry. But he does expect to be looked down on for it.

Timeline, ugh. “family blade he’d damaged this morning.” It is not actually possible for it to be the same day. I will take this as evidence that Dario is stressed and losing track of time.

Also, when did Dario get this spare Codex? Either this is the one he got back in Ink and Bone when his went missing, or he got it somewhere between Ink and Bone and the middle of Paper and fire when they left for Rome, or this is what he was doing during any of the windows of time when he’s unaccounted for in this book. Regardless, what was his original reason for having it? Paranoia? Family expectation that he be available as a spy?

He’s using a Codex the High Garda can’t track. Is he just worried about the Elites being able to track him? Traitors within Santi’s ranks (just how paranoid are he and Santi about that)? Wants to avoid giving away more than he has to about Spain’s spy operations even though he’s using them for the Library?

More Santi-Dario parallels: both express a desire to grab their partner and drag them off to somewhere safe and peaceful. And they both know Wolfe and Khalila would never agree with that.

Dario read Santi’s journal. And other journals. While he was a student. So... logistics. Did he break into Santi’s house? Seems unlikely - Wolfe and Santi would be too paranoid for that, and we know Dario isn’t that sneaky. I’m going to guess Santi kept a journal in his office in the High Garda compound. It’s plausible that Dario could get himself in there after hours. Also plausible that Santi would keep a journal there. 

Other option? A bit more out there, but not impossible. Codex hacking. If Dario found out Morgan’s secret, Dario could ask Morgan to help him hack into journals. If Dario’s snooping, Dario could find out Morgan’s secret, maybe even before Jess did.

“He’d found a great deal more than he’d expected.” And what he found made him feel ashamed of what he did, and he never used the information. So, yeah, he found out about Wolfe’s trauma there. Dario might just know more about what Wolfe went through than Jess, but he’s kept quiet about it.

Spanish spies are all male. Here we have more villains prone to sexist hiring practices. Maybe evidence the rest of the world isn’t as progressive as Alexandria?

Russians make good weapons.

Eskander made an untraceable Codex for Santi. Some parents get wine or theater tickets for their kids’ partners. Eskander gets his kid’s partner spy tools.

Nic’s messy handwriting! He can read the code, but his handwriting isn’t good enough to write it.

Assuming Eskander’s helping out with the automata here, too? So he also gifts his son’s partner with murdered enemies. Clearly, Eskander is trying to make up for lost parenting time here.

Dario is bluffing when he tells the angry spies to write to the king, but he thinks there’s some chance, at least, that the king might side with him. Interesting.

Dario remembers the Black Archives when carrying books in a place that smells like Greek fire. Very interesting. At the end of one betrayal, he thinks of the end of another.

Santi will let the Spanish spies off the hook even though they were plotting against the Library. There’s a certain pragmatism there. He’ll be watching them, I’m sure, but he’ll call it a fair trade to use them and let them go.

This whole thing does look like some good strategy on Santi’s part. He’s good at his job.

Dario thinks he can drink away the trauma of seeing so much violence. But not the trauma of Santi seeing him as a deceiver. For all that Dario takes pride in his ability to do what needs to be done, he’s conflicted. He doesn’t like what he is, and he really doesn’t like others knowing what he is. There’s a lot of room to explore this in post-canon fics, I think. 

This will be useful for my post-canon Wolfe&Dario fic, I think. His reaction to Santi knowing his capacity for deception may be similar to his reaction to Wolfe seeing his capacity for violence.

[cristallodineverosa]

Sehun’s handwriting analysis

I am bored so I decided to do a little analysis~ I really like Sehun personality-wise, so I’ll start with him.

Let me start by saying that Sehun’s handwriting is really interesting, at least according to graphology.

Okay, let’s first have a global look at how the writing appears without going too in-depth.  Sehun’s writing strikes as rather messy, especially if compared to Baekhyun’s, which looks neater, and to Chanyeol’s, which is straighter.

His formniveau (= the “movement” of his writing, as in a combination of rythm, gesture and speed, we could define it as the “flow” of the whole writing) is high, because we can already see how the hangul looks personalyzed to some extent and even a little hard to read at times. I can see that from the various occurrences of linking, where he didin’t bother to lift the pen and just dragged it on the paper to continue writing quicker. According to Helmut Ploog, a hightened formniveau reveals that the writer’s intentions are determined by unconscious feelings and impulses.

Look, it might get a little boring in this section so feel free to skip it if you don’t feel like taking a free class about how the human brain works, lol. Sorry but I noticed this and I thought it could be interesting to share. I am a trainer of fine motor skills anyway... let me brag a little.

An important thing to notice is his posture and grasp while he writes (this is my field so I feel confident about what I’m about to say). He is right-handed, as you can see, but he keeps the paper slightly angled towards left, bringing his face pretty close. I examined other pictures of him during fansigns, and he usually keeps this posture, even rotating slightly his right shoulder towards the opposite side, as you can see in this video. This is usually an indicator of crossed laterality, bear with me while I explain what it means.

As you probably already know, for right-handed people the left side of the brain is slightly bigger and dominant than the right one. The left emisphere yields the main centres that control language and communication skills, and along with the frontal cortex it controls the motor skills of the right side of the body, while the right emisphere controls the left side. Usually though, one of the two sides (especially for what concern eyes, hands and feet) is preferred/is stronger and this determines if a person in right or left-handed (ambidexterity is extremely rare): this phenomenon is called lateralisation. Following this reasoning, if a person is right-handed, the left side of the brain is bigger and controls the right side of the body, including the right eye, which is sharper and comes first, ideally “directing” the movement of the hand like when you need to take something and so on (oculomotor control). 

Sometimes, though, this laterality is crossed because even if the person is right-handed the directing eye, the main responsible of the oculomotor control skills, is not the right one (as it should be) but the left. This is pretty common and not absolutely a problem per se, but some studies link it to some particular cases of dysgraphia, dyslexia and aboveall of dyspraxia, since it still is a motor skill defect that affects vision and motion. It might also lead to a slight motor uncoordination (which makes me wonder how hard our Sehunnie must have trained to become this skilled in dancing). In my opinion, Sehun’s dominant hand is right, probably his foot too even if I don’t remember well, but his dominant eye is not the right one but the left, hence he represents a case of crossed laterality. I think he struggled quite a lot in school as a kid... 

His grasp is definitely a problematic one, and it probably is one of the reasons why his handwriting looks a little crooked. Technically, Sehun’s grasp is called a static tripod grasp, and in the picture below you can see an example in detail. 

If you look closely, you can see that this grasp uses the first three fingers to hold the pen (thumb, index and middle, hence the term tripod), but the index is pressed hard onto the surface of the pen, ideally “blocking” all the distal phalanges’ movements (if you look at videos taken during fansigns, you can see that Sehun writes keeping his fingers still while he moves just his wrist and shoulder - hence the need of rotation, to ease the tension gathering during writing). This is a problematic grasp because it can lead to tendon inflammation (De Quervain Syndrome, Carpal tunnel Syndrome) or to nerves compression, which believe me, is painful. Anyway, Sehunnie probably lift weights at the gym and works out on a regular basis, which strenghtens the muscles of the wrist and can help prevent inflammation.

A little disclaimer to conclude this section: I am not stating that he’s sick or has some severe motor control impairment. Crossed-laterality is IN NO WAY an illness or a disability, but it can be tricky especially during early age, because you need to understand the way your body works and you need to be in touch with yourself. I thought it could be interesting to share because this shows how much hard-working he is... that’s it. Also, it’s no secret because it’s under everyone’s eyes to see, and people usually doesn’t notice because they’re not trained to detect these things, so this is not an invasion of privacy or whatever.

But let’s return to the writing analysis. I used some colors to help you understand. 

The caliber (color: blue) is on the bigger side, which generally means good self-esteem but also frequent need of receiving attention and even a certain tendency to pathos (lmao if this isn’t Sehun I don’t know what a Sehun is). The width thoo isn’t that big in comparison, the writing looks pretty narrow, which usually indicates good self-control, strong sense of privacy and also a little bit of inhibition. The middle zone isn’t well defined, so the boy feels generally good with himself even if he lacks a bit of that push towards what’s new and unknown (as we saw in Chanyeol... you could compare their writings to see the difference). The slant is veeeery slightly angled towards left, which is a sign of introvertion. 

Let’s now talk about space (color: yellow). The space between words is pretty big, which usually means a good capability to discipline and organize everything, but as a downside it could be a spy of a certain tendency to feel lonely and to be messy in creating good relatonships with the others which is pretty fitting if you analyze Sehun’s past relationships. Even the spacing between lines is rather big, so this basically confirms the good capability to be neat and organized in everyday’s life (I can remember when he complained about Suho being messy back when they were roommates, lol). 

As you probably immediately noticed, though, the lines follow a descending direction (color: green), forming a sharp angle. You could argue this was just for aesthetic purposes, since the members all wrote in the same sheet, but he could have chosen to keep the same angle but write following an ascending direction, couldn’t he? Well, handwritten lines following a descending angle usually are a sign of melancholy, even of pessimism. Putting this together with the other aspects we already analysed, we could say that Sehun is satisfied with himself in general, but has a disenchanted, disillusioned vision of life/future. This is pretty sad, if you consider how hardworking he is, and how he improved since his debut. He needs to be protected.

We already talked during Baekhyun’s analysis how the linkings (color: pink) are a sign of understanding and gentleness towards the others. This, along with the flowy form of his writing, indicates a particularly pliable, sensitive inner self. The frequent occurrences of angles and arches (instead of garlands we already talked about), are a sign of vague mistrust towards others as well as neediness: the boy demands attention and above all consideration, but he is reluctant to reveal his heart too easily.

Another important thing to notice, is that he chose not to use his official signature but to write his name in hangul.

To conclude, Sehun’s writing is particularly telling of his hard-working nature. He has a gentle side, but he’s definitely not a wuss. The boy worked his ass off to obtain his results, but even if he generally feels satisfied with his achievements, probably there’s a part of him that’s never fully sated and needs more, both in terms of self-esteem and in terms of how others perceive his efforts. He looks out for praises and can be extremely hurt by bad comments and bad experiences. He is sensitive, as we probably already know, and particularly prone to feel lonely and in a way different, detached from the others. He is a pessimist more than an optimist, and in my opinion he doesn’t only need reassuring to feed his ego, but above all to feel better in his own skin. Considering his slight motor impairment, also, I think his efforts need to be appreciated even more, because dancing and learning complicate choreographies can be very challenging for people with crossed laterality.

So: Protect. At all costs.

What do you think of this? :D

[solrosan]

Snowflake Challenge – Day 2

I’m doing the @snowflakechallenge on DW to get into posting. I won’t share all of the posts here, but fic recs are always fun! So here, have them!

Day 2 -- Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create.

Let's see...

By His Dirty Hands We Know Him by @anarfea​ (BBC Sherlock, M/M, Mature, Graphic Description of Violence, Completed)

Mycroft and Greg are getting serious, and Greg is starting to ask  serious questions about the difficult and sometimes unethical decisions  Mycroft has made. Mycroft breaks things off before Greg can find out the   darkest secret in his past--which is about to catch up to him.

This is a really good, believable backstory for Mycroft and about what he did before he became the enigmatic character we see on the show. Anarfea has done a great job tying this to real events happening during The Troubles and show the... darker grey areas of what a someone in Mycroft's position would most likely have to deal with. I love the research she's done for this fic and I'll admit she had me hooked on the Author's Note alone, but even if you're not (like me) a sucker for fics with proper ties to real life events, this is an amazing fic. Her Lady Smallwood is fantastic and the ending is rare for fanfics, but it's executed so well. Then, if you after reading the fic is interested in the actual event, she provides links to the research material in the end! (Seriously, what more can you want?)

The Ink On Our Skin Stains Us Black by insanereddragon (Kingsman, M/M/M, Mature, No Warning Apply, WIP)

Eggsy tapped his pencil a couple of times on the  sketchbook, eyes unfocused as he thought. Looking up, he caught and held  Harry's eyes. “Do you trust me?”

Harry looked back at Eggsy and a snap of electricity seemed to spark between them. “Yes,” he replied without hesitation.

From his chair next to Harry, Merlin raised an eyebrow but said  nothing. Harry didn’t trust people. Life as a spy had ingrained in him a  general distrust of most things. When someone did gain his trust, it  was never fast, never with so much genuine emotion bleeding through.  There was more lingering there under the surface, more than just Harry  trusting Eggsy to come up with the right design. At the thought, Merlin  felt a warmth in his chest he had not been expecting.

-–

The tattoo!au where Merlin and Harry are a couple, Eggsy becomes  Merlin’s new tattoo artist, and the boys all refuse to talk to each  other about the attraction that grows between them.

I like this fic so much that I can't properly tell you how much I do. I might also have a problem understanding exactly why this went straight to my heart the way it did, but it did and now it's there and it will never leave me. (When rereading this before posting I realise that I probably should point out that all of this is a good thing!) It ticks a lot of my boxes, though! Tattoo!AU, check. Polyship, check. Established relationship, check. Slowburn, check. It's a WIP, but is a ride worth being on! It's not a complete civilian AU, Merlin and Harry are both still in Kingsman in the roles they hold in the movies. (Or movie, the fic started when there was no TGC so the second movie is irrelevant.) Red does a wonderful with the world building and pulling you in by photos, maps and additional info in the notes at the end of almost every chapter. Also: concealer. If you read it, you'll understand!

[Fandom stats] Gender representation in movies vs. movie fanworks by @destinationtoast​

There are a lot of discussions in fandom about gender  representation in fanworks, and whether fandom is shortchanging female  characters.  Over the last several years, I’ve seen various debates and  wondered about the underlying numbers.  So I went and found some… and  then got slightly obsessed analyzing them.

These analyses is not  going to be able to address some kinds of questions, many of which can’t  be answered with numbers. But I hope to answer some questions, and add   more data and new nuances to discussions.

Ending a bit different, but Toast so much work into what she does and deserves all the cred! (Also, since this is a multi-fandom event I thought everyone could find this interesting.) The name of the work and Toast's own summary explains pretty well what this is, this is an attempt to look at and answer the question about gender representation in movies vs. fanworks of those movies. It's about 80 slides + explanatory text about statistics divided into 7 chapters on AO3 but please, please, pleeeeease don't let that scare you. This is so good and well presented. And as I said, the work put into this is mind blowing. If you want to start with something smaller or you get interested and want to read more, Toast has made almost 90 of these! (And I know that some of these analysis are linked from Wikipedia. Just saying.) Go! Read! Marvel in what you can show with numbers!

Bonus: The Silmarillion Rewrite by jenavira

The Silmarillion

Translated from the Elvish by Professor J.R.R. Tolkien

Translated from Professor Tolkien's Handwriting by Christopher Tolkien

Translated Lovingly from the Tokienish by jenavira

Again, exactly what it says it is: a rewrite of The Silmarillion for all of us who don't really feel up to rereading (or reading for the first time) Tolkien's English translation. I'm half-way through and forever grateful.

Also, because can't make a rec list without mentioning:

Bandit Queen by lbmisscharlie (BBC Sherlock, F/M, Teen, Choose Not To Use Warnings, Complete)

She works for them – with them – both, and they each offer her countless   opportunities. For Jim, she’s a gunhand and something like a friend,   for Mycroft, she’s a brain, a processor, and occasionally a useful   pretty face. This arrangement works fine until Jim has to go and do   something stupid.

I'm going to rec this fic until I'm absolute sure everyone in the Sherlock fandom (+ some more people) have read this. It's post series 1, it's Anthea (or you know, not!Anthea) and the last line of this fic is the best last line I've seen. Ever. It's... perfect. Read it.

[tomeandflickcorner]

OUAT Episode Analysis- Wake Up Call

Yay.  A Regina Centric.  Don’t get me wrong, because so far this season, Regina hasn’t really done anything that annoyed me, barring the moment last episode when she automatically assumed Henry must have been having potentially romantic thoughts about Ivy just because he shared a drink with her.  But it still frustrates me when they try to make us forget about how Regina wasn’t always a good person.

So, we pick up where we left off last episode, with Roni/Regina and Henry puzzling over the photograph of them in Storybrooke.  Of course, because the denial game is strong with them, they just dismiss it as Victoria’s attempt to mess with them or something.  However, Lucy, upon hearing about the picture from Ivy/Drizella, is super excited over this tangible bit of proof.  But when she realizes that her father and adoptive grandmother are still skeptical, she decides to try and locate the Storybook, remembering how touching the book helped restore Emma’s memories at the end of S1, as well as the amnesiac Henry’s memories during the Wizard of Oz arc.  While her plan is a good one, she is forgetting one crucial element.  Simply touching the book isn’t enough.  You have to be open to believing, too.  But in the end, it doesn’t really matter, as she’s unable to locate the Storybook in her mother’s closet.

However, Roni/Regina ends up following Lucy to make sure she doesn’t get into any real trouble.  And let’s face it, it’s not far-fetched to think she might do something reckless, considering she’s Henry’s kid. Roni also speculates it might be better to just humor her for now, until she’s ready to accept that there isn’t really a curse.  (Shame she didn’t take this approach with Young Henry in S1.  Oh yeah, it was because she knew he was right and didn’t want anyone knowing that.)  But I guess this leads to Roni admitting that she’d like it if Lucy was right, because her cursed memories have led her to believe that she almost adopted a little boy once, but the agency ultimately decided she wasn’t a good fit.  And she would like to believe that she actually had been able to be someone’s mother.  Roni also later recruits Weaver to find out if there was documented evidence of a Regina Mills adopting a baby boy from Boston, like Lucy claimed.  At first, I wasn’t expecting Weaver to actually do what she asked, considering it was clear that he’s woken up and remembered who he is.  But to my surprise, he actually came through and produced the paperwork that Regina once filled out.  I guess Rumpelstiltskin is clearly back to his old tactic of seeking deals and favors, so he’s probably going to get Regina to do something for him on a later date.

Upon getting the copy of the adoption papers, Roni discovers that the handwriting of Regina Mills is identical to her own.  But before she can have the time to come to terms with the incontestable proof that Lucy might be right, Ivy/Drizella swings by and gives Roni/Regina a drink that was spiked with some kind of potion she and Mystery Witch concocted using the dirt and flowers from Lucy’s Community Garden.  This potion ends up waking Regina up.  As such, she remembers something very important.

In the Parallel Enchanted Forest flashback, we see Regina is having a hard time fully accepting the fact that Henry has grown up.  The scene in question starts with Henry and Parallel Cinder bonding while doing repairs on Henry’s motorcycle.  (By the way, I did grin a bit when we see Henry still has the Tron lunchbox that he had back in S1 and is now using it as a toolbox.  That was a rather cute callback.)  But when some ruffians suddenly appear and try to start trouble, Henry and Parallel Cinder are able to fight them off on their own.  Which also was a really cool moment, since Henry and Parallel Cinder were able to turn Henry’s tools into improvised weapons.  It really reminded me of Snow and Charming, and how they were able to do the same in their fight with the heart-controlled Count of Monte Cristo.

However, while Regina makes an effort to act like she’s taking it well, it later becomes clear that she’s feeling that Henry really doesn’t need her anymore.  So when she runs into Drizella in what I gather is supposed to be a magic junkyard of some sort, she ends up seeing an opportunity to take the young woman under her wing, especially when she finds out about the nature of Drizella’s relationship with Parallel Evil Stepmother.  Basically, Regina starts to view Drizella as a miniature version of herself, since Regina also had an abusive mother.  When she finds out that Drizella was born with the magic gene but was not allowed to nurture it, Regina decides to become Drizella’s teacher.  While at first Drizella has difficulty in honing her innate abilities, Regina ends up making a breakthrough with her when she magically creates a rockslide, leading to Drizella instinctively stopping the rocks from falling.  (At least Regina’s endangering herself in her magic lessons now.  A pretty good step up from when she nearly killed Emma in 3x17.)

Of course, this is when Regina finds out that Drizella wants to use her magic to kill her mother, so she can finally be free from her.  Regina, who apparently has finally allowed the message to sink in (how many times did she learn this lesson?), warns her against taking that particular path.  She tells Drizella about how she once sought the path of vengeance by casting the Dark Curse, and how it didn’t make her truly happy.  She states that the only thing that truly made her happy was Henry.  (Did she completely forget about Robin?  I seem to remember Regina saying she didn’t know true happiness until he came into her life.  Make up your mind, woman!)

But this is when Rumpelstiltskin pops up, fresh from his time in the Pocket Dimension.  Regina, I guess, has maintained enough reverence for her former teacher to have a little aside chat with him.  Which I personally wouldn’t have recommended.  Apologies to all the Rumple fans out there, but I’m afraid it’ll take more than just him saying he’s a changed man before I’ll start to believe it.  I’m going to need to see him actually making a tangible effort at being a better man.

Either way, Rumpelstiltskin suggests to Regina that maybe Drizella was lying when she claimed to be working against Parallel Evil Stepmother, and that maybe Parallel Evil Stepmother actually wanted her daughter to learn magic. I’m not sure if Regina took his suggestion to heart or not, but we then see her and Drizella spying on Parallel Evil Stepmother via mirror magic.  As such, they see her seemingly practicing removing Anastasia’s heart.  Upon seeing this, Drizella concludes that Parallel Stepmother is planning to kill her in order to resurrect Anastasia.  Because the only way of resurrecting Anastasia is by replacing her heart with the heart of another.  Once again, Drizella begs Regina to help her kill her mother, as she believes that it’s the only way she can be safe from her mother’s plan.  But when Regina tries to tell her that that’s not the way, Drizella runs off on her own.

Later that night, however, Regina manages to track Drizella down, arriving in the middle of Drizella’s confrontation with Parallel Evil Stepmother.  Once again, Regina tries to talk Drizella out of killing her mother. But that’s when Drizella reveals that she didn’t come to kill her mother.  Without further warning, Drizella proceeds to kill her prince fiancé.  (Did they ever mention this guy before? I remember them mentioning that the prince Parallel Evil Stepmother killed in the first episode turned Drizella down, which is why Parallel Stepmother wanted him dead.  But did they ever allude to this other prince before this scene?  I have no memory of it if they did.  Where are all these unnamed princes coming from?)

Anyway, it comes out that this was Drizella’s plan.  She’d purposely darken her heart so Parallel Stepmother wouldn’t be able to use it in her plan to bring back Anastasia.  And then, to further spite her mother by making sure she’d remain miserable, she plans to follow Regina’s example by casting the Dark Curse.  Because she apparently completely misinterpreted Regina’s attempts at explaining why it was a bad thing.

So let me get this straight. This means that this whole mess with the new curse, and Henry believing that he’s a failed writer who lost his wife and daughter in a fire, is pretty much Regina’s fault.  And if she had just stayed at home instead of tagging along on her son’s adventure, none of this would have happened.  Okay, maybe I’m not quite being fair to Regina here.  It’s not as if she knew this would happen. And I suppose I do see a little similarity to how things went sour with Merlin and Nimue (because Merlin hadn’t anticipated how deeply Nimue’s anger at Vortigan ran.)  But at the same, it’s like how the old saying goes- the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Now, you’re probably asking why Drizella decided to purposely wake Regina up.  Because you’d think having Regina awake would lead to her actively helping break the curse.  But it turns out that Drizella is able to blackmail Regina.  Because there’s some sort of nasty clause attached to Drizella’s Dark Curse.  If it does end up being broken by Henry and Jacinda/Parallel Cinder sharing TLK, then something really bad is supposed to happen.  Of course, they never actually state what this horribly bad thing is going to be. But whatever it is, it’s probably something to do with Henry, because Drizella is able to manipulate Regina into trying to keep Henry and Jacinda from falling in love.  But the solution to this is simple.  All Regina has to do is just share what she knows with Lucy. After all, she’s Henry’s kid, and it’s obvious she inherited a lot of her father’s best traits.  If there’s anyone who can find a loophole to Drizella’s nasty clause, then it would be Lucy.

This episode also has a little moment that rubbed quite a few people the wrong way, myself included.  It’s the scene when Regina is telling Henry about everything that happened with Drizella, and how she’s now planning to use everything Regina taught her against them.  In this scene, Regina admits that she was feeling as if Henry didn’t need her anymore.  To which Henry tells her that she’ll always be his mother, yadda yadda yadda.  While this is a nice statement and all, it’s how he words it that’s the problem.  He actually claims that Regina was the first person who loved him, and that she was the only one who loved him for years.

Okay, hold the bus a second. At times like this, I really think the show writers need to go back and watch S1 again.  Because they seem to be forgetting that Emma had loved Henry, too. Even before he showed up on her doorstep.  She loved him so much, she gave him up for adoption.  It wasn’t because she wanted to give him up.  It was because she believed that he would be better off being raised by someone else.  It’s why she wouldn’t let herself look at him when he was born- because she knew if she did, she would change her mind.  And she knew she couldn’t let herself do that, for Henry’s sake.  She even made sure that he would be adopted, in order to prevent him from ending up in the foster system like she was.  Because she didn’t want that life for him.  Henry even stated in the pilot episode that he knew Emma had given him up so he’d have his best chance.  And Emma only decided to stay in Storybrooke because she was having doubts that Henry was being properly taken care of.  As for Henry’s claim that Regina was the only one who loved him for years?  What about Archie, Mary Margret and Sheriff Graham?  I think it’s safe to say they at least cared about him.  Do they not count?

This is besides the fact that Regina was a horrible mother to Henry for ten years.  This was the woman who mentally abused and gaslit him, throwing him into therapy and trying to make everyone, including Henry himself, believe that he was crazy when he started to suspect that there was something wrong with the town, especially since he was the only one who was physically aging. This was the woman who the show strongly implied left Henry alone all day on a regular basis so she could go off and spend the day having sex with the brainwashed Sheriff Graham.  The Henry of S1 even stated on more than one occasion that he didn’t believe that Regina loved him.  So you can spare me these attempts to make it sound like Regina was always this wonderful, loving mother to Henry.  Because if Henry was completely happy living with Regina as you’re now claiming he was, then why would he have ran away and looked for Emma in the first place?  You know, sometimes I wonder about that scene when Regina erased some of Henry’s memories in 2x20, in her attempt to make him forget how she’d just announced her plan to destroy the town and everyone in it.  I wonder if she tampered with all of his memories, and not just his short-term ones.

Meanwhile, we also got a subplot with Detective Rogers/Wish Killian, who is continuing his ongoing search for this mysterious Eloise.  Because Weaver/Rumpelstiltskin is on medical leave as he recovers from getting shot last episode, Rogers decides to seek assistance from Tilly/New Alice. Why?  I have no idea.  Maybe he figured that Tilly, being a street urchin and all, is in a better position to hear the word on the street or something.  Either way, Tilly takes Rogers back to her home, which is located inside an abandoned boxcar.  While they’re there, Tilly starts speaking in riddles and resorting to chess metaphors. Basically, she tells Roger that, if he really wants to find Eloise, he should take a closer look at which pieces he has on his side of the chess board.  In other words, he should really study the evidence he already has in front of him.

On a side note, the sharp eyes of other viewers took note of the fact that there was a black rook and a white knight painted on the sides of Tilly’s boxcar house.  Which I gather is supposed to be further evidence that Tilly/New Alice is Wish Killian’s long-lost daughter.  While I will admit there might be something to this theory, I still find myself scratching my head over one nagging detail.  If New Alice is the daughter, then why would she seemingly ally herself to Rumpelstiltskin, her father’s bitterest enemy?  Considering Wish Killian is supposed to have an identical backstory to Killian Prime, up until the point when the curse was cast in Enchanted Forest Prime, it’s probably safe to conclude that Wish Killian also shared a blood feud with Wish Rumpelstiltskin, and would therefore hate Rumpelstiltskin Prime.

Anyway, on Tilly’s advice, Rogers goes back to scouring the few articles he’s collected for Eloise’s case file. This leads him to once again suspect Tattoo Guy of knowing something.  But when he ventures over to Tattoo Guy’s home address, he ends up finding Tattoo Guy lying dead on the floor.  So he’s still nowhere closer to solving the mystery of Eloise. Thankfully, based on episode titles, it looks like that’s going to be a major focus in the next episode. Hopefully, that will be good. Because after this episode, I really could use a good Wish Killian centric.  (What can I say?  The guy’s grown on me.)

Also, we did get a rather adorable bit with Henry and Jacinda/Parallel Cinder.  Jacinda happened to see some pictures Ivy posted on social media, depicting the drink she shared with Henry.  (So much for Ivy’s claim that she wasn’t looking to spite her stepsister.)  Of course, this results in the cliché of the girl jumping to conclusions and giving the guy the cold shoulder without letting him explain his side of the story. But Roni/Regina, deciding to play matchmaker, sorta tricks Henry into coming with her to this pizza place (which included a Lady and the Tramp reference), knowing full well that this pizza place was just around the corner from the spot where Jacinda and Sabine were giving their new food truck a new paint job and whatnot.  This led to an extremely cute scene when Henry pulls a ‘Say Anything’ move to get Jacinda’s attention.  Long story short, he finally ends up asking her out.  And we get to see Henry acting like a huge nerd when Jacinda agrees.  But of course, we now have to deal with the fact that Regina is probably going to try to drive a wedge between them to prevent this horrible thing that’s supposed to happen if the curse breaks with True Love’s Kiss.  So this might be a bit annoyingly painful.  Of course, it would really help if we were actually TOLD what this big horrible thing is supposed to be.  Hopefully, they won’t keep us in the dark for too long.

(Click here to read more Episode Analyses)

[chiefmauskateer]

It was the last day of the summer holidays. For 18-year-old Karl-Heinz Borchardt that should have meant an afternoon on a windswept Baltic beach with his girlfriend, or a few hours spent trying to catch the latest pop songs on his portable radio.

Instead his childhood came to a sudden end.

His mother hurried into his room unusually early and told him to get dressed. Five uniformed agents were waiting downstairs.

Borchardt bought himself time. "I needed time to think," he says. "It could have been for any number of reasons."

Insisting he needed a wash, he started to fling sheets of incriminating texts out of the window. He couldn't know that the secret police already had all the evidence they needed.

It was two years earlier, in September 1968, that Borchardt had written his first letter.

I don't think it's fun, always having to say the opposite of what you think Karl-Heinz Borchardt, in a letter to the BBC

It wasn't easy to keep anything hidden in the cramped two-room flat Borchardt shared with his family in Greifswald, a small town on Germany's northern coastline.

So as he sat down to write at the living room table he covered the sheet of paper with his homework whenever someone poked their head round the door.

The radio sat to his left and Borchardt was glued to the crackly foreign broadcasts coming out of Prague, where Soviet guns and tanks had rolled in to crush an attempt to introduce liberal reforms.

"To the staff of Radio London's German service!" he wrote.

I have only just started listening to your programme, 'Letters without signatures', but I like it a lot, since it airs opinions you don't find in our media. I am 16 years old. I will write to you regularly, mainly about young people and their views on world affairs. In my view, the west did not intervene strongly enough in Czechoslovakia. Does a country which fought so hard for its freedom have to carry on marching to the tune of the Soviets?

Warm regards from a schoolboy

Borchardt signed off with a codename, and addressed the envelope to a Rolf Degner in Kantstrasse 45, West Berlin.

Borchardt didn't know Rolf Degner, he probably didn't even exist. Kantstrasse 45 was in central Berlin but it was still a pile of post-war rubble. But this was the address he had noted down at the end of the BBC's latest transmission of the programme on its German service.

Listening to a foreign broadcaster was a crime in communist East Germany, let alone writing to one.

Yet Borchardt didn't see any personal risk. He believed he was shielded by anonymity. How could they possibly find him?

He dropped the letter in his local postbox.

The BBC arranged with the West Berlin post office to divert all the letters with this address to a private postbox. These were delivered to the BBC's West Berlin office and then on to Bush House in London.

The London-based presenter of Letters without Signatures, Austin Harrison, announced different postal addresses every few weeks at the end of the show and East German listeners wrote in their thousands, filling the weekly programme with 20 minutes of anonymous and uncensored letters from people behind the Wall.

Much to the ire of the East German regime, the BBC programme gave an extraordinary insight into the physical and emotional lives of a cross-section of GDR society for more than 25 years.

"It was like coming up for air," says Borchardt - a form of release for a young, curious mind locked in the suffocating atmosphere of the communist state.

"Freedom of speech didn't exist in east Germany, so they did a detour via London," says Susanne Schädlich, herself a child of the GDR and the author of Briefe ohne Unterschrift (German for Letters without Signatures) a detailed analysis of the BBC programme.

"I felt like I was unearthing treasures," says Schädlich. "The letters are authentic and unfiltered. The writers knew there was no censorship here and they spoke from their hearts."

Many wrote in desperation, appealing to the outside world not to be forgotten as the Berlin Wall was going up.

Others grumbled about shortages of butter, onions and soap and then offered creative substitutes.

There was widespread despondency and the fear of being trapped in a repeating cycle of history.

We're being held in a huge concentration camp. There's no escape. We vote for who we're told to. We're simply a herd of cattle which must obey.

(Anonymous letter)

Teachers wrote in, as did farmers, doctors, shopkeepers, even soldiers. An astonishing number of disillusioned children also put pen to paper.

We're being educated in lies. I can't tell truth and lies apart any more. The whole world is dishonest. Politics is just a lying contest. What's the point of life?

(Anonymous letter)

In its own way, the programme offered a small piece of democracy, crafting debate between the opposing views of its varied listeners.

"Some people wrote practically weekly," says Günter Burkart, right-hand man to the presenter, who recalls many years of fascinating work with a group of brilliant and eccentric characters.

Austin Harrison was the only presenter on the show for its 25-year run and he developed a real bond with his listeners, Burkart remembers.

"He thought it was very important that it was always him, that they always wrote to Harrison.

"He talked about 'us'. The family. He and his listeners. It was quite fantastic."

Burkart kept the letters under lock and key in the London office, fearful of spies.

The Stasi not only viewed the BBC as an enemy broadcaster, they specifically saw this programme as a form of psychological warfare aimed to destabilise the regime and incite resistance. They were convinced Harrison was an undercover spy, wooing agents in East Germany.

In the end it was the letter writers they really knuckled down on, and the Stasi were extraordinarily fastidious in their pursuit.

They took saliva samples from the licked envelopes to identify blood groups which they cross-checked with doctor's records. They traced fingerprints on the paper, sourced the ink and collated an extensive archive of handwriting samples.

It was his handwriting that caught out Borchardt.

"It just seemed like an ordinary piece of homework," he says, when the pupils in his class were asked to write an essay describing themselves and their later goals in life.

"The thing is, my father thought I had such terrible handwriting he wanted my sister to write it up for me. He nearly got his way."

As ordered, the school passed the essays on to a Stasi agent. Documents show a painstaking analysis of every curve and stroke of Borchardt's pen, comparing it to the intercepted letters from the anonymous schoolboy.

Borchardt wrote to the BBC three more times and with each letter he revealed bolder political convictions.

Dear Mr. Harrison!

I am 17 years old, I grew up in this country (..) but don't think it's fun, always having to say the opposite of what you think. (...)

My honest opinion is that only violence will help us. (...) If Hitler had been overthrown by the people, millions of lives would have been saved.

Warm regards, a schoolboy.

Six months later he was alone in the car with the Stasi. Not a word was spoken.

On arrival at Rostock Stasi prison, he was stripped and searched and put in isolation.

"I was still thinking, I need to get to school tomorrow," he says. "It took me a while to understand what was going on."

Alone in his cell, Borchardt had endless hours to fill. He counted the squares on his blanket, made chess moves in his head, recited maths tables and poetry. Soon he started to long for the interrogations.

After eight months he was convicted for "attempted subversive activities" in conjunction with an enemy broadcaster.

He was sentenced to two years in a youth prison in Dessau.

"You should be happy to live under socialism," were the words of welcome from a young officer as he arrived at the prison.

"Under the Nazis we'd have had you up in smoke a long time ago."

Those words have stuck in his head. The identification with the Nazis.

"The Stasi terminated biographies," says Susanne Schädlich, also drawing links with the methods and terminology of the Third Reich. "The way they went after people, for example, and shut them up."

And so it was for Borchardt.

School and university were replaced by the daily violence and hard physical labour typical of a GDR youth prison.

He was put on a production line, assembling gas appliances. Safety regulations were unheard of and none of the prisoners really knew how the machines worked.

"I saw bits of machinery flying through the air, fast as a gunshot," he says. "I was lucky, but there were a lot of injuries."

Towards the end of his sentence, Borchardt was offered a golden ticket to West Germany. Brokered by Amnesty International, the West German government had agreed to buy his freedom.

But he refused the offer.

He so desperately wanted to get back to his family and friends, he went on a hunger strike. The GDR relented and he was allowed to stay.

"There have been moments when I've regretted that," he says now.

"I overestimated a lot of my friends. When I was walking around town, they would look right through me. They feared for their future, most of them were at university."

Yet his family welcomed him back and he tuned into all the old Western stations he had missed inside. The Stasi hadn't stifled the rebel in him.

Then quite abruptly, in 1974, "Letters without Signatures" was taken off the air by the BBC.

The number of letters had reduced, according to former producer Günter Burkart. Maybe because more were intercepted by the Stasi, but he suggests the foreign office may have had a hand in it.

"Perhaps it was thought with diplomatic relations coming up and recognition of the GDR, it was time to end it," he says.

For many listeners it was a bitter disappointment. The letters kept coming.

"I could just cry. Where is the England which in recent history fought so honourably and bravely against suppression, slavery and injustice? Good night. It feels like 1939 all over again. The lights went out for years."

(Anonymous letter)

With the end of the show Borchardt stopped listening to the BBC altogether.

For the next 15 years he worked as an electronics engineer, and against all the odds studied and got a PhD in East German literature.

Still, he could only get a low-status university job. He was a glorified ticket-seller, he says.

It was only after the collapse of communism and the reunification of Germany in 1989, that he was able to start working as an academic at the University of Greifswald.

He is still lecturing in German literature there today.

Find out more

Listen to Witness: The German Schoolboy Arrested for Writing a Letter on the BBC World Service

[takomeex]

RAID THE CAVE: MY ANALYSIS

How can I start, hiatus is dead. Link to the episode here, if you haven’t watched it, go now, because this is a spoilerous train, and it’ll contain spoilers of the episode. And without anything else to say. Let’s start this analyisis fellas!

Since Glossaryck is in Ludo’s hands, Star is anxious to find him, I’m really doubting how many time has been since BBTBC. Marco’s talking to Jackie, so they haven’t seen I guess. But for Star there’s no time to loose. Apart from the fact that the backpack is too heavy for Star. 

I take that as a reference to Adam’s love for bobba. Since Adam (Marco’s voice actor)valways posts about getting bobba. So I’ll take it like that, nice reference (if it’s actually a reference) from other point of view, why does star has that typewriter laying around in her bedroom...

The pointless fact that packaging was more of a waste of time for Star...

This only proves how strong Mewmans are, at least is costing her a little effort to lift up all that weight,, and that Star is an Independent Warrior Princess (I loved that line ). But Buffrog said it, the only thing she actually needs is her wand.

Basically this is the monster’s point of view, how they see mewmans, not only they hate or at least they don’t like to eachother, but they only want corn, the book doesnt say: and they had the kingdom they deserved (well it’s only a children’s book, but I guess they only want food) they only want to fill their needs, in this case, food.

Well, I have to admit I laughed with the letters joke. And I already mentioned that in BBTBC analysis, Buffrog sent letters to warn Star, but they didn’t understood them, I guess that if they would understood it. Star would’ve been more careful and probably the event’s from BBTBC would went a little different.

The monster on the left is the one from the poster, I think she’s a squirrel, basing in her physical appearance, since she got a little of protagonism by noticing Marco and Star riding fiercly towards them, and she was the one who wasn’t shot I guess that’s why she was in the poster, but still, I liked the character design. And I hope that we’ll see her again and that that’s the reason of why she is in the poster, not only caused for the design but she’ll have more protagonism

I guess it’s logic that not all the monsters are warriors and want to destroy mewmans, they looked to human like, the clothing and the civilized attitude is a lot different from the monsters Star is used to. I guess that though there’re monsters that want to have corn by the force, there’re this ones that are peacefull and do not want any trouble this “Alternate Monsters” may be the chance to unite monsters and mewmans.

I’m still confused of how many time there has been between BBTBC and Raid the cave, Star spied Marco with the All seeing eye, but now she seems to be forgetting the spell causing wrong combination with peculiar results. I guess that every single word or action different with the origignal spell could cause any other results, like we’ve seen with the monster arm.

That was just too funny to left it out of the analysis, that’s all I’m saying

Marco was just too confused with the fact of Star knowing this spy spell. I guess he’s worried of what Star has saw using the spell. Maybe he did notice something weird when Jackie and him felt down during skating, but he didn’t seemed to notice it when it actually happened, so I guess it’s only one chance in a million.

Dipping down again has proving me wrong again, the power it makes is enough to break the barries from the spying spell, but I thought Star could interact with the objects surrounding the person she’s spying, not with him. Why does Glossaryck see her, isn’t it supposed to be a spying spell. Well he may’ve seen her ‘cause he’s her mentor and maybe his gem allows him to see this type of spells. But on the other side, I’ll headcanon that whenever you’re using this spell if you’ve tell the name of the person you’re spying he/she will be able to see you, by the moment I’ll keep this headcanon based on the other use of this spell in BBTBC, since Star didn’t said Marco’s name, or Jackie’s.

But again Glossaryck is being to cryptic, does Star actually deserves or needs this? to leave her mentor? If this is a training thing is a dangerous one. And even he says, he’s now from Ludo, doesn’t toatally fullfill the reason of why he doesn’t accepts to be rescued. Even how he despise the fact that Star tells him they’re friends. This is only a way to keep Star growing and being more mature. But he’ll not train Ludo, because in The Hard Way, he’s trying to force Glossaryck to teach to him, I think he’s there only to study the enemy, to see what’s going on.

Star feels this totally new reaction, because well, monsters hate mewmans but the fact that there’re ones who like her is amazing, I think she’ll be the one to reunite monsters and mewmans, she does stuff in her way, she’s the rebel princess. And this is a very important segment of the episode, I liked it a lot, is amazing, maybe a future foreshadowing of what she’ll do

River and Moon’s reaction was a little weird, but again, we’ve seen in Storm the Castle that all they want is to keep Star safe, and when she get’s into some trouble they’ll be there for helping her. They told her to not do anything but it seems like later she’ll do another try to recover his mentor. At least now they know the danger they might be facing. And I guess they’ll be prepared

I noticed that the handwritting on the cover of “Star and Marco’s guide for mastering every dimension” is almost the same, so I guess Star wrote it. Maybe Glossaryck is right, Star needed this, to mature, now she’ll be trying to perform spells.new or old. She’ll value more the book when it comes back to her...

My notes: I liked the episode, it’s a good way to end hiatus, Star again is trying to fix her mistakes, but now with a different attitude, not only she called her parents to explain what’s happening and not keeping ot as a secret like in Storm the Castle, other thing that has me confused is the fact of why the old seeing eye stopped working when Star became a little sad, I mean in BBTBC when she’s upset it only becomes stronger, and it’s contradictory, maybe breaking the wall of the spell while dIpping down was exactly what caused it to fail. This train is coming and with no brakes, season 2B is unstoppable, and I liked the start, ‘cause sure it showed us some interesting scenes and facts. Mostly everything is up there in the analysis. I just sleep like 3 hours, so forgive me if there’re any grammar mistakes, I hope you enjoyed it, thanks for reading it, and may the trash be with you!

[terryquinnblog]

MAKING PEACE WITH OBSESSION 

I’ve found that vacationing anywhere – never mind at this idyllic country house in an all-but-unfindable pocket of the Tuscan hills, where Jane and I are spending two weeks – hurls me up against myself in a way both soothing and vexing. For one thing, I sleep long hours, nine to eleven a night, though not always well. Funky dreams peopled by composite characters from the present and my distant past. A less than conscious awareness of the still-settling beams and joists of this stolid brick, wood and quarry stone structure. Insects and night birds that sound nothing like ‘ours’. Trees whose leaves don’t rustle in a light wind quite the way they tend to at home, either. I half-waken, fall back to sleep ... half-waken, conk out again. In short, a luxurious sense of peace and lethargy, pockmarked by moments of Where on God’s earth am I? (And worse, Who am I?) This seldom happens to me back in Brooklyn, where I get an uneventful six to seven hours of rest each night. Only during a stretch in some faraway land, when the humming of my machinery slows to a welcome halt.

The facade of our digs, Casa Carina

 Our living room

The loft bedroom

The daytime hours, filled as they are with the glories of nature and delectable food Jane and I have photographed for this post, invite me now and then to withdraw from the lush sensations all around me. To turn inward and, as a sharp-tongued theater producer I once worked with used to put it, “deal with the issues.” I don’t know what you confront, good friends, when you find yourselves driven down to such a level of undefended honesty. In my case it’s the crystalline realization that, for better or for worse, and for more than seven decades now, I’ve led a life marked chiefly by obsessions. Or, viewed in different lights, whole-hog passions, near addictions. Many of them have overlapped for years at a time. Few have ever seemed to me to operate in conflict. And every last compulsion, even if it’s gotten me into trouble with parents, bosses, whomever, has afforded more than enough pleasure to make it seem worthwhile.

 Jane in our kitchen, day one

Moderation in all things? Clearly the way to go. Yet the ancients’ golden mean has never lured me. Before presenting a roughly chronological account of my serial manias, let me set down here three random measures of what a close friend calls my irremediably obsessional state.

Looking out on the patio ...

 ... where had all our meals

I began preparing fairly elaborate dinners for Jane one November evening in 1969 and, by our conservative estimate, have cooked 16,280 since. (Miss one night in the kitchen and I’m antsy all the next day.) If I come upon a crossword puzzle, a chess problem, a frigging Jumble in the papers, I need to avert my eyes or I’ll be lost there till the damn thing’s solved. Most choral singers rehearse one night a week, with a single group, then perform a few months later at its concerts. I rehearse with five choruses throughout New York City, sing every day of the week except Saturday, and have all I can do, scheduling-wise, to make sure two dress rehearsals or public performances don’t take place on the same evening. And that’s not counting solo recitals, the occasional salon or, my favorite thing in life, cabaret gigs. All right. Now on to a more disciplined confession.

Those of you who’ve had the grace and stamina to stick with me as readers over the past two and a half years must have figured out by now that what I’m fashioning, with this blog, is a Book of Days meant to serve as the raw foundation for an eventual memoir. The underdrawing for a painting to come. I realize this might appear, or perhaps simply is, a narcissistic endeavor, but I’ll live with that. And so, there’s my justification for regaling you now with a catalog of personal obsessions I’m ready to admit to ...

Our pool, where we each swam a mile a day

Especially Jane

 At the age of seven I was so fanatical about playing schoolyard soccer that I would put off, for hours, running home to urinate, even when by bladder ached. A year later a surgeon at Long Island Jewish removed my right kidney after diagnosing it as defective from birth. I’d played, off and on, through two years of excruciating pain ...

 La Pietra, next door, the only other house in sight

I left a happy home in Queens at the age of 16, so obsessed with religion that I joined a teaching order, the Christian Brothers, where I prayed and studied for three fervent years – until I discovered college girls and deftly shifted to an obsession with sex. Actually, the whole idea of higher education so infatuated me that I wasn’t sated till I’d earned three graduate degrees. Romance languages and literature, linguistics, social policy analysis – couldn’t get enough of the stuff ...

The stairway down to the pool

A bee at work in the flower garden the two houses shared

Our mountaintop view of Umbria’s Niccone Valley

 For years I was certifiably nuts for tennis and golf, and in my early 30's so ensnared in the subculture of tournament bridge – all this in tandem with jobs as a legislative aide to two Congressmen in DC, followed by a year-long White House appointment – that I had to write a spy novel (The Great Bridge Conspiracy, St. Martin’s Press) as a desperate act of self-exorcism. And in the style of any authentic obsessive who opts for reform, I’ve never played a dang hand since ...

 Omelette with tomatoes, goat cheese and herbs from the garden

Incredibly fresh fruit from the markets in Umbertide and Mercatale

At one point while I was supposed to be researching and writing a biography (Second Daughter, Growing Up in China, 1930-1949, Little Brown), I became so enamored with the world of music theater that I devoted a full year to drafting the book, lyrics and score for an Off-Broadway show. This is one instance when two obsessions definitely were in conflict, and when my editor nearly throttled me ...

Setting up to prepare dinner

Diced asparagus and sun-dried tomatoes

Grilled zucchini, eggplant, chopped peppers and basil leaves

In the early 80's I was sufficiently abandoned to the practice of watching Redskins games, Beck’s in hand and supine on our couch, that when Jane rushed into the living room one Sunday afternoon saying she’d found the perfect Capitol Hill house for us to buy, I told her this was the two-minute warning and we’d have to wait till the start of halftime – then make it back to our apartment for the second-half whistle. All of which worked out. I was there as Theismann and Riggins did in the Cowboys, and Jane and I lived blissfully in that three-story Victorian for next eight years ...

The meal served al fresco

Afterwards: Gorgonzola, aged Asiago and Pecorino Romano

 Even after I got over the NFL, I so obsessed on TV comedy series (Honeymooners re-runs till 3:00 in the morning and the like) that I pleaded with Jane to go cold turkey with me, which she did. We junked that set in 1989 and haven’t ever bought another. That same month, in a rare fit of double obsession, we swore off red meat and went 26 years before tucking into a pair of Ted Turner steaks at a resort outside Bozeman, Montana ...

Kneading pasta dough for fettucine in the kitchen of the big house

For me, anyway, it was the same story with chocolate. Same story with Sprite bacon, Stolichnaya. Loved them all to bits and consumed them like a crazy person, up to the moment it became clear that only total renunciation could redeem me ...

Our setup, featuring regular and semolina flour

Many of these episodes turned out to be little more than dalliances. On the other hand, I experienced full-body immersions in social work then policy research and writing for a combined 23 years, followed by two ecstatic decades of college teaching. These were deeply impassioned commitments I was able to leave only when the handwriting of age and advancing irrelevance (yikes!) showed all too legibly on the wall ...

Cut ...

 ... and dried

Still, certain longtime pursuits don’t rely on youthful energy – and thank God, new ones can surface. I’ve written fiction, drama, music and poetry for 41 years now, and have lately added drawing and painting to my chain of wild enthusiasms. To say nothing of this blog. Or of the singing. Or above all, of Jane – my muse, my first editor, my one deliriously endless obsession.

A creamy frittata for our second-to-last breakfast

For dinner, pounded cutlets of veal, soon to be pan-roasted

 Could be I’m out of control. Could be I’m ripe for a stint at some version of the Betty Ford Center. In any event, this sojourn in Tuscany seems to be working wonders. I can hardly stay awake.

Ciao, tutti. Till soon ...

#Tuscany #Food #NaturePhotos #Terry&JaneQuinn

[cristallodineverosa]

Jongin’s handwriting analysis

Yooo it’s Nini’s turn~ Please take notice that I won’t talk about Kai here (as in Kai the EXO visual, main dancer, rapper etc). I will talk about Jongin, the real person who’s behind the stage persona.

Let’s start by saying that I was very curious to investigate Jongin’s handwriting because I was fascinated by his love for drawing. The boy literally doodles everywhere and no matter what he’s doing, I think this is extrememely cute of him, and also is very telling about his creativity and restless mind. I think that Jongin is a true artist, in a way truer than Chanyeol, who is frequently addressed as “the artist” of the group because he is an all rounder, because in my opinion Jongin is idealistic, romantic, and very in touch with his inner world. 

Drawings are a quicker, more universal way to express one’s feelings because they aren’t subordinated to a specific language. Jongin’s drawings might look childish, but they are detailed and well-thought, signalling, in my opinion, a very rich and complex inner word. He’s apparently very good at making good copies of animated characters or even of living subjects, which means that his mirror neurons’ system is very healthy (and this might be the reason he is so good at learning choreos as you can see in this video). 

In short, mirror neurons are motor neurons that help us learning something by seeing and imitating it. Receptive and well-trained mirror neurons are typical of fast visual learners, just like Jongin.

You can see below some other examples of his doodles (there are many others... just google it).

Let’s elaborate further.

Let’s talk about caliber (colour: blue). It’s on the small side, which means sensitivity, and the middle zone is pretty differentiated (you can easily detect the shortest/smallest part of the hangul, the “middle zone”, noted on the picture with the white arrow), which usually means concentration, objectivity and even modesty. This connects well with the way Jongin carries himself - the boy is the ultimate hardworker, never fully satisfied with his performances and, according to the others, the main critic of his own doings.

For what concerns space, you can see that the spacing between words isn’t always even (colour: yellow). Sometimes it’s large, sometimes it’s narrow. This might add a little bit of inconsistency to the mix, but if we analyse further, we can easily see that the spacing between lines is pretty narrow, at least compared with the caliber. This is a sign of a mild extrovertion, but also a constant need of solitude, because the writer actually enjoys being by himself. According to Jongin’s handwriting, I think the boy is quite shy, and even if he’s instinctively drawn to people and to express himself through arts, he never feels fully sure of what he has to offer. This sounds very Jongin-like, omg.

Also, the alignment of the lines progressively detaches himself from the left side, as we already saw in Baekhyun, meaning projection towards future.

The lines’ trajectory (colour: green) is vaguely convex. This usually indicates a kind of personality that gets fired up easily but then is prone to suffer a bit of demotivation in the long run. This completes what we previously stated about Jongin being an introvert and a strenuous critic of his own achievements.

Talking about forniveau and flow, Jongin’s writing looks pretty fast, but manages to mantain a certain elegance. This is syntomatic of a very spontaneous, quick thinker, of someone who feels the urge to express his inner feelings but at the same time is very self-conscious of what the others will think of him. Anyway, though, he seems to be aware that, even if he wanted, he can’t give himself completely away, as if he has to hide something away (maybe because he believes it would represent a disappointment for a certain kind of audience). 

Noted in pink, you can see how he links the hangul where he shouldn’t, while in other parts he keeps the characters well-detached and even-spaced. This “inconsistency” is the spy of a particularly strong inner conflict. I feel that Jongin would love expressing himself more, revealing more of himself, but at the same time he feels that he shouldn’t, maybe, as we can see from all the shyness and introvertion hints we gather from his handwriting, because he feels that would be too much, or because that would be judged negatively.

We already said how Jongin’s writing gives off a feeling of aesthethicity, of sensitivity and in general a very “artistic” flow. I can see some occurrence of the “garlands” we already found in Baekhyun’s sample, even if not as frequent: this is an indicator of a generous, emotional young man who always works constantly towards improving himself (and, consciously or not, to please others). Garlands in men are typical of those who are in touch with their feminine side, who know themselves well and are sweet and open towards others, even if, as in Jongin’s case, their introvert nature might prevent them from being very social.

The thing is, I really wonder what was in SM entertainment’s minds when they decided to give Jongin a stage persona like Kai. I mean, okay... judging on his appearance, he is very handsome and sexy and he has a signature style in dancing. But let’s not forget that he started as a ballet dancer, which isn’t exactly beast-like as they wanted us to see him. 

I am not criticizing anything, but in my opinion SM didn’t consider carefully the very big gap between Kai and Jongin. This dissonance is pretty unsettling, at least for me, because Jongin is soft and sweet, even clumsy and a little socially awkward, while Kai is seductive, agressive, extremely sure of himself. Everyone can pretend... but isn’t this a little too much? I’ve always felt that the other EXO members aren’t that different from their stage personas like Jongin. Kai is just another, completely different thing. And I frankly don’t know what to think abut his recent dating scandal, to be honest. In my opinion - but please take notice that it’s only my opinion, based on my own observation and feelings - it’s completely staged.

What do you think of this? Feel free to discuss below!